The Soloist (11 page)

The lawyer nodded but did not say anything. The witness coughed self-consciously but eventually realized he was not off the hook, and had to continue: “The koan Philip had is very well known. It’s been used for over a thousand years. It goes, ‘If you meet the Buddha in the road and he stands in your way, kill him.’ ”

The defense attorney’s face suddenly changed to one of great puzzlement, and she glanced over at us, as if to see if we shared her confusion.

“That does sound strange, Mr. Ellis. Can you tell us the correct interpretation of the advice, ‘Kill the Buddha in the road’?”

“No. I haven’t passed that koan yet.”

Then Ms. Doppelt asked the monk if it was true that according to Zen philosophy, a Zen master is considered a living Buddha. The monk said yes, that was true, and I thought I saw her fight back a hint of a smile. She clasped her
hands behind her back, nodded significantly and reviewed the information aloud.

“So your testimony is that Mr. Okakura was a living Buddha, correct?”

“Correct.”

“And Philip was given a puzzle that says if you meet a Buddha you should kill him, correct?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“When Philip started shouting that he knew the answer to the puzzle, Mr. Okakura ordered him to show it, to demonstrate it for everyone. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“That’s very interesting.”

She walked slowly back to her seat next to the defendant, creating a dramatic pause in the testimony, then turned around, glanced at us and said, “The defense has no further questions, Your Honor.”

I remembered the time I had a music-theory student who occasionally complained of depression but who otherwise seemed normal and well adjusted. During the school year a group of acquaintances repeatedly urged him to attend what they described as a “casual chat session for Christians.” He finally gave in, at first saying that he was interested in it only as a social activity but within a few months becoming seriously involved in their organization. Once he had become a full-fledged member he was expected to proselytize, and he even tried to get me to attend one of their meetings. Whenever he mentioned the Lord Jesus Christ, which was almost constantly, even during lessons, his face took on a relentless expression of happiness. He never missed an opportunity to remind me that since accepting the Lord Jesus Christ into his
heart he was happy all the time, no longer saw the need to use profanity and had learned never to hold grudges or think negative thoughts. Most important (judging from the number of times he repeated it to me) was that he had “found out who he really was,” although he never was more specific than that. When I found out he was pressuring some of my other students to join, in particular an exchange student from China who could barely speak English well enough to understand what he was talking about, I lost my composure and told him to keep his missionary activities out of my classroom. He dropped my course immediately and filed a grievance against me, but it didn’t come to anything and I never saw him again. I don’t even know if he graduated.

From what we’d heard in court that day, Zen sounded something like my student’s sect. Enlightenment, salvation, finding your “true self”—it all sounded too grandiose, hopeful and vague at the same time to be believed. I couldn’t understand how anyone could walk into a building, see a bunch of shaven-headed Caucasians dressed in robes, hear them chant in Japanese and not want to tiptoe as quickly as possible back outside to safety.

Things went both well and badly during Kyung-hee’s second lesson. No sooner had the boy and his mother gotten through the door than Mrs. Kim thrust the exercise book I’d given Kyung-hee in front of me, made an unpleasant face and said, “Too easy! Kyung-hee already good, why you want him do this?”

“Because, Mrs. Kim, it’s necessary if he wants to become great. He’s good now, but he’ll never be great if he doesn’t pay attention to the basics.”

“Eh?” she grunted, frowning at me as if I were the one with the language problem. “This too easy,” she repeated in a shrill voice, waving her plump little hand dismissively and planting herself on the couch in the studio. She crossed her arms in front of her and glared at me.

No wonder Kyung-hee never says anything. What child would dare express himself around a parent like that? For the first time, I felt sympathetic toward the boy rather than just annoyed by him. As he rosined his bow I tuned his cello for him, and saw that on the back of his cello he had placed a tiny sticker with an Asian character written on it. “What’s this?”

I asked him. He looked at me from behind the thick lenses that made his eyes look the size of nectarines.

“That means cat,” he said in a tiny voice.

“Cat, cat,” Mrs. Kim echoed. “Always cat!” She finished her thought in Korean, but Kyung-hee didn’t appear to be paying any attention to her.

“Do you like cats?” I asked partially to defy his mother.

He nodded. “Cats can see at night.”

“Yes, that’s true. And they’re excellent hunters. Have you ever seen one catch a mouse?”

He shook his head, looking at me expectantly. At least he was looking at me.

“Well, they creep up, very silently, until they’re very close to their prey. Then they freeze, just like a statue, and wait for exactly the right moment, and then …” I mimed the action of hunching up motionless, then bursting out of hiding. “They jump, just like they were shot out of a gun! It’s pretty exciting.”

He actually smiled and I saw his teeth for the first time. I felt as if I’d just caught a glimpse of the Holy Grail. Not wanting to lose the momentum, I picked up my bow and said, “You know, that’s exactly the kind of feeling you want to have when you begin a great piece. Watch me.”

I drew the bow and held it over the strings and froze, gathering energy for the first note. Then I let go and dug into it—high C on the A string, then tumbling down to the low C string at the bottom. It was the initial phrase of the third Bach suite. “You see?” I asked, hoping he would figure out that even a simple line could lead one to a world of musical images and emotions, “That last C was the mouse! I burst out of the woods, chased it down and caught it! Can you try?”

He froze like a little kitten, with an unintentionally comical look of determination on his face. Then he pounced, unfortunately hitting the thin A string so hard that it snapped. His face fell as if he had been shot; he went pale and his body turned stiff, as if he were going into shock.

“Aiyo,” his mother yelped, and then bolted up, leaned over him and scolded him, repeating the same phrase in Korean over and over. He hung his head and seemed to tune out; it was as if he were trying to make his body as small and unobtrusive as possible, and then make his soul disappear. Mrs. Kim shook her head in frustration and said to him in English, for my benefit, “You don’t listen to teacher! You don’t do like teacher do! How we going to pay for that if you breaking it? Daddy very angry when he gets home.”

I know that it’s best not to interfere with students and their parents, but I could not restrain myself. “Mrs. Kim,” I said, struggling to keep my voice under control, “your son is a cellist—an extremely talented cellist, and he may one day be a great and famous cellist. But he will never be anything if you don’t let him make mistakes. Cellists break strings—it happens all the time. There’s no way to avoid it. It isn’t your son’s fault—I asked him to play that way to try to help him!”

I couldn’t tell whether Mrs. Kim was furious with me or stricken with embarrassment. She walked stiffly back toward the couch and sat down slowly, fixing her eyes somewhere in the middle of the floor.

The rest of the lesson was a disaster. Kyung-hee had totally withdrawn; he didn’t even answer yes or no to my questions, merely shrugged. On the other hand, when he played his exercises for me I could see he’d made good progress.

Which left me even more confused than before over what to do about him.

The next state’s witness was the policeman who had first arrived at the scene and taken Philip Weber into custody. He was a young man, with a regulation mustache, of course, and all business. He never smiled, never paused to think about his answers or choice of words, didn’t look at anyone but the attorney examining him, and said “sir” in almost all of his responses to the prosecutor’s questions. Still, his testimony, in spite of his formulaic attempts to make it sound like objective fact and nothing more, let you know that he thought Philip Weber was a self-absorbed deviant who knew exactly what he was doing that day.

“Did Mr. Weber seem in control of himself when you arrested him?” the prosecutor asked.

“Yes, sir, he was completely in control. The suspect did not resist arrest. He was not agitated.”

“Did he speak to you at all after you had read him his rights?”

“Yes, sir. The suspect spoke quite a bit.”

“What did he talk about?”

“The suspect talked about his philosophy. It all sounded like gibberish to me. He was saying that everything was an illusion, but then he asked if we could adjust the handcuffs because they were uncomfortable. Also, in the car on the way to the station, the suspect told me to avoid a certain street because of construction. He said we would be delayed.”

“Was he right, officer?”

“Yes, sir. We were delayed several minutes.”

I thought I saw the policeman’s eyes dart uncomfortably as he said this; I think he was a little embarrassed.

The state’s last witness was the homicide detective who
had interviewed Philip Weber just after he was arrested. He was more of a bureaucrat than the officer had been; he didn’t need to use paramilitary terminology, nor did he sport a regulation mustache. He was black and seemed like a reasonable man, and I noticed that he looked at the defendant several times without any apparent malice or eagerness to see the young man punished. I got the impression that this had been a relatively trouble-free case for him.

“Did Mr. Weber make a confession, Detective Wright?” Mr. Graham asked.

“Yes, he did.”

“Had you read him his Miranda rights?”

“Yes.”

“And what did he tell you?”

“Well, he was very cooperative. He acknowledged right off that he’d killed the man, and when I asked him, he said he didn’t feel any remorse over it. He said that the killing was something between Zen masters, that us ordinary folks just wouldn’t get it, and there wasn’t much point in trying to explain it. He seemed to feel that the victim—the Japanese man—understood and wouldn’t have minded. Philip claimed that killing the Japanese man was really the best way to put the victim’s philosophy into action.”

“Did Mr. Weber say what that philosophy was?”

Detective Wright laughed and said, “Well, he tried to explain it to me, but I’m afraid it went over my head, me being just an ordinary guy, you know. It’s all in my report—you might be better off reading it straight from there than relying on my memory. Overall, Philip seemed to be saying that the whole Zen thing is about confidence. That if you have complete confidence in yourself, anything you do is all
right—that it’s perfect, in fact. It all sounds great—all these cults sound great at first—until you see what they lead people to do.”

During the breaks I tried not to talk about the case, but it was difficult. Gary, the meter man, in particular, evidently couldn’t bear to remain silent. He made it amply clear that he thought the whole thing sounded crazy; I did too, but hearing Gary talk you’d have thought the murder had taken place in a circus fun house. I actually heard him snort a few times during the witnesses’ testimony, as if he were squelching laughter; he told me that the image of a group of bald priests hitting each other with sticks struck him as being almost too comical to believe.

Whenever I could I found a chance to say a few words to Maria-Teresa, and a few times she initiated conversations with me. To my surprise, she and I were the only ones who didn’t follow the general pattern of the men talking to other men and the women talking to other women. After being at the university for so many years, where faculty and students of the two sexes mix regularly, this pattern seemed almost quaint. The only other exception I noticed was that Rose, the secretary, and Dwight, who worked at the defense industry plant, occasionally talked. But that seemed to be because they were the only two blacks on the jury.

After the detective’s testimony the state rested and Judge Davis invited the defense to call witnesses. When Ms. Doppelt declined the opportunity, saying that the witnesses for the defense would have nothing to say if they couldn’t discuss Mr. Weber’s mental condition, the judge raised his considerable
eyebrow once again, then shrugged and instructed the lawyers to make their closing arguments. I knew that public defenders were overworked and underpaid, but I always assumed they had to possess at least a certain degree of competence to represent clients in trials, particularly murder trials. Ms. Doppelt, however, hardly seemed to be putting up much of a fight.

Mr. Graham went first. He approached us in his usual relaxed manner and briefly reviewed the testimony. He emphasized that the witnesses all described the crime in unrefuted testimony, leaving no room for doubt that the defendant intentionally killed Mr. Okakura.