Brooklyn Zoo by Darcy Lockman Page A

It’s my word against the cop.”
    The doctors and Jim looked at each other. “It has to be one or the other,” said Jim. “My job is to help you decide.”
    “I’m not talking to you, man.” Mr. Willis spit toward Jim’s foot. “I’m not stupid. I’m not stupid.”

    The Brooklyn courthouse was a ten-minute walk from my apartment. I had never before worked so close to home. Had anyone? It was luxurious. I took to buying coffee from the breakfast cart on the corner halfway between home and the office. Soon the guy who ran it knew my order. Milk no sugar.
    In the basement holding cell Dr. Wolfe, Dr. Pine, Jim Danziger, a master’s student, and I sat waiting. We were a big crowd. On the outside it was still very hot, but the basement might have doubled as a meat locker, and I always brought a sweater. Our first defendant walked in handcuffed and escorted by a guard. He removed her restraints, and she sat down across from us. Her name was Beth. She was white with stringy hair. She was thirty and woozy. Jim announced her charges: assault in the second and third degree. She told us she was living at Rikers and listed the antipsychotic medications she was taking. I was learning the names of drugs that none of my graduate school patients had been on: Risperdal, Seroquel, Abilify, Depakote. They signified serious problems, as if in the holding cell these were ever remotely in question. Beth knew what month it was and the year—she was “oriented to time”—but she told us she had memory problems.
    “What kinds of things do you forget?” asked Dr. Wolfe.
    “Sometimes my name,” she said.
    She remembered that she’d been hospitalized for the first time at thirteen.
    “How come?” asked Dr. Wolfe.
    “I tried to kill myself,” she said.
    “What was going on?”
    “My parents died. Something like that.”
    Jim sat with his
New Yorker
, highlighting passages in slippery green.
    Beth told us she’d been born in the United States but grown up in Haiti, where her parents were missionaries. After they died, she returned to New York, where her aunts and uncles had declined to take her in and she was put into foster care. At nineteen she returned to Haiti, where she met a woman named Joanna who she believed was her sister. Dr. Pine flipped through Beth’s chart. “It says here she’s obsessed with Joanna,” Dr. Pine whispered to Dr. Wolfe, but loud enough for everyone to hear.
    “After I met Joanna, other people in my family started dying,” Beth told us. “And now sometimes I hear her voice, telling me to do things to people. She told me to attack those women.”
    “She’s delusional,” Jim announced, putting down his magazine.
    “In the U.S. you call them delusions, but that’s not what we call them in Haiti. In Haiti we call it voodoo, and there are laws against it. I want to see a Haitian doctor who can help me with the voodoo and my visions.”
    “So how about the insanity defense?” Dr. Pine asked our lawyer friend in the same half whisper she’d used before.
    “That was my original plan, but she’ll get more time in the hospital with that than she will in jail for what she did, so it doesn’t make any sense.”
    “Do you understand what will happen if you go to trial?” asked Dr. Wolfe.
    “I’m not going to trial,” she said.
    “So what is your plan?” he followed up.
    “I don’t have a plan,” she said.
    She refused to speak anymore, and the doctors summoned the guard, who cuffed her and escorted her out. Unfit, the doctors agreed.
    “Is anyone ever fit?” I asked Dr. Wolfe quietly. I didn’t want to embarrass myself with a stupid question. Maybe people were found fit all the time, and I just hadn’t seen it yet.
    “Sometimes,” he said, without lowering his voice. He was as unself-conscious as I was reticent, which was partly why I enjoyed him so much. “But think about who refers them for evaluation—lawyers and judges. Unless it’s a lawyer grasping at straws to get his