Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  CHAPTER 73 – David

  We are not moving. The car in front of me is a gunmetal colored Humvee. My Civic is so low to the ground my head is roughly level with the exhaust pipe. It’s like staring up the ass of a rhino.

  Ben sits as quietly as he can. He has picked up on my stress. Even if he does not know precisely the sort of violence I wish to unleash on each and every last driver on the streets of Columbus, he gets the general idea. He wants me to share in the euphoria he feels at not having to go to school. I cannot.

  “Why are there so many cars?” he asks.

  “Because some… bad person… has decided that today, of all days, would be a swell time to block off half the streets in greater downtown Columbus to make room for a parade, forcing all drivers to…”

  “A parade!”

  He looks around wildly for any evidence of a roving, festooned celebration.

  “Probably not a parade. Road construction. Building demolition. Maybe a fuel tanker accident. Something horribly inconvenient, not something fun.”

  He sinks back into his seat and goes back to pawing through his black satchel of compact disks. I have told him to bring all of his favorites because he is likely to be sitting without any other form of amusement for some time.

  Such preparations would not have been necessary if Martina Davis had not shirked her responsibility. Shirked is too strong. Hospitalization for a bursting appendix is not really shirking in the classic sense, only in the goddamnit-when-am-I-ever-going-to-catch-a-break sense, which is currently the only sense I really care about.

  It had been Martina’s call that woke me. The ringer on the bedside phone was off, so the sound came from downstairs in the kitchen and from down the hall in my parents’ bedroom. My eyes opened but I had laid still in a kind of groggy terror, listening to the to the obnoxious trill of my parents’ phone as though it came from some giant electronic cicada that had crawled in through a downstairs window and was now shrieking through the house looking for me. I had let it ring. I was certain it was my father calling to grill me about the phone message he had received from Cait. You’ve been indicted for what? Who’s missing? They’re firing you why? You were kissing who? I imagined him squinting into the phone trying to comprehend the unfathomable and yet strangely predictable news that I have stupidly wandered ass-backwards into a life of crime. Not exactly how I wanted to start my day. So I laid there. The answering machine picked up and I strained my ears to hear his voice, bracing myself.

  But it was not my father.

  I could not discern Martina’s words, but I knew she was calling to back out on her agreement to watch Ben. I picked up the phone. Burst appendix she said. I could tell she was in pain. I told her it was not a problem and not to worry. I would just take Ben with me, I told her. No big deal. I had thanked her for calling, wishing her well. Then I had slammed down the phone, flung obscenities all over my childhood bedroom, got out of bed, and started the first day of the end of my life.

  I stare at the idling rhino and its single bumper sticker, God Bless the Second Amendment. I wonder if God blesses any of the other amendments. The Fourth Amendment could use a little help these days.

  The traffic inches imperceptibly forward. I look at my watch. Twelve minutes and counting. I am still blocks away. It’s official. There is no way I will be on time for the hearing. I find it darkly amusing that I should be so upset about arriving late for my own execution. Are they going to start without me? The part of David Johns in this Kafka’s Playhouse production of “Joseph K had it Easy” will be played by...

  I am nearly beside myself with anxiety about being late, which is maybe just redirected angst about the entire process of adjudicating my guilt. I do not know the cause of the automotive cluster-fuck that has constipated Columbus and I do not care. I simply want to report for my incineration. I might have been able to call the telephone number on the hearing notice and advise someone that I am stuck in traffic, except that my cell phone is now in pieces scattered around the grill on my parent’s back deck.

  My shirt is too big. Too big in the chest. Too big in the shoulders. Too long in the sleeves. The size label digs into my neck. It is not my shirt. It is one of my father’s white dress shirts that I have taken from his closet, along with a no-surprises, standard issue, diamond print, blue-on-blue corporate tie. I did not want to go home to my own closet, which by now must smell like the banks of the river Styx. So I simply helped myself. Funny how a simple drug indictment will lessen one’s inhibition toward criminality.

  The shirt makes me think of dad and the fact that he must know by now the things I did not want him to know. I imagine the telephone conversation between my parents, arching through the airspace from Arizona to Ohio and back again. Where did we go wrong? What have we done to cause this? He’s a grown man for Christ’s sake! When does it end? Instinctively, my mother will want to chastise my father for being too quick to judge. She will want to hold up Tilly as the cautionary tale of the child too little understood and too harshly judged. But her instincts will falter from simple lack of ammunition. What could she possibly say? Hollis, we need to talk to David; we need to get his side of the story. Susan, of course, but we’ve been down this road before. Hollis…

  My mother. The woman from the television is back in my head. Her face; her voice. By the time I had looked up from the paper to gawk at the screen, her image was already disappearing as the camera panned the sign-dotted crowd. The voice had sounded like that of my mother. I would have sworn it was her. But the voice came from a woman whose fleeting image I did not have time enough to recognize. I had gone to bed believing it was her and yet woke in the middle of the night believing it could not have been her. That is not how my mother looks. That is not how she talks. That is not what she is or what she does. No way.

  But the voice…. And why, Mr. President? There must be a reason. Tell me again how all of this is necessary.

  It takes the unbidden visage of the unknown dead girl in Johnstown to displace the debate in my head about the unknown woman who sounds like my mother. I cannot help but picture this girl. Give her a name. And a voice. She is someone I knew. She was my student. She kissed me and tried to steal my movies and condoms. She played the violin. Every effort to shape the mental image of the dead girl into someone other than Brittany Kline fails miserably. So I have tried to stop thinking of her as a person altogether. I try to think of her only as the charred deoxyribonucleic acid in the bottom of a hot dumpster that a person wearing a white lab coat will soon examine through a powerful microscope and conclude that the events that have brought him to stoop towards the little eyepiece have absolutely no connection whatsoever to me.

  All day I have had to fight the urge to call Cait and tell her about the dead girl. I want to hear her tell me that I am paranoid; that there is a far greater chance of me being flattened by a meteor than the dead girl turning out to be Brittany Kline. I have tried to tell this to myself, more times than I can count. But I no longer have any credibility with myself. I know that I will say anything, and believe anything, that offers even the smallest consolation to my nerves. So I want someone else to tell me what I already suspect I know. Walter Cronkite would be great. Caitlyn Carson Lewis would do in a pinch. But I cannot call Cait because she has betrayed my trust and I have decided I hate her, even if purely on principle.

  I called Lonnie Lumkin instead. He could not talk long. Change of plea hearing. Twenty minutes. He was chewing. He had said that he, too, had read the article and had wondered. Wondered? Wondered what? Wondered if I had actually murdered my student? Lonnie had given me that finger-wagging tone, no doubt holding a fucking carrot in the air, and explained that he had only wondered whether the girl was Brittany, not whether I was actually a murderer. He said it could be anybody. Anybody, Mr. Johns! I told him I knew that, and I actually felt a little better. He told me that we would just have to wait and find out if it was Brittany and that if it was Brittany, then we would be among the very first
to know. I told him I knew that too, and I felt considerably worse. I hung up wanting to vomit.

  Ben is bored. He leans over and turns on the radio. He starts pushing all the presets. The sounds are ghostly, and vaguely familiar, fighting to cut through the static and then dropping away into some secret sonic abyss.

  “It’s broken,” I say. “Something electrical. I only get one station.”

  “What station?”

  “You won’t like it.” I change bands and find the signal.

  …sibility. That is an alien concept to our mentally challenged, morally impaired, pinheaded friends on the Left. Okay? Responsibility. Who will take responsibility? Who will take responsibility for the havoc wrecked by terrorists freshly emboldened in watching our own citizens tear down the Commander in Chief? Does the Left think that al Qaeda does not watch television? Do they think they are not over there cleaning their AK-47’s and watching the spectacle …

  Ben turns it off, making a face. I laugh in spite of the roiling sickness in my stomach. The car rolls forward.

  I am eighteen minutes late and panting when we step off the elevator on the 22nd floor of the Franklin County Courthouse Building. I speed walk down the hall looking for the probate court with my father’s briefcase in one hand and Ben in the other. He is struggling to keep up and his black satchel of music is banging against his leg.

  There is a sign on the door of the probate court. Closed Hearing – Parties Only. Below that sign is another. Columbus School District/Johns, reassigned to Juvenile Courtroom C, Floor 6. Expletives flood my neural pathways. I pull Ben sharply back toward the elevator.

  Sixth floor. Twenty-two minutes late. There are people, adults and students, milling around the end of the hallway outside Juvenile Courtroom C. My arrival on the floor has activated some sort of suction device inside the courtroom, pulling everyone out of the hallway ahead of me. One by one, and then in twos and threes, they disappear into the hole in the hallway wall. I can hear a girl’s voice inside the hole saying authoritatively, he’s here, he’s here. I feel strangely important. Birth aside, I am not sure my arrival has ever been so anticipated.

  The room strikes me as a bit…diminutive for a courtroom, but perhaps not for a Juvenile Court. Everything seems just a little smaller than I imagine it should be. The judge’s bench seems a little cramped and is not as elevated. The tables for the parties and their lawyers come with chairs that are disproportionately narrow. The witness stand is not an elevated box, but a small square table in front of a rolling short-backed chair.

  In a more sensible world, the smaller stature of this place would lessen some of the anxiety and might help to enforce a realistic, non-hysterical perspective. But there is nothing sensible about the world. Whatever its intended purpose, the three-quarter scale of the room adds an extra dollop of humiliation to my execution without doing anything to lessen my anxiety.

  Some progressive bureaucrat has obviously advised the architect of the Franklin County Courthouse Complex that juvenile proceedings should not transpire in a setting that follows the traditional pre-detention bunker model for adjudicatory venues. The courtroom is awash in daylight coming from a bank of high narrow windows running the length of the far wall, above the place where a jury might sit if the room had been designed to accommodate a jury. Purples and mauves predominate. Along the back wall is a large macramé of birds in flight. As in, bet now you really wish you could fly. Punk.

  There is a three-foot polished wooden wall that separates the counsel tables from the gallery. The table on the left is empty except for a microphone on a short black tripod, a silver water pitcher, and a stack of white Styrofoam cups.

  At the table on the right, two men are hunched over a neat stack of papers. They swivel in their chairs to observe my entrance. One of the men is mostly bald in silver glasses and a nicely tailored grey suit and a red tie. The other is Principal Robert B. Robertson III. A thin smile slips across his face, like he has opened a tiny valve somewhere in the back of his head. He holds up a hand in distant greeting and, because I am close to terrified and looking for assurance from anyone, even from someone who’s only possible assurance can be that mine will be a quick and painless death, I reciprocate.

  Between us is the gallery; six rows of purply-blue, padded bench seating that arch from wall to wall with an aisle at each end and one aisle down the middle. The gallery, which is the only thing in the courtroom that is oversized, is nearly full. Clusters of parents and students crane and twist their necks amid a low burbling murmur.

  They are all out of context. Recognition comes in fits and starts, like I am trying to remember people from a different life. The young faces suddenly resolve and leap out at me – Todd, Alicia, Ashley, Melanie, Walter, Taren, Becca, Martin, Cyndee, Kashawnda – eyes connecting, jaws working the collective gum. The little cannibals have turned out in force. Blink. Chew. Blink. Chew. They must have come directly from school. I wonder if Robertson bused them over for the event. Blink. Chew. Blink. Chew. The tables have turned. I am no longer in control. They see this as their turn.

  The adults I know less well. I can make educated guesses, matching parent with offspring, but with a few exceptions, they are all an indistinguishable mob. My only interest in the adults is in finding supportive colleagues. I look around quickly for Roger Deihl and Suzanne LaForest and Phil Barnes. The notion that Phil would stick his neck out was a reach. The notion that he would rally Suzanne and Roger was, in hindsight, ridiculous. None of them are present.

  Chuck North is present. He sits in the row immediately behind Principal Bob. Unlike Principal Bob, he does not hold up a hand in recognition. He is not offering even false assurance that this is all going to be quick and painless. He sits stone faced, filling out his tweed sport coat. He turns his back to me and leans forward and says something to Principal Bob and the lawyer for the School District. Something amusing, apparently.

  On the other side of the room, in the back, is Mark Shepherd. He gives me a solid unsmiling wave that I return. He is not the same, somehow. He looks drawn. Pale. Sick. I have never seen Shepp’s face register any emotion that might be close to tension or worry. A woman to his left leans forward and waves. It’s Mae. Perfect Mae. She smiles, but it is a smile that does not quite make it all the way across the courtroom gallery to where I am standing, holding my brother’s hand and wishing I could wake myself up from this nightmare. Wishing I could fucking fly.

  I can tell from the increasing tension at the end of my arm that all of the attention has made Ben nervous too. I pull him up the aisle to the first row behind the half-wall. The row is mostly full, but there is room enough on the aisle, directly behind the chair for which I am destined. I kneel in the aisle and put the music bag in his lap.

  “This will take awhile,” I whisper. “Move slow. Keep the volume way down. You have to be quiet. You have to be calm.”

  He doesn’t need this. I do. He turns his pale lunar face to me, mouth open, breathing audibly, the tip of his tongue resting on his lower lip, and squeezes my hand.

  There is movement to my right, in the front of the room. All around me the room gets suddenly taller. People stand. I stand.

  I had envisioned someone like Gandalf. Or Atticus. Wisdom incarnate. Compassion for the thoughtless little Pippins of the world. I realize now that my imagination was stacking the deck to keep me sane and alive; nourishing me on secret seeds of optimism. What could go wrong with Judge Gandalf or Judge Finch?

  But this man is neither Ian McKellen nor Gregory Peck. Bela Lugosi is closer. Without the cape and lipstick. And taller. A little Vincent Price around the mouth and eyes. Swell.

  “Sit, sit,” he says, irritated. The people do as they are told. “Mr. Johns, I see that you have decided to join us.”

  I push through the swinging door in the half-wall and lay my father’s briefcase flat on the table.

  “I… the traffic, your Honor…” I point apologetically towards the windows, meaning to indicate the streets b
elow. “They rerouted all the…”

  “We all figured as much.”

  He sits down heavily in the high-backed chair up on the shielded platform at the front of the room. I’m thinking sixty. Sixty-two. He has impressive black eyebrows arching dramatically over dark eyes, and a full head of black hair graying at the temples. He looks decidedly Italian, which is also terrific since I am on trial for slandering Christopher Columbus.

  “Well, I was going to give you another three minutes, so you caught us just in time. Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

  “Yes sir.”

  I sit and open the brief case. It is empty except for a notebook, a pen, and a copy of the current contract between the Columbus Board of Education and the Columbus Education Association. I take them all out and close the briefcase and slide it in front of the empty chair next to me.

  “Do I take it correctly, Mr. Johns, that you are not represented by counsel?”

  “Correct.”

  “You were initially, but are no longer.”

  “Correct.”

  “I see. Well, I have your initial request, through counsel, for a public proceeding. Can I assume, given that there has been no withdrawal of such request, that this remains your intent.”

  “Correct.” I say this out of reflex, sensing by his tone that it is the right answer, knowing that “correct” and “yes sir” have, so far anyway, served me well and without controversy in this hearing, now a full forty-five seconds old. It is not until the words are gone from my lips that I consider calling them back, realizing that I might have the power to clear the courtroom. Why did I ever want a public hearing? I remember a heady conversation with my erstwhile counsel. Something about turning the tables on Robertson; putting him in the spotlight. I summon the courage to speak; to reverse myself. But the moment is gone, flying south.

  “Very well. Let’s begin. We are on record in the matter of the Columbus Board of Education versus David H. Johns, disciplinary matter 05-0103. My name is Basil R. Archoni. The R stands for Raymond. My friends call me Ray. You can call me ‘Your Honor.’ ‘Judge’ also works. By appointment by the Board of Education and agreement of the parties, I will act as the Hearing Officer in this matter. I am grateful to the Franklin County Court System for once again allowing me to use its facilities on such occasions. It is not easy for an old judge to retire. The opportunity to continue to haunt these halls is much appreciated and comes to me with a sacred responsibility to maintain order and decorum. Does everyone in this room understand me?”