by Alex Dolan
He said, “This was built for sparky.” In the middle of the room, I found a square of singed linoleum and drill marks where the electric chair had been bolted to the floor.
In the corner, a smaller chamber had been constructed within the room. The floor-to-ceiling cylinder was shaped like a space capsule with riveting around the glass portals. To open and close the entry hatch, one would spin a wheel usually found on a submarine.
“When they outlawed the chair, they built the gas chamber,” he explained.
Through the hatch, a sickly green table stood at the center of the chamber. It had a medical feel to it, like a dentist’s chair stretched flat so the patient could lie horizontally. Two armrests jutted out like angel wings, straps lacing across the padding.
Royce said, “When they outlawed gas, they built this. The warden built a new execution chamber two years ago. Looks like a hospital room. They left this one alone, like a time capsule.”
“Hard for me not to feel like an executioner.”
“That’s what he thinks he’s getting.”
I closed my eyes for a few deep inhales, smelling hints of vinyl. Back outside the chamber, I stared at myself in the reflection of the viewing gallery’s safety glass. I looked homely in my soda pop glasses. I removed them and unzipped my duffel, pulling out a makeup kit and a mirror. I thought about applying lipstick, something to pretty me up. But grown women intimidated Walter, and I wanted to look nonthreatening—at least at the start.
While we waited, I asked, “What if something goes wrong?”
“We’re in a prison. Things go wrong all the time.”
A short wait later, Kearns escorted Walter Gretsch into the room. In the red jumpsuit and leg cuffs, Gretsch stumbled. His hands folded over his groin. The man had shaved that day, so he looked cleaner than when I last saw him. Walter seemed lost in thought, and he only pulled his eyes off the floor with some effort. When he saw the old gas chamber with the empty green chair, his legs buckled. Royce and Kearns both pulled him to his feet.
Walter Gretsch heaved a few times. His chin spasms were more violent, as if he wanted to unscrew his head from his shoulders. He had requested this—had agreed to Leland’s trade, just so I’d come for him—but he wasn’t ready for it. As the reality of his own demise set in, the natural biological impulses were taking over and he started to panic, breathing hard and fast.
I shouldn’t have pitied this man. He didn’t know it, but he wouldn’t even die that day. But his abject desperation made me feel sorry for him, even though I found him revolting. I stepped in front of the open chamber hatch so Walter couldn’t see the chair. “I’ll help you through this,” I said.
He brightened a bit when he recognized me. His mouth opened to say something, but he couldn’t talk. Walter had trouble walking, and Royce and Kearns carried him the rest of the way to the table. Kearns even offered some consolation. “It’ll go fine, Walter.”
They laid him flat and strapped down his arms and legs.
I’d never attended a client who had to be restrained.
Now tightly bound, Walter breathed in shallow puffs. No one who ever got my needle was ever this terrified. Because of all the misery he’d inflicted, I wanted to enjoy his terror, but I couldn’t. To ease the tension, I tried to get him talking. “I saw,” I was going to say your sister, when I considered the complexity of their relationship, “Helena. Outside.”
He looked at the ceiling as I sat beside him. “She’s a good girl,” he said to no one in particular. It was hard to say whether he had reappraised his sister since we last spoke, whether he was lying then or just bullshitting now. I doubted he had any feelings that might approximate love, but he seemed fond of her.
I said whatever came to mind as I prepped the needle. “She has a prosthetic foot. How’d she get that?”
Royce gave me a sidelong glance, likely wondering why I would bring that up.
Walter nervously chattered the way a first-time drunk would spill stories. “My momma. Our momma.”
I gaped at him. Maybe because I’d just seen Helena, I’d pulled the dose I might have given to her, a woman profoundly more substantial than Walter, even with the weight he’d put on in prison.
“She tried to beat the bad out of her. Didn’t work. Too much bad in both of us.” He laughed to himself. “One night Helena said she was going to run away. Momma took a hammer to her foot. Busted it open like a water balloon.” I didn’t want to hear any of this, but I needed him talking when the drugs kicked in, so I didn’t stop him. “Got infected. Nasty. So she cut it off.” Possibly reevaluating his family at large, he said, “My momma saved her by cutting it off.”
“Walter, do you know how this is going to work?” I asked. He shrugged. “I’m going to give you a shot that’s going to relax you and put you to sleep. It will take a little while. When you’re asleep, I’ll give you a second injection. Then it will be over. You won’t feel it.” Now was my turn to spin some bullshit. The dose of pharmahuasca would kick in somewhere between five and twenty minutes after the injection. He would most assuredly feel it.
His body clenched and his voice cracked, though he tried to sound carefree. “Hunky-dory.”
I rubbed the antiseptic swab over his forearm while he kept his eyes on the ceiling. “Least it isn’t gas. That would be rough,” he said. Walter Gretsch had no idea what he was in for.
I didn’t use the butterfly needle this time. I set up a regular IV drip. This was what Walter Gretsch was expecting, because this is how a traditional lethal injection would work—with the exception that the execution team would be in the adjacent room, so they wouldn’t have to face the convicted. Now that we started the process, a dreamy serenity cast over Walter.
I withheld the syringe. “Tell us where they are, and we’ll get started.”
“I already told Agent Moon,” he said. Immediately lapsing into a practiced patter, he was more at ease because he was doing what he was comfortable doing. Lying.
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“Honest, I told Agent Moon. He knows.” Walter nodded at me, almost believing his lie. He hadn’t told Leland anything. We all knew this was how it would go. Walter couldn’t resist trying to put something past us.
“These will be your final minutes,” I said, spooking myself with the severity of this declaration. “Is there anything you want to tell me that might give you some peace?”
“You a priest too?” He smirked at the men, as if they’d be in on the joke, seemingly at ease now that the end was inevitable.
I remained patient. “Would you want to say anything to the families you’ve affected?”
He closed his eyes. “You ever watch nature shows?”
“I’ve watched a few.”
“Then you seen it. Every time a crocodile snatches a baby wildebeest. Every time a lion tackles a zebra cub or whatever the hell they call zebra babies. Children are always targets for a good hunter. The weakest always get sorted out. If parents can’t protect their own, that’s just nature being nature.” I supposed this was the closest he’d ever come to a confession.
We didn’t honestly think Walter would honor his trade. Nor did I press too much for him to answer. If he did start confessing anything, he might lose his nerve, and I might not get the opportunity to surge his blood with these truth-loosening hallucinogens.
Right before the needle went in, I thought about messing up the injection, stabbing the wrong part of the arm or twisting it just slightly so that Walter Gretsch would feel it more. But I ended up just wanting to get it over with.
“God, I barely felt that,” he complimented. He got off lucky, relatively speaking.
I left some in the syringe, the difference between a Walter and a Helena dose, and set the needle on a worktable.
“It will take a few minutes for the drugs to settle in,” I said. “We’ll wait.” I reached for his hand and he flinched. Even as he thought he was dying, he was nervous around a grown woman. “Relax.�
�
After five minutes, the first indications were a fluttering of the eyelids. I excused myself from the room. Walter was too occupied with the sensations overcoming him to remark on my leaving.
Outside the gas chamber, I dug more items out of my duffel. Staring into the small mirror, I prepared. Most of my costume came out of a grease paint can.
Despite the dim lighting and small mirror, I worked fast. As I pulled my scrubs over my head, I caught Kearns stealing a glimpse in the reflection of the viewing room window, but he quickly averted his eyes, pushing the hatch nearly shut to give me a little more privacy.
As Walter moaned in the steel chamber, I smeared my face and arms with blue paint. I’d painted most of my body before I arrived. Tesmer got my back and hard-to-reach spots. In the mirror, the paint up and down my spine held up without major smudging. A low necklace of white skulls had been applied along my stomach and chest. Down went the pants, and I painted my ankles and feet, with touch-ups on the places where my skin was showing through.
Leland had instructed, “I want you to be terrifying.” The thing that seemed to terrify him the most was a woman, so I went braless and stripped off my underwear bottoms. In for a penny, in for a pound. I’d be as much of a woman as possible, and watch him squirm when he saw postpubescent lady parts.
When I was finished, most of my skin was a uniform cobalt blue, from pectorals to pudenda. Except for the skulls and the accents and black lipstick. I painted Kali’s red tongue down my chin. Crimson accents around my eyes made it look like I’d been crying blood. A midnight black mane cascaded down to my waist. In the mirror, what stuck out more than my unmentionables was the muscle definition. The sharp contours of my shoulders and the veins in my biceps were more severe when defined by the blue pigment. I was tribal, what ancient Anglos would consider a savage. Without a severed head or a scimitar, this was as close to Kali as anyone was going to get.
For my final touch, I took out the two tiny bags of ash. With a pinky, I dabbed a bit of my father on my right shoulder and a bit of my mother on my left shoulder.
Walter’s moans bounced around the steel metal tub. He kept asking Royce and Kearns what was happening, and he called to me. “Kali…”
The door to the room opened again, and I jumped. Our escort with the moustache was back, and he let in Leland Moon. In the old gas chamber, Royce shut the hatch so Walter wouldn’t see him.
I hadn’t expected him, but I wasn’t shocked to see him. He said, “I had to come.” For a tic I remembered I was naked, but when Leland looked over my costume, he seemed impressed instead of aroused. “You look good. Real good.” He grabbed an armful of maps from the table and walked into the viewing room. “Don’t tell him I’m here.” On the other side of the safety glass, he sat down in a folding chair and spread various maps on the seats around him.
When I reentered the chamber, Royce nodded to Leland in the next room. I closed the hatch all but a crack.
The guards hovered over their patient. As instructed, Royce was feeding Walter sips of water through a straw bottle to keep him hydrated through the process. The pharmahuasca had polluted his blood. Walter was squirming like mad against the restraints. One of his legs tore loose, and they had to fasten it down.
Kearns seemed horrified by my getup. He looked to Royce and back to me, hoping someone might clarify that he was indeed staring at painted nipples and privates. Royce gave him a look that told him to roll with it, whatever it was.
Walter’s pupils had swollen to minimoons. When I lurched over him, he found my face and fixated on me in petrified awe. His hallucinations had started, and I was adding to them. A urine patch blossomed through the red jumpsuit. Normally the condemned wore adult diapers to prevent this final humiliation. Not on that day. The darkening stain made me think of Veda Moon at the dinner table, and that memory made me think about what he and his sister had done to Veda. It was easy for Kali to be furious.
Walter half recognized me, but didn’t understand what he was seeing. Maybe he thought someone had drugged him, but he couldn’t be sure. When he spoke, he might not have known who he was talking to or if he was talking to anyone. “What did you do to me?” His limbs thrashed about, and Kearns fastened the straps as if cranking a jib. Walter shouted to all of us, “You said I wasn’t going to feel nothing!” He started to hyperventilate.
Walter Gretsch had no idea what was happening to him. The physical restraints must have also compounded the fear. He shouldn’t have been in real physical pain, but the disorientation would have been its own kind of torment. Fear isn’t pain, but it is the expectation of it.
I let him stare at me. There wasn’t anything I could say that would ignite his terror the way a whirly imagination could. The less I spoke, the more inhuman I seemed. The silence made him more vocal. He spewed curses and accusations, favoring the word cunt. Finding the guards in his periphery, he gave them hell too. My heart raced as well, and I did my best to retain my serenity, especially nude in a room with three men. I breathed deeply into my belly to ground myself, to remember that this man couldn’t hurt me. Walter spat at me, and I didn’t react beyond placidly wiping his spittle off my breast.
Walter must have also realized that he couldn’t hurt any of us, and so he was completely vulnerable. He shivered under my kind, reassuring smile. As the drugs worked their magic, he began hallucinating visions beyond me, somewhere behind me, possibly a mural of living characters stirring in a melting ceiling. He shrieked like a bird. I fought not to jump when he did.
I masked my own revulsion, not only of Walter, but of myself and of us all. This was what being a torturer felt like, and it felt so much worse than anything I had ever done, even though the victim was as deserving as anyone could be. Walter Gretsch twisted and shook in his restraints as waves of visions came to him. He had expected to be dead by now, and as the full flood of psychedelics coursed through him, he doubtlessly wished he was.
When Walter’s convulsions settled down to predictable tremors, Royce went to the hatch and opened it slightly wider, nodding a signal to Leland to let him know we were starting to question him. Walter couldn’t see him from the table.
Royce walked out to the viewing gallery and came back with a map and a note, which he unfolded beside Walter’s face. I took the note from Royce but didn’t open it yet—I didn’t want to break eye contact with him, not when he was so mesmerized.
I spoke in the lowest portion of my natural range, with the forced calm of someone who might snap at any moment. “Where are they?”
I had to ask several times before it sunk in. I let the silence do the convincing for me. In the quiet spaces he ruminated about his situation, trying to make sense of me and what was happening to him. By now he might have even put it together that we’d tricked him, doped him up. But eventually the drugs won out. The fear was too much. When he looked at me now, he lost his breath and tried with everything he had to squirm away. I lowered a hand over his frozen, shivering face, and when I touched his cheek, he screamed bloody murder, as if my hand were a branding iron.
“Helena said you had a garden. Do you remember that garden, Walter?”
He barely squeezed out the word, “Yes.”
“You brought the children to that garden?”
“Yes.” He stared at the map, “Never used one of those.”
I unfolded the handwritten note from Leland, which read, “Ask him to lead you there.”
“Fine. Take me there, Walter.” I needed a specific name, and I pulled one from Leland’s files. “How did you take Gayle Nelson there?”
“Gayle…”
“That’s right. Gayle. Gayle’s dead, Walter. You’ve bundled her up. How did you bundle her? Plastic?”
He hissed, “We had a blanket. A quilt. Helena made a quilt for them kids.”
“You wrapped Gayle in the quilt?”
“Yes. Tight like a burrito.”
“Then what?”
“We carried her to the car. Late, real late
. Put her in the back seat, in the bench. We put the sled in the back.”
“Did you say sled?”
“Sled because of Helena’s foot.” This didn’t make sense to me. Royce and Kearns seemed just as confused. The way sound echoed, Leland probably heard us out there. I wondered if it made more sense to him.
“Where did you go?”
“We drove and drove and drove. Late, real late.” He was babbling, but not to riddle with us. His mind was probably racing too fast to put together cogent thoughts.
“Where, Walter?” He clenched and bucked on the bench, fighting his own will to keep his secrets. His gaze was lost in a spot on the ceiling, at something that had come alive for him. He gulped at it. “What are you seeing right now?”
“Them,” he whispered icily.
“I can make them go away. Stay with me, Walter. Where did you drive?”
“Down the Thirteen.”
“Route Thirteen?” I asked.
“Yes.” Walter drooled on the s.
Kearns said, “He’s in California.”
“Then to Pinehurst and into the park.”
“Is that a town?” I asked.
Royce said, “Pinehurst Road. He’s in Oakland. Shit, he’s right over in Oakland.”
I asked, “Are you in Oakland, Walter? Is that where you’re driving?”
He started crying to whatever children haunted the space over the table, “Yes.”
I asked, “What park, Walter?”
“Redwoods.”
“Redwood Regional Park,” said Kearns.
“Is that right, Walter?”
“Yes. Yes.”
I felt our momentum build, and I wanted to keep him talking. “Where in the park?”
“We stopped on Pinehurst at a closed trail. Dark and safe. The police don’t go there, not when it’s that late.”
“How did you know where to stop? Was it marked?”
“One thirty-seven,” he gasped.
I had problems following him. “What is that? Is that another route?”
