to transfer you out of the ICU,” the doctor said, “to a regular room. We’re gonna hold on to you for a few more days, just to give that spleen some time to heal and make sure we don’t get any clots or blockages in your urinary tract from those kidneys. I do think the police want to have a word with you, and they’re out in the hall—are you up for it?”
“Uh, sure?” I had not thought about that at all, the legal side of my situation.
The doctor and nurse left, and a man and a woman entered my room. Some kind of switch flipped and suddenly I was sure all of this was fake, that it was part of some TV show or social experiment. These were not real detectives but people impersonating police detectives. It was so obvious. The man had mussed-up hair and was wearing a leather jacket over a button-down shirt that had a stain on it. The woman didn’t know how to dress at all, and her outfit was so extremely basic that only a costume designer could have produced it. They were both beautiful and yet ordinary-looking, with eyes that were too shiny.
“Michael,” the woman detective said, “I’m Detective Carmine and this is Detective Brown.”
Even their names sounded made up.
“We were hoping you could tell us a little bit about what happened on the evening of Tuesday the seventh.”
“Was that the night I got beat up?”
She nodded.
“Well, I was working, and then I got off work and I was in the parking lot.”
“Going to your car?” the male detective asked.
“No, I don’t have a car, I was just lighting a cigarette and I was about to walk home, when I saw a group of guys, and they called me over.”
“Did you recognize any of them?” Detective Carmine asked. Her teeth were way too white. It was the little details that people forgot about, and it was forgivable on TV, but for someone to be trying to get away with it in real life was absurd. No detective would ever have teeth that white.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Not sure if you recognized them?”
“I just—I’m coming to this place in my life where I’m not sure I believe in punishment.”
The two detectives exchanged a look.
“I can’t talk about this right now,” I said.
“We just need you to tell us as much as you can,” Detective Carmine said in a soothing voice. “Unfortunately, when you were admitted they were under the impression that you had been in a car accident and so no one preserved your clothes for evidence, so we have no fibers, no hairs, no actual physical evidence of any kind. Do you have any idea why someone would want to hurt you?”
“Well, because I’m gay,” I said. “Which would make it a hate crime. Which is, can you see why I am hesitant to just accuse people of a hate crime?”
“That’s something for their lawyers to worry about,” Detective Brown said.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want those boys to be punished. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe they were bad. I was disgusted by them. The look on their faces, the way they had laughed at me as they did it. But I was confused about whether or not to say Jason was among them. And it didn’t seem fair to name the others if I was going to refuse to name him. I remembered the nurse saying that my medical expenses would be covered so long as I cooperated with the police investigation, and I thought: They are trying to extort me!
“I just need to think about it a little bit more,” I said. “Would that be all right?”
“In an investigation like this,” Detective Carmine said, “it can muddy the waters. You don’t want a defense attorney saying, look, he wasn’t even sure he knew who attacked him, how can you know it was my client? If you won’t cooperate with the investigation, then I’m going to be honest with you, it will be dropped. Most likely it will be dropped.”
“Drop it, then,” I said. I don’t know why I was so angry, but I was furious. I felt that these detectives were questioning me in the wrong way, and I badly wanted them to behave differently. I wanted someone to say how sorry they were that this had happened to me, to ask me how I was doing, to make sure I knew what was real and what wasn’t,