But lucky, that was what he truly was, if only he could feel this luck. How often did he hear from his father that a soldier on leave had been found with his throat cut on a road from Algiers? How often did his father call to say that a friend’s son had been taken for questioning by La Sécurité Militaire and had not yet, after months, come home? Compared to those entering the draft now, his tour of duty had been well timed. Daily the press ministry printed Algerian newspapers that said the massacres—boys mutilated, mothers decapitated, bodies plowed in ditches—were the work of terrorists, the ruthless, fanatic, always increasingly desperate Groupe Islamique Armé. His father reading these words tried to see what was true and what was not. But how could his father know? He could not be everywhere in Algeria at once. He was one man running a hotel where a flute played by the sea. In Boston, uncensored papers from Cairo that Rafik brought home described an Algerian civil war. A fairly elected Islamic government had been overthrown by a corrupt military backed by France. The GIA was armed resistance to tyranny: tyranny that tortured defenseless women for information on their brothers and sons.

Aziz’s father told him of any massacre he knew of even slightly. It was stories incomplete, half wrong, made by ones boasting or guessing or wishing they knew. Aziz rejoiced each time he knew none of the dead. He saw this as cowardice. One day he forced himself to remember. Sitting by the cash register in the glass box, he willed the massacres into animation across the street, trying to see their Boston version. He imagined a sidewalk exploding, a handbag flying, a baby’s hat plopped on a manhole cover. But these dioramas melted in the radiance before him: the metallic of cars, the kid of a caramel glove, the creamy red of brake lights. The pretty new nothing that was America—he wanted to watch that.