Chapter 5 Summary
Keith enters the park and he is struck by how ordinary everything seems. He is carrying the briefcase and wants to turn back; he passes the tennis courts and wants to throw the offending object in the reservoir. Once he reaches her apartment building, he climbs the six flights of stairs and knocks on her door. She is a little wary but lets him in as he starts to explain that he had not meant to wait so long to return the briefcase, which he had tried to express on the phone yesterday. She explains that she had not canceled the credit cards because she thought the entire bag was lost in the rubble. The woman is about his age, a light-skinned black woman; she offers him some water. He tells her he found her name in the directory but did not think to check her name against the other list to see if she was alive. There is a pause, and he asks if she would like to make sure everything is still in the briefcase. Quickly she says no.
They make small talk about where they work and Keith prepares to leave; one hand is on the doorknob and the other is on the briefcase. She smiles as he realizes his error, done out of habit, he supposes. They relax and she waves him to a seat on the couch, where she serves him tea and cookies. Her name is Florence Givens; since that day, she has done nothing but sit in her apartment. An hour later they are still talking. She had been looking at her computer screen but did not hear the plane until she was thrown under her desk—it happened that quickly. A friend from Philadelphia called just at that moment and had no idea what had happened; she wanted to talk about an upcoming visit. Florence remembers being wet from the sprinklers, men tearing their shirts and using the cloth for masks. She was one of many trying to escape down the stairwells, holding on to one another in the dense smoke.
It is clear to Keith that Florence has not talked about the event in such detail before now, and perhaps she can do so with him because he was there and understands. Once she stumbled and fell and she felt panic at the thought of being trampled, but an elderly man helped her up and talked to her until she was able to again move with the crowd. There were flames in the elevator. Someone said he thought it was an earthquake. Water was passed up the stairwell from below, and firemen were running up the stairs into the smoke and fire. Florence saw one of the maintenance men she used to tease with running up the stairs with a crowbar, perhaps to pry open the elevators. Keith remembers seeing the same man with a hard hat on his head, and it seems somehow important that he had been brought from the smoke and terror into this room today. Keith lights a cigarette for her and she begins the story again. He is ready to listen again carefully, to find himself in the crowd.
Nina warned Lianne about the kind of man who is the “model of dependability” with his male friends and is all the things a friend should be—but is “hell on wheels” for women. That is exactly the man Lianne married in Keith. Now he is a “hovering presence” in her life. He spends his days doing ritualistic exercises to strengthen his injured wrist and spending time with his...
(This entire section contains 1402 words.)
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son, who loves nothing more than to play catch until he is exhausted. Lianne is beginning to see a man she never knew before.
Dr. Harold Apter is a consulting physician for patients with Alzheimer’s disease, and Lianne periodically drops off the writings from her group. Today she tells the doctor she would like to increase the number of meetings to twice a week, but he tells her to make it about them, not her. They should not feel as if there is an urgency to say and write everything before it is too late; they should look forward to their time together, not feel threatened.
In the next meeting they express their fears and beliefs and doubts about God, and Lianne encourages them to speak and argue. She needs these men and women because they are the “living breath of the thing that killed her father.” In all their discussions about whether God is to blame for the tragedy, whether He allowed it, or whether He loves the ones who lived more than those who died, none of them mentions the terrorists. There are no angry words, despite Lianne’s prompting, about the nineteen men who came here to kill and destroy. One man says we can get mad at the man who smokes too much and dies of lung cancer, or the man who overeats and has a heart attack, or the driver who hits a pedestrian—but we do not know what to do with these men, for they are “a million miles outside” anything we know. Lianne struggles with the idea of God and would like nothing more than to “snuff out the pulse” of the tenuous faith she has held for most of her life.
Keith has always felt strange to himself, but now he is different because he is watching. Every second he notices things, and nothing seems familiar. Justin is speaking only in monosyllabic words as part of a class experiment, and Keith is just as slow, drifting into spells of introspection. He discovers something is always happening if he chooses to look.
Lianne hears the continual sound of Middle Eastern, Islamic music emanating from the second floor and wonders why the woman, Elena, insists on playing this particular music at this particular time. As Lianne walks by, she hears the sound of men breathing in an “urgent rhythmic pattern” and again asks herself why now. She has to force herself to stop reading the newspaper stories and the profiles of the dead; she tells people she wants to leave the city, but they laugh and tell her they know she will not go. For the first time in fifteen days, she and her ex-husband do more than sleep in her bed. After coming home from a run, Lianne asks Keith if he knows anything about what Justin uses their binoculars for at the siblings’ house. He tells her they are searching the skies. The girl, Karen, had been home sick on that day and saw the plane that hit Tower One from her forty-story apartment building known as Godzilla.
Whether she really saw it or not, the three children are now watching the skies, waiting for it to happen again. Justin is in denial about the towers coming down. He knows they were hit but does not want to believe they came down, even though both his parents told him they did. Lianne asks about the name Bill Lawton, and Keith says he only knows because their son accidentally slipped and told the secret. Robert, Katie’s brother, heard the name on the news, at school, or somewhere, and it was associated with that day. What he thinks is “Bill Lawton” is actually “bin Laden.” Before he shut down the conversation, Justin told him Bill Lawton has a long beard, wears a long robe, and flies planes. He speaks thirteen languages, though he only speaks English to his wives. He has the power to poison foods but only some kinds, and someone is working on the list. He does not wear shoes anywhere he goes. Kate is old enough to have heard the truth, but she has clearly decided to perpetuate the myth.
The conversation gets personal. Lianne reminds Keith that two of his friends had been murdered in the attacks, and Keith tells her a third has been taken to a burn unit in Baltimore, near his family. She asks him why he is still here and if he is planning to stay. They decide they have forgotten how to talk to one another, but perhaps that is what went wrong the first time—they examined everything and “it practically killed us.” Now the friction seems to be gone, and they may be ready to “sink” into their “little lives.”
