THIS DOCUMENT IS LEGALLY PROTECTED MATERIAL PROPERTY OF
LIFE OR BREATH OF FRESH AIR D.R. SERVICES
Writing Under Deadline
Handcuffs significantly encumbered writing, Leslie learned, bothered with the hand that hovered uselessly just above and behind her dominant one, her left one, closely supervising the sign-in process as it dated and autographed every form. Both appendages fed the completed stack in tandem back into a vending machine of sorts, which slurped them quick but did not offer Doritos in return, and then situated in their owner’s lap until an officer walked through the swinging doors with a jerk of her head.
The officer sped Leslie in silence down a series of white tile halls that occasionally showcased clumsy, distantly macabre art — a row of paper dolls lynched from the ceiling by yarn, a canvas of frantic red handprints, the paint smudged and scratched, an alphabet cross-stitch stunted abruptly at the letter E. The string stood jutting out, ripped.
They approached a vacuum-sealed door. The guard keyed it open electronically and led her inmate to the next available chair in a series of two dozen, half lined against each wall. Fourteen others in queue, Leslie counted, their responses ranging in personal ritual from dignified tears to manic wails. Most were still, easily mistaken for asleep if not for the parting and meeting of their shaky lips, lips that discharged song or poetry, whispered or furthered aloud. At Leslie’s arrival the few closest looked up, while the veterans appeared deadened to the routine. Out of respect, Leslie avoided laughing. If she felt capable of intense emotion, perhaps she would have found Death Row moving.
Leslie sat and was immediately assaulted by an automatic restraining systems that snaked around her chest and every limb. The guard confirmed the snugness of her lap belt like at an amusement park.
“Take this, and wait,” she instructed.
“I was actually just considering leaving,” Leslie said back, receiving a pamphlet between her hardly mobile fingers, “but I’ll stick around if there’s dessert.”
The guard stepped away, sizing up the inmate and almost chuckling. “You may fare well in there. You’re funny.”
“Funny looking, am I right?”
“And I spoke too soon.”
The woman turned swiftly, already out of earshot as Leslie aimed to explain: “No see, I meant that ironically. It was a like, decent joke because it’s such a bad joke, get it?” She sighed. “Fine, busy little bee.” The factory that produced more prosecuted corpses than any other in the country was nothing if not efficient, besides the blip that meant as soon as the next prisoner was successfully euthanized, everyone would have to be released, herded down a spot, and painstakingly relocked all over again.
“S-so, uh, ahem. What’re you in for, M-miss?”
Leslie turned to face — or, eye, with fine motor skills as much as the cage trapping her skull allowed — her neighbor. “Don’t talk to me,” she said.
“Oh shit, sorry. God, yeah, never mind.”
Leslie faltered, briefly amazed at how such a radiation of pity managed to stir nothing within her. “What’re you in for?”
“Do you truly care to know?”
“Not exactly. But, whatever.”
“I-I walked on the grass,” he blurted out boldly, then steadied himself. “The sign, it said, don’t walk on the grass, in block print, clear as day. But I was walking back from class when I spotted my girlfriend, and gee, the sun — it toasted her face, touched her hair gold. I was so excited to see her that everything inside of me just like, lit up inside of me. I hadn’t — I hadn’t seen her all day, you see, not for breakfast nor-nor lunch, not since she’s started skipping meals for pleasure, so I peacocked right straight across all those tiny green blades. May as well have been razor. It’s a courtyard, if I hadn’t mentioned that, surrounding the main building at my school? I go to Harvard, obviously. Or… oh fuck. I guess I should say I went to Harvard. I, I clearly don’t anymore. And I won’t ever again. Oh god, oh sweet mother of goddddddd.” He collapsed forward into a cacophonous clanging of chains. “What if I never see her again, you know? What if I never get to steal another kiss? Another heart? Another Xanax from my roommate Carl?”
“Jesus. Relax, lucky dude, you have a lover, that’s the golden ticket. Focus on her. Let that consume you. She is your Euterpe, your muse.”
“To be honest, I don’t think she likes me very much.”
“We’re done now.” Leslie shut her eyes.
God, if a ray of light across a significant other’s skin was all she needed to misplace boundary and self-control, why, she could have been hauled in years ago. Everyone Leslie involved herself with, and she involved herself frequently enough to form a hypothetical extracurricular club, she kept at a fair distance: contained, controlled. From afar, she figured she could seduce and spellbind while sustaining secrecy and dodging the stupid, behind-the-curtain dullness of intimacy altogether. Only one had ever snuck up close, the one who had a year ago shattered her walls the same way a day ago she shattered the big pale windows overlooking the Charles. The one who had broken into her heart, armed and dangerous, in the same fashion she had broken into the Boston Museum of Science, the indoor zoo. The one who lured from her joyful belly laughter, not the flat-toned cynicism she flexed when a curator screamed, “Everyone, get out!” and Leslie countered, “But I just got here.” The one who, in a parallel course of reality, tomorrow she would miss, and then wonder about from up in the sky for eternity if afterlife existed.
But Leslie had not so overtly battled her way to Death Row to dwell nostalgically on what could have been. She was there to slice and dice her deadbeat life once and for all. She slapped her brain on the wrist for wandering about unattended like that and sought another way to kill time. By happenchance, the red light bulb above the room at the end of the hallway that she assumed meant it was “in use” flicked off, and a woman with nice crystal-encrusted glasses and a cashmere purple sweater cracked the door.
“David Lawrence. Inmate on Trial #256,412,677,043. Come on in, David Lawrence, we’re ready for you now.” She regarded David Lawrence with warmth as he was extracted from his confinements and invited into the chamber. The others were shifted forward in a fumbling march with some guards’ assistance, and another two were ushered in through the entrance and situated to Leslie’s left.
“Were you watching?” asked the Harvard boy with the fetish for anorexia, or more likely, internal disturbance.
“Watching what?” Leslie instantly regretted replying.
“You know, inside? Just there a second ago, with your eyes closed?”
“Excuse me?”
He cocked his head, confused. “Didn’t they tell you that at reception?”
“Tell me what? All they gave me was a load of judgment for my charge and then this little brochure.”
The newbies across them began to cry. One shouted he was innocent, that this was all so unfair.
“What does it say?” Yale asked over their dramatics.
“The usual, I’m sure.” Leslie glanced over the flimsy paper then dropped it. “There are too many people on the planet, too little entertainment. These people require preoccupation, to save them from the hardship — neigh, the responsibility — of living out their dead-end yet economically prolific existences as maddeningly bored, desperately lackadaisical lumps of lard… Rather than the so much better entertained, sedated, immune to restlessness lumps of lard. Death Row is the ultimate win-win, now isn’t it, granting the condemned the opportunity to return to society what they abducted when they walked across the grass. Such goddamn justice. Such critical, compulsory redemption. And the grand climax of it all? The greatest original ideas are the children of pressure and deadline, we think. Maybe. Who fucking knows? But let’s give it all a spin, shall we? Enjoy the ride, criminals. Is this not art, a hopeless escape? A hurt, grim pain topped with sprinkles and animated graphics and spooned to the robot-potatoes that can laugh and that can cry, but who will never, ever, as long as they keep sitting about absorbing, ever truly understand?!’”
The crying had stopped. Someone coughed.
“All I really knew about Life and Breath of Fresh Air specifically was the jingle,” said Yale.
“It’s catchy,” Leslie agreed.
He nodded, humming it to himself. “But right, yeah, what I meant was you can watch other people go in, from here and all over the world even, to make sure you don’t repeat a pitch when it’s your turn. You just lean your head back, yep, like that. Now you, you close your eyes, and press against the headrest.”
***
Escorted on either side, David entered the room and shuffled, slow, to the center of the space. Jars and baskets stacked upon tall steel shelves and displayed neatly upon a long oblate operating table boasted endless options for creativity: boas and odd props for theatrical production, the latest computer models for programming and type, an orchestra of instruments for composing, loose-leaf notebook paper piled in a heap. David eyed an easel with a fresh canvas, then a tub of sculpting clay.
“David Lawrence?”
He bowed his head yes.
“You know why you’re here?”
He stalled, maybe buying time, maybe sincerely choked up. “I… I got a letter. Said I’ve been taking up too much room lately. Said I’m a waste of air, if I remember correctly.”
“You remember correctly,” encouraged a judge.
“Do you fully understand why you’re a waste of air, David Lawrence?” asked another.
David gazed at his feet. “Well, um. I’ve been out of work for a bit…”
“For four months.”
“Yes. I was laid off. Budget cuts, you know.”
“You were an elementary school teacher of… Art?”
David stood quiet. “Yes.”
“Delightful. Now go ahead, inmate, your clock is set for fifteen. We have the right to condense that, to ten minutes or less. Choose your medium.”
***
Leslie continued viewing the pitches, invested more so than inspired, well through the evening. One prisoner scored a lucky break with a pilot contract, but the rest got lethal injection on the spot. Leslie most liked learning their professions and imagining their regular lives day-in-and-day-out. Like David Lawrence, she enjoyed art, or at least clung to it like a pathetic parasite when all else felt so drowsy and dismal she couldn’t get out of bed. She had been a student of the vast field, of writing specifically, an angry, spoiled brat with personality issues and a never whet thirst for attention who slipped by the system unflagged. She never earned a letter in the mail calling her a waste of space, however hard she believed she deserved one.
Leslie’s thoughts drifted to words, and her favorites: peccadillo, idiosyncrasy, aphrodisiac, visceral. Then her favorite artists: Roy Lichtenstein, Else Lasker-Schuler, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Sylvia Plath. Art did not save David Lawrence, though, Leslie reminded herself with a private reprimanding, and if all went well it would do nothing for her, either. To be killed was what she wanted. Death was her wish.
Harvard cleared his throat. He stood by on deck.
“What?” demanded Leslie, to which he rolled his eyes, tired of her apathy. That was the worst when that happened.
“I just want to know your story,” he said. “I mean, you can tell me now, right? At this point, who fucking cares? I’m just curious. Why are you here?”
Idiosyncrasy, aphrodisiac, Dostoyevsky, Lichtenstein, Plath. The one that shattered her walls. Visceral.
“I’m here on purpose, I guess,” Leslie said, through the clouds that were suddenly dimming her vision. “I made a scene. I fought to get caught. Tale as old as masochism.”
“Are you mad?” he asked.
“Mentally ill, yes. Duh.” She blinked back the blurs.
“I meant at something. If you wanted to die so fiercely why didn’t you just kill yourself?”
The door opened, and the woman in purple backed out, speaking still to its contents. “I’m going to grab a quick coffee; you can start without me.” She checked a clipboard. “Maxwell Green? I.O.T. #12,468,887,044? You’re up, kiddo. Knock ‘em dead.”
“Maxwell,” Leslie said, tasting the name.
“Max.”
“Leslie. I’d shake your hand, but…”
“I’m nervous.”
“You’re gonna’ kill it.”
“Will I see you on the other side?” Max half-joked.
Leslie smiled wryly. “I hope not.”
And, alas, he did not. As would be expected, unless you err on the side of optimism or devour mass quantities of romantic comedies, Maxwell’s shy pane of confidence cracked right in time with his voice during the ad lib refrain of “Across the Harvard Yard,” an ambitiously high-falsetto original country-pop song much more passionately dedicated to Harvard University than Stephanie his starving girlfriend, though neither plotline would have been considered very relatable to wide audiences. Discouraged by the judges’ reactions, Maxwell panicked, tried out some gymnastics moves, and then, in a last-ditch effort, pulled a knock-knock joke in vain. (TRANSCRIPT: “Knock knock?” “Who’s there?” “Literally no one. THERE IS NO GOD.” 4/10 for content. 2/10 for delivery.)
Leslie came in, cried for a couple minutes, and scribbled out this story. The movie will be released this upcoming May.
Life or Breath of Fresh Air D.R. Services
120 White Sand St., Summer County, CA 90001. P.O Box 4199.
“Write your death sentence!”™
Ellis Stump is a senior English and media studies major with minors in gender studies, psychology and international Studies, as well as a fellow in both the Paterno and Donald P. Bellisario Fellowship Programs. Primarily invested in dramatic writing (for the stage and screen), she has produced two full-length pieces at Penn State, along with numerous comedic sketches and stand-up sets. She is passionate about human equality and empowerment, support of creativity and the arts and health and wellness. She plans to pursue an MFA or page job at NBC next year, or maybe just write in a quiet cabin somewhere.