by Spencer Baum
You know what? I’m not telling you my pen pal’s name. I’m not telling you where she’s from either, other than to say that it’s not from the USA.
What I will tell you is that, for a couple years there, my pen pal and I traded between twelve and twenty letters every year, and by the time I graduated high school, my pen pal was my best friend in the world.
Letters and chores and doing something nice were only the beginning of the magic Grandma brought to our house. Two months after she moved in, and our lives were already on the upswing, Grandma took Kyle and me to Schwartz Sportz and told us each to choose a bike.
“Something durable, but not too expensive,” she instructed.
I should note here that on the day we went to Schwartz Sportz, Kyle and I already owned bikes, or what we thought were bikes. Grandma disagreed. Grandma declared the bikes we had to be “two-wheeled toys for children,” and I suppose she was right. The bikes we had were relics from childhood. We’d both outgrown them and never used them anymore. The same afternoon that Grandma bought us new bikes, she made us put our old bikes on Craigslist. The weekend after that she made us have a yard sale to get rid of all the other childhood toys that were still lingering in our house.
Grandma was like that. She thought childhood was for children.
I was thirteen and Kyle was eleven on that day we went to Schwartz Sportz. I chose a road bike with a white frame and over-wide pedals. Kyle got a mountain bike with hydraulic suspensions. The salesman explained to Grandma that the sticker price on the bikes was for “unassembled walk-out.” If you wanted the bikes assembled at the store, he said, it was fifty bucks extra per bike.
“Oh no,” Grandma said. “These kids are perfectly capable of assembling a bicycle at home.”
After Grandma wrote a check to pay for our bikes (Grandma was the only person I knew who paid for things with checks), an employee at the store rolled two giant cardboard boxes to our minivan. The boxes were so big we had to fold down both rows of seats in the back and bungee the hatch because it wouldn’t close all the way. While Kyle and I struggled with the bike boxes and bungee cords, Grandma sat in the driver’s seat with the air conditioner running. We asked her if she would come check our bungee job before we hit the road, to which she said, “Nope. I’m going to trust you kids to get it right, so make sure you get it right.”
When we got home, Grandma told us she expected our bikes assembled and ready to roll by the time she got back from knitting club.
I remember opening the boxes and finding an intimidating mess of rubber and metal inside. I remember Kyle saying, “How in the world are we supposed to do this?”
One step at a time, that’s how. The two of us having watched Grandma write a big check for those bikes in her slow and shaky penmanship, we weren’t about to let her down. And so we fought with Allen wrenches, got covered in grease, and cursed the Gordian Knot that was the unassembled drive chain.
But we finished. We were out on the street in front of our house that afternoon, the wind blowing in our faces as we rode, the feeling of accomplishment raising the spirits, and the potential, of two kids whose Grandma was helping them discover the value of productive work.
Grandma came home late that afternoon, commended us on our work (but only a little), and then did something that assured that this day, Bicycle Day, would be one of the most memorable of our lives.
She gave each of us a city map and a bus pass.
A bus pass! In Albuquerque! Automobile utopia, a city where your garage is your front door and every business is surrounded by a big, beautiful parking lot. Who the hell carries a bus pass in Albuquerque? Jenna and Kyle Duvall, that’s who. Kids who put their bikes on the rack at the front of the bus and go places.
Freedom of movement, wide open afternoons exploring the city where we lived, summer jobs, responsibility, trust, confidence, competence—I could go on for hours about all the gifts Grandma gave us. All the clichés about the people you love never really dying if they live in your heart? They are 100% true for Grandma and me. Even now, with my life gone to hell, I’m still drawing on Grandma’s strength to get through every day.
So let’s talk again about that picture the media has put in your head about me. You know, the picture where a young Winona Ryder plays me as a mysterious girl with rage issues and a fucked up childhood while Alanis Morissette and Lisa Loeb songs play in the background.
It’s all bullshit.
I had a fantastic childhood.
My life went wrong when I met Sunny, not before. I’ll tell you more about that next time. Right now, the librarian is pointing at her watch. Apparently, it’s time for me to put my pencil down and go back to my cell.
CHAPTER 4
Three races: The Qualifier, the Semifinals, the Finale. “The Tetradome Run begins each season with 144 death row inmates and, over the course of a six-week season, finishes with one survivor whose prize is a form of house arrest so luxurious it might as well be a full commutation of sentence!”
All of this and more was explained to Jenna on the “Orientation Video” they made her watch.
“When you arrive at the complex, you’ll be assigned to a cellblock with other Inmates…”
What a hideous experience the Orientation Video was.
Cheesy synthesizer music, late 20th century computer graphics, bad actors with museum haircuts, all of it narrated by Chad Holiday.
“You’ll begin training at our sports complex right away,” Chad said. “We have to get you in shape to run in the Tetradome.”
A description of the Tetradome complex and the rules for prisoners, a discussion of the “unique culture in our prison,” an explanation of the steel bracelet and spinal implant that would become a part of Jenna’s life as soon as she arrived in New Rome.
“Taken together, the cuff and implant make up our Training and Control system,” Chad said. “TAC for short. Because your TAC devices allow us to keep track of your whereabouts at all times, and provide us the ability to give you a little correctional jolt if you misbehave, you’ll find that you feel safer and have more freedom of movement in our complex than in any other prison. In the Tetradome complex, there are no iron bars, there are no cramped quarters, and our prisoners never fight.”
From there, the video went into standard Tetradome propaganda, as if a prisoner like Jenna was in need of political conversion.
“Between 1960 and 1971,” Chad said, “the number of Americans who were victims of violent crime every year went from one in two-hundred to one in five.”
This was always the first line of attack of the Tetradome apologists. It’s just public execution, they would say. All the great societies in the history of the world have used public execution to enforce norms of civilized behavior.
“On April 20, 1971, Congress passed The American Redemption and Restitution Act,” Chad continued, “empowering the American people to take back their streets, their businesses, their homes, and their lives.”
The soundtrack on the video slipped into a rendition of God Bless America. A slideshow of photographs filled the screen. President Nixon signing the original Redemption Act; police and citizens marching arm in arm down the streets of Manhattan; a home-made sign in a shopkeeper’s window that said, “Dear Thugs, We’re Not Scared of You Anymore.”
A photo of Senator Phillip Lomax, father of future Senator Barbara Lomax, waving a copy of the Redemption Act in front of a cheering crowd.
After she watched the video, they took Jenna to the complex, where they slapped a steel cuff on her wrist and embedded a microchip in her spine. They assigned her to a cellblock and got her started on her training regimen for the show.
Training was a daily, brutal, body-breaking experience. And it was just one line item on the packed agenda that was the life of a prisoner in the Tetradome. Training, television appearances, photo shoots, media junkets, the whirlwind life of a star on America’s most popular television show, and then, some three months after Bart Devlin ar
rived at the State Pen to take Jenna away, she ran in the Qualifier. Months of buildup led to the four-minute sprint from screeching fuzzballs and other monsters. Jenna won her heat, one of 36 to survive the Qualifier and move on to the Semifinals.
The day after the Qualifier was a rest day. The day after that was more training.
And the day after that, a guard came to the cellblock in the morning and told Jenna the Director wanted to see her.
She followed the guard out of the complex and across the street to Devlin Tower.
An elevator ride to the 43rd floor. An atrium under a glass roof. A burbling fountain, a hallway lined with a jungle of potted plants. A door marked “Bart Devlin, Director.” A waiting area with a dozen chairs and a bank of televisions that played videos of old Tetradome Runs. A receptionist named Carlos who gave Jenna a bottle of water and her choice from a bowl of miniature candy bars. She chose a miniature Milky Way.
Then Bart Devlin appeared, the first time she’d seen him since he took her out of the visiting room of the New Mexico State Pen. He invited Jenna to come into his office, alone.
His office window gave a view of New Rome a tourist would pay for.
“Impressive from up here, isn’t it?” Bart said.
The arc of its roof, the sheer scale of the structure—from this vantage Jenna could see the whole of the central dome and the three smaller arenas attached to it.
So much space. If she made the Finale, she’d be running through all of it.
“When you look at it, do you get excited?” Bart said. “Or nervous?”
Side by side, Jenna was only a half-inch shorter than Bart. She wondered what the power dynamic between them would be if she wasn’t his prisoner.
“Looking at it makes me sad, actually,” she said.
Bart let Jenna’s answer linger, and in the quiet, the sounds of the office made themselves known. A slight buzz from the lamp, the whir of a computer’s hard drive, footsteps in the hall beyond the door—it all mixed with the faint and diminished noises of the city below.
“Take a seat over there for me, will you?” Bart said.
Jenna sat in the chair opposite Bart’s desk.
“I’ve been impressed at your progress, Jenna. We all have. I hear nothing but good reports about your efforts in training, and in the Qualifier you were a standout.”
Bart pulled a newspaper off his desk. It was folded in thirds, but Jenna could still make out the masthead. It was her hometown paper, The Albuquerque Journal.
“There’s no easy way to tell you this,” Bart said. “The rest of the world found out yesterday. Of course, we keep you contestants in a bubble, and I wanted to tell you myself.”
“Tell me what?” Jenna said.
Bart tossed the newspaper in Jenna’s lap.
“Your brother’s dead, Jenna.”
CHAPTER 5
Brother of Jenna Duvall Found Dead In His Apartment
Kyle Duvall, brother of convicted assassin and current Tetradome contestant Jenna Duvall, was found dead in his one-bedroom apartment in Northeast Albuquerque in an apparent suicide.
Jenna read the newspaper account. She sat in a chair in Bart Devlin’s office, the walls of the world squeezing in around her as she read a newspaper account of her brother’s death.
She wanted to believe it wasn’t true. She told herself maybe it wasn’t true.
In an official statement, Robert Carrillo, press liaison for the Albuquerque Police Department, said Mr. Duvall was alone in his apartment when he died.
But it was true. Of course it was.
“Kyle Duvall’s body was on the couch when police found him,” Carrillo says. “His body was slumped over the armrest with a single gunshot wound to the head. A 38-caliber pistol was found at his feet. Although no suicide note was found at the scene, all evidence points to a single conclusion. He pointed a gun at his head and took his own life.”
She thought about the look in Kyle’s eyes the last time she saw him.
Police discovered Mr. Duvall’s body following a 911 call from Mary Roman, who lives in the apartment immediately adjacent to Mr. Duvall’s. In the 911 call, Ms. Roman stated she heard a popping sound like a gunshot, which coincided immediately with a burst of smoke from the back of her television set. Upon further investigation, Ms. Roman discovered a hole in the wall and a slug lodged in the back of her TV.
“I was watching Tetradome Run when it happened,” Roman says. “Thank God my TV was right there. The bullet came through the wall and would have hit me if the TV hadn’t stopped it.”
Jenna re-read a phrase from the report. Watching Tetradome Run when it happened.
The truth of what happened, the weight of what she’d done…I did this to Kyle. I told myself I was helping him if I went on the show…
It was the opposite. Kyle killed himself while he was watching the show.
While he was watching Jenna on the show.
Bart spoke.
“I’m sorry, Jenna,” he said.
“Fuck you,” said Jenna.
She broke down after that. Her visit to Bart’s office ended in a screaming fit of rage, one that got her clicked and ultimately sedated. Hours later, back in the cellblock, she drifted in and out of a chemical sleep, lost in thoughts and memories that floated in the darkness.
Like shipwreck debris in the ocean.
The State Pen. An empty room. Kyle confessing his juiciest secret. I had sex with Sunny.
Jenna acting affronted at the revelation. Kyle, do you really need to tell me this?
Kyle charging ahead with his confession even after Jenna asked him to stop. Your freshman year of college, he said. You had a bunch of people over at the house…a party…
And now the memory of that party, the sounds of that night, the music, the booze, the sex.
How could he do this? Alone in the darkness of her mind, Jenna shouted the question into the void: How could you do this, Kyle? How could you leave me here alone? Was it really that bad? I’m the one who’s been locked in prison. I’m the one who has to run for her life in the Tetradome even though I’m innocent. Innocent, Kyle! You knew it, you were the one I counted on to believe it. I gave you my memoir. I asked you to tell the world. That memoir was all I had left, Kyle. That memoir and you.
It was selfish of her to worry about the memoir. But she couldn’t help it.
More memories filled the void. Jenna at a solitary desk in the prison library, scribbling out the truth with a golf pencil. Jenna in her prison cell, alone, worrying about the safety of those pages. Jenna in solitary confinement for years, obsessing more and more each day about her memoir because there was nothing else to obsess about.
The memory of Kyle losing control. That was the worst memory of all. She could see now what should have been clear all along. Kyle had been teetering on the edge of a deep, dark pit for years. Jenna’s predicament, and the media madness that followed, had brought him there.
And her decision to run in the Tetradome was the push that sent him plummeting into the black.
CHAPTER 6
Personal Historical Accidents
Excerpted from A Victim of Circumstance: The Memoir of Jenna Duvall.
In 11th grade history I learned that Franz Ferdinand’s chauffeur took a wrong turn and accidentally drove him to the sandwich shop where his assassin was eating lunch.
“One of history’s great accidents” is how my history teacher described that incident.
I’ve been thinking a lot about historical accidents since I’ve been in prison. Personal historical accidents. Those random occurrences and chance encounters that derail the whole path of your life.
Like when I was in fourth grade and Ms. English came to my class and played a soaring, hypnotic melody on her clarinet.
I had no intention of signing up for band before Ms. English gave her demonstration to my class. But the melody she played that day was the most arresting thing I’d ever heard, and as she played her tune (an aria by Bizet) a beam of
sunlight poured in from the window and made the silver keys of her clarinet glisten under her fingers.
Ms. English passed around a sign-up sheet and I wrote “Clarinet” next to my name. One thing led to another and, soon enough, I was practicing for at least an hour every night.
Clarinet became central to my whole identity. Band Geek. Orchestra Nerd. Music Major. Artist. Before my life went to hell I intended to make clarinet my career. I intended to become Jenna Duvall, PhD, professor of clarinet at Some College, Somewhere and first chair clarinetist in the Somewhere Philharmonic.
I didn’t even realize I was in the midst of a life-changing event when I wrote Clarinet next to my name in fourth grade. Personal historical accidents are like that.
Here’s another one: Guy gets the last spot in the trumpet section in All-City Symphony because a trumpeter ahead of him has to quit and since you’re already in All-City Symphony you meet that guy and eventually he becomes your boyfriend.
And another: After 15 phenomenal months with said guy, his career path is calling on him to move to Texas and he invites you to come with him but you have way too many roots tying you to Albuquerque to just get up and leave and the two of you make the painful, but (in your opinion) necessary decision to break up rather than try a long-distance relationship.
One more: You lose track of the deadlines on your college registration paperwork over the summer and turn it in late.
That last one turned out to be significant. All good historical accidents are significant. Had Archduke Ferdinand’s driver not made a wrong turn, they wouldn’t have driven past the sandwich shop where the assassin was waiting. Had they not driven past the sandwich shop, Ferdinand wouldn’t have been shot. Had he not been shot, World War One might not have happened.
I was in the throes of some strong emotions during the summer between high school and college. Life was pulling me and my boyfriend apart. You can forgive me for forgetting about the Welcome To Hillerman College packet sitting in the bottom drawer of my desk.