Hi, it’s me again; the author.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the story up to this point. What you’ve read up until this point follows the storyline as I originally wrote it, many years ago. The original story ended shortly after this (well, about eight pages after this, and about twenty minutes later in terms of the time that elapsed in the story).
But the story didn’t age well.
The problem with the story is that it takes place in the present (well, plus or minus a few months, so it can take place in the summer). The present has changed. If I wanted to keep to the original storyline, it would have to take place in the past–before September 11, 2001.
When I picked up the story again in 2002, I realized that it was no longer plausible. The events couldn’t unfold in the way they do in the original story in the post-9/11, DHS, USPATRIOT Act world. I had to take that into account, because otherwise the story wouldn’t make any sense.
For example, in 1998 I could write a story about a dark-skinned, bearded young man traveling from Sudan on a plane destined to La Guardia, who is having trouble adjusting the inserts he wears in his shoes to make in look taller, because he’s heard that Americans are all tall and he wants to fit in with his new classmates at NYU. I can’t write that story now. It would end with the man in Guantanamo, instead of ending happily with a parable about diversity.
Of course, being a work of fantasy, these events probably couldn’t unfold anywhere anyway, but if they did unfold in this way, then people would react to them differently, and their different reaction would make the story go off in a different direction. Because the story after this point is all about the way people react to unexpected and stressful situations, I had to go back and fix it.
And so I did.
And so you can add to the list of things that 9/11 made worse this story, which, I will admit once again, was never particularly good anyway.
If you want to imagine what the original story was like, skip over all of the rest of the story until you get to the story that Sally tells Knox, and then imagine that she isn’t telling it to Special Agent Knox, because Knox wasn’t in the original story. The original story did not require the involvement of the FBI. Stories with happy endings rarely do.
