In the daytime Annika watched out of the lockshop window the zombie-eyed grackles, their eerie flashes of blue and green in the relentless sun, their relentless beaks on the glass. In the morning, Lizette opened the window to pour a line of corn on the sill to appease them, and Annika was always afraid one would flap its way in. Who knew what one of those things would do if it got inside? Dive straight for the eyes — Annika’s gray eyes, not so very lowered with guilt, or Luis’s carefully nonchalant and dark ones — to punish them for what they had done.

Who knew what one of those things would do if it got inside? Dive straight for the eyes — Annika’s gray eyes, not so very lowered with guilt, or Luis’s carefully nonchalant and dark ones — to punish them for what they had done.

In the late afternoons, Luis came to pick her up before he got his sons from basketball practice. Luis — who, according to their boss Bobbie (Luis’s wife Penny had shown her a picture) had looked, sitting on a stocky desert horse at the age of twenty, just like Pancho Villa. A mechanic in the Chilean army, then, stationed in different places in the world, it was at this point that he had met his American wife, young and doing internships in Europe and South America. He was tall and stocky, with thinning black hair that he wore down past his collar. He brought beans to work that Penny fixed for Annika, because she lived in a room with only a microwave and a sink.

It was with a strange mix of embarrassment and irony and pride that Annika ate those beans, like a child enjoying the reward given to her for a small success when only she knows it’s nothing compared to her still-unknown failure.

Annika was twenty-four. Locks and Keys was in a pretty gray stone building with mammoth, heavy wooden doors like those in a church. She and Luis and Lizette stood behind a tall, wide counter made of the same glossy dark wood. The walls of their little cubicles behind the counter were flimsy carpeted plastic, but Bobbie had a real office in the back.

Sometimes Annika walked slowly past Luis’s cubicle, twiddling a key or an authorization slip in her hands, when Penny stopped by to talk to him. They were worried about their handsome and rebellious teenage boys (the younger one, Sam, thin but straight-haired like his father, the other, Nathan, like Penny curly-haired and freckled). What will he wear, Will he keep his scholarship, Where are they now, Will he speak to me again.

They had always been good boys. But as they had grown older, Luis reported with anger and regret, they had been harassed without reason by the police, and were developing a general grudge because of it. On the phone Luis told them to be better to their mother. They worried her with the reckless attitudes they showed their teachers and with the tattoo the older one had gotten on a school trip to Trundheim.

Between four-thirty and six Annika climbed into Luis’s van and put her impatient hand on his waist. She gripped his belt, then groped her way to his skin. Inside the van it was cool, outside it was very hot. It was September. They had started all of this in July. It hadn’t been as hot in July. Annika had been in Texas for a year, working at the lockshop with Luis for six months. At the beginning of the summer, the air had been not too hot yet at all, but loud with cicadas, and the land was still green up in the hill country. By August the sun had burned it brown, but the Jersey Queen peaches were ripe in Nueces, so she and Luis went out to pick two brown paper bags of them. Who knew how Luis had managed to get away. With the evidence in hand he must have said he was going for peaches, but that was the kind of thing you did with your wife, wasn’t it. When Annika left him for the day, there were dried trails of peach juice run down his thickening neck.

He didn’t come into the room Annika lived in, her miniature cottage house, more like a furnished shed, behind an old woman’s main place. She pretended to hope, out loud to Luis, that this made it seem as if he were just giving her a ride somewhere. But she took a secret wicked pleasure in knowing very well that it just made things look worse. Hers was a dirt yard with tough stumps of buffalo grass. When she saw Luis coming, Annika stepped out onto the dirt swinging her hips and looking down for fire ants. Once she found a big fat freshly dead rat out there, fire ants already devouring the eyes.

Next door was a house, big, gabled, and white, the green lawn constantly being sprinkled. At first, that house had made Annika homesick for Brandy and Leo’s house, and for Teddy, but not anymore; because Luis was not up there, on the bogs and cold water, to pull her into the cool seat.

He drove to Barton Creek, all the way with Annika’s graceful sweaty hand traveling all over his leg. He always said they would take a walk first, and he would show her the gully where low warm water came up quietly over the rocks, and everywhere overhead there were strung silver spiderwebs in an almost continuous canopy between the trees; the sun came down in dapples and lay on the millions of strands like drops of water. They didn’t go for walks, there was only time to pull Luis into the back and put both of her hands on his legs now, then push him slowly against the soft give of the cloth seat until he had to put his hands around her waist to brace himself against her coming at him, and against her ardent rose of a mouth, which was everywhere.

During the day she could hardly bear it. There were metal cabinets in the back of the office where discontinued keys were stored in their small brown envelopes worn soft and broken. Sometimes a copy of one of these old keys would get turned in. Luis had shown Annika how to track down the name of a key no one knew the use of anymore, gauging it with the metal gauge, and knowing something about all of the kinds of keys that had ever been used on campus, even those to buildings that no longer stood. For the second part, she could ask Luis, and stand close to him in his cubicle, though not actually press against him — he had had to put his foot down about that. The computer was always up to a Chilean news site. On the wall were pinned pictures of his boys and the curly-haired Penny, and a postcard from his brother in Brazil.

He always said they would take a walk first, and he would show her the gully where low warm water came up quietly over the rocks, and everywhere overhead there were strung silver spiderwebs in an almost continuous canopy between the trees…

Annika did like to track down a key. She sat on the stool in tight jeans or a short skirt, opened drawers, and matched the strange one up to likely master keys from old doors: locks that had had to be changed because of employees who left badly, and from old buildings that had been entirely demolished. Sometimes she let a key slip out of her hand just for the bright clink it made on the stone floor.

When no one was looking for her, she leaned against the cabinets and dozed. She might wake in a reverie about Luis and crumple to the cool floor and close her eyes, thinking that even if she could get through another entire work day without Luis’s hands on her, she still would not be able to get through tomorrow. Why in the world was she here, by these cabinets, alone? What was it worth, to do anything that didn’t have to do with his body? What was it … that old myth about the ancient lovers who were turned into entangled trees when they died, then they could always be touching — but still they wouldn’t be able to move. So even that old romance became a bloodless torture to her.

Not as often, Annika’s little naps sent her somewhere else. She might remember, in that brief shadowy space, the calm assuredness with which she had walked into this job, because of all she had been able to teach herself in the months leading up to it. For that short time, anyway, she had really felt like an adult. And it had been nice: not boring at all. That adult calm seemed a long ways away from the mess of sleeping with a married man. She comforted herself with the assurance that the passionate experience of her affair was not something she could have missed. It would add a depth to her life that otherwise she wouldn’t have known. She could only justify it because she could not imagine a way in which to give it up.

When Annika left for the day to walk home, she kicked indignantly at the hordes of ungracious grackles that covered the university grounds, and were not afraid of anybody. In her head she had a dozen new pictures of Luis stored up from the day: Luis leaning over his keyboard, squinting at an online article, swearing softly, later discussing the news with Lizette, and rolling his dark, zealous eyes; Luis with his uncondescending kindness helping Bobbie in her struggle — as she raised her low-pitched, bullying voice louder and louder — to explain a policy to a Mexican cafeteria worker, easing the young man’s frozen, angry smile; Luis half-heartedly working on a paper for his marketing class. He was working slowly on a bachelor’s degree in business, taking a class every other semester or so.

When Luis touched Annika enough, in any one spot, so that the skin there began to get warm, she shuddered. How ridiculous for such a small area to be so happy! The last person she had slept with was Teddy (aside from her old boyfriend Carl, briefly, when she had first come to Texas — but her re-encounter with that poor man had hardly even registered), and she had forgotten the deep satisfaction of making love to a straight man, who loved your body not only because it was yours, but also because it was the thing he wanted in the abstract.

Luis covered her with warm spots, and she ran over them with her own fingers. Over him, in the van, Annika stroked his thickly-haired chest in time with her rocking, and later he would make her laugh with pride when he said that from the concentration on her serious white-pink face he could tell that she was melting anything destructive that had ever run through his blood, and lifting it out of the vessels.

One day early in September, she walked past a playground on her way home. A group of eleven or twelve-year-olds was out. The boys threw a football to each other over a long distance, and about thirty yards away, nine or ten girls stood in a patient line, one by one throwing a football to a lead girl. Two of the girls wore black headscarves and long dresses.

Then Annika noticed a lone girl in a jeans jacket stalking around the edges of the field. She held her arms tightly across her chubby body. Beneath the brim of a cap her face held a fierce look made of keen interest in the game combined with a painful need to conceal that feeling. None of the other children looked at her.

Her mind turned in the heat; she thought of Luis, and shuddered as if she were cold.

Annika stopped walking. She felt a violent throbbing pity for the girl. The sun was already crisping her pasty freckled shoulders but she stopped to stare hard at the lonely child, then at the rest of the children. “Someone go get her,” she muttered on the walk. “Someone go get her!” Her mind turned in the heat; she thought of Luis, and shuddered as if she were cold. “Someone touch her!” she said right out loud. “Someone get over there and put their arms around that girl!” She put her hot hands over her face and felt disoriented and sick. How could anyone, even children, ignore such craving loneliness? Why did it have to be so terribly hot? Why did her pity for this child feel like commiseration, when she would see Luis again in only a couple of hours? Why did Penny continue to like her, to send her more and more dishes and to tell her, through Luis, that what she had to do to bear it was to eat lots of spicy food, that it would thin her blood? To lay a wet cloth on her chest at night? If only Penny would leave her alone, Annika told herself, she didn’t think she would have to feel very guilty at all.

The next morning there was a lull in customers after nine. Bobbie came into Annika’s cubicle to tell stories. Today she was describing the details of every formal dress, down to the stitching and the cut of the crinoline sleeves, that she had ever worn to a dance when she was a young lady growing up in Palestine, Texas. From Lizette’s cubicle came the sound of old blues music on the radio. The singer played his guitar high and snappy and sang about a bourgeois man and a bourgeois gal in a bourgeois town. The man’s voice was hard and smart and Annika could recognize it as one of the famous ones, but still she was surprised they were playing the song on the radio, as it had the word “nigger” in it.

Bobbie was a gruff loving woman with a slim tan face and white-blue eyes. A head shorter than Annika, almost a foot shorter than Lizette, Bobbie liked to talk to Lizette and Luis and Annika even when they were up at the counter taking key authorization slips from the faculty members and graduate students and maintenance workers, and punching their social security numbers into the computers. Bobbie had been here for thirty years. She knew more about Locks and Keys than anyone alive, and the big-wigs at Facilities Management knew it. When she had come up for retirement last year, they’d offered her some big money to get her to stay.

She was in her late sixties, and trusted Luis for being the closest of them to her own age. She often gave him complicated projects that had to do with the design and workings of the whole department, and had hinted to him that she was trying to groom him for her job — if he wanted it. But who knew what Luis wanted? But who knew what Luis wanted? He talked about art and music, but in a removed way, as if, even though he liked those things, they had really nothing to do with him…He talked about art and music, but in a removed way, as if, even though he liked those things, they had really nothing to do with him; he said himself that he had dicked around his youth, joined the Army because he didn’t know what else to do, and, when he had found her, simply followed the determined Penny wherever she was going next. If he was up at the key counter he would more likely than not joke and laugh, especially with a girl or one of the maintenance men, but if he was sitting at his desk engrossed in something more complex — or, sometimes, even if he was only reading the news or a cartoon — and he didn’t feel like getting up, he wouldn’t. Even if it was his turn he would sometimes wait for Annika or Lizette to take it.

Usually Annika took it. She liked to give out keys. It was a good feeling to line up the new copy to the master and peer expertly down the shaft, and she liked showing off, for Luis, her cheerfulness and good humor with people. Also she loved it when Lizette was pleased with her.

“We only had the one formal,” Annika told Bobbie. “Prom was the only one we had.”

A woman came in so she stood up. Bobbie kept talking behind her, but after a moment she moved the same story into Lizette’s cubicle. The woman was fishing a crumpled piece of paper out of her big brown purse. She had black feathery hair and small annoyed eyes. Finally she handed over her slip and said, “I’m just on break, so —”

Annika smiled, then glanced at the slip and asked the woman for ID. The woman looked at her disparagingly. “Really?” she said. “That seems —” She dug again in the brown purse. “It’s just an office,” she said, pointing at the slip. “It doesn’t say it there, but it’s just a little office. Just an empty desk in there.” She pointed again.

Annika was looking at the woman’s license. When she was satisfied, she handed it back. “I know what it is,” she said pleasantly.

Electronic music tinkled from Luis’s cubicle, his cell phone going off. That made a good excuse for Annika to glance that way. It was only when she looked back at the slip that she noticed it was dated a year ago.

“This is very old,” she said to the black-haired woman.

“What? Too old?”

“And do you know who this is who signed it?” Annika squinted at the slip. “Because I can’t tell what it says, and I don’t recognize this handwriting.”

“What are you saying?” the woman said. “What, do you think people only work here for a year? Is that how old it is? I don’t know who it was. I had to go to her for a key, that’s all I know. That’s the only thing I ever had to go to her for. And I thought I was going to get it right there, but she said, ‘No, no, you have to go to these people.’”

“That’s so there’s a record.” As Annika was rubbing the limp, wrinkled paper between her fingers she felt Luis come up beside her, so she recited to the woman, “Even the President of the college has to come in here to get the key to his office, with an authorization slip signed by himself. Do you know who this is?” she asked Luis, pointing to the signature. She turned into him slightly. The woman made an awful, disgusted face. When Annika’s bent elbow brushed Luis’s arm, a trickle of heat bloomed out over her chest. She could smell hazelnut coffee on his breath.

“So what now?” she said.

“Why didn’t you get this key a year ago?” Luis asked her, in his beautiful accent. His voice was neither low nor high, a rich melodious sound like the mid-range of a cello. When he whispered, it really was like a very light bowing over strings. It was delicious to Annika how he didn’t say words like “wood” properly, and she did not think that making fun of him for it was any different (though Lizette had once gently tried to explain it to her) than how he teased her about how she couldn’t roll her “r’s.” Annika only mused over another thing Lizette had told her, as it added to the warm and colorful dream she liked to make up about Luis’s childhood: how mothers in Mexico, almost the moment their babies were born, got in their faces and “rrrrr”-ed all day and night, to teach them to be proper Spanish-speaking children. Lying on her bed at home, Annika savored the thought of her Luis in connection to every Spanish name of a street or river or town that she could think of: Brazos, San Marcos, Lampasas, Laredo, Zapata, Lamesa, Uvalde.

His voice was neither low nor high, a rich melodious sound like the mid-range of a cello. When he whispered, it really was like a very light bowing over strings.

“What business is it of yours?” the woman said testily to Luis.

Luis shrugged. “None of my business, unless you want this key,” he said, with an impassive expression. Annika ducked her head to keep the woman from seeing her smile. Then there was desperation in the woman’s face, she knew she was being ganged up on now. Annika turned to look out the window, and then she saw that around the university power plant across the street, men were putting up barricades. They worked quickly, with cables and long wooden barriers, guards taking up posts all around the perimeter. One of them shouted something to another that Annika couldn’t hear.

“Look at that,” she said, and even her own voice sounded odd to her. “Something’s going on out there.”

Luis glanced out, then looked back at the woman. The woman did not look at all. Annika released the slip quickly when Luis reached for it, watching the white paper pass into his squarish brown fingers. A light dusting of black hair curled over his arm and wrist. “We’ll have to show this to our boss,” he said.

“Who are you?” the woman demanded of Luis. She had placed both of her palms on the counter in exasperation, and now she threw them up and jutted her chin forward like a turtle.

“I don’t know. Who are you?” Luis muttered as he turned away. The woman let out a grunt of anger. Annika smiled weakly at her before following Luis into Bobbie’s office, where Bobbie was staring at her computer screen. There was a still picture on it of the sky, a tall building, and a kind of cloud. Annika couldn’t see it clearly, so she turned her gaze to the sculpted back of Bobbie’s dyed, peanut-colored hair. The office was filled with photographs of her daughter who played the flute, and Bobbie’s little big-eyed dogs. Also, on the wall behind the computer hung a studio photograph from the seventies of Bobbie, her hair dark brown, and her husband and her daughter when the girl was only a baby, all of them dressed in Superman suits, even the baby in a blue onesie and cape. It was hard not to snicker at that.

The room was dim and Bobbie didn’t look up from what she was reading even when Luis cleared his throat.

“Excuse us, could we get your help with someone?” he said.

Bobbie finally turned and looked at them, her tan face blank and strange.

Annika stared back at her. “Bobbie,” she said slowly, “do you know what’s going on with the power plant?”

“No, I don’t,” Bobbie said. “Why?” She turned to look out her window, but the shades were down, so instead she looked back at her computer. “But look at this, something’s happened at those big towers.”

Annika crinkled her eyes. “Our tower?”

“No, no …” Bobbie kept reading.

“Oh, good,” Annika said and patted her chest. She went to peek, anyway, through the blinds, to see if she could detect any problems with the UT tower from here. People were still setting up barriers and unrolling orange tape and walking briskly down the street, but Annika couldn’t see the tower from this angle. They had just opened it up again a year or two ago — about thirty years after a Marine had shot all those people from it.

“What tower?” asked Luis.

“The two towers,” Bobbie said. “The two towers in New York. The ones that are so big you can see them —”

“Oh, she means the trade center!” Luis muttered with contempt. “What, was there a fire?”

“No, a plane. I’m reading it,” Bobbie said crossly. Then, after a pause, she murmured, with awed gravity, but not without excitement, “They’re saying here that everyone on the plane has to be dead.”

Luis, now getting excited as well, and impatient, spat out, “A plane?” Lizette came in then in her long turquoise skirt, having heard about it on the portable radio she now had in her hands. Annika stepped back from the computer to let the three of them figure it out. She mentioned that perhaps the weather was bad in New York this morning; it must be foggy, if the pilots couldn’t even see.

She backed out into the hall to see whether or not the black-haired woman was still waiting for her and Luis. She was, and craning her neck over the counter to try and see what the trouble was. When she saw Annika, she threw her hands up again.

“Well?” she called.

Annika held up one finger. “Just a minute. We’re figuring it out.”

Luis rolled his eyes when she came back in. “That woman is stupid,” he said. He was now reading aloud from Bobbie’s computer screen and offering commentary. The people on the top of the tower had to be dead. Annika heard that and felt her first deep twinge of pity and sorrow.

They discussed how not one of them in the office had ever been to New York, unless you counted Luis flying out of La Guardia. How tall did the towers look really? The pilot might have been drunk, or maybe he was working too hard. Lizette had heard something, not too long ago, on the radio she had heard it, about pilots working too many hours, and complaining that they were too tired and it wasn’t safe. But no one had listened. Maybe the airline companies would sit up and take notice, now that this had happened.

They all stayed in Bobbie’s office until they said on the radio that meanwhile a second plane had hit.

“Well, Jesus,” Luis said after a moment, “now it sounds like it’s on purpose.”

“Oh, not really,” Annika said, letting her tone tease him a little.

“What, you think it could never happen?” Lizette retorted in a hard voice, then turned sharply and walked out of the room. Annika was shocked and felt tears sting her eyes. Lizette was smart and tough, but she and Annika were friends; she had always treated Annika with especial kindness. Luis walked out, too.

What was really remarkable was how easily all of them did register it; immediately Annika felt them all become sensitive and alert — in the way monkeys, on hearing the screams of other monkeys being killed, run not to help but to save themselves.

“Well, honey,” Bobbie said dramatically, turning to look at Annika and raising her penciled brows, “it looks like New York has been attacked!”

“But it doesn’t have that much to do with us?” Annika asked softly.

When she went to her desk, Lizette, her eyes still blazing, nonetheless came over to apologize for snapping at her. Luis came over too and helped Lizette answer the question that Bobbie had not. Oh, yes, it could have a terribly big amount to do with them. It was about all of them, said Lizette fiercely, in fact it was an indictment on all of them — but when Luis began to tell some of the gory details that were coming out of the city, Lizette’s lip trembled and she went immediately to her desk to be alone.

What was really remarkable was how easily all of them did register it; immediately Annika felt them all become sensitive and alert — in the way monkeys, on hearing the screams of other monkeys being killed, run not to help but to save themselves.

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.

When Annika passed Luis’s office, he was on the phone, turned to the window, so she couldn’t catch his eye. She looked at the figure his body made against the wall, his broad back, one hand on the back of his hip, his big head shaped somewhat like a walnut. He talked quickly and in Spanish. She stared at him; it hurt to pull herself away.

After a long time, he came to her again in her cubicle. He sat in another wheeled chair. There was no one in line. Lizette was quiet in her office, and Bobbie was downstairs discussing the crisis with the locksmiths. A half-hour before, Annika had sent a master key downstairs, in the noisy pneumatic tube, to be copied, and when it had come up with its usual wonderfully big bang, even those of them who worked here had jumped.

“They hit the Pentagon,” Luis said to Annika. Somehow his presence made her feel even weaker and more frightened, and she crumpled in her chair.

“What?” she said. “Another one?” She chewed over the news for a moment, then clutched a fistful of her loose dirty hair. “Luis,” she said, suddenly stricken with the idea, “does this mean that they might really be coming here? That they’re — moving west?” “Listen,” Luis said. He kept himself at a distance from her. It was agonizing not to touch him. He was acting no more or less discreet than usual, but at this moment Annika suddenly felt horribly offended. And not only on her part, but on behalf of all humanity; how little seemed amiss in their sweet, precious affair, in comparison to the evil in the world today! She glared at him. He started at the look as he asked her slowly, “Annika, do you know what today is?”

Annika knew he knew she wouldn’t know what today was, and even as he asked, he shook his head with his mouth half-open, looking very alone in his chair. He was often disappointed in her ignorance and her unworldliness. Annika was not completely dumb about the way middle-aged men saw twenty-four-year-old women, and she knew the freshness that she had and Penny didn’t; but in a few frank moments she had asked herself why else in the world was Luis sleeping with her. Because his wife, Penny, was not ditzy and ignorant, but really brilliant, a fluent speaker of Spanish, Hebrew, and French, with a masters degree; a social worker for immigrant children, well-read, eloquent, capable, and smart. And also exquisitely beautiful, in a smooth, statuesque, undeniable way. Annika was young and cute enough to look at Penny and think condescendingly, ‘Oh, how lovely she is, for an older woman; I hope I look like that when I’m fifty.’ But really it was a joke; she didn’t look that good right now.

“It’s the anniversary of the Chilean coup.” Luis laced his tense fingers tightly in his lap and looked hard at her.

“The coup…”

“The coup, the coup,” said Luis. “I don’t know if it means anything. Probably it doesn’t. But people in Chile hate the American government, you know?”

“Why?”

“I just told you,” said Luis, widening his eyes and spreading his hands in front of him. “Because of the coup.”

Annika looked away, embarrassed, but after a moment she turned back to frown at him. She whispered, “Don’t look at me like that. It’s so wrong, Luis, on a day like this, to act like that. We should be comforting each other.” Luis fell back in his chair, looking defeated, and also nervous. He wheeled his chair to the entry and looked both ways down the hall to make sure no one was listening.

“Okay,” he said, when he rolled back, with his supplicating eyes, “I’m sorry, sweetie. Just, please, Annika — keep it down with that kind of talk.”

She shrugged, but the fact that he had backed down was already making her soften towards him. She was trying to keep her head together, but it was separating out into wisps and strands and scattering all over the room. The locksmiths were talking about the attack in their slow drawls, outside the door that led to the workshop in the basement. Annika thought again of her parents, in Virginia, not so far away from D.C. at all, and of Brandy and Leo and the children. Maybe they were all going to die. Before the end of the day everyone in the country would be dead, or most of them, and which would she be?

Annika realized with a start that today she might walk home in a rubbled war zone. Trapped people in the wreckage, cars and buses smashed into each other, houses fallen in on themselves and in flames, the streets buckled. Some people would go mad with terror, while others would take advantage of it: cart televisions, bags of money from the banks, jewelry from the jewelry stores, down the street to ruined houses, while more planes dropped out of the sky. There would be gangs, warlords, something!

In the face of what she imagined, Annika thought for the first time that day that she was going to be brave.

It was the first, if not good feeling she had had for hours, the first one that did not make her nauseated to think it — and so she held onto it for dear life. The longer she considered it, the more comfort it gave her. As long as she was brave and generous and good, this thing could get as dreadful as it could get, but even if she were killed, it would not be the undoing of her.

In the face of what she imagined, Annika thought for the first time that day that she was going to be brave.

She had never been faced with anything like it. But she would make something of it. When she walked outside today into the gunfire and the blasting, and the blasting heat, she was going to transform.

She turned to Luis, touched his fleshy arm, firmly and protectively — her testy indignation, flaring only moments before, had all melted away — and said, with a new shrewdness, “Luis, when the government figures it out, they’re going to come after you. Everyone like you. I’ll take you to Canada,” she went on in her new sure voice. “I used to go up there and cross the border all the time when I was in high school. The guards knew us. They’ll let us across easy. Do you see what I mean?”

At first Luis seemed anxious again, and Annika thought he was going to reprimand her. Then, for the first time since he had come to her cubicle, he looked at her as if she had said something worthwhile. He leaned forward, his hands gripping the arms of his chair, his eyes glittering. “Annika, I think so, too,” he said. “I think they’re going to start rounding people up right away.” Annika nodded, and it was all she could do to contain her sudden strange pleasure, intensified by the thrill of hearing him say her name, and not smile. She shifted her gaze to a small black mole on his neck. When he patted her hand and left, the gesture didn’t strike her as worrisome or even patronizing, as it would have only two minutes ago.

The grackles didn’t care about anything, and were back on the window again, stabbing at the corn and stabbing each other to get at it. Annika watched Luis walk away, then pressed her fingers to her temples. She gave a key to someone from Civil Engineering and another to a young man from Theater and Dance. He needed access to a studio with a long mirror and a barre. He was trying to get out of Texas and to New York like everyone else in the world, but now the place smelled of burning metal and skin.

Most people at the counter did not talk to Annika about their work and their dreams. They assumed, as Luis did, that she was stupid and uninformed. She was feeling sensitive, too, and was touched. “Some other time you’ll have to come back in here and dance for me,” she said to the young man in a low voice.

“Some other time,” he said sadly.

There was another plane; but the news came dully to her now. Another, another — what was the difference? One more piece of the complete destruction they were all going to have to face.

There was another plane; but the news came dully to her now. Another, another — what was the difference? One more piece of the complete destruction they were all going to have to face. Annika wondered how excitable Lizette would do. This thing made you look at people in a whole different way. Maybe Lizette wouldn’t do all that well, but better than Bobbie, capable and comfortably smart when she knew what was what, but probably not so much when things went so ominous and foreign. On the other hand, knowing Bobbie, she might have a bunker to dive into when she got home. Luis, her Luis, he would be all right, Annika knew what to do for him: all they had to do was get in the van and drive.

She went into Bobbie’s office. “Bobbie, when do you think they’re going to close the University so we can go home? I’d like to call my parents,” she added. Bobbie had just been on the phone for an hour with her hysterical daughter, at college in California. Annika thought that the girl was smart to worry. Her theory was that the Chilean terrorists were going to get on each coast, then squeeze their way in until the whole country had been touched in one way or another.

“I don’t know what they’re going to do, honey.” Bobbie uncrossed her thin legs and clutched her hands in her lap. She was staring at her Superman family picture. “Facilities Management told me to sit tight. They closed down the capitol. I think every capitol is closed down now. If you need to go home, honey, you can.”

“Well,” Annika said.

“Every capitol, and the Mall of America.”

If they bombed the power plant (Maybe they were going to try and go after the President’s daughter, who went to school here, who knew? That was what all the locksmiths were saying now, standing around upstairs talking about it while customers, waiting for the keys that had not even begun to get cut, tried, out of respect for the extraordinary circumstances, to hide their impatience), and Annika had left Luis here to die, she wouldn’t be able to bear it. She went to see him in his cubicle and he was on the phone again, pacing around the little space. He was speaking again in Spanish. When he saw Annika he turned away, his hand on his forehead.

“Penny,” he said, tenderly, into the phone.