Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

I am alone at the top of the bridge for what feels like a long time.

Me and the metal railing, smooth under my fingertips, the whistle of the salty high wind in my ears, burning my eyes, tangling my hair, with just the occasional jogger passing behind me, admiring the view on the other side of the bridge of the crowded Miami skyline, the bank where Carlito once worked folded somewhere into it.

I stare down at the water rushing beneath me, its swirling silver-crested tide pulling against both sides of the bay and out toward the mouth of the Atlantic. I become dizzy, leaning against the railing, close my eyes, and see the image of my own body falling over the railing into the ocean just as the words fill my ears and leave my lips:

“Forgive me,” I say over and over. “Forgive me.”

When he comes back to me, Nesto has in his hands a bouquet of flowers, which he says he bought from the vendor selling them at the underpass just before the turn to the bridge.

He gives them to me and I tell him they’re beautiful: a mix of sunflowers, a few purple roses, and birds-of-paradise.

“They’re not for you.” He touches my hair gently. “They’re for you to offer to the sea.”

I don’t believe in these things the way he does, but I’m grateful because now I can leave something nice behind in remembrance of Carlito.

Nesto whispers some words I don’t understand and then repeats, several times, “Yemayá awoyó, awoyó Yemayá,” and tells me to say it too.

I whisper the words, take the flowers, and hold them over the railing.

It’s hard to let them go. I feel Nesto’s hand on my back guiding me, until I’m able to release my fingers, let my knuckles splay wide like a starfish, and the flowers fall from my palm to the water below.

We watch them fan into the current, some stems pulled under and others floating away from us above the waves.

That night Nesto and I don’t tear into each other like we normally do. We lie close and quiet, letting the sound of the tide fill the cottage.

For the first time in my life, I fall asleep and don’t wake until morning. And when I do I feel different, not lighter but heavier, as if the pieces of myself I’ve left behind at the bridge over the years, that which had been left there for me by others, have been restored to me.

During a visit to see Carlito, I noticed his prison suit looked kind of dirty and realized I never thought to ask before how many changes of clothes he had, or how they got cleaned. He said the prison laundry didn’t use detergent and clothes came out smellier than they went in. So he, like a lot of guys, used shampoo bought from the commissary to wash his own clothes in his cell toilet. Another inmate had explained things like that to him a while after he arrived on his cellblock, how to make life a little easier on the inside.

If he’d been a regular lifer, Carlito would have had a cellmate, but as death row cases, he and the others in his wing were in isolation. Most of the time, the only noises they heard were of the metal doors opening and closing on their corridor, or inmates screaming and banging on their cells’ walls until guards came in, deeming a rebellious inmate violent and buckling him by the arms and legs to the four corners of his concrete bed where he would be left for hours.

But the inmates could also call to each other through the hall between security checks, press their ears against the slots in the steel door through which their meals were served, and when everyone else was quiet enough to let the echoes carry, they could even have what resembled a conversation.

Sometimes Carlito got advice like that he should consider converting to Judaism in prison because the kosher food was better than the standard fare, and sometimes they even let you have a bar mitzvah party with a cake and guests. But Carlito told me even a friendly inmate, a guy you’d swear wouldn’t try to kill you if he had the chance, could turn on you in a second. Sometimes guards showed up in the middle of the night to search his room, cuffing him, pressing him hard against the door while they stripped every photo and magazine cutout he’d taped to the walls, ripping covers off books, checking every thread in that tiny cell even though they did regular room searches three times a week, just because some other inmate claimed he was hiding a weapon; if Carlito got caught with a shank or a blade or any kind of contraband, the snitch could earn favor points for ratting him out, and maybe have one of his own discipline charges or grievances against him dropped.

The only time he got to socialize, Carlito told me, was when he got taken to a civilian hospital for pissing blood after a guard punched him in the stomach a few times, though he couldn’t tell the hospital people the truth or other guards would retaliate later. And another time, when his colon was so backed up from the prison food that he wailed in pain in his cell for three days before they agreed to send him out for tests. You had to be near death to get to go from the prison medical unit to a hospital, Carlito explained, because inmates had this idea that with only two officers to a prisoner on hospital grounds, it would be easier to take them down to escape. Some guy had pulled it off years ago and ran free for a full three months before they caught him up in Jacksonville and brought him back in.

Some inmates just tried to get to the hospital to disrupt the routine of prison life; to see people other than the guards and shrinks and religious they were used to; to have a doctor or nurse look at them with kindness; to be touched for reasons other than being handcuffed or shackled, flesh to flesh; and to be able to look out a real window without seeing prison walls and watchtowers and barbed wire surrounding them.

They would do anything it took to get there. Scraping an arm against a wall until they broke the skin, cultivating an infection until holes burned through their flesh warranting medical intervention. One guy Carlito met in the hospital had even chewed off his own toe.

There in the civilian hospital, on gurneys parked in the blocked-off prison ward, Carlito would hear from other inmates — inmates awaiting treatment for tumors growing out of their bodies like new limbs, late-diagnosed cancers, necrotic wounds from neglected diabetes, pneumonia, or even organ failure from hunger striking — about death warrants already signed by the governor up in Tallahassee and those prisoners recently executed up in Raiford.

When a nurse came by to puncture the fold of Carlito’s elbow with a needle so he could receive intravenous fluids, he’d panicked, fearing they were going to shortcut his execution and do it right there, and instead of giving him electrolytes and nutrients like they were supposed to, they’d flush his veins with chemicals and cook him from the inside out.

He began to hyperventilate and they’d had to sedate him.

When he woke up, Carlito told me, he was in a room alone. Then he saw the two corrections officers at the foot of his bed.

“Am I dead?” Carlito had asked them.

One officer looked to the other and laughed.

“When it’s your time, Castillo, it won’t be as pretty as this.”

Carlito fell silent and stared at me across the table. He looked down at my hands cupped around his.

“When you get out of here you can tell everyone about this place,” I said. “They should know what life is like in here.”

“ If I ever get out, I’ll never talk about this place again.”

“What are you going to do when you get out then?”

I was still playing at a more hopeful game, and so was Carlito. We’d had no luck getting his death penalty overturned as “cruel and unusual punishment” and therefore unconstitutional. But we were working on getting another appeal on the grounds that the jury was prejudiced by the media and the trial should have been moved to another county. The new lawyer who filed the motion told us, you never know, maybe his sentence could be commuted to life so Carlito could get paroled after twenty-five or thirty years. He’d be in his fifties and still have a chance to build a real future on the outside.