The Dark Backward

by D. W. Buffa

  Alethia’s eyes glowed with triumph at what she had done and what she knew. Darnell did not doubt for a moment not just that she would gladly give her life for Adam, but that if anything happened to him, if Adam died, she could no more survive that than Adam could confinement.

  “I want to make sure we all understand this. You were required as a young woman to have relations with men chosen by lot?”

  She smiled at his modesty.

  “It wasn’t that one-sided: the men had no more choice about whom they slept with than the women.”

  There was a surge of nervous laughter in the courtroom, and then, again, the kind of silence in which even the slightest movement of a chair seemed a harsh intrusion.

  “In other words, no marriage, nothing permanent; no fidelity – no promise of fidelity – one to the other? And you rejected this? You preferred to live an outcast, you and Adam, alone?”

  “Yes, we knew it was wrong; we knew it went against everything we believed, but….”

  Darnell could feel the jury staring at her, mesmerized by what they heard, the strange practices that to them seemed so unlikely, so unnatural, so barbaric. It was the reaction he had been hoping for.

  “But no one here would think that what you did was wrong. You wanted to be with one person and no one else. And the only way you could this was, as you put it, to live alone, in a kind of exile, away from all the others?”

  “Yes, we had to leave the -”

  “The others. Yes, I understand.”

  He had stopped her before she could say something that might have revealed the existence of the city. There was another possibility he had to foreclose. He made it sound trivial, a brief pause before he moved on to the more serious questions he had still to ask.

  “And that was the reason…? No, let me ask it this way: You weren’t living in the village with the others when Captain Johansen was there, were you? No, of course not. But let me get back to what happened after you and Adam were sent into exile. You were pregnant, and you had a child?”

  “Yes, I had a child, a child that could not live.” She said this in a solemn voice, but without any sign of regret. It was the candid report of an unfortunate event that, like most of life’s tragedies, had to be dealt with as best one could. “It was a blue baby, something wrong with its heart. His breath was like a choking sob. I could not stand to see it suffer so. I would have helped it, ended all its pain myself, but Adam wouldn’t let me, said he knew it would hurt me too much.”

  “You said ‘he.’ It was a boy, then?”

  “Yes, Adam’s son. It broke his heart. There were tears running down his face, but he knew what he had to do and that he had to act the man.”

  “Act the man? How do you mean that?”

  “That he had to observe the ritual, after he had ended the child’s misery: wrap the body in white linen and then cleanse the body in the fire, return what had, if only for a little while, come into being, to the being that never dies, the eternal god, the one our people have always worshipped, the face of whom you call the sun.”

  “And is it part of that religion, part of what you and Adam and the people of that island believe, that a newborn child that cannot live should not be allowed to suffer?”

  “For as long as time has lasted.”

  “As long as time…?” repeated Darnell, struck by the perfect equanimity of the way she said it. “Are you telling us then, that what Adam did – the death of the child – was done because the child was suffering and was going to die, and because your religion – your way of life – required that you end a life when all that is left to it is unendurable pain?”

  She looked at him, shocked that anyone could think there was an alternative.

  “Who would be so inhuman as to let a child suffer?”

  “Who indeed?” replied Darnell as he returned to his chair at the counsel table.

  Hillary Clark rose slowly and with an air of reluctance, summoned to perform a duty no one would enjoy. At first, those watching imagined it was because she felt sorry for the witness, but they quickly understood that it was because she did not believe anything she had heard.

  “You expect us to believe that you and the defendant didn’t know you were brother and sister – had one or both of the same parents – because no one knew who their parents were, because in this fantasy of yours everyone is raised in common and the sexual relations among those old enough to have them can best be described as indiscriminate promiscuity, everyone sleeping with everyone else and no one sleeping with anyone twice?”

  “When I speak, I speak the truth,” replied the girl with simple dignity.

  Clark ignored her. She was not interested in the answers, only in the questions that would bring the jurors back to their senses.

  “Does everyone there look exactly alike? Do all the young women look like you?” She pointed to the defendant. “Do all the young men look like him?”

  “No one looks like him!” replied the girl with guiltless pride.

  “No one looks like him? But if there is a difference in the way he looks, if no one looks the same as anyone else, then surely the children must look more like some adults than others. And if that’s true, it wouldn’t be too hard to guess who your real parents were, would it?” demanded Clark with a hard, caustic glance.

  “It’s not a question anyone would ever ask,” asserted the girl with confidence.

  “More likely, not a question anyone needs to ask,” retorted the prosecutor. “Even assuming this mythical tale you’ve concocted was really true. But leaving that aside, by any measure there isn’t any question but that your testimony here today has convicted the defendant of the crime of murder!”

  “Objection!” bellowed Darnell, as he clambered to his feet. “Ask a question. Don’t start telling the jury what they’re supposed to think, especially when what you’ve said is so obviously wrong. She hasn’t convicted him of anything, except doing what their religion – which in this case is their law – told him was the only decent thing to do.”

  “Murder – decent? Not among any civilized people.”

  “Enough!” ordered Evelyn Pierce, banging her gavel to quiet both of them. “Ask a question, counselor. And, Mr. Darnell, the next time you have an objection, you might want to let me rule on it!”

  “I’m almost finished,” said Clark, turning back to the girl. “You said the child was a blue-baby, and that it had a heart condition, that its breath was labored - a choking sob, is how you described it.”

  “Yes, that’s right; that’s what I said.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that instead of a heart condition, your baby might just have been choking, that there might have been something lodged in its throat, that there might have been something wrong with its wind-pipe that might have corrected itself?”

  “I checked his throat. There was no obstruction. And his choking breath, that came together with a heart beat that was faint, spasmodic. The child was dying - I could look in his eyes and see the pain. You think it more decent – more civilized – to let the life be tortured out of it, than to help it to a peaceful end?”

  “I think it more civilized not to take a life that doesn’t belong to you!”

  “Then I feel sorry for you, and for anyone, that could do something so unnatural and so cruel.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Summer Blaine thought she would go crazy. Every time she looked up from the book she was trying to read, Darnell was either pacing around, mumbling incoherently, or collapsed in his chair, staring out the window with a blank expression. Manic one moment, depressed the next, he was fast becoming a textbook example of schizophrenia.

  “What is it, Bill?” she asked, tapping her finger against the closed cover of her book. “You’ve been like this all weekend. One minute you look like you’re ready to conquer the world, the next minute you look like you’re ready to give up and die.”

  He was back in the chair, sitting with his knees pulled up, rocking sl
owly back and forth, watching out the window with sightless eyes. He had not heard a word she had said. Summer lay the book aside and got up from the sofa.

  “Bill,” she said, touching him softly on the shoulder. He did not look, he did not move. She bent closer to see his face, closer so he could see hers. Pulling the threadbare gray cardigan close around his throat, he smiled at her and grunted an apology.

  “It’s this case,” he explained as he stood up and glanced around the room as if he had just awakened. He saw the look in her eyes and shook his head in a second apology. “But you knew that, didn’t you? When this one is over, perhaps you should do us both a favor and have me committed. Isn’t it a sure sign of mental illness when you’re convinced that everyone else is insane?”

  Summer went back to the sofa. It was getting dark and she turned on the lamp. Standing on the hardwood floor in his stocking feet, his hair pulled in all directions, he looked as confused as a tortured adolescent. She offered him what sympathy she could.

  “If you can ask the question, I think it means you’re not insane.”

  Summer’s eyes, the way she looked at him when he was troubled, always made him feel better, but it was the soothing warmth of her voice that made him feel safe. It brought him into a different world, a world in which everything made sense, even a trial that by any other measure made no sense at all.

  “I’ll bet I’m not the only one who isn’t sure of anything anymore. Those twelve people on the jury must be wondering whether, by the time this is over, they’ll know the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. You were there, you saw the way they looked at her, the girl, when she told them what happened.”

  “They felt sorry for her. Is that what you mean? How could anyone not feel sorry for a woman, especially a woman as young as that, who knows her baby won’t live and that it’s suffering with every breath it takes? Who can know the anguish of what she felt?”

  Darnell was pacing again, moving around the large living room in an aimless circuit. Summer could not take it anymore.

  “Could you please stop? Could you just stay in one place?”

  Darnell, stunned at first, began to laugh. His whole body seemed to quiver. He shoved his hands into his pants pockets and fixed her with a gentle, irrepressible grin.

  “You’ve caught me! This is how I work, how I get ready for the next thing I have to do at trial. I confess it isn’t organized; I know it isn’t pretty. I bounce around, keeping time to the things I hear myself saying - what I’m going to say at trial – and then, when I realize how stupid it sounds, I fall into a chair and sink into a deep depression. It works every time!”

  Summer had seen it all before. She did not need to have him explain.

  “And you sit there, looking dejected and almost suicidal, certain that you’ve lost not just the case but your ability to ever try another one; but then, suddenly, you think of something else, and you’re off on another one of your manic excursions, listening to what you’re going to say, mumbling your own applause!”

  Darnell nodded decisively.

  “Yes, I think that sums it up perfectly. And you don’t think I’m ready to be committed?”

  “No more than you have been for the last thirty or forty years,” said Summer, challenging him not to laugh.

  Darnell grabbed a straight back chair and dragged it next to the sofa.

  “All right, I’m sitting. I’m not dashing around, applauding my own brilliance. I’m not staring out the window, convinced I’m the greatest fool who ever lived. I’m alert, I’m in control, I’m…? - I’m at a loss to know what to do next.” He gazed at her for a moment. “I think I felt better when I felt suicidal.”

  With a shrug of her shoulders, Summer got up and headed for the bedroom.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m getting dressed. The least you can do before you kill yourself is take me out to dinner the way we planned. In case you’ve forgotten, our reservation is in half an hour.”

  They were a few minutes late, but they had come to this, their favorite restaurant, so often they could have been an hour late and the table next to the window would still have been available.

  “They always ask the condemned man what he wants for his last meal,” mused Darnell with a cursory glance at the menu he knew by heart. “Do you know what I would tell them, if I were on death row? I’d say, ‘Dinner in the city.’ I wonder if anyone has ever asked. I wonder if they’d do it.”

  Knowing that he was too distracted to think about food, Summer ordered for them both. She drank a red wine they liked and urged him to do the same.

  “What did Adam do this weekend? Was he out sailing again with Henry Hammersmith and his wife?”

  “He’d live out there, if they’d let him. Henry goes along, but he says that Adam does all the work. That boat of Henry’s is supposed to take at least two people to sail her, but somehow Adam manages everything himself. Henry – it’s the last thing I expected to happen – but Henry idolizes him. Adam is the son he never had. Henry – his wife, too, but Henry – poor Henry, he’ll be devastated if Adam is convicted and has to go to prison. Every time he sees me, every day when he collects Adam after trial, he keeps telling me in that gruff, no-nonsense voice of his – ‘It isn’t right, you know it isn’t.’ If Adam is convicted, I’m not sure he’ll never forgive me.”

  “He won’t think that, no one will. Everyone knows the only chance that boy has is you!”

  “The jury – you saw the way they reacted. What you said, it’s true: they did feel sorry for her; they know the anguish she must have felt. But I’m asking them to say that under certain circumstances it’s all right to kill a child. We’re not used to that; we think that in a certain sense death is inexcusable, that when anyone dies – but especially if it is a child – it’s a failure. All the old beliefs, all the old gods, are dead, and the only thing we now believe, the only thing we have to hang onto, is the idea that life itself is sacred and that, whatever the consequences, it has to be protected and preserved.”

  Summer finished her glass and asked him to pour her another. She seldom drank a second glass, and never, as far as he could remember, before she had started on her dinner. He felt guilty that he had been so preoccupied, so absorbed in what he did, that he had failed to think about what she might be going through.

  “I haven’t been very good company. I’m sorry for that.”

  She blushed when she realized why he said it. She put down the glass.

  “First, the wine is as good as any I’ve tasted; but, second, I’ve been thinking about my own reaction and what I think it tells me about the duty of a physician. What are we supposed to do, but restore health when someone falls ill and relieve suffering when someone is in pain? That’s easy to say when you work in a hospital and have all the best medicines and all the newest technologies. A baby born with a heat condition, struggling in pain with every breath it takes? – Operate, perform heart surgery, administer a pain-killing drug. But out there, on an island, with none of those things available? I would have done what she did, or rather what her husband did. If you can’t give the child a healthy life, if you can’t stop its suffering – what else are you supposed to do? Just let it lay there, so you can say it died of natural causes?

  “We talked about this before. I told you what I was told used to happen, years ago, when a baby was born with a condition that couldn’t be cured. And I said I didn’t think I could have done anything like that, but the other day, listening to that girl….I kept thinking, what else could I have done? And I had no answer, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this girl, this child with the wonderful name, has a greater sense of the tragedy of existence than I’ll ever have, and that what she did, what Adam did, was the only decent thing to do, and what I would like to think that I would have done had I been in their place.”

  Darnell ran his finger around the edge of the glass, shimmering dark and dusty in the candlelight’s reddish glo
w.

  “And if you had done that – what anyone with a sense of mercy thinks right – you’d be on trial for murder, because no one wants to think it can ever come to that, where that cruel choice is the only choice you have.”

  “But everyone knows it can come to that,” objected Summer.

  Darnell tried to explain.

  “No one wants to feel complicit, and every prosecutor – and certainly Hillary Clark – will tell a jury that they’re condoning murder if they don’t vote to convict. You saw what she did, how effective she was when she cross-examined that girl. That’s what she does – why she’s so good – she keeps after it, she’s relentless. Nothing matters except the fact that it was a child that died and that when anyone kills a child there is no excuse - it’s always murder. I suppose I should be grateful that she didn’t charge the girl as an accomplice, but, of course, if she had, she couldn’t have called her to testify for the prosecution.”

  “So what are you going to do, William Darnell? How are you going to convince twelve average Americans, all of whom presumably want to do the right thing, that this time, instead of murder, it was what each of them would have done if they had been put in that same impossible situation?”

  “Say that again.”

  “Say what again?”

  “You said, what each of them would have done if they had been in that same ‘impossible situation.’”

  “Yes, but I don’t -”

  “No, that’s all right. I have it now. Maybe that’s the best thing I can do, argue that it was impossible and that to say otherwise is to make the law the devil’s weapon. I wonder now if I should still call Adam as the last witness for the defense.”

  “Why wouldn’t you? He has the right to tell his story, doesn’t he – to tell the jury what he did and why?”