Joan Didion - Democracy

“Frankly, Inez, when it comes to handling kids, I don’t consider you the last word,” Dick Ziegler said. “Considering Jessie.”

“Never mind Jessie,” Inez said. “Make the call.”

The little difficulty Saturday morning when Chris and Timmy flew in from school and the airport dogs picked up marijuana in one of their duffels. The exact text of the letter Paul Christian drafted to the Advertiser about the “outrage” of not being allowed to attend Janet’s funeral. The exact location of the arcade in Waianae where Jack Lovett took Inez to meet the radar specialist who was said to have seen Jessie.

Jessie.

Jessie is the crazy eight in this narrative.

I plan to address Jessie presently, but I wanted to issue this warning first: like Jack Lovett and (as it turned out) Inez Victor, I no longer have time for the playing out.

Call that a travel advisory.

A narrative alert.

THE first electroencephalogram to show the entirely flat line indicating that Janet had lost all measurable brain activity was completed shortly before six o’clock on Wednesday evening, March 26, not long after Inez and Billy Dillon arrived at the house on Manoa Road. This electroencephalogram was read by the chief neurologist on Janet’s case at roughly the time Inez and Billy Dillon and Dick Ziegler and Dwight and Ruthie Christian sat down to the chicken pot pie. The neurologist notified the homicide detectives that the first flat reading had been obtained, called the house on Manoa Road in an effort to reach Dick Ziegler, got a busy signal, and left the hospital, leaving an order with the resident on duty in the unit to keep trying Dick Ziegler. Ten minutes later a felony knifing came up from emergency and the resident overlooked the order to call Dick Ziegler.

This poses one of those questions that have to do only with perceived motive: would it have significantly affected what happened had the call come from the hospital before Inez got up from the dinner table and walked through the living room and out the front door with Jack Lovett? I think not, but a call from the hospital could at least have been construed as the “reason” Inez left the table.

A reason other than Jack Lovett.

A reason they could all pretend to accept.

As it was they could pretend only that Inez was overwrought. Ruthie Christian was the first to locate this note. “She’s just overwrought,” Ruthie Christian said, and Billy Dillon picked it up: “Overwrought,” he repeated. “Absolutely. Naturally. She’s overwrought.”

As it was Inez just left.

“You could probably take off the lei,” Jack Lovett said when they were sitting in his car outside the house on Manoa Road. Most of the reporters on the lawn seemed to have gone. There had been a single cameraman left on the steps when Inez and Jack Lovett came out of the house and he had perfunctorily run some film and then retreated. Jack Lovett had twice turned the ignition on and twice turned it off.

Inez took the crushed lei from around her neck and dropped it on the seat between them.

“I don’t know where I thought we’d go,” Jack Lovett said. “Frankly.”

Inez looked at Jack Lovett and then she began to laugh.

“Hell, Inez. How was I to know you’d come?”

“You’ve had twenty years. To think where we’d go.”

“Well sure. Stop laughing. I used to think I could always take you to Saigon. Drink citron pressé and watch the tennis. Scratch that. You want to go to the hospital?”

“Pretend we did go to Saigon. Pretend we did it all. Imagine it. It’s all in the mind anyway.”

“Not entirely,” Jack Lovett said.

Inez looked at him, then away. The cameraman on the steps lit a cigarette and immediately flicked it across the lawn. He picked up his minicam and started toward the car. Inez picked up the lei and dropped it again. “Are we going to the hospital or not,” she said finally.

Which was how Inez Victor and Jack Lovett happened to walk together into the third-floor intensive care unit at Queen’s Medical Center when, as the older of the two homicide detectives put it, Janet’s clock was already running.

“But I don’t quite understand this,” Inez kept saying to the resident and the two homicide detectives. The homicide detectives were at the hospital only to get a statement from one of the nurses and they wanted no part of Inez’s interrogation of the resident. “You got a flat reading at six o’clock. Isn’t that what you said?”

“Correct.”

“And you need three. Eight hours apart. Isn’t that what you told me? This afternoon? About technical death?”

“Also correct.” The resident’s face was flushed with irritation. “At least eight hours apart.”

“Then why are you telling me you scheduled the second electroencephalogram for nine tomorrow morning?”

“At least eight hours apart. At least.”

“Never mind ‘at least.’ You could do it at two this morning.”

“That wouldn’t be normal procedure.”

Inez looked at the homicide detectives.

The homicide detectives looked away.

Inez looked at Jack Lovett.

Jack Lovett shrugged.

“Do it at two,” Inez said. “Or she goes someplace where they will do it at two.”

“Move the patient, you could confuse the cause of death.” The resident looked at the detectives for corroboration. “Cloud it. Legally.”

“I don’t give a fuck about the cause of death,” Inez said.

There was a silence.

“I’d say do it at two,” the older of the two homicide detectives said.

“I notice you’re still getting what you want,” Jack Lovett said to Inez.

They did it at two and again at ten in the morning and each time it was flat but the chief neurologist, after consultation with the homicide detectives and the hospital lawyers, said that a fourth flat reading would make everyone more comfortable. A fourth flat reading would guarantee that removal of support could not be argued as cause of death. A fourth flat reading would be something everyone could live with.

“Everybody except Janet,” Inez said, but she said it only to Jack Lovett.

Eight hours later they did it again and again it was flat and at 7:40 P.M. on Thursday, March 27, Janet Christian Ziegler was pronounced dead. During most of the almost twenty-four hours preceding this pronouncement Inez had waited on a large sofa in an empty surgical waiting room. During much of this time Jack Lovett was with her. Of whatever Jack Lovett said to Inez during those almost twenty-four hours she could distinctly remember later only a story he told her about a woman who cooked for him in Saigon in 1970. This woman had tried, over a period of some months, to poison selected dinner guests with oleander leaves. She had minced the leaves into certain soup bowls, very fine, a chiffonade of hemotoxins. Although none of these guests died at least two, a Reuters correspondent and an AID analyst, fell ill, but the cook was not suspected until her son-in-law, who believed himself cuckolded by the woman’s daughter, came to Jack Lovett with the story.

“What was the point,” Inez said.

“Whose point?”

“The cook’s.” Inez was drinking a bottle of beer that Jack Lovett had brought to the hospital. “What was the cook’s motive?”

“Her motive.” Jack Lovett seemed not interested in this part of the story. “Turned out she was just deluded. A strictly personal deal. Disappointing, actually. At first I thought I was onto something.”

Inez had finished the beer and studied Jack Lovett’s face. She considered asking him what he had thought he was onto but decided against it. After this little incident with the cook he had given up on housekeeping, he said. After this little incident with the cook he had gone back to staying at the Duc. Whenever he had to be in Saigon.