The Life of the World to Come by Dan Cluchey

you know it’s just giving up. I think you gave up on Fiona Haeberle. I believed in her more than you could have known, and there were times when I was the only one. That’s what really destroyed me, I think, more than you … going away, or whatever. Leaving. I had faith in the thing we made; I had faith in Our thing. And when your faith is, I don’t know, predeceased, I guess, by the thing you have faith in, well … it is really quite hard to come back from that. Do you understand, Fiona? You were the best person I ever met, and I wanted to spend the entirety of my only life growing up with you. Now you’re one of them, one of those other people, and I’m going to grow up alone. And I still—I still—I still believe that I’ll always be in love with you in some way, even far down that road, and when the feeling becomes fainter, when I recognize it only as a familiar sweetness in the air I breathe in and out every day, it will be softer but no less significant to me. It will linger the way I now realize it has been lingering there for years, waiting for an explanation that finally came to me on the night we met. Do you remember that awful party? For forty short/long months, every portion of me has been whispering your name and gesturing frantically like a weathervane toward you. Is that sappy enough to be silly? I cannot believe you’ve gone.
    Your Dearest Friend,
    Leo [undelivered of course]
    I was blown open when she left—blown open, and I couldn’t get closed. Everybody knows that, when you’re talking about a person, open things can get infected and closed things cannot. That’s basic medical science. And I lay there, open, taking in all the world’s bacteria, all the atomic details, every microscopic fact let loose to putrefy my self.
    It was them, of course; it was they: Fiona and Mark Renard in horrible concert. It was Theirs and not Ours that, since spring, had ruled the Earth. Mercy General had in fact been canceled, and the characters played by the two of them had in fact been killed in that boating accident—that was all true, and that was all known. But it was no accident, no: Mark wanted out of his contract; he demanded that they die. He killed her. It wasn’t the harbormaster at all. She must have wanted to go.
    She must have wanted to go because they were involved with each other. An integrated item, to borrow a phrase. I hadn’t seen the signs at the time, so I went back and planted them in my memory: the frequency of mention, the constant protestations concerning Mark’s intellect and talent, the late nights on set, and the distance towards the end, while I was, for once, distracted by my legal education. I never received my moment of j’accusatory revelation, my chance to rip away the curtains or the mask. My cathartic confrontation not forthcoming, I had to make do with a set of sputtering assumptions: loose rumors, drips and drabs. I resented Fiona for not having the decency to let me find out, and be the one empowered to tear Our world apart in righteous sadness.
    A couple of months after the cold facts set in, I bumped into one of Fiona’s actress friends, Alice Gerson, near my building, and she displayed for my benefit the scrunched, cock-headed, treacly-sad rendition of “Hey … how’re you holding up, man?” that can only truly be served up by a generally (but not specifically) compassionate woman to a man she doesn’t know well whom a friend of hers has cheated on.
    I’d get my confirmation later on, seeing them born anew, living together in Los Angeles, on a television screen in November. This would be the news: Fiona Fox, the actress—she was rising. Mark Renard was tabbed to be the leading man in some new show.
    Four days after Fiona left, I walked across the bridge to Manhattan, an island I’d tried almost religiously to avoid in the course of my Brooklyn years. I