The Speed of Life
An Illustrated Novel
By James Victor Jordan
Praise for The Speed of Life
From the courtroom to the swamp primeval to the underpinnings of the universe, James Jordan takes us on a wild ride. A hugely ambitious and thoroughly enjoyable triumph of a first novel. All I can say is "Bravo!"
T.C. Boyle Author of The Tortilla Curtain.
I hugely enjoyed this remarkable novel. It blends human courage & cruelties with solid astrophysics and with Seminole culture & mythology – resulting in a richness that held me tightly in its grip.
Kip S. Thorne Winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The Speed of Life is a fast-paced, character-rich, thought-provoking novel that takes the reader from the heart of Western philosophy and civilization to the heart of millennial America. A fine storyteller, James Jordan knows his characters and where all their secrets are buried, and something more—the hope still strong in their restless, striving hearts. A remarkable debut.
Aram Saroyan winner of the William Carlos Williams award for best poetry collection.
The Speed of Life, by James Victor Jordan, is a ground-breaking, scientific/philosophical novel wrapped in a Carl Hiaasen-flavored thriller. Jordan relates cutting-edge theoretical physics to ancient Seminole shamanistic practices and produces a credible explanation of why and how old magical methods may have tangible effects in our world. At the same time, this novel is sparklingly contemporary, bright and crisp around the edges of its plot, and ingenious in braiding elaborate story lines to bring an extraordinary cast of characters together. And it fires itself forward at a break-neck velocity; this is not a book you will want to put down.
Madison Smartt Bell, winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award and National Book Award finalist for All Souls Rising.
What happens when a horrendous crime threatens a mother’s love for her son? An old Florida family and those in their orbit get caught in a torrent of passion, a deadly legal system, and the mythology of the Everglades, which runs as deep as this story does. Propulsive, evocative, beautiful writing.
Tom Holland, screenwriter of Psycho II, writer-director of Fright Night, Child’s Play, Stephen King’s Thinner
“Impressive . . . Descriptions . . . are primarily images that Jordan sears onto the pages.” Kirkus Reviews
This is a publication of Turning Leaf Books
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information contact: [email protected]
For information about discounts for bulk purchases, contact the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All events are the product of the author’s imagination and other than references to historical or public figures, all characters are fictive— any resemblance to any other person, living or dead, is coincidence.
Text and illustrations Copyright 2018 James Victor Jordan.
Cover illustration Copyright 2018 James Victor Jordan
Cover Design and illustration in collaboration with Eric Savage, Savage Creative www.savagecreative.com
Title page of Part VII design and illustration in collaboration with Loraine Hall.
For information about bringing the author to your live event, please contact the publisher.
ISBN number: 978-1-7325143-1-7
Follow your own star and you cannot fail to reach your destination.
Spoken by Ser Brunetto Latino to the pilgrim Dante as they walked by the Phlegethon River of souls boiling in blood toward the Great Cliff above the Eighth Circle of Hell.
Inferno Canto XV: 54-56
By Dante, Translated and paraphrased by James Victor Jordan
We will see that, like a particle, the universe doesn't have just a single history, but every possible history, each with its own probability; and our observations of its current state affect its past and determine the different histories of the universe . . .
Page 183, The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Permission to use this quote graciously granted by Professor Mlodinow.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
In the dark-blue sky you keep,
And often through my curtains peep,
For you never shut your eye
Till the sun is in the sky.
From the 1806 poem, The Star
By Jane Taylor
Dedication
For my wife Andrea Zinder, my sun and my stars, for her inspiration, for lighting my path, for her tireless reading and rereading the manuscript, for helping me keep my sentences honest and this story true.
Contents
Part I Estella
#MeToo
Rough Justice
Part II Andrew
Betty Mae
Charlotte Crow
Billie
Part III Georges
Twentieth Century Fox
Aphelion
Father’s Day
Dressed to Kill
Part IV Ras
The Lineup
Waiting for the Sun
The Unveiling
Part V Merchants of Justice
Ismael
Sir Walter Raleigh
Ryan
Part VI Al and Hailey
Victim of Love
A Friend of the Devil
Part VII The Circle of Jupiter
A Warped Side of the Universe
Perihelion
Part I Estella
#MeToo
Andrew’s going to the beach, looking good, shades covering his brown eyes, wearing his hair too short. On his way out the door, he says, “Be home before sundown, Momma.” He’s not allowed to drive at night. The latch clicks, and he’s gone.
My balcony – my refuge when I weary from the demands of meting out justice – is cantilevered over a garden catching the light of the late-afternoon sun dancing and splashing over double hibiscus, second-bloom wisteria, and wild myrtle. I sip a lemon daiquiri. A fragrance of honeysuckle wafts in the air. A ruby-throated hummingbird flits from flower to flower to flower on a bottlebrush bush. In the rose beds, a golden rat snake crushes the last breath from a squealing young squirrel. A turkey vulture, majestic in flight, repulsive in sight, cawing, its fishhook-tipped talons extended like the fingers of an open hand, flaps its wings—spanning six feet—slowly, gracefully, as it descends to the upper fronds of a stately cabbage palmetto.
Yesterday, when I cross-examined the defendant – formerly revered as “The Queen” by her elderly clients – her crown rested uneasy as she stammered, contradicted herself, and failed to reconcile her testimony with the story she’d told on direct. The incredulity of the jurors was palpable, an unmistakable harbinger of a loose swift sword. Her victims’ life savings were invested in a collapsed Ponzi scheme that paid for her chartered-jet excursions to Lake Como and ski vacations in Gstaad. The satisfaction of her victims with the judgment will be transitory, a brief respite from their anguish. But to turn the other cheek is to ignore moral imperative, and to disregard morality is to court extinction.
This judge is fond of metaphor. A trial is a jigsaw puzzle, she told the jurors. Each piece of the puzzle is a piece of evidence. There is no order in which the pieces of the puzzle must be assembled. But you can’t see the puzzle’s entire picture until you have all the pieces. When all the evidence is presented, you will have all the pieces of the puzzle. Then following my instructions, it will be your job to put the puzzle together. You can only reach a proper decision after you’ve seen the entire picture.
No one believes that jurors will wait until they�
�ve seen and heard all the evidence before they make up their minds. Instructing jurors to keep an open mind, like the instruction to disregard what you just saw or heard, pays homage to one of the great fictions of Anglo-American law. But the judge’s metaphor gets it right because any quest for the truth – in science, in philosophy, or in literature as well as in the law – should consider and weigh all available evidence and test every reasonable hypothesis with the greatest possible objectivity. Considering what’s at stake in a criminal trial – or in a human drug trial for that matter – a failure to be objective and impartial would be— well criminal.
Well before we lived in a world of sound bites and subliminal messaging, people usually made snap subjective decisions about matters of significance rather than taking the time and making the effort to form reasoned, objective, and empirically founded ones. This is human nature stemming from cultural and religious indoctrination that begins in early childhood, an evolutionary development that fostered survival for our early ancestors. Today it leads to xenophobia and other forms of intolerance. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of my mother teaching me this lesson.
At the dawn of humanity, when one of our ancestors saw another person approaching, failure to promptly determine if that person was a friend or foe could be fatal. In this circumstance our early ancestor would have to make a swift decision: hurl a rock or a spear before the other person could, run, or greet the stranger. Most often, this decision was based upon whether the stranger looked like herself. This explains why the call to bar immigrants from our shores rather than benefit from multiculturalism resonates with many of our citizens. Xenophobia stems from primitive instincts. As a person of mixed race – part Seminole, part black, part white – this terrifies me. There aren’t very many people who look like me, or like Andrew, whose father was also of mixed race.
No one on my jury harbors even an iota of doubt about the Queen’s guilt. You can see that in the way they look at her and her lawyers. You can see it in the way they look at me. The trial isn’t over, but the Queen has already earned her verdict of guilty. Fortunately, in the Queen’s case, even though all the evidence hasn’t been presented, the jury’s got it right.
To celebrate, I go shopping for that pair of Jimmy Choos I’ve been wanting. Money can’t buy you love. But it can buy you shoes, and shoes won’t break your heart.
When I return from Saks, the sun is setting behind the Everglades, drawing dusk over the falling light of another day. Andrew isn’t home; he hasn’t called. Whatever the reason he’s late – he’s hurt, he’s stoned, he’s been arrested again – the news won’t be good.
I call. No answer. I leave voice mail. “Andrew?” I’m dispirited but my voice is a soothing breeze in the eye of a hurricane. “Your probation officer could call . . .” I send a text.
Waiting, I vacuum, dust, and polish. Every crystal in the dining room chandelier glistens, refracting the light, breaking it into vibrant spectrums of twilight. My ivory-white soft-leather sofa smells new; my bird’s-eye maple dining-room table, chairs, sideboard, and buffet smell like Pine-Sol; the lavender, mauve, and eggshell-white tiles on the bathroom and kitchen floors and counters smell like chemical flowers. The condo is a photo op for Good Housekeeping.
Almost.
I’ve left open the French doors leading to the balcony; the golden snake, a bulge in its midsection, nestles in plush piles of white carpet. Providence. Nature has sent me a companion.
A terrarium, a home unused since Andrew freed his pet snake years ago, now houses Providence and the promise of a rat later in the week.
Still no word from Andrew.
I do my laundry and then his, folding his twenty-eight-inch-waist jeans. He’s just turned twenty, but I remember him insisting that we teach him to hunt soon after his father died; he was only six.
“I have to protect you,” he said.
His grandmomma taught him the ways of her Seminole and African ancestors— respect for the earth and his elders. When he was twelve, he could survive on his own in the Everglades.
He was sixteen when he graduated from high school, where he won places on the debate and track teams and a black belt in taekwondo. He was nineteen when he graduated from college. Imagine my aspirations for my brilliant son. Imagine my incredulity when he was charged with possession of LSD with intent to sell.
He’s left his room tidy, his bed made, no clutter, as a well-mannered, overnight guest would upon departing from the home of his host. I wonder if he intends to return. But no. He wouldn’t leave without a word. I don’t feel better knowing this.
On my coffee table is a novel I’ve been meaning to read: The Lovely Bones. Misty Rabin, my best friend, says it’s all the rage, as if rage were a good thing. My boss, Aurora Goldin, has also recommended it. It’s a good time to read a page-turner, but soon the words blur and I’m remembering the afternoon I visited Andrew in jail.
As a federal prosecutor, I was no stranger to the county detention center. But before visiting Andrew there, when questioning a suspect or informant, I’d only been in the austere but immaculate inmate interrogation rooms enclosed within institutional-green walls with an armed deputy sheriff with an unmistakable countenance of menace nearby. The visitor facilities were different.
We sat on a filthy hard-rubber bench bolted to a gray picnic table in a gritty courtyard. The strung-out inmates were a lower class of criminal than the ones I prosecute.
A woman with a pincushion face and the word deviant tattooed on the back of her blubbery neck sat near a grizzled inmate – short white hair and a white handlebar mustache, sinewy, a serpent offering an apple to Eve tattooed on his arm. She tickled the old man’s earlobe.
He slapped her hand away. “Stop it!”
“Oh, baby, who loves you?” she said.
“Jesus loves me.”
“Jesus ain’t going to post your bail,” she said.
Andrew was thinner than a stalk of pussy willow.
“Where's Derek?” he said.
“We broke up.”
“I'm sorry,” he said. “What happened?”
“It was mutual. Have you had other visitors?” I said.
“Billie Bower came by yesterday. He wasn’t himself. I think this place freaked him out.”
Billie Bower. Andrew’s best friend, two years older, a surrogate big brother. He’d become a body builder, fastidiously following a healthy diet, always in training. A Seminole. An upstanding young man. I imagined how angry Billie must be with Andrew for poisoning his body with LSD, for possessing such a large quantity that he was charged with intent to sell.
“You’ve probably disappointed him,” I said.
Andrew’s expression didn’t change.
“Why haven’t you posted bail?” I said.
An inmate – mid-thirties, the type of guy who, if wearing a suit, could pass as a stockbroker – smelling of hair oil and fried food stopped in front of us. He was muscular, five inches taller, fifty pounds heavier than Andrew.
“Hello, Andrew boy! Who’s the babe?”
Andrew stood.
The man smacked his lips.
“Keep moving, mister,” I said.
“I can do that,” he said, thrusting his hips to and fro Elvis Presley style. “Inside of you.”
“Fred, don’t,” Andrew said. “You’ll get hurt—”
“I’d like her to try.”
I pride myself for my lightning repartee but before I could speak, Andrew scissor kicked the man, sending him to the pavement, which was covered with soot and cigarette butts. Blood dripped from his lower lip, his cheek smudged. The creep lay on the ground, groaning, holding his knee.
Two punks approached—The taller had a frozen, unblinking eye. With his good eye, he winked. “You want to kick me, cholo?”
With the heel of his palm, the shorter man struck his friend on the back of his head.
“¿Qué harías si su mama?” To Andrew he said. “Tú tienes huevos. Háblame mas tarde.�
�� They moved on.
“I can get drug diversion,” Andrew said.
My neck was stiff, my shoulders tight. “For dealing?”
“I’ll have to take randomly ordered drug tests.” He paused. “You’d have to sponsor me, let me live with you, and agree probation officers can search the condo any time.”
I felt a wave of relaxation. “Good, that’s good,” I said. “You need help. And you won’t get it here.”
I abandon the novel, mute the TV, channel surf through pointless, absurd images. What the hell am I doing? Derek channel surfed, and it drove me nuts. But when he held me, reassured me when I awoke shivering in the despair of deep night – “It’s only a dream, Estella, only a dream” – my anxiety was soothed. I wish he were here.
Derek – his body toned by hours well spent in the gym, his sandy hair blending with gray at his temples – says he still loves me. When the FBI assigned him to one of my cases, he was separated, and I was on the rebound, too. After a year, I knew he’d eventually go back to Kathi and his kids. When I broke up with him, that’s exactly what he did. The jerk.
Granted: Derek had failed a fundamental test of devotion. But compared to Andrew’s father, Karl, Derek was a poster child of reliability.
I fell in love with Karl when I was fourteen, a few months after my father was killed in combat. A year later, when I was pregnant with Andrew, I discovered that Karl was also sleeping with Claudia, a girl my age. Karl was charged with statutory rape.
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