The Fact of a Body

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

  Some years, the law firm Clive founds will represent half the men on death row in Louisiana. But even then, asked by reporters to speak about his career, it will be Ricky’s story he returns to. There is something unusual about this case for Clive, something that’s just beginning. His father was mentally ill. When he looks at Ricky, he sees his father. Can Clive feel yet, in this moment, how far that vision will drive him?

  Because of legal skirmishes, because of fights over motions and venues, because the swift wheels of justice are in fact creaky and slow and no one can identify whether they are justice at all, Ricky’s case will take years to resolve.

  Which gives me time to arrive in Louisiana.

  Twenty-Two

  Louisiana, 2003

  There’s no sign on the building when I arrive at the New Orleans address the lawyer gave me over the phone. Just a smoked-glass door, not even numbered, and windows with slat blinds pulled tight. Though the other buildings on the block are all gray, this one is Mardi Gras purple, and the color only accentuates how vacant the blocks feels, how evacuated, as if it were a night or a weekend. But it’s Monday morning, 9:00 a.m., and still no one’s here. Maybe this isn’t the right building, but the address is all I’ve got. I press the bell.

  A man answers the door. Behind him, the room is so dark it’s like a pocket of night in the middle of the morning. He’s wearing jeans and a short-sleeved, button-down shirt, no law firm suit, and now I’m really wondering if I’ve got the right place. Then there’s the man’s dark skin. When the lawyers talked about the noose ties on the phone, the way they talked made me realize that they were all white, most of their clients black. They wouldn’t have a client answer the door, would they?

  If the man can sense I’m startled, he doesn’t show it. He smiles. “Come right on in. You’re an intern, right? The others are upstairs.”

  This is John Thompson. The man who spent a year on death row next to Ricky, and fourteen years before he was exonerated. If he tells me his name now, if he sticks out his hand for a shake and introduces himself, the moment doesn’t tack into my memory. His name doesn’t mean anything to me yet. Instead my attention is on the office that is suddenly visible: how after the threshold the floor sinks and the two black fake-leather couches in the waiting room have seen better days; how the magazine covers are dated and dusty and the desk where the receptionist sits is behind a thick layer of plastic that looks like bulletproof glass. This isn’t a reception area for actually receiving anyone. Not like my parents’ firm, with its gleaming mahogany designed to impress. A dry-erase board on the wall lists an alarmingly long roster of names, its markings smeared. There’s a column for “in” and a column for “out,” magnets like poker chips meant to mark which lawyers are available. But only a few magnets are clearly in a particular column, the rest strewn haphazardly across the board. The board, like the reception area, looks like someone set it up long ago in a burst of optimism before succumbing to dust, time, and too much work.

  “The library’s right up this staircase,” John Thompson says.

  So the man who knew Ricky is the one who leads me to his story. One hand on the slim banister, I climb. The staircase is narrow and tight, the wooden ceiling so low I can just barely straighten my back. The room I leave and the room I walk toward are both dim. All summer this passage will strike me as strange to climb: to leave the overcooled office space and enter this pocket of hot darkness tucked to the side. Always it will seem at once illicit and stifling. Only years later, flipping through the photographs in Ricky’s file, will I see another staircase that perfectly evokes the same feeling, and stop short. The staircase in the Lawson house that Lucky and Dixon climbed, following Ricky. The staircase Ricky climbed, following Jeremy. The way the evidence photograph was taken, angled up, is exactly how the memory of this staircase will feel.

  Up top, the corridor opens into a cavernous space with a wide table at the center. The ceilings are impossibly high, leather-bound books climbing the walls as though trying to reach them. Case registers. These books hold the sources of the hypotheticals I love, the cases that are the foundation of the world I am entering.

  Eight other young people sit around the table—law students, like me, here to spend their summer working for the firm. At the table’s head stands a thin woman with a British accent, wearing a black suit. We make our pleasantries and our introductions. For the whole day we sit around that table. We learn the firm’s history. We learn its methods for keeping track of files. We learn what to wear when visiting clients.

  The next morning she again steps to the front of the room. Today, she says, we were supposed to meet her husband, Clive Stafford Smith, who founded this office. “But Clive is still in Texas, being the awake lawyer in the sleeping lawyer case.”

  We laugh, a little awed. That case is famous right now, one in which a condemned man has appealed for a new trial because during the original, when he was sentenced to death, his lawyer actually fell asleep during the proceedings. All of us at the table are from northern schools. All of us at the table are from the North. Until now, that case has had the feel of a story from far away. But we’re actually here.

  “Instead,” she says, “we’ll show you this.” She holds up a videotape. “This is the taped confession of the man whose retrial we just finished, recorded in 1992. Nine years ago he was condemned to death, but this time the jury gave him life.” She hadn’t planned to show it to us; that much is clear. But we’re here, the time needs filling, and what better way to preview the work ahead than to show us whom we’re here to defend?

  “Could you please,” she says to another lawyer, “get the lights?”

  On the screen a face flickers into view.

  Thick, Coke-bottle glasses. Too-big ears, the legacy of Bessie’s drinking. Brown eyes that were the last Jeremy saw.

  He is talking about molesting children. “Sometimes I, you know, rub my penis on them,” he says—and my grandfather’s hands are at the hem of my white flannel nightgown with the little blue stars; he is tugging it up and he is tugging down my underwear and he is undoing his fly.

  I came here to help save the man on the screen. I came to help save men like him. I came because my ideals and who I am exist separately from what happened in the past. They must. If they don’t, what will my life hold?

  But I look at the man on the screen, I feel my grandfather’s hands on me, and I know. Despite what I’ve trained for, despite what I’ve come here to work for, despite what I believe.

  I want Ricky to die.

  Part Three: Trial

  Twenty-Three

  That day I stepped away from the conference table knowing exactly whose confession I’d seen. But an hour later, I no longer knew the man’s name. I couldn’t remember it. When I tried to, darkness licked at my field of vision and the name was suddenly gone. I never worked on the man’s case, but I worked on many others, and afterward, too, I felt myself changed. Now it was the victims whose names I noticed in cases, the victims I suddenly wondered about.

  I knew it was strange that I couldn’t remember the man’s name. Something was happening inside me. I would read his file again and again to try to make myself remember it, my glance skidding short on those letters—why couldn’t I quite hold them? Always my vision would jolt just slightly, as though the focus on a camera had gone out. A high-alert flood washed over my body. Seconds later, I no longer remembered the name I’d just read. It was gone as neatly as if snipped from my consciousness, only the black mark of the excision left behind.

  When summer ended, I returned to Boston. I finished law school. And then I left the law—how could I become a lawyer, after wanting the man to die? My opposition to the death penalty had helped drive me to law school. And I still opposed it—or thought I did. But how could I fight for what I believed when as soon as a crime was personal to me, my feelings changed? Every crime was personal to someone. I went back to school for writing instead. But still I thought often of the boy the man
had killed, Jeremy, and of that boy’s mother, Lorilei. That she’d testified for his killer stirred complicated feelings in me: admiration but also anger. Yet I’d run from that complexity, I knew. I was a coward and I still couldn’t remember the man’s name.

  Which is why, twelve years after that day in the law firm library, I am standing under a giant truck-stop sign. Because it is not possible to let the past remain a haunting. The sign says CASH MAGIC. There is no sun, so the sign gives no shade. It is August of 2015, ninety-five degrees with ninety-five percent humidity, and the sky looks like sludge poured from a contractor’s bucket. Westward of Lake Pontchartrain, New Orleans’s exuberant purples and yellows, its neon and its billboards, have given way to reed-choked swamp. Two hundred miles outside New Orleans, as I-10 snakes its way across the lower half of Louisiana toward the town of Iowa, the road and sky bleed together on the horizon, oozing into one vast blank gray expanse. I got part of the man’s court record and read thousands of pages of files to get here. I read his name over and over, until the shaking subsided and I learned it.

  Ricky Langley’s case didn’t end in 2003 with the retrial Clive fought for. It didn’t end when Lorilei told the jury she could hear his cry for help. The verdict from that trial was thrown out, and in 2009 Ricky was tried again and sentenced to life again. That brought the trial count to three. In 1994, a death sentence. In 2003, life. In 2009, life. Before the 2009 trial, the appellate court had held that since he’d escaped a death sentence once, he couldn’t be made to face another.

  So it was the 2003 retrial—the one at which Lorilei had testified for Ricky, and that had concluded right before I arrived in Louisiana—that decided his fate. Why, then, had there been another trial after that, the third? He’d committed the murder. Who would have pushed for it? And how had Lorilei been able to fight for him when he’d killed her son—while I, despite my opposition to the death penalty, had been unable to? I hoped the court record would answer my questions. I hoped it would help me understand.

  But reading it, I soon realized that what I needed was everything that hadn’t made it into the words of the record I’d read. The emotions. The memories. The story. The past.

  * * *

  The past. Which had happened here, in the parking lot of the Cash Magic, once the Fuel Stop. In the heat, the lot is nearly empty. It looks as though it could accommodate at least sixty cars and a dozen trucking rigs, but there’s only a dented burgundy four-by-four truck with a purple-and-gold LSU fleur-de-lis on the back and a muddy white sedan with rusted hubcaps. A lone black truck jackknifes across four spaces at the back of the lot. Nearby squat two Dumpsters, one green and one blue, both mottled orange with rust. The back door of the gas station has been blacked out and painted with white letters reading ADULTS ONLY. Later tonight the Cash Magic will become the local casino, and the locals will search for the jackpot to change their luck.

  Sweat beads on my skin. My mouth feels like I’ve been sucking on a wet rag. I raise my camera and frame the green Cash Magic sign over the trees. There’s a glossy black hat on it, from which a magician’s gloved white hand extracts a rabbit. Click. The trees across the road seem to tremble in the heat, their branches snaking like arms, their tiny leaves like bejeweled fingers. Click. The leaves reach over the concrete, the land ready to reclaim itself. Click.

  Through my camera I frame the red metal signs over the gas pumps. I frame the shiny silver pumps and the dark asphalt that stretches beneath them. Twenty-three years ago, this lot wasn’t paved. Twenty-three years ago, a pale, skinny twenty-six-year-old man with jug ears and glasses that swallowed half his face sat perched on a tractor, spreading crushed shell across the ground I now stand on. If I squint, I can almost make out Lucky, as he steps out of the police cruiser and removes his hat.

  It’s all here. Just as it was twenty-three years ago. Just as it is in the files.

  Then the feeling begins. The feeling that—as much as any of the rational reasons I tell myself—is still really why I’ve come back to Louisiana. Why I’ve had to. My skin flushes and grows tight and prickly, my heart pounds and the sound echoes in my head. I lower the camera from my eyes and without the shield of the viewfinder the image in front of me seems to warp and blur. Everything suspended. Like being hurtled back in time.

  * * *

  Two nights before I came here, I was in bed with my girlfriend, Janna. After law school, I came out as gay. It was as though leaving the law—jettisoning the life I’d planned—forced me to accept the rest of who I was. For years I’d been afraid that if I came out, and anyone learned I’d been abused as a child, they would think that that was why I was gay. As if that had turned me gay. In my heart I knew that wasn’t it. The first time I slept with a woman, my chest opened up. I hadn’t known until that moment how closed it was. I’m gay because I love women, it’s as simple as that. But for so long the possibility that anyone might even think otherwise kept me hidden.

  Janna and I are opposites. I have my mother’s narrow shoulders and broad hips, the olive skin and dark curly hair of my grandfather. Janna is broad-shouldered and muscled, her hips as narrow as a boy’s and her blond hair as short, her Germanic skin so pale it’s almost translucent. When I came out as gay, my eating disorder faded, as though my body had been waiting for me to accept who I am. Now I cook elaborate meals. Janna would live on protein bars and caffeinated gum if she could, whatever she can fit in a hiking backpack or on the back of a bike. Maybe our differences come down to that I am a writer and she is a scientist. But often the superficial differences seem to reflect something larger: the way we experience time. For me, always layered. For her, the moment. We haven’t been together long—only a little more than half a year—but part of what we give each other is the chance to see differently.

  That night we were lying on my bed kissing. My studio apartment in Cambridge is tiny, chosen because it’s an affordable way to live within walking distance of Harvard, where I now teach writing. Stacks of books are everywhere—and at the room’s center, there is the bed. We were lying on top of it, not quite gone to bed together but not quite denying what we were doing, either. I turned onto my elbows so I was above her and I leaned down and kissed her. I love kissing her. My whole body seems to dissolve into sensation, nothing of the past about it, only that moment and her mouth and my tongue. We kissed and we kissed, and soon my hands were at her shirt and I was tugging it off. She slid her hands up my back and fumbled with my bra’s clasp. I yanked hard to pull the elastic band of hers over her head. Then I let my body fall forward into hers, closing my eyes to concentrate on the feeling of her skin meeting mine. I kissed her again and her tongue found my mouth. I reached down between her legs. She reached down to touch me and then we were moving together and it felt good and I moaned and it felt good again.

  And then it didn’t.

  When this happens I know it only the way you realize that the water has suddenly gotten too hot in the shower, has crossed over some invisible threshold and is now burning. Though it would be smarter to just hop out of the shower entirely—damn the bathroom rug, so it gets wet, who cares?—you stand under the spray that is now scalding you and you grope and fumble for the shower knob.

  “Oh, fuck,” I said when I realized I was going under, into the memory. All I could say, before panic overwhelmed. “Oh, fuck.”

  My breath quickened. I gulped air. I fumbled for something to hold on to. She was there and so it was her, but in that moment I was so gone I only wanted something solid. “Hold me,” I gasped, and I felt her arms go taut around me. I gripped her arms. I clung.

  Where does the mind go in these moments, while the body trembles? For me it is a white-hot slipstream blank-out, the nothingness of no time and nowhere and no one. It used to be a feeling, a single concentrated excruciating feeling: the smooth hot texture of my grandfather’s penis against my hand, for example, or the specific purple-pink color his penis had, a color that still makes me uncomfortable no matter where I see it, though th
e discomfort is vague now, the signal no longer traced back to its origin, with only the effect felt. But as the years have blotted the origin out (I am grateful), they have blotted the sensations, too, as though the film reel of the memory has been played so many times it has gone torn and blotched. Now I have only to ride the panicked blankness. “Oh, fuck,” I say when the wave of sensation starts to break over me, inside me, and then I breathe to keep up with the panicked race swell of my body, the heartbeat and the breath. The wave builds and builds, it crests and breaks.

  (It sounds as though I am describing something else, doesn’t it? But this isn’t an orgasm. It is terror.)

  When it breaks, I cry. The wave flows out of me. My breath slows, and I can feel the tears on my cheeks, hot, though I am not aware of them leaving me or even of any feeling of sadness. I am a sack into which the wave has broken, and now it must come leaking out of me. I have been a vessel; I am now only a throughway. Who I am outside this feeling becomes as irrelevant as time.

  * * *

  I meant to book a motel room a comfortable distance from Iowa. I intended to stay in Lake Charles, where, yes, the trial had happened, but where none of the sensitive events of the murder had. I had in mind that I would sleep somewhere safe and distant and would dip my toe into the past each day as comfortably as testing bathwater from the solid stance of a tiled floor. I did not book the cheapest room. I read reviews. I studied addresses. I wanted something clean and safe, a refuge I could grant myself at the start and end of each day.

  I flew into Baton Rouge, not New Orleans, intent on giving myself the shortest trip possible. Two hours from the airport, I had only a third of a mile left to drive, my phone’s navigation told me, when I noticed the CASH MAGIC sign ahead. There it was, high in the ashen sky. My breath raced. My chest grew cold.