The whole post-rally scene, in front of the Phoenix Civic Center, seemed very theatrical-a little circle of wild, violent action and then, beyond that circle, people casually standing around, filming it on their phones, checking in with their husbands or wives, talking about their softball leagues, or whatever.

But, in this context, they were ready to kill each other. I got the sense that if one had seen the other with a flat tire he’d have stopped and they’d have gotten along fine.

At a Trump rally in Phoenix, I saw these two otherwise nice-seeming middle-aged guys, one pro-Trump, one anti-Trump, just bellowing at each other, both using stock phrases that they seemed to have picked up from their respective TV networks. Once it did, another set of ideas started to find their way in-this time inspired by something I witnessed while working on a nonfiction piece for this magazine. Trying to find a voice is, for me, the first step-a little challenge to work at until the story kicks in. In the early drafts of the story, I was just trying to figure out how a guy like that might sound. So the story began as a thought experiment: Who would I be if all my memories and my language were erased? If I were like a new computer just out of the box-all operating system, no data? Would residual habits of thought continue to define me? What would it be like to have to learn language from scratch? That sort of thing. Although we think of ourselves as being solid and continuous and consistent and all that, we aren’t, really. That really stuck with me-how mutable “I” was. Then I came out of it and there I was again: same old me.

Everything was crappy, and all the things that normally made me happy weren’t making me happy anymore. It came from this idea I’ve had since I was a kid and had a really high fever and noticed that I . . . wasn’t myself. Or did the inspiration come from something else? I’m guessing that the story was inspired by accusations from Trump and others that Democrats were paying people to protest at his campaign rallies and elsewhere. Your story in this week’s issue, “ Elliott Spencer,” involves a scheme in which down-on-their-luck people are “reprogrammed” and deployed as political protesters.

Faithful ruslan by georgi vladimov