Brooklyn Zoo by Darcy Lockman Read Free Book Online Page B

longer than I’d been alive, and like Silly Putty laid over newsprint, he bore the stain of their mannerisms. His questions often tumbled out abruptly and in response to stimuli the rest of us were not quite privy to. “So what happened the day you were arrested?” he asked.
    “I went to a department store to buy something.”
    “Why’d you grab this woman?” Jim was less gentle than Dr. Pine and Dr. Wolfe, and I got the sense that while they liked him, they didn’t often appreciate his interruptions.
    Katrina began laughing again. “She’s lying. She’s a good liar. She’s a lying liar. A good lying liar.” Katrina was very fat and wore orange sneakers. Her flesh shook all over as she laughed.
    “What do you plan to do about the charge?” asked Dr. Wolfe.
    “Fight it,” said Katrina.
    “What would your defense be?”
    “I’d tell the truth.”
    Dr. Wolfe paused. “So what did happen then?”
    “It’s like, I just kept passing by her, and she probably thought I was stalking her. She hit me first. It was a fight.”
    “Do you want to go to trial?” asked Dr. Pine.
    Katrina looked off to the side again. She said, “I don’t
know
why they’re so eager to put me in jail!”
    Dr. Wolfe redirected her, and she explained to him her understanding of courtroom procedures and participants. When he praised her, she looked directly at him for the first time before blurting out, “To tell the truth, I do that all the time and walk away!” She went back to laughing with the companion the rest of us could not see. Like the defendants I saw at Bellevue, she was not oriented to reality and would be found unfit.
    After that we interviewed two more like her. Both men heard voices, wore shoes rendered laceless to preclude suicide, and could not make logical decisions about how to proceed with their charges. Unfit, unfit. We returned upstairs, and I settled back in the waiting area. The master’s students flirted and made boozy weekend plans. By four o’clock the staff was packing up. The defendants had to be taken back to Rikers around three, and once the psychologists’ paperwork had been finished, there wasn’t anything left to do. I went home to take the dog for a walk along the promenade and wait for George, who had been getting home much later than I. It was our fourth week of internship, and while I was eagerly awaiting the assignment of outpatient cases and supervisors and seminars to fill my days, he was already swamped with work and with classes—five outpatients and five outpatient supervisors, a rotation in a drug and alcohol treatment center, seminarswith heady titles. The discrepancy had me antsy, worried that I wasn’t going to get enough.
    When George got home, I told him about my day: Dr. Wolfe’s lecture, treatment court, the basement holding cell. “So all you’re supposed to do is watch these interviews for three and a half months?” he asked.
    “I guess so,” I said, feeling protective of the experience. “But they’re interesting. The defendants are basically psychiatric patients, just in a different setting.”
    “Well, I’m sure that will be good,” he said, only almost trying to keep the skepticism out of his voice. It irked me, not least because I quickly made it my own.
    George told me about his day. He’d been assigned some interesting cases and was excited about the analytically trained supervisors he’d met so far. At least one of his seminars seemed as if it was going to be thought provoking, as good as any of the best classes we’d shared in the last four years. Columbia-Presbyterian was clearly more like grad school than Kings County. I missed school intensely then—my supervisors, my classes, my patients there. One of the latter had wanted to continue our work together after my course work ended, to come see me at the hospital’s outpatient clinic, but in an e-mail exchange over the summer Scott had declined to approve that, suggesting that the very request was