Bio-Justice Read online

  And then it was over. There had been no visualizations of his life with Sonya other than her misery at the trial, no projections with him and Sonya and their baby. And in this, Danny felt an unconscious gnawing, understatements of a road being laid out before him that did not match his own imaginings.

  Amity Price removed the helmet. Danny’s pupils contracted, his eyes blinked, fighting to regain focus. She unfastened his restraints as the guard looked watchfully on.

  “Is it over?” Danny asked.

  “No,” Amity said. “That was just the first session. You’ll have another session tomorrow and then four more. When these sessions are completed, you’ll have more of a grounded sense of who you are, what got you here and it will give you a solid foundation on which to build your future.”

  So Danny returned for the subsequent sessions and the breadth and dimension of his infused memories expanded the protracted recall of his lifetime but again, to his dismay, he noticed no pleasant mirages which included Sonya and his son.

  It was on the evening of his last orientation session that Amity Price announced to Danny that when he finally left the facility, he would be released to a halfway house, then relocated to the Midwest where he would begin his new life—alone.

  CHAPTER 7

  The halfway house in Plainfield, New Jersey was to be the final stop before his release. There, in the house he shared with other processees, Danny was free to move about in a daily routine of his own choosing, a schedule most flexible with the exception of the mandatory group sessions held at three o’clock in the afternoon in the front parlor. Once the twelve room, two story structure had functioned as a modest transient hotel, and now it was Danny’s safe place within a real community before being released on his own. Danny was permitted to leave the house with an escort, take walks down the street—even in the early evening—past stores and restaurants and schools. With a small daily stipend, he was allowed to make simple purchases, like cigarettes or chewing gum, baby steps to integrate him back into the transactional flow of being a citizen again. His escort was trained to watch for any episodes resulting from a skewed alignment of the processee’s newly achieved age and a conflicted, intractable memory.

  At first, most of the other processees housed with him were quiet, as if they were afraid that if they said the wrong thing or spoke their minds, the promise to release them would be quickly rescinded. Slowly they sensed they were in no such danger and their bravado returned.

  Danny observed the other five in the house. Wilson Caine was not among them; Danny was told Caine was being held for extra treatment as his crimes had been so severe. Kyle Thompson kept to himself and discouraged any social exchange so he was pretty much left alone. As for the others, they were friendly but tentative. Vic Carbona was a fence—a pretty good one apparently—specializing in high-end stones, until he got into a gunfight one summer night with a guy trying to stiff him. Vic survived; the other guy was dead after seven bullets perforated his neck and torso, leaving as his sole survivor, his grieving father—a federal judge. Vincent Nase killed his brother-in-law after a heated argument over Vincent’s wife’s fidelity but claimed it was self-defense after the deceased pulled a knife on him. The jury didn’t buy it. Arson was Art Finley’s poison. Pissed at his business partner, Art burned their office down. Unfortunately, the cleaning woman, a mother of four, who was not supposed to be working that night, died a horrific death in the blaze.

  The men, tired of watching Wheel of Fortune and Entertainment Tonight, turned away from the screen and ventured some conversation. Paris Easley, who left a teller partially paralyzed when he nervously pulled the trigger during a ridiculously planned bank robbery, fixed Danny with his eye and spoke first.

  “The first thing I’m going to do?” Paris pondered out loud. “Probably get laid. Although, look at me—what woman in her right mind would want to fuck this?” His hand pointed to his body like a car salesman who didn’t have the heart to sucker a customer on a beat-up wreck with a damaged engine. He managed a smile and said to Danny, “How about you?”

  “The psychiatrist, Dr. Angstrom—he told me to forget about trying to reconnect with my girlfriend. He said that in the end it would only cause everyone pain.”

  “What the hell does he know?” Vincent said. “Goddamn shrinks.”

  Danny kept confiding. “They’re sending me halfway across the country, to make sure I don’t sabotage myself.”

  “They’re doing the same thing to me,” Paris said. “I’m going to Austin, Texas. I don’t know a soul in Texas, but I guess that’s the point.”

  “Chicago,” Danny said. “I hear your dick freezes off in the winter there.” He turned to Vic. “What are you doing?”

  “Same as I always did,” Vic said, his right hand shaking a bit. “Only this time, I’ll play it smarter.”

  “Shit,” Art hissed. “Don’t you get it, man?”

  “What?” Vic said defensively, acting genuinely surprised.

  Paris palmed back his long silvery hair. “Didn’t you learn nothin’? They ripped the prime years out of you, brother. It’s all downhill from here. You’d better figure out somethin’ else to do. Me, I’m gonna tag as much pussy as I can. I’m gonna die with a fine lady’s legs wrapped around my wrinkly ass.”

  Everyone laughed, not so much because Paris’ aspirations were so comical after what he had gone through, but because he captured the spirit they all desired for themselves, a confidence that defied improbable odds.

  “I got a wife at home,” Art said. “She worships the dirty drawers I step into each morning. It used to bug me, like she didn’t have a life without me. Now—well I think I’ll just let her take care of me for a while until I figure out what I’m gonna do.”

  “I’ll tell you what you’re gonna do,” Vincent snarled. “You’re gonna build your whole day around taking a good shit, just like the rest of us.”

  The men let themselves fall over in laughter. Even Art smiled a little.

  When the room got quiet again, Danny spoke, forgetting for a moment the ferocious cynicism searing anyone who dared to speak. “I’ve got a baby boy,” he said. “I haven’t even seen him. I mean they can send me to Chicago. That won’t stop me. He’s still gonna see his daddy.”

  “You mean his granddaddy,” Paris chided.

  “Fuck you,” Danny said, laughing at first. Then his face grew slack.

  “I was just messing with you, man,” Paris said. “How do you feel?”

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel,” Danny said, his eyes staring, unfixed.

  The room had become still and the men could feel the desperate air filling their lungs. Their laughter felt like a distant memory.

  Paris ran his tongue over his dry lips. “I shook my head when they asked me if I felt like I was fifty-three, but I’ll tell you the truth…” he said in low voice that sounded like coiled rage, “it feels like a terrible trick has been played on me. And I’m pretty pissed off.”

  Danny’s group was among the second wave of processees, the first group having been released to different parts of the country under intense scrutiny just weeks earlier.

  Van Houten was called in to examine the results as it would be his agency’s job to spin the publicity if the processees’ forays back into society were met with resistance, failure, or worse—tragedy.

  Already, serial rapist Elton Lancaster was dead. Two days after being released, Lancaster died of a massive cardiac arrest in a shopping mall in Atlanta. It was later determined that all of the valves leading to his heart had exploded because of intense compression caused by his Premium Sentencing treatments. Lancaster’s body had been immediately removed from the scene and had undergone an autopsy by Sarkis and his team for critical tests and analysis. As a result, the local news hadn’t time to scratch the surface of the event and reported Lancaster’s massive coronary simply as the sad ending for a sixty-six year old man with no traceable family, never mentioning his criminal rap sheet or his pa
rticipation in the Premium Sentencing program.

  And then there was Barclay Mathis, a notorious Harlem based drug dealer convicted of the execution style murder of one of his runners who stupidly decided to skim a little extra off the top. Mathis, aged to seventy-one years, was advised not to return to his girlfriend Monica’s house but hammered on her door anyway, shooting her three times in the chest before wrapping his open mouth around the gun barrel and blowing his brains out. Apparently, his girlfriend saw no future between a nineteen year old and a man in his seventies and told him so. Mathis finally agreed. The news stations didn’t let this story get by as with the one of Lancaster. The double killing involving this couple with their startling age disparity caused reporters to dig deep for all the lurid details and at the core of the story they found Bio-Justice.

  It occurred to local news stations that Bio-Justice would become the story of the year, perhaps of several years and soon reporters were being dispatched to different neighborhoods around the country to give the viewing public a stake in the public discourse. News directors could juxtapose their nightly stories of gang shootings and child murders with on the spot opinions by neighbors and eyewitnesses on the pros and cons of Bio-Justice. Ultimately, the Bio-Justice angle was a ratings godsend, with viewers tuning in to hear animated opinions about the new word on criminal punishment. It seemed as if everyone had a strong opinion on the subject and even though the consensus was mostly fifty-fifty, the networks could skew it deliberately to air more interviews with those who were in favor of it. It just made for more lively news segments and it seemed to coax the drama out of normally unremarkable or placid interview subjects. And after stations noticed an uptick in ratings when Bio-Justice was mentioned rather than Premium Sentencing, the latter term was seldom used.

  (Dallas) Reporter: “What would your opinion be if the suspect were found guilty of assault with a deadly weapon—do you think he should be administered Bio-Justice?”

  Interviewee: “What, you mean take the years off his life? Hell, yeah! Instead of taxpayers feeding him and paying for his cable TV and his conjugal visits, give him a real punishment. I mean, he’s going to spend the time anyway. It might seem severe to some people but believe me, he’ll think twice before he tries anything else.”

  (St. Louis) Reporter: “So they just arrested a gang member who has been charged with killing a young mother and her two kids. If he is convicted, would you be in favor of Bio-Justice—yes or no?”

  Interviewee: “I am so glad they came up with this Bio-Justice. You think you’re slick and you’re going to commit murder on women and children? OK, then. Pay the price—”

  Reporter: “Pay the price?”

  Interviewee: “Pay the price. You know, we don’t hang people in this country, we don’t electrocute them, all we say is do the time. Well, now they’re going to do their time. We never said anything about doing the time all at once, now did we?”

  (Los Angeles) Reporter: “Do you think it’s humane to take a man or a woman’s youth? Is it making we as a society no better than the accused—where we exact our revenge as opposed to seeking justice?”

  Interviewee: “The people have a right to be protected. All the bleeding hearts can cry over these murderers and rapists. I won’t lose a drop of sleep. Not a drop!”

  (Boston) Reporter: “Ma’am, the verdict in the recent home invasion murders—what if the convicted is sentenced to go through the Bio-Justice program?”

  Interviewee (laughing): “He’s got consecutive sentences, he’ll probably come out as a ninety year old man. I want to be there when he leaves prison on his walker so I can laugh in his face. Too bad they won’t take them beyond forty years. I’d like to see some of these animals come out on the other end as a pile of ash.”

  Reporter (turning to camera): “Well, as you can see, passions run pretty high on this subject. It seems as if the people have had enough and are speaking out. Back to you in the newsroom, Wendy—”

  But it was when the reporters discovered the whereabouts of Jimmy Ray Abbott in Galveston, Texas that the real mania began. Even with the knowledge that the government was releasing processees back into the population, no one had seen one—Lancaster and Mathis notwithstanding because of their quickly delivered deaths—and people were curious as to what they looked like, how they were coping, did they still have criminal intentions, or if, as one of the more flamboyant rumors had suggested, they were tagged like cows with small chips implanted under the skin so officials could track them.

  Instead, Abbott offered up a woeful sight: a grizzled old man who held up his hand, covering his face when reporters aggressively approached him with lights and cameras. Abbott looked tired and he was uncooperative, not giving the media and therefore the public the full human spectacle of a man who had his vitality taken from him with only decline to look forward to.

  On one particular evening, Abbott made a pathetic attempt to run from the haranguing reporters but his legs, now cumbersome with gout, could not carry him very far. Finally, Abbott, head down and grim-faced, pleaded with his pursuers to leave him alone, that he had paid his debt to society and now just wanted to live in peace. One reporter shouted if Abbott had apologized to the parents of the boy he had struck while drunk behind the wheel. Another yelled out if he had served enough time for the boy’s death. Then the reporters piled on and the audio heard on the evening news that night sounded like a mob bludgeoning Abbott with the name child killer. And when this was answered with an awful silence, the group of reporters finally relented as if ashamed of its indecency and left Abbott alone to return to his shabby hotel room.

  That moment seemed to chasten the media and many stations moved towards self-imposing a moratorium on stories exploiting processees. These were legitimate news stations not tabloid outlets after all and there had to be a line which wouldn’t be crossed.

  The moratorium lasted two days. Conscience-laden closed door meetings took place in newsrooms across the country, all with the same result. Now that they had tasted the curious allure of the Bio-Justice phenomenon, news directors could not go back to feature stories about offbeat weddings or wayward cats caught up in electrical poles. More importantly, the public’s appetite was still not satiated.

  Not long after, the Bio-Justice stories were back, even more prolific than before.

  Even late night television comedians incorporated at least one Bio-Justice joke in their monologues per night.

  Comedian: “Have you heard about this Bio-Justice? A 21 year old guy got caught shoplifting and they put him through Bio-Justice. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Well, I shouldn’t say it was a total failure. The guy still shoplifts, but now he’s lifting Milk of Magnesia and Depends.”

  After groups like Danny’s were met with conditional success, there was a rush to infuse more candidates into the system. Premium Sentencing was now taking eligible men and a handful of women in groups of twenty and thirty.

  Maximum security prisons in every state in the country were being siphoned by Governors in search of candidates for the program. Some of the more exuberant media outlets hailed the end of the era of coddling monsters, stoking the bloodlust satisfactions and revenge cravings that the society had seeded in its citizens when it failed to address the unanswered hardships of their lives.

  On the night after Labor Day, local and national news ratings hit their biggest audience share in thirteen years. The sight of Frank Wiggins, a notorious wife killer, aged to a man of eighty-seven, almost completely blind and hobbling with the help of a trembling cane sent the public into a frenzy, for Frank had become the poster boy for justice served and the embodiment of karma indisputably proven.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 8

  When Danny was released in Chicago, he reported to a state administration building on Randolph Street and was given eight hundred dollars as seed money to start his new life. He immediately took two hundred and twenty-eight dollars of it and bought a train ticket back to New York. Dr.
Angstrom, Amity Price and even Felice Bennett had said that for Danny to restart his life back in Brooklyn would be disastrous. They all but forbid him from going back to the old neighborhood, to the old faces, to the old life, but Danny knew that to the letter of the law, he had met his obligation and was not bound by constraints anymore. The folks behind this whole puppet show had a lot wrapped up in Bio-Justice and they wanted success stories—the shameful publicity of another Barclay Mathis they didn’t need. But for Danny, one idea, one notion was sacred since this whole Twilight Zone thing started—he nurtured it, held it close, and in turn it had given him hope, kept him forward-thinking and sane. The Orientation had given him a sense of inexorable time passed but it could not dissuade him from going home.