The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (9 page)

“That is the moment I think about every single day,” Rais said much later. “And it also helps me to check and balance—that why should I complain, why should I think about small-small things, why shouldn’t I do something better and bigger not only for myself, for others as well? Because if I enjoy life, if I control life, if I feel how life is important, then I should spread the message to others—those who don’t see it the same way; those who spoil their life behind drugs, behind this and that. Tell them how beautiful is that, just to live.”

Later that afternoon, on the same day he heard the angels, the hospital let Rais go. Because he was unfamiliar with the American health care system, he assumed this was a good thing. If they didn’t need to do anything further, then he would probably, with God’s blessing, recover quickly. On the other hand, his jaw wasn’t moving, he could not speak, his right eye remained closed, and the right half of his head looked like ostrich leather. All this even a devout optimist had to acknowledge.

I
N THAT MOURNING
house in Dhaka, the phone rang. It had been nearly a week since the mysterious call from Texas. Rais did not know his family had received that first call and so figured they knew nothing. He wanted to be able to move his jaw properly when he explained that, on a rainy afternoon, some man had fired dozens of scalding pellets into the right side of his face with a double-barreled Derringer pistol, and that he had nearly made it to heaven.

The family, with no news to go on, had seen its shock yield to grief, and grief begin to make way for transcendence. Now Rais’s mother picked up the phone. This time, only silence. Then a hint of a grunt
zipped through the undersea cables and into her ear. It wasn’t much. It was enough. “This is me, Ripon,” his shattered jaw mumbled, using a nickname from an earlier, happier time. “Amma, I am OK,” he managed to add.

He cried, and she cried, and everyone in the house cried. For the longest time, no one spoke. They just held their phones to their ears and listened.

Amma asked about the injury, about his course of treatment, about whether Rais could eat. Come home as soon as you can, she begged. Mightily she praised God.

W
HEN THEY ASKED
him to leave the hospital, the day after admitting him, Rais had mumbled some concerns. He would be fine, they said. He needed to return very soon for something called Outpatient Treatment. This was some kind of hard-to-understand American invention where you leave injured so that you can return and have done to you what they could also just do right now. Somehow, the act of leaving emergency care and returning as this so-called Outpatient made life easier—for somebody, though for whom wasn’t obvious. It was not unlike the maddening rules of bureaucratic classification that gummed up every little thing back home. Apparently, becoming an outpatient changed whose problem you were, which in America mattered greatly.

Still, Rais wondered: If there was more to do, why not just finish it off? He was right here. Why would they release him if he wasn’t whole? It would take time to understand that when an American hospital says you’re free to go, it may mean that they’re done with your insurance, not your problem.

In Rais’s case, there was no insurance of any kind. Rais didn’t have it, and Salim said the station didn’t have it because he liked to keep costs down. It was part of his business model—that as well as
recruiting old schoolmates as workers and mortgage-splitting housemates, by persuading them that toiling behind the counter of someone else’s convenience store was a swift path to owning your own.

The hospital assessors saw Rais’s bills mounting. They were already in the thousands of dollars: not only the ER care but also the hospital filing fee, the ambulance fee, the 911 call fee. They saw a fledgling immigrant and gas station clerk, and they had their ways of predicting that he wouldn’t be good for the money. He was out of the hospital that afternoon. He returned to Salim’s place with instructions to see an eye specialist by the name of Dr. Rand Spencer.

As it happened, Dr. Spencer was a fellow pilot who understood how the prospect of losing an eye might especially frighten an ex–Air Force man, for whom sight was a source of power and distinction. “If that’s part of your identity, then you’ve lost that part of yourself,” he said. “From a psychological standpoint, it probably makes you feel like you’re less of a man than you used to be.” The doctor was a tall, solid oak of a man who wore tweed blazers over his scrubs. He was one of the leading eye surgeons in the city, and not cheap. The first appointment alone would be $500. Salim was generous enough to pay that bill himself. During the first consult, the doctor peered into Rais’s uncooperative right eye. It was full of blood—in the deep aspects of the socket and under the retina, where it risked destroying the rods and cones. The lens had been pierced by the pellets, and a cataract was forming. Yet the eye could faintly perceive light. It could, for example, tell if you were shining a flashlight into it. Without such light perception, there would have been no hope of saving it. But this was modestly good news. A surgery was scheduled.

On the day of the shooting, Dallas police officers had come to Rais’s hospital bedside to show him images of known criminals. Hundreds of pictures. They all kind of looked the same to him, but he gamely picked four. They came to him again and again, and by early October he had narrowed his choice to two. Now, on the day of Rais’s first surgery, he saw on television the news that yet another
mini-mart clerk had been shot. This one was at a Shell station in Mesquite. First Hasan, then him, and now an Indian named Patel. The first and the third had died at once. Rais was aware of being the lone survivor of the three: a strange, bittersweet stroke of luck. In the recent case, the store camera wasn’t a fake, and the TV showed a video of the crime. The man in the video, raving furiously at the clerk, was the same man who had barged in and wanted to know where Rais was from. He matched one of the two photographs Rais had picked.

Rais went into the operating room. They put him to sleep with general anesthesia and pulled back his eyelids. Dr. Spencer saw now that two of the shotgun pellets, as best he could tell, had fully perforated the eye—gone in the front and come out of the back to settle somewhere behind it, where they would have to live forever. In that brief journey through the eyeball, much of the injury to Rais’s sight had been achieved. The doctor removed the bloodstained vitreous gel behind the lens, which had developed into a cataract. He removed the lens as well to avoid the need for further surgeries. He applied laser to the retinal tears near the exit wounds, to prevent the retina from detaching, and inserted some silicone oil to hold it in place. Rais went home and was told to take his eye drops regularly and to hope for the best. If he kept praying, the eye might well see.

Dr. Spencer, who had a flourishing private practice, was willing to cut Rais some slack on the payments. “I was certainly willing to work with him from a financial standpoint and do whatever it took to not send him to the poorhouse because of my bills,” he said. Still, the bills kept coming to Rais—from Spencer’s office, from that initial ER visit. The outstanding dues swelled by the day, and Rais began to hear from all manner of people employed in the collection of debt.

Less than a week after the first surgery, he received a letter from a company that called itself a reimbursement specialist, signed by a so-called Financial Assistance Representative who didn’t seem all that interested in assisting:

Dear RAIS BHUIYAN

We have attempted contacting you by mail and telephone but our efforts have proven unsuccessful. We understand that your time is valuable, and, therefore; will take only a moment to ask you to consider your hospital bill and the advantages of resolving it.

We feel certain you will be greatly relieved when this financial obligation is behind you. Also, taking care of these charges will prevent your account from being submitted to collections.

We hope you will take a moment of your time to respond to this letter. Your efforts could bring you financial assistance for your medical bill which is $12611.02.

I would appreciate a call as soon as possible at 972——. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

Twelve thousand six hundred eleven dollars and two cents was close to $12,611.02 more than Rais possessed. He had a tiny reservoir of savings—barely enough for medicine, groceries, and calling cards—and no other assets. He wondered what happened in America to patients like him. Maybe the bills were somewhat for show, and the doctors kept treating you regardless—sending the bills as a formality, as Dr. Spencer did, but caring for you whether or not you could pay. Or maybe they did just cut you off. What in God’s name would he do if they did that? What if, worse, they came after him? It was not a good time to be Muslim. Imagine being a Muslim who lived in Texas and refused to pay his debts to a Christian hospital.

T
O RAIS IT
was evident that the man who shot him was not a crazed loner, because inscribed across his body were the symbols of some sad, deranged tribe. He had to belong to something to do this—had to have some cause. Indeed, if an untrained newcomer went looking for fellow members of this tribe, they could seem to be everywhere in Dallas: bald heads, big arms and thick fingers, tattoos, sleeveless shirts, sports team jackets.

Rais decided to confine himself to Salim’s three-bedroom house as much as possible. There whole days passed in worry and self-questioning. Should he leave home? Was it safe? Were they, whoever they were, still after him? They could strike at any time. Rais figured, “If I go outside, somebody from Mark Stroman’s association will try to kill me, because I’m the only survivor.”

Nightmares devoured his sleep. They made the attack happen to him again and again—that man with those searing eyes walking in, pointing the twin-barreled gun, asking where he was from, and then the stings. The days weren’t much better, filled with flashbacks. He sank into an abysmal depression and knew he needed what the Americans called “help,” even though he came from a place where people could be suspicious of such things. And yet help would cost so much. He was no longer simply an invalid; he was becoming a debtor. Bank of America, when it got wind of his situation, would close his account, compelling him to borrow money from friends and open an account in a community institution called Inwood National Bank. No therapy for Rais, then: “I said, ‘Forget about that, going to a psychiatric, going to a psychological evaluation. Pray to the biggest psychiatrist in the world, which is God. Keep on praying to God.’ He is my psychologist.”

It must have crossed his mind from time to time how different it would be back in Dhaka. People spoke less of needing “help” there, because it was taboo, of course, but also because you had people. Rais grew up in that vast quarter of the world where you can ask friends you haven’t seen in years to do some giant task for you, and they will be offended if you cheapen the situation by thanking them. In Dallas it wasn’t like that. Even the fellow immigrants and Muslims whom Rais had met before the incident lived on their own one-bedroom, two-bath islands, at once in the community and apart from it. “They had their own lives,” Rais said. They came to visit him occasionally, but it was not like it would have been back in Dhaka,
where his wounds would be numbed, his mind stilled, by the sheer volume of people around him. It was not hard to picture it: He would lie in bed, and they would come—uncles with overwrought opinions about the war days and aunties with dishes he once claimed to enjoy and old schoolmates with evergreen dorm-room memories. All the while, he would be in the care of his parents and siblings—and, if she still would have him, his Abida.