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deep sorrow, like bone pain, is profoundly isolating. It won’t allow itself to be shared. For that matter, he did not want to share it in the hope of achieving what Ms. Hartley said was his ultimate goal—acceptance. Why should he accept the senseless murder of his wife by a gang of homicidal zealots?
    Maybe some wounds weren’t meant to heal. America seemed to have become a society dedicated to the proposition that no one should suffer, at least not for long. A Xanax in my tummy, and all’s right with the world. Castle had taken to reading the Roman stoics like Seneca and certain Greek tragedians like Aeschylus, whose voices spoke to him, across an ocean of time, with a thoughtfulness and a gravity utterly absent from Ms. Hartley’s psychobabble. And as in the November gloom he approached the Exchange Street station, a chorus from the Oresteia sang somberly in his mind’s ear. He who learns must suffer. And even now in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God . Suddenly, at the station’s mouth, the clammy subterranean air lofting up into his nostrils, he stopped and, without making a conscious decision, turned around and headed for Ground Zero. This was peculiar. Although HarrimanCutler’s offices were only a short distance from it, he always walked blocks out of his way to avoid setting eyes on it. Two months ago, during the observances of 9/11’s first anniversary, he made sure not to turn on the news. But now, for what reason he didn’t know, a compulsion like a magnetic force drew him to see and smell and touch the place where Amanda had been blown to atoms, also for a reason he didn’t know.
    He climbed up to a platform and joined a crowd watching giant shovels take bites of debris and spew it, giant mouthful by giant mouthful, into dump trucks. Workers in hard hats and hazmat suits descended into an excavation deep as a stone quarry. Cutting torches flashed amid the wreckage, which by this time had taken on an orderly appearance. Gone were the smoking, jumbled mountains of melted steel and pulverized concrete he’d seen in photographs; gone as well the tall, jagged fragment of a tower’s facade that had thrust out of the ruins like a broken idol from some vanished civilization. How strange to see so much light pouring into these streets. It wasn’t a cheering light; it heightened the impression of a vast desolation, like the sun on an empty plain. What awful power had directed those nineteen men to wreak this calamity? His pastel Episcopalianism rejected the existence of the devil except as metaphor, yet the scene before him testified that real evil roamed the earth. Castle had studied the photographs of the hijackers in newspapers and newsmagazines, paying special attention to Muhammad Atta, the ringleader, the Egyptian engineer with the unsmiling mouth and hooded eyes. A sinister face, but no more sinister than the mug shot of an ordinary criminal, its lineaments offering no clue to the madness within. No, not madness. The attacks had been too well planned and executed to have been the work of lunatics. That was a new thing in Castle’s experience, and it was beyond grasp—an insane act perpetrated by sane minds.
    He watched the workmen, he watched a team of dogs sniffing for remains in the mass grave of three thousand human beings. Mandy’s grave. Having been left without a body to bury had deepened the cruelty. Amanda hadn’t been killed, she’d been annihilated in that supernova of exploding jet fuel.
    He left the platform, ducked under a sawhorse barricade, and strode over hoses and past pumps and grinding machinery toward a mound of rubble, an incongruous figure in his pinstripes and trench coat. Spotting a hard hat on the ground, he put it on, figuring to masquerade as a city official who had business there. With the furtive movements of a shoplifter, he plunged a hand into the