The lawyer had given me the phone number of child welfare, which he said might tell me the name of Jackson’s case manager, but I could only contact people with a Global Tel Link account. I wrote letters and tried not to go insane. I sent one to Eva’s old address, and one to her at her father’s address, but I had little faith that either would reach her. I called Jimmy Darling, but the call did not go through, since he didn’t have Global Tel Link. I told myself if I ever got out, I’d blow up Global Tel Link.

Gordon went over the bridge to San Francisco alone, ate at a Vietnamese restaurant downtown that his student Romy Hall had told him about. Not that she was recommending it to him. She listed it among places she missed. The cook, she’d said, has this funny habit. After he uses them, he bangs his cooking tongs twice, and tugs on his shirt. His smock has a big grease splotch where he does that. And his father sits chain-smoking and chopping meat, upstairs, where the bathrooms are. The cook was there, on Gordon’s visit. He banged the tongs twice and pulled on his shirt. The father was upstairs, chain-smoking and chopping a huge pile of meat.

Laura Lipp walked into the bathroom. We stopped talking and stared. She looked like the Exorcist. She’d snuck punch from us. She was loaded.

“I’m from Apple Valley,” she said.

“We know,” everyone shouted. Sammy stood to push Laura out of the bathroom.

“But I never knew. I didn’t listen. Didn’t hear. I never understood what that means. The valley of apples. It’s about temptation. Right? Sin. See? Poisoned fruit. Oh, it feels so good,” she said, “to have a place to put your anger, to punish someone like you’ve been hurt. That is the truth and every woman like me knows it. The one who hits her child with a hanger or a belt or who shook a baby, it’s all the same. You do it because it feels good. They won’t say. They won’t tell you how it is. They don’t have the courage. I’m telling you. The devil goes in us and we do it to feel good. I wish they had stopped me but no one did. God, He stopped the hand of Abraham. He intervened. But where was He when I needed him? He wasn’t there. No one helped me. No one.” She stumbled like a blind person, kneeled on the floor on her hands and knees, and sobbed.

I dreamed I had just won on The Price Is Right. There was a crushing sound of applause, cheers, and whistles when my name was called. It was a deafening waterfall of clapping and screaming. I was trotting toward the stage in this pounding noise, the cheers of the studio audience, when I woke.

The first one he looked up was Sanchez, Flora Martina Sanchez, whom the others called Button. Her case was all over the internet. Sanchez and two other teenagers had assaulted a Chinese college student near the USC campus. He was premed, and the one allotted child his family was state-sanctioned to have. According to the confession Sanchez provided, the student had tried to “karate chop” her. All three kids mentioned in their confessions that the victim cried in a foreign language as they hit him with a baseball bat. The bat was green aluminum, Worth brand. It had on it fingerprints of the two boys and Sanchez. Sanchez had waved her Miranda rights. They all waved them, gave confessions, went to trial, got life without parole.

The word violence was depleted and generic from overuse and yet it still had power, still meant something, but multiple things. There were stark acts of it: beating a person to death. And there were more abstract forms, depriving people of jobs, safe housing, adequate schools. There were large-scale acts of it, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in a single year, for a specious war of lies and bungling, a war that might have no end, but according to prosecutors, the real monsters were teenagers like Button Sanchez.

In the primitive part of the mind, violence was body-to-body, punching and clubbing and cutting. Those people went to prison. Were not offered any kind of mercy. Signed up for Gordon Hauser’s class. Did or did not do the reading.

After indulging in the difficult facts, he all at once grasped why these kids, Button and her friends, had killed the poor student and ruined their own lives.

The student was not a person to them. That was the reason. They would not have harmed someone they knew was a full person. He was alien to them, his fluency in Mandarin something the kids never considered.

“Did you ever see the green flash,” she asked him after class, “down at Ocean Beach?”

He had not, he told her. She explained that it was an optical effect at sunset, when rays from the top of the sinking sun turned green. She had never seen it either, she said.

“Are you sure it isn’t a story cooked up by the Irish drunks who live out there?”

She laughed. They were standing outside the school trailer. It was a June evening when the sun sets late. The light was gold from valley haze and low, slanting into her eyes, filling the irises.

Looking at someone who is looking at you was a drug as strong as any other.

“Move it, Hall!” an officer yelled. It was time for evening count. “Move your ass, now! I said go!”

Whatever space Geronima would have needed to find a way to face what she had done was not provided in prison. Prison was a place where you had to be strong to get through each day. If you thought about some awful act you’d committed, every day, in graphic detail, enough to prove to a parole board that you had insight, the proverbial insight they wanted, needed, to let you go home, you might lose your mind. To stay sane, that was the thing. To stay sane you formed a version of yourself you could believe in.

And if she did show insight, tell them what was on her mind the day she killed her husband, why and how she did it and what she felt after, excitement, guilt, denial, fear, revulsion, if she showed the board how honest and precise she could be in her knowledge of her crime and why she committed it, if she spoke openly about the impact it had on her victim and on others, on society, if she trotted out the whole horror of it, she would, at the same time, freshly reactivate for the parole board all the reasons why they had wanted to lock her up. You could not convince them. There was no way to win.

Our Lady of the Valley smelled like the lining of an old woman’s purse. Our Lady’s Pocketbook, which had been collecting powdery makeup residue and mold spores for decades. Gordon had no religion, though the idea of mercy, offered by churches, a Christian god, but never the state, had been in his thoughts. He sat down at the end of a row of pews. On the other side of the aisle was a confession booth. The sinner’s side had a screen for talking to the priest. The screen was a metal plate randomly hole-punched. It looked like a road sign riddled with bullets.

Wind was moving through the church, from a single propped door in the back. Papers somewhere lifted and flapped, suggesting presence, but then again not. Suggesting wind stirring papers, and no one present, except Gordon. He stared into the vents, from his seat on the pew.

There were real, epistemological limits to knowledge. Also, to judgment.

I can only know myself, if I can know anyone. I can only judge me.

There’s a pizza place up Irving, Hauser said. They spin the dough in the windows.

I saw everything. The stretching floury disks that collapsed on the hands of the dough makers in their chef’s hats, fists working the disks around, dough growing in girth, orbit, then back up in the air. I saw the huge wreath of flowers that hung from the closed entrance one morning, announcing the death of the old man, the pizza patriarch. I’d never seen a wreath that large. I was eight or nine. Not yet into trouble. I linked flowers with death. That huge wreath connected them for me.

I saw the shining lid of the ocean from Irving Street, the way it rose, on a clear day, like something that breathed, that was alive, down at the end of the avenues.