“An American Execution” by Kay Vaindal

He’s delusional. Good in the sack, though. I flatten the popcorn bag on the microwave carousel and hit two minutes, express cook, and he asks me why I hit two minutes and not the button that says popcorn, and I say, oh, so they have popcorn in the universe you suppose you come from, and he says, well, yes. He says, popcorn was invented before Contact. Contact. Contact, Contact, Contact. Always about Contact, with him. Uh-huh, I say. 

When I first met Braden, he told me he’d been sent from an alternate universe by a body known as the Intergalactic Council on Sentient Life to determine whether human cruelty is a perpetual inevitability, or a condition imposed by centuries of violent conquest by Martian warlords. At the time, I was at a concert for a Simpsons-themed cabaret indie pop punk band so I said, sure. Ha-ha. Sure you are, Braden, I said, and I figured he was as stoned as I was. I had just moved to Baltimore. I had just turned thirty-one. The first man I stuck my tongue in was destined to be my boyfriend, at least for a few months.

Braden sighs, often. “You don’t know how good you have it,” he’ll say to me, or to Claudia, the little girl who’s hiding in my extra bedroom, since her mom is missing. She mostly just stares at Braden, bug-eyed, and goes back to the extra bedroom with her sugar-free Dunkaroo’s. He thinks she doesn’t speak English. Once, he asked her in broken Spanish where her dad is—which is a pertinent question for a girl who might now be parentless, according to the more dire of the news reports—and she shrugged one shoulder and went outside to jump rope.

We go to watch something stupid on Netflix. Braden likes to try to “get a feel for the zeitgeist.” Distilled human culture in this No-Contact world. One of the trending videos is a documentary on this upcoming thing they’re doing, where they’re resurrecting one of the hijackers from 9/11 so they can execute him. Whatever. Braden picks some teenage rom-com. It’s February, so my apartment is dark, and crowded with all the plants I brought in off my balcony. Pothos vines tangled in yellowing piles on the floor. Prickly pear sagging wrinkled in the window. A dying yucca. In April, when I put them back outside, they’ll bounce back. 

I fiddle around on my phone. Watch a reel with a fat dog that lost a bunch of weight. One-click buy a sweater on Amazon. Claudia’s mom’s immigration lawyer texts me that she thinks she might’ve been sent to Liberia, which is weird, because Claudia’s mom is Salvadorian, but also it’s possible that she’s still in Louisiana, so I probably shouldn’t say anything to Claudia yet, one way or the other. 

“It’s nice, what you’re doing,” says Braden later, on my bed, feet tucked under his legs.

“Hm?”

“With the girl.”

Claudia’s mom lived downstairs. She pulled twelve-hour shifts doing something in a high-vis vest. I offered to watch her kid sometimes, since I’m between jobs. One day, she never came to pick Claudia up. It’s been two weeks since anyone’s seen Claudia’s mom, and my babysitting gig has become a considerable net-negative for my finances.

“Can we go to the execution?” Braden asks, near the end of the night. He has to ask things like that, because he doesn’t have his own car. Or job. He subleases a three-hundred square foot apartment with a hot plate and a mattress on the floor. He pretended he was looking for a job, at first. But he’s dropped any pretense of that now. When I talk about looking for work, he talks about his reports to the Intergalactic Council on Sentient Life.

“In DC?”

He shakes his head. Braden has a big, thick mop of brown hair, curled at the nape of his neck, and dopey brown eyes, and whenever I compliment him on all that, he tells me in his universe, he’s considered ugly. “They moved it to New York,” he says.

I narrow my eyes. We haven’t fucked in weeks. Can’t, with Claudia on the other side of the tissue-thin walls. “You don’t really strike me as the public execution type.”

“If humankind is to receive a seat on the Intergalactic Council, I have to report on—”

“Fine, sure,” I say, because he’s about to spew a whole lot of bullshit that’s going to make me like him even less, and wouldn’t it be a sort of fun, weird note to have in my backstory, that I traveled with my schizo ex to the 9/11 memorial to witness the resurrection and execution of the Hijacker. It’s a silly exercise, the whole thing, I think, and most people think. The energy it will take to return the Hijacker’s charred corpse to consciousness is enough to power New York for thirty years. Not to mention the Hijacker is one of the ones who hit the Pentagon, not the Towers, but the new Mayor of New York campaigned hard on this promise of long-due justice for the long-since dead, and this body was the only one they could find that was intact enough for resurrection. All so they can say WE GOT HIM on that ticker outside Wall Street again. 

Then I realize, “I can’t leave Claudia.”

“Bring her!” he says, cheerfully. “It’s zeitgeist!”

The next morning, I ask Claudia if she’s ever been to New York City. Claudia’s mom’s immigration lawyer said I should keep her out of school a few weeks, since they’ll be looking for her. I called her sixth-grade teacher and said she wouldn’t be coming. Her sixth-grade teacher hummed and said, “Down to nine, then.” Claudia stares at me. She says she was born in Queens. I set her up with some cereal and the last of the milk and put on the new Bratz movie and I go work the DoorDash circuit for a few hours. 

Braden texts me good morning, followed by a long diatribe about the Intergalactic Council on Sentient Life. This is one of the days where I wake up and feel nothing; no pain, sadness, joy, hope, hurt can get through the walls of my skull today. Inside my head I am like the monotone voice of Siri, reading over my car’s speakers: …the report I sent based on my historical research does not bode well for recognition of human sentience, because sentience requires great empathy, according to the Council, and it appears that, even in a universe without Martian influence, humankind does these sort of things like vivisect each other, and gas each other, and dump hot acid on each other, and… He lists five or six more mechanisms of torture. I am driftwood today. Crushing by platform, says Braden in Siri’s voice. Whatever, I say as I drop a bagged-up Taco Bell breakfast meal on a rowhome stoop.

Whatever is a defense mechanism, I know. The great weight of this world cannot penetrate Whatever. This world, I think, isn’t the world I grew up in. The world I grew up in was a reasonable place, with reasonable rules, where we didn’t disappear mothers, or resurrect-execute jihadists, or if we did, maybe, it was all secret. Shameful. Quiet vans on quiet streets. Gitmo. Abu Ghraib. Scandal. Less people wrapped in the thick numbing blanket of Whatever, maybe, in that world. I’m certain this is the exact thought process that began unspooling Braden’s neurons.

I get back in the car. Nissan Altima. When the engine ignites, Siri starts up again on Braden’s text. Still, he says, these techniques are nothing compared to the innovative cruelty of the Martians. 

Braden’s upbringing, I suspect, was not a reasonable place with reasonable rules. How could it have been, for his brain to develop this way? Like a lot of directionless teenagers, I did a semester and a half of a psychology degree. Mostly the foundational stuff. Freud and why he’s wrong. Harry Harlow and his terrible, sad simian infants, born to be deprived. The parts of the brain. The Stanford prison experiment. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Braden has the type of mind I always wanted to dissect.

I drive home and book two tickets on the Amtrak to New York City. Then I remember Claudia and I book a third, which is twice as expensive as the first two, because of the cookies of it all. This is stupid, I think as I check my bank account. This is a weird, stupid thing I’m doing. Why would I want to see this? Why would anyone want to see this? I wondered that same thing when my brother showed me a video of a journalist getting his head chopped off when I was eight. I’m not sure who it was. Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg got their heads chopped off by jihadists in 2002 and 2004, respectively. I listened to a podcast on the topic, in an effort to soothe my purported inner child, back in my first semester of that psychology degree. Pearl and Berg were important, according to the podcast, only because so many people watched it on the web. Lots of people get their heads chopped off, said the podcast, all across the world, but most of the time the bodies end up somewhere like a flooded quarry in the Amazon, and nobody sees it. In my ex-boyfriend’s grandmother’s yearbook is a picture of a Black man hanging from a tree, and the white high schoolers in the foreground are turned to the camera, all smiles and thumbs ups. Public executions were vogue for millennia. Then, for a brief period at the end of the twentieth century, seeing someone die a violent death was a unique experience to an American child. Something worthy of psychiatric care. First it was Daniel and Nick. Now it’s everywhere. Drone livestreams of wars around the world. World news, firebombs, local news, asphyxiation. Famine, War, Conquest. Skeleton children on social media stories. Death has returned to its rightful place above our heads, an inescapable specter. The shepherd nipping our heels.

The execution, I decide, will be good for me to see. My purported inner child does not need to be soothed with basal nostalgia or intellectualized by podcast. In this new world, it needs further hardening.

***

All Claudia’s friends signed her coral-colored Jansport backpack in sharpie, once upon a time. They signed things like LOVE YOU BITCH XOXO which is a bit much for a twelve-year-old, but Claudia can apply liquid eyeliner better than anyone I know, so it’s clear she’s been reaching for the fire-escape ladder of her impending teendom for years now. She stuffs her backpack under her seat on the train, and I wonder what she’s thinking. About all the signatures on her backpack, girls she might never see again. About her missing mother. About me, her upstairs neighbor, and Braden, her upstairs neighbor’s mentally ill boyfriend. It’s a day trip. We’re taking the six AM train up—Penn Station Baltimore to Penn Station New York—and the nine PM train back. But Claudia’s packed everything. Clothes. Toiletries. Her mother’s jewelry. Like we’ll be here for weeks.

Braden says, whitely, “¿Qué tal, hijo?”

Claudia puts her headphones over her ears. 

The train chugs along through Wilmington, Philly, New Jersey. We all sit quietly. I do the New York Times crossword on an actual newspaper that I got in Baltimore Penn with a half-dry ballpoint pen. Braden writes his observations on humankind on his tablet, which he says can transmit directly to his alien handlers. Sometimes I glance. Sometimes I read things like: Kind young human helped disabled human put luggage in overhead bin. Wasn’t even her job, to help. Is that something? That’s something, right? Please, your lordships, that’s something.

It’s a harmless delusion, I tell myself. He’s a good man, beyond the delusion. He can’t help it, I tell myself, that he’s burdened with these strange beliefs. Wouldn’t I like to be? Wouldn’t anyone like to be? To believe they’re here for some higher purpose, some pursuit of truth? Maybe Braden has the rightest idea out of anybody. 

The train is mostly daily commuters. I imagined caravans headed up for the Hijacker’s execution. Bloodthirsty redhats and white boys in American flag t-shirts. Instead, it’s apolitical businessmen in wool overcoats and businesswomen in blazers. All sitting silently, laptops and coffee balanced carefully side-by-side on their tray tables. Bagels wrapped in tin foil like little UFOs.

“What were your parents like?” I ask Braden, abruptly. They’re dead, I know. He told me that. 

Braden’s hand stills. He licks his lips. 

“Did you have any siblings?” I try.

He nods. 

“Do you remember them?”

He looks up and down the aisle. The businessmen and businesswomen and Claudia all wear headphones and headsets. “My brother was purchased by agents of the warlord Kikikitro when he was young, and was raised as part of the Horde in the area you call Europe, and likely fed to the Barbitoos when he reached maturity, if he wasn’t used as a breeder,” says Braden, apologetically.

“Hm,” I say. 

“I am a very lucky human,” says Braden, not for the first time.

We get delayed, and reach New York at eight-forty-eight. The businesspeople hurry out of New York Penn Station and into the streets, click-clacking in their loafers and heels. Braden looks up, like a tourist, mouth open in awe, but so do a dozen Midwesterners. I keep a hand on Claudia’s shoulder. Her backpack forces her to slouch. Braden wanders into a shop, and we follow him. Justice doesn’t die! says a t-shirt printed with a grainy image of the Hijacker’s charred, near-mummified corpse.

“You’re not buying that,” I say as Braden searches for a size medium.

“As a sample,” he says.

I convince him to take a picture instead, which he does with his iPad, and we go up the street and buy some bagels. Three bagels, one for each of us. I get Claudia a matcha latte. At the beginning, I was keeping a record of all the money I spent on her. Pizza, sparkly beverages, chicken nuggets, new socks, frozen vegetables. She bites into her sandwich—everything bagel with egg, sausage, cheese. “We’re here to find my dad, right?” she says.

Braden chokes.

“Is he up here?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says. “But it’s my only shot, huh?”

I swallow my bite of bagel, and don’t take another. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, what the hell am I gonna do, is what I mean?” Claudia says. This has been a long time coming. Weeks of silence, stewing in the spare bedroom, now forced into the open, an early wakeup, a new environment, a trip that would be fun for a girl her age under any other circumstances, selfies with skyscrapers, shopping in the flagship Sephora, Broadway shows. “My mom’s gone. I’ll never see her again. I know I’ll never see her again. There’s nothing I can do. Did she ever have my birth certificate? I searched the whole apartment. Nothing. Is there any proof I was born here? Even if there is, what’s it matter? You’ll put me in foster care or something. I mean, you don’t have your life together. I mean, you can’t raise me. Look at you! Who even are you? I mean, if we can find my dad, that’s more or less my only shot, right? Like, my aunts are gone, too. Mom burned everybody. Like, I’m not stupid. You want to pass me off to somebody, but there’s nobody but him. You don’t just randomly say, hey, girl, let’s go to New York for the day with my freak-o boyfriend, and I’m supposed to believe, yeah, okay, sure, seems like a good time. Let’s go see the world’s first resurrection-execution. Seems like a—” Claudia begins to cry. Loudly, snottily, and Braden runs to the counter to get napkins. Claudia has had the blanket of Whatever forcibly removed from her shoulders, I realize, at the age of twelve, and the air is cold. My days’ long numbness leaves me. 

“Do you know his name?” I ask her.

She shakes her head, and tears fall from her eyes, streak across her cheeks in long, wet lines, falling off her chin to the checkerboard table.

“What do you need from me?” I ask.

She glares at me, like what the hell sort of question is that, and sniffles, and bites her bagel again. 

Braden places a large stack of napkins in front of her. 

“I have a picture,” says Claudia. She unzips her backpack and shows us a framed computer paper print-out of a short, ethnically ambiguous man holding a baby. “That’s him,” she says with a sniffle. 

I look at Braden. Braden says, “My handlers could find him in a jiff.”

I glare at Braden. Braden says, “I mean, isn’t it terrible? God, I’m sorry, Claudine. You’re too young to deal with all this.”

I get up, and go to the other side of our booth, and I give Claudia a hug. She cries liquid eyeliner on the shoulder of my ivory t-shirt. Then she says, “Get off me,” and she finishes her bagel and her matcha latte, and she asks me to ask the cashier for the key to the bathroom so she can go in there and fix her makeup. She stays in there for twenty, thirty minutes. When she finally exits, we barely catch the subway to the Financial District in time for the resurrection part of the resurrection-execution. 

On the subway, Braden taps on his tablet. I don’t know how he has a solid enough connection. My phone blips in and out of service between stations. “He’s not alive in this universe,” whispers Braden to me. “Her dad.”

I frown.

“He’s alive in my universe,” he says. “He lives in a human reservation on the moon.”

“We need to break up,” I blurt, surprising myself. Usually I labor through these things. Pick the perfect moment. Let them down easy. But here we are on the subway, hurtling toward the 9/11 Memorial, and I have spoken aloud the ending.

Braden laughs in surprise. “We will,” he says. “Soon. I’m certain after the execution, they’ll have made up their minds.”

I roll my eyes. “Oh, yeah?”

“We lack the empathy to be full-fledged Galactic citizens,” he says, eyes out the window. Cavernous service areas blink by beyond dark tunnels. “They’re convinced.”

“But the Martians can be?”

“No,” says Braden, with a ha-ha kind of laugh. “No way. Ha. No. But we, as their victims, you know, millennia of conquest, you know, maybe we could’ve been, without them.”

Claudia stares at him, eyes narrowed. She glances at me. I mouth sorry.

“And how did you end up an agent of the Intergalactic Council, then, Braden?” I ask. Now that we’ve broken up, here under the skin of the earth, prodding feels easier. It’s okay to stomp around landmines when you don’t mind the relationship exploding. I was selected, I’m sure he’ll tell me, for my glorious gifts of insight. I’m a gifted and talented human, he’ll say. I’m an excellent fighter. I possess in me the force. I’m the chosen one. Of course the aliens like me.

Braden says, “I puked on one of the Council member’s shoes.”

Claudia says, “Your aliens wear shoes?”

“Eight shoes like horseshoes,” says Braden, nodding. “And members of the Council were in town for a diplomatic mission with the Martians, and I had just gotten punched in the stomach, so I puked on someone’s shoes, and so they prepared to have the Barbitoo rip off my lower jaw to present as a gift, thinking, you know, that the Councilperson was offended, but the Councilperson actually delighted in seeing the contents of my stomach, because they came from a people where it was a kind thing to do, to show someone the contents of your stomach, so they took a liking to me, you know, and introduced me to the Task Force for Near-Sentient Beings, where I now hold a seat, as the first representative of humankind.”

Claudia says, “Like in Star Wars?”

And Braden says, “I don’t know, maybe.”

And I say, “No, I don’t think that happens in Star Wars.”

And we arrive at our station.

***

The crowd that has gathered before the stage is less redhat and more wool coat, businessmen and women come down from their great towers to watch the spectacle. There are patriots present, certainly.  Redhats still outnumber hats of any other color. American flags wave in the stands. But this isn’t a rally. This is a crowd composed of curiosity and proximity, not passion. The most passionate are the protestors, staying tidily in their permitted area just out of earshot. At the memorial, someone’s dressed the Survivor Tree in its best: a little bowtie and a tree-sized suit jacket. Photographers stalk the edges of the viewing area. News drones fly overhead. Claudia, Braden, and I arrive just as the corpse is placed in the metal chair. We’re far in the back. Hard to see. Our best view is of the video projection to our side, presented like a jumbotron, onto the back wall of the museum. They bend the corpse’s hips and knees carefully to place it in the resurrection chair, but bits of ash still spiral to the ground. Charred flesh. When they force his soul back in his body, I wonder if the Hijacker will feel pain. I wonder if the Hijacker will see around him the new skyline. Maybe he’ll feel proud to have been a part of it all. Maybe this is a gift to him. I wonder if he’ll see all the iPhones pointed his way and think, what the hell are those?

They begin flooding the corpse with volts and water and life, and on the floor beneath the chair, the long-dead wooden stage sprouts oak saplings, which grow green and reach for the spotlight. We are moving up in the crowd, I realize. Braden is pulling us forward, not with his hands but with this lulling, dragging motion, like he’s a ship drifting in with the tide, pushing between redhats and wool coats, and I am following him, and Claudia is following me. By the time the Hijacker drags in a rattling, pained gasp of twenty-five-years-later oxygen, Braden has pushed his way to the third or fourth row of gawkers. Claudia grabs my hand. An anchor. I stop. But Braden keeps floating forward, until he’s in the very front, staring. 

“I want to leave,” says Claudia, tugging on my hand.

I turn to look at her.

“This is horrible,” she says, holding the straps of her backpack. “Who would want to see this?”

There’s a crowd of one thousand people watching as the charred corpse screams in anguish, but its burnt vocal cords produce out-of-tune sounds, discord, unearthly sounds, horrible sounds, terror from a place beyond this place. It is eyeless. Eyes charred or long-since rotted away. Brain charred or long-since rotted away. What does this corpse know of the people it killed? What does this corpse know of the things it unleashed? What does this bundle of once-organic cells know of the person it was? I grab Claudia’s hand and we push our way back out, third row, fourth row, to the side of the revelers, who stand stunned, still, shocked maybe at the horrible sounds emanating from the reanimated corpse, who knows nothing but its pain right now. This is a closed-door activity, usually. This is Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, never before on the big screens. It is unusual to see firsthand any of this, or it was in the old world, but this is the new world, where unusual is usual, and the whole entire event will be met with Whatever by a people inundated with so many unusual things.

When we reach the edge of the crowd, a sudden commotion breaks the stillness of the revelers. People cry out. An onlooker has broken from the crowd. Vaulted the security fence. I see on the jumbotron projection as Braden hoists himself onto the stage. Armed security guards coalesce around him. “Kill it!” Braden’s shouting, face turned pink with exertion, tears and snot leaking out of him. “End it!” 

I grab Claudia and cover her eyes with my hand. On the jumbotron, Braden reaches the corpse and his fist goes through its chest like he punched a wall of wet Kleenex. All at once anguished cries crescendo. Braden takes a bullet to the head. His skull explodes. They electrocute the Hijacker’s corpse. When it stops jolting, seconds later, Braden is gone. Only his clothes remain, his blue-and-white sweater and his jeans and his socks and his shoes, in a pile on the ground. 

The saplings on the stage wither away, and shortly after, Claudia and I stuff her backpack under the seat on the three PM train back to Baltimore. The car is mostly empty.

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