by David R. Dow
That night the beanhole opened and McKenzie threw me a jumpsuit and a bologna sandwich. I ate a bite. It tasted like pennies, and I threw the rest away. He said, Welcome to level 3, asshole. You want to act like a goddamn camel jockey, we’ll treat you like one.
They gave me a toothbrush, a bar of soap, and a razor. I flushed it down the commode. A week later I had my second gassing. The drill was the same. While I was still coughing, they ran in, tackled me, and stripped off my clothes. This time I was careful not to break another tooth. After hosing me down, they took me to a brightly lit room with a single metal chair bolted to the floor. I said, Is this left over from when y’all used the gas chamber? The young guard wearing braces whom I hadn’t seen in a while said, Did we used to gas people here, Lieutenant? The lieutenant said, We’re corrections officers, Sergeant, not Nazis. I said, My my, young fella, congratulations on the promotion. He started to answer, but then caught the lieutenant’s eye, and didn’t. My hands were cuffed in front, and I used my thumb to squeeze a drop of water from my belly button. A thick leather strap across my thighs hid my genitals and kept me from standing. A trustee from general population used shears and an electric razor to shave me clean. I could not stop coughing. If the trustee had been using a blade, I’d have been sliced wide-open.
McKenzie walked in and nodded to the lieutenant. He said, You’re a slow learner, ain’t you, za-heater?
When they moved me back to B-pod Sargent was still across the hall. I told him about my time up on level. He said, You know what your problem is, Inocente? You think it matters to these people who you are.
Another spasm of coughs shook me. Sargent said, If that gas is still in your lungs, you might want to see the nurse.
I said, It’s not the gas. I just have a cold, and I don’t think she’s a real nurse.
Sargent said, True that, Inocente, but she got herself a scrip pad and she dresses like one. Ain’t that enough?
I said, No, not today it isn’t, and I started hacking again.
* * *
• • •
Being on death row alters your perception of time. When you’re still naïve and hopeful and believe justice will prevail, the clock slows down. Once you realize the game is rigged, the weeks fly by.
During my state court appeal, I woke up every morning thinking some CO would lift the beanhole and say, Hey za-heater, did you hear the news? You won. I was in a hurry for the judges to declare me innocent, positive today would be the day. Yet that day never came, and the weeks dragged on, taunting me with their monotony, until at last Olvido showed up to tell me we had lost.
Immediately my world started to spin too fast. Texas executed a woman, and the guys here protested like she was one of our own. The skinniest guy on the row got stuck in a pipe trying to escape from the shower. He had a heart attack and died as the COs frantically struggled to pull him out. A Thai inmate who learned Spanish from a cholo in a Salvadoran gang fell in love with a German serial killer whose parents had been missionaries in Mexico, and they romanced one another in perfect Spanish with accents that made me laugh. One day a Unitarian pastor stood outside the dayroom and presided as the two got married. A week later, they were executed on consecutive days, with the same pastor standing at both their feet.
So it went. An execution a week, a dead guy’s voice on the radio filling the row, another empty cell.
I prayed for time to slow down, desperate for someone to take however long was needed to realize I did not kill my wife. But when the federal court ruled against me, taking roughly the same amount of time as the state court had, it felt like it happened overnight. My legal team came to tell me the only appeal left was with the Supreme Court. They said the justices wouldn’t be interested in my case because it didn’t present any interesting or challenging legal issues.
I said, It’s not an interesting legal challenge that I’m innocent?
Luther, the former marine, had said, Nope. It’s tragic, sure, but not very interesting.
Olvido encouraged me to write the court and ask for new lawyers on the grounds that she and her team had made a terrible mistake by raising only a single claim. She said it was a long shot, but if the court agreed and gave me new counsel, I would get to start all over.
I said, I understand that for most of your clients, time is your friend. I wish you would understand that for me, time is the enemy.
I stood up and shouted for a guard. I was ready to go. I said to Olvido, I don’t blame you for anything. You’ve done exactly what I’ve asked. I’m sorry for lashing out. I just don’t have anyone else.
* * *
• • •
Summer came. The commissary now sold fans with plastic blades. I bought one for everybody on B-pod. I had never had dreams before, but I started to have them now. At the restaurant, the biggest fear we had was an infestation of roaches or rats. Even though it was a health code violation, we fed two stray cats anyway to entice them to patrol the kitchen and pantry. In my prison dreams, cockroaches came pouring out of a slit in my mattress and covered me like fur.
Day 1,699: Guard Johnson came by and told me I had a visitor. Guard Johnson was the only CO in the facility who said my name correctly. When she first saw my ID, she asked what kind of name it was and how to pronounce it. She practiced saying it in my presence until she had it down. I’ve never heard her curse, and I think she knows by name every last one of the more than three hundred inmates who call death row home. If I had even the barest desire to normalize my life here, I’d start by talking to her.
Guard Johnson stood there waiting for me to squat so she could cuff me and take me out to visitation. But nobody except my lawyer and people on her team ever came to see me, and (except for their initial visit) they always wrote first. That meant whoever wanted to visit was somebody from the media or some death penalty opponent who likes to meet with inmates to try to keep us from going insane, or maybe one of the pen pals whose letters I had ignored. Either way, I wasn’t interested. So I said to Officer Johnson, Please put me down as RV. I’m going to stay here and do my rec.
Officer Johnson said, Please don’t refuse the visit, Inmate Zhettah. It’s your lawyer.
As I was being pulled out of my cell, Sargent said, Tell her I send my love. From anybody else it would have been lewd, but Sargent was sincere.
Olvido was sitting in the booth twirling a pen between her thumb and index finger, occasionally pausing to mark a passage in a document she was reading. She did not waste any time.
She said, Supreme Court turned down your appeal this morning. We’ll keep trying to find another argument, or another angle on one we’ve raised, but I wanted to let you know your case is now at the point that the DA’s office in Houston will set an execution date.
I said, This is totally fucking unbelievable. I did not kill anybody. Why can’t I wake up from this?
She did not say anything. I didn’t expect her to.
I said, I’m sorry. How long?
She said, They have to give you at least ninety days’ notice, but I hear through the grapevine your ex-wife’s son calls the DA all the time.
I said, Reinhardt?
She said, Yeah, him. So I would not be surprised if they move fairly soon. We’ll file something else, even though I don’t know yet what it will be, but we’re digging through the oldest muck at the bottom of the oldest barrel, so it will be nothing more than a prayer dressed inside a bunch of legalese.
I said, I know.
She nodded at the vending machines and said, Anything I can get you?
I said, A suit, maybe a tie, and keys.
She smiled. I stood up and touched my hand to the glass. She touched it back. She tried to hide it, but before she turned to leave, I saw a tear spill from her eye.
The transport team came to get me right away. Sargent was back in his house, fresh from the shower. He asked what the visit
was about and I told him. He said, You hear that Tigres del Norte coming from Martinez’s house?
Yeah.
He said, Well, that ain’t the fat lady.
* * *
• • •
For four days after my lawyer gave me the news I didn’t leave my cell. I said no to rec. I skipped the shower. I didn’t shave. On the fifth day McKenzie tossed my cell with two new COs, but they didn’t make a mess. He told me to lose the facial hair. I didn’t even respond, and he didn’t write me up. When I grew so hungry I ached, I would eat a bite or two of whatever was on the meal tray. I had a six-pack of tuna and three cans of pinto beans, but I couldn’t find my can opener. Maybe McKenzie had taken it and I hadn’t noticed. I thought about ordering another.
I knew a guy who got exonerated after a dozen years and three execution dates. Now he runs a charitable foundation. In an interview on NPR, he talked about the resiliency of the human spirit. He recounted all the occasions he could have folded but didn’t, all the indignities that didn’t break him. But he was just a fool who got lucky. I got arrested and thought I would never stand trial. I went to trial and thought I’d be found innocent. I came to death row and believed a court would right the wrong. Resilient is just another word for insane. The more powerful force is delusion, more powerful by a million miles. Sargent had said it isn’t over ’til it’s over, but I wasn’t going to be one of those guys sitting in the holding cell waiting for the call to come minutes before six saying I’d been saved. Fuck it. There was nothing left to do. Unless God decided to flood the state and anoint me Noah, I was going to be executed for something I swear on my papá’s grave I did not do. I’m not strong enough not to fold. I’m not.
I said, I’m sorry, Tieresse. It was the first time I’d spoken to her since getting here. I hadn’t wanted her name or memory to be inside this place. I said again, I’m sorry.
When I lived in the free world I watched a video of a terrorist beheading an American hostage. Maybe on the inside he was terrified, but to me, the hostage seemed fearless. In my imagination, before the camera started to roll, he spat on the hooded thug holding the blade. The thug pulled a pistol from his belt and whipped the butt across the bound man’s head. The hostage listed, but he did not fall.
It had been a mistake to watch. There are some images your brain cannot erase.
On day 1,707 I had a dream. The hostage video was playing again. The terrorist, wearing a mask, drew his knife across a whetstone. The hostage, wearing an orange jumpsuit, was kneeling before him. His hands were bound. He was insolent and lithe. Off camera somebody said something in a foreign language, Arabic perhaps, and the hostage looked up at him. The face on the hostage was mine. I bolted awake. It was nine A.M. The captain was standing at my door.
The captain said, Good morning, Inmate Zhettah. Warden’s got something to tell you.
* * *
• • •
He moved aside and the warden stepped forward. I was sitting on the edge of my bunk. The warden said he’d get right to it. He told me the judge had set my execution date. It was four months away. He said I’d stay where I was until thirty days out then they’d move me. He didn’t say, To a cell we call suicide watch, but that’s what he meant. He handed me a piece of paper, the court order, said he’d be back in a few days to go over procedures, and he and the captain turned and left.
Sargent said, What was that about?
I said, I have close to five hundred million dollars in offshore banks the authorities never found. You want it?
* * *
• • •
Sargent said, Here’s what we’re gonna do. You get a day to memorize a sonnet, then I get a day. We alternate ’til they move you. Whoever makes the fewest number of mistakes ’tween now and then gets to write your final statement. Deal?
I said, You are a sick and morbid motherfucker.
He said, True that, Inocente. Now is it a deal or ain’t it?
I said, Bring it.
Sargent went first. He chose sonnet 117. He licked every note. I said, I love that line, Shoot not at me in your wakened hate.
He said, First poem I ever memorized. Read it right before I quit eighth grade.
I said, Well then that’s cheating.
He said, Might be. Your turn.
I went with the eighteenth. I nailed it too.
Sargent said, Nice, but a little obvious, don’t you think?
I said, Maybe, but I’d never paid much attention to the lines at the end, I forget what you call it.
Sargent said, The couplet.
I said, Yeah, couplet. So long as men can breathe.
Sargent said, Tell you what, you start getting all lachrymose on me, we’re gonna have to change the rules so I pick yours and vice versa, you feel me?
If Sargent had an objective other than to be my friend, I do not know what it was. If his goal was to distract me, I suppose he succeeded. But if his plan was to get me to dig in my heels and fight, it was a bust. Any fight I’d ever had I’d left up on level 3. On the day they came to move me, Sargent told me the score. We’d each made four mistakes.
I’ve heard two different explanations for the new routine. Some guys say you get special treatment because you no longer have anything to lose. Others say it’s because they want to make sure you don’t kill yourself before the state gets to do it. Either way, Lilac and McKenzie were unusually quiet when they came to transfer me to a different cell.
Sargent said, Listen up, Inocente, tie goes to the dead guy, but I might have a suggestion or two, all right?
I said, You earned it hermano.
* * *
• • •
The cells on death watch are the same size as the others, but they’re on their own pod. The pod is adjacent to a room where two guards sit monitoring a panel of seven screens. Six of them have displays that rotate every fifteen seconds: the shower, the dayrooms, the corridors, the visiting booths, the perimeter, the roof. They show every area of death row except the inside of the inmates’ cells. The seventh screen shows a constant feed from a small camera recessed into the ceiling of the cell that would be the last place on earth where I lived. They watch you eat, sleep, and use the toilet. They watch you brush your teeth and shave, and a guard comes in to confiscate the toothbrush and razor when you’re done. They watch you all the time.
Sargent might not have made it past middle school, but he read a book every other day. The year before he had been enamored of the French intelligentsia. Those are the intellectuals, he told me. In France, the public holds them in high esteem. One day he was droning on about a book by some French philosopher named René Girard. France does not have the death penalty anymore, but it did until recently. Girard supposedly compared executions to ritualistic human sacrifice. I told Sargent I’m no genius, but I know hogwash when I hear it. Then all of a sudden the prison officials started to care about whether I might kill myself, and I understood exactly what he was saying. I wanted to tell him I’d learned something important, to thank him, but he was too far away, and I didn’t trust the COs to deliver a kite.
They let me keep my new can opener, but they took away my hot plate. I ate beans from a can with a plastic spoon. I bought a box of graham crackers but my mouth stopped making saliva so I had to throw them away. I would break off a piece of a chocolate bar and let it melt in my mouth.
I was no longer permitted out of my cell to exercise. On shower days, the transport team stood three feet away for the four minutes I was allowed under the spray. A chaplain I had seen in the visiting area several times came by my cell to ask me whether I wanted to visit. I said no thank you. I slept even more than before, sometimes up to eighteen hours a day. I still had my radio, but I could not concentrate on any of the shows. The only reason I was not bored is that I was so terribly scared. If I had been the hostage in the video, you would have heard me wail.
I addressed the letter to my attorney and asked her to please try to deliver it. I also gave her additional details about my financial resources and authorized her to distribute to herself and her legal team ten million dollars. I requested she set aside another five million dollars for Sargent, and upon his death to Sargent’s daughter, and to give all the rest to legal aid organizations and public defender offices.
