He hesitates, then adds that since it will include a demonstration that may be offensive to members of the audience, this might be a good time for those people to leave.
Charles Gregory Doblin rises from his chair. Still refraining from looking directly at the crowd, he lets the state trooper escort him offstage. A few people in the auditorium clap self-consciously, then seldom-used gray curtains slide across the stage.
When the curtains part again fifteen minutes later, only a handful of seats in the auditorium are vacant. The one in the center of the stage is not.
A tall, skinny young black man is seated in the chair that Charles Gregory Doblin has kept warm for him. He wears a prison jump suit similar to the one worn by his predecessor, and his arms are shackled to the armrests, his body secured to the chair frame by the leather belts that had hung slack earlier. The same state trooper stands behind him, but this time his riot stick is in plain view, grasped in both hands before him.
The prisoner’s eyes are cold searchlights that sweep across the audience. No one can meet his gaze without feeling revulsion. He catches sight of the young woman in the third row who had asked a question earlier in the evening; their eyes meet for a few seconds and the prisoner’s lips curl upward in a predatory smile. He starts to mutter an obscenity, but shuts up when the state trooper places the end of his stick on his shoulder. The girl squirms in her seat and looks away.
The dean returns to the lectern and introduces the young black man. His name is Curtis Henry Blum; he is twenty-two years old, born and raised in this same city. Blum committed his first felony offense when he was twelve years old, when he was arrested for selling crack in the school playground; he was already a gang member by then. Since then he has been in and out of juvenile detention centers, halfway houses, and medium security prisons, and has been busted for mugging, narcotics, carjacking, breaking and entering, armed robbery, rape, attempted murder. Sometimes he was convicted and sent to one house of corrections or another; sometimes he was sentenced on lesser charges and served a shorter term; sometimes he was just let go for lack of evidence. Each occasion he was sent up, he spent no more than eighteen months before being paroled or furloughed and thrown back on the street.
Nineteen months ago. Curtis Blum held up a convenience store on the city’s north side, one owned and operated by a South Korean immigrant family. Blum held mother, father, and teenage daughter at gunpoint while he cleaned out the cash register and lucked two bottles of wine into his pockets. The family knell on the floor and begged him to be merciful and just leave, but he shot them anyway, along with an eleven-year-old kid from the ’hood who had been sent out by his mother to buy some cat food and beer and had the misfortune of walking through the door just as Blum was going out. He didn’t want to leave any witnesses, or maybe he simply felt like killing people that night.
A police SWAT team found Blum at his grandmother’s house two days later. He wasn’t hard to find; although by then he had bragged to everyone he knew about how he had capped three slants the night before, it was his grandmother who had called the cops. She also testified at her grandson’s trial six months later, saying that he regularly robbed and beat her.
Curtis Blum was convicted on four counts of second-degree murder. This time, he faced a judge who didn’t believe in second chances; he sentenced Blum to death. Since then, he has been filling in time on death row in the state’s maximum security prison.
The dean steps from behind the lectern and walks over to where the prisoner is seated. He asks Blum if he has any questions. Blum asks him if the girl in the third row wants to fuck.
The dean says nothing. He simply turns and walks away, vanishing once again behind the curtains on stage left.
Curtis laughs out loud, then looks again at the woman in the third row and asks her directly if she wants to fuck. She starts to get up to leave, which Blum misinterprets as willingness to conjugate; even as he assails her with more obscenities, though, another female student grasps her arm and whispers something to her.
The girl slops, glances again at the stage, and then sits back down. This time, she has a slight smile on her face, for now she sees something that Blum doesn’t.
Curtis is about to shout something else at the girl when a shadow falls over him. He looks up, and finds himself looking into the face of Charles Gregory Doblin.
Killing a man is actually a very easy thing to do, if you know how. There’s several simple ways that this can be accomplished that don’t require knives or guns, or even garrotte wires or sharp objects. You don’t even have to be very strong.
All you need are your bare hands, and a little bit of hate.
The dry crack of Curtis Blum’s neck being snapped follows the students as they shuffle out of the auditorium. It’s a cold wind, harsher than the one that blows dry leaves across the plaza outside the main hall, that drives them back to dormitories and apartments.
No one will sleep very well tonight. More than a few will waken from nightmares to find their sheets clammy with sweat, the sound of Blum’s final scream still resonating in their ears. Wherever they may go for the rest of their lives, whatever they may do, they will never forget what they have witnessed this evening.
Fifteen years later, a sociology post-grad student at this same university, in the course of researching her doctoral thesis, will discover an interesting fact. Upon tracking down the students who were present at Charles Gregory Doblin’s lecture and interviewing them or their surviving relatives, she will find that virtually none of them was ever arrested on a felony offense, and not one was ever investigated or charged with spousal or child abuse, statistics far below the national average for a population of similar age and social background.
Yet that is still in the future. This is the present:
In a small dressing room behind the stage. Charlie Doblin — no longer Charles Gregory Doblin, but simply Charlie Doblin. Inmate #7891 — sits in a chair before a makeup counter, hunched over the dog-eared Bible the mother of one of his victims sent him several years ago. His lips move soundlessly as he reads words he does not fully comprehend, but which help to give his life some meaning.
Behind him, a couple of state troopers smoke cigarettes and quietly discuss tonight’s lecture. Their guns and batons are holstered and ignored, for they know that the man in the room is utterly harmless. They wonder aloud how much vomit will have to be cleaned off the auditorium floor, and whether the girl in the third row will later remember what she yelled when the big moment came. She sounded kinda happy, one cop says, and the other one shakes his head. No, he replies, I think she was pissed because she missed out on a great date.
They both chuckle, then notice that Charlie Doblin is silently peering over his shoulder at them. Shut up, asshole, one of them says, and Doblin returns his attention to his Bible.
A radio crackles. A trooper plucks the handset off his jacket epaulet, murmurs into it, listens for a moment. The van is waiting out back, the local cops are ready to escort them to the interstate. He nods to his companion, who turns to tell Charlie that it’s time to go. The killer nods his head: he carefully marks his place in the Bible, then picks it up along with the speech that he read tonight.
He didn’t write this speech, but he has dutifully read it many times already, and will read it again tomorrow night in another college auditorium, to a different audience in a different city. And, as always, he will end his lecture by becoming a public executioner.