The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  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.

  TO 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.

  He was reminded of what he was missing out on again and again by his family, who could not understand what was keeping him in Texas. His parents, who had been heroically patient with Rais’s refresh-button dreaming, now regularly commanded him home. And Rais couldn’t deny that he needed what family alone can give.

  But he couldn’t and wouldn’t go home. Couldn’t because the doctor said so—at least for now. As Rais understood it, there was some kind of gas bubble in his eye, and it could expand and wreak havoc when gaining altitude. Flying risked the total loss of sight in his right eye. However, the truth was also that Rais didn’t want to go home, even after the doctor’s orders eventually lifted—and didn’t even want his family flying to America to care for him. This was a harder thing to explain over the phone.

  His mother might have been more important to him than the rest of the world, but in this moment it was even more vital to Rais that she not see him or his face. He had to be strong for them. His father was weak from the stroke. Neither parent spoke good English. How would they manage to get around, let alone tend to him? He had no home of his own, being at Salim’s still, and thus no place for his parents to stay. He didn’t want them standing in line repeatedly at the embassy, as he had. Abida couldn’t come because they weren’t yet married, and she couldn’t just hop on a plane and live with him in sin. If any of them did come, their welcome gift, Rais knew, would be vicarious despair: “They would have gone through the same suffering and pain—even worse than that.”

  It was especially difficult to tell Abida that he couldn’t come home. But he had gone to America with a mission. He had worked so single-mindedly for his goals; he couldn’t quit now.

  The more they pressed him, the more he stood his ground: “I said that, ‘No, I wanted to give it the fight, and maybe by the mercy of God things will change one day. I will make you proud. Let me stay there, and I will do my best.’ ” Rais was sure he would wither if he returned to Dhaka: “It will be haunting me for the rest of my life that I went to U.S.A. and I was shot and now I’m back home—and a loser. The background I had, that doesn’t allow me to be a loser. I was a fighter, and I was a soldier, and I learned how not to give up. And now if I go back with this medical condition, with this fear and phobia, it will be always there in my mind.”

  FOR THE LONGEST time after the attack, Rais felt terrified of strangers. Who knew what agendas lurked in the hearts of m
en? Rais confined himself to Salim’s house and made an exception only for regular visits to Dr. Spencer.

  When Rais went for his next eye checkup, he found that while God still wasn’t answering his prayers, He was at least receiving the messages. Wonderful news, at last: the petulant right eye could now detect and count fingers, could see Rais’s shadow on the ground, could perceive his image in the mirror. It was a huge improvement over merely sensing light. “We still have a chance to save some vision,” the doctor said triumphantly. That day, for the first time, Rais said, “I became very hopeful about getting my vision back.”

  A remaining complication was that Rais’s retina had detached again because of the growth of scar tissue, which is not uncommon after severe trauma. In November, Rais had to return for a second operation to reattach it. The retina was refastened and the scar tissue removed. The doctor left the silicone oil in for the time being, though you didn’t want to leave that in forever.

  The bills kept coming. The postal service started to feel like a subsidiary of the debt hunters. Rais’s barely established credit was soon shot.

  “I was getting medical bills from every direction,” he said. “The collection agents are bugging on me, they’re calling, they’re sending bills. And I didn’t know from where I would have got this money—$60,000-plus. And I was thinking that, God, will I ever be able to get my life back in this country?”

  Yet he felt grateful that it wasn’t even higher: “If I’d be staying in the hospital, the bill would be who knows how many hundreds of thousands of dollars. So now no wonder they let me go from the hospital, because they saved their back, instead of sending more bills and not getting paid.”

  It was only the beginning of his experience with this essentially American institution of debt. In time, he would discover how debt contradicted those attributes of the republic for which he had left home: how it bound you to history, and kept you who you were, and replaced the metaphor of the frontier with that of a treadmill.

  Sitting in Salim’s house, still healing, Rais pleaded over the phone with the collection people. He tried to tell them his story. “We feel sorry for you,” he remembers them saying in essence, “but this is our duty.” He was incredulous: “You cannot even excuse me even after knowing all these things? So where’s the humanity we talk about? That’s what I told many of the collection people.”

  Immigrant friends stopped by from time to time, sometimes bringing food or a “few bucks” to help with bills. But Rais knew that their lives weren’t easy, either, that they had dreams and hurdles of their own. He believed strongly that he should seek help only from big institutions: “I was feeling extremely bad that I should not be expecting this money from individual persons. It was my thought that a lot of organizations, they help people. And they’re helping people in September 11.” Rais believed that he had suffered on the Texan front of the same dismal war: “This incident happened because of September 11. At least can they come take care of my medical part?”

  He called United Way and the Red Cross and told them he was one of the 9/11 victims in Texas: “They said that no, I don’t deserve. I’m not eligible for any help because I’m in Texas. I’m not in New York City. And a victim of hate crimes of September 11 doesn’t fall in their category in their rules and their regulations to be helped.”

  Still, they visited Rais a few times with small amounts of food and cash. They were sorry that they couldn’t do more.

  For the first few weeks at Salim’s, Rais spent most of his time resting, praying, reading the Koran, and, twice a week or so, calling his family and Abida. Now, with his right eye slowly improving, Rais found himself looking toward the future. He started to tire of merely healing: “I thought, what I can do now, since I’m not going out? I’m wasting my time. So I thought about: learn something by staying home. That will pay me off later on.” This was no kind of life: lounging at home, praying, fearing the outdoors and the tattooed men who prowled there. “If I just stay home, get the medical treatment, I’ll be wasting time,” he said. “So I invested my time learning.” He couldn’t take classes outside, because Stroman’s associates could easily find him there, and he was reluctant to venture as far as a bookstore. What if he ordered computer-programming textbooks online and just taught himself at Salim’s? It would help him lay the groundwork for making money again. A computer stood at his disposal. He sought advice from his friends in the field and ordered Visual Basic 6 Black Book and Beginning ASP Databases and other titles.

  When Salim had phoned him in New York all those months earlier, Rais sensed that his old schoolmate regarded him as an investment. Salim had spoken with an aged kaka’s confidence: he and his brother had a business, they needed people, and they wanted to create opportunities for friends. When that angry man stormed into their market, it had interfered with everyone’s plans. Still, Rais figured that he was in good hands, because he was living with the man who brought him to Dallas and put him behind that counter. He assumed, correctly at first, that Salim would care for him—and would understand that Rais could no longer pay his half of the $800-a-month mortgage. It was Salim, after all, who got him into this situation.

  For the first several weeks, Salim—and his mother, who lived across the street with an older son—looked after Rais with genuine concern. Salim paid for that initial visit to Dr. Spencer and gamely drove Rais to and from his medical appointments. After a few weeks, however, there were changes in the boss’s demeanor. He sometimes ignored Rais; he spoke to him less and less, or on occasion not at all; he inquired less often about the state of Rais’s injuries, then stopped inquiring. The tone of the hospitality turned day by day. Honor slid into duty, then duty into obligation, obligation into burden, and burden into imposition. The care, when it started, was like what family would provide back home. When it ended, it had grown distant and calculated. “I could feel he didn’t want to go through that, because he’s a businessman and I’m pulling him down,” Rais said. Rais was no longer a friend in Salim’s eyes, and certainly not a fruitful investment: “I had no use. I was a dead horse for him.”

  One day, with an appointment looming, Rais was hoping for his usual ride. Salim claimed to be too busy; he didn’t have the time. “If you need help, go to a nursing home,” Rais remembers his friend saying. “I cannot do this kind of thing for you.”

  Rais was dazed. “I couldn’t believe how a friendly, sweet-talking person could tell me to go to nursing home, whereas I moved to Dallas by depending on him,” Rais said later.

  He knew that he had to get out. And go where? He was out of money, burrowing deeper into debt, possibly going blind in one eye, many oceans from his family, and now being pushed out of his only home. He remembered what he once asked Salim: “If I move to Texas, what I have there?” The question felt prescient now. The answer was becoming plain.

  WHEN RAIS SPOKE to Abida by phone, she asked what his face looked like. “I kept telling her that, ‘Don’t worry, things will get better. I’m getting another treatment, and things are getting better, and my face is already healing that time—slowly, slowly—though I had a lot of scars. But it’s healing.’ So she was asking me, ‘How bad is it?’ I said, ‘It’s not really that bad.’ ”

  “Do you remember I told you not to go to Texas, and I didn’t have good feelings?” she asked. “I was going to tell you at the time that something bad was going to happen, but …”

  Yes, maybe he should have listened. After all, her cryptically voiced fears had come true. What he wanted her to understand was that he hadn’t gone to Texas for himself. “She was the main reason behind coming to Texas,” he said. “If I would not have a fiancée, someone back home—I’m not blaming her, but just to analyze the point—I could have lived by myself in the New York City.”

  Abida wanted him home. “She was getting lot of pressure from her family to move on, and almost every week people were coming to see her at their house,” Rais said. “She was going through tremendous pressure to find someo
ne other than me.” He couldn’t fly home, he explained. He asked her for patience, for understanding and trust. “As soon as my doctor clears me to fly, I am coming home,” he told her.

  Several weeks after the shooting, the phone rang. It was a friend of Salim’s brother, but he was looking for Rais. He had heard what happened to him and wanted to help. Could he interest Rais in a job with his company? The pay was modest, just minimum wage. The job was in telemarketing—convincing motel and hotel owners, mostly from their own corner of the world, to refinance. Whether or not it was a plot by Salim to get mortgage money out of Rais by giving him an income again, it was a generous offer, and it was only sitting and making calls, so it wouldn’t tax his health. Rais accepted.

  On the job, Rais met a kindhearted Bengali who immediately took a liking to him. One day, unprompted, he offered that Rais could live with him in his modest one-bedroom. Rais slept on the sofa for the first several days, then on a mattress on the living room floor. “Pay whatever you can,” his new friend said. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

  So in December, at the tail end of a bitter year, Rais’s luck hobbled back to life. He left Salim’s for his friend’s place, where he paid no rent and never felt like a burden. In time, they would move to a two-bedroom. They would live together for roughly a year, at which time Rais would, at last, fly home to visit his family and Abida.

  WHEN THE TRIAL of Mark Stroman began the following spring, Rais was awaiting his fourth eye operation. A few months earlier, around the time Rais moved out of Salim’s, they had removed the silicone oil that was holding the retina in place. In a matter of weeks, that unruly retina drifted away once more. This wayward tendency was not typical and not good. Another surgery was scheduled for later in the year. The doctor’s best guess at this point was that maybe a quarter of the eye’s functionality could be saved.