The Soloist (9 page)

As Mr. Graham described the crime, several of the potential jurors stared incredulously at the defendant. He looked too frail to commit such a brutal murder. I also noticed a bit of a commotion in the back of the courtroom. I looked out and saw a group of Asian people surrounding an old couple, also Asian. The younger members of the group seemed to be translating for the old couple. I guessed that they were the parents of the murder victim.

“The evidence will show,” Mr. Graham concluded, pointing at the defendant and looking straight at him, “that Mr. Weber intentionally killed Mr. Okakura in order to demonstrate his spiritual strength to the rest of the world, and in order to eliminate the possibility that Mr. Okakura might challenge the validity of his self-declared ‘enlightenment.’ When you’ve heard the evidence, I believe you will find you have no choice but to find the defendant guilty.”

The prosecutor returned to his seat and the judge ordered the defense to make its opening statement.

Ms. Doppelt stood up and requested a private conference. Judge Davis reluctantly consented, and the court custodian led the jury out to the jury room so that we would not overhear what was said. When we returned to the courtroom I could see that Ms. Doppelt was unhappy about something. When the judge once again invited her to make her opening
remarks, she faced us and said, “Members of the jury, I am only allowed to introduce evidence of mental illness during the ‘sanity phase’ of the trial. So you in the jury will be forced to go through the process of declaring Philip guilty of murder before I have a chance to properly defend him. I can only hope that when this part of the trial is over, you will be willing to try to hear the evidence of insanity with open minds. Thank you.” The judge raised one of his massive eyebrows and looked prepared to rebuke her, but just as quickly his eyebrow settled back again. The defendant noticed this and laughed quietly.

As we filed out of the courtroom for the morning break the juror who read gas meters, whose name was Gary, asked me, “Sounds pretty weird, huh? Hey, I could be a Zen master—I have a baseball bat in my truck! Ha ha …” When he laughed I noticed that he had badly neglected teeth.

We’d been told at least a dozen times not to discuss the trial at all until the deliberations started; I smiled and tried politely to drift away from him, but he followed me to the water fountain and asked if I knew anything about Buddhism. I said I didn’t, but that I assumed it would be explained more carefully later on in the trial.

“Yeah, I hope so,” he muttered. “Maybe they’ll have a demonstration and get some guy to walk on coals or something!” He laughed again at his own comment.

I remembered from his voir dire that Gary was in his forties, but he looked twenty years older, probably from working in the sun. It was hard to believe we were so close in age. He had a round, protruding belly over skinny legs and a completely flat behind. I noticed this only because he was always tugging at his pants, as if he was used to having to keep pulling them up. He asked if I followed sports at all.

When I answered that I didn’t, he told me that, the night before, the Dodgers had suffered an embarrassing defeat.

“Against a shitty team, too,” he complained. “It doesn’t make sense, you know? A great team plays a shitty team, there shouldn’t be any question. But when you get a shitty team against a good team, it rubs off and everybody plays shitty.”

Relieved that he had at least changed the subject, I said that the same thing often happens in music. You can hire a terrific performer, but make him play with a weak orchestra and you’d be surprised how badly he’ll play sometimes.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “You know, my parents made me take piano when I was a kid for a few weeks. Man! Did I hate that—I made ’em let me quit. But now I have a kid, and my wife wants to make him take piano lessons. You’re into music—what do you think? Should kids take piano because it’s good for ’em, or do you think it’s a waste of time if they don’t seem interested? I mean, my kid’s not begging for piano lessons.”

I don’t think anyone knows the answer to this question, so I said that it depended on the child; some seem to get a lot out of music lessons, some don’t. You can’t tell until they’ve tried it.

Maria-Teresa was standing close enough to overhear our conversation. She drifted over and commented that her mother, who had always liked the sound of the accordion, made her take lessons on it for nearly a year. The lessons ended when the family acquired a new puppy who chewed the accordion apart and buried the biggest pieces in the backyard. “My mother had a fit.” Maria-Teresa laughed. “But I snuck him treats for a month after that. I hated that accordion.” She had a beautiful smile.

“Do you ever wish you’d stuck with it, though?” I asked her.

She looked at me suspiciously and asked, “Have you heard an accordion lately?” That was her answer; then she excused herself to go outside for a cigarette. I laughed, but she’d already left. It took me a few seconds to realize she was being humorous.

Maria-Teresa’s story reminded me of the night Wolfgang Bruggen, one of Germany’s most influential financiers and statesmen after the war, made my mother and me the guests of honor at one of his elaborate dinner parties. As usual I felt uncomfortable through most of the dinner; the other guests and even my distinguished host seemed uncertain whether to speak to me as a child or as an adult, and in such august company I hardly dared initiate conversation on my own. Eventually, as almost always happened at those events, the group settled into eulogizing me rather than speaking with me.

To make matters worse, Herr Bruggen’s eighteen-year-old son (I was fifteen) sat next to me with a pinched expression on his face, and avoided even looking at me. Just before the dessert course, Herr Bruggen brought all conversation to a halt with a wave of his hand, gestured in my direction and announced, “I would like you all to consider this: six hours a day, practically since the day he was born! And he never once had to be told to practice. Think of what each of us could have done with that kind of spirit! Think of it!” Having said this, he glanced pointedly at his son, then invited us to try the caramel custard.

After dinner, as the adults shifted over to the living room to smoke and sip brandy, Herr Bruggen ordered his son to
give me a tour of the estate’s flower and herb garden. Once outside, the young man dutifully but joylessly identified the various shrubs and plants until I finally asked him, “Do you like to grow things?”

“I’ve never planted a thing in my life,” he answered.

“Me neither. I’m not big on flowers,” I said, hoping to impress the older boy. Because of the difference in our ages, and perhaps because I sensed he didn’t like me, I craved his approval. A kind word from him—or better yet, a virile gesture such as confiding in me a forbidden exploit or asking if I wanted to see his car—would have meant more to me than all of his father’s accolades. Instead he squinted at me and muttered, “My father really enjoys doing this, you know. He gets somebody like you to come over to the house, he talks about how great you are, and it’s supposed to make me want to go out and do important things. But do you know what would happen to me if I said I wanted to be an artist or a musician? Christ, I’d be disowned in a minute. These dinner parties are pure bullshit, is what they are.”

Then, as if to make the point that he wasn’t going to be forced to admire me, he went right back to identifying shrubs. This incident, like Maria-Teresa’s story about her mother and the accordion lessons, makes me wonder how nature could have designed human beings to be so eager to make children, yet so uncertain about how to raise them. When do you let children follow their own instincts, and when do you push them to do what you wish you had done yourself?

The state’s first witness, Benjamin Frederick Ellis, was a tall, thin man wearing a suit that looked as if it must have been sold in only three sizes—small, medium or large. He made his way toward the front of the room, holding his arms stiffly at his sides, seeming very self-conscious. He looked only about forty years old, but he was completely bald. As he walked past the jury box, I saw that his hair had not fallen out but had been shaved.

I saw Ellis glance angrily at the accused murderer on his way up to the stand. The defendant smiled and nodded enigmatically; I couldn’t tell if he was putting on a “spiritual master” act by pretending to forgive his accuser with a pious smile or was truly off in a fantasy world of his own. Mr. Ellis took the oath and then sat down, sitting bolt upright with his hands folded symmetrically on his lap. I’ve noticed that Americans who become interested in Eastern mysticism always have to find ways to let you know it; they sit on the floor with their legs crossed even when there are chairs available, with their spines unnaturally erect, like West Point cadets. Mr. Graham stepped up to the witness stand, resting one foot on the platform and draping his right arm across the
railing. He seemed to be trying by example to make the witness relax.

Mr. Ellis introduced himself as the senior resident monk at the Los Angeles Zen Foundation church, which explained the shaved head. He nervously described what happened on the day of the murder. The members of their church were conducting an “intensive meditation retreat.” According to tradition, for one week they held to a rigorous daily schedule of getting up at four o’clock in the morning, chanting in Japanese, performing hundreds of full prostrations in front of an image of the Buddha, and sitting absolutely still for up to sixteen hours a day in meditation. They went to bed at eleven o’clock at night, but many of the students, Ellis explained, only pretended to do so; to show their determination, they would sneak back down to the meditation hall in the darkness and continue their efforts. The purpose of the meditation, he explained, was to try to find a solution to a seemingly irrational puzzle that the Zen master had privately assigned to each student. You could solve the puzzle only if you had a transformational insight, which they called “enlightenment.”

“On the fourth day of the retreat,” Mr. Ellis told us, “Philip started … um, breathing loud. This was in the morning, when we were sitting. Everybody thought he was just making a big push to concentrate, so no one bothered him about it.”

After a lunch eaten in complete silence—talking was forbidden for the entire week—they again began sitting in consecutive fifty-minute periods. I was wondering, and I’m sure all of the other jurors must have been as well, how can anyone actually do this? The thought of having to sit cross-legged on the floor for even half an hour without budging, concentrating on a puzzle, struck me as being almost unimaginable.

And then to do this for an hour at a time, sixteen or more hours a day—does it feel good to these people? Or is it a form of penance, like flogging yourself or saying thousands of Hail Marys, a test of endurance that gradually makes you feel euphoric? Then I realized, with a sense of irony, that I probably knew more about it than I gave myself credit for, because I had practiced the cello six or more hours a day for nearly thirty years straight, which many people would consider an unbearable schedule.

Mr. Ellis told us that during the first hour of meditation after lunch, Philip started crying quietly to himself. But—incredibly, it seemed to me—no one disturbed him. Ellis said that since Philip didn’t fall down or get up and seemed otherwise in control of himself, they thought he’d be all right.

“During the second hour,” the monk recalled, describing all of this as if it were perfectly ordinary, “Philip looked OK. His breathing was quiet. During the walking period—we walk around every hour or so to stretch and break up the monotony—he was walking kind of funny; his steps were real light—you know, like he was walking on a mattress? Then, during the third hour, he started smiling to himself. Then it turned to giggling. This was at around three o’clock. Okakura signaled for him to be quiet, and that’s when Philip jumped up and started yelling.”

“Do you remember exactly what he said?” Mr. Graham asked.

“Yes. He said, ‘I got it! I got my koan! I’m a Buddha! I always was a Buddha!’ ” Mr. Ellis glanced again at the defendant, who was nodding gently, as if he were listening to a story about someone else.

Mr. Ellis continued, “So Okakura stood right in front of
him and said, ‘Show me the answer to your koan!’ That’s the Japanese word for the puzzle you’re supposed to work on. Philip looked at him for a second, then grabbed the stick that Okakura always carried out of his hands, and … he hit him in the face with it. Extremely hard. It was so shocking—all of us were sort of paralyzed for a second. It was like it wasn’t real, it was so … so unbelievable. Okakura fell down and Philip kept hitting him. There was blood … there was so much blood everywhere, and you could see his skull was … caved in … I … I can’t really describe …” The witness closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “You’d have to know … what a wonderful man this was.…” he said, struggling to control himself. “Mr. Okakura was so wonderful … he was an inspiration to so many people.…”