When a woman heads down the hall, do other people wonder if they’ll ever see her again? When a father “goes for a drive,” when a mother walks out the door and into the snow, do other people think: Is this it, are they ever coming back?
To have been left is to know that anyone can leave, at any time. But that morning in the courthouse, I felt its opposite effect — the illusion that a person could return, that she might have a change of heart and emerge, at any moment, from one of these magisterial doors. It didn’t matter that Janis was dead, her ashes washed to the Gulf of Mexico. Hope doesn’t give a crap about facts like that.
Crystal pitchers of water were placed at the witness box and jury stand. Someone turned on the judge’s microphone, which filled the room with a light buzz. Beyond the bar, the room was alive with clerks and bailiffs, gesturing with color-coded folders, typing, and talking as they geared up for the morning’s docket. These were Janis’ old co-workers, and though they ghosted through varying realms of familiarity in my memory, the routine of their motions only furthered the illusion that amber rings from Janis’ tea must still stain that stenographer’s table, that a lost Lean Cuisine lunch or two yet haunted the back of the kitchenette freezer. Did her little lotus tree still spruce the Mediation Room?
I began to feel her presence — her pain-in-the-ass, can-do spirit, her maddening humming of songs too soft to make out, her stupid need to hug every human she encountered in the state of South Dakota — and I felt it physically, in my arms and knees, how much I’ve missed her since she died, six months before, in the guest room of my father’s house, even as he was packing her upstairs belongings for the dump.
The room grew colder. I felt as if I were sitting at the center of a merry-go-round, the world in motion viewed from the calm. My eyes, when I rubbed them, burned from the Mexican hair pomade on my fingers, and I watched through bleary vision as civil servants went about their business. Could none of them feel Janis in the room, the person with whom they’d eaten Chinese buffet twice a week for twenty years? Did none of them feel the parts of her that remained?
My father believed the dead lived on in their possessions. To him, Janis dwelled in the latent heat of an old curler set. She sighed in each exhale of a Tupperware lid, and spoke through the curled strips of trial transcripts she brought home and hung ribbony from refrigerator magnets. Trudy was partial to the notion that people preserved themselves through the images they left behind, and Eggers believed the dead were bound to the soil through which they’d trod their days.
It was by watching Janis here in this courtroom, as I read my history books and peeled bananas, that I came to see that the dead reside inside narrative, that something immortal was happening as Janis documented everyday people swearing to the truth of their lives. Husbands and bosses, grifters and orphans testified to broken promises and failed bonds, to randomness and surprise, to the unexpected turns life took, and Janis was there to give evidence, not for or against them, but of them. She was the repository of our town’s stories. Is there a more noble trade?
Farley swung into the courtroom, smelling suave in cologne and clicking a gold pen, a lozenge tucked in his cheek. He gave me a wink, then proceeded to glad-hand the prosecutor’s assistants before he worked the whole room in a counterclockwise circuit. My hands were trembling. An announcement was made, something I couldn’t make out. The judge made a joke, and everyone laughed. Through the doors came a clerk, balancing a stack of briefs. It was a clerk that Janis had mentioned before, the one with the stammer who grew angry whenever old people took the stand.
I heard the courtroom doors swing open again. When I turned, it was the new stenographer instead. She wore wire-rim glasses and carried a roll of tape. “Sorry, Judge,” she said, making haste for her seat.
I leaned back and stared at the courthouse ceiling, where there was a grand oculus whose natural light filled the room. Craning my neck, I studied the leaded glass dome and the great circular mural surrounding it. Chiseled from marble was a series of vignettes depicting the history of South Dakota: In quartz-veined stone, a red man in feathers offered an ear of corn to a loose-shirted fur-trapper. The next panel showed three buffalo kneeling, their horns pointing down, as a horse, returning after ten thousand years, approached through the wheat. A sodbuster yoked his plow to the rising sun as a row of boys, standing in descending order, observed and learned. A locomotive named Progress — its caboose a covered wagon — split the state in two. And in the final panel, an owl sat under an Indian moon, looking not at pilgrims or prairie schooners but down through the vault of justice, to me.
People were talking. Farley was talking.
“I have that right here, Your Honor,” Farley said, and the bailiff came to take a sheaf of paper from his hand. This bailiff was the guy who dressed up like a Civil War cavalryman on the weekends, who was known to eat hardtack and jerky at lunch, who made his own soap and smelled of lye. All of these people Janis had spoken of now played a role in my arraignment, but I don’t have the heart to describe them, to give their names or render the look in their eyes. They’re dead now, every last one of them in that room, every person but Farley, and how can I bring the entire courtroom to life as mere backdrop, as window dressing to my one morning there? There’s no such thing as doing quick justice to the deceased. To speak of the dead is to conjure them, and it would be a crime to beckon them from their graves, to prance them around in some conga line of history before vanquishing them back to the cold, as if their lives were no more than footnotes in the tale of another.
The more you learned about life, the more it seemed an engine of little design, and to survive its queer lottery was what we called living. You could choose to celebrate this survival, as my father did, or you could mourn the misfortunes of others, which I figured was the least we could do. But the future would prove us both wrong — to live when others do not, we were to learn, isn’t survival, but being left behind.
The next ocular mural of South Dakota, assuming you rebuild the courthouses, my friends of tomorrow, will not be chiseled with images of clerks or bailiffs or little people like me. Were the million Lakota who died of smallpox included in this one? No, the marble of the next history of this land will be inscribed with flames leaping to the sun, chains of dogs lashed together, and, of course, a great red hand.
* * *
Because the charges were federal, Farley managed to get me transferred to the federal prison camp at Parkton while I awaited a trial date. Before the sun was high in the sky, I’d been remanded to Club Fed, formerly Parkton College, a moderately religious school that had gone bankrupt some years earlier. I was “processed” in what had once been the main cafeteria, now filled with the old-carpet odor of bureaucratic cubicles and the scent, like aspirin, of copy toner in the air. The dining-hall windows, however, were still stained glass, and their luminous depictions — an anointing of grape leaves, the multiplication of fish, a last supper — cast a fruit-bowl light across the correctional system’s laminate desks and morguelike filing drawers.
They handed me receipts for all my property, and then I was placed in a white room that had once been part of the vast kitchen — still visible in the floor were marks where the old industrial freezers had been bolted down. Here I was forced to watch an orientation video. Following that, I had my head and nethers shaved, and was ordered to drink a chalky liquid, then made to urinate into a paper cup. Next, I was briefly violated, and before the rubber gloves even popped off, without so much as a glass of orange juice to calm my nerves, I was dusted with a delousing powder that tasted, in my nose and mouth, bitter as vitamin C.