—down—
It is a hard thing to watch, that tumbling moment, the instant of unloosing. His eyes in that moment, wide with realization. It’s private. There is nothing as intimate as terror.
Paige says “Back ten,” and the section backs up. Crane, again, standing and stretching; Crane, again, drags on the cigarette, flicking it, watching it fall. Crouching, and—
“Stop,” commands Paige, and the image stands still, hung between frames, Crane’s eyes half open, his body half up and half down, his last puff of smoke half-dissipated in the air around him, again caught in the instant before the instant that will undo him.
“So what I’m wondering,” she says, leaning back, “is what’s he even doing there.”
“What do you mean? On the roof?”
“No—as high as he is. Isn’t he higher than he ought to be?”
“What?”
“Well, the job is down here. Here. See? The job is closer to the eaves. They’re peeling off the tiles here to prepare the roof over the master bedroom for a second story.”
“So what’s he doing way up there?”
“That’s the question. There’s no reason.”
A thought lurches into my head, a rising bubble of speculation, and I murmur it, trying it out: “There is a reason.”
Paige says “Go” and we watch the man die another time: watch him toss his arms out, watch his legs trip each other, watch him lurch and tumble over the side like a drunken sailor. There is something cruel in this, in playing and replaying it like we are making the puppet of his body dance down to its destruction, watching it happen again and again. A kind of retrospective torture of the dead man.
Something catches my eye: a smear—a kind of stain—high up on the screen. “Freeze,” I say.
“Laszlo?”
“There.”
“What?”
“Do you see that?”
Paige blinks, leans closer. I point to the screen.
Aysa nods, three times, quickly. “Yes. I see it. Or—is that—”
“No.” I rub at the screen with a corner of my coat, because it almost looks as if a bug has landed on it, but no, it’s there. A shadow. A shape. The misshapen darkness is not in the room with us, it’s in the image of the earlier reality.
“There’s a shadow.”
“What?”
“I think it’s…”
Now we’re both leaning in, squinting. It’s hard to see. It’s nearly impossible. The shadow is the shadow of something we can’t see because it is off-frame, just outside the capture’s view, the kind of mottled wavering shadow that is refracted back by a pane of glass.
“It’s a skylight,” says Aysa, and I feel a child’s pang of envy that I didn’t say it first.
Why Mose Crane was crouching. What he was trying to see. Why he was there. A way to look in, or a way to get in.
The room grows dim at the corners, the dimness like dread, and it’s pulling at me, I feel it pulling. I see the candle inside the darkness, the tiny glow at the center of a vast room, but I’m not ready, not now, I’m not going, not now—Fuck off, I’m not going now…
I keep my eyes open. Stand up, shake it off. I turn off the screen, leave Mose Crane frozen in his fall.
“Very fine work on this, Ms. Paige.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Laszlo!” She looks at me, spreads her arms, laughing off my overprotection. “I’m fine! Are you fine?”
I’m not, not really. My throat is racked; my eyes are burning. I am feeling the familiar toll of our labors. Our gift that does not come free. The discernment of falsehood, the pull of speculation. My chest is tight, wrung, but I’ll just need a breath of air, that’s all, I need the cigarette I’m already digging out of my pocket, tugging from its pack. I’ll be fine. It’s Aysa I’m worried about, Aysa the unaffected, scrawling notes in her Day Book, no sign of any strain or symptom.
I’m worried about her because she’s like Charlie who didn’t feel a thing until it was too late, and he felt it all at once.
And maybe it is like Charlie, maybe she doesn’t feel it and so she doesn’t understand, but let her see it in me. Let me be a map of the dangers.
“All right, little sister,” I tell her. “Grab your coat. We gotta go talk to that judge.”
14.
“Ms. Wells?” says the honorable Judge Barney Sampson of the Court of Aberrant Neural Phenomena. “Ms. Wells, I will need you to settle down and pay close attention when the court is speaking.”
The owner of the house at 3737 Vermont Avenue sits high on his bench, exercising the solemn duty of his office. His stone-faced bailiff stands beneath him and to the right.
The subject of the hearing, despite Judge Sampson’s repeated admonitions, will not look up at him and will not stay still, shifting restlessly from side to side and flicking her fingers in weird patterns. I’m settled in my last-row pew, beneath the row of drooping flags that jut from the back wall of the courtroom: the Bear and Stars of the Golden State, the three bars of the city, the bright yellow circle of the Objectively So. There is a dull, airless quality to the courtroom, a tired dinginess, as if the very physical space has been worn down by the grim sameness of the daily proceedings. Watching Judge Sampson work, watching him gravely evaluate this poor lady, I wonder if the man isn’t jealous of his colleagues on the State’s higher benches—the Court of Grave Misrepresentations, the Court of Deliberate Falsity.
No, I think. He’s happy. Not smiling, of course, but engagedand brightly curious, eyes fixed on the defendant while he toys lightly with his gavel, while the courtroom’s overhead lights gleam off the dome of his scalp and glint off the big gold ring he wears on one pinky. He’s a short man, mostly bald, with tufts of hair ringing the smooth bulge of his scalp like high clouds around a mountain top.
Aysa and I have been here for five minutes. This docket item was supposed to be cleared ten minutes ago, and my plan was to be waiting for the judge in his chambers when it was done. Instead we’re sitting here in the back of the courtroom, a hard room for anyone to be in, but especially for me. Because the unfortunate Ms. Wells, aside from the shifting and the dancing, aside from the flicking of her fingers, is letting out a steady stream of preposterous and untrue statements, and it is increasingly hard for me to bear.
“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.