The Life of the World to Come (19 page)

*   *   *

“Tell us about John Jasper,” Rachel urged Tiegs on the morning of our ninth visit to the prison.

It was December, and the time we had left to save Michael was drawing short. Rachel and I were sharing a bed now, free from the pretense of the mai tais, and I have to admit that it brought me comfort to be near her—temporary comfort from the two ghosts who followed me around, just a step or two behind me, whenever I was alone. One was Fiona, not dead, but gone; when I was with Rachel, in all of her pleasant neutrality, Fiona's memory ebbed steadily away towards an asymptote: receding towards zero, but never, ever arriving there. The other was Michael, or rather the ghost he would become if we couldn't save—not save—stave. If we couldn't stave off death. Death, my oldest fixation, older even than Fiona—older than the universe—had come back into my arena, had slipped through the crevices and set up shop in the neon-lit room.

“How do you mean?” Michael drawled back at Rachel's inquiry.

“I mean what kind of a person was he. We know you didn't like him very much, but—a lot of people felt the same way, right? A lot of the other residents at Willow Creek? Certainly Therese felt that way—well, eventually, at least. We've read all of the stuff from the courtroom; we know all that. I'm just curious what you remember about him, maybe why it was that he inspired such … strong feelings.”

Michael sat up a bit in his folding chair, gripped with two dry hands the sides of his heavy head, and painstakingly cracked his neck in four directions, the frangible bones cuing a choir of hideous gunshots. Rachel shivered, and I looked quickly away from the both of them.

“I don't much like to speak ill of the departed,” he replied. “You know what you know from the records and whatnot—John Jasper, he had his share of trouble with sin.”

“He was a bad man?” I prodded, unhelpfully.

“Hardly for me to say,” answered Tiegs, “but I can tell you he was troubled. I can say 'smuch as that.”

“What do you remember about what he was like?” Rachel ventured on. “Apart from the negative feelings. What was he like just in the day-to-day?”

The cloughs below his cheekbones grew chasmal as he drew in breath, and he held himself there, hollow, for a brief moment in thought.

“Well, in the beginning,” he began, then paused. “In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth.”

“Jesus, Michael,” Rachel loosed.

“I'm answering your question,” he replied placidly.

“You are not,” she quibbled. “You just aren't. The Book of Genesis is not relevant here.”

“Can we hear him out?” I asked as gently as I could.

“Are you serious, Leo?” she countered. “He isn't answering any of our questions.”

“I'm answering your question in my own way, Sister Rachel—in my own way, but I'm answering it just the same.”

“Alright,” she sighed.

“The Book of Genesis is relevant here indeed, my dear sweet sister in Being a Touch Frustrated with Me Right Now, if you'd be so kind as to listen.”

“Alright,” she acquiesced.

“Where was I now? That's it, yes ma'am—the beginning. Well, as I mentioned, God created the Heaven and the Earth.”

“Yep,” I confirmed, “we've … we've heard.”

“Please go on,” Rachel pleaded with him.

“Well, that right there is the start of a story—the first story, in fact—the story of the Garden of Eden, of course is what I mean.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Of course. Now, that story—I won't bore you with the details of creation, but that story posits a man, name of Adam, formed of the dust of the ground. Can you believe that? Dust of the ground! And God, he went and breathed into Adam's nostrils the breath of life—”

And here Michael blissfully engorged a long, unsteady breath, awash with rhinal whinnies and a look of full joy.

“—Breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and Adam became alive—a living soul.”

“That's fantastic,” said Rachel, straining for patience, “but what happens next?”

“Well, naturally, next comes Eve,” he responded delightedly, peering directly into her eyes. “Torn from the rib, and the pair of them—man and woman—is all there is for a time, people-wise. Just the two of them, together, naked and unashamed in the garden.”

I swung one glance at Rachel, recalling the two of us, together in the Biblical sense, that very morning in the Jackson Days Inn. She didn't seem to register the analogy.

“We were happy, Therese and me, I mean, at Willow Creek and for a time after that. Not perfectly so—ain't nobody is, near as I can tell—but we were happy enough. We were clean, you understand? We were new, and maybe it felt like something of a new start for us.”

“And then…” I began.

“Like I said: oldest story on Earth,” he said, gliding his hands down to rest on the folding table in front of him. “Then comes the serpent.”

“John Jasper,” added Rachel as a point of clarification.

“In the flesh,” Michael replied. “Now, what you have to understand is, the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord had made. The serpent was a beguiler. He was a real smooth operator, he was. Charming; a liar. Every place he went, he slithered. He was a predator, just … slinking, slinking around the garden.”

Michael's thick fists were clenched and laid, like dead stones, on the table. He seemed incapable of anything approaching rage; even in his recasting of slick John Jasper, his enmity was dispassionate—tranquil, even. Fists of remembering, of a vestigial fury that had long since been rendered pointless. A frisson of serenity overcame him, and those fists were turned back into hands.

“So Michael,” Rachel interceded, groping for meaning, “are you trying to tell us that John and Therese actually—in the story, Michael, in Genesis, the snake leads Eve astray. That's how they lose the garden, right?”

“Correct you are,” he said.

“Are you trying to tell us that John … forgive me, Michael, but are you trying to tell us that John Jasper … seduced Therese? We know about his history with patients. A lot of his patients, they came forward afterwards, and—”

“It don't matter,” he declared, defeated. “Don't matter a bit.”

“It does, Michael,” Rachel reasoned in the face of my silence. “If Therese and John Jasper were involved with each other, it absolutely matters. It's a motive, Michael. It's the motive they used to convict you of his murder—that you believed there was something going on. Therese denied that it was true, but if it
was
true, Michael—if it was true, and it wasn't just something you believed had happened, like the prosecution claimed in court, then it would be her motive too.”

“Original sin,” he said. “Everybody wants to talk about original sin. I know what it is y'all want to hear from me, Sister Rachel, I really do. The thing of it is, the sin don't matter—it's the fall that matters. I can't know the truth of the sin; she is the only one who knows about that now. But I know the truth of the fall. We had our little paradise for a spell, and then something happened, and we lost it. That's all that truly matters, ain't it?”

“That,” said Rachel, “and the punishment.”

“Exactly,” I added. “God punished humanity—no more paradise, no more innocent days. Maybe Michael is right; maybe it doesn't matter in the end how it came to pass.”

“The snake, Leo,” she corrected me. “God punished the snake.”

*   *   *

Think of a word that means the opposite of itself—a word that carries two meanings, I mean, that are averse to one another: a contronym.
Oversight
is one such word; if I conduct oversight, then I am surveying something quite carefully, but if I commit an oversight, then something has been neglected due to my carelessness.
Sanction
is another, for I can either approve of good behavior by sanctioning it or discipline bad behavior by imposing a harsh sanction. If you wished to escape from me, you'd be wise to
bolt
—whereas I might bolt the door to keep you safely inside.

Now think of two people, and all of the damage that words can do. Contronyms carry their inner tension the same way that we carry Ours, hunched on the fulcrum of context—and whatever it is that I might mean to you today, tomorrow I could mean something else entirely. Take Fiona. She cleaved to me for many days (and it meant she held me fast), until a day came when she cleaved us apart (and it meant a separation). The thing about people is: they can always change what they mean.

Michael Tiegs was about to change his meaning, maybe. For the scant months I'd known him, the words of his name had always been wholly attached to a living person—but here, now, he was poised at any moment to mean the precise opposite of that. Everything I had ever felt and feared about death seemed as though it was advancing on my near-precise location, adjacent to the condemned. As I found myself drawn more and more to his web of ideas—nonsensical though I understood them to be—the rift between Rachel and me grew wider and increasingly unbridgeable.

“He is offering us nothing,” she told me sternly over dinner back at the chain restaurant in Jackson.

“It isn't nothing to him,” I replied. “In fact, it's pretty obviously everything to him. It's bigger than what we're trying to do—in his mind, I mean. It's a more important endeavor than just staying alive.”

Rachel dabbed a napkin across her lips, then held it there in contemplation.

“I think,” she started after a moment, “I think that when we encourage him to live in his head like this … when we allow him to dominate the conversation, and steer it into this place where it's all about religion, or philosophy, or the afterlife, or other things that—Leo—that have no legal bearing whatsoever…”

I lowered my eyes from hers—in shame or avoidance, I could not say.

“All we're doing,” she went on, “is indulging him in giving up.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Leo, I need to know that you're with me here. We need to be united here, a united front, because it can't be two against one the other way in there. Do you understand? If he thinks that you're taking him seriously on that stuff, it's only going to … it means he won't take
me
seriously—he won't take the real world consequences seriously. Just the magical, existential, whatever consequences. You know he's, like, teetering on the edge of the two. You know that. He can't get the impression that you're out there with him, or we'll have nothing. You're going to have to be a lawyer for a little while. And figure out the other stuff later. Okay?”

Of course, she was right about the fact that we were gaining nothing of legal value from our conversations with Michael; our prospects for saving him grew bleaker by the day. Could he save himself, I wondered, just by thinking it? Just by arriving at a peaceful understanding? I came back from our second trip to Georgia with little to show apart from an impending sense of terror: I didn't want to have to see this man die. This was too big for me to grapple with alone, and so I took it to the person you take it to when you need to devise a plan to keep things just as they are. Nobody did static better than Sona.

Over the precious din of a populous café, I asked her: “Have you ever known a dead person?”

“What are you talking about?” she replied. “What does that mean—‘know a dead person?' How do you know a person who's—”

“I meant,” I said, “have you ever known a living person who then, later, died. Do you—did you, I guess—did you know anybody who has died?”

“Like, have I ever gone from knowing someone to … knewing them, on account of their death?”

“Knewing, yes.”

“Well,” she reckoned soberly, “hasn't everybody?”

“Known a dead person?” I said. “Maybe. I mean, my grandfather died, for instance, and of course I knew him. But he was of age for it, and he went gradually; that's not really what I'm looking for. I guess what I mean is: have you known anyone who was younger, who went from completely alive to completely not? Someone who just switched, like that.”

She fretted and frowned, then sighed at me pityingly.

“Why are you asking me about this, Leo? You're not going to die, you know. Not yet. You don't have stomach cancer, and you don't have an enlarged or shrunken heart, and you don't have whatever else you think you have. Jesus, why are you asking me about this?”

“It's not for me,” I protested.

“If you say so.”

“Honest. I'm asking … for a friend.”

“Are you now?” she whimpered.

“Actually, I am. Not really for a friend, though. For a client.”

“Ah. I get it now. This the Georgia one?”

“Yes,” I responded. “The Georgia one. We have nothing, and he seems … okay with it all. And I don't understand—I can't understand that. How can a person be okay with the fact that they're going to just … be gone? It's looking very much like they're going to execute him, and it occurred to me that I've never really known someone who's gone out like that.”

“By execution?”

“No, I mean … unnaturally. Someone who died even though they didn't really … have to, I guess. I thought it might be good to talk about it, if you're up for it today.”

Sona looked quite insistently into my eyes—she often did this, with everyone—and cradled my whiskered chin with one small hand.

“You're very sensitive,” she said.

“Come on; stop it.”

“I mean it—you're a very sensitive young man,” she went on, wagging my jaw twice to each side before releasing me from her grasp. “It reflects well on your character that you think about these things. That's an honest compliment. Savor that.”