GARDE À VUE
ALM No.94, October 2026
ESSAYS
The walls were covered in graffiti, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d think it was the bathroom of an underground bar in Berlin, but I was in a cell at a police station in Alfortville, a banlieue southeast of Paris, trying to make sense of how I had ended up there.
I’d been arrested that morning after a fight with my friend Pierre-Thierry. We had been up all night talking and partying. I had stopped hours before him and gone to lie down. He hadn’t. By the time things turned ugly, I was half-asleep and he was not, but the neighbor who called the police didn’t care about any of that.
A policewoman stopped by and asked if I was hungry. I nodded. I was then handed a pasta dish with mushrooms in a questionable greyish sauce, and it would be the only thing I'd eat for the next three days. Beggars can't be choosers. Prisoners even less so. It was past noon.
A couple of hours later, an officer collected me for booking. Mugshots, fingerprints, John Hancocks. The banality of it was almost insulting. I was then led to a small room to meet with an investigator, who allowed me to tell him what happened.
Pierre-Thierry and I had been up for a few hours, talking, drifting, and by early morning I was done and went to lie down. He had a friend of his transfer 50 euros to my account, he had no bank account of his own, so he could keep going. When a password reset slowed things down, his impatience turned into anger. He started throwing punches. At some point I grabbed him to stop him from destroying my apartment, which he had threatened to do. He broke my remote control before I managed to get to the kitchen and barricade myself inside.
I met Pierre-Thierry a month before any of this. He was 27, mixed, but mostly read as white. Piercing green eyes, a lean body, and damaged yellow teeth were strangely part of his appeal. We hit it off immediately, hooked up a few times, then decided we were better off as friends. He was between apartments, so when he asked, I agreed to put him up until he found something permanent. For the most part it worked, despite his unwillingness to clean up after himself, his chain-smoking, and the daily blunt he smoked by the window as if he were on a terrace in Saint-Tropez.
What drew us together, more than anything, was a shared malaise. I told him about the two months I'd spent barely leaving my apartment after losing my job, curtains drawn, days bleeding into nights, going out only to buy food, then retreating back into the dark. It was the latest in a string of professional disappointments that had followed me across Europe. The false starts in Germany, the dead ends in Brussels, and finally Paris, where I'd been fired from a new job only months after arriving, and I still felt like a stranger in the country I was supposed to call home. Each failure had taken something from me. The darkness had been the price.
Pierre-Thierry was a bad boy, but not a bad guy. At 46, this was my first run-in with the law. At 27, he had an extensive rap sheet. He used more than I did, not recreationally, but to quiet a traumatic childhood, and when that wasn't enough, he sold his body.
"Would you be up for a confrontation?" the officer asked. In French legal procedure, a confrontation is exactly what it sounds like, both parties in the same room, not allowed to speak to each other, answering questions separately while sitting close enough to make things uncomfortable.
"Yes," I said.
The confrontation was exactly what I expected. We sat a few feet apart, close enough to hear each other breathe. Pierre-Thierry told the officers that I attacked him, a calculated move to keep himself out of deeper trouble. I couldn't even be mad at him for knowing how to play the system, they were foolish enough to keep two people in detention over an altercation.
"Who knows what you might have done in your life without being caught," one of the officers said to me.
I had a clean record. Pierre-Thierry had a documented history of violence and had been making a scene since the moment they brought him in. My blackness, apparently, superseded all that.
The powers that be decided the case needed further processing. I wasn't going home. The following evening, at 7 pm, I was transferred ten minutes away to the basement of the local courthouse called Le Dépôt, which, ironically, was also the name of a sex club in Paris filled with all types of men looking for all types of trouble.
A 2008 article in Le Monde described Le Dépôt as unsanitary, degraded, a violation of human rights. Judging by the mattress I was handed at the door, not much had changed. I barely had time to settle onto the concrete bench before the cell door opened again and a young 28 year-old Afro-Caribbean guy was shown in. He had the kind of face that made you wonder what exactly had gone wrong.
We skipped the small talk and got to it. Why was he here?
Proxénétisme.
In other words, pimping. It turned out Mike's brother had launched a small and successful operation. Mike's role, he claimed, had been minor, one visit to an apartment in a city nearby to bring cigarettes and drinks to the girls. One of them eventually went to the police. Mike, depending on the judge's mood, might walk away with probation, but as cute as he was he was still Black.
"I can only imagine what white people must think," I said, "seeing all these Black guys getting into criminal mischief." He smirked. We understood each other.
He thought an assault charge where you didn't throw a single punch wouldn't get me much, a warning, maybe. I had my doubts, given the two days I'd just lived through, but I appreciated the optimism.
The officers collected the mattresses at 7 am sharp. We moved to the concrete bench and kept sleeping.
My name was called at two. A young white female prosecutor notified me I was being placed under a contrôle judiciaire, some sort of supervised release with conditions to be set by a judge later that day. By 6:15 pm I had them: no contact with Pierre-Thierry, in any form, under any circumstances, and therapy, for both of us. Pierre-Thierry would violate the first condition that same evening, and again the following night. The court date was set in December.
I walked out a little after 7 pm. Three days. Two nights. No shower, no real sleep, no food worth remembering. I went home, stood under the water for a long time, then cleaned the apartment in silence. I lay down and thought about the four years that had led me there. The accumulation of professional failures, the drift, the days spent in the dark convincing myself things would turn around on their own.
I knew I couldn’t keep going like that. The thought of moving back to the US had been brewing for a couple of years, and it was time to make a decision. A few days later, I booked a flight to the United States. What I hadn’t accounted for was that leaving wouldn’t end anything. The case was still there, waiting for me.
In true French administration fashion, the December court date was postponed six months later due to the courthouse’s busy schedule. That was perfect. I needed time to rebuild my life in the US anyway and unpack the prior eight years in Europe.
I was happy to be back in Barack Obama’s promised land. I quickly found a job, started therapy, and reconnected with old friends. Routine eventually set in. Months flew by, and by the time June arrived, I found myself on a plane heading back to France.
The Palais de Justice in Créteil, a banlieue right outside of Paris, was, in all aspects, a typical piece of brutalist architecture: cold, grey, and ugly. Everything about it screamed austerity, from its depressing color to its monotonous allure to its béton brut, which defined the countless buildings erected in French banlieues during that era.
As I stood in front of it, I couldn't help thinking that the people working there, including lawyers, prosecutors, and judges, were just as stuck in that period as the building appeared to be, both in the way they saw the world and how they approached their work, and the scary thing was, those were the people about to decide my fate.
"Even if you had been guilty of attacking him, there was no need to take it that far. A fine would have been enough for a first offense," my attorney Maya had said.
As instructed, I waited outside the entrance, tucked into the gutter of the 16-story open-book-shaped building. I saw Maya inside and she waved me in.
Maya was a real estate attorney with an office in central Paris. Petite, late thirties, and entirely out of her comfort zone. Penal law wasn't her area of expertise, but a common friend had asked for the favor and she relented.
The courtroom was a small, square space with two sets of benches in the back for defendants and their people. It's always struck me as funny that a country so proud of its civilization had never seen fit to invest in air conditioning. Even the shittiest fan from Carrefour could have tamed the unbearable heat. The witness stand sat somehow in the middle of the room, and whenever a case was called, the defendant and their lawyer had to walk up to address the court. I had told Maya the day before that public speaking wasn’t my forté, even less so when the subject was my life and its lowest point. Nightmares do come true.
The courtroom filled quickly with lawyers, defendants, and prosecutors. Some of the attorneys were as dark-skinned as I was, and the thought that I should have bet Black briefly crossed my mind. All the people representing the system though reminded me of those I'd navigated as a child. Teachers, principals, counselors. The same faces, the same authority, the same quiet assumption that I needed to prove something.
Then, two middle-aged white judges, a man and a woman, made their grand entrance in the uniform of French justice. Black robes, and white neckpieces, a bad fashion show that had been running since 1810. The male judge was apparently a trainee, and he was the one doing the judging today. So, not one, but two middle-aged white French judges, each carrying their share of conscious or unconscious bias, would have to be convinced of my innocence. I knew right then that I was as cooked as chicken on the Fourth of July. One would have been difficult. Two? Forget it.
Most of the defendants were Black or Arabic, which was no surprise given the demographics of Créteil, but when your job consists of judging one Black or brown person after another, you have to wonder whether the line between guilt and innocence starts to blur after seeing so many similar faces and hearing so many similar cases. Thirty minutes per case at most, that was all we got. Those were the questions running through my mind as I sat there sweating through my shirt.
My name was called around 2:30 pm. I walked up to the stand, sweaty from heat and anxiety. The male judge verified my name and address, then recounted both sides of the story. Pierre-Thierry hadn't shown up and would be judged in absentia.
The judge asked a couple of questions, then allowed me to speak. Still, there was a overwhelming feeling in that room that the decision had already been made, and nothing I could say was going to change it. Their willingness to prosecute me in the first place had told me everything I needed to know.
Maya did most of the talking. She exposed the discrepancies in Pierre-Thierry's story, his most recent conviction just that January, and despite criminal law being foreign territory for her, she did well. The judges retreated to deliberate. The fifteen minutes they took to deliberate felt endless.
Guilty.
The word felt like a blade although their casual indifference was the ultimate blow.
I got spared prison time. The judges also recognized me as a victim: Pierre-Thierry was ordered to pay me 2,200 euros in punitive damages, and my record would remain clean. He was sentenced to ten months. He was a repeat offender and his absence hadn't helped him.
"It's a judgement of Solomon," Maya said.
I was raging inside. Despite Pierre-Thierry's extensive rap sheet, the visible wounds I had the day of the attack, his multiple violations of the no-contact order, none of it had been enough to fully convince them. His absence had even been excused.
"Well, he's homeless" the prosecutor had said.
After a quick exchange with Maya, I headed back into the city. I thought about appealing but let it go. More legal fees, another unwanted trip to a country that had already taken enough from me. If four years back in France had taught me anything, it’s that nothing had really changed since I was a kid growing up here. It wasn't the verdict that stayed with me. It was everything around it from the assumptions to the quiet certainty that none of it could have unfolded any other way.
Saul Siarras is a French American essayist based in San Francisco. He has lived and worked across France, Belgium, Germany, and the United States. His writing draws on this itinerant background to explore themes of migration, memory, and belonging across borders.
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