most. But Claire had a young child, and it was so late at night. Claire had her number, at least—but why hadn’t Fiona tackled her and made her write down her own? She didn’t have Kurt’s either. Running around the city to search for her was out of the question. She should go get a sweater, but she didn’t want to move.
There was nothing to do but keep calm. Cecily was in the air, and hopefully they’d let her plane land. What were the odds that Claire would show up for work tomorrow morning? What were the odds that the city would be thrown into such chaos that Fiona would never find her again?
She was surprised by her numbness, at least regarding the televised carnage, the bloodied, sobbing people on the streets. Was it because it wasn’t her city, or because the rituals of outrage and grief and fear felt so familiar now, so practiced? Or maybe it was the pain pills she’d popped after dinner for her hand.
She was struck by the selfish thought that this was not fair to her. That she’d been in the middle of a different story, one that had nothing to do with this. She was a person who was finding her daughter, making things right with her daughter, and there was no room in that story for the idiocy of extreme religion, the violence of men she’d never met. Just as she’d been in the middle of a story about divorce when the towers fell in New York City, throwing everyone’s careful plans to shit. Just as she’d once been in a story about raising her own brother, growing up with her brother in the city on their own, making it in the world, when the virus and the indifference of greedy men had steamrolled through. She thought of Nora, whose art and love were interrupted by assassination and war. Stupid men and their stupid violence, tearing apart everything good that was ever built. Why couldn’t you ever just go after your life without tripping over some idiot’s dick?
Richard’s show: No one knew if the preview could happen on Monday as planned. His publicist called, and his manager. “They need to calm down,” Richard said. “You’d think they’d have better things to worry about.”
Serge said, “We’re screwed. The whole world is screwed.”
He hadn’t stopped moving for the last hour and a half.
“I don’t mean to sound callous,” Fiona said, “but we’ve been through this in the States. And it’s not—”
“No,” Serge said, “whatever, a hundred dead people, I don’t care. That could have been a bus crash. What I care is, now they elect right wing across Europe. And then, yes: You, me, all of us, we’re screwed. Everyone acts from fear, the next year, two years. What happens, you think, to people like us?”
Fiona felt herself sinking. She said, “Things might seem different in the morning.”
Serge wheeled on her. “When people are afraid, we get the Christian Taliban. We get it here, you get it there, and we’re all in jail. We’re all in jail.”
Richard had been so quiet for so long that Fiona kept wondering if he’d fallen asleep. He stretched his arms overhead and said, “Serge, that’s enough.”
“I’m going out there.” Serge grabbed his helmet from the counter. “Hollande can fuck his curfew.”
Fiona expected Richard to stop him, expected Serge to stop himself, but Serge was out the door. Richard’s phone rang again, but he ignored it.
“I didn’t mean to offend him,” she said. “I’m not naive, you know that.”
He said, “It’s always a matter, isn’t it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it’s always only temporary.”
1986
Roman had a scar on the meat of his left arm from his smallpox vaccine: an indented circle made of a thousand tiny dots. Yale could put his thumb there. He could put his tongue there.
* * *
—
Roman would come over drunk. It seemed to take some alcohol to get him to show up without all the baggage of twenty-seven years of Mormonism. Roman would call at 8 p.m. on a Saturday and say he’d be over “in a while,” but he wouldn’t come till after midnight. And during that time, Yale would blast music, start drinking himself. Because he didn’t want to go out and miss Roman, but it was pathetic to sit there on the couch watching reruns and waiting.
* * *
—
Roman had silver fillings in his molars, and he always needed to blow his nose