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colonies of the evil empire clacketing down like dominoes around our big clown feet: Seventeen years and it was all different, all gone. Look. Look at the TV: There was war after war in the Middle East now, war after war radiating like shock waves from the wound in the island where the towers had stood. Crazy jihadists taking over the failed kingdoms of Islam, fanatic hordes of fundamentalist warriors who seemed to have burst alive out of a mural of the Dark Ages, burst, complete with beards and turbans, frothing horses, scimitars upraised, to go galloping nutso through real life. They would brook no god but their god, their ferocious god, no law but their sharia law. They would kill anyone who might oppose or offend them, any Muslim who imagined a new future, any woman who wanted to be equal or free. And they dreamed of conquering all the infidel West, subjugating the whole mess of the modern world. They were murderers in Holland. Rioters in France. Bombers in England, Russia, Pakistan, and so on. They were armies fighting for entire nations in Africa. Here in America too, after the World Trade Center, they continued to pull off attacks now and then. Sometimes it was a terrorist cell, sometimes just a lone mad-for-Allah boy opening fire in a shopping mall or running down some nonbelievers with his SUV. But there were always bigger doings in the works, foiled plots and whispered conspiracies: to bring down
more buildings, to bring down anything that stands—hell, to bring down the whole third dimension and make the world flat again.
    Look at the TV, I told myself. Look at the news. The past wasn't there to be confronted anymore. This was the state of things now, the state of things since Lauren walked away from me with the Twin Towers looming over her.
    No, I thought. It was unlikely she would look the same.

MONDAY

Lauren as She Had Become
    Nothing could have prepared me for her, though. No act, I mean, of my imagination. She was changed almost entirely from what she'd been.
    She lived in Astoria, in Queens, a working-class neighborhood just across Hell Gate from Manhattan. She had the bottom floor of a two-story row house, one of a set of red-brick boxes standing side by side in a block-long line a stoop away from the sidewalk. It was eight o'clock when I got there. A lot of moms were rushing by me, towing their kids behind, hurrying to drop them off at school, I guess, so they could get themselves to work on time. There were other kids slouching off to school alone. Guys in windbreakers twisting their cars out of tight parking spaces. Guys in cheap suits marching to the train.
    The clouds were breaking up over the low roofs. The sun was out, rising over the Island. The air was cool and fresh.
    I climbed the stoop and knocked on Lauren's door. I heard her shout out, "Just a minute!" from inside.
    I waited, squinting off toward the sun, nervous with anticipation. I heard the door open and turned to see her. The sight rocked me. I had to force a smile. Startlingly, she came into my arms. Her hair smelled the same, anyway: baby shampoo and cigarettes. She took my hand and drew me into the house.
    We moved together into a small living room. It was cramped and depressing and stank of divorce: the sudden loss of income,
a life cobbled back together in a rush. The walls were a slapdash beige slung on by the landlord. The tan carpet also must have come with the place. There was an aging TV on a stand in one corner. There was an aging sofa facing a mantelpiece. The mantelpiece should have surrounded a fireplace, but there was no fireplace, just the beige wall below and a mirror above it. There were framed photographs on the mantel in front of the mirror: a little girl, then the little girl older, then the same girl as a teenager. My eye flashed over them and I thought:
So she has a daughter now.
    I faced Lauren again. She was standing back from me, appraising me as if I were a statue in a gallery.
    "Wow!" she said. "I mean, you