He doesn’t say anything for a while. “Do you remember how many times you were in solitary confinement? It’s all right if you don’t.”
I chuckle nervously, because I don’t know how else to react. “I mean, the days kind of blend together in AdSeg. Look, there anything you can do to, like, up the dosage or something? I’m not trying to remember all of that.” My heart rate’s rising even while I sit here. “I got a burst of something last night that helped me sleep, but I need more.”
“The session was triggering, wasn’t it.”
“Yeah, but—”
“The chemicals are supposed to be a supplement, not the entire treatment.” He pauses to consider me. “Here is all about making you a productive member of society. Giving you a chance to contribute.” It sounds like a speech he’s done many times, but he also sounds like the type of nigga to make it seem like every time is the first time he’s done it. “Getting you back on your feet. Now, I’m sure there’s a lot that happened to you inside that’s never going to go away. We can’t reverse time. We can’t make those things un-happen. We can, however, move forward. And we can teach you to avoid triggers. And for those triggers you can’t avoid, we can teach you to deal with them.”
It’s not what I’m here to hear, and he sees it. “I… I have a sister. Ella.” Even as I talk, as I sound out the idea, it sounds strange to mention her to someone else. I don’t think I’d said her name to anyone that wasn’t family in nearly a decade. “Having a supportive family helps people not go back in, you know. And I was wondering, if I can reach her, can she visit? Like we used to do in jail?”
Dr. Bissell’s face drops. Like I punched him in the chest. “She can’t.”
Before I know it, the anger’s got ahold of me, but I grip the armrests and keep the rage right there in my fingers.
“This is a Sponsored community. Outsiders not a part of the program are not permitted.” He looks off into the middle distance. “There’s been trouble in the past. Some folks haven’t been able to deal with parts of their past that come here to see them. This is about a new start. Completely blank slate.”
“Till my parole’s over. In three years.”
Dr. Bissell cracks his knuckles. His nervous tic. “I’ll write to the Company about upping your dosage.”
I know this man’s here to help me. And I know he’s doing the best he can. He has a job, and it comes with constraints, and he’s trying to help me the only way he knows how, but that doesn’t stop my bloody thoughts.
It hits with the same suddenness as last night. That wave of peace. I ain’t have to look at my thumb to know it’s glowing. But I exhale and tap the armrests. “It’s all right. I’m good,” I tell him. This time, it’s only half a lie.
The stars are out by the time I get home. So’s Calvin.
He has a rocking chair out front. “You got time to rap for a minute, Youngblood?”
I don’t want to try sleeping just yet, so I walk over to him, post up on his porch. He’s got a six-pack of O’Douls Cherry, fishes one out and hands it to me, but I wave it away. “I don’t drink.” No more. And for a while, we sit there in silence. The only sound is his chair squeaking underneath him while he rocks. No one’s shouting from their cells. No COs are barking orders. There’s no mysterious banging from everywhere and nowhere at once. No sirens. No stampede of bootsteps as the Riot Squad clears the wing. Nobody’s blasting reggaeton from their windows. Niggas always talked about how the quiet was the thing that eventually got to them, how that was the most difficult thing to cope with, but only now do I know what they mean. There are maybe a few other ex-cons on the block now, some of them moved in about a week ago, but I can’t even hear cicadas anymore.
“This don’t feel like prison to you?” I ask Calvin. Shit comes out of my mouth without my knowing more and more these days. I hate it.
“Whatchu mean?”
I wave at the houses lining the street. “We completely shut off. No family comes to see us. I can’t use Facebook. No Twitter, no YouTube, nothing. I’m cut off. I wake up, I watch Miguel work until I get a permit to do my own welding, I go to my weekly meetings with Dr. Bissell, everything’s an appointment. And there’s no option to not do it, because there’s shit else to do.”
Calvin snorts. “You was happy a month ago.” He takes a swig. “And when you start to get upset, they pump that chemical from your chip into your brains and shit gets square again. You out, Youngblood. When you think about what you can’t do, think about what you get to do. You get to earn money.”
“I earned money inside, too. I had a job. I fixed computers. How is this any different?”
Calvin gets that look I seen older heads on the block get when they know they can’t talk sense into the youth.
I think I hate Watts.
I sometimes feel her behind my eyes, trying to bring me somewhere else when I’m working on prosthetics with Miguel or some other odd shape of metal, and I get nothing but pain from her. Any old thing makes her cry these days. And then I resent her for it. I dread every visit. The heart gets going, and heat flushes my face, and it’s like I’m getting ready to fight someone I can’t throw a punch at, so I just gotta stand there and take this new rage she’s got inside her, and that’s when I see some of where she’s been spending her time: the auditorium of Chicago’s public-safety headquarters where members of the police board sit beneath a banner that reads: “Chicago Police Generations—a Proud Family Tradition.” And the men at the front of the room are white, almost translucent. Like holograms, and the black folk in the audience are real and sweating and hurting and vivid with hypertension and the club and the church, and one woman is up on her feet shouting, “We know this board doesn’t care about black women! We know this board doesn’t care about black people!” As the police board tries in vain to explain upgrades to the algorithm that has been powering their policing, the algorithm developed in conjunction with extremely smart people in Silicon Valley, and that has helped reduce crime in the South Side by 19 percent, “But that’s raised the number of black boys you lock up without pretext by 200 percent,” another black woman shouts back.
“Listen to black women!” a young man in the audience shouts from his seat, half in jest, and everyone’s cheering and clapping, for him and for the woman still standing.
Then the police killings. The mechanized cops programmed with this supposedly race-neutral algorithm. And outside Watts, a dozen more shootings produce a dozen more weeping families that have to struggle stoically through their black grief or that can stand behind microphones and declare their black anger, and the bodies pile higher and higher and higher, and so does the frustration with the impunity “because,” says the district attorney in St. Louis in Kansas City in Staten Island in Dayton in Gary in Albuquerque in Oakland, “you can’t indict an algorithm.”
I see Ella walking through Milwaukee’s North Side, past makeshift memorials to dead black kids: teddy bears, browning flowers, ribbons tied to telephone poles waving in the breeze, and I know that she’s been touching the ground around those memorials and closing her eyes and seeing the whole of it, whether the bullet came from some other colored kid’s gun or from a cop, watching the whole story unfold before her.
She does the same with the Confederate monuments that rise from the ground in the South like weeds. Tributes to treasonous generals and soldiers serving Big Cotton. She touches their bases, feels their mass-produced faces, runs her fingers over their inscriptions. She wants to know who was hanged here. Who was beaten here. In whose name they were violated.