You can see everything, Jenny says, as the world folds open. From the beginning, all the way to the end.
*
The witness room is a tiny theater. The window is paneled with bars, the beige curtains drawn shut. There are no seats. Hazel leads her mother inside—they stand awkwardly in the center of the concrete box, the reporters lingering respectfully behind. From the other side of the curtain, Hazel can hear a faint, shuffling murmur. The glug of an IV bag. A heart monitor’s persistent beep.
Jenny arrives then, hovering. As the curtains slide open, as Hazel squints onto the stage, Jenny is here.
She is a scent, fleeting. A whiff. A glimmer. Jenny is in the oxygen that fills Hazel’s lungs, she is in the stubborn clench of Hazel’s fist. As Hazel peers through the glass and into the execution room, Jenny winks out from her own reflection. This, Hazel knows, is the miracle of sisterhood. Of love itself. Death is cruel, and infinite, and inevitable, but it is not the end. Jenny exists in every room Hazel walks through. She fills, she shivers. She spreads, dispersing, until she is nowhere—until she is everywhere—until she lives wherever Hazel carries her.
0
It is now.
As the footsteps arrive, you press a hand to your cheek. Stubble, jutting bone. You try to memorize the curve of your own jaw, the shape of the self you have lived with all your life. You do not know whether you hate your own body or if you will miss it when it’s gone.
*
The officers wait in front of your cell. Six of them, faceless, plus the chaplain, the Death House warden, and a balding man from the Office of the Inspector General. His voice is muffled, far away, like you are listening from underwater. They reach through the bars with a pair of handcuffs.
Your heart is a stick of dynamite. Waiting, useless, for the explosion. The guards unlock the door and beckon you forward.
One step, then another. You walk through.
The march from the cell to the execution chamber is cruelly short. Fifteen feet. You count each pace as it passes, the officers flanking like you are the president of the United States. Each second stretches, incalculable.
Too soon, you are in the room.
The execution chamber looks exactly how you imagined. The walls are green, the brick painted in a sickly shade of mint, like a stick of spearmint gum. There is a new smell here: medical equipment, the sharp zing of chemicals. In the center of the space, there is a gurney. The gurney has straps along the sides for each of your limbs, like some medieval device, and a microphone hangs on a cord from the ceiling.
How insane, you think. How deranged. The government paid money for this glorified table and placed it in this room. These twelve people woke up this morning, put on their uniforms, and drove to work, just to perform this demented exercise. The citizens of your very own country pay taxes to keep this operation running, to supply the three drugs that will flow through the IV. Your own neighbors—your mailman, your grocery store clerk, the single mother across the street—pay money to make sure your government can kill you in exactly this way.
They do not give you time. It moves too fast: you are ushered forward, and your own traitor legs propel you thoughtlessly onto the gurney. A flurry of activity, as the officers strap you down, a practiced choreography.
When the process is done, you stare up at the ceiling, arms stretched to the sides like a child flopped down to make a snow angel. The ceiling has no cracks. The ceiling has no stains. You miss your elephant.
*
A memory. You are nine years old. You are on the living room floor at Miss Gemma’s, fingers tangled in the brown shag carpet. You sit in a circle with the other children, a copy of the Holy Bible open in your lap. A pretty older girl reads from Corinthians—you watch her lips, not hearing the words.
What do we know about Jesus’s crucifix? Miss Gemma asks. Miss Gemma’s eyes are lidded heavy, her hair a chemical dyed halo. She fingers a dainty cross, glinting across her sunspotted chest.
The crucifix helps us understand Jesus’s suffering, she says. It also helps us understand his love.
*
The warden’s cologne is oppressive, filling the space in a noxious cloud. He checks the straps on the gurney. The medical team bustles around you, preoccupied, indifferent to your discomfort. The chaplain is the only one who gravitates to your center—the chaplain understands that you do not want to speak, because he only stands there, like a dog with its head nestled against your leg.
You look away as the IVs are inserted. Both arms. You feel the tiny pricks of pain, hear the fluid gulping through the bag. The medical technician adjusts the settings—you can smell the specific of her, not a perfume or a deodorant, but the way her house must smell when you first walk inside. Like cucumber soap, with something mustier beneath it. A strand of her hair has wafted onto your shirt, landed just beneath your armpit, and it lifts into the air with the force of your breath. Delicate, feminine, floating adrift.