Acid West

by Joshua Wheeler

  By the fourteenth century there is a greater cultural sense that hellfire as eternal torture might be overkill. In 1320, Dante writes Inferno and represents hell as part of a journey toward acceptance of God. The horrors of the Apocalypse of Peter are all still there but a bit more organized and not merely an exercise in chaotic sadism but also now part of an overall instruction in faith. The burning sinners are meant to help show us the way. From Canto XXII:

  And of the people who therein were burned

  Even as the dolphins, when they make a sign

  To mariners by arching of the back,

  That they should counsel take to save their vessel,

  Thus sometimes, to alleviate his pain,

  One of the sinners would display his back

  In 1667 John Milton adds his two cents to the wishing well of hellfire, writes Paradise Lost, in which hell is not just a garbage dump or a maze but a whole kingdom ruled by Satan, complete with palaces and all manner of aesthetic achievements that outstrip anything on Earth and rival even those in heaven. Human attempts at art are rather sad in comparison:

  Learn how their greatest monuments of fame

  And strength, and art, are easily outdone

  By Spirits reprobate, and in an hour

  What in an age they, with incessant toil

  And hands innumerable, scarce perform.

  Then the Americans come onto the scene and Jonathan Edwards, in 1773, takes us back briefly to hellfire as spectacle, adding applause from spectators, in his sermon “The End of the Wicked, Contemplated by the Righteous. Or, The Torments of the Wicked in Hell, No Occasion of Grief to the Saints in Heaven.” Edwards writes:

  When the saints in glory shall see how miserable others of their fellow-creatures are, who were naturally in the same circumstances with themselves; when they shall see the smoke of their torment, and the raging of the flames of their burning, and hear their dolorous shrieks and cries, and consider that they in the mean time are in the most blissful state and shall surely be in it to all eternity; how will they rejoice!

  “By the 1870s,” writes the historian Gary Scott Smith about hellfire, “many Christians viewed the traditional concept’s emphasis on endless physical torments as antiquated, malicious, offensive, inconsistent with God’s character, and unjust because finite sins did not deserve an infinite penalty.”

  In 1881 Robert Green Ingersoll wrote, If lunatics and idiots are in no danger of hell, God should have created only lunatics and idiots. This was meant to be an admonishment of those who believed in literal hellfire, a mockery of the complicated justifications they concocted about exactly who would and would not be subjected to hell. Ingersoll was among the many now of the belief that hellfire was only a metaphor. Or maybe he meant to prove that there was a benevolent god by pointing out that we are, all of us, lunatics and idiots.

  In 1956 Isaac Asimov writes a short story about the invention of slow-motion film, about a bunch of New Mexico scientists using that invention to watch the explosion of an atomic bomb, seeing for the first time a face that has always been hidden in the blast: “That moment of stasis—the fireball had shown dark spots for eyes, with dark lines for thin, flaring eyebrows, a hairline coming down v-shaped, a mouth twisted upward, laughing wildly in the hell-fire and horns.” There was no need to worry about otherworldly hellfire anymore. Satan had come to earth.

  These days hellfire is in the news all the time, in the form of a missile, named Hellfire, that we Americans keep raining down on the Middle East from drones.

  In 2007 the Pew Research Center, in their U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, found that 74 percent of all Americans believed in heaven while only 59 percent believed in hell. They surveyed many religious groups and even atheists. While the percentages of belief varied greatly between the groups, there was one constant: all believed in heaven at a higher rate than hell. For some reason those conclusions feel wrong to me, perhaps a result of people needing to feign optimism in the face of a pesky pollster. The precision with which so many peoples and cultures have been able to nail down a description of hell should tell us something. Ask ten people to describe heaven in one nonabstract word and you will get lots of hesitation and ten different answers. Ask anyone to describe hell. They’ll say fire. They’ll say it burns.

  The most recent edition of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy begins its entry “Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought” with this chilling thought experiment, the scenario they deem most apt for launching an investigation into afterlife:

  Indeed, despite their profound differences, many Christians (though perhaps not all) and many atheists can presumably agree concerning this: if a young girl is brutally raped and murdered and this should be the end of the story for the child, then a supremely powerful, benevolent, and just God would not exist. An atheist may seriously doubt that any future compensation would suffice to justify a supreme being’s decision to permit such an evil in the first place. But the point is that even many Christians would concede that, apart from an afterlife, such an evil would constitute overwhelming evidence against the existence of God; some might even concede that such an evil would be logically (or metaphysically) inconsistent with his existence as well. It is hardly surprising, then, that a belief in an afterlife should be an important part of the Christian tradition.

  Orwellian Ironies

  “… I am Terry Clark’s biological son,” begins the message by Justin Clark that has been relegated to the Letters to the Editor section of the Albuquerque Journal on the eve of Terry’s execution. This special edition of the section, entitled “Hung Jury,” is devoted to debating capital punishment and includes letters with titles such as “A Better Alternative: Life Without Parole” and “Clark Responsible for Own Death Sentence” and “Orwellian Ironies Will Corrode N.M. Society.” The Orwellian ironies, according to the letter, are that the Department of Corrections is correcting Terry by killing him, that the Department of Health is providing the chemicals to do it.

  Buried in the tiny, crammed columns of these letters is Justin’s letter—“Innocent Bystanders Smeared by Association.” I’m surprised to find this letter here because it has nothing to do with the death-penalty debate and because I expect words from the killer’s son to be more prominent news, especially when that killer’s execution is less than twenty-four hours away. But here it is, in the smallest font the newspaper prints, almost invisible on D13.

  Justin writes that he is upset because the Journal published information about his mother, Terry’s ex-wife, in a recent article; they printed her name, occupation, location, and even her hobbies. Justin argues that making such information public creates problems for an otherwise wonderful family struggling to distance themselves from an evil man. “People tend to look at you different when you suddenly become a murderer’s kid. Sure, I am part of the same gene pool as Terry, but I am nothing like that man, nothing like him at all…”

  I file that article next to the one I mistakenly printed many months ago: “Researchers Trace Human Genes Back to Common Ancestor.”

  Blameless

  Bryan Stevenson, a death-penalty opponent who has succeeded in stopping many executions, says that for the death penalty “the threshold is not whether they deserve to die, but whether we deserve to kill.” This is Jesus’s old who-will-cast-the-first-stone conundrum. How easy it is to see that no one is blameless. But Terry was asking for it.

  In his 2004 study, “Killing the Willing,” the director of the Cornell Death Penalty Project, John H. Blume, uses Terry Clark’s case as the basis of a hypothetical situation for determining whether inmates should be allowed to waive appeals and volunteer for execution. Though Blume suggests most condemned men who want to die are suicidal and therefore should not be allowed to waive their appeals—assisted suicide is illegal everywhere but Oregon—he suggests that in a case such as Terry’s, the prisoner’s request should be granted. Terry wanted closure for the victim’s family. He believed his punishment was just. According to
the court, he had a rational and factual understanding of the consequences of his decision. These three things make him the ideal volunteer for execution. Blume mostly skips over the issue of religion, mentioning only that our country has a long history of volunteer executions coerced by religious authorities. Anyway, it’s an impossible topic to resolve. Terry believed he was going to heaven, believed he would be there fifteen minutes after his heart stopped. That’s not a rational and factual understanding of the consequences. But in this country it is our right to maintain irrational and nonfactual understandings. It’s called freedom of religion.

  For Dena Lynn’s parents, it only mattered that Terry died. They gave this interview to the AP two days before the execution:

  “I won’t get excited until I see him strapped to that gurney and his lights go out,” Jeff Gore said. “To this day, I don’t care who does it, I just want the man dead.” Gore, who lives in Chaparral, said he has spent many a night plotting how he might kill Clark. “Very vindictive ways that would not be quick,” he said. Colleen Gore said she also has suffered from guilt. Dena Lynn asked her mother, her brother and her mother’s boyfriend to go with her to the store that afternoon, but ended up riding off alone on her brother’s bicycle. “We’ve all gone through a major guilt thing,” her mother said. “She just wanted to go spend her money. It was burning a hole in her pocket.”

  In their story on Brother Maxey, the Albuquerque Journal described his take on Terry’s last hours:

  Clark slept on and off that night and listened to country and western songs on his radio. He had his final visit with his girlfriend, Jean Ortiz, on Tuesday afternoon and became more agitated, Maxey said. “She said he was starting to come unglued,” Maxey said. “He really had a fear of being alone. He didn’t want to be alone to think. He started to get sweaty palms. He was shaking.” Corrections officers gave Clark a sedative about 4pm, and Clark became less agitated but reported that he felt the room was spinning. “I think it calmed him down so he could get through those last hours,” Maxey said. Clark repeatedly said he was scared.

  Brother Maxey was given a cell phone as he sat with Terry in the hours before the execution. The warden told Brother Maxey that Terry had until 6:00 p.m. to call his attorney and halt the execution. But Terry had already been sedated, and the phone was never used.

  Sedatives such as Valium and other anxiety-numbing drugs are relatively common in executions, with half of all death-penalty states allowing the condemned access to such drugs in the days and hours leading up to an execution. No state has any protocol for sedating death-penalty volunteers who have not exhausted their appeals, who technically still have the right to change their minds. And Brother Maxey says there’s no religious doctrine about showing up to heaven numb.

  Ends

  Terry is only the ninth man to be put to death by New Mexico since 1933, the first in nearly forty-two years. He remains the only man killed by the state in the modern era of capital punishment.

  In 1933 Thomas Johnson got the electric chair and didn’t speak but waved at the sheriff when asked for his last words. That same year Santiago Garduño got the electric chair after mixing strychnine with whiskey for his fourteen-year-old son to drink. Santiago said he had found peace with his god. Pedro Talamante’s last words to a priest in 1946 included descriptions of hallucinations about movies he’d been seeing on the concrete walls of the penitentiary and the claim that a witch lived in the corner of his cell. In 1947 Louis Young sang Use me, Lord, in thy service. Arthur Fay Johnson loudly maintained his innocence even as the electric chair whirred into action in 1954. Later that year and in the same chair, Frederick Heisler screamed, Don’t let them do it! In 1956 James Larry Upton asked that his face be covered because a rowdy crowd of drunks had somehow managed to gather around the electric chair and they were making him nervous. The normal execution hood did not fit Upton’s big head but someone in the crowd had a parka, and before they draped it over Upton’s face he said that he had no last words. No, he said. The parka was made of fur and when the switch was flipped and the voltage flowed, Upton’s head caught fire. And in 1960, David Cooper Nelson, the only New Mexico man to die in a gas chamber, said, Okay, Warden. God be with you.

  Terry Clark plans his last words for four months, inspired by reading about a pickax murderer born-again on death row in Texas. For months Terry repeats the chosen words like a mantra, trying them on, writing them, becoming comfortable with their sound. His last words will be Fifteen minutes. Then he will die. Then he will be in heaven before they even unstrap his body from the injection table.

  Brother Maxey is in the execution chamber with the warden and Terry. Two experts on execution from Texas are nearby, overseeing the injection. On the way in, Terry asks one executioner if it will hurt. The Texan scoffs, Well yeah. You’re gonna die. Terry looks to Brother Maxey, who, unable to refute the obvious, just smiles. The warden asks for a final statement. Terry gives his final statement. The state’s official record of his last words will be Fifteen minutes. But, as the drugs course into his veins and paralyze his muscles, an addendum of sorts will pass through Terry’s lips. Brother Maxey will be the only one to lean down and hear the involuntary whisper that slips out of Terry just before he dies.

  Several hundred death-penalty protesters hold candles outside the death house. Many of them have been here for forty-one days, protesting one day for each year since New Mexico’s last execution. Several dozen supporters of capital punishment, many friends of the victim’s family, linger among the protesters, inching toward the door to be the first to quietly congratulate the state’s witnesses when they exit.

  Somewhere I have a firsthand account of Terry’s final minutes. Something a reporter wrote—clichés such as “Time seemed to stand still for a few moments.” Brother Maxey didn’t notice time stand still. Or he doesn’t mention it. I don’t think it ever does. Time sputters and wobbles but keeps moving. Like the microfilm machine I keep going back to. Like the fan in the prisoner’s witness room where Jean Ortiz sits with Gail Evans, whose phone will never ring. Like the tape recorder of the reporter in the state’s witness room where Dena Lynn Gore’s mother and father sit with Donita Welch, all grown up, watching through the glass as Terry gets strapped in. Twelve straps. Strapped. Tight. A sheet pulled taut and tucked neat. IV lines shoved into both arms, extended out at angles well below ninety degrees. A pillow. They provide a pillow. Brother Maxey is opposite the windows where the witnesses watch, wearing flannel again. Terry only looks at Brother Maxey. Holds still. He’s promised himself he will hold still. The warden reads, never raises his eyes from the paper … Hereby directed and commanded to execute the judgment and sentence of lethal injection … the murder of Dena Lynn Gore … just hold still … give a final statement. Say it loud. Say it clear. Say it. Fifteen minutes. That’s it, then. Well, alright. Sodium Pentothal. Pavulon. Sodium chloride. Brother Maxey leans in. Terry exhales. Whispers, It burns a little.

  THE GLITCH IN THE VIDEOGAME GRAVEYARD

  In the Year of Our Lord 2014

  I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend.

  —CHRIS MARKER, Sans Soleil

  But is it a perfect world? When everything we can recall is legend, is that a utopia or a dystopia? I guess a world like that has no choice but to play out like a hall of mirrors. When all is said and done and rubble, the ruins will only reflect themselves. But then a security guard power walks up to me and breaks my trance and wonders aloud if I should be so close to the car.

  It’s a time machine, I say.

  Yeah, I guess it is. He watches as I try to take a picture of my reflection on the tinted window of the DeLorean, but because it is night and because I keep the flash off in an attempt to retain the perfect reflection of my face in the moonlit window of the DeLorean, the photo keeps coming out dark and empty. The guard says, It is pretty cool. Then he gets out his phone and points it at the time machine. He’s not after his reflection but also snaps without the flash
because he’s trying to capture who’s inside. Or what’s inside—a life-size E.T. doll, belted in shotgun, all brown and wrinkled plastic with that block head and those babywide eyes gazing through the time machine’s front windshield. I figure the guard’s pictures are coming out dark and empty just like mine because he keeps holding his phone close to his face to inspect the pictures, and in that electronic glow I see he is missing an ear and he scratches where the ear should be and curses under his breath and snaps the exact same image again and again because it is impossible to satisfyingly capture reality when it’s composed of the unreal. Then the Hollywood floodlights pop on and scare the darkness away and I see how near we are to a bank of Porta Potties and how fragile the little DeLorean is and how like a turd E.T. looks and how we are right in the middle of a landfill. I see, just over a few rolling hills of garbage, the real reason we are all gathered here tonight: the Pit.

  And so I walk toward the glowing mounds of trash.

  This is Alamogordo, New Mexico, on Friday night of Easter Week in the year of our Lord 2014.* It’s on this day of observance about resurrection anxiety that a documentary crew has descended on my hometown to conduct an excavation at the dump. They hope to retrieve hundreds of thousands of copies of Atari’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial videogame cartridges that, in September of 1983, were reportedly hauled ninety miles from a warehouse in El Paso, Texas, and left for dead thirty feet under our town. I want to tell the filmmakers that the time for resurrection has passed, that Easter Friday is just for shaking in your boots about running into a reanimated corpse, but that is not my place. I’m here only as a scribe, writing up the dig for what one of the film’s producers keeps referring to as a pointy-headed liberal rag. He says, What does a pointy-headed liberal rag care about our little dig for videogames? And he says, Why would a pointy-headed liberal rag send some kid? I don’t bother to point out that his second question answers his first. I’m a hometown boy, I say, and get out my notebook and go to work writing down adjectives for the nouns I’m seeing.