Джон Макдональд - The End of the Night

I never felt like an impostor.

I have tried to go all the way back through my years, and down into myself, to see if I can find any stray morsel of proof of the correctness of their classification. I find no thirst for blood. I have nearly racked up an automobile trying to avoid a chipmunk, and once I drove behind a car which swerved deliberately to hit a farm dog, and it filled me with a sick, helpless anger.

I can find but one incident I do not clearly understand, and it was buried deeper than it perhaps should have been.

I am twelve. It is late summer. Ever since my birthday I have owned a 22-caliber rifle, but it has been taken away from me by my father because I lied to him. He is angry at me this year. I lost a fight and came home weeping and so he whipped me and ordered me to stay in the house for a week. My mother hugs me and says he is too hard on me. I think I hate him this year. He seems to be cruel to both of us, to my mother and to me. My friends are out somewhere in the sunshine. I am alone in the house. I am restless. I do not know what I was pretending, but I hid in my mother’s closet, and I fell asleep on the closet floor, with one of the sliding doors open a few inches.

I am awakened by nearby sounds. I know at once that it is late afternoon. The blinds are closed. The bedroom is filled with a strange golden light. I know I should not be where I am. I get up onto my knees. I look through the crack where the door is open, and look across into the mirror of her dressing table and see reflected there the two of them, and see that they are making the sound which awakened me and which I could not identify. At first I am stunned with horror, believing that he is killing her in some horrible way, that she is fighting for her life, that they are gasping and writhing in mortal struggle. She makes a long, sighing moan, and I come dangerously close to screaming in panic, believing that she is resigning herself to death.

But the dirt-talk of the playground and the boys’ room is forcing itself into my mind. As my eyes become more accustomed to the golden light, and the mists of sleep burn off my brain, I see how they match the sniggering descriptions I have been given. They told me that my mother and father did it, but I could not believe they could secretly indulge in such a nastiness.

They are still. I can sense her horrible shame. She is the most beautiful woman in the world and, being his wife, she must submit to his vileness, to this naked degradation. I vow that when I get my rifle back I will kill him and she will be forever free of the pain that made her cry out.

To my astonishment she gets up from the bed and bends to kiss him lightly and tells him in a teasing way that she loves him. She is smiling. She gets cigarettes and gives him one, and lights his and her own, and then comes toward the closet. In silent panic I move back into the farthest corner, beyond the silk and scent of her dresses. She slides the door open, takes a dressing gown from a hanger and closes the door. I cannot hear them as clearly but I hear casual talk — about a party, about repairs the car needs and about me — about my disobeying by leaving the house. Later I hear them calling me outside, calling my name into the dusk, and so I go downstairs, pretending great sleepiness, telling them I fell asleep under my bed while pretending I was in a cave. I cannot look directly at either of them. My face burns with their shame. My father gives me back the confiscated gun and rubs my head with his knuckles.

The next afternoon I go into the woods behind the house with my rifle. I stretch out, face down, in an open place, and I try to stop thinking about It, but it is there, golden pictures in my head, a dirty, naked plunging. The grass is a jungle. Ants are the size of lions. I look at the box of shells. Dangerous up to one mile. The Club is less than a mile away. The pool will be full. I know the exact direction of the invisible Club. I aim the gun at a high angle. I empty the clip, reload, fire, reload, fire — panting, my hands trembling, until the last bullet is gone. I see them falling, screaming, drowning, turning the blue water to bright-red. I hurl the new gun into the brush. I am crying. I bruise my fists on a tree, then fall to my knees and vomit.

I am sick when I go home. She puts me to bed. I wait for them to come after me. Nothing happens. The next day I talk to a boy who was at the pool. Nothing happened there. Two weeks later I look for the rifle and find it, ruined by rust. I bury it. When he asks what happened to it, I tell him I loaned it to somebody. By the time school starts, he has stopped asking. For a long time I dream about him. He is standing naked on the high board, his back to the pool. Little black holes appear in his back. He shudders as each one appears. I wait for him to fall. But he turns slowly and laughs at me, and makes a gesture, and I see that where his penis should be, there is a big bullet, the brass casing shining in the sun, ready to kill anybody.

The memory was far down, covered by the careless debris of eleven years, but I excavated it intact, using all the care of an archeologist, the lens, the soft brush, the ancient writings. I do not know that strange small boy. He moves through his own world, playing his secret games. The Freudian dream is ludicrously obvious. I understand all of it. But I do not understand the attempt to kill. I wonder where the small bullets went... a whole half box of .22 long rifle arcing across an August afternoon.

The light in this cell is never extinguished. It is countersunk in the ceiling, shielded by heavy wire mesh. I have been told by one of the guards — a curiously clerical-looking fellow who spoke with professional pride — that in the event of power failure a standby generator cuts in automatically, and should that fail to kick over, a second generator will assume the load.

A death cell should be a dungeon, with black sweating walls and phrases of despair carved by those who have waited for execution. But this is a bright, clean, sterile place, functional, efficient. One could assume it has never been used before, but the clerkly guard assures me that it has, many times.

Under past administrations, prisoners under sentence of death lived under much the same conditions as the prisoners in the other cell blocks, except for living one to a cell and having no work assignments. But since the completion of the new execution area we, the condemned, inhabit — at the expense of the taxpayers — these special cells. We have soft bunks, books, writing materials, television, radio, good food from a special kitchen, regular medical and dental examinations. I have gained eleven pounds since I have been in this place. We live under continual light, without contact with each other, with a guard always on watch. There are eleven of us here, filling one more than half of the twenty special cells.

It amuses me to imagine a Martian sociologist studying this place, reaching erroneous but plausible conclusions. He might well imagine that we are individuals of great value and importance. He might assume we are being conserved for some superstitious and barbaric sacrifice. For one full year the Aztecs fattened and pampered their sacrificial virgins before taking them one by one to the top of a pyramid and cutting out their pulsing hearts with the obsidian knife at sunrise. I believe these maidens were selected by chance. I cannot avoid feeling that I have been selected in some random irrational manner for this questionable honor.

I have learned what they will do with Nan Koslov. She is being held in isolation in a women’s prison a hundred miles away. All the rituals of preparation will be performed there. When it is time to destroy the four of us, she will be brought to this place and, if the scheduling is efficient, will arrive minutes before her important appointment. My clerkly guard smirks and says, “Ladies first.”