I THINK THE THING I ACTUALLY MISS THE MOST IS WATCHING A sun sit still on a solid evening hour, its talons skewering the clouds beneath. That elongated stretch through the clouds; that beam downward, pointing like a strict schoolteacher, informing everyone around that, yes, there is a higher purpose. I’m not saying I found religion in here just because I can’t watch a sunset anymore. God, that would be cliché, and I’d rather die than pass on that impression. But I do sit alone, sometimes, wondering whether the clouds are gathering together, communing like a collection of cotton balls in a tightly sealed ziplock bag, or whether they’ve been flattened out like a stack of pancakes. Or if they’ve been vaccinated with a syringe of rainy dye so that only a select few darken into grays, blacks, and charcoals.
It’s funny how most things come in threes. Cumulus, nimbus, stratus. Three times a charm. Three strikes and you’re out. Hickory, dickory, fucking dock. I suppose, then, that it would only make sense that I’m going to die in a trio of poisons. Sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, potassium chloride. A three-drug cocktail designed first to anesthetize, second to paralyze, and third to exterminate. This, my lawyers told me, was a far more humanitarian way to finish the job than its predecessors, which included all but not limited to public executions of any and all forms, a firing squad, hangings, gas chambers, electrocutions, and, of course, our very own lethal injection. For some reason, people still like to call it The Chair, as if they’re holding on to the good old days. But nobody fries from the needle. They know this as well as they know the instrument of death that brought them here. No. They just experience botched anesthesia, welcoming the paralysis that precludes them from informing a single living being that the potassium chloride stings. It stings so much that the volcano at the vein has erupted prematurely, and as a result, molten lava is slowly rolling through the body, incinerating and smoldering arteries and organs in its track, like being burned alive without the ability to scream.
I’ve read up about it. I have articles from those habeas lawyers and from Madison McCall. It’s supposed to be painless, and might actually be. But how can that be tested? Honestly, is someone really going to care about any pain we feel on our twenty-sixth mile? They’re going to do it anyway, no matter how many veins they have to test to find the right one, no matter how many people divide up the task, no matter how late in the night they proceed. They’re going to do it anyway.
In the ’40s, they tried to fry some kid for murder and failed twice. They charged his body full of electricity—the metal cap tickling his brain, the straps wound tightly around his arms—but they couldn’t do it. It wasn’t his fault that the incompetent executioners messed up twice. Still, they tried it a third time to make sure the boy was dead, taking pleasure as his body shook in a lightning bolt of momentary seizure until, like the sizzling flicker of a fading lightbulb, he finally turned off.
Like I said, everything has a way of coming out in threes.
“I know that your father left before you were born,” Oliver said to me before “Hello,” “G’day,” or any number of greetings he could have mustered this early in our fledgling relationship. It was only a handful of weeks in, and already he was storming into the visitor’s booth toting a rolling briefcase behind him looking like Marlene Dixon’s fiendish protégé. Part of me wanted to slap him, and the other part wanted, well, the other part wanted the contrary, as I listened to him rambling off an enumerated register of alleged facts from my past that he, no doubt, was proud to uncover.
“I also know that your mother hasn’t visited you in five years. Your brother has visited you only once, as he lives paycheck to paycheck in Encino as a production assistant for a small independent film company. You never met your maternal grandfather, and your maternal grandmother suffered a fatal heart attack when you were arrested. You were never able to go to her funeral. Your paternal grandparents’ absence needs no explanation. I know that you were accepted to Princeton but decided on Penn instead. I know that you wanted to become a doctor and scored exceptionally high on your SATs but never followed through on that goal. You didn’t even attempt to get back into college. You never took driver’s education, once took a flight lesson, are nearsighted and lactose-intolerant.”
A smirk seeped out between my lips like an unsuspecting belch. As if he were the first person to take an academic interest in my life from January 1, 2003, onward.
“All that is in my trial record?”
Amused, I unfolded my arms.
“Shall I go on?” he continued.
“If you must.”
“I know that you chose to sleep through your trial and refused to offer any mitigating evidence at the penalty phase. And of course, that is primarily why we are here in the first place, isn’t it?”
“If you insist.”
“You didn’t help your attorneys at trial or on appeal, and you certainly aren’t helping me to piece together anything that can spare your life now. We have five months remaining, and you’ve done nothing but tell me about your mother’s mustache fetish.”
I sat back in my chair and placed my hands together, slapping them hard in slow motion at Oliver’s Academy Award–winning speech. It was very melodramatic, if I say so myself. The actress who will play me in the future cinematic depiction of my life will be thrilled to have such rich and hackneyed material from which to base her rendition.
“Well done,” I said. “You’ve reread my record and run a ninety-nine-dollar background check. But before you applaud yourself too earnestly, know that I only have a half brother, and he works in the exciting but respectable-ish industry of adult film. I actually attended Penn for slightly less than one semester and dropped out, you’re right, because I couldn’t shake the Van Pelt Incident. But good job there reminding me of the biggest failure of my life. My flight lesson was in a rickety old biplane in La Jolla when I was too young to even see over the dashboard of a car, which is why I did take driver’s ed. My grandmother died on the day of my conviction—not my arrest. And I’m farsighted.”
This was actually quite fun.
“You’re not inhuman and fearless,” he said to me, after a long pause. A strand of hair dropped between his eyes. “I know you think you are, but you’re not.”
Across the room, I noticed that Patsmith was getting seated in her telephone booth, awaiting another visitor for the umpteenth time this week. She wasn’t looking at me, though. She was staring at Ollie, as if he was another Pat Jeremiah of the ephemeral Pat’s Pub.
“We have five months to put together a narrative that might spare your life,” Ollie finally said. “If you don’t open up to me about who you are, about why you’re here, I can’t help you. And I want to help you, Noa. I really do.”
Beyond Ollie, beyond the multiplying layers of glass, chairs, linoleum, visitors, guards, space, Patsmith was turning away to someone new. I couldn’t help myself from watching her, but throughout it, Ollie’s gaze never left mine.
“Don’t get all serious on me now, Ollie. Come on,” I teased. “It’s the least you can do for me. It’s not like you’re actually my real lawyer. We both know it’s Marlene. You and I are just another one of her little projects.”
He shook his head no with a smile—the universal sign that he knew his place but wasn’t about to challenge the one person who could alter it. Maybe he didn’t believe me. Maybe he did, and that’s why he grew reticent.
“Tell me this, Ollie, did you always want to come to Filthadelphia, America, to work for one of the last remaining Queen Bees of the women’s lib generation so that she could make you feel guilty about everything you’ve ever done? Is that why you hopped over?”
A nervous grin bled through his face. “She’s not that bad.”
“You’ll see.”
“And, yes, I did want to come back here.”
“Back?” I said, lifting my legs to the chair. “Now I’m listening.”
He smiled downwardly again, signaling to everyone around him that he was approaching distinguished-hood prematurely but hadn’t quite realized it.
“Noa, please focus.”
“I am,” I said.
He looked behind to Patsmith and Nancy Rae and the surplus of empty chairs before slumping into his chair like a derailed child.
“I spent a summer traveling cross-country on a bus before university, and I loved it here.” He smiled, his cheeks spackled with dark-red spots. “I always knew I wanted to come back.”
I laughed. “You spent your summer on a bus?”
“A Greyhound bus,” he said proudly, as if reliving the vile memory.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“What?”
“What do you mean … what?” I asked. “Nobody takes the bus cross-country in America. You do realize that.”
He sat up. “I hate flying—that’s why I took the bus. That’s all.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” I sighed. “You’re one of them. You’re afraid to fly.”
“Come on.”
“I’m not. Really,” he said lowering his voice. “I was actually conceived on a plane.”
I folded my arms, one on top of the other. “I’m listening,” I said, though in hindsight, I don’t think I really was.
My eyes were drifting slightly beyond him to Patsmith, who was now glaring over at us from behind her visitor (a priest? a grandfather?). But Ollie’s lips were moving in animation, his eyes jumping about his face. Somewhere between Ollie’s throat-clearing anxiety and nail-biting interrogation, he had slipped into the role of enchanting storyteller, far better than Madison McCall, who never told me so much as his wife’s name, or Stewart Harris, who claimed he lived in Philadelphia, but I knew really lived in the Delaware Valley on the weekends, where his estranged ex had full custody of his children. Ollie, one month in, was already sharing the files from his life without my prying so much as a birth date or alma mater from him. It takes a certain amount of self-awareness to confide so much in a near stranger this early on. It takes an even greater amount of resilience to proffer it to a double murderer.
“My dad was a pilot, my mom a flight hostess,” he continued, “and, yes, it’s terribly charming—”
“—I was going to say cheesy, cliché, nauseating, but go on.” I smiled, looking directly at him.
“I was conceived on a weekend flight somewhere in either Morocco, Algiers, or Gibraltar, but no one can be sure exactly where.”
“Please tell me your father was not flying the plane that weekend.”
Oliver laughed, briefly. “No, he was just flying with my mum that weekend as a passenger.”
“I see.” I smiled. “Cute.”
“He’s very important to me,” he added. “My father.”
He clutched his hands together into a ball but didn’t elaborate. Instead, he gazed at me, looking up, sort of. He was short—I could tell that even when he was sitting down—and blessed or cursed with a mug of babyface magnitude. But his words were so elegantly articulated—even silently—that I was getting lost in his damned gaze. It bothered me.
“You’re not very subtle, are you, Ollie?”
Again, the uplifted shoulders.
“How do you know that what you’re reading in your record is actually the truth?” I asked.
“Perjury, Noa,” he declared. “That’s how.”
“And nobody lies on the stand? Really, Ollie. You’re foreign, but you’re not that foreign.”
“You never took the stand.”
“You have a point there,” I said, “but that’s not the reason I didn’t testify. Ask Marlene.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.” I sighed, looking beyond him again. Patsmith was still in her booth speaking at someone, while staring over at Ollie. Ollie was my visitor, though. Not Patsmith’s. She wasn’t about to change her name to Olliesmith days (or was it years?) prior to her execution.
“Noa?”
I looked back to him.
“Nothing,” I said. “You know, you’re not going to find anything new in that record of yours. You think I haven’t read it from cover to cover?”
“I spoke with your father yesterday on the phone.”
From their fans of lashes, average brown eyes stared back at me with urgency and precision. It was like he wanted a medal for picking up a telephone.
“Guard!” I called. It was instinct at this point. I stood and looked out from the divider. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Nancy Rae putting her Dr Pepper can down on a chair to walk over to me.
“Why won’t you tell me about him?” Oliver pleaded.
“I was really starting to like you.”
“He was very concerned about you,” Ollie replied.
“I haven’t heard from him in years,” I said, looking back to Nancy Rae. “I heard he was in Costa Rica.”
“Canada.”
“Canada,” I said, still looking for Nancy Rae. “Okay. Fine, then. Did Marlene put you two in touch?”
“Marlene?” He laughed, shaking his head no. “No. She doesn’t know where he is.”
“Right.” My head nodded, and I sat. “How would she?”
“I just felt that there was something missing when I read the transcript,” he said. “So I tracked him down.”
It was almost as if he were looking for validation. Pride in his job well done far beyond the call of pro bono law firm duty. I was about to hand him a dozen roses and a tiara when Nancy Rae arrived outside my door.
“Noa, please,” he said, almost pleading with me. “How often have you spoken with him?”
I said nothing.
“Noa?”
“Three times,” I said. “I’ve spoken with him three times since.”
“Three times?” he echoed. “Try again.”
God, he was relentless. I thought the English were supposed to be slightly more passive than us. Meanwhile, Nancy Rae’s ring of keys jingled off her belt like a corporate janitress. Metal clanking echoed into my booth as she searched for the proper key.
“Look, I knew my father only briefly before the trial, and honestly, that is the real reason that Sarah died, okay?”
“Excuse me?”
“Forget it, Ollie. You’ll never get in touch with that man again. Trust me.”
“What do you mean, that’s the real reason that Sarah died?”
“Hands,” Nancy Rae requested, rather timely, as soon as she found her key. She opened the four-by-ten-inch window on the door. It was the size of a mail slot. I stood, backed up to the door, and like a wounded bird, poked my bony fingers through the opening from behind, and the metal cuffs once again adorned my wrists. Oliver stared at me during the whole spectacle without budging.
“Noa, please answer me.”
“There’s no need. Clearly you already know everything you need to know.”