“Hello?” says the young woman on the stage. She has sharp small features, black horn-rim glasses, and pigtails. Taped in front of her is an eight-by-eleven piece of paper reading CHAIR, a slap-dash designation of authority. “Are we okay to proceed?” The crowd, those paying attention, half maybe, make the under-arrest gesture I spotted earlier in the library, hands in the air with palms up. I take this to be some understood signal of assent, because the young woman nods, goes, “Great.”
The defendant cranes his neck around nervously, scanning the crowd. I whisper to my seatmate, “Who is he?”
“What?” he says, looking up blankly. It’s an iPhone he’s got in his lap, and even as we talk he runs his thumb over the blank dead screen, absently, over and over.
“The defendant?”
The guy scrunches his nose, and I realize too late the word defendant might be considered significantly rearview. “What did he do?”
“I don’t know, actually,” he says, peering down at the shirtless shivering man at the front of the room as if for the first time. “Something, I guess. The next agenda item after this is the nudity policy. Pretty sure that’s why it’s so packed today.”
“Oh,” I say, and the guy turns back to his iPhone.
“So, okay,” says the chair, addressing the defendant directly. “We should start by apologizing to you, as a member of our community. We understand there was some unnecessary violence involved in your, uh, your detention.”
The prisoner mutters something I can’t hear, and the chair nods. The other judges have notebook-paper signs, too. The curly-haired one’s sign says VICE, and the pudgy-faced boy’s says VICE TO THE VICE.
“If you couldn’t hear, everyone,” says the vice, “he said it’s cool.”
Scattered laughter from the crowd.
“Oh, great,” someone yells sarcastically, and everyone turns to see who it is: a great big fat dude in overalls and a painter’s cap. “It’s cool, everyone. He’s cool. Don’t worry.”
More laughter. More people seem to be paying attention now. Someone from a distant corner, by the door, shouts “Thank God!” The couple making out a few seats up pause in their exertions for a moment, glance in the general direction of the stage, and then get back to business. During all this back and forth, I’m trying to work out a plan, trying first of all to figure out how many people are in this room: maybe a hundred rows of seats, maybe fifty to seventy-five seats per row, maybe eighty percent occupied, maybe fifty-five percent female. I have no photograph of Julia Stone, no physical description of any kind: no race or ethnicity, no distinguishing characteristics, no distinctive mode of dress. All I know is that she is a female between twenty and twenty-four years of age, and I am seated in a room with between one hundred seventy-five and two hundred people matching that description.
“Okay, so,” the chair is saying. “Theft from the community of the Free Republic is among our most serious infractions. It’s a big fucking deal. There are a lot of things we might do to handle this sort of situation. But it’s obviously important that everyone gets a chance to give their input and have their feelings on the subject heard.”
I look around the room, trying to narrow down somehow who Julia might be. If I were Brett, who here would I fall in love with? Who would I follow to doomsday? But I’m not Brett. I’ve never met him. Forty-five minutes until I’m supposed to be back at the Thompson Hall exit, collecting my dog and getting out of here.
“And—sorry, were you done?” says the vice, glancing respectfully at the chair, who nods, shrugs. “And so anyone who wants to say something is invited to do so at this time.” A handful of people are already making their way down the aisles, raising their hands to speak. The third judge, the vice to the vice, turns up his chin and watches them come. He’s quiet, watchful, little beady eyes scanning the room over and over. He has yet to speak.
There is a woman with red hair, dark red, so dark as to be almost brown. She’s three rows up from mine, across the aisle, and she seems to be taking notes or minutes on a pad of paper balanced on her bare knee. She’s wearing a very short black skirt, black boots. Brett, I think, would have found her attractive.
The first speaker to offer his input is a small man in cargo pants and a plain red T-shirt. He stands in one of the aisles and reads rapidly, almost agitatedly, from a stack of index cards. “The whole idea of theft from a communal store is itself a reflection of capitalist thinking. In other words, the crime of theft cannot and should not exist in a postcapitalist society, because property”—he leans into the word, his voice charged with disdain—“cannot and should not exist.” He flips to a new card; the vice to the vice looks irritated. “Our vigilance is required against attitudes that reflect not only explicit capitalist dogma, but vestigial reflections of same.”
“Okay, thanks,” says the chair. The little man looks up from his cards; clearly, he wasn’t finished.
“Thanks,” she says again, and someone says “Point of order” from the back—it’s the fat man in the overalls, and the chair acknowledges him with a nod. “I just want to say, in regard to what that guy just said: That’s stupid.”
The vigilant anticapitalist looks around the room, doe eyed, wounded. The chair smiles softly and nods for the next speaker. Small lines are forming in two different aisles of the auditorium. I keep my eye on the dark-haired woman three rows up. What is my move here? How long do these meetings last?
The next speaker is a woman with long matted dreadlocks, who wants to propose a complicated redemption-based system, wherein those accused of rule breaking would engage in a dialog with the community about the nature of their transgression. This idea the vice chair gets excited about, nodding vigorously as the woman speaks, his curls bouncing. It goes on like this, speaker after speaker: someone wonders if today’s proceedings might in fact inspire further infractions; a man asks politely if the public-nudity policy is still on the agenda, and the affirmative answer from the vice draws cheers; a young woman with earnest eyes and a single thick braid running down her back rises and says that she’s been carefully noting the speakers at this meeting, as well as the six previous R&R meetings, and can report that people of color are participating at a ratio of just one in twelve.
“Huh,” says the vice chair. “Maybe because radical movements have always been the province of the privileged?”
“Maybe because we’re in fucking New Hampshire,” says the class clown in the overalls.
In the laughter that follows, the woman with dark red hair looks around and sees me watching her. She does not look down: Instead she meets and holds my gaze. It occurs to me that I could pass her a note, and the idea is so absurd that I very nearly laugh out loud. Are you Julia Stone? Check this box if yes.
“Okay,” says the chair. “I think that’s enough. Just in terms of time?”
The vice looks surprised, but the vice to the vice nods. The defendant shivers, hunching forward, glancing from side to side. Male shirtlessness can in the right circumstances be powerful, leonine, but it can also make a person seem exposed and helpless, the knobs of the spine quivering and fragile like surfacing fish.