The Speed of Life

by James Victor Jordan

  I was worried about my client, an octogenarian, who’d never had a cell phone. I notified the judge’s clerk, telling him I’d been unexpectedly detained and would be a little late. There wasn’t anything else I could do.

  I wasn’t one of those maniacs who lean on their horns, give the finger to other commuters for imagined offenses, or curse. And I wasn’t worried about the time. After all, the case wasn’t a train that could leave the station without me. I was calm but anxious about the crick in my neck. Five days running and it wasn’t any better. Neither was the cough nor the nausea that also began on the morning of the first day of the trial.

  The night before the trial began I’d had a haunting dream. In the nightmare, I’m on the witness stand and under cross examination I’m asked, “Mr. Bohem, why shouldn’t your wife be granted a divorce?”

  I want to say, that lowlife wife of mine deserted us. Why should she get a divorce? But I’m distracted by my wife’s lawyer’s grease-thin mustache. The ends split into unctuous tentacles, fractals that grow and slither over the counsel table. I’m unable to speak as the swirling geometric forks of slimy facial hair slide up into the witness stand, climb my legs and torso, then circle my neck, tightening like a noose.

  My hands rise, trying in vain to pull off the oleaginous scaly skin of the tentacles constricting my throat. I hear cackles and hoots.

  “Give the lady a medal,” says the fat bailiff, his abundant belly hanging over his belt like a sack of flour.

  The judge’s tongue darts over her lips like a snake’s. She stares lustily at Bea, whose boobs flow over the top of her low-cut blouse. Returning the judge’s flirtation, Bea’s eyes dance, but she looks at me as if I’m toast.

  And my own eight-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer? What is he doing? Is he slamming his fist on the table, objecting to this sham proceeding, stopping this sideshow free-for-all? No. He’s polishing his nails, then blowing on them. He’s smoothing out the lapels of his Black Label Armani suit. Then he’s looking up at me as an afterthought, the corners of his mouth curling into an I-told-you-so smirk.

  I manage to swallow, trying to lubricate my windpipe. Croaking, I say, “She has no grounds.”

  “Georges, Georges, Georges,” Bea says, clucking as if we’ve been over this a hundred if not a thousand times.

  “We rest,” says her lawyer. “He’s clueless.”

  Clueless? What is it I don’t get? If I weren’t suffocating, I’d denounce the proceedings as unjust, a fraud, an affront to decency, but the judge, waving a pistol, cuts off my sputtering attempts to speak.

  “That’s enough from you, Mr. Bohem.” She stands, an imperious Kafkaesque sorceress in her flowing black robes, points the gun at my heart, as if performing a ritual, and pulls back the hammer until it cocks.

  Then the gravelly voice of an adolescent boy says, “I’ll do it.” It’s our fifteen-year-old, Dante. He takes the gun from the judge, turns it on Bea, and pulls the trigger.

  Traffic on the freeway was still at a standstill. I adjusted the rearview mirror, shocked by the sight of my aged face: lines etching my forehead like blistering paint; hairline receding like the ebb of a tide; swollen, deep-maroon bags under my lower eyelids.

  In the courthouse restroom, I tried to tie my too-wide tie, a Father’s Day gift in happier times from Bea and Dante. The background was bright turquoise with patterns of ivory-colored dice showing sevens and elevens in brown dots. Bea had said it was for luck. But when I adjusted the knot, all I could think about was waking from the nightmare with a jolt. I reached over to wake up Bea. It was instinct. During seventeen years of marriage she’d always said, “Never say the word ‘divorce.’ If you don’t say it, it can’t happen.” She’d never said it. But she wasn’t there. She’d moved out three months before, and I was still startled every time I reached over and found her side of the bed empty.

  I couldn’t fall back to sleep, so I’d gotten up and peeked into Dante’s room. His angelic face awash in the blue light of his monitor, rap thumped through his speakers. I stepped into his room to turn off his computer. When I moved the mouse an unsent e-mail to Bea appeared in place of the screensaver. It said: dear mom please return my calls its been three days love Dante.

  I had to focus on where I was, what I was doing. I’d run out of time to think about how to save my marriage or console my son. And even if I had time to think about the nightmare, which I didn’t, it didn’t take Sigmund Freud to interpret it. I was a seasoned transactional lawyer, a senior partner in a corporate law firm with a global practice, offices in fifteen cities on six continents.

  From time to time I took a case or a matter pro bono and this case was one of them. Fresh out of law school, I’d tried scores of criminal cases, and I handled white-collar criminal cases brought against established clients of the firm. But this was my first civil trial, which explained the dream. It was just a little stage fright rousing me from sleep, making everything taste like sawdust, making me put my hands in my pockets when they shook. This trial was like everything else; I had it under control. When it was over, I’d have plenty of time to pull it all together: my marriage, my family, myself.

  There wasn’t anything I could do about being fifteen minutes late, but I was consoled knowing that not one hearing, not one morning or afternoon session had ever started on time because the judge was always late— late in the morning, late returning to court after lunch, late returning from breaks as she chain smoked while chatting with other lawyers or judges in chambers or returned or made phone calls. A forty-five-minute delay was the norm.

  At the courthouse, in the men’s room, I knotted and then reknotted my tie, my fingers fumbling, my hands perspiring, still not getting it right. I took it off and retied it.

  I paused by the oak doors to the courtroom. Each one had a small window, like a porthole, covered from the inside by a cardboard sign that said: trial in progress. I summoned the caution I imagined all skilled civil-trial lawyers possess and pushed one of the massive portals open a few inches. Save for the high-pitched hum of the fluorescent lights, the place was silent as a crypt. When I slipped inside, the hinges groaned as the door closed behind me. The jury was in the box, and the bailiff, clerk, and defense lawyers were all in their places. Everyone but the judge, who was reading, stared at me. She tapped a silver fountain pen against a crystal decanter. The sound was ominous like the faint ringing of crinkling ice presaging an avalanche, or the bells of a church announcing the departure of a funeral procession. She waited until I reached the counsel table, then filled her glass with water. On her good days, her voice sounded like squealing truck brakes. Now it had a new edge, sharper than shards of plate glass.

  “Mr. Bohem. You’ve wasted public resources and the time of everyone here. What’s your excuse?”

  Shirley Isley, my client – her silver hair, accented by her soft ebony skin, piled atop her head in a neat bun as if it were a halo – sat at the counsel table, trembling. She wheezed every time she inhaled, a rattle of mortality echoing in her chest. We were in trial to prove that nursing-home neglect had caused the death of her husband, Tobias, and amounted to elder abuse. I placed my hand on her shoulder to reassure her, to let her know that everything would be okay now that I was there.

  The defendants’ liability in this case wasn’t in doubt. And the damages? $200,000 at least.

  The judge was angry because Shirley had refused a settlement offer of $15,000. For five days, like Godzilla, she’d trampled on our evidence, our witnesses, Shirley, and now on me. But I wasn’t about to play Bambi, not with my credibility with the jury on the line.

  “I telephoned, Your Honor, to let you know I’d been unavoidably detained,” I said, glancing at the clerk, waiting for him to speak. He didn’t take his eyes off his monitor.

  The sound of the tapping pen grew louder, more insistent.

  “I’m waiting, Mr. Bohem.”

  “May we take this up at the break, Your Honor?”

  “You’ve kept the ju
ry waiting for a quarter-hour. They’re entitled to know why.”

  “I had an accident,” I said.

  She leaned forward, staring at me so intently I stepped back. “Is there a police report?”

  This was it. The nadir of my legal career. I could quickly parse a complex business scam that had evaded regulatory oversight. Four months before, I’d been in Kuala Lumpur representing a multinational banking consortium at the closing of a multibillion-dollar loan to finance construction of a pipeline. Now I couldn’t even try this first-year-lawyer case without being humiliated. Was there anything I could still do?

  “I cut myself shaving,” I said.

  I was stunned by the judge’s outburst of laughter. Several jurors frowned while others snickered or laughed with her. The clerk lost interest in what he’d been typing and looked bemused. Even the defense lawyers, usually stoic as morticians, grinned.

  “I must admit,” the judge said, “I haven’t heard that one before.” The tone of her voice implied I was either an idiot or a liar. “There’s not a mark on your face,” she said. “You’re ordered to pay sanctions of $1,000 to the county by the end of the day.” She licked her upper lip like a well-fed tabby lapping cream.

  I tore off my jacket, unknotted my tie.

  “What are you doing, Mr. Bohem? If you don’t call your next witness, your case-in-chief is closed.”

  “I’m showing the cut on my neck to the court and the jury, Judge.”

  “Stop!” she said.

  But I’d already yanked off my tie and in haste my shaking hands ripped off the top two buttons of my shirt to reveal blood-soaked gauze taped below my Adam’s apple. When I turned to face the jury, I noticed blood on the inside of my shirt collar.

  The judge slammed her gavel. “Court is in recess.” She admonished the jurors, cautioning them not to discuss the case or form any opinions about the issues until all the evidence was presented. Then she said, “Counsel, see me in chambers.”

  When we entered her chambers, she was already smoking. The door hadn’t fully closed when the lead defense lawyer blustered, “We move for a mistrial, Your Honor.”

  “Denied!” the judge said, lighting another cigarette. “Get yourself a new shirt, Mr. Bohem. I’m rescinding the sanctions order.”

  “Will you tell that to the jury?”

  She exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. “Don’t push your luck.”

  “You think I’m lucky?”

  She regarded me with soft eyes and an expression one could easily mistake for kindness. “Your tie, Mr. Bohem—” I looked to see if I’d gotten blood on it, too. I hadn’t. “It’s atrocious. Tomorrow, consult with your wife before leaving for court.”

  Reflexively, I twisted my wedding band.

  I bought a new shirt and tie at Brooks Brothers, then went to the restaurant at the Music Center across the street from the courthouse, where I had a lunch date with Bea. The place was classic retro with framed paintings of nineteenth-century fox hunts, barristers in wigs, and sailing ships of war. Bea was already seated in a booth upholstered in red pleather. She’d been letting her hair grow and her tight blonde curls fell in velvet ringlets to her blouse collar. Her suit jacket lay in the booth beside her. She was clinking her wedding ring on the rim of a martini glass.

  “It’s 11:30,” I said.

  She signaled the server. “I’ll have another, please.”

  I slid into the booth next to her. “Aren’t you in trial?” I said.

  The server brought Bea’s second martini. I told her about Dante’s unsent e-mail. “Will you please call him today?”

  “You haven’t learned a thing in therapy,” she said. “Why are we bothering to talk reconciliation?”

  I felt throbs in my shoulders, which for weeks had felt strained.

  “What haven’t I learned?” I said.

  “Not to change the subject.” She raised her voice. “Who put you in charge?”

  “We were talking about—”

  “You were talking,” she said, her voice louder, her speech slurred.

  The place was filling up. Two of my partners stopped by our table, making small talk. Had they heard Bea’s outburst? When they left, I said, “Why are you angry?”

  “I heard You went to an Al-Anon meeting.”

  I took her hand, expecting her to pull away. She didn’t.

  “I’ll quit drinking after this trial,” she said, pushing the fresh martini away. “I know I need help.”

  “I need help, too,” I said. “That’s why I went to the meeting.”

  “We’re in therapy to get help. You don’t have to make our problems public.”

  “I thought it was anonymous.”

  She was still holding my hand. She gave me that mischievous, mirthful smile that meant she was on a roll. “Naiveté is not a beneficial character trait for a civil trial lawyer.”

  “I won’t be one for long,” I said.

  “That’s good,” she said. “Wrongful death. What a waste of your talent. Most lawyers would kill for your book of business.”

  “It turns out that there are trial judges who kill lawyers for sport.”

  The server brought our salads. “I’ll pick up Dante after school— if that’s okay?” she said.

  “It’s more than okay,” I said. “Spend the weekend with him.”

  “I can’t. The plaintiffs have filed new motions and the opposition is due Monday.”

  The jury returned a verdict of $525,000 for Shirley, but the judge denied my motion for attorneys’ fees. She said the failure of the nursing-home staff to verify the dosage of Tobias’s insulin day after day for nine days, even after he went into a coma, wasn’t a pattern of elder abuse. She reduced the award to what she said was the value of the life of a seventy-year-old man: $15,000.

  Shirley had emphysema and was deteriorating rapidly. “Three months,” her doctor had told me, “six at the most.” If Shirley died before the case was over, her claim would die with her and the nursing home would pay nothing. I filed an appeal and an emergency motion for an expedited hearing, which was granted. My opening brief was due in one week; the hearing would be held two weeks later. There would be no continuances.

  Before I knew it, it was the Saturday of Father’s Day weekend and the brief was due the following Monday by 4 p.m. For three days I’d be racing a short fuse.

  That evening I made dinner for Dante. We talked about the test he’d taken on Friday in analytical geometry, how he’d used quadratic equations to find the foci of an ellipse. He drew a graph of the equations, but I still couldn’t follow the proof. His knowledge of math had surpassed mine, so I was relieved when the conversation turned to his AP English class and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.

  “That’s a complicated play,” I said. “I didn’t read it until college.”

  “It’s not complicated,” he said.

  “What do you think Shakespeare had in mind?” I said.

  “If they had divorce when Helen ran away with Paris, there wouldn’t have been a Trojan War.”

  I had to laugh. “I guess that’s right, but then we wouldn’t have the woman whose face launched a thousand ships, nothing for Homer or Shakespeare to write about.”

  “Maybe that story was important before we had no-fault divorce, but it’s always somebody’s fault.”

  We did the dishes. Then I went back to my study.

  A half hour later I was working on the brief, and at first didn’t notice Dante when he came in. He stood in front of my desk as if applying for a job. On the front of his sweatshirt was a picture of pink freshwater dolphin leaping over the mud-brown water of the Amazon River. The inscription read: The rainforest you save may save you.

  “I can’t talk right now,” I said. “I’ll come see you in an hour.”

  It seemed only a moment passed before he called out, “Dad! The hour’s up!”

  The blinking cursor on my monitor pulled me in one direction. Dante’s voice pulled me in another. I felt the acce
leration of time; I felt time running out.

  His room had a musty odor. Damp towels, and books were scattered over the floor and his bed.

  He sat in front of his computer playing The Return of Argos. Argos and his warriors were coming home after winning a ten-year epic war, but their fighting wasn’t over. There were still temptations, trials, and tribulations to surmount and enemies to defeat journeying home. The game would be won when Argos rescued his wife, the queen, in the ultimate battle. I wondered if Homer would have been amused to see his poem reduced to pixels, to see Odysseus’ name changed to the name of his dog.

  Dante said, “Will you drive me to the track meet tomorrow?”

  “You know, my brief is due Monday.”

  “Please, Dad,” he said. “The team bus leaves at six, and I need a day to sleep in.”

  “Call your mother.” I stepped toward him to watch the battle on the screen.

  “She went to Vegas with her boyfriend.”

  “What boyfriend?”

  “The one with the chinchilla farm. He skins them.”

  I’d thought we’d been making progress in therapy. A boyfriend? An ache, like a cramp, spread from my chest to my groin. But with the brief due in a little more than forty hours, there was no time to dwell on it. And I certainly didn’t have time to take Dante to his track meet. Then I pictured my father at my high school baseball games. I could bring transcripts and my laptop to the track meet.

  “It looks like Argos will defeat the Cyclops,” I said, stalling for time, weighing alternatives, “but he’d better watch out for Neptune in the next round.”

  “It’s Poseidon,” he said, “not Neptune. You’re mixing up the Roman and Greek gods.” His voice was contemptuous. “Argos is fighting the Cyclops – Polyphemus – Poseidon’s son. Get it?”

  “I know. It’s the Odyssey. A twenty-eight-hundred-year-old story. But one thing hasn’t changed. If it’s Neptune or Poseidon who gets you, you drown just the same.”

  The soundtrack crackled. Argos had taken a hit. “Damn it!” Dante yelled. With a sweep of his arm he knocked papers off his desk. “It’s your fault I lost,” he screamed. “Your stupid dad jokes.” His face was crimson, his fists clenched.