Carthage (24 page)

At the center, rear of the low-ceilinged chamber was a bizarre structure: it appeared to be a diving bell, painted an incongruous robin’s-egg blue. It was octagonal in structure with several Plexiglas windows in its sides. Inside, you could see two straight-backed chairs positioned side by side.

The ceiling of the diving bell, at the apex of its curve, looked as if it could not be even six feet high.

An airtight structure, the Intern reasoned. Since gas had been a means of execution in the state of Florida until recently.

The Intern was feeling faint-headed like one who has ignored a warning, and has approached danger—but what was the warning?

She could not recall any warning.

Accompany me to the maximum-security facility at Orion. I will pay you one and a half your usual salary
.

The Intern had been grateful for the Investigator’s invitation. The Intern was in need of employment and was, at the present time, financially dependent upon the Investigator. It may have been, the Intern was emotionally dependent upon the Investigator as well.

In his grating voice the Lieutenant was chiding: “Those of you in front—please move out of the aisle. Please sit in those chairs! Those chairs are the most prized seats in the house, reserved for the family of the victim and for law enforcement officers with a particular interest in the execution.”

The members of the tour group murmured and whispered together. The witness-viewing area of the execution chamber was so
small
—you would always be in close proximity to the condemned man, no matter where you were seated.

Could scarcely draw a breath that wasn’t contaminated by—death.

The Lieutenant was saying, in his bullying-teasing manner, that, when a condemned individual was “obstructurous” as they were being, he was
forcibly carried
into the chamber.

Had the Lieutenant
chuckled
? No one laughed with him.

A mistake to have come here, the Intern was thinking. For—was something awaiting her,
here
?

At last the visitors were spread out into the room, some of them uncomfortably close to the diving bell. A few had reluctantly taken seats in the prized chairs facing the Plexiglas windows and could not help but stare inside.

The Investigator was still standing, in the aisle. The Investigator may have switched on a (miniature) recording device carried in a fountain pen, in his lapel pocket; the Investigator would want to see and record all that he could.

The Lieutenant said, gloating, with a zestful rubbing of his hands, “Now, folks, if you are settled— I will shut the door.”

Panic rippled through the low-ceilinged room! In a flock of birds such an alert would provoke all to fly away at once, flutter their wings and escape but these visitors had no wings and were trapped in a windowless cave.

Voices lifted, protesting. “Shut the door? Oh but why—”

The room was ventilated by a chill, mineral-smelling rattling overhead like the breath of a great sinuous serpent. It was not entirely subterranean but felt so. You felt the dark earth surrounding you, the gravity-tug of death and dissolution.

In his way that was part-sneering, part-sincerity—part reproach and part genuine pride—the Lieutenant was saying, to his captive audience: “The experience of our execution chamber at Orion is a closed one. Very few individuals are allowed into this place. And of these, not all leave again. You will have the wrong impression if you think that the open sky, fresh air, and a quick means of exit have anything to do with
execution.
”

The Lieutenant strode to the door and shut it.

THE INTERN THOUGHT
Eternity has no conjunction with time. This—where we are—is but a place, and a time. It will not prevail and cannot confine me.

He’d said with a doubtful look, you will do.

He’d been sifting through applications, candidates. He had not wanted, he’d said, a
merely academic
assistant of whom there were dozens available, and eager to work with
Professor Cornelius Hinton
of the Institute for Advanced Research in Social Psychology, Criminology, and Anthropology
,
University of Florida at Temple Park, Florida.

PROF. CORNELIUS HINTON
—this was the name on the little plaque affixed to the Investigator’s door at the Institute.

She’d assumed at the outset that yes, this was the white-haired gentleman’s name—“Hinton.” Later, she would learn that “Hinton” was one of several working-names the Investigator used when he was
incognito.

Not only was the Investigator other than “Hinton” but he was older than “Hinton” whose birth date on his laminated Institute ID card was 1941.

From a remark he’d let slip, the Intern understood that the Investigator was a few years older than the fictitious
Cornelius Hinton
. But so youthful-looking, for a gentleman of his age, and so resembling the slightly blurred, bespectacled and bewhiskered white-haired professor in the little photo ID, who would have suspected?

She hadn’t been searching among the Investigator’s files. She would not have wished to perceive herself that way—furtive, deceitful.

In her former lifetime lost to her now as the scattered and faded remnants of a photo album tossed among anonymous trash she’d created a wickedly witty pen-and-ink drawing in the style of her obsessive master M. C. Escher depicting small humanoid figures spying on one another in a landscape of dense vertiginous symmetries like impacted wallpaper. There were starkly white humanoid figures and starkly black humanoid figures in a Gestalt pattern so that, if the eye saw “white,” the eye could not simultaneously see “black”; if the eye saw “black,” the eye could not simultaneously see “white.” The trick of the drawing was that all these foolish/hapless figures spied upon one another yet were oblivious of being spied-upon. The wit of the drawing was that no humanoid figure differed in the slightest from any other: all were identical.

She’d been thirteen at the time of the drawing, in the first thrilled flush of inspiration.

Spying, snooping
—she felt a moral revulsion for such human activities. She would not have wished to snoop among the Investigator’s private files as much for her own sake as for his.

She was a convalescent, still. She’d been convalescing for how many years, she’d lost count.

She’d fled, she was in exile.
Back there
was a way of naming the unnameable.

Essentially in life you are at Point X—
this, where we are
—continuously. It’s a delusion to think that you can travel
back there
—from which you’ve been expelled.

And so, she hadn’t been searching among the Investigator’s files for anything other than the misplaced file he’d been looking for. (The Investigator was a methodical man for whom scrupulosity and order were sacrosanct: he’d been known to turn white-lipped with rage if a small item on his desk were out of place.) Yet she’d found, in an older filing cabinet, in a creaking lower drawer, a much-creased manila envelope that contained several laminated ID cards for several “identities”—all male, birth dates 1938 to 1943, and all associated with academic or research institutions in Minnesota, Illinois, New York State, Washington, D.C., Bethesda, and Florida.

These IDs dated back to another era, clearly. Might’ve been the 1980s. The Investigator at that time had had dark blond hair, a sharp-boned but whiskery face, shrewd eyes hidden behind tinted lenses.

Unless, the Intern speculated, the photos weren’t of the Investigator himself but of someone who resembled him enough to pass for him, should the ID have been inspected at a checkpoint. The more she peered at the little ID photos, the less they resembled the man whom she knew, and the less they resembled one another.

There is a thriving business in manufactured-to-order IDs including driver’s licenses. The Intern, whose own identity was not entirely fixed, understood this.

Still, you could stare at the Investigator’s numerous ID photos and not be sure if they were, or were not,
him.
As you could observe the man himself, seemingly placid, always preoccupied, humming under his breath, quizzical, bemused, beguiled, absently gazing out a window at a sky streaked with opalescent cloud above the Atlantic Ocean miles away as—(it seemed)—a tempest of thoughts raged in his brain—and not have the slightest idea who he
was.

To the Orion Maximum Security Correctional Facility for Men in the flatlands of central Florida the Investigator had brought a laminated ID card identifying him as
Professor Cornelius Hinton
of the
Institute for Advanced Research in Social Psychology, Criminology, and Anthropology, State University of Florida, Temple Park, Florida.
The Institute was an actual place, as the Temple Park branch of the State University of Florida was an actual place in one of the older palm-tree-lined suburbs of Fort Lauderdale. There, as a non-degree-enrolled student named “Sabbath Mae McSwain” the Intern had taken night school courses over a period of several semesters—courses chosen less for their subjects than for the convenience of scheduling; she’d become one of those individuals who dwell at the edges of large university campuses, attached to the universities in the way that a scattering of small treeless islands is attached to the mainland.

Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised.
Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.

There is Minimalist art: there are Minimalist lives.

By default she’d become a certain kind of student—older, solitary.

The ideal camouflage for one in exile—it wasn’t camouflage at all.

And she was sure by this time, no one was pursuing her.

She’d lived in Miami for a while, at various addresses. She’d had her “friend”—her “protector.” And they’d moved to Fort Lauderdale, and now in Temple Park where she was living alone, and was content to be living alone, or told herself so. Temple Park was a residential suburb north of Fort Lauderdale, partly bordering the ocean, but only partly. In all these places—Miami, Lauderdale, Temple Park—she’d worked at a motley succession of minimum-wage jobs—(store clerk, kitchen worker, waitress [a single, humiliating evening]), veterinary assistant, “lab tech,” fresh-produce market hand; valiantly she’d managed a secondhand bookstore for several haphazard weeks as the doomed and dust-ridden store (“Gay & Lesbian Pride, New Rare & Used Books”) sank into bankruptcy, and beyond. At the same general time, in Temple Park, she’d begun a circuitous progress, as she thought it, into the State University which in its labyrinthine interstices provided work-study scholarships for students, for which she believed she might one day qualify. She imagined for herself a university career of credits accumulated slowly and painstakingly as precious pebbles on a beach; somehow, a B.A. degree would materialize out of this earnest effort, then a graduate fellowship, a Ph.D. and a teaching position—in some subject, somewhere. She could envision for herself only college-level teaching, or a research position in a laboratory; she could not think of public school teaching, high school or lower, without a wince of dread and shame.

Already in her young girlhood, she’d failed at
that
.

She could not even recall. But she knew, she’d failed.

Back there,
she’d been stripped of all pride. She’d been exposed as contemptible, debased. And so it had been, but she was no longer
back there
.

Here, where no one knew her, and cared nothing for her, she felt a small residue of hope. She’d had friends of a kind, and had drifted from them, preferring to live alone. Her “progress” at the university resembled the motions of a rock-face climber who inches upward so close to the rock face that he’s blind to it, as he is blind to the spectacular view behind his back.

You must have faith, your efforts are
upward.
You are
ascending.

As she worked in a succession of nondescript and anonymous jobs mostly without complaint as she was without expectations so she lived in a succession of nondescript and anonymous residences far from the Atlantic Ocean, dazzling sand beaches and causeways and glittering high-rise hotels. In the great tourist cities of Florida it is possible to live within a mile or less of the ocean and to never see it, and to never think of seeing it, or of caring to see it. She’d made her way like flotsam floating upon a haphazard tide for months, and years; in so wayward a life, one year blends into the next, and that into the next; until in Temple Park where she seemed to have washed ashore, at least temporarily, she found herself living in a small single room in the slant-roofed attic of a rotting flamingo-pink Victorian house across the street, Pepperdine Avenue, from a multi-ethnic residence for undergraduate and graduate students called International House where in the cafeteria she ate inexpensive ethnic meals at long communal tables, was befriended by strangers, attended films, lectures, discussions; especially, she was befriended by a feminist group called Females Without Borders which had a center in the building. In such milieus her identity as
Sabbath McSwain
was never questioned: