Jury Duty Therapy

Jury duty is where people go to feel bad about themselves in a government building. I say that as a licensed therapist, so trust me, I've done the research. Twenty years of listening to other people's problems, and the county still summons me like I owe them money.

My name is Andy Shilling, I'm 54, and I'm sitting in a jury assembly room on an orange plastic chair built by someone who hates spines. The fluorescent light above me flickers on a rhythm, like it's trying to communicate. Around me, about sixty adults sit in the same posture, the posture of people who have given up on the morning.

Here's the funny part, and I do mean funny. I asked for this. Not literally, I'm not insane, but somewhere in me there's a guy who thought, wouldn't it be nice to be someone ordinary for a day? No office, no clients, no tissues on the table. Just a citizen, one of many, getting a parking validated.

That guy was an idiot. My back hurts.

The room smelled like old coffee and floor wax. A woman two seats down was already crying, and nobody had even said anything to her yet. That's a courthouse for you. It does the therapy before you get to the therapist.

At nine sharp, a bailiff came through the doors with a clipboard and the general energy of a woman who has seen every bad thing a human can do to another human and has decided to find it boring. Her name tag said T. BENSON. She looked like she'd been working here for twenty years, which, judging by the carpet, was around the same time as the invention of fire.

"Good morning," she said, in a voice that meant it was not one. "When I call your name, you will answer here. If you are not here, the court will assume you died, and we will process you accordingly. Let's begin."

She wasn't joking. I could tell because nobody laughed, including her.

She read names like a prison guard reading a menu to men who don't get to choose. Adams. Baker. Castillo. Each name got a flat "here" or, in one case, a "present, unfortunately," which got a small snort from the room and a glare from Benson that could stop a clock.

"Shilling."

"Here," I said, and raised my hand out of habit, like a kid in school. She looked at me for one extra second, the way people look at men who raise their hands voluntarily, and moved on.

And that's when I saw her.

Third row, aisle seat, sketchbook balanced on her knee. Ayla Jacobs. Thirty-eight years old now, dark hair shorter than I remembered, same sharp jaw, same way of holding a pencil like it owed her money. My stomach did something unprofessional.

Let me back up. Three years ago I was a witness in a civil case, something about a fender bender and a chiropractor who billed like he was performing surgery. Ayla was the courtroom sketch artist. We made eye contact during a recess, she made a joke about my tie, and by the end of the trial week we had exchanged numbers, and by the end of the trial week plus one Friday, we had spent a night together that I have thought about more times than I'd admit to a colleague.

One night. Then she took a job two hours away and the matter was closed, except they say that about things that actually end.

So there she was, fifty feet away, and she looked right through me like I was one of the orange chairs. I'm a professional. I read people for a living. And what I read, in the quarter second she allowed me, was nothing. Blank. Deliberate nothing, which is itself information, but my ego did not want to hear that interpretation.

She got up to stretch, walked past me to the water fountain, and did not glance over. Not a flicker. A person could walk past their own reflection with less effort.

Okay, Andy, I told myself, in my calm inner voice, the one I charge people by the hour for. Consider the possibilities. One, she genuinely didn't recognize you. Unlikely. Two, she recognized you and is protecting her anonymity in a room where everyone is bored enough to gossip. Three, she's angry about something from three years ago that you don't know about. Four, and this is the one my ego kept circling back to like a moth, she's angry because she remembers and she'd rather not.

The water fountain ran for a long time. She drank like a woman with somewhere better to be, then walked back and sat down without once looking left, which is where I was sitting, which took effort. Not looking at someone is a motor skill.

I spent a solid ten minutes on this. I want you to understand that I have talked people off ledges with less mental effort than I spent on why a woman I slept with once, three years ago, declined to wave at me in a government waiting room. Therapists are the worst patients. We know all our tricks.

Benson saved me by calling us into the courtroom. We filed in like schoolchildren, and the courtroom itself was wood-paneled and stuffy, with that smell courthouses have, old paper and anxiety and something faintly like pencil shavings, which I choose to believe came from Ayla's direction and I choose to not read anything into.

The judge was a small man with large glasses. He introduced the case, and I will give you the short version, because he gave us the long version and I watched two jurors fall asleep, which Benson noticed, by the way, she notices everything.

The case was this. A man claimed he hurt his back slipping in a grocery store. He sued the store for a lot of money. The store's lawyers had video of the same man, on the same day, loading a deep freezer into his pickup truck and, at one point, doing a small dance while doing it. The defense claimed fraud. The plaintiff claimed the dance was pain management.

I know. I know. I sat there thinking the same thing you're thinking.

The judge explained that the plaintiff was claiming he could not lift more than ten pounds, and the store's attorney would show us the video, and we were to keep open minds.

Here is where I made my mistake. See, when you spend your life in a room where people tell you the truth, you get a little twitchy in rooms where they might not. The judge said "incapacitating injury," I muttered under my breath, at a volume I thought was private, "Nobody who fakes a back injury remembers to fake it while unloading a freezer."

The room went quiet in the way rooms do when they're not actually quiet enough.

The young guy two seats down, a fellow juror in a hoodie, turned toward me. "Sorry, what was that?"

"Nothing," I said. "Commenting to myself. Old habit."

"That's a pretty good point, though," he said, and then turned back around as though he had just remembered where he was.

Benson, from her post by the wall, looked at me over her clipboard. The look said one more word and you're parking cars in the basement. The judge either hadn't heard or had decided I was beneath his notice, and voir dire began.

And here is where this story stops being about jury duty, because the first question the lawyers asked was about occupations, and when the sketch artist in the third row said, in a clear voice, "Ayla Jacobs, I draw courtroom sketches," she looked directly at me for the first time all morning, raised one eyebrow about a millimeter, and looked away.

That millimeter kept me warm for the rest of the day, which is pathetic, and I knew it was pathetic, and I'll get to what happened about it in a minute.

The voir dire itself was a slow-motion disaster. The lawyers went down the rows asking the standard questions, and the standard answers came back like they were ordered from a catalog. Could you be fair? Yes. Any hardship? No. Any experience with back injuries? My aunt had one. It was like watching people fill out a form with their mouths.

Then they got to me.

"Sir, your occupation?"

"I'm a therapist. Licensed. Twenty years."

The defense attorney, a tidy man with a tie that cost more than my sofa, actually smiled. "A therapist. Well. We'll come back to you."

I should have left it there. Any sane person leaves it there. But he circled back an hour later, during the bias questions, and pointed his pen at me like a small polite sword.

"Mr. Shilling, have you formed any opinion about the plaintiff's claim?"

And here is what I want you to know about me. I have spent two decades answering that exact question, only the question is usually "why do you think you drink," and the answer is never yes or no. So my mouth, trained on twenty years of open-ended inquiry, did what it does.

"I'd want to know what he believed happened versus what happened," I said. "People aren't usually lying so much as editing. The interesting question is when the editing started."

Silence. The kind of silence that has weight and takes up seating.

The defense attorney tilted his head. "You'd... want to know?"

"Professionally, yes. In here, no. I mean, I can set it aside. I set things aside for a living. It's a whole skill."

He looked at the judge. "Your Honor, I'd note the juror appears to be conducting a therapy session from the jury box."

"I am not," I said, which was the worst possible thing to say, because it sounded exactly like something a man conducting a therapy session from the jury box would say.

Tina Benson, from the wall, had her clipboard angled at me in a way I can only describe as accusatory. The judge peered over his large glasses and said, mildly, "Mr. Shilling, you'd be surprised how many people in this building are doing their jobs from the wrong seat.