Failed State

by Christopher Brown

  “You just talked to him?” said Karen, raising her eyebrows as she looked at Donny. Then she turned back to the judge. “Maybe counsel used a psychic for that, Your Honor. Because we have a death certificate showing he died four months ago.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Donny. “He was—”

  “He was killed,” said Karen. “And we have proof.” She held her hand in the air, and her paralegal handed her a stack of paper from one of the bankers boxes. “May I?” she asked the judge.

  The judge nodded, and Karen approached the bench with the document, then handed Donny a copy. There were multiple pages, stapled together.

  “What is this?” said Donny.

  “Defense Exhibit 317, with the court’s permission,” said Karen.

  “I’ll admit it provisionally for now,” said the judge. “I need to read it, and you’ll need to authenticate it.”

  “That’s fair, Your Honor,” said Karen. “But you’ll see it’s pretty straightforward. And the main thing is the second page, which is already self-authenticated in part: a Certificate of Death from the New Orleans Coroner’s Office, attesting that Daryl Harrison died on January 3. Cause of death: blood loss resulting from gunshot wounds.”

  Donny flipped ahead.

  “Where’s the autopsy report?” he asked.

  “There was none performed,” said Karen.

  “Because there was no body,” said Donny, holding up the death certificate and pointing at one of the notes.

  “Is that true?” said the judge, looking to Karen.

  “It is,” said Karen. “Mr. Harrison was killed in a firefight, while attempting to serve what the new government in New Orleans calls an ‘extraterritorial arrest warrant’ and the rest of us call an illegal kidnapping order. Here in Dallas, right after the New Year. He was shot by private security guards. Killed in action. And left behind by his colleagues, who finished the mission.”

  “I see that now,” said the judge, flipping the pages.

  “‘Suggestion’ of Death is right,” said Donny. “This isn’t proof.”

  “Of course it’s proof,” said Karen. “The coroner did not have the body. But they did have photos, taken by the security team before they disposed of the body. We are working on obtaining copies of those as well.”

  “So the body’s in Dallas?”

  “I believe there are cremains in possession of the municipal government, Your Honor, but no family has claimed them.”

  Donny looked back at the death certificate, searching for defects, signs of alteration. But it was the real thing. He felt cornered.

  He threw Karen’s document down on the table. “Your Honor,” he said. “You can’t throw this out over this. You heard the testimony just now. This is about hundreds of innocent people, maybe more, who were murdered for their peaceful resistance to the regime.”

  “I just heard your evidence, Mr. Kimoe. There is more to your allegations than I thought. But I don’t have a choice. The rules are very clear.”

  Donny held up his copy of the rules, and pointed at the provision they were citing. “The rule gives me ninety days.”

  “That was amended last year,” said the judge, beating Karen to it. “An effort to help clear the glut of cases from our backlog.” She gestured at her reconstruction docket. Every day was fully booked, including a few nights.

  Donny looked at the worn cover of his copy, and was reminded it was three years old. The fact that each edition cost several hundred bucks was no excuse, especially when the rules were also available online for free.

  “I didn’t receive this notice, Your Honor,” said Donny. The more accurate thing to say was that he had not seen it.

  “We have a file-stamped copy right here showing that you did,” said the judge. “And you also got a copy of what was filed last night. It’s a shame that you weren’t able to attend to this, as all you would have needed to do is give me a notice from the estate. Or provide another plaintiff, which you have made a persuasive case there are many to choose from. But now I have to dismiss your case entirely.”

  “With prejudice, Your Honor,” said Karen.

  “Don’t rub it in, Counselor.” With prejudice meant the case could not be refiled. “I’m only doing this because I know I would be wasting my time otherwise, as you would have the Court of Appeals overrule me. You’ll have to keep your own counsel about the consequences for the victims.”

  Donny wanted to sit down. His legs felt wobbly. He looked at Karen, containing her competitive satisfaction at the gotcha. He looked at the perfectly balanced scales of justice inlaid into the wood paneling behind the judge, which failed to show how rigged the system really was. So rigged the only way to rebalance it sometimes was with made-up bullshit.

  “What if I can prove he’s still alive, Your Honor?” said Donny, turning back to the judge.

  The judge raised an eyebrow. “How do you propose to do that?”

  “Just give me a few weeks, Judge. There’s something fishy about this.”

  “Looks pretty straightforward to me,” said the judge.

  “It’s backed up by news reports, Your Honor,” said Karen.

  “There’s no body, Judge. What if you throw this case out, only to later learn, too late for us to do anything, that the information was bad? Just give me a couple of weeks to look into it. Please.”

  The judge leaned back, considering that scenario.

  “Your Honor,” said Karen, “the rules do not permit that.”

  The judge looked at Karen. “They do not,” she said, registering some annoyance at being instructed in the bounds of her discretion. “And I have your form of order here ready for me to sign. But I am going to take a week to review it myself, and prepare my own order. Mr. Kimoe is free to consult whatever reanimators he wishes in the meantime. And if he can prove himself Lazarus by, say, a week from Friday, I will be free to tear that up.”

  “That’s your decision, Your Honor,” said Karen. “The outcome will be the same.”

  “That may be.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” said Donny, already wondering what better angle he could come up with in that time to keep the case alive.

  “And don’t try to come back in here with some other strategy to delay,” added the judge, as if reading Donny’s mind. “You have now officially exhausted our patience for your inability to manage your own mess. Can you manage that, at least?”

  “Absolutely,” he lied.

  2

  In a just world, it would not matter that Donny’s client was dead. All that would matter would be whether the crimes he alleged had been committed. And those crimes would be dealt with by the state. But Donny had made his living, such as it was, fighting for justice from an unjust system. Most of it fighting a state that no longer really existed, and had worked hard to cover its tracks while it could. Maybe it was because of all the cases he lost that he couldn’t stop fighting now that the war was over. Even as most people had moved on to dealing with the fact that, while they were fighting, nature died.

  It took a few years after the coup they called the state of emergency before the scope of the deeper crisis became apparent. Donny should have seen it coming. He started his practice representing detainees they had rounded up from the refugee camps, and he heard the stories about the barren breadbasket they had left behind up north. But when the price of corn started to lap the price of oil and outpace the rising temperatures and rising seas, the strain to the system became more evident. Even Donny realized it really was an emergency. And not just because he could no longer afford a cheeseburger, except on special occasions.

  You could agree it was an emergency without agreeing that the implementation of authoritarian population controls was an acceptable solution. Especially if you could see how the new system they implemented was rigged to make sure a shrinking elite was able to keep extracting fat profits from a starved economy. Donny ended up making what he called a living defending the people who dared to resist the
authorities, trying to work with a Constitution they were amending on the fly, one secret ruling at a time. It wasn’t easy, the clients were usually broke, and sometimes your own safety was at risk. But he got pretty good at it, and even learned how to clean himself up enough to argue his cases on the evening news, in the court of public opinion.

  The jury of the silent majority probably figured Donny was as guilty as his clients, if not more so. At least in the beginning. The need for labor to work the new farms gave perfect cover to the “resettlement” programs that were really just euphemisms for camps to lock whole populations up before they could start a revolution. The farms, if you believed the propaganda documentaries they streamed across the networks, were the secret to bringing back a healthy and well-fed future. New food that would feed the people, sustain the livestock, fuel the cars, and help clean up the mess, maybe even rehabilitate the exhausted fields to where they could once again grow the heritage crops that had failed. And people never really wanted to know where their food came from.

  So as much as Donny and his colleagues in the dissident bar liked to credit their work for helping bring the system down, in the end it was the overreaching by the people in charge of the system that led to the uprising. The pie kept shrinking, and the government controlled who got their piece, through official channels and unofficial ones, all of them equally corrupt. The president, who had been elected as a reformer who would heal the nation’s scars, became a self-dealing autocrat, and the accumulation of power brought out the mad king. When he began to piss off the wealthy donors who had given him that power, they turned on him. They made pacts with the underground networks who had been resisting him all along, and the exiles who had been seasoning the population with an alternate narrative, waiting for such a moment. And when the spark of revolution finally ignited, the uprising coalesced so fast, after so many years of repressed yearning for real change, that you couldn’t help but wonder what had taken it so long.

  They got more than they bargained for.

  The president who provided the regime’s public face and insane personality was gone, removed from office by a mob, tried for his crimes, and then assassinated before he could serve his sentence. International peacekeepers moved into the vacuum and brokered a cease-fire, immunizing the combatants from criminal prosecution. The resettlement farms survived, under new management. Now it was up to the people to renegotiate the social contract and come up with a new Constitution. In the meantime, the federal government was officially broken. The president had no replacement, and if the radical factions got their way, never would. Congress was short on members, with the former majority party having been outlawed, and met only infrequently. The courts still worked, except that most of the federal judges had been appointed by the deposed regime, and the only way they had to enforce their judgments was through the Marshals Service.

  That meant if you wanted to get justice for what had gone down in the dark years that preceded the uprising, you had to get creative. Jail was no longer a remedy. Money was. But if you picked your defendants well, that would hit them where it really hurt.

  “What would Njal do?”

  That was what his old colleague Miles jokingly said when he started this case, teasing Donny about one of his favorite books, saying the name so it sounded just like “y’all.” It was an old book, the only one of the Icelandic sagas whose hero was a lawyer rather than some ax-swinging Viking raider. A lawyer in a society that had no real government other than lawsuits, which would be settled every summer at a national camp-out presided over by the elders. Like the Anglo-Saxons who ruled England with their schedules of fees people could be made to pay for causing an injury: this much for an eye, a finger, a limb, a life. Tort law was the ur-law, the law that was older than the idea of the state that enforced it, rooted in ancient customs designed to temper the destructive forces of revenge that powered ever-escalating blood feuds.

  When Donny and Miles joked about Njal in those days, they didn’t know they were predicting the future. That the blood feuds were already happening on their watch, and would continue after the government was deposed. Hopefully by means other than the spilling of more blood. That Donny’s motivation in chasing this case was partly about avenging the spilling of Miles’s blood was something he tried to keep to himself. And as he sat there staring at the death certificate while everyone else in the room stood for the judge’s exit, hearing Miles ask him the question in his head, Donny knew one thing: Neither Miles nor Njal would let himself lose a case with these kinds of facts just because the client who actually suffered the injury no longer existed. If there was a real wrong, there was a way to make the law correct it, even when the law was designed to make that hard for a private party to do. Even when it was supposed to be impossible.

  Donny put the death certificate down, facedown, and looked over at the victorious defense team packing up their portable war room to the sounds of paper shuffling, clasps locking, and bungee cords snapping into place.

  “Hey, Karen,” he said, calling across the aisle.

  Karen looked at him with a smile that was equal parts predatory and friendly.

  “You know it’s not too late to settle,” said Donny, momentarily convincing himself that he believed it.

  Karen laughed. “Not if you’ll take five figures.” That would be enough to cover what most people made in a year, but less than Karen’s client was paying her every month, and a tiny fraction of what would be fair.

  “What a chickenshit way to try to get rid of this case. You know what really went down here.”

  “Spare me the lecture, Donny. It was war. And we all agreed to make it part of the past. Hell, you defended some of the worst so-called war criminals.”

  “The worst. But that was different, and you know it,” said Donny.

  “Whatever,” said Karen. “I’m not the one trying to profit from the dead. If you’ll excuse me, I am going to take my clients over to Bullion for a celebratory lunch.”

  “Steaks paid for by the dead.”

  “Fuck off, Donny. There’s plenty of that to go around and you know it.”

  “I’m not kidding about settlement. You heard what I got on the record today. There’s more of that to come. A lot more. If you wait, it will be too late.”

  She laughed in his face. She had Donny—and his case—nailed, like a frog pinned to the dissection table.

  As he watched them leave, he tried to convince himself there was a way out. Instead, he felt the floor disappear under his feet as he stood to gather his papers. The win-lose extremes of litigation always put high mileage on the souls of the lawyers. Especially a lawyer like Donny, who was both emotionally and financially invested in the outcome. But bad verdicts from runaway juries and adverse rulings from mercurial judges were to be expected. This was like going to the doctor for your annual physical and finding out you’re already dead.

  He looked at his files spread out there on the table. He had been so proud of what he had pulled together on this, a clear chronology that fleshed out his theory of the case and was actually supported by evidence he could show the company had been trying to suppress. Now it just looked like crazy man stuff, all his outlines and charts and sticky note palimpsests that theorized a lot but proved nothing.

  He picked the death certificate back up, but couldn’t stomach looking at it again, and just shoved it in his bag with the rest of the files, only barely resisting his urge to toss it all in the government-issue trash bin.

  He needed to get back to the sanctuary of his office and regroup. But first he had to get past the blogger from Detention Watch, who was waiting for him outside the courtroom.

  “Hello, Sarah,” he said.

  “Donny, can I ask you a couple of questions?”

  “Sure,” said Donny, stopping there in the hallway by the sign that listed the day’s docket, and trying to summon his composure as he thought how to frame it. Sarah’s readership was small, but sometimes her content got picked up by others.


  “That was wild,” said Sarah. “I for sure didn’t see that coming.”

  “You heard the testimony that witness gave, right?” said Donny.

  “Yes, that was some really scary stuff.”

  “It was more than scary. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. You should be asking them the questions. See if they can explain that away. We need to keep the pressure on. The truth will out.”

  “Yeah, but what about your client?”

  “Daryl Harrison earned the nickname Slider for a reason,” said Donny, summoning the inner spin doctor he had developed handling political trials. “During the long dark years when he was a valued member of the resistance that finally liberated this country from the tyrant and his enablers, they could never catch him. Not with drones, or undercover agents, or tracking devices, or dogs. News of his demise has come before, and every time he turns back up. I expect to be able to prove that what AMR pulled this morning is just another trick in their years-long cover-up. If Daryl is really dead, you can bet the murderers of his parents killed him. But what you can be certain of is that next Friday he will be back here with me, in person or in spirit, to hold AMR to account for their role in the murder of innocent citizens whose only crime was to hold contrary political opinions. I hope you will be here too. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go get to work.”

  It was good bullshit. So good that it rallied his own morale. Not so much that he actually believed it, but enough that he thought there had to be some way he could salvage the case. He walked toward the stairs with fresh determination.

  Only to be stopped again, by another verbal shirt-tugging.

  “Mr. Kimoe!” said a man’s voice calling from behind him. The guy had a foreign accent.

  Donny pretended not to hear, striding forward. Then it repeated, louder.

  Donny glanced over his shoulder. It was the guy with the architect glasses. The woman was with him.