All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort to find common ground.

Yes, he’d campaigned in poetry and is governing in prose, but surely adapting to the way the world actually works is the only rational thing to do: he has no power, after all, to compel the world to comply with his wishes.

We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning.

He must continue to hope.

13

At the airport, the woman weaves wildly through the passengers heading in the opposite direction, indifferent to the startled eyes trailing her. There are no taxis waiting outside the terminal—she’s on the departures level. The few cabs dropping passengers off don’t stop for her, despite her frantic waving. She must seem hysterical, she imagines, a tiny woman running toward them with her hijab fluttering, her jilbab billowing in the cold Bay Area breeze.

In desperation, she darts in front of a cab speeding away. It swerves to avoid her but does come to a stop. She clambers in, breathlessly announcing her destination, hoping the driver knows where the hospital is. The driver begins to protest in his gruff Russian accent, but something in her demeanor must be convincing of some emergency, for he nods and turns the meter on.

She’s riding the same route she’d taken scarcely a week ago, except this time she’s alone. But not entirely, for the ghosts of her mother and sister accompany her—a mother abandoned, a sister spurned. Sitting on the edge of the seat, she keeps her eyes fixed on the road ahead to avoid the sight of the empty seats beside her.

When the cab climbs up the final hill into San Francisco, she can see very little, the hilltop blanketed by a fierce swirling fog. When the taxi crests and swoops down the hill, she is dizzy, as though she is falling off a cliff whose base is hidden somewhere deep in the clouds of fog rising to meet her.

The city has been obliterated, erased with some vicious white marker, and in its place is a smoking void. Only occasionally the billowing fog parts enough, to reveal at times feeble pinpricks of house lights, at times glowing rivers of headlights like molten lava overrunning a hillside.

Somewhere in that are her sister and mother. It strikes her now that she’s riding into its fiery ruins for some definite trial and sentencing. For doesn’t the Quran warn of grievous penalty when the sky issues forth a smoky mist to envelop the people?