terrible crime. Your sister’s name is Renee and her friend is named Nancy, and they’re both thirteen years old. Let’s say they were last seen on the avenue, getting into a car with two men. The two girls are found a week later, facedown in a ditch on the outskirts of town.
Let’s say you wonder if your sister paid for what you did. Now you’re sending out messages, lists of people you want executed. You don’t know who did it, so you want them all dead. You want to see bodies stacked up high, a monument to the pain you’re feeling.
Let’s say you want to murder the world.
And then one of the men is caught and tried, and sentenced to death. And one day you see him, across the yard, separated by two fences, and you get him a message. One day, you tell him, after the system kills you, I’ll get out. And I’m going to kill your family. You mean it. He knows you mean it, and that’s the only satisfaction you have.
Let’s say every time you come across someone inside, someone who hurt a child, you think of him. And you make them pay.
But the other man who killed Renee and Nancy gets away. Let’s say his name is Reyes. He gets away and stays away. Let’s say he vanishes somewhere in Mexico.
One decade, two decades, three. Reyes has a life. He gets married. He has children. He’s divorced. He marries again.
And all that time, while the man who raped and murdered your sister is walking the streets, you’re in prison, and your hatred is something sharp in your chest. Something darker, more toxic than rage. You don’t let your family call you. You don’t let them reach you. This is something you have to do alone.
Let’s say sometime during your second decade in prison you begin to think about the true meanings of simple words. Words like compassion. Understanding. Consideration. Forgiveness. Simple words.
No one you grew up with could have defined any of them.
Let’s say one night, on the block, you wake up wondering who you are. What right you have to hurt anyone. Is this an eye for an eye? Didn’t you take a life?
You ask yourself why you turned out the way you did, but you know you’ll never arrive at a satisfying answer. But let’s say you resolve to stumble on.
Let’s say in 2012 you’re released. All told, you’ve spent thirty-two years inside.
Let’s say you emerge into a world that’s disappointingly familiar. Your town is the same, only more so. The violence you loosed has become routine, and the kids have learned from you. Perfected what you taught them. Your mother’s dead. Your homies are dead. Some of your brothers have died too.
You go around town and tell everyone you’ve hurt that they don’t need to be afraid of you anymore. It’s a long list. You visit the mother of the boy you killed.
The last time you saw her was in the courtroom, when you were on trial for the murder of her son. Now she has salt-and-pepper hair, and sits in an armchair, both her hands resting atop a cane, her head bent down toward the floor. She’s still afraid of you. You get on one knee, and with all your might you give her an explanation of why you did what you did.
You don’t ask for forgiveness. You accept responsibility. When you’re done, she clears her throat, and says that no one in her family had anything to do with Renee’s death.
She’s afraid of you.
She says she’s seen you in the neighborhood talking to the youngsters. She knows you’re trying to make amends. Then she says she forgives you. It takes your breath away.
Then she changes the subject: “What else have you been doing?” she asks.
“Construction,” you say.
“So do you know how to fix cabinets?”
“Yeah, señora.”
“That’s good, mijo. Do you know how to fix fences?”
“Yeah, señora.”
“That’s good, mijo,” she says. “So now you’re gonna fix my cabinet and my fence.”
And then you get a call. Alfredo Reyes has been caught. Before you know it, they’ve brought him back from Mexico, and the trial has begun.
Let’s say you weren’t prepared to see the paunchy, middle-aged man before you, his slouch, his thinning hair. He tells the court that no, he never spent much time thinking of Renee or Nancy. Very rarely did he remember what he’d done.
You spent decades inside remembering what he did.
“It was consensual anyway,” Reyes tells the court, and your heart rate quickens.
“It was the other guy who killed those girls,” he says, and you clench your fists.
But you aren’t the person you were. And still. Let’s say you spent years dreaming of killing this man. And now you’ve sat through weeks of his trial, watching him. Thinking, repeating to yourself: Compassion. Understanding. Consideration. Forgiveness.
These words you’ve taught yourself. Words that suddenly seem meaningless again.
And then you find yourself, at your sister’s grave site, full of rage. And then you find yourself climbing a wall across the street from the courthouse, and up a ladder, to the roof of an old theater. Let’s say from here you can see the garage where the bus pulls in from the county jail. From here you could have a clean shot.
He says it was consensual. He described it.
And let’s say you find yourself on the roof, holding a rifle, the feel of it like an old friend. Let’s say you can imagine the bullet hitting Reyes, and the image of him falling is so clear in your mind, it’s like a movie you’ve watched a thousand times.
You’re watching, you’re waiting for the bus to come.
What happened on the roof of that theater?
Let’s say you saw the man you used to be.
THE KING IS ALWAYS ABOVE THE PEOPLE
IT WAS THE YEAR I left my parents, a few useless friends, and a girl who liked to tell everyone we were married, and moved two hundred kilometers downstream to the capital. Summer had limped to a close. I was nineteen years old and my idea was to work the docks, but when I showed up the man behind the desk said I looked scrawny, that I should come back when I had put on some muscle. I did what I could to hide my disappointment. I’d dreamed of leaving home since I was a boy, since my mother taught me that our town’s river flowed all the way to the city. My father had warned me, but still, I’d never expected to be turned away.
I rented a room in the neighborhood near the port, from Mr. and Mrs. Patrice, an older couple who had advertised for a student. They were prim and serious, and they showed me the rooms of their neat, uncluttered house as if it were the private viewing of a diamond. Mine would be the back room, they said. There were no windows. After the brief tour we sat in the living room, sipping tea, beneath a portrait of the old dictator that hung above the mantel. They asked me what I was studying. All I could think of in those days was money, so I said economics. They liked that answer. They asked about my parents, and when I said they had passed on, that I was all alone, I saw Mrs. Patrice’s wrinkled hand graze her husband’s thigh, just barely.
He