Then he extricated himself from the employees and, with a staff psychologist for an escort, walked hurriedly down a hall and entered one of the units.
* * *
A girl, sixteen or seventeen, sat alone in front of a small TV in a room off the communal area, a cloth tied over her head, her dark face obscured by a horde of darker blemishes and scars. For a reason the psychologist didn’t specify, she hadn’t been able to, or hadn’t been allowed to, attend Ryan’s event. She turned only partway from the screen when Ryan introduced himself and summarized his story. “I just want to ask if you have any questions about my time in this place or my time after, to see if there’s anything I can say to, you know, inspire you or help you. Do you have any questions for me, any questions at all?”
“How did you feel?”
“How did I feel? You mean here?” He spoke to her impassive profile about his solitude and fear. The psychologist switched off the TV. “Was that the History Channel?” Ryan asked the girl. “Do you like history?”
“I like TV.”
“You like TV?” He was straining to engage her. “What do you like to watch? Do you like reality shows?”
“Yeah, reality shows.”
“Like what?”
She named a program, and he answered with his thoughts about the show. “Anyway, if you like reality TV, there’s so much involved in that. There’s so much you could do. You should look into production. Whenever you get back to school, you could start by volunteering—lots of schools have a newscast team. When I was here, I listened to the radio, the same songs over and over, memorizing. I had no idea at the time, but music was my passion. Your interest in TV might be the same, or it might lead to other interests.”
She listened stoically. A cacophony rose from close by within the pod, a thudding on one of the doors, a howl that hit an excruciating note, while Ryan kept on. “Do you have any other questions for me?”
“No.”
“Okay. It is such an honor to meet you.”
Another teenage girl came in, hair black and skin pale, a bandage on one arm from her elbow to her wrist, and she mentioned, in a slight accent, the Middle Eastern country she was from and that she had trouble with her family. She remained standing, her body petite, her voice tiny yet animated, her eyes downcast but eager. She said that she liked to sing.
“Do you know any Arabic songs?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you teach me one?”
She hesitated, shifting uneasily, but fleetingly her dark eyes met his. “This song, it’s about the end of sadness. It’s about we all make mistakes in our lives, like you were saying in the gym.” She prepared herself to sing, stilled her fragile body and seemed to wait for her mouth to move and for sound to emerge, but nothing happened. She laughed—the laughter no louder than a whisper. “Oh,” she said, lowering her head.
“That’s okay. When I first got onstage in high school, I froze and forgot my line. I just stood there. You can imagine what a blow that was to my ego. But you have to think about performing like this: when you go to sing, the people who are there, they want to hear you—it doesn’t matter how good you are or bad you are, they want to take in what you have. They want to absorb it. It’s okay to be scared. Can you teach me how to say ‘hello’ in Arabic?”
“‘Marhaba.’”
“‘Madahabah.’”
She giggled and slowed her pronunciation: “‘Mar-haba.’”
“‘Marahabah.’”
She slowed some more. “‘Maar-haba.’”
“‘Marhaba.’”
“Yeah.” Her voice frayed with sentiment.
“What are the first words of the song you were going to sing for me?”
She recited them.
“Wow, that sounds so cool. Sing the first line for me.”
She ventured a line, then three more, progressing from the flatness of shy speech to the rhythms of a chant to—with the last phrases—an ascent of notes followed by an artful bend and a simple, unself-conscious fade.
“That is so beautiful! Brava! Brava!” He was beaming, clapping. “I’ve heard singing in Russian and Spanish, English and Italian and German—you’re the first person I’ve ever heard sing in Arabic. I will never forget that, never. Brava!” He became both solemn and light-headed: “You know, I might not be able to be wherever you are to talk to you and encourage you and sing for you, but you can always put my name in on YouTube, Ryan Speedo Green, and hear my voice and remember how happy you made me today—you have no idea how happy you made me by singing for me.”
She held out a small notebook. “Can you sign for me somewhere?”
“Of course.” He asked how to spell her name. “Can you sing me more of the song while I write?”
Confidence crept into her answer. “Yeah, sure.”
She sang the ascent, the bend, an ascent yet higher, a plaintive syllable that she maintained and maintained until her voice skipped nimbly downward before rising again to the plaintive cry. She sang for a full two minutes. “That’s the whole song,” she said.
“Brava! Brava! And in case you can’t read my handwriting, this says, ‘You are an amazing talent. You are my hero. Thank you with all my heart.’”
* * *
The psychologist took Ryan toward another pod. A shout of rage penetrated walls and filled the corridor, the words unintelligible. The psychologist apologized to Ryan for his having to hear this. Quickly, tightly, Ryan said, “No problem.” He stared through a long window into an empty high-walled pen, one of the areas where uncontrollable kids went outside, alone, for exercise. He let out a groan.
In the pod, he sat in a side room with soft chairs and a beanbag cushion on the floor. The rapper walked in, the red leather high-tops impeccably clean, his blue-and-white plaid boxer shorts on display above the studded jeans he wore more than halfway down his hips. “Y’all want to talk to me?”
“Hey, what’s up, man? How you doing, man?” After the presentation, Ryan had said to Aaron that he’d like to speak with the kid. Now something close to a stammer invaded his effort to make conversation.
“Shiiit.”
“You can grab a seat.”
“I’m about to race.”
“You’re about to race? You can chill, man. Just grab a seat. Red your favorite color?”
“Yeah.”
“Why is it your favorite color?”
“Huh?”
“Why is it your favorite color?”
“Ever since I was a kid, it was. The Game was my best rapper.”
“The Game. I remember when I first heard The Game.” The Game was an L.A. rapper known for his crew’s gun battles, for getting shot, for his ties to the Bloods, who advertised their gang with red accessories. “You ever heard of Q-Tip?”
“He’s old-school.”
The talk sputtered. The rapper leaned far back in his chair.
“You weren’t there this morning in the gym.”
“I think I was ’sleep.”
“Hey, man,” Ryan said, sympathizing, “I should have told them. Singers, we don’t get up that early. I don’t usually get up till eleven thirty.”
“Yeah.”
“You know, a while back, I was a resident in here.”
“Whoa. Shit.”
Ryan gave some details. The rapper didn’t respond directly, but he shared some of his future plans. These involved his cousins, who were “in and out,” he said. “I used to be on the path they is. But they say they just going to help me get back on my feet. Take me to their clubs.”
“Did you know that rap is a form of poetry?”
“Yeah.”
Ryan talked about Langston Hughes. “He put his life on paper, he put his empowerment on paper.” Then he redirected the conversation. “We think we know hard times, growing up in the neighborhoods we grew up in. But fifty, sixty years ago, our people couldn’t drink at the same water fountain as white people. Couldn’t eat at the same restaurant.”
�
��Oh yeah,” the rapper slurred, slouching lower. “Like Martin Luther King.”
“Right. Like Martin Luther King. People then, they put their anger and their sadness to use for good. You don’t want to be around people who are going to pull you back. I know you think, I’m the only person who understands me, I’m the only person who cares about me. Those are exactly the thoughts that I had. You know Arnold Schwarzenegger? He was my hero. He could lift cars, he could rescue kids—he was like God. All I wanted was for my father to be like Arnold. I thought if my father cared like Arnold, I wouldn’t be here.”
“I know what you mean.”
“You should read poetry. Imagine if you could really learn how to put your emotions on paper.”
“How long is this meeting going to last?”
“It’s not a meeting.” Ryan hurried: “Things do get better, man. If you could have seen me. But you should never expect things to change overnight. It takes your will. Every day can be progress. Jay Z didn’t do it overnight.”
The mention of Jay Z didn’t regain the rapper’s interest, not in the way Ryan intended. The kid remarked that he needed some sex.
“Chill, man. Worry about what’s important. Just chill. Work on this and this.” Ryan touched his head, his chest. “You got to get those straight.”
“‘Chill,’” the rapper said. His voice had a quiet spite. “That’s what I am doing.” He’d had enough; he stood and sauntered to the door. “I’ll holler at you.”
* * *
“I’ve read a little bit of my files, but I couldn’t read any more,” Ryan said to the staff later that afternoon. “I thought, This is awful, this is awful. The things I did, the things I said. My right-wrong meter was very skewed.” In the meeting room, he sat at a beige table with Aaron to one side and the staff like a class in front of him.
“Yesterday,” the director said, “when you stood in the seclusion room, you used the word ‘torture.’” Aaron had a mission: to move the staff incrementally away from methods that relied too heavily, he thought, on rewards and punishments.
“Every time I got put back in there, I got crazier and crazier. Because it was this cell at the bottom of my existence—the bottom in this place where I thought I was being put for life. I’ve spent my whole life since then trying to forget it. It’s true, the staff, in my mind, they tortured me. They had a system, and if you screwed up, all your points got erased. And I would screw up—I made people fear me. That’s what I did, being physical when I was upset, that’s the way I was raised. And I would get erased, and I would get pissed, excuse my French—”
“We do hear worse,” Aaron said.
“And I would think, I’m not good enough, but also, It’s your fault, you don’t care about me. And my mother didn’t want me. And pock pock pock.” He devolved, losing language; he had only the sound and insistent rhythm of torment.
“But there was one lady, she would talk with me. I’ve spent so much energy trying to forget, I can’t remember what we talked about, but I believed she liked me. And she would give me a point when maybe no one else would have, and she wouldn’t erase everything when I probably deserved to get erased. And when I got put in seclusion, I thought she would quit liking me for getting put there. I thought she would stop, because I was so awful. I revved right back up again, but I felt—I can’t express it—because I worried she wasn’t going to like me anymore. I felt a lot of emotions for her. I remember thinking about her when I left here. She wasn’t afraid of me. That was one thing. I got here because I threatened my mother, and the law thought I was capable of doing what I said, but I remember feeling like this lady wasn’t always waiting for me to snap, like even when I had to be restrained, she wasn’t scared of me, because she thought I was a kid.”
Ryan had spoken briefly about her to Aaron and a few employees since the day before; no one seemed sure who she was. Now, as he answered staff questions, a woman in black slacks and a white blouse, with light brown skin and her dark hair clipped back, walked into the meeting room, paused along the side, exclaimed something in Spanish, and said, “You’re a little taller than I remember.”
He recognized her right away. “How did they get you here?”
“I got a little call today.”
An employee had solved the puzzle of her identity.
Ryan felt obliged to finish up with the staff, and returned to the answer he’d been giving, but soon the two of them sat in a conference room adjacent to Aaron’s office. This was Priscilla Jenkins, the Cuban staffer.
“Holy moly,” he said. “I couldn’t remember your name. I can’t believe—”
“I’m so proud of you.”
“It’s—it’s very nice to see you. I’ve wanted to—I’m living in New York City. I have my own apartment. I have a steady girlfriend. I’m an opera singer. I was just talking about you in there, how you helped me.”
“Children create stories to make themselves feel better.”
“No.” He stopped her. “Thank you. Whatever relationship you created with me, it helped me.”
“Oh, you were so angry. To see where you are today, it’s only what one can dream of.”
“Being here, meeting you, meeting the kids, it inspires me to do awesome things so I can come back and tell them nothing is impossible.”
She recounted that she’d retired from the facility after being injured by one of the residents, that she’d become a Spanish interpreter, that she had a teenage daughter.
“I know you’re a great mother,” he said. “Oh my gosh, I didn’t think I would meet you, but when I get home I’m going to put my words together. I was the worst of the worst on that unit. You’re one of the reasons why I’m—why my life isn’t ruined.”
“You had to do it.”
“I know. Believe me, I am one prideful person. But I am blessed, because there were people who put themselves in my life even if I acted like I didn’t want anyone in it.”
SEVENTEEN
I DON’T HAVE anything to sing,” he said at the party. He stood beside the piano. He’d already performed one song. The hostess and her husband lived a few blocks from the Met in a grand apartment building with a facade of ornate stonework. Their living room ceiling rose two stories, and the double-height walls were covered with European tapestries from centuries ago and a huge painting of a parlor scene and miniature portraits of Napoleon and his family. The hostess was a great fan of opera; she loved to fill her home with opera singers; and now, toward the end of his time in the program, a roomful of her guests stared expectantly at Ryan.
“Oh, you should do ‘Ol’ Man River,’” the pianist, an elderly African American, suggested.
* * *
There were moments when Ryan seemed utterly alone. It didn’t matter that he was cheerful and charismatic, that he drew people toward him, that he had a steady supply of people to socialize with, that he’d sought out an approximation of family within the Met and found it in the protectiveness of coaches like Noda and in Nichols when she had chased him through the garage and onto the street and held him after he got the call about his father. None of this altered his underlying solitude. His father was gone, glorified but infinitely beyond reach; his mother was near enough but unbearable for him to be next to; and he’d talked with Adrian only twice since their father’s death. It had been over a year now since the funeral. The first of the two talks had been a call from Ryan, the second a call from Adrian on his younger brother’s birthday. Afterward, Ryan described how that second call had felt: “The person in me who is pursuing achievement, trying to be a success, to that person maybe it’s not so important to have him remember my birthday. But to the little brother in me, the little kid in me, the human being in me…”
Once, Valerie had shown me a photograph of her two sons from around the time of her split from Cecil. Ryan, about four years old, wore snug gray gym shorts and a tight orange T-shirt that had been scissored off above his belly, a style that his father favored to show off his abs. The
positions of Ryan’s and Adrian’s bodies were telling. It seemed that whoever snapped the picture had said, “Turn this way.” Adrian’s entire body faced the photographer. Ryan had tried. His lower body was almost turned in that direction. But immediately he had been distracted by his interest in his big brother; his hips and shoulders angled toward him. Ryan’s head was in profile. The snapshot captured the glow of one plump cheek as all his attention fixed on Adrian’s wide smile. Ryan’s mouth was open; he was not smiling. He was doing something more than smiling. His mouth and gaze were full of attachment and wonder.
Neither of the two calls since the funeral had lasted long. “We don’t know how to talk to each other. It takes time, I guess. I was trying to figure out what to say, how to extend the conversation.” The intimacy of the late night at the diner, when Ryan had implored, “We’re made of the same genetic material,” was gone. Following the birthday call, he checked his phone log and saw that the conversation had lasted two minutes and thirty-four seconds. They hadn’t spoken in the many months since.
* * *
The girlfriend he’d mentioned to Priscilla Jenkins was the exception to the profound isolation I sometimes sensed. Irene Fast hadn’t known anything about opera when she and Ryan met online half a year after Cecil’s death, but they had something in common. It kept them talking by phone and texting and emailing for two weeks before they met in person.
Irene and her older sister had spent their early years in Kazakhstan, under Soviet rule, in the nineteen eighties. They had lived in poverty in a country that could be cruel to girls and crushing to women, and their mother was determined to rescue her daughters from the lives that awaited them. At last she managed to get them into West Germany. But the price was that she stayed with her husband, who was Irene’s sister’s father but not Irene’s own. He had relatives in West Germany and helped them all to immigrate. The price was that she and the girls continued to live with him. The man was a drug addict. He screamed and splintered furniture as he scoured their apartment for the money she tried to hide from him, cash he took for his drugs. She ordered the girls outside whenever he began to explode, so they wouldn’t have to hear and see.
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