The Life of the World to Come Read Online Free Page A

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