Roberts had had to arrive at Chillicothe, to be admitted through security into the Death Row unit, by 6:00 P.M. The execution had been scheduled to begin at 7:00 P.M. But now it was much later—more than two hours later.
Naomi had called her brother in Washington State more than an hour before she’d needed to have called. For Darren could not possibly hear from Roberts until after 7:00 P.M.
Darren had answered at once, irritably.
Yes, what? What do you want?
Just to talk. Before . . .
It’s too early! Christ.
But—please . . .
He’d relented. He’d heard the fear in her voice.
In this phase of his life which (Naomi thought accusingly) might be described as post-family, as it was determinedly post-modernist, Darren had taken a leave of absence from college, and had then dropped out of college, in order to devote his time to his “art”—graphic novels in a mordant vein, obsessively detailed, dark-comic-grotesque fantasies of contemporary American suburban life in conflict with what Darren called the “other side.”
D. Voorhees’s graphic novels were not easy of access. At least, Naomi did not find them easy. The first was titled Welcome to the Other Side—a Midwestern suburban family of maddening normalcy and complacency beset by demons like flying ants, mostly invisible; the second was titled Do You Want Me to Tell You When, Where, Why?—sexual ambiguity among young adults in an Ann Arbor, Michigan, setting; the third, most ambitious and most acclaimed, was titled Lethal Injection: A Romance—lurid scenes of executions by lethal injection in American prisons, drawn in excruciating detail. (For each of the executions was botched in a unique and lurid way.) Naomi had tried several times to read Lethal Injection: A Romance but had never been able to finish it.
She was fascinated and repelled by Darren’s work, and impressed by his obvious talent. But mostly she was envious of the use to which her brother had put two of his obsessions: narrative comics and lethal injection.
He is myself. My surviving self.
Since dropping out of U-M in his junior year, and moving to the west coast, initially Seattle, then Puget Sound, and now the Skagit River Valley Darren had become associated with a small press in Seattle, which had published all three of his graphic novels; he’d illustrated other books for the press which Naomi had not seen; he’d acquired an online presence—a much-visited website called Do You Want Me to Tell You When, Where, Why? She wondered how Darren supported himself, with whom he might be living, what his life was like now—she had but a vague idea.
Her own obsession had led mostly to failure. The loss of her father was the only significant event of her life but she could not give a shape to the experience, she could only inhabit it, helplessly, as a child inhabits a place of confinement, or handed-down bulky clothes.
She had tried! God knew, she had tried to assemble The Life and Death of Gus Voorhees: An Archive—but she’d been defeated by the enormity of her subject that fell into pieces like something that has been broken and inexpertly mended, that shatters again at the slightest pressure.
In her zeal she’d amassed a dozen folders. Hundreds of pages of notes. Newspaper and magazine clippings, taped interviews with people who’d known and worked with her father (most of which she had yet to transcribe and edit—indeed, some of these she had never returned to). Photocopies of letters written by her father, which recipients had provided; and letters to her father, which Jenna had allowed her to take. (Of course, Jenna had selected an undisclosed number of letters to keep for herself, or perhaps even to destroy, that were “too private” for Naomi to see.) Documents, timelines, sketches. Photographs—every kind of photograph including baby pictures. Much of the material Naomi had typed carefully online but it existed in scattered files of which several had been lost inside malfunctioning computers . . .
Most awkwardly she’d tried to “interview” relatives. What might have seemed like the most obvious course, as well as the easiest, turned out to be extremely difficult. Her mother refused to speak with her at all on this painful subject and her absentee grandmother Madelena Kein had rebuffed her in a terse email—“Maybe someday. But now is too soon. Please do not ask me again.”
Even Darren had discouraged her. He’d have liked to assemble an archive of Gus Voorhees of his own, Naomi supposed.
It had seemed to her also that the complete history of The Life and Death of Gus Voorhees could not be written so long as her father’s murderer remained alive.
Worse, the archive would have to contain material about the assassin, and the highly charged “political environment” out of which he had sprung.
This was the most bitter irony: to wish to honor her father was inexorably bound up with a fixation upon his murderer which filled her with despair, rage, shame.