FIRST WOMAN
Men in thousand-dollar suits have the words --

SECOND WOMAN
The bright gold light and clear sky of late summer.

FIRST MAN
A crowd of dark suits on the steps of the Capitol, flag hanging behind them, fluttering in the breeze made by their voices.

FIRST WOMAN
-- to tell me what I'm feeling.

FIRST MAN
A swarm of bees intones something like "America the Beautiful" something like "The Lord's Prayer." I don't know which.

FIRST WOMAN
They say them and they sing them. In unison.

FIRST MAN
Impressions a human eye takes in one after the other, a bee receives all at once. In a bee's eye, things in the field of vision take shape as a mosaic --

SECOND MAN
Uh -- tragedy! -- uh, put 'em on notice! Surveillance! Go get 'em! -- Uh, tragedy! -- Uh, missiles!

FIRST MAN
I bet you think that's an American flag. There you go assuming again.

FIRST WOMAN
Words make me safe. From grief.

SECOND MAN
Our great nation -- uh, targets! -- It's gonna be a long one -- Mark my -- You jes' wait!

FIRST MAN
Are bees buzzing in the boy's ear?

FIRST WOMAN
But where are the women?

SECOND WOMAN
A woman is painting her toenails dark red. Naked, middle-aged flesh. Eyeglasses with heavy dark rims. Combs her hair. Dresses, deliberate, graceful. Pantaloons, djellabah. Socks, necklace, bracelet, sandals.

Studies a pocket mirror. Takes off eyeglasses and puts on a birka. Turns her face to us. Covered from head to toe in heavy cloth. A circle of mesh permits breathing and seeing the minimum.

FIRST MAN
All the bees applaud.

FIRST WOMAN
I'm staring, not weeping, at pictures on soot-streaked brick, on corners. Banks of candles and flowers, altars like Mexican churches.

The word "heroes." The word "courage." The opening bars of "We Shall Overcome." I walk back and forth, unable to concentrate, sit, or feel grief.

SECOND MAN
Obscene.

FIRST MAN
Cut it. Just cut it right off.

FIRST WOMAN
After the glut of TV, days of the same news loop, I quietly lose it in a subway car, where the F goes above ground over Gowanus and Red Hook. where you can see the gap in the cityscape like a pulled tooth, an amputation.

I implode. A man elbows by, exiting the train, saying, "it's war."

SECOND WOMAN
My friends go downtown to peer into the rubble.

FIRST MAN
That century is over.

FIRST WOMAN
I jump at sirens. The first planes. Refrigerator trucks heading uptown with bodies and body parts. Bright lights in the street outside St. Vincent's. People standing, silent. Waiting. The plume still rising. The streets smell of burning. My bedroom stinks of acrid smoke.

FIRST MAN
Masks, candles, flags.

FIRST WOMAN
Can words again be used for more than to sell things.

SECOND MAN
Hey, in God we trust.

FIRST MAN
Stories from all sides. Where were you? Are you safe? Anyone you know? Looks in the street between strangers.

FIRST WOMAN
On Seventh Avenue, I see the nanny from Barbados whose name I don't know but who knows mine.

SECOND WOMAN
Big and smiling.

FIRST WOMAN
Tells me 28 people from her country worked in the cafeteria in a tower. Her friend's husband, whose leg had just been amputated, had not gone to work that day. The 96th floor, she says -- he could never have walked it.

SECOND WOMAN
I write to my neighbor, Gertrude, my old enemy on the board, who has refused to say hello or even look at me for several months.

She made it out of the '93 bombing and went back to work in the same tower. Always goes to work early.

She'd decided to go down to the cafeteria on the 30th floor.

FIRST WOMAN
Was she drinking sweet, light coffee?

SECOND WOMAN
She felt the floor shaking, looked at the others, and they looked back, knowing. Walked out and down the thirty flights of stairs. Walked over the bridge and back to the neighborhood. Home. She has her faith, a neighbor says. More than half her office are dead.

SECOND MAN
Why don't she say "missing"?

SECOND WOMAN
I write: Dear Gertrude, I was glad to hear that you're safe. I'm sorry for your losses. She writes back promptly, her handwriting like Mother's. Secretarial.

Dear Joan, thank you for your note & prayers. You probably heard that I am working twelve-hour shifts, six a week. I am proud to be an American, a New Yorker, and an employee of the Port Authority.

FIRST WOMAN
Edith, 75, slow, heavy, can't go back to her building yet. It will be months.

SECOND WOMAN
Maybe it's a sign I should move.

FIRST WOMAN
A black box may be in it and it's surrounded by military personnel. She's being shunted from one son to the other -- husband died suddenly a few months ago. She stumbled through smoke and broken concrete with a horde of others running from her building.

FIRST MAN
Windows blown. Nothing in her hand. Food left to rot.

FIRST WOMAN
A man offered her part of a frozen muffin. A woman said, "Cover your face with your coat -- I'll lead you." A man lifted her into the boat.

FIRST MAN
Taken by water to Jersey City and left. Fifteen hours. No food, water, toilet.

SECOND WOMAN
I paid two tough-looking boys to drive to a gas station where I could call my son. I wasn't afraid of them. Then we were stuck five hours in traffic, it was a bomb threat. I'm not going to cancel the CAT scan, did you know there are nodules on my lung? Do you think something else is going to happen to me?

FIRST WOMAN
I drive upstate, through small Catskill villages. Stores and trucks are draped with flags. Billboard letters spell out "God bless America." It's squirrel-hunting season. Next will be turkeys, then deer. Bows, then black powder, then pistols, then shotguns.

SECOND MAN
Everyone here's real careful.

FIRST WOMAN
My dog is shaking at the reports of guns. Her whole body trembles. I cover up my Gay and Lesbian Services Center T-shirt with a jacket.

Darryl, delivering a cord of wood, says, "They should declare martial law." I don't speak, and he says, "Well, don't you think so?" Then he says, "I finally cried yesterday."

Chip says, "Oh, they'll all be moving up here now."

SECOND MAN
This is good hardwood. Two years old, every stick. I'll let you have it cheap.

SECOND WOMAN
My old shrink, "S," is homeless but quote--OK--unquote. This comes from "H," via e-mail.

FIRST MAN
My friend down on Broadway says he and his lover may leave and move to Vermont. He's a chain-smoker; I had to stop going to his loft. Has cigarettes and all his meals delivered. His lover owns a Soho health spa and a line of skin care.

THIRD MAN
Paul hosted a gathering of psychics and shamans in his apartment Friday night to do "energy work."

SECOND WOMAN
"Will there be more?" I ask. "What do you think?"

THIRD MAN
"It will be all right," he says.

FIRST WOMAN
Do I think we have souls?

SECOND WOMAN
I picture six thousand souls rising out of their bodies at almost the same moment.

THIRD MAN
Wednesday night I walk west along Christopher and pass bars full of people drinking and watching TV. Big flag in the window of a leather bar.

FIRST WOMAN
She was waiting to be evicted from her ten-year sublet. The landlord hasn't been cashing her rent checks. She's already lost a studio and moved it once.

Words fail her. Her wordlessness ignites my fear. Curt. Silent. We implode.

She points out the black underwings of a vulture, white underwings of a hawk. Speaks the words she has been afraid of. A hawk rides an air current high above us. Even before she speaks, everything changes.

After an opening in Brooklyn, she goes to an artist's apartment with friends from the gallery. Sees a fine print or textile on their wall, then looks closer: it's a sheet of yellow legal paper, scorched all around the edges, that floated onto their roof. So delicate, she says. beautiful. They have framed and hung it.

SECOND WOMAN
A girl -- covered, like the woman, in a birka. She half-curtains the woman with her clothing, pulls bread from her djellabah and offers it. They eat.