A Private Sorcery by Lisa Gornick

he’ll have a coronary right here in her courtroom. “Does your client need a recess?” she asks his lawyer. The lawyer confers with the sweating man. My mind drifts—an afternoon some sixty years ago, sitting at my Uncle Jack’s dining room table, doing my homework. I could see across West End Avenue to the opposite building. An animal was crawling on one of the window ledges. At first I thought it was a pigeon. Then I thought it was a kitten that had climbed outside. Suddenly, the animal dropped from the ledge. It passed through the square of sky I could see from my chair. I rushed to the window to look below, but there were people on the sidewalk and cars going north and south and I’d been unable to detect anything.
    I hear your name being called. You sit in the same chair as the boy with the swastika on his scalp and the guy who looked like he was having a heart attack. The same armed police officer stands beside you. Morton is dressed in a brown suit, hair slicked back from his face. That confidence we invest in strangers on whom we need to depend dissolves and I stare at this simian-shaped man, jumping now from place to place with a yellow pad in hand. You look paler and thinner than the last time I saw you. I count back eight weeks to the day I handed you my credit card. Your eyes and nose appear to be running, and I think I can see the tremor in your hands. Despite Morton’s reassurances that thejail doctors will stay on top of detoxing you from the barbiturates, I’m afraid that your fine brain is going to seize.
    The other lawyer, the federal prosecutor, has the appearance of someone who has resigned himself to being fat. When he stands, his sport coat hikes over the waistband of his pants, elasticized in back. He reads the charges in a singsong voice: conspiracy to commit burglary, conspiracy to distribute controlled substances. He clears his throat. “In addition, we have been advised by representatives of the State of New York that they will be independently pursuing their own investigation through the Manhattan district attorney’s office and will be presenting a case to a state’s grand jury to secure an indictment of Mr. Dubinsky on manslaughter charges.”
    â€œWhat?” Morton says. “The weapon was never employed.”
    â€œThe pharmacist, Mrs. Kim Sun, miscarried from the shock of the experience.”
    Morton stands. The back of his neck is red. “What’s going on here?” “The miscarriage just took place this weekend. Mrs. Sun’s gynecologist is prepared to testify to this court that the pregnancy was well established prior to the burglary and that the trauma of the event was a precipitating factor.”
    The judge looks over at you. You are staring at the federal prosecutor. She beckons for the two lawyers to approach her. Afterwards, Morton goes to talk with you. The room is getting hotter and hotter, and I can hear the heat blasting in the radiators under windows the guards have pushed open. The judge bangs her gavel and Morton addresses her. “Your Honor, I would like, despite this new information which I do not believe further incriminates my client, to request that my client be released on his own recognizance. He is an employed physician. His wife, father and brother are also professionals. He has strong roots in the community and poses no risk to the court to fail to appear throughout these proceedings.”
    The judge writes some notes. Then she turns to the federal prosecutor. He twists in his seat to look at you as if to accentuate your utter depravity. “We are recommending no bail option. The defendant is anactive substance abuser. As the court may recall, we have data showing the extremely high percentage of nonappearances by substance abusers. Moreover”—here, the federal prosecutor raises his hands, as though to ward off a pending attack—“the government believes that the defendant is