Glad you found it, he says, you just made it, you seem well, haven’t had the pleasure in an age.
Don’t worry, you won’t have to do much talking, no one expects you to, what with…this is just a formality, let’s hope — at least, the jury seems sympathetic, have pity. They’re too honest not to be, and pitiful: we managed to get rid of the living early on in the process…still, we need to present well, and unfortunately we haven’t had much time to prepare. Answer me this. You can nod, or shake no. Or else we could have a whole system figured out: how one finger means yes and how another means, you get it. Suss it out. What I want to know is this: do you swear to tell the truth, to me, not the whole truth, to them, God help us, I object. What I mean is, next witness. And then upon the seventh day, we’ll rest. A bailiff, who’s just the guard who’d led Him here changed into a new uniform for overtime’s sake, approaches with no recognizance whatsoever, and without a word wraps his hands around His neck and clips onto Him a bowtie, obtained from a reputable receptacle piled with all manner of neckwear worn, mildewed tongues, preknotted, knit lengths stained with shvitz. Are you with me? Look me in the eyes. Read my lips, and without moving yours. Isn’t it true that? What — is that two fingers, or just one; work with me here, you call that a signal — you’re going to have to nod better than that. What were you doing on the night of the eighth, and how was that night different from the morning of the ninth — where were you when? Do any of the following names mean anything to you…when she said that, what exactly did Miss Demeanor mean? Est-her, but I don’t even know her! Then, the lawyer for the State enters, a piercing mensch his hair not wetted slick but oilgreased, rivulets of melt flowing atop the sheen of his widowpeak, his lips thin like the most expensive and so most successful but still painful of knives — he’s a shysty son of a something…ben Ballshabayit’s what they call him naked in the shower at his countryclub, if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t. Toweled then dressed in a wonderfully unconventional entirely camelhair suit, he’s much better tailored than His who in his shmatte (which his wife’s been after him to launder for a moon) the more he sits the more it’s wrinkled, rising with a sigh, such an effort to greet his colleague, his better save the two hundred more he bills per hour with extra padded for this very rising while still gripping his valise, which falls open to spill an unfinished ostensibly lean pastrami sandwich, the only contents of the dingy pleather case; as he stoops to pick up what’s left of it he smiles happens regularly, apologies to opposing counsel who’s used to all this, too: a ploy, this wry distraction, him having to address all the while the seeds of the ryebread stuck in the gaps between the teeth.
Everybody rise, is what the bailiff says as if in training for the reformed rabbinate, which he is, thanks to a correspondence class his daughter’s enrolled him in, nightseminary — and so everybody halfrises, more like stoops as if they’re too tired to care, or too cold, what happened to the heating. A door opens behind the dais and a bird, white, white, forget the species, flies in to perch on a bench in the back. An honorable I’m sure Judge, at least his intentions (and as golden, too, as the light that accompanies his head, a shining bulb as beacon), enters now, habilamenting his robe as dark as night on tight over his thickfeathered, strongstalked wings — always too cramped, everbinding; zips himself tripping over its flow, getting tangled, arranges himself then sits; instructing the bailiff with only a fluff of his beard to make himself useful, will you, and usher in the jury — laggard, haggard, and twelvestrong, a late jury here of the last twelve, the tribally lost, resurrectedly lining to their seats in the order of their deaths: Steinstein the Foremensch sits last, straightening his black, barmitzvah suit and tie he never got to wear, it’s shrouding, uncomfortable; he’s fidgeting with his collar that it keeps coming up, the fistsized knot that’s too strangling buttoned beneath, so handsome. As for the sanctuary of this courtroom’s case built against Him: worries that it was to be thrownout, desertexiled and such, are proving unfounded, at least unsubstantiated, un-transubstantiated, within the without of reasonable doubt. Rumors, excuse them into evidence. His judge clears his throat of that honorable beardness; his fist serves as a gavel, which he or it B’s thinking bangs hard to create a void in the icy air for the airing of a voice.
Has the jury reached a verdict?
How to raise my head?
The box is piled overflow with corpses.
