In the four plane crashes comprising the 9/11 attack, 2,977 people died. This wasn’t the deadliest strike to take place on what is now US soil — the continuing genocide of this land’s indigenous population is into the millions of lives lost. 102 minutes passed between the first plane striking the north tower of the World Trade Center and the televised live collapse of both towers. For all of those minutes, I stood in my in-law’s living room in North Carolina, bouncing my four-month-old son on my hip, watching people flee and die. I was a white, middle-class, 26-year-old who believed in things like Take Back the Night rallies and my paper-free kitchen, a world without plastic bags. In elementary school, I’d been taught to crouch under my desk and close my eyes tight in case of nuclear war. When the towers collapsed, I couldn’t imagine tomorrow.
In Diane Lefer’s novel, Out of Place, Dr. Emine Albaz, a Turkish, Jewish geologist working in a remote American research center on September 11, 2001, anticipates exactly what tomorrow will bring. Reflecting on the Islamist attacks on the Neve Shalom Synagogue in Istanbul when she was 14, she recalls her community’s “fear and rage, more solid and real than the world itself.” And then “Thank God we couldn’t act on our rage is what she thinks now. Thank God, and as the Muslims say, Mashallah.” Emine’s closest friend at the research center is Dr. Maria Castillo, a Mexican herpetologist who cannot return to her beloved home country because of an unfortunate incident with the head of a cartel. Maria also understands what is coming: “’When have you ever known America not to go war?’” she taunts Reenie Mulcahy, the center’s dull, lonely, white, middle-class, American secretary.
Emine and Maria grasp that American retaliation will touch them personally. Recall that nine days after the events of 9/11, President George W. Bush declared a war on terror. In Out of Place, Emine and Maria face the end of their research, the end of their visas, the immediate end of their safety. The FBI arrives. Both women are soon suspected of terrorist actions or connections. One woman goes on the run and the other works her connections to find placement in another country. Reenie, naïve American, proud of her work and the proximity it gives her to important scientists, cooperates with the FBI’s interrogators, even boasting of the center’s research projects. She ends up in a lightless detainment cell, chained to a concrete floor. “If I were a terrorist,” she thinks, “I could imagine enduring this for the cause. The only cause I’ve got is to hold onto my own humanity in spite of. Nelson Mandela did it. For years. But he believed in something. I’m a white American. The only cause I have is myself and I’m not sure that Reenie is enough.”
But this introduction to Out of Place is misleading. The novel isn’t about two non-American scientists living in America, facing scrutiny and worse in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It’s not about a banal secretary awakening through the trauma of a Guantanamo-style detainment. Or, rather, the novel isn’t only about these things. In the introduction, the reader learns two key details about the novel’s narrator: he/she/they (hereafter, they) have been researching Wikileaks for information regarding toxic waste sites in California, and shortly after 9/11 they were wounded in an accident that was labeled an act of terrorism. There is a connection between toxic waste and the incident that wounded our narrator, and Out of Place is constructed as a set of files representing our narrator’s efforts to make sense of the information they’ve uncovered. “Any gaffes, cultural and scientific, come from ignorance, not disrespect,” the narrator writes. “And yes, what you read now — the picture that emerges from the dots and fragments and the way I’ve chosen to assemble the files — reflects my own values.” What follows are 11 files, each comprising a series of vignettes. In these pieces, our omniscient narrator conjures internal lives for characters as varied as a naturalized American citizen who was born in a refugee camp “somewhere in the Horn of Africa,” a man who may be a child of rape and now works for the FBI; a college dropout from Oregon who cycles across Iran seeking a Zoroastrian teacher; and an Ukrainian filmmaker who escapes an American sex trafficking ring.
Ultimately, the reader of Out of Place learns how the narrator believes the accident that wounded them came to be, but the events leading up to this event aren’t presented linearly. It’s easy enough as a reader to imagine a through-line that could have transformed Out of Place from a novel of ideas to a thriller with a fiery climax. But Lefer refuses such a facile design, and reminds the reader of the dangers of what her narrator terms “cherry-picking.” In Lefer’s hands, the incident that wounded our narrator is caused not so much through ill intent as through a merging of coincidences, misunderstandings, and turns of luck both bad and good. Her narrator’s vignettes sparkle sometimes like a shattered mirror, sometimes like Indra’s Net.
The result is a novel as much about storymaking as it is a story. This is reflective of the hubris of novel writing itself — what does it take, really, to believe that one can and should sit down and create a world? It is reflective of politics as well — what does it take to believe that one can and should decide to invade a country, or to leave a country one has occupied for two decades? So far as I know, humans are the only storymaking animals, the only ones who need to know why. Reading Out of Place made me consider how humans use our innate storymaking capacities to create society.
As I write this, President Joe Biden is in the process of removing all US troops from Afghanistan. The Taliban resumes control of the country. There is a refugee crisis, but it should be larger than it is — too many Afghanis are being left behind, trapped in the country. I sit alone in front of my computer and watch men fall to their deaths as they try to cling to the outside of planes departing the country. The infant I held on my hip when I watched people leap from the windows of the burning World Trade Center is a man now; he works in emergency medical services. A few weeks ago he told me that in our confusing world, he values the clarity of his work: his task is to save people’s lives, no matter who they are or what has happened. I trace a through-line here. He was born months before 9/11 and the American invasion of Afghanistan; the first presidential election in which he was old enough to vote saw the violent invasion of the White House by American citizens. Am I cherry-picking to write that I believe those citizens were whipped into a furor by stories? “So we’re going to … walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,” former President Trump said to his followers. “And we’re going to the Capitol.” But of course, President Trump didn’t walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.
In the cold, dark cell of her detainment, Reenie Mulcahy recalls a high school teacher who “told us to memorize poetry so we’d have something to sustain us if They came for us.” Reenie didn’t do this. Now she thinks, “I’d write my own, or my confession, or my evidence, or whatever They want, but no one gives me paper or pen. Instead, I’m reduced to thinking!” What are you left with if you’re reduced to thinking, Lefer asks her reader. If you’re stripped of light and food and comfort and kindness, what stories will you have planted in your mind?
This is the question that lingers after finishing Out of Place. There are few moments of levity in the novel, and there are some moments that turn the stomach, such as the HIV positive man whose mother is treating him with raw vulture shit because she’s “not looking to support Big Pharma.” But vulture shit seems no stranger than my friends and relatives who refuse the Covid vaccine because they fear it will alter their DNA, or because they remember the Tuskegee Experiment, or because they lost the last shred of trust they had in government-backed solutions when the forced sterilizations carried out by ICE came to light last September. I believe in Covid vaccines, just as I still believe in Take Back the Night rallies, paper-free kitchens, and fewer plastic bags. But I no longer believe that any of these things make me a good citizen. I’ve heard the ringing emptiness of the adjective “good,” even if I can’t resist using the word several times a day. The question, again, comes down to narratives, not which ones are true, but which ones are worth nurturing. If I had not lived a life largely free of want and violence, then I wouldn’t have lost my sense of tomorrow as I watched 9/11 unfold on live television. I don’t mean that I wouldn’t have seen it as a tragic event, but rather that it may have seemed part of the world I already knew, complicated and entangled, in need of a change more internal, demanding, and profound than my performative caretaking. Out of Place reminds us that this is the current nature of reality.
[Published by Fomite Press on September 13, 2021, 388 pages, $15.00 paperback]