Music for Wartime (17 page)

The briefcase he used was a gift from his sister. Something to replace the canvas bag he’d carried through his academic life. She was the one who identified a scrap of it, charred leather and a bit of buckle.

There are things we can assume: that he was terrified, that he almost wet his pants, that he rehearsed, that he ordered a good meal that morning but wasn’t able to eat it, that he prayed, that he didn’t look at faces in the crowd. That his own name, when he checked into the hospital, sounded to him like a death sentence. That he’d pictured some glorious future, some altered universe, in which history would be written by the victors, among whom he’d be chief. That he couldn’t sleep the night before. But maybe those are facts about us, about the way we’d be.

The bomber’s ex-girlfriend is not ready to talk, but her roommate has given certain details: the fight about the keys, the time he broke the girlfriend’s wrist, the addiction to Indian food. The roommate starts most sentences with “If I’d known.” We are happy to allow her this.

He liked to solve puzzles. He liked to fix machines. When his third-grade teacher, Miss Mullens, told him there was not enough time to talk about sharks, he slowed the mechanism of the classroom clock. “Look,” he said. “I made the day longer.”

If he hadn’t felt the need to watch the explosion, he’d never have fallen from the roof of the bank, and would not have snapped his leg. Three days later he wouldn’t have stumbled, dazed and infected, to the hospital. He would not, when he saw the nurses’ eyes, when he realized the police were on their way, have barricaded himself, wouldn’t have taken the hostage, wouldn’t have demanded the suicidal drugs, wouldn’t have shot himself when they were denied. Or so we assume.

The country where he was born is on the map, but only a detailed map. It has a flag, but not a flag we’ve seen. His country is smaller than Luxembourg, larger than Lichtenstein, with a surprising number of sheep. To be honest, we’d forgotten about his country. We aren’t at all sure what he wanted.

The night before his twenty-third birthday, he sat in a mostly empty movie theater and watched Audrey Tautou run through the streets of Paris, suitcase in hand. As a botanist, he hated that the wrong things were blooming on-screen: This was meant to be August, but here were tulips in the park. Each flower, to him, had a taste. He’d rarely tasted nectar, just a few curious times—the viscosity, if not the flavor, reminding him of his girlfriend, of afternoons on her small white bed—but he knew each flower’s smell so intimately, so clinically, that when these tulips appeared he felt it on the back of his tongue. He admired the director’s brazenness (he assumed it wasn’t ignorance) in deciding what flowers bloomed when. He admired men who molded the universe like plastic. After this thought, his popcorn lost its flavor. We’ve gleaned all this from the video surveillance.

His mother stands on the porch and again and again says
why
, till it doesn’t sound like a word at all. It’s a different
why
from ours. We are ready to accept this.

He had a tooth pulled in the spring of 2012. He was allergic to strawberries. He excelled at tennis. There was no food in his refrigerator. He was dead before they could interrogate him. His blog has been erased.

We plan to learn more. We plan to keep updated. We plan to look for patterns. We’ve obtained a new map, with slightly different colors.