The Holdout

The adversarial system,” that’s what it was called. The attorneys on each side did their best to win, no-holds-barred—and whatever emerged from the mess of broken limbs was called justice.

In courtrooms all across this city, Maya had seen people get verdicts they’d wanted, and she’d seen just as many get ones they didn’t. But the verdicts had nothing to do with truth. No verdict ever changed a person’s opinion. Juries weren’t gods. The people who went into those courtrooms looking for divine revelation came out bearing the fruits of bureaucratic negotiation. Maya wanted to tell Lou that this need for vindication had become the mire of their whole petty country. Every day, they woke up fervently hoping for the headline that would prove, definitively, that their guys were the virtuous ones and the other guys were the absolute worst. But news of that certainty would forever elude them. Every new revelation that seemed to damn the people with whom they disagreed would be followed by a new rationalization. For every failed prediction, there would come a mitigating circumstance. They would double down on their most weakly held convictions because the alternative felt unbearable, and the bums across the aisle would follow suit. She wanted to say that the only thing worse than being wrong was having a bottomless need to prove that you never were. But she didn’t tell Lou any of that. Instead, Maya told Lou what he wanted to hear. She did it because she was the last person on earth who should be instructing Lou Silver on how to live out his days. And she did it because he’d asked her an honest question, and he deserved to hear from her an honest answer. “Mr. Silver,” she said, running her fingers through her hair, “I’m not sure of much of anything anymore.

What she missed the most about the person she'd been, Maya realized, was her hope for a coming world that turned out never to have been possible. She was nostalgic for an imaginary future.

In the stories, there's always an answer at the end. Resolution. The detective confronts the killer; the killer admits it. We know for sure. But out here - it's not like that. Out here, maybe somebody goes to jail. Maybe somebody doesn't. But we never know the truth. The real, whole, definite truth. It's impossible.

Every new revelation that seemed to damn the people with whom they disagreed would be followed by a new rationalization. For every failed prediction

Either she was who they wanted her to be, or she wasn’t, but either identity existed only in the shadow of their expectations.

Maya wanted to tell Lou that this need for vindication had become the mire of their whole petty country. Every day, they woke up fervently hoping for the headline that would prove, definitively, that their guys were the virtuous ones and the other guys were the absolute worst. But news of that certainty would forever elude them. Every new revelation that seemed to damn the people with whom they disagreed would be followed by a new rationalization. For every failed prediction, there would come a mitigating circumstance. They would double down on their most weakly held convictions because the alternative felt unbearable, and the bums across the aisle would follow suit. She wanted to say that the only thing worse than being wrong was having a bottomless need to prove that you never were.

Think of sexism. Fuck, think of sexual orientation. Think of the concept. Racism is about racial orientation. To say you made judgments about Bobby Nock because he’s black isn’t saying you’re some irredeemable redneck son of a bitch, dragging around a rope and a hood. We think of ‘racists’ as these other people—this subset of subhuman assholes. The villains in all those ridiculous movies with beatific white saviors. When the villains are so clear, we can tuck ourselves into bed at night knowing that we’re nothing like them. But what if it’s not so clear? What if it’s more complicated than here’s some heroic non-racist white people and here’s some villainous racist white people? What if, for me, the most pressing questions are not about how ‘racist’ you think you are or can prove that you aren’t. I don’t give a shit whether you think you’re a one or a ten on some kind of racism Kinsey scale. I care about what you’re going to do about it.

Wanting to know. Everybody wants to know. But maybe growing up means accepting that you're not always able to.

You think I have to identify with Bobby Nock in all this. That our blackness is the most defining feature about us. It’s okay, Maya. It doesn’t make you a racist. This is the craziest thing about good, well-intentioned white people, isn’t it? What lengths you’ll go to not to come off as in any way racist. Heavens! So instead of saying, ‘Bobby is a man and Trisha is a woman, so they don’t have much in common,’ you’re saying, ‘Bobby is black and Trisha is black, so that must be what they have in common.’ What’s the salient feature? The defining part of an object?

Maya repeated Wayne’s words back to him. “ ‘Because she looks honest.’ ” “That’s what

As always, they were most together when disobeying the rules.