“And you said the prosecution has two weeks to organize their case against me, right?”
“Exactly. They have two weeks after having arraigned you on murder to bring you before the grand jury seeking an indictment. During those two weeks I’ll be communicating with them also.”
“If I don’t have to talk in the courtroom tomorrow, then why wait?” I asked her. She looked at me curiously. “You said that you’re my lawyer. You can go hear the charges and tell me about it. I’ll be locked up already,” I said solemnly.
I don’t like those hand- and footcuffs and the chain that connected them together and me to the others. Behind bars I would be confined, true, but I could still move around and work out, I believed. More importantly, behind bars I could make prayer, I believed. In the bullpen, in the courthouse, before the judge and prosecution, I was hemmed in and still protecting my true identity. I had been six days without prayer, like those American cats who were locked up with me. Of course I could pray within myself, silently, but I could not make the salat or press my head to the floor.
“Why wouldn’t you want bail?” she asked me sternly.
“I’m alone in this world. I have no family. The guardian I do have, he has no money, no property. He’s sick and won’t be able to come to court or anything like that,” I told her because that’s what I wanted her to believe, and because it was also what anyone would believe about any African American: no family, no money, no property.
“Sick, how sick?” she asked me.
“He had a stroke, can’t talk and can barely see,” I told her, sealing her options or anyone else’s of interviewing him. “Besides, if he knew I was here, it would kill him. I can’t let him find out. I can’t let that happen.” She looked moved.
“Regarding the murder, the person you were protecting, was she or was he a friend, neighbor, or a relative? Was it a small boy or girl? Or were you protecting an animal?” she asked me. I paused. We stared at each other for some seconds.
I was curious if she caught on to me, the way I caught on to her. I was hoping my silence could convey to her that of course I was protecting people I know and love, my sister, a blood relation, and my wife who hurled the knife. Our Mrs. Marcy, who was our family’s only loved senior in the USA. But at the same time, of course, I was never going to tell her or anyone else that aloud and have some dishonorable authority sentence me to twenty-five years to life, like the good detective wanted to do, over the slaughter of a lesser man. She and I both knew and understood that this particular murder had to be committed, I could tell.
“How much time could I get for ‘resisting arrest’?” I asked her, overlooking all of her most serious questions.
“Six months to a year,” she said. “It depends on how bad they want to keep you. And then there’s the possibility of an ‘assaulting a police officer’ charge. There are a lot of variables. Maybe an officer or even the accusing detective will show up, and his presence in the courtroom may impact the judge in a particular way.”
“Send me straight to Rikers. Let me hear back from you what the charges are. Meanwhile, I’ll be working off the conviction for resisting arrest. I already know the outcome,” I told her.
“How could you know the outcome? Are you saying you want to plead guilty to resisting arrest?” she asked. “And what about the other charges they may allege? Do you want to plead guilty to those? I have to enter a plea on your behalf. Once I do, I’d organize your defense.”
“No, I did not resist arrest. I’m saying I already know the outcome because it’s my word against theirs, and the police lie with authority.”
“That’s not true,” she said swiftly. “Not all . . .” I cut her off.
“What is true is that I never resisted arrest. I never assaulted a police officer or a detective. I am not an armed robber or any kind of thief. I am not a drug dealer. I have never been in anybody’s gang. Never liked none of these dudes enough to gang up with them. I never confessed to murder, although they are saying that I did confess. And, I agree with you that that guy in those news articles that you just showed me deserved to go,” I said calmly.
“I never said that!” she exclaimed with guilt.
“Your lips didn’t. Your heart did.” My words somehow silenced her. She left for a few moments and returned with an orange juice for herself and a bottled water for me. Using my left hand, I wrote out a note for her to take with her.
“What is it?” she asked before accepting it.
“Read it,” I told her. She took it.
“An IOU,” she said, smiling.
“I’m no freeloader,” I told her. “Whatever you spend on me, even if it’s only your time, write it down. I’ll pay you what I owe.”
“I’m Legal Aid,” she said. “The government pays me, not the client.”
“I understand. How much was the water?” I asked.
“Just fifty cents.”
“Write it down,” I told her. She did.
Moments later, she slumped back in her chair and she just looked at me. “Thank you for saying that,” she said.
“For saying what?”
“For confirming what I believed and what I felt. You did not resist arrest or attack a police officer. You were never in a gang or selling drugs. You did not commit armed robbery or confess to a murder. I needed to be able to trust myself. To trust my instincts and to believe that even though I sit down with hundreds of young men who stand accused, some of them are wrongly accused. Some of them are innocent,” she exhaled.
“Remember this,” I told her. “Babies are innocent. They are the only ones who are. When you sit down with any man, know that he is not innocent. Men are given evil options throughout each day. How each man responds to evil options and suggestions is the only way for you to determine if he is a good man. He may be good. But no man is innocent.”
She stayed for a half hour longer. We talked, and I reminded her that she needed to leave so that she could get home before 11 p.m. and get up in time to appear in five courtrooms simultaneously.
“By the way, my sister thinks that you are guilty. She and I argued about it on my way over here to the hospital. My sister is usually right. Most of the time I listen to her. This time I decided to trust myself. If I am right after disagreeing with her, it will be the first time I won!” she said with a melancholy smile.
“Is your sister a lawyer also?” I asked her.
“No, she’s dead. But we talk anyway. We are twins, she and I. I don’t tell anyone about her. Somehow, you seem like a person who still has a heart and who would understand. And I know from working in this system that even if you told someone what I said, it wouldn’t matter, because their prejudices would never allow them to believe you over me.”
I just looked at her. She looked good, smart, and her eyes were clear.
“Memorize my number,” she told me before she left, handing me a business card. “I don’t think you really know what you’re walking into. In a sense, that’s a good thing. It means you don’t have any experience with this kind of thing. Some of the young men I represent know the laws as well as I do, because they have been in the system for almost their entire lives. Rikers is a tough place. Remember you have a right to an attorney. If anything goes wrong before you see me, please give me a call. I’ll be working on your behalf.” She turned to leave.
“You have an unusual name,” I said, staring down at her card. Her name wasn’t Ann. It was Ayn. I’d never heard that name before.
“It’s Hebrew,” she said, as though just stating that fact would somehow turn me away.
“What does it mean?” She seemed surprised at even that simple question.
“It means ‘prayer,’ ” she said.
“And Eliana?” I asked, reading her middle name off the business card.
“It means ‘God has answered,’ ” she said, still looking at me as though wondering how I could be focused on her when I should be so weighed down by my own fears and problems.
“That’s better than being my lawyer,” I said.
“What?” she asked.
“I’d rather you be the answer to my prayers.” She continued to look me in the eye.
“That’s the name my parents gave me. As for me, I’ve seen a lot of ugly things. I’m undecided as to whether God even bothers with our prayers. If he does listen, how could horrible things happen to children? Why doesn’t he protect them? And how could he let one die and not the other? Both of them would be just fine if they had either lived together or died together. That’s compassion. Do you understand me?” she asked. I didn’t respond. I knew something had happened to her. Her scar was on her wrist and probably even etched on her soul. People probably look at her every day and see the fight in her eyes, but not her sadness. I saw it almost immediately. Maybe that’s why she gravitated towards me.
“Good night,” she said softly and left.
She was smart. She was smarter than any and all of the detectives and definitely smarter than all of the police. She had figured out the case before it even became one. She had looked into the smallest details instead of jumping to the most typical and obvious conclusions. She had used her brain and her heart in her investigation. I peeped that she was warning me not to confess to murder for honor or any other reason. I peeped that she was gonna prove that I had been beaten by the cops. That their so-called unwritten, unrecorded “confession” was false! And that Jordan Mann, who had no documented history of violence or crime, was a falsely accused sixteen-year-old who like every good American boy had read The Catcher in the Rye. Yes, that would be her angle.
Alone now, I had more pieces to the puzzle than I had over the past week of my captivity. Neither the scenario nor the puzzle was completely clear yet. However, if I was correct in my thinking, the turn of events went like this: I murdered a man. Later that same night, I entered a Laundromat to wash off the evidence of the murder and to pen a letter to my Umma. The Laundromat was a front for some drug gang that was run, owned, operated, and/or protected by some dirty cops and some Jamaican gangsters. Somehow, some drugs went missing on the same night that I entered the Laundromat. Now the dirty cops and the Jamaican gang were looking for the drugs that either one of them, or both of them thought I stole. Either the dirty cops or the hustlers or both of them thought I was affiliated with some niggas who rob drug dealers. Either way, their drugs and/or their money is missing. They think I know where it’s at. If I would’ve talked during the interrogation, which I did not, there would be one or two or three teams gunning for me: the dirty cops, the hustlers, or the stick-up kids. But the murder I committed and my silence had zero to do with any of that. What a fucking mess. I leaned back.
14. NIGHT NURSE
The cop that was guarding the hospital room door wasn’t standing on point, I noticed. Was he to the left or right of the glass where I could not see the back of his head? Or had he stepped away for some reason as soon as the lawyer left my room? Did he follow my lawyer to question her because she had just become the only person I spoke to since they first cuffed me and began asking me questions a week ago? Maybe, but I doubted that the cops guarding the prisoners’ rooms in the hospital knew anything about our case details. They were not the faces of any of the cops I had encountered during the interrogation so far. Fuck it, the hospital guard would definitely show back up to cuff my hands and feet, or chain me to the hospital bed.
Instinctively, I did a series of sit-ups, but I lost the count in my thoughts. The hospital door opened. A slim female nurse entered. Her face was stern and stained with a scowl, like she had been angry for years. She looked at me exercising, looked at my bedsheets and then left.
A new cop walked in moments later. “Hands,” was all he said before he cuffed me. Now my hands and feet were cuffed, but I was still not chained to the bed. He stood post outside my door. I figured the nurse blew me up and went and got the cop to cuff me. Too bad, I thought. If I would’ve had a half hour more without cuffs, I would’ve undressed and washed the clothes I had worn for too many days. It might be for the better, was my second thought on the matter. By now, I realized I would never know when they would show up to move me. It would be crazy having to jump back into my clothes while they were still wet. At home my clothes were cleaned and sometimes ironed and laid out for me or hung in my closet, I remembered, but then canceled the thought, reminding myself not to crave home and not to desire or expect anything.
The same mean-faced nurse returned.
“Nurse,” I said.
“I’m not a nurse,” she said, in an even and dry tone. I looked at her. She was young but dry, like a raisin, I observed. She looked like she had not had a glass of water in weeks.
“What are you then?” I asked in an even tone also.
“Whatever I am, I’m not s’pose to be talking to you,” she said.
“Cool, we don’t have to talk,” I said, not used to being shut down by any woman. She entered the little bathroom like she was making an inspection. Then she came right back out. I wondered why she seemed to be looking at or for something in particular but never asked me about it, said what it was, or changed anything she saw.
“I’ll give you something. You give me something,” I offered her.
“I hope you are not trying to get fresh with me. You ain’t the only jailbird on my shift,” she said. Her words cut through me, reminding me of my new identity and low status. It set me back some.
“Here.” I handed her the slim packet of olive oil that was left on my hospital food tray. She looked at it like it was nothing. “Use this on your skin. After you wash your hands, put some in your palms and spread it around. You work with your hands. You should try and take care of them,” I told her sincerely.
“And what do you want?” she asked suspiciously.
“A nail clip,” I told her.
“You ain’t gonna stab nobody with it, are you?”
“Nah.” I smiled. She melted some. “I’m gonna take care of my hands too,” I told her. She looked down at my hands.
“Yeah, you need ’em clipped. I’ll be back.” She slid the olive oil packet in her front scrub pocket. I knew she could probably go in some supply cabinet or even to the hospital cafeteria and get a hundred more packets just like the one I gave her. I also knew that the one I handed her would remain special to her. These angry ’hood chicks each looked different, with varying degrees of attractiveness. However, on the inside they were mostly all the same. They talked rough, some of them even looked rough, but if the right or even the wrong man showed them an ounce of attention or affection, he could get whatever he wanted real fast.
“If you make friends,” my second wife would often say to me, “you won’t have to work so hard, alone. Making friends helps you to get what you need.” I remembered Chiasa’s words. She is an expert at making friends, I smiled.
Where I’m from, women pay close attention to their cleanliness, their scent, and their hands. A woman whose hands are unkept, undecorated, or rough, ashy, and neglected like the nurse’s hands were routinely considered by everyone to be unhappy, and unloved.
Feeling like I was being watched, once again, swiftly, I looked up and saw a dude dressed in street clothes looking into my room. The second he saw me see him, he vanished. A simple mistake? A lost patient? A detec in his street clothes?
Since arriving at the hospital, the thought never crossed my mind that anyone might try to hit me up or kill me while I was in here. Now my mind shifted. What was up with the guard who was supposed to be on post outside my door? Why did he keep appearing and disappearing? Needless to say, I didn’t consider him my protection. At the same time, if I needed to move him into the category of an open enemy and prepare to deal with a random attack from him, or anybody else, my entire circumstance would become an entanglement that would keep me trapped in their legal system for the rest of my life.
The nurse returned what felt like an hour later.
“I can do it for you,” she of
fered, easing the nail clip from her pocket. “Seems like it would be hard for you to do with them cuffs on. But I seen people do some crazy stuff while their hands were locked up like yours.”
“I can manage,” I told her.
“Just put your hands up here.” She pulled over the tray.
Her hands were now oiled, and even her wrists and face and neck had some moisture and shine. Hold up, she even switched her hair, I observed. She began clipping.
“I don’t do this for everybody,” she said in her stern manner.
“Thank you,” was my only reply. After that we both stayed quiet until the last fingernail was completed. “Good job,” I told her. “I appreciate it,” I added.
“You got good manners,” she said, as she cleaned up the clippings. “How come you’re not wearing your hospital gown? I see they got you in here till the morning. Ain’t you gonna get some sleep?”
“Right,” was all I said. She laid the gown over me.
“If you put it on, I’ll wash and dry your clothes for you and bring them back,” she offered.
“Bring ’em back when?” I asked.
“Soon as they dry.”
“What if you don’t? Then what? You want me to walk around in that hospital outfit?” I asked her. She laughed. It was the first smile I’d seen on a face that looked like it was in a permanent frown.
“I won’t do you like dat. I thought you could tell I’m a good person.”
“I can tell,” I said.
“Well den?” she asked but was already reaching for my T-shirt, helping me out of it and yanking it over my head. She looked at my upper body, got stuck in a gaze for a second, then realized my T-shirt couldn’t come all the way off and was now stuck wrapped around my wrists where I was cuffed. She laughed and reversed what she had done too eagerly.