He Sees Through Stone

Someone is playing a trick. Images appear on the sooty walls, muddling my mind and soaking my brain like a wet sponge. My vision is fuzzy, dirty as dust, fuzzy as the chocolate body moving in front of me mouthing words that I can hardly make out.

Patricia, my ex-girlfriend's 13-year-old daughter, in her short pajamas with her chest jiggling like two jellyfish. "Mom-Mom-Mom."

Something like that, reflections hurting my eyes.

Silence. A surge of heat rolls over me, hot enough to melt veins, and then vanishes.

Michelle, my leggy ex-girlfriend with her slender frame and olive brown skin. I can see her but can't speak. Her lips compress. There is a tension in her Western-Asian-like eyes that I have never seen before. I can't move my body or my mouth. She is wearing cut-off jeans and a gray hoodie. Her deep auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail, the color of sunlight through a glass of red wine. I was in love.

"Can you hear me, James?" Her voice is far away. Her words turn inside my head like cranking open a stubborn window.

Of course, I can. You're just not listening to me.

The edges of the darkness play on the cell walls in shale blue shadows spewing from the television several feet in front of me. Get me out of here, I want to say, get me out of this conviction. Make sense of this despair.

Michelle waves her hand before my face; it is a hand with many trails, one escorting the other.

"Put your arms down, James," she says. "Your last appeal was denied."

Arms down? Appeal? A meddling pressure see-saws in my head but I feel no pain, only the pendulum sensation swinging at intervals of its free will.

"Get a cup of ice," Michelle says to Patricia.

From the corner of my left eye, I notice Patricia veer slowly away and morph into sand-like particles sustaining its form of long legs on narrow hips, like Michelle.

"Open and close your fingers, James."

I can't. I know I am in Michelle's living room sitting up on the edge of the sofa. Where had I slept? If I could only speak, if I could only explain that my brain wants to compartmentalize little boxes of despair to isolate them from all that is hopeful. I didn't mean for it to happen that way.

Patricia returns with a cup. A white cup. Tears pool in her eyes. The shadows soften.

Michelle turns up my right palm, takes a blurry cube of ice from the cup, and places it in my hand. The cube shimmers. I feel nothing. She puts the cube in my left hand and a stab of violent cold tears into my palm and I drop the cube.

"Well, something's working," Michelle says. Then to Patricia, "Why are you crying?"

Patricia stands there, glaring at me in her pajama shorts, trembling. "He did it, mom. He touched me."

"He did what?" Michelle says, irate.

Patricia stands there, her crying eyes fixed on me. She had promised to keep it between us, not say a word. Our secret. "He made me do it, Mom."

Why are my arms raised at shoulder level? Why is my forefinger pointed at the blank television?

I want to turn on the television, to the morning news. Or is it time for the late-night news? I try to stand and turn on the damn black box. Nothing. A lot of something isn't working right with my body. I can't move my eyes left, right, up or down. Just stare straight ahead. Awareness skips back and forth in choppy fragments. Anxiety grips my throat like wrestling a heavy suitcase. My breathing staggers: I puff and puff as though starting a campfire. I try to stand again but I can't. Can't wiggle my toes or flex my fingers. Then my forefinger points straight ahead locked in place and I see its reflection in the black box as if somehow pointing at myself.

The television screen pops on and lights up in a snowy haze and a man's raspy voice cracks: "Guilty," is all he says, and the television screen continues to snow.

The thought of dying alone, in shame, clogs in my throat as a snap-flashing moment of killing Patricia scatters through me like glass splintering and tearing me inside out. I didn't mean for it to happen that way.

All those years I survived inside the prison, all those hours that I feared could have been my last, all those days and nights that I rotted in the silence of death row, and now I am condemned to die, a witness to my own undoing; executed by the electric chair. Yes, I killed Patricia, yes, I relapsed, was high on dope again, and upset that Michelle went and left me, and so I put a homemade bomb on the porch not intended for Patricia to pick up. She died instantly. I didn't mean for it to happen that way. My lawyer filed for an emergency stay of execution, but it is too late, too late to cleanse myself of guilt. I want my life to be mine one day but it is too late. After the cumbersome weight of nineteen years, The Almighty Savior says, "Judgement will be served."

I am afraid.

The guards say as if rehearsed from a script: "Can I get you some water?" "Can I get you a coffee?" "Can I get you a stamp to mail your last letter?" Each question flickers like a candle burning out.

Where was all the caring I never had in the first fifteen years of my life? Where were they when my father deserted my mother and me when I was three? Where were they when my mother died when I was eight? Where were they when I was in my fifth foster home and using drugs when I was twelve? Where were they when I was a young man returning from the war suffering PTSD and drug addicted?

Those spotlight questions beam inside the walls of my mind as a grim-faced guard comes in and shaves the hair off my body to prepare me for execution.

The pain that I have caused screams that I lost my way. I could have done better. I hunger for joy, yet old dreams torment me like phantom limbs.

Two guards step forward and strap me down on the gurney with belts that cross my chest, groin, legs, and arms. They place a sponge moistened in salt water onto my bald scalp. Next comes the leather cranial cap lined with copper mesh that covers my head and forehead. Then a narrow power cable is attached to the headpiece. Finally, an electrode, moistened with conductive jelly, is attached to my leg, and then I am blindfolded.

"Do you have any final words?" the warden asks.

"I do," I say. "I didn't mean for it to happen this way."