Still Lives

“Turn off your phones,” he said. “Don’t touch anything unless we direct you to.”

We filed into the dark theater and each took a number from a machine. Then we sat down on creaky wooden benches and stared through a one-way mirror into the room beyond, where Brent and Dee stood by the brown leather injection chair.

The red number 1 flashed above the doorway between the chambers, and Jayme, holding her number, went through the door in a pale-blue blazer and skirt. We watched in silence as Brent and Dee strapped her in. It took a long time, and Jayme’s ordinarily elegant form flattened and bunched in the chair; her hands groped at air as Brent tightened the buckles. Then we waited again as Dee pulled over the syringes on a small cart. They were filled with lethal chemicals, their caps sealed but the needles aimed straight at Jayme. It was like watching a dentist’s visit crossed with some kind of sick torture. Jayme wiggled in her restraints.

Brent pulled a lever and the chair tilted back. Jayme’s brown knees and chin aimed at the ceiling. Her legs were pressed together, but if she let them open we would see her underpants. Her ankles looked helpless, bare. Brent and Dee could do anything to her now and she wouldn’t be able to escape it. Then I saw Dee frown and touch Jayme’s shoulder. She must have moaned aloud.

I shifted on the bench. I would have to endure ten more of these slow humiliations before I would take the chair myself.

A television screen in the corner glowed with a message:

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS OUR SOCIETY’S RECOGNITION OF THE SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE.

—Orrin Hatch

Both rooms went completely black, except for the TV. Someone shrieked. We sat in the dark, reading Hatch’s shining words. We whispered and joked about how creeped out we were, and then, as the dark persisted, we fell into silent and individual reveries. I sensed the bareness of the room, the warmth of my own body, my sleeve barely brushing Yegina’s. I was glad not to be Jayme, but I felt like a prisoner anyway. I would have to become her soon.

When the lights came on, the injection chair was empty again. The red number 2 flashed above the door.

Executed. It was destined to be a blockbuster, and it bothered me that Jason Rains would get credit for Brent’s genius. Jason Rains had come to the Rocque with his sketch for the chair and the assistants to make it. He had come with adorably mussed red hair and known relationship woes with a hot British sculptor. But he hadn’t thought about the lag time between visitors trying out his chair, or about whether visitors would want to test it at all. He watched, dazed, at our exhibition-planning meeting as Brent took the sketch and the pen and began to fill in the viewing theater, describing the numbers that people would draw to wait their turn, the lighting. Harsh brightness and darkness would alternate throughout the experience, the way they did in criminal interrogations, to make people feel isolated and afraid.

“You can’t just kill people in your chair,” he said. “That part is pretend anyway. You need to make them part of the system that kills. That’s real.”

When the red 12 flashed above the door, I was almost grateful to enter the execution chamber. Being told where to sit and where to place my hands was a relief. The belts didn’t hurt. I waved at the darkened mirror. Dee rolled the syringes over, and then my chair lurched back. The tipping changed everything. My head sank like an anchor, dragging on my body. The white ceiling had a slick, sickly sheen. I knew people were watching beyond the mirror. Everyone is watching me, I thought. I felt their eyes. I heard their silence. They were already inured to pity. I strained against the belts. Then blackout.

A second TV flashed the names of the hundreds of people who have been executed in California since 1778.

“That was really eerie,” I said to Brent moments later as he helped me out of the chair. I wanted to compliment him, but my voice sounded false, chirpy. “It must have been something to see your stage sets.”

He inclined his brown head.

“We should do a show of your shows,” I added.

Brent finally met my gaze. Inside his eyes something glowed briefly, like an ember blown by breath. It burned into you, that look, and I could see why everyone worshiped and feared him. He seemed capable of reducing a person to ash. And now that his wife was worse, he acted like he was seeking a target—picking more fights with the curators, talking to his female staff in such an abrasive, flirtatious way it made one of them quit.

“Next person’s up,” he said, dismissing me.

Unsettled by the experience, I couldn’t go back to my office, so I walked down to Grand Central Market in the hot sun and bought a fountain cola with lots of ice. The cold sweetness tasted good. The bustling pupusa stall, with its white counter and round slabs of dough, almost comforted me. The ice-cream place made me pause wistfully, staring down at the pink, green, brown, and speckled mounds. I watched two women bend to bowls of caldo de camarones, their fingers delicately peeling shrimp shells, piling the translucence beside them. Neon signs led me farther. For the first time, I lingered at a jewelry stall, touching rings couched in velvet and name necklaces of cheap, diamond-studded gold dangling from a display. Isabella. Tracy. Samuel. I listened to Spanish radio and rapid spoken Vietnamese. Light spilled into the building from both ends, and the concrete floor wore stars of sawdust. My straw made squeaks on the cup’s Styrofoam bottom.

On the way back, I stopped at a water fountain, refilled the cup, and drank the slightly warm, slightly sugary sluice. I popped the lid and chewed the thin bits of ice until everything was gone. Then I returned to my desk. I did my job fine, but I was pursued all day by the dull sense that I had lost something valuable and could not find it.


After I hang up on Yegina, I go upstairs and try to nap but end up staring. I scrounge in my cupboards for a can of minestrone, heat it, set a neat table with a folded napkin and a full water glass. But I cannot eat. I flip open my phone and contemplate the keypad, but never dial.

Yegina’s right, I tell myself again and again. You can’t step into this stuff and step out again. But I just don’t believe Greg is guilty of murder.

It’s well past dark outside my bungalow when I unroll Kevin’s notes on my little dining table and pore over them, shaking my head.

I still haven’t seen “Disappearances” up close, but I know it resembles a real still life more than any of the others. It is packed with objects, and the objects are arranged, so why wouldn’t the objects hold a meaning? The real question is: What meaning, and how do you know? She doesn’t like what I’m seeing, Kevin told me. I don’t either. Reading his translations of the symbols in “Disappearances” makes my skin crawl. According to him, Kim Lord’s depictions of objects like a bottle, a notebook, and a bloodstained screwdriver each reference horrible crimes against women.

As I fold up the notes and raise my head, I can hear my own breath, feel its dampness. My body is cramped and prickly from sitting so long, but I have the feeling that if I rise from this chair, if I make any big movements, a dark, lurking presence outside will know I’m here alone and enter. I switch off the overhead light. Better. I switch off all the lights in the bungalow, until the only illumination is the orange glow of the rest of Los Angeles extending to the desert and the sea. The glow’s dull persistence is comforting. It will go on until dawn.

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