The Dark Backward

by D. W. Buffa

  “I don’t know what would have happened,” he told her quite honestly, “if we’d met when we were younger and were both still single. All I know is that now, for as many years as I have left, I want to spend all my time with you – including, whether you believe it not, even the weekend before a trial.”

  They exchanged a glance that said everything. Summer picked up her menu and ordered dinner.

  “You started to tell me that you didn’t have a choice; but you never told me what you meant,” said Summer as they lingered over coffee. “What didn’t you have a choice about?”

  “I didn’t have any choice but to reserve my opening. I didn’t like doing that. The jury is going to listen to each witness for the prosecution and think to themselves that it’s exactly what Hillary Clark said they were going to hear. That’s the only point of reference they’ll have. They won’t have in the back of their minds the kind of questions I would have tried to raise, the reason they ought to view with suspicion, or at least some reservation, what they’re told. But there wasn’t anything else I could do. After she finished with them, they would have looked at me as if I were a criminal myself if I had suggested that Hillary Clark might in some important respect be wrong.”

  “Yes, but you still have your chance, after she’s through and it’s your turn to put on a case.”

  Darnell sank lower in his chair.

  “If I have a case to put on,” he grumbled. “The only case I had was that the law – our law – shouldn’t apply; that it was unreasonable and unfair to subject someone to punishment for what, where he lived, might not have been a crime at all. It’s a little hard to argue that, however, when we’re dealing with incest, rape and murder.” Darnell sat up, looked around the restaurant and then leaned forward. “At first I thought I saw a way. These people – there can’t have been many, though how many no one seems to know – living together on an island through God knows how many generations? How could incest be avoided? But you won’t hear Hillary Clark making any concessions to that possibility. She made it sound like the boy was….”

  “But what is he, really?” asked Summer, searching his eyes. “Uneducated, illiterate, a boy in a man’s body.”

  “Illiterate? Only in the most narrow sense. That’s what I tried to tell Judge Pierce when she wondered how he could speak English so well if he couldn’t read or write. But now I’m not so sure that to call him illiterate in any sense doesn’t take all the meaning out of language. After all, why should he read or write? It would only slow him down.”

  The thought of Adam and what he was capable of made Darnell forget the trial and his own fatigue. A distant smile came unknowing to his face.

  “He came with me, to my office, the end of the day on Friday, after we had finished voir dire. I tried again to get him to talk about the island, how they lived, whether what he did was considered right or wrong, and the damn thing is that after all these months he still won’t tell me anything. I might as well ask a priest what was said in the confessional as ask him anything. His only answer is that it isn’t permitted, it isn’t allowed. He’s on trial for his life and he won’t do a thing to help, except to tell the truth about what he did.” Darnell shook his head in reluctant admiration at Adam’s honesty. “He asked me why the trial was taking so long – we’d only just finished jury selection, the trial hadn’t really started – he asked why we even had a jury, why we didn’t have one of our wisest people sit in judgment about what should be done after he told them everything that had happened!”

  “The kind of questions a child – an intelligent child – might ask,” observed Summer, a thoughtful expression in her eyes. “The child who always wants to know why.”

  Darnell agreed, but only to a point.

  “A child might ask them, but a child doesn’t make you feel inadequate when you try to answer, and there isn’t a child anywhere could do what he did, sitting there, the other side of my desk, reciting word for word questions and answers he had heard in court.”

  “He has that good a memory?” asked Summer. She was interested, but scarcely astonished, by what she had heard.

  “You don’t understand. I’m not talking about a question here and a question there; I’m not talking about some short, yes or no answers. He has perfect recall, whole paragraphs – pages – at a time. I think he could have repeated everything said in court, every question, every answer, during a week of voir dire if he had wanted to, if we had had the time. And it wasn’t something he had worked on, struggled with, something he had kept repeating until he had it right. It all came back to him spontaneously as soon as I said something about a question I had asked the first juror.”

  Darnell put his hand over his mouth and for a moment his gaze turned inward. He felt a strange sense of pride, the vanity of secret knowledge. He had witnessed something extraordinary, so far beyond the range of normal experience that most people would think it impossible, or, if possible, some kind of aberration, a narrow genius, a natural gift that no one can explain and no one else can learn.

  “I thought…well, I’m not sure what I thought,” continued Darnell. “I had him get me a book, a very old book – Blackstone’s Commentaries. I started reading out loud about the beginning of trial by jury and what it meant. I’ve spent most of my life in court, and I’ve seen, I think, every kind of witness. I’ve watched the way they concentrate, or try to concentrate, afraid that if they don’t understand a question, if they miss a word, they’ll make a mistake. But I’ve never seen a look of such perfect concentration, such total absorption in what was being said. It was almost physical, as if instead of just listening, the act of hearing caused the words to make their sound.” A flash of intuition lit up his eyes. “I hadn’t thought of that before; but, yes, that’s exactly what it was like. He sat there, so still he might have died, except of course for those eyes of his, shining firm and steady, greedy with possession.”

  “Greedy with possession?” asked Summer, struck by the novelty of the phrase.

  “Yes, that eager to hear, and hearing, to have what he did not know. I read a page, then I read another, and then I asked him if he could repeat it back to me. And he did, every word; but more than that, he did it exactly the way he had heard it, exactly the same emphasis.”

  Darnell paused. He sipped on his coffee.

  “He doesn’t read or write and so we think him uneducated. But it isn’t true. Whatever they do on that island, whatever they teach their children, they do it by the spoken, and not the written, word.” Darnell raised his eyebrows. “He told me he had learned mathematics, but that he had had some difficulty with irrational numbers.”

  Summer Blaine spilled her coffee.

  “Irrational numbers? Out there, on this island no one had ever heard of until a year or so ago? How is that even possible?” Then she remembered. “On Pitcairn’s Island they had the Bible and the one man left after the others had all been killed learned to read it and then taught the children the lessons he thought would help them live a decent, loving life. Maybe something like that happened here. The survivors, whoever they were, whenever they landed on that island, had a few books with them and those became the basis of what they taught and what they know. It would have been handed down, generation after generation, and without the means to print or to make new copies it would had to have been done through an oral tradition. That might explain Adam’s powers of concentration and his ability to remember so much of what he hears.”

  Darnell remained skeptical.

  “An oral tradition that passes on the higher mathematics?”

  Though Summer moved with a smooth, graceful elegance that made her seem younger than her years, she had the habit of a quirky, inward smile whenever she became convinced that she had suddenly discovered the truth of something.

  “Why not? You don’t have to know how to read to be able to count, and how do you learn geometry except through diagrams and pictures?” Her mouth turned pensive. “It would be interesting to know wha
t kind of numbers they used.”

  “What kind of numbers?”

  “Arabic, Roman; or some other kind: something of their own invention. But never mind. That isn’t important. What’s important is the case, the trial. When you were talking about Hillary Clark you seemed to have given up. You’ve never given up. You always think you can win.”

  Darnell shrugged his shoulders as if to say that nothing he had been able to do in the past had any bearing on this.

  “I don’t see how this time.” He pronounced this as a serious judgment, the simple truth that he would not hide from himself nor conceal from her. “He might have a chance if it weren’t for the murder.”

  With a worried glance, Summer acknowledged the force of Darnell’s observation.

  “Infanticide – The papers are full of it; it’s all they’re talking about on television. We debate abortion all the time,” she said, growing more animated. “But killing an infant, a new born child – there’s no debate about that.”

  Darnell hunched forward. He spoke in a low, thoughtful, probing voice.

  “You deliver babies – thousands of them in your career. Has there ever been…?”

  She understood what he was asking. She was too close to him, and much too decent a physician, to be shocked by the question.

  “No, I never have. I’m not sure I could….”

  “You’re not angry with me, are you? I only ask because there must be some situations where….”

  “No, I’m not angry - of course not. It’s not a situation we encounter that often anymore. I suppose you could say that the new technology has saved us from that kind of dilemma. Now we know during the pregnancy whether there’s any substantial risk of birth defects or other potential problems. And when there is, the mother can make her decision. But when I first became a doctor, before there was any way to know, I’d sometimes hear stories from some of the older nurses, the ones who were getting ready to retire and liked to talk about things that had happened, years before, when a baby was born with some horrible condition and might live only a few weeks or months and be in constant pain. Today they’d call it murder; back then it was thought an act of mercy. But I never had to face that situation and I’m not sure what I would have done.”

  Darnell stared past her, remembering things he had heard in the early years of his own career, things done privately that no one talked openly about. The law stayed out of it and those who had lost a child could try to put back the broken pieces of their lives.

  “You’re right,” he said presently. “Today they’d call it murder.”

  “Is that what happened here?” she asked, quietly alarmed. “Is that why the boy, Adam, did what they say he did?”

  Chapter Six

  Judge Evelyn Pierce seemed to move a little more quickly to the bench the next morning. She looked directly at Hillary Clark.

  “Are you ready to call your first witness?”

  Hillary Clark continued to study a document that had engrossed her attention. Or rather, as Darnell suspected, pretended to study it; a gesture, foolish in his judgment, meant to show the jury that while the judge might be presiding over the trial, the prosecutor was the one to watch.

  “Your first witness?” repeated Evelyn Pierce, anxious to get started. “Now, Ms. Clark, if you would.”

  Hillary Clark waited a few seconds longer before she raised her chin and threw back her shoulders. Darnell caught the look of triumph in her eyes. He had suspected earlier, when they first met in chambers to discuss certain procedural issues before the trial started, that she did not like Evelyn Pierce, but he was sure of it now. It was not because of anything that had happened in court; she had not been treated unfairly. It was not anything Evelyn Pierce had done; it was what she was: an older woman who had made it in a man’s world by becoming, in Hillary Clark’s uncharitable estimation, just like one of them. Evelyn Pierce had failed to understand that the real imperative was to change the world, not accept it with all its prejudices and limitations. That Hillary Clark might not have been admitted to law school, and would certainly never have been hired as a prosecutor, had it not been for women like Evelyn Pierce was beside the point.

  “The age of assumptions,” Darnell thought to himself. “The generation that believes whatever it does is right simply because they do it.”

  He found that he liked Evelyn Pierce even more than he had before, and Hillary Clark even less. He could not help himself. He stared up at the ceiling, a lethal smile on his lips.

  “Yes, are you going to call a witness, or did you think your opening statement so compelling that you wouldn’t need to add anything as tedious and troublesome as a little evidence?”

  Hillary Clark spun around.

  “I…what? Your Honor, I object!” she cried with a scathing glance at Darnell who suddenly sat straight up and turned directly toward her.

  “I take it then, that you do have a witness. It’s all right to let the judge know that, Ms. Clark.”

  She looked at him in open-mouthed astonishment; he looked at her, and at the jury behind her, with all the appearance of affable good-will.

  “It really is all right,” he said in the practiced, cultured voice with which he had charmed juries for years. “Call your first witness. I’ve been looking forward to his testimony for weeks.”

  She looked to the judge for help, but Evelyn Pierce was now busy with some papers of her own.

  “Your Honor!” she exclaimed, stamping her foot in protest. But there was no answer. The silence began to be uncomfortable. Finally, Evelyn Pierce raised her half-closed eyes and looked right through her.

  “Call your first witness, counselor; the court doesn’t have all day.”

  No fool, Hillary Clark quickly collected herself.

  “The prosecution calls Eric Johansen.”

  The double doors at the back opened and a gaunt-looking man in his late fifties entered the courtroom. His long gray hair curled up over his jacket collar and swept back over his ears. His mouth was straight and fine; his eyes, though bright and curious, were also watchful and cautious. There was something enviable in the way he seemed to move within his own, separate space, like a stranger in a foreign port surrounded by hundreds of prying eyes. He stood straight, his shoulders squared, as the clerk administered the oath, and then, as if he had been in and out of courtrooms all his life, turned and took the witness stand.

  “Mr. Johansen, would you please tell the court what you do?”

  A modest smile creased Johansen’s weathered face.

  “I’m the captain of a cruise ship, the Stargazer.”

  “Owned by a Norwegian company, if I’m not mistaken?”

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “You’re a citizen of Norway?”

  “Yes, I’m Norwegian.”

  “But you spend most of your time…?”

  “I don’t get home much anymore,” he said without apparent regret. “If that’s what you’re asking.”

  He had not let her finish her question. She hid her irritation behind a quick, glittering smile.

  “You spend most of your time at sea?”

  “Yes, you could say so; mainly in the south Pacific.”

  “As captain of the cruise ship?”

  “More on my own boat, which I do for pleasure.”

  Hillary Clark stood directly in front of him, less than ten feet away. She did a quarter turn and took a step toward the jury.

  “A sailboat, from what I understand.”

  “It may sound strange, that someone who spends his time on a cruise ship likes to sail, but on the Stargazer we carry two thousand passengers. It’s like a floating city. When I have the chance, I like to get closer to the sea.”

  “And this sailboat of yours, does it have a name?”

  Johansen’s eyes lit up with something close to affection and not far from pride.

  “Solitude.”

  “Solitude,” said Clark, raising her perfect eyebrows in a gesture of appre
ciation. “After taking care of that many passengers, I can imagine you might want to be alone. But tell us, if you would, where you keep it, this sailboat of yours?”

  “Tahiti. It’s where I live now.”

  “You said you sail her for pleasure, but you’ve gone on some fairly long voyages, haven’t you?”

  Johansen’s feet were spread apart, his elbows rested on the arms of the witness chair. His shoulders were hunched forward, and he held hands in front of him, his fingers loosely intertwined. His eyes stayed fixed on Hillary Clark as she walked to the far end of the jury box and placed her smooth, white hand on the railing.

  “All over the Pacific, South America in one direction, Australia in the other. You’ve gone as far as Indonesia; you’ve gone as far as -”

  “As far as the moon, for all that matters,” cried Darnell, throwing up his hands in impatience. “We’ll stipulate to the fact that Captain Johansen has sailed everywhere in the world if Ms. Clark will finally ask a question!”

  Judge Pierce gave him a searching glance, a warning that he had better be careful.

  “I believe she was about to, Mr. Darnell, when you interrupted her.”

  “Thank you, your Honor,” said Hillary Clark. “Perhaps counsel for the defense has forgotten there is such a thing as cross-examination!”

  Darnell laughed out loud. His eyes became, on the surface, sympathetic.

  “I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve forgotten quite a lot, but I do remember that if you don’t ask the witness a question there won’t be anything to cross-examine him about.”

  “Your Honor?’ Clark asked plaintively.

  With singular indifference, Judge Pierce twisted her head to the side and turned up her palms.

  “Ask your question, counselor. Let’s get on with it.”