Outside the door of the bank a young man appeared in uniform.

“You see that boy?” My grandmother pointed her finger at the guard. “Your mother killed him.”

Then she tweaked it. “Your mother sat right where I’m sitting and waited while people killed him. Waited.” My grandmother repeated the word as if waiting were the real sin. “You understand what she did?”

“She waited.”

“Exactly.”

That the young guard looked entirely alive contributed to the confusion of this moment.

Vavra widened her eyes in affected compassion. In the year since she’d let me, an online stranger, move into her apartment in Wedding, her tireless overtures of care and my circumventions of them had come to form a texture of cohabitation that could almost be called a friendship. [...]

While he is a regular on the betting list of potential Nobel laureates and the syllabi of classes on postcolonial literature, Ngũgĩ is often overlooked by the West’s leftist literati in their discourse about politics and fiction. Why does the revolutionary cast to his work go unrecognized? Perhaps some people view his novels, written in a “minor” language and steeped in “minority-centered” politics, as literally minor. Others may assume that his “postcolonial” worldview is wrapped in the barbed wire of the past—despite the fact that we continue to live in the postcolony. Or perhaps it’s simpler than that. Again, Ngũgĩ is a Marxist thinker—one born without an armchair. As fashionable as a dash of class analysis in a work of bourgeois autofiction may be, this level of political commitment from novelists simply won’t do. The truth is, Ngũgĩ is revolutionary in the way only a true artist can be—too revolutionary for our time.

The last person David chatted with was my mother. It was strange for me. It was only recently, since my father left, that I had gotten into the habit of truly seeing her. What I mean is that for the first time in my life I was able to remember what my mother looked like when she wasn’t around. Before that I’d had a block. Something in me, when given the opportunity, deleted her. She worked for a nonprofit that organized internships throughout the National Park System, and a lot of what she did was fight with the government or coax money out of private businesses. Part of her job was site visits. Six or seven times a year, she would be down at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, or maybe in Alaska, or on a peak in the Smoky Mountains. I would sometimes talk with her as she packed for a trip, and what most impressed me during those moments was the knowledge of how happy she was. My parents loved each other, but their love confused them. Witnessing their marriage was like watching a dog bark at the door when no one’s there. I’m not sure if they ever figured out what their problem was, but I would say it was mostly money and the fact that they took their disappointments in the world out on each other. My father was the only person absent from church that day.

“I met my counselor, Riccardo,” David said. “Sometimes Richard. His mother was Italian. And this fucking guy. This fucking guy was beautiful. He was a maniac. Total drunk. Total drug addict. But that was the world he came from: drunk, drugged, full of maniacs. He told me a story where he and his brothers shot a dozen horses—wild, starving horses—and bulldozed them into a pile and set them on fire. He’d been vicious. Now he lives his whole life in penance to other people and to the earth. When I met your mother, she made me think of him. This idea that, instead of destroying, you could protect. That you could dedicate your life to that. Not like you think you’re a savior, but just because that’s what you do. I think they’d get along. Fucking Riccardo, man. He saved my life. One morning we took the horses for a ride. The sun was coming up over Utah. The stars were still out. I was bitching about the first step. I was like, ‘Fuck God. I don’t want anything to do with God. God’s a lie.’ The usual. And then we came over this ridge, and we looked out across the desert. At first, it was black-and-white like the moon, but then all at once the buds on the plants opened up with the sun. They were all blue. I’m talking for miles. In the middle of it was this crater or maybe a cave. It looked like a huge blue eyeball. But I guess sometimes it’s purple. Or green. Or brown. It blinks when the wind blows. And Riccardo said, ‘This is God, you asshole. You live on God.’ ”

“I can see where he’s coming from,” my father said. “Your mother has a thing about her. That woman casts a spell. The first time I saw her I thought my heart was going to stop. The truth is, it took me a long time to be relaxed around her. Maybe I never was. It’s hard to explain. I wanted her to be free, but I also wanted that freedom to be mine. I think I’ve always been jealous of her. I sacrificed parts of my life to be with her, and I resent her for that.”

Yusuf gives me a little push toward the bed. We’ve been together for a year, but he is still in a hurry—it makes me laugh with excitement. He wants to be continually acknowledged, even waking me at night. Yusuf is a Moroccan muscle-builder postdoc in early modern at UC Berkeley. I don’t know what I am in his life. Possibly homosexuality itself.

“Ed,” Yusuf cries, “you look so sexy!” Ed looks up without bothering to act surprised. Won’t he resent this obvious lie when he sees himself in the mirror? He tips forward without changing his expression and the tears flow. Yusuf says with complete conviction, as though he hadn’t said it before: “Ed, you look so sexy!” He says it with joy: “Ed, you look so sexy!” Ed wears a questioning expression, and I can see that maybe he doesn’t look so bad. Yusuf says, “You look so sexy,” and I wonder if he is becoming demented. He says, “Ed, you look so sexy,” and Ed brightens a little. Ed does not look so bad, the shape of his head is fine, his features sculptural. His ears protrude, but that’s okay. Yusuf speaks with wonder and Ed begins to smile. “Ed, you look so sexy.”

Later that day we see animated dinosaurs, scaly and reptilian, on TV, and Yusuf says they look sexy. I wonder if Ed notices, but Yusuf’s credibility stays high.

Life is an intolerable burden if you have no idea what to do with it. I was a writer, but not the writer I needed to be. For that I had to become a different person. I thought the answer was Ed and maybe it was. He and I belonged together: the pressure of a more coherent self would have been intolerable. My loneliness had the taint of corruption. Was it part of an act? Displaying my deformity like a beggar in order to gain a penny? Ed’s seemed to me pure, stark, without context, without audience, as though pain were certainty—as though having pain were the same as having certainty. What is the right question to ask about a life? Ed exploded in rages he did not understand. His fury struck like dangerous weather. War in all directions, all against all. Our dog, Lily, crawled onto my lap and trembled as he stormed above, his features distorted or perhaps revealed.

On June 21, 1975, he found his first glory hole: “Hanging by my hands from the top of the stall, my legs rattled, I came hard in quick explosions. Bob, I collapsed inside from excitement.” Has anybody adequately described the sheer boredom of promiscuity? I did not have Ed’s patience, although I admired it. He waited in bars, waited at the baths, waited in sex clubs, waited in parks, waited at parties, waited for the orgy to begin. Someone’s outraged boyfriend burst through the door: the swarming limbs absorbed him but then the bed collapsed. He had an affair with a whole family. He had a fling with the Macy’s Persian-rug buyer on a stack of rugs in the storeroom, and with an obese man—it tickled him to agitate so much flesh with so small a button. “He came one little squirt, it sat on his belly, so little and innocent.” Where was I? Walking Lily perhaps. Her piss glimmered under the streetlights and raced down the sidewalk, a glittering stream. The streetlights exercised a principle of order, gathering buildings and trees flatly out of the darkness and into the inky, stately night. I passed a house where a stereo played a love song I knew, conventional lyrics, obvious, a melody climbing predictable changes, and it flooded me with longing.