over the course of the trial, whenever they found themselves in the jury room - first during the little breaks peppered throughout the proceedings, then throughout whole days, while their deliberation was underway - jackson found himself drifting over to the windows, which cast three rectangular swaths of dusty july light onto the carpet and the conference tables. the room was on the 23rd floor of the federal court building at 500 pearl street, and the view from there made manhattan look like a carefully-detailed model. the island has two major clusters of skyscrapers - one downtown, emanating around wall street and terminating roughly on chambers street and the courts area, and the other in midtown, beginning more or less at 34th street and ending near 57th street. this building on pearl street was at the north end of the downtown cluster, with a veritable flatland of apartment and office buildings which all capped out at around 20 stories lying between it and the beginning of the midtown cluster.
somehow, he had never quite noticed this before, how the skyscrapers in new york came like everything else, in waves. now, looking out from this jury room, it was like he had come over the crest of the first wave, and was staring at the second wave, comprised of the empire state, metlife, citibank, and chrysler buildings, rising some two miles ahead in the distance.
each day that the trial bored on, it would seem to him that the midtown wave was getting closer and closer to his vantage point on peal street. it was as if manhattan was a pin art toy - like you might see on a coffee table, or some executive's desk - with the buildings serving as the pins, and the giant hand of god lurking beneath the pavement, dragging the waves of buildings ever forward. with the midtown wave came the trough behind it: the decidedly-residential upper east and west sides, crawling with bugaboo strollers and middle-aged jowls and facelifts.
then, one day after he came back from lunch, without warning, jackson realized that what he had been looking at that whole time, the thing that brought him the sinking sense of imminence he had been experiencing, was not the topography of the city but that of his own life. soon he would be thirty.
behind him in the jury room, people were sitting at the conference tables, talking about one of the counts. a young hispanic guy said that the defendant was doubtlessly guilty on this charge, but he was uneasy about rewarding the fbi's shoddy policework. an older woman from somewhere in the caribbean said that she didnt want to give the fbi approbation, but without a reasonable doubt, their hands were tied.
he barely heard any of it. because at that moment, he saw the two visions at once; the one he had been watching, and the one he was just now feeling were transposed on one another. he saw his entire life rising, like a giant swell in front of him, and it was rushing towards him at breakneck speed. an apartment building in the far distance was approaching ever nearer. soon it would be close enough that he could count its stories. he could see its individual windows, and then theyd be close enough that he could see past their glare, into the apartments. soon hed be able to see inside the one with the master bedroom and the sub-zero refridgerator and the tv and the coffee table and the nursery and the bassinet and the two full baths, it would be right on top of him. and then it would get infinitesimally close and then at the last possible moment it would snap and suddenly it would all come crashing down on top of him, and when he finally swam up and reached the surface and the light, it would all already be behind him and hed be looking even further uptown, into harlem, whose heyday was far in the past and where things were already beginning to rot.
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