Iudex

Trigger Warning: Implications of Sexual Violence

“We didn’t know what we were doing.”

The boy stands beneath my bench, pitiless and yet pitiful. He stares up at me with quaking eyes deep as wells, his hazel irises like muddy water in their depths.

“Well then, son, let us hope that you do now.”

The old floorboards creak to a stop as the boy’s feet cease to shake, his whole body rigid and cold like the wooden planks beneath him. They might as well be the boards to his coffin. 

From up here, I can see it all descend upon him, that final hard swallow as one of two things happens. For, in the swallow, that kind of dry-mouthed, nervous swallow that drags a tennis ball down your throat, there lies only two actions: liquidation or consumption. 

Standing in his place those many years ago, back when the world was perfectly round and everything gleamed with such practical, mechanical sense, my swallow had been one of consumption. I swallowed down my hope, a large, fat lump of it that sailed down my esophagus as smooth as sugar down a funnel. How sweet it had tasted, that wink he had given me, that reassurance of my exoneration, the cherry on top of my judicial sundae.

And he had let me believe it. He had let me believe that I had really gotten off just like that. 

That didn’t mean my judge ever left me though. Everywhere I turned, it seemed he had followed me. Sometimes I couldn’t even look my own mother in the face without seeing that bulbous nose and those piercing eyes erupt out of her small, porcelain countenance, like wasps out from a hive. Even now, he haunts me in the form of a bloated old man, shrouded in black robes, staring out at me from the mirror. To think I had even gone so far as to stand outside the magistrates’ office one bitter winter night, close to getting frostbite from gripping the gleaming .45, the gelid trigger only growing colder as the snowstorm raged around me, anything to be rid of him and the guilt of my innocence . I thought I was going to lose my hand, so cruel and unending the pain had seemed. Not even the gash of the girl’s nails across my sweating cheek as I held her down rivaled it. The jarring ringing her screams had set in my ears, like fire on tree branches, spreading, spreading further and further into me, until my very heart seemed to beat to her shrieks’ gargled rhythm. 

Looking at the boy beneath me now, for that is all he really is, a boy, it seems his swallow has been one of liquidation, one of emptying. No longer does his face gleam red and cheery like the slick paint of his father’s sports car; instead, it carries only the pathetic, pale appearance of one of the cheap cafeteria tarts, ready to crumble in on itself at any given moment. 

He thinks I’m really going to give it to him. Throw the book at him as if my arms had any strength left to throw with. Even if they did, the tightness of my robes would never let me.

Considering him for a moment, shrouded now in the shadows of the dying sun, I imagine fulfilling his premonition, try to pull the words of rebuke and conviction out from my cancer-riddled throat and condemn him to the worst of deaths in a flash of electricity and excitement. Try as I might, the words refuse to come. I can scarcely even remember them, so fuzzy and abstract do they seem even as they lie stale on the textbook page in the recedes of my memory. I doubt I’ve ever heard them spoken allowed, certainly not by my judge and not by any other judge I’ve met since. In all brutal certainty, I know they’ve never fallen, heavy and final like atomic bombs, from my lips, cracked and dry as they sag on my plump, weathered face now. 

Instead, the ghost of familiarity flows through my tired, elderly mouth, flirtatious and playful, daring my tongue to once against dance in its lightheartedness, its easy fairness. They were only boys, it coaxes, rubbing against my legs like my wife’s cat used to do. How could they have the slightest inkling of what they were doing, what they were really doing? Let them go home to their families. Come on, you know the words already.

No sooner do they start to spill out of my mouth, the flood let loose from the dam, than do I clap a hand over my mouth, the courtroom a spinning tornado of eager and melancholy masks, twitching at my every word. 

My head pulses like it did back in the hot, sticky jungle, where the dampness clung to you like a parasite, leeching off your health with your sanity as each swipe of the machete only doled out more and more cruel vegetation. My temples begin to beat and sway as they grow numb where she had hit me, boxed my ears until I thought I would jump right out of my skin and strangle her just so it would all be over sooner. But, young and greedy, I hadn’t finished yet.

Looking at that frail, blond leaf beneath the podium, I wonder how long it took him to finish, how hoarse the girl’s throat had grown as she screamed and screamed beneath this avalanche of sweaty green army men who had collapsed upon her. The official report had said the whole thing only lasted ten minutes, but time seemed much more of a subjective matter in my department. Those whose knuckles had once looked as his did now, faded blue but still crusted with dried blood, often cut a few minutes, taking the extra edge off for a kid who probably didn’t know what he was doing. We were all kids once too, right? As for the converse, those self-righteous fools were so far up their own asses that they probably thought that they were doing the kid a favor by kicking his sentence up a couple years, so swift is the conversion of a few extra criminal minutes to a few extra incarcerated years. After all, discipline and hard labor build character. And without character, we would have neither justice nor its enforcers.

“How long did it last?” My scratchy throat cracks as I cough up the words, dusty sludge pushed out of a rusty faucet. 

“Ex-excuse me, your honor?” he stammers out, gripping the table like a drunk. 

Unable to speak another word, I stare at him, commanding him to force it out of himself.

A quick poke from his attorney gets him talking. “Uh, um, fifteen minutes, maybe? I’m afraid”– oh yes, he is afraid alright– “I’m afraid I don’t know exactly how long it was. We weren’t exactly keeping time, sir.”

Who ever keeps time, dear boy, on this long and weary road? It wasn’t but thirty years ago that I had held down a young island girl, kept her quiet, and buried her, thoroughly enabled by youthful, muscled arms that gleamed copper in the sunlight. It is through the ghost of those arms that the young man in me is kept alive still, lost in the memory of catching footballs in the waves in between walks with the platoon, dreaming of cutting into Mother’s peach pies and wrestling with my brothers on the minty-green lawn my father mowed every Sunday. And now whose arms restrain me and silence me every day that I climb atop this bench? Whose arms but the long, slender arms of that island girl who climbed trees and plucked flowers, made pots and gave massages all long before I came along.

“I see.”

Another hard gulp. Squinting intensely, I make out a slight darkening in the crotch of his pants.

“Do you feel remorse for what it is that you did?”

He pauses, his cheeks blooming like withering roses. It takes me but a moment to recognize and relive his confusion.

“Do you feel regret and guilt for this atrocity that you have committed?”

He hesitates.

Atrocity, another cold and alien word to him. Nevertheless, more prodding and poking from his lawyer earns me a sharp answer.

“Yes, your honor.” He reaches for his water glass and clumsily spills it, desperately trying to mop up the mess as he continues to stare up at me with a pouting lip. “Had I known how it would all turn out, I never would have invited the boys out into the jungle that day.”

“And why did you invite the boys out into the jungle that day? What was it that you had hoped to find?”

Something falls in his eyes as he hurriedly scans the sopping papers in front of him, their inky letters obscured with the water. His attorney shoots daggers at me. It wasn’t on the script, I know. How could the kid possibly know what to say to that in front of all these people? How could he know not to embarrass and shame himself? Regardless, I returned the lawyer’s steely gaze, staring back at the small, greasy man in the velvet suit, an itty-bitty cockroach from up on the bench. My attorney had had me memorize all my lines, pauses, intonations, and all.

“Young man?”

Met with a shrug, the kid starts drowning. 

“I really don’t know, sir. We just wanted it to be like how it was in the movies, you know? All vine-swinging and guns ablazing and damsel-saving. They told us-” he stops, the sheets of sweat coming to his forehead as if he really were back in that jungle. 

“They told you what?” 

“They told us it would be just like the movies, that they’d take care of us. That we’d grow into men. Like summer camp almost, I guess. We didn't think anything would come of it, you know, going into those woods.”

The migraine returns, this time stronger a thousandfold, a raging ocean beating against my skull. As the waves ebb and flow within my brain, I still hear the plop of her body as I rolled her into the sea.

“If you didn’t think anything would come of it, you wouldn’t have gone into those woods,” I shoot back, my voice both older and younger. In my chest, my heart beats with the speed of this young man’s heart, rattling around my rib cage like a mad clock pendulum. “Now, why did you go into those woods?”

He fidgets a minute, the cogs whirring around in his eyes as the whole machine is smashed to pieces within. The gray of his pants grows even darker still, a thin stripe tracing down his leg. With a rough snap of his lips against those perfect pearly teeth, he finally lets go.

“Because we didn’t know any better, okay?! We were–we are–just kids, conscripted for the freaking military. They didn’t tell us that we’d actually have to kill people or that we’d be marched around like mules all day long for those savages to pick off one by one! All you old lot think a man is forged in the fires of rotting flesh and gunsmoke, that we can just turn off that part of ourselves that screams that this is wrong, that this is all so terribly wrong?!”

His back shudders as he fights the sob welling in his throat, distorting the next words to come spilling out of his throat.

 “I’m just a kid, okay? I didn’t know what I was doing.”

The dim gray lights of the courtroom flicker a moment like the old projectors of the moviehouse down the street. In that instant, I see all their films float by, having seen none of them and yet having seen them all. The cheap jungle sets. The bad actresses contorting their faces somewhere between mild shock and enthused joy. The plastic toy guns that rattle ceaselessly until all the bad guys are flat on the gravel floor, degraded one final time by some cheesy one-liner spit out gruffly by the hero, the good guy smoking a cigar with the babe wrapped around his hulking shoulders, twirling his dog tags between her fingers.

Nowhere in those films was there ever a girl screaming, hands gripping her arms like bicycle handlebars and pushing her deep down into the dirt as though she belonged there.

“You knew what you were doing. You just didn’t know that there would be consequences.”

* * *

The rattle of the manacles wake me from what feels to be an endless slumber, my palm damp on my face as I am pulled out of that jungle and back into the cold, ventilated courtroom. 

The boy, looking not the small bug he was before but a full-sized man now, as does his lawyer, stares up at me as his hands are locked behind his back. The heat that still blazes in his eyes, the last embers of the jungle fires that always threatened our camps, pulls me down from the safety of my nest. Displaced, my robes contrast starkly with the boy’s white suit as he meets me at the door. 

With a final hot-breathed hiss in his ear, the boy’s lawyer puts a hand on his shoulder and slips out along with his family, their glares like iron weights upon me, leaving just us and the guard inside.

When he looks back at me, I know he knows about all the others, all the ones I let slip through the cracks all these years.

“Why?” he says, his trembling no longer out of fear but now born of rage. “Why did you let all the others go and not me? I am the same, you see, the same as all the others.”

“I know,” is all I can muster out at first, his trembling now contagious.

“Then, why, old man,” he spits, any speck of suppliant innocence sucked out of his glistening, vindictive eyes. “Why me? Why me when all of you did as I did before, coveted the life you’ve lived a thousand times over?”

Now it is I who wants for words, the little boy on the creaking floorboards, old and fat and completely helpless.

“I-I-I don’t know.”

“Come on, old man, spit it out!” he growls, his perfect teeth now white tiger’s fangs. I begin to fear that those steel manacles are not enough to hold him, a rabid zoo animal before me now. “Tell me, tell me. You owe me now that much since you’ve thrown my life away.” He pants a moment, his face a hot, wet mess of sweat and spittle. “Don’t you know I could have been someone, someone important? That was my destiny, don’t you see, old man? In every one of you, all you doctors, lawyers, and judges, there is one of me, a bright, young, creative asset to society that you have so spendthriftly cast to oblivion, branded and ruined for life?”

He takes a step toward me and I falter two steps back. Up close, his hair is a matted mess of mousse and gel, ruffled and cowlicked and totally tangled.

I begin to stutter out some nonsense.

“Don’t act so innocent. You know that you are like me, just like me. Each one of you has taken his share and has been totally ignored. If not ignored, then rewarded for it! Tell me, you old, conceited fool, how locking me away is supposed to ever make me a successful man like you?”

In deafening silence, I see the girl’s delicate copper arms plunge beneath the waves crashing in his eyes.

“It is so that you won’t be.”

Hearing the heavy oak doors clap behind me, I walk out into the lobby, glancing into the mirror by the coat rack. For the first time, my judge does not stare back.