by Joy Williams
He studied her a while longer and the shrunken space before which she fretted. Even in his time it had been larger, a whatyacallit, a sacred grove, a temenos. It had once meant asylum and within it one was asulos—the inviolable. It protected what was within and excluded that which was without. You can’t beat Greek, he thought. He felt a special relationship with the great Hellenes. They had invented logic, had they not? Temenos. The word comes from temno, to cut. Something cut from the meaningless, profane layer of life, something removed and isolated for a special purpose.
In fact it was the trees that had been cut cut cut, for there had been many more even in his time, a veritable grove of them. Now there was the one. And there were designs on that. He’d heard the rumors in his own courtroom. Once that tree came down, the place could be rechristened as a soccer field. First thing to be established after a catastrophe, or after a war peters out. Shows it’s OK to have fun again—shows the indomitability of the human spirit. Outside the park the earth was spongy, flooded, soft. It was practically smoking—a not fit dwelling place. How small the enclosure had become.
He glanced at the sky. Disheartening. The Greeks were blind to blue and green. They would have perceived this sky to be in fact what it was—an excrementitious brown.
He had told her to come back. What a folly, perhaps even an injustice. It was unprecedented, but he was curious about her. And of course she dizzyingly brought back that peculiar interlude when he was adrift, dependent, when he didn’t know what he was. Uncomfortable. Uncomfortable in his own skin. But he’d had the law even then, which he could mimic, and the law’s blustering treaties with the dead.
He pictured the hunter Gracchus in his courtroom, fresh off the black bark—ice encrusting its rotting sails—carted in under a floral bedsheet. His presence would be no more unusual than what had happened that day with her showing up.
But he was confident that with a little ingenuity, he could resolve that case. Gracchus was just a simple man of the forest, at sea, a fish out of water, not up to the demands of his situation. He’d issue a few writs, tour the vessel perhaps, find the wormhole. Kafka need not be involved.
Gracchus, the literal expression in a concrete image of an abstraction. That was what Kafka did best. And what a comedian! The peculiar painting in the ship’s cabin. The doves. The fifty little boys in attendance. Gracchus’s dog…
Had there been dogs?
He frowned. He’d been told he had a mind like a steel trap. He did have a mind like a steel trap. But did Gracchus have dogs when he fell down that ravine? He returned to his desk and picked up the same pages he had given her to read. He read them carefully. There was the wind, the wine, the doltish inquiries. Always the wrong questions! There were the fifty little boys. But the dogs had vanished from the story for some reason.
Jeffrey suddenly felt a great weariness. He rubbed his eyes. His grandfather had told him that if he rubbed his eyes, religiously as it were, he’d make them larger and thus be more commanding in court.
The diameter of the human eye is about 10 percent of the height of the head, his grandfather said. If you could boost your eye index up to say 18 percent…20 percent would be superb, you’d have them quaking in their undies.
Dad, Dad, his father would say, you’re scaring him.
I am not scaring this boy, his grandfather would say.
You’re scaring me, Dad.
That’s because you are not him, his grandfather would say. You’re a burbling disappointment, a little teapot.
Jeffrey, his grandfather would address him once more: Glaukopis. Owl-eyed, the great Athena’s epithet. Wisdom, Jeffrey, knowledge. Let the great owl-eyed Athena be your guide.
And Jeffrey would rub his eyes until they burned.
Ahh, what was the point…Sure he was commanding in court, sure he had them quaking in their undies, but what were wisdom and knowledge these days? Knowledge had deteriorated into mere detection and diagnosis. And you could train a giant pouched African rat for that. In three weeks a giant pouched rat from that once intriguing continent could be taught to sniff out land mines as well as most drugs and weapons. They could detect cancer in the unsuspecting, too, but their trainers didn’t want to burn them out with the boredom that too much success brings. In any case, everyone had cancer these days…cancer, Parkinson’s, leukemia, tumors, the sugar. Even a rat needs a challenge.
Owlet Jeffrey—Enoch—longed for the pickup another cookie would bring but he was an owlet of habit and structure. There would be no second cookie. He gave his eyes one more nostalgic swipe, left his chambers and descended to the courtroom to confront all those who had fallen under his jurisdiction.
It’s a serious matter to allow someone to wander among the living after their death. Or before they were born. Or, as she had argued, before their birth was fully accomplished. Is that what she’d said? Yes. And he had said that many feel that way about themselves without being actually aware of it. By which he meant that they become human without knowing the first thing about it, the requirements and such. That is, they suspected they were meant to be more or different but fumbled about in the smoky light of half-realized lives instead. That is…
He never should have sent her away. What if something befell her and she didn’t come back? Maybe he should go out and get her. But that would be unprecedented too. That would be the eighth day all right, the one that St. Augustine refers to, after the seven days of creation, the one with no evening to it.
“Your Honor,” some supplicant was murmuring, “I accept the unethical acts of my past. I tell you this sincerely and I wish therefore to alter their meaning.”
“Excuse me?” Enoch said. “Alter their meaning? That’s a good one. What’s your name?”
“Castor.”
“As in Castor and Pollux? Where’s your brother?”
“I don’t know no Pollux. I’m not responsible for no Pollux but I accept the unethical acts of my past and wish to be allowed to alter their meaning.”
“You don’t want forgiveness then?”
“I don’t believe there’s any benefit to that. Is there?”
“What’s it feel like accepting your past?”
“I feel like a new man.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard yet,” Enoch said. “Go over there, no there, to the left. Lie down over there. This court is in perpetual session.”
A woman was next, looking close to fainting.
“Don’t be frightened,” he said in what he hoped was not too unctuous a fashion.
“I planted butterfly bushes once but they, the butterflies, didn’t come.”
“Yes, well, I’ve heard that employees in these mega gardening centers don’t know what they’re talking about.”
“I even thought of suing them, not the butterflies of course.”
She faded away and was replaced by a man who said in a loud aggrieved voice, “I wanna work with survivors, I wanna dig survivors out of the rubble and build privies and shelters. Fuck the earth. The earth is worthless…Long live the earth who has freed us from the obligation to save her! You’re not gonna catch me serving the earth as if she were some sort of goddess, I want to serve my own kind.”
“Remove him at once,” Enoch said. As an afterthought he said, “Give him some privies to build.”
“I guess I’m next, am I next?” a young woman asked. “OK then, my mother kept rabbits. She collected them. It was so embarrassing. People called her the Bunny Lady. Otherwise she was normal. We had a little shed in the yard which should have been my playhouse but it was always full of rabbits. After I went to Yale she was arrested for having so many rabbits and I had to post bond. She was told not to go within one hundred yards of a rabbit. But she violated her probation and I was asked to post bond again but I didn’t, I didn’t post bond.”
“Now you want to know if you shou
ld have laughed or cried,” Enoch said.
“That’s right. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the time.”
“What did you do?”
“Neither. I went out and bought shoes.”
“Then that was the wrong response I guess,” Enoch said. “Is your mother still alive?”
“Dead and buried now. They won’t have to worry that she’ll get within one hundred yards of a rabbit anymore.”
“Umm,” Enoch said. “Have you heard the old belief that when you shiver for no reason it’s because a rabbit is running over your grave?”
The woman laughed in a projectile fashion before being led away.
So it went. Hundreds in an hour under his purview.
And the things they tried to sneak past him! One old soul had arrived clutching her bottle of vinegar, the old-fashioned kind with that cobwebby stuff floating around in the bottom of it. They brought sandwiches, pills, an alebrije with a broken tail. Some had pieces of plastic that once had given them anything they wanted that they still clutched like amulets. Some were surprisingly argumentative given the circumstances.
One fellow strode before the bench and announced, “You ain’t God.”
Enoch sighed. “I am not,” he said. “Look at these pictures. Do you see the diff…”
“Because I believe in God and the God I believe in will bring me back like I’ve always been, same way of doing things, same way of figuring…”
“The same apprehensions,” Enoch said, preferring formal usage.
“I’m not apprehensive about nothing because God will bring me back and it will be me, not just someone like me, but I won’t need to be concerned about what I’ve done or worry I should have done something different.”
“You regret nothing?”
“Wouldn’t question God, Shortstack.”
Jeffrey regarded him sourly. “Did anyone in your family cut that tunnel through Wawona?”
“Through what?”
“Wawona, the giant sequoia.”
“Oh, yeah. That tree older than Jesus that you could drive your car through for fun? One of my father’s brothers did that. Real outdoorsy type, was able to sign on as part of the crew. My mother had a photograph of him and it was in the kitchen for a while. Nobody ever called it ‘Wawona’ though.”
He looked somewhat stupefied, then bored, then impatient. Then he grabbed his chest and said something that sounded very much like “ghh.”
“Oh my,” Jeffrey said.
“I think I’m having a heart attack. Owww, it hurts like a motherfucker. Owww.” He sank to the floor and disappeared.
Jeffrey rose and peered over the great walled desk but could see no sign of him. He had simply disappeared. Jeffrey hadn’t even given a ruling, though it certainly would have been dismissal with extreme prejudice. It would have been well-nigh impossible for the ruling to be arbitrary, capricious, contrary to law, an abuse of discretion and not supported by objective evidence in this case. Maybe in the more obvious ones he should pick up the pace a bit. He hoped he wasn’t losing focus. He felt at times almost bodiless, just a massive ten-year-old brain presiding. Or a blossom, tossed about by the wind. The wind. How the wind had howled in that asylum by that aphotic lake! It was ceaseless. No wonder they’d all been nuts. You’d think his mother would have been more careful about their itinerary. He was the product of erratic parenting…When he was six she’d told him that when her time came, as she phrased it, she wanted to be cremated and her ashes stored in a martini shaker. He had said that he found the request exceedingly frivolous and he would never honor it. She had accused him of having no sense of style but the matter had not come up again.
His mother. He hadn’t thought of her in what seemed centuries. It was a peculiar day. He raised his arms, making the robes crepitate in that way that he liked, and thought again of that cloudland on the lake where elders and radical sickies prepared, prepared…He didn’t know exactly how they’d gotten there but he imagined the strange resolve descending upon them—like a cloud, was the best he could ever come up with for he did not have much of an imagination, he’d be the first to admit, a fact he wasn’t about to lose any sleep over, he who never slept. Maybe they saw Death studying them in that weary heavy-lidded way Death affected and they realized they didn’t want to donate their organs or give their last nickel to that holier-than-thou kid tricycling for charity. They felt bad and they would never feel good again. Bad and mad. They didn’t want to be reliable anymore or well-adjusted or accommodating or moderate or accepting.
And then the cloud, which was not a cloud in the literal atmospheric sense—cloud, after all, arising from the Greek gloutos, buttock for heaven’s sake—indicated to them something along the lines of What do you have to lose? for society was still counting on them, heavily, to think they had something still to lose.
He sympathized with the old delinquents actually. And then she showed up and asked what had become of them. It was depressing.
He was still peering into the space into which the disputatious fellow had vanished. Had he really called him…Shortstack…? That was perturbing. He raised his eyes and regarded his courtroom. The procedural unintelligibility of it all! Well, he’d wanted this. He’d wanted it very much.
He called for a recess and retreated to his chambers. The cases would be piling up, he was well aware. Men and women—even children, for he’d noticed one playing with a little truck, rolling it back and forth—would be creeping up the stairs in fetid flood if he continued to take these breaks. They’d smother him if they detected the slightest whiff of uncertainty or avoidance on his part. They’d roll right over him. Humanity could be quite overwhelming.
Who was he kidding. Humanity was overwhelming.
Goodness, how he would like to leave and seek her. He would pass through the court like a williwaw, leaving petitioners flailing to remain upright, their garments bloating out as though harboring the drowned. Someone would say, “In deep space there’s winds that blow a million miles an hour and this was like that.” And someone else would be sure to contest it. “A wind like that’s unmeasurable, someone’s pulling your leg.” There wasn’t much he couldn’t predict his court rats saying, querulous and opinionated as they were to the end.
She’d been right here before him and he had dismissed her. He had invited her back, yes, but would she be able to return? He couldn’t leave to go to her. His own masters wouldn’t let him. And they’d been good to him, kept him as a kid, allowed him all the bells and whistles, the robes and polished rails, allowed him ultimate authority over all who had lived so carelessly and onerously on the earth with such savagely entitled abandon, and even those who hadn’t. They had allowed him his incommutable sentences. The only thing they hadn’t allowed was the bringing back of his tata, his grandfather whose murder at the hands of his simple-minded devil of a father Jeffrey still had difficulty comprehending. The murder of the father, heinous, heinous. Only murder of the mother being more so, a collective action proceeding pretty much without cease if you addressed it in the lyrical entirety of mother planet.
Oh he couldn’t wait until she returned.
Don’t wait then, his grandfather would tease when Jeffrey would squeak his enthusiasm for some promised upcoming outing—a trial lawyer’s convention, tea with a retired federal judge, a visit to juvenile court (the juvies frightened him somewhat actually). Then don’t wait, his grandfather would say solemnly, do anything but wait.
And Jeffrey would never fail to find this amusing. His grandfather was known for his dry-as-a-desert wit. How he loved him. Ashes now. No more than the ashes of a book that had been poked about in a fire to provide a moment’s warmth.
He did not understand how he could have gone on living after his grandfather died, after he knew his grandfather had died, for there had been seven days when he had not known and when he had missed him
as one merely misses the temporary absence of a living loved one. There were no phones in the queer place where his mother had deposited them for a “holiday.” That was the explanation she had given for the disturbing silence from home. When he’d whined and inquired further, his mother told him that Thomas Edison had failed in his attempt to build a phone that he anticipated would bear messages back and forth across the veil, and if Thomas Edison had failed, wasting years of his life and becoming half-dotty by the quest, it was unlikely that such an apparatus could be found even where they were. Jeffrey hadn’t known what she was talking about. His grandfather had never spoken of Thomas Edison, thus he could not be of the Bar and was of little consequence. His mother’s pronouncements had become more and more irregular and incomplete due to her drinking.
Seven days and not a sign. Though he tortured himself frequently with the thought that his grandfather had appeared to him during that time on the shore of that disorienting lake, that he had in fact appeared as the small and helpless fish he’d caught.
Jeffrey took a deep and shaky breath. He had hyperventilated before when considering this. He had almost lost it actually when that very person, the interesting case, had brought up the soul like the fish in the sea, like the sea in the fish business.
He shoved his hands in his mouth and chewed. Oh that dreadful lake, that awful place with its drifting shades. How had his mother even come across it? It must have been by accident but she behaved as though it had been their destination all the while. We want your nicest room, she’d demanded at the desk, but of course there were no nicest rooms. Outside was even worse. There was a warped ping-pong table lacking a net, a structure with baffling signage toward which the other guests had streamed with disturbing ceremony and a not very clean swimming pool. What if he had wanted swimming lessons? What if he had wanted his mother to place her hand beneath his fragile spine and support him in clean cool waters? Beneath his vulnerable body would be a hand and the palm of this hand would be the point of secure serene balance upon which he would float…What if he had wanted that! He did not know how to swim to this day. And nobody seemed to eat there. The place certainly took away his appetite although in the beginning he’d missed his morning wheat germ. His mother had packed no bags for them. He didn’t even have his Black’s Law Dictionary or his dental floss. And then they left, as abruptly as they had arrived, and it was that night that his mother, in the bubble of their speeding car, had told him that his tata, his only advocate and ally, was dead.