By Darren Kaminsky
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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three. The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C. As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.
Click here for a Chapter Index.
Chapter Eleven
June 17
Tiny's
hand felt strange. The two cops were standing at the entrance to the cube.
Tiny's clothes were in the corner, covering my bag. I stared at that little
pile as if trying to remember...
I looked down and it wasn't Tiny's hand, it was the claw of a yellow-eyed,
red-tongued, golden-scaled lizard so large that it took up the entire
bed.
"Dew yew thhink I'm pwetty?” the lizard lisped in a rough, nicotine-damaged Bronx accent.
My body quaked and my head fell from my arm. The arm was stiff, cold, cramped and felt like it had been stung with 1000 ice needles.
I put my icy hand up to shield my squinting eyes from the too bright fluorescent lights. Most of the others in the room were from the protest and the whites of all their eyes, probably my eyes too, were blood red from the tear gas and pepper spray. All of them were cuffed to one of the three big, heavy, bolted-into-the-floor metal tables. I wasn't. I don't know why they'd left me uncuffed. No one in the room was familiar. No one in the room was talking. I didn't try talking either.
Two officers came to the door of the holding room and called my name. I, the only person in the room who could have raised his hand, raised my hand and they escorted me down the hall.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
'To your arraignment," the cop answered.
We entered a small, courtroom, also too brightly lit, where a small, wrinkled bald judge with thick glasses and a voice clogged with mucous cleared his throat as if to speak, but, instead, didn't. I stood waiting. After long minutes had seemed to pass, he finally made a last deep frog sound that must have been successful. "Let's see, Mr. Late? Is that correct?" he asked.
"It's pronounced, 'latke" sir. Like potato latke, just without the 'K.'"
"Yes, of course," he said and looked up at me through his glasses. "Well, we have some real doozies here, um, Disturbing the Peace, Incitement to Riot, Mayhem, Reckless Endangerment, Endangering the Welfare of a Child, Conspiracy to Overthrow the US government, and Racketeering. Do you have a lawyer?"
"No, sir," I said and suddenly, for the first time, felt afraid and very empty and still just a little woozy from the tear gas and the nausea that had overtaken me when I'd seen Tiny's arm break.
The judge struck his gavel and said, "Defendent pleads 'not guilty'...Son, do you wish to have a lawyer appointed for you?"
"Yes, sir," I answered not sure whether, considering the enormous absurdity of the charges, a lawyer, especially an overburdened public defender, could be of an use whatsoever.
"Bail is set at $10,000. Next."
I was escorted down the hall to a little booth with a phone.
' You can call your family or whoever," the officer said.
"One phone call?" I asked.
"That's just on TV. Call until you reach somebody. It's not like we want you sitting around this place," he said.
I tried the house and no one answered. I tried Nell’s office and no one answered. Ditto Teddy's. No choice: I tried Dani.
"Are you OK?" It made me feel good to hear the relief in her voice. "You guys made the news. They say you're Anarchists."
"We are not... I'm not."
"I know, but it sure makes for a good word on the news. Nellie is being called the ringleader. There was a clip of them raiding your house and Brenna and Kerran being taken away. Brenna looked really pissed. I think she was going to chew her handcuffs off."
"Nellie? Jean?"
"As far as I know, uncaught."
"Good."
"Are they going to let you out?"
"Never. Bail is $10,000" I said.
"Are you going to ask your parents?"
"I'm going to try not to. Can you imagine my mother...?"
"Then how will you get the money?"
"I don't know."
"Let me see what I can do."
'You don't have that kind of money."
"No, but we both know who does."
"But I'd feel guilty."
"She wouldn't want you stuck there."
"I don't want me stuck here either...Thanks for doing this, Dani. You know..."
"DON'T. Save it for later," she said and hung up.
They took me back to the holding room and then to a small cell with a cot in it where I immediately plopped down and went to sleep.
I woke up disoriented. I looked around, but had no idea where I was; then it all came back in a flash of flailing truncheons, spurting blood, and an obtruding bone that, in my memory, was longer and bloodier than I knew it had been in real life.
I got up and doused my face in water from the small sink and lay back down on the cot. I thought about the giant dream lizard of earlier and wondered what I would have told Tiny if she wasn't pretty? Would I have lied or avoided answering? Would she have asked if she didn't think she was pretty?
I was awakened by another cop, who escorted me down the hall to a clear plexi window behind which sat an ashen-faced clerk whose skin was hanging off his face, pulling all his features down with it. He handed me release forms and a plastic bag of my stuff. He told me that bail had been posted and I was free to go. The names on the bail certificate were Mary Belle Townsend and Imogen Corban.
Owe.
Love. Befriend. Betray. The money could be repaid. What the money represented
couldn't.
In jail, I hadn't had a way to track time and I thought it would be night
out. Instead it was morning. I had no idea how much sleep I'd had or what
day it was. It could even be Monday and I could be AWOL from work. How
much fluorescent light does it take to miss a day? How much to miss a
year?
Away from the police building, I walked slowly up one of the state-named
spoke avenues. I wasn't even sure which one. All the buildings had an
eerie 70's sci-fi sameness to them, made more extreme by an absence of
people.
At some point, I got near Logan Circle, then turned up P Street and passed THE parking lot and then to the Embassy for Space again, still flying it's Earth flag on a clean new flagpole. How were relations with Space these days? Maybe I should stop in and apply for a tourist visa? Or political asylum?
At Dani's building, I was buzzed in immediately. She was standing outside her door waiting when I got off the elevator. She flung her arms around me and we just stood there for a couple of minutes, my body getting warmer near hers and forgetting everything, just being warm. Then we started kissing and, avoiding the piles of clothes and newspapers, backed slowly into her apartment.
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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
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2005 Me Three