The Life of the World to Come Read Online Free

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:
    â€œI will,” Fiona said.
    I know .
    â€œI’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.
    â€œIt’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