horror, others rallied the hyenas on, yet others pleaded for the hyenas not to mortally wound him. 11. Hospital pictures revealed that from the beating his face had lost its features. Blood-red, ochre, and plum-colored bruises, tumescent and everywhere split; it looked like something that from inhumation had begun to putrefy. 12. One eye from distension was sealed shut, and from a baton blow that had severed his face from ear to chin, a new eye was opened. 13. Before it was sewn shut, there were those who deposed: along the round of the iris was inscribed, novue ordo seclorum. “A new world has begun.” And the jury went into a room to deliberate. There, with the information they were handed, they elevated and elaborated, parsed the pure from the impure, the subtle part from the gross, and within a matter of days returned with their verdict: ot guilty. How? How! It was as though the beating was legerdemain, that your eyes perhaps were cataract, your reasoning sublimated, from dereliction deprived, or that what you saw was a base version of the real, that the deluxe, superlit version existed elsewhere, where only those twelve people had in lux-ury stood. Sensing the fulminate taking shape, civic leaders and clergy rose to prayer, imploring, flapping, squawking, one by one, running the sky the way crows do before a storm; but no sooner had they come than space was emptied of them, of sense itself. The city had turned into a sense vacuum, and in a matter of hours into this vital negativity, this perfect black body, particles began to collide and form a kind of supernova. It was just about dusk when you felt it from the heavens with an appalling force hit. In a section of the city there was thunder, lightning, a gale strong enough to bust open the cages and set loose a horde: they flooded into the streets throwing bottles and rocks, overturning garbage cans,
and screaming from rage. Then they began striking at cars with bats and bars and jumping up and down. And then we saw, from a peephole in the sky this time, a big truck lumber like a lost elephant into an intersection and dumbly stop. Within seconds they had swung up and lifted from right out of his seat the driver, a sad, waif-like figure. They dragged him into a clearing, where he cowered and looked confused, because never, even on TV, even in the movies, had he seen anything like this. They screeched and hollered and spat at him and jumped up and down, and threw him to the ground, and one of them held his head down with a foot, and the others kicked and struck him, and he wondered— as he wobbled to his feet like a newborn calf, lost his balance and fell, and tried to find his feet again— what was going on, and they stood over him, kicking and striking, aping each other, and then a man with an X on his chest hurled a canister at his head, and then another man, at point-blank range, did a trick with a brick, busting it on the scrawny calf ’s skull, whereupon his body collapsed to the asphalt and went limp. We saw the bloody mop of his newborn head; his innocent body curled up unconscious. We saw the bricklayer do a little jig.
To Adam, a “white boy” was someone with pearly skin, freckles, and lanky limbs. White Boy was Nick—his partner at the bar—and that wasn’t what Adam saw when he looked in the mirror. He finally reached the bar and sat down in front of his computer and tried to work on a spreadsheet. But “white boy” kept drumming at his head, the ugly injustice of it making him mad and sad at the same time. It brought back junior high school, all those feelings. When Adam first came to America, he had enrolled in the local elementary school, where for two years he blended in fairly well; but by the time he reached junior high they had started “bussing,” and so for a semester and a half he took that rolling purgatory across town to what they called a “minority school.” When the bus door opened all forty students shuffled off the bus holding their breaths. Blackness was everywhere, alarming, that much of it all of a sudden, exotic, vaguely menacing, brothers and cousins of Crips and Bloods, all with searing wits, cocky rooster’s walks, and the jazziest way with words. What exactly he was, with olivebrown skin and black hair and eyes as black as theirs, was a wide open question. Some figured he was a kind of Messican, some wondered whether Arm-onion was A-rab. Say whah, Lebuhn-on where de fuck ih dat. Syria, and Israel, in that general direction, he might’ve said, if he’d thought it would help. In the meantime, he watched with horror—dozens of unambiguously white kids harassed and spit on and punched and tripped and made to squirm through the gauntlets of the hallways. He’d perfected his pace through it; not too slow not too fast, lest they prey on his fear, which he held in so tightly that by the time he hopped on the bus home he was close to shitting in the seat. Within a month two boys from the bus psychologically collapsed, and he never saw them again. Now and then, before he fell asleep, Martin Luther King would appear: his childlike face and river-big voice, telling Americans, “I HAVE A DREAM.” Adam too had a dream, Dr. King, and a prayer: that as he slept God