so fully conscious, and that I was thinking things so calmly, wondering when they would stop, if there was anything I could do to hasten the end of this situation, hoping Terrence would come out, hoping Terrence would not come out because it would be so terribly embarrassing. Then suddenly, I heard his voice, and I knew that my cousin Jason was with them, and I thought: Oh god, they are going to kill me.
But then I must have really, finally, blessedly gone into shock, because I cannot remember the beating ending, only that I suddenly became aware that they were gone and I was lying in the parking lot and I should probably get up in case someone came and ran me over. But the idea of getting up seemed impossible, and I decided it was all right to lie there because I would see headlights if a car was coming. And then I think I slept, or something close to sleep, because I had the sensation of waking when Terrence found me.
“Oh boy, oh boy,” he kept saying. “Sweet mother of god. Hold on, buddy, just hold on.” I could hardly see his face because the streetlight was behind him, but I knew his voice, and I loved him, oh how I loved him. I knew he would call 911 for me, and I knew he wouldn’t leave me, and I knew that he loved me, just as he loved all God’s creatures, and in my head I pretended that I was a deer that had been hit by a car, and Terrence was the kind of man who would stop, who would pull over, and he was holding me because I was real to him, because my face, in its terrible nudity, demanded something from him. It was my otherness that so angered those boys, my unknowableness, my dangerous wrongness. They couldn’t understand me and it made them want to extinguish me, and Terrence couldn’t understand me and it made him want to save me.
And that was all it was: a difference, a genetic predisposition, some ancient snippet of DNA that made you want to fight what was different from you or else fuck what was different from you, and both strategies existed in our population. I pictured Terrence with a strange-eyed, unknowable Denisovan wife, and I pictured Tyler and those boys murdering his alien and wonderful hybrid babies, and I understood then about bashing infants on the rocks, about internment camps and gas chambers, about slave ships and plantations and shooting black young men on the streets, about all of human history, it seemed, and then I was gone for a little while and I wondered if, even hoped really, that perhaps I was dying, but then the ambulance came and it was like a dream ending, and I wished that I could have stayed in that parking lot with Terrence forever, just breathing and quietly bleeding while he held my hand.
* * *
—
I don’t remember a lot of what came next, but I do remember how bright the hospital lights were and I remember big flurries of everyone doing a lot of stuff to me and then other times when I was left alone for what seemed like a long time. I remember overhearing a conversation between two orderlies who were taking me from one place to another about how one of them had gotten a new dog, and they were so excited to meet the dog and I wanted to ask what kind it was, but when I tried to talk they weren’t able to hear me and just went on talking as though I weren’t there. We took what seemed to be four or five different elevator trips, and I couldn’t imagine what kind of Escher-like design the hospital must have to require so many different elevators. When we finally got to my room, the orderly bent over me and said, so softly that only I would be able to hear, “You’ve gotta get out of here, buddy. This isn’t a real hospital.”
Adrenaline sang through my body, and suddenly I was in a large white room, but I was lying on the floor and I was by myself. I couldn’t see anything else in the room, but I remember the floor was extremely cold and my back was aching from how cold it was, and I wondered if possibly I was simply lying on a sheet of ice, but somehow I