There is a post office and a gift shop outside the gates of San Quentin. Quiet houses face the main road and look out over dull gray rocks to the bay beyond. On execution nights, the street is lined with cars and thick with people.
There are two reasons to come. One is to listen to the speakers who mount the portable stage and bemoan the injustice of it all. The second, less popular, is embodied by a man who, despite the state's bent for lethal injection, insists on a sign proclaiming "Let Him Fry."
From the charming Spanish architecture, the gate almost looks like the entrance to a mission, all adobe and tile. Night settles in and obscures the guard towers and barbed wire in the near distance. It could be a street fair, a block party. People are laughing, talking, cupping candles. All that's missing is the punch and cookies.
A man steps up to the podium and news cameras pan to his face. A smooth, slick scar runs down his cheek and winks in the garish streetlights as he talks. "I was on death row once," he says. "I was there because America didn't do its job. I was there for seventeen years. I was on the brink of death, real death, but now I'm back. How? I was exonerated."
There are more than enough stories like his to fill a play by the same name that runs off-Broadway. From the applause he gets, it is clear that people expect a miracle tonight. They want the dramatic show-stopper, the guard running down the hall and bursting into the sealed death chamber: "Stop! This man is innocent!"
Donald Beardslee, the man of the hour, killed two California women over drug debt while out on parole for another murder in Minnesota. Governor Schwarzenegger denied an appeal for clemency at four o'clock in the afternoon and chances of a last minute break aren't looking good. At eleven thirty, the crowd gets restless. Photographers surround the huddled groups of protesters. Reporters from the Chronicle make them sign releases as they look, teary-eyed, in the direction of the jail. The wind picks up.
A woman mounts the stage and clears her throat into the mic. "They are moving him out of his cell now. He refused his last meal." She clears her throat again and sings Amazing Grace.
Nobody goes up to speak at midnight. There is no noise, no movement as the announced minute of his death, 12:01, comes and goes. A woman in a parka digs into her purse to check her cell phone. An old man with a candle looks down at his watch, tilting his wrist and spilling wax on the pavement. The photographers form an indelible wall around those in the crowd who cry the hardest. Silence. No bell tolls, no fresh ghost floats through the gates.
The visitors look around. All they know is that a man has died, or is in the process of it. They wonder which of the three drugs they're pumping into him precisely at that moment and wince away the image their minds, hoping for a quick procedure.
Then, behind the barricade, the exonerated man receives a call from the inside. He answers, glances at the crowd, nods twice and hands the phone to the woman who sang. From the stage, he hangs his head. "Donald Beardslee died at 12:29 a.m., Wednesday, January 19th at the hands of the state of California."
My group was there because we had been cast in a theatrical version of "Dead Man Walking" under special license granted by Tim Robbins to Jesuit Universities. We went to San Quentin to find the truth that drove Sister Helen Prejean and recreate it on the stage.
On opening night, the curtain rose and I urged the young nun, my fictional daughter, to follow her heart. To be a light for the fallen and a champion of faith. And stay away from the death house at midnight, I wanted to add. There is nothing there for you but silence, fear and indignation. The pageantry of waiting for a government-sanctioned human killing with your hands bound tight behind your back.
I wanted to tell her this, to break the scene and address the audience, but I was still writing it for myself. I hadn't yet explained or justified, whichever came first, what I had witnessed and imagined from outside the gate. I still haven't, but one thing is for sure. It'll be a long time yet before you see me prowling around San Quentin after midnight, hoping for a miracle and getting nothing but the icy wind from off the bay.
Liv Archer lives and writes in San Francisco. When she's not writing, she works for a children's website and updates her teen website, http://www.imgoingtobe.com.