The Lieutenant’s listeners shuddered. The Lieutenant was an impresario at the mast of a careening amusement-park ride—roller coaster, demon-twister. You could not escape the hellish ride until the Lieutenant released you.
Visitors asked questions—the Intern couldn’t hear. A roaring had begun in her ears, a pounding of blood like a distant surf.
The Intern was fingering the leather straps. Fortunately the Lieutenant hadn’t asked her to place the straps over her arms and legs. She understood that an IV line, dripping toxins into a vein, would be inserted in one of her arms, or in the back of her hand.
At a little distance the Lieutenant was speaking. In his bragging bullying way, that had an undercurrent of excitement.
The Intern began to remember—something.
The Intern began to remember—how she’d lain curled upon herself. Not on a table and not on her back but on the ground crawling, and her face bloodied, her nose and mouth bloodied, dirt in her eyes.
Don’t want you get away you disgust me.
“Thing is, a death warrant is served these days it don’t mean what you’d think. There’s all these appeals—‘writs’—‘briefs’—‘arguments’—drags on for years. Any man—or woman!—gets to Death Row, let me tell you ‘innocence’ ain’t no likely factor in what got him here. Might be he’s ‘innocent’ of the crime for which he will be executed but no way he is innocent—or her. That is a statistical fact.”
There was a pause. The Intern shut her eyes harder and strained to see and to hear.
She was very frightened now. A sensation as of death was upon her, a numbness in her feet, her legs—rising . . . A numbness in her fingers, and in her face. Her tongue he’d ripped out.
So she could not speak. Would not ever speak.
. . . can’t talk? Maybe she’s deaf too.
Face looks broke. Lemme wash that blood away.
Whoever done it he’ll come back. They always do.
“Our last execution was in February. Like, a month ago. There’s been an execution—this ‘Richard Karpe’ in the news—that’s been postponed two, three times. Jesus! Nobody thinks this is any damn good for all involved like the victim’s kin nor even the condemned man himself jerked around like a damn puppet. A condemned man comes to terms with his life, he’s ready to die. You can ask them on Death Row, most of ’em will tell you. Most of them is solid Christian-religion, by that time. They will tell you. ‘Let’s get on with it,’ they will say. This last one, Pop Krunk. Have to tell you, I kind of got to like Pop Krunk—and Pop Krunk liked me. He was seventy-six when he died. He’d been in Orion since 1987. Before that, Raiford. He’d done time for robbery, aggravated assault. He was an old-timey kind of character with long hair, long beard—like in the Everglades, you’d find. Sent to Death Row after he beat to death somebody resisted him in a robbery, also he had warrants on other probable homicides in Tampa, that caught up with him. Pop would say he was ‘conned’ into it—confessing—then tried to ‘recant’ like they do—but the judge shut that out, fast. Right-away there’s some team of young lawyers trying to get Pop’s sentence overturned, and a new trial—Christ knows why! You can always have a new trial, there’s never gonna be any trial that’s ‘beyond a shadow of a doubt’ whether somebody’s lawyer falls asleep in court or shows up sick or drunk—that’s how it is. So last month they’re arguing for another reprieve, trying to argue the governor into commuting his sentence, Pop Krunk himself never bellyached he was afraid to die or treated unjustly, least not to me. His Last Supper was a good one: Big Mac with French fries, fried onion rings, chocolate milk shake. Asked if I would keep him company and I said yes but the sad thing was, old Pop started eating pretty hungry then kind of slowed down, and never got to the halfway point even, laying down the Big Mac saying shit, he ain’t hungry no more.
“Would you like the milk shake? Pop says. So I says OK, thanks!
“Did I say Pop Krunk was in a wheelchair? Started out just on crutches, his legs and hips was shot with arthritis, he wasn’t malingering but in pain you could see, his face all creased with pain, so he had this wheelchair from the infirmary, he spent most of his time in, in his cell. The death warrant’s delivered, once it is then the clock starts ticking, you know—only a call from the governor can defer it. But this time, there wasn’t gonna be any call. This time, Pop’s luck run out. He knew this. Like he could foresee certain weather—a hurricane, for instance. His bones just ached all the more, in that kind of weather. So he could foresee, no call from the damn governor. When the chaplain and us came to get him, Pop didn’t look nothing much like himself. Which is sobering to see. You come to expect a certain—you expect certain behavior from people you know. Drops of sweat were running down Pop Krunk’s face. He’d shut his eyes tight, his mouth, trying not to breathe. Trying to choke himself, suffocate himself, cut off his breathing. But he could not, the instinct to breathe is too powerful to resist. So next, poor bastid tries to hang back. In his wheelchair. He was panting, and sweating, and praying. We wheeled him into the chamber here, down a little ramp by the steps. But the wheelchair doesn’t fit into the diving bell, so he had to be hoisted to his feet and walked. I was one of the guards assigned to walk with him. Poor Pop Krunk shaking like I never seen him before. I’m saying to him—‘Pop! You can do it. Hell man, you’re gonna be OK.’ There’s the victims’ next-of-kin in the front chairs, some of ’em oldern Pop himself. Jesus they all been waiting a damn long time for this. And the warden is here, and prison commissioner, and some journalists. Pop was balking, scared. The wheelchair had to be surrendered. He caught on the edge of the doorway into the diving bell, his fingers had to be pried off. The chaplain said, ‘Don’t disappoint us, Pop. Not now. We expect more of you, Pop. There’s the relatives of the victims right here, looking for justice. You give ’em what they deserve, Pop.’ And Pop saw, this was only just. Right-away sat up straight as he could in that chair, they were strapping him in. All the witnesses were surprised. Pop Krunk said, with a sudden smile, ‘Hey! This is a beautiful day to die.’
“Saying so, was the signal. We lowered and secured the black hood over his head.”
He will hurt you again. He will murder you.
You can’t go back. Not ever.
. . . will protect you. I swear.
The Intern had ceased listening to the Lieutenant’s voice. The Intern was feeling that her heart had been slowed and stopped and was being revived now again and she did not know where the strength would come from, to return her life to her.
Men had died on this table, on which she lay. In the robin’s-egg-blue diving bell, men had died hideous deaths. Those others, who’d preceded her, the old man—Pop Krunk—had died strapped in here. They’d stabbed needles into his skinny old-man arms and drained poison into him and he’d slumped and ceased breathing and the witnesses could see nothing further except that the black hood over the head had slumped, and was no longer the head of a live man.
In desperation the Intern managed to sit up. Heavy air pressed against her: she was feeling weak. She stumbled to the door of the diving bell and past the surprise-faced Lieutenant and the other visitors to the door of the execution chamber which the Intern shoved open, in an impudent outburst of strength.
There were upraised voices behind her. Abruptly now, the tour would end.
The Intern had stumbled outside, and had fallen. But the Intern was breathing normally. The Intern had not fainted. The Intern’s knees had been scarred, years ago. The old scars had not been lacerated. For the Intern wore corduroy trousers, to protect her legs. The Intern lay where she’d fallen on a patch of scrubby ground outside the execution chamber at the farther end of the bleak cinder block facade of Death Row. She was summoning strength, to stand. The Lieutenant called after her in reprimand. The Lieutenant called after her, annoyed. And the Lieutenant was frightened, for a civilian fallen on his tour, a civilian casualty, was not a good thing. This was not a good thing for the Lieutenant, and for the Orion tour.
The Lieutenant exited the execution chamber to approach the Intern who was trying to rise now, on her knees. Was her face bleeding? Was her nose dripping blood? The Intern wiped at her face in chagrin, shame. The tour-group visitors were peering at her, some of them. From the doorway of the execution chamber they were peering at her. They were not clear what had happened. What had happened? In the diving bell, the Intern had obediently lain on the table in compliance with the Lieutenant’s command but then, suddenly, she’d jumped down from the table, and escaped. You could see that the Lieutenant was not accustomed to being disobeyed.
The Intern had panicked, and begun to faint. That must have been why she’d stumbled outside. And now the white-haired gentlemanly Investigator pushed past the others, to come to her.
Help her to her feet. She was on her knees shivering with cold.
Belatedly realizing, he’d wanted her to take pictures inside the diving bell! Of course.
Why she’d been outfitted with the Sony watch. Was that why?
Her brain was working fitfully. Her brain had been deprived of oxygen, toxins in her bloodstream and her brain had begun to die.
But that was why he’d given her the watch of course. Why he’d wanted her to accompany him to this terrible place. And she had not thought of it, at all. She had thought of other things but she had not thought of that.
Nor did she think of it now. All that—even him—was swept away, in the enormity of the moment.
Saying, “This is a beautiful day to die.”
TEN
The Betrayal
Temple Park, Florida, March 2012
SHE COULD NOT bring herself to say.
To utter the words. Could not.
“ . . . have to be leaving you. I’m so sorry.”
He did not reply. He might have been shocked.
He might have been incensed. She could not look at him!
Saying, stammering, “—think that I have to go back to where I—I’ve . . .”
She was feeling faint. That ringing in her ears, that is the pressure of heightened blood.
“ . . . I’ve been gone from. I’ve been ‘missing.’ ”
THE INVESTIGATOR TURNED from her. Abruptly, the Investigator walked out of the room.
She heard a door shutting, hard. Another door, slammed. She pressed her hands against her ears.
This had not ever happened before, between them. The Investigator and his Intern: their relations had always been wholly professional, impersonal.
He had not noticed her watching him. (Had he?)
He had not noticed her smiling at him, behind his back. (Had he?)
The Investigator’s pale-blue gaze, moving over her. It had not been a tender gaze, it had not been an affectionate gaze, and yet—seeing the Investigator looking at her, his quizzical smile, his bemused and beguiled smile, she’d felt a stirring of hope, and yearning; she’d felt a stirring of something she had long believed she’d quenched, out of self-disgust and shame.
“McSwain! Come here, I need your advice.”
Or, he would call: “McSwain! Here.”
It was the Investigator’s pretense that he was, like many of his generation, computer-illiterate. He could not navigate a computer as the Intern could. (In fact, this was not true. The Investigator was reasonably skilled at the computer, at least the computer programs he knew. The Intern’s method was random, hit-or-miss, a patience that is the consequence of a desperate need not to become hysterical. The Intern exuded calm as a principle.)
“McSwain!”—sometimes the call was pleading, a cri de coeur. Yet the Investigator was being funny, too.
Asking her to open a jar for him. A tall hefty bottle of his favorite juice—pomegranate. Why?
“Your fingers are stronger than mine, obviously, McSwain. You’re young, you can grip.”
Anything requiring fine-print-reading. Anything requiring the use of a remote control, a “menu”—“Never learned to use a ‘menu.’ Just do it for me, McSwain.”
But now. There was no humor, no playfulness between them now.
For she was trying not to shatter into pieces. Carrying herself with extreme care, caution. In the diving bell that had been painted a bizarre robin’s-egg blue she had been made to realize how close she’d come to annihilation, extinction.
Death had been precipitated, in that place. Death had not come haphazardly or by a “natural” sequence of events—death had been bidden, death had been executed.
Sick with guilt. Gut-sick, guilt.
This evening at the Investigator’s glass-walled house on the Rio Vista Canal. This evening after their exhausting tour of the Orion prison, from which they hadn’t returned until late afternoon.
The Investigator had had to drive the SUV most of the way. The Intern had felt so weak, light-headed. The Intern had felt so emptied out.
The first time she’d broken like this, in at least a year.
The first time, as the Intern.
Pieces like shattered glass. Slipped from her fingers, broken.
You scream, but it’s too late. Once shattered—too late.
She tried to tell him at first, it was nothing. It was nothing, and she was fine, and she was—well, she was disgusted, as he was, at the Lieutenant’s revelations, and the tour—the tour through that terrible prison!—and she was anxious, and she was . . .
Terrified, she was. Her life like water rushing in a drain, circling a drain, then in an instant gone.
HE’D STOPPED AT a mini-mall at South Bay.
He’d sent her into the liquor store. As the Intern, this was her usual task: store purchases. While the Investigator remained in the vehicle peering through his little notebook, taking notes.
Then, he came inside, too.
Tall white-haired gentlemanly Investigator who did resemble a retired judge, in a TV episode.
And she the young woman who resembled a boy, boy’s clothing, boy’s hair razor-cut at the nape of her neck, corduroys, flannel shirt, hiking boots. Drifting along the aisles pushing a shopping cart beneath the bright fluorescent lights, uncertain why she was there.
In convex mirrors like mad distorting eyes positioned to glare along each aisle of dark-glittering bottles her figure moved stealthily, hesitantly—might’ve been (in the sharp gaze of the proprietor who’d been shoplifted, held-up how many times in the past decade) an ashy-faced junkie/hooker looking like a kid of twelve, not to be trusted. In the convex mirrors her distorted face, scarcely recognizable.
Why here, what was her mission here. But where was here.
“McSwain.”
Blindly she turned. The name came to her—Zeno.
She was trying to remain upright. All her strength went into this—the effort of remaining upright. At the execution chamber, she’d had to stumble outside, into the fresh air, or what had struck her with the force of fresh damp air. Yet she’d fallen, to her knees. She’d lost the strength of her young body, she’d wakened to discover herself lying on the ground. Voices were uplifted, she’d violated the protocol of the tour-group by fainting.
Not vomiting. She had not been gut-sick, as she’d feared she would be.
In the wine-beer-liquor store. Somewhere on the North New River Canal headed south, to Fort Lauderdale.
Her lips were cold, numb. Her face was bloodless. The Investigator who was a gentleman in his early seventies was not one to take alarm, easily. His public manner was poise, cool, aloof, in control. His public manner was courteous. Yet now staring at the Intern, frowning.
But you are my young Intern! You are younger and healthier than I and you are to outlive me, I’ve hired you for that reason, to take care of me. McSwain!
She’d managed to select the whiskey the Investigator had requested: Johnnie Walker Black.
She’d managed to drop into the shopping cart a six-pack of seltzer water which the Investigator favored, and which the Intern often drank at their impromptu meals together.
The Investigator took the shopping cart from her fal
tering fingers. Pushed the cart to the front of the store, to the cashier now frankly staring at them—this ill-matched couple—had to be, what?—father, grandfather—young guy, or maybe girl. The cashier rang up the charges with quick-darting fingers, long painted-plastic fingernails it was a miracle to observe.
“McSwain. Go back out. I’ll take these.”
“No. I can help you, sir.”
“I said go on.”
Their accents weren’t Florida. Nowhere near.
SO EXHAUSTED! The Investigator glanced over at her, in the passenger’s seat.
Not ever had the Intern been so—helpless.
Worriedly the Investigator wondered: Maybe we should take you to an ER.
Maybe you need a shot of cortisone. Maybe you’ve had an allergic reaction to the execution chamber.
Driving south on Route 27, back to Fort Lauderdale. All the signs, gigantic billboards, drawing travelers south, to Fort Lauderdale and the Atlantic Ocean.
Female bodies horizontal on white sands, in tiny bikinis. Female bodies with luminous golden-glowing skin.
Weakly the Intern protested: No.
No ER, no medical examination. The Intern was fine, she insisted.
The Intern had a fear of being examined. The Intern had a fear of being found out.
SHE WAS HALF-CONSCIOUS. She was comforting herself, felt an almost voluptuous thrill, the prospect of—seated close beside the Investigator, at his large desktop computer, as the Investigator displayed on the screen the many mini-photos he’d taken surreptitiously at Orion. As they peered at the images, tried to identity the images, and the Investigator would play the tapes he’d recorded, or had tried to record—(for such surreptitious taping, in miniature, was not a flawless operation)—and the Intern would take notes, the Intern would number and name and eventually print out the photos, and file. And there was a comfort in this, the Intern wished badly to think.