Change of Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

yelled.
    There was no response from Shay Bourne’s cell.
    “Hey, when Crash talks, you answer.”
    “Leave him alone, Crash,” I sighed. “Give the poor guy five minutes to figure out what a moron you are.”
    “Ooh, Death Row, better watch it,” Calloway said. “Lucius is kissing up to you, and his last boyfriend’s six feet under.”
    There was the sound of a television being turned on, and then Shay must have plugged in the headphones that we were all required to have, so we didn’t have a volume war with one another. I was a little surprised that a death row prisoner would have been able to purchase a television from the canteen, same as us. It would have been a thirteen-inch one, specially made for us wards of the state by Zenith, with a clear plastic shell around its guts and cathodes, so that the COs would be able to tell if you were extracting parts to make weapons.
    While Calloway and Crash united (as they often did) to humili ate me, I pulled out my own set of headphones and turned on my television. It was five o’clock, and I didn’t like to miss
Oprah
. But when I tried to change the channel, nothing happened. The screen flickered, as if it were resetting to channel 22, but channel 22 looked just like channel 3 and channel 5 and CNN and the Food Network.
    “Hey.” Crash started to pound on his door. “Yo, CO, the cable’s down. We got rights, you know …”
    Sometimes headphones don’t work well enough.
    I turned up the volume and watched a local news network’s coverage of a fund-raiser for a nearby children’s hospital up near Dartmouth College. There were clowns and balloons and even two Red Sox players signing autographs. The camera zeroed in on a girl with fairy-tale blond hair and blue half-moons beneath her eyes, just the kind of child they’d televise to get you to open up your wallet. “Claire Nealon,” the reporter’s voice-over said, “is waiting for a heart.”
    Boo-hoo
, I thought. Everyone’s got problems. I took off my headphones. If I couldn’t listen to
Oprah
, I didn’t want to listen at all.
    Which is why I was able to hear Shay Bourne’s very first word on I-tier. “Yes,” he said, and just like that, the cable came back on.
     
    You have probably noticed by now that I am a cut above most of the cretins on I-tier, and that’s because I don’t really belong here. It was a crime of passion—the only discrepancy is that I focused on the
passion
part and the courts focused on the
crime
. But I ask you, what would
you
have done, if the love of your life found a new love of
his
life—someone younger, thinner, better-looking?
    The irony, of course, is that no sentence imposed by a court for homicide could trump the one that’s ravaged me in prison. My last CD4+ was taken six months ago, and I was down to seventy-five cells per cubic millimeter of blood. Someone without HIV would have a normal T cell count of a thousand cells or more, but the virus becomes part of these white blood cells. When the white blood cells reproduce to fight infection, the virus reproduces, too. As the immune system gets weak, the more likely I am to get sick, or to develop an opportunistic infection like PCP, toxoplasmosis,or CMV. The doctors say I won’t die from AIDS—I’ll die from pneumonia or TB or a bacterial infection in the brain; but if you ask me, that’s just semantics. Dead is dead.
    I was an artist by vocation, and now by avocation—although it’s been considerably more challenging to get my supplies in a place like this. Where I had once favored Winsor & Newton oils and red sable brushes, linen canvases I stretched myself and coated with gesso, I now used whatever I could get my hands on. I had my nephews draw me pictures on card stock in pencil that I erased so that I could use the paper over again. I hoarded the foods that produced pigment. Tonight I had been working on a portrait of Adam, drawn of course from memory, because that was all I had left. I had mixed some