September 2009

Bottom line: unless the miraculous occurs, in less than twenty-four hours my executioners will pump me full of pancuronium bromide to paralyze my body and potassium chloride to stop my heart, rendering me a corpse on the slab. It’s impossible not to be reflective in a time like this. Mostly I think of my regrets, which are legion, the biggest being that I never got a chance to tell my story — to describe the events, however implausible, that led to my planting a knife in the man’s eye. I must unburden myself, and it’s now or never. Whether you choose to believe me or not is moot as far as I’m concerned: as you’re reading this, I’m already dead.

I was living in this crappy apartment south of downtown, not quite the projects but no more than a stone’s throw from them. This was the kind of place still had A/C units hanging out the windows, dripping condensation that turned slimy green from the algae and attracted hordes of mosquitoes. My place was a one bedroom unit, with ancient gray carpet stomped to the hardness of asphalt, natty furniture with stains on all sides of the cushions, a coffee table bearing ashtrays heaped with old, crooked butts — you get the idea. The unit next to mine had been vacant for a few weeks. Then this guy moved in. I was at work at the time and missed the actual moving in process, but when I got home I noticed some noises next door that I hadn’t heard before, furniture being arranged and such. For a while I considered knocking on his door and introducing myself but nixed the idea on the principal that I hated people and wasn’t interested in making new friends.

Which isn’t to say I wasn’t curious. Especially after a few months went by and I realized I hadn’t seen the guy. At night I could hear his voice through the walls — not his words, just his voice. It was a resounding baritone that seemed at times to almost moan in its speech. Other times it sped up and grew louder, as if in a panic. It drove me crazy. I would put a cup and an ear to the wall to try to hear what he was saying, but it never worked. All I heard was his incoherent voice, and it was his voice alone. Nobody else seemed to be there with him.

Maybe if I’d had a girlfriend or a hobby, something to occupy my time, I wouldn’t have been so curious about this man. Hindsight — there’s a lot of time for that on death row, and I spend mine wondering how things might have been different if only there’d been the slightest change in circumstances, something however so slight to divert my attention. But the reality was, I had a lot of free time on my hands. So I took note of any sounds I heard coming from his unit, listening for patterns, vocal inflections, anything that marked activity on his side of the wall. Along with his voice, there were other strange noises that came though to me — sometimes a clicking, chirping sound that I associated with insects — crickets, I guess — but louder than any insect I knew of; sometimes a banging and thumping, as of heavy furniture falling and being maneuvered about; and sometimes, most disturbing of all, a tapping against the wall that separated us, not a steady tapping, but one with a pattern, a design, as if he were trying to communicate with me through code. This tapping, it sounded like something small and sharp produced it, like an eating utensil. Every once in a while, between the taps, I would hear a long scrap across the wall. I pictured a fork.