The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (41 page)

A moment later, he tempered his enthusiasm for his future children’s contact with his relatives: “I know the errors of my way, and I know I messed up. And when I have kids, I’m not going to—I’m going to be there. And I’m not going to allow them to be around anything, and that includes—if my sisters and my mom’s messing up, I don’t want my kids or nothing to be around it, because I don’t want them to see that. And that’s why I worry so much about my sisters and hope they get everything together before I get out, man, because I’m going to try help them as much as I can. But I can only do so much because it’s time for me to start my own family.”

All this talk of a new life as a protective family man seemed to make Robert zoom out and think of politics. “America’s losing it,
man,” he said out of nowhere. He was referring to “morals and stuff like that.”

“Same-sex marriage and all that?” he said. “That ain’t right, you know what I mean? That’s like that Sodom and Gomorrah: men was laying with men and all that. And what happened after that? Got blasted—you know what I mean? And now everything’s being accepted.”

T
HAT EVENING RAIS
was at the mosque in Richardson, the one where Mark Stroman had dreamed of slaughtering dozens of Muslims all those years ago. The congregants were celebrating the end of Ramadan. Rais wore a blue embroidered shirt in the back-home style and donned a golden cap as he entered the building. The worshippers ranged widely in age, ethnicity, and even dress, wearing everything from T-shirts and shorts to dress shirts and khakis to mesh Cowboys jerseys. Children were everywhere, frolicking in knowing and unknowing defiance of the solemnity.

Rais joined the other men in the waves of bowed prayer, in a building whose decor blended the acoustic ceiling tiles of institutional America with an Islamic dome painted pastel blue. After the prayer, the crowd spilled out into the heat, which was relenting at last, into a courtyard where sweets were on offer to mark the fast’s end. Volunteers gave out plates filled with Japanese party snacks and quarter doughnuts and such, to be washed down with a syrupy pink juice.

Sitting in the courtyard, Rais was talking about work—his job at the travel company. He was thriving there and had climbed to the point where he supervised a small army of engineers in Britain, the Philippines, and India. His phone endlessly rang with calls from foreign numbers: people needing his troubleshooting skills. Something that worried Rais, though, was that only his kind of position—supervisory work—seemed likely to stay in America. He saw it in his own company.
The managers were here, but all the new engineers they hired were overseas. The low rungs on the career ladder that had allowed him to build his American life were disappearing, and what good was a ladder with rungs only at the top?

Sometimes it had been Rais’s job to figure out how to shift work from his adopted country to countries not unlike the one he had left. He did what he had to do. But he said, as the sunlight slipped from the courtyard, that his campaign to save Stroman and his deepening understanding of, and commitment to, America had prompted him to push back against offshoring whenever he could. He had pressed his boss to consider more local hiring. If his engagement with the Stromans had shown him anything, it was that people starved of life chances are faster to hate. Rais had realized, much to his alarm, that he might be toiling at night to heal wounds that he was responsible for cutting by day.

Then, rather suddenly, he stopped speaking. He closed his eyes and began to pray. After some minutes, returning to this world, Rais observed that the end of Ramadan was “sweet and sour” for him: sweet because he could eat with gusto again; sour because the time of blessings had passed.

T
he following May, ten months after the execution, Rais found himself on tour in the woodlands of central Connecticut. These had been punishing, exhilarating months for a new fixture on the lecture circuit. Any gathering discussing peace or interfaith harmony or the like seemed to want Rais Bhuiyan on the platform. It wasn’t quite his dream of co-lecturing with Mark Stroman, but it was something. There were high school events in Dallas itself; talks at Stanford and DePaul; an Amnesty International anniversary in Los Angeles followed by an Amnesty International anniversary in North Carolina; a foundation gig here, a United We Change event there, a talk at Georgia State University, and of course repeated panels at Professor Halperin’s own Southern Methodist University. Fueling the invitations was press coverage: Rais had granted interviews to everyone from the BBC to NPR to CBS to a Farsi channel in Iran. He had taped his first thirty-second television advertisement, advocating peace and forgiveness on behalf of an Islamic charity. He had received various
honors, including from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Dallas Peace Center, and
Esquire
magazine, which named him one of its Americans of the Year for 2011. He had taken his roadshow to Italy, where he spoke about the themes of hate and mercy in high schools and town-hall meetings. He had more trips planned for the summer—Indiana and Alaska. He dreamed of Israel and Africa, although the requisite speaking invitations had yet to come.

“Since I can’t afford to go anywhere on my own,” he said, “people ask me, and I go.”

The event in May, in Middle Haddam, Connecticut, was especially thrilling to Rais. An English teacher at a local high school had learned of Rais’s story and written a play about it. The play was to be read aloud by a group of students this week at Christ Episcopal Church. The day before, in preparation, the church was hosting a Q&A with Rais, followed by a wine-and-snacks reception. This was the kind of impact Rais had once only fantasized about: a devout Muslim from Bangladesh talking in the middle of Connecticut to a church full of Christians about peace, Islam, and mercy.

Rais was staying at the home of the teacher, Linda Napoletano, and her husband, Dick, in the nearby town of Portland. It was a charming exurb with homes in the Federal and Colonial styles, set on rolling acres of green, which had been enhanced by recent rain. The area was actually rather dense—this was hardly rural living—but its planners had cultivated the illusion of frontierlike solitude and rugged independence, with plots just big and shaded enough to make you feel wholly your own. People came together, of course, as they planned to do that very evening in church, to cook things and pray for things and raise money. Still, the landscape spoke of an American longing that bound Connecticut to Texas despite all their differences: a dream, which had outlived the frontier itself, of being alone.

Rais was sitting at the kitchen table pecking away at his laptop. His phone, tethered to a hands-free cord, was right beside him in case India or Austria or the Philippines called, which they often did.

Rais’s focus these days was on building his organization, World Without Hate. He had invested $1,000 of his own money in hiring a Web designer for its site. He had poured a few thousand dollars he had earned through speaking engagements into the organization’s coffers. The goals of his effort were becoming clearer by the day. World Without Hate would undertake a number of endeavors: to host speeches by Rais and other anti-hate-crime campaigners; to develop an anti-hate curriculum for school-age children, in a workshop format; to stage an annual essay and art competition for high school and college students; to create a conference on hate crimes; to develop a robust online and social media presence for the group; to provide scholarships “to students who wish to pursue studies in human rights at the college and graduate level who are committed to bringing peace to their place of origin upon completion of their studies”; to offer financial aid to hate-crime victims who struggle to get help; and, underpinning it all, to raise funds to support this work on a sustainable, ongoing basis.

Rais had recently tacked on to these extensive ambitions a further one: becoming a teacher of human rights. He was hoping to enroll part-time at Halperin’s SMU in its brand-new program granting bachelor’s degrees in human rights. Unfortunately, they were saying it would cost $55,000, which he did not have. He was hoping Halperin might be able to help him devise a solution. One idea was to get the media relations people at the university excited about Rais’s attending as a kind of human-rights brand mascot, to “carry the logo of the program on my back,” as Rais put it.

He had continued to hear from Amber, although his optimism about being able to help her had waned. A few months earlier, she had texted him. She was planning to move back to Stephenville and said something about needing gas money to move her trailer down there. Rais had heard all about Stephenville and its meth heads, and he advised her to stick with her treatment. She asked for $15. He sent her $50. A few weeks later, she called again. This time, she
was hoping she could get Rais’s help to buy a uniform she needed for a new job. Rais had begun to worry that his money was funding unworthy causes, and one of Amber’s aunts had actually called and asked him to stop giving Amber cash. Thus Rais suggested that Amber ask her new boss to lend her the uniform money, and then he would drive to Stephenville himself to see her and pay the boss back. This offer Amber declined.

Rais, meanwhile, had emerged as a sought-after public speaker. From the earliest days of his campaign for Stroman, Rais had struggled to balance the inherent humility of his quest with the need to get attention for it, to play by the rules of this below-world that he knew to be a mere trailer for the real show. In time the balance had tipped toward attention, and Rais was ever more comfortable in his role.

Rais remembered that when Halperin was advising him the year before, the professor warned him not to get used to this attention, predicting that it would all vanish if Stroman were executed. Rais had responded, “Rick, you know that I’m not doing all what I’m doing right now for any media connection. Purely what I’m doing, it comes from my heart. I won’t be surprised if no one even calls me after Mark is executed. I’ll be fully fine. I’ll be OK with that.” Now Rais was happy to note that Rick was wrong: “It seems like people are getting more and more interested around this story because it’s something unique, and last week Rick was telling me that, ‘This country has a history of four hundred years of killing and revenge and hatred. And your message is coming something new, that we had enough. Starting from the founders of this country, we needed more forgiveness and peace than killing and revenge.’ So it’s a unique message and people are getting that.”

Rais was learning the tradecraft of the public speaker: how to customize his speeches to be funny for high schoolers, logical and evidence-based for college students, inspiring and hopeful for old people. He had learned to handle Q&A sessions and the pressure of riffing on hot-button topics he knew little about. But his
multitasking and feverish scheduling seemed to be levying a toll on his health.

The previous November, he had been speaking at SMU, in the student forum, when he went, as he put it, “from standing to boom.” He collapsed flat on the floor midspeech. An ambulance fetched him, and an electrocardiogram found ominous news: his heart seemed to have an extra, irregular beat amid the lub-dub-lub-dub. The doctors said it wasn’t anything to be excessively concerned about, so long as he ate healthily and slept eight hours every night, which was between double and quadruple what he was currently doing.

This time at Linda’s presented an opportunity: some days away from Dallas, a chance to get more than the usual amount of sleep. Linda, a cheerful bear of a woman, kindhearted and sharp, had taken to calling herself Rais’s American mother, to which he readily assented. Their distinct stories of reinvention perhaps created a natural affinity. You could trace Linda’s back at least to New York, where she was once a schoolteacher. Dissatisfied with the benefits and retirement plan, and needing to be closer to relatives, she returned to Connecticut, where she had grown up. She taught English and desktop publishing and journalism, among other things. As she approached retirement, she figured out that if she had just twelve more graduate-level university credits, to achieve a master’s degree, she would exit at a higher rank and command a fatter pension. That was what led her to Wesleyan, to which she came for mercenary purposes, but with whose rhythms she quickly fell in love. She wrote a play about Rais, called
An Eye for an Eye
, as part of her coursework, and, to her great surprise, it won the university’s prestigious Rulewater Prize.

Her husband, Dick, was also once a teacher. He had, in retirement, remade himself as a wedding and family photographer, with an elaborate studio overflowing with cameras and lights just off the kitchen; now, proud as ever of his “famous Napoletano omelets,” he was flirting with the notion of setting up a bed and breakfast in their house.

The Napoletanos belonged, in a way, to the same America as Rais:
the country whose governing faith is reinvention, the country that sees its essential trait as an ethic, not an identity. They were an older Christian white couple out in central Connecticut; Rais was a younger Muslim brown bachelor from Dallas. But they saw in him a devoted striving and a small, gentle greatness and a habit of defying odds that seemed to them profoundly American, and they wanted the country to possess these traits long after they were gone. Rais offered a chance to keep their America alive.