Walter Myers - Lockdown

"Mr. Pugh, what meal is this?"

"Shut up!"

"How many days have I been in here?"

"Shut up!"

The door slammed and I turned around and went to the tray. A container of apple juice, string beans, corn, chicken wings, applesauce, bread, and a cup of ice cream. I ate it. Then I sat down on the floor and watched as the room grew darker. The light from the rectangular window made an image on the floor that went halfway across and just touched the opposite wall.

Later, Mr. Cintron came to the door.

"Next week you go back to Evergreen," he said through the grating. "It's not for you, because you don't deserve it. I'm letting you go back because I want the program to at least look like it's working."

I didn't answer him.

"Anderson! You all right in there?"

"I'm all right," I said.

I can do this.

I thought of school and what the teacher had said about sundials. All you needed was a fixed object and a shadow and you could figure out the time. But where did the first time come from? I didn't have any markers or I could have made marks on the floor and then figured the time as the sun moved through the window. The window was the fixed object and the shadow was wherever the light wasn't shining. The first thing I had to do was to cop the time from whoever brought me a meal. Then I would mark that off, and the next time they brought me a meal I would mark that off, and then divide that into sections.

The room was getting darker. Soon it would be so dark I would have to feel my way to the cot. But I wasn't feeling bad about it anymore. Maybe if I stayed in detention for months, or even years, it would be different. But I could put up with bad stuff happening to me.

Then why do I fight all the time?

Because fighting is good. When you fight you're alive, you're somebody. You're not standing in the corridor with your hands behind your back. Maybe that's it, that you're free, swinging your fists, letting people know who you are. Even if you're going to die. That kid who beat up Mr. Hooft, maybe he knew more than Mr. Hooft thought. Maybe he knew he was going to die but needed to be somebody for that minute. Like the guys in the hood running down the streets throwing signs and spitting smack like they're bulletproof but knowing they aren't. Knowing they aren't.

I could do detention. Sitting there in the dark, trembling as the minutes slipped by. It didn't make any difference how slow it went. I was locked in and the rest of the world was locked out. I couldn't touch them, but they couldn't touch me, either.

I'm all right.

When they finally let me out, I was jumpy, off balance. It's how they wanted me to feel.

"Where's your beard, man?"

"What beard?"

"In the movies when a guy gets out of the hole, he comes stumbling out and he's got a beard and everything," Play said. "You supposed to be squinting and staggering around."

"It was kind of hard," I said.

"It was hard out here, too," Play said. "Since they had you in detention, we were getting steak every day to see how we liked it. Steak with mashed potatoes and gravy. Man, you know how boring that gets?"

"Get out of here, Play," I said. "You guys weren't getting no steak. If they gave you steak, you wouldn't leave when your date came up. You'd be hanging around for the eats."

"I decided what I'm going to do when I get out of here," Play said.

"What?"

"I'm going to be a rich white dude," he said. "Then I won't have to do nothing but sit around and worry about people like you coming into my neighborhood."

"Yeah, well, I decided what I'm going to do too," I said. "I'm going to look around for a rich white dude like you and take his stuff."

It was good talking to Play again. It was good just talking. I could see guys going crazy being locked up for years like they did in the max prisons where you were on lockdown twenty-three hours a day. In a way I didn't seem to be alive when I was in detention. Being alive wasn't about just breathing and whatnot. It was like you could look around and somebody else would notice that you were alive. Talking helped a lot, because when somebody answered, it meant they heard you. Even if somebody was yelling at you, it was better than silence. I knew if I was in lockdown long enough, I would probably talk to myself.

On my first day back from detention, I sat with Play at breakfast and listened to him complain about the eggs. I wanted to say something about the eggs being different when you ate them in the dining room, but I couldn't find the words that made it sound right. Eggs are eggs, and they shouldn't taste different if you ate them in one room or the other. But they did.

King Kong looked over at me from the corner of the room, and it made me laugh because he was still trying to look hard even though I had put him down good.

I didn't say nothing in school, even though I wanted to. When we left class for lunch, King Kong came real near me and brushed me a little. I gave him a look and he stopped and turned toward me, and Mr. Pugh came over and pushed us both against the wall.

"Cool it, girls!"

I knew Play was in because he cut a dude on Clinton Avenue in Brooklyn. King Kong wasn't keeping his square ass together after a beat down and I was wondering if I would have to shank him to get him off my case.

"Yo, Play, how it feel to cut a guy?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "I was just swinging and it happened. I won the blade playing Horse. I hit five shots in a row and I got the guy's blade, which wasn't no big deal because he had a whole trunkful of them."

My first afternoon out of detention was cool. Group was canceled because Miss Dodson's car had broken down on the highway and she couldn't make it. We went right to recreation and personal hygiene, and I checked myself out for a beard. Nothing.

Toon came over and sat with me in the rec room. He handed me a book.

"It's a gift," he said. "From me to you."

The book was Lord of the Flies.

"You don't have to give me a gift," I said.

Toon shrugged and looked down at the floor. "It's because in my heart we are brothers," he said. "I had a brother. In our family, he was the hero. My father said his name should have been Rama, but he wanted him to have an American name so he named him Raymond. When my brother Raymond was alive, he was the center of my family. He was smart and tall and looked very handsome. When he became sick and died, my family was very hurt.

"They took his ashes to India and scattered them in a river near where our family had lived before my grandfather came to America. I was very excited to go to India for the first time, but my father was mad at me for thinking about what I would see there instead of mourning for my brother. After that, he hardly ever spoke to me."

"What was India like?" I asked.

"Like the Bronx, but with more animals and older buses," Toon said.

"Your brother got shot?"

"No, he had a cough and his chest hurt, but my father said it was nothing. Even when he coughed a lot, my father said it was just making him stronger. Then he had to go to the hospital, and after two days, he died."

"I'm sorry about that," I said. "But you don't have to give me your book."

"You don't want to be my brother," Toon said. "But in my heart, you are."

"Okay, you're my brother too," I said.

Toon smiled and then went back over to where he had been sitting.

Toon was okay. He wasn't like a real brother. He wasn't like a real friend like K-Man or even Play. He was little and weak and goofy looking, the kind of kid anybody could mess with. In a way I wanted him to be okay all the time, but in another way I felt bad about him, as if it was something bad about him that made him weak. Even though I could get busy with my hands and could deal if I had to, there was also something in me that could be hurt like Toon. Not hurt, maybe. Not even bruised or nothing. Just fucked with.