by Jill Ciment
“Do you believe such a bond can exist?” she asks A-9, the chemical engineer and only African American on the jury.
“Yes.”
“What if it isn’t a literal captor and hostage? What if the captor and hostage are family members?” she asks F-17.
“Which family members?” he asks right back.
“Sisters.”
He thinks before he answers, “Yes.”
“Twins?” she asks B-7, the middle school teacher dressed for an after-hours club.
“Yes.”
The jury consultant signals the defense counsel back to the desk to confer. While they strategize, C-2 notices the defendant sneak a piece of chocolate from an open candy-bar wrapper on her lap.
The defense counsel returns to the jury box, walking the length of its wooden rail. “Do you personally know someone who would fall somewhere on the autism spectrum?” she asks no one in particular. “Family members?”
The church lady and the blonde with cornrows raise their hands.
The defense counsel glances over at her jury expert, who doesn’t seem concerned about the familial knowledge of those who lack emotional intelligence.
“Do you believe that innocent people are capable of false confessions?” she asks the church lady.
The church lady looks skeptical.
“What if that person is autistic and lacks the capacity to distinguish between falsehood and truth?”
“I guess” is her answer.
The defense counsel’s final question is for C-2: “Can you be objective about the death of a child and give it no more or less weight than the death of an adult?”
C-2 watches the defendant twist a shank of her harlequin hair. Is the pattern a calculated distraction or did they take away her black shoe polish when they arrested her and those are her natural roots? Markings always serve a purpose. The zebra’s stripes keep away the flies.
When C-2 had tired of photographing the human species, she started photographing animals—the work she is best known for. Her most reprinted series is about mothers trying to protect their young from predators. But rather than photograph the battle and kill, C-2 shot close-ups of the mother’s face at the moment she realized that her calf or fledgling or cub was doomed. Some of the mothers looked stricken, others hysterical.
For each expression she managed to capture, C-2 suffered weeks of bereavement. You don’t accidentally stumble across scenes like that: You track the mothers and infants for weeks. You get to know them as individuals. People think they understand what a kill is like because they’ve streamed a YouTube clip of a lion attacking a baby elephant. But a kill smells. You can hear chewing. Bones snapping doesn’t sound at all like wood cracking. And then there are the howls and caws and bellowing of the mothers.
C-2’s gaze moves to the middle-aged woman seated in the gallery, but she and the defendant’s prettier version have fled. The defendant also notices her family’s defection. She turns around in her chair, and C-2 can see her face again. On second look, the defendant’s face isn’t anything like a symmetrical how-to-draw face. One side of her lip is pulled up. Contempt? The only asymmetrical expression.
The defense counsel is waiting for C-2 to answer. She repeats, “Can you be objective about the death of a child?”
“Yes,” C-2 says.
* * *
· · ·
The potential jury, seven of them including the alternate, wait in the hall while the lawyers horse-trade.
The blonde with the cornrows says to anyone one who will listen, “What’s with the defendant’s hair?”
“Did you notice the twin?” asks the church lady.
“We’re not allowed to discuss the case,” says the schoolteacher.
C-2 walks over to F-17. She has always wanted to photograph a dissection, a contemporary cross between Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson and Vesalius’s anatomical illustrations.
“If one of us gets tossed,” she says to him, “can I get your number and email?”
Before C-2 can finish her question, she realizes that F-17 thinks she is trying to pick him up. He looks surprised, but intrigued.
“I’m a photographer,” she explains. “Would it be possible for me to attend your class and photograph a dissection?”
The bailiff calls them back into the courtroom before F-17 can answer.
“The trial begins Monday morning at nine a.m. sharp,” the judge says after the six of them, and the alternate, are sworn in. “You are not allowed to Google or watch or stream or upload or read anything about this case. You are not allowed to discuss this case with anyone, including spouses and best friends who promise they won’t say anything. You took an oath.”
She reminds the jury to pack any medications they need in case of sequestration.
C-2 can’t help but wonder which meds her fellow jurors are on.
* * *
· · ·
The afternoon squall has already begun by the time the judge dismisses them. The jurors huddle under the courthouse’s overhang, waiting for the downpour to let up. They have just learned too much about one another—what they ate for breakfast, how they decided to marry, if they jump to conclusions—and now they must press together to keep dry.
The first one to brave a drenching is H-8, Cornrows. She takes off her flip-flops and makes a barefoot dash for the SUV parked selfishly over the white line. The twitchy alternate goes next. He accepts that he is going to get wet and strolls off to the bus stop. The church lady has come prepared with an umbrella. She offers to share it. The chemical engineer and the schoolteacher take her up on the offer and they slosh together to their cars.
The rain is relentless, the overhang a waterfall, the steps rapids, the parking lot a floodplain.
F-17 and C-2 are the only ones left. Has he waited so that he can be alone with her? Does he think she has waited so that she can be alone with him? She regrets the miscommunication earlier, and then she doesn’t regret it.
“You would need to get permission from the families,” he says, as if nothing had transpired between their last conversation and now.
“Of course I would speak to the families first,” she says. “I wouldn’t photograph faces, or anything else that could identify them. I’m only interested in what’s under the skin.”
“Everyone looks as different inside as they do outside.”
“No two spleens look alike?”
“Some people have three spleens. Some people have two pancreases. One in seven is lacking a palmaris muscle.” He points to the muscle on his forearm, the ridge from his wrist to his elbow.
“But the heart is always on the left side,” C-2 says.
“Not necessarily. People with dextrocardia have a mirror heart on their right side,” F-17 says. “Let me think about it. These are my patients.”
The cloudburst is over.
“We remove the faces first. Maybe once that’s done,” he says.
“Did you get out of jury duty?” her husband says as soon as she walks in the door. Her husband has been home alone all day, writing his memoir—this despite the fact that when he was at the apex of his career, he said that he pitied old war correspondents who wrote their memoirs. “Did Jimmy’s ‘In God We Trust’ craziness work?” he asks before she can take off her wet shoes.
They live at the end of a dirt road on a private lake. The house is midcentury, 80 percent glass. It took them weeks to scrape off the gluey residual of taped Xs after the last hurricane blew through. They agreed that they would rather chance being decapitated by flying glass than tape the windows ever again.
She tells him she is on a murder trial.
“First-degree?” he asks.
“You know I can’t discuss it.”
She starts dinner, a simple salad. Neither of them cooks, though they own a si
x-burner stove. When he comes out of his study half an hour later, she knows he knows more about the case than she does.
“I wish you hadn’t done that,” she says. “It’s hard enough for me to stay away from my computer.”
“What harm is there if I know?”
“Because now every time I look at you, I know you are keeping a secret from me.”
“It’s not a secret. It’s all over the internet.”
“Who did she kill?” C-2 asks.
“Who is she accused of killing,” her husband corrects her.
“I’m going to find out Monday anyway.”
He doesn’t answer her.
She says, “This is exactly why you shouldn’t have done it. You’re ruining our last weekend together.”
His poker face softens into bafflement. He is—and has always been—a handsome man, if slightly abbreviated in the legs: flinty profile, white hair thick enough to cantilever over his brow.
“I may be sequestered,” she says.
She can see by his reaction that whatever was all over the internet heralds a protracted trial.
“For how long?” he asks.
“The judge told us to pack enough medicine for three weeks.”
She watches his face as he tries to process what her absence will mean. Being alone for twenty-one days at eighty-six, cocooned in your diminishing senses—this is a different level of loneliness than she has ever experienced.
“Should we get someone to stay with you?” she asks.
He has a stepson by a former wife only two hours away, friends, neighbors, but he will have no one beside him at night if he should wake up light-headed and unable to orient himself in the dark, or feel his heart fluttering, or his legs cramping.
Her husband is—and has always been—a hypochondriac, but recently, he has finally outgrown his disorder. All the imaginary symptoms are coming true.
“I’m not an invalid,” he says.
“We could have Jimmy come by once a day.”
“I don’t want Jimmy watching TV in the living room while I’m trying to write.”
“Do you want me to ask the judge to dismiss me? There’s an alternate.”
She can see how much he wants to say yes.
“That’s ridiculous,” he says, and finishes his salad. The second he puts down his fork, he asks, “Will I be able to reach you?”
“Of course. I think.”
* * *
· · ·
He loads the dishwasher, while C-2 retreats to her studio, a barn-size addition off the garage, sparsely furnished and clean as an operating theater. She spends the evening leafing through art books, searching for paintings of dissections, a surprisingly popular subject matter over the centuries. Every medical school and surgeon’s guild commissioned one. Rembrandt’s first painting after he had arrived in Amsterdam, twenty-five and ambitious, was The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp. His genius was to compose Dr. Tulp and his medical students and the cadaver as a single shape, splintered by light and dark, the first group portrait in which individualism melded into the collective. The cadaver was a common thief, the body purchased after his hanging. Dr. Tulp is tugging on what C-2 suspects is the palmaris muscle, the muscle that controlled the fingers that stole.
“What are you so absorbed in?” her husband asks, leaning in the doorway.
She shows him the illustration in the book and tells him about F-17, the anatomy professor who is on the jury with her. “He said if I got the family’s permission, I could photograph a dissection.”
“You told me you wanted your next series to be more life affirming,” he says.
“I would never use the words ‘life affirming.’ ”
“Lighter. That was the word you used.”
“I said I never wanted to photograph another kill.”
“So instead you want to photograph a dissection?”
“It’s completely different. It’s the opposite of a kill.”
“But you didn’t photograph the kill. You photographed the mother’s face. Somebody somewhere is grieving for those cadavers.”
He comes up behind her and kisses her neck, his prelude to intimacy.
She has just spent the past hour looking at dissections. She is hardly in the mood.
“I’m going to miss you so much,” he says, rubbing her shoulders. His nails have aged faster than anything else on his person, the keratin less lacquer than hoof. When he massages her shoulders, as he is doing now, the hardened nails sometimes spoil his gentle touch.
All happy families are happy in the same way; all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. She would add to Tolstoy’s dictum: All happy marriages have sex; all unhappy marriages don’t.
They still have sex, but nothing she would have called, at sixteen, “all the way.” He doesn’t so much possess her as haunt her. At the best of times, she can still marvel at how intrepidly he wants sex. Potency, technique, performance have been replaced by something more basic—the will to live while alive. His height and mass may have lessened with age, but his life force has only grown denser and more combustible. Their lovemaking doesn’t pivot on potency and technique; it does something far more intimate and abiding.
It slays C-2.
Monday morning her husband drives her to court in case of sequestration—they share the Prius. Their other vehicle, a rusty beater they had driven down from New York City twelve years ago, has sprouted lichen after an especially rainy summer and then sunk into the gum-mud by the lake, a hairy mammoth caught in a tar pit.
The courthouse is a four-story utilitarian marble cube in a sunstruck plaza, more Soviet than Le Corbusier. The town is the county seat, the biggest employer a land-grant university. Her husband had taken an endowed professorship at the journalism college after retiring from the Times but resigned after only two semesters. He told C-2 that he didn’t want to give away to youth all the tricks it had taken him a lifetime to figure out for himself. But C-2 knew the real reason: he was worried he would become a blowhard and talk away his memoir before he wrote it. They stayed because C-2 had started photographing her Mother series, and the lake by the house provided a scaly menagerie of predators.
As C-2 and her husband drive by the courthouse, television reporters and crews mill around the entrance, vying for the meager shade of three date palms. Armed with satellite dishes, a convoy of news vans block the curb, and a bus from the Villages—a megalopolis-size retirement community sixty miles south—idles across the street.
“I’m going to be sequestered, aren’t I?” C-2 says.
“How would I know?” her husband asks.
“You went online. Who did she kill?”
“She’s accused of killing her eighteen-month-old brother.”
“How?”
“Setting him on fire.”
Her husband steers them into the courthouse’s underground garage, a maze of deep contrasts after such a sunny morning. He parks outside the jury entrance and gets out of the car, walking toward her with the caution of someone who can hardly find his way in the dim light. They embrace. He has lost three inches over the years and she is now taller than he is. Whenever her chin rests on his head, she feels more protective than passionate.
“I may not see you for three weeks,” he says. “I love you so much.”
He kisses her, open-mouthed. He wants to make this a lover’s parting, but C-2 can feel his anxiety about returning to the empty house.
She whispers, “I’ll ask for conjugal visits.”
* * *
· · ·
Inside the building, after her overnight bag with its provisions of pills is searched, and her phone and tablet requisitioned and bagged, the deputy escorts C-2 to the jury lounge, a classroom-size windowless hold filled with dentist waiting room furniture and old issues of AARP and
Entertainment Weekly.
As she enters the room, F-17 looks up from his book, a sci-fi paperback fat enough to last three weeks. He shares the sofa with the chemical engineer, who is eating a power bar, and the alternate, who is reading a greyhound racing tip sheet. Everyone has brought an overnight bag.
“Are we being sequestered?” C-2 asks.
“No one has told us anything,” F-17 says.
“You saw the news trucks,” the alternate says.
“I understand the media frenzy over George Zimmerman or the loud-music murderer, but why a teenage girl?” the schoolteacher asks.
“She’s rich and she’s white,” the chemical engineer says.
“Quiet,” the deputy chides.
Cornrows arrives next, hauling an extra-large suitcase, as if she were going on a cruise.
“I brought a bathing suit,” she announces to no one in particular. “My boyfriend’s sister cleans at the Econo Lodge off I-75 and she says that’s where they’ll put us. It has a pool.”
* * *
· · ·
The deputy lines them up, the six jurors and the alternate, according to their assigned seats, and they file through the door.
Even festooned with flags and gold seals, the courtroom is nondescript, with beige walls and an acoustic-board ceiling. The chairs look like they were purchased in bulk from an online catalog, the court reporter is a blowsy blonde chewing gum, the judge has a sixteen-ounce Jamba Juice by her gavel, yet C-2 is humbled. She doesn’t consider herself a judgmental person, though judge she does—all the time. She judges her friend and colleague who got a MacArthur grant for her random, blurry snapshots; she judges her mother for choosing cruel boyfriends; she judges photography contests where she’d rather go blind than give an honorable mention to the tasteless photo of a homeless person. But this judgment is something else entirely. This judgment is as close as mortals get to God. She can sense that the other jurors are humbled as well. Even Cornrows, wearing her flip-flops, comports herself with dignity.
