Burning Down George Orwell's House

III

He woke up around dawn, or he thought he did. From inside a cloudbank it was impossible to guess the time of day. It felt like early morning, but it was just as likely four in the afternoon. Maybe it didn’t matter. Ray had no need to go anywhere or do anything and so spent his first morning at Barnhill in bed. The house creaked and moaned around him. Waves of rain splashed against the windows. He fell back to sleep for another hour. His thoughts turned again to that putrefying animal on his doorstep. He pictured it starting to move and squirm back to life. At some point, he pulled himself out of the dirty sheets and padded downstairs. The curtains were open, but the house remained dark. He balled up some newspaper, got a fire going again, and put a pan of tap water on top of the stove.

He filled a big stew pot with water at the kitchen sink and put it on the fireplace. It would take a while. In the meantime, he went upstairs and turned the bathtub faucets all the way on. If he could carry the boiling water from the sitting room to the bathroom fast enough, he might be able to get a decent bath. He slugged back a dram of scotch while the water boiled. Then he drank another one and carried the pot upstairs. The bath was hot enough to set his blisters blazing, but it felt so good to scrape off some of the dry earth.

The rest of the morning or afternoon or whatever was spent drinking whisky and staring out the windows. That woman who had given him a ride on Islay was right: he didn’t need his wristwatch anymore. Time operated differently on the Hebrides. It didn’t matter what time it was. Every so often the wind would push the clouds aside long enough to offer a view of the sheep that grazed around the house and were impervious to the weather. It felt so … so … right to not be at work. Ray could picture the flocks of businessmen and bicycle messengers and nannies back in Chicago racing in straight lines in adherence to the tight ant-farm grid of those claustrophobic city blocks and reporting their precise whereabouts every five minutes to concentric circles of online friends they had never met. He was free of it now. He had sold his truck and everything else he owned — furniture, flat-screen, turntable, everything. What he couldn’t sell, he donated. What he couldn’t donate, he hurled into the dumpster behind the dry cleaner’s. His smartphone was at that moment leaking persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic chemicals into Lake Michigan.

A shelf in the kitchen contained a row of guidebooks, histories, pamphlets, and a detailed survey map of Jura. The island looked to be about five miles wide and was shaped like a long, skinny oval of volcanic rock that had been bitten nearly in half by Loch Tarbert, the gaping mouth of which opened into the sound over on the Islay/Colonsay side. A previous tenant had circled Barnhill, but he couldn’t reconcile that name on the map with his presence here. It was too good to believe. All Ray wanted to do was curl up under a blanket and read Nineteen Eighty-Four yet again, here at the source, to see what new insights revealed themselves. He wanted to think. He wanted to do nothing at all. Other than that, his only goal was to see every square foot of Jura, to find the remaining wild goats and catch a lobster to eat. He wanted to drink gallons of scotch and climb the Paps. He would get to all of it soon, but first he needed to unpack before it got dark.

He placed his water-damaged books on a bedroom shelf and pulled a chair up to a window. The mist obscured the view of the sound and mainland and he couldn’t see any farther than the garden. He was so happy to find his copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four intact.

Ray checked the bolts on the front and back doors and fixed a bite to eat while he could see. He was still acclimating to life without electricity or gas. It was a hassle, but that was the whole point. He dropped some more peat bricks onto the fire and put a pot on the stove to warm a can of soup. It all felt so primitive—and that was wonderful and intimidating at the same time, but if bony and wheezy old Orwell could live this way so could he.

Over the next few days, Ray managed to convince himself that he was staying out of the rain in order to avoid some nascent flu symptoms creeping into his musculature. That he was simply collecting his wits after the awful events of the past few weeks and months. In reality, however, or in what passed for reality, he was scared shitless. He heard noises from the attic crawl space, the chimney, from the bushes surrounding the house. The floorboards groaned upstairs. Wind growled at him through the windows. Pacing-the-floorboards boredom became preferable to venturing outside and confronting the dead animal at the door, which in his imagination had grown to the size of the red deer that sailed past the kitchen windows. He tried not to think about what had left it there.

The weather was so dismal that he ended up spending his entire first week on Jura holed up indoors and drinking as much whisky as he could pour down his gullet. He did some reading now and then, but was distracted by the blank wall of fog and mist out the window. His attention span had shrunk so much that he couldn’t make it through more than a page or two of Orwell at a time. Unable to focus on anything for more than a few minutes, he grew restless. Even out in the middle of nowhere he felt trapped and hemmed in on all sides, but he did manage to settle into a daily routine.

Every morning, he gathered old newspapers and peat bricks and built a fire to warm a pan of water up for some instant coffee. Then he would spend several hours upstairs in his reading chair, from which he could watch the rain and allow the day’s hangover to withdraw. He stopped shaving because heating the water was such a pain. Sometimes he would attempt to get through a few pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four or some selections of Orwell’s collected letters or the tedious Diaries where he had recorded the minutiae of his farming and gardening, the amount of oil he used every day. None of it offered any insight into Winston Smith or Nineteen Eighty-Four.

When, around midday, he finished reading or not reading, Ray would head downstairs to scavenge some organic cookies or, if he was feeling ambitious, a canned good. The days were long. Before the sun could set — not that he ever saw the sun — he arranged some candles and a bottle of scotch so that he could find them in the dark. He longed for a hike, but the rain wouldn’t let up. In the evenings, he sat next to the fire and drank whisky again until sleep tugged him down into the cushions. He had neglected to bring pornography. During those late hours, drunk enough to make turning back impossible, his thoughts again began to grow dark and more sinister.

As long as Ray could remember, since he was a little kid running amok in the endless rows of corn, his mind had contained partitioned rooms he knew not to enter; in them were countless self-perceptions better left un-thought about and which generated moods that later in life — particularly after his career at Logos took off — his personal safety required him to avoid. But left by himself for days on end, half-dozing next to a dying fire, with the large amounts of whisky unable to fight off the constant din of the rain, he couldn’t help himself from picking open those locks and peering inside.

He thought a lot about his sister Becky, who had taken on the responsibility of caring for their mother. She had it so easy, what with her unquestioned acceptance of the status quo. Becky worked forty hours a week, believed in the literal divinity of Jesus Christ, and took pleasure in the hilarity of network television sitcoms. Unlike his father, Ray didn’t care about the failures of a professional sports team or need to insist upon the innate superiority of one soft-drink brand over another. He wished it were otherwise.

Left to his own brooding for too long, Ray came to recognize that nothing in the entire goddamn world meant what it was supposed to. He had just walked away from a high-paying job in order to hide out in a damp house in Scotland. Maybe that was another big fucking mistake. He had been so stupid, but part of him — a big part — no longer cared. Nothing mattered any longer, not really, except for the fact that each gulp of single malt scotch tasted even sweeter than the previous and that remained true down to the very bottom of each bottle.

Every two or three days Ray opened the front door and found another unidentifiable animal carcass on the mudroom stoop. His sightseeing expeditions extended to the edge of the garden, where he hurled the bodies into the bushes with a shovel. Otherwise he stayed indoors. He grew bored and claustrophobic, but some creature was lurking out there waiting for him. His interaction with the locals consisted of peeking out the window when he heard their 4x4s driving past Barnhill. He came to recognize the sounds of five different vehicles that made their way from the Kinuachdrachd settlement down to Craighouse and back again.

Sometimes Ray couldn’t remember why he had come to Jura and other times he couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. The scotch pooled into a murky, aqueous sense of depression that ebbed and flowed, ebbed and flowed. Some days were better than others. Some days were not.

He was attempting to read the memoir of one of Orwell’s contemporaries by the last evening light of the kitchen windows when a scraping noise came from the front door. He remained still, but the words “Loneliness began for me now fierce, desperate, taking on an importance out of all proportion to its quality which was that of a boy in his ’teens who” shook in his hands. There came another sound, and it grew louder. He put the book down.

Something rustled in the bushes outside the kitchen, then a monstrous face appeared in the window: an animal covered in mangy wet fur. It looked at Ray with knowing eyes that in a single glance interrogated him and his intrusive presence in this remote place, trapped in an old farmhouse a mile from the closest neighbors. The creature growled as if to speak and Ray screamed, but the hideous face still stared at him, its eyes shining with some fierce purpose, its crooked teeth glistening sharply from amid the soiled fur, until its so-nearly-human expression changed. In some savage and instinctual way, the thing appeared as startled as he was. It motioned as if to communicate with him through the windowpane: “Is everything okay, Ray?” it asked.

“Farkas? You scared the shit out of me.”

“Not literally, I hope. Would you mind letting me in?”

Ray unbolted the front door, where Farkas stood dripping wet. “Come in, come in,” he said. “You’re absolutely soaked.”

“Only on the outside, Ray,” Farkas said. “Only on the outside.” He sat on the mudroom bench and removed his wellingtons. “I could however use a wee dram if you have some on board.”

“I have a bottle I’ve been saving for a special occasion, in fact. You go sit by the fire.”

Farkas pulled a chair up. “I’m terribly sorry to frighten you like that,” he said. “And I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time, as I don’t mean to interrupt what you’re doing up here … what are you doing up here? I would’ve telephoned, but that wasn’t really an option, now was it?”

Ray dragged another chair next to Farkas’s. “I’m grateful for the company. I think I’m going a little stir crazy, in fact. Solitude is a lot less restorative than I thought. It turns out that life off the grid actually kind of sucks.”

“You’re not the first man to discover that for himself,” Farkas said. His voice carried a baritone roundness that in a different life might have lent itself to the opera. He lifted the glass to his nose, which was barely visible through his dense mask of mustache, beard, and eyebrow. “Nor I imagine will you be the last. This would be the eighteen-year-old, if I’m not mistaken.”

“You can tell that just from the smell? Slàinte,” Ray said. It was without question the most complex and delectable whisky that had ever crossed his tongue. It tasted the way living on Jura felt, like his humanity could reach a greater richness simply by living in such a rough and untamed land. “You certainly know your whisky. I forgot the water — I’ll be right back.”

“Don’t bother, don’t bother. I can drink water at home. And I believe that I’ve had close to enough of the stuff for one day, and, in any account, malt this good deserves to be taken neat.”

“I didn’t hear a vehicle pull up — did you walk all the way up here?”

“Sometimes I forget how big this little island truly is. I left my car at the public road and walked the last five miles. That path has destroyed sturdier cars than my own.”

“I believe it. But that’s still quite a walk. I have to admit I’m beginning to wonder what Orwell was thinking coming all the way up here. It must have been even more remote back then.”

“The whole world’s shrinking, Ray, at least in one sense, and that’s the truth. As I’ve heard it, however, our Blair didn’t get on very well with the locals. He was liked, as they say, but not well liked. There wasn’t much use on Jura back then for socialist intellectuals,” he said.

“And now?”

“Funny that you mention it. You did manage to upset Gavin. Don’t let it worry you, though. It’s not entirely your fault. He may be holding you to blame for some past crimes. There are some old stories — and the details are murky — there are old stories that suggest our Mr. Blair got himself into some hot water while here on Jura. Gavin swears that Blair was responsible for some unpardonable offense against his mother.”

“Pitcairn’s mother?”

“The very same. Blair was unwell even before he arrived. He suffered from tuberculosis where our climate, as perhaps you’ve noticed, can lean towards the damp. It must have been quite difficult for him, though they say he often took to sleeping outside in an army tent. It wouldn’t be a stretch to believe that the man needed someone to look after him. He was incapable of preparing himself a simple cup of tea, so he certainly needed someone to do his cooking and washing up.”

“Let me guess. Pitcairn’s mother?”

“Aye, Beatrice Pitcairn herself. A saint of a woman, bless her soul. Blair proposed marriage and, ever the practical Englishman, even offered her a considerable dowry in the form of his estate and future royalties to what would become Nineteen Eighty-Four. Unfortunately, however, he neglected to take into consideration the fact that she was already married quite happily. Our little Gavin was at that point still little more than a gleam in her eye, yet now he has come to believe that — like our Eric Blair — you’re here to split up his family.”

“But that’s absolutely—”

“Hear me out now,” Farkas said. “He knows that Molly plans to leave Jura at her first opportunity and he’s none too chuffed about that fact. He believes that exposure to the likes of you and your so-called intellectual ideas is going to hasten her departure.”

“I came here to get away from people. Please explain it to him — I don’t want to split up anyone’s family.”

“I know that, Ray. Can I trouble you?” he asked, holding aloft his empty glass.

“Sure,” Ray said. “One sec.”

The sky had darkened even further. His reflection stared back at him from the same kitchen window in which Farkas had appeared, and Ray yelped again.

He brought the whole bottle. Farkas was adding some peat bricks to the fire and stoking the ashes. The sitting room grew ten degrees warmer. “Now you can’t take anything Gavin says personally, Ray. He doesn’t care for much of anybody other than himself, but he upholds a special variety of loathing for outsiders — especially the tourists. And although I was born here, he still sees fit to consider me an outsider too, but I do try to get along with him. I can’t imagine what you said to the man, but I’ve never seen him so wound up, and you can trust me when I say that I’ve seen that man well wound up. You should have heard him the time Molly announced she was going off to art school.”

“Art school?”

“Aye, in Glasgow, no less. She didn’t even tell him she had applied until the acceptance letter arrived. I would speculate that every living soul on this island other than Gavin Pitcairn knows the importance of an education for Molly. The sheep and deer and seals know it. He called the school and threatened to burn it to the ground.”

“What an asshole.”

“He’s that, aye, but he’s also a good man in his way. He wants what he thinks is best for Jura, and it’s difficult to find fault with that impulse. That being said, before you go causing him any more trouble, I know for a fact that he would have burnt that school to the ground. Gavin’s entirely capable of such a thing, so unless you want to have your guts for garters you might want to stay clear of him, Ray.”

“Why, what did he say about me?”

“That at his first opportunity he plans to throw you into the Corryvreckan.”

“The whirlpool is real? Orwell mentioned it in his diary, but I thought he made it up.”

“I don’t know what you consider real or unreal, but right off the north tip of our island there’s a whirlpool which has swallowed up more fishing boats than you can count. Every few years the telly producers come out here to shoot yet another daft documentary about how Ulysses himself made it as far as the Hebrides. And some will argue that Corryvreckan is actually the mythical Charybdis, which makes it not so mythical by my reckoning.”

“You’re telling me that the sea monster from The Odyssey actually lives off the coast of Scotland?”

“That’s what they say.”

“And where do they say Scylla lives? Let me guess — Ireland?”

“As far as you’re concerned, she lives in Craighouse and goes by the name Gavin Pitcairn.”

Ray took a long drink. From the sound of things, he wouldn’t be able to buy supplies at The Stores or collect his mail for fear of being attacked by a crazed Scottish arsonist. “I’ll be right back,” he said, his tongue thick with whisky. He extracted a hundred quid from his wallet. “Give this to Pitcairn,” he told Farkas. “He says I owe him some money. That’s why he’s so mad. Tell him I’m sorry.”

“I’m afraid it may be a bit late for that, Ray, but I’m sure this will help. I’d encourage you to stay out of his way, which you will admit shouldn’t be too difficult for you up here. How’re you settling in, anyway?”

Good question. How was he settling in?

“Being here has definitely been liberating, and the whisky is spectacular. Do I remember correctly that you work at the distillery?” Speaking — or slurring, in this case — to someone other than himself felt great.

“I do, I do. I’m in charge of what you might call quality control.” Farkas touched his nose with a hairy finger. “This baby is my meal ticket. Or my drink ticket, I guess you could say. I possess an exceptionally acute sense of smell.”

“This house must be torture for you.”

“I’ll admit I detected a slight plumbing problem when I came in. And you’ve been burning garbage in the fireplace.”

“That’s quite a talent.”

“A blessing and a curse, Ray. A blessing and a curse, like most things. I will be happy to give you a tour — it’s quite an operation. And it’s my job, in a way, to keep a record of Jura’s history. Now I’m going to pour one more dram and head on back.”

“You just got here.”

“Aye, but I’ve quite a long walk ahead of me. I should inquire if given your interest in our Mr. Blair, you happened to take the opportunity to speak with Singer on your way over?”

“The ferryman?”

“The very same. He may be among the last of the locals who knew Blair personally. I’m not saying they were fast friends or anything, but I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t have some good stories for you — even if they aren’t what you might call true.” Stupidly, it never occurred to Ray that he should ask the older folks about meeting Orwell. Some of the longtime residents might still remember him. “And Miss Wayward up at Kinuachdrachd. I understand that her auntie knew Blair, though she’s known to be a bit weird even for a Diurach.”

“Is there anyone else I should speak to?”

“No one that I can think of off the top of my slightly intoxicated head. Oh … Mrs. Campbell.”

“I should talk to Mrs. Campbell?”

“No! She is devout in her hatred of everything having to do with Mr. Blair, a fact that might explain why the two of you got off to such an awful start.”

“You heard about that?”

“Everybody on Jura and Islay has heard about that,” he said.

“That’s not why she hates me, though. Or not the only reason. I really was terrible to her.”

“Aye, I heard that too.”

“What’s her problem with Orwell?”

Farkas finished his fifth or sixth glass of scotch. “Well, there’s been some speculation … and it’s no more than that. One story, set somewhere between myth and reality, goes that Mrs. Campbell’s dear mother, who lost her husband in the war, took quite a liking to Mr. Blair while he was here for the first time to inspect Barnhill.”

“And?”

“What do you mean ‘and?’ You’re going to have to keep your ears open on Jura, Ray. She took quite a liking to our Mr. Blair, if you know what I mean, while everybody else on the island detested the man. She may have even spent a few weeks here at Barnhill.”

Comprehension descended more slowly than it should have. “Are you telling me that Mrs. Campbell is Orwell’s illegitimate daughter?”

“I’m telling you nothing of the sort. Rather, I’m merely reporting, for your own edification, about some of the mythologies of the Isle of Jura, like Charybdis or our werewolf.”

“Jura has a wolf running loose? I might have seen it!”

“Not a wolf, a werewolf.”

“Oh a werewolf. Of course.”

“I’m entirely serious and you would do well to hear me out. Have you not noticed anything suspicious hereabouts?”

“Well, I have been finding dead animals on my front step.”

“Aye, and who do you think might be responsible for leaving them there, the tax assessor? And if I had to speculate, I’d say the first one appeared the night you arrived. Is that right?”

“I have no problem believing that there’s a wolf or bear or something loose on the island. I’ve scraped the evidence off my stoop, and it has me scared so shitless that I feel trapped in this house, but do you really expect me to believe that at the next full moon a werewolf is going to show up at my door?”

“No, Ray, I don’t expect you to believe it, but neither your belief nor doubt changes the reality. I have it on the best possible authority that it is not an ordinary wolf, but a lycanthrope, and we don’t only appear during the full moon — that’s just Hollywood superstition.”

“What do you mean ‘we?’ ”

“Well, if you must know, I have every reason to believe that I am a werewolf.”

Ray looked at Farkas. He did not appear to be joking. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why do you believe that you’re a werewolf?”

“I have my reasons. We’ll save that story for another day. I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not insane. No more than most people at any rate. That night you first arrived, that was the equinox, if you recall.”

“I’ll have to trust you on that.”

“That’s when Gavin and Fuller and the men go out hunting, every solstice and equinox, same as they did when you got here. They don’t believe me any more than you do, so they have spent their entire lives trying to find and murder what was in your garden that night.”

“Very funny, Farkas.”

“There’s nothing funny about it, I assure you. I’ll take another wee splash after all, thank you. It’s not something I can control, and I do worry that someone’s going to get hurt, namely me.”

“All the same, I think I’d like to see the next hunt. It sounds fascinating.”

“Aye, it is most certainly that. But I’ll ask you to do me a wee personal favor and refrain from shooting me. You’re looking at me like I’m daft, which I suppose I can appreciate, but even if you don’t believe me … and I don’t expect that you do … remember that the difference between myth and reality isn’t quite as distinct here on Jura as you might believe. Now I should go, it’s a long walk. Many thanks for the whisky.”

“Any time,” Ray said. “I hope you’ll come again soon.”

“That I will, that I will. I give you my word that the very next time I feel like a five-mile stroll through a snake-infested swamp masquerading as a path, this will be my first stop. I’ll see you down at the distillery one of these days and we’ll try to sort things out with you and Gavin.”

“Should I really be worried about him?”

“I can’t say, but it will be best not to risk upsetting him further, just to be on the safe side. This money will help.” Farkas slugged back the remaining scotch and sat in the mudroom to put his boots on. From his coat pocket he produced a small stack of envelopes. “I nearly forgot,” he said. “I’ve brought your mail.”

Ray watched Farkas splash up the hill until he disappeared into the rainy night. He went to the kitchen and, seeing his own reflection again, drew the curtains closed and filled a mason jar with water from the tap. The mail included a stack of printed-out emails Bud had sent to him care of the hotel. He placed them in the fire without reading them. The papers curled one by one in the heat until whatever bullshit his former friend and boss wanted to regale him with went up the chimney.

He also received a greeting card with his mother’s neat cursive on the envelope. He tore it open. Inside, her handwritten salutation “Dearest Raymond” was followed by the printed message:

Thinking of you

and wishing you all

the blessings of our

Lord and Savior.

She had signed it at the bottom, “Mother.” Ray put that in the fire too, then regretted it. He would need to send her a letter soon. What to say?

You know what I saw today? That had been his parents’ favorite joke. Every day when his father came in from the fields or, later, got home from the plant, he would ask Ray the same question. The habit continued long after he stopped falling for it and after both of them had recognized that the son’s humoring of the father signaled a permanent and unmistakable sea change in the relationship. Yet it remained funny even now. Everything I looked at!

MOST NIGHTS RAY MANAGED to drag his unexercised body upstairs to sleep off the booze, but every once in a while the dull morning light found him in one of the sitting-room chairs, his back and neck howling with pain, at which point he either would or wouldn’t bother to heat up a mug of water before stirring scoops of crystalline coffee bits into it and starting a new day all over again. He had grown thinner than usual after two weeks of dieting on scotch and cookies. His eyes sank into their sockets while the bones in his cheeks angled forward. His beard had sprouted in uneven patches of black bristle until he found a pair of scissors and sculpted it to a semblance of evenness. When his clothes started to smell he hung them out an upstairs window and dried them by the sitting-room fire. There was nothing to be done about the sweat stains on the shirts’ white collars. He had come to Jura for some peace and quiet, but living alone sucked. He should have remembered that.

Farkas’s visit had reminded him how much he needed to get out of the house and talk to someone other than himself. He was so bored that he became willing to risk meeting a wolf out on the moors. The Paps were calling, but that would require a bit of planning and — if at all possible — a clear day. For the time being, he chose a more modest destination.

The remotest reach of civilization on the island was a village a mile or so north called Kinuachdrachd. According to his diaries, Orwell had had friends there, some crofters. That was in the spring of 1946 so it was unfathomable that they were still alive, but Ray wanted to at least see where Orwell took a walk every morning; he would go there for his milk, until he acquired his own moo-cow.

Ray got dressed and headed out. If the sheep could get used to the rain, so could he. What he could not tolerate, however, was another stinking animal carcass. The smell was atrocious. He tossed it into the shrubberies. His socks were already drenched by the time he got up to the road. So much for his expensive boots. The rain was not going to stop him. The weather on Jura was no worse than the storms that rolled in from Lake Michigan — that’s what he told himself. The wind churned the surface of the sound. He could make out a small, craggy archipelago that hadn’t showed up on the maps. The mainland lurked ever so faintly in the distance.

Kinuachdrachd turned out to be a settlement of a dozen buildings, some of them in ruins. It looked like a fishing village, or like a fishing village was supposed to look. Smoke rose from the chimney of a little cottage and that was where Ray went. Around the back, a woman was wrestling with a ball of barbed wire. She had a pole through the middle to lift it, but it looked heavy. She was building an enclosure of some sort and having a tough time. A large dog heard Ray approach and it charged at him in a fury of teeth and slobber. The animal looked only semidomesticated, like it had never been indoors a day in its life, and like it was hungry for something other than its owner’s table scraps. Ray froze — wasn’t that what one was supposed to do? His heart stopped beating as if trying not to call attention to itself. There was nowhere to run, no trees to climb. He could almost feel the teeth sinking into his calf and tearing his pants leg. He tried to figure out where he would need to go for a regimen of rabies shots — Oban, maybe, if not all the way back to Glasgow — when the woman whistled and the dog stopped. It looked disappointed, but trotted back and plopped itself into a puddle in front of its doghouse.

The woman looked to be about seventy. She put the spool down with a grunt and wiped her hands on her overalls. Two of the four sides of the fence were already in place. “I guess you must be Mr. Welter.”

“I must be,” he said.

“Give me a hand with this, would you?” She nodded toward an extra pair of gloves near the back door of the cottage and held up a length of barbed wire. “Mind the ends — these are quite sharp,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I grew up on a farm and know my way around some barbed wire.”

She looked at him with some concentration, sizing him up. “Based on what Mr. Pitcairn says, I imagined you were a bit prissier than all that.”

“From what I can tell, that man is a borderline sociopath.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Welter. There’s nothing borderline about him, which is to say he’s an utter and complete sociopath, but he’s our utter and complete sociopath. It takes all sorts and he’s exactly as God made him.”

The woman’s face was leathery and wind beaten and beautiful. She looked like someone comfortable with her own fortitude. She had earned the crow’s-feet that led like ancient aqueducts from the sides of her eyes and Ray couldn’t help but think of the countless hours he had spent behind desks and in cubicles, staring at computers and watching web videos about animals doing amusing things. He had wasted so much of his life.

One end of the barbed wire had been wrapped and tied around a core post. The two of them lifted the spool together by the pole and let it unwind as they walked the length of the fence. “Go slow now,” she said. “That’s it.” It was a huge job and he couldn’t imagine that she had completed the first two sides by herself.

“Well my plan is to stay as far away from Pitcairn as possible.”

“Aye, that might be for the best, he’s a troubled soul, but in his heart he means well and he wants what’s best for Jura, or what he believes to be best.”

“And what’s that?”

The line got snagged on some debris on the ground. Ray held the entire spool — far heavier than it looked — while she got it loose again. “The sad part of it all is that for all his lip service about maintaining our way of life, as he calls it, and I’m not entirely sure what he means by that, he himself does not feel bound in any way by our traditional Highlands hospitality.” She put her side of the spool down again and removed a glove to shake his hand. “Speaking of which, I’m Miriam Wayward. Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Wayward.” These people and their tea. Ray would never feel entirely at home in a nation that didn’t know how to brew a decent cup of coffee. “I was told to stay clear of you.”

“You’re welcome to do that if you like, or you can come in for a cup, and it’s Miss not Mrs., but by all means call me Miriam. Allow me to guess: Mr. Pitcairn told you I was a witch who cooks the bones of children in a big pot and casts evil spells on my enemies?”

“Something like that. Mrs. Bennett says you’re quite friendly, but that I should leave Mr. Harris alone.”

“Aye, he prefers his solitude, it’s true, and he should thank our Maker every day that solitude isn’t a crime even in this ruinous age. No tea, then?”

“Let’s finish this first, Miriam. Are you building a pen for your dog?”

“Aye, to keep her in and some intruders out.”

“Intruders? Is there much crime on Jura?”

She laughed. “Crime on Jura? Never, not unless you consider driving whilst intoxicated a crime, but then there would be no getting anywhere. We have some sort of predator on the loose these days, not that I can tell you how it got here. Mr. Pitcairn wants to suggest it’s a wolf, but I find that difficult to believe.”

“I saw it in my garden the night I arrived, and there have been dead animals at my door.”

“Well that is peculiar, isn’t it?”

“I talked to Farkas about it.”

“He wants you to believe he’s a werewolf, I suppose?”

“It’s the fact that he believes it that interests me.”

“He’s mad, of course,” Miriam said, “but there’s little accounting for the beliefs of others.” She lifted the spool again and waited for him to do the same. They arrived at the far end and spun the line around the post a few times at the spot she had marked, a few inches off the ground, then continued along the final open side of the enclosure. When they got to the last post, she cut the wire and the end jumped, biting into her sweater. “Almost got me that time,” she said. She pulled a hammer from her waistband and used the claw side to pull in the slack, wrapped the loose end around the pole, and then twisted the end around the wire she had already connected. “There’s another one down. If you won’t take a cup, how about a wee dram?”

That was not something Ray was about to refuse. “I would love that,” he said. “Then we’ll finish this off.”

The notches on the wooden pole and the two completed sections indicated that they had four more lines to run. It would be an all-day job, and the rain showed no signs of letting up. The dog watched them go into the house.

Pelts and furs and unidentifiable animal skulls decorated the walls and covered the chairs and sofa. A chandelier made from deer antlers hung from the low ceiling. The smell of simmering stew wafted from the kitchen, where Miriam went and then returned with a tray on which she balanced a plate of scones, a bottle of the local whisky, and two empty jelly jars. “Oh do sit down,” she said. She poured two large drams. “Welcome to the Isle of Jura,” she said.

“Slàinte,” Ray said.

“Well, well,” she said. She sounded impressed. “Slàinte.” She took a long drink and he did the same. It tasted like French kissing a leather-clad supermodel, and felt like someone had turned the thermometer in his stomach back up to a reasonable temperature. He couldn’t get a good look at the bottle. “If you don’t mind me asking, Mr. Welter, I—”

“Please call me Ray.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, Ray, what fair wind has cast you upon our humble shore?”

“Excuse me?

“What in the name of our Heavenly Father are you doing on Jura?”

“You’re the third person to ask me that and I’m still not sure I have a good answer. I guess I needed to get away from civilization and think.”

She laughed a little bit. “You guess? It’s quite a drastic step to take based upon a guess. You may find yet that we Diurachs are quite civilized,” she said. “Most of us are, at any rate, our Mr. Pitcairn respectfully excluded.”

“No, I don’t mean it that way. Back in Chicago I felt like Big Brother had come true, and that if I didn’t get away from it I was going to lose my mind. I guess … I mean, I’m trying to figure out how to live my life in a way that doesn’t adversely affect others.” He gulped down some more scotch. “I always wondered why Orwell went to the least populated place he could find in order to write about living with an omnipresent government that watches our every move. It seems like a contradiction.”

“Yet it’s difficult to argue with his results, is it not? One thing you’ll need to know is that there was no George Orwell here.”

“What do you mean?”

“My auntie knew him quite well, and he visited this very house on many occasions, but he was always Eric Blair on Jura. No one called him George Orwell. It seems a bit daft that a man who took so many others to task for the slightest offense to his rigid sense of British integrity would spend his career hiding behind a pseudonym.”

“I never thought of it like that.” Ray finished his scotch and felt like a better person because of it.

“Why would you? There was none of that here, I’ll tell you: no, he was Eric Blair and when people such as yourself begin poking around looking for George Orwell, I tell them there was no one here by that name.”

“Do you know what I’d like to do?” he asked.

“What’s that?”

“I’d like to finish that fence. I feel like I’ve spent the past decade trapped indoors and now I’m dying to be outside. Thank you so much for the whisky.”

“Well take a scone with you,” Miriam said. She pulled her gloves on again and they got back to work. The rain felt pretty good, actually. “Like this — now pull this bit along, that’s it,” she said, and showed him how to better manage the unspooling line with his free hand. “You need to remember to give yourself enough slack to work with, but too much and you’ll soon find yourself entangled and bleeding.”

Ray stopped. That was so true — she was right.

“That’s very well put,” he said. Over the past few years, had he given himself too much slack or not enough? It was something he would have to think more about.

“I once heard someone say that on the radio.”

“To answer your question, what I want to do is leave the earth a slightly better place when I die. In the meantime, I want to be able to sleep at night. That’s all. If I can’t do that here, away from the world, it may never happen.”

“Your problem is, and I hope that you don’t mind me saying so, is that our little isle is just as much a part of the world as London or Paris or your Chicago, maybe more so because — and Mr. Pitcairn is right about this point — although we may be remote, and that’s by choice, particularly up here in Kinuachdrachd, God bless us, we still like being connected on our own terms.”

“And what terms are those?”

“It’s true that God’s green earth provides us with but one path to Craighouse and beyond, but I might ask you to consider other avenues. The seas also contain roads, there are paths over the water and even highways that sailors have traveled for millennia. If Jura is indeed remote, and I’m not so sure that it is, that’s only because the relatively recent invention of the automobile has made us forget our traditional travel routes, and that’s the only thing keeping us at arm’s length from what you call civilization. You seem like a decent young man, Ray. Troubled, to be sure, and I do hope you find whatever it is you’ve come looking for, but you don’t yet seem to see the full grace and glory of the world that exists before your eyes.”

“Maybe not,” he said.

Finishing the pen took the rest of the afternoon, until the setting sun turned the westerly sky a pinkish shade of grey. The breeze picked up and the birds in the trees and shrubs sang their plaintive goodnights. Ray’s body still thought it was on Central Time and it should be the early afternoon. He stifled a yawn. “It has been very nice to meet you, Miriam, but I suppose I’ll be heading back.”

“Can I tempt you with one more wee dram?”

“No thanks, I can’t keep my eyes open as it is.”

“Suit yourself. I suppose I’ll be seeing you around now that we’re neighbors.” She whistled for the dog and let her into the new pen, where she would be safe from the wolf or Farkas or whatever it was that wanted to slice her open and eat her for a late-night snack. Speaking of which — Ray needed to hurry home. What little brightness the clouds contained had all but faded and it wasn’t like there were streetlights to guide him back.

He found the path and oriented himself southward before the utter darkness took over. He saw no moonlight, no stars, no boats lit up on the water. He quickened his pace. The wind made noises in the trees. Every wave crashing onto the shore sounded like the breath of the monster out here with him. Ray took off running. He ran all the way to Barnhill and groped his way around the exterior of the house to the front door, and got into the mudroom without being mauled. His heartbeat throbbed in his neck. A knot of pain filled the center of his chest. He didn’t have the energy to start a fire and warm up some much-needed bathwater, and he began to snore before he flopped onto the bed.

THE NEXT MORNING, RAY picked up the Diaries again and read three pages without absorbing a single goddamn thing. The letters had aligned themselves into words and the words into sentences and paragraphs, but none of them made any sense. It might as well have been in another language. Orwell had written something about shooting rabbits and skinning them. He had liked eggs. Ray put the book down and looked out the window. Nothing had changed. Swirling shapes presented themselves in the mist and then went away. The drizzle spoke to him of mathematical and spiritual concepts. At that moment, he came to understand what infinity was.

Pouring a glass of whisky felt less like the right thing to do and more like the only thing to do. What remained of his supply stood sentry on the kitchen counter. Seven bottles, two of which were still sealed. The five open bottles contained various amounts of liquid, so he pulled the corks from all of them, practiced his embouchure with some kissy faces in the window, then whistled a jug-band rendition of the Ode to Joy over the necks of the bottles. When a note didn’t sound right, he chugged that scotch — a twelve-year old, a twenty-one — until it did. Freude, schöner Götterfunken my ass, he thought.

His boredom had morphed from a meditative state to an emotional liability. He belched up a cloud of single-malt scotch, ate a few crackers from a tin, and put some clothes on. Ray needed to get out of the house again before he hurt himself. The blue jeans and sweater felt cumbersome after so much time spent in sweatpants. He no longer wondered if it was raining or not — the rain was a constant, a given. It wasn’t even rain any longer, but something immutable and permanent. Something inestimable. The atmosphere of the Inner Hebrides was made not for him but for the sheep and colorful lichens that sprouted from every surface.

The plan for the day was to walk to the source of Loch Tarbert, about halfway down the length of the island. From the map, hiking there looked doable in a few hours. Every place was in walking distance if one had enough time.

He left without locking the door, went a mile, maybe two, before he couldn’t ignore the pain in his feet any longer. His boots proved to be useless. No, they were worse than useless — they were harmful. The extent of their utility was to cause pain. After so many miles the leather remained as stiff and unforgiving as the day he bought them. Every step sent waves of battery acid splashing into the blisters on his heels and soles. Each puddle he stepped in — and the path was nothing if not one long puddle — found its way to his bloody socks. He tried to distract himself from the pain tingling up to his knees, to enjoy the scenery and the fresh air, but there were several agonizing miles to go before he reached the road.

He stopped to watch a fleet of dolphins skipping across the surface of the sound. There were said to be seals nearby too, and puffins over on the far side of Islay. He would need to find a better way to get around. All this walking sucked, but he kept going. The blisters felt like hateful marshmallows stuck in his socks. The pain became disorienting. It was inconceivable that such small wounds could inflict so much suffering. He spotted a cylindrical tower at the top of a hill — a bunker of some sort — and decided to stop there to assess the state of his feet. Even the slight incline caused his Achilles heels to rub harder against the backs of the boots. Up close, the structure resembled a standing stone made of concrete, manmade but more monolithic than Neolithic. It could have been an elaborate marker for a barrow of some sort, but that seemed unlikely. The object served no purpose that he could see — it just was. He sat against it and removed his boots to squeeze the water from his socks. It wasn’t so terribly cold out; he could walk home barefoot. Whatever it took to avoid putting those boots back on. He tied the laces together to make them easier to carry.

If by some miracle the rains stopped and clouds parted, this spot would have granted a great view of the entire island, but, as usual, Ray had to imagine all that the mists concealed. To the south, Loch Tarbert divided the land in half and, beyond that, the Paps loomed over everything around them. A few long, blistered miles west toward Colonsay would put him on the seaboard. That part of Jura, north of the lake, remained uninhabited and untamed. The coastal cliffs on the western shore were said to be home to a series of caves that he wanted to explore; over the years, they had been occupied by pirates, gypsies, even bootleggers who were said to have produced Jura’s first whisky, which they shipped to prohibition-era America.

The attraction of living on a small island — which was not so small after all, as both Farkas and his own feet attested — was the belief, mistaken to be sure, that he might get to know it in its entirety, that there existed one place on the planet that he could fully understand. So far, however, he had seen so little and what he had seen made him want to see and learn more. The natural world was inexhaustible and at the moment he faced the impossible decision of where to go next. He could pick any direction, but the number of choices terrified him. Maybe there was such a thing as too much freedom. Every decision, big or small, eliminated as many possibilities as it opened up. He could go anywhere. Or he could make his way back to Barnhill and stay indoors to drink himself senseless. It was a tough call, but he preferred the disappointment and self-hatred he would feel after another solitary bender in the sitting room over the fiery ache in his feet. He had made it as far as he could and hadn’t reached the public road, much less Loch Tarbert. The water mocked him in the distance. Hiking to the Paps would be unthinkable. The day was an abject failure. His life was an abject failure. He never should have come to Jura.

The rocks and sticks jabbed at his bare feet, just as they had so long ago back on his parents’ farm. He was going to pull his boots back on when the headlights of a truck came bouncing up the path from Craighouse. If it was Pitcairn, Ray planned to ignore him. Let him drive right by. Anyone else, he would flag him down and beg — down on his knees in the mud like an animal if he had to — for a ride back to Barnhill.

Then he heard it. The sound of the vehicle was unmistakable. That roar. That 6.2 liter V8 engine that combusted petroleum by the barrel and farted climate-changing gases. It couldn’t be. The truck was still far away, but he made out a few scratches in the paint: O … I … L … H …

Ray wiped the rain and sweat from his eyes. When he looked again, the SUV had become a small 4x4 pickup that was getting thrown back and forth by the potholes and puddles. It was the little white truck he heard go past the house from time to time. The revving engine sounded seasick. It stopped and a window rolled down. The driver was a burly man in his fifties. His woolly, fisherman’s sweater matched the color and texture of his beard. “Barefoot, is it? You’ll be wanting a pair of wellies from Mrs. Bennett.”

“I had no idea my feet could hurt this much,” Ray said. “Good to meet you, I’m—”

“I know who you are. You’ll be wanting to sit in the back.”

The passenger seat was empty. The cabin looked so warm, but the driver motioned for Ray to climb into the truck bed. He walked around the side of the vehicle and saw that three inches of black mud lined the back. It squeezed between his toes. The truck started moving again and he had to crouch and hold on to the side to balance. That was when he smelled it. He was squatting in a truckload of fresh fertilizer. The morning’s scotch clawed up the back of his throat. Pig shit coated his feet and his clothes and all Ray could do was laugh. When the truck stopped at Barnhill he was still cracking up.

He hopped out and went to invite his savior in for a wee dram, if only to postpone his own boredom a few more minutes, but the man drove off without as much as a wave. Ray waited for him to get out of sight, then stripped off all his clothes and allowed the rain to wash the shit off and then shoveled the new animal corpse into the overgrowth.

It took no time at all to get a fire raging. Ray’s pyromaniacal skills had improved in a short amount of time. For the evening’s scotch he chose a lovely ten-year-old the color of blond wood that had very recently sang bass in his rendition of Beethoven. He poured a short dram and inhaled the fumes deep into his nose. If shoe polish could smell delectable, that’s what the ten-year-old smelled like. Shoe polish and salt water. The first sip felt soothing in his chest, the second in his shoulders. The afternoon faded to evening.

He was skimming through “Such, Such Were the Joys,” a typescript of which Orwell had mailed to his publisher from Jura around the time he began Nineteen Eighty-Four, when he came to an insight about his own condition. In that essay, Orwell had written about his days at boarding school, where the entire hierarchy of the English class system got distilled to its cruelest possible concentration. The American corporate world now operated in a similar manner.

The young Blair had suffered at the hands of the headmasters and his wealthy classmates, many of whom had estates in Scotland. This country had become the place where people of immense privilege came for shooting parties and to enjoy all the luxuries of upper crust British life — the kind of life that Blair was continually reminded he would never experience. Once Orwell attained some small financial success with Animal Farm he was able to obtain what had so far been out of reach. Barnhill served as his own privileged estate away from the hullabaloo of London’s postwar reconstruction, and in coming here he had achieved the social status denied him as a child. It made perfect sense.

There was a key difference, though, for Orwell. Instead of shooting pheasants and foxes while wearing a tuxedo, he wanted to work the soil with his bare hands. He didn’t have servants or host dinner parties — he planted vegetables and plowed the fields and sweated his tubercular ass off, all while continuing his literary correspondence and writing a masterpiece. He came to Jura in order to show up his classmates, even if only in his own mind, as the stuck-up snobs that they were.

The insight inspired a victory dance in the sitting room.

RAY DOZED OFF TO the sound of rain knocking at the windows. The wind eventually woke him and then punctuated eight and a half hours of eyes-wide-open insomnia before it yielded to a series of early morning dreams about every manner of natural and unnatural disaster. He half heard the sitting-room chair shaking and groaning beneath him while he recoiled from the sounds of automobile accidents, plane crashes, and crumbling skyscrapers. From the sickening crunch of metal against metal, the drip drip drop of broken sewer lines erupting into fountains of diarrheal waste. Naked bodies fueled a mile-high bonfire. He awoke disoriented and with the odors of kerosene and burning human flesh still in his nose. The room was strangely bright. It took a minute to figure out where he was. Outside, the sun shined upon Barnhill’s back garden.

The sun!

He opened the window to welcome the warm air in, but the smoky smell from his dream didn’t dissipate. Something was on fire.

A dozen possibilities ran through his mind: he had forgotten to blow out a candle and it had ignited the spilled whisky on the counter. Or a red ember had flown up the chimney and torched the bushes outside. A milk cow had kicked over a lantern. Whatever had started it, the odor was unmistakable. He was going to be responsible for burning down George Orwell’s house.

The smell of burning grease originated in the kitchen. He ran through the dining room with his socked feet sliding on the wooden floor. There were no signs yet of smoke, but the fire crackled and sizzled. Water. He needed a bucket of water. No! Not for a grease fire. For a grease fire, he needed … what? Baking soda? The odor grew stronger, more pungent. That pile of charcoaled bodies flickered again through his mind. If he didn’t know better he would’ve sworn that it smelled exactly like—

“Coffee’s on,” Molly said. She stood at the sink looking out the window and watching the sheep amble around the sunny garden. Their bells usually relaxed Ray, but this morning they sounded like a fleet of screaming fire trucks careening through the yard. The light pounded into his eyes. “Mind you, I can’t imagine how you Yanks drink this stuff.”

“What are you doing here?”

“What does it look like?” Her voice cracked the tiniest bit. “I’m making breakfast. I hope you don’t mind,” she said, and turned to face him.

It was called a black eye, but her face appeared more orange and purple: a horrendous masterpiece of secondary colors. A strawberry-sized lump protruded from her forehead.

“Would you mind if I stayed here for a little while?” she asked.

“Sure, definitely. I mean — no. I don’t mind.”

If he wanted to be honest with himself, Ray would have admitted that his very first thought was about the loss of his solitude. The idea of looking after an abused teenager didn’t carry much appeal considering that her murderous dad would be looking for her any minute, but under no circumstances could he turn away a girl who was getting beat up at home. “Does your father know you’re here?”

“You’re having a laugh, right? He was out drinking all night, so I made a break for it.”

“How’d you get all the way up here?”

“On my mountain bike. I brought as much as I could carry.”

“I’m not sure this is a great idea, but you can make yourself one hundred percent at home,” he said. “Take the room upstairs at—”

“At the end of the hall, aye. My things are already up there. You were still sleeping and, I should add, you snore like a beast. Now have some of this coffee before it gets cold. It’s better than that instant shite you’ve been drinking, and far tastier than Fuller’s. I swear he makes it that way on purpose.”

She almost smiled.

Sure enough, it was the best coffee Ray had tasted since leaving Chicago. Over his own moans of pleasure, he heard a sound like the release of springs in a metal can. Two pieces of white bread leapt from the toaster and poked their crusty heads out as if to see their shadows and determine how much longer he had to wait for a decent meal. She must have brought some food with her.

“How did you do that?” he asked.

“I pushed this lever down.”

“No, how did you turn on the electricity?”

“I switched on the generator out the back, dummy.”

“There’s a generator?”

“One of those silent ones at that. It’s in the stables. Are you telling me you’ve lived in this house for a month without electricity or gas? You didn’t notice the big, white propane tank outside?”

He had noticed it, sure, but it never occurred to him that it might work.

“You haven’t had any hot water?”

“I heated some pots and pans up a few times in the fireplace.”

“Are you positively deranged?”

He gestured toward her face. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

“About the hot water?”

“About your eye.”

She sized him up for a moment. “No, not really. Also, and I don’t mean to be insensitive or in any way appear less than grateful for your hospitality, but could I trouble you to put on some trousers?”

Oh hell.

He was wearing only a pair of boxers and black dress socks with gold toes. Cold pinpricks dotted his arms and legs. At least he wasn’t completely naked this time.

Ray went upstairs to put on some clean-ish jeans and a black “Oil Hogg” T-shirt. Living with a female again would take some getting used to. Wearing pants. No more pissing out back in the garden. No more drying his naked body by the fire.

Molly had breakfast ready by the time he got downstairs again: full Scottish, minus the haggis. The blazing sunlight illuminated the kitchen but also exposed a layer of grime on the counters and in the sink. He made the decision to ignore it. They sat and without delay Molly tore in to her food. Bacon, eggs, toast, tomatoes. Real coffee. She shoveled it all in with two hands. She slurped at her tea and belched into the crook of her elbow. “Have some tomato,” she said, sending bits of egg hurtling onto his shirt. Ray could’ve gone on eating for days, except that she sucked up everything in sight before he could get his fill. He would need to be quicker. Crumbs stuck to her cheek and wouldn’t budge even when she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, the fingers of which still grasped a triangle of toasted and buttered and jellied bread. She looked like a half-domesticated animal set loose on a feeding trough. Her gluttony was mesmerizing, yet also endearing. It was sweet in a strange and disgusting way. He envied her. She appeared so … healthy.

After she finished every morsel on her plate and then on his, she leaned back in her chair. “Okay, then,” she said. “A few ground rules. In exchange for the use of the room upstairs, I will do the cooking.”

She had clearly been rehearsing this conversation. “Terrific,” Ray said.

“Second, I will stay out of your way. I don’t want to interfere with your work and I don’t want you interfering with mine.”

“Fair enough,” he told her. Everything was happening so fast: in the span of twenty minutes he had gone from hermit to chaperone for an abused teenager. Also, what work could a seventeen-year-old girl have at a place like Barnhill?

“Most importantly, and I wouldn’t be here if I thought this would be an issue, but I want to make it clear that nothing is going to happen between us. Our relationship will be purely, strictly, and chastely platonic. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“You promise?”

“You have my solemn oath. Nothing will happen. No thing.”

She shook his hand with much ado, leaving a globule of jelly on it. “Now, while you do the washing up, I’m going to unpack my things. We’ll reconvene for lunch. Until then, I will appreciate very much having some privacy. Also, you stink — take a bath. Mind you, I do like your beard.”

The possibility of a physical relationship with Molly hadn’t even occurred to him. It wasn’t even within the realm of possibility. “Sure,” he said. “You’ll have all the privacy your heart desires. Can I help with your bags?”

“No, but you could get rid of the dead fox at the front door. You need to bury it or it will attract carrion and they attack the lambs.”

Indeed, another animal sat prostrate and disemboweled at the doorstep, surrounded by a miniature Stonehenge of gooey fur. The stench was unbearable. He squinted at it in the sun. A pair of crows was enjoying a feast and they dared him to chase them away. “Yah!” he said and stomped a foot in their general direction. They looked at him with disdain then continued to peck and pull at their brunch. He went to the garage to fetch the shovel. The generator now powering the house purred almost inaudibly, much unlike the petroleum-spewing models he would see on the neighbors’ farms as a kid or powering gigantic TVs and PA systems at Saturday tailgate parties.

Shovel in hand, he scraped the mess into a burlap sack and carried it to the garden, where he chose a dead tree as a grave marker. The blade of the shovel carved cleanly through the layer of heather and into the soft, peaty soil, but the job would still take half an hour. He got to digging. Molly’s uninvited presence got him thinking about Flora and the way his time in Chicago had ended. Flora had asked him once what he feared most and since then he had given the question a great deal of thought. Not rats. Not bad gin. He feared that he would never regain the certainty he had possessed when first reading Orwell.

He brushed the sweat from his forehead and surveyed the new grave. It was a beautiful thing to be in Scotland and to dig a hole on a sunny day. He kicked the sack into the hole and leaned on the handle of the shovel to catch his breath. His fingers grew calloused, but it was strange how easily he could slip off his wedding ring. Without giving it much further thought, he dropped it on top of the burlap sack and threw a pile of black dirt on top until the island itself swallowed the band of gold. That was when he caught Molly watching him from an upstairs window. He smiled at her, but the curtain flittered closed. Ray got down on the ground and reached for the ring. The putrid odor rose to greet him. The burlap squished beneath his fingers. He thought about putting it back on, but allowed the fox to carry it with him into the next world.

He ruled out searching for the other dead animals he had tossed into the bushes and refilled the hole and stowed the shovel back in the garage. The muscles in his shoulders ached and he wanted nothing more than to take a hot bath, but Molly had beaten him to it. She was in the bathroom singing something like a lullaby or children’s rhyme, albeit a profane one. He took the opportunity to poke his head into what had become her bedroom. The door creaked open.

Three folding easels stood sentry in a semicircle facing the northern window. A wooden bucket from the garage held a bouquet of paintbrushes and palette knives. White sheets covered the three paintings in progress. The bath was still running, so he tiptoed in and lifted the corner of one.

The painting was a self-portrait, but her hands and feet had yet to be painted. She was completely nude, her belly and big boobs protruding, and looking at the viewer as if to say, This is who I am. Take it or leave it. She had laid herself bare and in vivid detail. It was beautiful — she was an amazing painter. He couldn’t stop staring. Something operating inside his respiratory system came to a halt. His heart was no longer beating. Then the bath water stopped.

Ray covered the painting again and crept back into the hallway. The floorboards whined beneath his feet. Molly surely knew what he was up to. She would be livid. Before she could emerge, he fled to his room and closed the door. The image of Molly had imprinted itself onto his imagination. Her gaze challenged him to look away, but he didn’t want to.

In the painting, she had given herself a black eye.

During the days that followed they settled into a pleasant enough routine. Each morning after breakfast they retired to their respective rooms so that Molly could paint and he could read. She asked him a few times about his obsession with Nineteen Eighty-Four, and he was unable to come up with a sensible explanation. It had something to do with the fact that Winston Smith had suffered every manner of torture before he surrendered to the system. Big Brother threatened him with starving rats in a cage they placed over his head. The fear got to be too much and by the end he stopped rebelling. Winston came to love his oppressor and in doing so found some semblance of contentment.

Painting was different from reading in that there was only so much Molly could accomplish each day before she needed to stop and let the oils dry. She got restless when cooped up in the house too long. She spent hours sunbathing nude in the rear garden, and he tried not to notice.

Molly had been at Barnhill for over a week when, one afternoon, she barged into Ray’s room without knocking and interrupted his reading. “Why are you indoors on a day this lovely?” she asked.

“You can see that I’m reading.”

“I’m bored. Let’s take a walk. I need to get out.”

“So get out!” he said, but was already putting his bookmark in place.

“I’ll pack a lunch.”

It did look like a perfect day and with the blisters subsiding he was long overdue for some sightseeing. He put on a pair of cargo shorts and tall, burr-resistant socks. Molly was in the mudroom shoving two stained and threadbare mackintoshes into a military surplus backpack. “Raincoats?” he asked. “A little overprotective, aren’t we?”

“I’m not going to argue with you,” she said. She removed one of the coats and placed it back on its hook. “Mind you, I really don’t care if you get drenched.”

Ray opened the door to peek outside. Sunlight tickled the endless field of pink rhododendrons. Bees buzzed in the warm afternoon air. The sheep suffered in their winter coats. He looked at Molly, then at the cloudless sky, then at Molly again.

“Who are you going to believe?” she asked. “Me or your own lying eyes? It is going to piss down in, oh, three quarters of an hour.”

“Fine,” he said. No need to stir up an argument. “Give me that raincoat. Anything else? Maybe some scuba gear?”

She removed the mac from the hook again, crammed it into the backpack, and handed him the whole thing. “The next time you’re at The Stores, pick yourself up a decent pair of wellies. I threw away those ugly boots of yours.”

Sure enough, his boots were missing from the mudroom. “What do you mean you threw them away? Those were very expensive!”

“I put them in the bin. They’re shite at any stupid price. They might be right for the grueling conditions of inner city Chicago, but on Jura they’re as useful as nail polish on a snake.”

“What am I supposed to wear in the meantime?”

“What am I supposed to wear in the meantime? Jesus, do you listen to yourself? It’s not my problem — your plimsolls, I suppose.” He looked at her blankly. “Trainers? Sneakers?”

“I have a better idea,” Ray said.

The garbage pail at the back of the house overflowed with over a month’s worth of refuse. He needed to take it to the dump somehow. He retrieved his boots from the muck.

As much as he wanted to climb the Paps, they were way too far away to reach in one afternoon. They headed in the opposite direction, up toward Kinuachdrach. The air was aromatic with sage and wildflowers and hay. They walked in silence, but it became clear that Molly had something to get off her chest. He didn’t push it.

For the first time in months, his muscles seemed to be loosening. Was this what it meant to relax? It had been a long, long time. Every so often he and Helen used to get in the truck and drive up to the woods in northern Illinois or Wisconsin. They could walk for long, tranquil hours. Being on Jura brought back some of that joy, but with Molly there existed a different and tenser variety of shared silence.

After something like forty minutes or an hour, a damp breeze kicked up. He really had gained a new sense of time. His body felt more responsive to the natural environment than to the lumbering journey of an hour hand around the face of a wristwatch. The wind sent the grasses rippling in long waves. The cool air mitigated the heat beating down on his face and the part of his neck not covered by his beard, which had again assumed an unruly life of its own. Molly had remarked that he looked like a second-rate hippie guru capable of mass murder or a millionaire jam-band guitarist trying to resemble his unwashed fan base.

They arrived in Kinuachdrach and he knocked on Miriam’s door, but she didn’t answer. A cat stirred in the window and the dog growled at them from its barbed-wire cage. “Too bad she’s not in,” Molly said. “She bakes the best scones in Scotland.”

The pickup truck full of pig shit was parked next to another house, one crumbling and half boarded up. “Who lives there?” Ray asked.

“That’s Mr. Harris. He keeps to himself.”

“He gave me a ride to Barnhill the other day.”

“Are you having a laugh?”

“He said he knew who I was.”

“He stops by The Stores and even the lounge from time to time, but hasn’t spoken more than a sentence to anyone in two years. We’re best to leave him alone.”

They followed the path up to a summit, from where they could see the mainland and make out several of the neighboring islands. It was Ray’s first real view of his surroundings. A lighthouse or bunker of some sort stood vigil on one of the islands. The shadows of clouds spotted the land with fast-moving shapes. He stood at the centermost point of the entire universe and understood, finally, that he was on the Isle of Jura, that his physical experience of the natural surroundings and his mental image of the map were one and the same. He stayed put for a moment while Molly marched ahead; then he jogged to catch up. Beyond the summit, a path plummeted toward a gulf where she pointed to something in the water. “See that?” she asked.

A series of wooden docks housed some small boats, which looked perfect for fishing or even for a short jaunt over to the mainland. “Not really.”

“See where the water’s a bit darker? That’s the Corryvreckan.”

They went down to the quay and sat with their legs hanging over the water. Gigantic seabirds screeched at them and broke the surface of the water in perilous dives. Ray wanted to ask Molly a million questions — about Jura, about who might still remember Orwell, about her black eye most of all. They watched the sunlight sparkle on the water until the smell of the air changed and became almost metallic. Molly pulled a raincoat from the backpack. She put it on, but it was several sizes too large so she had to roll up the sleeves. When she stood it hung to her knees like a dress. He pulled the other jacket on. It felt like wearing a second skin of plastic wrap. Sweat poured into his eyes when he sat again.

The rain came at once and from nowhere. Every drop sought his attention. The sky still teased them with sapphirine clarity, but rain fell like it wanted to submerge the island again until the tips of the Paps protruded from the sea to form three smaller and even less populated islands. He thought that the weather would frighten Molly off, that she would turn around and return to Barnhill, but no. She stayed seated, impervious to the weather, watching the sound absorb the deluge until he couldn’t stand her silence any longer. “Is there something bothering you, Molly?” he asked. He was full of stupid questions.

“What could possibly bother me about spending my entire life trapped on a medieval island completely devoid of culture?”

He didn’t know what to say. He had felt the same way, at her age, about living in the Illinois cornfields, but there was no way to explain that. She would have to figure it all out on her own. “You’re only seventeen, and you’re probably not as trapped as you think. Your father — and I will grant you he is a raging asshole — in his own messed up way he has your best interests at heart. There’s no reason you’ll need to stay on Jura forever.”

“I knew you would take his side!”

“Here’s the thing,” Ray said, hoping that something helpful and encouraging would come to mind. He waited. “Thinking in terms of sides is never useful — there really aren’t any binary oppositions. Nothing is entirely black-and-white or good-and-bad.”

“That sounds to me like lame relativism.”

“Let’s go back,” he said. He needed nothing more than a tall glass of single malt to warm himself up with. They started the return trek to Barnhill. “It’s not relativism, it’s specificity. Every thing needs to be considered in itself instead of in relation to some false negation of it. Try to think of your situation from your father’s point of view. I’m not saying he’s right — I mean, look at your eye — but terms like right and wrong are beside the point sometimes.”

Their boots splashed in the mud. Ray’s toes grew wet and sent a cascade of prickles up his leg.

“Aye I get all that, but what if he doesn’t have my best interests at heart? I have every reason to believe he is a selfish arsehole who will do everything he can to satisfy his own needs. This island and our traditions are more important to him than I am, so where does that leave me?”

“It leaves you stuck on Jura, I guess, until you decide you’re ready for art school or whatever it is you want to do. As much as you want to moan and complain, I know that a part of you loves it here. A big part of you.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t hate it too — you said so yourself.”

“Right, so tell me what you love about Jura.”

“The history, I guess. People have lived on this island since the Stone Age.”

“What else?”

“I don’t know. In many ways, this may be the strangest place on earth. When I leave — and I am going to leave — I’ll miss the eccentricity here. We get all the telly programs from London and America, but we’ve also managed to maintain a unique way of life. I do love that about this place, but I also hate it. Is that okay?”

“Definitely.”

They walked for another hour, long enough for the rain to stop and the sun to dry their hair and clothes. Wet blades of grass stuck to his soggy boots. Back at the house, they stood on the stoop. The stain of animal fluids hadn’t washed away in the rain. Molly took off her wellies and socks, but didn’t stop there. Just as Ray had done on several occasions, she unbuttoned her pants and climbed out of them. Her legs were pale but looked exercised and uncorrupted by age or high-fructose corn syrup. She removed her shirt and then her undershirt and bra. Ray stood transfixed. Although he did his damnedest not to notice, she had a beautiful body.

Molly raised her arms and stretched with a loud groan in the breeze, soaking the atmospheric conditions into her skin. Her white underpants were the only thing standing between this girl and the full frontal nudity of the painting upstairs. She was so comfortable, so at ease with herself: a living, breathing sheela na-gig. Her nakedness had nothing to do with him. It was like he wasn’t there, or like she didn’t care that he was. The self-assurance was wondrous. “I’m going to take a long bath,” she said, “then I’ll see about something to eat. I’m famished.”

The water started running upstairs. She was singing a song Ray recognized, but couldn’t make out. He poured a large dram — he didn’t notice the age — and drank it in one long go. As far as Molly was concerned, he was so old, or now so familiar, so beyond the realm of sexual desirability, that in her mind there was nothing unusual about stripping naked in his presence or sunbathing topless outside his window.

In the weeks that followed, they fell into the habit of picnicking at a different spot every day. He would bounce ideas about Orwell off Molly, and she would fill him in about the history of the island. They visited the sites of Jura’s Iron Age settlements and ancient battles. She taught him about the Viking blood feuds that spanned generations, pitted neighbor against neighbor, and still got voiced in the sternly worded letters to the editor of a newsletter over on Islay.

The more he heard about Jura’s history — true or not — and the more he saw of its natural splendor, the better he came to appreciate the hardships Orwell had experienced. Molly also got him up to speed on the marital, legal, and pharmaceutical problems besetting the entire population. They found traces of old footpaths on which their stravaigs, as Molly called their walks, grew longer and her stories wilder. One afternoon, they followed a deer trail off into the wild. “I had an interesting conversation with Farkas not too long ago,” Ray told her. “He wants me to believe that he’s a werewolf.”

“Are you suggesting he isn’t?” Molly asked.

“So everyone on Jura just plays along, is that it?”

“You still don’t understand the ways things are here, do you?”

“I like Farkas, don’t get me wrong, but he needs a good psychiatrist.”

“As opposed to a bad psychiatrist?”

“As opposed to being surrounded by people willing to play along with his delusions.”

“Now I understand that you’re the sophisticated advertising executive and we’re all a lot of backwards Diurachs, but can’t you even consider the possibility that he’s not delusional?”

“You want me to believe that Farkas is a werewolf?”

“No, but I do want you to believe that it might be possible.”

“Do you think I’d be allowed to join the next hunt?”

“So you can shoot Farkas?”

“It sounds too strange and wonderful to pass up.”

“It’s also barbaric. Did you know that the preparations begin months in advance? Everyone on the island is supposed to contribute to the feast, but the women aren’t even allowed to attend. I sneaked out there once to watch them. Luckily they didn’t shoot me.”

“What goes on? Is there really a wolf?”

“Mostly the men just let off a little steam. They build a bonfire and go off in small groups to follow each other around in the dark and piss in the bushes. It’s not as interesting as you’ve been led to believe.”

“What is interesting is that you think Farkas might really be a werewolf.”

“Well he’s very hairy.”

“I’ll grant you that. It’s hardly conclusive evidence, however. Do you think he gets hairier when he transforms? Is that even possible?”

“Aye, I see your point,” Molly said, “but it is true that when he was a wee baby he was left here by Gypsies.”

“Gypsies. Of course.”

“It’s true. Forty or fifty years ago, however old Farkas is, Mrs. Campbell found him on the front porch of the hotel. There was no note or any indication of where he came from, but back then there used to be a pack of Gypsies that came over from the Continent every seven years and camped out on the western side, where the caves are. I’ll take you there sometime. They would catch a ton of fish and lobster, kill some deer, poach a few sheep, then move on.”

She spoke with such conviction that Ray wanted to believe her. “You can’t be serious,” he said. They continued walking.

“They had been migrating back and forth across the Continent since World War II, until one year when Baby Farkas appeared at the hotel. After that, much to the collective relief of our more or less racist and intolerant population, they never returned. Mrs. Campbell says that he was covered in hair even as a wee baby. He looked like a teddy bear. That’s how we ended up with a lycanthropic distiller.”

“And Mrs. Campbell adopted him?”

“The whole island adopted him. As my da puts it, he was more like a pet than another child. We’re not exactly wealthy on Jura, at least no one was back then, so people shared the responsibility of raising him. He lived here and there. The story gets funny peculiar. It was around the time Farkas turned thirteen that sheep and cattle on the island started turning up slaughtered every so often.”

That did it. Ray couldn’t hide his disbelief any longer. “Now I know you’re messing with me.”

“It’s true, I swear to you. Even now when he drinks too much, which is, oh, every bloody day by my calculation — and you might know something about that yourself — whenever he has too much to drink he boasts that he’s responsible for killing all these animals. It’s like he’s proud of it. He gets quite wound up. That’s why he doesn’t join the hunting parties. Don’t laugh, Ray — I’m absolutely serious.”

“You’re as crazy as he is.”

“I know for a fact that he has been researching laser hair removal systems online.”

“How do you know that?”

“There are no secrets on Jura. That’s a big reason I can’t wait to leave.”

They reached the cylindrical tower where he had once stopped to attend to his blisters. It turned out to be a trig point, which, before the advent of global positioning satellites, was used for accurate surveying of the land. It felt reassuring that people had gotten along very well for thousands of years without electronic technology; the earth would continue to spin long after the digital revolution ended and civilization crumbled. They stopped for a bite to eat before turning around.

Molly had so many stories of hidden pirate treasure, arsonist rock stars, visiting authors staying in Craighouse on the government’s dime and causing veterinarian-summoning scandals with sheep. It was in those days of long walks out on the heather moors that the morass of his thinking showed the first clear signs of disentangling; those deep, mental knots started to unravel and Ray began to feel like his old, pre-Logos self again. He was able to concentrate on his reading for longer periods of time and some days Molly would have to physically drag him from his chair in order to point out another trail or beachhead or standing stone.

In the evenings, they would retreat to Barnhill tired and sunburned. She would bathe and then return to her painting. He would read until they both grew hungry, at which point she heated up various combinations from the dwindling supply of canned goods. After dinner, Ray would light a fire and sip on some scotch. With more food in his belly those days, the quantities of nighttime whisky didn’t affect him quite as badly. Most nights they traded stories about their childhoods or made them up entirely. Ray had been an astronaut and a professional llama wrangler. Molly was actually from Egypt and her real name was Queen Nothinginkhamun. His laughter returned — it sounded strange at first. Only once in a while did he pass out in a sitting-room chair, at which time Molly would help him up the stairs and dump him onto his mattress.

Ray was sound asleep one night when the bed began to shake. It felt like one of the rare earthquakes they would get back on the Illinois prairie. The room rumbled beneath him for four or five seconds and then stopped. A distant voice addressed him. “Would you wake up already?” it asked.

It sounded like Flora. No — it sounded like Molly. The room shook some more. Molly sat in her pajamas at the foot of his bed.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. A faint light in another part of the house bled through the door. He hoped he had clothes on under the sheets. “Are you okay?”

“Can I ask you a personal question?” she asked.

Ray sat up. “I don’t imagine I could stop you,” he said.

“Do you want to have sex with me?”

“What?”

“Do you want to have sex with me?”

“I heard you. Why would you ask me that? No!”

“Why not? Because I’m ugly?”

“No — you’re … you’re very pretty.”

“ ‘Pretty’ is a pretty vague word. Pretty bad. Pretty ugly. Pretty depressed. Not much of a compliment, is it?”

“You’re seventeen years old.”

“Almost eighteen. I’m not saying I want to have sex with you either — I don’t, I assure you — I’m just curious, you know, if there’s some kind of tension going here that I should be made aware of?”

“And you decided to wait until the middle of the night to ask about it?”

“What better time?”

“Don’t you worry your, uh, pretty little head. No, I don’t want to have sex with you.”

“You’re not in here at night having impure thoughts about me?”

“No!”

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said and lay down next to him on top of the bed. The blankets established a safe, cotton membrane between them. Her hair on the pillow smelled like wet paint. “I saw you bury your wedding ring in the backyard,” she said.

“That felt good, but it had nothing to do with you. How do I explain it? Coming to Jura has given me a new perspective. I can’t stand the idea of being fenced in anymore. Being trapped in a symmetrical grid of city blocks. That ring just felt constricting, I guess. I’m still technically married, at least for now. I’m waiting for the divorce papers to come through. That is if my wife’s lawyers can find me all the way up here.”

“Are you still in love with her?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“I want to know.”

“Why?”

“I just do.”

Wind battered at the windows. The sheep bells were unusually quiet out back. Ray pictured the sheep huddled together to wait out the night, to protect their young from whatever was leaving the dead animals at the door. The weakest and slowest among them wouldn’t make it. “I haven’t thought about Helen that way recently, no. I’ll never not love her, but I respect that she needs to move on and I guess I’ve realized that I do too.”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“In bed?”

“On Jura!”

“Can’t we talk about this in the morning?”

“Why are you so miserable?”

“I’m not miserable, I’m tired. You want to know? Okay, I don’t really blame her for divorcing me. I haven’t been a very good husband, and I think I’m in love with one of my former coworkers, or I was.”

“So that’s why you’re so miserable.”

“No. Okay, maybe. Yes. But I was miserable before that too.”

“You don’t have to be the same person here on Jura that you were in America,” Molly said. “You can be happy if you want to be.”

She kissed him on the side of his head and returned to her room. The lights in the house blinked out. Her paint smell lingered and he couldn’t get back to sleep. His mind whirred. He felt somewhat happy, which was really fucking remarkable, but there still existed a source of deep-in-his-bones dread: Molly’s father.

Gavin Pitcairn lurked in the back of Ray’s thoughts and kept him on constant alert. All the single malt in Scotland wouldn’t be enough to make him fully relax. It was only a matter of time before that flatbed came rumbling up the path.

THE DAY CAME WHEN supplies of food, shampoo, and toilet paper dwindled enough to require an expedition to The Stores. Ray dreaded the thought of running into Pitcairn, but he was also expecting some important mail. There was no getting around it. Molly’s aluminum-crafted bike had been engineered with an elaborate suspension system capable of withstanding the special variety of abuse dished out by Jura’s infrastructure, and he hoped that his spine would prove equally durable. He also hoped no one would recognize it as Molly’s. She had tricked out the frame with a stainless-steel rack on the back and some antique leather panniers liberated from her father’s long unused five-speed. The fenders would in theory keep the mud off his clothes.

Molly packed him some lunch and placed it in the wicker basket affixed to the handlebars. He hadn’t ridden a bike in years and this one took some getting used to. The machine appeared unnecessarily complex. She taunted him for putting on the motorcycle helmet he found in the garage. “You look like a special needs child,” she said. He wore it anyway, which turned out to be fortunate.

He made it all the way to the public road with only minor readjustments to his skeleton, but somewhere beyond Ardlussa the tires slid on an oil slick, probably one left by Pitcairn’s truck. Ray squeezed the brakes so hard that the front wheel stopped; the rest of the bicycle however maintained its course and speed and catapulted him from the saddle.

Things grew a bit fuzzy after that.

When Ray arrived at the hotel he was covered in wet peat and had misplaced a sliver of a front tooth. He marched into the deserted lobby. The newly hewn edge of his incisor scraped against his tongue. A dull ache pulsed in his temples and he felt very sleepy. There wasn’t a soul in sight. He stood at the reception desk for some amount of time — there was no telling how long — until Mrs. Campbell emerged from the depths of the building.

“We’ve been expecting you, Mr. Welter. You’ve received quite a bit of correspondence. My goodness — you’re a mess. What happened to your face?”

“I feel a little woozy. May I sit down?”

“By all means,” she said. She came around the reception desk and latched her fingers into his arm, leading Ray to a chair next to the dormant fireplace. The remains of a charred log sat on the iron grate like a turd that wouldn’t flush. “You’re bleeding, Mr. Welter,” she said, as if it was news. “Stay put and we’ll fetch Mr. Fuller.”

Ray attempted to reconstruct the events of his ride, but the headache made linear thought difficult. He had fallen off the bike somewhere between Ardlussa and Craighouse. Images came back to him as if from a slideshow in random order …

Wet pavement four feet below him and somehow moving parallel to his body.

Up close eyes of a sheep staring at him as he regained consciousness.

A cheese and onion sandwich freed from its wax paper and seasoned with gravel and motor oil.

He had hit his head — that was it. Even with the helmet, he had taken a good knock to the cranium. In his daze he had carried the twisted frame of Molly’s bike the rest of the way. He stood to find the washroom and inspect the extent of the damage, but Mrs. Campbell and Mr. Fuller came rushing in.

“We did tell you to stay put, Mr. Welter. Let us have a look at you.”

“I fell off my bike,” he told them.

“Now why would you go and do that?” Fuller wanted to know.

“I didn’t mean to. It was—”

“An accident, aye. One word of advice: try walking next time. This is going to sting a little bit,” he said. He held a dirty kitchen rag to the top of a plastic bottle and drenched it in what smelled like bleach. He held Ray’s head and patted the rag against his scalp. The electric current carried down to his gut, where it would stay for the remainder of the day.

“If you do that again I am going to punch you,” Ray told him. He meant it.

“Do sit still, Mr. Welter,” Mrs. Campbell said. “It must have been quite a spill. While we have your attention, and you must forgive us for inquiring, you haven’t by any chance seen Molly, have you?”

“Molly? No, why? Is she missing?” he managed to ask. “I do hope she’s okay. Have you called the authorities?”

“I wouldn’t say missing,” Mr. Fuller said.

“No, not missing, just … unaccounted for at the moment,” Mrs. Campbell said. “She has a habit of disappearing for weeks at a time. Not to worry. At any rate, you should sit here for a few moments. He’s a bit concussed,” she told Fuller.

“He’s just had his bell wrung a wee bit, haven’t you, Mr. Welter? Now drink this.”

The odor of the tea stung his eyes before he sipped it. It tasted like rotten fish parts. He would’ve preferred a hot cup of the disinfectant sizzling on his scalp. Mr. Fuller wrapped a large bandage all the way around his head. “This’ll stop the bleeding. One word of advice: you might do well to sit still for a moment. If you don’t mind, I need to get back to my kitchen. The haggis won’t cook itself, will it?”

“Perhaps this isn’t the best time, Mr. Welter, but we do have some correspondence for you. From America, from the looks of it. Also, a number of emails addressed to you have arrived via our hotel website. We’ve taken the liberty of printing them. Normally we don’t accept email for guests, but these appeared to have some urgency about them. Now let us see where we put them.”

She wandered off.

Mrs. Campbell had read his personal correspondence and then left it lying around the hotel for all to see. These fucking people.

“Here you go, Mr. Welter,” she said when she returned, and handed over a stack of papers. She lingered for a moment like she wanted to read over his shoulder, so he held them to his chest until she stomped away.

The printed emails were from Bud. The papers looked like they had been thumbed through. Had there been a fire burning he would’ve thrown them in it again. The stack also included a large envelope from the Chicago law firm retained by his wife — and Helen was still his wife in some way and would remain so until he tore asunder the envelope.

The words on the top page wiggled in a dialect of Newspeak legalese and amounted to the official and fully expected news that he was no longer married. Pending his signature, the divorce would be final and its financial conditions unfavorable.

Next he found a small pile of greeting-card envelopes. Six of them, each with his mother’s secretarial-school handwriting. He opened the first one. The card had a plastic sheath and the cover featured a beach yellowed by a setting sun reflecting in a blue sea. Inside, she had written, “Dearest Raymond.” The manufacturers of the card had seen fit to include the familiar sentiment:

Thinking of you

and wishing you all

the blessings of our

Lord and Savior.

His mother had written at the bottom, “—Mother.” The other cards were identical, each mailed a week apart from the post office in his hometown.

The last two items in the pile were both postcards. On one, Bud implored Ray to get in touch. The face of the second was completely black apart from the white letters: “Machu Picchu at Night.” On the back, a colorful stamp confirmed that it had originated in Peru. The handwritten note read only:

Remain optimistic.

— f.

Ray stared at the postcard in the hope of making some sense of it. Flora had moved to South America as she had planned.

Remain optimistic. He didn’t know what that meant or what it was meant to mean.

“Remain optimistic,” Farkas read over his shoulder. Ray hadn’t heard him come in, which was astounding considering that the man panted like a dog even while sitting still. He took a seat at the fireplace. “What have you done with your head?” he asked.

“I fell off my bike.”

“I suppose that accounts for the twisted hunk of metal I saw out on the porch. Maybe you should have worn a helmet.”

“I did wear a helmet,” Ray said.

“You’re lucky to be among the living or at least among the non — brain damaged.”

“I’m pretty sure the jury’s still out on that one. In fact, I don’t feel very lucky at all.”

“You wouldn’t, now would you? That’s some bandage there.”

“I have Nurse Fuller to thank.”

“Aye, he’s a talented man, a talented man. If you’ll excuse me a moment, I’ll go procure us a couple drams.”

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea in my—”

“Well if it isn’t the Wolfman and Mummy, together at last,” Pitcairn said. Ray slipped the postcards and the emails into the big envelope from Chicago. “Let me guess: you fell off your fancy bicycle and banged up that big brain of yours.”

“Just a little spill,” he said. “Nothing serious.”

“Pour me one too while you’re at it, Farkas — especially if Chappie’s buying.”

“I am not buying.”

“It was worth a try. Pour me one anyway, would you?” Pitcairn asked. “You look famished, Chappie. Why don’t I go in the kitchen and ask Fuller to prepare you a nice, juicy AIDS sandwich?”

Farkas went to retrieve the whiskies and Pitcairn jumped into the vacant chair. He leaned in close. “I’m going to say this once,” he whispered. His breath smelled like gasoline. “As I’m sure you’re well aware, my Molly has gone missing.” He coughed and then spat something chunky into the fireplace. “I have every reason to believe she’s visiting that trollop friend of hers over on Islay. However”—more coughing—“if that’s not the case and I find out she’s at Barnhill, I give you my promise that I will kill you. Any man here will tell you that I mean it.”

Farkas returned carrying a tray on which three large drams sparkled like amber in the sun. Pitcairn slapped Ray on the back, maybe a bit too hard. “Isn’t that right, Chappie?”

“I’m glad to see you two have reconciled your differences,” Farkas said.

“That we did, that we did,” Pitcairn said. “Chappie and me, we’ve come to an understanding. Haven’t we, Chappie? I’ve even promised — free of charge, mind you — to drive him back to Barnhill when he’s feeling better. Slàinte, boys.”

“Slàinte,” Farkas said.

Ray grabbed his glass, but couldn’t bring the whisky to his lips. He needed to warn Molly that her father was on his way. If Pitcairn pulled up to Barnhill and she was sunbathing in the nude there would be real and unmistakable trouble. Ray needed a drink after all. Whisky was a great idea. “Cheers,” he said and downed his dram in one gulp. “I’m feeling much better. I need to take care of some paperwork and pick up some supplies from The Stores, then I’ll be on my way.”

He stood with some dizzy difficulty and went into the lounge, where he could look over the papers from Helen in private. Mr. Fuller busied himself in the kitchen clanking pots and pans together. Ray’s signature was all that was missing. He went behind the bar, where he poured another dram and left a tick mark on Pitcairn’s tab. Then he used the stubby pencil to add one final and specific clause to the divorce settlement and initialed the margin next to it. He had one modest demand of Helen, then she would be rid of him. He signed the document repeatedly, as required; his scribbled name would stand in for him in his absence.

He sealed the return envelope and carried it back out to the lobby along with three more drams duly charged to Pitcairn. He placed the glasses on the table where the two of them were bickering about a sport he had never heard of, then dropped the envelope on the reception desk, along with more than enough money to cover the postage to America. “I’m a free man,” he said. “I just signed my divorce papers.”

“Are congratulations in order at such a time?” Farkas asked.

“Hard to believe someone would let a catch like you get away,” Pitcairn said. “Anyway, we better get going. Right after this dram.”

“Mr. Welter,” Fuller yelled from the kitchen. He poked his head through the door. “Seeing as you two are getting along so nicely, perhaps you might like to come back down for our next hunt in a few weeks?” he asked.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Pitcairn said. “I don’t imagine Chappie here would have any interest in our old superstitions.”

“Why is everybody out to get me?” Farkas asked.

“Actually, I’d love to come along!” Ray said.

“Excellent,” Fuller said. “It will be good to have you on board. Maybe you’ll hit something. We sure as shite haven’t had any luck, have we? We can use all the help we can get. It will be on the evening of the summer solstice. Supper’s here at sundown.”

Pitcairn groaned.

“I can’t wait! What will we be hunting for anyway?”

“A wolf!” Farkas laughed. “Though for the record it’s a scientific fact that there hasn’t been a wild wolf seen in all of Scotland since the year 1743!”

“It’s not funny,” Pitcairn snapped. “Something’s been killing off our sheep.”

“There’s still plenty to go around,” Farkas said. He wiped the tears from his hairy face.

“That’s not the fucking point now, is it? Now finish your drink. I can’t wait to see what kind of redecorating you’ve done at Barnhill.”

The remains of Molly’s bicycle sat in a heap on the porch. The front wheel had folded in half and the back one was missing altogether. The frame was totaled, but Ray threw it on the back of Pitcairn’s truck anyway in case she could salvage the derailleur or other parts for the replacement bike he would soon be purchasing. “I have the very same panniers on my bicycle,” Pitcairn said. “Not that I use it much. These roads will do a number on the old nut sack — not that you have that problem, I suppose!” Pitcairn laughed until he choked, then stopped to rest his hands on his knees while some kind of goo rattled around in his chest and freed itself with a loud cough. “Now would you kindly hurry the fuck up?” he asked.

“I need to stop at The Stores,” Ray reminded him, hoping to delay the inevitable scene. Pitcairn was going to find his daughter — his underage daughter — running around naked at Barnhill. She would know to run inside and hide when she heard the truck approaching, right? A cell phone, a cell phone! His kingdom for a cell phone!

“For fuck’s sake, Chappie. I don’t have time to take your sorry, concussed self shopping for your tampons.”

“That’s fine. You can drop me off and I’ll get myself home.”

“And how do you propose to do that, then? You going to sprout wings and fly up there? Make it fast now and get me a packet of fags.”

Once again Mrs. Bennett charged him an insane sum for the canned goods, fresh bread, and toiletries he required. He put the two boxes on the back of Pitcairn’s truck next to the mangled bike. The truck handled the paved part of the road about as well as the bike had. All the bouncing around in the cab made Ray’s headache even worse.

Pitcairn didn’t say much on the way up the island, which was for the best, and he didn’t hit the brakes when he approached Barnhill. He drove right past the house.

“Where are we going?” Ray asked.

“I’m not dropping you back just yet. I have something special planned for you. An outing, you might call it. What do you say we do a little fishing, Chappie? Just me and you.”

That was when Ray began to fear for his life. He contemplated opening the door and jumping from the moving truck, but that would have been stupid even in the best of conditions. He already had a concussion — there was no reason to exacerbate it. “I don’t really like boats all that much,” he said.

“Don’t you worry, Chappie. There’s nothing to it.”

Even at the lowest points of his depressive states, when he had tried with great conviction to do permanent harm to himself, Ray had never felt afraid the way he did now. His lungs were so constricted that he couldn’t breathe and he started hyperventilating with a series of sharp inhalations.

Pitcairn drove past Kinuachdrach and to the northernmost tip of Jura and parked next to the wooden dock Ray and Molly had once sat on in the rain. A small boat bobbed in the water. Pitcairn untied it, though it clearly belonged to someone else.

Ray stepped on board and Pitcairn hit the throttle before he could sit. The motor was stronger than it appeared, and he was nearly thrown overboard. He managed to catch his balance and take a seat in the front. There was no life jacket, no seat cushion that in the increasingly likely event of an emergency could be used as a floatation device.

“What you have there,” Pitcairn said, “is the Isle of Scarba. That makes this—”

“The Gulf of Corryvreckan.”

The Cauldron of the Sparkling Seas. Home of the famous whirlpool — Charybdis herself. The lovechild of Poseidon and Gaia.

“Right you are, Chappie,” Pitcairn said. “Right you are!” He killed the engine and gestured toward a patch of water darker than that surrounding it.

Ray looked over Pitcairn’s shoulder to see just how far they were from shore. The Paps bounced up and down, up and down behind him.

“This whirlpool has swallowed up bigger fish than you, Chappie, and I can promise that they were never heard from again. Now, I’m going to ask you one simple question.”

“There’s no—”

“Your ability to tell me the truth will decide if you will be flying back to America in cattle class or in the cargo hold. Is my Molly at Barnhill?” The boat rocked. The whirlpool gurgled at Ray with icy loathing. She longed to suck him down into the murky depths and swallow him whole. She wanted to fill his lungs with her own briny breath, to anoint his sunken body with a thousand barnacles. “One simple question, Chappie. Yes or no?”

Ray’s nausea rose and fell with the motion of the water. His headache surged between shades of purple and red behind his eyes. The bandages around his cranium were the only things keeping his head from exploding and sending chunks of his skull and brain matter sailing into the wind. The surface of the sound danced in the evening sun.

He looked Pitcairn in the eye. “No,” he said.

“That was foolish, Chappie. You shouldn’t lie to me.” He sounded calm.

“I didn’t — I’m not!”

“Listen to yourself. You’re still lying.”

Pitcairn knew. Ray didn’t know how he knew, but he did and now he would be thrown overboard and into a whirlpool. “Okay,” he said. “She showed up a few weeks ago. I would’ve told her to go home, but she had a black eye. I thought she was in danger. You would have done the same thing.”

“So you admit that you lied to me?”

“Don’t you understand? I was trying to protect Molly. I would never do anything untoward—”

“Trying to protect your own arse is more like it. You assume that I gave her the black eye?”

“Who’s lying now? Who else would’ve done such a thing?”

“This isn’t about me, Chappie, or how I choose to raise my own daughter. It’s about some bloody Yank who shows up out of the blue to bless us with his presence and is so fucking smart that he thinks a teenage girl is better off living in his house than at home with her own loving da.”

Ray couldn’t think straight. He sorted through the rush of ideas overheating his synapses, looking for a kernel of logic or wisdom that might take the form of something meaningful to say, something that might help him find some clarity and, if possible, save Molly’s skin and his own. He managed to take a deep breath. The sea air tasted bitter with salt. “There is no way,” he said, “that I will send her back to you to get physically abused. She doesn’t have to stay at Barnhill, but I’ll contact the proper authorities and find her someplace safe.”

“She’s my daughter for fuck’s sake! I will discipline the little bitch in whatever manner I, as her father, see fit to do. If anything, she has a smack coming for all the worry she’s caused me. Look around you, Chappie. There’s not one fucking thing you can do about it.”

Ray leapt from the bench with the intention of tossing Pitcairn off the back of the boat, but the moment he stood the motor came to life and sent him toppling into the water. The cold sea filled his nose and mouth. He couldn’t tell down from up until the weight of his body tugged him lower. The bubbles of his own breath rushed upward as if to save themselves. The tide pulled at his clothes and dragged him one direction or another. Seaweed and debris gyred around him until he managed to claw to the surface. He pulled a bit of air in and stayed afloat long enough to untie his boots. He kicked them off and they sank like expensive, leathery sacrifices to the gods and their spoiled children.

The sight of the Paps helped Ray regain a sense of direction. He treaded water long enough to watch Pitcairn return to the shore. He swam for it, but the dock never got any closer. Pitcairn lifted the destroyed bicycle from the back of his truck, carefully removed his panniers, and tossed the frame into the water. He threw the boxes from The Stores to the ground and then the truck evaporated into the distance.

The wet bandages around Ray’s head made it difficult to see so he ripped them off. The undertow tugged at the legs of his trousers, but he didn’t want to remove them because one pocket was stuffed with the cash he had brought to cover the expenses in Craighouse. He grew tired though and soon had no choice. He unbuttoned his pants, their pockets full of sterling, and let them sink.

It took an hour to crawl ashore. He lay on his back — in his underwear — and caught his breath while the sun approached the horizon. The beach was made out of dull, round stones instead of sand. The tips of the Paps were lit up with the sun’s last rays. A cold breeze swept over his skin. It would be dark soon and there were unidentified wild animals prowling the island. Possibly wolves. He was drenched, exhausted, humiliated, and the extreme thirst exacerbated the effects of his concussion.

Molly was probably sporting a new black eye or two already, but all Ray wanted to do was sleep. Find a cozy shrubbery and climb underneath for the night, for the rest of his miserable life. Yes, everyone had been right — he was miserable. Sleeping half naked and shivering amid a field of sheep sounded better than going home to an empty house and the knowledge that Molly had been dragged away against her will and beaten up again by her father. Yet he wandered home in the dark, the stacked boxes punishing the muscles of his arms. The shame irritated him as much as the wet underpants. His socked feet ached. The numbness started as a static-like tingle in his toes and fingers, then grew with each step. Something like shock or hypothermia sought to introduce itself to his nervous system. He made it to the back garden more by blind luck than through any understanding of the geography.

Several of the lights were on at Barnhill and Ray saw movement inside, or thought he did. The front door was unlocked. Another vivisected animal sat in a pile at the front door. He ran inside.

“Molly?” he yelled. He marched through the house, still without pants on. “Molly?”

No answer.

He went to the kitchen, poured a big dram of scotch, and carried it upstairs. The door to her room — or what had been her room — was closed. He poked his head in. All of her things were strewn around, including her paintings. He took the opportunity to examine her work up close. The extent of her artistic talent came as a surprise. He lingered over the self-portrait that she had been so careful to keep hidden. The thick brushwork conveyed a kind of aggression, like she couldn’t get the paint on the canvas fast enough, but there was nothing haphazard about its application. The subtlety of her color palette — a thousand shades separating grey from blue — insisted upon a slow appraisal. He could look at her facial expression all night and never come to learn its depths. In the portrait, Molly had captured some sad understanding about herself that no teenage kid should have. Ray carried it to his bedroom. He took down a watercolor and hung Molly’s bruised and naked image in its place.