Brooklyn Zoo by Darcy Lockman Read Free Book Online Page A

was thirty-nine and frayed. She was Hispanic, pretty if too thin after years of taking in less food than heroin—about two hundred dollars’ worth a day, she told us, rolling up her sleeves to show us the track marks on her arm. She was on methadone now. “I wouldn’t be able to sit here and have a conversation with you if I wasn’t,” she told us. She’d started drinking and cutting herself at a young age, soon after her uncle began sexually abusing her, and then an older friend introduced her to heroin, which she eventually began prostituting herself to get, conceiving two children that way. Both were living with their grandmother. Her eyes teared up and she looked ashamed when she told us this, and I felt remorse about being there, an unnecessary interloper on Dr. Wolfe’s work. She said she wasn’t much interested in a program, and Dr. Wolfe asked why. She answered, “I was the middleman in a drug buy, a B felony. I’ll get one to three months. A program is five times that long.”
    “Sad,” I observed as we left. Maria had this traumatic history that she relied on drugs to numb herself against, and she didn’t know that therapy might make that numbing less imperative.
    Dr. Wolfe agreed. He said he was going to recommend a program rather than jail time despite what she’d said. Maybe she’d take it once she had more time to think. “She’s an unusualcase,” he said. “She seemed reachable.” It seemed regrettable that we would not be the ones to try to reach her. On forensics, I quickly got it, we weren’t that kind of psychologist.
    I went back upstairs with Dr. Wolfe, and we found Dr. Pine, whom I’d met at Bellevue, waiting for him. Dr. Wolfe went to the back to collect one more student, and the four of us plus the lawyer Jim Danziger were off to see another defendant in the basement holding cells where most of their business was conducted. I felt energized by the pace of the morning and all the things I was learning that were new to me. “We’re assessing a female defendant today,” said Dr. Pine. “Young and charged with assault in the third degree. Grabbed a woman’s breasts.”
    Our group rode the elevator to the lobby and then took a long flight of cement stairs down to a very cold and vast underground complex. We signed in with the guards, went through more metal detectors, and were admitted to a holding cell, a large room painted steel gray with metal bars like a jail cell on a movie set. The female defendant was brought in, no laces in her shoes. The officers uncuffed her before she sat down across from us. Dr. Pine introduced us and explained why we were there. The woman’s name was Katrina, and she was nineteen years old and jailed at Rikers Island as she awaited trial. She rocked back and forth on the bench, smiling and looking off to the side as if at someone, though we five were seated across from her. She knew her Social Security number and her birthday and that she’d earned a GED. She also knew that she’d been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons for the first time at age fourteen, by her mother, and that she’d since been readmitted at least fifteen times.
    “What are your symptoms?” asked Dr. Wolfe.
    “Nausea,” she answered.
    “Any voices?” he followed up.
    “All the time,” she said. “They annoy me. Say, ‘Katrina did this, Katrina did that.’ ”
    “Are you hearing them now?”
    “Yes. I’m trying to figure out how they’re there, everywhere I go.”
    “Do you recognize the voice?”
    “It’s the same person all the time. A lady’s voice. Bothering me.” She looked off to the side again and laughed.
    “What’s funny?” asked Dr. Pine softly.
    Katrina didn’t answer.
    Jim Danziger—who was not technically required to be there and had very little official business during the course of any evaluation—sat scanning and highlighting an issue of
The New Yorker
as if it were a used textbook. He’d been representing clients like Katrina for