The Weight

I died suddenly one day. Apparently it was due to some random gene tossed up at me through eons like a bone from the void. A gift from some long-forgotten ancestor, I guess, designed to make a random blood vessel in my brain pop while I was lying in bed at age twenty-six. Pretty fucking lame. Lamer still: it seemed that rather than waking up in Heaven, which would have been ideal, I woke to find myself in what looked like a courtroom. Or it was like a mock-up of a courtroom, something you might see in a college production of To Kill a Mockingbird or something. I was on the stand which appeared to be made of foam painted to look like dark wood. There was an empty jury box to my left and before me were rows of pews, as you would find in a church. Was that normal for a courtroom? I tried to remember, dredging up episodes of Judge Judy for comparison. Next to me was a tall judges’ bench, set slightly away from the stand. Surrounding all of this was a deep darkness. I reached out to see if the judge’s bench was foam too and I noticed that my body was covered in thick, heavy chains. These were decidedly real and shifted on my body like snakes. I couldn’t tell if they were wet or just very cold. As I inspected them, some movement from the bench caught my eye. I started, making the chains rattle. There was a whole guy sitting there that I had somehow missed on my first go-over of the room. He was small and seemed to fade into his high-backed chair. He seemed to be about in his mid forties with a pinched face and wire-rimmed glasses that he wore low on the bridge of his nose. He regarded me for a few moments before speaking and when he did, his voice was quiet.

“Actually, the desk is fake,” he said and then squinted down at what looked like a pile of hundreds of tiny scrolls, each tied with a scrap of red cloth. He picked one up, seemingly at random, skinned the cloth off and showed me what was printed on it. “This your name?” he asked. It was. I nodded at him. He sighed and tossed the scroll back into the pile. “Please verbalize for the record.” He snapped his fingers and suddenly a silver microphone on a skinny, sinuous stand appeared in front of me like a cobra. I leaned into it, careful not to let it touch my lips.

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes, uh, that’s my name.”

“Which is what?” I had to think for a few seconds before it came to me even though I had just seen it written.

“Joshua Adam Deem.” It felt wrong but I didn’t have a better answer. The microphone winked away.

“Well, Mr. Deem. Why are you here? What do you think you’re being charged with?”

“Am I on trial?” I asked. The Judge took his glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Yes Mr. Deem. You’re on trial. Now I am going to need you to put your thinking cap on so we can kind of speed this process along. I do have the answer here somewhere but as you can see...” He swept his hand over the pile of scrolls apologetically. I squirmed and the chains grew tighter. “At least give me something entertaining to chew on while I try to find it,” he said, without looking at me. He picked another scroll up, glanced at it and then crumbled it in his fist. “Imagine filing anything around here, Christ.” I felt a bead of cold sweat roll directly into my butt crack. I opened my mouth, not quite sure what I was going to say.

“Um, well, okay. So like? Sometimes when I’m talking to a black person? I think to myself: I am talking to a black person right now. And I congratulate myself for it.” The Judge glanced at me from over his glasses.

“A black person, well. Congratulations. That’s rich. Go on.” he said, grabbing a handful of scrolls and flattening them on the desktop.

“Oh and uh, I hate homeless people. I hate their faces, I hate the way they smell. After I see them I go to my home, which I worked for and I think about how much better I am than them.” The Judge continued studying a scroll. “And also? I can’t fucking stand my family.” I felt myself suddenly desperate for his attention and all these shameful words just flowed out of me. “I think they’re all morons except me. I used to fantasize about being adopted all the time. I’m lazy too, and I drive drunk. I look at weird, fucked up porn; the normal stuff just doesn’t do it for me anymore.” The Judge adjusted the green glass shade of a desk lamp, illuminating the scrolls in a golden triangle of light. One of the chains on my body shifted and it was suddenly touching the bare skin of my neck. I gasped and blurted out: “Am I here because I covered my soul in shit, sweat and anxiety? And I ruined it and now I’m on trial? Is that a crime?” The Judge stifled a yawn. I opened my mouth again but the only sound I could make was sort of a girly, frustrated bleat. I felt my fists ball up. The blackness behind the courtroom grew deeper and my chains were cold, cold. The Judge took his time with a scroll as I writhed. After basically an eternity he looked at me again.

“Obviously it hasn’t occurred to you that you might just be here for an unpaid parking ticket. Or, let’s see here,” The Judge unrolled a scroll and peered at it, “rampant blasphemy? Though that’s usually dismissed. My point is, this could all be for something completely innocuous. Well, there’s too much here; I have no idea where to start. Nevertheless, here you are and you must be processed. And you’re evidently representing yourself. So.” He made a kind of ‘on with it’ gesture. My chains creaked and I smelled well water.

I remembered the time with the girl.

“Oooh, the time with the girl?” The Judge asked. He removed his glasses completely and looked at me, finally seeming somewhat interested. He had the mild look of a math teacher and the whites of his eyes had a somewhat yellowish cast. “Well, out with it.”

Once there was this drunk girl. She danced in the backyard at a party I found myself at and she danced with diamond glitter around her eyes. I didn’t remember her name but I really remembered the glitter and and the liquid way her eyes looked behind it, wet with excitement that seemed just for me. I thought we felt a connection as we capered and laughed, making circles around each other that took us farther and farther away from the party. I smelled her crazy-making body through whatever scents she used to mask it and holy fuck I was so God damn horny that night. It had been months plus I was on this stupid no jack off regimen to preserve my chi or something, some bullshit I had read in a hippie book from the 70s. I thought it would help be be more productive, I guess. And I was drunk, maybe, but she was drunker and the stars were all shining and I danced her away from everyone else and laid her down under a pine tree where I unwrapped her like a present, my mouth filling with the sugar of the night. She had her eyes closed and her hands stayed limp when I put them on my body and I

“And you..?” asked the Judge.

And I fucked her and maybe she didn’t know.

“And you fucked her and maybe she didn’t know. Hold on,” said the Judge. “Let me jot this down real quick here.” From nowhere, he had produced a quill pen with a ridiculously large feather and I watched it bob around as he wrote on the back of one of the scrolls while muttering my contemptible words to himself: “...and maybe...she didn’t...know.” He ended the sentence with a flourish, the tip of the feather describing a Mobius strip in the air. He tossed the quill into an inkwell I also hadn’t noticed before. On it, worked right into the glass, were the words sole fide. The Judge saw where I was looking and laughed. “Nice, right?” he asked, fingering the object. “I picked this beauty up, well, a long time ago now.”

“I mean, I know she wanted to. She was flirting with me all night.” I didn’t care much about the inkwell.

“Who? Oh, that slattern? You could tell how again? From her glitter, or what?” the Judge asked. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I could tell she wanted to all the way down to my hormonal core, that hot bar that runs from my sacrum directly to the base of my brain. She definitely wanted to. She had to want to. I’m sure it would have happened just the same if she was, well, conscious. It had just been one of those things. The judge grabbed the quill pen again and touched its tip to his tongue. “Just...one of those things,” he mumbled as he wrote. “Great. I think we got it.” He snapped the quill in two pieces and threw it over his shoulder. The ruined feather disappeared into the darkness. “Just one of those everyday things that happen from time to time. Well. Have you ever considered...this?

The Judge waved his hand prestidigitatiously and an image appeared before us, obscuring the empty pews. It was Glitter Girl. Her face was bright and clear of the mild acne scars I remembered but she was dirty and dressed in rags. She had her head bundled in a faded floral kerchief and she was selling matches in the snow. We watched her wander with her pitiful wares through an endless Dickensian landscape, all soot-stained buildings and narrow walkways covered in sleet. She stopped only to peek into the picture window of a rich family and lick her dry lips at the sight of a Christmas ham being served to round-cheeked children. As she burned one of her precious matches for warmth I looked on with an open mouth and tears sliding from my eyes. Suddenly the Judge clapped sharply and the entire scene winked out.

“Ahaha, no. Just kidding, totally fake. Look, Mr. Deem, she never knew. Nothing, functionally, happened, basically zero consequences for either party, so what do we even have here? Are you guilty? Who cares? Let’s move on.”

I was shattered. I shook my head, unable to drop it.

“She must have had some idea.”

“She didn’t.” The Judge leaned in closer to me. He was beginning to look deeply interested. “She didn’t even feel anything the next day, you know, down there. You must be, well. How should I put this? Always finding yourself washing your dandelion root in the Adriatic?”

I was shattered. My chains shook. She didn’t know, she never knew. A wave of horror washed over me as I realized that the guilt I felt from the original act was nothing compared to the grief I felt from losing the knowledge that I had destroyed another person. I was starting to understand why I didn’t just wake up in Heaven after brother blood vessel gave up the ghost in my brain. I was a wretch. I imagined the baroque tortures waiting for me after my trial; the rack, thumbscrews, a hot poker shoved directly up my ass.

“A hot poker up the ass? That’s funny. That’s a real original torture idea right there, a hot poker. In the ass, even! Actually, you know what? We’re definitely done. It’s time for the scales. You’ll indulge the formality, I’m sure. They need a ritual, you know.” He gestured beyond the empty jury box at the inky void. ”They are hungry for it.”

I fell still and waited. The Judge sat with his long fingers in a steeple. I was beginning to have trouble focusing on his face. Silence filled the courtroom and it was heavy. It filled my ears with a cold throb and my mouth with the taste of pennies. I began to hear the blood rush around in my head; a sound I had not noticed since I was very small. I thought of the blind bureaucracy of the body, tunnels of blood inside me, delivering banal bits of life to sacs and glands that would just excrete them away again, around and around until the day it all comes apart. I could have screamed but I did not. The Judge sat at his desk, completely frozen. Eternities passed before I began to hear something.