by James Boice
When he wakes up there is a blanket draped over his shoulders. He throws it off. Cannot imagine what nasty substances are on it. He brushes his arms and face for lice and bedbugs and fleas, looks across the room and sees everyone has one, which makes him change his mind and think maybe he should use it, but then he sees Joseph there watching him and he understands and does not touch the blanket again, stays cold instead.
The next day he is still there in the bullpen of the Tombs, still waiting for Potter, still waiting for his father, for justice. He is very sick—being cold has made him acquire what must be some kind of new super rhinovirus that has mutated in here over the years. His head feels like a balloon filled with Elmer’s glue. He is the only one who is sneezing and sweating and breathing through his mouth. Joseph says, —Feel okay, Pills? and chuckles drily. He can hardly stand when at last he is called to meet with his attorney.
—What the hell is going on? Lee asks Potter. —What’s taking so long? When do I post bail and go home?
Potter says, slathering Purell on his hands, —This is homicide and a gun.
—I know that.
—There’s no bail.
—Sure there is.
Potter just shakes his head and says, —No.
—There’s got to be something we can do.
Potter says, —There’s not. It’s homicide and a gun. They don’t grant bail for homicide and a gun.
—Jesus Christ, they understand I’m not a criminal, right? I mean, what do they have? What are they basing their decision on? What information? Is it just a piece of paper they’re looking at, with my name and what the cops say I did? Maybe they need to know more, maybe if they had the full picture. Maybe if they knew who I was. Who I am.
—What do you mean?
—You know. I’m not like them. He gestures over his shoulder back toward the bullpen, the other prisoners.
Potter is just looking at him. He has made a name for himself by defending mobsters accused of murder, IMF officials accused of raping hotel housekeepers, professional athletes accused of both. —Being rich, he says, —isn’t a viable defense.
—No, I know that.
—Nor is being white.
—I know that, that’s not what I’m saying. All I’m saying is, maybe if they see that I’m a guy who has never been in trouble, who has respect for traditional American values—
—I know exactly what you’re saying. And I’m telling you: in the eyes of the court it makes no difference.
—That’s not true. Come on, everyone knows it’s not. What are they always complaining about? Double standards, white privilege. Right?
—Bail will be denied. I’m telling you. So plan accordingly. Now let’s talk about your son.
—I told you, my dad’ll take him. Is he here? Why hasn’t he come? They not allow visitors or something?
Potter looks at his notes and shifts in his seat, uncomfortable. —Maybe there’s a backup plan.
—What do you mean?
—Your mother says she’s tied up overseas but is trying to come as soon as she can, she says she’s worried sick and wants me to tell you she loves you and stay strong. She says one of your brothers or sisters would be more than happy to take him.
—Half brothers and half sisters, Lee corrects him. —And no way, I hardly know them, they might as well be strangers, I don’t know who they are or what they’re about. If they’re anything like her, absolutely not. But what are we talking about? Where’s my dad?
—He’s not an option at this point.
—Why not?
—Lee, he said no.
—I don’t believe that.
—Then don’t. He said no. He’s not coming.
—What? Why? Is he okay? Is he sick or something?
Potter has no answers. It’s irrelevant to him. —We need to find someone else. I have investigators looking at his mother and, boy, she really had no one, no family to speak of. Look, he’s headed to a shelter unless there’s somebody, anybody, you trust to take him. A friend, a coworker, a neighbor—anyone at all, Lee. Is there anyone you trust?
Lee can think of no one.
Potter says, —There is an option. There is a woman in Washington Heights. Court-appointed guardian. The court knows her, she takes in children in cases like this all the time and she’s stellar. The best in the city. I know her, I’ve used her before. I’d let her babysit my own kids. I’ve called in some favors and, well, that’s actually where your son is headed right now.
—You what?
—At least he’s out of the shelter, Lee.
—Washington Heights? My God, have you ever been there?
—Yes, have you?
Lee has not, but he does not say so. —My God, do you understand the risk he is under? Once the media gets ahold of this, there are going to be people out there who will want to kill me. And him. And you’re sending him up to God knows where, with God knows who.
—Lee, she’s a saint.
—She does not know how to protect him.
—And you do?
—Absolutely not will my son live with some welfare queen.
—That’s not who this is at all. She’s fine, she’s lovely. Really.
—Yeah, I’m sure. Fine to you. Don’t be so gullible, John.
—You think you know better than me?
—I’m not saying I know better than you, but I do know.
—What do you know?
—I know... things. Okay? I pay attention. I read.
—What do you read?
—I read the news, the real news. I read between the lines. I think for myself and pay attention to the world around me. And I know all about your homegirl up in Harlem.
—Washington Heights.
—I know all about her. People like her hoard babies like cats. They smile at whoever they need to smile at to keep their checks coming from the state each month, and then they turn around and stuff the babies into closets.
—She’s qualified.
—Is she a trained security expert? Because if not, in this case no, she ain’t qualified. They are out there, John. They will be coming for him. They will come for my son. And when they do, your homegirl will be zonked out on the couch covered in Cheetos dust, high as a kite on painkillers and... Lee cannot even finish. It’s too terrible to imagine. He is sweating and shivering. He is so tired. So sick. God, how he just wants to sleep. —Tell me this, he says. —Have there or have there not been death threats?
Potter sighs and says, —They’re being taken very seriously.
Lee puts up his arms in morbid victory.
—Law enforcement is on top of it.
—Yeah, I’m sure every cop on the NYPD is bleeding internally over it. Look, I’ll call my father and talk to him and figure this out. Meanwhile, just keep working on it.
Potter smiles, irritated at being ordered around. —Yeah, okay, sure, I’ll keep on working on it. What I am going to work on, because it’s a wise use of my time and your family’s resources, is getting you a fucking antiviral before that—he points to Lee’s face, signifying his cold—turns into pneumonia. You look like death. They’re supposed to provide you a blanket, didn’t you get a blanket?
—There’s a guy in here? Big criminal.
—Really. In jail?
—No, I’m talking real big, whale big. Okay? He’s one of these guys who acts nice and charming, but really he’s a bad dude, he’s wicked. And he’s got it out for me. He knows why I’m here. He’s got eyes everywhere. He’s going to hurt me.
—What’s he done to you?
—Well, for one thing, I was asleep when they were handing out blankets but he made sure I got one.
—I’ll have him hanged.
—No, you don’t understand. He put some kind of virus on it. That’s why I’m so sick.
Potter smirks and picks up his pen and pretends to make a note of it.
Lee says, —John, what about the gun? When do I get it back?
Potter m
utters, still looking at his legal pad, —The gun.
—I’ll get it back when this is all over, right?
Potter says, —I should put in an insanity plea. Lee, you’re going to prison for that gun.
—No, I’m not.
—You had an unlicensed gun in the city of New York.
—Any law that contradicts the United States Constitution is an unjust, immoral one and I do not recognize it.
—Well, this unjust, immoral law says you face two to five years automatically. No bail. No nothing. Even if bail were on the table, no judge would grant it. Not to you. Look at yourself. Look at your life. You have no ties to your community.
Lee starts to protest but Potter cuts him off.
—You have nothing keeping you here. No work. No friends, no family. You don’t even have anyone to take your kid.
—I have those things, Lee says, wondering if he has those things. —I have ties. I have work.
—Fantastic, Potter says, getting ready to write it down. —What do you do?
—Gosh, a lot of things.
—Give me one.
—Well, lately, I’ve been painting.
Potter laughs at him and does not write it down. He looks at him and says, —Yeah?
—Yeah, Lee says, offended. —I paint. I’m a painter. Write it down.
—You mean, what, like, house painting?
—Art painting.
—Okay. What do you art-paint?
—Lately? Mostly American flags and patriotic things like that.
—Make any money doing that?
—You’d be surprised, Lee lies.
—What do you do with them?
—Sell them on eBay. Got some on there right now.
—Great. Maybe I’ll buy one.
Lee ignores the vicious sarcasm. —Point is, I do things. Things are important to me. Not just my gun. I know there are other things that are important. I know. I’m not dumb, I’m not crazy. The gun is a means to things that are important. Okay? Like freedom. It worries me that you don’t see that. I’m kind of worried. I thought you were a good lawyer, but if you don’t see that my gun is about freedom, then I’m kind of starting to wonder here what I’m paying you for.
—I am a good lawyer. And you’re not paying me. One of your family’s shell corporations is. And very well too. I’ll be able to take the rest of the year off. I’m thinking Ibiza.
He returns to the bullpen. He does not believe he said no. He does not believe he is not coming. Then again, maybe Lee might have said the same in his position. They do not talk much. He likes to think of his father as frozen in time—the same guy he was when Lee was small. That is how he thinks of him, that is how he dreams of him. He’s not a man or a person to Lee but a set of sensations bonded to the time and place of childhood. When he saw him at the third wedding he was alarmed that the black hair on his head was all white, and all the muscles he remembered were gone to flab, the broad shoulders were slumped, and his face was dried up and withered with wrinkles, desiccated here and there with pale brown spots. Sometimes he gets a terse, enigmatic e-mail from him on his birthday (Happy Birthday, I think. Or as they say in Katmandu... .??) and he does not feel the need to respond to them, because it does not take a psychologist to understand they were written drunk. Lee has his address but has never been there. He knows the third wife left him, and he knows none of his other kids talk to him, but other than that Lee does not know much about what the man’s life is like now. But he can imagine: a big house completely isolated from anybody else; maybe some sad romantic misadventures; a general corroding loneliness, a kind of living death.
There was a cancer scare, he knows. Years ago, back before his father and his other kids fell out. One of Lee’s stepsisters e-mailed to tell him about it. Not serious, completely routine procedure, nothing at all to worry about, even if from the way his father was acting you would think he’d been diagnosed with the plague. Lee asked if he should come and was relieved when she said there was no need, they all had it covered, there was nothing he could do. So he did not go. Should he have gone? It’s different when it’s the son, isn’t it? The son does not have to go when it’s the father, but when it’s the son the father must go—always, absolutely. You just have not heard about it yet, is all, he tells his father now. Otherwise, you’d be here. Once you hear about it, you’ll come.
At last Lee’s name is called for court. A tattooed gang of five steroid-ridden correctional officers brings him upstairs, treating him so rudely and handling him so roughly it is like once they get there they will put him against a wall and execute him. It has been thirty-six hours in jail. He is filthy and exhausted. He has grown even sicker. Tortured with helpless worry for his son. No one in the bullpen but Joseph has seemed to recognize him yet, which makes him think what has happened has somehow escaped the media.
But this hope is decimated when the elevator doors open on the lobby of the court and through the big glass windows at the front he can see the sidewalk outside, the festival of hatred under way, the throng of murderous humanity gathered there. It is a wall of vitriol. Protestors pound the glass and scream at him. They want him dead. He is not human to them. What he has been through and continues to go through, how bad he feels for what happened, what he was forced to do, and the consequences he now suffers do not matter to them. Only the gun matters to them. They would be glad to see him dead, because they hate his gun so much. To them he is just a symbol to be destroyed. Lee is stunned by the fury in their faces smashed against the glass, contorted in unhinged rage for him. It is like a science fiction movie where a plague has turned ordinary people into monsters. Who is responsible for such madness? Who has stirred this up in them? Who has hijacked their minds, exploited their emotions and fears, and turned them into a private battalion; inflamed the worst parts of them and put the life of a man and his family at risk for political gain? Who would do such a thing?
His father says, You know who it is. You know. She’s here. Of course she is.
In the courtroom he looks for his father even though he knows he is not here. For a moment he panics—dead, maybe? Maybe Potter is lying to him, doesn’t want him to know his father died weeks, even months ago, and nobody thought to tell Lee.
He stands next to John Potter before the judge, trembling and sweating and coughing, so overwhelmed and ill he feels like he might pass out. He can hardly follow what is being said about him. They are discussing something far removed from Lee Fisher. They could be discussing mutual bonds, or the human microbiome. He can feel a brittle tension on his back, knows it is the parents, they are here. They have let the father out and the one they’re keeping in jail is Lee Fisher. The dread that comes with this realization numbs him so that he hardly hears it when the prosecutor announces homicide and gun charges and the judge remands Lee Fisher into custody without bail. And that’s it. Thirty-six hours in hell for that. There is cheering behind him, taunts and heckles from what sound like thousands of people. He does not turn to look into the noise, the thunder. He does not dare. Potter is gathering his briefcase, cops are taking hold of Lee.
—I don’t understand, Lee says to Potter, —what happened, what’s happening?
A woman’s voice behind him says, —You’re getting locked up, that’s what! And I hope they throw away the key!
More cheering, laughter. Lee turns and sees who said it, and there she is, Jenny Sanders, and now the dread consumes and the dizziness overwhelms him. The judge barks at them through his microphone but it does nothing to silence them. The hecklers are stomping, chanting: —Re-peal! Re-peal! Re-peal! Re-peal! and it is the last thing Lee hears as he loses consciousness and collapses.
He comes to alone in a room in the court and then he is examined by a nurse—he has a bump on his head from where he hit the edge of the table on the way down—and herded onto a Department of Corrections bus waiting in an underground garage beneath the court. Waits hours on that bus. Has to use the bathroom. Where the hell is his fathe
r? Why is she here and not him? One after another a new prisoner is brought out from the court and loaded onto it. Black, invariably. He has the impression they all know each other, that they have all been through this before and know what will happen. Joseph boards the bus, walks past Lee not making eye contact.
Hours and hours he waits. His bladder and colon are on the edge of bursting. Burns is here, begging like a little child to use the bathroom. —Please, man. Please. Snot and Blood is here too, staring sullen and unreachable out the window. Won’t somebody tell Lee what is happening? He knows not to ask, not to speak.
Two more hours pass. Burns starts moaning, —Man, I didn’t even do nothin’. My baby, man. Where my little girl, man? Where my momma, man...? and then Burns goes quiet and then Lee can smell urine.
Joseph in back complains, —Yo, you did not just piss yourself. You did not just piss yourself. He calls to the CO up front, —Yo, this nigga pissed himself.
The CO ignores him. They all sit in the hot stink of Burns’s piss, the hotter stink of Burns’s humiliation, until, for no apparent reason, the driver puts the bus into gear. Lee Fisher is taken across town—the free people outside in the streets glancing briefly at the bus as it passes and seeing nothing, seeing no one, and then forgetting it altogether—then up FDR Drive to the Queensborough Bridge, then up to another bridge, this one long, gray, and solitary, on the other end of which is Rikers Island.
Spends his first night on Rikers listening to a lunatic compelled by the Spirit of Jesus Christ, hollering: —NO FAITH, NO LIFE! NO FAITH, NO LIFE! People screaming at him to shut the fuck up, their screaming only adding to the noise, so other people screaming at them to shut the fuck up.
His father’s voice says, Potter is incompetent, a vacuous celebrity. What difference does it make to him what becomes of you?
