Ben Winters - Countdown City

I look around the room, trying to narrow down somehow who Julia might be. If I were Brett, who here would I fall in love with? Who would I follow to doomsday? But I’m not Brett. I’ve never met him. Forty-five minutes until I’m supposed to be back at the Thompson Hall exit, collecting my dog and getting out of here.

“And—sorry, were you done?” says the vice, glancing respectfully at the chair, who nods, shrugs. “And so anyone who wants to say something is invited to do so at this time.” A handful of people are already making their way down the aisles, raising their hands to speak. The third judge, the vice to the vice, turns up his chin and watches them come. He’s quiet, watchful, little beady eyes scanning the room over and over. He has yet to speak.

There is a woman with red hair, dark red, so dark as to be almost brown. She’s three rows up from mine, across the aisle, and she seems to be taking notes or minutes on a pad of paper balanced on her bare knee. She’s wearing a very short black skirt, black boots. Brett, I think, would have found her attractive.

The first speaker to offer his input is a small man in cargo pants and a plain red T-shirt. He stands in one of the aisles and reads rapidly, almost agitatedly, from a stack of index cards. “The whole idea of theft from a communal store is itself a reflection of capitalist thinking. In other words, the crime of theft cannot and should not exist in a postcapitalist society, because property”—he leans into the word, his voice charged with disdain—“cannot and should not exist.” He flips to a new card; the vice to the vice looks irritated. “Our vigilance is required against attitudes that reflect not only explicit capitalist dogma, but vestigial reflections of same.”

“Okay, thanks,” says the chair. The little man looks up from his cards; clearly, he wasn’t finished.

“Thanks,” she says again, and someone says “Point of order” from the back—it’s the fat man in the overalls, and the chair acknowledges him with a nod. “I just want to say, in regard to what that guy just said: That’s stupid.”

The vigilant anticapitalist looks around the room, doe eyed, wounded. The chair smiles softly and nods for the next speaker. Small lines are forming in two different aisles of the auditorium. I keep my eye on the dark-haired woman three rows up. What is my move here? How long do these meetings last?

The next speaker is a woman with long matted dreadlocks, who wants to propose a complicated redemption-based system, wherein those accused of rule breaking would engage in a dialog with the community about the nature of their transgression. This idea the vice chair gets excited about, nodding vigorously as the woman speaks, his curls bouncing. It goes on like this, speaker after speaker: someone wonders if today’s proceedings might in fact inspire further infractions; a man asks politely if the public-nudity policy is still on the agenda, and the affirmative answer from the vice draws cheers; a young woman with earnest eyes and a single thick braid running down her back rises and says that she’s been carefully noting the speakers at this meeting, as well as the six previous R&R meetings, and can report that people of color are participating at a ratio of just one in twelve.

“Huh,” says the vice chair. “Maybe because radical movements have always been the province of the privileged?”

“Maybe because we’re in fucking New Hampshire,” says the class clown in the overalls.

In the laughter that follows, the woman with dark red hair looks around and sees me watching her. She does not look down: Instead she meets and holds my gaze. It occurs to me that I could pass her a note, and the idea is so absurd that I very nearly laugh out loud. Are you Julia Stone? Check this box if yes .

“Okay,” says the chair. “I think that’s enough. Just in terms of time?”

The vice looks surprised, but the vice to the vice nods. The defendant shivers, hunching forward, glancing from side to side. Male shirtlessness can in the right circumstances be powerful, leonine, but it can also make a person seem exposed and helpless, the knobs of the spine quivering and fragile like surfacing fish.

“I’m sorry,” I say “Excuse me.” I stand up. This is stupid. This is the stupidest thing I could possibly be doing right now. “What is it he is accused of stealing?”

A room full of people turn their heads toward me, the man who fits in least with this crowd now drawing the maximum amount of attention to himself.

“It’s not really relevant,” says the vice, after glancing respectively at the chair for permission to handle this one. “Our protocol says, given limited time and resources, to focus on outcomes when the cause of action is relatively straightforward.”

“Yup,” says the chair. “Bingo.”

The vice vice’s beady eyes are fixed on me, birdlike and unpleasant.

“But he has the right to know the charges against him,” I say, nodding my head toward the defendant. The crowd has settled into near silence now, drawn out of their chatty genial atmosphere by this novelty. The guy next to me, with his iPhone, scootches over a little in his seat, putting some distance between us. My presumptive Julia Stone, the attractive woman with dark red hair, is staring at me with the same frank interest as everyone else. A wash of nervousness passes over me. This really was idiotic, but I’m still standing, so I go ahead and press my case.

“He also has the right to face his accusers,” I say. “If someone is saying he stole something, he gets to confront them in open court.”

The defendant cranes around, then glances anxiously back at his judges, trying to figure out if this mysterious interjection is aiding or hindering his case. I’m not sure, my friend, I tell him telepathically. I honestly don’t know. Somewhere in the room, someone opens a beer bottle with a pop and hiss. On the seatback in front of me is graffiti, RON LOVES CELIA, etched by some bored undergrad in days gone by.

“It’s not that we are unaware of the rules of evidence,” says the vice, shifting back in his chair and squinting at me. “I went to law school at Duke, okay? But those rules are moot in this context.”

“But how can you pass sentence—”

“We don’t call it ‘passing sentence’—”

“—without a fair trial?”

“Excuse me?” says the third judge, the vice to the vice, speaking at last and loudly, his voice high and reedy and charged with anger. “Who are you?”

I open my mouth but say nothing, cycling rapidly through a series of possible answers, sharply aware of the insufficiency of them all. They could kill me, these people—I could truly die here. The Free Republic of New Hampshire, for all its easy egalitarian spirit and New Age trappings, is a world unto itself, beyond the reach even of what little law remains; as the man said, certain rules are moot in this context. I could be murdered here, easily, if the mood of this crowd should change; I could be beaten to death or shot, my corpse abandoned in the dirt of the quad, my sister and my dog left to wonder why I never emerged.

“Well?” says the vice vice, rising from his chair. And then the chair says, “I knew it.”

“What?” says the vice.

“I knew someone would be coming to find him.”

She stares at me from the table on the stage—arms crossed, glasses, pigtails—and I stare back at her.

“Excuse me?” The vice vice says, glaring and confused. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

But Julia Stone is unconcerned with his bafflement, with the confused attention of the crowd. She gazes cooly at me.

“I told him they would come for him. That’s what your kind do, right? You come for people.”