Lost, Almost

by Amy P. Knight

  Dr. Brooks continues. “He was there less than a year when he started harping on it. Every meeting, and in between, he’d be at my door, he’d be at everyone’s door with some new calculation. Son of a bitch would not give up.”

  She wants to pause the conversation for a moment, to catch up, but he is barreling along. She clicks the pen open again and tries to start writing, but no ink comes out. He’s speaking fast, as though he’d had all this saved up and couldn’t keep all the words in his mouth any longer. “We had to make choices so we could move forward. You’re too young to remember, but it was a race. If we divided our resources in building three different cars, no one of them could win.”

  “You’re right,” she says, “I don’t remember. I’ve only read about it.” She is beginning to shape, in her mind, the story she now understands Diego would like her to tell. She realizes she had been operating on the assumption that he was wrong about the lasers, that if his idea had been so brilliant, it would have been implemented.

  “Would you say that he was selfish? That he wanted it his way because it was his way?”

  “No,” Dr. Brooks says quickly. Then, he is quiet for a long time. Charlotte resists the temptation to ask a further question. “I didn’t know the man that well. I only knew his work. But if I had to say, I’d guess that he honestly believed it to be best.”

  “Has that ever happened to you? You knew for sure, and nobody would listen?”

  “Oh, we listened. We just decided against it. Rightly or wrongly.”

  “Let me rephrase that. Have you ever had an idea you were sure would work that was decided against?”

  “I made the decisions.” She drains her coffee cup. She sees now how this man can help. He will be a key piece of the puzzle, the credibility they need.

  Charlotte went back to the prison four days after Diego threw her out. They were busy days; she had had a court appearance in another case that went poorly, and a women’s bar association luncheon, and a long-ago promised dinner at the law school. Her emotions around Diego had cooled some. Staying late in the office, to the sound of vacuum cleaners, she felt she had gotten it under control.

  She had written it all down, an individual page for each potential strategy, sketching out the arguments she would make, the kinds of evidence that would be involved. She had given each one a number, her estimation of its chances of success. If Diego wouldn’t talk with her, at least she could leave the papers behind, and he would eventually understand that she was right about this. She had never known a man in prison to refuse to read something, if she waited long enough. He would study them, and sooner or later, he would see that she was right.

  “So you are back,” he said. He was standing this time, his back straight, the legs of his jumpsuit too short, exposing his white, hairless ankles.

  “You need something from me, and I need something from you,” she said. “We don’t need to have a long visit if you’d rather not.”

  “Are you going to insult me again?” He took a wide stance, as though preparing to resist a blow.

  “No,” she said. “Nor did I insult you last time.”

  He grunted.

  She reached up to adjust her collar. “This is all a matter of strategy. It’s a game we can win, like chess. Do you play chess?”

  “This is not chess,” he said. “I am sitting all day and all night in a filthy prison while people out there call me names, and you want me to pretend I’m some kind of nobody just to get back out into a world where everyone will think I’m an imbecile.”

  “All right,” she said, her exasperation building. “It’s not chess. But we can still out-smart them and win with the right strategy. It’s about taking those charges in the indictment and poking little holes in them, one by one by one, until they forget any of the individual things we might have said about you in the process, because you’re a free man. They’re the ones who are going to look foolish. You have to trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

  He pulled his plastic chair out from behind the table and sat heavily, resting his elbows on his knees. “Yes, they are very foolish. Can’t see what’s sitting there right on their noses.”

  “All right, then. We agree.” She took her chair. “I’m going to show you four strategies.” She opened her portfolio.

  “Wait,” he said.

  She looked up, marking her place in the papers with one finger.

  “You said you wanted something from me.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m going to need some names.”

  “You sound just like the government men.”

  “No, not those kinds of names. I want to know who in the lab really knew you. Who understood what you were doing, and why.”

  “Nobody understood. They fired me.”

  She sighed. “Look, I can’t help you if you don’t cooperate with me. There must have been some people, along the way somewhere, who saw what you were trying to do. I’m not going to get anyone in trouble. I just want to hear what they might have to say. What kind of witnesses they might be.”

  He peered at her, still suspicious. “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “I’m your attorney,” she said. “I’m duty-bound to act in your best interests.”

  “Duty,” he said. He fixed her with his stare. “You think that means anything? I have a duty. I was trying to fulfill it and it landed me here.”

  “You know, when I take court appointments like this, they pay me about a quarter of what I usually get paid, and then I come in here and you yell at me. Why would I bother if I didn’t care about getting you off?”

  “I want you to do something for me,” he said. “To prove it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Take a note to my wife,” he said.

  “You know I can’t do that. You’re charged with conspiracy. It’s strictly forbidden for you to—”

  “What, tell a frightened old woman who was only trying to help her husband that he loves her?”

  “It’s obstruction of justice,” she said. “You and I could both be charged, and nothing we’ve said here today would be privileged anymore, and I could lose my license.”

  “And wouldn’t that be a shame.”

  This sarcasm stung. She thought quickly. She needed the names to build her case. It was out of the question that she deliver a note. It would be too easy to trace, and the stakes were too high. But even if she did take a note, the wife could not send a reply; how would he ever know, until after the trial, whether it had gotten there or not? It would be a lie, a bald lie, but not at anyone’s expense.

  “I’ll do it,” she said. She tore two sheets from her legal pad and passed him her pen. “Three names on this sheet, contact information if you know it, the note on this one. But I get to read it. If it says anything about the case, deal’s off.” He gave a barely detectable nod.

  “Show me your files,” he said. “What you brought. The strategy.”

  She lay the four sheets out on the desk, facing him. She had buried her preferred route in the middle, but it didn’t fool him. His hand went right to it, and he pushed it away; he did not wish her to prove that the reports he sold were old news, his so-called secrets relatively commonplace principles of physics, his claims of inside knowledge inflated. He also quickly rejected the one on the far left, the attempt at a plea bargain that she thought the U.S. Attorney was unlikely to accept even if she could convince Diego to talk. The two that remained were what she thought of, as she prepared them, as the suicide missions: a flat denial in the face of a mountain of evidence, or the cold truth, that the science is correct, that the U.S. has been mismanaging the program, that Diego Salerno was no spy, no traitor, but a whistleblower bravely insisting on a different path, one that needed to be explored, if not by the United States, then by someone else. A media circus of a trial, sure to end in a swift verdict and a severe sentence. The denial, she thought, stood a chance; she didn’t yet know just how much evidence there really was, if any of it was vul
nerable, if a skillful cross-examination might weaken it enough to pry a juror or two loose.

  “I’m going to leave all four of these here,” she said. “You can read them in more detail and think them over, and I can continue to gather information.”

  He did not respond. He was staring at the first sheet from her legal pad, whether trying to summon the names of those who were once his allies, or considering what he might say to his wife, she could not tell. She looked away, trying to give him some sense of privacy; this time alone with her was all the solitude he got.

  Once he began to write, he did not pause; he wrote the note first, four short lines, and then switched smoothly to the second sheet, where he wrote three names, two of them with addresses.

  “We’ll meet in a couple of days,” she said. “We’ll figure this out.”

  He passed her the two sheets.

  “She was never supposed to be a part of this,” he said.

  You did nothing wrong, the note read. I am safe, and I hope you are. I am sorry this happened to us. I love you. It was neither addressed nor signed. She slipped it into her file with the list of names. As she stood to leave, Diego Salerno offered his hand, and she took it, and for the first time she noticed how frail it was, how cold.

  When she got home, Charlotte retreated to her tiny home office, with its pale pink walls, the room the previous occupants had used as a nursery. Her desk filled one entire wall, the small window to her left, the door behind her when she sat, the wall to her right full of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves of law school books, spare copies of the rulebooks, a collection of popular books about lawyers that people had given her over the years. She hooked up her laptop and kicked off her heels. She could’ve change into jeans, poured a glass of wine, put something on the stereo, but she didn’t feel as though she was really home yet. The room was an island, halfway between her downtown office and her bedroom, its walls so close that when she spread her arms, she could touch both at the same time, depending on how long she had allowed her fingernails to grow.

  She liked the tightness of the space. Sometimes the rest of the house felt too big, too empty, although it was only 1,200 square feet. It had been six months since her last girlfriend, Leah, moved out, over a year since her mother had come to visit, and all the space served only to remind her of this. Leah had been a schoolteacher, had filled surfaces with ungraded papers and handouts and ideas. She had a loud laugh. Charlotte’s mother was the sort of person who quietly talked to herself, asking little questions that weren’t meant to be answered, always letting you know she was nearby, going about her day.

  Charlotte set the note and list of names in the center of her desk. She read the note over, then read it again. I’m sorry this happened to us. Yes, she thought, he is genuinely sorry, if not for any of the rest of it, for what this has done to his wife. It was the first glimmer of vulnerability she saw from him. She felt something shift in her, found herself wildly wanting, in that moment, not just to minimize his sentence, but to help him. It was not the professional desire she always had with her clients, the duty, the drive to win. It was something broader, that followed her here, into her quiet home. She had before her a man who loved his wife, who, without meaning to, had put her in harm’s way, who wanted desperately to change that. She felt that fact like longing, like loss.

  She picked up the list. The first name, Jim Garrison, had an address in Pasadena. The second, Ed MacMillan, was in Washington. She’d never heard either name, and couldn’t tell from the addresses if they were offices or condos. The third name was by itself, no address, no phone number, not even a city, but it had a little star beside it. Adam Brooks.

  A search turned up hundreds of people named Adam Brooks. She tried “Adam Brooks Science,” but that did little to help. “Adam Brooks Physics” was better, and “Adam Brooks Nuclear” yielded four phone numbers. She glanced at the clock. 6:15. These were most likely office numbers, where no one would answer at this hour, but she couldn’t take her eyes from the note, lying there on her desk, its pain seeping into her, spurring her to action.

  The first number rang seven times before she hung up. The second was answered immediately.

  “Yes?” a woman said.

  “Good evening.” She realized that she’d dialed a number in New York; it was 8:15. “I’m sorry to disturb you. Is there a Mr. Brooks there?” There was a silence. “Hello?” she said.

  “Who’s calling?”

  “I’m an attorney representing an old colleague of his. I was just hoping to talk for a few minutes.”

  “Hold on.” The woman had apparently set the phone down; Charlotte heard footsteps, then muffled voices, the woman’s, and a man’s. She could not make out the words, but there was a tension in the tones. Finally, a man picked up.

  “Who is this?”

  “Adam Brooks?”

  “I’m his grandson.”

  “Terribly sorry to disturb you,” she said. “I’m an attorney, representing a man who once worked with your grandfather. Do you know how I could get in touch with him?” She heard her own voice as though it were someone else’s, as though it were a recording.

  “I don’t know that he’d want to be in touch with any attorney,” the man said.

  “He’s still alive, isn’t he?”

  “What? Yes, of course, he—”

  “I understand if you can’t give me his telephone number. Maybe you could just tell me where he lives? What part of the country? What city?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” the grandson said. Charlotte pictured a woman huddled beside him, trying to hear, stroking his hand, the way Leah used to do when she made calls from home in the evenings. “You give me your name and number, and I’ll give them to him.”

  It was still light, and just outside her window, a bird perched in the cottonwood tree. She didn’t know what kind of bird it was; she never bothered to learn, not in New York where she went to college, or California at law school, and not here in New Mexico. Her skin began to sting with the day’s dried sweat. She always needed a shower when she’d been to a jail.

  She stood under lukewarm water, not bothering to soap or shampoo. She thought of Diego, surely made to shower in an open space, watched. She had no hint of the context of his life, just the stained tiles of the visiting room, the dark blue jumpsuit. And he knew nothing of hers, her cluttered office, her empty house. She wondered how she could know a person stripped of context. She wondered if it was already beginning to sink in, that the strategy was a painful one, but the only way to blast down the walls. He could keep his head tipped down in the courtroom, try not to listen, sing some favorite childhood song over and over in his head, never read any reports, hold his breath and wake up, if Charlotte had anything to say about it, a free man.

  She shut off the water and reached through the curtain for her towel. It wasn’t there. She stood, dripping, before remembering that she’d thrown it in the wash this morning, leaving only the hand towel. She took it. She squeezed the water from her hair, toweled the droplets from her shoulders, her back, her legs, then wrapped the towel around her head. Her cell phone began to ring. She sprinted down the hall, covering herself as best she could as she passed the street-facing window, to her office.

  “Charlotte Katz?” The voice was deep, warm. She had only the small towel wrapped around her hair. The office contained nothing of use, not a blanket or a sweater or even a scarf.

  “Yes,” Charlotte said. “Mr. Brooks?”

  “Doctor Brooks. I received a message via my grandson. Something about a colleague.”

  “Of course, Dr. Brooks, I apologize. I am representing Diego Salerno in a criminal prosecution stemming from what appears to be a mix-up about some information. He’s given me the names of a few people who might be able to shed some light on the situation, just in terms of understanding where he was coming from, and—”

  “Oh, don’t tell me,” Dr. Brooks said. Charlotte could practically hear him rolling his eyes. “Is this to do
with the laser?”

  “Not directly.” She crossed back to the bedroom and began riffling the hangers with her one free hand. “I’m sorry, Dr. Brooks, where are you calling from? Are you still at Los Alamos?”

  “I am.”

  “In that case, might you be willing to meet me in person?”

  Diego had surely known what he was doing, giving her this particular name, marking it with a star. She wishes she could call Diego, slip out just for a moment to tell him that she understands now.

  “You said you also fired him. Was it because of the lasers?” Dr. Brooks stares at her, silent. He is quiet for so long that she begins to count, to keep herself from speaking. She has made it to twenty-seven before he speaks.

  “You are an attorney.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I am not your client.”

  “No.”

  “Is there a way that I can speak to you in confidence? Not for anybody to hear, not the court, not the lab, not Diego?”

  “I can give you my word as a fellow human. It won’t be bound by the law, like the attorney-client privilege. But I can promise you.”

  “And do you?”

  “Yes,” she says, “I promise.”

  “There are two people on the planet who know what I’m about to tell you. Myself and my physician.” He stiffens in his chair, leans forward as though about to stand, then slumps back. “I haven’t got a lot of time left. And there will be a decline. There is a decline.”

  “You’re ill?”

  “Yes.” Dr. Brooks taps his temple with his right index finger. “I will lose my mind, and then I will lose my body, and then, I will die. Perhaps soon.”

  “And nobody knows.”

  “Just myself and my doctor. And you.”

  “You have a family,” Charlotte says. It isn’t a question she’d planned; it just comes out. “I spoke to—”

  “I have a son. He will know when he knows, and he can tell his family. My wife is gone. There’s the lab. They won’t need to know. I am no longer relevant.”