Limitations Read Online Free PDF

theater lobby. If life is a three-act play, then the curtain has gone up on the finale. After John Ban-ion had read #1’s message saying ‘You’ll die,’ the judge had tried to settle his clerk with humor while they awaited Marina. ‘This guy has no future in journalism,’ George told him, ‘because that’s not breaking news.’
    Still, irony gets you only so far. The facts settle hard. And with them comes an inevitable calculation of pluses and minuses. George tends to be unsparing, even harsh, in his self-assessments. Husband. Father. Lawyer. Judge. These days, he seems to be keeping a cool eye on the scoreboard.

4
THE CONFERENCE
     
    Nathan Koll is a formidable, if ponderous, intellect with the academic equivalent of a five-star general’s chestful of medals: first in every class with Latinate honors, Order of the Coif, law review, blah blah blah. Real fucking smart. George always wonders how Koll sees himself. Probably as lawyers are in the ideal, a tower of icy reason. But Nathan is in fact as eccentric as a street person. For one thing, he does not bathe. Inhaling the body odor is like dragging a tree saw through your nose. Sharing the tiny robing room with him, where the judges don their long black gowns before arguments, is a much-lamented ordeal. His fingernails are grimy, and his wavy black hair is pasted to his forehead.
    George has long viewed Nathan’s unwillingness to surrender even to soap and water as a function of his noticeable paranoid streak, in which the man’s fierce commitment to winning every argument may be a way to prove to himself that he is safe from everyone. Not that Nathan would ever admit to a personal stake. He never says, ‘I want,’ ‘I believe,’ ‘I need,’ nor will he acknowledge that anybody else might have any pride or attachment to his position. Everything is presented merely as a matter of ruthless logic, often with the traces of a snigger betraying itself at the corners of his lips.
    Off the bench, Koll keeps himself remote as a survivalist and refuses to give anyone, even his own staff, either his home address or phone. He can be reached only by BlackBerry. He has a wife, a beaten-down-looking Asian woman. George has met her twice but has yet to hear her speak.
    Nathan sits by interim appointment of the state Supreme Court, filling the remaining term in a seat being cut for budgetary reasons after 2008. He accepted the job sure it would propel him to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago after John Kerry’s election. Given present realities, Nathan would like to retain this position indefinitely, but there’s little chance of that. No vacancies are anticipated for years on the court. More to the point, Koll would find a complete absence of support among the judges, whom he has irritated to a person, George included. Judge Mason no longer cares that Koll and he often end up on the same side of issues or that Koll is a uniquely able ally, artful in using cost-benefit analysis to the detriment of conservatives, who tend to respond as if he has broken into their toolshed. Nathan regards himself as the uninhibited protector of the oppressed, but this is so small a portion of the bizarre parade that is his everyday performance on the bench that it is a virtual lie by omission.
    Now George braces himself as he enters the conference chambers beside the appellate courtroom. Like everything else in the old courthouse, the room has a classical finish and looks a bit like a private dining room in a men’s club, right down to the baubled chandelier. To protect the privacy of these deliberations, there are no windows, and even the law clerks who will do the first drafts of the opinions are excluded so the judges may speak freely, without the need to save face in the presence of juniors.
    The other member of the morning panel, Summerset Purfoyle, is seated with Nathan at the Chippendale conference table, long enough to allow all twenty members of the appellate court to confer in