Jack Gimpels Has His Day In Court, by A.D. Nesterenko

Jack Gimpels could not have eaten the building inspector had the cameras been installed on schedule. He had only the majority of the left hand to go. From an artistic standpoint, it had good composition. It was wristless, a flag-shaped flap of skin and meat torn away at the palm that made the phalanges really glow. The blood in the web between the thumb and index finger was dark, lightless, like resin. 
     In his more youthful days, Jack had gone on long expeditions between planets in search of the most unusual artwork he could find. But the lesson that stayed with him was that he couldn't always eat the food he encountered. An improvisational surgeon talked him into altering the ply of his stomach so that it could hold more food than natural, advocating, also, a procedure to slow his rate of digestion. Sure, the surgeon was just thinking about his sales, but the procedure truly worked for Jack, allowing him to eat for a week in one sitting. He hadn't been off the planet for years, but the procedure allowed him to be an unparalleled glutton.
     But Jack had just eaten a 128-pound man, and the condition of his body had become somewhat volatile. He looked like a gourd, stomach crawling out from beneath his shirt, spilling out over his pants. He was immobile - his stomach had intruded into the space required for other organs to function. His heart was pressed so hard against his ribs that an ounce of pressure could cause it to rupture. Even leaning the wrong way was enough to do it.
     Still. there was that hand. As an object, it could even have a place in this museum, except that blood would likely offend his kind of patron, and there was no way to clean it in secrecy. He wasn't going to wipe it on the ruins of his suit; the redness would leap from its sandy color. The atrium he was in was an octagon of white walls with fruit carved into them. The floor was a mosaic of a woman on crutches made out of bleached crushed pearl. In two more days, there would be paintings of oceans and forests clothing seven of the eight walls. If only they were here now, he would lift up a painting, wipe the hand behind it, put it back, and nobody would know.  
     A voice seeped beneath the door.
     "Sixty feet. Too low."
     No time for wishes now, Jack. That's the fire marshal. You have to get rid of that hand now.
     You've got to eat it.

     The fire marshal stood at the top of the vanilla and leather marble staircase, arms crossed, cutting little wrinkles in his work-shirt. Over his shoulder hung a helical sculpture. A hundred forked metal crooks of varying breadth and color dangled from its chassis. He arched his brow as he looked down at one of Gimpels' curators, a little woman in a brown dress and cat’s-eye glasses.
     "That sculpture is so not too low to the stairs. You've got to be kidding me." She said.
     "Well, sweetheart, here's the tape measure and there's the ladder if you want to measure it yourself."
     The tape measure clattered to the cement about five feet in front of her. The ladder was propped open on the staircase. She looked over at it hesitantly.
     Her assistant, a young man in a gray sweater and boxy black-framed glasses, cut in with an echoing "that's not fair."
     "Having the top of your head cut open for walking up the stairs isn't fair..." 

     Eat that hand, Jack.
     He knew it was the only answer.
     "No. I am so stuffed. Ugh, getting air in my stomach hurts at this point."
     But what could he do? It was small enough to put in his jacket pocket, but the blood would soak through – never mind that a bib of black blood had already run down his shirt. He took a deep breath and thought.
     "Okay, what I'll do is I'll eat this hand first, and then I'll eat my clothes. If I can, I'll cut myself and pray this guy doesn't have blood pirates. When the fire inspector finds me fat, wallowing in what is presumed to be my own blood, it'll catch some local news coverage, but I can 'come to my senses' later and say it was... euh... an artistic statement. Yeah, that... in art, we're all... so fat and naked and bleedi..."
     He looked at the hand. It was the left. He saw him write with it, knowing then he was left handed. This was the hand he touched everything with. It had some remnant of the germs of everything he ever touched. It was like eating every pet he ever touched, every child he ever touched, every bookshelf.
     The voices behind the door were knitting closer to each other. Jack could hear them outside the door now.
     "Okay, maybe I can convince the artist to take out some of the longer spires, will that do it for you?"
     "No. Eighty feet. Strict."
     But ugh, Ted wiped his butt with this hand! It still had that brass ring on it that he never took off. In this light, the wrinkles in his skin looked green. Maybe they were. Brass turns you green like that.
     Closer.
     "But, okay, look, if he took out those ones at the bottom, it would be, like, sev... sixty-nine, sixty-eight feet up. That's close enough, right?
     "No. Eighty feet."
     Jack could now hear the soles of their feet brunching toward the door. The time for avoidance had ended. He had to eat that hand all at once. Ted's fingers balled up into a wet fist in his mouth. He was going to swallow it all at once - no time to chew.
     CHUNK. CREAK. The door opened.
     "’Kay, no, that's stupid. There is no difference between seventy-eight-and-a-third feet and eighty feet."
     "Well, there's a one-and-a-fourth foot difference between sevent..."    
     Ted's bloody wrist dangled out of Jack's mouth of cracked teeth, sweating a viscous red jam. Jack stared up at the fire marshal with full, wanting eyes.
     All of his staff stared in aghast awe. The woman in cat’s-eye glasses quivered, on the verge of crying. The guy in the sweater turned a sour pale. 
     "Well, you're very obviously going to be under arrest."
     Whoever said it was very right. The realization that none of the solutions he proposed to himself would have worked fell on Jack like a downed wall.
     Only a minute later, a police officer slid through the doorframe calmly, almost timidly. She entered with her pistol drawn at his mouth and wore full body armor, clearly intended to protect against Jack’s peculiar attentions. Five more officers entered wearing variations on the same armor, two of which were carrying large navy blue cases. They came prepared, and it wasn't like this kind of crime was usual. The truth, which not even Jack knew, was that Jack Gimpels was the only person ever to have received this surgery.  
     A Buick-shouldered officer came through the doorway. His armor was like a cantaloupe rind in the shape of his body. He bore the police unit psychic in a caddy on his back – she had been crippled by a calcification gun fired into her spine, but was much too important for anything like an honorable discharge. She crawled up, her bark-faced head resting on his shoulder-mounted speaker, and gawked at Jack.
     "It's the guy I said it would be!" She said through teeth the size of toenails. The officers all cheered, and two of them opened the blue cases they had carried in. From within, they extracted two halves of a fiberglass brace and quickly moved to clasp them around Jack's torso.
     One of the arresting officers chuckled as he screwed his half of the brace into the other.
     "This has been in the weapons locker for fifteen years. I always asked why the chief would keep all this useless shit you’d designed!"
     "And think, Hawkins, of all times you’d said ‘if she's always right, how come we haven't arrested a man exactly five hundred and eighty-nine pounds with half that weight in his chest?'"
     "Yeah, yeah..." he smirked."
     "You know what this means, right?"
     "Well, you know I do."
     "That I'm always right."
     "Stuff it, Margaret."
     A gray cylindrical packet burst in through the window, already ballooning outward in mid-air. Wheels began to form first, then a chassis. Within seconds, a full-sized forklift was sitting in the middle of the room. It was mostly rubber and gas-filled metal alloy, but it was engineered well enough for the job.
     "Give him the shot, Hawkins," said Margaret in her smoky, honking voice.
     Jack's arms spun as Hawkins plunged a hypodermic into his stomach.
     "This kills your metabolism. Indefinitely. Don't know what for," muttered the bewildered soldier as he delivered the injection.
     "So his future will be a lot more interesting." She scolded.
     They lifted Jack to his feet. The brace allowed him to walk himself into the jaws of the forklift without exploding. Eventfully, he was fed out the window onto a slide that attached to the rear of a police van. When he landed in the van and the doors closed, he found himself surrounded by darkness. He felt a cold coma overtaking him. There was nothing that he could do but stay lax and hope that it left him alive.

     Jack became aware that he heard nothing. There was nothing for him to hear. 
     His eyes fell open. Behind his eyelids waited his pencil-thin body, strained to its limit from malnutrition. He lay on a gray cushioned block, wearing a sort of bedtime shirt and pant made out of gray hemp or hair or something that he couldn't place, but it was about three sizes too large. Looking down his shirt, he saw his sternum was a valley for coiled black hairs, and his ribs jutted just over his stomach.
     He didn't entirely recall why, but he felt like he should be fatter.
     Standing up was a success in spite of his broomstick legs bowing out on him. The three walls, floor, and ceiling were a sticky, smooth gray plastic. In the center of the ceiling was a daisy-like speaker. No sink or toilet, however.
     "Turn around, Jack."
     The voice sounded vindictive, hawk-like, and it came from the speaker. He did what it told. A thick pane of glass separated him from a panorama of crooked eyes fixed as best they could on him. Most of them came from the jury seated on the stained oak bleachers to his left. Their eyes were all he could see; their heads were withheld behind tight socks of black fabric with the eyeholes so carelessly slashed into them that it looked like they had been eaten through. The bleachers were in three decks of ten seats each. Gilt carvings of scales, ledgers, and the like ornamented the sides. To their left was a set of double doors.
     A thirty-foot tower of marble, white clouded with red, stood twenty feet in front of his little cell. At its peak was Judge Rasill, a small and gaunt 54 year-old Illinois war veteran. His ethnic roots were most detectable in his large, red-golden eyelids and possibly his hair if it were still black. At current, it was wispy and silver, like the end a frayed telephone cord, and brushed back with an equally metallic shine.
     "Guess why you're here, Jack!" prompted Rasill, his voice calm with an edge.
     "Uh... Wh... Is this court?"
     At that, the jury kecked a spittle of reptilian laughter.
     "Yeah, yeah, it is. Guess what else!"
     "I... I don't... know what to guess."
     "It's one hundred-fifty years after you were arrested, Jack!"
     "Okay... okay... are you mocking me? Because I don't take ver-"
     "Jack!"
      Rasill's microphone was louder than Jack's.
     “There isn't time for this, Jack. Take my word for it or don't, but here's the situation you're in: You are guilty of the consumption of Ted Irvins on August 9th, 1991."
     "I'm just guilty? Don't I get a lawyer or a trial?" 
     "You're a meme, an icon. You're revisited every so often in abhorrent fiction, art, and music. Your name has been printed in thousands of different textbooks and each of their revisions. Everyone in this room has learned about you. Our grandparents shudder when they tell us about the first time they saw the crime scene photos on Ogrish-dot-com. How, Jack, could you possibly circumvent the cultural establishment of your person to prove your innocence?"
     "If it's really that big, I can only do what I can and hope to convince the right people."
     "No! Here's what you get to do: when I start the timer, you have forty-five minutes to convince the jury and myself that what you did was somehow an action of grace, nobility, or general kindness. You will receive a numerical score which corresponds to a penalty..."
     A projection appeared on the window in front of Jack:

     "You likely won't be familiar with some of these options, Jack, so allow me to elaborate on some of the more colloquial outcomes..."
     Some of it was starting to come back to him. Yeah, he ate someone. He even ate his clothes. Ted Irvins? Was that his name? He probably ate his wallet, too. He saw the score for ninety. Prison of choice, eh? He remembered spending a few months in Imensen along the coast way back when for embezzlement. A cottage-like white stucco cell on the salty Hawaiian coast with a big picture window that let in all the breeze. A few luxuries were spared, like steak knives, but man, you could sit at that window with a cigar in your hand watching the pink Hawaiian sunset forever.
     "...istmas penalty, you never know what you're going to get. The box might spit acid in your eyes, or it might inject ball bearings down all of your fingers, but you will die."
     Okay, Jack thought. I gotta come off good, but not too good. I want them to like me enough but not a hundred percent...
     He saw the visage of the pink Hawaiian sun in his head for the entire duration of Rasill's instruction.
     "...poetically made into a device for home security. Do you understand the terms, Jack?"
     "Oh, yes."
     "Okay. Let's begin."
     A red digital clock in the corner of the window read 44:59, and began counting down.
     "Jack, you have the first word."
     "Okay then," Jack started. "While ted – I called him that, 'ted' with a lowercase 't' – and I hadn't spent a lot of time together, he felt like he could confide in me. He told me that he wanted to go spontaneously, as to... uh... sustain, sustain his excitement about death. He'd gotten really bored with the topic because of all of the really dark, disturbing art he had done... and told me that he wanted me, above everyone else, to eat him because of my... position in the local art culture... my stature, my power."
     Judge Rasill looked into Jack’s face.
     "No."
     "Wh... what? How can you say that?"
     "Ted did not tell you that."
     "How do you know he didn't? He's not here. You didn't-"
      The brandy-colored double doors opened slowly, ceremonially. Two bailiffs in balaclavas and light body armor held the doors open to admit a staff of medical technicians. An emaciated figure was being coaxed into the courtroom under the assistance of several nurses. White surgical rubber, polished for the occasion, was twisted all over his body. A hood of the same material sheathed his face except for two eyeholes made from clear rubber. His walk was labored, not quite a palsy, but it was clear that he wouldn't be able to feed or wet himself ever again.
     "We pumped your stomach, Jack. Then we asked questions."
     The bailiffs took his arms from the medical technicians and led him toward the witness stand. They released their grasp on his arms about halfway there, and he stood weakly. He looked into Jack's cell, arms splaying to the side, fingers curving like hooks.
     "Jaa-aaack."
     His vocal cords, scrambled from having been masticated, issued a puzzle of sounds. It was sandy, but watery and because of that very heavy on the ears. It was an expression of purest devastation; his devastated body expressing his devastated, re-assembled, re-interpreted psyche. 
     "T....e...d?"
     "Yooou guessed it."
     "Hi... Ted, how have you… been?"
     Silence wafted about the room as Ted skated on his slimy feet right up to the glass. The devastation of his body was censored between white rubber sheets, but even still, Jack felt a handless arm of vomit snaking its way up his esophagus.
     “I want to tell you something. Jack.”
     The words were garbled, barely discernable.
     "Wh...what is it?"
     “That museum you ate me to protect?”
     Ted turned toward the jury.
     "Yes, he ate me because I was the building inspector who had to close his stupid frrrgng…”
     Ted paused to cough up what appeared to be a piece of his reconstructed lung.    
     “…museum down because he had, like, fifty structural violations. He made people park on a frozen lake!”
     “It was more artistic!” Jack broke in.
     “Yeah, until the thaw.”
     The jury became extremely agitated about that. They howled salaciously. They pumped their leather fists. Ted turned back to Jack.
     “Yeah, that museum? It’s gone.”
     Jack gasped.
     “Once it had the stigma of cannibalism, the Tulsa art crowd abandoned it like a cancerous, rotting, inedible buffalo!”
     "Ted, I... don't know what to say."
     “Why don’t you keep saying I wanted you to eat me you rock of shhhit!”
     "...but it's true...?" Jack hazarded.
     "Still?" Judge Rasill asked, with a flare of his eyebrows.
     "Yes. It is." Jack said more firmly.
     "Whatever. It's been about twenty-three minutes so far. We're going to take a short recess, and then we're going to hear from another witness."
     The jury honked and belched in delight as they exited.  
     Jack took a seat and habitually patted his chest for his cigarettes, of which there were none. He could see horn-like brass metal conduits coming out of the witness stand and a gaggle of courtroom and hospital technicians inserting things into a horizontal metal lung.
     Ted stared at him from a table to the right of the room, his rubber hood swelling and ceding with each breath.
     A new voice came into the room.
     "H...hello?" It was soft, of indeterminate gender.
     "Yes, hello," answered Rasill.
     "I'm... conscious?"
     "Yes. Yes you are. Are you ready to testify?"
     "Hoo. Yeah. Just let me get my bearings here. This is all... wow... life is all new to me again."
     "Okay, take your time. But we're starting in two minutes."
     "Minutes...? I... know what they are? I... do... This is all so weird to me. These abstract ideas couldn't have even occurred to me before, but now they just come to me like... like I should have been aware of them the whole time. Language? The concept of language? I don't have a body to express with anymore. This is... This is..."
     The technicians stepped away from the witness stand. There was this glass vessel distended from the top of the metal lung. It was filled with a gray material, petrified by some catalyst. The glass sang with electricity here and there.
     "Back in ten seconds. All we need for you to do is answer our questions. Can you do that?"
     "Yes..."
     "Okay, good."
     A hollow shrieking came with the clinking of glass bottles, announcing the return of the jury. They sat down promptly.
     Rasill looked at the octopus of metal, hands clasped on the podium before him.
     "Now, I want you to tell me everything that you recall of the day in question."
     "Okay, well, I was really trying to keep myself cool, so I was hiding under a rock when this Gila Monster came up and showed me his tongue-"
     "Too far back. Go forward a bit."
     "I'll try... okay, I'm crawling away from this guy with a big electric stick but I can't crawl over all the other snakes... still too far?"
     "Yes, afraid so. Go back to after you got eaten."
     “Oh, right. Well, I was on a plate with some cauliflower and potatoes and Mr. Gimpels had already eaten most of me...”
     "Go on."
     "And, uh, I was being digested when I got tangled up with Mr. Irvins. Then we were flattened together, and it all gets hazy from there... But I don't get how I can remember what happened to me after I was dead and eaten..."
     "To answer that with as much brevity as the case can allow, you are a man-made consciousness applied to assess the situation experienced by the matter you have been infused into. You have been given a human brain or the equivalence thereof by which to express yourself."
     "Yeah, I get that, but if that's so then how can I really be the snake, and how can my testimony really mean anything?"
     Rasill smirked. Nobody noticed.
     "Look, thanks for the testimony. That will be all."
     "Whatever... I don't think this is right... I... I'll have to think about this some mor-"
     A courtroom technician disconnected the lung's electrical cord.
     "Thank you." Rasill commented. "Jack, that was the python steak you had eaten about an hour before you ate Mr. Irvins."
     "You question an animal I ate, but I don't even get an attorney?"
     "I told you, Jack. You’ve been found guilty of eating Mr. Irvins. The fact that we pulled him from your stomach and had to reconstruct parts of him that had been digested was proof enough."
     "I looked a lot like your colon."
     "Remember, Jack, you're guilty. You're not getting off the hook. You have to present the situation to the jury in the most noble light that you can in order to get the best outcome for yourself."
     Ted had unwrapped his left hand at some point during the trial. He held it up; the fingers moved gracefully like piano keys. In spite of the cellular loss involved with aging, it was in better shape than anything else on his body. His ring had turned clover, and was haloed by pine green skin. The fingers bit into the 3-ply rubber capsule censoring his head.
     "Look at thisss! Look at me!"
     The bailiff had known ahead of time that he was going to try this and grabbed his forearms, trying to pull them as far from his face as possible. 
     "I’m vomit, I’m puke, I’m chime!"
Jack barfed a brown snake of vomit onto the floor of his cell. The jury squealed in pleasure.
     "You ate me, Jack."
     The bailiff had gotten Ted's arms behind his back, but the rubber had been pierced in four crescent gashes. The eyepieces had stretched and deformed, showing how large his eyes really were. The color of Ted's bulby, caseous skin was so vivid that even the uppermost and farthest back juror could see its color. You could hear air whistle throughout his sinuses.
     "Nobody eats anybody for a noble reason."
     "Ted, if I may?" Rasill asked, completely calm. "Jack, you have fifteen minutes to..."
     Ted had managed to twist the rubber hood into his mouth, and the entirety of the rubber on his face broke into a web. Unable to swallow, Ted spat the sloppy rubber onto the table.
     His face wasn't as expressive as many had expected, even hoped, it would be considering the trauma the man had gone through. The mouth was a semi-flexible slot in the middle of the face with chips of gray ballistic plastic for teeth. The eyes, though functional, were just humps of protein with asymmetrical colorless irises, pasted underneath a canted brow. His flesh was a sheet of racially neutral man-made skin, and there was one nostril on his face, which was off-center to the right, small, and seed-shaped.
     “This is the face. What do you think the ressst of me looks like?”
Ted's face did not look angry because the few muscles in his head did not govern expression.
     “If you go to prison, I’ll commit a crime! I’ll find you there and I. will. kill. you.” He spat the words, each one punctuated with spite. “You wil – aaaeagh!”
     They had told him not to remove the hood or this would happen. The proteins around his eyes could not moisturize themselves just yet, and the condensation provided by the rubber had kept them wet. He grasped at the table with his gangly right hand for the rubber he had spat out. He covered his eyes as best he could with it as two medical technicians rushed over to him with a fresh roll of clear surgical rubber. One of them, the premium size for a linebacker, tackled Ted with no reserves about damaging his mangled body. One technician held his arms and legs as the other wrapped his head in bands of clear rubber. 
     "Five minutes, Jack."
     Jack stood erect, hands at his sides, trying to ignore the medical fiasco occurring in the corner. This was it. It had to be good, but not too good. It's either Imensen or suicide.
     "I can only say that I... I regret that our miscommunication has caused so much misery and discomfort for someone I knew so briefly, but who I care so much about. I can't begin to imagine what it must be like for him to be made to live the way he does now. What I can say is that I have always made every... always tried to do what I feel... or know, at the time, to be right. And I know now I was wrong in what I did to Mr. Irvins seventy years ago, and hope to atone for it in prison."
     Rasill looked over to the Jury.
     "Would anyone like to alter their vote?"
     A few hands reached for the little voting console clipped to the seat in front of them.
     "21. That's your score. Special alteration."
     He pronounced the word "special" as "spee-shial."
     Jack was confused.
     "As in 'species.'"
     Jack's eyes were full, his face dropped like a flag.
     "What, what, what, what is that?"
     "Were you listening when I told you?"
     "Wull, yeah... but?"
     Rasill sighed. "Every year, a list is compiled of prospective pet owners, but due to the high level of delinquency in caring for their pets, there are a lot of people who do not qualify to become a guardian for an animal. We invert the list, putting the least capable people first, and dole to them generic 'animals' made by cellular subtraction and the remodeling of prisoners with a score between 20 and 29."
     "So I'll be a dog?" Jack asked, incredulous.
     "Or a cat. Maybe a bird. You won't be any of these animals, of course, but you'll look a lot like one of them. Except with kind of the face you have now. And your tail won't be able to wag."
     He felt like his skin was going to crawl off of him and wad itself up in the corner to get away. This would be no prison paradise. By the time he died of starvation and abuse, he would understand want better than he ever thought he could.
     Rasill continued with the formalities of the case, but Jack was so disheartened that he couldn't hear any of it. The medical technicians and bailiffs were walking toward his cell. Maybe he could become a bird and fly away.
     Ted pressed himself up against Jack's window, stared directly into his pupils, and mouthed "I'm going to poison your water" as best he could through his plastic slot of a mouth.

<< back

©2006 A.D. Nesterenko