This, in itself, was a rarity. The six inmates in I-tier were radically dif24 ferent from one another; for one man to spark curiosity in all of us was nothing short of a miracle. Cell 1 housed Joey Kunz, a pedophile who was at the bottom of the pecking order. In Cell 2 was Calloway Reece, a cardcarrying member of the Aryan Brotherhood. Cell 3 was me, Lucius Du-
Fresne. Four and five were empty, so we knew the new inmate would be put in one of them-the only question was whether he'd be closer to me, or to the guys in the last three cells: Texas Wridell, Pogie Simmons, and Crash, the self-appointed leader of I-tier.
As Shay Bourne was escorted in by a phalanx of six correctional officers wearing helmets and flak jackets and face shields, we all came forward in our cells. The COs passed by the shower stall, shuffled by Joey and
Calloway, and then paused right in front of me, so I could get a good look.
Bourne was small and slight, with close-cropped brown hair and eyes like the Caribbean Sea. I knew about the Caribbean, because it was the last vacation
I'd taken with Adam. I was glad I didn't have eyes like that. I wouldn't want to look in the mirror every day and be reminded of a place
I'd never see again.
Then Shay Bourne turned to me.
Maybe now would be a good time to tell you what I look like. My face was the reason the COs didn't look me in the eye; it was why I sometimes preferred to be hidden inside this cell. The sores were scarlet and purple and scaly. They spread from my forehead to my chin.
Most people winced. Even the polite ones, like the eighty-year-old missionary who brought us pamphlets once a month, always did a double take, as if I looked even worse than he remembered. But Shay just met my gaze and nodded at me, as if I were no different than anyone else.
I heard the door of the cell beside mine slide shut, the clink of chains as Shay stuck his hands through the trap to have his cuffs removed. The
COs left the pod, and almost immediately Crash started in. 'Hey, Death
Row,' he yelled.
There was no response from Shay Bourne's cell.
'Hey, when Crash talks, you answer.'
'Leave him alone, Crash,' I sighed. 'Give the poor guy five minutes to figure out what a moron you are.'
'Ooh, Death Row, better watch it,' Calloway said. 'Lucius is kissing up to you, and his last boyfriend's six feet under.'
There was the sound of a television being turned on, and then Shay must have plugged in the headphones that we were all required to have, so we didn't have a volume war with one another. I was a little surprised that a death row prisoner would have been able to purchase a television from the canteen, same as us. It would have been a thirteen-inch one, specially made for us wards of the state by Zenith, with a clear plastic shell around its guts and cathodes, so that the COs would be able to tell if you were extracting parts to make weapons.
While Calloway and Crash united (as they often did) to humiliate me, I pulled out my own set of headphones and turned on my television. It was five o'clock, and I didn't like to miss Oprah. But when I tried to change the channel, nothing happened. The screen flickered, as if it were resetting to channel 22, but channel 22 looked just like channel 3 and channel 5 and
CNN and the Food Network.
'Hey.' Crash started to pound on his door. 'Yo, CO, the cable's down.
We got rights, you know...'
Sometimes headphones don't work well enough.
I turned up the volume and watched a local news network's coverage of a fund-raiser for a nearby children's hospital up near Dartmouth Co llege.
There were clowns and balloons and even two Red Sox players signing autographs.
The camera zeroed in on a girl with fairy-tale blond hair and blue half-moons beneath her eyes, just the kind of child they'd televise to get you to open up your wallet. 'Claire Nealon,' the reporter's voice-over said,
'is waiting for a heart.'
Boo-hoo, I thought. Everyone's got problems. I took off my headphones.
If I couldn't listen to Oprah, I didn't want to listen at all.
Which is why I was able to hear Shay Bourne's very first word on I-tier.
'Yes,' he said, and just like that, the cable came back on.
You have probably noticed by now that I am a cut above most of the cretins on I-tier, and that's because I don't really belong here. It was a crime of passion-the only discrepancy is that I focused on the passion part and the courts focused on the crime. But I ask you, what would you have done, if the love of your life found a new love of his life-someone younger, thinner, better-looking?
The irony, of course, is that no sentence imposed by a court for homicide could trump the one that's ravaged me in prison. My last CD4+ was taken six months ago, and I was down to seventy-five cells per cubic millimeter of blood. Someone without HIV would have a normal T cell count of a thousand cells or more, but the virus becomes part of these white blood cells. When the white blood cells reproduce to fight infection, the virus reproduces, too. As the immune system gets weak, the more likely I am to get sick, or to develop an opportunistic infection like PCP, toxoplasmosis, or CMV. The doctors say I won't die from AIDS-I'll die from pneumonia or
TB or a bacterial infection in the brain; but if you ask me, that's just semantics.
Dead is dead.
I was an artist by vocation, and now by avocation-although it's been considerably more challenging to get my supplies in a place like this.
Where I had once favored Winsor Et Newton oils and red sable brushes, linen canvases I stretched myself and coated with gesso, I now used whatever
I could get my hands on. I had my nephews draw me pictures on card stock in pencil that I erased so that I could use the paper over again. I hoarded the foods that produced pigment. Tonight I had been working on a portrait of Adam, drawn of course from memory, because that was all I had left. I had mixed some red ink gleaned from a Skittle with a dab of toothpaste in the lid of a juice bottle, and coffee with a bit of water in a second lid, and then I'd combined them to get just the right shade of his skin-a burnished, deep molasses.
I had already outlined his features in black-the broad brow, the strong chin, the hawk's nose. I'd used a shank to shave ebony curls from a picture of a coal mine in a National Geographic and added a dab of shampoo to make a chalky paint. With the broken tip of a pencil, I had transferred the color to my makeshift canvas.
God, he was beautiful.
It was after three a.m., but to be honest, I don't sleep much. When I do, I find myself getting up to go to the bathroom-as little as I eat these days, food passes through me at lightning speed. I get sick to my stomach;
I get headaches. The thrush in my mouth and throat makes it hard to swallow.
Instead, I use my insomnia to fuel my artwork.
Tonight, I'd had the sweats. I was soaked through by the time I woke up, and after I stripped off my sheets and my scrubs, I didn't want to lie down on the mattress again. Instead, I had pulled out my painting and started re-creating Adam. But I got sidetracked by the other portraits I'd finished of him, hanging on my cell wall: Adam standing in the same pose he'd first struck when he was modeling for the college art class I taught;
Adam's face when he opened his eyes in the morning. Adam, looking over his shoulder, the way he'd been when I shot him.
'I need to do it,' Shay Bourne said. 'It's the only way.'
He had been utterly silent since this afternoon's arrival on I-tier; I wondered who he was having a conversation with at this hour of the night.
But the pod was empty. Maybe he was having a nightmare. 'Bourne?' I whispered. 'Are you okay?'
'Who's... there?'
