The decor in his mom’s living room was modernist, which was paradoxical in a way since her ideas were not, at least to Donny’s sensibility, modern. Unless by modern you meant the thinking of the heart of the century before, that thought of itself as forward but was really just streamlining very old thinking.

Maybe Donny’s newer ideas of what a better future could be like were no more than an updated version of the same thing. Whenever people set out to make things better by design, to improve on nature, they almost always made things worse. Joyce was right about that.

“Here you go,” said Broyles, handing him a glass of scotch and sitting across from him.

Donny recognized the record now. It was one of those performances by Raquel Wang, the Baltimore-born prodigy who had been such a big deal a few years earlier for her electric piano interpretations of Bach’s organ works. People said that you could hear the sound of the artist crying into her instrument if you listened closely, but Donny never listened closely. He was too distracted by her politics. By what they liked to call at the time “the sound of the coming age.” The coming age that was now long gone.

“What are you reading?” said Donny.

Broyles held up his book. Burr, by Edward Alvarez.

“Heard of it?” he asked.

Donny shook his head. “No, but leave it to you to read a book about a treason trial in your spare time.”

“It’s not so much about the trial,” said Broyles. “It’s a new history of what led to the arrest and prosecution. But more than that. The writer has an agenda. Starts out making you think he’s a revolutionary, like your old clients, or a fellow traveler, like you.”

The way Broyles said that now, it was more like talking about which football team you liked, even though they all carried the scars of what had gone down.

“He seems to be building a kind of interesting thesis. About national rebirth. About the idea that the nation can be many nations. Or no nations at all. Just communities, but all connected.”

“You’re a little late to the party, Judge.”

“I didn’t say I buy it.”

“Neither do I. But you have to admit it has a certain appeal.”

“I suppose. But the problem is when you leave everything fragmented like that, people end up fighting. You need unification to maintain order. And that has to come from above.”

You could hear the order in the music.

Looking across the coffee table at this old man in his wool cardigan and wide-wale corduroys peering at him over the rim of his glasses with those incisive eyes, Donny had a flashback to when he would peer down at him from the bench. Those same eyes were scarier when they were wrapped in black robes and backed by the penal power of the state.