Settling into a leather swivel chair, the judge fixes her eyeglasses on her nose and summons the lawyers and prosecutors with a curt wave. Four men dressed in three-piece suits step forward. There is a whispered conference. One of the lawyers raises his voice.
“Trespassing is the most my people will plead to.”
The judge taps her gavel once. The lawyers return to their seats. The judge, mumbling, starts to read the charge sheet: “… on or about … did knowingly … county trespass ordinance …” She looks up. “I’ll take the defendants’ pleas now.”
The bailiff calls the roll again.
“Starbuck, D.J.”
“Guilty.”
“Perkins, Word.”
“Guilty, huh?”
“Holloway, Lawrence R.”
“Guilty.”
Lemuel turns to Rain in panic. “Why is everyone admitting guilty?” he whispers.
“Our lawyers got them to reduce the charge to simple trespass in return for a guilty plea,” Rain whispers back.
On the high bench, the lady judge is touching up her lipstick.
“Nachman, Asher ben.”
“Guilty.”
“Macy, Jedediah.”
“Guilty.”
“Dearborn, Dwayne.”
“Guilty.”
“Stifter, Shirley.”
“Also guilty.”
“Morgan, Rain.”
“Yo. Guilty.”
“Falk, Lemuel.”
The judge stops applying lipstick and surveys the courtroom. The bailiff, the lawyers, the court stenographer twist in their seats to get a good look at the man who answers to the name of Falk, Lemuel.
“Falk, Lemuel,” the bailiff calls again.
Rain elbows Lemuel in the ribs. “The fix is in,” she whispers. “You cough up thirty dollars for the fine and you’ll be out of here like Vladimir.”
Lemuel climbs to his feet. He clears his throat. He raises his chin. “In a civilized country the man driving the tractor would be on trial,” he tells the court. “He almost killed me.”
The judge handles Falk with kid gloves. “The court notes you signed a charge sheet acknowledging trespass.”
Lemuel shakes his head. “That is not my signature.”
“He signed it in front of me, Your Honor,” the bailiff asserts.
“I saw you sign too,” Rain whispers. “How’d you pull it off?”
“I wrote it from right to left,” Lemuel whispers back. “ ‘klaF leumeL.’ It still says Lemuel Falk, but the handwriting comes out different.”
The judge addresses the county prosecutor. “Does the defendant have a prior record?”
The prosecutor, a nearsighted political appointee sporting a bow tie, holds a yellow file card up in front of his nose. “When he was booked, Your Honor, he admitted to a previous arrest, but he claimed there was no conviction.”
“I had tribulation but no trial,” Lemuel says.
“As this allegedly occurred in the former Soviet Union,” the prosecutor continues, casting dark looks in Lemuel’s direction, “we are unable to verify the facts in the case at this moment in time.”
The judge speaks directly to Lemuel. “What were you arrested for, Mr. Falk?”
“The Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti discovered that someone named Falk, L. had signed a petition criticizing Soviet imperialism in Afghanistan.”
“What is this Komitet whatever?”
“It was the official name of the KGB.”
“And did you sign the said petition?”
“My name was on it, but I was able to convince them it was not me who did the signing. I had two signatures, one for my internal passport or my pay book or my applications for exit visas. The other signature I used to sign documents I might want to deny I signed.”
“And which of these two signatures is on the charge sheet admitting trespass?” the judge wants to know.
“The one that a handwriting expert will swear you is not mine.”
Somewhat testily, the judge turns to the two defense attorneys. “I don’t see how I can accept guilty pleas from sixty-seven defendants if the sixty-eighth pleads not guilty. If he is found not guilty of trespass, which we have to treat as a theoretic possibility, it would mean the other sixty-seven were likewise not guilty.”
The defendants in the front rows hold a hasty conference with their two lawyers, then break out of the huddle and try to talk Lemuel into pleading guilty.
“If you don’t cop a plea, there’ll be a trial,” D.J. warns. “Who’s going to feed my pussycats?”
“Another trial maybe means another night or two in jail,” the Rebbe adds. “And I’m not even sure which way’s Jerusalem.”
“How am I gonna pay the rent on Tender To if I don’t cut hair?” Rain asks.
“I’ve already missed two graduate seminars,” Professor Holloway complains.
“I’ve already missed two gridiron scrimmages,” one of the football players says. “Hobart is gonna swamp us Saturday night if we don’t come up with a credible zone defense.”
“That’s Zbig,” Rain informs Lemuel in a whisper. “He’s a Polish-origin nose tackle with an unpronounceable last name.”
“We’ll have to rent lawyers,” Word Perkins says, angrily eyeing the three-piece suits. “They make more an hour than I make a week.”
“Does the defendant wish to enter a plea?” the lady judge prompts from the bench.
“You were trespassing,” Rain whispers.
“Who gets to decide which side is up?” Lemuel asks Rain.
“Hey, they own the dump site,” Rain says quietly. “They own the state police. They own the courthouse. They get to decide.”
“Falk, Lemuel?” calls the bailiff.
Lemuel shrugs. “Guilty,” he mumbles.
The judge brings down her gavel as if an item has been sold at auction. When the last guilty plea has been recorded, she sentences everyone to thirty dollars or thirty days, gathers her papers and scuttles like a crab from the courtroom before anyone can change his mind.
Spilling out of the county courthouse, the defendants, each thirty dollars lighter, are momentarily blinded by the dazzling sunlight. Flanked by Rain and the Rebbe, Lemuel—carrying the plastic shopping bag filled with the sheriff’s file folders—hears a shy cheer float up from the street. Shading his eyes with one of the file folders, squinting, he makes out a hundred or so students milling behind police barriers in a small park across the street. An enormous spinnakerlike banner, billowing in the sunlight, floats over their heads. Printed in large letters across it is
“What language is ‘Klaf L’?” Lemuel asks the Rebbe.
“It is definitely not Hebrew, it is definitely not Yiddish. Sounds maybe Lilliputian to me.”
Rain waves excitedly. “They’re so stoked they’re holding the goddamn banner outside in,” she exclaims. “Don’t you get it? It’s like the ‘oT redneT’ on the window of my barbershop.”
The students catch sight of something or someone and break into a roar that sounds like surf pounding a shore. They seem to repeat two words over and over:
“Ell fauk! Ell fauk! Ell fauk!”
“L. Fucking Falk!” breathes Rain in awe.
Two buses pull up at the curb in front of the courthouse, and the defendants begin boarding them for the fifteen-mile ride to the Backwater campus. On the street, near a white truck with “ABC” painted on its side, someone shouts, “There he is—the one in the faded brown overcoat and the ski cap with the pom-pom!”
Disoriented, Lemuel stumbles down the steps toward the buses, only to find himself confronted by two dozen grown men aiming an assortment of cameras at him. Other men holding long booms dangle microphones over his head. Flashbulbs explode in his face. Lemuel, who knows a lynching party, as opposed to a reception committee, when he sees one, backpedals; traces of alarm appear in the sudden whiteness of his normally bloodshot eyes, in the delicate lift of his brows, in the slight flaring of his nostril
s.
“What made you risk your life for a garbage dump?” someone shouts.
“How do you feel about the governor suspending work on the dump site pending a new feasibility study?”
Rain grabs Lemuel’s wrist and thrusts his arm over his head as if he has just won a heavyweight championship. “How he feels is totally stellar,” she cries. “He comes from the country that gave the world Chernobyl. He knows what it means to drink milk from cows raised on goddamn radioactive grass.”
“He is against poisoning the garden of God with nuclear waste,” the Rebbe puts in.
The cameras, the microphones zoom in on Lemuel.
“Is it true you’re a visiting professor at the Institute for Chaos-Related Studies?”
“What can you tell us about the relationship between chaos and death?”
“I can say you …” Lemuel starts to respond, but his voice is drowned out by journalists shouting questions. The hook on the question mark at the end of each question snags another question. Caught up in a feeding frenzy, the journalists don’t seem to notice the absence of answers.
“Is that a designer overcoat you’re wearing, Professor?”
“Have you ever attempted suicide before?”
“If they bring the bulldozers back, will you lie down on the ramp again?”
“He knows which side is up,” yells Rain. At her feet, Mayday senses her mistress’s excitement and responds with a nervous fart. “If they come back,” Rain adds, “so will the visiting professor.”
“Were you aware you were being televised while you were lying on the ramp?”
“Did you realize the shot would appear on prime-time TV?”
“Eighty million Americans saw you defy death. How does it feel to be an instant hero?”
“How does it feel to attract crowds?”
“I am allegoric to crowds,” Lemuel mumbles.
“What did he say?”
“Could you repeat that?”
Before Lemuel can open his mouth, someone calls, “Can you comment on how it feels to be alive?”
“Is it true you were a leading dissident in the Soviet Union?”
Lemuel tries to slip a word in. “There is no Soviet Union anymore—”
“Can you confirm the rumor that you once lay in the path of Brezhnev’s limousine to block it from leaving the Kremlin?”
“Is it true you were arrested in Red Square for demonstrating against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?”
“Is it true you signed petitions calling on the KGB to publicly apologize for seventy years of terror?”
“I signed petitions, but I did not use my real signature—” Lemuel tries to explain, but the questions continue to drown out his answers.
“Is there anything to the rumor that you left Russia to avoid military service?”
“What do you think of American women?”
“What do you think of American food?”
“What do you think of America?”
“Your towns, your citizens are smaller than in Russia,” Lemuel starts to reply, “though maybe they only seem smaller because I was expecting—”
“Are you married?”
“Have you ever been unfaithful to your wife?”
“If you were to meet the President of the United States, what would you ask him?”
In a sudden lull Lemuel can clearly be heard to say, “I would ask him how one city can be more Florida than another.”
“Are you for or against the fifty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit?”
“Are you for or against women’s liberation?”
“Are you for or against capital punishment?”
“The socialists had their chance,” Lemuel says, “now the capitalists must be given the opportunity to—”
A television reporter turns and speaks into the camera. “The Russian immigrant who risked his life to defend the county against nuclear pollution is definitely in favor of capital punishment.”
“Would you share your views on acid rain with us?”
“What is your opinion on busing as a way of solving racial imbalances?”
“If you buy a car, will you buy American or Japanese?”
“Do you have an opinion on the budget deficit?”
“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?”
Lemuel murmurs, “There is no Communist party anymore,” but he might as well not be there.
“Are you now or have you ever been a homosexual?”
“Is there any truth to the rumor about your testing HIV-positive?”
“If you had it to do all over again, would you do it all over again?”
“If you could re-live your life, what would you do differently?”
“If you could undo something you’ve done, what would it be?”
“If you could do something you left undone, what would it be?”
Without thinking, Lemuel blurts out words that make no sense to him. “I would say them it was me who hid the exercise manual.” But nobody pays attention.
“How do you feel about abortion?”
“Do you plan to apply for political asylum?”
“Do you plan to apply for American citizenship?”
“Do you have any plans to run for Congress in the next election?”
“What are your academic ambitions?”
Rain pulls one of the dangling microphones down to her mouth. “He has no ambition,” she shouts into the microphone—it is a sound bite that will make the national six o’clock news programs. “L. Falk is downwardly mobile. He wants to live and let live in a county without radioactive garbage dumps, without serial murders, without birds choking to death on bloated rice.”
“What’s your name?” a reporter demands.
“R. Morgan,” Rain shouts back, “as in J. P. Morgan. In case you are not familiar with him, he had something to do with money, which is what I want to have something to do with.”
“Would you look this way, Mr. Falk.”
“Could you gaze up at the American flag over the courthouse, Mr. Falk.”
“Can you raise his hand over his head again, Miss.”
“What is your position on legalizing drugs?”
“On protecting the ozone layer?”
“On using fossil fuels?”
“What is your position on abortion?”
“He’s already fielded that question,” a well-known anchorwoman notes.
“How do you feel about distributing free condoms in high schools?”
“I am too busy looking for pure, unadulterated—” Lemuel starts to say.
“How do you feel about doing away with the Electoral College?”
“I am for educa—” Lemuel starts to say.
“Thank you for the interview, Mr. Falk,” one of the journalists shouts up from the street.
“You are—” Lemuel starts to reply, but the journalists are already racing off to meet deadlines. Muttering under his breath, he completes the sentence: “—a pack of earlobes.”
Part Two
Chapter One
A whisper of something other than winter finds its way into Lemuel’s ear: a breeze grazing ground that is no longer frozen, water gushing through the throat of a creek that is no longer choked with ice, the knell of the carillon reverberating through air that no longer stings the nostrils. Confirming the beginning of the end of winter, Lemuel discovers the single hand on Rain’s Swiss watch that tells the phase of the moon and the season leaning against the “S” of “Spring.”
In a wistful fiction, he sees himself leaning against the “R” of “Randomness.”
Something of a celebrity now, Lemuel holds out in the apartment over the Rebbe’s for three full weeks after the trespassing trial before packing his enormous cardboard valise, his Red Army knapsack and his duty-free shopping bag and spiriting them into Rain’s loft. The official explanation for this change of venue is that he is on the lam from the television reporters who besiege the Rebbe’s
house day and night, who set up klieg lights outside in the hope that he will crack a window and holler answers to their hollered questions. The real reason for the move is that he has grown accustomed to Y-jacking in the bathtub with a female whose nakedness is more than skin-deep, to sleeping in the same bed with a Siberian night moth, to being roused mornings by Occasional Rain murmuring “Yo!” in his ear as she coaxes exploitable erections from his drowsy flesh.
From long experience with tribulation, he wonders when the bubble will burst and the trial will begin.
The telephone in the apartment over the Rebbe’s head never stops ringing after Lemuel moves out. The Rebbe bounds up the stairs, toppling several waist-high towers of books in his eagerness to answer the phone. Introducing himself to each caller as Lemuel’s business agent, he jots down offers to endorse ecological laundry detergents or non-polluting oven cleaners.
“You are letting yet another lucrative opportunity slip through your callused fingers,” he scolds Lemuel when he phones in with the day’s messages.
Lemuel pays scant attention to the Rebbe. There have been five more murders in the three weeks he has been working with the dossiers the sheriff gave him, bringing the total number of victims to eighteen. He is obsessed with quantifying the information in the sheriffs files, feeding bytes into his computer and devising software to test the material for randomness. Has he, at long last, stumbled across an example of pure, albeit macabre, randomness? His heart says, Why not? His head tells him that this seeming randomness is nothing more than the name he gives to his ignorance.
But what doesn’t he know?
“What would I do with the money?” he asks when the Rebbe nags him about the latest phone call, an offer to endorse biodegradable underwear. “I am already rich beyond my wildest dreams. The Institute pays me two thousand U.S. dollars a month. In Petersburg, this is worth two million rubles. When I left Russia, my monthly salary at Steklov was seven thousand, five hundred rubles.”
“In your wanderings, haven’t you stumbled across something called capitalism? With money you make more money,” cries the Rebbe. “With more money you can serve God, you can build a yeshiva, you can spend your waking hours, your sleeping hours too, unraveling strands of chaos in To rah.” He adds in exasperation: “I don’t understand your attitude. It is not American.”
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