Free The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas by Anand Giridharadas Page A

thought of himself as an “allied combatant” going up against “enemy combatants,” as he’d heard them called on the news, may have been contemplating a gruesome attack on a Dallas-area mosque—a kind of 9/11 counterstrike.
    In Stroman’s car the police found a loaded semiautomatic rifle with at least 150 matching cartridges; an Uzi knockoff with 29 cartridges; a .44 Magnum; a .45 Colt; a Top Line bulletproof vest; a pill bottle with a little cocaine; bottles of Effexor, an antidepressant, and Carisoprodol, a muscle relaxant; 2.5 grams of marijuana and rolling paper; and a hat that said, “Show me your tits.” Long afterward, Stroman addressed what he called the “rumor” of his planned attack on worshippers at the Richardson mosque. It had crossed his mind, he confessed. He would become the patriotic American inverse of “Mohammed Atta and all them fanatics” from 9/11. After all, what a statement they had made. “In my mind, if I’d walked in that mosque and leveled about a hundred or so people, that would’ve made a statement, too,” Stroman said.

Outpatient
    “W here am I?” he remembers asking. Rais figured the voices belonged to the angels at the gates. He had always wondered about the Afterward. The voices sounded warbled and far away, as in the movies. They were beautiful voices—perfect women’s voices. They seemed to be above him now. Were the angels holding his hand? Yes, he sensed that they were. Was this heaven or earth?
    “Am I still alive?” He gargled the question through what tasted like a doubly salted ocean in his mouth. He resolved to try to open his eyes. He pulled at them hard. No movement, only feverish pain.
    “Yes, you are still alive,” the nurse said in that perfect voice. “Good morning!”
    He was still down here.
    Night had fallen and lifted. It was morning now, the first full day living with fresh realities. Memories of the incident started trickling back. Joyful tears poured over his bulging face. His jaw seemed under someone else’s control; he had barely managed the few wordshe had uttered and sensed that more would be difficult. He couldn’t swallow.
    After a time, he understood that his two eyes were no longer on the same schedule. The right refused to bargain. The left hinted at being slightly more reasonable. Once again he pulled. And this time the left opened, glazed with its own saltwater. It was definitely not heaven, just a floodlit, sterile room, and he was on an adjustable bed, a woman gently clutching his hand.
    It wasn’t long before he asked to see himself. The nurse handed him a mirror.
    “I looked at myself with my left eye open,” Rais said. He saw stitches. Heavily seasoning the puffed right hemisphere were little blood-hued dots. These were where three dozen or so burning-hot pellets—designed to escape the cartridge and form a metallic spray to bring down erratic birds—had entered: they flew into his mouth and broke a tooth, flew into his cheek, his nose, his ear, his forehead. “That face was swelling like this big, and this area”—around the eye—“was a big bruise, like somebody punched you a hundred times,” Rais said. “All those dots, all those gunshots. And I said, ‘Wow, I look terrible.’ Though I was happy that time that I was alive, once I see my face, I was in a shock. Will I live with my face like this for the rest of my life?”
    It didn’t take him long to wonder, “What will Abida think?”
    The nurses informed him that, despite contrary appearances, he had been mightily fortunate. The pellets had flirted with entering his brain and, at the last second, held back. They were millimeters away when they stopped.
    As Rais tells it, though he was sickened by his condition, even in this moment, another part of him—the part that always kept him in check—tried to spare him from a descent into self-pity: “I was thinking that, well, why should I complain? I got my life, so let’s not worry about that right now.”