There was no help for it, you couldn’t help how you felt: they were not without pity and remorse, but all of them in the office knew almost immediately that the biggest horror of all of this was not all those people crushed or vaporized or burning and the big ugly mess of that poor city, but the sudden shocking certainty that everything easy was over, that they or at least everything around them was probably going to be next.

More than anything Annika just wanted Luis next to her, right now.

… all of them in the office knew almost immediately that the biggest horror of all of this was… the sudden shocking certainty that everything easy was over, that they or at least everything around them was probably going to be next.

The angry woman was gone. There were three or four people waiting, but Annika had settled into her chair to cry quietly. The customers stared at her, where she sat bent over in front of her computer in a wheeled chair, one foot in a white sandal flat on the floor to keep herself from rolling, wearing a black and white sundress too tight in the chest.

Finally Lizette came to help them. “Who’s next,” she barked. She had a few tears on her face, too, but her annoyance with the wash of unfeeling impatience building in the room soon dried them up. If these professors and especially their coddled little students, on their leisurely breaks between classes, wandering the hot leafy campus streets, couldn’t realize the import of this crisis, and how it might merit a break for those of them in this office, stuffed in airless rooms all day, then today she would just have to hate them even more than usual. Lizette was so tall that she had to hunch over to type, and could hide the streaks on her long thin face. The customers shifted with unease, looking at one another and at the door, but finally they went ahead and handed over their slips, shamefully averting their eyes. Luis was not crying, but he ignored all of the customers as he walked by, on his way to his own office, and to the Chilean news, Annika could only guess. The towers fell and none of them had ever been to New York to see them.

One tall arrogant man, denied what he had come for by another faulty slip, dared snap at Annika, “You people need to do a better job of getting people into their offices.” But that wasn’t her most important job, as she saw it now: that was keeping the wrong people out. She did not even smile to soften the point, as she would have done yesterday, like a faithful old dog, and that actually felt pretty good.

On her way to the bathroom to fix her lipstick, Annika looked out the window and saw that now, the whole street running past the power plant was blocked off. There were people everywhere. This was a real shock. Now it was official: they were expecting it to come here, everyone was, the people in charge as well as all the hysterics and crazies. And she began to imagine that before the day was over someone would come running in weeping to say that their own tower had been taken over again, that someone was up there looking at all of them through binoculars, and dropping bombs on the ones who looked the kindest and most innocent.