The Blue Hour

Eighteen

Colesceau sat in his darkened living room at 12 Meadowlark and listened to the chanting of the crowd on the street outside. The blinds were closed and the lights were off. He stared openly at the images on the TV screen but his attention was outside with die mob. His heart felt heavy enough to stop beating. Five days before the nightmare would end, and this is what they do to you. He felt a rage so overwhelming his arms trembled with the power and urgency of it. He felt the weight of ice picks in his hands.

When the chanting stopped he went over and worked the blinds open just a crack so he could see out. But as soon as they saw the plastic louvers move they started yelling again. It had gone like this for two straight hours now, and six hours yesterday after work. It amazed him how a news story in yesterday’s morning paper hatched a crowd so instantly. One day he had privacy; the next he had these... concerned citizens howling for his blood. And photographers bushwacking him as he got out of his little red truck.

But he looked through the thin crack anyway, at the outraged and outrageously beautiful face of Trudy Powers contorted into a mask of purest hatred. She raised and lowered a sign in rhythm to the chant:

Her sign said RAPISTS MAKE BAD NEIGHBORS and Trudy waved it up and down like a fan at a soccer game.

Jesus, thought Colesceau, I don’t exactly love children but I’ve never even considered hurting one. He wondered what the police had told these people. Did they know his convictions were only for attempted rape of very old, pathetically ugly and helpless women, not the glowingly healthy children of people like Trudy Powers? Did they know he was pumped full of female hormone and quite harmless? He was astonished. He touched his crotch — a bag of dumplings.

The reporters were still there, too. They were different ones but you could tell what they were — cameras and microphones and grim, hungry faces. There were two big news vans parked on the other side of the street. One of them was from the channel he was watching!

He twisted the blinds shut all the way again and went into the kitchen. He made a big Bloody Mary with the mix from the fridge and the vodka from the freezer and about a tablespoon of hot sauce.

His phone rang again. Holtz had called once yesterday and once today. Kaufman, the ACLU lawyer, had called twice today and promised to call again. Sure enough:

Colesceau felt a rush of anger surge through him and he picked up the phone.

“This is Matamoros.”

“Good, great. I’m glad you picked up. Now, how are you holding up?”

“It is difficult. I feel like an animal.”

“They’re treating you worse than an animal. I hear something in the background. Are those your neighbors?”

“They chant like monks, hours at a time. I feel like it may cause me to lose my mind.”

“Can I come over? Like right now? I think we can get a court order to desist against them, or at least move them back to the nearest public place. You live in an apartment complex, correct?”

“The Quail Creek Apartment Homes in Irvine.”

“Well, that’s private property. Do you have a back door into your unit?”

“None.”

“All right. Look, there are a lot of people out there who are on your side. And we can convince a lot of others, if you’re willing to stand your ground and speak your piece. We’ll talk about our options. Would you mind making a statement on-camera? It could go a long way to getting some public sympathy coming our direction.”

“I have nothing to hide. But I don’t like cameras.”

“No cameras, then. Until we meet, don’t say anything to anybody. Don’t open the door. Don’t say anything to those people. I’ll be coming down from L.A. so let’s say exactly one hour from now. I can get you out of there, we can go get some coffee or dinner if you want. Or I’ll bring some takeout.”

“That would be welcome. I need to go out.”

“Do you have a copy of the medical protocol you signed when they released you from the hospital?”

“I have it.”

“Perfect. Give me your address.”

Kaufman brought an overcoat that Colesceau pulled on over his own before they walked through the front door and into the jeers of the crowd. Even with his face buried down in the big coat he could see the bright jolts of light from die photographers’ flash attachments, and he could feel the white brightness of the lights set up for the video shooters. And the chant tripled in volume as he moved toward the driveway and Kaufman’s car.

... get out of Irvine... miserable creep... pack your bags... the fuck out... rapist, raper, human swine... don’t come back... keep on going... filthy animal... don’t sleep or we’ll bum your place down with you in it...

“Middle America snarls,” whispered Kaufman as he swung open his car door and guided Colesceau in. “You’re just this week’s entertainment.”

A moment later Colesceau’s head pitched forward as Kaufman backed out of the driveway and swung wide, then shifted into drive and gunned it down the street.

Kaufman suggested a family-style restaurant on a busy boulevard up in Costa Mesa. He spoke to the waitresses by name and seemed expected. Colesceau was shocked to be introduced and not see them recoil in disgust. Pratt and his sneaky sidekick Garry had told all their customers about him before he even started work there, apparently, and rarely did he meet someone who failed to register morbid interest. You could see it in their eyes.

The booth was back in the corner by the rest room hallway. It was large and private and upholstered in vinyl. Plastic ferns hung above it from thin chains. There was a bus tray piled high with dirty dishes across the aisle from the table in front of them, but other than that the table was fine.

He studied the lawyer for the first time: a pretty man of perhaps thirty, physically fit, sandy brown hair and very blue eyes. Pretty in the sense that he was so vibrantly groomed: teeth and gums sparkling, fingernails coated with clear polish, casually perfect hair. Colesceau, no stranger to fine menswear — at least as a window shopper — priced out Kaufman’s tie at $80. It made absolute sense to him to be represented by a lawyer who was successful.

First Kaufman told him what the ACLU was, how it stood for protecting individual constitutional rights, often from those very agencies that were supposed to guarantee them — government, law enforcement, the courts of law, and so on. There was no charge for their representation. All ACLU attorneys were paid an annual salary, modest at best. They had been behind some of the biggest decisions ever made in this country, and had successfully defended men and women from small civil courtrooms to the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. Kaufman personally saw his organization as the best and final weapon a citizen could use against the powers of the state. A weapon against fascism, racism, the abridgment of personal liberties. A sort of David to the state’s Goliath.

Kaufman spit all this out in a hurry, and Colesceau had the impression he’d said it a million times before. The waitress took their orders.

“Are you willing to speak to me frankly?” Kaufman asked when she was gone.

“I have nothing to hide.”

The lawyer studied him with his cool blue eyes. “Did you bring the protocol for the hormone treatment?”

Colesceau withdrew the document from his coat pocket and handed it to Kaufman.

Kaufman unfolded it and smoothed it out against the tabletop. “Have you had all the injections, every week?”

“Every week.”

“What’s it feel like? To have that hormone in you.”

Colesceau looked hard at the lawyer, then out toward the bus tray of dirty dishes still sitting in the aisle, then to the stout redhaired waitress busying herself under the flickering fluorescent light behind the counter. She glanced at him with exaggerated indifference.

“Don’t answer that if you’re uncomfortable. I just remember reading the Assembly floor analysis of AB 3339 — the chemical castration bill — and thinking what a goddamned barbaric thing it was.”

Colesceau almost liked this man. “It feels terrible. It turns you into a woman very slowly. But not all the way. I have gained weight and my genitals got small. My breasts have grown unnaturally. The hair on my face turned to fuzz. I’m irritable and emotional in a way I never was before. I feel like my soul has been asked to change. I feel like I am being forced to become a person different than the one I was born.”

Kaufman had produced a narrow notebook and was writing in it now. “What’s it done to your sex drive? Do you get erections?”

“Almost never.”

Colesceau looked at the lawyer. This lawyer is really no different than anybody else, he thought: he’s nosy, impudent, disrespectful and gleefully fascinated by the plight of my testicles. Colesceau imagined his own right arm in a short, chopping motion, totally unexpected, delivering an ice pick straight through the expensive cotton shirt and through the attorney’s stunned heart.

What’s it feel like? To have that pick in you?

“Can you describe to me what it feels like to be chemically castrated, then to see attractive women, or to be around them?”

At this point the soft drinks arrived and Colesceau went into that strange state in which he both observed and participated. He watched himself sitting there, as if he were looking in from the other side of the window. He saw the top of Kaufman’s head, as if he were a bird perched in the fake fern above them. He heard himself chattering away now, laying it on thick for Kaufman, being as humble and misunderstood and innocently wronged as possible.

“... and you can understand the great disappointment of my mother. Without her love and attention, without her support, I truly think I might die.”

He was careful to use the word support because Americans loved to use it so much, as if friends and family were actual structural elements that held them in place, as if they were so physically fat and mentally weak they’d collapse without support.

“We’ve been very close since the murder of my father by fascist state police in 1979.”

“You were actually forced to watch as trained attack dogs mauled your father to death, Moros?”

“No. He was shot by fascist police. The dogs attacked me when I ran to him after.”

I actually enjoyed every second of it, Seth. The man was a drunken pig except when he was asleep. I was the one who made it possible. I listened to his conversations. I made reports by a secret phone in the cooperative leader’s barn. I spoke creatively, as a child would. I added more subversive material when I needed impact. I stole his letters and put them back before he knew they were gone. I put die guns in our barn. When they finally murdered him it meant more coffee for me in the morning and nothing more. Stupid to rush to his side as if I cared. That was to throw my mother off my trail. She knew he had no guns. But what are a few hundred stitches compared to living years on end with that cruel, stupid hog?

“Do you relive that moment still? Do you ever see what they did to him, or what the dogs did to you?”

“Yes. Every morning in the mirror I see what the dogs did to me. What the police did to my father is a thing I can’t remember without tears. For a boy, some horrors never die. The scars on my body are nothing compared to the scars on my heart.”

“Amazing.”

The lawyer was staring at him now like one of Pratt’s or Lydia’s friends, friends who were trying to act like they knew nothing about him. He had seen the same expression on hundreds of TV audience members during the daytime talk shows he sometimes viewed when work was slow at the auto parts store. Of course Lydia was constantly tuned in. It was a look that made him think of hungry cows. Purposeful. Intent. But lacking any means to satisfy themselves except for the passive ingestion of whatever the host or guest would say next. Such insatiable appetites for accounts of calamity, misfortune, ruination, perversion, violence, death.

For them it was just entertainment.

“Is it true, as it states in the protocol here, that your breasts have swollen?”

“I already told you that they did.”

Kaufman pursed his lips and shook his head. He made a note in his book and sighed.

“Well, here comes dinner. After we eat, would you mind talking about your rape convictions? I’ll need to know about them. I’m interested particularly in your state of mind during the acts. Anger, sexual drive, your thoughts and feelings. What was going through your head. Why you chose older women. It might help us toward an overrule at some point. I’m thinking of the Circuit Courts of Appeal.”

Colesceau looked at the lawyer. Then he explained briefly that he needed to be loved and in his confusion he thought he could force his victims to love him. He said, in a confession that surprised him, that his penis felt like an extension of his heart, which was actually quite true.

Seth looked slack-jawed at this.

“But those events are past. My punishment was supposed to end Wednesday, so long as I obeyed the rules. I obeyed every rule. I allowed myself to be poisoned and polluted with unnatural substances. Every week, into my veins, with needles. Now I have crowds outside my door. I have been evicted. I will probably lose my job. A drastic injustice has been done.”

“That’s why I’m here. But my ammunition has to come from you.”

“So, I will talk about these things if you need to know. Even though they shame me.”

“It’s going to help us, Moros. Everything you can tell me is going to help us.”