Notes from Interview, 11/19/2***

“I blew his brains out.”

Those were the first words the prisoner said to me when I sat down across from him. He’s a tall man, thin, with strong, ink-stained fingers and stubble- rough, not sloppy- on his chin. He had also killed a man, pled guilty in court, and protested only that he deserved the death penalty, not the legally administered prison sentence.

“I blew his brains out,” he repeated, his voice steady, almost proud, “and I knew it was wrong even then.”

He lapsed into silence.

“I oughtn’t to have killed him. If I was behind him now, though, his brainpan would be emptied just as quickly.” He tapped his fingers on the table; the guards had, in defiance of protocol (leave this out of article), failed to cuff them down. Nobody here, after all, could honestly say they disagreed with what he’d done, not in their deepest hearts. More accurately, most disagreed, and most knew they’d have done the same, hoped they’d have done the same, feared they’d have done the same.

I considered speaking, but it seemed unnecessary.

“I have not repented. I know it was wrong, but I have not repented.”

I leaned forward; he had not spoken much in court, but we all remember his desire to be executed. It was, after all, what he’d administered to another. This man was, at least, true to his principles, in desiring for himself what he granted to another, even if his crime was by many thought lesser. I asked a question. “You would die with a smirched soul?”

His lips bent, a stoic smile. “All men,” he said, “go to their Creator with stained souls. I do not fear for my fate if I am slain before I can forgive him.” He paused, pursed his lips. “I fear that in failing to forgive, in failing to repent, I do not do as my Savior would.”

Fear was, I thought, not quite the word he wanted. ‘Know’, perhaps, would do just as poorly, but no worse.

“I hate him,” he said, and I could almost see an immolative flame in his pupils, illumining the irises. “I have not forgiven him. I know it can be done. Our Lord forgave some who tore Him from His father, and He was a man, like me in humanity, though also God, who made me in His image.”

“Yet surely,” I remonstrated, “No mere man could be expected to so soon forgive, not without time’s softening.”

“Does time soften?” he asked, but not of me. After a moment, he took up the thread of the question again. “Man is made in His image, and in His image I might forgive. I know that man has done it; I was there, you see, when a father forgave the man who tormented and….” He choked, but I knew his own story. He did not need to finish the sentence, and he did not, resuming without completing it. “That man cried, you see, the murderer, when all the hate in the world left him amused.”

I saw here another strand, almost hoping to help him. “Would not forgiveness, then, be the greatest victory over him?”

He laughed, low and gentle, though not from merriment, only its dying, sickly kin. “He is dead, sir, dead as a door nail. I gave his body to the police myself, checked the pulse first for all his forehead was sprayed out across the floor. You can’t beat a dead man, not when he’s in heaven and not when he’s in hell. All I can say is that he went to hell quickly.” He chewed on the inside of his lip briefly before abandoning the occupation to speak again. “I am glad,” he said slowly, almost painfully, “that I did not try to harm him more than what one trigger pull would accomplish. I am glad I did not compound my crime in God’s eyes by forsaking all mercy.”

He looked at me with soft eyes, but the flames still burned at the back of them.

“I cannot forgive, you see, because I hate. If I tried to forgive him in order to harm him, I would not forgive him, only feign it. Making forgiveness out of hate isn’t consonant with reality.”

“Will you forgive him?” I didn’t ask if he would repent. I might have, but my voice failed me, died in my throat. It seemed too much to ask a man who’d suffered as he, who’d done as he.

“In God’s name, though not today,” he said, “for my heart, I trust, has been made a heart of flesh.” His voice too cut off, and he looked down, turning away from my eyes- not for the first time that day, but perhaps now, unlike before, he could not have looked up.

He clenched his hands.

“I seek,” he said, each word like rocks through a coffee mill, “to repent of my sin, which I knew even as I committed to be sin, which I knew I could not intend beforehand to repent of. I never thought the inexorability of God’s holiness a justification for my crime, at least. I seek to forgive him, him who I slew, and I seek to repent of slaying him.”

He looked up at me, his shoulders tensing so that I wondered afterwards if he was able to move at all in that moment.

“You will not sin as I have?”

I did not nod or shake my head; I feared what lay between us (not violence, but perhaps death) too much to lie, and I did not comprehend yet how he had sinned.

“You will remember not me, not him, not her, but the Lord God who will cleanse me despite myself, whose justice is everlasting?”

I tried to nod, and perhaps he saw.

He sat back in his seat, to all appearances exhausted, and I left, too tired to speak.

(This one’ll be hard to write. Due midnight)

A/N: Written after midnight in one go, then edited two months later, then remembered six months later.