The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas by Anand Giridharadas

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 anothermini-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