* * *
“Let’s just say it was chaos.” The Defendant chuckled. “With all three of us there. Total chaos.”
Tina’s face is earthly in the setting Seattle light. We are sitting in teak chairs on her back stone patio at her home on Vashon Island, Patagonia fleeces zipped up under our chins. The Cascade Mountains are reflected in the looking glass of the sound, and we are one foot in both worlds. The one where we have to imagine how it ended for Ruth and the one where we don’t.
* * *
People die of all sorts of things. Cancer, car accidents, old age. This girl, whose name I would never know, whose parents I could never tell—she died of fight. I saw it happen. She was pummeling his head, his neck, left fist, then right. The final swing seemed to connect to some unseen socket. There was an exploding-star jolt; an outage that sounded like electricity itself. The disruption in magnetic fields trembled the house and sent him flying off her. He landed in a crashing heap, tangled up in his own limbs, and dozed off for a moment. I hoped for a concussion, for a brain bleed, his death, and though I didn’t get that, I suppose I got the next best thing.
I saw it all over him as he staggered to his feet, kissing his singed knuckles, as he came toward me with her spit sheening his face. She had scared the ever-loving shit out of him. He was as mortal as me, made small by whatever else was out there, whatever had given her white-hot light at the end.
I did not have long, but I did have enough time to return to the kitchen with Tina, smelling of basil and burned butter. You’re never supposed to turn your back on butter you’re trying to brown, but I’d had to grate more cheese—Tina and her sticky fingers—and I hadn’t noticed the blackening foam until it was too late to salvage. I was rinsing out the pan and I was chiding Tina and I was laughing when it happened. Look what you made me do!
“I’m so sorry,” Tina says, pressing her nose to the back of her hand while the tears fall and fall. “God, I’m sorry, Ruth.”
The Court: Is there anything now you want to say to the Court?
The Defendant: There sure is. Did you think you could get away without me saying something?
The Court: Oh, no. If I thought I could, I wouldn’t have asked.
The Defendant: I’d like to talk about the choice of counsel, but only briefly. I remember when I brought the issue up a week or so ago about me representing myself. The Court said, “Well, if you were a brain surgeon you wouldn’t operate on yourself.”
And I started thinking of that analogy in its real perspective and I said, “Well, think about the education a brain surgeon has. There are some brain surgeons I would rather have represent me in a criminal trial than some attorneys.”
Because, let’s take the medical profession. Four years of medical school, plus six, seven, eight years of residency before they can go out on their own. Think about it.
We have attorneys doing brain surgery after three years. Sort of in a symbolic sense. There’s nothing that prevents a newly graduated law student from representing a person in a capital trial. And I think this is a shortcoming of the legal profession.
It’s like some incredible Greek tragedy. Must have been written sometime. There must be one of those ancient Greek plays that portrays the three faces of man. And I don’t know how the court can reconcile those three roles, because I think they are mutually inclusive. And I think the court, in spite of its experience and wisdom, is just a man.
And I will tell the court that I am really not able to accept the verdict because although the verdict found in part that those crimes had been committed, they erred in finding who committed them. And as a consequence, I cannot accept the sentence, even though one will be imposed… It is a sentence of someone else who is not standing here today.
—THE DEFENDANT’S CLOSING REMARKS, 1979
PAMELA
New Jersey, 2019
Day 14,997
Not too long ago, I was waiting in line at the Summit Starbucks when I heard Judge Lambert’s distinctive drawl from behind. I ran my tongue over my teeth, used a knuckle to paste down the unruly hairs in the arches of my eyebrows, before realizing it didn’t matter if I was wearing lipstick where it shouldn’t be because the man who deserved my nastiest bitch smile had been dead a decade.
“I think it’s more toward the end,” a girl’s voice said, and there were the craggy, telltale signs of a video, stopping and starting, patches of the wisecracks Judge Lambert managed to work into his final remarks even as he sentenced a man to die by electric chair.