Justice, Subsection 7.0

(Continued from Justice, Subsection 6.0)

If I'm not confusing my years here, Nelson had actually just helped us weather a predatory audit fired across our bow by the city by befriending the auditor and discussing with him the relative merits of the various corporate accounting methods in use in those years. It was a contrivance that was, shall we say, completely natural to him. Oddly enough, I think it was also Nelson's huge love for the game of football that helped us survive as a household for as long as we did. Barring cranial trauma or insanity, after all, there is no such thing as a complete divorce from the prevalent culture. And without Nelson's superficial allegiances to the trappings of that culture, which included his almost worshipful regard for the pigskin, I tend to think we would have collapsed in on ourselves well before being undone by the events I'm about to unfold.

"Every Sunday during the fall he would make a great production of cooking burgers or ribs or a chili, usually very well, holding forth as he did so about the similarity of the game at hand to various great historical campaigns that only he knew anything about. He equated the best NFL coaches with the generals of those campaigns. Noll was the great Byzantine Belisarius, Madden was like Patton, and he prized Landry as a Hannibal or a Scipio Africanus, depending on his mood and the matchup. And if Nelson was thorough about anything, it was about football Sundays. Without fail, halftime would feature a betting pool and a little scrimmage between us and some of the kids from the neighborhood, kids who'd drifted in on the wafting odor of burgers. Nelson would sometimes even run a book handicapping the scrimmage on the side, and tempers had a tendency to flare. 

"Nelson also brewed beer, and he liked using football Sundays as an occasion to pilot new varieties. He actually saved out house quite a bit of money how much brew the nine of us could put away all told. He did a lot of research into the brewing, flavoring some of the recipes with spices and fruits from our garden, and was able to delight us with anecdotes about which Belgian abbey or German keller his flavor-of-the-month had made its first appearance in. But he had problems with sanitation, as sanitation requires discipline. Every second batch or so verged on being undrinkable, making the games a bleaker affair than they would have been with the proper lubricant.

"But still. Football brought us together. Together on the strength of paradox. The rest of us may not have given much of a shit about the game, but all of us were enthusiasts of enthusiasm. And of course beer. Truth be told, of all of us in that house, Nelson may have been the one with the most nuanced and expansive revolutionary urges, notwithstanding the conventional, even reactionary wrapper they came in. When he wasn't talking about football or military campaigns or other esoterica you might have heard him waxing poetic about 'going back to Plymouth' and 'sundering the original link in the chain of parasitism'.

"Nelson also had a relationship with the final person who was part of our group at the time, Natalie. If you want to call it a relationship, that is. As far as he was concerned, I think it was little more than an arrangement of sexual convenience. Whereas for Natalie Nelson was the latest link in the long chain of disappointments she had come to expect from and even unconsciously cause in her relations with men. She was a little bit older, around 35 or so, and her background was one of flight. She'd been brought up conventionally, had gone to college conventionally, married a conventional man and embarked on a conventional life. But she had not prepared herself for the dark side of convention, and her husband's thoroughly conventional infidelities had cracked her up and sent her running. Nobody knew for sure, but the consensus was that she had abandoned a child as well. To abbreviate a long story, and one that nobody knows anymore anyway, after a year of peregrinating between friends' houses and a variety of the pseudo-cults that were so much in vogue among the most despicably cretinous faction of our generation in those days, she ended up with us, and we took her in, mostly out of pity and for lack of anything better to do, to be more honest. Not that Natalie was utterly a wandering victim. She was also an artist. Small things mostly: Socks, bracelets, drawings made on 3x5" note cards or even in the margins of playing cards, designs on coffee mugs, small things, indices of her living and her suffering--but things nevertheless, pretty things. 

"If she expected from Nelson nothing other but disappointment, he did not disappoint her. Relationships are mathematical creatures, they must balance. It's not that he treated her badly, exactly. Just that he couldn't be bothered, and was perfectly happy to let the relationship languish at the emotional level of the first date while Natalie's prophesy slouched toward its fulfillment.

"And so a meeting was called to decide what was to be done. We met in the reading room where some of us had heard the drunken Colonel pontificate on dogdom and insult us earlier in the evening. I remember the atmosphere being faintly doggen as we filed in. We sat down, organizing ourselves by instinct in columns that stretched down either side of the table from Dean at its head. Nelson's face was grinning incongruously at the top of his serious suit as he served beer from a large tumbler. What was to be done? The eternal question. But in order to do, we had to think and to talk.

"Dean began. 'We are in crisis,' he said. 'And we must find our way forward. What happened tonight has changed Vanessa's life forever. It was a horrible crime that cannot be undone. It will also come to change Kamill's life forever, as well as the future course of our shared living experiment. The essential thing to know and to recognize at this point, however, is that we are still in control of the form those changes will take, as we have not submitted this case for arbitration by the state.

"'At this point we can proceed along any one of several paths, each with very different consequences for Kamill and for the group. Each of you surely has a sense for what these paths are and what they entail. First you have the con--