“It never was! You were lonely. I thought you should have somebody to talk to. That’s all.”
“You have to keep on playing those games, don’t you, right up to the end?”
“I’m going to marry Dal. Nothing can change that. And you must stop phoning me and writing me and following me.”
“You got it all wrong. You’re talking about the way it was, Helen. For all these weeks and weeks. Right up to tonight. It isn’t that way any more. You have to understand that. It’s different now. From now on, it’s you and me.”
Something in his voice gave her a chilly, uneasy feeling.
“Arnold, you have to try to understand.”
“I understand that you’re the only thing that can happen to me, Helen. The only possible way out. So it has to happen. It can’t happen any other way. That’s what you’ve got to understand. It’s like they say—a destiny.”
“I guess you’d better take me …”
“Now it’s time to tell you about the surprise I got.”
“Surprise?”
“I planned it all out careful, honey, just the way you’d like it. This crate is all tuned and gassed. Smitty is going to run the station. I got a thousand bucks cash on me. First time in my life I ever carried that much. In the trunk is two brand-new suitcases, yours and mine. Both full of brand-new stuff. I know I got pretty things you’ll like, and they’ll fit. So you don’t even have to go home again. We’re going to drive on through to Maryland and get married there and go on up to Canada for the honeymoon. How’s that for a surprise?”
She heard her own nervous laughter. “But I’m going to marry Dal …”
His big leathery hand closed suddenly on her wrist, so strongly that she hissed with pain. “That joke is over and I’m sick of it, Helen. I can’t get no more laughs out of that old joke. So drop it from now on. We’re taking off from here, right now. We’ll wire your folks. We’re going to drive right on through, so you see if you can go to sleep and rest up for getting married.”
He released her and started the car. She heard the high, hard whine of a car coming along the road behind them, coming the way they had come. As the Olds jumped forward she turned and opened the door and plunged out.
She made four or five giant running steps, fighting for balance, hearing a hoarse yell and scream of brakes, and then she tripped and dived headlong into a tumbled blackness where a sudden white light burst like a bomb inside her head, behind her eyes.…
THREE
DEATH HOUSE DIARY
I, Kirby Palmer Stassen, stood last February—sixteen thousand years ago?—at a window on the second floor of a fraternity house, looking out at the curiously warm, mild rain that misted Woodland Avenue. I was wearing a dark-gray cashmere cardigan and gray flannel Daks. I was smoking a cigar. The window was open a few inches. I felt the damp breath of the day against the back of my hand. It was the best layout in the house, a two-bedroom suite, handy to the shower room. I shared it with Pete McHue. We were both seniors. It was a Tuesday afternoon. Pete was spread out on the couch behind me, wearing an old terry robe, plodding his way through an assigned book, spooning all that dead dry stuff into his head where it would remain forever.
I remember that I’d put some Chavez on the machine. I can’t remember the name of the symphony, but it’s the one Clare Boothe Luce commissioned him to write as a memorial to her daughter who got killed in an automobile thing, in California, I believe. If I’d put on the Chavez Toccata for Percussion it would have fitted my mood better, but Pete wouldn’t have gone along with that. On the far sidewalk, headed east, was a dumpy little girl in a red sweater, walking in slow defiance of the rain, hugging books with both arms, her rump jutting, damp brown hair bouncing. I wondered what she was thinking about.
When you look back on the moments that change your life, you get good recall. I was thinking about that good Spanish word Hemingway used a lot. Nada. Nothing. Pronounced with accent on first syllable. First syllable is dragged out, sneered, with a lift of the lips. The d is soft—halfway between a d and the th sound. Naaaada. Truly, Mother, it is nothing. En su leche. And that day, that week, that month of my twenty-second year, the word could have been suitably embroidered across my groin.
My college career made a nice, neat chart. I’d come busting onto the scene as a hotshot from Hill, ready to slay the university, but nobody seemed to appreciate my significance and importance. So I went after them, buckety-buckety. So draw the chart in a nice upward curve from the base line, right up to a peak that comes about the middle of the junior year. Kirby Stassen, large man on campus. Background sounds of continuous applause.
Then sag it off. No more honors. No athletic participation. Maximum cuts, and then some. And, for the first time, I found myself on academic probation. And it was raining. And in the rain was a ghostly whiff of spring. Chavez rounded off the coda and the player clacked off, and let some of the sounds of the world come into the room. Traffic on the avenue. Underclassmen horsing around downstairs.
“It’s all crap,” I said.
“What?” Pete asked vaguely.
“Nada. Zero times zero equals square root of minus zero.”
“For Chrissake, Stass, stop standing around here fingering yourself. Go get drunk. Go get banged. You’ve been a drag for weeks.”
“I bother you?” I asked him politely.
“You bother everybody,” he said, and plunged back into his book.
And exactly at that moment is when it happened. For the first time in a long gray time there was a little queasy wiggle of excitement way down there on the floor of my soul. What the hell was keeping me there? What was the Christ name good of coasting through to a degree, which I could manage to do, and then signing up for that Executive Training Program the old man had all lined up for me?
It is like something going click in your head. I had been part of it—part of Pete, part of the guys horsing around downstairs, part of the traffic on Woodland, part of the strange girl in the red sweater. And all of a sudden, without having made a move, I was on my way. I had peeled myself loose from my environment. Once it was done, in that instant, I knew I couldn’t ever go back. I even had a feeling of nostalgia. Good old Pete. It was as if I’d come back to visit one of the places where I had grown up. I stood like a stranger in the middle of my own life, with that excitement coiling and uncoiling way down inside me, making my breath a little short.
I went up into the storage place in the attic and located my foot locker and suitcases and brought them down to the room.
“Now what the hell are you doing?” Pete asked.
“Taking off.”
“You look like you’re planning one hell of a long weekend, old buddy.”
“As long as they come. I’m off for good.”
“With only four months to go? You’re nuts!”
“I’m off to seek my fortune, sir.”
He went back into his book, but I was aware of him pausing from time to time to stare at me. I was very neat. I would take one suitcase. I tagged the locker and the other suitcase for express shipment to 18 Burgess Lane, Huntstown. I sorted books, clothes, records, and made a discard pile. Four years of frivolous accretion.
“Pete? Come here and pay attention.” He ambled over and saluted. “Please have Railway Express pick these up and ship collect. Take first choice of anything you want in this pile, and distribute the balance among the needy brothers.”
He squatted and pulled out a white cablestitch sweater. “We po’ folk are humbly grateful, squire.”
I shook hands with him. When I left the room he was once again squatting, prodding at the pile. It was my intention to go from room to room and exchange the fraternity grip and bid a sturdy masculine farewell to the brotherhood in residence. But instead I went right down the stairs and out the back of the house, got into the Impala and drove away from there. My checking account was down to about eighty dollars. So, on a slow circuit of the commercial strip next to the campus, I cashed three twenty-five-dol
lar checks at places where I was known and, ninety minutes after the moment of decision I was clear of the city, singing right along with Doris Day on the car radio as I made a hundred and ten feet a second on the way to New York.
That’s what the newspaper types have kept asking me—how did this all start? How did such a clean-cut, privileged, American youth embark upon such a career of violence? The women—do they call them sob sisters still?—are the worst. They are getting a sexual whee out of it. You can tell from their eyes. To the very best of my knowledge, sob sisters, it started that February day, with rain and Chavez and nada.
It is strange that while I am trying to fit my mind around the enormity of what they are going to do to me—strap me down and turn out all my lights—precious, unique, irreplaceable little ole me—I can still feel intense indignation toward whatever newspaper clown invented that Wolf Pack designation. How banal and tiresome and inaccurate can you get?
It is as though I expected more dignity out of electrocution, which is in itself a drab and tragicomic thing. It is the suitable terminal incident in the lives of people named Muggsy Spinoza—or Robert “Shack” Hernandez?—but seems unsuitable for a Kirby Palmer Stassen. I resent my pending abrupt demise being labeled a Wolf Pack Execution.
Perhaps any attempt to comprehend what they are going to do to me is as footless as a chipmunk trying to tuck a coconut into his cheek. Objectively I know it is going to happen. But subjectively I know the cavalry will ride over the hill, the red-skins will skulk off into the brush, the warden will give me a new suit, a train ticket and a handshake, and I will stride off into the sunset as noble music swells and rises on the sound track.
Another sore point in the newspaper coverage—should I have hired a public relations specialist?—has been the half-ass attempts at amateur psychoanalysis. The favorite conclusion has been to label me a constitutional psychopath. Obviously this takes society off the hook. If I can be labeled as something different—a deviation from the norm—then it is evident that the culture is not at fault. I am sick, they say. I have been sick from the beginning. I hid all my wicked violence behind the bland mask of conformity. I was an impostor. That is the implication. And so all the schools and group adjustment programs and cultural advantages are blameless.
I never felt like an impostor.
I have tried to go all the way back through my years, and down into myself, to see if I can find any stray morsel of proof of the correctness of their classification. I find no thirst for blood. I have nearly racked up an automobile trying to avoid a chipmunk, and once I drove behind a car which swerved deliberately to hit a farm dog, and it filled me with a sick, helpless anger.
I can find but one incident I do not clearly understand, and it was buried deeper than it perhaps should have been.
I am twelve. It is late summer. Ever since my birthday I have owned a 22-caliber rifle, but it has been taken away from me by my father because I lied to him. He is angry at me this year. I lost a fight and came home weeping and so he whipped me and ordered me to stay in the house for a week. My mother hugs me and says he is too hard on me. I think I hate him this year. He seems to be cruel to both of us, to my mother and to me. My friends are out somewhere in the sunshine. I am alone in the house. I am restless. I do not know what I was pretending, but I hid in my mother’s closet, and I fell asleep on the closet floor, with one of the sliding doors open a few inches.
I am awakened by nearby sounds. I know at once that it is late afternoon. The blinds are closed. The bedroom is filled with a strange golden light. I know I should not be where I am. I get up onto my knees. I look through the crack where the door is open, and look across into the mirror of her dressing table and see reflected there the two of them, and see that they are making the sound which awakened me and which I could not identify. At first I am stunned with horror, believing that he is killing her in some horrible way, that she is fighting for her life, that they are gasping and writhing in mortal struggle. She makes a long, sighing moan, and I come dangerously close to screaming in panic, believing that she is resigning herself to death.
But the dirt-talk of the playground and the boys’ room is forcing itself into my mind. As my eyes become more accustomed to the golden light, and the mists of sleep burn off my brain, I see how they match the sniggering descriptions I have been given. They told me that my mother and father did it, but I could not believe they could secretly indulge in such a nastiness.
They are still. I can sense her horrible shame. She is the most beautiful woman in the world and, being his wife, she must submit to his vileness, to this naked degradation. I vow that when I get my rifle back I will kill him and she will be forever free of the pain that made her cry out.
To my astonishment she gets up from the bed and bends to kiss him lightly and tells him in a teasing way that she loves him. She is smiling. She gets cigarettes and gives him one, and lights his and her own, and then comes toward the closet. In silent panic I move back into the farthest corner, beyond the silk and scent of her dresses. She slides the door open, takes a dressing gown from a hanger and closes the door. I cannot hear them as clearly but I hear casual talk—about a party, about repairs the car needs and about me—about my disobeying by leaving the house. Later I hear them calling me outside, calling my name into the dusk, and so I go downstairs, pretending great sleepiness, telling them I fell asleep under my bed while pretending I was in a cave. I cannot look directly at either of them. My face burns with their shame. My father gives me back the confiscated gun and rubs my head with his knuckles.
The next afternoon I go into the woods behind the house with my rifle. I stretch out, face down, in an open place, and I try to stop thinking about It, but it is there, golden pictures in my head, a dirty, naked plunging. The grass is a jungle. Ants are the size of lions. I look at the box of shells. Dangerous up to one mile. The Club is less than a mile away. The pool will be full. I know the exact direction of the invisible Club. I aim the gun at a high angle. I empty the clip, reload, fire, reload, fire—panting, my hands trembling, until the last bullet is gone. I see them falling, screaming, drowning, turning the blue water to bright-red. I hurl the new gun into the brush. I am crying. I bruise my fists on a tree, then fall to my knees and vomit.
I am sick when I go home. She puts me to bed. I wait for them to come after me. Nothing happens. The next day I talk to a boy who was at the pool. Nothing happened there. Two weeks later I look for the rifle and find it, ruined by rust. I bury it. When he asks what happened to it, I tell him I loaned it to somebody. By the time school starts, he has stopped asking. For a long time I dream about him. He is standing naked on the high board, his back to the pool. Little black holes appear in his back. He shudders as each one appears. I wait for him to fall. But he turns slowly and laughs at me, and makes a gesture, and I see that where his penis should be, there is a big bullet, the brass casing shining in the sun, ready to kill anybody.
The memory was far down, covered by the careless debris of eleven years, but I excavated it intact, using all the care of an archeologist, the lens, the soft brush, the ancient writings. I do not know that strange small boy. He moves through his own world, playing his secret games. The Freudian dream is ludicrously obvious. I understand all of it. But I do not understand the attempt to kill. I wonder where the small bullets went … a whole half box of .22 long rifle arcing across an August afternoon.
The light in this cell is never extinguished. It is countersunk in the ceiling, shielded by heavy wire mesh. I have been told by one of the guards—a curiously clerical-looking fellow who spoke with professional pride—that in the event of power failure a standby generator cuts in automatically, and should that fail to kick over, a second generator will assume the load.
A death cell should be a dungeon, with black sweating walls and phrases of despair carved by those who have waited for execution. But this is a bright, clean, sterile place, functional, efficient. One could assume it has never been used before, but the clerk
ly guard assures me that it has, many times.
Under past administrations, prisoners under sentence of death lived under much the same conditions as the prisoners in the other cell blocks, except for living one to a cell and having no work assignments. But since the completion of the new execution area we, the condemned, inhabit—at the expense of the taxpayers—these special cells. We have soft bunks, books, writing materials, television, radio, good food from a special kitchen, regular medical and dental examinations. I have gained eleven pounds since I have been in this place. We live under continual light, without contact with each other, with a guard always on watch. There are eleven of us here, filling one more than half of the twenty special cells.
It amuses me to imagine a Martian sociologist studying this place, reaching erroneous but plausible conclusions. He might well imagine that we are individuals of great value and importance. He might assume we are being conserved for some superstitious and barbaric sacrifice. For one full year the Aztecs fattened and pampered their sacrificial virgins before taking them one by one to the top of a pyramid and cutting out their pulsing hearts with the obsidian knife at sunrise. I believe these maidens were selected by chance. I cannot avoid feeling that I have been selected in some random irrational manner for this questionable honor.
I have learned what they will do with Nan Koslov. She is being held in isolation in a women’s prison a hundred miles away. All the rituals of preparation will be performed there. When it is time to destroy the four of us, she will be brought to this place and, if the scheduling is efficient, will arrive minutes before her important appointment. My clerkly guard smirks and says, “Ladies first.”
I now return to the February day when I left the university. I drove into New York at about six o’clock in a heavier rain that was just beginning to turn to sleet. I put the car in a garage on 44th Street and started phoning hotels. There were conventions and the city was loaded. I gave up after a dollar’s worth of dimes, and phoned Gabe Shevlan.
The End of the Night Page 4
