Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row (29 page)

Cally also donated extraordinary sums of money to our defense efforts, and she never wavered in her support and affection for me through all the years I was incarcerated.

In the early years, Jason and I actually exchanged letters through our various visitors. We told each other not to give in, not to give up hope, to keep fighting no matter what. He described living conditions in the general prison population—everything you’ve read about prison is true, only more so. The violence is incomprehensible, and Jason was brutalized in unspeakable ways. Among other things, he suffered a fractured skull and had to be hospitalized after he was thrown headfirst onto the concrete floor by another inmate. He told me he never saw his attacker. He’d been my closest friend and I missed him during those years, though he lived just nearby. The guards and wardens were obsessed with making sure we never spoke; when a letter was discovered, Jason was threatened and so we didn’t try communicating often.

I was still a child when I was sent to Death Row. I grew into adulthood, both mentally and physically, in this hellhole. I came into this situation wide-eyed and naïve. Now I view most everything and everyone with narrow-eyed suspicion. I’ve learned the hard way that the world is not my friend. I thought that pretty much the entire human race wanted me to die a slow, painful death, until a miracle occurred. It seems my hopes of receiving divine intervention weren’t completely ignored.

One thing I’ve noticed time and time again in prison is how quickly people in the outside world forget you. Their lives do not stop simply because yours does. Sooner or later they get over the grieving process and move on. Even your family. Two years is a very long time for someone to stick by your side once you’re in prison. Most don’t even last that long. Domini moved on with her life; she’s now married, has a beautiful daughter, and lives all the way on the other side of the country. I haven’t seen my father in many, many years. He has another family to worry about and care for now. There’s not much he could have done for me anyway.

Between October 2009 and September 2010, we filed a motion to make an oral argument in front of the Arkansas Supreme Court requesting a new trial based on all of the new evidence and DNA findings we’d accumulated over the past ten years. A hearing isn’t guaranteed, and by this point Lorri and I were both worn down by the process. We had exhausted every possibility in terms of uncovering new proof of my innocence, and none of it had worked. We had all of the elements we needed in this battle—we simply could not get the court system to pay attention and we were running out of time. In fact, it looked to us like we would spend the rest of our lives in pursuit of something just out of reach.

All around me were people who had been abandoned to their fates. No one came to see them or offer encouragement. No one wrote them long letters with news from home. They had no one to call when they were so sad or scared they felt they couldn’t go on. No one sent them a few dollars so they wouldn’t have to eat the rancid prison food.

They are the true living dead. The world has moved on, and they are forgotten. The thought that I could have so easily been one of them fills my heart with terror. I’m fortunate beyond my ability to describe because I’ve had a few friends who have stuck by my side since almost the beginning.

*  *  *

M
orphic field. That’s what it’s called when a certain kind of energy pattern is repeated over and over until it creates something like an aura. This prison, for example. All of the hatred, ignorance, pain, humiliation, and greed constantly being put out by everyone in here has created one hell of a negative morphic field. The thing about morphic fields is that they behave like magnets. Like attracts like. It draws more of the same energy to itself, and it touches everyone who comes here. The people who come to see me immediately feel disgust, anger, and repugnance for the kind of people they have to deal with here. It also explains why every new batch of guards who come to work here are a little more brutal and ignorant than the last. As the morphic field grows increasingly worse, it draws in the kind of people who resonate with it.

Even the best-laid plans seem to go bad in a split second. All you can do is stand there in a state of shock, wondering what went wrong. It’s one of the worst feelings possible, to helplessly watch as the world slips through your fingers like sand. Your heart seems to run out with it.

What happened to me was a great disruption. It was the violent shuddering jerk of something that has slipped horribly off track. I sit in this cell now, filling someone else’s place. It is a murderer who should be here, not me. I often wonder if this mistake was made deliberately, by those who have something to hide. Other times I wonder if it’s for some great and secret purpose known only to a power much higher than myself. But I believe the most important question of all is what will it take to set things right? What will it take to restore my life to its right track and clockwork precision? Is it already happening?

I come from a line of men with no fathers. I have no paternal traditions to pass on to my own offspring, and can count the number of times I’ve seen my son on one hand. They say that blood calls to blood, but I have thirty-two years of doubt and no contradiction. No one was there to teach me how to knot a necktie or explain the mechanics of sex. I had to learn on the run, wherever I could. My own son doesn’t even know me. All he has is a handful of someone else’s dusty memories, most of which aren’t even accurate.

There are long stretches of time that fly by so quietly that another year has crept up on you before you realize it. The year can feel as oily as the steel of a gun barrel. Other times the stress comes in and floods out everything. It steals your sleep and your clarity of mind. Consciousness becomes a mental misery that takes a toll on the body. All the worldly concerns drop in to introduce themselves at a time you least suspect. Hairline fractures trace their way across the skull and settle into a deep throb. There is never enough time, patience, money, or enthusiasm. The pressure is relentless, and I twist in the wind like a sheet on a clothesline. The constantly shifting strategy wears me down and tires me out. The cycle is endlessly repetitive and I have no distractions. Matters of life and death are no more than afterthoughts to the cogs that turn the wheels. I keep feeling that if I could only get one break, then I could find a way to get ahead. It never comes. I am at the end of my rope.

Last night I dreamed that a bunch of rednecks burned me at the stake in a Walmart parking lot. Surprisingly enough, it wasn’t entirely unpleasant. I was still conscious after I became smoke, and it felt good to spiral in the air. I didn’t just float around the way smoke tends to. I flew quickly, and with a purpose. I was following someone, but can’t remember who or why. I only remember watching them cross a gray winter field from a great distance as I formed a giant white spiral in the sky. I felt free and strong, vibrating with purpose. Sometimes we forget the raw power of that feeling when we leave the purity of youth behind. I recognized and remembered it in the dream. When I awakened, it lingered like an aftertaste.

In my best dreams I always run on all fours, like an animal. I still have the same body, but I travel like a quadruped. I’ll be running and suddenly realize that I can move much faster if I use my hands. I lean forward just enough to get my hands on the ground and then use all four limbs to thrust myself forward like a rabbit, a cheetah, or a deer. It’s a feeling of absolute freedom and power. These dreams feel ten times better than the few dreams I’ve had in which I can fly. I’ve had these running dreams for as long as I can remember, and it’s always seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Someone once told me that in these dreams I am becoming my totem animal, that I am taking the form of my spirit guide, and that it probably has something to do with my Native American bloodline. The only flaw in that theory is that when I see myself in these dreams I don’t look like any animal. I look like myself, only running faster than any human ever could.

The trauma of living circles me like a pack of wolves. It waits for the exhaustion to drive me to my knees so that it can devour me at leisure. It lingers over my bones, taking pride in its ghoulish feast. When life eats you, it always starts with your heart.

I’ve always sneered at weakness, and at those who need a painkiller to make it through the day. My sneers were caused by false pride. The only thing strong about me is the grip I have on my masks and delusions. Now all I feel is surgery without the anesthetic. All that I know is fear, and I can’t find my way out.

I have a new next-door neighbor. He hasn’t slept in several days. He paces his cell throughout the night, arguing with himself in several voices. One is a deep bass mumble, one is a screeching shrew, and a third does nothing but curse and swear at the other two. Sometimes they all merge into a bug-eyed, strangling gargle. It doesn’t stop until daylight comes.

For the first time I see how I’ve spent my entire life on a pendulum, swinging back and forth between the two faces of God—the face that hides in shadow and the face that shines forth from the light. The cigarettes, the yoga, the sleeping pills, the meditation, the trashy horror movies, the music of Bach, the losing of myself in sex, the Catholicism, the self-destructive urge, and the abandonment of myself to the ecstasy of love. I saw the face of light as I struggled to understand life through the heart of the Rose.

What I crave more than anything today is to sit at an outdoor café on a cool autumn day. I just want to feel that end-of-the-year breeze as I sip a cup of green tea and take my time with a piece of pumpkin pie. I would slump in my chair and allow my mind to roam wherever it chose. Nothing else in the world epitomizes absolute freedom to me more than that thought. I could be alone or with a friend I know so well that we wouldn’t have to speak. Sometimes I wake up in the morning thinking about pumpkin pie.

I’m convinced that people see the ghosts of themselves all the time, but most just choose to block them out. The words don’t even make sense to me, and I know it’s true. When I was seven years old I saw the ghost of myself at the age of eighteen. Ever since that day I’ve kicked myself for not asking questions. I’ve no idea what my eighteen-year-old self could have told me at that point—perhaps nothing at all. Still, I can’t help but think of it as a lost opportunity. Somehow there was a slight fluctuation in the current, and two of me bled through the fabric at once.

Trying to figure out the meaning behind such events can drive you mad, because there is no answer. Perhaps it was some sort of hiccup. Then again, perhaps I was making some Herculean effort to reach out to myself, and that was all I could manage.

I used to wonder if some other me had died on Death Row, causing all of my selves to snap back like a broken rubber band and haunt each other. Now I doubt it, even though no other answer is any more likely. It just doesn’t feel right.

These things are always strongest in December, when the year is as thin and transparent as plastic wrap. Something in the center of my chest rejoices that this is my birth month—it swoons like a religious zealot with a mouthful of Hallelujahs.

D
ECEMBER
11

I have never seen the sun on my birthday. It simply does not shine. This one single day is immortal, eternally waiting for me to return to it once every year. It is a sentient gray room that sits outside the world’s rotational authority. This is the day of the winter eclipse, and the graveyard of my alienation. Time is marked with an hourglass filled with snow instead of sand.

This day is one of the closest things to ritual or tradition that my family ever embraced. It’s the quietest day of the year—no birds sing, no cars backfire, and there is no laughter. It enwraps me in a soft and soothing cocoon, and it holds me like a secret. Even the pictures on the walls silently sing its grace. If there was ever only one day on Marlou Island, then this would be that day.

D
ECEMBER
25

Christmas Day itself is always bittersweet, because it’s the last day of that beautiful magick that’s been building up like a tidal wave for the past month. In just a week it will be hard to even remember what it’s like. I’ll be brokenhearted at the thought of it being gone again for an entire year.

At home I always preferred Christmas Eve to Christmas. All the family would come over for the party. There would be sandwiches, homemade cookies and candy, chips and dip, and everyone would be in a great mood. After they left, my sister and I would be allowed to open up all of our presents at the stroke of midnight, unless I was at St. Michael’s for the Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. If I was, then we opened them the second I got home. The house was always so warm. No one was ever in a bad mood, because we were experiencing the magick that had been accumulating for months. It sparkled in my mother’s eyes.

It’s been about fourteen years since I’ve really celebrated Christmas, or even had a decent meal on this day. The feeling the day carries manages to seep in through these concrete walls, but there’s no one here to share it with and nothing I can do with it. I’d be happy to pass a stranger on the street and hear them say, “Merry Christmas,” or to be able to say it to them. I want to be bundled up as I walk beneath the slate-colored afternoon sky. I want to sit and look at twinkling trees while sipping eggnog. In the outside world the air would feel like a music box, just like in the old days.

This is the time of year when it hurts the most to be here. The summer may be a misery to my body, but missing this magick hurts me to my soul.

December tastes like Hershey’s Kisses. The month of December and those little Hershey’s Kisses candies are connected in a way that I can’t quite articulate. For me, at least. I do know that eating a Hershey’s Kiss is like an act of communion—like taking a tiny taste of December into myself. I don’t like to eat them at other times of the year, because I don’t want that special association to fade.