Fogbound

by Joseph T. Klempner

  But Jorgensen knew enough to understand that in the business of death, “a few more months among the living” was often as good as it got. Nowhere else did the old saying, “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” take on as much significance as it did in the world of capital punishment. The governor of Virginia wasn’t likely to declare a moratorium on executions. But then again, the same thing could have been said about the governor of Illinois, and he had. Or maybe some long-lost blood or semen sample would surface, some jailhouse informer would admit he lied at the trial, some detective would acknowledge that he coerced the confession out of the defendant.

  When Death comes knocking at the door, even a two-minute delay in answering it amounts to a reprieve of sorts.

  So what was Jorgensen to do? They’d pretty much admitted they only wanted him on the defense team as a figurehead, someone to lend his white-haired presence to the cause. They had their own people doing legal research; they had a team writing the brief; they even had somebody who was going to prepare him for the oral argument. No doubt they had a slew of experts on autism, too. All Jorgensen knew about it was what he’d learned from the movie Rain Man - ninety minutes of the Gospel According to Hollywood.

  And if he’d read the reactions of his visitors correctly, they hadn’t even much liked the idea of his going to visit Davies at Brushy Mountain.

  But having agreed to help, he couldn’t very well do nothing, could he? He wasn’t going to sit around for the next six months and then let them carry him into the courtroom like some windup doll, ready to spout their words for them. It was bad enough that the American people had been made to suffer through eight years under an actor-president; the last thing they needed now was an actor-lawyer.

  And while here Jorgensen - who’d never heard of Ally McBeal or LA. Law or Judging Amy or The Practice or dozens of other lawyer shows before them - had made the mistake of seriously underestimating the needs of his countrymen; his deficient thinking only goes to show how very out of touch one can get when one lives in an old lighthouse on a barrier island, deprived of so much as a single television set.

  As he sat with his brandy that evening, Jorgensen tried to imagine what it would be like to argue Boyd Davies’s case before the Supreme Court. The trouble with appellate arguments was that they were so impersonal, so sterile, so bloodless. They were always about issues instead of people. Sure, they bore people’s names - Miranda v. Arizona, Terry v. Ohio, Furman v. Georgia - but only as captions. The defendants were never there, nor the victims they’d hurt, nor the families on either side, whose lives would never again be the same. There were no vindictive or reluctant witnesses, no smug arresting officers, no earnest jurors struggling to reach a verdict.

  There were only the lawyers.

  For all the years Jorgensen had sat on the Fourth Circuit, listening to appellate argument after appellate argument, he’d hungered for the human story behind the case. Who was this man, referred to before the court only as “petitioner” or “appellant?” Wasn’t he a real living person, complete with parents and children, hopes and dreams, fears and foibles? What kind of a child had he been? What did he look like? Jorgensen had always tried to imagine what could have gone so terribly wrong to take a man and turn him into a name, a number, a caption, a citation.

  A footnote.

  He drained the last of his brandy, feeling its pleasant heat spread out from his throat and across his chest. If he could do nothing else, August Jorgensen told himself, he was determined to make another effort to get through to Boyd Davies, to find the person locked up inside the body. And the first step, he knew, was to get himself ready. That meant moving beyond Rain Man, learning something about the mysterious affliction known as autism.

  Eight hundred miles to the north, Jessica Woodruff lay on her double bed in her designer-decorated apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Alone. She hated being alone. But it seemed to come with the territory, at least when you were dwelling in the territory of seeing a married man.

  “Give me time,” Brandon kept telling her. He was working on a plan. As best as she could figure it out, his plan was trying to manipulate his wife into being the one to ask for a separation. That way there’d be less anger, less guilt, less alimony, and less child support. Furthermore - and he kept stressing to Jessica how important this was for everyone concerned, far more important than the anger and the guilt and the money, which he assured her he had plenty of and could care less about - there’d be no suspicion that the two of them had been carrying on behind his wife’s back.

  Then, after a month or two of separation, it would be the most natural thing in the world for him to start seeing someone else. Especially someone bright and young and single and attractive, someone he already knew from Trial TV. “Be patient,” he kept saying. “It’s going to work, you’ll see.”

  But time and patience were two things Jessica had never had an overabundance of, and was rapidly running out of.

  The other thing she was beginning to run out of was her certainty that August Jorgensen was, in fact, the right person to argue Boyd Davies’s case before the Supreme Court. What had ever made her think he was up to it? The man was in his eighties, for God’s sake. He had no telephone, no beeper, no computer, no E-mail, no fax machine. He was half deaf, didn’t see well, and had hair sprouting out of his ears and nose. And he lived like some sort of recluse, in that, that lighthouse of his.

  She opened her bedside table drawer and rummaged around until she found half a joint and a monogrammed silver lighter. The joint she’d been given by a cameraman at the studio; the lighter had been a gift from Brandon. She lit the joint and inhaled deeply, holding the smoke in her lungs until she began to feel lightheaded. She repeated the process until the joint was nothing but a roach, and was too small to hold without burning her fingers.

  He sure did look the part, though. And his voice - God, his voice was great. When the oral argument got close, she’d set up a long interview with him, let them pick up his baritone and zoom in on that face of his. The camera would absolutely love him. Later on, when the case was over and the book was out and the movie rights sold, they could have Max von Sydow read for the role. He’d be perfect. He was almost a double for the old guy.

  Come to think of it, maybe they ought to bypass Jorgensen altogether, and ask Max to argue the case before the Supreme Court. Now there was an idea. She giggled at the thought of it. She’d have to remember to run it by Brandon first thing in the morning. He’d get a kick out of it, Brandon would.

  The ringing of the telephone startled her, actually made her jump slightly, even as she lay on the bed. Realizing she was too stoned to carry on a business conversation, she waited for the caller-identification screen to tell her who it was. Only when she saw it was Timothy Harkin, calling from the Southern States’ Court Monitoring Program in Atlanta, did she pick up.

  She didn’t work for Harkin.

  “Hi, Tim,” she said, trying hard not to slur her words.

  “Hello, Jessica.”

  “What’s up? It’s nighttime up here.”

  “Here, too.”

  There was a pause. Jessica hated pauses. On the air, they made for uneven interviews. Off the air, they usually signified trouble. And trouble wasn’t something she needed right now, straight or stoned.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Harkin.

  She almost said, “That’s bad,” but managed to restrain herself. Settled instead on, “What about?”

  “You know. The whole thing.”

  “Don’t go getting cold feet on me, Tim. You yourself agreed that there are times the end justifies-”

  “I know, I know. But how can you be so sure we’re doing the right thing? I mean-”

  “You’re damn right I’m sure,” said Jessica, in as firm a voice as she could muster. “Listen, Tim. We’ve been over thish a hundred times.” Thish was bad, but Jessica let it slide. Correcting it would have only
served to highlight it. In television, they trained you early on to ignore your mistakes, leave them behind you. Just plunge ahead, focusing on the prompters or winging it, as though it had never happened.

  “Tell me it’s worth it,” Harkin was saying.

  “It’s more than worth it,” said Jessica. “It’s worth it a thousand times over. You know that as well as I do, don’t you, Tim?”

  “Yeah,” said Harkin. “I guess I do. Look, I’m sorry to have bothered you, Jessica.”

  “That’s all right. Remember, though, it’s definitely worth it.”

  Shut up, she told herself. It was the grass, she realized. Whenever she smoked, she developed a tendency to repeat herself over and over.

  After exchanging good-byes and hanging up the phone, Jessica made a mental note to call Brandon Davidson the following day and tell him about Harkin’s second thoughts. But whether it was the joint she’d smoked or the late hour, come morning she’d have more pressing things on her mind, and she’d completely forget about her conversation with Tim Harkin.

  August Jorgensen owned no telephone, no television, no VCR, no microwave oven, no dishwasher, no garbage disposal, no fax machine, and no electronic kitchen gadgets. He’d once had some of these things, but over the past dozen years, he’d been simplifying, or “paring down,” as he liked to call the process. A less-charitable friend of his once suggested to him that what Jorgensen was really doing was getting ready to die. “We’re all getting ready to die,” Jorgensen had observed, “one way or another.”

  Books Jorgensen had by the hundreds - probably the thousands, if you wanted to count those that lurked in the bottoms of closets or bided their time huddled together in cardboard cartons. But of all the books he had, at least so far as he could ascertain, not one of them had anything to say about the subject of autism, save a well-worn Random House dictionary, vintage 1966, which provided him with this nugget of wisdom:

  au.tism (ô’tiz em), n. Psychol, the tendency to view life in terms of one’s own needs and deires, as by daydreams or fantasies, unmindful of objective reality. [AUT- + -ISM] -au’tist, n. - au.tis.tic (ô tis’ tik), adj.

  It didn’t take him long to decide that if the editors were incapable of spelling the word desires, perhaps he shouldn’t put too much stock in the rest of their information, either.

  But what to do?

  The local library was utterly worthless, he’d long ago found out, unless you were looking for books on Confederate heritage or Bible study, or a complete set of the Hardy Boys’ adventures; the nearest one that might have anything on the subject was a good hour and a half’s drive. Same for the university, over in Charleston. He wondered if there might not be some national association or foundation concerned with the disease, the way there was with diabetes and cancer and heart disease. He could look them up and send them a letter, or call them on one of those 800 numbers they all had now, and ask them to send him pamphlets and stuff like that. The process might take some time, but time was certainly something he had.

  So the following morning, when he’d driven over to the general store for his newspaper and a couple of things, he asked Pop Crawford - Pop was a good fifteen years younger than Jorgensen, but since everybody else called him Pop, Jorgensen did, too - if he might use the phone.

  “Local call?” Pop wanted to know.

  “One of those 800 numbers,” said Jorgensen. “Same thing.”

  Pop looked at him suspiciously, but handed over the phone. Jorgensen dialed the toll-free operator and asked if she had a number for the American Autism Association, or anything like that.

  He waited a moment while she looked it up.

  “Would you like the listing for emergency road service,” she asked, “or travel assistance?”

  He tried for another minute or so, but it was obvious they were having two different conversations, and the twain were not about to meet. He thanked her for her trouble and hung up.

  “What is it you’re trying to find out?” Pop asked him.

  “Autism,” said Jorgensen, “information about autism. It’s a disease where-”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Pop cut him off. “I know what it is. They say Nellie Strock’s boy has it. Used to bite folks when he was young. Zack!”

  “Zack has autism?” That surprised Jorgensen. “I thought he was just a rotten kid.”

  “No, no,” said Pop, “not Zack. Nellie’s kid is Donald. Zachary here is my nephew.” And as though on cue, a skinny, bespectacled youngster appeared from the back room. “He’s staying with me till his momma gets back from up north. Right, Zack?”

  The boy nodded shyly, but said nothing, serving only to perpetuate Jorgensen’s confusion. He looked to be about seven or eight, standing no more than four feet tall and weighing maybe fifty pounds, all of it knees and elbows. The kind of kid who got picked last whenever sides were being chosen for a ball game.

  “Zack,” said Pop, “do me a favor. Take the judge here with you and help him look up some stuff. He used to be a smart man, but he doesn’t get out much anymore.”

  Jorgensen was about to take issue with the comment, but the boy had already turned and was headed back to wherever he’d materialized from.

  “Go on.” Pop shooed him away with a dismissive wave. “Unless you’re too proud to learn from a ten-year-old.”

  “If he’s ten,” said Jorgensen, “how come he’s not at school like he’s supposed to be?”

  “And for his first lesson,” Pop called to the boy, “why don’t you teach him the days of the week?”

  Jorgensen looked down at his newspaper, saw it was Saturday. “I knew that,” he mumbled, and headed to the back room.

  He found Zachary sitting at an old rolltop desk, his feet dangling a foot above the floor, his face lit up by the blue glow of a television screen. In front of the TV was a keyboard, but the boy seemed to pretty much ignore that. Instead, his right hand rested on a gadget that had a wire sprouting from it, connecting it to a big plastic box. Every once in a while, he’d move his hand a tiny bit, and images on the screen would jump around.

  “A computer,” said August Jorgensen.

  “How old are you?” asked the boy.

  It turned out to be easy, amazingly easy. Zachary needed a little help spelling autism to start him off, but that was about it. Once he’d typed the correct letters into a little box and pressed the enter key, the machine seemed to take over and do the rest.

  Not that Jorgensen didn’t know about computers, or what they could do. He lived in a lighthouse, after all, not on another planet. He’d seen people using computers in banks and department stores, and looking up listings at the Motor Vehicle Department and the Social Security office. He knew everyone was online these days, exchanging E-mails instead of letters, and that you weren’t anybody unless you had .com after your name. It was just that he’d never actually seen anybody doing research on one before, the kind of stuff you used to have to go the library for, lug all sorts of books around, and spend forever trying to zero in on what you were looking for.

  Suddenly, it was all right there at his fingertips - okay, their fingertips, the white-haired octogenarian and the nerdy ten-year-old with the Coke-bottle glasses.

  Autism, Jorgensen was surprised to find out, wasn’t a disease at all. It was a pervasive developmental disorder that occurred in as many as one in every 500 individuals, or as rarely as one in every 5,000, depending upon the diagnostic criteria one chose to use. Symptoms usually appeared during the first three years of childhood and continued throughout life. They typically included problems with communication (particularly verbal skills), conceptualization, social interaction and, occasionally, motor skills. Autistic children seemed removed; they often failed to respond to other peoples’ voices, and tended to avoid eye contact. Endless and obsessive repetitive motions were common, such as rocking, spinning, stroking and hair-twirling. In extreme cases, biting or head-banging occurred. People with autism often exhibited unusual responses to light, sounds, sme
lls, or other sensory stimulation. Paradoxically, they could be relatively impervious to pain while exquisitely sensitive to touch.

  Autism was an equal-opportunity disorder in that it affected people of all geographic, racial and social groups; but it discriminated between the sexes, choosing five males for each female it selected.

  In terms of causation, autism has long defied easy analysis. Once thought of as the manifestation of flight from poor parenting (particularly frigid mothering) or early psychological trauma, the disorder was now recognized as having an array of physiological components. No unique biological marker had been discovered, and no single gene “caused” autism, although several had been identified as contributors. Families with one autistic child had a 5 percent risk of having a second child affected, far greater than the normal expectation. Recent neurological studies had uncovered abnormalities in a number of areas of the autistic brain, most prominently the cerebellum and hippocampus. In at least some cases, these changes could be attributed to diseases - among them rubella, fragile X syndrome, PKU (phenylketonuria), tuberous sclerosis, Rett’s syndrome, encephalitis, and hydrocephalus - contracted either in utero or during the early months of childhood. There was some evidence pointing to chemical imbalances, and heightened or depressed serotonin levels had been found, as well as abnormalities in various other “signaling” molecules. But these anomalies might eventually prove to be more effects than causes.

  Whatever the particular causal agent of the damage might be, the effect seemed to manifest itself as a disruption of the normal circuitry of the brain. Specific areas could be left relatively intact, but integration with other areas might be greatly diminished or even totally absent. The result was that complex behavior - such as language skills, social interaction, conceptualization, and the development of a sense of personal identity - became difficult, if not altogether impossible.