Fun With Problems

The Wine-Dark Sea

ON A VERY FOGGY late-autumn morning, a man named Eric Floss was wandering the quaint streets of a preserved Connecticut whaling town. He found himself walking scrubbed brick sidewalks that fronted the marble steps of exquisite Federal-style houses. Old ironwork bordered gardens grown with lilac bushes and hedged in boxwood. There were warmly lighted shops soon to open for the sale of antique ornamental pieces and vintage furniture. One place had antique willow-patterned china from the ginseng trade. Most of the windows, though, offered midlevel, tourist-standard marine studies. There was scrimshaw from the lathes of the Philippines and here and there some genuine old pieces, crude but authentic. A few shops had rows of jade and amber jewelry for sale and the odd lissome ivory apsara.

Floss had come to the town because it was where a ferry crossed many times a day to Steadman's Island, the only habitable point on a reef of rocky islands, a low-key resort where large holdings and a paucity of space and fresh water had made summering expensive and restricted. One section of Steadman's Island was called Heron's Neck, the site of the island's largest and most ornate summer cottage. The big houses were all called cottages.

It had become generally known that the owner of Heron's Neck, a friend of the Secretary of Defense, had made the place available to his friend for a few days. The Secretary liked to summon his political retainers to remote and inconvenient meeting sites to inform them of his wishes, and the island had become a favorite. That fall week he had called a conference to sic the dogs of his department on some of their opposite numbers in other government agencies.

Eric was a freelancer whose demonstrated unreliability had limited his prospects of journalistic advancement. It was not his reporting or the soundness of his prose that had failed to satisfy, but his tendency to overlook deadlines and even entire assignments once undertaken. This time he had signed for an article on the reaction of the year-round island population to the presence of the policy conference on its shores. The journal was a post-pornographic monthly that had passed into the hands of an old colleague of his. That fall, both Eric and the magazine were attempting to find their way back to seriousness. The magazine was cutting back on its ration of sexual fantasy and hard-core pix, running an occasional piece of political revelation. Eric had nearly stopped drinking and using recreational drugs.

The theory behind the story was that the locals might have some comments worth recording on the combination of mystery and ostentation that surrounded such a high-level, high-security event. Moreover, Eric had what he thought might be a useful local connection. One of the year-round inhabitants, Annie Shumway, was the sister of a woman with whom Eric had traveled in the Middle East. It would be an interesting beginning, he thought, to visit them.

The fact was that his enthusiasm for the story had been waning since he had pitched it successfully to his acquaintance. Still, he thought that if he went to the island something original might present itself. And he would get to see the place and meet Lou's sister. There were no hotels, and both of the bed-and-breakfasts were serving as barracks for the security detail. So he had rallied some effrontery and telephoned Annie, who had, with obvious reluctance, invited him to dinner with her husband and herself.

He was a few weeks out of rehab in southern California, but contrary to its principles he had started smoking the odd joint and getting drunk by six. He had occasional blackouts once more and woke up with strange troublesome women. Still, he had allowed himself to believe that things were working out. Hanging around the classy mainland town, waiting for the next ferry, Eric found the fog, particularly, beginning to bother him.

On the Atlantic side of the island stood a cluster of small saltbox houses where the original farming village of Steadman's Island had been. Some of the houses were as old as the first settlement, and some were new, conforming to the original style. A few barns there had been converted to condos, over ineffectual opposition. Among the most vigorous opponents of the condos — of all exploitive change — were the Shumways, Annie and Taylor, who lived in one of the saltboxes. Taylor Shumway's family went back on the island for centuries. Annie, his wife, came from Oregon, where they had met at a seminar for eco-activists. Annie was not in her first youth, but no one would quite call her middle-aged. She was youthful, peppy and attractive. She wrote a gardening column in the island paper every week and taught two primary grades at the school.

That evening, she and Taylor were expecting Eric Floss, an old boyfriend of her sister Lou's, who had called out of nowhere. He was at the ferry on the mainland, waiting for a crossing. The piggy conference of fat cats on the Neck and the impossible visibility had stalled all transport. Eric claimed to be an alternative journalist who wanted to keep one eye on the conference. "One eye," he had said.

In the late afternoon, fog had settled so thickly over the island that it was difficult to see across the main street of the village or even the neighboring houses. The fog warning at Salvage Reef, off the northeast light, sounded at sixty-second intervals. Annie had never found anything dismal about the groaning of the horn. But in the faded gray light of that afternoon she had an unfamiliar sense of enclosure and isolation. She had never experienced so many days at the heart of such enveloping fog before. At the same time the air was wet and sweet with honeysuckle, bay and wild rose, maybe more fragrant for being confined.

She had been taken by surprise by the sudden necessity of entertaining a guest, a situation she shamefacedly knew she had brought on herself. The Shumways were not dinner-party people. Taylor Shumway, who worked on the ferry, kept a boat and lobster traps; his days began well before autumn light. Annie Sorenson-Shumway did not drink, and Taylor couldn't. He particularly did not enjoy company at home. On her side, Annie was indifferent. She had plenty of social life around her Sunday Meeting, the island school and her botany column in the weekly paper. For Taylor, a pleasurable group activity after work might be driving across the island with his power jacks to help a crew raise the corner of a house. He would leave before the beer was opened.

But that morning, after Eric had made clear who he was, she had impulsively invited him for dinner. He seemed to have sort of expected it, and she was a bit of a people pleaser. Then too, she was plain curious about any guy Lou had taken up with — Looie was a world traveler and collector of what she called "types," but the individuals Annie had met seemed pretty unique. She was also curious about what Eric was on to, as a freelance journalist, in terms of the big-shot gathering on the Neck. She and Taylor had both been activists. Taylor had gone to prison, though it was only drinking that had moved him to hurt anyone.

Annie realized that if Taylor had answered the telephone, he would have told Eric Floss to piss off, or to do something along those lines. She herself had been amazed when Eric had patently angled for shelter. But she had offered him the couch. What else could a civilized person do?

"What the shit?" Taylor had demanded when she reached him between ferry trips.

His manner got her back up, and of course she felt foolish.

"Well, gee," she said, "people dropping in. That used to be all right."

"When was that?" he asked.

On the mainland, Eric paced Harbor Street, trying not to look at his watch too often. Dead time was hard for him. His recent rehabilitation had been partly paid for by a prosperous former girlfriend, a television producer, who had sent him for treatment at her favorite facility. They had treated him at Possibilities for what she called virtual addiction. She used the word "virtual" in the old journalistic way, as a nifty reinforcing adjective. However, Eric's addictions were substantial, to marijuana, alcohol and so on. The docs at Possibilities had pronounced him bipolar, a condition formerly known as manic depression. He had then been virtually imprisoned with loons, and a very expensive confinement it was.

Possibilities was well named, since anything could happen to you there, from being whacked with a chair leg in a locked corridor by a brother or sister bipolaroid to a lightning-fast heave-ho if your money ran out. The idea was to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and you became Mr. or Ms. In Between. There were pills to zonk or stun. There were even pills to encourage, but Eric was not allowed them. Dope was around, but of course getting thrown out was a waste of time and money. Eric managed not to use it. Hitting the street, he had felt ready for sobriety. Some unremembered misstep had betrayed him into his own lower nature.

Annie, the Steadman's Island lady he had spoken to — importuned somewhat — sounded nicer than her sister. Anyway, Eric was used to soliciting contacts and hospitality in a variety of places. For quite a few years he had been traveling the world, scratching a living from his trade. He had written about the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and the Middle East and had seen disturbing things along the way. At times he had experienced the elation of being in new cities and new landscapes that were dangerous and fascinating. As a younger man he had been able to truly rejoice in those things.

In the early afternoon, Eric found his way to the comfortably unpreserved back streets of town. In the shadow of a fog-wrapped railroad underpass he came on a tavern called the Fisher's Inn. It had an anchor over the door, always a good sign. The place was empty except for a couple of old-timers in ragged team jackets and baseball hats. At the Fisher's Inn, where no one bought drinks for Eric, the fog seen through dim windows was seamless. Eric sauntered out and took up headquarters in a yo-ho netting-and-knotboard joint that overlooked the water, or would have if there had been anything to see through the gray shroud. He was waiting for the hour when the public might be carried across the bay. Beefeater was prohibitively expensive in the harbor spot, but Eric allowed himself several. He had drunk more modestly at the Inn. On the walk to the dock he had been shocked to discover two joints of the finest pakalolo in his raincoat pocket. A left hand had faked out the right again.

In a day or two, the conferees at Heron's Neck would hold a press conference on their deliberations at a media center on the mainland. From Eric's point of view, the only interesting thing about the event were the rumors of the Secretary's spectacular mood swings. Insider material, not funny if you were a ragged peasant in the shadow of his gleaming wings. Not funny for his undermanned, under-equipped and underinformed legions either. A few insiders had suggested in print that the main event of the conference might be some maneuvering by the Secretary's enemies to test his grip on things. There would be leaks — controlled burns, as they said in the Forest Service. That kind of thing, even considering Eric's perspective, was hard to resist.

Security officials had canceled a bird census for the duration of the conference, not that anyone could see a bird that week. It was a gesture by the Secretary's office. They were contemptuous of the sort of folks who might object to the cancellation, as they imagined such people. Around the Secretary's office they imagined such people a lot, and felt certain that the fine, all-believing yeomanry they claimed to represent hated such people as much as they did.

The trip over to Steadman's was agonizingly slow. The small two-deck ferry proceeded through swells that presented a glassy surface but set the boat into long fore-and-aft glides. The dope was good for nausea, so Eric found himself a gear box and let the breeze carry his smoke over the wake. There was nothing to be seen except the water; everything else was invisible, even the squawking gulls that attended the ferry. When, after an hour and a half, the boat eased into the island's principal town, Eric had no idea what the place looked like. His first sight of the island as the ferry came about to tie up was of Feds in raincoats on the dock, backed up by armed Navy men in jump suits. He flicked his roach into the harbor.

The houses of town were white clapboard, and there were a couple of old buildings with cupolas out of Currier and Ives. Putting the place together was akin to a blind person's feeling out an elephant, so thick was the going. It was not so hard to find a liquor store. There, a glum Portuguese man sold him two bottles of California cabernet for an all-time record price. The wine would be his house offering, one he ought to have bought off-island. He bought cigarettes too, Marlboros, the red-and-white packs that had once bought taxi rides across emerging nations. These also cost a lot.

The liquor store clerk gave him directions to the Shumways' house, which turned out to be not far but an uphill trudge. He was a little unsteady on the way. After a few minutes of walking he turned to look down on the harbor, but of course it had disappeared behind him. No up, he thought. Neither down nor sideways. It was liberating, the complete obscurity. Past gone, present solitary, future fading out. A crazy little whoop of joy inside. Must be a rush, he thought.

At twelve-step meetings and to nurturing females Eric liked to give the impression that dreadful sights had brought him to the booze- and drug-examined life. He liked, in fact, to give himself the same impression.

In his heart he knew better than to blame his ways on bad experience. No one would convince him that character was fate; he had seen too much of each to believe it. Everyone was tempted by bad choices great and small, everyone was subject to bad luck. But he had always been a boozy, druggy person, and he would have been one had he lived to middle age in the bosom of mercy itself.

All at once he thought he heard laughter, somewhere distant, at the heart of the fog. Laughter and convivial chat, a strong sound carrying many voices. Something about it made him shudder. Then the voices were subsumed in the rattle of dead leaves underfoot and his interior noises. For all he could tell the laughter had started there. Listening for whatever it was, he became aware of the foghorn on the island. He had been hearing foghorns for hours. He incautiously took the second joint out, turned from the breeze and lit it for two quick tokes.

After a few minutes the slope evened out and the blacktop road he followed looked recently surfaced. He saw that there was an old house on his right, fronted by moss-covered old stone, and beyond that a sagging porch with a defunct oil furnace sitting on it. There was a light on in the back. He walked on and saw more houses, widely spaced on both sides of the road. They appeared and disappeared behind him. Then he heard singing, the real thing, a single voice.

Steps on, he came upon a young woman in gardening gloves cutting and gathering flowers, pulling clumps of nettle and pigweed as she worked. She was tall and pretty with graying black hair. No kid was she, but she seemed very youthful.

She looked up and saw him step out of the fog and put a hand to her hair, which was to him — as they said at AA — a trigger. Her eyes were blue, her look unguarded. She seemed to be shy and sweet and much nicer than his former girlfriend.

"Hi, Annie," he said to her. "Eric." They shook hands. "What kind of flowers?"

Annie had chosen mainly asters, zinnias and gerbera daisies, all of them dripping wet. Gathering flowers, which was something Annie did all season long, never failed to remind her of the days in her childhood when she was appalled at cutting them at all. She was practically ten before she could truly believe that they did not experience pain. The thought came back to her in various forms, borne on different memories.

She told him with a smile what kind they were. "I always think they have feelings," she said.

As she straightened up, he asked, "You think the flowers have feelings?"

"Well, not really." She brushed the soil and stems from her hands and smiled.

A chatterbox, he thought. Goofy like Lou, the ex.

"I understand. Too much pain, right?"

Annie affected to laugh heartily and turned away, blushing, toward the door. Eric followed her inside.

Taylor was sipping apple juice from a fruit jar at the kitchen table.

"This is Taylor, Eric," Annie told him.

"Neat," Eric said, glancing at the fireplace, at Taylor, and at the fifty-year-old furniture that had never made its way back to the mainland.

Annie hastened to display the garden flowers to her husband. "What do you think of these, Taylor? They'll work, don't you think?"

Taylor looked over his uninvited guest and burped rudely. He stared at the backpack Eric was removing.

"Good of you to join us, there, Eric."

Eric laughed as politely as he could.

A garlicky vegetable stew Taylor had made days before was simmering on the stove. "Eric is Lou's ex," said Annie.

"I heard," said Taylor.

Though he had passed forty that very summer, there was a quality about Taylor of late lingering adolescence. He kept staring at Eric's backpack.

Outside the kitchen window that looked on Annie's befogged garden, a male cardinal was fiercely attacking his own reflection in the glass. The cardinal was searching for a mate and was determined to drive off rivals. He had become obsessed by the house's windows; a tireless challenger kept appearing in them, matching him cry for cry, dealing him hurtful thumps. The bird's every sally was checked by this relentless enemy. But the love-driven red bird had heart. For days, from misty dawn until the dissolving of the light it had been fighting itself. Annie and Eric looked toward the window.

"Sad," Annie said.

"That's life, isn't it?" Eric said, turning to Taylor. Taylor looked at him without expression.

"It shouldn't be," Annie said.

Annie and Eric turned back to the window and then took a sneaking look at each other.

"Speaking of how life ought to be," Eric said after a moment, "I have some wine for us."

Annie blushed again.

"We don't…" she began.

"We don't drink it," Taylor said sharply. He stood up as Eric took his two bottles of cabernet out of the bag and put them on the table. Taylor took a pair of metal-rimmed glasses from his blue chambray shirt pocket. Then he picked up one bottle after the other and examined them.

"God damn, man," he said softly. He was looking at the price stickers over the labels.

One thing Annie had learned to live with was Taylor's anger. In her case, that anger threatened only her peace of mind because Taylor never hit her. He had, however, served twenty-three months in an Oregon state prison for an act of violence. During the period when she and Taylor had been eco-activists in the Northwest, he had responded to a taunt from a local logger. The response caused him to become one of the few individuals in that state ever charged, under an old frontier law, with the crime of mayhem, which the movement lawyers were able to plead down from felonious assault. Taylor's removable dental bridge had caused disfiguring damage to the logger's nose. Taylor was passionate, and in certain situations he could lose control. Situations involving alcohol were dangerous for him and for others.

"God damn, man," he said again, and smiled. He had never replaced the bridge.

Taylor stood a couple of inches taller than Eric. Thin and tanned, he managed to look frail in spite of his size. He was long-necked, floating a prominent Adam's apple. His eyes were blue and bright. It was impossible not to notice the humps of muscle on his narrow shoulders and the rippling of sinew down the length of his tanned bony arms. He would never look exactly athletic, but the work he did as a deckhand on the island ferry had made him extremely strong. His hands were scarred and callused, the knuckles battered, split, fractured and healed over. He showed a high forehead, prominent cheekbones and a strong jaw. His fair hair was as soft and fine as a girl's, cut short and lying slack on the top of his skull like a tonsured knight's. Annie's sister, Lou, had described him as an ectomorph, a word previously unknown to Annie. It apparently meant a tall, skinny guy who brooded and couldn't drink. That was Taylor.

"Thanks, Eric," Annie hastened to say. "We don't drink wine."

Taylor thrust one of the bottles under Annie's nose to show her what the wine cost. Like everything else on the island, the wine was grossly overpriced. Taylor laid the bottle lengthwise on the table and rolled it casually toward where Eric was standing. Annie made a move to catch it if it fell.

"Wow!" she said. "Thanks anyway," she told Eric kindly. The prices were a little disgusting given the state of the world, but he had only meant to be polite.

"Waste of money," said Taylor. Annie saw that he might be at the point of tossing them outside, breaking them. But Eric had a corkscrew out. He took one of the bottles straight from Taylor's hand and uncorked it.

"Guess I'll have to drink them both then," said Eric, grinning.

Mainly to distract Taylor, Annie hastened to bring Eric a fruit jar.

"He'll just piss it out," Taylor said. "Won't you, Eric?"

"Ah!" Eric said. "But first the buzz! Right, Annie?" He raised his fruit jar to her.

It made Annie dizzy to watch him drain it. Of course it had been a mistake to let him crash at the house — she had known as much at the time. It had been a bad day for Taylor because there had been special trips for big shots on the ferry. Fog had grounded planes.

"Hey, let's eat!" she said with feigned delight. Taylor belched again, set his juice on the table and shambled to the stove. Annie watched him as though she were forcing him there by her will. "Veggie stew," she declared, "always better the second or third day." She looked at Eric, trying to convey anxiety, a warning, something to make him cool it.

Eric poured himself more wine, drank it and stood up.

"Going out for a smoke," he explained. "Be a second." He took the wine with him.

"What?" Taylor asked loudly.

Outside, the breeze seemed only to turn the enveloping fog on itself. The air was sweet. Eric felt excited but confused. What was with the looks Annie was giving him? Did she have a clue how lovely she looked with her guileless Oregon-blue eyes? She seemed innocent but mysterious. Clearly the husband was a menace. He was in danger.

In recent years Eric had tried to internalize a mechanism that controlled his impulsiveness. But he had gone on drinking and smoking too much dope, traveling too much. Strange thoughts assailed him. In Haiti, it might have been, or Indonesia — somewhere that powerful, perhaps infernal, supernatural beings roamed — he dreamed that an unmanageable spirit had entered into him. Flashbacks? Second adolescence on the way down? One never knew.

He smoked one Marlboro after another. Turning toward the Shumways' door, he thought, Make an entrance! An inappropriate urge, like so many. He opened the door dramatically to face them. Annie looked alarmed. Eric marched to the table and opened the second bottle of wine.

"Hey," he said. "Sorry, bad habit."

"Well," she said, "it reheats."

Taylor served the stew in silence, a somnambulist waiter. Eric noticed that the cardinal's struggles continued into darkness. He thought that unusual.

"Veggies, right?" Eric asked them. "Love 'em! Never eat anything with a face. Seriously," he asked them, "I mean, what is meat? A certain consistency to the teeth. A rub for the gums. Like chomp chomp, right? No more to it. Hey, guys," Eric said, "how about some more plonkorino?" He poured some into his fruit glass. "Overpriced? Yes! And yet? Not so bad."

Taylor had begun to smile unpleasantly. Eric looked at the plate before him. He took a forkful of the vegetable stew and put it in his mouth, as much to silence himself as anything else. He glanced at Annie. She seemed strangely calm.

"Hey, Eric," Taylor said finally, "why don't you tell us what you're really doing out here." Eric shrugged and kept his eyes on his plate and swallowed. "He's a wanderer," Taylor told his wife.

A wanderer, Eric thought. That was a good one. "The conference," he said. "At Heron's Neck."

"You ain't part of that shit, are you?"

"No." Eric tried to explain. "I came out to see… what local people had to say."

"Local people?" Taylor asked. "What do you mean by that?"

"He doesn't mean anything," Annie said.

"I got nothing to say," Taylor told him. "Annie's got nothing to say neither."

"I might, Taylor."

"I should have been here earlier," Eric explained. "Fog. And I had you guys' address from Lou. And I wanted to maybe meet her friends. So I thought I'd call and say hi. So here I am. Tomorrow…"

"On your merry way?" Annie Shumway asked. "Up to the Neck and the conference? Hey, this ratatouille turned out really well."

"Well, no," Eric said.

She was watching Eric being overcome by the wine. He was ever so slightly like Taylor. Like her dad too, though not quiet and surely not violent. These people shouldn't drink. Like her dad. Scandinavian family on her side. Surely not violent, but you could never tell. She had discovered once that drunks were boring and unpleasant, and she had left Taylor once, before they lived on the island. Then the guy she had gone with had told her: Boy, that asshole — meaning Taylor — was work. He was your job, not a lot more than that. She had thought, Oh, I don't know. Because he, that guy, was also boring and unpleasant, and violent sometimes himself, not as brave as Taylor, and that turned out to count with her, as it did with most women. He was not committed to the world outside himself the way Taylor was.

She got tired of the guy mocking Taylor; she came to see it as mockery against herself. So love has no pride like the song says, and she had found out how ruthless she could be in a worthy cause, and she had gone back to Taylor, who took her back quite lovingly. They had moved to the island, and she had made people unhappy and she had helped people and she thought helping felt better, as was well known. So that was love for Annie.

"Veggies pretty good," she told the men. "Very nice, Taylor."

"The bird life is interesting here too." The word for Taylor's smile, Eric thought, was grim. Unless he had started imagining it, the cardinal was still at the window. "You a bird watcher too?" the grim ferryman asked. "You know," he asked his wife, "you remember the last pack of weird bird watchers we had?" He turned the rictus back on its subject. "They were Feds, Eric. They were government spies. Now, you say you're here for that conference. You say you're talking to local people. What's up, partner?"

"Well, not really." Eric proposed to explain himself further.

"Maybe you know something we don't, Eric."

Perhaps because of the bird outside, the dark Paraclete descended on Eric once again.

"Know something you don't?" He turned to Annie with a radiant countenance, then to Taylor. "That may be."

Taylor trembled.

"Taylor probably doesn't believe a lot of what he reads in the papers," Eric ventured, addressing Annie.

"You got that right," said Taylor. "I disregard the trash."

Annie watched, less anxiously. Having seen these situations before helped. Fraught as they got, they usually ended with some bloodless antler-rattling when she rallied herself to protect Taylor's feckless prey.

Eric had fallen under the spell of his demon.

"This is wise," he said. "It's not just a matter of slanted perspective. It's a matter of arrant fictionalizing. They rarely get caught."

"He says it himself!" Taylor declared. "Admits it's all bullshit!"

"I've never heard it put that way, Taylor, have you?" Annie asked. "I want to hear." And she did, if she could not change the subject.

"Like those planes!" Taylor did not raise his voice but spoke with great passion. "That was faked, wasn't it? The planes into buildings. For oil, wasn't it?"

"There were no planes," Eric said.

"But wait," Annie exclaimed.

"I knew it!" Taylor shouted. He half rose from his chair. "No planes whatsoever!"

"No, Taylor," Eric said. "No planes." The force within him drove him to assume a wise condescending expression. An air, perhaps, of punditry. "Annie? There were no planes, do you understand?"

"But people were killed," Annie said. Taylor, triumphant, only grew more angry.

"Annie? Taylor? Have either of you ever heard of fractal imaging?"

"I have," Annie said. "I think." Taylor looked as though he were hearing something he had always known without quite realizing it.

"Did you know," Eric asked, "that in professional wrestling the outcome was always agreed to? The referee called the signals. This did not mean that people didn't get hurt." Eric chuckled. "Oh yes, Annie, people got hurt. Even killed. Did you know that the former Soviet People's Army accepted a four percent casualty rate in maneuvers?"

"This wasn't the Russians," Taylor said. "This was no maneuver."

Eric looked at the empty fruit jar and spoke thoughtfully. "That depends, Taylor, on what you mean by a maneuver. Think about it."

"What are you trying to do, man," Taylor asked, "make some bullshit excuse or something?"

"No no no, Taylor, don't misunderstand."

Annie watched Eric carefully. Taylor took a deep breath and puffed through closed lips. Eric leaned backward in his uneven captain's chair with an air of complacency.

"Watch the chair, Eric," Annie warned, but Eric took no notice.

"I've been doing this all my professional life, my two friends. I've been — you might say — behind the scenes. Listen to your Uncle Eric, as I'll call myself tonight. Whatever you think is happening, be certain it's not happening. Nothing you ever see or hear is correct. Shit, it's not even real. See, some are content. Others confused. Some shocked into a dreadful unprotesting silence. Some incensed, filled with impotent rage. All persuaded."

"I'll give you impotent rage," Taylor said softly.

"It's a funny idea," Annie said. "But our rage isn't impotent at all, I'm afraid. Although," she said to Taylor, "we're very peaceful people. We've accepted peace."

"You!" Taylor kept his seat but turned corpse-white. "Maybe it's your job to keep people persuaded! Could be that's what you're doing here."

Eric laughed.

"Think it's funny, Eric? You gonna tell me those planes weren't part of a U.S. government conspiracy? Invented in every detail?" He raised his voice. "And fuck the people! A monster conspiracy, right?"

Eric looked into Taylor's small, very blue eyes with an expression of serious sympathy.

"That's precisely what I am telling you, Taylor."

"The phone calls! The whole thing invented by baby-raping motherfuckers. And you, man — who we don't want in this house — I can tell you're one of them!" He breathed heavily. "Second plane! Third plane! Bullshit!" he shouted.

Annie knew the one thing she could not do was threaten to leave the room or actually leave it. To her surprise and dread, Eric seemed oblivious to the danger. He laughed into Taylor's uncomprehending rage, his eyes wild. He looked desperate until his gaze settled on the fire.

"It's all conspiracy," he said to the fire, then looked to Annie. "It's all conspiracy, Annie. I can explain it for you."

Neither of them answered him. Annie wondered briefly if she might hear some valuable information. She thought it unlikely.

"You guys heard about history being mere fiction? That's the way it's always been. Heard of the Romans?" Eric demanded. "They never existed!" He raised his voice. "It's baloney. I mean there's Rome, right. But there never were any Romans with togas and shit, and helmets and feathers. A fairy tale out of the Vatican Library. They even dreamed up the idea of a Vatican Library. There isn't one!"

Taylor and Annie exchanged looks.

"The Greeks! There weren't any Greeks, not ever. I know there are Greeks, but they're not the Greeks. I've been to so-called Greece. Plato? Mickey Mouse's dog. Babylonians. Israelites? The pyramids are like forty, fifty years old, Annie. Right, Taylor? This shit is all made up by the government. Once more unto the breach, dear friends — what a laugh. You think people in iron suits rode around on horses? Horse shit is more like it. Don't give up the ship? I mean — come on!"

Annie became giddily curious to hear what he might say next. It was a kind of intoxication.

"Why?" she asked Eric. "Why do they do it?"

Taylor watched him with what Annie knew to be a gossamer web of caution he might cast off in a moment.

"Why?" Eric shouted. "Why do they do it? To fuck up you and Taylor!" He rose from the table and staggered toward their sofa, half paralyzed with mirth. "You're on all the lists!"

When Eric lay unconscious, Annie half dragged her husband into their bedroom. "You stop where you are!" Annie told Taylor when she had him behind the closed door. "He's passed out and I'm not going to let you kill him in my living room. Forget about it."

"The prick is still laughing," her husband protested.

Annie opened the door a crack and peeked out at Eric, who remained unconscious on their sofa.

"He's dead to the world! Let him be. He'll be gone tomorrow."

Assured of her control, she leaned against him.

"Come, baby. Come on to bed, sweethome."

She got under the handsome white-and-yellow sunburst quilt her friend Vera Gold had done in Boston. Taylor sat down on the bed and slowly undressed. But in a moment he was on his feet again, raging. She knew, however, that it was unlike Taylor to attack in his underwear. He was physically quite modest. When he was settled beside her she took up her night's reading, which involved the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson.

"What does he mean, 'the lists'?" Taylor asked.

"Honey? Do you not see that he's a crazy? He's sort of a homeless person, I think."

"I think maybe we should call Lou. Find out if he really knows her."

"Taylor," Annie said, "if anyone would come up with such a guy, it would be Lou."

"I don't like it, Annie," Taylor said. "That conference happens. Then this jerkoff turns up. Then he says we're 'on the lists.'"

"Taylor, everything is not connected. Shit happens, right?" Annie was not sure this was the explanation for it all. It would have to do.

In the morning, somewhat to their astonishment, Eric and his bag had vanished. Their dinner table was clean and scrubbed, the dishes all washed and stacked. Eric had left a daisy and a wild rose on the table, and a note with them that read:

"Daisies are better than meat, and roses are sweeter than wine."

"Fuck's that mean?" Taylor asked her.

When she went outside the fog was still heavy on the island. As she drove Taylor to the ferry slip they passed Eric slogging unhappily downhill.

"It's him!" Taylor said, craning his neck to look.

"Yup." Annie said.

"Well, at least you didn't stop to give him a ride."

"At least he's not riding a black helicopter," said Annie.

At the ferry slip armed men in flak jackets who looked as though they actually belonged in black helicopters had more or less barricaded the dock.

"You're late for school," Taylor told his wife as he put his ID card around his neck. "Better rush."

"I'm late anyway." She watched Taylor hold up his papers in a surly way for the agents. They looked after him briefly as he walked up the gangway.

Annie drove back through town and up the hill toward home. On the way she passed Eric making slow progress down. She made a two-point turn and pulled up beside him.

"C'mon, Eric," she said. "I'll give you a ride as far as town." Eric threw his bag in the back and climbed into the passenger seat.

"Do you remember us?" she asked him. "Taylor and me?"

"I remember you."

"Thanks for the daisy," she said. "Hey, you're the height of weirdness."

"Right."

"You were living dangerously last night."

"Yeah. I blunder into that." As they rounded a bluff over the ocean, going slowly in the bad visibility, Eric said, "I fell in love with you. You're beautiful."

She laughed.

"But really," Eric said. He seemed close to tears. "I love you, Annie."

"Yeah? You're funny. Last night you were a scream."

"Didn't you feel it?"

"I'll take you as far as town," Annie said. "Don't forget your bag."

"But didn't you?"

"I'm attracted to you," she said. "That's true."

He raised his hand to his forehead. "So?"

"So nothing," she said.

On Heron's Neck that morning the Secretary was cross. When the steward came knocking he swore at the man.

"Aye aye, sir," the steward said soothingly through the door. Of course they were Navy stewards and that was naval usage, but it was not a phrase often heard outside the uniformed branch. Then, from a distant corridor, what sounded like a disrespectful utterance echoed for a second or two. Some barbarous holler, maybe in Tagalog. It was strange and it made the Secretary angry. Certain arms of the naval intelligence service believed an Austronesian-speaking spy agency was providing Moro jihadis with information on naval operations. It was similar to the Mormon yeoman spies the Joint Chiefs had run in the Nixon days and to the Mossad frames that functioned with American collaborators under several Israeli governments.

The fog was thicker than ever. There was a breeze spinning the mist but it seemed not to help, and the settled damp looked dirty to the Secretary. No poetry in this soiled cotton blanket. The Secretary actually wrote poetry. One poem began:

If I manifest manhood'S pride

Yet I know its pain, its secret

Griefs…

Not much poetry in anything that day, though. And he had the odd feeling that the night before, his six-month plan had been brushed aside politely. Better, he thought, to have kept his mouth shut and waited for signals.

There seemed no question of flight this Monday. Coast Guard cutters prowled the fog for foolhardy windsurfers, lost sport fisherman, disoriented boaters. The Navy's small boats were one cape away. The Secretary ordered that the ferry be chartered again. His security detail drove him to the pier.

"I guess it didn't occur to you to provide for this," he said to the chief of his detail as they drove over the moor. Depressing dark green vegetation, what you could see of it.

"Sir" was all the agent said. A swarthy man, short hair treated at the top in some contemporary fashion. The Secretary looked at him long enough for his stare to register. "I suppose that's not your job." The damn automated foghorn kept sounding its cadences as it had in and out of his anxious dreams.

"Transport confirmed at the seat of government, Mr. Secretary."

A gruff military type, the Secretary thought. More gruff than ought to be allowed. The Secretary wanted some explication of the agent's jargon but thought better of it. He knew enough to recognize it as an unfavorable portent. Everyone seemed ill-tempered, even people who had no right to be.

On Heron's Neck, the Secretary had spent an uneasy night, though not for want of medication. He had lain awake a long time, and just when he began to drop off, a steward rapped quietly but insistently at his door. The steward knocked quietly out of discretion, but also because, awakened suddenly, the Secretary sometimes shouted. Even screamed, the stewards told each other, and the word passed into use from the Secretary's households into government and political circles. A woman he happened to know who had called him owlish had also referred to him as Screamin' Newton. Someone had managed to let him know this, a false friend, a subordinate who had not been well-intentioned toward either of them. The word was that the pressures were getting to him.

While the Secretary waited in his vehicle on the dock, his security detail's chief and Captain Negus of the MV Squanto were having a bad-tempered, pointless exchange over the gangway's having been down all night. The chief of security had angered Negus by insisting the captain had been ordered to secure it.

"Wasn't by you," Captain Negus said.

"No, it wasn't by me, Ace. Personally, not by me. But you were ordered to keep the vessel secure with the gangway up. That didn't get done, did it? So guess what?"

Captain Negus did not like to be dressed down by people in sunglasses, which, off season, he took as a sign of moral inauthenticity. He was a buoyant soul, pretty easygoing but not used to scoldings. When the local Coasties checked his underway on-board passenger numbers or the supply of children's life jackets, the atmosphere was not chummy, but it was respectful, and there were handshakes without snipe or snip or snot like with the goddamned Heron's Necks. Captain Negus did not like being asked to "guess what?" because it brought to mind his unhappy childhood. Least of all did he like being addressed by a younger man as Ace. Captain Negus was proud of his past military time, although he shared several attitudes with Taylor Shumway, who was after all his second cousin.

"You'll have to tell me, mister. I ain't much of a guesser."

What the gruff agent delighted in telling him was that the boat would have to be gone over completely again, big spaces and small spaces, because the enemy's devices came in all shapes and sizes. His crew would have to have their papers checked again. It would take a lot of goddamn time and the Secretary would have to wait and the scheduled customers would have to take the ferry after his. When they walked out from under the car deck, the rain was falling harder and the security detail had put on their lettered rainwear and were reading the crewmen's laminated IDs again. A Coast Guard engineman, a boatswain's mate and one of the detail went through the vessel's spaces for the second time.

After the security detail finished with the captain and crew and allowed them behind the auto barrier, the Secretary got out of his car and began measuredly pacing the plank section of the pier. He was so angry that he found it necessary to imagine subordinates, inadequate ones, close by. It was better than feeling alone. Sometimes, alone in silence, he would imagine dialectical conflicts with enemies, turning their taunts against them, making them out to be utter fools. Of course they were imaginary. Two agents monitored the ovoid orbit of his pacing.

The rain eased again. Soon segments of blue appeared overhead. "What do they pay these weather dudes?" someone in the waiting group asked. "They should stick to balloons or drones," someone else said, and a third person muttered under her breath. But they did not seem to be changing arrangements. The Secretary continued his rotations.

When it became plain to the small civilian crowd that no one would share the Secretary's boat in any weather, folks began sauntering away. Some strolled toward the pretty town, some to see if they could reclaim Heron's Neck.

Captain Negus and Taylor Shumway stood on the A deck, one up from the car deck, looking at the scene. Scully, a boozy but efficient deck sailor from away, stood beside Jimmy Slaughter, the dockmaster, who was very short and fat. Jimmy never went to the mainland, and for that reason never bothered about his few yellow teeth, which were mostly lower incisors. His appearance annoyed the senior menials at Heron's Neck, which cheered him somewhat. Jimmy had two assistants, his children. One was Jin, the pretty blonde in the Bosox cap on the dock. The other was Jimmy Slaughter Junior, a youth with his father's shape but with fresher tattoos and the island's first, only, and apparently last Mohawk. Both male Slaughters had been impressed for the trip across.

"Son of a bitch tells me I ain't allowed onto my own goddamn boat all night," Captain Negus said.

"Lookit the Secretary or whatever," Scully said. "Fuck-face dimwit. Turkey."

"Jeez," Jimmy Slaughter said, "gimme a passenger load of drunks anytime over these weasels." He shook his head at them, causing one security agent to frown from the dock.

"Yah, well," Jimmy's cocky son told his father. "Good money for this, right?"

"Ya," the captain said, "you get a receipt but ya gotta wait for it. Your fuckin' fuel's twice as much by then. Taxpayers don't get it. Never will. Fuckin' nation of sheep."

"'He calleth his own sheep by name,'" Taylor said rather bitterly.

"So? That there's in the Bible or what?" Scully asked. But Taylor was too amazed and upset to answer. He had recognized a man on the dock as his recent guest, Eric. He began to tremble.

Some of the disappointed passengers and their friends were being accosted by Eric with a notebook. They appeared to appraise him as a nobody at best. Eric also approached some of the politicians, who with their wives graciously eased around him with sour looks. One politician wished him a pleasant morning. Another actually said that it was good to see him again. But it became obvious to the Secretary's detail, if not to the Secretary himself, that Eric's spindle-legged progress was directed toward that official.

Scully was trying to engage Taylor for reassurance. The kid had his fits, not that he couldn't work right through them. No one could say he wasn't a good worker. Scully was also trying to engage Captain Negus's eye.

"Know what?" Scully said. "Now they took Johnny Damon down there and made him look like a fuckin' salesman." By "down there" Scully meant New York or Washington or anywhere. Scully called Cape Ann "down there" and the Bay of Fundy "down there."

"You're right," Taylor said, but he never lost sight of Eric. His thoughts were confused but his anger was not in the least diminished. "I'll be a son of a bitch," he said. No one responded to this.

Scully went on about Johnny Damon.

"Fuckin' Steinbrenner," he cawed. "Says he looks good now, he looks like a Yankee." He noticed Taylor's evil eye on the pier. "I kinda liked it when Johnny Damon looked sort of like you, Taylor."

Below them, the Secretary was screaming at Eric. Eric was trying to smile. But the Secretary simply kept screaming, halting some of the in-crowd — though only for a moment — in their tracks.

"Look at the little rat," the Secretary screamed. The chief of security put his weight against the Secretary as if assisting him to stand. He might also have seemed to be holding him back. Ignoring the Secretary, two other agents, one male, one female, were taking Eric down.

"Why are they doing that to him?" Taylor asked.

"They better do that on town property," said Negus. "I don't want that crap on the Squanto. A passenger got certain rights."

"Stay down, sir," said the female agent as the Secretary carried on. They succeeded in leveling Eric to the wet pavement. Other agents came over quietly. The one in closest custody of Eric was a black woman in a gray pantsuit.

"I wanted to especially ask you," he told the woman. "I hoped we could talk."

"You lucked out." She lifted Eric's leg as though she were about to make a wish on him while her colleagues kept him prone. She ran cupped hands up the khaki pants, ripped out the cuffs where they had been sewed and twisted Eric's leg to rotate it on the hipbone, each twist eliciting a groan. Then she let the leg fall.

"When's the last time you ate, sir?" she asked him. Eric mistook her question for solicitude, but it was just profiling.

"Christ," Taylor asked no one special, "t sn't he one of them or what?"

"Shit," said Jimmy Slaughter Senior, "you fuckin' got me. Don't seem they like him a lot."

The town constable's patrol car, which had been idling behind a taffy stand, rolled out to receive Eric. The chief security agent, the one Captain Negus particularly disliked, was trying to make himself heard in the pilothouse, turning colors, dancing, silently singing, waving his hands alternately in menace, supplication, inviting harmonies. He wanted the captain to get the boat under way. The Coast Guard had driven their Secretary, invincible within the vehicle, thirty feet onto the car deck. The security agent refused to stop capering below the wheelhouse.

Negus buried it all under the sounding of his vessel's horn. He hardly looked down at the agent, who was half kneeling, holding his ears.

On the pier Eric was smiling dementedly.

"Well I'll be goddamned," Taylor said. "That dipstick thought it was a joke."

"He was over your house last night, I heard," Jimmy Slaughter said.

Taylor grunted.

As they pulled away from the pier, Officer Ussolini, the constable, drove Eric slowly up the hill in his squad car. "I thought he was one of them," Taylor told Scully. They were swabbing an interior passage that had been soiled by the authorities' unnecessary second inspection.

"They're all one of them," Scully said. "Eat from the same trough. Fuck their little differences, they ain't no friends of mine." He paused and leaned over his swab. "You all right, kid?"

Taylor kept swabbing, trying to dig the mop deeper into the steel deck than was possible or the work called for. When he had worn himself down he stepped out through the hatch onto the ladder that led to the wheelhouse and looked out over the ocean. There was a fair wind up, the sky clearing fast. Scully spotted Taylor in his half reverie and winked at Jimmy Junior three ladder steps above them. Taylor was in deep-think mode.

"Guy was okay," he said quietly to Jimmy Junior, "once he stopped drinking and trying to grow weed out west."

In his reverie Taylor was pondering Eric. Just a nihilist. Nihilists, Taylor believed, were the living dead. They couldn't take a punch and you couldn't wake them up with one. Whatever made them the way they were made them allergic to light, so they lived their lives outside it, laughing down holes. No wonder this Eric had transformed himself into the world's biggest asshole. Wasn't even his fault. And that was why he was so ugly and stupid and clammy and walked and talked and drank and mocked like a fool. Dead to grace. All of it suspended, withdrawn, none within, none without. But, he thought, Annie was wicked smart and you needed to pay attention to her at times. She had done well, Taylor considered, to spare Eric the beating of his life.

"Look at that bastard," Scully said to Taylor. "Looks like a fat turkey, don't he?"

"That's about it," Taylor said. His attention turned to the Secretary, who was walking to lean on the car deck's rail. You can't teach a man like that through mercy, Taylor thought. Born to kill — kill the grass they walk on and their own kind. Then you got a lot of them never knew a goddamn thing except what some flunky told them that they wanted to hear and they never so much as thought about it again.

Scully and Taylor looked off to starboard and saw an old swordfishing boat, all lines and shrouds and pulpit, running toward the ferry harbor. The fog was clearing as fast as your eyes could handle it.

"Holy shit," said Scully. "How long since you saw one of them? There ain't even any more swordfish."

"Sportfishing," Taylor explained. "Too much time and money. Now, the old man" — he meant Negus—"could tell you how they ran thirty, thirty-five of them sweethearts from Block Island Sound to Nova Scotia. Right outa this harbor."

The Secretary stood against the rail of the car deck between two worried-looking agents, the Afro-American woman and a younger man. The agents' concern did not seem to center on the Secretary in any personal way, but to involve the things around them, spare, uncomplicated things that seemed to menace them — the ocean, the clearing sky, car vibration from the ferry's engines.

"I need more air," the Secretary told his guardians. None of the three looked at the others.

"Where would you be comfortable, sir?" one of the agents asked.

The Secretary looked up the ladder toward the next deck. Taylor and Scully were working just above that one, right below the wheelhouse.

"Would you like to sit on a bench outside, sir?" the young man asked. "There's a row of benches topside."

"He's speaking to me like I was a geriatric patient," the Secretary complained to the woman. "I'll tell you where I want to go."

The younger agent led the way up to the A deck. The woman climbed behind. Jimmy Slaughter Junior popped his head out of the hatch to have a look.

"You people have to be there?" the young agent called up. Captain Negus heard him on the bridge, looked down through the glass and swore at him.

"No," he muttered, "we'll just let you shitbirds drift over to Portugal."

The Secretary took a seat at the end of the row of outside benches. This left the young male agent with no place to sit, so he manfully placed his hands on the backing of the seat row and stood to the Secretary's right. The young woman stood behind them.

The Secretary turned his head to fix the agents with his raptor's eye.

"Sometimes," he said, "I wonder if I get the best of you people."

The woman in the pantsuit flushed under her dark skin.

"Sir, the presidential detail…" she began. Her colleague was violently shaking his head to caution her. From farther down the A deck the chief agent was walking toward them, arms folded.

Then the Secretary leaped to his feet. He pointed up at Taylor.

"You stupid long drink of water," he screamed. "You useless little scut runner. You're staring at me!"

The agents leaped to their feet, but the Secretary was halfway up the metal stairway to the hatch where Taylor was polishing brightwork. Taylor was taken by surprise. The younger agents were coming up fast, the chief agent behind them. The victim of his own astonishment, Scully froze and stared.

"You murdering dog!" Taylor shouted back at the Secretary. "Shittin' up our island while mothers' sons die! You goddamned pirate." Scully backed down the ladder, keeping an eye on them.

"You faggot," the Secretary yelled at Taylor. "Think you push me around? You measly punk." The agents struggled with him in vain. He commanded the strength of madness.

Taylor's recollection of the struggle would always be compounded of confusion and a lust to kill. His veins and muscles were engorged for combat, but his arms still trembled. He was so surprised and angry he could not make his hand obey his own strength. Next, to his disbelief, he was airborne, falling and headed straight for the water below.

Captain Negus killed the engines and wheeled to port. Scully was shouting. The whole crew came to the rail one deck down, all of them shouting at once, "Man overboard!" as the young agents looked on. Scully turned on the Squanto's emergency siren and slid down the rails of the inboard ladder. Everyone took off for their man-overboard stations. The two youngest agents, male and female, were in a tangle at the foot of the ladder.

The Secretary raised his arms to heaven, looking wild-eyed and triumphant. Captain Negus's repeated blasts of the ship's horn were confusing to everyone.

The Secretary's face was as bright as Moses' own. Laughter foamed and bubbled in his throat and spilled over his teeth. He had lost his glasses.

"Did you see that? Pathetic punk of a loser. Tried to kill me and got his own skinny ass wasted."

In the water, not as cold as he had feared, Taylor felt himself slipping toward the Squanto's hull. The green-painted freeboard below the fender rose and fell above him like a living wall; she was underloaded and high in the water. With all his strength Taylor set off in a rowing backstroke to put ocean between himself and the hull, the slowing screws aft. Falling, he had sunk deep, but he was quick and at home in the water. The Squanto hurried past him as though she were fleeing for the ferry dock. He rested on his back and breathed regularly.

The agents and the crewmen on the Squanto tried to carry the Secretary down to the row of seats below.

"Don't move him right now," the chief agent said. "Keep him still."

"Did you see it, you men? Got his own skinny ass wasted."

The Secretary struggled with his bodyguards, attempting to assault Taylor again. The chief agent looked up at Captain Negus.

"Let's get this thing to Quonset Point," he said. "There'll be an ambulance."

"We got a man in the water, officer," Jimmy Slaughter told the agent. "I think we best get him back."

They did not have to put a boat over to get Taylor aboard. Jimmy Junior and Scully guided him back with marlinspikes and hauled him over by force of arms. Scully brought blankets and coffee from the galley. The agents had stayed beside the Secretary, who sat in a swoon of triumph. His screams, celebrating his strength and overcoming, echoed off the metal bulkheads. He declined coffee in order not to be interrupted and even refused a blanket.

Scully and the crew looked on while the agents took Taylor's coffee from his hands and tossed it over the side. Two of them bent his arms behind him and forced him to his knees on the deck. One slid plastic handcuffs over his wrists.

"You're under arrest for assault on an officer of the United States cabinet and on federal officials," the young woman informed him.

Negus, who had sent Jimmy Junior up to take the wheel, interrupted her reading of Taylor's rights.

"Fuck you doin'?" he asked her.

The woman blazed up at him. "You got a problem, sir? You stand aside or you're going with him."

"Listen, Captain," the senior agent said wearily. "Just get this thing to Quonset Point. We got an ambulance and backup there."

Captain Negus looked at his watch.

"We ain't going to Quonset Point," he told the agent. "Ace! Officer! Quonset Point's over two hours aboard this motor vessel. I got a crewman freezing cold and maybe injured. I'm going to the island Coast Guard station."

"Sir," said the agent in charge, "they don't have what we require there."

"I know what they got there, Ace. They got a chief corpsman. The victim got a wife there."

"The victim?" the agent in charge asked.

The young woman stood as if transfixed. She spoke rapidly and mechanically.

"We'd have to get a helicopter for the Secretary's safety," she declared. "We can't take the perpetrator in the same aircraft or vehicle. I haven't read this man his rights!" she said, turning toward Taylor as though he were unoccupied space. "I haven't finished reading the subject his rights."

"I know my rights!" Taylor shouted. Scully came out of the galley with another cup of coffee for him and a replacement blanket. In an after hatchway, the Secretary was locked in silent struggle with a much larger agent, and the others turned to watch him. After a moment the big man prevailed and drew the Secretary out of the hatchway.

"I seen it," Scully told them all. "Kid just passed a remark. Crazy old fuck threw him over."

"We all saw it," the captain said, although he had not, really. "Kid just passed a remark."

When they tied up, the Secretary was free of restraint though closely observed by his guardians. The crewmen were telling the agent in charge that they had all seen it. Taylor had simply passed a remark. The agent in charge seemed to be writing it down. On the dock, people took pictures of the Secretary's triumphant turn around the top deck. He was smiling broadly. But suddenly his mood changed. He began to snarl and swear at the small crowd.

"Sir," one of the agents asked the cabinet officer, "would you like to come down and take it easy?"

"Like hell," said the Secretary. "Feeling fine. I'm not afraid — we have to defend ourself from fanatics. Little bastard!" he screamed. "Scum of the earth! Ha ha!"

Officer Ussolini took Captain Negus's report over the satellite phone. He pulled up in his squad car, lights flashing. Negus went down to the pier to talk to him.

"What's the matter with him?" the island cop asked. "He go nuts or something?"

"Nuts? He thrown Taylor Shumway off the ferry."

Ussolini stared at him.

"So?" he asked after a minute. "Is there a complaint?"

"I got a complaint. I don't know about America in general."

"You mean he just tossed Taylor over? Without no provocation."

"Wasn't any. Old guy's bad-eyeing Taylor. Kept him from work. Interfered with him. You know Taylor. He passed a remark."

"Jeez."

"Next thing the guy puts Taylor in the drink. No provocation, not particularly, no. His own detail tried to stop him."

"This is a high-ranking individual," Ussolini said.

"Christ," the captain said, "that's the whole point, ain't it?"

While they talked, one of the agents walked over to the squad car.

"We'd appreciate it if this incident was kept confidential," the man told them.

"Yeah, what am I supposed to tell the company? What do I tell the Coasties?"

The agent was annoyed. "We'll take care of that, boss. Don't worry about it."

"Lot of people seen it," Negus said.

"Don't take it on yourself — you know what I'm saying?"

On the top deck of the ferry, the Secretary seemed to be in flight from his own security detail. The chief agent looked around uncomfortably. His eye fell on Eric, who looked disheveled and was walking up to the pier.

"Who's that guy? Didn't you have him in custody?"

"We're not holding him. He's just some writer," Ussolini said.

Approaching the gangplank now, the Secretary seemed to be edging away from his guards, who were moving subtly to block his path.

Negus and the officer watched Eric. He was looking for his glasses, which were hanging from his shirt collar.

"He's a freelance reporter. He's on assignment for Roxy magazine."

"Roxy?" Negus asked. "I thought they were a fuckbook."

"That's what I thought. But I talked to this woman editor — sounded educated. Like she had clothes on."

"What do you know!"

"I called Sheila, too, to come down." Sheila Toolin was the all-season doctor on the island. "And you know what? They said forget about it. They got their own doctor."

"Keepin' quiet about it, ain't they?"

"I hope someone told Annie."

"I told her," the cop said, shaking his head. "Bells of hell, Delbert, you didn't want to be there for that." Ussolini looked up the hill. "She'll be coming down with Sheila. They better get the old fucker off island. Anyway, I bet ya Annie gets it in the paper next week. Me, I gotta write a report. Them Secret Service, they'll be scattered to the winds of the world. I gotta live here."

"I wonder how much of a screwball old Eric over there is. Hey, Eric!" Negus beckoned Eric with the crook of a finger. "You do stuff off the record?"

"Of course," Eric said. "I never got anyone in trouble for talking to me." This was not altogether true. Eric could be quite discreet, however. "Did the Sec really throw Taylor off the boat?"

Officer Ussolini looked troubled.

"Wait a second, Del," he said.

"Word's gettin' out, Charlie," Captain Negus told the policeman. "Annie's gonna write about it. You're gonna write it up for the record. They know they can't kill it."

"Yeah," Ussolini said. "But Eric's — pardon me, Eric — he's a little strange."

"No, no," Eric said. "I only appear strange. You can check my clips. My background."

The two of them watched him. "I could call you," Eric suggested, "'officials familiar with the circumstances.' I wouldn't have to say 'local officials' if you didn't want me to. If the Coast Guard investigated, I could say 'Homeland Security officials.'"

"They couldn't kill it after that, could they, Charlie?"

"Trust me," Eric said. He gave the captain his card. "I'll be in touch."

Being led tenderly up the gangway, the Secretary was sure he spotted wise guys in the crowd. Some were taking photographs with their cell phones. Agents advanced on them threateningly. A reporter on the dock was wrestling an agent for his laptop.

"How do you like it now, gentlemen?" the Secretary called merrily to the people on the dock. That, he happened to know, was what Hemingway used to say to wise guys.

In a day or so, Eric sneaked back onto the island to interview his eyewitnesses. Taylor refused to speak to him. Annie also refused. But in the end it was Annie, working day and night at the island paper, who got her version of the events in print before anyone else. Annie's version was extremely partisan but convincing enough for the paper's owner to triple the print run and sell copies on the mainland. Blogs picked it up before the mainstream press did, together with YouTube videos of the Secretary's tantrum. The package was a great success.

A magistrate dismissed the charges against Taylor on the grounds that he had only passed a remark. The Sorenson-Shumways were not litigious and sought no settlement, although they were irritated to discover that in common law the king could do no wrong.

The public relations people at Defense were unable to keep the story under control. The plenitude of YouTube scenes provided evidence more vivid than any description of Annie's or Eric's ever could. In them, the Secretary railed against the CIA and its collaborators, who were mainly Filipino Mormons from Panay, paid handsomely to spy on him.

His mission completed, Eric left the island forever and never saw Annie or Taylor again. Six months later in India he was reunited with Lou, who explained ectomorphism and its relationship to alcoholism and mayhem. Eric and Lou went to Bali together, and then Eric went back to Possibilities.

The Secretary resigned his cabinet post and returned to private life, working on his poetry and translations. Presently he was reported ill, resting at a naval facility near Baltimore. The facility was a twenty-story wedge of brick, almost winged in shape, red brick wings folded each over the other. It seemed capable of some kind of ungainly sudden flight that would appall and unsettle witnesses. Its wings hovered over a courtyard a hundred feet below. The Secretary's accommodations had an exhilarating view of the sky too.

The Secretary's special labor in the months following his embarrassing exposure to the press had been translation. He had been working on little reading costumes calculated to charm an audience, making crowns, transliterating the Greek alphabet. He had fashioned a pillowcase with an eye torn in it for his poem about Cyclops, Poseidon's son:

Blinkered child of sea and sky

Made weak by the sly man'S trickery,

Conniving Odysseus laughs and chooses,

Leaves to you the cursed, the defense of island realm, resounding cavern.

Defending your island, your realms your caverns resounding.

Then one day he took it to their faces, a banner short and sweet, and on it read: APOTETELEMENON! A strange device to the cowards — Mission Accomplished! Yes, strange to this one and that one, cowards and defeatists! Mission Accomplished, or something close, Victory!

"Nobody's killing me now," the Secretary screamed. And raced them to the window again. It was a close-run thing, but he was overtaken and put to bed.