I get to the wing and in the anteroom, I strip down for the cavity search. Then, sweats back on, I’m in the corridor with a few of the guards, one of which is asleep with a contraband magazine on his belly. The one who’s awake looks up and gives me a perfunctory nod before returning to whatever part of the wall he was staring at before I came in.
My chair’s ready for me in front of the first cell. The cell door has bars enough for me to see through, but even if it didn’t, the lights are all the way on in the suicide ward. Nevernight, it gets called. And they say they keep the lights on because then guards can better see when an inmate on suicide watch is going to try something, but keeping someone in that nightmare from being able to sleep ain’t gonna help. It ain’t my place to tell them that, and a bunch of the guards, the smarter ones, probably know that already, but it ain’t their place to say it either.
I take my seat and watch the kid on the other side of the bars not stir in his suicide blanket. Sturdy, quilted, tear-proof nylon. I’ve seen others where it’s been turned into a smock. This collarless, sleeveless gown with adjustable shoulder openings and another opening down the front that gets closed with fasteners. That ain’t what this kid got, thank God. It’s just the blanket. The way he lies on his mattress, though, it’s like he’s dead already. But this is my job now: sit with suicidal prisoners and just talk.
So that’s what I do.
Introduce myself: name, no NYSID number, then make some crack about how “I didn’t do it” or something like that, not because it matters at this point but because, for the younger cats, maybe it helps to hear it come up. I used to talk about how shitty the food was but then I would remember what I used to get when I was in the Box, and I’d remember that their shit probably has worms in it. So instead, I tell him about the others. I tell him about Rick, who’s practically an institution he’s been here so long, and I talk about Bobby, who did a bid at Folsom in California and used to be a vegetable smuggler, like he actually worked on a garden with some other inmates on China Hill and they would sneak food back into the prison in their clothes: a jalapeño pepper wrapped in a sandwich bag and smushed in his left boot and in his right boot a bundle of tightly wrapped green onion shoots. One guy brought back a watermelon slice, another some tomatoes. And I tell the kid now about what Bobby once told me, which is that they weren’t supposed to garden per se, they were landscapers, but they weren’t gonna not garden on that grassy knoll.
And then I tell this kid who may or may not be asleep about the book club.
It’s not just a story about a buncha niggas reading a book but it’s also a story of some of those niggas being cats locked up for a backpack and some of those niggas being neo-Nazis. A story that makes you ask what’s the point of a neo-Nazi learning to treat a black person as a human if he’s just gonna die in a year and a half anyway, or maybe the lesson is that the only whites ready to look at black folk as human are the ones getting ready to die anyway. But then I chime in on this conversation I’m having out loud to myself, and say Rikers is weird like that. Jail’s weird like that. Prison’s weird like that. All types of absurd shit happens here, and you just need the patience to step back and watch it happen. Maybe that comes with time. Maybe not. Maybe you spend your entire sentence here getting the shit kicked outta you. Maybe they kill you in here. But maybe you make it out. Not out from behind bars, but out of wherever it is they try to put you when they put you behind bars.
I’m telling the kid about how everyone in the book club had to sit at separate tables, and you had to swivel around to talk to people so nobody felt left out. And if someone wanted to read something out of the book, you had to toss it to them and hope they caught it or it landed within reach.
“How long you been here?”
The kid’s so quiet that anybody not trained to listen for any little noise might have missed it, but I stop dead in the middle of my sentence.
“You sound like you been here long.” He’s drugged up. His words slur. He’s got that wooziness in him, drunk-tired.
“You just see a lot here pretty quickly,” I tell him. But then I add it all up. The arrest, the time in Central Booking, then my arrival at Rikers. Me trying to get my case tried separately from the niggas I was with at the time. Seventy-four days later is the first time I see a judge, and I hear my charges for the first time. Mama wasn’t there. Ella wasn’t there. But I knew it’d kill them both if I pled guilty, so I tell the room “not guilty,” and I get a trial date for six months after that. Two hundred and fifty-eight days later, I’m in court again, bigger from what RNDC has already done to me, and the prosecutor requests a deferment. “People Not Ready” like it takes more than just the DA to do what needs doing to me. Then more deferments, such that I ain’t even need to be in court. Two weeks, one week, one week, two weeks. Then fights with inmates and time in the Box and admin charges added to what ain’t even technically a sentence, and it blurs. In that blur are more fights, COs attacking us, COs trying to rape us, beating us in the showers, us fighting back, slashing, trying to get our ass-whoopings caught on camera. More time in the Box. “Eight years.”
“That’s gotta be some sort of record.”
I’m stunned. I’d never counted it out like that before. Makes me gulp and need to take a few deep breaths. “Yeah. But I’m getting out soon.” I don’t say I’m eligible for parole or that I got a hearing coming up, because there ain’t enough certainty in those sentences. I need to say I’m getting out. The kid needs to hear that it’s possible.
I need to hear that it’s possible.
“I’m getting out.”
The CO who’s still awake taps his shock-stick against the ground. Time’s up. I move my chair to the next cell and start talking.
The closer to Kev’s parole hearing they get, the more exaggerated his moods. Either he’s electric with hypomania or catatonic with depression. Their first of the two hugs they’re allotted is swift. Perfunctory. They sit down less like a sister traveling to visit her inmate brother and more like prospective business partners.
Kev fiddles with his fingers, forearms resting heavy on the table, his brows so furrowed they nearly cover his eyes.
Twice he tries to start speaking, but something swallows the words in his throat. Finally, “I wish I’d talked to Mama more.”
Confusion and sorrow war in Ella. She blinks her surprise, then flexes her toes.
Strands of white light peel out of thin air and wrap around her, spawning more threads, tree-branching until whole cloth covers her, bathes her in ivory that takes the sun’s light and makes her glow.
This is a new thing. Ella takes Kev’s hand and smiles. “Come with me, Kev. I want to show you something.”
Two steps forward take them into a field overgrown by weeds where, in the distance, railroad tracks cut through overgrowth. A ghost train, translucent against the blue sky, thunders past and Kev squints and sees in one of the compartments, a family, laden with a single suitcase, and sees within that suitcase the clothes and the bags of chicken that are meant to sustain the two children on their journey northward. He doesn’t know how he knows they are heading north, nor does he know how he knows where they stand, that it is the Delta, but the conviction rocks him. He watches in wonder as the train passes, its billowing smoke outlined in luminescence by the golden orb that gilds everything its light touches.