The Good Father

by Noah Hawley

  “My conviction is simple: More violence is not what Julie would have wanted. More violence will not bring Julie back. More violence only makes our society more violent.”

  At 6:45 a.m. the guards arrived and began the final preparations. McVeigh was searched again, and then handcuffed with his hands in front of him. He took one last look at the moon, a crescent of bright salvation, then entered the hall and walked the short distance to the execution chamber unaided. There his cuffs were removed. He looked for the witness gallery, but the curtains were closed. It was important to him that they know he was not afraid. That he died not as a loser but as a martyr.

  He was strapped to the gurney and covered with a gray sheet. A priest gave him the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. It was meant to provide comfort and forgiveness before the crossing. Only after he had swallowed were the curtains opened and the faces of the witnesses revealed. A camera had been set up so relatives not present could watch the execution on closed-circuit TV. McVeigh raised his head and stared into the lens. He watched the curved glass, eyes unblinking. Family members at the viewing center felt as if McVeigh was looking into their souls.

  Bill had not come. He couldn’t bring himself to watch his son die. This was not the boy he remembered, the skinny kid who laughed too loudly. The shy kid who didn’t know how to talk to girls. Last month, McVeigh had refused to hug him during their visit. In his eyes it was like he was already dead.

  In the execution chamber they asked McVeigh if he had any last words. He wanted to sit up, but the straps were too tight. He quoted the British poet William Ernest Henley and said, “I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.”

  Next door, the executioner stepped up to the machine. He pushed a button and turned a key. Three chemicals were injected. First sodium pentothal, which causes sleep; then pancuronium bromide, which stops respiration; and finally potassium chloride, which stops the heart.

  If injected improperly or in the wrong doses, a prisoner remains awake as the pancuronium bromide flows into his veins. He is paralyzed but feels an agonizing burning sensation. Is this what happened to McVeigh? Did he feel the pain his victims felt, an explosion of flames eating him alive? Or did he go peacefully, dropping off into crapulent sleep? We’ll never know for sure. What we do know is that when the chemicals began to drip into the IV in his right leg around 7:10 a.m., McVeigh’s skin and lips became paler. Minutes later, witnesses said McVeigh made a few spasm-like movements.

  At 7:14 a.m. local time, he was declared dead.

  It was Murray’s idea to go to Royce Hall. I’d been afraid of it, the power it held. It was a place imbued with history, with implications I didn’t know how to contemplate. We were driving away from Carlos Peña’s apartment. There was a dirty unease in the car, a feeling of contamination, as if crazy were a flu you could catch from a sneeze. I thought about what he’d said. Acceptance. Was that the key? Would I never be happy again if I didn’t accept that my son had murdered another human being? And yet what did my happiness matter when my son sat in a jail cell? When he would soon go on trial for his life? As his father I would gladly trade my happiness for his life.

  We drove west on Sunset Boulevard through West Hollywood, crossing La Cienega and driving into Beverly Hills.

  “I’ll call my guy at the FBI,” Murray said, “have them look at this Carlos guy again. Steak knives in the sofa. That is one creepy dude.”

  I watched the palm trees pass overhead through the sunroof.

  “I’ve been reading a lot about the other assassinations,” I said. “Lincoln, McKinley, Kennedy.”

  “Which Kennedy?” said Murray.

  “Both. I’ve got a stack of books by the bed it’ll take me months to read. I don’t know why. What could it help?”

  “You’re a doctor,” said Murray. “They’re case studies. As a lawyer I find myself looking for precedents. I remember a fight with my ex because I came home late and smelled like strippers. And yet when we were dating she liked that about me. My randiness. Standing in the kitchen, pots flying past my head, I argued the case like there was a judge there who could overrule her, who could grandfather the strippers into my marriage. We can’t help it. Our professions become our identities.”

  We drove past the Beverly Hills Hotel. The sun was out again, rain-bowing the houses of the rich.

  “I’m reading all their biographies,” I said. “Sirhan Sirhan, Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  “You’re looking for your son. John Hinckley watches the same movie twenty-seven times and stalks an underage actress. You think, ‘Could my son do that?’ Lee Harvey Oswald defects to Russia. He is America’s most important Communist. He stands on a New Orleans street corner handing out ‘Fair Play for Cuba’ flyers. You read this and you try to picture Danny sweating in the Louisiana mug.”

  Case studies. Is this what I was doing? A woman presents with shortness of breath. Her pulse is weak. She has trouble lifting her right arm. Examining her, I consider these symptoms in context of all the other cases I’ve worked. All the other patients who’ve presented with one or all of these symptoms. Case studies. Inside the diagnosis of others lies the answer to every patient’s problems.

  “There were three shooters in Dallas,” I said.

  “Maybe. Or maybe that’s just what we tell ourselves because Oswald is too small. How could this weakling, this sissy, have killed America’s first movie-star president? Look at Reagan. He was a cowboy, John Wayne with nukes, and this fat nobody drops him like a bad penny.”

  “Do they do it because they’re sick? I’m trying to understand.”

  Murray stopped at a red light. A pink Ferrari pulled up next to us, driven by a braless blonde.

  “I read an article after the Giffords shooting,” said Murray. “Studies show that nearly all these guys are mentally disturbed with no rational political plan. The politics are incidental. According to a recent Secret Service white paper there are four basic types of political assassins. Type Ones view their acts as a sacrifice of self for a political ideal. Type Twos are people with overwhelming and aggressive egocentric needs for acceptance, recognition, and status. Type Threes are psychopaths or sociopaths who believe that the condition of their lives is so intolerably meaningless and without purpose that the destruction of society and themselves is desirable for its own sake. Type Fours are characterized by severe emotional and cognitive distortions that are expressed in hallucinations and delusions of persecution and/or grandeur.”

  He turned and looked at me.

  “You see your son in there anywhere?”

  I shook my head. Danny wasn’t a psychopath. He wasn’t a radical. He didn’t crave attention and he wasn’t schizophrenic. If the symptoms don’t match the diagnosis, the diagnosis must be wrong.

  “He didn’t do this, Murray,” I said. “After seeing Peña I’m more convinced than ever.”

  “It’s not what we believe,” said Murray. “It’s what we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt.”

  We arrived at UCLA just as classes were getting out. The lawns were filled with students: boys in school T-shirts, women in denim skirts and Uggs.

  “I can’t help it,” said Murray. “I can’t walk around these places without picturing the epic fucks, coed chicks with their knockout bodies. Little tits, big tits. Runner’s legs. They’re not tired of the whole deal yet. They still like the way a dick tastes, how it feels rubbing up against their thighs.”

  “You need help,” I said.

  A makeshift memorial lingered in front of the entrance to Royce Hall. Piles of flowers, farewell cards, testimonials. The university was considering renaming the building after Seagram. At the very least there would be a memorial. A plaque. We entered through the main doors. The building was a light-red brick edifice with porticos and archways. Two towers rose on either side of a steepled roof.

  We were standing in a large entry hall. From video footage I knew that my son had entered through the middle doors. Cameras had caught him pas
sing through the metal detectors at 2:51 p.m. I tried to picture the foyer filled with students, to imagine the energy in the air, the thrum and pulse of a crowd. Ahead of us were doors to the main theater. From my timeline I knew that these hadn’t opened until just after three. There were stairways to our right and left. The one on the right led up to the hallway where the Secret Service claimed to have found a fire extinguisher still sticky with duct-tape residue. The prosecution would argue that Danny had climbed those stairs moments after entering. That he’d waited until the second-floor hallway was empty and then taken the gun from its hiding place.

  I tried to picture this, my son pulling off the tape, running his hand over the sticky steel. Would he have pulled the clip and checked the chamber to make sure the gun was still loaded? Did he stuff it into the waistband of his pants like a common street thug? I couldn’t picture it. But maybe this was my flaw. As a doctor I couldn’t afford to rule out any diagnosis. I couldn’t afford to let emotion color my judgment. “Let’s go inside,” I said.

  The houselights were low. We entered from the back, walking down the red-and-yellow carpet toward the stage. I tried to picture all the seats full, the restless hum of voices. Seagram’s campaign manager had demanded students be allowed to stand in front of the stage. Otherwise it would look like the crowd was disinterested. They needed that rock-concert press, hundreds of fans hungry for closeness, wanting to touch their star.

  The stage was five feet high. Before his speech began, Seagram had come to the front of the stage and shook the outstretched hands. The speakers were blasting the Smashing Pumpkins song “Today.”

  Today is the greatest

  Day I’ve ever known.

  Can’t live for tomorrow.

  Tomorrow’s much too long.

  I thought about the footage I’d seen. Seagram touches the upraised hands. He stands in the middle of the stage taking in the smiling faces, reveling in the applause. He has been campaigning for more than a year. He has won the Iowa caucus, the New Hampshire primary. He has won Super Tuesday, and now he is alone at the front of the pack. But there are still five months to go. There is the Democratic convention and then the national election, the knock-down, drag-out with his Republican opponent. He has slept maybe five hours in the last two days. There is so much to do, phone calls to be made, money to be raised.

  He wants to stay close to his children. He doesn’t want his wife to forget what he looks like. He stands on the stage energized by the crowd, and yet hasn’t he made this same speech a hundred times? He tries to make the words fresh. He tries to give them something special. They are the future, after all. It sounds corny, but it’s true. They are tomorrow’s voters, tomorrow’s taxpayers. He who controls the young, controls the world. He thinks about saying this, but it sounds cynical. “Controls” is the wrong word. “Commands” would be better.

  Seagram takes a moment to look over at the west wing, where Rachel is standing. She smiles at him, gives him a thumbs-up. She has been so strong throughout this whole process. First lady. When he says these words to her she laughs. She can’t believe this could be her. At the same time she says, “Couldn’t they call it ‘first woman’? Lady always sounds like what a cabdriver calls you when he’s trying to take you for a ride.”

  He turns back to the crowd. The faces in front of him are white and black, Indian, Chinese. This is the America of the future, a patchwork of nations. Behind him Larry and Frank, his Secret Service detail, scan the crowd, looking for anything suspicious. Seagram soaks in the love of the crowd. It’s hard to believe that anyone here would want to hurt him. He starts to talk about hope. About how the founders built hope right into the constitution. The pursuit of happiness.

  “This is what makes our country great,” he says. “We are all, each one of us, required to go out and find the things that make us happy. But that happiness comes with a price. Because isn’t our neighbors’ happiness just as important as our own? How can I be happy if my neighbor is suffering?”

  In the balcony somebody throws a beach ball. The crowd below surges up to catch it, to bounce it around from hand to hand like they’re at a baseball game or a rock concert. “Without hope,” he says, “there is no growth. Without growth there is no life.”

  He is in the home stretch now, climbing toward crescendo. He bounces on the balls of his feet and punches the air. When he is president he will change it all. He will drive the lobbyists out of the city. He will talk first, shoot later. He will listen to his advisers, to the people themselves.

  “We were not put on this earth,” he says, “to kill each other, to step over our neighbors in the streets. We were not put on this earth to get rich, or put up walls. We were put here to take care of each other, to start families and raise our children.”

  He steps away from the podium, walks forward. He wants to be closer to them, to feel their hands move the air in front of him.

  “We were put here,” he says—then suddenly he feels as if he’s been kicked in the chest. The sound comes after, a metallic clap, echoing through the hall. He steps back, tries to steady himself. The second shot hits him in the neck. He drops the microphone and the world seems to tilt up around him. The stage hits him hard, breaking his wrist. He lies there bleeding. Six seconds ago he was talking. Six seconds ago he was heading toward the end. Now he is losing life, watching it spray out in a violet arc. He puts a hand on his neck, trying to stop the flow, but his arm is weak.

  His wife is running now, trying to reach him. Larry and Frank stand over him, guns drawn. Frank is shouting into his wrist and searching the crowd, his head whipping left and right.

  Not like this, he thinks, as Rachel drops to her knees beside him. He thinks of his children at home with their grandma. He prays they are not watching. And then he thinks of his son Nathan. Those final seconds struggling against the icy water. Daddy’s got you, he’d said when he finally pulled the boy out of the pond. His little face was blue. His limbs limp. Daddy’s got you.

  Death comes for all of us. And now it was Jay Seagram’s turn.

  “Paul,” said Murray.

  I looked around. I was standing on the empty stage. Heavy lights hung above me, the curtains folded in the wings. Aside from Murray and me the theater was empty. I thought of John Wilkes Booth jumping from Lincoln’s box inside the Ford Theatre, landing on the stage, snapping his leg. I thought of him pausing before the stunned audience, an actor savoring a moment. Though his leg was broken he stood tall and yelled, “Sic semper tyrannis.”

  Thus ever to tyrants.

  Politics had always been a kind of theater. It was the same with medicine. Surgery used to be a public affair, a man with a knife cutting open the human body in front of dozens of spectators. In the early days, the operating room was known as the operating theater.

  “Paul,” Murray said again. He was standing in the pit looking up at me, unconsciously occupying the very space my son had occupied, and I stood where Seagram had stood. It was the nature of the space, the way guests are drawn invariably toward the kitchen.

  It’s too much, I thought. Too big. We were standing in a place that was now a part of history, a place that housed the best and worst qualities of the human animal. Hope, and then murder. The extinction of hope. If my son had done this thing, I did not understand the world I lived in. Nor did I want to live in it.

  Sic semper tyrannis.

  But who is the real tyrant, if not the man with the gun?

  He stayed in Iowa City for four months. The weather turned warm, then wet, then fractious. Hail fell from the sky. Tornadoes blew in like crazy drunken uncles, destroying homes and lives. Some days the heat was so bad the Mexicans would fill feeding troughs with water and take turns throwing each other in. Danny found he liked riding his bike in the rain. He liked to watch the heavy clouds roll in, to feel the static charge in the air. There was a risk to it he found he responded to, the appeal of a breathless, harebrained scheme.

  He saw his first funnel cloud on Jul
y 16, God’s evil finger reaching down and stirring up the American anthill. He was riding his bike north toward Cedar Rapids. Towering cumulonimbus clouds crowded the western horizon. The wind had been rising steadily for the last hour, first a steady breeze, then a thrusting gust that flapped through his hair and clothes. Rain blew sideways. Coming to a crossroad his bike tipped and bucked and he landed in a ditch. Mud soaked through his pants and into his shoes. He lay there for a moment making sure nothing was broken. In the distance he watched as massive black storm clouds squatted over the flatlands and gave birth to a twisting finger of death. The wind was roaring in his ears. He was a kid from the suburbs. What did he know about the animal threat of weather?

  He watched the funnel cloud touch down and race through the farmland several miles north, swallowing cars and houses. It was an ugly black wedge. He pictured cows vaulting up in the air, circling the ground like spiders in a toilet bowl.

  He got to his knees, then his feet. He started to run. The earth made a groaning sound. He looked back. The finger had become an arm, a whirling black limb battering the ground. What was he doing here? Risk is one thing. But this was insane. Around him it sounded like planes landing and taking off. He thought of another near-death experience, an airplane ride he took when he was eight. The feeling that everything was happening faster than he could control. He found a battered rock wall and hid behind it. He knew it wouldn’t protect him from the twister, but there was nowhere else to go. He was soaked from the rain. Hailstones the size of baseballs pummeled his back and shoulders. It was hard not to feel hatred toward him, as if the earth, the sky, the world hated him in that moment.

  He remembered standing on an elevated subway platform in a blizzard one night, waiting for the F train. He was fifteen years old and living with his father. Bored, he had skipped school entirely that day to explore the city. The wind was high and cold. And the snow was blowing sideways so that it came streaking, silent and hungry, right toward him. And with the darkness hanging like a shadow under every flake, and in the muffled light of the overhead fluorescents, it felt as if he was the one who was moving, blown forward by the wind into this grid work of snow that hung frozen in the air, the way snow looks when you’re driving and the heavy wet flakes are leaping in through the glare of your headlights and colliding with the glass in front of you.