My first visitor comes two days later. It feels like much longer, so much so that when I get called up, I tell them my name again, because I think they have the wrong guy.
“Someone, they love you,” Héctor says from the bulge of the top bunk. He sounds slightly surprised.
Sunita Habersham sits in a crowded cafeteria-style room at a round table, and doesn’t look up at me even when I sit down across from her. In front of her, a stack of comic books sits in a perfectly organized pile, but even still she adjusts the corners of it with her hands, identifying some invisible lack of symmetry. When I say hi, she says, “I got you this week’s pull list, and last week’s; I don’t think you read them. I could have brought in more but Spider chickened out. He’s scared of prisons. He’s waiting in the car.” Sun’s voice trails off at the end, and then she finally looks up. And then she stares straight at me. And we’re not talking.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and in doing so realize while I truly need to express these words, and am completely and eagerly willing to say them, they are also utterly inadequate.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Sunita asks me too loud, but nobody else in the place turns around, because that is not just an appropriate question in this room, it is the whole theme. It should be painted in ornate gilded letters on the wall. But Sun knows what I was thinking. And the only addition I could add would be offensive: that I thought I could pull it off.
“Tal wants to come, to see you. I told her not to — I don’t want her to see you like this, Warren.”
“Me either. But please tell her I love her. Tell her I’ll talk to her when I get out.”
“We can try to get the cash for the bond, but that amount…Jesus. I know Roslyn has it, but she’s been bugging since Loving Day. The protesters are still there, you know that right? The white protesters — the black ones left, I think they had to go to work. Somebody got the city to serve eviction papers this morning, now they’re saying all the propane tanks constitute a fire hazard. Roslyn’s told everyone to kill their cell phone service, instituted a ‘media blackout.’ She’s even telling people you tried to destroy the ‘sacred house.’ ”
“To be fair, I did try to destroy it.” I have to admit.
“Yeah, but she’s acting like that shit hole is the Temple Mount. All this while the construction crew has started chopping it up.” Sunita starts laughing, covers her mouth when she can’t stop. I smile but am silent. I want to laugh too but am in jail and that isn’t funny. “I can’t deal with all this. Your court date isn’t for weeks, but I think I have to get out of there. Tal’s fine, has everyone around her. But I need a break. Spider’s going down to work a zydeco festival in Louisiana next week. I’m thinking of going, but I don’t want you—”
“Go.”
“I went on your computer, emailed your friend Tosha. She said she thinks she can get her husband to drop the charges but I don’t know how soon—”
“Go on the trip, get a breather,” I tell her. “I’ll wait here till you get back.” And Sunita Habersham starts to smile a bit at that too, as I intended, but looks at me again and stops.
“Wow. You really fucked up.”
“Yeah. I do that sometimes.”
“Yeah, me too,” Sunita Habersham tells me, then pushes the comics across the table.
It won’t be for another hour, when I’m be back in my cell on my mattress, that I’ll open the first comic on the pile, The Manhattan Projects 12. It will take until then for me to see the note that I’d forgotten I’d even written to Sun, as it falls out onto my coarse blanket.
Thanks for leaving this. Love you too, it now says at the bottom in Sunita Habersham’s handwriting.
—
I finally manage a successful career in comics, both as a merchant and an artist. The comic books I read to the point of memorization, I sell. Their market value in cigarettes and stick deodorant proves to be so high that I use that boon to trade for pencil and paper to start drawing daily comics of my own to cash in on the boom. The result is really some of my best work; it’s like printing money. Thursday’s full-page spread of our local representatives from the Latin Kings portrayed as superpowered mutants goes to the highest bidder for three breakfast muffins and a mini-tube of Aquafresh. Some of the black crew are so impressed by it that they’re even talking of claiming me now.
Ten days later, the guard comes to my cell and gives me three minutes to gather my things and get out.
“Holy shit, the mutts bailed me,” I say when he leaves. Héctor hears me.
“ ‘Mutts.’ This gang you say you hang with, what’s up with that?” Héctor hits me with this as I’m rushing around, gathering my remaining illustrations in a pile.
“They’re just a bunch of mixed people. Half-black and — white folks. African and European. A little Indian. They got a kinda club.”
“So, they like Dominicans or Puerto Ricans or something?” Héctor rolls to a sitting position on his mattress, and from my bed I get a good view of his hairy beige feet.
“No. They’re American. Just black and white. And Indian, sometimes.”
“But yo, how is that different?” Héctor bends over, so I see the tips of his little dreads and his eyes staring at me, confused.
“I don’t know. They speak English,” is all I can think to offer.
“I speak English too, bro,” Héctor says, lying back on his bunk, finished with the discussion.
The mutts didn’t bail me out. There is no bail. There is no bail because there are no more charges. There is no one waiting for me but a clerk from my public defender’s office, who delivers this news and no more. As I walk back on the street, though, I decide to read my release as a silent gift. From Tosha. And I silently thank her as I rush toward Suburban Station and the way toward home.
24
THERE ARE THREE TRAINS that are supposed to stop at Wayne Junction, which is just two blocks below the mansion. Hardly anyone gets off there, though, because the train costs $1.50 more than the bus and is mostly for middle-class people and there aren’t a lot of those living on the border between North Philadelphia and Germantown. The conductor seems surprised when I ask him to make the stop, which I have to do or they’ll just crawl right by the platform as if the driver is covering his eyes the whole time.
I trudge up the hill of Germantown Avenue bringing flowers. For Tal. Roses. White for my little big girl. It’s trite and feeble and they’re a little brown around the edges because I got them at a kiosk in the station, but I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know, but know I have to do something, start somewhere. And if anyone else sees me — and everyone will, everyone will see me coming in — I want them to know that no matter what they think of me, this is what I think of her.