The Soloist (20 page)

The witness, whose name was Fran DeLacy, said she was an artist and had first become interested in Zen for professional reasons. She had been studying with a Japanese ceramicist at the time, and her teacher had recommended Zen to help strengthen her concentration. Within a few years her interest in Zen grew to overshadow her interest in art, so she moved into the Zen Foundation in order to devote all her energy to practicing meditation full time. As she spoke I noticed that the defendant was shifting restlessly in his chair and avoiding looking at her. He seemed uncharacteristically tense during her testimony.

Ms. DeLacy recounted how Philip came to join their group. When Ms. Doppelt asked her to describe her early impressions of Philip, the witness said, “The first day he walked in I could tell he was ‘off.’ He needed a therapist, not Zen lessons.” When she said this, Philip laughed out loud; it was the first time he had made any noise at all since the trial began.

“I remember,” Ms. DeLacy continued, “that at the house
meeting where we were deciding whether to let him become a resident or not, I was against it.”

“Did you express your concern?” Ms. Doppelt asked.

“Yeah. I said, ‘Hey, we don’t run a halfway house, we run a Zen center.’ I thought it would be a problem to have him living there because he was obviously a mixed-up kid. But I got voted down.”

Ms. DeLacy no longer lived at the Zen Foundation. She had left right after the murder, but she told us she had been planning to leave for some time. When asked why, she said it was because she disagreed with the late Zen master’s teaching methods. She thought he put too much pressure on students to achieve enlightenment.

“Mr. Okakura was always saying, if you’re really serious about Zen and really push yourself, you’ll have a sudden enlightenment and it will be the greatest experience of your life. He said you had to practically kill yourself if you wanted to attain it.” She sighed and ran her tongue over her lips as if to moisten them. A glass of water sat on the table next to her, but she didn’t seem to notice it. “I got tired of that attitude, I guess. I think it’s a macho thing. Zen teachers think that since they went through hell to get their knowledge, you have to go through hell too or you can’t join their club. When you get someone like Philip, who’s already kind of obsessive, and seems to be on the edge, and push someone like that … I mean, I’m right, aren’t I? Look at what happened.”

“So you feel that Mr. Okakura—or his methods, rather—pushed Mr. Weber over the edge, so to speak, during the retreat?”

The witness twisted her mouth to one side and looked around, thinking. “Well, not intentionally,” she finally answered.

“But I think the koan he assigned to Philip, the one about killing the Buddha in the road … I think it had something to do with it, yeah.”

The reason the dead man’s relatives left the courtroom became apparent during the cross-examination. In his usual polite but wry manner, Mr. Graham reported that a witness had mentioned in a prior statement that Philip had been quite upset, as many of the Zen Foundation members were, when a romantic relationship between the doomed Zen teacher and several students, including the witness, came to light in a very public way.

It turned out that the Zen teacher had been sleeping with several of the female members of his churches without letting them know about the others, and that one of them had even brought a sexual harassment suit against him that was settled out of court.

Ms. DeLacy did not seem surprised that this came out in the trial. The defense attorney must have prepared her for it. She said that yes, the scandal did upset a lot of people, including Philip. She said that one night, at an emergency house meeting, one woman said she thought that Okakura was a fraud, and that he should be banned from teaching. Philip didn’t yell at her, but he did go up to his room and several of the members heard him crying. “There’d been a lot of crying around the foundation then, though,” she added.

“Ms. DeLacy,” Mr. Graham asked in his charming drawl, managing to seem polite even while asking the most intrusive questions, “before this incident came out in the open, did you have any reason to believe that Philip liked you? In the sense of having a crush, I mean?”

Again Philip laughed out loud when he heard the question.

When I looked at him he was shaking his head, with a forced-looking smile on his face.

“No, he didn’t give me any reason to think so,” the witness said. “In fact, he almost never looked me in the eye. He wouldn’t talk to me unless I asked him something, and then he’d practically run away.”

Mr. Graham nodded slowly, then glanced at Philip, who was frowning slightly and making notches in a pencil with his thumbnail. It got me thinking; if he’d had an immature crush on Ms. DeLacy that he couldn’t express in an acceptable way, and he knew that the Zen master had slept with her and betrayed her, perhaps the murder wasn’t entirely without motive after all.

“Have you been practicing with your suit on, Kyung-hee?” I asked as I tuned his cello for him.

He barely nodded, then said, “But I don’t think the real Batman would play the cello.”

“Why not?”

When he looked up at me, I noticed that his glasses had been repaired again with electrical tape, this time over the bridge holding them together. He moved his lips silently for a moment, as if rehearsing what he was going to say. He rarely spoke, and when he did he seemed to have a difficult time putting his thoughts into words.

“There’s a bunch of superheroes,” he began, frowning behind his damaged glasses. “Like Thing—he’s made out of orange rocks, so he can’t really get hurt if you punch him. Batman has all sorts of tools that he invents. Those guys have special powers for fighting bad guys. But playing the cello wouldn’t be a good power because it wouldn’t help them in a fight.”

It was the most I’d ever heard him say. I was delighted, and wanted to encourage him to express himself more often, but at the same time I could hardly agree with what he was
saying. “You have a point, Kyung-hee, but fighting and music are completely different. People fight in order to hurt other people, or to protect themselves, but people make music to feel good. It makes life worth living. Even those superheroes you mentioned have to do something besides fight, don’t you think?”

He stared into space, concentrating, then in disagreement shook his head, which bobbed precariously on his narrow shoulders. “There’s an awful lot of bad guys, Mr. Sundheimer.”

“Well, OK, but let’s talk about you. You don’t fight bad guys, but you do have a special power. You have a special ability to understand music. You realize that, don’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And in a way, your special power is greater than those comic-book characters’, because all they can do is fight, but you can do so much more with music. With your playing, you can say a great deal to people, and give them beautiful moments so they can forget their hard work or remember things out of the past. I think that’s the greatest power of all, don’t you?”

Kyung-hee fell into deep thought again. When he resurfaced, he said gravely, “Well, if you don’t have music you can still live and do other stuff, but if you get killed by a bad guy, you can’t do anything. So maybe superpowers are still the best.”

I couldn’t fail to recognize the logic in what he was saying. Although I was disappointed to learn that he considered fighting more important than music, it relieved me to know that he was capable of reasoning appropriate for his age, and was not an idiot savant as I’d feared when I first met him.

“Well, perhaps it’s foolish of me to make comparisons,
Kyung-hee. But let’s talk about Batman—isn’t he the one whose parents were killed by a bad guy, so then he decided to fight crime?” For once I was glad I had seen a popular movie.

“Uh-huh.”

“So he’s like you and me, isn’t he? He’s not superhuman—he’s just very smart and determined.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So he might play the cello in his spare time, right?”

Kyung-hee’s face suddenly froze; he looked as if something had dropped from the ceiling on his head.

“No!” he said with uncharacteristic vigor. “Batman wouldn’t because the Batcave is where all the computers are and stuff, but he could have played cello when he was Bruce Wayne! In Wayne mansion! It would be perfect!”

“Why would it be perfect, Kyung-hee?”

“Because Wayne mansion
looks
like music! It has candles and old rugs and shining armor in it!”

Delighted that he was relating music to other aspects of human experience, even if it was only furniture, I asked him if the Wayne mansion looked like all music, or only a certain kind of music.

“Like Mozart!” he exclaimed. “Fancy, with a fireplace! And your house looks like Bach!” he added.

“Why?” I asked, feeling enormously complimented.

“Because everything in here, the chairs and desk … it’s all …” He struggled for the words. “It’s all skinny stuff!?”

I realized that he meant the furniture was spare. “And that bookshelf,” he continued, pointing to the set of shelves on the far wall, “it’s the same on that side of the door as on the other side!”

In the matched pair of bookshelves on either side of the
door, he was apparently reminded of the harmonic symmetry that Bach had perfected.

I was so excited I could hardly stay seated. “Kyung-hee, let’s try something. Keep thinking about music and houses for a moment.” I got up and fetched several books of photographs from the shelves, hoping to find pictures of a wide variety of distinctive buildings and gardens. I showed Kyung-hee a photograph of the gardens at Versailles, and without an instant’s hesitation he shouted, “Mozart!”

Next I found a picture of the Venice skyline, and once again, without any hesitation, he cried out, “Mozart!” When he looked at a picture of the Capitol in Washington, he immediately said, “Bach!”

As we went through more pictures, he identified anything remotely elaborate as being like Mozart and anything spare or classically symmetrical as being like Bach. I began to realize that these might be the only composers he was familiar with. When I showed him a picture of the ruins of an old castle, he stared at it for a long time, then said, “That doesn’t look like music.”

As an experiment, I pulled out a recording of Debussy’s “Sunken Cathedral,” an exquisite short piece for piano that features hauntingly liquid chords that were arranged to sound like the bells of an ancient church ringing under the waters of a deep, still lake. Kyung-hee listened without moving; when it was over, he looked down at the picture of the ruined castle, then back up at me, his pupils so dilated that his eyes looked like shiny black marbles. “It’s incredible!” he said; the sound of his voice, coupled with the awed expression on his face, was both lovely and pitiful. The thought that had it not been for an elementary-school music teacher in Long Beach needing a cellist for the school orchestra, the Korean boy
might have gone his whole life without ever discovering classical music made my whole body ache.

I knew then that my primary responsibility to Kyung-hee was not to improve his technique but to make sure that his talent was properly nourished by exposure to great music. I asked him what classical records or tapes he listened to at home; he answered that his family did not have a stereo. “We have two TVs, though,” he said proudly.

I told him to have a seat on the couch, that for the first half of the lesson we were going to listen to music, and put on the Cleveland Orchestra’s recording of Moussorgsky’s
Pictures at an Exhibition
. Instead of giving him the traditional explanation for each of the movements right away, I spread out the books of photographs on the floor and invited him to find pictures in them that “looked like” what he was hearing.

Kyung-hee approached the problem in a way that at first didn’t make sense to me. When the music began, he listened for only a few seconds, then jumped down onto the floor and started leafing through the books at such a fast pace that I was afraid he might tear some of the pages.

He didn’t pause over any of the photographs, making me think that he hadn’t understood me properly, and wasn’t actually trying to relate them to the music. It didn’t appear that he was paying any attention to the music at all. By the fifth movement, barely a third of the way through the piece, he had glanced at all of the pictures in every book, then climbed back up on the sofa.

I debated over whether to stop the music and repeat my instructions to him, but in the end felt it was more important that he hear the music straight through without interruption. After the last movement, the grand procession through the
Gate of Kiev, when the final notes had died away, I looked to see his reaction. He was looking at me with an expression of anxious concentration.

“What did you think, Kyung-hee?”

“Do you want me to show the pictures now?” he asked, fidgeting in his seat.

“Sure.”

He pounced on the books, pushing all of them to one side except for one, a book of color photographs by Ernst Haas. “This one has the pictures that look the tightest,” he said, flipping rapidly through the pages. Humming from memory the opening theme, the Promenade, which depicts the composer strolling from picture to picture at the exhibition where his late friend Victor Hartmann’s paintings were hung, Kyung-hee settled without hesitation on a photograph of horse-drawn carriages in Central Park, their drivers wearing top hats and long coats.