Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories

Promises of London

Hands, gentle and rough. The last time I stood on this bridge, it was a fairer hand on my arm, light as a sparrow, young and full of love and warmth. Full of promises. But that was a long time ago. This more recent hand lands like a hawk, talon fingers squeezing, a British bark unintelligible, but I can guess the meaning. The officer wants to know what I’m doing there.

It’s the bolt cutters, I’m sure. The business end pokes out the top of my backpack, the zippers hugging the jaws on either side. There are a scattering of tourists on the bridge. It’s just after dark and warm in London, much like it had been on our honeymoon. The officer in the bobby hat with the baton at his side isn’t harassing anyone else. Just me. With my bolt cutters and my scraggly beard. With my slept-in clothes. With the smell of a hostel on me, the wild red eyes that might be from bawling, might be from drugs. That senseless stagger of a drunk, of a man lost, of a man without that light sparrow on his arm, guiding him through the world.

I watch as the backpack is searched. The cop procures a flashlight. The dark bowel of the bag swallows every ounce of light. Nothing to see here. A great void. A hollow. Keep looking.

“And what’re these, then?”

He knows what they are. But I tell him. “Bolt cutters,” I say. The numb put up no resistance.

“This looks a fair bit suspicious,” he says. And now people are watching. A young couple train their phones on me in case this is worth sharing. “Empty bag,” he says. “Bolt cutters.”

“Just taking back what’s mine,” I tell him. My eyes drift to the ornate rail. Both sides of the bridge are studded with locks, like some paranoid chain mail. Links in gold and silver. Tarnished and new. Etched and anonymous. The officer moves his beam of light to my chest, the cone spilling across my face. He is reading me. Proper now. The stagger and the absence of fear. The red eyes. All those locks. And the cutters in my bag.

The light clicks off. He hands me my things. “I’ll be right over here,” he says, pointing to a spot along the rail. Even the police in England are achingly polite. Disappointment flashes across the faces of the young couple, illuminated by the pale glow of their phones. Nothing to see here. Keep looking. I wonder if one of these locks is theirs. I wonder how long it’ll last.

My hand coasts down the rail as I move to the center of the bridge. The Thames glides silently below. A glass dinner boat trudges away, pushing against the ebbing tide. The buildings along the bank glow, the glass new ones and the crumbling monuments alike. The London Eye spins lazily. It and the river are unceasing. Some things are.

All the worries about finding the lock have been misplaced. My hand falls straight to it. Part of me had worried the entire rail might be gone. In Paris, the Pont de l’Archevêché across the Seine gets so overburdened with padlocks—locks looped upon locks—that the entire rail is chopped away and replaced every few months. Rail and locks go to a scrapyard. The permanence is illusory. The nearby lock vendors know this, but they don’t warn anyone. The greeting card people and the florists and the jewelers and the writers of fiction are all in on the ruse. Forever holding their peace. Nobody says to watch out, that rail can go, and you’ll be swept away. They just keep selling little promises with their twin keys. And the locks get melted down at the scrapyard, and the keys tumble in the swift current and are pulled out to sea.

We didn’t leave a lock on any of the rails that are known to get replaced. We asked around. Avoided the tourist traps. Planned ahead.

The bolt-cutter teeth clamp down on that little bent finger of stainless steel. I have to move the handles so far to get the jaws to travel so little. It’s the leverage. This is how people move, like these handles. So much to get so little. But the violence when it does happen—the violence.

And now after the long flight, after the weeks before of feeling lost, of not being able to sleep at night because of this damn lock, this pebble in the shoe of my dark thoughts, the nagging hypocrisy on the other side of the world, that lock cinched tight around my throat, bobbing heavy with every swallow, obstructing every breath, the lack of closure from unanswered texts and calls and emails, and the plan to set myself free—after all of that, I hesitate. And by the light of half a moon, I see our initials, the little scratches turned to rust, a crude heart between us.

My pulse pounds. I can hear it, can feel the throb in my temples as I squeeze the handles. A soft give. More. The expectation of nothing. A quiet eternity. And then what went together with a gentle click pops with a metallic bang, and the unbreakable shatters. The cutters nearly slip from my sweaty palms, but the lock still dangles on that crowded rail. I caress it with my fingers for a brief moment, remembering. And then a twist sets it free.

A couple somewhere hurls a pair of small keys out into the void. They laugh and hug while a lock lands with a splash.

I feel lighter when I stand. But only a little. There is a notebook in my back pocket, the stiff covers of which are bent from riding there so long, so many years ago. It is an old notebook. One I took on our travels. Like a partner in life, it has taken some of its shape from its proximity to me. And I walk with a hitch because of my time with it. I fish the notebook out and turn the pages, though I already know. By the light of half a moon, I find my next stop. Amsterdam. Images from that vacation strobe unbidden. And bolt cutters slip into an otherwise empty bag.

This is a very different sort of piece for me, a work that doesn’t really fit a genre, more like something I might’ve written in a creative writing class (had I ever taken one). The inspiration came from my travels while promoting translated works in various countries. I saw these lock bridges everywhere. I think they started in Paris, then spread to London, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Budapest, and so on.

When I try to think of something to write, I often start with an idea and then flip it on its head. Maybe reading Philip K. Dick as a kid got to me. Or perhaps it’s an extension of my contradictory nature. Or it could be me wanting to only write what I hope has never been written before, otherwise why do it? So when I imagined a couple traveling around the world leaving locks on bridges, my mind immediately inverted this to a single man on a mission to cut free all the locks he and his ex had fastened together. It is a rejection of the supposed permanence of love and the things we leave behind. It’s a story I wrote about a year before my longest relationship ended.

Whenever I write a short story, I always have in mind the way that I would continue it if I had to. This is likely a result of Wool’s success. In that case, I didn’t have any more story in mind beyond the original novelette. So even if I don’t plan on getting around to writing more in any of these worlds, it’s impossible to not at least think about it. In this case, I had the idea of writing several accounts of different bridges this character traveled to, with flashbacks to his past relationship. And I toyed with the idea of him arriving at the last bridge to find his ex standing there, seemingly a mirage at first, but very much real. She is as beautiful as he remembers. She is smiling that familiar smile of hers. And holding her own pair of bolt cutters…

Peace in Amber

All this happened, more or less:

One morning I stood beneath a bright blue sky and watched it blossom orange and black as jet fuel went suddenly alight. I saw men and women jump and plummet like flightless birds, the howling wind sucking suit jackets from backs and whipping skirts in a frenzy. I heard the sharp cry of bending steel as it screeched downward, and I smelled that awful char of office furniture and asbestos as it burned and burned for days and days.

The movies get most of it right, I learned. Fireballs look just so. Crowds run just like this, with their eyes wide and with less screaming than you might imagine, just mouths agape as they push each other out of the way. We devolve into animals when we creep near to death. The movies with the big stomping lizards that crush buildings get most of it right. I think the lizards are something we remember, deep in our bones and in our DNA, from earlier times. Run, we think, as buildings crumble. Run, as people perish.

I was a yacht captain for a number of years, which is decidedly less glamorous than it sounds to the untrained ear. Yacht and captain are a couple of five-dollar words, but the yachts were not mine and the rank was largely unearned. I was never a private like Billy Pilgrim, never worked my way through any ranks. I lived on a sailboat while I was in college, took a two-week course that required very little study, passed some government tests, and then billionaires let me drive their boats from one harbor to the next. That was my job. A glorified bus driver who also plunged the toilets, scrubbed the decks, and polished the stainless steel.

At the age of twenty-five, I was a certified captain living on a seventy-four-foot yacht in the shadow of two of the tallest buildings in the Western Hemisphere. The shadows of those buildings draped across North Cove Marina and cooled me on the hot summer days of the year 2001. Each morning, the sun rose above the Atlantic—far across the other side of Manhattan Island—and peered down at me between colossal towers of metal and glass. It was in those shadows that I scrubbed the decks, getting them clean before the broiling renewed. Here was my brief respite, given to me in those towering dark patches, where now there is only blue sky.

On the planet Tralfamadore, there lies a zoo comprised of scattered geodesic domes. Inside each dome are members of various races, kidnapped from their home planets and housed among the representative clutter of their former abodes. There are sea snakes from Zyx writhing in a flooded dome amid fake and crudely painted spike coral. The Zyx talk to one another by squeaks and blown bubbles, and so old conversations find themselves trapped at the top of the dome in a pocket of noise. The Zyx have lived on Tralfamadore long enough to have relinquished any hope of seeing their home reefs again, any dream of wrapping their tails around loved ones. But not long enough yet for the water to have lost that foul tinge of regret and despair, that smell of paint leaching from plastic coral.

Adjacent to this flooded dome are five balls of fur that roll about and bump into one another. The floor is an uneven series of steps and ramps carved out of dense foam and sprayed to look like the indigenous rock of the dwarf planet Upelote. The five Upes spin senselessly and carom off the large dome’s glass walls. These poor and hapless aliens are still shaken from the long flight aboard the Tralfamadorian zookeeper’s starship. The gravity isn’t right there on Tralfamadore. Neither are the suns and stars.

Across from the Upes, two Earthlings sit on display: Billy Pilgrim and Montana Wildhack. Montana is just waking up from her long slumber aboard a flying saucer. She was picked up two stops before the Upes, kidnapped to give Billy Pilgrim company. Her eyes flutter open, and then her mouth. Montana screams and screams while hundreds of Tralfamadorians gather around the dome to take in this newest exhibit. The heads of these strange aliens resemble oversize hands, a single eye in the palm. The Tralfamadorians clap by making fists, over and over. Montana Wildhack sees them through the glass and thinks that this is the time when people stir from their nightmares. This is the time. She goes on thinking this, screaming and screaming while the Tralfamadorians make their delighted fists.

It is one thing to know that there are more than three dimensions; it is another thing altogether to see them. It isn’t so hard to see up to nine dimensions, but humans rarely attempt the feat. They are happy enough to see in three. Many stick to two. Some are content with one and travel through life the way a subway moves through the earth. They are always on some line. Here is their stop. Work and home. Home and work. Back and forth, with a magazine read, perhaps, between the two. There was one woman who lived her entire life in a single dimension, never moving from where she was born. Seventy-five years later, she was buried on that very spot, and by all appearances seemed happy enough on most days. By the time Montana Wildhack was abducted from her home in Palm Springs, California, more and more people were attempting to live a life in one dimension. Advances in computing technology known as Zynga were making this more and more feasible. It was becoming A Thing.

On Tralfamadore, there lived a race of beings shaped like plungers with hands for heads. They saw in four dimensions by natural course. They couldn’t see the world in any other way. For them, time didn’t slide by like the shadows of buildings. They saw every state of the world all at once, not in slices like Earthlings do (those who even bother).

Listen: There is Montana Wildhack inside a dome, screaming and terrified. There she is on a couch in a rented office space in Hollywood, California, silent and similarly afraid. A friend has sent her to audition for a movie. She is sixteen, but her driver’s license says she is older. A man who is a director but likes to call himself a producer keeps staring at the locket that hangs between Montana’s breasts. He rubs his mustache over and over and asks what she’s been in before. The room smells of old cigars and sweat. Montana Wildhack will be a famous movie star in a few years, and of course any Tralfamadorian can see that. But all Montana can see is a strange man leaning in too close, a hand on her knee, asking her if she wants to be a star.

There are books written in the Tralfamadorian way. You can read them in any order, front to back or sideways and inside out. It doesn’t matter, because it all happened. You have to see it all at once to know the book. To tell anyone what you are reading is pointless. You have to wait. You can only comment on your sense of the thing when studied from some distance. I studied a book like this in college, just a few years ago (a Tralfamadorian would say that I am still studying it). I hated the book when I read it the first time. A lot of people died. Truly awful things happened to a man who became an author, but he wrote of these things and utter nonsense in the same breath, and this made me dismiss the book. Until I finished it. You have to see all things at once, as on Tralfamadore. I read it again. I caught a glimpse of some other dimension. I began to back away, and I saw all of it at once, and that’s when I wept and saw that it was good.

The thing I hated while reading this book, it turns out, was me. Bad things happen, and shoulders are shrugged. The most serious of events are blended with the strange. The author pulled me inside his mind, and what I found there was a dead stillness, the somber and poignant wisdom of someone with little hope and scars across his eyes. There was humor there, too. But not the bright kind. The man who wrote that book is dead. So it goes.

Montana Wildhack was abducted while sunning beside her pool. She was twenty years old, which is middle-aged in her profession. In her first two years, she made over seventy films. It didn’t take long to film movies such as these, try as men might to prolong each scene. And Montana was in high demand, for in addition to being lovely, she could act. Had she known this skill had other outlets, she would have skipped her early career altogether and made a different sort of film, the kind with plot and wardrobe. But that would come after, and the least of the little a young person knows is what they’re capable of. It takes a Tralfamadorian to see all of time and know that life won’t always be so dim. Nor so good. Seen all at once, the way a Tralfamadorian sees time, life makes perfect sense. Which would be an odd way to live one.

Waking up naked inside a glass dome does strange things to Montana’s brain. There was a blue California sky and a burning sun overhead one moment, and now the sound of her own screaming voice. She can still smell the baby oil on her skin. A man is there, also naked. Tall and skinny and unattractive, with a leer that makes him look like a Hollywood director. And beyond the glass, hundreds of fleshy beings that look like plungers with hands for heads and eyes where the palms should be clap by making fists. This is how Tralfamadorians show that they are happy. This is how they know the world is right by them. They make fists.

If I try hard enough—which is to say by not trying at all—I can see in the fourth dimension the way a Tralfamadorian does. There I am, sitting in a college classroom. It is the summer of 2011, and I’m studying a book that jumps around and makes me feel angry and hollow inside. It’s also summertime ten years earlier in New York, and I’m working on a windlass in the stern of a fancy yacht. It is the summer of 2013, and I’m lying in a bed in Florida, typing. My dog is having a dream. On Tralfamadore, time is seen all at once, which makes it difficult at times to see how things are tied together. I’m reading a book about bombs being dropped on Dresden. Twenty-five thousand people are dying. There’s a plane banking over Manhattan right now. I can read the jumble of numbers and letters on the tail of that plane. I am screaming in my head for the pilot to pull up. On Tralfamadore, they communicate telepathically. They do not do this on Earth. No one will ever hear me. There is orange and black against a bright blue sky, and I think I can feel the heat of a movie effect against my face, but maybe it’s just fear and my imagination. My friend Kelly yells down at me from the neighboring yacht: “Did you see that?” Kelly’s brain is doing odd things. Montana Wildhack is screaming. All of us are. Twelve years later, I’m lying beside my dog in an otherwise empty house. She dreams and I cry. Thousands are dying all over again. So it goes.

Montana Wildhack learned at a young age that she would only be loved for her flesh. Her uncle taught her this, and no one ever thought to teach her otherwise. The Serenity Prayer is engraved on the locket around her neck. Listen:

She has read it enough to be able to read it upside down, just as it lies. The trickiest part is the last line. This is where mortals who live in three dimensions have too much expected of them. All of human misery lies here. Hubris and cowardice, too. If only it were as simple as a prayer that can fit on a locket. If only wisdom were so cheap. But men wrestle with the things they cannot change, and they ignore those that might bend to some economy of effort. Winning at wrestling is about picking your partner. Most people prefer the unconquerable brute they already know. Or maybe, if you look around, we’re addicted to a challenge. And so things go unchanged and unaccepted, and our arms and hearts grow weary.

On Tralfamadore, the applause of fists dies down, and Montana is alone and terrified in a room with a naked man. She has been here before. She knows what to do, and it is a sad thing that she does not know any better. Billy Pilgrim thinks he is a lucky man, that he is saving her. Montana feels dead inside, but this is the only feeling she has ever known. She is on the planet Tralfamadore, billions of light years from Earth, but she feels right at home in this stranger’s arms. The way a mosquito feels at peace in amber.

September 10, 2001. A storm is brewing in New York City. A clash is about to begin. Tempers will soon rise as historical conquests and slights are remembered and renewed on the eve of this fight between ancient and embittered foes.

Yes, the Boston Red Sox are playing the New York Yankees.

Roger Clemens is slated to pitch, looking for his twentieth win. It’s the last meeting of the year between the two teams. I’m there to watch. My best friend, Scott, is there, visiting from South Carolina. Kevin—my boss and the captain of a neighboring yacht—is there as well. He is also joined by his best friend. It is a coincidence, our best friends from out of town staying with us that week. It’s a Monday, and the weather is dismal. A storm comes, and then the rain, and we stand in it, naively hopeful, as fifty thousand fans slowly leak from Yankee Stadium. We splash in the rivers at the bottoms of the bleachers, while candy wrappers and empty cups drift toward distant drains. Men down on the field cover the diamond of dirt so that it won’t turn to mud, and it’s dark when they announce there won’t be any baseball. It feels less like America after that. We head home sad and soaked, but it is only rain.

Our friends had come a long way to see something distinctly New York and vastly American, and so as we pass through those glass towers toward the marina we call home, Kevin and I take our best friends up to Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. After a long elevator ride, we wet our insides to go with our outsides. The city sparkles from those heights. There isn’t a soiled patch of street to be seen, just wet newness, black asphalt shiny like rivers of oil. I stand with my forehead pressed to the glass, shoulder to shoulder with Andrew, a mechanic from another boat, as we both peer into that unblemished, that happy and serene America, far, far below.

“Imagine this coming down,” I say out loud. I believe it’s the mammal in me that has this thought, the mammal that can remember living in trees. It’s the same part of me that is terrified of giant lizards. It’s the part of me that makes me contemplate a fall when confronted with an abyss or some great height.

Far below Andrew and me, taillights wink on and off. A light turns green, and everyone races off all at once, in a hurry to get somewhere. After a pause, Andrew says that these buildings will always be here, that they will outlive us all. And I believe him.

“But just imagine,” my mammal brain says, “if you took this one we’re standing in down in such a way that it toppled into that guy.” My monkey paw points to the adjacent building lit up here and there by janitors and workaholics. “They’d go like dominoes,” I say, “one after the other.”

Andrew tells me the building would go straight down, however you tried to topple it. He says something about mass being pulled toward the center of the earth, something about structural loads. He tells me you’d have to make this building much stronger to sit at a lean, and so any lean at all would send everything plummeting as neat as a demolition.

My mammal brain rejects this thought. Andrew is an engineer, but I still don’t believe him. Behind us, one of the bartenders complains about the late hour and says he has to be back early in the morning to work a double. I glance at my wristwatch. It has gotten so late that it is now September 11, and there I am standing in a patch of blue and empty sky.

I’m in the lazarette of the motor yacht Prelude on the morning of September 11. The compartment is tight. There’s raw fiberglass against my shoulder, the site of a future itch. A Tralfamadorian would know to go ahead and scratch it. I’m sweaty and hot in that cramped space, and it’s difficult to breathe or even move. I’m loosening the last bolt on the underside of a motorized winch when I hear the boom. I hear it and I feel it. The boat shudders, the fiberglass resonating, a hollow in my chest like standing too close to a tower of speakers at a noisy concert.

Someone’s in trouble, I think. Some jet pilot has just buzzed New York City, racing down the Hudson so low and so fast that a shock wave has been sent out to rattle tall buildings. I have an image from a film in my head, a hotshot pilot buzzing a tower, coffee spilled, a man clutching his tie and cursing. In my mind, there is nothing but exciting things happening out in the world while I work on this stupid winch. My best friend is visiting from out of town. All I want is a day off from work.

I squirm out of the tight space, leaving the ratchet set behind. I plan to come right back. I just want to see what’s going on. Up on the deck, Scott yells from inside the boat, asking me what that was. I tell him a pilot just buzzed the Hudson. Scott shakes and flaps his newspaper over to the next page, looking for something interesting. On the wharf behind Prelude, a crowd gathers. They shield their eyes against the low morning sun. I follow the dozens of gazes high up the North Tower and spot the smoke. That hotshot pilot who buzzed the Hudson is forgotten. Here is something new. The boom and the smoke—these two things are unrelated in my mind.

A fire. An office fire. The crowd swells. Many of these people are just off the ferry from New Jersey, were heading toward that very building—but now they’re not so sure. Many others gawk for the simple newness, for the absurdity of a smoking skyscraper. What is normally a thoroughfare of pedestrian traffic has ground to a halt. On a typical morning, this is a conveyor belt of moving heads, of swinging briefcases and purses, of ties flapping and dresses swirling, expensive shoes and high heels clop-clopping on concrete. Now it is a rumor mill. It is a game of Chinese whispers. A Cessna or some small plane has crashed into the tower. No, it was something bigger.

The windows high above glow amber from the flames trapped inside. The smoke and fire march across the building, spreading. There are sirens in the distance, a noise that is such a steady backdrop to this city that it often goes unheard. But this is different. An odd cacophony. A lot of sirens. A sense of urgency.

But the fires are not urgent. They move at a crawl, and the gray smoke drifts lazily into the cloudless sky, and I can’t imagine that anyone is hurt. They will get away. They will get away. There are sirens coming, and this is just some thing to gawk at.

Montana Wildhack has been on display for as long as she can remember. Trapped and on display for as long as she can remember. She was the first one in school with breasts. She was in sixth grade when her grandma took her to Penney’s to pick out a bra. Her grandma told her that she couldn’t run around like she was, that people were watching. This was right after a family cookout. Montana and her cousins swam in the mud-brown lake. Her uncle Chip showed her how to pitch horseshoes. The next day, after church, her grandma took her shopping. The bra was tight and pinched and was hard to get on and off, but her nipples stopped getting raw from rubbing on her shirts. And like a person abducted by aliens but in complete reverse, Montana appeared suddenly from out of nowhere. She went from unpopular to the complete opposite in the course of a single summer. A flash of hormones, and suddenly a stranger was in their midst.

She was asked to join the cheer squad. She was invited to sleepovers, where every girl in school wanted to brush her hair and try on clothes with her in the bathroom. She caught them watching her in the mirror after PE. People noticed her. Her grades improved, but only in some courses. English with Mr. Mayberry and history with Mr. Thomson, where she wrote in cursive and got large red A-pluses. In math with Mrs. Pickens, where she wrote in numbers, her grades got a little worse. At school dances, the boys lined up for her, giggling, while the same girls who brushed her hair looked on, unsmiling. Life was as good as it would ever get for Montana, for every curse begins with a blessing. This is a truth the Tralfamadorians know, for they see what follows right from the start. Montana had to learn the hard way. Gradually, the way a fire moves.

Her uncle Chip won $60,000 from a scratch-off once. Montana was in eighth grade and remembers the party he threw. Uncle Chip became suddenly popular. Even Montana’s dad, who hated his brother Chip, liked him just fine all of a sudden. And at the party, Uncle Chip took Montana for a ride in his new truck. He gave her a pair of earrings and told her not to lose them, that they weren’t fakes. Then he asked her to thank him with a kiss. Montana remembers his breath tasting like beer and his hand accidentally brushing against her breast. Back at the party, she looked everywhere for her grandma, but Granny had passed away the year before. Uncle Chip would be dead a year later, as any Tralfamadorian could plainly see. Shot himself with his brand-new gun in his brand-new truck, a year’s worth of scratch-offs under the seat and stuck to the mud of his brand-new boots. So it goes.

Breasts were a lottery ticket, Montana saw. One random girl in every school wins that first pair, and at pool parties, the boys laugh and tug at those knotted bows on sunburnt backs, like ribbons on Christmas presents. She can see it now like a Tralfamadorian, how each thing leads to the other. Dating. Obsessed with the boys who are obsessed with her. Ninth grade and not a male teacher on her schedule. Ninth grade a second time with the same results. Dropping out. But life was good. A boy who graduated the year before wanted to see her steady. He showed her the college campus and said they’d get married one day. She drank too much and danced at a party, and someone offered her money to take her shirt off. There was laughter, which eventually vanished, but the money stayed real. The air was cool in that house—so cold her nipples hurt like tiny fists. The money, though, was warm from sweaty palms. This was a thing, getting paid to dance. Montana never knew before.

Everything happens twice in your life. Often, it’s quite more than that. This is a thing Tralfamadorians know and humans ignore. It’s rarely enough to suffer a thing once, the Tralfamadorians like to say. Not when you can suffer it again and again.

I ran away to Charleston, South Carolina, more than once. The first time was to elope. I was nineteen. A girl I loved was leaving to take a job on a boat, and getting married would make sure that we stayed together even while we were apart. On Tralfamadore, they would laugh, knowing what happens next.

Less than a year later, I quit my career as a computer technician, packed what I could into a car, and fled to Charleston, an emotional wreck. A chessboard there saves my life. Fleeing to Charleston saves my life. I am twenty years old and will soon divorce. So it goes.

There is a café on King Street where chess players sit on coffee-bean sacks and move around six-inch wooden soldiers, soldiers we slam down with happy violence. My hurts disappear when I move those soldiers. A stranger is sitting across from me, as strangers do in that place. Names are exchanged. “Scott,” a man says, not looking up from the board. He must be a decade older than me. The woman beside him glances up from her magazine to smile piteously at her boyfriend’s next victim. But Scott is about to save my life. As most things go, he will do this more than once.

Best friends form like fires spread. Gab turns to conversation. Familiar faces are smiled at. People have to eat, so why not grab a bite together? Like Montana Wildhack, Scott dances for a living. But it’s called ballet and wardrobe is involved, so somehow it’s more respectable. In Charleston, South Carolina, you can have a ballet studio within four blocks of a church if you want. But probably not right next door. There are limits.

When I decide I should buy a sailboat to live on, Scott goes with me to Baltimore to sail it down the coast. Neither of us knows what we’re doing as we head for Charleston around Cape Hatteras in January. Boats have disappeared to the bottom of the sea here once or twice. We soon discover this is so. And it is not the last time Scott and I will see trouble from the deck of a boat. Nor is it the last time that I am certain I will die.

At the base of the Twin Towers, there is a glass dome called the Winter Garden. Palm trees stand there in the dead of winter, like the sea snakes of Zyx, trapped in a strange world. I wake up one day to find myself living in that dome. One moment, I’m attending college classes in Charleston. The next minute, I’m in an alien land, surrounded by strangers, trapped in a glass dome, wanting to scream and scream.

The line to get a bagel in this place is infuriatingly slow.

Montana bought a house in Palm Springs with her own money. Movie money. Her realtor showed her houses in the hills with nice views, but seeing out meant others could see in. She settled on a small place with a roof that needed repair, but she liked the hedge. And it had a pool, where she could lie out and feel the sun warm her flesh, touching her without touching her. Until she woke up smelling like baby oil and coconuts, a nightmare of creatures gazing in through geodesic glass, a naked stranger beside her, a horror she knew all too well.

Montana had forgotten what it meant to own her body. She had lived a life on display, first because it felt nice, later to survive, and then to profit. She wasn’t oblivious to this trade-off. There were days when the exchange made her feel powerful, when checks came in the mail from her agent and she thought of the number of men aroused by her on-screen performances. It reminded her of that party and dancing for those college boys, going home with more money than she’d ever held.

But then there were days in the middle of a shoot, brief moments of nakedness when the director yelled “cut” or the cameraman needed to change rolls, and the magic of the scene vanished and the characters around her faded back into actors. Here was when an assistant took a dozen paces to bring her a robe, and Montana Wildhack felt a chill. Here was the off-camera hell when the actor from the previous scene continued to touch her as if she were his. This was when they would ask her out. Tell her how great she was. The best ever.

On Tralfamadore, she was back on display in a geodesic dome of glass that held thousands of alien viewers at bay. This was her movie set, with its lime-green kitchen appliances, yellow lounger, sofa bed, end tables, lamps. The alien zookeepers had installed a phonograph that worked and a television set that didn’t. The latter had an image painted on the curved glass screen, an image of two cowboys dueling with pistols. Montana thought she recognized the film. She’d had sex with one of the actors a few years ago when his feature career had hit the skids and hers had not yet begun. He had played a doctor, she a nurse.

Montana remembered the trepidation she’d felt on every new shoot. Arriving at some rented house, the smell of morning coffee, a man she would perform with smiling too widely as the director introduced her. They would pump her hand, these actors, and stare at her breasts where a locket lay with its little prayer, Montana silently pining for the wisdom to know what things she might change.

Billy Pilgrim stirred on the sofa bed, and the Tralfamadorians outside the dome went wild from the sudden movement. Montana Wildhack shivered from the cold of being trapped with yet another actor. They had been on display for several months, she and Billy Pilgrim, and she was fairly certain of two things: The first was that she would never see her home again. The second, that she was pregnant.

We are on the dock, gazing up at the smoking building. My boss Kevin is there. And so is Andrew, the engineer. The first sign that something is wrong is Andrew’s wife running to us, shaking and crying. This is not the Leslie I know, the forever smiling, the warm and friendly. This is a wife collapsing into the arms of her husband, unable to talk, barely able to breathe.

She was in the gym on the top floor of the hotel. There was a crash. Ceiling panels rained down, lights exploding. They had run from the building, had run through the courtyard, and there were bodies—

There were bodies everywhere.

Andrew held his wife. My best friend, Scott, ran off to investigate. The rest of us looked up at those marching flames and that drifting smoke. Here was a thing to gawk at.

If Montana Wildhack had a type, she was quite sure that Billy Pilgrim was not it. Billy possessed a weak countenance, was thin and made up of more joints than bones. He also did not seem entirely sane.

He would drift off to sleep at all hours and claim upon waking to have traveled through time, to be both there on Tralfamadore and also back on Earth, to be simultaneously younger and older, and to know how he would one day die. He said he knew every mistake he would make, that he could see them all at once, and complained that he was doomed to repeat them again and again. “There’s no stopping,” he would say. And then he would drift back, unstuck from time, the Tralfamadorians listening in on his dreams with their telepathic minds as Billy squirmed and murmured and slept.

It wasn’t until Montana watched him cry in his sleep, whimpering his whispers of war, that she began to care for him. Billy woke her one night while the zoo was quiet and told her about the bombing of Dresden. Every horrible detail. The stars overhead twinkled serenely, and Montana had a revelation. Billy Pilgrim wasn’t weak, she decided, as he drifted back to sleep—he was broken. The whole system was broken. Sending young men to war, expecting them to come back whole, their bullets to make things right. Expecting a girl from the Big Sky State to step off a bus in LA and have a career that wouldn’t kill her. The machinery of it all was set up unfair from the start. Living in three dimensions meant you learned what you needed to know too late in life.

Montana held Billy in her arms that night while he had another fitful dream, and she watched the stars fade and the sky brighten. She wondered which of those pinpricks up there held Earth in its orbit. The view blurred as she thought of the friends and family she would never see again, the sounds of the waves on Venice Beach, the horns blaring as lights turned green, the wind in the palm trees that shrouded her small home in the Springs, the simple torture of deciding what she would eat that day, every day, three times a day.

There were things she wouldn’t miss, but many more of them she would. And it took this to realize her life wasn’t so bad as she had once thought. She felt an impulse to go back to school, to study this time, to read more, to make herself better. Because it wasn’t right that they had the two of them on display here, that this was all the Tralfamadorians would know of Earth. Not these two to represent them. She and Billy, two broken souls. This was not their kind. It made the zoo a lie, and this frustrated her the most.

Billy whimpered, and Montana wiped her eyes. The sky brightened, and the zoo opened, grotesque aliens sidling by beyond the glass. These creatures covered their eyes with their fingers; they made fists of joy; and Montana could hear their thoughts leak into her mind. But as loudly as she screamed in her own head, no one moved to save her. They just clapped and clapped.

Billy disappeared later that day. Montana had stretched out on the sofa for a nap—she liked to sleep when the Tralfs were watching; she spent her waking time when the zoo was closed and they weren’t around. When she woke up, Billy was gone. Back to Earth, she caught herself thinking, envious of his deluded voyages. Back to his youth or forward to his death. But that was impossible, however much she liked to dream it wasn’t.

She rose and took a shower and used the bathroom, every movement on display, and the crowds outside grew dense as the Tralfs shuffled to a leering stop. She could feel them probing her mind. A thousand hands pawed at her head like bodies stuffed into the same crowded train. A thousand unblinking eyes bored through her flesh. She could hear them. Their language was gibberish, but she knew they could understand her. She begged them to let her go, to take her home, that she wasn’t an animal for a zoo. She repeated this in her mind like a mantra. She remembered chanting something similar as the cameras looked on and men twice her age were rough with her. She remembered thinking that if she froze and sat real still, Uncle Chip would know that she was uncomfortable, that he would stop.

Montana toweled off and pulled on one of the robes that cycled back and forth through the food chutes. The robes had come after much begging. The Tralfs could talk back to her by means of a musical organ with a humanlike voice, but she never knew when they might respond and when they might simply go on ignoring her pleas. It was maddening, this. The inconsistency. It was back to living with a drunk.

It was Stained who explained why their responses didn’t make sense. Stained was one of the zookeepers who cleaned the domes at night. He had a red blotch on his palm, and since Tralfs didn’t have names, Montana had given him one. Stained explained that Tralfs saw in four dimensions, and so sometimes they answered before a question was asked, and sometimes they waited until years later to answer, and so you had to listen carefully. He told Montana this two days before she asked about it. It took some piecing together, talking to Stained.

Stained also explained how the universe would end. He cleaned the glass by dunking a large fleshy finger into a bucket of suds, and between the sounds of squeaks, he told Montana about a test pilot trying out a new type of fuel and how this would blow up the entire universe one day. Montana asked, “If they knew it was going to happen, why didn’t anyone stop him?” She said the question out loud, even though Stained could read her mind.

Stained went on cleaning the glass for a few hours, and Montana busied herself with making the bed. She knew rushing Stained or repeating the question wouldn’t make any difference, so she kept herself busy. She had a system for making the bed that took four and a half hours, but she had additions in mind that might stretch it out to five. Finally, Stained answered her last question. At least—she thought it was her last question. It could’ve been the answer to one she would ask tomorrow.

“Because,” Stained said, his voice musical and sonorous through that great pipe organ over her head.

Montana nodded. It was the answer she had expected.

I am about to die. It is September 11, and every cell in my body is acutely aware of my looming demise. The certainty of it. The inevitability. Not years from now, not weeks or days. Moments. Like how a Tralfamadorian knows.

The first plane hitting a skyscraper was an aberration, an accident, something to gaze upon and wait for things to get better, wait for the sirens to arrive. The second jet, however, brought the promise of a third and a fourth. Here was a pattern. Jets are falling out of the sky. The world has gone amok. A GPS malfunction, an EMP detonation, solar flares, a dozen disaster films, and science fiction plots. My brain is misfiring with all the possibilities but the real one. Trapped between a cliff wall of burning buildings and the Hudson River, I look around for my best friend, Scott, but he went off to investigate the fire, the report of bodies. I feel the impulse to run after him, to push through the crowd that’s heading the other way. I start up the metal ramp toward the wharf and away from the yachts.

“We have to get the boats out of here,” Kevin tells me.

Kevin is my boss, and he’s right. We need to get the boats away from these burning buildings, away from the next impact and the one after. I look to the wharf for Scott. He’ll be back at any moment and help me cast these lines off. He saw the second plane disappear into that building, and he’s running back my way. I try not to think of the bodies Leslie saw or the debris raining down. I try not to think about that. He’ll be back.

I scamper onto the boat. The starboard engine has been having problems—it won’t crank from the helm or the flybridge. I have to go down into the engine room to start the mains. This is where I’ll die. This is when the surety of my last breath seizes me. It’s when I lift that heavy hatch of stainless steel and teak decking and gaze down that steep ladder into the darkness of the engine room. Down there, I won’t be able to see the sky. I won’t spot the next jet hurtling in at hundreds of miles an hour and be able to… to dodge, to know that this is the end, to witness my destruction, to do anything about it. I turn my back on that loaded gun—that bright blue sky—and descend below deck.

The engines crank one by one, slowly, starter motors whining, diesel firing under pressure, kicking up into that throaty rattle of an idle that sounds as though it could stop at any moment, that sound like a weakened heart.

Scrambling back up the ladder, feet clanking on rungs, I find chaos outside. People are running across the wharf, away from the buildings, looking to the sky for the next plane. A man asks if I’m leaving. People can hear the engines, can see the exhaust, are watching me scramble around the decks to make ready.

“C’mon,” I tell the man. Others are looking at me expectantly. “Anyone who wants to go, c’mon,” I say. I have people to help. Somehow, this helps me.

I loosen the spring lines as strangers dash onboard. Someone offers to get the bowline and runs up the dock before I say yes. “No shoes,” I tell a man. This reflexive bark comes as quickly as the realization that such rules are now ridiculous. But there are habits. And my body is calmer now with something to do. I have a responsibility to this boat, to its owner, to these dozen or more strangers onboard.

There are briefcases and business shoes scattered across the deck. Up on the flybridge, I put the boat into gear. I lay on the horn a few times, yell my friend’s name, look for him in the crowds. But Scott is gone. The motor yacht Prelude pivots neatly in the tiny marina and points its bow across the Hudson toward New Jersey. We pass through the narrow breakwater, and I look back over my shoulder to see a dark object plummeting from a burning building, a man in a flapping business suit, who disappears out of sight. The flag on the back of the boat goes to half-mast as we motor away. The wind picks up on our faces, but all else is silence.

The marina across the Hudson won’t take us. We tie up on the fuel dock, everyone trying their cell phones to let loved ones know they’re okay, but the networks are jammed. Men put on their business shoes and gather their briefcases and disappear. Crowds gather on the docks and along the shore to gaze at this burning neighbor across the way. I can’t stay on the fuel dock, they tell me. I have to pull away.

I need to go back and look for Scott. I have mobility, while so many others are trapped. And out here on the Hudson, I can see the sky; I can get out of the way. I am heading back to Manhattan when the screeching starts, when the top of the South Tower tips, when a building leans its head sadly to one side and then sinks into the earth.

A building collapsing sounds a lot like a jet throttling up on a runway. A high-pitched scream builds and builds. You brace for a boom, a roar, a masculine anguish—but it is a shrill cry. It gets you not in the chest, but in the bones.

I watch from the deck of a boat named Prelude. The flag on the aft of the boat is already at half-mast. A man in a business suit with a briefcase lowered it as we left the marina, other men in similar suits taking flight from office windows, escaping the heat.

A plume of crushed steel billows out over Lower Manhattan. My best friend is in there somewhere. I turn the boat around, away from the onrush of dust and debris, away from the home where I used to live.

September 11. Cell phones do not work, and part of me is glad. As soon as I get a signal, I’ll be able to call my mom and tell her I’m alive. But I’ll also have to call Shannon, Scott’s girlfriend, and let her know that Scott is dead, that a building has fallen down around him, that he went off to investigate a fire and now is gone.

I consider this aboard Prelude. I cannot stay on the fuel dock, and there’s no available slip, so I creep toward Manhattan, where fellow boats from North Cove Marina are pulling people from the seawall. People are desperate to leave. They jump to Prelude’s swim platform, each with a different story. The wake and chop make for treacherous maneuvering so close to a concrete wall. On the New Jersey side, we let people off by docking up to a restaurant. There are construction workers there with hard hats and muddy boots and lunch pails. They’re looking for someone, anyone, to take them across the Hudson, opposite this tide of humanity. They say they want to help. I tell them I’m going back anyway, and they can ride.

As they scamper onboard, I forget to tell them about their boots, about minding the deck. We cast off and watch from the Hudson as the second building falls. I ask them if they’re sure. They are. As I creep into the marina, my home is unrecognizable. Debris is everywhere. The glass dome of the Winter Garden is wounded, and a lower chunk of one of the lesser towers is missing. The world seems a precarious place. Buildings mean to topple on men. Buildings have. I pivot in the tight marina and back into my old slip, like I’ve done a thousand times, and white paper flutters down like a flock of exhausted birds. The paper catches on the deck and in the scuppers. There’s the smell of something acidic, something foreign, something I have never tasted but I know to be toxic. All but one of the men jump to the dock. The lone dissenter has seen enough. I don’t blame him.

“That building looks to topple,” I tell the men with the hard hats, pointing to the smaller World Trade 7. Two hours ago, I didn’t know buildings could do this. Suddenly, I’m an expert.

I scan the wasteland around me and see no sign of Scott, no sign of anyone. “Be careful,” the guy who stayed behind calls out to his friends, and I am convinced that I have delivered these men to their deaths. I pull out of the slip once again. We pick up more passengers from the seawall south of the marina before heading back across the Hudson. There is much to do, pulling people away, right up until the Coast Guard comes and orders us to stop.

Scott is dead. My cell phone is dead. My mother must think me dead. So it goes.

I pick up the papers that have drifted down on the boat and have become plastered there, these relics from great buildings that no longer stand. The first one I grab is an insurance document. Listen: What I tell you here is true. The first line on the first page I pick up, it begins:

So it goes.

A red sun slides across the geodesic dome, and the crisp angles between the glass panels divide that alien sky into triangles of magenta and gold. Another day in those prison walls. Billy is asleep on the sofa bed, mewling like a cat, his hands twitching in some dream, some time-travel delusion. Montana escapes from the fold-out bed as quietly as noisy springs will allow. She grabs her robe and covers herself. The zoo is quiet, the doors not yet open to the hordes of skinny aliens with their hand-like heads. This is the only time when she can see the critters across the way, those balls of fur that roll around and bump into one another, their long periscope antennas unfolding to peer out at the world, at the woman peering back at them.

Montana watches the furry aliens scurry and bump about. She thinks of what Stained told her of the universe ending, how a pilot presses a button and all that ever was or ever is goes kaput. It’s hard to believe such an end might be possible. Even harder to summon some fear of this, some longing or regret. She presses her palm to the thick glass, cool to the touch, and she remembers this, something both distant and familiar: Her hand on peeling wallpaper. A domestic prison. A feeling of being trapped. Broken knuckles and blood in the sink, and barely a dent in the sheetrock.

It is September 11, 2013. Twelve years have gone by. I’m on a flight from San Francisco to Fort Lauderdale, a cross-country flight loaded down with fuel. Looking out the window, I think of a woman I have invented, the woman in 13D. I’ve been thinking about her for twelve years. I’ve been on fifty flights this year, and I think about her every time.

I don’t know this woman in 13D. Maybe she’s a man. Maybe that seat is empty. But I’ve been thinking about her—imagining her—ever since that ball of orange and black erupted overhead. I wonder if she knew, in those last moments of her life, that she was about to die. The engines outside her window must’ve been screaming, making that noise like a great steel building collapsing to the ground. The wings must’ve been creaking, the wind howling across the trembling skin of that aircraft, New York City so near below. Too near. Buildings rushing past, knuckles white on the armrests, a stranger clutching the wrist of another stranger in fear, that sense that this wasn’t right, that those men who have taken over the plane—who won’t let anyone go to the restroom up front—aren’t going to land and simply trade hostages.

I’m on the wharf, looking up. There’s a plane howling across the clear blue sky, banking hard, coming in too fast. One building is burning, and another can’t get out of the way. A pattern is forming, but in my head I only have a silent scream to a pilot who is already dead. Pull up. Pull up, I silently shout. What’re you doing? I scream this to the pilot as I watch, trying to talk to him as a Tralfamadorian might. This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening.

The woman in 13D is screaming and thinking the same thing.

And then it happens.

The Coast Guard won’t let me move. The Hudson and the East River have been shut down. New York City is smoking, and I am not aware of this last fact, but the entire world is watching. Some with happy fists.

Another boat has tied up to the restaurant dock. Hours march by. The construction workers return for the lunch pails they left on the dock, and they say there was little to do in the way of help, that they had to catch the same rescue boats as everyone else. But they saw things. They tell me awful stories, things I do not want to hear. They leave boot prints of mud and ash on the docks, trailing away.

I hear my name. Turning, there is Scott on the dock across the water. A dead man, standing. My best friend, waving at me. I nearly dive in and swim across. My heart is bursting out of my chest, and for all the death I’ve seen, now is when the tears come, this sight of someone I love, very much alive.

I go to crank Prelude to drive the comical distance across this leap of water. It would take an hour to walk around. A crew member from the sailboat says to use their tender, so I do. Scott and I embrace. He tells me what happened, the choking cloud, how he had to breathe through his shirt, how he followed the stampeding others, dangled over the Hudson from a rail, dropped into a boat, saw someone else land and their leg go sickeningly sideways, didn’t know where I was, marched down the Hudson shoreline and stopped at every marina, and now here.

We look at each other for a long time. We talk on top of each other. I have to touch his arm several times to make sure he’s real.

On the dock, someone suggests we find food. And has anyone seen a TV? There are rumors about Chicago and LA. Are they right? Are more coming? The Sears Tower? The White House?

We head through the parking lot toward town, but there is a man blocking our way. Sitting astride a tractor with a big scooping bucket on the front, he yells at us for being on his property. We explain the boats, and he says we can’t tie up there, that this is his restaurant. We say there’s no room anywhere, that the Coast Guard won’t let us leave, that they’ll shoot at us if we do.

He tells us we better go fucking home and get our guns. He tells us we’re at war.

We watch as a car pulls up, a friend of his, and the man lifts the bucket of that great tractor so that this one car can come through, and then the bucket rattles back to the concrete. No one else may pass.

“Better get your fucking guns,” he yells at us, as we run off in search of food. We run, and our feet make the sound of Tralfamadorians clapping, of happy people making fists.

Stained is washing the same triangle of glass that he washed the night before. He peers in at Montana and seems to be watching her knit. Montana has snapped the antennas off the TV, much to the chagrin of Billy Pilgrim, who says this Western is his favorite show. He settles when he sees the reception does not waver. Montana finds she has to rough up the smooth metal a bit before it will hold the thread. She is taking the carpet apart and making a dress for her child. Her arms rest on her swollen belly. The thread pulls neatly from the carpet, one line at a time, back and forth, as the opposite happens in her lap. There is destruction and creation taking place all at once, connected by a single thread. The glass squeaks as Stained washes the same spot, over and over.

“Because,” he says, apropos of something, the organ overhead playing his tune-like voice.

Montana smiles. She’s not sure what question this is aimed at—not that it matters. She is content to have someone who listens. Billy doesn’t always. He just stares in the vicinity of her locket.

“I wish you wouldn’t destroy the universe,” Montana says, not for the first time. She starts a new row, really likes the way she can extend or retract these needles to make them shorter or longer, thinks TV antennas are just fine for knitting, and then looks up at Stained. “Those of us who only see in three dimensions, we would most appreciate having the universe around.”

Stained blinks and watches her. Montana peers down at the dome of her belly, this dome within a dome, this prisoner two domes deep, naked and ignorant and soon for this world. “It would be nice to have a universe for my baby,” she tells Stained. Not that this would move him, just her thinking aloud. Just talking over Billy, who is murmuring in his sleep.

“I’m not angry at you,” she tells Stained. And the squeaking and cleaning stop. “You took everything from me, but I’m not angry at you.” Another row of stitches. Montana adjusts herself in the lounger, because being pregnant requires a constant quest for some elusive comfort. She loves her baby; this is what she knows. And she never wanted one. Never would have had one back at home. Not in that life. It made hating this place difficult at times. Stained seems to be reading her mind, the way he stares at her.

“I was angry, you know,” she tells him. “For weeks and weeks, all I wanted was for all of you to die for what you did. Maybe you heard me screaming it in my head, those long speeches saying I’d get even with you, that my world would come for me, would blast you to smithereens.”

Stained watches her.

“But this is where we’re different. You see the future and refuse to change it. Where I come from, we can see the past, but we keep repeating it. That’s where we’re different. The same but different.” She nods vigorously. “I’ve never been free before, you see. Not once in my whole life. I used to make fists and hit walls, but it hurt me more than it hurt them. The people who did bad things to me, they didn’t care how angry I got. It didn’t fix a thing. So you go right on cleaning and peering in, and I’m going to—”

“He loves you, too,” Stained says.

Montana turns and peers at Billy Pilgrim, who has rolled over and has uncovered himself. She knits two and purls one. Knits two and purls one. “I know,” she says. She doesn’t say that she doesn’t really love Billy. Pities him, more like. After a long while, she remembers where the conversation had been going.

“You know what I’ve realized? Just a week ago, sitting here, miserable for my kid who will be born in this zoo of yours. I realized that I have never owned myself. Not really. I’ve thought what others wanted me to think. I’ve felt the way I was supposed to feel. I used to get angry and want to hit things, thought that would make it better, make things right.” Montana laughs. She balls up her hand. “I used to make fists like you do, that’s what I did.”

The glass before Montana has never been so clean.

“And then I realized what a blessing it is that I don’t know the future. That I don’t see like you do. Because what would I do? I’d be as numb and callous as you are. A prisoner. I’d already know how this dress comes out, and that wouldn’t make me wanna go through with it. You know?”

“It’s a boy,” Stained says.

Montana looks from her knitting to the Tralfamadorian with the red splotch on his palm. If Montana had lived a different life, she would have called this Tralf Macbeth. But that wasn’t the life given to her.

“What did you say?” she asks.

Stained blinks. Montana rubs her belly.

“Can you read his mind? It’s gonna be a boy?”

Tears blur her vision like the rainy Tralfamadorian nights streak the dome.

“If you can talk to him, tell him I love him. Tell him everything’s gonna be okay.”

Stained has gone back to cleaning. Montana wants to scream, but the thing she is angry at is in the past. The past can’t hear her. This is the thing, her great discovery. She smiles at the future. Happiness is a choice. She knits another row and loves every man who ever wronged her. More important, she loves those who will wrong her yet.

“Because,” Stained says, curling a finger, and peering in at her.

“Yes,” Montana agrees.

“Because.” She laughs, and almost feels free.

A plane disappears into an office building, and bombs erupt everywhere at once. In London and Baghdad, in Spain and Afghanistan, every bomb that ever was and ever will be detonates in unison. All the same bomb.

The Tralfamadorians see time stretched out in all directions. They see a people who can do nothing but make joyous fists. Something is wrong with those who don’t. Something is terribly wrong with those who don’t. And where are the more like them?

It is July 6, 2001, and I am on the deck of the motor yacht Symphony. There is a stranger beside me, a beautiful girl; I do not know her name. She is a dancer, one of the high-kicking Rockettes, and we have exchanged smiles more than once over the course of the night. I join her on the bow. It is a warm evening on the Hudson. I have yet to meet my wife, Amber, in whom I will find peace. Symphony turns away from the Statue of Liberty and aims for Manhattan, steams through those lapping waters toward a skyline alight, toward those tall pillars of gleaming glass that blot out the blackest sky.

At that moment, a stranger leans in and kisses a boy, and the universe has never been so right. If time could be lived in a single dimension, there is where I would be. A boy and a city whole. But it is a man who writes this, every word of it true. And in that bright blue and empty sky where shade used to shelter my toil, I take solace in the wisdom of Montana Wildhack—who knows that nothing in the past can keep her from being free.

This is by far the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. It’s the only time I grossly missed a self-imposed deadline, and what is little more than a novelette took longer to compose than most of my full-length novels. The final 10,500 words required that I first write about 100,000, composing and recomposing passages over and over again, crafting and deleting, until I ended up with the piece I submitted.

In 2014, Amazon launched a new program called Kindle Worlds, which allows fans to write stories based on their favorite characters and worlds. My Silo series was included in the program, and Amazon was also interested in me writing for one of the other “Worlds.” When I saw that Kurt Vonnegut’s works were included in the program, I expressed interest. I think I knew from the start what I wanted to write; it just took me a while to admit it to myself.

Slaughterhouse-Five is not my favorite of Vonnegut’s works—that would be Cat’s Cradle—but it is the most powerful. Semi-autobiographical, Slaughterhouse-Five allowed Vonnegut to write about the bombing of Dresden, which he survived, by approaching it askance. I like to imagine that writing the novel was both difficult and cathartic for him. Because “Peace in Amber” was both for me. It was the first time I tried to write a detailed account of my experiences on September 11, 2001.

All of the details in the story you just read are as accurate as I can make them. Writing it down, I bawled. Some days, I just sat with my laptop and cried, not knowing what to write. Like my pain for years, I hid the process from those around me. By the time my girlfriend got home from work each day, my face was dry. I tried to not look tired. There were other days that I shuffled around the house muttering to myself that life wasn’t worth living. Through it all, I wrote and deleted. Wrote and deleted. It’s impossible to convey to you, reading this, how different writing felt at the time.

I’ve always beaten deadlines by a mile. This one came and went. But slowly, the form of the piece fell together. And gradually, there were details of the day that I could look at without it crippling me. I’d been avoiding so much for so long. Not just the imagery, but the helplessness. And the agony I felt thinking my best friend was gone, and then seeing him again, and then the survivor’s guilt, the something close to elation soured by death’s specter.

At the end, the piece I dreaded most and got through in the worst manner helped me like no other. I have no idea what it reads like to the general public. Is it the inscrutable mess that I sometimes feel like it is? Impenetrable? Surreal? Discordant? Discomforting? I hope so. It’s what Slaughterhouse-Five feels like when I read it again and again. And it’s what that day felt like as I revisit it far too often.