she asked me to get her a green card

“Although I would have liked to have taken a photograph, my camera was full, and they’d already walked away toward a shop with a sign advertising Calzones.”

Editor’s Note: The following is an essay previously unpublished for the past decade that was written in response to the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks.

Pakistan was far away, and Maria was living in Lahore while her husband studied accounting at the University of Central Punjab. She and I were supposed to be pen-pals and talk about shorba soup and how we danced to different music. She told me about her five-year-old son and how her husband slept in his office most nights. Two weeks later she wrote to me again explaining that she wanted to come to my country and that her husband could work hard.

Ten years had passed since a little boy kneeled on a carpet of alphabet soup to gaze past windows with finger paintings waiting for his father to come and fetch him. At an impromptu moment of silence that afternoon, I bowed my head among the other boys with neatly combed hair to mutter with puzzlement, uncomfortable inquisition, “I Say Yes, my Lord.” At the kitchen table that night, I asked my father why Arthur hadn’t come on at four o’clock and why Theo wasn’t allowed outside. He told me “some people did some bad things.” It’s not so much a story of men in helmets with axes, those we regard as heroes for posters in a doctor’s office. It’s a story of a generation that, in its short stretch of existence, has observed a decade that altered American life while leaving it recognizable but most certainly different.

The flag that I keep on the porch beside the wicker chair had fallen over and was a bit muddy. I ought to wash it or at least drop it in one of those metal containers that look like a mailbox but are painted red and say “Flags Only.” They’re run by the American Legion, and the veterans must have to draw straws to decide who has to drive to the box twice a year to see if anyone’s put anything inside.