Episode 7: The First Night

Summary

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Out of the Valley’s Shadow

Episode 7: The First Night
Host: Aziz Saad (narrator: Adam Saad)
Date: May 23, 2026

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Overview:

In “The First Night,” Adam Saad shares his arrival and first night inside Unit 5 of Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center. The episode is a close, atmospheric exploration of confinement—detailing the psychological tension, small negotiations for trust, and the subtle architectures of endurance, dignity, and adaptation. The story’s power lies in its focus on the unglamorous, often unseen human experience behind institutional procedures and colors.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Arrival: Shattering Expectations

• Adam is introduced to Unit 5 as “dangerous men. High risk. Maximum supervision. Red shirts” ([00:00]).
• Contrary to media stereotypes, the men are ordinary: “No one looked like a supervillain. A man was washing his underwear in the sink. Another waited for the microwave… Two men played cards without speaking.” ([00:38])
• Insight: The so-called “dangerous” reputation is more about story than fact:

  “The most dangerous thing in the room was just boredom. Unit 5 did not feel like a den of predators. It felt like a DMV with bunk beds.” ([01:47])

• Notable Quote:

  "…red, I was learning, was a story more than a color." ([02:01])

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Navigating New Rules & Earning Trust

• Adam enters his cell, sharing with an older African man who is careful, reserved, and offers a moment of trust:

  “You can turn the light on. At least I won’t have to hear the dominoes outside.” —Alex (The Butcher), ([04:34])

• Insight: Bonds form through “tiny negotiations over discomfort” ([04:41]), not grand gestures.

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Institutionalization & Psychological Effects

• Adam feels the thinness of the mattress, thinks back to medical school, and is struck by the overstimulation (fluorescent light, constant noise, lack of distraction):

  “For the first time since the arrest, there was nothing competing for my attention… Just thought. Raw thought. The kind that arrives uninvited once distraction dies.” ([05:48])

• Insight: Silence inside is not peaceful, but “a hallway where every locked door inside your mind begins opening at once.” ([06:07])

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Morning Life: Social Structures & Introduction to Alex (The Butcher)

• There is no sense of day or night—just “different levels of exhaustion” ([06:36]).
• Adam meets Alex (The Butcher), an Albanian who introduces himself with casual authority and a veiled history ([07:36]):

  “They call me the Butcher” —Alex ([07:36])
  “From Egypt. You?” —Adam ([07:39])
  “Albania.” —Alex ([07:43])

• Insight: Early social sorting in detention happens “less by race than by familiarity, language, and sentence length.” ([08:18])

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Negotiation of Identity

• Red shirts become a mark of reputation and expectation, as seen in a tense, performative exchange with a large Hispanic man ([09:09]).
• Memorable Moment:

  “Relax. I seen Reds coming here crying before Count.” (—Hispanic man, [09:33])

• Insight:

  “Everyone else immediately started writing another [story of you]… That was how places like this worked.” ([09:46])

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Showers & Erosion of Privacy

• Showers are communal and unpartitioned—“abandoned by the idea of dignity years earlier” ([10:22]).
• Adam witnesses moments of private self-indulgence by others (the old man in the shower), underscoring how adaptation and erosion of boundaries become dangerous:

  “After a while, the truly dangerous thing is not humiliation. It is adaptation, because adaptation starts to feel natural, frighteningly fast.” ([11:42])

• Notable Quote:

  “Detention strips privacy away in layers. First your freedom, then your schedule, then your silence…eventually the invisible boundaries people normally protect.” ([11:52])

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The First Phone Call: The Emotional Architecture of Confinement

• Adam calls Aspen for the first time since detention; emphasizes the administrative coldness of the process:

  "The first phone call you make from detention does not belong to you. It belongs to the person who answers." ([12:30])
  “They’re charging you for this… You have to accept it.” ([13:11])
  “I love you.” —Aspen & Adam ([13:53], [13:56])
  “Even grief had terms and conditions. Two minutes, then cut, then start again. If you could afford it.” ([14:03])

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Micro-Communications & First Day Lessons

• The smallest shifts in objects (moved water bottle, missing spoon) operate as communications and signals ([14:06]).
• Chess, dominoes, and shared waiting become rituals for “calibration”—testing who you are, how you will react ([15:05]).

  “First day is calibration…” —Alex ([15:22])
  "No one plays well in here." ([15:09])

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• On boredom and danger:

  "The most dangerous thing in the room was just boredom." ([01:47])

• On silence:

  "Silence is not peaceful by default. Sometimes it is a hallway where every locked door inside your mind begins opening at once." ([06:02])

• On adaptation:

  "After a while, the truly dangerous thing is not humiliation. It is adaptation, because adaptation starts to feel natural, frighteningly fast." ([11:42])

• On identity:

  "Everyone else immediately started writing another [version of you]... That was how places like this worked." ([09:46])

• On the emotional toll:

  "Even grief had terms and conditions. Two minutes, then cut, then start again. If you could afford it." ([14:03])

• On trust:

  "That was how trust began in places like that. Not through speeches, through tiny negotiations over discomfort." ([04:41])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:00-02:35] — Adam’s arrival in Unit 5, first impressions, and reality versus expectation.
• [02:35-04:41] — Entering his cell, meeting his older roommate, and negotiating light/discomfort.
• [05:00-06:24] — Lying awake, wrestling with intrusive thoughts and silence.
• [06:36-08:10] — Morning in Unit 5, meeting Alex “The Butcher”, and early social dynamics.
• [08:10-09:11] — Meeting another Egyptian detainee, identity through color, and “red shirt” moment.
• [10:22-12:30] — Showers, loss of privacy, adaptation.
• [12:30-14:03] — First phone call to Aspen, institutional humanity, and emotional distance.
• [14:03-15:09] — Interpersonal signals, first day lessons, playing chess, testing boundaries.

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Tone & Style

• The narration is intimate, reflective, restrained but deeply emotional.
• Dialogue and observations are minimal, precise; the story listens more than shouts.
• There is a deliberate attention to physical detail and psychological nuance, reinforcing the theme: survival and dignity negotiated in every small moment, often in silence.

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Final Reflection

The episode closes with a gentle urging:

“If this story stayed with you, don’t let it stay only with you. Share it with someone who still believes systems are made of paper instead of people… somewhere tonight another phone is ringing inside another fluorescent room, and someone on the other end is trying to sound less afraid than they are.” ([15:42])

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This episode offers a deeply human look at bureaucracy, adaptation, and survival in confinement. More than politics or policy, it explores the small, deliberate resistances—acts of connection, moments of trust, and the refusal to vanish.

Transcript

[Narrator]

Chapter 7 unit 5 first night. There are places where you introduce yourself. Inside unit 5, you were introduced by color. I had been told this was the worst of the worst. Dangerous men. High risk. Maximum supervision. Red shirts. When you hear that, you expect something cinematic, something out of prison break. Steel eyes, silent threats. Men pacing like wolves behind glass. The door opened. What I saw was a long hallway, rooms lined along one side, a shared bathroom, a common day area in the middle, and another hallway stretching beyond it. Large fluorescent panels lit everything with that cold, institutional brightness, the kind that makes skin look tired and time feel paused at the first glance. No one looked like a supervillain. A man was washing his underwear in the sink. Another waited for the microwave, holding a bowl of ramen noodles like it was his turn at something important. Two men played cards without speaking. The television roared above them. Make no mistake, as I get to learn later, some of them were exactly what you'd expect. Gang members, men with histories that explained the color. But most weren't. Most looked like men you might pass at a deli, a car wash, a construction site. Men who would clean your gutters or fix your roof. They came to this country seeking a better life and may have missed paperwork, lost tempers, or stayed too long. Truth be told, the most dangerous thing in the room was just boredom. Unit 5 did not feel like a den of predators. It felt like a DMV with bunk beds. But the shirts were red, and red, I was learning, was a story more than a color. As I walked through the hallway, men glanced up, measured me, then returned to whatever version of waiting they had chosen. A group of Hispanic men played dominoes, slamming each tile down with a clean, sharp authority. The sound cracked against the metal tables. The escorting officer handed me a thin navy green mattress, the kind that is just a bit better than sleeping on the hard floor, but nothing more than that. No pillows were allowed.

[Alex (The Butcher)]

Room 12, bunt 2, top bed.

[Narrator]

Then he left. The door closed behind him. And that was the moment. No chains, no escort. Just men around your thoughts inside and time. The room was maybe 10ft by 10. Five metal bunks welded into the walls, stacked too high, enough space for 10 men if nobody minded breathing each other's air. The kind of room designed by someone who measured human beings the way cargo ships measure containers. I was only the second occupant. My roommate lay on the bottom bunk across from mine. African, early 60s, maybe older age inside. Detention blurred differently. Some men arrived old. Others became old quickly. The lights were off except for the pale rectangle leaking in from the hallway. It cut across his face just enough for me to see the silver in his beard and the deep lines beside his mouth. A careful face, the kind shaped by years of watching before speaking. He glanced at me once when I entered. Then he nodded and closed his eyes again, headphones over his ears, a small radio resting on his chest. I stood there holding the mattress under my arm, trying to understand the rules of a world no one had explained. I needed light to make the bed, but it was two in the morning. Now there was a decision. Turn the light on and wake a stranger or sleep on bare metal. Do I ask permission? Do I just do it? I suddenly realized how long it had been since I had shared a room with another man, probably my first year of medical school, back when life still moved forward in straight lines and every exhaustion had a purpose attached to it. I decided to leave the room, light off, and open the door instead. Hallway light spilled across the floor in a weak yellow strip. The old man turned toward me.

[Alex (The Butcher)]

You can turn the light on. At least I won't have to hear the dominoes outside.

[Narrator]

His accent was thick. African, maybe Kenyan or Nigerian educated. Underneath the exhaustion, I appreciated the gesture. I think he appreciated mine too. That was how trust began in places like that. Not through speeches, through tiny negotiations over discomfort. I turned the light on. The mattress was thin, military foam, wrapped in dark plastic. It bent like cardboard and smelled faintly of bleach and old sweat. I spread the sheet over it, tucked the corners under the metal frame, climbed into the top bunk, and stretched my back carefully against the stiffness. Above me. The ceiling was covered in uneven white paint that looked thick enough to hide decades. For the first time since the arrest, there was nothing competing for my attention. No phone vibrating, no emails, no scrolling. No noise carefully engineered by billion dollar companies to keep human beings from sitting alone with themselves. Just thought. Raw thought. The kind that arrives uninvited once distraction dies. People underestimate silence. Silence is not peaceful by default. Sometimes it is a hallway where every locked door inside your mind begins opening at once. I stare it upward. Court. Aspen. My son. My career. My life. The terrifying thing about intrusive thoughts is not that they are irrational. It is that some of them are perfectly logical. My roommate removed his headphones and looked up at me through the darkness.

[Alex (The Butcher)]

You think a lot.

[Narrator]

I let out a small laugh. That obvious?

[Alex (The Butcher)]

Yes.

[Narrator]

Then he put the headphones back on. That was the extent of my welcome. Morning in Unit five did not begin. It resumed. The lights never truly shut off, so there was no real distinction between night and day, just different levels of exhaustion. Men drifted through the common area carrying plastic cups of instant coffee, half awake, half institutionalized. Already, somewhere near the phones, dominoes were still being played by men who either could not sleep or no longer respected the idea of bedtime. I had barely stepped out of the room when a tall man approached me. Broad shoulders, thick beard, close cropped dark hair already graying at the temples. He moved with the loose balance of someone who had fought before, maybe many times. Not aggressive, but gravity around him felt slightly altered.

[Alex (The Butcher)]

You knew?

[Narrator]

His English was rough but direct. Yes.

[Alex (The Butcher)]

Name?

[Narrator]

Adam. You?

[Alex (The Butcher)]

Alex. They call me the Butcher.

[Narrator]

From Egypt. You?

[Alex (The Butcher)]

Albania?

[Narrator]

He nodded. Once. Albanians ruled Egypt through the dynasty of Muhammad Ali Pasha, a man who once invited the Mamluk leadership to a celebration at the Cairo citadel, sealed the gates behind them, and had them massacred before dessert. Legend says only one escaped by throwing his horse off the citadel walls. So when he told me they used to call him the Butcher, I was not especially alarmed.

[Alex (The Butcher)]

There is another Egyptian.

[Narrator]

Then he turned and walked toward the tables. I followed. The common area smelled like detergent, sweat, and powdered soup. The televisions mounted near the ceiling screamed morning news. Nobody was truly watching. Men sat in clusters, divided less by race than by familiarity, language, and sentence length. At a table near the phones sat a skinny Egyptian man wrapped in a gray thermal shirt. Despite the heat, his face looked hollowed out, like detention had been quietly feeding on him from the inside. How long? He asked me in Arabic. Today? He nodded slowly.

[Alex (The Butcher)]

Three weeks.

[Narrator]

The way he said it unsettled me. It sounded eternal coming out of him. Alex looked down at my shirt.

[Alex (The Butcher)]

You Red?

[Narrator]

Yes. He held my gaze for a second too long. Before I could answer, a voice cut across the room.

[Alex (The Butcher)]

Hey, Red shirt.

[Narrator]

The dominoes paused. Not fully. Just enough for you to notice. I turned. A large Hispanic man leaned forward over middle aged, heavy shoulders, glasses resting low on his nose. He studied me for a moment. The room waited with him. Then he grinned.

[Alex (The Butcher)]

Relax. I seen Reds coming here crying before Count.

[Narrator]

Laughter rippled softly through the room. The dominoes resumed immediately afterward, tiles cracking against the table with sharp little reports. But Alex did not smile. He kept looking at me carefully. You see, he said quietly. Unit 5 had already begun building a version of me inside their heads. That was how places like this worked. You arrived carrying your own story. Everyone else immediately started writing another one for you. Eventually I needed to use the restroom and shower at the far end of the hallway. Were the showers open? No curtains, no partitions, just a row of showerheads bolted into stained tile walls like a public pool locker room abandoned by the idea of dignity years earlier. The floor was permanently wet. Not freshly wet, institutional wet. Water mixed with soap residue, footprints, Hair. Time. Men moved in and out, casually talking, brushing their teeth, washing clothes and sinks, existing beside each other with a strange, forced intimacy that only detention, prison, war, and poverty seemed capable of creating. I stepped inside and kept my eyes forward. That was already becoming instinct, not looking too long at anyone, not looking nervous either. Across from me, under one of the shower heads, stood an old man who looked in his 70s, masturbating beneath the water. Detached from the room, detached from himself almost, he moved with the distant, mechanical rhythm of someone whose mind had drifted somewhere far away a long time ago. No one stared. I remember standing under the water, realizing that detention strips privacy away in layers. First your freedom, then your schedule, then your silence, then eventually the invisible boundaries people normally protect. Without thinking, you stop being alone almost entirely. And after a while, the truly dangerous thing is not humiliation. It is adaptation, because adaptation starts to feel natural, frighteningly fast. I still cannot unsee that scene. I have to admit, part of me envied how relaxed he was, a man in his 70s, detained, stripped of nearly every freedom, yet still carrying himself at the careless ease of someone untouched by the room around him. He laughed and enjoyed himself publicly with the kind of freedom most men only permit themselves in private. The first phone call you make from detention does not belong to you. It belongs to the person who answers. I put my water bottle on the sink as I found an open wall phone bolted to the cinder block. The receiver was heavy, the cord short, something you would expect to find hanging inside a forgotten phone booth and no one believed still worked. I dialed Aspen. A mechanical voice cut in first.

[Aspen]

This is a call from a detainee at an immigration detention facility. To accept this call, press Adam.

[Narrator]

They're charging you for this, I said. You have to accept it.

[Aspen]

I don't care.

[Alex (The Butcher)]

Where are you?

[Narrator]

Delaney Hall, Newark, Unit five.

[Aspen]

Are you okay?

[Narrator]

I'm here, I said. That's all I know. Behind me, the television erupted, shouting, chair scraping. I pressed the receiver harder into my ear.

[Aspen]

The house is so quiet.

[Narrator]

I'm still here, I said, though I wasn't sure what that meant anymore.

[Aspen]

I'm scared.

[Narrator]

I know.

[Aspen]

I don't know what to do.

[Narrator]

Just stay.

[Aspen]

I love you.

[Narrator]

I love you. The automated voice cut in.

[Aspen]

Your call will be terminated in 30 seconds.

[Narrator]

I'll call again, okay? The line went dead. Even grief had terms and conditions. Two minutes, then cut, then start again. If you could afford it. When I came back to the sink, my water bottle had been moved 2 inches to the left. Not taken. Moved. Inside unit 5, objects develop meaning quickly. A moved chair, a folded blanket, a missing spoon. Men communicated through tiny disturbances because direct confrontation cost energy and sometimes blood. I looked around the room. No one looked back. Across the room, two men sat at a table worn down to its corners. A chessboard had been drawn directly onto it. The pieces didn't match. One pawn was a bottle cap. They didn't speak. One moved a piece. The other watched him. Not the board.

[Alex (The Butcher)]

You play?

[Narrator]

One of them asked. Not well.

[Alex (The Butcher)]

That's fine. No one plays well in here.

[Narrator]

A piece slid forward. The Albanian passed behind me, carrying a tray with two hard boiled eggs and instant coffee balanced carefully beside the bread.

[Alex (The Butcher)]

First day is calibration, he said, testing

[Narrator]

whether I would react, whether I would confront someone, whether I would pretend not to notice, whether I understood the rules yet of what he kept walking.

[Alex (The Butcher)]

O fuel.

[Narrator]

If this story stayed with you, don't let it stay only with you. Share it with someone who still believes systems are made of paper instead of people. Follow the show. Subscribe wherever you listen, because somewhere tonight another phone is ringing inside another fluorescent room, and someone on the other end is trying to sound less afraid than they are. This is out of the Valley's shadow.