“I’m sorry,” I say “Excuse me.” I stand up. This is stupid. This is the stupidest thing I could possibly be doing right now. “What is it he is accused of stealing?”
A room full of people turn their heads toward me, the man who fits in least with this crowd now drawing the maximum amount of attention to himself.
“It’s not really relevant,” says the vice, after glancing respectively at the chair for permission to handle this one. “Our protocol says, given limited time and resources, to focus on outcomes when the cause of action is relatively straightforward.”
“Yup,” says the chair. “Bingo.”
The vice vice’s beady eyes are fixed on me, birdlike and unpleasant.
“But he has the right to know the charges against him,” I say, nodding my head toward the defendant. The crowd has settled into near silence now, drawn out of their chatty genial atmosphere by this novelty. The guy next to me, with his iPhone, scootches over a little in his seat, putting some distance between us. My presumptive Julia Stone, the attractive woman with dark red hair, is staring at me with the same frank interest as everyone else. A wash of nervousness passes over me. This really was idiotic, but I’m still standing, so I go ahead and press my case.
“He also has the right to face his accusers,” I say. “If someone is saying he stole something, he gets to confront them in open court.”
The defendant cranes around, then glances anxiously back at his judges, trying to figure out if this mysterious interjection is aiding or hindering his case. I’m not sure, my friend, I tell him telepathically. I honestly don’t know. Somewhere in the room, someone opens a beer bottle with a pop and hiss. On the seatback in front of me is graffiti, RON LOVES CELIA, etched by some bored undergrad in days gone by.
“It’s not that we are unaware of the rules of evidence,” says the vice, shifting back in his chair and squinting at me. “I went to law school at Duke, okay? But those rules are moot in this context.”
“But how can you pass sentence—”
“We don’t call it ‘passing sentence’—”
“—without a fair trial?”
“Excuse me?” says the third judge, the vice to the vice, speaking at last and loudly, his voice high and reedy and charged with anger. “Who are you?”
I open my mouth but say nothing, cycling rapidly through a series of possible answers, sharply aware of the insufficiency of them all. They could kill me, these people—I could truly die here. The Free Republic of New Hampshire, for all its easy egalitarian spirit and New Age trappings, is a world unto itself, beyond the reach even of what little law remains; as the man said, certain rules are moot in this context. I could be murdered here, easily, if the mood of this crowd should change; I could be beaten to death or shot, my corpse abandoned in the dirt of the quad, my sister and my dog left to wonder why I never emerged.
“Well?” says the vice vice, rising from his chair. And then the chair says, “I knew it.”
“What?” says the vice.
“I knew someone would be coming to find him.”
She stares at me from the table on the stage—arms crossed, glasses, pigtails—and I stare back at her.
“Excuse me?” The vice vice says, glaring and confused. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
But Julia Stone is unconcerned with his bafflement, with the confused attention of the crowd. She gazes cooly at me.
“I told him they would come for him. That’s what your kind do, right? You come for people.”
The low murmur of the room is beginning to bubble up again, people leaning across one another to whisper and nudge, people exchanging questioning expressions. I ignore them, keep my eyes locked on Julia Stone.
“Um, yes, point of order,” says the vice, while the vice vice stands stonily, arms crossed. “What are you talking about?”
“This man has entered our space on a false pretense,” says Julia, and points at me with one steady finger. “He’s not here to take part in our community; he’s here to infiltrate it. He is on a mission to hunt down another human being like a pig or a dog.”
Silence, then, the room suddenly alive with tension, everybody staring at me or at Julia or back and forth, me to her. I feel it again, the dread gut-level certainty that these people could kill me: that I might die here, in this room, and no one the wiser. And at the same time, nevertheless, I am feeling these wild waves of excitement, looking at the woman for whom Brett named a pizza, the woman who drew him from Concord and from his wife, the woman I went looking for and found. I want to take a picture of her and send it to Detective Culverson and say, “See? See?”
“You don’t understand where you are,” Julia tells me. “This is a new world. We have no room for police-style tactics here.”
“I’m not a policeman,” I say.
“Oh, yeah?” she says, “But you are police-style, aren’t you?”
“What is going on, Julia?” says the vice vice, and he takes an aggressive step toward her around the back of the table, and the vice rises to stop him with one hand pushed against his chest. “Whoa.”
Julia keeps her eyes on mine. “You’ll never kill him,” she says.
“Kill him?” I say. “No, I—his wife sent me.”
“His wife?”
She stands breathing for a second, taking this in, deciding what to do with it, while I’m thinking: Kill him? Who would be coming to kill him?
“Sorry about this,” says Julia to her colleagues on the tribunal, and then turns to address the room. “I call for an extraordinary postponement. I need to speak to this man alone.”
“Oh, come on,” says the vice vice petulantly. “You just asked for an extraordinary postponement yesterday.”
“Yes, well,” she says drily. “These are extraordinary times.”
Julia Stone steps down over the lip of the stage and motions for me to meet her at the door. As I pick my way over legs down the tiers, the kid with his hands tied sits down, confused, and the vice chair moves that the meeting advance to the question of public nudity. Everybody cheers and raises their hands, palms up.
4.
The woman Brett loves, like the woman he married, is not beautiful, not in any conventional way. But where Martha Milano’s plainness is redeemed by a sweet radiant quality and warmth of spirit, Julia Stone’s small thin body and dark features are attractive in a whole other way. She doesn’t speak, she pronounces, talking fast with her black eyes flashing, each word charged with energy.
“There,” she says. “Those kids. On the roof. See?”
I look where she’s pointing, to a cluster of busy shapes atop one of the dorm buildings off in the distance. “Exercise machines. Maybe twelve people up there now. Sometimes we get thirty or thirty-five. Bikes, treadmills. This is an example. You join us here, you do what you want, as long as, A, your action does not interfere with the ability of others to do what they want, and B, whenever possible, your action offers some concrete benefit to the community.”
Julia pauses and stares at the air in front of her, as if scouring the words she has just said, satisfying herself of their soundness before plunging forward. We’re on the roof of Kingfisher Halclass="underline" steam pipes, a wilted rooftop garden, a weather-beaten sofa someone lugged up the concrete stairwell and out the trap door.
“We have a team of engineering postdocs who rigged those machines to capture the electricity generated in a central battery. So that, for example…” She swings her arm until she’s pointing at another building, much closer, where on the first floor the curtains are pulled shut tightly. “… those people can watch movies. A French New Wave festival at present. Then they do Tarantino. And so on. They vote on it. There’s a committee.”