“Ms. Wells?” says the honorable Judge Barney Sampson of the Court of Aberrant Neural Phenomena. “Ms. Wells, I will need you to settle down and pay close attention when the court is speaking.”
The owner of the house at 3737 Vermont Avenue sits high on his bench, exercising the solemn duty of his office. His stone-faced bailiff stands beneath him and to the right.
The subject of the hearing, despite Judge Sampson’s repeated admonitions, will not look up at him and will not stay still, shifting restlessly from side to side and flicking her fingers in weird patterns. I’m settled in my last-row pew, beneath the row of drooping flags that jut from the back wall of the courtroom: the Bear and Stars of the Golden State, the three bars of the city, the bright yellow circle of the Objectively So. There is a dull, airless quality to the courtroom, a tired dinginess, as if the very physical space has been worn down by the grim sameness of the daily proceedings. Watching Judge Sampson work, watching him gravely evaluate this poor lady, I wonder if the man isn’t jealous of his colleagues on the State’s higher benches—the Court of Grave Misrepresentations, the Court of Deliberate Falsity.
No, I think. He’s happy. Not smiling, of course, but engagedand brightly curious, eyes fixed on the defendant while he toys lightly with his gavel, while the courtroom’s overhead lights gleam off the dome of his scalp and glint off the big gold ring he wears on one pinky. He’s a short man, mostly bald, with tufts of hair ringing the smooth bulge of his scalp like high clouds around a mountain top.
Aysa and I have been here for five minutes. This docket item was supposed to be cleared ten minutes ago, and my plan was to be waiting for the judge in his chambers when it was done. Instead we’re sitting here in the back of the courtroom, a hard room for anyone to be in, but especially for me. Because the unfortunate Ms. Wells, aside from the shifting and the dancing, aside from the flicking of her fingers, is letting out a steady stream of preposterous and untrue statements, and it is increasingly hard for me to bear.
“I was dragged here,” she claims, hisses, growls, wagging an accusing finger at the stolid bailiff. “Dragged by dragons, dragons in wagons, wagons in wheels.”
It is babble she is talking, a cackle of words, but the sounds are statements and the statements aren’t true. I feel her nonsense in the air, gathering in slight wispy clouds. This is why she’s here. Madness is an assault on the Objectively So, and the State has a responsibility to contain and control it. The defendant certainly looks the part, in layers of long unkempt skirts, a cascade of dirty and tattered fabrics. Her eyes are pale and milky, and as she talks—declaims; chants, really—her eyes roll and dance inside their sockets. She wanders in a small circuit, her radius limited only by the length of chain with which she is tethered to the floor. She jerks her head in little circles, too, wrenching herself to look behind her, again and again, to the rows of us watching. Her hair is wild, stiff with sea grit and sand; her face and arms are streaked with dirt.
“A demon was dreaming and dreaming.” Raising her hands up, shaking her head from side to side. “Dreaming of dragons and dreaming of me. Dreamed of me and here I be.”
I turn to the side and cough as all this non-truth fills the room, floor to ceiling, window to wall, leadening the air, thickening it up, like smoke off a wildfire. I am starting to think I may have to get up and get out of here, go and wait on the benches that line the hallway outside the room. Ms. Paige, of course, is unaffected. She watches the proceedings with her usual ardency, eyes darting back and forth between the bench and the defendant as Judge Sampson taps his gavel, trying to corral the madwoman’s wild attention.
“Ms. Wells,” he says. “We need to speak calmly.”
She is not able. “Calm,” she barks, her hands high above her head, her dirty hair swept lionlike behind her. “Calm as a bomb.”
“Ms. Wells,” says Judge Sampson. “Eyes up here, please.”
“My eyes,” says Ms. Wells. “My eyes, my eyes.”
Judge Sampson nods, as if her answers are perfectly reasonable, and writes something on a small pad beside him. His desk is absent any extraneous ornament: just the pad, the gavel, a glass of water. It is just him and Ms. Wells, examining each other, staring across the gulf of reality.
I’ve spent time in these courts before, of course, as little time as I can get away with. I had a drug abuser once, a man whose mind became so addled that he could no longer distinguish what was from what was not; I have seen not only madness but amnesia, schizophrenics, and the mentally retarded. And all the old-timers’ diseases, of course, the whole range of senility and infirmity. Any assault on reality, any infusion of falsehood in the air can’t be countenanced, no matter the source.
“Have you ever in your life,” asks the judge, “been administered the dream-controlling medication Clarify?”
“No. Yes. No.” She squints, moves her cheeks, scratches at her neck. Judge Sampson’s manner is mild, but his eyes miss nothing. “I am not a doctor, sir. I am not a dream.”
I cough hard, into my hand. A bearded man in a suit turns around and glares at me. I don’t want to be drawing attention to myself but it’s getting harder to tamp down. A little more of this and I’ll have no choice but to duck out into the hallway. My chest feels tired. My hands are shaking, just a little bit.
“Have you been evaluated by a mental health professional?” asks the judge.
This time she doesn’t answer, just hisses like a steam vent and waves her hands.
“Have you ever—” Judge Sampson stops, raises one hand, and snaps his fingers. His fingers are long, the nails manicured. He snaps, snaps again. “Ms. Wells? Right now. Where are you in the present moment?”
“Court,” she says, and there is a palpable sense of relief in the room. She’s not so far gone as that. Ms. Paige glances at me, hopeful. Ms. Wells has one foot, at least, in the world. Everyone knows what happens if this goes the other way.
“I’m in a court. And you are the king. The king of the thing.”
“Ms. Wells?”
“The king is singing, now. Loud and long or low and slow. The king sings and the snakes are dancing.”
Ms. Paige looks at me again. Ms. Wells’s moment of lucidity has passed through her like weather, and now she is off again, babbling with hands raised, caught in her interior dance, her mind fixed within, and another spasm catches me, worse than before. My coughing, I can tell, is drawing the attention of the judge. His attention flickers over me, and he is clocking the blacks, the hat, the coughing. He has known many Speculators, of course. He knows what I am, what we are, but does he know why we’re here?
His attention returns to Ms. Wells—he asks her to look at him directly, and she ignores him again. Not defiant, exactly. Uncomprehending. Disinterested. She twists her head in different directions, like a loose compass searching for north.
Judge Sampson drums his fingers on the bench, and turns to his bailiff, a big man with wide shoulders and a rocky forehead like a dinosaur.
“Do we have a representative here from the department this morning?”
“Yes, sir.” The bailiff points at the bearded man in front of me, the guy who glared at me a minute ago. “Dr. Marvin Ailey.”
The man stands up. “That’s me, sir.”
“Hello, Dr. Ailey. An object in motion tends to stay in motion.”
“Good morning, your honor. An object at rest tends to stay at rest.”
“And so it ever shall be.” The judge sighs. “All right, then. What do we know about Ms. Wells’s relationship with reality?”
“Tenuous, sir. Unfortunately. Lorna Jane Wells on three occasions has been administered the full assessment and on all three occasions her percentile scores were found to be abjectly unsuitable. And”—Dr. Ailey clears his throat, frowns—“and, unfortunately, as I say, she has proven unresponsive to treatment.”
“Tell me about the extent of the treatment?”
“Standard, sir. The standard battery.”
“Beginning at what age, Dr. Ailey?”
“Beginning at age nineteen, your honor.”
“Beginning with Clarify, doctor?”
“Yes, your honor.”
The facts form a pile. The pile grows higher. Dr. Marvin Ailey, referring to his Day Book, to various files he’s brought with him, proceeds through the years of Ms. Wells’s life, her history of neural nonconformity, all of the drugs to which over many years she has proved nonresponsive; while the woman herself proves the point, bobbing her head in small chicken-like motions, making little half dance steps in different directions.
When he is done with Dr. Ailey, the judge stands and hitches up his robes, almost daintily, like a woman in a long dress coming down off a horse. The climax of this event is getting closer now. Whatever else I am to find out about Judge Sampson, I know that he does this many times a day: sits with people’s lives in his hands, weighing their fitness. What does that do to a person, such a burden as carried by the soul?
He crosses his courtroom and pulls up a chair at the defense table, plunks himself down unceremoniously beside Ms. Wells.
“Hi,” he says softly. “Lorna. Lorna, do you have living family that are aware of your condition?”
“What?”
“Are there people that care for you?”
The judge sees her humanity. I see it, and I can see him seeing it, trying to locate the human person within the murky depths of her illness. Seeking a way, if a way can be found, not to do what he is empowered to do; not to exercise the power of his office. But Ms. Wells jerks backward from him in a swift reptilian motion, and claps her hands on his shoulders. “The book cares.”
“The—what?”
“I got it for a song,” she says. “The book. The big one, the old one, the good one, the gold one. The big book with the red spine.” Her voice has built into a singsong rhythm, sweetly childlike. “Past Is Prologue, boys and girls. I have read it close.” She spins around to face the gallery, and she gives us a broad wink. “I’ve seen through the curtain.”
“Ms. Wells,” says Judge Sampson, frowning. “Stop.”
“My eyes are spies. X-ray eyes. Okay? I can see behind the black. The parts behind the parts.”
“Ms. Wells,” says the judge again, his voice dire with warning. “Stop speaking.”
He casts a stern and meaningful look to his bailiff, who does not, as I expected, charge across the room toward the defendant. Instead he steps closer to his own small desk, lifts up a panel built into its top, while Ms. Wells raises her hands high into the air, her two thumbs interlocked and her palms spread wide.
It’s a book. She has made of her hands a book and she is holding it aloft.
“Big book, old story,” she sings, “And you know what’s odd?”
“Ms. Wells!” cries the judge, but she sings on—
“In the scratched-out pages is the face of—”
The judge is looking at the bailiff and the bailiff is pressing a button on the desk that sucks all the sound from the world. In an instant it becomes absolutely silent, a pure, deep silence like the courtroom is encased in glass, as if it is not sound but the very idea of sound that has disappeared. For a moment, wild Ms. Wells keeps talking, moving her mouth, moving her head in confused circles, but then she trails off, looks with bafflement around the impossibly silent room. After a minute of this, when her lips have stopped moving, the judge nods to the bailiff, who taps his desk once more and unmutes the courtroom, and the imposed silence is replaced by the subtler everyday quiet of a room full of people, watching the judge, watching the confused madwoman—who stands now with her hands flapping nervously at her side.
Judge Sampson keeps his eyes focused for a moment on the floor, a man briefly lost in important conversation with himself. And then he stands and returns slowly, solemnly, a one-man procession, to the bench.
“It is the verdict of this court that Ms. Wells has no connection to reality nor prospect of achieving one.”
Paige looks at me, startled, and then back at the judge. Poor thing. Young girl. She grabs my shoulder. Wanting me to—what—to leap to my feet? Object?
Judge Sampson looks at the bailiff, who makes a small gesture with both hands, palms up, like an elevator rising up a floor. Everybody stands. I take off my pinhole and press it to my chest. The judge keeps his eyes on Ms. Wells, who, of course, has no idea what’s going on. She is living in her own reality, and shelled within it, shelled and sheltered, flinging rocks over the top, a danger to us all, but not for long—not for long now.
“The presence of Ms. Wells within the Golden State is therefore deemed to be unsafe and unhealthful for its inhabitants.” The bailiff stands before the bench, a still pillar, hands behind his back. Paige’s grip tightens on my shoulder, as if it’s her on whom sentence is being passed. I feel her fingers through the thickness of my jacket. Trying to understand the judge’s words, though they are not hard to understand. Like a pledge or a curse, like “I do” or “I promise,” the words of a verdict are illocutionary: they do not have an intended effect, they are the intended effect.
The judge has changed reality. The madwoman was of our world and now she is gone from it.
“The remedy to the offense your presence represents is to be effected immediately.” And Judge Sampson brings down the gavel, three short chops, bap bap bap, and the bailiff steps forward to unshackle Ms. Wells from the ground.