“Mama,” Kev whispers.
He reaches a hand out and takes a step toward one of the little pig-tailed girls being bounced on an older woman’s knee.
“Mama.” Tears blur the vision. “Mama. Oh, Mama.”
It feels like forever, but it was only a few seconds. And in the visiting room, Ella sneaks her hand away before the guard can catch her.
Across the table, Kev smiles his thanks. Tears still pool in his eyes, and he lets them rest there for a moment before sniffing them away and becoming his hard self again.
“They’re really gonna let me out, aren’t they.” When Kev says it, it doesn’t sound like a question. It doesn’t sound like an acclimation. It sounds like an accusation. It sounds like Kev himself peering sideways into Ella’s head, a passenger in her mind as she spoke with Kev’s public defender and handed over the materials to help the defender make the case for parole with the review board—the proof of lodging, the contact info for Kev’s eventual employer, the location and admission requirements for nearby schools. It sounds like Kev watching her brush past every correctional officer whose path she crossed, grazing just enough to let her Thing flow through them and convince them of what a model inmate Kev has been. It sounds like Kev watching Ella cheat.
“When you get out,” Ella asked. “Where do you wanna go?”
For a while, he doesn’t say anything. Ella watches the potential answers wash across his face, watches him catch them, bounce them from hand to hand or turn them over, then toss them away. Watches him carry in his arms the whole time a simple desire to be away from violence. Until finally he comes to the one word Ella never wanted to hear again.
“West.”
IV
WATTS
WATTS is a Sponsored spot.
I didn’t really know what that meant until I got out here. The parole board picked it when they put all my shit through the algorithm. My records, my time in Rikers, the stint upstate, my mental health assessment, the Urban Wounded program Ella set me up with out here, job prospects, all of that. I told them I wanted to be out west, away from people, places, and things that’d bring me back to jail, and Watts was the best option that came up. There are Sponsored communities all over the country, and you can tell them where you’d prefer to be and why, like maybe somewhere closer to family or somewhere away from where you have an outstanding beef, and the humans on the parole board will pretend to have the final say, but they pretty much rubberstamp whatever the algo spits out.
I’d worried about pushback. The logistics of having the System follow me all the way out there, but apparently it wasn’t a problem. They got it all figured out. They even contacted a mechanic that’ll put me to work right away. No more job applications with the Box on it.
Ella never asks me why I wanted to go out west of all places, and I never ask her why it bothers her so much. I know she and Mama lived out in Florence, in South Central, for a bit before I was born. But I remember I was born there, and it’s the only time I can remember both Mama and Ella smiling at me.
Either way, when I get there, I see sprawl. Newly painted stucco houses. Everything’s one or two stories. And there’s a daytime brilliance to everything, gives it a shine I never got from the crowded, leaning tenements in Harlem. But there are logos everywhere. A large billboard over the Pacific Electric tracks with the same three-bar logo as what was on the machine that told me to come out here. No ankle monitor for me. Instead, after the hearing, they cut my thumb open and put a chip in, which I heard they’d started doing a few years back. No chance of snipping your monitor off or having it malfunction when you go for a swim. While there’s now no way to get away with a drink or a hit or a Xanax bar, I don’t have to pee in front of a guy I don’t know who could send me back to jail if he had a fight with his girl the night before. The chip had the three-bar logo on it before they put it in me.
I walk by the abandoned train tracks and half expect to see bottle shards from when kids come by here, bored, to break something. But there’s nothing. No needles, no broken bottles, no empty dime bags. Tin cans, nails, nothing. A couple blocks away, kids play on a jungle gym.
A part of me expected post-apocalypse when I got here. On the inside, you hear about what’s going on outside, new presidents elected, rise in hate crimes. Nazis in the streets killing black folk. Folks getting locked up for whatever again. Important shit getting lit on fire. You remember the old heads in jail telling you about riots in the ’60s, riots in the ’90s. Younger cats my age telling me about the riots in the 2010s. What’s left after all of that? Pigeons congregating on the red-tiled roof of a police substation, vacant lots still charred around the edges, shards of broken port bottles winking at you in the sun. All types of refugee-type kids walking barefoot with pieces of glass in the bottoms of their feet, not even flinching because living through the End of the World enough times does that to you.
But, no. They got pool halls here and churches. Mosques, even. It’s like one of those Rockwell paintings but if a hood nigga stood over his shoulder whispering in his ear about home.
But this ain’t home; at least, no home I’m trying to get back to. It looks new. All of it. Which suits me just fine.
My place is one of those one-stories on a block of identical houses. There’s a yard and a chain-link fence. Even space for a garden, but I guess they’re leaving it up to me to see if I want to plant something. I half expect to see niggas out on their front lawns riding those big-ass lawnmowers you see white dudes riding in the movies, all moving in unison on some Stepford Wives–type shit. But it’s all quiet. A few folks hang out on their front porches. One or two nurse a cold beer. And the sun sits on the horizon so that the whole sky is cut with knife scars of purple and pink and white and blue.
I go to the knob, but when I try to turn it, it doesn’t budge. There’s no keyhole. Curtains cover the windows so I can’t see inside, and I call up the info on my Palm, and it says I’m at the right spot. I’m geotagged where I’m supposed to be. This is the address.
They said stuff like this was supposed to be over now that we didn’t have to deal with real actual human beings anymore, just algorithms and machines, and I figured the parole board was the last set of ugly-ass white faces I’d have to see for the rest of my life, but if I have to call in tech support for this bullshit in my first week?
I can feel it building. Even as I know it’s coming and I know what it’ll mean, the world begins to take on a shade of red, and I’m two steps away from breaking my fists against these Plexiglas windows when I hear “Youngblood!” from behind me.
He’s got one of those older-man short-sleeve button-downs, the type that come cut specifically to accommodate the basketball-belly you get once you hit forty. He’s got a beer in his hand, fingers only half covering the O’Douls label.
He’s chuckling. That kind of chuckle that old heads let out when they see something they think reminds them of themselves. If it ain’t the most irritating sound in the world, it’s close. “You gotta use the touchpad.”
“Touchpad?”
With his beer, he points to a small black square right by where a doorbell would usually go.
“They gave you a keycard, right?”
“You on parole too?” I realize he’s the first dude I’ve talked to since I got here. Maybe this place looks so new because it’s a ghost town. Ain’t nobody get here yet.
“Yeah, three years now.”
“Where you from?”