“I was dragged here,” she claims, hisses, growls, wagging an accusing finger at the stolid bailiff. “Dragged by dragons, dragons in wagons, wagons in wheels.”
It is babble she is talking, a cackle of words, but the sounds are statements and the statements aren’t true. I feel her nonsense in the air, gathering in slight wispy clouds. This is why she’s here. Madness is an assault on the Objectively So, and the State has a responsibility to contain and control it. The defendant certainly looks the part, in layers of long unkempt skirts, a cascade of dirty and tattered fabrics. Her eyes are pale and milky, and as she talks—declaims; chants, really—her eyes roll and dance inside their sockets. She wanders in a small circuit, her radius limited only by the length of chain with which she is tethered to the floor. She jerks her head in little circles, too, wrenching herself to look behind her, again and again, to the rows of us watching. Her hair is wild, stiff with sea grit and sand; her face and arms are streaked with dirt.
“A demon was dreaming and dreaming.” Raising her hands up, shaking her head from side to side. “Dreaming of dragons and dreaming of me. Dreamed of me and here I be.”
I turn to the side and cough as all this non-truth fills the room, floor to ceiling, window to wall, leadening the air, thickening it up, like smoke off a wildfire. I am starting to think I may have to get up and get out of here, go and wait on the benches that line the hallway outside the room. Ms. Paige, of course, is unaffected. She watches the proceedings with her usual ardency, eyes darting back and forth between the bench and the defendant as Judge Sampson taps his gavel, trying to corral the madwoman’s wild attention.
“Ms. Wells,” he says. “We need to speak calmly.”
She is not able. “Calm,” she barks, her hands high above her head, her dirty hair swept lionlike behind her. “Calm as a bomb.”
“Ms. Wells,” says Judge Sampson. “Eyes up here, please.”
“My eyes,” says Ms. Wells. “My eyes, my eyes.”
Judge Sampson nods, as if her answers are perfectly reasonable, and writes something on a small pad beside him. His desk is absent any extraneous ornament: just the pad, the gavel, a glass of water. It is just him and Ms. Wells, examining each other, staring across the gulf of reality.
I’ve spent time in these courts before, of course, as little time as I can get away with. I had a drug abuser once, a man whose mind became so addled that he could no longer distinguish what was from what was not; I have seen not only madness but amnesia, schizophrenics, and the mentally retarded. And all the old-timers’ diseases, of course, the whole range of senility and infirmity. Any assault on reality, any infusion of falsehood in the air can’t be countenanced, no matter the source.
“Have you ever in your life,” asks the judge, “been administered the dream-controlling medication Clarify?”
“No. Yes. No.” She squints, moves her cheeks, scratches at her neck. Judge Sampson’s manner is mild, but his eyes miss nothing. “I am not a doctor, sir. I am not a dream.”
I cough hard, into my hand. A bearded man in a suit turns around and glares at me. I don’t want to be drawing attention to myself but it’s getting harder to tamp down. A little more of this and I’ll have no choice but to duck out into the hallway. My chest feels tired. My hands are shaking, just a little bit.
“Have you been evaluated by a mental health professional?” asks the judge.
This time she doesn’t answer, just hisses like a steam vent and waves her hands.
“Have you ever—” Judge Sampson stops, raises one hand, and snaps his fingers. His fingers are long, the nails manicured. He snaps, snaps again. “Ms. Wells? Right now. Where are you in the present moment?”
“Court,” she says, and there is a palpable sense of relief in the room. She’s not so far gone as that. Ms. Paige glances at me, hopeful. Ms. Wells has one foot, at least, in the world. Everyone knows what happens if this goes the other way.
“I’m in a court. And you are the king. The king of the thing.”
“Ms. Wells?”
“The king is singing, now. Loud and long or low and slow. The king sings and the snakes are dancing.”
Ms. Paige looks at me again. Ms. Wells’s moment of lucidity has passed through her like weather, and now she is off again, babbling with hands raised, caught in her interior dance, her mind fixed within, and another spasm catches me, worse than before. My coughing, I can tell, is drawing the attention of the judge. His attention flickers over me, and he is clocking the blacks, the hat, the coughing. He has known many Speculators, of course. He knows what I am, what we are, but does he know why we’re here?
His attention returns to Ms. Wells—he asks her to look at him directly, and she ignores him again. Not defiant, exactly. Uncomprehending. Disinterested. She twists her head in different directions, like a loose compass searching for north.
Judge Sampson drums his fingers on the bench, and turns to his bailiff, a big man with wide shoulders and a rocky forehead like a dinosaur.
“Do we have a representative here from the department this morning?”
“Yes, sir.” The bailiff points at the bearded man in front of me, the guy who glared at me a minute ago. “Dr. Marvin Ailey.”
The man stands up. “That’s me, sir.”
“Hello, Dr. Ailey. An object in motion tends to stay in motion.”
“Good morning, your honor. An object at rest tends to stay at rest.”
“And so it ever shall be.” The judge sighs. “All right, then. What do we know about Ms. Wells’s relationship with reality?”
“Tenuous, sir. Unfortunately. Lorna Jane Wells on
