What's Behind My Face

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn’t my own. It wasn't a mirror, really. Not your typical glass mirror. They don't give prisoners glass mirrors for obvious reasons. The highly polished stainless-steel reflection on the cabinet above the sink in my cell is as clear as a glass mirror, almost. It was always good enough to shave and floss and keep a clean face. That’s one of the unspoken rules of prison life; keeping clean. Even people on death row take care of themselves. Yeah. I'm on death row.

I killed two dozen people before they caught me. They were so pleased with themselves for catching me, a smooth-talking, deceitful, unempathetic serial killer. But I cannot help myself. It’s my nature, which they don't understand. They don't understand a lot of things about human behavior that do not fit the norm. And they don't understand anything about the nature of the human spirit, but I think I do, and that is why the face in the stainless-steel mirror in my cell tonight is not my face. It's the face of another man I have yet to meet. Yet to know. The new face appeared because of what happens tomorrow. Did I not tell you yet? Yeah. I'm on death row and tomorrow, at half past noon, I will be executed by the state for my crimes against humanity.

I've been told by one of the guards that my execution will be quite a show tomorrow. He said it with what seemed like satisfaction at first, and then his face grew solemn. He said the families of the victims will be present, for they have been waiting a long time for my death, waiting for each appeal—each attempt at a reprieve—to make it through the courts, and fail.

Yes, they're waiting, and they're feeling... and what they're feeling is both hatred and fear.

Before everyone in the cellblock beds down for the night, I hear the steel doors slamming shut. After the block is still, I hear the echoing of those doors in my final dreams: the grinding of pulleys, the clinking of latches, the clanking of frames against metal jambs. At times, it sounds like the blade of a guillotine axing into its own base, again and again, practicing for the head it will claim. At times, it sounds like the “Ready! Aim! F—!” -bang-bang-bang! of firing squad rifles and the bullets exploding imperceptibly through the small space between muzzle and heart to suddenly be somewhere on the other side, shattered against the cold steel wall, with no memory left of their passing through my flesh.

I wake from the dreams and during these last quiet hours, no one stirs. The guards sit quietly with smartphones or a deck of cards. Cell residents on the block whisper out of silent respect — but they do not know that, to me, this human silence is the whisper of a rope snake slithering around my neck to administer the suffocating constriction.

As three o’clock passes and the darkest hours silence by, I lay waiting for my fate less dramatic than guillotine blades, more subtle than firing squad bullets or electric chairs, less historic than the taught jerk of a hangman’s hemp — but every bit as lethal. For tomorrow, at 12:30, my execution will be performed. I hear it’s going to be a cloudless day.

It is an educated brain I have; a mind that wanted to make intelligent choices and build a life of modest comfort, respectability, and happiness. But something inside me did not want me to have that civil life.

After all the genome work, all the nanotech attempts at brain surgery, all the code selection to filter out "undesirable" genetic traits—and a million years of natural human evolution before that—the most basal depths of the human psyche are still inside me. Even with the most modern treatments of drugs, therapies, or Reconstructive Genetic Infusion techniques, that one trait—the capacity to murder another human being—is still buried within each of us. Yes, even to this day in the technologically brilliant twenty-first century, some killers are just . . . born.

They let me have an unbreakable monitor tonight—one of my last requests—so I can watch a favorite movie. They suddenly treat you with an odd and irreverent respect on your final day, as if your life suddenly now has meaning and everything else that came before, that you did or did not do to put you here, no longer really matters.

Perhaps it is something much more selfish that makes everyone around me quiet and fearful . . . it could be any one of them headed toward execution. And with death lurking, even for a convicted murderer, God is suddenly quite close, and all souls are suspect.

A cigarette—even though I don’t smoke—seems appropriate. After all, how many times have we seen it on the monitors, like the one across from me now? A last cigarette before I die.

“Ironic,” the guy says from the cell next to mine. It’s all he has to say to me, so I stop talking to him about movies, cigarettes, and these last hours of my life.

Like the rest of the men in this echoing chamber—in this high-tech prison no one could ever escape from—my neighbor does not speak now. Even my monitor does not speak—I shut it off just before 0200—and it’s blank now, silent, green-faced, and as glassy looking as I imagine I must look. I cannot know for certain how I look now, for when I last looked in that stainless-steel mirror, the face in it was not my face. It was the face of another man. At first I thought it was the face of the man I was the last time I was a serial killer. But the more I thought about it, I realized it was more likely the face of the serial killer I will become. Yes, the face of the man I will become in my next life.

My next life?!

Yes, I will be back. I will be back, and they know it. They will be there in the audience to watch me die tomorrow. To see my chest rise and fall under the sheet as my body tightens before the injection hits my veins, freezes my muscles, coagulates my blood. They will sit there for twenty minutes after to make sure I’m really dead, that my chest has stopped moving, that my breath is really gone. They will need to see as much as they can to close their feelings of hatred.

On their way home, and during the days and weeks after, they will hope my soul will advance a little more in the process of moving from this life to the next. They hope that I will not be a monster to their children’s children who I will meet, of course, in time.

It is, after all, those with young souls who are destined to live over and over again, to crawl and step and walk and run as mortals until learning happens and growth occurs and, like those before me, I too become an old soul, filled with compassion, wisdom, a calm temperament, and I finally get a reprieve from the fallacy of human flesh and ascend into spiritual purity.

But I have a long way to go before I reach that place. And they know that too.

I have seen the face in the mirror. But they cannot guess what face I will wear tomorrow. Nor will their children recognize what horrors my new smile will conceal. And their grandchildren will not understand what dangerous thoughts behind my eyes will look back into theirs.

And they will realize they cannot stop men like me. That men like me come back and come back and come back no matter how many times they genetically alter us, chemically treat us, or in their final desperation, execute us.

They know and feel all these things. And that is why they fear my death tonight even more than I.

END