Brushy Mountain State Prison looms as a giant wall, set atop a hill and visible for miles from whatever direction one approaches. The bricks that were used to fashion the wall a century ago were molded from the red-brown clay of the surrounding Allegheny Mountains. The result is that the wall takes on the color of the ground from which it rises. It is the color of iron, of soil, of the earth itself.

But August Jorgensen lived by the sea, and to him, it looked less like a wall and more like one of those giant ocean-going tankers you saw riding high and dry at anchor, its rusted hull risen up from the depths.

He identified himself and was permitted to drive through the gateway, where he was directed to park his truck in a visitor’s spot and leave his dog.

“Unless he’s one of those seeing-eye ones,” said a guard.

“No, no,” said Jorgensen, “I’m afraid he’s not.” But the thought of a guide dog navigating for a blind driver caused him to chuckle and smile at the guard, in appreciation of the man’s little joke.

The guard didn’t smile back.

There was an inner wall, smaller and less imposing than the first, but it had gun towers at each corner and was topped with big loops of razor wire. Razor wire is exactly what it sounds like: It is barbed wire (or bob-wire, as they say in the South), only instead of sprouting pointed barbs every four inches or so, it sprouts razor blades.

Jorgensen took the manila folder, a pen, a legal pad to take notes on, and his reading glasses. Everything else he left in the truck. He knew from having been a defense lawyer years ago that he’d be going through metal detectors inside, and that any loose change, keys, or paperclips in his pockets would only set buzzers off and be taken from him.

He was ushered into a sign-in room, where he was required to produce identification and fill out a handful of forms. They wanted his full name, address, nationality, date of birth, year of admission to the bar, and about twenty other particulars. He was required to promise in writing that he was a member in good standing of the bar, that he was unarmed, and that he wasn’t smuggling drugs or other contraband into the prison. He was made to wait while a lieutenant confirmed that arrangements had been made for him to visit Wesley Boyd Davies. Then he was made to wait some more while someone contacted someone else on the unit where Davies was housed, and an officer could be dispatched to escort the inmate to the attorney visit room.

Finally, after almost an hour, Jorgensen was told they were ready for him. He was directed through a series of steel doors, each of them electronically opened by a guard housed behind thick glass. The last of the doors opened into a large room containing small tables bolted to the floor. At each of the tables were two or three flimsy plastic chairs, the kind you could hit someone with, Jorgensen figured, and not hurt him too badly.

Except for a guard who sat behind a desk on a raised platform, overseeing everything, there was only one other person besides Jorgensen in the room. He was a black man, seated at one of the tables. He was dressed in a prison-issue blue jumpsuit. And he looked to be about thirty-five years old.

Jorgensen walked over to where he sat. “Are you Boyd Davies?” he asked the man.

The man said nothing and didn’t look at Jorgensen. But he nodded up and down once. Jorgensen sat down opposite him. “My name is Jorgensen,” he said, “August Jorgensen. Some people have asked me to help you with your case. I’m here to find out if that’s okay.”

“That’s okay,” said Boyd Davies.

Well, that was certainly easy, thought Jorgensen. “Good,” he said. “Before I ask you a few questions, is there anything you want to ask me?”

“Ask me.”

“Any questions you have?”

“Questions you have.”

And it dawned on Jorgensen that Boyd Davies wasn’t so much answering him as he was repeating the last few words of everything he heard. Echolalia, they called it, a behavior characteristic of autism.

“What is your name?” asked Jorgensen, pointing his finger at Davies’s chest on the word your.

It took a moment, but Davies replied, “Boyd.”

“Hello, Boyd. I’m August.”

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

If it was a less ambitious start, at least it seemed to get them acquainted. “How are you, Boyd?” Jorgensen tried next.

Nothing.

“Are you okay?”

“Okay.”

Hard to tell from that.

Jorgensen was stumped. Here he’d driven for the better part of two days, waded through a small mountain of bureaucratic red tape, and waited for an hour, only to find out he hadn’t the vaguest idea of how to communicate with his client. His would-be client.

Then an idea hit him. He took the legal pad he’d brought and slid it across the table in front of Boyd. Then he handed him the pen. “Draw something for me,” he said.

Boyd looked down at the objects as though unable to make the connection between them, or between them and what Jorgensen had just said.

“Can you draw a face?” Jorgensen asked him.

“A face,” Boyd repeated. But he gave no sign of comprehension.

“A happy face?” Jorgensen suggested, forming his mouth into an exaggerated grin. “Or a sad face?” inverting it into a pout.

No reaction.

“How about Boyd?” he tried. “Can you draw Boyd?”

Still nothing.

“Can you draw anything at all?”

Apparently not. Apparently whatever gift, whatever talent the young man had once possessed, had died at some point, somewhere within these walls. In a last-ditch effort, Jorgensen picked up the pen himself, reached for the pad, and began drawing himself. He wasn’t much of an artist, and he ended up with a crude stick figure, standing next to a lollypop tree. He rotated the pad 180 degrees, so that it faced Boyd, and offered him the pen.

But wherever Boyd Davies was at that particular moment – if, indeed, he was anywhere at all - it wasn’t at a place where he could take pen and paper and make things come to life.

It was dark by the time Jorgensen got back outside to his truck. He found a motel south of a town called Rocky Gap. It wasn’t until he was feeding Jake that he realized he himself hadn’t eaten since breakfast. But he was tired, far too tired to go looking for food. He stretched out on the bed and, within minutes, fell asleep with his clothes on, even his shoes. He felt old and exhausted, and very far from home.

“So do you think he’ll do it?”

The voice was Brandon Davidson’s, checking in with Jessica Woodruff by cell phone, fifteen minutes before Jessica was to take over as anchor for Trial TVs afternoon segment of “You Be the Jury.”

“Oh, he’ll do it,” she said. “That’s not what worries me.”

“Okay,” said Davidson, “what worries you?”

“I don’t know. He insisted on going up to the prison, and meeting with the defendant.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” said Jessica. “Only I don’t like working with people who need to control everything. Why couldn’t he just say yes or no, and then, if he’s going to do it, just go with the program?”

“He’s from the old school,” said Davidson.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, when he was on the bench and used to find himself in the minority - which was most of the time, naturally - he was never satisfied just saying he disagreed with the majority. He always insisted on writing something. And his dissenting opinions were usually so well written that more often than not, he’d drag another judge or two with him. The majority always prevailed, because they had the votes. But if you were to sit down and read the full opinions, you’d see he was almost always on the right side of the issue.”

“Well,” said Jessica, who hadn’t sat down and read a full opinion since law school, “I just wish he wasn’t such a weirdo. I don’t like working with people who like to make waves. It makes me nervous.”

“He’ll be okay,” said Davidson. “What are you covering this afternoon?”

“Some trial from Florida. Nine-year-old kid brings a loaded revolver to school for ‘Show and Tell.’ Prosecutor wants him tried as an adult, so they can lock him up for fifteen years.”

“And the audience?”

“Pretty evenly divided.”

“Ratings?”

“Eighteen-five. I’ve been on the phone with the defense lawyer, trying to talk him into putting the kid on the stand. I figure we could break twenty if he does. The kid’s cute.”

“Good,” said Davidson. “What’s Court TV doing?”

“The usual. Timothy McVeigh, the World Trade terrorists, A1 Sharpton.”

“Jerkoffs.”

“I’ve got to go, Brandon. Makeup wants me.”

“Okay, babe. Break a leg.”

“Thanks.”

Mercifully, the drive home from Brushy Mountain didn’t take nearly as long as the drive up. At least it seemed that way to Jorgensen. It always seemed that way, in fact. There was something about heading home, some mysterious gravitational force that exerted itself on you, and drew you in as you got closer and closer. He decided to drive straight through, even though Marge would have told him not to trust his eyes after dark. But the thought of another night lying on a bad mattress in a cheap motel made him shudder, and he tightened his arthritic hands around the steering wheel and pushed on.

“To the lighthouse!” he shouted. “To the lighthouse!” And if he aimed the words at his dog, who responded with a concurring wag of his tail, August Jorgensen knew full well that the rallying cry was meant for himself.