Chapter 48: Under the Lamp
Page three of a three-page document is not a dramatic object.
It is mostly white.
There is about an inch and a half of typed text at the top, then a great deal of nothing, then the block at the bottom.
That is how execution pages are built. The last page is mostly air.
I have scanned thousands of them.
I have flattened the fold on thousands of them.
I laid it face up inside the circle of light and squared it with the edge of the board.
Then I sat back on my heels and looked at it.
The paper is a photocopy of a photocopy. The black has gone grey and the white has gone warm.
Down the left edge, the band. The same band I make four hundred times a day.
At the top, the last two lines of the third paragraph.
That I have read the foregoing. That no promises were made.
Then my signature.
I looked at my own signature for a long time.
It is the handwriting of a twenty-four-year-old who was not careful about it.
The C is too big. There is a loop on the second s that I stopped doing in my second year inside.
Under it, my name typed in capitals, so anybody who cannot read the signature can read the name.
Then counsel's initials.
Then the witness line and the name I did not know.
Then, set right, in the header typeface, on its own:
EXECUTED ON: 03/07. TIME: 1420.
I did not take the bus transfer out of my coat.
The coat was on the hook four feet away, the transfer in the inside pocket since October. I did not get up.
I did not need to. I knew what it said. I write things down so that I do not have to carry them.
stmt p3 — exec 03/07 — sig was Sat.
So I already knew the line was wrong. I had known for two months.
What was different was only this. The page was now number two hundred and eighty-three in an order I had built myself, out of file stamps, over nine evenings.
In a chronological order a date is not a detail on a form. It is the reason the page is where it is.
I looked at the line under a four-dollar-fifty lamp on the floor of a halfway house at twenty to eleven at night.
I want to say exactly what I did next. It is the least impressive thing in this book.
I picked up a yellow tab.
I peeled it off the strip with my thumbnail and stuck it on the right-hand edge, level with the printed line.
Number twenty.
Then I wrote it in the index in the back of the notebook, in the same hand as the other nineteen.
p283 — stmt, execution line — date query.
Date query. Two words. That is the whole entry.
I did not underline it. It sits in that index between p279 — supp report, page missing and p301 — PSI, interview date illegible, and it looks like both.
I have that notebook in front of me now, years later. I have looked at that line more times than is reasonable.
It is not a clever entry. It is a clerk doing her job on a stack of paper on a floor.
Then I put page three back at two hundred and eighty-three.
I clipped the four hundred and twelve pages, squared the stack, and pushed it under the bunk next to the box with the six sealed envelopes.
It was 10:58. The overhead light was already off.
Dorrie turned over and said something that was not words.
I lay down on my back with my hands on my stomach and did the arithmetic I do instead of sleeping.
Twenty tabs. Four hundred and twelve pages. Nine evenings. Nine dollars and seventy-eight cents.
Eighty-one days until the one-eighty review. No apartment. No coat.
Three hundred dollars in an envelope in a handbag, ninety-four miles of nothing, and a signature somebody needed.
That is where the year had got to. I could have said all of it out loud in under a minute.
I did not think about the date again for a long time.
I want that on the record, because it is the truest thing here.
I saw it in October. I tabbed it in December. I did not understand it until the following autumn.
Twenty-two months, from a bus transfer in a coat pocket to the night I finally read my own case the way I read everybody else's.
That is not a mystery. That is how long it takes.
I reached up to the lamp.
Then I stopped. I left my hand on the switch and did not press it.
I left the lamp on all night, angled down at the floor, at the place where the page had been.