But I don’t respond this way, and someone slips a suction tube into my mouth to clear my windpipe and induce me to start breathing. Someone else wipes me clean of the blood and mucus smearing my face and body. They thump me on the back—part encouragement, part prod—to shock my body into responding. My collapsed lungs resist, and someone places a mask over my nostrils to force air into me. My stubborn lungs strain with the pressure, but even as I convulse and splutter, they expand only slightly.

As if, by some grace, I’ve been given the power to choose whether I wish to enter this world or, by holding my breath, forsake it.

8

On a ship sailing from England to Italy, a poet despairs—a storm rages outside, and a storm rages within. He’s confined to his cabin in this wooden coffin taking him away from everything he loves. It’s not fame he lusts after anymore, nor the moon’s otherworldly beauty.

His friends and supporters have chipped in generously to finance this convalescence in Rome, in the hope that the merciful Roman winter would grant him a reprieve, allowing him to return to his world—to his fiancée and friends, to his poetry. But he knows there’s to be no return from this journey. The symptoms are recognizable—blood, phlegm, a wasting away, a hollowing of chest and body. Hasn’t he nursed and lost his mother and brother to the disease’s ravaging clutches?

He has asked the friend accompanying him to buy him some laudanum for seasickness—a drink of that could put an end to his suffering. Who would have thought the human heart capable of containing so much misery?

The sea outside, the very air, heaves and strains.

9

In the basement of a church in Oakland, a to-be father who will never know his son serves a much delayed breakfast to hungry children. There are three tables, each with twenty kids, and they’ve been waiting for food the last thirty minutes. They’ve been led in their daily pledge already—I pledge to develop my mind and body to the greatest extent possible; I will learn all that I can in order to give my best to my people in their struggle for liberation; I will discipline myself to direct my energies thoughtfully and constructively rather than wasting them in idle hatred—and one of his Panther comrades has given them an impromptu lecture on resistance and history, but they have less than half an hour to get to school, and they are restless and ravenous.

He arrived at the church early that morning only to find the storeroom ransacked—the flour strewn around, the fridge emptied, the eggs smashed, the milk spilled—and one window busted open. There had been little time for anger or investigation, but he’s sure he knows the perpetrators: the pigs in uniform.