Fear Itself

Learning to live in the age of terrorism

"They got what they wanted." The March 11 Madrid commuter train bombings influenced Spain's election. (Pablo Torres Guerrero - El Pais via Reuters)

"The meaning of life is that it ends."

-- Franz Kafka

YOU ARE NOT AFRAID OF TERRORISM, REALLY. You have weighed the facts and have concluded, rationally, that even if terrorists strike again in this country, the chances are negligible that you or anyone you know will be killed or injured. You feel no special tension when you place your seat tray in the upright position. You are old enough to have lived through other supposedly apocalyptic times, or you've surely heard about them -- most famously, the silly spectacle of 1950s-era schoolkids giggling under their desks in anticipation of The Big One.

The recent warnings about terrorism during the election campaign have ratcheted up your concerns a little, but so what? You are going on with your life not as an act of defiance so much as a celebration of rationality. You will be fine.

So here's a question: Would you ride a bus in Jerusalem? Right now? Here's your 5 1/2 shekels, go take a bus to market, buy some figs. Pick a bad day, after the Israelis have assassinated some terrorist leaders and everyone is waiting for the second sandal to drop. There are lots of buses in Jerusalem -- the odds are still long in your favor. Do you take that dare?

A few weeks ago, I did just that: boarded a bus on just such a day, and rode for nearly an hour. I did it because I wanted to better understand the psychology of terror. Not the psychology of the terrorist -- the psychology of the terrorized.

After 9/11, Americans are concerned enough by terror to be waging a costly war against it. But, by and large, the fear of terrorism has not seeped into our bones. We are new to this thing. The Israelis are not. Terrorism creates a hierarchy of fear; theirs is greater than ours.

Hence, this trip. Call it a scouting report.

The bus I chose was the No. 18. Its route is a vital artery, traveling down Jaffa Road through the heart of Jerusalem. Twice in the last decade, someone boarded a bus on this route, reached into his pocket, thumbed a button and detonated. As is dictated by the grisly kinetics of suicide bombing, the bombers' heads remained intact, shooting skyward with the roof of the bus. But their bodies were frothed into pulp. Forty-six other people died. Some of those were torn apart; some looked almost unscathed, but their organs had been jellied by the shock wave, a medical syndrome common to bus bombings and almost nothing else. Dozens of other people survived, but were crippled or disfigured by shrapnel: Customarily, suicide bombs are jacketed by nails, nuts, screws and ball bearings, for maximum damage.

Like everyone else, I waited in line, deposited my fare, and stepped aboard the bus. Early afternoon. Sixty-odd people seated and standing, some with shopping bags, some without. Eyes forward, no one saying much to anyone else. It was hot.

TEN TIMES IN THE LAST THREE YEARS our leaders have told us that something was up. They didn't say what, exactly: ominous "chatter" of an undisclosed nature in unspecified channels of communication among unidentified individuals planning an unnamed atrocity of uncertain dimensions in an unknown location at an indeterminate time. So what should we do about it? Unclear.

When there was finally an intelligence breakthrough early this month -- a named source, a likely weapon (truck bomb) and five specific targets in three specific cities (New York, Washington and Newark) -- it was followed by the sheepish disclosure that the information was mostly four years old, which was followed by charges of political fear-mongering, which was followed by indignant denials, and at the end of it all none of us had any idea whether anything important had just happened. The day after the initial alert, I walked into one of the target buildings, the World Bank on Pennsylvania Avenue. At the front desk I asked a question about security. An important-looking man came striding up. He was the building's security manager. "How did you get in here?" he asked. "I walked in the door," I said. He escorted me out and began berating a subordinate.

Our preparedness, at least those measures we can see, sometimes seems almost comical -- from our Crayola eight-pack danger alert codes to those video displays on the Beltway urging us to report anything suspicious. (What is one likely to see on the Beltway to arouse suspicion? "I [heart symbol here] bin Laden"?) At the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, visitors are wanded, their backpacks fed through metal detectors. A sign stipulates what size and shape of pocketknife is permitted inside. A visitor from Washington takes this in, thinking: Someone is going to hijack the Arch?

Hierarchies of fear. Ours is worse than yours.

Interesting fact: In the year after 9/11, many people stopped flying. Road deaths spiked.

There has been terrorism in the world, more or less nonstop, since 12th-century Syria, when a persecuted Persian religious sect called the Assassins knifed people to death in crowds. Terrorism has persisted because terrorism works. It makes people crazy. It is a cost-effective method of waging psychological war by those who see themselves outnumbered or disenfranchised.

A disenfranchised minority cannot sack Rome, rape Nanking, burn Atlanta or firebomb Dresden. These are terror attacks by nation-states, military sieges with the primary goal of sowing despair among the enemy and weakening their will to resist. A disenfranchised people -- whether Palestinians in the Middle East, or Tamils in Sri Lanka, or Islamic zealots who see the spread of Western culture as an assault on their religion -- will use the means at their disposal. Amoral though it may be, terrorism succeeds in focusing attention on whatever cause its practitioners espouse. It does this in a particularly insidious way.

A quarter-century ago, a cultural anthropologist named Ernest Becker wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book called The Denial of Death. For a time, during the primacy of Freud, it was huge. It's not about terrorism, it's about the psyche, and its central thesis is one of the most disturbing analyses of human behavior ever set in print.

Everything we are, Becker argued -- our personalities, our attitudes, our very being -- is an elaborate lie, a carefully crafted self-delusion constructed to avoid having to face a fact so terrifying it would drive us mad: Not only are we certain to die, but death could come at any moment, followed by an eternity of nothingness. Lower animals, blessedly unaware of their mortality, plod thoughtlessly through their lives on instinct alone.

Lacking their ignorance, Becker says, we compensate by making ourselves stupid. We tranquilize ourselves with the trivial; we make friends, raise families, drink beer, follow the Redskins, find comfort in religions promising eternal life, all of which takes our minds off the potentially paralyzing truth. We deceive ourselves into believing -- not literally, but emotionally -- that we are immortal. Paranoiacs and depressives are in some ways the sanest among us, according to Becker, because their layer of denial is so fragile it fractures. Most of us, though, are able to retain our sanity so long as our anxiety is held at bay, and our anxiety is held at bay so long as our bold illusion remains manageable. This is not exactly the anthem of romantic poets or motivational speakers, but no one has ever successfully challenged Becker's central thesis. On some level, we attempt to smother our elemental fear of death with a grand lie.

That's where terrorism comes in. Terrorism penetrates that self-deception in a way that few things can.

During the Cold War, Americans knew that the Soviets had missiles pointed at us, and we at them. And yet, paradoxically -- applying Becker's paradigm -- this gave comfort. Mutually assured destruction seemed to offer an anodyne, a plausible measure of deterrence and thus a toehold for our state of denial.

It would take something truly diabolical to dislodge that toe, something that existed only in fiction. Remember SPECTRE, the shadowy international organization that was James Bond's nemesis? The acronym stood for "Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion." It was an absurd concept, really -- an entity of no fixed address, affiliated with no state, answerable to no constituency, diffuse, elusive, nihilistic, unavailable for negotiation, promiscuously cruel, fueled by hatred, with no comprehensible agenda other than mayhem, destruction and death.

You know, al Qaeda.

With al Qaeda, however, there is an additional fillip, a small, elegant frisson. It was probably best expressed in a quote attributed to Osama bin Laden himself, a few weeks after 9/11: "We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us."

SPECTRE, with a suicide wish.

My terrorism field trip had destinations other than Jerusalem. The itinerary would take me to Madrid, to ride the same train route that al Qaeda blew up on March 11, killing 191 and injuring nearly 2,000. Then, Jerusalem. And then I would fly home on British Airways Flight 223, the one that kept getting canceled because of reports that terrorists were going to bring it down. There was really nothing to worry about, from a rational standpoint. Just a few days on vehicles of public transportation.

I brought The Denial of Death with me. Also, Kafka.

AWAITING TAKEOFF FOR THE FIRST LEG OF MY TRIP, Dulles to Heathrow, I found myself seated on the aisle watching the last of my fellow passengers boarding the plane. It looked as if I might luck out, with the middle seat beside me unoccupied. But at the last moment a man arrived, struggled to stuff a large duffel bag in the overhead compartment, then plopped down next to me. I nodded, smiled, and looked away to compose myself.

A few months after 9/11, I told a co-worker that I thought the Pulitzer Prize for news photography for the year 2001 should go to a machine. I couldn't decide which machine -- the overhead camera in an airport in Maine that caught a shirtsleeved Mohamed Atta passing briskly through security on the morning of September 11, or the ATM camera in Maryland that snapped hijackers Hani Hanjour and Majed Moqed withdrawing cash. Both photos were riveting for their grainy banality, and for what they say about the duality in all of us. Here were ordinary-looking people engaged in ordinary-looking activities, indistinguishable from any of us, with dreadful secrets in their head.

I hadn't thought about those photos in a long time, until now. I gathered my thoughts, prepared my face, and looked back at my seatmate. Hani Hanjour.

In the ATM snapshot, Hanjour -- the Saudi national believed to have piloted the plane that hit the Pentagon -- is standing behind and to Moqed's right, both looking placidly down as their money plops into place. I had pretty much the same view of him, here in the plane, to my left. Small guy, lithe build, olive complexion, angular face, sparse goatee, hard eyes.

If you Google "Hani Hanjour" you will find a spider work of conspiracy theories speculating that he is still alive -- a demonic Elvis who has recently been seen walking the streets of Riyadh. He wasn't on that plane at all; his piloting skills were too feeble to have maneuvered a 757 through a hairpin turn at breakneck speed and bring it down onto a target that was, comparatively, the height of a Necco wafer.

"So," I said as cheerfully as possible to my new seatmate, as the plane taxied for takeoff, "where are you from?"

"Saudi Arabia," he said.

Yes, yes, security for this flight had been formidable. This was the sister flight to the infamous Flight 223 -- the return leg on the Corridor of Terror. There were two separate inspections of our persons and our belongings. The second machine was so sensitive it busted a woman with a gold chain no thicker than a yo-yo string. Security officers took aside a little girl, 5 or 6, with a gappy smile, and wanded her thighs up under her skirt. This sort of thing went on for 25 minutes, until it came time to board, at which point the final 20 or 30 people in line, and their carry-ons, were waved aboard with no inspection whatsoever. I was one of those people. Hani, here, came in after me -- he must have been one of them, too. His duffel bag was enormous.

So, what does a terrorist seem like, anyway? How do you know one if you see one?

Social scientists and law enforcement agencies have been focusing on this question for more than a quarter-century, with no coherent results. In the late 1970s, a psychologist interviewed 80 imprisoned terrorists in 11 countries and concluded that most of them had defective vestibular functions of the inner ear. This was an exciting finding, until it fell apart under scrutiny. More rigorous studies have found, disturbingly, that terrorists tend to be fairly ordinary people -- relatively sane if politically extreme individuals of ordinary appearance and demeanor. Like Hani, my seatmate.

What should I do? Summon a flight attendant? Stop the plane on a wild suspicion? Too late anyway, we were in the air.

I think you know where this is going. My seatmate's name turned out to be Tareq Ali Alghamdi. He's 22, an engineering student at the University of New Haven -- a nice guy, no more of a terrorist than I. I know all about him because he burbled it all out within minutes of takeoff, even showing me his visa papers, unbidden. I'm guessing he does this all the time -- he knows what he looks like, and is aggressively and engagingly open about himself in a preemptive defense. I know, for example, that he's a Muslim but no fanatic. He will have a beer every once in a while and is, he emphasizes, a regular guy: "Hey, if I see a pretty girl, I'll look at her ass, too."

Tareq says customs officials often detain him for unreasonable lengths of time, simply by virtue of his passport and his general appearance. He says that his brother, who is diabetic, has been held for questioning for hours without access to his insulin.

As we began our trip across the Atlantic, Tareq and I solemnly agreed that terrorism is making people too tense, that ethnic profiling is a dreadful indignity, and that dumb Americans are too darn willing to leap to unjustified conclusions about people, on slim evidence.

"Life is possible only with illusions. And so, the question for the science of mental health must become an absolutely new and revolutionary one, yet one that reflects the essence of the human condition: On what level of illusion does one live?"

-- Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

IF THERE WAS ANXIETY, it was not apparent on the faces of the people on this double-decker commuter train that brings workers into Madrid from the blue-collar, northeastern suburbs. People dressed for work sat quietly, in that state of swaying, hypnotic detachment familiar to subway riders everywhere. Some glanced at the time and temperature, which flashes continually in these trains on a dot-video display. But no one seemed to be noticing a large hiker's knapsack, left unattended. It was getting stares only from me, and only I bothered to nudge awake a dozing man across the aisle, to ask if it was his. It was.

Of course, most of these people had ridden here 50 times since the day that this very train -- same destination, same time of day -- exploded. That was 10 weeks before, March 11, one of four bombings that occurred almost simultaneously, in different rush-hour trains, along the 40-minute commuter line. The instruments of destruction were backpacks detonated by cell phone. Al Qaeda masterminded it; Spain was said to be a target because of its cooperation in the war in Iraq.

This train took the worst hit, multiple bombs detonating a minute before it was to roll into the giant Atocha station -- Madrid's version of Grand Central. Dozens of people died in unspeakable ways. When some survivors tried to describe for TV crews what they had witnessed, they began, but fell grimly silent.

On this day, on this train 10 weeks later, there was nothing. Soldiers with assault rifles had been very much in evidence at the park-and-ride suburban station of Alcala de Henares, where I had boarded. Alcala was where most of the terrorists were thought to have entered the system with their deadly cargo.

But the train itself held only commuters, staring blankly ahead as they passed through gray industrial parks, clotheslined shantytowns with rusted corrugated metal roofs, and the familiar New York-style graffiti that turned rocks into gaily spray-painted monogrammed pastel pillows. For many people on 3/11, this was the last sight they ever saw.

The train I was on was now standing room only. As we neared Atocha and the display time hit 7:39 -- the moment of the bombing -- I approached a small, trim woman in her forties, and asked her if she was nervous. Celia Alves, a secretary, was headed for work. Nervous? She shrugged no, and nodded disgustedly toward the newspaper I was carrying. It was that day's El Pais; I had picked it up at the station but hadn't yet looked at it.

"Obtuvieron lo que desearon," she said. They got what they wanted.

This was May 25. The headline read "Los Ultimos de Irak." It reported that the final group of Spanish advisers had returned from Iraq. The troops had been ordered home by Spain's new antiwar government, elected in a backlash after the bombings.

They got what they wanted. Nothing to worry about anymore.

Can it be that easy to banish fear? Just find a reason for optimism, and optimism returns. But is the threat really gone? Isn't Spain still a modern, Western, capitalist, secular democracy, flagrant corrupter of a large Muslim population -- as despised by radical Islam as any country other than ours?

The fact is, the Spanish economy has rebounded nicely from 3/11. When I was there the country was giddy over the marriage of the dashing Crown Prince Felipe to a pretty TV anchorwoman. And at Atocha station, when I got off the train into a crowd five deep waiting to board (this disaster would have been much worse had the train detonated in the station), things were at a brisk and seemingly normal morning pace -- though everywhere, a police presence was evident.

The public consciousness of the dead and wounded of Madrid's 3/11 wasn't gone, it was tucked away at one corner of Atocha, behind barriers, next to vending machines that sell Doritos and Toblerone and ham sandwiches. The improvised shrine was similar to those spontaneous memorials in downtown New York that sprang up after 9/11 -- personal messages, religious icons, photos, flowers, teddy bears. But there was an additional element that made this particularly powerful.

I felt it before I actually understood what it was. Many people who left a letter or a message also left a votive candle, contained in a broad, foot-deep glass cylinder. These candles have stout flames that burn for a week or more. Hundreds of them were on the floor, maybe a thousand in all, and, as I approached this shrine, I literally felt its warmth. I knew none of the dead, and yet, standing there at the barrier, at this small furnace of grief, I was startled to feel a tear on my cheek.

Weeks later, a wire story would report that the candles at Atocha had been removed and replaced with video screens and computers on which passersby can leave messages. People had complained that the candles were too emotionally powerful, preventing them from putting the attacks behind them.

"But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die."

-- Genesis 2:17

ADAM AND EVE'S PUNISHMENT FOR GETTING TOO CURIOUS WAS BANISHMENT from the Garden of Eden. But that was the least of it. The Bible is unclear about whether the first couple were immortal before their expulsion, but in a way, it is immaterial. What matters is that, as their punishment, they learned that they would someday die. That's when their Hell on Earth began.

To enter the modern, stone-porticoed building on King David Street in Jerusalem, I needed to give my name and show ID to an armed man who stood outside with a walkie-talkie. He radioed the information to a woman inside, who checked the name against her manifest, and radioed back a clearance. Only then was I admitted.

"Welcome to Jerusalem," the guard said, deadpan. I was not sure if this was meant ironically or not. Probably not. This was my hotel.

Things are different in Jerusalem, different from anywhere you have ever been. Before entering a grocery store, or a bus station, or a movie theater, you are stopped and wanded, often questioned, and sometimes frisked. Many restaurants keep their doors locked and buzz their customers in. At Ben-Gurion International Airport, the X-ray machine is the size of a panel truck, and the inspection of a single laptop computer can take 15 minutes. Ordinary citizens walk the streets of Jerusalem carrying concealed pistols -- this is not only legal but encouraged, to maintain an omnipresent citizen militia. Soldiers on weekend leave stroll the street in civvies, but with assault rifles slung over their shoulders, like ugly, 15-pound handbags. This, too, is encouraged. Soldiers are also under orders to carry tourniquets, just in case. All of this is to make ordinary people feel safer, against the onslaught.

There is a Hebrew word, hamatzav, that is used to describe the state of dread that has swaddled Jerusalem like damp, clammy gauze since the Palestinian intifadas made merely living a daredevil act. Hamatzav literally means "the situation," and it seems to cover everything: the high security, the high anxiety, the high-stakes game of chicken. Palestinian militants believe they can make the Israelis so fearful, so desperate for peace of mind, that they will end their occupation and surrender more land than they ever bargained for. Israeli leaders believe their fierce reprisals will, in time, crush their attackers' will to kill. Both sides, of course, know fear: Plenty of innocent Palestinians have been killed in Israeli military actions -- for Palestinians, the act of living must also, at times, seem like a mortal risk. Each side accuses the other of terrorism. Each side describes its own actions as self-defense. And so it goes.

On my first night in the city, I walked from my hotel to the Western Wall, Jewish Jerusalem's holiest site, and there I met Ozer Bergman. It is hard to miss Bergman. He stands 7 feet tall -- 6-foot-5 of it is Ozer, and the rest is hat, a dramatic, thick cylinder of fur. It was sundown on the holy day of Shavuot, and Bergman, a Hasidic Jew, had come here to pray. He works for a research institute that translates the writings of Nachman of Breslov, a revered 19th-century rabbi.

"That's a full-time business?" I asked.

"In Jerusalem, it is," he said with a laugh.

I almost didn't approach him, anticipating a language problem. It turns out that Bergman is originally from Long Island. Devout Mets fan.

We were speaking outside the Western Wall's security gate, where Bergman was waiting in a crowd of hundreds to board the No. 2 bus, which carries the faithful to the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood where he lives. It's a mob scene, with an empty bus arriving every minute or two and leaving moments later, packed cheek by jowl.

Eight months before, one of these buses -- crowded just like these, on a similar day -- blew up, killing 23 people, many of them children. Many more were grievously injured. The suicide bomber, a father of young children, was black-bearded like Ozer and dressed to resemble a Hasid. He had boarded the bus, wedged himself in the middle of a crowd of riders, patiently waited until his bus passed another bus to assure maximum loss of life, and exploded.

Bergman is not afraid to take buses?

"Never!" he thundered. "I take buses all the time. My wife, too. It's my country, I will not let them push me around." Bergman, 48, said that if a Jew dies in a terrorist attack, he is in a state of martyrdom and is guaranteed the highest reaches of Heaven.

Isn't this more or less what the suicide bombers believe, about themselves?

There are ironies in this situation, Bergman conceded, that "sound obscene." But it doesn't matter, he said. Bergman believes what Rabbi Nachman taught: that God intends all things, good and bad, to happen for a reason -- that there is pain in the world but no evil, because whatever occurs is part of an eternal plan leading to a state of utopia for all mankind. It's all predetermined: "If you're number's up, your number's up," he said. But since it's all for good, in the end, there is no need for fear, and no reason to meet apparent misfortune with sadness or regret.

It was time to go. Bergman gently took the hand of his adult son, Nachman. Nachman Bergman wore a black suit, side locks that curled down from his temples, and the sweet, trusting eyes of the mentally retarded.

Hand in hand, father and son headed for the No. 2 bus.

"What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? . . . People were ready to have their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life."

-- World Controller Mustapha Mond, explaining the origins of the dehumanized but anxiety-free dystopia in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

WHAT IS THE TOLL OF TERRORISM, once terrorism has become not an occasional horror but a fact of everyday life? How do people adapt, and at what cost? Looking to the future, these are questions Americans might ask.

Everyone in Jerusalem deals with hamatzav in his or her own way, depending on one's personal threshold for danger, or one's personal calculus for safety. These are highly subjective matters.

Ilan Mizrahi is a freelance photographer who has covered the latest intifada since its inception. He negotiates the city on a minibike, fearlessly threading through traffic, and is often among the first on the scene when carnage occurs. In his travels, Mizrahi will pass a bus, if he must, but will not squeeze between two of them. With two buses, he feels, the odds of an explosion are doubled, elevated to the point that he is uncomfortable. That's his threshold.

In the late 1990s, Mizrahi said, his mother would frantically phone him as soon as word got out that there had been a suicide bombing. She wanted reassurance that he was safe. But within a few years, after bombings had become commonplace, she no longer called. One day, he arrived at the scene of a blast at a coffee shop, and realized that it was right below the bridal shop in which his mother worked. He went up there to get an overhead shot from her window. Oh, hi, she said. She said she'd gone downstairs, checked out the three bodies, made sure it was no one she knew, and then gone back to work.

Israel has assimilated terror, and institutionalized it. A bombing scene is cleaned up in hours, and one day later, there is often no sign it ever happened. Aleph Aleph Glass, once a small glazier company, is now a huge glazier company. It got the government contract for repairing windshields, and is very good at working very quickly. For the first few days after a terror attack, when people are afraid of public places, many restaurants will start offering takeout menus. Then, things return to normal.

I found myself remembering Terry Gilliam's macabre 1985 movie, "Brazil," about a dysfunctional society that has given itself over to fear. Government officials are forever assuring that the war on terrorism is going well. At one point, the characters are seated in a fancy restaurant and a terrorist bomb explodes. Obsequious waiters instantly swarm the scene, putting up room dividers, dragging away corpses and apologizing profusely to diners for the disturbance.

Mizrahi and I were seated in Moment, a cafe just a few blocks from the residence of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Two years before, on a Saturday night in March, this popular dining spot became a charnel house when a suicide bomber walked in -- right over there -- and blew himself up in the middle of a packed, young crowd. Eleven people died. Their names are inscribed on a stone tablet outside. Memorial tablets like that are all over Jerusalem, sometimes more than one on the same street corner.

"Our bill here will be one shekel higher," Mizrahi said, taking a forkful of salad, "because you're paying for that guy outside, sitting in the sun, waiting to explode to save your behind." He's talking about the security guard outside the door, a taciturn African Jew who has been a fixture at Moment since it was rebuilt. He'd frisked us as we entered. Not infrequently, when an attack is averted, it is done so by these security guards -- ubiquitous in Jerusalem -- who spot an attacker and bearhug him to the ground. Sometimes, if the guard can't immobilize the attacker's trigger hand in time, or if the bomb is rigged with a preset timing device, the two of them blow up together. Security guards are paid very well.

Mizrahi carries with him, in a little leather pouch, a thick metal machine nut he picked up from the street outside, part of the body-piercing shrapnel the bomber wore. The nut was deformed, the hole in the center now a squashed crescent. "Can you imagine," he asked, "the strength of the explosion that could cause that?"

Mizrahi is a regular patron at Moment; he was planning to be there at exactly the time of the bombing, but he had stayed at home for a while to watch a TV news report of another suicide attack. In Jerusalem, such almost-but stories are legion. There is a famous picture of the bartender at Moment a few seconds after the blast. He had ducked down behind the bar to get a glass, and in that instant the bomber detonated not 15 feet away. The bar shielded the bartender. In the photo, he has just stood up, and is staring in disbelief at the bloodbath around him.

We climbed on his minibike, and Mizrahi wove through the streets of Jerusalem, shouting over the engine: "See that, that's bus No. 13, the lucky one. It's never been hit. There's Netanyahu's house. Hey, we have a joke -- When a suicide bomber gets to Heaven he finds out it's not 72 virgins, it's a 72-year-old virgin."

Mizrahi is Jewish but of Kurdish and Spanish descent; with his copper skin he has the look of an Arab, and with his camera case he has the look of an Arab Carrying Something. He is stopped by security guards all the time, and submits good-naturedly. Actually, few people in Jerusalem resent these searches.

We parked and walked toward Zion Square on Jaffa Road, a commercial strip similar to one you'd find in any large city. Mizrahi was talking, and I was taking notes. His memory is encyclopedic.

"See the stone lion on that building, four stories up? Body parts hung there from the second bombing of the 18 bus in '96. Down the street, see the Sbarro sign? Fifteen dead, August 2001. It's closed now. They moved it, but no one goes there anymore. That falafel place to the left? It exploded the same day as that pub over there. See the flower shop?"

"Where?"

"There. One person died, 2002. Right here, there was a suicide gunman, firing on people. A friend of mine, a civilian with a long ponytail, pulled out a gun and wounded the guy. January 2002. The guy ran, but the police finished him off. See that man, with the yarmulke? He's got a gun in his pants pocket, see the lump there?

"A refrigerator was abandoned over there, across the street, and it exploded. Thirteen people died. That was a famous one, a long time ago, I was a kid. Right over here, three years ago, a guy parked his car, walked right over there into a crowd, and exploded. He left another bomb in the car, with a timer, so when people came to help the people injured from the first bomb, they were killed. Eleven died."

"A woman walked into that clothing store and blew up. See there . . ."

I asked him to slow down. I was having trouble getting it all down.

"Way down over there, at the vegetable market, 16 dead in 1997. Two bombers. That guy selling earrings from the stand in the street? His son died in a shooting attack."

Up to this point, we hadn't moved an inch. Mizrahi was just pivoting and pointing. Now, we started walking. We passed a bearded man wearing jeans, a tie-dyed T-shirt and a submachine gun. "See that bank machine?" Mizrahi continued. "Five girls were shot there, waiting in line. One was the daughter of my family doctor. She was just trying to get 20 shekels. People don't wait in lines much, anymore. You'll see them scattered around, keeping a distance from each other, less of a target."

Mizrahi stopped, smiled wryly and nodded toward a street kiosk with a tattered advertising poster. It was for the national lottery. It said, "Hapa'am yehiyeh lechah mazal." What does that mean, I asked.

"This time, you'll be lucky."

Mizrahi is an adrenaline junkie. He loves Jerusalem, wouldn't live anywhere else, least of all Washington, which he considers too boring for words. He moves effortlessly through his city with his camera, chronicling the madness, absorbing it all with an attitude between stoicism and bemusement. He is an Israeli patriot, but no moralist. He says if he were a Palestinian, living out there in the occupied territories, in a life without hope, he might well become a suicide bomber, too.

Mizrahi has photographed more than 20 bus bombings in the past eight years. His portfolio is, in a word, heartbreaking. He knows that the vast majority of buses don't blow up, but he won't ride one, and he recently got angry with his wife when she did. "I can't help it," he said. "I see a bus, I see death."

"We have to ride a bus now," I said.

"Okay," he said. Work is work.

IT HAD BEEN TWO MONTHS since the last suicide bombing, an eternity in Jerusalem time. In the meantime, Israel had carried out brazen assassinations of Hamas leaders Abdel Aziz Rantisi and Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the latter an elderly paraplegic in a wheelchair who was considered the father of the strategy of suicide bombing. No Palestinian reprisals yet. So this was not the best moment, perhaps, to be riding a bus.

Mizrahi photographed both bombings of the 18, which came a week apart, in 1996. While standing on the roof of a building shooting down on the carnage of the second explosion, he had to step over body parts. On the balcony below him, he saw the bomber's head.

Before you get on a bus on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem, you get the once-over from security guards who are posted at every bus shelter. These are tense young men in tan vests, with sunglasses and wires snaking down from ear microphones.

They fidgeted over Mizrahi, eyed me cursorily and let us aboard. The bus was packed. Jerusalem is a big city with no subway, expensive taxis, $3-a-gallon gas and bad traffic. Most everyone rides buses.

"I don't ride buses," said Assaf Gershoni.

Assaf Gershoni was our bus driver. He meant when he is off duty. Work is work.

A few minutes into the route, we passed a curious sculpture on the side of the road. It was a memorial, an enormous Star of David that appears to be made from scrap metal. It is. It is made from the twisted remains of the first No. 18 bus.

The people on the bus tend to be philosophical about their plight: What are you going to do? They will tell you their anxiety is reduced because of the guys in the tan vests outside, and because of the driver, whose judgment is, as far as they see it, the last line of defense.

This was interesting because at the bus stop, a tan vest had told us he'd never let his own relatives ride the buses. I asked Gershoni, the driver, if there's anything special he is trained to do if he thinks a bomber has just boarded his bus. Yes, he said. "When I see an Arab with a package, I say to myself, 'Please don't blow up, please don't blow up.' "

Anyway, this is not about what Israelis think as they ride a bus in Jerusalem. It is what an American thinks, on his first ride. An American watches every new person as he boards, prioritizing his concerns. Old woman, good. Old man, okay. Young, skinny person in tight clothes, no problem. Fat person: Is his flesh jiggling, or might it be something more rigid than protoplasm under that baggy shirt? Why is no one watching the back door? Someone could slip on, undetected, as a passenger gets off. No one is watching! Good, a soldier got on. But maybe that isn't good, maybe it makes us more of a target.

By minute 10, the American is pretty exhausted. But by minute 30, he's let down his guard a little. By minute 40, he has reached a state where he actually notices the pretty woman in shorts. Because, really, isn't that what life is about -- noticing the pretty woman in shorts? Isn't that what the human animal does? Life, as they say, goes on.

IN A PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT IN THE 1980S, a group of municipal judges were asked to set bail for prisoners in mock criminal cases. Half of the judges were first asked to fill out a questionnaire about their own mortality. Those judges wound up setting much higher bails. Contemplating death toughened them. It reduced their compassion.

Mizrahi had one more place to show me before we said goodbye. French Hill is an upscale, Bethesda-like neighborhood in northeast Jerusalem. Attacks here are frequent; one of the most notorious occurred in March, when a drive-by shooting by Palestinians killed a 20-year-old jogger. The victim, apparently chosen at random, turned out to be the son of Elias Khoury, an Arab lawyer who had represented Yasser Arafat himself. Khoury had also lost his father in 1974 to a terrorist bombing near Zion Square -- the abandoned refrigerator that blew up, back when Mizrahi was a little boy. Nothing is ever over, in Jerusalem.

French Hill is a lick of land, a part of Jordan taken by Israel in the '67 war. It protrudes into the West Bank like a raised middle finger. Mizrahi led me to a corner patrolled by Israeli soldiers in camouflage gear, with assault weapons. I counted seven soldiers in the space of 60 feet. They were stopping everyone, even other soldiers, to demand ID. The center of the street was bisected by metal barriers. That is to slow up any suicide bombers trying to race toward the street corner from the Arab area. That delay will, with luck, buy enough time for the soldiers in the sniper's nest, up above us, to aim and fire.

This is not a war zone, exactly. It is a civilian bus stop.

The soldiers wore bulletproof vests. They were wary. The people waiting at the bus stop were wary. One Muslim woman, in a head scarf, was being detained by the soldiers because her papers were not in order. The woman was apoplectic, shouting that she was in Israel just to shop for new eyeglasses for her daughter. She commanded the embarrassed 10-year-old to show her scratched lenses to the soldiers, to the police, to the journalists, to random passersby. Over the soldiers' radio crackled a command, in Hebrew, to let the woman go. But the soldiers didn't. Twenty minutes had gone by, and it would be another 20 before they released her, so she'd learn from her mistake.

Never in my life had I felt so much ambient mistrust, fear and hatred in one place at one time.

And suddenly, seemingly from out of nowhere, a shaggy black dog showed up. She was Benji-sized, a little projectile of panting exuberance. She scampered up to everyone in turn, wagging her tail like mad, going person to person, saying howdy, ignoring no one, bursting with enthusiasm and slaphappy joy. For me, it broke the tension, and I found myself grinning. Then the dog wheeled around, raced back the way she had come and hopped into her cage on the back of a trailer on a military vehicle.

She'd been sniffing for bombs.

"The dread of evil is a much more forcible principle of human actions than the prospect of good . . . What worries you masters you."

-- John Locke

RICKI BERNSTEIN IS PEELING SWEET POTATOES. Her husband, David, is preparing the grill. Their extended family bounces in, one after another, gathering as is their custom for Shabbat dinner.

This is a family that never should have been. I know because I was at Ricki and David's wedding, 33 years ago in New York. She was 18, he was 19; out in the audience, my girlfriend and agreed it was a shame that these two good kids were marrying so young -- obviously, this union was doomed. Sensibly, my girlfriend and I waited longer. We're divorced now.

There is a Yiddish expression, bashert, which means that some things are "meant to be." It would be hard to find a closer family, anywhere, than the Bernsteins of Jerusalem. David -- "Bernie" to his friends -- is a history teacher and dean of a Jewish studies institute. Ricki is a therapist who specializes in the treatment of trauma -- a thriving, if dispiriting, business in this city.

They have four children, whose names suggest the cultural, spiritual and geographic journey that Ricki and Bernie have made since he and I were raising hell together on the NYU newspaper, 33 years ago. Their oldest, at 27, is Jessica. Daughter Ariel is 24. Their older son, Shai, is 21. Tani, the youngest child, is 17. Only Shai couldn't make it today; he is in the army. That would be the same Shai who used to lose fights with his older sisters, growing up. Now he's a member of a combat unit. All Israeli kids serve in the military.

One day not long ago, Ricki got a text message on her cell phone from Shai:

"It just said, 'I'm okay, I love you,' " she recalls. "It took me 20 minutes before I realized what that was about. It came on the news that two soldiers had been killed in an attack in Gaza. He was preparing me, telling me not to worry."

There is a skill to living in Jerusalem, a skill in taming personal terror.

"It's like a head game, a bargain you make with yourself," says Ricki. "It's a kind of denial you have to practice if you believe in living here."

"In my apartment," Jessica says, "the living room faces one of the main roads to the hospital. So I count sirens . . ."

"With a siren," Ricki interjects, "we all say to ourselves, 'It's just a woman in labor, it's just a woman in labor . . .' "

"If you hear one," says Jessica, "you brace yourself, because you don't want to hear two or more. One siren, just one, delivers a sense of relief."

How you respond depends often on what you have seen. Ariel rides city buses, as many as four a day, except in the few harrowing days after a terror attack, when, at her parents' insistence and with their money, she grudgingly takes taxis. Jessica won't ride city buses at all. In 1996, she was in a bus directly behind one of the No. 18s that blew up on Jaffa Road. She remembers it as a dull thud -- "it's not like an explosion in the movies."

"I hear about it from the dreams," Ricki says. She is talking about her clients who have been through a bombing, and the memories that plague their sleep. "There's a silence after a bomb, a deathly stillness. The birds have flown away, the air is sucked out of everything. Everyone is frozen. They can't speak.

"Then," she says, "it starts."

"It" is what happens afterward. Each person tends to carry away a specific image, a memory that haunts him. With Jessica, it is the cinders that floated down like sinister black rain. Levi Levine, Ariel's husband, was at the scene moments after Sbarro was bombed, in 2001, trying to help the victims. Many were beyond help.

"My mother takes care of babies," Levi says. "One day, afterward, I was with her, and one of the babies was asleep, and I had to ask her to move the baby's hand, because the baby's palm was in the same position as a baby's palm I saw in Sbarro." Shai was among the first at the scene at a Friday morning bombing of a supermarket in which three people died, including the teenage female bomber and a security guard who was trying to stop her. That afternoon, at home, Shai became nauseated when Ricki was cooking chicken.

"Olfactory triggers," Ricki says measuredly, "are very common."

It's all visceral. Some of it stays visceral, and needs help escaping. Disguising details to protect the privacy of the person involved, Ricki tells a story about a client of hers: The patient was a young man experiencing emotional problems, for no apparent reason. Ricki first interviewed the patient's mother, and asked for a routine mental health history. Were there any particular traumas in the boy's life? The mother ticked off the usual list: hospitalizations, divorces in the family, death of pets, that sort of thing. Nope, nothing special.

Meanwhile, the patient was delayed in arriving. The mother apologized, saying that he couldn't take the bus. "I almost didn't ask why," Ricki says. It turned out he wouldn't ride a bus because he had been personally affected not by one bus bombing but by four -- hearing one happen, losing a relative in another, and so forth.

"You raise your kids to think people are good, because the alternative is too terrible to bear," she says. "You don't want to live in a world like that, where there is evil lurking behind every smile. You don't want to believe in that. And then your children find out on their own."

One ordinary Israeli family. Seven people. Levi, Jessica and Shai have each been at the scene of a bombing. Ricki counsels victims. And Bernie? "Two students of mine were killed at the bombing of the cafeteria at the Hebrew University in 2002. A third one was sitting between them, and bent down to get something from a knapsack, and because of that, though she was wounded, she lived." Only Tani, the quiet, handsome boy with the soft eyes, seems not to have a story to tell.

I ask Bernie and Ricki: Why do you still live in this place?

"There has to be a Jewish homeland," Ricki says. "This is not a guaranteed thing. Someone has to do it, and we didn't want to be people who just send money to plant trees."

And so they live, partly in defiance, but mostly, they do what they must to keep their own tree flowering. Bernie, one of the gentlest men I've ever known, owns a pistol. He carries it when he is traveling with his students somewhere. The Israeli Ministry of Education requires armed escorts on class trips.

In the intractability of the current situation, the history teacher hears echoes of the past.

"The history of war," Bernie says, "shows us that there is always a demonization of the enemy. You don't know what to believe. In World War I, we were told that the Kaiser was murdering children. That was not true. In World War II, when the Allies said the Germans were killing civilians, it also sounded like propaganda. Now the Palestinians are being told outrageous things. They are being told by their leaders that the Jews are poisoning their wells. They don't know what to believe. They are deprived of a decent life, and they are whipped into a frenzy. I don't think most Palestinians are evil."

It is at this point that Tani speaks out. It turns out he does have a story to tell, after all.

"When I was in eighth grade I had a friend who lived in a settlement. He and another friend skipped school and took a hike down the valley near their home. A Palestinian shepherd killed them with bricks and stones, and dipped his hands in their blood, and wrote things in blood on the wall of a cave. They were beaten so badly they couldn't be identified by dental records. They needed DNA."

An ordinary Israeli family, preparing for Sabbath dinner.

MY TRIP HOME WAS UNEVENTFUL. It turns out there was nothing at all to worry about with the fated, fearful Flight 223. Security was surprisingly light, and we were checked aboard by a Sikh in a turban and Muslim woman with a head scarf.

There are no more bad rumors about Flight 223, no more delays or cancellations. There used to be a problem, but British Airways has taken care of it.

Flight 223 no longer exists. The same plane still flies along the same route at the same time, but it is now called Flight 293.

International air corridors are not Jerusalem. Things are simple, still.

On the way to my house, I asked the cabdriver, as I always do, if anything interesting had happened while I was gone.

Plenty, he said. The government had issued an alert to be on the lookout for seven people suspected of belonging to al Qaeda, possibly planning something bad, though it wasn't clear what, or when, or if they were in this country at all. The government was urging people to go on with their holiday plans, though. The driver said he felt things were getting pretty scary, here.

Then he asked me why I was laughing.

NO ONE KNOWS WHAT TERRORISM, FUELED BY NEW TECHNOLOGIES, WILL UNLEASH on our country in the coming months, or years. In fact, as I write this I can't be sure that a catastrophic terror attack will not have occurred between the deadline for this story and the day you read it.

In our climate of strategically restrained anxiety, it is considered almost a crime to make predictions. When, shortly after 9/11, the brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking dared to speculate once again that advances in genetic manipulation of biological toxins will make it almost inevitable that mankind will extinguish itself on this planet in the not too distant future, scientific colleagues rose one by one to distance themselves from these terrible, irresponsible thoughts. You probably don't even remember this episode. Good, good.

Will America of the next decade resemble more closely the Jerusalem of today than it will the America of today? Maybe. How scary is that? Plenty. But I'm a little less scared of it than I was before I met my old friend Bernie, and his family, surviving with love and dignity and a sense of purpose.

In Israel, I think, the constant grind of terrorism has not only penetrated people's sense of denial, it has sanded it almost completely away. But what it has exposed is not the blind, paralyzing fear that Ernest Becker envisioned in The Denial of Death. It is something else altogether. The Israelis live defiantly, indomitably, with a heightened intensity, as though each day might be their last. After a bomb killed two dozen young people at a Tel Aviv disco a few years ago, Israeli youth refused to be cowed. They resumed a robust nightlife. Today, outside the scene of the bombing, beneath a stone memorial listing the names of the dead, is a single inscription: "Lo Nafseek Lirkod." It means, "We won't stop dancing."

I think Becker got it only partly right. Yes, death is a certainty, and we get by through denial. But would immortality, in a world such as ours, really be better? Becker, in his own bleak way, was too insistent on defining the human as just another animal dumbly fulfilling his Darwinian destiny. With the right frame of mind, denial can be a magnificent ignorance; the possibilities within it are limitless. In the end, those possibilities -- not self-delusion -- are what make us human and keep us sane.

Just before I left on this trip, my friend Laura gave me a $5 bill. Laura is a journalist, an expert in affairs of the Middle East, and the daughter of a rabbi. The bill, she told me, was "mitzvah money." When someone is heading off on a possibly dangerous journey, it is a Jewish custom to give him money to give to a beggar at his destination. That turns the journey into a good deed. With luck, God will protect you.

The bill is still in my wallet; I'd completely forgotten about it. At first, I felt ashamed. But sometimes, when you focus too intently on your own situation, you miss the big picture. I'm going outside, right now, to give the five bucks to the first homeless person I see. It's all the same world, you know.

Gene Weingarten is a Magazine staff writer and columnist. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article at 1 p.m. Monday on washingtonpost.com/liveonline.