I hadn’t seen Julius Deeds since, either. His lawyer had him cleaned up for the trial, but King Kong with a haircut is still King Kong, so I should have recognized him right off the bat. But I was so gung-ho to get on the jury, I spent my first half hour in the courtroom focused on the juror questionnaire. It wasn’t until I got done bullshitting my way through that and handed it in that I noticed Deeds staring at me, trying to work out where he knew me from.
We both got it at the same time. Then he smiled, like Christmas just came early, and all my good intentions went straight out the window. I started hoping three things in quick succession: one, that I didn’t get picked for the jury after all, two, that Deeds hadn’t made bail, and three, that if he had made bail, Ganesh was either dead or out of the country, because Ganesh knew where I lived.
I’m going to guess that none of your hopes were realized.
Of course they weren’t. I’d done such a great job on the questionnaire that I was the first juror seated—Deeds looked really happy about that—and then later, after we were dismissed for the day and I’d snuck out of the courthouse, I saw him on the sidewalk shaking hands with his lawyer.
So I tried calling Ganesh, but his phone had been disconnected. I didn’t know whether that was good or bad. I thought it might be a smart idea for me to skip town regardless, but first I made a stop at the house of this other dealer I knew, to re-up my Valium stash. And it gets hazy after that, but I guess between the Valium and the bottle of vodka I kept in my freezer, I decided not to skip town.
Now there’s one other important thing I haven’t told you, and that’s the date that all this happened. I got summoned to jury duty on Monday, September 10th, 2001. And so the next morning I came to in my living room at around six a.m., and the TV was on, and at first I thought it must be tuned to the Sci-Fi Channel because there was this image of the World Trade Center, and one of the buildings was on fire. Then I saw the CNN logo in the corner of the screen, and I’m like, hang on a minute. And it had just registered that this wasn’t a bad movie, this was real, when the second plane flew in.
I turned up the sound and sat there for about an hour with my jaw hanging open. Then my phone rang.
It was King Kong: “Hi there, Jane.”
Instead of being freaked out like I should have been, like I was supposed to be, I actually felt sorry for the guy, because the world had just turned upside-down and he obviously hadn’t gotten the memo yet. So I said: “Are you near a TV set?”
That wasn’t the reaction he was looking for. “Listen, you stupid bitch,” he said, “do you know who this is?” And I said, “Yeah, I know who it is, and I know you think you’re a badass, but the thing is, you’ve just been trumped.” And he went off, all threats and swearing, but I didn’t really hear it, because it was right then that the first tower went down. A hundred-ten-story building, and it turned to rubble right in front of my eyes, and I realized in this weirdly detached way that I was witnessing a mass murder.
On the phone, Deeds was raging: “Are you listening to me? Are you listening to me?” And I said, “Get fucked, killer,” and hung up on him. There was a moment right after I set the phone down when I thought, That probably wasn’t too smart, but then I looked back at the debris cloud on TV, and by the time the second tower collapsed, I’d put Julius Deeds completely out of my mind.
I took some more Valium and went for a long walk. Around noon I ended up at Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. By then all the planes had been grounded, and the city was quieter than I’d ever heard it—the only sounds were the wind and a few people crying. I was looking for a place to light up a joint when I saw Phil. We didn’t say anything, just wandered off together and sat down to watch the day go by.
It was after dark when I finally went home. The drugs had worn off enough for me to start worrying about Deeds again, but by then I couldn’t remember whether that early-morning phone call had really happened or was just something I’d imagined. I was wary going into my building, but when I found my apartment door closed and locked, not kicked off its hinges, I figured I was safe.
I let myself in. My TV was on, and that seemed wrong, but I told myself not to be paranoid. I started hunting around the living room for the remote, and then the television shut off on its own, and Deeds said, “Hello, Jane.”
He was sitting in the darkest corner of the room, with a baseball bat across his knees. I looked at him, and the bat, and then at the door I’d just come in by, and he said: “You won’t make it.”
“OK,” I said, standing very still. And he said: “You were right about me being trumped. This morning when we talked, I had no idea. You know they say the body count could be as high as five thousand?”
“Five thousand…”
“Yeah. Kind of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? Still, it’s not all bad news. My trial, for example: it’s been postponed.”
“Postponed?”
“Yeah. The courthouse was closed today, and the way things are, my lawyer says it could be months before I get a new trial date.”
“I’m happy for you,” I said.
“Oh, it’s not just good luck for me. It’s lucky for you, too.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” He stood up. “You’ll have time to recover.”
That’s my last clear memory from that night. I know I did try for the door, and I eventually made it—I was bleeding out on the landing when the neighbors found me—but not before he worked me over. He broke my collarbone, and my right arm in two places, and cracked or broke half my ribs. He also got in one really good shot to my skull—the doctors told me later it was a miracle I didn’t end up dead or a vegetable from that.
I was in a coma for ten days. I woke up in a darkened hospital room with a television playing somewhere nearby. Tom Cruise was talking about a priest who’d died giving last rites to a fireman at Ground Zero. Then Mariah Carey started singing that we all have a hero inside us, and I thought maybe I’d died, and this was hell. But the show went on, with more celebrities coming out to sing and tell stories, and there were calls for donations, and eventually I realized I wasn’t in hell, I was just in America.
The cops came around. I told them I didn’t know who’d attacked me. Then Phil came to see me, and I told him the same thing, but he knew I was lying. I told him to mind his own business.
I had another visitor, too. I first noticed him about a week after I woke up, and for a long while I wasn’t sure he was real. I was in a lot of pain, but because of the coma the doctors were nervous about drugging me. But I kept after them, and eventually they put me on a morphine drip. And I was floating on that when this guy showed up.
He was black, with a round face. He sat in a chair over by the window, watching me.
What made you think he wasn’t real?
The way he was dressed. He had on this cheerleader’s uniform: pink checked skirt, pink sweater with OMF across the chest, pink pom-poms, plus this wig—a yarn wig, like a pink mop head with pigtails.
That does sound a little strange. On the other hand, San Francisco…
Yeah, I thought of that too, but the other thing about this guy, nobody else seemed to be able to see him. The woman I shared the room with had end-stage brain cancer, so she was out of it, but there were nurses and doctors coming through all the time, and they never so much as glanced at him. I tried to draw attention to him without, you know, actually saying anything—if it turned out he wasn’t real, I didn’t want my morphine drip pulled—but no dice.
So finally I gave in, and tried talking to him: “What do you want?”
“What’s the magic phrase?” he said.
“What?”
“What’s the magic phrase?” He lowered his pom-poms and puffed his chest out.
“Omnes mundum facimus,” I said.