“What do you mean you started smoking crack?”
“What’s vague about that?”
“There’s nothing vague about it, it’s just incredibly bizarre don’t you think?”
“No.”
“Well where’d you get the crack from?”
“I bought it, on the street. Where I was living there was no shortage of places.”
“You could’ve been arrested! Your career would have been over. Not to mention the embarrassment. Everyone would’ve thought you were a crackhead.”
“As far as my career goes I can scarcely think of anything I attach less importance to, with the possible exception of my concern for how others view me. The very reason I was buying and smoking crack was to prove these same people wrong. They say perfection in human endeavors is impossible. I say they’re partly right. It is impossible, for them, but not for me or a select few others. Besides the risk is minimal if you take precautions.”
“So what happened?”
“I put it in my pipe and smoked it.”
“How many times?”
“Several”
“And?”
“And what?”
“What did it feel like?”
“Pleasure. Extreme pleasure in a way that makes everything else irrelevant. At first, it seemed like all other pleasures like sex and good food were merely facets of this larger pleasure.”
“Have you smoked any since?”
“No.”
“Weren’t you worried you might become addicted? Did you at any point feel it becoming addictive, feel it becoming a need?”
“It was more like an objective realization that if I had nothing else going on, if I didn’t have sufficient access to other pleasures, I could see myself wanting to do nothing else. It was another challenge because there’s a weakness involved with addiction. But please kids, don’t try it at home. Anyway, the crack wasn’t the point. Perfection was and the drug use was done solely in service of that goal. The end result was that those weeks allowed me to prep Barnes perfectly to testify because I had a special insight into what form this individual’s testimony would take.”
“So it went to trial?”
“It did, which introduced the most important party to any trial, the jury. I thought a lot about jurors and the expectations and biases they bring to the process. I feel that defense attorneys ignore the role of mass media in shaping juror attitudes to their extreme detriment. As research, I read or watched every single popular depiction of our criminal justice system. This included reading fictional legal thrillers for example. This was no small sacrifice as these books are uniformly and horribly bad. They all have these galactically idiotic names like Proof of Service or Notice of Appeal too. Nonetheless, they are extremely popular so I read them and in the process gained insight into the layman’s hack warped view.
Knowledge of what jurors bring with them and what they expect when they come into a courtroom to sit on a case is the single most important area of knowledge to have if you’re trying to get an acquittal. Jurors are conditioned to expect and want dramatic performances but at the same time, for a particular kind of juror that we encounter often in Manhattan, their ego can’t help but be implicated. As a result, although it is probably true that the more smooth and polished you are the more persuasive you’ll be, I believe this is only true to a point. If you cross that point you now implicate the juror’s ego and he becomes cognizant of not wanting to feel he’s been hoodwinked by a silver-tongued salesman. If you think I’m wrong ask yourself this. How many times following an acquittal have you spoken to the jurors? What you find invariably is that a substantial portion of them will be falling all over themselves in their rush to tell you what you did wrong and how it wasn’t really your arguments that led them to vote not guilty but rather something that they thought of on their own once they started deliberating. This is a juror who most likely went against every preconception she had when she entered the courtroom and voted to acquit but before she goes home she wants to convince herself that she did so based on objective facts and not your performance. Seems to me it stands to reason that this popular emotion can often be an impediment to acquittals.
Because of this, a bit of intentional fumbling or display of nerves can be useful in creating the perception in these jurors that to the extent they find an attorney’s argument compelling they do so not as a result of any skillful, read deceptive, oratory by that attorney, but rather due to the argument’s logical appeal stemming from its relationship to the truth. With that in mind, during the trial I had to skillfully negotiate the line between a perfect performance, which one instinctively feels should be highly polished, and a truly perfect performance which includes some appearance of imperfection in order to create a more acquittal-friendly atmosphere.
The trial lasted about a week. My performance was perfect. Perfect pretrial legal arguments and perfect voir dire rounds followed by perfect selections then a perfect opening. Of course those things were under a great deal of my control so I was never really concerned. The people’s witnesses were a greater challenge since I was then being asked to achieve the perfect in conjunction with an openly antagonistic party. Well I did it. Perfect crosses of the kind usually reserved for the stupid movies.
Then Barnes testified. I directed him perfectly and he held up beautifully under cross thanks to the perfect preparation. All that was left was for me to give a perfect summation and then get an acquittal of course. If I did that I would have achieved my goal; a goal I had worked tirelessly at for five months. I had overnight to work on the summation. I had written it months ago and it required little revision. I spent my time the night before reflecting. I had no doubts about the upcoming acquittal. The DA was a beaten shell who if given a vote probably would herself have cast it to acquit. The jurors had set aside their poker faces and seemed to be openly rooting for my success. They were in the presence of a progressing perfection and they seemed to recognize this. They seemed to understand that a meaningless criminal case paled in comparison to what was being achieved before their very disbelieving eyes and with their near-compulsory complicity.
In the morning I would deliver this perfectly-reasoned, perfectly argued, and perfectly-rhetorically-pitched speech. I would do so without notes, which wouldn’t be necessary since by that point the summation was as much a part of me as my nose. I would deliver it with the perfect tone for the situation and then I would be done. Perfection would become a part of my being. For the rest of my life I would know what I had always suspected, that I was not bound by the limitations of the average person. I was better, and better in a way that couldn’t be quantified. I would stand alone in my perfection. I would be greater than God. God is perfect merely by definition. And it is his tautological perfection, not his own will, that makes his every deed perfect. I on the other hand would have created perfection out of imperfection, an altogether greater achievement.
The next morning I stood up prepared to take my rightfully lofty place in the universe of mortal achievement. The whole thing would take twenty-two minutes. Twenty-odd minutes and I would float out of that courtroom to compose my resignation and start looking for other fields to conquer. And so it went, with everything proceeding as planned until I neared a dramatic pause I had installed near the end. I’d decided that the pause would go on just a little too long to be comfortable in order to create some of the purposeful imperfection I spoke of earlier. The problem was that when it came time to come out of the pause I couldn’t fucking remember what came next! I stood there looking at these fucking jurors knowing that every second that passed my dream—the word dream is woefully inadequate here, it was a fucking obsession, a life and death need—was slipping away. When too much time had passed for me to possibly reconcile I felt my actual heart being squeezed and lost my breath. Then I slammed my hand down on the podium screamed damnation and sat the hell down.”
“Why? You could’ve just played it off. Easily too. Someone like you? Nobo
dy would’ve known the difference.”
“Too late, I knew. I knew I had failed. I had to abide by the conditions I’d imposed on myself. I had to be honest or else the whole thing would reduce to mere charade. I knew this particular imperfection hadn’t been planned. It was a mistake. An error beyond my control. Imperfection at a time when my every action was geared toward the pursuit of perfection and what could be more demoralizing? I credit myself for not having immediately broken down into tears. I was furious. At myself. At life. At my lot to be no better than anyone else.”
“What happened?”
“I just told you.”
“I mean the verdict.”
“They acquitted him in like nine minutes but who cared at that point? I bailed out of there in record time. The jurors wanted to talk to me, probably to ask what had gotten me so angry. I went into my office and barred the door. I had a dartboard in my office back then and I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to hit the bull’s-eye with my eyes closed. When I finally did I went home and drank. A lot.”
“Damn, you needed maybe some perspective. You tried a case probably better than anybody else ever has and as a result you got an almost instantaneous acquittal on a dead case.”
“Listen don’t get me wrong. I’m way over it now. But what happened in that courtroom that morning was nothing short of devastating. I had trouble coping. I looked for ways to atone. I thought about writing a perfect appeal. What I found in my preliminary investigation is that writing is an often unsatisfying process even more fraught with error.”
“Fuck yeah.”
“The rest of my practice had gone to shit too. My other clients barely knew my name and I somehow felt bad about this. Acting like such a responsible attorney on the Barnes case made me actually feel like the responsible attorney I was emulating. I wasn’t able to separate the two. Seemed my actions determined my internal state more than the inverse and this new responsible internal state was devastated by the neglect I had visited on my other clients. I was lost. I hadn’t expected to still be doing this job. I spoke to a friend of mine at the time about my predicament. I told her what had happened and why it had me in a tailspin. She was a generally useless person this friend but she said one thing that stuck in my head and which finally allowed me to move on, to set my sights elsewhere. She said I was absolved of all blame because my project stemmed from crime and was therefore doomed to imperfection. In other words, the natural or perfect order of things is law-abidingness and because criminality deviates from this it is inherently imperfect. This imperfection then necessarily taints any attempts at perfection such as mine that stem from crime. Now a greater crock of shit than this is hard to envision but it got me thinking about the nature of crime and for that I am grateful.”
“Grateful why?”
“Let me put it this way. Have you ever imagined what your performance would be like if you were suddenly cast in a different role than defense attorney? I have lost cases, though thankfully not many. That said, I am certain that if I was a DA, with the advantages attached to that position, the greatest being the ability to exercise a great deal of control over which cases go to trial, I would never lose a case.”
“Never might be too strong a word but in general I agree.”
“What this means is that being a prosecutor is an easier job when the job is defined as the successful acquisition of legal victories. So if you define perfection in one instance as never losing a trial, having a perfect trial record, the prosecution of criminal cases is more susceptible to perfection, whether attainable or not, than criminal defense. Now turn your attention to our clients whose job, so to speak, is to successfully commit crimes. Success obviously involves evading prosecution so in one sense all of our clients are already imperfect failures. Have you ever envisioned yourself, or a comparable other, seriously engaged in the practice of crime? How difficult is the criminal’s job in relation to others in the criminal justice system? Well one thing that seems true about crime as a profession is that you far more often see the types of errors that boggle the mind in their stupidity. So you hear about the bank robber who writes the demanding note on his personal stationery. Or the defendant who wears the proceeds of his larcenous activity, unique lizard-skin boots, to the trial on those charges.”
“Or the defendant representing himself who asks the complainant in an identification case whether or not she got a good look at him!”
“Or the robber who parks his getaway car in a tow-away zone with predictable results.”
“Or the guy who stumbles onto a movie set and surrenders to actors portraying cops only to be held for later arrest by the real thing.”
“You get the idea. Is there something about crime that makes not only perfection but simple competence such a challenge? I’ve done my research and it does appear that crime gives rise to a higher incidence of error than your average process. Nonetheless, I think that the commission of a perfect crime is possible and I view crime’s imperfect nature as a challenge which can potentially create a higher order of perfection. More importantly, what ultimately proved therapeutic to me and what has taken me to the crossroads I’m at today is the notion that I can kill all of the birds currently fluttering about my head with one large beautiful stone. Incidentally, these birds also circle yours so you’d do well to listen attentively.”
“What?”
“What?”
“What do you mean?”
“What?”
“What birds?”
“Oh, these birds. For one, although I’m by no means poor, I have nowhere near the amount of money I want or deserve. That’s exacerbated by the fact that in my current condition I need to quit my job soon. Of course, for you matters are far more pressing.”
“What do you know about it?”
“Second, there’s the matter of my fascination with the Perfect and my consequent need to achieve perfection vis-à-vis becoming Godlike and so forth.”
“A fascination I don’t share.”
“Nonsense. I seem to recall you saying that what makes a caper compelling is the idea that you can execute it without flaw. Sufficient planning and intelligence were I believe referred to.”
“That’s fantasy.”
“How many trials you done?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, how many jury trials have you done alone or as lead attorney?”
“Twelve.”
“And how many of those have you won again? How many resulted in acquittals?”
“All of them.”
“A perfect record.”
“Whenever I’ve tried a case I wanted desperately to win but—”
“More accurately, you were terrified of losing.”
“Maybe. But in every case my effort was directed towards a particular result in that instance and for that individual, not in service of some higher pursuit of overall perfection.”
“Lastly, there are my thoughts, which I have previously expressed to you, regarding a legacy and the fact that I simply cannot stand idly by watching all sorts of lesser talents build impressive legacies while I prepare to merely disappear without so much as a whimper.”
“So what’s your solution?”
“Imagine you and I committed the perfect crime, bearing in mind my definition of Perfect.”
“What are you possibly talking about?”
“Hear me out. Imagine this crime involved an astronomical amount of money. Now imagine that aside from being committed perfectly, this crime was of such a compelling nature and committed in such a sensational way that it intrigued our information-saturated world with its perfection. With our pursuit of perfection and avarice satiated we could wait for some suitable time when we could not be prosecuted, for example on our deathbed or after the running of the statute of limitations, and we could confess in painstaking detail thereby ensuring our legacy as History’s sole purveyors of perfected crime. What do you think?”
“You don’t want to know. I’v
e got to get the hell out of here too Dane. This is like the longest lunch ever and I have work to do.”
“Go ahead I’ll wait for the waiter, it could be hours.”
“Here, this should cover it.”
“What about tomorrow?”
“What about it?”
“Lunch.”
“No. I’ve got 180.80s, I’ll be swamped all day.”
“After work then, drinks.”
“Can’t, I’m meeting some doctor.”
“What’s your ailment?”
“No it’s like a date deal.”
“That word still used?”
“Deal?”
“No, date.”
“No. But speaking of ailments, what is your current condition?”
“What?”
“The one that necessitates you quitting soon?”
“Oh yeah. I’m dying.”
“You’re what-ing?”
“There’s that bastard waiter, fucking guy should tip me. Let me snag him else I stay here all day, later.”
“Yeah.”
I walked into Conley’s office with a rare legitimate purpose that I immediately forgot when beset by its panasonic air. Inside was the usual trio of Conley, Liszt, and Debi. But also there was Julia dangling a shiny pump off her stockinged foot, Toomberg with a frayed Penal Law in his mitts, and Cleary with his white collar. Cleary got to wear the cool collar because in addition to being a barely competent attorney he was also, I fuck with you not, a Catholic priest. Unfortunately for Father Cleary his true favorite spirits assumed liquid form and underneath his shellacked yellow lid of hair, which seemed to hover in suspension above his perfectly circular melon, his face wore burst blood vessels in the shape of spider webs as evidence.
A Naked Singularity: A Novel Page 24
