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By Root 798 0

Someone else found him, which was probably just as well, but Sean didn’t leave. Not that day, not for the next seven months. When he was kicked off the actual recovery crews because he wasn’t police or fire or construction, he worked around the edges, helping organize a protest to keep the firefighters working in the hole; forming a committee to agitate for more space for the memorial. He got the acreage doubled. His “trouble with authority,” as parents and teachers had always termed it, had become an official advantage. Soon he was giving speeches all over the country—most often in the small towns no one else wanted to visit—to Rotary Clubs and Kiwanis Clubs and police and firefighter and veterans’ organizations, all of them eager for a firsthand account of the rescue and recovery. In his head as in his speeches, even his derelictions became proof of devotion. “For seven months, every single day, I went to the hole,” he told the crowds who gathered to hear him. “I lost my marriage”—always murmurs at this point—“I lost my career, I lost my home, but that’s nothing.” A pause. “My brother—my only brother—lost his life.” Sometimes people would break into inadvertent applause at this, which was awkward. Sean learned to lower his eyes until it stopped.

Even returning home to live with his parents after he and Irina split seemed right. Their modest Brooklyn Victorian had always been carefully tended—Eileen knew how to husband scarce resources—but by the time Sean moved in, the paint was peeling, the doors squeaking, a mouse leaving brazen shit. Sean, without asking, fixed, cleaned, cleared, painted, sanded, oiled, caulked, trapped. Put his hands to good use. Took down all the family pictures in the hall and replaced them with pictures of Patrick. Eileen, who’d always given Sean, the youngest of six, a threadbare mothering, warmed.

But then he was left off the memorial jury. The requests for him to speak tapered off, as if the country was moving on without him. In the movies Sean watched, redemption was a possession never lost once obtained. In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid. The old him kept popping up, often in his mother’s eyes. In recent months she’d reverted to her brusque self, telling him to make his bed, which grated doubly because it was the twin of his childhood. His father kept calling him by Patrick’s name, and Sean didn’t have the heart to correct him, though Eileen, acidly, did. And Sean’s “contracting” business, which he’d tried of late to restart, felt like a suit he’d outgrown without money for a new one. Two days earlier, he had stalked off a job installing IKEA shelves after the housewife who hired him asked if he would carry her garbage down to the street at the end of the day. “Do you know who I am?” he had wanted to scream at her, but the true answer burned. He was a handyman living with his parents.

Alyssa Spier watched, transfixed, as her Mystery Muslim scoop entered the news cycle and rolled forward, crushing every other minor story before it. By noon she was booked on three television news programs and had done four radio interviews.

She sat in a chair, waiting to be made up, next to a local anchorman who was complaining that the foundation color being applied diluted his tan. As the makeup artist turned her attentions to Alyssa, who had no tan to dilute, the anchor began to practice saying “Muslim”—“the New York Post is reporting that a Muslim has been selected”—with just the right note of ironic surprise on the first syllable. “The jury’s not talking, but stay tuned,” he continued in a confiding tone that masked that he had nothing to confide. The TV lights glinted off the gel in his tight curls like sunlight on a river.

Every politician was talking about her news, or avoiding talking about it. “I’m not going to comment on unconfirmed reports,” the mayor said on NY1. He’d been a brawler of a politician in his youth but had mellowed into a civic paterfamilias. “Right now I’m more concerned about unauthorized leaks—which may