More Justice

I pushed through the gawking crowd until I was standing in front of the offender. His neck was fixed in the center hole so his Adam’s apple rested on the edge. His wrists were shackled in the holes on either side. His blue eyes and flared nostrils twitched arrhythmically, and his sparse blond goatee failed to hide his acne scars. It was an instantly hate-able rodent face. I guessed he’d been carefully selected to make us, the general public, comfortable with the new form of punishment.

He glared at me from under stringy eyebrows. His pocked chin was thrust forward. A list of his crimes was nailed to the wood just out of reach of his left fist: armed robbery, possession of narcotics, sexual assault.

I’d noticed the structure on my way home from the office the day before but, empty, I’d dismissed it as another of the nonsensical sculptures that clutter lower Manhattan. It was built of four stacked oak beams, each four feet long and thick as railroad ties, bolted across two cement blocks. A steel hinge glimmered on the left side, a padlock on the right. The offender’s eyes were stuck on the knot of my tie, as if he’d like to give it a twist. His lips curled up at the corners.

I wanted to tell him that men like him were eroding our society from within. I wanted to poke him with a stick, like the dead creatures I used to find on the beach in Maine. Instead, I switched my briefcase from my right hand to my left.

“Fuck you,” he said.

His low, scratchy voice startled me. It did not seem that he should be able to talk. I edged around the side of the cement block, nearly tripping over a dumbstruck toddler. She raised a wet, trembling finger. Her blue cap was cocked so far back it was about to fall. Her mother scooped her up, holding the cap, and they whirled away.

From the front, the structure looked like a very clean sort of punishment—the offender’s scrawny neck and arms locked firmly in place, everything else hidden—but around the back his knees sagged and his spine trembled with exhaustion. His booted feet were awkwardly braced against the pavement.

I smiled, then quickly turned, making sure he could not see.

A single policeman stood guard. His eyes moved impassively over the crowd; his hand rested on his baton. Union Square was as it always is: a teeming mess of humanity. Commuters hurried toward the subway. Adolescents in jackboots and black jeans slouched beside a Halal cart. Bums squatted in the shade holding signs about bus tickets and the war and needing help to get back on their feet. Approaching the policeman’s shoulder, I asked if the offender might be gagged, with so many women and children around.

He shrugged.

Cars passed on Park Avenue behind him. Sunlight exploded off each successive windshield. The crosswalk light changed and a wave of tourists swelled the crowd, jostling me toward the fence surrounding two cherry trees. An orange-vested construction crew was drilling into the street and the shrill, ragged noise made everyone move even faster. I had the familiar, vertiginous sensation of being overwhelmed by the combined volume of metal and humanity.

A tattooed couple, pierced and leather-coated, pushed past me.

“It’s a fucking pillory,” the boy said, impressed.

“Fascists,” the girl answered.

I made my way to the train, deeply bothered. I was not against the pillory in principle—our legal system had become dangerously lax and needed more justice—but why must I, a law-abiding citizen, be faced with it on my way home from work?

I had a date that night. They did not usually go well and now I was flustered and disturbed to add to my usual nerves. I realized I was muttering to myself. I stilled my lips, trying to look bemused. A preacher hollered into a microphone while three young women in jogging shorts stretched behind his amplifier. Their legs were three different shades of brown. I’d been alone for so long that I was starting to wonder if there was something wrong with me, something that everyone else could see.

People streamed down the subway stairs carrying plastic bags, books, strollers. “Just a dollar,” one of the bums beside the entrance said, as I passed. A yellow puppy slept in a nest of plastic bags at his feet.

I shook my head, wishing I’d spoken to the offender, put him in his place.



He was in the pillory for a week. He did not get noticeably thinner, so I knew they were feeding him, but his face changed. The defiant twist left his lips, and when I visited him on Friday, he was a slumped husk. His back was bowed almost ninety degrees; his knees rested on the pavement. Flecks of drool clung to his blond whiskers.

It was late in the evening and the crowd was sparse. I knelt beside his cheek, folding my hands atop my briefcase. His eyes lolled half-closed, no longer twitching or even seeming to see. In a voice only he could hear, I told him about my troubles with women. My date had been overweight, with a screeching laugh and no real interest in the Dutch films mentioned on her profile. Or, it turned out, in me. A waste of nearly two hundred dollars, counting dinner and the cab. I knew as well as anyone how they could lie and tease. But that did not justify, not ever, what he had done.

“You slime,” I hissed.

He did not answer. A tuft of blond hair sprouted from his ear. I wished for the stick again, to poke it in there, clean him out.



The next offender was a clean-shaven, fat pedophile. The conversation with his predecessor had left me relieved, and I was both excited and saddened to see this new face. I stood on my tiptoes and stared over several baseball hats and a poorly bleached Mohawk. His head barely fit through the hole. His cheeks merged with his neck in a single blubbery mass. Rolls of flesh pressed against the wood like he was being extruded through it.

Disgusting, how people let themselves go.

A thin, haggard woman wearing an ankle-length black dress elbowed past me. I was about to remark on her rudeness when I noticed the carton of eggs in her hand. She held it so tightly that the muscles in her arms stood out.

She stopped a few feet from the pedophile’s face. The people around her pressed back. One of the baseball hats glanced off my chin. I held my briefcase up to my chest. She opened the carton and removed an egg.

The afternoon sun gleamed on the spires high above Park. A flock of pigeons burst from the gables of the Lincoln Building and flew down to join us, settling on the fence behind the pillory. There was a momentary ebb in the city noise, as if the taxi drivers, construction workers, and trains were in concert with the woman. Her hand trembled. Her face, when she turned it to glance around, was drawn so tight that I thought she might burst.

The pedophile opened his mouth. The pink tip of his tongue touched the back of his front teeth, but before he could speak, the woman threw the egg in a single jerking motion. He flinched and it exploded on his squeezed-shut eye. Yolk slid down his cheeks.

The policeman made no move to stop her and she repeated the action, working fast, her arm whipping through the air, back to the carton, and again through the air. I felt a distinct charge of pleasure, a sizzle, with each wet pop. The pedophile wrenched his head back and forth. He tried to blink the yolk from his eyes. Viscous threads connected his chin to a shining puddle on the pavement.

When the carton was empty, the woman stopped, breathing heavily.

Electricity hummed in the air. It passed from shoulder to shoulder, buzzing in my chest and through the square. Even the pigeons were frozen, watching. Our place in the system was suddenly clear. The muscles in the pedophile’s jaw clenched and unclenched. He shook a gob of yolk from his lip. White shell shards stuck to his forehead, as if he’d just hatched.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

A spasm of emotion contorted the woman’s cheeks. She swung around and we parted to let her pass.



I stopped at the store on the way to work the next morning and bought three pounds of overripe tomatoes, on sale.

I was not alone in my convictions. When I left the office, people young and old were lined in front of the pillory with eggs, vegetables, and other rotten foods, waiting their turn to pelt the pedophile. The man in front of me had brought his young son. They each had a yellow bottle of mustard and when their turn came they painted yellow lines over the pedophile’s lips and cheeks. His head hung motionless, his eyes closed. Every once in a while he twitched, his ear bumping the wood.

“He deserves to die out here,” the father said, squeezing his son’s shoulder as they walked away.

Nervous sweat dampened my palms. The pedophile was even fatter up close. Gel mixed with the pulp in his black hair. I searched through the bag for a tomato with the right mushy but taut consistency. I imagined him in front of the mirror in the morning: running his gel-covered fingers along his skull, flattening his sideburns. Was he embarrassed about being so fat, when so many people would see him? My date had not been embarrassed at all. She swung her stomach around as if it were part of the joke.

I chose a tomato, kicked away a pebble near my toe. I rolled my shoulders.

“Either throw it or get out of the way,” a short, pug-faced man to my right said.

Not wanting to miss, I lobbed the tomato. It bounced off the pedophile’s cheek and landed intact on the pavement.

His eyelids fluttered. A woman behind me laughed. I wondered why I had put myself into this situation when I could so easily have been alone in my apartment making my way through a bottle of Malbec.

I gripped the second tomato like a baseball, digging my nails into its flesh. The evening sun angled down through the buildings, filling the windows with coppery light. I thought of all the times I’d been pushed aside, the women for whom I didn’t even exist. I inhaled, leaned back, and threw with all my strength.

The tomato burst on the wood to the left of his face, spattering his cheek with juice.

“Christ, c’mon.” The pug-man was holding a sack of plums like a mace. “Why don’t you just cut it up and feed it to him?”

More people began to laugh. Even the policeman smiled.

I stepped forward so the pedophile was just over an arm’s-length away. He tried to turn away but his neck was too fat. I hurled the third tomato across the bridge of his nose. A large chunk caught in the corner of his eye. He coughed, a choking sound. The laughter turned to cheers.



I developed a weekly routine. On Mondays, I put several tomatoes, along with wormy apples, blackened pears, shriveled little oranges, and whatever other suitably rotten fruit I had, in a large Tupperware and took it with me to work. It sat on the corner of my desk all day, and in my spare moments I glanced at it. The dark shapes behind the opaque plastic were full of possibility: how they would burst, the color of their juices. At six sharp, I hurried to the square, joined the produce-laden crowd, and waited my turn.

I grew friendly with the other regulars, even the pug-man. We discussed which types of produce were most appropriate for each crime. We joked about durians and watermelon.

The rest of my life went on much the same—a cycle of meetings, reports, and sleep, but I had more energy, and whenever I felt terribly alone I thought of the men in the pillory. Some were white, others black, Hispanic, Asian. Some growled and swore; one spat a wad of pale green phlegm onto my recently polished loafer. But by week’s end they all slumped forward, their eyes blank.

Vendors set up carts by the steps selling water balloons full of spoiled relish and ketchup. Groups of schoolchildren came from as far away as South Carolina to be instructed on the dangers of crime. All the bums were cleared from the steps to make way for the crowd, and a carnival atmosphere took hold around the pillory. Protesters circled the fringes with hand-painted signs, but they were always outnumbered

I came to treasure the small part I played in the justice system. I stopped eating fruit altogether but continued to buy it. I kept a close eye on my neighbors. I watched the local news every morning, tracking criminal activity. I left peaches, avocados, and mandarins on my kitchen windowsill where the afternoon sun shone the brightest.

Only once did I see the policeman intervene, when an old man threw a rock he’d brought in a rolling suitcase. It opened a gash on the offender’s forehead, and the policeman cleared everyone away and called the paramedics. I stayed, watching the EMT kneel in front of the blocks and stitch up the wound.

The old man was taken away in a squad car. He stared straight ahead through the bulletproof glass, his suitcase on the seat beside him.



They waited almost a year before they put a woman in. It was a shock, at first. Her head and wrists were small enough that she looked like she could slip free. Her lips were fuller than the men’s, and the bones in her jaw more delicate. There was something shameful about the empty holes in her earlobes.

The crowd stood around tentatively. They scuffed the pavement like children outside the principal’s office. Dark red water balloons dangled from their fists.

I had been eyeing a particularly moldy peach all afternoon, but now I, too, felt unsure.

The woman’s skin was mottled and leathery. Tired lines etched her cheeks. The bridge of her nose bent to the left. It was a face that had been wrung out by the world. Her unwashed brown hair hung almost to the bottom beam. She was a con artist, drug abuser, and thief.

I stepped forward.

She looked up. She blinked. Her dull, brown eyes were mirror images of several I had sat across from in overpriced restaurants, then never seen again. I opened the Tupperware. A putrid stench wafted out, like August in the Bowery. The people around me pushed back. A car horn blared on Fourteenth Street and men in suits ran for the train. Coins of sunlight were scattered across the pavement. Green buds dotted the branches of the two cherry trees.

I gripped the peach’s sticky skin, feeling the weight of the pit. She closed her eyes. My heart raced against my ribs. She would listen. She had to, but what was there to say? I hoped they would put a pretty one in, someday.