Wednesday. The day you have been dreading.
You get up just like it is any other day. Cheryl has the coffee ready when you get downstairs. The Starbucks half-caf that you like so much. You have reached that point in middle age where you have to watch your caffeine intake. Salt. Sunlight. Shit like that.
You eat a grapefruit half with your coffee. It tastes like crapola.
Cheryl kisses you goodbye. She knows it is a bad day for you (and a worse day for someone else—ha-ha) but she knows you well enough to not ask if you are okay or to try and say something stupid like, what you are going to do tonight is really a humane thing and you are performing a service for the community and she is proud of you yadda yadda yadda, ad nauseam. But she will not say that. Partly because she is smarter than that, but mostly because both of you know that this little part-time job of yours is most certainly not something you are doing for the good of the community. It’s simply a way to make extra money because both of you want to go to Paris for your twentieth wedding anniversary, but you don’t want to dip into your retirement accounts to do so. There is an extra-tasty cabin on Lake Tahoe that you both see yourselves in ten years from now and neither of you wants to jeopardize that. So, you got yourself a sweet little part-time job to bankroll the Paris jaunt. Irregular, erratic hours, but the pay is good.
The morning is cool, so you leave the car windows up as you drive in to the office. With the car closed up, you can smell yourself. You smell like a doctor. You smell dry and dusty—like white birch tongue depressors—and sharp—like isopropyl alcohol.
It is a usual day for you. You see the same old shit that you have seen every day since you and Bob Zegna opened an internal medicine practice together. Ingrown toenails, broken fingers, infected piercings, generalized anxiety, persistent headaches, kids with fevers, men with limp dicks, women with dry pussies.
You get back home at four. Cheryl is out somewhere, but she has left dinner for you in the microwave. Eggplant parmesan. You zap it for seventy seconds. It is good.
You get to the prison at six o’clock. Thank God there are no protestors. Not yet, anyway. You hate, hate, hate protestors, and this one has been getting a lot of play in the media. CNN, Fox, the networks, the bloggers, the Twitterers, the YouTubers. Mostly because the condemned, just barely an adult when sentenced, had been diagnosed with possible learning disabilities and some definite mental health issues when he committed his crimes, and because Billy Smith is the only person in America on death row who has not been convicted of murder. Smith was convicted of Kidnapping With Bodily Injury—a capital crime in the peach state. The talking heads like to bat it back and forth how capital punishment, if used at all, should be reserved only for those who took another human being’s life. The other side likes to point out how Crisium Lovejoy did indeed lose her life even if Billy Smith was not specifically charged—and let’s not forget the various other persons who lost their lives along the way. And also there was the contention that Smith was in fact a kidnap victim himself, abducted by Norris and Dobbs. That it was a Patty Hearst scenario. A Stockholm Syndrome situation.
But you try not to concern yourself with the politics of it. What would be the point? You are not Eddie Vedder. And Billy Smith is not Troy Davis. (And Christ a’mighty what a fuckup that was. News vans and swelling crowds out here while you had Davis inside, strapped to the gurney, waiting for the Justices of the United States Supreme Court to finish texting and Skyping each other and make up their ever-loving minds whether Davis should live or die. And in the end, it was you in the death room with him. It was you who had to say, in essence, Well, Troy, old pal, thanks for playing, but it looks like Caesar has given you the thumbs down. Better luck next time. What a fucked-up night.)
So you are glad that you do not have to cross a protest line or brave the probing lens of the media as you drive through the gate. Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison is about an hour outside of Atlanta, and apparently nobody felt compelled to make the commute from the city to hold a candlelight vigil. Of course, now that they were scheduling the executions at 7 p.m. instead of midnight, candlelight vigils lost some of their impact. It’s still daylight outside, for Christ’s sake.
You walk through the prison yard to the Death House. There is only one entrance. When you walk in, you have to cross through the observation room where there are three wooden benches as long as church pews that face a glass window obscured by drawn curtains. Almost like a little movie theatre. Everything except a popcorn machine.
A small door to the left of the observation window leads to the execution chamber. You enter. The execution chamber smells the same way you do—dry, like dusty tongue depressors and sharp, like alcohol. The walls are cinderblock, painted an antiseptic white. The door that leads to the death watch cell is painted a cheery lemon yellow. You realize that is absurd, but it’s true. It’s a cheerful lemon color. The door’s trim is black, and the baseboards are black. White curtains cover the observation window. The gurney is covered with a black pad, black pillow, and black restraining straps that dangle over the sides. It’s all really quite color coordinated. The extensions that support the condemned man’s arms are black, too. They jut off from the gurney like the wings of an ebony angel.
There are two metal ports in the wall directly behind the gurney and that is what interests you most at this particular point in the evening. You walk through the lemon-yellow door and avert your eyes from the deathwatch cell and the two correctional officers standing guard there. You turn left into the room directly behind the death chamber and find Warden Clark Jerrod. He is talking to the nurse on duty. You nod and exchange a few words, but really you can’t stand Jerrod. Arrogant prick.
You busy yourself with running lines from two saline drips to the wall ports. One line will run pure saline only. The other line, the hot one, will run saline and a pertinent other drug. You affix a tubing manifold to the hot line. And to this manifold you attach three plunger apparatuses that feed into the line. Two of these plungers you fill with harmless saline solution, and the third you load with 120 milliequivalents of potassium chloride, a salt which is essential for the proper health of human beings, but in this instance will be delivered as a massive overdose that will stop a human heart like a sledge hammer.
Hmmmm. You wonder how you say potassium chloride in French. And are you really killing people to finance a Parisian vacation? Can that really be true? No, of course that is not true. You will not be the person who depresses the plunger, the one that delivers the lethal overdose to Billy Smith’s veins. No, all you are going to do is set it up for the executioners. You are not the executioner. The three men who depress those plungers will have to sort out their consciences on their own. The reason for the three separate plungers is so that no individual will have to bear the burden of knowing he or she delivered the hot dose. So those anonymous prison personnel will go home tonight knowing that there is a one-in-three chance that they took the life of a fellow human being in the course of their work. But were those odds really skewed enough to help a man sleep at night? Personally, you don’t see the point in the three-card-monte ruse, because in the immortal words of Meat Loaf, two out of three ain’t bad. Ha-ha. If it helps them sleep at night, then fine.
And what helps you sleep at night? The fact that there is a zero-out-of-three chance that you delivered the lethal dose? Well, yes, actually, that is exactly what helps you sleep at night. And in any case, what’s the point of this line of thought? There is no point to it. So stop thinking it. Yours is not to reason why, yours is to watch ’em die. Ha-ha. Another good one. You are on a roll, my friend. The bons mots are just a rollin’ ’round your noggin. And besides, it’s not like you’re in here every week overseeing an execution. Good God, no. You’ve been doing this a little over a year now, and this is only the fourth execution in all that time. But you get a check every month all the same. And those checks are adding up nicely. How are they gonna keep you down on the farm after you’ve seen Paree
? Ha-ha.
When you walk back into the death chamber, the nurse and the correctional officers have Billy Smith strapped to the gurney. You are surprised at how old he looks, he was just a kid in the photos you’ve seen, but you realize that the appeals process can drag on for years, decades even.
The nurse has run the wall lines to peripheral venous access that she has prepared in each of his arms. You inspect her work, and you are satisfied with the placement of the IV catheters. The saline seems to be flowing just fine. Smith looks you in the eyes and you nod to him, pat his shoulder. You switch on the high-intensity LED surgical light that hangs over the gurney from a mechanical arm. The bright warm light is not needed, but the intensity of it causes Billy Smith to close his eyes against it. And that is why you turned it on. You can’t look into their eyes. You just can’t. It’s too much.
Two correctional officers stand at the ready, but Billy Smith is strapped down tight. He is not going to move.
“In just a minute I’m going to give you something to relax.”
You turn your back on him and prepare a syringe with five thousand milligrams of pentobarbital to induce relaxation and unconsciousness. This dosage does not approach a lethal level and is therefore not in violation of your Hippocratic Oath. Nope, you’re A-Okay. You are cool on Christ. It’s all good, brutha’.
You look at the clock and you’ve timed it just right. It’s time. No standing around making chit-chat with the condemned, making small talk, telling him how you’re just picking up some extra hours because the missus wants to see the Eiffel Tower and you know how women are, wink-wink. You are not here to offer counsel or words of wisdom. That’s not your job. The chaplain took care of that already.
The white curtains go back and it’s showtime. The warden steps out and gives his little speech about this and that and the Superior Court of the State of Georgia, introduction of lethal chemical into your bloodstream, until such time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and he wraps it all up with how the little special phone didn’t ring so he reckons the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles in Atlanta has not decided to grant clemency. Tough titty, said the kitty.
The warden gives you the nod and you stab the hypodermic into the right side catheter and you put your hand back on the inmate’s shoulder while you’re doing it. Tough titty, said the kitty, but the milk sure was good.
You and the nurse watch together. When you’ve both deemed the prisoner to be unconscious, you will give the warden another nod, and he will signal to the men on the other side of the wall to let loose with those chemicals the state of Georgia has seen fit with which to kill a man in the most humane way possible.
You watch as Billy Smith’s eyes close. Movement below the prisoner’s waist draws your attention and sure enough Billy Smith is sporting a hard-on. Not a bad way to ease on out of this world. You and the nurse share an amused glance. You’ll have to note it in your write-up. Tumescence of the penis observed after administration of pentobarbital. Then you see his Adam’s apple moving. Up and down. Up and down. He is swallowing. Over and over, he is swallowing. This does not alarm you, because you have seen this before. It’s a common side effect of the pentobarbital. Never had that problem with the sodium pentothal, but there was that big brouhaha about how it was perhaps improperly imported into the states and whether it was effective anyway, so now they use the pentobarbital and it works fine with just this one weird side effect. The swallowing goes on for two minutes. Then it stops. Billy Smith is clearly unconscious.
Next you load the catheter with fifty milligrams of pancuronium bromide, a curare mimetic which will paralyze the patient. This is procedure. Don’t want to take the chance of any unseemly muscle tremors upsetting the observers. Once administered, you rake a tongue depressor up and down the soles of both feet and get no reaction, the nurse silently concurs and you give the warden the nod. And in the room behind you, the lethal drug begins to inch its way through IV tubing, into this room, and into Billy Smith’s veins.
You wait.
And then the worst thing that could possibly happen actually does happen. Something that is simply not possible. The inmate shows signs of consciousness. Billy Smith speaks. It is just a faint whisper, but you see his lips move and there is an observation room full of journalists and the mother of the kidnapping victim watching this and you could damn well lose your license over a fuckup of this magnitude—goodbye medical career, goodbye part-time job, and goodbye gay Paree. But these are a human being’s last words, and they deserve to be heard. It is your job to hear them. To witness. So you lean over Billy Smith. You put your ear to his lips and your fingers to his carotid artery like you are just checking for a pulse even though he is hooked up to a heart monitor and you damn well know the lethal overdose hasn’t reached his veins yet. It’s like maybe you decided you don’t trust that rickety old heart monitor and your stethoscope just wasn’t good enough for a job of this magnitude. So you have your fingers to his throat and your ear to his lips like it’s the seventeenth fucking century and you’re trying to rule out catalepsy. Like maybe Edgar Allen Poe is making this shit up on the fly. And who knows, maybe Poe really is writing this, because goddamnit, past all reason, Billy Smith whispers again. He’s supposed to be paralyzed and unconscious, not horny and chatty. How is this even possible? You’ll write it up in your notes as a facial tic. A muscular tremor. The nurse won’t say anything. Her job is on the line, too. Only it wasn’t a tic. Billy Smith spoke. And you heard him. You understood him.
And then the pulse in his neck is gone. Just stopped. Like his heart has finally been hit by that proverbial sledgehammer. He is dead.
By order of the state of Georgia, a condemned man’s last words are to be preserved. Written down and recorded. Issued to the media. Them’s the rules. But you can’t admit the possibility that you fucked up. There is law, and there is man’s moral law. There is right and there is wrong. And then there is Paris. And we’ll always have Paris. You’ll keep these words to yourself. In fact, maybe you misunderstood. Because what he said really didn’t make any sense. You must have misunderstood. No, no you clearly heard his last words. Your ear is still damp from the two puffs of fetid air on which those meaningless syllables arrived.
Just two words.
The moon.
EXTRACTS
(139) Human beings may be classified, in a general way, into normal and abnormal. By "abnormal" is meant departure from the normal. While the term "abnormal" often suggests ethical or aesthetical characteristics, it is here employed with no such reference. Thus a great reformer and a great criminal are both abnormal in the sense of diverging much from the average or normal man. The principal and extreme forms of human abnormality are insanity, genius, and crime. The third form, "crime," includes all excessive degrees of wrong.
(8) The present work may perhaps be considered as an introduction to abnormality in general, giving a description, diagnosis, and synthesis of human abnormalities, which seem to be constant factors in society.
(7) While certain forms of abnormality as genius and talent are desirable, the larger number, such as criminality, pauperism, insanity, etc., are not.
(44) The criminal by nature has a feeble cranial capacity, a heavy and developed jaw, a large orbital capacity, projecting superciliary ridges, an abnormal and symmetrical cranium, a scanty beard or none, but abundant hair, projecting ears, frequently a crooked or flat nose.
(44) Criminals are subject to Daltonism; left-handedness is common; their muscular force is feeble. Alcoholic and epileptical degeneration exists in a large number. Their nerve centers are frequently pigmented. They blush with difficulty. Their moral degeneration corresponds with their physical, their criminal tendencies are manifested in infancy by onanism, cruelty, inclination to steal, excessive vanity, impulsive character.
(44) The criminal by nature is lazy, debauched, cowardly, not susceptible to remorse, without foresight; fond of tattooing; his handwriting is peculiar, signature complicated an
d adorned with flourishes; his slang is widely diffused, abbreviated, and full of archaisms.
(50) The deformations of the genital parts have a special diagnostic value, because a part of them in both sexes leads to sexual disorders of every nature, which are causes of mental troubles. The most frequent deformations are: atrophy of the testicles, phimosis, stunted or deformed penis; fissure forms of the urethra, growing together of the penis with the scrotum, hypertrophy of the clitoris, [and] closing of the back part of the vagina. See: (31) Criminal teratology [pathological sexuality, onanism, pederasty, sodomy, masochism and sadism, and saphism.]
(9) An individual may be said to be abnormal when his mental or emotional characteristics are so divergent from those of the ordinary person as to produce a pronounced moral or intellectual deviation or defect.
(31) The study of the criminal can also be the study of a normal man; for most criminals are so by occasion or accident and differ in no essential respect from other men.
(9) The normal class of individuals, who greatly exceed all other classes in number; these in every community constitute the conservative and trustworthy element and may be said to be the backbone of the race.
(189) We do not feel because we do not know. In our ignorance we allow ourselves to believe that the criminal is merely a victim of ancestry and of surroundings; that he is forced to this life of crime by an inexorable necessity; that criminality is a disease, perhaps transmitted, perhaps contracted; that the criminal is not guilty but only unfortunate; that he is not an object of condemnation but only of commiseration. Every man is the resultant of three factors --- his ancestors, his surroundings, and his individuality. No man can be forced into crime.
Abnormal Man: A Novel Page 16