A man’s voice, ragged and on the verge of cracking, yells, “Say his name!”

The chorus howls in anguish, “George Floyd!”

I join a group of perhaps 200 occupying the federal courthouse plaza. The energy is committed and insistent, the air echoing with chants. No justice, no peace! No racist police! Eventually though, a restlessness begins to stir in the slanted afternoon sun. A young kid, white, with shoulder length dirty blonde hair and an ashen hoodie, looks back and forth between the courthouse windows and the lantern that he’s liberated from a garden bed. Smartphones swarm to document. The moment is too much to bear: He’s a deer frozen by headlights until a woman calmly walks up to him, makes eye contact, and takes the lantern out of his hands. He backs away, dazed, but he’s coming unravelled. A couple minutes later, I watch him fish an empty liquor bottle from his backpack, then stride across the street toward a glass-fronted store. I’m on his heels, anonymous in my black hoodie and sweats, face concealed behind a double layer of black paisley, Android ready to shoot. I’m hoping to help keep the peace as long as possible, but it’s no longer possible.

A glossy black crow takes flight from a streetlight, startled by frightened screams behind me. I turn to see a Ford Explorer, engine roaring, plow through the crowd with a Black man hanging from its white hood. Pandemonium. A few of us sprint after the car. A police perimeter encircles the protest, but the driver slows and weaves past it as the injured man slides off the hood. We keep running, lungs burning, screaming at the cops. Stop that fucking car! He just hit three people! They do nothing. I haven’t yet learned that the police will end up arresting the man who was hit.

The once well-organized march devolves. Entropy increases. Windows of a car dealership are smashed. I jog a few blocks away from the vandals, then duck into an alley hiding a group of three teens, their eyes wide and darting. I nearly leap out of my skin when one of them test fires her stun gun, its ionic crackle announcing that it’s ready for anything. Through a cloud of adrenaline, I rush back past the courthouse, slip into a huge mob outside the downtown Nike store. Glittering chunks of ice-blue glass strewn across concrete and fleeing armloads of quick-dry athletic wear signal that the protest has become something else. A chain of humanity links together, arm in arm in arm, and stretches across the storefront to stop the looting, to maintain peace. But it’s too late: property has been damaged. A riot control vehicle—all sharp angles, glossy black panels reflecting flashes of red and blue, loudspeakers growling orders—escorts two dozen of Spokane’s finest down the block. White skin, black armor: violence in grayscale. The shield wall advances. All of our faces are masked against an invisible virus in the air. These masks, though, do little to protect us from the toxic whiteness that billows forth to disperse the protest. Hissing canisters, a stampede, a cacophony of screams. Choking gas burns my eyes and throat, leaves me coughing and spitting, my face streaming with tears and snot. I can’t breathe.

•

I’m staring at a screen, a video, an incomplete reproduction of a scene. A hulking white cop is standing in front of a late-night diner, towering over a drunk Black woman sprawled before him on the sidewalk. A second officer, a spitting image of the first, enters the frame and immediately menaces a trio of other women with a nightstick, then drags and shoves them to the ground. The officers gesture with their batons and bark orders at the women, who are compliant, except for the one who isn’t, who won’t do what they tell her. She’s made up for a night on the town, dressed in a sleeveless white blouse and an orange skirt, her feet clad in liquorice-colored heels with a leather strap binding each ankle. To the growing number of drunk patrons-turned-bystanders, the cops don’t seem to be protecting or serving anyone—they instead seem like bullies, like caricatures of masculine rage looking to pick a fight with a group of black and brown women. The orange-skirted one resists them. She keeps trying to stand up, but one of the officers forces her back to the ground. She spins away from him, stumbles to her feet, momentarily escapes the long arm of the law.

The two cops look like they could be twin brothers: tall, balding, bulging with the girth of what I imagine is too much desk duty. Each sports the dark blue uniform of the Denver Police Department, a golden badge glinting on their left breasts, shielding their hearts. Each is wearing a pair of poorly polished black tactical boots. Hugging their right hips: matte black, semi-automatic, .40 caliber Glock pistols, waiting in their black leather holsters. On each left hip: a canister of pepper spray. They’re waving black steel batons. They do not speak to the women, but rather yell, command, rebuke, their voices rising against the desperate protests of their detainees and the murmurs of the onlooking crowd.

It’s two in the morning. A strip of neon lights encircling the restaurant bathes the altercation, the sidewalk, the faces behind the tall glass windows, in a sickly glow. A clandestine voyeur—a halo security camera perched high above on a streetlight—surveys the scene, looking for trouble. The camera swears to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. A cockroach near the corner of the building twirls its antennae in the air for a moment, then decides it’s seen enough and scuttles toward a dumpster down the alley.

One of the officers, the one with a cigar clenched in his teeth, grabs the disobedient woman, whom he outweighs by more than 100 pounds, and slams her to the ground, her limbs flailing like a doll. The other officer—neither of whom have yet been fired by the Denver PD—unloads a canister of pepper spray at point-blank range, punches another woman in the face. The four women—who have not yet reached a $360,000 settlement with the city—are left handcuffed and writhing on the curb.

•

The streets of an industrial downtown sweat in the mid-summer heat. Beams of sunlight tear through the clouds to stake out the boundaries for an incendiary confrontation near the heart of Denver. The dilapidated has-been of a coliseum does its best to muster the energy for one more unforgettable event. A dirty white and rust-colored pigeon takes off from its perch atop the gray dome, spiraling higher and higher to get a bird’s eye view of the gathering citizens who will soon claim the streets. The brick walls and chain-link fences and as-yet-unshattered windows hold fast in solidarity.

Inside, the backdrop of the stage flutters with a huge anarchist flag—a five-pointed ruby star on jet black cloth—while the quartet of Rage Against The Machine bellows fury into a crowd pushing 10,000. My brother Bobby’s right arm is draped over my shoulders, my left arm over his. His dark eyebrows furrow beneath an olive military cap, complete with a blood red star, a la Che. He’s sweating through a well-worn scarlet T-shirt—printed with a five-sided fist icon—and a pair of old jeans. I’m in a plain charcoal tee, ripped jeans held together with safety pins, and black high-top Chuck Taylors; an American flag bandana is knotted around my neck and my short, dark hair is spiked into a fauxhawk. Neither of us has shaved for a few days; neither of us particularly cares to do so regularly. How punk-rock we are: a couple of tall, skinny, pissed-off white guys.

We’re not vets, but we’re both wearing orange plastic wristbands printed with Iraq Veterans Against the War—the nonprofit group organizing the concert, the march. Mine will last most of a year before falling off, a year during which I welcome every opportunity to tell people what the disintegrating bracelet stands for and why I wear it, why so many people oppose the war, why we’re doing it all wrong.

We throw ourselves around, pogoing and pinballing our way through a moshing swarm of comrades, still hugging each other’s shoulders. Each of our free arms flings a fist into the air in perfect tempo with “Killing in the Name,” a song decrying the ties between police forces and the KKK.

We snarl in unison with the lead singer, again and again, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!”

Bobby’s hair is long enough that it’s crawling out of the back of his hat, around his ears, flopping just a bit each time we jump; he’s in some kind of anarchist/hippie phase that will never really end. The stage lights flip onto the audience. It’s a lot of people in their twenties, like us, clothed in punk or metal or anarchist attire. Reds and blacks, spiked wristbands and chokers, bleached and dyed hair, bandanas and mohawks, T-shirts and jeans. We want to send a message to the senators who own giant homes, luxury cars, and mountain condos, and who keep sending so many young Americans to fight a morally bankrupt and unjust war. We want each and every one of these young Americans to have the opportunity that we did: to follow their curiosity while remaining mostly free from the crushing yoke of student debt. And to do so without having to take up arms against phantom foes, without trading their own blood for dividends in their masters’ offshore accounts. We want our privilege to matter.

We repeat the defiant refrain, over and over, jumping higher and higher, until the song ends in a ferocious crescendo of feedback and crashing cymbals, leaving us in an ecstatic frenzy. As the bandmates hug each other at the front of the stage, so do Bobby and I. We’re all smiles; neither of us ever hesitates to bare our perfectly imperfect teeth. The guitarist grabs the mic. Meet us at the march! Rage Against The Machine exit stage right while Bobby and I trickle out into the street amidst a throng of dissidents, a tributary joining the torrent heading toward the 2008 Democratic National Convention at Denver’s newer, corporate-named arena.

Bricks and windows can’t wait to be introduced to each other. The air is ready to be displaced by clouds of tear gas. The would-be riot bides its time. The dirty, rust-colored pigeon flutters high above, surveying the gathering with impunity—for there are no eagles anywhere in sight.

We slip into the river of people carrying anti-war signs and march across downtown. No war with Iran. Global justice not war. Rage for peace. Iraq veterans against the war. Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot. Bankers sit in their offices, high above, in towers of steel and glass, looking down on the protesters like so many ants milling about in the dirt. The march is vibrant and raucous, even in the oppressive heat.

We join a chant. “Exxon, Mobile, BP, Shell: take your war and go to hell!”

Sidestreets are blockaded, leaving a single path to the event center hosting the DNC. We cross the six-lane highway through the heart of the city, right next to my college campus, right next to a late-night diner with a watchful security camera. Someone with a megaphone announces that anyone who is “not arrestable” should not proceed any further.

Bobby and I confer. “They’re not going to arrest thousands of people.”

“Fuck it, let’s go.” I pull up my bandana, hiding my face behind an American flag.

There’s a theatrical element to it all. It’s peaceful, civil, organized, and permitted, yet also castrated: a chain-link perimeter fence bars us from coming within half a mile of the convention. The crowd murmurs. After a lengthy negotiation, a delegation of veterans and the band members, who had taken up posts at the front of the march, are allowed to approach the building to deliver a message. The rest of us gather in the highway, staring down a line of militarized cops: bulky black armor, nightsticks, teargas canisters, assault rifles loaded with rubber bullets, bodyshields, shiny onyx helmets with visors screening their faces. Men transformed into something else entirely by their uniforms.

Bobby and I stand at the edge of no-man’s-land. There’s a gap of about 20 feet between us and the obsidian-carapaced creatures. Their shadows stretch toward us. A protestor dressed in plastic mock riot gear, complete with rubber gasmask, steps into the void and holds up a sign: This is what a police state looks like. He takes a knee and spreads his arms wide, posing for photos in front of the wall of living weaponry. After a minute, he scurries back into the fold of humanity.

A police radio crackles and mumbles orders. The officers look left and right, confirming their instructions with quick nods, then begin to advance. I put my arm around my brother’s shoulders. He stands up taller and reciprocates. My heart is doing its best to find a way to escape the prison of my ribcage, but I glare at the encroaching line of armored violence and offer a silent fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.

•

I walk across campus, carrying a backpack heavy with books—continental philosophy, behavioral neuroscience, and addiction psychology. My ragged jeans don’t yet need safety pins to hold them together. My black Ramones shirt devours the sun. I pass the diner where the group of four women have not yet had their late-night altercation, cried on the sidewalk. I pass the intersection where Bobby and I have not yet had our standoff, protested in the streets. High above, a bald eagle flaps and glides. Its feathers, like its silhouette against the luminous sky, a contrast of light and dark.

At the edge of campus I spot the brewery—a red brick building with two walls of tinted glass—and jog across the street, my thumbs hooked under the straps of my backpack. I’m nervous. Inside now, I see him sitting at a round bar table. The cop from the video. He’s not chomping a cigar. He doesn’t look like a villain. Or like a superhero, for that matter. I introduce myself and shake his hand. Let’s call him David. He is my long-lost half-brother and we are meeting for the first time. After a couple pints, and just before we say goodbye, we put our arms around each other and his giant figure completely envelops me.

•

Twelve-hundred miles away in Portland, Oregon, I answer my cell, a Motorola flip phone with a pull-out antenna.

“Hi honey. How you doing?”

“Hi mom, I’m fine,” I lie.

Dozens of empty PBR cans and orange prescription bottles litter the glass coffee table, the kitchen countertops, the dingy carpet. Granite sweatpants and a soot black Social Distortion hoodie hang off my emaciated frame. Months of overcast and perpetual drizzle roil behind my eyes, swirl between my thoughts.

“What’s up?”

A false black widow strings together some disjointed threads in a ceiling corner of my bedroom.

“Well, I’ve got something I need to tell you about. I tried to tell you when you were younger, but you weren’t ready to hear it.”

There’s something that outweighs the comfort of a secret: she needs to tell me about my half-brother that I never knew existed, the one who’s trying to uncover his family medical history. She needs to tell me I’m an uncle—the uncle of a nephew whose death, ten years hence, will color these reflections on boys and men and heroes and villains.

•

It must have gone something like this: At a neonatal ICU in Denver, a baby boy with a mess of tubes taped to his face and arm sleeps behind a wall of plastic. His head is misshapen and his spine is crooked. A battery of monitors bleep their sympathies.

“Your son is very sick.”

“We haven’t been able to get the seizures under control.”

“We’re not certain what’s causing them, but they’ll likely result in severe neurological impairment.”

“It could be mitochondrial disease.”

“We’d like to compile your family medical history as soon as possible.”

“I’m adopted,” the cop—now sporting a light grey, XXL Yankees jersey and faded blue jeans—tells the doctor.

He runs a hand along his stubbled jaw, pinches his chin with cigar-scented fingers, sighs deeply. A doctor puts a hand on his shoulder. Somewhere outside, somewhere in this vast, interconnected world, in that very moment, an inky raven leaps from a barren branch.

“Have you ever been exposed to any contamination?”

•

I try to imagine the scene that brought our lives together: an avalanche of noxious smoke boils through the streets, sending thousands fleeing in chaos. A tall, hulking, not-yet-balding cop strides through the haze. My half-brother. This time, he’s cloaked in the dark blue uniform of the NYPD. He holds up a man in a ripped, bloodstained, $3,000 khaki suit as they stumble out of the maze of Lower Manhattan rubble. They’re both coated in fossil-gray powder. They look like ghosts. The cop half-drags the injured man toward an oasis of flashing amber and crimson light bleeding through leaden fog. The silence of a graveyard fills the air. Pulverized, billowing remains of the world’s two tallest buildings search for a resting place. Perhaps a couple of paramedics wearing respirators meet the cop and the suit at the edge of the still-roiling cloud. They shoulder the capitalist’s arms and carry him toward the back of an ambulance. His bloodied head slumps to his chest. The cop wipes his face with the crook of his elbow, then doubles over in a coughing fit. He turns back toward Ground Zero.

One of the paramedics calls after him, “Here, take one of these. We’re gonna be here for a while,” then hands him a white particulate mask.

David goes back into the dusty crypt alone. He returns, again and again, sometimes with injured people, sometimes with lifeless corpses. He’s in shock, but is relentless and machinelike in his labor. He lifts massive chunks of rubble—like some sort of superhero—to save stock brokers and insurance agents, his fellow Americans. A pile of concrete and steel debris coughs up a shell-shocked rat that tries to run away, but there is no away.

•

Eighteen-hundred miles away, I awaken to a cheap Nokia rattling next to a pile of cocaine on a mirrored bedside table. I’m naked, save a pair of white cotton boxer shorts. The sides and back of my head are shaved, prickly, the top a chin-length mop of bleached blonde; I’m in a bit of a Kurt Cobain phase that will never really end. It’s early. Bloodshot eyes squint above dark crescent bags. My breath tastes of soured booze. I wipe half-encrusted drool off my face with the back of my left hand and answer the phone with my right.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

It’s one of my friends across town. He’s frantic. He tells me that a plane just crashed into the fucking World Trade Center. I think he’s fucking with me. I don’t own a TV, so I walk around the side of the house—a duplex on University Hill in Boulder, Colorado—and duck a sprawling spider web in an oak tree. I sit on my neighbor’s fuzzy maroon microfiber couch. I watch the second plane hit the South tower. I sit in my underwear and watch the towers collapse, watch the world change.

•

It’s recess, fifth grade, the year my family moved to Boulder: a grassy field, browning in early Fall and abutting an elementary school’s asphalt playground. Bobby takes the snap and drops back to survey the field. The sudden movement of his powder-blue gym shorts, whitish Nike tee, and red clamshell Adidas startles a grasshopper into flight. One of the defenders counts one-banana, two-banana, three-banana as fast as he can.

I sprint downfield with a small pack until an open patch of real estate beckons me to peel off. My slate-grey jeans, white Jordache high-tops, and teal, dolphin-printed t-shirt look out of place amidst the other kids’ athletic wear. I wave my arm and yell. I’m open! Bobby sees me, licks his upper lip, and flings a tight spiral. He grimaces as soon as the pigskin leaves his hand: we’re practically joined at the hip these days, almost always a package deal when we pick teams—but not today. It’s a perfect pass. I catch it against my stomach. Interception. I shoot a toothy grin back at Bobby while my teammates wrap me in their arms and ruffle my hair.

“Nice one,” my brother concedes, shaking his head, a tiny smirk lifting the corners of his mouth.

•

An old photo of David: he’s young, hasn’t yet joined the NYPD, hasn’t yet shouldered the burdens of 9/11 first response, hasn’t yet fathered a sick child, hasn’t yet moved to Denver and gone on to abuse those he’s sworn to protect, hasn’t yet buried his son, is still in the Army. He’s part of the foundation of a human pyramid, holding up his fellow infantrymen—fifteen in total, all of them white. In the background, flies swarm a trash can overflowing with red plastic cups. The young men are all smiles: a menagerie of togas, camouflage boonie hats, sunglasses, crew cuts, bad moustaches. Smoking and drinking. At the top of the pyramid: a guy in a blue Mickey Mouse T-shirt—maybe he got it at Disneyland. They’re just boys being boys, brothers in arms hoping to protect America from the bad guys, whomever they might turn out to be.

•

Early in fifth grade, Bobby and I start a gang. We call ourselves The Slugs. I make a two-inch square booklet out of lined notebook paper, staple its spine. I sketch a slug on the cover in graphite, lightly shade its translucent slime trail, and fill the pages with our creed in microscopic scrawl. Something about kindness and bravery, always standing up for justice. In my English class, I write a story about a team of mercenaries, including Bobby and me, who break into a fortified compound to rescue a group of innocent captives. We’re armed with miniguns and nitroglycerin explosives. Society presents us with hypermasculine role models, action heroes—Schwarzeneggers and Stallones and Van Dammes—who employ force and violence in the name of justice. We haven’t yet learned better than to idolize them.

After school one day, Bobby and I stand in the mottled shade of a cottonwood. A brown garden snail gathers itself up and lurches forward, again and again, carrying its home—at once a shield and a burden—across exposed roots and sunbaked grass. Little wisps of cotton whirl on the breeze like the ashes of collapsed buildings. In unison, Bobby and I take long, snorting inhales. We clear our throats. I purse my lips and drip a viscous glob of saliva into my right palm. Bobby mirrors me. The spittle, full of tiny white bubbles, catches the dappled afternoon sunlight. We look each other in the eye, nod, and shake. Commingled spit squishes between our clasped hands. We hug with our free arms, laugh a bit. I release my new brother and spread my fingers, transfixed by the glistening web stretching between them. I wipe the slime on my acid-washed jeans, creating a new shade of gray.