When Cedric finally fell into an uneasy rest, it was only because no other alternative was possible.
He had been awake for hours, maybe even days. Between the fluorescent lights that never once dimmed and the windowless desolation of the crowded cell, he had no way to know how long he had been here. Time stretched on endless, immense. Though he had nothing to hold on to, though he was choking, he would not stop grasping for something to keep him afloat.
Every so often, a little packet was delivered to each of them, the only scrap of mercy permitted in this place. Inside a clear plastic bag would be a clumsily assembled sandwich, a bruised piece of fruit, and sometimes a carton of warm milk. He was always queasy, but he could not relinquish his human weakness. He was tired. He accepted what was offered to him.
When he succumbed to thirst, he stood and walked awkwardly across the small room, his shoes loose and stripped of their laces. He brought his hands together over the sink and drank. In this action, he felt vulnerable, exposed. He imagined the men watching him as he brought the brackish liquid to his mouth. It was tepid, stale, but it was what he had. The less he needed to interface with his biological reality, the better.
Trying to stave off despair, he recoiled from eye contact with the others. Looking at their faces brought their helpless gaze upon him, their weary expressions echoing through his nerves. He could not bear this pain, so he tried to pretend he was as alone as he felt. But the twisting miasma of sweat and bleach made it impossible to pretend they were in solitude.
Two of the people knew each other. Forced to eavesdrop in the intense confinement, Cedric had gleaned that they had previously served sentences together at Rikers Island. From their chatter, it seemed that’s where most everyone ended up.
He supposed that included him.
One guy was named Tommy. It was hard not to learn his name because the other one repeated it as repetitive punctuation every time he addressed the other. Cedric didn’t know the name of the other man. He wasn’t going to ask. He didn’t want to know.
They just kept talking.
And they were probably still talking when Cedric first tried to sleep. He had taken a turn on the steel bench, and he had laid immobile, soaked in terror and vacant of all structured thought. On the bench, without the warmth of a pillow or blanket, disbelief and idle hope took turns clawing at his disordered mind. His only instinct was to endure, and yet that too was being consumed. Reason did not serve him in this place, and it had given way to fear. Adrenaline surged through his body, fighting his desperate need for rest. Sleep was the only comfort he could afford now.
The cold metal seared his skin, forcing his consciousness to remain.
He thought of Betty. When the cops had offered him a call, her face had risen to his mind like reflex.
But that wasn’t the first time he’d failed her.
They had brought him to a desk in a room that smelled of old coffee and body odor, walls absolutely plain. Artificial lights buzzed overhead, one flickering in a frenzied rhythm that seemed organic, pleading. His head ached and he yearned for the sky.
A woman sat behind the desk, middle-aged, dark hair pulled back, reading glasses perched on her nose. She was looking down through the bottom of the lenses when the officer deposited Cedric in the plastic chair across from her.
“Kenyon?” She spoke without looking up. “Cedric Kenyon?”
The officer reached down and unclasped the handcuffs, Cedric’s eyes looked first to him, and then at the woman.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m with CJA. Criminal Justice Agency.” She opened a drawer and pulled a fresh form from within and laid it before herself, uncapping a pen. “I’m going to ask you some questions. I suggest you answer fully and honestly. The answers help the judge decide whether to release you before your trial. You understand?”
Cedric nodded, feeling oddly jittery with his hands unbound.
“I need a verbal answer for the record.”
“Yes. I understand.”
“Good.” She dated the form. “Full legal name?”
He fought an instinct to hesitate, and spoke. “Cedric Kenyon.”
Her eyes looked over the dark rim of her glasses. “Middle?”
“No middle.”
Her pen moved forward, leaving a blank. “Any prior names or aliases?”
His stomach plummeted. He knew this would come up. Maybe, if he’d wanted that face to die quietly, he should have done something else. Been someone else. “I — yes. I changed my name. Legally. Last year.”
He looked at the pen, feeling her eyes burn upon him. “Prior name?”
He shivered, quiet as the chill rippled through his body. Knowing he had little choice, he told her his old name, the syllables like stones in his mouth. And when she asked for his date of birth and Social Security number, he recited the digits attached to his new name, the ones that were supposed to be his fresh start.
“Current address?”
Cedric felt cold sweat dampen his clothing. “I — I rent a room in Newburgh.” He recalled the numbers, and gave them. “On Liberty.”
“How long have you lived there?”
“Four months,” he replied, and refined his response. “Almost five.”
“Is there a working telephone at your residence?”
Cedric’s mind drifted into his memories, the smell of roast chicken wafting through the entry. “Y-yes. There’s a telephone.”
She waited, the whites of her eyes framing an impatient stare. “I’ll need that number.”
Cedric’s throat tightened. He thought of Betty answering the phone, her voice going quiet when someone asked if she knew a Cedric Kenyon, if she knew he was in a jail in Manhattan, if she knew what he’d been carrying in his car.
“I’d — rather not give that out.”
The woman blinked and raised her eyebrows, mocking him. “You’d rather not.”
“She’s—” he protested, seeing her face in his mind’s eye. “My landlady is elderly. I don’t want to worry her.”
The woman laid her pen across the form, looking at him with a renewed look nothing short of patronizing. “Mr. Kenyon.”
Cedric brought his teeth together behind tight lips.
“I’m trying to help you here,” she began. “The judge needs to see that you have ties to your community. A place to live. People who know who you are. If I can’t verify your residence—”
“I live there,” he insisted. “I’m telling the truth.”
“I’m sure you are. But if I can’t verify it, it doesn’t count for much.”
She waited. Cedric heard the officer behind him shift, the metal hanging from his belt clanging against itself.
“And before Newburgh? Where did you live?”
“Uh—” he stammered. “Ohio.”
“Ohio.” she repeated. “How long were you in Ohio?”
“My whole life. Until last year.”
“Do you have family in Ohio?”
The question was casual, bureaucratic. She had no way of knowing what it cost him to answer.
“I don’t have contact with my family.”
“Parents living?”
He swallowed, and his mouth was dry. “Mother, yes. Dad — Don’t know.”
She moved on to the next section of the form.
“Are you currently employed?”
“Yes, I am. I work at a grocery store in Newburgh. Started working there in June.”
“Name of the business?”
“Sullivan’s,” he uttered, trying to comprehend what he’d said and what he was about to say.
“Can you give me their phone number?”
Cedric tried to breathe. He’d called the number enough times to know it by heart. He knew who would answer. He hesitated a moment, enough for her to look at him in expectation, and then he recited the sequence.
“Anyone else who can verify your information?” The woman had her pen at the ready. “Family in the area? Friends?”
Cedric went backward.
“Zed can verify everything,” he said, not believing himself. “He’s my supervisor at Sullivan’s. He’s my—”
She brought her pen down on the paper and continued to write.
“Zephyr is his name,” Cedric clarified, watching the pen move. “Zephyr Wildwood. He knows me.”
He’d been denied release on recognizance. So he sat in the cell and waited. His arraignment came and went, his hunger pangs and tired head making it impossible to focus on the details. Bail had been set at an even thousand, but it might as well have been a million for what he had at his disposal.
They offered him a call.
He still had committed to memory a string of digits that would ring in a kitchen several miles from a river in Ohio. A mother or a father would lend their ear, offer to drive out and render whatever support he needed. Yes, they’d pick up the phone, or, even worse —
Diana herself.
Betty would almost certainly have come to his aid, he bargained. Over the months that he’d lived in her home, he’d come to think of her with a certain softness, an affection. He had surmised, behind the pop bottle glasses, that the feeling was mutual. She was there every night, she was there every morning. She cooked the same meals every week and he’d come to look forward to them, appreciating the routine. And if he worked late, she left a plate carefully wrapped in the center of the refrigerator. Something about that life had felt comfortable, correct, ordained, as if this, in contrast to what came before, was exactly how things were supposed to be.
But when he’d rendered in his imagination her voice over the phone and contemplated what he would have to beg, he’d become paralyzed. He didn’t want to utter those words, he didn’t want to tell that story. He didn’t want to admit that shame and give it shape.
If he told her what he’d done, well —
Then it would all be real.
He lingered there on the metal platform for a while, trying to console himself with the disintegrating platitude that he still had options. He heard the other men breathe and cough, shuffle positions, use the toilet. He thought to himself the same things over and over again, trying to invoke sleep, trying to fathom that he still could change his mind and ask for help. He tried to believe that he had not painted himself into a corner.
He soon gave up, left the bench, and sat huddled against the concrete wall for a while. Tommy and his friend were sleeping on the floor when the guard came for someone else in the room. One of the men had begun to snore. The gate clattered open and shut again, the sound reverberating in the tiny chamber, dampened only by the bodies trapped within.
Cedric pushed his back against the poured rock, curled very slightly into himself, and succumbed to exhaustion.
When Cedric dreamt, he saw without looking. This was the way he was accustomed to knowing things. He did not use his eyes alone to realize the world — how could he when they were closed tight?
Though he had been plunged into darkness, he could not be stripped of a persistent sentience that had infected his existence since before he’d become aware of the motion of his mind. Too hot, too cold, too scary — those sensations, long ignored, had become a pestilence he’d learned to suffer in silence. In this pain, nerves had stopped pulsing and he saw with half-truths. Despite his handicap, the rest of him kept the tally. Someday he would remember what he had been forced to forget.
The silhouette stood a step behind, watching, waiting — feeling — until he could join what was severed. Until he was ready to make whole what had long ago been broken.
Cedric was hungry. ‘Starving’ was a strong word, one he could not yet justify for his condition, but it was nevertheless true that his stomach was quite hollow. His gut had given up crying out for attention but it still pulled at his innards, desperate for nourishment. He could think only of food, and the present lack there-of.
It was with this singular focus that he found himself at a very peculiar dinner party. He was alone in a huge room, ceiling and walls stretching off into eternity, staring at an empty plate that reminded him of the tiny pewter tokens he’d clutched during his childhood.
[Not pewter.]
The plate was silver, tarnished, the thick edge risen and carved with inexplicable detail. The crevices of the ornamentation were blackened, lending contrast to the relief. What might have once been crisp definition had worn down with age. The plate was like nothing he’d ever seen before.
But it still could not feed him.
Cedric felt his dire need overwhelm all other sensation, leaving him only capable of staring at the greyish silver, hoping it would give him what he craved.
[No food.]
Desperate, impatient, he looked up. He realized he was sitting at one end of a very long wooden table, weathered, perhaps quite ancient. What stood out to him was how very like this plate was the table — entirely barren: no bowls, no cups, and even to the side of his own oblong silver plate, not a single utensil. Except for his own place-setting, the table was laid plain.
There were no candles, and yet the room was not so dark that he could not see. A fireplace blazed behind a single chair at the other end of the table, obscured, and yet casting diffuse light throughout the room.
He considered that empty chair, facing him, seeing him, black against the crackling orange flames.
He tried to look to either side for escape but his eyes would not obey, seeming leaden and tethered. The dark wooden table instead drew his focus, the rich brown evoking steak, bread, gravy.
And that was when he saw them.
[The hands.]
Alabaster skin covered the pair, emerging from dark folds of cloth. Each finger was adorned with a short nail, the edge rounded and even more brilliant white than the tinted flesh it protected.
He felt sense recede as those hands floated, belonging to no man; skeletal, and yet not dead. In the void left by emotion’s vacancy grew a seed of fear.
[The voice.]
It came from the right side, and, suddenly aware of himself, he looked toward the sound, not even sure what word had been spoken. Cedric raised his eyes, searching, but there was nothing beside him, and here the fire’s light was fading to black.
It spoke again, emitting an utterance more primitive than language, beckoning him to look toward the head of the table.
In the shadow cast by the tall chair, with his own eyes, he saw those white hands.
[The knife.]
One hand bore a steel implement, grey-blue in the darkness, with a smooth wooden handle. Opposite the knife was held a pale block with a matte finish, scattering the muted illumination. The blade cut through the block and a shaving hung for a moment before it fell to the table, its curved shape suggesting the delicacy of the medium, easily yielding to division.
“Such a waste. We tarried too long.”
Cedric was sure there was no one in the room but the two of them.
“Such potential. With a little training—”
He looked down at the silver, begging for food. He was still famished but words would not rise to his throat.
“We have wasted too much time already. But that is my fault, not yours.”
He looked away from the plate. The cloaked man seated upwind now had an audience of several ghostly figurines, each frozen in a unique pose and sporting a variation upon a whitish hue. Lilac, carnation, apricot, they stood gaping, running, cowering, praying to him as he carved another in beige.
“Nothing is your fault.”
Cedric let his eyes fall and he found his plate scattered with the sculptor’s crumpled leavings, a pungent perfume invading his nostrils.
[Soap.]
He looked up again, and where there had been four figures, now scores of them, perhaps a hundred, cluttered the table. But the hands still methodically drew the blade into the tender material, fresh scraps fallen unseen behind the table’s edge.
“You don’t have to be afraid anymore. Everything is proceeding precisely according to plan. This is your home. You belong here.”
Cedric looked down to find he could not see the silver. The plate was completely hidden by heaping mounds of soap shavings, billowing about to obscure his end of the table.
“Eat.”
He brought his own hand up, and as he closed his fingers around a slender ribbon of soap, Cedric felt the force of his heartbeat reverberate in his chest, pounding against the pit in his stomach. He brought the sliver toward his mouth and parted his lips over the teeth.
[Lavender?]
Repulsion flooded his veins. This was not food.
He looked up with a flash of indignation to see a spectral face, a bank of snow with coal for pupils, rush toward him with unbridled hunger, the glow of the fire extinguished.
Its mouth was open, coming for him, but all he could see was the blackness above.
When Cedric returned to his reality, harsh light from the buzzing fixtures seeped unwelcome through his eyelids. Before he even need regain his vision, he recalled those bars and the bodies that filled the cage.
He remembered the path that had led him to this place.
His eyes fluttered open and he stretched tension from his muscles — as little he could release without touching a fellow captive.
“You get some sleep, youngblood? You gonna need it.”
Tommy’s friend sat next to him, moved from where he’d been before Cedric had fallen unconscious. He didn’t like it when things happened while he wasn’t watching.
“What’s your name, anyway? Don’t think I got it. Screws gonna call you what they call you. I don’t wanna be like that.”
He realized how dry his mouth was, and that he had nowhere to hide. “Cedric.” He tried to put the thirst out of mind.
“Cedric, eh?” He pondered the information. “I got an old friend named Cedric. He ain’t no wonder bread like you though.”
An awkward silence crept in the space between.
“What they got you on?”
Cedric paused, not wanting to speak, and the man seized on his hesitation.
“Come on fresh meat. You can tell me. We all the same in here.”
Cedric held back, and the man grimaced, broken only by Tommy’s paternal attempt to soothe the escalating pressure. The other men turned their heads and looked away.
“Give it a rest. He’s just a kid.”
But his friend refused to back down. “Yeah, yeah Tommy, we all kids in here.”
He turned back to Cedric. “So what’d you do? They catch you moving weight? Pushing to high schoolers?”
Cedric felt red rise to his cheeks. “It doesn’t matter.”
Tommy spoke before his friend could protest. “He’s scared, Javier. Leave him alone.”
But Javier continued his assault, wearing his frustration like a bright smock. “This pretty-boy thing you got going,” he said, gesticulating over Cedric, “Acting like you too good for us, all mysterious and shit? Thinkin’ you special?”
He spat on the floor. “You ain’t fuckin’ special, kid. Get used to it. In here, you no different than anyone else. We all eat the same slop and piss in the same pot.”
Cedric didn’t say anything.
“You keep this up, you ain’t gonna like what happen to you. We got a name for people like that.”
Tommy kept trying to ameliorate his acquaintance. “Enough, Javier.” But he maintained his position on the other side of the room as if he’d been sworn to non-interference.
“We call ‘em punks,” Javier continued. “Better start practicing your ‘yes, sir,’s and ‘no, sir,’s and ‘whatever you want, sir,’s, ‘cause that’s gonna be your whole vocabulary over there.”
Javier kept moving slowly toward Cedric, incrementally threatening his personal space.
“But maybe I can help you, kid. You don’t deserve that. I’ll give ya something. Me to you.”
His face twisted into a strained smile. “What you need is a little ink. Something to show them that you ain’t no punk.”
He peeled up his sleeve and displayed his elbow, around which had been drawn several radiating spokes of a spider’s web, connected to each other with widely spaced branches of silk.
“That one takes a while. Weeks. You ain’t ready for that yet. It’ll hurt. And of course there’s the classic—”
He raised the opposite forearm, where a wristwatch had been drawn, the lines somewhat crude and childish, fading into his skin.
It had no hands.
“Yeah, I like this one. Did it myself, but you ain’t earned that either. Someday, maybe, if you be good. You ever lost someone?”
The non-sequitur stunned Cedric into silence. But Javier continued unfazed, raising his volume as the sound of the crashing metal gates echoed against the walls.
“I’ll give you a little tear,” he said, reaching forward to bring his fingertip to the corner of Cedric’s cheekbone, beneath his eye. “Right here. To let e’rybody who see it know—”
“No touching!” The C.O. bellowed, and Javier withdrew. For a minute, none dared speak, and they looked on in silence.
“Kenyon!” The man called into the cell. “Your bail’s been posted. Get up here, let’s go.”
Cedric looked around in confusion, and the men looked back at him. He looked toward the C.O., somewhat stuffed into his uniform.
“What?” Cedric asked, perplexed, slowly rising to his feet. “What do you mean?”
“Your bail. Someone’s posted it.” He looked down at his clipboard and back at Cedric. “You are Cedric Kenyon, aren’t you? Time to process out.”
He looked down at himself, catching the disheveled shoes at the bottom of his vision, completely dumbfounded. “Yeah, just—”
Cedric felt the ire of the men around him, but he couldn’t help but protest. “No one knows I’m here.”
“Look, kid, who’d you call? Lawyer? Mom? Ex-girlfriend?”
“I—” Cedric felt sweat leak from his pores. “I didn’t call anyone.”
Javier, still seated, pushed against his calf and whispered something inaudible.
“Look, Kenyon,” the C.O. repeated with impatience. “I don’t care who bailed you out or why the hell you’re playing dumb about it, but you got two choices. In, or out. Don’t got all day.”
Cedric blinked and stepped up to the bars, where he stood still as the cop leaned down and opened the door.
As the mechanism clanged and clattered back into place, the last thing he heard before he stepped into the next chamber was Javier shouting after him.
“See ya on the flip side, Cedric!”