Falling Man

1

It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars.

The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall.

He wore a suit and carried a briefcase. There was glass in his hair and face, marbled bolls of blood and light. He walked past a Breakfast Special sign and they went running by, city cops and security guards running, hands pressed down on gun butts to keep the weapons steady.

Things inside were distant and still, where he was supposed to be. It happened everywhere around him, a car half buried in debris, windows smashed and noises coming out, radio voices scratching at the wreckage. He saw people shedding water as they ran, clothes and bodies drenched from sprinkler systems. There were shoes discarded in the street, handbags and laptops, a man seated on the sidewalk coughing up blood. Paper cups went bouncing oddly by.

The world was this as well, figures in windows a thousand feet up, dropping into free space, and the stink of fuel fire, and the steady rip of sirens in the air. The noise lay everywhere they ran, stratified sound collecting around them, and he walked away from it and into it at the same time.

There was something else then, outside all this, not belonging to this, aloft. He watched it coming down. A shirt came down out of the high smoke, a shirt lifted and drifting in the scant light and then falling again, down toward the river.

They ran and then they stopped, some of them, standing there swaying, trying to draw breath out of the burning air, and the fitful cries of disbelief, curses and lost shouts, and the paper massed in the air, contracts, resumés blowing by, intact snatches of business, quick in the wind.

He kept on walking. There were the runners who’d stopped and others veering into sidestreets. Some were walking backwards, looking into the core of it, all those writhing lives back there, and things kept falling, scorched objects trailing lines of fire.

He saw two women sobbing in their reverse march, looking past him, both in running shorts, faces in collapse.

He saw members of the tai chi group from the park nearby, standing with hands extended at roughly chest level, elbows bent, as if all of this, themselves included, might be placed in a state of abeyance.

Someone came out of a diner and tried to hand him a bottle of water. It was a woman wearing a dust mask and a baseball cap and she withdrew the bottle and twisted off the top and then thrust it toward him again. He put down the briefcase to take it, barely aware that he wasn’t using his left arm, that he’d had to put down the briefcase before he could take the bottle. Three police vans came veering into the street and sped downtown, sirens sounding. He closed his eyes and drank, feeling the water pass into his body taking dust and soot down with it. She was looking at him. She said something he didn’t hear and he handed back the bottle and picked up the briefcase. There was an after-taste of blood in the long draft of water.

He started walking again. A supermarket cart stood upright and empty. There was a woman behind it, facing him, with police tape wrapped around her head and face, yellow caution tape that marks the limits of a crime scene. Her eyes were thin white ripples in the bright mask and she gripped the handle of the cart and stood there, looking into the smoke.

In time he heard the sound of the second fall. He crossed Canal Street and began to see things, somehow, differently. Things did not seem charged in the usual ways, the cobbled street, the cast-iron buildings. There was something critically missing from the things around him. They were unfinished, whatever that means. They were unseen, whatever that means, shop windows, loading platforms, paint-sprayed walls. Maybe this is what things look like when there is no one here to see them.

He heard the sound of the second fall, or felt it in the trembling air, the north tower coming down, a soft awe of voices in the distance. That was him coming down, the north tower.

The sky was lighter here and he could breathe more easily. There were others behind him, thousands, filling the middle distance, a mass in near formation, people walking out of the smoke. He kept going until he had to stop. It hit him quickly, the knowledge that he couldn’t go any farther.

He tried to tell himself he was alive but the idea was too obscure to take hold. There were no taxis and little traffic of any kind and then an old panel truck appeared, Electrical Contractor, Long Island City, and it pulled alongside and the driver leaned toward the window on the passenger’s side and examined what he saw, a man scaled in ash, in pulverized matter, and asked him where he wanted to go. It wasn’t until he got in the truck and shut the door that he understood where he’d been going all along.

2

It wasn’t just those days and nights in bed. Sex was everywhere at first, in words, phrases, half gestures, the simplest intimation of altered space. She’d put down a book or magazine and a small pause settled around them. This was sex. They’d walk down a street together and see themselves in a dusty window. A flight of stairs was sex, the way she moved close to the wall with him just behind, to touch or not, brush lightly or press tight, feeling him crowd her from below, his hand moving around her thigh, stopping her, the way he eased up and around, the way she gripped his wrist. The tilt she gave her sunglasses when she turned and looked at him or the movie on TV when the woman comes into the empty room and it doesn’t matter whether she picks up the phone or takes off her skirt as long as she’s alone and they are watching. The rented beach house was sex, entering at night after the long stiff drive, her body feeling welded at the joints, and she’d hear the soft heave of surf on the other side of the dunes, the thud and run, and this was the line of separation, the sound out there in the dark that marked an earthly pulse in the blood.

She sat thinking about this. Her mind drifted in and out of this, the early times, eight years ago, of the eventual extended grimness called their marriage. The day’s mail was in her lap. There were matters to attend to and there were events that crowded out such matters but she was looking past the lamp into the wall, where they seemed to be projected, the man and woman, bodies incomplete but bright and real.

It was the postcard that snapped her back, on top of the cluster of bills and other mail. She glanced at the message, a standard scrawled greeting, sent by a friend staying in Rome, then looked again at the face of the card. It was a reproduction of the cover of Shelley’s poem in twelve cantos, first edition, called Revolt of Islam. Even in postcard format, it was clear that the cover was beautifully designed, with a large illustrated R that included creatural flourishes, a ram’s head and what may have been a fanciful fish with a tusk and a trunk. Revolt of Islam. The card was from the Keats-Shelley House in Piazza di Spagna and she’d understood in the first taut seconds that the card had been sent a week or two earlier. It was a matter of simple coincidence, or not so simple, that a card might arrive at this particular time bearing the title of that specific book.

This was all, a lost moment on the Friday of that lifelong week, three days after the planes.

She said to her mother, “It was not possible, up from the dead, there he was in the doorway. It’s so lucky Justin was here with you. Because it would have been awful for him to see his father like that. Like gray soot head to toe, I don’t know, like smoke, standing there, with blood on his face and clothes.”

“We did a puzzle, an animal puzzle, horses in a field.”

Her mother’s apartment was not far from Fifth Avenue, with art on the walls, painstakingly spaced, and small bronze pieces on tables and bookshelves. Today the living room was in a state of happy disarray. Justin’s toys and games were scattered across the floor, subverting the timeless quality of the room, and this was nice, Lianne thought, because it was otherwise hard not to whisper in such a setting.

“I didn’t know what to do. I mean with the phones out. Finally we walked to the hospital. Walked, step by step, like walking a child.”

“Why was he there in the first place, in your apartment?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t he go straight to a hospital? Down there, downtown. Why didn’t he go to a friend’s place?”

Friend meant girlfriend, an unavoidable thrust, she had to do it, couldn’t help it.

“I don’t know.”

“You haven’t discussed this. Where is he now?”

“He’s all right. Done with doctors for a while.”

“What have you discussed?”

“No major problems, physical.”

“What have you discussed?” she said.

Her mother, Nina Bartos, had taught at universities in California and New York, retiring two years earlier, the So-and-So Professor of Such-and-Such, as Keith said once. She was pale and thin, her mother, following knee-replacement surgery. She was finally and resolutely old. This is what she wanted, it seemed, to be old and tired, to embrace old age, take up old age, surround herself with it. There were the canes, there were the medications, there were the afternoon naps, the dietary restrictions, the doctors’ appointments.

“There’s nothing to discuss right now. He needs to stay away from things, including discussions.”

“Reticent.”

“You know Keith.”

“I’ve always admired that about him. He gives the impression there’s something deeper than hiking and skiing, or playing cards. But what?”

“Rock climbing. Don’t forget.”

“And you went with him. I did forget.”

Her mother stirred in the chair, feet propped on the matching stool, late morning, still in her robe, dying for a cigarette.

“I like his reticence, or whatever it is,” she said. “But be careful.”

“He’s reticent around you, or was, the few times there was actual communication.”

“Be careful. He was in grave danger, I know. He had friends in there. I know that too,” her mother said. “But if you let your sympathy and goodwill affect your judgment.”

There were the conversations with friends and former colleagues about knee replacements, hip replacements, about the atrocities of short-term memory and long-term health insurance. All of this was so alien to Lianne’s sense of her mother that she thought there might be an element of performance. Nina was trying to accommodate the true encroachments of age by making drama of them, giving herself a certain degree of ironic distance.

“And Justin. Having a father around the house again.”

“The kid is fine. Who knows how the kid is? He’s fine, he’s back in school,” she said. “They reopened.”

“But you worry. I know this. You like to nourish your fear.”

“What’s next? Don’t you ask yourself? Not only next month. Years to come.”

“Nothing is next. There is no next. This was next. Eight years ago they planted a bomb in one of the towers. Nobody said what’s next. This was next. The time to be afraid is when there’s no reason to be afraid. Too late now.”

Lianne stood by the window.

“But when the towers fell.”

“I know.”

“When this happened.”

“I know.”

“I thought he was dead.”

“So did I,” Nina said. “So many watching.”

“Thinking he’s dead, she’s dead.”

“I know.”

“Watching those buildings fall.”

“First one, then the other. I know,” her mother said.

She had several canes to choose from and sometimes, on the off-hours and the rainy days, she walked up the street to the Metropolitan Museum and looked at pictures. She looked at three or four pictures in an hour and a half of looking. She looked at what was unfailing. She liked the big rooms, the old masters, what was unfailing in its grip on the eye and mind, on memory and identity. Then she came home and read. She read and slept.

“Of course the child is a blessing but otherwise, you know better than I, marrying the man was a huge mistake, and you willed it, you went looking for it. You wanted to live a certain way, never mind the consequences. You wanted a certain thing and you thought Keith.”

“What did I want?”

“You thought Keith would get you there.”

“What did I want?”

“To feel dangerously alive. This was a quality you associated with your father. But that wasn’t the case. Your father was at heart a careful man. And your son is a beautiful and sensitive child,” she said. “But otherwise.”

In truth she loved this room, Lianne did, in its most composed form, without the games and scattered toys. Her mother had been living here for a few years only and Lianne tended to see it as a visitor might, a space that was serenely self-possessed, and so what if it’s a little intimidating. What she loved most were the two still lifes on the north wall, by Giorgio Morandi, a painter her mother had studied and written about. These were groupings of bottles, jugs, biscuit tins, that was all, but there was something in the brushstrokes that held a mystery she could not name, or in the irregular edges of vases and jars, some reconnoiter inward, human and obscure, away from the very light and color of the paintings. Natura morta. The Italian term for still life seemed stronger than it had to be, somewhat ominous, even, but these were matters she hadn’t talked about with her mother. Let the latent meanings turn and bend in the wind, free from authoritative comment.

“You liked asking questions as a child. Insistently digging. But you were curious about the wrong things.”

“They were my things, not yours.”

“Keith wanted a woman who’d regret what she did with him. This is his style, to get a woman to do something she’ll be sorry for. And the thing you did wasn’t just a night or a weekend. He was built for weekends. The thing you did.”

“This isn’t the time.”

“You actually married the man.”

“And then I threw him out. I had strong objections, building up over time. What you object to is very different. He’s not a scholar, not an artist. Doesn’t paint, doesn’t write poetry. If he did, you’d overlook everything else. He’d be the raging artist. He’d be allowed to behave unspeakably. Tell me something.”

“You have more to lose this time. Self-respect. Think about that.”

“Tell me this. What kind of painter is allowed to behave more unspeakably, figurative or abstract?”

She heard the buzzer and walked over to the intercom to listen to the doorman’s announcement. She knew what it was in advance. This would be Martin on the way up, her mother’s lover.

3

He signed a document, then another. There were people on gurneys and there were others, a few, in wheelchairs, and he had trouble writing his name and more trouble fastening the hospital gown behind him. Lianne was there to help. Then she wasn’t anymore and an orderly put him in a wheelchair and pushed him down a corridor and into a series of examining rooms, with urgent cases rolling by.

Doctors in scrubs and paper masks checked his airway and took blood-pressure readings. They were interested in potentially fatal reactions to injury, hemorrhage, dehydration. They looked for diminished blood flow to tissues. They studied the contusions on his body and peered into his eyes and ears. Someone gave him an EKG. Through the open door he saw IV racks go floating past. They tested his hand grip and took X rays. They told him things he could not absorb about a ligament or cartilage, a tear or sprain.

Someone took the glass out of his face. The man talked throughout, using an instrument he called a pickup to extract small fragments of glass that were not deeply embedded. He said that most of the worst cases were in hospitals downtown or at the trauma center on a pier. He said that survivors were not appearing in the numbers expected. He was propelled by events and could not stop talking. Doctors and volunteers were standing idle, he said, because the people they were waiting for were mostly back there, in the ruins. He said he would use a clamp for deeper fragments.

“Where there are suicide bombings. Maybe you don’t want to hear this.”

“I don’t know.”

“In those places where it happens, the survivors, the people nearby who are injured, sometimes, months later, they develop bumps, for lack of a better term, and it turns out this is caused by small fragments, tiny fragments of the suicide bomber’s body. The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outward with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get trapped in the body of anyone who’s in striking range. Do you believe it? A student is sitting in a café. She survives the attack. Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into the skin. They call this organic shrapnel.”

He tweezered another splinter of glass out of Keith’s face.

“This is something I don’t think you have,” he said.

Justin’s two best friends were a sister and brother who lived in a high-rise ten blocks away. Lianne had trouble remembering their names at first and called them the Siblings and soon the name stuck. Justin said this was their real name anyway and she thought what a funny kid when he wants to be.

She saw Isabel on the street, mother of the Siblings, and they stood at the corner talking.

“That’s what kids do, absolutely, but I have to admit I’m beginning to wonder.”

“They sort of conspire.”

“Yes, and sort of talk in code, and they spend a lot of time at the window in Katie’s room, with the door closed.”

“You know they’re at the window.”

“Because I can hear them talking when I walk by and I know that’s where they’re standing. They’re at the window talking in this sort of code. Maybe Justin tells you things.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Because it’s getting a little strange, frankly, all the time they spend, first, sort of huddled together, and then, I don’t know, like endlessly whispering things in this semi-gibberish, which is what kids do, absolutely, but still.”

Lianne wasn’t sure what this was all about. It was about three kids being kids together.

“Justin’s getting interested in the weather. I think they’re doing clouds in school,” she said, realizing how hollow this sounded.

“They’re not whispering about clouds.”

“Okay.”

“It has something to do with this man.”

“What man?”

“This name. You’ve heard it.”

“This name,” Lianne said.

“Isn’t this the name they sort of mumble back and forth? My kids totally don’t want to discuss the matter. Katie enforces the thing. She basically inspires fear in her brother. I thought maybe you would know something.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Like Justin says nothing about any of this?”

“No. What man?”

“What man? Exactly,” Isabel said.

He was tall, with cropped hair, and she thought he looked like army, like career military, still in shape and beginning to look seasoned, not in combat but in the pale rigors of this life, in separation perhaps, in living alone, being a father from a distance.

He was in bed now and watched her, a few feet away, begin to button her shirt. They slept in the same bed because she could not tell him to use the sofa and because she liked having him here next to her. He didn’t seem to sleep. He lay on his back and talked but mostly listened and this was all right. She didn’t need to know a man’s feelings about everything, not anymore and not this man. She liked the spaces he made. She liked dressing in front of him. She knew the time was coming when he’d press her to the wall before she finished dressing. He’d get out of bed and look at her and she’d stop what she was doing and wait for him to come and press her to the wall.

He lay on a long narrow table within the closed unit. There was a pillow under his knees and a pair of track lights overhead and he tried to listen to the music. Inside the powerful noise of the scanner he fixed his attention on the instruments, separating one set from another, strings, woodwinds, brass. The noise was a violent staccato knocking, a metallic clamor that made him feel he was deep inside the core of a science-fiction city about to come undone.

He wore a device on his wrist to produce a detailed image and the sense of helpless confinement made him think of something the radiologist had said, a Russian whose accent he found reassuring because these are serious people who place weight on every word and maybe that’s why he chose classical music to listen to when she asked him to make a selection. He heard her now in his headset saying that the next sequence of noise would last three minutes and when the music resumed he thought of Nancy Dinnerstein, who ran a sleep clinic in Boston. People paid her to put them to sleep. Or the other Nancy, what’s-her-name, briefly, between incidental sex acts, in Portland that time, Oregon, without a last name. The city had a last name, the woman did not.

The noise was unbearable, alternating between the banging-shattering sound and an electronic pulse of varied pitch. He listened to the music and thought of what the radiologist had said, that once it’s over, in her Russian accent, you forget instantly the whole experience so how bad can it be, she said, and he thought this sounded like a description of dying. But that was another matter, wasn’t it, in another kind of noise, and the trapped man does not come sliding out of his tube. He listened to the music. He tried hard to hear the flutes and distinguish them from the clarinets, if there were clarinets, but he was unable to do this and the only countervailing force was Nancy Dinnerstein drunk in Boston and it gave him a dumb and helpless hard-on, thinking of her in his drafty hotel room with a limited view of the river.

He heard the voice in his headset saying that the next sequence of noise would last seven minutes.

She saw the face in the newspaper, the man from Flight 11. Only one of the nineteen seemed to have a face at this point, staring out of the photo, taut, with hard eyes that seemed too knowing to belong to a face on a driver’s license.

She got a call from Carol Shoup, an executive editor with a large publishing house. Carol had occasional jobs for Lianne, who edited books freelance, working usually at home or in the library.

It was Carol who’d sent the postcard from Rome, from the Keats-Shelley House, and she was the sort of person who was sure to sing out, on her return, “Did you get my card?”

Always in a voice that hovered between desperate insecurity and incipient resentment.

Instead she said softly, “Is this a bad time?”

After he walked in the door and people began to hear about it, in the days to come, they called her and said, “Is this a bad time?”

Of course they meant, Are you busy, you must be busy, there must be so much going on, should I call back, can I do something, how is he, will he stay for a while and, finally, can we have dinner, the four of us, somewhere quiet?

It was strange, how terse she became, and uninformative, coming to hate the phrase, marked as it was by nothing more than its own replicating DNA, and to distrust the voices, so smoothly funereal.

“Because if it is,” Carol said, “we can talk whenever.”

She didn’t want to believe she was being selfish in her guardianship of the survivor, determined to hold exclusive rights. This is where he wanted to be, outside the tide of voices and faces, God and country, sitting alone in still rooms, with those nearby who mattered.

“Which, by the way,” Carol said, “did you get the card I sent?”

She heard music coming from somewhere in the building, on a lower floor, and took two steps to the door, moving the telephone away from her ear, and then she opened the door and stood there, listening.

Now she stood at the foot of the bed and watched him lying there, late one night, after she’d finished working, and asked him finally and quietly.

“Why did you come here?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“For Justin, yes?”

This was the answer she wanted because it made the most sense.

“So he could see you were alive,” she said.

But it was also only half the answer and she realized she needed to hear something beyond this, a broader motive for his action or intuition or whatever it was.

He thought for a long moment.

“It’s hard to reconstruct. I don’t know how my mind was working. A guy came along in a van, a plumber, I think, and he drove me here. His radio had been stolen and he knew from the sirens that something was going on but he didn’t know what. At some point he had a clear view downtown but all he could see was one tower. He thought one tower was blocking his view of the other tower, or the smoke was. He saw the smoke. He drove east a ways and looked again and there was only one tower. One tower made no sense. Then he turned uptown because that’s where he was going and finally he saw me and picked me up. By this time the second tower was gone. Eight radios in three years, he said. All stolen. An electrician, I think. He had a water bottle he kept pushing in my face.”

“Your apartment, you knew you couldn’t go there.”

“I knew the building was too close to the towers and maybe I knew I couldn’t go there and maybe I wasn’t even thinking about that. Either way, that’s not why I came here. It was more than that.”

She felt better now.

“He wanted to take me to the hospital, the guy in the van, but I told him to bring me here.”

He looked at her.

“I gave him this address,” he said for emphasis, and she felt better still.

It was a simple matter, outpatient surgery, a ligament or cartilage, with Lianne in the reception area waiting to take him back to the apartment. On the table he thought of his buddy Rumsey, briefly, just before or after he lost sensation. The doctor, the anesthetist, injected him with a heavy sedative or other agent, a substance containing a memory suppressant, or maybe there were two shots, but there was Rumsey in his chair by the window, which meant the memory was not suppressed or the substance hadn’t taken effect yet, a dream, a waking image, whatever it was, Rumsey in the smoke, things coming down.

She stepped into the street thinking ordinary thoughts, dinner, dry cleaning, cash machine, that’s it, go home.

There was serious work to do on the book she was editing, for a university press, on ancient alphabets, deadline approaching. There was definitely that.

She wondered what the kid would make of the mango chutney she’d bought, or maybe he’d had it already, had it and hated it, at the Siblings’, because Katie talked about it once, or someone did.

The author was a Bulgarian writing in English.

And there was this, the taxis in broad ranks, three or four deep, speeding toward her from the traffic light one block down the avenue as she paused in midcrossing to work out her fate.

In Santa Fe she’d come across a sign on a shop window, for ethnic shampoo. She was traveling in New Mexico with a man she used to see during the separation, a TV executive, flauntingly well-read, teeth lasered lime white, a man who loved her longish face and sort of lazy-lithe body, he said, down to the knobby extremities, and the way he examined her, finger tracing the twists and ridges, which he named after geologic eras, making her laugh, intermittently, for a day and a half, or maybe it was just the altitude at which they were screwing, in the skies of the high desert.

Running toward the far curb now, feeling like a skirt and blouse without a body, how good it felt, hiding behind the plastic shimmer of the dry cleaner’s long sheath, which she held at arm’s length, between her and the taxis, in self-defense. She imagined the eyes of the drivers, intense and slit, heads pressed toward steering wheels, and there was still the question of her need to be equal to the situation, as Martin had said, her mother’s lover.

There was that, and Keith in the shower this morning, standing numbly in the flow, a dim figure far away inside plexiglass.

But what made her think of this, ethnic shampoo, in the middle of Third Avenue, which was a question probably not answerable in a book on ancient alphabets, meticulous decipherments, inscriptions on baked clay, tree bark, stone, bone, sedge. The joke, at her expense, is that the work in question was typed on an old manual machine with textual emendations made by the author in a deeply soulful and unreadable script.

The first cop told him to go to the checkpoint one block east of here and he did this and there were military police and troops in Humvees and a convoy of dump trucks and sanitation sweepers moving south through the parted sawhorse barriers. He showed proof of address with picture ID and the second cop told him to go to the next checkpoint, east of here, and he did this and saw a chain-link barrier stretching down the middle of Broadway, patrolled by troops in gas masks. He told the cop at the checkpoint that he had a cat to feed and if it died his child would be devastated and the man was sympathetic but told him to try the next checkpoint. There were fire-rescue cars and ambulances, there were state police cruisers, flatbed trucks, vehicles with cherry pickers, all moving through the barricades and into the shroud of sand and ash.

He showed the next cop his proof of address and picture ID and told him there were cats he had to feed, three of them, and if they died his children would be devastated and he showed the splint on his left arm. He had to move out of the way when a drove of enormous bulldozers and backhoes moved through the parted barricades, making the sound of hell machines at endless revving pitch. He started over again with the cop and showed his wrist splint and said he needed only fifteen minutes in the apartment to feed the cats and then he’d go back uptown to the hotel, no animals allowed, and reassure the children. The cop said okay but if you’re stopped down there be sure to tell them you went through the Broadway checkpoint, not this one.

He worked his way through the frozen zone, south and west, passing through smaller checkpoints and detouring around others. There was a Guard troop in battle jackets and sidearms and now and then he saw a figure in a dust mask, man or woman, obscure and furtive, the only other civilians. The streets and cars were surfaced in ash and there were garbage bags stacked high at curbstones and against the sides of buildings. He walked slowly, watching for something he could not identify. Everything was gray, it was limp and failed, storefronts behind corrugated steel shutters, a city somewhere else, under permanent siege, and a stink in the air that infiltrated the skin.

He stood at the National Rent-A-Fence barrier and looked into the haze, seeing the strands of bent filigree that were the last standing things, a skeletal remnant of the tower where he’d worked for ten years. The dead were everywhere, in the air, in the rubble, on rooftops nearby, in the breezes that carried from the river. They were settled in ash and drizzled on windows all along the streets, in his hair and on his clothes.

He realized someone had joined him at the fence, a man in a dust mask who maintained a calculated silence designed to be broken.

“Look at it,” he said finally. “I say to myself I’m standing here. It’s hard to believe, being here and seeing it.”

His words were muffled by the mask.

“I walked to Brooklyn when it happened,” he said. “I don’t live there. I live way uptown on the west side but I work down around here and when it happened everybody was walking across the bridge to Brooklyn and I went with them. I walked across the bridge because they were walking across the bridge.”

It sounded like a speech defect, the words smothered and blurred. He took out his cell phone and entered a number.

“I’m standing here,” he said but had to repeat himself because the person he was talking to could not hear him clearly.

“I’m standing here,” he said.

Keith headed in the direction of his apartment building. He saw three men in hard hats and NYPD windbreakers, with search dogs on short leads. They came walking toward him and one of the men tilted his head in inquiry. Keith told him where he was going, mentioned the cats and the children. The man paused to tell him that the tower at One Liberty Plaza, fifty-plus stories, near where Keith was going, was about to fucking fall down. The other men stood by impatiently and the first man told him that the building was actually and measurably moving. He nodded and waited for them to leave and went south once more and then west again through mostly empty streets. Two Hasidic men stood outside a shop with a broken window. They looked a thousand years old. When he approached his building he saw workers in respirators and protective body suits scouring the sidewalk with a massive vacuum pump.

The front doors were blown in or kicked in. It was not looters, he thought. He thought that people had taken desperate shelter, taken cover wherever they could when the towers came down. The entrance hall reeked of garbage uncollected in the basement. He knew that the electricity had been restored and there was no reason not to take the elevator but he climbed the nine flights to his apartment, pausing on floors three and seven to stand at the near end of the long corridors. He stood and listened. The building seemed empty, it felt and sounded empty. When he entered his apartment he stood a while, just looking around. The windows were scabbed in sand and ash and there were fragments of paper and one whole sheet trapped in the grime. Everything else was the same as it had been when he walked out the door for work that Tuesday morning. Not that he’d noticed. He’d lived here for a year and a half, since the separation, finding a place close to the office, centering his life, content with the narrowest of purviews, that of not noticing.

But now he looked. Some light entered between splashes of window grit. He saw the place differently now. Here he was, seen clear, with nothing that mattered to him in these two and a half rooms, dim and still, in a faint odor of nonoccupancy. There was the card table, that was all, with its napped green surface, baize or felt, site of the weekly poker game. One of the players said baize, which is imitation felt, he said, and Keith more or less conceded this. It was the one uncomplicated interval of his week, his month, the poker game-the one anticipation that was not marked by the bloodguilt tracings of severed connections. Call or fold. Felt or baize.

This was the last time he would stand here. There were no cats, there were only clothes. He put some things in a suitcase, a few shirts and trousers and his trekking boots from Switzerland and to hell with the rest. This and that and the Swiss boots because the boots mattered and the poker table mattered but he wouldn’t need the table, two players dead, one badly injured. A single suitcase, that was all, and his passport, checkbooks, birth certificate and a few other documents, the state papers of identity. He stood and looked and felt something so lonely he could touch it with his hand. At the window the intact page stirred in the breeze and he went over to see if it was readable. Instead he looked at the visible sliver of One Liberty Plaza and began to count the floors, losing interest about halfway up, thinking of something else.

He looked in the refrigerator. Maybe he was thinking of the man who used to live here and he checked the bottles and cartons for a clue. The paper rustled at the window and he picked up the suitcase and walked out the door, locking it behind him. He went about fifteen paces into the corridor, away from the stairwell, and spoke in a voice slightly above a whisper.

He said, “I’m standing here,” and then, louder, “I’m standing here.”

In the movie version, someone would be in the building, an emotionally damaged woman or a homeless old man, and there would be dialogue and close-ups.

The truth is that he was wary of the elevator. He didn’t want to know this but did, unavoidably. He walked down to the lobby, smelling the garbage coming closer with every step he took. The men with the vacuum pump were gone. He heard the drone and grind of heavy machinery at the site, earthmoving equipment, excavators that pounded concrete to dust, and then the sound of a klaxon that signaled danger, possible collapse of a structure nearby. He waited, they all waited, and then the grind began again.

He went to the local post office to pick up his undelivered mail and then walked north toward the barricades, thinking it might be hard to find a taxi at a time when every cabdriver in New York was named Muhammad.

4

Their separation had been marked by a certain symmetry, the steadfast commitment each made to an equivalent group. He had his poker game, six players, downtown, one night a week. She had her storyline sessions, in East Harlem, also weekly, in the afternoon, a gathering of five or six or seven men and women in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

The card games ended after the towers fell but the sessions took on a measure of intensity. The members sat on folding chairs in a room with a makeshift plywood door in a large community center. A steady bang and clatter bounced off the hallway walls. There were children racing around, adults in special classes. There were people playing dominoes and ping-pong, volunteers preparing food deliveries to elderly people in the area.

The group had been started by a clinical psychologist who left Lianne alone to conduct these meetings, which were strictly for morale. She and the members talked a while about events in the world and in their lives and then she handed out lined pads and ballpoint pens and suggested a topic they might write about or asked them to choose one. Remembering my father, that sort of thing, or What I always wanted to do but never did, or Do my children know who I am.

They wrote for roughly twenty minutes and then each, in turn, read aloud what he or she had written. Sometimes it scared her, the first signs of halting response, the losses and failings, the grim prefigurings that issued now and then from a mind beginning to slide away from the adhesive friction that makes an individual possible. It was in the language, the inverted letters, the lost word at the end of a struggling sentence. It was in the handwriting that might melt into runoff. But there were a thousand high times the members experienced, given a chance to encounter the crossing points of insight and memory that the act of writing allows. They laughed loud and often. They worked into themselves, finding narratives that rolled and tumbled, and how natural it seemed to do this, tell stories about themselves.

Rosellen S. saw her father walk in the door after a disappearance lasting four years. He was bearded now, head shaved, one arm missing. She was ten when this happened and she described the event in a run-on convergence, an intimacy of clean physical detail and dreamy reminiscence that had no seeming connection-radio programs, cousins named Luther, two of them, and a dress her mother wore to somebody’s wedding, and they listened to her read in a half whisper, one arm missing, and Benny in the next chair closed his eyes and rocked all through the telling. This was their prayer room, said Omar H. They summoned the force of final authority. No one knew what they knew, here in the last clear minute before it all closed down.

They signed their pages with first name and first letter of last name. This was Lianne’s idea, maybe a little affected, she thought, as if they were characters in European novels. They were characters and authors both, able to tell what they wished, cradle the rest in silence. When Carmen G. read her pieces she liked to embellish them with phrases in Spanish to seize the auditory core of an incident or an emotion. Benny T. hated to write, loved to talk. He brought pastry to the meetings, large jellied bladders that no one else would touch. The noise echoed in the hallway, kids playing piano and drums, others on roller skates, and the voices and accents of the adults, their polyglot English floating through the building.

Members wrote about hard times, happy memories, daughters becoming mothers. Anna wrote about the revelation of writing itself, how she hadn’t known she could write ten words and now look what comes pouring out. This was Anna C., a broad-bodied woman from the neighborhood. Nearly all of them were from the neighborhood, the eldest being Curtis B., eighty-one, a tall taciturn man with a prison history and a voice, in his readings, that had the resonance of entries in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a collection he’d read front to back in the penitentiary library.

There was one subject the members wanted to write about, insistently, all of them but Omar H. It made Omar nervous but he agreed in the end. They wanted to write about the planes.

When he got back uptown the apartment was empty. He sorted through his mail. His name was misspelled on a couple of pieces of mail, this was not unusual, and he snatched a ballpoint pen from the mug near the telephone and made the corrections on the envelopes. He wasn’t sure when he’d started doing this and didn’t know why he did it. There was no reason why. Because it wasn’t him, with the name misspelled, that’s why. He did it and then kept doing it and maybe he understood at some snake-brain level of perception that he had to do it and would keep doing it down the years and into the decades. He did not construct this future in clear terms but it was probably there, humming under the skull. He never corrected the spelling on mail that was out-right third-class indiscriminate throwaway advertising matter. He almost did, the first time, but then did not. Junk mail was created for just this reason, to presort the world’s identities into one, with his or her name misspelled. In most other cases he made the correction, involving one letter in the first syllable of his last name, which was Neudecker, and then slit open the envelope. He never made the correction in the presence of someone else. It was an act he was careful to conceal.

She walked across Washington Square Park behind a student saying hopefully into his cell phone. It was a bright day, chess players at their tables, a fashion shoot in progress under the arch. They said hopefully. They said oh my god, in delight and small awe. She saw a young woman reading on a bench, in the lotus position. Lianne used to read haiku, sitting crosslegged on the floor, in the weeks and months after her father died. She thought of a poem by Bashō, or the first and third lines. She didn’t remember the second line. Even in Kyoto -I long for Kyoto. The second line was missing but she didn’t think she needed it.

Half an hour later she was in Grand Central Station to meet her mother’s train. She hadn’t been here lately and was not accustomed to the sight of police and state troopers in tight clusters or guardsmen with dogs. Other places, she thought, other worlds, dusty terminals, major intersections, this is routine and always will be. This was not a considered reflection so much as a flutter, a downdraft of memory, cities she’d seen, crowds and heat. But the normal order was also in evidence here, tourists taking pictures, commuters in running flurries. She was headed to the information desk to check the gate number when something caught her eyes out near the approach to 42nd Street.

There were people clustered near the entrance, on both sides, others pushing through the doors but seemingly still engaged by something happening outside. She made her way out onto the crowded sidewalk. Traffic was building, a few horns blowing. She edged along a storefront and looked up toward the green steel structure that passes over Pershing Square, the section of elevated roadway that carries traffic around the terminal in both directions.

A man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of the viaduct.

She’d heard of him, a performance artist known as Falling Man. He’d appeared several times in the last week, unannounced, in various parts of the city, suspended from one or another structure, always upside down, wearing a suit, a tie and dress shoes. He brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump. He’d been seen dangling from a balcony in a hotel atrium and police had escorted him out of a concert hall and two or three apartment buildings with terraces or accessible rooftops.

Traffic was barely moving now. There were people shouting up at him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation, a body’s last fleet breath and what it held. It held the gaze of the world, she thought. There was the awful openness of it, something we’d not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all. And now, she thought, this little theater piece, disturbing enough to stop traffic and send her back into the terminal.

Her mother was waiting at the gate, on the lower level, leaning on her cane.

She said, “I had to get out of there.”

“I thought you’d stay another week at least. Better there than here.”

“I want to be in my apartment.”

“What about Martin?”

“Martin is still there. We’re still arguing. I want to sit in my armchair and read my Europeans.”

Lianne took the bag and they rode the escalator up to the main concourse, steeped in dusty light slanting through the high lunettes. A dozen people were grouped around a guide near the staircase to the east balcony, gazing at the sky ceiling, the gold-leaf constellations, with a guardsman and his dog standing alongside, and her mother could not help commenting on the man’s uniform, the question of jungle camouflage in midtown Manhattan.

“People are leaving, you’re coming back.”

“Nobody’s leaving,” her mother said. “The ones who leave were never here.”

“I have to admit, I’ve thought of it. Take the kid and go.”

“Don’t make me sick,” her mother said.

Even in New York, she thought. Of course she was wrong about the second line of the haiku. She knew this. Whatever the line was, it was surely crucial to the poem. Even in New York -I long for New York.

She led her mother across the concourse and along a passage that would bring them out three blocks north of the main entrance. There would be moving traffic there and cabs to hail and no sign of the man who was upside down, in stationary fall, ten days after the planes.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? To sleep with your husband, a thirty-eight-year-old woman and a thirty-nine-year-old man, and never a breathy sound of sex. He’s your ex-husband who was never technically ex, the stranger you married in another lifetime. She dressed and undressed, he watched and did not. It was strange but interesting. A tension did not build. This was extremely strange. She wanted him here, nearby, but felt no edge of self-contradiction or self-denial. Just waiting, that was all, a broad pause in recognition of a thousand sour days and nights, not so easily set aside. The matter needed time. It could not happen the way things did in normal course. And it’s interesting, isn’t it, the way you move about the bedroom, routinely near-naked, and the respect you show the past, the deference to its fervors of the wrong kind, its passions of cut and burn.

She wanted contact and so did he.

The briefcase was smaller than normal and reddish brown with brass hardware, sitting on the closet floor. He’d seen it there before but understood for the first time that it wasn’t his. Wasn’t his wife’s, wasn’t his. He’d seen it, even half placed it in some long-lost distance as an object in his hand, the right hand, an object pale with ash, but it wasn’t until now that he knew why it was here.

He picked it up and took it to the desk in the study. It was here because he’d brought it here. It wasn’t his briefcase but he’d carried it out of the tower and he had it with him when he showed up at the door. She’d cleaned it since then, obviously, and he stood and looked at it, full-grain leather with a pebbled texture, nicely burnished over time, one of the front buckles bearing a singe mark. He ran his thumb over the padded handle, trying to remember why he’d carried it out of there. He was in no hurry to open it. He began to think he didn’t want to open it but wasn’t sure why. He ran his knuckles over the front flap and unbuckled one of the straps. Sunlight fell across the star map on the wall. He unbuckled the second strap.

He found a set of headphones and a CD player. There was a small bottle of spring water. There was a cell phone in the pocket designed for that purpose and half a chocolate bar in a slot for business cards. He noted three pen sleeves, one rollerball pen. There was a pack of Kent cigarettes and a lighter. In one of the saddle pockets he found a sonic toothbrush in a travel case and a digital voice recorder as well, sleeker than his own.

He examined the items with detachment. It was somehow morbidly unright to be doing this but he was so remote from the things in the briefcase, from the occasion of the briefcase, that it probably didn’t matter.

There was an imitation leather folio with a blank notebook in one of the pockets. He found a stamped envelope preaddressed to AT amp;T, no return address, and a book in the zippered compartment, paperback, a guide to buying used cars. The CD in the player was a compilation of music from Brazil.

The wallet with money, credit cards and a driver’s license was in the other saddle pocket.

This time the woman showed up in the bakery, mother of the Siblings. She walked in just after Lianne did and joined her in line after taking a number from the dispenser on the counter.

“I’m just wondering about the binoculars. He’s not, you know, the most outgoing child.”

She smiled at Lianne, warmly and falsely, in a fragrance of glazed cakes, a mother-to-mother look, like we both know how these kids have enormous gleaming worlds they don’t share with their parents.

“Because he always has them lately. I just wondered, you know, what he might have told you one way or the other.”

Lianne didn’t know what she was talking about. She looked into the broad and florid face of the man behind the counter. The answer wasn’t there.

“He shares them with my kids, so that’s not it, because their father promised them a pair but we haven’t gotten around, you know, binoculars, not the highest priority, and my Katie’s being supersecret and her brother’s her brother, loyal to a fault.”

“You mean what are they looking at, behind closed doors?”

“I thought maybe Justin.”

“Can’t be much, can it? Maybe hawks. You know about the red-tails.”

“No, it’s definitely something to do with Bill Lawton. I’m sure of this, absolutely, because the binoculars are part of the whole hush-hush syndrome these kids are engulfed in.”

“Bill Lawton.”

“The man. The name I mentioned.”

“I don’t think so,” Lianne said.

“This is their secret. I know the name but that’s all. And I thought maybe Justin. Because my kids totally blank out when I bring up the subject.”

She didn’t know that Justin was taking the binoculars on his visits to the Siblings. They weren’t his binoculars exactly, although she guessed it was all right for him to use them without permission. But maybe not, she thought, waiting for the man to call her number.

“Aren’t they doing birds in school?”

“Last time it was clouds.”

“Turns out I was wrong about the clouds. But they’re definitely studying birds and birdcalls and habitats,” she told the woman. “They go trekking through Central Park.”

She realized how much she hated to stand in line with a number in her fist. She hated this regimen of assigned numbers, strictly enforced, in a confined space, with nothing at the end of the process but a small white bow-tied box of pastry.

He wasn’t sure what it was that woke him up. He lay there, eyes open, thinking into the dark. Then he began to hear it, out on the stairs and along the hall, coming from a lower floor somewhere, music, and he listened carefully now, hand drums and stringed instruments and massed voices in the walls, but soft, but seemingly far off, on the other side of a valley, it seemed, men in chanted prayer, voices in chorus in praise of God.

Allah-uu Allah-uu Allah-uu

There was an old-fashioned pencil sharpener clamped to the end of the table in Justin’s room. She stood at the door and watched him insert each pencil in the slot and then crank the handle. He had red-and-blue combination pencils, Cedar Pointe pencils, Dixon Trimlines, vintage Eberhard Fabers. He had pencils from hotels in Zurich and Hong Kong. There were pencils fashioned from tree bark, rough and knotted. There were pencils from the design store of the Museum of Modern Art. He had Mirado Black Warriors. He had pencils from a SoHo shop that were inscribed along the shaft with cryptic sayings from Tibet.

It was awful in a way, all these fragments of status washing up in some little kid’s room.

But what she loved to watch was the way he blew the microscopic shavings off the pencil point after he finished sharpening. If he were to do it all day, she’d watch all day, pencil after pencil. He’d crank and blow, crank and blow, a ritual more thorough and righteous than the formal signing of some document of state by eleven men with medals.

When he saw her watching he said, “What?”

“I talked to Katie’s mother today. Katie and what’s-his-name. She told me about the binoculars.”

He stood and watched her, pencil in hand.

“Katie and what’s-his-name.”

“Robert,” he said.

“Her little brother Robert. And his older sister Katie. And this man the three of you keep talking about. Is this something I should know about?”

“What man?” he said.

“What man. And what binoculars,” she said. “Are you supposed to take the binoculars out of the house without permission?”

He stood and watched. He had pale hair, his father’s, and a certain somberness of body, a restraint, his own, that gave him an uncanny discipline in games, in physical play.

“Did your father give you permission?”

He stood and watched.

“What’s so interesting about the view from that room? You can tell me that, can’t you?”

She leaned against the door, prepared to remain for three, four, five days, in the context of parental body language, or until he answered.

He moved one hand away from his body, slightly, the hand without the pencil, palm up, and executed the faintest change in facial expression, causing an arched indentation between the chin and lower lip, like an old man’s mute version of the young boy’s opening remark, which was “What?”

He sat alongside the table, left forearm placed along the near edge, hand dangling from the adjoining edge, curled into a gentle fist. He raised the hand without lifting his forearm and kept it in the air for five seconds. He did this ten times.

It was their term, gentle fist, the rehab center’s term, used in the instruction sheet.

He found these sessions restorative, four times a day, the wrist extensions, the ulnar deviations. These were the true countermeasures to the damage he’d suffered in the tower, in the descending chaos. It was not the MRI and not the surgery that brought him closer to well-being. It was this modest home program, the counting of seconds, the counting of repetitions, the times of day he reserved for the exercises, the ice he applied following each set of exercises.

There were the dead and maimed. His injury was slight but it wasn’t the torn cartilage that was the subject of this effort. It was the chaos, the levitation of ceilings and floors, the voices choking in smoke. He sat in deep concentration, working on the hand shapes, the bend of the wrist toward the floor, the bend of the wrist toward the ceiling, the forearm flat on the table, the thumb-up configuration in certain setups, the use of the uninvolved hand to apply pressure to the involved hand. He washed his splint in warm soapy water. He did not adjust his splint without consulting the therapist. He read the instruction sheet. He curled the hand into a gentle fist.

Jack Glenn, her father, did not want to submit to the long course of senile dementia. He made a couple of phone calls from his cabin in northern New Hampshire and then used an old sporting rifle to kill himself. She did not know the details. She was twenty-two when this happened and did not ask the local police for details. What detail might there be that was not unbearable? But she had to wonder if it was the rifle she knew, the one he’d let her grip and aim, but not fire, the time she’d joined him in the woods, as a fourteen-year-old, in a halfhearted hunt for varmints. She was a city girl and not completely sure what a varmint was but clearly recalled something he’d said to her that day. He liked to talk about the anatomy of racecars, motorcycles, hunting rifles, how things work, and she liked to listen. It was a mark of the distance between them that she listened so eagerly, the perennial miles, the weeks and months.

He’d hefted the weapon and said to her, “The shorter the barrel, the stronger the muzzle blast.”

The force of that term, muzzle blast, carried through the years. The news of his death seemed to ride on the arc of those two words. They were awful words but she tried to tell herself he’d done a brave thing. It was way too soon. There was time before the disease took solid hold but Jack was always respectful of nature’s little fuckups and figured the deal was sealed. She wanted to believe that the rifle that killed him was the one he’d braced against her shoulder among the stands of tamarack and spruce in the plunging light of that northern day.

Martin embraced her in the doorway, gravely. He’d been somewhere in Europe when the attacks occurred and was on one of the first transatlantic flights as schedules resumed, erratically.

“Nothing seems exaggerated anymore. Nothing amazes me,” he said.

Her mother was in the bedroom dressing for the day, finally, at noon, and Martin walked around the room looking at things, stepping among Justin’s toys, noting changes in the placement of objects.

“Somewhere in Europe. This is how I think of you.”

“Except when I’m here,” he said.

The standing hand, a small bronze normally on the bamboo end table, was now on the wrought-iron table, laden with books, near the window, and the Nevelson wall piece had been replaced by the photograph of Rimbaud.

“But even when you’re here, I think of you coming from a distant city on your way to another distant city and neither place has shape or form.”

“This is me, I am shapeless,” he said.

They talked about events. They talked about the things everyone was talking about. He followed her to the kitchen, where she poured him a beer. She poured and talked.

“People read poems. People I know, they read poetry to ease the shock and pain, give them a kind of space, something beautiful in language,” she said, “to bring comfort or composure. I don’t read poems. I read newspapers. I put my head in the pages and get angry and crazy.”

“There’s another approach, which is to study the matter. Stand apart and think about the elements,” he said. “Coldly, clearly if you’re able to. Do not let it tear you down. See it, measure it.”

“Measure it,” she said.

“There’s the event, there’s the individual. Measure it. Let it teach you something. See it. Make yourself equal to it.”

Martin Ridnour was an art dealer, a collector, an investor perhaps. She wasn’t sure what he did exactly or how he did it but suspected that he bought art and then flipped it, quickly, for large profit. She liked him. He spoke with an accent and had an apartment here and an office in Basel. He spent time in Berlin. He did or did not have a wife in Paris.

They were back in the living room, he with the glass in one hand, bottle in the other.

“Probably I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he said. “You talk, I will drink.”

Martin was overweight but did not appear ripe with good living. He was usually jet-lagged, more or less unwashed, in a well-worn suit, trying to resemble an old poet in exile, her mother said. He was not quite bald, with a shadow of gray bristle on his head and a beard that looked about two weeks old, mostly gray and never groomed.

“I called Nina when I got in this morning. We’re going away for a week or two.”

“Good idea.”

“Handsome old house in Connecticut, by the shore.”

“You arrange things.”

“This is something I do, yes.”

“I have a question, unrelated. You can ignore it,” she said. “A question from nowhere.”

She looked at him, standing behind the armchair across the room, draining his glass.

“Do the two of you have sex? It’s none of my business. But can you have sex? I mean considering the knee replacement. She’s not doing the exercises.”

He took the bottle and glass toward the kitchen, responding over his shoulder with some amusement.

“She doesn’t have sex with her knee. We bypass the knee. The knee is damn tender. But we work around it.”

She waited for him to return.

“None of my business. But she seems to be entering a kind of withdrawal. And I just wondered.”

“And you,” he said. “And Keith. He’s back with you now. This is true?”

“Could leave tomorrow. Nobody knows.”

“But he’s staying in your flat.”

“It’s early. I don’t know what will happen. We sleep together, yes, if that’s what you’re asking. But only technically.”

He showed quizzical interest.

“Share a bed. Innocently,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I like this. How many nights?”

“He spent the first night in the hospital for observation. Since then, whatever it is. This is Monday. Six days, five nights.”

“I will be asking for progress reports,” he said.

He’d talked to Keith a couple of times only. This was an American, not a New Yorker, not one of the Manhattan elect, a group maintained by controlled propagation. He tried to gain a sense of the younger man’s feelings about politics and religion, the voice and manner of the heartland. All he learned was that Keith had once owned a pit bull. This, at least, seemed to mean something, a dog that was all skull and jaws, an American breed, developed originally to fight and kill.

“One of these days maybe you and Keith will have a chance to talk again.”

“About women, I think.”

“Mother and daughter. All the sordid details,” she said.

“I like Keith. I told him a story once that he enjoyed. About cardplayers. He’s a cardplayer of course. About cardplayers I used to know and about the seating arrangement they maintained at their weekly game, for nearly half a century. Longer actually. He enjoyed this story.”

Her mother came in, Nina, in a dark skirt and white blouse, leaning on her cane. Martin held her briefly and then watched her settle into the chair, slowly, in segmental movements.

“What old dead wars we fight. I think in these past days we’ve lost a thousand years,” she said.

Martin had been away for a month. He was seeing the last stage of the transformation, her embrace of age, the studied attitude that weaves easily through the fact itself. Lianne felt a sadness on his behalf. Has her mother’s hair gone whiter? Is she taking too much pain medication? Did she have a minor stroke at that conference in Chicago? And, finally, was he lying about their sexual activity? Her mind is fine. She is not so forgiving of the normal erosions, the names she now and then forgets, the location of an object she has just, seconds ago, put somewhere. But she is alert to what is important, the broad surround, to other states of being.

“Tell us what they’re doing in Europe.”

“They’re being kind to Americans,” he said.

“Tell us what you’ve bought and sold.”

“What I can tell you is that the art market will stagnate. Activity here and there in modern masters. Otherwise dismal prospects.”

“Modern masters. I’m relieved,” Nina said.

“Trophy art.”

“People need their trophies.”

He seemed heartened by her sarcasm.

“I’ve just barely set foot in the door. In the country in fact. What does she do? She gives me grief.”

“This is her job,” Lianne said.

They’d known each other for twenty years, Martin and Nina, lovers for much of that time, New York, Berkeley, somewhere in Europe. Lianne knew that the defensive stance he took at times was an aspect of their private manner of address, not the stain of something deeper. He was not the shapeless man he claimed to be or physically mimicked. He was unflinching in fact, and smart in his work, and gracious to her, and generous to her mother. The two beautiful Morandi still lifes were gifts from Martin. The passport photos on the opposite wall, Martin also, from his collection, aged documents, stamped and faded, history measured in inches, and also beautiful.

Lianne said, “Who wants to eat?”

Nina wanted to smoke. The bamboo end table stood next to the armchair now and held an ashtray, a lighter and a pack of cigarettes.

Her mother lit up. She watched, Lianne did, feeling something familiar and a little painful, how Nina at a certain point began to consider her invisible. The memory was located there, in the way she snapped shut the lighter and put it down, in the hand gesture and the drifting smoke.

“Dead wars, holy wars. God could appear in the sky tomorrow.”

“Whose God would it be?” Martin said.

“God used to be an urban Jew. He’s back in the desert now.”

Lianne’s studies were meant to take her into deeper scholarship, into serious work in languages or art history. She’d traveled through Europe and much of the Middle East but it was tourism in the end, with shallow friends, not determined inquiry into beliefs, institutions, languages, art, or so said Nina Bartos.

“It’s sheer panic. They attack out of panic.”

“This much, yes, it may be true. Because they think the world is a disease. This world, this society, ours. A disease that’s spreading,” he said.

“There are no goals they can hope to achieve. They’re not liberating a people or casting out a dictator. Kill the innocent, only that.”

“They strike a blow to this country’s dominance. They achieve this, to show how a great power can be vulnerable. A power that interferes, that occupies.”

He spoke softly, looking into the carpet.

“One side has the capital, the labor, the technology, the armies, the agencies, the cities, the laws, the police and the prisons. The other side has a few men willing to die.”

“God is great,” she said.

“Forget God. These are matters of history. This is politics and economics. All the things that shape lives, millions of people, dispossessed, their lives, their consciousness.”

“It’s not the history of Western interference that pulls down these societies. It’s their own history, their mentality. They live in a closed world, of choice, of necessity. They haven’t advanced because they haven’t wanted to or tried to.”

“They use the language of religion, okay, but this is not what drives them.”

“Panic, this is what drives them.”

Her mother’s anger submerged her own. She deferred to it. She saw the hard tight fury in Nina’s face and felt, herself, only a sadness, hearing these two people, joined in spirit, take strongly opposing positions.

Then Martin eased off, voice going soft again.

“All right, yes, it may be true.”

“Blame us. Blame us for their failures.”

“All right, yes. But this is not an attack on one country, one or two cities. All of us, we are targets now.”

They were still talking ten minutes later when Lianne left the room. She stood in the bathroom looking in the mirror. The moment seemed false to her, a scene in a movie when a character tries to understand what is going on in her life by looking in the mirror.

She was thinking, Keith is alive.

Keith had been alive for six days now, ever since he appeared at the door, and what would this mean to her, what would this do to her and to her son?

She washed her hands and face. Then she went to the cabinet and got a fresh towel and dried herself. After she tossed the towel in the hamper she flushed the toilet. She didn’t flush the toilet to make the others think she’d left the living room for a compelling reason. The flushing toilet wasn’t audible in the living room. This was for her own pointless benefit, flushing. Maybe it was meant to mark the end of the interval, to get her out of here.

What was she doing here? She was being a child, she thought.

The talk had begun to fade by the time she returned. He had more to say, Martin, but possibly thought this was not the moment, not now, too soon, and he wandered over to the Morandi paintings on the wall.

It was only seconds later that Nina dropped into a light sleep. She was taking a round of medications, a mystical wheel, the ritualistic design of the hours and days in tablets and capsules, in colors, shapes and numbers. Lianne watched her. It was difficult to see her fitted so steadfastly to a piece of furniture, resigned and unstirring, the energetic arbiter of her daughter’s life, ever discerning, the woman who’d given birth to the word beautiful, for what excites admiration in art, ideas, objects, in the faces of men and women, the mind of a child. All this dwindling to a human breath.

Her mother wasn’t dying, was she? Lighten up, she thought.

She opened her eyes, finally, and the two women looked at each other. It was a sustained moment and Lianne did not know, could not have put into words what it was they were sharing. Or she knew but could not name the overlapping emotions. It was what there was between them, meaning every minute together and apart, what they’d known and felt and what would come next, in the minutes, days and years.

Martin stood before the paintings.

“I’m looking at these objects, kitchen objects but removed from the kitchen, free of the kitchen, the house, everything practical and functioning. And I must be back in another time zone. I must be even more disoriented than usual after a long flight,” he said, pausing. “Because I keep seeing the towers in this still life.”

Lianne joined him at the wall. The painting in question showed seven or eight objects, the taller ones set against a brushy slate background. The other items were huddled boxes and biscuit tins, grouped before a darker background. The full array, in unfixed perspective and mostly muted colors, carried an odd spare power.

They looked together.

Two of the taller items were dark and somber, with smoky marks and smudges, and one of them was partly concealed by a long-necked bottle. The bottle was a bottle, white. The two dark objects, too obscure to name, were the things that Martin was referring to.

“What do you see?” he said.

She saw what he saw. She saw the towers.

5

He entered the park at the Engineers’ Gate, where runners stretched and bent before going out on the track. The day was warm and still and he walked along the road that ran parallel to the bridle path. There was somewhere to go but he was in no hurry to get there. He watched an elderly woman on a bench who was thinking distantly of something, holding a pale green apple pressed to her cheek. The road was closed to traffic and he thought you come to the park to see people, the ones who are shadows in the street. There were runners up to the left, on the track around the reservoir, and others on the bridle path just above him and still more runners on the roadway, men with handweights, running, and women running behind baby strollers, pushing babies, and runners with dogs on leashes. You come to the park to see dogs, he thought.

The road bent west and three girls wearing headsets went rollerblading past. The ordinariness, so normally unnoticeable, fell upon him oddly, with almost dreamlike effect. He was carrying the briefcase and wanted to turn back. He crossed up the slope and walked past the tennis courts. There were three horses hitched to the fence, police helmets clipped to their saddlebags. A woman ran past, talking to someone, miserably, on her cell phone, and he wanted to toss the briefcase in the reservoir and go back home.

She lived in a building just off Amsterdam Avenue and he climbed the six flights to her apartment. She seemed tentative, letting him in, even, strangely, a little wary, and he started to explain, as he had on the telephone the day before, that he hadn’t meant to delay returning the briefcase. She was saying something about the credit cards in the wallet, that she hadn’t canceled them because, well, everything was gone, she thought everything was buried, it was lost and gone, and they stopped talking and then started again, simultaneously, until she made a small gesture of futility. He left the briefcase on a chair by the door and went over to the sofa, saying he could not stay very long.

She was a light-skinned black woman, his age or close, and gentle-seeming, and on the heavy side.

He said, “When I found your name in the briefcase, after I found your name and checked the phone directory and saw you were listed and I’m actually dialing the number, that’s when it occurred to me.”

“I know what you’re going to say.”

“I thought why am I doing this without checking further because is this person even alive?”

There was a pause and he realized how softly she’d spoken inside his jumpy commentary.

“I have some herbal tea,” she said. “Sparkling water if you like.”

“Sparkling water. Spring water. There’s a small bottle in the briefcase. Let me think. Poland Spring.”

“Poland Spring,” she said.

“Anyway if you’d like to check what’s in there.”

“Of course not. No,” she said quietly.

She stood in the entranceway to the kitchen. The small boom of traffic sounded outside the windows.

He said, “See, what happened is I didn’t know I had it. It wasn’t even a case of forgetting. I don’t think I knew.”

“I don’t think I know your name.”

He said, “Keith?”

“Did you tell me this?”

“I think so, yes.”

“The phone call was so out of the blue.”

“It’s Keith,” he said.

“Did you work for Preston Webb?”

“No, one floor up. Small outfit called Royer Properties.”

He was on his feet now, ready to leave.

“ Preston ’s so sprawling. I thought maybe we just hadn’t run into each other.”

“No, Royer. We’re just about decimated,” he said.

“We’re waiting to see what happens, where we relocate. I don’t think about it much.”

There was a silence.

He said, “We were Royer and Stans. Then Stans got indicted.”

Finally he moved toward the door and then picked up the briefcase. He paused, reaching for the doorknob, and looked at her, across the room, and she was smiling.

“Why did I do that?”

“Habit,” she said.

“I was ready to walk out the door with your property. All over again. Your priceless family heritage. Your cell phone.”

“That thing. I stopped needing it when I didn’t have it.”

“Your toothbrush,” he said. “Your pack of cigarettes.”

“God, no, my guilty secret. But I’m down to four a day.”

She waved him back to the sofa with a broad arc of the arm, a traffic cop’s sweeping command to get things going.

She served tea and a plate of sugar cookies. Her name was Florence Givens. She placed a kitchen chair on the other side of the coffee table and sat at a diagonal.

He said, “I know everything about you. A sonic toothbrush. You brush your teeth with sound waves.”

“I’m gadget crazy. I love those things.”

“Why do you have a better voice recorder than I had?”

“I think I’ve used it twice.”

“I used mine but then never listened. I liked to talk into it.”

“What did you say when you talked into it?”

“I don’t know. My fellow Americans,” he said.

“I thought everything was lost and gone. I didn’t report a lost driver’s license. I didn’t do anything, basically, but sit in this room.”

An hour later they were still talking. The cookies were small and awful but he kept nipping into them, unthinkingly, eating only the first baby bite and leaving the mutilated remains to litter the plate.

“I was at my screen and heard the plane approach but only after I was thrown down. That’s how fast,” she said.

“Are you sure you heard the plane?”

“The impact sent me to the floor and then I heard the plane. I think the sprinklers, I’m trying to recall the sprinklers. I know I was wet at some point, all through.”

He understood that she hadn’t meant to say this. It sounded intimate, to be wet all through, and she had to pause a moment.

He waited.

“My phone was ringing. I was at my desk now, I don’t know, just to sit, to steady myself, and I pick up the phone. Then we’re talking, like hello, it’s Donna. It’s my friend Donna. I said, Did you hear that? She’s calling from home, in Philadelphia, to talk about a visit. I said, Did you hear that?”

She went through it slowly, remembering as she spoke, often pausing to look into space, to see things again, the collapsed ceilings and blocked stairwells, the smoke, always, and the fallen wall, the drywall, and she paused to search for the word and he waited, watching.

She was dazed and had no sense of time, she said.

There was water somewhere running or falling, flowing down from somewhere.

Men ripped their shirts and wound them around their faces, for masks, for the smoke.

She saw a woman with burnt hair, hair burnt and smoking, but now she wasn’t sure she’d seen this or heard someone say it.

Times they had to walk blind, smoke so thick, hand on the shoulder of the person in front.

She’d lost her shoes or kicked them off and there was water like a stream somewhere, nearby, running down a mountain.

The stairwell was crowded now, and slow, with people coming from other floors.

“Someone said, Asthma. Now that I’m talking, it’s coming back a little bit. Asthma, asthma. A woman like desperate. There were panic faces. That’s when I think I fell, I just went down. I went down five or six steps and hit the landing, like stumble-falling, and I hit hard.”

She wanted to tell him everything. This was clear to him. Maybe she’d forgotten he was there, in the tower, or maybe he was the one she needed to tell for precisely that reason. He knew she hadn’t talked about this, not so intensely, to anyone else.

“It was the panic of being trampled even though they were careful, they helped me, but it was the feeling of being down in a crowd and you will be trampled, but they helped me and this one man I remember, helping me get to my feet, elderly man, out of breath, helping me, talking to me until I was able to get going again.”

There were flames in elevator shafts.

There was a man talking about a giant earthquake. She forgot all about the plane and was ready to believe an earthquake even though she’d heard a plane. And someone else said, I been in earthquakes, a man in a suit and tie, this ain’t no earthquake, a distinguished man, an educated man, an executive, this ain’t no earthquake.

There were dangling wires and she felt a wire touch her arm. It touched the man behind her and he jumped and cursed and then laughed.

The crowd on the stairs, the sheer force of it, hobbling, crying, burnt, some of them, but mostly calm, a woman in a wheelchair and they carried her and people made room, bending into single file on the stairs.

Her face held an earnest appeal, a plea of some sort.

“I know I can’t sit here alive and safe and talk about falling down some stairs when all that terror, all those dead.”

He didn’t interrupt. He let her talk and didn’t try to reassure her. What was there to be reassuring about? She was slumped in the chair now, talking into the tabletop.

“The firemen racing past. And asthma, asthma. And some people talking said bomb. They were trying to talk on cell phones. They went down the stairs hitting numbers.”

This is where bottles of water were passed up the line from somewhere below, and soft drinks, and people were even joking a little, the equity traders.

This is where the firemen went racing past, going up the stairs, into it, and people got out of the way.

This is also where she saw someone she knew, going up, a maintenance man, a guy she used to joke with whenever she saw him, going up right past her, carrying a long iron implement, like something to pry open an elevator door, maybe, and she tried to think of the word for the thing.

He waited. She looked past him, thinking, and it seemed important to her, as if she were trying to recall the man’s name, not the name of the tool he was carrying.

Finally he said, “Crowbar.”

“Crowbar,” she said, thinking about it, seeing it again.

Keith thought he’d also seen the man, going up past him, a guy in a hard hat and wearing a workbelt with tools and flash-lights and carrying a crowbar, bent end first.

No reason ever to remember this if she hadn’t mentioned it. Means nothing, he thought. But then it did. Whatever had happened to the man was situated outside the fact that they’d both seen him, at different points in the march down, but it was important, somehow, in some indeterminate way, that he’d been carried in these crossing memories, brought down out of the tower and into this room.

He leaned forward, elbow braced on the coffee table, mouth pressed against his hand, and he watched her.

“We just kept going down. Dark, light, dark again. I feel like I’m still on the stairs. I wanted my mother. If I live to be a hundred I’ll still be on the stairs. It took so long it was almost normal in a way. We couldn’t run so it wasn’t some kind of running frenzy. We were stuck together. I wanted my mother. This ain’t no earthquake, making ten million dollars a year.”

They were moving out of the worst of the smoke now and this is when she saw the dog, a blind man and a guide dog, not far ahead, and it was like something out of the Bible, she thought. They seemed so calm. They seemed to spread calm, she thought. The dog was like some totally calming thing. They believed in the dog.

“We, finally, I don’t know how long we had to wait, it was dark wherever we were but then we came out and passed some windows and saw the plaza where it’s a bombed-out city, things on fire, we saw bodies, we saw clothes, pieces of metal like metal parts, things just scattered. This was like two seconds. I looked two seconds and looked away and then we went through the underground concourse and up into the street.”

This was all she said for a time. He went over to the chair by the door and found her cigarettes in the briefcase and took one out of the pack and put it in his mouth and then found the lighter.

“In the smoke all I could see was those stripes on the firemen’s coats, the bright stripes, and then some people in the rubble, all that steel and glass, just injured people sitting dreaming, they were like dreamers bleeding.”

She turned and looked at him. He lit the cigarette and walked over and handed it to her. She took a drag, closing her eyes and exhaling. When she looked again, he was back across the table, seated on the sofa, watching her.

“Light one up for yourself,” she said.

“Not for me, no.”

“You quit.”

“Long time ago. When I thought I was an athlete,” he said. “But blow some my way. That would be nice.”

After a while she began to speak again. But he didn’t know where she was, somewhere back near the beginning, he thought.

He thought, Wet all through. She was wet all through.

There were people everywhere pushing into the stairwell. She tried to recall things and faces, moments that might explain something or reveal something. She believed in the guide dog. The dog would lead them all to safety.

She was going through it again and he was ready to listen again. He listened carefully, noting every detail, trying to find himself in the crowd.

Her mother had said it clearly, years earlier.

“There’s a certain man, an archetype, he’s a model of dependability for his male friends, all the things a friend should be, an ally and confidant, lends money, gives advice, loyal and so on, but sheer hell on women. Living breathing hell. The closer a woman gets, the clearer it becomes to him that she is not one of his male friends. And the more awful it becomes for her. This is Keith. This is the man you’re going to marry.”

This is the man she marries.

He was a hovering presence now. There drifted through the rooms a sense of someone who has earned respectful attention. He was not quite returned to his body yet. Even the program of exercises he did for his postsurgical wrist seemed a little detached, four times a day, an odd set of extensions and flexions that resembled prayer in some remote northern province, among a repressed people, with periodic applications of ice. He spent time with Justin, taking him to school and picking him up, advising on homework. He wore a splint for a while, then stopped. He took the kid to the park to play catch. The kid could toss a baseball all day and be purely and inexhaustibly happy, unmarked by sin, anyone’s, down the ages. Throw and catch. She watched them in a field not far from the museum, into the sinking sun. When Keith did a kind of ball trick, using the right hand, the undamaged one, to flip the ball onto the back of the hand and then jerk the arm forward propelling the ball backwards along the forearm before knocking it into the air with his elbow and then catching it backhanded, she saw a man she’d never known before.

She stopped at Harold Apter’s office in the East 80s on her way to 116th Street. She did this periodically, dropping off photocopies of her group’s written pieces and discussing their situations in general. This is where Dr. Apter saw people for consultation, Alzheimer patients and others.

Apter was a slight man with frizzed hair who seemed formulated to say funny things but never did. They talked about the fade of Rosellen S., the aloof bearing of Curtis B. She told him she would like to increase the frequency of the meetings to twice a week. He told her this would be a mistake.

“From this point on, you understand, it’s all about loss. We’re dealing inevitably here with diminishing returns. Their situation will grow increasingly delicate. These encounters need space around them. You don’t want them to feel there’s an urgency to write everything, say everything before it’s too late. You want them to look forward to this, not feel pressed or threatened. The writing is sweet music up to a point. Then other things will take over.”

He looked at her searchingly.

“What I’m saying is simple. This is for them,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s theirs,” he said. “Don’t make it yours.”

They wrote about the planes. They wrote about where they were when it happened. They wrote about people they knew who were in the towers, or nearby, and they wrote about God.

How could God let this happen? Where was God when this happened?

Benny T. was glad he was not a man of faith because he would lose it after this.

I am closer to God than ever, Rosellen wrote.

This is the devil. This is hell. All that fire and pain. Never mind God. This is hell.

Omar H. was afraid to go out on the street in the days after. They were looking at him, he thought.

I didn’t see them holding hands. I wanted to see that, Rosellen wrote.

Carmen G. wanted to know whether everything that happens to us has to be part of God’s plan.

I am closer to God than ever, am closer, will be closer, shall be closer.

Eugene A., in a rare appearance, wrote that God knows things we don’t know.

Ashes and bones. That’s what’s left of God’s plan.

But when the towers fell, Omar wrote.

I keep hearing they were holding hands when they jumped.

If God let this happen, with the planes, then did God make me cut my finger when I was slicing bread this morning?

They wrote and then read what they’d written, each in turn, and there were remarks and then exchanges and then monologues.

“Show us the finger,” Benny said. “We want to kiss it.”

Lianne encouraged them to speak and argue. She wanted to hear everything, the things everybody said, ordinary things, and the naked statements of belief, and the depth of feeling, the passion that saturated the room. She needed these men and women. Dr. Apter’s comment disturbed her because there was truth in it. She needed these people. It was possible that the group meant more to her than it did to the members. There was something precious here, something that seeps and bleeds. These people were the living breath of the thing that killed her father.

“God says something happens, then it happens.”

“I don’t respect God no more, after this.”

“We sit and listen and God tells us or doesn’t.”

“I was walking down the street to get my hair cut. Somebody comes running.”

“I was on the crapper. I hated myself later. People said where were you when it happened. I didn’t tell them where I was.”

“But you remember to tell us. That’s beautiful, Benny.”

They interrupted, gestured, changed the subject, talked over each other, shut their eyes in thought or puzzlement or in dismal re-experience of the event itself.

“What about the people God saved? Are they better people than the ones who died?”

“It’s not ours to ask. We don’t ask.”

“A million babies die in Africa and we can’t ask.”

“I thought it was war. I thought it was war,” Anna said. “I stayed inside and lit a candle. It’s the Chinese, my sister said, who she never trusted with the bomb.”

Lianne struggled with the idea of God. She was taught to believe that religion makes people compliant. This is the purpose of religion, to return people to a childlike state. Awe and submission, her mother said. This is why religion speaks so powerfully in laws, rituals and punishments. And it speaks beautifully as well, inspiring music and art, elevating consciousness in some, reducing it in others. People fall into trances, people literally go to the ground, people crawl great distances or march in crowds stabbing themselves and whipping themselves. And other people, the rest of us, maybe we’re rocked more gently, joined to something deep in the soul. Powerful and beautiful, her mother said. We want to transcend, we want to pass beyond the limits of safe understanding, and what better way to do it than through make-believe.

Eugene A. was seventy-seven years old, hair gelled and spiked, a ring in his ear.

“I was scrubbing the sink for once in my life when the phone rings. It’s my ex-wife,” he said, “that I haven’t talked to in like seventeen years, is she even alive or dead, calling from somewhere I can’t even pronounce it, in Florida. I say what. She says never mind what. That same voice of no respect. She says turn on TV.”

“I had to watch at a neighbor,” Omar said.

“Seventeen years, not one word. Look what has to happen before she finally gets it in her head to call. Turn on TV, she tells me.”

The cross talk continued.

“I don’t forgive God what He did.”

“How do you explain this to a child whose mother or father?”

“You lie to children.”

“I wanted to see that, the ones that were holding hands.”

“When you see something happening, it’s supposed to be real.”

“But God. Did God do this or not?”

“You’re looking right at it. But it’s not really happening.”

“He has the big things that He does. He shakes the world,” said Curtis B.

“I would say to someone at least he didn’t die with a tube in his stomach or wearing a bag for his waste.”

“Ashes and bones.”

“I am closer to God, I know it, we know it, they know it.”

“This is our prayer room,” Omar said.

No one wrote a word about the terrorists. And in the exchanges that followed the readings, no one spoke about the terrorists. She prompted them. There has to be something you want to say, some feeling to express, nineteen men come here to kill us.

She waited, not certain what it was she wanted to hear. Then Anna C. mentioned a man she knew, a fireman, lost in one of the towers.

All along Anna had been slightly apart, interjecting only once or twice, matter-of-factly. Now she used hand gestures to help direct her story, sitting hard and squat in a flimsy folding chair, and no one interrupted.

“If he has a heart attack, we blame him. Eats, overeats, no exercise, no common sense. That’s what I told the wife. Or he dies of cancer. Smoked and couldn’t stop. That was Mike. If it’s cancer, then it’s lung cancer and we blame him. But this, what happened, it’s way too big, it’s outside someplace, on the other side of the world. You can’t get to these people or even see them in their pictures in the paper. You can see their faces but what does it mean? Means nothing to call them names. I’m a name-caller from before I was born. Do I know what to call these people?”

Lianne suspected what this was. It was a response defined in terms of revenge and she welcomed this, the small intimate wish, however useless in a hellstorm.

“He dies in a car crash or walking across the street, hit by a car, you can kill the person in your mind a thousand times, the driver. You couldn’t do the actual thing, in all honesty, because you don’t have the wherewithal, but you could think it, you could see it in your mind and get some trade-off from that. But here, with these people, you can’t even think it. You don’t know what to do. Because they’re a million miles outside your life. Which, besides, they’re dead.”

There was religion, then there was God. Lianne wanted to disbelieve. Disbelief was the line of travel that led to clarity of thought and purpose. Or was this simply another form of superstition? She wanted to trust in the forces and processes of the natural world, this only, perceptible reality and scientific endeavor, men and women alone on earth. She knew there was no conflict between science and God. Take one with the other. But she didn’t want to. There were the scholars and philosophers she’d studied in school, books she’d read as thrilling dispatches, personal, making her shake at times, and there was the sacred art she’d always loved. Doubters created this work, and ardent believers, and those who’d doubted and then believed, and she was free to think and doubt and believe simultaneously. But she didn’t want to. God would crowd her, make her weaker. God would be a presence that remained unimaginable. She wanted this only, to snuff out the pulse of the shaky faith she’d held for much of her life.

He began to think into the day, into the minute. It was being here, alone in time, that made this happen, being away from routine stimulus, all the streaming forms of office discourse. Things seemed still, they seemed clearer to the eye, oddly, in ways he didn’t understand. He began to see what he was doing. He noticed things, all the small lost strokes of a day or a minute, how he licked his thumb and used it to lift a bread crumb off the plate and put it idly in his mouth. Only it wasn’t so idle anymore. Nothing seemed familiar, being here, in a family again, and he felt strange to himself, or always had, but it was different now because he was watching.

There were the walks to school with Justin and the walks back home, alone, or somewhere else, just walking, and then he picked up the kid at school and it was back home again. There was a contained elation in these times, a feeling that was nearly hidden, something he knew but only barely, a whisper of self-disclosure.

The kid was trying to speak in monosyllables only, for extended stretches. This was something his class was doing, a serious game designed to teach the children something about the structure of words and the discipline required to frame clear thoughts. Lianne said, half seriously, that it sounded totalitarian.

“It helps me go slow when I think,” Justin said to his father, measuring each word, noting the syllable count.

It was Keith as well who was going slow, easing inward. He used to want to fly out of self-awareness, day and night, a body in raw motion. Now he finds himself drifting into spells of reflection, thinking not in clear units, hard and linked, but only absorbing what comes, drawing things out of time and memory and into some dim space that bears his collected experience. Or he stands and looks. He stands at the window and sees what’s happening in the street. Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into night, if you stand a while and look.

He thought of something out of nowhere, a phrase, organic shrapnel. Felt familiar but meant nothing to him. Then he saw a car double-parked across the street and thought of something else and then something else again.

There were the walks to and from school, the meals he cooked, something he’d rarely done in the past year and a half because it made him feel like the last man alive, breaking eggs for dinner. There was the park, every kind of weather, and there was the woman who lived across the park. But that was another matter, the walk across the park.

“We go home now,” Justin said.

She was awake, middle of the night, eyes closed, mind running, and she felt time pressing in, and threat, a kind of beat in her head.

She read everything they wrote about the attacks.

She thought of her father. She saw him coming down an escalator, in an airport maybe.

Keith stopped shaving for a time, whatever that means. Everything seemed to mean something. Their lives were in transition and she looked for signs. Even when she was barely aware of an incident it came to mind later, with meaning attached, in sleepless episodes that lasted minutes or hours, she wasn’t sure.

They lived on the top floor of a redbrick building, four-storied, and often now, these past days, she walked down the stairs and heard a certain kind of music, wailing music, lutes and tambourines and chanting voices sometimes, coming from the apartment on the second floor, the same CD, she thought, over and over, and it was beginning to make her angry.

She read stories in newspapers until she had to force herself to stop.

But things were ordinary as well. Things were ordinary in all the ways they were always ordinary.

A woman named Elena lived in that apartment. Maybe Elena was Greek, she thought. But the music wasn’t Greek. She was hearing another set of traditions, Middle Eastern, North African, Bedouin songs perhaps or Sufi dances, music located in Islamic tradition, and she thought of knocking on the door and saying something.

She told people she wanted to leave the city. They knew she wasn’t serious and said so and she hated them a little, and her own transparency, and the small panics that made certain moments in the waking day resemble the frantic ramblings of this very time of night, the mind ever running.

She thought of her father. She carried her father’s name. She was Lianne Glenn. Her father had been a traditional lapsed Catholic, devoted to the Latin mass as long as he didn’t have to sit through it. He made no distinction between Catholics and lapsed Catholics. The only thing that mattered was tradition but not in his work, never there, his designs for buildings and other structures, situated in mostly remote landscapes.

She thought she might adopt a posture of fake civility, as a tactic, a means of answering one offense with another. They heard it mainly on the stairs, Keith said, going up and down, and it’s only music anyway, he said, so why not just forget it.

They didn’t own, they rented, like people in the Middle Ages.

She wanted to knock on the door and say something to Elena. Ask her what the point is. Adopt a posture. This is retaliation in itself. Ask her why she’s playing this particular music at this highly sensitive time. Use the language of the concerned fellow tenant.

She read newspaper profiles of the dead.

When she was a girl she wanted to be her mother, her father, certain of her schoolmates, one or two, who seemed to move with particular ease, to say things that didn’t matter except in the way they were said, on an easy breeze, like birdflight. She slept with one of these girls, they touched a little and kissed once and she thought of this as a dream she would wake from in the mind and body of the other girl.

Knock on the door. Mention the noise. Don’t call it music, call it noise.

They’re the ones who think alike, talk alike, eat the same food at the same time. She knew this wasn’t true. Say the same prayers, word for word, in the same prayer stance, day and night, following the arc of sun and moon.

She needed to sleep now. She needed to stop the noise in her head and turn on her right side, toward her husband, and breathe his air and sleep his sleep.

Elena was either an office manager or a restaurant manager, and divorced, and living with a large dog, and who knew what else.

She liked his facial hair, the hair was okay, but she didn’t say anything. She said one thing, uninteresting, and watched him run his thumb over the stubble, marking its presence for himself.

They said, Leave the city? For what? To go where? It was the locally honed cosmocentric idiom of New York, loud and blunt, but she felt it in her heart no less than they did.

Do this. Knock on the door. Adopt a posture. Mention the noise as noise. Knock on the door, mention the noise, use the open pretense of civility and calm, the parody of fellow-tenant courtesy that every tenant sees as such, and gently mention the noise. But mention the noise only as noise. Knock on the door, mention the noise, adopt a posture of suave calm, openly phony, and do not allude to the underlying theme of a certain kind of music as a certain form of political and religious statement, now of all times. Work gradually into the language of aggrieved tenancy. Ask her if she rents or owns.

She turned on her right side, toward her husband, and opened her eyes.

Thoughts from nowhere, elsewhere, someone else’s.

She opened her eyes and was surprised, even now, to see him there in bed, next to her, a flat surprise by this time, fifteen days after the planes. They’d made love in the night, earlier, she wasn’t sure when, two or three hours ago. It was back there somewhere, a laying open of bodies but also of time, the only interval she’d known in these days and nights that was not forced or distorted, hemmed in by the press of events. It was the tenderest sex she’d known with him. She felt some drool at the corner of her mouth, the part that was mashed into the pillow, and she watched him, faceup, head in distinct profile against the wan light from the streetlamp.

She’d never felt easy with that term. My husband. He wasn’t a husband. The word spouse had seemed comical, applied to him, and husband simply didn’t fit. He was something else somewhere else. But now she uses the term. She believes he is growing into it, a husbandman, even though she knows this is another word completely.

What is already in the air, in the bodies of the young, and what is next to come.

The music included moments of what sounded like forced breathing. She heard it on the stairs one day, an interlude consisting of men breathing in urgent rhythmic pattern, a liturgy of inhale-exhale, and other voices at other times, trance voices, voices in recitation, women in devotional lament, mingled village voices behind hand drums and hand claps.

She watched her husband, face empty of expression, neutral, not very different from his waking aspect.

All right the music is beautiful but why now, what’s the particular point of this, and what’s the name of the thing like a lute that’s played with an eagle’s quill.

She reached a hand to his beating chest.

Time, finally, to go to sleep, following the arc of sun and moon.

She was back from an early-morning run and stood sweating by the kitchen window, drinking water from a one-liter bottle and watching Keith eat breakfast.

“You’re one of those madwomen running in the streets. Run around the reservoir.”

“You think we look crazier than men.”

“Only in the streets.”

“I like the streets. This time of morning, there’s something about the city, down by the river, streets nearly empty, cars blasting by on the Drive.”

“Breathe deeply.”

“I like running alongside the cars on the Drive.”

“Take deep breaths,” he said. “Let the fumes swirl into your lungs.”

“I like the fumes. I like the breeze from the river.”

“Run naked,” he said.

“You do it, I’ll do it.”

“I’ll do it if the kid does it,” he said.

Justin was in his room, a Saturday, putting last touches, last pokes of color onto a portrait he’d been doing, in crayon, of his grandmother. Either that or drawing a picture of a bird, for school, which reminded her of something.

“He takes the binoculars over to the Siblings’. Any idea why?”

“They’re searching the skies.”

“For what?”

“Planes. One of them, I think it was the girl.”

“Katie.”

“Katie claims she saw the plane that hit Tower One. She says she was home from school, sick, standing at the window when the plane flew by.”

The building where the Siblings lived was known to some as Godzilla Apartments or simply the Godzilla. It was forty stories or so in an area of town houses and other structures of modest height and it created its own weather systems, with strong currents of air sometimes shearing down the face of the building and knocking old people to the pavement.

“Home sick. Do I believe that?”

“I think they’re on the twenty-seventh floor,” he said.

“Looking west across the park. This much is true.”

“Did the plane fly down over the park?”

“Maybe the park, maybe the river,” she said. “And maybe she was home sick and maybe she made it up.”

“Either way.”

“Either way, you’re saying, they’re looking for more planes.”

“Waiting for it to happen again.”

“That scares me,” she said.

“This time with a pair of binoculars to help them make the sighting.”

“That scares the hell out of me. God, there’s something so awful about that. Damn kids with their goddamn twisted powers of imagination.”

She walked over to the table and picked half a strawberry out of his cereal bowl. Then she sat across from him, thinking and chewing.

Finally she said, “The only thing I got out of Justin. The towers did not collapse.”

“I told him they did.”

“So did I,” she said.

“They were hit but did not collapse. That’s what he says.”

“He didn’t see it on TV. I didn’t want him to see it. But I told him they came down. And he seemed to absorb it. But then, I don’t know.”

“He knows they came down, whatever he says about it.”

“He has to know, don’t you think? And he knows you were there.”

“We talked about it,” Keith said. “But only once.”

“What did he say?”

“Not much. And neither did I.”

“They’re searching the skies.”

“That’s right,” he said.

She knew there was something she’d wanted to say all along and it finally seeped into wordable awareness.

“Has he said anything about this man Bill Lawton?”

“Just once. He wasn’t supposed to tell anyone.”

“Their mother mentioned this name. I keep forgetting to tell you. First I forget the name. I forget the easy names. Then, when I remember, you’re never around to tell.”

“The kid slipped. He let the name slip. He told me the planes were a secret. I’m not supposed to tell anyone the three of them are up there on the twenty-seventh floor searching the skies. But mostly, he said, I’m not supposed to mention Bill Lawton. Then he realized what he’d done. He’d let the name slip. And he wanted me to give him double and triple promises. No one’s allowed to know.”

“Including his mother who gave birth to him in four and a half hours of blood and pain. This is why women go running through the streets.”

“Amen. But what happened,” he said, “is that the other kid, the little brother.”

“Robert.”

“The name originates with Robert. This much I know. The rest I mostly surmise. Robert thought, from television or school or somewhere, that he was hearing a certain name. Maybe he heard the name once, or misheard it, then imposed this version on future occasions. In other words he never adjusted his original sense of what he was hearing.”

“What was he hearing?”

“He was hearing Bill Lawton. They were saying bin Laden.”

Lianne considered this. It seemed to her, at first, that some important meaning might be located in the soundings of the boy’s small error. She looked at Keith, searching for his concurrence, for something she might use to secure her free-floating awe. He chewed his food and shrugged.

“So, together,” he said, “they developed the myth of Bill Lawton.”

“Katie’s got to know the real name. She’s way too smart. She probably keeps the other name going precisely because it’s the wrong name.”

“I guess that’s the idea. That’s the myth.”

“Bill Lawton.”

“Searching the skies for Bill Lawton. He told me some things before he clammed up.”

“One thing I like. I like knowing the answer to the riddle before Isabel knows.”

“Who’s that?”

“The Siblings’ mother.”

“What about her blood and pain?”

She laughed at that. But the thought of them at the window, with the door closed, searching the skies, continued to disturb her.

“Bill Lawton has a long beard. He wears a long robe,” he said. “He flies jet planes and speaks thirteen languages but not English except to his wives. What else? He has the power to poison what we eat but only certain foods. They’re working on the list.”

“This is what we get for putting a protective distance between children and news events.”

“Except we didn’t put a distance, not really,” he said.

“Between children and mass murderers.”

“The other thing he does, Bill Lawton, is go everywhere in his bare feet.”

“They killed your best friend. They’re fucking outright murderers. Two friends, two friends.”

“I talked to Demetrius a little while ago. I don’t think you met him. Worked in the other tower. They sent him to a burn unit in Baltimore. He has family there.”

She looked at him.

“Why are you still here?”

She said this in a tone of gentlest curiosity.

“Are you planning to stay? Because I think this is something we need to talk about,” she said. “I’ve forgotten how to talk to you. This is the longest talk we’ve had.”

“You did it better than anybody. Talk to me. Maybe that was the problem.”

“I guess I’ve unlearned it. Because I sit here thinking we have so much to say.”

“We don’t have so much to say. We used to say everything, all the time. We examined everything, all the questions, all the issues.”

“All right.”

“It practically killed us.”

“All right. But is it possible? Here’s my question,” she said. “Is it possible you and I are done with conflict? You know what I mean. The everyday friction. The every-word every-breath schedule we were on before we split. Is it possible this is over? We don’t need this anymore. We can live without it. Am I right?”

“We’re ready to sink into our little lives,” he said.

ON MARIENSTRASSE

They stood in the entranceway watching the cold rain fall, younger man and older, after evening prayer. The wind sent trash skidding along the sidewalk and Hammad cupped his hands to his mouth and exhaled six or seven times, slowly and deliberately, feeling a whisper of warm breath on his palms. A woman on a bike went past, pedaling hard. He crossed his arms on his chest now, hands buried in armpits, and he listened to the older man’s story.

He was a rifleman in the Shatt al Arab, fifteen years ago, watching them come across the mudflats, thousands of shouting boys. Some carried rifles, many did not, and the weapons nearly overwhelmed the smaller boys, Kalashnikovs, too heavy to be carried very far. He was a soldier in Saddam’s army and they were the martyrs of the Ayatollah, here to fall and die. They seemed to come up out of the wet earth, wave on wave, and he aimed and fired and watched them fall. He was flanked by machine-gun positions and the firing grew so intense he began to think he was breathing white-hot steel.

Hammad barely knew this man, a baker, here in Hamburg maybe ten years. They prayed in the same mosque, this is what he knew, on the second floor of this shabby building with graffiti smeared on the outer walls and a setting of local strolling whores. Now he knew this as well, the face of combat in the long war.

The boys kept coming and the machine guns cut them down. After a time the man understood there was no point shooting anymore, not for him. Even if they were the enemy, Iranians, Shiites, heretics, this was not for him, watching them vault the smoking bodies of their brothers, carrying their souls in their hands. The other thing he understood is that this was a military tactic, ten thousand boys enacting the glory of self-sacrifice to divert Iraqi troops and equipment from the real army massing behind front lines.

Most countries are run by madmen, he said.

Then he said he was twice regretful, first to see the boys die, sent out to explode land mines and to run under tanks and into walls of gunfire, and then to think they were winning, these children, defeating us in the manner of their dying.

Hammad listened without comment but was grateful to the man. He was the kind of man who is not old yet by strict count but who carries something heavier than hard years.

But the shouts of the boys, the high-pitched cry. The man said this is what he heard above the noise of battle. The boys were sounding the cry of history, the story of ancient Shia defeat and the allegiance of the living to those who were dead and defeated. That cry is still close to me, he said. Not like something happening yesterday but something always happening, over a thousand years happening, always in the air.

Hammad stood nodding. He felt the cold in his bones, the misery of wet winds and northern nights. They stood in silence for a time, waiting for the rain to stop, and he kept thinking that another woman would come by on a bike, someone to look at, hair wet, legs pumping.

They were all growing beards. One of them even told his father to grow a beard. Men came to the flat on Marienstrasse, some to visit, others to live, men in and out all the time, growing beards.

Hammad sat crouched, eating and listening. The talk was fire and light, the emotion contagious. They were in this country to pursue technical educations but in these rooms they spoke about the struggle. Everything here was twisted, hypocrite, the West corrupt of mind and body, determined to shiver Islam down to bread crumbs for birds.

They studied architecture and engineering. They studied urban planning and one of them blamed the Jews for defects in construction. The Jews build walls too thin, aisles too narrow. The Jews built the toilet in this flat too close to the floor so a man’s stream of liquid leaves his body and travels so far it makes a noise and a splash, which people in the next room can sit and listen to. Thanks to the thin Jew walls.

Hammad wasn’t sure whether this was funny, true or stupid. He listened to everything they said, intently. He was a bulky man, clumsy, and thought all his life that some unnamed energy was sealed in his body, too tight to be released.

He didn’t know which one of them had told his father to grow a beard. Tell your father to grow a beard. This is not normally recommended.

The man who led discussions, this was Amir and he was intense, a small thin wiry man who spoke to Hammad in his face. He was very genius, others said, and he told them that a man can stay forever in a room, doing blueprints, eating and sleeping, even praying, even plotting, but at a certain point he has to get out. Even if the room is a place of prayer, he can’t stay there all his life. Islam is the world outside the prayer room as well as the sūrahs in the Koran. Islam is the struggle against the enemy, near enemy and far, Jews first, for all things unjust and hateful, and then the Americans.

They needed space of their own, in the mosque, in the portable prayer room at the university, here in the apartment on Marienstrasse.

There were seven pairs of shoes set outside the door of the flat. Hammad went in and they were talking and arguing. One of the men had fought in Bosnia, another avoided contact with dogs and women.

They looked at videos of jihad in other countries and Hammad told them about the boy soldiers running in the mud, the mine jumpers, wearing keys to paradise around their necks. They stared him down, they talked him down. That was a long time ago and those were only boys, they said, not worth the time it would take to be sorry for a single one.

Late one night he had to step over the prone form of a brother in prayer as he made his way to the toilet to jerk off.

The world changes first in the mind of the man who wants to change it. The time is coming, our truth, our shame, and each man becomes the other, and the other still another, and then there is no separation.

Amir spoke in his face. His full name was Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir el-Sayed Atta.

There was the feeling of lost history. They were too long in isolation. This is what they talked about, being crowded out by other cultures, other futures, the all-enfolding will of capital markets and foreign policies.

This was Amir, his mind was in the upper skies, making sense of things, drawing things together.

Hammad knew a woman who was German, Syrian, what else, a little Turkish. She had dark eyes and a floppy body that liked contact. They shuffled across the room toward her cot, clamped tight, with her roommate on the other side of the door studying English. Everything happened in crowded segments of place and time. His dreams seemed compressed, small rooms, nearly bare, quickly dreamt. Sometimes he and the two women played crude word games, inventing nonsense rhymes in four pidgin languages.

He didn’t know the name of the German security agency in any language. Some of the men who passed through the flat were dangerous to the state. Read the texts, fire the guns. They were probably being watched, phones tapped, signals intercepted. They preferred anyway to talk in person. They knew that all signals traveling in the air are vulnerable to interception. The state has microwave sites. The state has ground stations and floating satellites, Internet exchange points. There is photo reconnaissance that takes a picture of a dung beetle from one hundred kilometers up.

But we encounter face to face. A man turns up from Kandahar, another from Riyadh. We encounter directly, in the flat or in the mosque. The state has fiber optics but power is helpless against us. The more power, the more helpless. We encounter through eyes, through word and look.

Hammad and two others went looking for a man on the Reeperbahn. It was late and bitter cold and they saw him finally coming out of a house half a block away. One of the men called his name, then the other. He looked at them and waited and Hammad advanced and hit him three or four times and he went down. The other men advanced and kicked him. Hammad hadn’t known his name until they shouted it out and he wasn’t sure what this was all about, the guy paying an Albanian whore for sex or the guy not growing a beard. He had no beard, Hammad noticed, just before he hit him.

They ate skewered meat in a Turkish restaurant. He showed her the dimensional specifications he did in class, where he studied mechanical drawing, halfheartedly. He felt more intelligent when he was with her because she encouraged exactly this, asking questions or just being herself, being curious about things including his friends at the mosque. His friends gave him a reason to be mysterious, a circumstance she found interesting. Her roommate listened to cool voices speaking English in her headset. Hammad troubled her for lessons, for words and phrases and we can skip the grammar. There was a rush, a pull that made it hard to see beyond the minute. He flew through the minutes and felt the draw of some huge future landscape opening up, all mountain and sky.

He spent time at the mirror looking at his beard, knowing he was not supposed to trim it.

He did a little lusting after the roommate when he saw her ride her bike but tried not to bring this craving into the house. His girlfriend clung to him and they did damage to the cot. She wanted him to know her whole presence, inside and out. They ate falafel wrapped in pita and sometimes he wanted to marry her and have babies but this was only in the minutes after he left her flat, feeling like a footballer running across the field after scoring a goal, all-world, his arms flung wide.

The time is coming.

The men went to Internet cafés and learned about flight schools in the United States. Nobody knocked down their door in the middle of the night and nobody stopped them in the street to turn their pockets inside out and grope their bodies for weapons. But they knew that Islam was under attack.

Amir looked at him, seeing right down to his base self. Hammad knew what he would say. Eating all the time, pushing food in your face, slow to approach your prayers. There was more. Being with a shameless woman, dragging your body over hers. What is the difference between you and all the others, outside our space?

When Amir spoke the words, talking in his face, he inflected them with sarcasm.

Am I talking Chinese? Do I stutter? Are my lips moving but no words come?

Hammad in a certain way thought this was unfair. But the closer he examined himself, the truer the words. He had to fight against the need to be normal. He had to struggle against himself, first, and then against the injustice that haunted their lives.

They read the sword verses of the Koran. They were strong-willed, determined to become one mind. Shed everything but the men you are with. Become each other’s running blood.

Sometimes there were ten pairs of shoes outside the door of the flat, eleven pairs of shoes. This was the house of the followers, that’s what they called it, dar al-ansar, and that’s what they were, followers of the Prophet.

The beard would look better if he trimmed it. But there were rules now and he was determined to follow them. His life had structure. Things were clearly defined. He was becoming one of them now, learning to look like them and think like them. This was inseparable from jihad. He prayed with them to be with them. They were becoming total brothers.

The woman’s name was Leyla. Pretty eyes and knowing touch. He told her that he was going away for a time, absolutely to return. Soon she would begin to exist as an unreliable memory, then finally not at all.