The Room
The guard watched as the deputies escorted her in. They stopped, and she stood there, her expression impossible to read. No protocol, no words. The guard raised an eyebrow to ask ‘ready?’ She nodded, walked over, and he unlocked the door.
He stood aside and she entered the room. The furnishings didn’t just say ‘I am odd’—they said ‘you’re in the weirdest situation you’ll ever be in.’ She didn’t know if she had looked forward to, or feared, this day more.
Gray metal walls. No windows. A long table dissecting the square space. Two chairs. Not by the table but across the room from each other: one just inside the door she had come in, the other against the facing wall, by the other door.
Where someone else would soon enter.
The guard handed her the gun. The 19mm Glock he had used. Lex talionis.
“Any questions?” he asked.
“No,” she said. She was done with questions. And her training had been thorough.
“Aim for the chest,” he reminded her. Hearing him say it, she felt a shadow cloud her thoughts. She tried to shake it away.
The guard nodded encouragingly and left.
* * *
Once they were both in the room, and the doors sealed, there would be no intervention. No one would even be watching. No one would hear. Whatever happened in the room would be final and irrevocable, with no blame either way. If one person walked out, that person would be free and the record erased. If it were both, or neither—same thing.
The dilemma of the barbarity of the death penalty, and the deep human need for vengeance, most felt, had found its most enlightened solution.
Perfect justice meets Schrödinger’s cat.
* * *
She stood there in the silence, waiting. One of those little eternities, hanging by a thread.
The far door opened.
She had cultivated a mental image in the weeks since his conviction, and now, as he entered, she saw that it was distorted—he seemed smaller, his facial features less dramatic. Except for the eyes. Those were the same.
She had been coached well. She knew the wisest strategy here, the safest, which in fact the majority of people in this situation followed. Come to the edge of the table, position herself, aim, and shoot him immediately. Empty fourteen rounds into his chest, then one in the face as an exclamation point. Do not engage with him. Do not let him talk. Finish it.
He stood there, watching her, perhaps expecting this. She thought, where’s the satisfaction in that? She felt her power like a drug, and wanted him to feel it too. For a second she thought she saw ‘I want you to kill me’ in his eyes—but with that smirk. The smirk she remembered from the trial. Maybe it was ‘I want to kill you.’ She nodded toward the chair by the wall.
“Do you mind if I stand up?” he said.
“I want you to sit down.”
“Oh, please—it’s not too much to ask. I’ve been sitting down all day.” He took a step toward her. She tensed and raised the gun. He smiled. “You’re very close, aren’t you? I mean, you’re right there. Man, I can tell you, that’s a rush, knowing you could be dead the next second. One blink away from nothing. I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to feel that. How many people get that chance?”
“Sit down.”
“Oh, come on. Look at the situation. Here we are. You can’t grant me that one little mercy?”
She had been repeatedly coached about the danger of losing her concentration. Giving him even the smallest opening. A flash of distraction blurred her mind again—he took another step—and she came out of it with a surge of adrenalin. Do it, a voice said. But she didn’t, quite.
“There’s something I don’t think you understand,” he was saying. “Maybe I’ve done some bad things—everybody’s done some bad things—but I’m not a bad person.”
“You are what you do,” she said.
“I don’t expect you to understand. It’s a lot to get your head around.”
“It’s not that hard,” she said. “You’re saying exactly what I expected you to say.”
“See? You imagined us talking.” He smirked. She just stared at him and kept the gun raised. “Look at the world,” he went on. “Look at nature. Killing is part of it. It’s built in. It happens. You’re taking it too personally—it’s just the way things turned out. You think you wouldn’t be capable of the same thing?”
She wasn’t exactly making him suffer, was she? “I’d be capable of killing you, but an innocent person for no reason?—no.” That smirk. “You’ve lived your stinking miserable life without anything good or beautiful or redeeming in it, and when you die it will just be the world taking a shit.”
“Well, that’s a little harsh.”
“How can you live to your age and not have one shred of grace or class or wisdom? You’re just sewage.”
“Whoo! I understand ‘sewage’ but I don’t know what those other words mean. You go through shit, you deal with it, you come back to fight another day. You survive. That’s all I know.”
“It won’t help you much in Hell.”
“You can save the fairy tales.”
“You took the thing I loved most in this world.”
His eyes were like razors—watching her the way a predator watches its prey—seeing the surge of agony distract her, her arms lose their tension.
“Ain’t a whole lot I can do about that now.”
“Just one thing.”
“You think I’m afraid to die?”
“I don’t know, or care, what you think.”
“If that was true, we wouldn’t be standing here. So I’ll tell you: I’m not. You can have this stinking life and everything in it—it doesn’t mean a goddam thing to me. The only thing that means anything to me is what I’m about to do: come over that table, take that gun away from you, and have some fun with you right there on that floor.”
He jumped onto the table, held his arms out, and cried, “Let’s make love! Nobody’s watching!”
And leapt.
What was this sudden brain-freeze? By the time she sent the command to her trigger finger his hand had her by the wrist, and the shot went awry and she heard the bullet ricochet off the metal walls.
He was on top of her and wrenched the gun from her hand.
She couldn’t understand how she’d let it come to this. She braced herself—and when nothing happened she saw the other options—that he could kill her, then himself—or not kill her but take her with him—or leave her there alive and walk away free. Please, that, she thought. I can live with that. What subterranean snake-infested hole could he return to? The man’s life was his punishment—
Or,
Once he had the gun, he rose, stepped back, put it to his temple and said, “I told you I wasn’t a bad person,” and pulled the trigger—all in one smooth decisive motion—
Or,
She fired three times directly into his chest as he fell, then backed away, watching him. He didn’t breathe or move for a minute. Two. Three. She heard her instructor—“Make sure. If he survives we have to let him go.” She approached him, holding the gun out, aiming it at the back of his head. She hesitated, lowered the gun, and nudged his shoulder with her foot. Nothing. Blood was pooling under his upper body now. There wasn’t any surviving going on here.
Kill him once, it’s on him. Kill him twice, it’s on me. Whatever he was, he’s not that anymore, she thought. He’s probably glad.
She didn’t think dealing with it morally would be difficult at all.
* * *
The guard heard the bell and came over to unlock the door. He was excited. He didn’t know what he’d find when he opened it, he only knew he had five hundred bucks riding on the five to one.
October 1, 2022