My anger flared up in me again. I felt like punching something, maybe him this time. I clenched my fists and held them at my side. He saw me and just stood there, ready for whatever was going to come.

“Fine,” I said. “It’s not working out. I just need things to stay good for all of us.”

He listened to the words passed from person to person on street corners, in looted stores, in the lines waiting for the meager food handouts from the government. In one such line, two old women spoke about the angels they had once seen.

“I was in the hospital once, long before all this,” said a woman bent over a cane to the woman standing next to her. They were both old, both had white hair and dark skin, dark eyes and lips painted over false teeth despite how the world was falling apart around them. “I was hooked up to a machine and it was beeping, beeping, beeping, until suddenly that beep became a trumpet, a song out of the heavens. Standing there was an angel, all in white robes with the face of my daughter who died when she was just a teenager. She stood there telling me that everything would be fine, that even if I let go of this life—and she told me it was my choice to let go or stay—but if I did let go, there was a kingdom waiting for me. All I had to do was believe. I told her I wanted to stay, that I wanted to be with her again, but there was my boys and their babies left here, and I had to stay for them. Then the trumpet became a beeping again, and I was back in the hospital. That’s how I know there’s more than this life, more than this struggle,” she said. “That’s how I know that there’s something waiting for us all after this.”

“It takes faith to get through this life,” the other woman said. “I do believe God does reward us for our faith.”

Murmurs like this went all up and down those long lines that always moved too slowly.

One day, in another line, he heard of a teenager who had been shot by a policeman. The cop said he thought the boy had a gun, but what he’d really had was a banana that the Red Cross had given him. He’d waited in line all day for the banana.

That night, he went to the spot where the boy’s blood was still on the ground. He took his spray cans. He painted over the bloodstain. He painted a gun with a banana instead of a barrel. He painted the skin peeling back, revealing the body of a child where the banana would have been.

The painting only stayed on the ground a few days before a crew came to blast it off.