Juror Number Twelve

I rub my hands together. It's freakin' cold even though the room is set to a comfortable temperature. The stupid pearls around my neck feel icy, and my naked ankles are chilly. Should've worn hose today. But they didn't go with this pencil skirt.

Being cold has nothing to do with my ability, despite what some so-called psychics claim about drops in temperature. I wish it did. Instead, I get cold when I'm nervous. So I shake because my nerves are doing the hokey pokey, and I shake because my body won't stay warm. It's hard to take me seriously when I look so unconfident. I know that. Thankfully, I don't have to make them believe, because I can make them see.

"You want the court to reread the defendant's testimony?" Four asks. "We'll have to write a formal request and send it in. But I'm happy to do that." He's handsome, accomodating, and courteous, the natural choice for Jury Foreman, but not only for those reasons. He's also Dick Butler, NBC 4 L.A.'s ten o'clock news anchor. So, we're all comfortable with him and look up to him, because, in a way, we've all let him into our homes many times.

"No," I say, shaking my head. I never explain my abilities well because...well, I never explain them. I've been hiding them my whole life. They aren't a party trick, and they certainly aren't something you build a resume around. If people knew you were looking into their minds, what you had access to, they'd stay far, far away from you. But I had no choice now but to reveal what I can do, because it could save an innocent man's life.

"I want to play back a part of his testimony for you—it doesn't matter," I say. "We don't have a lot of time. The less sharp the memory is in my mind, the weaker the psychic connection."

"Have mercy," One says, rolling her eyes, "I thought I misheard when she said she was 'psychic' the first time." The wrinkled old lady, probably in her eighties, elbows Five at her left, a blond with round glasses, like a cross between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. She speaks to him out of the corner of her mouth, over-loudly, because she is hard of hearing. "Next, she'll be selling us palm readins and tarrot cards." She says tarrot like carrot.

Harry Malfoy chuckles.

"I'm not a professional psychic," I say, my voice wavering. The cold pushes right through my wool jacket even though Ten, a portly woman with squished eyes and a pinched nose and mouth, has sweat permanently clinging to two deep creases in her forehead. "I'm a park ranger at Angeles National Forest."

"A psychic park ranger?" says Three with a wry smile. "Tell me, which bear am I thinking of?" He glances around the table and collects a few laughs. A comedian.

"Yogi!" shouts Seven. Her auburn shoulder-length curls dance as she laughs at her own joke. Comedian number two. Great.

"Hey, Seven! You must be a bear psychic too!" Three said, mimicking suprise. "It could have been Smokey or Baloo!"

"That's not how it works," I say, calmly but firmly. "We don't have a lot of time. Please, just let me show you what I saw during the defendant's testimony. Give me permission to enter your mind and show you."

I don't need consent to enter another person's mind. But I ask for it for a couple of reasons. One, when I'm in there, there's no telling what secrets you'll share with me on the mind plane. You are not in control of your subconscious. At all. It does what it wants to do. And usually, the real you doesn't know what subconscious you tells me when I'm in there. But sometimes, it does, depending on how close your conscious is to your subconscious. The closer the two are in agreement with each other, the more likely you can perceive what inner you is up to on the mind plane. So if I go in there and you reveal something you didn't mean to, but you know you do, I can cover my butt by saying, I asked and you gave me permission to see.

The second reason I ask consent—this is really important—is because when you choose to enter the mind plane, you are more likely to interpret what you see there as your discovery, even if I put it there. Think of it like this: the two of us in a desert, excavating. I could just rip the canvas off the hole and say, Ta da! An alien monolith! Or, I can hand you a shovel, point to where to dig, and let you remove the last scoop of sand, revealing the obsidian, smooth surface of the top of the monolith beneath. You see the difference? I knew you would.

"Look," I say. "If in five seconds, nothing psychic happens, then I'm a fraud, and you've lost nothing, right?"

"We'll have lost time," Two says, arms folded tightly across her narrow chest. She looks expensive, like her time is worth more than everyone else's at this table. Probably is too.

"Then, all the better to let me demonstrate. It'll only take a moment. Cross examining me has already taken up precious minutes. Besides, if nothing psychic happens, I'll vote guilty too."

"I say we try it," Dick Butler says.

Murmurs of agreement around the table.

I smile at him. Number Four of NBC 4. His juror number is perfect, just like him. If I hadn't sworn off relationships a year ago, I'd see if I could get his other number. Maybe I will anyway. I don't have to call.

"Thank you," I say, and I can't help but flip my hair over my shoulder with a hand. Old habits die hard.

"Fine by me," says the male comedian.

"This should be good," says his counterpart. She's smiling. That won't last for long.

"Do we have to hold hands—" says the first, but before he can finish his thought, the deliberation room warps and stretches around us like it's made of Spandex being pulled away from us.

"Whoa," says someone.

"Earthquake?!" says the old lady. "Big one!" She reaches out for Malfoy and puts a wrinkled, veiny, brown hand on his chest. His eyes roll back in his head.

"I can't see!" cries the male comedian.

It's true. The room is being pulled and stretched so far that it loses it's color and brightness. It grows dark until we swim in a pitch blackness. The walls go, the floor goes, the chair you're sitting on goes. It looks like you're falling into a void. Even the people go. The jurors are there one moment, and then blip; they are gone. A hair of a second later, there's a pop, and the world rushes back at you like a rubberband being snapped. You want to fall over to avoid being hit by it, but you can't and you won't be hit. Because, now, you're on the mind plane.

There are no walls here. No chairs. Just miles and miles of desert until dunes and plateaus in the distance. I've never been there. I'm too afraid to go. I don't like coming to this place at all. It's part of the reason I avoid meaningful relationships. I don't always mean to slip into the mind plane with people, but it's hard not to when the stakes get high. Do you really love me? Can I really trust you? (I realize the irony of that last question.) So I avoid them.

Once, when I was two, I accidentally took my parents to the mind plane. Just before the trip, Mom was giving me a bath. Dad walked in and spotted mom in her swimsuit (she wore it because I was a splasher), and the look in his eye was so curious, so much like burning fire, that I accidentally took us all to the mind plane. I saw what Dad wanted to do to Mom here, and she saw it, and wanted him to do that to her too. The fire spread to her eyes and scared me. I pulled us all out, and I wanted nothing to do with either of them, not for a while after. And, on some level, they felt the same way about me. That's hard on a two year old.

Pop! The jurors rush back into view around me. We stand in a circle, even though we were sitting around a table just a moment before. In the middle of the circle is someone else, not from the jury—the defendant.

He looks so real, even though he's just a memory.

His lawyer just asked him a question, "Mr. Camry, what were you doing on July 17, 2020, at 7:09PM, the time of your wife's murder?"

There were no tears in Mr. Camry's eyes. His irises almost looked black, darker than the spiderweb tatoo on his neck and the graying hair on his buzzed head. He stared down at his hands.

"I-I—" he began. "I was in the home office."

"And where is the office?" the disembodied voice continued.

"It's down the hall, by the bathroom."

The voice continued, "What were you doing in the office that made it so you couldn't hear the intruder come into the house, couldn't hear your wife's screams and cries for help—cries the neighbors heard two houses away?"

Now the tears came. "I-I was playing video games."

"You were playing video games. Did you have headphones on?"

"Yes."

"What kind?"

"Sony active-noise cancelling headphones."

"Sony active-noise cancelling headphones, which we've proven earlier are effective enough to cancel out the noise of a combustion engine train three houses away. Now, Mr. Camry, where were you at 10:14PM, three hours after your wife's murder?"

"Playing video games."

"You were still playing video games. Had you taken a break from gaming anytime between seven o'clock that and 10:14 that night?"

"No."

"And when the police arrived at 10:15PM, where did they find you?"

"Playing video games."

"Could you be specific about how you discovered the police were in your house?"

"I felt a hand grab me by the shoulder right here." The defendant grabbed his own collar bone. "It yanked me backward and I fell back and then there were three of them on top of me."

"You didn't hear their sirens? You didn't hear them knock the door down? You didn't hear them come up the stairs or enter the room behind you?"

"No."

"So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury," the invisible voice turned toward us and grew closer. "What's more likely: an angry husband rapes his wife for interrupting his gaming session, kills her, and then goes back to playing video games, leaving her body in bed to be found by cops hours later; or, an intruder breaks in, rapes and kills Mrs. Camry while her husband is just down the hall, but he can't hear her cries because he is wearing noise cancelling headphones that do what they were made to do?"

At that moment, Mr. Camry put his head in his hands and showed us his graying hair. It looked much grayer than two days before when the trial began. He seemed to be giving up, and his body was leading the way.

So I dove into his mind.

Since this is a memory, there's no nightmarish stretching and pulling this time. Instead, Mr. Camry lifts his face from his hands and looks directly at each of us, really looks at us, for the first time since the trial began.

The fat lady gasps. I don't blame her. I did earlier that morning when I saw this memory. But I didn't know he was innocent then either. Plus, it's extremely uncomfortable when someone locks eyes with you on the mind plane. People are much more emotional than they let on in real life. On the mind plane, their masks come off. It's like looking into a skeleton's eye sockets and knowing something inside is looking back.

Mr. Camry's eyes are blood shot and streaming tears. His nose slobbers. He looks like a very sick alien, because of his wide-set eyes and heart-shaped face. Worse, we hear his voice loud and clear even though his mouth doesn't move.

"I know you think I'm guilty," he says. "I don't deserve to live. Not after what I let happen to Mindy. Not after how I treated her." (They fought a lot, that very night about video games, according to the neighbors.)

"But I hope you find her killer, cuz he doesn't deserve to be free. Condemn me, but get him too."

He lowers his head again. The memory of what I saw in the courtroom ends.

I look around at the jurors standing in the circle. Most of them stare at the defendant. Some of them stare at me. But my work is done so I look to our friendly, neighborhood anchorman and foreman.

His eyes are trained on the defendant. There's fire in them. He looks hungry—no—he looks ravenous. His mask is gone and he's revealing a secret to me, to all of us.

"I want you to die, Mr. Camry," he says in a voice much quieter and more intimate than the one he uses on T.V., like he's telling Mr. Camry a lover's secret. "I want to convict you so badly, I want to scream 'guilty!' But I can't look overeager to all these people around me. I have to be cool. I'll have to be cool when I ask my boss to let me cover your execution. It's research, I'll tell him, part of a story about the hubris of the death penalty. About how our liberal state decries the killing of citizens by the police in the streets, but then votes to let them do it legally in prison. Then, I'll get a press pass and I'll get to watch you die by injection. It'll be like watching someone overdose on heroin. What a rush! And then, I'll get to watch many more die in the name of the story. Just thinking about it feels amazing and powerful. But, first, I'll get to see your face when we announce your guilty verdict. And that—that's going to be delicious."

I pull us out of the vision. The deliberation room snaps back into place around us.

I stare at Dick Butler. He stares back at me. I hyperventilate, and my coat rubs at my neck, which is hot now, not cold.

"He's a murderer," the old lady says. She stabs a bony finger at Dick. "He's the one we should be convicting."

Dick looks at her. "What are you talking about? Are you okay, ma'am?" he says in his customary calm baritone.

Malfoy shrinks in his chair and scoots backward.

"Yeah," the male comedian says. "That guy confessed it all! He wanted to see all those people die!"

"I saw that too!" the fat lady says. "He looked like...like he wanted to eat the poor man!"

Dick looks around the room, blinking innocently. And then he looks at me, and I don't have to dive into his mind to know what he's thinking. His mask is good, but his eyes betray him. He wants my life. He wants to wring his fingers around it until it oozes out. He's afraid. He's no longer the smooth talking, calculating version version of himself. And now, his subtle comments earlier made so much sense. He had tried earlier to seem like a reasonable, unbiased party, even disagreeing with someone who thought Mr. Camry was guilty if their opinion was based on a feeling or prejudice. At the same time, he never failed to agree to someone who presented evidence that pointed to Mr. Camry's guilt. This whole time, he'd been steering us all carefully, gently toward that guilty verdict, like a captain of a sailboat on a glass sea. He'd even given up the wheel for a moment to the last holdout—me—the one juror unconvinced of Mr. Camry's guilt. It was all part of a ruse to appear fairminded and just. But didn't he only hand it over when I said I'd vote guilty if the rest of the room didn't experience anything psychic? Of course. He didn't believe in the mind plane. If he had, he'd never have allowed us to go there, because he has a very dark secret to hide.

But he did let us go there. And now, I need to make sure he doesn't take back the wheel.

"Focus!" I say, clearing my throat. "We are hear for one purpose: to determine if Mr. Camry is innocent or guilty."

All eyes find me.

"But what about Dick?" says the male comedian. "He wanted to—"

"Mr. Camry is on trial," I say. "No one else, no matter what you think you saw."

"She's right," says Malfoy. He rubs his neck, which has pinkened like his cheeks and forehead as if he's sprouted a fever. "We aren't here to accuse anyone else of anything, so let's just get this done and go home so we can forget the whole thing."

Dick's eyes soften, they are no longer glinting, black blades. He glances around the room and rolls back his shoulders. He rests his hands on the table, and the veins stick out like ropes under his skin. Everyone else, as if afraid to touch the same surface, removes their hands from the table, but he doesn't seem to notice.

"Well, Mr. Butler," I say to Dick. "What do you say? Shall we vote on the verdict for Mr. Camry?"

Dick scans the room, reading. He takes his time, and suddenly I'm cold again.

"That's what we are here for," he finally says. A shiver shakes out of me as his eyes crawl over me. "Since you have enlightened us all with your...gift, number Twelve, I can no longer in good conscience vote...guilty." He spits the word out like horrible-tasting medicine. "We must not judge Mr. Camry for sins he has not actually committed."

I nod my head. "We all clearly saw the desires of his heart. I also vote not guilty."

Dick smiles and nods at me. Then, he turns to quietest juror of all at his right, Eight.

"Not guilty," the tiny woman croaks.

"Not guilty," says the fat woman.

All around the circle, everyone declares their vote. It's unanimous.

Dick says, "Great job, people!" and leads us out of the room.

The male comedian pulls me aside just outside the deliberation room. The old lady stands with him.

"We can't just let him get away!" the comedian whispers. "Dick's more a murderer than O.J. Simpson."

I watch Dick walks down the linoleum-tiled hall ahead, to be sure he doesn't turn around to see us whispering. I'm about to open my mouth to speak when the old lady butts in.

"Dick didn't see what we saw," she said. "Shoot, I'm not quite sure what I saw myself, except it's hard to deny."

"So?" the comedian said. "We saw what we saw."

The old lady ringed her gnarled hands in front of her and stared down the hall. "We all made it sound like we knew Dick was a murderer in there. Maybe he thinks we saw something in the future, or, heaven forbid, the past." The old lady shivered. "Maybe he thinks we saw him commit a murder. And maybe that's enough to stop him from doing something horrible from here on, because everytime he'll think of us and wonder if we'll turn him in."

I hadn't thought of that at all. The old woman, whose eyes are so light gray I wonder how well she can actually see, had seen something in Dick's fear I hadn't. She might even be right about it. Dick's mask was so different to what was underneath that there was a good chance he didn't see what we saw in the mind plane.

"She's right," I say, motioning for us to get moving down the hall so we didn't lag suspiciously far behind. "I think he's too afraid of us now to do anything really bad."

"You saw how evil he is. We can't just do nothing!" says the comedian.

"We won't," I say. "I see more than desire in the mind plane. I can see the future." I put a hand on the comedian's shoulder. "I'll keep tabs on Mr. Butler."

The comedian exhales and nods. Color returns to his pale face. "Thank you," he says.

"Yes, thank you," says the old woman, touching my elbow affectionately. "You're an angel."

I smile at her. Then, we walk the rest of the hall to the courtroom in silence. The comedian even takes the old woman's arm in his and escorts her there. They are calm again, more at ease, probably because I promised, to keep them safe.

But I lied. I can't see the future. I can only see the desires of one's heart. That's just the way it works. Of course, I won't tell them that. Right now, we need to focus and save an innocent man's life, not be distracted by fear. If one of us brings up a vision, Dick's murderous intentions, or, God forbid, the mind plane, we'll lose all credibility as a jury and earn a mistrial. Then Mr. Camry is at the mercy of the next jury, and who knows what they'll decide. If they're like us, it won't be good.

Besides, Dick isn't guilty of murder. Not yet. And so, we can only hope our worst fears (and wishes, if you're Dick) never come true.

Still, after the court lets us go today, I'm not going to walk to my car in the parking lot alone. Just in case Dick's around.