She can’t forget it. He can’t talk her out of remembering.
They had sex so many times. But until it happens again, it’s in the past tense, it’s unreachable. Hasn’t he always somehow known, even when they are together, that each minute with her is in the fugitive tense? Already escaped and gone forever? Even the night before the trial. The memory waits for him. On the second time that night he somehow managed to outlast her; he was still inside of her, Alice silently and fiercely rubbing against him, and then, to their surprise, she began to shudder and moan. In that moment, when he knew she was about to come, did he shut his eyes to feel it pass through him, did he accept it as only the first of a thousand times? No, he opened his eyes. He pulled slightly away from her in order to watch her face. He wants nothing in the world but to see that again.
Remembering, wrenched with helplessness and fear, he tries to hold her to him, but she clutches her knees to her chest, her body enclosed and private, sealed into itself.
“Alice,” he says, “then what will you do now? Will you go to the Spiritual House? Will you become a nun?”
She smiles. “No.”
“Then …”
She touches her nose to his. “I said I can’t ever do it with you anymore, but it doesn’t mean I’ll never do it with anyone else. Just not with you, and not in this community.” At her use of the words “this community,” he understands she sees herself as being apart from it. “Not here,” she says.
“You’re going away?”
“Yes.”
She’s lying in his bed with him, their heads on the pillow, and she is looking back into his face, her eyes serious and wide, deep pupils, caramel-colored irises. She is eight years old. They are squatting over an anthill on her lawn. Below them, ants boil from the mound, their flat wings tilting, glittering in the morning sun. She is fifteen years old and hunched over her sketchbook, glancing up at him from the back room of her mother’s store. She is nineteen. She’s standing in the Spiritual House, she drops her purse, their heads almost bump together, and he smells vividly her cheap shampoo. Then the light changes and it’s autumn; leaves blow down a broad and unfamiliar sidewalk in an unknown city. She is standing before a plate-glass window of an art supply store, wearing all black, her face a pale oval reflected in the glass. Her hair is cropped in a way he’s never seen before, so that it sticks up a little, rough edged like the feathers around a crow’s beak. James’s vision fades; for a moment he can’t see any further into the future. He closes his eyes. With an effort, he imagines Alice standing at a mirror in a smaller, high-ceilinged chamber with a narrow bed, clothes draped over her bureau. She’s seated at a drafting table in a painting studio, the northern light from a high window filling the room with spiritual purpose, like the light of a cathedral. He can’t make out the outline of her drawing.
In this instant, when James understands he may not see Alice much anymore, he doesn’t know this is the moment when time will begin to circle backward. Even though he’ll see her before she leaves for New York, although he’ll see her, less and less frequently, at the Christmas holidays, he’ll never again see her head on the pillow next to his; he won’t feel this way again, but will only return to it, over and over, in his memory. And each time he returns, the memory will change, will alter and degrade. Will she be looking into his eyes with the same intensity as now? Or will she not look at him in quite the same way, will she gaze at him with gentleness and yet with a kind of coolness, of distance? No, not even the memory will be the same. At some point, the hundredth repeat, the thousandth repeat, the memory will be lost to time. James and Alice look into each other’s eyes. Alice looks away and the moment is gone.
The Verdict
Posted on May 1, 3 p.m.
You’ve probably heard the jury has found Dagou guilty of murder.
Judge Lopate had thought the sentence through. She acknowledged Dagou was born into an unusually complex, emotionally violent family, an immigrant family that had no choice in our society but to labor under unreasonable hardship in order to establish itself. Also, born the first son of a “difficult man with a domineering and violent temperament.”
“In these things,” she said to him, “you had no choice. But as human beings, we are not merely victims of fate.” She says it’s foundational to American society that its adult citizens are expected to exercise free will and to behave in a morally upright manner no matter what the difficult circumstances, no matter what has been done to them.
She went on about how Dagou lives in the United States. “You may believe you remained with your family out of filial piety, the pillar of your culture’s vision of family. But you are now living in a culture where you are allowed, even required, to make your own choices, your own decisions,” she said. “Your behavior was that of a trapped animal who would kill its keeper in order to escape. But in reality, you were never trapped.
“The jury has found you guilty of second-degree murder. You have been sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment without parole.”
Behind us, the gallery burst into applause.
Dagou sat stunned, with his gaze fixed on Judge Lopate like he was expecting her to take it all back. She met his gaze calmly, then looked out at the gallery.
From the first few rows, we all stared back at her.
We were outraged, stunned, anguished; but we did not fight back. We were, by and large, too docile. Too well behaved, too pragmatic, too self-doubting. I sat speechless, like the others, ashamed of myself, and furious that not one of the jury chose to believe a flawed but heartfelt Asian man.
Only Fang stood.
“Appeal!” Fang bellowed, loud enough for everyone to hear. “There’ll be an appeal! Ack!”
Ma Wa had reached up and thumped the back of his head.
DECEMBER 24
Anniversary
It’s a mild winter morning more than six months later. Deep in the Chao house, seated at the old PC in his late father’s cluttered den, James waits for Dagou to appear on-screen for a prescheduled video visit from the prison fifty miles away.