Book of Job Revisited: Book II, Chapter 11. The Judgment

There we were, in the judge’s antechamber, the two of them, Celeste and Dirk with their lawyer, G. Alpink, and me… yes, the good ole bend over and let you fuck me in the ass, Max McGee. The venom welled up, adrenaline coursed through my veins and it was all I could do to contain myself. I reached for a magazine… a National Geographic. My hands were shaking. I thumbed through it pretending to be interested in the pictures and trying with all my might not to make eye contact… not with their lawyer present. I’d rained on their parade. They hadn’t expected me to show at all. I could tell Celeste was hesitantly trying to catch my attention… staring at me with worried furrowed brows that spoke softly, “Forgive us, please Max; this hurts me as much as it hurts you.” She cracked a faint smile, half-assed hoping all would be okay.  Dirk looked edgy, like he was ready to jump for the door as though I would do something stupid right there in the Judge's anteroom. Finally, we were ushered into the chambers where the Honorable What's-his-name sat behind a huge mahogany desk. He had a file in his hands and scanned the pages while we were taking our seats.

It was like a bad movie that played from a continuous loop for years to come.

FADE IN:

INT. LAWYER’S OFFICE - VISION

Trophies of decapitated heads decorate the walls of the Demon Alpink’s office. She perches behind her desk grinning with blood dripping down her jowls. Max is roped into his chair, unable to move.

DEMON ALPINK

So, Mr. McGee, you think you have an ice-cube’s chance in Hell?

FADE OUT:

I can’t remember much that was said up to the point where, from out of the fog of confusion, I heard the judge ask whether I had representation. It was an adoption hearing or deposition, something like that, in preparation for an adoption procedure. I was inside the pages of  the National Geographic I’d left in the lobby… on the jungle trail in Nicaragua again and looking into the teen-aged boys face… finger on the trigger… a short blast would be all it would take. Swooshed back to the here and now. The Judge asked whether I could afford representation. Of course, I couldn’t afford a lawyer and I answered the judge tersely, “No.”

The hearing was postponed until I could find representation and I was directed by the judge to the public defender’s office. It had come to this, I thought. So much for restoring the amicable part of the divorce. My mind went back to the cypress swamps where I was relatively safe.

At the public defender’s office, I was told that such proceedings were civil matters and the public defender only handled criminal law. That was a blow but, what the hell, I didn’t expect to have any help from the law. There are those for whom the laws are passed for all the good intentions and they work directly against any reason or positive result regarding the people the same laws were meant to protect. Nowhere is the law more subjective and bent against a man than in child custody or adoption cases.

I had a hard time finding a lawyer but I did come up with one who would at least look at my case. Joe Kindness took me up into the tower of the courthouse, pulled the file on the case, and read it. The truth was leaning against me enough, regardless, but the exaggerations and downright lies floored me: the greatest of which centered on the obstructions against visitation imposed by Kali and Dirk that were omitted…. that they had tried to hide the location of where in the hell they lived, restricting me to communicating only through a P.O. Box from the get-go. They had refused even reasonable visitations as though it was a privilege they allowed rather than a right I had as Ariel’s father. This had been going on for a couple of years in which I had only been able to see my daughter a handful of times. The fact that I had seen Ariel only a few times in two years was noted in the record, implying negligence, but the real reasons for the reality of it were not on those pages.

“Have you filed to assert visitation rights?”

“No.” I couldn’t explain. It was another Nicaragua moment when I couldn’t pull the trigger.

“It will be a difficult case to verify without some kind of court record.

“I have journals and letters between us with me now that account for every attempt.” I offered.

I showed Atty, Joe Kindness, one letter, tucked into the journal’s pages, I carried to the proceedings. Searing my heart, it read:

Dirk and I are married and are raising Ariel in a conservative nuclear family setting … Dear Max, please let go and allow Ariel to have a normal family life. She considers Dirk her father now and no longer sees you as anything but an estranged and very remote friend of the family.

“Don’t even let them know you have journals and letters,” Joe Kindness handed the letter back.

“Why, they document the whole business… in detail!” I protested further.

“Journals and letters are very useful weapons that could and would be used against you… they are, as a rule, so incriminating that it is better that you don’t bring them up at all. You do that and they would then be open to subpoena. They would then be able to read your whole journals… the anger… the frustrations… Do you want them to be seen in the open?”

I saw the point the lawyer was making. I could think of several passages in the journals that described the anger and murderous rage I reserved for those private pages. It took the wind out of my sails: It had come to this. I would be fighting for something that I no longer had the energy for. My will had been so worn down. I gave myself to the priests waiting for me with obsidian knives poised to take my still beating heart out my sliced open chest and from the top of the jungle pyramid toss it down the steps to Kali and Dirk in that moment.

It is hard to explain this to anyone that knew me in the old days. I was once a fighter and thrived on conflict, always on the side of the under-dog, no struggle too impossible… but this was different. I contemplated murder or suicide. I wanted to see Dirk roasting on a spit. I wanted to see Celeste tied to a stake and slowly, painfully, stripped of her skin. There was no torture or punishment too extreme or cruel and fierce that would have appeased my frustration and anger. The court records revealed where she lived but memories of that last embrace from Ariel reminded me that to take any further action would cause Ariel to suffer the most. The motivation to murder was stemmed. It was a nothing more than a violent fantasy and never a serious consideration. I simply left them alone. Tragedies are reported all too often on the evening news whereby an estranged father acts out what I had in my heart but, for Ariel’s sake, I was impotent to act on these impulses.

I cruised by their house at night and sometimes glimpsed Ariel going to the bus in the morning but I made no attempt to contact her. Were it not for Ariel, I would have just chalked it up as a setback. Life would have gone on and so would have I. Deflated, I put my life on hold. Only a crystalline pure hatred, harbored in the darkest corner of my heart, kept me alive. I wasn’t sure what I was thinking but I knew I had to stay alive for Ariel’s sake, even if being alive was but to be an abstract and intangible presence.

Oh, dear Kali, you make Job’s wife a saint. Her jealousy was animated by a need she had to be someone herself. She tried hard to “make it” in worlds that were closed to her. These worlds were closed to her because she had no center of her own and she could only ape the talents of others. Blaming her failure on a general bias against females in a male dominated world, she wrote for a local so-called independent rag as an art critic… or rather, an art gossip monger. That would describe better what she did. She became little more than a cheerleader for whatever trend was current and a slayer of talent outside that range or scope of her attention. She cropped her naturally beautiful multi-colored wavy locks and dyed them black with bright red tints. This acquiescence to fashion should have forewarned me that she was turning away from me and the Muse long before the divorce. She would become the destroyer of men with her girdle of decapitations wrapped around her waist like trophies and, as Kali, the mother of chaos; I had become passé to her: not even significant enough to be a trophy on her belt.