One crystal blue fall morning, a bellow comes from the other room. Her nickname, stretched out to the length of stillness, without the final consonant: Daaa . . . Her skin creeps. It’s worse than the bellow he makes when he fouls the bed and needs her to come clean him. Once more she runs, as if there never has been a false alarm. In the room, someone is talking to her husband, and he’s groaning. She flings the door open. “I’m here, Ray.”

At first glance, there’s only the man in the frozen terror mask, the one she has gotten used to, at last. Then she turns and sees. She lowers herself to the bed, next to him. The television is saying, “Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness.” Saying, “That is the second tower. That just happened. Live. On our screen.”

Some hard, skittering animal in the bed grazes at her wrist. She startles and shouts. Her husband’s movable hand, knocking against hers.

“It’s deliberate,” the screen says. “This must be deliberate.”

She takes his stiff, curled fingers and grips them. They stare together, understanding nothing. Orange, white, gray, and black billow against a cloudless blue. The towers vent, like cracks in the crust of the Earth. They waver. Then drop. The screen staggers. People in the streets scatter and scream. One of the towers folds up flat, like collapsible hanging shelves. The animal shrieking will not stop. Refusal trickles from Ray’s mouth. “Nh, nh, nh . . .”

She has seen this before: monstrous columns, too big to be felled, falling. She thinks: Finally, the whole strange dream of safety, of separation, will die. But when it comes to prediction, she has always been worse than wrong.