Life Is Messy Enough As It Is

“Well if something like that happened, you would want him to get nothing?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Well then what?” She demanded.
He shrugged, dropped the napkin his nervous hands were playing with, and looked away.

Taking a long swig of her drink, she continued: “If someone had raped and killed your daughter, wouldn’t you like to see him executed?”
He store blankly at her, she store hard into him.
“Well?”
“No.” He said meekly. “No, I wouldn’t.”
She let out a sigh of exasperation and seized the napkin his hands were inching towards. “Or maybe raping a girl, isn’t a serious enough crime for you.” She fired before taking another long sip of her drink.
“Don’t do that.” He seized the napkin out her hands.
“Well then what is it? What does one have to do to-”
“Don’t bring sexism into it. You brought it in first with him raping and murdering the daughter. Second of all, murder is wrong whichever way you put it. It’s wrong when one does it to hide their horrible actions and it’s wrong when the state does it to get its jollies off of self-righteousness.”
“So that’s it?”
“No,” he continued. “It doesn’t matter what I’d want. I’d want him to be ripped apart by wild dogs and that’s why the victims don’t mete out punishments. That’s not justice, that’s vengeance. That’s a blood feud.
If all it was about is what the family of the aggrieved wants then why have a trial? Why have due process? And where does that lead us? What about the demands of the family of the executed? What of the demands of the family of the wrongly executed? When do we stop hooking people up to the guillotine?
We have something called the law here and something called the Constitution. And section twelve of the Charter rules out ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ we don’t justify one law by breaking another.
No one’s denying that there are acts so heinous, so wrong that we would want to become cruel and unusual but that’s not justice. That’s acting out of a place of fear and rage that never sates itself.”

She sat back and drank the words in.

He leaned in, continuing in his low voice as if confiding a secret. “Even if it was legal here, how many people do you think could actually stand to watch it? Not that many in the States do, sometimes the parents, the reporters don’t even ask for the tape. The rest are just the sickies and fanboys.
To watch them drag the guy out. Ghost white and damp with sweat. To have him lie down, constantly eyeing the phone hoping for that last minute reprieve. What must…”

His voice trailed off as he caught sight of something to the side, she continued staring hard at him.

“What does one think? What does one think when they’re strapping on the IV to you, how many times do you think they dream of that phone ringing… feeling your heart pound as the sweat rolls off your face onto the bed sheets, watching the blue then the red filling up the tubes, heart pounding and pounding, the tense hand gripping the side of the bed straining and exposing each muscle on the arm before… growing lax. Watching all resistance become overpowered by chemicals… until… until it’s done.
Heart stops.
I don’t think I could sit through that. I don’t think I could go to sleep knowing I belonged to a country, state, whatever that does that.” He wrapped his hands around the pint glass, each finger outstretched like a web. He looked up back at her and added: “And I don’t think you could to.”

She blinked blankly and stretched her fingers around her glass just as wide.

“You’re right, I wouldn’t watch it,” she began anew. “But I wouldn’t watch liposuction or a triple coronary bypass being done either. And I’m not against that either.”

“People have that done willingly,” he shot back. His voice was rising, he felt a heat emerging from his throat, and recognizing this he leaned back again. As if he popped and soon deflated.

She saw this and gulped down the rest of her drink.

“So what should we do instead? Lock them up for life, where we have to support them for the rest of their miserable lives?”
“It’s prison, not summer camp.” He finished his drink in a long sip. “And it’s been shown that in the States, it actually costs more to service one on death row than life imprisonment.”
“How so?”
“The appeals system. People fight it. Plus there’s the extra security and services for them.” He leaned back and looked around the rest of the bar. “Where is that damned waitress?”

“She‘ll come around,” she assured, as he sunk back into his seat. “How have you been lately?”
“I don’t know.”
“You seem quiet.”
“Yeah.”
“Am I boring you?”
“No,” he sat back up and leaned in again. He allowed a slight smile then a chuckle before freezing back up. “I called you. I called you up, suggested the drink. I-I wanted to see you.” He hunched his shoulders and began playing with the napkin again.
“Good. I was beginning to think that I was boring you or something.”
“No, of course not.” He said with a rising sly smile, eyes drifting up to meet hers. “You never bore me.”
“You used to love talking about things like this.”
“I don’t know anymore. We talk and we talk and it seems nothing ever changes. We whip ourselves up into this anger. This anger that used to excite me and now…” He tossed aside the napkin in annoyance. “Now it just wears me down.”
“Good,” she said again. “For a second there, I was beginning to think it was me.”
“How so?”
“Like… I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Like I wasn’t worth arguing with. Like it was a waste of time telling me those things.”
“Never.” He sat back up in a rapt manner. “Never. Not in your lifetime. In fact, even if you were in a coma I’d be sitting there right on your bedside. Screaming at you at the top of my lungs about how you could possibly be so wrong on capital punishment or the Sens over the Leafs.”
“And freaking out the nurses.”
“Well, that’s an added bonus.”
“So what‘s been with you lately?”
“I don’t know. I guess, it’s just been getting to me.”
She shifted her seat uncomfortably and looked at her drink. “Well what more can we really say about that.”
“Nothing. But that’s not why I called.”
She began stabbing the ice with her straw and searched for the waitress.
“Do you…” He looked back out into the bar as if for the rest of the sentence. “Do you think that people can be forgiven?”
“Yeah. Absolutely.” She raised her eyes to him and began to see in his shifty gazes and nervous fidgeting something new. “After all, I forgave you.”
“Yeah, I know.” He brought his hands to his face and rubbed as if searching for something underneath the skin. “And I forgave you,” he said dropping his hands again.
“I guess forgiving others though is more of an act of mercy.”
“How so?”
“Well we still get mad and all. It just seems we do it because they need it more than we do. More than we need to be mad at them.”
“Yeah. It’s just that I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. The past. All those nights distant yet… fresh in a way.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m not quite sure. And it’s not just with you. It’s been with everyone. I feel all I want to say but the words won’t come out right.”
“I get that way too. Especially when I’m writing songs. It’s like I know everything I want to hear but it all just gets messed up. Too many ideas at once, crashing into each other with piles of ripped metal flying off the rails. But I just realize- and need to quite often again, that it’s not about playing anything new, something no one’s heard of before, but just playing something. Once I let go of that piece of vanity, the rest seem to just fall into place.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
“So what’s happened? What’s taken away our drunk boy screaming out against the night?” She took his hands and leaned in, forcing his eyes into hers.
“I guess…” He shifted back, uncomfortable. “Where is that damn waitress?” He said again, breaking their gaze.
“Forget her,” she said pulling him back in.
“I guess, I’m here tonight because I need to be reminded of something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Something, anything.”
“And have you?”
He gave her an empty look and store at his hands, his covered by hers.
“I think the thing with you,” she began, “is that you haven’t forgiven yourself.”
“And how does one do that? How does one get themselves out all they’ve allowed themselves to become?”
“Well you survive it. You are forgiven and you forgive and you move on.”
“To what?”
She released his hands. “Life,” she said moving her hands with an exaggerated flourish. “Do you see it?”
“Yeah, I’m starting to.”

THE END