The light in his cell flickered, but by the time it came back on, she was gone. As Ella retreated to her New Haven apartment, she felt the aftermath of the visit hang like tendrils on her, the lingering navy-blue aura of grief, a tiny, whispering simulacrum of the feeling that had clung to Ella the first time she’d left them. When she’d seen fifty gunshots fired into Sean Bell’s car, and, without warning, vanished.
“I don’t want no ghost coming to see me,” Kev had said without moving his mouth. “If I see you, I wanna see you for real.”
“You ain’t gonna ask who did this?” Kev doesn’t need to point to the laceration at his temple and the bandage that struggles to cover the length of slice and can’t.
Ella leans back in her chair across the table from Kev while loved ones or family or friends or old classmates or people settling a grudge or people burying a hatchet do this visit thing. She has her arms crossed, posture all defiant. Anger, unfamiliar and slow, swirls at the bottom of her gut, creeps into the back of her brain. “Nope,” she says.
Kev leans forward and already has that conspiratorial convict hunch that cons have on TV or in movies. “You gonna read my mind or something? Scan one of the CO’s brains or something? I bet you could just put your hand to the floor and get all the stories that ever passed through this place.”
He’s not wrong. Ella’s mind had wandered into one of the female COs who stood by a wall with her baton cradled under her crossed arms. There’s one inmate, a black guy with tight cornrows meeting with another dude, probably a brother or cousin who repped the same set, that she has made it her duty not to look at, and Ella knows, can probably tell without Diving, that they’re fucking. Memories run like shards across her line of sight: the two of them on the outside, he with his crew when he was younger and she with her older cousin, both her and her cousin sporting big hoop earrings with their names in gold, walking back from the movies and passing the boy with his crew and the boy hollering at her and the big cousin telling the boy off in sharp, smooth, knife-blade Spanish. Then furtive sneaking from one’s house or the other’s to fuck after the girl’d gotten out of school, and the boy not doing well in class and his mother not around because she was working three jobs, and he couldn’t bear to see an eviction notice slide under their door like it did to the people one floor up, so he starts slanging, and when he hollers at the girl with his new kicks and his chain (that will be snatched in a week or so and that he’ll have to stomp someone out to get back), she smirks, and the cousin fights even harder to keep the girl away from that sweat-sheened, Carhartt-clothed, muscled, bejeweled embodiment of Trouble. More fucking, then the girl goes to college, and the guy goes to jail for dope and a parole violation from a prior, and there’s a guard shift and as he’s lined up with the other inmates on his block, he looks out the corner of his eye and sees homegirl walking down the line tapping her baton against thighs he remembers she used to wrap around his back when they got the springs in her bedframe to squeak and groan.
“It wasn’t her,” Kev says, and Ella realizes she’s been staring.
“I know.” But Ella can barely concentrate because an inmate three tables ahead has a shank wrapped up and shoved into his rectum and Ella feels herself boofing. And in that inmate’s mind’s eye and now Ella’s eye is an image, a flash, of tissue he stuck in the door’s locking mechanism so that he could jiggle it open even though it showed up as closed on the guard’s boards. Then a jagged, slow-motion clip of the inmate’s plan to pop his cell after lights out and join two others who’d done the same to knife an Aryan whose son, on the outside, put that guy’s son in the hospital at a Confederate flag rally.
“But that’s the thing about the hospital, you know? You get your little bit of freedom. That’s how you get it. That’s how you get the attention you been dying to get. Gets to be a bit like home after a while.”
“I ain’t been around much.” Ella dislikes that it feels like an apology. She hasn’t gotten to hate yet. “But you know how the fam is.”
When Kev finally looks up from his folded hands, there’s fear in his eyes. For the first time since Ella started visiting. In his brain are capsules, pills. Seroquel. Benadryl, drugs the medical staff give him, sometimes saved up so that he can just lie there and take a bunch at once and just wait for them to hit, only to wake up the next day and realize “Fuck, I can’t do this.” It’s all in Kev’s eyes, and Ella sees it, though her ephemeral fingers only touch the contours of that thought. And Kev asking her without opening his mouth: you could burn it down; you could just burn this motherfucker down, all of it; please, just burn it down.
She looks down, then up again and past her brother. There’s an inmate talking to his baby’s mother, and the inmate’s leg is bobbing up and down because earlier in the day, he splashed a CO, threw urine all over the guy’s face and soaked the front of his uniform, practically popped a balloon on him, then put his arms behind his head so that the cameras would see that he wasn’t resisting or striking the CO. He knew that guy and a bunch of his buddies would be waiting for him, maybe right outside the showers in the cameras’ blind spot, to put him in the hospital or maybe even kill him, and this might be the last time he sees his baby’s face ever again.
The metal table dips where Ella’s fingers press into it, and she realizes what she’s doing and takes her hand off and puts it in her lap.
An older man tells his grandson, brought in by his daughter, about how he’s learning chess so that when he gets out he can play his grandson, who’s getting really good, apparently. He says this, knowing he will not get out, that he will die either here or somewhere upstate where, he hears, the prisons are starting to turn more into hospices than anything else. But he still tells his grandson about how he’s learning to play in solitary, because that makes his situation seem less scary, though his daughter knows exactly what a stay in the Bing entails. And the older man’s words are brightly colored, even as Ella sees the man’s imagination, sees the man and the inmate in the cell next door both drawing the board on pieces of paper and screaming their moves out to each other, and the loneliness washes purple over the image and reminds the older man about how dirty his cell was when he first moved in and how the only way to get Sanitation to come in and clean it was to stuff the toilet with books he was sent and flood the cell or to break the toilet so that the cell became unusable.
Ella wants to tell Kev to just survive, as though that would be enough. Just survive. But, in her chest, it becomes a cruel thing to ask him to do.
She doesn’t want to reduce this entire compound—its ten jail facilities with approximately sixty beds in each, its eight-by-ten solitary confinement chambers, its hallways and the cameras placed so that there were blind spots where the bleeding happened, and its railings and its bars and its slatted windows and its shitty air-conditioning—all to dust. She wants to be able to go port back in time, reach her hand in and put it to Kev’s chest the night of that attempted armed robbery. Or to go back even further and stay closer to Kev for longer to keep him in that bubble of protection so that cops would leave him alone more often. Or to go back even further and keep him from becoming friends with Freddie, who would one day get picked up by cops for looking at one for too long and in the police van on the way to the station would get his spine severed. Because maybe if Kev didn’t know him as a friend, as a brother, almost, in Ella’s absence while Ella went to discover her powers where she couldn’t hurt people, maybe Kev might not be here. Or maybe reach back even further and nudge Mama to bring the family somewhere else where the land didn’t burn underneath them and catch fire, where they could settle and where white people were maybe a little less thirsty for his blood.