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of escaping detection. Out of this thought a question arose: Why this sign, rather than another? He might have chosen a windbreaker and ski mask, he might have chosen anything. The trench coat was a sign of the suburban commuter. By extension it was the sign of our town. Was he trying to say that he was one of us? Or was he not one of us, but someone who had adopted the coat contemptuously, in a spirit of parody?
    WE WHO WERE NOT SLAPPED . We of course felt sympathy for those who had been slapped. It was impossible not to imagine the moment: the stranger emerging from nowhere, the flare of danger, the hand raised to strike a blow. We wondered how they must have felt, those unlucky ones, as the sound rang out, as the stranger walked away. We wondered what we ourselves would have done, as he stepped up to us with his angry eyes. We understood that our compassion for the victims had in it a touch of superiority, of condescension, which the fortunate are bound to feel for the less fortunate, and we tried not to feel too great a pleasure in having escaped their fate. We understood one other thing. Even though we were pleased to have been spared, even though we were the ones to whom nothing ugly had happened, still we wondered, at times, whether they were more fortunate than we. After all, their ordeal was over, they had been tested, they had nothing more to fear, whereas we, the innocent ones, we, the unslapped, walked in a world crackling with danger. It was as if they knew something that we didn’t know. At times we even envied them a little.
    WALTER LASHER AND THE FOOTSTEPS . Walter Lasher walked along the station platform, carrying his laptop in one hand and a New York Times folded under the other arm. It was nearly dark; he had worked late. Once again he’d drifted off at his desk in the afternoon, not a nap thank god, but close to it, sitting there with half-closed eyes and drumming temples. There was still a good crowd at this hour, though he sensed a nervous watchfulness as they approached the stairs leading down to the lot. It was lit up now by those orange lights that made everything look like a stage set awaiting the actors. He himself had no anxiety, only a dull, heavy irritation as he entered the lot and began walking toward Section B. The police were hopeless, not a clue in all this time. The town was no longer what it used to be. When he’d first moved here from the city, it still had the feeling of a small old-fashioned place tucked away at the end of the commuter line. Now you had upscale retailers fighting for prime locations, the old drugstore gone, the news store gone, corporate headquarters springing up, teardowns replaced by monster houses built out to the property line. Asians moving into the newer neighborhoods, all professionals, all very classy, even a touch of India, that woman coming out of the wine shop in a rose-colored sari carrying herself like a foreign queen. The stranger in the coat was part of it somehow, as if he’d been swept in along with everything else. It was all nonsense, he wasn’t thinking straight. As Lasher walked toward his car, three rows away, he heard footsteps not far behind him. It wasn’t unusual, in the station parking lot, at this hour, to hear footsteps not far behind you, but these were not usual times. Lasher felt a tension rippling through his upper back. The footsteps drew closer. As if he were moving a heavy weight, he turned his head slowly. He saw a man in a long coat coming swiftly toward him. Lasher turned his body around. He stepped forward and swung his open hand violently against the man’s face. As his palm cracked against flesh, knocking the face to one side and throwing the body back against a car, he felt deeply soothed, as if he had sunk down into a warm bath after a long hard day. A moment later he saw that the coat was a double-breasted wool coat, dark, no belt, the face different, older. He understood that it was all part of a necessary pattern, and