14
My dad puts it best when he says he never thought I would be the kid to end up in jail.
But jail is what I end up in. Jail is distinct from prison, which is something I learn that I never knew before. Jail is where you are when you’re awaiting trial. Prison is where you go after you’ve been convicted.
I can’t believe myself in jail. I don’t buy that I’m there. I also can’t believe how much like a school it is, and I don’t mean that to make some point about public education being indistinguishable from incarceration or whatever, I mean the architectural philosophies and materials that were used to build this jail are similar to the ones used to build my high school. I go to a fairly modern, antiseptic school and this is a fairly modern, antiseptic prison. The doors are the same, down to the little rectangular windows with the wire mesh inside, except they lock from the other side.
If I am quiet and introverted in a classroom full of students who don’t care about me one way or the other, then here I am … I don’t know. Operating under the principle that if we don’t see other people they aren’t there, I never look up, in holding, in the common areas, in the cafeteria, in the cell I share with a kid named Ricky. I don’t meet anyone’s eyes, ever. I see my own eyes reflected up at me from the pool of water forming underneath me in the shower.
In third grade I was convinced a classroom full of relatively well adjusted fourth-graders would suddenly jump me at any moment for no reason, even though they’d expressed no violent intentions. Here, everyone expresses their violent intentions towards you all the time, then retracts them, then laughs, then high-fives somebody, then reiterates the threat. Christine’s college friends could sound ironic while meaning what they said. These kids can sound threatening and friendly all at once, and be both. It’s always a joke, and not a joke, and a threat, and not a threat, but still a threat. You can put your head down and not look anyone in the eye but you can’t not hear what gets yelled.
My third night after lights out when I can hear Ricky stumbling around in the dark trying to find our toilet, or at least I hope that’s what he’s doing, I realize I have been too dazed and scared to think for more than ten seconds about Eric and about what happened. And the next day I am just settled in enough to the terrifying routine that I am able to think about it, and I think about it for the next three days.
The difference between prison and jail isn’t the only thing I learn. I learn that paralegals are not lawyers, and that Ricky would have tried harder to stay out of trouble if he’d known that, because his stepmom is a paralegal and he figured even if he got caught he’d be fine because she could get him off, so he’s at the very least going to slap his stepmom when he gets out of here for giving him a mistaken impression. I learn that Corrections Officer Cliff Hines is particularly disappointed to see white kids like me in here with, in his words, “the niggers and the cholos.” I learn a good deal of Spanish swear words, and am a few days and a few catcalls away from matching all the words to their definitions when I realize I’ve been in here a full week without seeing a judge.
And I am working up the nerve to tell Officer Hines just that, when he unlocks my cell and looks in on me and Ricky and points to me and says, “Visitor.”
Down the long hall that is not all that different from the one that connects the science classrooms in my high school, I think of all the people it could be. My brother, here to kite me some smokes and tell me to keep my head up. My dad, to be less angry than he is just confused. My mom, to be angry at herself and me and probably to start a fight with a guard. Christine, to ask me where Eric is. The Man, to do whatever’s left to do to me.
We round the corner and Officer Hines unlocks a little room and opens the door, and inside, sitting at a little table, is none of those people. It’s a young, reasonably pretty, professional-looking woman. She gestures for me to sit down in a metal chair across the table from her.
“You okay?” Officer Hines asks.
“Yes,” she says.
I sit down. Officer Hines leaves us alone.
“Hi,” she says, less professionally than any lawyer I’ve ever seen on TV. “I’m here representing somebody who basically thought you’d know who they were without me having to identify them. Make sense?”
I think I know who she’s talking about but I wonder why they switched from being represented by men in suits with black sunglasses to women who, absent the clothes and briefcase, seem like they should be selling cell-phone covers at the mall. I nod.
“Great. So … Yeesh. So … it is NOT very much fun in here. Right?”
I just stare at her.
“Right. Here’s the thing. They told me not to say ‘This can all go away.’ BUT—” she says, and she smiles, and waves her hand like, “but there you have it.”
“You can be prosecuted for what you would stand accused of doing,” she says, “or … you can not be prosecuted, be let go, and just, like … continue onward.”
“Really?” I say.
She nods, once, not even a full nod. She just lowers her head in one sharp movement.
“Of course, contingent upon that … I mean, no-brainer … you don’t say anything, to anyone, ever. It can all go away, it can all come back. Make sense?”
“Yes … You can do that?”
“I mean I can’t do that. But you know, the people that I, you know, represent … they’re very good.”
We sit there for a second.
“Do you need some time to think about it?”
“Who do you work for?” I say.
She shrugs and smiles knowingly like, I don’t know, I couldn’t tell you if I did know, I am a recent college graduate employed by powers great and murderous and my name is Amy and I get to go home after this.
Two hours later my dad comes to pick me up and that’s when he says the thing about he never thought I’d be the kid to end up in jail. In the passenger seat of his SUV the sky through the windshield seems particularly big and blue, but not in a pretty way. I think of rap lyrics I have heard my brother recite in the past about what happens to snitches who talk to buy their freedom, and I wonder if it is better or worse than what I deserve. Then I think, I guess I didn’t really snitch. If anything I agreed NOT to talk. But then I think, Wait, I did snitch. I snitched to the guy from church when I was angry. Except snitch is the wrong word. Snitching is too cool. I told. I tattled like a little kid.
One kid, Eric Lederer, our high school, his dad’s gun, “homemade weaponry,” and doubtlessly evil plans foiled by our crack security staff and the local PD. That’s the official story. He is now in federal custody, because some of the “homemade weaponry” may have strayed into domestic-terrorism territory.
My friend Eric has dirt all over his name, but mine is clean, at least in an official sense. According to my brother, the conventional wisdom at the school is that I had something to do with it, or failing that, that I knew enough to leave school that day before everything went down. I’m not there to hear it. I finish that year at a Catholic school where some of my brother’s friends go, and I do my junior and senior years at another school on the north side of the city. Everywhere I go kids seem to have a vague understanding that I am not to be trusted. Someone tells me there is a Namespot group made by some kids at my old school called “DARREN BENNETT, HOW COME YOU GUYS WANTED TO KILL US?”
I could never rejoin the college kids at the house with the lemon tree from which Eric and I were going to conquer the world, because just about every kid who doesn’t go out of state goes to that college and it would be the same kids who suspected I was ruined. I had to go across the country if I ever wanted to salvage anything of what we had that week or two where the world seemed like anything could happen in it. And my grades were okay and my record was clean, so I went.
“Homemade weaponry.” That hurts the most. Like we never dreamed up a universe and made parts of it real and almost got away with it. Like Eric never meant that anything could exist. Like Eric never existed.
But of course, he did exist. That’s why we have Symnitol now. I’m 90,000 percent sure they got him, they juiced his brain and precipitated it and all the other shit my lab partner used to gape at me in honors chemistry for not understanding, and now experts are debating whether it’s a good or a bad thing that medically the human race no longer has to sleep. They are not going to be debating for long.
The world had something in its pure unadulterated form and I fucked up and now it’s accessible to everybody, people who won’t have the scruples to go out into the desert when the things they imagine start becoming real, people without the imagination to form things that deserve to become real, their thoughts will start appearing too, one-dimensional, all violence and fucked-upedness. The world as it isn’t, it will be.
And it’s a little bit of that stuff that’s in me now, a little bit of Eric that has let me stay up all night writing this down without once feeling tired, and a messed-up thing is that the kid who could’ve told it way better than I could is gone. A kid who dreamed so hard it exploded from his head and into the world, promising everything. And I sold him out hard.
The only hope I have is that if I take enough of this stuff I will push myself to Eric’s levels really fast, and if TimeBlaze was our story and he made it real, then this will be my story and all of the sudden it will be real and he will be back. He won’t materialize; suddenly he will have been there all along. I will turn around and he will be standing there, a nerd standing over my desk, confident, not shifting from foot to foot, telling me my drawings are good. And I can tell him how sorry I am.