Perhaps that’s why Anthony never saw that pistol. Or rather, Anthony could not remember seeing that pistol. It’s a funny thing about memory: it doesn’t always feel hazy when it’s wrong. Maybe it’s why witnesses to violent crime swear they saw things they never did, and swear they didn’t see things that happened right in front of them. It’s why burglarized store clerks sometimes don’t recognize what’s going on in the jumpy CCTV footage of the robbery or the shoot-out: what they actually experienced felt entirely different from what they see on the screen.
Sometimes memory can feel precise, a laser-cut model of what happened, so you can see a fully detailed picture right there in front of you when you close your eyes. It can feel certain when it’s wrong. How are memories formed, but through a system of sensors arranged around your body to take in sights, sounds, smells? What if those senses are off? What if they’re calibrated wrong? What if the shape of your eye has changed so that, like through a fisheye lens on a camera, the image you capture is altered? What if even the way you’re experiencing time has changed? Anthony experienced the attack differently from Alek, who experienced it differently from Spencer. The acceleration and near-freezing of time began and ended at different points for each of them. Each have large black spots over their memories of parts of the attack, extraordinary clarity over other parts.
Later Spencer would say he wished he had a video of what happened, but his older brother, Everett, a highway patrolman, disagreed. Everett knew what it was like to go through a traumatic confrontation that felt so maddeningly different from what an unfeeling security camera captured that it was actually disorienting. “It’s better that you just have your memories,” he said.
But that was just it. Their memories were different.
In 1985, European officials met in Schengen, Luxembourg, to hammer out an agreement. The purpose was free trade. European countries had similar values, and if you could ease passage between them, you could make trade easier. Easier trade was good for everyone; all economies would benefit. All countries would get richer as goods and services passed seamlessly between them, with fewer regulations, fewer taxes, fewer holdups at border crossings.
The idea was to turn the whole territory into effectively one country—once you were in, you were in. Internal borders would become almost meaningless.
For someone traveling from outside, the challenge would be getting into Europe. Once you arrived, you could move within the continent at will. If you had a Schengen visa, you usually wouldn’t get ID checks. The agreement also made it easier for foreigners, like American tourists, to vacation in Europe. They didn’t need visas at all, and after they arrived in one of the participating countries, they never had to show their passports again, even when they moved between countries.
Not all of Europe signed on to the Schengen Agreement immediately, but among the first seven members were three critical ones: Belgium, France, and Spain. It made Europe, or at least those countries, more appealing to American tourists. And to immigrants.
Ayoub El-Khazzani was born in Morocco, and lived in a place called Tétouan. Its name came from the Berber word for “eyes,” a reference to the watersprings that littered the city; Ayoub was raised in something of a Moorish paradise. His family was not wealthy, not even middle class, but the world that surrounded him was luxuriant, suffused with souks overflowing with handicrafts, pomegranate and almond trees lining the hills. It was a North African crossroad; the clothes and crafts in shops testified to all those who had marched through and deposited part of their culture there, most prominently the Berbers, but also the Moors and Cordobas. It was mostly Muslim and, in a way, a reflection of a bygone period thirteen hundred years earlier, when the Muslim world was at its richest, a cultural and intellectual powerhouse, a place with security and civil liberties where even Christians and Jews were protected because they too were sons of Ibrahim. And although they paid extra taxes for their beliefs because they were of course still infidels, they also didn’t have to fight in the army. Things were fair. Things were balanced, stable, orderly. The great Caliph Usman came along and eliminated poverty. Great scientific discoveries emerged from that place. Al-battani, the astronomer and mathematician who fine-tuned the concept of years lived then, as did the father of optics, Ibn al-Haytham, the man who proved that eyes don’t emit light, but take it in. Al-Farabi, the greatest philosopher after Aristotle, studied there. It was the time of the House of Wisdom, where philosophies were translated from Greek to Arabic so they could end up in the West.
The world owed the caliphate its knowledge; the West owed Muslims.
Ayoub was well east of ancient Mesopotamia, the site of the explosion of culture that emerged where the Tigris collided with the Euphrates, and that became known as the cradle of civilization. But his city gave the cradle a run for its money. It resembled the place and the time that continue to produce such powerful yearning in its descendants.
And which also, occasionally, produces such extraordinary violence in those who believe they can return the world to that utopian period, if enough trauma can be delivered to the powers corrupting Muslims that they shrivel up and retract like severed arteries.
Despite the wealth around him, work was sparse; Ayoub was near that rich, verdant world, but not of it. His family was poor.
In 2005, Ayoub’s father was forced to board a ferry for the short ride to Spain so that he might find better work. Eventually he got a job dealing in scrap metal, extracting value from the things other people discarded.
He was gone for two years, so Ayoub went through his adolescence straddling two kinds of lives. Not fatherless, but his father was absent, living in another country, living on another continent, and yet not even a hundred miles away. There, and not there. Close, but in another world.
AUG 13, 11:49 AM
Joyce Eskel:
Spence how is your ankle? What happened?
AUG 18, 6:50 PM
Joyce Eskel:
Hey need to post pictures!!!
JOYCE ESKEL CLOSED THE COMPUTER with an uneasy feeling.
She didn’t love the idea of Paris. She’d followed the story of the terrorists attacking the magazine there, Charlie Hebdo, a few months back. She’d been reading about Islamic extremists since 9/11, and she knew France had open borders. Paris was a big city of course (she’d been there before, but that was many years ago now) and the odds that the boys would be at any kind of risk were low. She knew that.
Still, she felt something.
Plus Anthony was there, and whenever her son got together with Anthony, things just happened. Two weeks into their trip, she couldn’t quite believe they’d managed to avoid major catastrophe.
Although they’d avoided major catastrophe only barely. She knew about the two drinking just a little too much, so that Spencer stumbled over a cobblestone and nearly broke his ankle, on the very first night of their trip. Spencer told her, when he connected to the Internet, that he might need to call it off and go back to base. Call off the whole trip, done on the first day. Could you even get an X-ray there? Would his insurance cover it?
It was uncanny, how they brought