[DRAFT]
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Let’s imagine a boy named Billy H., who likes to dig in his parents’ backyard looking for dinosaur bones. At night, he clings to a stuffed purple triceratops that he once found in his parents’ attic and without which he cannot go to sleep. The man who lives by himself next door, a Mr. M., has an epiphany tattoo that says DOES NOT UNDERSTAND BOUNDARIES, a tattoo that is correlated with child molestation. Mr. M. is canny enough to wear long-sleeved shirts exclusively and has evaded the attention of Billy H.’s parents, of local law enforcement, and of other community leaders. One day Billy decides to ring Mr. M.’s doorbell to ask whether he can dig for dinosaur bones in his backyard. Mr. M. says that Billy would be more than welcome to do so, and that in fact he has heard rumors about dinosaur bones in his backyard, so Billy will have a lot of work to do and should first come inside for a glass of lemonade.
Imagine if Mr. M.’s telltale tattoo had been in a database, allowing law enforcement officials to keep track of whether he had, say, moved next door to a child. Unfortunately, Billy lives in a country that will defend an abstraction called “privacy” even if that means delivering him into the hands of a man who means him the worst of harm.
But let’s say that Mr. M. does not mean Billy the very worst of harm. Let’s say that Billy is only molested, rather than molested and murdered. He graduates high school and college with excellent grades, though also with persistent social and particularly sexual difficulties. Perhaps he pursues graduate work in paleontology at Columbia University, and pursues it successfully. One beautiful spring day, on that campus’s storied steps, he strikes up a conversation with Angela R., who is pursuing an MFA in fiction. They share a taste for worlds that either no longer exist or never did. On their fifth or sixth date, he tells her of his molestation, and she listens with great sympathy but does not, as other girls have tended to, treat him like a wounded bird. As they both near completion of their thesis work, they move in together into a small apartment in Astoria; there are promises of postdoctoral fellowships and the strong prospect of a tenure-track position for him, and impressive publication in The Paris Review and Granta for her.
On the morning of their graduation, Billy puts on his cap and gown and looks forward to hugging his parents, looks forward to telling them that despite all that has happened he has forged a meaningful, fulfilling, and joyful life, something he could never have done without their unwavering support. Though he has blamed them in the past, he understands that they would have done anything that they could have to save him from Mr. M., if only they had known about Mr. M.’s tattoo.
Seeing Angela in her cap and gown, Billy tells her, quite truthfully, that she looks beautiful. He takes her hand, and together they walk to the subway. A train arrives just as they reach the top of the steps, as though it has been chartered just for them. As soon as they sit down, Angela puts her head on Billy’s shoulder, and they both gaze at the Manhattan skyline. She is reaching up to brush his tassel out of his eyes when they are both suddenly reduced to bloody bits of viscera.
Several hundred other people on board the train are blown apart immediately, or burn to death slowly, each of them with their own families, hopes, delusions, triumphs, disappointments, and aspirations.
It will later be discovered that the bomber had an epiphany tattoo that read: WANTS TO BLOW THINGS UP.
Perhaps there are valid reasons to keep epiphanies secret. Perhaps these reasons outweigh the right of Billy H. not to be abused as a child and murdered as an adult. But if you believe that they do, we would ask: Would you want to be the one to tell Billy’s parents—who, as the bomb goes off, have just arrived at Columbia University to celebrate with their son—how they will be spending the day instead?