“If you want to get in touch again, you know my file name.”
The screen went blank, but William continued to sleep restlessly for another three hours, and when he did wake he’d forgotten everything about the dream except that his father had been in it and that they’d flown together above the city and that at the end of the dream he had told him the name of the file to access on the computer if he needed to see him again. But what that name was he could not remember.
BOOK FOUR
40
With luck Jimmy Deeters might still be let off. Even though he was nineteen now and had graduated from the Family Court to this dump, he looked a lot younger. There were places downtown where he got asked for his ID when he wanted to buy a pack of fucking cigarettes, and as for getting a drink in a bar outside his own neighborhood, forget it. But today, according to Wiener, the dipshit Legal Defense lawyer assigned to his case, it might turn out to be a plus that he didn’t look his age. The dipshit thought the D.A. had messed up on Friday when he let the old lady with the bandaged foot be on the jury. She was a grandmother of five, and maybe she would take it in her head to hold out against a conviction, seeing as Jimmy was still basically a kid and shouldn’t have to be sent up for two to five years, which was what he was facing, less for the snatch than for assaulting an officer and resisting arrest. So when he’d come in to the court today he didn’t wear the camo he wore on Friday, when they were picking the jury, but a Twins T-shirt that belonged to his kid brother and a pair of chino pants. But the old lady had also come in wearing a different outfit. The bandage was off her foot and she was dressed in a baggy black dress like she was coming to a funeral. Which was not, Jimmy thought, a good sign, ‘cause whose funeral would that be but his?
The old lady’s sympathy was about all he had to bank on, because there was no way to deny that he’d done what he was charged with. The bitch he’d grabbed the purse from had been a police decoy, and she had two partners who witnessed the whole thing. He’d been set up, but it was all supposed to be legal, as the county prosecutor had explained to each person who was examined to be on the jury, and each one of them, including Granny, had to agree that they didn’t see anything wrong with using decoys. So really all he could hope for was sympathy on account of his looking like a slightly older Gary Coleman. He would have plea-bargained if they’d let him, but because of his record they wouldn’t. They were out to nail him and send him to Stillwater for two to five.
His record was what would wreck him, even with the grandmother of five, but Wiener said they wouldn’t be able to bring up all that shit if he didn’t take the stand in his own defense. Anyhow, according to all the guys he’d talked to, that was almost never a good idea. But as it turned out they got to read his whole Family Court arrest record to the jury anyhow, and Wiener only made it worse shouting out “Objection!” each time, and each time the two lawyers would go up and whisper to the judge, and the judge would say “Objection overruled” in this real bored voice, and the other lawyer would smile this smile of his at the jury and read the shit on this sheet of paper the size of a fucking newspaper: February 2, 1976, second degree arson; August 14, 1976, third degree attempted burglary; November 20, 1976, attempted rape. Et fucking cetera. What Jimmy hated more than the look on the asshole’s face when he was reading through the list was how almost everything was “attempted.” Like he’d never actually been able to carry through on anything. Which wasn’t true, those were just the times he was caught. But what could he say? Objection, Your Honor, I’m better than that!
At a certain point Jimmy got depressed and forgot what he’d been told by Wiener, always to try and look innocent. Which meant not to react to what was being said about him but just to keep his eyes on the table in front of him like he was in school. Not an easy trick when everyone in the room was staring at him like he was a fucking werewolf. None of them were hiding the way they felt about him. They all wanted to nail him, even the grandmother of five. You could tell from the way her lips had got all squeezed together, the way she wouldn’t look at him anymore. Fuck looking innocent! Fuck the jury! Fuck them all!
When the decoy started in on her testimony, Jimmy turned round in his plastic chair and looked at the people in the back of the courtroom. Wiener nudged him, and he told Wiener to fuck off. This might be his last act of freedom for two to five years. There were not many familiar faces. His own mother had taken off, and the only person he knew was Ms. Tough Titty, his old probation officer, who must have come for the sheer enjoyment of seeing him shafted. That’s what was going to happen, no doubt about it. This was not Family Court, this was the real thing. This was Stillwater, and for what? For a fucking purse with nothing but fucking confetti in it.
A courtroom they called it! He’d seen courtrooms on TV and he knew this was no fucking courtroom. This was just a waiting room where everyone had to sit on plastic chairs, everyone but the fucking judge. And the judge was no judge, just some kid out of college, still so young they wouldn’t have let him on a golf course except as a caddy. Two to five years, because he’d been carrying a piece! He hadn’t tried to use it, he hadn’t even reached for it, even when he’d got loose from the decoy’s first partner. So he was carrying a piece, what did they think? That some bitch was going to say, “Oh sure, honey, here’s my purse, just help yourself to what’s in it.” He’d never used the fucking piece, and never meant to, but they were going to nail his ass anyhow. Unless someone on the jury agreed with Wiener that there was a reasonable doubt.
Which there wasn’t.
Now it was the decoy’s partner’s turn to tell his story. He was some old Uncle Tom who didn’t look like a cop at all. He might have been the twin brother of the grandmother of five. Jimmy wished he had used his piece, even if it had meant thirty to life, just so as not to have to listen to the bastard recite his answers to the D.A. Yes, he could point out the perpetrator. Yes, the perpetrator was here in courtroom. Yes, that was the weapon he had removed from the defendant.
But the absolutely worst part and what made the whole thing seem like a nightmare was that all the while they were setting him up for his two to five years there was this goddamned little student sitting in the back row of plastic chairs taking notes like he was in a fucking classroom. In a fucking Izod polo shirt. A schoolkid. Every time Jimmy turned round to look at him he looked away, but when he looked again the kid would be staring at him, with his lips squeezed tight like the old lady on the jury. Jesus Christ, wasn’t there a law to keep kids out of courtrooms?
The judge announced there was going to be a recess, which meant the jurors got a free lunch. For Jimmy it meant he could go to the toilet, which was down the end of the hall on the right. On the left were the elevators, and the stairs, and the guard. Wiener, who had been full of talk up till now, suddenly didn’t have anything to say. He sat at the table and avoided Jimmy’s questions by working a crossword puzzle in the newspaper.
Jimmy went out into the hall. The guard was there in front of the elevators where he always was, looking like he wished Jimmy would make a dash for it and give him a chance to lay into him. At the other end of the hall the kid who’d been sitting in the back row of the courtroom with the notebook was standing in front of the men’s room holding the door open, as though he couldn’t make up his mind whether to go in or go out. When he saw Jimmy, he let go of the door and started walking toward the elevators, looking down at the rubber tiles, as though if he’d looked straight at Jimmy, he’d have caught some kind of disease. Jimmy moved out into the middle of the hallway, so the kid would have to walk around him, and the kid, with his eyes glued to the floor, didn’t even notice till he was just a few feet away. He stopped and said “Excuse me,” and when Jimmy didn’t move, he walked around him and went back into the courtroom.
Jimmy thought of going after the kid, but if he did, what then? Wiener was in there. Fuck them all. Jimmy just wanted to be by himself. And the only way to do that, with the guard watching him like a hawk, was t
o go down the hall to the men’s room. He figured he would take one last small revenge on Hennepin County by pissing on the floor. But as soon as he’d gone inside, he forgot all about what he’d meant to do, because lying on the tiled floor just in front of the door to the first of the toilet stalls was a small red change purse. He almost laughed out loud, because he knew that it must have fallen out of the kid’s pocket when he’d come out of the crapper. Who else but a wimp like that would keep his money in a change purse? At least, he hoped there was money in it.
There was. A five-dollar bill and some change. He hadn’t really expected more than that, not in a fucking change purse.
He pocketed the money and threw the change purse into the waste bin. Then, feeling a little peculiar, he went into the toilet stall, locked the door behind him, and sat down on the toilet seat without even bothering to take down his pants.
When the guard was dispatched, a few minutes later, to bring the defendant back to the courtroom for the conclusion of his trial, he was discovered in the locked toilet stall, dead. The County Medical Officer was summoned at once from his office two blocks away and declared that the cause of death was apparently asphyxiation. As a drug overdose seemed to be the probable underlying cause, an autopsy was performed within hours, but there were no traces of any drug in his system. His asphyxiation seemed to have been entirely spontaneous. Mrs. Deeters was interviewed on the Evening News and denounced her son’s death as a clear case of police brutality. The Urban League backed her demand for an investigation, but really there could be no suspicion of foul play. There were no signs of a struggle, and the toilet stall had been locked from inside. Even Mrs. Deeters came to accept the fact that her son’s death had been an act of God and, very likely, a punishment for his sins.
41
The ambulance pulled up to the main entrance of the courthouse at two forty-five, according to the clock on the tower of the building. William had been pacing back and forth alongside the wall of endlessly cascading water in the plaza of the Government Center across the street. The attendants wheeled a stretcher in through the courthouse’s low, barrel-vaulted entrance. William was sure that Deeters was dead, but he wanted to see them bring the body out of the building. If they didn’t turn the siren on when they drove away, that would mean Deeters had died right there in the bathroom, as soon as he opened the purse.
He hadn’t expected it to happen so fast, and he was shaken up, not so much on account of what he’d done, but because it hadn’t gone according to plan. From what he’d read in the medical book, he’d supposed that Deeters would continue breathing regularly until he fell asleep that night—probably in a jail cell. William had counted on being present to hear the jury deliver its verdict and the judge hand down his sentence and to see Deeters produce one final scowl. After Deeters’s guilt had been officially recognized in that way, William’s unofficial death sentence would have seemed less of an act of vigilante justice. But now that Deeters was dead, those scruples didn’t disturb William’s conscience. Deeters had been a dreadful person, and he would surely have gone on being a dreadful person for the rest of his life. A couple of years in prison wouldn’t have changed that. Arson, burglary, rape—all before he’d turned eighteen. And a look in his eyes all through the trial like he’d have liked to add murder to the list of his accomplishments. The world would definitely be a better place, and Minneapolis a safer city, without James Deeters.
But he shouldn’t have died there in the courthouse, with William still in the vicinity. That had been a major error in judgment of William’s, and that’s what had set his heart to pounding so that even now, an hour and a half after the courtroom had been cleared, he still couldn’t trust himself to think clearly. What if the guard had noticed him coming out of the bathroom just before Deeters had gone in? What if someone remembered him being in the courtroom and simply tried to locate him as a witness? But a witness of what? He was being panicky about nothing. Still, it had been a mistake to be present in the courtroom, even with the excuse ready to hand (an excuse that was halfway true) that he was watching the trial as part of a report he had to make for a summer school Civics class. As it turned out, no one had seemed even to notice his presence in the courtroom except the defendant, who had scowled at him a couple of times when he wasn’t scowling at the D.A. or the witnesses. The reason he’d felt he should be at the trial was that he didn’t want to zap anyone—even someone who was guilty as hell—who seemed to be basically a good person. Which had turned out to be the situation at the first trial he’d started watching, on Thursday, a man who’d got drunk and stabbed his wife in the shoulder and then threatened two policemen with a gun. Not a nice thing to do, but the man seemed sorry for it, and he was not someone who made his living preying on innocent people. Like Deeters. Deeters had deserved what he got.
But why had it happened so soon? According to what he’d read in the textbook, apnea (which was the general condition that Ondine’s curse was just the most extreme example of) was always connected with sleep. The commonest kind of apnea and what the textbook mostly discussed was snoring. And from the definition of Ondine’s curse it seemed logical to suppose that it was also connected with sleeping. Without even trying to, just by having studied it so carefully, William had memorized that definition: “Ondine’s curse, a primary insensitivity of the medulla’s respiratory center, of unknown origin, which impairs the reflex drive so that breathing becomes voluntary and no longer automatic.” Or, in the simpler words of the “Stranger Than Fiction!” column of the Green Magician comic book where he’d first learned of the existence of Ondine’s curse: “The doomed victims of Ondine’s curse never realize the danger they are in until it’s too late! This rare disorder short-circuits the part of the brain that makes you go on breathing without having to think. With Ondine’s curse you can only keep breathing as long as you think about it! And when you finally can’t keep from falling asleep, then it’s Lights Out—forever! You stop breathing—and Die of Asphyxiation!!”
When William had first read that in “Stranger Than Fiction!” almost a year ago, he’d dismissed it as a fabrication. But he kept remembering the accompanying half-page drawing of a blue-faced corpse with one hand clutching at the collar of his pajamas. And then, on Tuesday, when the phone call had come from Rhoda Winckelmeyer in Florida and he realized that he would have to act quickly to help Judith, he’d recalled that picture again and, on the hunch that Ondine’s curse might be a real disease after all, he’d gone into his stepfather’s study, where he kept his medical books. Ben liked to claim that he had a better medical library than most doctors, and he subscribed to a dozen medical journals and had them bound in buckram bindings. It seemed a fair bet that if Ondine’s curse was more than a comic book artist’s fantasy, there would be something about it in one of these books. But a library without a librarian can be as useless as a computer without software. Tracking down a single rare disease among all those tomes had been like looking for a needle in a haystack, and William had almost given up the search when, in the index of a two-inch-thick Introduction to Neurophysiology, he had spied the needle’s glint: “Ondine’s curse: see apnea.” Looking up “apnea” he was directed to page 465, where in a long paragraph about breathing disorders, for which “apnea” is the technical term, he’d found the short definition of Ondine’s curse that proved that the disease existed.
But the medical book had not said in so many words that someone with Ondine’s curse only stopped breathing when he went to sleep. Even the comic book said you only went on breathing as long as you think of it. Deeters must not have realized what was happening to him. It was hard to believe that someone could be dying of asphyxiation and not start gasping for breath. It would be like drowning, a reflex. But a person with Ondine’s curse didn’t have that reflex anymore. Deeters must have died in the courthouse bathroom almost as soon as he’d opened the change purse William had cursed with the caduceus:
Take the money from this purse
And you will suffer Ondine’s curse.
He’d drowned in the open air without even knowing he was drowning.
At three o’clock, just as the bells of the tower began to ring the hour, the two medics wheeled the stretcher out of the courthouse. The body on the stretcher was covered with a sheet, and when the ambulance drove away it did not sound its siren. Deeters was dead.
He thought that being a murderer would have made more of a difference in the way he felt. He’d expected he’d have to contend with guilt or remorse or an urge to confess what’d he done. But all he felt was relief that it was over, as though he’d been traveling for days and days on an endless bus ride. He took a long, lung-filling yawn and then another deeper yawn, and even as he did so it came over him what a strange and wonderful mechanism the human body was. The heart pumping the blood round and round, and the lungs working like a microscopic filling station fueling the red corpuscles with oxygen, and the brain’s mainframe firing off its strings of commands to all parts of the system. Was there anything else in the world so profoundly beautiful, so endlessly, intricately interesting? He stretched his arms up high over his head and clenched his fists and drew another, deeper breath, bending back his head to feel the muscles in his neck, drawing his elbows down slowly, conscious of the flexions of his shoulders and his back.
Out of nowhere came an intense urge to run. Not away from anything, but from the sheer joy of inhabiting his flesh. Or better still, to swim! To feel his muscles meshing together in a single smooth continuous effort. To feel cold water slide across his skin, defining its geometries. Suddenly the statue he had passed in the courthouse lobby, the statue of a naked, bearded man sitting on top of an alligator (a sign had identified him as “Mississippi—Father of Waters”), instead of seeming ridiculous, seemed to make sense, completely and logically, though it was not a logic he could have explained. There was something in the whiteness and smoothness of the marble and in the calmness and the strength and the size of the figure on the pedestal that declared that the body, in itself, was like a god. The Greeks had understood that and had filled all their temples with statues of naked bodies for that season.
THE M.D. A Horror Story Page 24
