The Soloist (29 page)

Dwight leaned back in his chair and sighed. “I knew somebody once, when I was in the service, who lost it all of a sudden. It was in Vietnam, when a lot of people were losing it. One day he was OK, the next he went completely bullshit and shot some innocent people. So I know this can happen.

“But the question is, did it happen here? As Grace just pointed out, we have to be certain. I can’t say I’m certain yet, but I’m not ready to convict him either.”

“I have another question,” Grace said almost apologetically. “Mr. Sundheimer, you were saying before that you felt convinced the young man couldn’t control himself that day. I know what you mean about losing control—I’ve certainly done some foolish things in my life, impulsive things. But I thought the main issue is whether or not the boy knew he was killing a man, isn’t that it? He just had to be aware of what he was doing, I thought. He certainly seemed to be aware. He was able to talk about it to those doctors, and to the police.”

“That’s right,” Rose agreed. “We can’t say if he could have controlled himself, and we don’t have to. We only have to know if the guy was aware that he was killing somebody.”

“Exactly.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Yeah.”

I pointed to the copy of the judge’s instructions and said, “I thought that way too until I read this over. I noticed that Judge Davis put the definition of legal insanity in here for us. It says a person is legally insane if ‘as a result of mental disease or defect, he lacks substantial capacity
either
to appreciate the criminality of his conduct
or
to conform his conduct to the requirements of law.’ Those words ‘either’ and ‘or’ give us some leeway here.”

Roy was shaking his head again. “Look, he was able to, uh,
confirm
his conduct to the requirements of the law for almost every other moment of his life, including after killing the guy. Why should we believe that just for that one instant he lost his mind? Just for long enough to do something that would
guarantee he’d go down in history as the guru to beat all gurus, or whatever the hell they call themselves? It seems awfully convenient to me that he had his one instant of insanity at such a perfect time.”

“Yeah.”

“Good point.”

“Yeah,” Gary added, “you know, it’s like the guy who has a crummy job all his life and who’s jealous of his boss, so he shoots the boss and says, ‘Hey, man, I’m sorry, I went insane—but I’m OK now, so do you mind if I take his job?’ This Weber guy might get out of the hospital in a year or two, start his own cult of people like him who think that it’s cool to walk on the wild side a bit, and—”

“We had guys like that at the plant, believe me,” Roy said. “One day they’re welding, the next they got some lawyer calling in shouting for worker’s comp, sayin’ their client has emotional suffering—you name it. So we had to have doctors take a look, and guess what, most of ’em were faking it. You can’t just start letting anybody who says, ‘Oops, I lost my mind,’ get off, or everybody’ll jump on the bandwagon.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I still think it’s the drugs,” Jesusita said.

“But what if the drugs aggravated the mental illness and made it worse?” I asked. “Do we hold that against him?”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Rose said, shaking her head. “If this guy was black and from South Central, we wouldn’t be sitting here even asking the question. He’d be convicted in a minute. But you get a white kid smoking dope and beating somebody to death, you’ve got an army of people talking about his father didn’t love him enough, doctors arguing for hours, and even religious experts coming in here arguing
about the meaning of life. I tell you, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

“That may be true,” I said, “but that doesn’t make it right. Should we rush through this and call this man guilty just because another man wouldn’t get a fair trial?”

“Yes!” she answered, flashing an angry glance at me. “The law should be the same for everybody, and if it’s one way for blacks, then it oughta be the same for whites too, because that’s the only way things will change if they’re lousy. You know what I’m saying?”

“So you believe that convicting him would be lousy justice, then? You agree with me?”

“I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying a black man would be convicted, and that helps me make a decision. I’m voting guilty, and I don’t have any second thoughts about it.”

We continued arguing for another two hours over Philip Weber’s sanity, but without any real progress; by five o’clock we were only repeating ourselves, and the room had become unbearably close. I was exhausted from the tension. Ten people in that room badly wanted to be done with this trial after almost three weeks of sitting in court. One of them in particular probably wanted to be done with me, and they all honestly believed that Philip Weber was guilty. But Dwight and I had a different view, and we were holding the others prisoner. Their lives were being put on hold while we clung to our minority opinion. It was an almost unbearable situation, but I took solace in the fact that at least one other juror shared the burden with me.

At last we decided to call it a day and resume the next morning, since we obviously weren’t going to bring in a
verdict that night. Several of the jurors groaned at the thought of having to go through another day of jury duty just to convince two overcautious men that their concern was misplaced. I have a feeling that some of them believed that Dwight and I were holding out just to be stubborn, or simply to enjoy an opportunity to wield power over ten other people.

By eight o’clock the next morning it was already 90 degrees out and a first-stage smog alert had been declared. Immediately after getting up I had called the Kims to cancel Kyung-hee’s lessons for the week. After the weekend I’d just had and the way the deliberations had gone the day before, I knew that even if the trial ended later that morning I would be too exhausted to think about teaching for at least several days. Mrs. Kim sounded concerned; she said that Kyung-hee had been very excited since Saturday night’s concert and was eager get back to his lessons. I apologized, but assured her that we could resume at the latest by Monday of the next week.

The traffic was even worse than usual. I saw one man who had been in a minor accident literally hopping up and down in frustration; at first I thought he was joking because it looked so comical, but as I got closer I saw that he was purple in the face with rage.

Even though the courthouse was air-conditioned, the jury room was already stuffy, and Mrs. Friedman was fanning herself with a piece of cardboard. The custodian announced that we would have to wait for Betty, whose car had overheated
on the way and who was still waiting for a tow truck.

I couldn’t stand the tension in the room, the feeling that so many people were angry with me. I tried to tell a funny story, hoping to give them the impression that I was not an unreasonable man. I told about the time I gave a concert with an orchestra in Rome on an especially humid summer night, when I thought that nothing could surpass the discomfort of the heat. Suddenly the unthinkable happened: my chair was placed on the fixed part of the stage along with the rest of the orchestra, but the spike of my cello rested on an extended platform that could be raised or lowered by throwing a switch backstage. The stagehand, an ancient fellow, was overcome by the heat and fell asleep, slumping forward onto the switch and setting the platform in motion. I could see the audience react in horror as the platform started to descend. The conductor couldn’t see it, so he and the orchestra kept going. I didn’t want to be the one to stop, so I didn’t stop as the cello sank. The cadenza—my solo—arrived, and I kept playing. The cello sank so low that at one point I was doubled over with my chest touching my knees. Fortunately the kettledrum player realized what had happened and rushed backstage to throw the switch in reverse, so the platform slowly came back up again. I got through the cadenza without missing a note, we finished the concerto, and I got a thunderous standing ovation. The Italians love a spectacle, so I became an instant celebrity when the story and photos hit the local papers.

I hoped that telling the story would make it possible for me to debate the verdict without drawing hostility from anyone. A few of them laughed at the story, but I think my plan backfired; apparently some of them thought I was telling it as a conciliatory gesture before admitting that I had been
wrong yesterday and was now ready to vote with the majority. When Betty finally arrived, in a terrible mood over being put through all this, Roy smiled at me hopefully and asked, “So, any change of heart since yesterday?”

Everyone turned to look at me, and they were all smiling, except for Maria-Teresa, who was looking at me without any expression at all.

“Not really.”

A collective sigh of exasperation let me know that my hope for debate without frustration was an unrealistic one.

“What about you, Mr. Anderson?”

Dwight glanced at me, then leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms in front of him. “I thought about it a lot last night. Especially about what Reinhart said about how, if even normal people can lose control under pressure situations, then a guy with mental problems could be pushed out of control a lot easier. And I thought about my example of the guy in Vietnam who lost it from battle fatigue, and all the guys who’ve lost it even after the war ended because the stress finally got to ’em and twisted their minds into knots. But then I had a problem.”

“What problem?”

“Well, soldiers get put into hellish situations because it’s in the line of duty. They have to wade through that swamp, or crawl through that field where they could get shot or blown up, because they’re under orders, they have to complete their mission. When a person not in a war situation does something strange, when he loses control, you have to ask what the situation was. Was it something he could have avoided before he lost control? Do you see what I’m getting at?”

“No, I don’t.” Mathilda complained. “Are we … are you talking about war now?”

“I’ll give you an example, ma’am. When someone’s drunk, really stone-dead drunk, they lose all control of their reflexes and their judgment. They stumble around, they act rude, they do stupid things and regret it in the morning—if they remember at all, that is. They’re out of control, right? A drunk man can’t suddenly straighten up and control himself, right? But we convict drunk drivers. Not because they knew what they were doing when they were driving, but because they knew what they were doing when they did all the drinking. If they knew they had to drive, they could have thought about that when they were sober and not had so much to drink.

“My problem with our Mr. Weber is that while I’m willing to believe that at the time he killed the Zen guy he was out of control, I think the fact that he chose to participate in that retreat when he knew how tough it would be, and knew how strange all the puzzles would be, that’s where he loses my sympathy. A guy like this, who’s dropped out of college, who’s been jerkin’ around with dope, who has brains and can use ’em when he wants to, had plenty of opportunities to improve himself rather than make himself worse. So he lost my sympathy when he joined this group instead of, say, going to a counselor or a drug clinic.”

“That’s what I was gonna say,” Jesusita said.

“Yes,” Grace added quietly, “I didn’t think of it that way, but now that you mention it … He could have done so many constructive things, or at least tried to, but instead he chose to join a group where he could sit around all day and think about himself. I don’t think we have to feel sorry for people who make this kind of choice, especially when it leads to murder.”

“Right.”

“So you’d vote guilty now?”

“Yes,” Dwight said, to my great disappointment, “I’m convinced that it would be the right thing to do.”

I was all alone. No one was looking at me, but it was obvious that I was the center of everyone’s attention.

“What do you think of what Dwight said?” Roy asked me, grinning as if our foreman’s change of opinion were a personal victory.

I said it made sense, and that I would certainly give it my full attention.

“It doesn’t change your mind, though?” Gary asked.

“Not yet.”

“Can you say why not? Or try to?”

“I … I think that … It may not be a fair analogy, but this boy has … a physical disease, something he was born with—”

“But he chose to join that church!” Roy practically yelled, “and this is a religion where their saints hit people with sticks! He decided to join that bunch, just like he decided to drop out of school and loaf around the house smoking pot! You can’t blame it all on a disease, for Chris’sake.”

“No, I’m not saying that everything can be explained by his disease. He joined the group of his own free will, it’s true, but that shouldn’t be counted against him. You talk as if joining that church only proves that he’s a bad person!”

“But it does! It’s not a normal religion you’re talking about. Maybe it’s normal for people over in Japan, but not here.”

Dwight’s analogy of the drunk driver came up again; it was a good point. But something about it didn’t seem right. I struggled to figure out why it didn’t convince me, then offered another analogy to counter it. “What if a man is at
home … he’s drinking at home and he has no intention of going out. Then he gets a phone call from a hospital. His wife has been in an accident and she’s badly hurt. The man jumps in his car to go to the hospital; if he were sober, or if it weren’t an emergency, he might think clearly enough to call a cab. But he panics; he runs out to his car, drives it and causes a bad accident. OK? Now he’s on trial for manslaughter.… Granted, he caused an accident; he was driving drunk and it was his fault. But is he as guilty as the guy who goes to a bar and gets drunk for fun, then drives?”