Once, she asked a student who enjoyed skydiving what it felt like to fall through a cloud. His answer disappointed her: he said there was no sudden transition between the cloud and the blue sky.
You’ve done roughly the same on the ground, he said. Just imagine wandering into a very low, very large fogbank.
If she tries to think like that, it also becomes possible to believe there is something outside the cloud. But it’s exhausting. She encounters some large boulders and has to walk around them. It is impossible to stick to a set direction.
She checks her watch. Now it says twelve o’clock but the brightest place is not right above her. Her steps create sodden echoes that make her look over her shoulder. She tries to speed up and walk more lightly but that’s worse still. There’s a sucking sound every time she lifts her heels. She can hear her own quick breathing while she wades through clumps of rushes that reach her hips. The water is seeping over the tops of her boots.
Then a mound appears some way away, a place where she can stand on dry ground. But she gets close to the mound faster than she expected and realizes that it is no more than a bump, just about large enough for the soles of two boots. She bends like a tightrope walker, and, suddenly, she sees a light ahead of her. A searchlight, a head lamp, perhaps the fluorescent glow of a rescue helicopter light. She splashes through the wet moorland, running toward the light that spreads and becomes stronger the closer she gets.
Just a few more steps and she sees it: it is the orange tent. A sentence comes to mind. She might have written it herself or perhaps read it somewhere or perhaps it has occurred to her at this moment.
There is a component of deprivation that is similar to starvation: a physical sensation of hollowness.
22
A WOMAN LOVES a man very much, he loves her very much, they cannot imagine life without each other, and, even though it is not said aloud or even clearly formulated in their thoughts, they take the fact that they have found each other and love each other and have created a good life together—the fact that love, after all, does exist—as proof that life as a whole has a hidden but beautiful pattern, that there is an inner order to the apparent chaos of the world around them, a lofty intention behind everything.
But these are their very last words to each other; this is how the two lovers say farewelclass="underline"
“But Tom has been waiting for that DVD for ages. It’s the one about the guy who builds himself a log cabin, yeah? And lives alone in Alaska?”
“Sure. You do what you like.”
23
BEFORE THE COURT hearing began, she had made a decision: she would meet the defendant’s eyes as often as possible. That her gaze would be reciprocated was something she had not taken into account. The first time she stood face-to-face with Scott Myers, outside Court 1A in Dane County Courthouse during the chaotic moments just before the hearing was due to start, he either pressed his chin against the narrow blue tie he had obviously borrowed, and mumbled something to his defense lawyer, or else used his superior height to stare placidly at a point above her head. When the doors opened, his lawyer escorted him swiftly inside. They were followed by the defendant’s father, a man with a graying crew cut and arms that stretched the seams of his blazer, who pushed Myers from behind with his large hand, as if covering his son’s back in some kind of forward sporting move.
Scott Myers kept his eyes fixed on a point above hers during his statement to the effect that he turned down the right to a pretrial plea—there was no point in denying that he had committed the offense. It was all over before Jane had managed to catch his piggy blue eyes. She had seen these eyes many times on the Green Bay Packers’ website. Scott Myers was a tackle on the reserve team. He was twenty-four years old, six foot five, and three hundred pounds. He showed no signs of remorse.
Outside the courthouse, when Jane was standing on the steps with Robert and Dorothy, Scott Myers’s father had come over to her.
“We pray for you, just as much as we pray for our son. I can’t hope that you will forgive him. We hope that God will.”
She noticed that her body weight increasingly rested on Robert, she felt his arm support her, then almost slacken before it held her up again.
“What we’re doing now, we do because it’s our duty. Because he is our son. He has a right to defend himself.”
Scott Myers’s father said all this as if preparing to lead troops into battle. He held his hands together just in front of his stomach. Only his red-rimmed eyes and the way he twisted a large gold ring round and round on his finger gave away that he was speaking from a bottomless depth. Jane would on several occasions come to wish that he was on her side.
On the way home Dorothy said, “I understand that you couldn’t bear to answer him,” which almost certainly meant the opposite. The catastrophic consequences of the accident had not penetrated into the barricaded, light-shy core of Dorothy’s mind, so she actually felt that Jane had been impolite.
“I somehow couldn’t breathe, Mom,” she explained.
For the duration of the court case, Jane was unable to distinguish clearly between fantasy and reality. She kept a thin notebook in her handbag—she had torn out half the pages and thrown them away because they had been used for notes on a novel—and wrote down information that had seemed important at the time, or that she had been told was important. The notes were unsystematic. One page contained a detailed description of the jury selection process, even including which day of the week it usually took place. It was followed by an almost entirely blank area devoted to a single word.
Ravens.
On the next page, written in letters that grew larger and larger:
That I write this down means…
The sentence ended there and the next two pages were empty until the entry of a date and time and the words:
Jane A will make a victim impact statement. You will not be asked to do anything else.
Underneath, her name, scratched repeatedly in the same place until the pen had torn the paper.
She perceived her mind as a smooth, black surface made from a material capable of registering a particle storm of impressions. In the evenings, lying in bed at home or in her parents’ house or in Tom and Vladlena’s guest room, she tried to visualize the defendant’s bull neck, round red cheeks, and small goatee. She recalled the TV interview with one of the sheriff’s officers wearing a gold-braided cap and a hi-vis vest: he stood near the incident site and described the chain of events for a professionally appalled reporter from NBC. And she thought about the home page of the legal firm handling the defense, with its crass advertisement: Not all lawyers are used to the thrill of victory after an unconditional discharge. We’ll get you off the hook!
Then, she might feel another tightening of the airways, a few seconds of increased pulse rate, a pang of recognizable emotion, like a tattered little banner blowing in the wind at the far horizon beyond a desolate battlefield.
Myers’s defense neither apologized for his action nor attempted to modify his account. It wasn’t that kind of case. Both sides went in for plea bargaining. Myers would admit to all the essential elements in the prosecution’s case, but charges would not be pursued for minor breaches of law—such as leaving the scene of the accident. The prosecution wanted the case to be briskly concluded, without shades of doubt or pending options for appeal. As for Myers, any agreement would imply a reduced term of punishment. What such an outcome implied for Jane was obviously questionable. Her father held the not uncommon view that plea bargaining in cases such as this was typical of a legal system that was rotten to the core. Others have argued that if justice was seen to be done swiftly and in a satisfactory way, both parties would have the best prospect of moving on. As far as Jane was concerned, the first opinion was uninteresting and the second one so naïve that she briefly recalled what it felt like to laugh.