Lethal Injection

21 May 2001
Neil is waiting.

It seeps into the bloodstream like a sigh, that same slow exhalation. Clusters gather, gradually growing, the city's pulse slows like the traffic on the freeway: dipping to cruising speed for a few snatched instants of voyeurism. Suddenly it's not just the professionals on either side that know where the prison is to be found.

It's hot and the whole state is sticky with expectation but the hours count lazily down, refusing to savour the eagerness or the dread. Seven in the morning it will be, so it doesn't hang over our day like it has hung over our lives. We can go about our business with it all behind us: move on, cleansed. Or for the lucky ones sleep right through it, not have to be conscious at the moment it happens, just thump the alarm clock, jump in the shower, too groggy to remember till later that it is done.

To begin with you wonder whether anything will happen, if you've been cheated, but then the effects start to become clear. Two murders, now, in a week: a young woman battered with a nine iron in a domestic. The same pattern, the same spate every single time and the dogs go mad in the back yards, scorched by the Southern sun, breathing in the same poisonous air as us all.

Some try to block it out, walk from the office every time conversation loops obsessively back to the subject, but it is on their mind as much as anyone's and nobody can seal themselves off from the ticking of bulletins and column inches. Only some kids, skating around the entrance to the underpass, seem oblivious as the same clattering trick is tried again and again, immersed in themselves with their baggy jeans, their caps and their piercings that set off the metal detectors every time they go into school.

They're advising us to do something positive with the day: visit a friend, plant a tree. It seems a fair exchange- a life that produces oxygen for one that sucked out so much. And does it really matter: one life? When bus-loads of Bolivians go off the edge of treacherous mountain roads and thousands of HIV related Africans cease existing each week, can we really justify paying such attention to a single Western death, the switching off of one evil American mind. For the families, for more than just the families, it is righteous retribution: it is a focus, an atoning sacrifice, a scapegoat for all the pain and anger, all the hate they've ever felt, it is a promise of closure. But what about me? What am I doing here? Which nerve is it, which electronic impulse, which part of that slimy grey sponge that no amount of religious instruction has managed to calm into acceptance, that continues to thrash and flail against the inevitability of its own insignificant demise. I will not weep for him, his own parents will not weep for him: just the memory of the boy he once was, but I will weep for his life.

The clusters are swelling, the other (of course) much faster than my own: clear-eyed Furies angry that it will all be over so quickly. They howl across at us in furious incomprehension, spitting curses that label us as the supporters of murder, happy to have a temporary target in the enforced absence of the main attraction. Sweat drips as they work themselves into a rapturous frenzy, as pointless as a pro-globalisation protest or an ozone destruction rally.

Between us serried flashbulbs click continuously, keen that no angle should go unrecorded, and local evening haruspexes stride around self-importantly, eager to make their readings. The pulse quickens as the bulletins tick, the last push towards fever pitch whips up the crowd around my hopeless stand, towards climax and the hope of release. I hold my placard. I wait.