Boiled down, it becomes simple and stark. There is before, and there is after.
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Before Sept. 11, Dendau Jongjitr had never heard of Saranya Srinuan. Now one is dead, one alive, and destinies are forever intertwined.
Before, Ruediger Bendlin was just a college public-relations guy who was willing to help. Before, Mohammad Sohaeb Irfan Siddiqui could fly America's skies with no hindrances. Before, Aicha el-Wafi simply assumed her son was making a life for himself in America. Before, David Lee wasn't afraid of America and Sergei Dreznin had music inside of him - unformed music - waiting to come out.
But now is the Age of After.
They are the latest members of history's supporting cast - regular people caught up at the margins when the world convulsed, just now figuring out what has changed since Sept. 11.
None of the above is American. Only one even lives in America. Yet the violence that happened on that late-summer morning in New York and Washington changed them. One received a scholarship. One lost his faith. One's motherhood was tested. One gave up an opportunity. One wrote a musical.
Lives change. No one expects otherwise. But not like this. Even those at the edges are still wrestling with the reverberations of that day.
* * * *
Odds are you've never heard of Aicha el-Wafi. Her son's name is more familiar: Zacarias Moussaoui.
Moussaoui, facing trial in the United States, is the only person charged in the Sept. 11 attacks. And across the ocean, in an ivy-covered stucco house along the Mediterranean Sea in southern France, his Moroccan-born mother thinks back on her life and awaits news about what she calls "the problem with my son."
"All these dreams, washed up," she says. "The days for making plans are over."
One of el-Wafi's daughters brought the first news. She called to say Zacarias' picture was flashing on the television. El-Wafi, who is divorced, hadn't seen him since 1997.
"Tell me it's not true," she said to herself, pacing around the house, looking at a picture from the time when he was a smiling teenager who looked something like Willis from "Diff'rent Strokes."
"The sky fell down on me," she says now, fighting her tears.
She has been to the United States several times, to a country she had never visited before, seeing her son through a glass prison panel.
She cries often from exhausted eyes that offset a kindly smile. She watches television, takes sleeping pills, catalogs legal documents and clippings about her son in plastic school binders, in cardboard boxes, in suitcases. She listens to Elvis and Stevie Wonder on vinyl and Joe Cocker and Mariah Carey on CD.
In a living-room cabinet, cast in plaster, is an echo - a model of Zacarias Moussaoui's childhood hand. His mother pulls it out, cradles it, kisses it.
"It's so small," Aicha el-Wafi says, and then wonders about the real hand of her real son, so far away and in so much trouble. "I'm afraid of never touching it again, of never kissing it again."
* * * *
He is a musician, with a musician's ear and a musician's take on the world. And two years after the towers fell, this is what Sergei Dreznin hears:
"The world is in a minor key."
He was born in Russia and lives in New York, Vienna and Moscow - but mostly New York, where he was on Sept. 11, 2001.
Last year, on the first anniversary, Dreznin made an unorthodox choice: He wrote "Vienna-New York Retour," a somber chronicling to music of Sept. 11 as seen by a young singer who lands a dream role on Broadway on the eve of the attacks. It opened last year in Vienna.
"It's a purely personal account: 'This is what happened to me,"' the composer says. "Everyone had their own personal 9-11."
Today, Dreznin sees lost opportunities and hatred in the post-Sept. 11 world. His own world, he says, has become more focused. As a Russian in the United States, he perceives a deepening of what he considers the American experience.
"Now you can talk to an American mass audience about serious things," he says. "They joined the family of those who experienced horror. The positive thinking, all the smiles - that's always been the American philosophy. Only now it's smiles in spite of horror. The American smile got deeper, more human."
* * * *
When Mohammad Sohaeb Irfan Siddiqui would fly from his adopted country, Mexico, to his native Pakistan, he would go via the United States. It was quicker and cheaper. He'd go to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, get a transit visa and that was that.
His family's restaurant in Polanco, an upscale Mexico City neighborhood, draws frequent visits from American Embassy staff who come for the naan and mattar paneer. They helped him get his five-year transit visa, which expired in 1999.
Last year, Siddiqui wanted to return to Karachi to visit his father. He made an appointment for a new transit visa.
Before, the hassles were few. This time, he was taken to a room alone, fingerprinted, grilled repeatedly about the purpose of his visit to Pakistan and asked to fork over $80 for a background check.
"I was so nervous," he said. "It was like Osama bin Laden himself had arrived. ... I felt like a suspect in front of a superpower."
As of late last month, he still hadn't heard about his visa. He ended up on a flight that stopped in Madrid, Rome, Dubai and finally Karachi. It took two days and cost $500 more.
The U.S. Embassy, he's told, may be calling soon to tell him he has a visa. But Siddiqui says he doesn't need America anymore.
* * * *
Siddiqui is kept out of America. David Lee turned his back on it.
Lee, a 20-year-old college student, was preparing to transfer from Malaysia's Inti College to Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., a college town in a country he had never visited.
Then the towers fell, and Lee decided America wasn't for him.
Too dangerous.
"My father said it might not be so safe to go, in case there might be more terrorist attacks," Lee said.
Though those fears subsided, Lee feared the same tightened regulations that stood in Siddiqui's way - the list of countries, including Pakistan and Malaysia, that were undergoing special scrutiny. But instead of ensnarling himself in them, Lee turned away.
Now he plans to transfer to the University of Adelaide in Australia. Regrets? He says not, though he still wants to visit America someday.
"Australia," he says, "is closer to home."
* * * *
Before: Ruediger Bendlin was a marketing director. He worked in the image business, making sure the Technical University Hamburg-Harburg looked good.
After: He has the same job, goes to work each day. But the man he was - the "foundation," he calls it - has been shaken. His faith in people is diminished, perhaps even gone.
Mohammed Atta and another of the Sept. 11 hijackers attended Bendlin's school, as did several other members of Hamburg's al-Qaida cell. When the news broke, Bendlin was the point man for public statements. It was chaos, and he had to take all comers.
He tried, with his colleagues, to figure out whether there had been signs that they had missed, whether there was something they should have done.
Locals began calling his school "Terrorist University." When Bendlin took the subway, he thought everyone was looking at him. Were they blaming him? It started to eat into his job; suddenly, the public relations man had little enthusiasm for the public.
The worst part: his dealings with a Moroccan student named Mounir el Motassadeq. Days after Sept. 11, el Motassadeq asked Bendlin for help dealing with the media. Bendlin obliged. El Motassadeq later confessed to training with the hijackers in Osama bin Laden's camps. He was convicted of providing logistical support to Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and other members of Hamburg's al-Qaida cell.
Today, Bendlin feels damaged, left with echoes of distrust for foreign students - something he acknowledges is irrational. He realized it in May when he went to an annual spring party for non-German students; almost immediately, he had to turn around and leave.
"It was just too much," said Bendlin, 41, sitting in his office a minute's walk from where Atta defended his thesis. "It has nothing to do with the individuals. It was something in me, inside."
* * * *
Somewhere in southern Thailand, in a town called Nakhon Sri Thammarat, a connection was made between two young women who never met and never will. On both sides of it lies tragedy.
Dendau Jongjitr, 19, grew up poor. Abandoned by her parents, she spent her childhood drinking gathered rainwater. She wanted to be a nurse and struggled to raise the tuition fees.
Saranya Srinuan was born in New York City and met her end there, too, working as a bond trader for Cantor Fitzgerald high in the World Trade Center when the airplanes hit on Sept. 11, 2001.
Her father came from Nakhon, and she spent a year of her childhood there. Her parents have set up a scholarship in her memory so someone in Nakhon can benefit from their loss.
Now Dendau has an unimaginable 10,000 baht - about $240 - each year to help her live and study.
"I thought Saranya was an old woman who died, so her children established this scholarship for her," Dendau says. "I knew there were Thais who died in the World Trade Center, but I didn't know who they were."
Dendau Jongjitr, whose name means "shining star," has a better chance to shine herself now thanks to Saranya Srinuan, who died in an inferno a world away.
"I know about her life now," Dendau says. "Even though she has died, we've met."
Sept. 11, 2001. There is before, and there is after.
And all over the planet, there are the people living with it.
* * * *
Associated Press correspondents Angela Doland in France, Traci Carl in Mexico, Alisa Tang in Thailand, Sean Yoong in Malaysia, David Rising in Germany and William J. Kole in Austria contributed to this report. Ted Anthony is AP news editor in Beijing.
