Summary
Motion sensor lights turn on as Brandon emerges from the hole in the drywall into a woman’s bathroom on the 85th floor. He goes out to find people gathered at the window. They watch sheets of paper fluttering down along with a liquid pouring and scraps of metal. They don’t know what has happened. Brandon gets people to help rescue the others from the elevator. Brandon realizes there is a fire axe behind a piece of emergency glass. A man uses it to open up the wall. The passengers climb out just before the elevator plummets into the dark shaft. The woman with the cell phone gets a signal; she learns from her husband that an airplane has hit the tower. While the others decide to take the stairs down, Brandon remembers what his father always says: “We’re a team. That’s how we survive. Together.” He ties the wet napkin around his face and starts to climb the stairs up to Windows on the World.
Reshmina tells the soldier that she is forbidden from touching him, and she must not be alone with a man who isn’t in her family, so she offers to get her father. He tells her not to leave him. Reshmina figures out a workaround: she will walk very slowly back to her home, speaking aloud from her English textbook. The soldier understands, crawling behind her. Her father, Baba, agrees that if the man has asked for refuge, they must give it to him. Baba helps him in the house and they lay him out. The soldier says his name is Taz, nicknamed after the Tasmanian Devil. Pasoon arrives talking excitedly about the Taliban ambush in Pashtu, saying it killed all the Americans. When he learns of the plan to help Taz, he renounces the family, saying he is no longer part of it. Baba plans to make the long trek to the ANA base to let them know about the soldier, who rips his LOWERY name tag off his uniform for Baba to give the ANA. After Baba leaves, Reshmina becomes concerned that her brother has finally run off to join the Taliban. When she sees his prized toy airplane is missing, she reasons he has left for good. She sprints for the goat path up to the mountains, determined to catch her brother before he tells the Taliban about Taz.
Brandon climbs the stairs; it is difficult in the heat. Clear liquid gushes down the steps. Not jet fuel, but probably water, Brandon reasons. He wants to apologize for letting his father down by getting suspended. His father has always been there for him, especially after his mother died of cancer when Brandon was only four. Eventually he hits mountains of broken drywall that he has to climb. He falls, scraping his body and hitting his head, but he thinks of what he learned from skateboarding: If you want to be a skater, when you fall you have to get up and try again. He climbs over the drywall until he reaches the 88th floor, where he sees an orange fire. He is relieved to think that this is where the plane hit, meaning his dad is safe. However, the entire 89th-floor stairwell is missing. He reasons that if he is A stairwell, there must be an intact B stairwell. He pushes open the bent, damaged door and slips out. But the 89th floor is missing. Brandon stares out into open sky.
Reshmina searches the mountains for Pasoon, remembering a time when he invited her to the mountains a year or two earlier. They found a rifle that Pasoon’s older friends left for him. Pasoon explained they’d pay him five dollars to shoot at the Americans. Pasoon loaded the gun and Reshmina warned him not to shoot. He shot anyway, being knocked to the ground by the force of the rifle. They hid behind rocks as the Americans shouted and began shooting. Pasoon laughed because they had no idea where Pasoon and Reshmina were. In the present, Reshmina realizes Pasoon is likely going to the same place. She runs down the hill and asks a group of boys playing on a decommissioned Soviet tank if they saw her brother. They say they did. Reshmina keeps going. She thinks of how the first textbooks she learned from were anti-Soviet primers printed in the United States and smuggled into the country from Pakistan. The alphabet lessons encouraged Jihad against the Soviets, calling it, “the kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims and Muslim lands from the enemies of Islam.” The Americans hadn’t realized they would one day invade Afghanistan and become the “infidels they had trained the mujahideen to fight.” She had resisted the propaganda in the books, but Pasoon had been indoctrinated. Reshmina then sees Pasoon on a ridge across the valley. She puts a hand up to block the sun and sees him waving to a group of four Taliban men on the next ridge.
Brandon sinks to what’s left of the ground. He imagines himself falling the 89 stories to the ground as wind whips fiercely around him. He knows he needs to move, get to safety, but it’s like he is paralyzed. A police helicopter rises to view and he waves his arms, but even though the police inside can see him, he realizes there’s no way for them to access him. Brandon climbs along a ledge to get to the intact south side of the building. A gust of wind drags him flat on his stomach. Then human hands grab him and pull him to safety far from the ledge. He looks up to see a familiar face.
Reshmina chases after Pasoon, shouting at him not to go. He ignores her and climbs the mountain toward the Taliban fighters. She feels the vibrations of an Apache helicopter. A rocket streaks from it to the hillside where the soldiers had been standing. Rubble hits Reshmina as she ducks for cover. She hears the Soviet-era rifles of the Taliban hitting the Apache, which turns around and attacks the hillside with tracer bullets. Reshmina reaches Pasoon, and she scolds him for being stupid, but is relieved he is safe. They scramble along a ridge only for Reshmina to find herself clinging to the edge of a cliff, her feet kicking in the open air. Pasoon tries to pull her to safety. The Apache appears, so close Reshmina can see the pilot through the glass. A giant machine gun hanging from the bottom of the helicopter is pointed at her.
Brandon’s rescuer turns out to be a man named Richard. Earlier in the day, they rode the escalator at the same time and Brandon and Leo helped Richard not drop the things he was carrying. Richard gives Brandon a wet handkerchief. Brandon is relieved to cling to the stranger as they move through the smokey hall. Brandon says he has to get to his dad. Richard is resistant, but agrees to go with Brandon over the mounds of debris on the stairs. However, there’s no way of getting beyond the 93rd floor. Brandon despairs, but Richard reassures him that the firefighters will put out the fire and reach his dad eventually. Richard carries Brandon back down the stairs.
The helicopter pilot speaks into his microphone. Reshmina wonders if someone far away is deciding her fate. The Apache then tilts and flies off, leaving Pasoon to pull Reshmina to safety. The twins keep moving, taking cover behind a large pile of cedar logs as bullets are fired in their direction. They realize that an entire tribe of Kochi nomads and their camels are hiding behind the woodpile too. Reshmina has only ever seen them in the distance. They have no permanent home, instead traveling and trading back and forth across the Pakistan border. The Kochi give them naan and rice to eat. Reshmina dreams about being one of them, imagining what it would be like to stand separate from the conflict between the Taliban and Americans. When the sounds of fighting have moved down the valley, Pasoon stands and announces he must go. Reshmina forbids him from joining the Taliban. He says she can’t stop him. She pulls his toy airplane from her tunic and holds it out of his reach.
Brandon and Richard walk on the 91st floor. Brandon sees a person fall past the window, but assumes he must be hallucinating. Brandon’s eyes sting from the smoke. They find no one, so decide to check for people on the 90th before returning to the 89th. On the 90th there is an elevator full of people. They can’t get out because a sheet of blue flame is raining down the shaft and covering the elevator opening, like a waterfall of jet fuel. A woman jumps through it, but she catches fire so badly that her hair is burned off. She tells the others she can’t feel it. They stand around stupefied. Then the elevator falls. Brandon reasons the four people left in it are surely dead.
Pasoon lunges for the plastic airplane, but Reshmina holds it away. Reshmina says he can’t tell the Taliban about Taz; he can’t give refuge and take revenge at the same time. Pasoon says he can make twenty times more in the Taliban than as a goat herder. She says they are killers. Pasoon reminds her that the Americans killed the person who gave him the plane: an American drone dropped a bomb on her on her wedding day. The two argue, Reshmina saying the Taliban, while Afghan, are only successful because they are backed by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan; in this way, they are like all the other historical invaders. Pasoon finds a cedar cone. She knows that the country once had many cedars, but the invading armies had cut them down, leaving Afghanistan rocky and dead. The only ones left are in the mountains where armies fear to go. She finds a seed in the cone and plants it in the ground. She asks Pasoon, “What if there was another way?” But she looks up and sees he is gone.
Analysis
The theme of resilience—the ability to recover quickly from adversity—emerges in Brandon’s storyline when he finds himself trapped in an elevator just a few floors below where a hijacked airplane has hit the North Tower. Brandon and the other oblivious elevator riders have no idea why the elevator has stopped or why it is filling with heat and noxious smoke, but rather than succumb to despair, they work together to cover their mouths with wet napkins and then free themselves by prying open the doors. As the only child on board, Brandon must summon his courage and hope as he climbs through the hole in the drywall without knowing what’s on the other side. In doing so, Brandon brings help to the other passengers and saves several lives just before the elevator plummets down the shaft.
In Reshmina’s storyline, she cleverly gets around the issue of a man outside her family being allowed to touch her by reading aloud from her English textbook as she slowly leads Taz back to her home, where he can seek refuge. The theme of betrayal arises when Pasoon discovers his family is harboring an infidel. Disgusted with their decision to give refuge to an American sergeant, Pasoon renounces the family. While Reshmina’s parents assume Pasoon is merely throwing a childish tantrum, Reshmina fears that Pasoon has finally done what she has anticipated for so long: he has left to join the Taliban. In doing so, he will betray his family and neighbors, putting their safety at risk because the Taliban will decimate the entire village as punishment for not being loyal. Gratz touches again on the themes of hope and innocence as Reshmina sets out to stop Pasoon before he betrays the family; naively, Reshmina still hopes her brother is not a lost cause.
The themes of hope and resilience also arise when Brandon sets out to climb up to his father rather than head down the stairs to safety. Ignorant of the fact a plane has taken out several floors of the staircase, Brandon attempts to climb over mounds of debris and rubble. When he falls, he remembers the lessons of resilience he has learned as a skateboarder: if you fall while trying a trick, you have to get back up and try again. This thought helps Brandon get further up the stairs. However, in an instance of situational irony, he emerges from the stairwell onto the 89th floor to discover that there is no 89th floor, only a gaping hole and the sky where the windows once were.
Gratz returns to the theme of lost innocence with Reshmina’s recollections about how her brother, like so many young men in Afghanistan, became indoctrinated into jihad at a young age. In an instance of situational irony, the early textbooks they learned from contained overt Cold War propaganda from the United States that encouraged young Afghans to take up arms against the Soviets occupying their country in the 1980s. In a perverse corruption of simple alphabet lessons, the textbooks promoted righteous holy war against enemies of Islam. However, in an instance of situational irony, the Americans who trained the mujahideen in Afghanistan and Pakistan would later become the “infidels” in the Soviets’ place.
The theme of revenge arises when Pasoon and Reshmina get into a heated discussion about the righteousness of Pasoon joining the Taliban and giving up the information about Taz staying in their home. Pasoon reminds his sister that the Americans killed their older sister on her wedding day, and he questions how Reshmina could possibly want to give refuge to an American after that. Reshmina argues that it is no better to side with the Taliban, who she says are also the product of foreign influence from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The chapter ends with Reshmina considering the possibility of Afghan people finding another way forward, independent of foreign influence. To symbolize this hope, she plants a cedar seed in the dry ground and imagines the landscape of her country returning to what it once was before other countries invaded and uprooted both the trees and the culture that was there.
