Lloyd lay on his bunk in the darkness and thought about the pictures he had seen of his brain. Two officers he didn’t know had driven him to a hospital in Lubbock to get them taken. The hearing was in a week. Schwartz had pointed out patches in the pictures’ rainbow colors, scratching his bald spot and pacing. He’d said that although parts of Lloyd’s brain were damaged so that alcohol could cause longer and more severe blackouts in him than in normal people, such damage might not be enough for the court to recognize him as incompetent. And the rest of the tests had proved that he had a dissociative condition but not multiple-personality disorder. Lloyd had wanted to ask if Schwartz thought he was incompetent, but he figured he wouldn’t get a straight answer.
In the darkness of the steel room Lloyd touched his head, trying to feel the colored patches of heat and coolness that the pictures showed in his brain. He imagined he could sense some here and there. He had come a long way — not many people knew what their brains looked like. But the thought that he might be incompetent frightened him. What if someday one of those big machines they put over his head was put over his chest and a picture was taken of his soul? What would it look like? He saw a dark-winged creature with tearing claws, cloaked in a gray mist.
The knock came to Lloyd in a half dream, and at first he thought he had imagined the sheriff’s voice. The whole jail was quiet; all the inmates were covered in the same darkness.
“Lloyd? Lloyd? You awake, son?” The voice didn’t sound exactly like the sheriff’s, but Lloyd knew that’s who it was. He rose and went to the door, too sleepy to be nervous. He peered out the square window. The glare of the hallway made him squint. The sheriff stood in silhouette, but his steely eyes glinted. Looking at him through the crosshatches of wire in the security glass, Lloyd thought that he, too, looked caged.
“I’m awake, Sheriff.”
The door opened, and the sheriff said, “Come on.” Lloyd could smell whiskey. He followed the sheriff out past the booking area. Everything was still and deserted in the bare fluorescent light. Gonzales dozed in a chair at the front desk with a porno magazine in his lap. The sheriff opened the door to his office, making the same mocking gesture as before, though this time he seemed to be trying to share his joke with Lloyd. He snapped the door’s lock and sat down behind his desk. A single shaded lamp glowed in a corner, casting shadows from the piles of paper on the desk and reflecting golden patches from plaques on the walls.
The sheriff pointed at a low-backed leather chair and told Lloyd to have a seat. “Excuse me gettin’ you out of bed, son. I figured this was the only time we could talk.”
“It’s no trouble.”
“You can prob’ly tell I been drinkin’,” the sheriff said. “I don’t do it as a habit, but I apologize for that too. I been doin’ it more lately. I do it when I’m sick at heart. At least that’s my excuse to myself, which is a goddamned poor one, unbefitting a man, if you ask me. But I am. Sick at heart.”
He took a long pull from a coffee mug. Lloyd followed it with his eyes, and the sheriff caught him.
“And no,” he said, “you can’t have any. One of us got to stay sober, and I want you to remember what I’m gonna tell you.” He leaned across the desk. “You know what a vacuum is, son? I mean in a pure sense, not the one you clean with.”
Lloyd shook his head.
“Well. A vacuum is a place where there ain’t anything, not even air. Every light bulb” — the sheriff nodded at the lamp behind him — “is a vacuum. Space is mostly vacuum. Vacuum tubes used to be in radios. And so on. A place where there ain’t nothin’. Is that signifyin’ for you?”
Lloyd nodded.
“Good. So we, because we’re on this earth with air to breathe, we are in a place that’s not a vacuum that’s in the middle of a vacuum, which is space. Think of a bubble floating out in the air.” The sheriff made a big circle above the desk with his fingertips. “That’s what the earth is like, floating in space. Are you followin’ me?”
“I think so.”
“Well, are you or aren’t you?” the sheriff said with sudden violence. Not waiting for an answer, he yanked open his desk drawer and took out a large folding map of the world. He tumbled it down the front of his desk, weighted its top corners with a tape dispenser and a stapler, and came around the desk to stand next to Lloyd. He told Lloyd what it was and said, “I study this all the time. Do you know where we are right now?”
To Lloyd, the shapes on the map looked like those inkblots. By reading, he found the United States and then Texas, and then he gave up. He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know, Sheriff.”
“That’s okay,” the sheriff said gently. He pointed to a dot in the Panhandle which someone had drawn with a ballpoint pen. Cursive letters next to it said “Dumas.” “This is where we are. Two specks within that dot, on the dark side of the earth, floating in space. Over here” — he pointed to Hong Kong — “it’s lunchtime. Japs eatin’ their noodles or whatever. Here” — he pointed to London — “people just risin’, eatin’ their sausages and egg sandwiches.”
He stepped back, behind Lloyd, and put his hands on the chair. The heat of his body and the smell of his breath washed over Lloyd.
“But look, son,” the sheriff said, “how many places there are. It’s some time everywhere, and everybody is doin’ something.”
The sheriff stood there for a few moments. Lloyd felt as he had when he was a child watching TV — he couldn’t imagine how all those people got inside that little box. Now he couldn’t fathom people inside the little dots. The world was vast and stranger than he had ever imagined.
“We are all here doin’ things,” the sheriff said, “inside this bubble that is not a vacuum. We all breathe the same air, and everything we do nudges everything else.” He stepped over and propped himself on the edge of his desk, next to the map, and crossed his legs. The lamp’s soft light cast him in half shadow.
“And this is why I’m sick at heart. Because I thought I knew you. Separation is the most terrible thing there is, especially for a man like me.” The sheriff gestured to take in the whole room. “This is what I got. It ain’t much. You and I aren’t that far apart, son. Both of us solitary. But what you done, son, and I do believe you did all that, that separates a man from the whole world. And that’s why I said you need to get right with yourself.”
Lloyd bowed his head.
“You don’t need to tell me you ain’t done that.” The sheriff’s voice rose and quickened, began to quiver. “You and I both know you ain’t. But that itself — a negativity, a vacuum — ain’t nothin’ to breathe in. Things die without air. So what I’m askin’ you is, I want to do my own competency exam, for my own self. This is between Lloyd Wayne Dogget and Archibald Alexander Lynch. I need to know what’s inside you to know what’s inside myself. So you tell that lawyer of yours I’ll stipulate to whatever he wants. Remember that word — ‘stipulate.’ Now get outta here.” He turned from Lloyd and began folding the map with shaking hands. The corner weighted by the tape dispenser tore. Lloyd could not move.
“Shit,” the sheriff muttered. He wheeled unsteadily on Lloyd, his eyes wide with panic and surprise at what he’d said. Lloyd could tell he was afraid, but not of him, as Mr. Mac had been. The sheriff was afraid that he might show his own soul to Lloyd and so break out of the bubble in which he lived. “Git!” he yelled. “Go tell Gonzales to take you back! Get outta here before I say somethin’ foolish!”
“He wants you to do what?” Schwartz paced in the little white room, looking at the floor.
Lloyd was sitting at the table, turning his head to follow Schwartz. Was Schwartz right with himself? He repeated what the sheriff had told him.