Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,35
of which had also been taped to the lobby door: WORK PERMIT: PLUMBING – ALTERATION TYPE 1 APPLICATION FILED TO PERFORM SUBDIVISION OF EXISTING SIX (6) ROOM RAILROAD ON 5TH FLOOR INTO TWO SEPARATE ONE (1) BEDROOM APARTMENTS. GENERAL CONSTRUCTION, PLUMBING, GAS AND INTERIOR FINISHES AS REQUIRED. EXISTING APARTMENT DOORS TO REMAIN. NO CHANGE TO EGRESS FROM APARTMENT TO HALL.
• • •
In the jury assembly room she sat next to a man wearing a T-shirt that read IT’S NOT THAT I’M ANTISOCIAL, I JUST DON’T LIKE YOU. In front of her, another man was eating a blueberry scone and explaining to the woman next to him why some Muslims do their best to avoid most musical genres. He’d been to MoMA the day before, and there had overheard a docent speaking to a group of schoolchildren about the “musicality” of Kandinsky’s work; this had struck him as an especially interesting point of comparison, “because the Muslims you’d expect to prefer Kandinsky over figural artists would almost certainly be the same ones who live in suspicion of music, whose sensuality and purposelessness, they believe, encourage humans’ baser tendencies.”
“What tendencies?” the woman beside him asked.
“Promiscuity,” said the man, chewing. “Lust. Immodesty. Violence. To my very conservative uncle, for example”—he brushed some crumbs off his lap and onto the floor—“Britney Spears and Beethoven are the same thing. Music is offensive because it appeals to our more animalistic passions, detracting from our more intelligent pursuits.”
“So if your uncle were in a restaurant and they started playing classical music, would he put his hands over his ears? Would he get up and leave?”
“No. But he would probably find the playing of any music at all extremely silly.”
The more you learn, thought Alice, the more you realize how little you know.
At 9:20, a short bald man stepped onto a box at the front of the room and introduced himself as Clerk Willoughby. “My fellow Americans. Good morning. Everyone please look at your summons. We want to make sure you’re all in the right place on the right day. Your summons should read July fourteenth, Sixty Centre Street. If anyone is holding a summons that says something different, please take your things down the hall to the main office here and they’ll get it cleared up.”
A woman behind Alice sighed loudly and began gathering her things.
“Now. In order to be a juror in this court, you must be a citizen of the United States, you must be over eighteen years old, you must understand English, you must live in Manhattan, Roosevelt Island, or Marble Hill; and you must not be a convicted felon. If anyone does not meet those requirements, you too should pick up your things and take them to the administration office.”
The man in the antisocial T-shirt got up and walked out.
“Jury duty hours are from nine a.m. to five p.m. with a lunch break from one to two p.m. Jurors not involved in a trial and thus still here in the assembly room at four thirty will in all likelihood be allowed to leave at that time. If a judge is making use of you, however, it’s out of my hands and you will have to stay until you are dismissed by the judge. The average length of a trial is seven days. Some are longer, some are shorter. At this point we’ll be showing you a short orientation film, and I would be grateful if everyone would please remove your headphones and close your books and newspapers and give it your full attention.”
The movie began with a fade-in on a lake. Led by a burly guard, a herd of medieval villagers trooped down to the water’s edge.
In olden times, said a voice-over, in Europe, if you were accused of a crime or misdemeanor, you had to go through what they called trial by ordeal. This was an idea that first surfaced some three thousand years ago, in the time of Hammurabi.
The herd of villagers parted to make way for a man whose wrists had been bound tightly with rope. Two guards pushed him toward the water.
One of these ordeals called for you to plunge your hand into boiling water. Three days later, if the hand healed, you were pronounced innocent. Another trial by ordeal was even more extreme. It demanded that you be tightly bound and thrown into the water. If you floated, you were guilty. If you sank, you were innocent.
Now the guards were tying the prisoner’s feet while a pair of