Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

They let Carlito have a CD player with headphones. But he told me his ears had become so sensitive from the solitude that even listening to music was painful. He talked to himself, he confessed to me, something he used to think only the most pathetic insane people did. He didn’t get to interact with the other inmates since he was permanently in segregation. Most inmates only got put in solitary for days, weeks, or months, not years, but committing a crime against a child put him at the bottom of the prison hierarchy, and if left among the main population, chances were he’d be dead in an hour.

But the tedium of his confinement was so unbearable that Carlito once told me he could spend hours biting his arms, palms, thighs, calves, any part of himself he could reach, testing the threshold of his pain, until he made a solar system of pink and purple spheres across his body, dabbled with red pinpoints in places where he managed to puncture the skin, just to see how long it would take for the teeth marks to fade from his flesh.

And when the marks cleared, he would do it again.

Dr. Joe told me those in segregation sometimes act out, saving their feces or piss to ambush the guards with, deliberately clogging their toilets with shit, or flooding their cells with water from the faucet.

“You remove an individual from society and they lose their ability to be social. Normal behavior falls away.”

“So why do they do it?” I’d asked him. “Why do they put them in solitary?”

“Someone long ago figured out it’s the worst kind of punishment.”

Ignoring inmates was one of the guards’ favorite games, but at least it wasn’t as bad as when they were really in the mood for cruelty, locking inmates in a lightless storage room with no food or toilet for days. Other times, since the guards were heavily rotated, the new guys often forgot to let Carlito out for his scheduled kennel time, to make a phone call, or even to give him his mail.

“It’s the monotony that’s so destructive,” Joe told me. “For some in solitary, the only constructive activity they can come up with is to plan their own suicide.”

I used to think I was the only person Carlito ever used his phone time to call, till he let it slip that there were a few women he had regular conversations with on the phone. Women who’d gotten his photo and profile off one of those Internet directories where strangers can write to inmates. I looked up his profile myself and there was my brother, in his prison reds, crouched against a gray concrete wall, a headline under his photo: Looking for a friend . I thought women who seek out attachments to a convicted murderer when they don’t have to must be some kind of nutty, but Carlito said they were like angels, and in a way, those lonely women, feeling irreparably wronged by life themselves, were like prisoners too.

When the jail turned his cadaver over to Mami and me, they also gave us a box with all his possessions, junk he’d accumulated during his prison life that hadn’t been confiscated: a small radio, a photo album I’d made for him, books he’d held on to rather than donated to the prison library. There were also the letters from women, but I wouldn’t read them. Even if he was dead, I thought Carlito deserved his privacy.

A few days after he hanged himself, one of those women called the house.

“I know you’re his sister,” she started. “I haven’t heard from Carlos in a few weeks. I called the prison but they won’t tell me anything.”

“You haven’t seen the news?”

“I’m in Utah.”

I told her Carlito had died but before I could go on she whimpered, “They killed him! I knew something like this would happen. He told me they were poisoning him. He was afraid to eat or drink.”

“He hanged himself.”

“How do you know that?”

“The warden told me they found him in his cell.”

I had begun to wonder how the cord didn’t tear from the beam with the force of Carlito’s weight, how he could have remained dangling like they said, or if they’d found him on the floor, choking, or already dead.

“Did you have an autopsy done?”

“No.”

“They’re lying to you. They killed him. I know it.”

She started to cry and I thought about trying to console her but just said I had to go.

After I hung up, I considered her words.

Carlito sometimes talked about how it cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep a single inmate in prison and his execution would cost taxpayers even more, so it was cheaper to keep him alive than to kill him. Still, he never said anything to me about being poisoned. I guess it wasn’t totally out of the question. I knew the guards had a thing for exacting revenge, like the time I made the mistake of openly referring to one of them as a “guard” and he became indignant as he reprimanded me. “We are corrections officers, ma’am, not security guards. We are law enforcement .” I said I was sorry for the mistake, even though what they called themselves made no difference to me, just like they could call the building Carlito lived in a “correctional facility” instead of a prison or even a purgatory, but I guess my apology didn’t come off as sincere enough because that guard kept Carlito from calling me for a week.

Carlito knew I kept a record of every instance of incarceration injustice and prisoner mistreatment for the sake of his appeals and stays of execution even though most of it couldn’t be proved since it was always his word against an officer’s.

He’d never mentioned anything about being poisoned.

I wondered whom he’d been trying to protect: the woman on the phone or me?

I still feel the impulse to report to my brother on life on the outside. Sometimes I narrate things in my mind as if he can hear me — always the good things, never the bad — because I can never shake the feeling of not wanting to disappoint him, even if it means embellishing or inventing the world as I see it.

Look where I am, Carlito. Look where I’ve taken my life.

Look at this ocean, and these animals. Look at these baby dolphins, the way they swim tight with their mamis.

Look at this sky, feel that sun, smell that air, taste that salt.

Forgive me when I hate you.

Don’t think I’ve forgotten you, hermano, even if you’ve forgotten me.

I take you everywhere with me.

I’m still your little guerrera. I’m still your Reina.

Years ago, back in Havana, Nesto says he sometimes felt so confined in the city that when he couldn’t afford to put gas in the car, rather than take a guagua, he’d stand by the road haciendo botella, waiting for a local car to give him a ride on its way out of the capital, with nothing but the clothes he wore and a few pesos in his pocket. On one of those trips, he started on Avenida Maceo and caught a lift in a Pontiac to the Vía Blanca highway. The other people sharing the ride got off at the Playas del Este or Guanabo, but he stayed on, wanting to go as far as he could out of Havana.

They only made it to the Bacunayagua Bridge before the car broke down and all the travelers had to make their own way. But Nesto didn’t look for another ride. Instead he walked down from the mirador point overlooking the canyon that sank into the Straits flushing toward the Matanzas province. There were no defined trails on the slope of the hills, just some slightly foot-worn paths made by the few people who lived down in the valley. He walked and walked until he came across a bohío in a clearing near the shoreline. An old man sat in a block of shade under the grass roof overhang with a scraggy dog curled like a horseshoe at his feet. Nesto greeted him and the old man asked what he came down there for. Nesto wasn’t in uniform so the old man knew he probably wasn’t with the police, but he could have just as easily been undercover. Nesto told him he’d just come to take a look around, and asked if the old man minded if he stayed by his hut to rest for a while.