by P A Duncan
Reality is an elusive thing, she thought. Jokes and sarcasm can put it away until the casual use of a word smacks you in the face. All the defiance, anger, and facades fell away. Before her was a man who knew he was about to die.
“I wanted to feel you that way,” he said.
“I know.” For a scant moment, she had, too.
“I still imagine what it would feel like to be inside you.”
Mai couldn’t respond; her own mask would slip, and sanity would fall with it. She looked at him, hated by people who didn’t know him, and some who did, hated because of the single bad thing he’d done.
“It would have been the best you ever had,” she said.
“No doubt.” As if embarrassed by the admission, he looked away. “Okay,” he said, sighing, “I’m going to pray the Rosary, and I’d like you to say it with me. Then, it’ll be time for you to go. When you do, tell that priest I’ll see him.”
He’d heard the unrelenting second hand as well. He bowed his head and clasped her hands in his. His fingers trembled, she shifted her hands to still them. He wouldn’t want anyone to see weakness.
No Rosaries to finger, only each other’s hands and the imprint of Catechism class. Ancient words of entreaty bound them in transcendence, the point of prayer after all. She prayed with intensity, though she knew no one heard her. He blessed himself when he finished and fell silent, his breathing now frenetic, as if he’d been running. She didn’t look at him; he wouldn’t want her to see his fear. His hands were like ice, and she rubbed them.
“When I leave, move around a little,” she said, “to get your blood flowing. You don’t want anyone to mistake shivering from the cold for anything else.”
He nodded, his fingers flexing against hers. She needed to leave, but she didn’t know how to extract her hands without revealing to him this was the last time.
“You know what I want done after, right?” he asked.
“Yes. I’ll take care of it.”
“That envelope by the door. Take that when you go. It’s for my dad. I was a jerk to him and MaryAnn at their last visit. Tell them… It didn’t mean I didn’t love them, but I couldn’t hug them knowing, you know, it was the last time.”
“I’ll take it to your father personally.” She looked at the door. The guards’ faces had gone from serene to serious. She nodded to them again. “I’ll be where you can see me,” she said.
He looked at her. “They said I could… That you could be closer before you left.”
Rare had been the opportunity to grant a dying man’s wish. His fingers gripped hers in desperation. She kissed his forehead, letting her lips linger as long as possible.
True to his mission to the end, he murmured things for her ears only, things she’d wanted to know before when he’d stood fast. She thanked him. He released her hands, his fingers gliding along her skin. He looked into her eyes, his expression telling her something.
“I know,” she said.
His visage altered, hardened, became the monster face everyone expected, needed, to see, and she left him.
A guard escorted Mai to the observation room, where Carroll’s lawyers waited—as well as someone she hadn’t expected to see. Alexei had indicated he’d wait for her return in their hotel room. But all those years ago, he’d promised he’d be here. Here he was. As usual, his expression was unreadable, but his eyes sent the message: No need for you to do this alone. She nodded, and when she turned to face the execution tableau, he came to her side and stood, silent, hands clasped in front of him.
In the other observation room, ten people who’d won a lottery to attend the execution would be seated by now. Nearly a thousand survivors, other family members, and first responders waited in a convention center in Kansas City to watch over closed circuit television. One camera only, focused on the face of the man who changed their lives for all the wrong reasons.
When the priest came in, Mai knew the time was close. The priest looked around and came to her.
“Father,” she said.
“You’re Siobhan?”
“Yes.”
“He wanted me to tell you…” He stopped, swallowed hard. “He said you were going to see his father, and he wants you to tell his father he confessed and had Last Rites. He said you’d understand.”
“I’m Catholic.”
He blessed her, moved a few paces away, and waited.
Alexei unclasped his hands, and one came to rest at the small of her back, where her gun usually sat. The pressure was slight, his fingers unmoving, but his touch grounded her. For that, she was grateful.
When John Thomas Carroll entered the killing room, she saw the man she’d spotted at Killeen, eight years ago, the man who’d started her down a long, dark road.
Under his own power, he lay on the gurney, still and calm as the guards strapped him down and covered him with a sheet to his neck. When the three needles went into his calf, she thought she saw a flicker of pain in his eyes, so fleeting she must have imagined it. He turned his head toward where she was, gave a nod, and looked at the camera over his face.
Though Mai had learned to kill with little emotion, her heart raced. This was a nightmare she’d never had: this clean, sterile place where a human being was about to be killed for killing human beings.
The warden read the death warrant and said, “Mr. Carroll asked me to read his final words, a poem by William Ernest Hensley entitled…” The warden squinted at the paper he held. “Invictus.”
Mai had dictated the poem to Carroll from memory and had wanted him to read it, but he’d said no.
“If I do,” he told her, “everyone will see I’m not a monster after all, only a man about to die, and we can’t have that.”
The warden cleared his throat and began.
“Out of the night that covers me,
“Black as the pit from pole to pole,
“I thank whatever gods may be
“For my unconquerable soul.”
Mai decided these same words would, one day a long time from now, be read over her grave.
“In the fell clutch of circumstance
“I have not winced or cried aloud.
“Under the bludgeonings of chance
“My head is bloody but unbowed.”
Mai murmured the words with the warden. Behind her, the priest whispered the Our Father.
“Beyond this place of wrath and tears
“Looms but the Horror of the shade,
“And yet the menace of the years
“Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
“It matters not how strait the gate,
“How charged with punishments the scroll,
“I am the master of my fate:
“I am the captain of my soul.”
The warden folded the paper and pocketed it. He nodded toward a blacked-out window next to the gurney. A hidden medical technician would administer the drugs.
Carroll’s facade relaxed when the first drug invaded his bloodstream. Alexei’s hand shifted until his arm lay around her waist. She leaned against him, needing his unvarying strength for what was about to happen.
Mai knew before anyone else when John Carroll died: She heard her first bean si, a banshee. Some observers, not understanding the physiology of the drugs, thought his open eyes a final insult.
His last words, read by a stranger, weren’t the ones a country had waited to hear. No one in the public would ever hear what John Thomas Carroll, soldier, had said to her, his cheek against her hand, his lips moving like soft wings against her skin. Those were not the words to haunt her remaining days, as she came awake every night in the midst of their echo.
No, it was the simple question, asked not by a mere monster, but a complex man.
“Will I dream?”
The End
A Perfect Hatred
Begun June 1997, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Completed December 2019, in Staunton, Virginia
Afterword
&nbs
p; History as Prologue
I didn’t know it at the time, but the germ of the story that became A Perfect Hatred stirred on April 19, 1995, amid the news coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing. That germ sprouted two years later when I was in Oklahoma City, teaching aviation safety inspectors how to advocate for safety. During my two weeks in Oklahoma, a jury in Denver, Colorado, found Timothy James McVeigh guilty of all charges related to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. That same jury later sentenced him to death.
When the jury rendered its verdict, business in Oklahoma City came to a standstill. People went into the streets. My work was at a facility near Will Rogers Airport, but employees carpooled downtown. They gathered at the bombing site, not yet transformed into the permanent memorial you see today. Though I had no ties to the events, the historian in me compelled me to go with my colleagues who did.
Oklahoma is the buckle of the Bible Belt and proud of it. At the government facility where I worked for two weeks, it was commonplace for anyone to ask you what church you attended and to admonish people for not going. (The cafeteria ladies wholly disapproved of me; I turned down all their suggestions.) These were Christians, some of whom were eager to tell everyone that’s what they were and that the rest of us were hell-bound heathens. That didn’t bother me so much; I’d heard it all before.
I observed people who purported to be followers of Christ suggest a litany of un-Christian things about McVeigh’s ultimate fate—from a lynching to locking him in a room with the families of those he’d killed. At that moment, I decided I needed to learn more about McVeigh and his act of terror, beyond what I’d seen in the media.
But, back to 4/19/95. A few hours after the explosion, with pictures of the gutted building as his backdrop, a “terrorism expert” declared the attack bore the earmarks of middle eastern terrorists. Two years before, a truck bomb had exploded in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City. The FBI’s investigation clearly pointed to an organization led by the then-obscure Osama bin Laden. Truck/car bombs were the preferred methodology of terror for the warring clans in Lebanon. Two truck bombs had destroyed the Marine Barracks in Beirut in 1983, killing 241 Marines.
Why wouldn’t a truck bomb in Oklahoma City be the work of middle eastern terrorists?
But…consider the target. A mid-rise U.S. government building, housing field offices of agencies subject to bad press and popular resentment: FBI, ATF, DEA, IRS, etc.
And the date, April 19.
Two years before, to the day, the FBI had ended its almost two-month standoff with the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, by charging the compound with military tanks altered to fire tear gas canisters. A fire broke out (The debate on who started it still rages.), and dozens of men, women, and children perished in an inferno seen around the world.
A government building. The anniversary of Waco. Was this homegrown, I wondered?
Now, what did I, a pilot, technical writer, and mid-level bureaucrat, know about domestic terrorism? A lot less than I know now, but I did know then the anti-government voices had grown stronger. Hate had moved from private AOL chat rooms to television programs and news broadcasts. The selection of the target had no significance for al Qaeda. That government building, however, did have significance for religious extremists and patriot fundamentalists in the United States, all of whom were convinced (and still are) “the government” was coming to take their guns and put them in concentration camps for being Christians.
I kid you not.
After the 1992 election of a dreaded “liberal” president, William Jefferson Clinton, (though he was often right of center) hate crimes became newsworthy. Scholars who studied extremist movements wrote books about a growing, violent “patriot movement,” which had had its beginnings in the 1980s farm crisis. Conservative “entertainers” dominated talk radio and television, and even though they’d cleaned up their language about Jews, blacks, and feminists, their messages of hate remained the same. Vilification of “faceless bureaucrats” became the norm, and on occasion, physical violence had been directed at them.
That was the part significant to me, because I was a bit more than midway through my thirty years of public service. My writing skills and aviation knowledge meant I was often tasked with responding to “difficult” correspondence forwarded by congressional staffs. The language in these letters, not censored by those staffers, was sometimes bewildering, often frightening. If my reply citing policy and regulations didn’t satisfy the constituent, letter after letter would follow, each more threatening than the last. Not against me. Against “the government.” And this didn’t only happen in my agency; it was government-wide. In some parts of this country, even today, government vehicles can’t display any government markings—even a license plate—lest they get shot.
The people comprising the backbone of this so-called patriot movement were the silent majority of Richard Nixon, the base of Ronald Reagan, the followers of G. Gordon Liddy who cheered when he bragged on air about shooting at life-sized targets of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Conservative pundits extolled the intent to reduce government until it was small enough to be drowned in a bathtub.
Instead of denouncing such rhetoric on the floor of Congress, elected representatives outdid themselves in using tasteless metaphors for people on welfare or Social Security. The rising class of Republicans in Congress espoused beliefs as anti-government as those on the fringe. Compassion was nonexistent. Grievances, real and imagined, against the government and its employees amassed; racial divides were wider than ever; and people in the “Me” generation cared only for themselves as they accumulated wealth and position power without regard for anyone else’s life and liberty. The pursuit of happiness, in the form of bulging stock portfolios, was worshipped more than any god.
Sound familiar?
I’m talking about twenty-five years ago, when they didn’t call themselves the Tea Party or Proud Boys or Qnon or Alt-Right or The Base or wear MAGA hats. Their racism, hate, and anti-government message remains the same, however.
Twenty-five years ago, into this hostile environment on a beautiful spring morning, a disgruntled ex-soldier drove a truck bomb to a federal building, lit the fuses, and walked away in a moment of perfect hatred. He was certain his act would be acknowledged as heroic by those voices he’d heard on the radio and television, that a second revolution would occur, and the country would be great again.
And we wondered how it could happen here. We still wonder.
I wanted to know what we as a country could have done to stop it or, more importantly, to keep it from happening again. And that’s all a writer needs: a what-if.
My initial training was as an historian, and that’s how I approached writing what was, at first, a single novel. Research revealed a deeper, darker story a single novel couldn’t do justice.
Part of my research was to experience those extremist beliefs, first hand, or original sources, as historians say. I didn’t have to go far. Members of my own family were caught up in this darkness. I also went to gun shows and “prayer” meetings, to seminars and lectures by leaders of this patriot movement. I wished what I’d heard was fiction.
I did discover when you merely observe, when you don’t participate in chanting “white power” or “burn the Jews,” you’re considered suspicious, a possible “government plant.” I decided it would be safer to lurk online using a fabricated persona. (Yeah, GRU, I did it first.) My performance was so good, it cost me a friendship of long standing.
These experiences, the books I read, the recordings I listened to, the videos I watched, filled my dreams with dark figures. Like the author of one of my source books on the dangers of militias, I thought someone followed me to and from work. My friends and family worried about the dark and disturbing material I read (too many copies of Soldier of Fortune ended up in my house) and the long hours I spent writing.
I didn’t stop; this was a story I needed to tell.
&n
bsp; Twenty-plus, thirty-plus, forty-plus years ago, paramilitary compounds and camps and hate groups existed; likely more so now, many masquerading as patriot groups and churches. I don’t mean Islamic madrassas. I mean people who consider themselves Christian warriors and believe we are at war with them—we being anyone not their kind of Christian. Today, we call this Christian Nationalism, but their roots are in Christian Identity. Their personification? The country of Gilead in the television series, The Handmaid’s Tale. Not all Christians, of course, but you’ll be surprised how many.
And don’t think these folks have gone away. I started A Perfect Hatred in 1997, in the era of Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution. I finished it twenty-two years later amid birthers and truthers, tea-partiers and Proud Boys, Alt-Right and Qnon. As I wrote the first draft of this Afterword, someone had mailed pipe bombs to Democratic politicians. Someone tried to get into a black church and, upon finding the doors locked, went to a nearby grocery store to kill two black people. He assured the white shoppers by telling them, “Whites don’t kill whites.” Yet a third someone posted on a right-wing social media site that his people, i.e., Christian white people, were being slaughtered; he went to a synagogue and shot eleven people during a Shabbat service.
All in the space of six days.
Those couched words about the evils of globalism and the golden promise of nationalism and a war on Christianity were born decades ago and hidden in the fringe. Our modern technology has brought them into the mainstream. This has become everyday speech for some politicians. And that should fucking scare you.
All right, enough preaching. You get it; I know you do.
Finally, I realize some who have read the whole series A Perfect Hatred might be upset that instead of portraying the character based on Timothy McVeigh as a one-dimensional, evil monster, I showed him as a full-fledged and flawed human being. (Aren’t we all?) We don’t want to acknowledge it, but that is what he was. I tried to understand his actions; not excuse them, not admire them, not support or condone them. His act of perfect hatred was in many ways inexplicable given his life before something twisted him. He was not the simplistic monster people needed him to be. None of us are.