Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  It is clear to see why everyone trusts Javier: he can speak others’ lingo. Vic especially appreciates the way Javier manages to rally, always ready to squeeze a philosophical frame onto experience and in not just this way, Javier reminds him of one of his old-time students, trying to impress. Despite his cologne, Javier puts on few other airs, happy to entertain Vic’s talk of anything, even of vigilantism and lynching history as strong predictors of the density of a state’s inmates who reach capital punishment. And if the CO knows Vic’s crime, he instead chooses to talk of issues like prison mind.

  Javier has said that the people in charge of the Bureau of Prisons want more than anything to connect: to taxpayers, bureaucrats, offenders.

  “You’re one of the few appreciates the guards,” Javier tells Vic, also seeming to think that by sharing protocol with Vic, he will free at least part of Vic’s mind.

  Because Javier had loaned him the execution protocol manual, Vic knows every step that will lead to his own death. Beyond the choice of electricity over poison, few other choices exist, the supreme joke of a humane age.

  Lunchtime, doing a double shift, Javier shows up outside the slats, hair glossy, gaze muted.

  Vic senses that something embarrassing and unmanly may have transpired the day before—had the men hugged each other?—and that it might be advisable to seek restitution. “You know, prisoners want connection too,” says Vic. He senses, speaking what he meant as an apology, a thump. His terminology sounds vulnerable as a come-on; a tongue that used to be able to turn anything into glissando is now too thick to spin a riddle.

  Another piece of prison must be this loss of control. Sentences slip away with unmanageable echo, even as Vic would like to make a joke about one of Javier’s stories, the one about the dimwit doomed to be executed. He’d been condemned the year before Vic showed up in Old Parcel, when Javier had been assigned to another unit. “That cheeseburger guy?” Vic manages this half-sentence in Javier’s general direction.

  During his last meal, the guy had eaten half his cheeseburger. He had then carefully wrapped the other half in a Bureau of Prisons linen, saying to Javier: I’ll save the rest for later.

  “Dimwits on the taxpayer’s dime,” Javier says now, having delivered the lunch tray, readying himself for disappearance. No one has yet mentioned what now comes back clear as a heart attack: that Vic had asked Javier to lay his head on his chest, the memory a nail hammered through Vic’s sternum.

  “Sir, actually? Take your meds before lunch? Stay sitting up.” Javier turns back, remembering, waiting to watch as Vic chokes down the rainbow of horse pellets since this happens to be the week that finds Javier and Vic between nursing assistants. The Bureau of Prisons, one of those rare institutions suffering from a budget surplus, still has a hard time finding RNs willing to work in any capacity within the broad field of capital punishment. Given the extra medical and forensic credits Javier had taken during recertification, until the BOP finds a solution for Vic’s cell block, Javier has been asked, in the interim, to sign on for additional duty, including checking on the functioning of Vic’s pacemaker, that little electronic disc only the slightest little bulge out from his chest. “Keep going,” murmurs the guard. When Vic is done with the big-pharm golden-calf veneration, swallowing down the last of the water, his guard asks: “You okay for the afternoon, Legend?”

  Left to his own devices, sometimes Vic organizes what is happening in his case. He sits up again to write out facts in a spidery handwriting, one skittering toward the edges of the paper, claiming corners in a penmanship no longer his own:

  1st—

  he writes,

  I tried to get a mistrial called because that first defense attorney remained a drunk, despite protestations of sobriety, and had been thrown off many other cases. The judge failed to call a mistrial because it would have marred her unblemished record of completed trials.

  2nd—I am waiting for a stay on compassionate, medical grounds. That is: a cancer eats me from the inside out, no one ever fully survives brain cancer and I am on the tail end of some chemotherapeutic protocol which is not working, so why should the state go to the bother, expense and political capital involved in execution? The new lawyer says the question forms the answer, but also that given the imminent California statute, the answer could work in my favor. Too much interest by the state at this juncture could prove dangerous.

  His handwriting foils him: it fails to provide the satisfaction of ordering chaos, and in this way as well, Vic sympathizes with the short super and his love of control.

  On good days, Vic likes to call it impulse rather than choice that led him to prison: but do distinctions matter? Whatever it is, at this point Vic’s choice would have graduated from college, and now those who rule far above the razor-nosed super of Old Parcel wish to do exactly this, graduate Vic.

  At least he still has his mind or most of it, usually, and for this greater portion the officials have sustained their illusions, offering new college degrees and a choice of chaplains, the opportunity to create a prisoners’ Web site, throngs of pen pals. The only good thing about his cell block, this final row before execution, is its relative quiet, a boon for Vic’s sensitive ears for years bombarded by inmates shouting out chess moves through iron grilles at one another, each inmate with a board in parallel, moving queens, pawns and bishops made of compressed toilet paper. Vic, too, used to engage in cage chess as well as all the other desperate games, cage Monopoly, checkers, bridge, but now the people in charge have rendered upon him this balm of quiet and soon the BOP will offer its final fur-lined coat: the last meal and statement.

  Would any pharaoh not have been stymied by the idea of making a last statement?

  I am clear-sighted, pragmatic, prepared. Does one wait for the eleventh hour to write last thoughts on a subject?

  TWELFTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 12:42 P.M.

  Cynics in the fourth century suggested that parents who outlive their usefulness might become food for their children. First night in prison, Vic decided that every word he would write would be not for his dead wife but his absentee daughter, though sometimes the women he has known and what he imagines as their poisonous sac of rage against him merge and in this way his wife and daughter appear to be one. It’s about correcting behavior, not being, his wife used to caution whenever he mentioned using some harsh, old-world child-rearing technique on their daughter Lana. He used to say back: she has been spared the switch and probably spoiled.

  Though in truth, given his background, he had never been that vigorous a believer in any kind of corporal discipline. If Mary could have lived and just known her wrongness, lived with wrongness at the base of her self, clearly Vic would have chosen that she still be alive. No man wants a dead wife. Not divorced, not separated but dead when a man can’t talk back to death. The ultimate gag. In fact everything in these last few years, everything but his luck in being assigned such a supreme, excellent correctional officer as Javier a few months ago, seems to have been designed to lead Vic toward mutism or at least superior control of his mouth.

  Ever since those first days in prison, Vic has given up protesting his innocence. As the first of the guards had told him during intake, people never say what they’re in for and, besides, no one will believe you anyway.

  That first guard, avuncular Kevin Barraco with his long jaw scar, had taken chewing gum from Vic because gum of all flavors can jam a lock after a guard leaves, and had also tossed the highlighter pen Vic used to keep compulsively in his chest pocket, telling prisoner #4267 that highlighters make marks that the surveillance camera regards as identical to the invisible-ink numbers stamped onto visitors’ hands. Kevin Barraco had been so casual in surrendering prison secrets that Vic could not help but be fascinated by what seemed like the tubercular hotel he was entering for a little R and R. The guard had said: look, you’ll thrive if you assume everyone has maximum guilt. People pass in the halls and who cares what they stink of, disinfectant or damp wool blankets, you got
to turn your eyes inside, play the game, smell only mood. You’ll never get to pretend you have a pressing arrangement someplace else.

  Based on the optimism of the first of a phalanx of forgettable, incompetent lawyers, that first year Vic still believed he would get out. Self-defense, mistrial: the ideas had floated like happy unpopped balloons at one of his daughter’s old-time birthday parties. Back in the child balloon era, he used to think that actually all he needed was the equivalent of a hotel, some anonymous place functioning on its own rules, plus a few good years alone without family to think. You get what you wish for, he’d preached to the followers his family called his shaggies, and here for years he has tasted the bad news: prison lets him think. The special cruelty being that, whatever liberal ideals anyone has about rehabilitation, redirection, recidivism, no way in hell can the officials fill your moments, the machine so much huger than anyone’s ideals, knowing that around every corner, second-guessing awaits you. What might I have done differently? And the state knows this second-guessing will kill you better than any state-devised torture, your time like taffy, uncountably palpable. The key is that you must stretch into time, not let it stretch you.

  Sometimes Vic uses the bones they throw, time-killers like the frat-like movie nights with glazed donuts, or even the computer room, filled with the banter of all offenders deemed mid-risk by the super. Some leftist billionaire had gold-rushed the commodity of blue-green algae and in a similar onrush of do-gooder spirit had granted the prison its computers, each branded with his company’s name in letters the exact hue of the green-lace mildew spilling down the room’s corners.

  Though Vic got iron-barred before people started using the Internet for everything, he quickly understood the idea of a web connecting people’s brains—his earliest work had rotated around this idea—and so he became among the first in his cell block to apply for privileges. In the computer room, using this new web to catch old flies, sometimes he almost finds that former thrill of freedom. Only occasionally does he stoop to looking up the sites everyone else looks up: the best way to pick padlocks or the lurid history of some surly CO.

  Part of the problem is that the computer room is so dank and subterranean: whatever bones the officials throw your way, they also make sure you never forget that above lives the law with its memory of your act, and this act means you have become unremarkable muck flowing below others’ surface gratings. Sometimes in their special cruelty the officials of the machine open a slat in the computer room so offenders catch a surprise whiff, not cafeteria-fried chicken but rather wet daisies reaching up.

  During intake, Vic had failed to guess at the machine’s vastness, not understanding that some force had it in for him, one that would find maximum excitation if the rest of his life became one long bridge of sighs, and that also there would be little he could do against any chunk of the machine without getting written up as some hapless revolutionary.

  After he turned himself in, a foolish believer in the blindness of justice, he had no idea how reciprocal his act would become, how terrifyingly symmetric. His faith had claimed that a justice that wished to hear both sides existed and that such justice would let him live, the delusion clinging even after they slapped him with a date and an end that bore the thousand plumes of all those ridiculous inmate nicknames, the product of the bastard creativity that flourishes only inside a machine like state-sponsored execution. At first he finds the names for execution so optimistically witty: the necktie party and meat-fryer, the crown of thorns, the reverse toilet, the Rosenberg hug, the sociable, names letting a person both belittle and cozy up to a cranky patriarch. Later Vic will revile the poverty of nicknames: whatever its tribe members call execution, the thing still will beat them.

  What Vic pores over and cannot help but revisit is less his bad act and more his failure in facing off against the jury, composed of bland western faces who surely lived in their own glass Sacramento houses and yet dared throw such stones, convicting him before going home to sleep just as if Vic Mahler—he had to think of his case as belonging to an entity named Vic Mahler—lacked extenuating circumstances. For all that Vic had tried, he had not been able to talk them out of their smugness.

  After twenty-plus years, the actual jury faces had faded enough to let other demons take their place: the parade of lawyers breathless in explaining the shifting winds of constitutionality, the governor’s fickle finger allowing some offenders to live and others go the way of the chair, Vic witness to it all, to the rising popularity of lethal injection, the trails of campaign promises made and rescinded, the referenda and ballot initiatives, the need to build new prisons to satisfy communities, the state’s debates over fear versus finances unending. It is clear that the machine undergoes its convulsions, the machine with its need to keep him in a place evil enough to boil the princeliness off any frog. Truly, the slowness of the boil is most ingenious, one that makes Vic’s current address the obverse of Eden, a sadist’s ultimate expulsion. So why had his overmasters not gone and offed Vic years ago? Instead they want him to second-guess and suffer, to choke on the hemlock of memory, to sight his own Gomorrah. They like him less as a man and more as their own personal pillar of salt.

  One day someone will take his tray.

  One day, unseen, people he has never met, members of the community benefiting from the prison’s placement in a boom-and-bust agricultural valley, workers trained and registered for the job, will emerge from the arteries and move toward the heart, knowledgeable about oxygen. Everyone will file into an execution room the color of gray fingernails. The workers’ goal will be to guarantee that the air-conditioning works and lighting functions. Their chief concern will be that all inside, witnesses and condemned alike, remain comfortable. To the warden, at some point, they will give a thumbs-up.

  A man or woman, because at this point it might still be a woman, will press a switch. Down the hall a blue light will blink its jealous eye, a sign for the strip search in his cell, a mild indignity Vic likes, the laying-on of hands a rite good enough to ease a backache made chronic after years on a cot, the hands better than a visit from the doctor, and this when, in life outside, he had never known as good a doctor as you find inside, feeling himself lucky to have encountered so many wonderful doctors, with names he has forgotten, all dedicated to promoting his health.

  After the strip search will come the reverse promenade.

  Somewhere between the opening and closing of curtains, he will make his last statement, noted by the Bureau of Prisons official recorder. He will have five minutes to speak before select witnesses, numbering exactly zero, an empathetic and beautiful figure to contemplate, zero, a gift from the Arabs, an icon comprehending the existential abyss. If he will not have managed to summon his daughter to see him while he lives, why would he invite his heir to be with him, buffering him from zero at the moment of death? So he will be alone, out of the cradle forever alone, and yet he will have five minutes to speak, this allowance a humanistic vestige from the Greeks and Romans: he will speak before the Warden, the Executioner and the Recorder. He could call these officials’ mandate to inscribe his utterance a gift of the Enlightenment, and, as if Vic were truly a pharaoh or at least a Christ, he will become their burnt offering, reminding them of the worth of their own survival as well as their bourgeois pieties, allowing them to feel sober and practical in considering how many gifts they have given him on the path deathward.

  At the right moment, 1:15 p.m. on December 26, 2008, drapes will be pulled so that the witnesses won’t view suffering. The drapes, he notes, are a gift of the Americas: he may know the history of execution but the morphology still confounds him. In one of his books, which exactly he can’t remember, he had called suffering the dramatic interpretation that life performs on pain. He had told Javier that the drapes must deprive the officials of theater, though the drapes must also act as a covered mirror for their own conscience.

  And no one will care whether all memory of him dies right there or if his mem
ory is resuscitated and finds new life.

  Thus, until now, he has left the crumpled form on which he could write a final statement elegantly empty. Any script or utterance will be released to the media and his living heir.

  Now, pen poised, given the equivalent of a fairytale’s final wish, he considers what a lifetime of speech might free him to set down.

  I would like to be given one last choice, he writes before immediately striking it out.

  Part Two

  THIRTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 4:02 A.M.

  Rose could begin with superstition and the way all commonplaces have turned into a command. All signs have been speaking to her in the imperative. WASTE reads a trashcan and she wishes to chant back: I refuse, I will not waste away. THE UNIVERSAL SIGN FOR CHOKING, showing someone gagging, makes her say: I am no one’s universal, I will not sign for choking. When she reaches for an alarm clock in the dark, her fingers close on a penknife and not because of the bloody cut she gets but because she reached for the wrong thing, her day falters.

  For years she has been sending letters to someone on death row who used to write back letters funny and deep and these had been good omens, but during these same years this man has refused to list her as someone who could visit. He keeps his daughter’s name lonely on the list, Lana Mahler, and this when he lives behind bars 108 miles north, a number with enough mystical overtones to have invited Rose up from the apartment she calls her little rabbit hutch in Ellay.

  Thirteen days before his date, no stay in sight, she tells herself she must have struck the wrong note. Plus she has failed to procure his absentee daughter for him.

  Zero letters from him in the last three months. A freak heat wave demolishing a town that makes it an article of faith to scorn air conditioners as a sign of imperfection. She leans over the kitchen sink and dyes her hair with sixteen ounces of black potion, breaking with a recent spell of bad luck. The chemicals she inhales with greed, the friendly tang of a foreign body piercing her solitude.