LOOMING OVER THEIR heads, the great cross turned under a thunderhead sky, its readout scrolling endlessly across the flat exurban landscape. On one side: CHRIST DIED FOR YOUR SINS! and on the other: NOW IT’S YOUR TURN!
The Risen Lamb Correctional Facility, two miles from Fort Oswald, had been designated for Jay’s execution. The jail had only been open a month and no sinners had yet been executed in the Death Center, the facility’s multichamber execution rotunda. Jay would be the very first. The Reverend had more than one thing to celebrate that morning.
Lightning on the horizon already impinging on their consciousness, making them jump a little, the twelve Elders of the Church of the Risen Lamb checked their weapons at security. Escorting them was the Reverend in a warden’s cap, standard issue Blood-of-the-Lamb crimson, cocked at a jaunty angle.
The nine Brethren unloaded an arsenal of handguns and pocket rocket launchers. The Chief Justice had one of the new hyper-lasers that could burn a dime-sized hole clear through a perp in 13 milliseconds. The other Brethren looked at it longingly.
“Eleventh Commandment,” warned the Reverend. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s hyper-laser!”
He’d sent for me right after the verdict. I was trying to sneak away to the diner and tell the women the disastrous news, but he’d insisted I accompany the execution party. “I’d be happy to cover the execution,” I’d stuttered, “but can I bring Jay’s mother along to say goodbye?”
The Reverend laughed, incredulous. “His mother? She spawned Satan. Get in the car.”
As we headed along razor-wire tunnels, the Rev explained features of the facility to such Elders as Cardinal Grise of Los Angeles, who were making their first visit to the facility.
We arrived at the oak-paneled antechamber to the Death Center. Double oak doors opened soundlessly. We went down a wide fauxmarble staircase and into the spacious oak-paneled central observation room. Ancient prints of various forms of execution covered the walls. At its center was a lavish circular bar, manned by two smiling vestal virgins in sexy blood-colored versions of a corrections officer’s uniform. The room was a giant underground skybox.
Around the room’s circumference were ten wide observation windows each giving onto a small lethal-injection chamber about the size of an average bedroom. The death chambers were identical: shaped in a parallelogram, the inner wall narrower than the outer one.
The Reverend, with the singsong babble of the house-proud, pointed out the sliding partitions between each observation post. These could be activated to ensure privacy, if desired; gaily patterned curtains could likewise frame the windows. “Studies show,” said the Reverend, “that victims’ relatives like curtains. They want the sinner to know that, while he’s checking out, they’re going on living behind the cheery curtains of home. It helps closure.”
Victims, not relatives, could also choose how to dispose of the executionee’s corpse. In each observation booth were two large buttons: BURIAL AND CREMATION.
I peered into the chambers, every muscle in my miserable body wanting to flee but not daring to, fascinated by the mechanism of legal murder. It was a way to reject the reality, which I could not face, that the young man I’d met a mere three months ago, and who had occupied my every waking thought since, would soon cease to exist.
Facing me in each chamber was a five-foot-wide retina of oneway glass through which the condemned sinner could be observed by the executioner as the lethal drugs were administered. Below each retina were two triads of copper outlets. Each had three flexible tubes color-coded for the three drugs that made up the lethal cocktail; each terminated in a tridentlike attachment that was plugged into an IV. The drugs were administered through both these devices, one in each arm. A death gurney with padded restraints neatly folded over it and armrests at right angles to the top part stood in the center of each chamber.
Well, not quite each. In Chamber A the gurney was missing. It was in use.
The Reverend had been holding forth about Death Row not being Easy Street, but now he got to his big finish. “Compassion marks our faith from all others. We do everything here to encourage deathbed—or lethal-injection-gurney—conversions. We alone offer the miracle of salvation.
“Brethren, out in the anteroom of Chamber A is the very first cardinal sinner this facility will execute. A creature so corrupted by evil that he barely merits the name of man. But I believe that even this degraded soul can, through the grace of the Risen Lamb, be saved!”
The Brethren gravely nodded their approval. The Reverend swept from the room toward a magically open door. I jumped up to follow him. Was I not his scribe? He put a firm paw in my chest. No coverage needed.
Actually I welcomed the rejection. I couldn’t have faced Jay standing beside his captor—my captor—obediently taking notes.
In any case, every last word in that place was taped.
The Reverend comes into the Repentance Area, a bleak white room whose only decoration is a large wooden crucifix. Jay is kneeling beside the gurney on which he’s to die. The Reverend crosses his arms: “Hoping for a reprieve, amigo? Don’t waste your breath.”
Jay rises in agony, straightening up to meet his tormentor. The sudden effort causes blood to well into his mouth. Internal damage has been caused. Still cuffed, he can’t stop it from trickling down the sides of his chin.
The Reverend stares at him, bare teeth clenched in a smile—a familiar smile I recognize from a windy March morning in a New York boardroom years earlier. The triumphant redneck is back. He struts, he has on his Tony Lama boots. When he put them on early that morning, he must have known what the verdict would be long before the tribunal made it.
“So you’re Hay-soos. I’m supposed to be in here to save your soul, Hay-soos. Don’t think I’ll bother. Send you back to Hell where you came from.”
Jay says nothing, looking at him from under those lashes as if too tired to ask, Will there be more pain?
“I don’t get it, Hay-soos. What were you trying to accomplish, boy? Even if you were Jesus, what’s the point? You ain’t the Christ people want. People want someone who makes them feel safe. What ordinary folks mean by saved is safe. Safe in the world to come, safe to enjoy this world’s abundance.
“You got anything to say, Hay-soos? Time’s getting short.”
Jay has nothing to say.
“Look at you: dirty, penniless, raggedy-ass. Tell you what. If you were Christ and you came back like this, I’d still hunt you down and kill you. We corrected Christianity, Christ. Worked out the kinks. We don’t need you. We got things running smoothly: right from wrong, good guys, bad guys, what the Bible says down pat. People don’t want more than that. The less they know, the more they understand.
“Got any last words, Hay-soos? Cat got your tongue?”
Jay bows his head. A gesture of humility? Forgiveness? Or just plain defeat?
“God is a woman! Love your enemies! Just the kinda thing a woman would say. God is man, Hay-soos. He made the world in His image. God doesn’t love His enemies. He destroys them. That’s why I destroyed you—because you’re my enemy and I love my God!”
Jay raises his head. It isn’t forgiveness or defeat. Just plain exhaustion.
“If you’re Christ, turn me into salt. Wither me. Shatter your shackles, make the guards fall into a slumber. Walk out of here in glory!”
Jay upchucks a little. More blood trickles down his chin. The Reverend stares at him with distaste for a long beat, as if turning some final insult over in his mind.
“I wondered, for about a millisecond, if I’d got it wrong. When I heard about you working miracles? If you were the man I met long ago. But I know my Bible, see? I know—”
Jay swallows as he speaks: the blood, no doubt. “I was that man, Jimmy. The day down by the river?”
The Reverend, who has been preening, strutting a step or two every now and then, busy victory in his body language, is suddenly very still.
Jay’s voice is a bloody whisper. “I remember the joy in your heart—and in mine. I even remember the tie you wore: your favorite tie that you folded up and put by itself on the changing table.”
“What was . . . on that tie?”
“Little crucifixes.”
“You’re just guessing.”
“And little lambs with wings. Rising.”
Jay is standing straight now; the Reverend seems to have shrunk.
“Your heart was filled with love that day, Jimmy. When your father let your head up out of the muddy water, it was as if everything but love had been washed away. Remember?”
“No! You . . . Satan! Using truth to defile truth!”
“When I came into your dream the other night, Jimmy, it was to remind you of that.”
“Get thee behind—”
“Remember?”
Jay kisses him lightly on the lips. For a split second the Reverend does nothing, staring at the man kissing him. In wonder? Recognition?
Then he recoils as if shotgunned, Jay’s crimson blood smearing his mouth like lipstick. He spits and slaps frantically at the blood as he rushes from the room.
Let’s draw no pious morals from Jay’s death.
It was not on some bleak Golgotha, from whose barren slopes sprang a message of hope echoing down the centuries. It took place in a sterile spirulina-green chamber lit by blinding halogens, on a gurney of black imitation leather. It cost his executioners $1,744.13. Thousands just like it had occurred in Texas jails in the years before his. Jay’s death was a mere number in a sequence, of no more consequence than that of a bug at nightfall.
Yes, his arms were outstretched, but not as they were said to have been long ago, against a stormy, spectral sky. He was flat on his back, his wrists bound to the armrests of the gurney by plastic restraints so that IVs could be inserted into incisions made in each forearm and the three poisons introduced one by one into his body.
Let’s not make too much of the fact that he died of slow asphyxiation just as crucifixion killed the crucified, the weight of their bodies gradually crushing their lungs. Jay died of slow asphyxiation because, by order of the Reverend, the IVs were deliberately set to miss his veins. Not enough of the pancuronium bromide that was supposed to paralyze his lungs, reached them to kill him. Nor did enough sodium thiopental, designed to render him unconscious, reach his brain. So while he slowly asphyxiated, he was fully conscious. The coup de grâce, potassium chloride, took forever to reach his heart.
An execution that normally takes a very short while took, instead, forty-five minutes of agonized gasping and convulsions as Jay’s body fought instinctively for oxygen and the wayward poisons racked it with pain. Even if he’d decided to die with dignity, his reflexes wouldn’t let him.
But the Elders did have ample time to sink to their knees on the blood-crimson carpet and pray that the sinner would repent of his blasphemies before it was too late.
And, yes, the blood flowed down his place of execution just as it once had from the nails and the crown of thorns. But the blood welling from Jay’s mouth and into his nose, splattering his face and gown as he choked on it, was from internal injuries inflicted by his expert torturers. The blood pooling on the floor gushed from gashes torn in his forearms by the convulsions of a body that was drowning without being able to drown.
I saw no inspiring parallels or portents in the bucking, gasping body on the gurney. I saw only a young man put to death in terrible agony for the crime of saying that men have no right to kill other men, a young man dying on a gurney largely because my petty machinations had put him there, without which he might still be alive and free, bringing relief where there was pain, comfort into lonely and imperfect lives.
Other than my guilt, there was no moral. And certainly no glory. Nor was there any point in begging a nonexistent God—though I did—that the kid would save himself, now of all times, with a miracle.
More than half an hour into the torment, at 12:37 P.M., the Reverend proclaimed the false messiah’s repentance to be a lost cause. The Elders got up, dusting off their pants. As Jay’s death throes began, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and the Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles ordered Bloody Marys from the bar.
Suddenly at 12:44 P.M., Jay, who had uttered not a word throughout his ordeal, cried, “¡Dios! ¡Madre! ¡Nada mas!”
The Elders cheered. The Chief Justice and his Eminence clinked glasses. The CEO of FoxWorld, the vice president of the United States, and the man who many hoped would be the first King of Israel in 2,700 years, high-fived. “Praise the Lord!” shouted the Reverend. “Satan cried uncle!”
Jay gave a long shuddering groan. Then the thread of his life snapped and his spirit shot to the stars.
Or rather, the Messiah of Morris Avenue ceased to exist.