the day i was disappeared
jon marcantoni
On Sunday night, I was pulled over for what appeared to be a routine traffic stop. Ten minutes later, I would be arrested for reasons that would become clear even if the logic behind them didn’t. A traffic violation from three years earlier, or really, my failing to show up to court, had landed me in jail. I was unaware of both the missed court date or there being a warrant for my arrest.
The details of the case, the ins and outs of the absurdity of being in a room full of violent criminals while I waited to be seen by a judge for a three year old traffic violation, is not the reason for me to write this. I write this because writing is my way to make sense of both myself and the world, and this experience was an existential one.
It took me 15 hours to be able to reach my father, so he could know what was happening. But for 15 hours, nobody, not my girlfriend or my family or any of my friends, knew exactly where I was or why I was missing. And for the next 9 hours, I would wait to be let go. As the minutes passed, I seriously doubted I actually would leave. I was in a cement box, with no control over my fate, and after reaching my dad, there was no way for me to call anyone else, since prisons require the friends and families of inmates to pay for their phone calls, and nobody in my life knew this. So I was left at the whims of a legal system that saw me, drug addicts, wife beaters, thieves and murderers as the same category. I was in a cement void, not even able to scream, for fear that I would be punished and forced to stay longer.
I was disappeared, from my life and from the lives of those I love. Given my knowledge of history, especially Latin American history, where disappearances have long been used as political violence, I couldn’t help but think of the 30,000 who were disappeared in the Dirty Wars of 1970s and 80s Argentina, or the 10,000 disappeared Chileans during the Pinochet regime, or the 3,000 Puerto Ricans who were disappeared in the 1950s by the US and Puerto Rico’s colonial government. All these examples of the disappeared were leftists, like myself. Many of them were artists, like myself. I had joined a grand tradition of Puerto Rican soldiers whose minds and bodies were broken by US imperialism when I served in the military, and now I had joined another grand tradition of Puerto Ricans being incarcerated for reasons that hardly make any sense.
I shouldn’t compare myself to the freedom fighters of the 1950s, though not all disappeared fought for independence. Many were collateral damage, relatives of independentistas who had done nothing criminal, who were guilty by association. Though that never mattered to the people who tortured, murdered, and hid them, preventing their relatives from knowing what happened, even if on a profound level, there was no mystery. Tío Jon isn’t coming back. You don’t need to know the why, just that he isn’t.
Sitting in my bunk during lockdown, watching the light move across the wall, tapping my foot against the concrete, wondering if I had more in common with these inmates than I cared to admit. I thought of the people who have been cruel to me, the so-called friends who ghosted me, the people who rejected me in one way or another, and I thought about what if they had a point. Maybe I was beneath them, and deserved to be in jail. Maybe the reason certain friends kicked me to the curb was that they saw the inferiority of me. They threw me away like trash because I am trash. It would make sense, why else would I be in this situation? Why else would I struggle so much over the last three years if I were a good person? This is karmic. Me being disappeared is justice.
My toe tapped the wall with the cadence of me falling through a void full of twigs, each toe tap another branch snapping as I descended further and further into darkness until I was the darkness, until the walls had vanished and I became the abyss.
I listened to the inmates around me talking, some were old men who had been in and out of jail for decades, others were less than thirty, but on the same track. These people didn’t mind the abyss, it was home to them. Two of the inmates volunteered to clean the toilets so they could get privileges you only know about when jail has become more a home than anywhere on the outside. One of them couldn’t have been older than 25. They not only had nothing to live for, they had fully embraced that this institutionalized existence is all there is to live for.
A light came through the abyss, and shone across my eyes. We were not the same, and I don’t deserve to be here. I refuse to exist in the shadows. I refuse to not be seen, or heard. I refuse to be lost.
All while this was happening, my loved ones were looking for me, because I do matter. They were terrified, even after finding out my fate, they wanted to help but didn’t know how. Unlike so many disappeared persons, they at least had an answer, just not a satisfactory one. I suppose this was true in the past too. No explanation can ever fully justify the anguish, terror, and confusion of walking into a loved one’s apartment and they not be there.
Ironically, I had recently read and requested to produce, a new play about Latinos being disappeared in the United States. The story focuses on a young woman who spent the last year overseas, only to return to an authoritarian US where her boyfriend has disappeared. The opening scene echoed what my girlfriend told me later about coming into my apartment, unsure what she would find.
The pain of this single day will haunt us, and no explanation will justify that pain.
Before I was released, i was transferred to another ward, one with much harder criminals, a ward for permanent inmates, I was told. I said I was supposed to be discharged, and the guard just said, “If I get a call to release you, you can go. If not, you’re staying.” So I marched in a circle with other inmates, an endless march in an unknown circle of hell, waiting anxiously for them to call my name.
When my name was called, I didn’t trust it. Three days later, I still don’t trust it. I keep expecting to be arrested again. The long claws of the abyss feel close, just within reach to snatch me. I am scared in a way I never was in the military, because this justice system feels so much more unpredictable. When a bomb goes off or a rifle is fired, you kinda know what to do. But with a cop you never know what you’re going to get. And given the long history of Latin Americans being disappeared, in this new era of Trump, being disappeared feels not only like an inheritance, but a destiny.
I am scared, and tired, and unable to weep like my body wants me too. I am afraid to trust that this whole nightmare is over. So I keep running from the abyss. I keep running in hopes of fixing this fucked situation so it won’t repeat itself.
If I disappear again it won’t be from a lack of love, or worthiness. My darkest thoughts aren’t true. I was received on the outside with embraces and love. I deserve the best from life. I do good things. I work hard for my community. And I will make my voice heard, in writing and in speech, because the abyss can’t take that from me. My voice will reach from the depths of hell to the ears of those who care.