Tom sighs, looking out the window as if it gives a prospect onto the previous century. He recounts his past with a wandering, feverish bitterness, as if angry that it’s all so far gone. Jim finds it both interesting and depressing at once.

“There were a couple of girls that hung together, everyone hounded them without mercy. Called them Popeye and Mabusa, meaning Medusa I suppose. Although it amazes me that any kid there knew that much. They were retarded, see, and looked bad. Popeye all shriveled, Mabusa big and ugly, Mongoloid. Boys used to hunt for them at recess, to make fun of them.” Tom shakes his head, staring out the window again. “I had a game of my own that I played on the teacher who was recess monitor, a kind of hide-and-seek. Psychological warfare, really. I used the cellars to get from one side of the yard to the other to pop out and surprise her. The monitor would see me here, then there—it drove her nuts. One time I was doing that, and I found Popeye and Mabusa down there in the cellar hiding, huddled together.…” He blinks.

“Kids are cruel,” Jim says.

“And they stay that way! They stay that way.” Coppery bitterness burrs Tom’s voice. “The nurses here call us O’s and Q’s. O’s have their mouths hanging open. Q’s have their mouths hanging open with their tongues stuck out. Funny, eh?” He shakes his head. “People are cruel.”

Jim grits his teeth. “Maybe that’s why you became a public defender, eh?” Seeing two retarded kids, huddled together in a cellar: can that shape a life?

“Maybe it was.” The little room is taking on a coppery light, the air has a coppery taste. “Maybe it was.”

“So what was it like, being a public defender?”

“What do you mean? It was the kind of work that tears your heart out. Poor people get arrested for crimes. Most crimes are committed by really poor people, they’re desperate. It’s just like you’d expect. And they’re entitled to representation even though they can’t afford it. So a judge would appoint one of us. Endless case loads, every kind of thing you can imagine, but a lot of repetition. Good training, right. But … I don’t know. Someone’s got to do that work. This isn’t a just society and that was one way to resist it, do you understand me boy?”

Jim nods, startled by this intersection with his own recent thoughts. So the old man had tried to resist!