The goat was both a joke and a statement of fact. Last week, at podium training for the U.S. Gymnastics Championships, when the athletes have a chance to try out the equipment inside the arena before the competition begins, Simone Biles wore an iridescent gray sleeveless leotard with her name written in studded crystals on the back, and, below, also in crystals, the cartoonish head of a goat. On Twitter, Biles posted a picture of herself with the back of the leotard on display, one muscular leg extended, hair in a knot, and a smile on her face, in profile. In the photo, the goat appears to be giving the rest of us side-eye; the caption reads “podium training :).” In July, Biles competed at a qualifying meet in a leotard that had her name on the back, and some gymnastics fans took offense—it is unusual, though not unprecedented, for gymnasts to wear leotards emblazoned with their names. (The men often have them in N.C.A.A. gymnastics, for example.) There was a backstory about Biles having her name on the leotard, though there didn’t need to be: she is using her name to make history. The goat, she said, was a lighthearted way to “jab back” at the “haters.” But, really, no one can dispute it, at this point: Biles is the greatest of all time.

On Friday, the first night of the women’s competition, Biles, on the balance beam, stood for a long time, then did two back handsprings, soared high into the air, and, seeming to rise even as she peaked, began to twist and flip. She completed a double-double with control and ease, and just a slight hop on the landing. If—when—she does the dismount in international competition, the move will be named the Biles. Her second pass on floor is already known as the Biles, because she was the first to do that one, too; there is also a Biles on vault. On Sunday, during the all-around, Biles, her hair trailing behind her like an exclamation point, became the first woman to perform a triple-double—two flips and three twists—in competition during a floor routine. Only a few men can do it, and the way Biles does it is better than the way most of them do. The triple-double is so difficult that U.S.A. Gymnastics has argued that a new tier needs to be added to the code of points, gymnastics’ rule book, to account for it. When Biles performs it in international competition, that will be named after her, too.

There are certain irresolvable tensions within the ideals of sportsmanship: winning is the ultimate goal, but it isn’t everything; it’s all fun and games, but you better take your job seriously; be proud, but don’t show it. These unwritten rules have always been less kind to women than to men, who are typically given some leeway when it comes to embracing their greatness and making their names. Traditionally, of course, women have given up their names altogether, in marriage, and feats of physical prowess have not often been encouraged. “There is some sort of double standard for females in sports,” the soccer player Alex Morgan said last month, after the ecstatic celebrations of the U.S. National Team were criticized, during the Women’s World Cup. Women, Morgan said, are encouraged “to feel like we have to be humble in our successes; we have to celebrate, but not too much; we have to do something, but in a limited fashion.”

Biles does not do anything in a limited fashion. (Watch that triple-double again.) That may, in the end, be her most enduring legacy. She is arguably the most dominant athlete in the world right now. At the national championships, she had a bad first day—a mistake on floor left her furious, and she muttered that her bars routine was “a piece of shit”—and still won the competition by five points. Serena Williams does not win every tournament; Michael Phelps sometimes lost a race. Biles has not lost an all-around title in six years. In that time, she has won twenty-five medals at the Olympics and at world championships. She has been competing against only herself for a long time.

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One of the many remarkable things about Biles is that she makes empowerment and self-confidence seem uncomplicated. “I feel like every day in training I amaze myself even more, so we’ll have to see what’s to come,” she said last month, in an interview during the qualifying meet, after performing the double-double dismount from beam and the triple-double on floor, during podium training. There was no palpable egotism in the comment; it was, like the goat, a statement of fact. In a way, Biles offers a new example of an old ideal. The pride that comes with challenging yourself isn’t something to hide. It’s the point.

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. 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. Or did the inspiration come from something else?

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. Everything was crappy, and all the things that normally made me happy weren’t making me happy anymore. Then I came out of it and there I was again: same old me. That really stuck with me—how mutable “I” was. Although we think of ourselves as being solid and continuous and consistent and all that, we aren’t, really.

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. In the early drafts of the story, I was just trying to figure out how a guy like that might sound. Trying to find a voice is, for me, the first step—a little challenge to work at until the story kicks in.

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. 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. It was sad and nightmarish. 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. But, in this context, they were ready to kill each other. 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. And yet the violent action mattered: that was what was seen by the world beyond Phoenix. So that was on my mind, I guess—this brave new world where reality matters less than mass representations of the same, the loss of nuance and gentleness when bodies need to be mustered.

But, honestly, this early in the game, with the story only just finished via our editing process, I’m not exactly sure what it means. I’ve been (we’ve been) working on how it should proceed. That, to me, is the wonderful thing about fiction: the meaning of a story is contained in the way it unscrolls, in the experience the reader has, phrase by phrase. Everything else—the analysis we tend to feel the need to do—is reductive (fun, but reductive). The reading experience, when you think about it, is so complex and lovely and hard to describe: ideas come up and are complicated and refined by the next beat; moral notions arise and are challenged; the language surprises; parallel images from our own life are continually invoked; questions that, in our everyday mode, we’d be more simply opinionated about are endorsed and negated and complicated. All this happens at once, and in a granulated way that’s impossible to describe. I think it’s important to be respectful of how mysterious the whole deal is: a person being moved by a story another person made up. It’s weird but it happens and it can really change people’s lives. I think fiction at its best can serve as a moment of induced bafflement that calls into question our usual relation to things and reminds us that our minds, as nice as they are, aren’t necessarily up to the task of living, and shouldn’t get cocky.

Your protagonist, “89,” or “Greg,” has had his memory erased and is re-taught language and syntax. How did you decide on your method for showing that typographically and visually?

Usually I work (to an extent that’s hard to communicate adequately) from instinct. A certain thing will just . . . seem good. Or won’t suck as much. And if I follow that feeling, obsessively and iteratively, the story will head off in a direction that I couldn’t have predicted, that will be more alive and weird than anything I could have planned. So, in this model of fiction, the writer is asking, “What would you like to say, story?” rather than ordering, “O.K., story, here’s what I need you to do.”

I did a big tour for my novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” and noticed that, when a person (me, anyway) is talking about how a work of fiction came to be (as one tends to do in that book-tour situation), he’s almost inevitably being too rational, short-changing the actual process by which the book was written, making his intentions sound grander and more cut-and-dried than they really were, or talking as if he knew from the outset what the piece’s charms and power and meaning would be. That’s not how I experience writing fiction, at all. It’s more like a series of optometrist moments (“Is this better? Or this?”), and then you look up after a bunch of drafts and the story is saying . . . something. But you’re not sure what, exactly—it’s got a mind of its own and is talking to you via your attempt to improve those small, line-by-line moments, which, in this case, included things like whether to capitalize after a gap in the text and where to break up the character’s sentences. The story communicates its deeper intentions to the writer through thousands of line-level choices.

Here, I just tried to imagine what the world would look like to this guy whose memory and language had been “Scraped,” and that unusual spacing came to mind as a way of communicating, I guess, “tentativeness.” (I’d used a version of this for the Willie Lincoln sections of “Lincoln in the Bardo.”) One interesting thing is the way that format affects output—a sort of feedback loop kicks in. You see the in-progress text, with those spaces in it, and that colors what comes next. It’s like speaking with an accent: if you speak with a British accent, your thoughts are altered by the sound of that voice coming out of you and you start saying surprising things. (“I am not, my good lord, chuffed about Brexit, but, rather, knackered from bloody talking about it.”)

89 feels real compassion and love for Jerry, who teaches him English and mobilizes him to protest. And the feeling may be mutual. What inspires that connection between these two men?

On Jerry’s side, 89 is just an interesting and challenging chance to experiment on somebody. I think that’s how technology gets out of hand: the technology is developed and, of course, people (specialists!) whose lives have revolved around developing that technology get excited and have no choice, it seems, but to plunge ahead. (Think of the hydrogen bomb. Or Cambridge Analytica. Or some of the overproduced records from the nineteen-seventies.) I think Jerry becomes fond of 89 just from being around this sweet old guy day after day. As for 89/Greg/Elliott, he adores Jerry because Jerry was his savior. He took 89 out of “blankslate”—that language-free state that, because it is technology-induced, is not pleasant. Jerry is really the only person 89 knows and he feels that he owes everything he is to Jerry. Jerry’s a sort of mother or father or Dr. Frankenstein figure: the founder of the feast, as far as 89 is concerned.

There’s a suggestion in the story that these protesters are not being deployed, as they believe, in defense of the poor and the weak.

Right, exactly.

What are they being used for?

Well, that’s left a little intentionally vague. This is set in the future, and my sense is that, in this future time, politics will have morphed to the extent that none of us, transported there, would know exactly what “our” side was anymore. Although there’s a hint, in what the journalist says about union organizers and teachers, that Jerry’s side has helped oppress. Looking at history, it seems clear, at least to me, that there’s a consortium that has always favored, let’s say, materialism/corporatism/violence. And that consortium also often exploits and encourages the degradation of language. And tends to be down on education and workers’ rights. I think that Jerry and his pals work for those guys—for the future incarnation of those guys. And Jerry’s company (which is, in my mind, something like, say, Blackwater, albeit a little more white-collar) has learned to couch its goals in sympathetic language—its representatives talk about things in the “right” way (they are “fighting oppression,” etc.), regardless of what they might actually be trying to do. This seems to be the way of the world. Nobody says, you know, “Bwa-ha-ha, let’s lock up the little kids, and have them sit in their own shit!” They say, “We are working tirelessly, under difficult conditions, to see that the rule of law is respected.” And maybe, to the person saying that, it’s true. But the kid is still sitting in his/her own shit.

In a way, the story is almost a fairy tale: this man was a mess in his previous life and now has a chance to start fresh. Without entirely giving away the ending of the story, do you see a possible happy future for 89?

Probably not materially—he’s in a rough spot. But, to the extent that he’s still himself—or his “new himself”—I think that his decision is a good and hopeful one. There, at the end of the writing/editing process, the story seemed to want to “be about” the notion that, as long as we have our minds and good intentions, that’s heaven. Or, you know, heaven’s within our grasp: we can do better, we can relate to our situation (even if it’s a bad situation) and change it, or come to some accommodation with it. 89 tells himself something along the lines of “I can still learn, am still learning.” He’s starting to understand being more articulate as a way of being “a better person.” That’s all promising, I think. These days, I take some comfort in trying to see life as a series of small, local moments. I’ve recently discontinued my (already pretty negligible) social media “presence” and it has felt good, to see how my mind responds to the removal of that particular form of projection; the world, actually, is right here, too, not just “out there,” and, in fact, the world “out there” is one degree less real than the world “right here” since seeing the world “out there” requires us to essentially project on top of someone else’s projection (those posts of someone’s trip to Malawi or a cat bench-pressing a can of tuna fish or whatever). So 89’s got some time left and, during that time, he’s going to continue to become more articulate and develop a more authentic relationship to the world as he finds it, which is, I guess, all that any of us can hope for. Of course, he might also be recaptured or die alone somewhere. One never knows.

You’ve written a number of stories that involve a kind of technological-psychological manipulation of human guinea pigs. What keeps you coming back to this theme?

I’m really not sure. I think it’s just something that I feel I can make come alive. That’s how I start—by looking for a language that’s fun to write, that I can sustain, and that keeps tricking me into making plot. And that (eventually) will divert me (temporarily) from my simplistic everyday moral positions. It’s a process that gets me out of “me”—always a relief. I don’t really have any intentions re theme or worldview. More and more, I have no idea what I think of anything. It’s as if the world were this very strange beast under a big tarp. Writing is a way of poking at the tarp. You can watch what the beast does during the poking and maybe surmise something about the sort of beast it is, but you also don’t want to be too confident in your theories. I really like the fact that, these days, I can’t say what writing is for, what it’s supposed to do, or how it’s supposed to affect us. I just like doing it.

Also, in thinking about this question, I remembered having a really powerful experience as a kid with “Flowers for Algernon.” If I’m recalling the story correctly, the main character is given this intelligence-increasing drug and then his speech changes accordingly (until he lapses back). I love that notion—of using a voice change as a character indicator.

Are there any other stories or novels you love that explore this terrain?

I think “A Clockwork Orange” is pretty hard to beat—the way that the invented language allows Anthony Burgess access to some really scary new moral spaces. I also think of “Faithful Ruslan,” by Georgi Vladimov. It’s told from the point of view of a Siberian concentration-camp guard dog and is a great illustration of the way that “limited” language can destabilize our habitual, lazy ethical constructions—can undermine our usual “us and them” way of thinking. My wife, Paula, and I just saw a staged reading of a wonderful new play, as part of the Santa Cruz Shakespeare series, called “The Formula,” by Kathryn Chetkovich—a sci-fi reimagining of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” that, through the device of a love-inducing chemical spray, was able to say some new and lovely things about the nature of passion.

Last Saturday morning, Sylvia Saucedo had her dog Sasha, who was old and ill, put to sleep. The dog “was like a member of our family,” Saucedo told me recently, sitting in her darkened den, in El Paso, surrounded by family pictures: a bullfighting brother who’d died from a heart attack; a Vietnam-veteran brother who’d died of cancer; her father, born in Juárez, who’d died, at eighty-two, after suffering multiple strokes. A fifty-eight-year-old former military-base accountant—who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, pulmonary fibrosis, and fibromyalgia, which forced her to retire early—Saucedo is active and upbeat on Facebook. She frequently posts pictures of her ninety-one-year-old mother, Silvestra; religious musings; favorite expressions in English and Spanish; and lots of emojis. At a quarter to six, on the same morning she said goodbye to her dog, she’d shared a quote attributed to Jane Goodall: “How is it possible that the most intellectual creature to ever walk the planet Earth is destroying its only home?” A few hours later, at 7:26 A.M., she took a photo of Silvestra lying down exhausted in bed in the house that they share. It had been a long week of mourning.

As a distraction from losing Sasha, and because they needed groceries, Sylvia and Silvestra drove to the Walmart four miles away, at the Cielo Vista Mall. While she was parking, Sylvia received a text from a friend inviting her to breakfast. She sent back a picture of the Walmart lot, at 9:21 A.M. Inside, they shopped. Then, smelling pancakes wafting from the McDonald’s within the store, they decided to have breakfast. “Thank God we stayed there,” Sylvia told me.

Midway through their meal, as her mother sipped her coffee, Sylvia noticed people running inside the store. “It must be a big sale,” her mother quipped. Sylvia sensed that something was wrong. “That’s when we heard the shots from the parking lot, by the main door,” Sylvia told me, which was only twenty feet away. “The cashier lady said, ‘¡Tirense en el suelo, esto es un tiroteo!’ ” (“Get on the floor, this is a shooting!”) “Mom got stuck on the bench, so I pulled her down by her blouse. She fell. I was afraid she’d break something.” Sylvia called 911. No answer. She called again, with the same result. “So I started recording with one hand,” she said. With the other, she held her mother, who was quietly praying and crying. “Her cheeks were shaking with every shot,” Sylvia told me.

Sylvia considered posting the video to Facebook with a plea—“There’s a devil here shooting at Cielo Vista, come help!”—but decided against it, worried that the shooter would somehow see the video and find her under the McDonald’s table. “So,” she told me, “I thought, No, I’ll wait.” In all, she stopped and started three short videos, from the floor, beginning at 10:39 A.M. They capture legs running through the store; a person crouching by a cash register; another body prone under a McDonald’s table; a stunned man looking for his wife as an employee begs him to take cover; another body dropping, limply, in an aisle.

Sylvia showed all three videos to me, narrating what happened. At one point, she referred to the shooter as “that demon over there.” She added that she meant “demon” literally. A third clip showed the view that she had of their eventual escape route, through a side door, beckoned by a Walmart employee. “I said, ‘We need to get out of here.’ Mom said, “Quiero mi café.” (“I want my coffee!”) “She was in shock. I told her the shooter was maybe looking for more ammunition, we had to go.” As they left, leaning against each other for strength, they realized that they were the only people still in the restaurant.

Outside, she went on, “it was like a nightmare, like a horror movie: people running and crying all over.” A man in a blood-soaked shirt stumbled toward an ambulance. Their car was at the back of the lot, and her mother was having trouble moving, so they caught a short ride there. As Sylvia finally drove out of the lot, with her hands shaking, a police car, coming the other direction on a one-way street, missed striking hers by inches.

Back home, Sylvia collapsed in her room. She crawled under her sheets and picked up the phone. She called her adult son. Then she logged on to Facebook, where her online community waited. After resting for about forty-five minutes, she posted a clip from the shooting—the one taken under the table that did not show anyone dying. Alongside it, in Spanish, Sylvia wrote, “What a horrible experience!!!! Shooting in the Walmart at Cielo Vista!! My mom and I were under the table recording! 911 never answered! We are very grateful to Jehovah God for having taken care of us!!!” The video has since been shared thirty-three thousand times and drawn nearly six thousand comments on the social-media platform. It has been viewed nearly two million times.

Some of the earliest viewers of Saucedo’s video of the shooting were journalists. She was flooded with so many texts and calls and direct messages from the news media that she couldn’t keep track of texts from her family and friends. She turned off the notifications on her phone.

Among the first to discover her video and reach out to her, Saucedo said, was a local El Paso TV news station. It aired and then shared her video with “Good Morning America”—without her permission, she told me. Saucedo assumed that that was how things worked. She was picked up at three-forty-five the next morning, as requested by “Good Morning America” ’s producers, and, after hours of coaching, briefly appeared on the show. Following that appearance, Saucedo—or her video, or both—made their way to CNN, ABC, and Univision. She was interviewed by Jorge Ramos and David Muir—“very professional and handsome,” she said of both. She received calls, or was otherwise contacted, by reporters and producers from Serbia, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Colombia. A few offered her “a lot of money” for rights to the video, which she declined. “Every single channel reached out except Fox News,” she told me. (Days later, she offered to provide the videos to the F.B.I., and they looked through her phone, she said, despite her protests that she had personal photos and videos—of her recent attempts to lose weight—mixed in with the clips they were after.)

Saucedo took videos of eager journalists interviewing her, capturing one reporter who thrust his microphone in her face and said, “Can I ask you, what happened on Saturday? Just tell me your story.” She answered his questions and didn’t turn any other reporters away. “I wanted to help everybody,” she said. “I look at the interviews now,” Saucedo went on, in her living room, “and God knows what I was saying. I was like a zombie. I don’t know how I was even walking or talking.” She froze during an interview with MSNBC, she said, unable to speak. “The pressure,” she went on. “ ‘We want this, we want that.’ ”

During some interviews, bystanders pressured her to make political statements. Standing in front of the Walmart, where many of the interviews took place, strangers called out to Saucedo. “ ‘Why don’t you say this was Trump’s fault—labelling us as rapists, criminal, drugs dealers?’ ” she recalled them asking. “ ‘This is why this evil person killed so many Mexicans.’ ” In that moment, she was too shocked and scared to think critically about what had happened. “I couldn’t say it yet,” she told me. “And they got mad.” Speaking with me five days after the shooting, she said the cause of the shooting was clear. She said that she had added to the top of her original post, “Perfect definition of WHITE SUPREMACY,” in Spanish and English. “I do believe that now—that the President’s words helped cause this. But I couldn’t say it then. I couldn’t post on Facebook about white supremacy until a few days later,” she told me. “I was scared they’d come find me,” she said, of why she’d waited. Who would find her, I asked? “Crazy people,” she said. “White people. White supremacists. I don’t know.”

Her mother wandered out of a room in the house, where she’d been watching television in a floral nightgown. She sat down near us, petting a stuffed alpaca and watching Sylvia talk.

Saucedo went on, “The cameras, I said to them, ‘I’m still very hurt, I’m crying, I’m scared. I’m locked in my room. My mom and I are here by ourselves.’ ” But she did the interviews anyway. By Wednesday, by her own accounting, Saucedo had done nearly fifty interviews, most resulting in sound bites—“Good Morning America” aired about a minute—describing something she was still processing: hiding under the McDonald’s table as a twenty-one-year-old man, wearing safety glasses and ear protection, gunned down twenty-two people near her, injuring even more, with a legally purchased AK-47-style assault rifle.

There was another set of questions she was hearing, too, which made the questions about her trauma even harder. “People saying, ‘Why did you record that video? That’s not right,’ ” she recalled. “Well, I had faith we weren’t going to die. But I thought he’d shoot us, too. It was confusing, feelings going back and forth. I wanted people to see what we went through, to see that this isn’t right. Maybe to see my last moments, too, to make sure my son sees it.” She added, “People got mad, which made it all harder.” On Facebook, she replied to comments with heart emojis, not words. “I don’t hate,” she told me.

And what Saucedo felt now—beyond fear and anger at the shooter, the President, and a country consumed by hate—she wasn’t sure. After I arrived at her house, she closed and double-bolted her front door, which her dog had guarded for the past twelve years. An hour and a half into our conversation, Saucedo heard a faint noise in her house. It sounded innocuous to me, like a running toilet. She stopped suddenly, midsentence, to investigate. Fifteen minutes later, when there was a rapping at the window, she shot out of her seat and ran to the door. “¡Dios mio!” she said, discovering her sister outside. Saucedo began crying a little later. There was a tightness in her chest, she said, “a pain that won’t go away.” She went on, “I’m so scared. Now that the attention is going away, it’s just me and my thoughts.”

I asked how this experience would affect her politics. “I usually don’t vote,” Saucedo said. “I’m not a Democrat or a Republican. Not very political. But I’m sick of what the President has been saying about Mexicans. I don’t want to hear it anymore. I think he’s a racist and he needs to get voted out. I can say that now, finally.” Working on a military base for nearly two decades, Saucedo had encountered—and trusted—many kinds of people in her life. She’d never been afraid of particular races. But now white people will get a second look.

She didn’t know what to do with the viral video, though, which remained on her phone and on her Facebook page. The other, more graphic videos, she decided, would never become public. She asked me what I thought. I had no answer. She paused and said, “I guess I’ll leave it up a little longer. Then I need some rest.”