Seven hours. Four hundred and twenty minutes.
Twenty-five thousand and two hundred seconds. That is how much time there is
left before Dave McLean is legally pronounced dead.
Dave, a death row inmate, was convicted of murdering
a police officer in Dallas, Texas in the summer of 1985. His home of twenty-one
years has been a six-by-twelve-feet cinder block with a slit called a window
seven feet up the wall. Every night, entrapped in this cell, he relives that
night. The chaos of the drunken brawl. The gunshots. The screaming. The pool of
blood. And the look on the victim’s face when the lights within his eyes dimmed
and faded away.
“Visitor!” shouts Bill, the prison guard, breaking
into the hour-by-hour visits from the ghosts of his haunting past.
Four hours. Two
hundred and forty minutes. Bill clicks the metal handcuffs onto Dave’s hands.
Keeping a grasp on his right arm, he escorts Dave to the visitor’s room. The
door opens to a familiar face. Dave sees his sister, Grace, trying to smile
while biting her lips. Her eyes glisten. With age, she looks so much more like their
mother, who passed ten years ago. He presses both of his hands on the glass
window, up against hers.
“I’ll be there
with you until the end,” Grace chokes through her tears.
“We already
talked about this. I don’t want you there,” Dave says through his tightened
throat.
“You’re my big
brother. Why don’t you want me to be there with you?”
“It’s because I’m your big brother that I
don’t want you to be there.”
He traces his
fingers on the outline of her face. He looks up and she swipes a tear away.
“One minute!”
Bill warns.
“Gracie. Listen
to me. I love you and don’t forget that. I’ll be with Mom watching over you.” His
voice breaks.
“I’m so sorry.”
Bill comes back
into the room, grabs his right arm, and pushes him towards the door. Dave takes
one last glance behind to see that Grace mouths “I love you.”
Back in his cell, he crawls into bed and lays in the
fetal position. He shoves a pillow in his mouth to muffle the noise.
“Dinner!”
Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Dave wakes up to Bill shouting into his cell. His
stomach grumbles in response. Forty-eight hours ago, Dave requested for his last meal—a crispy bacon sandwich with ketchup, a
loaf of bread, a peach cobbler, three Cokes, three root beers, French fries and
onion rings—to be provided to a homeless person.
“Your request was denied. Here is your special meal. A loaf of bread, curly fries, onion rings, mashed
potatoes, grape juice and a pecan pie. This is the best they could come up
with,” Bill says after handing him a plastic tray.
“Thanks.”
Dave accepts the plastic spork and napkin. His eyes wander from the
curly fries to the onions rings and finally settle on the mashed potatoes with
gravy. The loaf of bread soon disappears into his mouth, along with the curly
fries and onion rings he shoves inside with his greasy fingers. The gorging is
over once he has sucked out the last drop of his grape juice. He picks up the spork
to delve into the pecan pie, the highlight of the meal. But then he puts it back
down.
“Maybe I’ll just save it for later,” he chuckles to himself. His eyes
glaze over and he falls silent as he remembers—sixty minutes. Dave finishes the
pecan pie in three bites. He tries to swallow the last bite along with the
bubbling fear rising in his stomach. He chokes instead. Dave shoves his head
under the faucet and takes large gulps of water from the sink inside his cell.
Before he can fully digest his last meal, two men approach his cell.
Bill and Brian, the new bodyguard, come into the cell, faces grim. Bill
sturdily locks the chains onto Dave’s ankles. Brian breaks into a sweat, trying
to handcuff Dave’s hands with his shaky fingers. Bill and Brian each grabs an
arm and begins to escort Dave out of the cell.
“Would you mind if I walked on my own?” Dave requests.
Bill takes his hands off and nods to Brian. Dave’s knees begin to feel
weak. His legs shake and then give out. Dave collapses. He whimpers while Bill
and Brian pick him up and drag him down the hallway. At the end of the
corridor, there is a gurney with a clean white sheet. Without a word, the two
guards lift Dave onto the gurney. Dave lies on his back while they secure his
hands and legs onto the metal bar. Dave looks up to see the fluorescent lights
passing by. The gurney stops and he is in a spacious room.
The technician, a masked man wearing a white gown, enters. Dave is
attached to the heart monitor. A machine beeps. The technician stabs his arm with a needle. Dave winces. The
technician takes it out, stabs it in the other arm, and starts the saline
drip. Dave curses as he sees his
arm swell. The technician curses too.
“Damn. The IV isn’t in correctly.”
He takes out the needle and tries a different vein. This vein is usable.
The technician looks through the glass at the adjoining room for the warden’s
signal. He nods. The anesthetic is inserted.
Dave turns his head toward the window. He sees his mother on the other side.
Dave blinks twice and shakes his head. His eyes focus on Gracie, who has both
of her hands clutched over her mouth, shoulders shaking.
“I’m sorry. Forgive me,” Dave whispers. He nods one last time in
response to Gracie’s silent wails before he turns his head away. Looking up, he
blinks away a tear. His long black
lashes flutter lethargically until they finally close.
Zero hours. The technician inserts pavulon, which paralyzes
the entire muscle system, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart. The
monitor flatlines. Dave McLean, brother, son, and once-aspiring football star
is pronounced dead at 8:05 pm at age forty on his last birthday.
