You enter quietly. The bench is empty. Someone has left a half-finished cup of tea on the rail of the witness stand. You may sit anywhere. Nobody will tell you where.

A ceiling fan turns slowly. There is a sound, almost — the low hum of an analog monitor warming itself toward attention. The room is honeyed, the wood is worn, the brass is dull where hands have rubbed it. We are here to HEAR, to WEIGH, and at last to RULE.

The clerk strikes a small bell. Nothing arrives.

Anyone may be heard who has stood long enough at the rail. The witness, of course; but also the empty chair, also the dust on the bookcase, also the pause between two questions. Silence has standing here. It has always had standing.

"I came in by the side door. I did not see who let me in. I waited until somebody read my name from a list, and the name they read was almost mine."

In this hearing the TRUTH is admitted as evidence even when it cannot stand. We will not ask it to swear. We will only ask it to remain in the room.

What is weighed today is not a person. It is a habit: the habit of speaking quickly when speaking slowly was asked of us. The habit of mistaking confidence for accuracy. The habit of the room itself, which has heard so many cases that it has begun to anticipate them.

On the left pan: every objection raised in good faith. On the right pan: every objection raised because it was the third Tuesday of the month and someone had a flight to catch. The pans are not level. They have not been level since the building settled, sometime around 1958.

"I, having no better word for what I saw, will tell you what I saw. I will tell you also where my eyes failed me. I will not pretend to a memory I do not have. I will speak in the order of remembering, not the order of events."

The clerk does not write this down. The clerk has stopped writing things down, sometime around the third witness, because the typebar caught and nobody has fixed it since the TRUTH was last in season.

Exhibit A is a photograph that is not in the file. Exhibit B is a letter the writer never sent. Exhibit C is a sound that everyone heard but no one was prepared to describe. Exhibit D is missing. The court does not yet know whether it was misfiled or whether it never existed.

On what grounds. On what grounds. Speak. The court is required to HEAR you. The court has been required to hear many things, and has, in its way, heard most of them. Speak.

The grounds are not legal. The grounds are not procedural. The grounds are: this has gone on long enough. That is a ground the court recognizes, off the record.

The court, having heard everything that could be heard, and a great deal that could not, finds as follows. It finds that the question was not the question. It finds that the answer was complete only insofar as it admitted its own incompleteness. It finds, finally, that the RULE of this hearing is the rule of careful attention.

"Let it be entered into the record that the record is, by its nature, partial."

What remains unresolved is everything that was not asked. What remains unresolved is the question of who left the cup of tea on the witness stand. What remains unresolved is the half-second of silence after the last gavel — whether it was an answer, or merely the room's settling.

The court does not pretend to TRUTH here. It pretends only to listening. The two are sometimes the same. The two are usually not.