NOTE: This is part of a continuing online novel. Here is the Table of Contents.

The world has divided itself into red and blue. Red and blue states, towns, even neighborhoods.

Kirkwood, my Atlanta neighborhood, is staunchly blue. Kerry and Dean signs, some stained from being around garbage, line the streets like sentinels or totems to warn off harm.

The two young couples on my street who supported Bush in the election have not been so lucky. One had a car’s windows smashed, right where their W ’04 sticker had been. The other had its living room windows smashed. Someone had remembered their yard sign.

I worry about my wife. She works in a red neighborhood. She takes the train up there, and trains, being urban artifacts, are de-facto blue. I wonder if someone might take a hint at her train station some day, or along the road where she walks the last mile to her job.

She tells me to stop worrying. I tell her to wear something to work other than her blue cape. She says she likes the color blue. She says her winter jacket is blue. She says it has nothing to do with politics and everyone should know that.

I tell her everyone doesn’t anymore.

My son says the world has become Crips and Bloods, that America is one big ghetto. But he says this with a smile.

So far all the utilities work. But there is bad news every night concerning Atlanta’s ability to pay its bills. Atlanta is a blue island in a red sea, and the newly-Republican state legislature has turned from apathetic tolerance of it to boiling rage against it.

On Sunday morning my son goes to Sunday school, as always, and I head over to the YMCA for a workout while my wife gets ready for church. I don’t hear the explosion. I just see the ambulances lining the road from a block away, and my heart jumps out of my chest.

I park in front of my house, around the corner from the church, then run around the block because that’s a faster way to the scene. There is smoke coming from the sanctuary, and our minister, Lanny, is sitting on the curb, dazed and confused.

Where’s my wife, I think. Where’s John? I just look at him, don’t say anything. Lanny understands, and motions toward one of the ambulances. Jenni is inside, sitting beside a stretcher. She sees me and sticks up her thumb. He’s going to be OK.

Before I can react two jump-suited orderlies come to the ambulance. They pull the stretcher off, and disconnect my son from it. He seems to be fine except for the huge, ugly bandage around his thigh. I give the orderlies a dirty look. “We have worse cases,” one orderly says sternly, giving it right back to me. “Can you get there on your own?” This last is said in a pleading tone that says more than anger could have. I nod toward him. John hops off the stretcher and nods as well. Jenni nods, smiles at the orderly, and cradles her head under one of her son’s shoulders. I take the other one and we stumble off.

As we toddle along John says he was downstairs, in his Sunday school class, and that the explosion happened above his head. He says some of the younger children had just been taken upstairs for a final practice on an Epiphany hymm they were going to do at service that day.

He’s 13, he’s 5’7”, he’s trying to be so grown-up about this. So he doesn’t mention what undoubtedly happened to those younger kids. We should consider ourselves lucky, and we do. We shamble along, together, actually happy, and I see Lanny again, on the curb, so I give him a thumbs-up sign. He’s more than dazed, I see now. He’s stunned, silent, and is that blood dripping from his left ear? Jesus.

“Is this what 16th Street was like?” my son asks when we’re outside the police line, in the relative quiet of the street where we live, me fumbling for my keys and my wife straining to support a son grown six inches taller than her.

“I don’t know, son,” I say, not certain what he’s talking about.

“Maybe,” my wife says. “Four little girls were killed that day, by a bomb, in Birmingham, Alabama, because they were black, and because the church was being used for civil rights meetings.”

“And we’re on record for gay rights,” John says as I put my key into the lock and twist it.

“But your hair is red,” I say, trying to make light of it. “Let’s get you onto a couch, see how bad that leg is, and maybe we can avoid the hospital entirely. What do you say?”

He smiles.

When I turn on the TV to entertain my son, while my wife goes for some alcohol and prepares to pull a chunk of wood from her son’s leg, I expect the bombing to be the big news of the day. I’m surprised to see that it’s not. In fact it barely rates a mention.

America is at war with itself in 10,000 places. In states like Georgia it’s cities being attacked. In states like New York, where I grew up, it’s wealthy suburbs being attacked. The attacks are generally small, uncoordinated, unsustained, minor spontaneous bits of terrorism against people perceived as enemies. It’s people lashing out against people, a peoples’ war against itself. The message to the victims in all cases is clear. Go behind your own lines.

Our lines are 1,000 miles away.

“The whole country’s going crazy” I say out loud, as our daughter, awakened by our commotion, comes out of her room wearing a robe and slippers. She’s shocked by the vision of blood, her brother’s leg propped up on a dining room chair as he lies on the couch, trying hard to be brave, a good soldier, while my wife, my dear brave wife, plunges tweezers inside a small wound, finally seizing a splinter and pulling it out.

“I think that’s it,” she says, holding up the bloody wood. John smiles, but Robin screams and rushes back to her room, yelling “Disgusting!” behind her between sobs.

“How are you going to stitch that up?” I ask.

“It’s pretty small,” she says, squeezing the skin, “and I don’t think any arteries are hit. Let’s elevate it, and chill it. You get on the phone to Egleston and some of the other minor hospitals, see when they might take him.

“You think Ira might have something we can use at home?” I ask, mentioning our pharmacist by name.

“Call him first,” she says. “If we can stay out of the medical system today it will be a blessing.”

But before I can call the pharmacy, our phone rings.