ONE
“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.”
“You’re not listening if you’re playing with the chart,” she said, but what she didn’t understand—what she couldn’t understand—was that I could play with the chart and listen at the same time. I relented, although, again, I could have read the chart—actually just a frayed clipboard gripping salmon and citrine forms, and not at all the chart you think of when you think of the many graphs that describe how you are living—I knew that I could have clap-clap-clapped at the chart while listening and done well.
“Okay. So would you agree that time is infinite in both directions? I mean infinite into the past and the future.”
“This sounds pretty heavy, Fiona dear.”
“Do you agree or not?” she inquired roughly, turning suddenly so close that I was sure I could feel the breath of her “not” winnow through the wires of my unripe beard.
“I need to know first where this is going, because it sounds pretty heavy,” I said, chart-free but now snapping at the hair elastic she kept stationed always around her stalky wrist.
“Don’t be a brat. This is groundbreaking new knowledge, alright? This could be Descartes—I’m essentially the new Descartes right now, or Kierkegaard. I mean I could be, if I’m right. Do you agree about time?”
“Do I agree that it’s infinite? I mean, there was a point in the past where no life existed, right?”
“I don’t mean life; I mean time. Even if there’s no life, there’s time and some sort of existence. It’s not nothingness. What I mean is … there’s a venue, even if there are no planets or stars or anything.”
“Got it. Yes, I have no reason to believe that there isn’t an eternal venue that spans out infinitely into the past and the future.”
Fiona’s imagination was a tempest, and this sort of conversation—which I believed that nobody ever had, anywhere—was for us nothing short of typical, and this was simply because half of us was her. With two lazy fingernails, I traced her skin from its point of exposure just above her left elbow and just below the amorphous opening of her pale green gown diagonally down to the wrist for another snap. Again: elbow, wrist, snap.
“Okay,” she continued, “so if time is infinite, then everything that could possibly happen in the universe—say, for example, the formation of Earth—has to happen, not just once, but an infinite number of times.”
“You’re talking infinite Earths?”
“I’m saying the Earth we live on, let’s say it gets destroyed in a billion years. Hundreds of trillions of years go by, and more planets are formed, but they’re all different. If time is infinite, though, then trillions of trillions of years later—or before!—eventually the exact circumstances have to come together again to form another planet exactly like Earth, even if it takes billions of planets similar to Earth but not exactly like it. You dig?”
“I dig,” I said, even though I only maybe half-dug.
“Okay, and, again, time is infinite, so maybe it takes billions of these exact Earth replicas, but eventually one comes along that not only is exactly like Earth, but it develops human life. And maybe every billion or so of those, an exact version of you or me comes along. This would take forever, but that’s okay, because, you know, infinity.”
“This is a conversation that happens after you wake up, Fiona, after we’ve filled you full of the drugs.”
“Come on, just play along for a minute. Just do this. We’ve got this Earth now, okay? At last, we’ve got this Earth that has one of us perfectly re-created—our minds, bodies, souls, even. Everything. One-in-a-kajillion odds—”
“But that’s okay, because kajillions of years and planets have gone by at this point.”
“Exactly! Yes. So eventually, untold eons into the future, there has to be an Earth that has not just you, not just me, but both of us, and at the same time and place.”
“This is very cute,” I whispered into her neck.
“This is serious, though. This is extremely important in case I don’t wake up.”
Here Fiona sighed quietly, and looked away from me for effect. How was it that an actress so gifted could at once be so reliably transparent in her emotional life off-screen? In a moment, somebody was bound to draw back the pigeon-blue curtain separating us from the world. In a moment—but not yet.
“Nobody dies during wisdom tooth removal surgery,” I reminded her gently.
“You don’t know that. You don’t know that.”
“No one dies from this.”
“Fine, but the point is that death isn’t important anyway—not anymore, not after this groundbreaking new theory I’ve developed. Even if I accidentally get quadruple anesthesia and I die, doesn’t matter: we’ll have another life together at some point in the future, actually we’ll have infinite lives, and also in the past. So this isn’t the first time we’ve been together, you know?”
“This isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation,” I offered.
“Exactly!”
“We’ve had it, I suppose, infinity number of times? And we will have it infinity times again, right?”
“Right.”
“Even if we only have it once every billion lives we spend together, each of which is only one of every billion of our own, solo lives, each of which is only one of every billion Earths, each of which is only one of every billion Earth-like planets?”
I snapped at her hair elastic, too hard this time. Fiona gathered her frantic, splayed curls into a loose rope on the pillow, and looked up.
“Infinity is forever. This isn’t ridiculous.”
* * *
Scientists claim that the universe was created thirteen-point-seven-five billion years ago, a fact that—and I’m sorry, science—but a fact that is absurd to insist we can ever really know. The point is, an extremely long time ago this happened, and things percolated for a bit, and four-point-five-four billion years ago collected remnants of the solar nebula fused together to form the Earth, a massive sphere covered mainly by vast expanses of salt water. It took less than a billion years after that before self-reproducing ribonucleic molecules became life (not sure how), followed thereafter by the invention of photosynthesis, complex cellular organisms, fish, seeds, plants, bugs, and, about two hundred million years ago, mammals. There was an ice age, and there were monstrous, hulking dinosaurs, and then humans emerged a couple of hundred thousand years back. They learned to walk, to catch the fish, sow the seeds, eat the plants you can eat, squash the bugs, and in 2012 I graduated from law school nearly one-hundred-and-fifteen-thousand dollars in debt.
Ernest Hemingway once wrote that all stories, if you follow them far enough into the future, end in death, and that nobody who claims to be a true storyteller ought to keep that information from you. Of course, he was almost certainly drunk at the time. He forgot to say where all stories begin if you follow them far enough into the past, but the creation of the universe seems as reasonable a guess as any. I like Hemingway, and I’d like to be true. So it is: like every story, this story begins with the creation of the universe and ends in death. And if it doesn’t, that’s only because this story is not, in truth, over. At the very least, this is how I remember it; a friend recently told me to make my life sincere, and I have sworn to try.
The last time I saw Fiona Fox-Renard I was twenty-six, the universe was thirteen-point-seven-five billion and twenty-six, and Fiona still went by her real last name: Haeberle. She and I had met in college just four years earlier, at the terrible party of a mutual friend of a friend, six weeks before graduation. Said party was one of your standard red-plastic ordeals—strident bass in a dark dorm, the windows overlooking the quad slick with condensation, the children overlooking each other slick with sweat, what air there was in the room nearly tropical despite this being Massachusetts and despite this being April. I had handed in my senior history thesis that morning—States of Confusion: A Political-Psychobiographical Analysis of the James Buchanan Presidency—and my roommates, bless their twisted little hearts, had forced me to attend under threat of being c’mon, dude-d all the way to the grave.
She was the only person at the party who belonged there less than I did—that much I knew right away—but where I sipped drippy in the corner with a lone boot sole pressed tightly to the wall, she bounded briskly to the thumph thumph thumph of a song I believe-it-or-not remember but won’t mention here out of respect for the seriousness of the situation to come. This was not a very good song. I surveyed the room listlessly, monitoring the graceless, exuberant hordes from my perch, and waited for her to stop dancing before I approached. Saying that I waited for her to stop dancing before I approached is a bit like saying that the astronaut waited to return to Earth before taking off his or her space helmet, which is to say I am not a strong dancer. Ten minutes later, loafing behind her in line for the restroom, I calculated what to say, how to look, how to be, when to—
“Hi.”
“Heh—hey. Hey-lo. Hello. How’s … it going?”
Nailed it!
“I’m Fiona. You look like you’re having absolutely no fun.”
“That’s … you’re dead on. I’m emphatically not having fun, although I’m committed to turning things around. Keeping a positive attitude, all that.”
She was lean and confident-seeming, with the breezy look and feel and wit of a flapper poetess. She had the slightest accent I could not place—her voice, upland and high, sounded as though it must have rolled through the wheat fields of America for thousands of years, kicking up the soil, filling up on music and Wisconsin grit. An iconic mole, which on my own face would have succeeded nowhere, rested effortlessly just below the western curve of her lower lip like a goddamn jewel.
“Hmm,” she purred my way. “Have you tried enjoying it from another angle?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I mean, this party is rubbish, right? It’s objectively a bad time. But appreciate it. From another angle. You’re a senior, yes? So appreciate it for its novelty—pretty soon, we won’t have this level of absurdity in our lives anymore. So you can enjoy this … this disaster … as, you know, a piece of pre-nostalgia. Something you can hold on to, later, when your life has turned stale.”
“I like that—I like ‘pre-nostalgia.’ That’s a solid angle.”
Her hair was some new color I wasn’t familiar with from twenty-two years on Earth. She spoke with impeccable diction, and stood with perfect posture, and I was pulled quite quickly into her orbit.
“Look,” she said, “I know this whole scene is a little much, yeah? I get it. You’re too cool for this? Or not cool enough? One of those options, maybe? But those people—that’s your generation out there, rubbing up on each other.”
“My generation.”
“It’s true!”
“My generation is really getting after it.”
“They’re excitable,” she said, mock-thoughtfully pursing her entire face and commencing to absently crack each of her wispy fingers in turn.
“Every time I come to one of these, I like to pretend I’m an anthropologist,” I offered after a torturous beat threatened to end it all before it began.
“Aw. That’s super weird, my new friend. A super weird thing to say to someone you’ve just met. Are you … are you like, some sort of a kind snob?”
Some sort of a kind snob. That’s probably exactly what I am. Exactly. Fiona had recently finished her thesis too—Thirteen Ways of Looking at ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird:’ Modernist Poetry, Modernist Movement—and the fact that she was a double major in theater and dance led me inexplicably to bring up the not-dark but also not-flattering secret of my ineptitude in the latter discipline.
“You cannot be that bad,” she challenged, but she was wrong: I certainly could.
“I am indeed that bad. I am the worst.”
“Ugh! Okay, that’s it; we need to go dance right now.”
Fuck no.
“No, thank you.”
“No, you have to come dance. It is decided.”
Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t do this to yourself.
“I need to be really clear with you on this, okay?” I pleaded faux-desperately, but also actually desperately. “I need you to consider the consequences of your actions: if you make me dance, you won’t ever want to talk to me again.”
“No?” she mouthed mockingly, wide-eyed, already pulling my sleeve toward its inescapable destiny of bewildered flailing.
“Not just that. You’ll never dance again.”
“I love to dance,” she said.
“Not anymore. Not after you go through what you’re about to go through if you make me dance. You can’t un-see what you’re about see. It’ll destroy the whole medium for you.”
By then I had realized that I never had a chance, that she had checkmated me—when? Not when I brought up my failures as a dancer. Not when she brought up her successes as the same. No, it was much earlier. When she put on that devastating sundress? The day her parents met? Thirteen-point-seven-five billion years ago, when nothing at all erupted knowingly into everything there would be? I thought of what Joni Mitchell said about us being stardust, golden, billion-year-old carbon; calibrating even for the fact that I was now quite drunk, I decided then that it must be true, at least in Fiona’s case. She was made up of prehistoric stars—that elegant electric dust—more obviously than anyone I’d ever met.
“Jesus. You weren’t kidding,” said the stardust.
I looked like a monumental idiot, and the music tore through the sopping room like a frightened bird, and all night long she called me “Neil,” which is not my name. Just briefly then, in the humiliating haze, it occurred to me that I’d never cared enough to dance for someone up until this instant, not ever, and certainly not so suddenly. I am not a sudden person.
By chance, we met again the next day: Bettany Skiles, my natty and occasionally brilliant dorm-mate, was screening her thesis film—The Nervous System: A Very Deep Film by Bettany Skiles—in which aspiring actress Fiona portrayed someone’s unlovable daughter, a gaunt and ghostly teenager stricken terminally by ennui.
“Leo,” I corrected her warmly when we nearly bumped into each other in the clinical-white foyer of the campus theater.
“If I sit with you, do you promise not to talk about the film or about me?”
This would prove to be the first of maybe ten thousand instances in which Fiona spoke to me as though we had been smack in the middle of some longer conversation, and I sensed this, I guess, and smiled.
“Of course you can sit with me. You’re in the movie?”
“You’re the only person I know here who maybe won’t talk about the film or about me,” she explained as her eyes darted frenetically between the smattering of assembled students, looking for recognizable faces from which she could shrink.
“We don’t have to talk about anything,” I answered with my still eyes on hers: twin hazel atoms, agitated, whizzing suspiciously around the room.
“Because we don’t know each other, I mean.”
“I’m sorry?” I inquired, suddenly and strangely and intriguingly hurt.
“We don’t really know each other, so we can talk about anything else. We can talk about the Giants, for example, because I don’t know how you feel about them yet.”
“Right, I—”
“And you don’t know how I feel about them either.”
“Right, so I don’t really—”
“I hate them. I hate the Giants.”
“Alright. Do you mean the New York Giants, or—”
“So we shouldn’t talk about that, probably, but what I’m saying is that we can basically talk about anything, just please not the film and not me. Not me in the film, I mean. Not acting.”
“Fiona, we don’t have to talk about anything. It would actually be … rude, to talk, you know? We’re at a movie, and everyone will be—”
“We’re at a film, Leo,” she breathed, almost inaudibly, and in that moment I saw for the first time in my life a whole beautiful future.
I am not a sudden person, but something in her chased that all away. Stardust, maybe, though looking back it’s difficult to say what parts of that were real. Even then, Fiona seemed infinitely more alive, and yet less lifelike, than the rest; she was ruled by other impulses, governed by other laws passed down from brighter bodies. And right then and there, in the gaping mouth of the campus theater, she snapped me from my present.
Within a week, it was decided that if we were going to be the perfect little love of the century we were going to have to do everything in double-time. And so it was: days of lunch and dinner, days of breakfast and lunch, afternoons spent hastily Venn diagramming our respective circles of friends, nights spent studying each other for the big quiz that seemed certain to come at the close of the academic year. If our nearest and dearest were shocked by the velocity of it all, Fiona and I neither noticed nor cared. Fast love was a business, and at graduation we took dozens of photographs together, correctly suspecting that our later selves would think us smart anticipators.
* * *
To those who don’t know her well at all, Fiona is a dazzling cartoon mouse of a woman. Lithe and full-throated, perpetually bright-eyed and winging, she was impossible to miss, even at those times—and there were many—when she wanted nothing more than to be some icy and long-forgotten planet, rather than the gauzy, centric sun of every eager solar system she happened to flit through.
I learned this and everything else about her that summer and in the three following years. We moved into an apartment together on the first of September—I know, I know, but we did—four days before my first day of law school. The place was, by any metric, stark and sunless, but it provided untold gallons of renewable fuel for Fiona’s acting machine; to her (she of the Great Midwest), it felt more like the Eastern Bloc than Brooklyn, a perspective that served to authenticate her entire artistic creaturehood. To me, the apartment brought to mind nothing more than striving, as of two young, squawking lovebirds barnstorming their way through life’s challenges, shitting on the windshields of all who dared to question their liberal arts degrees. We were twenty-two when it started.
Becoming an adult is a funny thing in much the same sense that love is a funny thing, which is to say it usually isn’t very funny at all. One minute we had been relics—quaint and crumbling New English artifacts quite simply as quaint and crumbling as the Old Man of the Mountain himself—and the next we were the sudden babies of New York City, reeling from the torrential overload of a fresh, strange world. All at once, Fiona and I had gone from feeling the oldest we had ever felt to feeling the youngest we had ever felt, and even though we were right the first time there was a sense that everything we’d done and seen to that point had been somehow prenatal.
The fear made us young, too: I was scared because I had acquired this whole array of adult skills—tandoori cooking, laundromat navigation, knowledge of gyms, relative expertise concerning the Buchanan presidency—but wasn’t sure how to convincingly make a complete life out of them, and Fiona was scared because I explained this to her in exactly that way.
“What’s it all going to be like?” she asked me with typical moon-eyed wonder, not thirty seconds after we opened our new apartment’s thin door for the first time. The frame was splintered; the knob slumped loose from its mooring like a guilty dog.
“The whole thing?”
“Or any part. What will it be like for us?”
“I don’t—I think we don’t get to know. I think it’s good that we don’t get to know.”
“Yeah, but it’s easy for you to say that because you’re going to be a lawyer in three years. There are unknowns, but they’re completely adorable, like ‘what prestigious internship am I going to get,’ or ‘how well am I going to do on my torps exam?’”
“Torts.”
“Torps?”
“It’s torts. You really thought—”
“I thought it was short for torpitude. Like crimes that are morally…”
“Turpitude.”
“Right. Okay, yes—turpitude. That one I should’ve had. Look, obviously I don’t know what torps are, and I’m thrilled that you’ll be learning about them, but my point is that your anticipated line of work comes with a certain degree of job security that mine does not.”
“Okay, well, absolutely, being a lawyer carries with it a lot less question marks than—”
“Fewer!”
“Nice. Yes. Fewer question marks, but the payoff of being an actress is a lot bigger.”
“How?”
“Well, for one thing, you’ll be famous.”
“Ha!”
“You will. You’re that good.”
And she was, she really was that good.
“Okay, but even a lot of phenomenally talented actors never break through,” she said wistfully, now lying perfectly still, face up, arms splayed, on the hardwood floor.
“You will. I already know that you’ll become a star, Fiona. I know that with confidence. What are you doing? Are you making an apartment angel?”
It was hard, then, although that was almost certainly the point of the experience. When law school started, I became predictably overwhelmed by this whole rich and terrible world of ideas and rules, what an old professor once called “those wise restraints that make men free.” I dug into the work; it suited something in me, even if I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing there in the first place. My decision to apply to law school had been spurred by the same allergy to suddenness that Fiona later charmed away; why halt my education abruptly when there were so many graduate schools out there to help soften the fall? I had no particular career ambitions, but was frightened of closing doors, and among my several options the least narrow (and therefore most attractive) was the law.
The greatest thing I learned in law school was this, and here you’ll want to maybe take notes, because I still find this to be just horribly interesting: if you move onto someone else’s property, and if you can stay there long enough without being detected, under certain circumstances it will just become yours.
“Shut the fuck up,” said Fiona when she heard.
“I’m not kidding. Trespass somewhere for enough time, and eventually you own it.”
“That doesn’t sound right to me. How is that a thing?”
“It’s called adverse possession. It’s been around since before America; it’s a well-established thing.”
“Okay and what are the rules again?”
“Actual, continuous, open, notorious, hostile, and exclusive possession for a statutory period of—”
“English, counselor.”
“Well, you need to actually be present on the property, uh, continually, for however long the period of—”
“How long is that?”
“It varies by state, but in New York it’s ten years.”
“And if you run out of toilet paper or Sriracha…”
“You can leave to go to the store. Continuous just means you can’t leave for a long time and then come back. You’d have to start the ten years all over again.”
“Okay and what else?”
“Open and notorious means you can’t actively hide from the owner or pretend you aren’t actually squatting there; you need to change the land somehow, which could be by building something, like a fence, or a house—”
“A gazebo!”
“… Yep. A gazebo would definitely count. You need to be there without permission: that’s hostile. The only other thing is exclusive. Exclusive means that the real owner can’t be there while you’re also there. Otherwise, you know.”
“Chaos.”
“Exactly.”
Maybe she shouldn’t know that adverse possession exists, I found myself thinking. Maybe it’s too—
“We’re doing it!”
“We’re really not.”
“Why would you tell me about this and think that we wouldn’t … of course we’re doing it!” she practically shouted, now pacing conspiratorially the short circuit of our almost comically small kitchen. “We’re gonna do it to a farm upstate somewhere.”
“What? Why?”
“Well, you can’t camp out in Brooklyn.”
“Fair.”
“We’re gonna do it to a cranberry farm!”
“Is that a real thing?”
“We’re gonna do it to … a regular farm!”
“There might be cranberry farms. It was a sincere question,” I offered, and I still don’t know.
“Or an apple orchard! I bet we’d be the greatest farmers, or orchard keepers. You could drop out of law school—”
“Deal.”
“And I wouldn’t ever have to go to another audition again. We could live off the land,” she said serenely, smushing her forehead onto mine for a long moment before clamping her lily teeth around my nose until I agreed to be a trespassing farmer.
Having begrudgingly entered adulthood, we tried to become established quickly as something like naturalized citizens in our new home—and here is where adverse possession became for us a peculiar sort of manifest destiny, a watchword to chart our progress as takers of the world. Every restaurant we ate at twice instantly became Ours, and at every bar we intentionally ordered the same drinks over and over because we knew that we could build an easy home out of routine. When we discovered bookstores, we told everyone about them.
“Adverse possession!” she would bellow proudly when we found something we wanted for our own.
Fiona and I kept taking, kept living in this way, long after our friends had grown comfortably into their older, smaller lives. We claimed every experience for only ourselves: the first snow, the last rays of the day, every star we gazed was ripped from the public domain—property of Fiona and Leo’s New Life Together, copyright and patent pending and no squatters allowed. We were celestial thieves; we had no remorse; our only desire was the annexation of all beautiful things. We adversely possessed things we read about, things we’d never even seen. The phosphorescent pools out west. Some weathered stone walls near Galway. Slushy St. Petersburg. Brooklyn belongs to us now.
We almost had the Northern Lights. I found out that if we rented a car, left in the morning, and drove fifteen hours due north we could take them for sure:
“I will,” Fiona said.
I know.
“I’m serious, I really will,” she said.
I will too.
We fought and loved like I imagined the great couples of history fought and loved. In our worst moments, we whiled away the time the way some people dice onions: every move a tiny violent severance, every new layer reached another baffling chemical reason to dam up your eyes, each action so crisp and so careless that someone is inevitably bound to draw blood. In our best moments, we were mad for one another, fully pooled in each other’s ideas and aspirations.
She told me once, between sibilant smacks of an apple, that she could read my thoughts, and I believed that it was true.
“It’s good that no one is like you,” she told me.
I loved every small thing there was about Fiona. That she was a bawdy drunk. That she always, always talked to people as though they could easily intuit cardinal directions (“you’re going to want to head south at the light, ma’am”). The way she said “Leo,” so precisely, every time, as though a rougher enunciation might bruise the word. The way she was warm to no one but me.
I never loved Fiona so much as I did then, in those first awe-filled days, because she kept me from having to be born again, alone. And when we struggled, we did so secure in the knowledge that this was happening everywhere, and to people just like us, that it had happened before and would continue to happen so long as there was college and currency and wine.
* * *
Probably the most important thing to know about me is that I am a fraud. When I was in second grade, Mrs. Easterling gave us a spelling test, and because I was good at spelling I finished it early. We had to sit quietly until everybody finished, though, so while I waited I decided to doodle on the back of the paper: three-dimensional boxes, those cool letter esses that look like gothic figure eights, and a small diagram explaining, with a drunkard’s penmanship but accurately enough, the basic premises of the Pythagorean theorem. I must have seen it in one of my brother’s encyclopedias; I used to sneak into his room at night when I couldn’t sleep and read them on the floor by flashlight. We can’t know why—I was voracious for worldly knowledge back then, in the way that today I am voracious only for free food.
Teachers, parents: all agreed that my scrawlings had been the unmistakable first gurgles of genius. Within a week I was whisked off to fifth-grade math classes, special little tutor sessions, advanced everything; by the time I was twelve I was essentially in high school, this wunderkind, head down, excelling. Every step forward looked impressive enough on its own to make the next a foregone conclusion, regardless of merit or work ethic or interest, and I can trace that Rube Goldberg device straight from law school all the way back to the moment when I pointlessly regurgitated a little Greek doorstop onto the back of my spelling test in colored pencil.
Mrs. Easterling thought I was the future, but really I was only peaking young. I never cured cancer or split the atom or changed the way anyone thought about anything. I never even wanted to. Rockets were the future, once, and so were drive-in movies, and Lenny Bias, and the Edsel, and Betamax. Bayonets, CD-Roms, Communism. The United States of America. Things get away from you. They get away from you, and it happens so quickly, and all that promise grows obsolete.
Fiona, who was smarter and more curious by nature than I would ever be, never much minded that my super-genius days were long behind me. She didn’t much care that I talked in my sleep—she secretly recorded it, in fact, for several weeks, and laid my subliminal maunderings onto a trembling and frankly regrettable “post-dubstep” (?) beat during the fondly-remembered Month She Decided to Be a DJ. She weathered my brimming catalog of neuroses, my soy allergy, the way I cock my head like a terrier when I get judgmental or confused. My hypochondria.
O, my hypochondria: on occasion, almost totally debilitating (or is it, right?), lacking all regard for my otherwise quite adequate capacity for basic reason. An abridged survey of the ailments and decrepitudes with which I have honestly and wrongfully believed myself to have been stricken over the years would include bone cancer, kidney cancer, lung cancer, skin cancer, about a thousand brain tumors, calcium deficiencies, young adult arthritis, chronic heart attack, various ulcers, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, pneumonia, acid reflux, both types of diabetes, a torn anterior cruciate ligament, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, scabies, migraines, carpal tunnel syndrome, anemia, gout, dormant epilepsy, hyper- and hypoglycemia, SARS, osteoporosis, restless legs syndrome, extremely-early-onset Alzheimer’s, generalized anxiety disorder, very specific anxiety disorder, and—I kid you not—the avian flu.
Quoth Fiona: “You do not have that.” But in the moment—amid the news reports, the breathless speculations, the hurt bird I saw that morning on the steps of the law library—in the moment, I did have that.
Fiona had none of those things, and until her wisdom teeth were removed on the morning of her twenty-fifth birthday she had never been a patient in a hospital. She came from Lutheran stock, and her people were hale and hardy, the starch of the human species: vigorous and lusty and all other adjectives more at home describing a gale or a stew than persons. They say “belly” instead of stomach, and even their littlest (see: five-four Fiona) seem large, their aspects puffed up and out by their own magnetism, like folk heroes.
Perhaps it was that indomitable blood that made her so steady on a stage. Acting came as naturally to Fiona as nothing came to me; she’d wanted to be a movie star since she was eight years old and her older brother let her watch Sigourney Weaver in Alien while their parents were away, and it is a rare thing that a child’s singular fantasy of adulthood conspires so effortlessly to suit her when the moment comes to choose what she might be.
I wasn’t imaginative enough to harbor that kind of desire. When I was little, the concept of movie stardom didn’t make a lick of sense to me; I’d see Tom Hanks and be outraged: I know you’re not an astronaut, because I just saw you fight that volcano. It’s the same person! Always the same person, just pretending to be a cop or a baseball manager or an adult kid. If the movie people really wanted us to become engrossed in their stories, why wouldn’t they cast entirely new actors for each one? At least then I could imagine that you are who you say that you are. Why should I participate in the universal hallucination of agreeing that you’re William Wallace? You’re blatantly Mel Gibson, and I see you on television all the fucking time. I don’t know when in life I finally caved to the world on this point, but I’m glad that I permanently succumbed to the charade in time to enjoy watching Fiona over and over again. I’m glad.
She worked consistently during Our First Year—in nearly credible black-box art pieces, mostly, and once in a national commercial for auto insurance alongside multiple computer-generated co-stars of the animalic variety, co-stars whose heavy accents bore no relationship whatsoever to the natural habitats of their respective genera.
Even in lesser fare, she cut a brilliant ingénue or fender bender-er, conveying with the merest morsel of a look whichever ineffable feeling was required. Fiona was blessed with easy access to the full bright constellation of human emotions. She was wasted on the too-clever playwrights of New York, wasted on the horn-rimmed directors, wasted on her peers, those parched minds packed unstably into beautiful bodies. I never liked any of her acting friends—not one. Mackenzie Walters, loudmouthed and positively Amazonian, whom Fiona had met at an arts camp in seventh grade. Alice Gerson, a sweet but shivering bundle of unearned insecurities with whom Fiona frequently competed for parts. Joel Enson, Mackenzie’s even-louder-mouthed boyfriend who never once came to our apartment without cooking something elaborate out of our freshest ingredients that clearly didn’t belong to him. The parade of smirking autolatrists from Fiona’s acting class, boring men and boring women, each of whom had long ago convinced themselves that it was their intricate talent alone which daily attuned the spheres of Heaven and Earth.
Fiona wasn’t one of them—she had character of the sort for which you cannot simply substitute in hair product—but it made me nervous that these were her friends. I found myself eyeing her for residue every time they came around, the way you might check your partner for ticks after hiking through a stretch of long grass. Could they infect my complicated darling with their swooning idiocy? Is lack of depth contagious? Of course not, I decided each night, as she curled herself once more onto my arm. She writes notes in the margins of poetry books in pencil; she listens to people when they speak.
Her first true break arrived the summer before my third and final year of law school. Mercy General was one of the few television shows that still shot in New York; like me, it had been running for twenty-five years, and was a moderately successful soap opera featuring a number of suspicious doctors. Millions of laundromat employees, inpatients, cat-sitters, and children home sick tuned in each week to watch the uniformly attractive denizens of Titular Hospital make bad writing worse. Fiona won the part of nurse Jeanette, spunky-yet-sensitive medical neophyte and reluctant love interest to the Adonic Dr. Adam Strickland, who was portrayed by the actor Mark Renard: an Olympic-level brooder with no other discernable modes or abilities. Before doctor and nurse were killed off in a boating accident to end the season (but really the harbormaster did it), Fiona would appear in nineteen episodes—enough to quit waitressing, pay off her student loans, and gain a certain amount of traction within the industry.
And when success arrived, she handled the change the way I knew she would, like a guarded but grateful weirdo. Most young actors never come anywhere near even the farthest outcrops of Fame Mountain, but suddenly we were—she was—being stopped on the street. It happened at least a dozen times that year, and in each instance she was embarrassed to the point of near-panic. Once, in a truly seminal display of awkwardness, she even went so far as to ask a befuddled autograph-seeker to reciprocate—there was a great deal of confusion, and no paper, and we landed on having the starstruck old lady sign the back of my hand in blue pen (“EILEEN R. STURDIVANT LOVE THE SHOW THANK YOU!”).
It seemed very much like the start of something, even if the show itself was no great shakes. She was acting, I was learning, we were cooking and reading and walking and running together, and brunches and wine-bottle candlesticks and the record player playing and then so suddenly it’s summer again, and I’m a sudden lawyer now, and if it weren’t for that goddamn harbormaster—
* * *
There are things about Fiona you don’t get to know. Infrared secrets, pitched beyond the dog whistle, things stored so far to your east you might just as well head west. There are tigers in those parts—the old kind: tygers with a “y”—too far removed from you in place and time, and fogged in by obscurities to find, nacarat and sable in their primal postures. Everyone who has ever lived has harbored their own unseen ciphers; you can call their home a hiding place, or a furnace room enkindling the ways that each of us will be. The point is this: you will never get to know these things about Fiona, but I had seen them all, had charted every inch of her vast topography, had categorized her fauna and danced a thousand times to her classified music, those arcane and dissonant chords, and it was a hard night, the night I let her go.
Copyright © 2016 by Daniel Cluchey
