When she bought them, Joyce explained how they were made on the French-German border. The inventor was on the German side and his factory was on the French side. Or maybe it was the other way around. The point was that the place had been on both sides. That the shoes were from a place that knew borders are a lie, even when they define your world.

No wonder they look so funny, said Donny.

They look great, she said. They work with a suit, or in the field. Try them on.

He did, and they fit perfectly. Joyce was always good that way.

It was the only time he wore them.

On TV, Nassra was in Jackson Square now. The rebel leader Gertrude Almeida was giving a speech to the gathered crowd. Donny had the sound low, and he couldn’t read the captions from that far away, but you could see Gertie was mad.

Gertie made her name by being mad, about things she had every right to be mad about. She was mad before they locked her up for talking about those things, and she was a lot madder when she got out, after the riot in the Superdome that freed all the prisoners.

You could just hear what she was saying.

First they stole our future. Then they stole our present. So now we are going to take their past.

It was a good line. She got it from Donny, at the meeting where he pitched the idea for the truth and reconciliation tribunals. An idea they had grabbed on to, and then taken in a totally different direction than he had in mind.

Donny tried on the boots. After he got the dead bugs out. Then he walked over and turned up the volume.

A group of purple-hooded paramilitaries made some middle-aged white guy in a green-and-blue golf outfit kneel in front of Gertie. They pulled a noose around his neck. Or that’s what it looked like, until they made the guy take off his clothes, and you could see the rope was a leash.

Nassra explained that the man was a real-estate developer. One who had sold off foreclosed acreages in the Midwest at a huge profit to Tripto Labs and its biofuels partners.

He did not look good naked.

They had tried him for the destruction of the habitat of the animals that had lived on those lands, and for the poisoning of the Mississippi River watershed that the fuel producers caused.

The man did not produce enough money to satisfy the judgment, which meant he had to give back to nature in accordance with the old laws. By which they meant the laws of nature.

That part of it they didn’t get from Donny.

Maybe it was the way the camera caught it, but Gertie’s accusatory finger was a powerful and scary thing, especially close-up.