He said it calmly. His companions laughed. I laughed too. He wasn’t expecting that. It must have seemed a deliberate measure of scorn when he was expecting me to become silent and pale from fright before collapsing to weep and beg forgiveness.

“It’s clear you’re not from around here. You’re too old for me to fight, so just get out of here. Otherwise, I’ll mop the ground with you!”

He finished with a shove, ignoring my provocation and rejoining the circle of his friends sitting on the pavement that formed a median in the street. They were having a good time with their snacks, their cigarettes, and their narghiles. I moved away, but no farther than one step. I had walked the whole night without finding my prey, and my skin was itching. There was no way I could leave, just like that, without one of them destroying my body with a beating that would send me to bed disjointed but with my head cleared.

A breeze stirred and carried the smell of a burning narcotic herb. Belatedly, I understood the secret of the young gang’s forbearance, and why they chose not to punish my impudence. Their virility usually went off like gunpowder for the paltriest of reasons, and their aggressiveness only ramped up at the sight of tears, but now both were dozing, drugged, slack. What rotten luck, I told myself. Looking up and sighing into the sky, I saw small banners for some political party fluttering in the air atop the lampposts. Glinting yellow in the dark, the banners whispered what I had to do in order to enrage those people who had brushed me off like an insect. I threw back my head, and with all the force I could muster, I spat into the air. Before the gob even fell back to the ground, the bearded young man leapt up like a madman, outpacing his companions to wrap his hand around my throat. He drove his thick-soled tennis shoe into my guts …

What a genius I am! How did I come up with that brilliant idea? And how many signs there were! Yellow, white, orange, green, black, and blue, they differed from one street to another, one neighborhood to the next, sometimes even from apartment to apartment within the same building. I only had to rip one down and spit or step on it for a volcano to erupt upon me. Before long, I discovered that the reaction was not limited to political parties. All it took was an insult to any flag, any slogan—belonging to a soccer team, a Boy Scout troop, a civic organization, a school, a company, an animal humane society—and I would ignite the fuse of a nuclear explosion in the brains of its followers, members, supporters, and defenders. They would swoop down on me, without giving a damn about anything. Don’t all people everywhere chant about shedding blood and laying down their lives for this or that cause? I guess that included teaching me a lesson by sending me sprawling on the pavement.