II
Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.”

(A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.”)

Virgil, The Aeneid (trans. Robert Fagles, 2004)

16

September, 2001

Walking to Stuy, Marwa thought it was a bright and sunny morning, not a dark and stormy night. It was still summer, ten days till the autumnal equinox, but it was not really a summer morning. There was no gauze of humidity, and if it were ten degrees cooler, it would have to be October. There was that nervous quickening about everything, as if light bounced more keenly off surfaces and sound more sharply knifed the air. Marwa’s taut nerves were caused not only by climate but moreso by these first days of senioritis (this is it, the last, highest, most competitive hurdle before college acceptance) which Marcus called “acute inflammation of the Alpha gland.” Marwa knew that at other high schools nationwide senioritis meant slacking off, letting go, it was all over but the shouting, but at Stuy, that was blasphemy.

Marwa shifted her heavy backpack on her shoulder and stretched her neck. The incessant traffic, as she walked north on West Street nearing Murray, reminded her of the waves at that beach Marcus had taken her to (moving, moving, faster, slower, white-capped, the birds, gulls, terns, that black granite waving memorial wall, the huge flag waving, snapping in the wind, the sculptor drowning in the sand tentacles of his own octopus imagination where the real tide overcame the real shore). A taxi’s sudden horn staggered Marwa out of her reverie, and she froze. Then she laughed and heaved the backpack up higher on her shoulder, thinking, you can never get used to New York , you can never slack off, let go, because it was always about the shouting. Marcus said, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.”

So she admitted Marcus was on her mind that perfect September morning. And if Marcus, then Prix, the thought of whom immediately brought a blush to her face and genital engorgement. That was about as ugly a way as Marwa could say it to herself. It was true, she had learned, not only that satisfaction did not eliminate desire, but also (thank you, Mr. Haddam, for intruding on the mental masturbation and correcting her earlier breakdown in parallel structure), but also that it had precisely the opposite effect. It was inversely proportional. Every footstep that took her closer to her first class at 7:38 a.m. repeated: Again, I want, Him again. There was granite glitter in the cement of the sidewalk, and it blinded her in the same rhythm:Yes, again, Prix, again, And again.

Marwa replaced the heroin addiction of desire with some methadone of guilt; she knew she had disappointed Prix in some way more profound than he had pleased her. He had wanted something from her, seen something in her, that she did not know how to give even if she’d had any idea what it might be. Step by step to school, Marwa admitted that if she had known what this mysterious element were, she might not have been willing to give it in exchange for Prix reluctantly but ultimately giving her what she wanted from him. How could she? It wasn’t fair. You would have to know what you were giving up, wouldn’t you, to make a choice? Which was why she felt guilty when she thought of Prix. Which was pretty much all the time. It felt better to feel confused and hot and guilty about Prix (which approximated the addictive rush of the sight, smell & touch of him) than not to have Prix at all.

It was also competitive, she further admitted. She felt that what Prix had wanted from her was something more, better, than what she had gained from him. It was quantitatively (more) and qualitatively (better) than the knowledge/experience he had given her. So it wasn’t fair on his part! What was it? Marwa knew that Prix would never be able to put it into words. She just saw the disappointment in his glorious eyes. The expression on his face was more than a memory. She could see it in Hamlet’s inescapable mind’s eye anytime, and when she was not even looking, Prix’s face would appear, awake or in dreams, out of context, independent of invocation, a sad, forsaken ghost.

Marwa blinked and scolded herself to wake up, she was a block away from Stuy, and she still had to get the elevator to the 10th floor Art room for her first class. She hefted her heavy backpack, mentally checking its contents, hoping the dual assignment for Art and Math carefully perched in a cardboard box on top of her books had not been bent out of shape. Last night she had agonized folding the thick white paper into a recognizable curve. Her art and math teachers, a married couple, had taken a summer course in California , Santa Cruz , in ‘computational origami’. Judy and Marcus had conference-IM’d over the homework last night: Judy all atwitter over origami sekkei, and Marcus even more immersed in his native, mathematical, language. Both had annoyed to Marwa because she was stressing to get at her Latin assignment, the reading in ICELAND ’S BELL (the first novel for AP English), and all the Chicago origin stuff for her ongoing Social Studies project. Marwa’s stomach reclenched at the memory. But at least she had slept well for 5 hours before getting up at 6:15 . She didn’t remember dreaming. Retasting the sweet, hot coffee she had gulped down as breakfast, Marwa remembered noticing that weird book her mother was reading about psychics helping archeologists locate the tomb of Alexander the Great in Alexandria. The spine-broken paperback was splayed open to where a psychic said, “I know by the feel…the older the colder.”

This was not the full extent of Ummee’s recent excursions into what Marwa called Wogga-wogga Land — what neural torque had frisbeed that baby name for Mommy into her Stuyvesant senior’s consciousness? — no, her mother had also taken to daily taping Banana’s favorite tv show and engaging in earnest discussions about the psychic’s (alleged) communications with the Other Side which both middle-aged women would abruptly break off in Marwa’s presence as if she could sap the (alleged) psychic power merely by narrowing her eyes at their superstition.

At last, Marwa was in the high school’s elevator rising to the 10th floor. As she emerged, she faced a glass display case wall already filled with new sketches for sculptures of the “first non-Native American to settle Eschikagou…a Haitian who ran a trading and farming business near where Michigan Avenue crosses the Chicago River today…He married a Potawatomi Indian, Catherine…” Catherine? Marwa shook her head in amazement, wondering what ‘Eschikagou’ meant in Potawatomi. She shifted her shoulder again under the backpack also containing her Social Studies notes about the Right Reverend Henry Benjamin Whipple (husband of Rose Cleveland’s lover, Evangeline) who established the first Episcopal Church in Chicago in 1856. The Potawatomi called him Straight Tongue.

Prix’s tongue was not straight; it had ruched edges and a kind of crack down its center. Still looking through her mind’s I, Marwa also saw one of the school posters — of a bolt of lightning – that her new math teacher had put up on his back bulletin board with its loud caption:

BENOIT B. MANDELBROT – ‘CLOUDS ARE NOT SPHERES, MOUNTAINS ARE NOT CONES, COASTLINES ARE NOT CIRCLES, AND BARK IS NOT SMOOTH, NOR DOES LIGHTNING TRAVEL IN A STRAIGHT LINE.’

A final burst of nervous energy propelled Marwa into her assigned place at one of the tables in Art class seconds before the bell rang at 7:38 . Vivian Cheng was removing her homework from a big shopping bag. It was a tower-like structure with arches, two feet high. Marwa’s heart sank. It was a near-replica of the model photo they’d been given.

“How did you do that?” Marwa whispered as the teacher was already starting class.

Vivian shrugged. “It’s nothing creative, I just copied it.”

The red-headed Art teacher glanced at Vivian and Marwa to silence them. She was holding up an enlarged photograph of a woman with a glass jar filled with flies. The teacher walked around the classroom, showing everyone that there were holes punched in the jar’s lid so the flies could breathe but not escape.

“This is a psych researcher at Harvard,” (audible senior moans), “who demonstrates with these flies-in-a-bottle the human tendency to being so committed to seeing things a certain way that we can no longer imagine other possibilities,” the teacher said “In this study, when the lid is removed, the flies are free to fly away, but they don’t.”

“Excuse me, Ms. Siegel?” a skeptic said. “Where was that study published? The Enquirer?”

“Excuse me,” Ms. Siegel replied, “The flies have lived so long in the jar that they know no other way to live. They’ve committed themselves to entrapment.”

“Flies commit?”

“If flies don’t fly, what d’you call ‘em?”

“Y’know what Picasso said when he climbed out of the caves at Lascaux –”

“So now we know what you did on your summer vacation –”

“Humanity didn’t commit to living in caves is his point –” a defender attempted.

“Thank you, but it is not. What is, is what Picasso said, ‘We have invented nothing.’”

“What’s the point of that?”

“I thought we were folding paper.”

“Ms. Siegel, did you see Vivian’s origami?” Judy said.

“May I point out that it’s rude to point?”

“It’s only a point in our limited dimensions.”

“The point is,” the art teacher tried again but was also interrupted –

– “Artists fly away,” a student said impatiently to approving groans.

Art ended at 8:20 , and Marwa took the stairs with Judy and Vivian (homework in hand) down to Math where Marcus stood waiting by the door before the bell rang at 8:25 . He took Vivian’s tower origami and compared it favorably with his own which was less smoothly curved but altogether surprising in novelty. Marwa avoided the entire competition by going to her seat and staring at the banner the math teacher had added — since yesterday — over the front board. Acknowledging with relief that some of her teachers were at least as Type A as their students, Marwa silently read:

THERE IS NO PERMANENT PLACE IN THE WORLD FOR UGLY MATHEMATICS. G.H. HARDY

“How about for ugly origami?” Marwa asked Mr. Ralph, who was concentrating on taking attendance. Then he saw she was looking at the banner and said, “It doesn’t take all kinds, Ms. Al-Hal, there just are all kinds.”

Mr. Ralph was younger than Mr. Spin, but not by much. His hair was gray, though, not white, and it had never found a way to be cut that freed it from being a distraction to his students. It was curly and straight, cowlicked and flat, and altogether appeared to demonstrate a variety of mathematical possibilities in topology. He was, however, the best math teacher at Stuy despite his assertion that he could tell a student’s grade “by eyeball.” He began the second period Math class by wandering about the room “eyeballing” the origami homework, and he stopped at Marcus’s desk to pick up the concentric domes.

“So whadja think?” Mr. Ralph asked Marcus.

“Paper doesn’t stretch,” Marcus said.

“It tears — and cuts,” Biren added, holding up theatrically band-aided fingers.

“You’ll be a comedian before you’re a mathematician,” Mr. Ralph observed, still fixed on Marcus’s origami and waiting for the senior’s real answer.

“I cheated,” Marcus said. “I researched it — it’s all about the pi condition — if you have a point surrounded by four creases and you want it to fold flat, then opposite angles around the vertex must add up to180 degrees, pi radians.”

Mr. Ralph rotated the origami. “You applied that?”

Marcus laughed. “I don’t know what the hell I did. It was mystical. Like the paper told me how to fold it curvy.”

“We know almost nothing about curved creases,” Mr. Ralph said.

“Oh, please, say that again!” Biren called out.

Mr. Ralph turned on Marwa. “What did you think?”

“Well, aside from Biren being a pig, and therefore totally non-halal, I thought of protein-folding, which isn’t always pretty,” Marwa pointed again to the headline banner tacked at the front of the room.

Vivian said, “It’s interesting how math manifests in the paper.”

“Everything is math,” Mr. Ralph said. “Everything attests to the essential unity of mathematics. For all the increasing varieties of maths, it’s e pluribus unum all the time.”

Biren said, “Which came first, the unum or the pluribus?”

Then they were startled by the BANG of a truck backfiring nearby. They had not heard any engine roar overhead. It was 8:46:26 A.M.

The lights flickered, then steadied; the room jarred. Biren’s origami, close to the edge of his desk, fell slowly to the floor.

“Will you look at that?” Biren said, but it wasn’t clear what he referred to, the flickering lights, the fluttering origami, or the view out the room’s southern-facing window, where the class quickly massed along with their teacher. They were looking at the north face of the North Tower .

“What happened?”

“Some idiot flew into the WTC.”

A huge orange fireball erupted 200 feet out of a black gash.

“Holy shit.”

“What floor? My mother’s on 68.”

At which point, what had hit the giant tower hit them. Mr. Ralph sent them back to their seats and lowered the blinds. They obeyed and watched the teacher go to the door; he spoke to someone outside and nodded, then turned to the class.

“Let’s get those desks as far away from the windows as possible,” he said and then walked to the windows to close them behind the blinds. He shook his head at the students who went to help him, and they focused on moving the desks instead. Several seniors had taken out their cell phones and were trying to make calls unsuccessfully. Then the requests began to go to the phone bank in the lobby.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Mr. Ralph said. “If you’ve got third free, go then. Let’s just wait for the bell or information.”

In the ensuing silence, there were many sounds: screaming sirens, more sirens than anywhere in the world, all converging toward one point; unintelligible voices in the hallway; in their classroom, intelligible ones clearly cursing cellphones; the rumbling and bark of further explosions five blocks away –

– and then, they did hear a second plane — why hadn’t they heard the roar of the first one? — it was as if the class leaned in one body toward the blinded windows, first curious, then recoiling in one sway away from the sound that Dopplered further south –

“Omygod,” a girl’s voice caught, “not the Statue of Liberty –”

– then the roar turned back north toward them, and they shrank together in their closely massed seats, stiffened, Mr. Ralph standing between them and the windows –

– 9:02:54 AM — there was no lightning, only a crack of thunder so loud everyone bowed heads and covered ears, but even in the explosive roar, a long, low, human sound vibrated through pressed lips, more moan than whimper.

The lights shuddered, the building shook. When eyes opened again, they saw Mr. Ralph leaning behind his desk, his palms pressed flat on its surface, his arms stiffly holding himself up. Everyone looked at the closed, blinded windows; it was hot in the room. Mr. Ralph shook his head at them again, keeping them seated. “The South Tower , I guess.”

Moments later, the Principal’s voice came over the PA in the front of the room.

“Please remain calm and stay in the building,” the Principal said. “You need to understand at this moment there are no trains and no buses in Lower Manhattan . So leaving the building, you can’t go home. There’s nowhere to go, and I think it’s dangerous in the street because of falling debris. Stay in the building. Stay away from the windows on the south side of the building. Those are the windows near the Statue of Liberty. We have security in the building, and federal agents have arrived. If anyone asks for ID, please, just present your ID or your program card so we know you belong in the building. Whatever you do, stay calm. Try to go to class. The bell ending second period will ring normally at 9:07 , and you should go to your third period class. If you stay in the hallways we just don’t have enough room for walking. If you have a free period and you want to sit quietly, you’re welcome to come to the theater. I will try to come on the PA before 10:30 to give you more information. Thank you.”

No one noticed five minutes pass. The automatic bell sounded, and automatically the students filed out of the room. Judy and Marwa held hands momentarily, but Marwa went to Latin with Vivian, and Marcus also went to his third period class. There was some crying in the halls, but that was the artificial sound of freshman or sophomore girls imitating an expected emotion, and some lower-pitched, nervous laughter from younger boys or their bravado cursing.

Marwa and Vivian entered the Latin classroom. Their teacher welcomed them at the door. Ms. Margolis had sounded like the witch in Hansel & Gretel to Marwa three years earlier, but now her fluent Latin meant ancient, eternal Time, and above the chalkboard familiar postered phrases translated soothingly.

Quot homines, tot senteniae. (There are as many opinions as there are men.)

Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. (I am a man: nothing human is alien to me.)

And Marwa’s favorite: Proximus sum egomet mihi. (I am closest to myself.)

Marwa realized she must have been elsewhere because she returned only then in a frantic rush, calling herself to action: Joey, I have to get Joey!

“Ms. Margolis,” Marwa turned, unable to move to her seat. “I have to get to my little brother. He’s across the street at 234, at Independence .”

“So’s mine,” Vivian said, and Marwa saw the grim, sword-wielding look on her face.

“I understand,” Ms. Margolis said. “Sit down, ladies. Now.”

They did. More students entered the room; many were missing. At her desk, Ms. Margolis held up their text, the Terence play THE WOMAN OF ANDROS.

“Let’s skip the rest of the Prologue today and start with Act I,” she directed.

One moment did not connect to the next, as in a dream. A classmate read and stumbled with his translation. Ms. Margolis supplemented, “‘Of surpassing beauty and in the bloom of youth.” She called on Vivian to continue.

Vivian’s voice sounded as sharp as her championship saber. “Percussit ilico animum. Attat! hoc illud est,” she translated, “This hit me at once. Oh no! This is it–” But Vivian lost her breath as she continued, “hinc illae lacrimae –” she looked up at Ms. Margolis.

“Hence these tears,” Ms. Margolis said.

“Hence these tears,” Vivian repeated.

To herself, Marwa translated Sosia’s reply, ‘Quam timeo quorsum evadas!’ — ‘I dread to think where this is leading’ — but she was interrupted by the PA loudspeaker crackling to life at the front of the room. It was the Assistant Principal this time, telling the student body that a bell would ring momentarily. “You are to report to Homeroom which will be extended until further notice.”

Marwa and Vivian exchanged a look. The next thing Marwa knew, she and Vivian were on the marble staircase, then passing through the wide lobby’s crowd of grim-faced, huge men in uniforms, Stuy security, teachers, and dozens of students like themselves moving towards and through the building’s exits onto Chambers and West Streets. Outdoors, bright light, smokesmell, and siren scream assaulted them all at once. White police vans, wooden barrier cordons and so many different uniforms, NYPD and huge, rifled military linemen — West Street at Chambers, their familiar corner, had been transformed into a new Wall Street, separating those who were allowed to pass south from those who were barred. The two girls joined hands not to be separated in the tidal wave of human urgency that pushed them east on Chambers. They were surrounded by noise and confusion, but in her mind, Marwa heard baby Latin homework: Urbs vias latas habet. Per vias urbis contendimus; and the translation: The city has wide streets. We hurry through the city streets.

Ash. Powder. Timber Wolf. Shadow. Charcoal. Charr. Sere. Payne’s Gray. Pain.

Marwa tasted the gray & black smoke & and gash in the tower, orange/red/yellow fires, sharp white straight lines of giant tower cornered against blue skyblue blue — huge, horrible, beautiful, irresistible. Looking south — now they lived only in one directional dimension — debris erupted, flew, spilled, fell, they were falling! –

Men and women stood in the black gash in the North Tower , waving jackets and shirts. On the north face, on the west.

An upside-down number 4, a jacketless man in white shirt and dark slacks, dark hair, his arms held or pinned to his sides by the pressure of falling, one leg crossed against the other, as if he were in a stage of sleep on a mattress, plummeted.

He must have held his arms stiff to his sides because many others were falling like dummies, rolling, flailing, unconscious or already dead.

“Oh, don’t!”

“No, no, no!”

But those who saw could not stop the falling people — no more than they could stop moving themselves. How had they crossed West Street through the mob and traffic? Were they all, people and things — minute particles immersed in a catastrophic Brownian motion? Again, the ground quaked and the girls were momentarily thrown against each other, steadied by others equally balancing themselves, and then a deep rumble sounded low, but it came from above, and there were cries all around them as the mass did stop, stunned, then lurched forward as the South Tower, thickly wrapped in billows of smoke oh that might cushion its — how could It be falling, folding, collapsing? — but It was, and out of Its outraged roar rose an even more terrifying volcanic cloud rushing north towards them, veering slightly right, west, straight in their direction –

However randomly, they were inside the doors of the elementary school. Marwa lost Vivian then as she searched for Joey’s class, forgetting that Vivian’s brother was in the same one. Remarkably, filing past Marwa were neat lines of little people led by serious teachers. She recognized Mrs. Shapiro, Joey’s teacher, and there behind the young woman, 8th in line, was Joey. Was this when she first felt pain in her chest — so that she worried, had she been shot, was Joey in danger of being shot? — or was it an visceral echo of outside when her eye had instantly, insanely, accurately calculated (v = 32t velocity of a falling body equals thirty-two times the time that it takes to fall) the impact of those leaping, tumbling, living bodies — all Marwa knew was that it hurt to breathe.

Mrs. Shapiro recognized Marwa and Vivian, who was already walking in the quiet line holding her little brother’s hand. Then Marwa realized she was doing the same. They followed another group outside and walked to the right, west, on Warren Street , heading for the river. At the end of Warren was P.S. 89 which they joined in evacuating south to a cove marina where fireboats were moored, waiting to ferry the children across to New Jersey . They could see a Circle Line ferry curving toward an entry slip, and their fireboat appeared to be aiming for its path. They were aboard a boat! Joey’s hand held hers tightly. He looked up at his tall sister.

“Your eye is bleeding,” he said.

Marwa touched her face with her free hand. It was her blood. She felt the sticky wetness from the outside and suddenly remembered seeing bleeding people walking north past her on West Street . She thought perhaps it had been their blood that had gotten on her somehow.

“It’s the lid,” Marwa said. “It doesn’t hurt at all.”

What a relief that the children were distracted from the dark, inverted storm behind them by the yellow-banded, black-slickered firemen, like a breed of human-wasp, in giant hardblack helmets, on a tugboat-sort-of-vehicle in the middle of the glittering, splashing Hudson River, plowing a foam-spraying way, leaving a white wake of churned up waters.

Joey told Marwa, “Eschikagou means Stinkland. Onions grew in the swamp. The black man who started Chicago married a Potawatomi lady named Kittihawa, but what does Potawatomi mean?”

Marwa shook her head.

“The Hudson River has lots of native names,” Joey said. “It depends on which tribe is telling the story.

“Shawnatawty, Cahohatatea, Shatemuc,” said a little girl in braids holding hands with her buddy.

Joey frowned at her interruption and emphatically pronounced, “Mahicanituck, the river of the Mohicans!”

“What was the name of Hudson ’s ship,” Mrs. Shapiro encouraged.

A classmate of Joey’s called out, “The Half Moon!”

The teacher nodded, then said to Marwa and Vivian, “On September 13, 1609, on a clear day like this,” she caught herself, “like this, the Half Moon sailed from the Narrows into the Upper Bay. 28 log canoes came to visit them, bringing oysters and beans, the welcomers smoking tobacco from big pipes of yellow copper. Hudson called the river ‘the noble, nameless stream.’” Mrs. Shapiro looked back over her shoulder at the burning city. “ Lot ’s wife turned into salt,” but she covered her mouth at the sight and sound of the North Tower ’s roaring death throes, falling and filling the already blackened sky above Manhattan with another giant cloud of smoke and grief.

Marwa did not remember landing and disembarking. She returned to herself much later, still grasping Joey’s hand, sitting beside him on a metal folding chair. Vivian sat nearby with her brother. Mrs. Shapiro and other teachers were within hearing distance. Marwa had no idea where they were. Cold fluorescent lights were on overhead although it was still bright outside. Her injured eye had been bandaged so she could only see out of the left one. She could feel the heat and swelling of the right eye. It reminded her pierced ears. That had happened in the past. If there had been a past, then there was reason to believe there could be a future. Now was only now.

Three teachers were talking. Marwa saw out of one eye that Vivian was eaves-dropping intently.

“What exactly did he say?” Mrs. Shapiro was asking a kindergarten teacher.

“‘Giant towers will fall down, will fall down, will fall down, Giant towers will fall down, my fair lady!’ Fawaz didn’t say it, he sang it, and his whole group danced to it.”

“And when exactly did he sing it?” the third teacher asked.

“Last Thursday, I told you. So I asked him what he meant, and he pointed right at the Twin Towers –” the woman put hands to her face and shook her head back and forth, a kind of keening. “I asked Fawaz what he meant, and he said, ‘Those two buildings won’t be standing there next week and you shouldn’t go on a bus.’ And Abdel told him to shut up and shoved him so I had to give them both time outs. I wrote it down and reported it to the new Principal, but she had her hands full with the first week of school and how can you take something a five year old says?”

Marwa’s mind seemed incapable of clearing as if the dark billows blowing south and east away from Jersey onto Long Island had somehow changed direction and filled her head. She smelled smoke, horrified to be filtering through the alveoli of her lungs the cinders of incinerated souls. But there was no real smell of smoke in this building.

Joey said, “Where is Daddy?”

Marwa looked down at his black curls and big dark eyes. “I tried to call Mommy. The phones don’t work yet. We’ll go home soon.”

Vivian’s brother dropped her hand. “You’re shaking,” he said. “Stop shaking.”

Vivian looked at Marwa. Then she knew where Vivian’s father worked.

Marwa took out her cell phone. It was connecting. Everyone paid attention. When she heard her mother’s voice breathe “Joey?” Marwa answered, “Ummee, Ummee, I’ve got him here right next to me. Here.”

She put the cell phone to Joey’s ear — he grabbed it out of her hand.

“Mommy, I’m in New Jersey ,” Joey reported. “Marwa cut her eye. She’s all right. How is Daddy?”

The smile on his face changed everything. Marwa didn’t look at Vivian.

Joey gave back the phone. “Mommy said you.”

Her mother said they couldn’t return to Battery Park City, their apartment was contaminated or something. Or something. Her father was making arrangements for them to stay someplace in Brooklyn . Someplace. Don’t meet at Masjid Salam, the mosque on 116th Street near Columbia . Certainly not Masjid al-Farah, the one downtown, twelve blocks north of, of — there, either. The phone went static and then off. Marwa looked at it as if her mother were inside it.

“Try yours,” Marwa said to Vivian.

Vivian’s didn’t work at all. Her Asian face reddened. She hissed at Marwa, “Did you know, too? Did you all know? Are you happy?”

Marwa thought: Vivian is scared and hurt and angry, and I feel nothing at all. Only protective of Joey.

“No,” Marwa considered, “I am not happy.” She could have added “either.”

How odd, living through it, remembering only in shreds and patches, losing all causal or temporal links. How had they gotten back to Manhattan , and when? Marwa had no memory of crossing over the water a second time in daylight or at night. When did she hear about the other two planes, at the Pentagon and in a grassy Pennsylvania field? Where did she learn that two of the jets had taken off from Boston ? No memory of connecting Boston to LA, only a momentary clench of fear hearing D.C. to LA.

But Denim Prix was the 93rd passenger on American Airlines Flight 11 that left Logan International in Boston at 7:59 A.M. and crashed into the North Tower at 8:46 A.M. when Biren was asking, “Which came first, the unum or the pluribus?”