Layman's Report

by Eugene Marten

  Sometimes nights were bad. He dreamt of the daughter of the family in the field, the one he’d left for dead. She crawled to him, convulsed and contorted, across lunar landscapes of ice and time, and they met, and coupled with great difficulty, but in their joining his ejaculations were curative, restoring her limbs and straightening her spine so that she walked away whole again, without leaving footprints, without looking back, and he woke not remembering what he’d dreamt nor that he had at all, but shaken and sobbing as with irrevocable loss.

  “You all just keep my dominoes,” Payday shouted on the bars. “Just tell em it was natural causes,” and he hung himself with his bedsheets.

  The little brother wrote it down. He wrote a children’s book about a rat with no name who crawls up out of a toilet into a housing project and tries to join the human family. Started work on a less disguised autobiography and wondered if he would finish in time. Others had done it before him, had achieved publication and critical acclaim, had attracted the intercession of celebrities and celebrity attorneys, earned reprieves, even commutation, another chance, but he had no illusions about being forgiven. Innocence was never an option; he wanted only to live.

  His wife stopped visiting. The next word he received from her was through a lawyer, just before his petition for clemency was denied. The grounds were mental cruelty and sexual neglect. His feelings for her didn’t change.

  Five days after the warrant was issued, five days before one minute past midnight, they came to his cell and had him throw all his possessions into a laundry cart. Then he pushed the cart to the holding cell in the death house.

  Deathwatch was a considerable improvement over the wing. The cell was bigger and cleaner, there was a TV and VCR (the little brother hadn’t seen one before), and you enjoyed free canteen privileges. The only downside, other than the fact that they were going to kill you, was the guard who sat right outside the bars looking in twenty-four hours a day. The guard kept a log and in it he wrote down everything the little brother did and said in the holding cell, including when he used the toilet and what he babbled in his sleep.

  “You want to count the corn in that turd?” the little brother asked, and the guard wrote down that he’d said this.

  The warden visited several times a day. The little brother didn’t find him particularly objectionable, nor did he take it personally that the warden would supervise his execution—someone had to do it, he supposed—but the chaplain came only once before the appointed hour. He’d been a hay farmer in the eastern end of the state and late in his life when he felt the call, though apparently with some reluctance.

  “I was just talking to the Father and he instructed me to drop by and say hello.” As if he had no choice in the matter, but he seemed to know better than to call the little brother son. “Is there anything you need?”

  “Can’t say in fronta mixed company,” the little brother said. The guard scribbled.

  The chaplain stared through the bars. “Aren’t you beyond lust at this point?”

  “I wish I was,” the little brother said. “Come on in and I’ll show you what I’m beyond.” In truth, sex was the furthest thought from his mind, affianced as he was to the most jealous of suitors; he just wanted to burn the old boy’s butter.

  “I’m referring to the needs of your immortal soul,” the chaplain said, and the little brother cited the Gita, which says that worn-out garments are shed by the body, and worn-out bodies are shed by the dweller within the body. (The dweller within dons new bodies like said garments.)

  The guard asked how Gita is spelled.

  “With all due respect,” the chaplain said, “those people should stick to cooking curry.”

  “Now you’re making me hungry,” the little brother said, and asked the guard about the fare in the dining hall.

  “What about forgiveness?” the chaplain said. “Is that on the menu?”

  “Mashed, boiled, baked, whipped,” the little brother said.

  “‘Except ye eat of the flesh of the Son of Man,’” the chaplain said, “‘ye have no life in you.’”

  “You left out the blood,” the little brother said. “How I’m supposed to wash it down?”

  “‘Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water,’” the chaplain said. “John, chapter six.”

  “I think you mean chapter four.”

  “The Word is the Word.”

  “Well maybe you should get your ass up off the block and come back when you got your thing down.”

  The guard looked at the chaplain. The chaplain looked as if he’d felt the call to regroup. “I’ll continue to pray for you,” he said like a threat, backing away.

  “Just pray they don’t burn my pork chop,” the little brother said; he’d remembered that today was Tuesday.

  Nights were no longer a problem. He watched movies all day and well into the evening and then slept so soundly even he wondered at it. They parked the set right outside the cell. The titles were to be entirely his choice but at night they seemed to watch only what the second shift preferred—gangsters machine-gunning each other, barbarians of the nuclear future, shape-shifting aliens. The little brother didn’t mind but when out of curiosity he asked the night watch why he never selected a tamer genre—comedy, even melodrama, if only for variety’s sake—the guard responded, “They don’t know how to make people laugh no more,” and said nothing else on the subject. He didn’t write it down.

  On the morning of his last day the Korean prison doctor came to his cell with two guards and had him remove his clothing. The doctor weighed him and took his temperature. Listened to his heart. Tapped his knee. Cupped his balls and told him to cough. The little brother obliged but for some reason had expected a more thorough examination. They told him to get dressed.

  “So how long you give me?” he asked, and the doctor, whose English was poor and spoken only when necessary, gave him a thumbs-up: “You good to go.”

  On deathwatch the visitors were brought right to your cell, and that afternoon the little brother had two: his mother and a man wearing a suit that looked twenty years too small on him.

  “My baby!” and she fell upon him like a child in the Lost and Found. His response, if he’d given one, would have been buried in the crush of reunion.

  She backed up to get a good look. She wore a platinum wig and looked dressed for both funeral and wake. “My baby is gray,” she said, amazed.

  “Well it’s been a while, ain’t it?” her son said, and reverted instantly to a self they would recognize. “Bet you is too up under that.”

  “Don’t hold it against me,” she said. “I just couldn’t bear to see my child caged up like a dog. Are they feeding you?”

  “He ain’t missed too many meals.”

  The little brother turned to look at the speaker. A short round man with a thin hoarse voice. Mustache, hair waved and slicked back.

  “I’d like you to meet my fiancé,” the little brother’s mother said, and held up a ring.

  “He work?”

  “Sanitation department,” her fiancé said without defensive-ness. “Twenty-three years.”

  “Garbage man.”

  “I wouldn’t trade it. You can learn more about folks by they trash than all the books ever wrote. And it kept me from runnin the streets—mighta done you some good, too.”

  “But now,” the mother said. “It ain’t all his fault. I think that war messed with his head—they got a name for it.”

  “Only war I been in I never fired a shot.”

  “Too late to play that card,” her fiancé said. “You got your affairs in order, boy?” and he looked in the wastebasket as if with professional interest.

  “Only affairs I got left is what I’m having for supper,” the little brother said. “Boy.”

  “That ain’t what I’m talking about.”

  “Y’all wanna watch a movie?”

  “Oh, you gonna see a movie all right. It’s called Th
is Was Your Life, now playing at Heaven’s gate, and there ain’t but one Critic and His review is everlasting judgment. You know what I’m talking about now?”

  “He used to be a preacher,” the mother told the guard, who’d stopped writing momentarily and was listening now as though it were his own past that would soon be up for assessment.

  “The question is,” the fiancé said, “when they call the roll up yonder, will your name be on that list?”

  “I ain’t got but a number,” the little brother said, “and where I’m going I won’t need that either.”

  “My baby’s lost his way,” his mother lamented.

  “How would you know?”

  “Take it easy, boy,” the fiancé said. “She’s a changed woman—I’ve seen to it.”

  “I’m sorry if you think I wasn’t there for you,” his mother said. “If there was anything I could do now.”

  Her son looked at her. “You can go sit your fat ass up in that chair and we’ll call it even.”

  “Say what?” her fiancé said.

  “Well I rather do that than sit here and listen to you tear my heart out,” she said, but her eyes were narrowed and dry.

  “Take it back,” her fiancé said. “Take it back or when they through with you I’ll bring you back to life so I can beat you back to death.”

  “All right,” the guard said, not quite looking up, having resumed his endless transcription.

  “Why can’t you just be happy for me?” the little brother’s mother said. She held up the hand that wore the ring.

  “You know what?” the little brother said to the fiance, as if the thought had just occurred to him. “I kill a motherfucker now, I could probably do another year on the DR while they decide which one they gonna do me for,” and the guard said, “This visit is terminated.”

  Dinner was fish, cole slaw, French fries, iced tea.

  At seven they synchronized the clocks and tested the phones. Half an hour later they came to the holding cell with a new set of clothes. Shaved the top of his head like a monk, shaved his ankle, put a plug up his ass and inserted a catheter that drained into a bag taped to his thigh.

  The Egyptians thought mummification transfigured the corpse into a new body filled with magic.

  Black pants and a clean white shirt. He looked like a busboy.

  “You like sedative for you?” the Korean doctor asked.

  “I’ll take all you got,” the little brother said. Though refusal is the first choice available to us, and sometimes the last, he knew if he said no they’d force it on him.

  The chair was tested with a tub of saline solution in place of a human being and declared ready. The blinds were closed.

  They checked the phones at regular intervals. At ten thirty the chaplain reported to the holding cell and the little brother was too full of liquid Valium to mind.

  “Would you care to pray?” the chaplain asked.

  “Go ahead and start without me,” the little brother said. He went back to whatever he’d been thinking about but it was no longer there, only the chaplain’s voice, as empty as a parrot’s speech.

  The tower guards were doubled. The state witnesses arrived and the hearse was parked at the sally port. The department director telephoned the governor’s office to see if there was a stay. He looked at his watch. His watch looked back: eleven thirty-five.

  The hall was narrow, twenty-seven steps long. They took it slow. The little brother wore handcuffs and leg irons and there was a guard on each side of him, two in front and two behind. The chaplain led the way with Job: “‘But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people.’” A door. A room. Another door behind the chair. The room was bigger than he’d expected and the chair smaller. Heavy oak dark with age, and when they sat him down it was almost a perfect fit because he was a small man like his father. They took off the iron and strapped you in like a test pilot. Leather belts for his ankles and his wrists, and for his lap, arms, and chest, tightened and fastened with clamp buckles. Before him were two windows covered with blinds, and on the other side was a small amphitheater divided by a partition; state witnesses sat in one half, and the inmate witnesses in the other. The little brother did not know who his witnesses were, nor if he had any at all; he was allowed to submit a list but hadn’t done so.

  “‘I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou art my God from my mother’s belly.’”

  The room filled: the warden, the director, the deputy director, the doctor, the plant maintenance chief, the chaplain, the assistant superintendent of programs. The telephones were tested. They listened for the ring. At midnight the department director called the superintendent to ask if there was a stay. The blinds were opened. The windows were smoked black and the little brother couldn’t see through them, didn’t know that the parents of the pregnant woman he’d shot in the a-rab’s store—they’d raised the child as their own—sat among the state witnesses, couldn’t know that his mother had chosen not to attend, that in her place on the other side of the partition there sat only one observer, a pale, twisted, shriveled figure installed in an electric wheelchair, unattended, often prone to spasms and emotional outbursts but now uncharacteristically still and silent.

  The warden read the death warrant in his nasal voice. He asked the little brother if he had anything left to say.

  The little brother opened his mouth and then closed it.

  “God bless you, son,” the warden said.

  They put the mask on him then and the last thing he saw of the world was a roomful of men who weren’t looking at him, and the blackness in the window that was. He heard a gush of water like a sponge being squeezed, felt its wetness on top of his head, then the cold metal bowl of the helmet and the taut leather of the chinstrap. Something cold and greasy on his ankle. No countdown. (His heart would be weighed in the Field of Reeds. If it was so heavy with sin it tipped the scales, it would be) two knocks at a door and it was like they shot a blowtorch into his ear. His invisible audience felt the hum that filled the room, saw his body stiffen upright as with some great realization. A blue-white flame burst from one side of the mask. (Lights like a swarm of fireflies in his eyes, a taste in his mouth like) the hum ceased. The little brother was seen to take a deep breath and pointed his finger.

  The director, the deputy director, the assistant superintendent of programs, the Korean doctor, the chaplain, and the maintenance chief all looked at the warden. He nodded again. Two more knocks at the door and in response the hum resumed.

  Now the blue-white flames flared from both sides of the mask, and blood dripped from behind it onto his white shirt from his mouth and nose, and then from two new holes in his face as his eyeballs burst with the steam pressure in his skull.

  Someone screamed through the darkened glass and the chaplain fainted away. The ankle electrode sparked and the little brother’s trousers ignited. Another scream. The warden drew his finger across his throat and the plant maintenance chief removed the fire extinguisher from the wall. Three knocks this time. A sweet burnt smell. The warden picked up a microphone.

  “At this time,” he was heard to say in his nasal voice, “I would ask that the theater be cleared in a safe and orderly fashion. A guard will escort you back to the waiting area.”

  The plant maintenance chief sprayed the little brother’s legs with foam. The doctor revived the chaplain, who immediately vomited and was escorted from the smoky room. The door to the hall was kept open. The doctor approached the chair with a handkerchief over his face. The little brother took another breath. His finger was still pointing though they couldn’t tell exactly where. The warden knocked on the door himself.

  At the third jolt the ankle electrode sparked again. The little brother convulsed so violently his shoulder was heard to separate with a loud snap. The foam on his trousers kept them from reigniting but the mask was burning outright now, contracting to the contours of his face. A hole opened for his mouth and its only utterance was a strip of flesh b
lackened and shriveled as a piece of jerky. His shirt burst into flame. The plug in his rectum melted and the catheter shattered. His bodily waste streamed forth and cooked and reeked, but he was no longer moving nor pointing so the warden gave the final signal and the only sound was the maintenance chief emptying the fire extinguisher. All that remained now was to wait for the little brother’s body to cool so that the doctor could pronounce him in his version of English, and the remains then be removed.

  But in all the smoke and commotion one witness had been forgotten, left behind, still sat unseen behind the dark glass. She’d watched from her wheelchair, had never taken her eyes away and regarded him now: a scorched and smoking monarch still enthroned and holding court. She took a deep breath of him then and gripped the armrests with both hands, one artificial, gathering all her strength and will, preparing to stand and walk again like a whole person. And all around her the prison strangely quiet; condemned men watching an X-rated film parked in front of their bars.

  From the Report:

  All of the ovens have multiple retorts. They are of an older design. They are constructed of red brick and mortar, and lined with a refractory brick. Some are blowered, though none utilize direct combustion. None have afterburners, and all are coke-fired except for one facility no longer extant. (It should be noted that unless specifically designed for a greater bone-to-flesh-to-heat ratio, the retort may not consume the material assigned to it. It should also be noted that the odor issuing from a tannery or ironworks has sometimes been compared to that of burning flesh.)

  After Okinawa, after the Divine Wind, after Fat Man and Little Boy, Fred Sr. delivered the mail. Instead of raining napalm B and hand grenades down on Japs hiding in underground caves and tunnels, he started his day sorting and casing and bundling, then finished it delivering to some three hundred recipients out of a leather satchel weighing more than his flamethrower. There were dogs. Four months and a thousand miles and a rat terrier kicked half to death later, he heard they were taking applications at OSP. Because he was a veteran and had already passed his civil service exam, the assistant superintendent hired him on the spot. The quartermaster gave him a shitstick. He also issued Fred Sr. two pairs of black pants, three gray shirts, one hat, and a black coat. The pants were short in the legs and wide in the waist. You had to buy your own shoes.