The Intern perceived that power over generations of confined men had corrupted and deformed the Lieutenant as the hardiest of trees is deformed by a pitiless wind.
Why had the Intern volunteered to try to open the damned door, when no one else had stepped forward?
No one could know: the Intern had been prodded into action because the Investigator, who was the tall white-haired gentleman with the little notebook, had cast her a significant glance a moment before.
Well, the Investigator hadn’t cast her a look she’d actually seen. She had sensed it.
Go ahead, McSwain! Step forward.
In such circumstances, in public places, it was to be their protocol: without a word the Investigator might signal an order to the Intern, who was not to question his motives.
This signal had come swiftly and deftly as a neutrino passing between them. For the two were not strangers as they appeared to be—(they’d taken care to keep a little distance from one another on the tour but they’d come to Orion in the same vehicle, driven by the Intern). But no one, even the sharp-eyed Lieutenant trained to intercept covert glances among his charges, seemed to have noticed.
“Sir, I think the door must be locked, or stuck . . .”
“One more try, fella! Then you can give up if you wish.”
In dark corduroy trousers, long-sleeved shirt and corduroy jacket, and hiking boots the size of a child’s boots, the Intern resembled a precocious sub-species of schoolboy virtually non-existent in central rural Florida. She wore glasses with round dark plastic rims. Her long-sleeved shirt was white cotton, and not entirely clean. Her face was small-boned, plain and fiercely intent. Her dark hair was razor-cut at the nape of her neck, short as a boy’s. A premature furrow wavered across her forehead and a bluish vein throbbed at her right temple.
A final try, and still the door would not budge.
“All right, then! I will open it. Excuse me.”
The Lieutenant positioned himself in front of the ancient-looking door, grasped the knob and tugged and lifted—(the Intern saw: this was the trick)—until the door swung open like a gaping mouth.
The point of the Lieutenant’s demonstration would seem to be: Death is not easily approached.
In a matter-of-fact voice, as if to suggest how effortless the task had been for him, the Lieutenant explained that, in fact, the door to the execution chamber was always kept locked—of course. “It’s opened only for occasions like this and when an execution is being prepared.”
But now, were they expected to shuffle inside? Inside and down? No one edged forward. Already the visitors could smell an overripe earthy-chemical odor wafting from the opened doorway.
“Step inside, friends! I advise you to take a deep breath beforehand.” Like a cruel impresario the Lieutenant stood beside the doorway, beckoning.
Of course, no one wanted to step forward. Especially the young female graduate students hung back, flurried and frightened as birds.
“Oh!—if people have died inside here . . .”
“Can some of us w-wait outside . . .”
The Lieutenant laughed, not unkindly. “No. No one can wait outside. The tour won’t conclude, and you won’t be released to the outside, except through the execution chamber—that is our tradition at Orion.”
Was this true? The Lieutenant rubbed his hands which were large stubby-finger hands, with a zestful air. The pebbly eyes continued to rake the faces of his captives.
“But if human beings have d-died in here—”
“Of course human beings have died in here. What would be the purpose of a taxpayer-supported execution chamber, if no one died in it?”
Several of the visitors laughed. As they’d been laughing since the start of the tour, nervously.
It seemed quite natural, the dignified Investigator was the first to enter the cave-like chamber. A tall straight-backed man, he stooped to enter. He set his foot on a grimy stone step, the first of three that descended to a grimy concrete floor as in a crude and unimproved cellar.
The Intern saw: the Investigator’s slender feet were shod in shiny-black-leather dress shoes. No one else in the tour had dressed so particularly.
Amid the civilians in the tour group this elderly white-haired gentleman had kept to himself from the start. He had resisted efforts to “befriend” him—he’d resisted the instinct, powerful in such a group as a rush of piranha after prey, to participate in the edgy banter between the Lieutenant and the others. He had not been observed to be disdainful or aloof—he’d been intent upon taking notes in his little notebook, which was not forbidden in the prison facility, like taking photographs or videotaping. (Any kind of camera equipment, however small and ordinary, was forbidden to bring into the prison.) You had the sense, seeing the Investigator scribbling into his small spiral notebook, that, if you looked over his shoulder, you’d discover he was writing in code.
The Investigator passed by the Intern without a glance. The Intern was looking not at the Investigator—she was too professional for such a slip—but toward the Investigator with the expression of a young person who both reveres and fears an elder.
Please don’t make me do anything more—sir! Not in this terrible place.
One by one the others followed the Investigator into the execution chamber. Stepping out of the overcast March morning that was yet a dull glowering-white as if in a cataclysm of the Florida sun in which only an afterglow remained, but that powerful and even blinding in contrast to the dimly fluorescent-lit interior of the execution chamber.
The Intern hung back. How the Intern would have liked to flee, back to the front gate of the prison! But the prison grounds were labyrinthine, and dangerous: no civilian was allowed to wander off from the tour group.
The Intern swallowed hard. The Intern had seemed to know, before she and the Investigator had left their vehicle in a remote corner of the visitors’ parking lot, that accompanying her employer to Orion prison was a mistake she would regret.
Beside the doorway the Lieutenant was waiting for her. With a smile to indicate that, if he didn’t keep a sharp eye, the little fella would slip away.
The Intern took a deep breath, and stepped inside. But already it was too late, the dank air of the execution chamber had entered her lungs.
“Go all the way in, please. Plenty of room. Those in front move forward, please.”
The Lieutenant spoke chidingly. The Lieutenant spoke with an air of grim jocularity. The Lieutenant assured the visitors that there was room for as many as thirty people in the cramped space.
“In recent years, with lethal injection, there are sometimes double executions. The demand for seats is doubled too, as you can imagine.”
No one was eager to move forward. The frightened young women and their professor had stopped dead in their tracks a few yards from the front of the room. Even those men who’d been bravely stoic about marching around the entirety of Cell Block C to the hoots and shouted obscenities of prisoners were balking now, pushing to the side where there were two rows of straight-backed chairs in front of a grim windowless cinder block wall.
At the center, rear of the low-ceilinged chamber was a bizarre structure: it appeared to be a diving bell, painted an incongruous robin’s-egg blue. It was octagonal in structure with several Plexiglas windows in its sides. Inside, you could see two straight-backed chairs positioned side by side.
The ceiling of the diving bell, at the apex of its curve, looked as if it could not be even six feet high.
An airtight structure, the Intern reasoned. Since gas had been a means of execution in the state of Florida until recently.
The Intern was feeling faint-headed like one who has ignored a warning, and has approached danger—but what was the warning?
She could not recall any warning.
Accompany me to the maximum-security facility at Orion. I will pay you one and a half your usual salary.
The Intern had been grateful for the Investigator’s invitation. The Intern was
in need of employment and was, at the present time, financially dependent upon the Investigator. It may have been, the Intern was emotionally dependent upon the Investigator as well.
In his grating voice the Lieutenant was chiding: “Those of you in front—please move out of the aisle. Please sit in those chairs! Those chairs are the most prized seats in the house, reserved for the family of the victim and for law enforcement officers with a particular interest in the execution.”
The members of the tour group murmured and whispered together. The witness-viewing area of the execution chamber was so small—you would always be in close proximity to the condemned man, no matter where you were seated.
Could scarcely draw a breath that wasn’t contaminated by—death.
The Lieutenant was saying, in his bullying-teasing manner, that, when a condemned individual was “obstructurous” as they were being, he was forcibly carried into the chamber.
Had the Lieutenant chuckled? No one laughed with him.
A mistake to have come here, the Intern was thinking. For—was something awaiting her, here?
At last the visitors were spread out into the room, some of them uncomfortably close to the diving bell. A few had reluctantly taken seats in the prized chairs facing the Plexiglas windows and could not help but stare inside.
The Investigator was still standing, in the aisle. The Investigator may have switched on a (miniature) recording device carried in a fountain pen, in his lapel pocket; the Investigator would want to see and record all that he could.
The Lieutenant said, gloating, with a zestful rubbing of his hands, “Now, folks, if you are settled— I will shut the door.”
Panic rippled through the low-ceilinged room! In a flock of birds such an alert would provoke all to fly away at once, flutter their wings and escape but these visitors had no wings and were trapped in a windowless cave.
Voices lifted, protesting. “Shut the door? Oh but why—”
The room was ventilated by a chill, mineral-smelling rattling overhead like the breath of a great sinuous serpent. It was not entirely subterranean but felt so. You felt the dark earth surrounding you, the gravity-tug of death and dissolution.
In his way that was part-sneering, part-sincerity—part reproach and part genuine pride—the Lieutenant was saying, to his captive audience: “The experience of our execution chamber at Orion is a closed one. Very few individuals are allowed into this place. And of these, not all leave again. You will have the wrong impression if you think that the open sky, fresh air, and a quick means of exit have anything to do with execution.”
The Lieutenant strode to the door and shut it.
THE INTERN THOUGHT Eternity has no conjunction with time. This—where we are—is but a place, and a time. It will not prevail and cannot confine me.
He’d said with a doubtful look, you will do.
He’d been sifting through applications, candidates. He had not wanted, he’d said, a merely academic assistant of whom there were dozens available, and eager to work with Professor Cornelius Hinton of the Institute for Advanced Research in Social Psychology, Criminology, and Anthropology, University of Florida at Temple Park, Florida.
PROF. CORNELIUS HINTON—this was the name on the little plaque affixed to the Investigator’s door at the Institute.
She’d assumed at the outset that yes, this was the white-haired gentleman’s name—“Hinton.” Later, she would learn that “Hinton” was one of several working-names the Investigator used when he was incognito.
Not only was the Investigator other than “Hinton” but he was older than “Hinton” whose birth date on his laminated Institute ID card was 1941.
From a remark he’d let slip, the Intern understood that the Investigator was a few years older than the fictitious Cornelius Hinton. But so youthful-looking, for a gentleman of his age, and so resembling the slightly blurred, bespectacled and bewhiskered white-haired professor in the little photo ID, who would have suspected?
She hadn’t been searching among the Investigator’s files. She would not have wished to perceive herself that way—furtive, deceitful.
In her former lifetime lost to her now as the scattered and faded remnants of a photo album tossed among anonymous trash she’d created a wickedly witty pen-and-ink drawing in the style of her obsessive master M. C. Escher depicting small humanoid figures spying on one another in a landscape of dense vertiginous symmetries like impacted wallpaper. There were starkly white humanoid figures and starkly black humanoid figures in a Gestalt pattern so that, if the eye saw “white,” the eye could not simultaneously see “black”; if the eye saw “black,” the eye could not simultaneously see “white.” The trick of the drawing was that all these foolish/hapless figures spied upon one another yet were oblivious of being spied-upon. The wit of the drawing was that no humanoid figure differed in the slightest from any other: all were identical.
She’d been thirteen at the time of the drawing, in the first thrilled flush of inspiration.
Spying, snooping—she felt a moral revulsion for such human activities. She would not have wished to snoop among the Investigator’s private files as much for her own sake as for his.
She was a convalescent, still. She’d been convalescing for how many years, she’d lost count.
She’d fled, she was in exile. Back there was a way of naming the unnameable.
Essentially in life you are at Point X—this, where we are—continuously. It’s a delusion to think that you can travel back there—from which you’ve been expelled.
And so, she hadn’t been searching among the Investigator’s files for anything other than the misplaced file he’d been looking for. (The Investigator was a methodical man for whom scrupulosity and order were sacrosanct: he’d been known to turn white-lipped with rage if a small item on his desk were out of place.) Yet she’d found, in an older filing cabinet, in a creaking lower drawer, a much-creased manila envelope that contained several laminated ID cards for several “identities”—all male, birth dates 1938 to 1943, and all associated with academic or research institutions in Minnesota, Illinois, New York State, Washington, D.C., Bethesda, and Florida.
These IDs dated back to another era, clearly. Might’ve been the 1980s. The Investigator at that time had had dark blond hair, a sharp-boned but whiskery face, shrewd eyes hidden behind tinted lenses.
Unless, the Intern speculated, the photos weren’t of the Investigator himself but of someone who resembled him enough to pass for him, should the ID have been inspected at a checkpoint. The more she peered at the little ID photos, the less they resembled the man whom she knew, and the less they resembled one another.
There is a thriving business in manufactured-to-order IDs including driver’s licenses. The Intern, whose own identity was not entirely fixed, understood this.
Still, you could stare at the Investigator’s numerous ID photos and not be sure if they were, or were not, him. As you could observe the man himself, seemingly placid, always preoccupied, humming under his breath, quizzical, bemused, beguiled, absently gazing out a window at a sky streaked with opalescent cloud above the Atlantic Ocean miles away as—(it seemed)—a tempest of thoughts raged in his brain—and not have the slightest idea who he was.
To the Orion Maximum Security Correctional Facility for Men in the flatlands of central Florida the Investigator had brought a laminated ID card identifying him as Professor Cornelius Hinton of the Institute for Advanced Research in Social Psychology, Criminology, and Anthropology, State University of Florida, Temple Park, Florida. The Institute was an actual place, as the Temple Park branch of the State University of Florida was an actual place in one of the older palm-tree-lined suburbs of Fort Lauderdale. There, as a non-degree-enrolled student named “Sabbath Mae McSwain” the Intern had taken night school courses over a period of several semesters—courses chosen less for their subjects than for the convenience of scheduling; she’d become one of those individuals who dwell at the edges of large university campuses, attached
to the universities in the way that a scattering of small treeless islands is attached to the mainland.
Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.
There is Minimalist art: there are Minimalist lives.
By default she’d become a certain kind of student—older, solitary.
The ideal camouflage for one in exile—it wasn’t camouflage at all.
And she was sure by this time, no one was pursuing her.
She’d lived in Miami for a while, at various addresses. She’d had her “friend”—her “protector.” And they’d moved to Fort Lauderdale, and now in Temple Park where she was living alone, and was content to be living alone, or told herself so. Temple Park was a residential suburb north of Fort Lauderdale, partly bordering the ocean, but only partly. In all these places—Miami, Lauderdale, Temple Park—she’d worked at a motley succession of minimum-wage jobs—(store clerk, kitchen worker, waitress [a single, humiliating evening]), veterinary assistant, “lab tech,” fresh-produce market hand; valiantly she’d managed a secondhand bookstore for several haphazard weeks as the doomed and dust-ridden store (“Gay & Lesbian Pride, New Rare & Used Books”) sank into bankruptcy, and beyond. At the same general time, in Temple Park, she’d begun a circuitous progress, as she thought it, into the State University which in its labyrinthine interstices provided work-study scholarships for students, for which she believed she might one day qualify. She imagined for herself a university career of credits accumulated slowly and painstakingly as precious pebbles on a beach; somehow, a B.A. degree would materialize out of this earnest effort, then a graduate fellowship, a Ph.D. and a teaching position—in some subject, somewhere. She could envision for herself only college-level teaching, or a research position in a laboratory; she could not think of public school teaching, high school or lower, without a wince of dread and shame.