Fogbound

by Joseph T. Klempner

  Please do not contack me as I have a new husban and he do not no about Boy and I am a fraid he will leave me and my babys if he find out and I can not a ford that.

  Ever nite I pray to Jesus to bless Boy and now I will pray for Him to bless you to for helping Boy.

  Nell McDaniel Ashworth

  He read the letter twice through before replacing it in the shoebox. What kind of a man, he wondered, would leave his wife because of sins committed by her afflicted brother? Plenty, he decided. And what good would a stack of old letters do him? None that he could think of. The fact was, they were all hearsay, the words not of Boyd Davies himself, but of one of his sisters. Boyd Davies had no words. And August Jorgensen had no appetite for reading a bunch of old letters assuring an ailing mother that her autistic son was doing just fine on death row. He laid Nell’s “Dear Mr. Judge” letter on top of the rest of them and replaced the lid on the box. “Save them for a rainy day,” his mother used to tell him.

  Well, there’d be plenty of those.

  And this business about Nell’s praying for Jorgensen to be blessed? He had to chuckle at the thought of that. A lifelong atheist in a state full of Southern Baptists, he’d been forced to answer a lot of pointed questions at his confirmation hearing, when subjects like abortion, creationism, and separation between church and state had come up. And now Jesus himself was being asked to bless Jorgensen’s appearance before the Supreme Court.

  Hell, he figured. Why not? Or as folks liked to say nowadays, What’s the down side to it?

  There was none, of course.

  Then again, if Jorgensen’s memory served him, that Jesus fellow hadn’t fared too well in his own battle against the death penalty, had he? If you wanted to look at it that way.

  Three days before Thanksgiving, Jessica Woodruff received a telephone call from Linda Greenhouse. Like Jessica, Linda was a lawyer who’d managed to find employment on the other side of the bar: Linda made her living covering the United States Supreme Court for The New York Times. But “covered” hardly did justice to Linda’s reporting. Her analyses and commentaries - which often began at the top of Page One - were so informative and insightful that she’d long ago become required reading for most of the nation’s constitutional scholars.

  On top of that, Linda had been a friend of Jessica’s since law school days.

  “I just thought you might like to know,” she said now, “the Court’s scheduling order came out today.”

  “Oh?” said Jessica.

  “And oral argument on the Davies case has been set down for April tenth.”

  “How much are they giving us?” Jessica asked.

  “Each side gets forty-five minutes.”

  “Not exactly Bush versus Gore, huh?”

  “No,” Linda agreed. “But it could have been worse. A lot of them get only half an hour.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “Are you going to argue it?”

  “Me? No way.”

  “Larry Tribe?”

  “No,” said Jessica. “And you have exactly one more guess.”

  “David Boise.”

  Jessica did her best impersonation of a buzzer, signifying a final wrong answer.

  “How about telling me off the record?” Linda asked.

  One thing about Linda: When she said off the record, it was off the record. Still, Jessica said, “Promise?” It was her way of letting Linda know she really didn’t want this to get out.

  “Honest Native American,” said Linda.

  “Okay,” said Jessica. “We’ve reached deep into the retired judges’ geriatric ward.”

  A silence on the other end told her Linda was stumped. Supreme Court justices tended to die, rather than retire. “I give up,” Linda said.

  “August Jorgensen.”

  “August Jorgensen? Is he still alive?”

  “I think so,” Jessica said. “Though every once in a while, I’m tempted to check for a pulse.”

  “Where’d you dig him-, I mean, where’d you find him?”

  “I’ve got to tell you,” said Jessica, “it wasn’t easy. He lives all alone in this dilapidated, falling-down lighthouse, halfway into the ocean. Heats the thing with logs. And get this: The guy doesn’t have a phone. Can you believe it?”

  “So what’s your thinking?”

  “Are we still off the record?”

  “You know we are.”

  “Linda, what do you think our chances are on this one?”

  There was only the briefest of pauses before Linda answered, “Somewhere between slim and none.”

  “I think you’re being charitable with the slim part.”

  “So you’ve decided to go down to defeat with venerable dignity?”

  “Something like that,” said Jessica.

  “Well, good luck.”

  “Thanks. And I appreciate the heads-up.”

  April tenth. That was early in the term but still almost five months away. Jessica toyed with the idea of dictating a letter to Jorgensen, so he could circle the date. But then she decided against it: There was simply no need at this point. It wasn’t like he was carrying a caseload, like other lawyers, and might have a scheduling conflict. No, they’d let him know a month or so ahead of time, give him enough time to leave a bowl of food out for his dog.

  For August Jorgensen, the next rainy day came sooner than expected. He awoke two mornings later to what he considered a medium fog. (A medium fog was one you could actually see in, and occasionally even see through. By way of contrast, a heavy fog was one that obscured absolutely everything, so that when you looked out one of the lighthouse’s portholes, you had the sensation that someone had draped a gray blanket over it from the outside.)

  Within the hour, the fog had become supersaturated with moisture, which had begun to precipitate out as rain. When that happened, the fog dissipated to a certain extent, and the visibility became better. But if you went outside, instead of just getting damp from the fog, you got good and wet from the rain, and - this time of year, at least - good and cold, as well.

  So Jorgensen cracked the door open just enough to let Jake slip out. When you were a Labrador retriever, damp was okay, but wet and cold - they were your briar patch.

  Then the old man slid another log into the stove, gave it a poke to get it going, and reached for the Thom McCan shoe-box. Settling into the chair closest to the stove, he lifted off the lid of the box, put Nell’s cover letter to one side, and removed the rest of them, the ones tied together with the faded blue ribbon. None of the letters was dated, and it took him a moment to figure out that the most recent were on the top, so after he’d untied the ribbon, he turned the stack over, so that he could start at the beginning.

  Dear Mama,

  I went to the prison yestaday at Brushy Mt. It is a scary place when you first see it with a grate big wall. But onst you get use to it it is ok I guess. When they fond out I was ther to see Boy they was nice to me. I think they like him cause he is so quite and he dont give them no truble.

  Boy is ok he reely is. He dont say nuthin but I can tell he recanize me. In a way I dont think been in prison will be as hard for Boy as it wood be for most fokes if you no what I means. They give him food and close and look after him. He was pretty clean to. Acourse Boy is never to clean if you no what I means. Ha. You rememba the time he came home afta plane in the mud down by the riva and alls you cood see of him was his 2 eyes. Rememba how we laff and laff. Even Boy laff that time.

  Ο Mama there bees to much pane in this worl. I miss you and send you my love.

  Your dawter Nell

  Too much pain, indeed. Jorgensen put down the letter. He’d intended to work his way through the entire stack, hoping that, in the process, he’d somehow get to know Boyd Davies a little better. Already he was beginning to realize he might have been wrong, that there simply might be no getting to know Boyd at all. Maybe the most you could ever come away with was an image of a young man so covered with mud that only his eyes were
visible. But then again, he’d laughed; or at least Nell had remembered him laughing. That was something, wasn’t it?

  And as he sat there that morning by his stove, it occurred to August Jorgensen that, sooner or later, he was going to have to give it another try. He was going to have to go back to Brushy Mountain and somehow get through to Boyd Davies, whatever it took.

  A single bark brought him out of his thoughts. He pushed himself up from the chair, walked to the door, and opened it. Jake, ever thoughtful, shook himself off before entering. Jorgensen found a dry towel. Jake obediently buried his nose between the old man’s legs, as if to suggest that while he had no use for the rubdown that was about to come, he’d suffer through it nonetheless just to please his master. Jorgensen’s own private suspicion was that Jake absolutely loved it, but was too embarrassed to let the smile on his face be seen.

  “Better get some rest,” he told the dog. “As soon as the weather clears up, you and I are going to be hitting the road again.”

  The Wall at Brushy Mountain was every bit as imposing as it had been the first time. Jorgensen was waved through to the parking area and found a spot for the truck in the visitor’s section. Walking through the main gate, he tried his best to look straight ahead or down at his feet; still, he couldn’t help noticing the gun towers and the coils of razor wire looming above him.

  He went through the sign-in procedure, the metal-detector drill, and the waiting. Again it took almost an hour before he was finally ushered into the counsel visit room. But August Jorgensen was a good waiter. Over the course of his eighty-plus years, he’d come to learn that the longer you had to wait for something, the more you appreciated it when it finally happened. All of a sudden, you were so grateful that the waiting was over, you completely forgot how annoying it had been.

  Boyd Davies sat in the same chair, at the same table, as he had the first time they met. If he recognized Jorgensen, or even remembered their earlier visit, he gave no sign of it. And yet, thought Jorgensen, this was the same young man who, from nothing but memory, had created a likeness of the older man that was absolutely photographic in its accuracy.

  In fact, Jorgensen had brought the drawing along, and now, withdrawing it from his folder and smoothing out the creases, he placed it on the table between them, in such a way as to face Boyd Davies. And although Boyd didn’t look down at it, as anyone else might have been expected to do, Jorgensen was quite certain that he took it in just the same, with the most fleeting of sidewise glances.

  “This is very good,” said the old man, speaking slowly, the way one might speak to a child, or to one whose grasp of English was severely limited. “Very, very good.”

  There was no reaction from Boyd, no indication whatsoever that he’d even heard the words, let alone understood their meaning. No hint of a smile at the fact that his achievement had been appreciated, his talent recognized. Jorgensen turned the paper over, exposing its blank side. He took a pencil from his jacket pocket, pushed it across the table. “Can you do it again?” he asked.

  He half-thought he saw Boyd shrug his shoulders ever so slightly, but he might have been wrong - it might have been nothing more than a tic, a tiny involuntary muscle spasm. Or it might even have been Jorgensen’s own imagination, engaging in an exercise of wishful thinking. “Do it again,” he said, this time turning what had been a question into an instruction. Then he turned his face away to one side, as if to soften the imperative aspect of his words just a bit.

  They sat like that for a full fifteen minutes, a period of time that would have been an absolute eternity in any normal human relationship. But in a sense, August Jorgensen was no more normal a human than was Boyd Davies. He’d spent more than eighty years on the planet, but his closest companions had come to be the sea and the wind and the fog. His only living friend had four legs, a wet nose, and a tail. He’d chosen to live a monk’s life in a modern world. And somewhere along the way, he’d gained a capacity for patience. He could wait out blackouts, whiteouts, storms, entire seasons. He could sit at that table for an hour, if he had to. Hell, he could sit there at the visiting table for a week, if they’d let him.

  But they wouldn’t have to.

  Boyd Davies had picked up the pencil. He was drawing.

  At first, Jorgensen was afraid to look, or even move. But he needn’t have been. As he gradually turned back to the table, he realized that Boyd was paying him no attention: It was as though Boyd were sitting there alone, with only the paper and pencil. Jorgensen could have been a million miles away, for all Boyd seemed to care.

  But down on that tabletop, on that piece of paper, something extraordinary was happening, something just short of a miracle. When Jorgensen had sat in front of the computer with young Zachary, in the back room of Pop Crawford’s general store, the boy had fiddled with the keyboard and clicked away with that mouse thing of his, and images had appeared on the screen. Some of them had popped up right away, but others - color photographs, for example - had developed more slowly, from top to bottom or left to right, until they were complete. Now that same electronic process was occurring on the piece of paper. A likeness of Jorgensen was appearing - materializing was the only word to describe it - materializing from the tip of the pencil, and spreading out from the upper-left-hand corner to the rest of the page.

  It took only ten minutes, fifteen at most. When he was done, Boyd simply laid the pencil down and looked away. Jorgensen had to reach across the table for the completed drawing and slide it toward himself. It was quite remarkable: Without once turning it over to make reference to the earlier drawing, Boyd had somehow succeeded in replicating it, almost perfectly.

  But not quite.

  For August Jorgensen was looking at a likeness of himself that was distinctly less world-weary than the one on the flip side. He wasn’t quite smiling, but there was something more upbeat about him, more resolute. Though, as he turned the sheet over and over, comparing his two faces, he’d have been hard-pressed to point to a single detail that had contributed the change.

  “I’m going to come back tomorrow,” he told Boyd, “and I’m going to ask you to draw some more.”

  And though Jorgensen might not have been willing to stake his life on it, he was almost certain that some part of Boyd shifted or moved ever so slightly, as if to tell him that would be all right.

  Jorgensen went back the following day as promised, and asked Boyd to draw pictures of his mother and his sisters, and Boyd did. And although Jorgensen had never seen so much as a photograph of any of the subjects, and therefore had no idea what they looked like, he had no doubt he was looking at them now, through Boyd’s eyes, exactly as they’d once appeared to him.

  In one of the drawings, Hattie McDaniel looked to be about twenty years old, her eyes clear and her skin so smooth and youthful that Jorgensen had to fight the impulse to reach out and touch her cheek. Thinking about her that night, back at his motel, it occurred to him that if he was right about Hattie’s age in the drawing, it meant that at the time she’d looked like that, Boyd himself could have been no more than two or three. Yet somehow that image of his mother had seared itself into his memory at that tender age. And now, a third of a century later, because of some freakish accident to his brain, he was able to tap that memory as though it had been only yesterday, and effortlessly and flawlessly recreate it on a piece of 8½×11” paper.

  Jorgensen had planned to drive home the following morning, a Friday, and had even told Jake as much - not that he was convinced the dog understood him. (Then again, no one could convince him the dog didn’t; and when it came to Jake, he was strongly inclined to place the burden of proof not upon the believer, but upon the doubter. So he kept telling Jake things, the way a young mother might speak to her newborn, or an expectant one to her belly.)

  But the implications of that one drawing kept tugging at him, denying him sleep. What were the limits of Boyd’s memory? Or were there none? Could he recall the moment of his birth? Could he reach back even further
, to when he sat coiled inside his mother? Too bad the lighting conditions were so poor in there; but for that, Jorgensen might have been able to test his hypothesis.

  He felt Jake shift his weight at the foot of the bed, and heard an exaggerated, long-suffering sigh, the dog’s way of letting Jorgensen know that his insomnia was contagious.

  Discovering Boyd’s earliest possible memory was interesting, but only in the most academic sort of way: It did nothing in terms of helping Jorgensen argue on behalf of his client. What was the issue again? Ah, yes, Boyd Davies’s ability - or inability - to connect his crime to his punishment. Suppose Jorgensen were to go back to Brushy Mountain once more in the morning, and ask Boyd to draw what it was going to be like to be strapped down to a gurney, to feel a needle inserted in his arm, and to hold his breath as long as he could, in a doomed attempt to fight off the poison they were pushing into his vein and toward his heart.

  The old man looked to the foot of his bed, causing the dog to raise his head and open one eye expectantly. “What say,” Jorgensen asked, “we put off leaving until tomorrow afternoon?”

  He was answered with another sigh, even more mournful than the first.

  Boyd was at a loss. He looked at the blank sheet of paper Jorgensen had placed in front of him, reached for the pencil and picked it up. But unlike the exercises of the past two days, this was one he evidently couldn’t fathom. To Jorgensen, it was almost as if the pencil had no more drawings in it; it had finally run dry.

  So Boyd wasn’t going to be able to help himself with his talent, after all. He couldn’t picture his punishment, because he’d never glimpsed it in real life. It was an idea, something still off in the future, an abstraction. And in Boyd Davies’s universe, there were no abstractions.

  If Boyd had no way of comprehending his punishment, he certainly had no way of comprehending its connection to his crime. But how did Jorgensen go about demonstrating that to the court? He couldn’t very well show them a blank piece of paper and say, “See, he can’t even visualize what they’re going to do with him.” It would be contrived - contrived and pointless.