Still Lives(37)

“Absolutely not,” she says. “We’re not qualified, and besides, if she has been murdered, and if Greg is the killer, your judgment is too clouded to see it—”

“If Greg is the killer!”

“And if the killer is someone else, he’s still out there and you’re putting yourself in danger by snooping around. So no. Don’t get involved.”

“You’d rather let an innocent man get framed?”

She makes a frustrated noise.

“You don’t care what the truth is?” I ask.

“Maggie, you don’t come from a haunted people.” Yegina’s voice deepens. “I do. You can’t just step into this pit and step out again.”

She’s right. I’m already in it. I’ve been in it since Nikki Bolio was murdered, and I thought I’d left for a while, but Still Lives brought it all back: the fear that any path is a bad one, that any surface beneath my feet can break and plunge me into a bottomless dark.

Yegina is still talking. Her tone has smoothed to a warm hum. It says, I know you’re hurt and confused, but time will heal you.

“We’re just laypeople. Rubes,” she finishes.

“Fine. I have to go,” I say.

She doesn’t protest, and we hang up.

Maybe I am a rube. Maybe I always will be. I regard my living room and its possessions: Bare walls except for one print of fishing boats that I brought home from the Mekong Delta. The faded gold couch, the cheap glass coffee table, bookshelves in maple veneer. The only items of value are my books. Their titles gently pull my eye: In Cold Blood. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Kaputt. The Love of the Last Tycoon. Only the books are arranged, cherished. Without them, the room would have no personality but neglect. Without them, a visitor might guess the occupant had just moved in, or was moving soon, or didn’t believe in having taste. Or maybe that she didn’t even notice what was missing.


Three days before the press preview of Executed, the Jason Rains exhibition about capital punishment, Lynne Feldman invited the staff to test it out. Twenty of us showed up, a little crowd, chatty and nervous. Although Lynne welcomed us, it was Brent Patrick, the exhibition designer, who told us what to do. As Brent stood in the darkened doorway to the show, the possessive pride in his face startled me. This show had Jason Rains’s name on it. But it was Brent’s vision, Brent’s staging that would alter us.

“Turn off your phones,” he said. “Don’t touch anything unless we direct you to.”

We filed into the dark theater and each took a number from a machine. Then we sat down on creaky wooden benches and stared through a one-way mirror into the room beyond, where Brent and Dee stood by the brown leather injection chair.

The red number 1 flashed above the doorway between the chambers, and Jayme, holding her number, went through the door in a pale-blue blazer and skirt. We watched in silence as Brent and Dee strapped her in. It took a long time, and Jayme’s ordinarily elegant form flattened and bunched in the chair; her hands groped at air as Brent tightened the buckles. Then we waited again as Dee pulled over the syringes on a small cart. They were filled with lethal chemicals, their caps sealed but the needles aimed straight at Jayme. It was like watching a dentist’s visit crossed with some kind of sick torture. Jayme wiggled in her restraints.

Brent pulled a lever and the chair tilted back. Jayme’s brown knees and chin aimed at the ceiling. Her legs were pressed together, but if she let them open we would see her underpants. Her ankles looked helpless, bare. Brent and Dee could do anything to her now and she wouldn’t be able to escape it. Then I saw Dee frown and touch Jayme’s shoulder. She must have moaned aloud.

I shifted on the bench. I would have to endure ten more of these slow humiliations before I would take the chair myself.

A television screen in the corner glowed with a message:

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS OUR SOCIETY’S RECOGNITION OF THE SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE.

—Orrin Hatch

Both rooms went completely black, except for the TV. Someone shrieked. We sat in the dark, reading Hatch’s shining words. We whispered and joked about how creeped out we were, and then, as the dark persisted, we fell into silent and individual reveries. I sensed the bareness of the room, the warmth of my own body, my sleeve barely brushing Yegina’s. I was glad not to be Jayme, but I felt like a prisoner anyway. I would have to become her soon.

When the lights came on, the injection chair was empty again. The red number 2 flashed above the door.

Executed. It was destined to be a blockbuster, and it bothered me that Jason Rains would get credit for Brent’s genius. Jason Rains had come to the Rocque with his sketch for the chair and the assistants to make it. He had come with adorably mussed red hair and known relationship woes with a hot British sculptor. But he hadn’t thought about the lag time between visitors trying out his chair, or about whether visitors would want to test it at all. He watched, dazed, at our exhibition-planning meeting as Brent took the sketch and the pen and began to fill in the viewing theater, describing the numbers that people would draw to wait their turn, the lighting. Harsh brightness and darkness would alternate throughout the experience, the way they did in criminal interrogations, to make people feel isolated and afraid.

“You can’t just kill people in your chair,” he said. “That part is pretend anyway. You need to make them part of the system that kills. That’s real.”