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By Root 367 0

trucks flashing by me, until I arrived at what they call a scene of mayhem. It was cloudy. There were police and medical workers and other people everywhere, many of them weeping and/or screaming, and, as I got closer to the station, more and more confusion. People streamed from the various exits, some of them wounded, lightly I guess, and emergency workers rushing in. I saw, I might have seen, a dazed teenager with blood all over his face and a paramedic who took his arm and sat him down and gave him something that looked like an ice pack, instructing him to sit and hold it to his head. There was an odor of burnt plastic. Someone asked me what had happened. Helicopters beat the air overhead. I wandered around for a few minutes, found a wall to sit against, shut my eyes, and listened.

After I don’t know how long, I stood and walked back toward and then up El Paseo del Prado, ambulances and people rushing past me. As I got farther away from the station I saw crowds in the doorways of bars and restaurants watching televisions and I could hear people saying “ETA” and quoting the estimated numbers of the dead, looking down toward the station and then back up at the screens. I reached the hotel lobby that was now packed and loud and took the elevator to my room; Isabel was gone. I felt in my pocket for my keys and rediscovered the necklace. I left the room, left the hotel, and walked up Huertas to my apartment. I climbed the stairs and took off my jacket and turned on my computer. It was almost ten. Surprised at how much time had passed, I opened a browser, called up the New York Times, and clicked on the giant headline. The article described the helicopters I could hear above me.

I wondered where Isabel had gone. Then I didn’t. I made some coffee, took one white pill, climbed through the roof, and sat with the coffee and listened. After a while I dropped back down through the skylight, brushed my teeth again, and left my apartment. I went to the bank of pay phones in La Plaza Santa Ana and called Kansas with my calling card. For a while all the lines were in use and they could not complete my call. I kept trying and eventually got through. It was around four in the morning there. The phone rang its foreign ring and finally my mom picked up, still half–asleep. It’s me, I said, and she asked what time is it, are you O.K. I said I was fine but there had been a terrorist attack. My dad was on the phone now, and asked me how far my apartment was from Atocha and I said I had been staying at the Ritz. This of course confused them both and again they asked if I was O.K. I hesitated and, voice cracking, said I had done a terrible thing. What, they said, and I told them that I had claimed in the presence of various people that my mom was dead or gravely ill and my dad was a fascist. Why, one of them asked, confused, but not upset. To get sympathy, I guessed. After a brief silence, my mom said she’d like to hear more about this later, but how many people had been killed, who was responsible, what was I going to do now, thank God I was O.K. I said I was exhausted and was going to try to sleep. They said that was a good idea and asked that I call them later, when it was night in Madrid. We said we loved each other and, before we hung up, my mom suggested I give blood.

I went back up to my apartment and refreshed the Times; the number of estimated dead was now around two hundred, at least a thousand injured. I considered walking back to Atocha, but instead I opened El País in another window and the Guardian in a third. I sat smoking and refreshing the home pages and watching the numbers change. I could feel the newspaper accounts modifying or replacing my memory of what I’d seen; was there a word for that feeling? The only other feeling I registered was fatigue. I fell asleep and when I awoke it was dark; I could hear café noise, albeit less than normal, in the plaza. I ate what there was to eat and read the news but my head was clouded; I could not process the conflicting theories regarding responsibility. The government maintained it