I will stand this, she said when the lights came on and she saw where she was — the steel thing on the wall that was the toilet. In China, the conditions would have been worse.
She left her cell and saw the others shuffling out, fat, puffy-faced, hostile, acne-covered, their afro hair standing up, taking over the picnic table in the center of the room, milling around the stairs, wandering to the glass window and back. They played with each other’s hair. A black girl farted and said, You heard? There were rural women with Indian blood in them and crosses on their hands who stayed together. You could tell who had been picked up in an immigration sweep. It was obvious who she was. She squatted by herself, as all the migrants did.
The deputy came and let a trustee in with a food cart. Everyone got up. She stood aside and let the blacks and Americans go ahead of her. When she received her tray, she took it to her cell and ate her boloney and cheese sandwich, looking resolutely away from the toilet.
She spent the day walking back and forth to the window in the big room, keeping along the wall, until the lights went out in the facility.
She had been there two or three days when she realized she wasn’t sure if it had been two or three exactly, which. It could have been either, or it could have been more. She tried to count the days, but there was no way to tell them apart. There were no clocks. She briefly thought of keeping a calendar, but she didn’t have anything to write with. There was nothing at all except themselves, her and the other females, in the loud, dirty sealed room.
She tried to say to a woman, a white woman with a crushed nose, did they ever have a chance to watch TV in here?
TV? Oh, yeah, sure, we got one. It’s over by the Jacuzzi.
What there was was a payphone by the window. It had a bail bondsman’s card taped to it with an 800 number on it. She had watched people calling from it. Silvio, a voice said after she put the number in and the line clicked. She did her best to tell him who she was. He asked her where she was calling from, and she didn’t even know that. Well, no problem, he could call around. It would be one of two places if she had gotten herself picked up in Bridgeport. Do you know what you’re being charged with? No? It could be from the sound of it, they got a thing now where, if you entered the country under the radar, so to speak, you’re not eligible for bail. That’s the Patriot Act. He repeated it for her. Yes, she nodded. I know it.
Do you have anyone who can bond you out?
No, she said. I am just me in this country. I will work for you when I get out, if you just get me out, she struggled to express. I am honest. I pay everything. She said this into the receiver gripped in her hand, half bowing her head.
Oh, he said. I don’t doubt that. But if it’s like that, there might be nothing I can do.
She listened.
That’s the way it is.
He had to go.
To keep her spirits up, she went back to walking up and down along the wall and distracted herself counting miles.
She started doing walking lunges every three steps, counting in her head. There was yelling, but she didn’t think it was directed at her. It surprised her when someone got off the picnic table and came over. She went around them. They followed her, getting louder. Now they were really yelling and everyone was looking. They were yelling at her to stop. Don’t be doin that in here. I ain’t playin with you. She stopped doing lunges. The yelling stopped. You could hear the person who had been yelling at her breathing hard.
Fuckin monkey-ass bitches playin like they don’t speak English.
Something troubled her and she pushed it out of mind. No one told her anything. There were no lawyers. Then in the night, she dreamed her father came to the jail, short, tan, sharp, in uniform, saying nothing. The Americans deferred to him. He picked her out of the rest, and they had to let her go. The dream returned in a second version in which he had made a terrible mistake by entering detention and now he couldn’t leave. She sat uncertain on her bunk.
She watched a woman who was being released walking away on the other side of the window, sashaying with one arm out, following the deputy towards the front of the facility, where she would be given back her clothes and let out on the winter street.
Zou Lei ate a boloney sandwich and did knee bends in her cell next to the toilet.
They were lined up to see a social worker, who asked her if she had STDs. This concept was explained. She thought it meant AIDS. No, she said.
Are you pregnant?
She shook her head.
Do you know what day it is?
She shook her head.
It’s Tuesday. Do you speak English?
She nodded, then shook her head.
Are you gang-affiliated?
She didn’t know. No.
She said she wanted to know if she was going to get to see a lawyer. No one had told her what she had been charged with or on what basis she was being held. When she tried to ask what was going to happen to her, a deputy ordered her to move away and return to her side of the room.
The Latinas had a gang they called the Niñas Malas for self-protection. And what are you? the white women with their stringy hair wanted to know. Someone said Al Qaida. I’m Chinese, Zou Lei said. She wet her hair in the sink and tied it back to make herself look another way.
She did not like exercising in her cell. When she was alone, her mind turned inside-out like an envelope. She would drift and come back and hours would have gone by. Once, her mind traveled to the clutch plate factory where she had been working, and she saw and heard them working and talking about this and that. They were saying, Remember that girl? What happened to her? And she knew they were talking about her. In her mind, it was a day of blue sky, and she could smell the asphalt and the field and the lunch truck.
Some Latina girls asked her, Are you with it? Hey, yo, you wid it? And instead of ignoring them, she stared back at them and said, I don’t with nothing. She pretended she didn’t see them, but she was scared. The fear came in and out like a radio signal. When it faded out, she went back to being sick. She picked up the phone and listened to the dial tone and put it down, stared out the window and waited for anyone to walk by. Her sickness came from this sealed room. I cannot stand it, she thought. Deputies walked by from time to time in their green uniforms. Sometimes a male trustee would come by, a certain expression on his goateed face because one of the females would jump off the picnic table and rush the glass and pound on it and make signs at him.
There was an aching in her eyes from loneliness. When she closed them, tears scattered down her face.
Later in the artificial day, she stood by the others, who were talking on the stairs, gathered around a composed young woman emphasizing what she was saying by socking her fist in her hand. Zou Lei got as close as she could and tried to listen. The speaker was saying that she had been given thirty years for armed robbery.
He had the gun and I was with him.
Ninety-nine problems.
For real. He doin life.
You stay here? Zou Lei spoke up.
The others looked at her, then at the armed robber to see what she would say.
Will I stay here? No, I’m going to state prison.
After a minute, the woman, as if vexed with children, lowered herself off the stair where she had been sitting and moved apart from the others. Zou Lei approached her and asked her what she had been waiting to ask.
Deport you, the woman said. I don’t know. They might put your ass in Uncasville.
This was the answer Zou Lei finally received: No one knows what will happen to you.
Well, what would she probably be facing?
Probably you’re talking a year. Zou Lei got a look of concentration when she heard this. A year and then? A year and then they decide what to do with you.