I Killed Hemingway

True, he had not killed him alone, not like shot him or anything, but he had helped. He had been there. He could have done something, but did nothing. He had helped kill a legend. He had killed a legend.

This is the confession of the psychiatric nurse that helped administer the last fatal electric shocks to Ernest Hemingway, those that robbed him of his ability to write and that made self-inflicted death seem the only solution.
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What I dislike the most about electric shock is the smell. That, and the little sound it makes which I didn’t hear at first. What with the humming of the machine, the doctors talking, and the patient moaning and even screaming sometimes, it was hard to hear, but once I did, once I did hear this sound, distinct from all the other sounds in the room, now I can’t stop hearing it, every time.

What this sound is is a tiny sizzle—as if you were frying a very small egg in not much butter, or in hardly any oil—that’s the little sizzle the electrodes make where they meet the skin. Of course, it’s usually just the jelly frying, but sometimes, if the patient needs a lot of juice, or if the helmet slips a bit, the skin fries too and then it leaves little marks that stay a while before they go away, sometimes quite some time.

When the skin fries it makes a drier sound, a bit like lean bacon but not as loud of course, and not the same smell. Bacon in the pan smells just fine, but the electric smell, the smell of the electrodes sizzling the jelly or the skin, smells of burning—of tiny deaths.

They say it doesn’t smell, but that’s not true, it does. It smells of electricity searing through the skin, then through bone and into the brain. It smells of voltage. And of many little deaths, rushing in, anxious to get to him. And that is what I dislike the most, that smell of tiny deaths.

You can tell them, the little deaths. You can tell them by his face, by the arch of his spine and by the way he bites down on the bit. They’re in his grimace, those little deaths. They hurt him badly. It’s written all over him, and I don’t mean that as a pun or anything.

My name is John, and I work at Saint Mary’s. Saint Mary’s is part of the Mayo clinic here in Rochester. That’s in Minnesota, of course.