Summary
Narrated in the past tense by a third-person limited-omniscient narrator, Ground Zero opens with a chapter in the point of view of Brandon Chavez, one of the novel’s two protagonists.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Brandon has been suspended from school, so he takes the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan with his father, Leo. Leo and Brandon discuss how Brandon had punched a fellow student, Stuart, in the nose because he stole Brandon’s friend Cedric’s Wolverine gloves. Brandon says that Stuart was a bully. Leo says that by throwing a punch, Brandon was acting as the bully in the situation. They exit the subway and Brandon is issued a temporary ID badge with his photo in order to get into the World Trade Center (Twin Towers). His father works as a kitchen manager at Windows on the World, located on the 107th floor of the North Tower. Brandon makes note of the Sam Goody store at the base of the Towers. He plans to buy a pair of Wolverine claws to replace the ones he broke.
The point of view shifts to the alternate-chapter protagonist, Reshmina, a twelve-year-old girl living in Afghanistan in 2019. She practices her counting in English as she gathers sticks of firewood. Reshmina is saddened to realize it will soon be time for her parents to harvest their rice paddies, wheat fields, and vegetable gardens, meaning they will pull her out of school to help. Reshmina’s twin brother, Pasoon, shouts “Taliban attack!” and leaps from behind a bush to startle her. Despite looking near-identical, their lives are very different: Pasoon’s only task is to take goats up to the mountains to graze, while Reshmina attends school and also takes care of animals and domestic chores all day long. Reshmina is learning English because she wants to be a teacher, but her brother points out that her husband won’t let her work. Pasoon mentions the older boys he looks up to, one of which recently went where “all the young men went, eventually”: to join the Taliban in the mountains. The narrator comments that Talib means “student” in Pashto, which is “the language of the Afghan mountains.” The Taliban follow a very strict interpretation of religious law and they fought their way to power in the last civil war in the 1990s. While the American army drove them out of power, the Taliban are still hiding in the mountains around where Reshmina lives. The American army is still fighting the Taliban alongside the Afghan National Army.
Pasoon helps her by gathering sticks. Seeing a chance for revenge, she shouts, “Snow leopard attack!” and jumps on his back. They tumble and wrestle and laugh like they did when they were little. Reshmina wishes she could preserve moments like this; she knows that soon her teenage sister will leave for her arranged marriage and Pasoon will follow the older boys in joining the Taliban. Suddenly they hear a commotion in the village. They run down the hill to discover that Afghan National Army men and American soldiers are banging on people’s doors, demanding to be let in. With alarm, she realizes her village is being raided.
With excitement, Brandon rides the express elevator more than a thousand feet up to the 107th floor. He goes to the window and looks out, seeing a news helicopter flying beneath him; his skin tingles at the wonder of “standing so high up” and “safe behind the glass.” Brandon obliges when his father puts him to work filling breakfast customers’ water glasses. Suddenly a grease fire in the kitchen draws the attention of the staff, but no one is hurt. Brandon takes the opportunity of the distraction to take the elevator down to Sam Goody to buy Cedric new Wolverine gloves. More passengers get on. As they slip past the 86th floor, something booms above them and the elevator goes sideways. Two elderly passengers fall down. The shuddering and leaning elevator confuses Brandon; he realizes the entire tower must be leaning. The passengers hold their breath and the lights flicker. The elevator begins to slide.
Reshmina has never known Americans to come to her remote little village; she wonders why they have come now. Pasoon is incensed to see Afghans taking orders from Americans in their own country. They make it to their own house just before the soldiers arrive. Reshmina is delighted to realize she understands the English the American soldier speaks. She is surprised to see an Afghan woman working as a translator. All the Afghan women she knows are mothers, wives, or daughters—none have jobs outside the home. The woman tells the family in Pashto that they are searching the village because they were told there is a cache of Taliban weapons somewhere. Reshmina quietly asks the woman who she is. Mariam smiles and says she is from Kabul.
When the soldiers find nothing, the American asks Mariam to translate his hope that they can put the past behind them and start over with a clean slate. Reshmina’s father asks how they can have a clean slate when they force their way into their homes and kill their people. Pasoon cries that the Americans killed his sister Hila. He accuses the Afghan National Army soldiers of betraying the country by working for the Americans. Mariam translates for the American, who replies that they should keep the Taliban out of their village if they want to be left alone. Reshmina asks how they can keep the Taliban out when they aren’t allowed to have weapons. The American says they always have a choice. Mariam tells the sergeant that the villagers are in the impossible position of either siding with the Taliban and getting killed by the Americans, or siding with the Americans and getting killed by Taliban. The American shrugs and leaves. Pasoon spits on the ground and says he hates them. Reshmina runs out to speak with Mariam more. Pasoon stops her. He confides to her that the Taliban started the rumor of the hidden weapons to lure the soldiers there. His friends Darkish and Amann told him it’s a trap: the Taliban will attack the soldiers on their way out of the village.
As the elevator slides, Brandon lunges to hit the emergency stop button. He smells chemical burning, like lighter fluid on a charcoal grill. Shavinder, one of the passengers who works in the tower, uses the call button and learns there was an explosion or something on the 91st floor. The line goes dead. One woman has a cell phone, but gets no signal. Black smoke creeps through the seams at the top of the elevator box. Shavinder dips napkins from his bar cart in water and tells the others to wrap them around their mouths to filter out the smoke. The passengers sit on the floor and introduce themselves. As the space heats up and the smoke thickens, they try to find a way out. They work together to pry open the doors, discovering a sheet of drywall with 85 written on it. They uses utensils from the bar cart to cut a hole, discovering that there are three layers of sheetrock. Brandon is the only one small enough to fit through the pizza-sized hole, so he climbs through into the dark unknown.
Reshmina stares at her brother in disbelief. She says that the ANA are Afghans—their people. She rushes to warn them, but Pasoon holds her back. Sounds of gunfire and explosions make her duck. Pasoon pulls her back toward the house. As she takes cover, she considers how she too could become a translator working for the Americans—it would be better than being bartered off as a bride. Rifles and rockets boom outside; she pulls out her books to study, not wasting a second in achieving her dream. Her mother comes in and tells her and her sister Marzia to get back to their housework, saying, “Keep your heads down and learn how to be good wives. That’s how a woman survives.” When her mother leaves the room, Reshmina’s grandmother, Anaa, tells Reshmina that her mother, Mor, was never allowed to dream. Anaa says she herself grew up in a golden time before the American, Taliban, and Soviet invasions. It was a time when women went to school and got jobs and dressed like Westerners. Reshmina is astonished to hear her grandmother say she used to wear a miniskirt outside, in public. She says they were all Muslims, but there was real tolerance of others. She fled to the mountains when the Russians invaded forty years ago. Reshmina resolves to be kinder to her mother, who has known no better life, but also to maintain her dream.
When the shooting stops, Reshmina’s mother sends Reshmina out to gather more wood. Reshmina is walking while reading from her English lesson book when she comes across a wounded, blinded American soldier dragging himself across the ground. The narrator comments that Pashtunwali, the way of the Pashtun people, says it is right and just to seek revenge against someone who has done you wrong. Why should she care about the American, when Americans killed her sister? She decides to slip away. However, she drops her book; he hears. In English he asks for help. She considers the Pashtun concept of nanawatai, which means one must give someone help or protection no matter who asks, even if they are a foe. He asks for her help again.
Analysis
In the opening chapters of Ground Zero, Alan Gratz introduces the reader to the novel’s split-storyline form. In alternating chapters, Gratz tells two parallel stories: in the first, a nine-year-old boy living in New York happens to be with his father at the World Trade Center on the morning of the real-life event known as the 9/11 terror attacks or September 11th; in the second, a twelve-year-old Afghan girl struggles to keep her family safe when they are caught in the middle of the conflict between the United States and the Taliban, a militant group hiding out in the mountains near her village. Occurring in 2001 and 2019 in different countries, the two storylines appear at first to have little to do with each other. However, as the narrative progresses, Gratz will show that Brandon’s and Reshmina’s lives and fates are intertwined in surprising ways.
The opening chapters also establish several of the novel’s major themes: terrorism, betrayal, revenge, powerlessness, resilience, hope, and loss of innocence. Oblivious that he is about to become a target in the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil, Brandon accompanies his father to work while naively concerned with getting back on his father’s good side and patching things up with his friend Cedric. The only reason Brandon doesn’t become trapped on the 107th floor of the North Tower with his father is that he tries to sneak down to the underground mall to buy Cedric a pair of Wolverine claws. With this simple, kind-hearted goal, Brandon’s childlike innocence is on full display.
The theme of lost innocence also arises in Reshmina’s storyline as she contemplates the growing distance between herself and her twin brother, Pasoon. At twelve, Reshmina knows her childhood is fleeting; the expectations of her strict Muslim society mean she will be married as a teenager, like her older sisters. For Pasoon, a lack of well-compensated job opportunities means he will inevitably join the Taliban, who can pay him far more than he could earn as a goat herder. This is the fate of so many young men in Reshmina’s milieu, and she naively hopes she can stop her brother from getting embroiled in the group’s conflict with the Americans.
However, the conflict between the Taliban and the Americans comes home to Reshmina’s village when ANA and American soldiers arrive to raid villagers’ homes in search of a rumored stockpile of Taliban weaponry. The theme of betrayal arises when Reshmina and her family members angrily attempt to explain to Taz, the American sergeant who searches their home, that they are in an impossible situation: If they are loyal to the Americans, the Taliban will kill them for betraying their countrymen; if they are loyal to the Taliban, the Americans will kill them because they see them as no different from the enemy combatants. Anything the villagers do will be seen as a betrayal against the other side.
As the Americans and ANA members leave the village, Gratz presents an instance of dramatic irony: Unbeknownst to the characters who have just spoken with Reshmina’s family, Pasoon informs Reshmina that the Taliban planted the rumor of the weapons to lure the enemy into the village for an ambush. While Reshmina wants to intervene, she is powerless to get the message out before the fighting begins. Later, once the shooting dies down, she goes out to resume collecting firewood at her mother’s command.
In an instance of situational irony, she comes across the sergeant who earlier raided her home, but he is now wounded and needs her help. The theme of revenge arises as Reshmina considers her people’s Pashtunwali etiquette of seeking revenge against those who have harmed you. However, she finds that she is in a bind because Pashtunwali also dictates that you give help to anyone who asks, even if you consider them an enemy. Caught between competing impulses, the chapter ends on a cliffhanger as Reshmina considers whether she will help the blinded soldier.
