by David R. Dow
At eight I called Jerome, who is also the office ethicist, and asked him whether I needed to report Green to the warden. I was pretty sure it was illegal for death-row inmates to have access to cell phones, meaning I knew a crime was being committed. Green was not my client, so I did not have any duty of loyalty toward him. Jerome said, Don’t you think we need to keep Green warm in case he really knows something about Quaker? I asked Jerome to set up a meeting for me to see Quaker on December 30. He said, One other thing. I went ahead and wrote up something for O’Neill. I’m going to e-mail it to you. I’d like to get it filed the day after Christmas, so can you look at it today?
I said, I thought we decided not to do anything for O’Neill.
Jerome said, Actually, you decided that. But you said that it was based on nobody’s having time. I couldn’t sleep last night so I had eight hours to write the motion. I didn’t think you’d care what I did on my time.
I told him I would look at it right away.
There’s nothing quite like being the boss.
FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, I did not turn on my computer or check my voice mail. I was completely focused on trying to avoid being a terrible dad.
My dreams were not so forgiving. The night before I was going to drive to the prison, I dreamed that Katya, Lincoln, the dog, and I were hiking up at Guardsman Pass. It was late November. A dusting of snow covered the steel-hard ground. Deep in the forest, we drank soup from a thermos and ate saltine crackers and chocolate. When we got back to the truck I asked Katya where Lincoln had run to. She said she thought I had him. Winona was running back and forth, nose to the ground, agitated. There was less than an hour of daylight left. Katya and Winona took off to retrace our steps. Just then Henry Quaker came out of the woods, carrying Lincoln on his back. Winona started to bark, a sound of joy. Lincoln was saying, Hooray for Henry, Hooray for Henry.
Maybe we don’t love our son more than you love yours, but I’m certain we love him more than my clients’ parents loved theirs. Henry might have been an exception.
At dawn on the thirtieth I went for a run with the dog. When I got back I wrote a note for Katya and Lincoln saying I’d be home in time for dinner. I drove off to see Quaker.
I TOLD QUAKER that his mom had called me. He asked whether that was why I was there on the day before New Year’s Eve. I told him about the message from Green. He said, The only time I talk to the guy is to say, What’s up? I didn’t tell him nothing about my case.
I’d driven four hours to see a client who did not need to see me.
I asked Quaker whether he wanted anything to eat. He said, They got beer in those machines? He smiled. He said, You know, I was planning on going to see Dorris on the day the police came to get me.
I had avoided asking Quaker what had happened between him and Dorris, but I felt like I had to. It was like listening to a fairy tale. He had gone to a basketball game with her when he was in ninth grade, and that night when he got home he told his mama that he had met the woman he was going to marry. He said to me, This is corny, man, but the first time I talked to her, I felt like I’d known her forever. I knew we belonged together.
Nicole, the guard, came over. She asked Henry how he was doing. I would have sworn she winked at him. She told me Happy New Year and walked away. I looked at Quaker. He shrugged.
Quaker said, Was it love at first sight for you?
I said, I thought love was only true in fairy tales.
He said, Then for someone else but not for me. I love that song. Did you know that Neil Diamond wrote it for the Monkees?
I hadn’t known that. I said, Seriously?
He said, Yeah. Some famous jazz critic, first time he heard Bill Evans, thought the guy was a lounge player. Can you imagine that? Bill Evans?
I had heard that. I said, There’s a certain kind of talent that you have to learn to appreciate.
He said, The flip side of belonging together the way we did is that Dorris needed me, needed me a lot. She was one of those girls who needed to talk and talk. I didn’t have to say nothing, just so long as I was listening, you know? And she liked to be touched. Holding hands, neck rubs. Didn’t matter what. She wanted me to be close to her.
There was a fly buzzing around inside the cage where he was sitting. It landed on his hand. He didn’t try to kill it, just shooed it away.
He said, She needed intimacy. He stressed the word, like maybe I didn’t know what it meant.
He said, After the fire, I couldn’t give her what she needed. I tried. I really did.
His eyes lost focus, like he was seeing the scene. He continued, One time I had this dream that my hands got cut off, but I didn’t even know it till I sat down at the piano in church and couldn’t play. I looked and they were just stubs. I felt all them people in the pews watching me. That’s what it was like. I was trying, but what I needed was gone.
He did not need any reassurance from me. I don’t even know if he needed me to listen, but I wanted to. He told me about the morning it happened: He was fixing breakfast for Daniel and Charisse. Standing at the stove, wooden spoon in hand, he saw he was no longer what she needed. It was a vision, not a thought, and it did not come gradually, but instead overwhelmed him, suddenly, unexpectedly, and completely. He said, It reminded me of the story in the Bible about Esau, Jacob’s twin brother, how he’s born fully developed. It was like being in a fun house at a carnival. Nothing looked familiar. He wasn’t sure which of the kids asked him to put sausage in the eggs, or whether they wanted butter on their toast.
He said, It was sort of like losing my memory, except I remembered enough to know I was losing it. Isn’t that strange?
When he told her he was missing the parts that made them right for each other, Dorris said she could wait it out, wait until he was back to normal again, however long it took. But the way he was was the way he was going to be. He knew it. He fantasized about driving off into the desert, or swimming out into the ocean, and just surrendering. He said, God has a plan for us all. I was ready for Him to take me so He could take care of my family. I asked him why he hadn’t. He looked at me with what I thought was surprise, but it might have been pity. He said, The kids, man. I had two kids. The Lord will provide bread, but He doesn’t go to ball games or swim meets. Just ’cause I was no good for Dorris didn’t mean Daniel and Charisse would be better off with no dad.
One minute I felt like we were connecting. The next I felt impossible distance. I got up to go to the bathroom. I splashed water on my face and looked in the stainless-steel mirror at the dark circles under my eyes. There was no trash can for my paper towel. I flipped it into the toilet and flushed it away. I felt an overwhelming urge to go home. When I came out an inmate I had not met was wildly waving me over. I picked up the phone. He said, You know me? I shook my head. He said, I’m Greg Whitaker. Come see me, okay? I didn’t kill nobody. I was there, but I didn’t pull the trigger. Can you please come see me? I told him I’d try and I put down the phone. Whitaker? I knew something about the case but I couldn’t think of it. My brain felt thick.
I walked back over to Quaker. He was reading. I said, What did you tell your lawyer about the insurance?
Everything about him felt so sincere, so completely honest. I wanted him to lie to me. I wanted him to give me a reason not to believe a word he said. He said, Oh, the insurance. I wondered when you were gonna ask. That was the agent’s idea. I was just planning on getting insurance for the cars. She told me that it’s a good way to save money. I told Dorris about it. She said to go on ahead. We had two children. We needed to save for college. So I bought it. I kinda thought it was a waste of money, but they just took it out of my paycheck.
He said, Do you have life insurance? I told him I didn’t. He said, See, that’s what I’m saying. Smart dudes like you don’t buy it. Why should I?
We sat silently for a while. Then he said, How come you ain’t asked about the blood? I shrugged. Please, I thought, tell me a fucking lie. He said, If it was really Danny�
��s, it must have been from one of his nosebleeds. He had ’em all the time.
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.
He said, I want you to do anything you can.
I said, Okay, but let me explain how it will work before you decide that.
I went through the normal speech, telling him that we would probably lose, and that we would not know we had lost until twenty minutes before six, and that I would call him and he would not have a chance to prepare or tell anyone good-bye.
He said, I ain’t got nobody I have to say good-bye.
Okay. But you still won’t have much time to get ready.
So you don’t think I’ll get me a stay?
I said, I think there is at most a one percent chance you’ll get a stay.
What’s that?
What’s a stay?
No. A one. What did you say?
I said there is no more than a one percent chance we�
��ll win.
He said, Yeah, that. What is it? Like out of a hundred?
I said, Percent? Yes. It’s like there are a hundred Ping-Pong balls. One chance we will win. Ninety-nine chances we will lose.
He said, Okay. Yeah. I want you to.
That night I told Katya about the visit. She knew what was coming. I said I couldn’t go to New York. She said, For somebody who claims he doesn’t want people depending on him you sure create a lot of dependency.
I said, I know it won’t make any difference, but I think it helps him to know someone is out there trying to help him. Katya didn’t say anything. I said, I think the worst thing is to feel completely alone in the universe.
Katya was mad I was not going to go to New York. She said, I get that.
LINCOLN AND KATYA were watching SpongeBob SquarePants when I got back to the beach. Lincoln ran over and hugged me. I pretended that he knocked me down and we rolled around on the floor, me tickling him, until he begged me to stop. Katya said, How did it go?
I said, Quaker asked me whether when I met you it was love at first sight.
She laughed. She said, Did you lie and say yes?
I said, If I had said yes it wouldn’t have been a lie. It just took me several years to realize it.
She said, Right.
Lincoln said, What’s love at first sight? Katya explained that it is when two people know as soon as they meet each other that they want to be with each other forever. Lincoln said, That’s impossible.
Katya looked at me and smiled. She said, He’s definitely your son.