A Book of American Martyrs(140)

If they’d said thank you doctor he would say sure. And fuck you but no one thanked him. He exited.

Shortly then the body that had ceased writhing and was now very still was covered in a white bloodstained cloth of the size of a tablecloth. The red-mottled contorted face with opened eyes and mouth agape as in childlike terror and wonder was mercifully covered.

The gurney bearing the body was wheeled to the prison morgue by the COs who’d administered the drugs. Shame-faced and sullen and swaying on their feet with exhaustion. And their uniforms covered in blood from their myriad mishandlings of the needle. And in the morgue the fevered body began at once to cool. In this place of sudden calm, quiet. A drop in body temperature from 102°F to 99°F and then in inexorable and irreversible decline to 90°F, within an hour 82°F, eventually 60°F, and at last 36°F. which was the temperature of the aluminum gurney beneath the corpse and the temperature of the very still air of the morgue.

Total darkness in this place and not a single reflection of even muted light. Even the faintest eclipse of light, there was none. The darkness on the face of the deep before the creation of light before the first day of creation and total silence, not a breath neither inhalation nor exhalation.





THE EMBRACE


MARCH 2006–MARCH 2010





AUTOIMMUNE


Not yet.”

Waiting for the news. Waiting to learn that Luther Dunphy had at last been put to death.

In this borrowed room in Ann Arbor she’d forgotten where she was. And Darren two thousand miles away in Newhalem, Washington.

Hours they’d been waiting together. Since 5:55 P.M. and now it was 9:18 P.M. and no news had come from Chillicothe and the strain of the vigil was exhausting.

On an arm of the vinyl sofa where Naomi sat stiffly was a mobile receiver set to speakerphone. At the other end of the line was her brother Darren two thousand miles away in a place she could not imagine (for she had never seen it) with a similar phone similarly positioned.

It was Darren who had two phones primed for use. One of them, a landline, was connected to Naomi in Ann Arbor and the other was a cell phone poised to receive a call from Chillicothe, Ohio.

In Chillicothe a journalist named Elliot Roberts who’d known the Voorhees family when they’d lived in Detroit was witnessing the execution of Luther Dunphy in order to write about it for the Associated Press. Roberts had contacted Darren, to arrange for a private call to notify Darren when the execution was completed; but Roberts had to leave his cell phone in his vehicle parked outside the prison facility, for electronic equipment was not allowed inside the facility. Not until Roberts was released from the facility, presumably with other civilian witnesses after the execution, could he call Darren with the news.

Roberts had had to arrive at Chillicothe, to be admitted through security into the Death Row unit, by 6:00 P.M. The execution had been scheduled to begin at 7:00 P.M. But now it was much later—more than two hours later.

Naomi had called her brother in Washington State more than an hour before she’d needed to have called. For Darren could not possibly hear from Roberts until after 7:00 P.M.

Darren had answered at once, irritably.

Yes, what? What do you want?

Just to talk. Before . . .

It’s too early! Christ.

But—please . . .

He’d relented. He’d heard the fear in her voice.

In this phase of his life which (Naomi thought accusingly) might be described as post-family, as it was determinedly post-modernist, Darren had taken a leave of absence from college, and had then dropped out of college, in order to devote his time to his “art”—graphic novels in a mordant vein, obsessively detailed, dark-comic-grotesque fantasies of contemporary American suburban life in conflict with what Darren called the “other side.”

D. Voorhees’s graphic novels were not easy of access. At least, Naomi did not find them easy. The first was titled Welcome to the Other Side—a Midwestern suburban family of maddening normalcy and complacency beset by demons like flying ants, mostly invisible; the second was titled Do You Want Me to Tell You When, Where, Why?—sexual ambiguity among young adults in an Ann Arbor, Michigan, setting; the third, most ambitious and most acclaimed, was titled Lethal Injection: A Romance—lurid scenes of executions by lethal injection in American prisons, drawn in excruciating detail. (For each of the executions was botched in a unique and lurid way.) Naomi had tried several times to read Lethal Injection: A Romance but had never been able to finish it.

She was fascinated and repelled by Darren’s work, and impressed by his obvious talent. But mostly she was envious of the use to which her brother had put two of his obsessions: narrative comics and lethal injection.

He is myself. My surviving self.

Since dropping out of U-M in his junior year, and moving to the west coast, initially Seattle, then Puget Sound, and now the Skagit River Valley Darren had become associated with a small press in Seattle, which had published all three of his graphic novels; he’d illustrated other books for the press which Naomi had not seen; he’d acquired an online presence—a much-visited website called Do You Want Me to Tell You When, Where, Why? She wondered how Darren supported himself, with whom he might be living, what his life was like now—she had but a vague idea.

Her own obsession had led mostly to failure. The loss of her father was the only significant event of her life but she could not give a shape to the experience, she could only inhabit it, helplessly, as a child inhabits a place of confinement, or handed-down bulky clothes.