Cargo of Orchids (32 page)

This evening Officer Freedman interrupts me in my house, where I am peacefully watching another live execution (the channel they now keep my television permanently tuned to).

“Heard the one about the gal who’s going to be executed, they offer her a last cigarette? ‘No thanks,’ she says, ‘I’m trying to quit.’ ”

I keep my eyes tuned to the screen, where a girl who shot and killed a taxi driver after robbing him of $4.36 and his Medic-Alert bracelet is now going to die in the gas chamber.

When Officer Freedman sees I have disappointed her again, that I am not going to die laughing, she turns her eyes to the TV too, because just as the girl finishes getting dressed in a new pair of jeans and a fresh white T-shirt without pockets (no underwear, no shoes, nothing where the gas can accumulate and kill the guards when they go in to untie her afterwards), she slices her tongue almost all the way off with a sliver of her personal mirror she has kept hidden in her mouth. She bleeds all over everything, especially her white T-shirt. Because her arms are slippery with blood, and because she can’t weigh more than ninety pounds, she manages to slip out of the straps holding her in the chair just after the executioner lowers the cyanide into the vats of acid. She races around the chamber, beating her fists against the window, but soon after she gets her first whiff of the gas, she stops screaming.

“Feed me. I’m sick.”
I turn from the horrible spectacle to another one—Officer Gluckman standing beside Officer Freedman, smiling at me. She dangles the dying Nano at the end of her leather strap and shakes her head. And when I say nothing, she decides to inspect my underwear; she’s disappointed when I lower my sweats to reveal I am wearing the right colour. Am I interested in last week’s
TV Guide
, she asks (she’s nuts—no point taking it personally), and then complains a lot about her back, which needs replacing, and how she was up again till after midnight reading reports, and how this place is understaffed and nobody understands how important her job is and how seriously she takes her work, and how no one else could ever do her job for her. I want to tell her the graveyard is full of people who think they are indispensable, but I don’t; I offer to trade places with her for a day instead.

“With my luck,” she says, “I’d choose the day you go to get gassed.”

I don’t let this cruel remark phase me. “My luck too,” I say, “because then I’d be doing
your
job for the rest of my life.”

My mother writes that Vernal arrived in a taxi and “chauffeured her around town” so she could finally return the unreliable lamp. Vernal took her for lunch afterwards, and ordered her a Scotch while she waited for her soup to arrive. “The clam chowder was lovely,” she writes, “but I had to give Vernal the Scotch. I told him, ‘I wish I
could
drink whisky. I know it’s
so
good for you.’ ”

I read an article in a magazine that says it becomes more difficult to love your parents the older you get, the
same way it becomes harder to love your own children as they themselves grow older and begin to appreciate your love. I wish I could say I’d had the opportunity.

There’s this to think about: If I hadn’t had Angel, I could have lived my life without ever wanting anything enough to hurt over.

WHAT IF WE NEVER WANTED ANYTHING ENOUGH TO HURT OVER?
I wrote this in big letters and stuck it on the wall in front of the table where I sit to write, and Rainy asked me if that was going to be the title of my book. No, I said, it was too many words.

She thought about that for a while. “Well,” she said, “maybe I could use those words for the twins.” Her twins shared a grave and she had always wanted them to have a marker, but hadn’t been able to think of anything important enough to have carved in stone. But she liked
What if we never wanted anything enough to hurt over?
I told her it sounded like she was making an excuse for having to kill them, as if she’d loved them so much she
had
to leave them under a train, and she said finally someone got the picture.

She said this the night before she disappeared. I’ll always remember how Rainy looked the last time I saw her—as if she had finally found some kind of peace in knowing she had wanted something enough to hurt over. Now, too, when I say, “I’ll always remember …” I think of Rainy. “It’s a pretty sure thing,” she said. “You won’t have time to forget.” Rainy never stopped reminding me that here on the Row, “always” has an expiry date.

Rainy believed in reincarnation, that she would always be here on earth in one form or another. For that reason, she wanted the word
always
on her headstone. “Something simple, to make people think.”

“Always
what?
” I asked.

“See, you’re thinking.”

I reminded Rainy Always was a brand of panty liners. Did she want people thinking about
that?

“Even better,” she said. “ ‘
Always, with Wings.
’ ”

I can’t let myself think too much about what happened to Rainy. I know she wanted to die on a Monday, not a Friday—because being turned off on a Friday would be a bad start to a weekend—and in the late evening, at bedtime, when she was ready for a good sleep. She didn’t want to die in the morning, with the whole day ahead of her, because she might miss something, like spaghetti for lunch.

The fact that Rainy didn’t have any good veins left didn’t save her. She underwent a “cut-down”: her arm was slit open—by corrections officers who had no experience as surgeons—searching for a usable blood vessel.

Rainy’s was a high-profile case, and tickets to her execution had sold out the morning they’d gone on sale. Some people camped overnight to get the best seats in the house. That must have boosted Rainy’s self-esteem.

One of the guards assigned to Rainy—to make sure she remained sane and healthy in the Health Alteration Unit during the days before her lethal injection—spoke to a reporter. “We give execution—lethal injection—at eleven in the morning, right after coffee. Usually it’s a Friday, end
of the week; you need a break after it. On Friday, around five a.m., I go upstairs and bring the individual down to the death cell, right next to the lethal-injection chamber. Then I sit with her until it’s time to go.

“I drink coffee, play cards or watch television with the individual. Sometimes she just likes to talk, or she’ll ask to see the chaplain. Whatever I do, I try to make her last hours memorable. My official title is Death Watch Officer, but really I’m just a glorified babysitter.”

I scarcely remember those last days with Angel on Tranquilandia. To say they are a blur would be as clear as I can get. I begged Consuelo to let me stay, or, if she had to send me away, to let me take Angel with me. Without him I had nothing to live for, I told her. “We don’t choose our blessings or our curses,
mijita
” was all she would say.

Angel seemed to be growing more fragile every day. When babies are hungry they cry, but Angel was too weak now to make the one sound I so badly wanted to hear. The day before I was destined to fly away with a coffin that held the body of someone else’s child, Consuelo came to say Daisy and I were to take Angel to see the one
bruja
she could trust, the one who lived on the mountain, at Chocolata’s shrine.

The
bruja
would help Angel get strong again; Consuelo said she wanted me to understand what Angel had been
born to, and how he had to survive and grow up to claim what was his own. Tranquilandia was his birthright; knowing this should make it easier for me to bear leaving my baby behind.

She opened my curtains to let in the day; during the night someone had planted, on the sharp end of a stake driven into the ground at the foot of the
borrachio
tree, the half-chewed head of the miniature horse. His tongue stuck out of a corner of his mouth, as if feeling around for a last taste of sweetness. A bib of flies tucked into his throat, feasting there. I asked Consuelo to close the curtains, and after she left, saying Yepez would be driving her to the city for the day, I climbed into bed with Angel and rocked him and tried to make him eat. He kept turning his head away from me, and I felt scared. If I hadn’t had him, I could have lived my life without ever wanting anything enough to hurt over.

My mind was a mess, and now was the moment I needed a base toke, another hit of the intoxicating
mejoral
, a long line of Bolivian marching powder to make my brain cells come to attention, fall in line, shoulder their rifles, beat their drums. I felt flat, lifeless. I got out of bed and broke another piece off the rock from the
muestra
Consuelo had left me, crushed it into smaller rocks and made a
bola
to carry with me. Then I broke off a bigger chunk and cooked up a toke.

Angel started complaining again, but stopped fighting the minute I began dressing him; he didn’t even resist as I slipped his feet into his little boots, tickling his sole out of habit to make him straighten his toes. When Daisy came, a
while later, she found me staring at the closed curtains. She told me Alias had stopped breathing during the night; she had shaken him and now he was feeling better, but sometimes he still had trouble catching his breath. Consuelo had taken him to the hospital in the City of Orchids, “to see the best doctor money could buy.” I told her I felt there was little hope left for any of us.

“You only learn to know hope when everything in you is dead,” Daisy said. At the time I didn’t understand what she meant, but now I do. There is more hope here on death row than in any other place in the universe.

I told Daisy Consuelo’s plan for me. I didn’t think I could leave my son behind. As I said these words out loud, and pictured myself walking anywhere in the world without Angel’s small body nestled up against my breast, I began to weep; my tears fell onto his face, rolled off into his ears and down his neck to the hollow place in his chest, and collected there.

The fields surrounding the Church of Our Virgin of Mercy were deserted, except for a solitary old man, in a loose-fitting shirt and baggy trousers, turning the earth with a broken spade. He didn’t look up as we parked. El Chopo, whom I hadn’t seen since the morning he delivered me to the Hacienda la Florida, said he would wait with the car. Even before we started our climb I felt the hot, wet air on my skin. The trail looked steep, the mountaintop, Chocolata’s shrine, far away in the sky.

A vulture kept an eye on us, higher than the clouds that hovered, whitely, like the corpses of angels. As we
passed the Cementerio de Niños, a look of sadness scudded across Angel’s face. Daisy said it was a pity there was no shade in that place, only, day after day, the sun, and always the
angelitos
moaning for their mothers.

She kept quickening our pace, and once we got beyond the graveyard, where the rough road narrowed into an even rougher trail, I had difficulty keeping up to her. A long line of rifles had been thrust into the earth like fenceposts to mark the trail, which might otherwise have been indistinguishable through the fields of crucifix orchids. The few trees that had been left standing grew straight and white, topped by bunches of leaves that reached for the sky like zapped hairdos.

Propped against one of the rifles was a sign: “If You’re Going to Make a Start, Keep on Going—If You Know What You’re Doing. But If I Were You, I’d think it Over.”

“It’s to discourage people from going to the shrine for the wrong reasons,” Daisy said when she saw my worried look. “It is not meant for people like us.”

For people like us.
What had I become?

I had made a start, I would keep on going.

Yellow storm clouds had begun gathering to the north, over the City of Orchids, while above us the vultures continued to make their slow rounds in the sky. The Buddhists were right, I thought: desire was the cause of all suffering. The desire to live, and for my child to live with me—to grow up whole and be allowed to hear the wild music of the world, to stumble from his dreams and to hear the humming of wild bees, know the taste of rainwater on his tongue or the smell of a campfire burning out at dawn—I had never felt desire so strong.

I suffered as I climbed, a kind of sickness that I am beyond suffering now, sitting here in a cell the size of a rich person’s coffin. I hope I never desire anything again. Or even
want
anything. To want is to be weak, vulnerable. Prey for the wolves. Pray for them. As Frenchy once said, “ ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.’ I don’t get it. If he’s my fucking shepherd, why shouldn’t I fucking want him? That’s the trouble with the Bible. It fucks you up.”

But that day on Nevada Chocolata, I felt desire. The desire to hold and be held, to take Angel home with me, to smell mock orange drifting through a June window at the Walled-Off Astoria while I drink jasmine tea sweetened with wildflower honey, leaning against pillows part drifting cloud, part daydream. I desired my child, who needed me. I kissed his face as I climbed, kissed his name over and over again in my head, each beloved letter of his name, as I followed the cold line of rifles up into the higher, cooler air, stopping every so often to look down on the cemetery embedded in the hillside, to remind myself of the reasons to keep going.
“When you are sad, remember that Angel exists.”
It took all my resolve to pick my way around the stabbing rocks and large, meaty-leafed plants, and go on.

At a sudden point, the stark upland scenery softened and became an almost subtropical forest, a haven for an innumerable variety of orchids growing on tree trunks, on branches and along the ground. Some rose up on erect flower stalks into lurid, contorted shapes; others jumped out at you, big enough to steal your jewellery. Even the air was filled with spidery green, jewel-like blossoms, scarcely larger than the heads of pins, drifting down from the trees.

We made slow progress up the trail onto the last of the high ridges that trapped the clouds and barred the sun. Tiny cold streams cut down the mountain’s face. Even now, when the sun shone on the rest of the valley, the top of the mountain, a grim heath of yellowish bog grass and stunted
frailjones
, was blanketed by swirling cloud and horizontal rain.