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.