Free The Soloist by Mark Salzman

the victim of a crime only once, when her car was broken into. She had not been in the car at the time, and lost only a tape player, a pair of sunglasses and her husband’s basketball.
    The prosecutor educed that no one in her immediate family suffered from mental illness, that she had worked for the ambulance company since finishing high school, and that she and her husband, who worked for the railroad as an engineer, were both politically moderate. She stayed poised throughout the questioning, and answered in a masculine, whiskey-flavored voice. During one of the breaks I discovered why: she was an unabashed chain-smoker.
    Ms. Reiter made it through her voir dire, leaving only one more juror to be confirmed. After two dismissals—a woman whose cousin had died in the Guyana tragedy and did not want to hear testimony about cults, and a man who had been badly frightened recently by a “crazy” homeless person—the two lawyers focused their attention on a black man, Mr. Dwight Anderson, an ex-Marine who worked as an industrial investigator at a defense plant. Toward the end of his interview, at about four-thirty, a patch of sunlight that had been gradually making its way across the floor of the courtroom reached the jury box. As the sun fell the patch of light crept up our legs, then spilled onto our laps, and eventually reached chest level. The brilliant red fabric of Ms. Reiter’ssweater drew my attention. The afternoon sunlight illuminated the soft wool and, from where I was sitting, made her sweater partially transparent, giving me a clear view of her breasts in three-quarter profile. They were at the very beginning of exquisite decline. It dismayed and embarrassed me that I could feel this sort of longing so suddenly and so strongly, and in such an inappropriate setting.
    When I could stand it no longer I shifted my attention back toward the courtroom. To my amusement I noticed that almost all in my field of view, male and female, had their eyes on Ms. Reiter’s chest. I looked around at the rest of the room and saw that only two people seemed oblivious to the spectacle: the court stenographer, who was facing directly away from us as she typed, and the defendant, who was looking right at me. He had a bland smile on his face, as if he knew exactly what was going through my mind. I shuddered and looked away; when I glanced back a few moments later, he was staring out the window where the sunlight was coming from. For the first time I comprehended the reality that this was a murder trial, I was a juror chosen to decide a man’s guilt or innocence, and now that man knew my name and quite a bit else about me.
    The panel was sworn in, two alternates were chosen and the trial finally got under way. At last we were going to find out what the pale young man had done. I’d been especially curious after hearing about the tabloid article referring to the defendant as “the Zen monster.” I had tried to track the article even though this was against the rules, but when I mentioned the name of the magazine to a librarian friend on campus, she stifled a laugh and suggested I try checking the dumpsters behind supermarkets.
    Judge Davis began by telling us that since the defendant was pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, the trial had to be divided into two parts. First was the “guilt phase,” where we had to determine whether or not the defendant actually committed the crime. If we found him guilty, we would then move to the “sanity phase,” in which the defendant would try to prove that although he did commit the crime, he was insane at the time. The judge did not explain why we couldn’t do these two things simultaneously; it seemed like an inefficient way to go about it, and I began to wonder how long I was going to be stuck in this courtroom.
    The prosecutor gave his opening arguments first. In his gentle drawl, with almost a hint of sadness in his voice, he told us that the defendant, Philip Weber, was a