“Tell me about the extent of the treatment?”
“Standard, sir. The standard battery.”
“Beginning at what age, Dr. Ailey?”
“Beginning at age nineteen, your honor.”
“Beginning with Clarify, doctor?”
“Yes, your honor.”
The facts form a pile. The pile grows higher. Dr. Marvin Ailey, referring to his Day Book, to various files he’s brought with him, proceeds through the years of Ms. Wells’s life, her history of neural nonconformity, all of the drugs to which over many years she has proved nonresponsive; while the woman herself proves the point, bobbing her head in small chicken-like motions, making little half dance steps in different directions.
When he is done with Dr. Ailey, the judge stands and hitches up his robes, almost daintily, like a woman in a long dress coming down off a horse. The climax of this event is getting closer now. Whatever else I am to find out about Judge Sampson, I know that he does this many times a day: sits with people’s lives in his hands, weighing their fitness. What does that do to a person, such a burden as carried by the soul?
He crosses his courtroom and pulls up a chair at the defense table, plunks himself down unceremoniously beside Ms. Wells.
“Hi,” he says softly. “Lorna. Lorna, do you have living family that are aware of your condition?”
“What?”
“Are there people that care for you?”
The judge sees her humanity. I see it, and I can see him seeing it, trying to locate the human person within the murky depths of her illness. Seeking a way, if a way can be found, not to do what he is empowered to do; not to exercise the power of his office. But Ms. Wells jerks backward from him in a swift reptilian motion, and claps her hands on his shoulders. “The book cares.”
“The—what?”
“I got it for a song,” she says. “The book. The big one, the old one, the good one, the gold one. The big book with the red spine.” Her voice has built into a singsong rhythm, sweetly childlike. “Past Is Prologue, boys and girls. I have read it close.” She spins around to face the gallery, and she gives us a broad wink. “I’ve seen through the curtain.”
“Ms. Wells,” says Judge Sampson, frowning. “Stop.”
“My eyes are spies. X-ray eyes. Okay? I can see behind the black. The parts behind the parts.”
“Ms. Wells,” says the judge again, his voice dire with warning. “Stop speaking.”
He casts a stern and meaningful look to his bailiff, who does not, as I expected, charge across the room toward the defendant. Instead he steps closer to his own small desk, lifts up a panel built into its top, while Ms. Wells raises her hands high into the air, her two thumbs interlocked and her palms spread wide.
It’s a book. She has made of her hands a book and she is holding it aloft.
“Big book, old story,” she sings, “And you know what’s odd?”
“Ms. Wells!” cries the judge, but she sings on—
“In the scratched-out pages is the face of—”
The judge is looking at the bailiff and the bailiff is pressing a button on the desk that sucks all the sound from the world. In an instant it becomes absolutely silent, a pure, deep silence like the courtroom is encased in glass, as if it is not sound but the very idea of sound that has disappeared. For a moment, wild Ms. Wells keeps talking, moving her mouth, moving her head in confused circles, but then she trails off, looks with bafflement around the impossibly silent room. After a minute of this, when her lips have stopped moving, the judge nods to the bailiff, who taps his desk once more and unmutes the courtroom, and the imposed silence is replaced by the subtler everyday quiet of a room full of people, watching the judge, watching the confused madwoman—who stands now with her hands flapping nervously at her side.
Judge Sampson keeps his eyes focused for a moment on the floor, a man briefly lost in important conversation with himself. And then he stands and returns slowly, solemnly, a one-man procession, to the bench.
“It is the verdict of this court that Ms. Wells has no connection to reality nor prospect of achieving one.”
Paige looks at me, startled, and then back at the judge. Poor thing. Young girl. She grabs my shoulder. Wanting me to—what—to leap to my feet? Object?
Judge Sampson looks at the bailiff, who makes a small gesture with both hands, palms up, like an elevator rising up a floor. Everybody stands. I take off my pinhole and press it to my chest. The judge keeps his eyes on Ms. Wells, who, of course, has no idea what’s going on. She is living in her own reality, and shelled within it, shelled and sheltered, flinging rocks over the top, a danger to us all, but not for long—not for long now.
“The presence of Ms. Wells within the Golden State is therefore deemed to be unsafe and unhealthful for its inhabitants.” The bailiff stands before the bench, a still pillar, hands behind his back. Paige’s grip tightens on my shoulder, as if it’s her on whom sentence is being passed. I feel her fingers through the thickness of my jacket. Trying to understand the judge’s words, though they are not hard to understand. Like a pledge or a curse, like “I do” or “I promise,” the words of a verdict are illocutionary: they do not have an intended effect, they are the intended effect.
The judge has changed reality. The madwoman was of our world and now she is gone from it.
“The remedy to the offense your presence represents is to be effected immediately.” And Judge Sampson brings down the gavel, three short chops, bap bap bap, and the bailiff steps forward to unshackle Ms. Wells from the ground.
