Some distance down the road, Harold Fineman sat in a parked car, looking past an orange barricade. Something was definitely wrong; he realized that now. Harold was starting to remember his dreams, which he hadn’t for years. They were more pleasant than they had any right to be, but they found pleasure in things and people he had barred from waking life. And even if he wasn’t much for introspection, he could watch his own behavior. He was alert to unease, expert at detecting a guilty conscience, able to read a witness through one quivering eyebrow or a single bead of sweat. He had assessed himself with an advocate’s eyes in the past, of necessity, for he had no others. But he had always taken his side in the matter, placed things in their best light. And now, with one simple change, the shift of perspective that had once been habitual, he was seeing it from the other side. The picture was not pretty; when he looked at himself, he saw a man who was coming unglued.
The signs he was giving off weren’t particularly subtle, more galling still. There was the professional hyperaggressiveness, for one thing, the laughing will to push the boundaries of acceptable litigating behavior. In the past he might have taken that as merely a sign of high spirits, which on some occasions it had been. But now it was paired with solitary moments of painful remorse, self-doubt, anxiety. That had never happened before; the sword does not question what it cuts. Uncertainty meant that he was no longer the pure advocate he had been. Part of him clung to that role, more fiercely than ever, but part was now divested, living outside the arena and trembling to watch.
So I’m overcompensating, Harold told himself. That stuff about sending the documents to Canada. I’m disparaging what I don’t have. That ridiculous rant about children, like auditioning to play Herod. I’ve been a little excessive in some ways. Why does that mean anything?
The rhetorical question did not console, for Harold knew quite well what it meant. The witness asserts himself more forcefully because he doesn’t believe what he’s saying. Push him a little more, drive him to a grosser exaggeration. Make him say something he can’t stand to hear, and he’ll crack. He’ll recant it all. And the jury in the courtroom sees what the jury within has pronounced, what the heavenly jury has always known. The starry sky above and the moral law within, the immanent and the transcendent. They will not be thought away. Something had tracked him to this stretch of highway: the doubt he had lived by and lost, the doubt that had been his earliest faith. It had come back, a part of himself long put aside and now returned to judge what he’d become in its absence.
That’s it, Harold thought. It’s finally happened. They warn you that law will divide you from your family, your friends, your hobbies. He had avoided this by having none. But no one tells you that it will divide you from yourself, that it will fracture you, one half horrified by what the other does. That’s where I’ve come. Where the path of the law leads. This is splitsville.
Nor was there much of a mystery how it had happened. Work had called to him in the mornings, sweet with the promise of struggle. He enjoyed it all, arguing motions, writing briefs, giving commands to his legions, crushing opponents with resources they couldn’t match. Even filling out time sheets, recording his battles, tabulating his worth. Now he was growing deaf to that voice, and Katja was what he thought of, her querulous smiles, her brave resolve. He had used her for her fresh eyes, but what she showed him had become more than a datum for the litigator. There was something unbearably moving about the world she lived in, its beauty and innocence and vulnerability, the blue-green pearl of the earth seen from space. He longed for it like all he had set aside, and he longed for her as its embodiment and bearer. Fitful connections kindled within him, the agony of sea on a lonely shore.
All this was deeply irksome to Harold, who’d consciously set himself on a narrow path. His basic thesis had been that everyone was an enemy.
Some were provisionally on your side. They were your partners, your associates; they played on your team. But they were still rivals against whom you had to strive, the partners competing for the same points, the associates fighting to keep a life beyond the job. Harold had been alone all his adult life, but he had never been lonely. What he had failed to anticipate was her kindness, that sudden unexpected shower. It seeped into him like water into a rock, and in the chill of the night it bloomed into ice and split him from within.
Harold watched a small figure grow in his rearview mirror. The heat laid illusory puddles across the road, bending the light in unexpected ways, and she danced through them as though flying. I shouldn’t have brought her here, he thought, shouldn’t have involved her in this. Bad for both of us. Katja rapped on the car window and he lowered it.
“What are you doing?”
Harold gestured at the map. “I thought I’d try deciding where I was going before I got there,” he said.
Katja laughed and leaned in through the window. “Need help?”
I certainly do, Harold thought. Her sudden appearance took his breath like a pack-a-day habit. He felt a tumult of possibilities, a speechless upheaval within him, an urge to lay his lips in the hollow of her neck. “No, I think I’ve got it figured out.” He paused. A longing for the kiss, a dim apprehension of what that kiss would mean. “Go back to the warehouse.”
“Don’t worry, Harold,” she said. “I’m going to bill ten hours today.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Harold told her, suddenly in pain. “You shouldn’t be out here. In this.” He gestured toward the blackened plains beyond.
Katja lost her smile. “You mean it’s dangerous?”
“Just go back,” said Harold. Katja stepped away from the window, lips slightly parted, hands on her hips, her chest rising with the even rhythm of her breath. God in heaven, thought Harold. I’m falling in love. What else can go wrong? He gunned the car to life and accelerated savagely away.