“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 three occasions has been administered the full assessment and on all three occasions her percentile scores were found to be abjectly unsuitable. And”—Dr. Ailey clears his throat, frowns—“and, unfortunately, as I say, she has proven unresponsive to treatment.”
“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—”