My lawyer is the one who wanted me to file a civil complaint alleging police misconduct. She keeps telling me I’m “on trial in the press” right now and that we need to fight back. Her name is Shevita Young and everything I know about the laws here, I learned from her. I’ve been found guilty of murder and multiple counts of aggravated assault. No matter, says Shevita. If we can show the world the ways that I’ve been failed—by inadequate support from the Reintegration Education and Adjustment Counseling Authority and by the ineptitude of my therapist, by a shitfoot of a dealer who preyed upon my ignorance of the potency of street drugs here, by anti-UDP bias against me in my initial trial, and by simple mishandling such as is evident in my encounter with the police—all that can help me. She seems to think that if she can get a jury to see how pathetic I am, they’ll feel too bad to pin me.
Pin me. Where I’m from, that’s slang for getting executed. Because they use the firing squad method there, and that means they shackle you to a chair with a hood over your head and literally pin a paper target to your chest first before they hand out the guns. So, pinning.
Shevita loves it when I mess up my idioms like that, especially when there are reporters around, but they don’t have the death penalty here. Not in this New York State; what I’m looking at is life in prison.
I understand that, and I also understand what “on trial in the press” means. I’m not dumb. They do get us newspapers here in the Rose on Rikers.
It was a couple of hours after I’d killed Ms. Kravitz when the sticks came by my place. I wasn’t a suspect yet, just the last person who would have been expected to see her alive, being scheduled by the care agency to get her up and do her meds and all. I let them in when they buzzed—thought I had to. I was coming down by then, but I was still pretty out of it. I’d cleaned myself up, but not well enough. I guess there was still a lot of blood on my clothes, and I couldn’t really control the way I was talking. Also, I had her dog, Mimi, with me in my apartment.
The two police asked me questions. Shevita says there’s some statement they’re required to read—anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law—and I don’t remember them saying that to me, but I’m not mad about it. The state I was in, I bet I would have incriminated myself even if they had read it like they were supposed to. It only took five minutes or so of us talking for me to confess, in detail, to what I’d done, and then they were placing me under arrest, radioing for backup. I was put in those zip-tie handcuffs—I didn’t try to stop them from putting them on me—and I sat in my apartment alone with them, waiting for their backup to come.
“You’re one fucking remorseless bitch, aren’t you?” the smaller of the two sticks said.
There’s only one person in this world who knows the person I used to be. Shevita dug her up as a character witness at my first trial; a former classmate’s older cousin who happens to be another one of the Hundred Fifty-Six Thousand. What are the chances, right? The authorities resettled this woman in Seattle. She’s got cancer now from the rad exposure, like most of the people from the final lots. She knew me before, but all she remembered was me playing Dusty Peach dolls on the carpet with her cousin fifteen years ago, so it did me no good.
I allowed that I probably was a pretty remorseless bitch.
“We never should have let any of you through,” the stick said.
I told him that I could see his point. I’d made a mess.
Personally, it’s the salt that bothers me, more than the stabbing.
I want to blame the drugs, but it’s my brother back home who had that weakness. They do brain scans on everyone at eighteen there, which is the legal drinking and smoking age, before they assign you to your military or Alternative Service unit. My scans came out fine, but he was found to have the propensity for dependence. Of course, it already was too late for him; he’d been wilding for four years with older friends and he was well and good addicted. When they did the aversion therapy on him, it didn’t work the way it was supposed to. They just stamped NO CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES on his ID, so he couldn’t buy legally. Within a year, he’d moved on to the hard stuff you can’t buy in stores anyway—to grind and H and dross.
He used to hit his wife, my sister-in-law. He’d threaten her with pliers, say he was going to pull out all her teeth. Made her eat salt by the spoonful until she vommed all over the kitchen. Who knows why.
I would have said I hadn’t thought of that in years, but it wasn’t true. I must have remembered.
Spoonful by spoonful. Why did I do it?
I sat on my own couch, hands zip-tied behind me, trying to figure it out. To recap, at that point, the two police officers still hadn’t read me my rights (which is a violation of procedure, Shevita says, classified as Abuse of Authority) and the smaller officer had just called me a remorseless bitch (a curse word, which is therefore classified Discourtesy). Then Mimi, Ms. Kravitz’s little dog, climbed into my lap. She is a hairy, mop-looking thing with an underbite and a sweet temperament, and she’d been there for the whole thing that happened earlier, walking through the blood. Hadn’t put up any resistance at all—really, she should have been embarrassed to let me treat her owner like that. Now, she got in my lap, curled up with a little sigh.
I wouldn’t have hurt her. With my hands restrained, I couldn’t have even petted her, like she probably wanted. But the smaller stick came rushing over, picked Mimi up real quick, like he was rescuing her.
“You fucking aliens,” he said to me. “You’re worse than animals.”
Shevita argues that, used as an insult against a whole category of people, the term alien is similar to an ethnic slur or a racist or homophobic remark and should be considered Offensive Language.
I solemnly affirm that all this happened. The Abuse of Authority, Discourtesy, and Offensive Language. But who cares?
I don’t. I knew—I know—that I deserved it all. I didn’t start out wrong, like my brother did. I always did fine at home, never got into fights, never drank more than a few Mack Bullets. And then I’m here for a year and somehow I’m drinking every morning and in another year, I’m doing drugs I never heard of and wiping some old lady’s ass for minimum wage, and the next thing you know, I am my brother. I’m worse.
“They’re animals,” the big stick said. The partner, this was—the quiet one. He said it sadly and he wasn’t talking to me, so I knew he wasn’t trying to goad me. He meant it.
I wished I could have agreed, but I didn’t. “Animals don’t do that,” I told him. “Only people.”
CHAPTER FIVE
On Tuesday, Hel arrived more than half an hour later than she’d said she’d be. The library building—different from the one she remembered—was a white wedge decorated in gold, like an Egyptian tomb. She spotted Klay right away camped out at a small metal table, one of several set up in front of the entrance, each one shaded by its own beach umbrella. Klay’s bare legs extended beyond the shadow, stippled with goose bumps.
“Hey,” Hel puffed, breathing heavily from the walk from the subway. “I’m sorry, I would have sent you a message but I couldn’t get signal underground.”
Klay offered a bemused smile. “It’s fine, really.” In the bright morning light of Grand Army Plaza, she looked younger than she had in the dim midnight reception room. Her wide face, her shorts, her impatient manner, her clunky plastic watch that resembled what a schoolgirl would wear in Hel’s world: the overall effect was of an adolescent summer camp counselor, or the director of a standard five play—someone insecure in her power yet exasperated by its limits. But Hel would have to swallow her doubts and make peace with this flunky. She’d left the precious book in Donaldson’s hands, a hostage and an act of faith. Klay stood, gathering notebook and tablet from the table. “Ready to go in? We can do some digital searches of the archived newspapers for Ezra Sleight and William Sleight. And if there’s anything on paper in the Brooklyn Collection—letters or photos or whatever—I can get us access. The archivist here owes me a favor.”