Notes on an Execution(28)

You flush with the knowledge: you will not see any of it. You imagine how the warden’s face will look in a few hours—embarrassed in front of the news cameras. His cheeks will be ruddy, the tendons tight in his neck.

Warden, you say. Can you do me one favor?

The man crosses his burly arms.

My witness, you say. Can you tell her I’m sorry?

You have heard the warden’s cruelty. You’ve listened to him yell at the other men, pull the taser from his pocket, back them up against the wall. You’ve heard how they scream. But you are not stupid. You know how to handle women, and you know how to handle certain types of men. You understand men like the warden, standing with his feet spread wide in that manufactured power stance. You are careful to stay seated on the edge of your cot, to keep your head slightly bowed in deference. You have never once stood to reach the warden’s height; always, you let the man be taller. For this reason, you have your jokes. You have even shared some of your Theory with the warden. You are his favorite prisoner, in the entirety of Polunsky Unit. Ansel P, he hollers, like you are two men on a couch watching a football game. He fist-bumps you through the slats in the recreation cage.

The warden loops his gum around his tongue and pops it. You smell saliva, cinnamon.

Make sure your stuff is ready by the door, the warden says.

You take this for a yes.

*

The warden only got to you once—once, in your seven years at Polunsky. He did not use a taser or the hulk of his arms. You are different. There is a ruffling pride, mixed with the shame of remembering. You require a special technique.

You’d been talking about the Theory.

Explain it to me, the warden said, leaning bored against the wall. It was the middle of a sweltering Texas summer, when the row stank constantly of sweat and slick feet, the air unbreathable at ninety-eight degrees.

Well, you said. It’s a Theory about good and evil.

Written? he asked. Like a book?

Of course, you said. I work on it every night.

Okay, the warden said. So what’s your thesis?

You pulled one of your notebooks from under the bed and slid it beneath the door.

Hypothesis 51A, the warden read aloud. On Infinity?

Yes, you said. On Infinity explores the concept of choice. We have billions of potential lives, thousands of alternate universes, running like streams beneath our current reality. If morality is determined by our choices, then we must also consider those other universes, in which we’ve made different ones.

Where are you in those? the warden asked.

Where am I?

In those other lives, the warden said. Where are you, if you’re not here?

I don’t know, you said. The options are infinite. Our alternate selves live in another dimension, multiplying, just outside our line of sight. I could be a writer, or a philosopher, or a baseball player. The possibilities are endless. They prove that who I am—my goodness or my badness—it’s fluctuating. Morality is not fixed. It’s fluid, ever-changing.

The warden seemed to ponder.

Then where would they be now? the warden asked.

Who?

Those Girls, Ansel. In an alternate world, a world in which you had not killed them, what would they be doing in this exact moment?

The question stunned. A blindside attack. It stung, this sudden turn of the warden. You stared at the veins in your hands until the man huffed a chuckle; he rapped on the steel door, as though to remind you of your own entrapment.

So you’re a manifesto guy, huh?

It’s not a manifesto, you said.

Show me one and I’ve seen them all, the warden said. They all look like this. Like justification. There is no justification for what you’ve done, Ansel P, but God knows you’ve got the time to keep searching.

With that, the warden walked away, leaving you alone with your furious breath. How dangerous, you thought. How futile. How senseless, to reveal even a corner of yourself—when that self, they say, is monster.

*

Now, the warden is gone. You wait. Nine minutes until the transfer. Sometimes you are certain this is all you are made of: a fleeting instant between action and inaction. Doing something, or not. Where is the difference, you wonder? Where is the choice. Where is the line, between stillness and motion?

*

The second Girl was a waitress at the diner.

That teenage summer progressed: 1990, Bon Jovi and Vanilla Ice. Weeks went by, and the search parties faltered. The missing posters faded, and the news programs died down, and only in the most random and surreal moments did you think about what you had done. You had killed someone. A Girl. You remembered only blips of the act itself: your belt undone and snaking, the calluses on your hands from the tugging. The fact felt completely detached from your being, something vaguely related to you but not quite urgent. You’d wake in the middle of the night to the regular sounds of the trailer park and you’d imagine footsteps. Sirens. Rattling chains. You’d huddle beneath your cheap scratchy sheets, certain this was it—finally, they were coming for you.

But they never did. June passed, then it was July, and still, they had not found her.

Late at night, you drove to the diner. Nestled in a dark corner off the highway, the diner closed at midnight, and you liked to spend those sleepy hours drinking coffee in a back booth, avoiding the gloom of your trailer. Your favorite waitress had a perky blond ponytail and freckles scattered across her cheeks—she chattered as she refilled your coffee. She was young, maybe sixteen, and easy to blush. Angela, read the tag on her apron. You repeated her name in the shower, on the road, in the walk-in freezer as you organized tubs of vanilla.