Chapter One — It’s a (912)
The smoke detector went off at 9:14 a.m. on a Saturday, which was honestly a personal best.
I’d had the heat too high under the pan — the heat is always too high under the pan, that’s just my relationship with stoves — and I’d turned my back for a second to grab the eggs, and that second turned out to contain the kind of small domestic catastrophe that I, personally, am evolved to produce. The butter went past brown, past nutty-brown, past the brown they tell you about in cooking shows, and into the brown that means you have created a small problem with consequences. I yanked the pan off the burner. The smoke detector kept screaming. I waved a dish towel at it — the wrong color of dish towel, which is to say clean, which is to say useless — and somewhere in the waving Marcus emerged from the hallway in basketball shorts and exactly one sock, took one look at the kitchen, and said the words he says about three times a week.
“Joshua. Honey. Why.”
“It’s fine,” I said, still waving. “It’s fine, it’s just the butter —”
“Joshua, I have eaten brown butter. Brown butter does not set off the smoke detector at nine in the morning.”
“Well, the brown butter and I had a difference of opinion about how brown was too brown, and the smoke detector took her side.”
Marcus reached past me and pressed the little button on the underside of the smoke detector with one calm finger, and the screaming stopped, and the kitchen was suddenly so quiet I could hear the refrigerator and the window unit and the very faint disapproving breath of God.
“Thank you,” I said. “I was going to make you a frittata.”
“Your visions,” Marcus said, “are how I got smoke damage on my security deposit.”
“That was one time.”
“It was last Tuesday.”
He looked at me. He looked at the pan. He looked at the eggs, which I was still holding in one hand, too tightly because my grip strength does not know how to do gentle before coffee — and then he reached over, very gently, and took them out of my hand and set them on the counter like he was defusing something. “Sit down. I’ll make breakfast. You sit.”
“I don’t need to —”
“Joshua. Sit.”
I sat.
This is more or less how Saturday mornings work in the apartment off MLK and West 39th. I get up first because my brain wakes before the rest of me and there is no negotiating with it, and I decide that today is the day I make some elaborate breakfast, because cooking is one of the maybe four things on Earth that makes my head go quiet and I love it the way other people love church. And then somewhere between the ambition and the execution my brain darts off after a thought I forgot I was having — a phrase from a deposition transcript, the sudden urgent need to know whether the Sandoval appeal had been refiled — and the butter goes past brown and Marcus emerges in one sock and takes the eggs out of my hand.
Marcus is a public defender, on a six-month clerkship in Savannah while he waits for a permanent position in Atlanta. Marcus has systems — a wall calendar with three colors of marker, a folder labeled FINANCIAL — Q3 — DO NOT IGNORE that he does not ignore. We met our first week of UGA Law, when I said out loud the thing the professor was about to say and the professor stared at me for a full uncomfortable beat and Marcus, two seats over, started laughing into his hand. We have been each other’s people ever since.
He cracked the eggs into a clean pan with an ease I find offensive, and I sat at our two-person breakfast table — really a card table with a tablecloth on it — and tried very hard not to think about the thing I had been not-thinking-about for six weeks.
Six weeks ago I had sent my application to Humphrey & Associates. I had sent them my résumé and my law-review note on landlord liability post-Harker — the note I had spent more time on than any human should spend on a thing nobody was going to read, the note I had written because I knew I would one day put it in front of the man whose name was on the case — and then I had clicked Send, and heard nothing. Not a we received your application. Nothing. Six weeks is long enough for silence to become a fact about your life.
Marcus had been there the night I clicked Send, and every night since when I refreshed my email at two in the morning, and for the slow slide from hope to its quieter cousin, the one who shows up uninvited and takes off her shoes and stays a week. I’d been in the cousin stage about four days. Marcus had not been making me talk about it.
“Eat,” he said, sliding a plate in front of me.
“It’s perfect.”
“It’s eggs, Joshua. You could’ve made them yourself if you’d put the heat on three.”
“Three is for cowards, Marcus.”
He laughed — the small private one, the one I think nobody else in his life gets to hear — and sat down across from me, and the morning started to be the morning. The window unit hummed. Somewhere outside on West 39th a kid was yelling at another kid. I drank Marcus’s coffee. It is better than mine for the simple reason that Marcus does not get distracted while he is making it, and I started to feel a little human.
That was when the phone rang.
It was face-down on the table — I’d put it face-down sometime in the last week, having decided the sight of the screen was worse than the silence — and it buzzed against the cheap wood with the kind of dull insistence that meant a real human being. I picked it up. The screen said (912) UNKNOWN.
912 is the area code for Savannah. 912 is the area code for every law firm I had applied to in Savannah, a list of one, and that one was Humphrey & Associates, and I had not heard from them in six weeks. The universe of reasons for a (912) number to call me on a Saturday was a universe of two possibilities. One: a timeshare scam. Two: I was about to die.
I forgot how to swallow. This is a thing my body does — when something is too much, the mechanism that is supposed to be automatic stops being automatic, and the conscious doing of it makes it worse, because now the muscles are suspicious of each other —
The phone buzzed again. “Joshua,” Marcus said, over his coffee cup, with the expression of a man who has watched me forget how to swallow before. “Answer the phone.”
“It’s a 912.”
“I know. I am sitting here. Answer it.”
I answered it. “Hello?” — and my voice came out one octave too high and one syllable too long, the hello of a person pretending to be a competent professional adult while actively dissociating from his own throat.
“Hello,” said a woman, in a voice warm and businesslike and Savannah-accented and absolutely, devastatingly prepared. “May I please speak to Joshua Pierson?”
My thumb was already digging its nail into the pad of my other thumb, hard enough that there’d be a half-moon mark later, and some part of me very far away was grateful for it.
I said: “This is.”
That is what came out of my mouth. Not This is he. Not Speaking. This is. Like I was a haunted house.
“This is Gina, calling from Humphrey and Associates.”
I keep, at all times, a small theater behind my sternum, and behind the curtain a standing cast of about forty-seven Joshuas, every last one of whom had been waiting backstage six weeks for someone to say the words Humphrey and Associates. The curtain went up. They came on all at once.
“Mr. Pierson?” Gina said, after a beat in which I had failed to make any human noise.
“Yes. Yes, hi. Hi, Gina. I’m here. I’m Joshua. Yes.”
Across the table, Marcus very slowly put his coffee cup down.
“I’m calling on behalf of Mr. Humphrey,” Gina said, so gently, like she had made this call to a lot of twenty-five-year-olds. “He has reviewed your application materials, and he’d like to schedule an interview. Are you available next Friday?”
“YES,” I said — the way a person says yes when they are being asked to accept an organ donation from God. Marcus winced.
“Wonderful. He has an opening at eight in the morning. Does that work?”
“Eight in the morning works perfectly,” I said, in the voice of a person for whom eight in the morning works perfectly. I am a person for whom eight in the morning is a theoretical construct. But Gina did not need to know that.
“Excellent. Our offices on Bay Street. Do you need the address?”
“I have the address.” I had the address memorized in three different fonts.
“And — congratulations on getting an interview. Mr. Humphrey is very particular about who he meets with personally. He liked your writing.”
The room went briefly silver around the edges. “He — he read my note?”
“Mr. Humphrey reads everything,” Gina said, with the smallest amount of fond exasperation. “Have a wonderful weekend, Mr. Pierson.”
“You too. Thank you. Thank you, Gina. Thank you so — okay. Goodbye.”
I hung up. I put the phone down on the card table very precisely, the way you put down a thing that might break if you put it down wrong.
I looked at Marcus. Marcus looked at me. The window unit hummed.
“He read my note,” I said, in a voice that was not entirely my voice. “Marcus. He read my note.”
Marcus put down his coffee cup. He folded his hands on the card table, very deliberately, the way he folds them when he’s about to do something he has been waiting to do, and he said, in a voice so calm I knew the calm was a lid:
“Joshua. The man you have been writing toward for five years read your law-review note and liked it and he is interviewing you on Friday.”
“Marcus. I know. I know.”
And then Marcus did the thing I have seen him do maybe four times since I’ve known him, which is break — not weeping, nothing the front of a shirt couldn’t contain, just the small involuntary half-second where his mouth goes a little not-Marcus and his eyes are suddenly too bright, and you can watch the very expensive lid come down on the very large feeling, and catch, and hold. He took a breath. He picked up his coffee cup. He said, perfectly calmly: “I am going to need you to walk me through, very slowly, every single thing she said. Starting with the part where you forgot how to say speaking.”
I burst into tears.
I had not cried in six weeks. I had been doing the thing where you decide I am not going to feel this until there is something to feel, and now there was something to feel, and the dam was not even slightly prepared for the volume. Marcus got up and came around the card table and put his arms around me from behind, because I was still in my chair, shaking and crying into my own hands, and he said oh honey, oh honey, to a man whose body had finally caught up with what his mind had been carrying.
I cried for about ninety seconds. Then I said, into my hands, muffled and snotty and completely embarrassing: “I need a suit.”
“Joshua. Baby. We are going to deal with the suit. Right now you are going to finish your eggs.”
“My eggs are cold.”
“That is what happens to eggs when you cry on them for ninety seconds. Eat your eggs.”
I ate my eggs. They were cold and they were Marcus’s eggs and they were the best eggs I had ever had in my life.
He was halfway into a list — suit, shoes, haircut, how early I’d have to leave Friday with a buffer of at least twenty minutes because I am involved, whether Ms. Cloe was going to start — a separate problem, because Ms. Cloe is a 1998 Oldsmobile with moods — when the phone rang again.
This time I knew who it was. There is exactly one person on Earth with the structural awareness of my interior life to call at the exact moment something Harker-shaped has happened to me, and her name is Emma, and she is my older sister, and she has been doing it since I was sixteen.
The screen said Emma.
“Em,” I said.
“Joshua David Pierson. What happened.”
There was a long second while my brain ran through everything she already knows about me, which is everything.
Nine years ago the ceiling of our apartment came down at ten o’clock at night because a management company had been told eight separate times about a soft brown stain and had eight separate times written back the word cosmetic. Marie was under it for three hours. Emma was nineteen and got there first and stayed, both arms in it past the elbow, talking to our sister through a foot of plaster until somebody with a saw got the joist up; her hands have kept the record of that, and she does not discuss them and she does not hide them. Marie had three surgeries and eleven months before she could walk across a room without something to hold. And then four years of a phone ringing in the wrong direction, four years of the matter has been referred, until a lawyer in Savannah named Richard Humphrey took a case very like ours all the way to the Supreme Court and won, and a door that had been painted shut came open.
All of that lived in the silence between what happened and what I said, which was:
“He read my note.”
A silence. “He read the whole thing.”
“He wants to interview me. Friday. Eight a.m.”
The silence this time was the silence of a woman whose body has just been told a thing it has been waiting years to be told. “Joshie,” she said, suddenly very small. “You’re going to be in a room with him.” A beat. “Are you going to tell him?”
There it was. The question I had been avoiding for five years, and Emma — the only person alive with the standing to ask it — was asking it on a Saturday morning, six days out, in the gentle voice she uses for the things nobody else can ask.
“No,” I said. I said it fast. Faster than I should have. Marcus, across the table, did not look at me, which is how I knew he was listening very carefully.
“Em, I can’t. If I tell him in the interview it’s going to look like I’m cashing in a chip. Like I’m asking for the job because of what he did for us. And that’s not why I want it. I want to do the work, the way he does it. I don’t want him to look at me and see —”
I stopped. I could hear Emma breathing.
“You don’t want him to see a kid he saved,” she said, very quietly.
“...Yeah.”
“Joshua. Honey. You are a kid he saved. I’m a kid he saved. Marie walks to work. Refusing to tell him doesn’t make that not true. It just makes it a secret. And secrets in a law firm —”
“I know, Em.”
Another silence — two people acknowledging a thing they both already knew and agreeing to pretend, for the rest of the call, that the acknowledgment hadn’t happened. Then Emma, in the voice she uses when she has decided to let me have a thing: “Okay. You don’t tell him in the interview. But you are going to tell him eventually. And when you do, it’s going to be a hard day, and I want you to know in advance that the day that man finds out you are our Joshua is going to be a good day — even if it’s also the day you’d choose not to have, if you could choose.”
“Em.”
“I’m just saying, Joshie. Now go put on a clean shirt. And wear the navy tie. Not the gray one. The gray one makes you look like a substitute teacher.”
She hung up.
I put the phone down very precisely, same as before, and looked at Marcus. “Emma says hi. Emma also says thank God it’s Marcus, because she wouldn’t trust any of my other friends to get me to Friday alive.”
“Your sister,” Marcus said, “is correct on every count.”
I laughed. It came out a little wet and a little surprised, the way laughs do on the back side of crying.
The week happened — the compressed, unreal forward motion of days you can’t stop walking through, Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday blurring into one. We bought the suit: charcoal, single-breasted, tailored at the waist by a man on Broughton Street who owed Marcus a favor and therefore did the alterations in three days. We bought a navy tie, because Emma was correct on every count. Marcus drilled me on interview questions until the answers started coming out of my mouth like sentences spoken by a person rather than recited by a hostage.
I did not sleep well. I had not expected to. On Thursday night I sat on the edge of my bed at almost midnight and looked at the suit hanging on the closet door, where I’d hung it at 11:47 after taking it out of the dry-cleaning bag just to look at it, because it was what I was going to wear into the most important room of my life so far. The shoes were arranged on the floor below it, the way you arrange the pieces of a costume the night before a play.
The apartment was quiet except for the window unit. Somewhere on West 39th a dog was barking at nothing, patient about it, the way Savannah dogs bark because it’s their job and not because they expect anything to come of it.
I thought: tomorrow morning I am going to be in a room with Richard Humphrey. I had rehearsed that sentence for years and had never once been allowed to say it. The sentence kept arriving and arriving and there was nowhere for it to go.
At some point my right hand had found the soft skin on the inside of my left wrist and was pinching — small, precise, not enough to bruise, just enough that there was a place on my body that was now, and the now of it was louder than the sentence. There was a small pink mark on the inside of my wrist. I had not decided to make it. My hand had remembered for me.
I had wanted this since I was nineteen years old.
I got up. I touched the sleeve of the jacket once, very lightly, to confirm it was real. I turned off the light, and lay down on top of the covers because it was August in Savannah and the window unit was losing, and I closed my eyes, and I did not sleep, and somewhere on the other side of the not-sleeping, very far away, the morning was already coming.
Chapter Two — Footnote 47
Here is what I knew at 7:29 on a Friday morning in August, sitting in a 1998 Oldsmobile named Ms. Cloe in the parking lot off MLK and West 39th, wearing the charcoal suit Marcus had watched me put on like a man dressing a friend for a funeral he was about to officiate: the interview was at eight, the drive was twelve minutes, and I’d built in forty-eight minutes of buffer because two weeks ago Marcus had said the word buffer at me in a tone that meant it was non-negotiable. And Ms. Cloe was making the noise.
The noise was the small apologetic click under the dash that meant the security module was having one of its feelings, and the feelings meant the starter was not going to talk to the battery, and no amount of turning the key was going to change her mind about it.
“No,” I said. Out loud. In the car. In a suit. “No, Ms. Cloe. Not today. Any other day in the calendar year you can have feelings about your security module. Not today.”
I turned the key. Nothing.
The steering wheel was already warm from the sun coming through the windshield at the low aggressive angle Savannah gets in August, the angle that exists to remind you the day is not on your side. I pressed my palm flat into the crack in the seat where a dime had slipped into the seam years ago, hard enough that the stitching made a row of points against my hand, and the points were a place, and the place was now, and I had about four seconds before Brain Joshua decided this was a crisis big enough to justify forgetting how to swallow.
I spent them on the phone.
“Humphrey and Associates, this is Gina.”
“Gina.” It came out by itself, in the voice of a man handed a life preserver. “Gina, hi. This is Joshua Pierson, I have an eight o’clock with Mr. Humphrey, I’m having a small issue with my car —”
“Mr. Pierson. Is your car not starting?”
“No ma’am.”
“Are you calling to reschedule?”
And there it was — the version of my life that lived on the other side of the word yes, the one where I came this close to a room with Richard Humphrey in it and backed out of the room because of a security module. My spine did a thing I had not known spines could do, which was get rigid in a direction.
“No ma’am. I’m calling to let you know I’ll be there on time.”
A pause. The pause of a woman who had worked at a law firm long enough to develop a professional sympathy for the things twenty-five-year-olds say into telephones. “Mr. Pierson. Where do you live?”
“MLK and West 39th.”
“That is three and a half miles from our offices.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“In August.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“In a suit.”
“Gina, I have to go now. I’ll see you at eight.” I hung up.
I got out of Ms. Cloe and took off the jacket and laid it across the passenger seat the way you lay down a thing you might never see again, and then the shoes, and the navy tie Emma had told me to wear. I stood in the parking lot in a dress shirt and socks thinking I do not own running shoes that are in this car — and then I remembered the gym bag I had not taken out of the trunk since March, which held, because of who I am as a person, one pair of running shoes, a pair of Under Armour shorts, and a tank top, all of them clean because Marcus had made me do laundry on Sunday and I had, for once, done it.
I changed in the parking lot in ninety seconds, crouched between Ms. Cloe and a gray sedan belonging to a woman in 4B I was going to have to pray was not at her kitchen window. I zipped the suit into the bag and slung the bag across my back.
7:36. Three and a half miles. On time, like I’d told Gina I would be.
I ran.
Running three and a half miles through downtown Savannah in August with a gym bag full of wool banging against your lower back every third step is not a thing you do while thinking about something. It is a thing you do while your thinking gets knocked out of you by the running. The first half mile my brain was still itself — cataloging the heat, the humidity already inside my shirt, the strap sawing my shoulder, the fact that I hadn’t eaten because I’d been going to eat in the car — and then somewhere around Drayton and Liberty the cataloging stopped and there was only the running.
Savannah at a quarter to eight in August was a city sucking in the first breath of its day and deciding whether to hold it. The live oaks over Drayton hung their moss in long gray drapes that didn’t move because the air didn’t move. On Monterey Square a woman was walking a small dog, and the dog wore a sunhat that matched hers, and on any other morning I would have stopped, because a woman and her dog in matching sunhats at 7:48 is exactly the kind of thing you write down and keep — and I had just enough breath to think matching sunhats and then lose it, because there was no room in me for anything but lungs.
On Bay Street, four blocks out, the sun cleared the roofs and hit the side of my face with a fresh and personal hatred, and my brain tried — heroically — to reach for an image for what was happening in my chest.
My chest is like a —
It was not like a.
My chest is —
Nothing. The whole library was empty, because what was happening in my chest was just what happens when you sprint three and a half miles in August without breakfast on the worst morning of your life, and there is no metaphor for that. There is only the thing. Sometimes your brain reaches and the shelf is bare and you keep running.
I kept running.
The revolving door looked, on its best day, like the entrance to a small cathedral, and on this morning like the door to the part of my life I was going to spend the rest of my life on the other side of. I pushed through it at a dead run. A woman getting off the elevator took one look at me and stepped back with the grace of a person who had lived in Savannah long enough to know when to. I hit the button for the fifth floor twice, because the first time didn’t count.
In the mirrored back wall a Joshua looked at me: roughly the color of a boiled lobster, hair plastered to his forehead in wet comma-shapes, tank top no longer white, wearing an expression I’ll describe as what have I done.
The doors opened on five, and somewhere far back in my chest a small voice I’d been outrunning the whole way finally caught up, and it said: you are about to meet him.
I made it six feet into the lobby before my body filed its complaint. I put my hands on my knees and bent over them and breathed, which is not how you enter the most important room of your life, but my legs had opinions and the opinions were winning.
“Mr. Pierson, I presume.”
I knew the voice before I straightened up. I’d heard it in two oral-argument recordings and one panel Q&A I had streamed at one in the morning with my forehead nearly against the laptop, and I would have known it anywhere, and it was here, six feet away, attached to a man.
I straightened up.
Richard Humphrey was taller than the recordings let on and stiller than a person has a right to be at eight in the morning, in a charcoal suit that made mine — wherever mine currently was, in a bag, on my back — look like an apology. Gray at the temples. A face that gave away precisely nothing, which I knew from the panel Q&A was a thing he did on purpose. And he was looking at me — the lobster-red, the wet hair, the running shorts — with an attention so total and so level that every cell in my body stood up at once and pointed at him like iron filings, and the thing I felt, dripping on his marble, was not embarrassment.
It was recognition. The whole-body kind. There you are, said the part of me that had been getting ready to say it for six years. There you are. It’s you.
And then, half a second behind it, the terror: do not let it show. Whatever you do, do not let him see it. Which is a tall order to hand a face like mine.
“Yes sir,” I said. Between breaths. “I’m — sorry. My car. I ran.”
“You ran.”
“From MLK and West 39th.”
“From MLK and West 39th to Bay Street is three and a half miles.” A beat. “In August.”
“Yes sir.”
“It is 8:02.”
“Yes sir.”
He looked at me a moment longer, and I had the sudden vertiginous certainty that the level attention had snagged on something — that he had caught the thing I’d told my face not to do. He sees it, I thought, and the floor of my stomach went out. He can tell. Then I told myself what he could tell was that I was a kid who’d just run across a city and was about to faint in his lobby — true, and a far more survivable thing to be caught at.
“Gina.” He did not look away from me. “Take Mr. Pierson to the washroom at the end of the hall, find him a clean shirt from the supply closet, and tell him his interview begins in my office in precisely fifteen minutes.”
“Of course, Mr. Humphrey.”
“Mr. Pierson. Fifteen minutes is a concession, and I am making it on the strength of a note that was worth the read. It is not a concession I make twice. Are we clear?”
“Yes sir. We’re clear.”
The clean shirt was a charity-run shirt two sizes too big in the shoulders, and over the running shorts the effect was less associate than man who lost a bet. I buttoned it true and tucked it in like I had chosen it, because the only thing worse than looking absurd is looking absurd and sorry about it. I looked at myself in the washroom mirror — a man dressed by a 5K and a panic attack — and said, quietly, okay, and went down the hall.
His office had one wall of glass and one wall of photographs and a visitor’s chair that turned out to be a beautiful mid-century walnut thing engineered, I understood about thirty seconds in, to be quietly unbearable — the kind of chair that sorts the people who can think through discomfort from the people who can’t. I sat in it and did not let it win.
“Tell me why you applied to Humphrey and Associates.”
I had three openings ready. I’d built them over six weeks, said them to the bathroom mirror; one of them had a structure. I opened my mouth and all three went over the side at once, and what came out instead was the truth, which is the one thing I have never been able to keep behind my teeth.
“Because of Harker v. Pegasus Properties.”
“I see.”
“Because of the chain-of-accountability argument in section three. Because of what it did to tenant standing in the Eleventh Circuit. Because of footnote forty-seven of the majority opinion, which —” and here some animal caution caught up with my mouth a word too late “— which I’ve read more times than is reasonable.”
Something happened in his face.
I’ve replayed it enough times to be sure of this: nothing moved. He leaned back in his chair a degree or two further than the conversation asked for, and the stillness of his face acquired a kind of depth, the way still water gets darker as it gets deeper, and for one second the most attentive man I had ever been in a room with was looking at something that was not, exactly, me.
“Footnote forty-seven,” he said.
“Yes sir.”
“Footnote forty-seven of the Harker majority is a three-sentence aside on the reach of respondeat superior to property-management shell entities.”
“Yes sir.”
“It is, as footnotes go, technical.”
“Yes sir.”
“And you have read it more times than is reasonable.”
“Yes sir.”
I had no idea what I’d done. I’d said a true thing about a footnote and the temperature of the room had changed and I couldn’t read the direction of the change, and reading rooms is the thing I do when nothing else works. I decided I’d overstepped — that there’s a way a student is allowed to admire a case and a way he isn’t, and I’d just demonstrated the second one — and I sat in the unbearable chair and waited to learn how badly.
“Mr. Pierson. Your note on post-Harker landlord liability is the best thing I have read from a law student in about four years.”
The red that had been leaving my face came back from a new direction. There is no way to hold a sentence like that. The body just receives it and colors, like a sunburn arriving.
“Thank you, sir.”
“I have one concern. You cite the majority some nineteen times, which is ordinary for the genre. Where you cite it is not. You don’t build on the headline paragraphs. You build, almost entirely, on the footnotes — the scaffolding most readers of that opinion, including most of the lawyers who’ve cited it since, have never climbed down into.”
“I was taught,” I said, “that the footnotes are where a writer has to commit.”
“Taught by whom?”
And here is the first brick of the thing I will have to answer for eventually: the true answer was sitting in the chair across the desk from me. The true answer was you. By reading you at one in the morning for six years. By a settlement that paid for my sister’s surgeries because of a case you took all the way up. The whole true answer rose in my throat in the half-second of the question, fully formed —
“By a professor,” I said.
He held my eyes a beat longer than the lie deserved, and let it go.
“Tell me about a time you solved a legal problem by coming at it sideways.”
And something unlocked, because this was a question I had the whole answer to. “Legal Aid, last fall. Eviction client. Landlord said she hadn’t paid; she’d paid cash, no receipt. She kept apologizing for the no-receipt — I know how this looks, I know how this looks — and I thought, the thing she’s apologizing for is not having paper. So what does she have that is paper. Her bank statements, in a folder, because she’d used them for her taxes. Same withdrawal, same day, same amount, fourteen months running. I subpoenaed the landlord’s deposits. Matching, to the dollar, the next day, every time.”
“Who told you to look at the client’s statements?”
“Nobody, sir.”
“Nobody.”
“She kept apologizing. The apology was the evidence.”
He was quiet, and I’d learned enough in twenty minutes not to fill it.
“We start new associates Mondays at eight.” He slid the résumé across the desk so I could see the top of it, where someone in his front office had printed my name as Joshua Pierce. “The name is wrong. I have corrected it. Someone here owes you an apology and I’ll see it made — and I’ll note that you got this far without correcting me yourself, which is either restraint or a willingness to let small injustices stand, and at some point I am going to want to know which.”
I looked at the line he’d drawn through Pierce, and the Pierson in the margin in a hand that was, I am not making this up, unusually careful, and I understood that he had been watching me not correct him for forty minutes, had filed it, and was handing it back to me as a question.
He thought it was restraint. He thought he’d caught a young man too eager to please the name on the door to risk a correction. That is what I let him think. The actual reason I had not corrected Pierce — that a part of me had gone very still and very glad to be, for forty more minutes, a man named Pierce with no particular history in this office — was not a reason I was going to hand anyone across a desk on the first day.
“Thank you, sir,” I said. “For correcting it.”
“It was a small courtesy. Welcome to Humphrey and Associates, Mr. Pierson.”
I don’t remember standing. I remember his hand, and mine, a handshake firm and brief that did not linger, and I remember that somewhere behind my sternum a thing I’d been holding open for six years eased shut, quietly, like a door in another room.
“Gina will see you out.”
I waited until the elevator doors had fully closed before I let my back hit the mirrored wall. It was cool through the borrowed shirt. My hamstrings were vibrating at a frequency I hadn’t known hamstrings could reach. The small theater behind my sternum — the one that had opened six days ago at a card table, Marcus across from me and a stranger named Gina saying Humphrey and Associates into my ear — had gone completely, blessedly dark. Empty house, lights down, one exhausted man in the middle of the auditorium, too tired to applaud.
I had the job.
I’d gotten it by running three and a half miles in Under Armour shorts, and Richard Humphrey had corrected my name in the margin of my résumé with his own pen, and I was going to be turning that over — the neat line through the wrong name, the right one in the careful hand — for a great deal longer than was reasonable. I knew that already. I was not going to look at why I knew it. Not today.
Ground floor. I crossed the lobby in a motion closer to a controlled lateral collapse than a walk, out into a Savannah morning that had gotten meaningfully hotter, and took stock on the sidewalk: no car, no ride, Ms. Cloe three and a half miles away being exactly as broken as I’d left her, Marcus at work in the opposite direction. I took out my phone, opened the thread with Marcus, and typed the only word I had.
Marcus
It buzzed back in four seconds, which is how long it takes Marcus to understand that a one-word text from me means the words are still coming.
joshua
joshua what happened
joshua pierson are you alive
i got it, I typed.
The dots came and went, came and went. Then one word.
how
I stood on the sidewalk in a borrowed shirt and running shorts and looked at how on the screen, and thought about the suit in the bag on my back, and Ms. Cloe in her lot, and the line drawn cleanly through the wrong name, and I typed:
marcus i need you to come get me
And then:
also you should sit down before you read the rest of this
I lowered the phone and turned my face up and let the August sun hit it flat, the way you let a thing happen to you when you’re out of the energy to prevent it, and I thought: I am a person who has a job at Humphrey and Associates.
My hand pressed once against the center of my chest, where the theater had gone dark.
I hadn’t told it to. It had remembered for me.
Chapter Three — Mold Farts
I got to Humphrey & Associates at 7:31 on my first morning, twenty-nine minutes early, because I’d made Marcus drive me — Ms. Cloe being in a shop on Abercorn having her security module spoken to firmly by professionals.
Marcus had dropped me at the curb on Bay Street and looked at me for a second with both hands still on the wheel.
“You’re going to be great,” he’d said.
“I’m going to throw up.”
“You’re going to be great and you’re going to throw up. They’re not mutually exclusive. Go.” And then, as I’d opened the door: “Joshua. Heat on three. All day. Every burner of your life. Three.”
I had nodded like this was metaphor. I was fairly sure it was metaphor.
The security guard was the one from the interview — Curtis, who watched me come through the revolving door in an actual suit with the expression of a man witnessing a sequel.
“You’re the runner,” he said. Not a question. It was never going to be a question.
“Limited engagement,” I said. “One performance only.”
“Mm-hmm.” He slid a temporary badge across without looking it up, which meant he’d had it ready, which meant I had been discussed. “Fifth floor. They’re expecting you.” A beat. “Nice to see you with pants on.”
I got in the elevator before my face could do the thing it does. My face did the thing it does anyway — I watched the red climb out of my collar in the brushed-steel doors, the way it has since I was six, on its own schedule, answering to no one. I pressed my thumb against the sharp corner of the temporary badge, and the corner was a fact, and the fact was now, and now was an elevator going up to a building I’d walked past twice last summer pretending I had reasons.
The fifth floor didn’t look like a law firm is supposed to look — no oxblood leather, no dead men in oil who wouldn’t have shaken your hand. It looked like somewhere people did work they believed in: warm wood, a wall of glass, light off the river, the firm’s name in brushed letters against deep blue — the same letters I’d looked at on the website at two in the morning more times than I’ll admit in a document that might be read aloud in court someday.
“Mr. Pierson.” Gina rose from the front desk — today a woman in a green dress who had clearly decided to enjoy this. “Right on time. And dressed for the occasion.”
“I’m building a reputation in the other direction,” I said. “Slowly. One fully-clothed appearance at a time.”
“You keep it up.” She gave a small nod I chose to receive as a passing grade. “Sandra in HR needs forty minutes of your signature, and then I’ll walk you back. And — ” she lowered her voice “ — somebody’s going to apologize about your name. Your interview packet had it as Pierce. That was us — a temp back in June — and Mr. Humphrey was — ” she paused, selecting “ — displeased, in the specific quiet way that’s worse than loud. So when Sandra apologizes, let her. She’s been rehearsing.”
I’d spent six years building toward this building, and on my first morning it was apologizing to me, for my name — on Richard Humphrey’s instruction, because he had read the packet.
He had noticed. He had minded.
“I’ll let her,” I said.
“Good. Down the hall, third door. I’ll come for you at nine.”
I went down the hall, and that’s where I made my first tactical error of the day: I looked at the walls.
The walls were a museum of the firm’s wins — front pages, legal-journal covers, a courthouse crowd with their fists in the air — and two-thirds of the way down, in a plain black frame behind glass somebody kept clean: the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the day after. LANDMARK RULING HOLDS LANDLORDS TO ACCOUNT. Under it, on the courthouse steps, a younger Richard Humphrey squinting into a Washington morning, not smiling, holding himself like a man who has just set something down that he’d carried a long way.
I knew that front page. We had it — on the refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like a peach, for most of a year, until the newsprint went soft and yellow at the folds and my mother moved it to the drawer where she keeps the things she can’t throw away, the same drawer with my sisters’ hospital bracelets in it. I did my homework at a kitchen table eight feet from that front page. I became, in a real and not exaggerated sense, a person because of it.
And now it was on a wall eight feet from where I was about to have a desk, behind clean glass, and I couldn’t touch it, and I couldn’t explain it, and I couldn’t stand there looking at it for the length of time my body wanted to, the kind of length that gets noticed.
I made myself keep walking, past the front page, down the hall to sign forty minutes of paperwork with a woman named Sandra who apologized, twice, sincerely, about a typo — it’s completely fine, these things happen — while the true sentence sat behind my teeth the whole time, getting heavier.
By the time Gina walked me back, the true sentence had gone quiet again, and I was a professional adult again, more or less, right up until she stopped at a desk and said, “And this is you.”
I looked at the desk.
The desk was directly outside Richard Humphrey’s office.
Not in the associate bullpen across the floor. Not in a shared anything. Here. A clean wide desk with a window to its left and Richard Humphrey’s glass office wall to its right — close enough that a man at that desk could, theoretically, be observed all day by the man in that office, on the general principle you’d apply to a pot you weren’t sure about.
“Is this — ” I started.
“He requested you here specifically,” Gina said. “He wants you on his tenant cases, working directly under him. Which” — already turning, but she gave me this over her shoulder, a gift she wanted me to have — “does not happen. Mr. Humphrey treats first-years as a species of wet dog he has been asked to hold. He made an exception. Try not to make him regret it before lunch.”
And then she was gone, and I was standing at my desk — my desk, outside his office, my desk — with the morning sun coming off the river through the window on my left. I set down the one box of my things. I arranged my pens parallel to my legal pad, squared my monitor to the edge of the desk, aligned my stapler, with the kind of precision that, in another life, with another brain, I might have been able to sustain.
That version of me lasted about as long as it takes to describe him.
Richard Humphrey came out of his office at 8:52 and put a case file on my desk. The file was not so much a file as a geological event — a banker’s-box worth of documents bound and clipped into something with its own weather — and it landed on my squared and parallel and aligned desk and the desk stopped being any of those things.
“The Dominguez matter,” he said. “Familiarize yourself with it by two o’clock. We’ll discuss strategy then.” And he was already turning, already going, talking to my future self — the one who’d have it familiarized by two, whom he’d decided to believe in without consulting me.
“Yes sir,” I told his back. “On it.”
I opened the file.
The Dominguez matter was a family. Mother, two kids, a converted mill rebranded as luxury, a landlord, and mold — black mold, in the walls, behind cosmetic paint, in a building where the management’s idea of a repair was a man with a spray bottle of bleach and a grievance. The little boy had asthma. The asthma was new. The asthma had arrived with the apartment.
I read the top page and felt the specific heat come up the back of my neck that I have learned to recognize as this one is real, this one is going to live in me, and then I stopped recognizing anything because I was working.
By 9:47 my desk looked like a recycling center had achieved sentience and immediately given up. Maintenance requests in one drift, flagged blue. Medical records in another, yellow. The landlord’s responses — such as they laughably were — in green, and the green stack was the shortest stack, and the shortness of it was an argument all by itself. I ran out of desk. I moved onto the chairs. I had, I would later be informed, established a small forward operating base on the carpet around my feet.
“What,” said a voice directly above me, “is happening here.”
I looked up. Richard Humphrey was standing over my desk looking at it like a scene he was going to have to describe to investigators.
“Organization,” I said.
I heard it as it left my mouth — the word organization hanging over the visible evidence, like a caption on a photograph of a building on fire that reads everything is fine.
His eyebrow went up a genuinely impressive distance. “I see. And does this organization operate on a principle, Mr. Pierson, or is it more of a — ” he looked at the floor installation around my feet “ — movement.”
“It’s a mapping system. I can’t see connections in a stack — everything’s hidden behind the thing on top of it. So I make it flat, I make it visible, and then the pattern’s just there, on the desk being a pattern at you. Blue’s maintenance requests. Yellow’s medical. Green’s the landlord answering, except he mostly didn’t, which is why there’s barely any green. The size of the green pile is the case.”
I ran out of air.
I waited for the part where he reassigned me to a basement, or fired me, on day one, over carpet.
He looked at the green pile.
“The size of the green pile is the case,” he repeated, like he was checking the sentence for weight-bearing capacity.
“Yes sir.”
“Hm.” He straightened. “As long as you can find what you need the instant you need it, I’ve no interest in what your desk looks like getting you there. Results outrank tidiness, Mr. Pierson. However.” He nodded, once, at my feet. “The carpet is shared infrastructure. Contain it to the desk.”
“Right. Yes. Containing.” I started gathering the floor outpost into my arms. “Sir — for the record — I always know where everything is. It just doesn’t look like I do.”
He paused at his door. He did not turn all the way around. “I’m aware,” he said. “You found the green pile.”
And he went in, and the glass door closed, and I stood there with an armful of someone else’s catastrophe and my face doing the thing again. The first thing I felt was professional: he didn’t make me change it. The second thing arrived half a second behind and was not professional at all — the way he’d said I’m aware, the dryness of it, the not-turning-around — and I knew in real time it was a problem, and I put it in the drawer with the other thing, the lower drawer, the one that was getting full.
“You should know,” said a new voice, “that you have just witnessed something the rest of us have only heard about.”
A trim man maybe mid-forties, reading glasses shoved up into his hair, a coffee in each hand. He crossed and set one on the only square inch of my desk that didn’t currently have a human being’s medical history on it.
“Martin Chen. I do Mr. Humphrey’s casework with him. That” — he tipped his head at the closed glass door — “was him intrigued. With Richard, intrigued and a parking ticket look identical. But the last associate who built a ‘system’ on that carpet spent half a year in document review contemplating his choices, so. Welcome.” He nodded at the coffee. “You haven’t had anything to drink since you got here. You’ve been vibrating.”
“I do that.”
“I noticed.” He said it without any edge, a fact reported and set down, and went back to his office, and I drank the coffee, and it was good, and got back into the file, and the morning closed over my head like water.
At 2:00 exactly Richard came out with his briefcase and said, “Are you ready,” and I gathered the relevant drifts of the Dominguez matter into a portfolio in an order that looked like chaos and was not, and we went to meet the family — Richard takes new associates to clients immediately, Martin had warned me on the way past. Baptism by deposition. He believes in the deep end, and he’ll deny believing in anything.
The mill was beautiful the way a thing is beautiful right before you notice it’s lying to you. Exposed brick, enormous windows, a smell in the lobby that I clocked before we’d cleared the front mat.
“Observations,” Richard said, while we waited for an elevator that announced its arrival with a shudder.
“Water’s getting in, and it’s been getting in a while,” I said. “There’s a bulge in the exterior brick on the north face — not cosmetic, a wall holding more water than a wall should. And that smell — ” I breathed in to confirm it and immediately regretted breathing in “ — that’s mVOCs. Microbial volatile organic compounds. The gas mold puts out when it’s alive and busy. It’s basically — ”
The word arrived in my mouth before the committee that’s supposed to review my words had been seated.
“ — mold farts,” I said.
There was a silence in the elevator lobby of the Dominguez family’s building.
“It’s not the technical term,” I said.
“I gathered,” Richard said. “I am familiar with the phenomenon. I had not, until this morning, heard it given that name.”
“You can use it. In court. If you want.”
“I’ll weigh it against the alternatives.” The elevator shuddered open. “Continue, Mr. Pierson. Without the — vocabulary.”
Elena Dominguez met us at the door, a small straight-backed woman in her early thirties with the particular tiredness of someone who has been right about something for a long time and ignored about it for exactly as long. Behind her, two kids. The girl, maybe seven, with the careful watchful face of an oldest child. The boy, smaller, with an inhaler in his fist held the way other kids hold a toy they’ve been told they can’t lose.
Richard was courteous in a way that was almost formal, and the formality was kindness — the precision of his manners made room for her dignity instead of crowding it. He photographed. He asked his questions in order. Mrs. Dominguez led us through her apartment pointing at the evidence of her own life going wrong — the stains, the bubbled paint, the vents — and her documentation, when she produced it, was a binder so organized it could have testified on its own behalf.
The little boy watched me the whole time.
I know that watch. That is the watch of a kid who has figured out that the adults in a room are talking about him in a language built to keep him from understanding it, which is a thing adults do because they think it’s mercy and is actually just lonely. So when there was a lull, I went down. Not crouched — down, all the way, sat on my heels, because you cannot have a real conversation with someone you are looming over.
“That’s a good dinosaur,” I said. There was a dinosaur on his shirt. “Triceratops?”
A nod. Shy.
“I’m Joshua. What’s your name?”
“Miguel.”
“Miguel. You’ve got the inhaler there. You have to use it a lot?”
He looked at the inhaler in his hand like it had been called on in class. “When it rains,” he said.
And there it was, handed to me by a six-year-old in three words — when it rains — the correlation three of his doctors and none of the landlord’s people had been willing to draw, and I felt the case turn over and lock into place with an almost physical click. And underneath that, the other thing — the thing this kid’s small expert grip on his own inhaler did to me, which I’m not going to put words around, because the words are my sisters’ and they are not for this file.
“Can I ask you something important,” I said to Miguel. “Where in the whole apartment do you feel the worst? Where does breathing get the hardest?”
He pointed, without having to think, at a doorway down the hall. His room. On the north face. Behind the bulge.
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Yeah.”
He studied me with the terrible directness little kids have before the world teaches them to round the edges off. “Is the bad air the thing making me sick?”
I had a whole answer ready. The careful adult answer, the one with I’m not a doctor in front of it like a little fence. I got as far as opening my mouth, and then I thought about the ceiling — no, about the eleven months after the ceiling, and me being sixteen and standing in a hallway while adults said careful fenced things over Marie’s head, and how much she had hated it, how she had told me later that the worst part wasn’t the pain, it was that everyone kept managing her — and I took the fence down.
“Yeah,” I said. “It probably is. But here’s the thing, Miguel. That’s not allowed. Where you live is supposed to be the safe place. It’s actually against the law for somebody to let the place you live make you sick and not fix it. That’s a real law. And me and Mr. Humphrey, that’s the whole reason we’re here — we make people fix it.”
He thought about this with his entire small face.
“My favorite is the ankylosaurus,” he said finally, which is how I knew we were friends now, and went and got a shoebox of them to prove it, and for a while there in the wreckage of that family’s living room I sat on the floor and a six-year-old walked me through the defensive adaptations of armored dinosaurs while his sister, won over, brought her science homework for a second opinion, and somewhere behind me the photographing stopped.
I became aware of the quiet the way you become aware that someone has been standing in a doorway.
I turned. Richard was watching us. Watching me, on the floor, with the kids. His face was doing nothing at all, which I was starting to understand was its own kind of information — a thermostat with the one reading, and you learn to feel the building around it.
“I believe we have what we need,” he said. “Mrs. Dominguez. You’ll hear from us inside the week.”
Miguel tugged my sleeve at the door. “Are you really going to make the bad air go away?”
I looked at Richard. Richard gave me a nod so small it barely cleared the threshold of being a nod.
“We’re going to do everything there is to do,” I told Miguel. “That’s the job. We make it right when somebody’s made it wrong.”
In the car, I waited to be corrected. I had been informal. I had promised a child an outcome, which they teach you in clinic never to do — and I’d gone and done it anyway, to a kid holding an inhaler.
“You connected with them,” Richard said instead, pulling into traffic with the unhurried exactness he brings to everything, like the car is also a document he refuses to be sloppy with.
“They’re good kids. They shouldn’t have to live in a wall that’s making them sick.”
“No. They shouldn’t.” A pause, and then, with his eyes on the road: “Your familiarity with mold pathology is unusual for a first-year. Most attorneys reach for an expert. You reached for the — terminology.”
And here it came, the place where the ground gets thin, the place I had known was somewhere in this drive because it is somewhere in every drive: the small ordinary question that, if I answer it all the way, lets the heavy sentence out.
“I did some environmental health stuff in school,” I said. Which is true. It is true. It is also a door I shut on a much larger room, and I shut it smoothly, and I felt the smoothness with a private flush of relief — good, handled, clean, he bought it — and I looked out the window at Savannah going by so he wouldn’t see my face confirm how relieved I was.
“Mm,” Richard said.
That was all. Mm. He let it sit there, the way he’d let organization sit there over my burning desk, and I read the Mm as the sound of a man accepting an answer and moving on, because that was what I needed it to be.
“When we’re back,” he said, “begin the documentation. The pattern of cosmetic repair against the documented health timeline. Organized.” A beat. “On the desk. Not the carpet.”
“On the desk,” I agreed. “Yes sir.”
I lost the rest of the afternoon and a fair amount of the evening, the way I lose time when something has its hooks all the way in, and when I surfaced it was past seven and the floor had gone quiet and dark except for the lamp at my desk and the light still on behind Richard’s glass.
I packed up slowly, my body stiff from however I’d been sitting — I couldn’t have told you — and on my way out I let myself do the one thing I shouldn’t have, and stopped and looked through the glass.
He was at his desk, reading, the way he reads, with his whole attention, like the document might try something. He didn’t see me. The lamp had turned the window into a half-mirror and I could see myself in it, faintly, laid over him — a tired kid in a wrinkled suit, superimposed on the man whose footnote I have read more times than is reasonable — and I stood there a beat too long. I have a very accurate sense, in the moment, of exactly which beats are too long. It has never once helped me stop.
I made myself go to the elevator.
In the elevator I texted Marcus, because the day was too big to carry up the stairs alone:
survived. didn’t get fired. desk is outside his actual office, which is going to be FINE and NORMAL and not a problem at all.
The three dots came and went.
“fine and normal,” Marcus wrote back. from you that is a flare in the sky and a man on the ground waving two orange wands.
eat something, he added. i’m not home, i’ve got the late intake shift. there’s rice.
I put the phone in my pocket. The elevator went down. My thumb found the sharp little corner of the temporary badge and pressed and held, and that was as much of the day as I could hold at once — the first day of the thing I’d been walking toward since I was nineteen, and I was going to have to do all of it without my face giving away either of the two things it was, right now, dying to give away.
One day at a time, I figured.
I had been wrong about easier things.