*
The officers pull you violently down the hall.
Please, no—
You did not expect to beg. They only tug harder, a warning. Don’t fight. Your legs are sludgy now with a panicked hesitation, but they prod you forward anyway, ignoring the weak dig of your heels.
Right now, you should be reaching the river. You should be listening to the grumble of water, flowing over smooth rocks. You should be putting one foot into the stream—a shiver, then the other. You imagine how the cold would feel on your ankles, the icy water slapping you gloriously awake.
The shock spreads. It thrums, then collapses, rolling in waves of bewilderment. Until this instant, you did not realize how wholly you had believed it. You had believed that you would escape, or at least that you would die trying. You had believed this for so long—so fully—that the truth now seems ridiculous. Impossible.
There is no sky. There is no grass. There is no getting out.
*
You are a fingerprint.
A thumb, pressed firm to an electronic pad. No question: it is you, wiping dust from your eyes with the back of your hand, it is you, tugged forward by the link of your handcuffs, it is you, wearing new white scrubs that smell inexplicably like meat. It is you, stepping across the threshold. It is you, now, in this place they call the Death House.
The holding cell is small. Back on 12 Building, descriptions of this famed place always varied in shape and size, depending on who came back to tell the story. When you reach the door, you clock the difference immediately: your old cell at Polunsky had a window built into steel. The Walls Unit keeps open bars.
It would be so easy with Shawna, to touch through these bars. But Shawna does not work at the Death House. Shawna is back at Polunsky, walking Jackson down the hall for his shower, her fleshy arms jiggling as she shuffles through the gray. You picture her face, guilty and stupefied, as you walked out of 12 Building for the last time—how Shawna stood, watching useless, knowing she had lied.
There was no gun. There was never any gun.
All those chunks of wasted time. The stolen moments, sappy love notes, grazing touch, all for nothing. Shawna is nothing, with her rolling hips and the sores across her mouth, a stutter forming on her chapped and cracking lips. Shawna is weak. So very woman. Her future will be empty without you—Shawna will complete her morning rounds, she will drink watery coffee from her old stained thermos, she will serve hundreds of meals to other bad men, and eventually she will forget these weeks, in which she was nearly significant, a part of something important. Almost, you feel sorry for her.
But then you see the room.
It is only a glimpse, taken in the tiny second before they shove you into the holding cell. Fifteen feet away, down the hall to the right, the door is propped open. You catch just a sliver of that halfway place, a fleeting flash, the stuff of lore. The execution room. In that millisecond glance, you see the walls, a noxious shade of mint green. You see the window, a curtain shrouding. The two rear wheels of a gurney.
You stumble into the cell, wishing you had not looked. That room is like heaven, or hell, or the moment of death itself: a place you should not see until your name is called.
*
Three hours, fifty-four minutes.
The world goes sideways, all wrong with the change. You sit on the edge of the new cot, hands firm on the mattress, trying to figure how you have arrived here.
You have had months—years—to consider this outcome. In all that time, you never imagined you might actually see the Death House. The future always managed to twist itself, expanding into pliant and inscrutable shapes. The future was a mystery, unknowable. You honestly never considered that the future might come to this. It feels too small, too helpless, for a person like you.
You remember that man back at Polunsky—the inmate who famously gouged his own eye out and ate it. You recognize some obscure corner of that feeling, a desire that makes some raw sense to you now. The desperation is intentional, maybe the most important part of this exercise. It is why they made you wait for years, then months, now hours and minutes, the whole of your life transformed into a countdown. The point is this. The waiting, the knowing, the not wanting to die.
*
How do you work this job?
You asked the question one noontime shift—Shawna looked tired, purple bags sinking beneath her eyes. Big Bear had been taken to the Walls Unit that morning. He’d sobbed as they marched him out to the van, heaving, wracking, two hundred and fifty pounds of utter devastation. Big Bear, a Black man with a singing voice like God. Big Bear, the only person you are absolutely certain did not deserve the Death House. Twenty years ago, Big Bear had been watching TV in his living room when a team of police officers burst in with a no-knock warrant, meant for the man in the apartment one floor above. Big Bear kept a gun beneath the couch cushions. The room was dark.