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there was this little voice, saying, Maybe you should stop. Maybe you should give yourself up. Maybe the police are right.
    Maybe you’re the bad guy.

CHAPTER EIGHT
The Truth You Live
    In quiet moments there were things that came back to me sometimes—things from my life before this nightmare started. I thought a lot about my karate teacher, for instance: Sensei Mike.
    Sensei Mike was just about the coolest guy I ever met. He’d been in the army for a long time and had fought the Islamic extremists in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He even got a medal from the president of the United States because he once helped hold off an attack by a hundred bad guys with a .50-caliber gun mounted on an armored truck. He never talked about that, but I looked it up on the Internet and found out what happened. He’d been wounded in the fight and had to come home and have a piece of titanium put in his leg. He never talked about that either.
    But he did talk about a lot of other things. About karate mostly, of course. How to fight—and how to avoid a fight if there was any possible way you could. How to control your emotions and your body. How to harness your fears and transform your nervousness into energy and focus. He talked a lot about focus, about paying attention—not just to karate but to everything, to the people you loved and the people who needed you, and just to everything you were trying to accomplish, to life in general.
    “Here’s the deal, chucklehead,” he told me once. “God wants you to have a big, full, terrific life. And you can’t have that kind of life unless you’re paying attention.”
    I guess Mike was somewhere in his thirties. He was about my height, but with broader shoulders. He had this thick, black hair that he was very proud of. He always kept it neatly combed, even when he was working out. He had this big drooping mustache that he was proud of too. If you looked carefully, behind the mustache and into his eyes, you could usually see him smiling, as if he found everything kind of funny. After everything he’d been through, I don’t think there was really very much in life that Mike took seriously. Only a few things. Only the things that really mattered.
    Anyway, this one time, something happened in the dojo . . . Well, it all ended up in the dojo, but it started before that. It started that morning in history class with my teacher Mr. Sherman.
    I had Mr. Sherman in history two years running. He was a trim, fit, youthful-looking guy, handsome in a sort of bland way with a friendly smile and intelligent eyes. I never thought he was a bad person or anything, but, to be honest, I did think he was kind of a doofus. My problem with him—the thing you could say sort of constituted his doofy-os-itude—was that he fancied himself some kind of big-time radical. He was always trying to get us to “question our assumptions.” And look, there’s nothing wrong with that as a general sort of thing. It’s just that Mr. Sherman sort of took it to the Crazy Place, if you know what I mean.
    See, Mr. Sherman’s point of view was that nothing was really good or bad, it was just a matter of how you thought about it. Now that didn’t make any sense to me, but I have to admit I sometimes found it hard to argue with him.
    That’s what happened this one morning in class. We’d been having a discussion about current events. Mr. Sherman was sitting on the edge of his desk, tossing one of the whiteboard markers in the air and catching it. “The problem with this country,” he was saying, “is that too many people believe blindly in absolute morality, absolute truth. Our country was founded on absolutes: truths that are supposedly ‘self-evident.’ And because we believe our truths are absolute and self-evident, we’re only too quick to hate other people and impose our truths on them. Absolutism is the meat of tyrants. Real morality is always changing. It depends on your situation and your cultural