Part Nine: What Brennan Did
He sat in the waiting area outside the committee room while Elena testified.
He had not expected to be there at the same time. The scheduling had not been communicated clearly, or he had not attended to it, and he arrived to find that she was already inside and that he would wait until she was done.
He sat in a plastic chair in a hallway outside a committee room and he waited.
He had spent three weeks in the specific condition of administrative leave, which is not freedom and is not detention but is its own uncomfortable state — the state of someone whose ordinary structures have been suspended and who has therefore been left alone with themselves in a way that the ordinary structures typically prevent. He had not found this comfortable.
He had thought, across three weeks, about what he had done.
Not in the way that people think about things when they are building a defense — not the thinking of someone looking for the explanation that will reduce the damage. But genuinely. The kind of thinking that is reluctant and costly and that arrives at conclusions you would prefer not to arrive at.
He had thought about the word place.
He had thought about what he had meant by it and what he had believed, in that moment, that it communicated. He had thought about what a person must believe to say those words — what prior assumptions must be in place, what view of the world must be operating — for those words to seem like the appropriate response to a woman reading in a café.
He did not find comfortable conclusions.
When Elena came out of the committee room, she nearly walked past him. Then she stopped.
They were alone in the hallway. The circumstances were not the circumstances of the café — there was no audience, no formal structure, no identification to produce.
She looked at him.
“Why did you stop?” he said. The words came out before he had decided to say them.
She was quiet for a moment.
“Because you’re still a person,” she said. “Whatever you did.”
He did not know what to do with that.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She looked at him with the assessment of someone who has been told things across thirty years and has developed a comprehensive ability to hear the difference between the apology that is a social instrument and the apology that is a genuine thing.
“I know,” she said.
She walked away.
