OUR TOWN : Terrorism with a library card.

Delray Beach, Florida, is a town with a population of about fifty-five thousand in southern Palm Beach County, midway between Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. It hums pleasantly with a sense of civic purpose, having just been designated an "All-American City" for the second time in ten years. Its main street, Atlantic Avenue, runs straight to the ocean, and its eastern ten-or-so blocks have become a flourishing downtown, a model for surrounding communities that have come to realize the value of an identifiable center. Gertrude Stein would not say of Delray Beach, as she might of some towns nearby, that "there is no there there."

The same spirit of purposeful optimism that revitalized East Atlantic Avenue seems now to have focused effectively on plans to do the same for West Atlantic, which stretches from Swinton Avenue to Interstate 95, through an African American neighborhood with deep historical roots. I have a stake in this as president of the board of our public library, which hopes to erect a new building at the eastern end of this corridor. It will replace a beloved but now seriously overtaxed structure east of Swinton. This older building recently became a footnote to the events of September 11 and a minor tourist attraction, with implications that are as yet unclear.

The reference librarian at the library, a tall, friendly woman who had moved here recently from Michigan, found herself briefly in the news and under the close attention of the FBI. As computers have established themselves in libraries across the country, people in her position have become self-educated techies, simply because they are the nearest ones to ask how to get online and access e-mail. When demand is high (and that is most of the time) they maintain sign-up lists and ration usage. This is what she was doing one evening in July when two young men confronted her--not belligerently but with an awkward silence that forced her to ask whether they wanted to sign up for one of the computers, all of which were in use.

They did so, with a name not their own but not made up either, as it turned out. She recognized their conversation with one another as Arabic because she had once lived near the largest concentration of Arabic speakers in the United States, in Dearborn, Michigan. When they were both seated at one computer she remarked to a coworker that she had not heard Arabic since arriving in Delray Beach. Whenever she looked over at them, one of them looked steadily back at her, apparently concerned that she might be suspicious of what they were doing. But his gaze was not nervous or furtive but controlling, establishing a zone that she was not to enter.

Within an hour or so a third man, apparently older, joined them, spoke to them in Arabic and then approached her desk and sat down at a table that faced her directly. He had no books or magazines or papers to read. With incongruous equanimity he sat there, often looking at her, and effectively setting up a wider perimeter of control. Eventually he asked her if she could recommend a restaurant. She said that she could not, being new to the area, but several library patrons chimed in with their recommendations. Soon after, the three men left.

When names of suspects appeared in the news in the days after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, she was stunned to recognize the name that she had placed on the waiting list in July. It was Mohand Alsheri, a hijacker on the plane that struck the World Trade Center's south tower. She notified the director of the library and then the Delray Beach police. When the FBI appeared with pictures, she recognized three faces, but not that of Mohand Alsheri, whose name they had used. Two of those she knew were Waleed M. Alshehri and Wail M. Alshehri, who were on the plane that struck the north tower. The third, who looked and may have acted older but who seems to have been the same age as the other two, was Marwan Al-Shehhi, a hijacker of the plane that struck the south tower. The FBI took away two computers for examination, returning them only the other day and, naturally, said nothing about what, if anything, they had found in them.

When Marwan Al-Shehhi returned home that night in July, he went to a gated community with a row of trees on its eastern border that interrupts the sunset in our backyard. Like the local pharmacist who did his best to supply a remedy for Mohamed Atta's red, sore hands despite Atta's evasiveness about how they got that way, like the local doctor who prescribed Zantac for another terrorist's nervous stomach, not knowing that his other job as a Palm Beach County deputy sheriff was more urgently relevant, we did not have a clue. A friend in that gated community with a special interest in his neighbor's occupation also shared our obliviousness. He is a retired commander in the New York City Police Department who gained an international reputation as an expert on terrorism. In the mid-1970s, he told a conference in Paris that one of the two or three likeliest targets of a terrorist attack in the U.S. was the World Trade Center. He reports that his community is now on high alert, organizing watchful committees, and very unlikely to accept another applicant for a rental apartment who lists his occupation as "Wanderer."

Daniel Murtaugh, a longtime Commonweal contributor, teaches in the English Department at Florida Atlantic University.