Notes on an Execution(3)

Your favorite part of the photograph is the upstairs window. The curtain is split just slightly open, and if you look closely, you can see the shadow of a single arm, shoulder to elbow. The bare arm of a teenage girl. You like to imagine what she was doing at the exact moment the photo was taken—she must have been standing near her bedroom door, talking to someone or looking in the mirror.

She signed the letter Blue. Her real name is Beatrice, but she was never Beatrice to you or anyone who knew her then. She was always Blue: Blue, with her hair braided and flung over one shoulder. Blue, in that Tupper Lake Track & Field sweatshirt, sleeves stretched anxious at the wrists. When you remember Blue Harrison, and your time in the Blue House, you recall how she could never walk by the surface of a window without glancing nervous at her own reflection.

You do not know what the feeling is, when you look at the photograph. It cannot be love, because you have been tested—you don’t laugh at the right moments or flinch at the wrong ones. There are statistics. Something about emotional recognition, sympathy, pain. You don’t understand the kind of love you read about in books, and you like movies mostly for the study of them, the mastery of faces twisting into other faces. Anyway, no matter what they say you are capable of—it cannot be love, that would be neurologically impossible—looking at the photograph of the Blue House brings you there. To the place where the shrieking stops. The quiet is delicious, a gasping relief.

*

An echo, finally, from the long hall. The familiar shuffle of Shawna’s footsteps.

You drop back to the floor, resume a stilted motion with your paintbrush: you are dotting the grass with tiny flowers, blooming red. You try to focus on the pinpoint bristle, the waxy smell of crushed pencil.

Inmate, state your name and number.

Shawna’s voice sounds always on the verge of collapse—today, an officer will come by every fifteen minutes to check that you are still breathing. You do not dare look up from your painting, though you know she will be wearing that same naked face, her desire plain and unhidden, mixed now with excitement, or maybe sadness, depending on her answer.

There are things Shawna loves about you, but none of them have much to do with you. It is your position that enthralls her—your power caged while she holds the literal key. Shawna is the type of woman who does not break rules. She turns dutifully away while the male officers perform their strip searches, before every shower and every recreation hour. You spend twenty-two hours a day in this six-by-nine cell, where you cannot physically see another human being, and Shawna knows this. She is the type of woman who reads romance novels with hulking men on their covers. You can smell her laundry detergent, the egg salad sandwich she brings from home for lunch. Shawna loves you because you cannot get much closer, for the fact of the steel door between you, promising both passion and safety. In this sense, she is nothing like Jenny. Jenny was always prodding, trying to see inside. Tell me what you’re feeling, Jenny would say. Give me your whole. But Shawna revels in the distance, the intoxicating unknown that sits always between two people. And now, she perches at the edge of the gap. It takes every ounce of self-control not to look up and confirm what you know: Shawna belongs to you.

Ansel Packer, you repeat calmly. 999631.

Shawna’s uniform creaks as she bends to tie her shoe. The camera in the corner of your cell does not reach to the hall, and your painting is positioned perfectly. It comes in the slightest flash of white, nearly nonexistent: the flicker of paper, as Shawna’s note slips beneath the crack in your door, hiding seamlessly under the edge of your canvas.

*

Shawna believes in your innocence.

You could never do that, she whispered once, paused outside your cell on a long evening shift, shadows razoring across her cheeks. You could never.

*

She knows, of course, what they call you on 12 Building.

The Girly Killer.

The newspaper article was generous with the details: it ran after your first appeal, spreading the nickname across 12 Building like wildfire. The writer had lumped them all together, as though they were intentional, related. The Girls. The article used that word, the one you hate. Serial is something different—a label meant for men unlike you.

You could never. Shawna is certain, though you have never once claimed this for yourself. You prefer to let her talk in circles, to let the outrage take over: this is immeasurably easier than the questions. Do you feel bad? Are you sorry? You are never quite sure what this means. You feel bad, sure. More accurately, you wish you were not here. You don’t see how guilt helps anyone, but it has been the question for years now, all through your trial and your many fruitless appeals. Are you capable? they ask. Are you physically capable of feeling empathy?

You tuck Shawna’s note into the waistband of your pants and gaze up at the elephant on the ceiling. The elephant has a psychopath smile, alive in one moment, just an impression in the next. The whole question is absurd, nearly lunatic—there is no line you cross over, no alarm you set off, no scale to weigh. The question, you have finally deduced, is not really about empathy. The question is how you can possibly be human.

And yet. You lift your thumb to the light, examine it close. In that same fingerprint, it is inarguable and insistent: the faint, mouse-like tick of your own pulse.

*

There is the story you know about yourself. There is the story everyone knows. As you pull Shawna’s note from your waistband, you wonder how that story became so distorted—how only your weakest moments matter now, how they expanded to devour everything else.