Chapter 12
The past was a floating country. It could surface when you least expected it, only to sink like some Atlantis as you sailed toward its shore.
A few months after 9/11, everything had changed, and nothing had changed. The world had become a smaller, nicer, more fearful, less innocent place, irrevocably so. But Jade knew that wasn’t really true. The world, he learned early on, the real world was precisely what it had always been, a place where you were never as rich or as beautiful or as loved as you thought. And what had fallen away was merely the veil that kept this world shrouded—and all of us shielded, he thought—allowing the mind to focus on the Dow Jones-soaring, latte-lapping universe that had passed itself off as the real one.
The day after 9/11, that real world reassert
