(no subject)
Write page 57 of your 300-page autobiography.
Excerpt from As Yet Untitled by Alan Shore.
I went. Simple as that. I was twenty-three-newly twenty-three-and not in the habit of soul-searching. I knew what my soul contained. Industrious little stock clerk that I was, I took inventory regularly; if pressed, I could have drawn up an itemized list of its contents.
Morris Mason was thirty-two. Seven years earlier, he had raped an elderly neighbor, clobbered her with an axe and nailed her hands to a chair before setting fire to her house. The next day, he had raped and sodomized a girl of twelve and then shot her thirteen-year-old sister, leaving the girl a paraplegic. For these crimes, the Commonwealth of Virginia had decreed his death.
I made the ten-hour drive from Boston to Richmond in a green Chevy Vega that had either air-conditioning or the ability to climb steep hills-never both at once. It was a hot, sticky day and I spent most of it listening to whichever baseball game I could pick up on the radio, stopping to stretch my legs or buy a soda.
No one’s ever asked me what it’s like to witness an execution-perhaps because it’s not something I readily discuss, or perhaps because the answer is obvious: it’s awful. And I had no delusions on that score. I knew I was speeding down the eastern seaboard to watch approximately 2000 volts of electricity fry a man’s internal organs. I knew I had as little chance as Mr. Mason of emerging unchanged from the seat set aside for me by the Virginia Department of Corrections.
I sure as hell knew better than to eat on the way there.
But at the same time, I had this sense of-I’m sitting here mentally snapping my fingers in an attempt to conjure a word that probably doesn’t exist in the lexicon of a forty-six-year-old cynic-resolve, I suppose. Hope, even, absurd as that sounds. My crazed jaunt felt, on some level, like a rescue attempt; on some level, maybe I believed that by witnessing the death of a stranger I could salvage some part of him.
(He had, at most, an IQ of 66. At the age of twenty-one, he’d begun to hear voices urging him to commit violent, destructive acts. He spent much of his life in and out of mental institutions. The day before the murder, something had impelled him to seek refuge in a halfway house; there hadn’t been any room. I enclose this information in parentheses because it had little to no legal relevance.)
It was dark by the time I arrived in Richmond. I stopped at a gas station and scrambled into my suit in the bathroom, raked a hand through my hair.
Witnesses were to assemble in a dingy little room at the police station, where we would be briefed and then crowded into a van bound for the state penitentiary. Walking into that room was like showing up at a cocktail party just as everyone’s finished polishing off that one drink too many. All of them-the loose knot of
Excerpt from As Yet Untitled by Alan Shore.
I went. Simple as that. I was twenty-three-newly twenty-three-and not in the habit of soul-searching. I knew what my soul contained. Industrious little stock clerk that I was, I took inventory regularly; if pressed, I could have drawn up an itemized list of its contents.
Morris Mason was thirty-two. Seven years earlier, he had raped an elderly neighbor, clobbered her with an axe and nailed her hands to a chair before setting fire to her house. The next day, he had raped and sodomized a girl of twelve and then shot her thirteen-year-old sister, leaving the girl a paraplegic. For these crimes, the Commonwealth of Virginia had decreed his death.
I made the ten-hour drive from Boston to Richmond in a green Chevy Vega that had either air-conditioning or the ability to climb steep hills-never both at once. It was a hot, sticky day and I spent most of it listening to whichever baseball game I could pick up on the radio, stopping to stretch my legs or buy a soda.
No one’s ever asked me what it’s like to witness an execution-perhaps because it’s not something I readily discuss, or perhaps because the answer is obvious: it’s awful. And I had no delusions on that score. I knew I was speeding down the eastern seaboard to watch approximately 2000 volts of electricity fry a man’s internal organs. I knew I had as little chance as Mr. Mason of emerging unchanged from the seat set aside for me by the Virginia Department of Corrections.
I sure as hell knew better than to eat on the way there.
But at the same time, I had this sense of-I’m sitting here mentally snapping my fingers in an attempt to conjure a word that probably doesn’t exist in the lexicon of a forty-six-year-old cynic-resolve, I suppose. Hope, even, absurd as that sounds. My crazed jaunt felt, on some level, like a rescue attempt; on some level, maybe I believed that by witnessing the death of a stranger I could salvage some part of him.
(He had, at most, an IQ of 66. At the age of twenty-one, he’d begun to hear voices urging him to commit violent, destructive acts. He spent much of his life in and out of mental institutions. The day before the murder, something had impelled him to seek refuge in a halfway house; there hadn’t been any room. I enclose this information in parentheses because it had little to no legal relevance.)
It was dark by the time I arrived in Richmond. I stopped at a gas station and scrambled into my suit in the bathroom, raked a hand through my hair.
Witnesses were to assemble in a dingy little room at the police station, where we would be briefed and then crowded into a van bound for the state penitentiary. Walking into that room was like showing up at a cocktail party just as everyone’s finished polishing off that one drink too many. All of them-the loose knot of