Riot Baby

IV WATTS

WATTS is a Sponsored spot.

I didn’t really know what that meant until I got out here. The parole board picked it when they put all my shit through the algorithm. My records, my time in Rikers, the stint upstate, my mental health assessment, the Urban Wounded program Ella set me up with out here, job prospects, all of that. I told them I wanted to be out west, away from people, places, and things that’d bring me back to jail, and Watts was the best option that came up. There are Sponsored communities all over the country, and you can tell them where you’d prefer to be and why, like maybe somewhere closer to family or somewhere away from where you have an outstanding beef, and the humans on the parole board will pretend to have the final say, but they pretty much rubberstamp whatever the algo spits out.

I’d worried about pushback. The logistics of having the System follow me all the way out there, but apparently it wasn’t a problem. They got it all figured out. They even contacted a mechanic that’ll put me to work right away. No more job applications with the Box on it.

Ella never asks me why I wanted to go out west of all places, and I never ask her why it bothers her so much. I know she and Mama lived out in Florence, in South Central, for a bit before I was born. But I remember I was born there, and it’s the only time I can remember both Mama and Ella smiling at me.

Either way, when I get there, I see sprawl. Newly painted stucco houses. Everything’s one or two stories. And there’s a daytime brilliance to everything, gives it a shine I never got from the crowded, leaning tenements in Harlem. But there are logos everywhere. A large billboard over the Pacific Electric tracks with the same three-bar logo as what was on the machine that told me to come out here. No ankle monitor for me. Instead, after the hearing, they cut my thumb open and put a chip in, which I heard they’d started doing a few years back. No chance of snipping your monitor off or having it malfunction when you go for a swim. While there’s now no way to get away with a drink or a hit or a Xanax bar, I don’t have to pee in front of a guy I don’t know who could send me back to jail if he had a fight with his girl the night before. The chip had the three-bar logo on it before they put it in me.

I walk by the abandoned train tracks and half expect to see bottle shards from when kids come by here, bored, to break something. But there’s nothing. No needles, no broken bottles, no empty dime bags. Tin cans, nails, nothing. A couple blocks away, kids play on a jungle gym.

A part of me expected post-apocalypse when I got here. On the inside, you hear about what’s going on outside, new presidents elected, rise in hate crimes. Nazis in the streets killing black folk. Folks getting locked up for whatever again. Important shit getting lit on fire. You remember the old heads in jail telling you about riots in the ’60s, riots in the ’90s. Younger cats my age telling me about the riots in the 2010s. What’s left after all of that? Pigeons congregating on the red-tiled roof of a police substation, vacant lots still charred around the edges, shards of broken port bottles winking at you in the sun. All types of refugee-type kids walking barefoot with pieces of glass in the bottoms of their feet, not even flinching because living through the End of the World enough times does that to you.

But, no. They got pool halls here and churches. Mosques, even. It’s like one of those Rockwell paintings but if a hood nigga stood over his shoulder whispering in his ear about home.

But this ain’t home; at least, no home I’m trying to get back to. It looks new. All of it. Which suits me just fine.

My place is one of those one-stories on a block of identical houses. There’s a yard and a chain-link fence. Even space for a garden, but I guess they’re leaving it up to me to see if I want to plant something. I half expect to see niggas out on their front lawns riding those big-ass lawnmowers you see white dudes riding in the movies, all moving in unison on some Stepford Wives–type shit. But it’s all quiet. A few folks hang out on their front porches. One or two nurse a cold beer. And the sun sits on the horizon so that the whole sky is cut with knife scars of purple and pink and white and blue.

I go to the knob, but when I try to turn it, it doesn’t budge. There’s no keyhole. Curtains cover the windows so I can’t see inside, and I call up the info on my Palm, and it says I’m at the right spot. I’m geotagged where I’m supposed to be. This is the address.

They said stuff like this was supposed to be over now that we didn’t have to deal with real actual human beings anymore, just algorithms and machines, and I figured the parole board was the last set of ugly-ass white faces I’d have to see for the rest of my life, but if I have to call in tech support for this bullshit in my first week?

I can feel it building. Even as I know it’s coming and I know what it’ll mean, the world begins to take on a shade of red, and I’m two steps away from breaking my fists against these Plexiglas windows when I hear “Youngblood!” from behind me.

He’s got one of those older-man short-sleeve button-downs, the type that come cut specifically to accommodate the basketball-belly you get once you hit forty. He’s got a beer in his hand, fingers only half covering the O’Douls label.

He’s chuckling. That kind of chuckle that old heads let out when they see something they think reminds them of themselves. If it ain’t the most irritating sound in the world, it’s close. “You gotta use the touchpad.”

“Touchpad?”

With his beer, he points to a small black square right by where a doorbell would usually go.

“They gave you a keycard, right?”

“You on parole too?” I realize he’s the first dude I’ve talked to since I got here. Maybe this place looks so new because it’s a ghost town. Ain’t nobody get here yet.

“Yeah, three years now.”

“Where you from?”

“Florissant.” Meaning St. Louis. Meaning the South. The way he says it, he knows I’m supposed to give him respect now. It ain’t enough to be an old head anymore or to have the tattooed proof that you were out once, banging, or that you were doing any number of other foolish things. Bringing the Fury or the Force or whatever it’s called where you come from down on your head out of your own stupidity. But some places, you got to deal with the worst of white folk, the terrorists. The places that made money off you by charging you for tickets and scheduling court dates when they knew you couldn’t make it, then fining you for those missed dates if they don’t jail you first, then they say they’ll graciously set you up with a payment plan, then you get a day or two late one month and they put out a warrant, then when they do get you in jail, you gotta post $2,000 bond or some shit like that that they know you can’t pay, and that’s how it starts. While in jail, you miss your job interview, and when you finally get your day in court, they say you gotta change out of your jumpsuit, but you gotta put on the same funky clothes you spent however long getting arrested in and you gotta stand in that courtroom smelling like rotten poom-poom, handcuffed, and you gotta do all you can to even feel like a person still. If you got family, maybe your mama can borrow against her life insurance policy to post your bond.

I know better than to ask him about kids.

He’s at my side now, and out of his back pocket, he pulls a thin white card. Whatever writing used to be imprinted on it is pretty faded. Looks like Braille more than anything else, but it’s got the three-bar logo on it.

“Each house here got one of those touchpads. Put this to it, and you’re golden.”

I pat my pockets. I don’t remember getting anything that looked like that, not at Rikers and not here, and now I’m back to getting ready to cuss out the System that can’t even get rid of me properly. “I ain’t get that,” I tell him. Then I remember something. “They put a chip in my thumb, though.”

The dude’s eyebrows rise in slight surprise. “Ain’t that some shit.” After a beat, “Well, go on. Try it!”

I put my thumb to the touchpad, and the screen door slowly opens toward us. Then the main door slides into the wall, revealing a room dressed in darkness. But already, I can make out a couch, a dining room table with chairs around it, and a hallway, which must probably lead to a bedroom and a bathroom. It’s strange to think of those two things as being separate. Feels, more than any of this other stuff, like the greatest luxury in the world. I ain’t gotta shit where I sleep.

“Who’s paying for this?” I ask, without turning back to face him.

“You are, Youngblood,” the dude says, laughing outright. “Nigga, who you think?”

“How, though?”

“Same way everybody else does. They take it out your paycheck.” He’s shaking his head at me while I take the whole thing in. It hadn’t really hit me till then. Barely do I get to process my freedom before I already got another set of obligations sitting on my shoulders. But this is good. In prison, in jail, routine was good. Had three square meals a day, though most days you couldn’t call ’em that. Had work. Also had to remember that you never knew when or where the harm would come from.

But I look around, and I only see the two of us on this street. And it doesn’t sound like anybody’s waiting for me in there.

“It’s all right,” he tells me. “You ain’t incarcerated no more.”

I wanna tell him I know, but it’d be a lie.

He starts to walk away. “Next time you in trouble, need some help, call on Calvin.”

There’s more room in the shop than I think Miguel needs. It’s supposed to be a barbershop-type setup, but we’re in an open hangar, a bunch of us with varying degrees of time on the outside. Royce came up in Detroit and was in Dearborn for a while before getting transferred here. Romero was the Dominican from the Bronx, Marlon the Jamaican from the same neighborhood. They hadn’t known each other growing up, had gone to the same high school and mixed it up with the same gangs but never really banged with each other until after they got out and had that whole “Hey, ain’t you the cat from—” exchange.

There’s metal all around us. It’s gotten hot enough outside that you can’t let your skin touch the hoods of the rusted-out car-husks scattered out around the hangar. A couple other parolees lie on them anyway, knees up, newspapers covering their faces as they try to sleep. We’re supposed to be working, but a bunch of us don’t have our mechanic’s license yet, so we have to apprentice. And Miguel’s only got one customer right now.

A light-skinned man sits quietly in his chair, chest up against a cushion, his stub of a right arm out on another cushion in front of him. Miguel has his tools on a piece of metal at the man’s arm, and sparks spray in arcs that sizzle when they hit the floor. Miguel used to be a barber and a tattooist, and now he does this.

“There’s no union or anything like that yet,” the light-skinned dude in the chair is saying, “but a bunch of us at the factory are trying to get something together.”

“You think they’ll allow it?” asks Miguel almost absentmindedly in that way barbers have of maintaining conversation while engaging in the geometric precision required for a fly high-top fade.

Marlon leans forward on his milk crate. “You just can’t call it a union in English. You gotta say it in Spanish. Or patois. Had a PO one time who thought bumbaclots were an after-school snack for the kids. Like fuckin’ Tostinos pizza rolls or some shit.”

Mero lets out his belly laugh and nearly falls off his own crate. “Make their software in their fuckin’ algorithm auto-translate from Spanish to English and the shit still doesn’t make sense.”

“Right! Dominican Spanish ain’t Spanish, my nigga. It’s Dominican-ese. It’s like in the Pen when you gotta speak that code while your shorty visiting.”

Mero pointed his O’Douls at Marlon. “But she gotta sag her pants when she first come in because the CO’s like ‘No, ma, you can’t come in here, you look too sexy right now’ or she gets turned away ’cause she got the underwire in her bra.”

Marlon chuckles. “Right before she pulls the heroin out her poom-poom.”

Even that gets me laughing.

Mero lets out a sigh and says, “Shoutout to jail.”

“No!” Marlon shouts back. “Shoutout to getting out!”

Royce, on the car hood, removes the paper from his face, then slides so his legs dangle over the side. He doesn’t even flinch when the hot, rotted metal touches his skin, makes me think he’s got augments, or prosthetics at least. “Niggas really think when you get out, you just gonna start over. Niggas never stopped. You ever play Monopoly, my nigga? You know how you go to jail, then you just wait two turns or whatever? Wait till I get out, I’ma buy Baltic Ave., nigga. Niggas couldn’t walk down Boardwalk without paying respect.”

He says it all straight-faced, but we know he’s clowning.

“Everything green was me, nigga.”

Mero says, “You know all the avenues in Monopoly are mad fucked up in real life. You know that, right?”

Marlon: “You can actually buy those avenues with Monopoly money.” Through his laughter, “Bronx Monopoly.”

Meanwhile, I’m staring at the guy in the chair. He’s chuckling while Miguel’s saying something to him, but I can’t hear any of it. “Ayo!” I call out. “What’s that factory job like? Is it government?”

Marlon giggles. “You see how he asked that question? Like it was pino or something. Oooh, look at that nigga workin’ weekends getting that double-overtime. Weekend rates, hunh, my dick is hard, yo.”

Mero: “Damn, you know how much vacation time that nigga probably accruing?”

“You don’t even look at girls and shit, you like, ‘You know that nigga got benefits, right? Oooh, I wonder what that nigga paystub look like.’ Wake up in the morning with your robe open, watching the sanitation workers.”

I have to wait for the Bronx niggas to calm down before I can nod at the dude in the barber’s chair. “So?”

The dude in the chair shrugs. “I’m here getting a new arm.”

“You lose the old one workin’?”

“Yeah, but the Sponsors got me covered. Paid for my hospital time and everything.”

Mero leans forward on his crate. “They ain’t dock your pay?”

The dude winks as Miguel fuses the metal to the man’s nerves. “Government job, yo.”

“Issa Babylon ting,” Marlon murmurs in an exaggerated Rasta accent, smirking.

I squint. “That don’t hurt?”

The dude lets loose another shrug. Not sure if he’s trying hard to advertise for these factory jobs. Maybe he’s getting paid to seem as excited for this gig as he reasonably can. “Nah, the Company turns off the pain receptors for my appointment. My chip, yo.”

I look at my thumb, where my own chip was put in after the parole board back in New York approved my release. Can’t tell if it’s the way the sun’s shining and casting shadows, but I think I see it glowing blue under my skin. Blue bars like the Company logo I seen on the billboards.

There’s a bunch of us in a circle.

Dr. Bissell’s the one with his back to the door, and the rest of us sit around him. About eight of us or so. Almost all black and brown. Nobody’s got gang tats, so it’s like we were all singles passing through the system, spat out to land here in this little oasis where we have a job and a pretty big place to sleep. Dr. Bissell doesn’t say much. Looks like he’s been doing these sessions for a while, and he’s seen enough of us come through that he knows it’s impossible to “earn” our respect, like a points system or something, but that sometimes you just gotta let the one guy talk and the others’ll maybe slide through that open door. I remember the prison counselors and all those mental health workers Rikers used to churn through. Just couldn’t shut the fuck up and stick around to wait and see that these closed-down, shut-down niggas just lookin’ for a reason, any reason, to talk.

Calvin’s here too. Tan-color button-down over his Jupiter-sized belly.

“Violence causes trauma,” Calvin had told me just before I slid through the open door to this room. “And trauma causes violence, Youngblood. Hurt people hurt people.” He’d said it in a low, counseling voice. I wanted to tell him to stop calling me Youngblood. Twenty-eight ain’t that young.

A kid named Davis is talking. Philly kid. Probably the kind of shooter Philly rappers rapped about knowing personally. The ones they were whipping work in the kitchen with, maybe the type to appear in their music videos. If I pulled up a Meek or Beanie or Cassidy music video on someone’s tablet, I’d maybe see him neon-lit in the background.

“It’s like, we don’t get shot or stabbed, we get ourselves shot or stabbed, you know?” He talks with his hands in front of him, constantly putting his fist in his palm for emphasis. That’s the whole ambit of his reach. He doesn’t wave, doesn’t point, just claps with his knuckles and palms. “Like, my boy—I ain’t gonna say his name—but after he got shot and got out the ER, he used to jump out in front of buses and, at the last minute, hold his hands out.” Soft clap. “I ain’t wanna end up like that. So soon as I could, I got the transfer to Watts. I heard you was here.” He shakes his head. “And all over some stupid shit.”

An Atlanta cat named Hendrix, with dreads down past his shoulders, leans back in his chair. Type of nigga to wear sunglasses indoors. “You ever think about revenge?”

Davis bristles. “All the time, nigga. What you think?”

Their voices have started to rise, and I eye Dr. Bissell, who remains unmoved.

“That’s why I come here. So I can talk about it, ’stead of do it. What I look like, huntin’ the nigga who stabbed me over weed.”

I feel Ella in the room. Standing somewhere between me and Davis. Haunting me. And her Thing, her ability to get into other people’s heads, it’s starting to get to me, so that when Davis talks about the nigga who stabbed him over weed, I can see the abandoned church on the corner of 18th and Ridge in North Central Philly, and I can see Davis taking too long to mull over a purchase and the other dude, bulky Sixers jacket on to protect against the Philly winter, sucking his teeth, getting impatient, then telling Davis to go buy his weed elsewhere in a few more words than that and Davis saying, “I go wherever the fuck I wanna go,” and the dude saying some things back, then Davis swinging and catching the dude on the side of his head, and the dude swinging and Davis not caring if the dude was strapped, just knowing that if he got the drop fast enough, he could smack the dogshit outta dude, but then metal glints—a knife—and the other dude slashes then stabs, and then Davis watching the knife going in and out in and out in and out, still swinging, feeling no pain, even though there’s blood everywhere, then the dude running out of Davis’s grip and Davis writhing on the ground, then Davis thinking of calling an ambulance, thankful the weedman ain’t take his phone, but then realizing he’d have to pay, like, $2,000 so, gritting his teeth, Davis picks himself up and walks a little over a mile to Hahnemann University’s emergency department. During the whole walk, Davis is holding his stomach together. Blood drips on the sidewalk. Strangers see him, offer to help. But his Francisville folk, the people he’s known all his life, know better than that. They know what kind of person he is. So he shrugs off the strangers and walks and walks and walks.

And I wake up, still in the circle with the other Watts guys. Everybody’s quiet, and Davis is looking at me with this pained look in his eyes. I got no idea how long I was out. But I must’ve been staring the whole time.

I put my hand to my eyes, shake Ella out of my head.

“I’m good,” I say quietly. It looks like they’re waiting for me to say more, but I’ve already lied once to these guys. When Hendrix starts talking about his prison bid and the first time he got thrown in AdSeg, I have to leave. I can’t live through that guy’s memories too.

Dr. Bissell’s door is open, but I knock anyway.

He has a tablet on his desk and a few pictures of what I guess are his family. The frames’ backs are turned to me, so it’s just a guess. He sees me and smiles, then gets up to shake my hand. “Kevin, right?”

“Yeah. Kev. Kevin Jackson.”

He goes to close the door, then I sit down in one of the chairs and he takes his seat behind his desk.

“Trouble sleeping,” I tell him, before he can keep going with any small talk. “You the type of doctor that can write a prescription or something?”

“We don’t do prescriptions here.” He folds his hands and leans forward on his desk. His shirtsleeves are rolled up. No tattoos that I can see. Doesn’t mean he isn’t his own kind of hard. “But if residual anxiety from your time inside is getting to be too much, I can write to the Company and have them up your dosage.”

“Dosage? Of what?”

“They gave you an implant, correct?”

I look at my thumb. “You mean this? Yeah, but it’s only for access. You know, to my home and stuff. And when they need to check on me.”

“Well, the chips are also equipped to monitor your biorhythms, and when the chemicals in your brain begin to show signs of rising anxiety levels or if your symptoms of PTSD begin to recur, it can release chemicals to counteract them. Are your episodes recent?”

I shrug. I’d dreamt of the night I borrowed Freddie’s ski mask. “I mean, I had one last night, but it’s never really been that bad.”

He doesn’t say anything for a while. “Do you remember how many times you were in solitary confinement? It’s all right if you don’t.”

I chuckle nervously, because I don’t know how else to react. “I mean, the days kind of blend together in AdSeg. Look, there anything you can do to, like, up the dosage or something? I’m not trying to remember all of that.” My heart rate’s rising even while I sit here. “I got a burst of something last night that helped me sleep, but I need more.”

“The session was triggering, wasn’t it.”

“Yeah, but—”

“The chemicals are supposed to be a supplement, not the entire treatment.” He pauses to consider me. “Here is all about making you a productive member of society. Giving you a chance to contribute.” It sounds like a speech he’s done many times, but he also sounds like the type of nigga to make it seem like every time is the first time he’s done it. “Getting you back on your feet. Now, I’m sure there’s a lot that happened to you inside that’s never going to go away. We can’t reverse time. We can’t make those things un-happen. We can, however, move forward. And we can teach you to avoid triggers. And for those triggers you can’t avoid, we can teach you to deal with them.”

It’s not what I’m here to hear, and he sees it. “I… I have a sister. Ella.” Even as I talk, as I sound out the idea, it sounds strange to mention her to someone else. I don’t think I’d said her name to anyone that wasn’t family in nearly a decade. “Having a supportive family helps people not go back in, you know. And I was wondering, if I can reach her, can she visit? Like we used to do in jail?”

Dr. Bissell’s face drops. Like I punched him in the chest. “She can’t.”

Before I know it, the anger’s got ahold of me, but I grip the armrests and keep the rage right there in my fingers.

“This is a Sponsored community. Outsiders not a part of the program are not permitted.” He looks off into the middle distance. “There’s been trouble in the past. Some folks haven’t been able to deal with parts of their past that come here to see them. This is about a new start. Completely blank slate.”

“Till my parole’s over. In three years.”

Dr. Bissell cracks his knuckles. His nervous tic. “I’ll write to the Company about upping your dosage.”

I know this man’s here to help me. And I know he’s doing the best he can. He has a job, and it comes with constraints, and he’s trying to help me the only way he knows how, but that doesn’t stop my bloody thoughts.

It hits with the same suddenness as last night. That wave of peace. I ain’t have to look at my thumb to know it’s glowing. But I exhale and tap the armrests. “It’s all right. I’m good,” I tell him. This time, it’s only half a lie.

The stars are out by the time I get home. So’s Calvin.

He has a rocking chair out front. “You got time to rap for a minute, Youngblood?”

I don’t want to try sleeping just yet, so I walk over to him, post up on his porch. He’s got a six-pack of O’Douls Cherry, fishes one out and hands it to me, but I wave it away. “I don’t drink.” No more. And for a while, we sit there in silence. The only sound is his chair squeaking underneath him while he rocks. No one’s shouting from their cells. No COs are barking orders. There’s no mysterious banging from everywhere and nowhere at once. No sirens. No stampede of bootsteps as the Riot Squad clears the wing. Nobody’s blasting reggaeton from their windows. Niggas always talked about how the quiet was the thing that eventually got to them, how that was the most difficult thing to cope with, but only now do I know what they mean. There are maybe a few other ex-cons on the block now, some of them moved in about a week ago, but I can’t even hear cicadas anymore.

“This don’t feel like prison to you?” I ask Calvin. Shit comes out of my mouth without my knowing more and more these days. I hate it.

“Whatchu mean?”

I wave at the houses lining the street. “We completely shut off. No family comes to see us. I can’t use Facebook. No Twitter, no YouTube, nothing. I’m cut off. I wake up, I watch Miguel work until I get a permit to do my own welding, I go to my weekly meetings with Dr. Bissell, everything’s an appointment. And there’s no option to not do it, because there’s shit else to do.”

Calvin snorts. “You was happy a month ago.” He takes a swig. “And when you start to get upset, they pump that chemical from your chip into your brains and shit gets square again. You out, Youngblood. When you think about what you can’t do, think about what you get to do. You get to earn money.”

“I earned money inside, too. I had a job. I fixed computers. How is this any different?”

Calvin gets that look I seen older heads on the block get when they know they can’t talk sense into the youth.

I think I hate Watts.

I sometimes feel her behind my eyes, trying to bring me somewhere else when I’m working on prosthetics with Miguel or some other odd shape of metal, and I get nothing but pain from her. Any old thing makes her cry these days. And then I resent her for it. I dread every visit. The heart gets going, and heat flushes my face, and it’s like I’m getting ready to fight someone I can’t throw a punch at, so I just gotta stand there and take this new rage she’s got inside her, and that’s when I see some of where she’s been spending her time: the auditorium of Chicago’s public-safety headquarters where members of the police board sit beneath a banner that reads: “Chicago Police Generations—a Proud Family Tradition.” And the men at the front of the room are white, almost translucent. Like holograms, and the black folk in the audience are real and sweating and hurting and vivid with hypertension and the club and the church, and one woman is up on her feet shouting, “We know this board doesn’t care about black women! We know this board doesn’t care about black people!” As the police board tries in vain to explain upgrades to the algorithm that has been powering their policing, the algorithm developed in conjunction with extremely smart people in Silicon Valley, and that has helped reduce crime in the South Side by 19 percent, “But that’s raised the number of black boys you lock up without pretext by 200 percent,” another black woman shouts back.

“Listen to black women!” a young man in the audience shouts from his seat, half in jest, and everyone’s cheering and clapping, for him and for the woman still standing.

Then the police killings. The mechanized cops programmed with this supposedly race-neutral algorithm. And outside Watts, a dozen more shootings produce a dozen more weeping families that have to struggle stoically through their black grief or that can stand behind microphones and declare their black anger, and the bodies pile higher and higher and higher, and so does the frustration with the impunity “because,” says the district attorney in St. Louis in Kansas City in Staten Island in Dayton in Gary in Albuquerque in Oakland, “you can’t indict an algorithm.”

I see Ella walking through Milwaukee’s North Side, past makeshift memorials to dead black kids: teddy bears, browning flowers, ribbons tied to telephone poles waving in the breeze, and I know that she’s been touching the ground around those memorials and closing her eyes and seeing the whole of it, whether the bullet came from some other colored kid’s gun or from a cop, watching the whole story unfold before her.

She does the same with the Confederate monuments that rise from the ground in the South like weeds. Tributes to treasonous generals and soldiers serving Big Cotton. She touches their bases, feels their mass-produced faces, runs her fingers over their inscriptions. She wants to know who was hanged here. Who was beaten here. In whose name they were violated.

She’s gathering it within her. All of it.

The turret guns follow Ella as she walks up the sidewalk. Everyone who would have tended to the concrete is indoors or has fled the neighborhood for a place where Guardians don’t circle overhead, where surveillance orbs don’t scan their faces and match their features against their recorded data, where Augments don’t congregate on sidewalks, outside of shops, at subway entrances, to disappear anyone with a record. The young whites who have moved in, some of them carrying about them the faint whiff of weed in their dirty dreadlocks, turn their heads when they see her, then turn back around when she gets out of earshot. It’s a short walk, but it feels like a pilgrimage across a desert.

She gets to the church, and it stands out like a single, manicured toenail in a gangrenous foot. A single thought, and the door pushes open. The hinges have been oiled, she can tell, but the doors still make a ponderous sound when they move and when they close behind her.

A single man in rolled-up shirtsleeves slips hymnals under the pews.

For a moment, a feeling of transgression shoots through her. She feels like an interloper. Then it passes, and she’s able to step forward, loud enough to be heard.

The man raises his head, salt-and-pepper beard trimmed close to his jawline. He smiles, tired. “Bible study ain’t tonight, it’s tomorrow.”

“I know, Pastor. I just—”

Worry creases his brow, and she knows he’s thinking about the Guardians. He’s thinking of the algorithms that police the block and wondering if this break in the pattern of movement will bring them down on his head.

She doesn’t know why she’s here. Maybe if I wait long enough, this man can tell me, she tells herself. “You—my mother used to come here. Her name was Elaine.”

The worry vanishes, replaced by the joy that comes with time-traveling to an aureate memory. “Lanie,” he says, wistfully. Then sorrow darkens his features. “So sorry for your loss. Wow, you must be Ella.” He seems to forget the police forces outside. “It’s been so long. You live around here now?”

Ella shrugs.

“Here, take a seat.” He sits on the cushioned pew and pats the space next to him.

They sit in religious silence.

“Your mother was one of our most enthusiastic members. No matter how many shifts at the hospital she had to work, she came through. Some Sundays, she was even wearing her scrubs!”

Ella imagines those Sundays, Mama on the subway heading here straight from work, not even bothering to wake up her children, Kev revealing later that Mama had been texting him the whole time to keep tabs on his sister, to make sure she was getting her rest, to see if she’d broken anything, if she’d broken herself.

“She even headed her own Bible study.” He chuckles.

“You still get churchgoers?”

He rocks back and forth on the pew. “It’s not how it used to be. Everyone’s older or moved out. Some of the new residents come by, but few stay. These new kids, they don’t seem to have much need for what’s on offer here, but we keep on keepin’ on. That’s what we do, right?”

“Is it?” There’s bite in her voice. Too much bite.

He lets the moment settle. “You had a brother, right? Kevin?”

“Yeah. He’s out on parole.”

The pastor nods, putting the pieces together in his mental timeline. “Lanie used to bring him. Had him taking notes in that pew right over there. Probably to keep him awake more than anything else. But he’d walk in with that notebook and his glasses, and he’d be scribbling down all the points I was making in my sermons. Put quite a bit of pressure on me to get it right, if I’m being honest. Sometimes, after the service, I’d see his notes. He had bullet points and everything. She knew how that child worked. She was getting him to try organizing”—he waves his hand to indicate the human entirety—“all of this. How to fit grace and tribulation into the same cupboard. Probably figured that child’s strongest muscle was his brain.” He leans over to Ella and says, in a conspiratorial whisper, “But it’s the heart.”

“Do you worry, Pastor?”

“About?”

“About some kid who hates us walking into here and shooting you and your congregation dead?”

The pastor sits back in his pew seat and looks heavenward. “God’s will is God’s will. But faith is believing not just that He’s omniscient and omnipotent, but omnibenevolent as well. Faith is believing that the universe is organized out of love for us.” He looks to me. “What that white boy did? Many of us still carry it in us. And I’m not going to tell you to love and forgive it away. It’s not my place to tell you how to grieve, but—”

“Stop.”

He blinks at her.

“Why can’t it happen here?”

“I’m not sure what you—”

“Why can’t what happened in Charleston happen here?”

The pastor turns his gaze away and looks again to the altar, like he’s searching for guidance. “All we can do is the work. I recognize it’s not enough to preach free love. We have to combat free hate as well. You know the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, for a few years now, I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that there were ten righteous men, only their righteousness was not relevant. That’s been the great problem of the church. Pretending that in here is different from out there. For many people, it needs to be.”

“When you talk about righteous people, you talkin’ about white people?”

He smirks at her. “They ain’t all bad.” Then, he lets out a soft chuckle. “People need to feel safe here.”

“That mean gettin’ lied to?”

“Child, I don’t lie to my congregation.” Metal stiffens his voice, and Ella’s body sings to it. “We don’t get where we’re going by matching hate for hate.” And in his mind, she sees it. Amid the swirl of fire and screaming and riots, she sees streets packed with factories. Bursting with black life. A man dressed in the suit of an actuary coming out of his house and waving to the factory worker next door. The houses teeming with professionals and gangsters and new homeowners. The pastor, a younger man, eyeing the strip where sits a place with a sign emblazoned: THE CHIT CHAT LOUNGE. And he’s got a fedora on his head and a trumpet case in his hand. He joins the folk on the sidewalk and walks past the drugstore and the grocery and the woman opening her drapery-cleaning shop. And then the wig shop for the beauty salon where the street girls went to, not the church ladies who lived a few streets over. And in the air, the word “Detroit.” Before it all burned to the ground. “I’m just trying to carry us to the next day.” He grits his teeth. “Look at outside. We don’t have drug dealers on the corners anymore. I can’t remember the last time someone was shot on this block. My churchgoers can come and go in peace.”

“When there isn’t a curfew. Pastor, this isn’t peace. This is order.”

His eyes ask her, “And why would we give that up?”

Ella rises to her feet. Whatever she was looking for, she’s not gonna get it here. “I was a kid when they let O.J. off. Everyone knew he was guilty. I mean, everyone. Wasn’t till I got older that I realized why it happened.” He frowns, waiting for her to continue. “Same reason the housing laws got passed in 1968. Same reason we got civil rights in ’64.”

“Child, what do you know about ’64? You weren’t even alive back then!”

“But you were!” she shouts back. “You should know. You were in Detroit when the riots happened.” Ella calms herself. “They freed the slaves at gunpoint, Pastor.” She softens. “My brother, Kev. He was born during the L.A. riots. 1992. Mama and I were trapped in the hospital when it happened. When we came out, everything was gone, but I had a baby brother.”

“Violence didn’t give you your brother.”

Ella grits her teeth and remembers it ain’t this church she wants to punish. “But it will get him back.”

When she squeezes her eyes closed, she sees Mama in her last moments, a phantom of her former self. She feels so much of Mama’s entirety: her history, her love, her bitterness. Lounging on cars with friends in a languid Mississippi summer, mopping blood off a hospital room floor, praying with Ella, for Ella, on a sidewalk in South Central. All of it, gone. And all Ella could do was watch. This pastor didn’t save her. Ella didn’t save her. Ella couldn’t.

She tries not to turn the wooden doors into splinters on her way out.

It’s not till she’s outside that she realizes what she was looking for in there. What she’s been looking for all these years. What she realizes now she no longer needs.

Permission.

I am the locusts. Ella sends the thought out like a concussive wave, so that it hits every surveillance orb in the neighborhood, every wired cop, every crabtank in the nearby precinct. I am the locusts and the frogs and the rivers of blood.

I’m here now.

I’m putting on my watch when I see Ella in front of me, smiling. Her locs are completely silver, not an inch of black in them, and they’re floating in the air around her head, almost like a halo.

Before I can tell her not to, Ella makes the room vanish.

Noise. So much noise. Voices shouting at each other, people giving orders, someone crying out in pain.

I’m in a waiting room.

Everybody’s clustered beneath the TVs. I turn to Ella. “Where are we?” But the question’s barely out of my mouth before I see the grainy footage on one of the televisions. An angry crowd surrounds someone. From the aerial footage, all I can see are shoulders and the tops of heads swarming over a spot where someone has, by now, probably stopped moving.

“I smell smoke!” someone screams, running into the waiting room.

I turn back and see, in the chairs, what looks like my sister as a child. She’s squirming in one of the chairs while Mama, belly swollen, rocks back and forth, eyes squeezed shut in pain. A broad-shouldered man in dark slacks and suspenders holds her hand, or, rather, lets her squeeze his.

“Somebody shut that damn TV off!” Mama shouts. To the man, “Brother Harvey, I ain’t lettin’ them cut me open. Not this time. God, I just want this baby to be born.” There’s a nurse in front of her who keeps glancing back at the doors to the hospital operating rooms and who keeps saying, “Any time now” like some kind of mantra. Like she’s forgotten how to say anything else.

“Ella, is that…” I trail off.

She takes a step toward the cluster of people, and I follow her, and suddenly we’re outside where the chaos hits me in hi-def. A gray Cadillac races toward Florence and Normandie, and it’s dusky out, but this place looks familiar. Feels familiar. I’ve been here before. The car skids to a stop. The man behind the wheel flicks the safety off a gun and hops out. A woman jumps out the passenger’s side and runs with him to a row of stores being looted.

Helicopter blades whip overhead. Spotlights sweep the streets and sidewalks.

A rig rolls to a stop at the intersection, country music lolling out of the open windows, heard faintly through the rioting, then a piece of the mob breaks off and tears the truck door open, hauling the driver out. Rocks and chunks of concrete smash the windshield. Someone darts forward and swings down with a hammer, and the truck driver crumples.

Ella’s walk is stately. I can’t stop staring at the beating and the smashing and the hurting. I lose her, then run to where I last saw her. People are passing around a bottle of Olde English 800, rapping N.W.A. lyrics, some of them twisting the words of Negro spirituals to fit the rhythms. There’s no police.

There’s another swarm around a lone car. I get there just as a Korean woman is being dragged out by her hair. The whoop-whoop of police sirens sound as the black-and-white screeches to a stop. Two officers jump out, guns drawn, and there’s a moment of hesitation before rocks and bricks arc in a storm toward them. Then they’re gone.

Someone takes a near-empty bottle of Olde English left on the floor, folds up an issue of Vibe magazine, lights it, and hurls it at a nearby corner store. Kids nearly run me over on stolen bikes. Further down the block, guys with red and blue bandannas tied around their faces take crowbars to a pawnshop and a group of them dash in, then come out half a minute later, draped in jewelry and carrying the guns they got from the back.

A woman struggles past me burdened with toilet paper on her back and bags of kid’s shoes on both arms.

I move to follow her, and I’m back in the hospital room. Mama is screaming something fierce while nurses scramble around her. A doctor breaks her water, but there’s no progress. Then he and a nurse hook her up to a drip for Pitocin. I track the contractions in the changes in her face, and it’s like her features are sinking even deeper into her skin from the pain. I’ve never heard screaming like this.

The doctor looks back and forth between Mama and the screen where I’m supposed to be showing, then shakes his hands and takes what looks like a pair of spoons and reaches into Mama beneath her gown. He fumbles around, then gives up. On the screen, I’m still not moving.

I’ve lost Ella, and when I rush for the hospital room door, I stumble out onto the corner of Martin Luther King and Vermont. Above me, National Guardsmen perch on roofs with their M16s aimed at the crowds, and looters hug the sides of buildings. It’s late afternoon, and this can’t be for real if time is moving this fast and what about Mama where’s Mama?

In deserted parts of the city where the violence has abated, taxicabs pull up and keep the meters running while their riders hop out and come back with VCRs.

Smoke rises in columns over the city. I run farther, past overturned police cars and roadblocks. I have to get back to Mama. Time runs as fast as I do, and when I blink and stop running, Centinela Hospital looms over me. Night has fallen. Over a bullhorn, an official-sounding voice announces a curfew. Sirens wail as ambulance vans make a regular circuit up to and out from the hospital’s main entrance. Those who walked, weak from gunshots or stabbings or dehydration or beatings or weary from having lost everything, stagger toward the doors for treatment.

Far back, I see a car stop. A two-door. And a man in dreadlocks gets out. Dark, angular face. Some of the bones still twisted in the memory of a beating. He looks at the city, looks at me, with horror. And… guilt. That face looks so familiar, then I nearly fall over when I realize who it is, and he’s staring right at me.

“Is this my fault?” Rodney King seems to mouth at the mass streaming into the hospital. He snaps out of his trance, then gets back in his car and drives away.

Mama.

I shove my way past people who don’t notice me into a waiting room filled to bursting. Blood stains the linoleum floor in pools. I crash through another set of doors, calling out “Mama! Mama!” and look into each room for Mama and Ella and me. Nothing here. I find the stairs and run up and it’s on the second floor that I find them and, through the door’s glass, I see Mama in her hospital gown, sweating a waterfall into the hospital’s bedsheets while child-Ella looks curiously at the squirming new baby in Mama’s arms. Mama’s face is loose. Like how it would get when I used to catch her watching me and Ella play in that cramped Harlem apartment. It’s slackened, wrung out. Liberated.

“This is how you were born,” Ella says at my side.

“Why are you showing me this?” Something deep in me has cracked. I feel myslf slipping, then I land with a thud on my bed. Ella stands over me.

“This is what made you.”

“Ella, please, stop.” I have my head in my hands. My head is pounding. My arm is on fire. “Ella, please. Make it stop.”

“It will never stop.” Her voice sounds so distant, faraway, even though she’s standing right in front of me. I feel like if I were to look up, I wouldn’t recognize her face. What did this to her? “This. It will happen again. And again. And again. It already has.”

“What do you want me to do?” I scream.

In the silence that follows, I’m huffing. Sweating. Shaking. I can’t stop shaking. Whatever cracked is getting more broken, and I need to put it back together. I know I need to put it back together. I’m struggling to put it back together, but it’s like I’ve got my shoulder pressed against a screen door in the middle of a flood. My body strains. I know what she wants. I know what she wants, but I can’t give it to her. I won’t.

“Ella,” I tell her through gritted teeth, “I can’t afford to be angry anymore. I can’t. I don’t have it in me to keep being this angry.”

Ella kneels down so we’re eye to eye. “Did you ever stop being angry?” she asks me, softly but with Mama’s sternness.

“But my life,” I say to her, and she knows without me saying that I mean my job and my house. She knows I mean not having my back on fire from tension, walking up and down the walkways of Rikers waiting to defend against harm. She knows I mean the fact that I haven’t seen a white person since I got here. “I can’t see ’em to hate ’em. Please don’t take me back out there.”

“Kev, it was never just ‘out there.’ It’s here, too.”

And that’s when she shows me the metal Miguel and Royce and Marlon and Mero and I have been working on, have been bending, building. Shows me that it doesn’t just go to damaged workers in the factory but that it’s being put on cops outside to increase their reflexes, to upgrade them. That those misshapen pieces of metal we’re forming make shields on their bones, beneath their skin, so that no bullet can kill them. We’re building the turrets mounted on our street corners. We’re working to make the police invincible.

“You were never free.”

My thumb is on fire. Ella looks at me with this pained, sorrowful gaze, watches me hold my hand and try to bear the hurt. And I close my eyes and grit my teeth against the hot needles piercing every inch of skin on my thumb where that fucking chip is, and it gets bigger and bigger, the pain, until I’m blind with it, the whole world white, then it stops.

There’s an arc of blood splashed in a single line down one wall. My thumb is cut open. And there on the rug in front of me, past Ella’s ghost, is the chip. Glowing blue in the near-darkness.

“You took it out,” I say between heavy breaths.

“No. You did.” She’s smiling when she says it.

Instinct tells me I should be afraid. That this is the same as cutting off my ankle monitor. They can’t watch my bloodstream anymore, can’t see if I’m sleeping right, can’t inject compliance into my veins when I get angry, can’t tell me when curfew is, can’t pay me my wages, can’t get me into my home, can’t see me—

She touches me and there’s weight in my arms, a warmth. It smells of milk. A baby.

Ella shows me. Shows me the doctors who looked down on Mama, this woman they were supposed to care for, with such disdain. With such disgust. Feeding her the wrong medicine. They didn’t care whether she lived or died. Whether her child lived or died. Our sister.

Ella’s looking at her. “This child could have seen the world. But they killed our sister before she even had a chance to breathe.”

The weight vanishes. I can’t move. “I don’t want—I just want to go home.”

“There is no home.” Ella is gentle. “Mama prayed we would happen,” she tells me. “God is a loving God, but he’s also the architect of our revenge. He delivers us from Egypt. But he also brings the locusts and the frogs and the rivers of blood.”

All this time, I’d wanted it. Somewhere in the back of my mind. As a kid in those interrogation rooms, as an older kid in Rikers. Then it gets beaten out of me, and I’m convinced we’re too small for it, Ella’s too small for it, for burning it all down.

Is this what Ella’s been doing while away?

“I can see the future, Kev,” she says quietly.

I breathe deeply. Against every instinct, I say, “Show me.”

She puts a hand to my head, skin against skin.

Fire and blood and screaming and singing. Shattered chunks of marble littering park grounds. Monuments to the Confederates pulverized into dust. Police stations turned into husks, watch posts unmanned and creaking with rust. Cities, whole cities, rising into the sky. So much death, but there’s joy in it.

Apocalypse sweeps the South. Vengeance visits the North.

When she lets go, I’m trembling.

“Now, you can see it too,” she tells me. She sticks her hand out, and I shake myself back into the present. “Tell me what you see,” Ella whispers into my ear.

I see the After.

Grassland, hills that undulate, green everywhere, except when there’s fire coming out of the ground and when craters appear and the new government men knock on doors to order newly poor whites to leave, condemn houses or purchase title. The first orange and white and red fire, that time the local trash dump bursts open, is, for them, the beginning of the end. Streaks, fingers almost blue as the anthracite underground creeps closer to the surface and the asphalt is hot to the touch. The air rancid, everybody coughing, always coughing. One day, a house gets emptied, first of its things, then of its people, and a big red slash gets painted on the front door, marking it for condemnation. From the hilltop, the town is nothing but a mouth with just a few broken teeth left. They’ll feel us in every corner of this country.

Then and only then will we clear those forty acres of poison, pull the radiation out of the air. Use our Thing, jettison it into space, make the land ready for our people.

“What do you see?” she says.

There’s so much. It’s a jumble in my head, but Ella and I are in the scorched middle of it.

“Freedom,” I tell her. “I see freedom.”