“New York was a pioneer in the use of the electric chair, you know,” the Warden was saying. “The first one was a man named William Kemmler up in Auburn Prison back in 1890. That one was pretty crude and, uh, shocked a lot of people, if you’ll pardon the expression…” The Warden chuckled loosely at his joke and I smiled weakly, staring at the cherry-colored oak chair with its leather straps and wires, amazed at all the empty space around it. I guess I’d expected a small room, private, glassed off, like the gas chambers we had out in California. There was something weird about all this space. “But we’ve made a lot of refinements over the years, and it’s not so gruesome any more. For the victim, electrolethe, as we used to call it, is probably the best way to be taken off — much faster than gassing, garroting, or hanging, surer than shooting. As far as we know, it destroys them instantaneously — the current melts the brain so fast that the nervous system probably doesn’t even have time to register any pain.” It’s not the shock itself that hurts, I thought, goddamn it, my own brain tingling, it’s the anticipation. “Of course,” smiled the Warden, “we can’t be sure, since nobody’s ever come back to tell us what it’s really like.”
“You mean, it’s that…it always…”
“Not even the guillotine has a better record, Mr. Nixon.” It looked like an ordinary high-backed dining-room armchair with leather upholstery, brass-studded, something you might find in an antique shop or up in the attic. Except for the special headrest, the thick cables, and a broad middle leg that stuck out in front like a kind of deck-chair foot-rest. The burning tree. Maybe that crossword puzzle answer wasn’t GOLF after all…. “The only near-failure we ever had was just sixty years ago this summer up at Auburn when the chair broke during the first jolt. Took over an hour to repair it, and meanwhile the prisoner, who was still semiconscious, had to be kept doped up with chloroform and morphine. The poor bugger. One wonders what dreams he was having. But here at Sing Sing we’re still batting a thousand.”
There was a large skylight overhead, the panes sooty. From the inside? The lamps in the ceiling were shaped like flowers. “Is this the first woman you’ve had to…you’ve had to put to…”
“To sleep?” The Warden seemed amused at the expression. “Oh no, she’ll be the ninth. If the sentence is carried out.” He paused. “The first one we had here was a woman named Martha Place. That was back when Teddy Roosevelt was governor. She appealed to him for clemency, and when he refused her, what she said was: ‘That soldier-man likes killing things and he is going to kill me!’ She was right enough about that…” What was the Warden trying to get at? If he wanted to accuse us of something, why didn’t he just come right out with it? “You can buy souvenir postcards of her down in the town.”
The Warden stepped into an alcove to the left of the chair and turned on a big barn-door spotlight. “This is where the electrician works,” he said. The switch was a long handle with a big knob on the end, like a gearshift lever on an old Ford. It was in full view of the chair, lit up like a special exhibit. The victim was denied nothing.
“Must be hard to find anybody to take the job,” I said.
“Last time there was an opening,” said the Warden, “there were over seven hundred applicants. That was when we hired Mr. Francel.” This seemed to prove something to me that I’d always believed, though I couldn’t remember exactly what it was. The Warden stood in the alcove, talking about volts and cycles and amperes, rheostats and dynamos, but I was thinking: the old legends about Death were closer to the truth than the ones we had now — it was a substantial reality, a kind of person, an active intervention in the endless process of life. “The current enters the body through a metal electrode lined with a wet sponge and placed on top of the head, toward the back, the hair having been shaved from this area to provide a good contact.”
“I see…”
“It leaves the body through a similar electrode strapped to the calf of the left leg. The flesh’s resistance to such a current generates a great heat and the body’s temperature shoots up as high as a hundred and forty degrees — which is enough in itself to render most of the vital organs inoperative.” The cables coiled out from under the chair like snakes, like thick turds, then disappeared into the floor somehow. There were elegantly paneled benches for the witnesses, and near them, oddly, a lavatory. For washing up? But who—? No, I thought: for throwing up in. “The body in the chair struggles convulsively against the straps — it can be pretty appalling to watch, but it’s believed to be just involuntary muscle spasms induced by the current.”
“Aha…” That’s what they said about little Arthur when he went into his meningitis death throes. I wondered if the Warden planned to remain throughout the interview. He was probably hanging around trying to find out what the fresh information was I’d mentioned earlier as an excuse for coming here. “Where does that door—?”
“That’s the corridor that leads to the Death Cells,” said the Warden. There was a sign tacked up over the door that read SILENCE. “We could isolate it for you.”
“All…all right…”
“Do you want to see both of them at the same time?”
“No! Uh…no, just one…” I think that when a third person is present, one is distracted, wondering what his reaction is. Or people sometimes show off to the third man. But if there are just two of you—
“Which…?”
“Either one. Uh, the woman.”
While I thought about that, the suddenness of my decision, the Warden led me out into the corridor and asked a guard posted there to have “C.C. 110.510” brought down. I realized that I’d been planning to talk to her first all along, since back aboard the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special, maybe before. There were black blinds on all the windows, giving the whitewashed corridor the appearance of being somehow lit from within. Aglow. Empty except for the old steam radiators. The Last Mile. I was reminded of the Ambassador Hotel corridor in Los Angeles, the night of my Checkers speech. “It’s so, uh…polished…”
“The convicts here call it the Dance Hall,” smiled the Warden around his long cigar.
“The what—!?”
The Warden watched me a moment as though to ask me: Why are you nervous? — then said: “I think they’re coming.” And he walked away from me down the corridor to let them in.
He’d left the door into the death chamber open, but there was no time to close it now. I stared in at the electric chair, the coiled cables, the white hospital cart, the long black switch, thinking: So this is it, then. I felt suddenly like running, but my feet seemed stuck to the floor. I looked down on myself and saw the Vice President of the United States of America standing, rooted in panic, in the Sing Sing Dance Hall, awaiting the arrival of the notorious Spy Queen, Mrs. Ethel Rosenberg, and I felt just like I’d felt before the Checkers speech: I just don’t think I can go through with this one, I’d said to Pat. Of course you can, she’d said firmly, confidently. Of course you can…
I squared my shoulders and turned to face the door at the other end of the Last Mile (it is a challenging world, yes! I told myself, trying to stop my knees from shaking — but what an exciting time to be alive!) just as Ethel Rosenberg, flanked by a pair of matrons, stepped through. I nodded at the Warden and the two matrons, and they left us, pulling the door shut. We were alone.
“It’s…it’s all right,” I said. “Don’t be afraid. It’s just me, Richard Nixon.”
24. Introducing: The Sam Slick Show!