When they were gone, Matthew sat frightened at the foot of the stairs. His innards steeled themselves, hardened with fear. The Judge lit a cigarette and held the smoke a long time before expelling it into the air. “What did they ask you?” he said, turning to face Matthew.
Matthew told his father everything he remembered, and as he did so he watched the Judge’s face to make sure he did not slip up.
“Is that all?” the Judge said, a long gray ash hanging at the end of his cigarette.
“They asked if you knowingly approved a juror who would not be able to render a fair decision.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I said, ‘I don’t know.’”
The ash fell to the floor.
“‘I don’t know’?” the Judge said, his voice rising. “When the district attorney’s office asked you if your father knowingly approved a juror who was dishonest and corrupt, your only answer was ‘I don’t know’? What is the matter with you, Matthew? Don’t you have a brain in your head?”
“Dad, you don’t understand.”
“Matthew,” the Judge said, cutting him short. “I don’t think you understand how serious this is. You’re graduating from high school soon—you’re going to be a man. You have to know these things.”
After a moment, Matthew said, “I made a bad choice.”
“Blood is not a choice, Matthew, yet somehow, somehow you managed to circumvent thousands of years of genetics, biology, and history in one fell swoop.” Turning away and speaking as if to a private audience, he said, “He’s a modern miracle, a revolutionary wunderkind. He’s stormed the Bastille and brought down the ancien régime.”
“I made a mistake,” Matthew pleaded.
“Matthew, have you ever read a play called Othello by a man named William Shakespeare who had the answer to everything? I suggest you read it. Particularly act 2, scene 3, lines 281 to 284.”
“I made a mistake,” Matthew sobbed.
“No mistakes,” the Judge said, walking toward the open door of his study. “There can be no mistakes.”
MORNING ARRIVED LIKE a hammer to Stone’s head, and he was wide awake, animated with pain through every quarter of his body, little more than a flaming nerve, as if he had no skin at all. He had slept the entire night sprawled across the front seats of the Thunderbird. His clothing was sodden with sour sweat. The new day promised worse than the day before. His logical mind said he had not seen his father, he had been overtired and his imagination had played tricks with him, his unconscious desires and fears manifesting themselves as vivid hallucinations.
It was then he realized where he was. He had, as if guided by an invisible hand, returned home to his father’s apartment, parking in the street right out front. The Judge’s bedroom window was lit up, and Stone was seized by terror, his throat clenching in a stifled scream, until he remembered Pinky had refused to turn off the light when they had left, saying it didn’t fucking matter since nobody was paying for it anymore.
The Judge had worked so diligently to drill into Stone the ideals his hero Jabotinsky had preached: the concept of hadar—beauty, respect, self-esteem, politeness, faithfulness. Stone displayed none of these qualities. He had willfully made himself ugly in the eyes of the Judge. He had spent his life ignoring the wisdom of his father, chasing after disastrous sexual entanglements, clutching the sinking lifeboat of hopeless relationships and cheap marijuana highs. He believed in nothing. He was nothing. Slumped in the front seat of his father’s Thunderbird like a homeless thing, he realized he was in danger of becoming less than nothing, an absolute unexalted negative clinging to this world simply through the vagaries of biology and a deep-seated stubbornness. But there he was in front of his father’s apartment, and he knew he had arrived there for a reason. Stone had been so distressed about the state of the trashed apartment that all he had wanted was to gather up his father’s precious books and keepsakes and leave as quickly as possible. But this was not a random breaking-and-entering. Simple vandalism was not the goal. Nor did the man in the Mets cap have anything to do with this. He had money. He was no second-story man. The fact was, he had wanted the books and yet the books remained. The answer was so clear now—the break-in was about his father’s meds. The Trinidadian hospice nurse, Mavis, who had been coming twice a day for months to check the Judge’s vitals and to ensure his morphine drip dosage was correct, had begun pressuring the Judge to move to a palliative care clinic to receive round-the-clock attention. “Judge Stone, your quality of life will be greatly improved with a team of specialists working to make you comfortable. It will be the best for you.”
If Stone knew one thing, he knew the Judge wanted to live on his own terms, surrounded by his books; he would never submit to any form of institutional care. The Judge, furious his reading had been interrupted by her repeated requests, beckoned Mavis over to his bedside and said, “I won’t have some community-college-educated mammy tell me what is best for me.”
“But Judge Stone, you are not well,” she said.
“And you are not welcome.”
She left immediately, never to return. But in her haste, she had left behind the lockbox in which the Judge’s medications were stored, his IV dilutions, his pills—benzodiazepines, fentanyl, morphine.
Stone still had the apartment key in his pocket and he opened the front door, afraid not of what he would find but of what he wouldn’t find. Mavis had hugged Stone good-bye and wished him the best, but he was certain now that her friends from East Flatbush, eager to even the score and make a nice profit, were the ones who had broken into the apartment. The place smelled of stale sickness and sounded hollowed out, echoey without the walls of books to absorb the noise. All the mirrors had been smashed, and Stone picked up a fragment, saw the state of his face, wrecked by grief and exhaustion, and dropped the shard to the ground. He was afraid to go into his father’s bedroom, and had asked Pinky to gather anything worth saving so he wouldn’t have to enter the place where his father had breathed his last breath, but now he had no choice if he wanted to find the lockbox of medication.
A deep sense of unease penetrated him, and he froze at the doorway as if some psychic force were preventing him from entering his father’s room. But the pain throbbing behind his eyes, his nerves electrified with hurt, was so oppressive he forced himself to enter—one foot first, then the other—and he was in. The ceiling light glared against the bright morning sun sifting in through the windows, and he flicked the light switch off.
Stone recalled the times he had seen his father drift away as the morphine entered his system. For the longest time, the ever-stubborn Judge had been loath to take anything that would affect his mind, keep him from his reading, but during the last weeks he could no longer sleep without the morphine drip. He had seen his father’s face soften, his eyes rolled back in his head, and Stone had seen something like joy. Now he wanted to go to that place, to float away on a river of light where pain was nothing but a rumor.
The lockbox had been smashed open and tipped on its side, but Stone was surprised to find none of the medication was missing. The intravenous bags of morphine sulfate had all been cut open, their contents puddled on the floor, but the prescription bottle was not damaged at all and it was still half full with orange 60 mg tablets. The pills called to him with an irresistible force. He saw his father’s name on the Duane Reade bottle and a sticker that read: “Side effects may include . . .” Fuck it, Stone thought.
He dropped a pill into his hand and, heart stammering in his chest, crushed the pill beneath his heel. Stone dropped to his knees, pinched a nostril, and snorted the powder off his father’s parquet floor.
Oh, the torment is over, Stone thought, a glowing warmth radiating through his whole being—massage on an atomic level. The pain dripped off him like the wax of a