a human impulse and not a moral failing on my part as his son but some kind of genetic adaptation, a holdover from a time when we decided whom to fuck and whom to kill based on whether they were the same or other, was deeply comforting to me and intellectually freeing.
Questions that had always bothered me, about slavery, about the Holocaust, about the Armenian genocide and the Rwandan one, about the human ability to look at another human being and decide, nope, I think that kind of human is an animal, suddenly coalesced into a powerful shape of interdependent facts and observations. Human beings were murderous because it had been necessary for our survival. Human beings committed genocide because we had evolved to commit genocide. Human beings projected themselves onto animals, and then retracted that sympathy, and then projected that sympathy once more, confused about the line between what was like us and what wasn’t, because for thousands of years we had been making exactly those judgment calls. Violence was not something that had infected us, some alien thing that could slip into our bloodstream and cloud our judgment via ideology or mechanization. It was not gray-eyed Athena tricking Ajax into murdering sheep. It was sewn in. We were violent, murderous animals, by design.
So I was not entirely surprised when a group of boys jumped me behind the Rite Aid as I was getting off my shift. I was tired, but I was excited because I was about to go meet Anthony. If we got caught, fuck it. I hadn’t spoken to Bunny since that night in her house, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want her to apologize for her father, to try to explain him to me. And I didn’t want to have to apologize for myself.
While Matthew Shepard had been murdered when I was a child, it was still a story very much in the zeitgeist. In 2007, Ryan Skipper was found dead of multiple stab wounds and a slit throat, and his murderers had driven around in his blood-soaked car, bragging of how they’d killed him. So I understood that other men would want, and possibly would try, to kill me. But it had not occurred to me that it would happen in my hometown. In some sense, I think I viewed North Shore, even then, with the child’s eyes with which I had first seen it when I was eleven. It seemed to me too good a town to harbor such violence, though I kept being proved wrong. Donna Morse’s murder. Bunny beating Ann Marie. Yet I still assumed that if such a thing were to happen to me, it would happen to me in college, or in my adulthood, when I was living in a glamorous metropolis. I just hadn’t imagined I would be getting off work at Rite Aid, still wearing my blue smock, lighting a cigarette.
The one I recognized first was Ann Marie’s boyfriend, Tyler. “Hey, faggot,” he called to me in the parking lot. And so I knew what they were there for, but I did not know how far they meant to take it. I paused, and perhaps because I was very tired, I sighed dramatically and said, “What do you want, honeys?” I had never let myself talk like that except in private, and it felt thrilling and dangerous.
“We wanna talk to you,” one of the other ones said, a boy named Jonah whom I had taken English with sophomore year. I remember we read The Great Gatsby. “Just come here, we wanna talk.”
I started toward them. “Listen guys, I—” But by then I was close enough, and Tyler socked me in the face. The pain was as sudden and real as when you bark your shin on a coffee table, and for a moment I could not understand what had possibly happened. He hit me again, and I went down.
Then I was on the ground, and they were kicking me, and they were shouting things and spitting on me and laughing. I had my hands wrapped around my head because my instinct was to protect my face, but this left my ribs and stomach open, though I was curled into a ball as well as I could. “Dude, I’m gonna pee on him,” one of them said, but I don’t think he ever got around to it. I was surprised by how much it all hurt. I was almost indignant that I was still