Burning Down George Orwell's House

V

Without Molly at Barnhill the bottles emptied at their previous, brisk pace. Ray woke up most mornings in a sitting-room chair. Days rolled by without direction or purpose. He spent more time in his boxers. He would wake up late, sometimes in Molly’s bed or, once, on the staircase with a puddle of sixteen-year-old slinkied down the steps below him. After a week alone, another swan dive into the Corryvreckan whirlpool began to sound less awful. The irony did not go unnoticed: he had gotten off the grid for the purpose of eliminating all distraction from his life and to find some kind of inner focus. The email and social networking sites, the text messages, microblogs, and forgotten passwords. Yet now that he was alone again he found it impossible to concentrate.

Hours passed him by while he sat in the garden or hiked until his feet bled into the sneakers that weren’t designed for long distances. The sheep grew accustomed to him and no longer regarded him suspiciously or drifted away when he approached — they ignored him and the bells around their necks stayed quiet. He carried books with him and would stop in a shepherd’s abandoned enclosure to try to read and sometimes snooze. He wouldn’t return to Barnhill until it had grown dark, and, because he always neglected to leave the lights on, he arrived home to invisible, shin-bruising furniture and, every few days, another animal carcass on the doorstep.

He was spending another quiet evening at home with the whisky when he heard someone or something approach the house. In the absence of mechanical or digital noise, every footstep could be heard in the bed of mud and stone outside. He roused himself from the easy chair and grabbed the shotgun, which he had taken to keeping handy and as fully loaded as himself. Pitcairn was certain to seek revenge for whatever indignities he imagined Ray had perpetrated upon his daughter. Ray crept upstairs with the shotgun in one hand and a bottle of twelve-year-old in the other. The bedroom window afforded the best view of the front door. He wasn’t going to shoot Pitcairn, obviously, but he wasn’t going to let him in the house either. They had no further business to discuss.

The footsteps outside came slowly. Ray took a long gulp and put the bottle down. Something was approaching the house. He would fire a warning shot into the air if he had to. He went to slide open the window when — blam! — the gun went off. The glass crashed onto the intruder below. “Holy shit!” Ray yelled.

“Holy shite!” Farkas yelled.

It had only been a matter of time: firing the gun was something he could now check off his list of things to do. He knocked away the loose glass and stuck his head through the window frame. “Are you okay?”

“Right as rain, Ray. Only in this instance the raindrops are made of broken glass. I do appear to be bleeding the tiniest bit. Might I come in?”

Ray ran downstairs. Farkas stood panting in the mudroom. A thin line of blood had found a path through the forest of his eyebrows and came to a rest at the tip of his nose. Nestled in his arms he carried a fresh case of scotch, duly delivered as ordered.

“Come in, sit down. I’m so sorry!”

Farkas took a seat next to the fireplace. “I did ask you not to shoot me, but try not to let it worry you. I would, however, appreciate a little sip of something to calm the old nerves.”

Ray poured two healthy drams from the best bottle in the house. The glass shook in his hands. He could’ve easily killed Farkas — or himself. He took a big sip and topped his whisky up, then carried the drinks to the sitting room. Farkas mopped at his face with a handkerchief. His nose twitched. “Now this is a treat.”

“Only the best for my attempted homicide victims. Can I get you a towel or something?”

“I’m fine. Do you suppose this is the first time I’ve been shot at?” Farkas asked. His laugh sounded like a sea lion mating with a dump truck.

“No, I can’t imagine it is.”

“I’ve brought you your case of malt, though the truth is, Ray, that I came to see if you were still alive, if you know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure that I do.”

“Well, our dear friend Gavin, as you’ve discovered, suffers from certain, shall we say, sociopathic tendencies. And I thought he might have paid you a visit with the intention of causing some not insubstantial physical harm.”

“He did throw me into the whirlpool.”

“Aye, he mentioned something about that. I’m pleased to see you on this side of the ground.”

“I thought you were him. That’s why I had the shotgun out.”

“I imagine it does have a safety mechanism. And a wee bit more caution might carry you a long way.”

“Are you saying I don’t have to be worried?”

“About your marksmanship? Most definitely. About our Gavin? It’s hard to say, hard to say.” He took a sip of whisky and groaned with delight. “It’s true that he’s liable to get a bellyful one night and come knocking. He believes that you behaved inappropriately towards Molly and feels honor bound to respond.”

“That’s not true. I only gave her a place to stay after he hit her. Did you see her black eye?”

“Aye, but he’s worried about more than that. A girl of her age.”

Now Ray understood. “I need to make this perfectly clear: I swear to you that my relationship with Molly is … was … totally innocent. I never laid a hand on her. If Pitcairn doesn’t believe me there’s not a thing I can do about it, but that’s the truth.”

Farkas appeared relieved. “I am glad to hear that,” he said. “However, you of all people should appreciate the distinction between perception and reality. I’ll talk to him. Sometimes he listens to me, although most of the time he doesn’t.”

“What should I do?” Ray asked.

“If you decide to reload that shotgun of yours, please do mind the safety. Many thanks for the whisky. I should be getting back.”

“But you just got here. How about a refill?”

“I’d love to, Ray. Next time, next time.”

Something didn’t feel right. Farkas had come a long way just to stop in for a quick drink. He had something up his sleeve beyond lugging a case of whisky through the mud. Maybe it was an espionage mission. That was it. Farkas was serving as a spy for the rest of the island. He had infiltrated the foreign enemy’s compound in order to collect intelligence. The locals were no doubt sitting around at the hotel lounge waiting for him to report back. “Farkas, did you come all the way up here to find out if I fucked Molly?”

“Not precisely, no,” he said, but he looked guilty. “I’ve come to deliver your whisky and your mail. Some of it looked important.” He stood and handed over a large paper bag full of envelopes.

Maybe that was all there was to his visit after all — the mail. Farkas seemed like a good guy, even if he was delusional. “Thank you, I appreciate this a lot,” Ray said. “It’s difficult being so out of touch. I came here with all kinds of romantic notions of communing with nature or whatever, and for a while I felt like I was getting close, but it ultimately hasn’t really worked out.”

“Give it time, Ray. Give it time. Thanks again for the whisky. I suppose I’ll see you in Craighouse next Friday evening. You’ll be joining in the carnage, is that right?”

“The hunt — yes. I wouldn’t miss the chance to practice my aim.”

“I wouldn’t think so. I’ll come meet you at the end of the public road, save you a bit of a walk.”

“You’re obviously a very good sport about all of this, so let me ask you something. How do you know you’re a werewolf? You have to admit that it sounds a bit far-fetched. What evidence do you have?”

Farkas took a deep breath. “To tell you the honest truth, I don’t think in terms of evidence. I have memories of doing things — atrocious, horrible things beyond the ken of mankind. They’re more like visions or dreams than memories, but they’re as real as you or me. There comes a time every so often, usually around the time of the new moon, when I cannot control my actions, when my body operates at odds with my best rational thoughts. I hate it. I hate it more than I could possibly convey to you. I’m not an educated man, but I know what I know, and I know that I’m capable of terrible things.”

“Aren’t we all.”

“Aye, but until you’ve awoken with the taste of blood so strong on your lips, and tufts of some pelt beneath your nails, you cannot hope to understand the things I’ve done.”

“Have you considered the possibility — and I hope you’ll forgive me for this — have you ever wondered if you’re delusional?”

“Ray, I pray that I’m delusional because that would be preferable to the waking nightmares I’ve had all these years. And now I should be off. Good night.”

From the doorway, Ray watched Farkas’s progress into the utter darkness of Jura. A biblical swarm of insects sought the light of the sitting room, so he went in and poured another drink, and then another. Farkas didn’t sound crazy, except that he kind of did.

It was a good hour before Ray felt ready to read his mail. A black, imageless postcard read “Rio de Janeiro At Night” on one side. On the other:

Ray, I hope you still

feel as optimistic as

I do. With love — f.

He was overjoyed to learn that Flora was still thinking about him. He read her haiku again and again looking for clues about the true nature of their relationship. “With love,” it said. He then opened the three identical greeting cards:

Thinking of you

and wishing you all

the blessings of our

Lord and Savior.

Next he tore into the large envelope from Helen. She had used her personal stationery, not her lawyer’s, and had had it reprinted to redact his name from her own. He scanned the cover letter for the only news that really mattered … and … there it was. Molly would be ecstatic.

Helen had agreed to his final and somewhat awkward stipulation of the divorce settlement, perhaps in violation of her own precious ethical standards: upon the successful completion of the minimum requirements of admission, Molly Pitcairn was to receive a full, four-year scholarship to attend the university where Helen taught. The offer included a generous housing stipend and a work-study job in the college of fine arts to cover additional expenses. Ray had it in writing. He had secured Molly’s ticket off Jura and couldn’t wait to tell her. Her father would be furious, perhaps murderously so, but there was nothing that could be done about that. Ray had acted in Molly’s best interests and anyone who didn’t like it would be cordially invited to go fuck himself.

In exchange for the scholarship, Ray had surrendered all rights to his share of the condo and agreed not to pursue additional monies from Helen. He was now broke. It felt liberating.

HE FOUND A PEWTER flask under the sink and filled it with a young and lightly peated scotch, tucked the legs of his trousers into his socks, and without locking the door behind him trekked out to meet Farkas, who simultaneously was and was not a werewolf. The shotgun he left behind. Ray had nearly killed himself and, besides, a real weapon would never work against an imaginary beast.

Hiking to the public road would be some of his greatest physical exertion since Molly’s abduction. Jura’s terrain had all but destroyed his canvas sneakers. The blisters under his socks begged to come out for an encore; he would need to finally pick up a pair of wellingtons from Mrs. Bennett if she was still open. Whisky formed a warm kiddie pool in his belly. He drank half the flask before he got up the hill and past sight of Barnhill.

The evening grew colder and worked its way through his sweater, his feet ached, and although he wasn’t much closer to piecing together the bits of his fractured mind he felt something like happiness about the night ready to unfold, about participating in a werewolf hunt on the Isle of Jura on the night of the summer solstice.

Farkas stood waiting for him next to his compact car, an Eastern European model that had gone out of production shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “Sorry about the mess,” he said. “You can throw that shite on the seat into the back.”

“Good to see you, Farkas. What can I expect from this affair tonight?”

“I don’t fully participate, for reasons you can appreciate, so I can’t rightly say. But if these goings-on are at all consistent with every other aspect of life on Jura, it’s fair to warn you to keep your expectations to a minimum.”

“A salient point. I’ve brought some scotch — care for a blast?”

“Wouldn’t say no to a wee sip, would I?” Farkas took Ray’s flask in his hairy hand and, steering with the other, drank what appeared to be the entire contents. He looked disgusted and rolled down his window to spit it out. “Have I insulted you in some way, Ray?”

“Insulted me? No!”

“Then why in heaven’s name are you giving me this new malt? That shite is best left to the tourists, and that flask of yours might have done with a good washing up as well, I might add.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

Farkas handed the empty vessel back and reached into his own pocket. “Try on this tasty little fellow for size,” he said. He passed over a flask that contained a whisky so delicious it might have come from the Virgin Mary’s own tender nipples and been used to suckle the baby Jesus in his downy crib as mother and child were serenaded by a host of angels.

“What on earth is this?” Ray needed to know.

“I told you that we—” he hit the brakes to let a family of red deer pass. They scampered off unaware of their near collision and of the fictional wolf in its make-believe den waiting for darkness to come in order to find the most vulnerable among them. “I told you that we Diurachs save the best of the whiskies for ourselves. Well I personally keep a small collection, an archive if you will. And what you have here was aged for twenty-eight years and will never again see the light of day. When this final bottle is gone it will be gone for good. Try it again while you can.”

Ray took another sip. It tasted entirely different the second time down, and even better. More nuanced. It tasted like caramel and wood smoke and moonlight glowing on a winning lottery ticket. It tasted like drinking joy itself. “I didn’t know whisky could be this good.”

“It can’t. Not anymore, at any rate.”

“Nevermore. Right around here is where I did that face plant off the bike.”

“Aye, nevermore. That would be a nice name for a whisky. Things are different nowadays — maybe that’s Gavin’s point. No going back, as they say.”

“I don’t mean any offense, but just how different are things? It feels to me like the island is stuck in time.”

“Only everything is different, Ray, and that’s the truth. It’s a matter of perspective. The water’s different now. The air we breathe. The whole climate. All of it affects the whisky.”

Darkness settled in and the beginnings of Ray’s reflection appeared in the passenger-side window. He hadn’t trimmed his beard in a few weeks; the locals were liable to mistake him for the wolf. “Maybe change isn’t always bad, though?”

“When I say that malt whisky is the lifeblood of this little island, I want you to understand that literally,” Farkas said. “This new RAF flight plan changes the amount of the jet fuel in our atmosphere, and our atmosphere is not only what we breathe, but what the whisky breathes. Do you mind if we make a quick stop? There’s something I’d like you to see. I know you’re expected at the hotel, so we’ll do this with some haste.”

Farkas pulled into the grounds of the distillery, which sat on a hill and took up a large chunk of downtown Craighouse. Not that Craighouse had much in the way of a downtown. The distillery compound contained two white plaster structures that stood three or four stories tall. They had been built on top of some old, painted-over ruins and were big enough to be seen all the way from the mainland. A warehouse of blue sheet metal loomed above them and the height of the smokestack dwarfed that. The hotel across the street was even larger. People were already gathering over there and Ray was eager to join them, but not before a free tour of a working distillery.

They got out and Farkas conjured a key ring the size of a basketball hoop and festooned with more keys than there were cars and houses on Jura. For decorative purposes, three oak barrels stood in a pyramid next to the entrance. “I thought you didn’t lock your doors here,” Ray said.

“Aye, I know you’re teasing me, Ray, but you understand that our distillery, she’s a different story — she must be locked or casks would be drained dry before you could blink.”

“By who, Mr. Fuller and those guys? They do seem like troublemakers.”

“By me. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve awoken here after one of my new-moon escapades, my hands in the cookie jar, as it were. I cannot always control my own actions, Ray, and that’s the sad truth. Besides, seeing as I’m still considered an outsider on Jura, I don’t feel quite as obliged as some of the others to obey every little superstition.” Farkas found the light switches and revealed a reception area. “Now follow me,” he said. “We’ll do the short tour now, and I’ll show you around the whole works another time.”

Rooms were filled with a network of tanks and tubs and tubes: the equipment that produced all that delicious single-malt scotch. The distillery turned out to be a highly technical operation; this was no backyard still, but rather a modern facility that used computers and specialized, carefully calibrated machinery for maximal yield and quality. Farkas led him to a grimy room containing two huge wooden vats suspended up high on a catwalk. Their shoes clanked against the metal steps. The pungent stink reminded Ray of one of those extinct, old-timey bars in Chicago and Ray saw why: the tanks looked like swimming pools full of stale beer.

“Here put these on,” Farkas said and handed him a pair of sweaty rubber gloves and an oar from a rowboat. “I use only Scottish barley, though much of it comes in by ship. We let it germinate in one of the buildings out back for two or three weeks until it’s ready to get dried in the kiln, which is where it picks up that peat flavor. After that, we grind it to a fine grist that we brew with hot water in the mash tun. What you’re seeing here is the fermentation. We take the wort and add the yeast until we have what might in lesser hands form the basis of beer. We have machines to stir it during the wash, these blades that rotate automatically, but I prefer to do it by hand when I can. Watch me now. Skim the paddle across the top of it, like so.”

Farkas moved with more precision than his frame and usual level of intoxication led Ray to believe possible. He stretched over the railing and stirred the very top of the broth.

Ray followed his lead, but the sweeping motion was more challenging than it looked. “Is this the wort — is that what you called it? — that gets distilled?”

“Right you are! Now don’t chop at it, Ray. Gently now, that’s it. Once I have this where it needs to be, it follows through there to the stills.” He pointed to the pipes leading through the wall to another room. The door sat beneath the smaller of the two tanks. They climbed back down. A sign affixed to the low catwalk said MIND YOUR HEAD. Good advice.

Ray didn’t grasp the nuances of the entire process, but Farkas appeared to be in a rush to get upstairs. He had come fully to life inside the distillery and moved like a man half his age. The whisky-to-be flowed from the vats, through the walls and into the actual stills, eight containers shaped like big butt plugs that stretched to the ceiling. That was what they looked like. More tubes led at right angles from the tops of the stills to some holding tanks in another room.

“When the whisky’s good and ready, and not a moment before, I store it in oak casks to put some years on it. And it might just interest you to know that some of those casks come from none other than your America. We buy them from the bourbon manufacturers as a matter of fact, so however much our Gavin wants to cry about outside influences — that’s what he calls anything that didn’t originate on Jura — the malt he’s drinking relies on your people for its flavor. Try to keep up,” Farkas said.

Ray followed him downstairs and outside, through a courtyard and to a barn topped with a pagoda-shaped cupola. A bank of clouds approached from the seaside.

“We have one more stop. Once the malt has been casked, we store it in here. Three years is the absolute minimum, and even that is a disgrace. A good whisky doesn’t even know its own name before the age of twelve, and that’s the problem with that cack you’re carrying around in your pocket tonight, I might add. It has no years on it yet. Again, like your America. Now feast your eyes upon this.”

He pulled open the doors and Ray beheld the kingdom of heaven. The warehouse contained hundreds of casks of single-malt scotch stacked to the rafters. A row of open-air windows near the top welcomed in the evening mist. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

“Aye, that it is. We house the whisky here for decades in many cases, and you’ll notice that the casks get exposed to the elements, to the rain and the sea air. See those wee little ones? Those are called pins and contain four and a half gallons. The next one up, a firkin, holds twice that. Most of these are barrels, which hold thirty-six gallons of liquid gold. While I’m sad to report that we don’t have one on the premises, the biggest cask of all is called a butt and it contains one hundred and eight gallons. The size of the cask and the location, that’s how every malt gets its distinct flavors. And from the geographical location of the distillery and the tiniest variations of coastline and altitude too. Is it made inland, as in the Highlands? Or perhaps near the water in a small bight such as we are in Craighouse. Over on Islay, you have Bowmore sheltered in a deep bay, but also Ardbeg or Lagavulin smack on the quay and exposed to the full teeth of the sea. Over there they will rotate their casks for consistency — for uniformity — until the entire bottling tastes the same. Bah! With my malt, I can tell you from appearance how long it has aged and, from the taste, where in my warehouse it slept. So if you ask me if the change in our atmosphere is all bad, if the pollution and the rising temperature of the globe and the deforestation is all bad, I say aye. Aye! Because it means the end not just of this bottle”—he took a small pull from his own flask, closed his eyes—“but the end of an era. I’m a historian, if you will. The bottle of single malt is a time capsule. A record of the natural life of Jura.”

“You’re making me very thirsty,” Ray said.

“To tell you the truth, all this talking has given me quite a thirst too. Now, technically, I’m not supposed to do this, but we have some experimental batches over here. What the marketing people call our boutique barrels. These don’t often travel far beyond Craighouse.” Farkas extracted the cork from a cask. “Sometimes I’ll fill a barrel with madeira or dessert wine or whatever comes to mind, simply to see how the malt takes to the treated wood. That’s a fairly common practice these days, but I’ve had the idea of setting the insides of a cask on fire and aging some malt in the charred remains. Let’s see how she looks!” Ray followed him over to another cask. “Here we are,” Farkas said. He used a thin hose to extract two drams of black, opaque whisky. “Now that’s something! Slàinte!”

“Thank you, cheers!”

The scotch tasted like a forest fire, all smoky and ashy. It made Ray thirsty and quenched the thirst at the same time. It was unique, and kind of gross.

“Not quite ready yet, is it?”

“It’s pretty interesting.”

“Aye, that it is. We’ll try her again another day and see if she behaves a bit better. Now let’s get you to the hotel. I imagine you’ve already missed supper.”

“That’s all right, I’m not very hungry.” Not for Fuller’s stew, anyway. “I really appreciate your showing me around. You’re like a mad scientist.”

“You’re wrong on both counts. I’m neither mad, contrary to what everybody believes, and I’m certainly no scientist, just a humble man charged with recording Jura’s natural history one bottle at a time. Now I know what you’re thinking, Ray,” Farkas said. They stopped at the road to take in the sights. The fog had swallowed the water and was coming for the hotel next. Cars, trucks, motorbikes, and the odd horse or two filled the parking lot. People had gathered together from all over the island to hunt down a wild animal and far more importantly, Ray now surmised, to maintain the vestiges of Jura’s traditions. They were here out of a sense of shared responsibility, but also to celebrate themselves. “You’re a smart man. A man who can see beyond the trappings of his present circumstances. And that’s why I’m so glad you’ve come to stay with us. You’re a man of vision. You’re thinking that the natural life of the present is equally worthy of recording, am I right? Certainly it is. Here you go. Slàinte.”

He handed Ray his flask one last time. The whisky tasted different yet again, as if Farkas had been secretly switching them. The flavors — licorice, sour cherry, honey — came one after the other and were followed by a burst of laughter and the squawk of bagpipes. The party was in full swing. There were maybe fifty people in all, with more stragglers pulling in every few minutes.

“And here’s what I want you to try to understand,” Farkas said. “You have already affected the natural life of Jura, we all have, and I would not want for it to be any other way. Unlike our Gavin here”—Pitcairn had appeared, coughing into a handkerchief, on the hotel’s porch—“I recognize that change is unavoidable and I appreciate the likes of you who try to affect things for the better. Even your visit today will have an effect.” He took his flask back and drained the final, precious drops.

“I find it tragic,” Ray said, “that that scotch is gone now and it’ll never exist again.”

“Now I’m not prone to excessive philosophizing, not even about such important topics as malt whisky, but that particular batch was made to be drunk and enjoyed, and it was. It’s gone, aye, but that’s the way of all things. And that’s one reason we’ll continue to make more this year and next year and the year after that and every year until the seas rise and reclaim our little island. The batch you had a small hand in today will tell some lucky sod in the future a great deal about who we were and where we lived, just like this one has done. Even your three minutes of stirring will make a difference down the road in one bottle or another.”

Ray looked around. It was a glorious night: damp and so misty that he couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of him. The fog demanded a certain presence of mind, a being here that did not come easily otherwise, like everything that mattered in the entire world was contained in his immediate vicinity. The party was raging, and he couldn’t wait to join in.

He had watched enough overblown PBS costume dramas with Helen to expect the full foxhunting circus. Buglers and beagles, tweed waistcoats and whinnying steeds snorting their oat-breath into the mist. The reality wasn’t all that far off. Cigarette smoke and the salty stench of whisky hung in the air. A pack of braying dogs was tied up someplace behind the hotel. The assembled men ranged in age from young teenagers to the antiquated ferryman, Singer, and taken together they resembled a good, old-fashioned mob. Many wore kilts in the tartans of their proud, if dwindling, clans. They sang crude songs and told familiar jokes and spat in the dirt. They carried hunting rifles, pitchforks, torches that fought off the encroaching night. Bagpipers wheezed out nationalistic hymns and drunken-sailor ditties. The mist made it difficult to see from one side of the parking lot to the other, but he recognized a few faces from his first night on the island. Was that already three months ago? Even the dour Mr. Harris was sulking around. Pitcairn’s phlegmatic chortle rose above the commotion. The periodic discharge of a rifle cracked through the conversations and songs and they silenced the men and hounds alike for an instant, only to have them resume their boasts and oaths and threats and wagers. Bottles of scotch better than what Ray had brought got passed around freely and he availed himself of a swig from each and every last one. A ten-year-old and then another, and another. A sixteen came by — rich caramel and brine and seaweed and cotton candy — and another ten or maybe one he had already sampled. He felt loose, and ready for the evening’s spectacle. He was going to shoot a werewolf! Only he hadn’t brought a gun; maybe that was okay.

The ferryman ambled over. He brandished a rifle even older than himself. It might as well have been a musket and should have been in a museum.

“Hello, Mr. Singer,” Ray said.

“If it isn’t our Orwell aficionado!” He was so far along in his booze that he couldn’t stand straight. He held the rifle by its iron barrel and leaned on it like a cane.

“Farkas tells me that you knew him?”

“Who’s that?” Singer asked. “Farkas?”

“Orwell.”

“George Orwell?” He took a long swig from a bottle of whisky and made faces like he was chewing it without teeth. Some of it dribbled down his white-bristled chin and glistened in the lamplight.

“The very same.”

“I spoke to him on several occasions, aye.” He looked around to be sure no one was eavesdropping and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I can let you in on a little-known fact about our George Orwell.”

“What is it?” Ray asked.

“I don’t suppose there’s any harm in telling you this,” Singer said.

“Yes?”

“I mean, the man is dead and gone, as they say, so I don’t really see the harm.”

“Yes?”

“Enough time has passed and we need to let bygones be bygones.”

“Yes? Yes?”

Singer took another long drink. “You will be surprised to learn, young man, that George Orwell was not his real, God given name.”

That was it? That was Singer’s big secret? “You don’t say,” he said.

“No, no.” Singer looked around again. “His real name — and you should write this down — his real name was Eric Blair. E-R-I–C.”

“Eric Blair. Got it. Thank you, Mr. Singer.”

“Not at all, not at all.” Singer took another gulp and examined the barrel of his gun as if looking through a peephole, and found it clogged with mud. Ray took the opportunity to slip into the hotel. He had important matters to discuss with Molly, as far from her father’s earshot as possible. Mrs. Campbell stood waiting for him behind the desk. Damn. “Good evening, Mrs. Campbell,” he said. “You’re looking well.”

“Mr. Welter, some correspondence has arrived for you.”

She handed him a small stack — more cards from his mother and something in a green envelope — and he was surprised that they hadn’t been torn open and pored over. He shoved them into a pants pocket. “Thank you, Mrs. Campbell. Is Molly here, by any chance?”

“What would you want with her, then?”

“Frankly, I’m not sure how that’s any of your concern.”

“Being equally frank, Mr. Welter, we can’t imagine the sort of sordid business a grown man such as yourself might have with a young girl like Molly.”

“Mrs. Campbell, does it please you to single-handedly destroy the Highlanders’ otherwise deserved reputation as the most hospitable and friendly people in the world?”

“You leave that girl alone and get out of this hotel this instant.”

“Leave her alone?” he asked, walking away. “I’ve done nothing wrong, you old bat. In fact, where were you when her father was beating her up? You weren’t so protective then, were you?”

“Mr. Welter!” she called after him. “Mr. Welter!”

Molly sat perched behind the bar in the lounge, a book open on her lap. “That was awesome,” she said. “Mind you, you won’t be seeing any more of your mail.”

“Doesn’t matter. There’s no one I want to hear from anyway,” he said and then realized that it wasn’t entirely true.

“I suppose you’re here to murder some animals tonight?”

“Yeah — I mean, no. I’m not even sure there’s a wolf, much less a werewolf. It’s absurd.”

“Of course it’s absurd, but if you want to get by on Jura you need to embrace the absurdity, not run from it.”

“If Farkas thinks he’s a werewolf, and if I simultaneously think I see him turn into one, then he is a werewolf?”

“Exactly,” Molly said. “All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.”

“Clever girl.”

“Why can’t two plus two equal five?”

“Because they just can’t.”

“You’re a lost cause, Ray.”

“So how do you explain the dead animals at my door?”

“I can’t help you with that one. Some things can’t be explained, not with all the logic in the world.”

“Maybe you’re right. Either way, I have some good news for you.” He lowered his voice so the old bat wouldn’t hear. “My divorce went through and—”

“Hold on, Ray,” Molly said. “Are you asking me to marry you? Because if so, I don’t think—”

“No! My wife — my ex-wife — teaches at a very prestigious university in Chicago. It took some finagling, but as part of my divorce settlement I insisted on a full scholarship for you. You will have four years, all expenses paid. Housing, room and board, an allowance for books and living expenses. It’s not entir—”

Molly screamed. She held her hands to her face and belted out a scream than would’ve made Edvard Munch proud. The iron chandelier swayed. The candles flickered. The men outside probably heard her above their gunfire and revelry.

“The offer doesn’t include airfare,” he said, “but I can try to help you with that. The university has an excellent art program and the best art museum in the nation is a couple of stops away on the L.”

Mrs. Campbell rushed in to investigate the noise. In her mind, Ray had probably torn the poor helpless child’s skirt off and started raping her behind the bar. She was surprised to see them both clothed and laughing. “You leave that girl alone! What is the meaning of this?”

“I’m going to Chicago!” Molly yelled. She jumped up and down. Her shoes hammered against the floor. The bottles rattled behind her.

“Chicago?” Mrs. Campbell asked. “We’ll just see what your father says about this! You are a wicked man, Mr. Welter. Shame on you.”

“All the information you’ll need is here,” he said and handed Molly a large envelope stuffed with paperwork. It also included enough cash for a replacement bicycle. “Now I’m going outside to murder a defenseless animal that both is and isn’t there.”

“Just one minute, Mr. Welter!”

He didn’t stop to discuss it. “Good evening, Mrs. Campbell,” he said and tracked his muddy sneakers back across her floor.

She followed behind. “Mr. Welter!” she said.

Ray ignored her until, outside, she pushed past him and found Pitcairn behind the wheel of his flatbed. Farkas stood on the porch taking in the excitement. The caravan had already started to pull away and Pitcairn’s truck sat idling, last in line at the hotel entrance. The area on the western side where Loch Tarbert emptied into the Sound of Islay was said to be prime wolf territory. Engines roared. The headlights of the pickup trucks carved at the fog. Innumerable dogs barked and howled like a Greek chorus foretelling some poor sucker’s fate. Peat smoke and diesel exhaust fought off the fresh sea air. All the men and boys filled the backs of the trucks to form a drunken parade of the deluded and kick up mud behind them. There’s no fucking wolf, Ray wanted to holler after them. It wouldn’t have done any good. Mrs. Campbell leaned in the open window of Pitcairn’s truck. Standing with Farkas on the porch, he couldn’t hear them, but it was clear that she was telling him about Molly’s scholarship. Pitcairn looked at Ray and leaned on his horn. On her way back inside Mrs. Campbell refused to as much as look at him. His comeuppance had been long, long overdue.

Pitcairn stepped out of the truck with a groan. Sponge and Pete sat fidgeting in the cab like bored children. Pitcairn stretched his shoulders and cracked something in his back. He looked calm, which was unnerving. Outright hostility, even violence, might have been preferable. He had already tried once to kill him. That was no joke — the man was capable of murder. “Care to join us, Farkas?” Pitcairn asked.

Farkas was already smashed out of his gourd. Whisky and drool glistened in his immense beard. He held to the railing of the porch for balance. “Not this time, Gavin,” he said.

“How about you, Chappie? You ready?”

“With all due respect,” Ray said, “I think I’ll stay here with Farkas.”

“Respect now, is it? Well there’s a lovely fucking change of scenery. Oh no — you’re coming with us. I’m not supposing you have a gun, now do you, Chappie?”

“No, unfortunately I don’t.”

“You’re not much of an American, are you? I thought all of you Yanks had guns.”

“Here’s where I’ll say my goodbyes,” Farkas said on his way back in to the lounge. “Catch me if you can!”

Farkas clearly didn’t want to know about whatever it was Pitcairn had in mind for Ray. He wasn’t going to stick his neck out for a foreigner. On Jura, as back in the advertising world, remaining noncommittal on all things was the key to self-preservation. It was a shame, but Ray couldn’t count on Farkas’s help, not even with someone as dangerous as Pitcairn.

The last of the other trucks rumbled off into the fog. The engine noise tapered to oblivion, leaving a pocket of silence. Behind the hotel, the water slapped against the docks and seawall. A slight wind sounded in the palm trees, the tops of which were rendered invisible by the mist. There were no lights to be seen beyond the hotel grounds. The mainland — and all of civilized, gridlocked Europe — was so close that Ray could feel its magnetism, but with no direct route of escape it seemed so distant. Jura was another planet unto itself. “I have an idea,” he said. “I’ll stay here at the hotel until you guys are done. At that point we can discuss anything that’s on your mind.”

“You’re full of bad ideas tonight, Chappie. I have half a mind to go over to the rescue and rehoming center and adopt a cute little puppy just so I can name it Welter and have the pleasure of kicking it every night.”

“Would you hurry along, eh?” Pete shouted. “They’ll have shot that wolf before we’ve even left the car park.”

“You heard what the man said,” Pitcairn said. He lifted the front of his soiled soccer sweatshirt to show Ray the wooden handle of a small, antique pistol. “Now be a good lad and get in, Chappie. It wouldn’t do to make a scene here.”

Pete and Sponge squeezed over to let him in. Sponge, who was pressed against the door, swigged from a bottle of whisky, but Pitcairn let go of the clutch and nearly cost him his front teeth. The bagpipe cassette provoked the same sensation in Ray’s skull that a hacksaw might have. They pulled from the relative safety of the parking lot and turned south into the foggy night. The headlights couldn’t penetrate more than a few feet in front of the truck, so Pitcairn turned them off. He plunged the truck, at full speed, into total darkness.

“What are you doing, eh?” Pete asked.

“I know this island like the back of my wanking hand.”

Ray closed his eyes and sat sandwiched by sweaty, half-drunken Scotsmen in a truck with no lights on. Pitcairn didn’t slow down. The cabin of the truck vibrated like a motel room bed. The road turned and climbed and twisted and every so often the tires ran off the road. Pitcairn somehow corrected his course in the dark and only turned the headlights on again in time to swing the wheel onto a trail even worse than the path to Barnhill.

Several pairs of eyes appeared in the headlights, froze for a moment, and then disappeared. The afterimage remained glued onto Ray’s vision and imposed itself on everything he looked at. “Where are we going anyway?” he asked.

“Why to the Paps of course,” Pitcairn said.

THE TRUCK SLID TO a stop in the cleavage between two of the island’s three mountains, a mossy patch of land the locals called the bealach. Three men were playing bagpipes that sounded out of tune even by the lax standards of that instrument’s repertoire. A bonfire blazed in the center of the clearing and, yes, several grown men were shimmying around it naked, including Singer, who at his advanced and flaccid age looked like a dancing skeleton celebrating the Day of the Dead. Ray got out of the truck. The whisky had hit him hard, but that didn’t deter him from partaking again from every bottle that passed by. The alchemical process that had produced their contents utilized little more than earth and air and water and time. Single-malt scotches, he had come to understand, were as individual as people and, like people, became toxic in large doses.

The rest of the caravan had already arrived and the celebration carried over from the hotel, but the laughter had taken a turn; the men still made jokes, told stories, but the voices were quieter, if only marginally. A subtle seriousness had overtaken the proceedings, maybe a greater sense of purpose. Wagers were made, liters of whisky consumed. The flames curled to the sky as if to chase off the fog and Fuller toiled around it in preparation for a feast. A goat rotated slowly on a spit. At dawn, at the conclusion of the hunt, two cauldrons full of seawater would be set to boil; they awaited the dozens of lobsters, caught nearby, that tangled and jousted in their ice chests. There was fresh cheese and bread and an entire cask of single malt, all of it local. That the food was organic went without saying. Jura had its own ecosystem, its own cycle of consumption and replenishment. Ray thought about what Farkas had said. Had his own presence contributed to the isle’s natural life or disrupted it?

Men unpacked rifles from truck-bed lockers and loaded them with lead shot. The younger participants had the responsibility of lighting torches from the bonfire, which they would soon carry off into the shortest night of the year.

Ray watched as Pete took a long, three-Mississippi swallow from his bottle and handed it to Pitcairn, who with noisy deliberation hacked up a butter pat of green phlegm and drooled it into the remaining whisky. It bobbed in the beam of his flashlight like a bloated worm. “I’m supposing the rest of this belongs to me now,” he said.

“You’re an arsehole,” Pete said. He took the bottle from Pitcairn and, undeterred, drank another long swallow. Sponge looked on in disgust that verged on awed respect and then opened his hunting bag, from which he produced a bottle labeled ISLAY. He peeled off the foil, pulled the cork, and enjoyed a long taste.

Pitcairn climbed onto the bed of his truck. The crowd grew quiet, the bagpipes wheezed their last breaths. Even with everyone’s attention, he didn’t speak right away. He surveyed the assembled party with approval, then took a drooling gulp from a bottle handed up to him. He lit a cigarette while his congregation awaited his gospel. “I thought I might say a few words,” he said, and took another gulp. He swayed on his feet. “The problem we face, gentlemen, is one that is within our power to fix so long as we can come together on a night like this under the moonless sky to fix it.”

A few voices spoke out in assent from the crowd.

“I’m talking about an invasive species that has come to savage our lambs in the night and to ruin our very livelihoods and those things most precious to us.”

“Aye,” a few more men said.

“We’re talking not only about this wolf we are going to skin this night”—a cheer went up—“but about the parasites bleeding us dry.”

“Aye!” said the crowd.

“I’m talking about the men who come from Glasgow to harvest our peat and sell the very soil out from beneath our fucking feet!”

“Aye!”

“I’m talking about the bloody fucking tourists who leave their bottled water on our beaches and pollute our seas.”

“Aye!”

As the token American, Ray could see where things were headed and slinked out of Pitcairn’s line of vision.

“Here we go,” Farkas whispered. He had appeared out of the fog.

“I didn’t think you’d be here,” Ray said.

“I’m not.”

“I’m talking about the scholars,” Pitcairn continued. “The intellectuals like old Eric Blair who deem fit to grace us with their presence and treat our Jura like their own private museum, who turn our proud heritage and our way of life into some kind of tourist attraction. Have they forgotten that we actually live here?”

“Yeah!” Ray shouted from the back of the crowd. He was enjoying himself despite the hatemongering now directed fully at him. “Those fucking intellectuals!” he yelled. “Let’s string ’em up!”

Laughter rippled through the men. “Good on you,” someone said behind him. Pitcairn tried to continue, but his audience had turned — not against him necessarily, but the mood had shifted with the sea breeze. “The danger is worse than you think,” he warned them all, but a dozen other conversations had begun. More wagers got placed. People were eager to get the hunt started and then, no doubt, climb into their warm beds. “You ungrateful bastards will wish you listened to me one day.”

“Not today!” someone answered, inciting a good deal of amusement. It sounded a bit like Fuller, but who could tell?

“Shut your gobs one more minute, you fuckers,” he shouted, but it was too late. The bagpipes squawked back to life. Pitcairn stumbled while climbing back down and landed in a heap on the ground. A hunting dog licked at the whisky on his lips and it yelped when he punched it in the face.

The men congealed into parties of five or six. Each group had one torchbearer, who was armed with either a flashlight or a real fiery torch and who was also responsible for carrying the bottles of whisky. Every man kept his voice low now. They peeled off into the darkness. Some headed straight up the inclines of the Paps, others toward the shore or along some unseen paths leading into the fog that seemed to extinguish the torches like so many birthday candles. Only a few people remained. Fuller tended the fire in preparation for what looked like a lavish feast.

“You’re coming with me, Chappie,” Pitcairn said. He stood at a trailhead that Ray hadn’t noticed and shined a flashlight in his eyes. Ray squinted in time to see Sponge and Pete go on ahead and get swallowed whole by the encroaching fog.

“I think I’ll stay here and help Mr. Fuller,” Ray said.

“Oh so you’re now a gourmet chef, are you? I think Mr. Fuller can manage without the benefit of your expertise.”

“But …”

“You go ahead, Mr. Welter,” Fuller said. “I can take care of this. One word of advice: it’s easy to get lost on the moors at midday, not to mention on a night such as this one. Keep an eye on where you’re going.”

“He’s right, Chappie. We wouldn’t want you wandering off, now would we?”

“I don’t have a flashlight.”

“I don’t have a flashlight.”

There was no point in arguing. Resistance was futile. Anyway, Pitcairn wouldn’t dare hurt him, not with Sponge and Pete as witnesses.

“Not to worry. You just stay close to Mr. Pitcairn,” Fuller said. “Bring us back some fresh meat to add to our feast.”

“You heard the man, Chappie, you stay close.” Pitcairn turned and went off into the night. He took four paces before his flashlight blinked out of view.

Ray followed after him, but the bonfire behind him soon evaporated and the darkness hit his body like a sudden fever. He couldn’t see a goddamn thing. “Pitcairn?” No answer. The soles of his sneakers sucked at the muddy ground, and just like that he was lost. Nothing existed except nothingness itself. The entire universe consisted of the absence of light. Panic swelled in Ray’s windpipe like a chunk of unchewed beef. Sweat tickled him from beneath his beard. The fog seemed to distort the sounds of the wind in the bushes. Somewhere there were waves lapping against the stony shore, but he couldn’t tell which direction they came from. He stumbled over unseen rocks and roots and divots, but walked in what he hoped was a straight line. Then he felt the terrain change and found himself on an incline. A hill, maybe the base of one of the Paps. If the peak jutted above the fog, maybe he could gain his bearings from there. Even if the lights in Craighouse and at the ferry port and over on Islay only illuminated small patches of fog, that would be enough to figure out which direction the hotel was in.

The mountain was too steep to climb straight up, so he circled it in progressively higher rings the way the groove of a record album eventually terminates in the middle. His sneakers were worse than useless and his intense intoxication didn’t help. The flask was empty. His ankles twisted back and forth. His progress — if he was making progress at all — was slow and laborious. His eyes had not adjusted to the light because there was so little light for his eyes to adjust to. The worst part was that Pitcairn had done this to him. Getting him lost out here, that had been totally intentional. It had to be. That asshole purposely led him out here into the black night with the purpose of getting him lost. That had been his agenda all along.

Ray climbed, blind, for twenty minutes, maybe more, and the higher he went the better he came to appreciate the reality of his circumstances. The seas would eventually rise again, as Farkas said, and that was thanks in some part to global warming and the thousands of SUVs he had unleashed. Ray had come to Jura in order to escape the consequences of his actions, but that was impossible. For the time being, however, here he was on one of the Paps of Jura, high above the cares of the mundane and overcrowded world.

He had to be nearing the top and so he hiked faster, his treads skidding on the rock surfaces, until a horrible sound reached his ears. It was a disgusting, retching howl that came from above him and echoed between the Paps then returned to its maker. There was something out here with him. The noise came again, closer, but this time it sounded like someone coughing up the boozy contents of his stomach. A halo of light bobbing in the fog guided Ray to the peak of the mountain, where he was actually glad to see Pitcairn. “I want you to take a deep breath, Chappie,” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

Ray did so. He stopped and tasted the sea on his tongue. The Scottish night felt so clean, so good and pure; it was unpolluted and sweet in his lungs. “Mr. Pitcairn, I’m so—”

“What you have a hold of there is fresh air. Something you won’t bloody well find in your Chicago.” He pronounced it She-cah-go. “Do you know why I wanted you to come up here with me tonight?”

“To shoot me?”

“That’s a very good guess, but I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to shoot you or not. I wanted you to come with me so that you might understand why it is that I don’t want you filling my Molly’s head with ideas.”

“If you ask me, her head’s already full of ideas,” Ray said. His heartbeat made its presence felt now in his neck. “Nothing you or I do is going to change that.”

“That’s what I’m talking about, Chappie.” Pitcairn spoke quietly. A bird peep-peeped at them from some nearby overgrowth. “I’m not asking you. No one is asking you any such fucking thing. No one has come pleading for your almighty opinion. Understand that. Right now, we are standing on Beinn a’ Chaolais. While you can’t see her at the moment you can believe me when I tell you that to our left is Beinn an Òir and on her other side is Beinn Shiantaidh.”

The three Paps. Translated from the Gaelic, they were called Mountain of the Kyle and Mountain of Gold. The easternmost one — hidden behind Beinn an Òir — was Holy Mountain. On a clear day they could be seen in all their glory from as far away as Northern Ireland.

The buzz Ray had going alleviated most of the pain in his feet and his fear of Pitcairn. He felt at home in the natural splendor of the Inner Hebrides. The wind pockmarked the cloudbank and exposed a pair of stars above. The swatches of night sky were remembered and forgotten like good intentions.

“I guess you heard about Molly’s scholarship?” Ray asked.

“And what scholarship is that, Chappie?”

“I know that Mrs. Campbell told you about it.”

“Told me what, then?”

“That’s how you want to do this? Fine. As part of my divorce settlement I got — at tremendous personal expense, I might add — a full-paid scholarship for Molly to attend a university back in Chicago. I’m talking about a world-class education for her, and it’s absolutely free.”

Pitcairn started walking again, following the crest of the mountain, and this time Ray stayed close to the light. It would be easy — way too easy — to get lost again. “I’ll need you to keep your voice down, Chappie,” he whispered, “if we’re planning to kill this wolf.”

“There’s no goddamn wolf, Gavin. You know that. Why the charade?”

“I said to keep your fucking voice down. If there’s no wolf, what’s slaughtering our sheep? I know what you’re thinking here, Chappie. Maybe in the vast recesses of that sophisticated brain of yours you really do believe that you, above everybody else on God’s green earth, know what’s best for us bampots out here on Jura. Free education? There’s a free education from Beinn a’ Chaolais. Under the stars. Even if you can’t see them, Chappie, they’re still twinkling all the same. I also suppose it’s equally possible that you think you’re helping Molly by getting away from her big, bad da. For all your books and your advertising awards and your prissy clothing you don’t understand the first thing about what this world is really like.”

“Yes, but—”

Pitcairn stopped again and turned to face him. He had in his hand the old-fashioned six-shooter. Maybe it was loaded with silver bullets. “Now just keep your gob shut for once in your entire bloody life. Do you smell that, Chappie? That’s the sea air in your lungs, not smog or fast food grease or petrol exhaust from all your sport utility vehicles. What makes you believe for one instant that I would allow you or any man to deprive Molly of this? I would rather be dead than live in Chicago, because they’re pretty much the same thing. Do you even know how it feels to be alive?”

“Don’t you think that it’s up to her? I understand that—”

“Here’s what it feels like,” Pitcairn said.

The loud crack hit Ray’s ears first, echoed four or five times off the Paps, and then came back to rest in his stomach. He had been shot.

The pain arrived as a new sensation. It wasn’t like anything. Not the sharp sting of an insect or like being hit with a hammer. It didn’t feel like anything except what it felt like to get shot. He knew now. It fucking hurt. His own fluids glued his clothing to his body. The wound wasn’t a small toothless mouth or a reproduction of A Sunday on La Grande Jatte done the size of an Indian Head nickel: it was a bullet hole in his stomach. The metaphors arrived slowly. His belly now contained a tiny baby of lead who sucked the nutrients from his body. Then it was a fisherman’s sinker plugging a hole in the ocean. A.44-inch paperclip fastening his mortality to his immortality.

He had been shot. Pitcairn had shot him. The smoke danced from the barrel of the pistol and was lost amid the fog. The pain was mesmerizing. Ray fell to the ground and remained there. Pitcairn looked down at him and spat into the cold heather in which Ray now wanted to sleep. Just a short nap. The ground was comfy. The fog blanketed him.

Pitcairn’s boots grew smaller, quieter. Ray closed his eyes. The earth itself grabbed wetly at his clothes; it found his skin, pulled him closer, held him tight. Shhhhhh, the wind said. Every so often a gust blew away some of the fog and the stars would poke through the shifting windows of starry sky. All the tensions and tightnesses inside him gave way and his body deflated even further to the ground.

Another breeze brought with it a sharp odor of putrefaction, something animalic and rotten.

A live wolf stood not three feet away. It smelled of iron, of decaying earth. Its luxurious coat glimmered like polished silver even in the little light afforded by the stars. The creature looked him in the eye and growled ever so quietly, a low sonic rumble Ray felt in his chest. His body purred along involuntarily with the wolf’s breath. He felt the weight of the creature’s heartbeat, heard the blood sluicing through its taut musculature. He became aware of his own pulse beating at the base of his neck, and the enormous wolf sensed his quickened pulse too; it wanted to find the source of Ray’s remaining warmth with its teeth, to drill its hungry muzzle into the too-small bullet hole.

“It hurts,” he told the wolf. He showed it the blood on his sweater. “Do you see what happened to me?”

The wolf moved a step closer. Ray read its yellow eyes. The growl grew louder, more specific to him and his last moments on earth. Louder than the agony in his belly. The wolf understood him; it was here to lift him from his pain.

With this creature breathing its moist breath onto his face, the only choice now was between acceptance and resistance. That had been his only choice all along. All of his previous ideals about freedom and independent thought, all the marketing strategies in the world, every advertising campaign, those were meaningless in the face of a lunatic with a gun or a carnivorous monster. His life all along had followed a circumambulating path between free will and fate, but had always returned to the fate side.

Ray chose acceptance: there would be no more fighting it. No more challenging the collective wisdom of his grand and enlightened civilization. He would neither fight any longer nor flee. Not to the most distant corner of the most remote island on the planet or into the darkest recesses of his own miserable and troubled mind. He would accept with all his heart what the wolf had come to tell him; he would take responsibility only for those things within his power to control. The plundering of the rain forests was not his sole doing. Neither was the destruction of the last orangutan’s native habitat or the mercurial toxicity of seafood or the fact that Moby-Dick could no longer communicate with other whales over long distances because of the human race’s vehicular noise. Even the immense pollution caused by fossil fuels — that wasn’t entirely his fault. “Do you know what I saw today?” Ray asked the wolf.

A flicker passed through the creature’s eyes, and it flinched an instant before the beam of a flashlight captured it.

“Everything I looked at,” he said.

The blast from a shotgun kicked up the dirt next to him and lodged a few hot pellets in his skin. The wolf, unharmed, was gone as if it had never been there.

The rest of the night was a blur. He remembered lying next to the bonfire in the clearing between the Paps. He watched Fuller tap a barrel of whisky and rub some of it on the wound in his side. That pain was even worse than the initial gunshot. He seemed to remember Sponge and Pete carrying him from under his shoulders across the lobby of the hotel, his feet dragging across the floor, where thanks to Mrs. Campbell’s bitterness he went the entire night without food or water or even clean bandages.

A DOCTOR CAME OVER on the first ferry of the morning and tended to Ray’s wounds, which were neither superficial nor life threatening. The prognosis was better than the pain led him to believe. The doctor, out in the hallway, gave Mrs. Campbell the tongue-lashing of her long and nosy life. “Is this how you treat your guests on Jura?” she asked. “You should be ashamed of yourself!”

Ray restrained his laughter, but only because it hurt so goddamn much. The bickering was interrupted by the sound of someone coming up the stairs whistling. His next visitor was Mrs. Bennett, who had very thoughtfully brought him some expensive supplies from The Stores. “How are you feeling, Mr. Welter?”

“Like hell.”

“Well that’th to be expected — you have been thot. I’ve brought you thome thingth.” The box she carried contained bandages, ointment, cotton balls, medical tape. Everything he would require to keep the gunshot clean. “When you’re feeling up to it, I’d like to talk to you about your planth for Barnhill.”

“My plans for Barnhill?”

“Yeth. Our letting agenthy hath a young couple in London who ith quite eager to athume the leathe on the houthe.”

“You’re kicking me out?”

“Oh heaventh no, Mr. Welter. We had jutht thought that you would be leaving, given your condition. They are offering to pay conthiderably more each month than yourself, tho I’m confident we could work out a mutually beneficial arrangement. There are many other beautiful and more convenient hometh available should you with to thtay on Jura.”

“I’ll give it some thought, Mrs. Bennett. Thank you for the bandageth … I mean, bandages.”

He got out of bed. Every step hurt. The envelopes and pewter flask weighted down his pants. He had forgotten about that. In the movies, a man’s flask was supposed to deflect the bullet and save him from this kind of agony. Reality was infinitely more subtle, and more painful.

Still in his bloody clothes, he made it downstairs with Mrs. Bennett’s help and without running into Mrs. Campbell.

“Pleathe think about what I’ve thaid, Mr. Welter.”

“I will, thank you. I’ll drop by for some boots as soon as I’m feeling better.”

Ray sat on the porch of the hotel, unsure of his next move, until Farkas pulled up. He looked like he hadn’t slept. There were sticks and twigs in his hair and beard, mud on his nose. “As I understand it,” he said, “you’re lucky to be alive.”

“What’s so lucky about attempted homicide?”

“There is the attempted part.”

“Pitcairn tried to kill me,” Ray said. He had to bend over to climb into the car and pain filled his lungs. “He should be in jail.”

“He says it was an accident. And if he did go to jail, who would look after Molly? You?”

“What are you trying to say?”

“That you and I both know that no one here — and I mean no one — will take the word of a stranger over Gavin’s, even though we know you’re right.”

The surface of the road jostled the tiny car, sending pain squirting through his entire system until it settled into one all-encompassing ache that stretched from his groin to his teeth. “That doesn’t bother you?”

“A lot of things bother me, Ray. But that is simply how it is here.”

“We’re talking about attempted murder.”

“You have to let it go, as there are bigger and more important issues at stake.”

“More important than my death?”

“I’ve come to a bit of an insight, if you will. Gavin believes he’s the only one who understands how to maintain our traditional ways, but he may be trying to preserve something that never existed. The best bottle of malt ever produced is worthless if it stays in the bottle. And I’ve spent too many years trying to be accepted as something I already am. I know what you’ve done for Molly, and I want to help. I told her I would smuggle her off the island and help her get to Chicago.”

“Really? What if Pitcairn finds out?”

“In that event, he will most certainly have another attempted homicide under his belt. And even if he lacks the wisdom to understand as much, having Molly get an education is what’s best for her and what’s best for this island in the long run. The big picture here is the only picture worth attending to. I’m a historian, I’ll have you remember. That girl doesn’t belong here right now any more than you do. You’re not cut out for life on Jura — this isn’t exactly a theme park.”

“So I’ve learned,” he said. “What about you — do you belong here?”

“Aye, of course I do, even if not everybody appreciates that fact just yet. And if it’s my lot to be treated as an outsider on the only home I’ve ever known, so be it. And speaking of home — Mrs. Bennett tells me that a young couple keeps ringing up from London hoping to hire Barnhill.”

“She told me the same thing just now. It sounds like she wants to get rid of me.”

“No, we hate Londoners as much as Americans, but it does sound like they’d be willing to take over the lease. They’re apparently very keen on it. You might even make a profit on the deal.”

“Is that what you think this is about — making a profit?”

“Not really, that’s just something one says to Americans. She also sent along some wellies. They’re in the back. You can pay her whenever it’s convenient. Here we are.”

Farkas stopped at the end of the road. Ray climbed out and leaned on the open door to collect his strength for the walk ahead of him. “I appreciate your advice, Farkas. You’re right. Maybe it is time to go home.”

“I brought you a little get-well gift,” he said. He reached into a bag on the seat behind him and produced a bottle. The handwritten label said 1984.

“1984?” he asked.

“That’s when it was distilled. It’s an extremely rare whisky. I put a small batch aside because of that year’s significance to our merry little island. May it treat you well.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“How about, slàinte?”

“Slàinte, Farkas.”

“You get yourself better now. I’ll stop by in a few days, see how you’re holding up.”

The little car puttered away, back toward Ardlussa and Craighouse. Ray fingered the shape of the bandages under his clothes, the strips of cotton and medical tape holding his insides inside. It hurt so much. If he opened the bottle and drank a gulp, would whisky trickle out his wound and further stain his sweater? For the first time in months, years maybe, he had no desire for a drink.

The hike homeward took forever and each step hurt more than the previous. He clutched the bottle of scotch and his new boots — they looked comfy and dry, but he couldn’t bend over to put them on. The sky blazed in a spectrum of blues and watched over its own reflection in the sound. By the time he arrived at the crest and Barnhill came into view, it had ceased to be George Orwell’s house and had become his own. He had never felt more up to the challenge of being himself.

He was tempted to take a long nap, but lying down and getting up again would be way too painful. He made it to the kitchen for a glass of water and found a sunny spot in the sitting room to read his mail. With some reluctance he opened the strangely shaped envelope made of green paper reminiscent of the papyrus an intern once brought him from Egypt. The return address was printed with soy ink in a curling font designed to appear earthy and earnest and it came from an organization called the Ethos Co-Op of Chicago, Illinois. Before he opened it he knew that it contained a job offer from Bud.

He had not, however, expected the check made out in his name for $50,000.

Bud’s letter began “Dear Raytard” and detailed how his former friend had been so inspired by Ray’s bold decision to move to Scotland that he had arrived at an epiphany concerning the inherent evil of the business model at Logos. Bud had quit his job and opened his own agency, one organized around the principles of ethical responsibility and environmental awareness. Ethos Co-Op dedicated itself to working for progressive companies that focused on issues of local and global sustainability. He wanted Ray to sign on as executive vice president.

The case for returning to Chicago had become more persuasive, though it didn’t pass his notice that the word “nonprofit” was nowhere to be found in the letter.

“I traded in my SUV,” Bud had written. “Can you picture me driving a hybrid! Reuse recycle and all that shit. Please accept this offer. Ethos needs you.”

Ray sipped from his glass and remembered that it contained only water. The scotch had been such a constant in his life that it felt odd to drink anything else. He tucked Bud’s letter back into its envelope and placed it on the mantel instead of in the pile of kindling. There was another greeting card from his mother. The airmail stamp had been cancelled with a brown splotch of his own blood.

He spent the day drinking tea, of all things, and rereading the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Something felt different about the text this time. Something was different. It seemed too convenient to attribute the change to his near-death experience, but it was clear now that he had been so wrong about that book. He saw it now. The appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, the infamous and thorny essay “The Principles of Newspeak,” was in past tense. That meant it was set after the demise of the entire Oceania empire. The appendix hinted at a world after Big Brother.

Orwell was an optimist after all.

Flora was right.

The end of Nineteen Eighty-Four suggested that all the degraded conditions and noise pollution and invasions of privacy people put up with every single day — it could all eventually end. Even after the builders whitewashed over Flora’s graffiti, her message would remain there, hidden yet waiting to get read again some distant day after the current and all-too-real version of Big Brother disappeared.

He put Orwell down and reread the letter from Bud. The physical sensation of holding the check in his hand was not enough to convince Ray of its existence. He stayed up half the night considering his options.

When Molly showed up a few days later, his belongings were packed and Barnhill’s floors mopped clean. She had carried a picnic basket on her new bike, freshly arrived from a mail-order company in Oban, and let herself in without knocking. Ray was fully clothed this time. He sat in the kitchen sipping a cup of black tea.

“What happened to your face?”

He was clean-shaven, with a constellation of bloody toilet paper pieces orbiting his chin. His skin felt raw and taut. Exposed. “Your father is right about at least one thing,” he said. “You really are a little bitch.”

“I see now why he shot you. Anyway, I heard you were leaving.”

She knew where he was going. He hadn’t told anyone yet.

“Who else knows?”

“Everybody. Mind you, it wasn’t that difficult to figure out.”

“It’s funny how an attempted homicide can make you rethink your life.”

“Aren’t we being a bit melodramatic today?”

“Am I the only one who thinks getting shot is kind of a big deal?”

“I heard that the bullet only grazed you.”

“It was worse than that. Anyway, it’s more the intent that bothers me.”

Molly sat and helped herself to his plate of food. “How are you feeling otherwise?”

“The fever’s gone. But look.” He held his arm out and the coffee cup rattled in its saucer. “I have the shakes. It won’t stop.”

“Too much whisky last night?”

“Not enough. I haven’t had a drop since I got home. I’ve been shaking the entire time.”

“I hope you’re up for a walk. I’ve packed a picnic.”

“No way. I’m going to catch the ferry tomorrow and need to get some rest.”

“You are not going to spend your last day on Jura moping around this dreary house. There’s one more place I want you to see.”

“What is it?”

“I said I want you to see it, not hear about it. Jesus.” She ran upstairs to check on her easels and collect the few clothes she had left behind, which she carried back down in a bundle and stacked in the sitting room. “It appears that something is missing.”

“I should’ve asked. Is that going to be a problem?”

“Pack your raincoat and a blanket so we can sit without being eaten alive.”

Another unidentifiable dead animal lay prostrate on the steps. It was enormous — the size of a deer. They stepped over it. The sky was bright and the air sharp in his lungs. A bank of clouds in the distance promised a shower. The two of them walked westward or maybe northwestward at half their usual pace in deference to his wound. It felt more like a leisurely stroll than their typical forced march. The clouds moved in and an advance party of raindrops persuaded them to put their coats on and quicken the pace. It fell in sheets by the time they got to the cliff that overlooked the water and the island of Colonsay. “We never get to see the sunset from here,” Molly said with some disappointment. The storm sat swollen in the sky between them and the sun. “Mind you, I have another idea. Follow me,” she yelled over the sound of the rain and the surf.

Molly found a switchbacking path that led down the cliff and to the beach below. The descent was treacherous with mud and slick rocks. She moved as gracefully as a mountain lion and waited for him at the bottom, then took his hand and led him on farther. A lamb had spilled from the cliff and lay mangled on the ground, where it fed a murder undaunted by their presence. A crow popped out one of the animal’s white eyes and flew off pursued by his friends.

“Here we are,” Molly said. She pointed to the opening of a cave and ran inside. He shuffled after her. The cave smelled of rain and freshly mown hay. Spray-painted graffiti covered the walls and the small fire pit contained some charred beer cans. Molly pulled the blanket from his pack and spread it on the ground at the opening, just beyond the range of the dripping water. He sat with some difficulty. Molly curled up next to him for warmth and pulled one end of the blanket over the two of them.

Even with the ache in his side, Ray felt satisfied now: neither sad to leave Jura nor eager to return to Illinois. He enjoyed the quiet moment in Molly’s company and looked forward with equal parts anticipation and dread to whatever his life would present him with next. “It has occurred to me,” he said, “that I no longer have an email address or even a phone number, but once I get settled I’ll send you my contact info. I can look around for apartments, unless you want to live in the campus housing, which I don’t recommend. You’re going to love Chicago. I mean, it’ll be a little overwhelming at first, but you’ll—”

“I’m not going.”

“—find that. What?”

“Don’t be mad.”

“What do you mean you’re not going?”

“I’ve decided to stay on Jura.”

“Because of your father? You can’t listen to him! You need to decide for yourself.”

“Aye, he was against it, but this is my decision and mine only.”

“What are you going to do? Spend the rest of your life here?” He didn’t like the tone of his voice but didn’t know how to modulate it without sounding like even more of an asshole.

“Maybe I will, mind you. This is my home after all. I want to be a painter … no, I’m already a painter. No fancy university can make me get better at my art the way the sunlight and the sounds and the Paps will. I appreciate everything, Ray, I really do! But I belong here, at least for now.”

Ray felt like he had been shot all over again. Pitcairn had brainwashed this poor girl. There was no other explanation. The scholarship had cost him a fortune in the divorce settlement. Didn’t she understand the opportunity she was throwing away? “Don’t you understand the opportunity you’re throwing away?”

“I think I do. I’ll always be grateful to you, but there’s an opportunity here too.” The rain formed a wall in the mouth of the cave, but it appeared to be letting up. “To be honest, I’m a bit tired of every man I know telling me what I should be doing with my life.”

He closed his eyes and inhaled the musk of the cave and the sweat of Molly’s hair. Here he was, even further off the grid than ever before and outside of time, returned for a moment to a state of bucolic perfection. The rain slowed to a steady drip. Molly exhaled a wheezy snore. He slid her hair off her face and tucked the blanket under her chin. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re absolutely right.”

It was dark when they awoke. Neither of them had moved. “Oh hell,” she said. “I need to get home. My dad’s going to kill me.”

“You and me both.”

Ray stood and the soreness in his back and neck obscured the pain in his side. He helped Molly up. She kept the blanket wrapped around herself.

“I’ll come visit you in Chicago,” she said.

“I’d like that. I’ll need to find a place to live first, though. Speaking of which, my lease of Barnhill isn’t up for a few more months. If you have any more trouble at home you’re welcome to stay there.”

“What about the people from London?”

“If they offer you enough money for the place, take it.”

“I may just do that, thank you. It looks like I need some new art supplies.”

“Yeah, about that.”

Back at Barnhill, he had removed her self-portrait from the bedroom wall and, without asking, rolled it up and packed it with his things to bring to Chicago. It remained unfinished — she never got around to painting her hands or feet.

“I would’ve given it to you if you’d asked, you know. I do want you to have it.”

“Thank you — that means a lot to me. You can finish painting it when you come visit.”

“It is finished, Ray, or at least as finished as I want it to be. Portraits are unlucky here. They say that the woman who gets her portrait painted will never enjoy a day of health ever again.”

“Do you believe that?”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe. I’m glad that at least my image, if nothing else, will get off of Jura. Now I really have to get home. You can find your own way back. Leave my bike in the garage. I’ll get it another time. Look!”

A falling star dripped into view, a hunk of rock that had come too close and got sucked into the earth’s atmosphere to die a fiery death. They watched it burn with its own innate sense of purpose, but it didn’t flicker out. It kept moving, steadily, perhaps in too straight of a line.

“They’re watching us,” Molly said.

“Who?”

“That’s a satellite.”

She was right — the flight path was too perfect to be natural. Only the manmade achieved such pristine linearity. Ray’s precise location at that moment, and at every other moment of his gleefully inconsequential life, could be found and plotted on some celestial map of the cosmos. That had always been true. There had only been the grid the entire time.

“I need to go,” he told her. “Goodbye, Molly.”

She hugged him and headed in the opposite direction, back to her father.

The next day, he awoke with the dawn and set out for a final errand. All of his affairs were in order except for one thing. Wind stirred in the trees. The sheep bah bah-ed at him with contentment, their bells tickling his ears. He smiled into the morning sunlight, and it smiled back at him. His new boots made all the difference in the world, and he regretted not buying them sooner. They were sure to keep his feet dry during even Chicago’s slushiest winter days. He didn’t look forward to those, but he also did. Some wool socks would be essential. Maybe he could score some from a local spinster before he left.

Smoke rose from Miriam’s chimney, so he knocked. “Miriam?” he called. No answer. He knocked again. “Miriam, it’s Ray.” Her dog growled at him from her new prison of barbed wire. It looked like she had grown even fatter. A curtain fluttered open at the next house over, where Mr. Harris’s truck was parked. Ray understood his desire to be left alone and had once shared it, but he gave Mr. Harris a regal wave all the same and the curtains shot closed with grumpy finality. Some people really did want to be by themselves.

Miriam opened the door a crack and blocked Ray’s view of the interior. Her face was covered in sweat, her hair matted to her forehead. “Hello, Ray, this is quite a surprise.”

“Did I catch you at a bad time?”

“No, I’m just dismembering some children so they’ll fit into my cauldron.”

“I’d be glad to help.”

“With all this proper nourishment these days, these vitamins and whatnot, their little bones aren’t as quite brittle as they used to be.” She smiled and wiped at her forehead with a paper napkin. A loud scraping noise came from the direction of the kitchen. “If I might have a moment to straighten up I would be glad to offer you a scone.”

“No, no, that’s not necessary — thank you. I just wanted to say goodbye.”

“Aye, I understand you’re taking your leave, and I hope you didn’t find we Diurachs too unaccommodating.”

“Well I did get shot and thrown into a whirlpool.”

“Aye, I can see how that might be frustrating. Speaking of which, before you go, do stop at the strand facing the Corryvreckan.”

“I know it all too well. In fact, I’m on my way there now.”

“Good, good. Some people will tell you that if you take a stone from that particular strand and bring it home with you, it means that you will come back to Jura one day.”

“I’ll do that. Thank you, Miriam.”

“God bless you, Ray,” she said and shut the door. She appeared to be in some hurry.

“Bye,” he said and there was so much more he wanted to say. He continued on to the island’s northern tip, where he had a date with a whirlpool.

On days like this one, even with the lingering discomfort, out in the sun on the planet’s last unspoiled corner, the amount left to learn felt more like a privilege than a chore. Jura still contained so many things beyond his experience or understanding — but so did Chicago.

The boat Pitcairn had commandeered still bobbed next to the creaking dock. Ray went down to the shore and chose a flat, grey stone to bring home then sat at the end of the pier with his feet dangling over the water. The Corryvreckan gurgled her farewells in the distance.

He pulled the first edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four from his pocket and tore out the first page, crumpled it up, and tossed it like a basketball free throw into the water. He had done the same thing in Chicago with his cell phone. It felt even better this time. Perhaps there was a trend in his behavior. The paper sat for a moment on the surface as if surprised to find itself getting wet, then caught a prosperous current and moved slowly away from the shore. With calm and joyous deliberation, Ray ripped all the other pages out, one after the other, for what had to be an hour or maybe two or three. He watched each page of the appendix float on the surface and drift, ever so slowly, in single file, toward the whirlpool: a fleet of rudderless paper boats carrying the sum of everything he had learned and wished to forget.

THE BELLS TIED TO the doorknob jingled, and Bud walked in. It had only been a matter of time. Ray muted the TV on the wall behind the counter. The White Sox were playing the Tigers. The game had gone on for hours. The Sox had been his father’s favorite team and Ray was praying for them to win. “Hello, Bud,” he said.

“The fuck are you doing, Ray?”

“What does it look like? I’m the proud owner of a drycleaning business. How did you find me?”

“I knew you were back in town when that check cleared. Then I saw your ads on TV Fifty thousand dollars, Ray.”

“Yeah, thanks for that. It was the only way I could get the mortgage on this place. Do you like what I’ve done with it?”

He hadn’t changed all that much other than upgrading the television and having new signs and plastic sacks made. A photo of a young Mrs. Kletzski hung next to the board listing all the prices. The bells tied to the door were new — they had been liberated from the necks of Barnhill’s ovine population.

“That check was an advance against your salary at Ethos. It wasn’t your money yet.”

“That’s strange. It had my name on it. I assumed it was a bonus for the millions of dollars Logos made from my Oil Hogg campaign.”

“You knew perfectly well what that money was for.”

“I wasn’t trying to steal your money. You’re now a twenty-five percent owner of Welter’s Warsh House. I have the paperwork around here somewhere. Our accountant says we may not see a profit for five or ten years. Dry cleaning just isn’t as popular as it once was. People are apparently content these days to throw away their clothes when they get dirty. I’m bringing in just enough business to pay the bills and get those TV spots made. Catchy, aren’t they? The apartment upstairs is mine, though. I’ll show you around sometime.”

“I don’t care about the money, Ray. My problem is with friends quitting on me. You left me hanging.”

“I left you hanging? Tell me this — did you fuck Flora?”

“Is that what this is about? It wasn’t for a lack of trying. She just wasn’t interested.”

“Hard to believe.”

“She said to tell you that she plans to stay in South America more or less forever, but if something changes she’ll look you up. You’re right, though, that I would not have thought twice about selling you down the river just for the chance to sniff her panties.”

“There are plenty here in the back if that’s what you’re into.”

“Dry cleaning? You can’t even keep your own clothes clean.”

“It’s tough to explain, but this is exactly what I want. Real, honest work. These clothes are either clean or they’re dirty. There’s no middle ground, no ambiguity.”

“The fuck happened to you over there?”

“Among other things, I got shot.”

“Did you deserve it?”

“No! I don’t know. Maybe.”

“What the fuck, Ray?”

“I need to finish up here. Come back at seven when I close, and we’ll talk then. I have a bottle of scotch I’d like you to try.”

“Is it worth fifty thousand dollars?”

“No, but it’s a very special single malt distilled in 1984. Even you will be impressed.”

“We’ll start with that and then hit the town. We’ll go see Miss Ukraine. Oh, wait … let me guess. You’ve quit drinking too.”

“No, I’ve definitely dialed it back a bit, but I’d love to go get shitfaced. In fact, that would do me a world of good.”

“That’s a relief. On the way, we should visit Lily at McCrotchety’s. She’s been asking about you.”

“Sounds perfect,” Ray said. The cleanup hitter for the Sox struck out with men on base, sending the game into extra innings. “Damn. Meet me later and we’ll talk.”

“You’re a strange man, Ray-son d’etre,” Bud said. “Now are you going to clean this for me or what?” He handed Ray his overcoat, which felt soft and outrageously expensive. The inner pocket had a stain that looked like the result of an unsecured whisky flask.

“I’m not responsible for garments left over six weeks,” Ray said.

The bells rang again when Bud pulled the door closed behind him. He got erased by the crowds of shoppers on the sidewalk, by the nannies and beat cops and the homeless men whistling happy songs through missing teeth. Summer sent its final breath of old newspapers and fast food bags flying past the windows. A cold, lake-effected winter was on its way, and then spring. Ray un-muted the ballgame, which was still away at a commercial. One of the teams would eventually win and the other would lose, even if it took all night. He busied himself pressing strangers’ clothes and waiting for the jingle of his next customer.