David Dow - The Autobiography of an Execution

It hadn’t really occurred to me that the blood might not be Daniel’s. I asked him whether he had told his lawyer about the nosebleeds. He said, ’Course I did. Told the police, too.

I told him the next time I would see him would be at the hearing and asked if he needed anything in the meantime. He said, I could use some more books. I’m reading this dude named Tim O’Brien. He’s got books about Vietnam. They resonate with me.

I said, Resonate?

He grinned and said, I got plenty of time in here to get educated.

I told him I’d send him some books, and I stood up to leave. He hesitated, I saw it, but then he put his hand on the glass to say good-bye.

IT’S NOT FASHIONABLE to believe in truth, but what can I say? There’s good and bad, right and wrong, true and false. My conversation with Quaker left me dizzy. It was gray outside. The drizzle felt like pricks of ice. I hallucinated. I saw Quaker swirling in black water, his white jumpsuit like the middle of an Oreo. Have you heard of the Coriolis force? The mathematics are complicated (Google Laplace’s tidal equations if you want to see for yourself), but that’s not what I was struggling with. It was something else. Coriolis is true, but the belief that it influences which way the water spins on its way down the toilet is false. And it remains false even if a million people, a billion, think it’s true. It doesn’t matter which direction he was spinning. Here’s what I was thinking: Either way, he’s dead.

In The Things They Carried , Tim O’Brien says, A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth . He’s right, and the more important thing is that he is not disagreeing with me. A jury of middle-class white people spent a week looking at a sullen unshaved black man and listening to a passionate prosecutor while the black man’s lawyer slept, and there were three dead bodies, and two of them were children, and when you see pictures of a dead child, especially one who’s been shot, you need to know who did it, believe me you do. They believed her version: a true story that never happened .

But just because you believe in black-and-white doesn’t mean that you can’t also believe in gray, because even though something that is true cannot be a lie, and even though a lie can never be true, not everything that is true is equally true. Happening truth is not false; it is just less true than story truth .

Happening truth just is ; story truth needs a teller. That’s what law is. The facts matter, but the story matters more. The problem we faced is Quaker’s story had already lost, and the only truth that mattered now was the one that I didn’t have the facts to tell.

LINCOLN’S MIDDLE NAME is Peter, after Katya’s dad. Peter died from metastatic melanoma when he was sixty, a month before our second wedding anniversary. Katya’s mom has never even thought of remarrying. She believes in soul mates. Her husband was her life.

I envied their relationship. Katya feared it. She didn’t want her world to end if I died prematurely, or if I woke up one day and walked off to be alone with myself. She set up a page on Facebook and collected a couple hundred friends. She started competing in Latin ballroom dance.

It seemed to me like she was nurturing a parallel life in case ours ended too soon. I told her that. She said I was being ridiculous, but I noticed that she didn’t deny it.

One night she and some of the dancers from her studio went out for sushi and then club-hopping. At midnight she called to say she was on the way home. The club was fifteen minutes away. Half an hour later, she still wasn’t home. I called her cell phone and went straight to voice mail. I sat in the upstairs reading area of our house, a Cormac McCarthy novel open on my lap, and stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the street she’d have to come down. Ten minutes later I called her cell phone for the second time, and again five minutes after that, then a fourth time. At one fifteen she answered.

Where the fuck are you?

What’s the matter with you? Janet lost her keys. I’ve been trying to help her find them.

I said, You told me you were coming home more than an hour ago.

She said, Since when do you worry about me? I thought you’d be asleep. You’re always asleep when I come home late.

The truth of that observation jolted me. I said, I don’t think you can draw any inferences from the fact I fall asleep early sometimes.

She said, That’s true.

I tried to figure out whether I was mad or worried. I’ve heard that anger is never the first emotional reaction. Maybe I was worried and then mad. Or maybe jealous and then mad. If I’m going to need her, shouldn’t she need me, too?

BEFORE KATYA AND I were married, while she was still practicing law, we had plans to go to her law firm’s annual meeting in New York. Our flight left Friday morning. On Thursday I went to the prison to see Moises Ramirez. Ramirez was scheduled to be executed the following week. He was not our client. He had written me five letters in three days, begging for help.

When he came into the cage he was wearing horn-rimmed glasses and had peach fuzz on his chin. He looked like the character who played Michael J. Fox’s father in the first Back to the Future movie. He had a tattoo on his left forearm that said Clara. I had no idea what he had done. I was there to tell him there was nothing I could do.

I said, I talked to your lawyers and told them I was going to come talk to you.

He said, I ain’t heard nothing from my lawyers in like five years. They don’t live in Texas no more, do they?

In fact, his lawyers had left the state. But I was surprised they had not even written him. I asked, Who told you about your execution date?

First time I heard about it was when the major called me into his office. That was a month ago.

I looked down at my notebook. I wrote the word Scared . He said, I been writing my pen pals. Cheryl, she lives in West Virginia, wrote me back and gave me your address. I just need some kind of help, man. I want y’all to represent me. My pen pals can get y’all some money.

I said, The problem isn’t money. The problem is that it is really too late to file anything else.

His lower lip quivered. I thought, Please don’t start crying.

That morning the Supreme Court had decided a case having to do with the obligations of lawyers appointed to represent death-row inmates in federal court. In my office we had started constructing an argument based on the new case we thought might buy some more time for a few of our clients. I did not want to waste it on Ramirez.

I said, The Supreme Court decided a case today that we might be able to use to get you a stay.

He said, What’s that?

I said, A stay means you won’t get executed next week.

He said, No. I know. But then what? Does it mean I get another month or something?

I said, At this point, the only goal is to get you a stay. If you don’t get executed next Wednesday, then we can try to figure out what else to do.

The phrase blank stare was invented to describe the look he was giving me. I could not tell whether he did not understand what I was saying, or whether he did not like what I was saying. I said, I’m not going to file anything unless you want me to.