Shame

She was supposed to have an hour’s session with him. She wasn’t yet sure whether that was too much time or not enough.
    “‘The clock indicates the moment—but what does eternity indicate?’” he asked.
    “Excuse me?”
    “Whitman,” he said. “You started me reading him. I’m afraid I quote him to excess. I am not sure if that means I’ve run out of things to say myself or whether he just says them better.”
    She sneaked a quick glance his way. He was pale, the result of being hidden away from the light of day. Death Row inmates, she knew, were allowed in the exercise yard only twice a week for two hours at a time. She looked down at her sheet of questions. When she’d been preparing them, she had kept wondering, What do you ask the devil?
    “Is that why you spared me? Because I quoted Whitman?”
    He didn’t answer. Instead he looked at her and made her look at him. “Why are you here, Miss Line?”
    “To interview you,” she said.
    “Then it seems only fair that I have the opportunity to interview the interviewer.”
    Elizabeth nodded.
    “Do you really have any idea what you’re doing?” he asked.
    “I was a literature major. I wrote—”
    “I’m not inquiring about your writing skills. I assume you can join a noun and a verb together and make a passable sentence. But I wonder if you know exactly what you’re pursuing. You say you want to talk to me. What if the things I have to tell you change you forever? Are you prepared for that?”
    She allowed herself a moment’s hesitation, a moment’s thought, before replying, “I’m prepared to listen to what you have to say.”
    “Is money your incentive for writing this book?”
    “No. I’ve been offered money, yes, but I’d write the book for free. I’ve always wanted to be a writer.”
    “But is this the book you always wanted to write?”
    “I suppose I won’t know that until I finish it. What I do know is that I wouldn’t have chosen to be one of its main characters.”
    He nodded, as if to say “fair enough,” then asked, “What do you hope to get out of this?”
    “Some understanding. Some coming to terms with what happened.”
    “‘But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not.’”
    “More Whitman?”
    “More reality, Miss Line. Are you willing to look into the abyss? To crawl to that edge and stare down? You thought you lost your innocence that first night we met, but that was just the initiation, the cakewalk.”
    They were seated five feet apart. His right hand was on the table. He moved it forward, just past the line that people always establish for each other: this is my territory, that’s yours. It made her want to turn her head to the hack’s window, want to make sure the guard was standing there watching, but she was afraid of finding him absent and having Shame make that same discovery.
    “Right now your heart’s pounding,” he said, “and it feels as if there are these hands squeezing your chest and your face. You want to walk away and go back to your old world. If I were you, I’d do that. Let someone else write your book. You can be one of those ‘as told to’ authors. That’s the safe way. In a couple of years you’ll even be able to forget I came into your life. I’ll just be a big, bad dream.”
    His hand had moved closer to her body, another inch over the line. She was afraid, but she also felt herself growing angry. He had made her feel powerless once, something she often reflected upon. She didn’t want that to happen a second time.
    “I’m going to write my own book.”
    “Stubborn,” he said. “But then you’ve always been stubborn.”
    She wondered how he knew that about her but was too stubborn to ask. He must have known that as well.
    “Your name announces how stubborn you are. Most people would have shortened it. They’d be Liz, or Beth, or even Lisbeth. Your whole life you’ve been facing up to people with axes who have tried to chop at your name, but you haven’t let them. Would you like to tell me why?”
    “Would you?”
    Her reply seemed to amuse him, but only for a moment. He took up her challenge, his words coming fast and hard: “Because having a long name was a way of standing out. When you were a girl you used to like to imagine that the blood royal ran through your veins, that some mistake had been made, and that your real residence was a palace.”
    Elizabeth’s red face spoke to the