Dividing by Zero – Part Six

It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

Basic geometry: Rod lived in a cell that was directly above Rayford, so it should have been a simple enough matter for him to shoot his fishing line through the grate on his door, over the handrail, and through the stairwell down to One-Row, where our friend could fish it in. Once connected, Rod could put Rayford’s share of the tacos on the line, and the old man could pull them in the side of his door. Easy. We were pros, we had forty years of shared prison time, we’d done this sort of thing a thousand times. It almost always works. Until it doesn’t.

“Uh, problem,” Rod called out to me on the mics. 

“I don’t see one. These are pretty good. My compliments to the chef,” I responded, mouth half full.

“No, the problem is on the run. Use your mirror.”

It took me a minute to get situated but, once I had the mirror at the right angle, I saw it: Rod’s line had somehow flipped around one of the handrails and gotten snagged. Trying to untangle it, he’d told Rayford to “hold on” but somehow the old man had heard “go on” and started pulling. A number of cocktails may or may not have had something to do with the miscommunication. The end result was that Rod’s line had snapped and a bag filled with tacos was now hanging suspended about eight feet above the floor of One-Row. Wonderful, I thought to myself, grabbing my own line and pole.

This was not the first time such a thing had happened. On New Year’s Eve of 2012, someone had gotten the brilliant idea of making tamales at 2:30am. Again, it may be relevant that a highly significant majority of the eight guys on the mics involved in this decision were absolutely annihilated on prison hooch. A division of labor was announced, and several guys upstairs started stomping on bags of corn and tortilla chips to make the masa. Once this was complete, Hardwood bagged everything up and ran line with my neighbor, Juanillo. In some kind of way, the line got so twisted up around itself that with all of the drunken pulling and tugging, the plastic bag ripped and about six pounds of masa went shplattering all over the run. Those of us on One-Row merely stared at this most unpleasant turn of events until Juanillo started singing an impromptu corrido about a narcotrafficante named Little Masa that had gotten gunned down by a crooked cop while he was running along the edge of a ravine.

Thus was born the legend of Little Masa. Any time someone’s door got kicked in by Gang Intelligence and we couldn’t genuinely determine who was behind the snitchery, he caught the blame: “Fuckin’ Little Masa did that shit.” Likewise, whenever the goon squad’s lieutenant pulled convicts out to his office to interrogate them over something, Little Masa became the culprit: “Look, you didn’t hear this from me, but there’s this guy….” The TDCJ probably has a rather large file stuffed with reports on the still-unidentified Little Masa and his exploits. That is one bad hombre. 

“Oh, you guys are so screwed,” John “Batman” Battaglia piped in back in the present, after hearing my first few failed attempts at snagging Rayford’s tacos from peril.

“Not helpful, sir.”

“I mean, not Rayford,” John continued. “They’ll probably let him make it on this, since he’s so screwed in another way. You guys are toast, though.”

“Okay, Bruce Wayne,” I murmured, taking aim again.

“I don’t want to go by Batman anymore,” he shot back, masterfully missing the point I was trying to make about being occupied. Even if I wasn’t, it’s easier to change your eyeballs than a prison nickname, so he was pretty much out of luck.

“You’ve got about ten minutes until the next security check. They find that, they’re going to take all of your stuff.”

“Yes, thank you for your concern,” I responded, still trying to snag the line. Disciplinary write-ups result in losing most of your property for ninety days. None of us had ninety days left. Rayford had less than twenty-four hours – thus John’s comment about him being screwed. None of the rest of us wanted to finish our bids in an empty cell, though. More out of pure luck than from any type of skill, I was able to catch Rod’s line and pull Rayford’s dinner back from the abyss. The operation hadn’t gone completely unnoticed, however, as Officer P called out “Just in time, guys,” as he passed through during his next inspection of the Death Watch section.

That night was one of the darkest I had ever experienced on the Row. Rayford was loved by pretty much everyone, and most of us stayed up until past midnight talking to him. He made me promise to cheer on the Dallas Cowboys for one game, should I survive our current ordeal. (I did, during the 2018 season when Dallas stomped on New Orleans; I’m sure he would have been mightily pleased over the whole affair, since I care about sports about as much as I care about de Rham cohomology… or less, now that I actually type that out.) I ended up staying awake all night. Rayford wanted me in the dayroom first round so I could receive and then disperse all of his property. This is considered good form amongst convicts: to leave behind the things that could still benefit the struggling. It was definitely noticed when, after Anthony “T-Bone” Shore had been manhandled out to his last visits, the Property Officer had needed to use two carts to lug out all of his belongings. A few days later, it was widely reported that Anthony had given both his property and his body to one of the largest murderabilia dealers in the nation, a name I refuse to mention as I do not wish to grant him any undeserved attention. A well-known “victims’ rights advocate” (read: pro-death penalty activist), whose name I omit for the very same reason, was heard on the local Fox affiliate hyperventilating over this move: “Even after death, Anthony Shore still craves and wants the limelight, the attention… Wherever he is now, he’s still having the last laugh going ‘people will never forget me.’” Considering this man is reported to have bought enormous amounts of murderabilia “so that others can’t get it” (Huh?), I’m not sure how far he should be trusted to determine what, if anything, the dead are thinking.

In his last statement, T-Bone apologized to the families of the women he killed, and said he was leaving with a clear conscience. It is recorded that he then said, “There is no others.” I suspect what he actually said was “There are no others,” meaning victims. After everything, his entire shtick about being the I-45 Strangler was a ruse. As he died, he also said: “I can feel that it does burn. Burning!” his voice rising at the end. Texas has been using compounded pentobarbital for years, purchased covertly from vendors that are not subject to the same stringent federal statutes as pharmaceutical companies, and whose identities are shrouded by state law. Me and two other inmates filed a separate appeal on this issue in 2013, and the Supreme Court had scheduled it to be heard in conference on 23 February 2018 – the day after my execution, a point that most people in my camp thought horrible, but which made me smile: that’s pretty much how things work in this system. Inmates had been making similar statements to T-Bone’s for some time about the solution burning, and pharmaceutical experts had begun to opine that it was possible that Texas’ supplies had expired. I never heard anyone I shared the Deathwatch cells with voice concern over this, though. Given all that was going on, I guess a few minutes of pain, no matter how excruciating, just didn’t move the needle much with us anymore.

In any case, Rayford didn’t seem to have any of T-Bone’s après-death chicanery in mind. That next morning, reeling from grief and exhaustion, I roped in his line and pulled his radio, the last of his commissary items, and a few of his books into the dayroom. Rayford was a man that did nothing but add to the overall quotient of dignity and decency on the Row, and to see him so ruthlessly subtracted from our lives stung (and still does). A few minutes after I’d sent his belongings to the next section, an escort team arrived with a wheelchair. In contrast to T-Bone, no ranking officer was present, no scrum of police detectives, no humiliating display of naked, dancing flesh. When they wheeled Rayford out, he was smiling at everyone and telling them he loved them, and that he’d be “back later [that] night.” The chorus of men’s voices wishing him goodbye from other sections was deafening, and the guards let him stop in the atrium next to the picket, so everyone got a chance to say something.

In his last statement, Rayford apologized and asked forgiveness for what he’d done, saying that “it has been bothering [him] for a long time.” He then thanked his supporters and asked that his kids be told that he was “sorry for being a disappointment.” As the drugs entered his system, he began to writhe and shake on the gurney. When it was announced on the 7pm NPR newscast that Rayford had not been granted a stay, Batman knocked on my wall. “Guess that means you are on deck.” His date was only two days away. I didn’t say anything in response. What is one supposed to say to that?

There was something about Rayford’s death that acted like a superconducting magnet attracting silence. I wasn’t the only person to notice this. Even Batman seemed to be infected with it, after his initial comment. In the forty-eight hours between Rayford’s exit and his own, he essentially shut down, and I do not recall him having a single substantive conversation with anyone.

Sadly, this included last visits. When an inmate is scheduled to die on a Thursday, he is allowed “all day” (8am to 5pm) visits on Monday and Tuesday, and “half day” (8am to noon) visits on Wednesday and Thursday. No one came to see him off on 1 February 2018, a sad testament to how he had spent his years in prison. Rather than go to the visitation room, the major had him placed in A-Section’s dayroom at 8am, where he stayed until noon. Several times I approached my door, trying to think of something to say to him. He spent most of his time laying on the steel table, staring at the ceiling. I’m ashamed to say that I never could find a way of breaking the ice. I had never seen any spark of human compassion or warmth in him, no desire to be enfolded into the human family. (I wasn’t the only one to have trouble with this: when Billy Tracy began publishing his Deathwatch Journal , he asked multiple people to try to come up with anything positive to say about Batman; only Rod was able to come up with the fact of his military service. “What are thorns but branches that were never given a chance to grow?” he added. “That’s not why thorns evolved, bro,” I opined. “You are missing the metaphor,” he sighed.) I might have eventually figured out how to approach him, save that Tabler beat me to the punch. John cut off his attempt to conversate pretty quickly: “You worry about yourself, Richard, and let me worry about me.” A few minutes later, a priest came along to perform the rite of extreme unction. A half hour later, he was gone, carted away by a throng of stern-faced men in grey uniforms.  Six hours later, he was dead. Aside from acknowledging his ex-wife, he didn’t make a last statement, perhaps the only time in his life where he didn’t insist on having the last word.

I was, to continue John’s metaphor, up to bat.

*****

I was convicted and sentenced to death for masterminding the 10 December 2003 killings of my mother and brother. My father was also a target, but he survived that attack and went on to forgive me for my part in the plot, a tale he told in his New York Times Best Seller book, Murder by Family. This remarkable stance had its roots in his Christian faith, though I suspect it wouldn’t have mattered much if he had been Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist or a follower of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Some people just have an inherent goodness of character that holds up all of the beliefs and creeds they build on top of that core. In every war, every conflict, one can find people who are capable of looking directly into supernovas of pain and evil and never lose sight of who they are inside. I’m far too clumsy a wordsmith to even approach this subject; everything I write about my dad always ends up falling short, makes it sound like his journey was far simpler than it was in reality. There were moments after the deaths of my mom and brother, and before my eventual flight to Mexico, where I witnessed my father break down, shattered into innumerable jagged shards. I don’t know how he ever managed to tape himself back together again. He walked through hell in a gasoline trench coat and came out the other side unsinged. If I have ever once borne my punishments with the tiniest hint of dignity, if I have ever been successful at overcoming my past and becoming something better than I was, it is largely due to his example. 

This could have been a pretty amazing story of love and forgiveness. However, the elected District Attorney of Fort Bend County, John Healey, was not so minded, and chose to pursue the death penalty over the increasingly strident objections of my family. On one occasion, my father fell to his knees in Healey’s office and literally begged him not to follow a course that would only bring him more pain. Healey was unmoved. This produced a state of affairs where the elected District Attorney of a politically conservative county began treating the surviving victims of a horrendous crime as if they were defendants themselves. While this is highly atypical, there really wasn’t any remedy to be found in the law. Judges are under no obligation to care about the opinions of victims. If there was to be any relief found, it was going to have to come via the executive clemency process, a sort of last resort for the condemned where they plead directly to the Governor for mercy. This seldom happens in Texas; indeed, it has been granted only twice since the Gregg decision revived the death penalty: once under Governor Bush, once under Rick Perry. This was the longest of shots, one made a bit more difficult by the fact that the current Governor, Greg Abbott, had been the Attorney General responsible for prosecuting my case in the federal courts. To say that he needed a little convincing to save my life is to use a Texas-sized understatement. 

To assist with this approach, attorney Keith Hampton and the rest of my family and friends devised a media strategy that we hoped would put the State on the defensive, one that ultimately proved to be very effective.

The slow build from local to regional media outlets exploded upward once the Washington Post ran a lengthy story on my case. This culminated in mentions on national news programs, and an invitation for my father to appear on a two-segment interview with Megyn Kelly on her show. I’m not in love with Ms Kelly’s politics; not too long after this interview, she made some foolish statements regarding race that ultimately ended her relationship with NBC. Still, for all that, she was extremely kind towards my dad, and was perceptive enough to make the comment that it seemed odd that a state that fashioned itself as a “victims’ rights paradise” should be so aggressive in trampling my father’s desires. “I feel that ‘victims’ rights’ should include the desire for mercy, not just for retribution,” he responded.

“You hear that?” Rod asked me, after listening to the interview on the radio.

“I heard all of it,” I replied quietly, wishing I could have seen my dad’s face as he spoke.

“I’m talking about the sound of a bunch of tight-asses squirming in their chairs in Austin,” he laughed. “He’s their worst nightmare: a genuinely compassionate conservative. It must be like seeing a unicorn or a dragon in the real world for them: a thing of fantasy plopped right down in the Wendy’s drive-thru.”

“That’s assuming anyone in Austin watches Megyn Kelly,” I muttered. It seemed to me that Texas government officials had managed to construct some awfully thick ideological walls separating them from the rest of the 21st Century, and it was an open question as to whether any of them were even aware of what was going on in the mediaverse. Twenty-four hours later, I got an answer of sorts.

The following day an escort team approached my door a little past 9am. I was informed that a member of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles was here to meet with me. When I asked if either of the officers had overheard the person’s name, they could only recall the first: James. My hopes, so briefly sent skyward by the positive news coverage, crashed to the earth in flames. Over the course of our opposition research, we had graded each of the seven members of the Board based on their past voting history and what few public statements we could find. We had rated two members as being relatively open-minded, which in this context simply meant they had voted to commute the sentences of multiple inmates. Three others were considered moderates, meaning they had voted on a single occasion to commute. Two others had never done so, and were rated as guaranteed “no” votes, a sort of automatic win for the State on every occasion. In other words, our ceiling was five votes – that was the best-case scenario.

James LaFavers was at the bottom of every grade, easily the least likely member to vote for clemency. The thinking was, if they sent him or Frederico Rangel they had already decided to deny my appeal for clemency and were merely looking for pretextual reasons to do so. I didn’t have the time to reflect much on this as they led me to the meeting; my only memory is that I felt like I was about to walk into a massacre.

The legal booth they led me to was remarkably free of bodily waste this time around; someone must have given the place a once-over before the big man arrived. I’d only been in the booth for a minute or so when a captain opened the opposite door and stood to one side. A young, pretty lady with a series of manila folders stepped in, studiously not looking me in the eye. She shifted to my right, taking a plastic chair, and began to lay out files, still acting for all the world like I was not present. I looked down at the stacks of paperwork she had unloaded. They were quite large – definitely larger than the ones I had brought. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. I had been well-monitored, apparently, the panopticon showing itself to be uncharacteristically vigilant.

A few minutes passed before the lady was joined by a distinguished looking man in his late 50s or early 60s. Before taking his seat, he gave me a long, penetrating stare. I returned it. More than 160 men had been executed in my time on the Row; many of these had submitted petitions that moved across this man’s desk. He had denied every last one of them. In countless hours of speculation, I had wondered what impenetrably tough elements constituted such men, what thoughts and feelings made such men possible. I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if LaFavers had shown up dressed like an orc out of Tolkien, chewing on the thighbone of an ox. Instead, he wore a surprisingly modern sports coat and Oxford shirt, a trendier ensemble than I had expected from a conservative demi-god from the backwater burg of Abilene. The only obvious symbol of power he carried with him – outside of that glare, perhaps – was a lapel pin bearing the seal of Texas. Beyond that, LaFavers looked alarmingly normal. That’s my primary memory of those first few moments: that the guy looked like someone that you might run into in the dairy section of the grocery store, trying to decide if all the hype surrounding almond milk was worth the added cost. He didn’t look like a killer. I suspect on some level he was thinking the same thing about me.

Over the course of the next few hours, I was given a master lesson on how to pin a human being to the wall and then dissect them using mere words, glances, and innuendos. I knew LaFavers had years of experience in the Amarillo Police Department, but his skill as an interrogator wasn’t immediately apparent. He used, for want of a better descriptor, a Colombo-esque strategy, a sort of Gee, I’m-not-very-good-at-this-whole-thing hucksterism that strongly implied he hadn’t even read my file until maybe that morning. Variations of “Well, I’m obviously not as smart as you” were deployed at least four or five times in the first half hour. If there was any indication that he was something other than what he seemed, it was the way he used the volume of his voice and his body language to manipulate my mental state. He was fond of lowering his voice and leaning back slightly, as if he were relaxing, attempting to engage in a more intimate level of conversation. When I leaned forward to better hear him, to complete the relational circuit, so to speak, he would cross his arms or turn his body or face slightly. Subtle stuff, but when one’s life depends on having a genuine connection with someone, it can leave you feeling oddly battered. And he knew what he was doing. I caught a whisper of a smile flicker across his face when I stopped playing the game, and just resolved to sit like a stone in my chair and focus on reading his lips: the cat grinning at the mouse that has recognized the hopelessness of its quandary and has simply resolved to getting the unpleasant parts over with. When you add the obvious skepticism bordering on outright hostility of his questioning, it seemed pretty obvious to me from the beginning that he had walked into that room a solid vote for Fort Bend county, a solid vote for denial.

This isn’t to suggest that this conversation was as one-dimensional as the previous one I’d had with the Calvinist parole officer. As we delved further into my history, it became increasingly obvious that this man knew quite a lot about me, including information that he could have only gathered from reading some of my essays and letters to my friends and family. At first, I wasn’t sure if I was imagining this, but when he specifically linked some of my post-conviction behavior to a quest for redemption – a subject I’ve written about extensively – it seemed odd. When he opined that he tended to agree with “whoever it was” that wrote that it wasn’t the experience of redemption that drives good people, but the desire for it, my jaw fell open.

“Sound familiar?” he asked, smiling for the first time.

“I… wrote that. Like, eight years ago,” I responded, still stunned.

“Oh, we have quite a file on you.”

“File?’ laughed the woman, the first time during the entire interview she’d done anything but write notes on her pad of paper. “Try ‘filing cabinets’ in the plural.”

I tried to regroup. “I still believe that, what I wrote. Sometimes I think it’s a little naïve, but I’m not sure I’d want to live in a universe where we aren’t all living on some kind of moral arc, where we are never worth more than the worst moments in our lives.” I looked up at LaFavers. “Scratch that: I’ve been living in that universe since September of 2005, and it’s not really living.”

This exchanged seemed to shift the tone of the conversation. It was never friendly, but LaFavers no longer seemed to be trying to catch me in a lie. It felt like he had mostly been trying to determine if the person I represented myself as in my epistolary life in any way synched with who I was in the real world. Once he verified that, he moved on to different goals. He sincerely seemed to want to understand how my brain worked in 2003, and how I might have changed in fifteen years. When my answers weren’t immediately clear, we explored why that might be, the sort of messiness that lurks at the core of the human condition. To my great surprise, he seemed to understand that we are all a tight confluence of good and evil, light and darkness, good intentions mixed with vain desires and half-understood drives. This was not a man that lived in a world of black and white: he saw in grayscale. I found myself simultaneously uplifted by this realization and incredibly unnerved. I finally confessed to this, blurting out: “This is not what I had expected from you.”

“What did you expect? Another lecture on predestination?”

I blinked. “You read my letter to my dad regarding the last hearing.”

“I read all kinds of things. You didn’t answer the question.”

I admitted that I had anticipated meeting with one of the relative moderates on the Board, that we had war-gamed my confrontation with everyone but him and the member from Huntsville. He grinned at this. “What did your attorneys advise you to do? I throw you off your game any?” I confessed that over the course of my years in prison, I had developed a way about myself that some people regarded as cold or aloof, and which detractors claimed was evidence of sociopathy. I explained that this was not how I was in the freeworld, that it was a response to surviving in a dangerous environment where mistakes in social situations had real consequences to one’s personal safety, coupled with a deep desire to become a highly disciplined person, someone who was contemplative rather than rash. I had simply come to distrust myself to the degree that I required constant monitoring – the word I used was “stalking” – of all of my actions and thoughts, to make sure that I was not acting immorally. This was often misperceived as a sort of indifference or disinterest in my surroundings, instead of the exact opposite: a form of caution rooted in not doing any additional damage.

“One of my attorneys told me I had to hide my ‘Inner Spock’. She said you wouldn’t understand it. But that’s one of the things I’m most pleased about, because since I slowed myself down like this and learned to put my thoughts under a microscope, I haven’t made any major mistakes. I generally understand my motivations now, and I separate stimulus and response to the degree that when I do or say something, it’s deliberate and intentional, not mere reflex. I’m terrified of what I’ve done, not because of the consequences of my actions, but because of the original motive. The only way I’ve ever found to police my motives in real-time is to treat my thoughts like a peer-reviewer analyses a submission to an academic journal.”

This apparently interested the note-taker, because her pen was moving very quickly now. LaFavers allowed her to catch up before we circled back to the subject of remorse. He was especially interested in whether my father’s forgiveness of my actions had had any bearing on what I had previously labelled as my rehabilitation process. I told him that I felt it was integral to it, that alone among my peers I had been given the opportunity to come face-to-face with the person I had wounded most with my conduct. While this was incredibly painful at times, I felt that this constant reminder of the horror I had inflicted had made reform inescapable. I mentioned that I felt it connected me also to a sense of shame, which had been central to my process. That produced a discernible effect in LaFavers, and we ended up talking about how that concept had seemed to evaporate from our culture in recent decades. I managed to avoid the subject of our commander-in-chief, a man I had no doubts he had voted for, but only by the tiniest of margins: a comment about Trump being a walking Aesop’s Fable about those who lie down with dogs died on my lips, and its ethereal corpse floated between us for a moment.

“Everything you are telling me relies on a sort of… I don’t know, let’s call it an introspective nature of yours. Where did that come from?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. I’ve mostly lived inside my own head my whole life, and this has always seemed, to me, to be my greatest flaw; an inability to connect comfortably with other people in truly meaningful ways. To see this flipped around and listed as a catalyst for my rehabilitation had always disturbed me a little, and I wasn’t sure how to explain it succinctly.

“If you are asking for some sort of replicable process, I guess all I can say is, if you do not belong to the place you call home and cannot belong anywhere else, you can’t help but to live anywhere besides the inside of your thoughts. Who I am is a result of that vagrancy. I exist here in prison. I do not live here.”

We had been talking for more than two hours when LaFavers glanced at his watch. He settled back into his chair and gave me another of his long looks. He steepled his fingers and looked pensive. “Is there anything else you’d like to say, before I go?”

Cue the sound of my mental machinery blowing gasket after gasket, the tearing, screaming agony of a device pushed beyond its limits. What does one say when they have exactly one opportunity to try to justify their continued existence? I thought back over the course of our conversation. We’d covered my schooling, my writings. We’d discussed the stance of anyone that could reasonably be considered to have been negatively affected by my crime, and the efforts I’d gone to in order to rebuild as many of those relationships as possible. I felt like I’d hit all of the major points on my list, but that the conversation was somehow still desperately incomplete. Was I supposed to beg? That seemed pathetic, and like many of the memoirs I’d read of men who were facing execution, to me dying seemed less important than holding on to some kind of dignity. When I looked up at Mr LaFavers, he seemed to sense some of my unease. That he should be capable of such feats of empathy once again sent me into spirals of confusion. Neither of us was exactly playing close to the role that the other had expected.

That finally settled things for me – I instantly knew what I wanted to talk about. This was my one and only chance to speak directly to power, to a man who had sat in front of this same glass interface, across from my friends, and decided their lives were not worth preserving. I started out by telling him that he was at least partially supervising, and therefore partially responsible for, a prison system that had become increasingly toxic to any conception of human decency, that the so-called bureaucratic reforms of the past two decades had produced a culture of hostile indifference towards those of us in white uniforms that was actually an order of magnitude worse than outright barbarism. I supplied him with a few examples of officer behavior that I had witnessed that very morning that in any rational corrective regime would have resulted in the immediate termination of those guards, but which had nevertheless become de rigueur across the state. I could see a frown beginning to form on the clerk’s face as she continued jotting down my words, but LaFavers’s facial topography remained flat.

Despite all of the socialization pressures promoting deviance that assailed us, I told him that I had known men who had reformed themselves over the years and turned not just into moral, decent convicts, but also into fantastic human beings. I gave him some examples: I told him about my friend Arnold Prieto, Jr, and how he had paid for correspondence courses to complete his high school diploma with his art. I listed numerous men who had essentially been born into gangs, but who had, during their time on the Row, not only severed their ties to these organizations but had persuaded others to do the same – and that this was the sole reason why prison families had far less influence in these pods than virtually anywhere else in the system. I told him about Santos Minjarez, who, while calmly dying of an imminently treatable Hepatitis C infection, cheerily gave away all of his belongings in a spirit of solidarity, and how in the midst of months of vomiting and weight loss and an inability to crawl the six feet from his bed to his door to get his trays, somehow never gave in to bitterness over the fact that he was being allowed to die because the drugs that could have saved him were deemed to be too expensive for use on prisoners.

“I want you to understand that this state regularly kills men who, were they to be released instead of being executed, would never get so much as a traffic ticket going forward. Can you understand that?” I pleaded at last, tears running down my face. I don’t know how they got there. I’m not a crier, but there they were nonetheless. I guess I just wanted some kind of accounting for all of the horror I’d witnessed, and LaFavers was as close as I was ever going to come to meeting someone who actually had a say in how things operated in those halls. I didn’t really expect him to answer me, but he actually nodded in a tired way and took a deep breath. I could see that my rant had blasted right through the glass separating us and struck him deeply. Whether this had helped me or hurt me was a mystery at this point and, in that moment, I didn’t care; regret and second-guessing would come later that night. It had simply felt right. From a distance, it was one of my few good moments during my entire execution experience.

“Well, I think that covers everything,” LaFavers said at last, nodding to his assistant, who immediately began packing up to leave. He turned and gave me another long look, but the certainty he’d displayed in the beginning had evaporated. “What did you think of all this?”

“The hearing itself?”

“Yes.”

I hesitated. I did not want to admit that LaFavers was an interesting person, who, in different circumstances in another life, I’d have enjoyed getting to know. All of these thoughts felt treasonous to me, like I’d suddenly crawled out of my trench, stepped over the concertina wire, and gone to have tea with the other side in the middle of No Man’s Land. Still, it felt important to be honest about how conflicted my feelings were. “This was more… human… than I expected it to be.”

“We’re all just people here,” he responded solemnly.

I wanted to hug him. I wanted to punch him. I wanted to punch myself for wanting to embrace him, then again for my inability to see him as anything other than the enemy. I wanted to weep for our poor, derelict species and the ideologies that trap us. Instead, I pointed to the seal on his lapel pin.

“That says otherwise.”

He reached out and stuck a finger through the mesh divider. “Good luck, Mr Whitaker.” Then he was gone.

When an escort team finally came to retrieve me, I was informed I had an attorney visit. I was led to the visitation room, where one of my lawyers, David Dow, was waiting on me. He was shocked to find out I’d already had my hearing with the Board – all the lawyers involved had been told that it would take place the following day, and he had come up to the prison to go through one last prep session in anticipation. He was even more dismayed upon learning which member had attended. I could see Dow’s emotions warring as I told him this; he clearly thought I was a dead man.

“How bad was it?” he asked at last.

“He was definitely a ‘no’ vote when he entered the room. He still may be a ‘no’, but I think it’s going to be a bit more of a complicated denial than he expected.” I scanned through my memories, trying to shore up the important moments. “One thing you need to tell the team is that our models for these people are completely off. They may act like one-dimensional conservative puppets, but they themselves are not simple. At least LaFavers wasn’t. This guy thrives on nuance. He understood and endorsed, in a way, my whole logical positivist thing.” I thought some more. “Also, they know everything. This man quoted from a letter I wrote years ago, from memory. He’d studied. If I’d lied about anything or been fronting as something other than what I am, he’d have torn me to pieces. You have to tell your clients this: if they are going to attempt clemency, they’d better actually do the work. They can lie to their people, their friends, their attorneys, but they won’t be able to lie to the Board.”

“I still can’t believe they sent LaFavers. He’s rotating off the Board this year. There was no reason to send him.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “Any word from Austin if the Board is going to allow my dad to meet with them?”

“No. They said we’d have an answer by this week. We’re going to be filing your successor petition on Friday, so someone from the office will come up here with a copy either then or Monday morning.”

I had sixteen days to live, and we both knew that this was likely to be our last visit. I thanked him for all he’d done for me over the years, for fighting the way he did for his clients. I was exhausted and I’m not sure my full gratitude was expressed in a particularly graceful form, but I hope he understood. To do this kind of work in a state like Texas requires a toughness I don’t think many people understand.

*****

Two days later, I met with the warden. This was a formal event, one that every condemned man must attend. The evening before, a guard had brought me a series of forms that I had to fill out if I was going to be allowed into His Majesty’s presence. (You can see a copy of these forms <here>.) The purpose of this meeting was to eliminate any confusion about who was to receive my material possessions and my body, declare who would be allowed to witness my execution, and to submit my final commissary order. For this last trip to “the store”, the TDCJ suspends the normal maximum limit and allows the condemned to spend $150 (or more, if the warden approves). Also unique: upon entering the major’s office, one’s handcuffs are removed, constituting the one and only time in the incarcerated life of a death-sentenced prisoner when they are allowed free movement of their hands in the company of other human beings, or, in this case, the warden, major, captain, two sergeants, an escort team, and a chaplain. As soon as the cuffs were off, I realized that I had no idea what to do with my hands. It felt strange to just let them hang there, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what I used to do with them when attending a party or any other social occasion. I almost put them behind my back out of habit but managed to force myself to stop.

The warden hulked behind the major’s desk, and I was led to a wooden bench facing him. Polunsky’s Head Warden is a mountain of a man, a continent, a planetary body in his own right. When he is wearing his Stetson – which, come on, is pretty much all the time, y’all – he tops out over seven feet tall. This was the first time I’d ever seen him without it, and I recall thinking that the great Brunelleschian battering ram of his dome probably weighed more than my torso. The first time I met him, a few years prior, I was outside on the rec yard, separated from my friend Cujo by metal bars. The warden stepped outside to inspect the locks, and after a moment noticed Cujo’s weighing gaze.

“Something on your mind?” he asked.

“How much do you clock in at?” Cujo shot back. “I’m guessing about 320.”

“I weigh enough.”

“Oooh,” Cujo moaned, as if impressed, giving me a sly grin. “Yeah, yeah, toughie, I’m sure you do.” Our resident terrorist was having fun. “Yep, it’s decided: You are definitely a two-shanker.”

“You want to run that by me again?” the warden asked, taking in Cujo’s grin, clearly unable to determine if the man was joking or insane.

“You know, a two-shanker. As in, one for each hand when we inevitably go at it.”

The two alpha males glared at each other for about ten seconds before the warden turned to look at me. “Would you like to make any pointless threats as well?”

“Ah… barring the miraculous appearance of a howitzer, I think I’ll pass.”

He remembered that comment, because as I sat down across from him, he smiled. “You never did procure that cannon, I see.”

I winced but decided there wasn’t much point in responding.

“None of us take any pleasure in this,” he said, turning serious. “We are simply here to execute a court order, and that is what we are going to do on the 22nd.”

It took me a minute to decide what I felt about this statement; it sort of squatted right on the line separating irksome from so-fucking-stupid-this-has-to-be-a-joke. I’ve never been completely certain that Hannah Arendt nailed that whole ‘banality of bureaucratic evil’ thing, but she was definitely on to something when she wrote of macabre humor and the way horror morphs so erratically into comedy. I finally decided to tip the scales towards irritation: “Executing a court order my ass. Obviously, I’m incapable of viewing matters in quite those terms. I’d appreciate it very much if we could skip the fake sympathy and whatever other distancing methods you planned to use to pretend that you are doing something other than killing me.” I could see one of the sergeants squirm in his seat a little, and my opinion of him moved up a few notches. The warden remained resolute. “Fair enough,” he said at last, and set about stamping my paperwork and approving my final visits.

The chaplain seemed disappointed that I did not desire any “pastoral care” (his words) and departed with a frown on his face. I refrained from mentioning that I had never seen him before and had not seen any chaplain in years. It’s always seemed very strange to me that in this supposedly very pious state, the authorities offer no church services to the condemned. If we were indeed this man’s flock, he shouldn’t be surprised that some of us had been picked off by the wolves of rationalism and skepticism during his extended absence.

As I was handcuffed again in preparation for my return to A-Pod, the warden happened to glance at my commissary list. His eyebrows shot up. “Forty-two pints of ice-cream?”

I shrugged. “I have a hankering for some Blue Bell. What can I say?”

“I’m sure this has nothing to do with the fact that there are exactly forty-two cells on your half of the pod?”

I put on a face of amazement. “What an astounding coincidence!”

He leaned his imposing girth back in his chair. “I ain’t never had no problems with you. So, I’m going to allow you to buy twelve pints. That’s enough for your close friends. I’m also going to call the picket and instruct the officer to turn his back for five minutes after everything gets delivered. Be quick.” He was true to his word, I’ll give him that. My friends got something decent to eat and no one got written up; this is what passes for a good day on the Row. During our five-minute amnesty, I also managed to pass off almost twenty of my last books, including my Oxford American dictionary and my thesaurus, plus my homemade soldering iron, sewing needles, and several other implements of up-to-no-goodery that should probably remain unmentioned. I’d witnessed T-Bone depart with so many bags of property that it looked like he was embarking on an expedition to the antipodes, and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake.

The following day, Jeff Newberry, David Dow’s lieutenant, brought me a copy of my successor writ that had been filed that morning in the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. He also brought me some fantastic news: David Gutierrez, Chairman of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, had granted my family a hearing in Austin for the following Tuesday, a chance for them to argue for my continued existence in person. This was the first time the Board had agreed to hold such a hearing since 2007. I’d been focusing on remaining calm and controlled, but this news broke through the emotional glacier I’d encased myself in and I found myself unable to wipe a goofy grin off my face. This hearing was a necessary step – not sufficient, but certainly needed. If they’d denied the hearing request, it would have been a clear signal that they were not interested in paying serious attention to my petition.

I ended up seeing my father later that day, and he was as elated as I was. We were still in the game. He seemed sort of shocked that they had granted him this opportunity, so accustomed had he grown to having his desires ignored by the State. We were pretty giddy, so much so that the officers patrolling the visitation room kept giving us suspicious glances. To the average correctional officer, if you are laughing in prison, you must be up to something nefarious. I commented on this to my dad. “Well… We are, aren’t we?” he responded. I laughed at this even more: my dad does nefarious about as well as a hippopotamus could do a triple salchow.

I was still grinning when I was led back to Deathwatch. On my way up the stairs, I glanced towards Rod’s cell, about to yell one of our code phrases for connecting to the mic network. As I did so, I noticed what looked like a silhouette standing at the door to 11-Cell – Batman’s old cell. I nearly missed a step, so surprised was I, then again as I recognized the face staring back at me: Castillo. He gave me a small, forced smile as he saw my face fall.

“Hey. I’m back.”

I just shook my head, completely at a loss for words. His stay of execution in December and his subsequent eviction from Deathwatch had been the one unequivocally good event that had taken place during my stay in A-Section, and now he had a new date for 16 May. We had all expected San Antonio to do some kind of genuine forensic examination of the contested evidence in his case, which should have granted him an additional two or three years, if not his actual life. Instead, he’d only managed to stay off of zero status for two months.

That night, Castillo, Rod, and I made a “welcome back to hell” spread together. “How many jalapeños do you guys want in this?” I asked, leaning my face to the table where my mic laid, face up.

“Melt my taste buds off. I don’t want to have to taste the gruel on the trays for a week,” Castillo responded.

“I want to have to use asbestos toilet paper in the morning,” Rod said, upping the ante.

“Bleh,” I lobbed back.

“Too far?”

Always hungry, Rabbit mentioned that he wished he could get some of these atomic tacos. “Sure,” I answered. “All you have to do is write District Attorney Kim Ogg in Houston and tell her you want to give up your appeals. Then you can get a date and get moved over. Better hurry, though, I’m somewhat limited on time here.”

“Ah. Pass, I guess.”

As was our custom, Rabbit and I stayed up after the other guys had gone to sleep, listening to music and working on some letters. A little after midnight he asked me to turn the volume down.

“Yeah?” I asked, sensing some hesitation in his voice.

“So. Tuesday…” I didn’t respond, still waiting on his question to arrive. After a minute or so he asked: “What then?”

“Depends on their vote. I still have my successor writ,” I mentioned, not knowing that the TCCA had already denied this on a fast-track basis. “And, of course, my lethal injection challenge in the SCOTUS. If the committee agrees to hear the case on the 23rd, I’m assuming that they are going to revive my corpse. That’s how that works, right?”

“Haha,” he gave his best sarcasm-laced imitation laugh. “That’s not what I mean, though, and I think you know it. That’s what they are doing. I’m asking what you are going to do.”

I knew what he was talking about. Over the years, I had developed an abiding hatred for the execution process. I’m not talking about the dying part: a man can face such a thing with resolve and take some of the sting out of it. Rather, I mean the sort of state power theatrics that are displayed leading up to the final act. There is a pageantry to it, a kind of prideful dance, that had initially revolted me, and which had only grown more detestable over time. Whatever the warden claimed about not taking pleasure in my death, I’ve known of many officers who take pride in the act of an execution; treating it as important to their sense of being part of the grand machine of justice, central to their way of being-in-the-world. Given the inescapability of my end, I vastly preferred to meet that event on my own terms.

For security reasons, this preference for a last-minute suicide was not one I’d discussed with many of those close to me. The State hates a Deathwatch suicide, about as much as I hate the execution two-step, and will do pretty much anything to prevent one if there is even the tiniest suspicion someone is heading in that direction. I’d given a lot of thought to both the method and timing over the years. I’d registered with every major organ donor organization in the US and had over a dozen ID cards collected to prove it. My intention was to make a large sign that read: “I’m an organ donor.” I would then tape this under the camera minutes before I self-paroled, with the various ID cards also taped to the relevant parts of my body. The method I’d settled on had no chance of harming any of my organs, and, as these things go, shouldn’t have been as painful as some of the other few options available to me. Finally, I’d spent the better part of three months making a small but significant modification to my cell door. Once a final alteration was made, the guards would have literally had to cut the door off the wall to gain access to the cell. The less said about this the better, save that even steel obeys willpower when enough time is added to the equation.

Rabbit knew my stance on this. While he didn’t want me to die, he knew how important it was for me to have some kind of volition at the end, to be able to go out in an act of resistance and a denial of Texas’ concept of justice. This was to be my metaphorical sneer that I aimed back at the firing squad. He knew all of this; what he didn’t know about was the timing.

“There are only three real possibilities at this point, bro,” I answered at last. “If the Board votes in favor of clemency, the decision moves to the Governor. He can grant or deny. If he denies at any point before the 22nd, I will check out that night after mail-call. If he waits to the last day to deny, I will just have to participate in their little process, since I won’t have an opportunity to die on my own terms. If the Board denies, however, my plan is to act that night.”

He sighed. “And they are going to release their vote on the 19th?”

“No, that’s President’s Day and they won’t be working. They will make the decision public on the 20th.”

“So, on the 20th, if they deny…”

“On the 20th, if they deny.”

He was quiet for a long time. “You know, I’ve been on the mics with almost four dozen men the mornings of their execution. This doesn’t get any easier.”

I pondered the implications of his statement. “Would you really want it to? The day this becomes easy is the day they win.”

“You always say things like that. Most of the time, though, it feels like they win no matter what we do.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that, so I didn’t.

Read Michael Wayne Hunter’s reflection on this chapter of Thomas’s story here