James H. BATH
Bio to come
I WAS CALLED UPON TO SERVE JURY DUTY
I was called upon to serve jury duty. Hell of thing. Well maybe not ‘Hell’ of a thing, since Hell is real hot with rivers of molten lava glowing red and black, flowing through valleys more blistering than a world-sized oven on full broil. Only a volcano could breathe that air. I was breathing this air, so it couldn’t be Hell.
But it was just like it, nevertheless.
I just hate leaving the house, that’s all. I mean, how many times does it happen that you’re on the way to the store and see composers in the trees, and you quite naturally figure you can stop and chat with them to catch up on the gossip, if the monkeys aren’t throwing coconuts at you.
I ran into Beethoven the other day, after the monkey threw him at me.
“Ludwig! How are you?”
“Guten Morgan, Herr Thomas,” he said, brushing himself off in the most dignified manner he could muster and casting an offended look back at the trees.
“Nice piece,” I said.
“Vhat piece?”
“That symphony. The number 5 thing. The one you did in C minor. You know… da da da daaa...
“Oh. Ja. Nice piece. Da da da daaa. Da da da daaa,” he sang, raising his arms and waving them playfully at the blue sky, as if conducting an orchestra in the snow-colored clouds.
“How did you come up with it?”
“Zee whole thing? Zee whole Symphonie?”
“Yes.”
“I ride zee wave of zee infinite. How else? Is only way to make musik.”
“Now, Ludwig, that symphony’s too complex to be composed without thinking, planning, timing, theory, and . . . ”
“Pfui Teufel! Vhat a joke—this thinking, this timing, this theory! I make musik. I play vhat sounds good. End of discussion.”
“But surely, Beethoven, there is much thinking that goes into composing such a wonderful piece as your fifth. I mean, the way you keep referring back to the original da da da daaa. It’s like the voice of God saying ‘Now Children, listen up! For all the secrets of Heaven are about to be revealed!’”
“Oh, posh.”
I looked at him. “But you based your entire movement on that opening. Everything that came after it was so intertwined with it, so related to it as if it were the feet of God himself anchored here on this earth while he stretched his mighty hands and arms into the infinite to-. . .”
“I vas svatting flies, mein Herr. Da da da daaa. Da da da splat.”
“You were swatting what?”
“Flies, Herr Thomas. Flies. Insects. But, my secretary, she vas taking notes when I svatted zee fly. And when I looked at these notes I saw zee da da da daaa, and thought ‘Hmm. Vhy not?’ and left zem in zee composition.”
I eyed him suspiciously.
“Vhat?”
“I think you are playing with me, mein Herr. You are trivializing your own Heavenly composition. To what purpose, I am not sure.” One of my eyebrows arched up, as the eye under it zeroed in on him, dubiously. I rubbed my chin, “Hmm . . . ”
“But vhere are you going, mein Herr?”
“I’m on my way to jury duty.”
“Ja? And who is defendant?”
Since I didn’t know, I couldn’t give him a specific answer.
We talked about nothing in particular for the next few blocks, then Beethoven bade me farewell, for he was going to buy some cotton swabs.
The courtroom was a harmony of polished oak, hard pews, and air like a tomb. The jury sat to one side. I was one of them.
The judge was a gnarly man of deep lines crawling all over his face. The slit of his old mouth turned sharply down at the corners. Knobby veined fingers gripped gavel and slammed thunderous authority into the room.
“This court will come to order.”
“Yo’ Awnah. Ah would call mah fust witness, if it please th’ co’it,” the fancy prosecutor said, smiling at the judge the way one wolf smiles at another when they stumble across a plump, juicy infant in the woods, “It shan’t take a moment, then we can git back up to Black River and finish ketchin them trout.”
“Proceed.”
“You, Suh!” the prosecutor swung in my direction and pointed his trembling finger straight at me.“Where were you on the afternoon of the twentieth of this month?”
“Pardon me?”
“Where, Suh? Dammit, answer me!”
“Right here, in this very seat looking at you point at me, for this is the afternoon of the twentieth of this month.” Confused, I looked around the room and noticed a peculiar thing—the witness stand was empty and there was no defendant in sight.
“Yo, Awnuh. Would you instruct this witness to answer yes or no and to refrain from pontificating and elaborating?”
“The witness is so instructed.”
“But I’m not a-”
“Now. I ask you again, Suh! Where wuh you on th’ afternoon of the twentieth of this month!”
“Well, I was . . . I mean, I am . . . ”
“Answer yes or no!”
“But I . . . ”
“Yes or no! Yes or no! Yes or-“
“Yes!”
“No further queshuns, yo Awnuh.” The prosecutor virtually floated back to his seat on a cloud of satisfaction. He smirked at his cousin, the portly counsel for the defense, as he sat down.
The defense lawyer heaved himself up with a grunt and walked to the witness stand, which was empty, and spun his great bulk on the jury box.
“Ladies and Gentlemen of the-.”
“Hi, Daddy!” the pigtailed, freckle-faced twelve-year-old girl beside me yelled, waving at the lawyer, “They let me out of school so I could have jury duty!”
“Well that’s nice, Petunia,” he said, leaning over and spitting tobacco juice in a spittoon, “But the jury is on trial here, Child, which means you’re in a bit of a quandary, you and your compadres.”—lean over and spit again—“That is to say, you’re in deep shit, Precious. If I can’t clear your name, then you’re gonna fry like green tomaters on your mammy’s wood stove, and Daddy can’t do diddlysquat to stop it. So I want you to be very careful, Petunia—I mean reeeeeel careful—when you answer my next question, you heah?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, Petunia. Your very life depends on this question. Now, what is the square root of the hypotenuse of e taken to the power of j times ten to the negative thirty first power divided by theta when-”
The little girl fell back in her seat, her eyes looking this way and that, but at nothing as she tried to follow the flow of mathematical logic, her shiny braces reflecting light away from her puzzled lip-trembling frown, her misting eyes turning desperately to me (of all people) and the other jury members for support (who all looked away and started playing with hemlines and studying fingernails), then utterly confoundedly and newly frightened she looked back to her father as he continued to drone out, “. . . times pi minus the radius of the reciprocal of the statistical probability of the infinite summation of permutations mutually exclusive or incompatible with the mean under the curve when X is greater than N minus 1 and the second derivative of . . . ”
The little girl was bawling torrents now. The motherly juror next to her grabbed her, held her, and rocked her back and forth. The child was blasting out her anguish like a brass horn in Hell, and the middle-aged woman was saying, “There, there.”
“Answer me, Petunia! Damn you! Do you want to die?”
“Daddy… I…”
“Answer me! Or surely you will roast in fires of Hell for eternity—after you fry like bacon in the electric chair!”
“But what have I done wrong!”
“Your Honor, this is a hostile witness.”
“Answer your fucking father your stinkin’ little bitch before I plug you in the God damn wall myself!”
“Four.”
A hush came over the courtroom. Could it be?
“My God, she got it right,” Professor Whittle mouthed from the corner, looking up from his portable computer.
Juror number six, who was a baby, only six months aged, began to cry, waving his little arms spastically. All eyes in the courtroom cast suspicious glances at him. Why was he crying? What was he trying to hide?
Juror number three said, “Woof” and wagged his tail. I secretly signaled him to be more discreet.
The counsel for defense winked at Petunia, smiled, and said, “I rest my case, Your Honor.”
“Next witness,” the judge said wearily.
“I call old lady Easterby to the stand, yo’ awnuh,” the prosecutor purred.
“She’s right there in the jury box, Cecil. The whole damn thing, the whole box is the witness stand today. Talk to her there. It’ll take the whole damn day to make her maneuver that walker to the witness stand.”
“Yes, yo’awnuh. Mizzzz Easterby! As I am quite certain you cogitate, a hurricane is not a thing apart from the calm. Is it, Mizzz Easterby?”
“Why no, Cecil. It is not completely apart. At least, not in a purely physical sense. I mean, the calm gradually blends into it and becomes the violent winds of the storm with no definite dividing line between the two.”
“Quite right, Mizzz Easterby. It is an edge to the calm, and gradually do we come up to this edge to peer into the still, peaceful vortex. Is this not correct?”
“Objection!”
“On what grounds?”
“The prosecution is leading the witness.”
Suddenly the sweetest music ever heard by human ears floated into the courtroom. It preceded a cloud diffusing at its edges, merging ever so subtly into the empty air of the courtroom, the air we all breathed and expelled our foul breaths into; and on this cloud a great orchestra played to the beckoning of a conductor’s sweeping arms; and on a grand piano a magician plucked sweet, profound, Heavenly sounds from its keys, and this musician was the great, the unequaled Ludwig van Beethoven.
I burst into tears, the sound was so divine, as the shimmering white cloud filled the courtroom. The orchestra was ethereal, entering into souls one and all, reaching the very prayer stools of our blood cells and macrophages, our veins, our spines, our brains, our twisting, spiraling neurons, until we lost our individual differences, our greeds and creeds, our wants and needs, and interred, melted, merged egoless into the Bliss of Almighty God.
“Your Awnuh. I must object to this intrusion. If counsel for defense thinks that these mere theatrics will sway the opinion of this co’it-”
“Order!” screamed the tomato-faced judge and slammed his gavel down so hard it exploded his desk into splinters, “I’ll have order in this court!”
“You, Suh, are out of order!”
“What did I do?” I asked.
“You planned this disruption. I know you did! I know you did!” screamed the prosecutor.
“As you wish,” I said with the greatest majesty (which I had learned through my lengthy association with Ludwig and other such impeccable maestros) and, without a second thought, I turned my smiling attention back to the magnificent composer as he kneaded from the keys of his grand piano ream upon ream of eternal bliss and ecstasy, overwhelming all of us with a grace that made angels cry on the windowsills and sing “Hosanna! Hosanna!” and burst into eruptions of pure joy.
Da da da daaa!
Da da da daaa!
Then all too soon, all too suddenly, as a storm cloud ominously rolls into our lives on hot summer days, boiling with blackness that eclipses the sun, my friend Ludwig and his orchestra floated out of our lives, soared away, revealing the sun once again. But we didn’t lose because of the exit of Beethoven. We gained by the entrance of the sun. The sun replaced the splendor of Ludwig; for this flaming orb was the comforter and sustainer of all things earthly, the midwife if you will, serving God Himself to give us divine rebirth and participation in the glory and magnificence of His indescribable and unequalled universe.
The twelve year old juror was smiling at me with every brace-clamped tooth she had, “Wasn’t it just wonderful? Wasn’t it just so, so wonderful?”
“Shut up, bitch, I’m warning you!” hissed the prosecutor.
“Plug her into th’ goddam wall, bailiff!” raged the judge, “Fry her disrespectful little—I said order! Order in my court!”
“Wait! Wait!” I yelled, “Beethoven was just the avant-garde. There’s more!”
I stood and waved magnificently in the direction of the window.
And the whole court jumped up in thunderous applause as Johann Straus waltzed in leading a thousand member orchestra blaring out “The Blue Danube” with such perfect pitch and tension that the heavenly waters themselves rained upon the star-studded universe like diamonds in babies’ dreams. Carousels, Ferris wheels, and majestic rotating space stations swirled all around us in endlessly deep air. Shooting stars, glowing moons, and exploding dawns adorning the edges of every planet imaginable filled the eyes of the courtroom. Everyone levitated to his and her feet (save the seething prosecutor and his nasty cousin the judge) and waltzed above the pews, amidst galaxies and measureless dimensions of eternal ecstasy.
Composers from down through the ages marched in followed by the New York and London Philharmonics and high school bands and the Beach Boys. And Bach fugued us beyond belief.
“These composers, some of them are hundreds, even thousands of years old,” I muttered in awe.
“Maybe we will live to be that old, too,” the girl in pigtails said to me.
“It doesn’t really matter,” Socrates interrupted, riding in on a giraffe, “When we drop these so-called human bodies, we continue living anyway, as something else. Staying in human form or leaving it behind is no more significant than choosing between a bus and a plane to continue our journey through eternity. No matter which we choose, our journey goes on and on. It doesn’t matter for the journey is our real home; the destination is always mere illusion.”
“Yes! I see what you mean,” the little girl said.
At a signal from the judge, armed guards marched three abreast toward the jury, arm bands dripping freshly painted blood, displaying the words “Gratitude for Platitudes— Death to Truths.”
The guards grabbed the little girl by her pigtails and yanked her from the jury box, scraping and cutting her knees in the process. The juror who was a dog growled baring fierce fangs and lunged toward the guards, with unquenchable fury as his jaws clamped into a guard’s throat and ripped it open to the tune of the “Emperor’s Waltz.” I was on my feet in an instant before the butt of a gun put my lights out.
When I came to, I saw that we all—the entire jury—were bound in our chairs, with our feet immersed in buckets of water. Each bucket was connected to wires and clamps, and the whole circuit was connected to a huge electric switch which the bailiff held in sweating and trembling hands as crazed laughter erupted from his face with demonic glee.
“Fry the bastards. Fry the bastards. Fry the bastards. Fry the bastards,” the courtroom chanted, “They tried to give us truth when we only wanted lies!”
I was surprised to see the whole room turn on us like that, but what the heck. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccate and Fugue in D Minor undulated through the court. The young lady’s pigtails waved in the deep currents of the fugue, red hair like sea anemones swaying in infinite oceans, a sunrise on countless horizons, her blue eyes so crystal and deep, so beyond man’s feeble attempts to measure, this beautiful twelve-year old angel with braces of silver organizing pearly teeth, quarter moon smile arching up like the hull of a happy ship; and as I watch, hypnotized by her loveliness, that perfect smile began to rock on the swells of Bach’s great fugue, like a ship far at sea, and her delicate white nose became its sail; and before my stunned eyes this ship and sail took flight upon the mounting crests and deepening valleys and undulating currents of the fugue, and the child’s shining eyes ascended like two shining suns, two blue-tented angels, into the highest realms of Heaven and God’s thunderous voice thundered down, “In this child, I am well pleased!”
My heart broke with joy. It shattered, atomized, from the depth of the purity of the sweetness of the one thing that is incorruptible in all our lives—innocence!
Innocence began a new day! A new birth!
“You, Suh!” the prosecutor spat, sneered, as the judge hammered on the soles of my feet with his gavel, “You, Suh. Wake up! Wake up!”
“You can’t sleep here, bum. Move it before we take you to jail.”
I opened my eyes. Two city cops standing over me, one banging on my feet with his club. I felt the crush of the park bench against my back. The cop’s flash light blinded my eyes. The stench of my clothes reminded me of how much I needed a bath; and that memory reminded me of how long I’d been homeless.
As the city cops waited impatiently for me to bring my focus back into his world, I heard one say to the other, “It’s fucking disgusting. It never ends. You run ‘em off and as soon as you turn your back they’re back in the park, messin’ up public property and bothering good people. Move it you stinking wino bum. I’m not gonna tell you again.”
I moved on, staggering at first while my blood made its slow-oozing way down through my cold veins and into the peripheral reaches of my body. By the time I’d walked a block, I’d regained pretty good coordination and proceeded on into the night with a slight limp. Soon, to the staring eyes of the police officers, I disappeared into the darkness of the cold city streets, wondering if I’d ever see that twelve-year-old girl again, or Ludwig or Straus or be carried away by the sweet depths of Bach’s fugues . . . or . . .
Yes. I would. I knew I that. And that’s what made it all bearable.