by Dan Cluchey
A beat of silence.
“Boots—”
“Boots told you. Of course.”
“He’s looking out for you, man! So you’ll think about it?”
I shuffled the forest of papers in the case binder, nicking my thumb on a glossy close-up photograph of the murder weapon.
“I’ll think about this,” I replied, tapping on the dossier, and stepped back demurely to the doorframe of her office.
“You’re a sharp guy, Leo. I’m confident you can think about both at once.”
“You know, Martha, I could probably sue you for creating a hostile work environment or something.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“That right?”
“You’re not a very good lawyer!” she whispered, then broke into a warm and raucous fit of laughter.
“Thanks boss,” I said, and slipped around the corner into the hall.
“Fly safe, gumshoe!” she called after me.
As it happened, I didn’t phone Rachel—although I did order Chinese. Michael Tiegs’s case was more or less typical as these things go: grossly out of step with human experience writ large, of course, but fairly typical within the select population of those who have been accused of killing a person in a southern United State in the initial bit of the twenty-first century. I knew enough to know that, guilty or not, the endless chips of the system were stacked against him; I knew enough to know that he would almost certainly fry. Not fry, no—he would just be given that brief new blood. Pentobarbital, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. The “cocktail.”
I met Rachel in the airport terminal after a marathon weekend of study. Cramming for the Tiegs case had reminded me of cramming for a law school exam, only the test was: can you save this man’s life, and (for extra credit) should you? Now we were in transit to the big show.
“Are you nervous?” was the first thing Rachel said when she found me on the safe side of the security check. For a second, I thought she was talking about the flight.
“I’m always nervous,” I answered, and she laughed, though I wasn’t kidding. There is nowhere on Earth I am less comfortable than thirty thousand feet above it; I have a fear of flying of the precise middling magnitude where I can still manage to board, but cannot make it past takeoff without near-complete internal panic. This has been true since childhood, when en route to family vacations it would invariably occur to me, somewhere over Ohio or Kansas or the Atlantic Ocean, that cavernous hunks of metal simply were not meant to remain aloft.
“I’m 26F,” she said, flopping her ticket skyward. “You?”
“I am … oh. 26E. We’re neighbors.”
“What are the odds?” she purred, and gave the nod which means: follow me, now, to our gate. In the moment, I groped for the exact right word with which to describe her to myself in my head, but it didn’t come to me for hours: gamine.
When the call came to board, I walked the antiseptic white mile of the jetway a pace behind her, quaking like an aspen tree in the brisk, recycled air. I knew what would happen to me next: suddenly I’d be strapped down, bracing for that first lurch forward. It always goes the same way. Anxiety gestates in my brain, but it’s never long before it matures and metastasizes, vacationing in my tropical gut, colonizing my outer digits. It’s raw, and I might black out. I forget how to breathe, then remember at the last possible moment. The plane dips and flutters—we’re just servants, at this point, to the whims of the violent sky. Head down, ice cold beads of sweat the size of marbles leap desperately from the ledges of my brow. I imagine they are panicking stockbrokers, panicking over the coming crash: Sell! Sell! Sell this flight! My heart can be heard and felt from any part of my body now. It will ease a bit, and only a bit, at the first merciful ding.
The truth is, technology will never overcome the rollercoaster-physical necessity of takeoff, nor, apparently, the ragged-blue cloth and associated 1970s trappings. Any airplane will always, always feel to me like a rickety Buick daring the giant sky.
My primary concern on this plane was preventing all aboard from growing wise to the mounting dread inside me, in the following order of priority: Rachel, Taryn the joyful flight attendant, 26D, the pilot (somehow), our across-the-aisle row 26 cousins, the other attendants, the other passengers. I recognized the absurdity of my fear—even in its grip I recognized the logical failures that brought me dry-mouthed and pulsing to the edge of despair. It is primitive to fear that way, in the face of all reason. Statistics indicate that you are dramatically more likely to die in the cab on your way to the airport than you are in a fiery plane crash, but try telling that to my paper-white knuckles.
Once at cruising altitude, Rachel and I ordered twin whiskey gingers for very different purposes: hers was for regular human consumption, whereas mine was a carbonated antipsychotic. She ordered another one, because what the hell; I ordered another one because damn the torpedoes. I paid for her third so that it wouldn’t seem odd that I needed a third, which I did, due to the fact that aluminum was still heavier than fucking air. This is how we ended up drunk over the Carolinas.
“How come you never come out with us, Leo?” Rachel asked cautiously, long after we’d abandoned all pretense of huddling about the case. “We go out—Salim, Sam, Aaron, your boy Boots. Kevin comes out; Jessie too, sometimes. Even Martha came to karaoke one time. How come you never want to hang out? We’re fun, and I’m not just saying that. We’re fun. Fun crew,” and she hiccupped, blushed, and opened her eyes as wide as a person can before bursting into a cavalcade of giggles.
“I know you’re all fun,” I said, sounding not at all fun myself.
“But you don’t come out with us. Is it—are you too cool for us? Is that it, Brice? Too cool for school?”
“I am decidedly not too cool for school,” I replied, left hand fastened like an epileptic remora to the armrest I shared with comatose 26D.
“So what is it? Is it—oh.”
“What?”
“No, it’s just…”
“Rachel?”
“It’s private,” she said apologetically.
“Okay, but it sounds like it might be … my … private. As opposed to your private. Sounds like it’s a private thing about me, is what I mean. So you should feel free to share.”
She dislodged the last ice cube from her cup with lissome fingers and crunched it between her teeth before turning all she could of her belted body to face me.
“Boots said you had a really bad breakup, and that’s why you’re so glum all the time. He said you were a positive, high-functioning good guy, and then someone you loved kind of … ripped your heart out, and now you’re kind of a piece of shit.”
“He’s really harping on that phrase, huh?”
“It’s none of my business. But just so you know, we’ve all had some version of that—a lot of us, at least, have been hurt badly, and it’s hard to come all the way back from that, sometimes. It’s not unusual, I guess is what I mean. It’s really not. It’s okay; it’s normal. Is it the sort of thing where you don’t want to talk about it? Or is it good to talk about it?”
My hand stopped shaking for the first time since the engines fired up; here was something worse than a crashing plane. Of course, she had me dead to rights—I remembered having been functional at one time; I remembered a time when I could more readily think about small things, fun things, even.
“I’m pretty sure it’s the first one. Not that I don’t want to—I can’t,” I heaved, and each new word grew thornier in my throat. “I can’t talk about it, I don’t think.”
Jesus Christ, man.
She crumpled her plastic cup, and turned back to face forward.
“Oh,” she said softly. “Oh, well that’s alright.”
“Sorry,” I said back, stoned by shame.
“No!” she replied, too quickly. “But, for sure, if you ever want to—”
“Uh,” I said, just to stop her, “it’s just difficult to explain. That’s all. I can try, if you … it’s di
fficult to explain because I don’t quite know what it did to me. What it’s done. It’s just, it’s one of those things where my whole world felt like it ended, but the world kept going for everyone else. Can you understand that? Like if the plane crashed—but only for me. Everybody else’s plane is just … sailing … along…”
I had lost my train of thought.
“Dude, you’re drunk,” she said.
“That didn’t make any sense, huh?”
“No, that was weird!” she laughed, and I laughed too, to show I knew how.
And we touched down.
SIX
THE TELEVISION WHIRRED AND FLICKERED AND POPPED with rich blue light: the stars were out. Entertainment awards ceremonies were not something I’d given a thought to in my life until the day I had it planted in my head that the actor Mark Renard, whom I at one point knew, would be presenting the award for Best Sound Mixing to this year’s person or people who mixed sound best, presumably. Mark was by now a regular on America’s number-one new drama, Briefs, which, because the world can be so cruel, was an overwrought, underwritten show about fit-and-frisky lawyers. With two movies in the works, his broader fame was impending. He was set to arrive shortly on the Red Carpet, and—in defiance of a whole lifetime of not doing this sort of thing—I was tuning in to see.
“And now we have Mark Renard, who’s presenting tonight! Great to finally meet you, Mark!”
“Great to meet you, Terri.”
“Mark, you’ve had quite a year!” bellowed a dazzling twit.
“Yeah, it’s been great, Terri. So, so great. It’s been, like, unreal.”
“Has your life just completely blown up, Mark? You’ve just blown up this year, huh?!”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Hit show, got some movies coming out—tell us about the movies! When are they coming out, Mark?!”
“Uh, one is called The Drying of the Rain, and it’s a very serious dramatic … piece, and, uh, it’s coming out in June, and one is called Timesport, and that’s more like a suspense thriller type-action-thing, and that’s coming out early this summer.”
“Now, for The Drying of the Rain, you filmed that over in Europe, huh Mark?!”
“Yeah, we were in Firenze, in Italy, for the filming.”
The twit was excited. “Exciting!” she said.
“Yeah.”
“And you were working with Marcus Wimms on that one. What was that like?”
“Marcus is just a great director, you know? It’s a real honor to be able to work with a great director like that.”
“I’ll bet! What was the best part about filming in Italy, Mark?”
“Uh, it’s really just pretty over there, you know? And the food’s good. They have really good olives. I hadn’t ever really been a big olives guy. Ha! Right? So, olives, I guess.”
Mark’s date was wrapped in a seafoam gown and loitering, silent, behind him, strung up with a dancer’s posture. I was on the wrong side of the television; she refused to look me in the eye. Goodbyes were exchanged, and the sprauncy couple drifted away to live someplace else, off-screen.
In my mind there was a sleek car quietly trembling on the street below me. I hardly touched the fire escape on the way down, my suddenly divine limbs collaborating with a fearless syzygy they’d never known. I raced across the country and it was night the whole way; “I’ve never made such good time!” I mused to the Nevada desert as it cleaved effortlessly before me. Outside the nameless theatre, I ditched the car and tidied the cuffs of my tuxedo. Inside, I was flashy, stellified, at home among the beautiful. All I have to do is find her, and then I could explain.
“And the winner for technical editing of an animated foreign short,” started some ingénue, “Wladislaw Budziszewski!”
I weaved through the thunderous crowd toward the front, beyond the yachty masses, beyond the orchestra pit. I kept a searching eye on the rows of my audience, but I couldn’t find her; the famous faces were somehow unfamiliar. Once on stage, I snatched the trophy and began:
“Thank you! Thank you, Academy! Please! I want—”
“No!” shouted Wladislaw, loping up the steps. “He’s not real!”
“Please!” I went on. “I want to tell you—”
“Hey!” barked Wladislaw, and he was irate, grabbing at my lapels, lunging for the statue. I stared out, searching, into the assemblage of stars.
“I want to tell—”
“He is not real!” blasted the superlative technical editor into the podium microphone. “I am Wladislaw Budziszewski!”
I struggled to reclaim my position, and overcame the smaller Wlad.
“You don’t know that!” I bellowed to the crowd. “None of you know the animated technical whatever—”
“I am the real Wladislaw Budziszewski,” he yelped, his voice cracking.
“No!” I countered. “I am the real Vladishaw … Budin … owski.”
“Please! Stop this!” he called up from the ground. “You aren’t real!”
“I am! I am real! I want—”
“No!”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“He’s not real!”
“I’m looking for the actress, Fiona Fox—”
“You cannot do this!”
“Listen, everyone: I want to tell you a story.”
* * *
The trip from the Jackson Days Inn to the Georgia Department of Corrections death row facility goes like this: Rachel Costa knocks so quietly on the door to your room that you’re not certain if anybody is there at all; you drive two-point-eight miles in a rented Nissan Sentra to the easterly end of town, and park in a gated lot designated for visitors to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison; you walk nearly two hundred yards from the lot to the guest entrance, where one of you marvels aloud at the fact, learned earlier, back in the car, that it is sixty-two degrees today in Georgia even though this is allegedly December; you hand photographic identification to a sturdy woman with a large gun, then proceed through a metal detector after placing your phone and keys into a gray plastic bin; you give your names and the name of the inmate you are visiting to a stern man in a brown suit, then also provide him with the same photographic identification you just displayed a moment ago; Rachel Costa hands her purse to a gray woman, grayer even than the plastic bin, who spirits it away into another room; everybody signs their name to a sheet of paper and dates it, and everybody gets a visitor badge to be displayed at all times; the two of you and a solitary guard walk together in silence down an impossibly long hallway and through two security doors; you enter a neon-lit room that has no need to be as large as it is—the only thing in it, apart from six folding chairs and one folding table, is the convicted murderer Michael Tiegs.
“How many are here?” Rachel asked the man in the brown suit on the occasion of our first visit.
“Sorry, ma’am?” he grumbled, hands folded palm-to-anti-palm behind his back like a sentinel.
“Inmates. How many inmates do you have in this facility?” she asked again. I figured she was only making small talk; we both knew the answer already.
“Ninety-eight men here, ma’am,” he replied, and pushed his lower lip up against the full length of his drooping Zapata mustache.
“They’re all men?” I asked, frowning. I guess I felt like making small talk, too.
“The women are kept up at Metro State Prison,” he answered stiffly, “in Atlanta.”
We trundled past the man in the brown suit, past endless flecked ceiling tiles and caged lights, down the hall to meet Michael Tiegs.
“Hello, Michael? Good morning, Michael. We’re the attorneys from the New Salem Institute who’ve been assigned to come … meet you, and speak to you about your case. My name is Rachel, and this—”
“Ms. Costa,” said Tiegs. “Mr. Brice.”
He was thirty-six when we met him, and just impossibly gaunt. It was difficult to believe that this same man—now monkish and pale—was at one time in po
ssession of a low-nineties fastball, the most feared arm in southern Georgia. His face was fixed in a state of lassitude, but those eyes: Christ, how they darted and swelled. He had the same hushful drawl as the man in the brown suit; words seemed to drip out of him like candle wax. Serene in his movements, he reminded me at once of a place I’d only read about: the Sea of Tranquility, on the moon. It’s not a sea, per se, but rather a lunar mare—reflective, mysterious, salty, and completely placid, a basin beyond the reach of human interference.
What we learned that day in the neon-lit room: Tiegs had spent the past decade reading every book in the prison library save for the legal texts and contemporary American fiction. He found Jesus in 2008, and became what he called “a latinitaster—just basically, sorta like a petty scholar of church Latin.” Every night, he engaged in three hours of elaborate liturgical prayer. He had an eerie command of religious history, from Stonehenge and the life of Krishna to the Second Vatican Council. He demonstrated no special interest in the outcome of his case or the future of his life on Earth.
“You Jewish?” he asked me, less than twenty minutes after we’d met for the first time.
Here we go.
“In fact, I am,” I said, braced curtly for my initiation into some lost strand of truly medieval prejudice.
“I guessed that from your name,” said Tiegs, now grinning. “I should’ve said more like, ‘my brother in the Vast Abrahamic Tradition,’ I suppose. Leo is Leonard?”
“Yes. Leo is Leonard.”
“I knew a Leonard, back in grade school,” he went on. “That Leonard, though—he wasn’t a Jew. But a lot of them are. Y’all know Leonard Cohen? Leonard Bernstein?”
“You know Leonard Bernstein?” asked Rachel, clearly incredulous but somehow not rude-sounding. I couldn’t get over the way he said ‘Bernstein.’ BURR-uhn-stay-uhn, the uhns brief, but there, the plosive stay ejected from his mouth like a wayward mosquito.
“I do, young sister. I even know Lenny Bruce—he was a Leonard too. And he was a Jew too, I’m pretty sure. I’m not entirely certain about that, now, but I’m pretty sure. I’m wondering now if either of y’all know the story of Mosheh ben Maimon.”
