t was on Monday that Mr. Pennitt could be seen ambling through the crowds that lined the streets on such a fine summer’s day. Between the mob hawking and buying wares, trinkets, tape-cassettes, video-cassettes, yet a million other trifles; around music stands bleating all sorts of electronic euphony; around smoke ridden dread-locks; bandy salesmen with peering eyes; he strode with an air of urgency buoyed by an authority imbued from his rather formal attire. His deportment implied an ungainly height; thin legs, thin body, and pinched features across a thin face, all the way up his pin-stripes, through all those buttons, over the starched white collar, even into the red cheeks and bloodshot nose. And yet he was almost invisible, so shadowy between such color, too regular precise movements among so restless a crowd, that like a zebra amid the heard he blended away in some strange phenomenon of deconstructive-interference.

Despite his sumptuous attire and somewhat determined mien he passed by the most unsightly of urban citizens without a blink, a shudder, or sparing change. He was on the way to court and couldn’t be late. He didn’t have time to take account of his surroundings, and so his surroundings seemed to take no account of him. If you were to ask among the people strewn between the streets on that fine Monday about him, not one would recall Mr. Pennitt, his decisive walk and protracted expression. He simply didn’t exist.

He had made a living by being similarly unnoticed. A clerk is a recorder, a pen and ink. Mr. Pennitt certainly had the capacity for original thought, could reason and imagine—even fantasize—and yet his was a profession of dumb alacrity, piecing together the paperwork and stamping the correct boxes, surrounded by the formal proceedings his was the fortune to be among. And he attended his duty in almost a thoughtless state, empty aside from those simple habits reinforced through countless repetition. No one ever looked at him. He was a human computer, an automaton that could be held accountable and didn’t need programming.

His seat was to the left of the Judge, on a lower tier conveniently shadowed by the splendid wooden rafters that adorned the interior of this county seat. He lay like a spider in this shadowy web, typing up the sentences and filing the documents correctly so the paper trail would remain intact and anyone could find out anything about whomever had been before him.

Although he didn’t pass sentence, didn’t even open his mouth and oftentimes failed even to make eye-contact with the accused, he took his roll in this judicial theater with the utmost self-importance. Each paper was printed, stamped, and handed the sentenced—most of whom left without a clear picture of the man who had handed over the inks that would further condemn their identities to the listings in the growing database of criminal dispositions.

He had never made a mistake in over eighteen years at his post and, although forgotten, held a strong reputation on paper and among the personnel at the courthouse. And yet always the condemned, paroled, or convicted would remember the face of the judge, even his name: But never Pennitt, the inauspicious clerk.

Things seemed settled for the clerk, his life a straight narrow tract between the spidery mess of Justice. Yet with time, perhaps from boredom, a strange perversion arose in Mr. Pennitt to corrupt his decorous pedantry. The clerk, so trusted by all three judges sitting in this fine county seat, realized that a slight change here or there in wording, an X in a box only one below the intended target, or similar slight disruptions to the deployment of law, could pass unnoticed from his pen, beneath that of the presiding judge, and out the door with the sentenced. It happened by accident the first time, he was tired, bored, and assumed he knew what the judge had written. He couldn’t decipher the script (or couldn’t be bothered to) and wrote what he believed the verdict was. He was erroneous, the convict was wrongly assigned an inner-city jail. He was raped and badly beaten. An appeal was filed by a distraught lover. When at last it was decided a mistake had been made, that Chapman George had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice (and a peace officer at the processing department was fired), Mr. Pennitt (relieved) smiled an ironic smile and oddly didn’t feel wrong. In fact color flooded his cheeks for the first time in years, and the clammy suit of his flesh burned with desire.

And so it was that Mr. Pennitt began making justice fit the accord of his whim. Silently he swelled in importance. He grew inside himself, pressed against the thin walls of his flesh, splayed bones, and felt each extremity fill with super-heated blood. His dark outpost became filled with the light of the Lord—the Judge slowly became Charon, he Rhadamanthus. He collected souls at the doorway to the underworld; silently he would watch each case number, listen to the judge, assign the paperwork correctly leaving a tiny smudge at his volition, effecting the case negatively in some instances or positively in others. Witnesses didn’t matter. Evidence, or lack of evidence didn’t matter. What mattered was how Mr. Pennit felt about the accused, about the facts, and display of emotions. Not being the target of sympathy Mr. Pennitt saw inside the accused—he knew them—could see through the sides of their eyes. Tiny gestures, minute expressions made in respite once the judge’s gaze was elsewhere, allowed Mr. Pennitt to gather up his impressions and size-up the truth.

Of course he couldn’t outright disagree with a judge, or change the sentence completely around. But he could add a few years here, change a charge there, advise for certain parole officers known to be the more troublesome among released convicts. Or he could palliate the sentence, change the jail code a few digits, spare them the penitentiary, the sodomy, lessen their probation, or, in the case of Ethel May, reduce the sentence to five years from ten. Yes, that was his masterpiece, his gold-medal in changing the course of justice. But he would never be so blatant again—Judge Wies had passed away, and it was his confidence in the efficacy of Mr. Pennitt, as well as his failing eyesight, which had allowed the clerk impunity in that case.

He arrived early at the gothic courthouse in this town fair enough to be made county seat. He took up his post, booting up the computer and placing his hat delicately above his coat on the wrack at the official’s end of the room. It wasn’t even 2pm, the judge would not be out of his chambers for another fifteen minutes, yet already there was an audience building. He could see the summoned, dressed to diffuse any prejudice and ready to set their social standing right. He could see the relatives, tired and bored with having to be there; the reporters licking their pencils, smoothing their neck-ties and creasing their trousers; and the lawyers, glasses burning beneath the afternoon light, bursting stomachs from penned up waistcoats, fluffing briefcases, and whispering last minute adjurations.

They rose when the judge walked in—all of them except Mr. Pennitt. A shadow never lies, he thought, and no one notices his shadow until he stands before Rhadamanthus. He watched the Bailiff announce the Judge, saw him polish the oaring of the tiny boat that would bear another soul to Hades. He licked his lips as the court settled and the rustle of clothing ceased, merging the past into an ominous pause where reality seemed folded and time washed away.

The Judge made his announcement, the one customary to all hearings. This day of this month. This year. Etc. He looked at the docket and read the names gauging who was present and who wasn’t. He mentally ordered the cases, but Mr. Pennitt already knew which was to be first. He knew because he had already decided. Judge Hornet preferred to deal with the more timely cases first, and had a slight predisposition to alphabetize his order. Sure enough the state vs. Beaumont was first. A trifle, nothing interesting, shop-lifting charge, family of four. Pennitt had already typed up the papers before the judge had finished adjuring the sentenced. He had plead guilty, reparations to the retail chain and one year unsupervised probation. A shadowy yawn from the clerk.

Mr. Pennitt piqued up when the next case was announced and the defendant rose to follow his lawyer to the stand. Cocaine, possession. Four grams—enough, but he had no intention to distribute, your honor, all in a single baggy bought in bulk economically. A dabbler, your honor, no threat, no dealer, and certainly not a habitual user.

Zero tolerance, thought Mr. Pennitt, and had Judge Wies been alive and presiding currently, he too would have uttered a similar reproach. But Hornet was a soft fool with an optimist’s faith in humanity. Couldn’t he see that this was clearly a habitual user, a bad father, a common dreg from society’s ever flowing toilet? Let him go down. While other sentenced people awaited their documentation Pennitt was already working on the case before the judge. He gave him three years—the judge had suspended the sentence, adding two years supervised probation with many nasty contingencies including enrollment in various programs, weekly drug-testing and unannounced stop-offs at his residence for sampling. Pennit slid through the verbiage, omitting the ‘suspended’ from ‘three-year suspended sentence’. The man waited in line for his documentation, was sped to the processing office to be assigned a probation officer, to find he’d require a parole officer instead, in about three years. Pennit glowed, tendrils of pleasure sucked out of him, weaving through the shadowy desk, snaking a golden mist to the heavens. Judgment, once more. A life altered, the course of events shaped by a single instance, the single key-stroke, of an inauspicious clerk. In a thousand years such minute restructuring of the social construct could reek major changes, buildings could move, rise up or fall down, exist or never exist, people could be born, shift continents in war or plenty, or not be born. He mastered such changes—unknown differences in a future history slid out of him—and his loins heated and stirred. He licked his lips.

Now Mr. Pennitt never drew revenue from his position in the court—that would be criminal—and had a lawyer known his predilection to alter the law as he felt best served justice, and offered him a pay-off to lessen any passed sentence, he would have refused outright and then had the attorney arrested for venality. He disliked attorneys intensely, even biasing his alterations against some of them. He hoped to be entirely rid of Harold Proctor, for example, tarnishing his record of past clients with pepperings of increased sentences, nasty probation officers determined to land their clients behind bars, anything to create the impression of incompetence on Proctor’s part. In the last month alone he’d hit three of Proctor’s clients. This, he thought, was the greater justice—a venal, obviously immoral, character like Proctor had no business practicing the law. Even if some of his clients were innocent, their lives were a small sacrifice to pay compared with ridding the legal world of Harold Proctor, a mission given down by Poseidon. He must not be allowed to return home—and none given berth in his legal ship, defended by the shield of his rhetoric, should return either.

The power of moving a tiny number, a meaningless scratch on parchment made sensate only by shared consensus; lifted then by the might of human purpose yoked beneath bureaucratic protocol; unleashed such lust in Mr. Pennitt as never a woman could rise out of him. It made him feverish. It intoxicated him; each perversion to the handed-down law outmatching the previous to excite his perverted lust. His changes did draw attention, but as a judge could really never be wrong (it would undermine the raison d’etre of law, said Mayor Lanterhayer) the heat always burned down the line, the fuse stopped outside the courtroom door, where it sputtered non-explosively.

The heat, though, would lessen his audacity. He’d wait a few weeks between each change, even let juicy possibilities slide by untouched. Neither would he react to obvious inequities on the part of the judge if it meant straying outside the schedule he had set himself. But the nature of his perversion pushed him further and further, breaking each new rule he set himself, firing bursts of pleasure only when outmatching previous bouts of daring. And now he dared again, and again until we find him today, as he is, fraught with a terrible obsession.

He hasn’t slept properly for weeks. At night his mind whirs with the imagery of what he imagines happens to the victims of his amending. The surprise, the horror. The insolvency of the impregnable guards and prisoners. The laughter. The change of events, the slow vacuum engulfing the convict. The protraction from daily life—a social ghost, the dust settles over the place he’s been, and he’s forgotten; not even the imprint he left on his mattress remains. The room is shut up. The laughter...it’s the clerk that’s laughing, laughing on his bed in the hot-wet night of his feverish nightmare. The nightmare he’s created. He’s eked out the nightmare to the warranted, those deserving the intervention of his justice—his true law gleaned from sideways glances and the glittering reflection of self trapped in the birdcage of the defendant’s face. The shadow of being, lost deep inside the firing neurons and the electric web, can’t hide the truth it carries. When you look in the side of the eyes you can glimpse it—read it—and make a judgment, entrap the vermin in a cage for its body, an amplification for the one already in its mind.

The next case was up, and he pondered. The skirt, pressed, perhaps a little short. And what was that? Some glance to the side, some nervous twitch, a flash of guilt? He watched carefully. It didn’t matter what the judge was saying anymore. He didn’t care—the charges were in front of him on the screen. Breaking and entering, burglary, malicious destruction of property, theft in excess of $5,000 and others—quite a handful. And why, why would such a young girl do such a thing? It hardly mattered. It was plain that she had done it—look, look at her reddening cheeks, those callous eyes. The tramp. Mr. Pennitt hunched forward, peering distantly from behind his desk with the raised partition and wide berth. He knew it was hard for them to see him. The judge was talking now, mixing words like he always did, berating here, serious and stern. Then ponderous, perhaps to powerful. Mighty to righteous. Inquisitive. Cautionary. End in the question?

She tried to answer. Leaning forward skirt rising. Orange lipstick, nails in neon. Clawing at the courtroom, she’s trying to escape…listen to her. But she’s a whore. She’s a damnable whore and she’s not even repenting now, showing timidity perhaps, yes, that turn of the shoulder. But she won’t get by, not past the desk in the shade of the rafters. He licked his lips, the heat stirring between his legs.

Admonishments from the judge, but Pennitt recognized his tone, knew he had taken pity. Oh, he’d scare her a bit but let her return to the streets because of those wide-strung eyes, a soft exposure of flesh, and the wet hole she carried in her. But what really had changed? No, it wasn’t right.

Mr. Pennitt was no misogynist. He had helped his share of women. It wasn’t his fault he wasn’t attractive to them and had remained single, he was lying now he knew that (he knew quite well it was his strange sense of abandonment around women that led him to ineptly remain silent throughout every encounter)—but he was human, after all. What did you expect, an immortal Roman myth? Rhadamanthus himself? He laughed, laughed out loud before realizing where he was. He coughed. Collected himself. The judge shot him a glance, the defendant couldn’t see him. Who had laughed? And why laugh? Why?

“Mr. Pennitt, that will be quite enough thank you. You have finished, haven’t you?” The judge had asked him: He hadn’t replied because he knew that that question wasn’t literal, it wasn’t have you finished? it was why did you start? An answer was expected of him, an explanation…..

“Nothing your honor.” It was nothing; no-one at all.

The lights seemed clustered, augmenting each other in streams. Pulses. He blinked, screwed up his eyes and took off his glasses. He put them back on slowly. Yes, the same girl. It was her. So he hadn’t missed much—at least nothing important.

The coffee on his desk from the morning was cold but he drank it anyway, sipping at the Styrofoam from thin skeletal fingers like some bird with shrunken wings. The whole room was somber, just the droning voice of the judge somewhere in the distance like a far-off motorboat. The occasional cough in the cloisters. And such bright lights, why do they have to polish them so much, thought Mr. Pennitt, why?

He had to type up the paper now. When did he sleep—had he been sleeping, even, just then? He didn’t know. What had been said? She sat down on the seats by the side awaiting her paperwork. Mr. Pennitt stood, excused himself quietly to the Judge between cases, and went out to the bathroom.

He immediately cut into the judge’s chambers when certain no one was nearby. He breathed deeply, calmly, staggering forward to lean against the large oak desk with the one-piece top. The two adjoining flags, creased and folded with some strange lacquer from years of caresses, glowed and drew him near. He whispered, feeling the banner. The fingertips of years, the paintings in the hallways, even the busts, it was all right here on these two flags, glistening unctuously an inch thick in the folds. Smeared like honey along the stripes and the bayonets. He pressed his cheek into the banner, tears springing from his lashes. He turned and rubbed his pate and scalp across both fabrics breathing heavily with wet breaths that fogged up his glasses.

He knew what he had to do, and he had to do it quickly. The sun streamed through the window blazing a wild rectangle across the carpeting, sliding ever so slowly over the seal of justice in the direction of the courtroom. He had entered from the shadowed side, from dawn. He always thought it safer to enter Hades from the morning, from the beginning, and not go in from the opposite direction—only the judge could travel that way, against time. He reached for the chair, letting its cold leather slide under his hand while he turned it to seat himself. The Judge’s computer was idling. He opened the icon resembling a courtroom. Then suddenly in the window, word by word, the stenographer’s transcript as occurring. If it wasn’t Hornet presiding, he thought, he wouldn’t even have needed this nice spree into the chambers. Hornet never kept the same password, like the others, and logged onto the LAN securely. He granted ‘clerk-1’, his computer in the courtroom, access to the LAN. It was probably Bumblebee again, like last week.

When he returned he was collected and austere. Outbursts and confusion could not be tolerated and he would stay within the strict parameters as prescribed the norm of court decorum. The cases awaited him, and after a quick recollection with surmising glances he was back at it. Formal.

So he typed his paperwork diligently, all madness retracted. His back had hunched, perhaps to contain it all, and he drew himself over his keyboard like a bird of prey fending its kill. A few drops of sweat slid suddenly off his glasses’ rim; the glasses had made contact with his cheeks when he grimaced in licking his lips; and sputtered onto his keyboard. Horror suddenly precipitated in his concoction of self-absorption: He glanced up, panning his head. No one had seen. Thank god for that!

He clicked the next window, the printer engaged as the prior case became legitimated. It was her—the girl who had started his delirium. He held himself together, spanning a widening distance that threatened to tear him apart. A dark chasm; if he could just keep his feet on either side, but it’s growing—his ankles bristling, the strain in his groin….

He filled out what the judge had ordered, only he specified a probation officer in the database. When she took the form to processing they would find Merryl Caramatz pre-assigned, which was common enough. No questions, a stamp falls, another turn-style clicks over, and on into actuality and irrefutable fact.

So, who was next on the docket?

It was all so easy. On Thursday evenings he’d wait for the others to leave. Tarry by the coffee-machine in the Clerk’s office, re-filing, perhaps reading the docket for the coming week, typing the very same, anything to waste time. Of course he’d schedule tasks specifically for these ‘after-hours’, using it as a free-parking amid the schedule of his week. Inevitably it would happen—he was the last to leave. Then, access to the LAN was easy enough. Perhaps a slight alteration to the stenographic record to align with his alterations if he had been unable to access the LAN from his place in the courtroom (which was only when Hornet was presiding). He had, of course, ashamedly vandalized three audio cassettes. Those cases were too large, and he had made the first one without realizing the contradiction he had exposed himself to as evidenced in the Judge’s taped sentencing. He realized that evening, already restless, even then, that there were recordings kept in the basement that word for word expressed a largely different transcript. Minor errors or inconsistencies could always be attributed to the stenographer, or the very computing system itself, although most went unnoticed. But with Ethel May, he couldn’t help himself. He went too far, and reduced her sentence by five years, suspended three, knowing she’d see the better part of one alone.

The panic in him was furious. It marked the first of his sleepless nights. The next morning, ever-so-early he gained access to the archives to remove the tape. The sentence was passed by Judge Weis, always strong with the law. But Ethel May, the 24-year-old, thin, maladjusted, fluttery infant, couldn’t understand prison. It was no place for her, and the man was wrong. He looked at the cassette, the thin lines of the spool showing through the tiny window. DAT, another twenty-first century acronym—the coming language of runes and symbols. But prison would have killed her. He remembered her standing there behind the table, somehow distracted, eyes like lanterns, spinning mirrors so the light bounced off. She’d look up, over her shoulder, and her attorney would notice, catch her in the corner of his eye. He’d move over, look at her, try to bring her arms down with his hands, even break his rhetoric, saying “your honor, I-I…” with his hand out to the side whispering “Ethel!” fanning her down, trying to press her back into her seat like a master chef by the crab-pot.

He took the tape, opening the front flap. Weis really didn’t care about her, nor her bad defense—she was a whore, a drug addict, everything epitomizing urban decay and the cracks of civilization where so many, unnoticed, congregate. Weis wanted to throw her where he didn’t have to think about her, where no one had to think about the mess life had made of Ethel May. She was deranged—perhaps even as a result of her scurrilous life—but she was a child! A poor child lost in this ghastly dream, left alone on the street corner. Her clothes hang from her, her small breasts seem almost visible. She somehow caves into herself when she sits, eyes flickering like scintillating pennies cast into space. She is crushed and evacuated. A tide of spirit floods through her face and she just can’t find it, can’t make it, floats onward through the putrid vapors like an evanescent cloud alive for the brief moment the sun falls across it. She can’t die yet—she hasn’t had a chance to live!

He cut the tape, a flush blooming almost intolerably from beneath his collar. He gasped, suffocating, his penis throbbing suddenly. She was smooth, shapely, by all accounts pretty in a run-down way. But also simple and conciliatory. He could imagine her relief, her surprise, perhaps a glowing sensation like the one now running throughout him. She would offer a thankful praise for the timely release, to some unknown benevolent entity. He was trembling, breathing heavily. He unzipped his pants—he had to, it was trapped, pressed in an excruciating curl, burning like an iron. And suddenly he was falling into his lust, gratifying the pressure that wanted to explode out of him, there in the archives of the court house, his belt undone, pants wide open, the tape he had come to steal gripped tight in the fist of his left hand. Images flittered through his head in no constructed order; her on the bed held by the inmates, her begging, her lifting her dress slowly to show him what was underneath. Her incomprehension at the judges words drawing lines in her face. A whirlwind of expressions and exposures of flesh, faster and faster, a kaleidoscopic merry-go-round, spinning, flashing, gaining, pumping and pumping, whirling until it rushed out of him like a tide and he glowed in slow deflation like an punctured balloon. He lay up against the table leg, the pain in his back becoming evident as his breathing slowed. And then the sudden revulsion at what he’d done. He scrambled to clean the mess, pushing the tape in his pocket wiping his hands on the inside of his jacket. Fumbling, he drew out a blank DAT from his inside pocket, and replaced it in the sleeve. Then to the bathroom to get paper towels and quickly finish up, scrubbing at his trouser leg, cursing under his breath.

It hadn’t happened to him, he simply refused to think about. A sudden burst of emotions all atop each other, but in a second he’d flash them up, and the pictures vanished before he could see them. No point looking there.

The other tapes also had to be destroyed—but don’t worry, there was nothing as embarrassing accompanying those episodes. Just simple conniving. Mr. Pennitt looked over at the judge, unaware, rambling the same motor-boat up and down the courtroom walls. He was sweating, his shirt hugged his arms, and he didn’t dare remove his jacket. Oh, he had had it washed—that very evening, thank you, but the sweat must be visible. He could feel it, slicking his shirt across his back, dribbling in the chasm of the armpit, fleck, fleck, fleck. He quietly excused himself, explaining illness (which seemed plausible), and went home early for the evening.

 

arold Proctor walked into the courthouse almost simultaneously as Mr. Pennitt walked out. He noticed someone brush past him hurriedly, but took no account of the incident or the man’s identity, for he too was consumed in internal regression. He was perplexed over a certain oddity, and it wheeled through his mind as the doors swung to and he strode into the hallway.

He was a man of average height, strait-legged but hunched at the hips so as to lean into each step. Swinging his arms widely in counterweight, as if he was pulling himself up an invisible rope, he strode toward the records office. His face was sloped at the forehead, he was balding and wore glasses, yet in his eyes the distant sun of intelligence glowed. He was proud, ordinary, and enunciated his speech perfectly with a slow deliberate voice.

Harold Proctor, Attorney at Law, was becoming an investigator. It was a strange aspect to practicing the law he had never really embraced before, but one he was enjoying immeasurably. He certainly felt more prepared in court.

But what had struck him as odd was that his client, James Buchet, had been assigned a new PO, a nasty bastard called Farrington who almost always exercised his right to stop off at his client’s residence to enforce his drug-testing privilege. It seems Agent Farrington has an inordinate fondness of watching people urinate, thought Harold Proctor. A micturaphile? A Uraphile? There has to be a word for that, he thought, but couldn’t think of it.

“Betty,” he said poking his head round the open door. He didn’t go to the window, he wasn’t on their side then.

“Mr. Proctor,” she replied with some surprise, “we haven’t seen you for a while.” She stalled in her photocopying to greet the Attorney with a smile.

“Three weeks,” he nodded. “Look, I was wondering if you could get the Buchet file for me.”

“Buchet?”

At forty-three years old, Betty Harborough was still a dish. He smiled back at her as she moved toward the filing cabinets noting the lilt in her hips, the tumble of her hair, her light step.

“It’s an old one, more than five years,” he said. She replied with an oval in her lips, closed the drawer she had opened, and went into the back room.

He thanked her when she returned, as usual joking about her engagement ring, “still engaged” and when “the rock gets too heavy…”, even asking if she had had her lunch break. He had some color behind his old gray suit. He took the file, and realizing he hadn’t had lunch himself and it was already 2:30pm, handed it back to her.

“Would you be so kind as to Xerox this for me?” She took the file back with a wry smile.

“You know it’s 10 cents a copy right?”

“Sure. You know, if you’d have lunch with me I wouldn’t need something to read in the restaurant. I wouldn’t have to put you to all this work.” He grinned.

So she copied the court documents, refusing (as always) to photocopy the contents of the little “Confidential brown envelope.” He paid her, and left cheered somehow by the whole experience.

 

he sickness was crushing him. Even his pillow was heavy, a wet canvas trap for the fluttering of his mind. Stumbling through the blackness, the switch made the bathroom glow. Above the sink, his arms bending as he staggers into it, there, the cabinet! Five or six of the melatonin should do it. Sobbing with his face down tangled with his duvet waiting for the black hole to eat him so tomorrow is new. It’s 3pm, 16 hours—

The morning has light.

He showered, dressed, ate a rudimentary breakfast and left collected once more, austere. He didn’t walk today, but took the bus. He didn’t have a car—had never even acquired a driver’s license. The ride was pleasant and without incident. He hadn’t recognized anyone. And the paper was dull.

He stopped at the little bistro off of Main Street, down a small one-lane access alley with a steaming grate, dumpster and fire-escape ladders, to get his coffee. He just nodded at the attendant, paid and left.

And then in front of the courthouse, the spire towering up through perspective to replace the entire sky—no the entire world!

He smiled, hitched up his newspaper and strode through the doors. It was still early and aside from the janitor he was the first one in. Straight to the courtroom to boot-up the computers, dabbing sweat before the day’s begun. He folded his handkerchief back into his pocket while he took off his coat and hat, obediently putting them on the rack. To the computer.

It booted slowly with an insect rhythm, tiny legs whirring, round and round sliding scales and hairs rigid with steel. The screen lit, a second dawn, and the icons reflected in his glasses. He logged on, then with lightening speed to the judges chambers. Locked? Of course, but without incident he produced a hair-like key that slid into the lock. He had broken three of the lock’s pins with his penknife the first time he had got in early. He had wrestled in desperation, even twisting his blade in the lock. But the courthouse was an old building, the lock had given with the cracking of three pins. Now his skeleton key worked to perfection.

He slid in, barely opening the door. He didn’t turn on the light. The morning sun was upon him, there at the beginning of time. Twelve hours or so later, and the luminous window cast on the floor would slide through the door that led into the courtroom, the souls of the sentenced would be swallowed in judgment, and a new day would begin. It moved him, this early scene, the bright almost-white sunlight through the prism of the air, the window, the tears on his lashes, his own eye, and finally his brain where it split into rainbows of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. He fell to his knees, hands clasped.

Muttering. Mumbling. Intoning madness in tongues, flailing forward with crab-like spurts of the knees, crying, waiting to howl, to howl out the anguish, to burn with the flames of the flag. The tongues were rushing out of him, curling around the desk, over the flag, melting it without heat.

He was screaming when the janitor knocked on the door, hands pressed against his temples, and he hadn’t been aware of what he was doing: that he was about to poke out his own eyes. The sound of knocking—rrrap, rp, ap, “yur’ onner, yur onner”—and the little face peeping round surprised him horribly.

He froze, throwing down his arms and straightening his tie and jacket.

“It’s quite all right Sanchez, thank you,” he said glaring deeply into the janitor’s eyes. The janitor nodded, grumbled some protest in astonishment, and left with a disconsolate frown.

“We’ll have to see to him,” he said as he sped to the desk and logged onto the LAN to grant himself access from his terminal in the courtroom. Noises, the judge was coming, he could hear his voice up the stairs—what on earth was he doing up at this hour?—the switch without shutting down, the computer whirred to a stop while the display collapsed into a tiny square. He froze. He couldn’t, not through heaven, not that door. But the judge was coming, was already at the top of the stairs. Hear his footsteps, his soft quibbling with Debbie from the records office. Early morning pleasantries. The keys in the lock. Shit! He ran, bungled with the lock and sped out slamming the door behind him.

He stood in the courtroom. On Olympus itself. He collected himself, it was dark, the morning had not begun here, and he tiptoed over to his desk on the other side of the docket and bench. His computer monitor glowed. He keyed into the LAN and brought up the docket.

“Hmm, yes,” he said, “yes, yes,” reading the names clicking the cursor rabidly with his mouse, “good, yes, good,” and to the end.

“Mr. Pennitt?” It was the judge, Mr. Pennitt had heard the door open, seen the light from heaven come pouring up the walls of great Olympus. It would have been a grand entrance, the flowing robes and iridescent tendrils—a god is alighting—then the snap and the fall of shadow.

By the time the judge stood by him he had minimized his windows and was obediently typing up court orders that he had on hand specifically for such purpose.

“My, you are here early today,” said the judge, peering at him. Mr. Pennitt smiled broadly and sat back from his keyboard.

“Why, Judge Hornet, how good to see you so early in the day, this must be the earliest we’ve seen you, your honor” he said obsequiously.

“We?” Inquired the judge while raising an eyebrow, an inquiring aspect he had acquired from the circuit.

“We? Yes, I suppose the courthouse, your honor, the court house and myself, who is imparting the pleasant wishes.” He smiled again, lots of teeth.

“I see.”

“Quite so,” agreed Mr. Pennitt and sat forward to resume his typing. The judge lingered, let wrinkles of displeasure spread around his eyes, and walked out loudly.

He finished the court order, brought up an unfinished one, and then brought up the docket. Lets just make the day more exciting. Indecent exposure, that’s a fun one to add to any list of a cop like…. Officer Harrington, fantastic, who rarely appears having a tough beat that drew in the dregs: Auto theft, drug possession, sometimes distribution, armed robbery. Good criminal elements with usually enough evidence not to require the presence of a good cop. Stand-ins aren’t too much of a worry: Mr. Pennitt had learned that the police officers of his county never did their homework. They were automatons dispatched by the bureaucracy of law, they had no need of paperwork, rather followed its direction like a menu. And what fun to play chef, mix up some trifles.

The sweat ran into his eyes, sending the docket into a miserable contortion. He pulled off his glasses, snapping round: No one here yet. Then dabbing the forehead, hide the sweat, keep it at bay. He had to take care of the janitor somehow, maybe a warrant for burglary? No, too close to home, he’d have to…

It was nearly nine am, the Bailiff came in and turned on the lights. So the court was in session, the organism of justice began to fill with its organs of adjudication. The Bailiff, the clerk. The perfect placement of the flags. The stenographer, the DA. Everyone taking their place giving strength to the body. Then the congregation of lawyers, like enormous phagocytes ready to ingest their bibles, regurgitating settlements and ethics as ruined bricks. Some police, coded by color to run the electricity and stir up the arms. Next to come in is the broken back flea, thought Mr. Pennitt, and his feeling of the metabolism of this organism was not far off. He had espied the accused in the hallway, eyeing each other up, reading the docket, waiting to be called in. And the Bailiff to the door, inside, this way, the court’s about to be in session. The rustle of seating, the whispers of repudiation. A flash, a wrist watch—perhaps a ring—and the waft of cologne.

He sat back, comfortable in his shadow of the rafters, distant, a speck of conscious at the back of the organism’s cranium. He smiled and licked his lips. There was a good turn out today.

With the usual delay the judge entered when announced a good twenty-three minutes past nine; not before a quiet nervous charm had settled over those seated. The Bailiff called his name, silence prevailed after everyone stood, and suddenly, upon seating, the heart of the animal blazed its beat.

“Court is in session.” The gavel down. He made the usual particulars, but then startled Mr. Pennitt, who shuddered forward in the shadows, when he said:

“Officers!” Followed by the prompt entry of uniformed men. They stood in triplet at each entry way. “We have some additional business that must first be attended, and the court has considered it important enough to delay these proceedings. I thank you all for your patience.”

The doors swung open, and between the policemen, who had dispersed to accommodate his sweeping passage, strode Harold Proctor, down the aisle like a wedding guest about to contest a marriage. His arms were full of boxes, which he slid inelegantly onto the district Attorney’s desk with bangs! And thuds! hitching his pants while turning to survey the room, eyes rolling behind his glasses, to address the judge, those assembled, and the mind of Talbot County.

“Your honor, I have evidence in my possession that proves the guilt of a county official who has grossly distorted justice. The evidence I have is enough for a preliminary, enough even for a conviction. The nature of this awful,” he swung his arm and took step forward, “revolting,” another step and, “vandalism—to the substance of this very court!— warrants no provision of bail. Let the man suffer as he has others.” He turned and marched directly to his bench where he lifted the lid off one of his boxes and drew forth papers.

“Due to the accused’s access to regulatory data, we have been unable to bring this to the court before now.”

The sweat was intolerable. Mr. Pennitt stirred to take off his jacket, he wanted to roll up his sleeves (why hadn’t he rolled up his sleeves?) but couldn’t risk the jacket. It was holding in a pool that would swamp them all. He hunched. He tried to access the database, locked out. He could do nothing. He couldn’t even close the docket he had displayed in a hidden window. The evidence was right on the screen.

“Through manipulation of state justice technologies, this man has altered all of these cases.” Proctor emptied a box in a dazzling helter-skelter across his desk. The judge leaned forward. Every heart seemed stopped. Mr. Pennitt reached forward and held down his computer’s power key.

“He has increased sentences, thrown men, and women,” he said turning for all to hear, “into prison, when the state of ________ said they could walk free as reformed criminals.” Harold Proctor was walking toward his spider web, roping his way toward him as if up some invisible slope. The computer fizzled with a clunk, and all went black.

“The perpetrator destroyed at least two audio cassettes and altered court transcripts. In one instance he released an insane woman, who had been sentenced to ten years for murder.

“Your honor, we believe that Mr. Samuel S. Pennitt,” Proctor’s hand was on his desk, his eyes shimmering behind his glasses, “is indictable for the destruction of state property, the practice of civil fraud, and the bastardization of state law. He is liable to every single person he sentenced contrary to state law. But even Samuel S. Pennitt, a studious clerk who covered his tracks remarkably well, should have known what every bureaucrat knows.” He clicked an audio tape at Mr. Pennitt. “Always keep a carbon copy.”

At this point Mr. Pennitt screamed. He leapt up, over the computer and his desk, toppling the monitor with a curdling cry, flailing into the center of the courtroom. The policemen rushed forward to restrain him.

“Stop!” he screamed holding forth his hands, wheeling on an ankle hunched forward pitiably. His hair was sodden across his scalp, even his jacket couldn’t constrain the patches under his arms or the swath across his back. The gavel banged.

“Order! Mr. Pennitt, you will sit hear and hear the charges. You are here without representation, so this is not a sentencing. If you do try to leave, however, or act malevolently during these proceedings you will be arrested. Do you understand?”

He nodded his head, writhing the corners of his jacket in his hands. The judge sat himself. Three policemen came forward to show Mr. Pennitt the way to his seat, the seat of the damned. A bucket that led through the well of justice to the pit of Hades. He shook his head and removed his glasses after he had sat down. He was weeping.

“Do you understand, Mr. Pennitt, you must say yes for the audio cassette.”

Mr. Pennitt collected himself. He put back on his glasses and stood slowly.

“Your honor, I’d like to represent myself, as I’m sure of my innocence. Forgive my hysteria, but after working for the state for eighteen years, it is upsetting to be suddenly accused by them. However, I have suspicions I can prove my innocence and am willing to rush the process by having a preliminary hearing now, assuming the prosecution does not object?” The judge looked at Proctor.

“Not at all, your honor.” Proctor smiled at Mr. Pennitt contentedly.

“Well, it seems to me that there is plenty of proof against someone, but that that someone might not be me. If I may say something that might interest the court, the janitor is not present here currently, and he should be brought here now.”

“Mr. Pennitt, are you accusing the janitor?” Asked Judge Hornet.

“I am, your honor, just this very morning I caught him sneaking out of your chambers, your honor. I suspect he is trading in vengeance, using his proximity to our system to win profit from unscrupulous public. Who else has keys to the whole building?” In a show of bravado, he pulled out his key ring showing only the key to his house. The skeleton key sat hotly in his pocket.

Harold Proctor was horrified. “Your honor he is lying, the janitor is an immigrant. He lacks the knowledge of the law necessary to perpetrate these crimes.”

“If he got into the judge’s chambers, he could have accessed the whole LAN. Further even. Your honor, these are skills easily acquired in books. Or from instructions even.” Retorted Mr. Pennitt.

Just then Sanchez Ramirez was escorted into the court room.

“Your honor, the man doesn’t even understand what’s happening to him,” said Harold Proctor, gesturing to the small Mexican with roaming eyes cowering between the policemen.

“A cunning rouse your honor, I’ve heard him on the telephone speaking very coherent English on numerous occasions. Just this morning, when I arrived, I caught him coming out of your chambers, your honor, just shortly before you yourself came over to see me. Why would I change the law your honor? I have worked here almost half my life. This whole county is like a family to me. I have no reason to do such extraordinary things. This man is poor. He has affiliations with a biker gang, he could learn to follow instructions well enough to act like an inside man. He’s been here at least five years.” Mr. Pennitt suggested.

“Is this true?” Asked Judge Hornet, “the biker gang?”

“His tattoos, your honor, he has a one percent sign on the back of his hand. It is a tattoo affiliated with the ‘1%’ of bikers who aren’t law abiding, your honor, according to Newsweek.” He coughed nervously. He had placed doubt in the judge, he could see it, twitching beneath his eyelids.

The officers confirmed the presence of the tattoo.

“Officers, take Mr. Ramirez into custody,” said Judge Hornet resolutely.

“Mr. Ramirez, you are being arrested for the falsification of court documents. Your preliminary hearing is set for August 6, at 9am. Do you understand?”

“No sir,” said Sanchez Ramirez, shaking his head cowering between the police officers.

“You’ll have time to have it all explained to you before your hearing. Considering the prosecutions statement I think Mr. Ramirez should be held without bail.”

There was an uproar when the policemen cuffed Sanchez Ramirez, the man howled in incomprehension and was taken away.

Judge Hornet turned to Mr. Pennitt and said,

“Mr. Pennitt, you are still a suspect and are not to leave the county.”

“Yes, of course your honor, I have no need to do so,” said Mr. Pennitt with a smile.

 

[END]

© 2004 - Ben Williams Contributor's Bio

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