Ten Little Indians

Can I Get a Witness?

AFTER EATING LUNCH ALONE in Good Food, a postcolonial wonder house that served Japanese teriyaki, Polish sausage sandwiches, Italian American pizza, and Mexican and Creole rice and beans, she sipped the last of her coffee and looked for her waiter. He’d taken her credit card over fifteen minutes earlier and had not yet returned. Maybe he’s banging a waitress in the pantry, she thought. Let’s not be homophobic, he might be banging the handsome Guatemalan busboy. Maybe he’s buying Internet porn or remaindered celebrity biographies with my card; maybe he’s a bitter and lazy employee; or maybe he’s kind and decent and terrible at his job. Or maybe my bank has finally frozen my overextended accounts and the IRS is on the way to arrest me. She wondered if the United States would ever reestablish debtors’ prisons. If so, she would probably be sentenced to life without possibility of parole. But prison might not be so bad, she thought, and solitary confinement would be quiet. She was the wife of a big man and the mother of two teenage sons, and she hated their male cacophony. She’d enjoyed more solitude and meditative silence when she was a seven-year-old living in the endless pine forests of the Spokane Indian Reservation than she did now as a fifty-year-old woman trapped in this water-trapped city. She was a prepubescent monk! She was closer to God when her vocabulary was 75 percent smaller. But she’d give away all of her five-, four-, and three-syllable words if God would return to her. She missed God! And she missed her waiter. But maybe her waiter had never existed. Maybe he was a ghost. Maybe I’m delusional, she thought, and I don’t even realize it. Do crazy people know they’re crazy? Look at me, she thought, the paranoid schizophrenic at lunch. She laughed and wondered how she had become a lonely person who ate alone and laughed loudly in public. I’m a homeless crazy woman who happens to pay rent, she thought. Pretty soon I’ll wear shopping bags for dresses, and what would Donna Karan think of that? And where the hell is the waiter? She looked around the restaurant for any proof of his physical existence: a dirty apron, a ballpoint pen, the smell of pheromone-soaked cologne. But the waiter was gone, missing, absent, destroyed.

Good Food was busier than usual because the sun was finally shining in Seattle after 113 consecutive days of gray and rain. In the absence of UV rays, the white folks had turned penal-colony pale, and the black and brown people had faded to concentration-camp beige, but everybody was happy and hungry today. She’d eaten a chicken burrito and a teriyaki-chicken sandwich. She’d ordered only the burrito, but the sandwich had mistakenly arrived with it. Chicken this, chicken that, she’d chanted to herself as she ate both meals and enjoyed them, though the meat in each tasted like it had been sliced from the same bird. She’d never been one to complain about poor service. She searched the restaurant for her imaginary waiter, checked her watch, and wondered if she was going to get fired for being late yet again. She worked as a paralegal at Ruffatto, Runnette & Kurth, a medium-sized firm that focused on civil rights cases. She knew it was good and great work, and it should have inspired the best in her, but she was a distracted and incompetent employee, a paraparalegal. She always ran late and had been officially reprimanded four times in the past year for tardiness. Civil rights lawyers might have been reluctant to fire poor employees, but they certainly knew how to humiliate them. Her employee file was four inches thick. Ah, the height, width, and length of her inferiority! She was a parawife and a paramother and a parafriend. She checked her watch once more. She was going to be at least twenty-five minutes late. A new office record! She looked around for her waiter, wondering if she should bother to return to work or if she should buy a newspaper and start scanning the want ads. God, she thought, I am so shockingly average. What had happened to her? Didn’t she used to be special? Wasn’t she supposed to be somebody important? She couldn’t remember a time when she still had potential. She was middle-aged (if she lived a century!) and college-educated and made ten dollars an hour. What kind of life had she created for herself? She was a laboratory mouse lost in the capitalistic maze. She was an underpaid cow paying one tenth of the mortgage on a three-bedroom, two-bath abattoir. And where the hell was her waiter? She stood and stretched her neck and scanned the room like the world’s tallest prairie dog, hoping to get somebody’s attention, and looked at the front door as a small and dark man stepped inside, shouted in a foreign language, and detonated the bomb he had taped to his chest.

Outside the restaurant, three people were killed by the initial explosion, and two others died during ambulance rides to the hospital; another thirty-seven were injured. Inside the restaurant, twenty-three people were killed instantly, and fourteen more would die within the next twenty-four hours. Forty-one people survived the blast, but thirteen of them suffered serious injures that required long hospital stays and intensive rehabilitation. It was a highly effective and economical suicide bombing. The bomber had spent only $436 to make his bomb, so it had cost him a little over ten dollars a head.

He would eventually be identified as a Syrian American born in Seattle and raised in upper-class comfort by his Muslim father and Catholic mother. He’d graduated from Lakeside Upper School and Seattle University, and had been working toward his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Washington. He was engaged to another Ph.D. candidate, a French American woman who sang lead for a local folk band. The FBI and local police would investigate the suicide bomber for a year but would find no evidence that he’d engaged in or espoused terrorist activity or philosophy. They’d find no one who had ever heard the man express an anti-American sentiment. He was a registered and consistent voter who preferred moderate Democrats but whose best friend was a local Republican fund-raiser. Over the last five years, the bomber had made equal monetary contributions to Israeli and Palestinian charities. Exactly equal, right down to the penny. The investigators would conclude the bomber was either the most careful, eccentric, and invisible terrorist of all time, or an unsolvable mystery. The FBI had no ability to deal with the existential, and the American public was notoriously hungry for resolution, so the bomber was finally diagnosed as one more lone nut in the long American history of lonesome killers.

But the bomber hadn’t thought of himself as crazy or lonesome as he walked toward Good Food. He’d been listening to the voices in his head and following their orders. Content and proud of his commitment, he’d been smiling when he stepped into the restaurant. Right before he exploded the bomb, she’d seen his smile and thought for a moment that she knew him. Her waiter had disappeared, and her husband and sons were strangers to her, and she’d wondered if this dark-skinned man had come to rescue her. A ridiculous notion, to be sure, but she’d been smiling back at him when he detonated the bomb he had taped to his chest.

She’d been knocked unconscious by the explosion and woke crushed by the terrible weight of dead bodies. Pushing and crawling through anonymous body parts and building debris, she rescued herself. Bloody and bruised but not seriously hurt, not really hurt at all when compared to all of the other survivors, she emerged from the wreckage. People were screaming and dying all around her. They looked up at the skyscrapers and expected them to come crashing down. They expected airplanes to fall out of the sky and catch the city on fire. But this disaster was not that disaster; this explosion was small and real, while that other explosion was larger and distant and existed only on film and video and in memory. Here, in the aftermath, real sirens wailed. Real fire trucks and police cars arrived from all directions. News helicopters filled the sky. Rescuers pulled the bodies of the dead and living from the tangle of cement and metal and wood, from a building reduced to its basic elements. As if she were an innocent bystander, an objective journalist, she watched all of it happen and took mental notes. Six pairs of paramedics performed CPR on two men and four women. A horribly burned man, his skin peeling off his hands and arms in long, bloody strips, wailed for his wife. A little black girl and a little white boy hugged each other in the back of an ambulance. Wearing a soldier’s combat bucket hat, a homeless black man pushed his shopping cart in circles and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” On the ground around her were plates and forks and spoons and bowls and salt and paper shakers and chairs and tables and aprons and napkins and one baked potato half wrapped in aluminum foil. A white man in a tattered gray suit wept over the mutilated body of another white man wearing another tattered gray suit. Somewhere in the distance, she heard a radio playing the Latin Playboys. She didn’t know which song, but she recognized the harmonies. Across the street, in a sixth-floor window, a white woman leaned out and filmed it all with a video camera.

“Are you okay?” a man asked her.

She turned to look at him. He was a short forty-something Caucasian in a black leather coat. Handsome, with kind eyes and a stupid mustache, he was maybe twenty pounds overweight and would certainly carry thirty extra pounds in ten more years and forty in twenty and so on and so on. The inevitable obesity of the American male! But for now, he looked like the sexy bass player for a bad garage band. Maybe his belly was soft, but his art was rock-hard! In another place or time, she would have smiled at him, flirted, and possibly thought of him the next time she made love with her awful husband. Why was she thinking about sex at a time like this? Worse, why was she thinking about adulterous sex? The world, or at least a small part of the world, was coming to an end, and she was thinking about another man’s naked body. How perverse! Or was it a reflexive and natural reaction? With so much death and pain around her, wouldn’t it be good to throw this man down in the middle of the rubble and make love to him? Wouldn’t it be good to create life, to conceive it? After all, didn’t these self-martyring terrorists believe they would be rewarded with seventy-two virgins in heaven? Political posturing aside, didn’t a few thousand stupid men believe terrorism was another way to get laid? What would happen if the United States offered seventy-three virgins to each terrorist if he would abstain from violence? Instead of deploying an army of pissed-off U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan and Iraq, we could send a mercy team of patriotic virgins. Oh, God, what is happening to me, she thought, I’m losing my mind. She was in shock, of course, but she wondered if her brain had been more seriously damaged by the blast than she’d thought. Maybe her skull had been ripped open and her brain was exposed for all to see. Wouldn’t that be the most extreme form of public nudity? Wouldn’t that be the greatest shame? My brains are leaking out of my head, she thought, and I don’t even know it. She touched the top of her head and expected to feel soft tissue but felt only her strong and bony skull. She was going crazy, and she welcomed it. She wanted to be crazy.

“Were you in there?” the chubby bass player asked her and pointed at the destroyed restaurant. He was strangely calm, she thought. What kind of man can calmly point at an exploded building? Maybe he’d gone crazy along with her. Maybe everybody had gone crazy.

“I wasn’t in there,” she said. She lied, and it felt good to lie. “I saw it. I just saw it.”

“What happened?” he asked.

“A bomb guy ran into the restaurant,” she said. “With a bomb. He opened up his coat, and there was a bomb, and he screamed something. I don’t know what language it was. After he screamed, he blew up the bomb.”

“Were you in there?” he asked again. Of course, she thought, of course I was in there, you idiot! How could she know exactly what had happened if she hadn’t been inside to witness it? He knew something was wrong with her story but was too confused and frightened to figure it out.

“No, I wasn’t in there,” she said. “I was standing right here when it happened.”

“Are you okay?” he asked. He was close to her. She could smell the cigarettes on his breath. Or maybe everybody smelled of fire and smoke. Maybe everybody would always smell of fire and smoke.

“No,” she said. Given the opportunity to tell the truth, she kept lying. “I was just walking by.”

“I saw you coming out of there,” he said. He was interrogating her. How dare he question her at a time like this?

“I was looking for people,” she said. “I was trying to save them, but there’s nobody. There’s just pieces of people.”

She realized she was shouting to be heard over the din.

“Are you hurt?” he shouted back at her. What kind of conversation was this? What kind of madness were they sharing? “Are you hurt?” he asked. He kept asking her the same question. She had to stop him from asking it again.

“No, no,” she said. “Just get me out of here. I don’t want to be here. Help me get out of here.”

He took her hand and led her away from the crime scene. For ten blocks, he pushed through the advancing crowds of would-be rescuers, media saints, journalistic vultures, emergency workers, and the curiously morbid. Everywhere there were still and video cameras. She wondered how many thousands of photographs would be taken, how many films would be made. How many of those photographs and films might include her image? Had somebody captured the very moment when she emerged Jesus-like from her exploded tomb? After all, she thought, Jesus is still here because Jesus was once here and parts of Jesus are still floating in the air. Jesus’ DNA is part of the collective DNA. We’re all part of Jesus; we’re all Jesus in part. If you breathe deep during the storm, you can sometimes taste Jesus in a good hard rain. Maybe pieces of Jesus have burned into skin and bone and cement and wood. Maybe you can see the face of Jesus in every bloodstain. Maybe you can see Jesus in my bloody face, she thought, maybe I look like Jesus. Or maybe I’m not Jesus-like, maybe I’m Jesus himself. Maybe I’m a resurrection of the resurrected.

“Where do you live?” he asked. “Do you want me to take you home?”

“No,” she said. “Take me where you live.”

He hesitated. He didn’t understand what was happening. He wanted to be logical. He wanted to make it make sense. He lived at the end of the next block. It was close and safe, and therefore he decided it was logical to take this stranger, this strange woman, to his apartment. He wondered if they were going to have sex. He knew it happened. He’d read of strangers who fell into each other’s arms during earthquakes and tornadoes and hurricanes and wars. His uncle Ernie, a Vietnam War veteran, had rescued a young Vietnamese woman and her infant son in 1967, married her, adopted the kid, and brought them back to Seattle. They were still married, somewhat unhappily, but stayed together. Who can explain these things? Maybe I’m supposed to take this woman home, he thought, maybe we’re supposed to fall in love. Okay, maybe it’s not logical, maybe it’s nonsensical. But what makes any sense in a world where a man can run into a crowded restaurant and explode a bomb? He looked at this woman with her long black hair and brown skin and brown eyes, and wondered if she was Iraqi or Saudi Arabian or Afghani. Maybe she was a Muslim terrorist who’d exploded the restaurant and was using him to make her escape. God, he thought, I’ve watched too many action movies and too much FOX News, and worse, I’m a racist who has watched too many Stallone flicks and too much Bill O’Reilly.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. He was being honest. He wondered if his honesty was real.

“Just take me where you live,” she said again. “And then we’ll figure it out.”

He led her to his apartment building in Pioneer Square and three flights up to his place. He unlocked the door, followed her inside, closed the door behind them, and sat her down on his living room couch.

“Do you want something to drink?” he asked. How basic and inane! Why hadn’t he offered her something important, like world peace or spiritual redemption? He couldn’t have delivered either of those wonderful abstractions, but his offer would have been solid.

“I’d love some water,” she said.

“Water is important,” he said. “Whenever I’m depressed or lonely or whatever, I drink a glass of water, and I usually feel better.”

What the hell was he talking about? What kind of fool was he? He walked into the kitchen to get the water. He was happy to step away from her. He wondered if his charity was not really charity at all. Perhaps he’d helped her, a smallish act of human goodness, as a way of dealing with a larger fear. What if this one explosion was only the first? How many more terrorists were walking the streets of Seattle? How many more suicide bombers were building bombs? There was no way of knowing. That information would be forever unknowable. He would sooner know if God were real.

While he was gone, she stood and looked around the apartment. What a strange time for a self-guided tour! The front room was large, with exposed brick walls. Tasteful and anonymous two-sided prints hung suspended from the ceiling. Forming a sort of art curtain, they cut the room in half. Odd and beautiful, she thought. The bedroom was large enough for only an unmade bed and an end table stacked high with books. The bathroom was small as well, with a clean white sink, a toilet, and a shower. She’d never be able to live without a tub. But there were no guitars, no musical instruments of any kind. So maybe this chubby guy wasn’t a bass player. She walked into the small kitchen where he stood quietly and stared out the window.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“I can see the smoke,” he said.

She heard the sirens and the helicopters and the other human and machine noise. If anything, it was louder than it had been before. Nobody would sleep tonight.

“Here’s your water,” he said and handed her a full glass.

She drank it all in one swallow.

“You drink water like a man,” he said.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said and laughed. She laughed with him. They were flirting. How could they flirt at a time like this? She’s beautiful, he thought, and then he was ashamed of himself for noticing.

“I’m married,” she said.

“Do you want to call him?” he asked, relieved that she’d established her barriers.

“No,” she said. “I hate him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I have children, too,” she said. “Two sons.”

Oh, man, he thought, maybe she was covered with her children’s blood.

“They weren’t in the restaurant with you, were they?” he asked.

“No, they’re in school. And I told you, I wasn’t in the restaurant when it happened.”

“You’re lying. I don’t know why you’re lying. But you are lying.”

“If you think I’m a liar, then why did you bring me home?”

“I don’t know. I thought you needed help.”

“You thought you might help by getting me in bed, right?”

“No.”

“Now who’s lying?” she asked and walked back into the living room.

He followed her. “Listen,” he said. “I think you might have hit your head or something. You’re not talking right. I think you need to see a doctor.”

“Maybe I talked like this before the bomb,” she said. “Maybe I’ve always talked like this.”

“But what about your husband and kids? Won’t they be worried about you?”

“I told you, I hate my husband.”

“But you can’t hate him.”

“A wife can’t hate her husband? You can’t be that naive, can you?”

“No, I was married.”

She laughed. “You’re funny,” she said.

“I’m not trying to be funny,” he said.

“Funny people don’t have to try.”

“Listen, forget all that. What about your kids?”

“They hate me more than I hate them.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“You don’t think a mother can hate her kids?”

“No, it’s not that. Mothers aren’t supposed to hate their kids.”

“What kind of jerk are you?”

She threw her empty glass against the brick wall, and this second explosion was stronger for him than the first one. He was afraid of this woman and her possibilities.

“I don’t want you to be here anymore,” he said.

“I don’t want to be anywhere,” she said.

“No, really, I want you to leave now. If you don’t leave, I’ll call the cops.”

“Yeah, and I’m sure they’ll be here right away. I’m sure you’ll be really high on their priority list.”

“All right, I’ll throw you out myself.”

“Oh, aren’t you the tough guy? Just like my husband. All you want to do is fight. All right, I fight him, I’ll fight you.”

She balled her hands into fists, but she stuck her thumbs inside. If she landed a punch, she’d break a thumb. He knew she’d never thrown a real punch in her life. She looked pathetic.

“Why are you smiling?” she asked.

“You’re scared,” he said. “I’m scared, too. I haven’t been in a fight since third grade. And she beat me up. Her name was Susan. She broke my nose with her Snoopy lunch box.”

Yes, she thought, this man is funny and smiles like a fragile little boy, as if he’s slightly ashamed of his crooked teeth and crooked sense of humor. She dropped her fists and paced around the room. She felt an ineffable anxiety. She knew she needed to make plans, but she couldn’t figure out what to do first.

“Listen,” she said, “I’m sorry about being such a bitch.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Considering the circumstances, I think we’re probably doing all right.”

“Okay, okay, you’re a good man. We need more good men in the world. How about we start over? How about we introduce ourselves and pretend like we just met?”

How could she say something so banal? What was wrong with her?

“Look at yourself,” he said. “I don’t think it’s possible to start over.”

She was covered with blood and dirt. She was surprised. How had she forgotten that? And why was she worried about this stranger’s feelings? Again she wondered if she was crazy, if she was dreaming this whole day, if this man and his apartment were illusions.

“Hey,” he said, “I’ve got a clean robe in the bathroom and clean towels. Why don’t you take a shower, wash all that stuff away. How does that sound?”

Now he sounded trivial: Hey, the city is burning, but you’ll feel so much better if you floss your teeth.

“You just want to get me naked,” she said.

“You’re very pretty, and I will admit I thought briefly about sex. But mass murder and suicide bombs sort of shrink the wonder wand, you know?”

She laughed again. She sat on the couch and laughed. She covered her face with a pillow and laughed. She threw the pillow at him and laughed. “You’re so funny,” she said.

“Come on,” he said. “I was not trying to be funny. I was trying to tell you how I feel.”

“Maybe everything you feel is funny,” she said and wiped tears from her eyes.

“Maybe everything is funny to you,” he said. “But you’re crazy pussy, and I was married to crazy pussy before, and I have no real interest in getting near it again.”

“Crazy pussy!” she shouted and laughed. She rolled off the couch onto the floor and laughed. “Nobody has ever called me crazy pussy!”

She lay facedown on the floor and laughed into the carpet. She cried and wailed and kicked and punched. She convulsed. He rolled her onto her side and held her head while she seized. When it was over, she inhaled deeply and fell asleep. He knew about seizures. When she woke, she’d feel like a buffalo had kicked her in the skull. He sat on the couch and stared down at her. God, he thought, I hope she doesn’t die on my carpet. How would I explain that? He picked up the telephone and dialed 911, but all he heard was a busy signal. He tried again and again, ten, eleven, twelve times, but heard only that same awful busy signal each time. After looking up the general numbers for the police and fire departments in the Yellow Pages, he dialed them and heard more busy signals. He called individual precincts and firehouses, but nobody answered. He called hospitals and clinics and churches but couldn’t get past the computerized answering machines. God, he thought, what a fragile world I live in. One building explodes, and the whole system falls apart. He was more afraid than he’d been before, but then he dialed another number he knew by rote.

“Domino’s Pizza, how can I help you?”

How many times had this young man answered the telephone that way? Did he know how the tone of his voice completely changed the meaning of the words?

“Domino’s Pizza, how can I help you?”

If the pizza guy repeated the question enough times, it might become a prayer.

“Domino’s Pizza, how can I help you?”

“I can’t believe you’re open.”

“Well, it’s just me. Everybody else left. I stayed. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“You’re not really going to deliver pizzas, are you?”

“I don’t know. You’re the first person to call since it happened.”

“Isn’t your family worried about you?”

“They know I’m okay. My dad told me to stay here and lock the door. He said I’d be safer here than trying to get home by myself.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know. I’m scared. Do you think this is the start of World War Three?”

The pizza boy sounded like he was eighteen or nineteen years old. How could he know how many teenagers around the world had already survived bombings, and lived with the daily threat of more bombings, and still found courage enough to dance, sing, curse, and make love in the tall grass beside this or that river?

“Are you a cook or a driver?”

“I’m both.”

“Well, kid, I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you start making pizzas? Make as many as you can and stack them high. A whole bunch of hungry people will be wandering the streets. Put a sign in the window that says, ‘Free Pizza for Rescue Workers!’ and you’ll be a hero.”

“I don’t think the corporate office will like that.”

“Forget the corporate office.”

Surely this young man was incapable of socialistic rebellion, no matter how smart or self-contained.

“What did you say?” the pizza boy asked.

“The city’s on fire. Make the pizzas. Forget the corporate office.”

The young man thought about it.

“Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “Forget the corporate office.”

“I can’t hear you.”

“Forget the corporate office.”

“What did you say?”

“Forget the corporate office.”

“That sounds good, but your language, it’s not acceptable.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“‘Forget’ is not a powerful verb.”

“I don’t know about that, sir. I feel pretty bad when somebody forgets about me.”

“You’re right. That’s a fairly wise thing to say. But there is a more powerful verb, a more powerful F-word.”

“Oh, sir,” he said, “I can’t say that word. That’s cursing. And I’m a Christian.”

He was a Christian working for an international conglomerate and worried about foul language?

“All right, then, pizza man, you have your mission. Forget the other F-word and forget the corporate office. Make those free pizzas.”

“Yes, sir.”

He hung up the phone, laughed at the ceiling, then looked down at the crazy woman lying on the floor. She stared back at him.

“What did you just do?” she asked.

“I think I started a pepperoni and double-cheese revolution,” he said.

She laughed and winced. “Oh, man,” she said. “My head hurts.”

“You had a seizure,” he said.

“I know. I was sort of having it and watching me have it at the same time.”

For years, she’d been living a binary life as participant and eyewitness. She’d been so bored and unhappy, and so objective about her boredom and unhappiness, that she’d been conducting social experiments on her family. Last July, she’d served dinner five minutes later than usual, an innocuous change in the family ceremony. But the next evening, she’d served dinner ten minutes later than usual, and then fifteen minutes later than usual the night after that, and so on and so on. By the end of the month, she was serving the meat and potatoes as the eleven o’clock SportsCenter was beginning. Her husband and sons had never once uttered a comment or complaint about the gradual and profound change in dinnertime. How could they be so compliant and disinterested? How could they be so dependent on her and so unaware of her blatant manipulations? As they’d eaten and cursed at the football and hockey highlights, she’d studied the man and two boys, her personal space aliens, and couldn’t believe all three of them had spent significant time in her womb.

Now she lay on the floor of a stranger’s apartment, ambivalent about her life. Maybe she could lie on that floor forever. Maybe she could ossify or fossilize. Maybe she could change into a bizarre coffee table. As a piece of furniture, she might feel valued and useful. She closed her eyes and wondered if the other furniture would come to accept and love her.

“Wake up!” he shouted at her.

“I’m very tired,” she said.

“I bet you have a concussion or something,” he said. “We should get you to the doctor. But the thing is, I’m going to have to take you there. The phones aren’t working. I can order a pizza, but I can’t order an ambulance.”

“I don’t think I’d be able to walk very far. Not for a while. I need to rest first.”

“Okay, but if you seize again, I’m going to pick you up and carry you there, okay? It’s about a mile up to Harborview. I’ll drag you there if I have to.”

“I don’t think I’m going to seize again.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s not going to happen again.”

“You’re the one lying on the floor. I don’t think that says much for your psychic ability.”

“Have you always been funny?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. His sense of humor had destroyed his marriage. With each joke, he’d punched a hole in his ex-wife’s heart. But he couldn’t help it. His entire family was hilarious and inappropriate. During his wedding, as his soon-to-be wife walked up the aisle toward him, his little brother had loudly told an AIDS joke. How grotesque was that? If his wife had been smarter and less in love, she would have turned around and fled the church. But she’d believed her soon-to-be husband was better than his homophobic and racist and wildly stupid brother, and when her husband proved to be kinder and more progressive but just as wildly stupid, she’d felt cheated.

On the night his wife had signed their divorce papers, she called him up and cursed him. She was drunk and lonely and enraged.

“All right, Mr. Funny!” she had yelled. “Let’s see how long you can go without telling a joke! How long! How long, Mr. Funny?”

“About seven seconds,” he’d said after seven seconds of silence.

She’d cried and cursed him again and hung up the phone. He’d sat alone in the dark and wondered how he could so easily hurt a woman he loved. Why was it more necessary for him to tell a joke than to acknowledge her pain?

And now, two years after his divorce, he stared down at the strange woman lying on his floor and wondered if she’d been delivered to him as punishment for his sins. Maybe God hated jokesters. Or maybe she was a test. Maybe he could prove his worth by helping her, by saving her. Maybe God was giving him a chance to be serious and reverential.

“My ex-wife used to call me Mr. Funny,” he said.

“That’s a cute name,” she said.

“It wasn’t meant as a compliment.”

“All right, Mr. Funny, let me rest here for a little while, and then you can take me to the hospital.”

“It’s a deal. But I’m not going to let you sleep. You’re going to stay awake. So you better start talking.”

“What should I talk about?”

“Tell me about your husband and kids.”

“I hate them.”

“You already told me that. Tell me why you hate them.”

She didn’t talk for a few moments. He nudged her with his foot. “Talk,” he said.

“Where were you on September eleventh?” she asked.

“On September eleventh, when I was seventeen, I lost my virginity to a girl named Atlanta.”

“Always the wise guy. You know what day I’m talking about.”

“On that September eleventh, I was working.”

“What do you do?”

“I design computer games.”

“If you design computer games, why don’t you have a computer in your apartment?”

“What are you, a detective?”

“I’m good with details.”

“It’s a boundary thing. I want my work life and my home life to be separate.”

“How’s that going for you?”

“I’m never here.”

“That must be fun.”

“It was until the eleventh. I was working on the final stages of a terrorist game. A first-person shooter.”

“What’s a first-person shooter?”

“You see through the eyes of the gunman.”

“You get to shoot terrorists? Must have been a big seller.”

“In our game, you play a terrorist who shoots civilians. You can attack a shopping mall, an Ivy League college, or the World Trade Center.”

“Oh, God, that’s disgusting.”

“We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop and manufacture it. Even before the eleventh, we figured that kind of game would be controversial. We figured it would get tons of press, and every dumb-ass rebel teenager would have to own it. We were looking forward to the censorship and the lawsuits. We were manufacturing units based on how much negative publicity we estimated we’d receive.”

“How could you live with yourself?”

“We redesigned the game after the eleventh. Now you play a cop who hunts terrorists in a shopping mall or a college. We dropped the World Trade Center completely.”

“And that’s supposed to make it all better?”

“We’ve presold ten million copies. I’m going to be very rich.”

“It’s blood money.”

“All money is blood money.”

“Is that what you tell yourself so you can sleep at night?”

“For a few days after the eleventh, I thought about suiciding. I thought about going up to the top of the Space Needle and jumping off. I figured it would be appropriate for me to die that way.”

“There’s a bunch of people who would have helped you jump.”

“Yeah, but it was all about self-pity. I mean, I’m alive, right? Think about how many people died in the World Trade Center. It took Giuliani how many hours to read all the names?”

“There were about twenty-five hundred of them.”

“Yeah, twenty-five hundred innocent people dead, and me, a living, breathing coward.”

“A millionaire coward,” she said.

On September 11, she’d been collating files in the law firm’s library when the first plane hit the first tower. When the second plane hit the second tower, she’d been watching it on the conference room television along with the entire firm, forty-five white-collar professionals who watched with equal parts revulsion and excitement. She remembered how, when the first tower collapsed, she’d closed her eyes and listened to her colleagues’ anguished moans and wondered why they sounded so erotic. We’re so used to sex on TV that everything on TV becomes sexy, she thought. Their law offices were on the sixtieth floor of the Columbia Center. From the conference room windows, all of the lawyers and staff had at one point or another looked south and watched airplanes arrive and depart from Boeing Airfield and Sea-Tac Airport. After the tower collapsed, she’d looked out the window after somebody screamed the fearsome question they’d all been asking themselves—What if they hit us? — and she’d almost seen a passenger jet cutting through the sky. Everybody else in the conference room must have seen their own illusory jets, because they’d all panicked as a group and run screaming out of the room, down sixty flights of stairs and onto the streets below. She’d stayed in the conference room. She’d walked to the window and waited for her airplane to come. She’d wondered if she would be able to see the pilot’s face, and perhaps recognize him, before he destroyed her. And she’d wondered, as she waited to die, if some other unhappy woman or man had stood in a World Trade Center window that morning and committed suicide by inertia.

“You know,” she said, “I don’t think everybody who died in the towers was innocent.”

“Who are you?” he asked. “Osama’s press agent?”

“Those towers were filled with bankers and stockbrokers and lawyers. How honest do you think they were?”

“They didn’t deserve to die.”

“Think about it. Maybe they did deserve to die. Open your mind.”

“It’s tough to be open-minded about this stuff.”

“But you’ve got to be. You can let any event have one meaning, right? Your games don’t have one meaning, do they?”

“No.”

“All right, then, maybe September eleventh means things nobody has thought of yet.”

“You’ve thought of other meanings, right?”

“Yes, I have. So listen to this. Let’s say twelve hundred men died that day. How many of those guys were cheating on their wives? A few hundred, probably. How many of them were beating their kids? One hundred more, right? Don’t you think one of those bastards was raping his kids? Don’t you think, somewhere in the towers, there was an evil bastard who sneaked into his daughter’s bedroom at night and raped her in the ass?”

He couldn’t believe she was doing this math, this moral addition and subtraction, this terrible algebra. He wondered if God would kill thousands of good people in order to destroy one monster. He wondered if he was a monster, making the games he made and earning the money he earned. Ha, ha, he thought, but I’m Mr. Funny. I’m the highlight of every party. I’m the best dinner guest in the history of the world. I can make any woman fall in love with me in under five minutes and alienate her five minutes later.

“I’m not some wimpy liberal or anything,” he said. “I believe in capital punishment. I believe in the necessity of war. But I don’t think anybody deserves to die.”

“You’re contradicting yourself.”

“Fine, then I’m a contradiction, but at least I admit that. You’re talking about these things like you know more than the rest of us. Like you’re absolutely right.”

“Somebody has to be right,” she said and tried to sit up but could only fall back and close her eyes against the nausea.

“Are you okay?” he asked, happy she was quiet for a moment. How could she say the things she was saying? Wasn’t she afraid of God?

“I’m just dizzy,” she said. “If I keep my eyes open, I’m going to vomit.”

“You’ve got a concussion, I told you. I’m sure of it. We’ve got to get you to the hospital.”

“No, you wanted to talk, and we’re going to talk. I’m going to tell you everything, and you’re going to listen, and then you’re going to take me to the hospital.”

“I don’t want to hear the things you’re saying.”

“That’s the problem. Nobody wants to hear these things, but I’m thinking them, and I have to say them.”

He stood and walked around the room. He wondered if he was supposed to ignore this woman. Maybe that was the lesson he was supposed to learn. Words were dangerous. His nouns and verbs had destroyed his marriage and created a game that mocked the dead. Her story seemed more potentially destructive than any bomb or game he could create or imagine.

“Are you going to listen to me?” she asked.

“Talk,” he said.

“All right, all right,” she said. “Didn’t you get sick of all the news about the Trade Center? Didn’t you get exhausted by all the stories and TV shows and sad faces and politicians and memorials and books? It was awful and obscene, all of it, it was grief porn.”

“I got so tired of it, I picked up my TV, carried it down the stairs, and threw it in the Dumpster.”

“That’s exactly what you should have done. I wished I could do it. But my husband and my sons — they’re twins, they’re both sixteen — watched that garbage every day. My husband put U.S. flags in every window of our house. What kind of Indians put twenty-two flags in their windows?”

Her husband had been a champion powwow fancydancer when she’d met him, a skinny, beautiful, feminine boy who moved in bright-feathered circles, but he’d become a tired grunting old man. And a patriot! He’d already talked the twins into joining the marines when they graduated from high school.

“Hey, Ma,” they’d said in their dual grating voices. “The marines will pay for college. Isn’t that great?”

Jesus, she was raising two wanna-be marines. How could any Indian put on a U.S. military uniform and not die of toxic irony? Hell, she hadn’t let her boys play with toy guns when they were little, and now her husband took them on three hunting trips a year. She lived in a house with deer antlers mounted on the walls. Antlers and flags! Antlers and flags! Antlers and flags! Men have walked on the moon and written Hamlet and painted the Sistine Chapel and played the piano like Glenn Gould, she thought, and other men still have the need to hang antlers and flags on their walls. She wondered why anybody was surprised when men crashed jets into buildings.

“Nobody is innocent, right?” she said. “Isn’t that what all of the holy books say? We’re all sinners? But after the Trade Center, it was all about the innocent victims, all the innocent victims, and I kept thinking — I knew one of those guys in the towers was raping his daughter. Raping her. Maybe he was raping his son, too. And beating his wife. I think about that morning, and I wonder if the bastard was smiling when he hopped on a train for work. I think about his daughter and son sitting in some generic and heartless suburban classroom, just sad and broken and dying inside. And his wife sitting at home dying inside. That bastard gets off his train and walks up to his office on the hundred and seventh floor or something, and everybody loves him there. He’s a hero at work. And Mr. Hero is sitting at his desk, smiling and being heroic, when that airplane flies straight into his office. Flies right through the window and obliterates him, completely disappears him. And the news travels, right? The wife turns on the television and sees the towers burning, and the teachers wheel televisions into the classrooms, and the son and daughter watch the towers burning. The wife and kids count the floors, right? They count all the way up to the hundred and seventh floor, and they see it burning, and they’re happy, right? They’re hopeful, right? Aren’t they hopeful? Then the first tower comes down. Both towers come down. And the wife is jumping up and down at home. She’s celebrating. But the kids have to stay calm, because they’re in public, you know, but inside they’re jumping up and down like their mom. They run home, and all three of them sit in the living room together and watch the news, and they wait. Yeah, they wait for him to come home. The news is talking about the survivors, right? About the people who made it out. And the wife and kids are praying to God he died. That he burned to death or jumped out a window or was running down the stairs when the tower fell. They sit in the living room for three days, waiting for him to come home, and then they wait for three more days, waiting for him to come home, and on the seventh day, they realize he isn’t coming home. He’s dead and they’re happy. The monster is gone and they’re celebrating. They dance around the living room and sing songs and dance dances and they’re happy. Don’t you think all of this is possible? Don’t you think there was at least one man in the towers who deserved to die? Don’t you think there’s a wife and kids who are happy he died? Don’t you think there’s some daughter walking around who whispers Osama’s name with tenderness and affection? Don’t you think there’s a wife out there who thanks God or Allah or the devil for Osama’s rage?”

She wept. He sat on the floor beside her and held her head in his lap. He stroked her hair until she calmed down.

“We’re going to go now,” he said. “I’m going to take you to the hospital, okay?”

“Wait, wait,” she said. “There’s more.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” he said. “I don’t want to hear these things. I don’t want to think about them. I don’t want to remember them.”

“Please,” she whispered. “Please listen to me.”

She was desperate. She needed him. He wanted to be needed. He nodded.

“The thing is,” she said, “the biggest thing is, ever since the Trade Center fell down, I’ve been hoping it would happen to me. I kept hoping I’d be at work or in some shopping mall or theater when it blew up. So when that bomber ran inside the restaurant and shouted at us, I was happy. I knew God had answered my prayers. I knew I was going to survive. I was going to live, and I was going to crawl out of the ruins, and I was going to walk away from my life. I knew they’d never find me and would figure I was dead. They’d mark me down as dead, but I’d be alive. I’d be so alive, and I’d walk away. I’d walk away and start a new life, a better life. I was going to escape.”

How could anyone be so unhappy? How could anybody survive so much pain and loneliness? But these questions were inadequate, he knew, and he was inadequate. She needed him to be a good man, and he had never been that, not once in his life. He pushed her away and ran for the bathroom. But he was not fast enough and vomited on the living room carpet.

“It’s awful,” he said. “It’s so awful.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I am, I am.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Take me to the hospital. Make sure I’m safe, and you never have to see me again. Promise you’ll take me to the hospital. Promise me I’ll be safe.”

Stronger than he knew, he picked her up like a child and carried her out the door and down three flights of stairs. Curled in his arms, she cried and prayed. Through the crowded and hectic streets, he carried her. All around them, men and women and children stared up into the skies and waited for death to swoop down and claim them. He looked at those strangers and knew each of them lived with terrible secrets. He knew that man cheated on his wife with her sister and that woman pinched her Alzheimered mother’s arms until they bled. And that teenage boy set dogs on fire and that pretty teenage girl once knocked down a fat ugly girl and spit in her mouth. And he knew that father had two sons, one who couldn’t read and one who wore dresses, and he made them punch each other because they were stupid and weak. And there was a white grandmother who hated her Mexican grandchildren and a priest who burned himself with cigarettes whenever he dreamed about sex with little boys. And that man had abandoned his wife and children and didn’t know they were now living in a car, and that woman hadn’t talked to her father in fifteen years and didn’t know he was now dying of prostate cancer. And none of these people, not one of them, had loved any of the others well enough. Failures, he thought, we’re all failures. Carrying the woman, he walked among these sinners, the obese and the vain, the intolerant and the selfish, the liars and thieves, the wasteful and the avaricious. And wasn’t he the greatest sinner? Wasn’t he more dangerous to the people who loved him than any terrorist could ever be? Wasn’t he the man who failed the woman who’d loved him most? Didn’t he explode her life and burn her to the ground? Right now, somewhere in the world, wasn’t she still grieving the death of their marriage and the death of some large part of her? Forgive me, God, oh, forgive me, he thought as he carried this other exploded woman. If he could save her, he hoped he might be saved. But she wanted to escape. She pushed and pulled against his grip and he set her down. Everything smelled of smoke and fire. She kissed him hard and touched his face. He wanted to talk, to say the words that would free her. But he was silent and she was silent. And wasn’t silence more ambiguous and terrifying than anything else? Loose-limbed, he trembled. He wanted to love her, and he wanted his love to be bittersweet and irrepressible. He wanted his love to be different than everybody else’s. He wanted his love to be the only true image of God. He wanted his love to be the tyrant that saved the world no matter if the world desired to be saved. He wanted his love to be the wine and bread, and the blood and flesh. He reached for her, a dangerous stranger in a city of dangerous strangers, but she turned away from him and walked unsteadily through the crowd. How many loveless people walk among the barely loved? She looked back once, and he thought to chase after her, but she shook her head, and again walked away from him. And he watched her until he couldn’t see her anymore.