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

He remembers feeling a strange, immense gratitude. “I could feel the happiness—that how beautiful,how precious is just to live,” he said. “How life is so precious. I got my life back, and I’m still alive.” He could speak to his family again. See his mother, his father, Abida. That was the greatest blessing. If he felt other, darker things, he refused to confess them.
    “That is the moment I think about every single day,” Rais said much later. “And it also helps me to check and balance—that why should I complain, why should I think about small-small things, why shouldn’t I do something better and bigger not only for myself, for others as well? Because if I enjoy life, if I control life, if I feel how life is important, then I should spread the message to others—those who don’t see it the same way; those who spoil their life behind drugs, behind this and that. Tell them how beautiful is that, just to live.”
    Later that afternoon, on the same day he heard the angels, the hospital let Rais go. Because he was unfamiliar with the American health care system, he assumed this was a good thing. If they didn’t need to do anything further, then he would probably, with God’s blessing, recover quickly. On the other hand, his jaw wasn’t moving, he could not speak, his right eye remained closed, and the right half of his head looked like ostrich leather. All this even a devout optimist had to acknowledge.

    I N THAT MOURNING house in Dhaka, the phone rang. It had been nearly a week since the mysterious call from Texas. Rais did not know his family had received that first call and so figured they knew nothing. He wanted to be able to move his jaw properly when he explained that, on a rainy afternoon, some man had fired dozens of scalding pellets into the right side of his face with a double-barreled Derringer pistol, and that he had nearly made it to heaven.
    The family, with no news to go on, had seen its shock yield to grief, and grief begin to make way for transcendence. Now Rais’s mother picked up the phone. This time, only silence. Then a hint of a gruntzipped through the undersea cables and into her ear. It wasn’t much. It was enough. “This is me, Ripon,” his shattered jaw mumbled, using a nickname from an earlier, happier time. “Amma, I am OK,” he managed to add.
    He cried, and she cried, and everyone in the house cried. For the longest time, no one spoke. They just held their phones to their ears and listened.
    Amma asked about the injury, about his course of treatment, about whether Rais could eat. Come home as soon as you can, she begged. Mightily she praised God.

    W HEN THEY ASKED him to leave the hospital, the day after admitting him, Rais had mumbled some concerns. He would be fine, they said. He needed to return very soon for something called Outpatient Treatment. This was some kind of hard-to-understand American invention where you leave injured so that you can return and have done to you what they could also just do right now. Somehow, the act of leaving emergency care and returning as this so-called Outpatient made life easier—for somebody, though for whom wasn’t obvious. It was not unlike the maddening rules of bureaucratic classification that gummed up every little thing back home. Apparently, becoming an outpatient changed whose problem you were, which in America mattered greatly.
    Still, Rais wondered: If there was more to do, why not just finish it off? He was right here. Why would they release him if he wasn’t whole? It would take time to understand that when an American hospital says you’re free to go, it may mean that they’re done with your insurance, not your problem.
    In Rais’s case, there was no insurance of any kind. Rais didn’t have it, and Salim said the station didn’t have it because he liked to keep costs down. It was part of his business model—that as well asrecruiting old schoolmates as workers and mortgage-splitting housemates, by persuading