The Trial of Fallen Angels (24 page)

33

A
t 12:01 a.m., two guards lace a foul-smelling leather mask around No. 44371’s head and face. It is almost a comfort, this mask, because it holds, like a memory, the final impressions and breaths of other men whose names have become numbers, and, in this way, whispers to the next man to wear it that he is not alone. No. 44371 knows what to expect. In fact, he knows just about everything there is to know about the art of judicial electrocutions. More, possibly, than the executioner himself.

No. 44371 knows, for example, that the idea of electrocuting criminals originated in the city where he himself once lived—Buffalo, New York—from the creative mind of a dentist in the 1880s who began experimenting with the application of electricity to animals after witnessing the accidental death of a drunk man who had stumbled onto a live wire. No. 44371 also knows that the beloved inventor of the electric lightbulb, Thomas Edison, promoted the concept of electrocuting criminals as a means of winning control of the electric utility industry away from archrival George Westinghouse, by demonstrating the dangers of Westinghouse’s alternating-current transmission system over Edison’s own safer but inferior direct-current lines. So determined was Edison to sway public opinion against Westinghouse that he invited the press to witness the execution of a dozen innocent animals with a thousand-volt Westinghouse AC generator, coining the term “electro-cution.”

The next year, he successfully lobbied the New York legislature to use Westinghouse AC voltage in the first electric chair. No one, Edison gambled, would want AC voltage in their homes after that. Westinghouse did all he could to stop it, refusing to sell the generator to prison authorities and even funding judicial appeals for the first souls to be put to death by the device. He lost those appeals, and the condemned men lost their lives, but he did ultimately win control of the electric utility industry.

Yes, No. 44371 knows well the peculiar history of the electric chair, and now all of it flashes through his mind. He studied it long and hard until he reached the point where he could hear the word “chair” and not swallow so much and blink so often, anesthetizing himself to the fear of his own death by bathing himself in it. And so, he read with more than morbid curiosity the case of William Kemmler, who, by murdering his paramour in Buffalo, won the honor of being first to sit in Edison’s chair. And this made No. 44371 wonder about the peculiar relationship the City of Buffalo bore to the dentist, the electric chair, Kemmler, and No. 44371’s own life.

In the year 1890, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Bill Kemmler’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus, ruling that death by electricity does not violate the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel or unusual punishment. So sanctioned, the citizens of New York wasted no time in trying out their new toy. They fitted Kemmler with two electrodes, one on his head and the other at the base of his spine, and for seventeen seconds they passed a Westinghouse alternating current of 700 volts through his body. Witnesses reported seeing hideous spasms and convulsions and clouds of smoke and smelling burned clothing and flesh. They gave him a second dose, of 1,030 volts, lasting two minutes. A postmortem revealed that Bill Kemmler’s brain had been hardened to the consistency of well-done meat and the flesh surrounding his spine had been burned through. Among those in attendance that historic day at Auburn Prison was a disgusted George Westinghouse, who remarked on the way out: “They could have done better with an ax.”

Techniques improved.

No. 44371 has been assured by the guards that he will receive a lethal jolt of 2,000 volts straight away, then two more of about 1,000 volts each for good measure, each lasting a minute in duration and spaced ten seconds apart. His body temperature will be raised in that time to over 138 degrees Fahrenheit—too hot to touch but not so hot that he will begin to smoke like poor Bill Kemmler. His chest will heave and his mouth will foam, his hair and skin will burn, he will probably release feces into his pants, and his eyeballs will probably burst from their sockets like a startled cartoon character—hence the snug fit of the stiff leather mask the guards have just placed over his face.

Yes, No. 44371 knows all there is to know, and now with the mask over his face it seems like he knows too much. He knows that despite more than one hundred years of practice, perfection in the art of judicial “electro-cution” remains elusive. Thus, weighing heavily now on No. 44371’s mind as they clamp the cold electrodes to his shaved legs is the botched execution in the year 1990 of Jesse Tafero in Florida. During the first two cycles, smoke and flames twelve inches long erupted from poor Jesse’s head. A funeral director with some experience in these matters opined that the charred area on the top left side of his skull, about the size of a man’s hand, was a third-degree burn. But Jesse was dead, sure enough.

The guards tug at the leather straps around No. 44371’s chest and waist, and now he starts to blink faster and swallow harder.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when for humane reasons society no longer destroys even rabid dogs this way—and the electric chair in most states has already taken its place in the museum of horrors beside disembowelment, the rack, burning at the stake, the noose, and the guillotine—No. 44371 need not have faced execution in such a brutal manner. In fact, four years before his death sentence was issued, the governor of Pennsylvania signed a law making lethal injection the preferred method of execution in the commonwealth. But death by “Old Sparky,” as some referred to the chair, was the one condition No. 44371 had insisted upon in his agreement with the district attorney to plead guilty to two counts of kidnapping and two counts of first-degree murder, irrevocably waiving all his rights to appeal. When his lawyers refused to assist him in striking such a deal, he fired them on the spot.

“Maybe a lethal injection can dull society’s conscience of what it plans to do to me,” he boldly proclaimed to his fellow death-row inmates, “but I won’t take ’em! I hope my body bursts into flames and burns the prison to the ground! I want history to remember what happened to me and the Rabuns of Kamenz! Did the martyrs in the Colosseum deny their faith? Did Christ himself? Would the world remember any of them today if they were dealt a dreamy death with the prick of a needle? When humanity nailed Jesus to a cross, it nailed itself to the cross. And when humanity electrocutes me in the chair, it will electrocute itself in the chair!”

Such was the courage—or the madness—of No. 44371.

The district attorney was more than happy to seek a special order from the court to accommodate No. 44371’s unusual request. Yet even with the guilty plea entered in the docket and the special order signed, fifteen years had passed because neither No. 44371 nor the district attorney considered the possibility of collateral appeals being filed by opponents of the use of the electric chair.

Now, at long last, all those appeals have been denied. The death warrant has been signed, Old Sparky has been removed from the museum of horrors and returned to the death chamber, the possibility of a stay of execution has passed, and No. 44371 is finally about to be granted his wish. But now
he
is having doubts.

After all those years of studying judicial electrocutions, No. 44371 cannot control his panic in these final, terrifying moments. The leather mask reeks with the vomit of dead men, the copper cap scratches into his naked scalp, the electrodes dig into his legs, and his waist and limbs are lashed too tightly against the rough wood. He imagines the current crashing into his skull, detonating his brain like a bomb before plunging down his spine and fusing his gut under the intense heat, imploding his bowels. He imagines it leaping from his legs like a crazed demon, carrying his soul down, down into the earth. Then nothing.

No. 44371 hears the heavy breathing of the guards, heavier now than even his own breath. His lungs are afraid to breathe because the next breath might be their last.

“Mount Nittany,” he mumbles despondently, trying to conjure his last glimpse of the mountain from his cell window before they removed him to the isolation chamber a day earlier. He had hoped that remembering this last view of the world would calm him in the final moments. And, yes, yes, the paper! It’s still in his fingers, a single scrap of newsprint he has kept in his wallet for years.

But what did it say? The words! What were the words? No. 44371 has forgotten them already.

“Doug! Doug!” he cries out.

“I’m right here,” says the guard, attempting to sound reassuring while trying to steady his own nerves and bear his own fear and guilt. In these final moments there is compassion between inmate and jailer. They’ve known each other for so long, but they know too there’s a job to be done and each man must play his part. There are no hard feelings.

“Doug, I can’t read it. Read it to me, Doug.”

No. 44371, whose arms are strapped to the chair, is trying to wave the sheet with his fingers and nod his head in its direction, but he’s strapped too tightly and can’t move.

“Just a second,” the guard says, turning toward the narrow slit in the wall behind which the executioner stands, blinking. “I think . . . Yeah, it looks like they’re ready now,” Doug says.

“Wait!” No. 44371 pleads. “Please, Doug. I can’t remember the words. I haven’t given you any trouble.”

“Okay, okay,” Doug says, “I’ve got to take it from you now, anyway.” The guard retrieves the scrap and says to the executioner, “Just a second.”

“Read it, Doug.” No. 44371 whimpers. “Read it.”

“Do you want me to read all of it?” the guard asks.

“No, just the underlined part,” No. 44371 replies.

“Okay, here’s what it says:

No good deed ever goes unpunished, but whether a deed is good or bad appears to turn not on the nature or quality of the deed itself but rather the amount of hatred that exists for those who are its intended beneficiary.

No. 44371 takes a deep breath and smiles beneath his mask.

“Thanks, Doug,” he says gratefully. “I remember now. You’ll put it in my pocket when it’s over, right, like you promised?”

“Sure, Ott,” Doug replies, relieved now that the prisoner seems ready to accept his fate. “Sure, just like I promised.”

34

I
n life and in death, Nana Bellini kept lush pots of pink and white vinca, impatiens, marigolds, ferns, and a dozen other varieties on the front porch of her house. She planted ivy and wisteria vines around the perimeter and allowed them to pull themselves up the balustrade like children at play. The flowers perfumed the air, attracting hummingbirds and bumblebees that tormented the cats napping in the shade. Like the garden behind the house, the front porch was its own little ecosystem and parable of life.

That all changed when Nana left Shemaya, leaving me alone to take care of the place. But by the time Luas had come to find me after my meeting with Ott Bowles, everything had withered and died. Only raw piles of dirt filled the pots now, littered with fragments of dried stems and roots. The banister sagged and swayed dangerously in gusts of wind created by the thunderhead that stalked the four seasons of the valley day and night like a homicidal lover. The windowpanes of the house were broken, and paint peeled from the mullions and frames. The place looked as if it hadn’t been lived in for decades. There were no cats or birds, and there was no color, just a monochromatic frame. My Shemaya had turned to shades of gray.

I hadn’t seen Luas or been out of the house since the day the spirit of Otto Bowles entered my office and infected my soul. I had staggered from my office in a daze, down the long corridor, through the great hall and the vestibule, through the woods, up the steps of the porch, into the house. There I stayed, behind closed doors, reliving his life again and again, horrified and fascinated. My body aged with the house. My hair turned gray, thin, and coarse. My face contracted into the frightened expression of an old woman, barely more than a skeleton with absurd knobs of bone protruding from my chin, jaws, and forehead. My lips shriveled and hardened like an earthworm baked in the sun, disappearing into the toothless hole of my mouth. I slept during the day and woke during the night aching all over, my joints brittle and inflamed with arthritis.

I knew it would be Luas when I heard the knock on the door. There had been no visitors during all those years. He would be coming to say I could no longer delay the presentation. Otto Bowles was waiting in the train shed for his case to be called, and God was waiting in the Courtroom to judge his soul.

Luas said nothing about the change in my appearance. He only smiled—that knowing grandfather’s smile of his, the way he smiled at me when I arrived in Shemaya, as if to say:
Yes, my granddaughter, you have suffered, and it is difficult, but I would only be making it worse by noticing.
I offered him a seat on the porch. “How are you, Brek?” he asked.

“I’d pull the switch again,” I answered. I spoke now in the quivering voice of an old woman, weak but defiant. “Until there was nothing left of him but ash.”

The dark anvil of the thundercloud crossed the sky. I imagined how I would feel to be pulled hot from a fire and hammered against its flank.

“Nero Claudius committed suicide,” Luas said. His face pinched as his hands groped through his pockets to find matches for his pipe. “Unlike Mr. Bowles, he cheated the world of its opportunity for justice.”

“So God has a sense of humor after all,” I said. “Satan is a lawyer and carries a briefcase. What did we do to deserve all this?”

Luas struck a match. It flared bright orange in the shadows. The white smoke from his pipe bubbled over the sides, too weak to rise into the wind.

“I did cheer when they stoned Saint Stephen to death,” Luas said, “so I guess I had it coming. But this isn’t hell, Brek. The Judge must be certain of our fidelity and self-control. If we are impartial when presenting the souls we most despise, then the Judge can be certain we will present all postulants with dispassion. Our motives must be pure when we enter the Courtroom—we can show no favoritism or emotion. The judgment is Yahweh’s. He alone determines how Otto Bowles and Nero Claudius spend eternity.”

A blue bolt of lightning flashed across the valley, followed by a loud clap of thunder. A doe and her fawn, tiptoeing through the band of deep white snow covering the meadow, lifted their ears toward the sky, confused by the sound of thunder on such a cold day in their part of Shemaya.

Oh, take care,
I wished the doe with all my heart, one mother to another.
It’s not safe here. They’re after your baby, and they’re after you. Trust no one. Assume nothing. Run. Run!

“I did everything I could to bring people to justice,” Luas continued. “But then one day I found myself blinded by this idea of forgiveness. I don’t know how it happened. Oh, it was quite a conversion; I started preaching it to the people and criticizing them for appealing to the law courts.”

“You misled a lot of people,” I said.

“Yes, I did,” Luas agreed. “I realized that when I met Elymas. When he threatened me, I couldn’t just turn the other cheek. I blinded him on the spot, just as I had been blinded. He still carries a grudge about it even though I’ve apologized a thousand times. I went back to the old law of an eye for an eye, Brek, and I can’t tell you how good it felt. But by that point, it was too late. The Romans imprisoned me as an enemy of the state. But I wasn’t about to give up without a fight the way Jesus did. I demanded my right to a trial as a Roman citizen. When it looked like I couldn’t get a fair hearing, I appealed to Nero Claudius. He had a good reputation in those days. Nobody knew he would turn out to be such a sadist. You know the rest. Now Nero and I meet again here every day in the afterlife. Even mighty emperors receive their just deserts.”

The storm clouds cleared, revealing four moons in the nighttime sky: a quarter moon, a half-moon, a three-quarter moon, and a full moon, each set against the constellations appropriate to its season, hashing the sky into astronomical gibberish. The air cooled and I wrapped one of Nana’s shawls closer around me for warmth. Bats flickered above the trees, chasing after insects. In the distance I could hear a great horned owl and a whip-poor-will, and the bark of a lonely dog—the sounds I’d heard many nights on that porch as a child.

“Ott Bowles can speak for himself in the Courtroom,” I said. “He made his choices. He doesn’t need a lawyer. He needs an executioner.”

Luas tapped his pipe against the banister to empty it of ash. “Perhaps so,” he said, “but it is justice that needs our help in the Courtroom, Brek, not Ott Bowles. Presenters supply the distance that makes justice possible for the accused and the Accuser, the created and the Creator. Lawyers are the many colors in the promise of the rainbow as it fades into the horizon of eternity.”

“
I
am the Accuser, Luas,” I corrected him. “There’s no need for a trial because I’ve already found him guilty. It’s time for justice to be served.”