1
Execution Poem Expert
On June 11, 2001, CBS News in New York City called to see whether I, a poet and professor, would appear on a daytime news show to explain why Timothy McVeighās last words took the form of W. E. Henleyās āInvictusā (1875), an old warhorse of a poem, sixteen lines long, handwritten by the prisoner on death row and handed to the warden. McVeigh was facing the lethal injection because he had detonated the bomb that killed 168, wounding hundreds more, in Oklahoma City in 1995, in the single worst act of domestic terrorism in the nationās history.
McVeigh was convicted, he was condemned, but he wasnāt ready to flinch. āInvictusā is Latin for āinvincible,ā and McVeigh was presenting himself as defiant, proud: āMy head is bloody, but unbowed.ā The poemās conclusion: āI am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.ā That the bomber would represent himself with a poem was noteworthy, and CBS needed someone with the literary credentials to talk about the choice and how it reflected the mind of a mass murderer facing execution.
It was my birthday, and the TV appearance was, as far as I was concerned, a lark, an adventure, or an auspicious omen. I went through the various stages that precede even a bit performance on televisionāthe endless rehearsals of things you have told them you would say, the application of makeup. The task was not onerous. I knew just enough about Henley to locate him in the anchorpersonās mind, and the poem is straightforward enough. You could tell what McVeigh meant to say.
The CBS producer, an efficient Wellesley alumna, was in a rush, as the job required. But she took the time to ask me whether I pronounce my name āLee-manā or āLay-man.ā
āLee-man,ā I said.
As I sat in the greenroom waiting for my three-minute stint before the cameras, I watched the program. Heading for break, the screen announced what was coming: āExecution Poem Expert.ā
What a wonderful distinction, I thought. My wife, Stacey, made me business cards with these words on them.
And when I got on the air, I was introduced as David Lay-man.
That is what I mean by a spot of time.
2
Spots of Time
It was Wordsworth who introduced the phrase. In The Prelude, his autobiographical epic, Wordsworth wrote, āThere are in our existence spots of time, / That with distinct pre-eminence retain / A renovating virtue,ā such that, in unhappy or humdrum circumstances, they leave our minds ānourished and invisibly repaired.ā A spot of time, recollected and stored in the memory, āenables us to mount, / When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.ā
This is a deservedly famous passageāor used to be, when English majors were many and all were required to read the major romantic poets. I would, however, insist that the moments and hours that transcend the here-and-now and make so lasting an impression are not limited to ones that gave pleasure the first time around. On the contrary, the recollection of a melancholy or painful episodeāan emotional crisis, an illness, an accident, a humiliation, even the death of a loved oneāmay perform the ārenovating virtueā that Wordsworth described. The memory may be involuntary, triggered by an uncanny sense of repetition, or provoked by the act of writing, as I hope to demonstrate here.
3
CafƩ Loup
The Harvard professorās lecture on The Prelude was as brilliant as advertised. The professor linked the passage I just quoted to comparable instances of recollection and ārenovating virtueā in Wordsworthās āImmortality Odeā and āI Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.ā When he quoted from memory the magnificent last paragraph of Ralph Waldo Emersonās great essay āCompensation,ā the audience was as moved as it was impressed. I moderated the lively question-and-answer session that followed, which went off without a hitch, and the students lined up to get their books signed by the distinguished lecturer. It was a perk of the job that I got to take the professor out to dinner and drinks to cap off the evening in celebratory fashion, and we went to CafĆ© Loup, the bar on Thirteenth Street west of Sixth Avenue where the food is lousy but the pour is generous. We arrived in good cheer but, to my astonishment, our guest, so erudite and knowledgeable in the lecture hall, was, when relaxed, an old-fashioned bore: someone who talks your head off without pause. From the first taste of his single-malt scotch on the rocks, my guest talked, and talked, and talked. Now he was holding forth to a captive audience of three of my colleagues, a graduate student, and my wife about Chinaās theft of our intellectual property while the listeners sipped their cocktails and fidgeted with their napkins. I motioned to the waiter (āanother round for everyoneā) and excused myself to the menās room. But instead of finding refuge, I glanced down to see that I had pissed blood in the icy white urinal. It was ugly, like cracking an egg to find a spot of blood on the yolk. When I returned to the table, my guest had changed the subject, now orating on the effort to unionize the adjuncts at his universityāāthe wrong union at the wrong timeāāand the others continued to pretend to be paying attention, and I did my best to appear as though nothing unusual had just taken place.
4
No Big Deal
āProbably a UTI,ā says my GP. She phones in a prescription for Cipro. āTake these twice a day for ten days and youāll be okay.ā But Iām not okay. I watch the blood in the toilet bloom like one of those time-lapse photos of an exotic flower transformed from bud to blossom. Every morning I stand in front of the toilet praying for a stream the color of sunlight. For weeks it would be. Then the blood returns, like the first plague God visits upon the Egyptians in Exodus.
āIām freaking out,ā Stacey tells her sister Amy on the phone when she thinks Iām not listening. Sheās in the bedroom, door shut, and Iām in the living room watching The Wild Bunch for the eleventh time, but the wall is thin and Iāve lowered the volume.
āThe doctor says itās a remote possibility,ā Stacey says after a listening pause. āIāve been googlingāI know, I know, that way madness lies, but still.
āYou mean, besides the blood in the urine?
āLower back pain on one side (check, since the summer) and upper thigh and pelvic pain (check, heās had pain in his groin which he thinks was a muscle pull from too vigorous swimming).
āIām a nervous wreck.ā
āDonāt panic,ā Dr. Isamu says when the antibiotics fail to solve the problem, and sends me to Dr. Langsam, an expensive out-of-network urologist.
āThe symptoms sometimes go away of their own accord, but that can be temporary,ā Dr. Langsam says. He avoids making eye contact. āThe sample you left contained trace elements of blood.ā
āWhat does that mean? An infection?ā
āPerhaps. The tests can be inconclusive. We sometimes get a false negative.ā
Iām wondering whom he reminds me ofāI mean in looks. The young Bruno Ganz, maybe?
āYou need a cystoscopy,ā he says, looking over his shoulder as he washes his hands. āI wonāt jolly you alongāmost men wouldnāt volunteer to have one. That said, itās over quickly. Here Iāll show you the apparatus.ā
This guy radiates confidence. āMen come from hundreds of miles away for my cystoscopies.ā
Maybe, but I almost pass outāfrom fear more than from paināwhile the catheter is in me.
āYou have a polypāno big dealābut youāll need to have it scooped out,ā he says. He hands me the name and phone number of another urologist, a younger man, Dr. Caine. āBest surgeon in the city,ā he says, āfor what you have.ā
āWhich is?ā
Cancer: so far no one has used the dread word, but I bring it up in Dr. Langsamās office. āItās unlikely,ā he says. āItās remote. But even if you have it, bladder cancer is one hundred percent curable if you catch it early.ā The double if undid the rest. I knew it then. It was likely. It was not remote.
A week later, I visit Dr. Caine for another cystoscopy.
More than what he said, I remembered the enthusiasm in the brilliant young doctorās voice when, after examining me, he announced, with the air of a mathematician who has solved a problem long thought insoluble, āYou have bladder cancer.ā
5
Cancer Alley
Like every cancer patient on getting the bad news, I wondered what I had done to deserve this punishment. How does one even get bladder cancer?
āWe donāt really know,ā Dr. Caine said. āHave you ever taken the New Jersey Turnpike from the Holland Tunnel?ā
I nodded.
āThen youāve inhaled the fumes from all of those processing plants. You know what we cal...
