He warned that he would do the same to the staff. “You’re doing this to me! You’re the fucking reason!” he told them. They pinned his arms behind his back. They shut him in one of the seclusion cells.
There was nothing. The cinder block walls were off-white. The linoleum floor was a watery blue. The cell throbbed—fast, loud pulses of sound from an air vent above. The rhythmic noise encased him, invaded him, vibrated inside his skull.
Why do they think you’re so evil? Why are you so evil?
I’m crazy, I’m crazy, I’m crazy.
He gazed through a slit of glass in the door. It gave him only glimpses. Staff were smiling, a kid was smiling. He couldn’t hear them but knew they were laughing. He lay on his belly on the tiles. “Get me out of here!” he howled into the gap at the base of the door. “Get me out of here!”
He stood, pounded on the door, pounding, pounding. “I’m going to put my foot up your ass!” he shrieked at the girl who haunted him. “I’m going to kill you, white bitch!” he told a nurse. “Racists!” he accused. “Hawaiian bitch! I am perfectly fucking calm! I want the fuck out! I promise I will kill each and every one of you!”
His voice left him. He sat on the floor, mute. He leaned his back against the wall, but the rough feel of the concrete on the backs of his arms was unbearable. He slid over and collapsed against the door.
* * *
A half hour before the finals—after ardent days of trying to drill into himself everything Matheson had taught him and root out everything Summers found repellent, days of wishing to believe that the way Nichols had saved him for last when she’d named the eight finalists on Sunday, “and last but not least,” meant that he was somehow a favorite of hers and possibly had a chance to win, days of looking in the direction of Lincoln Center every time he exited the hotel, even if he was going the opposite way, to a deli to get something to eat, as if paying this tribute to the opera house, no matter how badly he needed to put it out of his mind, might bring it into his future, days of avoiding any touring around the city for fear that inhaling the wrong bit of airborne dirt or dampness would leave him infected, worsening the scratchiness in his throat and killing any prospect he had of victory—Ryan and three of the other singers gathered in the lounge between the dressing rooms.
There were soft chairs, a stretch of red carpet. Philippe was shoeless in his tux. The whimsy of his argyle socks pronounced that he hadn’t a care, that he would be among the victors. An unspecified number of the finalists would be picked as winners; maybe the judges would anoint five of them for their quality and promise, maybe they would name only three, but the number made no difference to Philippe. He twirled balletically, arms wide, then squatted and hopped like a Slavic dancer, then struck a set of martial arts poses, extending his arms with his palms turned outward. He mimicked a hero fighting in a futuristic movie, killer rays shooting from his hands.
Following his mishap in the sitzprobe, the orchestra rehearsal, and the sting of Summers’s baton, Ryan had gone to Philippe for solace and advice, and Philippe had reassured him. But now Ryan stared at his show of invincibility and understood that his new friend could give him nothing. They were too far apart. The other finalists in the lounge stared, too. One ate a banana, potassium being known to prevent trembling. Another, shifting his eyes away from Philippe’s animation, gazed down at the ungainly bulging and buckling of his own shirt above his cummerbund. Ryan paced. He touched his toes and did jumping jacks but felt the feebleness of his movements. He grabbed a banana.
A finalist sped past them into a hall beyond, the cuffs of his shirt flapping. He mumbled that he was locked out of his dressing room. But he seemed reluctant to call out for help, like a man suffering the first moments of a heart attack on the street who feels as much embarrassment as fear.
On the carpet in one of the dressing rooms, Deanna lay on her back and just tried to take full breaths. She stood between the Yamaha upright and the crimson sofa, putting herself through mental exercises she’d been taught, tricks that would somehow enhance her high-flying voice: imagining an “openness in the area behind my eyes,” or imagining a fountain of water spurting from the top of her scalp and a Ping-Pong ball kept aloft by the vertical stream.
Philippe interrupted his tai chi and burst into Sinatra.
Come fly with me, let’s float down to Peru
In llama land there’s a one-man band, and he’ll toot his flute for you
Finishing his banana, Ryan attempted equal insouciance. “I’m a Chiquita banana”—he sang a line from the advertising jingle. The line fell flat. Philippe spilled into a chair. Things got quiet.
“Now we wait,” a finalist said, sitting next to Philippe and asking him, “Do you think it’ll be any different with everyone out there?”
The singers all knew that the house was packed. Getting no reply, the finalist answered himself: “With the stage lights, we won’t even be able to see them.”
“Yeah,” Philippe said, “but we’ll feel them. It’ll be a buzz.”
“Do you have any weird little things you do before you sing?”
“No,” Philippe said.
The finalist bent forward in his chair, almost doubling over. He tapped his heels against each other at a frantic pace. “I brush my teeth with mouthwash,” he shared. “Listerine. Afterward, I’m like, Aaaah! Aaaah!” He let out two operatic notes.
Philippe said, “I wish I could find someone to play badminton.”
To Ryan, everyone’s words—even the fact that they were speaking at all—seemed incomprehensible. He had a premonition. If he opened his mouth to say anything, his voice would flee. It would be gone, his larynx useless. Everyone’s chatter was making him dizzy. He left the lounge and took refuge in his room.
The concert’s master of ceremonies, Joyce DiDonato, one of the Met’s star mezzo-sopranos, wafted from her dressing room, blond hair sculpted and blue gown gleaming. Lately, between singing bel canto arias, she’d been performing the role of Sister Helen Prejean, ministering to a rapist and murderer on death row, in an opera of Dead Man Walking. Backstage, DiDonato seemed irrepressible; she fluttered past some of the singers, encouraging, ebullient. She strode to the podium, joked with the crowd about never having made it to even the semifinals of this contest, and announced the first singer.
Summers and the Met had selected Philippe to open the performance. The eight would sing their first arias, followed by an intermission, after which the lineup would return, in the same order, with their second arias. Philippe crossed to center stage. The stage floor had been laid with sumptuous reds and blues. Philippe was, in his aria, a king whose army was under siege. He awaited the orchestra’s regal phrases and sang a sequence of defiant runs.
Deanna was slated next. Her lovestruck character inhabited her body, and her culminating note soared above the orchestra’s strings. “Brava! Brava!” the audience cried.
Ryan’s turn came in the middle. The Met had positioned him neither early nor late. They had given him the responsibility neither to seize the crowd’s attention nor to stir raptures at the end of the show.
He walked from his dressing room through the yellow-striped doors that cautioned “Do Not Enter.” He walked past a crate marked “Dry Ice,” past a stretch of gray metal wall, through the stage technician’s nook with its video screens. Above him: scaffolding, cables, piping, all of it rising a hundred feet into blackness. He stepped out from the wings and into the lights; he stood on the red and blue flooring. The orchestra’s tremulous harmonies rose from the pit, louder and louder. He came in on the right note.
Studia il passo, o mio figlio!
He surrendered some of the ambition that had constrained him in the semis, some of the insistence on purity that had stiffened his performance. A Met coach had suggested that he unlock his feet from the floor. Now he took a step or two in either direction, and the motion was just enough to hint—though there was no set—at the menacing forest surrounding the castle, the peril surround
ing him. He relinquished some of the nobility that had hardened his face and dominated his singing. His expression became doleful as well as steadfast; his voice became lost as well as resolved. Unmoving in their seats, the audience seemed to reach out protectively.
Next, the finalist with the lowest voice sang his liquid depths. He engulfed the crowd, and they rewarded him with applause that surpassed Philippe’s or Deanna’s. Michelle sang after him. Her phrases were sometimes feathery, sometimes on fire. Someone near me murmured, “She’s got it,” well before she was through. Thrilled with her sustained final note, the audience erupted into approval while her voice still carried. It was intermission.
* * *
They let him out of the cell. They led him to a lesser form of isolation in his room. When he “contracted” with staff—the facility’s term for making a pledge to show self-control—he rejoined the eleven other kids on the pod. This was the cycle that defined his days: release from isolation; relative calm; freedom within the unit; isolation.
They had to remove him from Anger Busters: he was too hostile. When they escorted him to his room and shut him in, he whipped the door with his belt, lashing and lashing with the buckle. “You are pushing my anger button!” he yelled under the door. “You are pushing my anger button!” He contracted. He came out. The girl he’d targeted came near. He reminded her what would soon happen to her. He informed the nurse who intervened that she would get the same treatment. “White bitch!” he screamed, and faced the nurse with his belt in his hand. Two staff wrenched his arms and ripped the belt away and put him in the seclusion chamber.
The throbbing permeated his brain. “I am uncalmable! I can’t manage my fucking anger! It won’t work with me!”
He contracted.
He tried to bite a staffer.
Punished. Reentered pod. Traded punches with another boy.
“White Hawaiian bitch!” he yelled at the worker with the yellow-beige skin and inky hair. He could see everyone laughing through the slit. “I know all! I know fucking all!” He beat at the door. “What I’m fucking going to do is not a threat, it’s a promise!”
Always, when he folded to the floor, he avoided the texture of the wall, making sure that he didn’t lean against that surface, that the backs of his arms below his T-shirt sleeves didn’t touch it. He revived, threatened, asserted his omniscience until eventually there was nothing left.
He contracted.
* * *
The white Hawaiian bitch was named Priscilla Jenkins. She was Cuban. “He had these gorgeous eyes,” she remembered despite the years and despite having left the facility for another career. “But he had nothing except anger. He led with it. Talking to him was like walking on eggshells, because you never knew what would set him off. Punch you, cuss you, kick you. I can picture them both, him and the girl. The wild-haired girl. Big girl for her age. They came at around the same time, both from really broken homes. Her goal was a ride in my Cadillac. I had a white-on-white Fleetwood. A lot of the kids knew about the car. You share some of your life with them, because you want to connect.
“The two of them would set each other off. When they wound up in the two seclusion rooms at the same time, they would battle it out, screaming. The whole unit echoed. I would think they were done, and they would fire up again. I hated those seclusion rooms.
“After the center, I don’t think things went very well for her. But she did get her ride. I told her, ‘You give me one good week, and you and I will take a spin.’ She had to work so hard to make that happen. The drive was just down the hill. Down the avenue and back.
“I used to tell both of them, ‘You’re just a mini me.’ I couldn’t tell them exactly why; that wouldn’t have been right. But I’m sure I told them something. I wanted them to know I understood. I wanted him to know I understood his anger. My family came over to Miami when Castro got in power, and my mother, in Miami, this was before she had me, she got on the wrong path. She became a drug addict and a prostitute. My grandmother would get calls when I was a baby. She would find me with a dirty diaper and Coca-Cola in my bottle. My father was gone around the time I was two. I got dumped on my grandmother when I was eight. Off and on my mother would come in, come into my life, high, needles on the glass table. She would cuss me out. She told me, ‘You’re never going to be nothing but a whore, just like I am.’ She said, ‘I’m going to wind up taking your child from you, just like Grandma took you from me.’
“A lot of the kids, their relationship with their maternal or paternal figure has been awful. I wanted to introduce them to a healthy relationship, and me being a Cuban woman, I’m big on giving hugs. But this wasn’t always going to work. On the unit, you have to be careful. I had a girl, she called me out from the fishbowl, where the staff have their office behind the glass. I was four months pregnant. I went around. I must have ticked her off somehow, because right away she started kicking me in the gut. I couldn’t try and stop her—that’s what she wants, so we can struggle. I just turned my back, let her kick me in my back, till another staff pulled her away.
“I had a boy tell me—it was during that same time—‘I’m going to kill your baby.’ That one apologized. But Ryan was from a little earlier. He had those big eyes, so you could see, even with that anger, even with how much he needed you to feel as angry and hurt as he was feeling, there was more to him. You could see his soul. You could see how smart he was. He would challenge you on everything. He was wise with his words. He could pierce your heart. It didn’t matter to me. I knew I was just the one in front of him. Sometimes I gave him points when he didn’t deserve it. Maybe he was one or two points shy of being on the next level. I would tell him, ‘This is a down payment. I know you’ll get this—I know you’ll get this by the end of the night.’ So he could play that Nintendo.”
* * *
Someone on the staff gave him something else: a small radio. He lay still on his crinkly mattress and listened. He landed on a pop station and stayed there. Usher sang, “All I seem to think about is you.” Backstreet Boys sang, “Backstreet’s back, all right, all right.”
He listened and began to sing along softly. He wrote down the lyrics, song after song, as the radio played. He memorized, and joined his voice to Usher’s and Nick Carter’s and dozens of others, joined his voice to the outside world. What came from his throat, he was sure, wasn’t anything anyone would want to hear. If he sensed someone right outside his room or about to open his door, he cut himself off.
* * *
He lost the privilege of the radio if he lost control. No set of incentives, not the radio itself, not the Nintendo game, not Jenkins’s approval, was able to prevent that: the loss of control. He shed the rewards and was given them back and failed to retain them, as though self-discipline wasn’t within his capacity at all.
“Her face will be part of the floor!” he screamed from seclusion, screamed about the wild-haired girl. “They better be ready! They better be ready when I beat her into the floor! They better take me away!”
Isolation ended. He lunged at a boy who would not give up his seat in front of the television. Isolation was reimposed. He focused again on the girl—“I will get her tomorrow morning!”—then switched to his mother, spewing from solitary, “If I ever get sent home, there will be blood and death.”
Subdued days went by, comparatively quiet days when the log entries read:
“Watched peers play Nintendo. Prompted numerous times for being disrespectful toward peer, hard time using self-calming.”
“No problems observed.”
“Prompted for cursing and disrespectful peer interaction.”
“Did use self-calming during altercation with peer.”
“Observed without incident.”
“Some demanding behavior but basically did very well.”
“Watched movie with peers. Prompted about talking very loud but lowered voice.”
Then, on the day before a scheduled conference call with Valerie, he tried to go
ad a boy into helping him attack the staff. He told a woman on duty that he would smash her head. He elbowed another worker. Between periods of isolation, he stormed through the unit: “I want fucking popcorn! Bitch, I want some popcorn!”
He grew furious with his mother on the phone the next afternoon and, with a staff member on the line, restated that she had abused him. Not for the first time, he made it clear that he did not want to be sent home. On the unit, he spiraled. There was more seclusion. When he emerged, he was, in the words of the log entries, “hyper…unfocused at times…arguing…loud…very demanding.” He seemed, meanwhile, to be skidding backward through years, playing with a remote control car someone had donated to the institution, playing with Legos.
The facility, for reasons unclear in the record, chose to persuade Ryan to agree to live at home again. The state social worker assigned to Valerie had failed to convince her to accept any kind of counseling or guidance within her home if Ryan returned. For Valerie, a few hours of home visits per week was a few hours too many. It was too much intrusion. But she had begun to see a therapist, and perhaps the facility judged that this was enough. The center was under budgetary pressure to move kids through, to avoid the expense of keeping kids for long stretches. The facility might have placed Ryan in foster care, but, by whatever logic, unnoted in the record, the administration decided against this, though Priscilla Jenkins recalled thinking that a foster family would have been the better choice.
Ryan eventually relented, giving his agreement. In the week leading up to his discharge date, after about two months at the facility, he degenerated yet further; he would not brush his teeth, shower, or comb his hair without the staff prodding him through these steps. One afternoon, at a table in the communal area, he sat with a group making bracelets. They slid colored beads onto string. But he couldn’t keep his body still. He was so jittery he couldn’t get the beads onto the string. He mocked the others at the table, scorned their jewelry, meddled and taunted to keep them from finishing. He went into isolation; he contracted; he railed that he would kick a boy in the head until his skull caved in. Staff members wrestled him into a seclusion cell.
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