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hear. My mother is pretending to be stronger than she is. She’s telling him she’s fine, she can handle the kids in his absence; she’s only worried about him. She has been holding her questions in so long that they all come out in a rush: Are you safe, Sayyid? Are you getting enough to eat? Are there other Muslims here? Do the guards let you pray? What can I bring you? What can I tell you, Sayyid, besides I love you, I love you, I love you?
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    We haven’t returned to our apartment in Cliffside Park since the shooting, just as my mother feared we wouldn’t when she laid the white sheet on my floor and told me to fill it. We’re living at Uncle Ibrahim’s place in Brooklyn temporarily—three adults and six children in a one-bedroom apartment—and trying to build a new normal, brick by brick.
    The New York police raided our home just hours after we left it. It will be years before I’m old enough to read the details, and by then I’ll know that my father was lying when he told us he was not a murderer. The police carted away forty-seven boxes of suspicious materials suggesting an international conspiracy—bomb-making instructions, a hit list of potential Jewish targets, and references to an attack on “the world’s high buildings.” But most of the material is in Arabic, and authorities dismiss some of the notes as “Islamic poetry.” No one will bother translating the bulk of it until after the first World Trade Center attack less than three years later. (Around the same time, federal agents will arrest my Uncle Ibrahim and, while searching his apartment, find fake Nicaraguan passports in my family’s names. If my father’s plan to kill Kahane had gone off without a hitch, I’d apparently have grown up in Central America with a Spanish name.) The authorities aren’t just ignoringthe forty-seven boxes from our apartment. The FBI also has surveillance footage of my father and others training at the Calverton Shooting Range—but nobody has connected the dots. The NYPD chief of detectives insists that my father was a lone gunman. The idea is absurd, as the investigative journalist Peter Lance and the U.S. government itself will prove long after the fact.
    For years, theories will flourish that my father entered the Marriott with at least one, possibly two, other conspirators, though no one else will ever be charged. My father was wearing a yarmulke to blend in with the mostly Orthodox crowd. He approached the podium, where Kahane was declaiming with his signature fury about the Arab menace. My father paused, and then said aloud, “This is the moment!” Then he fired at the rabbi, and raced out of the ballroom. One of Kahane’s supporters, a seventy-three-year-old, tried to block him. My father shot the man in the leg, then continued out onto the street. According to reports, his friend Red, the taxi driver who would call my mother that night, was supposed to be waiting outside the Marriott in his cab. A doorman, however, had apparently told him to move along. So my father got into the wrong cab. After the cab had gone one block, another of Kahane’s supporters stepped in front of it to stop my father from getting away. My father put his gun to the driver’s head. The driver leaped out of the cab. Then my father leaped out, too. He ran down Lexington, exchanged fire with the postalofficer, who was wearing a bulletproof vest, and fell to the street. According to some theories, my father’s accomplices escaped via the subway.
    History will prove that my father did not act alone. But it’s 1990, and the NYPD can’t yet fathom the concept of a global terror cell—virtually no one can—and they have no interest in trying to prosecute one.
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    We haven’t returned to our old school in Cliffside Park, either. The media descended on it the