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eating our Cheerios and watching the cartoons. I remember it as the only time he and I could be alone together without him punching or kicking me or throwing me to the floor or stealing or breaking my toys or calling me names in a wild, high voice like a demon's. The TV seemed to hypnotize and pacify him and he would just lie on the rug beside me, munching his Cheerios, staring at the screen. As far as I could make out, that was pretty much all he'd been doing ever since.
    My long trip over, I plumped down onto the sofa with a sigh. I picked up the remote gizmo. Studied it for a few seconds and pressed the buttons. The big TV made a sizzling sound. A red light flickered at the bottom of it, then went green. The set came on. Pictures. Voices. Drowning out the babbling ghost inside the house. What a relief.
    A woman appeared on the screen, a perky little blonde thing, glossed and powdered to a fare-thee-well. Sally Sterling, she was—so said the caption across her breasts. Her gigantic face took up the entire far wall, her features so huge they fairly forced themselves on my consciousness. Ultra-kissable bee-stung lips. Glistening blue eyes that managed to be ambitious and imbecilic at once. She struck me as the kind of girl who in a bygone age would have set her sights on an aging millionaire. Now here she was, blown up to the size of a bus, bothering all the rest of us. She was holding a penis-shaped microphone in front of her mouth—
well, I couldn't help but perceive it that way with it jumping out at me as large as that. Her great white smile flashed. She looked as if she could barely contain her glee.
    "Is this the end of civilization as we know it?" she drawled ironically, a laugh stuck in her throat. "Three major Hollywood studios certainly hope so as they get ready for the premiere of the first film ever using Real 3-D Technology at the New Coliseum Theater just off Times Square—"
    I pressed the remote, hunting through the channels. An ad for car insurance went by, then an ad for soda, then a game show with lightbulbs flashing around a babe in a short skirt. I settled on the news. Enormous images tumbled past of American soldiers curling around the doorways of bomb-gutted houses, young men charging into bullet-riddled darkness with brave and fearful eyes. There were bodies in an Arab marketplace around an exploded car. There was an old woman in a black burqa weeping on her knees. In St. Petersburg, some Islamo-fascists had set off a bomb near the Church of Saints Peter and Anne. In Paris, a lone jihadi had gone apeshit at the Louvre, stabbing two tourists before he slashed a priceless painting, Ingres's
Odalisque.
    I stared at the images, but again, my mind drifted back to Lauren, wondering what she wanted, why she had called me. And suddenly, thinking of her, watching the images on the screen, a realization came to me. With all this business about confronting the past and so on, I realized I'd been imagining Lauren as if she would be the same, as if she would look the same as I remembered her. When she'd spoken to me on the phone, her voice was unchanged. It was still a low, throaty drawl, sardonic, mocking, secretly vulnerable. The image of her that came into my mind as I listened was the image of her as she once was: young, narrow, wired, with that braced, expectant air some women have as if they're waiting to be taken by storm. I remembered her mostly as
I saw her last, turning away from me, walking away, disappearing into the crowds by the harbor, Liberty in the distance to the left of her, the Twin Towers looming against the sky to her right.
    But she will have changed, I reminded myself, as if talking to a simpleton. Of course she will have changed. I'd changed. Everyone had. The whole city was different, diminished, those towers themselves blown to rubble, the thousands in them dead. The whole world—that stunned, victorious West we lived in—our dumb, hilarious, in-the-money America with the slave