The soloist

by Salzman, Mark

  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 awfiil it is, how innocent the people with the disease are, and how they suffer. I wouldn't qualify to sit in that jur^ 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 w^hat it does to a person."

  She rubbed her forehead with her palm, then dropped her arms back to her sides stiffly. 'Thilip 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

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  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 honesdy 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

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  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 jfonna 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 annhing 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 aft-aid 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."

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  "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.>"

  "WTiat 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."

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  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

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  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."

  "That may be true," Dwight said, a touch of disdain beginning to show in his voice, "but we have to stick to answering the question of whether he was sane or insane."

  "You can't ever prove what's in a guy's head," Roy shot back, looking around for support. "It seems to me we just gotta do what seems best, and what seems best to me is that this guy goes to jail."

  Dwight didn't let anyone come to his rescue. "If we can't decide if he's sane or not," he said firmly, "we have to tell that to the judge, and they'll have to do the whole thing over. But even that'd be better than making a decision for the wrong reasons."

  "I thought we weren't going to debate yet," Mrs. Friedman said. "Let's try to stay on track here, or we'll never get through this. We're only talking evidence now."

  When it came her turn, Maria-Teresa said, "After he killed

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  the guy, he got tackled to the ground and he didn't complain. He got handcuffed and busted, but didn't resist. He got taken to jail and talked to his lawyer and to all these doctors, and now he sits in a courthouse for a couple of weeks while people talk about how crazy he is. . . .All those situations are pretty stressful, right? But he was calm through all of it. If you're insane, you're supposed to be out of control, right.^ He doesn't seem out of control to me."

  A soft voice said, "And then there's the puzzle." It was Grace, whose late husband had worked at the jet lab. "The one about killing the Buddha. If the puzzle talked about killing, and the boy admits that killing the teacher was his answer to the puzzle, then ... he knew he was killing, right.^ It seems to me that this weakens the argument that he didn't know what he was doing."

  "Fritz? What about you?"

  The old janitor scratched his head. "I can't think of anything right now. I'm trying, though."

  I mentioned the fact that he had been able to sit still, in complete silence for hours at a time, every day for nearly a year before this had happened. That struck me as something a schizophrenic might have a hard time doing.

  "Bett\>" Dwight asked.

  "I didn't like the fact that he didn't testify at all. If he's innocent, why didn't his lawyer put him on the stand? It seems like the lawyer is trying to hide something that way."

  "Madiilda?"

  All eyes turned on poor Mathilda. She fidgeted, then said in a pained voice, "All of the above, I guess. I don't know how we're supposed to know all this stuff by heart." I was thankful for her confusion this time because it kept me anonymous for a while longer. I needed time to think; after an

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  agonizingly slow trial, the decision-making part seemed to be moving too quickly, and I didn't feel prepared to make a final decision yet. We'd been in the jury room only a few minutes, and already it seemed that everyone but me wanted to vote guilty and go home.

  "I thought of something," Fritz said, drawing the heat away from Mathilda.

  "He was a smart boy—everybody said so. It seems like he was too . . . regular to be crazy. Crazy people, you can tell so easy. They just. . . You can just see fi-om the way they walk and talk. They don't seem smart."

  No one else had any comments for the time being. I showed my notes to Dwight and he said, ''OK, that's a good list. Now let's talk about the evidence that suggests he was insane. I might as well start again. Whether we think he acted like a real crazy person or not, it seems like it's a fact that he has schizophrenia. Both doctors agreed on that. So we're not talking about someone who just, out of the blue, says, T went crazy all of a sudden.' He was getting worse as the years went by, even though he was managing to keep out of trouble. We have to consider that he really does have this disease. ... So a guy with this disease was living at this church where he had to go along with the strict discipline. And during that retreat they got very little sleep, no talking out loud, and hour afi:er hour of sitting still. Remember what that first doctor said.> Something about how that could drive even a normal person nuts.>"

  This time around the pauses between contributions were much longer. Jesusita was the next one to speak. "Well, I have to say . . . the Japanese man who was so nice—Mr. Hayashi, right.> He made their religion sound peaceftil, but I don't know. . . . The teacher that got killed sounded kind of

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  weird. You hear on TV, you know, how every once in a while a kid who seems normal gets into some religion and suddenly he does craz}' things. You ever heard of Santeria? They're crazy—they kill animals, and sometimes people ... So if this Philip was really sick, maybe the religion threw him off."

  After another long pause, I tried to mention casually that the fact that the defendant had been so violent with the teacher and then suddenly so calm afterward seemed curious. If he was really controlling himself, willing himself to kill for selfish reasons, he'd have had to work himself up to quite a ft-enz% wouldn't he? Wouldn't it be hard to turn something like that off all of a sudden? And not be worried or defensive or contradict himself at all during any of the aftermath? That would seem to require either superhuman planning and self-control, which he had never before shown in his life, or a mind that had become unpredictable and out of control. As I said this, I realized I was directly contradicting what Maria-Teresa had said a few minutes earlier. She gave me a vacant look, then turned her eyes away.

  After another pause Rose turned to Mathilda and, sounding as encouraging as possible, asked, ''What about you, Mathilda? Can you think of any other evidence that says he's not guilty?"

  Mathilda frowned and said, "If you're going to wait till the end to call on me every time, how is there supposed to be anything left for me to say? I—"

  "You aren't the last person to be called on," Mrs. Friedman said abruptly. She was beginning to lose patience with the hapless Mathilda. "There are still plenty of people who haven't spoken."

  "Fine! Well, I can't think of anything."

  People squirmed noisily in their chairs; Mathilda was really

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  getting them angry. They all assumed that she was the holdout, and resented her not even contributing an explanation of her position. Mrs. Friedman frowned and made a little smacking sound with her lips, but said nothing. Tension hung in the air until Grace said in her quiet voice, "Up until he killed that man, this boy didn't seem like a mean person. Not like a killer. He wanted attention, but couldn't get it the regular ways. He had a bad family life, what with his mother being so sick and a father who didn't seem to be aware of what was going on in his family. When you think about all that put together, it makes you wonder."

  "Wonder what.>" Mathilda asked.

  "If everything was really that boy's fault."

  "It doesn't make me wonder," Roy said. "He's twenty-one years old, he lived away from home for years, he holds a job and he can put his own pants on. You can't blame his old man for what he does now."

  When it became clear that no one else had anything to add, Dwight said, "Then let's do the blind ballot again."

  "You mean the secret ballot.^" Mathilda asked, sounding panicked.

  "Blind ballot, secret ballot, whatever," Mrs. Friedman sai
d through clenched teeth.

  I wrote down "Not guilty" this time. I'm not sure why; I wasn't even thinking about convincing any of the others, but the more I thought about it, the more sure I felt that Philip had been insane. Dwight counted the slips again. Without registering any surprise or annoyance he said, "This time it's ten guilty, two not guilty." A few people sighed heavily, and Roy groaned out loud. I felt so gratefiil for the second vote that I had to control myself from asking whom to thank.

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  ''Well, does anyone object if we have a show-of-hands vote at this fx)int?'' Mrs. Friedman asked. No one objected. There wouldn't have been much point in any case, because only two people in the room would have had any reason to object. ''All right, then. Who voted guilt^?''

  Ten hands went up. I felt my heart pound as I kept my hand on my lap. Maria-Teresa glanced at me for a second when she saw that I was one of the bleeding hearts, but looked away without showing any reaction. I leaned forward and turned to my left, looking toward Mathilda, but saw that her hand was raised higher than anyone else's and was actually waing vigorously. I turned right and saw that the other dissenter was D wight, the defense-plant investigator and our foreman.

  I wasn't the only one who was surprised. Most of the others glanced curiously at the two of us out of the corner of their eyes, except for Roy, who shook his head and made a snickering noise, and Mrs. Friedman, who stared at me as if to say that she knew all along because it fit perfectly with everi:hing else she knew about me.

  "Do you want to start?" Dwight asked me.

  "I was hoping you would—I'm not sure I can put an argument together just now," I said. He laughed easily and said that he had the same problem. I asked to see the copy of the judge's instrucdons. I wasn't sure what I was looking for; I was really only stalling for rime. I read it over, but the excruciating pressure made it impossible to think. The words jumped around on the page, so that by the time I got to the end of a sentence, I couldn't remember how it had begun. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, but it didn't help. "I'm sorry," I said, "I'm having difficulty' concentrating."