-7-

There’d been a change in plan. In the eleventh hour, the first man whose execution Board would record had insisted on being hung instead of electrocuted.

When Warden File had told Board this, he had only been able to gape at the man a moment or two before stammering, “But…I haven’t tested the camera…with hanging…”

“It’s a pain in the ass, but that’s what he wants, and he has that option, so that’s what we’re going to do. It doesn’t really matter that you tested with electrocution. You positioned the camera perfectly, you got everything nicely in the shot. All you have to do is adjust for this positioning instead…”

“But,” Board started. He didn’t go on.

“We don’t have time for a pig at this point.” The warden sighed. “I don’t know why the change, except maybe he heard stories about bleeding eyes and such. I’m sure he thinks this will be quicker, or cleaner. In any case, this is his option—so be it. Now, before the execution we’ll test the trapdoor by dropping a sandbag a dozen times. That’s the procedure. The camera won’t record inorganic subjects, so it won’t do to film the sandbag tests, but at least you can watch and gauge your distance before they bring the prisoner out…”

This prisoner’s name was Charles Zipper and he was a repeat sex offender who had been sentenced to death for two convictions of child rape, with a girl of six and another of nine years. Besides the prison chaplain, Warden File would be in attendance during his execution, as would the parents of both children and the prisoner’s wife, who File told Board was still supportive of her husband. She claimed that her husband was a sensitive and intelligent man—a piano instructor—who had suffered a miserable childhood, physically abused by his father and even more so by his mother. One time his father had slapped him across the face because his son had given him an impulsive kiss on the cheek. Men didn’t kiss each other, the father had yelled. Another time his mother had beaten him severely for having an erection while he was curled up behind her in bed for a nap. File wore a faint smile as he related these stories to Board, as if he found them pathetically amusing. Board asked the warden if Zipper had murdered or harmed the girls after he’d raped them, and File said he hadn’t. Zipper’s attempts to have his sentence commuted to life imprisonment had been denied, despite a psychiatrist’s protest that Zipper was sick and incapable of resisting his impulses.

Wearing the cheap suit he’d had on at the time he was first brought to the prison, Board had set up his camera squarely facing the gallows. He tried not to look directly at any of the people who filed silently into the brick-walled, windowless chamber to take their seats in three rows of folding metal chairs, the legs of which made painful scraping sounds across the concrete floor. The prisoner’s wife sat in the front row, the families of his victims in the last, separated by a row occupied by several newspaper reporters—already scribbling madly as if producing spirit writing. File would also sit up front, as would a prison physician who would check for vital signs after the fact and pronounce Zipper dead. Board heard sniffling—he was sure from the soon-to-be widow.

The prisoner was escorted into the chamber, the high ceiling of which echoed with the sound of the door being closed again. His hands were bound in front of him to a restraining strap he wore around his waist. To Board the man looked thin, weak, half-starved though he knew he wasn’t. Zipper was allowed to go to his wife, who embraced him for almost a minute, whispering tearfully to him, until they were urged apart. Only now, after that intimacy was over, did Board thumb the button on the end of his plunger, to indicate to the camera that it should begin shooting. He saw tears in Zipper’s eyes but the man’s face was otherwise stunned immobile as he was walked up the steps of the scaffold by a guard who held his elbow.

“Rot in hell,” he heard a woman mutter in the back, just loud enough for everyone to hear.

His bible already opened before him, the chaplain stood atop the platform, as did the executioner, whose only function was to throw the lever that would release the two bolts holding the trapdoor in place. The rope would be fitted over the prisoner’s neck by a man File had referred to as a Certified Hanging Technician. The prison’s executioner, Theodore Rasp, stood ready by the lever, jutting up as conspicuously as an erect phallus. Rasp was sixty-five, his white hair neatly parted, his suit that of a businessman. He smelled of pipe tobacco. No black hood, no crossed muscular axe man’s arms. An executioner of the modern age. He looked like a judge or a doctor.

Now that Zipper was centered on the trapdoor, his ankles bound together by a restraining strap that gave an awful creak as it was tightened, the Certified Hanging Technician poised a black denim hood above the prisoner’s head, causing Mrs. Zipper to sob, “I love you, Charlie!” while he could still see her.

Board glanced at his camera. He could tell by the extra-excited rippling of its many legs that it was filming. Drinking it all in with the expectation of a tiger flicking its tail in the underbrush, tensed up to spring. Board had a perverse urge to cheat it, just as the executioner threw his lever…to cover that lidless cyclopean eye with his palm.

The chaplain began to softly read aloud. Warden File asked, “Do you have any last words, Mr. Zipper?”

“I’m sorry,” Zipper simply blurted. Either to his wife, or the families of his victims. Or to the chaplain, and his God?

Board fought another urge; to look away. Why should he watch, so long as his camera watched? He knew this man had done wrong. And he doubted seriously than any one incident like a father slapping his face for kissing him had made him the deviant that he was. Still, Board’s guts squirmed at the man’s helplessness…squirmed with empathy for a fear so great that even the survival instinct to flee was blotted out. He couldn’t really blame the families of the raped children for wanting to see, with their own eyes, as this man was punished. So why did he hate them at this moment?

The elderly CHT lowered the hood into place over Zipper’s head, and followed that by slipping a heavy noose of paraffin-lubricated hemp over the shrouded lump. Board almost expected the technician to hum to himself as if puttering in a garden, as he positioned the knot behind Zipper’s left ear, then tightened the noose snugly.

Board imagined that Zipper’s heart was pumping extra fast, trying to fit a cheated future of beats into a single minute. But could the prisoner’s heart be beating any faster than his own did? Could Zipper’s dread be any greater? Board felt as though it was his own life that was seconds away from being snipped free of its single, flimsy marionette’s string.

Theodore Rasp put his hand around his lever, and while the chaplain droned on—and with no special fanfare or final decisive proclamation from any of the assembled—calmly pulled it toward him…

Earlier that day, Charles Zipper had been measured from his chin to the floor, in order for the CHT to gauge the length of rope needed. He had been weighed. All moving parts of the scaffold had been oiled. Things were very advanced here at Maxillae Penitentiary. As a result, everything went smoothly when the trapdoor dropped out from beneath Zipper’s feet, and his body fell.

He did not kick bare feet; his feet were shod. If his tongue was thrust out of his mouth, it wasn’t seen behind that mask. He was like a neat cocoon in his restraints and hood. A chrysalis from which nothing would emerge, unless the chaplain’s words proved true…which Board held little hope for.

When his sudden drop was halted by the rope, several bones of Zipper’s neck were broken, his spinal cord severed. Had the drop been too little, he would have remained conscious as he choked. Had the drop been too great, his head might have been torn from his body. As it was, Zipper immediately lost consciousness. He did not squirm, did not writhe like Harry Houdini in his bonds, as Board had feared he would. Almost more horribly—he just dangled. Hung there, an unmoving pendulum that had stopped measuring time.

Board threw a look over at Zipper’s wife, who was sobbing outright and—thank God—covering her eyes with her palms. Couldn’t some relative, a sister, a mother, even a friend, have accompanied her? Beside her she had only the warden, who watched the proceedings with a fixed expression, as if enraptured. Whether involuntarily or not, the legs of the tick fused to the back of his skull was stroking the sides of his neck, as though playing the strings of a harp.

Looking back to his fellow prisoner, Board saw that the front of Zipper’s uniform had darkened with urine. He smelled shit. He glanced at the clock high on the brick wall like a shining impassive eye. Though unconscious and in medical shock, though unmoving, Zipper was strangling even as Board and the others watched.

Board would witness much more grisly executions—most of them electrocutions, death by technology seeming more appropriate for the times—in the months and years ahead. During one electrocution, an improperly affixed head electrode would result in foot-long blue flames shooting out both sides of one man’s skull. Smoke would pour from the heads of other men. If they were too sweaty, sometimes they caught fire. Eyes might burst from their sockets. Often, in the case of a botched electrocution, the physician would find that the man’s heart was still beating. Sometimes Board would hear a soft moan or a wheeze. The man might live on for several, to nearly fifteen, minutes. Sometimes a second round of electrocution was called for.

Board did not always feel great sympathy for these men. Some of them had murdered honest fathers and mothers with multiple children. Some had raped and sadistically murdered women. They were not good men. But it didn’t make Board feel like a good man watching their skin turn vividly red as thousands of volts coursed through them, seeing them vomit blood onto their chests. Watching them struggle, just as their victims had struggled. And just as bad as watching their contortions was watching the fluttering of his camera’s legs, as if it fought to swim closer to them.

Board was grateful that Mrs. Zipper kept her eyes covered. But as the minutes began to tick by (despite that stilled pendulum), and no one spoke or moved, she inevitably lowered her own improvised blindfold. Her sobbing rose to a higher pitch. Had she expected to see her husband gone, the scaffold again empty when she looked at it?

The minutes ticked by.

Though Charles Zipper’s neck and spine had given way in less than a second, it took six minutes for him to go into brain death. It took eight minutes for his heart to give its last, faint throb.

The attending physician had ascended the stairs. The steps creaked as the rope had creaked when the trapdoor had swung wide, as the ankle strap had creaked. He was elderly like the executioner, like the technician, like generals who sent young soldiers to war, and his very body seemed to creak. He bent beside the chrysalis and pressed his stethoscope to it.

A minute ticked by. Straightening, the physician wheezed, “The prisoner has expired.”

Board heard one gasping sob, so loud that it startled him. But it wasn’t so much its loudness as its origin that had startled him…because the sound had issued from his own mouth. As tears, inexplicably, issued from his own eyes.