Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

  I’d made her mad, and I relished her anger. I wanted this reduced to the familiar: me the cheeky daughter, and my mother giving back as good as she got. But when my mother spoke again, she was pleading.

  “I hope Debra reads from his letters, the beautiful passages about his love for nature.” She wrung her hands. “I gave her a wonderful photo of him from when he first moved to the cabin. He’s wearing a good-looking pair of corduroy pants, a nice sweater.” She searched my face. “Wouldn’t you think she’d show it so the jury can see how he looked before?”

  “He doesn’t want before and after pictures,” I said. “That’s what the fight with his lawyers is about.”

  My mother got up to peer between the curtains. “I worry when Sara runs in the dark,” she said.

  *

  WE DIDN’T HAVE to get up early. Still, Sara and I were in our twin beds by nine thirty. Sara lit her small pipe. I held my tumbler of Scotch, no longer caring if my mother smelled what Sara smoked.

  “Had you read that horrible stuff in the diaries?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “They just showed me what they wanted me to see. They spared me the truly hideous passages.”

  “I keep thinking this will end sometime,” she said. “That I can go home to my tomato plants, take a bath in my own tub. But I’ll never be clean again.”

  I took a long sip of my drink and told her about the professor in the stairwell. “I was me and then I was someone else ready to yank this guy’s other arm off.”

  “This thing has made us all someone else,” Sara said.

  We were quiet for a long while. I tucked my nightgown under me and raised one leg into the air.

  “What kind of weird exercise is that?” Sara asked.

  “When I was kid I used to look at my leg like this,” I said. “I thought from this angle, my leg looked like yours, and that I could be a cheerleader like you one day.”

  “You need to ease up on that drink,” Sara said.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “I was fascinated by you. You were always hopping in or out of a car full of kids. I never had that kind of high school life.”

  “You didn’t need it,” Sara said. “You didn’t care. You only thought you did.” It seemed like a compliment, but I didn’t want to press and find out that it wasn’t. I lowered my leg and settled back into bed. Sara turned off the lamp.

  My head felt suddenly light. A tune ran in my head. “Look, look, my heart is an open book,” I crooned. “Carl Dobkins Jr. Bobby gave me a dollar to buy the record for him. I was nine. This grown-up errand. I remember the feel of that forty-five in my hand.”

  “And look at us now.” Sara said quietly. “We’re still running Bobby’s errands.”

  *

  BOBBY CONSENTED to see me late Wednesday afternoon. I waited for him in the cement room. I could go there every day and I’d never get used to it.

  As if it were something too personal to watch, I looked away as Bobby squatted against the steel door to have his handcuffs removed. He sat at the table bolted to the floor, not quite looking at me. He crossed his thin legs, slouching. I remembered the posture: as if he were boneless. Trade the jumpsuit for a tweed jacket and you’d have a professor too shy to look a student in the eye.

  “I didn’t know if you’d see me,” I said, my voice betraying my nervousness. “You never look at us in court.”

  He sighed as if I were a tiresome child. “I’m on trial for my life. I can’t be distracted.”

  There was something different about him. A stillness. His hands on the table didn’t move. His wrists were so small, like a woman’s.

  “This thing with my lawyers is nothing personal.” His voice was mellow. “We disagree fundamentally about my defense.”

  I listened with an alertness I knew too well, as if I’d lived my entire life with my ear to the lips of a dying man.

  “I got a fax on Monday from an attorney willing to give me the political defense I want,” he said.

  My mouth went dry. A political defense? As in: I did it to save the planet?

  “But the judge won’t allow it.”

  Thank God, I thought.

  “It leaves me no choice but to put on the defense myself.”

  For a moment, I just stared dumbstruck. “Defend yourself? That’s suicide,” I said.

  “No, that’s Faretta.” He smiled, but I didn’t get the joke.

  “Faretta versus California. It says a defendant has an absolute right to defend himself.”

  “The judge isn’t going to let you put on a political defense,” I said, flailing. “It’s the same thing as admitting guilt. He’ll stop the trial.”

  “Obviously, I have to be careful,” he said calmly. “But the fact is I’m being prosecuted for my beliefs. If I didn’t believe in anarchy, in an end to technological society, I wouldn’t be on trial.”

  I just kept staring at my brother. No, I thought, you wouldn’t be on trial if you hadn’t killed those people. It was all so crazy, yet he seemed calmer, more pleasant, more like his old self than I’d seen him in years.

  “I wish I were younger,” he said. “I don’t have the stamina I had even five years ago.” He squinted. “How old are you now?”

  It was the first time in all this that Bobby had asked me a personal question. I was so disconcerted, I had to think. My birthday had passed like so much else since all this began, uncelebrated. “I’ll be fifty next year.”

  He looked genuinely surprised. “My baby sister fifty. I can’t believe it.”

  It was the warmest thing he’d said to me in fifteen years, and it made me desperate.

  “They’re going to say you can’t defend yourself because you’re crazy.”

  “Let ’em try. I’ll prove them wrong.”

  “You’ll let their shrinks examine you?”

  “If I have to. Plus I’ve got you to testify to my sanity.”

  I laughed as if it were a joke, but there was no trace of humor in his expression.

  “You can testify that you’ve met with me, and you’ve seen no evidence of anything wrong with my mind.”

  I rubbed my throat to calm the pulse beating there. “I won’t help you get the death penalty.”

  He smiled. “I might get myself acquitted.”

  I assumed he was kidding, but I wasn’t sure. “You should know by now that the government isn’t your friend,” he said as if I were still ten years old. “If they want to put you away for crimes you didn’t commit, they’ll plant the evidence to do so.”

  My astonishment must have shown but he didn’t react to it. He looked thoughtful. “Besides, there are worse things than death,” he said. “I’m not just some guy on trial for shotgunning a family and their dog. I’m a threat to the United States government. You know where they’re going to send me?”

  “No,” I said.

  “To the supermax prison in Colorado. Solitary confinement in a cement cell, seven by twelve, meals shoved through a slot in the door. Twenty-three hours a day without fresh air or natural light, without a glimpse of the sky, of anything green. They’ll censor my mail, restrict my reading. There will be a camera in my cell. I’ll be constantly monitored, not a single private moment, even on the john, for the rest of my life.”

  I opened my mouth to say something. What? That it was preferable to death?

  “I’m better off on death row,” he continued easily. “The conditions are much more pleasant and they can’t refuse you law books. I might even appeal. There are larger issues here.” He shrugged. “I could tie them up with legal maneuvers for thirty years. They won’t know what hit ’em.” There was real joy in his smile.

  I pictured Bobby, white-haired in a cardigan sweater like my father wore, hunched over a desk in a normal-size cell, surrounded by law books.

  “I won’t do it,” I said. “You’ll have to get someone else.”

  He was quiet before answering. “I don’t have anyone else.”

  He leaned forward, a cavity
at his neck. “Do you know what my lawyers were going to do?” He didn’t wait for me to surmise. “They were going to use the cabin I built with my own hands to call my sanity into question. They had my place taken apart, shipped here. They were planning to display it in the courtroom.”

  I tried to picture how a cabin could fit in the courtroom. Then I got it. How insanely small it must have been.

  “The home I built,” Bobby said, a finger hitting his emaciated chest. “The life I freely chose. The skills I acquired to survive on my own in the wild. My defense team was going to use my every accomplishment, everything I’m proud of, care about, to argue that I’m crazy.”

  In a flash like a backhand to the face, Bobby’s tone, his expression, darkened. “You’re saying you want to save me, but how? By destroying me?”

  My eyes darted from his glare, my gaze going from the floor to walls. There was nothing to break up the cement that enclosed us, not a splotch of paint, a shelf, a venetian blind, or even a drain in the floor to distract me.

  “How about you?” he asked. “Would you want to live in this world if technology took away everything you valued? All the children, for example. Wouldn’t you do whatever it took to prevent that?”

  I didn’t answer. He wasn’t interested in what I had to say. He was shaping his defense.

  My eyes watered. “You have your values, your principles that you don’t want taken away. But you have no regard for mine or anyone else’s.”

  “And, what principles would those be, Natalie?”

  It was the first time in all this that he’d used my name, and he’d used it against me.

  “For a start, choosing life over death. Standing up to injustice, to the wrong the government is trying to commit.”

  “Natalie.” This time he repeated it gently. “If you listen to the lawyers and the others,” he said, “you will spend the rest of your life talking in a monotone about the mentally ill and the death penalty. You will have a cause—you will please Mother—but you will lose yourself.”

  Bobby looked just to the side of me. “People will do whatever they can to keep their illusions intact,” he said. “Then they justify it with a philosophy.”

  Was that all I was doing? Or was my brother revealing the truth about himself?

  It didn’t seem to matter that I didn’t answer him. He signaled at the two-way glass that we were done.

  There was the sound of locks turning in the metal door. “Bobby, when I was young,” I said desperately, “you were everything to me.” I searched his eyes for recognition, that he knew what I was trying to tell him.

  “You didn’t have anyone else,” he said as he turned toward the door.

  *

  AT EIGHT the next morning, Debra rose from the defense table to request on Bobby’s behalf that he defend himself. I heard the murmur in the courtroom through the rushing in my ears. My mother turned to me. “Why?” she asked before covering her eyes.

  The judge conferred with the attorneys. He ordered a psychiatric evaluation, and set a competency hearing for the following week.

  Later, we told one another what we wanted to hear. “The competency hearing and the rest are merely pro forma,” my mother said. “The judge will never allow Bobby to defend himself.”

  “Unless he’s an idiot,” Sara said.

  “Which he isn’t,” I said. “He isn’t going to let this case become any more of a public spectacle than it already is.”

  “The judge has had it, that’s for sure,” Sara said.

  I phoned Eric and told him I’d be back in Berkeley in time to pick up the girls, that there was nothing left for any of us to do but wait.

  *

  I PUT TOGETHER dinner and opened a bottle of wine. When Eric came home, I managed to ask how he was doing before blurting: “You don’t think the judge would really let Bobby defend himself, do you?”

  “Depends,” he said. “You don’t have to be sane to be competent in a legal sense. If Bobby’s symptoms don’t interfere with his ability to put on his own defense, the judge could say yes.” He paused. “But I can’t imagine him taking a chance on losing control of his courtroom in such a big case.”

  It was what I wanted to hear. I was worrying about something that was never going to happen.

  *

  ON MY ninth day home, a Friday, Sara phoned. “The shrink report came in,” she said immediately. I drew in my breath.

  “Paranoid schizophrenia, preoccupied with a systemized delusion about education and technological society, with otherwise minimal impairment and periods of remission. Meets criteria for legal competence.”

  I sat in a kitchen chair, my knees suddenly weak. “This is good, right? The government will have to agree to a plea now, won’t they?”

  “Fuck if I know,” Sara said.

  “Has the judge ruled?’

  “Not yet.”

  “The judge is never going to turn his courtroom over to a schizophrenic,” I said.

  “A paranoid schizophrenic,” Sara corrected.

  “And that’s as crazy as it gets.”

  “Sorry to have to tell you,” my former-social-worker sister said. “They are more functional than schizophrenics. They can pass as normal, sort of. Until you spend enough time with them.”

  “Oh God,” I said.

  “All I know is Bobby has been found legally capable of standing trail and representing himself,” she said. “That and we’re back in court on Thursday.”

  *

  WHATEVER I did, no matter how pleasant—a movie with the girls, an hour to myself—I wanted it over. Yet I dreaded going forward. I missed my daughters even as they sat next to me.

  I dallied too long at home on Wednesday and got caught in afternoon traffic. I heard about the judge’s decision on the radio outside of Davis. I cut into the right lane, pulled off the freeway, and parked beside farmland, frantically searching for Debra’s number on my phone.

  “It’s legally sanctioned suicide,” she said, acknowledging my worst fears.

  “Maybe it’s a ploy to force a plea,” I said, as if I were the attorney.

  “Bobby pulled that off the table. He has what he wants.”

  I gasped, wanting to beg: Give me something, anything. “You’ll be there, though? You’ll help him.”

  “I’ll be in court as an observer,” she said, “but I’ve made it clear to him, I won’t be a party to this.” A court-appointed attorney would replace Debra and her partner at my brother’s side. “The most we can hope for is grounds for an appeal.”

  *

  THERE WERE news vans outside the gates of my mother’s complex. Inside, we disconnected the phones to keep them from ringing nonstop. My mother went to her room early, less, I suspected, from a desire to rest than a need not to talk. Even with Sara and me.

  I phoned Eric. He spoke to me as a doctor to a patient about to be hospitalized. He was trying to use his expertise to comfort me, and I clung to every word.

  The next morning, there were more demonstrators than usual outside the courthouse. Placards supporting us, damning us, having nothing to do with us. We sought out friendly faces, hugged the anti-­death-penalty demonstrators who’d been out there every day. Normally, we did not speak to the press outside the courthouse, but that day we made an exception.

  “We are devastated by the judge’s ruling,” Sara said. We looked it, I thought, my mother too small in her clothes, Sara’s face worn, me sleepless and dazed.

  Bobby did not look up as the courtroom filled. His head hunched over a yellow legal pad, he was writing madly. He’d been given only a day, but in a sense his whole life was preparation for this.

  His sweater was gone. He was a lawyer now. He wore a thin sport coat, a button-down shirt, a tie. There was something in addition to the usual tension in the courtroom. I felt it in my stomach, the kind of sick excitement you get at the first news of a disaster.

  chapter forty-six

  AT EIGHT TEN, the jury filed into the box, the r
ustling of their clothing the only sound in the courtroom. The judge explained that Bobby would be acting as his own attorney. It was his turn to make an opening statement.

  It shocked me when Bobby stood. I was so used to his movements being restricted that I feared they’d reprimand him. He looked pale, timid, his clothes loose and mismatched, a teacher afraid of his class. I felt the same fierce protectiveness toward him that I felt when my daughters performed in front of an audience.

  Bobby walked to the far end of the jury box, paused, looked a juror in the eye, and said hello. He moved down, and said hello three more times.

  Had someone told him to do that? He shoved his hands in his pockets. They were shaking, but his thin voice was even.

  “The last time you were here, you heard about a man who built bombs and sent them to people he did not know,” Bobby said. He spoke slowly, deliberately, without notes. “A man the FBI could not find for twelve years despite his being among their most wanted.” He paused. “Now I’d like to tell you about me.”

  He promised to be brief and he was. He’d left his job as an assistant professor of mathematics because he found the relationship between the government and the university dispiriting. “The old scientific values have been replaced by the amorality of the marketplace,” he said. He’d built his own tiny cabin on a parcel of land in Idaho and learned to become self-sustaining. He’d still be there now if weren’t for the misplaced anxiety of his sister and her husband.

  I sat there next to my mother and Sara, but I felt utterly alone.

  According to Bobby, we’d given the FBI—frustrated after twelve years of looking for their man—a plausible bomber. Only thing was, the FBI had no evidence on which to get a search warrant. No problem. They lied. They staked out his place, arrested him, and then spent days searching his cabin.

  Bobby paced off an area about eight feet by ten. “Days,” he repeated, “to search a place this big. Did they ask for help from the local sheriff? No. Was there anyone outside the Bureau there to supervise what they were doing? No, again.”

  Bobby stood in front of the jury and placed his hands on the box. I looked to the judge. He let the gesture pass.