The Coming of Bright (9 page)

She knew his type, or thought she did: the over-protective brother figure. He took his TA duties too seriously, as far as she was concerned anyway, allowing feeling to interfere with doing.

She chalked up his solicitude, overbearing as it could be at times, to a by-product of Victor’s brooding interest in her. He resented Victor, whether out of rivalry or genuine distrust she didn’t yet know. And very likely it was a by-product, one Victor hadn’t foreseen and couldn’t forestall, of the professor asking the TA, the lowly cog, to be a go-between with a favored student. A middle peg.

Zora prayed to God, as much as she found Jack charming in his wayward way, that his being the middle peg wouldn’t extend to
ménage à trois.
 She hoped with a rising inner heat that Jack’s knowledge of French didn’t extend to the intricacies of
that
term, the tangled meaning of
that
phrase. She’d been raised a traditional girl, and
ménage à trois
between a professor, TA, and first-year student—not necessarily in that order in the way it actually played out—was definitely pushing the conservative envelope. Maybe even the liberal one, though from stories she’d heard she doubted it. She was no stranger to TMZ, let’s put it that way.

Jack was far from done playing the middle peg. After they’d exchanged pleasantries, and Jack had casually, playfully touched her arm, knowing the
Qi
meridians of her body, his touch instantly relaxed her, his fingers could perform their own acupuncture without needing to break the skin, calibrating the rhythms of her self back to their natural state, he handed her a small envelope.

It was sealed in red wax with an impression of the Chinese character for “forbidden,”
jin
, a complex symbol of 13 strokes, the bottom meaning the revelation of God and the top signifying two trees, the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. An allusion to the forbidden fruit. A symbolic bond between ancient China and the Judeo-Christian world.

Zora ripped open the envelope, splitting the waxen symbol vertically, tearing the revelation of God in two and cleaving the Tree of Life from the Tree of Knowledge. It had to be from Victor. His version of a
billet-doux
. A love letter. She read eagerly, having to hold the note at an angle to banish Jack’s inquisitive eyes.

Hello my luscious Pandora,

Now you’ve done it, opened the forbidden note. Who knows what may come, daring love. The symbol in wax comes from my collection, my most valuable object, an ivory stamp once belonging to the Qianlong Emperor to enclose state secrets. To break its seal by the wrong hand was to invite death by a thousand cuts. Stop by my house tonight. Bring the plea for Dorothy and bring your desire to know. I have something for you, something that melts like wax and seals up skin. It will enclose a secret of its own, a secret meant only for your senses, every single one. Life by a thousand touches.

V.

Her hand clenched upon the note, crumpling it. Her teeth clenched even harder, straining at their roots. A seizing up of muscle, of sinew, from a rush of adrenaline. No one could take the power of death and magnify it into love like Victor could. It wasn’t until Jack tapped her hard on the shoulder that Zora realized her eyes had clenched shut as well. She must have looked like someone being electrocuted.

Speak of the devil, there was Victor at the front of the class. She sought him out with pooling eyes, ripples of feeling on their surface, pulsing with the energy of connection, but he deflected them with indifference, the air of the regal professor for whom every student is a pauper, a peon. Her energy reflected back, rejected back, its warmth cooled into hurt.

She glared but that made no difference. Searching for connection of any kind, she bored her eyes into Jack for making
her
the go-between. For passing information to Victor without her consent. How else could he know she’d already found the room? For someone who thought so ill of Victor, Jack sure was absorbed in him now.

“Good morning, pe—”

Zora thought he would say “peons” but he finished the greeting with “people.”

“Let’s jump right into the Nozick reading, shall we?”

That was a reading she’d actually done. Her whirlwind affair with Victor had thrown into disarray her carefully laid plans to make the law journal—through sheer, mindless drudgery. Drudgery was rapidly giving way to poetry of limbs and lips.

Nozick was token drudgery, he came from a packet of xeroxed readings she’d picked up at the Founders Bookstore, the packet had the ominous title “Theory.”

The reading was just a few pages from the 70’s “classic”
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
. Not quite
Fear of Flying
, her favorite book from her favorite decade, but at least she could fly through it. She thought Nozick a fool, a dangerous fool, for thinking that virtually any injustice—slavery, murder, you name it—could be condoned. The only thing that mattered in his mind was whether everybody started out on a level playing field, and whether everybody “freely” agreed to injustice. If someone ended up on the losing end, ended up a slave, but still agreed to it, then so the fuck what.

That was the basic argument as she understood it. Let the chips fall where they may, no matter if you end up signing your life away. No wonder Victor liked that reading—it seemed to follow the same kind of twisted logic of economic “freedom” that he and his esteemed ass subscribed to.

She had a strong and extremely unsettling premonition that Victor would single her out, riddle her with Socratic barbs, and he didn’t disappoint. She’d already devised a feeble attempt to back out, an homage to his love of strained wordplay. It worked like paper steel.

“Ms. Bright, care to tell us why Nozick is right?”

What a loaded question. Fuck.

“No, sick.”

She feigned her best pneumonic cough.

Not only did the pun not work, it emboldened his inner asshole.

“Ms. Bright, if you can talk, you can answer. Let’s hear it.”

A few more fake coughs, hand to mouth. She had to pretend that she was clearing phlegm from her lungs, and even added the flourish of wiping her hand with disgust on her right pantsuit leg, after recoiling from its drenching of imaginary cough-up.

“Sorry Judge, what was your question again?”

“Why is Nozick right?”

“Um, I don’t think that he is.”

“Oh, really.”

He curled and warped his voice, his palate, his face, around the word “really”—as though the very notion of her dissent, of her independent will in a utopian world of male minds, was inconceivable. Absurd.

“And where did he stray from your path of righteousness, exactly?”

He was getting ugly. Unconscionable. Cruel. The monster that Jack had warned her of. She needed to hold her own, not allow the turmoil of her emotions, her confusion and consternation at his ugliness, to break her down. Make her break down right there in class.

“Slavery—I don’t think that anyone can freely be a slave. It’s offensive. There’s always coercion, bigotry, wrong. It’s like saying that Africans sold into slavery freely took the risk—that by going to war with each other, they accepted the risk of being captured, becoming slaves.”

“Well, didn’t they? And let’s say for the sake of argument that some Africans in the slave trade did freely assume the risk—knew full well if they were captured in internecine wars, they’d become slaves. Why say that’s wrong? Do you not believe in freedom, Ms. Bright?”

For the sake of argument. What a scumbag lawyer ploy. Everyone knew the slave trade was evil. Christ. She wanted to scream at him,
Shut the fuck up, you prick! You’re not thinking like a lawyer, you’re thinking like a fascist!

She held her tongue. And hoped for his sake he didn’t believe what he was saying, or she’d never let him touch her again. Shake hands even.

Zora spoke without fear, without thought, of the gulf between them.

“Judge, with all due respect, let me speak in a language you can understand. The language of money. Economics. Just because there might be a supply doesn’t mean there has to be a demand. It was the demand for slaves that fueled the whole process. It was a vicious cycle. If you criminalize the demand, the supply will dry up. That’s why slavery finally ended, and none too soon.”

“Ouch, Ms. Bright, that hurts.”

He affected a stab in the chest, complete with imaginary bodkin, right out of Shakespeare.

“You think I care only about money. You’re wrong. I care about people taking responsibility for their own lives and their own actions and their own choices, not expecting the government or the legal system to do it for them. New Deal bullshit. If someone wants to be a slave and can find a willing master, it’s their choice. If someone wants to be killed and can find a willing killer, it’s their choice. That’s what Nozick is talking about. I suggest you take it to heart.”

“Over my dead body.”

She said it in a loud harsh whisper which most of the class could make out.

“Excuse me, Ms. Bright. What did you say?”

“Nothing. Just coughing a little.”

She could tell from his furrowed face that his question had been rhetorical. He’d heard her perfectly well.

“The real question is, Ms. Bright, why are you taking this so personally? Care to share? We’ll lend you our ears.”

Once he got started with Shakespearean allusions, there was apparently no stopping him. He might have had countrymen in that classroom, but he definitely had no friends. And he was on the verge of losing a lover. A few people who’d taken Latin in high school were as close to Romans as he was going to get.

He was no Caesar, let’s put it that way. Based on how the class was going, though, he’d have to watch his back when Zora showed up at his house. Not to mention his collection of ivory-handled
mizu-honyaki
knives.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about Judge.”

He won’t bring up our tryst in class, will he? Is he really that cruel? That self-destructive?

“Sure you do—your mother’s ancestors were slaves, weren’t they? That’s why you can’t see this issue clearly.”

Her mind reeled.
How the hell could he . . .

Then she knew. Of course. He’d read her admissions essay, like he’d pored over her resume, raking in her life. Being a rake pure and simple. A scoundrel.

She’d written about her parents, the symbolism of their lives, the redemption of their union. The marriage that their marriage signified—of the laws of the heart and the laws of the land. After so much wrong, so much injustice. So much history.

It had been classic Zora, the idealist that Victor mocked so openly and admired so profoundly. With such high-minded ideals, it was a miracle she’d gotten into Founders at all—a law school whose favorite Founding Father seemed to be Ben Franklin. Not so much for his diplomacy or inventions as for his face on the $100 bill.

What she found so irksome, goading, and she was feeling sick now, positively feverish, was how Victor was trying to use her family, her heritage, against her. He’d better put those fancy Japanese knives under lock and key, or his flesh was going to be butter.

She was even starting to see creative uses, diabolical ones, for the Kama Sutra figurines—one of those copulating couples, shoved with enough force down the throat, could turn an Adam’s apple into Eve’s fist, life size.

She wasn’t fucking seeing clearly?!
After she’d taken his ivory fountain pen to his eye sockets he’d know what it meant not to see clearly. At that moment she thought herself capable of making the Gatekeeper look like a Girl Scout.

She rose above the fray of these frantic thoughts, murderous thoughts, bouncing around, searching for blood. Baying for it. Well, not totally above the fray.

“Yes, my mother’s ancestors were slaves, and yes, I
can
see this issue clearly. You’re the one who is blind, arrogant, selfish. Without pity for the downtrodden. I happen to disagree with Nozick, and I happen to disagree with you. Strongly. I suggest you move on before I come up there and slap you.”

Twenty members of the class gasped in unison, as though they were witnessing up close a terrific accident in the midst of human triumph, at the apex of triumph, like a high-wire walker who had never faltered before, not a single time, on a single step, plunging unexpectedly, wordlessly, to his death on the brightest and stillest of days.

The rest of the class was shocked dumb. Jack turned to her, his mouth stupidly ajar, his lower jaw hanging loose under its own weight. Pure, unadulterated shock. She winked at him. As if gravity had gotten stronger, instantaneously intensified by virtue of her wink, his jaw fell further toward the floor.

Victor laughed at her words, her impudence, and she smiled at that, for she knew him well enough to know that his laughter was the only betrayal of his weakness, her power over him. His sign of submission to her will.