The Dark Backward

by D. W. Buffa

  It would have been impossible to guess that Darnell had scarcely slept the night before, or that the hour or two he did sleep had been on his office sofa. Dressed in a dark blue suit and an understated tie, his short, gray hair parted neatly at the side, he did not look any different than he usually did in court. If anything, he seemed to move with more energy, a greater bounce to his step, as he came up to the jury box, bent his head slightly to the side and fixed each one in turn with that eager, knowing glance of his. Every gesture, every movement, promised something that, though you had not known it, you had just been waiting to learn. They were drawn toward him, those twelve jurors, in ways they could not explain. With close to choreographed precision, they all leaned forward.

  “When I was first starting out, years ago, a young lawyer eager to learn his trade, I made a point of spending as much time as I could in the courthouse, listening to the way the older lawyers tried their cases. I didn’t have anything else to do – I didn’t have any cases of my own. In those days, lawyers weren’t in so much of a hurry. They didn’t talk as fast as most of them do now, and they didn’t spend all their time worried about how much money they were going to make. They liked what they did. Liked it? – It was who they were, what they lived for. They took me under their wing, tried to teach me the craft, the way the law was supposed to work, what a lawyer could do to make sure there was at least a chance for justice. Some of them – all of them at times – were cynical and irreverent, what you would expect from men who had seen how often the promise was betrayed by reality; but they were, in those days, all great readers, men who had a thorough knowledge of not just the law, but literature. One of them – who I think must have read everything – used to quote to me – and if he did it once, he did it a hundred times – a line that summed up the lawyer and his trade. The legal mind, he would quote, his chest starting to rumble, ‘chiefly displays itself by illustrating the obvious, explaining the evident, and expatiating on the commonplace.’”

  With a wistful glance, Darnell shook his head at the memory of a vanished age. He took a step forward, paused, and then, a broad, boyish grin stretching across his mouth, admitted the truth of they were thinking.

  “The language now may seem too formal and ornate, structured, forced, and even artificial, but at the time – and perhaps still, to some of us – it was smooth, flowing, nothing short of perfect, a few short phrases that captured forever the self-importance of the average lawyer and the average way he tried a case. The average lawyer didn’t like it; the average lawyer never does.

  “I miss the men who taught me, the ones who could quote a line like that and never get tired of it, the ones who knew there is no such thing as an average case, that every case is, or rather would be if you treat it right, unique; the ones who stayed up all night, who never slept, when a man’s life was at stake, even if, or perhaps especially if, they knew that there wasn’t any chance in the world they would ever get paid.

  “I have tried to tell myself that, remember it, every case I get. But this case, there was no need to be reminded; this case every average lawyer would know is like no other, a case without precedent, a case that, whatever your verdict, is a tragic mistake, an attempt to subjugate a people by a law they never made and did not know. We think we know what is good for others when we seldom know what is good for ourselves; we think we know the future when we know scarcely anything about the past. I quoted you a line that, years ago, when I was young, was quoted to me. Let me quote you something that as I grow older seems to teach the limit of what we know. Shakespeare, in The Tempest, has Prospero say to his daughter about something she remembered from her childhood:

  ‘But how is it That this lives in thy mind?

  What see’st Thou else In the dark backward and abysm of Time?’

  “The ‘dark backward and abysm of time.’ How much do we know about ourselves, our own history? How much do we know about his?” asked Darnell, turning to the counsel table where Adam sat alone. “How much do we know about this island that, until two years ago, no one knew existed? How long have those people lived there, and where did they come from before that? Are they the remnants of some ancient civilization, some lost tribe, that had managed, like certain tribes of South America, to avoid contact with the outside world?

  “I don’t ask these questions because I think they have answers. I ask them because, as I am about to prove from the same witnesses who have already testified as witnesses for the prosecution, the prosecution doesn’t have answers for them either. But if the prosecution doesn’t know anything about the history of these people, if the prosecution doesn’t know anything about their customs, their traditions, then the only basis they have to convict the defendant of a crime is raw power – not the law, because the law of one nation does not apply to the citizens of another nation – but power, the brutal fact that the government of this country can do what it likes because no one on that island has the power to resist!

  “So that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we’re going to do for the next several days: listen to the prosecution’s own witnesses, some of whom bragged about how they were bringing civilization to a backward people, under oath confess their ignorance. And then, once we’ve done that, shown the thing to be the fraud it is, I’m going to put one last prosecution witness back on the stand, the girl herself, the supposed victim of the defendant’s supposed crimes, and have her tell what really happened on that island and why, even under the law the prosecution insists is the only one any civilized people could have, none of it was criminal. There will be only one witness after that, the only one you haven’t heard from before, the defendant, Adam, at which point Ms. Clark can ask him anything she wishes.” Darnell turned just far enough to see Hillary Clark staring back at him. “One of the things he was taught from childhood in that lawless island where he was raised is that the truth is all that matters and that lying is worse than death.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Summer Blaine laughed when she saw the look on Darnell’s face.

  “You didn’t expect to see me in court today, did you?” She took his arm and they headed out of the courthouse into the echoing noise of the city. “I was worried,” she explained in a soft, lilting voice. “I tried to call last night, several times, and by midnight, when you didn’t answer, I knew you were going to do what you promised you wouldn’t do anymore: I knew you were going to work all night, stay up till dawn, preparing for trial.”

  “If you know me so well, why worry when you know exactly what I’m doing?”

  It was antic logic, a complete evasion, a denial of all responsibility. She wanted to scold him, tell him that he was a thoughtless fool to take such poor care of himself, but she knew it would not do any good, that with the blood still racing through his veins, every part of him full of the trial, he would only tell her that he was indestructible and that he had not felt this good in years. Later, when the excitement and the energy had run their course, the tell-tale signs of age and exhaustion would peak out from behind his eyes and the steely defiance on his lips would become more a burden than a badge of courage.

  “It’s the moment,” he whispered as they hurried along with the sidewalk crowd. “What else is there to enjoy? The more I think about it, the deeper I get into this case, the more certain I am of that. Every day is a miracle, a chance to learn something new.” He was walking fast, gesturing with his hands, his voice a rising staccato, short bursts of enthusiasm that underscored the intensity of what he felt. “We have a chance; finally, we have a chance. Judge Pierce threw out the rape charge. That still leaves incest and murder, but after what I learned last night, after what Holderlin told me about the island, about who these people are -”

  “The island? Who these people are?” asked a bewildered Summer Blaine as she struggled to keep up. But Darnell was oblivious.

  “Yes, what Holderlin told me, last night, in my office; what I stayed up all night thinking about – how I could use it, whether there was a way to do
it that would make sense. What Holderlin told me, what….” He stopped walking so suddenly that Summer was two steps past him and had to come back. “You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you? I’m sorry; you must think I’ve lost my mind, going on about something I haven’t even bothered to explain. Bothered to explain,” he repeated with a rueful expression. “Once I explain who Holderlin is and what he did, once I tell you what he told me, you really will think I’m mad. It doesn’t matter, I have to tell someone, and if I can’t tell you, I can’t tell anyone.”

  “Why don’t we go somewhere for lunch? We’ll find someplace quiet and you can tell me everything about last night.”

  “I probably should have something to eat.”

  “You didn’t have dinner last night, did you?”

  “Of course I had dinner; I always….Did I have dinner? No, I guess I didn’t. We talked about it, several times as a matter of fact, but there was always something more Holderlin wanted to say. So, no - now that I think about it - I didn’t eat.” He sneaked a guilty, sidelong glance, as they walked down the street. “And then, this morning, there was so much more I had to do that….”

  “You didn’t have breakfast, either? Then why waste time with lunch, a man your age who doesn’t need food or sleep? I wonder why I never thought to prescribe that regime to any of my other patients.”

  With the puckish grin she had never been quite able to resist, Darnell tugged at her sleeve.

  “Because none of your other patients have ever lived as long as I have? Besides, if you are all that worried that I might miss dinner, why don’t you stay in the city so you can make sure I do all the things you think I should?”

  “I would, if I thought you meant it; and I might do it anyway, even if you don’t. Someone has to take care of you, now that you’ve proven incompetent to take care of yourself.”

  She felt better for saying it and, to her surprise, so apparently did he. They had just arrived at the restaurant. He was about to open the door.

  “I’d like it if you would. I’ve missed not having you with me. But can you take the time off from the hospital? I don’t want you making that drive every day.”

  Summer looked at him with the calm certainty of a woman who knows her mind and did not say anything. They knew each other too well for words to matter.

  For the next hour, they sat undisturbed in one of those quiet, out of the way places where you have to walk through a long, narrow bar to get to the few tables in back. It was Summer’s turn not to eat, or rather, barely to pick at her food as she listened in growing amazement to the astonishing story that Holderlin had told.

  “It’s impossible!” she exclaimed. That was the judgment of her mind, though her heart, as reflected in the knowing smile on her lips, said she believed every word of it. “But there are so many details, so many connections with recorded events….And the way he started out, that story about the man – Schliemann, was it? – who discovered Troy; the way he reasoned that there might be a parallel between what Schliemann found in Homer and what he thought he found in Plato! And you, – you’ve had to make judgments about people all your life, and you don’t think he’s crazy – You believe him?”

  Hearing the question from Summer, instead of asking it of himself, as on more than one occasion he has done the night before, Darnell became cautious.

  “I don’t think he’s crazy, and I don’t think what he told me is impossible. I believe it could have happened – Atlantis, the lost tribe, all of it; but am I sure of it, the way I’m sure you’re sitting on the other side of this table, talking to me? Last night, when he was there, telling me this – I was certain of it, certain he was right about everything; but now, in the cold light of day, thinking back on it…? The only way to know for sure would be to announce it to the world and then someone would go to look; but then, if Holderlin is right, the price for that kind of certainty would be the destruction of what I hoped to find.”

  Summer believed that there was another way, but that Darnell was too involved in the trial to have thought of it.

  “When the trial is over, you might go there yourself. Perhaps Holderlin would go with you. It’s been forty years since he’s been there, forty years with this secret that he hadn’t been able to share with anyone until, last night, he revealed it to you. It might be good for you finally to take a vacation. You haven’t been on a ship since the war.”

  Darnell looked at her with grateful eyes. He thought it a wonderful idea.

  “You don’t think I’m a little too old to go searching for lost cities?”

  “A man who doesn’t need to sleep or eat?” she countered with a teasing smile.

  Grumbling cheerfully at this last reminder of his truant habits, Darnell signaled the waiter for the check.

  “Where shall we go from here?” he asked to Summer’s puzzlement.

  “Don’t you have to be back in court?”

  “The hell with it! I’d rather go somewhere with you and have a good time,” he said as he helped her out of the chair. She gave him a glance filled with knowing mischief.

  “Better be careful, William Darnell - I might call your bluff and where would you be then?”

  “I’m always in trouble anyway; what difference would it make? But I’m not bluffing,” he insisted as an impish grin fought its way to freedom. “I thought we’d check into a quiet hotel and spend the afternoon.”

  Summer’s answer was a throaty laugh, a suggestion of things that once had happened when they were both much younger and had been drawn together by more than the sunset friendship they now enjoyed.

  “You think I can’t?” he asked with a look in his eye she remembered quite well.

  “I think you won’t, when you have to get back to the trial.”

  Summer walked him back and said goodbye on the courthouse steps.

  “I have appointments this evening, and some things I have to do at the hospital in the morning, but I’ll be here tomorrow in the afternoon and I’ll stay through the weekend and all next week. So you have only one more night of freedom, only more evening to misbehave.”

  She kissed him on the cheek, turned and started to walk away. She knew, in the same way that she always knew, that his eyes were still on her, and after a dozen steps, she turned around and waved goodbye again. He only smiled, instead of waving back, but that, for her, was better than anything.

  Darnell watched the bright, sad, look of affection spread across her lovely, gentle face and remembered how she had become so much a part of him that he often found himself talking to her even when she was not there. He watched her go, watched until he could not see her anymore, and then he climbed the steps and made his way down the long marble corridor, back to the courtroom and the strangest case he had ever known.

  Adam, deep in thought, did not notice when Darnell sat down next to him. Darnell touched him on the arm.

  “I have something to tell you.” Adam began to apologize, but Darnell stopped him with a look. “There is someone who wants to meet you. I didn’t have time to tell you this morning with everything that was going on. A man named Holderlin. Does that name mean anything to you? Did you ever hear it mentioned on the island?” Darnell paused, searching the young man’s eyes for the first glimmer of recognition, an anticipation perhaps of what he was going to say next. “He was a visitor to the island, before you were born, forty years ago. He was brought on shore, saved from the sea. Have you ever heard of him – any stories you remember about a stranger who once came to the island and stayed there for more than a year?”

  “No,” replied Adam with a curiosity so genuine that Darnell could not doubt he was telling the truth.

  “He didn’t stay in the village for a year,” Darnell continued as if he were adding a detail of no great importance. “He stayed in the city, the one the other side of the river, high up on the mountain, the one no one knows anything about.”

  Adam’s eyes went wild, darting everywhere at once. It was true! - Every
unbelievable word of it. Impossible or not, Holderlin had done everything he said he had. He had been the first to discover the island and the only one to see the city. Adam’s eyes kept moving, searching for something – anything – that would tell him what to do, how to defend the secret that was not a secret anymore. Darnell tried to calm him.

  “It’s all right. Mr. Holderlin has known about it for forty years and never told anyone until he told me last night. He made me understand why no one else can ever know. And even if I wanted to tell, no one in their right mind would believe it. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t met you and come to know just a little of what you can do; and to tell you the truth, there’s a part of me that isn’t quite certain that I haven’t become delusional.”

  As quickly as it had come upon him, the fear and the uncertainty left Adam’s eyes. He knew that Darnell was a man of honor, and that, now that someone else had revealed it, he could trust him with the truth.

  “There is a city, which I was part of, until I was banished for my misdeeds, when I refused, when the girl refused, to….”

  But before Adam could say another word, the door at the side opened and everyone in the courtroom was on their feet as the Honorable Evelyn Pierce marched to the bench, gesturing for the bailiff to bring in the jury. With a quick glance and a brief nod she told Darnell to call his first witness.