Author’s note: Parts 2 are each direct endings of Part 1. Each Part 2 is independent of all other Parts 2.
*********
A dog barked somewhere in the distance.
The doorbell rang. Followed by a knock.
My sleep-deprived brain was agitated by this nonsense. Who the hell comes by the house at this hour–
I opened the door.
My mind balked.
Chills spread across my body.
In the dim porch light stood a figure in a black hoodie.
**********
Twenty years later.
**********
It wasn’t claustrophobia.
There was a word for it, but that wasn’t it.
If they had not taken away his phone, he could have looked it up. He knew it wasn’t claustrophobia.
He had once been sent for an MRI after he tore his rotator cuff. The slow trip into the constricted space had been like going into the grave, or what he imagined such a confinement would be like. Terrifying at first, but the nice woman had told him if he yelled she would hit a button and slide him out. And she would know for sure he was a pussy. Okay, he didn’t really think that. Panic was an unmanageable reaction. It overwhelmed the rational mind. Otherwise brave people freaked their first time in the machine. He fought, panting and sweating, until it lessened enough to bear.
This feeling he had no word for was slower. More subtle. More dreadful.
What it was, was fear of being in a locked space. Didn’t matter that the space was as expansive as a good-sized living room or that it was brightly lit by those industrial strength overly white lights that make you think you are in a warehouse.
Which is a good analogy, now that he thought about it. He made a note on his allowed materials. One yellow legal pad, lined. One pencil, not too sharp.
“Mr. Gale? Alan Gale?”
He nodded. Who the hell else could he be? This was the fourth station to scan his ID and snap his picture. He did not doubt there was software cranking away right now busily matching the parameters of the real time image of his face to the state’s database.
What if it didn’t match? None of the uniformed personnel carried sidearms. They did have thick black cylinders clipped to their belts. He knew these were batons, extended to a couple of feet long with a flick of the wrist, and terminated with an ominous heavy bulb. He didn’t want to be that visitor whose face did not pass muster.
His escort, an assistant warden who carried himself more like a bookkeeper than a prison guard, led him down a bluish-white corridor which terminated in a solid metal door. It opened invisibly with a creak that cried out for grease. They stepped inside, and the door closed behind them just as invisibly and with the same haunting creak, but this time it slammed shut with an echoing clang that made him jump. But not, he noted, his escort.
Was the unrelenting noise part of the punishment? He had never been inside a prison. The echoing cacophony could have been intentional or it could have merely been the result of decades of delayed maintenance. Surely a modern prison might be designed and built so that the doors shut quietly. Part of him knew this cruelty and others would be baked into the blueprint. Such was the creeping cynicism of being a reporter.
The room was antiseptic, white as a hospital. Three walls were devoid of any mark or attachment. The last wall had five windows divided by partitions extending into the room. Between the partitions ran narrow shelves, a wooden chair scooted underneath each. On the partition hung a telephone. An old-fashioned telephone, with a black plastic hand piece on a metal hook. This phone, however, did not have a dial. It only connected to one place — the matching phone on the other side of the thick smudged glass.
The assistant warden pointed him toward the middle window. The reporter dragged the chair out, put his pad and pencil on the shelf, and sat. His escort took a seat at the far window.
**********
The email from the Senior Assistant Managing Editor had been about as short as her title was long.
From: Lynne Renzo
To: Alan Gale
Re: Cavanaugh interview
Alan,
Your visit to Pine Bluff is set for Tuesday at one. Check in at the administration building.
Good luck,
Lynne
Renzo had mentioned the assignment to him two weeks ago, but he originally thought it unlikely to ever happen. He had transferred to the news desk from the business section only three months before, so him being assigned this death row interview meant nobody senior to him wanted it.
As he was the rookie, it meant nobody wanted it.
He prepared for the interview anyway. He was the new guy and needed to outwork the veterans to dodge the next round of layoffs.
Yes, he was a reporter. A dinosaur hammering out content destined to be printed onto dead trees. More likely these days was the transmission of his words at the speed of electricity to be rendered on flat screens of all sorts and then scraped, stolen, and served up to eyeballs who had not contributed a cent toward his salary.
Reduction of headcount was a constant concern. The reporters and management parried worry with tired resignation and black humor. The Grim Reaper was on the loose at the end of every quarter.
**********
This sterile interview room smelled like soap and pine with a little mint in the background. Most of the men who had sat on the other side of those innocuous windows were now dead. Not laid off polish your resume dead, but dead dead. Their brain turned off by the first injection, their breathing stopped by the second, and their heartbeat ended by the third.
Pine Bluff sounded like the name of a nice place to live and raise your kids.
Matthew Cavanaugh, a 26-year-old white man with a college degree in mechanical engineering from a top school, with a stable job, with — by all accounts, up to a certain point — a loving wife in a happy marriage, with no criminal record, with no hint of mental illness in his past, had come home one day twenty years ago, taken his gun, and executed his wife and her lover.
Tomorrow, the state was going to get payback on Matt with three injections.
Oddly, at least to Alan’s mind, the needles used to kill Cavanaugh would be carefully sterilized.
A door opened on the other side of the windows and a man wearing a loud orange jumpsuit walked calmly to the chair opposite Alan. He sat and picked up the handset and peered through the glass with a complete lack of expression.
Matt Cavanaugh, Alan thought, was an unremarkable man. Medium height, thin but not emaciated. He had close cropped brown hair and a round pleasant face. The guy you passed on the sidewalk all day, who served you a hot dog, who came to fix your copier. The guy who took a 9 mm Smith & Wesson and blew his wife’s brains out. Then put a round through her terrified lover’s forehead.
Alan remembered the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil”, and decided she was describing the man on the other side of the glass.
He picked up his handset.
“Good morning, Mr. Cavanaugh,” Alan said. He immediately regretted wishing a man condemned to die a good morning. He forged on. “My name is Alan Gale. Thank you for seeing me today.” He again kicked himself – for introducing the concept of time into a conversation with a man quickly running out of it.