An Invisible Client

by Victor Methos

Justice will not come until those who are not injured are as outraged as those who are. — Solon, 560 BC

juries could never be trusted to do the smart thing—and

Under the law, a person was valued at exactly how much money that person could earn. Anyone who hadn’t gone to an Ivy League school, pulled in at least six figures, or had a family business waiting for them was what PI lawyers called “an invisible client”—one who lived and breathed but didn’t officially exist.

“It was money,” I said. “I’m rich . . . and I couldn’t save him. Everything I have—all my money, power, everything I fought so hard to get my entire life—it was . . . an illusion. When I needed it, nothing was there.”

Like Oscar Wilde said, the poor in America don’t think of themselves as a repressed lower class, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Plato wrote that the gods were jealous of man’s powers after the days of creation, that we had four arms and four legs and two heads, and were full of love and intelligence and grit, so they split us in half and threw our halves all around the earth. The point of life, then, is to find your other half and become whole again. The tragedy of life is if you find them and don’t hold on.”