Brooklyn Zoo by Darcy Lockman

sporadically homeless, often incarcerated, and chronically mentally ill Grant Carson, as the defendant was named, became the unlikely subject of an extensive psychological screening.
    Generally, psychologists do two kinds of testing, cognitive and personality, and I’d done a fair amount of both in graduate school. Cognitive tests measure IQ and educational achievement. They’re used to diagnose learning disabilities, including ADHD, and to quantify other intellectual abilities, most often when they seem on the decline, say after a head injury, or if some kind of dementia is settling in. Personality tests look at different aspects of a person’s cognitive, emotional, and interpersonal functioning. Some of them involve self-reports, where the participant answers a series of questions about himself. Others are projective, which means the subject is presented with an ambiguous stimulus like an ink blot and askedto make meaning of it, offering clues to his emotional preoccupations. Cognitive and personality tests are ideally given in conjunction, as the two areas are inextricably intertwined, our intellect shaped or constrained by our character.
    The first time I met with Grant Carson, it was not to administer any test but simply to hear about his life. I went into the basement on my own for the first time, down the very long staircase, and found him sitting, lanky limbed and bent, on the metal bench that lined the back wall of the holding cell. He was staring at the gray cement floor beneath his laceless boots. He did not look up when I introduced myself and explained why I was there, though he did stick out his cuffed hands meekly to shake mine. His long neck craned downward, his eyes hidden in shame, he was the most pitiful being I’d ever seen, like a woodland creature awaiting transformation in a fairy tale. Though he was almost fifty, he looked like a little boy, something in his face and the way he was folded. I sat down at the table in front of him and put down my notebook and pen. “How are you doing today?”
    “I’m tired,” he said, still looking at the floor. His tone and prosody did nothing to lend credence to the idea that he was a grown man. “I don’t sleep much at Rikers.”
    “How come?” I asked.
    “My mother comes to see me in the middle of the night. She sits next to me and we talk. She died of cancer a few years ago, so the only time I get to see her is when she shows up real late.”
    I nodded and thought. “What do you talk about?”
    “About when I was a child. I tell her if she’d loved me, she wouldn’t have let my stepfather rape me. She tells me I’m worthless and that I should shut up.”
    “What’s that like for you?”
    “She’s a real comfort,” he said, nodding his head and rocking back and forth.
    “How long has she been coming to see you like that?”
    “She started when I was in Attica.”
    Grant Carson went on to describe his life, more than a third of it spent in one type of prison or another. His longest stint had been ten years at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, not too long before our meeting. The charges had always been similar: robberies he could not recall, criminal possession of weapons, drugs. He told me he started using marijuana at age seven, the year after his stepfather began sodomizing him in his closet on an almost daily basis. When he wasn’t being raped himself, he could hear the man in the next room with his sister. “I used to see her crying in her room, and I knew.”
    His stepfather threatened to kill the children’s mother if they told, and Grant kept quiet. He began responding to a voice that no one else could hear around age nine, was disruptive in class, and got suspended or expelled multiple times. His family doctor labeled him hyperactive. His stepfather died when Grant was fifteen, but the man continued to haunt him in his dreams, where his appearance was enough to make Grant get up and run in his sleep. He began