Cargo of Orchids (37 page)

On “Execution Day Minus Two (2),” the equipment is tested again, and there’s an execution-squad drill. If they
really wanted to get your underwear in a knot, they’d make you sit in the Chair, or stand on the gallows, as a kind of dress rehearsal. I’m not going to suggest this to Officer Gluckman, though. She’d bring it up for discussion at the next guard meeting and wouldn’t even credit me with having thought of the idea.

“Execution Day Minus One (1)” is the day the kitchen takes your last-meal order. Unless you are like Frenchy, who always got her order in early.

Your last meal is served on a paper plate, and your only utensil is a plastic spoon. If you request a steak, the cook has to cut it into bite-sized bits for you, then reassemble it to look like a steak.

I haven’t thought about what I will order, but I know it won’t be anything I have to chew. I don’t think I could lift the plastic spoon as far as my mouth either, so I won’t start with soup.

The Aztecs called on priests to perform their sacrifices, and each one sat disguised as a god. Chanters came forward and began to dance with the prisoners and encourage them to sing.

The only ones dancing and chanting around here are the death-penalty proponents who wait outside the prison gates with their placards, cheering and hooting when the power dims or they catch a whiff of the deadly gas spewing from a T-shaped exhaust pipe high atop the dancehall.

Inside the prison no one is celebrating. Sometime around midnight you are allowed a one-hour contact visit
with a clergy person, if you want one. At four in the morning you are served your last meal, and no later than 5:30 a.m. the official witnesses to the execution, thirteen in number, meet at the prison gate and push their way to the front of the mob. If you are the person being executed, you are allowed to designate the thirteenth witness (in Frenchy’s case it was Rainy, but Rainy didn’t ask me—she said she wouldn’t even ask Jesus to get out of bed for her at that ungodly hour). I miss Rainy more than I had thought I would. I miss her Rainyisms—the dead if you dos, dead if you don’ts; the whoopee fucking dings. I almost miss her interrupting me all the time with her dumb but honest questions.

The twelve witness seats are sold on a first-come, first-served basis. As I’ve already said, they have no trouble filling the seats; people would pay to watch if there were standing-room-only, but fire regulations don’t allow it.

At 6 a.m. the media witnesses arrive, also thirteen in number, and everyone is escorted to the Witness Viewing Park, where they are seated. Your execution team assembles in the death chamber. Somewhere behind this scene you are allowed to shower, change into your last new clothes. The superintendent reads your death warrant to you one final time. Only the prison chaplain will be allowed to accompany you as far as the death chamber.

The Aztecs led their victims, one by one, to the sacrificial stone. Each was given a drink of divine wine and shown how to defend himself. Some preferred to throw themselves on the altar and get it over with, some tried to fight; but it was all the same in the end. The heart was
torn out, held up, offered to the sun, then sealed in a jar.

The state never shows much interest in the bodies of executed criminals. As soon as you are pronounced dead, you are taken to a waiting ambulance and transported to a medical examiner’s office. An autopsy is performed, as if there can be any doubt about what killed you! I once read an interview with a coroner who said that even in death, no two bodies are alike, none is unremarkable. Sometimes in suicides you find advanced liver cancer, impending appendicitis, right-sided hearts; in the bodies of women who have been executed you might find a heart with a hole in it, as if an average-sized fist had slammed right through her body and out the other side.

Your remains are returned to your family, if your family will accept you. A mortician will prepare your body so you look natural, covering the cyanide rash on your leg with make-up, forcing your tongue back into your mouth. If no one claims your body, you’ll be sent out for cremation. Then you’re brought back to prison in a jar.

Rainy followed Frenchy to the Hill—you get a view of it from the chow-hall window—which is where they bury the ashes of all unclaimed Death Clinic inmates. She got a Styrofoam urn, and her inmate number on a slab of white-painted wood. The dead in prison don’t even get their names back.

For most women, it’s a pretty sad way to end up. I mean, each of those women was somebody’s baby once. A mother, like me, nursed each one and loved her—even if it was just for a little while.

——

Having looked at it from both sides, I have come to believe that the death penalty is another symptom of the confusion in our society. Capital punishment does no more to deter crime than the Aztec human sacrifices did to keep the sun burning in the sky. Capital punishment, in our present-day state, could be described as an institutionalized “spiritual” response to a problem in modern life when our knowledge and technology fails. The right-wing religious groups
like
this magical solution. Their advocacy of capital punishment is a symptom of their own disease, their need to focus their hatred on those among us in society who are already most diminished.

The criminal has become the enemy, the only person left to hate now that we are expected to love our neighbour, no matter what his race, religion or sexual persuasion. The criminal is the Jew being chugged away to Auschwitz, the nigger on the chain gang, the queer in the closet, the spic, the wop, the wog; the criminal is a stranger, a monster, Female Evil incarnate. Through our hatred, criminals become something much bigger, more frightening, than what they really are. Men. Women. Like me. Like you.

I’ve seen enough here to know that nothing is certain, certainly not death, but I can’t say I was prepared for Pile, Jr.’s latest letter.

“Do you think you are a good risk to be let back into society?” my classification officer asks.

A good risk? Well, I tell her, I won’t invade Kosovo.

She says this isn’t the answer she is hoping for. What am I supposed to say?

Pile, Jr.’s letter explained that as a result of the Women’s Empowerment Coalition’s latest efforts, I have won a new hearing. The coalition received an affidavit from a woman in Tranquilandia, casting a new light on the prosecution’s version of the events in my case. And because of the passage of time and the difficulty of reassembling witnesses and evidence, the state might be willing to make a deal. The result would be a sentence under which I would be eligible for parole. If I accept the deal, Pile, Jr. said, I would be the first woman in history ever to become eligible for parole from a life sentence while still being held under a sentence of death.

A hearing would mean going through the whole process all over again. Many woman have had their sentences commuted or reduced by the Supreme Court who seem eager, these days, to overturn a death verdict; Pile seems to think I’ve got a real chance at Life.

I recalled Daisy’s warning: she was Colombian—she’d always know where to find me. She wrote to me also, in her best King’s English, saying she was married now, had two healthy boys of her own and worked at Hacienda la Florida as a drug-rehabilitation counsellor. The hacienda had been raided again not long after I left, she said, and was now (she drew a happy face) under new management. “There is no one left from the old days, except I.”

No word of the Black Widow. Or Consuelo. Nothing about my boy. Daisy, though, had finally come to accept the truth about how her first son, Alias, had died.

Inside the card was a pressed butterfly. “The dead one can tell no stories,” she wrote. “But for my son’s sake, for Angel’s, it is time I tell yours.”

The night I received her letter, I dreamed I died. I found Angel alive and woke up in Heaven, believing we could both live forever.

In this world there is an unending supply of sorrow, and the heart has always to make room for more.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Excerpt from
American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books.

Excerpt from
The Dwarf
by Pär Lagerkvist, translated by Alexandra Dick. Translation copyright © 1945 by Hill and Wang, translation copyright renewed 1973 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Excerpt from
The Prince of Tides
by Pat Conroy. Copyright © 1986 by Pat Conroy. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Every effort has been made to source the quote used as an epigraph to part two. Any information regarding its authorship would be welcome and may be sent care of the publisher.

A version of chapter 7, entitled “Valentine’s Day in Jail,” was published in
Fever: Sensual Stories by Women Writers
, edited by Michelle Slung, and in
The Best American Erotica
, 1995, edited by Susie Bright.

The same story was optioned by Back Alley Film Productions to be developed into a television series called “Desire” for Showcase.

Selections from the death-row sequences have been published in Monday magazine.

My thanks to Diane Martin for being my editor, and to Stephen for all the years he saw me through.