thought about the boys who robbed us. I had an idea of their lives. A culture of violence, alien and extreme; a world of dark streets, arbitrary punishment and deprivation, gangs, armed children, a kind of steady viscerality. No one offered them help. If they were killed, the police wouldn’t bother to find the killers. Everything around them advertised the low price of their lives. They were ragged, malnourished, they were not physically imposing young men. Even the weapon they used to rob us was cheap and makeshift—there was tape on the handle of the knife. Society didn’t protect them, and so they had no incentive to obey the boundaries society created to protect others. For them, abandonment and freedom were inseparable; by freedom, I mean the freedom they felt to violate the rules others followed. The consequences of being caught robbing us were not significantly worse than the consequences of not robbing us. If they had begged peacefully, if they had asked for charity, we wouldn’t have given them anything.
Unemployment, if nothing else, gives you time to think.
For instance, it is insane to walk down a city street in America and expect the homeless men there not to attack you and rob you.
I wondered if that boy had ever used his knife on a woman whose purse he wanted. It was an enormous blade, more enormous now in memory. The fact that he had taped up the handle only made the threat seem more authentic. I felt a horizon of rage expand within me, long and bright, something like what I imagined my husband was feeling when he spoke of killing the boy who had the knife. The rage was simple, satisfying, and I savored the sensation as it melted out of me like ice.
I couldn’t think of the boys as thieves. Jean Genet was a thief.
Thief —from Old Saxon and Middle Dutch, and a whole gene pool of other dead tongues. I find it difficult to come across a word and not think about its origins. This ends up being debilitating, as you might imagine.
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