The Empty Chair

"Arthur Penhaligon," the clerk said, his voice flat and devoid of inflection. I remained still, waiting for the other man in the room to answer, assuming there was a mistake or a shared name in the pool of candidates. A hand went up in the front row of the jury box, the first seat on the left. The movement was precise and economical, the fingers long and the wrist visible where the cuff of a white dress shirt had pulled back slightly. The man turned his head a few degrees to the left, revealing a profile that matched the one I saw in the mirror every morning: the straight nose that had been broken once in childhood and healed crookedly, the slight asymmetry of the ears, the thin lips that tended to press together in thought. He wore a navy blue suit of heavy wool, identical to the one I had purchased three years ago from a department store downtown. The fabric pooled over his shoes exactly as my own pooled over mine. He did not look at me. He looked straight ahead at the judge's empty bench.

"Arthur Penhaligon," the clerk called again, moving to the next line on his paper. A second hand went up, this time from the third seat. This man wore the same navy suit, the same white shirt, the same dark tie with its pattern of small geometric diamonds. He had the same posture, the same set of the shoulders, the same way his hair fell over his forehead. When he turned his head, the light caught a small, flat mole just beneath his jawline. My left hand rose of its own accord to my own face, and my fingers found the raised skin of the mole. The clerk did not look up. He continued down the list, and each time he spoke the name Arthur Penhaligon, a different hand rose from a different seat, until every person in the box had acknowledged the summons. There were thirteen of them. Thirteen men who looked like me, dressed like me, sat in the box, filling it to capacity. The clerk placed the paper on the desk and smoothed it with his palm, the sound a dry hiss against the wood. I gripped the handle of my briefcase tighter, the leather digging into my palm. The door behind me remained shut.

I walked down the center aisle of the gallery, my footsteps muffled by the carpet. I needed to speak to the clerk, to inform him of the duplication in the roster, a clerical error that was significant but surely easily corrected. As I moved closer to the front of the room, the smell of the place changed subtly, shifting from the generic scent of wood polish and old paper to something more specific, triggering a memory of the hallway outside my apartment. It was the smell of lemon furniture wax mixed with the faint, metallic odor of radiator steam and the lingering scent of boiled cabbage from a neighbor's dinner. The smell belonged to a private residence. It had no business in a public building. I stopped at the railing that separated the gallery from the well of the court. The clerk did not look up. He was busy arranging the papers on his desk, lining up the edges until they were perfectly flush with the corners of the blotter.

"Excuse me," I said. My voice sounded lower than usual, as if the air in the room were too dense to carry the sound waves efficiently. The clerk paused, his hand hovering over a stapler. He turned his head slowly, his neck making a faint cracking sound. He regarded my coat, then my shoes, then my face, with eyes that were pale and watery, lacking any recognition of my presence as a distinct entity.

"Please take your seat, Mr. Penhaligon," he said. "We are about to begin."

"I am already seated," I said, and I gestured toward the jury box where the thirteen men sat in absolute stillness. The clerk followed my finger with his gaze. He frowned, a small pursing of the lips that suggested a minor annoyance rather than confusion.

"The jury is impaneled," the clerk said. "Please take your seat in the gallery."

I stood my ground, the silence of the room pressing against my eardrums. The men in the box were all looking forward. None of them blinked. I studied the man in the third seat, the one with the mole, waiting for the twitch in the left eyelid that often occurred when I was tired or stressed. A minute passed. Then the corner of his left eye contracted, the skin fluttering rapidly for a fraction of a second before settling. At the exact same moment, my own left eyelid twitched, the muscle spasm in my face synchronized perfectly with his. The man in the first seat brought his right hand to his mouth and coughed, a short, dry sound. A tickle rose in my own throat, the sharp urge to cough building in my chest, which I suppressed by swallowing hard. The clerk turned back to his papers. The smell of my hallway grew stronger, filling the room with the scent of my private life.

I walked to the first row of the gallery, the floorboards creaking under my weight, and sat in the chair directly behind the railing. I placed my briefcase on the floor beside me and took out a small notepad and a pen. If the court would not hear my objection, I would do what I had done for eleven years: I would record what I saw, and I would find the discrepancy, because there was always a discrepancy, and a discrepancy was a thing you could take to a supervisor. The men in the box, I told myself, were a clerical error with faces; I would write them down and let someone with a higher pay grade sort them out. I clicked my pen and wrote the date at the top of the page. October 14th. Then I began to catalogue them.

I numbered them in the order of their seats. One: the man in the first seat, the one who coughed. Two: the man beside him, who held his hands flat on his knees with the fingers pressed together, the way I did when I was waiting for the printer to finish. Three: the one with the mole, whose left eyelid twitched when he was tired. Four: the one whose left loafer bore a long, pale scuff along the outer edge of the sole — the same scuff on my own left shoe, acquired three years ago this spring when I caught the heel on the brass kickplate of the elevator at the registrar's office. Five: the one with the chickenpox scar below the hairline on the back of his neck; I carried the identical indentation, and I had not thought of it in years. Six: the one who sat with his right ankle crossed over his left, though the rest of them sat square. Seven: the one who wore a watch on his left wrist, the same make and model as mine, with the second hand stopped at the number four; my watch had run out in the autumn and I had never had it repaired, because a stopped watch still told the time twice a day, and I had found a grim satisfaction in that. Eight: the one who was left-handed, holding his hands loosely clasped with the left thumb on top, a detail I would have missed if I had not spent years watching people sign documents. Nine: the one with the pale band of skin on his ring finger, the ghost of a ring he had never worn; I owned the same pale band, a product of nothing but the habit of never wearing jewelry. Ten, eleven, twelve: the ones who sat with their chins at slightly different angles, as if the machinery that had made them had tired of precision. Thirteen: the last seat, the one the court reserved for an alternate, and the man there sat with his shoulders pressed into the back of the chair and his hands flat on his thighs, patient as a man at a bus stop.

I wrote all of this down, quickly, in my small, even hand. It was a good catalogue, I thought; it would make a fine report. Every man in the box shared my face, my suit, my haircut, but the details that separated them were the details of a single life lived over and over — the scuffs, the scars, the broken things that had never been repaired. I told myself this was the work of a costume department or a mannequin manufacturer. The county could not have assembled thirteen copies of one citizen by accident. And yet the alternative — that it had done so on purpose — was a thought I set aside, because I had spent my life learning to set aside thoughts that did not belong in a report.

The scratching began while I was writing the description of seat four. It was the sound of a pen moving across paper, a rhythm that matched my own hand exactly — the same speed, the same hesitation at the end of a line, the same slight drag where my wrist turned to begin a new row. The men in the box were sitting with their hands in their laps. None of them held a pen. I stopped writing. The scratching stopped. I wrote a single word — discrepancy — and the sound returned, louder this time, a ballpoint dragging across cheap paper fiber. I wrote faster. It kept pace. I wrote my own name, Arthur Penhaligon, in block capitals, and the scratching in the room kept pace with every stroke, as if the wood of the jury box were learning my handwriting. I closed my notepad. The sound ceased instantly, cut off as if a hand had been laid over it.

I tested it again, twice more, the way I tested a filing cabinet drawer that would not close. I wrote the date. The scratching came. I wrote a word I had no intention of keeping — cabbage — and the scratching came, obedient, unhurried. I held my pen above the page and thought of a word without writing it. The room stayed silent. The sound answered only when my hand moved; thought alone was never enough to summon it. I set the pen down, put the notepad in my lap, and let my eyes run over the box again, because the catalogue was not finished, and a finished catalogue was the only armor I had ever known how to wear.

The better part of an hour had passed, and the smell of my hallway had not faded. If anything it had thickened, settling into the weave of my coat. I identified it the way I identified the contents of an old file: the lemon wax, the radiator steam, the boiled cabbage, and beneath those a fourth note I had not placed at first — the particular papery smell of the records room, the lignin of a hundred thousand old certificates, the dust that settles on the dead between the covers of a manila folder. That smell should not have been in a courthouse. It should not have been anywhere outside the basement of the registrar. And yet here it was, arranged around me like furniture, and I understood that I had been smelling my own hallway and my own office and my own private history all at once, as if the room were a drawer and I were the file inside it.

The door at the side of the room, behind the judge's bench, opened. A bailiff entered, a tall man with a uniform that looked too large for his frame. He walked to the center of the room and stood by the flag stand. He spared the jury box no particular attention. He turned his face to the door he had just entered.

"All rise," the bailiff said. His voice was a monotone drone.

I stood, and the thirteen men in the box stood with me, moving as one, a wave of charcoal wool and synchronized motion. The judge entered. He was an older man with heavy jowls and silver hair, wearing a long black robe that fell to the floor and swallowed the shape of him. He moved with a slow, deliberate gait, his robes swishing against the carpet, and he ascended the steps to the bench and sat. He arranged his papers, looking down at them through spectacles that sat low on his nose. He did not look up at the gallery. He did not look at the jury. He looked only at the pages on his desk, and the silence returned, denser than before. I sat. The jury sat.

The judge picked up his gavel. He held it in his right hand, weighing it, and tapped it lightly against the sound block on his desk.

Thump.

The sound was dull and muted, the wood giving a wet, heavy thud like a raw piece of meat dropped onto a counter. A pressure settled in my chest, a rhythmic thud that matched the sound of the gavel. My heart was beating in time with the judge's strikes. Thump. My heart contracted. Thump. My pulse hammered in my ears. The judge struck the block again, harder this time.

Thump.

I gasped for air, my lungs tight, as if the room had been vacuum-sealed. The judge looked up, over the top of his spectacles. His eyes were black, without whites, like pits of tar. He let his gaze move across the jury box, across the empty seat at the defendant's table, and then it arrived at me in the gallery. He did not speak. He simply pointed the gavel toward the defendant's table.

A door opened on the opposite side of the room, and a man walked in. He was dressed in an orange jumpsuit, his hands shackled at the waist. His head was shaved. He walked to the table and sat, and the bailiff moved to unlock the shackles. As the prisoner raised his hands, the cuffs of the jumpsuit rode up, revealing the skin of his wrists. The skin was pale, the knuckles slightly swollen. On the wrist of his right hand was a small, jagged scar, a mark from a bicycle chain accident when I was twelve years old. Under my coat sleeve, I could feel the scar tissue on my own right wrist pulling tight as I flexed my hand. The prisoner sat hunched over the table. He was wearing my clothes underneath the jumpsuit — the collar of a white dress shirt poking out at the neck, the tip of a navy blue tie tied in a Windsor knot, the way I tied it every morning. The jumpsuit was zipped only halfway down, revealing the charcoal wool of my suit coat. The prisoner lifted his head and looked at me. He had my face. He had my eyes. He looked terrified. I felt nothing — a calm, observational detachment, as if I were watching a nature documentary about a prey animal realizing it was being hunted.

When the judge spoke, the sound rose out of the paneling and the ceiling and the hollow of the jury box at once, assembled from many voices — men and women, young and old, each lending a syllable — so that the words arrived layered, like pages of a file pressed together and read as one.

"Will the jury now stand and be sworn," the judge said.

The thirteen men stood. I stood with them, because the voice had arranged the room without asking. The bailiff produced a card and read from it, the words of the oath, and the thirteen men repeated them in unison, in my voice, at my exact pitch and timbre, flattened by the acoustics of the room.

"Do you solemnly swear that you will well and truly try the matter before this court and render a true verdict according to the law and the evidence, so help you God?"

"I do," they said. It was my voice. The word came out of thirteen mouths at once and settled into my chest like a stone I had swallowed. I opened my mouth to correct them — to say that I had not been sworn, that I was in the gallery, that I was Arthur Penhaligon and there had been some terrible mistake — but the judge had already turned to the clerk.

"Is the jury ready?" the judge asked.

The thirteen men turned their heads in unison to face the bench. "We are ready," they said, again in my voice. The clerk was bent over a yellow legal pad, writing quickly, and I realized after a moment that the writing was my handwriting — the same small, even hand I used for the ledgers, the same way of pressing down on the downstrokes. He was writing with my pen. I reached into my pocket and found it empty. The defendant had begun to tremble. He pressed his palm flat on the table, and his fingernail began to scratch at the wood, a grating sound that filled the room, louder than the pen had been, desperate. I felt the friction of the table under my own fingernail, though my hand rested on my knee. I could feel the grain of the wood, the resistance of the varnish, the splinter catching under the nail. My hand stayed still. The defendant's hand kept moving. The nail bent back and snapped. A sharp pain shot through my left index finger, and I brought my hand to my face. My fingernail was broken. A bead of bright red blood welled up from the quick. The defendant pulled his hand back. He was bleeding. I was bleeding.

The judge banged the gavel again. Thump. My heart skipped a beat, and the pain in my finger was a bright, throbbing pulse that matched the rhythm of the strike.

"Order," the judge said. "We will hear the charges."

The clerk stood and read from a single sheet of paper. "The People versus Arthur Penhaligon. Count one: Existence without warrant. Count two: Failure to integrate. Count three: Unnecessary deviation."

The defendant shook his head. He looked at me, his eyes wide, pleading. His lips formed a word. Help. I felt the muscles in my own face twitch, mimicking the shape of the word. I wanted to stand up and shout that this was a mistake, that I was Arthur Penhaligon, that he was a fabrication, a copy. But my legs felt heavy, rooted to the floor. The floor seemed to be softening, turning to mud under my shoes. The carpet was rippling slightly, like the surface of a lake in a breeze. The smell of my hallway was overpowering now, lemon wax and radiator steam and something else, something sweet and cloying, like rotting fruit. The thirteen men were no longer looking at the judge. They were all looking at me. They were smiling — the small, tight smile I used when speaking to a difficult patron at the archives. The thirteen smiles were cataloguing me. I understood that the room had wanted only the shape of me in a chair, and that the shape had been delivered. The catalogue was complete, and it ended with me.

The judge pointed the gavel at me. "Call the next witness," he said. The bailiff walked to the door at the back of the room and opened it. There was no one there. He looked into the hallway, then turned back to the judge. "The witness is present, Your Honor," the bailiff said. "He is approaching the bench."

I scanned the room again. There was no one else. The gallery held only me. The defendant's table was occupied by the man in the jumpsuit. The jury box was full. The clerk was at his desk. The bailiff was by the door.

The bailiff walked toward me. He stopped in front of my row and gestured to the aisle. "Mr. Penhaligon," he said. "You are excused from the gallery. Please take your place in the box."

I stood up. My legs were stiff, reluctant to obey the command. The jury box had thirteen seats, and all of them were occupied. "There are no seats," I said. My voice sounded distant, as if it were coming from a radio in another room.

"A seat has been vacated," the bailiff said.

I counted them again, the way I had counted them an hour ago. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. Thirteen men. But the man in the first seat was changing. His outline had become indistinct, like a pencil sketch erased too many times. The dark wool of his suit was turning translucent gray, and I could see the wood of the chair back through his chest. The seat was taking him in. The wood of the armrest grew over his hand, swallowing his fingers, and he let it happen, a look of mild boredom on his face, the way I looked when a patron asked me to find a document that had never existed. As he vanished, the seat became empty. The mahogany paneling gaped where he had been. The bailiff gestured toward it. "Please."

I walked up the aisle. I passed the clerk's desk. He was bent over a yellow legal pad, writing in my handwriting. I watched him finish a line. Case 449-B. Integration successful. He was writing with my pen. I reached into my pocket and found it empty. I passed the defendant's table. The man in the jumpsuit was gone; the orange fabric had collapsed in on itself like a deflated balloon, and the shackles lay on the table, clicking against the wood. I climbed the steps to the jury box and walked past the rows of men who looked like me. They did not look at me. They looked straight ahead at the judge. I reached the empty seat at the end of the front row.

It was a recess in the wall, lined with velvet the color of dried blood. It was exactly the shape of my body — indentations for my shoulders, my hips, my legs — like a mold taken from a plaster cast. A strange pull drew me toward the hollow space, a magnetic attraction I could feel in my teeth. The smell of lemon wax was so strong I could taste it on my tongue. I turned to look back at the gallery. The room was stretching, the distance to the door increasing with every second. The lights were dimming, narrowing down to a single spotlight focused on the judge's bench. The judge raised the gavel.

"The court finds the defendant redundant," the judge said.

I stepped into the recess. The velvet was soft against my back. It fit perfectly. I leaned my head back, and the wood of the paneling felt warm, like living skin. I tried to move my arms, but they were pinned to my sides by the contours of the mold. I tried to lift my foot, but it was wedged into the shape of the shoe. A pressure settled over me, firm, like a hand pressing against every inch of my body at once, and it increased. The velvet took my back as if it had been waiting years for the exact weight of me. I could feel the threads of my wool coat interweaving with the fabric of the seat, the leather of my shoes bonding with the floor of the box. The chair had finished with sitting. It had a purpose for me now, and the purpose was to hold me.

I watched the judge. He lowered the gavel and placed it carefully on the desk. He stood and walked around the bench, coming toward the jury box, and stopped in front of me. He reached out and touched the wood where my face was. His finger pressed the wood, and I felt the pressure somewhere behind my eyes, transmitted through a layer of mahogany. He smiled. He turned and walked back to his bench. "Court is adjourned," he said.

The thirteen men in the jury box stood and walked out, single file. As they passed me, I saw that they were no longer identical. The first man had red hair. The second was old and stooped. The third was a woman. They were strangers, citizens, and they had worn my shape to fill a quota; now that the duty was done, they were allowed to be themselves again. They left the room. The clerk packed up his bag. The bailiff turned off the lights. The room plunged into darkness, save for the dim light seeping under the door from the hallway. I could not move. I could not speak. The box held me, fixed in place, the way a file drawer holds a file, waiting for the next name to be called. I could feel the vibration of the building, the hum of the HVAC system, the footsteps of people walking in the hallway above.

A janitor pushed the door open. He flipped a switch, and the overhead lights came on. He wheeled a cart into the center of the room, then stopped and looked at the jury box. His eyes passed over the wood of the box without stopping. He found a scuff mark on the mahogany, where the armrest met the backrest, and he went to fetch his rag. He took a rag and a bottle of cleaner from his cart, climbed the steps to the jury box, and stood over me. He sprayed the lemon-scented cleaner onto the rag, and the smell filled my nose, my lungs, my existence. He began to wipe the armrest where my hand used to be, rubbing hard, buffing the wood, erasing the last trace of my presence. He moved to the backrest, rubbing in slow, circular motions. I felt the friction wearing me away, layer by layer. Polish, then preservation, then the long quiet of a drawer. Whatever I had been was being filed. The janitor stepped back and admired his work. The wood shone. It was smooth. It was flawless. It was empty. He turned and walked away, pushing his cart out the door. The door clicked shut. The latch engaged. The silence returned, absolute and eternal.

Then the door opened again.

The light was the same flat municipal light; the air still held its sixty-eight degrees. The bailiff walked in, crossed the room with his unhurried tread, and came to the end of the front row, where the recess in the paneling held the shape of a man. He reached out and touched my shoulder.

I did not feel it.

His fingers pressed into the place where my shoulder should have been and found the polished oak of the jury box, smooth from a hundred wipes of a lemon-scented rag. My hand was already resting on that oak, pale and familiar, the nail of my left index finger still broken from the morning. And I was sitting in the far seat, the last seat of the back row, my hands flat on my thighs, and across the room I could see myself standing up from the recess where the bailiff's hand still rested on the polished wood. I watched myself button my coat — one button, the way I had buttoned it every morning for years — and walk down the steps of the box and up the center aisle toward the door at the back of the room. The door was behind me now. It swung open on well-oiled hinges, and I watched myself step across the threshold and close the door behind me, sealing out the hallway. The latch engaged.

The silence returned, and the room held its sixty-eight degrees, and I understood that the man I had watched leave was already walking at a measured pace down a linoleum hallway, his heels clicking in time with a stopped watch, and that a clerk somewhere was clearing his throat, beginning to read a name from a fresh sheet of paper. The name would be mine. And I would wait in the far seat, my hand on the polished oak, patient as a man at a bus stop, for the next trial to begin.