Reversible Errors

by Scott Turow

  “I think Muriel’s a very good lawyer,” said Gillian. “She raised a lot of dust.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  She had not really pondered that. To believe or not had somehow seemed secondary. It was not her decision, for one thing. Moreover, she could feel now how much the spectacle itself had drawn her in. She had not been inside a courtroom since she’d been sentenced. But it had enlivened her today in a way she had refused to imagine. The lawyers, the judges; the way the sound carried; the flash of emotion that exceeded even what took place in a theater because it was so resoundingly real. When Erno had spoken about his oncoming death, it was like a sustained lightning strike. She half expected to smell ozone in the large room.

  Gillian was not all that surprised to experience a measure of envy. She’d always cherished the courtroom. Yet what had shocked her was how near at hand it remained—the calculation and reflection that went into each question, the effort to read through the judge’s inscrutable responses. She realized only now that she had dreamed of it all every night.

  “Very frankly, I’m not sure I want to believe him, Arthur. But I thought your redirect was quite brilliant, as effective in its own way as Muriel’s cross.”

  “Hardly,” said Arthur, although he could not contain a smile. Nor was Gillian being polite. Arthur had been first-rate. Cross-examination required flourish, as the interrogator became the visible embodiment of disbelief. Redirect had an artistry of its own, far more subtle, in which the lawyer, a bit like a parent asserting a gentle influence over an unruly child, indiscernibly steered the witness back into a flattering light.

  “I suppose, at this stage, I have an open mind about Erno,” she said. “Can you corroborate him somehow?”

  “I can’t figure out how. Not with the physical evidence. If he said he’d assaulted her, maybe there would be a pubic hair, DNA, but there’s nothing.”

  “Why do you think he denies that? The sexual assault?”

  “From the day I went down there with you, he’s insisted Painless got it wrong. I actually think it counts in his favor. If he were really trying to tailor his testimony to the evidence, he’d have admitted that, too.”

  They were advancing slowly in the dense afternoon traffic. Gillian mulled. At this stage, merely raising doubts about the conviction would not be enough to get Gandolph off death row. Ten years along, it was far too late for that. But there was a chance Muriel would want to get the litigation out of the spotlight.

  “Muriel might talk to you about a deal, you know,” she told Arthur.

  “You mean a deal for life? Even if he’s innocent?”

  “What would your client say?”

  “That’s the equivalent of trial by ordeal. Offer him life. If he’s guilty, he’ll jump at it. If he’s innocent, he might say yes, too, just to live.”

  “His choice, isn’t it?” Gillian asked, but Arthur shook his head.

  “I want him to be innocent. I’m as bad as Pamela now.” He glanced at her with a trace of little-boy bashfulness. “This is better than being a prosecutor. You do right as a prosecutor. But not like this. I have to take on the entire world. This is the first time in years I haven’t felt beaten down when my feet hit the ground in the morning.” Arthur, never one to hide his feelings, briefly bore the pure light of exhilaration.

  Gillian smiled, but she again felt herself wandering where she no longer had the right to go. Instead, she asked Arthur about his sister, and he briefly recounted Susan’s history in one of those deadened tones that suggested not true detachment but rather that all hope had finally been run over by pain. It was a common story: periods of stability, then crashing relapses and hospitalization. Susan had disappeared several times, awful stretches when Arthur and his father had hunted for her on the streets, and in which, the last time, she’d turned up in Phoenix, strung out on speed—the worst thing imaginable for a schizophrenic—and three months pregnant. For Arthur’s father in particular, who had remained ever hopeful that the beautiful girl of glimmering promise would somehow be returned to him, the cycles of her illness had been crushing.

  “Do drugs help?” Gillian asked.

  “They help a lot. But sooner or later she refuses to take them.”

  “Because?”

  “Because the side effects of some of them are awful. She gets the shakes. Tachycardia. Her neck gets sort of paralyzed with her head tilted to one side. One reason for the group home is so we can watch her get a shot of Prolixin once a week. She did better on the Risperdal, but that’s every day, which never works out. This stuff just sort of tames her. And she hates it. With all of them, I think the worst thing for her is that life is drab, compared to what’s in her head when she’s not taking anything. You’re talking about somebody with an IQ of 165. I can’t even imagine what’s going on in there. But I know it’s vivid, wild—electrifying. She’s still a genius. To her the outside world is about as relevant as the Middle Ages, but she reads three papers every morning and never forgets anything.”

  Arthur said that for several years now, a childhood friend of Susan’s, now Senior V.P. at Faulkes Warren, the mutual-fund house, had arranged jobs for her—keypunching, collating, sorting industry reports. She’d actually shown skill as an analyst. If she didn’t have to sit in a room by herself, or be hospitalized twice a year, Arthur said, Susan might be making a quarter of a million dollars. Instead, her behavior always left her on the verge of dismissal. As a result, he had struck a deal with Susan’s employers. When his sister went into a paranoid spin, they would simply call the police to remove her. Arthur had an old friend at West Bank Two, Yogi Marvin, a sergeant, who dispatched a squad car. Susan usually welcomed the police, certain they’d arrived to quell whoever she was sure had done her wrong.

  “Shit,” said Arthur as they came down the street toward the station now. “There she is.” West Bank Two was a functional contemporary structure, the shape of a shoe box made out of brick. In front of its glass doors, two women appeared to be arguing, while a uniformed officer stood to the side. Arthur parked in a space only a few feet from them and dashed forward. Gillian left the car and waited by its radiant fender, uncertain if it was more impolite to stay or to slip away.

  “I need my cigarettes,” Susan was saying. “You know I need my cigarettes, Valerie.”

  “I do know you need your cigarettes,” said Valerie, “and Rolf knows that, too. That’s why we wouldn’t take them.” Valerie, Gillian took it, was a social worker in the assisted living home where Susan resided. Arthur had said one of them was on the way over. If a lifetime’s experience was any guide, Gillian would guess Valerie was a nun. Her patience, as she attempted to talk Susan down, was otherworldly, and her attire was only slightly more chic than a habit—a shapeless jumper and thick shoes. Valerie’s face was round and pleasant and appeared not to have been touched for years by any chemical agent, even cold cream.

  “You told me not to smoke at work,” said Susan, “and you thought I was ignoring you and so you took them.”

  “Susan, I think you know that I wasn’t at work with you. What I told you was that Rolf is asthmatic and that because he’s in the next space, you should follow their rules and smoke in the lounge. That doesn’t mean that I would take your cigarettes. Or that Rolf would.”

  “I know Rolf took my cigarettes.”

  Arthur asked if it would help if he went to the store and bought another pack for Susan.

  “But why won’t they make Rolf give back the cigarettes he took? I want to smoke a cigarette now.”

  Catching sight of Gillian at the curb, Arthur gave her a desperate look. She had left Alderson hoping never to witness another screaming battle about cigarettes, a daily event in prison, and largely on impulse she reached into her purse.

  “I have one,” she said.

  Susan recoiled and her hands shot up protectively. Although Gillian had been no more than a few steps away, Susan had plainly missed her. Arthur introduced Gillian, calling her a friend. G
illian’s hope to end the dispute over cigarettes was quickly fulfilled. Susan’s suspicions now focused on her.

  “You don’t have any friends who smoke,” Susan said. She was addressing her brother, but looking toward Valerie rather than having to turn in Gillian’s direction again.

  “You can see Gillian has cigarettes,” Arthur said.

  “You don’t like me to meet your friends.”

  “I don’t like it when my friends aren’t nice to you.”

  “You think I don’t know I’m schitzy.”

  “I know you know that, Susan.”

  She took the cigarette without ever quite facing Gillian’s way, but muttered a meek thank you. On the bench, Gillian had seen her share of acute-phase schizophrenics. There were also at least half a dozen women in Alderson who clearly suffered the same illness and should have been hospitalized rather than imprisoned. Given that experience, Susan’s appearance was something of a surprise. She could have been a suburban housewife on her way for groceries, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. She was pudgy and pale and surprisingly neat, hair trimmed short and showing quite a bit of gray. She was older than Arthur, early forties, Gillian supposed, and strikingly pretty, with even features. But she was entirely detached from her external self. Accepting the cigarette, her hand shot at full length from her, as if she were a tin man. Her eyes were dull and her face was rigid, seemingly acknowledging that regular emotion of any kind presented an untenable risk.

  “Is she a shrink?” Susan asked her brother.

  “No.”

  Susan blinked spasmodically, wincing whenever she began to speak, and for the minutest time, her light eyes flashed toward Gillian.

  “You’re a Compliant, aren’t you?”

  “I’m sorry?” Gillian turned to Arthur, who looked pained. The word, he said, was Susan’s coinage. Schizophrenics who refused drug therapy were commonly referred to as noncompliant. It took Gillian an instant to register what Susan was suggesting about her.

  “You and Valerie are always trying to get me to meet people who’ve recovered,” Susan said.

  “We think it would help you. But Gillian is not one of them.”

  Susan, who had simply held the cigarette until now, lit it with matches from her pocket and closed one eye in her own smoke. Despite her fairly assertive declarations, in the intervals between them, Susan was quick-eyed and frightened.

  “I know you’re not Gillian Sullivan.”

  “I’m not?” Gillian asked, before she could think better of it.

  “Gillian Sullivan was a judge who’s in prison.”

  She saw what Arthur had meant about Susan retaining the content of the newspapers.

  “I was released from prison several months ago.”

  In response, Susan took a step too close, revolving her face like a searchlight as she suddenly scrutinized Gillian.

  “What drugs are you on?”

  Arthur reached for Susan’s arm, but she shook his hand away.

  “Paxil,” said Gillian.

  “Me, too,” said Susan. “But what about neuraleptics? Antihallucinogens?” When Gillian hesitated, Susan shook her head emphatically. “You’ve been there, I can see it.”

  Those who pretended they did not understand the insane were doing just that—pretending. Susan was right: Gillian had been crazy. Not in Susan’s fashion. Susan had been unable to cross the valley that most of us traversed in childhood, surrendering our own mythology in favor of a shared one. But Gillian had been in retreat from reality. She knew that. She addressed a world of bad acts and hard consequences from the bench, and then, in the stupor of heroin, reclaimed her fantasy of valiance and invulnerability. In the instant before she nodded out, she always felt regal and dominant in the same way she had when she’d played with dolls as a child. No, she had nothing on Susan and would never assume she did.

  “I’ve been there,” said Gillian.

  “I can always tell,” said Susan, and shot a plume of smoke in the air, with the exasperated imperial air of Bette Davis. “But I don’t understand why you say you’re Gillian Sullivan.”

  Still trying to win the point, Arthur reminded his sister that he had been assigned years ago to Judge Sullivan’s courtroom.

  “I remember,” said Susan. “I remember. You were in love with her. You’re in love with someone else every three weeks.”

  “Thank you, Susan.”

  “You are. And none of them love you.”

  Arthur who had looked immeasurably fatigued as soon as he arrived, for an instant appeared too flattened to bother with anything else.

  “That isn’t my fault, Arthur.”

  “I don’t think it is.”

  “You think if you didn’t have this crazy sister to look after, then everything would be hunky-dory.”

  “Susan, I like it more when you don’t try to confront me. I love you and I want to help you and you know that. I have to get back to my office. I’m on trial. I told you about the case. The man on death row?”

  “Are you going to get him out of prison?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Did you get her out of prison?”

  “She finished her sentence, Susan.”

  “You got her out of prison so you could show her to me, didn’t you? What is she taking?”

  “Actually,” said Gillian, “in my case, it was what I stopped taking that made me better.”

  Encouraged by her success so far, Gillian had thought her remark would be helpful, but it proved a serious mistake. Susan for the first time became volatile, throwing her stubby hands through the air.

  “I keep telling them that! If they’d just let me stop, I’d be back, I know I’d be back! She’s back and she doesn’t take anything.”

  “Susan, Gillian was in prison, not a hospital. She served her sentence. Now she’s putting her life back together.”

  “Like you want me to do.”

  Arthur was stymied here. It did not seem much to concede, but apparently he’d learned over the years that granting any point would reinforce Susan.

  “I would like that, Susan, but you have to do what makes sense to you.”

  “I want to get better, you know, Arthur.”

  “I know you do.”

  “Then you can bring her back.”

  “Gillian?”

  “Whoever she is. Bring her on Tuesday. Three is better anyway.”

  Arthur, for the first time, appeared alarmed.

  “I don’t think she’s available Tuesday night. You work then, don’t you?”

  Gillian watched Arthur for cues, but it seemed his question was genuine. She shook her head circumspectly.

  “Now you don’t want me to be around her,” Susan said.

  “Susan, ask yourself if you’re making an effort to cooperate.”

  “Why won’t you let her come on Tuesday? You don’t really want to help me. You want me to keep getting this shit and she doesn’t want me to, and so you don’t want me to talk to her.”

  “Susan, I really like it when you’re not so provocative. Why don’t you go home now with Valerie?”

  Susan remained agitated, insisting that he was trying to keep her away from Gillian. And he was, of course—Gillian could see that, albeit for her sake, rather than to hurt Susan. She felt inclined to volunteer for whatever ‘Tuesday’ was, but hesitated because of the unpredictable results so far of her attempts to be helpful.

  Instead, Arthur temporized, telling his sister that they would see. Susan quieted briefly, then refused, almost visibly, to move toward equilibrium.

  “I know she won’t come.”

  “Enough, Susan,” said Arthur. “This is enough. You’ve had a cigarette. I’ve said we’ll see about Gillian. Now go with Valerie.”

  It was several more minutes, but eventually Susan and Valerie were both in the white van from the Franz Center, as the group home was known. Susan departed, vowing to discover who Gillian really was. As soon as the vehicle pulled out of sight, Arthur fell over hims
elf apologizing, first to the cop who’d stood by throughout, then to Gillian. He explained that whenever one thing went wrong with Susan—the cigarettes, today—the whole scaffolding was likely to collapse.

  “Arthur, there is nothing to apologize for. But may I ask the significance of Tuesday?”

  “Oh. She gets her shot. And then we go to the apartment. It was my father’s apartment, but I’m there now, mostly for her sake. We make dinner. It’s become a big deal, especially since my father died. I think that’s what she meant when she said three is better.”

  “Ah. It would be no great difficulty for me to come, if it’s really important to her.”

  “I won’t ask that. And frankly, Susan wouldn’t pay any attention to you, once you got there. I can tell you that from experience. There’s no continuity. Except the paranoia.”

  Arthur insisted on driving Gillian the short distance to the mall. She briefly demurred, but it was close to five already. As they sped from the police station lot, Gillian asked if it was hopeful that Susan spoke of recovery.

  “Every conversation with Susan is about recovery. That’s been going on for nearly thirty years.”

  Thirty years. Contemplating the energy that Arthur’s sister required, she felt another surge in her admiration for him. She would have been exhausted long ago.

  “I know you won’t believe it,” he said, “but I think she really liked you. She usually acts as if strangers aren’t even there. That business about getting out of prison—I don’t have to explain. It’s bound to interest her. But I’m sorry she was so insulting.”

  “She was far too accurate to be insulting.”

  Arthur did not seem to know what to make of that remark, and for an instant the car was full only of the radio’s babble. With a moment to think about it, Gillian found herself vaguely amused. Despite Arthur’s frequent declarations of common cause with Gillian, it was his sister, not he, who was the kindred soul, a woman blessed with uncommon looks and intelligence, torn down by mysterious inner impulses.

  “Susan is every bit as smart as you said she is,” Gillian told him. “She’s quite penetrating.”

  “She certainly nailed me,” said Arthur. He exhaled and actually touched the spot on his suit coat over his heart. There was no need to ask which comment had caught him. ‘And none of them love you.’ She felt yet again the vastly thwarted nature of Arthur Raven’s life.