The Kid (48 page)

“I thought you might want to take a few shots, you of me, me of you, just for fun. What do you say?”

I don’t say. He ain’t mentioned coins yet—I want at least two bills—and he
ain’t
taking no pictures of me doing nothing. He motions for me to take the key sticking out of his fat shirt pocket. I make him put the stuff down and open the door himself. The room is no surprise. Bed: box spring and mattress pushed up against a permanently-attached-to-the-wall headboard. Two thin pillows on top a dreary bedspread with geometric designs and a VCR on a dresser. And next to the VCR an ice bucket and two paper-capped glasses. He starts setting up his stuff and pops a cassette in the VCR. Two black boys appear on the screen, twelve, fourteen, maybe sixteen at the most, on their hands and knees fucking each other doggie. And that’s what they look like, skinny black dogs. Is this supposed to be turning me on? The picture opens up to show him, or someone who looks like him—chunky oldish white guy—sitting in a chair, no shirt, pants unzipped, whacking off. I hardly ever go to the Bronx, what happens up in Boogie Down aside from this shit, and house fires, drug shoot-outs, or shoot-downs like Amadou Diallo? Someone like that taken off the count for believing in a dollar and a dream and having a cell phone, and this guy is riding around with a kiddie-porn home industry in his car like it’s nothing at fucking all.

“I want to get the camera set up, OK?”

“Let’s just go on and do what we gonna do. I don’t feel like taking no whole bunch of pictures right now.”

“You think I came all the way up here and rented a room for that? We could have done that in the backseat.”

Man, he’s like nasty!

“OK, give me two hundred.” Fuck it, who’s gonna see some shit like that? I mean, how many people can he show it to without going to jail?

“I don’t have two hundred.”

“You wanna take pictures?”

“Look, I—”

“No, you look. What kind of money are you talking about?”

“I’ve got twenty dollars.”

“Twenty dollars?”

He yanks out his wallet, snatches out a twenty, and thrusts it at me. “I had to pay for the room in cash. I don’t carry around a lot of cash. . . .”

I’m just standing looking at him, his voice trails off. He’s scared. I snatch the wallet out of his hand. I could stick a fork through him, hold him over boiling water like a tomato, skin him alive. It’s like a fire in my brain. He brought me all the way up here for twenty motherfucking dollars? I open his wallet and see a bulge under a Visa card and pull out a wad of bills.

“One hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred! Now we’re talking,” I say in a triumphant voice.

“Oh, please, I got to get my son’s bicycle from the shop.”

“Use one of these.” I point to a row of plastic cards.

“It’s his birthday. The guy who’s customizing his bike for him only takes cash.”

I put the four bills in my pocket and step into him and slap him as hard as I can. The slap knocks him onto the bed on his back, but he bounces up again like a jack-in-the-box. I hit him in the face with my fist, hard, all my weight behind it. I hit him again and again, then snatch him up off the bed and throw him on the floor. He’s groaning, his face is covered with blood. I kick him in the stomach. Wish I had boots on. I look around the room for something to smash him in the head with, although a little voice in me is saying stop, enough already. I pick up his camera and throw it at his head. He jerks as the camera bounces off his head to the floor. I look at my hands—hitting his stupid ass has broken the skin on my knuckles. My right hand is covered in blood. I don’t know whether it’s mine or his. There’s blood on my right shoe. I go to wash my hands in the bathroom; even with the cold water, my knuckles are still bleeding. I grab a towel. How should I do this? I wipe the blood off my shoe. What should I do with the towel? Take it with me, it has his blood; leave it, it has my blood. I start to stuff it in my pocket, then see how big the pool of blood is getting around his head. He’s groaning? I don’t believe it, maybe it was my own voice. Just drop the towel in his blood? No take it with you. Take it and get the fuck out of here.

Where am I? Way the fuck up around Van Cortlandt Park. Slow down. Train train train. I gotta find a train downtown. Stroll, walk slow. I locked the doorknob lock from inside and pulled the blinds tight, then drew the curtains over the blinds. Either he’ll wake up or they’ll find him, him and his kiddie porn. OK! Number 1, Van Cortlandt Park station. After 225th Street, Marble Hill, we go over the bridge. I step between the cars and let the bloody towel drop. Swirling down toward the water, it looks like a white wounded bird.

I switch to the A train at 168th in the Heights. I look down at my feet. I didn’t get rid of all the blood on my shoe. So cut these motherfuckers up in little pieces for landfill, yeah, everything I got on. Twenty dollars! I should have cut his dick off!

It’s Dr See’s deep “Hmmmm” that lets me know I’ve been talking and at the same time stops me from talking. Dr See is sitting by the bed.

“Tell me, do you
dream
like that often?”

“I don’t know.”

“Abdul, can you tell me about the dream that brought you here?”

“I don’t remember most of my dreams,” I tell him, and it’s the truth. Not that I owe him the fucking truth.

“If you could remember, what would you remember?”

He’s fucking with me. I got this shit figured out; he’s in me, he’s my mind. I’m going to die. They’re experimenting on me with all these drugs, and they’re never going to let me out. They’re going to kill me or. Or
something.
What the fuck is going on here? If I don’t remember, why doesn’t he? Shit!

“If I don’t remember, why don’t you?” I ask.

“Say what?”

“Don’t you know what I remember?” I ask.

“How would I know that? That would be to know who you are. Who are you but what you remember?”

“But you know why I’m here,” I tell him.

“Even if I knew everything about you, I still wouldn’t know what you remember. Even your DNA couldn’t tell me what you remember.”

“I want to go to sleep.”

“Am I stopping you, sitting here?”

“The lights.”

“They’re a problem. Shall I get you something to help you sleep?”

“No, yes, let me see,” I mumble, drifting in the whiter light like polluted foam down a stream. I reach out my foam hand for things: my name—just had it, but it passes me by. I can’t hold on to nothing with my foam hands. Things are drifting past me again, how old I am, where I am, did I ever know? Of course I knew, I had to have known, but like a bar of soap in the shower it slipped out of my hands. How long
have
I been here? If I knew that, I could figure out how old I am, maybe. If I’m normal, what am I doing here? I feel death trying to rub up on me. And the guy across the hall, Watkins and another nigger are talking. “. . . Piece of Velcro wasn’t did, letting another piece of Velcro to be undid, ’n he got loose! And hung himself from the side of the bed.” “Close the door,” one says. “I ain’t closing shit,” Watkins taunts. I see across the hall. I can smell shit piss. It’s not like the movies, no stretcher or wheeling the bed away. Watkins and the other guy roll his body onto a long piece of black plastic and then roll him over and over again in the plastic like he’s a tamale they’re wrapping in corn husks, and then they kick his body onto a long piece of canvas and drag him BUMPETY-BUMP out the room. It’s like they ain’t going to fuck up their back carrying the nigger.

So that’s it. No more nothing. The end. That scares me. I feel darkness under all the light and air turn to bricks that are impossible to breathe. Dr See is just sitting there. Why doesn’t he turn the lights out and go, so I can sleep? I look at a tube in my arm and wonder when it got there and who put it there; the next thing I see are horses. I’m standing with them in a green pasture, and the air is balmy but the sky is cloudy. I can smell the ocean even though I can’t see it. I follow the smell to the top of a hill, which turns to a cliff where the surf is crashing against the rocks below. A tall woman on a pretty silver horse is riding toward me. The horse stops abruptly, then picks up again with a gallop toward me. I step closer in its path rather than away from it. The long silver hairs of its mane brush my face, leaving the smell of an ocean breeze in my nostrils.

I know the horse is coming back for me without the woman.

“Why?”

Am I talking?

“It will be like . . . I don’t know, dying, the silver horse is death, don’t you think, Dr See?”

“Actually, that’s not what I think. But what do
you
think death will be like?”

“I think it will be gray and cold. I’m tired of talking about it.”

“Don’t you dare,” he says. “Every time I bring you out of the fog, you run right back in.”

“You think you control everything.” Mindfucker, I hate him, and I hate myself for sounding like a fucking kid talking to his daddy.

“What you’re doing is not control; it’s not even resistance, if you’re fooling yourself into thinking that. You’re not a child whose tantrums are going to get him what he wants. You’re an adult turning the key that’s going to lock you in.”

It’s the truth socking me in the jaw! I feel like I’ve been hit by lightning or found God. I sit up rigid with fear and a raggedy little piece of hope.

“So we need to talk.”

“About what?” I ask.

“Your mental state. Look, boy, I’m not angry at you or tired of you, though perhaps I should be or could be. I don’t know which. What I do know is this is about it for me and therefore in some ways about it for you unless I have something to put in my report on Friday.”

“Friday?”

“Friday is my last day.”

Last day? Last day?
Day?
I don’t even know what year this is, and he’s talking about day. I don’t say anything. My chest muscles tighten.

“Yes, I’ll be leaving to work for Big Pharma. I’ll be doing the same thing I do here—”

“Huh?”

“Run clinical trials—”

“Dope?”

“
Director,
medical director. I could never do that here.”

Here. He’s leaving? He can’t leave without telling me my name, how long I been here, why I’m here, how old I am. My mother, my dancing? He’s chitchatting like, like this isn’t my life, like he’s talking about his grocery list.

“You can’t leave without telling me who I am. I deserve to know why I was brought here. You can’t just lock people up for no reason and then say, ‘Friday is my last day’ and—”

“Well, let’s get one thing straight: You were locked up for a reason. And basically when you end up in the position you’re in, we can do whatever we think is necessary.”

“The man across the hall?”

“Nobody
did
anything to him. He did it to himself. But you’re right to ask, because that could have been you.”

“Isn’t this a hospital? Aren’t you supposed to help people?”

“Do you want help, Abdul?”

What the fuck, am I talking to the devil here? What’s going on? Weird, weird. I sink back down in the bed.

“Come on, sit back up, look alive, Abdul. We don’t have much time unless you want to stay here for a very long time.”

“I don’t want to stay here.”

“On Friday I will hand in an evaluation on our sessions together.”

“What sessions?”

“I will write up all those times you pulled the sheets over your head and turned your back on me and pretended you were asleep or bit yourself and spewed blood on the walls—”

“They got it off, all of—”

“Yes, they’re—
we
are, I guess you could say that, good at getting rid of things. As I was saying before you interrupted: Those sessions, that’s what I get paid for, I’m a psychopharmacologist.”

“I couldn’t talk on all that shit. Why—”

“Talk now. Talk now, Abdul. Talk.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Stop whining, Abdul. What’s on your mind? You can always start there.”

“How old am I? What’s my name? How long have I been here? Where,
what,
is this? Who am I?”

“You know, this is interesting, but to be honest with you, there are certain things I need to hear. That’s if you want to leave here. I can’t write a recommendation for you to leave here if you’re going to be running around telling people you don’t know your name. What is your name? Let’s start there. What is your name? I asked you a question, Abdul. Don’t you get it yet?”

“I’m not sure.” What’s with this guy?

“What is your name?”

“Abdul Jamal Louis Jones.”

“OK, that’s not exactly what I have written down here.”

“Yeah,” I say re-remembering. “That’s not exactly what I have ‘written down’ either.”

“So what exactly
is
your name?”

“Abdul Jones, period. I dropped the rest.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, it felt like dead weight. All I need is Abdul and Jones.”

I so don’t trust this guy. I thought he was different from Watkins and those niggers. Yeah he’s different, but the same. Or maybe he isn’t the same, maybe he is my friend.

“The name I have is Abdul-Azi Ali. How old are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know?”

“Well, I don’t know how long I been here, how many years, or whatever.”

“How old were you when you came here?” Staring at me hard.

“I don’t know. I don’t remember coming here.”

“What
do
you remember, Abdul?”

“I don’t. I just woke up one day and I was here strapped down getting shot up.”

“You know you’re not delusional. Maybe you have some depression or posttraumatic stress, maybe. And that’s not so strange, considering what you’ve been through.”

Like he’s not part of what I’ve been through.