Merely Semantic by Mary Ann Dimand

George thought of it while he was shaving. He was pulling the skin of his right cheek down and carefully stroking with the razor held in his left, less adroit hand, and it was such a shock that he cut himself: Lawyers are magicians. As he applied styptic to his dark cheek, he spun it out: Lawyers bring entities into existence by naming them and delimiting them. Without lawyers, there are no geographical countries, and barely peoples. (And those peoples, insofar as they exist, tend to be distinguished as much by the language they speak as by their companioning.) Lawyers set boundaries, and the lesser wizardries of surveying and mapping arose to aid them.

George was in law school himself, and had been only an indifferent student, struggling for perfection in memorizing cases and references he did not find interesting at all. Now, though, thinking of himself as a magician in the making, thinking of case citation as search and application of ancient sorceries, he began to shine and to rise. Property? Absolutely, all definitely created by the descriptions and labelings made by the law. The development of intellectual property rights? Finding the sorceries to leash and constrain immaterial entities, like wrangling intransigent demons. Torts? All personal boundaries defined by law, and warfare at the boundaries. Administrative law: magical conjurings to set golems to work so that the magician can rise above the details, operate at more transcendent levels. Con law: how a constitution brings into being a government, empowers and limits it. Or tries to. (You can’t get humans out of the mix, and no magic operates itself.)

As he copied and pasted, when he wrote an argument himself, he thought of himself as waving a lordly quill and creating kingdoms with casual and growing puissance.

It was all right while he thought about boundaries. He didn’t realize that he had run into danger when he began to think of channels and functions. And so he tumbled into the pit all unaware.

What, thought George, is a name, an identity, but an unnatural creation that distinguishes this entity from that? Isn’t individuality brought into existence by the mere sorcery of naming, the magics of law? And what else is the law about in this enterprise than making work for its adepts? Without individuals, there are no transactions—merely flows within a body. Lawyers have brought us to think of contracts as promised transactions to be fulfilled, and an uncompleted contract as a party’s violation of agreement. But surely what is occurring, if there are not truly individuals, is merely a blocked, shunted, or weakened flow, or a flow of something unexpected and possibly harmful or helpful to the egress and source. A seller is merely a source, a buyer only an outlet of the source’s flows, both part of one body. And how can an actor offend against a community they’re a part of? It’s all one body, and that’s how it operates! Law merely provides tools to classify—now, to create!—parts of the community, not to heal it.

That stopped his progress in law school. He couldn’t make himself attend classes, see his advisor, work on his third-year project: He understood now that those could be only quixotic capering in a thoroughly fictional world by someone deluded into imagining he existed as a “he.”

He failed, of course, which hardly ever happens. His advisor, who had become fond of him, was concerned. He had started as an anxious first year, laboriously trying to reproduce examples, get “the right answer,” and avoid talking in classes. Then something happened, and he began venturing creative reframings, with increasing conviction. He began to call her Imani—fine with her—the way only the most cocksure students did, though he’d never seemed like one. Still didn’t, in fact. He wasn’t in one of her classes when he disappeared, but she thought she would have checked on him even if he had never been her student. Of Maltese and Indonesian parentage herself, she always took a little extra interest in students of color, and George was Black.

Her phone calls to him during the term had received no answers or responses, and after the letter of expulsion was delivered by registered mail, he still wasn’t answering his phone. She took the time to drop by his apartment, where George’s roommates let her in and gestured her to the living room.

At first she didn’t see him. “George?” she said softly.

The large plastic tube she’d noticed alongside a couch rolled, then thrashed a bit. Slowly, George’s pallid, doughy face emerged from one end. He looked oddly shiny, perhaps even sticky.

“There is no George,” he said thickly.

“What?!”

“There is only the body. We are the body. All of us are the body.”

“George, George, what are you doing? You need help!”

George stretched his mouth a bit. Smiling, perhaps. “I am doing the best I can. I don’t know who can help.”

His advisor bent as one might to a child. “How can I help, George? May I call a doctor? A therapist? Clergy? A friend?”

“No. No, only a physiologist might—but they wouldn’t help. I don’t know how to become a leukocyte. I’m trying to figure it out. I don’t know what else to do. There is nothing else to do. Not that it matters…”

He subsided, muttering, withdrawing his head back into the tube the professor realized was the best marrowbone simulacrum her one-time student had achieved.

She had known incoming students who imagined law as a compendium of instructions for justice, pillars that upheld truth, and who were shocked and disquieted to learn about and engage in the processes of demolition, new construction, reshaping, refitting, and reinterpreting, which were what good working lawyers actually engaged in. It wasn’t unusual for them to quit. Few—not many—had become seriously disturbed. Now, George seemed to have been toppled into madness by understanding law’s arbitrariness. Maybe the arbitrariness of language itself.

She shook her head, shrugged her shoulders, and headed out to adjudicate the first year moot court. An untenured law professor gets all the most tedious jobs—especially if she’s a woman of color.

Mary Ann Dimand

Author note: I’m grateful to my helpful beta readers Carol Scott and Sheeyun Park.

AImage by 193584 from Pixabay – a shelf of legal textbooks in blue and yellow covers with roman numerals for the editions and titles in gold.