Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  “I was dragged here,” she claims, hisses, growls, wagging an accusing finger at the stolid bailiff. “Dragged by dragons, dragons in wagons, wagons in wheels.”

  It is babble she is talking, a cackle of words, but the sounds are statements and the statements aren’t true. I feel her nonsense in the air, gathering in slight wispy clouds. This is why she’s here. Madness is an assault on the Objectively So, and the State has a responsibility to contain and control it. The defendant certainly looks the part, in layers of long unkempt skirts, a cascade of dirty and tattered fabrics. Her eyes are pale and milky, and as she talks—declaims; chants, really—her eyes roll and dance inside their sockets. She wanders in a small circuit, her radius limited only by the length of chain with which she is tethered to the floor. She jerks her head in little circles, too, wrenching herself to look behind her, again and again, to the rows of us watching. Her hair is wild, stiff with sea grit and sand; her face and arms are streaked with dirt.

  “A demon was dreaming and dreaming.” Raising her hands up, shaking her head from side to side. “Dreaming of dragons and dreaming of me. Dreamed of me and here I be.”

  I turn to the side and cough as all this non-truth fills the room, floor to ceiling, window to wall, leadening the air, thickening it up, like smoke off a wildfire. I am starting to think I may have to get up and get out of here, go and wait on the benches that line the hallway outside the room. Ms. Paige, of course, is unaffected. She watches the proceedings with her usual ardency, eyes darting back and forth between the bench and the defendant as Judge Sampson taps his gavel, trying to corral the madwoman’s wild attention.

  “Ms. Wells,” he says. “We need to speak calmly.”

  She is not able. “Calm,” she barks, her hands high above her head, her dirty hair swept lionlike behind her. “Calm as a bomb.”

  “Ms. Wells,” says Judge Sampson. “Eyes up here, please.”

  “My eyes,” says Ms. Wells. “My eyes, my eyes.”

  Judge Sampson nods, as if her answers are perfectly reasonable, and writes something on a small pad beside him. His desk is absent any extraneous ornament: just the pad, the gavel, a glass of water. It is just him and Ms. Wells, examining each other, staring across the gulf of reality.

  I’ve spent time in these courts before, of course, as little time as I can get away with. I had a drug abuser once, a man whose mind became so addled that he could no longer distinguish what was from what was not; I have seen not only madness but amnesia, schizophrenics, and the mentally retarded. And all the old-timers’ diseases, of course, the whole range of senility and infirmity. Any assault on reality, any infusion of falsehood in the air can’t be countenanced, no matter the source.

  “Have you ever in your life,” asks the judge, “been administered the dream-controlling medication Clarify?”

  “No. Yes. No.” She squints, moves her cheeks, scratches at her neck. Judge Sampson’s manner is mild, but his eyes miss nothing. “I am not a doctor, sir. I am not a dream.”

  I cough hard, into my hand. A bearded man in a suit turns around and glares at me. I don’t want to be drawing attention to myself but it’s getting harder to tamp down. A little more of this and I’ll have no choice but to duck out into the hallway. My chest feels tired. My hands are shaking, just a little bit.

  “Have you been evaluated by a mental health professional?” asks the judge.

  This time she doesn’t answer, just hisses like a steam vent and waves her hands.

  “Have you ever—” Judge Sampson stops, raises one hand, and snaps his fingers. His fingers are long, the nails manicured. He snaps, snaps again. “Ms. Wells? Right now. Where are you in the present moment?”

  “Court,” she says, and there is a palpable sense of relief in the room. She’s not so far gone as that. Ms. Paige glances at me, hopeful. Ms. Wells has one foot, at least, in the world. Everyone knows what happens if this goes the other way.

  “I’m in a court. And you are the king. The king of the thing.”

  “Ms. Wells?”

  “The king is singing, now. Loud and long or low and slow. The king sings and the snakes are dancing.”

  Ms. Paige looks at me again. Ms. Wells’s moment of lucidity has passed through her like weather, and now she is off again, babbling with hands raised, caught in her interior dance, her mind fixed within, and another spasm catches me, worse than before. My coughing, I can tell, is drawing the attention of the judge. His attention flickers over me, and he is clocking the blacks, the hat, the coughing. He has known many Speculators, of course. He knows what I am, what we are, but does he know why we’re here?

  His attention returns to Ms. Wells—he asks her to look at him directly, and she ignores him again. Not defiant, exactly. Uncomprehending. Disinterested. She twists her head in different directions, like a loose compass searching for north.

  Judge Sampson drums his fingers on the bench, and turns to his bailiff, a big man with wide shoulders and a rocky forehead like a dinosaur.

  “Do we have a representative here from the department this morning?”

  “Yes, sir.” The bailiff points at the bearded man in front of me, the guy who glared at me a minute ago. “Dr. Marvin Ailey.”

  The man stands up. “That’s me, sir.”

  “Hello, Dr. Ailey. An object in motion tends to stay in motion.”

  “Good morning, your honor. An object at rest tends to stay at rest.”

  “And so it ever shall be.” The judge sighs. “All right, then. What do we know about Ms. Wells’s relationship with reality?”

  “Tenuous, sir. Unfortunately. Lorna Jane Wells on three occasions has been administered the full assessment and on all three occasions her percentile scores were found to be abjectly unsuitable. And”—Dr. Ailey clears his throat, frowns—“and, unfortunately, as I say, she has proven unresponsive to treatment.”

  “Tell me about the extent of the treatment?”

  “Standard, sir. The standard battery.”

  “Beginning at what age, Dr. Ailey?”

  “Beginning at age nineteen, your honor.”

  “Beginning with Clarify, doctor?”

  “Yes, your honor.”

  The facts form a pile. The pile grows higher. Dr. Marvin Ailey, referring to his Day Book, to various files he’s brought with him, proceeds through the years of Ms. Wells’s life, her history of neural nonconformity, all of the drugs to which over many years she has proved nonresponsive; while the woman herself proves the point, bobbing her head in small chicken-like motions, making little half dance steps in different directions.

  When he is done with Dr. Ailey, the judge stands and hitches up his robes, almost daintily, like a woman in a long dress coming down off a horse. The climax of this event is getting closer now. Whatever else I am to find out about Judge Sampson, I know that he does this many times a day: sits with people’s lives in his hands, weighing their fitness. What does that do to a person, such a burden as carried by the soul?

  He crosses his courtroom and pulls up a chair at the defense table, plunks himself down unceremoniously beside Ms. Wells.

  “Hi,” he says softly. “Lorna. Lorna, do you have living family that are aware of your condition?”

  “What?”

  “Are there people that care for you?”

  The judge sees her humanity. I see it, and I can see him seeing it, trying to locate the human person within the murky depths of her illness. Seeking a way, if a way can be found, not to do what he is empowered to do; not to exercise the power of his office. But Ms. Wells jerks backward from him in a swift reptilian motion, and claps her hands on his shoulders. “The book cares.”

  “The—what?”

  “I got it for a song,” she says. “The book. The big one, the old one, the good one, the gold one. The big book with the red spine.” Her voice has built into a singsong rhythm, sweetly childlike. “Past Is Prologue, boys and girls. I have read it close.” She spins around to face the gallery, and she gives us a broad w
ink. “I’ve seen through the curtain.”

  “Ms. Wells,” says Judge Sampson, frowning. “Stop.”

  “My eyes are spies. X-ray eyes. Okay? I can see behind the black. The parts behind the parts.”

  “Ms. Wells,” says the judge again, his voice dire with warning. “Stop speaking.”

  He casts a stern and meaningful look to his bailiff, who does not, as I expected, charge across the room toward the defendant. Instead he steps closer to his own small desk, lifts up a panel built into its top, while Ms. Wells raises her hands high into the air, her two thumbs interlocked and her palms spread wide.

  It’s a book. She has made of her hands a book and she is holding it aloft.

  “Big book, old story,” she sings, “And you know what’s odd?”

  “Ms. Wells!” cries the judge, but she sings on—

  “In the scratched-out pages is the face of—”

  The judge is looking at the bailiff and the bailiff is pressing a button on the desk that sucks all the sound from the world. In an instant it becomes absolutely silent, a pure, deep silence like the courtroom is encased in glass, as if it is not sound but the very idea of sound that has disappeared. For a moment, wild Ms. Wells keeps talking, moving her mouth, moving her head in confused circles, but then she trails off, looks with bafflement around the impossibly silent room. After a minute of this, when her lips have stopped moving, the judge nods to the bailiff, who taps his desk once more and unmutes the courtroom, and the imposed silence is replaced by the subtler everyday quiet of a room full of people, watching the judge, watching the confused madwoman—who stands now with her hands flapping nervously at her side.

  Judge Sampson keeps his eyes focused for a moment on the floor, a man briefly lost in important conversation with himself. And then he stands and returns slowly, solemnly, a one-man procession, to the bench.

  “It is the verdict of this court that Ms. Wells has no connection to reality nor prospect of achieving one.”

  Paige looks at me, startled, and then back at the judge. Poor thing. Young girl. She grabs my shoulder. Wanting me to—what—to leap to my feet? Object?

  Judge Sampson looks at the bailiff, who makes a small gesture with both hands, palms up, like an elevator rising up a floor. Everybody stands. I take off my pinhole and press it to my chest. The judge keeps his eyes on Ms. Wells, who, of course, has no idea what’s going on. She is living in her own reality, and shelled within it, shelled and sheltered, flinging rocks over the top, a danger to us all, but not for long—not for long now.

  “The presence of Ms. Wells within the Golden State is therefore deemed to be unsafe and unhealthful for its inhabitants.” The bailiff stands before the bench, a still pillar, hands behind his back. Paige’s grip tightens on my shoulder, as if it’s her on whom sentence is being passed. I feel her fingers through the thickness of my jacket. Trying to understand the judge’s words, though they are not hard to understand. Like a pledge or a curse, like “I do” or “I promise,” the words of a verdict are illocutionary: they do not have an intended effect, they are the intended effect.

  The judge has changed reality. The madwoman was of our world and now she is gone from it.

  “The remedy to the offense your presence represents is to be effected immediately.” And Judge Sampson brings down the gavel, three short chops, bap bap bap, and the bailiff steps forward to unshackle Ms. Wells from the ground.

  15.

  “Now wait a minute.” The judge looks me over, up and down, quizzical, curious, pleased. “I know you. We’ve met—yes? Tell me. Where have we met?”

  “I don’t think so. My name is Laszlo Ratesic. I’m a Speculator, your honor.”

  “Oh, you needn’t tell me that. That, I can see. And what a rare treat it is, to have one of you mysterious bats come to roost in my courtroom.” He offers Aysa a smile. “One or two. No, but”—the welcoming, slightly puzzled smile returns—“I know I know you, though.” He wags a finger at me. “Well, that’s all right. Let's talk. It’ll come to me.”Judge Sampson settles back, fully at his ease. His chambers are as shabby as the courtroom, only darker, lined with thick carpeting and heavy curtains that cover the windows onto Grand Avenue, curtains so long the fabric pools along the floor. There are framed photographs, a tacky little Bear and Stars flag in a stand on the desk; there is a portable bar cart now docked snugly at the side of the desk, within the judge’s easy reach. The cart is not his only indulgence; there’s a small wall-mounted on the wall opposite the windows, and I wonder what sorts of themed streams Judge Sampson enjoys, after hours, when the last defendant has been dealt with.

  There is something disorienting, something half anomalous, about a judge in chambers— especially a judge of the ANP. A man both small and large at once, still wearing his black robes but with his shirt collar unbuttoned beneath them and his tie loosened. An avatar of the State’s great power sitting with his ass half on and half off of his chintzy little desk, lifting his wry eyebrows, fetching a short glass from his bar cart and filling it with three ice cubes before popping the cork on a crystal decanter.

  “Okay. So.” He enjoys a long sip of the drink and sets it down. “What can I do for you?”

  I draw breath to speak and find that Ms. Paige, standing behind the chair where I’m sitting, has already begun.

  “Why did you do it?”

  The judge looks at her, eyebrows raised. “Why did I do what, exactly?”

  “Send her away.”

  Judge Sampson examines my partner with amusement. “You mean the poor woman in the courtroom? Just now? Today’s defendant?”

  “Her name was Ms. Wells.”

  “I know her name, young lady. I know all their names. I wonder what you think I am.”

  I have craned all the way around, turned my large midsection as far as it will turn, trying to catch Ms. Paige’s eye and stop her from doing whatever it is she thinks she’s doing. What I told her was to wait, to watch and wait. That’s what I told her to do.

  “I passed the sentence I did upon that particular defendant because it was what the facts required of me. Based on her history and current presentation, Ms. Wells showed no likelihood of reform. She would continue to commit daily, even hourly, assaults, on the Objectively So. She inhabits her own truth and is unable to step free from it. Such a person can not be allowed to continue inside the Golden State.”

  “So you condemned her.”

  “Her own mind condemned her. I only acknowledged that reality, on behalf of the State. If you think I enjoy making such decisions, you are incorrect.” But he smiles, and sips contentedly at his drink.

  Paige is not satisfied. “You know what will happen to her out there.”

  “No, young lady.” The judge sets the glass on the desk with a clink, a sharp and decisive sound like the gavel coming down. “I do not know. And you do not know. The fate of the exiled is unknown and unknowable, and any unconditional expression of that fate, any statement such as, for example, ‘You know what will happen to her out there,’ is by definition not true.”

  We are in a moment now. Judge Sampson has just called Ms. Paige a liar, more or less, and he is not smiling any longer, and she for her part stands seething. What she wants to say is, Of course I know. Of course she knows what will happen to Ms. Wells, out there, over the wall, behind the curtain. But she can’t say it and she won’t say it and she wouldn’t and neither would I. She knows and we all know and it’s unknown and unknowable.

  I raise one hand from my lap. This is supposed to be my show, after all.

  “Hello. Excuse me. We’re going to move on.”

  “Yeah,” says Aysa. “But—”

  I look at her. “Ms. Paige,” I say. “We’re moving on. Okay?”

  But Judge Sampson isn’t done. He tilts his head to one side, smiles with what looks like warmth.

  “Have you,” he says to Ms. Paige, “perhaps lost someone to exile?”

  “Yes,” she says, and he says “Ah,” and I recall h
er saying “Fuck my parents,” and the room fills with a brooding silence. I saw a lecture once, delivered by Our Acknowledged Expert on Geology and Geography, explaining how the Golden State, the whole thing, is built on movable plates, vast tracts that move, that push and scrape against other plates. The same is true inside Aysa Paige; the same is true inside me.

  The judge takes a sip of his drink, licks his lips, and says, “Now. Please. What can I help you with?”

  “We are working on a case, your honor,” I say. “A death.”

  “A murder?”

  “We don’t know what it is. It is a death. We are seeking the full and final truth of a recent death.”

  “The death of whom?”

  A mild playful tone accompanies the question, and I ignore it. I take out a picture of the dead man and lay it on the judge’s desk. He peers over the rim of his whiskey glass to inspect it.

  “The gentleman’s name,” I say, “was Mose Crane.”

  The judge sniffs, draws another sip. “If you’ll excuse an idiom, it rings no bell. Has he been in my courtroom?”

  “No, sir. He died at your house. On your lawn.”

  “Ah. The roofer. Yes. Tragic.” My interpretation of what he says is informed by the way he looks into his glass, by the tinkling of the ice. A man not moved by tragedy. “I had not understood that the authorities had discovered any anomalies in that situation.”

  His tone is very smooth—very cool. I catch a ripple in the air, a minor distension. I look at Paige to see if she catches it too, but she’s looking straight ahead. I have a feeling she is out in the wilderness, with or without Mr. and Mrs. Paige.