It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  Yet more insidious were variants of these questions.

  Your father, Eric Strohl, has just confessed to us, to influencing you—so you may as well confess too. In what ways did he influence you?

  This had to be a trick, I thought. I stammered—In no ways. Not ever. Daddy did not.

  More harshly the voice continued.

  Your mother, Madeleine Strohl, has confessed to us, both she and your father influenced you. In what ways did they influence you?

  I was sobbing, protesting—They didn’t! They did not influence me . . .

  (Of course, this wasn’t true. How could any parents fail to “influence” their children? My parents had influenced me through my entire life—not so much in their speech as in their personalities. They were good, loving parents. They had taught Roddy and me: There is a soul within. There is “free will” within. If—without—the State is lacking a soul, and there is no free will that you can see, trust the inner, not the outer. Trust the soul, not the State. But I would not betray my parents by repeating these defiant words.)

  At some point in the interrogation I must have passed out—for I was awakened by deafening noises, in a state of panic. Was this a form of torture? Noise torture? Powerful enough to burst eardrums? To drive the subject insane? We’d all heard rumors of such torture interrogations—though no one would speak openly about them. Shaken and excited, Roddy would come home from his work at MDB to tell us about certain “experimental techniques” Homeland Security was developing, using laboratory primates—until Mom clamped her hands over her ears and asked him to please stop.

  The deafening noises stopped abruptly. The interrogation resumed.

  But it was soon decided that I was too upset—my brain waves were too “agitated”—to accurately register truth or falsity, so I was removed from the cylindrical imaging machine, and an IV needle was jabbed into a vein in my arm, to inject me with a powerful “truth-serum” drug. And again the same several questions were asked, and I gave the same answers. Even in my exhausted and demoralized state I would not tell the interrogators what they wanted to hear: that my father, or maybe both my parents, had influenced me in my treasonous ways.

  Or any of my teachers. Or even Mr. Mackay, my enemy.

  I was strapped to a chair. It was a thick, squat “wired” chair—a kind of electric chair—that sent currents of shock through my body, painful as knife stabs. Now I was crying, and lost control of my bladder.

  The interrogation continued. Essentially it was the same question, always the same question, with a variant now and then to throw me off stride.

  Who wrote your speech for you? Who influenced you? Who is your collaborator in treason?

  It was your brother Roderick who reported you. As a treasonmonger and a questioner of authority, you have been denounced by your brother.

  I began to cry harder. I had lost all hope. Of all the things the interrogators had told me, or wanted me to believe, it was only this—that Roddy had reported me—that seemed to me possible, and not so very surprising.

  I could remember how, squeezing my hand when he’d congratulated me about my good news, Roddy had smiled—his special smirk-smile just for me.

  Congratulations, Addie!

  JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author most recently of the novel A Book of American Martyrs and the story collection DIS MEM BER. She is a recipient of the National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, the PEN/Malamud Award in Short Fiction, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN America, among other honors. She has been a professor at Princeton University for many years and is currently Visiting Distinguished Writer in Residence in the Graduate Writing Program at New York University; in the spring term she is Visiting Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her forthcoming novel is Hazards of Time Travel.

  SARA PARETSKY

  * * *

  Safety First

  She guessed cameras, or at least microphones, were hidden in the cell. Possibly in the showers, the cafeteria, even the attorneys’ meeting rooms. From the moment of her arrest until the day of the trial, she said nothing inside the prison, except immediately after her arrest, and that was only to repeat a demand for a phone call. Finally on the fifth day, when she’d been kept sleepless and could no longer be sure of time, a guard handed her a cell phone and told her she had thirty seconds, and if she didn’t know the number, they weren’t a phone directory, so tough luck.

  Once she’d made the call, she became mute. She didn’t speak to the assistant attorneys for the Northern District of Illinois sent to interrogate her, nor to the guards who summoned her for roll call four times a day, or tried to chat with her during the exercise period. Because she was a high-risk prisoner, she was kept segregated from the general population. A guard was always with her, and always tried to get her to speak.

  The other women yelled at her across the wire fence that separated her from them during recreation, not rude, just curious: “Why are you here, Grandma? You kill your old man? You hold up a bank?”

  One day the guards brought a woman into her cell, a prisoner with an advanced pregnancy. “You’re a baby doctor, right? This woman is bleeding, she says she’s in pain, says she needs to go to the hospital. You can examine her, see if she’s telling the truth or casting shade.”

  A pregnant woman, bleeding, that wasn’t so rare, could mean anything, but brought to her cell, not to the infirmary? That could mean an invitation to a charge of abuse, malpractice. She stared at the pregnant woman, saw fear in her face and something less appetizing, something like greed, or maybe unwholesome anticipation. She sat cross-legged on her bunk, closed her eyes, hands clasped in her lap.

  The guard smacked her face, hard enough to knock her backward. “You think you’re better than her, you’re too good to touch her? Didn’t you swear an oath to take care of sick people when they gave you your telescope?”

  In the beginning, she had corrected such ludicrous mistakes in her head. Now, she carefully withdrew herself from even a mental engagement: arguing a point in your head meant you were tempted to argue it out loud.

  She sat back up, eyes still shut, took a deep breath in, a slow breath out. Chose a poem from her interior library. German rhymes from her early childhood. English poems from her years in London schools. Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh and Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

  • • •

  When her lawyer finally arrived, three weeks after her arrest, she still didn’t speak inside the small room set aside for attorney-client meetings. The lawyer explained that it had taken them that long to discover where the doctor was being held. “They’re fighting very dirty,” the lawyer said.

  The doctor nodded. Come back with an erasable board, she wrote on an edge of the lawyer’s legal pad. When the lawyer had read the message, the doctor tore off the handwritten scrap and swallowed it.

  She was being held without bond because she was considered a flight risk, the lawyer explained. “We tried to fight for bail, but these new Homeland Security courts have more power than ordinary federal courts. We are challenging the constitutionality of both your arrest and your post-arrest treatment. We have our own investigators tracking down information and witnesses in your support. Keep heart: there are hundreds of thousands of people in America and across the world who are aware of your arrest and are protesting it.”

  After the lawyer left, the guards took the doctor to a new cell, one with three other inmates. Those women were noisy. One had a small radio she played at top volume at all hours. Another heard voices telling her to pray or scream or, on their third day together, to attack the doctor. The radio player was shocked into calling for a guard. When no one came, the radio player grabbed the woman hearing voices; the fourth cellmate joined her. Together they subdued the voice hearer.

  “You gotta file a complaint,” the radio player said. “You can’t let people be trying to kill you. That’s what they want, you know, they told us they hoping you’ll die, or that we’d
annoy you so much, you’d attack one of us. They didn’t say you was an old lady who wouldn’t hurt a flea. So you gotta file a complaint.”

  The doctor almost touched the radio player’s shoulder, remembered in time that a touch could be turned into a sexual caress by clever camera editing, and clasped her hands in front of her. The following day, she was back in her old cell, one bed, just her, alone.

  After that, she was sent to exercise with the general population. The woman who’d attacked her tried to do so again, joined by several others who liked to prey on the old or friendless—including the woman who’d been brought to her with a problem pregnancy. “She’s a doctor but she only treat people with money!”

  The radio player intervened. She had plenty of friends or at least followers within the prison, and she summoned enough help that the attackers withdrew.

  “You a doctor?” the radio player demanded. “Why you in here?”

  The doctor shook her head. Because they were outside, presumably far from microphones—although these days you probably were never far from a camera or a mike—she risked a few words.

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was hoarse from disuse.

  “How come you don’t know? You know if you killed a patient, right? You know if you stole money from Medicare. So what you do?”

  The doctor couldn’t help laughing. “True, I’d know if I did either of those things. I didn’t do them. I don’t know why the United States government arrested me.”

  “You got some big fish pissed off,” the radio player nodded sagely.

  After that, people approached the doctor during exercise in the yard. The radio player served as an informal triage nurse. Swollen nodes in necks or armpits, varicose veins, heavy periods, no periods, bruises, knife wounds.

  The doctor had limited ability to treat, no way to conduct a proper exam, but she would recommend the infirmary or a demand for hospital care or, in most cases, wait it out—which is what the inmates would have to do in any event, even the women whose swollen abdomens didn’t indicate pregnancy but ovarian tumors.

  Finally, seven months and twenty-three days after her arrest and arraignment, the trial began.

  • • •

  The clerk of the court: “Docket number 137035, People v. Charlotte R. Herschel, MD, Homeland Security Court, Justice Montgomery Sessions presiding.

  “Dr. Charlotte Herschel is accused of violating United States Act 312698, An Act to Guarantee the Security of the Borders of the United States, known as the ‘Keep America Free Act,’ paragraphs 7.97 through 7.183 inclusive, relating to the medical treatment of undocumented aliens and to the willful concealment of undocumented aliens from the federal government. She is charged further with violating paragraphs 16.313 through 16.654, relating to the sanctity of the life of all United States–born citizens, from the moment of conception.”

  Justice Sessions: “Today’s hearing is held in camera. Because the Security of Borders Act addresses Homeland Security, neither journalists nor civilian observers can be present. I must ask the bailiff to clear the courtroom of everyone but the lawyers and their assistants.”

  Some forty people from the Ex-Left were in the courtroom. Predictably, they raised outraged howls at being ordered to leave. In fact, many of them lay limp on the floor. The bailiff and federal marshals didn’t suppress grins as they banged the protestors into the benches or against the doorjamb on their way out of court.

  About the only legislation the 115th Congress had passed was the Keep America Free Act, and its follow-on, the law funding the Homeland Security courts. Dr. Herschel’s case was one of the first to be heard in a Homeland court.

  The law was sketchy on what defendants could do to support themselves. They could not have a trial by jury—a tribunal of five federal judges was empaneled for each trial. Defendants could call witnesses, but it wasn’t clear on the presence of citizens in the courtroom. Justice Sessions had decided that matter, at least for Dr. Herschel’s trial.

  From the moment of her arrest, Dr. Herschel’s case had been drawing attention from the Extreme Left and their fake news machines. The New York Times huffed and puffed so furiously that a Real News cartoon, showing the paper as the Big Bad Wolf unable to blow over the government’s case, went viral. Of course, in response, the Ex-Left tried to paint the government as a trough full of pigs, but everyone agreed that the Times response was a lame knockoff of the Real News original.

  However, the Times coverage meant that the Ex-Left fat cats put up so much money for the doctor’s defense that Ruth Lebeau had agreed to take the case. Lebeau was a formidable constitutional lawyer with a team of experienced research lawyers at her side. Except for the court reporter and Dr. Herschel, she was the only woman in today’s courtroom, and the sole African American, but she seemed to pay no attention to that distinction, nor to the insults lobbed by Real News, comparing her to a talking chimpanzee.

  • • •

  Opening statement of Melvin Coulter, federal attorney for the Northern District of Illinois:

  “Dr. Herschel is well known to federal agents throughout the Northern District. She runs what she calls a medical clinic, but is in reality a squalid den where the most vile crimes are committed. She not only harbors known enemies of the United States, but is a self-proclaimed murderer of the most innocent lives in our midst. So heinous are the crimes, and so intent is this doctor on keeping them from public view, that she spent a small fortune in turning her abattoir into an armed fortress.”

  Coulter droned on for over an hour. Ruth Lebeau, dressed in navy suiting with an Elizabethan collar framing her face, made a few notes, but spent most of Coulter’s speech either smiling reassuringly at her client, or mouthing comments to her second, who seemed to find Lebeau very witty.

  Dr. Herschel was a small woman, with graying hair cut close to her head. She wore no makeup and no jewelry. The court reporter thought she looked like the kind of doctor you could trust, not the formidable monster described in the government’s brief. It troubled the reporter that the doctor didn’t look at Coulter or Sessions during the opening statement. The reporter believed innocent people could stare down their accusers. She didn’t know that sociopaths could also stare down their accusers and that innocent people might be looking at their clasped hands so that judge and prosecutor couldn’t see the furious contempt in their eyes.

  When the prosecutor sat down, Ruth Lebeau made her own opening statement. She sketched Dr. Herschel’s history: an orphan, a refugee, who had dedicated her life to the health and welfare of women in the United States. The many awards she had received for her humanitarian work, for her innovations in perinatal medicine and in surgery. Lebeau spoke about the Constitution as well, and how the law under which Dr. Herschel was charged set up two classes of people.

  “We’re skating perilously close to Nuremberg laws here. Americans reject the idea that one class of person has higher value than other classes, whether the division is between black and white, Christian and Jew, foreign-born or native born. We will show that Dr. Herschel’s whole life and career have been devoted to caring for women and children who most need help, and that she has used her own resources to bring free medical care to Americans who can least afford it, but need it most.”

  The court adjourned for lunch. Melvin Coulter was seen eating with Justice Sessions and the other judges on the tribunal. A photograph of them together in the Potawatomi Club circulated on Fake News websites, but Real News assured Americans that there was nothing wrong with two old friends meeting for lunch. The Ex-Left also put up videos of the federal marshals dragging protestors from the courtroom; Real News showed patriots cheering the marshals.

  • • •

  In the afternoon, the evidence part of the trial began. The government had been surveilling Dr. Herschel and her clinic for many months. Even before the Keep America Free Act, ICE agents had paid particular attention to her Damen Avenue clinic because she treated so many low-income women, not just immigrants from
Muslim countries and Mexico, but poor Americans as well.

  Coulter began with photographs of the Radbuka-Herschel Family Clinic projected onto the three screens in the courtroom. These days the clinic was padlocked, the windows covered with obscene graffiti, including swastikas and “death camp” in jagged capital letters, but the pictures had been taken during the surveillance and data-gathering phase of the case.

  The clinic stood near the corner of Damen and Irving Park Road in Chicago. The sidewalks were dirty, the nearby storefronts run-down or boarded over. The court watched two women in head scarves approach the building, one with toddlers in a double stroller, the other carrying an infant while an older child held her skirt. The women glanced around furtively, then rang the clinic bell.

  “You can see the armor-plated glass”—Coulter tapped the windows in the photograph—“and the video cameras. Once the women gained entrance through the first door, they were sealed in the equivalent of an airlock while clerks videoed them. Only then did they gain admittance to the death chambers inside.”

  The testimony of all the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, along with the FBI, took close to two weeks to hear. The most dramatic testimony actually came from one of Dr. Herschel’s own nurses: Leah Shazar had worn a tiny body camera to record many of Dr. Herschel’s patients and procedures, even patients she herself was examining.

  When Ruth Lebeau rose to cross-examine her, Shazar broke down into sobs. “They threatened to deport my own mother, my sisters, back to the men who raped them. What else could I do?”

  “Find someone to help you fight them,” Lebeau said. “What did you think you were doing to the patients entrusted to your care?”

  After Shazar’s weeping went into its second inarticulate minute, Justice Sessions ruled that Lebeau was badgering the witness and to stop such an emotional line of questioning. When Shazar stepped out of the witness box, she tried to approach the doctor, but Dr. Herschel turned her head away and refused to look at her.