Al-Tounsi

by Anton Piatigorsky

  “You’re really upset about losing.”

  “I wrote a brilliant precedent twenty years ago that my dear companions on the Court have just thrown into the garbage.”

  “Why is it that you only come to me when you’re feeling bad?” Katherine picked a speck of dark lint off her linen slacks. “You might think about coming sometimes when you’re feeling good.”

  Killian frowned and buried his chin in his fist.

  “I’m an interesting person,” she continued, with her preternatural calmness. “And fun. You might think about visiting because you like me, not just because you want to vent your problems and have sex.”

  “That’s not fair. I’m crazy about you.”

  Katherine smiled—not quite immune to his affection—but suppressed it. “Look, Killian, you don’t owe me anything. I’m not your wife and I’m no idiot. I’m just saying you used to come here in a good mood, and we had lots to talk about. Lots. Shakespeare. Marlowe and Middleton. All your complicated cases. Brazil. I’m the same interesting person I used to be.”

  “I know you’re interesting, believe me—I don’t have much patience for people who aren’t interesting.”

  “My mind’s a wealth of thoughts and references and obscure facts, all interesting to you. Worth its weight in gold.”

  Killian’s jowls trembled. He tried to contort his face into a mask of somber contrition but for some inexplicable reason, he couldn’t stop a mirthful chuckle from rising. He covered his mouth and laughed.

  “What’s funny?”

  “I have no idea.” Laughter, his favorite thing—where would he be without its clarifying properties? “You were doing that Brazilian dance thing, whatever the heck it’s called.”

  “Capoeira, you jerk.”

  “Still doing it?”

  “Every day except Sunday.”

  “Your bird is Brazilian, too, correct?”

  “A sunburst conure. Alive and well.”

  “Harry?”

  “Hugo.”

  “Whatever.”

  “His name is Hugo. Like your personal hero, Hugo Chavez.”

  “Cute. I was close. Two names that start with H.”

  “Is this really so hard, Killian? A few simple questions about my life?”

  “It is very difficult, actually.”

  “Why’s that? Because all you can think about is that absolute spanking you got in Geitz v. Arkansas?”

  “Look, Katherine, I don’t mean to be a pig. I like you immensely and I have missed you.”

  Katherine hopped off her desk and moved into her chair. “We don’t have to talk about my boring old bird.” She braced her feet against the side of the desk, pressing her thighs against her chest. “I don’t mean that.”

  “It’s just that I spend most of my time thinking about the law, you understand. I’m 18 hours a day thinking about cases, and I’m afraid that if you don’t want to talk about them, there’s really not much I can discuss at this juncture. Maybe next month, when the term’s done and I’ve got a break, but now? Not so much.”

  “I want to talk about your case, actually. The gay sex one.”

  “See, that’s just the thing that irritates me.” Killian leaned forward in the armchair. “It’s not a gay sex case. I mean it’s not about gay sex. It’s about the right of the majority in the state of Arkansas to make democratic laws based on their own moral judgments.”

  “Really? It’s not about gay sex?”

  “I never said I thought the law was morally correct. Just that it has the right to exist.”

  “But you do think it’s morally correct.”

  “That’s beside the point. The state has a right to legislate morality—that’s what states have always done—and it’s an act of supreme arrogance for an unelected justice to say they are not allowed to do it.”

  “I see.” Katherine’s sardonic smile spread. “Well, what about adulterers, then? What if the state declared adultery illegal, made you pay a fine and threw you in jail for visiting me?”

  Killian recoiled and erupted in laughter, which shook his big belly. “Bravo! Let ’em! Look, from time to time there have been laws banning adultery in this country, and if one of those laws ever reached us on the Court I would say that it was a perfectly legal expression of the people’s will, their moral will, and that if adulterers broke the law, well, then they would have to suffer the consequences just like any other lawbreaker.”

  “So when the police bust in here today and catch you in my arms?”

  “Tough luck for me. I broke the law. I’d have to suffer the consequences like anybody else.”

  That was a good sign: Katherine suggesting that the police might bust in here today and catch him in her arms.

  “I’m no hypocrite, Katherine. It’s just lucky for me there’s no statute on the books criminalizing infidelity in the District of Columbia.”

  “Doesn’t it make any difference to you that gay people have suffered years of abuse?”

  “Oh, please. You want a donation for the elite gay folks living their hard-knock lives in their prime, urban real estate?”

  Now Katherine rolled back and chuckled, shaking her head in disbelief. “You mean the rich elitists like my brother Kyle, who was offered a full scholarship to University of South Carolina but instead decided to work two awful jobs in Seattle and live in a dump because the thought of passing one more day of his life in South Carolina, a state of thugs and bullies, made him want to kill himself? Who had to cross the country to Washington in order to survive?”

  “I’m talking about a demographic, Katherine.”

  “My brother didn’t tell my parents he was gay until he was twenty-four years old because he was terrified that his own mother and father—who he loves as much as you loved your parents, by the way—would never speak to him again. And he was right. They did almost disown him. That must be who you’re talking about, because Kyle’s got a miserable little one-bedroom apartment downtown in a liberal city.” Katherine was positively gloating.

  “This isn’t about your brother’s suffering, real as it may have been.”

  “But it is about his suffering. You talk about the moral will of the majority like it’s an abstract thing, but who are the people suffering the wrath of that majority? When Kyle was in ninth grade he was tortured—I mean, Jacobean stuff, Killian, like scenes from the Duchess of Malfi.”

  “He was shown a severed hand and told his entire family was murdered?”

  “I’m serious. There was a hall in Calhoun High on the first floor that everybody called the Gauntlet. Every day after lunch the jocks and metal heads and straight-up insecure wannabes, even the math and computer nerds, gathered and pressed themselves up against the lockers and stood there whistling and grinning and ribbing each other until the one group that they had all agreed to torture came by. The gay kids. Then everyone pounced. They shoved them back and forth across the hall like pinballs, punching them in the kidneys and jabbing their elbows into their ribs and generally abusing and terrifying them. The Gauntlet was the only way to get from the cafeteria to the math and science rooms, so kids like Kyle had no choice but to pass through it. The entire population of Calhoun High called him a faggot and beat him up—and the slightly less abused kids like the math nerds were the worst.”

  “Kids can be awful. Everybody knows that.”

  “It wasn’t just the kids, Killian! The school administration gave the Gauntlet their tacit approval. Every now and then some teacher would drop by to scold these abusers, but with a really feeble command to settle down, settle down, and a big smile. I think the administration actually liked the Gauntlet. It was the only place in South Carolina other than the football field during a game where black and white students actually mingled with each other, let alone with the outcasts, so the school probably thought it was progressive. Nobody cared about gay kids like Kyle back then. Now you’ve got me wondering if that hallway wasn’t just another version of your Arkansas case. Aren’t you c
laiming that Calhoun students and staff had the unspoken right to pass a law endorsing the Gauntlet? That their sacred hallway expressed the moral will of the majority?”

  “No. Your brother was assaulted and harassed in that hall, and there are laws against that kind of behavior, good ones on the books in every state, including South Carolina, and school codes, too, probably in every district, so your high school’s administration was wrong, criminally wrong, not to enforce them. And you’re also wrong to compare the abuse of your brother to an entirely democratic anti-sodomy law. It’s like apples and oranges. Legislatures have the legal right to ban certain actions that they think icky, actions like gay sex—and no matter how you spin it, banning a sexual act is not the same as condoning abuse. Then the citizens governed by those legislatures have free choice as to whether they want to engage in those forbidden activities and accept the consequences—which weren’t so terribly bad in that Arkansas case, I’ll remind you, just a couple hundred bucks and a night in jail—or acquiesce to the moral will of the people.”

  “How is that not just another form of discrimination?”

  “Oh, don’t give me that civil rights malarkey!” cried Killian. “These are laws banning activities, Katherine, not states of being. A man doesn’t have a choice if he’s black or white or Jewish or Italian, and so the Constitution rightfully says you can’t discriminate based on race or religion. Easy-peasy. But having gay sex isn’t a state of being. It’s an action. The law says you can’t beat up a kid in a hall, and the law also says a man can’t have sex with another man. That’s the proper comparison, not the opposite. Gay sex is just one of many activities that have been prohibited by democratic will in Arkansas and other places without any real complaint from the populace. Robbery and murder are other examples.”

  “You don’t understand what I’m saying.”

  “Anti-sodomy laws have been on the books since common law. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that homosexual sex is a fundamental right, or even what we call a fundamental liberty interest, which would be protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, and would trigger strict scrutiny on a statute.”

  “You still don’t get it.” Katherine pulled her feet beneath her and sat cross-legged. “The sex act is so fundamental to peoples’ existences they have no choice but to engage in it.”

  “There’s nothing innate about engaging in an act. It’s a choice.”

  “Homosexuality is innate. Everybody knows that. That’s what I’m saying.”

  As Katherine scolded him, Killian stared at the wall behind her head, where she had mounted a poster from a recent conference on ancient manuscripts at the British Library. The poster featured a multicolored, medieval illumination of a pair of dainty English monarchs, the king in a flowing blue robe and the queen in a shimmering rose gown, sitting beside one another on tiny thrones and holding their delicate fingers in each other’s slender hand. Both monarchs wore crowns and clutched matching scepters, angled outward, like tilting goalposts, which framed their seated figures. Before the royal pair knelt a man in a pied robe of bright red and blue, who was bequeathing the queen a large bound book held together with golden clasps and decorated with gilt edges and a thick leather cover. This trio was surrounded by the tapestry, flooring and frescos of a Tudor castle, which in turn was framed by turrets, columns and stone arches dating from that same period. The image had a narrative, obvious enough: it portrayed the gift of a book to the monarchs of the English nation, and somehow, through the angling of scepters, tapestries and turrets, the image declared that gift as the keystone to the entire empire. The manuscript was the featured element, particularly illuminated, like a beating red heart. It was as if that book pulsed life into the glorious institution surrounding it. Katherine has got to respect the power of ancient text as much as I do, thought Killian Quinn. In her own way, she must. A surge of love for the young woman sped his aging heart, and he released a weary sigh.

  “I give people more credit than that,” said Killian. “We can choose where and when we have sex, and with whom.”

  “Oh yeah?” Katherine leaned over her desk, her wry smile returning. “So what do you think of yourself, Mr. Morality, diddling the manuscript curator while your faithful wife waits for you at home?”

  Killian allowed his shoulders to sink, his belly protruding upward and outward like a packed duffle bag resting on his lap. “I sit in severe judgment of myself, if you really must know. I made a choice, you’re correct, and I’m quite ashamed of it. I think you’re a delightful woman, Katherine, in style and substance, but I know if I were a better man, less sinful, and strong enough to live in accordance with the values I respect and know to be true with a capital T, I would have never gotten close to you in the first place.” He shrugged. “There. Okay? I am a terrible sinner, but like I said, no hypocrite.”

  A quiet settled over her office. Killian stared into his plump fingers, clasped together in his lap.

  “I should state what I believe more plainly.” Katherine spoke somberly now. “I don’t think being honest about your weakness changes my verdict. If you believe that something’s wrong and you do it anyway, then you’re a hypocrite, Killian. No matter how much I like you, or how much you claim you’re not.”

  “Yes.” He displayed a beatific grin. “You’re more right than I am.”

  “Oh, God, don’t give me that!” Katherine laughed, loudly, in her thin-walled office. “When I call you a hypocrite, you’re supposed to fight me, you infuriating man.”

  Killian laughed along with her. “Oh believe me, I see the flaws in your logic and I could rip it to shreds. But I think you misunderstand me. It’s not that I like fessing up to my failure. I hate it as much as anyone. But I hate it more when people don’t take responsibility for their choices. There are ideas worth holding onto that are more important than blatant self-interest. Ideas like virtue and morality and the classical ‘good.’ Redemption comes only with embracing one’s guilt. That is a stable law of the universe, and it applies to me as much as anyone else. A criminal might be able to get off legally on a Miranda rights exception, but that doesn’t mean they should. The weasels who weasel out of their responsibilities are corrupting our world with trickery, and worse still, more intimately, they are denying their own poor souls any chance whatsoever for salvation. They damn themselves to hell, both figuratively and, I would argue, literally as well. A weasel cannot stop being a weasel until he admits far and wide that he is one, and then accepts the just punishments accorded to weasely weasel bastards.”

  “This is not a hypothetical conversation. You are the weasel in question.”

  “An unusually fat weasel.”

  “So let’s not forget that.”

  “I have not forgotten it.”

  “Good.” Katherine’s fast fingers snatched a paper clip off her desk and whipped it at him. It bounced harmlessly off the cushion of Killian’s belly. “How can you sit there waiting for me when you believe that?”

  “Is that a real question?”

  “It is, actually.”

  Killian sighed. “A little demon convinced me to do it. An imaginary devil who helps me enact my deeply felt psychomachia.”

  “What?”

  “Psychomachia—the internal battle for one’s soul.”

  “I know what psychomachia means, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m trying in my stupid way to say I like you, Katherine. I admire and respect you greatly, and that makes me want to embrace you, and make love to you, and confess all sorts of things I have no business confessing.”

  Katherine’s fingertips rapped in quick succession along the surface of her desk. She squinted at Justice Quinn. “Your legal response to sodomy is atavistic and paranoid and full of misplaced fear.”

  “You know,” countered Killian, as he adjusted his tone into a playful lilt that didn’t quite go as far as an Irish accent, but certainly indicated the possibility of one, “I much prefer your argument about ho
mosexuality being innate than the rational-basis test professed by Justice Katsakis and adopted by his feeble-minded majority, which as far as I’m concerned just ends up saying that you can’t legislate against morality. Where in the Constitution does it say you can’t? Aren’t there laws against polygamy? No one’s complaining about those. And against gambling, incest, public masturbation, bestiality—you name it. Sex can be regulated. What are those laws if not moral judgments? It’s so absurd I can’t even think straight. At least you declare that gay people have a fundamental right to sodomy, based on their innate gayness, or whatever.”

  Katherine stood, slipped around her desk and approached Killian. She cupped his face with both hands, planted a firm kiss on his lips and pressed her tongue into his mouth. He wrapped his arms around the tiny woman’s lower back and he pulled her onto his lap to straddle him. With his hands slipped inside the thin cotton of her shirt, he felt the smoothness of her skin, the knuckles of her spine, her ropey back muscles, toned and strengthened from years of Capoeira. Katherine pulled her mouth from Killian’s and leaned back, cradling his face and absorbing his image, her cheeks flushed and warm.

  “I’ll close the blinds. Just give me a sec.”

  Katherine climbed off him and the musty armchair. Killian closed his eyes and felt the darkness settle on his eyelids. Willing himself—willing—but it wasn’t any use. He was weak and deflated in the old armchair. No amount of teasing, toying and licking would spur the erection of what most needed erecting. Broken, dysfunctional—an old, limp man, well past his prime, gradually retiring from the heated and carnal battle for his soul, beyond the pleas of a well-meaning angel or the temptations of a sinister devil.