When they passed out the waitlist cards he couldn’t feel certain parts of himself. He knew it could have been worse, could have been the false warmth of hypothermia (bodies found naked by would-be rescuers, clothing shed in the final moments as if in preparation for the hereafter). The cards were numbered. Technically you could leave the line—you could go somewhere and stay alive and return without losing your place, but Fred wasn’t taking any chances. Neither was the man in front of him. The man in front of Fred wore a hunting cap and coveralls and was drinking from a half-pint and half of that was gone. He pushed it at Fred but Fred shook his head.
“I don’t think that helps,” he said.
“As long as it feels like it does,” the man with the half-pint said, and took another one. He took his other hand out of his pocket and put his thumb and little finger together. “So long as you can do this…”
“So they say,” Fred said, but didn’t try it himself yet.
The man looked into the street at passersby. “Seen any bigshots?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t know if I had,” Fred said.
“Good for you,” the man said. “How do you tell a local from an out-of-towner?”
Fred tried to form a smile, told him he’d heard that one in the pub.
“Well excuse me,” the man said. “I just live here.”
“Well that’s a switch,” Fred said. He wasn’t sure what else to say so he asked the man how he made his living.
“Sucking shit out of septic tanks,” the man said. A pump truck, hepatitis B shot. “Thought I’d see what all the people in black come here and freeze their asses off for. You’d think it was a goddamn funeral.” He pushed the bottle at Fred again and again Fred said no thanks.
“Excuse hell out of me,” the man said. You couldn’t tell if he was offended or just talked that way. He looked a little unsteady on his feet. “I wanted to see that witch movie, couldn’t get in. You see it?”
“This is what I came to see,” Fred said. The man looked at him, leaned back as if for a better appraisal, lost a little of his balance and bumped a couple in front of him.
“Excuse me I just live here,” he said by way of apology. He asked if they knew how to tell an out-of-towner from a local. Asked them if they’d seen the witch.
He reeled back Fred’s way then, tilted his head toward the marquee and tried to lower his voice. “I hear this movie they show somebody getting the chair.”
“I don’t think so,” Fred said. Or was this another change? Additional footage.
“I heard he’s some kind of ex…ex…” The man trailed off, tried again, faltered. “I hear he’s some kinda damn Nazi.”
“He isn’t a Nazi,” Fred said. “He’s an engineer.” His mouth had trouble forming certain words, but not these.
“I’ll kick a Nazi’s ass,” the man said. Then he raised the bottle reflectively and said, “I’ll say one thing though.”
“It’s a true story,” Fred said.
“Disciplined,” the man said. “And clean. I’ll say that. Then I’ll kick their ass.” And he drank to their discipline and cleanliness, or to kicking their ass.
“What do you mean not a Nazi?” he said suddenly. “The hell are we doing here then?” He looked a little suspicious. “How do you know so much? This guy a friend of yours?”
“I know the story.”
“No shit,” the man said. “So why do they call him Mr. Death?”
“I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you.”
“Mighty white of you,” the man said. “Me being a local yokel and all.”
“No offense,” Fred said.
“I’ll be judge of that,” the man said, and raised the bottle but it was empty.
“Well fuck me,” he said. He raised the bottle again and it was still empty. Looked around.
“Time to change the antifreeze,” he announced then. “Flush and fill—don’t start without me…”
“That’s what the cards are for,” Fred said.
“Why you think they give us these cards?” the man said, stepping away. “Kick a Nazi’s ass,” he mumbled, bumping into people, excusing hell out of himself.
When he’d gone the theater staff started selling waitlist tickets at ten dollars each. The volunteers moved the barriers. One of them announced they were seating the advance ticketholders. The advance ticketholders formed another line, and when it had disappeared into the theater there was room in the lobby for the waitlist. It surged forward as one making grateful sounds and Fred staggered along, his feet somewhere below him, operating under remote control. The lobby was small, the doors closed just behind him. On the wall over the concession stand were pharaonic likenesses in relief and painted scarabs, and a sign on a door said the balcony was closed for repair. Fred smelled coffee but wanted nothing, just stood there in the ecstatic warmth while someone drove nails into his ears and through his feet.
Almost half an hour later the novelty of survival had worn off and the staff were still counting heads in the theater. They were shorthanded and running late. Fred watched in vain for the documentarist. A young man dressed in black with a shaved head came out and announced they would seat waitlist ticketholders one through seven. Fred looked at his ticket though he already knew his number. He took off his gloves. They let in more of the line from outside and the crowd shifted. The stomping of boots, melting ice. There was slush on the carpet. Footprints.
The young man with the shaved head came out of the theater and announced that no more seats were available, the screening was now officially sold out. He said he was sorry. Their tickets would be refunded at the booth. The doors were closed behind him.
It was Fred’s turn to have to piss.
There was nothing Egyptian about the restroom. All the urinals were occupied so he went into a stall and shut the door. When he’d finished and come out, he washed his hands for a long time. He washed them till everyone else was gone. Thought he heard distant applause.
He could demand to see the manager, tell them who he was. Demand they speak to the documentarist.
He could make demands.
He stood there. Didn’t look in the mirror.
Coming up the stairs, he heard drama that was not a soundtrack. When he was back in the lobby, he saw that it was coming from the entrance. The local man who drained septic tanks for a living was standing just inside the doors, pleading his case.
“Excuse me I just goddamn live here,” he shouted. He’d managed to get drunker while keeping his feet. “What was I supposed to do, piss my pants? There was a line.”
Probably one at the liquor store too, Fred thought.
“The room is filled to capacity,” someone who must have been the manager said. “I couldn’t let you in if I wanted to.”
The whole theater staff seemed to be there, except for the young man with the shaved head, who stood before the doors to Fred’s film like a bouncer. From behind him came circus music.
“Sir, if you don’t leave I’m going to have to call Sergeant Little,” the manager said.
“I’ll kick his Nazi ass,” the local man said. “Kick Redford’s ass,” and he started with Redford’s manager by hitting him in the mouth with the back of his fist. The staff closed in around him. The kid with the shaved head headed for the trouble.
Fred stopped thinking and moved. He saw the boatman on the wall, stopped. The door to the balcony was closer. He kept waiting for someone to call to him but all he heard was the local man’s voice in struggle: “I live here. This is my home.” The door with the sign was unlocked.
He climbed the narrow stairs, climbed into the music. Opened the door on lightning. It was not a large balcony, but it was not a large house. Mr. Death rising in his cage; the seats dirty in disrepair, some of them missing. He closed the door behind him and moved down along the wall, wondering if the floor would hold even him. But it made no sound nor betrayed other sign of weakness, as if he weighed nothing at all, and he sat in front and took off his hat and w
atched them electrocute the elephant.
It collapsed in a great smoldering pile of meat. Sounds of outrage below. Fred looked down at the backs of all those heads and wondered would he be charged with this atrocity as well. Edison, he would tell them, he would have his chance, and then he heard his voice and saw them hearing it: it was telling the world how much coffee he drank. He saw them seeing his huge elastic self, undulating in a shiny black pool.
He looked himself in the eye, but it was their mirror, not his.
He saw it for the first time again.
Home movies: his father, himself, the guards and trustees, working and horseplaying on the grounds at OSP. A re-enactment, staged, fake scratches and age, but his young self looked more like him than he had.
He couldn’t see his father’s face.
“When I was fourteen years old,” he said.
Sitting in his chair in black and white, in a grain so turbulent he seemed to be disintegrating into the particles of being; standing at the switch, throwing it on himself, the ensuing brilliance revealing the walls of the theater, the glyphs and reliefs figured upon them: the jackal-headed god, the scale on which your heart will be weighed, the demon who will devour it if it is too heavy with sin, as the mind devours light and spits up stones in the dark.
He heard the voice of his wife but could not see her; she hadn’t let them have her face.
He drove his car and drank coffee and smoked, saw himself stirring himself into bits…The German in his yellow hardhat, iron in brick, Fred in the camp in the hat he now held in his hands. Video flattened onto film, drained of blood and color… Someone behind a surgeon’s mask, pretending to be him, moving in slow-motion like a sleepwalker. Chiseling at a wall as if to inscribe his text, his report, his own book of the dead. A life…faces he hadn’t recognized the first time and didn’t know now: detractors, debunkers, belittlers, revilers, crows and jackals wearing the masks of men. The British historian who said the Report had changed his life, saying, “An insignificant little man who came from nowhere and returned to it,” but who did he mean? Wasn’t he a friend? He too had been edited, remade, deformed. Only lies are larger than life.
They called him a Columbus who called the world flat.
He heard the audience cackle, protecting itself with laughter. Then it lifted its hands in a great cataract of applause. Fred’s remained on his lap. He could not add to nor take from the clamor of skin, of shouted and whistled air, it was meant for someone else. They applauded with their backs to him till the credits had run. Then the other light came on.
The color of the walls—they’d thought gold was the flesh of the gods. The curtain closed over the screen. A festival official took the stage. Attractive in middle age, streaks of gray, a down vest. She thanked everyone for coming, and for coming to the festival. She introduced the documentarist and the producer, who also stood and then the entire theater was on its feet as in imitation, clapping again, not a seat left sat in out of two hundred and sixty-two.
There are fourteen judges in the Hall of Two Truths.
The official announced they would commence the Q&A portion of the screening. She dispatched a couple of volunteers with wireless microphones who would relay the queries of audience members chosen at her discretion.
They asked about the origin of the film, and about the device. They asked about the authenticity of certain footages. The elephant. The documentarist was articulate. He was funny and charming, and sometimes coy, and occasionally impatient as genius sometimes is.
Sometimes he did not understand the question.
Someone asked about the Harvard screening and the producer said, “There is only one cut.”
Someone asked where Fred was and Fred said, “Up here.”
The documentarist looked up. People turned their heads, then the rest of themselves, and a low murmur was conducted like a current through the audience.
“I’m here,” Fred announced, a little louder, standing now though the balcony rail was low. The murmuring rose, then began to fall. The producer took a step. The documentarist stayed where he was but seemed to be nodding and might have been smiling, though from a distance it was hard to tell.
The balcony at the back was now another stage. The audience had reversed itself more than seemed physically possible—filmmakers, journalists, agents, executives—their faces featureless as the backs of their heads. Fred swayed dizzily but there was no sitting down now, only falling. He stood above them at a height of seven thousand feet, within the gold walls just beyond which the snow fell and the wind howled, hungry for your flesh. It would beguile your body from its clothes and from your body whatever self it concealed. He heard the stairs somewhere behind him, the door, but no one yet touched him, as if he could not be found. Was this what the historian meant by nowhere?
“I’m Fred,” Fred said, his voice now less than the silence into which it spoke.
No thank you.
Jerome Bowden, executed by lethal injection November 15, 1996, upon being asked if he wished to make a final statement.
All the walls are down. All the gates and towers, save the west tower, gone…the gymnasium, high school, the dining hall. Zone Two, Zone Three, the death house, the powerhouse, the building where the band rehearsed: dust. A high fence runs across the middle of what used to be there, and on the other side stands the minimum-security wing of the new facility. You can see the inmates far away and below from the west tower, walking their dogs. A new program: they have been trained to train them for the blind. You can see them but you can’t take their picture; your camera will be confiscated and you will be escorted from the grounds. You will be permanently barred from returning, they say.
I’m told the program is a great success.
What remains: the administration building and the warden’s quarters, the central guard room, the visiting room, the Catholic chapel. The east cell block and the west cell block, the laundry and showers, the infirmary—gutted but still there, preserved by the Preservation Society. Bare fixtures, peeling paint, debris. The receiving dorm and the library upstairs, the barber shop in the long wing slanting northeast of the control room and, in the northwest wing, the old prison court and the isolation cells buried beneath it. A catacombs. They’ve left the cemetery next to the railroad tracks—you can see the headstones from the west tower but that’s as close as you can get; it is still on state property, still in use. You can’t take their pictures either.
The Preservation Society took the state to court, and the court took it off the state’s hands. They’ve managed to restore whatever they’ve been able to raise money for, and they conduct guided tours five days a week. (Eight dollars for adults, six for children.) They’ve made the administration building a museum, and in a glass case there is a ticket to a public hanging—thirty dollars, a lot of money then and now it is again. In another case, much bigger, is the chair I built for the warden. The plaque says Donated by Anonymous—I try not to draw attention to myself, even if it seems not to matter anymore.
The chair is still there but the warden is gone, as are the tailor shop and garage, the print shop…the lumber mill, the greenhouse, the dog who slept in the road…
They put it behind glass because kids kept climbing into it.
Now here comes Hollywood with its cameras and lights. The Discovery Channel, music videos, rock stars and rappers, performers who either belong here or pretend to. (And the younger one pretends to be them.) Celebrities have visited, but I won’t drop any big names. You can rent out space for parties and receptions and reunions, and once a year there is Murder Mystery Dinner at sixty-nine dollars a plate.
Once a year there is Halloween.
Twice a month, March through November, the Society allows for another kind of visit. Admission is higher than usual and there is a waiting list. There is a limit of a hundred guests, and children must be accompanied by an adult. No guides, no concessions, no light but what you can carry, and the doors are locked behind you, dusk till
dawn. You sign a release. You can leave whenever you want, but once you’ve left you can’t come back. The younger one turns thirteen on the day of one of those nights, and this is our gift to him. Happy birthday.
They call it a hunt, not a tour.
We stand in our coats in front of the front entrance. Granite pillars. Victorian. Gothic. We are not alone, but the other visitors are lugging around cameras and microphones, Geiger counters, ion counters, infrared thermometers. Gear. We carry only lanterns and spare batteries. The only ghosts I know of are the ones you always bring with you, and you are looking for a place to lose them.
I’m a show-me kind of guy.
“Looks like a castle,” the younger one says, and so it does. A castle without king or subjects, only invaders.
Queen Anne. Romanesque.
They lock the doors behind us.
It is always ten degrees cooler inside. There is light and power in the administration building but tonight only the foyer is lit. The museum is off limits. He’s wearing the same baggy uniform he usually wears, but I’ve made sure his pants are not below his waist, not under his shoes. I’ve made sure his headphones are in the car. This is no place for music.
We take the stairs. The steps are painted. I don’t pretend to be his father, I try to set an example. I’ve never held a child’s hand, and I’ve fought the urge to take the back of his neck. In the central guard room there are more granite pillars and the ceiling is almost too high for our lamps. I try to draw his attention to the spirit of the architecture, the upward thrust of its design, meant to inspire inmates up and out of old ways, old lives…Anyway, I try to instruct.
“Where did they do the raping?” he says. He is afraid of the wrong things.
I pretend not to hear that and show him the control center instead, a two-story cage of glass and steel. Restored. Faded parquet floor, black and white squares like a big chessboard.
Layman's Report Page 26