“You think it was her way of talking about . . .” oh, go ahead, “his soul?”

She gazes into Maxine’s eyes and nods. “Day before yesterday, when she asked me to bring you the money, she talked about the last time she saw him, the surveillance, the helicopters, the dead phones and frozen credit cards, and said she’d really come to think of them again as comrades-in-arms. Maybe she was only being a good spook widow. But I kissed her anyway.”

Maxine’s turn to nod.

“Where I grew up in Huehuetenango, where Windust and I met, it was less than a day’s journey to a system of caves everyone there believed was the approach to Xibalba. The early Christian missionaries thought tales of hell would frighten us, but we already had Xibalba, literally, ‘the place of fear.’ There was a particularly terrible ball court there. The ball had these . . . blades on it, so games were in deadly earnest. Xibalba was—is—a vast city-state below the earth, ruled by twelve Death Lords. Each Lord with his own army of unquiet dead, who wander the surface world bringing terrible afflictions to the living. Ríos Montt and his plague of ethnic killing . . . not too different.

“Windust began hearing Xibalba stories as soon as his unit arrived in country. At first he thought it was another case of having fun with the gringo, but after a while . . . I think he began to believe, more than I ever did, at least to believe in a parallel world, somewhere far beneath his feet where another Windust was doing the things he was pretending not to up here.”

“You knew . . .”

“Suspected. Tried not to see too much. I was too young. I knew about the electric cattle prod, ‘self-defense’ is how he explained it. The name the people gave him was Xooq’, which means scorpion in Q’eqchi’. I loved him. I must have thought I could save him. And in the end it was Windust who saved me.” Maxine feels a strange buzzing at the edges of her brain, like a foot trying to come back awake. Still inside the perimeter of newlywed bliss, he sneaks out of bed, does what he’s in Guatemala to do, slips back, in the worst hours of the morning, nestling his cock against the crack of her ass, how could she not have known? What innocence could she still believe in?

Automatic-rifle fire every night, irregular pulses of flame-colored light above the treelines. Villagers began leaving. One morning Windust found the office he’d been working out of abandoned and cleared of everything sensitive. No sign of any of the neoliberal scum he’d oozed into town with. Perhaps owing to the appearance overnight of ill-disposed country folk carrying machetes. Somebody had written SALSIPUEDES MOTHERFUCKERS in lipstick on a cubicle wall. A 55-gallon oil drum out in back full of ashes and charred paperwork was still seeping smoke. Not a yanqui in sight, let alone the Israeli and Taiwanese mercs they’d been coordinating with, all of them suddenly gathered back into the Invisible. “He gave me about a minute to pack a bag. The blouse I wore at our wedding, some family photographs, a sock with a roll of quetzals in it, a little SIG Sauer .22 handgun he was never comfortable with and insisted I take.”

On the map the Mexican border wasn’t far, but even though they first headed down to the coast, away from the mountains, the terrain was demanding and there were obstacles—army patrols, blood-drinking Kaibil special ops, guerrilleros who would shoot a gringo on sight. At any moment Windust was apt to mutter, “Spot of bother here,” and they’d have to hide. It took days, but finally he got them safely into Mexico. They picked up the highway at Tapachula and rode buses north. One morning at the bus station in Oaxaca, they were sitting out under a canopy of poles and palm thatchwork, and Windust suddenly was down on one knee offering Xiomara a ring, with the biggest diamond she’d ever seen.

“What’s this?”

“I forgot to give you an engagement ring.”

She tried it on, it didn’t fit. “It’s OK,” he said, “When you get to D.F., I want you to sell it,” and it wasn’t till then, that “you” instead of “we,” that she understood he was leaving. He kissed her good-bye, and turning away from maybe the last merciful act in his résumé, moseyed on out of the bus station. By the time she thought to get up and run after him, he’d vanished down the hard roads and into the heavy weather of a northern destiny she’d thought she could protect him from.

“Foolish little girl. His agency took care of the annulment, found me a job in an office out on Insurgentes Sur, after a while I was on my own, there was no more interest or profit in tracking me, I found myself working more and more with exile groups and reconciliation committees, Huehuetenango was still down there, the war was never going to go away, it was like the old Mexican joke, de Guatemala a Guatepeor.”

They’ve walked down to Fulton Landing. Manhattan so close, so clear today, yet back on 11 September the river was an all but metaphysical barrier. Those who witnessed the event from over here watched, from a place of safety they no longer believed in, the horror of the day, watched the legions of traumatized souls coming across the bridge, dust-covered, smelling like demolition and smoke and death, vacant-eyed, in flight, in shock. While the terminal plume ascended.

“Do you mind if we walk back across the bridge, over to Ground Zero?”

Sure. Just another visitor to the Apple here, another one of those obligatory stops. Or was this the idea all along, and Maxine’s being played here, like an original-cast vinyl LP? “That ‘we’ again, Xiomara.”

“You’ve never been there?”

“Not since it happened. Made a point of avoiding it, in fact. You gonna report me to the patriotism police now?”

“It’s me. I’ve gotten obsessed.”

They’re up on the bridge again, as close to free as the city ever allows you to be, between conditions, an edged wind off the harbor announcing something dark now hovering out over Jersey, not the night, not yet, something else, on the way in, being drawn as if by the vacuum in real-estate history where the Trade Center used to stand, bringing optical tricks, a sorrowful light.

They glide like attendants toward the room of a waker from civic nightmare who will not be comforted. Open-top tour buses cruise by carrying visitors in matching plastic ponchos with the tour-company logo. At Church and Fulton, there’s a viewing platform, allowing civilians to look in past the chain-link and barricades to where dump trucks and cranes and loaders are busy reducing a pile of wreckage that still reaches ten or twelve stories high, to gaze into what should be the aura surrounding a holy place but isn’t. Cops with bullhorns are managing the foot traffic. Buildings nearby, damaged but standing, some draped like mourners in black façade netting, one with a huge American flag attached across the top stories, gather in silent witness, glassless window-sockets dark and staring. There are vendors selling T-shirts, paperweights, key chains, mouse pads, coffee mugs.

Maxine and Xiomara stand for a while looking in. “It was never the Statue of Liberty,” sez Maxine, “never a Beloved American Landmark, but it was pure geometry. Points for that. And then they blew it to pixels.”

And I know of a place, she’s careful not to add, where you dowse across an empty screen, clicking on tiny invisible links, and there’s something waiting out there, latent, maybe it’s geometric, maybe begging like geometry to be contradicted in some equally terrible way, maybe a sacred city all in pixels waiting to be reassembled, as if disasters could be run in reverse, the towers rise out of black ruin, the bits and pieces and lives, no matter how finely vaporized, become whole again . . .

“Hell doesn’t have to be underground,” Xiomara looking up at the vanished memory of what had stood there, “Hell can be in the sky.”

“And Windust—”