Limitations

20

When the Judge and Cassie arrive at chambers a little after nine, there are two problems. The first is that he has no computer. The second is that John, who is always at work by eight, has not appeared.

A technician from Information Services eventually comes up with what she swears is a clone of the judge’s machine. Predictably, it freezes the moment the young woman is gone. George is still cursing when Dineesha announces John’s arrival.

George doubts that Dineesha knows exactly what’s going on-he’s sworn Cassie to silence, a vow that even she could not forsake so quickly-but Dineesha is intuitive enough to sense the disruption in the tiny universe of their chambers, especially since the judge has asked about Banion several times. In an oddly formal gesture, she ushers John in, her round face grave.

Banion, characteristically, cannot quite bring his eyes to the judge’s. Instead he extends an envelope.

“What’s this?” George asks.

“I’ve decided to resign, Your Honor. At the end of the term.”

George hesitates to reach forward, realizing that he’s been harboring some fragmentary hope that his conclusions about John would prove as unmerited as his suspicions of Cassie, one more misperception to be added to a list that has lately been growing impressively. But the meaning of John’s desire to leave seems unambiguous: the search for #1 is over. Between them, silence lingers. It could be called meaningful, except that George has always experienced such moments with his clerk. In John’s company, the question of who is supposed to speak next frequently seems to be a mystery to rival the beginnings of time.

“That’s very disappointing, John. Sit down, please,” the judge says. Banion has more or less lagged the letter onto George’s desk and actually taken a step in the other direction. “What have you got lined up for yourself?”

At breakfast, George told Cassie that he wanted to handle things with John himself before involving Marina. But in the event, he’s not sure what he means to accomplish. He has never been positive that confession by itself is good for the soul. Certainly, without a quid pro quo, it’s seldom advantageous in the world of law-so many of George’s clients ended up worse off for unburdening themselves by admitting what they’d done as soon as they were arrested. Nor does he have the heart to badger the truth from Banion. Cassie put her finger on it. It’s a virtual certainty that John’s actions were the product of his isolation, his inability to grasp the significance of his deeds to anybody but himself. That, of course, is the emotional synopsis of every crime. Which is why every crime, at its core, is marked by an element of pathos.

“I don’t have anything, Judge. Not yet. There’s a job as a staff clerk on the Alaska Supreme Court that’s been advertised. I might try for that.”

“Alaska? Could you get any farther from here? Are you running away from somebody?”

Every trial lawyer tends to believe at moments that he is an actor worthy of Broadway, but George discovered in the courtroom that he has a limited range-quiet contempt for liars, an appealing dignity when beseeching juries to acquit. But he was never any good at broadcasting emotions he does not actually feel, and he has failed again now. He doesn’t manage a convincing smile with the last words. Instead they emerge with a steely undertone of accusation, and that is all John needs. The soft face of forty-two-year-old John Banion crumples in upon itself like a rotting apple; he grows flush and, just like George’s sons twenty-five years ago, begins to sob without control, initiating the same guilty, flustered moment when George is suddenly beyond his comfort zone in the world of adult justice.

“It’s not me,” John says then. “It’s not me.”

Against all reason, George finds his heart lighting up.

“Who then?” he asks. But John is crying too hard to hear him.

“It’s not me to do something like this, Judge. It really isn’t. It isn’t.”

John must repeat those words twenty times, continuing even after George has finally taken all this in and said more than once, “I know.

“I just don’t understand why, John.”

Banion gasps then. “That’s why,” he says and wails again.

“What’s ‘why’?”

“Because you didn’t understand.”

“What didn’t I understand?”

“You made me watch!” John cries, stiffening in his vehemence. “You made me watch that awful, disgusting tape. You couldn’t stand to see it, and so you made me watch it. Me! Ten times, twenty times, so I could describe all the most horrible things. It was disgusting!” Banion utters the last word with such fury he spits. Collapsed in the black wooden armchair in front of the judge’s desk, he is a spitting, shaking, weeping mess. His skin is the color of a sunrise, and his face is wet all the way down to his chin. But he is a new man in George’s eyes, not because he’s crying-you couldn’t deal with John without sensing sorrow. It’s the depths of his anger that are shocking.

“How could you do that to me?” John is more or less shouting. That too is a novelty. “You didn’t make her do it. But me? You didn’t even ask if I’d mind. And you told me to watch it again and again.” ‘Her’ is Cassie, of course. And Banion is right- right about a lot.

George drops his face into his hands for some time before finally turning to the window and peering down to the canopy of treetops in the parkway five floors below. No matter how equable and kind he aspires to be, how Christ-like in the way his father taught, he knows himself well enough to have predicted that his reaction to John was going to be anger. Worse, outrage. The sad man weeping in that chair betrayed the judge’s trust, including by revealing himself as an outrageous nut. And he also committed a serious crime, wreaking havoc in George’s life at a time when he was already on his heels.

But he feels very little of that. Instead, still his father’s son, he finds he is chastening himself. Because he failed mightily. He was too upset by his own secret crisis to consider anything besides escape. Knowing the profoundly disturbing quality of those images, he inflicted them on John without a second thought about the consequences. And the judge sees that his failures are not without their harsher ironies either. Pivoting under the weight of the bad old past, he nonetheless remained its captive; it was vestiges of old-fashioned chivalry that made him put aside any thought of asking Cassie to take on the task. And the truth, as John has clearly sensed, is that Cassie would have been far better equipped for the job. She might not have buffed her nails or microwaved a bag of popcorn while she watched, yet Cassie at some level is the worldliest person in these chambers when it comes to the subject of women and men. The tape would have infuriated her, fed her certainty about the proper outcome in the case. But she would have handled the tape far more calmly than John for one overriding reason: it would not have told her anything she had long tried to avoid knowing about the human universe-or herself.

“And you actually want to let those boys go,” John cries. “You’re willing to let them do all of that”-he is looking for a word, but it defies him- “all those terrible, terrible things, and you are actually thinking about letting them go when they have to be punished.”

“John,” Judge Mason says. He steps around his desk to comfort the man, but a protective pat on the shoulder is as far as he feels safe to go. “John, you should have said something.”

“That was worse!” John heaves a gale and bawls harder. “Judge,” he says, “Judge, I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

What sense do human beings ever make? George thinks. All of us. Each of us. The iron-headed logic of the law, which George has blithely mouthed, is that John should have spoken up. But to fully contemplate John’s situation for a moment is to recognize how impossible that was. Could insular John Banion, so shocked and overwrought by what those images stimulated in him-could that man have admitted as much to anybody else? No wonder he felt certain that the judge would have been disappointed in him.

And there was one further rub: saying something would have required Banion to stop watching the video.

“John, I’m very sorry,” the judge says and is struck at once by how much he means it. This is clearly the worst part: in his blindness, George has laid waste to a perfectly useful human being. Left to himself, John might have avoided forever what the judge forced him to confront. “Truly, John, I am sorry.”

He realizes that there is probably not a word he can say that will be right, but his apology makes Banion howl again.

“Don’t be noble!” he shouts. “You always want to be the best person. I’m the one who’s sorry.” The cycle plays out again here as it undoubtedly has in private for weeks: rage, then shame. Banion enters another prolonged period of weeping, then with his livid face and running eyes, suddenly looks straight at George for the first time.

“Forgive me,” he says. “Please, forgive me. Can you forgive me, Judge?”

Forgiveness, George thinks. Confession alone might not be good for the soul. But forgiveness always is. What a slender, simple thing it is that has chased around these chambers for weeks like a yearning spirit.

“I forgive you, John,” he says. “I do, I truly do.” He pats John’s shoulder one more time. Banion, in the chair, is now spinning his thin brown hair.

“I’m just no good at this,” he tells the judge.

“At what?”

Banion weeps and weeps before he says, “At being a human being.”