The Life of the World to Come
Page 4
Professor Barnes spruced her papers and strode out crisply, trailed as always by her stern TA.
“Well, that was sufficiently terrifying,” said a weary Boots.
“Stop it,” I replied, stashing my notebooks away. “You did great, and you know you did great, and, most importantly, she knows you did great.”
“This coming from Captain Needle-Thinker, who somehow manages to cut to the moral core of the issue even when he’s just trying to avoid the third degree.”
“Yeah, I sort of lucked out there. Who knew she’d pick today to go maudlin on us for the first time ever?”
A voice from behind:
“Hey Bootsie. Hey nun from Dead Man Walking.”
“Clever,” I said.
Sona Gasparyan was the third fifth of our study group, and the only one of my classmates apart from Boots with whom I would ever voluntarily have a conversation about, say, the Nature of Existence. She was harsh, affected, a year my senior, the sort of person for whom the word “coquettish” was invented (“more like ‘cokeheadish,’” she’d dryly retort, apropos of nothing, after I first advanced the theory). Like Billie Holiday’s, her voice was dark and thick—positively glutinous in its slow, low, deep-blue streams of brassiness and cheek—so much so that it nearly repudiated her rather charming physical brevity, which was marked by an elastic, feline slenderness, a perpetually wicked expression, and a dense, cascading forest of wild black hair. She was going to be a prosecutor, and had all the requisite opinions and insecurities. I saw her cry, once, walking home after a party, and she told me that I was the only person who had ever seen her cry. She was a liar.
“Mr. Brice, you’re soooooo emotionally connected to the material.”
“Okay.”
“So scrupulous.”
“Thanks.”
“You really get it. You know? You … just … get it.”
“Alright, Sona.”
“Mr. Brice, will you put a sensitive baby in me?”
“There it is.”
“Come on, you crazy kids,” interjected Boots, “we gotta go get smart.”
The study group, such as it was, met in KF-1 (the William Burnham Woods Room) on the third floor of the law library every Tuesday after Barnes and every Thursday after Boots and Emily could extricate themselves from their clinical office. Prim, cerebral Emily Roca had started dating Boots on or around the fourth night of 1L orientation; she was probably the smartest of us, and almost certainly the most committed to the ostensible aims of the group qua group. Though she was square in all the ways that Boots was not (and literally so: from her fastidious blond bangs to her quadratic face to her ponderous, square-rimmed glasses), they were reliable to each other and, as a unit, to the world. Nobody could, or would ever want to, say an unkind word about Emily—she did everything right, humbly, and without complaint. I liked the way that she mellowed Boots as they grew up together, just as I liked the way that he frayed some of her neatly-hemmed edges. They were just one of those couples.
Gracie Coolahan was our last member. I’d met her in a gender justice reading collective during our second semester—every week, nine women, myself, and a confounded French masters student would sit cross-legged on scratchy zabutons in Professor Talia Zimmerman’s cozy, quirky office and discuss male privilege over wine and beer. I’d come to feminism ignobly, sophomore year of college, on the tracks of a hopeless crush named Marlena, but soon graduated to true believer. As for Gracie, she was perpetually elated, always in the market for her next full-bellied laugh; when she found it, she’d go limp, blithely ensnaring her nearest friends for abutment, infecting them with her gladness, draping their shoulders with her winding, woolly dreadlocks. She was my neurotic equal, and our young friendship proved substantial enough to survive the scholastic fracas that, just two months after its inaugural session, tore that reading collective apart.
“Hey y’all,” lilted Gracie on our arrival at KF-1.
“Who’s in charge of treats?” inquired Sona sharply.
“That’s me,” said Grace. “Jim Beam, and hard cider for Emily.”
“Cups?”
“Swigs.”
“I adore you, Gracie,” said Sona.
“Gracias, Gracie,” added Emily.
“De nada, darling.”
“Vamos a tomar!” Emily squealed, lofting her cider to the overhead light. I asked her what it meant, to which she replied, “come on, Leo—I thought you had a Spanish-speaking aunt?”
“Well,” I answered tepidly, “I mean, she isn’t really my aunt. And even if she was, that wouldn’t automatically just equip me with all Spanish.”
“Hey ladies,” Sona cooed breathlessly, “did you know Boots and Leo nearly—nearly—saved the world today?”
“No! How?” asked Gracie, ever the enabler.
“Passionate moral assault on the death penalty. You should’ve seen it!”
“You’re never going to drop this, right?” wondered Boots.
“I can’t just drop it. Everyone needs to know what good guys you are. Defending rights. Taking a stand. Stickin’ on up for justice. Seriously, though, it was just too ethical for words. There wasn’t a dry skirt in the house.”
“Gross,” squeaked Emily.
“I hope you and Fiona realize how lucky you are to have these decent young men, that’s all,” continued Sona.
“Boots isn’t young,” Emily pointed out, and—speaking relatively—this was true.
“Could we get started?” I said. “We don’t have a lot of time, and there’s almost nothing about this I understand.”
* * *
A brief note on death: it haunts me. Ever since I was five years old, I’ve been terrified by the unknowable abyss, the perpetual destination which I was stunned to discover represented the only certain part of my future. The way I pictured it was this: death was going to feel like being forcibly ejected into space. One minute you’d be here on the ground, the way you usually are, and then death would come and you’d feel light. And you’d lift, not fast, but insistently enough to stay afraid, and soon the very same buildings you used to go into and out of would begin to look like freckles on the face of the Earth, and after that, you’d cross into cold darkness, the lights growing fainter and fainter until there were no lights at all—not even from the stars, which you’d long passed by—and you’d keep drifting like that, untethered from all the things you loved, in a straight line out, forever.
I couldn’t comprehend, and I still can’t, the idea that I might not be conscious for the experience. In my mind, the screen never actually turns off—there’s just nothing being broadcast apart from the wall-to-wall black. I imagine there will be time to think. I imagine that time will be devastating and endless.
It was still winter when Boots and I each got e-mails from Katherine Barnes asking us to come meet her for lunch at the Faculty Club. Neither of us had been there before, nor had we ever exchanged words with her outside of class—nobody had, as far as we could tell.
“Misters Rosenbaum and Brice,” she began, after Boots and I slinked to the table where Barnes and her astringent TA were already stabbing at tiny, identical salads, despite the fact that we had arrived on time. “You each took my criminal procedure class this fall, yes?”
I turned to Boots awkwardly, as if to confirm.
“Y … yes, we both did,” he answered.
“And you stood out to me in that class?” she queried, seemingly, at least, before allowing the longest-ever six seconds of silence to tick away.
“I’m sorry Professor Barnes,” I spoke up at last, “was that a question?”
“No, I’m—I’m sorry, Mr. Brice—I’m saying that you did, as a matter of fact, stand out to me in that class. This is what I’m saying. You stood out to me on a particular issue that we covered on a couple of occasions, which happens to be why I’ve asked you to come here today. Said issue, Mr. Brice, is capital punishment,” she announced with another stab. “I’m sure you recall the conve
rsations the three of us had on the subject? You were the unfortunate two who took the bait, as it were—the metaphorical bait, that is, by which I mean you challenged me on the subject of death.”
“I remember,” said Boots.
“We—yes, we remember,” I added meekly.
“Would it surprise you to learn that I am in agreement with you both regarding capital punishment? By which I mean categorically opposed.”
It would. Her insistence on thinking about the needle aside, Katherine Barnes had been a celebrated prosecutor, the youngest U.S. Attorney in New York State history, and had the sort of tough-on-crime bona fides usually reserved for Reagan Republicans or Batman.
“I took the liberty of checking in with the Office of Career Services,” she continued. “Neither of you are going to firms next year?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“And neither of you applied for judicial clerkships?”
We shook a no.
“Do you mind, then, if I ask you the rather obvious question of what you plan on doing with yourselves upon graduating?”
Boots and I made eye contact again, warily. As third-year law students, we’d engaged in this ritual dozens of times before—with parents, friends, strangers, even—and it never grew more impressive or less humiliating.
“Well, I’m sort of interested in helping musicians,” offered Boots. “You know, independent musicians who need a lawyer to help them navigate the world … of music. The music business, I mean. See, I was a musician before law school. So, that’s the, uh, genesis story of why I want to maybe do that.”
“Legal … services … I think,” I hawed like a guilty child.
Barnes did us the monumental favor of withholding comment, and carried on just as though we’d said nothing at all.
“I’m involved—quietly involved, that is—in an organization in which I thought, perhaps, one or both of you might potentially have interest. This is a small, but I assure you sleek, non-profit organization that works to exonerate wrongfully convicted death row inmates. They do fantastic work in that regard, and they need thoughtful lawyers. It’s hard; it’s direct services on the most consequential level imaginable.”
“What are they called?” asked Boots as the curt TA signaled for a check.
“The New Salem Institute,” answered Barnes, before puncturing her sole surviving cherry tomato and directing it pointedly across the table at each of us in turn. “Could this be something in which you might be interested?”
ABOUT
THE NEW SALEM INSTITUTE
I. Our Story; Our Mission
Founded in 2007 by former classmates and colleagues Martha Bok and Peter Ausberry, the New Salem Institute is a Brooklyn-based non-profit advocacy organization that provides legal support to death row inmates who maintain their innocence. Clients served by NSI have generally exhausted all other avenues of legal recourse, and cannot afford to bear the costs of effective representation.
Ms. Bok and Mr. Ausberry first met in 1989 as second-year law students at Yale, where they served together in the school’s nationally renowned Capital Punishment Clinic. After successful stints in the private and public sectors, respectively, Martha and Peter conceived of the idea for an innocence advocacy organization in 2005, and spent the next two years making their dream a reality.
The New Salem Institute was created to advance the cause of justice in America by ensuring that unfairly incarcerated inmates are given the opportunity to prove their innocence. The NSI advocates for those who have been denied the chance to advocate effectively for themselves, with the firm belief that no prisoner should be put to death for a crime they did not commit.
II. Our Attorneys
Working with our dedicated support staff and interns, our team of attorneys uses their elite research and litigation skills to provide desperately-needed legal assistance to prisoners who have been condemned to death.
MARTHA BOK, CO-FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Martha Bok was born and raised in Rochester, New York, and earned her B.A. in English from Smith College in 1988 before entering Yale Law School as a member of the class of 1991. From 1991 to 2006, Ms. Bok performed complex litigation at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, first as an associate, and later as the youngest female partner in the firm’s history. Since co-founding the New Salem Institute in 2007, Ms. Bok has been recognized as one of the nation’s leading capital punishment reform advocates, and was the recipient of Amnesty International’s 2010 Blackmun Award. She married fellow attorney Tom Nixon in 1997, and the couple has two daughters, Kerry and Elise. Ms. Bok is admitted to the state bar of New York.
PETER AUSBERRY, CO-FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Peter Ausberry is the New Salem Institute’s co-founder and executive director alongside his former Yale Law School classmate, Martha Bok. Before co-founding the NSI in 2007, Mr. Ausberry clerked for Judge Ray Westley of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, served as a fellow in the Department of Justice’s Honors Program, worked as a senior attorney in the Office of the Solicitor General, and was appointed to the President’s Advisory Council on Prison Reform. A native of Seattle, Mr. Ausberry received his B.A. in Political Science from Yale University in 1987 and his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1991. He has been married to Christine Lanchik since 2003, and is a member of the state bars of New York and Washington. He appears at first glance to be gruff, but he is also kindly in his way.
JESSIE SUNDBY, MANAGING ATTORNEY
Jessie Sundby has been the New Salem Institute’s managing attorney since its inception in 2007, and was a member of its original team. Before coming to NSI, Ms. Sundby served as a clerk to Judge Dale Centers of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and worked as an associate in the San Francisco offices of Morrison Foerster. Originally from Los Angeles, she received her B.A. in Political Science from Pomona College in 1999 and her J.D. from Stanford Law School in 2004. Ms. Sundby is a touch frenetic, and is a member of the state bars of New York and California.
KEVIN BLEDSOE, SENIOR STAFF ATTORNEY
Kevin Bledsoe joined the New Salem Institute as a staff attorney in 2007, and specializes in litigating post-conviction DNA cases as well as talking to Mr. Brice about college football based on one conversation they had on Mr. Brice’s first day of work that led Mr. Bledsoe to the mistaken belief that Mr. Brice was at all interested in college football. After graduating from law school, Mr. Bledsoe spent two years as a litigation fellow with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund before returning to his hometown of Boston to join Ropes & Gray as an associate. Mr. Bledsoe received a B.A. in History from Harvard College in 1997, an M.A. in Political Science from Northeastern University in 1999, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2002. He is admitted to the state bar of New York.
SALIM MCCULLOUGH, STAFF ATTORNEY
Salim McCullough is a proud Texan, and has been a staff attorney with the New Salem Institute since 2011. He’s pretty rah-rah about the whole Texas thing—maybe too much, given the line of work he’s in. Mr. McCullough received his B.A. in Texan Studies or something from the University of Texas in 2004, and his J.D., also from Texas, in 2010. He spent 2010 clerking for a judge in Texas, and is admitted to the state bar of New York.
SAMANTHA KIDEARE, STAFF ATTORNEY
Sam Kideare joined the New Salem Institute as a staff attorney in 2011 after clerking on the Second Circuit. The two most obvious things about her are that she is tall and joyful. Ms. Kideare always has a sweet thing to say, and always says it earnestly; there is no one with whom she cannot get along. Mr. Brice thinks that she might be interested in him, romantically, he means, but there have definitely been a great number of times when Mr. Brice has thought that and been sort of comically wrong. Once back in high school, Lucy Gafford complimented him on his cool Elvis Costello t-shirt, and Mr. Brice became convinced that the moment stood for something more; she had dyed hair, the color of bad blood, which she always twirled with one thin finger when she talked to him about bands he’d ne
ver heard of or art shows he’d never attended. Three weeks after Lucy—who was neither tall nor joyful—broke up with her boyfriend, who at the time would have been several years into college had he cared about that sort of thing, she and Mr. Brice were the last two remaining at a late-night bonfire on the beach. He’d had four or five beers, and, jousting at the embers with a long driftwood stake, he listened as she recounted a dream she’d had of a boat ride: how the black water washed on forever through the dark of her mind, and disappeared at dawn. He tried to kiss her then. He tried to kiss her then, beneath the olive oil moon, but a man has never been so wrong. Ms. Kideare earned her B.A. in Political Science from Harvard College in 2006, and her J.D. from Yale Law School in 2010.
AARON KIA, STAFF ATTORNEY
Aaron Kia has been a staff attorney with the New Salem Institute since 2012, following up a year-long clerkship with Judge Delilah Cobb of the Eastern District of Michigan. Mr. Kia received his B.A. in Political Science from Duke University in 2004 and his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2011, and is definitely interested in Ms. Kideare, romantically, that is, because he never, ever stops talking to Mr. Brice about it, weirdly. He cares about soccer too much and is a member of the state bar of New York.
RACHEL COSTA, STAFF ATTORNEY
Rachel Costa became a staff attorney at the New Salem Institute in the fall of 2012 after serving as a legal intern during the summer of 2011. She earned her B.A. in Art History from Wellesley College in 2009 and her J.D. from Northwestern University Law School in 2012, and is admitted to the state bar of New York. Ms. Costa is a warm, thoughtful person, and really quite striking, which is a fact that has already touched down, softly, somewhere in Mr. Brice’s vasculature.
BOOTS ROSENBAUM, STAFF ATTORNEY
Boots Rosenbaum joined the New Salem Institute in the fall of 2012, and is one of the very few people whom Mr. Brice trusts at this point. He didn’t flinch when the walls caved in around Mr. Brice’s head; he stuck around to help clear the rubble, and that meant a great deal. Mr. Brice hadn’t ever had a friend like that before, one who could be counted on in a crisis. Mr. Rosenbaum received his B.A. in English and Music from New York University in 2004, and also graduated from a prestigious law school in 2012.