Reckless Disregard

by Robert Rotstein

  Poniard:

  >And it’s just not the one thing you have to worry about becoming public. Revelations beget revelations

  PStern

  >How biblical of you.

  Poniard:

  >Or if you prefer Greek Mythology, think Pandora’s Box. That’s why I won’t reveal even my age. But tell you what—I’ll keep your secret if you go to court and make sure I get to keep mine, OK? And together we will nail Billy Bishop for what he did to Felicity

  So now I have to win the court hearing to get Poniard to keep my secret? I’m tempted to tell him to go fuck himself, but I don’t, and not because of the blackmail. I’m going to stay on the case for a different reason.

  PStern

  >I’m in for now. But make no mistake . . . I won’t continue to play your game forever.

  Poniard:

  >My game is as good as any other. Better, actually, from what I read. No reason to blow your cover to make a point. Another rule of game design—never lose sight of your objective

  PStern

  >Why me?

  Poniard:

  >I told you in our first chat—you’re good. You’re not intimidated by Frantz. You can keep a secret

  PStern

  >You’ll do far better with another lawyer for so many reasons.

  Poniard:

  >We gamers have a saying: embrace the chaos. So, hey, Parky embrace the chaos. You’ll find life more exciting

  This kind of excitement is the last thing I want. I type fuck you into the text box, punch the send key hard, and sign off. But I’m not about to leave this case, and somehow this Poniard senses it. From what I read, part of his genius is his ability to manipulate game players on a quest into believing that they can take alternative paths, when all the time they’re unwittingly being funneled in one direction. The technique is called creating a chokepoint. How fitting.

  On the night that Brighton’s great-aunt died, the paramedics called Social Services, which placed him in what on TV they call The System, and he thought he’d stay there for a long time. But then those two people marched on in and told him those unbelievable things. Now he lives with them in a large house. He’s made up secret names for them. The man is Bugsy because he talks like an old-time TV gangster. The woman is Hoar Frost Queen—his fourth-grade class read this poem called Hoar Frost and of course everybody cracked up—because she’s cold sometimes though not always, and because of what he’s read about her on the Internet. In September, they force him to go to a rich kids’ school, where of course he doesn’t have any friends.

  The one good thing is that they have a computer with a twenty-four-inch LED monitor, way bigger than the one he had at home. And they have a new Xbox One. As long as he cleans his room and does some chores—clearing the dinner table, loading the dishwasher, making his bed, finishing homework—Bugsy lets him play video games, though the HF Queen doesn’t like it. The game he plays most is Abduction!

  In the few months since the video game came out, Poniard’s critics have accused him of scamming them, of releasing a game that doesn’t have a solution. Brighton refuses to believe that Poniard would cheat his fans like that. And yet, he can’t get past the beginning stage, in which Felicity sits in her bedroom getting ready for some kind of appointment. At first, this frustrates him, and if Abduction! were any other game, he would have given up long ago. But as he continues to play, he finds comfort in the way Felicity’s voice sometimes quavers like a tragic violin. There’s the way she sits at the mirror, gently brushing her red hair and gazing at her reflection. He finds himself getting protective of her. He’s never wanted to protect anyone or anything before, not even a pet. Aunt Greta owned a cat, but it hissed and scratched if he tried to pet it.

  Poniard has given Felicity a lot of dialogue, part of the game developer’s genius. Brighton feels sometimes that Poniard has invented the game for him alone, that he and Felicity are having a real conversation. As he maneuvers the cursor across the screen, she’ll talk about random things—the weather, how her roommate Natalie is a pain in the butt, how men treat her badly, how she has a hot date that night. She talks a lot about being an actress, how she got famous for starring in a movie called The Fragile Palace, but her favorite role was in the flop Meadows of Deceit because she didn’t have to play a dumb, sexy girl in that one. Then there are her displays of flesh. When he first started playing, it turned him on, but now he gets embarrassed, as if he’s accidentally walked in on his big sister while she’s in her underwear. Sometimes it seems as if she can read his mind and answer his thought questions. He’ll be thinking of a strategy—wondering if a series of keystrokes will open a drawer or if dragging the mouse in a certain way will unlock the front door—and she’ll frown and shake her head before he even starts the move. Or he’ll walk into his room and stare at the computer screen without even moving the mouse, and she’ll look up at him and smile.

  He works so hard to solve the puzzle that when he goes to bed at night and closes his eyes he can see Felicity’s room on the inside of his eyelids—the mattress and box springs with the flower comforter and puffy pillows; the knotty pine wardrobe that goes from floor almost to ceiling, with its large and small drawers, all of which will rattle at a mouse click but none of which he can open; the black wood dresser where she keeps her perfume and makeup; the old-fashioned mirror with light bulbs all around it like you see in an old movie; the household accessories, which seem so real that when Brighton accidentally bumps the mouse with his elbow, a lamp falls off the nightstand and breaks into tiny pieces. Felicity gives him a dirty look, gets a broom and dustpan from a dark corner of the closet, and sweeps up the glass.

  Once he accepts that he’ll never get past Level One, that so long as he keeps playing the game he’ll be trapped with Felicity in her bedroom forever, a funny thing happens—he begins to treat the aimless keystrokes as a sort of ritual—superstitious, maybe even religious. Each time he touches the keys, it seems as if he gets a bit closer, not to winning, but to earning a divine reward. The world of Abduction! becomes more familiar, far safer, than the world that Bugsy and Hoar Frost Queen rule. Not that he confuses the game with reality. Just the opposite—the game is so clearly imaginary that it begins to feel truer than his real life.

  And then one warm September evening, while trying random combinations on the input devices, a hidden drawer in the wardrobe opens, spewing out hundreds of envelopes and letters that swirl in a paper tornado up and out of the screen.

  Kava, Celexa, Toprol, Argentum, Valerian—loyal soldiers all. Not in some massively multiplayer online role-playing game, but in my battle against stage fright. These are the names of the herbs and the beta-blockers and the anti-anxiety drugs that I mix and match and sometimes misuse to get through a court hearing without becoming awash in flop sweat or passing out on the courtroom floor. But these potions can’t vanquish the rodent that will decide to hone its teeth on my lower thorax at the very moment I enter a courtroom. Which is one reason I gave up trial work to become a mediator.

  I park in the Music Center lot and cross the street to the courthouse. By the time I reach the Grand Avenue entrance, my eyes are teary and my forehead is hemorrhaging sweat. It’s the afternoon heat and the acrid smog, I reason, not rising fear. I pass through security—belt off, shoes off, smartphone in a plastic bin, flash your bar card so the bailiffs don’t confiscate the phone, get dressed, and hurry down the windowless corridor. Though courthouses are supposed to reflect the power and solemnity of the judiciary, the Superior Court for the State of California, County of Los Angeles, is a dump. The air-conditioning system rattles and coughs and makes the air dry, so that if you spend more than an hour inside you develop this hacking cough that will last for hours. The third-floor cafeteria serves food whose freshness is measured by the color of the mold propagating on the surface. Every courtroom smells like a combination of caked-on floor wax, fusty law books, and the rank body odor of the inmates from the County Jail who’ve passed through for
sentencing. I revere the place. Or, I did before the fear descended upon me.

  I take the escalator up to the seventh floor, where the Honorable T. Tedford Triggs presides in the courtroom designated Department 79. Most court business occurs in the morning, so in the afternoon the hallways are usually deserted except for a few harried trial lawyers conferring during a recess, anxious witnesses waiting their turn to take the stand, and a smattering of regulars flitting from courtroom to courtroom hoping to find the real-life equivalent of Law & Order. But on this afternoon, a large crowd has gathered outside Department 79. Lined up near the locked door are members of the media, many of whom I recognize—entertainment reporters, tabloid writers, and an earthworm named Brandon Placek who recently joined an online gossip website called The Tinseltown Zone. Bishop’s publicity machine has undoubtedly alerted them to the hearing. A bailiff stands guard in front of the courtroom, which I know is locked because pieces of cardboard obscure the tiny windows in the doors.

  On the opposite side of the hall, maybe half a dozen people are huddled in an alcove, each wearing a costume patterned after a character from one of Poniard’s video games. There’s a woman wearing a pink wig, with ribbons and a matching pink dress—Raggedy Ann Dohrn, a violent radical who led a revolution of dolls in Poniard’s game Eggheads and Skinheads. There’s a college-aged Goth Abe Lincoln with tattoos covering each arm, a tall man in his thirties dressed like a character at a Renaissance faire, a woman dressed like a combination druid and guerilla fighter—Sigourney Guevara, Poniard called the character in Reality Rogues—and a man dressed up as a Samurai Elvis Presley (sans sword, of course). And there’s a woman dressed like Felicity McGrath—a replica not of the real person but of the caricatured Felicity from Poniard’s video game. The bailiff glances over at them nervously. I’m sure he’d like to kick them out of the courthouse, but it’s a government building, and under the First Amendment, they have a right to be here no matter how they’re dressed. Way back in 1971, the Supreme Court held that a man named Paul Cohen had the right to wear in this very courthouse a jacket that bore the inscription “Fuck the Draft.”

  The Renaissance man approaches me, bows, and waves his right arm in a courtly swirl. “Banquo Nixon at your service, Mr. Stern.” He has a full black beard that needs a trim, a long nose, and the dark, swampy eyes of a meth addict. It’s clear from the name he’s adopted that he’s fanatical about Poniard’s Macbeth in the White House, a role-playing game that conservative pundits, not without justification, have interpreted as advocating the violent overthrow of the United States government. He’s carrying a laptop computer under his left arm, the cover scratched and dented. The thing is so antiquated, it must weigh fifteen pounds.

  “Nice to meet you.” I extend my hand, but he doesn’t shake it. Instead, he moves closer to me, almost aggressively. He reeks, emitting an alliaceous body odor. He has the wan face of a transient, but how could a transient access a video game? Though I want to move back, I hold my ground because I don’t want to offend the guy.

  “Thanks for your support,” I say.

  “We’re here for Poniard, not you,” he says. “We don’t know you. We’re here to protest this vicious attack on Poniard’s privacy, the attempt to silence one of the greatest minds of our era. We’re here to defy the corporate oligarchs and their Führer, the murderer William the Conqueror.” He speaks in a faux English accent, addressing not me but rather an invisible throng that must find his every word riveting. Then he meets my eyes and jabs an index finger at my chest. “It’s your job to stop Bishop and his henchpeople.”

  The redhead dressed like Felicity McGrath comes over and loops her arm in Banquo’s. “Is this the lawyer?” she asks.

  “Parker Stern, Esquire,” Banquo says.

  “He’s cute,” she says. “Looks a little like Mercutio Clinton, don’t you think?”

  “I most certainly do not,” Banquo says, pulling his arm away. “But Mr. Stern, if you need help—”

  “Thank you, but my staff and I—”

  “Even if it’s just playing Poniard’s video game. It’s a difficult game, and that’s what we do.”

  As I struggle to find a way to decline this man’s offer of help without offending him and perhaps setting him off—who knows how stable he is?—there’s a jangle of keys and the click of a lock. The members of the media push forward, but the bailiff, a somber man in his late forties, shouts, “Hold on. Only the attorneys. Are counsel for Mr. Bishop here?”

  As I wend my way through the pack of grumbling media members, Brandon Placek pushes past me and says to the bailiff, “Haven’t you people heard of freedom of the press? We have a First Amendment right of access to the courthouse. Our lawyers are standing by. If Judge Triggs thinks he can—”

  “Nothing’s going to happen without you,” the bailiff says. “Logistics.”

  “Out of my way, Placek,” I say, and he backs away when he hears my voice. We’ve clashed before. He’s made the mistake of considering himself a legitimate reporter when he’s nothing but a gossipmonger.

  “What’re you doing down here, Stern?” Placek asks.

  “Unlike you, trying to do the right thing.”

  “You have court business, counselor?” the bailiff says.

  “I’m representing the defendant in the Bishop ex parte,” I say.

  He twitches the side of his mouth upward in a kind of oral shrug. “All right, come on in. The judge didn’t expect anyone to show up for the defendant.”

  Once I’m inside, he locks the door. I don’t expect to see my adversaries. Lou Frantz and his protégés always come late, as if they’re heavyweight-boxing champions who’ve earned the privilege of waiting for the right moment to enter the ring.

  The thought of what’s to come sends my heart careening. I list to the left and grab a chair-back to steady myself. I take some slow breaths and plead with my heart to decelerate. It doesn’t, but it doesn’t accelerate either. If it gets no worse than this, I can get through the hearing. I go to the defense side of the lawyers’ table and sit down. To take my mind off the stage fright, I power on my laptop and use the court’s Wi-Fi to search for Poniard and costumes. It turns out that many of Poniard’s most rabid fans are into cosplay, short for costume play. Or maybe they’re larpers—live-action role players who act out fantasy adventures physically and in real time. It’s common for rabid fans of comic books, anime, and video game fanatics to become cosplayers or larpers. Grownups playing dress-up, though some consider it performance art. There’s a whole society built around it. They worship Poniard like he’s a god. The thought makes me even queasier. I learned enough about fanaticism as a child to make me shun any charismatic leader or organized religion. That’s probably why I became a lawyer. The law is a profession that encourages you to get your questions answered, and I have a lot of questions. Maybe believers do too, but they don’t demand answers, because their faith or their prophet provides all the answers. As a matter of fact, that’s why I’m in court on this day, Poniard’s threat to expose my past aside. I hope to get an answer that has so far escaped me.

  The bailiff opens the courtroom door, and Bishop’s attorney Lovely Diamond walks in. That’s her real name. I’ve seen her driver’s license.

  “This is wild,” she says. “The media and the Muppets. Anyway, please let Judge Triggs know I’m here. Our application is unopposed, so—”

  “Not unopposed, Ms. Diamond,” the bailiff says, tilting his head toward me.

  Lovely stops halfway down the aisle.

  “Good afternoon, counselor,” I say, drawing on the remnants of my childhood acting skills to deep-freeze my voice. “Parker Stern appearing for the defendant.” It’s the most I can muster without my voice shattering, just as I shattered when she left me a few months ago without explanation. For nineteen months, three weeks, and four days, I played her leading man in a sublime romantic dream, only to wake with a start and find that I’d nodded off in the back row of a seedy movie theater. I even
missed the end credits, the hilarious outtakes, the fade to black, and now there’s only malign diffuse light and a future as blank as the screen. I shouldn’t have been surprised. After the excruciating pain dulled down into a cruel, incessant ache, I once again embraced a central fact of my life—the people I love always leave. Why had I expected her to be any different?

  What does puzzle me, though, is what happened after we split. She was a rising star in the US Attorney’s office, a prodigy with an illimitable future, and yet suddenly she left her dream job to go back to work as a drudge for Louis Frantz, her former mentor. The same Lou Frantz who’d turned on her when she became involved with me. I agreed to take Poniard’s case because her name appeared as a cc recipient on Frantz’s cease and desist letter.

  Her eyes widen and then shut for a moment, as if she’s trying to stave off a migraine. “Seriously?” She walks down the aisle and sets her briefcase on the table. I inhale, expecting the scent of orange blossoms and ginger, but now all I smell is soap. It occurs to me that she’s washed me out of her life, and now she smells sanitized. It seems as if she’s about to reach out and touch my arm, but she only set her hands on the table and leans forward.

  “Did you take this case because you found out I’m working on it?” she says. “Because you shouldn’t have.”