The Life of the World to Come (5 page)

“Does anyone know what happens when they put you to death?” continued Professor Barnes. “Anybody?”

We stayed crickets, and she pressed on, steadily, but more quietly than I remember her ever having spoken before.

“Okay, let me tell you what happens. Right here in America, when they decide that they want you to die, what they do is they strap you onto a gurney. They bind your ankles, and they bind your wrists, and a doctor attaches heart monitors to your chest. The first needle goes into your medial epicondyle—that's the inside of your elbow, where the good veins are—but it's only saline solution. The warden gives the all-clear, and they raise up the curtain that separates you from the folks who showed up to watch you die. They're in the next room, and they'll watch through plate glass as the next needle anesthetizes you, paralyzes your muscular system, and finally stops your heart. They fill your blood with a cocktail of pentobarbital, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. They fill your blood.”

Here she paused, and nobody coughed.

“We can talk about capital punishment, and we can break it down with hypotheticals, and logic, and statistical findings, and well-reasoned arguments on every side. That is what law school is for, and you'll get plenty of that—you'll get plenty of that from me as much as anyone. This is not a point about procedure, alright? You're all going to be lawyers, and that means you can have a big impact out there in the world, but it is exceedingly,
desperately
critical that you remember to also be human beings. Don't let your instincts get crushed by anybody's intellectual wizardry, alright? Not even mine. Be a person. Think about the needle. Okay? Okay. I'll see you tomorrow.”

Professor Barnes spruced her papers and strode out crisply, trailed as always by her stern TA.

“Well, that was sufficiently terrifying,” said a weary Boots.

“Stop it,” I replied, stashing my notebooks away. “You did great, and you know you did great, and, most importantly, she knows you did great.”

“This coming from Captain Needle-Thinker, who somehow manages to cut to the moral core of the issue even when he's just trying to avoid the third degree.”

“Yeah, I sort of lucked out there. Who knew she'd pick today to go maudlin on us for the first time ever?”

A voice from behind:

“Hey Bootsie. Hey nun from
Dead Man Walking
.”

“Clever,” I said.

Sona Gasparyan was the third fifth of our study group, and the only one of my classmates apart from Boots with whom I would ever voluntarily have a conversation about, say, the Nature of Existence. She was harsh, affected, a year my senior, the sort of person for whom the word “coquettish” was invented (“more like ‘cokeheadish,'” she'd dryly retort, apropos of nothing, after I first advanced the theory). Like Billie Holiday's, her voice was dark and thick—positively glutinous in its slow, low, deep-blue streams of brassiness and cheek—so much so that it nearly repudiated her rather charming physical brevity, which was marked by an elastic, feline slenderness, a perpetually wicked expression, and a dense, cascading forest of wild black hair. She was going to be a prosecutor, and had all the requisite opinions and insecurities. I saw her cry, once, walking home after a party, and she told me that I was the only person who had ever seen her cry. She was a liar.

“Mr. Brice, you're
soooooo
emotionally connected to the material.”

“Okay.”

“So scrupulous.”

“Thanks.”

“You really
get it
. You know? You … just …
get it
.”

“Alright, Sona.”

“Mr. Brice, will you put a sensitive baby in me?”

“There it is.”

“Come on, you crazy kids,” interjected Boots, “we gotta go get smart.”

The study group, such as it was, met in KF-1 (the William Burnham Woods Room) on the third floor of the law library every Tuesday after Barnes and every Thursday after Boots and Emily could extricate themselves from their clinical office. Prim, cerebral Emily Roca had started dating Boots on or around the fourth night of 1L orientation; she was probably the smartest of us, and almost certainly the most committed to the ostensible aims of the group qua group. Though she was square in all the ways that Boots was not (and literally so: from her fastidious blond bangs to her quadratic face to her ponderous, square-rimmed glasses), they were reliable to each other and, as a unit, to the world. Nobody could, or would ever want to, say an unkind word about Emily—she did everything right, humbly, and without complaint. I liked the way that she mellowed Boots as they grew up together, just as I liked the way that he frayed some of her neatly-hemmed edges. They were just one of those couples.

Gracie Coolahan was our last member. I'd met her in a gender justice reading collective during our second semester—every week, nine women, myself, and a confounded French masters student would sit cross-legged on scratchy zabutons in Professor Talia Zimmerman's cozy, quirky office and discuss male privilege over wine and beer. I'd come to feminism ignobly, sophomore year of college, on the tracks of a hopeless crush named Marlena, but soon graduated to true believer. As for Gracie, she was perpetually elated, always in the market for her next full-bellied laugh; when she found it, she'd go limp, blithely ensnaring her nearest friends for abutment, infecting them with her gladness, draping their shoulders with her winding, woolly dreadlocks. She was my neurotic equal, and our young friendship proved substantial enough to survive the scholastic fracas that, just two months after its inaugural session, tore that reading collective apart.

“Hey y'all,” lilted Gracie on our arrival at KF-1.

“Who's in charge of treats?” inquired Sona sharply.

“That's me,” said Grace. “Jim Beam, and hard cider for Emily.”

“Cups?”

“Swigs.”

“I adore you, Gracie,” said Sona.

“
Gracias,
Gracie,” added Emily.

“
De nada,
darling.”

“Vamos a tomar!”
Emily squealed, lofting her cider to the overhead light. I asked her what it meant, to which she replied, “come on, Leo—I thought you had a Spanish-speaking aunt?”

“Well,” I answered tepidly, “I mean, she isn't really my aunt. And even if she was, that wouldn't automatically just equip me with all Spanish.”

“Hey ladies,” Sona cooed breathlessly, “did you know Boots and Leo nearly—
nearly
—saved the world today?”

“No! How?” asked Gracie, ever the enabler.

“Passionate moral assault on the death penalty. You should've seen it!”

“You're never going to drop this, right?” wondered Boots.

“I can't just drop it. Everyone needs to know what
good guys
you are. Defending rights. Taking a stand. Stickin' on up for justice. Seriously, though, it was just too ethical for words. There wasn't a dry skirt in the house.”

“Gross,” squeaked Emily.

“I hope you and Fiona realize how lucky you are to have these decent young men, that's all,” continued Sona.

“Boots isn't young,” Emily pointed out, and—speaking relatively—this was true.

“Could we get started?” I said. “We don't have a lot of time, and there's almost nothing about this I understand.”

*   *   *

A brief note on death: it haunts me. Ever since I was five years old, I've been terrified by the unknowable abyss, the perpetual destination which I was stunned to discover represented the only certain part of my future. The way I pictured it was this: death was going to feel like being forcibly ejected into space. One minute you'd be here on the ground, the way you usually are, and then death would come and you'd feel light. And you'd lift, not fast, but insistently enough to stay afraid, and soon the very same buildings you used to go into and out of would begin to look like freckles on the face of the Earth, and after that, you'd cross into cold darkness, the lights growing fainter and fainter until there were no lights at all—not even from the stars, which you'd long passed by—and you'd keep drifting like that, untethered from all the things you loved, in a straight line out, forever.

I couldn't comprehend, and I still can't, the idea that I might not be conscious for the experience. In my mind, the screen never actually turns off—there's just nothing being broadcast apart from the wall-to-wall black. I imagine there will be time to think. I imagine that time will be devastating and endless.

It was still winter when Boots and I each got e-mails from Katherine Barnes asking us to come meet her for lunch at the Faculty Club. Neither of us had been there before, nor had we ever exchanged words with her outside of class—nobody had, as far as we could tell.

“Misters Rosenbaum and Brice,” she began, after Boots and I slinked to the table where Barnes and her astringent TA were already stabbing at tiny, identical salads, despite the fact that we had arrived on time. “You each took my criminal procedure class this fall, yes?”

I turned to Boots awkwardly, as if to confirm.

“Y … yes, we both did,” he answered.

“And you stood out to me in that class?” she queried, seemingly, at least, before allowing the longest-ever six seconds of silence to tick away.

“I'm sorry Professor Barnes,” I spoke up at last, “was that a question?”

“No, I'm—
I'm
sorry, Mr. Brice—I'm saying that you did, as a matter of fact, stand out to me in that class. This is what I'm saying. You stood out to me on a particular issue that we covered on a couple of occasions, which happens to be why I've asked you to come here today. Said issue, Mr. Brice, is capital punishment,” she announced with another stab. “I'm sure you recall the conversations the three of us had on the subject? You were the unfortunate two who took the bait, as it were—the metaphorical bait, that is, by which I mean you challenged me on the subject of death.”

“I remember,” said Boots.

“We—yes, we remember,” I added meekly.

“Would it surprise you to learn that I am in agreement with you both regarding capital punishment? By which I mean categorically opposed.”

It would. Her insistence on thinking about the needle aside, Katherine Barnes had been a celebrated prosecutor, the youngest U.S. Attorney in New York State history, and had the sort of tough-on-crime bona fides usually reserved for Reagan Republicans or Batman.

“I took the liberty of checking in with the Office of Career Services,” she continued. “Neither of you are going to firms next year?”

“That's right,” I said.

“And neither of you applied for judicial clerkships?”

We shook a no.

“Do you mind, then, if I ask you the rather obvious question of what you plan on doing with yourselves upon graduating?”

Boots and I made eye contact again, warily. As third-year law students, we'd engaged in this ritual dozens of times before—with parents, friends, strangers, even—and it never grew more impressive or less humiliating.

“Well, I'm sort of interested in helping musicians,” offered Boots. “You know, independent musicians who need a lawyer to help them navigate the world … of music. The music business, I mean. See, I was a musician before law school. So, that's the, uh, genesis story of why I want to maybe do that.”

“Legal … services … I think,” I hawed like a guilty child.

Barnes did us the monumental favor of withholding comment, and carried on just as though we'd said nothing at all.

“I'm involved—quietly involved, that is—in an organization in which I thought, perhaps, one or both of you might potentially have interest. This is a small, but I assure you sleek, non-profit organization that works to exonerate wrongfully convicted death row inmates. They do fantastic work in that regard, and they need thoughtful lawyers. It's hard; it's direct services on the most consequential level imaginable.”

“What are they called?” asked Boots as the curt TA signaled for a check.

“The New Salem Institute,” answered Barnes, before puncturing her sole surviving cherry tomato and directing it pointedly across the table at each of us in turn. “Could this be something in which you might be interested?”

ABOUT
THE NEW SALEM INSTITUTE

I. Our Story; Our Mission

Founded in 2007 by former classmates and colleagues Martha Bok and Peter Ausberry, the New Salem Institute is a Brooklyn-based non-profit advocacy organization that provides legal support to death row inmates who maintain their innocence. Clients served by NSI have generally exhausted all other avenues of legal recourse, and cannot afford to bear the costs of effective representation.

Ms. Bok and Mr. Ausberry first met in 1989 as second-year law students at Yale, where they served together in the school's nationally renowned Capital Punishment Clinic. After successful stints in the private and public sectors, respectively, Martha and Peter conceived of the idea for an innocence advocacy organization in 2005, and spent the next two years making their dream a reality.

The New Salem Institute was created to advance the cause of justice in America by ensuring that unfairly incarcerated inmates are given the opportunity to prove their innocence. The NSI advocates for those who have been denied the chance to advocate effectively for themselves, with the firm belief that no prisoner should be put to death for a crime they did not commit.

II. Our Attorneys

Working with our dedicated support staff and interns, our team of attorneys uses their elite research and litigation skills to provide desperately-needed legal assistance to prisoners who have been condemned to death.

MARTHA BOK, CO-FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Martha Bok
was born and raised in Rochester, New York, and earned her B.A. in English from Smith College in 1988 before entering Yale Law School as a member of the class of 1991. From 1991 to 2006, Ms. Bok performed complex litigation at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, first as an associate, and later as the youngest female partner in the firm's history. Since co-founding the New Salem Institute in 2007, Ms. Bok has been recognized as one of the nation's leading capital punishment reform advocates, and was the recipient of Amnesty International's 2010 Blackmun Award. She married fellow attorney Tom Nixon in 1997, and the couple has two daughters, Kerry and Elise. Ms. Bok is admitted to the state bar of New York.