On November 13, 2015, I was working as what was called an events coordinator at a bookstore in Brooklyn. The store hosted an author reading nearly every night and it was my job to set up chairs and the microphone, welcome and introduce the author, break everything down after the reading, count the receipts, and close up shop. That night the speaker was Kamel Daoud, the Algerian journalist who had just published his first novel The Meursault Investigation, a variation on Camus’ The Stranger seen from the point of view of the brother of the Arab man Camus’ protagonist murders. The previous December, for public statements suggesting, among other things, that slavish devotion to Islam was retarding the Arab world, a fatwa had been issued against Daoud.
A few hours before the reading, one of the store’s owners pulled me aside and told me that, because of the fatwa and the attention Daoud was receiving with the publication of his novel, he, the owner, had called the Brooklyn police and asked them to have a squad car cruise by that night. How, exactly, a passing squad car was supposed to determine if anything was wrong inside he didn’t explain to me. A few hours later, after my meal but before I had to set up, I was manning the cash register and since business was slow I switched the computer screen over to the New York Times. It was about then that the stories started coming through about the coordinated Islamist attacks inside the Bataclan theater in Paris, and outside the Stade de France stadium, and at various cafés and bistros throughout the city. I kept up on the news trickling out as best as I could. I checked in on a former student living in Paris and received a text from her telling me she was safe and sheltering in her apartment. Setting up for the evening, I put a box cutter in my jeans’ pocket.
I’m aware of the sick irony of choosing for protection the very instrument that allowed the 9/11 murders to be carried out. It wasn’t like I expected an attack on a small independent bookstore in Cobble Hill, and in any event the reading went off without problems. But on a day when some terrorists had gone to a lot of planning to stage coordinated attacks, being on edge at an event for a writer under a fatwa still seems to me to have been a reasonable reaction. I don’t want to indulge the grotesque practice of trying to associate myself with tragedy. What I went through was nothing. But beyond the bodies and the destroyed buildings, the endgame of terrorism is to leave behind survivors. The point of terrorism is terror, and you can’t frighten the dead.
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