Fogbound

by Joseph T. Klempner

  The trip back had been a waste of Boyd’s time and his. In fact, the whole trip had been a waste. He’d ended up with some nice drawings, but nothing more. No insights, no breakthroughs, no ammunition. He looked across the table, imagined he saw disappointment on Boyd’s face, realized it had to be his own projection. People like Boyd didn’t feel disappointment. Disappointment was a construct of emotions, a concept, and was therefore beyond them. Still, he looked disappointed, the corners of his mouth turned down, what, maybe a millimeter? And why shouldn’t he be? Jorgensen had come back to visit him, and had asked him to draw again, and he couldn’t. What a cruel way to be left.

  Later on, Jorgensen would look back and recall his own thought process at the time. He’d needed to let Boyd down easy, he realized, if not for Boyd (whose disappointment had almost certainly been a figment of Jorgensen’s imagination), then for himself (whose guilt over causing it had been real). So he’d tried to come up with a remedy, the way he used to do as a judge, once a litigant had proven that there had been a wrong committed. The remedy he’d decided on was to ask Boyd to draw something he could draw, something he’d actually seen. Originally, he’d wanted a drawing of Boyd’s punishment; that had turned out to be impossible. He rubbed his eyes, played a quick game of word association with himself.

  Punishment?

  Crime.

  But surely that would be too painful, too cruel. Then again, would it really be? Only, he decided, if Boyd was capable of experiencing guilt. But guilt was a complicated concept, one that required a blending of understanding, responsibility, and regret. Guilt had to be every bit as alien a notion to Boyd Davies as quantum theory was to August Jorgensen.

  Or so he convinced himself.

  And turning back to Boyd, he’d leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Draw me the day the little girl died,” he said. “Draw the killing for me, Boyd.”

  “Draw up a proposal for me,” Elizabeth Algren told Jessica Woodruff over martinis. Elizabeth Algren was rumored to be the daughter of the writer Nelson Algren. And if she wasn’t, she was smart enough not to deny it. Her married name was Cippolini, but she retained Algren as her business name. And since her business was running a literary agency, she figured it didn’t hurt.

  “Draw up a proposal,” she said again. “You know, a summary, a first chapter, and a rough outline of where you want to go with it.”

  They were sitting at a corner table at Anglers and Writers, a fitting enough selection to discuss a book idea. Jessica had been working on it off-and-on for nearly a year, but until now she’d been afraid to tell anyone about it. It struck her as, well, just a wee bit unseemly, at this point. So she’d confided only in Brandon Davidson (who’d assured her it was nothing less than a brilliant idea) and one or two others. But with oral argument already scheduled, she’d decided it was time to start putting out feelers. Five months was a blink of the eye. Besides, Liz Algren was more than a literary agent; she was a friend. She could be trusted.

  “I absolutely love the concept,” Liz was saying, “and if we time the release right . . . Well, let me put it this way: The publicity could be an absolute windfall for us. What are we going to call it again?”

  Jessica took a sip of her martini, regretted that she hadn’t ordered a sea breeze or a continental. But this was a book meeting, and she hadn’t wanted to come off like a wimp. “Actually,” she said, “I haven’t come up with a title yet.”

  “How about ‘Drawings from Beyond,’“ Liz suggested, “or ‘Drawings from the Grave?’“

  “Not bad,” said Jessica. “Or maybe, ‘Dead Man Drawing.’“

  “I’m afraid you’re too late, sweetie. That was a movie. Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon-”

  “Exactly,” said Jessica. “Only that was ‘Dead Man Walking.’ ‘Dead Man Drawing’ would be a play off it. See, in prison, a guy on death row, they refer to him as a dead man walking. You know, like he’s still walking around, but he’s already dead?”

  “You can do better,” said Liz. “But don’t worry about it. The publishing house will end up calling it whatever they want, they always do. They’ve got focus groups and all that kind of stuff to help them know what’ll make Oprah happy, what’ll work with the book clubs, what fits on the best-seller lists. Listen, hon, what do you say we order? I’m absolutely famished.”

  August Jorgensen stared at the drawing in front of him. He’d asked Boyd to draw him the killing, the day the little girl died. And to a certain extent, Boyd had complied. What Jorgensen was looking at was a picture of a man, a man carrying the lifeless body of a child in his arms.

  The first thing that struck Jorgensen was the perspective. Boyd’s sense of perspective was always flawless, just like that of the other autistic savants Jorgensen had read about on Zachary’s computer screen. In fact, had this been a photograph - and, like all of Boyd’s drawings, it very much resembled a photograph, except for the fact that it was done in pencil, and on regular paper - Jorgensen would have guessed that it had been shot from slightly below, say from ground level, looking upward at the subject.

  The next thing that got his attention was the man’s face. Although his eyes were hidden behind mirrored sunglasses, Jorgensen could still feel the pain on his face. His lips were slightly parted, his teeth visibly clenched beneath them, and though there was no real way to tell if his grimace reflected the horrible sorrow of the moment or simply the physical weight of the burden in his arms, Jorgensen knew. And neither pain nor sorrow began to describe it. It was anguish Jorgensen was looking at, torture, pure, undistilled agony.

  And there was one other thing about the man’s face that struck Jorgensen.

  It was white.

  Not white, as though it were wintertime and he’d been spending too much time indoors, or had just that moment thought he’d seen a ghost.

  White, as in Caucasian.

  Had Boyd misunderstood what Jorgensen had asked him to draw? Instead of drawing the moment of the killing, had he drawn the recovery of the little girl’s body? And if he had, what did that say about him? That he was still too racked by guilt to picture - either for Jorgensen or for himself - what he himself had done sixteen years ago?

  The implications of that were at once comforting and frightening. Comforting, because experiencing guilt made Boyd Davies human and frail and pitiable. But frightening, because if Boyd could feel guilt, it meant he was capable of making the connection between his act and its consequences. From there, what a tiny step it would be for the state to argue persuasively that he could also connect his act to his punishment.

  Jorgensen wanted to tear up the drawing, crumple it up into a ball, but he was afraid to do so in front of Boyd, its creator. He’d wait until he was outside. This much was certain: There was no way he could let it fall into enemy hands.

  He tried to remember from his reading of the file they’d left him, or of the narrative account they’d told him, just who it was that had found the body of young Ilsa Meisner. There’d been a bloodhound, he recalled, that had led some deputy sheriff or other member of the search team to the grave site. That must be the man whose tortured face he was looking at now. Rural areas weren’t like big cities when it came to stuff like this, Jorgensen knew. Chances were, the deputy had known the Meisner family, might have sat next to them in church each Sunday. Perhaps his daughter had babysat for little Ilsa, or had been in her class at school. Things had a way of getting personal in small towns, of hitting home.

  Maybe, thought Jorgensen, it might not be a bad idea to save the drawing after all, see if he could find out who the deputy was. If Boyd Davies had seen him well enough to draw him from memory sixteen years later, carrying the little girl’s body like that, didn’t that mean the deputy would have had to have seen Boyd at the very same moment? Mightn’t he be able to describe Boyd’s reaction at seeing the result of his acts? The deputy didn’t look that old in the drawing, thirty-five or forty, at most. Maybe he was still alive. Maybe he could help. Nothing else seemed to be he
lping; that much seemed sure.

  The deputy who had dug up the body of little Ilsa Meisner had been a man named Whitey Alverson. He’d been sixty-one years old at the time, with a beer belly and a head of hair to match his nickname. The highway officer who had taken over for Alverson and carried Ilsa out to the coroner’s station wagon had been Rufus Catterson, a dark-skinned black man. At all times thereafter, the body had been transported on a stretcher. All this Jorgensen found out over the course of three weeks and a dozen trips to Pop Crawford’s pay phone. The only thing he didn’t know was where it all left him.

  Pop used his fax machine to make copies of the drawing, and Jorgensen sent one off to Boyd’s sister Nell, being careful not to refer to the murder, just in case Nell’s husband were to see it. She wrote back that she had no idea who the man in the picture was.

  He sent another copy to Jessica Woodruff. He got a letter back from her (actually, from some intern at the studio), in which she questioned the relevance of the man’s identity to the issues in the upcoming argument. But she promised to have one of their investigators try to track him down, if that would make him happy.

  He hunkered down for winter, spent a fogbound Christmas day, and brooded. He knew the Supreme Court’s scheduling order should be out by now, but nobody had told him.

  Nobody ever told him anything.

  He dug out the envelope in which he kept all of Boyd Davies’s drawings - the ones Jessica had first left with him, the two of himself, the ones of Hattie and Nell, and the latest one, of the man carrying the lifeless body of Ilsa Meisner. He spread them all out on the table in front of him, looking for clues, searching for messages.

  “Speak to me,” he said, “help me.” But no answer came. And if someone had happened to be in the lighthouse at the time, standing over his shoulder, August Jorgensen would have been hard-pressed to explain whom he was addressing - the drawings, the faces depicted in them, Boyd Davies, or some god whose very existence he doubted.

  Jessica Woodruff was beginning to doubt her sanity for having enlisted August Jorgensen in the first place. “He sent me a copy of some drawing he got from Davies,” she told Tim Harkin and Ray Gilbert on a conference call. “He wants us to tell him who carried the deceased’s body after they discovered it.”

  “Why should he think that has any relevance?” Harkin wanted to know.

  “Exactly.”

  “Are we sure this dude’s still got it together?” Gilbert asked. “I mean, it’s beginning to sound like you picked someone who’s got an advanced case of old-timer’s disease.”

  “Don’t you do that to me, Ray,” snapped Jessica. “You guys signed off on him, remember. You said he’d add a measure of gravitas to it.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Harkin, “he’ll be okay. So what did you tell him?”

  “Tell him? The old coot has no phone, remember? I can’t tell him anything. I had Ginny send him a letter, told him we’d do our best to identify the guy for him.”

  “Good, good,” said Gilbert. “Humor him, stroke him. And when we get a month or so away from the argument, we’ll reevaluate the situation, see if he’s up to it. If not, there’s plenty of names out there who’ll jump at the chance.”

  “To argue a case like this?” asked Jessica. “On two weeks’ notice?”

  Professor Gilbert laughed into the phone. “On two hours’ notice,” he said. “Not everyone’s senile, you know. Or living in some godforsaken lighthouse, surrounded by fog.”

  The only fog surrounding August Jorgensen at that particular moment was a mental one. Outside, the air and water temperature were close enough to produce an equilibrium, a truce of sorts that would more or less hold until early spring. Then dry, warmer breezes would drift over the still-cold ocean, producing an instability where the two met, an instability that would set the stage for a whole new season of fog.

  Was he deluding himself? Was he so taken by the intricacies of Boyd’s pictures, so fascinated by the paradox of one who couldn’t speak but could draw like a camera, that he’d convinced himself the images could tell him a story when in fact they couldn’t? They were drawings, after all. Nothing more, nothing less. Drawings done by a man who was incapable of conceptualizing, editorializing, or imparting hidden messages. What you saw was what you got, as the saying went. And yet, he couldn’t stop staring at them. Particularly the one of the man carrying the girl.

  Jorgensen had always wanted to be a pilot. As a boy, he’d dreamed of flying fighters in the war. Not to bomb civilians below, or knock out MIGs or Zeros, but just to soar. His dreams were always about climbing, banking, rolling, and diving; the killing was never a part of them. But he’d been too young for Europe, too nearsighted for Korea, and too old for Vietnam, and he’d had to settle instead for the cockpit of his living room, devouring every aviation book he’d been able to get his hands on. Of all the things he’d come across, one had stuck with him the longest. He’d been reading a study about young pilots who’d been shot down by enemy aircraft they’d never seen. The common denominator in each case had been this: The pilot had been so intent on scouring the horizon for planes approaching in the distance, that he’d failed to notice one almost on top of him until it had been too late to react. As incredible as it sounded, it kept happening over and over again, often with fatal consequences. Relax, was the lesson the trainers learned from the phenomenon and passed on in flight school, relax and take in the whole picture. The older pilots - the ones who’d somehow learned to do it - swore it worked like magic. And they had their lives to prove it.

  So Jorgensen tried relaxing. Looking at the drawing, he stopped squinting, instead opened his eyes wider, allowing the muscles around them to slacken. Stepped back from the table a foot or so, took a deep breath. Exhaled. Took another. Stood there for five minutes like that, trying not to miss anything by looking for it too hard, doing his best to take in the whole picture.

  And, like magic, it worked.

  At first, he thought his eyes might be playing tricks with him. thought maybe he’d made it up. He looked away, then back again. Counted once, twice, a third time, just to make sure.

  He was right, and it was the drawing of the man carrying the girl. If you looked too hard, you missed it every time; but if you relaxed it was plain as day: The way the man was carrying the girl, both of his hands were completely visible. If you squinted and peered and concentrated too hard, you ended up thinking that part of his right hand was obscured by her clothing. But when you stepped back, you saw that simply wasn’t so.

  And the thing of it was this: The man’s right hand - the one that seemed to be partially covered by the girl’s clothing, but in fact wasn’t - had only three fingers.

  Jorgensen’s first reaction, upon satisfying himself that he was correct, was to wonder if maybe Boyd Davies hadn’t simply made a mistake. But as he considered the likelihood of that, he realized that for that to have been the case, it would have had to have occurred in one of three areas: an error in perception at the time, a lapse of memory over the years, or a failure to accurately reproduce an image on paper. But to Jorgensen, none of those possibilities seemed plausible. Boyd had trouble with all sorts of tasks; you could write a book about the myriad of things he couldn’t do, like speaking and reading and writing and conceptualizing the way other people could. But in terms of seeing something, remembering what he’d seen, and drawing it later on, Boyd had no match among mortals. When it came to those three things, the gods themselves had to be envious.

  No, thought Jorgensen, Boyd hadn’t made a mistake; he wasn’t capable of it. If Boyd said so - and his drawing was his way of saying so - then some unidentified, three-fingered deputy sheriff (or state trooper, or other member of the search team) had carried the lifeless body of Ilsa Meisner as Boyd had watched from nearby, crouching or lying on the ground. Sure, all of that had happened sixteen years ago. But how hard could it be to track down a man with three fingers on his left hand, to see what light he could shed on Boyd’s understand
ing of what he’d just done to the poor girl.

  If, indeed, Boyd had had any understanding at all.

  Jorgensen wished he could get in touch with Nell, Boyd’s sister. She’d been around at the time the body was discovered; maybe she could be of some help here. But Nell had specifically asked Jorgensen not to contact her, and he’d done so once already. He didn’t want to further risk jeopardizing her marriage to her new husband by letting him know there was a murderer lurking in the family.

  So he found Jake and took another ride to the general store. He was beginning to regret not having a phone in the lighthouse, but imagined it would take a good two weeks to get the folks from Horry to come out and install one. By that time, he’d no doubt be ready to have it disconnected. He decided he’d just have to keep making do with the one on Pop Crawford’s wall, at least until he’d exhausted Pop’s patience and his own supply of quarters.

  “He’s driving me crazy, Brandon.”

  “He?”

  “The judge.”

  “What now?”

  “He just called me from a pay phone. He’s carrying on like he’s The Fugitive, on the trail of some three-fingered man.”

  “Calm down, Jessica. You told me yourself, he’s a harmless old man.”

  “I know, I know. But all we asked him to do was to stand up in court for forty-five minutes and look dignified. Instead, he’s plugging into the Internet, researching the entire history of autism, running back and forth to that prison, getting Davies to draw all sorts of pictures for him, and God knows what else. Where’s it all going to end?”

  “It’s going to end,” said Davidson, “when they uphold the Court of Appeals decision, vacate the stay, and tell some warden to pull the switch.”

  “The IV.”

  “What?”

  “There’s no switch anymore,” Jessica explained. “Virginia’s joined the ranks of the lethal-injection states.”