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3 1 I confess I’d been watching too much terror TV. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t get enough of 24, NCIS, Homeland, Sleeper Cell, MI-5, and The State Within. I watched them all. I watched the reruns and I rented the DVDs, sometimes more than once. These shows and miniseries drew me the way other people were hypnotized by the corniest disaster movies. You know, the ones with “all-star” casts and warbling theme songs. It wasn’t just because of 9/11, which had branded the calendar over a decade ago. And it’s not as if I really thought anything in those shows could happen to me: kidnapping, bomb threats, torture. But I had inexplicably been involved in enough crime at the State University of Michigan (SUM) to realize that even the sanest existence—mine as a bibliographer of Edith Wharton—could be struck by lightning like a lone tree in a field, blasted and fried. Maybe I was superstitious. My life had calmed down considerably after getting tenure, becoming a full professor, and being appointed to oversee a departmental speaker’s program endowed by a former straight-A student of mine. He had made it big in a dot.com, died young of cancer, and left money in his will to the university, with me as the sole administrator. With my new status, crime and instability had disappeared from my world, and so maybe I was trying to fill it with sensationalistic visions of chaos to ward off actual chaos by sympathetic magic. I failed. That warm late May evening, I was putting out the lights downstairs in our typical 1950s Michiganapolis center hall Colonial. It was a beautiful house on a street where the maples grew so thick and tall that their foliage formed a canopy over the street from spring into the fall. There was always something mildly ceremonial when you drove along it in the warm, green months. 4 I’d grown up in New York City—the Upper West Side specifically— as the child of immigrants, Jewish refugees from 1930s Europe. A different world entirely: brownstones, massive apartment buildings, endless noise and commotion. Traffic on Broadway, traffic on Riverside Drive and West End Avenue, traffic on the West Side Highway. But it was safe despite the commotion. Still, my Michiganapolis home had seemed an even stronger bulwark against the kind of horror my parents had survived by fleeing and building a very comfortable life in America. Yes, my cousin Sharon lovingly derided where I lived as very Father Knows Best, but that was okay by me. If you can’t indulge in fantasy in your own home, you might as well never buy a house, and as fantasies go, it was pretty tame. But then what would you expect of a bibliographer? We don’t dream of winning literary prizes, we just hope nobody finds an error in our indexes and gloats about it in print. As writers go, we’re not fierce and stately wolves, we’re more like prairie dogs ducking down into our tunnels at the first sign of threat. At least that’s what I thought. As I turned off the last lamp in our spacious blue and gold living room, the kind of relaxed, cozy room that would sell a house even in a bad real estate market, I could see flashing lights in the distance through the nearest window. Two black armored personnel carriers hurtled down our quiet Michiganapolis street, and I wasn’t shocked as much as resigned. I’d seen the SWAT team vehicles in our local newspaper in an article about “domestic preparedness,” but never in action of any kind. “This is it,” I thought. There were terrorists in our college town. On my street. Of course. It had to happen. We were an unlikely target, which made it all the more possible. And then the APCs shuddered to a stop right in front of our house. That’s when I started to panic, and felt rooted to the living room window, even though a voice inside me shouted “Run!” Upstairs, out the back, anywhere. Run. My throat tightened, my face felt icy cold despite the balmy air bringing in the rich scent of lilacs and viburnums from the front and back yards. In novels, people’s stomachs are always churning when they face the worst, but I felt paralyzed from the neck down, hell, from the neck up, too...

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