The Autobiography of an Execution

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?