The Last Bite

A gentle melody echoed down a stone hall whose frigidity came not from the lack of sun but rather from the dispassionate gray rock that ensconced dim, sickly lights which seemed to pull whatever heat there was away from the air itself. The whistling came from familiar lips, and was soon accompanied by an arrhythmic tapping; a baton against the stone. If Javier was correct, the melody belonged to a hit from the 2000s, though he couldn’t put his finger on which one, exactly. Memories from those days seemed to be whirling around his head at light speed these days, rarely staying long enough for reflection.

His room had a little window near the top through which he could see a hint of a pleasant blue sky with some wispy clouds that moved across his dingy frame of view with some urgency. Javier leaned back in his bed, hearing the melody get closer, the rapping of the baton against the stone grow more inconsistent. He had grown so accustomed to the walls of his room that he had a favorite divet in the rock that comprised his wall, one that seemed to fit his shoulders and his broad back perfectly. His legs were starting to grow numb from being pressed against the hard steel bed, the thin roll of his mattress doing little to cushion them. Javier ran a hand over his buzzed head, feeling the thick, sharp bristles of his hair and moving his hand down to his prominent eyebrows, his deep-set eyes, and a large nose that held a ridge from when it had been broken in the past, another memory that flitted through his mind faster than those clouds in the sky. He knew what was coming.

The whistling stopped suddenly and the baton rapped against steel. “Ay, J-man! How’s it going in there?”

Javier turned his head slowly and opened his eyes to see Donny Tremaine smiling with a cup of coffee in one meaty, red hand and his baton in the other. His round face was cracking a crooked grin, all ruddy and gone to seed, just like the rest of him in the ill-fitting blue uniform. The hat on his head was straight as a pole, the badge on his chest gleaming in a beam of sunlight. His beady black eyes were dancing as he looked at the gaunt prisoner before him.

Javier took a deep breath, tensing each muscle from the bottom of his feet up to his neck just like his mother had taught him to do before bed. Once his own brown eyes could fix Donny’s with stoic rigor, he said, “You should know the answer to that, cabron.”

Donny chuckled, the sound wet and insolent in his throat. “Hey, don’t take it out on me now. I’m not the one that killed that family.”

“Neither am I,” whispered Javier, the conviction of his words ringing in the heart that beat strongly, for now, beneath his ribs. He had to believe this, for so often was that conviction lacking in his mind; so often had he been told he was guilty that he had started to believe it himself. Perhaps he was guilty, guilty of something so terrible that they had to use this façade of a trial, of a crime, to keep him here, to force him to count down the days of his life alone.

“What was that?”

“Nothing…”

Donny frowned. “Listen, I’m just here to check on ya. I’m your friend, y’know.”

“News to me,” whispered Javier.

“Huh?”

“Nothing.”

Donny huffed and hit the baton against the steel in what Javier was sure was supposed to be a show of force. “Hey, watch it now. You think these bars are made of some sorta electric forcefield that I can’t come in there and whoop your ass?”

Javier tensed all of his muscles again sequentially. Though his frame had dropped twenty pounds in prison, the wiry, combative strength was still there. Yet he couldn’t help but look down and say, “I’m sorry.”

“Damn right. I’m just here to tell ya that your last meal’s almost ready… jerk.”

Taking another deep breath, Javier said, “Thanks.”

Donny grumbled something and shook his head, realizing after several moments that Javier was not going to entertain him today. Scowling, he went back down the long stone corridor through which only he was permitted to walk freely.

Time passed. Javier was not sure how much. Eventually, he rose to use the latrine in the corner of his cell, placing his attention on each one of the small deviations of the stone wall, though he had mapped them all in his mind long ago. Thicker clouds had come to cover the sun. When he was back on his bed, he tried to meditate, as his mother had taught him years ago to quell his anxiety. However, in the last day or so, even this final refuge had been taken from him. For a reason he could not ascertain, even the calmness he usually found in turning inward had abandoned him in a hurry, his heart beating quicker now every time he closed his eyes to begin his practice.

It was in this state of agitation that Donny found him again. He whistled sharply and said, “Hey! Time for dinner, J-man.”

Javier was cuffed and put in chains, led by Donny and a female version of him with blistering blue eyes and a strong grip. On the way, Donny asked, “You made peace with the real J-man yet?”

Javier did not answer, so his captor continued, “Hm. Coulda sworn you were a Christian. How about the A-man? Allah, or whatever.”

“I’m not Muslim,” said Javier quietly, his deep voice reverberating in the cold iron around his neck.

“Well Jeez then what are ya?”

Javier was silent for some time, until they got to the anteroom. A distant rumble of thunder pushed its way obstinately through the rock and the thick glass on the windows. Finally, as Donny buzzed to open the door, he said, “I’m just a man.”

An innocent man, finished Javier in his head.

He found himself shortly before a table at which there was some cutlery in a closed container. He was chained to the table, unable to move even in this last overture of freedom. Donny said some words. Then his superior said some words. Javier nodded as though he had understood them, even though they seemed to be speaking a foreign language; he only spoke one language now. The language of the living dead.

He only answered, “Yes, I agree,” to anything they asked him.

Soon, there was food in front of him. Not just prison gruel, slimy and minimally satiating, but real food. The very scent of it pierced his heart the moment it entered his nostrils. It revived him in a way, bringing back an assortment of memories so pungent, so specific and brutal that they cut through the miasma of confinement with ease. Yet these same memories reminded him that he was not an automaton designated to do exercises, tense muscles, and live a life of the mind from within his cell. No, he was a human. A living, breathing creature who had once had a life beyond the steel bars and stone walls.

He took a bite out of a tamale, gingerly at first. His mind flashed back to blustery winter mornings in Queens when he’d awake to the hearty aroma of tamales emanating from his kitchen. His mother would make them often in this season, and when he got to the table she’d ruffle his hair and say in Spanish, “Did you have a good nap?”

He’d nod heavily, the way children nodded, and she would pile his plate high with tamales, rice, and beans. The latter two items were also on Javier’s plate currently; he took a spoonful of that flavorful Mexican rice and couldn’t help but feel a smile alight his lips, the first one in years. The muscles were sore.

Javier took a sip of lemonade and was thrown into a memory of his first kiss with his first real girlfriend. Melissa Davenport, a white girl whose face, he’d learn later, would go red from even the slightest spice. He had seen her that night on their second date. She was wearing a lime green cardigan that lay open over a white top. She wore tight, dark blue jeans. They had just eaten dinner, finishing with a shared lemonade while they walked around a pond at twilight. A cool breeze was coming over the water, salvation after a sweltering day. They were holding hands loosely, and eventually Javier picked a bench for the two of them to occupy.

He sat near her, his heart pulsing with enough strength to seemingly break through his sternum. They laughed and chatted, watching families walk with their dogs and young couples lean on one another on other benches. Javier risked putting an arm around Melissa. She did not pull away; actually, she nestled into him a little. His heart almost squealed with joy. They looked at one another, the city lights twinkling in her hazel eyes. They moved closer imperceptively, their lips parting a little, and Javier felt himself move toward her slowly, deliberately, and she moved toward him. Their lips met and electricity exploded in Javier’s body, lighting his nerves on fire and shooting up and down his spine. The suppleness of her skin, the softness of her hair as he tenderly held the back of her head… All of this from a sip of lemonade.

When they broke apart she whispered, “I was waiting for you to do that.”

He smiled and replied, “Can you feel my heart going?”

Melissa put a hand on his chest and started laughing, pausing only to meet his gaze once more; a silent understanding passed between them. This heart would soon be hers. It would become her job not to break it.

They were no longer together; a two year romance that saw Javier take Melissa to Europe, to Mexico–a two year romance in which there were a lot of “firsts” for him, including his first heartbreak when she, rationally and for good reason, said that they didn’t belong together, that their goals were different. He had wept in his car after giving her a parting kiss on the cheek.

Javier took a bite of steak. Growing up, any steak they had was from the cheap cuts, the kind you had to beat relentlessly to tenderize it. He remembered doing his homework in his bedroom in Queens, getting frustrated that he couldn’t focus because his mom was hammering a steak in the kitchen. He also remembered the first time he’d been up to Boston and eaten at a nice steakhouse. It was a new city; his first business trip, too. His company had gone out somewhere with three dollar signs on Yelp. Javier knew he wasn’t paying, but he still ordered one of the cheaper ribeyes, his heart turning at the thought of his colleagues spending ninety dollars on a filet. That first bite of medium-rare, perfectly seasoned and seared steak lived in his mind for years.

“I think Javier likes it!” Teddy Knowles had chortled, pronouncing the “J” in his name all wrong.

Damien, his boss, said with a smile, “Practically licked his plate,” and when Javier looked down in shame, he added, “D’you want something else?”

A bite of margarita pizza sent Javier back to the courtroom. He recalled the long hours of testimony, of lawyers bickering, and pizza being just about the only thing he had time to eat. His lawyer would pick it up from this shop in Brooklyn, and every slice he tried was delicious. When he’d spend time in jail between proceedings, Javier would think about that pizza and miss it, seeing it in his evening gruel like a phantom drifting listlessly amidst gravestones.

The courtroom… no, the arrest. He’d been drinking beer then, a Modelo. The same beer that now sat in front of him. He took a long draught and remembered the way police had screamed their sirens and squealed their tires as they rushed him in front of his apartment building, the lights shining off of the slick sidewalk, cobalt blue and white glittering like jewels in the puddles.

“Javier Perez?” asked one of them gruffly.

He nodded with wide eyes. Another said, “You’re under arrest for the murder of Cindy Walker, James Walker, and Anthony Walker.”

Javier had been struck. Not physically of course, but his mind had gone blank. He hadn’t even heard those names before. He tried stammering something like, “Wait, you’ve got the wrong guy! You made a mistake!”

Yet for some reason, whenever Javier was stressed, his English was the first to go. Explaining himself in Spanish, as he tried as well, just deepened the scowls on some of the officers faces. One of the female officers pushed his face into the door of the cruiser against which he was being held and said, “You better shut your ass up before but my boot up it.” Then she, and her partner, had used some expletives he hadn’t heard since elementary school.

Days and nights in the prison, eating nothing but gruel. He’d even included gruel in his meal, though it was spiced and hearty. He took a bite and recalled guards whispering about him:

“He’s saying he’s innocent…”

“After all that evidence? He must be crazy.”

“Must be? He clearly is if he’s here, no?”

“God what a sicko.”

“I don’t know, some of that evidence looks planted…”

“Open your eyes, dumbass, look at him.”

That last part seemed to be a recurring comment. Javier took a bite of a churro, feeling the residual memory of his mother’s kitchen flare up briefly–the slightly grungy oil and cinnamon sugar melting into his mouth. Yes… he couldn’t help but think about it himself. He wished he had the beaming, toothy grin of the prosecuting attorney. Perhaps the slightly tanned, perfect skin of the judge. He wished his eyes weren’t so far back into his head, that his hair was long and smooth like one of the juror’s. He saw the dazzling blue eyes of a witness and wished his own weren’t so muddy and enigmatic. He wished the aquiline nose was smaller, straighter, less savage. Javier cursed the father he never knew because it seemed he’d only inherited guilt from the man, or at least the penchant to look guilty. A couple of times, Javier tried to smile, tried to look laid back and relaxed, but once he realized it was not working, he quickly lost the energy. He began observing the proceedings more as a formality. He knew where he was going, and though he could not help but let his spirit be buoyed by the attorney who coddled him, Javier felt the scissors of fate cut the thread of his life the moment he entered the courtroom.

And here he was, eight months later. Postponements, hopes for an appeal… none of it had mattered. He may as well have died when he was twelve and his mother had pulled him back off the street where he’d narrowly avoided a bus. What had his life amounted to, anyway? He felt he was counting down his heartbeats, a heart that had been so full and so empty and so whole and so broken…

Javier swallowed a bite of a chicharron burrito and felt a twinge in his heart. Perhaps… He began to wonder if that was what his life amounted to–that very fullness, the capacity for breaking, the anger and the bitterness and the joy that had brought him sometimes to tears. Javier began to smile. Truly smile, because he knew in the pit of his stomach that that was all worth it, that if he could go back, and he sorely wished he could, that he’d do it all over again in the same way because every tear he’d shed, for joy and for grief, had come from a heart that had blossomed with vitality even at its lowest point.

He put the fork down, having eaten his fill and belched a little approvingly. A last meal… It had been more than worthwhile, just like the tapestry of his life. Silently, he waited, the emotions within him broiling. He waited longer. Eventually, he started to feel the need to use the restroom again. He was about to get up and knock on the door when it opened and Donny, his face ashen, led a thin black man wearing a crisp suit into the room. His sharp features and fiery eyes betrayed an urgency in his purpose.

“Javier Perez?” he asked. When Javier nodded, his mouth dry as he wondered if this was to be his executioner, the man cleared his throat and said, “The court’s just called it in. You’re acquitted.”

The words rang in the air, hitting Javier like a shockwave. Acquitted? There was something about new witness testimony, a new confession, planted evidence… it all washed over him like a tidal wave that ricocheted within him and erupted as a wrenching, guttural sob that nearly caused him to faint. He was brought to his feet, heavily supported by the same two guards that had brought him into this room. Tears fell down Javier’s face, an affirmation of the truth given to him as a folio that slipped from his hands before finally being forcefully placed there by the suited man. He heard things like “reform” and “compensation,” but Javier did not care. He knew only this; he had not consumed his last meal just now, but rather his first. The rest of his life would be spent with his heart as open as it had been in the moments immediately following that last, first bite.