Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

I’d read the petition and the DSS attorney’s packet of medical records out in the parking lot. Respondent is a 24-year-old male with a history of severe physical and sexual abuse that led to his foster placement at age 12, I read. Respondent suffers moderate mental retardation and disappeared from his Alamance County foster placement at age 17. On Friday, October 25, Respondent was found wandering the highway north of Glen Raven poorly nourished, in a confused and disoriented state, wearing clothes not appropriate for the weather. Respondent suffers from memory loss and severe delusions.

But the next sentence really raised my eyebrows.

Respondent believes he is a Navy fighter pilot.

I found two young men—Maverick and Goose from Top Gun , I guess—in Room 408 at Magnolia Plantation. I knocked on the door frame and stood there for a moment trying to figure out which one of the guys sitting Indian-style on their beds and watching Dr. Oz was Brandon Cross. Neither one of them looked at me. I waited a minute, then asked them.

Without even taking his eyes off the television for one second, the man closest to the window raised his right arm and hand straight out from his body and pointed his index finger at the other man. Who, unaware that his roommate had dimed him out, continued to ignore me.

“Thanks,” I said. I approached Brandon Cross. “Brandon?”

No response. Dr. Oz must have been on fire this afternoon.

“Mr. Cross? Brandon Cross?”

Still no response. He blinked when I talked, though, which suggested that he at least perceived my presence but chose to ignore it. Probably because he was a fighter pilot, a Navy officer, and I wasn’t addressing him correctly. I stared at his profile, pawing through the shallow understanding of Navy ranks I’d gained through reading Tom Clancy novels until I found a word that might fit. “Ensign?”

Now he looked at me. “Lieutenant Junior Grade,” he said.

He pronounced it wootenant juniuh gwade, unable to pronounce the “r” or “l” sounds. “I’m Kevin Swanson,” I said. “I’m your court-appointed attorney in the incompetency proceeding filed against you by Alamance County. You mind talking to me a bit?”

That was a lot of information for a patient in a lockdown unit to process at once. He blinked at me for a moment, and I thought, out to lunch . His head looked impossibly narrow, like he’d spent his formative years squished between two bricks. This promised a very quick, very simple and very shallow interview; if I didn’t want to go back to my office this afternoon, I’d have to find another excuse. Because an in-depth meeting with a respondent like Brandon Cross wasn’t going to happen. Mentally, I started formulating my very quick, very simple and very shallow report to the Court.

And then he asked, “Go somewhere else?” Go somewhewh ewse? He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at his roommate. “Nosy.”

“Uh… sure. Is there somewhere we can sit?” I remembered who he thought he was and added, “Sir?”

Wownge, he said and slid himself off the bed. Walking with a pronounced limp, he led me down the hall to a little room decorated with motivational posters, a ficus tree and what looked like dorm furniture or decades-old leftovers from the principal’s office back when this place used to be a school. Bright sun streamed in through the window, but the lounge was bereft of patients. Probably because it didn’t have a television.

Still limping, Brandon dragged a chair up to the coffee table—not as cheap or scarred as the one in Dr. Koenig’s office but pretty bad in its own right—and motioned for me to sit down. He took the couch.

I showed him my copy of the petition and notice of hearing. “Seen these before? Sheriff’s deputies bring them to you?”

He nodded.

“So you know what this is about?”

He shook his head and told me that he couldn’t wead .

“How does a man get through Officer’s Candidate School and learn to land an F-14 on an aircraft carrier if he can’t read?”

“F-18. F-14 decommissioned.”

“My bad. How’d you get to be a fighter pilot if you can’t read?”

He snorted and shook his head again, a sullen gesture that said man, this is some bullshit, having to explain this again. He looked out the window, deep in thought. He took a breath, opening his mouth like he was about to say something, then thought again and closed it. His brow furrowed.

“What is it?” I asked.

“This hard,” he replied. Dis hahd. “I a… retard.”

“Take all the time you need.”

“I retard,” he repeated. “Retarded. Can’t think right. Can’t read.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Just tell me how a man gets to fly fighter planes when he can’t read.”

He looked over my shoulder, and I turned to see a hunched-over old man hobbling past the lounge. Brandon waited for him to shuffle away, then leaned forward and hissed, “Not fighter pilot.”

“Really?” I said it like this was a surprise.

“Here,” he continued, “Retarded. Can’t read. Can’t think. Cloudy . ” Cwowdy.

“What do you mean by ‘here?’”

He pointed at the coffee table. Then he pointed everywhere. “ Here, ” he said. “Here, here, here! Retarded!”

“You mean… when you’re in this place, you’re retarded?”

“This world.”

“When you’re in this world, you’re retarded.”

He nodded emphatically, smiling now, pleased that I understood.

“But you’re not retarded… in another world?”

He drew his lips into a tight grin and shook his head.

“In another world, you’re a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy and you fly F-18s.”

At this point, I felt like I had all the information I needed to make a recommendation to the court. I didn’t need to sit here on the state’s dime talking to a guy so obviously incompetent to handle his own affairs that I could have figured it out if he spoke only Chinese. Professional pride, though—and a desire to not return to the office any sooner than necessary—kept me in my seat. Brandon Cross may have been a mental incompetent, but the nurses and orderlies weren’t. When they saw his lawyer jetting out the door five minutes after he signed in, they’d say, that’s a court-appointed piece of shit right there. Didn’t hardly spend any time at all with the man.

“Why don’t you tell me how that works?” I asked. “Living in two worlds, I mean. Do you just jump back and forth between realities whenever you feel like it, or is it more of a surprise, like you’re sitting on the john on an aircraft carrier one minute and suddenly whoa, you’re in a mental hospital?”

He shook his head energetically. The grin had disappeared.

“No? No what? No, you can’t control it, or no, it isn’t a surprise?”

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Behind him, clouds obscured the sun on their way across the sky and the window turned from yellow to gray.

“No two realities,” he said, pronouncing it weeawitties.

He opened his eyes.

“That real,” he said. “This a nightmare. And I stuck .”

Brandon’s DSS file waited in my email inbox when I got back to the office. They’d pulled him out of his mother’s home at age twelve, when her boyfriend had taken a shine to him. His special education teacher noticed him walking funny at school one morning and when she asked him why, he said that when he walked like that, his butt didn’t hurt as bad. Mama and Boyfriend went to jail, Brandon went into the foster care system. He spent the next five years shuffling from placement to placement until he ran away at seventeen. Nobody saw him again until they found him on the highway up there in Glen Raven.