All the Beautiful People We Once Knew

by Edward Carlson

  Risk Rewards tomorrow

  Don’t forget

  Need report for Celeste pronto

  13

  I LACED ON A suit and stiff dress shoes for tonight’s Risk Rewards dinner and walked to work, the swish bag’s seatbelt buckle tightened fast against my chest. Global warming had begun to feel like nuclear winter. The snow continued to fall, silent and large, breaking up the movements of the city, as if someone had edited frames from the footage. I fought the urge to check the phone, admonishing myself to be still, to take in the moment, that these moments were rare. Once again I caved to digital temptation, downloaded a fresh email from Fleeger cracking the whip and copied to Celeste. Saying that whenever I was finished playing with myself he needed the report re Pennsylvania court findings, future handling, deposition strategy, etc. etc., like yesterday. He did this for show. Because he was an asshole.

  Protesters stirred about the camp sipping steaming beverages from Styrofoam cups. In the wet, slow snow they mustered, a mass of bedraggled individuals in an almost silent vigil. I followed them as they marched south along the East River and beneath the elevated highway toward Wall Street. A crusty, tattooed protestor—her skin infused with permanent muck—extracted a Sharpie from the pocket of her tattered, hooded sweatshirt and vandalized the capstans as she passed them. IXXI IXXI IXXI IXXI. Once for mooring ships at Fulton Street, now for graffiti and security against truck bombs targeting tourists and Halal guys and steel-hulled windjammers. I detached from the crowd and entered the office building.

  During my brief absence from the office Lazlis had answered my discovery demands. I counted the boxes piled on my floor. Twelve boxes of Thomas’s medical and military records, most likely extracted from Thomas’s basement and rolled in here by dolly. Redacted military records. Operation Nifty Package. Nerve maps of where it all hurts. Numbness to the extremities. Colonoscopy reports. Polyp scans. Kidney soundings. Inflamed glands. Concerned I would contract Thomas Syndrome by handling his records, I set to work, steeling myself against the pull of online media.

  Now was no time for distraction, not when the trip to Pennsylvania was still fresh. I printed the photographs of the Pennsylvania court records and unboxed my steel ribbon of productivity and commenced the hum and click of billing law and time to WorldScore. Digging between my teeth with the shards of a toothpick while my mental machine extracted salient facts from the documents and converted them into a report. Thomas’s military commendations, combat reports, discharge evaluations, custody battle, at home alone with his daughter, his motivation to sue, to exaggerate his injuries. “Thomas’s presentation as a disabled former military contractor with an expanding litany of mental and physical ailments likely motivated by the need to fund custody proceedings in Pennsylvania.” I processed salient facts into clauses, clauses into lines of attack during his deposition, about prior warzone deployment with the US military. About postdeployment employment with FreedomQuest. About his relationship with his ex-wife and his daughter and the allegations his ex-wife made against him to Child Welfare Services. About his inability to lift his arms above the shoulder plane. About his financial predicament. About the incoming gun and mortar fire he allegedly experienced in Afghanistan and its lack of evidentiary support in any of the military or employment records. Postulating, why is that? Why doesn’t it mesh with your previous statements? Why doesn’t your version of events, your lawyer’s version of events, mesh with anything contained in the twelve boxes of records we received? Explain that for me Bud. Make us, me, WorldScore, understand.

  I wanted to crush him. My arguments snapped together and fused into strategies for future handling. I continued writing, immune to the temptation of electronic distraction while atomizing Thomas into facts. Into multiple one-tenths of an hour, points for Fleeger’s board. With each posited question, each flagged inconsistency, the veracity of his allegations vanished bit by bit, eclipsed by our version of events. I was erasing Thomas with lawyering, erecting in his place our version of events. Solid legal work akin to drafting blueprints with words, constructing an alternative reality of chosen facts applied to the Code of Federal Regulations to support the predetermined conclusion that Thomas deserved nothing.

  Fleeger stood in my doorway gripping his Kilgore tote and a paper towel, yellow schmutz smeared on the shoulder of his black pinstriped suit. I played offense.

  “You owe me thirteen hundred bucks,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “I paid for that blue neon sign you smashed. To keep the restaurant from calling the cops.”

  He looked tired and irritated.

  “Good man,” he replied.

  Except for the fact I made love to his almost ex-wife. My treachery had now almost vanished, receded behind the curve of the Appalachian Mountains.

  “He’s suing WorldScore to fund his custody battle,” I said.

  “Who is?”

  “Thomas.”

  “So what?”

  He had no time for this now. There was a stain on his shoulder that demanded bitching.

  “It goes to his motivation,” I continued.

  “Who cares about his fucking motivation? We just need to know whether he can return to work so WorldScore’s not paying this asshole comp for the rest of his life.”

  He shifted gears.

  “Look at this, man.” He pointed at the stain. “These protestors are like fucking rats. Pissing on the sidewalk. Living in the subways. Throwing shit at people for having a job.”

  He scrubbed the stain on his shoulder with a white rage. Whitey entered stage left, like some stand-up act in the Catskills, ready to juice Fleeger on cue.

  “I don’t know. Some bitch troll. I think it’s Boston cream,” Fleeger explained to Whitey. “I hope it’s Boston cream.”

  Whitey feigned concern.

  “That’s nice fabric, Robert.”

  “Yes, well, Whitey, I’m fine, thanks for asking.”

  “It’s just a stain, Robert. I’m sure it will come out.”

  “Only because we have Risk Rewards tonight did this happen.”

  “It’s the gods, Robert,” Whitey said. “They test us all.”

  He patted Fleeger’s lower back and exited stage right and Fleeger stepped into Attika’s office. His finger-toe pedigraph still taped to her office door.

  “He was asleep,” Fleeger scolded her. “Why did you wake the dog? I told you not to wake the sleeping dog.”

  She mumbled a reply.

  “Well then you call Nelson and tell him that. Let’s see how many cases he sends you now that your settlement recommendation destroys his reserve limits. How many times do I have to tell you, Attika?” He struck the palm of his hand again and again against a bookshelf of published federal decisions. “You don’t litigate the case you want. You litigate the case you have.”

  Fleeger exited Attika’s office and removed the stained suit coat, cufflinks like clementine lozenges, and handed the coat to his secretary. He needed it dry cleaned like yesterday, he said. Dark blotches of sweat bloomed in his French-blue armpits. He smelled like barbecue. Attika brushed past him, exiting her office holding something beneath her eye with a finger.

  “You’re not going to cry are you?” he asked her.

  “Technical foul,” I said, making the motion.

  “Technical foul,” he replied. As if he had Down syndrome. He breathed through his nose. I granted him time and space to compose his partnerhood. He inquired about Thomas. I told him I was writing it up. Writing what up, he wanted to know. All of it, I said. You find something we can use in PA? I told him I did. Nothing that’s going to get us into trouble? Worth the risk, I replied. He told me to be careful. I told him he could bail me out. That the case was proceeding according to plan. He wanted to know whose plan. My plan. Our plan. The plan. He wanted the report re future handling and deposition strategy by the end of the day. In order to review and forward to Celeste. I confirmed it would happen.

  “And we have this thing t
onight,” he added.

  “Whatever you do, be first class.”

  He gave me the finger. The receptionist breathed into the intercom.

  “Mr. Fleeger, you have a telephone call on line three. She says it’s urgent.”

  “Lucky number twenty-three,” I said, but he was already on the move, his middle finger still floating in the doorway.

  I reentered Thomas’s medical and military records for six good billable hours. Up through his intestines. Into his lungs. Across the surface of his spine, observing the calcifying anchor hitches. Now steaming through his veins, on the lookout for Thomas’s attack vehicle, Hamid Karzai at his side, pointing straight ahead in his purple-and-green robe.

  “Be careful, Major. Taliban.”

  “I’ll blast him, Hamid.”

  “Allahu akbar.”

  The day was ending. Fleeger emailed me, demanding the report, admonishing me for spending enough time on it already. Send it to him now and he would get it across the finish line. He wanted to read it. I closed and transmitted the Word document. Outside, the snowfall resumed, now in opposite directions, like effervescent lorazepams, Alka-Seltzers, lottery balls. I picked up the binoculars and glassed the apartment windows across the street. Orange with light, purple with screensavers, empty of people.

  “Stephen, stop staring out the window,” Attika said as she stood in my office door.

  “I think I’ll jump,” I replied.

  She laughed. Back in good spirits. Kilgore’s Atta-girl.

  Fleeger sat hunched over his desk, report in hand, slashed and rewritten in the margins with a red felt-tip pen. Armpits still blotched with sweat, he looked up from the document.

  “Dude. This isn’t a litigation report. It’s a fucking epic poem.”

  I couldn’t determine whether this was unacceptable.

  “Nothing about the report resembles an epic poem.”

  My reply was weak. Yet still I was right. The report was eleven pages long, double-spaced, almost 4,500 words, focused and diligent. Fleeger leaned back in his swivel chair and propped eggplant-black wingtips atop his crowded desk.

  “You spent the day travelling to and from Pennsylvania—which you, not me, recommended to Celeste—and all you come back with is the fact that Thomas has a custody battle with his wife? Which is his main motivation for suing WorldScore? That’s your big insight?”

  “How is it not?”

  “What does that have to do with separating his alleged injuries from exposure to WorldScore?”

  “It establishes his motivation.”

  “His motivation is to get paid. That’s it. Since when did his motivation become an issue?”

  “It’s always been an issue. He says one thing, we say another, he has a financial motivation to not tell the truth in order to collect a bigger payout.”

  “That’s your insight?”

  “It is.”

  “You’re missing the point again.”

  “The point is that he’s a bullshitter.”

  “If that’s an offense then me and you and everyone in this place is guilty of being a bullshitter. Then we’re all fucking frauds. Our only objective is to sever his alleged ailments from his employment with FreedomQuest. Fuck, you have got to pin this to the ground, brother.”

  “I do pin it to the ground.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Then what do I do?”

  “I don’t know what it is. It’s hard to describe,” he said. “You poke at it. You kick it over and study it for meaning. You’re too distracted by what you find interesting and so you keep missing the point.”

  He gestured as if this was something dirty.

  “You’re a personal injury insurance defense lawyer, Stephen. I know you may not like it but that’s what you are. For now at least. So stop trying to make this guy so fucking interesting. Don’t try to make anything about this case interesting. No one’s even going to read your report except for me. Celeste maybe but what she really wants is tangible confirmation that she can feel with her hands that we’re on top of things.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Yes, I’m sure about that. Just as I’m sure this report won’t do it for her. Because all you’re giving her are more questions than answers.”

  He leaned over in his chair and attacked something beneath his desk.

  “For example, you’re obsessed with the deer stand in Thomas’s front yard. You mention it like five times in your report. So he has a deer stand. The point is not whether there is a deer stand built atop a buttonwood tree in his front yard, but whether he built the deer stand himself. If so, what tools and materials did he use to build the deer stand? How heavy were those tools? How heavy was the lumber? When did he build the deer stand? Before or after Iraq?”

  “Afghanistan.”

  He resurfaced from beneath his desk.

  “Whatever. And then the point is, are, whether he still uses the deer stand. And if so, whether he hunts with a compound bow or with a rifle. It it’s a rifle, how heavy is the rifle. How much recoil? What caliber? Can his shoulders and back withstand the recoil? If it’s a compound bow, then how much weight does it take to pull the string? And if it’s fifty pounds or thirty-five pounds or whatever then how does he have the strength and the orthopedic dexterity to climb up a tree and launch an arrow with enough torque to kill a deer, when he’s alleging torn rotator cuffs and slipped discs and maybe even the PTSD comes into play too. He says he can’t concentrate? Then what’s he doing while sitting in the deer stand? Whittling dicks? And if he testifies during the deposition that he can’t hunt from the deer stand anymore, then we have Honda video him doing so. If he says he can then we run it past our orthopedic specialist and ask for a professional opinion as to whether Thomas’s alleged injuries permit him to return to work now, someday, or in the future in some capacity and if they do and he says he can’t …”

  Fleeger lost his train of thought.

  “This is your case, Stephen, not mine. Why is it that after almost seven years of practicing law you continue to lack real impact? It must be my fault. Have I not taught you correctly? You don’t know how to advocate, Stephen. You marvel. Ponder. Expostulate. You have this counterproductive habit of trying to sound profound all the time. It prevents you from being aggressive.”

  He returned under the desk again looking for something, and resurfaced. Whatever it was he couldn’t find it.

  “There is something inherently unaggressive about you, Stephen. You need to be a shark. You just do it.”

  “Just do it.”

  There was a pause.

  “How are we going to beat this guy if you’re in love with him?”

  Hot anger coursed through my shoulders. Along my cheeks. Flushed through my capillaries. I wanted on the offensive. To tell him about Kath. About my dick in her mouth. That he was incapable of operating outside his comfort zone. That his dimensions were limited. That he was limited to this and this was his all.

  “I’m not in love with him.”

  “Bullshit. And if not, then what is this report? Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner? Kubla Khan? Stormed Tora Bora on horseback. Self-sufficient survivalist. Collection of woodworking tools. Single dad under duress. Black powder boar hunts.”

  “Bear hunts.”

  “Who fucking cares? The problem is this guy’s your hero. We’re barely out of the gates with this case and we’re under McKenzie’s microscope and I put this whole thing in your hands and this guy is your fucking hero.”

  “No he’s not.”

  “Yes. He. Is. But you know how we defeat your hero, buddy? By not denying the fucking truth. And the truth is that this guy is faking his injuries to obtain a payout he doesn’t deserve represented by that sack of shit Lazlis. Looking to take something from our client that isn’t his. That’s all you need to know. Those are your marching orders. That’s your polestar. And only after you sufficiently counter his allegations of physical and mental illness, only then do you get
to engage in the sexy work of impeaching his credibility with all these juicy details you’re addicted to. Yes we want to bloody him up where he can’t get his story straight. But not until after you cover the bases of causation and injury. And don’t ever write about it in fucking iambic pentameter.”

  He was conflicting himself. I wanted to tell him that maybe if he hadn’t spent so much time sport fucking and hockey sticking and grab-assing and handballing and mouth sputtering that maybe he’d get his fucking instructions straight and stop lining up moving targets for me to shoot upside-down and backward so that he could yet again Rough Rider in at the eleventh hour and yet again manage to pull off a win with the grip of his handshake and his self-inflated gravitas but that it wasn’t stable. It wouldn’t last. It couldn’t last. And he was bound to fall. And he was certain to fail. And that as much as I never wanted this to happen I also did. To teach him that the same rules which applied to me and Kath and Attika and everyone else also applied to him.

  He raised his eyebrows a quarter inch to enjoin my executory insubordination. My mouth sealed like a tomb. I pushed against it. It was no use. The stone wouldn’t budge.

  “Look, Stephen. I want you pulling this oar alongside me. You’re like me. You need that extra bit of juice to keep it moving otherwise this all sucks. And I get your need to try and make these cases more interesting. But the time for that is over now. The time for that has passed. You need to evolve. You need to show me you can do this on your own without me babysitting you. We’re engaged in a money war here and the battle is all about momentum and alliances. Who is your go-to guy. I want you to be my that guy. Otherwise you’re out the door shucking cases like Nelson for a mediocre paycheck, an apartment in Union City, wheat beer, and potato skins. Is that going to work for you?”

  He was going into my future, armed with objective evidence. I retracted into my shell.