I stood and watched them for a while and was making to leave when the boy saw me and called out in a slushy voice, “Heeeeey! Blackie!”

I stopped.

“Where’s your bitch?”

The girl was staring at me quizzically, but when the boy added, “Bring the bitch! We’re fine with threesomes here!” she burst out laughing.

Whatever he was smoking had taken it out of him, so it wasn’t that hard to get him on the ground. I’d left the house intending to teach him a lesson, to give him a beating, drawing on the rage I felt at Irene’s tears, but who can say with any certainty what will happen even a minute from now?

He was on his back, on the lakeshore grass, and I was on top of him, each with our hands at the other’s neck, when suddenly I felt his girlfriend grip my throat from behind and squeeze. They were both choking me and all I could do—levering as much strength as I could from the base of my spine—was squeeze harder myself. I saw his eyes bulge and for a split second I had a vision of both of us dead, locked together, with the bitch on my back the only survivor.

I once read that, for over ninety percent of people imprisoned for murder or manslaughter—for killing someone—it was their first and only offense. Most were completely ordinary people who, for a brief moment, brushed up against something outside this world—an instant in which they were turned into instruments for death—then the moment passed, leaving them beached, ordinary once more, gaping in astonishment at their victim’s corpse and trying to summon them back to life as though that death, too, might only be momentary.

In that moment on the lakeshore, as I throttled him, as they throttled me, I remembered:

One night, while I was being interrogated following my arrest at the demonstration, the officer made a strange request.

I was blindfolded, being escorted from one interrogation room to another. They were pushing me down a corridor when I heard a sound off to one side, like the repeated banging of some metallic object. My blindfold was jerked up and the officer said, “Kill it.”

I looked and I saw it: a rat in a trap.

The tinny banging I’d heard was the sound of the rat throwing itself against the metal bars of its cage.

My eyes were still adjusting to the light and of course I had no idea how I was going to kill the thing. How do you even get at a rat in a cage? I stood facing the rat, bewildered.

Then the officer was pointing at a bucket of water.

“Drown it, you idiot.”