The Corrections

vice president, Rick Flamburg, joined hands on big shears to cut ribbon. Local politicians of color said children and tomorrow . They said digital and democracy and history .
    Outside the white tent, the usual crowd of anarchists, eyed warily by a police detail that was later criticized as having been too small, openly carried banners and placards and privately, in the pockets of their cargo pants, carried powerful bar magnets with which they hoped, amid the cake-eating and punch-drinking and confusion, to erase much data from the center’s new Global Desktops. Their banners said REFUSE IT AND COMPUTERS ARE THE OPPOSITE OF REVOLUTION and THIS HEAVEN GIVES ME MIGRAINE . Billy Passafaro, neatly shaved and wearing a short-sleeve white button-down, carried a four-foot length of two-by-four on which he’d written WELCOME TO PHILADELPHIA !! When the official ceremonies ended and the scene became more appealingly anarchic, Billy edged into the crowd, smiling and holding aloft his message of goodwill, until he was close enough to the dignitaries that he could swing the two-by-four like a baseball bat and break Rick Flamburg’s skull. Three further blows demolished Flamburg’s nose, jaw, collarbone, and most of his teeth before the mayor’s bodyguard tackled Billy and a dozen cops piled on.
    Billy was lucky the tent was too crowded for the cops to shoot him. He was also lucky, given the obvious premeditation of his crime and the politically awkward shortage of white inmates on death row, that Rick Flamburg didn’t die. (Less clear was whether Flamburg himself, an unmarried Dartmouth grad whom the attack left palsied, disfigured, slurred of speech, blind in one eye, and prone to incapacitating headaches, felt lucky about this.) Billy was indicted for attempted murder, first-degree assault, and assault with a deadly weapon. He categorically rejected any plea agreement and chose to represent himself in court, dismissing as “accommodationist” both his court-appointed counsel and the old Teamster attorney who offered to bill his family fifty an hour.
    To the surprise of nearly everyone but Robin, who had never doubted her brother’s intelligence, Billy mounted an articulate self-defense. He argued that the mayor’s “sale” of the children of Philadelphia into the “technoslavery” of the W——Corporation represented a “clear and present public danger” to which he’d been justified in responding violently. He denounced the “unholy connivance” of American business and American government. He compared himself to the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord. When Robin,much later, showed Denise the trial transcript, Denise imagined bringing Billy and her brother Chip together over dinner and listening while they compared notes about “the bureaucracy,” but this dinner would have to wait until Billy had served seventy percent of his twelve-to-eighteen-year sentence at Graterford.
    Nick Passafaro had taken a leave of absence and loyally attended his son’s trial. Nick went on TV and said everything you’d expect from an old red: “Once a day the victim’s black, and there’s silence; once a year the victim’s white, and there’s an outcry,” and “My son will pay dearly for his crime, but W——will never pay for its crimes, “and” “The Rick Flamburgs of the world have made billions selling phony violence to America’s children.” Nick concurred in most of Billy’s courtroom arguments and was proud of his performance, but after the photos of Flamburg’s injuries were introduced in court, he began to lose his grip. The deep V-shaped indentations in Flamburg’s cranium, nose, jaw, and clavicle spoke to a savagery of exertion, a madness, that didn’t square well with idealism. Nick stopped sleeping as the trial progressed. He stopped shaving and lost his appetite. At Colleen’s insistence, he saw a psychiatrist and came home with medications, but even then he woke her in the night. He shouted, “I won’t apologize!” He shouted, “It’s a war!” Eventually his dosages were upped, and in April the school district retired him.
    Because Rick Flamburg had worked for the W——Corporation, Robin felt responsible for all of this.
    Robin had become the Passafaro ambassador to Rick Flamburg’s family, showing up at the hospital until Flamburg’s parents had spent their anger and suspicion and recognized that she was not her brother’s keeper. She sat by Flamburg and read Sports Illustrated