by Sadie King
What a ridiculous diversion, no chance of working. She looked through him.
“I want to join and I want you to tell me how.”
The Juris Club was a secret society of lawyers and judges, devoted to sweeping reform in the legal system, to shattering change from the inside out, a coup d’etat of jurisprudence, a new legal order. Most law schools had a chapter. Nobody on the outside knew exactly what the hell the group’s workings were, what kind of coup they wanted—the magazine’s source had intimate knowledge, hadn’t played loose—but the expose had indicated that membership was barred to women.
If that were true, Zora would stop at nothing to right the situation, slay the misogyny, sacrifice her time and passion to reform the reformers. She’d be a heroine in a periwinkle pantsuit. The boys’ club badly needed a woman, a bastion of maledom needed demolishing. Good riddance.
“Ms. Bright, I told you, there’s no chance of—”
Judge Ras drew a breath, a long pause, a look of contemplation and arousal, pressed his lips, elbow on the table, rested his lips against the index and middle fingers of his right hand. Another sign.
“—champagne. I have a bottle of bubbly I’d like to share with you. After you meet Dorothy. Celebrate her clemency.”
Zora wondered why he didn’t say plea, to celebrate her clemency plea.
“Perrier-Jouët Fleur de Champagne, 1999. Means Flower of Champagne.”
Come on Judge, I may not read Baudelaire in my free time, but I know enough French to know that.
“It really is a work of art. The bottle’s painted in Belle Epoque flowers and the wine’s like savoring a botanical garden.”
Zora conjured up something musty, swarming with bugs.
“The whole experience is like peeling back the layers of a spider orchid right next to your face, the tastes and smells.”
Not necessarily the most appetizing experience Zora could picture. Arachnophobic tendencies. And did a spider orchid really have layers? She sensed a metaphor of flesh in his words, the way that the light in his eyes played off the light of her body.
The taste of the air in the room, of her inhalation, lingered on Zora’s tongue, her palate, colored her emotions. She imagined the air to taste of orchid. His words, the sonority of his voice, had the power of synesthesia, the power to mold and fuse her senses.
Seized by the voice, her perceptions struggled against, flurried against, her judgment. Judgment seemed to hold the upper hand:
“Judge, I really don’t think—”
“Don’t think. Just come. I will tell you about the Juris Club. I’m the leader of the Club here, I’m on the national council. I know everything there is to know. Trust me.”
Trust him? She searched his face for any trace of gray and found none. Maybe he had already lied about the club out of loyalty to confidentiality, to an oath; maybe he was lying to her now, pointing her down the primrose path. Rough lust beneath his smooth facade, the lust that monks spend their lives trying to kill, primitive, cellular, rooted at the base of the spine.
Could he be a monster? The air told her no—he was a man with the profoundest of passions, who roiled inside like a teeming hive, but he was incapable of forsaking the Law, of allowing the irrational to embrace the criminal. He would not harm her. Physically. Whatever his power, his strength, she had the absolute resolve of the “no” on her side, the freedom to wield it without fear.
She did not respond the way she did because of the Juris Club. She responded the way she did because of the catalyst of the touch: the desire to know. The desire of the original garden. The desire of the serpent.
“One glass.” She stood.
Black expanded into blue, the Judge’s pupils dilated, taking in more light, more of her. He tore off the lower right corner of her resume, jotted something down. Folded the scrap of her paper life. Handed it to her across the zebrawood.
Unfolded: 232 Cherry Hill Lane Monday evening. Time is yours.
Her back to him, voiceless, language would have to wait, hand on the knob.
“Talk to Ms. Kim on the way out. She’ll give you the details on your meeting with Dorothy.”
Everything inside her imprisoned now in the new air, trapped in the new light—her perceptions, her feelings, her thoughts. She was out of his office. Her body free.
CHAPTER FOUR
“How you do, Miss Bright. Welcome to ADX Madison Springs.”
Warden Arnold extended his left hand, a southpaw; she nervously, perspiringly, flipped her right hand 180 degrees to clutch his fingers, no contact of palms.
“No need to worry, this is the most secure prison in the world. Not a single serious incident here in the 13 years we’ve been open, aside from some creative use of excrement.”
Zora cringed at the gratuitous information; her interest in the facility was legal, not fecal.
“Thanks, Warden. Nice to be here.”
Shit, what absurd civilities in such a godforsaken desert for outcasts. Driftwood of society that couldn’t be burned. But could be dissolved into oblivion, painlessly, pharmacologically.
Officer Tiffany, Mike Tiffany—he’d gotten a few jokes around the Drome about that one, other guards and of course the prisoners called him Tiffany in a singsong voice, told him he was the fucking ugliest Tiffany they’d ever seen. Flat as a board. The whiskered woman. He took it in stride, any distant relation of Louis Comfort Tiffany probably would, family legacy made it easy to play along, plus he had a handful of pretty good knock-off lamps at home to reinforce the legacy.
Officer Tiffany shook her hand again, he’d taken her this far, through the metal detector, briefed her on protocols and procedures, the life and death of the Drome.
“Take care, Zora. Good luck with your interview. You might need it.”
He half-nodded to her right, “Warden.”
He about-faced, military style, back down the corridor fluorescing manically, lit up like the inside of a patient’s mouth during a root canal.
“Let’s head in, Miss Bright.”
Zora followed the warden into the counsel room, sat in the stainless steel chair he gestured to, farther from the door than the Gatekeeper’s chair. Centered in the room, bolted to the concrete floor, the floor covered in gray epoxy to give it a waterproof, bloodproof sheen. Little blue, yellow, and red specks scattered in the epoxy, decorative like penitentiary Christmas, the table bolted too, bigger bolts.
Before she sat the warden introduced her to Officer Waxman, waiting in the room, Georgia Waxman, the only female officer in the Drome, tasked specifically to the Gatekeeper. Waxman would be standing three feet behind Zora the whole time. Another layer of security added to the four wide-angle cameras hooked through to the central guard room nearby. Additional guards on stand-by.
The Gatekeeper had never shown any real rumblings of aggression, outbursts against chains and flesh, on the inside. No matter, protocol was protocol, schizophrenia was schizophrenia, crazy was crazy. Dorothy Krause was in the Drome for a reason, the only woman ever placed in the Supermax system, a system awash in the horrors and sins of testosterone, catastrophes of testosterone, the Y chromosome run amok. Her crimes had been too heinous, too perverse, too deviant and violent for a woman. Otherwise she’d be in Carswell.
Officer Waxman left to get the Gatekeeper.
The Warden:
“Remember not to budge from your chair the entire time Prisoner 98-Sierra is in the room, even though she’ll be chained to her chair.”
Officer Mike had explained this—every convict had an alphanumeric code by which they were addressed, a bleeding of the military alphabet into the federal penal system. Only certain letters were used in the convict code, Zora figured the guards just couldn’t get themselves to refer to an inmate as “Romeo.” More to do with homophobia than with Shakespeare. “Papa” was a whole other story, best left for quiet time curled up with Oedipus Rex.
“Officer Waxman will prevent you from leaving your seat without permission. If you
need to leave or stop for any reason, nod to Waxman and she’ll remove 98-Sierra from the room first. At that point the meeting will be over. No contact whatsoever with the prisoner, you may not touch her or reach more than halfway across the table. Waxman will be watching, we’ll be watching. We’ll record you and mail a transcript to the address you gave us. No lawyer-client privilege here.”
“Oh, I’m sure Judge Ras explained to you, I’m not a lawyer. A One-L, totally harmless.”
“Right, he did. Of course. Just letting you know the policy. Remember to smile for the cameras.”
He grinned a grin stained with nicotine and tepid coffee, mottled with over-the-counter whiteners that didn’t come close to doing the job. Left the room.
Waiting, steeling herself, Zora went through the list of questions she had prepared for the Gatekeeper. Questions about motive, about culpability, about insanity. She had thought about having a normal conversation with Dorothy, personal, the magic of everyday empathy, the lilt of the interplay of two people’s casual, meaningful words.
Then she realized—About what? How vitreous humor spills from the eyes when they burst, how the chest heaves under the knife? An impossible idea. She had an hour, timed like a test. Less if she so chose, more was out of the question.
The Gatekeeper stepped into the stainless room, a wretched blot of humanity in a pristine, sparkling space. Her cropped hair was a natural peroxide: stiff, angular strands at the pinnacle of dark green prison scrubs. Her lips were barely redder than the pasty expanse around them, no circulation to her mouth, dead capillaries.
Waxman guided her, roughly, shackled her to the chair, legs to legs, hands to back, whispered in her ear. The Gatekeeper grinned wider than the warden, teeth not the warden’s teeth, the bluish whiteness of snow reflected on water.
A casual cruelty: Waxman had reminded her she would die in the Drome, no salvation, Waxman said things to her like that all the time in a whisper. There was something hateful about the Gatekeeper that had mesmerized Waxman, had turned her into a whispering ventriloquist of spite.
Dorothy’s pupils had no dilation, seemed not to exist, only an expanse of iris, only hazel, as though her brain, her mind, had no room for light. Zora wondered if her pupils would dilate if they saw sun.
The Gatekeeper regarded Zora, her gaze queerly fixed somewhere to the right of Zora’s head. Her voice directed at an invisible overlapping double of the person before her. The Gatekeeper projected that fixed, unfixed voice at a ferocious pitch, a reverberating stream of sound, loud enough to make Zora tremble with each syllable.
“Why have you come here? Why have you brought your curse to my grave?”
Zora coughed, stuttered, completely unnerved, already shattered, “U-um, I’m not sure what you, here to interview you about, um, write a plea, President.”
She tried to collect her thoughts and start over. Too late.
“Show me your hands.”
Zora had laid them in her lap, not wanting to trigger Officer Waxman’s suspicions of any unseemly appendage creep, any violations of the rules of reaching. She let them lie, thinking her thoughts had been well enough collected to continue.
“Um, Dorothy please, my name is Zora, nice to meet you, I’d like to ask you . . .”
“SHOW ME YOUR HANDS!”
Already strident, the Gatekeeper’s voice rocketed in decibels, Zora suddenly afraid everything in the room would come unbolted by the Gatekeeper’s fury, her wave of dread surging against the Gatekeeper’s wave of sound.
She held up her hands as though the Gatekeeper’s words were a gun leveled at her head. Beside her now, forward, was Officer Waxman, her Taser unsheathed and poised. Zora noticed it read “X26” on the side. The Gatekeeper’s eyes did not shift toward Waxman, uncaring, complete apathy, oblivious.
The Gatekeeper inhaled sharply and exhaled rasping from her larynx. Struck by a hidden revelation. Her voice returned to normalcy, as close to normalcy as her stridency could come.
“Ah, you have the stigmata. An omen, a sign. You have been redeemed by the mark of the slave.”
The mention of slavery shook Zora. It was uncanny. Both her parents, Alice and Jordan, had lived together for 26 years in Appomattox, were both nearing retirement from the National Park Service. Jordan had one year left, Alice three.
Zora spoke to them almost every day, but kept from them her cares. They had been colleagues before they were lovers, had met as administrators and resident historians at the park, where time was frozen at just after the end of the war in 1865. Both Ph.D.’s from public universities.
In the summers they shook off their bookishness, shook off the bureaucracy, to impersonate locals from that tattered hopeful era for the Living History program. The euphemistic thing to say would be that it was a time of uneasy transition.
Alice played Charity Travers, a freed slave who sharecropped with her husband nearby and came into the village regularly. Jordan played William Ellis III, a wealthy plantation owner and Charity’s former owner who now employed her and her husband at meager wages. Who also had a thing for her.
Her parents saw no awkwardness, no conflict, in Charity and William, played the roles with heart and soul and love, ever the historians and ever the lovers. In their spare time they did genealogical research, had discovered an almost-perfect irony: Alice was descended from slaves in Tennessee, Jordan from a large plantation family in South Carolina. Zora was no stranger to the legacy of slavery.
But what the hell did the Gatekeeper mean about being redeemed by the mark of the slave? She felt she’d rather not ask—the Gatekeeper might end up making her question her commitment to the abolition of the death penalty. Dorothy was shaping up to be one disgraceful excuse for a human being. A throw-away-the-key type of human being. A needle-in-the-arm type of human being.
Hands back down, thoughts collected, ready: “Dorothy, why did you kill those people?”
“The slaughtered, the slaughtered.”
These words of refrain were quieter, approaching the level of a normal human tone. The Gatekeeper seemed to be turning them over in the hollow space over the table, examining them in mid-air from all angles, not projecting them with full linear force at Zora.
“The blind must be made to see, the mark of the slave freed from the body and the earth. You know that, you above all.”
Zora thought it pointless to disagree with her, to insist her words made no sense, were non sequiturs of lunacy without any of the dignity of real religion. The Gatekeeper sounded like a version of the Bible written by a schizophrenic, which of course did make perfect sense given her diagnosis by Dr. Kary, the court-appointed psychiatrist.
Paranoid schizophrenia with messianic delusions.
Better to move on to the next question, get this over with before Waxman ended up having to put that Taser to good use. Maybe the electricity would scramble the Gatekeeper’s brain circuitry back into place.
“Do you feel guilty Dorothy?”
“I need to see your feet, to know for sure. The palms and the soles must bear the mark of the slave. Show them to me.”
“Dorothy, if you’re not going to answer my . . .”
“NOW SLAVE!”
The insane urgency of the Gatekeeper’s voice rattled Zora at the centers of her cells; her eyes spontaneously filled with tears at the shock.
This time Waxman did not hesitate, jumped forward and shot the Taser darts into the Gatekeeper. These were high-powered darts, voltage-wise and velocity-wise, and the thin prison scrubs of the Drome did almost nothing to slow them down. They burrowed into the Gatekeeper’s skin, and Zora noticed to her horror that the trajectory of the darts took them deep into the Gatekeeper’s breasts.
Growing nipples of blood sprouted on the scrubs above the Gatekeeper’s areolas, a milk of crimson flowing into a field of evergreen. All the while the Gatekeeper maintained the same whitish-blue grin she had sported when Waxman whispered in her ear. Zora could see her teeth chattering involuntarily and tiny ri
pples moving along the skin of her face. She did not collapse and convulse; her eyes did not shift in their sockets.
Zora stood involuntarily. “I need to leave.”
“Sit down!”
This time it was Waxman, not the Gatekeeper, projecting her voice imperiously at Zora. She did not sit.
“I need to leave.”
Waxman relaxed the amps through the wires, yanked the impaling barbs from the Gatekeeper’s breasts. Blood flowed from them much more freely than milk ever could, than it ever would. Hastily she unshackled Dorothy from the chair, jerked her erect, no resistance from the Gatekeeper, the same surreal smile, skin not rippling any more, teeth not chattering, shoved her out of the room.
Over her shoulder: “Wait here.”
Not another word from 98-Sierra.
Alone in the room, erect, quivering, Zora glanced over at the table, at the drops of blood sitting there, already congealing, on the stainless steel. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the nausea, on balling it up back into her stomach.
For some reason all she could feel was her tongue, it seemed to grow inside her mouth, to balloon out of all proportion, fill the entire cavity of her mouth, ready to burst. She bit it hard, to make sure it was real, and felt the trickle of blood against her gums.
CHAPTER FIVE
The knocker on the door of Judge Ras’s townhouse, 232 Cherry Hill Lane, was ivory with arms of brass. A custom fitting of a Meiji-Taisho piece of antique ivory the Judge had bought anonymously at auction for well north of $20,000.
Zora’s eyes bulged, her tongue swelled, as she swung the object back and forth three times, eliciting an inhuman groan of an echo from inside the home.
The knocker was a human head, about three inches high, face forward, made entirely of entangled women’s bodies. Nude. The nose was a pair of protruding buttocks; the open lips, showing perfect teeth, formed by two sets of legs spread apart, feet meeting in the middle. Each bulbous eye was the enormous breast of a different body. It immediately occurred to Zora that this was the kind of thing that Giuseppe Arcimboldo would have made if, number one, he had had an ivory fetish, and number two, he had been possessed through time and space by the tormented soul of Robert Crumb.