A Naked Singularity: A Novel (74 page)

“I saw you in the hall before,” she said. “Aren’t you coming to the orientation? There’s going to be food and drink and I hear both will be quite good.”

“Huh?”

“Oh I’m sorry, you are with Serpent right?”

“Oh. Yeah I’m with Serpent.”

“Thank God, I would’ve felt so stupid. The way you looked at me I was like, this guy has no idea what I’m talking about.”

“No I’m a reptilian protestor.”

“You mean a reptile protector.”

“Exactly.”

“Wow your room is so much better than ours, can I see?” She started to walk in and I was thinking I hadn’t really told such an egregious lie as I probably had a greater affinity for reptiles than the average person and, if forced to commit, could see myself agreeing that they deserved as much protection and access to new technology as any other vertebrates, although from the phrasing, I then thought, it was probably the protectors themselves who were claiming to be enititled to new technology. And I loved the way she walked as if a light string she wished to avoid snapping was tied between her dainty ankles.

“Jacqueline c’mon, we’ll be late!” said a disembodied female voice from the hall with the urgency common to the realization that the party being called may be about to engage in exclusionary diversion.

“I gotta go,” she said spinning around to face me. “But I’ll see you down there okay?”

“Okay.”

“Yes.”

She left. I stood near the door until I had done so for a longer period of time than I had interacted with her. Then I went back to the bed and lay in it. I closed my eyes and dreamt they kicked me, quite literally, out of the hotel because I wasn’t with SERPENT. Once so expelled I slept on the street.

The next morning I got that thing where you’re not sure where you are when you first open your eyes. The clock on the table was blinking 12:00 and my watch, wherever it sat, was not easily accessible. The position of the sun against the sky was hidden from me by the maniacally effective drapes. I had no idea if it was early or late, had ample time or none. I could’ve found out but I didn’t. Instead I slid further under the vacuum-sealed blanket and returned to sleep. When I woke from that sleep, purposeful ignorance was no longer an option. I got up, found my watch, and saw that I would have to hustle. I got ready and went downstairs.

“I can tell you where it is, I can even show you how to get there, but I also have to tell you that I don’t think you should go there.” So said B.M. Santangelo that morning in B.M.’s concierge booth as Big Mac Santangelo tapped on the keyboard in front of him using his index fingers only and pausing often to click his mouse. He was getting me directions, directions that would take me from The Orchard to Holman Prison’s Death Row. He indicated verbal satisfaction and the printer began to spit out paper. Surprisingly, the printer was one of those old kind that made a racket and took its time syllable by syllable. When it was done B.M. Santangelo snatched the paper, removed the perforated edges, then extended the result towards me while staring as if to say
have you no reaction to what I just said?

“You don’t want me to go there?”

“I recommend you do not go there, that’s correct.”

“Why not?”

“What do you want to be going to that place for?”

“I don’t know that it’s a want situation, I have to go there.”

“Nobody
has
to go there.”

“Well I do. It’s the reason I came here, the reason I’m staying at The Orchard and everything, you understand?”

“I think it’s entirely probable that you feel that way but I have a responsibility to my guests. I consider it an almost sacred responsibility to ensure their well-being, and that responsibility now requires that I advise you not to go there, not to take the approximately forty mile trip to that place.”

“Thanks for your concern B.M. and thanks for the directions but I’m going now.”

Surrounding Holman Prison in Atmore, Alabama was nothing that warranted a specific name. And it wasn’t so much that I entered that facility as it was that I just found myself inside. And little of inanimate physical essence that I saw there on either day made any lasting impression on me or even seemed to minimally register at the time.

What I can’t help but recall is Jalen Kingg and The Guard.

To get to see Kingg I had to constantly show an extreme amount of paperwork. The last person I showed this paperwork to was The Guard who was hirsute and lean but commanding in a way that made the many bars in the vicinity seem extraneous. And I thought, in the many minutes I spent waiting for him and his friends to establish that I did not bring a cake with a file in it, that Death Row was so named not in reference to the future that awaited its inhabitants but rather in reference to the inert quality of the life found within. The still, mute air.

The Guard came back and told me that Kingg was on his way. He said there were rules I would have to observe and I nodded. He pointed:

    NO Cell Phones

    NO Beepers

    NO Paging Devices Of Any Kind

    NO Smoking

    NO Eating

    NO Drinking

    NO Shouting

    NO Yelling

    NO Screaming

    NO Spitting

I nodded again, thinking we were done, but there was more so he pointed elsewhere:

    DO NOT Touch The Inmate

    DO NOT Give Anything To The Inmate Except For Legal Material

    DO NOT Accept Anything From The Inmate Except For Above

    DO NOT EVER Allow The Inmate To Touch You

I said
okay
and he said
good
then we just stood there, he and I, alone and waiting.

“You know you’re the first right?” The Guard said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “No, I mean, no, the first? First what?”

“You’re the first visitor Mr. Kingg has had.”

“Today?”

“Ever.”

“No.”

“Yup.”

“What are you talking about? I’m sure his mother came out before she died.”

“Never.”

“Other family he has.”

“None.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

“What about his lawyer, I’m not his first. Didn’t his lawyer on the direct appeal meet with him?”

“No.”

“What about someone from the project or whatever it’s called, the people that got me involved in this?”

“No one.”

“I’m sure you’re wrong. I think they meet with everyone whose case they take. Maybe you were off that day.”

“I work every day there are visits.”

“Maybe you called in sick.”

“Twenty-three years on the job, never called in sick or taken vacation.”

“Your wife must love you.”

“Single.”

“Oh.”

“Twenty-three years on death row partner, I’ve seen them all come then go.”

“Hm.”

“Not many want to work this post you know.”

“I didn’t.”

“Not an easy post, I’ll admit that right up front. See I don’t know if you know how it’s done here, because I’ve never seen you here before, but we use the chair here.”

“Yes, I know.”

“So you know about Yellow Mama, that’s what we call her.”

“I do.”

“Well then you probably know about her, shall we say, fickle nature.”

“Hm.”

“I know about it first hand because I’m the one who literally pulls the switch as they say.”

“Oh.”

“That’s right, no one else would do it when I first got here. Which is an odd thing in and of itself don’t you think?”

“Um.”

“I mean the fact that nobody wanted to be the one to do it. The thing is, around here support for the death penalty runs about ninety percent and among people who do what I do for a living that figure is probably even higher so you wouldn’t think there would be this great reluctance to be the one who actually carries out the sentence. People out there think of a judge or the governor as being the one who seals a man’s fate but really it’s me who does it right? So in that sense I do understand the reluctance. It
is
technically killing. Don’t get me wrong I know it’s completely different but still there’s also a sense in which it’s also just killing. I once crunched the numbers and figured this out, it was strange when I first said it out loud, at a party I think it was, but I’ve killed more people then the next ten people scheduled to be executed combined. Well that was true at the time, God knows if it’s still true. Some of these guys have put up some serious figures. You get the point. I’m a killer. Killing is killing. One day I’ll shave your kid’s head. I don’t like it, he’s a decent kid the few times he talks, but that’s what it’ll probably come to regardless. I’ll shave his head and then I’ll massage the conducting gel they give us into his scalp and just pray he’s not another John Evans. You know John Evans?”

“Evans.”

“Well I was here for that just like I’ve been here for all of them. It’s the smell that people don’t realize. Burning human flesh is unlike anything you’ve ever smelled, I can guarantee you that. You don’t want to smell that and you don’t want to see the eyes either when that thing’s not working like it’s supposed to, let me tell you. Like I said, I was here with Evans when it took fourteen minutes and three separate jolts to finish the job. They kept hearing a heartbeat the doctors. I was there when he caught on fire after the first one and some of the sparks that came out from under the hood landed on me. When it was finally over he looked like the charred piece of meat at the end of the barbeque, the one that falls through the grating? Those things happen is what I’m saying, that’s a fact. People don’t want to hear it but they do happen and it could, God forbid, happen to your kid for example. And you know what counselor? I remember Evans all the time, I do, but fact is at least with Evans it was difficult you know? Maybe it should be difficult to end someone. The ones that really stick in your mind are the ones that seem to have nothing to them, like just turning off a light. That’s just my feeling but maybe that explains it I don’t know. Know what I mean?”

“Definitely, explains what?”

“Like I said, people are in favor of the death penalty and all but when they find out what I do for a living it’s not like they get all happy or anything, I get the feeling they kind of think I must be weird for doing what I do you know? Like it’s somehow wrong for me to do what I do even though it’s my job. Look who I’m talking to, you probably get the same thing. Okay here he comes. You can have a seat in there and wait for him it should only be a couple of minutes. A pleasure meeting you young man, I can tell from the way you speak that you’re quite intelligent, you’re client is in good hands, I’ll tell him too.”

When they bought Kingg in to me he wouldn’t look me in the eye. I think he thought he was in trouble. I looked at his face and saw that he looked no older than in those pictures taken years earlier. Like the twin in the rocket, in that still air Jalen had aged slower than the rest of us. I introduced myself and told him I was the same person who’d written him those letters. His attorney, lawyer. We traded words. It wasn’t really like talking to a compromised adult, more like talking to a fully realized eight-year-old who displayed occasional flashes of comparative near brilliance.

“You knew I was coming today right? I told you in the last letter remember?”

“you melvyn?”

“No, that’s good though. You’re right Melvyn Toomberg is your attorney too. You have two attorneys right now. Melvyn’s one of them and I work with Melvyn. I’m your other attorney, Casi.”

“oh, they let me have two?”

“Yes, you can have even more, it’s okay.”

“what about mister joe?”

“You mean Joe Tellem Bennigan?”

“yes.”

“You’re right he was your lawyer at trial and on the first appeal but when cases go further than that, like yours has, you get different lawyers, understand?”

“but I never said anything bad about mister bennigan or nothing.”

“I know. This is just the way it’s done Jalen it doesn’t mean you didn’t like Mr. Joe or anything, it’s just that the case has become more serious and Mr. Joe, uh Mr. Bennigan, doesn’t deal with cases when they get to this point.”

“oh.”

“Just like him though my job is to protect you, do you understand?”

“yes, like mister joe.”

“Right, Melvyn and I are going to do everything we can to protect you.”

“to keep me here right?”

“Well actually what we want is to get you moved to where people with less serious sentences are held.”

“or to get me out of jail?”

“That would be great.”

“but where would i go?”

“We’d think of something, it would be a nice problem to have.”

“where? my mother died.”

“I know.”

“where will i go?”

“Jalen, the chances of you getting out aren’t very good. Melvyn and I are much more concerned with—”

“but i don’t want you to get me out unless there’s a place for me to go, can you just tell me where i would go if i got out even though i know i’m probably not going to.”

“I don’t . . . you would . . . you could stay with . . . Mable . . . Jalen.”

“maple?”

“Yes.”

“is she nice?”

“Yes, very nice.”

“what does she look like?”

“She looks like Maple, she’s very nice.”

“but how does she look like?”

“Well she’s big, but soft and chubby, and she has a mansion with lots of room for you.”

“a big house? like big with land?”

“Yes and behind it is a river of the clearest water you ever saw to swim in or drink. You swim in it and it cleans you, drink it and it fills you.”

“and trees?”

“Trees everywhere, trees that fruit just jumps off of. But that’s it Jalen. I shouldn’t even tell you that. That’s just for you to know where you would go, okay? Promise we won’t discuss it more than this because, like I said, it’s very unlikely I can get you there. Promise?”

“promise but you promise to try to get me out to go there right?”