I was on trial for the murder of my friend Alex Hauser. Alice Boudreaux, the county prosecutor, a squat woman with frosted blond hair, was marching back and forth in front of me. She was talking to the jury, wagging her finger in my direction. The jury box was sunk in deep shadow. All I could see of the jurors were a dozen pairs of eyes, gleaming in the darkness, staring at me where I sat in the glaring light.
“The defense will tell you that Mr. West passed a lie detector test-and that’s true,” Boudreaux said as she marched back and forth, “but when you consider the other evidence, the overwhelming evidence against him, passing that test only proves what an accomplished liar he truly is. Consider this: By his own admission, he’s almost certainly the last person to have seen the victim alive. He and the victim argued violently before the victim went into the park. Traces of the victim’s blood were found on the defendant’s clothing. The murder weapon had his fingerprints on it and his DN A.” She stopped in her pacing and leveled a finger directly at me. “This is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the only possible verdict is guilty.”
Her words sent a cold jolt up my spine. I knew, of course, that it was Waterman who had put the traces of Alex’s blood on my clothes. It was the Homelanders themselves, as I found out later, who had planted the murder weapon with my DN A. The whole thing was a frame-up from start to finish. And yet as I listened to the prosecutor tick off the evidence against me, I was sickened by the idea that people all around me were believing her.
I turned to look at them-at the other people in that distorted dream courtroom. I saw dozens of people sitting in the weird, shifting shadows behind me. Even in the dark that came and went as the walls moved in and out, I recognized some of them. People from school, teachers, students. People I’d grown up with. Relatives. Some of their faces were illuminated for moments at a time by spotlights that seemed to shine out of nowhere and pick them out of the dark. I saw my friends-Josh and Rick and Miler-leaning forward intently, listening intently to every word the prosecutor said. I saw Beth, casting me quiet looks and gestures of encouragement whenever I turned to her. I saw my father, frowning angrily at the prosecutor as he watched her moving back and forth across the courtroom.
And I saw my mother. She was sitting beside my father and he had his arm around her. She wasn’t crying now, but I could see by her pallor and her unnaturally bright eyes that she was devastated; terrified by what was happening to her son. I felt the terrible weight of her grief and fear. And I felt the terrible weight of my own guilt for having chosen the path that made her feel this way.
Then I spotted Mr. Sherman. He was sitting near one shifting wall. He saw me look at him. He smiled at me and nodded, as if some secret communication were passing between us.
The sight of him made me nauseous. I felt the movement of the shifting, shadowy room inside me as if I were standing on a ship in a raging sea. Some lines from the Bible went through my mind, a passage about sailors in a storm:
They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits’ end. Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble…
I wanted to cry out to the Lord too, but what could I cry? He knew what none of my friends or family knew: that I wanted to be found guilty-that I had to be found guilty for the plan to work. All I could ask was that he would comfort the people who loved me, that he would comfort my mom especially…
I turned away from Sherman to face the front of the room again. There was the prosecutor, her face pressed terrifyingly close, her features all distorted as she shrieked at me:
“Guilty!”
Startled, I snapped out of the fever dream-but not out of the fever. For a moment, I was awake in a haze of heat and sickness. Where was I? What was happening to me? The room I was in was a foggy, shifting blur.
“Mom…,” I heard myself groan.
And I heard her answer, “Ssh. It’s all right now.”
I turned eagerly to the voice, lifting my hand. I felt a cool hand take mine. I searched for my mother’s face. And there she was… But wait, no, it wasn’t my mother. It was another woman. Blond, weary. Did I know her? Yes… at least I’d seen her before… But I couldn’t quite remember who she was. Still, her voice was gentle and comforting.
“Just lie quietly.”
She put a washcloth on my forehead. It was cool and damp, and the feel of it against my burning skin was incredibly soothing.
“Guilty…,” I said.
“No, no, no,” she murmured. “It’s going to be all right.”
I shook my head at her. It would never be all right. “Guilty… guilty…,” I tried to explain.
From far away, I heard another voice: “Is the man dying, Mommy?”
“No, sweetheart,” she said. “He’s just sick and tired, that’s all.”
I held on to her hand. “I’m so sorry,” I said.
“I know. Just rest.”
I felt myself sinking again, falling down and down and down into the foggy world of the past…
“Look I’m just asking you to think logically here. I just want you to ask yourself some simple, logical questions about the things you’ve been taught to believe. That’s not evil, is it, Charlie? Asking questions is just what a teacher is supposed to do. Isn’t it?”
The voice was murmuring low-practically whispering- in my ear. There was nothing else. Just darkness. Just that voice. I knew the voice, but I couldn’t place it right away, couldn’t figure out whose voice it was.
“I mean, when you get a different set of facts, you have to reconsider the situation. Right? You might think the sky is always blue or the grass is always green, but if you wake up one morning and the grass is red, well, you have to reformulate your opinions around those observations. Different information requires a different worldview.”
Slowly, as if lights were coming up on a stage in a theater, the scene became visible around me. I was in a restaurant. It was in my hometown, but it was not a restaurant I knew. It was a sort of cocktail lounge in a mall. It was dark with black walls, low lights, small tables, far apart from each other. There was a bar where men sat slumped over their drinks while a basketball game played soundlessly on the TV on the wall.
This was not the kind of place I would normally go to. It was sleazy. People sitting around drinking in the middle of the afternoon. But that’s exactly why we were here. It was the kind of place where no one we knew would see us.
I turned to look at the man who was speaking to me. It was Mr. Sherman, my old history teacher. Again, the sight of him made me feel kind of ill, as if the room were going up and down on a stormy sea. He was close to me now, sitting right next to me in a booth seat at a small table. He was leaning toward me over our lunch plates. I could feel his breath as he spoke.
“Look, no one likes to abandon cherished beliefs,” he went on in that insinuating murmur. “I mean, we all find these old superstitions comforting and reassuring-I know that. No one likes to find out that something he was taught as a child by his parents or teachers might be wrong. But you have to be realistic. You have to consider the facts.”
I looked at him. I forced myself to nod, as if I were considering his words, as if he were making headway in convincing me. To be honest, I didn’t much like pretending in that way, but that was what I was supposed to do. That was the job Waterman had given me. I was supposed to make Sherman think he was changing my mind, convincing me to join the Homelanders.
But all the while, I could see right through him. I mean, I had taken history from him two years in a row. I knew exactly the way he argued. He would begin by making these broad generalizations that had an element of truth to them. He would say: You have to use your reason. Or: When the facts change, you have to change your opinion. Which, of course, are true statements as far as they go. But it’s easy to twist even the truth and use it for false purposes.