know. It will still be pretty good, but not great. He spread his hands two feet apart. He said, If this is great… Then he held his hands two inches apart and said,… and if this is terrible… He held his hands about six inches apart and said, Going to Galveston without Dada will be this good. Katya leaned over and kissed him on the head. He said, Dada, I’m hungry.
We stopped for ice cream. Walking back to the truck, Lincoln noticed the tape measure next to the door. He asked why it was there. I told him that if the place got robbed, and police asked the clerk how tall the thief was, she wouldn’t need to guess. Lincoln asked why someone would steal, and I said that there are some bad people in the world. He said, But maybe he just needs money to eat. I said that might be possible. Lincoln said, Besides, if he’s bad, Dada, he might shoot the person. I told him that was true. He said, Remember when Mia pulled my hair? I told him yes, I did. He said, I still don’t understand why some people are bad. I just don’t get it.
LINCOLN STARTED GETTING night terrors when he was almost two. He would start to cry softly, and it would grow, crescendo-like, until he was screaming. His eyes would be closed. Katya or I would lift him from his bed, and he would be limp and tense, back and forth, eyes shut, shrieking. We would pace, turn on the lights, talk to him loudly. Minutes would go by, sometimes five, sometimes ten. He would finally stop without ever waking, and in the morning recall nothing.
I knew these terrors were not my fault, and that they were. They started the night that Julius Anthony died. Anthony lived on death row for twenty-two years. He and two of his gang buddies shot an elderly woman for her Cadillac when Anthony was nineteen. His friends fired the shots. Anthony only drove the car, but the others were two years younger and not yet old enough to be executed for the crimes, so Anthony was the only one sentenced to die. On death row he grew up. By the time he died, he was not remotely the same person he had been. Six guards wrote letters, pleading with the governor to spare his life. They said they supported the death penalty, but not for Anthony. He was a peacekeeper, they wrote; he had intervened in fights and saved guards’ lives. He had counseled other inmates. He was not a risk to anyone and he caused others not to be risks as well. The governor turned them down, issuing a boilerplate statement the day of the execution that said the jury had spoken. The chaplain told me that it took prison officials forty-five minutes of poking to get the needle inserted into a vein. One of the guards on the tie-down team was crying. Anthony told him not to worry, that everything would be okay, the inmate consoling the executioner. After the execution, the victim’s son and I found ourselves standing next to one another outside the execution chamber, a rare social blunder by prison officials. He put his arm around me and leaned his head on my shoulder. A reporter called me on my cell phone while I was driving home to ask me how it felt. I told him to hold on for a moment. I put the phone down on the passenger seat, and left it there for the two-hour drive back to Houston.
When I got home that night Katya was sitting in the rocking chair in Lincoln’s room listening to her iPod. She stood up and hugged me, and we watched him together, his arm wrapped tightly around a teddy bear. We went downstairs and I poured us a drink. An hour later, Lincoln was wailing.
AS I PULLED onto the freeway after our stop for ice cream on the drive home from Galveston, I saw a flash of lightning out of my right eye. I asked Katya whether she had seen it. She said no, and then I saw it again. A window shade came down, and just like that, the top half of my vision was gone. I said, Uh- oh. Lincoln asked me what was wrong. I told him nothing. I asked Katya to drive. She heard something in my voice and didn’t ask why. When we got out of the car to change seats, I told her I couldn’t see out of my right eye. I called my neighbor, an eye surgeon, and he told me to come over as soon as we got back to town.
I walked next door to Charlie’s house. He looked at me and drove us to his office. He dilated my eyes and told me that my retina was torn into the macula, and he wanted to operate on me the next day. He explained that the retina is the layer across the back of the eyeball that serves as the film for the eye. Images go from the retina to the optic nerve to the brain. I needed to have the retina repaired, or I would be blind. He said, I told you to stop boxing. I reminded him I had quit sparring more than ten years earlier. He said, Hmmm.
I asked about the recovery time and Charlie said I would not be able to do any work for a week, maybe two, perhaps as long as three. I told him there was no way I could put things off for that long. He said, The alternative is that you go blind. I asked him what were the percentages of that. He said, Of going blind with an unrepaired retina that is torn into the macula? I nodded. He said, One hundred percent.
I said, Well, I guess that’s that.
After he drove us home I told Katya. The surgery would take around two hours. I found my will and my living will, telling doctors not to take heroic measures to save me. I called the office and talked to Jerome to let him know what was going on. I asked him whether he could call the judge’s clerk to see about the possibility of putting off the hearing for a week or two. The next morning, Katya and I dropped Lincoln at a friend’s house and she drove me to the hospital. At nine the anesthesiologist said I would begin to feel woozy in a minute or two. The last thoughts I had were: If I die, I wonder if Quaker will get a stay. Then: If I die, I’ll have stumbled onto a guilt-free way of not doing this anymore.
Three hours later I woke up in the recovery room feeling like I’d eaten a bale of cotton. Katya and Lincoln were there, reading Narnia. Lincoln said, Look, Mama. Dada’s awake. I smiled and tried to drink some water. It spilled out of my mouth. My tongue felt like wax paper. Lincoln said, Look what I brought. He held up a wishbone. Nana gave it to me. Let’s break it, okay? He got the bigger piece, again.
I said, Amigo, are you cheating when we break these things?
He said, No, Dada, I am not. Do you want to know my wish? I nodded. He said, My wish is that you get to help the person you are trying to help.
THIS IS A LITTLE KNOWN FACT, but I invented books on tape. When I was in college, I said to myself, I should open a business renting out books on cassette tapes. It was my best idea, surpassing even my idea for a single serving of ground coffee that could be brewed in a bag like tea, for that fresh-brewed taste on camping trips. I also invented the idea of a computer in a car, with local maps programmed in, that could give you directions. I was going to put them in rental cars. Unfortunately, I took no steps in any of these instances other than having the idea, which apparently many other people had as well.
My grandmother was an avid reader. She went blind before there was such a thing as books on tape. She lost her vision when she was eighty-four and died when she was eighty-eight. She had cancer in her sinus that required radiation. The doctor told her she might lose her vision in the eye next to the sinus with the tumor. The doctor didn’t say anything about losing the vision in the other eye. I wanted to sue. If I had been eighty-four and the doctor told me I would be blind, I’d take my chances with the cancer.
Death-penalty lawyers have a peculiar definition of victory. I already said that when my clients die of AIDS on death row, I count those deaths as victories. But it doesn’t stop there. One of my clients was supposed to be executed on July 1. We got a stay on June 30, so he did not get executed until August 1. Another month of life in a sixty-square-foot cage. But he was breathing. That’s a victory. When you lose most of the wars, you start seeing successes in individual battles as victories. In the free world, as my clients call it, definitions are different.
When I asked Charlie about the risks of the surgery, he told me I could lose my vision anyway. I said, I can’t work if I can’t see. He said that I’d learn to read Braille. I have a seven-year-old son and a wife I love. That seemed like a victory in my world.
Everybody sent me books on tape. I listened to the first book, written and read by David Sedaris. For five minutes I laughed out loud. Then I could not stop thinking about never being able to read again. Instead of hearing what he was saying, I was hearing him reading, and being reminded with every word that I could not read to myself. I did not listen to any more of the tapes.
FOR A WEEK I worked with my eyes closed. Though I wouldn’t want to stay that way, I have to say that my piano playing got much better, and my thinking was less clouded. Katya drove me to the office in the morning after dropping Lincoln at school, and I would lie on my couch and talk to Jerome, Gary, and Kassie about the case. Kassie felt sure Green was involved. She said, Woman’s instincts. Trust me here.
It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her. Green was who I didn’t trust. When I was in elementary school, my brothers and I would dial a random number and tell whoever answered not to pick up their phone for the next hour because the electric company was working on the line, and if they answered the phone, whoever was calling would get a severe shock. We’d wait ten minutes and dial the number again. Someone usually answered, and when they did,
