How could God let this happen? Where was God when this happened?
Benny T. was glad he was not a man of faith because he would lose it after this.
I am closer to God than ever, Rosellen wrote.
This is the devil. This is hell. All that fire and pain. Never mind God. This is hell.
Omar H. was afraid to go out on the street in the days after. They were looking at him, he thought.
I didn’t see them holding hands. I wanted to see that, Rosellen wrote.
Carmen G. wanted to know whether everything that happens to us has to be part of God’s plan.
I am closer to God than ever, am closer, will be closer, shall be closer.
Eugene A., in a rare appearance, wrote that God knows things we don’t know.
Ashes and bones. That’s what’s left of God’s plan.
But when the towers fell, Omar wrote.
I keep hearing they were holding hands when they jumped.
If God let this happen, with the planes, then did God make me cut my finger when I was slicing bread this morning?
They wrote and then read what they’d written, each in turn, and there were remarks and then exchanges and then monologues.
“Show us the finger,” Benny said. “We want to kiss it.”
Lianne encouraged them to speak and argue. She wanted to hear everything, the things everybody said, ordinary things, and the naked statements of belief, and the depth of feeling, the passion that saturated the room. She needed these men and women. Dr. Apter’s comment disturbed her because there was truth in it. She needed these people. It was possible that the group meant more to her than it did to the members. There was something precious here, something that seeps and bleeds. These people were the living breath of the thing that killed her father.
“God says something happens, then it happens.”
“I don’t respect God no more, after this.”
“We sit and listen and God tells us or doesn’t.”
“I was walking down the street to get my hair cut. Somebody comes running.”
“I was on the crapper. I hated myself later. People said where were you when it happened. I didn’t tell them where I was.”
“But you remember to tell us. That’s beautiful, Benny.”
They interrupted, gestured, changed the subject, talked over each other, shut their eyes in thought or puzzlement or in dismal re-experience of the event itself.
“What about the people God saved? Are they better people than the ones who died?”
“It’s not ours to ask. We don’t ask.”
“A million babies die in Africa and we can’t ask.”
“I thought it was war. I thought it was war,” Anna said. “I stayed inside and lit a candle. It’s the Chinese, my sister said, who she never trusted with the bomb.”
Lianne struggled with the idea of God. She was taught to believe that religion makes people compliant. This is the purpose of religion, to return people to a childlike state. Awe and submission, her mother said. This is why religion speaks so powerfully in laws, rituals and punishments. And it speaks beautifully as well, inspiring music and art, elevating consciousness in some, reducing it in others. People fall into trances, people literally go to the ground, people crawl great distances or march in crowds stabbing themselves and whipping themselves. And other people, the rest of us, maybe we’re rocked more gently, joined to something deep in the soul. Powerful and beautiful, her mother said. We want to transcend, we want to pass beyond the limits of safe understanding, and what better way to do it than through make-believe.
Eugene A. was seventy-seven years old, hair gelled and spiked, a ring in his ear.
“I was scrubbing the sink for once in my life when the phone rings. It’s my ex-wife,” he said, “that I haven’t talked to in like seventeen years, is she even alive or dead, calling from somewhere I can’t even pronounce it, in Florida. I say what. She says never mind what. That same voice of no respect. She says turn on TV.”
“I had to watch at a neighbor,” Omar said.
“Seventeen years, not one word. Look what has to happen before she finally gets it in her head to call. Turn on TV, she tells me.”
The cross talk continued.
“I don’t forgive God what He did.”
“How do you explain this to a child whose mother or father?”
“You lie to children.”
“I wanted to see that, the ones that were holding hands.”
“When you see something happening, it’s supposed to be real.”
“But God. Did God do this or not?”
“You’re looking right at it. But it’s not really happening.”
“He has the big things that He does. He shakes the world,” said Curtis B.
“I would say to someone at least he didn’t die with a tube in his stomach or wearing a bag for his waste.”
“Ashes and bones.”
“I am closer to God, I know it, we know it, they know it.”
“This is our prayer room,” Omar said.
No one wrote a word about the terrorists. And in the exchanges that followed the readings, no one spoke about the terrorists. She prompted them. There has to be something you want to say, some feeling to express, nineteen men come here to kill us.
She waited, not certain what it was she wanted to hear. Then Anna C. mentioned a man she knew, a fireman, lost in one of the towers.
All along Anna had been slightly apart, interjecting only once or twice, matter-of-factly. Now she used hand gestures to help direct her story, sitting hard and squat in a flimsy folding chair, and no one interrupted.
“If he has a heart attack, we blame him. Eats, overeats, no exercise, no common sense. That’s what I told the wife. Or he dies of cancer. Smoked and couldn’t stop. That was Mike. If it’s cancer, then it’s lung cancer and we blame him. But this, what happened, it’s way too big, it’s outside someplace, on the other side of the world. You can’t get to these people or even see them in their pictures in the paper. You can see their faces but what does it mean? Means nothing to call them names. I’m a name-caller from before I was born. Do I know what to call these people?”
Lianne suspected what this was. It was a response defined in terms of revenge and she welcomed this, the small intimate wish, however useless in a hellstorm.
“He dies in a car crash or walking across the street, hit by a car, you can kill the person in your mind a thousand times, the driver. You couldn’t do the actual thing, in all honesty, because you don’t have the wherewithal, but you could think it, you could see it in your mind and get some trade-off from that. But here, with these people, you can’t even think it. You don’t know what to do. Because they’re a million miles outside your life. Which, besides, they’re dead.”
There was religion, then there was God. Lianne wanted to disbelieve. Disbelief was the line of travel that led to clarity of thought and purpose. Or was this simply another form of superstition? She wanted to trust in the forces and processes of the natural world, this only, perceptible reality and scientific endeavor, men and women alone on earth. She knew there was no conflict between science and God. Take one with the other. But she didn’t want to. There were the scholars and philosophers she’d studied in school, books she’d read as thrilling dispatches, personal, making her shake at times, and there was the sacred art she’d always loved. Doubters created this work, and ardent believers, and those who’d doubted and then believed, and she was free to think and doubt and believe simultaneously. But she didn’t want to. God would crowd her, make her weaker. God would be a presence that remained unimaginable. She wanted this only, to snuff out the pulse of the shaky faith she’d held for much of her life.
He began to think into the day, into the minute. It was being here, alone in time, that made this happen, being away from routine stimulus, all the streaming forms of office discourse. Things seemed still, they seemed clearer to the eye, oddly, in ways he didn’t understand. He began to see what he was doing. He noticed things, all the small
