The Soloist (27 page)

There follows a section called the “Grave Song,” carried by the oboe, which is a meditation on death. “Of Science,” the next movement, depicts the complexities of modern life, and “The Convalescent” evokes the restrained joy of spiritual awakening. “The Dance Song” reflects Zarathustra’s happiness at seeing Cupid and wood nymphs dancing together. His joy gives way in the final movement of the piece, titled the “Song of the Night Wanderer,” in which we hear twelve heavy strokes of an ancient bell, accompanied by octaves in the strings, that gradually die away.

As the last note faded into silence and the audience burst into applause, Kyung-hee looked at me with an expression of utter puzzlement. His face was drenched in sweat.

“It isn’t done!” he cried over all the noise.

“What do you mean? That was the ending, Kyung-hee.”

“No! It wasn’t—it wasn’t closed! He didn’t finish it right!”

I realized with excitement that he was referring to the fact that Strauss ended the work in two keys, a device that also startled the first audiences to hear it nearly one hundred years
ago. The upper woodwinds and strings play in the key of B while the basses hold steady in the key of C. Strauss himself never explained this ending, leading most people to conclude that this lack of harmonic resolution denotes Zarathustra’s realization that in spite of all his knowledge, life remains a mystery. I tried to explain this to Kyung-hee, but to no avail.

“He should have finished it,” he kept saying, his hands shaking with emotion. “It was so good until the end.… It was so good.…” He looked as if he had been swindled.

I had hoped that his first night at the symphony would be a more unreservedly joyous occasion, though certainly the experience had not been a failure. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more his reaction pleased me. It showed that he responded deeply to music as an emotional experience, and that he expected more from it than mere distraction. It also demonstrated a natural affinity for classical harmonic structure, best represented by Bach and Mozart, which requires that a piece be harmonically resolved according to the rules of counterpoint. Bach, for example, would have finished (or closed, as Kyung-hee put it)
Also Sprach Zarathustra
in only one key, and it would have had to be in the key of the tonic, in this case C, established at the very beginning of the piece. Since I shared Kyung-hee’s attraction to strict harmonic design, I was delighted by his annoyance, and had to restrain myself from saying aloud that if Strauss had had Kyung-hee’s natural talent he might have written better music.

In spite of the success of the evening, I ended up drinking heavily all day Sunday. Brooding over my barren social life, it infuriated me that I’d thrown away my entire childhood and youth, thinking that music was all-important. Look where it had landed me, I thought; I was a failure by the time I was
eighteen, and had spent the sixteen years since then becoming steadily more ignorant of how to carry on the kind of relationships that human beings were designed for. I couldn’t even manage sex with a beautiful woman who was starved for affection.

I was hung over Monday morning and was the last juror to get to the courthouse. Maria-Teresa noticed that I didn’t look well and asked what was wrong. I told her I must have picked up a bug, and that I’d been wiped out all weekend with it.

She looked relieved and said, “God, I was afraid it was because of me.”

“No, no, it had nothing to do with you. How could it?”

She smiled at me and said, “I hope not.” I wished she hadn’t been so nice about it; it would have been much easier if she had ridiculed me or been angry, because then at least I could have felt indignant or hurt or—anything but that sense of failure. I could hardly bear looking at her.

The day crept along unbearably. With all of the testimony and evidence out of the way, there were only closing arguments to hear before starting our deliberations.

Ms. Doppelt went first. She began by saying that by now we all knew that Philip Weber suffered from mental disease; this was an unrefuted fact. The only real question was whether we should send this mentally ill person to a hospital
or to a prison. If she had asked for my opinion just then, I would have said, Who gives a damn? Why should we spend so much time and money on one spectacular lost cause, when those of us who become lost causes gradually are expected to shuffle out of sight without disturbing anyone?

Although I did try, I couldn’t pay attention during most of Ms. Doppelt’s speech. The only part of it that I really heard was the ending, where her voice suddenly dropped low and she said, “I have a particular reason for believing that Philip didn’t know what he was doing that day. Do you remember that during the voir dire Mr. Graham dismissed anyone who had a relative with mental illness? Well, there’s a reason for that. If someone in your family has this problem, then you know how awful it is, how innocent the people with the disease are, and how they suffer. I wouldn’t qualify to sit in that jury box with you—Mr. Graham would have kicked me off it. I have a sister with a mental illness. It’s destroyed her life, and it isn’t her fault at all. I had to watch it happen, so I know what it does to a person.”

She rubbed her forehead with her palm, then dropped her arms back to her sides stiffly. “Philip Weber’s future—and possibly the future of other innocent people he will have contact with during the course of his life—is in your hands now. All I ask is that before you make your final decision and judge him, ask yourself this one question: If justice is meant to protect and enhance the lives of good people in society, what verdict in this case best protects and enhances our lives? Keeping a dangerously ill man out of society for a while—probably a short while—by locking him in a cell for an arbitrary period, or keeping a dangerously ill man out of society by putting him in a secure hospital for as long as it takes to heal him? I realize that this is a difficult question to
answer, but I hope that this trial will force you to answer it.

“Remember that Philip never claimed to be insane. He was judged to be insane by a qualified specialist, and I have defended him on the basis of that evaluation and the other evidence. He hasn’t assisted me in his defense at all. As you learned, he refused the services of a private lawyer because, as he said to me, ‘I don’t want my father to have to pay for this. I don’t need to be defended, because there’s nobody here to defend!’ He is not someone who committed a crime, then thought, I know how to get out of this—I’ll say I was insane! The day I met him I could tell immediately that something was terribly wrong, so I hired a psychiatrist to evaluate him. It was on the basis of that evaluation that I chose the insanity defense. If you feel any resentment about having to sit through an insanity-defense trial, blame me for it, not Philip. He honestly thinks that the outcome of this trial is utterly irrelevant. He is now, as he was on January fourth, clearly not sane and is unable to grasp the significance of what he’s done, or to recognize the difference between right and wrong. To put him in jail would be like throwing a five-year-old in jail—it wouldn’t bring Mr. Okakura back to life, it wouldn’t help Mr. Okakura’s family, it wouldn’t help us, it wouldn’t be punishment, and it would be a meaningless gesture. I honestly believe that.”

Maria-Teresa slipped me a piece of paper that had “Indian restaurant again?” scrawled on it. I nodded and tried to look enthusiastic, but felt nauseated. I didn’t even hear Mr. Graham’s closing argument.

Lunch was a disaster. Maria-Teresa tried to cheer me up, but that made matters worse. Her attention only made me feel pathetic in addition to all the other negatives. At last she became exasperated and asked, “So just because we didn’t
have sex that night you don’t want to talk to me? I didn’t think it was such a big deal, but if you’re going to act like it’s the end of the world, it’s
gonna
be a big deal, you know? Relax, will you?”

I didn’t blame her at all for getting irritated with me, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I felt as if I were bound, gagged and chained to a table, and now someone was asking me to socialize. I couldn’t even form complete sentences. She finally grew too frustrated to try anymore, and we trudged back to the courtroom in deafening silence.

“First thing is we elect a new foreman,” Mrs. Friedman said.

“Why? You did just fine before, Ruth.”

“I don’t want to have to do it twice. I nominate Mr. Anderson.”

No one else volunteered, so Dwight Anderson, the black ex-Marine, took charge. He suggested that we start with a secret ballot, as we had before.

I wrote “Undecided.” I did believe Weber had been out of his mind, but didn’t necessarily want to have to make a stand. Hearing the other jurors’ comments in the hallways and the men’s room, and from looking at some of their faces as they rushed to write “Guilty” in bold letters on their slips of paper, I was afraid I might be the only dissenting vote; if so, I wanted the option of being able to change my vote quietly if I thought it wasn’t worth fighting over.

“Eleven guilty, one undecided.”

“Does it have to be all twelve to make a verdict?” Mathilda, the nervous woman, asked.

“Yes,” Dwight said, “that’s what the judge said; since it’s a murder trial, it has to be unanimous.”

“Oh, boy,” she groaned. In the tense silence following her comment, I realized that everyone assumed that the one dissenting vote was hers, just as before. I nearly smiled at the misunderstanding, though it wasn’t really funny.

“The next step, then,” Dwight said, “is to go over the evidence. We’ll go around the room and list all the main points of both sides. Then we’ll take another secret ballot to see if the vote has changed.”

“Why don’t we just say who voted how,” Roy asked. He was the retired plant manager, the redneck. “The one voting not guilty is going to have to explain her reasons anyway, right?” From the way he said it, I got the feeling that he simply didn’t like taking instructions from Dwight.

“Well,” answered Rose, the large black woman, “in those jury instructions they suggest we do it this way. There must be some reason.”

Dwight nodded and said, “It’s too early to put one person on the spot. We got to take our time here. It’s murder we’re talking about.” Everyone was too polite at this point to grumble. “So let’s get started, then. Rose? You want to start?”

“What is it we’re starting now?” Mathilda interrupted, “I’m a little confused.”

Several people exhaled loudly. Patiently Dwight explained that we were going to start reviewing the evidence that suggested he was sane; then we would talk about the evidence that suggested he was insane.

Mathilda was becoming flustered already. “I guess I’m the dumb one, because no one else ever has any questions. I guess I should just shut up.”

“You’re not dumb,” Jesusita, the nurse’s aide, said, smiling at her. “Relax.”

During all of this, Maria-Teresa didn’t look at me. She seemed to be going from being hurt to being angry, for which I was both sorry and thankful.

“Should somebody be taking notes as we go?” Grace, the soft-spoken widow, asked. “It might make things easier in the long run.”

“Good idea. Who can write fast?”

No one wanted to volunteer. “Come on,” Dwight prodded, “somebody has to be able to take good notes—Rose?”

“Hey, mister, I have to do that every day at work! It’s bad enough being in this trial, but at least I get out of taking dictation for a while.”

“Yeah, but you can do it better than any of us,” Roy said. I was afraid he and Rose might start arguing, so I offered to do it. I also figured it might help me to think more clearly, in a more structured way, about the evidence, and it would keep my mind off the fact that Maria-Teresa was ignoring me so conspicuously. By this time everyone must have noticed our rift, which only added to my sense of discomfort.

Dwight passed me a big yellow pad and a pen. “We’re talking about evidence of sanity,” he resumed. “I’m starting, and we might as well go around the table like last time. First of all, there’s what the second psychiatrist said—that the kid was sick, but not crazy. That psychiatrist thought the kid definitely did know what he was doing.”

“Yeah,” Gary, the meter reader, said, “and then there’s the way he was so on target with that stick. Somebody nuts would be swinging wild, running around, panicking, saying he was Napoleon or …”

Roy nodded. “Yep. And he was able to lead a normal enough life—he kept a job for a while and paid rent. That kid knew enough to talk his old man into letting him goof off and
smoke pot at home for six months. He didn’t act very insane before that day.”

Jesusita seemed convinced that the drug use was responsible. “Even if he wasn’t doing it that day … I know people who do the drugs, then stop, but still there’s something wrong with their mind, you know? A lot of ’em were pretty calm people before they got into dope, but after, they can’t control their temper.”

“You know what else is going through my mind?” Roy asked. “It’s—if this guy really thinks he’s God, and he says he doesn’t care where he goes, then he might as well go to jail, right? Because—” he added, thumping on the table with a stubby forefinger, “if he’s guilty and he’s just faking that he’s crazy, then he’ll pay the price, but if he really is nuts, he won’t know the damn difference! He’ll be just as happy in jail. So guilty is the safest way to go, no matter what.”