"The Bulwark's Shadow" - A Novel in Progress via Steemit (Part I, Chapter 11)
I'm posting up the chapters of this uncompleted book as I hope the Steemit community might offer up its criticism (which would, in turn, force me to finish it, honestly). Started in 2008, this was my first foray into novel writing and was my undergraduate thesis required to graduate. The story is about an executioner in the not-too-distant future. Executioners are highly trained individuals with extensive educations built to help them execute their prisoners in the exact same manner that the prisoner's victims died. This is called the law of retaliation or lex talionis; you may know it better as "eye for an eye."
Because I was also getting my degree in philosophy, I wanted to explore the ethics involved. While I feel I'm a better writer now and could certainly expand most of this book, I also really enjoy criticism as I'm usually too close to the work to see what's working and what's not (though in this case, there's plenty that I feel is not working). So please...feel free to criticize the work if you'd like, but be constructive about it. Simply saying "this part isn't good" doesn't tell me much; don't hesitate to tell me why it's not good or offer up possible alternatives to make it better.
Thanks in advance!
Previous Sections/Chapters:
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter One
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Two
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Three
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Four
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Five
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Six
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Seven
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Eight
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Nine
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Ten
I remember from my studies the pyramid way of looking at the history of executions. It was something I had never envisioned until a lecture on the psychology of killing a man injected itself into my education. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in class with serious misconceptions about the methodology of punishment killing. Firing Squads were the first in the long line of organized death merchant dealings that used illusion to make a point.
A standard firing squad consisted of 3-7 men standing in a line facing the accused. Seven men, seven guns, seven bullets. The odds here are pretty clear that someone is going to kill the accused in a quick manner. Men with varying degrees of accuracy cocked, locked, and loaded rifles in order to snuff out the life of the blindfolded person 10 feet in front of them. The accused would stand in front of a long wall so the bullets from the shooters would dig themselves into the hard material. Years of this practice chipped away at the surface, leaving marks and blood spatters ingrained in the cement or brick as a warning to others even thinking lightly about the life of a criminal. What most people don’t know is that this was one of the first examples of placebo experimentation. Psychology at its earliest stages.
The head of the firing squad would prepare the guns the night before, filling three of them with real bullets and four of them with blanks. This practice came about after the realization that one man could effectively halt an execution depending on his morality. Using a primitive version of a mob mentality, firing squads added more people to the equation to cut down on the insubordination. If one person fired, everyone else would fire as well, not wanting to be left out of the event.
The beauty of this was that no one knew if they were the ones who had truly executed the accused. All could say they did and no one would be the wiser afterwards, but no one actually knew. Hell, it was possible for one of the guys shooting blanks to claim responsibility for the shot that sent gray matter into the mortar behind and no one would argue. Even the head of the squad wouldn’t know which gun had made the kill. This variability not only led to more effective executions, it alleviated guilt from the minds of the shooters, regardless of their beliefs. If one shooter felt guilty later, he could always blame one of the other shooters for actually making the killing shot. Conversely, if one shooter originally felt he had missed, he could later convince himself that he had made the killing shot and not feel guilty about it whatsoever. The placebo of blanks versus real bullets provided a blanketed gray area in regards to taking a life for the shooters involved. It was calculating, it was crazy smart, and it was effective.
This practice continued on into the method of hangings only a hundred or so years later. A great deal of science was involved initially; the height and weight of the accused in relation to the strength of the rope in order to make for a clean killing was key in making sure the prisoner died of a neck break rather than a prolonged strangulation accentuated with the seizure like movements of a body trying to breathe. If the prisoner was too tall, his feet would touch the ground beneath the trap door and the execution would have to start all over again, much to the chagrin of the heads in charge. Too short and the amount of pressure in pounds needed (1260, it’s been said) would lead to a long and uncomfortable execution. Death’s wishlist has always included the words “quick” and “painless.” The universal death is the one that doesn’t let you know you’re dying or have already died.
However, there wasn’t just one overlarge executioner in a hood. There were three and they all had their hands firmly placed on three separate levers. These levers were all seemingly connected to the trap door beneath the prisoner and all three executioners would flip their levers at the same time, none knowing who had flipped the real one. Again, this placebo of death method has displaced the guilt involved and all three executioners can admit to themselves that their lever was the one that killed or that their lever was the bunk one. Welcome to plausible deniability in its infant stage.
Man became more inclined to be savage in his ways of eliminating the criminal. The gas chamber, both a byproduct of the suicide attempts made by disturbed owners of gas stoves and the use of gaseous weapons during the first world war, became the prime method of elimination. It was less mess and could be contained in a single, air-tight room which was aerated shortly after the body stopped spasming uncontrollably. Again, three switches were connected to the mechanism of the room and none of the executioners knew which one actually released the cyanide pellets into the sulfuric solution directly underneath the chair. Lethal gas executions make up less than 2% of the total executions since 1976. The generations before us never really get the intelligence credit they deserve. They were a lot smarter than we’re taught. We’ve been deluding ourselves for thousands of years and have never really owned up to it because we gave ourselves an “out” every time. I’m still surprised that it took us nearly 30 years to realize that we mimicked the Third Reich in that aspect. We just agreed to justify it in better ways.
I think Ben Franklin would protest vehemently if he had seen the bastardization of the power of electricity. As one of the founding fathers, I think the brutality of the electric chair would overshadow the science of it unequivocally. I imagine he’d actually be incredibly ashamed to know that we had harnessed one of the greatest gifts given to man and used it to kill. Either way, three switches, three executioners, three differing levels of guilt and or self-doubt as a body burned from the inside out, incensing a room with the smell of charred flesh and organs if you were lucky. If you weren’t, you would witness the execution a second time.
Twenty-three hundred volts for 8 seconds, one-thousand volts for 22 seconds, followed by another twenty-three hundred volts for another 8 seconds. I saw one in class once, on video, and it was the longest minute and eighteen seconds I had ever encountered. The accused hadn’t died the first time and they put him through the entire process again. I was in the back of the room, but I still remember thinking I could smell the skin burning off as I heard him scream over and over and over.
The first person executed was a man named William Kemmler in 1890. It took the state of New York over 8 minutes to completely kill him and it was the beginning of a specialized cleaning crew, commissioned to clean the electrodes of any skin left over. I spent a good portion of the next class period in the bathroom saying goodbye to breakfast.
The human body is composed of 70% water. Add to that the accumulated perspiration of an accused on the day of his or her state-issued death and you’ve got instant conductivity. One hundred and twenty volts (the standard for most electrical outlets) is lethal and can cause cardiac arrest. Twenty-three hundred volts moving at 186,000 miles a second, and you’ve got a body cooked through and through. According to medical examiners at the time, the brain is just a mess of overcooked and unresponsive neurons. The prison uniform is soiled and the room must be aired out for weeks after. It’s not the brutality of it that affects people, it’s the smell that comes after. I always thought that to be odd.
Lethal injection was the slippery slope that finally put guilt back into the hands of the executioner. A badge and a state salary were all that separated the needle from the skin. There were no placebos, no absence of possible guilt, no denying the reality of the situation; one man, one needle, one death. The ability to delude one’s self had disappeared with the increased effectiveness of a corpse cocktail sent intravenously. I laughed when I heard the arm used to be doused in antiseptic. What good is an antiseptic to someone about to die? It seemed absurdly comical to me, but not in a funny way.
Doctors were never allowed to participate as it violated the Hippocratic Oath, so an orderly or some other inexperienced person would administer the triple injection. One to clean the injection area, one to sedate the prisoner, and finally the one to stop the body from taking in oxygen, effectively killing the accused. If the orderly had injected a muscle, it would corrupt all the veins and a good half-hour would be taken to find another spot on the body to inject potassium chloride into, hoping for a freeway to the heart. Once the potassium chloride reached the heart, an actual doctor would pronounce them dead and that was that. Another killer gone and the sanctity of the public would be restored until the next asshole came along.
Then there was lex talionis, from the Latin meaning The Law of Retribution. Salton, with his silver tongue and winning smile, had convinced his already adoring constituents that in order to make a point, an “eye for an eye” must be enacted within the already burgeoning idea of underground prisons. With no viewing rooms for the victim’s families and only one executioner per accused, the state would save money, we would rid the streets of violent criminals and the “innocent” could sleep better at night knowing their tax dollars were hard at work for less money on the dollar than previous. They didn’t have to see it happen and they were paying less for justice and that worked just fine for everyone.
As executioners, we got used to it. We weren’t killers of men, we were euthanizing dangerous animals that had been let loose on the streets of the surface and we were doing the greatest service possible by helping out. Snuffing the life of an animal was regarded as slightly higher than ending the life of a fellow human, regardless of their crime. I suppose a case could be made for that being our own self-delusion, but it didn’t matter when you realized a certain level of vengeance made up for the loss of a family member. It was good sometimes to pretend to be part of the family; this month a Smith, two months later a Nicholson. The detachment made it easy, made it safe. The placebo never really went away, we just hide it better now.
More Chapters:
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Twelve
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Thirteen
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Fourteen
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Fifteen
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Sixteen