Given (2 page)

The Latrine turned her face, trying, I imagined, to block out our driver's monologue, and lowered her window all the way. I took a big breath of the dust-and-eucalyptus-smelling late summer air as we entered a tunnel where the words NO MORE ACCIDENTS had been sprayed in day-glo red. “No such thing as an accident,” Earl said. He accelerated until we were back out in the hazy sunlight.

“One daughter, she's a hairdresser in Stockton,” he continued, in answer to a question I hadn't heard asked. He switched lanes. “The son's predeceased. Suicided himself.” He switched back again. “From the day he was born I never understood him.”

I stared through the bars at the planes coming in for a landing, and saw the sign saying, “Airport Exit Ahead”. Earl lit a cigarette, then stubbed it out. “I'm supposed to stay quit,” he said.

He didn't continue right away but studied the road in front of him. “The boy, he was a peaceifistic kind of kid, hated guns, any kind of violence. He wanted to play the piano. You know what they say about kids. They don't come with instructions.”

Earl said a day didn't go by when he didn't wish he'd been more of a father. He wished he could have accepted his son the way he'd been. If he could turn back the clocks again he'd even pay for piano lessons.

I could see planes circling overhead. Earl increased his speed, seeming not to notice the roadworks up ahead. The Latrine grew more agitated as the freeway merged into one lane. I wondered if she was worrying about the same thing I was thinking: what would happen if we met another vehicle coming the opposite way?

Earl narrowed his eyes, as if the white lines were leading him somewhere he had never intended to go. I followed his gaze, saw the world floating towards us on waves of breath, and when I glanced at him again his eyes had become hopelessly fixed on the Latrine's breasts.

“Holy fuck,” she cried; Earl had misjudged the distance between her side of the van and a tree covered with brilliant red blossoms. As he tried to get control, he missed the Exit to Departures and pulled a sudden, rash, U-turn on Airport Boulevard. I saw the giant billboard with its bigger question looming up in front of us:

ETERNITY
WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING?

Earl, as if entranced, gunned the van towards it.

After the crash I saw, in the shattered mirrors of his sunglasses, three red blossoms reflected, as if each one had been placed there in memory of our lives. I'd spent my life feeling that I was hanging on to the side of the planet with suction cups, and now all of a sudden I had been hurled into the luminous hereafter and my singing heart was full.

Then came the usual crowd of the morbidly curious, like worms after rain, straining to get a closer look, a vicarious taste of mortality. A putrid, steaky smell filled the air. The volume on the van's radio seemed to be getting louder with each breath I took. I looked at my watch, but the face had been smashed off.

I lay for the longest time where I had been thrown clear of the wreckage, intoxicated by the pure feel of blood coursing through my veins. I tasted my own flesh, and heard sirens winding down. After a while my thoughts became the colour of water; I got to my feet, brushed myself off, and looked at the scene from my new perspective.

Fate always gives you two choices: the one you
should
take, and the one you do. Earl had made the wrong choice, and now he lay face down in the stubble-grass next to my lifeless escort, his body so black it stood out like a hole in the day. How long, I wondered, before the police notified the War Department, who would forever wish she hadn't forced breakfast down her husband's throat before he'd left the house that morning, and would always feel guilty for not having kissed him goodbye?

Fatty be fucked like a bologna pop tart,
Frenchy whispered in my ear.

Then my thoughts of Earl vanished, merging with the traffic that was, once again, beginning to flow. I picked up my escort's purse and her aviator shades that lay on the grass a few feet away from me. I put the aviators over my eyes — I remember thinking then that nothing, not even your life, looks as beautiful as when you are leaving it behind — and turned to face the terminal building.

Given time we begin to lose all interest in our past, but I still remember those first hours after the accident with a kind of detached curiosity. I expected I might feel everything more intensely than I had when I was a prisoner, but instead the world right away assumed an ordinariness that filled me with a mixture of homesickness and dread. For most of my life only the fear of death had prevented me from dying all the way. I felt afraid, now, of what I was about to become. Our care and treatment counsellor had reminded me every chance she got, “To free yourself is nothing, the real problem is knowing what to do with your freedom.” By escaping, I knew, I had exiled myself to the lonely recklessness of the fugitive. Suddenly I felt as if I had been cast adrift in a leaky boat without oars, no charts, no stars to go by, only an endless emptiness, and the final consolation: sorrow and its truth.

The airport was under construction and I had to enter at the Arrivals level. Everything I looked at seemed to shine with its own light — the plummy grains of wood in the panelling on the wall, the red blouse of a woman walking towards me, the eyeless GI in the wheelchair, the chunky brown dog hunched beside him, the poster advertising HEAD, a kind of footwear, the sign advising against making jokes, particularly about bombs or hijacking. They had a similar rule at the Facility: when you wrote a letter you weren't allowed to joke — about anything: sex, politics, religion, or any aspect of institutional life.

Two of my faithful correspondents had stopped writing to me when they died: my father in my sixth year on the Row, of heart failure, and my mother, six years to the very day later, following a freak gardening accident. After twelve years — thirteen if you count the year I was a hostage on Tranquilandia — I had lost touch with most of my friends; being on Death Row could be said to have tested the boundaries of what is meaningful between people and the way we are tied to each other without ever understanding why. There had been too much explaining to do, and in the end I had realized I really didn't know anybody very well, not even my estranged husband. These days when I closed my eyes I couldn't remember what Vernal looked like, or the taste of his skin, or the way he'd kept his eyes open when he kissed me, as if he'd been afraid I might disappear if he so much as blinked.

The morning light struck the terminal windows like a backhand to the mouth. I had become so used to being led everywhere, having to ask permission or send in a written request before I made a move in any direction, that now, having abandoned myself to fate, I had become lost.

I let my shadow lead me, trying to see whether I could catch the reflection of my face in other people's dark glasses, to verify I was real. My shadow rounded a corner and I followed it into a public washroom where I removed the Eternals and hesitated for a moment, looking at myself in the wall of mirrors over the sinks, my eyes the ice blue of power-line insulators, my mouth turned down from the way things had gone. I put on the aviators again (
What you do now? Win an Oscar?
Rainy breathed in my ear
)
wanting to stay hidden.

I turned from the mirror, and locked myself in a stall where I could go through the Latrine's purse in privacy. Along with forty-five dollars in small bills and some change, my escort's purse contained a collection of photo booth snapshots — her ex and his two boys making faces for the camera — and her Department of Corrections ID card.

I took my few possessions, including a toothbrush, a change of clothes, prison issue pyjamas, a photograph of my son, and a clean sweatshirt out of the duffel bag, then turned the sweatshirt inside out so that the Heaven Valley logo didn't raise any red flags at the check-in counter. I put the ID and the change in the pocket of my jeans, and slipped the rest of the money in my sock, then stuffed the Latrine's wallet in the sanitary napkin disposer. I wasn't proud of myself for doing that, but at least this way someone might find it and turn it in to the Lost and Found. I repacked my duffel bag, and left the washroom without glancing again in the mirror. Then I found a pay phone and called Vernal at his office in Vancouver, collect.

I tried to tell him I'd been in a wreck but a gurgling, rattling sound came out of my throat, as if my breath were slogging through a slough of mucous. “My God, you sound terrible,” Vernal said. “You should see . . . don't they have doctors down there . . . wherever you are? I'll try getting someone on my cell . . . just hold on . . . is there someplace you can . . . you still with me?”

I nodded into the receiver, furrowed my brow, wanting Vernal to stay calm, to know I was giving this question proper consideration, when really I knew he couldn't see me and I felt lonely as the furthest stars. Bullying muzak blared from a speaker somewhere near my spinning head. Vernal kept asking if I was still there, had I had anything to drink? At first I thought he was asking if I was drunk, then realized he meant water, that I needed to drink water so I wouldn't dehydrate. I promised him I would buy a bottle as soon as the world stopped turning so fast, and gave him the details, my new alias — he said he would book me a ticket home online. I waited until the dizziness passed and I could walk without drawing attention to myself, then rode an elevator up one floor to Departures.

All around me people shouted the intimate details of their travel worries into the palms of their hands. I felt conspicuous, even though I blended with the crowed that was dressed, for the most part, casually, in jeans and sweatshirts like the one I wore. The only noticeable difference was my shoes.

And my face, the face that had recently appeared on the cover of
Newsmakers,
a special issue profiling women waiting to die on Death Row. I'd signed the release forms though I hadn't seen a copy of the magazine to date. I was death's latest poster girl and my mug shot had been on TV, too, on more than one occasion — most recently on
Executions Live!
the night Rainy died.

Nearly everyone I saw carried a bottle of water — hard to believe the planet would have had so many pure mountain springs (as Vernal would have said, “Evian is naïve spelled backwards.
”)
When I first met Rainy she used to wash her important parts with the bottled water we were issued, the tap water having been declared unpotable at the time: she claimed they made the taps in our cell sinks especially hard to turn on and off so that girls would break their fingernails trying to wash, and the institution would save money by not having to provide us with nail clippers. Frenchy said her logic didn't make sense, that bottled water cost way more than nail files.

Your point?
said Rainy.

You stupid?
Frenchy shot back.

I stopped at the first newsstand I came to, to buy my own bottle of water, and a copy of
Newsmakers,
then stood waiting to pay while the salesclerk, applying a layer of blue nail polish, talked on her phone. “When Carley broke up with him he wanted to kill himself so he ate a pencil.” She looked up at me, spreading her fingers to let the polish dry. “He wanted to give himself lead poisoning.”

My eyes shifted to a nearby table, piled high with books that had been marked down — how to die with dignity, how to cheat death, how to write a foolproof will, an etiquette book including helpful hints on everything from planning an after-funeral soiree to the right coloured flowers to send the deceased's family and
Why We Live After Death
— not the kind of escapist literature I could imagine anyone enjoying on their flight. The salesclerk must have read my thoughts because she removed her cell phone from her ear and volunteered that death wasn't real popular in airports, the main reason why her manager had decided to clear their stock. “When people are travelling, they don't want to think about, you know, not getting there type of deal?” I could tell she wanted to get rid of me so she could get back to her phone call, so I paid with cash and thanked her for her help.

I found the American Airlines check-in counter and joined the long line snaking its way towards the only available ticket agent. The man in front of me was watching a rerun of
Executions Live!
on his laptop and I found myself sneaking glances over his shoulder. Since I'd been convicted and sent to prison, executions had become a spectator sport; on the night Rainy was dispatched to meet her maker, a contingency of pro-death advocates revved their motor homes and honked their horns and set off fireworks outside the prison gates. We didn't know it at the time but Rainy, who had injected drugs for so long she didn't have an uncollapsed vein left in her body, was undergoing a “cut-down”. Shortly before midnight as the pro-deathers fired up their barbecues and began grilling greasy slabs of bacon, corrections officers, who had no experience as surgeons, were in the process of slitting Rainy's arm open, searching, desperately, for a usable blood vessel into which they could syphon their lethal cocktail.