Writing exercise, July 14, 2023

julio 14, 2023 at 2:59 pm (Writing exercise)

The first disappearance of a Supreme Court Justice judge did not terrify people. It unsettled them, to be sure—how does one of the most protected people in the country just vanish? But it wasn’t the sort of thing anyone could apply to their lives—so she’d disappeared; what does that mean for me, personally? 

Which isn’t to say that change didn’t happen. As the fifth vote in a conservative court, Joy Garrett had been essential part of Republicans’ efforts to roll back the last century’s worth of progress. Now, the (barely) Democratic Senate, along with the Democratic White House, had a chance to turn things around—at least if Garrett were to ever be declared dead. And so, many people, including Jackie Joyce, just shrugged and tried to keep their schadenfreude in check. Sure, it was weird as hell, what had happened, but wasn’t the world a better place now? 

One month later, just as people seemed in the verge of forgetting, the second judge disappeared. 

After the disappearance of Rufus Wainwright, a fixture of the Supreme Court for over twenty years, all hell broke loose. There wasn’t a pattern quite yet, but the extremely low bar for speculation had been cleared, and so a million new theories arose, many of them centering on the fact that, like Garrett, Justice Wainwright had been a staunch—Jackie Joyce would say radical—conservative. If this was a recurring act of God, it was starting to seem as if it had an agenda.

And so impulsive action was taken. Security measures were beefed up, and investigations begun, for all the good they did. Gun sales jumped, and this time Jackie Joyce had to admit to her girlfriend that she couldn’t blame people for it; if people could just disappear like that, then paranoia seemed, if not quite logical, understandable. They were also starting to see more people at church, although their pastor indicated that she did not expect this to last. It was what always happened, during a crisis, and these always eventually ended or were forgotten.

In the Senate and in the networks, Republicans, realizing they had no real leverage, began speaking of conciliation. Given the tragic disappearances of two justices—not deaths, they always emphasized—it would be impulsive and disrespectful and downright irresponsible to even think about rolling back recent decisions. The White House, with its customary fecklessness, seemed to be suggesting the same thing, although according to some sources, steps were being taken in the background to move forward with nominations, and not altogether terrible ones.

One day before Justice Garrett was set to be declared dead, three senators—two republicans; one, a democrat in name only—went missing.