Wayward

by Dana Spiotta

  Also, protection of private property requires police and prisons and copyrights. So libertarians like rules in some cases. Maybe they are not for total liberty, but for protecting their own liberty at the expense of others’. Nope, didn’t once suggest this idea.

  Finally, is it really a net good to take beautiful old buildings (old schools, libraries, religious buildings) and, by dint of, I don’t know, say 4.6 million dollars in tax breaks, turn them into tacky condos and co-work spaces for tech bros? Shouldn’t we all have access to these buildings even if we don’t have the public will to build like that anymore, or especially, maybe? Is it a little problematic to turn spaces dedicated to people like Saint Marianne Cope into private spaces? And furthermore, what about mixing in design clichés, like barn doors, on buildings designed for elegant respite, not gaming chairs and Tabata gym sessions? Okay, now I am scaring myself, because I sound like my mom, lol.

  Still, one can see that the publicly funded rehab of beautiful old buildings for private profit is an interesting way to regard Joe and his philosophy. There is something fake in the apartments, in how they are not really well made. The key is to appear well made. It is a prosthesis for actually making something beautiful. “Pro” means “add” or “in,” and “thesis” is from “tithenai,” meaning put down/place in place of something missing. So he uses high-key cliché touches to signal something classy, like subway tile and granite slabs and reclaimed gray-tinted hardwood in place of actual historically relevant and thoughtful renovation. But my point is that could apply to—could be a metaphor for—a lot of what Joe does in his life.

  Ally stopped writing and stared at her laptop. She realized that this was not really a college essay. Or what had begun as her college essay had morphed into a harsh breakup letter to Joe. Yet when she thought of him, his body with his soapy smell and the way he kissed her neck and her ears—she shook off the thought, buried it. Thus she discovered, and could not undiscover, that you could want someone—really want them—even though you no longer liked or respected them.

  Five

  Sam

  1

  As soon as she got home, she found her phone and called the one person she knew would be awake. MH.

  “What should I do now? Not call the police, right?” Sam said, feeling as if she had already blown it, that she should have reported it by now.

  “You should go to the Citizen Review Board and file a complaint. Do you have video?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t bring my phone. I was taking a phone-free walk.” She could hear MH sigh.

  “You should write down exactly what you remember, times, location, what you heard, everything.”

  “Right, right. Okay.”

  “You can call the district attorney’s office. The ACLU. And you can call Syracuse Streets.”

  “Good, yes.” Sam opened her laptop, and it woke up. The page she’d been on when she’d last opened it—“Best Sleep Apps 2017.” A trivial concern from her previous, innocent life. Not innocent, maybe. Ignorant.

  “But, Sam?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing will come of it.”

  “How so?”

  “Here’s how it goes. You will tell who you tell. You have no video evidence, just your word. But you are credible, and you are white, so there is that. The CRB will investigate. There will be a simultaneous Office of Professional Standards investigation. It will get sent to Fitzpatrick, the county DA. Then what?”

  “What?” Sam said.

  “Nothing happens to the cops. They always have cause, they are allowed to make mistakes, to misjudge, to escalate. Everyone else is not allowed to make mistakes or misjudge or escalate.”

  “This was a kid, a boy. Unarmed. Not holding anything but what was clearly a soda bottle.”

  “You know, you could do nothing, just let it go. Because reporting it does no good, and you might even make yourself a target. The police, the union, and the district attorney’s office all take care of each other—”

  “I have to tell what I saw.”

  “Yeah. I figured you would say that. I gotta go,” MH said. “We’ll talk in person soon. I’ll call you when I get back to town.”

  Where was she? Sam didn’t really care anymore.

  She typed it all out in a Word file. But the exact details were hard. It had happened so fast. She was sure she saw the woman shoot him, but really her eyes were on the boy. She heard the shots and saw the boy fall. His back was facing them as they shouted and then he spun around and then turned again. Then he fell. She heard the pops and then saw him fall. She saw the man stand over him, heard him ask her why she fired. Sam was far away—how far exactly? She had left the scene. She didn’t have a video. She was suspicious too. Why had she been out at three a.m. in that neighborhood? She could imagine being cross-examined. They would make her out to be a sleep-deprived crazy woman.

  When she was done writing, she filled out the eight-page complaint form on the CRB website. When she hit the Submit by Email button, nothing happened. She tried again and again. She would have to submit it in person when city hall opened, at eight o’clock. Now what? It was too early to call anyone. She looked at Syracuse.com. Already there was a story up about the shooting.

  NORTHSIDE SHOOTING

  Posted August 31, 2017 5:00 a.m.

  by William Conner | wconner@syracuse.com

  SYRACUSE—A man was shot in an officer-related shooting in the 200 block of Park Street shortly after 3:00 this morning. As of 5:00 a.m. today, the area was blocked off by police crime tape. A uniformed police officer discharged at least one round from her weapon, Syracuse police said. The man died at the scene and was declared dead at St. Joseph’s Hospital at 3:45 a.m. He was not identified by the police.

  She should wait to talk to a lawyer or the district attorney or the Citizen Review Board, but instead she emailed the reporter and told him she was a witness. He immediately called her.

  “The reason I contacted you is that your story is wrong. It wasn’t a man that was shot. It was a boy. He looked fourteen, fifteen.” Then, when he asked, she told him exactly what she remembered seeing: nothing more, nothing less.

  By seven a.m., the story was the same but amended with this:

  A witness to the shooting spoke to Syracuse.com: “A female police officer shouted, ‘Stop!’ and then when the boy turned around, she shot the boy three times. He clearly was not armed. He had a soda bottle in one hand. The soda spilled into the street. After he fell, they called for help on their radio. Then the female officer stood by while the male officer bent over him. I heard him ask her, ‘Why did you fire?’ And she replied, ‘He was charging us, he had a weapon.’ ” The police did not respond to reporter inquiries.

  The full story was public now. She waited for what would happen next.

  2

  After she filed her report with the Citizen Review Board, after she spoke to an ACLU lawyer, after the police interviewed her, after she talked to an alarmed Matt and told him she was okay, she went home and collapsed into a deep sleep.

  She woke in the dark middle of the night. She felt the panic before the thoughts came and shaped it: what she’d seen, what she’d heard. She let herself see the moment again: the panic in the voice, the shots. The boy bleeding out, the cops fumbling. The “Why did you fire?”

  Heat and sweat; she couldn’t breathe and threw off her blanket. The air was cold, but she burned inside.

  Sam did not check the time or pick up her phone. She knew it was two or three. Four is an early morning; one is a late night. Two or three are only for violence and prayer. Desperate hours. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up. She felt the floorboards under her bare feet. The house throbbed against her. She heard the wind in the trees outside. The city was out there. She was in the house and the house was in th
e city. The city was in the world.

  This was why you came here. You came here to witness, to see the world and then to act and make it better. To re-form it. She was fake poor, Sullivan’s Travels, slumming-it “poor.” But now she understood her obligation. The obligation of history, of her wealth, of her position. Even recasting her losses as gifts emerged with new purpose: the night waking drove her out to the street; her invisibility made her seem as innocuous as the pavement. She was a secret creature, a cryptogon. Her loneliness, with its grotesque emotions, outsized in the suburbs, here made her feel the pain—the weight—of what she saw. What was the extra-life for? You woke because it was not the time for gentle sleep. You sought the world with clarity, and it turned out it had been here all along, waiting for you to see it.

  She was in the house. The house was in the city. The city was in the world. The world was history. This was why she bought this house in this place.

  Sam opened her laptop and read an article that had just been posted about the dead boy. He now had a name, Aadil Mapunda (his friends called him Adi). Adi Mapunda. Here was his picture from ninth grade (fourteen, his expression, his baby face, even younger than Ally). He looked ready for the world, open, one of those awkward adolescent toothy smiles, the face floating in the school-photo blue of no space, no time. But he was a boy in time, and when Sam looked at it, she tried to connect that face with his face in the light the moment before he fell. And here was a photo of his mother, Imani Mapunda, in a gold print head scarf next to her son at his eighth-grade graduation.

  (His mother. The boy’s mother. Aadil’s mother, Imani.)

  She looked very young and lovely, but even then, her face did not have an open smile like his. The feature focused on the irony and tragedy of their story. They were Bantu from Somalia. He had been born in the Dagahaley refugee camp in Kenya. Aadil had a brother, but he had died before Aadil was born (so this was the second child she has lost). He and his mother lived in the camp until he was six. Then—in a great stroke of fortune—they were granted asylum and emigrated to the United States. Catholic Charities found them a small apartment. Her son was enrolled in the large, run-down, but cheerful primary school full of children from all over the world. And many Somali people. He learned quickly, and by the time he got to middle school, he excelled at sports and his studies. The article described how the mother learned English and then began working as an aide in a nursing home.

  Sam thought of her father, and the young aides who had taken care of him in the end, when he’d spent a year in Withrow Center. The women who would let him joke and wink at them so that he would let them shave, feed, and, finally, change him. All the indignities and intimacies of a dying body, yet they managed it with a quiet, practical kindness.

  Mapunda was a rising sophomore at Henninger High School. He had made the honor roll, had many friends and even a girlfriend. He became American in ways his mother would not. He dressed American, he listened to American music. He was American; he understood America in a way she never could. Aadil was the bridge. Everything had gone so well, a story of progression and a fulfilled hope for true refuge. (But there is no true refuge for anyone, not really.) They must have felt so lucky—to have escaped a war zone and made it safely to America. The article noted what a particularly cruel turn of fate it was to have violent death come here, in the place you thought was safe.

  Fate, huh?

  Sam wanted to go see the mother. Imani Mapunda. Why? To do and say what? Hold her, talk to her, comfort her? Give her money? Or tell her what she had seen? Who would that help?

  She could imagine losing Ally, had imagined losing Ally many times, and she knew it would be unbearable. It would make everything Sam had done her entire life feel meaningless and wrong. It would be one thing if your adult child died before you, it would devastate you, but at least they’d had a life. To lose someone so young would change your life, make it a broken, cursed life. Parents who lost children were her Mid fears in the flesh. And here was this woman, not only losing a second child but losing a child to violence—to murder, just call it that. Her son shot and dying in the street with only his killers to keep him company. If she spoke to her, told her what she’d seen, Sam would sob and lose control. Besides, she had nothing of comfort to report to Aadil’s mother. It was a terrible death—a lonely shitty pointless death.

  Contacting her would give Sam something (what, exactly? a purpose, a place, for what she had seen), but at what cost to this woman? Just back the fuck up. Monstrous, to think she had a purpose here. Was the boy who’d been killed a part of her purpose? Her penance? Was Aadil Mapunda not a human with his own purpose, all dashed and spilled on the concrete in a matter of seconds. And what about the two police officers. Was he a fulfillment of their purpose, their crossing over into the realm of killers? The officers, the woman (apparently a twenty-two-year-old rookie) and the man, the police officers. Don’t, for god’s sake, think about them. Don’t think about yourself. For the sake of decency.

  So instead Sam wrote a letter to Aadil’s mother, and she asked the ACLU lawyer to give it to her. She wrote that she would testify at the trial, and if there was also a civil suit, she would of course testify for that too. Sam wrote that she was so sorry for what had happened, and she wished her peace. She wrote her address, email, and phone number on the letter in case the woman wanted anything more from her. She wrote “Please feel free to contact me” as a PS. But then she rewrote it without the PS. Wasn’t it implied? And putting it explicitly in writing made it a sort of pressure, she thought.

  Using all the remaining funds in her checking account, she made an anonymous donation to the GoFundMe someone had set up for his funeral and other expenses.

  The only thing left for Sam to do was to keep reporting what she’d seen, which would do very little for this mother or her son. (Are you still a mother once your child dies? Or did you used to be a mother?)

  She wanted to hear Ally’s voice, to see her, touch her and know that she was okay. But of course she was okay. Ally was protected, Ally would never be shot in the street. What a luxury, what an advantage, that the world believed in her child’s innocence. Or, maybe, the right way to think about it was that it was not a luxury at all, but the basic thing every person should have. Which was not the case, not now, not in this moment.

  3

  Sam’s struggles with sleep worsened despite everything she did: the light-blocking face mask, meditation breathing, melatonin, not eating or drinking before bed. And yet here she was in the Mid, wide awake and without even a hot flash to blame. Her careful calibrations of body and mind led her to one thing: the face of Aadil as he lay dying on the street. It had been two nights, and it had replaced all her other Mid ruminations and fears. The way it came to her was so odd, like a movie: she could see the details of his face, not the blur of the moment the way it had seemed to happen. Was it possible that her brain, under stress, had been hyperrecording, taking in more details than she’d realized? She thought then of the statement she had turned in to the Citizen Review Board. It seemed stingy to her, insufficient. Why did she think of it in the language of an accounting ledger, double entry, with lines of liabilities being offset with what? Equities? No. Her statement was anorexic, anemic, bloodless.

  She got up, looked at her phone. Since she’d been blocked, there was no point in texting Ally, and the phone had considerably less allure for her now. MH had texted and wanted to meet her so they could talk. Soon she would text with a safe location and a time. MH wrote that she was dopamine fasting and checked her phone only once per day. Whatever.

  The MH stuff bothered Sam, but it was a kind of referred pain at this point. A place her pain was expressed, but it wasn’t the real source of the pain. It was a dislocation and barely a distraction.

  She made coffee, sat at her table, and pressed a button on her sleeping laptop. Syracuse.com was already open on her browser. She scrolled down. Another
article about the shooting. But this article had tacked in a predictable direction. The chief of police had released a statement: Mapunda had been drinking at a party earlier in the evening, and he’d had a vape pen with marijuana residue on his person when he died. The chief hinted at the possibility that he’d been out at three a.m. to buy weed (of course they couldn’t comment on the shooting, and yet they had revealed this detail). The police union president spoke to the press: “I feel confident the investigation will show that the officer acted reasonably and responsibly.” However, he couldn’t answer questions about an ongoing investigation. They had to wait for the ballistics test results, the forensic report, the gathering of all the evidence.

  Sam did not read the comments. She knew—because the ACLU lawyer had told her—that Aadil had been at his girlfriend’s after the party and had fallen asleep. When he woke up, he walked home, drinking a soda, and was suspect because he was a Black teenager on the street at three a.m. For this, he was dangerous and a threat. For this, he was shot. No, she did not care to read the comments. Pot in a vape? So what? Even if he’d been out looking for weed, what difference could that possibly make?

  The ACLU lawyer had told her that because it was a police-involved fatality with an unarmed victim, it would be investigated by the state’s attorney general, not the county. She also explained to Sam that her eyewitness testimony was important but easily impeachable. She’d been half a block away. It was nighttime—could she really hear what they said? Okay, but even without what she had heard, another unarmed Black person had been killed by police officers. They had not acted “reasonably and responsibly.” She had seen it.