Michael Hanson

Judgment Night

An illustrated story. 10”x8” acrylic, on 300 lb watercolor paper

Pg. 1: I am a man of words, a life of jurisprudence. Words are my financier, buying time to wander. Tracking. The silence is heavy. Today it’s all anxiety.

Pg. 2: I thought I believe in law. I thought I am just. We all live with delusions that tangle our perception. Everybody comes in contact with law in one way or another. Some master it. Some are trampled. I preside over its proceedings.

 Pg. 3: I can’t be involved too deeply but I am, in every single case. It’s so difficult. Everything takes time, everyone is distraught, everyone wants their way. I iron it out. I show compassion. Sometimes it’s not possible, my job is to sign off on that impossibility. I can’t show how it gets to me.

 Pg. 4: A Stoic knows how to sublimate, to endure in silence. I endure with others. We suffer together. We laugh. We drink. We never tell each other anything to bring us down. We cry silently. It works and it doesn’t.

Pg. 5: Raised in a house of discipline, I thought I did everything right. Father thought I never did anything the right way. He was drafted against his will and later made me enlist. I wanted his approval, as an equal. I mastered the age of father as a child, a trivia genius and history buff. A life drinking hard with them. I became them. Who am I when they are all gone and only I remain? Was I ever really one of them or just any ol’ interlocutor, the last one holding the bag(gage)?

Pg. 6: A new world usurps and plows under the old. I am sentimental. I am obsolete. I howl and strum my guitar at local bars with my band on weekends. Singing songs memorized from my youth, a time where I fit in. I shut my eyes, the dead animate. I love my bandmates. I don’t know who I’d be without them anymore.

 Pg. 7: My wife is my best friend. She knows me better than anyone. We go out nightly to local taverns. She knows how I need to be around people, to be stimulated by their energy. We are perfectly at home in the heartland of farming rural America. We belong here, it gives us everything, it limits chaos. It’s stable here but because of my role as a local judge I never feel safe. Every stranger has revenge carved into their face when I’m in that mood. At the bar my wife sees my anxiety. I don’t want to talk about it. She tells me it’s all right. She orders two drinks and spins a tale about the wizardry of the interior electrical voice of self. How it saddles us each with an unknowable mistress inside, that neither of us will ever know. It is all right she says. I find comfort from her.

Pg. 8: My whole life, in all practicality there has only been one political party in my rural area. All my friends and family are affiliated. I came to believe it was a party of values and law, protecting those I love. Now my political party is controlled by zealots. They are a corruptible group stealing the name and purpose of my party. They insist on a coalition for the sake of amassing power at all costs. What they believe, or say they believe changes daily. I don’t know who my friends are anymore. They want me to revel with them in their perversions of civic life, to blow it all up if they lose. They harass me to serve their interests on the bench. I refuse. Now I am the other to them, another enemy.

Pg. 9: I usually only go hunting with friends. I don’t like to be alone. This trip is different. I’m yards away from of the buck I’ve stalked all week. Bringing home meat is a simple possibility. I raise my rifle. Law is complicated. Although my mind is nimble within the constraint of legal proceedings, it is more than me. I do not author or legislate it, I interpret it. It moves slow, often too slow. That is my hell, the languishing in too slow. I lower my rifle.

Pg. 10: I trekked on for another day before turning back. I’ll take some shit for returning from my hunting trip empty handed. It doesn’t matter. The days and nights spent outside here remind me that I’m flesh. Weak flesh at that. Closer to the end than the beginning. I let the stag escape last night. I feel whole in that moment. Then the moment disappears.