Silber said nothing. Lately, the truth was, he hadn’t. Not even close. All he had was the image of the back of his eyelids, as his face sat in his hands for hours at a time. What sort of life was that? And, as Manning was implying, it had made him less afraid of things like a threatening letter. Months ago, he would have wanted the National Guard in there over it. But now, some woman with presumably a gun and some rapid-fire crazy talk didn’t worry him. It would probably do more for his name than anything else, he even thought, at a particularly low moment in the long pause.
“I don’t want to call the cops,” Silber finally said.
“Nobody’s asking you to, asshole. I’m on it.”
Normally, Manning taking charge would have a warming effect on Silber, but this time it felt chilling. “I think it’s a bad idea. Don’t ask me why! I just do. Not that you care.”
“I don’t, frankly,” Manning said, pulling an old-fashioned-looking cell phone of walkie-talkie proportions out of his back pocket. “And you know why? Because I’m done.”
“You’re done?”
“This has been a nightmare. We’re done after this, Bran Silber.”
Silber snorted. “Oh, that’s all you meant? Well, fine. But I beat you to it, because there’s nothing to be done with.”
Manning cocked his head to the side, not understanding.
Silber got up. He didn’t even want to be in the room for the phone call. As he opened the door to leave, he looked over his shoulder — still one to love a gesture with sky-high dramatic flair — and snapped, “Believe it, Mans. There’s nothing after this one. You’re done because I’m done. The end!”
To capture them in that era, a still would do: a young couple, closed mouths, apart — in the same room, but their bodies so very apart — frozen in a New York City apartment. It was always Asiya’s apartment those days. She, suddenly in better spirits — they seemed in a perpetual seesaw of spirits, her down, him up, her up, him down — had ordered Chinese, a stir-fry that she claimed she had made, if only to make it more special. She had meant to make it, only she couldn’t sit still those days, not enough to focus on vegetables and measurements and cutting and cooking.
Something, she could feel, was happening. Hotter, closer, more than ever.
Zal was as pale as it was impossible for summer to render a human. He was sitting hunched over an empty bowl, chopsticks poised, ready for something that was not yet coming. The already cooked meal was cooking just a bit more in a pan, for authenticity’s sake.
Asiya watched him carefully. He didn’t know.
Zachary had moved back a few weeks ago, and, just minutes after they’d shown up at the house that evening, when Asiya was sure he wouldn’t be around, he had come in and seen Zal there. Zach shouted some profanities and threw a couch pillow Zal’s way, and then he left with a slam of the door. The whole time Zal had looked down at his bowl, on the same seat, same pose, same stupor.
If he knew, he wasn’t letting on. But he didn’t, she thought — how could he? Not yet at least.
She brought the steaming stir-fry over and scooped some on his plate with rice, and they sat silently, eyeing their food. Two sounds broke through the silence: the central air on an intense blast as it had gotten so very August, more than ever, in August’s final days; and the sound of Willa, laughing or crying, her soft voice somehow tumbling down the staircase to their table.
Asiya blocked it out, sure she was crying.
Zal tried not to hear it, sure she was crying.
It had been that type of August, a time of the bloodiest angst yet for all of them.
Asiya got up from the table and took a plate of food up to Willa, whose sounds stopped the minute she entered. There was nothing but silence up there, Zal noted, and the moment Asiya left, there was just more of it. No more sobs. But also, no clatter of silverware against ceramic, either. Willa had started to eat less and less, for reasons no one could pinpoint.
He could know, and what could he do with the knowing but pretend he didn’t know, she thought. She had done it, and that was that. It was all going to be over soon.
She took a bite, recoiling a bit at how hot it was, in temperature and in spice. She put her fork down and tried to meet Zal’s eyes, still on his untouched food. “Zal,” she said gently, a few times, and finally, less gently, “Zal.”
He had looked up slowly, ever so slowly, and suddenly she thought, My God, he does know.
She shook off what she was going to say and faced what was in front of her. She looked away and said, with a harshness that was not intended, “And so what? It’s a good thing, you know. It could have been the end.”
PART IX
Once, the sky was free of hardware. .
Asiya, to Zal’s amazement, never stopped believing in God. During those weeks from late August to early September, she talked about God more than ever. And in those same conversations, she admitted something she never really had before: She was terrified of dying.
And she knew that someone who believed in God should not be, and that made it all the worse. She was constantly, it seemed, having panic attacks, in the company of Zal or alone, and she was sleeping less and less, until it seemed like she didn’t sleep at all. The extreme sleep deprivation led to more panic attacks, but also to hallucinations, more of what she thought might be valuable information about what was to come. She was constantly asking Zal how it was that everyone on earth wasn’t preoccupied with death, the inevitable it. How did they eat their meals and have their sex and go for their jogs and cuddle their pets and watch their television and meanwhile, at any given moment, it could strike down upon them, take them or their loved one or all of them, without even the tip of a hat to logic or reason or rationality, not to mention decency or generosity or humanity. How did they keep going in the face of it all? Why was it like a plane in turbulence, every single man and woman feeling it, feeling it very strongly, and yet never raising their chins to look up from those Condé Nast Travelers or whatever they were reading, never risking actually admitting they were scared, perhaps worrying that acknowledging it would have a domino effect, that everyone else would be forced to acknowledge it, and then what? How could they possibly endure their fear, that perhaps the only thing keeping them going was that very denial, perhaps the only thing worse than cold black death was the facing of it, the looking it straight in the eye, not when it was near, but before it was — though it always was before, wasn’t it? Reality was just one big prelude to the very end.
Why are you even thinking about it? Zal would interrupt, sometimes sounding gentle but often sounding irritated, and then of course he’d almost instantly regret asking. He knew, of course. Asiya said it over and over: We’re this close. And while she seemed also to insist they’d be okay, she felt like they were on the verge of not being so. And it was as if death was a sort of great black-winged visitor that would swoop down on them suddenly and soon, and while he would miss them, possibly reject them even, he’d cause all sorts of chaos in their vicinity and have his way with their community and claim them, if not their lives, by changing everything. That couldn’t be avoided, Asiya declared. There was no getting around the fact that nothing would be the same after the first third of that month, September.
And when the police knocked on her door — one of those nights when she and Zal were apart, a fight night, an evening when the increasing tensions of that period had come to a boil and overflowed and left Zal wordlessly, almost silently even, in the face of her screaming, walking out, seemingly never coming back, and her, as in all fights of that era, eventually numb and mute — and told her she was being arrested for threats against Bran Silber and the World Trade Center, she didn’t even blink an eye. Something had told her, even while writing the first draft of that letter, that this could come about, and that if this was all that came about, at least she’d have done her duty. The only thing that surprised her about the whole ordeal was that they kept asking her to spell her name over and over — something she was used to, to an extent, but never so many times — eventually getting to their real point, she supposed, in making her jump through those hoops: “ASS-ya? Is that right? Hispanic? Indian? A Muslim name?”