E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

We knew whoever said that was not one of the inner circle. The people who knew us thought of us as weird and demanding, Just before an appearance we’d suddenly decide we wanted malted milks or hamburgers. Once Susan insisted on chicken chow mein. We blackmailed anyone who made the mistake of befriending us. We were always a threat. By not cooperating we could ruin the best plans. Our public appearances were heartstoppers, The image was of two good, fine children. Those who were close to us knew better.

The Fischers disliked us intensely. They were always rushing us to rallies and meetings and hurrying our supper. We hated them. They lived in a big house and we had two rooms on the third floor. Mrs. Fischer left an old vacuum cleaner up there so we could keep the floors clean. There was a laundry bag for our dirty clothes; when it was full we brought it to the basement. Sometimes we’d find new clothes from Alexander’s laid out on our beds. Our schedule was on the bulletin board in the kitchen. The house, a dark Tudor-style mansion, was well back from the street; and the entire property was surrounded by tall hedges. We often looked through the hedges but saw nothing but another Tudor house. We went to a private school in a station wagon, and a station wagon brought us home. We had no friends.

One day we hid in the basement behind the oil burner. We stayed there all day and missed a rally. I was growing hair around my penis and I showed Susan. We talked about that for a while. Susan read The Enchanted Garden. I took a nap. We could hear the phone upstairs ringing every few minutes. Finally we got hungry and went upstairs. It was ten o’clock in the evening. Mr. Fischer’s tie was pulled down, his collar was open, and the points of the collar were turned up. He yelled at us. Mrs. Fischer looked pale and kept lighting cigarettes and almost immediately mashing them out in the ashtray. She was a thin blond woman with bulgy eyes. “Do you think we’re doing this for our health!” Mr. Fischer screamed. “You rotten kids! They’re your parents! You miserable brats!” Yet one week when it was time to make our visit to prison there was no one to take us.

Then Jacob Ascher came to the house. We hadn’t seen him in a long time. He drove us back to Judge Greenblatt’s Children’s Court and the Judge removed us from the custody of the Fischers. “No more of this,” he said pointing a finger at Ascher. The old lawyer laughed bitterly and shook his head.

What more is there to say? YOUR CAREER IN ELECTRICITY. Electricity is a form of energy. It is generated by various power sources driven by water, steam, or atomic fission. The leading electric-power producing countries are the United States (987,432,000 kilowatt-hours per year), and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (379,096,000 kwh per year). The theory of electricity is that atoms lose or gain electrons and thus become positively or negatively charged. A charged atom is called an ion.

I suppose you think I can’t do the electrocution. I know there is a you. There has always been a you. YOU: I will show you that I can do the electrocution.

First they led in my father. They had rightly conceived that my mother was the stronger. All factors had to be considered. They wanted the thing done with as little fuss as possible. They wanted it to go smoothly. It is not a pleasant job, executing people, and they wanted to do it with dispatch. His legs were weak. He had to be held up. His eyes were red from crying, but he was drained, and now they were dry. He wore slippers, grey slacks and a loose shirt with the sleeves rolled. A round area on the top of his head had been shaved. His right pant leg had been slit with a scissor.

There were a number of people in the room with him. The warden, the executioner, three guards, the rabbi, two doctors and three reporters chosen by lot to represent the press corps. One reporter was from the Herald Tribune , one was with Associated Press, and one was from the News. My father’s hands were shaking and his breathing was rapid and shallow. He had been advised that a phone with a direct line to Washington would be in the execution chamber. He did not look for it when he entered the room. He made no sign that acknowledged the presence of any of the onlookers. He had to be helped into the chair, gently lowered, like an invalid. When he was seated his breathing became more rapid. He closed his eyes and clenched his hands in his lap.

Nothing had gone right. No cause had rallied. The world had not flamed to revolution. The issue of the commutation of the sentence, their chance for life, seemed to have turned on the quality, the gentility, the manners, of the people fighting for them. The cause seemed to have been discredited as a political maneuver. As if there was some grand fusion of associative guilt — the Isaacsons confirmed in guilt because of who campaigned for their freedom, and their supporters discredited because they campaigned for the Isaacsons. The truth was beyond reclamation. The President of the United States had called in the Attorney General of the United States just before he announced his decision on the Isaacsons’ petition for clemency. It is believed that the Attorney General said to the President, “Mr. President, these folks have got to fry.”

My father’s hands were raised, and separated, and his arms strapped at the wrists to the arms of the chair. The arms of the electric chair are wood. The frame is wood, although a metal brace rises from the back of the chair and the chair is bolted to the concrete floor with metal braces. His ankles were strapped to the chair. The chair straps are leather. A strap was tied across his lap, another across his chest, and another, like a phylactery, around his head. A guard gently removed his eyeglasses, folded them, and put them aside. A guard came over, dipped his fingers into a jar, and with a circular motion rubbed an adhesive and conduction paste on the shaved place on my father’s head, and then kneeled down and did the same for the place on his calf that had been shaved. Then the electrodes were fixed in place.

Electricity flows in circuits. If the circuit is open or incomplete electricity cannot flow. In electrocution the circuit is closed or completed by the human body. My father’s lips were sucked up between his teeth as the hood came down over his face, every last tremor of his energy gathered in supreme effort not to cry out. The hood is black leather and is offered in respect for the right to privacy at the moment of death. However, it is also possible that the hood is placed on the head to spare the witnesses the effect to the musculature and coloration of the face, and the effect to the organs of the face, the tongue, the eyes, of two thousand five hundred volts of electricity. My father’s hands gripped the wooden chair-arms till it seemed as if they could squeeze them to sawdust. The chair would kill him but at this moment it was his only support. The executioner took his place behind a protective wall in a kind of cove. On the wall in this cove was a large handled forklike switch. The switch is thrown from an up position to a down position. The executioner looked through a glass panel, and observed the warden observing my father. Waiting a moment too long the warden turned to the glass panel and nodded. The executioner threw the switch. My father smashed into his straps as if hit by a train. He snapped back and forth, cracking like a whip. The leather straps groaned and creaked. Smoke rose from my father’s head. A hideous smell compounded of burning flesh, excrement and urine filled the death chamber. Most of the witnesses had turned away. A pool of urine collected on the cement floor under the chair.

When the current was turned off my father’s rigid body suddenly slumped in the chair, and it perhaps occurred to the witnesses that what they had taken for the shuddering spasming movements of his life for God knows how many seconds was instead a portrait of electric current, normally invisible, moving through a field of resistance.