The Dark Backward

by D. W. Buffa

  “When they first came; not so much when they tried to talk to us, but when they talked among themselves.”

  Darnell was not sure he understood, but he did not doubt that this was the way Adam had done it. The phrase ‘perfect pitch’ kept going round in his brain. He imagined that Adam could imitate anything he heard. No, that was wrong, he told himself; it was more than imitation. Adam did not just hear a sound, he could get inside it and, in some way Darnell knew he could never fully grasp, make it into something that belonged to him. A lot of people could imitate the sound a particular bird was known to make; he could imagine Adam doing that but with the difference that when he did it he would know exactly what a bird like that would feel.

  “So that’s how you learned the use of words?”

  There was something disconcerting in the way that, despite the great disparity in their age, Adam could seem not just his equal, but at times something more than that. It was more than the sympathy that was often in his eyes, more than the simple, unassuming way he could his recite whole paragraphs from a courtroom dialogue Darnell, who prided himself on his own ability to recall things said in court, had all but forgotten; it was the uncanny feeling that this astonishing young man had lived before, that he had been born with a soul that had been in being through all the ages, that in some strange sense Adam had been here since the beginning. It lasted only a few brief seconds, but when he found himself under the watchful scrutiny of Adam’s eyes the feeling was so certain, so profound, that he could not doubt that it was true. But then, moments later, when he broke away from Adam’s gaze, the spell was broken, though the memory of it never quite disappeared. It lingered in his mind, the certainty become a question, a different kind of doubt, a kind of wonder whether what he had always believed about the rationality of the world might be incorrect.

  “So that’s how you learned the use of words?’ he heard himself repeating.

  “Isn’t that the way that every child learns, and not from books? But, yes, that’s how I learned to speak English with the English-speaking people; the same way I learned numbers and their meaning.” Adam remembered something that made him laugh. “That goes too far. I learned mathematics, and geometry – I could remember what I was taught – but I can’t say I ever quite understood the secret of irrational numbers and what their meaning meant.”

  “What their meaning meant?” Darnell’s voice faltered and became faint. He was just about to grasp what Adam meant when it slipped away, taunting him, as it were, with his inability to see what he thought must be right in front of him. “To look through a glass darkly,” he mumbled to himself.

  “That’s always the difficulty, isn’t it?’ asked Adam, who had heard. “To get beyond the obvious to what you sense is there.”

  “Get beyond the obvious to what you….And you don’t read or write?” Darnell suddenly realized the time. “We’d better go. Mrs. Hammersmith will be here and she is not a woman who likes to wait.”

  Darnell got to his feet, but Adam did not move.

  “What is it? They’re treating you all right, aren’t they – Mrs. Hammersmith and her husband? I’ve known them both for years. I’m sure there can’t be anything wrong. But, well – what is it?”

  “No, there’s nothing wrong. They’ve done everything they could for me, shown me everything there is to see. No, it isn’t that.” His eyes drew in on themselves as he sat, hunched forward, a sudden look of despair and loneliness on his face. “It’s the girl,” he said presently, his voice not quite as strong and confident. “It’s been months now, and no word about the girl. I need to see her, to know that she’s safe.”

  Darnell put his hand on Adam’s shoulder.

  “We’ve talked about this before. Nothing has changed; there’s still nothing I can do. The only way I could keep you from being locked up in jail the months we waited for trial was on condition that you would have no contact of any sort with her. She’s the victim, the one they say you raped. I’m sorry, but the only time you’re going to see her before all this is over is when they bring her into court, a witness for the prosecution.”

  Chapter Five

  Whatever their point of view, everyone seemed to agree that what was about to unfold in a San Francisco courtroom was a strange case, perhaps the strangest case anyone had ever seen or heard about, stranger than any made-up story, stranger than any lie. No one could have invented what had happened; no one would have had either the imagination or the nerve to try. Incest, rape and murder, than which nothing could be worse, and nothing simpler, if you believed the prosecution; a tragedy of tremendous proportions, a clash of civilizations, a crime that was not a crime at all and a trial that should never have taken place, if you believed the defense.

  Hillary Clark did not have the slightest doubt she was right. What had happened was, as she put it to the jury in her opening statement, “monstrous, as clear a violation of human rights as it is possible to imagine, acts of violence without any conceivable justification.”

  William Darnell watched with grudging admiration as she told the jury what the prosecution was going to prove. She was good, better even than he had been led to expect, and that was good enough. Wearing a blue silk dress, her golden brown hair pinned at the top, she stood in front of the jury box talking in a smooth, quiet voice. There was none of the false emotion, none of the false bravado, with which less experienced prosecutors try to condemn the accused before the first witness has even been called to testify. Hillary Clark was much too certain of herself to need any courtroom theatrics.

  Darnell turned his chair toward the jury, just as he had during voir dire, to make them think he was paying strict attention to everything the prosecutor did. He was fascinated by the way Hillary Clark could be so much different in a courtroom than she was in real life. Most of those who had ever had to work with her did not like her. The lawyers who had to try cases against her, cases they almost always lost, positively loathed her. Judges who thought themselves entitled to absolute respect did not particularly appreciate how often she appeared to contradict them. Jurors on the other hand – those twelve strangers who would only see her in open court – liked the way she talked to them. She did not condescend to them the way she did to judges who were not quite up on the law; she did not make cutting remarks the way she did about lawyers who had the misfortune to stumble over a word or forget for a moment the next question they wanted to ask. In front of a jury she was a different person altogether. The six men and six women that sat in the jury box liked everything about her, the pleasant manner, the easy affability, the way she explained in clear, understandable language everything the prosecution was going to do.

  Twice-divorced and not yet forty, Hillary Clark seldom lost a case and thought it someone else’s fault on those rare occasions when she did. But if you had asked that jury to make a guess at who and what she was, there would not have been one among them who would not have said that she was probably happily married with two or three wonderful children and more friends than she could count. They were watching her now, listening to everything she said, more than willing to believe that every word was true. She took her time, describing exactly what the defendant, “the one known as Adam,” had done and how the prosecution was going to prove it.

  Darnell was intrigued by the effect she had. It was really quite remarkable. Hillary Clark was a stunningly beautiful woman, and beautiful women were often resented and usually disliked by those who did not know them. It was a form of jealousy, of suspicion, a belief that there had to be a flaw, if not an arrogance born of vanity, a lack of character or intelligence. In a single sentence, a few words of no consequence, she had disabused them of any thought that she was different from the unassuming, completely average, person they thought everyone should be.

  They liked her. That was a fact that Darnell would have to deal with. They liked the slow and meticulous way she outlined in advance what each witness for the prosecution would say and how, “like the links in a chain,�
� it would all tie together and prove beyond that famous reasonable doubt every element in the case against the defendant. But, as Darnell had begun to grasp, there was something else that they liked as well: the marvelous clarity of her mind, the logical precision with which she constructed what she made to seem an iron-clad case for the prosecution.

  Darnell leaned back, his eyes half-closed. With a brooding look on his face, he tapped his fingers against each other, thinking about what it meant. Logic, precision, the seeming certainty of every well-structured sentence that came out of her mouth, as if the world was ruled by reason and reason itself did not require an act of faith. She could start from a premise and march like a Roman general to the only possible conclusion, but the premise – that she did not think about, that she did not know; although, like nearly all of us, she thought she knew it as well, or better, than she knew anything. The premise – whatever one she had seized upon – was to her mind the only principle any sane person could have. Darnell’s eyes opened wide. He bent forward, watching her now with a different level of interest. That certainty, that dependence on the logic of her position, precisely what she thought her greatest strength, was in fact her greatest weakness.

  Still, listening as she came to the end of her hour long presentation, he knew that his chances of turning that weakness to his own advantage were remote at best. Her summary of the case that the prosecution was about to prove was nothing short of devastating.

  “The defendant is charged with incest, rape and murder. But it’s worse than that, worse because taken all together what he did,” said Hillary Clark as she turned and pointed at Adam, “is more than the sum of his crimes. Incest has always been one of the worst things anyone could do. It destroys the family, breaks the sacred bond that is supposed to exist between parents and children and among the children themselves. It destroys all trust. Rape takes away – destroys – what it only belongs to a woman to give and, as in this case, all the innocence of a girl. And murder – that can never be excused, but if there are any murders worse than others, it has to be the murder of a child. The defendant did all these things, and did them in a way that is almost beyond belief. He committed incest with his own sister, incest when he raped her, a girl not yet fifteen years of age; and then, in this chronicle of horrors, when he discovered that she was pregnant with his child, took the baby, only hours old, and in an act of infanticide almost without precedent, killed it, strangled it in cold blood.”

  Darnell had in his time witnessed the reaction of a good many juries to a prosecutor’s indictment of the crimes of the defendant, crimes the prosecutor promises to prove, but he could not remember anything quite like this. They were looking at Adam, all twelve of the jurors, with something close to hatred in their eyes and something close to fear.

  The silence in the courtroom when Hillary Clark returned to her chair at the counsel table was heavy and oppressive, burdened with a judgment that had already been made. Adam, the strange creature sitting there undisturbed, his head, unaccountably, still held high, was guilty, as guilty as anyone had ever been.

  Whatever the jury might think, whatever the feeling of the crowd that had watched, transfixed, the closing moments of the prosecution’s opening statement, Evelyn Pierce had not changed expression. Crying, screaming, cries for mercy, cries for revenge – she had seen it all during her long years on the bench and if she had ever been moved by anything no one had ever known it. She looked at Darnell with the polite interest with which she generally invited an attorney to take his turn.

  “Mr. Darnell, does the defense wish to make an opening statement at this time?”

  Darnell stood facing the bench. Then he turned and looked straight at the jury. His eyes were full of such confidence that they had to wonder what he knew. What was he was going to tell them that would make them change their minds or at least begin to doubt the validity of what they had just heard? With a look of grim defiance on his mouth, he nodded slowly twice, drawing their attention away from the prosecution and back to the defense, dominating the silence in a way that made them remember that the trial, far from ending, had only just begun.

  “Mr. Darnell…?”

  “Yes, your Honor. With the court’s permission, the defense would like to reserve its opening statement until the prosecution has finished its case and we can start to put on ours.”

  That night at dinner he tried to explain to Summer Blaine that there had not been any choice. They were in a restaurant down a brick lined alleyway two blocks from his office. Full of dark tables and white tablecloths, it was frequented by lawyers, bankers and other members of the commercial class whose work often kept them downtown at night. Everything about the place had the understated tone of people who were used to money and all its advantages. Tourists and other idle pleasure seekers did not know of its existence.

  “There was nothing I could do,” said Darnell. He broke a piece off a roll and buttered it. “Nothing.” He took a bite and with a white linen napkin wiped the crumbs from his lips. “Not a single, blessed thing.” He lapsed into a long silence, marveling at what he had witnessed. “She’s good,” he said finally. “And that’s a serious understatement.”

  “But you’re the best, William Darnell,” replied Summer, smiling her encouragement. “There’s no one better.”

  He did not hear her. He was listening to the voice of Hillary Clark charm the jury. With his elbow on the arm of the chair, he placed his thumb under his chin and slid two fingers along the side of his face. His head began to bob back and forth, keeping time to the impatience of his mind. In a gesture of abject helplessness, he flung his hand off to the side.

  “If she’s that good at closing, I’m finished. There won’t be anything I can do to save this boy. You should have seen her. No man could have done what she did. She made them think she was just like them, a next door neighbor, someone who might watch their kids and they’d watch hers. They didn’t think that at first, when we first started voir dire. She looks distant, unapproachable, a woman too good-looking to feel anything but her own superiority. But the moment she started talking to them in that calm, quiet voice; the moment they realized – or thought they realized, because as far as I’m concerned it’s all an act – that it had never occurred to her to think they were anything but equals, they couldn’t get enough of her. It was like watching people meet their favorite movie star only to discover that all this time the movie star had just been waiting to meet them! I’m beginning to believe that people will believe anything.”

  From the moment he met Summer outside the restaurant he had been full of himself and the trial. He realized that now and was embarrassed.

  “Sorry,” he said with a chastened grin that barely broke the line of his mouth. “You come all the way to the city to keep me company and all I do is talk about what I’ve been doing.”

  Summer Blaine may have lost some of the beauty of her youth, but she still had the most wonderful eyes of any woman Darnell had ever known, filled with light and laughter and a sympathy that never went away, eyes that, whatever might have happened, always made him feel better. It was as if, in her presence, nothing could ever really go wrong. The day he had suffered a massive heart attack in court, she had been there, kneeling over him, and the last thought he had had before he woke up hours later in a hospital room was that even at the moment of his death he could find comfort in her eyes.

  “Tell me what your week has been like.”

  Summer threw back her head and laughed. She put down the wine glass before she had taken a drink.

  “It’s only Monday, Bill; the week has barely started.” Reaching across the table she placed her hand on his. “This isn’t Friday. I wasn’t here this weekend, and you didn’t come to Napa.”

  He shook his head at his own confusion and started to stammer a reply.

  “Yes, I know; but you know how I am – the days just before a trial. I can’t do anything, think about anything; I’m perfectly useless. I would have been terrible
to be around; I would have -’

  “You needed to be alone,” she said matter-of-factly. “I know that. But I did miss you – a little,” she added with a coy glance.

  “And I missed you, too.”

  “Liar!” she cried softly in a voice full of laughter. “Give that ‘eyes wide open, I’ll never tell you anything but the truth’ look to a jury, if you like; but I wouldn’t try it on me. Don’t you think that by now I’ve learned all your lawyer’s tricks, the way you manage somehow to convince even yourself that what you say must be the truth, simply because you say it?”

  Darnell sat straight up, enlivened by the challenge.

  “It’s the absolute truth that I missed you and there’s no lawyer’s trick in that. I miss you every day you’re not around.” He raised his round chin a bare fraction of an inch, a comic look of promised retribution in his larcenous gray eyes. “Which only proves the sacrifice I made when, knowing how unbearable I can be the last few days before a trial starts, that I decided I had to spare you all that.”

  Summer’s fine drawn mouth quivered with radiant pleasure at the sheer duplicity of what she was quick to point out was the biggest lie anyone had ever told her.

  “But it’s true, you know; I am a bear to be around,” said Darnell with a look of injured innocence. “I wouldn’t subject you to that for anything. And, you might remember, I called, not just once, but several times each day.”

  Listening to himself say it out loud, he remembered how often, as he was trying to make sense out of what had become an impossible case, he had wished she were there. She was the one person whose judgment he fully trusted, and the only person he always liked to be around. Remembering that, he felt awkward, as if he really had been discovered in a lie, or rather, had discovered within himself a failure to tell the truth. He had loved his wife all the years he was married to her, loved her until the day she died, loved her even longer than that; but he was not sure that he had ever loved her quite as much as he now loved, and needed, Summer Blaine.