“Only wondering why, if these guys are as well funded as Arabs are thought to be, they have to build their own.”

“I looked at it frame by frame, and they aren’t building unit from scratch, they are modifying existing hardware, possibly Estonian knockoff they bought someplace?”

So maybe only busywork without an end product here, nerds in a room, but suppose it’s one more thing to worry about, now. Would somebody really try to set off a citywide electromagnetic pulse in the middle of New York, or D.C., or is this device on the screen meant for transshipment somewhere else in the world? And what kind of a piece of the deal could Ice be duked in for?

There’s nothing else on the disc. Leaving everybody up against an even larger question about to lift its trunk and start in with the bellowing. “OK. Igor. Tell me. You think there might be some connection with . . . ?”

“Ah, God, Maxi, I hope not.” Self-administering another shot of Jersey vodka.

“What, then?”

“I’ll think about it. You think about it. Maybe we won’t like what we come up with.”

•   •   •

ONE NIGHT, without any buzz on the intercom, there’s a tentative knock at the door. Through the wide-angle peephole, Maxine observes a trembling young person with a fragile head sporting a buzz cut.

“Hi, Maxi.”

“Driscoll. Your hair. What happened to Jennifer Aniston?” Expecting yet another 11 September story about frivolities of youth, newfound seriousness. Instead, “The maintenance was more than I could afford. I figure a Rachel wig’s only $29.95, and you can’t tell it from the real thing. Here, I’ll show you.” She shrugs out of her backpack, which Maxine notices now does seem to run to Himalayan-expedition scale, roots through it, finds the wig, puts it on, takes it off. A couple of times.

“Let me guess why you’re here.” It’s been happening all over the neighborhood. Refugees, prevented from entering their apartments in Lower Manhattan, whether fancy-schmancy or modest, have been showing up at the doors of friends farther uptown, accompanied by wives, kids, sometimes nannies, drivers, and cooks also, having after exhaustive research and cost-benefit analysis concluded that this is the best refuge currently available to them and their entourage. “Next week who knows, right? We’ll take it one week at a time.” “Day at a time’d be better.” Yupper West Side folks in their greatness of heart have been taking these real-estate casualties in, what choice do they have, and sometimes fast friendships grow even deeper and sometimes are destroyed forever . . .

“No problem,” is what Maxine tells Driscoll now, “you can have the spare room,” which happens to be available, Horst shortly after 11 September having shifted his sleeping arrangements into Maxine’s room, to the inconvenience of neither and to what, if in fact she ever went into it with anybody, would be the surprise of very few. On the other hand, whose business is it? It’s still too much for her to get her own head around, how much she’s missed him. How about what they call “marital relations,” is there any fucking going on? You bet, and what’s it to you? Music track? Frank Sinatra, if you really need to know. The most poignant B-flat in all lounge music occurs in Cahn & Styne’s song “Time After Time,” beginning the phrase “in the evening when the day is through,” and never more effectively than when Sinatra reaches after it on vinyl that happens to be in the household record library. At moments like this, Horst is helpless, and Maxine long ago has learned to seize the moment. Allowing Horst to think it’s his idea, of course.

Driscoll is followed within two hours by Eric, staggering underneath an even more sizable backpack, evicted without notice by a landlord for whom the civic tragedy has come as a convenient excuse to get Eric and the other tenants out so he can convert to co-ops and pocket some public money also.

“Um, yeah, there’s room if you don’t mind sharing. Driscoll, Eric, you met at that party, down at Tworkeffx, remember, work it out, don’t fight . . .” She goes off muttering to herself.

“Hi.” Driscoll thinks about tossing her hair, thinks twice.

“Hi.” They soon discover a number of interests in common, including the music of Sarcófago, all of whose CDs are present among Eric’s effects, as well as Norwegian Black Metal artists such as Burzum and Mayhem, soon established as sound-track accompaniment of choice for spare-room activities which begin that evening within about ten minutes of Eric observing Driscoll in a T-shirt with the Ambien logo on it. “Ambien, awesome! You got any?” Does she. Seems they share a partiality to this recreational sleeping pill, which if you can force yourself to stay awake will produce acidlike hallucinations, not to mention a dramatic increase in libido, so that soon they are fucking like the teenagers they technically were only a short time back, while yet another side effect is memory loss, so that neither remembers what went on exactly till the next time it happens, whereupon it is like first love all over again.

On meeting Ziggy and Otis, the frolicking twosome exclaim, more or less in unison, “You guys are real?”—among widely reported Ambien hallucinations being numbers of small people busy running around doing a variety of household tasks. The boys, though fascinated, as city kids know how to maintain a perimeter. As for Horst, if he even remembers Eric from the Geeks’ Cotillion, it’s been swept downstream by recent events, and in any case the Eric-Driscoll hookup helps with any standard Horstian reactions of insane jealousy. His reasonably serene domestic setup being invaded by forces loyal to drugs, sex, rock-and-roll doesn’t seem to register as any threat. So, figures Maxine, we’ll all be on top of each other for a while, other people have it worse.

Love, while in bloom for some, fades for others. Heidi shows up one day beneath deep clouds of an all-too-familiar disgruntlement.

“Oh no,” cries Maxine.

Heidi shakes her head, then nods. “Dating cops is like so over. Every chick in this town regardless of IQ is suddenly a helpless little airhead who wants to be taken care of by some big stwong first wesponder. Trendy? Twendy? Meh. Totally without clue’s more like it.”

Ignoring the urge to inquire if Carmine, unable to resist the attention, has perhaps also been running around, “What happened exactly? Or no, not exactly.”

“Carmine’s been reading the papers, he’s bought into the whole story. Thinks he’s a hero now.”

“He’s not a hero?”

“He’s a precinct detective. A second or third responder. In the office most of the time. Same job he was always on, same petty thieves, drug dealers, domestic abusers. But now Carmine thinks he’s out on the front line of the War Against Terror and I’m not being respectful enough.”

“When were you ever? He didn’t know that?”

“He appreciated attitude in a woman. He said. I thought. But since the attack . . .”

“Yeah, you can’t help noticing some attitude escalation.” New York cops have always been arrogant, but lately they’ve been parking routinely on the sidewalk, yelling at civilians for no reason, every time a kid tries to jump a turnstile, subway service gets suspended and police vehicles of every description, surface and airborne, converge and linger. Fairway has started selling coffee blends named after different police precincts. Bakeries who supply coffee shops have invented a giant “Hero” jelly donut in the shape of the well-known sandwich of the same name, for when patrol cars show up.

Heidi has been working on an article for the Journal of Memespace Cartography she’s calling “Heteronormative Rising Star, Homophobic Dark Companion,” which argues that irony, assumed to be a key element of urban gay humor and popular through the nineties, has now become another collateral casualty of 11 September because somehow it did not keep the tragedy from happening. “As if somehow irony,” she recaps for Maxine, “as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious—weakening its grip on ‘reality.’ So all kinds of make-believe—forget the delusional state the country’s in already—must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.”