The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (13 page)

“Where did you get that?”

He placed the gun in my hands and they fell instantly onto the desk from the shock of it.

“Take it, Noa,” he whispered. “Be very careful. It’s not loaded now, but—”

“—who was that?” I asked, pulling my hands out of the grip of the revolver.

He didn’t respond.

“Take it, Noa. Please.”

My chest ached from the top down.

“Who the hell was that? Why did you do that? Are you some sort of secret spy? Do you work for the FBI and this is your cover?” I gasped. “Oh my god, are you … are you an assassin?”

He tried not to smile, which fueled me even more.

“Take the gun, Noa,” he urged, dropping the grin in an instant. “You need it for protection.”

“From what? From whom?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I’m not taking your contraband,” I told him.

“It’s not about me,” he insisted. “It’s for your own good. It’s for your own protection.”

“Stop saying ‘protection.’ Protection from what?” I cried. “From whom? I don’t think that guy will be following you around anymore. Or was he following me?”

Silence.

“Tell me. Tell me exactly what you’re involved in.”

“I’m not involved with anything.”

“If you want me in your life at all, then you’ll tell me.”

He shook his head and dropped to the chair in disbelief.

“How can you sit there in the same body and tell me how much you want to be a part of my life with gentility and kindness, and change, and then beat a man to a pulp in the same breath?”

He refused to speak. He refused to change his expression out of concern. He refused to take the gun back. I turned away to open the door, but he had locked it when we came into his office. I looked back to him. Instead of explaining things to me, he walked around his desk, took my hand, and pulled me back to the chair.

“I don’t know who that man was, Noa, but I’ve spent enough time around men like that to know that you can never be too prepared.”

“You know that’s not true,” I said to him, pulling my hands away.

“Please just take this.”

He was sweating heavily through his shirt, almost all of which was drenched in his own moisture, with just a few quarter-sized spots left dry as doubloons.

“I don’t know what I would do if something happened to you.”

“I’m not taking a gun, Caleb. You know this. I’m not carrying a gun. I’m not shooting a gun. That’s final.”

His head drifted downward. He was disappointed. If this had been ten years earlier and I had broken curfew, he would have sent me to my room. I would have probably spent years in therapy trying to overcome that paternal disappointment.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t.”

He held out his hand to me again, and this time, I didn’t meet it. Instead, I just turned around and jogged the doorknob of his office.

“Can you please unlock this?”

My hands were sweating over the metal knob. My right arm burned at the shoulder in a way it hadn’t in years, so I tried my left hand, but the doorknob would not budge. His breath closed in behind me, and I could feel its exhaust on my neck. With one violent hand pushing down on my shoulder and the other unzipping my bag, I knew exactly what he was doing, and I didn’t stop him. After a long enough pause, he reached behind me and placed his hand over mine, twisting the knob to the right until it clicked open. With my weighty backpack sealed to my body, I left without turning around.

When I got home that night, I locked my door and took a long shower. Waves of tears came forth in series and rounds. Perhaps, to this day, I never truly washed that night or my father off of me. When I got out, I walked over to my backpack and took out the little napkin from our first meeting at Bar Dive with my father’s name and number written
on it, signed with a small heart below the signature, as if written by an adolescent girl. It waved between my fingers, the old paper starting to harden at the edges, before crumbling in my hand into even little pieces that I could scatter outside my window. A ceremonial disposition of my father’s ashes.

I opened my backpack to remove my wallet, cell phone, and key, and found the revolver sitting there awkwardly like an adult in a kindergarten class. A box of .38 caliber bullets was resting beside it, heavy with ammunition. Next, I scrambled around inside the canvas bag to find the postcard, but it was missing. I carried it around with me for the better part of the last decade and now it was gone.

T
RUTH BE TOLD
, A
MERICA IS NOT AGAINST THE DEATH PENALTY
. And to be honest, I’m not entirely certain I am, either.

Historically, people have never held their morals high enough above their brows to follow through on their firm, yet pliable, beliefs. Rather, we are a species of voyeurs, eager to witness the demise and destruction of one of our own. To claim that groups like MAD are part of a new movement is insulting to our progress. I’ve done my research. Half are admittedly in favor of the death penalty, while that other so-called noble half says with an air of superiority that they are against it. Then, through their yellowing brittle teeth, they close in on you to whisper that it might be okay, you know, if the person was truly evil. Evil-evil, like Hitler or Miloševic or bin Laden. Yes, then, they confess, it would be okay.

I think it’s better to admit our weakness (or strength as you might see it) and just accept who we are: animals whose pulses race and eyes devour the spilled blood of another. (As long as it’s not actual spilled blood anymore and, of course, so long as we did not do the cutting ourselves.) Let’s take a quick look back.

Ancient Rome: gladiators draped in metal garments, arms swollen with bulbous flesh, hands grasping a lampoon, a lance, or a shield. Surrounding them: thousands of cheering fans, screaming as their veins pulse through their temples and their necks, eager to watch
one body fall prey to another. Two human beings fighting before fans until one of them drops dead.

The Crusades: medieval fundamentalist Christians making pilgrimage in chain mail and swords, exterminating those who got in their way to the Holy City, roaring crowds on the side, cheering them on.

The French Revolution: guillotines, aristocracy, a teeming crowd of peasants ready to drop the slice of metal that beheads one Marie Antoinette or Louis XVI. Humans screaming with all their might that it must be done, she deserves it, get rid of that, off with her head.

The noble English, our sovereign forefathers, Oliver’s beloved home: the Tower of London, King Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn. Murdering the enemy and chopping off its head to place as the tip of a life-sized effigy for all to see and loathe. An example so that no other soul would repeat such errors.

Indigenous tribes. Shrinking heads. Thai prisons. Fuck it, modern-day boxing, wrestling matches, cockfighting.

So then, how about this? Pay-per-view.

The United States of America. Present day: Americans are glued to their handheld computers, digital television systems that hang on walls like great portraits, satellite radios and cell phones, and any other technological advancements that evolved during my incarceration. People are living solitary lives, their brains controlled by what they see on TV. So why not just stick my gurney in the center of a boxing ring with multiple video cameras, a trained movie producer and sports commentator, and let everyone watch me die? Nobody has to watch, just as nobody had to attend the public quartering of William Wallace. All the proceeds can go (a) to those who want to raise money for some lost child or aging parent or grandparent, (b) to pay back all those legal fees, or (c) for whatever reason they choose: better prison food, cancer research, a new public school. This way, people who take pleasure in this sort of extermination can pay a mere ten bucks, all proceeds going to the little child or even (and I’m trying to write this without laughing) MAD. Clearly, it wouldn’t come on too
often. It would probably only air during political campaigns or summer recesses from situation comedies and prime-time soap operas. American capitalism at its height. It’s not that crazy a thought.

Look, I’m not about to use this little idea to protest that I can’t be executed on November 7 because I can’t understand what I did or why I’m going to die. I know what I did. I know what I didn’t do. I said that from the beginning of this manuscript. But my death—my public death—would give some people pleasure, and it would bring others quite a well-deserved windfall. If you ask me, it’s unadulterated altruism that has yet to be exploited.