The next one came in an envelope on the letterhead of the American Association of Handicapped Americans, featuring a logo of Sisyphus in a loincloth pushing a rock up a hill, or maybe it was Atlas trying to climb a mountain while carrying the world on his shoulders.
Dear Mr. Watson:
I have spent twenty years of my life as an advocate for citizens with special needs. I have seen the indomitable spirit of the disabled and I have seen the hatred and disregard of the rest of our society for those with special or different abilities. James Whitlow hates anybody and anything different than a phenotype of a white, low-intellect, extremist mentality, which is to say he hates everybody but himself and a few other tattooed, militia-minded thugs who shoot pool in bars and like to beat up people with different abilities or lifestyles.
My deaf clients consider Mr. Whitlow’s intentional use of violence against a deaf person and his public disdain for American Sign Language to be an affront to their culture and their self-esteem, and a threat to their very existence. This morning we will be mailing 5,000 letters to Senator Bond and Congressman Gephardt asking them to be certain this administration and the federal prosecutors in this case settle for nothing short of the death penalty.
Yours very truly,
Amanda Wright
Vice President
American Association of Handicapped Americans
In the shower, he thought about Pontius Pilate and Lady Macbeth, even though it wasn’t his hands he was washing. Afterward he peed, drank three glasses of water, scrubbed his face again, clipped his fingernails, brushed, flossed, finished brushing, swabbed cerumen out of his ears with Q-tips, peed again, and trimmed his nasal hairs. The flurry of purification rituals did nothing to assuage his contamination anxieties. Irrational, neurotic fears to be sure. Diseases from a hand job? Yes! What about the monkeys and rats she was always handling? He should have stopped her and insisted on a latex glove. “
I don’t want you to do this, but if you do it, please use a latex glove.
”
At bedside, he turned around three times looking for his reading light, his glasses, his book, then got under the covers. He had a sudden urge to retrieve his subnotebook and defrag its hard drive. Run a new antivirus utility he’d downloaded at work. Update the video driver
with a beta version that had just come out. But he’d left his machine in the car. Nothing but trouble if he went and fetched it. She’d probably find a gun.
Instead, he stared up at the dark ceiling and tried to think of himself as a complex animal, a distant relative of Cham, an organism fitted out with a brain that was evolution’s crowning glory, a biochemical marvel refined by centuries of neural Darwinism and programmed to do whatever was necessary to protect and transmit his genes into the next generation. That’s it, he thought, I’m a male biological force. Females can produce, at most, one child per year; it behooves them to be highly selective when mating. But males have every evolutionary incentive to mate with the highest number of desirable females and create as many offspring as possible.
In other words, adultery made perfect sense, biologically, and he was only fulfilling his genetic destiny by chasing a beautiful brain scientist.
Honey, don’t blame me! Get Darwin on the line and tear
him
a new asshole.
But wait, he thought, calming himself. True to form, he was overreacting. A semivoluntary hand job, adultery? A
prelude
to adultery, perhaps. Certainly not sexual intercourse. Petting, the nuns would have called it. A teenage infraction, worse than staying out past curfew to be sure, but not adultery. Not a mortal sin.
His father’s words rang in his ears:
“Are you ready to be faithful to one woman?”
He recalled a vivid, recurring dream, in which he was making love to … well, not Sandra. An old girlfriend, a secretary, a stranger. And on waking, the dream changed into a nightmare, because for a half-minute space of time, his heart squirming in his chest, he knew and could recall being unfaithful to his wife many, many times, separate episodes, graphic details. But because he had such morbid, Catholic fears of committing adultery, he had blocked the memories of these indiscretions from his conscious mind. Only the recurring nightmares provided glimpses into his true bestial nature. In these very brief, waking moments, he saw his real self and felt … How did the renegade Catholic Jimmy Joyce put it? “I had sunk to the state of a beast that licks his chaps after meat.” (This from a guy who thought he was throwing off mind-forged manacles?)
Formerly, Watson could always wake up from these persistent nightmares and breathe deeply of the consolations of the real world.
It was only a dream!
He was still a good and faithful husband. Could he still say
that? Maybe not. Now he had to settle for some specious ratiocinations about how adultery made perfect evolutionary sense.
Next to him in their queen-size bed there would soon be another complex animal with advanced language capabilities. He jumped when she sat on the edge of the bed. She had a different satin teddy on, this one a rose-petal pink. She set the alarm on her clock radio by stabbing the button repeatedly.
“It’s your turn if they wake up,” she said curtly. “There’s a bottle in the refrigerator. Don’t forget to change him or the bed will be wet.”
Still angry about him being late? But why the teddy? Not the usual cotton T-shirt? Did she just grab it? Or was she in the mood? Again? That would not be good, because what if he couldn’t so soon? Or what if the turmoil of guilt jangling his nerves kept him from—? What if he said no? She would suspect something. Home very late, and then turning down sex? Her husband, Joe Watson? She wouldn’t suspect, she would
know.
“Arthur called,” she said irritably, slipping under the covers. “Did I tell you that?”
“No,” he said, suddenly unable to breathe. “What did he want?”
“He was looking for you,” she said. “Where were you?”
“When?” asked Watson. “I was at the brain place. Then, I was back at the firm. I was probably still there; he just couldn’t find me. That’s happened before.”
“He said you weren’t there. He tried you on the communicator. And he paged you.”
“Then I was at the hospital. I had to leave the communicator in the doctor’s office because of radiation and magnetic fields.”
She sighed long and hard.
“I’m not making dinner anymore, unless you call and tell me before four o’clock that you will be home before eight-thirty.”
“Fine,” he said. “Once this appointed case is over, I’ll be getting home by seven every night.”
She was definitely ticked and not in the mood, which made him feel better. But Arthur? Calling him at home? To bitch about not reporting Harper’s call? And the teddy was still making him nervous. What if she got in the mood? He would be on the spot. Only one thing to do. Risky to be sure. Pretend he was in the mood, while she was still peeved, betting that she would rebuff him the way she usually did when she was pissed because he had come home late.
He snaked one hand out and rested it on her thigh.
“I don’t feel like it,” she said.
Whew.
She rolled over and stabbed buttons again on the clock radio.
“Arthur is killing me,” said Watson. “It’s worse than golden handcuffs, it’s more like being bound and gagged. He’s a black widow. They have liquefied my insides, they are siphoning my guts.”
Another of her sighs filled the air with poison vapors. “Maybe you could pass on a few of those PizzaFax golf outings and get some work done?”
“Can’t,” he said bitterly. “They’re required.”
He suddenly felt like Raskolnikov after the ax murders. Watson had let a brain scientist convince him that the
conscience
was a vestigial, evolutionary device that had served its purpose in the village setting and was no longer useful in the modern world. As usual, Shakespeare had come true, and conscience had become an obstacle, a thing beggaring any man who keeps it. Living well meant trusting yourself and living without it.
He had invested years of daily human industry in building a family, only to merrily risk it all for an episode of
Erotic Science Quest.
Big fun. Now what?
“So what are we doing about this appointed case?” she asked. “Are you getting rid of it?”
“Can’t do that yet,” he said. “The government is going for the death penalty.”
“Because he’s guilty, right?” she asked. “That’s why they want the death penalty. It’s not like he’s innocent.”
“He probably killed the guy, OK?” said Watson. “But I don’t think he did it on purpose. I don’t think it was malicious—”
She cut him off with a smirk and rolled over to face the other direction. “He called a black man a nigger and shot him in the chest, but it wasn’t malicious? Is this one of those legal theories you develop after spending weeks reading cases you downloaded from the computer? I didn’t work for two years at the accounting firm, putting you through law school, so you could defend a destitute racist. I think you better hurry up and do what Arthur told you to do.”
“Arthur ain’t his lawyer,” said Watson.
“
Ain’t?
So you’ll be trying to get a hate killer off, I guess, is what I’m supposed to tell people.”
“He ain’t getting off,” said Watson, thinking:
If only!
He’d be the hottest new legal talent in town if he could manage anything less than life, much less
off.
He closed his eyes and replayed his client’s phone message in his mind’s ear.
“Or maybe some extra money for yourself”?
The guy had cheek a mile wide. And that question again:
“What would you do?”
One more time, and Watson promised himself he was going to answer that question. He mentally rehearsed his answer.
What would I do? I would say to myself: I am experiencing an acute, domestic relations crisis.… I have an almost uncontrollable impulse to kill my wife and her spare significant other, a disabled African-American. I am contemplating the ultimate breach of the laws of Church and State, the taking of human life—serious criminal conduct with profound, lifelong legal consequences. Didn’t I go to Ignatius High with a fellow who’s now at Stern, Pale & Covin, the best law firm in town? Sure, Joe Watson. I’ll put the safety back on my weapon and give old Joe a call.
Once I reached Joe, we would have caught up on old times, and Joe would have immediately referred me to the firm’s domestic relations specialist, Drath Bludsole, Esq. Drath’s advice would be to rethink the murder option. Murder, he would probably explain, can be an important estate-planning device, or a tool for resolving domestic relations disputes short of trial in divorce court. However, because of certain niggling statutory and common-law prohibitions, murder almost always requires careful planning and expenses related to the hiring of third-party experts. Was this something I had thought out in advance after consulting with my attorney and deliberating with the aforesaid specialists and consultants? No? Drath’s opinion would be that impetuous decisions to use murder as an alternative dispute resolution device almost always expose the client to unnecessary legal sanctions ranging from loss of a driver’s license to fines or even imprisonment.
“Let’s think about this,” Drath would say. “What is it we’re after? I don’t know you all that well, but I sense at least a passing desire for revenge, which you’ll savor for all of two or three minutes if you select murder as your modus operandi. And for that, you risk prison? Skip the prison sentence,” Drath would have sagely advised. “Let’s make them suffer horribly for years, while you and I stay completely within the letter of the law.”
After he made sure the gun was put away, it would be routine. Drath would probably take another call and turn me over to the firm’s family law paralegals, who would have told me in simple numbered sequences exactly what to do.
1. Do nothing to betray your knowledge of the affair.
2. Hire a private investigator with a telephoto and get some pics of her and the African-American significant other desecrating your conjugal bliss. If pics are unobtainable, hire somebody to rear-end them in front of his house and get a copy of the police report with both of their names on it.
3. After you get the pics or the police report, clean out all joint accounts and take the proceeds in cash. Cancel all joint credit card accounts and tell them to send her the bills.
4. Decide which car you want, then strip the other one of all cellular phones and valuable electronic devices. Carry anything out of the house that is portable and worth more than $500, except her jewelry and family heirlooms.
5. Take the kid and move to Texas, which has a homestead exemption and some very traditional laws about things like alimony and marital infidelity. Move the cash offshore and stir it through a few numbered accounts, put what’s left in the new house, which no creditor, including your soon-to-be former wife, can touch.
6. File for divorce and sue for custody of the kid.
7. Get a court order for a medical and psychological examination of the kid. After the forensic psychologists and the recovered memory experts help the kid through posttraumatic stress disorder, he may be able to remember that the African-American once acted like he wanted to sexually abuse him, or that he may have offered drugs or said suggestive things, in sign language, I guess. Or claim the guy brainwashed the wife and kid with deaf-culture delusional systems. It’s a stretch, but if it’s handled properly, somebody in the district attorney’s office might charge her or the African-American with child abuse.
8. Get custody of the kid.
9. Get the wife’s attorney to agree to waive maintenance and alimony in favor of a huge property settlement including assets A, B, and C. If they sign onto that, file an immediate Chapter Seven bankruptcy, which discharges almost all debts, including the property settlement, but which would not discharge maintenance and child support payments, of which there are now none.