The Life of the World to Come (27 page)

“He lives!” she hollered down the hallway and through the still-parting elevator doors, and I winced at the sudden attention.

“Hi, boss,” I sheepishly replied.

“Come on; come in, come in,” she said, ushering me into her office. “A little bird told me you'd be dropping in today, Leo. I'm beyond glad to see you. Look at you—you shaved!”

“So I did,” I said, leaning my crutches up against the doorframe. I flopped my body onto the leather couch, and sighed for the effort.

“You look like a person!”

“Thanks.”

“A real person, I mean. A person who is thinking, perhaps, about coming back to work?”

The time I'd spent away after Georgia had been mostly given over to recovery (of a life and, less gravely, of a ligament). This had been fruitful, I'd thought; Lita and Rafi were always there, so I never was left alone. Boots and Sona came around to indulge my lingering questions and wean me off of remorse. Even Rachel was speaking to me again. And now there was Jane. If the future wasn't entirely bright, at the very least, for the first time in ages, it was there. I could see it.

“I was hoping we might talk about that,” I said, and Martha whisked a thick gray binder from her desk. “I, uh,” I started, and noticed she was paying no attention to me whatsoever—she was rifling through the file. “As you know, Martha, I had a hard time … getting over…”

She gathered, then lofted, the binder, and it landed heavily on the open seat next to me on the couch. A splotchy stamp on its front read LA-DOC B19411607-2013 PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL.

“Denard W. Cope,” she said.

“Martha,” I began.

“We got a ripe one here,” she continued.

“I'm just not sure I can handle—”

“You talk about your all-time terrible lawyers, Leo—this guy's counsel takes the cake.”

“I was hoping—Martha, I was hoping we could maybe talk—”

“Here's what you're gonna do: you're gonna go to Louisiana, okay? You ever been to Louisiana? It's crazy. You're gonna go down there, and you're gonna meet this guy, get the scoop, figure out our best play. You're first chair on this—you and Boots. And Leo—Leo, look at me.”

I did.

“Leo, this guy—what'd I say his name was again?”

I took a long breath, and repeated it steadily: “Denard W. Cope.”

“Yep. Cope. Leo, you might not save this guy. He might die. I know you understand that now—I know you know what that means—but I need to hear you tell me that it's alright. You know it's alright, right? You're gonna get back on the horse, yes?”

I leaned in from the couch, my left hand absently tracing the edges of the case binder. A smile evolved on my clean face, and Martha smiled right back. Stashing the dossier under my arm, I propped myself up, collected my crutches, and began to move with purpose.

“Good man,” she said warmly.

“I almost forgot,” I said, and dug into my jacket pocket. “I brought a couple of these back from Georgia like you said, but it took me a while to—look, I'll be honest: they went rotten. This one isn't quite the real thing; I actually bought it on the street on the way over. It isn't what you wanted, but, you know, it's actually even better, because it's what's here.”

I tossed the little morsel, and as I started out the door it described a perfect arc from my hand to hers.

“What the hell is this?” she called after me.

It was a New York peach.

*   *   *

James Buchanan lived to see the world go on without him, and for that reason he died with a wisdom that Lincoln could never grasp. He died like Mithridates, just a moment too far beyond the future, and not like Socrates, on whom the poison worked. I myself lived for a very long time, and that was good. It took me years to mend the broken oarlock of my life—but I did become happy later on in the story, someplace off-screen.

The present carried on, unflinching. It never did get more profound than twenty-two. Jane didn't promise me forever; she didn't promise me an afterlife. Just this one.

We do some things together, but not everything. She is very bad at dancing—maybe even worse than I am—so we took a class, and flailed around, the very worst students there ever were. We made real things Ours: a home, a new city. When Lita passed away a few years later, we took in Rafi, and we also went down to the shelter and got him a friend. There are things about us you don't get to know, but it couldn't matter less.

What's important is: she rehabilitated my leg, and I fell in love with her. I can say this now, in the present tense, because four years after she contorted my stricken hinge, I actually married Jane Dailey. I can speak to her warmth, her grace, the full planet of her love—here in the future, I am free, at last, to remember those things.

And every night when the world ends, I hold her in my arms. Our dying bodies stick so close together, and it always makes me feel the same way: warm.

A kajillion years later, I wake up.

*   *   *

“I have a theory about the universe that, if true, will just blow the lid off of everything,” Fiona whispered to me from her side of the hospital bed.

“Go on.”

She came out of surgery still punch-drunk off of the anesthesia, and as I wheeled her to the taxi stand it started to rain: big hissing drops.

“I was wondering about that theory of yours,” I started.

“What?”

“I was wondering about it. About infinity. I was wondering if—I mean, if it's true—I was wondering if it guarantees us a world where it all works out, you know? If it
is
true, and we get to come back as many times as we need, then there should be a version of events where everything's okay.”

“Everything is okay,” she murmured.

“How will we know?” I continued, though I knew she couldn't understand me now. “How will we know if it's this one?”

In the future, she was gone, and now also in many parts of the past there are whole expanses where she is missing.

I am speaking to you now, Fiona, because this is the end of the world we built up from the soil. We raised it the way you would a child: we taught it to speak our language, spoiled it, steeped it in the stories of our own sacred adventures, watched it grow until it was large, watched it grow until it was larger than both of us, and one day we locked eyes—we watched it die.

You are not supposed to outlive the things you create, but if you do, you have two choices. The first is you can sit at home—elbows on knees, hands clasped and forming a cross with your lips—and stare straight ahead while your mind plays detective, scouring the scene, making wild accusations, planting evidence: a bad cop. The second is you can go for a walk by yourself; that's what you chose. And walk you did, but walk you never did alone.

I saw you in Delhi, picking out new fruits at the dusty bazaar.

I saw you in London, smelling the salt in the gray air.

In Firenze you ate nothing but olives, and in Cadiz you drank nothing but red wine. You dined also in Prospect Heights, on linguini and whole tomatoes.

I saw you in Los Angeles the next time you fell in love, and I saw you years later when that scene came to pieces right before your eyes.

I saw you when the scales tipped, when all the stars turned to so much dust. And for so long, I bled to find those places again; I sweat cold and breathed heavy, kissed you hard on the mouth, wandered the same well-worn streets in my mind. I tried so hard but they were gone, turned to stone by the setting sun, lost to the historical record, captured by the cruel photography of a past that sped mercilessly toward us from behind, that threatened always to catch up with us, to overcome us. Letting go was hard, but it was nothing compared to the letting go that comes next. You know how that goes, don't you? All of our stories begin with the creation of the universe. All of our stories end with its death—when
it
lets go at long last, however many iterations and tenderfooted Leos from now, unmooring itself from the bracing waters of existence. Fiona, if that's true, then I will try my damnedest to stick around for the extremities of time, and maybe I'll see you there, an accomplice in leaving, one hundred trillion years in either direction, before there was light, after there was darkness, my lips on your forehead when the world seemed right, my hands in my pockets when came creeping loneliness.

And I'm telling you this because you are the only one who knows, because I'll never let go of life, or of Jane—I'll forever love her for not speaking our language. So I refuse to say goodbye to anybody but you, because I know how, now. And I'm telling you this, maybe, to create some ripple in the still water we've shared, or to remind you of your place—the large, vacant room, full of the things you taught me and of words and silences, which my memory will preserve exactly as you left it—in the immense, creaking vessel of my private heart. And though I'm ready to admit that I'm capable of dying, I have a difficult time believing that I ever actually will. If—
if
—it happens, most likely a hundred years from now or more, we can call it waiting; I have more faith in time than I do in death, and the more I think about infinity the more certain I am that you were right, and that we eventually have to recur. I will be waiting for that billionth Earth to come along again so I can find you, the way I have a billion times before, and tell you about the infinite future, about adverse possession and the Northern Lights, and about being made whole. And I will be waiting, again, to let you go. And could we convince the world to surrender just one more of its countless secrets?

This is not the version where everything is okay. This is the version where I ask if there is a version where everything is okay. Fiona, if by whatever coincidence you happen to be there when I go, explain this whole operation with patience to anyone who cries. Tell them I'm not yet finished. And if they need it, do not say that I am in Heaven but rather that I already was. Heaven, ha! It turned out to be a bit of a joke, right? I mean, what good is it now anyway? You wait around there, maybe, for the Earth to break; you wait around to come back and hear, again, the joke about Heaven. Each time, heavenly was how it felt, is how it feels, will be how it will feel. To be gone. To be gone.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I used to be one of those people who, when happening to come across an awards show on TV, and hearing some actor or singer lead off his or her acceptance speech with an ardent “I'd like to thank my agent,” would roll his eyes and find it all so cold and trite and ridiculous. I am no longer one of those people. The simple truth is that this book quite simply would not exist but for the talent, faith, wit, and wisdom of Claire Anderson-Wheeler (she of Regal Hoffmann & Associates). For more than three years, Claire has been this novel's principal advocate, editor, and chaperone. She has etched bits of her bright energy on every page, and squired the whole of it safely through every obstacle with characteristic rigor and good humour-with-a-u. In the story of how this book made it from my head to your hands, Claire is the hero. So, yeah, I would like to thank my agent.

Gratitude being a thankfully renewable resource, I turn next to Laura Chasen of St. Martin's Press. As an editor, her instincts are impeccable; as a literary Sherpa, she is quite simply peerless. Laura is responsible not only for making this a better book, but for making it a book at all—when she brought
The Life of the World to Come
to St. Martin's in November of 2014, Laura ensured that, if you're reading this, it isn't necessarily because you are my mother. I am hugely indebted to her for her keen judgment and ceaseless savvy.

In addition to being the best writer I personally know, Bree Barton is a dynamite correspondent whose timely e-mails from California kept me from deserting this book more than a couple of times. Sergei Tsimberov provided significant guidance. I've never met Dorie Barton or Megan Kurashige, but they were the first people to read the first draft, and their feedback meant a lot to me.

As for Miriam, my family, and all my wicked friends, the acknowledgments section is not nearly enough, except to say that I will acknowledge you deeply for the rest of my days. I'll tell you about it later.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dan Cluchey
is a native of Portland, Maine, and a former Obama administration speechwriter and advisor. During his time in Washington, he wrote hundreds of speeches and op-eds on behalf of senior leaders throughout the administration, on topics ranging from health care reform to international trade. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School, Cluchey lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
The Life of the World to Come
is his first novel. You can sign up for email updates
here
.