David Dow - The Autobiography of an Execution

When I got home that night Katya was sitting in the rocking chair in Lincoln’s room listening to her iPod. She stood up and hugged me, and we watched him together, his arm wrapped tightly around a teddy bear. We went downstairs and I poured us a drink. An hour later, Lincoln was wailing.

AS I PULLED onto the freeway after our stop for ice cream on the drive home from Galveston, I saw a flash of lightning out of my right eye. I asked Katya whether she had seen it. She said no, and then I saw it again. A window shade came down, and just like that, the top half of my vision was gone. I said, Uh-oh. Lincoln asked me what was wrong. I told him nothing. I asked Katya to drive. She heard something in my voice and didn’t ask why. When we got out of the car to change seats, I told her I couldn’t see out of my right eye. I called my neighbor, an eye surgeon, and he told me to come over as soon as we got back to town.

I walked next door to Charlie’s house. He looked at me and drove us to his office. He dilated my eyes and told me that my retina was torn into the macula, and he wanted to operate on me the next day. He explained that the retina is the layer across the back of the eyeball that serves as the film for the eye. Images go from the retina to the optic nerve to the brain. I needed to have the retina repaired, or I would be blind. He said, I told you to stop boxing. I reminded him I had quit sparring more than ten years earlier. He said, Hmmm.

I asked about the recovery time and Charlie said I would not be able to do any work for a week, maybe two, perhaps as long as three. I told him there was no way I could put things off for that long. He said, The alternative is that you go blind. I asked him what were the percentages of that. He said, Of going blind with an unrepaired retina that is torn into the macula? I nodded. He said, One hundred percent.

I said, Well, I guess that’s that.

After he drove us home I told Katya. The surgery would take around two hours. I found my will and my living will, telling doctors not to take heroic measures to save me. I called the office and talked to Jerome to let him know what was going on. I asked him whether he could call the judge’s clerk to see about the possibility of putting off the hearing for a week or two. The next morning, Katya and I dropped Lincoln at a friend’s house and she drove me to the hospital. At nine the anesthesiologist said I would begin to feel woozy in a minute or two. The last thoughts I had were: If I die, I wonder if Quaker will get a stay. Then: If I die, I’ll have stumbled onto a guilt-free way of not doing this anymore.

Three hours later I woke up in the recovery room feeling like I’d eaten a bale of cotton. Katya and Lincoln were there, reading Narnia. Lincoln said, Look, Mama. Dada’s awake. I smiled and tried to drink some water. It spilled out of my mouth. My tongue felt like wax paper. Lincoln said, Look what I brought. He held up a wishbone. Nana gave it to me. Let’s break it, okay? He got the bigger piece, again.

I said, Amigo, are you cheating when we break these things?

He said, No, Dada, I am not. Do you want to know my wish? I nodded. He said, My wish is that you get to help the person you are trying to help.

THIS IS A LITTLE KNOWN FACT, but I invented books on tape. When I was in college, I said to myself, I should open a business renting out books on cassette tapes. It was my best idea, surpassing even my idea for a single serving of ground coffee that could be brewed in a bag like tea, for that fresh-brewed taste on camping trips. I also invented the idea of a computer in a car, with local maps programmed in, that could give you directions. I was going to put them in rental cars. Unfortunately, I took no steps in any of these instances other than having the idea, which apparently many other people had as well.

My grandmother was an avid reader. She went blind before there was such a thing as books on tape. She lost her vision when she was eighty-four and died when she was eighty-eight. She had cancer in her sinus that required radiation. The doctor told her she might lose her vision in the eye next to the sinus with the tumor. The doctor didn’t say anything about losing the vision in the other eye. I wanted to sue. If I had been eighty-four and the doctor told me I would be blind, I’d take my chances with the cancer.

Death-penalty lawyers have a peculiar definition of victory. I already said that when my clients die of AIDS on death row, I count those deaths as victories. But it doesn’t stop there. One of my clients was supposed to be executed on July 1. We got a stay on June 30, so he did not get executed until August 1. Another month of life in a sixty-square-foot cage. But he was breathing. That’s a victory. When you lose most of the wars, you start seeing successes in individual battles as victories. In the free world, as my clients call it, definitions are different.

When I asked Charlie about the risks of the surgery, he told me I could lose my vision anyway. I said, I can’t work if I can’t see. He said that I’d learn to read Braille. I have a seven-year-old son and a wife I love. That seemed like a victory in my world.

Everybody sent me books on tape. I listened to the first book, written and read by David Sedaris. For five minutes I laughed out loud. Then I could not stop thinking about never being able to read again. Instead of hearing what he was saying, I was hearing him reading, and being reminded with every word that I could not read to myself. I did not listen to any more of the tapes.

FOR A WEEK I worked with my eyes closed. Though I wouldn’t want to stay that way, I have to say that my piano playing got much better, and my thinking was less clouded. Katya drove me to the office in the morning after dropping Lincoln at school, and I would lie on my couch and talk to Jerome, Gary, and Kassie about the case. Kassie felt sure Green was involved. She said, Woman’s instincts. Trust me here.

It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her. Green was who I didn’t trust. When I was in elementary school, my brothers and I would dial a random number and tell whoever answered not to pick up their phone for the next hour because the electric company was working on the line, and if they answered the phone, whoever was calling would get a severe shock. We’d wait ten minutes and dial the number again. Someone usually answered, and when they did, we’d scream like we’d been electrocuted. People torture others because it’s fun, or because they don’t have anything else to do, or because they’re on death row, and they’re angry and cold, and they aim to inflict as much pain as they can on the outside world before they get removed from it.

Two years earlier, a chaplain on death row started reading scripture to my clients. They began asking me to waive their appeals. The chaplain told them if they repented, Jesus would forgive them, but if they fought, they would burn in hell. In his universe, pursuing legal appeals was a form of fighting. By appealing, they were refusing to take responsibility for what they had done. Two times is a coincidence, three makes a conspiracy. After my fourth client wrote instructing me to waive his appeals, I drove to the chaplain’s small house in Huntsville and sat in a rocking chair on the front porch, waiting for him to get home. I’m not a Christian, and if I were, I wouldn’t be a good one. My capacity for turning the other cheek is shallow. I introduced myself and told him that if he spent another nanosecond with any of my clients, he’d learn for himself the ins and outs of litigation. He looked at me with what I first thought was incomprehension but later decided might have been sorrow, like I didn’t know salvation when it was sharing my clothes.