“Okay then, let me ask you a few questions. Can you tell me the day and the date, Jamie?”
“It’s the fifteenth of whenever, nineteen hundred and fuck-all. You think I don’t see through that one?”
“Maybe you see through it, but I’m not trying to fool you. The date is right on the wall.” He pointed at a sign on the wall that said:
TODAY IS
thurs june 27
YOUR DAY
“My only reason for asking is to find out if you take an interest in what day it is. Can you tell me where we are today, Jamie?”
“We’re in the goddamn looney bin.”
“Can you tell me the name of the hospital?”
“Arizona State Hospital.”
“Great. Very good. Now — please don’t object to my asking you these very obvious questions, okay? Just trying to get our bearings. So how about telling me what wing of the hospital we’re in right now?”
“Wing? You mean, like of a bird? Of a dove? ‘The Wings of a Dove?’”
“No, that’s not quite what I mean. I’m asking you to tell me the name of this part of the hospital. All the parts are named after famous people.”
“The parts?” For a second — just a tick — she saw something breaking out of the doctor’s face. “I don’t know who you are, Mister,” she said, “but if you don’t get out of here you’re finished.” A weasel or something.
“I’m knocked up, is what I think,” Jamie kept telling them. Her stomach churned continually, and it was a rare moment when she came around to the true state of things long enough to appreciate that it was fear, a pure utter terror created by her thoughts, that took hold of her innards and squeezed until she was nauseated. “You’ve got to get yourself organized on a daily basis,” the nurse told her in confidential tones. “Well, fuck you,” Jamie said. She was sorry to talk this way, but it was necessary. You only had to listen to the news to see that the world was splitting apart. She had no idea what was going to break out of the middle of things when the time was finally at hand.
The temperature in the lock-up was uniform. Only by watching those who came and went could he believe the desert summer’s heat had arrived. It blazed in the faces of new arrivals and melted from the pores of the guards as they greeted him at the start of each shift — always the first of their duties, checking the prize defendant at the end of the cellblock. And as the temperature rose out in the world, Bill Houston felt the jaws of his captivity crushing him, and found reason, in the news that Fredericks brought him twice weekly, to count himself among the lost.
“We have a grave situation here,” the lawyer said. “I was misinformed earlier, and I misinformed you. This Crowell — the man who was killed in the hold-up — they’re calling him a cop. He wasn’t a cop. He was retired. But they’re just not looking at that fact. They want to get technical.
“I won’t sit here and quote every law for you, but I’ll get you Xeroxes of every statute they’re charging you under, and you can look at them, along with any other statute that applies, including death penalty statutes, William, because that’s what we’re looking at. These bastards want you. I’m not going to pretend they don’t want you, because they do.” He watched Bill Houston as if Houston might now offer some sign that none of it was true.
The defendant made a gesture of invitation with his hands: play on.
“What I’m saying is we’ve got a nice new judicially acceptable, constitutional, unbeatable death penalty statute, and there’s this huge groundswell all of a sudden — but I mean everybody, all the powers-that-be — I’m telling you they want to off the first killer who comes down the road, without any delays — that’s you, William — and they also intend to gas the oldest remaining denizen of Death Row out there in Florence, who happens to be Richard Clay Wilson, the child-murderer. I really can’t believe that they really believe they can bring all this about. But they’re like kids. They’ve got this new law and now somebody’s got to die.”
By June’s end it was clear that Burris, James, and Bill would all be tried — separately — according to the original schedule. Bill Houston had been identified unanimously in a line-up. And now the lawyer was helpless and nervous most of the time. Houston knew lawyers; he knew when a lawyer had lost. None of their motions for delay was granted. There was a fearsome, inexorable gist to the decisions. Always the Ninth Circuit ruled against Fredericks, his motions to quash evidence, to have witnesses impeached or testimony thrown out. Houston’s trial approached unimpeded, as if no defense whatever had been mounted against it. “We’re going to send you over to have your head checked,” Fredericks told his client. “But I guarantee you right now, they’re going to certify you sane.”
The new man across the catwalk, an Italian sort of guy who’d beaten his father-in-law mercilessly and broken a great many of his bones, asked Bill Houston how it was going. Bill told him the truth: “I’m going up the pipe.”
“Let’s walk Irene down to the Outpatient Area for her appointment,” the nurse would say — this nurse or that nurse, she really didn’t care which nurse.
“Let’s walk over to the commissary,” the nurse would say. “We can’t have you lying on that bed all day, thinking those thoughts of yours.”
“Do you know where you are?” the nurse would say. “It’s July Fourth. This is the Helen Keller ward.”
She was right about lying on the bed. When Jamie was up and doing, things were okay, but when she lay down and considered the way of the world, her picture of life came up shining impossibly, with a molten border around it, and she knew that things were not at all as they had seemed, that it wasn’t July Fourth, that the boiling slimy whores had a grip on the march of time and that everything was happening over and over. She heard the instructions coming out of the walls, affirming that she must kill herself in order to save the others, to get the days going again, and she experienced her own murder at every turn of her breath, repeatedly born into the blazing frame of a moment that never changed. Often she woke up in a place made entirely of green and white squares going away from her infinitely. For a moment, once, she had a handle on the whole situation: this was a small room of tiles with a drain in its floor, and she’d been asleep on a little pad almost like a quilt. But in a minute, it just wasn’t like that at all. It was much, much more horrible. Everything depended on the position of a single green square, and she didn’t know which one, but the certainty with which her heart seized this one, then this one, then another — it was driving her insane. Her mouth was chapped, and both arms were sore. When they opened the door to the little room and came in with the hypodermic — the nurse and the little monkey-man who told her what to do — she remembered about her arms.
“Well!” the nurse said, as if that said it all. ‘Did you remember that today you’re moving over to the Madame Curie wing?” She knew how to make the sheet of the bed float softly.
“What?” Jamie was watching her make the bed.
“Moving day! Oh—” the nurse was disappointed. “You don’t have your things together. Where’s your stuff, honey? Your toothbrush, and your little diary?”
“Here’s what I think,” Jamie said. “Everybody fuck everybody up the ass. I mean — oh, eat everything made of shit. You cunt whore suck.” She could feel her face getting hot.
“You’re going to have to watch that mouth,” the nurse said.