Reckless Disregard (5 page)

Poniard:

>It can’t happen . . . but I’ll immediately wire transfer my retainer to your client trust account—isn’t that what you mouthpieces call it? Six figures is fine, whatever you need. Won’t that show my bona fides, as you lawyers say?

PStern

>I must have the information I request or I’ll resign effective immediately after tomorrow’s court hearing.

Outside in the corridor, one of my more unscrupulous colleagues is bragging to another that he’s extended a mediation over two full days when it should’ve lasted three hours—a major economic coup when you bill each side $750 per hour.

Poniard:

>Wow. I thought if anyone would respect a person’s right to keep their identity secret, it would be you, Parky G. I’m disappointed in you, my man

I rest quivering fingers on the keyboard and tap out inarticulate clatter—words of protest, denial, feigned ignorance, righteous indignation. I even type out
who the hell ARE you?
before realizing how absurd that question is. All of which I delete before I can bring myself to hit
send
. There’s only one positive—I’ve learned that Poniard is an adult. Children aren’t such good blackmailers.

What Poniard has somehow discovered about me is this: while William the Conqueror Bishop’s acting credits might not appear in the up-to-date version of the Internet Movie Database, mine do.

Parky Gerald, born July 16, 1974, in Los Angeles, California; active 1977–1987; a blond, rosy-cheeked waif who was a child star of the 1970s and 1980s, known for his wide eyes and piercing shriek of fear; appeared in 28 movie and TV productions, most notably Alien Parents (fourth top-grossing PG movie of 1983) and Alien Parents 2; dropped out of sight in late-eighties, current whereabouts unknown.

I’ve spent the last twenty-five years trying to keep this secret. My celebrity almost ruined me, and I don’t want it back, not even a vestige of it. I’m a lawyer, not an actor. I closely guard the truth about my past and have kept it secret through luck and hard work—mostly luck. My career ended before the Internet era, so there was no instantaneous cyber-stalking. Hormones helped—once I hit puberty, I looked nothing like my onscreen self. I became an emancipated minor—divorced my mother, in other words—and so had control over my own affairs. I spent my teenage years hiding in Southern California’s overpopulated public schools—loners aren’t much noticed—and after law school emerged as the newly minted Parker Stern, Attorney at Law. The few people who know about my childhood haven’t revealed it, either because they care about me or because they have secrets of their own that they want me to keep. I thought that after my last trial, which garnered so much publicity, some reporter or blogger or fan would finally discover that I was Parky, but so far it hasn’t happened. Maybe it’s not that surprising—these days, Parky Gerald is far less prominent than Poniard, or that graffiti artist Banksy, or writers Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon, and they’ve all managed to keep secrets about themselves. There’s a music group called The Residents that’s been around since 1974 and whose members’ identities are unknown. I cling to these examples in the hope that my background, too, can remain hidden.

Poniard:

>And it’s just not the one thing you have to worry about becoming public. Revelations beget revelations

PStern

>How biblical of you.

Poniard:

>Or if you prefer Greek Mythology, think Pandora’s Box. That’s why I won’t reveal even my age. But tell you what—I’ll keep your secret if you go to court and make sure I get to keep mine, OK? And together we will nail Billy Bishop for what he did to Felicity

So now I have to win the court hearing to get Poniard to keep my secret? I’m tempted to tell him to go fuck himself, but I don’t, and not because of the blackmail. I’m going to stay on the case for a different reason.

PStern

>I’m in for now. But make no mistake . . . I won’t continue to play your game forever.

Poniard:

>My game is as good as any other. Better, actually, from what I read. No reason to blow your cover to make a point. Another rule of game design—never lose sight of your objective

PStern

>Why me?

Poniard:

>I told you in our first chat—you’re good. You’re not intimidated by Frantz. You can keep a secret

PStern

>You’ll do far better with another lawyer for so many reasons.

Poniard:

>We gamers have a saying: embrace the chaos. So, hey, Parky embrace the chaos. You’ll find life more exciting

This kind of excitement is the last thing I want. I type
fuck you
into the text box, punch the
send
key hard, and sign off. But I’m not about to leave this case, and somehow this Poniard senses it. From what I read, part of his genius is his ability to manipulate game players on a quest into believing that they can take alternative paths, when all the time they’re unwittingly being funneled in one direction. The technique is called creating a
chokepoint
. How fitting.

On the night that Brighton’s great-aunt died, the paramedics called Social Services, which placed him in what on TV they call The System, and he thought he’d stay there for a long time. But then those two people marched on in and told him those unbelievable things. Now he lives with them in a large house. He’s made up secret names for them. The man is Bugsy because he talks like an old-time TV gangster. The woman is Hoar Frost Queen—his fourth-grade class read this poem called
Hoar Frost
and of course everybody cracked up—because she’s cold sometimes though not always, and because of what he’s read about her on the Internet. In September, they force him to go to a rich kids’ school, where of course he doesn’t have any friends.

The one good thing is that they have a computer with a twenty-four-inch LED monitor, way bigger than the one he had at home. And they have a new Xbox One. As long as he cleans his room and does some chores—clearing the dinner table, loading the dishwasher, making his bed, finishing homework—Bugsy lets him play video games, though the HF Queen doesn’t like it. The game he plays most is
Abduction!

In the few months since the video game came out, Poniard’s critics have accused him of scamming them, of releasing a game that doesn’t have a solution. Brighton refuses to believe that Poniard would cheat his fans like that. And yet, he can’t get past the beginning stage, in which Felicity sits in her bedroom getting ready for some kind of appointment. At first, this frustrates him, and if
Abduction!
were any other game, he would have given up long ago. But as he continues to play, he finds comfort in the way Felicity’s voice sometimes quavers like a tragic violin. There’s the way she sits at the mirror, gently brushing her red hair and gazing at her reflection. He finds himself getting protective of her. He’s never wanted to protect anyone or anything before, not even a pet. Aunt Greta owned a cat, but it hissed and scratched if he tried to pet it.

Poniard has given Felicity a lot of dialogue, part of the game developer’s genius. Brighton feels sometimes that Poniard has invented the game for him alone, that he and Felicity are having a real conversation. As he maneuvers the cursor across the screen, she’ll talk about random things—the weather, how her roommate Natalie is a pain in the butt, how men treat her badly, how she has a hot date that night. She talks a lot about being an actress, how she got famous for starring in a movie called
The Fragile Palace
, but her favorite role was in the flop
Meadows of Deceit
because she didn’t have to play a dumb, sexy girl in that one. Then there are her displays of flesh. When he first started playing, it turned him on, but now he gets embarrassed, as if he’s accidentally walked in on his big sister while she’s in her underwear. Sometimes it seems as if she can read his mind and answer his thought questions. He’ll be thinking of a strategy—wondering if a series of keystrokes will open a drawer or if dragging the mouse in a certain way will unlock the front door—and she’ll frown and shake her head before he even starts the move. Or he’ll walk into his room and stare at the computer screen without even moving the mouse, and she’ll look up at him and smile.

He works so hard to solve the puzzle that when he goes to bed at night and closes his eyes he can see Felicity’s room on the inside of his eyelids—the mattress and box springs with the flower comforter and puffy pillows; the knotty pine wardrobe that goes from floor almost to ceiling, with its large and small drawers, all of which will rattle at a mouse click but none of which he can open; the black wood dresser where she keeps her perfume and makeup; the old-fashioned mirror with light bulbs all around it like you see in an old movie; the household accessories, which seem so real that when Brighton accidentally bumps the mouse with his elbow, a lamp falls off the nightstand and breaks into tiny pieces. Felicity gives him a dirty look, gets a broom and dustpan from a dark corner of the closet, and sweeps up the glass.

Once he accepts that he’ll never get past Level One, that so long as he keeps playing the game he’ll be trapped with Felicity in her bedroom forever, a funny thing happens—he begins to treat the aimless keystrokes as a sort of ritual—superstitious, maybe even religious. Each time he touches the keys, it seems as if he gets a bit closer, not to winning, but to earning a divine reward. The world of
Abduction!
becomes more familiar, far safer, than the world that Bugsy and Hoar Frost Queen rule. Not that he confuses the game with reality. Just the opposite—the game is so clearly imaginary that it begins to feel truer than his real life.

And then one warm September evening, while trying random combinations on the input devices, a hidden drawer in the wardrobe opens, spewing out hundreds of envelopes and letters that swirl in a paper tornado up and out of the screen.

Kava, Celexa, Toprol, Argentum, Valerian—loyal soldiers all. Not in some massively multiplayer online role-playing game, but in my battle against stage fright. These are the names of the herbs and the beta-blockers and the anti-anxiety drugs that I mix and match and sometimes misuse to get through a court hearing without becoming awash in flop sweat or passing out on the courtroom floor. But these potions can’t vanquish the rodent that will decide to hone its teeth on my lower thorax at the very moment I enter a courtroom. Which is one reason I gave up trial work to become a mediator.

I park in the Music Center lot and cross the street to the courthouse. By the time I reach the Grand Avenue entrance, my eyes are teary and my forehead is hemorrhaging sweat. It’s the afternoon heat and the acrid smog, I reason, not rising fear. I pass through security—belt off, shoes off, smartphone in a plastic bin, flash your bar card so the bailiffs don’t confiscate the phone, get dressed, and hurry down the windowless corridor. Though courthouses are supposed to reflect the power and solemnity of the judiciary, the Superior Court for the State of California, County of Los Angeles, is a dump. The air-conditioning system rattles and coughs and makes the air dry, so that if you spend more than an hour inside you develop this hacking cough that will last for hours. The third-floor cafeteria serves food whose freshness is measured by the color of the mold propagating on the surface. Every courtroom smells like a combination of caked-on floor wax, fusty law books, and the rank body odor of the inmates from the County Jail who’ve passed through for sentencing. I revere the place. Or, I did before the fear descended upon me.

I take the escalator up to the seventh floor, where the Honorable T. Tedford Triggs presides in the courtroom designated Department 79. Most court business occurs in the morning, so in the afternoon the hallways are usually deserted except for a few harried trial lawyers conferring during a recess, anxious witnesses waiting their turn to take the stand, and a smattering of regulars flitting from courtroom to courtroom hoping to find the real-life equivalent of
Law & Order
. But on this afternoon, a large crowd has gathered outside Department 79. Lined up near the locked door are members of the media, many of whom I recognize—entertainment reporters, tabloid writers, and an earthworm named Brandon Placek who recently joined an online gossip website called The Tinseltown Zone. Bishop’s publicity machine has undoubtedly alerted them to the hearing. A bailiff stands guard in front of the courtroom, which I know is locked because pieces of cardboard obscure the tiny windows in the doors.