Thirteen Confessions Read online

  I mean, honestly and concretely, that my father made as little impression on me as humanly possible in the years he was alive. And it feels like I’ve been waiting to say that all my life.

  I remember what Mother said, as we were scrambling about the house in such a panic, packing so hurriedly. “I have to get out before I disappear along with him.”

  It wasn’t just Mother who felt afraid, of course. Why else would I need to write all this?

  I think I felt it most strongly that time he told me, when we were discussing my studies, that he’d long had a secret fascination with Nietzsche, in particular his theory of eternal return. “Every moment of our lives will repeat in exact detail for all eternity,” he said. “What do you make of that, Stephanie?”

  I tried to explain that Nietzsche’s point wasn’t to state a cosmological conviction, but to propose a way of life: we should live each moment in such a way that we would be happy to revisit it over and over and over for all eternity.

  He didn’t seem to hear, or perhaps had drifted off, or once again simply wasn’t listening. He seldom cared what I had to say.

  But from that day forward it seemed to me that he was rehearsing for how he should behave if that particular moment, the one he was currently experiencing, ever occurred again—that in fact he’d been rehearsing his whole life. But that would suggest an actor playing a part, and I never felt any genuine conviction anything existed but the role. No actor resided behind the mask. Just a kind of quivering emptiness.

  And yet perhaps I suffer from the same affliction. If there’s anything I dread, that’s it. My genetic heritage: invisibility.

  As for Nietzsche and eternal return, I suppose that means my father will be repeatedly strangled to death in the same disgusting way for all of time. Presuming, of course, he was ever actually here.

  I wonder what Natalie would say about all this. Or, as Darling Daddy liked to call her: Naughtily. Except she’s in Africa, doing what she does, delivering medical aid to Darfur. She’s engaged in the world.

  Freudian slip: I almost miswrote that last sentence as: She’s engaged with the word. But that, of course, would be me.

  —4—

  Every day in court I been watching that man, the so-called killer, watching him real close, wondering if he was gonna jump up and do something.

  Let me tell you, there’s an anger in him for sure. Sensed it in him like I sense it everywhere around me every day.

  Some folks think like, you know, anger’s just a lie. A “masking emotion,” one of them fellas on the stand, the so-called expert, called it. Way to hide the fact you’re scared, or hurt

  But maybe we’re just angry. What about that?

  Truth be told, I come to hate every damn soul in the courtroom, judge and jury both, even the pretty little slip of a thing taking it all down on her machine. So smug, so la-di-da about how above it all they is. They ain’t above nothing. Phonies. Hypocrites. Pharisees.

  Jurors act like just because we all sit together in that box we some kinda family. Come up to me and compliment my shoes, my hat, my suit, “Oh I just love that shade of violet,” like I can’t see the ugly meanness behind those smiles.

  Didn’t much care for the lawyers, neither. Prosecutor was one of those slick, put-together jobs thinks he got it all, and I mean all, figured out. Defense lawyer, sad-and-brainy type, trying not to talk down to everybody but he couldn’t help himself.

  There’s the truth, you want any of it.

  So if I feel this anger inside me, every minute, every day, like water just about to boil—who am I to judge that man? Can’t make me do it. Could be me sitting over there, him sitting here. Am I the only one here with an honest bone in his body?

  —5—

  I understand the other jurors view me as an outsider. My speech, my manner, so much is different. And I know I am expected to be one of them, to think like them, to come to some agreement with them in the end. But I fear this is not possible. Not yet. Not given what I have heard and seen so far.

  It feels as though I have been given something to fix, but a crucial part is missing.

  As anyone who has seen me knows, I sit here every day, listening intently. I have taken careful notes—I will gladly share them with anyone who asks. I have performed my task seriously and done my best to fulfill my duty.

  But doubts remain.

  I am new here. When not in court I spend my time, or most of it, catching up with work at my repair shop. I live modestly, a small apartment, few possessions. It is important to be honest, reliable, clean, polite—this I believe. I try my best to do what is expected of me. I have done that here, to the best of my ability, with the seriousness of a student, playing close attention because, after all, how can we know which detail will prove crucial?

  But despite everything I have heard, the evidence, the testimony—the facts, as the lawyers say, or refuse to say—I still do not understand why the victim, Mister McMahan, died. Why the accused, Mister Craig, killed him.

  Anger is a reason. Greed is a reason. But there was no argument—the neighbors who came forward confirmed this, they heard no shouting, not on “the day in question,” as I’ve heard the lawyers say. There are no bruises or marks on the victim’s body to suggest he tried to defend himself. The police have testified nothing was stolen or even disturbed. They arrived at the house and found one man dead on the floor, the other sitting calmly in a chair, waiting. And all he said was, “I’m the one who called. I’m the one responsible.”

  Yes, I know, he said more at the police station, his so-called confession, but am I the only one who finds all that a bit fantastic? Could not all that be the result of shock, or despair, or some subtle influence the police exerted in their desire to, as they say on TV, “close the case”?

  Let me suggest an alternative. Imagine the shock of stumbling upon your neighbor, your friend, lying dead in his house. Picture it in your mind, as we have been obliged to picture the events of that day in our minds throughout this trial. Imagine thinking: If I’d only come by a few minutes earlier, I might have saved him. Imagine the terrible sense of helplessness, of insignificance. Would you not want to do something, say something, anything to reclaim a sense of power, of purpose?

  I do not want to be a problem. I do not want to disappoint or cause difficulty for the other jurors. But a man’s life is at stake, and I cannot afford to be mistaken.

  As I said, I repair things. It is my job, my reason for being. I am supposed to know when an item can be fixed and when it cannot. Nothing is more humiliating than to discover I do not know what to do. Nothing more humbling than to stare into the puzzling, infuriating machinery only to ask: but why?

  —6—

  I should, perhaps, explain why I did not come forward. I don’t feel proud about it, of course, but I don’t feel overly guilty, either. Just how it is.

  I live across the street from both John and Pete and know both men rather well. Knew, I guess I should say, in John’s case at least, though I wonder at this stage how much I really know Pete.

  Regardless, in my opinion—and, admittedly, I wasn’t there—but in my opinion, and it’s only an opinion, they’d probably been drinking (again) and arguing politics (again).

  By politics, I mean everything—the world, work, money, people, government, guns, you name it.

  John, I suppose you could say, took an expansive view of matters. Every question suggested another question. And that is precisely the sort of thing that drove Pete up the wall.

  Let me give you an example. John said the reason people believe in the Apocalypse is because they’re terrified by life’s uncertainty. They want to believe in fate and victory. They want to be shown the way out, but there is no way out. We’re wandering a labyrinth in the fog, he said.

  To this, Pete replied somewhat predictably, “You want out? Build a ladder.”

 
“But Peter,” John responded, in that tone of his, “everybody knows that if you climb out of one labyrinth, all you do is land in another.”

  The more they drank, the worse it got. John saw the joke in everything, life was a gray haze, and there was no finish line except death. Pete believes in materials and tools, jobs to do and payment for work performed. Leave the middle ground for the cowards. It’s black or it’s white. Take a stand.

  Another example: the poor. John always took the side of the down-and-out. He said if you spent five minutes honestly trying to see things from that end of the stick, it would change how you viewed the world. Pete considered that kind of thinking, to use his terminology, unmitigated crap.

  He had nothing against poor people, he said, who worked hard and played by the rules. But being poor was no more an excuse for anything than being an astronaut. History can’t be blamed for your sorry life—we’re all born into the same mess. We all come out of the womb a little lazier, a little weaker, a little needier than we’d like. And who honestly thinks he has enough money? Sooner or later you just have to suck it up, admit you’re on your own—no one is going to bail you out and nobody else is to blame—and get on with your business.

  To which John, with almost pathological irony, would say something like, “And what exactly is our business, Petey?”

  But as I’ve said, that was just one thing among dozens that stirred them up. They were on opposite sides of virtually every issue, and yet they also seemed, to the rest of us in the neighborhood, to be fast friends. In the end they always just poured another drink and slapped each other on the back. Which is why none of it makes any sense.

  It also brings me back to the reason I kept all this to myself.

  New Year’s morning, the day John died, he rang me up and asked if I’d come over and watch the game with him and Pete. He said things had ended a bit rough the night before and he felt the afternoon would go more smoothly with a referee of sorts in the room. “Pete tends to rein it in when he feels outnumbered,” he said. That smile of his.

  Well, I’ll admit, I couldn’t have been less interested. I mean, if you’d ever watched them go at it you’d understand. The thought of sitting there as they played Down the Hatch and eviscerated each other had about as much appeal as watching someone cut out his own liver.

  So I begged off. I made some excuse, a trip to my sister’s. “I’m afraid I’m obliged to wander my own labyrinth today,” I said.

  John found that humorous, actually.

  You can imagine my shock, then, when I learned what happened. And everything else I felt. If only this, if only that, and so on. But I saw little point in speaking with the police. What purpose would it serve? It can’t bring John back. And Pete confessed. What more does anyone need to know?

  —7—

  I have served on the bench in this county for twenty years, in civil and criminal and probate division. I have listened to thousands of arguments and issued as many rulings. I have come to accept that, despite all the trappings of the law, there is no justice. There is, in the end, only a decision.

  Permit me to explain myself.

  I have had the same court clerk for almost my entire tenure, and have come to rely upon what others might belittle as her fussy exactitude. She wears high-collared blouses and mid-calf skirts, nothing more than a one-inch heel, flesh-colored hose. Her jewelry consists of her wedding band, a wristwatch, faux-pearl earrings with a matching necklace: nothing more. Ever. Her footfall is quick and hard—you can hear her coming from halfway down the corridor. She can, admittedly, come across as a bit of a martinet.

  And yet any belief that her life is pinched or dry or unloving would be wildly off the mark.

  I’ve met her husband—an ample, balding, rumpled sort, the kind of cog-in-the-wheel who passes unnoticed, I’d imagine, all day every day. But make no mistake: the man adores that woman.

  And yet their marriage is, to be kind, a trifle strange. They barely converse—no, it’s more than that, they hardly utter a word to each other, as though whatever once needed to be said was long ago ritualized into habit: a gesture, a smile, a nod.

  Once, early on, when they invited me over for dinner, I’d barely spent five minutes in their house before feeling like I’d been trapped in amber. And yet, as the evening wore on, I came to recognize in the silence between them the kind of stillness one encounters in the desert. And like the desert, it secretly abounds with life.

  I have come to envy that. Who doesn’t hope to discover someday that the emptiness isn’t, in fact, empty?

  This is what I was thinking, sitting there in my robes, perched at the bench, when, right in front of me, the defendant rose from his chair in the middle of the medical examiner’s testimony, took the bible he’d been holding, and slammed it down onto the floor, bellowing, “Why are we wasting all this time? Why piss away good people’s tax money? Get on with it!”

  I’ve had disruptions in my court before, of course, but this was unique. The man began to laugh. And with that it felt as though time had opened up and swallowed us all. I don’t know how else to explain it.

  Still laughing, the man latched his gaze onto my bailiff and began marching toward the bench. Toward me. “This what it’s gonna take? Am I gonna have to do this?”

  My bailiff exhibited commendable restraint. He drew his sidearm but did not fire. The defendant, he would later explain, did not yet pose a credible threat, and was unarmed. You can’t kill a man for mockery.

  In that moment’s hesitation, to kill or not kill, I recognized the whole of justice. A decision was made.

  —8—

  See it all the time. Suicide by cop. Told myself, don’t give him the satisfaction.

  He took one look at my weapon and all thought of harming the judge must’ve melted away, because he turned from the bench and came straight at me. Daring me to shoot him. Instead I waited till he came in close and just coldcocked him, hard, blow to the temple, my gun hand. Man hit the deck like a magnet dragged him down.

  No trouble after that. I got him cuffed while he was still dazed and on the floor, and pretty quick a swarm of deputies showed up. We took him away and put him in the holding cell we have here in the courthouse, called medical staff to see to his head, which was cut and bleeding a little. Let him sit there awhile, I thought, cool off, though by that point he didn’t look all that riled up anymore. More just baffled and kinda impatient, seemed to me, like he had some appointment to keep and we were all in the way.

  Just as I was turning away to get back to court, his eyes met mine and held for a second. And I remembered this one time with my granddad on our way back from church. We’d taken a different route home that day, and were walking down a street in the nicer neighborhood that bordered ours. Big old houses with screened-in porches, giant oak trees shading the lawns—and all the good people staring out at us from behind their curtains, like even in our Sunday suits we might rush in, steal everything we could get our hands on, rape the women, kill the men.

  Granddad said, “I want you to remember this day. Remember it good.” Then he took my hand and held it, real gentle. Felt like my fingers were wrapped in leather. “You live up to your own expectations, young man. Not down to theirs.”

  —9—

  Let me tell you how it is. I was a trustee here at the jail, worked the food cart. There ain’t no dining hall in here like they got up at Quentin or Folsom. Here the inmates all eat in their cells, two hots and one not, though “hot” is kinda relative, if you follow me.

  Routine went like this: I come by with the cart and deliver the trays one at a time through a thigh-high slot in the door, which is solid, thick, made of steel, okay? If there’s a specialty menu to consider, like diabetic or gluten-free or kosher, I identify that tray when I’m sliding it through. Otherwise they all get the same food, so there ain’t no fights—trust me, some of these nitwits will ki
ll over a goddamn cupcake. There’s usually four to five inmates in a cell, and a small table in there where they all eat.

  That’s the system, okay?

  After whatever happened in the courtroom, some outburst or whatever it was, they moved NK, the Neighbor Killer, to the Isolation Pod and put him on suicide watch. Iso means you’re in there by all by your lonesome, and they check in on you every half hour, but from my ’spective it meant there ain’t no issue about whose tray belongs to who.

  And that, if you follow me, means, let’s say, that if somebody in here wants to deliver a little something to a specific inmate in Iso Pod, there’s a way. Understand?

  Okay, so come lunchtime I’m stacking trays on my cart and one of the other trustees, inmate who works in the kitchen (I’d prefer to keep this no-name for now), he takes me aside.

  “You hear what that fool did up in court yesterday?”

  He means NK. I tell him I heard in general, no particulars.

  “Tried to get the bailiff to take him out. Like just by raising a little fuss he gonna get his sorry ass killed.”

  I agreed, that sounded slight.

  He says, “Man gotta understand you need to go big or go home you wanna make a weak-ass bailiff, does nothing but collect dust most days, shoot you dead.”

  Then he looks around, make sure ain’t nobody watching, and he slips this toothbrush been honed to a point, wrapped in a note. “You tape this up under his tray, slip it to him.”

  I try to tell him it ain’t that simple, guard standing right there as I pass along the tray, watching me like a hawk.

  “Then you better make it simple. Ain’t just the damn guard watching now.”

  See what I’m saying? No choice in the matter. Do what I’m told or I get done.

  Well, I had a chance to duck inside the toilet and check out the package. Standard-issue shank, plastic probably softened with a cigarette lighter then shaped and sharpened against a brick or cinder block. It was the note that was non-standard, if you know what I mean.