Dead Voices, page 20
No, laughing itself could backfire and be no laughing matter.
Mark sat at his kitchen table, mesmerized by the document. Its very vagueness caused him alarm. He heard the fridge suddenly shiver, jarring him back to reality. The rest of the townhouse was silent. Outside through the window it was a mild autumn day, the sun peeking through the clouds every so often.
He had to get his mind around this document in some way to restore his equilibrium and rhythm. Later in the afternoon he had a dental appointment.
On his iPad he found out that hearings were usually disciplinary proceedings for teachers or lawyers or doctors who had been charged with professional misconduct. But he was a retired teacher — and he had never been in trouble as a teacher in all his years at the job. Sure, he had his share of controversies. He had his own standards of scholarship and discipline to uphold. He had always tried to provoke his students to improve their skills in writing and thinking beyond the norm. Did they want to be ordinary students jumping through hoops, he’d ask them, or did they want to excel and think for themselves? He had never wanted to be the average teacher that was content to move the kids along, not challenging them with the ultimate questions, and taking the easy road.
Could a former student or a former colleague have brought charges against him? Had he done something wrong he wasn’t aware of? These days, teachers were being charged decades after the fact for grave crimes. But the summons wasn’t from the College of Teachers, the official body that oversaw the qualifications and made rulings on the conduct of its members in the profession.
There was also something called a preliminary hearing in which the Crown had to prove it had a strong enough case to go to trial.
Mark felt out of his depth. What he should do was call a lawyer and get some advice immediately, but the fact of the matter was that he didn’t have a lawyer. Nor did he know any lawyers casually enough to ask about the hearing. When he and his wife had separated, it had all been done without a hitch. They had signed papers in a lawyer’s office in the presence of two lawyers. And before that they had signed some papers for a will. He had casually looked at the documents he had signed, but hadn’t read them carefully. What was the point? He had to trust the legal system and the people who administered it and enforced it. Behind its abstruse language it was a self-enclosed world, a world one had to pay handsomely to enter. If they wanted to take advantage of him, there was nothing to stop them.
Besides, the document strongly suggested he shouldn’t get legal counsel.
After giving the situation more thought, he finally laughed it off and put the document on his pile of correspondence on the kitchen counter. It couldn’t be that serious. He wasn’t being arrested, after all. It was just a hearing. Better to forget about it and go on with one’s business. Time would put things into better perspective. Why be so anxious over something so vague?
Someone was playing a joke on him. The Officer of the Court, the delivery kid, was probably laughing his head off somewhere. Or he was part of a ridiculous game, and all he had to do was walk away.
That afternoon, as he sat in the dental chair, his dentist asked him if everything was OK.
“I got a summons today,” Mark said.
The dentist, his mouth covered in a mask, looked down at him with concern.
Dr. Alvarez, a refugee from Cuba, was a young stocky guy growing prematurely bald. Mark, having visited Havana once, had struck up conversations with him in the past about his home country and baseball. The previous year, Ricardo, who now called himself Rick, had shown him photos of his first-born son on his smartphone.
“A summons for what?” Rick asked him, trying to be nonchalant.
“It wasn’t from Fidel,” Mark said.
“A summons is no laughing matter, my friend. I could remember my family shaking if we ever got any mail from the authorities.”
“This isn’t Cuba.”
“Yeah, lucky for us. But no one is safe.”
“Safe from what?” Mark said, on the verge of laughing.
“Open your mouth,” Rick said, coming down to his face with his mask and his drill. “This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me.”
The dentist’s words were cause for concern. Instead of telling him the truth, he had made a joke of it. That wasn’t good. He should’ve told him it was a summons for some unknown charges made by some unknown people. He should’ve told him that the unknown had a way of bothering him much more than the known. It was as if, even now, the more he knew the more he didn’t know, as if there was no end to knowing, to thought, to anything. Maybe Rick could’ve given him some pointers on how to handle the tyranny of the law. But this wasn’t Cuba. Still, the document had opened more questions than answers. And that couldn’t be good.
Mark spent a few sleepless nights afterwards, going over the past year, day by day, trying to remember what, if anything, he had done wrong. Then he went further back, where his memory could be spotty. Nothing came to mind, however. His everyday life, in his retirement years, was like clockwork and rather dull on the surface. He got up each morning, did his writing in the basement, went for his run, showered, had his lunch, spent the afternoon exercising in one way or another, made his dinner, read, and then watched TV. If the weather was decent he rode his bike in the afternoons and played outdoor tennis. In the winters he worked out at the gym and played indoor tennis. The rest of the time was spent doing research or just reading for the pleasure of it.
He could say, with a measure of confidence, that he spent so much time either using his own words or reading the words of others that he had come to actually live in words. At one time words and books had been great mysteries that he felt excluded from. Now he had become one of the initiated. It was as if the words had seeped into his blood stream, transforming him from the inside out. Metaphorically, of course, but also literally. He could lose the sense of where the words ended and the visible world began.
When he was a kid he’d put himself to sleep concocting elaborate scenarios in which he’d dominate over the adult world. These days he put himself to sleep concocting scenarios just as elaborate, but with words alone that could be heard by anyone. His inner voice was powerful enough that anything he saw wasn’t just what it was as it was — the what-is — but also what it could be, once it was enfolded in the grace of language and the metaphors of the what-if. The world as word and will, he called it.
He could open a book by any of the great poets or novelists or playwrights or thinkers and feel entirely at ease in their presence. No longer did he think of them as his role models or his superiors. They were simply his equals — and even his friends. Modesty forbade him to think of them as beneath him, of course, but it didn’t stop him from occasionally finding fault with them, or correcting them on their style or technique, down to the illogical metaphor or malapropism or le mot non-juste. Sometimes he’d disagree with their ideas, find them shallow, or overly pedantic, or too obscure to unravel. Of course, he could be dealing with a translation, which complicated matters somewhat.
All in all, however, they were all dealing with words and how words conveyed meaning and expressed emotion and played with all manner of rhetorical devices. And he knew all the tricks of the trade, so to speak. They couldn’t pull the wool over his eyes anymore, no matter their reputation, their authority, their position in the literary pantheon.
Maybe that was the problem, he told himself. Ever since his wife had gone back to live up north in their hometown, maybe he had slipped too much into the words of his solitude, a victim of his own thoughts and fantasies. Maybe he lived so much in words that he was losing his grip on reality. After all, a word was just a word and not the actual thing in itself.
And yet words had the power to make it seem as if they could create something out of nothing. As he had learned from his studies and from his own writing. One just had to look at the Bible, for example, and see how the words conferred a reality on what had never before existed and made it work as a theology of survival. Sometimes he felt it was better to live in the what-if of metaphor, with the great heroes and great thoughts and great spirits, instead of the what-is of his real and dull existence. His small outer-self, with its fears and anxieties, could never compare with his inner-self with its words and great thoughts.
Could that be what he had done wrong? Had he conferred too much power on his inner self so as to make himself a legend in his own mind, as his friend at work used to say?
Was he a victim of his own illusions of grandeur?
His day-to-day outer life wasn’t much of a success, there was no doubt of that. He was single again and practically invisible as a writer. He had very few friends. Held no political stance, except to be aloof and critical like the ancient Cynics. He didn’t belong to any organizations or institutions. He simply paid his taxes and was a law-abiding citizen. And he was getting older now and able to sense his mortality in his time-worn body, while the fears for his immorality were coming back to him in haunting dreams, all visual by the look of them, that he couldn’t make any sense of.
He had lost contact with all his former friends, living pretty well a hermit’s life. He didn’t do much more than watch TV, go to movies, listen to the radio, read the papers, and use the Internet. He kept his eyes and ears on the social networks and did his share of tweeting. And all the information and material he couldn’t get from hardcopy was right there for the taking. From hard-to-find ancient books and interlineal translations and scholarly journals to the latest fads and opinions and news.
Was he being summoned to answer for his failures?
But that couldn’t be an indictable offense. What else could it be?
When he went further back into his past, he could uncover his share of mistakes and character flaws. With his parents and sister, his friends, his wife, and his son. With students and colleagues at work. He had been, and still could be, quite self-centred and vain. He had lost his temper, gone into his fortress of solitude, given people the silent treatment, held grudges for years, and hurt a number of people with his calloused jokes. But he hadn’t done anything truly despicable or evil, as far as he knew. And he had never broken the law, except for a few speeding and parking fines.
He couldn’t be sure, however. How could he be sure of anything? Even his memory, at times, was playing tricks with him. He could remember a face, for example, and his mind would blank out at the name. Could it be possible that he was being charged for something he had no name or words for?
Or could he be charged for something he couldn’t remember? Nobody was guiltless, least of all him, he well knew. He had to be guilty of something to get a summons. Even if he hadn’t done anything, he still could’ve thought about it and done it in his heart. He was always thinking and concocting scenarios, after all. Sometimes he felt that just giving something thought was enough to make it real.
But he couldn’t be summoned for his thoughts alone. That was preposterous.
He could only conclude that the hearing wasn’t for any legal misdeed or wrong-doing. The summons said personal and suggested that he had to argue his own case. If he had to testify on his own behalf, it could only mean that the charges were being directed to his character or his work. Unless he was reading too much into the summons. His inner voice, getting way ahead of itself, had a tendency to play back on itself, like a microphone put against an amplifier and locked in feedback loops.
If the problem was his work or his character, however, at least he had something to go on.
A lot of his work had to do with unearthing and reinterpreting the past. Like writing fiction disguised as memoire, or memoire disguised as fiction — he couldn’t tell the difference. Or was it metaphor disguised as reality? It was just words, in the end.
His wife had repeatedly told him, however, that he got the story wrong, no matter what spin he put on it. After reading some of his work based on her, she had been royally pissed off. She told him that his memory was too selective, too influenced by vanity and self-deception, and that he didn’t see things right at all.
When he came to think of it, maybe he shouldn’t have written about his own family, no matter how noble his intentions. After all, he had based everything on what had actually happened, had gone into explicit detail, exposed old wounds, and picked at scabs that could never be healed in the real world — even though his intention had been to heal them in the metaphorical world. What right had he to perform such a deed, when his words were still too raw and hurtful to his own family? They didn’t see it as metaphorical at all, having lived through it. That in itself could be an indictable offense — according to his own unwritten writer’s law, in any case, which was much more stringent than any civil law. Could he be charged by his own law?
It was all so confusing he was at his wit’s end.
After a few sleepless nights, Mark decided to take the initiative. If he had to defend himself he better prepare himself.
He went to the larger libraries in the city and took out a number of books on law and jurisprudence. Suspending all his other reading, he studied them carefully. He read books on the history of law, the nature of law, the enforcement of law, the practice of law. Most of the books were far from applicable to his case, he could readily see, but it was an eye-opening experience, to say the least.
They brought him back to the enormity of the task ahead of him. How could he possibly defend himself against a system that was so large and inclusive? He had to contend with no less than the making of law, the enforcement of law, the practice of law, the interpretation of law, all rising up like a tower of Babel. He had to contend with the many types of law — natural, civil, criminal, international, constitutional, and so forth. He had to contend with the nature of justice and fairness, the objectivity of judges, the conception of community, the difference between morality and law. It was clearly much too much for him to get through in a few weeks, let alone a few months — forget about mastering it.
Then there was the Torah, the Sermon on the Mount, the Upanishads and Gita, the laws of Gnosis and Sophia, the Perennial Philosophy — and no end to it.
He gave up. This couldn’t be his line of defence. It couldn’t be the working law that was out to get him if he had never been one to break the law. And if it was the moral law of the prophets, he was guilty as charged.
One morning, as he was running along his route in the large park adjacent to his townhouse, his torso soaked with sweat, the words of his defence came to him on their own. If he didn’t know the charges, then his only method of proof would be to present himself as he was, in all his naked self, outer and inner, real and metaphorical.
And yet on the day before the hearing, while he was eating his lunch, it dawned on him that he could be in deep trouble. How could he prove himself to a panel of judges when he wasn’t certain of anything — least of all himself?
As a matter of fact, his confidence in himself had always been suspect. And whenever he was put in a pressure situation, in sports competition or real life, he had a tendency to choke and be his own worst enemy. He’d be too self-conscious and stutter like an idiot. And, then, if he got too full of himself or was too joyous in his accomplishments, he had a tendency to put the brakes on, lest he be a victim of hubris.
It was his nature, he told himself, and one couldn’t change his stripes. He could laugh all he wanted at miracle, mystery, and authority, but when it came down to facing the ultimate authority, his yellow stripe was as prominent as anyone else’s. There was no way of avoiding the final judgement.
Next morning, Mark spent some time deciding on his attire. His anxiety had built to such a peak that he didn’t sleep a wink the night before.
Should he wear a suit and tie or his usual attire of jeans and sneakers? Would his attire be used for or against him? The thing was, even though he had never been inside a real courtroom, he had seen enough courtroom dramas on TV or in the movies to know he had to look presentable. One had to give the appearance of being serious or one would be held in contempt of court. All the books he had written wouldn’t mean crap in the eyes of the judges.
This, however, went against his principles. To judge a person by their appearance was totally against everything he stood for. And yet he had judged the Court Officer, the kid who brought him the summons, by his appearance. Was the justice system testing him even before he set foot in the courtroom? Was its intent and purpose to create so much doubt in him outside the courtroom that he’d be so discombobulated that he wouldn’t have a chance in the courtroom?
If that were the case, he was defeated even before he started.
Why should he wear a suit and tie, Mark asked himself, if it didn’t stipulate on the summons? According to Pascal’s Wager, of course, he’d be hedging his bet if he, in fact, wore a suit and tie. Either he’d be following protocol, in which case he’d be doing the right thing and be rewarded for his efforts, or, if it didn’t matter, nothing would be lost. The thing was, however, if he wore a suit and a tie, it wouldn’t be the real him. He’d be faking it. And if that was what Pascal meant, then he’d take Pascal to court on the issue. The point was to be true to one’s self, wasn’t it? And then he’d be true to all men, as Polonius said.
But Polonius was this stupid guy in a play. Would he take Polonius’s word over Pascal? Pascal was one intelligent guy, a math genius as well as a religious seeker. Polonius was an old fool, given to garrulous meddlesome speech. But fools in Shakespeare were often the opposite of what they appeared to be. Was Shakespeare pulling a fast one on all of them?
But Mark couldn’t joke his way out of this one. He spent some time taking the one black suit he owned, the one he had last used for a funeral, brushing it and trying it on. When he looked at himself in the mirror, however, it didn’t feel right. He was trim and neat and presentable, sure, with his short white hair and lean features, but it made him feel he was going to attend another funeral.
Was this an omen of some sort?
