The Life of the World to Come Read Free Page B

else’s property, and if you can stay there long enough without being detected, under certain circumstances it will just become yours .
    â€œShut the fuck up,” said Fiona when she heard.
    â€œI’m not kidding. Trespass somewhere for enough time, and eventually you own it.”
    â€œThat doesn’t sound right to me. How is that a thing?”
    â€œIt’s called adverse possession. It’s been around since before America; it’s a well-established thing.”
    â€œOkay and what are the rules again?”
    â€œActual, continuous, open, notorious, hostile, and exclusive possession for a statutory period of—”
    â€œEnglish, counselor.”
    â€œWell, you need to actually be present on the property, uh, continually, for however long the period of—”
    â€œHow long is that?”
    â€œIt varies by state, but in New York it’s ten years.”
    â€œAnd if you run out of toilet paper or Sriracha…”
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œOkay and what else?”
    â€œOpen 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—”
    â€œA gazebo!”
    â€œâ€¦ 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.”
    â€œChaos.”
    â€œExactly.”
    Maybe she shouldn’t know that adverse possession exists, I found myself thinking. Maybe it’s too —
    â€œWe’re doing it!”
    â€œWe’re really not.”
    â€œWhy 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.”
    â€œWhat? Why?”
    â€œWell, you can’t camp out in Brooklyn.”
    â€œFair.”
    â€œWe’re gonna do it to a cranberry farm!”
    â€œIs that a real thing?”
    â€œWe’re gonna do it to … a regular farm!”
    â€œThere might be cranberry farms. It was a sincere question,” I offered, and I still don’t know.
    â€œOr an apple orchard! I bet we’d be the greatest farmers, or orchard keepers. You could drop out of law school—”
    â€œDeal.”
    â€œAnd 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.
    â€œAdverse 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,