The sky over Bombay was filled with gold and silver, masonry, bricks, steel girders, and human limbs and torsos, flying through the air as far as Crawford Market. A jeweler was sitting in his office in Jhaveri Bazaar when a bar of solid gold crashed through the roof and arrived in front of him. A steel girder flew through the air and crashed through the roof of Victoria Terminus, the main train station. A plate of iron landed on a horse and neatly decapitated the animal. Stray limbs and fragments of bodies were blown all over the docks. Bombay had never, till then, seen any wartime action. It was as if the city had been bombed.

In business, so entrenched has extortion become that the Bombay High Court recently ruled that extortion payments are tax deductible as a legitimate business expense. Extortion is a form of tax. Since there is a parallel justice system, there have to be parallel taxes. It used to be that there was only one gang—Dawood’s. But now that there are multiple gangs operating, as soon as the businessman pays one, all the others line up for their payments, so he finds himself paying four or five gangs at once. He might even be paying freelance extortionists, people who pose no real threat. The implicit or explicit tradeoff in the protection racket—you give me money, I give you protection from myself and others—no longer applies. The gangs are powerless to afford protection against the others. It is less a protection racket now and more like a simple mugging: You give me your money or I’ll kill you.

The narrative principles that propel the plot are alien to those of, say, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I spent two years. I entertain myself by imagining what would happen if the script were put up in workshop. My contribution to the script is minimal at best. I propose an idea that departs from the standard Hindi film formula. Vinod thinks about it. “We can’t do it because if we put it in the film the audience will burn down the theater. They will rip out the seats and burn down the theater.”

I withdraw the suggestion.

The statue’s resting place looked pretty good. All she really had to do was get him deep enough so the dogs didn’t dig him up before the sale. After her exertions over his tomb, the hollow Saint Joseph seemed to weigh nothing in her hand. He seemed to float in space before her eyes. She set him down on his back in the hole, but found that she couldn’t shovel the dirt on top of him, not right on his face like that. She turned him face-down, but that seemed worse. When she picked him up again, half-frozen dirt had sifted into his open base. You could see it through the translucent, cream-colored skin: Saint Joseph turning brown as he filled up with soil.

Jennifer was a performance artist. The blood was a prop in her act. There were many props in Jennifer’s act, but blood was the unifying device. She concealed plastic sacs of the homemade blood in various articles she had with her onstage—a child’s fluffy teddy bear, her pearl-encrusted evening bag, the bodice of her white bridal gown. For an hour she paraded about to her own synthesizer music, acting out dysfunctional family relationships and decrying bankrupt, oppressive governments, while the Barbie-doll world hemorrhaged around her. 

More than anything, he would like to turn the nighttime sky into 3-D color TV. That would be the most incredible hack of all, he says, and he claims to know how to do it, but it would cost a lot of money, even for a few seconds, and so far the funding has been elusive. He pitched the idea to his old friend Vernon DeCloud—financing celestial television by selling some sky-time for advertising—and though Vern would be perfectly happy to go down in history as the man who turned the stratosphere into a Coke commercial, he said no. Vern didn’t believe Tempesto could do it.

When the gates fly open the horses are like a freak storm moving over the track together, their legs attended by a cloud of dust that they trail behind them, their jockeys’ colors flashing kaleidoscopically in the sunlight. The loudness of their pounding takes me by surprise. It overwhelms even the crowd. I am so stunned by the sight of them that by the time I collect myself, they have disappeared around the turn. We who are sitting close to the wire stand there listening to the call, waiting for them to reappear.

A little under a million years ago, the old Atlantic land bridge having receded and a new one having formed over the Bering Strait, this thing, which was now a specimen we would recognize, found its way over—opposite to the way we came—and colonized Europe and Asia: herds of wild horses, alpha stallions with their harems of mares, “bachelor bands” of subdominant males, moving like wind patterns across the steppes and the plains. They had become ungulates—mono-toed, hooved—and they had become fast, faster than anything on the solid earth apart from the cats, and the cats could maintain their speed for only a few hundred yards or so, whereas this creature could run from morning to night.

So many horses had died in World War I that some voiced fears for the global equine population: numbers had dipped low enough that a single epidemic might put the species within range of extinction. Field Marshal Haig, not convinced by the tends of thousands of men he had watched ride to their deaths, was still arguing in 1926 for the “value” of the horse in war, writing that “as time goes on, you will find just as much use for the horse—the well-bred horse—as you ever have done in the past,” but by the time World War II broke out, even the old fops had accepted the fact that tanks, planes, and machine guns made cavalry tactics untenable.

Aneita Jean never liked the men at the Klan rallies. It scared her not to see their faces. It made her uncomfortable that they all seemed to know her daddy, and that he knew them by their raspy voices. She would watch them circling around on the hill, their crosses aflame, and snuggle closer to her father’s chest.

“I want to leave, daddy,” she’d say softly, fearful they might overhear and come running back, robes flapping behind like hateful phantoms.

“Hush up, Jeannie.”

She awoke to the sound of the door creaking open. She could tell from the backlit outline that it was not the baby’s mother who was coming in, but a boy. She said nothing, pressed her eyes shut, and pretended she was still asleep. When the boy climbed on top of her, she knew who it was. Silently, she slid the baby to the far corner of the blanket, until only her fingertips were touching the baby’s chubby thigh. Then she lay absolutely still while George Kelly ran his shaky hands over her belly and under her dress.

When you work at the pottery or the mill or the mine, you come to understand certain truths. Hands are lopped off. Bones are broken. Machines grind men up. Mines collapse. Lungs clog. Men drink. Women gossip. You are born knowing that most people get lost, that their stories die with them. You expect little else. And so you talk a lot about nothing and you get shit-faced and you welcome violence if for no other reason than because you can ignite it.

In Lima, dying is the local sport. Those who die in phantasmagoric fashion, violently, spectacularly, are celebrated in the fifty-cent papers beneath appropriately gory headlines: DRIVER GETS MELON BURST or NARCO SHOOTOUT, BYSTANDERS EAT LEAD. I don’t work at that kind of newspaper, but if I did, I would write those headlines too. Like my father, I never refuse work. I’ve covered drug busts, double homicides, fires at discos and markets, traffic accidents, bombs in shopping centers. I’ve profiled corrupt politicians, drunken has-been soccer players, artists who hate the world. But I’ve never covered the unexpected death of a middle-aged worker in a public hospital. Mourned by his wife. His child. His other wife. Her children.

My father’s dying was not news.

There were ten of us and we shared a single name: compañero. Except me. They called me Pintor. Together we formed an uncertain circle around a dead dog, under the dim lights off the plaza. Everything was cloaked in fog. Out first revolutionary act, announcing ourselves to the nation. We strung up dogs from all the street lamps, covered them with terse and angry slogans, Die Capitalist Dogs and such; leaving the beasts there for the people to see how fanatical we could be. It is clear now that we didn’t scare anyone so much as we disturbed them and convinced them of our peculiar mania, our worship of frivolous violence. Fear would come later.

Every year of Mayra’s birthday, since she turned one, I have asked Sonia to marry me. This year our little girl turned five. Each rejection has its own story, but until recently, before the two of them left, I preferred to think of these moments as one long, unfinished conversation. Mayra’s fifth fell on a hot, bright day. I had twenty-five soles in my pocket, the ring, and a little makeup kit I’d bought for my daughter. I was at the Plaza Manco Capac, waiting for a spot at the lunch counter of a cheap criollo place before heading over to see the women of my life.

Like most of the fight world’s habits, hand wrapping is both practical and ritual. Done properly, it protects the hands from damage without giving a fighter an unfair advantage. Like boxing gloves or a football helmet, wrapping functions as both armor and sword, a protective measure that allows you to hit harder and more frequently than you could without it. One of the officials murmured, “That’s beautiful.” Colonna said “Thank you” without looking up from his work.

The Polkaholics, sweating like stevedores, are in fine ironic form, decked out in white shoes, black pants, white ruffled shirts, and stunning leopard-print vests with matching oversize bow ties. All wear thick-framed glasses, and anyone standing anywhere near the stage can smell the torrent of Old Spice with which they douse themselves, Method actor style, before a show. They do not play polka versions of rock tunes, an ill-advised crossover strategy that has produced far too many bizarre novelty songs by polka bands. Rather, they play original songs and well-chosen polka covers that make use of rock sensibilities, winkingly sampled classic-rock phrases, and bursts of the jet-engine guitar whine common to certain forms of punk and heavy metal—all undergirded by drums and bass playing straight-ahead, hurry-up polka rhythms.

Tom C. cultivated a morbid fascination with clowns. Instead of merely doodling in class, he created obsessive dossiers of clown types: the savage Jester, the crocodile-teared Sad Clown, the enigmatic Bowler Hat, the rare Plume Clown, the annihilating Whiteface. He practiced different stylized ways of saying the word clown—drawing it out, barking it sharply, stretching his rubbery features to make a demented face while he said it, adopting a strangled or a booming voice—as if he could figure out what was hiding in the word by turning it inside out. He drew up clown scenarios and composed clown ditties, and invented ancient traditions to which they belonged. He tried to figure out if it would be worse to wake up one night to find a clown at the foot of your bed or to think you had dreamed it and then find a deflated balloon in your room the next morning.