by Owen Thomas
“I don’t. Not with a proper context and balance. It’s not that you teach these things, Mr. Johns. It’s the way you teach them.”
“Oh, really? How do I teach them?”
“Like you want these events to define us.”
“Don’t they?”
“Not to me. Not to Pamela Knox or Walter Green or any of the other parents. And as for the kids, well that partly depends on their teacher, doesn’t it? Which is where I come in. I care about how their teacher would have them understand, viscerally, the history of their country.” He leans forward in his chair, clasping his hands and bracing his forearms against the edge of the table. He is fully in control. “How would you have these kids understand their own history?”
“Realistically.”
“Realism would be fine. It’s the pessimism – the cynicism – that worries me, Mr. Johns. It’s corrosive. It keeps us from living differently. From living better. It keeps us from improving and thinking better of ourselves. The pessimists and the cynics always find their way back to the dark. That’s where they believe they belong. That’s home.”
“And how do you expect us to learn from our mistakes, if…”
“Now, me? I’m an optimist about this country. I’m bullish by nature. I suppose part of that comes from my faith. I am a devout man. I know that you are not.”
The question on my tongue, the one I sensor, is how a devout and literal adherence to a faith premised on original sin can provide fertile ground for optimism. How does one escape and move on from that indelible scarlet letter?
Robertson can see me thinking. He holds out his hands defensively.
“I’m not judging. We are just different that way. I’m always looking forward. For myself. My family. My country. Sure, we have much in our past that is unsavory. What country and culture does not? We’re all human. But we learn from history and we put it aside and we move on. We do not let it define us. We do not let it trap us forever. That is not the country we want to be. If I am upset by an election, I move on. But the pessimist, the cynic, cannot move on. He starts hollering about a coup d’etat, as you have done.”
“So Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas can simply ignore the conflict of interest …”
“Mr. Gore has moved on, Mr. Johns, why haven’t you? Join us in the present.”
“Gentlemen,” intones Judge Archoni. “We seem to have strayed.”
“I’m just answering the questions, your Honor.”
“Mr. Johns…”
The voice that sounds like Harry Belafonte comes again, this time in three sharp reports, like sonic melons hitting the side of the building. The muffled cheers gush and recede. Gush and recede. The judge closes his eyes, summoning patience. Begins again.
“Mr. Johns, do you have other questions for this witness about the termination?”
It is Archoni’s way of asking whether I want to ask Robertson anything about the elephant in the room. The principal’s testimony has brought me within an inch of being a convicted felon responsible for the disappearance of a young girl whose charred remains may be at the bottom of a Johnstown dumpster. And yet, he and Etus have made the salient question not whether I am actually guilty, but whether I might be guilty, and whether it was reasonable for them to terminate me, in part, because I might be guilty. Insisting that I am actually innocent will get me no further than insisting that Christopher Columbus was actually guilty. That’s not the right focus Mr. Johns. Truth is irrelevant.
Etus is rolling his pencil back and forth on the table. Robertson is looking at me. His expression is pleasant. Patient. He wants me to talk about the elephant in the room. He wants me to describe it in detail. As far as he is concerned, the more detail the better. Let’s talk more about that kiss in the bar. The drugs in the car. The drugs in your closet. Let’s talk about the last time you saw Brittany Kline. See if you can explain it all away.
“I don’t have any more questions, Judge.”
“Very well. Mr. Robertson, you are free to return to counsel table. Mr. Etus?”
“Your Honor, the Board of Education calls Mr. Mark Shepherd.”
The collective beast behind me shifts its weight. I can hear the back door open as Shepp is summoned. The sun is lower in the sky. The rectangle of light on the wall opposite the bank of high windows is yellowing, deepening as it slowly climbs for the ceiling. The gate behind me opens. Shepp slows. I look up at him as he is looking away.
He seems terrified. Is it fear of testifying, or does he now know that I know about Mae? I can feel her back there somewhere off behind my left shoulder. I wonder if she can fit us both into her field of view. I wish Cait were here.
Etus stands as Shepp sits. Shepp’s shirt is tucked in and buttoned up to the neck. Cuffs rolled down and buttoned. He is making an effort.
There is a commotion at the door. A bustling.
“Hold on there Mel. Keep your pants on. Let me get into position first.”
The voice and the double-entendre entrance and the sudden heaviness moving through the airspace identify her before she is actually through the gate and standing beside me like a mountain of lavender pushed in by a sweaty gardener.
“Glenda Laveau of Chaney, Baker, Smith & Lyons, counsel to Mr. Shepherd.”
I stand like I have been stung on the ass. I look at the profile of her colossal head and its towering black Medusan coif framing a heavily pancaked face. She does not acknowledge me. I catch Mark Shepherd looking at me. He looks away.
I look around at the people behind me for some confirmation that my astonishment is justified. In front of me is Ben; mouth open, eyes drinking in this leviathan of color. Behind him is a courtroom full of faces, all raptly trained on the newcomer. Behind the sea of faces, in the center of the last row, legs crossed, hands in his lap, is my father.
He is not looking at Glenda Laveau.
He is looking at me.
Glenda’s leather attaché case thuds heavily on the table, an inch from my fingers.
“Move over sweet cheeks,” she whispers. “Mama’s here.”
CHAPTER 74 – Angus
The Lion Tree, by Angus Mann
“You’re leaving me?”
“Yes.”
“Here? Alone?”
“Yes.”
“You can’t…”
“I know. But I will anyway.”
“Why, Elle…”
“I should think that would be obvious.”
“I … did not … kill her. Why would I do such a monstrous thing? I loved Jules.”
“Oh. You mean like you love me?”
It was a crack in the façade. She had acknowledged that it was personal. It had to do with her, not the law. He took that as a glimmer of hope. It meant she cared.
The solar triad was near complete. In another hour the turbines would circulate the air, animating the tips of the wheat in a breezy simulacrum of nature. The dome lights had begun their final fade cycle, leaving only the ghostly blue Everglows hanging above the doors of the barracks and above the CAB – the Core Access Bays that opened down into the Byzantine corridors, the echoing man-made intestines of Rhuton-Baker, from which virtually every aspect of the continental terrarium – its soil, its water, its atmosphere –could be monitored and controlled. Above him, Elena’s face shone like concentrated starlight in the gathering crepuscular gloom.
“No,” he said. “Not like I love you. Is that it? You think I could do that to you? Abandon you? Poison you? I couldn’t.”
“You could. You will. If I let you.”
“Why? Why would I?”
“Because that’s your lion tree, Lieutenant. You’re always going to go back to that understanding. That identity.”
“My lion … What identity? What understanding?”
“You’re not the one left behind. That terrifies you. You’re the leaver. The one who avoids the inevitable. Who was the one who first set this sickness in motion? She must have been something. I’m guessing your mother.”
&n
bsp; “Elle…”
But she was not listening. The tips of her fingers played across the imitation texture of the picnic table.
“Was there a wife before Jules? Someone else you haven’t told me about?”
“I love you. You. That’s my only memory or understanding about anything. You.”
She closed her eyes, sharply, denying those words every access down into her own labyrinthine emotions; the only place where he had ever wanted to be lost. When she opened her eyes again, they said she had withdrawn the question. Who he had loved or not loved, married or not married, was irrelevant to her. The dome darkened another eighteen percent with a soft but massive sigh, as if the entire planet had remembered something no longer true.
“You can’t just leave me here. You can’t be serious. They’ll prosecute you for not bringing me back. They’ll…”
She cut him off, as if he were not really there. As if his protests were the buzzing of an insect on a world without insects.
“My uncle was a forensic mentalist for the military. A good one. Before that he was in private practice. He liked to tell his patients stories. Parables. He liked to recast the stories so that his patient was somewhere in the middle. He’d stop and let the patient finish telling the story. He said it helped him figure out why they did the things they did.”
There was a distant rumbling, beneath them and to the North, in the direction of the hangar bays that had been carved into the rock to hold all of the interstellar ships that would now never come.
“Elena,” he said, the pleading injured bird again thrashing in the thrushes of his tone. “Please. We’re running out of time. Let’s just go.”
He stood abruptly, as if to lead her over to the CAB and down below to the ship whose engines were already humming to life. But she was ready for this, and he should have known she would be. Her thumb flicked, activating the tiny electrodes in his neck. Every muscle in his body tightened in a quiet, uniform spasm. He dropped like a flat-ended stone back down onto the bench. His muscles went slack.
“The lion tree story was my uncle’s favorite. You know lions, Lieutenant?”
He looked up at her and sighed in defeat. He rubbed the hot spot on his neck.
“Yes. Elle. I passed Natural History. I know what lions were.”
“The lion tree story starts with a family; a mother and father and two children, one boy and one girl. The family takes a trip to Kenya. You know Kenya?”
He nodded, forehead in his hands. He knew Kenya. He had been an excellent student. But it did not matter to her.
“Kenya was a country on the African continent. It was nothing like the Africa we studied in school. No domes. No undercities. This was much earlier. It was a living continent then. Teeming. It was habitable. All of it.”
“Elena? Elle?”
“They went for a safari. The father was a big-game hunter and photographer. He wanted pictures of the wildlife. Elephants. Giraffes. Water buffalo. All in plentiful supply back then. Just wandering around for people to see. So the man hired a team of guides and the group of them, along with a complement of cooks and servants, spent two weeks roaming the baking savannahs, camping and taking pictures. Now, one day, …”
There was a knocking sound – a series of precise collisions of rock and metal – that passed up through the spongy pinkish loam and reverberated off the convex sky. Something enormous was opening or closing somewhere unseen beneath them.
“Elena… it’s almost time to go. I’m begging you. Don’t do this. Even if I deserve it, don’t give in to that uniform. You’re not a heartless person. Take me with you. It’s a long trip back. We’ll work things out. I’ll explain everything. If you still aren’t persuaded, I’ll take my chances with UNIX. I’ll prove my innocence. The science can be wrong. Even if I’m convicted, I’ll feel better if you’re not my executioner. So will you.”
It was a false distinction. She would deliver him to his fate, one way or the other. She could not escape any more than he could. But she knew that already. And it did not matter in any event, for she would not be moved. Not again. Not by him. Maybe not ever.
“One day, as the sun was setting, the group set up camp beneath a cluster of large trees. They were called acacias. They had canopies that looked like layers of green clouds, casting pools of shade across the dry hot, grasses of the savannah.”
Something like daylight broke over her face and her lips began a smile.
“Wouldn’t you give just about anything to live in a time when you could see wild trees? Just to stroll up to one, sit under it and watch the sun looking for you all afternoon?”
“Yes,” he said, too eager to exploit the diversion. “If you were with me beneath that tree, then yes.”
She thought for a moment, apparently thinking about what he had said. Time slipped its gears and the moment stretched, elongating like a shadow on a sunlit wall. She blinked and he watched, his heart sinking, as her lips resumed their shape.
“When it was completely dark, and everyone was in their tents, the lions came. They had all heard them roaring in the night, but they had seemed so far away and the perimeter of the camp was well lit with torches. It was an unusually large pride. They killed many people, devouring them horrifically in their tents and dragging away what they did not consume off into the blood-stained grasses. The man’s entire family was eaten alive. But the man himself,” the Colonel raised a finger, “he survived. He and only a few others.”
“And why is that? I assume you mean to tell me.”
“The reason the man survived was that he had left his tent in the dead of night, too exhilarated by his day of hunting to sleep, and he had crawled surreptitiously into the tent belonging to the daughter of one of the cooks. She was a strong and lovely woman to whom he had grown very attracted during the course of the trip. She had made her interest in the man known in the way that young women can do without so much as a word. And as they were consummating this mutual interest, the lions had come and taken his family. Both the man and his young lover had been spared.
“The man was so stricken at the horror of what had happened that he wandered off into the savanna for two days, threatening to shoot anyone who followed. He tracked the pride day and night, following the sound of roaring. Not to kill them, you see, but to be eaten. For he was the one who had been unjustly spared. He was the one who deserved the fate wrongly meted out to his wife and children. The roaring seemed to grow fainter and fainter, like it was a kind of terrible, toxic water seeping away into the soil, and he was soon unable to tell the difference between what he actually heard and what he remembered. At night, alone in the wild, the man lay upon the hard ground and waited. But the lions never came.
It was always sleep and its terrible dreams that came on cat’s feet to take him.
“When he returned to camp, he found the others waiting for him. They had buried what little remained of the dead in a grave they dug beneath the acacias. The cook’s daughter, bereft at having lost her father and friends, came to him consolingly, needing comfort in return. But the man was incapable of love and he rejected her harshly. They made the long ride back to town and then parted without speaking.
“The man did not return to his own country. He stayed in Kenya. His friends and extended family, hearing the terrible news and fearing for his wellbeing, begged him to return. His work sent emissaries. He refused them all and resigned. All of his old identities had shriveled away and collapsed into a new understanding of himself. He was then, simply, the unjustly spared.
“The man made monthly excursions, alone into the savanna, looking for lions. He carried no gun. He was deliberately careless with his food scraps. He slept in the open without torches burning. But the lions never came. As he lay listening beneath the stars, the Kenyan soundscape offered him not a single distant roar on which to pin his dark hopes. Each time, the man returned to the city bitter in his disappointment and that much more certain of his new, singular identity.”
�
�He could have just done the work himself,” said Miller.
“It was not about suicide, Lieutenant. Even suicide is not always about suicide.”
Miller slumped, his posture bowing outward, bracing himself on his forearms.
“One day, after many years of this monthly disappointment, the man happened upon the cook’s daughter at a local bazaar. She was as much a stranger to him as was happiness itself, and yet he was surprised at the fondness with which he recognized her. She was even more beautiful and engaging than he remembered. Over time they became friends and then lovers once again, spending all of their hours together. Eventually they were married and started a small goat farm outside the city.
“The man continued to make his monthly trips out into the savannah. But the longer he and his new wife were together, the more fearful he became that the lions might actually find him. He began taking a gun, which, he told himself, was to kill small game to eat. He slept in a tent, to keep out the insects, and kept torches burning as late into the night as possible, so that he could read his books. His routes stayed closer to civilization where lions were less likely and he came back to town sooner, glad to be home. He started taking a camera so that his new wife might believe him when he said that he was part of a photography group and that the point of his excursions was to take pictures and to domesticate the savagery and terror from all of those years ago. But the truth was, even as he denied it to himself, the terror was slowly accumulating again in his heart.
“Eventually, the man became so lonely on his excursions that he invited one of his few friends to accompany him. That friend invited a couple of his friends who invited a visiting relative and so on until there were usually a dozen or so amateur photographers searching for game. The man was able to sell some of his photographs to tourists and, rather suddenly, what had started as a defense against a dangerous compulsion he could not control, became a way to supplement his modest income.
“It was not unusual for his wife to join the photographers on these monthly trips. She had no talent with a lens, but she was a good cook and delightful company who did not particularly like being left at home alone, even if for just a few days. The others in the group adored her almost as much as her own husband and when the man began to observe this admiration, month after month, as his friends developed their own friendships with her and elbowed him in the ribs and winked at him in passing, he began to entertain a possibility that was dark and perfidious to his soul. The possibility that, in his more unguarded moments, began to creep into his head, was the possibility that he was the lucky man; that he was a man upon whom fortune just might be inclined to smile.
