What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife? A Memoir

After Jamie’s physical recovery, we left Israel and settled in Washington, D.C. – a new city, a new place in which to start over, to begin this new beginning we’d been granted by chance.

We grabbed a one-bedroom apartment in the neighborhood of Mount Pleasant, where Salvadorian fruit sellers and Mexican CD pushers mixed with not-for-profit ideologues and lawyers at the Justice Department, where the smells of fish and coffee and smoking tortillas mingled with turbulent currents of hip-hop and reggaeton.

We’d chosen to live in the city despite landing teaching jobs at a Jewish high school in suburban Rockville, Maryland. We’d chosen the corner bakery, the walk-in hardware store, and the neighborhood bank over manicured lawns and strip malls disguised as small towns. We’d chosen bustle and distraction over sterility and calm. And despite fleeing Israel with our first child growing in Jamie’s belly – this new life only months away from choking out her first breath – we’d chosen risk along with the rewards. Two months after settling in to our urban apartment, the pop-pop of gunfire echoed one night in the dark, followed by an ambulance siren’s wail. Looking out from our fifth-floor window, we watched the police and television crews gather on Park Avenue at the corner of Mount Pleasant Street. And then the ambulance, lights turned off, left our building’s front stoop with its cargo, rolling away slowly, silently.

Jamie looked over. “Does that mean someone just died?”

“I think so.”

We looked at each other, neither of us capable of speaking, understanding nothing more could be said without saying everything, without asking whether we had made the right decision, without asking whether we could handle the slightest hint of danger given the things we’d fled to arrive at this place. Our new home.

“We should go to bed. I need to go to bed,” she said.

“I know.”

She took the first shift in our one-bedroom apartment’s sole bathroom. As she got ready, I absently launched an online chess game, seeking to bury my head in an abstract haze of strategic calculations and precise movements. While the screen told me that my opponent was an intermediate player from Ireland, I knew better – knew that the adversary I was about to face resided in my mind. I shut my eyes and tried to channel Bobby Fischer, who before the greatest match of his life, said, “I don’t believe in psychology. I believe in good moves.” I nodded. You don’t believe in psychology. You believe in distractions, I thought before escaping into the pixelated board where light and dark pieces were pitted opposite each other. I played black – on the defensive from the start – as my opponent probed for vulnerabilities easy to find. I touched the mouse to various pieces, illuminating squares where movement was possible, revealing a pawn blocked, a bishop on the move. I found solace in the knight, in jumping over everything.

“Come to bed,” Jamie said, fatigued and flossing her teeth. She had come out of the bathroom and was standing over my shoulder. “Just close it.”

“But I’ll lose.”

She looked at me sadly and tilted her said as if to say, Please don’t be a fool, before trailing off into the bedroom. I shut down the computer and angled toward the window for one last look into the dark. The television vans with their retractable antennas had left. The gaggle of police cars honking and flashing had left. In their place was something new – a police trailer, long and white with blue lights ignited on its roof, still, unmoving. It was an anti-gang unit.

For the next week, that trailer idled on our block at all hours, the officers always inside, unseen, watching.

Work had brought us to the capital. We’d both been hired by the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School (JDS), the city’s eminent non-denominational Jewish high school, after an unconventional joint interview. Expecting separate chit-chats, we were surprised when the principal and administrators shepherded us into the conference room together, motioned for us to sit around a circular oak table, and commenced with the interview as though we were a tag team. When a question was lobbed before us – “How would you describe your teaching philosophy?” – it was nearly impossible to discern whether it had been directed at anyone in particular or simply thrown up for grabs. Each time I felt the desire to tag Jamie’s hand and exit the ring.

Whether they knew Jamie had been in the Hebrew University bombing was unclear, and we hoped somehow they did not. We had braced ourselves for it to sneak in off handedly during a traditional interview, but in this chaotic, debate-style approach, I could feel it lurking in the opposing team’s playbook, ready for it to be hurled at us while Jamie delivered brutal clotheslines and I took a series of elbows to the face. When the interview was over, Jamie had clearly won on points – they smiled every time she opened her mouth.

Fortunately, I was offered a teaching position as well, most likely to sweeten the deal, my offer little more than her signing bonus. But Jamie decided to decline JDS’s offer, choosing instead to stay at home for the year, waiting for our infant to arrive, waiting to be a mother, to be the caregiver, finally. And so I found myself navigating D.C.’s public transportation system alone on the first day of school.

Standing at the corner of Park and Mount Pleasant, surrounded by historic row houses and bundled against a crisp, early autumn morning, I waited for the H4 bus to Cleveland Park, where I could catch the Metro to Rockville. It was before dawn. Around me were construction workers, mothers holding infants and high school kids wearing baggy pants, bobbing to their MP3 players. Scanning the group, noticing the dented lunch boxes, the aluminum Thermoses and stylized backpacks, a surprising thought bubbled to the surface: I’m not looking for a bomb. As the H4 approached, I stumbled forward to the door, shoved by the realization that it had been years since I’d boarded a bus without wondering if my flesh would be torn open by a spray of metal. And as we vibrated downhill, crossing through Rock Creek National Park, I looked around me – at the mothers holding their children and the students awkwardly flirting – and was overcome by amazement, thinking, These people aren’t afraid of dying. They aren’t suspicious. For a moment, I remembered what normal life, life removed from a war zone, felt like.

At Cleveland Park, I followed the crowd to the Metro station and caught the Red Line north to Rockville. As we rocketed underground, I realized I had misjudged the commute. I was late. When the train finally reached the suburbs, I hustled to JDS, splitting hedges and hopping guard rails to make up time. When the school finally came into sight, my first class was due to start in only fifteen minutes, and I had to make a choice: cut down a steep hill behind the school, or take the long, winding sidewalk around the sprawling campus to the main entrance: thirty seconds versus three minutes. I took the hill, failing to notice the smooth, slick sheets of moss, wet from the morning, blanketing the slope. I tried to compensate by alternating my steps, digging my heels in as though I were ice climbing, feeling my soles slide and then, suddenly, lose contact with the ground. I stabbed my hands backwards and slid down the hill as though wheels were attached to my palms and feet. When I reached the bottom and stood up, amazed that I had somehow managed to keep the seat of my slacks from hitting the mud, I saw the blood spurting from my right palm.

Cutting through a back door to the school, I found a restroom and grabbed a handful of paper towels, then slid into class as the bell sounded. Everyone looked up. I wrote a name on the board and introduced myself to my first class – an eleventh-grade survey on biblical texts – while squeezing paper towels above my head to staunch the bleeding.

“What happened?” a giggling, Abercrombie-clad girl asked.

“Yeah, you okay?” asked a few others.

“I’m fine. Just a first-day wound.”

“How’d it happen?”

“Oh, just some newfangled hazing ritual rookie teachers must undergo. I’m fortunate Rabbi Sandler called off the pit bull so quickly. You should see the English teachers.”

The teenagers, many of them Ivy-League bound, gazed back at me, eyebrows cocked. They were not impressed.

Despite the inauspicious start, I was complimented early in the year by the school’s administrators for my innovative and effective teaching. I was making things look easy. Take, for example, my toughest assignment: seventh-grade Bible studies. The curriculum entailed a thematic run through the Torah, from God breathing life into Adam’s nostrils in Genesis to Moses’ death upon Mount Nebo in Deuteronomy. Now, most middle-school students are so flummoxed by hormones that they can devolve, without warning, into banana-throwing chimpanzees during even the most engaging of classes. My little chimpanzees were an entirely different sub-species, coming from some of the most prominent Jewish families in the nation’s capital – families who produced exceedingly intelligent and witty children. Among my students were the children of prominent journalists, high-ranking politicians, and ambassadors. These students were capable not only of throwing objects with their hands but with their minds as well. Particularly when they were bored.

My solution was to transform the class into a simulated FBI operation, grouping students by fours and fives into field offices – Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston – with me as the chief stationed in Washington. The text was our playground, and when the monotony of learning became too much to bear, or when the curriculum demanded that I put them through the rigor of learning an interpretive skill, I’d reach into a drawer, don a police cap and pronounce, Get into your FBI agencies as a bunch of twelve-year-olds scurried to their ‘field office.’ Then, sitting quietly, ready for their instructions, they’d eye me intently, ready for the textual mystery that needed to be solved.

Things were going well on the surface, a surface that appeared to most everyone as smooth and placid. But that’s the problem with still bodies of water – you can glance down and, suddenly, see your reflection.

Deep within, things were off. It began with suffocation. During one of my first classes, while my eleventh-graders were busy generating philosophical questions about the Garden of Eden, an internal drawstring was suddenly pulled, and in a beat my lungs constricted. Hands on my chest, I tried to catch myself and started gasping, unable to take in much more than a shallow breath. Silently standing and retreating to a bathroom, I locked the door and gripped the sink, light-headed, leaning into the mirror. In subsequent months, this would become the norm, suffocating while checking my email or walking to class, unable to expand my lungs, unable to breathe deeply enough to feel sustained, to feel safe. Then one evening, while I was at home grading papers, it happened. I heard Jamie say, “You’re not okay.”

“I’m fine,” I responded, mouth open, trying to force the air in, frustrated and amazed by my inability to perform such a routine, automatic function – to take a breath.

“You don’t look it.”

“I just can’t breathe, is all.”

“Is all?”

“Yeah, is all.” I tried forcing a yawn, opening wide and attempting an intake into the back of my throat. After five seconds frozen in that position, a yawn came, and the sensation of oxygen enriching cells tingled my chest. I was ecstatic.

“Just had to yawn. See?”

“Mm-hmm.”

Jamie had been in therapy for over a year, and had made significant steps toward mitigating much of the raw anxiety that she felt after the trauma. This success compelled her to drop subtle hints about my own refusal to seek help – “You’re an idiot, just go.” But I refused, believing that I was fine, thinking, I just can’t breathe, is all. And anyway, I was adjusting to a new city, navigating a new job, and expecting our first child. Symptoms of stress didn’t seem worrisome. These were just jitters. Nothing that wouldn’t dissipate over time.

Such rationalizations were quickly flooded by reality when Jamie started contractions just as Tropical Storm Isabel was forming off the coast. We drove to the hospital, through Isabel’s outer bands of rain and wind, on September 17, a six-foot storm surge building up in the Atlantic and making its way to Chesapeake Bay. It took nearly twenty-four hours for the waves to course through the varicose waterways leading into Washington, and as the waters began to pour into the Potomac River,¹ its banks beginning to crest, Jamie began pushing. I held on to her leg as something emerged. The midwife leaned in and pressed a blue bulb syringe into an indistinguishable mass that immediately popped out in response. It was as though a crumpled, rubber mask had been flipped inside out and formed into a face. “That’s my daughter,” I whispered at the moment of recognition, the moment they placed her on Jamie’s chest, the infant’s mouth instinctively suckling as Jamie’s milk flowed and the rain pounded outside. The world had shifted irreversibly; I was a father. A permanent caregiver. And while love came at first sight, so too did its consequences. Jamie was right. I was not okay.

The stress of parenting quickly became intolerable. Caretaking, caring for another – another who needed me for survival, for comfort, for sleep – I couldn’t do it, at least not well, having already done more than I could bear in Israel.

I never yelled. Never hit. Never expressed anything but a gentleness that belied what was actually going on inside me, my lungs tightening even more, my stomach eating itself. But I shook off such symptoms daily, hourly, minute-by-minute, thinking, Calm down. She’s beautiful. You’re in love. Just be okay. But I wasn’t, and so I became obsessed with making things right for my daughter, Noa, with making her okay instead.

And Noa did have a serious problem that needed fixing: sleep. At three months, she wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t stay down for more than thirty minutes at a time, this tiny mess having absorbed everything in the womb, having felt the umbilical cord’s constriction. A PTSD baby, born neurotic, always alert and sensing a coming threat. Noa seemed unable to handle the dark, just like her father, who took it upon himself to “cure” her infant insomnia, to make her relax, as if such a strategy has ever worked: I’ll make her relax.

Jamie should have known that I was the problem. She should have said, “This will pass.” However, suffering herself from a mind-numbing fatigue induced by Noa’s all-night escapades, Jamie agreed that we had to do something.

We first considered sleep consultants, then tranquilizers, before settling on a fascist regimen outlined in a book recommended by mothers online, The No-Cry Sleep Solution. The title appealed. I didn’t like the crying; I liked sleep; and most of all, I liked solutions. The book promised results: a baby who would sleep through the night, a serene baby for the ages. Photographs of sleeping babies punctuated the pages to prove the soundness of its methodologies. And not just any babies, mind you, but the author’s own children, slumped in high chairs at the dinner table or drooling on pillows, eyes closed, page after page. Amazing. We bought it, and I bought into its ninety-five-step plan, tracking sleep patterns on spreadsheets and plotting trends. I kept a pad next to the bed and marked every night-waking precisely, seven, eight times a night. Up at 3:30. Down at 3:48.

I was stubborn, committed, and utterly useless. Things were not good.

I wasn’t sleeping. Noa wasn’t sleeping. Jamie was growing impatient. My yawns were increasingly becoming both a genuine physiological response to sleep deprivation as well as desperate attempts to take in enough oxygen when normal breathing failed me. But instead of relenting, I upped the ante and went all in with a measure the book called “Pantley’s Gentle Removal Plan,” named after the author, a pox on her name.

According to the book, the problem with our pacifier-using baby was something it called the “sucking-to-sleep association.” In short, Noa was a full-blown sucking addict, only able to settle down once a nipple, or a nipple-substitute, was between her lips. The problem came when her pacifier, having dutifully fulfilled its mission, slipped from her parted, sleeping lips, at which point she would startle. My job, according to Pantley’s Gentle Removal Plan, was to wean her from this rubber dependence using trickery. I was to launch a smoke-and-mirrors strategy after pulling the pacifier from her lips as she slept:

Often, especially at first, your baby … will startle and root for the nipple. Try to very gently hold his mouth closed with your finger under his chin, or apply pressure to his chin, just under his lips, at the same time rocking or swaying with him. (Use your key words if you have developed them.) If he struggles against this … go ahead and replace the nipple or pacifier, but repeat the removal process as often as necessary until he falls asleep.²

Use your key words if you have developed them. The only key words I’d developed were fuck, shit, and fucking shit. Still, I was diligent about the technique, memorizing the steps and practicing the chin hold – thumb under the chin and index finger on the nose – which was supposed to mimic the pressure of a pacifier lodged in Noa’s little mouth. Whenever she drifted to sleep, I’d pounce, wiggle the pacifier away, and squeeze her mouth closed. This often resulted in flailing, not the promise of continued slumber. After the first episode – watching me wake Noa by ripping the pacifier from her resting lips – Jamie threw in the towel. “This is absurd.” But I remained diligent, becoming the sole practitioner of Pantley’s Gentle Removal Plan. I was dedicated to its methodology, to its misguided system for imposing calm and order where none could possibly exist.

“How long do you plan to do this?” Jamie asked, completely spent after a night in which I intentionally tortured the three of us.

“The book says that we can break her, if I’m vigilant and consistent, in around ten days.”

“Ten days? You plan to take the pacifier out every time she falls asleep for ten days?”

“I guess.”

“I don’t think so.”

“But the book says we should see a major reduction in night wakings if I do this.”

“Here’s an idea: we’ll see a major reduction in night wakings if you don’t wake her by taking the pacifier out of her mouth when she’s sleeping.”

“But that’s not the plan.”

“I can’t take this for ten days.”

“But what if it’s the only way?”

Jamie looked at me, holding our daughter, who had fallen asleep in her arms while feeding, and shook her head.

For months, Jamie had been undergoing a therapy called EMDR, for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, which aided psychotherapeutic recovery through a strange blend of bi-lateral stimulations, such as alternating beeps fed into stereo headphones. The technique was a bit of a mystery, and sounded suspiciously New Age. But the woman who created EMDR, Francine Shapiro, had tested it on trauma victims, people who had gone through terrible experiences – Vietnam, sexual assault and molestation, emotional abuse³ – and claimed magical results. Jamie was also claiming magical results.

One night, after getting home from a therapy session and putting Noa to bed, Jamie sat me down on the living room couch and, with the sort of energy I usually reserved for recapping fourth-quarter comebacks or walk-off home runs, began giving a play-by-play of the day’s therapy session:

“Today was really interesting. Want to hear?”

“Sure,” I said, fidgeting.

“Okay, first thing Suzy did, after giving me the headphones and vibrating things to hold – the ones that alternate right–left in sync with the beeps – was to get me to envision a younger version of myself, not exactly my inner child, but along those lines.”

“Uh-uh.”

“So I thought about ‘her’ in my old room – you know the one in Pittsburgh that my Dad’s turned into a workout room?”

I nodded.

“So anyway, I envisioned myself in my old room, an adolescent me, and then was told to envision myself now, my present-day self, walking into the room and engaging the girl in conversation.”

“Why?”

“To help with some anxiety I’m having now.”

“From the bombing?”

“Yeah.”

“Wait, so why the imaginary girl talk?”

“Who I am relates to how I’m responding to things now.”

“Oh. Okay.” I didn’t understand.

“So anyway, I did what Suzy asked, the whole conversation thing, and it was really strange.”

I stared out the window, trying to figure out if the pulsing light atop the Washington Monument was blinking at a rate slower or faster than a true second.

“Hey, are you even listening to me?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“What did I just say?”

“You said you were in your old room talking to yourself.”

“Basically. Ask me what my conversation was about.”

“What?”

“Ask me.”

I tried to sound curious. “What was your conversation about?”

Jamie mapped it out for me, after which she said, “The really amazing thing is that after this imaginary talk, I suddenly felt amazing relief.”

“That’s great,” I said, deciding the blinking light was pulsing slightly slower than the pacing of a second hand.

“And then Suzy described what was happening in my brain. This is a simplification, but basically some of my memories are stored separate from my emotions, and the back and forth stimulations, the vibrations and stuff, make connections between each side of the brain. So it kind of helps extract emotions from one side to go along with the memories on the other. Helps reunite them so they can be processed. Kind of amazing, huh?”

“Sure,” I said, trying to sound sincere.

“You should do it.”

I laughed. “I don’t think so.”

“You should think about it. There’s another person in the practice who uses EMDR who I got a recommendation for.”

“Naw, but thanks.”

Just then Noa let out a whimper. I hopped off the sofa, crept to the doorway and peered in, hoping everything was fine, hoping she’d settle on her own – that things would just resolve themselves without the need for any intervention.

We abandoned the sleep book and Pantley’s Gentle Removal Plan, at which point I had to confront the fact that my insomnia rivaled my daughter’s. Unable to settle down most nights, I would pacify myself with the Internet, playing chess with some stranger in Singapore or finding an amateurish distraction at www.addictinggames.com. My favorite there was Kitty Cannon, a game I first encountered at JDS after hearing the giggles of middle-school boys coming from the corner of a computer lab. I snuck up on them to find students huddled around a single screen, shooting an animated cat from a silver adjustable cannon. The group’s spokesman, Ben, turned around and began a sales pitch.

“Hey Mr. H.-G., have you ever seen this?”

“Nope.”

“It’s so funny. Watch this.” He then shot a kitten, the screen scrolling in tune with its velocity across a green field riddled with explosives, razors, trampolines, and Venus Fly Traps. After bouncing off a trampoline into the air, then hitting some dynamite held by a floating balloon, which further propelled it forward, the kitten finally bounced to a bloody stop. Six hundred and seventy-five feet.

“Aw, that’s weak,” squeaked one of Ben’s sidekicks.

“Yeah, that was a bad one. I got over one thousand feet once,” Ben gloated. He pointed to the screen and explained. “See the red number? That’s the angle. You can adjust it to set the cannon any way you like. And the power bar you just have to hit at the right time, when the line is full. Want to play?”

“This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen,” I said, properly assuming my role, despite salivating internally.

“It’s not dumb, just silly.”

“Fine, but shouldn’t you guys be doing research?”

The bell rang, and everyone scattered, a smattering of Shabbat Shaloms echoing around the lab. My students had forgotten to log out, and Kitty Cannon sat idly on the screen, waiting for some action. Just once, I thought, and started playing.

Kitty Cannon began taking its toll. I fell into a pattern of consistently dozing on the Metro during my morning commute, occasionally missing my stop. At school, the complicated block schedule confounded me such that I’d realize, as my students waited for me in a classroom, that I was supposed to be teaching. And at home, simple acts, such as remembering to turn off the stove, proved challenging. At one point, I put a dirty diaper in the microwave and a burrito in the garbage, my mouth open, trying to intentionally yawn.

It got to the point that Jamie didn’t have to convince me to seek help – it was clear that I needed fixing, that I needed an intervention. Deciding to give therapy a try, I sheepishly asked Jamie for a recommendation.

“I don’t know how to do this,” I said.

“I’ll help you,” she promised, deciding upon a therapist and scheduling an appointment for me.

A week later, I found myself on the twelfth floor of a Dupont Circle office building, attempting to appear relaxed while reclining on a suede couch. Sitting across from me was Kathy⁴ – a tall, attractive blonde with a gentle manner that masked a professional ferocity.

In our first few sessions, Kathy allowed me to dance, to bob and weave, around the topic of the terrorist attack. I offered detached shrugs and averted eyes, keeping my elbows tucked close to my body, the gloves under my chin, a defensive posture. Eventually, tired of the show and the footwork, she swung. “David, let’s just lay everything on the table so we can see what’s what. It’s the first step, getting the whole story out. Which is why I’m going to ask that you please recount, in painful detail, the entire narrative of your traumatic experience, from beginning to end.”

After forty minutes of going through the chronology for the first time – plucking images of Israel from constricted layers of grey matter and placing them before us both – I walked out of her office and felt absolutely nothing. No paroxysmal convulsions brought on by recalling all the muck. No clichéd breakdowns, on my knees supplicating with fists clenched. Just disembodiment.

On the way home, I felt relief – not because any psychic healing had occurred, but rather because I’d achieved a great escape. I had managed to talk about the attack, finally, with no emotional fallout.

I was a brick wall. I was impenetrable. I was one tough fucker.

In our next session, I showed up prepared to analyze my narrative, assuming we’d spin our wheels around the story. I knew enough about psychoanalysis to suspect an impending Freudian dive into the past in order to claim it, or understand it. But I was taken aback when Kathy sat down and, after cycling through some pleasantries, said, “I think we need to talk about your guilt.”

“My guilt?”

“Yes.”

“Guilt about what?”

Kathy smiled faintly and explained that she wanted to seize upon something I’d recalled during the narrative construction of the attack. Something that I had let slip tangentially, she said. Something that stood out, she said. She always looked for the tangents, she said.

The tangent to which she referred was something I had apparently mentioned offhand, as a bit of back story, about how we had all created a magical world of make-believe in Israel in order to remain sane. We had pretended that Hebrew University was a collegial oasis of integrated study outside the greater conflict, a universally agreed-upon no-fire zone. Kathy mentioned how I had recalled for her, unprompted, my walking around the campus before the attack, quietly inspecting Palestinian workers, about the newspaper article, the one which dreamed up a hypothetical attack, about how I knew the dangers all along.

Kathy:	Do you not remember telling me about all that?
Me:	I mean, I remember it. I remember the article. And I guess I said all that stuff last time, since you clearly know it. But I honestly don’t remember talking about it.
Kathy:	You were on auto-pilot.
Me:	Yeah.
Kathy:	What we’re going to do is try to take you out of auto-pilot.
Me:	But what if I like being on auto-pilot?
Kathy:	Exactly.

Sitting before her on the sofa, picking at the parallel lines of suede running down the square cushions, I listened as she discussed the power of guilt, the overriding control it can have in obfuscating everything, in tamping down everything, in shutting off our emotional centers. That guilt was responsible for my numbness, for my ability to tell the story of Jamie being bombed without a hint of sadness or anger, without any emotional fallout. Where was the sadness? Where was the anger? Where were any of the normal stages one passes through when processing and moving beyond a trauma? I wanted Kathy to be wrong, but intuitively I knew she was right. And that was when she decided to hit hard:

Kathy:	You need to grieve.
Me:	Umm –
Kathy:	See, it’s your story. You can sit here. You can tell it – but it means nothing to you. It’s just floating, disconnected from anything real, disconnected from who you were before the attack. Because if you truly felt how the story of what happened relates to you now, you’d have grieved, or felt grief. Or sadness. Or anger.
Me:	Okay. So – what now?
Kathy:	Do you have anything tangible, anything physical that could help you?
Me:	Help me?
Kathy:	Help you access what happened. Something that you can look at or hold that recalls what happened.
Me:	Umm – I don’t know. I mean, even if I did, and I’m not saying I do, there’s nothing that it could connect with. I was caring for Jamie in the hospital, isolated, knew only that world. I never flew back for the funerals, never went to the memorial services for Ben or Marla, never really processed any of it. They’re just gone.
Kathy:	You don’t understand – forget your friends. Have you ever cried for Jamie?
Me:	What?
Kathy:	For what she experienced: the physical pain, the horror of it all, the guilt of surviving, the long recovery. In all that time you were caring for her, did you cry?
Me:	I don’t think so.
Kathy:	Forget your friends for the moment; you haven’t grieved yet for your wife. For all she lost. For all she endured. That’s your narrative before this, David, your life with Jamie. Didn’t you say she might have been pregnant?
Me:	Maybe. I don’t know.
Kathy:	Have you grieved for the fact that your first child may have been killed in the blast?
Me:	Why are you doing this?
Kathy:	I’m trying to help. You’re paralyzed. No anger. No sadness. At least not expressed as such. And yet you feel tense, can’t breathe, always feeling overwhelmed, wondering why.
Me:	I’m sad. Really, I am.
Kathy:	When was the last time you cried?
Me:	I got choked up a bit when watching the movie Magnolia recently. I get like that sometimes when watching emotionally-layered dramas, particularly those involving people struggling to overcome situations or past events. I seek them out, actually.
Kathy:	So when you’ve attained a distance, a disconnection, you’re able to feel some emotion, particularly when characters might be struggling like you have in the past. You seek out movies to feel that emotion, don’t you? To see how others, struggling like you, express their darkest, most painful emotions.
Me:	I’m not struggling.
Kathy:	You’re in therapy for a terrorist attack that’s rendered you semi-functional.
Me:	You said therapy is normal, that I shouldn’t feel like a freak when I told you I felt uncomfortable paying to talk with someone, that I felt like it was some strange form of urban prostitution.
Kathy:	That was nervous wit, not honesty.
Me:	Fine.
Kathy:	You want permission to grieve, permission to feel all those things you should be feeling, all those things characters in the movies you watch feel. But instead you feel guilty about not having prevented all this, and now feel guilty about feeling guilty. You feel guilty about not crying, about not feeling any emotion. So much guilt.
Me:	I’m Jewish.
Kathy:	Not funny.
Me:	That’s just because you’re not Jewish.
Kathy:	Here’s my suggestion. Find articles online, or pictures even, relating to the attack. Look at them, look at them and think, “I didn’t do this.” Say it over and over again until you believe it. It may take minutes, may take hours, may not work at all, but it’s worth a try.
Me:	Why do I want to do this?
Kathy:	For anger. The anger you feel toward yourself, which we’ll call guilt, needs to be re-directed toward those who actually did this. It’s an opening, a cognitive trick which I hope will release you from the burden of responsibility and help you realize emotionally the stakes of your story. I know it may sound strange, but it’s worth a try. The self-blame has paralyzed you – your belief in it has paralyzed you and continues to generate anxiety responses, the manifestations of which you complain of – shortness of breath, insomnia. You believe you are responsible for the attack. You believe you did it by failing to mention the dangers. And every time you think it, even if you don’t realize you’re thinking it, it’s causing debilitating symptoms. Our goal is to change your thought from “I did this,” which is not even a conscious thought but is nonetheless wreaking psychological havoc, to “I didn’t do this.” If we can change your thinking, we might change how you relate to your story. That’s the theory I’m going with, anyway.
Me:	But I blame God, too. I’d rather play that guy.
Kathy:	Let’s stick with blaming yourself for now.
Me:	Okay.

That night, I went home and, for some reason, heeded the doctor’s advice after Jamie fell asleep, turning on the computer and rolling a chair to the screen, where I searched for articles, wanting information, data – impersonal bits of dry, formulaic exposition. And I found them: archived pieces chronicling the attack, the destruction, the numbers maimed, killed, missing. Remembering the phrase – I didn’t do this – I began uttering it repetitively while monitoring myself: Do I feel anything yet? Reading sentences, repeating the phrase, I took internal readings: Nope, nothing yet. The thought arose that perhaps I was trying too hard, that such emotions couldn’t be forced. It had to be a natural, organic process. So I tried scanning the articles free of motivation, free of expectations, and became obsessed with my approach, couldn’t stop thinking about it, wondering if I was doing the exercise naturally, correctly: Am I doing this right? Flummoxed, I moved from words to pictures, unsure what I was looking for or how to go about absorbing whatever it was that lay in wait for me to find. Most newspapers had archived photos of the attack, the majority of which depicted the physical wreckage – the beams bent, the ceiling collapsed. Occasionally, there was a photo of random people sitting, blood running down a forehead or streaked across a face, people looking dazed. None of them did anything for me, despite my mumbling, “I didn’t do this,” to which I sniped back occasionally, “No fucking shit, genius,” the sarcasm skipping a needle working hard to detect something deep in the grooves, circling back on itself, going nowhere.

Then, a disturbing thought came to me. Maybe I should look for Jamie. Maybe if I see her, saying “I didn’t do this” will work. But I couldn’t find an image of her, and her absence elicited a per verse new distress as I scanned countless pictures, hoping to find her face, hoping to find an archived, imagistic record of history. Something capable of proving that all of this had happened. That it was real.

The psychological experiment was failing badly.

Me:	Is that anger? No, just frustration. You’re frustrated about not finding a photograph of your injured wife so you can say, “I didn’t do this,” because your therapist told you to do so, because you don’t already know it.
Me:	You realize you’re looking for photos of your wife, injured. And you’re mumbling.
Me:	I know. You think I’ve lost it, don’t you, that all this is crazy.
Me:	Actually, I think it’s comical, all of it. You should see it from where I’m sitting, over here. All this manic activity. And the irony piled on, that thing you keep saying, having the opposite effect.
Me:	This isn’t funny, you fuck.
Me:	Was that anger? That’s anger. Well done.
Me:	I’m talking with myself. I’m mad at you. Meaning me. Meaning it doesn’t count.
Me:	Now that’s funny.
Me:	Go away.

I should have stepped away from the computer, the experiment ruined by my hyper self-awareness, by my biased attempt to skew the outcome, the failure proving that the experimenter should never double as the subject. Superimposing a mantra on my psyche was clearly not going to work, but I refused to give up, just as I had refused with Noa’s pacifier. So I moved to Google’s image search, which brought me to an Israeli site housed by the Foreign Ministry that, unbeknownst to me at the time, collects photographs taken by Israeli investigators from every terrorist attack ever perpetrated against civilians. Evidence of war, of injustice, of the Garden not yet attained. For posterity.

Realizing what I had stumbled upon, I swallowed, then clicked, and clicked again. I typed in the words Hebrew University, and froze. I wasn’t prepared. Wasn’t prepared for the image that appeared. An image of bodies covered partially by black bags and scattered in close proximity. Some faces were exposed. Others shielded. The picture had been taken from above at some distance, most likely from the cafeteria’s roof. One of the bodies, sprawled on its back, only had the face covered. That’s Ben, I thought. His body was large, distinctive. I knew. The mouse in my hand gripped tightly. Looking at him, lying on the ground, dead. Why is this online? Why is his head covered? This shouldn’t be here.

I am still uncomfortable with what happened next. For an hour, I looked at these images from the attack that had been archived by the State of Israel, scrolling, copying, and pasting pictures into a graphics program, zooming in, trying to identify my friends, to know for sure that, yes, That’s her, That’s him, that they hadn’t simply disappeared.

Maybe it was an unhealthy dedication to the task at hand, a deranged, focused attempt at trying to evoke something, to open an emotional well and produce some cognitive surge within. Looking at the bodies, knowing my wife could have easily been among them, I thought, I didn’t do this. Copied. I didn’t do this. Pasted. I didn’t do this. Enhanced, zoomed in on hair, on the legs, on the shape of things. I didn’t do this.

By the time I had closed the graphics program, deleted the pictures, and shut down the computer, it was nearing dawn, a pinkish haze beginning to illuminate the Washington Monument’s tip miles to the south. The refrain, I didn’t do this, was etched in my mind, the idea of self-blame branded there alongside those images of partially covered bodies sprawled on the campus cobblestones.

Rising, I reflexively searched for the nut pulled from Jamie’s intestine, which had been placed in a backpack not long after her surgery and forgotten. I found the black bag, made by Swiss Army, stuffed in the closet. After pulling it out, I reached in and felt around for the nut. It was still there, wrapped in a plastic sandwich bag.

I thought about its trajectory: made somewhere in Israel, bought in Jerusalem, taken to Ramallah, placed in a bomb which was placed in a backpack which was placed in a cafeteria at Hebrew University on July 31, 2002, then thrown into my wife’s body by the force of a remotely-detonated blast, removed by surgeons and dropped in a plastic container, handed to me, taken out in a hospital bathroom, scrubbed with shaking hands, placed in a plastic bag, then transported to Washington, and forgotten. Until now.

The nut had once been hexagonal, but now one side was caved in, giving it the shape of a half moon, except that the concave side bent by the blast was jagged, with two of the hexagonal sides forming teeth, a wicked smile. A jack-o’-lantern’s mouth. All Hallows’ Eve. The nut’s original purpose – tightening – was still apparent in the threads winding within it, while two sides on the unbent portion, the portion that must have been facing outward, away from the explosives, were smooth and angled perfectly at 60°. But the smile was scored, rough, the bent edges sharp, capable of drawing blood. And despite its size, the metal had an impressive heaviness to it, a denseness exposed by gravity’s jilted pull when lifted, when rolled around between the thumb and pointer finger.

Taking it out of the plastic bag, placing the nut between my fingers, I tried to squeeze it, to bend the steel back, to change the shape of things, make it round, whole, wondering how something so solid could be rendered malleable in the flash of an instant, nauseated by an explosion that could achieve such power.

But then I thought that, perhaps, I was overestimating things, giving the blast too much credit. Maybe the nut, rather than bending from the combustion-induced torque, bounced off of something hard before finding Jamie. Maybe it first hit the floor, a wall, the table’s synthetic surface. Maybe it wasn’t bent by the mere force of heat and release when the bomb exploded, as I’d always assumed, as though how it bent mattered, as though it changed anything. Regardless, it felt like a revelation, this thought – maybe the nut hit something first.

A few days after Jamie’s surgery, I had finally opened the lid of the plastic container in a hospital bathroom and pulled out the nut. There was a fine, transparent film covering the crooked hole, a dried, plastic-like layer of organic material – some hardened fluid from Jamie’s body. I swallowed. Then, I ran the nut under hot water, scrubbing it vigorously, hoping to remove everything stuck between the threads, wedged in the smile’s teeth.

After cleaning the nut, I put it in a pocket, held on to it, despite the memories it elicited, because it was the first thing I could wrap my fingers around and think, This is something. Everything else was ozone, air disappearing.