That night Kevin and I went to the casino in the pouring rain. I had taken a caffeine pill to counteract jetlag and now I was wired to the point of agitation; on the train into town I desperately hung on to Kevin's words, scouring them for meaning. I confessed to him how wired I was and he laughed.

The other morning on the bus to work I was in a mildly hung over reverie, slouched in my seat with my forehead leaning bumpily on the cool glass. I became vaguely aware of a man in front of me barking loudly into his cell phone. An older man, with a gruff Brooklyn accent.

Suddenly a woman in the front yelled out, "Sir! Would you please stop that?"

"What? I can't talk? Mind your business," he protested. And at the same volume as before he said into the phone, "I don't know, some woman is telling me to quiet down."

"You're very loud, sir," she continued.

"I'm not bothering anybody. Am I bothering anybody? Everyone raise their hand if I'm bothering you. See? No one raised their hand."

Another woman, sitting across the aisle, said to him, "You know, it really is annoying."

Things more or less calmed down after that.

There is no God and there is no devil but there is temptation. And there is righteous resistance to temptation borne of an instinctive apprehension that to succumb is wrong. Not wrong because God says so. Not wrong because man says so. Wrong because on a deep level, an unconscious level, we all know this: When you harm another you are harming yourself. Why? Because there is no other. "Other" is an illusion. We are all manifestations of the same being. And in spite of ourselves, in spite of our desires, in spite of our religious delusions, we know this is the only real truth. Though I deride all organized religions, the Christian notion of "do unto others" comes close to expressing this. The thing they got wrong, once again, is that the dictum does not come from God – it's much simpler than that. It comes from pure logical truth. To harm another is not sinful; it's perverse.

Somewhere in the course of the development of civilization we forgot this simplest truth, oneness. (Animals, incidentally, have not forgotten. They never do anything that is not morally justifiable. Animals do not – they can not – "sin." And it's not because they wouldn't take pleasure in doing so. It is simply not in their nature to violate nature.) And we had to invent an apparatus to maintain order in the face of this fracturing of consciousness. We had to invent God. How foolish – and foolhardy – to imagine that God is something outside ourselves. Because if it's outside of ourselves we can never be fully reconciled with it, and so our religions themselves become elaborate means to rationalize and support our transgressions. And in many cases, to exploit them.

The current wave of child molestation and denial in the Catholic Church is a clear example of the failure of religion, and religious orthodoxy in particular, to save man from temptation. These men who seduced young boys, young girls – who violated their vows but did much worse of course – are not inherently evil. Banish that facile interpretation from your head. They were sorely tempted, and the gravity of their temptation was proportional to their piety. These were not cynical men who entered the priesthood without faith, intending to rape the mouths and asses of the first altar boys they got their hands on. Of course not! They were religious men. Their faith – not just the hierarchy of the Church itself (though that counts for a lot) – actually enabled them to repeatedly molest children.

The Christian notion of forgiveness is to blame. Sin and redemption – that magical, compelling moral narrative that seems to invest every Christian life with meaning – actually provokes terrible deeds by the faithful. Original sin and inherited sin mark believers as sinners and they live down to that expectation. But there is no original sin – there is only original sanctity! And it's by denying our sanctity – and embracing our "sinfulness" – that we have gone so far astray.

"Look in your sister's room," P. C. said, as he walked past me to the kitchen.

"Look in my sister's room?" I said.

"Yeah."

"You want me to look in my sister's room."

"Look in her room."

I got up and walked over uncertainly and peered in the open doorway to find her slumped sideways on her bed, shoes on, face buried in a tangle of bedspread and pillow.

"She came home earlier and I said how are you and she said, ‘I'm shitfaced'," P. C. explained. "She went into her room."

"Did she tell you why she was shitfaced?"

"She went in and I expected her to come back out and tell me but she just like that, went down and that was it. Like that."

She winced a bit. "The things you do for fun in India you can't do here. I don't know, I read," she said. She ate tortilla chips in tiny bites. Sometimes a piece would crumble off and fall in her downy drink and she would pluck it out and pop it in her mouth. "I see how people live on television," she said, "and it's very different from life in India. I wonder what it would be like to live like that. I think I would like to try."

"But life on television isn't like real life," I said.

She looked across the room for a moment. "People going out to bars and drinking, and laughing, and doing things like playing pool," she said. "I think I would like someone to show me what that is like."

And I realized she was right: life in America is like life on TV. She was describing my life, and it had more in common with a beer commercial than with anyone's life in India. And I also realized what she really wanted from a man, an American man, and I realized I could give it to her if I wanted but I knew that I didn't and it was sad.

We sat at a table in the corner and she ordered a strawberry daiquiri and I ordered a scotch. I asked her if she had just ended a serious relationship and she acted a little surprised that I would ask, but she said yes, and we talked about that. The romance was gone, she said. They'd been together for nine years, almost since she'd come over, and they had done everything together. He was Indian too and he was practically her only friend in the States. She teased the frothy surface of the daiquiri with her straw and bent her head down when she went to drink.

"You've met other people though, right? At work?" I inquired hopefully.

"No. It is a very big problem with immigrants. They come over and they never fit in. They try to but they cannot. They stay with their own kind always."

We talked more about her ex, and about mine. She still lives with him, she said. He's a writer, he's trying to sell his novel but he hasn't and he's depressed. But she kept returning to this sad theme of being lost in the New World, of longing for what was all around but out of reach.

"What do you like to do for fun?" I asked, hoping this idiotic and banal question would lighten the mood.

Everything is quiet and gray-dark in the apartment. There's a half-filled glass of water on the coffee table but no one's there.

She waved to me from across the street and pointed we're going this way, across the avenue. Before we'd even crossed she asked me what do I do – oh you write? What kind of writing? If you write about your experiences, how does the reader know you're not lying? These writers who do this, they're vain, they only want to look good. Yes I suppose it's a problem, I said. We walked a few blocks, turning here and there, and she stopped across from a Mexican Restaurant.

"Do you want to go there?" she asked.

"Sure."

It was a generic blonde-wood margarita place with a basket of chips on every table and twinkling Christmas lights for décor, a sad and futile place to suit the nature of our encounter. Like me, illegitimate.

From a dream, yesterday morning: May freedom melt in your throat like ice cream.

I went to 28th Street and walked up and over to the uptown side and I waited. I watched as waves and waves of commuters got off trains and filed through the turnstiles, disappearing upstairs to leave the station quiet again. I scanned the crowd for any dark woman's face. I was calm but not serene; all I could think of was how strange this was, this dreadful anticipation. I was about to see her.

Finally she appeared. She was slender, with a long black coat and her hair tied back. She had thin lips, high cheekbones, a bit of an overbite. She looked good and I was relieved. Pat, she said, yes I said, and she smiled and we stood wordless a moment, and I said would you like to get together later and she said sure. I said what about tonight and she put her hands up to her head and said I don't know, I'm so pressed for time and I said that's OK, how about tomorrow and she said yes. I said we'd talk later and it was good to meet her and I shook her hand.

Later she called me and left a message. "It's Sajita, I want to make sure everything's all right." She was afraid I had changed my mind, I realized. I called her back and said everything's fine and she said why don't you come out to Brooklyn tonight, come out to Grand Army Plaza and call me when you get out.

I waited on the corner on Nevins Street, waited for her to come and find me, watching people walk home in the cool spring dusk. Two women, one black and one white, walked up.

"Excuse me," the black one said.

"Yes?"

"You speak English!" she exclaimed with goofy, exaggerated delight. "Do you know how to get to Park Slope?"

"I'm sorry, I'm not from around here."

"Oh."

I motioned toward the subway entrance with my head. "You could go down and ask the, uh, the tollbooth guy."

"Good idea!"

"The token booth guy."

"Good idea!"

They nodded to each other, eyebrows raised.

"Good idea! Thank you!"

And I was left to stand and wait again.

P. C. found a walk-don't walk sign on the street somewhere – just the flat part with the words on it – and put it on the wall in the kitchen. In its new context it is quite striking. Here's what it looks like, in big bold block letters:

DON'T

WALK

WALK

It is a poem, a piece of found art. Stare at it for a long time and see where your mind goes.

Last night I couldn't remember whether it was 2001 or 2002. I saw 01 on a computer file I thought was recent and I thought, damn, is it still 2001? Then, is it 2002? Hard to say which was more baffling. And in the morning I was chilled by the looming date on the milk carton – it seemed so far away at the store.

We are well into the future. 

The last day at Les Frauds is when Mom and I got to talking about September 11th and it was curiously contentious; she found the picture book moving yet maudlin too, and she was right, and it was exactly what I feared she might think, and what I feared about everyone's reaction to the whole thing too in a way, but I found myself growing defensive anyway. The elevation of the towers themselves as iconic vehicles for the projection of grief and rage, which was fascinating to me (those smooth facades, those beautifully square corners, so abstract, could bear anything in their unreality – after having collapsed in reality under the burden of the attack itself), seemed alarming to her. Those were our worse tendencies, she thought. The vigils reminded her of Lady Di's death, and the exploitation of a moment of genuine national tragedy for such self-indulgent melodrama was sick. Yeah, yeah. I knew she had a point. But I wished I'd articulated something else, a different view, but instead we moved on and talked about Israel and Arab anti-Semitism. I ranted about the eventual decline and disintegration of all major world religions, starting perhaps with Islam. I was inspired toward exaggeration and extreme rhetoric. We talked about the Arabs who would deny that September 11th was the work of Islamic terrorists, what a terrible portent that was. I drew comparisons between the hatred of the Arabs for the Jews with all the other great racial hatreds of modern civilization. And she said it goes the other way too, and remember, the Israelis have so much and the Palestinians have so little. Religion is racist, I said.

There's a pair of black shoes strewn ten feet apart on the rain-spotted sidewalk outside our door.

A prostitute on an HBO documentary said she tells abusive pimps this: Don't you have no respect for your mother? You came out of a pussy just like what I'm sellin'.

Eight and a Half by Eleven

A man was wandering crosscurrent to the crowd, shouting into his phone: "I want everyone in the E.R. now!" It was shocking to image a parade of the wounded, the burned, filling overwhelmed triage centers; later was a bigger shock: the idleness of hundreds of doctors waiting for nothing. 

We walked up Fifth Avenue with everyone. The Empire State Building looked vulnerable and naked in the sun. There was a fierce, raw charge in the air, like anything might happen. You couldn't get a phone signal. We dropped off Julie with her boyfriend Guy, who was waiting across from Grand Central. Guy held Julie in one arm and told us they hit the Sears Tower in Chicago. Yasser Arafat, she hissed. He took credit for it already. I parted company with Paul and walked up Madison. 

People were generally calm. Some seemed almost cheerful, hitching rides on flatbed trucks, kicking dangling feet like little kids. I walked alongside a middle-aged woman with glasses and curly hair who was weeping so uncontrollably she was choking on her tears. Then I passed a posh Upper East Side restaurant and peered through the picture window. People ate and drank. A waiter fussed over a bottle of wine in a tableside bucket. They had to know. It seemed outrageous they could do this at a time like this. But a time like what? Maybe no one could take the measure of this event and respond appropriately. Still, it was jarring to see their dimly happy faces through the glass, the glint of silverware before them, crystal on their lips.

The first call I was able to make was to Mike. We talked about how it would always be before and after from now on. He said he saw the towers burning from the roof of his apartment in Chinatown and ran down to get a camera. When he came back upstairs one of the towers was gone. He took some film of a police officer who was helping people escape. While the camera was rolling the cop realized that other guys in his squad had been crushed in the collapse and he broke down. Mike wondered what he could do with this footage but confessed to feeling guilty for his mercenary thoughts. He never did say anything about it again.

Back home, Mel called. She said Su was over at her place and did I want to come over. I said I did. I got on the downtown bus at Fifth. It was crowded and I stood near the front. People were talking animatedly about the event. There was an eerie glee about the chatter. They seemed to want to outdo each other with stories of horror, to be the bearers of worse and worse news just for the vain thrill it gave them. Or maybe if they made it worse in their heads, and asserted it, the reality would not be quite so bad.

"I heard 40,000 people died," a woman said.

"Oh no. Way more than that," said a man. "200,000."

The bus driver told his story.

"I was down there," he began. "I looked out the window and I saw what do you call it. Graffiti coming from the sky." We knew what he meant. "But then I realized it ain't no graffiti. It's pieces of paper. Eight and a half by eleven."

I got off around the Metropolitan Museum and walked across the park with a crowd. Everyone's pace seemed slow by half a step—with nothing left to escape, we instinctively adopted a processional solemnity. In a way, though, it was just like a beautiful afternoon in Central Park. There were lots of children, acting like children, skipping and swinging their parents' arms. Still they knew. 

"Daddy, did the airplane really hit the building?" I heard one ask.

"Yes."

"What happened to the people inside?"

A roaring fighter jet pierced the empty sky above us.

On the way to work the other day I noticed the menu board on the sidewalk outside Dewey's flatiron advertising "Whensday specials."

Two nights ago Sean and I were sitting watching TV.

Blam blam blam blam blam blam blam blam!

Just like that, like drums, an utterly deliberate and emphatic expression. 

"That was scary," said Sean.

"Yeah," I said. I was eating a big bowl of rice and lentils and beans, sitting deep in the fake Eames chair. "As long as they're not aiming at us."

"Eight shots," he said. Like the number might mean something.

"Yeah?" I wasn't sure he was right. It seemed high. But he probably was. They came in a hurry.

"Have you heard gunfire around here—"

"Yeah."

"Yeah, so have I."

"That is scary," I asserted, feeling like my first reaction had somehow been too flip. I wanted to hear myself say it was scary before my next mouthful of rice, my next sip of wine. And I imagined where it must have all gone down to have echoed so loudly among the buildings outside our window—103rd Street? Mad? In my head I saw the arm, the hand and the gun; the body falling and the killer run.

I awoke groggily this morning, trying to remember dreams. The name Rohan came into my head, Rohan, the sullen Indian who hung out at Richter's like Keith, Rohan who played foosball better than anyone I've ever seen; better than Keith, and Keith is pretty good. I remembered nervously tending goal as Rohan drew his toy forwards back and forth, teasing the ball, until he felt the moment was right and in less than an instant the ball was deep in the gullet of the goal with a humiliating thunk. They're repaving Madison Avenue. Men are perched in strange heavy equipment, awaiting their turn to scrape or surface or steamroll. The traffic has to go around. Peter, our CEO, seemed oddly unfazed by the unfolding events. He'd wander out of his office, glance at the TV. He said something about how people could stay in a hotel if they couldn't make it home to Jersey or wherever. He'd wander back to his office, hands clasped behind his back. Brian and Daniela and I decided to walk home at about noon. Outside, the streets and sidewalks were completely overrun by people walking north. The analogy is tired but completely true: the only time you ever see something like this, your environment transformed like this, is in movies. It was as though 10,000 extras had been hired to swarm around the Flatiron Building and up Fifth Avenue for some disaster epic. Places everyone. They'll never let us close these streets again so let's get this right. Action!

Went out last night to a comedy club, Emma had some free passes. Five comedians or something, none too funny. One had an odd, hesitant persona, like a small child. "A lot of guys like big breasts. I like little breasts. They're so nice,” he said. “They're like, ‘Hi! Can I help you?'"

The Kiwis were there, Jen and Steve, and Chloe too. Then we went to Von on Bleecker and met up with Jim and Shane and Sophie and someone named Nicole who looked familiar and seemed to recognize me, so I pretended I knew who she was and said "Good to see you" not "Nice to meet you." Emma was leaning on me, arm around me. She and Chloe left early, and the rest of us wandered a while until we got to the Edge. There were lots of beautiful young women with their backs turned to us. Jim talked about how he's been seeing Lucy at school and they've been meeting up for drinks. Where might that be going? We talked about her mania. Sophie said she can never get a word in when she’s with her.

I played great pool. I've been playing great the last three times. Since Mel broke up with me. Maybe that’s what did it. Heartbreak’s prodded me to greater heights. The 2 was about five inches from the side bumper near the far corner but my shot to that hole was blocked; I hit the ball on the right, banked it, the cue ball and the 2 narrowly missed each other on their ricochets and the 2 rolled right in the near corner pocket. 

Eventually Jim and I lost and it was time to go home. I walked up 1st Avenue to Stromboli on 8th Street for a slice, past shuttered shops, past revelers whose nights were still young, past bags and bags of garbage, past a beautiful wide-eyed blonde clutching a book of Tartans in her green-gloved hands.

On the screen the towers stood stricken, smoking furiously. The anchor repeated what little was known in a tremulous voice, betraying shock but clinging determinedly to professionalism, to that formal tone and lingo by which we've come to identify The News itself—except this wasn’t news, it wasn’t what you consume with dinner at six or peruse drowsily on the morning train. Her mannered delivery seemed suddenly inappropriate, as though she were saying these things sitting right beside us on the couch. In case you're just joining us… as you can see from these images… two aircraft struck the World Trade Center towers this morning… the first hit the North Tower at 8:48 a.m., the second hit the South Tower 15 minutes later at 9:03… We also have word from Washington that the Pentagon was hit by a plane at approximately 9:40… Authorities suspect these are terrorist attacks…

Lucy sat watching, so did Paul. Other coworkers drifted in and out, unable to sit or stand or anything. Everything around me seemed precarious, uncertain; right down to the coffee table I sat on and the air I breathed. It occurred to me that we had suddenly been plunged into a new world of utterly chaotic possibilities and that perhaps it was not a world that was worth living in.

We watched.

I went to my desk and called Su because I thought she had jury duty downtown. You were supposed to call everyone you knew who was closer to the action than you I guess. There was no answer so I tried her at work and she was there after all; the court had been closed for some unrelated reason. She was crying and shaky. I called Mel, who was oddly calm. She’d been up to her roof to see. She said she was trying to call the editing studio where she was freelancing to see if they needed her to come in.

"I… don't think you're going to be working today," I said.

"I have to call them,” she said, annoyed. “I don't know that."

"Nothing after this will be the same."

"I know."

Lucy called out from in front of the TV: "Oh my God one of the towers is falling!" I ran in to see it evaporating in an enormous cloud of ash and debris that quickly climbed to obscure its twin. I went back to my desk. To stare at the screen awhile. I don't know.

"Oh my GOD the second tower fell!" screamed Lucy. A trace of outrage in her voice mixed with the grief. For some reason this was the real shock—the first one could almost be rationalized as a freak accident, something outside of human control so not of our concern. The falling of the second made both systematic, the conclusion of a grand design. Lucy and Julie were crying.

Last week I was jogging down Fifth Avenue, blissfully lost listening to live Grateful Dead music that I'd downloaded off the Internet, some hissy space jam from Berkeley, California, during the Reagan Administration and there I was on the Avenue, listening and blissing as the guitar went dee-dee-dee and bap-bap-bap-bap and the cymbals went whoosh-clang, and the bass went bum-bum-bum. I crossed the street down near the Met, one-two-one-two dee-bap-clang-bum and I sensed some motion to my left.

In a drawn-out moment I saw a dark Volvo race inexorably toward me, toward my legs; it screeched and skidded to a halt as I leapt to my right and held out my arms, palms out and fingers splayed, as though to block the giant object with my bare hands. I skipped away as the car lurched forward again, pursued by furious honking traffic. Bee-wee-wee-wop-bap-bap in my ears as I tried to think of how lucky I was to be alive, how close this really was; people stood around half-noticing, half-turned to me on the cobblestones. I kept running, bee-dee-whoosh, bee-dee-whoosh.

On the gravel in the station parking lot Sebastien eagerly took my bags, making me a little bit ashamed for every time I never lifted someone else's bag; his smile shined like a searchlight through the darkness and the rain. I had just about decided he was an all right guy when I got in the car with Mom to follow him and she told me what an insufferable pain in the ass he is, how you can't have a discussion with him because he always has to be right, you don't want to talk about politics or September 11th or anything because he's going to disagree and he'll say something about Americans and won't quit until you shut up. This is basically what she said anyway, as we searched the darkness for his furtive taillights disappearing and reappearing around each bend. So then I changed my mind and we talked about some other things.

The house was warm and lovely with a big fire and Yves sitting in front of it in his big chair, all wrapped up in his shawl with the tubes in nose and the oxygen humming nearby. I shook his frail hand and we said "Bonjour, comment ca va?" and that's almost all we said to each other the whole time. 

We all had drinks and I told Sebastien about my job and we talked but I had been made wary of him and I sensed I wasn't saying as much as I normally would. Anyway I wanted to talk to Mom. It was a matter of navigating between these two other figures, the extraordinarily quiet, unassuming presence and the noisy, needful one. We spoke French at dinner and afterward Mom and I lapsed into English when the others faced the other way, seeming to leave our world. I went to sleep early and slept late, a country winter night. 

The next day we sat around and I fixed some things on Mom's computer. In the late afternoon I went for a run in the cold wintry drizzle. I ran the twisting and dipping road, past fields piled with freshly cut trees, their wood dark yellow from the wet and bearing the loggers' inscrutable day-glo markings. It was foggy and silent and there wasn't a single car in sight. I tried to get a sense of where I was; the deep French countryside, the particularity of it, but it was hard.

A while ago I got on the bus to go home from work and there was a half-torn sheet of oak tag carelessly taped to the back of the divider behind the driver. Scrawled on it, almost illegibly, were these words: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

I slept on the train down. Made my connection to the crowded little commuter train but missed the stop—I awoke to see the sign for Bussiere-Galant out there in the darkness as we pulled away. And I hated, hated myself for fucking up. I got off at the next stop and the station master offered to let me phone from his office, and I spoke to Yves’ son Sebastien, who said my mom was on her way to the station but they'd come out to get me in this other town now. He sounded irrepressibly, unaccountably cheerful.