The Execution of Noa P. Singleton Read Online Free PDF Page A

I’m woken up in my cell. Most people wake up midslumber because of nightmares or to quash their dreams or to use the bathroom. I wake up because my current neighbor screams hourly for her lover. She killed him in Harrisburg, allegedly in self-defense, but the truth is quite contrary. I remember it vividly because it happened before I got here. She was robbing a convenience store when she shot him in the head. “Him,” of course, was not, in fact, her boyfriend or lover or husband or friend, but a guy named Pat Jeremiah, who was the owner of a local sports bar she frequented. He had gone out to pick up some cigarettes when she followed him inside the convenience store to get the cigs for him—of course free of charge. She pulled out a gun when the convenience store clerk wouldn’t oblige but, not knowing how to use it, accidentally set it off toward the door where her stalkee was exiting. She was so fraught with fear and heartbreak that she shot the convenience store clerk as well and ran away. All of this was caught on surveillance camera and played on the news at the time I met Sarah, so she has a specialplace in my heart. But the point of the story is that she screams at twenty-one past each hour, the time of death for her beloved “Pat” of “Pat’s Pub.” It keeps me aware, at the very least, though. I don’t have a clock, and the only way I know the time is by my neighbor screaming, “Pat, I love you, Pat! I need you, Pat. I miss you, Pat!” in triplicates. In truth, I don’t know that she even has a clock in her cell. Presumably not. Maybe it’s not actually twenty-one past the hour each day when the conductor taps her baton. But something tells me her internal hour stings at that moment daily, so I trust it as much as I’d trust a sundial. She’s reliable and omnipresent. I like to call her Patsmith in homage to the olden days when your name indicated your vocation, like a blacksmith or silversmith. In this case, she was a lover-killer, a Pat-killer, a Patsmith.
    The other fifty-five minutes of each hour are occupied by contemplation of my past, of my crime, of the spiders that build their homes in the corners of my cell. I can’t speak with any counterfeit personalities that purportedly live in the cell with me, and I don’t think that anyone wants to hear my singing voice. My neighbors speak with themselves rather than through the wall to me. And I’d rather remain silent than confess, yet again, through a wall with bars and eyes and ears and microphones.
    I’m in prison, for Christ’s sake. It’s literally a vacuum into which people are sucked to clean up the outside. I live inside this vacuum that is my own universe, and I think about me (and Sarah and Sarah’s child, and occasionally Marlene and my father and my childhood friends). That’s why, when I get a visitor, all I can do is talk. Talk and take in what the visitor is wearing or saying or not saying. Observation is my only remaining skill. If they or anyone else (be it Oliver or even Marlene) want to claim that I was self-absorbed before I got here—fine. But not now. Now I obsess over image because that is what people obsess over with me. What I look like, what I say, what I did. I obsess over the fact that I’ll never become middle-aged. I obsess over the fact that I’ll never be able to change my hair color to cover my experience. Or counsel younger versions of myself.
    Then again, every once in a while, a person will come into the vacuum to bring me something new to ponder. Oliver certainly didn’t. At least not yet. But there was something seductive in his innocence. For hours after he and Marlene left, I pictured him looking at me through the Plexiglas divider, smiling a smile stretching from Alcatraz to Sing Sing. In that hour, he was a politician, a TV game show host, a weatherman, selling me on his authenticity and his reliability. He was also a fifteen-year-old boy who had just graduated from middle school and this was