The Autobiography of an Execution

wall off their relationship with him and numbly escort him to the gurney? I knew their numbers and addresses, and I was going to have to find out. It might not help, but it definitely wouldn’t hurt, for the guards to say that they thought Quaker was innocent, for them at least to say that he shouldn’t die.

He rubbed his wrists where they had been cuffed. He leaned toward me and looked at my eye. Man, he said, you look like ET.

I said, You know a guy on the row named Ezekiel Green?

He said, I know of him.

I said, What do you know?

Why’s it matter?

I’m just curious.

He said, The guys in here who ain’t too bright think he’s like a prophet or something.

Yeah.

The other guys think he’s insane.

I said, Which group are you in?

He smiled. Hey, I’m no genius like you, but I’m on your side of the bell curve.

I said, So you think he’s insane.

He said, It’s just based on what I heard. Like I said, I ain’t never had much of a conversation with the guy. He’s next to me on the pod, and I hear him talking on the phone and shit, and he doesn’t seem crazy. The words make sense, you know what I mean? I nodded. Quaker said, Why you wanna know?

I said, He just told me who murdered Dorris and your kids. He said it was a case of mistaken identity.

ON THE WAY back to my office I called Katya. She asked, What did he say?

I told her that his mouth literally fell open. His chest sagged, his chin jutted forward, and his lower jaw just fell. I thought it was just a figure of speech. But it was an actual physical reaction. His jaw really dropped. He started to say something, I think his lips actually moved, but no sound came out. Then he rubbed his eyes, using the knuckles on his index fingers. Finally he said, Why?

I didn’t know whether he was asking me why Green had told me, or whether it was a more Job-like question. I told him everything Green had said, including about hearing Quaker talking to himself in a foreign language. My voice was flat, like maybe I believed him, maybe I didn’t. Quaker said, It ain’t no foreign language. I got a book of Wallace Stevens poems and I read them out loud. I don’t know what half the words mean but I like the way they sound.

He started crying. The only reason I could tell at first was that his chest was heaving, like he was out of breath from sprinting. Then I saw the tears. He kept saying, My poor babies, my poor babies, my love. Over and over. I didn’t know what to say. I just sat there.

He said, After the explosion, my company sent me to someplace near New Braunfels. The shrink said I had PTSD. But you already know that, right? It was like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. You seen that movie? All these old people walking around. They were mostly German, I think. I couldn’t understand nothing they were saying. Anyway, one night I was sitting on the balcony smoking some weed and thinking about how I could just disappear in that town, it’s beautiful there, maybe walk off into the mountains, and nobody would ever miss me. You ever feel like that? That you could die and no one would even know? They’d probably look for me for a while, but they’d stop eventually. Then it was like Dorris and Danny and Charisse was standing there. I could feel ’em there, actually feel ’em. They’d miss me. It saved me to be thinking that. I swear to God it did. I wanted to watch Danny and Charisse graduate, be a grandpa, get old with Dorris.

Katya said, He didn’t do it, you know. I don’t know whether Green was telling you the truth, but your client didn’t kill his family.

I said, I know. I am sorry to say that I know that.

TWO MORNINGS LATER Lincoln came into our room at five. I was still sleeping. He said, Dada, can I get up now?

I said, Linco, it’s Sunday. I want to sleep a little longer. He said he wasn’t tired. I told him he could stay up if he’d go with me for a run when it got light.

He said, But Dada, I’m too big for the stroller thing, and it’s too far for me to ride my bike.

He had me there, so I got up, got dressed, and went out while it was still night, just the dog and me, and told Linco not to bother his mama unless it was an emergency.

From the time Lincoln could hold his head up until he was five, I would take him with me in the stroller when I would go jogging on weekends. I hate jogging. When I’m swimming or rowing, my mind wanders, and solutions to problems come to me, at least sometimes. When I’m jogging, all I’m thinking about is finishing. Jogging with Lincoln changed all that. I would tell him stories before he could talk, and listen to his stories later. He and Winona and I would run around a mile-and-a-half loop. We’d usually run three laps, and I wouldn’t even notice how much my knees were hurting. Some days, when I felt fresh and it wasn’t too hot, I’d say to Lincoln, as we were finishing up lap number three, Hey, amigo, how about another circle today?

One morning he asked, Dada, why do you like running so much?

I said, Actually, Linco, I hate running. But I like hanging out with you.

He said, But you can hang out with me at the house.

I said, Yeah, that’s true, but I want to hang out with you for a lot more years, and if I jog, I think I’ll have more years with you.

He said, Okay, then. Let’s run one more loop. But faster this time, okay? I’d sprint for as long as I could manage, and he’d say, Wheeeee.

He and Katya would be leaving for the beach later that day. I had the Quaker hearing coming up, a looming execution date for O’Neill, and the possibility that Green would get executed before I could learn whether he was lying or telling the truth, or whether he knew any more truth, or, for that matter, any truth at all, that could help me. I felt myself sinking. There was nothing I could do about anything. Three people were going to die in a month because I was completely out of ideas. I thought to myself, I should have gone rowing.

KATYA HAS A CHILDHOOD FRIEND who grew up to be an artist you’ve probably heard of. They’re like college roommates. They talk and text and e-mail every day. Sometimes I’m jealous of their closeness. I don’t have any friends like that, except Katya and Lincoln, and the dog. Ten years ago, we were in New York at my law-school reunion, and the artist invited us to dinner at her fancy apartment. Katya had told her that I like to cook. Almost as soon as we were introduced, the artist asked me to make a pitcher of martinis, and after I mixed them and poured three glasses, she told me how to light the grill, where the salad ingredients were, and that she liked her steak so rare that it would still moo. (I did not hold this against her; Katya likes hers the same way.) The two of them went one way, carrying their glasses and the pitcher, and I stayed in the kitchen, looking for the tools I needed to make dinner. By the time I brought the food to the living room, where we ate off a coffee table while sitting on the floor and watching America’s Next Top Model, Katya and the artist were drunk as skunks.

I mention the point about inebriation solely for the sake of lending credibility to what I am about to say: This artist is a detestable human being. My experience is that drunk people don’t lie, and in her drunken state, she was racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, narcissistic, and altogether unlikable. Twenty years before, while she was involved in a relationship with two other people (who might or might not have known about one another), she got pregnant by a third—well, at least she thinks it was the third. You might consider it a sign of redemption that she agreed to marry the probable father, except that she started cheating again a month after their kid was born.

I’m a libertarian. If people want to be married to lecherous spouses, let them. But my own life is too short to waste even the briefest moment with people like her, and that would be true no matter how long my life happens to be.

When we were back in Houston, and enough time had passed, I told Katya I was amazed that she could be friends with this terrible person. She said, She’s been my friend since she was eight years old, which is way before she was a terrible person. What am I supposed to do? Abandon her? There are beautiful things about her I know about that you don’t, because you are too judgmental to see them. If you have a friend, you have to take them as