A system of torture chambers is discovered in Syria. This is being reported live from yesterday.  The reporter named Ole speaks on behalf of a human rights organization.  The system is expansive, situated within civilian apartments, invisibly embedded in communities. This is my routine.  Load yesterday’s news, boil water for coffee, fry an egg, and afterwards, in the same cast iron, warm the tortilla. Ole is positioned on a hill overlooking a neighborhood of hill-colored houses in what must be Syria.  He wears a grey suit coat and a purple dress shirt, casually unbuttoned at top. He speaks as though he could be from anywhere.  I move the lace curtain and look out the kitchen window.  There is a lilac bush, a mailbox, a bus stop.  Today, July 4^th, will reach a high of 103 degrees.  Tomorrow when I turn on the news from today, there will be no headlines.  Instead, there will be a prerecorded special on the life of Woodie Guthrie, whose one-hundredth birthday will be celebrated July 14^th.  Now the tortilla is inflated with steam, so I shut the laptop. 

A month ago I stood on the border of Syria, the Israeli side, with a law student from outside Tel Aviv.  We’d taken a cable car down to the sea grottos of Rosh HaNikra, and could see the barbed wire fences fringing the chalk cliff face, the twirling radars, the searchlights, the tiny soldiers in the guard towers.  The military is visible everywhere: in the grocery store, in the cemetery, in the trains, in the gas station, on the basketball courts.  In the mornings from hotel courtyards I saw soldiers on their balconies binding the Tefillin around their arms, heads covered and m-16s at their side.   The law student and I took a train down the Mediterranean to a beach outside Jaffa.  A group of women in burqas waded with their children in the green water. An Israeli submarine floated causally offshore.  

“Can I ask you something I’ve always wanted to ask an American?” The law student asked. I nodded.  “Why did you react in this way to just one attack?”