by James Morrow
‘This document was putting words in your mouth, wasn’t it?’
Commotion at the prosecution table. ‘And Mr Bonenfant is putting words in his client’s mouth,’ Aquinas asserted.
‘Ask another question,’ said Justice Jefferson.
‘To tell you the truth, your Honors’ – Bonenfant ambled back to the defense table – ‘my client is so palpably innocent that I cannot think of a single additional question to ask him. He’s yours, Mr Aquinas.’
As the chief prosecutor charged forward, the butterflies in George’s stomach began producing larvae.
‘You have told the court that you used to sell tombstones,’ Aquinas began.
God, has he nailed me already? No, I did sell tombstones. ‘That’s right.’
‘Was it your practice to have customers sign sales contracts without reading them?’
‘No.’
‘And yet you are asking the court to believe that you signed a scopas suit contract without reading it?’
‘I did read it, sort of. It confused me.’
‘ “I hearby confess to my complicity in the nuclear arms race.” That sounds like plain English to my ears.’
A vulture expert. Everything would be fine as long as a vulture expert showed up. ‘It was the other parts that confused me.’
‘Do you or do you not understand the words, “I hereby confess to my complicity in the nuclear arms race”?’
George knew that his voice was going to sound weak and defeated. ‘I understand them.’ Weak, defeated. ‘I wanted my little girl to have a scopas suit. Is that so terrible?’
The chief prosecutor placed the contract at arm’s length, as if it harbored an infectious disease. ‘Can you point to a single action on your part that would lead the tribunal to doubt your negligence?’
‘Well, not exactly. No. But if you heard Mr Carter’s testimony, then you know that just about everybody else—’
‘Just about everybody else is not on trial here.’
Aquinas took a long, deliberate stroll around the prosecution table. George twitched like a skewered moth.
‘I’m curious, Mr Paxton,’ the chief prosecutor said at last. ‘How do you feel about your co-defendants?’
‘How do I feel about them?’
‘Yes.’
‘They’re my friends.’
‘Good friends?’
‘We play poker. Reverend Sparrow once saved me from some dangerous ensigns. Dr Randstable has been showing me the basic chess openings. General Tarmac helped me find a fertility clinic.’
‘So you like them?’
‘Sure I like them. They certainly aren’t war criminals.’
‘And how do you feel about their ideas?’
‘Their what?’ George asked politely.
‘Their ideas.’
‘If I’d been the one in Washington, I probably couldn’t have done any better.’
Aquinas scowled. ‘Again I put the question to you. How do you feel about your co-defendants’ ideas?’
The high-school students were back in George’s mind, merrily kicking off the abolition regime. Plop! went the Soviet SS-90 intermediate-range missile into the glowing magma of Mount Erebus. He thought: our case is going well, my friends did an excellent job of defending themselves, and now I’m about to blow it. Still, this is a court of law. I touched a Bible and swore to give the truth. ‘I guess I’d have to say . . .’
His intestines writhed around each other. Overwhite will never speak to me again. Randstable won’t teach me any more openings. Sparrow will stop praying for me. Brat will hate me forever . . .
‘I guess I’d have to say that my friends’ ideas were pretty bad.’
‘Pretty bad?’
‘Yes. Bad. Bad ideas. Terrible, in fact.’
Aquinas began warming up for a gigantic smile. ‘Why do you suppose your co-defendants spent so much time and energy on these bad ideas?’
‘That’s hard to say.’
The prosecutor’s smile grew. ‘Can you guess?’
‘Well, I suppose that thinking about bad ideas is more interesting and exciting than . . . you know.’
‘Than what?’
‘You know.’
‘Abolishing the weapons?’
‘Yes,’ sighed George.
Aquinas’s smile reached full potential. ‘No further questions,’ he said, slapping the sales contract on the bench.
A new and particularly bitter layer of frost had infested the glass booth during George’s absence. ‘I found you very sympathetic,’ said Overwhite tonelessly as the tomb inscriber settled back down in the dock.
‘Sincerity city,’ said Randstable without passion.
‘I don’t think it was necessary to mention bad ideas,’ said Brat.
‘Yes, I had trouble with that part too,’ said Overwhite.
‘Abolition regimes are inherently unworkable,’ said Wengernook. ‘Seabird admitted as much.’
‘You don’t need to keep saying that,’ George snapped.
Justice Jefferson put on her whalebone glasses, briefly studied the sales contract, and asked, ‘Might I assume that the case for the defense is concluded?’
‘Our final witness will take the stand tomorrow,’ said Bonenfant.
When his advocate glowered at him, George’s bullet wound felt as if it were reopening.
Thrust into a frigid hell with nothing to sustain him but a glass painting of his unborn child, infused with the feeling that his performance on the stand had been a disaster, sick with the thought that he had betrayed his friends, George was nevertheless as happy as any human has ever been. For walking boldly through the courtroom, eyes dead ahead, was the future mother of Holly’s stepsister. His spermatids thrashed with desire. Morning smiled at him quickly, subtly; perhaps she hadn’t smiled at all. She changed the world. The palace brightened. Everyone in the gallery, even the old ones with their bleak eyes and crushed postures, had a beauty George had not noticed before.
‘Hey, look,’ said Wengernook. ‘It’s the periscope lady.’
‘Somebody that frigid should feel right at home around here,’ said Brat.
‘Why don’t you be quiet?’ hissed George.
After Morning had been sworn in, Bonenfant asked, ‘Are you a war refugee?’
She closed her eyes and said, in a voice George and his spermatids found overwhelmingly sensual, ‘I practiced psychotherapy in Chicago when it existed.’
‘Did you treat the six defendants for survivor’s guilt aboard the City of New York?’ Bonenfant asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Why do you wish to testify?’
‘I know something that will help Paxton’s case.’
‘Something you learned while treating him?’
George grimaced internally. Nothing makes you as self-conscious, he realized – no magnitude of nakedness or public blunder – as the experience of observing others discuss you.
‘No, my testimony comes from before that time,’ said Morning. ‘Mr Bonenfant, members of the tribunal, let me take you back to the day of Paxton’s rescue. Our submarine lay in Boston Harbor, waiting for the abduction team to return. I trained one of the periscopes on the defendant’s hometown.’
‘Why?’
‘I was trying to spot my new patient.’
‘Did you?’
‘No. I became fascinated by the town itself. I realized that it was about to disappear, and I wanted to see how everyone was spending his time. The people’s faces were tight and grim. They went about their Saturday morning duties – getting their mail, buying their doughnuts – and I could find no joy. This was seven days before Christmas. But then a little girl and her mother came out of a store. The mother carried a bag of groceries. The child had a small plastic snowman in her hands. She was bubbling about it. Her lips said, “You’re going to live on our Christmas tree!” I began feeling much better . . . and much worse.
‘The warhead was groundburst, and the mother became trapped under a brick wall. Everything
was dark. I had to use the infrared. “I’m thirsty,” the woman said. The initial radiation, of course. So the little girl ran into the burning store and came back holding a carton of orange juice. It was hard to tear open. She said – children’s lips are easy to read, they put so much into talking – she said, “Look, Mommy, I opened it! Will this make you better, Mommy?” She nursed her mother with orange juice. “Everything will be all right, Mommy,” the little girl said. The mother closed her eyes – stopped breathing. Then a man who knew the child came along. I think he worked at the bank. He seemed to be sleepwalking. “Is my mommy dead?” the girl asked. “Is my mommy in heaven now?” she wanted to know. The man fell down. The little girl began to cry. “I want my daddy,” she said. A few seconds later, another warhead arrived.
‘And then, the following month, while I was treating the defendant, he showed me his daughter’s nursery school photograph, and I realized who had given the dying woman the orange juice. The point I wish to make, your Honors, is that George Paxton is much more a victim of this war than a perpetrator. His wife and daughter were innocent civilian casualties, and he would have been one too if the prosecution hadn’t pulled his name out of a hat, entrapped him, and brought him to this ridiculous trial. Do you want revenge? Convict him. Justice? Let him go . . . I shall not answer any further questions, nor shall I submit to cross-examination.’
George’s sobs were slow and regular, like tympani notes at a funeral. Somebody – Brat? Wengernook? – gave his knee a firm, sympathetic squeeze.
‘Mr Aquinas, are you satisfied not to interview this witness?’ Justice Jefferson wanted to know.
‘I would like to ask her one question,’ said the chief prosecutor.
‘All right,’ said Morning. ‘One.’
Aquinas stomped on a WHEN? balloon and approached the stand. ‘As I understand your testimony, Dr Valcourt, you were on the City of New York during the whole of its seven-week passage from the United States to Antarctica. I also understand that, during this time, you engaged George Paxton in an intimate series of psychoanalytic sessions. Assuming that you do not wish to deny these facts, then my question is this – to what extent are you romantically involved with the defendant?’
The unpregnant expectant mother frowned gently and straightened up. ‘I am not now,’ she said, ‘nor have I ever been, romantically involved with the defendant.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In Which the Essential Question Is Answered and Something Very Much Like Justice Is Served
‘The tribunal will hear the closing argument of the prosecution,’ said Shawna Queen Jefferson.
Aquinas rose, approached the bench, and stood silently before the judges.
‘Fifteen billion years ago,’ he began at last, ‘the cosmos came into being. Nobody, even the best of our unadmitted scientists and clerics, quite knows how, or why.’ Looping his arms together behind his back, he paced around the pile of frozen missiles. ‘Later, some three and a half billion years ago, another miracle occurred. On one particular planet, Earth, organic molecules formed. We do not know whether the same miracle happened elsewhere. The opportunities were overwhelmingly for it, the odds overwhelmingly against it.’
‘At this rate he won’t get around to us for a week,’ said Wengernook.
‘Shut up,’ said Overwhite.
‘The organisms evolved,’ said Aquinas. ‘Great apes appeared. Some of these apes were carnivorous, perhaps even cannibalistic. It is probable that the human species branched off from bipedal, small-brained, weapon-wielding primates who were stunningly proficient at murder.’
George noticed that Reverend Sparrow appeared to be suffering from apoplexy.
‘Are we innately aggressive?’ asked Aquinas. ‘Was the nuclear predicament symptomatic of a more profound depravity? Nobody knows. But if this is so – and I suspect that it is – then the responsibility for what we are pleased to call our inhumanity still rests squarely in our blood-soaked hands. The killer-ape hypothesis does not specify a fate – it lays out an agenda. Beware, the fable warns. Caution. Trouble ahead. Genocidal weapons in the hands of creatures who are bored by peace.’
‘I think I’m going to throw up,’ said Brat.
‘But the fable went unheeded. And the weapons, unchecked. And then, one cold Christmas season, death came to an admirable species – a species that wrote symphonies and sired Leonardo da Vinci and would have gone to the stars. It did not have to be this way. Three virtues only were needed – creative diplomacy, technical ingenuity, and moral outrage. But the greatest of these is moral outrage.’
‘Self-righteous slop, you needed that too,’ said Brat.
‘You needed a trough of it,’ said Wengernook.
‘Shut up,’ said Overwhite.
‘For the past twenty days the walls of this sacred palace have enclosed a curious world,’ said Aquinas. ‘A world where peril is called security, destruction is called strategy, offense is called defense, enlightened self-interest is called appeasement, and machines of chaos and ecological horror are called weapons.’
‘And kangaroo courts are called tribunals,’ said Brat.
‘It is the world of Major General Roger Tarmac, the MARCH Hare, who believed that his Holy Triad meant salvation for America. In the name of the Bombers, and of the Subs, and of the Land-Based Missiles – Amen! It is the world of Brian Overwhite, the weapons industry’s favorite arms controller, who never in his entire career denied the Pentagon a system it really wanted. It is the world of William Randstable, the doomsday doctor, whose smart warhead was just one more bullet in the revolver with which humanity played, you should forgive the expression, Russian roulette. It is the world of Peter Sparrow, the Ezekiel of the airwaves, who wanted America to demonstrate her moral superiority over her adversary by becoming just like her adversary, adopting the economy and mentality of a garrison state. It is the world of Robert Wengernook, the auditor of acceptable losses, who forgot that a species as inquisitive as Homo sapiens cannot draw up plans for a war, even a war of extinction, without eventually needing to find out how well they work. And it is the world of George Paxton, citizen, perhaps the most guilty of all. Every night, this man went to bed knowing that the human race was pointing nuclear weapons at itself. Every morning, he woke up knowing that the weapons were still there. And yet he never took a single step to relieve the threat.’
Has Bonenfant’s team found that vulture expert? asked George’s spermatids. I don’t know, he told them.
‘Learned justices, you are about to write a verdict in the case. Your opinion will be the final chapter in human history. It will matter. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to speculate that, beyond our solar system, another intelligent species monitors this trial, seeking to learn what nuclear weapons are good for. And so I urge you to fill your pens with your black blood and tell these celestial eavesdroppers that the harvest of nuclear weapons is threefold – spiritual degeneration, self-delusion, and death. Perhaps we should bury your verdict in a capsule beneath the Antarctic ice, so that one day, a year or ten years or a century from now, some wayfarer in the Milky Way might find it and know that, for all our love of violence, at the final moment we were able to say no to fusion bombs and yes to life.’
‘Does he make up this crap himself?’ said Brat.
‘All the greeting card writers are dead,’ said Wengernook.
‘Shut up,’ said George.
‘While we cannot know for certain to whom your verdict will speak,’ said Aquinas, ‘we do know for whom it will speak. It will speak for the thousands who sit in this courtroom and for the multitudes who wait on the glacier. It will speak for history – for those who struggled to make this planet a repository of art and learning, and whose achievements have now been laid waste. And it will speak for a population who, in our self-pity as unadmitteds, we sometimes forget. I refer to the five billion men, women, and children who were blasted and burned alive, irradiated and crushed, suffocated and starved and sickened unto death in the recent h
olocaust.
‘Their blood cries to heaven, but their voice cannot be heard.
‘Give them a voice, your Honors. Give them a voice.’
AQUINAS DELIVERS ELEGY FOR HUMAN RACE, said Mount Christ-church that afternoon.
‘The tribunal will hear the closing argument of the defense,’ said Justice Jefferson.
George noticed how barren Bonenfant’s table had become – Dennie gone, Parkman gone, all of the papers gone save one.
‘Remember what he said on the boat,’ muttered Brat. ‘He’s got a rabbit or two in the hat.’
‘I’ll take two,’ said Wengernook.
‘A boy rabbit and a girl rabbit,’ said Randstable.
‘Honored justices,’ Bonenfant began, ‘I submit that, beyond the ornate pieties of my learned opponent, the issue you must decide is simple. Did these six men aim to wage a war or to preserve a peace? Their aim, we have seen, was peace. Indeed, no firmer fact has emerged from this long inquest.
‘Lest we forget, my clients did not ask to have thermonuclear weapons at their disposal. They did not want to inherit a world that knew these obscene devices. But inherit it they did, along with the threat to freedom posed by Russian Communism. I ask you, learned judges, would any of you have acted differently in their place?
‘We all know that the peace was not preserved. During this hearing the mechanism of peace-preservation – the policy of deterrence through strategic balance – has been characterized as self-defeating. In his cross-examination of Robert Wengernook, the prosecutor even went so far as to suggest that my clients pursued deterrence so vigorously that they forced the Soviet Union into the suicidal action of striking first – and with second-strike weapons, no less.
‘Now that is a most improbable scenario. Crazy. Fantastic. Weird . . . Indeed, it simply did not happen that way. I can prove as much.’
Gasps rushed through the courtroom like a thousand icy breezes. The Mount Christchurch reporters leaned over the balustrade of the press box.
‘At this point in the hearing it would be most peculiar were I to put anyone else on the stand. And yet, your Honors, that is what I now propose to do. For there is a seventh defendant in this case – a defendant who should have stood trial in place of my clients.’
