The Life of the World to Come (21 page)

Michael huffed, and rubbed his hands together, and jerked his mottled head from side to side.

“Michael,” she continued, “the next time she comes to visit you, you absolutely need to convince her to talk with us. If you don't do that, we cannot save you.”

“Save, save,” he muttered defiantly.

“Michael, we need you to understand that this is your very last chance. You have no case without her. You have no
life
without her.” And turning fully to me, she added: “Leo, tell him it's true.”

“Yes, Brother Leo,” echoed Michael slyly, still again at last. “Is that the truth of it? Ain't I got no life without her?”

I tracked the whole existence of a single tear, from its birth on the dusky inside corner of Rachel's right eye to its death on the concrete floor. And I thought: you can't save anybody who doesn't want to be saved. You certainly can't save anybody who believes they've already done it themselves. I couldn't pretend, not for one moment more, that I didn't find a certain peace in Michael's well of reason. Those other lives, those planets, this endless future—they had to matter more than earthly acquittal. They simply had to, otherwise—

So I didn't say a word. I stood with Michael, then, in knowing silence. Rachel lost her patience; she breathlessly questioned whether either of us cared if Michael lived or died (“In this life! On this Earth!”), and left me in the prison. Twenty minutes later, I found her sobbing over the hood of our rental car.

“Don't you want to save him?” she asked me calmly.

“Of course I do. But Rachel, we can't—”

“Because he's going to die, Leo. He's going to die, and whatever we're doing in there isn't helping. And I feel like you don't even care—I feel like you're enabling him.”

She smoothed her hands over the car's broad hull, and breathed in deeply.

“I think,” I said, “we both know how this is going to end. I think all three of us know. Rachel, we've been over this and over this; he's made his peace. Even if he's innocent. Even if she's guilty. He
wants
to go—the things he cares about, at least in his mind, they all come after he's gone from here. What are we going to tell him that will change that? What are we going to tell a judge that will make his next trip through the system any different than the last time, or the time before that? It's always going to end the same way for him.”

“So what?” she asked, not crossly but with all sincerity. “Are you really content to just give up?”

“Innocent people die. And sometimes there's nothing we can do to stop that. But if talking about death helps us to—if it helps him, I mean—if it helps him face what's coming, then I think that we can still provide a service here. And maybe it isn't much, but maybe it's all we can do for him.”

“It's not our job to indulge him in his faith, Leo,” she said, wiping away the last of her tears. “It just isn't, okay? We're lawyers.”

“I know,” I said.

Rachel took my hand in hers. I squeezed it, helplessly.

“If we can't save him,” she said, “and I mean actually save him, legally, not spiritually, then I can't be here with you anymore. Do what you need to do here. Honestly. Whatever it is. Talk with him about life after death; ask him whatever questions you want answered. Do what you need to do, but please don't wallow down here with him—it's not your prison. I hope you know that. I have to go back to New York. And if you can't come with me…”

“I can't come with you,” I said. “I need to be here, and I know that sounds—I just need to talk with him a little more.”

“Leo, he's insane. The things he talks about—don't you see that he's insane?”

“Death,” I said quietly, “makes it very difficult to live sometimes.”

She bristled: “Are you making a joke right now?”

“No,” I answered. “I just mean—maybe I need to talk about it, too.”

“But Leo,” she replied, now perfectly steady, “you're not the one who's dying.”

I looked around at the cars and the dust, the light, the prison, the hurtling Earth.

“Everyone is dying, Rachel,” I said. “That's the end of all our stories—all of us. Okay? All of life, honestly, when you get down to it, is about learning to die, and I think … he has something to say about it that I still want to—”

“What?” she asked, incredulous.

“I said that—”

“All of life is
not
about learning to die, Leo,” she said. “The fact that you think that … of course it isn't, Leo, of course it's not about that. Life is about living, of course—about learning to live. I know you're not that sad, Leo; I know you're not like him.”

I stood quietly in the lot, knowing she was right, knowing also that I had to know for sure—that I had to stay, that I had to see Michael go, to see what that would mean to me. Rachel placed a slim hand on my stubbled cheek, and dipped the crown of her head to the center of my chest.

“We can't keep seeing each other, Leo,” she said as she rose again to meet my eyes. “I wish that we could—honestly, I do. I like you a lot, but this is just too much for me to abide. I think that you have things to figure out, and I hope that you do.”

“Okay,” I said, and let her hand slip out of mine as she walked slowly to the passenger side door.

We didn't break things off in a fit of rage. We didn't break things off in a fit of anything; perhaps that was the problem with us. I wanted the fire that Fiona had once kindled in my wooden life, and Rachel lacked the ability to destroy me like that. So I just drifted away from a remarkable woman, and all that promise grew obsolete.

After I dropped her off the next morning, I drove straight from the airport back to death row. I made my way beyond the gated lot and the armed guards, past the ponderous gaze of the man in the brown suit, back down the hallway to the neon-lit room where Tiegs was waiting to speak again about the afterlife.

“And then there was one,” he announced grimly, without looking up from the folding table.

“Rachel wanted me to express to you,” I began, then trailed off.

“I assure you, Brother Leo, there aren't any sore feelings. She's got work to do; we've got work to do—I understand that. It's good you came back, though. I've been thinking about our last conversation. I'm wondering now: is it possible you might be a Buddhist?”

“Not as far as I know,” I told him.

“I got some reading done last night,” he went on. “Turns out, the Buddhists believe that you actually can come back as a human after all—doesn't just have to be a bug or a bird or what have you.”

“Aha.”

“Conditions have to be right. You have to be moral enough in your life to avoid dropping down a level or two, but not so moral that you get bumped up to bo-dee-sat-va or Buddha-Heaven or anything like that. You can come back as a person—not necessarily the
same
person, which I'm pretty sure was your whole recursion thing—but it sounds like it's at least, you know, a possibility for you. If you're a Buddhist, that is. Although you ain't.”

“Well … that sounds promising, I guess,” I told him, and we passed a full minute in silence.

“Brother Leo?” he asked at last.

“Yes, Michael?”

“You seem sorry that she's gone.”

I let out one sad chuckle.

“I don't think Rachel really understands the things we talk about in here,” I said, although I couldn't be certain that I understood myself. I knew that I wanted something from Tiegs—some proof. I wanted him to validate my parking in the spacious lot of the faithful. I wanted him either to live, or to die and have it be okay. How can it be okay? I had to know for myself just how in the world he would go.

He jerked up suddenly, as though seized by a pain, and spat twice onto the concrete floor.

“Not everybody wants to face their future. Y'all both are smart ones, but I don't know which is smarter: thinking these thoughts about what comes after you die, or pushing them down, not giving them a thought at all.”

“It doesn't make a difference, does it?” I responded. “Thinking about it; not thinking about it. We can believe whatever we want—it won't change the truth. Whatever that happens to be.”

“You're wrong about that, Brother Leo,” he said, grinning weakly. “Faith matters. Belief matters. And we are nothing without it—pure spirit is what we are when the rest has broken away.”

I swallowed hard, thinking now of the way that Michael's frail body, which always seemed so close to vanishing, would soon very likely see its own pure spirit forcibly evicted. If there was a soul, it would be pulled out of him at needlepoint, and those electric eyes would empty themselves of light. This would all take place at a scheduled time, this preordained sleep; he'd twitch, and it would be over. And maybe in that instant, he'd know.

“I wouldn't even worry about it,” he said after a moment, seeming freshly energized. “About the afterlife, that is. It's pretty much been proven to exist.”

“Is that a fact?” I asked him earnestly.

“I know what you're thinking—but I ain't even speaking of faith now. I ain't speaking of truth like the truth of Isaiah or Matthew or Daniel, or the Book of Revelation and the Nicene Creed. I don't mean that kind of truth. I mean the usual kind; the kind a lawyer'd like. Rigorous logical analysis and all that—I'm talking 'bout actual proof.”

I shut my eyes.

“Oh, buck up, attorney-of-mine. You'll like this,” he exclaimed. “Have we ever talked about
The Phaedo
?”

“Nope,” I said, settling in.

“Okay, so it goes like this: the day before Socrates died, see—you know, they sentenced him to death too—the day before that, he starts talking to his student, Phaedo, about the afterlife, sorta like how we've been doing. So the key to the afterlife, according to Socrates, is the immortality of your soul. If you can prove that the soul is everlasting, then there has to be somewhere for it to go once your earthly body hits the bricks. So Socrates supposes that the body and the soul have to be opposites, because every state of being has an opposite one, right, like hot has cold and awake has asleep. Well, you can't have an awake soul without a soul that's been sleeping, neither. The body is brittle, it can be destroyed—but its opposite, the soul, is completely indestructible: when you die, it just goes to sleep for a bit until the next body wakes it on up. Cold things come from hot things; hot things come from cold things; living people come from dead people; dead come from the living. And when you're gone, that soul of yours is just hanging around on the flip side of the coin, as it were. That other side—there's your afterlife. There you are with Socrates and the rest, just waiting around to catch a ride on the next body headed back this way.”

Tiegs coughed violently, the folding table executing a noisy spasm in time with his own convulsions.

“Anyway, take that as you will. It's only just another theory. Oh and Phaedo, after he hears about all this, he bears witness to the end of the world. The end of one man's world, at least—he watches Socrates die.”

“Jesus,” I muttered vacantly.

“So, Brother Leo,” said Tiegs, leaning just slightly across the table, “are you gonna?”

I shifted in my chair. The persistent hum of the neon flowing above us zapped to an abrupt stop, then surged back to life.

“Am I gonna what?”

Tiegs was looking straight at me—I felt it—but I would not look at him.

“Appeal's coming down any time now. You think you'll be there when I drink the hemlock? I'd ask that you do so, if it's alright with you. You can keep a look out for any … signs … any semblance of the coin flipping over.”

I'd dreamt about it once already: Tiegs in an ethereal chamber, smoke for a ceiling and darkness for walls, strapped down and shivering while all about him hordes of strangers watched in utter silence. They were strangers to him, but not to me; the cast of my past turned out in staggering numbers—long-gone acquaintances, old classmates and teachers, my family and friends. Mrs. Easterling with her colored pencils. Gracie Coolahan, twisting fingers through her woolly hair. Emily, expressionless, with an arm around Boots. A disappointed Katherine Barnes flanked by her anonymous TA. Everyone had come to see. But Fiona was not there.

And when the moment arrived, Tiegs froze in his folding chair. The executioner stepped forward, and I recognized him from his brown suit. I couldn't get a reaction. I wanted all of them to speak, but no one would even look at me. “Say something!” I hollered at them, “Say something before it's too late!”—but their mouths were sealed, and their eyes were fixed on Tiegs. I pushed my way to the front, and lowered my face to meet his. “Christ,” I shouted at him. “Won't you say something about this, Michael?”

And he said: “
Olam Haba
.”

And I said: “Michael, I don't know what that means.”

And he said: “Don't you understand, Brother Leo? You don't get to know what everything means.”

 

EIGHT

T
HERESE
C
ALLEY WAS AN UNBRIDLED MESS.
A
T
thirty-three, her skin was cracked and scarred, her hands shook, and the whole of her abessive frame seemed ready to crumble into toxic dust at any moment. Her voice was like a long, slow car accident. Her eyes were so hollow they appeared to be deliberately retreating from the world outside her skull. She had rosorial features, and her tongue, which she bit habitually, was speckled gray.

“I don't know why you came here,” she gasped from her depleted front porch, before I'd finished exiting the rental car.

In truth, I didn't either. Michael's appeal would come down the next day, and his fate was unequivocally out of my hands. Rachel and I hadn't spoken in the three days since she requested to be taken off of the Tiegs case, which was the day after we decided to stop trying to date one another. I stayed behind to tie up loose ends and address any of the client's remaining needs—“closing,” we called it at NSI. But what I was really doing there: I couldn't say.