Fiction: "The Governor Has His Day in Court"
I have been working on a lot of fiction over the past year and a half, but haven’t been able to publish a lot of it because I’m tuning it up, theoretically, to eventually be published somewhere else. This one doesn’t have that problem. It has a limited shelf life and lives too much in between modes (among other problems) to be published anywhere I’ve ever head of.
Still I enjoyed creating it. I’d say the genre is “weird fiction,” maybe abstract fiction, heavily stolen in style from Percival Everett and Amelia Gray. It’s obviously inspired in part by some recent and current and maybe future events, but it is not satire or allegory, and lives in its own strange space. It was written as a work of compulsion, as I was trying to focus on other things, and it took way too long because I couldn’t let go. Now I am doing so, at least for now.
The Governor Has His Day in Court
We were gathered on the steps in the spirit of camaraderie, to see the governor to his day in court. We had no great love for the governor. Or at least, we did not like him. Or: we did not think that he was likable. But then again many of us were “unlikeable”: small-minded or angry, broken or distant, out of touch, old, disrespected, disregarded, used up, beaten down, ashamed, prideful, out of place, or out of the place where we wanted to be. And we were still worth saving. The governor, too, was still worth saving. He was ours. He was better than ours. He was us.
Many battles had been fought to get him here, to his day in court. There were times when we thought he’d never make it, when it seemed inevitable that he’d be dragged out by the mob, defenestrated and eviscerated, while his accusers, nobodies with no power, who had never earned or fought for the right to hurt us, slapped each other on the back, took selfies, passed around mimosas. Behavior unbecoming of conquerers. So vivid was this scene – the many variations of this scene that populated my imagination – that when I realized, the morning of the governor’s day of court, that no version of this event had actually happened, I hardly believed my memory. I thought I must just be forgetting where it was filed, the mnemonic key that unlocked it.
Of course, it wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere. The governor was alive and well, and in office, too. Not all of his accusers had made it. One was sent over Niagara Falls in, and eventually out of, a barrel; one we lit on fire and dropped from the torch of the Statue of Liberty; one had been tied to the bottom of a bridge over the Hudson on the coldest night of the winter and chipped down by sledgehammer the next morning. These accusers were, we feared, attempting to prevent this day, the governor’s day in court. That despite our fears this day had finally come felt almost surreal, like were in a place that didn’t exist, a shiny Battery Park in October 2001. A pleasant place, but one that we had no sense of how to react to, because we had already adjusted to its destruction. If we had been able to turn back time and save Jesus Christ from the crucifixion, would we still be saved today?
It was with these uneasy feelings that I stood on those deep, low, gray steps and watched the governor step out of his limousine and begin his ascension into court. The scene felt distant, though he was but a couple hundred feet away. Where I stood I was retreated into my gut or the spaces around it. As though I were sunk in some turbulent sea, my eyes just some periscope out into the world above. I could turn the periscope, follow him with my eyes. I could command movements. I made my hands clap. I could make my voice cheer, sure. The governor turned toward us, not more than 15 degrees, half a clock hour, and smiled weakly, or maybe grimaced. He did not often make a show of caring for us, which is how we knew he was a good and honest man. From him, a pittance was a fortune. At what we though to be a nod in our direction, we doubled the applause. He continued on his way, talking to his aides, who shielded him from the reporters. And then the governor was gone, gone to his day in court.
I would have left him then, gone home like a proud parent having dropped her son at college, where he would have his own adventures, make his own fate. To accompany him would be an invasion of his privacy. Also I was tired. We had done our job, I felt. We had gotten our governor his day in court. We had fought for the American Justice System, and, against all odds, won. Now it was time for our hero to fight this last battle alone, a sacred thing, staged in a sphere we could not enter.
I would have left him then, but something held me back, held me uncertain and idle. Maybe it was a culmination of small signals that had not yet risen to my consciousness, but were telling me my work was not finished. Or maybe it was something simpler, more arbitrary, like the geography of the courthouse and its surrounding landscape. I come from a swifter place. My city floods and drains quickly. A crowd can empty in minutes, its droplets washed down into the subways, out a spindly web of small streets, into buses and big lobbies and a thousand small shops. But the capital is still a small town, and while power flows easily through it, people do not. Lacking these drainage systems, these plentiful and interlocking distributaries, it instead forms eddies, holds its crowds stagnant. So I stayed, milled, and then I felt some part of our pool drawn upward, backflowing toward a side entrance of the courthouse. Lacking any momentum of my own, I entered the stream.
Around the courthouse we went, behind a blue wall of plywood and out into a wider waiting area in front of some more modest steps behind a black mesh fence. There we were briefed by a woman with a clipboard and a smart suit. We were being given a special opportunity, she said, to show our support for the governor. It would mean the world to him. Of course we wanted to do what we could. We followed her through a narrow hallway, up a small staircase, down another hallway, up a pair of elevators, into a stately vestibule, down a final hallway, and through a frosted glass door which led to a balcony, a narrow rim of a wide oval overlooking the courtroom. The balcony had been built just for us, for this day, at the special request of the governor. He felt it symbolized his struggle, held resonance with similar stories of the past. There were no seats on the balcony, which consisted of a series of risers around an oak railing. The steps were too small, and our feet overhung them slightly, which caused us to crowd and waddle like penguins around water. Behind and between the shoulders of two large men, so strong they would not be pushed together even by the crowd, I found a gap where I could see down into the courtroom. There I spotted a judge, a jury, a large audience, a throng of reporters, many lawyers, and indeed, our governor himself.
It was difficult to hear the proceedings. The opposing lawyer stood up and gave a few remarks. Our governor looked unfazed. Soon his lawyer, our lawyer, had the floor. She was a tall, confident woman with long hair. She strode in front of the judge, back and forth in neat, long steps, making arguments I could not hear. Then she turned to look upwards and gestured angrily at us.
“And the governor’s own supporters,” she shouted, “have been treated like second class citizens, confined to the balcony while the elite hold him at trial against their will!” At these words we applauded, and were told by the judge to be quiet. The lawyer said this exactly proved her point. “As you see, even the judge seeks to silence the governor’s supporters! And worse, to deafen them. Not only are they hushed when they try to make their voice heard, they are not even provided a sound system to follow the trial!” she shouted. “I have to shout!”
The lawyers conferred, and a bailiff disappeared behind the bench and re-emerged with a set of speakers on long cords. He left the room again, heading to the door behind the bench where’d come from. He returned fifteen minutes later through the courtroom’s public entrance, still with the speakers in tow.
“How do I get up there!?” he shouted. “There’s no way up!”
The lawyers conferred again and a very large stepladder was brought in. Bailiffs, marshals, construction workers, maintenance people, a variety of employees of the court, moved this ladder around the room until the speaker system was rigged up to face us from many angles. Microphones were hung from the far side of the balcony, hovering over the judge and lawyers. They accomplished this all fairly quickly and our lawyer looked disappointed but she conceded that it had been done.
The proceedings, once we could hear them, were rather boring. Such and such law was cited, such and such precedent, witnesses were sworn in and their expertise established. A break was called. At lunchtime the lady with the clipboard returned and we were brought out into the hallway and given turkey, roast beef, tuna, and eggplant sandwiches, potato chips, whole apples, and a fruit platter with melons, grapes, and large strawberries. We were allowed to use the bathrooms. There was no women’s room on the floor, but we were designated one of the two men’s rooms, the one with fewer urinals. The line wasn’t as bad as it could have been because we had the whole floor to ourselves. Outside we heard the voices of some others – younger people, we could tell from their lackadaisical tone – who seemed to be trying to find the balcony entrance. But they could not, and soon they hurried down the stairs again, not wanting to miss the trial as it returned from recess.
The calm routine of lunch had again satiated my anxiety as well as my hunger. The trial was not horrifying. It was just more bureaucracy, more proof of what the governor had to go through on a regular basis, the kind of things he shielded us from with his knowledge of law and politics. But as we made to file back into the balcony, my sense returned again that something was not right. First we were held up at the door. The lady with the clipboard took one phone call, then another. She walked around the balcony, holding a hand out toward us to signal “stop” whenever someone made to enter. As the judge gaveled the court back to order, she seemed almost reluctant to return us to our seats. She rolled her eyes and waved us in with her right hand. The clipboard, in her left, hung slack at her side.
In the courtroom another of the many plaintiff’s attorneys, an unpleasant woman with her hair cut short, was working to set up a series of boards with the help of a short, stout man who had the tired demeanor of a schoolteacher. It was hard for me to read the boards from above, our angle of overlook too steep. But I could read the worried demeanor at the governor’s table, his own avoidant posture. It did not bode well. The fix, it seemed, was in.
The man and the woman conferred with each other. They walked behind their boards and angled them up to face the balcony. We averted our eyes. The woman lawyer began to speak, telling lies about our governor.
“No!” someone shouted. “Keep it to yourself!”
But she continued. Calmly smearing the great man, with the demeanor of a sociopath.
“Stop!” said someone behind me. “Stop!”
More of us were joining the calls.
“We don’t want to hear it!”
“Lies!”
We all began crowding in reverse. Where once there had been a scramble to get close to the action, there was now a scuttling away from the libelous evidence, the slanderous speech. People backed up to the walls. Some could not find the doors to escape. “Help!” someone yelled “We’re being squished!”
In the spirit of camaraderie we moved forward again to clear out space for those trapped. Some fell to the floor. One skinny man tumbled comically down the aisle, people getting out of his way at first, then moving to catch him, too late. He careened into the bannister and his back flopped over it. His arms windmilled, searching for support but finding only space. His skinny legs, in pants that hugged them so tight he resembled a goat or faun, hung in the air for a second, balanced evenly with his upper body on the far side. “Grab him!” a woman shouted to the large men nearby. But before her words got it out it was over. The skinny man’s torso dropped, his legs flew up, and he disappeared below the horizon. I moved into to a gap to look over the edge. Below the crowd was rippling away from the man, like a pond splashed by a stone. He lay twisted between benches, his left leg folded on top of his head, his right one splayed out to the side from under his torso, looking like a too-big arm.
“Oh my god!” shouted another man. “Oh my god!”
An elbow in front of my face pushed me back into the crowd and for a while I could not see. I heard more feet pounding, bodies thumping. Then the bannister broke and we were rushing forward, forward. I sat on the ground to save myself, my legs braced against the shoe of the bannister, which remained solid even as the spokes above it were splintered. Around me more and more people were going over, first falling, then jumping. “Get them!” someone cried. “Get them!” I watched as the jumpers landed one on top of the other. The falling bodies piled up, forming a hill, cushioning the impact for the next jumpers. Soon they were landing more or less intact, healthy and alive, though they were quickly squashed by those behind them, after which they moved more slowly. A few layers later, they were buried out of sight.
The pile mounted. Higher, higher. Soon it was less than a human’s height from the level of the balcony. People jumped on the top and landed precariously, some rolling, some sliding, some keeping their feet under them and charging down the hillside like insane infantrymen. Still I held back, scared. I tucked my head and covered my neck with my hands. “Come on!” I heard. “Get ‘em! Don’t let ‘em get away with this!” Someone caught me by the elbows and dragged me to my feet. “No!” I shouted. She shrugged, then held her nose and hopped onto the pile as though she were jumping into a pool. She slid to the bottom where she lay on her butt, then got up to join the crowd. Behind me even the stragglers were moving forward. The woman with the clipboard was standing back against the wall, texting frantically, the clipboard strewn several feet away from her. The stampede began to thin. Only a few of us were left, The pile was grown so high now that to reach the top was just a step. A man a little older than me, a gentleman stepped across and extended his hand. It was a long stride, but the drop was short, not even a full stair’s height. We stood together for a second, a peaceful moment, then he fell off to the side and I slid down, landing with a bump on my feet.
On the floor it was madness. Running and shoving. Shouting. “Get them, get them!” Awakened again from my brief trance, I remembered my anger at the slander. Our governor! But the lawyers, now holding their posterboards as though they were shields or crucifixes, were still talking at us. They climbed the judge’s bench, angled the weapons to face us. “You can’t ignore the evidence!” the teacher-lawyer said, matter-of-factly, as though he were lecturing his students for the thousandth time. “And exhibit G,” said the lady with the short hair.
We turned away from these horrible lawyers. In the rush it was hard to tell who was one of us and who was a member of the audience. Up on a table the governor stood, a radiant smile on his face. We grabbed him and hoisted him over our shoulder.
I wish I could tell you it was a happy ending. That we carried him out of there, set him back in his office, barred the doors, protected him forever, showed that the people can triumph over arbitrary power. But the world is harsh and cruel. We cannot defy the authorities for long. Only the strong can survive at all, and even they crumble with time. Our governor had shown us the way. He had done what had to be done, crushed many adversaries, but it was over, it was all over, and he could not protect us any longer. There was only one thing left to do. We all knew it. But so many of us were afraid, afraid at what had to be done. I myself had been afraid, afraid to jump, afraid to stand, afraid to charge.
No longer.
I took the first bite. Just a section of his earlobe, the dangly bit. I had never bitten a chunk out of a person before. I did not know it would work. But it had to, so I tried. I clamped down, at an angle so the point canine tooth would sink in. I held on and braced myself against his neck with my hands, shook my head back and forth. Steadied to adjust the grip of my teeth. Shook my head again. It stretched and then I was free. There was not as much blood as I expected. The piece was chewy and rubbery but I swallowed it easily. I tried to savor the iron taste in my mouth but it was already washing away.
“Stop! Stop!” the lawyers screamed. “Stop!”
I looked at them and grinned, guffawed. “He’s our governor!” I shouted “And you can’t have him!”
The full crowd was upon him by then, bearing down and digging in. A large man, one of the two who had stood in front of me before, reached into the governor’s armpit, splayed his fingers, grabbed, twisted. He passed me a piece. The misshapen lump of flesh was chewier, more muscley. It had a large vein or artery buried in it. I had to chew all of ten minutes to soften it enough to swallow, but I did. By this time our governor was mostly skeletonized and all there was left was to clean the bones, an honor I left to those who had been there longer. Some rude young college student stuck a camera in my face, a camera with a microphone. I didn’t hear what she said. “Yeah I got a comment,” I said. “It’s a shame what you did to that man.”
* * *
At night I sometimes get my governor’s dreams. Maybe his memories, maybe my imagination. I’ve heard some horror stories. The one I have, it’s not so bad. Just yelling at a man on the phone. I say words but I can never remember them, only the feeling, the feeling that he does not understand, that I am moving pieces and he is in the way, that he cannot fathom the way the world works and I cannot fathom where he conjures the idea of his size, his ego, his arrogance, that he must be so fucking stupid to not know he is small, like women are small, like all the small-timers are small, except those who choose to be part of something larger than themselves, something like me. I do not know, as I said, if the dreams are really his, but whether from reincarnation or from inspiration, I know that in some way, some very important way, our governor lives on, and as long as he lives on there is the hope that we can be strong like him, that all it takes is contempt of the small, the small parts of ourselves and the small parts of everyone else.
end