Jury Duty

(page 3 of 3)

When I returned to the courtroom, I found that the reading room and the TV room were packed with carpetbaggers, who taken advantage of the short break. I looked in despair around the main room for a seat, finally settling down next to an extremely old man, who, implausibly, had rollerblades tucked under his seat. I had already consumed all the good parts of my newspaper, and now, out of boredom, prepared to read the business section.

After about forty-five minutes, the officer of the court emerged and told us we could break for lunch but to be back by two. By two! It was only noon! I wandered back out into the heat, and meandered aimlessly around lower Manhattan for two hours.

Soon after I returned, the officer came out and read another list of names. Mine wasn’t listed. I saw Boris get up with his companion. He’ll make a terrible juror, I thought. He has a plate in his head. As they were leaving the room, another young woman dashed up to join them. I now realized that the three were obviously friends, so I had been wrong about the accidental nature of their relationship. For some reason, this plunged me into despair. If I was wrong about Boris Bonehead, I could be wrong about anything. I would be a terrible juror. It was just as well they didn’t call me, I thought miserably. I didn’t know how to judge anyone.

The room had emptied out quite a bit now. An hour or so passed very slowly. Some more people were called to serve on various juries. I didn’t get called. Time took on an almost palpable quality, like a thick, gooey sauce. Row after row of people sat in various states of decomposition, snoozing behind their newspapers, draped over their chairs like rag dolls,. No one spoke. I was so bored I got up to go to the men’s room, although my need was less than urgent. While I was in there, I noticed a sandwich lying on the floor of the stall. I bent down to look at it: it looked like ham and cheese, with one bite out of it. Back in the reading room, I tried to imagine various scenarios in which a half-eaten sandwich might wind up on the floor of a bathroom stall. It seemed like the work of Snuffy McGoo.

I yawned. I decided to go have a cigarette, even though I didn’t particularly want one.

Bizarrely, everything outside was exactly as it had been several hours ago. The guards were smoking, the little girl was with her father and the bag lady, the two men were still blessing women and talking, only now they were talking about Star Trek. I began to wonder if someone paid all these people to sit in the park. If they were, I don’t know, municipal extras. I mean, who sits in a park for five hours on a sweltering hot weekday?

On the far side of the park I saw a homeless man throwing bread at pigeons. He wasn’t throwing bread to the pigeons — he was taking great hunks of what seemed to be stale Italian bread and hurling them at the pigeons with all his might. The pigeons exploded into flight, circled once and floated back to the ground, where the man was waiting for them with a fresh hunk of bread. Another homeless man, apparently an acquaintance, dashed up and angrily grabbed the bread out of the first man’s hand. Shaking his head in disgust, he tossed the bread into a trash barrel. The first man glared at him, fished out the bread, and furiously hurled a piece at a nearby pigeon. The second man wrestled the remaining pieces back out of his hand, and they stood there arguing. Finally, they sat down on the bench together, as if they had reached some sort of truce.

I’d finished my cigarette. It was 4:30 in the afternoon. Back in the courtroom, the officer was speaking to everyone, and I sat down to hear what he was saying. We were done, he told us. We could go home now, and, he assured us, we wouldn’t be called again for four years. He thanked us for helping sustain the American system of justice, and with a sigh of relief, we all rushed out of the building, eager to return to the rich, vibrant tapestry of our lives.