Q and A – Dean Greig

August 9, 2026

Our college campus formed an obelisk of sorts in the middle of an uptown neighborhood whose wide avenues were once studded with the country estates of our city’s industrial titans, but which had since wilted in our time by the hallmarks of urban blight: redlining, extreme poverty, tacit segregation. All of that is to say, a certain amount of crime was expected by us students. We kept our guards up. But there had never been anything like this before. In total, twenty-three people were robbed.
        These incidents went, in most permutations, like this: it is late at night. One or two students, never more than three, walk through the area directly adjacent to campus, past aisles of sagging rowhomes, garish new construction for student housing, and ominous, shuttered bodegas. Sometimes they are drunk, returning from some dingy house party. Alternatively, they may be returning from the library (why anybody would need to stay late in the library in this day and age, and especially at this school, is a mystery to me)– it didn’t matter. The students walk in silence.
        At a corner, any corner, it seems, within a four-by-three block zone, contained like a biohazard from the south by Combly Street, nestled in between Sledge and Waystrill on the east and west, respectively, lorded over from the north by Ernest S. Trout Avenue (named after a local civil rights hero), three tall, young men exit a silver fourth generation Nissan Altima which idles grimly in front of a crosswalk. Their faces are concealed, and the white detailing of their black athletic wear glitters wildly in the streetlight.
        “Yo,” one of the men calls to the students, unsettlingly familiar. “Yo, hold up!” he presses. In a swift, fluid movement, they encircle them. The students dare not move, staring straight at the ground.
        One of the men, hopping with the unsure yet eager jitteriness of a teenager, steps forward. He reveals a stark black handgun from the waistband of his mesh sweatpants and points it straight at the head of one of the students, then wagging it between all of them in rapid little jerks.
        Another one steps forward then, apparently their leader. He flashes his gun too, almost as if it were a formality, quickly pocketing it afterwards. The other two men look at him deferentially, brimming with awe. He stands before his victims and delicately unfurls the fabric of his balaclava (a consistent detail in all statements is that his hands are noticeably manicured, glistening as if anointed in perfumed oil), unveils his lips, and speaks, saying in no uncertain terms: they will let the students go, with all of their belongings, and no harm done unto them, if they could only answer three simple questions.
        He then opens his mouth wide, and it is clear he has never worn braces, there is a gap large enough to slide the tip of your pinky through between his front teeth. There is no established consensus on the quality of his voice; it varies from story to story. High, bright, trilling, gruff, gravelly, commanding… but we know what the voice asks. The voice asks this: “Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?”
        As you can imagine, most students were dumbfounded by this. The most common reaction was to simply hand over their phones and smart watches and wallets in perfect silence, proffering a material exchange to save some intellectual fates, surely a lesser loss.
…
Like many items of human interest nowadays, these incidents, as they repeated, spread widely over the internet. A few appellations were applied post-facto to the group of thieves, either by imitators or dubious commentators– at one point, “SPHINX GANG” was trending on TikTok, and numerous short form videos from accounts such as “Gangland Histories” attempted to trace the genealogy of the group (those were almost entirely spurious). The man with the unfurled balaclava was hailed and feared as “The Riddler.”
        In some of our city’s affluent suburbs, the whole ordeal became something of a fad. Groups of white, All-American high school boys began assembling in large numbers in the evenings after school, spurred and inspired by this example of notorious criminality. There gathered, they “ran up” on witless retirees and children as young as seven in expansive WalMart parking lots and other such liminal spaces, demanding that they “run their pockets,” a confusing command hindered further by the too-thick fabric of overlarge, neon colored woolen ski masks, earlier pilfered from their family’s winter storage, which they wore with gusto. Often, these boys would forget the three crucial questions of the criminals they were imitating until the end of their charade, at which point they would produce a quite jumbled facsimile, which often quickly devolved into a sort of call-and-response (‘Who are we? ‘SPHINX GANG BITCH!’ and so on).
        Since these boys had no access to firearms besides their father’s antique musketry, this performance was more often than not met by their victims with confused silence, ranging in tone from abject bewilderment to amused condescension. One red, close-shaved veteran choked a boy until he was unconscious outside of a Panera Bread in a fit of triggered combat trauma, but that sort of violence really formed the fringe of cases. Regardless of the outcomes, the boys would post shaky videos of these confrontations online in a desperate search for something, anything– can you imagine being a child right now? Lame and gay, as most commenters noted.
        Anyway, they must have known it would all come back to them, on some level. They probably knew and did not care. Many boys were identified but no real action was taken. There were brief social media crusades against them, but once they weathered this scattered, ephemeral tide of vitriol, nothing much came of the whole thing. Some of their prep schools opted for ‘in-house disciplinary action,’ forcing them to take six weeks of anti-violence counseling. In the end, many a college acceptance was retained, securing not only the future of the boys involved, but, it was implied, also the future of the country in general. But this is all beside the point. They were clearly not our true culprits. From the real thieves, we heard nothing: complete radio silence. Until they struck again.
…
Amongst our own student body, things weren’t much better. There were a few different solutions to the growing threat of the criminals, though most students simply opted to stay home.
        Despite the university’s attempt to increase the presence of their unarmed ‘peace officers’ around the campus and its surroundings, more often than not these swaggering security guards would ride their electric bikes around the green in myopic, slowly enclosing circles, their phones affixed to their handlebars and their eyes affixed to their phones, continuing in this fashion until they hit a natural terminus, running head first into each other (a blessing that they wear concussion-proof helmets!)
        If indeed accosted by the thieves, many daring students attempted to respond to their questions with humor, the favorite tactic of jesters currying favor with tyrants, but these clowns too were robbed.
        A group of philosophy majors, moronic as they were, prepared a brief survey of Major Western Thinkers’ responses to the three questions at hand, and had it published in the university newspaper. I don’t believe they would have made it past the pre-Socratics before they would be robbed summarily, out of principle. I imagine the thieves would have taken particular relish in jutting the steel of their gun in the gaps between their axioms and aphorisms.
…
One could posit, with no real evidence save for vague intuition, that we students were probably of a similar age to these criminals. Our brains had formed, were still forming, from the same mass of mush. We had probably watched the same television programming as children. We had also presumably faced broadly similar events which adumbrate all lives: struggles, triumphs, embarrassments, sins. Even our bodies were perhaps not dissimilar; at least, I imagined mine was not. Tallish, slim, untrained, ill-at-ease.
        But our proximity to their youth, far from absolving us, was all the more damning. It somehow ostracized us, stranding us in the savage middle ground between outrage and complicity, the fear of the other and the hatred of the self. They were the true young, the vital, the feared. We were the perpetual victims who knew nothing of life. We were their fodder; watch them feed.
…
Things were bad for me too. I had a girlfriend at the time, Margaret (who I am still dating right now, actually, two years later, though this episode is regrettable enough to belong wholly to the past, as far as the mythology of our coupling is told and retold, with no carryover into the now, the inexorable present).
        In the middle of all of this chaos, we were together in my small room in a shared apartment, listening to music on my laptop, when a university alert was sent to both of our phones. It reignited a long simmering argument between us since the robberies had begun. I had admonished Margaret many a time to be afraid, extra cautious, offering ceaselessly to accompany her on the mile walk back to her apartment across campus (I didn’t really want to do this), to which she would reply, unfailingly, that it was I who should be afraid, that it was I who had the habit of drinking excessively and wandering around the streets with my buddies, that not only would I be just as vulnerable as her if faced with a brandished firearm, but that in fact my accompanying her might, if anything, inflame the passions of these criminals, whose primary motive, she observed, seemed to be the humiliation of their victims. And so on and so on back and forth to various degrees of upset.
        “You can’t leave tonight. Look at this,” I said, gesturing with my phone. The university had instituted a strongly recommended curfew for all students living within a two-mile radius of the campus. I didn’t even intend to start an argument, but she laughed out loud at me, sitting there, holding my phone to her face. Did I not remember, she asked playfully, when they alleged that cannabis sold in that section of the city had tested positive for traces of rat poison and fentanyl? Or banned basement house shows due to a proliferation of foot fungus? “Besides,” she said, giggling, “I don’t have any of my stuff. You’re not getting me that easily tonight.”
        What an idiot I was then, bristling at her unwillingness to grant me my moment of chivalry, to tell her no, to tell her that I would walk her back to her apartment, to guard her (calling a car was out of the question– we had no money)– better yet, I would go to her apartment myself and grab her things, because it was not safe out there. She had to stay put, this was a real emergency, couldn’t she understand that? Her laughing still– “What are you talking about? Do you hear yourself?”– I’m talking about your life, Margaret, and you better pay attention. I shouldn’t have to fight with you to get you to understand that. And all the while I’m wondering, why couldn’t she hate these men the way I did? Why did she refuse to see herself as a potential victim? I was certainly afraid, I was afraid every time I left the house, braving my bare hands against the cold to hold my stainless steel water bottle which would fall heavy upon the brutish head of anyone who tried to accost me. Why couldn’t she be afraid too, or at least angry? Constantly apologizing for their crimes, bemoaning our privileged intrusion into their neighborhood. Their neighborhood– I thought the whole point of place, space, and the socially constructed notion of home was that it was subject to constant change, interminable fluidity, that there were no true owners of anything in the world, I had learned that much from my general education courses if nothing else. Why couldn’t she see that? Why did her antipathy for all men seem to extend only to the limits of humiliating me? Why not protect herself, or my dignity? All of it served nothing except to assuage her own fragile insecurity. It was stupid. Why was she choosing to be stupid? That last part I said out loud to her.
        Cruel and callous, yes, I know, I know. But I said it. Beginning to cry, at first trembling with hurt and then, shooting a glare at me, with glowering anger, tears seeping out of her like a squeezed cheese cloth, she left, slamming the door. My roommates poked their large, malformed heads out of their rooms to see what was going on. I told them to go away.
        I didn’t follow Margaret. I was going to, but I didn’t want to show too much desperation. I thought it best to give her the time she needed to calm down, to text me later, to make up with me, to let love speak louder than frustration. I didn’t hear from her.
…
I had to find out two days later first through the university newspaper and various social media posts, then through certain venomous turncoat mutual “friends” or ours, that Margaret had been robbed that night. She still wouldn’t speak to me. At least, this is what I assumed. I did not have her new phone number (I was certain she had gotten a new one immediately– Margaret was preternaturally attached to that thing, more so even than many of my generation) and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she did not know my number by heart. Having only a dim, impressionistic understanding of her class schedule, I began to wander about the entrances of different campus buildings during the changing of classes, haunting the front doors like a stately ghost against waves of exiting students, hoping to casually run into her.
        I stood leaning against the biting cold of a metal bike stand adjacent to the doors of the chemistry building (where she may or may not have been taking classes, I really didn’t know), feeling a little embarrassed about the number of texts and calls I had sent her in the intervening days. That horrible masked man was probably grinning as he read those pathetic missives on her phone: “baby i love you,” “Please call me back,” “I’m so so sorry I love you so much.” Or, probably he did not care at all and did not bother to observe any of his stolen treasures. He was probably sitting or sleeping in a filthy room less than a mile away from me, with numerous other men and thousands of stolen cell phones, all shut down to prevent location tracking, reverted to dead glass and metal, preparing for a long voyage home in a shipping container bound for their country of origin: undoubtedly China.
        Students left the building in front of me in droves, but Margaret was not among them. I thought I remembered something about a poetry class that she was taking– it wasn’t worth following up on.
…
That night I drank several beers and then went out searching. There was no way for me to get a gun on such short notice, but I did have, jutting against my ribs beneath my large parka, an imitation Celtic short sword housed in an ornate leather sheath. I had obtained it as a sort of half-gift from my father, who, in his more active days, had roamed barn-yard auction houses for cheap antique weapons. He had remarked off-handedly that I could have anything I wanted from his expansive collection; he was done collecting crap, he declared. Its pommel was a Celtic cross in bronze, recognizable with its interloping innards, tight knotted intersections of God and earth, blood and man.
        Walking the dark streets of our neighborhood, I felt its weight bob easily against my side, tucked into my pants, ready to wield at a moment’s notice. I would be no match for one or several guns, but I would surely cut one of them down before I fell. It would be a glorious death, an assured sensation. Perhaps, with luck, it would accord me folk hero status in certain corners of the internet, if not in the American consciousness at large. I would be a man who “took a stand.”
        The streets seemed strange… unrecognizable. I couldn’t tell which way was north. I just kept walking, turning every so often to maintain a small radius of movement. To keep myself occupied, I formulated a few responses to their jeers. Who are they? The scum of the earth, the maligns. The disrupters, those who make the world unbelievable, evil, failed. Who knows where they come from, what fetid hole evil crawls out of. Agents of chaos and destruction. Agitators. It seemed inconceivable that I should be made to share a world with such people, whose disappearance, either through hypothetical mass killings or prudent anti-crime laws, would certainly be a net positive for the world. Who are they? A better question was who were their parents. Because either they were raised abysmally or they were a predetermined evil of biology; neither interpretation left much room in the way for human agency, free will. Though of course perhaps this was in fact their will: the ultimate expression of their freedom, their refusal to cope with the deadening propriety of our current earth.
        Perhaps they were following the brutal, necessary regiment of young men against the world– engaging in that naive, brave, natural habit of juvenile rebellion, lauded as a rite-of-passage through various knowing smiles and shaking-of-the-heads by sad, nostalgia-sick elderly souls. That sounded about right.
        But where did that leave me? I abhorred the world; I loathed the criminals; I didn’t particularly care for myself in the end.
        Surely though there was a difference between resigned melancholia and true hatred. Because I hated the man in the balaclava. I wanted him to die, for me to kill him, violently. I could see him grinning at Margaret, whose tears had frozen to her face, exposing his chapped hungry lips to her, forcing her to bear the ludicrous routine of the questions. I was sure she had said nothing to him in response. She must have handed over her items and walked straight home, six blocks, without saying a word to herself or anybody.
        I had failed her, but he, he had violated her. I had pushed her out, but he had gathered her in, fed on the scraps of her bruised, shaken self, licked his lips at her dejection. I was sure of myself. They were to blame. There was no middle ground here. And there would be no time for questions when we met, only the swift cut of death. Then they would find out where they were going.
…
When I came upon them minutes later on the streets, I was hardly surprised. Their car was idling beneath the harsh light of a streetlamp. A traffic light dutifully rotated colors before them. I assumed a carefree motion to my gait, beginning to admire the buildings around me and the low, black sky, transforming myself into an unwitting victim.
        The car doors opened, I walked on; they exited the vehicle, I walked on; they approached me, surrounded me, began muttering in low, vicious tones, and I met them unflinchingly. Like vultures they encircled me, homing in, the man in the balaclava directly in front of me, reaching into his pocket; I was resolved to not give them a chance to speak. I ducked quickly to reveal my blade in a jarring, jerk-like motion, like I was doubling over in intestinal pain. I was regrettably not a practiced swordsman.
        There was a rash flurry of movement, grunts of surprise, general exclamations, confusion all around. All of a sudden, I became aware of a terrible, fatal resistance in my chest. I fell forward, the screaming rush of blood crowding my ears. I’ve been shot! I thought madly. The bastards!
        Before my eyes, the variegated white of heaven appeared, staggered and holy, soft and downy. I was prepared to meet death head on. The enveloping white was comforting, to be sure, but also strangely real, material in a way I found at once familiar and strange, and not entirely out-of-this-world. I wondered if heaven could really surprise one like this.
        Then, I saw the white slowly fade into darkness, and strange shapes began to form there, the shapes of men, tall and looking down upon me, and I came to understand I was not dead. My sword had ripped through the lining of my large vintage L.L. Bean parka; its slack plush had given way easily to the blade, and an immediate onslaught of seemingly self-perpetuating feathery down had exploded up into the air in an elaborate puff. This scene strikingly resembled, I imagined, the aftermath of an unsuspecting grouse shot down mid-flight in a brown field, heavy with the bounties of late autumn.
My sword had clattered to the ground along with my body; I made no move to lift either. I shielded myself in an instinctual protective pose: arms up, elbows out, defend the most sensitive areas. The man in the balaclava laughed, looking at the sword as if it were a child’s plaything. I could see his grin widen beneath his sinister mask, the fabric stiffening at the brutish insistence of his lips, flesh warring with cold polyester. Those questions were winding up inside of him, and I wanted to beg him not to speak, not to ask anything. I began to cry. “What can I say?” I asked, hands outstretched, looking up at him. “What do you want me to say?”
        He knelt down; I perked my head up. He whispered the words he was looking for, and I nodded in thanks.
        He motioned briefly for his comrades to back away, allowing me room to get on my feet and steady myself. Once standing, his friends studying the concrete bashfully, the man put his hand on his gun again, as if it were a poor approximation of my failure. I stupidly did not understand, but as he gestured it perfunctorily toward my face, I caught his drift. I handed over my phone and wallet. Now I was surely going to have to find Margaret face-to-face, I thought with a pang of anxiety. I’d have to go to her front door, knock, and wait, something I hadn’t had the heart to do before then. Throwing pebbles at her bedroom window. I would make it up to her somehow (and I did, remember that– I managed to do that much if nothing else).
        I began weeping harder then, heedless of the men, who obviously felt a bit awkward. Perhaps my reaction was unusual in its own way. People, even coddled college kids, can be exceptionally brave under the most trying of circumstances; most of their victims probably waited for the privacy of their small rooms, perhaps with the aid of a pillow or a small bundle of towels, to finally sob. The masked man, not seeming to know what to do, made silent signals for his cabal to leave.
…
And so now you’re wondering: what was it? What are the answers? Rest assured, there are answers, this was no exercise in nihilism. There was a sequential ordering of no more than two or three dozen syllables which was the skeleton key to the whole ordeal, a command they would respond to like well-trained dogs.
        What was it? It was mildly witty wordplay; a chess problem embedded within a mediocre joke; a sinister yet none-too-complicated Grimshaw; a popular logic puzzle you could not solve let alone construct on your own, but could dimly understand once explained to you in simple terms. It was a problem whose solution revealed your place in the scheme of things: one who attempts to grasp and fails, one who must be helped, coaxed, who must prematurely flip the crossword upside down in a frenzied search for simple solutions. Forever walking the path of man’s search for meaning wearing a sandwich board sign with ASSISTANCE REQUIRED plastered in crude, childish block letters, donning a bicycle helmet on your head.
        I’ll give you a hint then, fellow walker, though I’ll never tell in full without a fight: the answers have to do with place, space, and the socially constructed notion of home. Figure it out yourself. Or don’t. Really, if you pressed me, in the end I have to take back what I said about nihilism. I don’t think he cared what you said to him, despite the clever and true answers that did really exist. Nobody really ever does.
…
I walked away without looking back at the men as they walked calmly back to their car. Feathers still spilled out of my jacket like guts. I shed the garment and threw it in an alleyway to face the cold, sonorous wind alone, letting it embrace and envelop and pierce through me.
        Immediately upon turning the next corner I came upon a group of girls approaching me. The desolation of the street was filled suddenly with laughter and light. They were surely students, with elegant, slender vodka seltzer cans in hand, headed undoubtedly to a wild and raucous function where they would stand together, protect each other, check in amongst themselves periodically, prepared always for a full-scale evacuation should one of their number go a little too far, get a little too drunk, or become herself the target of a slobbering, sinister fool– theirs was a sisterhood comprised of trust and mutual aid.
        I considered warning them of my experience with the thieves, but quickly thought better of it. They would be alright. Strength in numbers. Besides, I could hear the squealing tires of the getaway car as they sped away into the night, to some other block, some other terror.
        I briefly convinced myself that I in fact might be perceived as a threat by these girls; I was a half-crazed, red-eyed young man walking alone in a t-shirt in January. But they did not even look at me. Still, as a precaution, I crossed the road in front of them, and then walked on into the blasted gutters of the winter streets, into the wider, blacker night.