Shame

wanted to join,” said Elizabeth, “a club we should make sure gets no more members. I want to know if the same man attacked us. Will you talk with me about what happened?”
    “Yes,” said Dana.
    They shared a similar hoarseness as well.
    “Was this man familiar to you in any way?”
    She shook her head very carefully.
    “Did he use your name or seem to know anything about you?”
    Another shake of the head.
    “Did he talk to you?”
    A half nod. “He said he only wanted my valuables, and that’s when I let him tie my wrists and ankles.”
    Elizabeth felt her hands tighten on hers. Dana was angry that she had allowed herself to be trussed up without a fight. Good. She’d need her anger.
    “He told me he needed his drug fix, but the way he talked made me suspicious.”
    “Why is that?”
    “He talked like some professor.”
    “Professor?”
    Dana took a second to find the right answer. “It was the way he spoke, like he was lecturing or something, and the things he said. It didn’t sound like he was just there to steal.”
    “What was he lecturing about?”
    “About men that had been executed.”
    “Do you remember any of their names?”
    Dana started to shake her head, but then stopped. “One of them was named Appel,” she said.
    “Good. How did you remember that?”
    “Because of the story he told me. He said that before he was electrocuted Appel told everyone that when they finished with him he’d be a baked apple.”
    “Do you remember any other names?”
    She shook her head, albeit gingerly and with a little wince. “But I remember him saying something about this other criminal who arranged to have his body donated to some college because that way he said he’d get a good education.”
    More capital punishment references. Elizabeth had been offered a name as well. While gasping for air, as her life was slipping away, he had told her that John C. Woods always slept like a baby. She had whispered that name to the detectives, and later they had come back and told her that Woods had been the busiest hangman in American history, having hanged 347 men.
    The translation, Elizabeth thought, was that her death wouldn’t bother him in the least.
    “Did he say anything else? Ask you any questions?”
    Dana tentatively shook her head. “No. He mostly kept trying to calm me, kept shushing me.”
    She shuddered. The motion seemed to jar her memory. “He asked me whether I liked poetry,” she said, suddenly remembering.
    Elizabeth opened her mouth to ask a question, but her throat tightened, her stomach did flip-flops, and the words wouldn’t come out.
    “He said something about Whitman. I don’t really remember what.”
    “Try.” The word sounded like a croak.
    “He was going to recite some poem to me.”
    “Which?”
    Dana felt Elizabeth’s imploring in the squeezing of her hands.
    “I don’t...I was just so frightened.” A moment’s pause, and then: “He told me the title. It was something about felons.”
    Your Felons on Trial in Court,
she thought. Gray had once told her it explained his epiphany and his evil.
    “Why?” she asked.
    He looked at her, showed his large white teeth. “Fellow I know said there was this philosophy professor who once asked that question on a final exam. Three-hour final it was, and all the students were scribbling furiously, taking up all that time to answer that question, all except one fellow who wrote: “Why not?”
    “Why?” Elizabeth asked again.
    “People are going to tell you it was my childhood and my mother. But I don’t believe that.”
    “Do you feel things?”
    “Finish your sentence, E-Liz-a-Beth.”
    His exaggerated way of saying her name always made her smile. It succeeded again. “What do you mean?”
    “‘Do you feel things,’ you asked. But the unsaid part was, ‘like a normal human being?’ And my answer to you is that I feel things even more than a so-called normal human being.”
    “Then why?”
    “Because hell’s tides continually run through me. Whitman. If I weren’t so set on being cremated, I’d probably ask for the last few lines of his poem to be chiseled into my tombstone.”
    “I’d like to hear them.”
    “Is it that you want to hear the words or that you want to be able to write, ‘On Tuesday the eighth, Shame recited another one of Whitman’s poems to me’? People seem to be all excited about the fact that I read books and enjoy poetry.”
    “Most murderers don’t like poetry. Most