Jerry Gordon (5-58-2006)

The Halo



The first day of jury deliberations went nowhere.

There could be no beginning the discussion of evidence, no review of arguments, and definitely no polling of guilt or innocence until John, jurist #4, turned off his halo. That was something all the rest of us agreed on.

But, there was no reasoning with him. He simply sat there silently, one leg lazily crossed over the other. He didn’t talk back or argue or even explain why he wouldn’t shut the thing off. If he had, that might have changed how we felt about the whole issue. But nope, he just sat there and thumbed through the book he’d brought to each session of the trial while that thin circle of light hovered just above the round of his head. Stubborn bastard; he just sat there going through that little book and glowing.

He was forever turning the pages, back and forth. He didn't have a page marked, as far as I could tell. No one ever saw him actually reading it, and I spoke to most everyone. He just browsed, seemingly without beginning or end. Jurist #8 joked to me about it on that first day as we stood at the wall urinals after lunch. He said, "If John could decide where to start, he could use that halo for a reading lamp." I laughed with him because it seemed funny, but then stood there in front of that somewhat abstract shape of white porcelain and silently considered if it was in fact possible: if in fact the light would cast as far as the book. I didn’t think it could. And the book wasn't really an interruption. The halo was. That’s what was really causing the problem.

The gold ring of vague light was clearly visible to the naked eye, but it wasn't bright. It didn't glow strong enough to create a shadow any farther than the edge of his brow, and I didn't really think it was a distraction in the beginning. But, gradually, everyone else seemed to find that is was impossible to continue on with the halo lit. It seemed to become something of "a matter.” There was discussion about it outside the jury chambers. Whispers and low talk, you know, when John was at the vending machine or out of earshot.

Jurist #3, a woman who lived in the desert and asked us to call her by her middle name, Helen, was developing a multi-stranded theory about how the halo could go unnoticed in the jury selection process. The parts of her thesis that I couldn't follow involved hypnosis. I could never keep track of who was supposed to have been hypnotized. In another theory, which I liked the idea of but had unanswered questions about, Helen said that the lawyers were unable to see the halo because their souls were clouded. I asked her why we could all see it. Weren't any of our souls clouded? She said I obviously answered my own question and left it to get a styrofoam cup to mix some powdered medication in.

But the part of her theory that seemed to fit the general feeling of the members of the jury was that John could control it, that he could turn it off and on like a flash light. But Helen wasn't satisfied with us simply agreeing on that much. She wanted to pin down more of it. She felt driven to explain how he controlled it. It seemed like without getting the rest of us to agree that John was given the special power of illumination by aliens or by a lightning strike, she wouldn’t settle for the fact that we all agreed that John could turn the thing off. Everyone else just wanted him to get rid of it or make us stop seeing it. By flipping a plastic on/off switch, removing a battery or however.

On the first day, we broke early after lunch, aware that we would get nowhere.



On the morning of day two, we all waited for John to arrive. Everyone knew what everyone else was wondering. The room became heated with the dull electricity of anticipation. Jurist #8 made several quiet jokes to two of the women, but they only laughed in courtesy. I became worried that sweat would stain my shirt, and didn’t want to take my jacket off just in case. When we heard him at the door, the room hushed. The door opened, and when he came in, his halo was still glowing.

As I looked at it on that second day, I thought it was rather a waste of a halo. It lit up a blurry ring on the crown of his head, but because he didn't seem to take much care of his hair, the ring didn't appear as crisp as I imagined it could. It was nothing very impressive. It seemed a bit of a shame. I thought that it would have been put to much better use on the head of jurist number five, a beautiful woman from, I think, Vietnam. She had rich black hair that she was obviously very proud of. She gave out audible sighs of loss when strands became snagged on the screws that attached the seat-back. She would have done the halo real justice. I'm sure it would have been dazzling on her.

John took his seat with his book in hand. Everyone looked at each other like, “what are we going to do now?” It seemed like an affront to us all. He knew how we felt. He knew what we wanted. There was a raw silence that I was very afraid to break. I watched as thoughts floated in and out of my mind. Then I suddenly started to feel sorry for him. I thought, maybe it was something that he couldn't control. Maybe it was like a childhood disease that would flare up and embarrass without warning. Maybe John didn't like people to pay attention to it, like it was a hand that stopped growing at around the age of 12. He could live with it, but he wanted people to just go on, to not make it get in the way.

Then #10 spoke in a paced rhythm. He said, "Look, #4, (he called everyone only by their number), that thing has got to go off. It's not fair to the rest of us. It's like one person smoking in a room full of non-smokers."

No one understood what he meant by that.

He went on, "It makes me uncomfortable and I need to be comfortable to think clearly and I need to think clearly to determine guilt or innocence. So, please turn it off or cover it up."

That made more sense. We all nodded. It was uncomfortable. And it was true, we needed to be comfortable to make the kind of decisions we were entrusted to make.

John got up and left the room for a short time. When he returned, the halo was gone and his hands were empty.

Everyone thanked him for his cooperation and we began to work on the case. We went over many different parts of the complicated transcripts and met with little or no disagreement. We seemed to be delightfully in sync. We were all working well together. We broke for lunch and left the room having made speedy progress towards a verdict.

As I was moving through the adjacent room, where a guard sits staring and keeps things quiet, I tossed a paper Kleenyx into the trash can and noticed that John's book was in there. I looked down into the vinyl-lined basket, interested to see what the book was. I picked it out of the swirl of newspapers and scraps, but there was no title on the blue cloth cover. Then I noticed a vague glow of gold above my forehead.

I dropped it back into to the basket before the guard became suspicious and looked up from his staring and found me guilty under the gold halo. I left the book in the trash, but I couldn't remove the experience from my mind for the rest of the afternoon's session. As we left the room at the end of the second day, I lagged behind. Most of the jurists were eager to get on the freeway and home, so there was no suspicion about my pauses to tie my shoe and to carefully place the chalk back in its white card box. But as I moved into the adjacent room, I sensed I would have trouble from the guard who had to clear everyone out before he could close the rooms and turn in his day's report. I wanted to get that book, but I didn't want to get in trouble, so I came from the threshold of the jury room and moved straight for the trash can. I thought, it would be best to make my interest in the trash evident, because to try to camouflage my plans would for sure raise the suspicions of a trained professional.

My plan worked. The guard said to me, "Where you goin’? I gotta close the rooms up."

"Yes, I know. I just wanted to check the trash for something. I think I threw away my Tupperware bowl by mistake after lunch. Is it o.k. if I give a look?"

"Yeah, go ahead."

And there it was. The book was still resting in the nest of crumpled xeroxes and morning papers. I stared and moved the trash can around with my hands to give the guard the impression that I was searching for my Tupperware. I opened my briefcase and said loud enough for the guard to understand, "I'd throw away my head if it wasn't screwed on." Then I reached in quickly and dropped the book into my open case. "My wife would have my hide if I lost that plastic tub."

"Hmph," the guard responded while quickly filling out his daily form.


Once I got home, I closed myself in the bedroom and studied the book. As I looked through it, I didn't see anything written on the pages, but images and lines of language appeared in my mind. I was reading without reading. The book was empty, but my mind became filled with clear prose as long as I stared at the bare pages. If I turned the page, a new topic was present in my mind. But the topics didn't follow any theme or particular subject. One page showed details of obscure history; another page was a passage from the secret diary of a middle aged woman. The page I was looking at would change if I turned to another page and then turned back. It was as though the book was an endless stream of information without beginning or end. As though it wrote itself at the edge of the instant. It was as though I was able to breath the thoughts of humanity, particular but non-selective. As though consciousness were a charge in the air that the book could translate into mental visions. A dream-link that crossed over divisions of space and time.

But, to be able to sit in on a never ending flow of other people's thoughts soon became consuming and I found that I began to lose an idea of what I myself thought. It was as though in my act of randomly experiencing other people’s thoughts, I lost the need to distinguish my own as apart, to hear my own mind as separate and distinct from others. I found that I became lost within the clarity and purity of other people’s random jottings. A woman’s mumbled and simple concern about her watch running slow had the power of take all my attention. As I stared at the page, all I could realize was the directed thought of that instant, as it was thought by that person. My thoughts became replaced. My feelings became replaced by the purpose or concern contained in the random words as long as I looked at the book. I was transformed into nothing of me, as though I felt the thoughts of everyone else, but without preference or choosing. I could understand each person’s unique intent or desire or worry or fear in the precise way that they understood themselves. As long as I held the book I knew compassion and real acceptance. And, surprisingly, this angelic seeing extended to myself, for on two occasions during my flipping through the book I came across my own thoughts and concerns. And while I might describe my thoughts as petty and unimportant now, when I had the chance to see my own situation through the leaves of the book and beneath the glow of the halo, I felt a sincere sense of care for myself. I valued myself then as I have since or before valued nothing else. I was able to love myself and my situation for precisely what it was, just as I was able to do with all the other things that I saw through the book. The smallest of things seemed to require nurturing and appreciation. It was as though everything hinged on those bits of nothing. It was as though perfection was being shaped from the base and random happenings of the world.

The next morning, I was exhausted after spending the entire night going back and forth through the book. As the time to leave for jury duty approached, I began to grow fearful. I knew it would be a problem if I went into the jury chamber with a halo. I didn’t know what to do. Looking in the mirror, I shuffled my hair into place and could see the faint gold light play across the shape of my hand. I put the book into my briefcase and went to my car without any breakfast.

I was still unsure of what to do. But as I sat stopped in the left turn lane, waiting for the light to change, I took out the book and stared at the traffic rushing right and left across the intersection in front of me, the sound of my turn indicator keeping time with the pace of the cars. I opened the book and the whispering self-talk of drivers, and of passengers on buses, and of a person deciding whether to use exact change when buying a pack of cigarettes or to break a twenty, filled my mind. I closed the book and opened the car door just as the green left-turn arrow flashed on. I leaned out of my car, my seat belt tightening around my waist and slipping off my shoulder. I thought, “The cars behind me aren’t beeping.” I set the book on the concrete meridian and then righted myself into my seat. Still no beeps. I closed the door and made my turn, followed by a line of four or five cars.


I got to the court house on time and it took only two hours that morning for us to decide that the defendant was guilty.

Amanda Hare (4-23-06)

Amanda read from the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. Here are the excerpts that she read.

By sunup, Jonathan Gull was practicing again. From five thousand feet the fishing boats were specks in the flat blue water, Breakfast Flock was a faint cloud of dust motes, circling.

He was alive, trembling ever so slightly with delight, proud that his fear was under control. Then without ceremony he hugged in his forewings, extended his short, angled wingtips, and plunged directly toward the sea. By the time he passed four thousand feet he had reached terminal velocity, the wind was a solid beating wall of sound against which he could move no faster. He was flying staight down, at two hundred miles per hour. He swallowed knowing that if his wings unfolded at that speed he'd be blown into a million tiny shreds of seagull. But the speed was power, and the speed was joy, and the speed was pure beauty.

He began to pullout at a thousand feet, wingtips thudding and blurring in that gigantic wind, the boat and the crowd of gulls tilting and growing meter-fast, directly in his path.

He couldn't stop; he didn't know yet even how to turn at that speed.

Collision would be instand death.

And so he shut his eyes.

It happened that morning, then, just after sunrise, that Jonathan Livingston Seagull fired directly through the center of Breakfast Flock, ticking off two hundred twelve miles per hour, eyes closed, in a great roaring shriek of wind and feathers. The Gull of Fortune smiled upon him this once, and no one was killed.

By the time he had pulled his beak straight up into the sky he was still scorching along at a hundred and sixty miles per hour. When he had slowed to twenty and stretched his wings again at last, the boat was a crumb on the sea, four thousand feet below.

His thought was triumph. Terminal velocity! A seagull at two hundred fourteen miles per hour! It was a breakthrough, the greatest single moment in the history of the Flock, and in that moment a new age opened for Jonathan Gull. Flying out to his lonely practice area, folding his wings for a dive from eight thousand feet, he set himself at once to discover how to turn.
(p. 27-29)
...
The gulls were flocked into the Council Gathering when he landed, and apparently has been so flocked for some time. They were in fact, waiting.

"Jonathan Livingston Seagull," said the Elder, "Stand to Center for Shame in the sight of your fellow gulls!"

It felt like being hit with a board. His knees went weak, his feathers sagged, there was a roaring in his ears. Centered for shame? Impossible! The Breakthrough! They can't understand! They're wrong, they're wrong!

"...for his reckless irresponsibility," the solemn voice intoned, "violating the dignity and tradition of the Gull Family..."

A seagull never speaks back to the Council Flock, but it was Jonathan's voice raised. "Irresponsibility? My brothers!" he cried. "Who is more responsible than a gull who finds and follows a meaning, a higher purpose for life? For a thousand years we have scrabbled after fish heads, but now we have a reason to live-to learn, to discover, to be free! Give me one chance, let me show you what I've found..."

Jonathan Seagull spent the rest of his days alone, but he flew way out beyond the Far Cliffs. His one sorrow was not solitude, it was that other gulls refused to believe the glory of flight that awaited them; they refused to open their eyes and see.

He learned more each day. He learned that a streamlined high-speed dive could bring him to find the rare and tasty fish that schooled ten feet below the surface of the ocean: he no longer needed fishing boats and stale bread for survival. He learned to sleep in the air, setting a course at night across the offshore wind, covering a hundred miles from sunset to sunrise. With the same inner control, he flew through heavy sea-fogs and climbed above them into dazzling clear skies...in the very times when every other gull stood on the ground, knowing nothing but mist and rain. He learned to ride the high winds far inland, to dine there on delicate insects.

What he had once hoped for the Flock, he now gained for himself alone; he learned to fly, and was not sorry for the price that he had paid. Jonathon Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull's life is so short, and with these gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.
(p. 38-41)

They came in the evening, then, and found Jonathan gliding peaceful and alone through his beloved sky. The two gulls that appeared at his wings were pure as starlight, and the glow from them was gentle and friendly in the high night air. But most lovely of all was the skill with which they flew, their wingtips moving a precise and constant inch from his own.

Without a word, Jonathan put them to his test, a test that no seagull had ever passed. He twisted his wings, slowed to a single mile per hour above stall. The two radiant birds slowed with him, smoothly, locked in position. They knew about slow flying.

He folded his wings, rolled and dropped in a dive to a hundred ninety miles per hour. They dropped with him, streaking down in flawless formation.

At last he turned that speed straight up into a long vertical slow-roll. They rolled with him, smiling.

He recovered to level flight and was quiet for a time before he spoke. "Very well," he said, "who are you?"

"We're from your flock, Jonathan. We are your brothers." The words were strong and calm. "We've come to take you higher, to take you home."

"Home I have none. Flock I have none. I am Outcast. And we fly now at the peak of the Great Mountain Wind. Beyond a few hundred feet, I can lift this old body no higher."

"But you can, Jonathan. For you have learned. One school is finished, and the time has come for another to begin."

As it had shined across him all his life, so understanding lighted that moment for Jonathan Seagull. They were right. He could fly higher, and it was time to go home.

He gave one last look across the sky, across that magnificent silver land where he had learned so much.

"I'm ready," he said at last.

And Jonathan Livingston Seagull rose with the two star-bright gulls to disappear into a perfect dark sky.
(p. 52-53)

In the days that followed, Jonathan saw that there was as much to learn about flight in the place as there had been in the life behind him. But with a difference. Here were gulls who thought as he thought. For each of them, the most important thing in living was to reach out and touch perfection in that which they most loved to do, and that was to fly. They were magnificent birds, all of them, and they spent hour after hour every day practicing flight, testing advanced aeronautics.

For a long time Jonathan forgot about the world that he had come from, that place where the Flock lived with its eyes tightly shut to the joy of flight, using its wings as a means to the end of finding and fighting for food. But now and then, just for a moment, he remembered.

He remembered it one morning when he was out with his instructor, while they rested on the beach after a session of folded-wing snap rolls.

"Where is everybody, Sullivan?" he asked silently, quite at home now with the easy telepathy that these gulls used instead of screes and gracks. "Why aren't there more of us here? Why, where I came from there were..."

"...thousands and thousands of gulls. I know." Sullivan shook his head. "The only answer I can see, Jonathan, is that you are pretty well a one-in-a-million bird. MOst of us came along ever so slowly. We went from one world into another that was almost exactly like it, forgetting right away where we had come from, not caring where we were headed, living for the moment. Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand! And then another hundred lives until we began to learn that there is such a thing as perfection, and another hundred again to get the idea that our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth. The same rule holds for us now, of course: we choose our next world through what we learn in tis one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome."

He stretched his wings and turned to face the wind. "But you, Jon," he said, "learned so much at one time that you didn't have to go through a thousand lives to reach this one."

In a moment they were airborne again, practicing. The formation point-rolls were difficult, for through the inverted half Jonathan had to think upside down, reversing the curve of his wing, and reversing it exactly in harmony with his instructor's.

"Let's try it again,"Sullivan said over and over: "Let's try it again." Then, finally, "Good." And they began practicing outside loops.

One evening the gulls that were not night-flying stood together on the sand, thinking. Jonathan took all his courage in hand and walked to the Elder Gull, who, it was said, was soon to be moving beyond this world.

"Chiang..." he said, a little nervously.

The old seagull looked at him kindly. "Yes, my son?" Instead of being enfeebled by age, the Elder has been empowered by it; he could outfly any gull in the Flock, and he had learned skills that the others were only gradually coming to know.

"Chiang, this world isn't heaven at all, is it?"

The Elder smiled in the moonlight. "You are learning again, Jonathan Seagull," he said.

"Well, what happens from here? Where are we going? Is there no such place as heaven?"

"No, Jonathan, there is no such place. Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect." He was silent for a moment. "You are a very fast flier, aren't you?"

"I...I enjoy speed," Jonathan said, taken aback but proud that the Elder had noticed.

"You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there."

Without warning, Chiang vanished and appeared at the water's edge fifty feet away, all in the flicker of an instant. Then he vanished again and stood, in the same millisecond, at Jonathan's shoulder. "It's kind of fun," he said.
(p. 60-65)