Ella raises her fist to knock.
There’s a bus called the Rikers bus.
Ella takes the M60-SBS from 125th Street. Usually she gets on at Lexington, sometimes before, depending on how late she was out the night before. Sometimes, after she moved to New Haven, she rises before the sun, beats it into New York, catching the beginnings of the sky’s gilding just before the train glides over the bridge. The M60 takes her to Astoria Boulevard, where she transfers to the Q101 at 23rd Road. Sometimes schoolchildren ascend the steps and clog the main thoroughfare of the bus. Sometimes it’s empty. Sometimes the only people on it other than Ella carry transparent plastic bags filled with the types of items permissible in the jail. And Ella knows exactly and immediately what they’re going to be doing this morning. There’s no camaraderie among the straphangers, no shared sense of enduring the city’s indignities or of annoyance at the jail’s security protocols or the idiosyncratic things that occasionally happen, like lockdown, when you’re trapped in the jail and kept isolated from whatever horrible and hateful thing is being done to an inmate, maybe the very person you’ve come to visit. There’s only a grim cloud hanging in the air between them, and they descend on Hazen and wait for the Q100, the Rikers bus, that will ferry them across the River Styx into the parallel, deathly reality that Rikers Island occupies. Where the circles of hell don’t radiate outward but rather populate the space like satellite orbits.
She worries sometimes, whenever she gets onto the Q101, that she’s turning into one of the other women or the other men coming to visit friends, brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, fathers, mothers, guardians, godparents, bullies, victims, community pillars, the man who sold their mother crack. That deadness of the face. That unthinking that attends the packing of goods and materials to make sure no contraband is being brought into the jail facility.
When Kev and Ella sit in the visiting area, across the table from each other, Ella breathes a slow sigh. One time, they’d brought her to a different room where glass separated them and Kev had been escorted to his place in chains, having been dubbed that morning a problem inmate. There were no bruises on his face, yet, nor any discernible limp, but the shuffle very obviously masked some sort of hurt. Maybe his ribs.
This time, there are no chains. They let him walk freely, and his arms, though they don’t swing far or wide, speak of that freedom.
He talks about parole, about watching guys get out, but doesn’t sound too excited about it, because it’ll be no different on the outside than on the inside and he’s got some years before he’s eligible. If he can stay out of trouble. No consorting with known felons; well, that means he can’t even get a ride from Melo or Prodigy or anyone else on the block. Has to report regularly to his PO, and most POs are assholes and maybe this one won’t even pick up his phone. Has to regularly report any change of address, etc., etc., etc.
Ella knows she should be excited for the possibility of him being let out, but she has Oscar Grant’s murder in Oakland playing in her head and wonders if she would have the wherewithal to film Kev’s death and upload it live. She doesn’t know what she would do; maybe it is safer for Kev in here. And suddenly the thought of him on the outside, where so much has happened without him, terrifies her.
It’s early in what’s going to become a much longer stay than I ever expected. But I pick up things quick, have to, because I come in smaller than most of the others, and I start out in the juvenile ward, RNDC, before I get starred up and end up sharing a cell and a chow hall with the older niggas.
This old head named Ricky is standing over me taking hits from a Capri Sun in between bites from a chocolate chip cookie while I take my shit, and I got the palm of my hand against my eye to try and push back the headache that’s making me go practically blind. I can’t hear what Ricky’s saying, only the mosquito-buzz of this nigga’s incessant storytelling and supposed wisdom, and he says something about how jail sentences beget more jail sentences, and you’re only supposed to be in Rikers for short sentences or pretrial and it’s mostly niggas that can’t afford bail here and something about making poverty illegal, and I wanna tell him to shut the fuck up with the voice I used to use in Harlem, the loud, commanding, brimming-with-violence voice. I have a different voice in here. I ask questions like “We have a problem?” or “Nigga, you good?” and I can mean “Do you need help?” or “You want me to fuck you up?” and it’s like gang finger-shakes how people here immediately know the difference.
“Rick,” I whisper. “Please, be quiet.”
The headache lets up a little, but then I get dizzy, and I worry I’m gonna fall off this toilet with my jumpsuit around my ankles and my ass out in the air, and it’s gonna be a wrap for me because Ricky here, or whoever, isn’t gonna mind a little shit-dick. Ricky starts humming what sounds like an old Negro spiritual, a prison song, and I close my eyes tighter, and suddenly, I can feel Louisiana beneath me. A rush of color and sound and smell, then it’s all gone. Headache and everything.
Whispers skip down the line of cells, and I finish my shit, wipe, and go to the bars to see niggas twisting their fingers and notes getting passed. Shit.
Under my bed are a bunch of National Geographic magazines. I pull them out with a roll of duct tape and start taping the issues around my torso. Ricky’s got this sad look in his eyes, and I just tell him, without turning all the way around, “Stay in your cell for rec.” And I see suddenly past his look and into the mess of feelings wrestling behind his eyes, his sorrow that this is now a Young Man’s Game, that he has aged out of the everyday chaos of incarceration, gratefulness that this guy, Kev, NYSID Number 25768192Y, is looking out for him, wants to keep him safe, then the hard joy that comes with dodging the violence, a sort of glowing peace.
Out in the yard, we cluster. Eight by the pull-up bars, four on the basketball court, nine by the benches. One of the prisoners by the bench puts a leg up on the seat to mime tying his shoe and pulls out a homemade shank.
My group rushes them, and I feel nothing.
Rusty metal breaking jawline, fists smashing cheekbones and cracking ribs, someone getting a boot print stomped into their chest. It’s gravity that smashes us together, and then we turn into electrons being flung apart by stuff larger than ourselves. It’s all physics. The wild, swinging punches, the crumpling. The thwap of knuckles beating soft flesh, the dust rising to cover us, but unable to muffle the squawk of walkie-talkies and the foomp of the first gas canister being launched, and the coughing. The blood-rich coughing. All of this has the air of inevitability in it.
Burning takes my eyes and my face as I prowl for the rest of the fight, the tangle of bodies to get lost in. Someone’s blood has already crusted on my knuckles.
“Get the fuck on the ground!”
I ignore the command, because that’s how this is supposed to go.
The first volts seize through me, and I prepare to go down, but then I hear bones cracking. Through the smoke, the CO flying through the air to land on the ground somewhere in the distance. The earth rumbles beneath me, like it’s getting ready to swallow me up. A crater forms. Then more and more craters form, and COs are shouting and screaming, then I hear the rubber bullets. More gas canisters. Then, eventually, darkness.
When I wake up, I’m naked in a single-man cell with a yellow piece of paper on my chest. There’s a blue jumpsuit at the end of the green mat. The place still smells like the last three guys who got thrown here in AdSeg. Through the aching, I work my way into the jumpsuit, then, finally, pick up the paper to read it: “This prisoner is unmanageable in G.P. Loss of all privileges. No TV, no books, no sheets, no hygiene products, twenty-four-hour watch.”