Brain Storm

by Richard Dooling

  He lifted the handset. “Joe Watson.”

  “Oh,” said Arthur, “you are in. Did you see my note?”

  “I was on my way over to see you,” said Watson. “I was at the Gage Institute, talking to Dr. Palmquist about our prisoner. Until I got a Code Orange on my communicator.”

  This was Watson’s way of letting King Arthur know that his trusty associate had been unable to complete his assigned mission, because some overweening junior baron had presumptuously summoned him back here to do rinky-dink Westlaw research. If bluntness had a place in the feudal hierarchy of big-firm politics (which it didn’t), Watson could have said, “Boss, some foul usurper has defied you by commandeering your protégé and right-hand man.”

  “Sorry to bring you back,” Arthur said coolly.

  Watson lost a lungful. “You brought me back?” he asked as respectfully as possible.

  “Yes,” said Arthur, using the same crisp timbre, “Todd Boron has an urgent project, and I told him you had time.”

  Todd Boron? Watson thought. Boron the moron? Boron was the most junior partner he could think of, a legal robot, a paper-processing R2D2. He had made partner by billing 3,500 hours a year, every year, for nine years, which averages out to 67.3 billable hours per week, every week, which comes out to 11.2 billable hours per day—if you assume he took Sundays off for spiritual upgrades—and 9.6 billable hours per day, every day—if you assume he didn’t. That’s billable hours; it doesn’t count nonbillable hours, for things like recruiting interviews and lunches, timekeeping, firm luncheons, meetings, repairing a hangnail, client golf outings, pro bono work, continuing legal education, bending a few paper clips, taking a call from an old girlfriend or a buddy from law school, or logging on to “Ask the Contessa” at the altsex.org Web site.

  At an average Stern, Pale associate billing rate of $200 per hour, Boron’s nine years of 3,500 hours amounted to over $6 million in firm revenue. He was a legendary figure capable of superhuman feats of mental drudgery, the first associate in Stern, Pale history who had made partner not by rainmaking or big verdicts, not by ingratiating himself with big clients or moving the family to open the Hong Kong office, but solely by dint of sheer Herculean labor. He had no personality, no clients of his own, no rapport with in-house counsel, no flair for firm politics, no pizzazz for wowing or lulling summer associates into the firm, nary an extralegal thought or sexual peccadillo to distract him. He was Mr. Grind, a highly compensated drudge, a dumping and transfer station for massive, menial legal projects—the kind of stultifying toil normally reserved for paralegals. But if the client was oblivious or obtuse enough, or, more likely, smug and flush enough to insist that all of their legal problems were too special or complex for lowly paralegals, then attorneys were called in to do essentially the same work at twice the rate. For these “special” clients with massive legal projects, Boron and any unprotected associate hirelings were locked up in off-site warehouses with computer terminals and boxes of documents, or sent to the library and ordered to compile summaries of the Bureau of Weights and Measures regulations for all fifty states.

  Senior partners with big cases loved him, because they could take him down to the loading dock and say, “Todd, in four hours, two semitrailer trucks are going to pull up at this dock with nine tons of documents produced in our client’s litigation with Aileron Ballistics Corp. Those documents must be scanned by optical character readers, summarized, indexed, and they must be retrievable by author, recipient, witness, subject matter, and keyword before the first of the month.”

  Whereupon Boron would say, “The first of the month? Why, that gives us twelve—wait, thirteen days? Cakewalk with cherry pies and duck soup. Fish in a barrel of gravy.” But between these performances he was shunned and pitied like an off-duty circus freak.

  The quality of mercy was strained and no rain in sight for the first-year associates who were locked up in document warehouses with Boron. A diet of Mountain Dew, Jolt, No-Doze, Snickers, and espresso. Keyboard-induced carpal tunnel syndrome and radiation sickness from computer monitors. The firm provided family law services free of charge when the spouses of Boron’s minions filed for divorce and custody of the children. The one suicide on Boron’s watch had been covered up and blamed on “personal problems.”

  Why was Arthur allowing Watson to be summoned back to the office to work for the likes of Todd Boron?

  “From the looks of things, you seem to have plenty of time on your hands for nonpaying clients,” said Arthur, “and Todd has a Code Orange for a real client, so I told him you were available.”

  From the looks of things? The old ferret wasn’t even going to pretend he had not been in Watson’s office sifting documents.

  “It’s right up your alley,” said Arthur. “More handicap discrimination. Pick up Nancy Slattery and meet Todd and the client up in the main conference room on twenty-four.”

  / / /

  At the briefing, Boron presented the facts of the Code Orange. The client was Gateway Steel, and the plaintiff was a male steelworker named Mikey, who wore fishnet nylons, a merry widow corset, a chiffon bustier, and Magenta’s wig from a Rocky Horror dress-up kit out to the line on a Friday morning, and was summarily terminated. Mikey promptly hired a lawyer and sued for reinstatement, back pay, and punitive damages, claiming that Gateway had fired him because he was a transvestite, a handicap allegedly protected under the terms of the Illinois Human Rights Act. The litigation department was in eleventh-hour settlement negotiations on the night before Gateway’s summary judgment motion.

  Seated at Todd’s right hand was Spike McGinnis, the line supervisor who had done the firing, a short, stout authoritarian with a bench-presser’s physique, who interpreted any attempt at resolving the dispute short of trial as a direct challenge to his authority. He needed only a bearskin admiral’s hat with a white-and-amaranth cockade and a lapel to tuck his right hand under to round out his Napoleon complex.

  When Boron introduced Nancy as the department’s expert on state and federal handicap laws, Watson could tell that Spike felt the firm was shortchanging him by pawning a female lawyer off on him in his hour of need. His attitude was not lost on Nancy, who dealt with assholes for a living, two of whom were sitting across the table from her. She listened intently to Boron’s and Spike’s descriptions of Mikey’s escapades, nodding and asking for additional details. What kind of hose did he have on? Was Magenta’s wig artificial? When they got to the bustier and the corset and the termination, Nancy flatly declared: “That’s completely inappropriate.”

  “You mean, it’s not covered under the Illinois Human Rights Act?” asked Boron. “You mean the firing was inappropriate?”

  “I didn’t say that,” she said. “I’m saying it’s completely inappropriate to wear both a corset and a bustier. One or the other, fine. But both? He’s not a transvestite, he’s a fashion victim.”

  Spike took the position that if Gateway wanted to settle the case they would have hired an East St. Louis firm with offices next door to the ambulance service for eighty bucks an hour, but instead he had come to Stern, Pale and paid three times as much, which in his considered opinion entitled him to some legal authority for the proposition that he was right and Mikey was wrong. Nancy took the position that Gateway had paid its money for an accurate appraisal of Gateway’s legal position, good or bad, and if Spike didn’t like it …

  Three hours later, Watson was hunched over his monitor. Outside, rush hour was beginning, and Boron’s Code Orange was still in progress. “Transvest! /s discriminat! or handicap! or disab! but not transsex!” Watson tapped the search query at the command prompt on Westlaw, sat back, and waited for more relevant case law on the subject of transvestism as a handicap to appear in window one, the upper right-hand corner of his twenty-eight-inch monitor, which was now a patchwork of open windows and dialogue boxes, all of them relating to different client matters.

  Pretty exciting stuff for a Boron assignment—and Watson counted himself lucky�
��but not exciting enough to keep him from reading the Post-Dispatch article three more times between searches. Arthur had put him to work for the likes of Boron when the case of a lifetime was unfolding on the front page of the Post-Dispatch. (For the first time, he dared to consider the delicious scandal, the trajectory of his career, if he actually managed a defendant’s verdict. Far-fetched, yes. Possible? Of course.) Instead of researching hate crimes, calling Dr. Palmquist, getting on the Web to find out more about forensic neuroscience, he was on-line trying to find a court opinion that might suggest that transvestism is not a handicap protected under the Illinois Human Rights Act.

  Unlike the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, which explicitly excluded from its coverage the more controversial mental disorders (kleptomania, pyromania) and sexual disorders (pedophilia, transvestism, transsexualism), the state handicap laws often had no such exclusions. When these popular, well-intentioned laws were passed, many of the people with conventional disabilities—blindness, deafness, paraplegia, mental retardation—were either already happily working, or they were at home avoiding any W-2 income, which might disrupt their Social Security, food stamps, Medicare, and Medicaid payments. But nothing feeds the legal imagination like new laws with undefined terms, and soon, under the expanded coverage of state and federal handicap laws, just about any “disability” was good for a lawsuit seeking “reasonable accommodation.” Pandemic outbreaks of heretofore unheard-of, undiscovered, undreamed-of physical or mental impairments that “substantially limit one or more major life activities” claimed victims nationwide, and lawsuits poured in from hypochondriacs, people with bad backs, phobics, transvestites, transsexuals, junkies, alcoholics, narcoleptics, insomniacs, women who believed they had a man trapped inside of them, men who believed they had a woman trapped inside, sufferers of something called “chronic lateness syndrome,” the obese, people with low or high metabolic rates, bulimics, neurasthenics laid low by the rigors of indolence, distressed citizens with irritable bowels and spastic colons. Later, no less crippling for their strangeness, came disorders such as Prominent Facial Birthmark syndrome and excused absenteeism for “experiencers” and alien abductees raped in outer space.

  Watson proceeded to spend several billable hours on-line, scouring legal databases for any opinion containing transvest and discrim or disab—but not transsex—in the same sentence. He scanned case summaries on the screen and found even more of them that were not going his way. He was dreading another phone call from Boron and Spike; they were upstairs in a conference room gorging on catered food … waiting. He was finding administrative opinions in other jurisdictions declaring that a male transvestite’s desire to wear women’s clothing is a “physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities”—magic words, which meant that employers were obligated to reasonably accommodate the predilections of transvestites by allowing them to cross-dress in the workplace. Watson would have to tell Todd and Spike that Gateway might be better off letting Mikey return to work as Magenta because of potential liability under the Illinois Human Rights Act—sort of like telling the Ancient Order of Hibernians that an injunction had been issued giving Boy George and a shaved transsexual called the Leather Tinkerbell of Castro Street the right to march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

  His eyes strayed from the Gateway window of his monitor over to the upper left-hand corner, window two, where a helicopter gunship equipped with air-launched Cruise missiles was poised to fire at a Level Four Minotaur on the Planet Anthrax. In the lower left-hand corner, window three, was a downloaded graphic from On-Line NetErotica called STACY.JPG, featuring a snake-hipped Stacy with implants the size of cantaloupes; she was lounging in a nest of feather boas and dreamily dandling a computer joystick with one hand, while the other was busy somewhere down at the convergence of her legs. The graphic image invited the viewer to attend at the moment just before Mother Necessity gave birth again and Stacy invented a new application for the featured peripheral.

  In the lower right-hand corner, window four, his personal information manager was open, the cursor bar highlighting the entry for Dr. Rachel Palmquist. He saw his notes, which he’d entered after his first meeting in Arthur’s office: Neuroscientist, potential expert witness, mentioned Sup. Ct. hate crime case of Wisconsin v. Mitchell, divorced, knows Arthur, major babe … with the dialogue box open and the software prompt: “DIAL WORK NUMBER FOR THIS ENTRY?”

  The program waited patiently for him to click YES or NO. The stark options didn’t do justice to the complex moral and professional implications of calling the good doctor just because he wanted to see her, to hear her voice, to visit her for the second time in one day. He needed a PERHAPS or IT DEPENDS, or an Ethical Event Planner, which could display projected marital repercussions with a click of his pointing device.

  “Are you ready to be faithful?” he recalled his father asking him, when Joe had told him he wanted to marry Sandra.

  His father was probably thinking about the revolving ensemble of nubile babes Watson had been parading around since high school.

  “I think so,” Joe had said, vividly recalling how the question had caught him off-guard. He had assumed that fidelity would be a natural by-product of marriage, not something he had to be concerned about. But his father seemed worried about whether Watson was capable of it.

  “Being faithful to your wife and your children is not optional,” his father had said. “It’s required. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life thinking about how you committed adultery. My advice would be to make damn sure you’re ready to be faithful to her. Otherwise you’ll end up divorced.”

  Watson recalled his father’s chilly warning and recalled thinking at the time about how certain women seemed to produce gravitational fields or tractor beams, and how, once touched by their force fields, he fell into an orbit, where it was almost impossible to think about anything else. Dr. Palmquist was one of these celestial bodies—the first one he’d been alone with in a while. Probably best to stay away from her. But he couldn’t, could he? What if his client needed her? What if he was already in orbit?

  Palmquist’s entry was linked to the Whitlow file, and a click took him to his notes from his first client interview, where the words “Lucy Martinez” and “Fort Sheridan Base Towing & Vehicle Impound Lot” scrolled by and caught his eye. Why not? thought Watson. And who knows? Maybe it would lead to exculpating evidence. He called information and got the number.

  A woman answered: “Vehicle Impound.”

  “Yes,” said Watson. “I’m looking for a 1992 Ford Taurus. A gray one with no plates. I’m told it was towed seven or eight days ago from base housing at Fort Sheridan.”

  “Hold on,” she said. “It’s in the system. A woman came for it yesterday afternoon.”

  “Oh. Right. That would be my wife. I’m out of town,” Watson said, “and, um, I haven’t talked to her since yesterday. But she asked me to call and find out what we needed to do to get it back. If she already got it, then never mind.”

  “She don’t have it yet,” said the woman, “it’s still here. It’s got no plates and an expired registration. Your wife was here saying she needed to get your briefcases out of the trunk because they had your credit cards and checkbook in them and she would need those to pay the towing charges and register the car, but she didn’t have the title papers. We can’t give her access to the vehicle unless she shows us title and proof of ownership. She said she was going back home to try and find them.”

  “Oh,” said Watson. “I see. So she’s coming back for the car then?”

  “She needs title and a photo ID,” said the woman. “Until that happens the vehicle has no owner, because it ain’t registered and has no plates. When we ran the Vehicle Identification Number through the computers we got an expired registration. Either you or her needs to come in with title papers, and then you will have to register the vehicle and get new plates before you can drive it off the lot.”

 
“I see,” said Watson. “So the vehicle is in the impound lot.”

  “That’s right, sir,” said the woman.

  “It’s not being held for any other reason?” asked Watson.

  “Title and a photo ID,” said the woman, “and you will have to register it, pay any back taxes and licensing fees. Then, it’s yours.”

  “Thank you,” said Watson, typing the information in his contact database in a window at lower left.

  Watson hung up and stared at the phone. “Your wife was here saying she needed to get your briefcases out of the trunk because they had your credit cards and checkbook in them”? No time to wonder about that one, because, back in the upper right-hand corner on Westlaw, the Code Orange was still in progress. He returned to the PIM and selected YES for a call to Dr. Palmquist, while his eyes strayed back over to window three, where Stacy was looking like Leda with a swan by the neck. The line was busy.

  “Busy?” Nancy Slattery appeared at the door with a flashy striped envelope. “A courier left this at the front desk,” she said, setting the priority envelope on top of the stacked, cross-hatched, sliding piles of paper covering his desk. Then she handed him a diskette. “Survey of state handicap laws and transvestism,” she said. She glanced down at his monitor. “Taking a break?”

  “Breaking my back with labor,” said Watson. Using his trackball pointing device, he began at upper right and proceeded counterclockwise to identify the client and matter occupying each window. “One, Gateway Steel, disability laws research. Two, Subliminal Solutions, intellectual property analysis for Anthrax Avenger. Three, People Against Nudity on the Internet and Cyberporn—PANIC—a nonprofit organization filing an amicus curiae brief with an appendix of downloaded graphical samples—it’s work, you see. And over here, window four, my appointed case, U.S. versus Whitlow.”

  “True multitasking,” said Nancy.

  “I have a program that keeps track of which window I’m in for how long, enabling me to accomplish continuous, interleaved billing.”