Outside the restaurant, three people were killed by the initial explosion, and two others died during ambulance rides to the hospital; another thirty-seven were injured. Inside the restaurant, twenty-three people were killed instantly, and fourteen more would die within the next twenty-four hours. Forty-one people survived the blast, but thirteen of them suffered serious injures that required long hospital stays and intensive rehabilitation. It was a highly effective and economical suicide bombing. The bomber had spent only $436 to make his bomb, so it had cost him a little over ten dollars a head.
He would eventually be identified as a Syrian American born in Seattle and raised in upper-class comfort by his Muslim father and Catholic mother. He’d graduated from Lakeside Upper School and Seattle University, and had been working toward his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Washington. He was engaged to another Ph.D. candidate, a French American woman who sang lead for a local folk band. The FBI and local police would investigate the suicide bomber for a year but would find no evidence that he’d engaged in or espoused terrorist activity or philosophy. They’d find no one who had ever heard the man express an anti-American sentiment. He was a registered and consistent voter who preferred moderate Democrats but whose best friend was a local Republican fund-raiser. Over the last five years, the bomber had made equal monetary contributions to Israeli and Palestinian charities. Exactly equal, right down to the penny. The investigators would conclude the bomber was either the most careful, eccentric, and invisible terrorist of all time, or an unsolvable mystery. The FBI had no ability to deal with the existential, and the American public was notoriously hungry for resolution, so the bomber was finally diagnosed as one more lone nut in the long American history of lonesome killers.
But the bomber hadn’t thought of himself as crazy or lonesome as he walked toward Good Food. He’d been listening to the voices in his head and following their orders. Content and proud of his commitment, he’d been smiling when he stepped into the restaurant. Right before he exploded the bomb, she’d seen his smile and thought for a moment that she knew him. Her waiter had disappeared, and her husband and sons were strangers to her, and she’d wondered if this dark-skinned man had come to rescue her. A ridiculous notion, to be sure, but she’d been smiling back at him when he detonated the bomb he had taped to his chest.
She’d been knocked unconscious by the explosion and woke crushed by the terrible weight of dead bodies. Pushing and crawling through anonymous body parts and building debris, she rescued herself. Bloody and bruised but not seriously hurt, not really hurt at all when compared to all of the other survivors, she emerged from the wreckage. People were screaming and dying all around her. They looked up at the skyscrapers and expected them to come crashing down. They expected airplanes to fall out of the sky and catch the city on fire. But this disaster was not that disaster; this explosion was small and real, while that other explosion was larger and distant and existed only on film and video and in memory. Here, in the aftermath, real sirens wailed. Real fire trucks and police cars arrived from all directions. News helicopters filled the sky. Rescuers pulled the bodies of the dead and living from the tangle of cement and metal and wood, from a building reduced to its basic elements. As if she were an innocent bystander, an objective journalist, she watched all of it happen and took mental notes. Six pairs of paramedics performed CPR on two men and four women. A horribly burned man, his skin peeling off his hands and arms in long, bloody strips, wailed for his wife. A little black girl and a little white boy hugged each other in the back of an ambulance. Wearing a soldier’s combat bucket hat, a homeless black man pushed his shopping cart in circles and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” On the ground around her were plates and forks and spoons and bowls and salt and paper shakers and chairs and tables and aprons and napkins and one baked potato half wrapped in aluminum foil. A white man in a tattered gray suit wept over the mutilated body of another white man wearing another tattered gray suit. Somewhere in the distance, she heard a radio playing the Latin Playboys. She didn’t know which song, but she recognized the harmonies. Across the street, in a sixth-floor window, a white woman leaned out and filmed it all with a video camera.
“Are you okay?” a man asked her.
She turned to look at him. He was a short forty-something Caucasian in a black leather coat. Handsome, with kind eyes and a stupid mustache, he was maybe twenty pounds overweight and would certainly carry thirty extra pounds in ten more years and forty in twenty and so on and so on. The inevitable obesity of the American male! But for now, he looked like the sexy bass player for a bad garage band. Maybe his belly was soft, but his art was rock-hard! In another place or time, she would have smiled at him, flirted, and possibly thought of him the next time she made love with her awful husband. Why was she thinking about sex at a time like this? Worse, why was she thinking about adulterous sex? The world, or at least a small part of the world, was coming to an end, and she was thinking about another man’s naked body. How perverse! Or was it a reflexive and natural reaction? With so much death and pain around her, wouldn’t it be good to throw this man down in the middle of the rubble and make love to him? Wouldn’t it be good to create life, to conceive it? After all, didn’t these self-martyring terrorists believe they would be rewarded with seventy-two virgins in heaven? Political posturing aside, didn’t a few thousand stupid men believe terrorism was another way to get laid? What would happen if the United States offered seventy-three virgins to each terrorist if he would abstain from violence? Instead of deploying an army of pissed-off U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan and Iraq, we could send a mercy team of patriotic virgins. Oh, God, what is happening to me, she thought, I’m losing my mind. She was in shock, of course, but she wondered if her brain had been more seriously damaged by the blast than she’d thought. Maybe her skull had been ripped open and her brain was exposed for all to see. Wouldn’t that be the most extreme form of public nudity? Wouldn’t that be the greatest shame? My brains are leaking out of my head, she thought, and I don’t even know it. She touched the top of her head and expected to feel soft tissue but felt only her strong and bony skull. She was going crazy, and she welcomed it. She wanted to be crazy.