Bad Lawyer Read Free Page A

to qualify as a closet. Downstairs, a living room with a little nook for the dinner table, a half-bath, a kitchen. The unfinished basement, too damp for storage, held the furnace, the washer and dryer, a few rusted tools, their handles gray and moldy.
    I went through the house like a burglar, from room to room, touching the odds and ends of Magda’s life—knives and forks, a lace doily on a chair back, the ceramic butterfly I’d given to her on a long-forgotten birthday—holding these objects in my palm as if trying to gauge their weight. My mood was speculative, curious, almost wondering; my progress stately, careful, punctuated only by the occasional snort of first-cut cocaine.
    Inevitably, I came to Magda’s bedroom, opened the closets, the drawers in her bureau, feasted on a row of faded housecoats, a pile of neatly mended cotton underwear. Then, beneath a stack of flat white boxes, each containing a pair of nylon stockings, I found a book.
    Though kept chronologically, the book was more ledger than diary. In it, my mother had fashioned a record of her correspondence, entering the date and the contents of each letter she’d sent or received. At the very end, after filling more than a hundred pages, she’d listed the names of her immediate and extended families, and their ultimate destinations: Auschwitz, Birkenau, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec …
    Half the names bore the tag unknown, but I think it’s safe to assume that Magda had given up on these, because underneath the list she’d printed two lines in crude block letters:
TOD MACHT FREI
    DEATH MAKES FREE
    The date of this final entry: October 16, 1963.
    I twisted as I fell, like a burning sheet of paper tossed from a high window. Pieces of my life, charred black, flew away as I dropped. My wife, Iris, first, taking my son, David, and what was left of the family fortune to sunny Los Angeles. The hirelings, except for Caleb and Julie, came next. Sharp enough to read the graffiti on the wall (where it was, indeed, writ large), they left for more promising situations. Then I arrived at work one morning to find my office padlocked, my landlord’s attorney standing next to a city marshall, the marshall holding an order to evict.
    The Mercedes was gone by then, likewise the Rolex and the pinky ring, the antiques and the co-op overlooking Central Park, and I remember feeling distinctly relieved when I caught sight of the marshall standing in front of the door. He was a short, dumpy man with a ratty mustache, the kind of bureaucrat I routinely bullied in my prime, but I simply turned and walked away, walked directly to the men’s room where I began a monumental binge by filling my nose with cocaine.
    By the time I reached Bellevue’s crowded emergency room three days later, my heart was pounding in my chest like a trapped animal. My clothes were drenched with sweat; blood dripped from both nostrils. My eyes were rolling in their sockets, while my arms and legs jerked like the limbs of a puppet in the hands of an epileptic puppeteer. I fully expected to die, felt that I deserved nothing less, was ecstatic and terrified at the same time, a mental state that left the emergency room staff profoundly unimpressed.
    They’d seen it all before, of course; they saw it every day. I was given the requisite medication, trundled off to a bed on the third floor, assured that I would live to fight another day.
    But I had no fight left. And in the dim, sedated light of the following dawn, I felt my life close around me, as dark and confining as a shroud. The routine of the hospital flowed defiantly: a nurse took my vitals, a doctor repeated the process an hour later, breakfast was laid on the rolling table next to my bed, an orderly tugged me into a chair and fussed with a set of clean sheets. My three neighbors rose, took walks, watched television, received guests, chatted among themselves. I seemed, by comparison, utterly irrelevant, a non-being, devoid of either force or