PLAINTIFF: Can I just say something?
COURT: Counselor, please restrain your client.
ATTORNEY FOR PLAINTIFF: No further questions.
* * *
Fred’s expert witness fee was five hundred dollars. And in South Carolina. And in Oklahoma.
Jim Dolly saw to the punch. The secretary had decorated a tree in a corner of the front office, hung a wreath in the window, and sprayed artificial snow out of a can. She drew the blinds. There was a meat tray and a gift exchange, music. Jim Dolly brought a guest, the woman who’d originally held the secretarial position. She professed no hard feelings, as though this were her prerogative, and drank so much of the punch she even tried to dance with the draftsman, tottered around under the weight of her wig, spent the last half hour or so kneeling in the bathroom. Fred brought the night gal. The machinist, having received the gift of cologne (in a set that included eau de toilette spray and deodorant stick) from an anonymous giver, stood near the bowl. Outside, another four inches fell.
The office closed early on New Year’s Eve, and was closed on New Year’s Day. Everybody but Jim Dolly came in the day after that. He didn’t call. “Just like last year,” the secretary said, and Fred remembered, but Jim Dolly didn’t come in or call the next day either. The secretary dialed his home number and no one answered but a machine. She left a message.
“He came in last year,” she muttered. The draftsman looked up, and looked back down.
That afternoon Fred got in his Buick and drove to the far west side. The sun was out but it was fifteen degrees and even the light of the new year looked frozen, the snow and ice incandescent.
Jim Dolly lived in a high-rise condo overlooking the arctic desolation of the lake. The building stood a couple hundred yards off the street and was occupied mainly by singles and retirees. It was self-contained as a moonbase: glass elevator, tennis court, swimming pool, putting green, sauna, weight room, handball and racquetball courts, a film society, deli, restaurant, and lounge; there were tenants who hadn’t left in years. There was a receptionist and security guard in the lobby, and a warm and spacious foyer that was as far as they’d let you get.
There was a phone. A panel of buttons and numbers and Fred pressed the button next to Jim Dolly’s number. The foyer was carpeted. Fred pressed the button again. A kid came in delivering groceries and the receptionist buzzed him in. Fred called the lobby and spoke to the receptionist. He asked about Jim Dolly and watched her tell him over the phone that she wasn’t permitted to discuss the comings and goings of tenants, but would be happy to take a message. The guard looked at him. Fred kept it brief.
He drove once around the lot looking for Jim Dolly’s Lincoln. He didn’t see it but there was an underground garage he had no access to, and he followed a slow-moving truck equipped with a salt spreader back out to the street, keeping his distance and glad he believed in undercoating.
When he got back to the office the secretary looked up like she’d been waiting for him. She told him to call the bank. Also waiting were two serious-looking gentlemen in Jim Dolly’s office. Polite but not excessively so.
At T + 7 seconds the applause is over. The ship begins to roll. It has cleared the tower, cleared the sea, and we can hear Houston and we can hear the wire-thin radio voice of the crew: the commander, the pilot, the first and second mission specialists. “Roger your roll” Houston says, and the vehicle turns on its long axis, the shuttle swinging around and leaning back, arcing away from us, all fire and white and sky.
At T + 15 the second mission specialist says what sounds like “Fuck-in hot” and that’s all we hear her say. “Oookay,” the commander says a second later and Houston says, “Roll program confirmed” We are switched to another camera then, perhaps airborne, a longer lens, the better to track this furiously burning progress.
“There’s Mach one,’ the pilot says at T + 40 seconds and at T + 53 Houston says, “Velocity twenty-two hundred fifty-seven feet per second, altitude four point three nautical miles.” At T + 1 minute, 7 seconds all we can see of the ship is the white column of its trail and the coronal brilliance atop which it rides, a meteor returning to its origin, and Houston says, “Go to throttle up.”
Another camera and we see the vehicle again, flattened, grainy, and the commander says, “Roger go at throttle up!” at T + 1 minute, 10 seconds. Three seconds later the pilot says, “Uh oh.” We hear a loud burst of static, almost a roar, and even after the ship is gone, consumed by its own suddenly engorged exhaust, upward progress momentarily unchecked, even then Houston continues to report velocity (twenty-nine hundred feet per second), altitude (nine nautical miles), downrange distance (seven nautical miles), and it is not for another twenty-five seconds, when what remains is a thick trail of white forked like a two-headed serpent and a tiny, unaccounted-for fragment of the stack darting crazily across the blue, jetting smoke and flame as if skywriting an epitaph in some deranged longhand, not until T + 1 minute, 38 seconds that the voice of Houston says, “Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation,” that he says, “Obviously a major malfunction…“
He says, “We have no downlink.”
The Department of Corrections called. New Jersey? Delaware? The draftsman couldn’t be sure; he didn’t like answering the phone. He and Fred took turns because they no longer had a secretary. Nor was there a machinist and they now worked out of Fred’s basement, but the Commissioner of the Department of Corrections was on the line and he needed a machine.
They’d passed a bill. The statute forbade the participation of doctors. Fred put on his coat and hat and drove to the library.
The main branch was downtown, a big gray block of granite and terra cotta next to the old post office and more or less a repetition of it. Just inside the main entrance, beneath the two-story ceiling and cordoned off with velvet ropes, stood a scale replica of the terrestrial globe, six feet across and turning imperceptibly, once every twenty-four hours, like the planet to which you were so precariously attached with all its other inhabitants and their dreams and diseases and this blue reproduction, turning. Fred stood before it and cast his modest shadow on the western hemisphere, wiping his shoes.
The restrooms stank of homelessness. In the Popular Library shabbily dressed men and women falling through cracks landed momentarily in upholstered chairs, looking through magazines, talking back to them, nodding over them as if in agreement. The old man at the Information Desk looked vaguely disappointed in Fred and said, “Science and Technology.” This was Literature.
Down a winding flight of shiny stone steps and through an underground passage, a gallery of local history and progress—on one side the heroes of commerce, on the other men and women of color and their inventions: the traffic light, the gas mask, the carbon light bulb filament, the potato chip. Old photographs staring at an afterlife of dusty glass.
In Science and Technology Fred scrolled through microfilm, a stream of white print in a field of blue, occasionally stopping the blur to write down numbers. Euthanasia. Phlebotomy. Sodium Pentathol. R726 .H86.
He took an elevator.
On the third floor he haunted the aisles and stacks, grabbing at spines, loading his arms. Some of them old as relics, bindings cracked and peeling, shedding their leaves. Fred sat in the middle of a long table with banker’s lamps, the light in the tall windows growing cold, graduated. Besides him were just the young librarian and a few scattered patrons, one a thickly bearded man in a parka, wearing a dirty woolen cap, scribbling furiously in a notebook surrounded by obscure texts as though drafting an extremist manifesto. He moved his lips.
Truth serum—Sodium Pentothal—really just a potent sedative. Half-life of about twelve hours. Fred wrote it down. Used medically to induce coma at a dose of one and a half grams. What would, say, five grams do, he wondered, and wrote it down.
They left one by one. The bearded man muttered: “Goddamn bill of attainder.”
Pages yellowed, parched; sometimes they crumb
led in his hand. The smell of them. Curare smells like nothing. It is extracted from a vine that grows in the Amazon. Witch doctors boil the leaves and roots, native hunters tip their arrows with it. Its synthetic equivalent: pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant derived by witch doctors in white lab coats. In the spaces between the lines Fred saw molecules, flooding the neuromuscular junction like an army of officials waving their warrants, blocking the binding action of acetylcholine, preventing the contraction of muscle fiber. You stopped breathing.
Malartia bequaertiana. The librarian laughed softly into the phone.
He could find nothing about lethal dosages, and consulted the protocol for putting down unwanted animals. Pentobarbital would pretty much destroy the respiratory system without any help, but imagine the righteous outcry. Better to stick to the medical literatures, to potassium chloride.
The procedure and equipment shall be designed to ensure that the identity of the individual actually administering the lethal substance shall be unknown even to said individual.
The bearded man was gone. The windows shiny with night. She sounded like she was flirting.
You get potassium from eating bananas, also from South America. In larger doses it effects the conductivity of the cardiac muscle. Fred looked at waveforms.
The heart stops, filled with blood. His coat draped the back of his chair.
The young librarian said goodbye but didn’t lower the phone. She pressed a button, cleared her throat of all affection and her voice filled the building, announced the library would close in twenty minutes.
Two days later Fred called the warden at OSP and asked if he was still raising livestock in Minimum.
“Having a pig roast?” the warden asked.
“Furthering human progress,” Fred said.
“How much hog does that call for?”
“Two hundred pounds should do.”
The draftsman owned a van. He and Fred took out the backseats and covered the floor with old carpeting. At the farm the inmates covered the carpeting with straw and loaded the pig on a ramp. A big Yorkshire, pink and muscular, it balked at the top of the incline but they fooled it by holding a wooden board in its face. Then they leashed it to a frame stanchion so it couldn’t get at its fellow passengers.
The draftsman drove. The pig commenced pissing and shitting as soon as the van was in motion. They opened the windows.
“You’re going to enter history,” Fred told the pig. “All you have to do is go to sleep.”
He sat with a box of corn cobs in his lap. The pig farted.
They checked into a motel on the Boulevard, just north of where it turns into the Strip. A double was thirty dollars and there were free adult movies and a wedding chapel and a complimentary continental breakfast. Neither Fred nor his draftsman had been to Las Vegas before, though the draftsman had once spent a weekend in Atlantic City.
In the morning they went to the lobby but all that remained of breakfast were a few pieces of fruit and some complimentary burnt coffee. They got in the van and headed south, drove past palm trees and signs familiar from the neon montage of movies and television, redolent of spectacle and exotic possibility, but during the day looking sunblasted and secondhand. Crooked bits of plastic spelled out the names of entertainers, performers either born to this place or reborn to it, working the end of the road.
It was already hot. The mountains were solid and close in morning light and there were underground nuclear detonations just sixty-five miles away.
They turned left on Convention Center Drive and drove toward the big silver dome. There was a hassle with the parking lot attendant; they hadn’t scheduled a slot at the loading dock. If Jim Dolly were there he would have told the guy to tell it to Andrew Jackson, or Johnny Walker, or just backed him off. The last time with Jim Dolly had been Chicago, and there’d been flashing of bills then too (though Fred knew now where they’d come from), and drinking and gladhanding and whoring and altercating, while meanwhile Fred manned the booth, attended conferences, made contacts, nursed a social drink, went to bed early. His fifty-one percent.
He did not like asking for favors; they would carry it in from their parking space. They had less than two hours to set up but they were displaying only one product.
By ten the convention was in full swing. Men, mostly, with name badges and plastic cups in their hands visited booths where every conceivable device and application were promoted, brochured, demonstrated, guaranteed: a dozen varieties of handcuffs, restraints, portable cages, things made bulletproof, knifeproof, flameproof; shields, visors, helmets, uniforms for both guards and inmates, riot guns, tranquilizer darts, a multipurpose billy club that could spray Mace, deliver an electric shock, transmit an officer-down but could it still just plain knock the shit out of someone? A small metal vehicle about the size of a shopping cart that was actually a one-man tank, rolling almost noiselessly across the carpet. Women in scanty modified guard uniforms with caps, fishnet, patrolled the room, pouring champagne and proffering trays of hors d’oeuvres.
Some of the vendors offered their own refreshment, and these were visited by a derelict Shoshone who seemed to have wandered in straight out of the desert. He wore a dirty Hawaiian shirt and had long graying hair, no teeth, red-brown skin that looked as though it could deflect a knife blade and as though it had done just that. He reeked of booze and old sweat and worse, and when he approached the women with the trays veered off and gave him such clearance he could only stand with his hand empty and his eyes full, watching them pass.
Close to noon a small crowd had gathered in front of National Engineering, Inc., drawn by the gurney with its single armrest, the IV stand, the EKG machine, the black boxes. They were waiting for a demonstration but Fred and his draftsman could not recruit a single volunteer. It was an aspect of the industry that saw little light at these events, and beyond the matter of propriety, there was that of superstition.
The Shoshone approached. He stopped, looked about, pointed a finger at Fred. “You know a guy put out a little spread… wings, something,” he advised, “guy could pull some business.”
Fred looked at him, then looked away. Then he looked back at the Shoshone and said, “You help us out and I’ll get you so many wings you could start an air force.”
“What’re you selling?” the Shoshone asked, apparently unfamiliar with the theme of the event.
“Dignity,” Fred said.
“And hardware,” the draftsman said.
“I gotta sign something?” the Shoshone asked. The draftsman gave him a release form and he affixed to it a name which in English has no translation.
They laid him down on the gurney and secured his arm to the rest with an elbow splint. Fred noted the tracks of an old doper. It would have been necessary to perform a cutdown, make an incision in the neck or groin, lift out a good vein and insert the needle, and Fred, now a licensed phlebotomist, was qualified to train prison staff in just this procedure—it was part of the package, though he chose to not yet share this with his audience. Instead they covered the Indian with a gray woolen blanket and taped the IV line from the drip stand to his arm, covering it with a bandage so you couldn’t quite tell it drained into a pail under the gurney.
“Saline solution,” Fred explained to the growing crowd. “Makes it easier for the body to accept the drugs when we administer the cocktail.”
“Cocktail,” the Shoshone repeated, eyes closed. “Happy hour.”
They strapped him in with four sets of straps. The draftsman ran another line from a T-valve in the IV to a fitting at the bottom of the first black box.
The deputy warden from Mississippi looked at the Shoshone and asked what was his crime.
“See his shirt?” someone said. “Does the condemned have anything to say?” someone said and at this a woman in the crowd spoke up against such exploitation, and when the man with her offered to take the Shoshone’s place, the Indian lifted his head and spoke quite clearly on the score.
“Go
find your own fuckin gig,” he advised. “Guy’s trying to make a living here.”
“This is the delivery module,” Fred said when the couple had gone, and opened a panel in the first black box. The syringes, upright, two rows of three.
“One set’s backup,” he explained, and the operations manager from Oklahoma asked, “What’s your power supply?”
“Twelve-volt battery,” Fred said. They’d taken it out of the van. “Rechargeable. In case of a power failure, the procedure can still be carried out. If need be it can complete six cycles at fifteen-minute intervals before it has to recharge.”
“Hear that, Texas?” Oklahoma said. “Think you all can keep up now?”
Fred went to the other black box and stood to one side of it. The draftsman stood on the other and from under his breath Fred told him to get rid of his pipe. There were two keys in the front panel, and two buttons. Fred faced his prospects.
“The death warrant has been read,” he announced, and the Shoshone slept, at peace and breathing evenly. “At a signal from the warden, or other designated event coordinator, the control module is armed.”
He turned one of the keys, and the draftsman turned the other. A red light came on.
“The machine is now armed,” he said, “but the cycle has not yet begun.” He pressed a button above the key. The draftsman pressed the other one. The red light went off and an amber light came on.
“A computer inside the control module is now deciding which of us actuated the delivery,” Fred said. “Once the decision is made it is erased from memory. It will never be known.”
“My brother-in-law was playing the two-bit slots at Bally’s last night?” the deputy director from Oklahoma said in a low voice. “Double Diamond, five paylines. Hit three on the diagonal, paid out twenty-five thousand quarters. Son of a bitch.”
Layman's Report Page 10