“Great! I’ll do it!”
“And Friday afternoon we’ll go off together. I already took Tom and Ida for a walk today.”
We wound up the conversation. Carol got on the phone with Sorrel for a minute and talked about details. It was like old times, thinking and planning together as a family.
Of course Hiroshi came home then, so I finished my tea and cleared out. Carol saw me to the door.
“The trial is at the Hall of Justice on West Hedding between San Pedro and Guadelupe,” I told her. “It’s with Judge Carrig on the fifth floor, courtroom 33. I’m supposed to be there at eight-thirty, but it probably doesn’t start till later.”
“Where’s West Hedding?”
“Up near First Street and 880.”
“What was that I heard you tell Sorrel about your bail being revoked?”
“West West fired me.”
“Oh, Jerzy. I’m sorry. But if Sorrel will be here with a rental car on Friday, I might work that day. I can’t miss too many days. It’s only Tom and Ida who insist they see every day of the trial.”
“That’s fine. And thanks for all the support. Bye, kids!”
Carol closed the door. I drove home to Queue’s and called Gretchen to tell her I was too tired to get together. I went to bed early.
The courtroom was much smaller than I’d expected; it was just one of thirty or forty courtrooms in the Hall of Justice. In the back were five rows of seats for onlookers, and then a waist-high partition-the bar-with a sign on it that said:
ALL COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE PRISONERS VERBAL, WRITTEN OR SIGNED IS UNLAWFUL WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE DEPUTIES.
Carol, Tom, and Ida were there. On my side of the bar were, from left to right, a desk with a Santa Clara County sheriff with a gun and a computer, a desk with a DEFENDANT sign where I sat next to Stu, a desk with a PEOPLE sign where the District Attorney sat, and, against the right wall, two rows of comfortable chairs for the jury. There was also a desk for the court clerk, and the judge sat behind a big raised pulpit-the bench. The witness stand was squeezed in between the bench and the jury. The judge’s name was on his bench: Francis J. Carrig.
The first part of Thursday was spent in dealing with the people who wanted to get out of jury duty. Beefy Judge Carrig spoke very slowly and clearly in a slightly overbearing way. He didn’t seem like a guy you’d want to interrupt or argue with. Out of boredom I jotted down some of his more judicious-sounding phrases, and came up with these:
“Let me finish. I’m asking for your cooperation. I don’t want to have to repeat this. I have the utmost confidence that this case will be completed by June fifth. Let me help you out. I will ask you the same question collectively. Can you be a fair impartial fact finder? Counsel approach the bench.”
That’s what the judge sounded like. Once he’d found twelve willing jurors, he asked the prosecutor and the defense to introduce themselves. The prosecutor’s name was Eddie Machotka-he was wiry and intense, with a bald pate and big puffs of curly clown hair on the sides of his head. Then the judge read out my name and the charges against me: criminal trespass, computer intrusion, and extreme cruelty to animals.
“Are any of you jurors familiar with this case?” asked Judge Carrig. Of course they all were-prior questioning had already revealed that everyone on the jury had a TV. So then the judge went into finding out if anyone on the jury was already convinced I was guilty. Could they be objective? As Judge Carrig put it, “We’re not asking you to decide complex technical issues. Just things like: was it up or was it down, was it left or was it right, was it hot or was it cold?” Two jurors got weeded out here, and the judge replaced them with two of the alternates who were waiting in the onlookers’ seats. I turned around and looked at my family every now and then.
By Thursday afternoon, the judge had finished impaneling a jury that neither Stu nor the D.A. objected to. I spent Thursday night at Gretchen’s. It hadn’t occurred to her to come to the trial, which was just as well. We ordered out for Mexican food and watched a video from Total Video-it was Natalie Wood and Tony Curtis in Sex and the Single Girl. It turned out Gretchen was a big fan of Natalie Wood; she even had a big book about Natalie, with an Andy Warhol portrait on the cover.
Friday morning, Sorrel was there in the courtroom with Tom and Ida-Sorrel with her short mouth, messy hair, and big cheeks. Judge Carrig began talking about some of the points of law relevant to my charges, and explained that the jury was to decide whether or not I was in control of the actions of Studly.
After lunch, Eddie Machotka, the D.A., made his opening presentation, followed by Stu’s opening statement for the defense.
Machotka had prepared an incredibly realistic cyberspace mock-up of the crimes as he thought they had happened. His simulation held a space-time continuum surrounding Jose Ruiz’s block of White Road for the crucial three minutes, and he could observe the running of his world from any position in it, or from any series of positions in it-he could pick any space-time trajectory he pleased. He could even speed up and slow down time, or run time backward-he was the master of space and time.
As we in the courtroom watched a big Abbott wafer display, Machotka flew us through his world. First he showed Studly standing on the picnic table and me standing next to him talking to him. Jose Ruiz was visible in his house, watching us out his window. The words Ruiz attributed to me appeared on the bottom of the screen like subtitles: Jerzy Rugby: Yes, Studly, now send in the ant viruses! Then Dutch the dog came running out of Ruiz’s house and I fled, calling back to Studly. Ruiz’s quote of my words: Jerzy Rugby: Studly, kill that dog! It was quite convincing. Machotka flew us through his world four times, from four different angles. Members of the jury kept glancing over at me and looking away.
Stu’s presentation was much more limp and legalistic. More than anything else, he harped on the point that Studly had legally been the property of GoMotion at the time of the crimes. Nobody in the courtroom looked like they gave a fuck. Stu insisted that I hadn’t told the robot to screw up the Fibernet, nor had I told Studly to kill the dog, but after Machotka’s virtual reality demo, Stu’s bald assertions carried no force.
Leaving the courtroom at three-thirty Friday afternoon, I felt sure that we were going to lose. Before the reporters pressed in on me, I managed to say hi to Sorrel and tell her I’d see her at Carol’s in an hour.
After I shook off the press, I drove to the Wells Fargo in downtown San Jose and found a parking space on the street. My bank balance was indeed thirteen thousand dollars plus. Thank you, West West! Though the teller didn’t like it, I got the thirteen thousand in cash; it made a fat envelope of 130 hundred-dollar bills. I’d decided to give a third of it to Carol for the children, so I asked for another envelope and counted 44 hundreds into that one. I felt grim and sad. I was leaving my country and my poor little family-maybe for good.
I calmed down a little on the walk over to Pho Train. I ordered the same pho soup again. This time I used the tip of my chopstick to add some red-pepper paste to the broth. With the pepper and the spicy green leaves, the soup was truly delicious. I slurped down as much as I could before Vinh appeared, fuming cigarette in hand.
“You ready?” he asked. “We can walk from here. But give me the thousand first.”
“Okay.” I pulled my main envelope of hundreds out of my pants pocket and counted out ten bills for Vinh under the table. His bony hand reached across to take them, and then he passed me a flat plastic package under the table: my four Y9707 chips. I stuck the package unopened in my other pants pocket.
We walked two blocks to a neighborhood of rundown two-story apartment buildings made of crumbling pink stucco over plywood. The buildings had flat roofs, prefab aluminum windows, and concrete stairwells. All the children playing in the street were Vietnamese-a regular Our Gang of loud little girls, T-shirted toddlers, and watchful boys. Everyone seemed to recognize the pockmarked, chain-smoking Vinh Vo. Vinh knocked at a street- level apartment door and a thin young woman holding a screwdriver let us in.
It was a single-room efficiency apartment with another young woman, fat, sitting down. The windows were hermetically closed off with filthy curtains and Venetian blinds. The room was lit by computer monitors and lamps; the ventilation came through an antique wall unit air conditioner. There was a great hoard of computer equipment along the walls, and there were loads of books and computer manuals. The chairs had vinyl cushions.
“Here’s your customer, girls,” said Vinh. He smiled thinly at me. “This is Bety Byte and Vanna. They’re computer science students at San Jose State. They’re the best cryps in our Vietnamese community.”
Heavyset Bety Byte wore a cyberspace headset pushed up onto the top of her head like sunglasses. She had thick lips, yellow, skin, and greasy, permed, distressed hair. Surely she had no inkling that I’d seen her tuxedo in
