There was some daylight now. He looked through wire mesh, intended to withstand the heat of a blowtorch, at a world awash in a violet peace. He felt as if his feet had found the shore. This is your eternal life. This is for always. This happens once.
They had her by the elbows, one man on either side. The door opened. Her feet didn’t touch the ground. One of her slippers fell off. “End of the line, baby. Smack in the Middle of Things.”
“What the fuck’s fucking? Fuck you,” she said.
“That’s real pretty,” they said. “This is the center of the Search of Destruction where the Devil will eat you.”
“Going to eat your pussy. All bloody teeth,” another one said.
“Fat soul. Suck warts of the soul in death. This is Ground Zero,” they said.
“Wait a minute,” Jamie said. “Wait a minute.” The answer was only a word away.
“Great!” they said. “Why don’t you do that? In the middle of the night.”
“As soon as the Search of Destruction eats it,” they said.
She felt her face getting hot. She could hardly keep a grip. “Is the bomb here?”
“You tell us,” the man said. “What do you think?”
They took him up to the eighth floor of the Maricopa County Court building in handcuffs and leg irons. “Not a chance,” Fredericks said as soon as he saw Bill Houston in chains. He took a breath to protest, and the prosecutor, a tall grey gentleman who appeared very wise — Bill Houston wished he were the defender — raised a friendly hand and nodded to the guards.
They unbound him amiably and he sat down in a pew beside his lawyer, but Fredericks wasn’t satisfied. It galled him that his client should have to appear before impressionable jurors wearing the denim garb of a prisoner. He was nearly apoplectic. Houston had never seen him so excited, so wronged and abused — but he appreciated that this was the show-style appropriate to the side that could hope to triumph only in a limited way and piecemeal, through a horizonless march of writs and appeals. In future appearances William H. Houston, Jr., would be permitted to wear a cheap suit; but it would go into his brief that on the trial’s opening day he’d been made to look like a criminal before the jurors who would decide his fate.
Now the jury wasn’t here, however. Now only a skeleton crew of local justice was present, the stenographer laying out his equipment, three prosecutors, two jailhouse guards and two courthouse guards, and a few spectators. Bill Houston couldn’t help feeling like an errant youngster when he spied his mother in the third row.
She looked small in these quarters, with their distant ceiling and ominous bulking judge’s bench, their originless fluorescent illumination, their austere and holy Modern Airport decor and the posh hush of carpets and central cooling. She wore a pink dress and a pink pillbox hat with a pin in it and a veil, which she removed when she saw her son to disclose her face looking healthy and alive, just as she’d looked at his trials in the past: because it was only on these occasions when her loved ones fought the law that anybody took any notice of her. Though her kind of people were generally ignored — or at best slightly mourned and slightly pitied — by those who built and staffed these magnificent rooms, everyone was forced to see now that it was really for her kind of people that these places had been built, after all — and now you are working for us. Now you’ll take reckoning of us in your sight. The last shall be first. It made her ashamed to take very much pride in all of this tragedy, and yet the day seemed electric — she had to admit it — because her boy was on page one.
He looked good. They had him dressed in work clothes, like a person of low degree, but he looked good. Obviously he’d been eating and exercising. It was the same as always. Left to his own devices, he was hopeless and dangerous both, but in custody he flourished. Her oldest son was at home in locked places.
At the very center of things they killed Jamie. It had a hold of her wrist at the very center of things, saying, “You damn doodad, you can’t do that, you damn doodad, you damn doodad.” There were two of it. “You smear shit on the wall, you’re going to clean it up every time,” it said. It took hold of her wrist and made her hand look huge. She threw her hand away and it picked her back up and attached her to her hand. She was choking. “Responsibility,” it said. “Terrification.”
It had a hold of her wrist and dipped her hand into the waters of the lake of poison.
The screaming of sirens came out of her two ears. Waters of the lake of the poisonous filthy death. You wanted everything. Well, I gave it to you. I’m nothing now.
“This is a clean establishment of walls,” it said. “We’re making you put fire on the things you’ve smeared on the walls.”
That’s me. That’s what you wanted.
“Responsibility and Terrification in the Lake of Fire and of Poison,” it said.
When they made her hand touch her secret writing formed from the filth of her bowels, she ceased. Greatness exploded in her face.
I have been washed away off these walls.
But this is me, she said. I’m still here.
What am I doing wrong?
Where the secret terrible word had been, there was fire running down the surface.
WHAT AM I DOING WRONG?
“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said this month,” it said. There were two of them.
So that’s it, she said, and she felt the electricity running out of her brain. There’s no way out of here. This is it. I’m here forever. I had it all backwards.
Baby, they said, you are impressing the hell out of me. You see what you needed all this time? Responsibility. Self-respect. And do you know where you get that from?
Fire in the center of your name.
As the days unrolled and Bill Houston came to understand that he would never be called as a witness, he lost interest in these proceedings. He didn’t trust anybody to speak in his stead — he alone knew who he was. He only wanted to be allowed to share this person with the jury. He just wanted them to know the person they were condemning — and it angered him that he should be the cause of all this show, and his mother coming day after day to watch, and they had no intention of acknowledging him. He felt like a grownup in a room full of children playing with toy cars. To get them to see who he was involved tearing them out of a tiny exclusive world of their own creation.
In his bored reveries he came back again and again to the moment when he’d turned his weapon on the bank guard. The guard had been paralyzed by the chemistry of panic and excitement, and in the instant of time when Bill Houston had tightened his grip against the trigger, he had known there was a better way of dealing with the situation. It might have been possible to disarm the man somehow and leave him alive. That space between heartbeats had been big enough to accommodate any amount of contemplation of the act. It made him feel good, it made him know that life was real, to admit that right there inside that nick of time he’d seen a clear choice and been completely himself. He wanted to confess it to these people, because he sensed there was a chance they might never hit on a moment like that one. He just wanted to give away the most important thing he knew: I did it. It was me.
He watched his trial from behind a wall of magic, considering with amazement how pulling the trigger had been hardly different — only a jot of strength, a quarter second’s exertion — from not pulling the trigger. And yet it had unharnessed all of this, these men in their beautiful suits, their gold watches smoldering on their tanned wrists, speaking with great seriousness sometimes, joking with one another sometimes, gently cradling their sheafs of paper covered with all the reasons for what was going on here. And it had made a great space of nothing where Roger Crowell the bank guard had been expecting to have a life — a silence that took up most of Bill Houston’s hearing. It was a word that couldn’t be spoken, because nobody knew what it might have said. It was the vacuum no larger than a fist, no more spacious than the muscle of the heart, that drew things into it and unbalanced and set loose all the machinery Bill Houston saw moving around him now. They said things; they failed to say things. They stood up; they sat back down. They huddled at the judge’s bench, and they conferred in his chambers, and they passed among themselves expressions and slight gestures intelligible to no one else. Periodically Fredericks drew him close to explain what deal had been struck, or how the evidence was tilting. But what Bill Houston couldn’t shake was the remarkable power in the subtle difference between pulling and not pulling the trigger. A tiny movement of the finger, a closing it together of half an inch: and it caused these men and women to convene, to parade themselves mercilessly along the routes of their arguments and their laws, never omitting a proper station or taking a shorter way, as if they actually had it in their minds that they might have come here to accomplish anything but his death.