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wait outside on the steps,” Amy said, pulling her skirt down a little. “I’ll get him. You two go on back to the kitchen. Matthew, show him the I.D.”
    The minister asked, “What I.D.?”
    From my shirt pocket I extracted a dog-eared card. “She means this.”
    The card I handed over as we walked back down the hallway was an expired Illinois state driver’s license issued to one Chaym Smith, birth date 01/15/29, height 5′7″, weight 180, eyes brown. The minister gazed—and gazed—at the worn license, picking at his lip, and finally looked back at me, poking the card with his finger.
    â€œThis could be me!”
    â€œThat’s what we thought too,” I said.
    â€œWho is this man?”
    â€œWe don’t know.”
    â€œBut what does he want with me?”
    â€œSir,” I said, “maybe he should tell you himself.”
    I could see the minister was impatient now for some explanation. Minutes passed. In the kitchen, the wall clock ticked softly beside an
Ebony
magazine calendar. Food smells, sour and sharp, floated from the sink and an unemptied, paper-lined garbage pail beside it. Then from the front room we could hear the door open. Outside, sirens pierced the hot night air. The neighborhood dogs howled. Through the window, I saw flames from burning cars dancing against a dark sky skirling with tear gas and smoke. The night felt wrong. All of it, as if the riot, the looting and lunacy, breakdown and disorder, had torn space and time, destroying some delicate balance or barrier between dimensions—possible worlds—creating a portal for fantastic creatures to pour through. I could not shake that feeling, and it grew all the stronger when Amy entered the kitchen with the man whose driver’s license I’d handed to King. A man without father or mother, like the priest Melchizedek who mysteriously appeared in the Valley of Siddim after the king of Sodom rebelled against Chedorlaomer.
    Stepping back a foot, King whispered, “Sweet Jesus …”
    â€œI thought you’d be interested,” I said.
    Far beyond interested, he looked spellbound. Then shaken. He might have been peering into a mirror, one in which his history was turned upside down, beginning not in his father’s commodious, two-story Queen Anne-style home in Atlanta but instead across the street in one of the wretched shotgun shacks crammed with the black poor. Certainly in every darkened, musty pool hall, on every street corner,in every cramped prison cell he’d passed through, the minister had seen men like Chaym Smith—but never quite like this.
    He tore his eyes away, then looked back. Smith was still there, his eyes squinted, the faint smile on his lips one part self-protective irony, two parts sarcasm, as if he carried unsayable secrets (or sins) that, if spoken, would send others running from the room. His workshirt was torn in at least two places, and yellowed by his life in it; his trousers were splotchy with undecipherable stains and threadbare at the knees—he was the kind of Negro the Movement had for years kept away from the world’s cameras: sullen, ill-kept, the very embodiment of the blues. Then, as the minister knuckled his eyes, Smith, behind his heavy black eyeglasses, beneath his bushy, matted hair and scraggly beard—as rubicund in tint as Malcolm Little’s—began to look less threatening and more like a poor man down on his luck for a long, long time, one who’d probably not eaten in a week. Neglected like the very building we were in. Everything about him was in disrepair. Just as the city’s administration and the flat’s landlord, a white man named John Bender (who was hardly better off than his tenants), had failed to invest in the crumbling eyesore and allowed it to degenerate into a dilapidated, dangerous public health hazard, so no one, it seemed, had invested in Chaym Smith.
    For a moment, the