Second Wind

Chapter 5

A long time after coherent thought of any kind had stopped, when flashes of illusion still made me believe my grandmother in silver was swimming in the waves not far ahead, a long time after the apparitions of Robin and Kris, holding hands, had dissolved from beckoning me wetly towards them to be shot, in the roaring non-human severity of Odin, while the remains of instinct flickered still in heart valves and groped for life in brain stem, a monstrous wave picked me up and lifted me high and flung the rag doll I’d become against an impossibly towering peak.

The peak wasn’t water... it was rock.

Far from giving me joy, it knocked me out.

This gift of a spared life, I gleaned a fair time later, came from the rock wall forming one end of the deserted jetty where ships had once docked to unload the life-blood stores for Trox Island.

There were the remains of scrubby bushes and stick-like saplings still growing indomitably from cracks and ledges, and it was among them, and gripped by them against an uneven and abrasive rockface, that I had come to rest.

Held fast there, I slowly seeped back to consciousness, and it seemed at first natural, and then with woozy reflection, extremely unnatural, that I should know where I was.

The knowledge came without strength or desire to do anything about it. I turned myself slightly to look along to the end of the dock and found that more than half of the structure, though built of very heavy timber and rooted in concrete, had been torn away as if made of cardboard.

Consciousness drifted away again into a troubled bad-dream-filled utterly exhausted state that was as much daze as sleep.

Several centuries or so later I noticed it had been raining ever since I’d opened my salt-water swollen eyes. Rain washed the salt from my limbs but all my skin was crinkled from too long an immersion, and in spite of water water every where nor any drop to drink, I had like any ancient mariner a scorchingly painful salt-induced thirst.

Rain... I opened my mouth to it hungrily. It filled my throat; it filled my mind. I realised that my grandmother wasn’t really out there in silver, swimming. Robin Darcy’s gun was back in Sand Dollar Beach, scaring the shit out of intruders.

Weakness went on, however, encouraging me to lie still. On the other hand, I was half way up a low cliff, lying among roots that the constant rain was loosening: and as if on cue, some of the bushes slid out of their anchorage and sent me tumbling and slithering with a mass of scratches down and down until I reached the hard surface of the dock itself.

By good luck the dock, though now smashed, had originally been built for the mooring of merchant ships, which meant the surface of the dock itself was above the turgid water. Brown rough waves sped threateningly along its length now, but only a few slapped heavily over its surface, as if searching for things to suck back into their grasp. The height and vigour of the waves that had managed my arrival had died down by nearly half. Seas of the present weight couldn’t have ripped up something as heavy as the dock.

So I lay a bit longer in the rain and thought of Kris and the eye of Odin, and the whole day seemed unreal.

The whole day... the light was grey... but it wasn’t night, and it had been night when I’d been on the edge of drowning.

Yesterday, I thought with incredulity. Kris and I had come here yesterday... and I’d spent all night in the black water, and I’d seen the shape of the cliff I’d crashed onto because the tired old world was spinning slowly towards the return of grey morning.

Ticking over again on the shattered dock I realised that it hadn’t been so damaged the day before. There hadn’t been any damage at all. I simply hadn’t the energy to do more than conclude that the destructive winds of Odin had crossed the island since we’d left. Soon, I told myself, soon I would go back up the hill to the little village. Soon I would get on with living. I had actually never before felt so weak.

As if to prod my flagging spirits, the heavy rain abruptly stopped.

To make some sort of start, I fiddled with the clips fastening the life jacket and managed only to tie the tapes into more difficult knots. Undoing them took ages. It was stupid how much my arms ached.

I still had no impression of hours. Day was light, night was dark. When day began fading again I finally put some resolution into things and with more effort than normal struggled to my bare feet and very slowly trudged up from sea level to the village which sat on the cliff top at a height of roughly two hundred feet. Storm surge waves might not wash away whole communities at such a height, but hurricane winds came with no such inhibitions. The little village of the day gone by, the houses, the church and the mushroom sheds, all had been blown to destruction.

I stood stock still, the life jacket dangling from my hand.

The concrete rectangles where the houses had stood were still in place: the roofs had vanished and the timbers of their walls were heaped and scattered with broken window frames twisted, glass gone. The water-catching cisterns were full of debris and mud, with no buckets to be seen.

The church had no roof. The spire and two walls had collapsed. All the mushroom sheds had vanished, though on the ground in outline one could see where they had been.

The only structures still standing were the two ultra-thick-walled concrete huts, and even they showed marks of battery from other flying debris.

Without shoes — and with socks sea-lost also — I found the village area made for even more uncomfortable progress than the hill, but I trod my way gingerly to the nearest of the thick-walled huts, the one that had contained the bunk beds, and went inside.

The doorway — with no door — led through the four-foot thick wall into deepening gloom, where my eyes took time to adjust. The entrance, I reckoned at length, had been almost face-on to the wind, in view of the chaotic results. A good quantity of wood was still inside the hut, even though no longer neatly organised into bunks. Hefty planks seemed to have been hurtled across the interior space to crash like battering rams into the walls. The force needed for the holes they had dug in the plastered walls gave me the thankful shivers: Kris and I might have thought we would find safe shelter in there if the storm had caught us on land.

Shelter. It occurred to me that the roof hadn’t blown off, as it had off everything else, except perhaps off the other hut. The tangled planks, and the concrete floor, were mostly dry. Outside it was still not raining, though the light was fading against a heavy sky.

No one would come now before night. No one could have seen little Trox earlier in blinding rain. Accept it, I thought with tiredness; in twelve hours, but not before, someone would come.

Believe it.

Someone will come.

In the remains of the light, I laid several planks side by side on the dank inhospitable concrete, and with the flotation collar for pillow I lay down on my back... and couldn’t sleep.

Thirst had passed, but hunger burrowed like a screw in my stomach. I’d eaten nothing since the barbecue dinner in the Ford house, and I hadn’t wanted breakfast in the run up to the Odin hunt. The uneaten Danish pastries at the Owen Roberts’ airfield tantalised my emptiness until I could almost smell them. In the morning I’d find food and drink, I told myself, but without shoes I wasn’t going foraging in the dark.

The island air, at least, was sweetly warm; and, if it rained again, I would be dry. Hurricanes, particularly those like Odin, that formed and gained their strength in the Caribbean, not the Atlantic, were notoriously unpredictable in their travel, but they seldom turned right round one hundred and eighty degrees and retraced their former path. If it had happened, the occurrences had been so rare that it wasn’t worth worrying about.

I closed my eyes, but after its sluggish day my brain accelerated and relentlessly reviewed, remembered and relived all the steps to my present troubles. There were still whole prairies of unanswered questions defeating the simplest speculations, like why grow mushrooms on a tiny island in the Caribbean Sea? Like why send two meteorologists to race a hurricane to see what state the mushrooms were in? But surely Robin Darcy wouldn’t have bought an aeroplane just for that... and he’d bought it for Nicky, not Odin.

I supposed that someone, somewhere, might make sense of it. Robin had to know, didn’t he?

I spent a long time imagining Kris in the orange dinghy, his face looking back at me in horror as the screaming elements seized his future. If he managed to stay in the dinghy he would whirl across the face of the waters faster than racing speedboats. According to the instructions I’d followed too carelessly about how to open the dinghy (I should have climbed in to start with) there was a rudder and two paddles to steer with, but the calm sea they needed lay long hours ahead.

I switched off at the possibility that the gales had sucked the dinghy airborne. I balked at the probability that the canvas inflated shell went somersaulting over and over across the seas until Kris fell out into the water and met no Trox cliffs to scoop him to land.

I shifted restlessly on my hard plank bed, and long before dawn went outside to sit with my back against the hut’s exterior wall, my sight filled unexpectedly with stars.

The hurricane had gone over. The night was cloudless and still. Only the waves, heavily hurrying along the ruined mooring stage with a distant slap and hiss, spoke of the terrible force unleashed a day earlier on the little wrecked hamlet.

Hunger set me moving as soon as I could see where I was treading, but I already knew all the cupboards were bare, even if any were still standing. When the people of Trox Island had left they’d packed their lives to go with them. I looked in vain for a container that would hold liquids, and ended by sucking up spoonfuls of rain water from any sort of hollow I came across.

There was nothing to eat except muddy grass.

I navigated carefully over to the second thick-walled hut, that had been empty anyway on our first visit, and stood inside looking in puzzlement at the change high winds had wrought.

For a start, the inner surface of two of the walls had been peeled away, leaving bare breeze-blocks in view. The two huts, though appearing the same from outside, were constructed differently within. The hut I’d passed the night in had been built of solid concrete with a plaster facing. The second hut’s thick walls had been lined with prefabricated panels of plaster-like walling, and it was several of these that had been torn off their fastenings and broken into pieces.

Because I was expecting to see nothing but destruction, it took me a while to notice that there were differences in these ripped-off walls, and that, in particular, one panel, dangling off its fixings, was half-hiding a door of sorts underneath.

I went over for a closer look and found that the inner door, behind the loose bit of walling, was fastened shut by a combination lock and was the front, in fact, of a safe.

If the thoroughness of the rest of the exodus was anything to go by, that safe too would be as bare as Mother Hubbard’s. I tried to pull it open, on the basis that the wind had weakened or destroyed everything it reached, but this one barrier stood obstinately fast and, giving it up, I returned to my hunt for food.

The big blue birds with brown legs looked tantalising, but without shoes I couldn’t catch one, and without fire I’d have to eat it raw, and I wasn’t yet desperate enough to try that. I could perhaps catch one of the larger iguanas who moved more slowly than the little ones, but again the lack of cooking deterred me.

But where were the cows?

Cows gave milk, and milk was food. There had been a large free-roaming herd of cattle on the island two days ago, and surely some of them had had calves, and calves needed milk...

As long as the whole herd hadn’t been blasted into the sea, as long as I could get a cow to stand still, as long as I could find any decent container such as an empty can to drink from, my worst and most immediate predicament would be solved.

Problem: I couldn’t see the herd.

Trox was a mile long, with the village at one end and the consolidated grass airstrip extending from it to the other. I carefully walked to the beginning of the strip, from where we’d raced to get off in the aeroplane, but search as I could for cows, I saw not so much as a tail swishing.

What I did find, though, to my delight, was my dropped camera. Second thoughts cooled the enthusiasm somewhat as although it was supposed to be waterproof and was still in its protective leather slip cover, it had been lying deep in mud as if I’d also stamped on it when I’d dropped it. I picked it up sadly and held it dangling with its strap entwined in the tapes of the life jacket.

With hunger still a priority I set off along one side of the runway, seeing a rocky fringe of land sloping down between the flat grass and the tossing sea. There was room for a herd there, but not a cow in sight. Depressed, I left that side of the runway and crossed over it to the other, and on the way thought that although that landing strip had been fabricated of earth and grass, it had been quite a feat of engineering, as its dimensions were wide and long enough to accommodate full-sized cargo and passenger aircraft, not just small twin-engined toys.

On the other side of the runway there was a much wider extent of rocky land, much of it scraped bare by abrasive winds. Palm trees lay on their sides, roots helpless in the air, palm crowns like sodden mop-heads on the ground. Palm trees... coconuts... I diverged from cows to coconut milk and lost a bit more skin from legs and feet in descending from runway height down nearer to sea level.

Before I found a coconut, I found the cows.

They were lying in a long dark group, their stomachs on the ground. A low cliff beyond them had given shelter of sorts against the gales, and I supposed their own weight and mass had done the rest.

Many of them turned their heads as I approached, and a few lumbered to their feet, at which point I took note of bulls amongst the cows, and wondered if the milking expedition weren’t after all a bad idea.

Three of the bulls were heavy-shouldered Brahmans. Two were cream-coloured Charollais. Four were brownish red and white Herefords. Four more were what in horse circles would have been called chestnut in colour, but were outside my rudimentary knowledge of agriculture. Several were black and white Friesians.

Satisfied that I meant no harm, the gentlemen of the herd lost interest, moved their great heads around without menace, and settled down again in peace.

As Friesians, I distantly remembered, were lavish milk producers, I inched a wincingly careful way round the vast throng of big animals until I came to a large docile-looking Friesian cow with a satisfied calf lying beside her. I hadn’t actually ever milked a cow before, and as soon as I touched her the big creature lumbered to her feet and looked at me balefully with mournful off-putting eyes. If hunger hadn’t been so pressingly painful I would have stopped right there, particularly when she stretched her neck and issued a long hollow comment which brought a whole lot of her companions to their feet.

The only container I had was the slip cover of my camera, a filthy, muddy, soaking wet soft black leather pouch.

I went down on my knees to the Friesian lady, who looked round in manifest surprise at my attempt to use her milk as dish-washing liquid, and although my best efforts yielded little, by the fourth filling, rubbing and emptying, the contents of the pouch looked whiter and cleaner and getting on for drinkable.

I sipped the sixth pouchful. The milk was warm, rich and frothy, and tasted faintly of mud. I tested the next few amounts with increasing confidence, and I drank the pretty clean tenth pouchful entirely, before the cow ran out of patience, swished her tail in my face and with dignity swayed conclusively away.

With a stomach quietened for the moment I walked back to the ruined village and by one of the mud-laden rain water cisterns rinsed the pouch as best I could. Using a damp shirt tail, I wiped mud from my now dry camera until when I pressed the shutter release button for a third try, it actually worked, and not only clicked but automatically wound on the film.

I used two more exposures taking views of the village’s destruction. I would probably then have snapped the cattle, most of whom had followed me slowly up the island and were now standing around watching me in curiosity, except that of the roll of thirty-six exposures I’d begun with, there were only a few left. Cows were cows were cows anywhere. Cows were as interesting as no mushrooms.

Sunshine returned to the Caribbean.

By midday, judging time according to the sun’s height in the sky, no one had come.

Two days had passed since Kris and I had left Grand Cayman. We would surely be missed.

Someone would come.

I wandered into the second of the thick-walled huts merely for something to do, and in the same aimless fashion pulled the loose flapping panels of off-white walling entirely away from the concrete underneath. Minus its cover, the safe was revealed as a square grey metal box of about two feet by two, let bodily into the wall at waist height. I frowned. If it hadn’t been for the hurricane, the safe would have remained out of general sight: and it wasn’t unusual, I thought, to find some way of camouflaging the very existence of a cache.

I tried to open its door, but it seemed a hurricane-proof steel box could easily deny access to the soft hands of meteorologists.

The way in consisted most obviously of a short flat lever, but to allow the lever to be moved there was an electronic key pad — letters as well as numbers — like that of a touch telephone. It seemed a complicated lock to find on a mushroom farm; just one more mystery, in the whole series of unanswerable questions.

Sighing, I strolled outside again, where the cattle now populated what was left of the village’s foundations and were behaving with aversion round the uncovered parts of the muddy cisterns. If they stretched their necks down far enough they might just be able to drink the filthy water, but thirst hadn’t yet driven them to such lengths.

It was interesting, I thought, that the cattle mostly hadn’t sorted themselves into separate breeds but stood in haphazard groups, Charollais mixed with Friesians, a Brahman bull, from sacred-cow India, in a clump of beef-producing Herefords, and on the fringes there were a few hulking dark shapes that I hadn’t noticed before, of black Aberdeen Angus.

The brain plays odd tricks, and besides, taught by my grandmother, I’d always given brain cell room to random connections of apparently unconnected thoughts.

I’d had a friend called Angus when we were both about ten, and he had had very large stick-out ears. Teasing, people laughed at him and called him Aberdeen because his stick-out ears looked like a cow’s, and he had cried about it, and sank so deep in depression that his parents had let him have cosmetic surgery, and then other boys had teased him about ‘pinning back his lugholes’ until he cried about that too. My grandmother had told ‘Aberdeen’ Angus to his sad little face to be glad he had ears at all; it was better than being deaf.

Trox Island was a ridiculous place to be remembering stick-out-ears Angus. My grandmother would be admonishing me that I might not have food better than milk, nor shoes, nor comfort, but I did have life.

I went back into the concrete hut and without hesitation tapped out ANGUS in numbers — 26487 — on the touch pad of the combination lock of the safe.

Nothing happened. No clicks, no encouraging blips. Stick-out-ears Angus didn’t work the lever to open the box, and of course there was no reason to suppose it would.

With nothing much else to do to pass the time I walked across what might have been a sort of village square and looked again at the damaged interior of the hut I’d spent half the night in.

Why did a mushroom farm need a hut with walls four feet thick and a hurricane-proof roof? A mushroom farm didn’t, was the concise answer; but a meteorological or seismic station might. The instruments and the records would have left with the general inhabitants, but a building that no housed a seismograph, for instance, would need to be constructed to be of extreme inertia in itself before it could measure earthquake tremors far away. The concrete floor, I guessed, would be at least as thick as the walls.

Outside again, I looked up at the clear blue sky and listened to the subsiding march of the waves, but what I really needed was a rescuing aircraft, and of that there was no sign.

Evelyn, perhaps, was lying in the sun on Sand Dollar Beach wondering where Kris and Perry had got to. But Odin was still on the rampage somewhere, and Evelyn, perhaps, had taken to the hills — of which Florida had few.

Thoughts dribbled on. In Robin’s house the police came waving guns at houseguests who swam at three in the morning, and the security checked by telephone to make sure all was well. ‘Yes,’ Robin had said easily, ‘yes, it’s Hereford.’

Hereford? I stood on Trox looking at a red and white cow, a Hereford. So what if Robin’s Hereford was to the Sand Dollar Beach security firm a sort of password. Hereford... Hereford... All is well.

Why not?

People used the same password over and over in many different configurations, because it was easier to remember one password than many.

With still all the time in the world, I was simply playing games. I went back to the touch-pad of the safe and tapped 4373 (HERE) and 3673 (FORD) and instantly there was a loud click.

Astonished, I grasped the lever by its flat handle and tried lifting it upwards, and without the slightest stiffness in its travel the lever rose upward and the door silently opened.

Treasure there was none, or at least not to my eyes at that in first meeting. Two objects only lay on the cloth-covered lining of the grey metal safe. One of them was a yellow box, an electronic-looking instrument complete with a dial with a pointer and a short rod on the end of a curled cable like that on a telephone. It seemed to me from much past acquaintance that the box was probably a Geiger counter, and when I lifted it out and pressed an on-off switch, it rewarded me with slow irregular unurgent clicks. A Geiger counter indeed, with few Geigers to count. Technically, a Geiger counter counted high-speed particles emitted by the decay of radioactive material. The short rod contained a tube invented long ago by physicists Geiger and Müller. A high-energy particle, entering the tube, ionized the gas inside, which allowed the gas to conduct electricity, thus creating a pulse of current which in turn caused the click.

Lying beside the Geiger counter, the only other thing hidden away was a single fawn folder, the sort used universally in offices to help with filing.

The folder, when I lifted it out in its turn, contained roughly twenty sheets of paper, nearly all in different sizes, with and without formal headings, and all in foreign scripts, most of which I didn’t recognise. There were combinations of letters-with-numbers on almost every page, whatever the language, and it was those that I recognised positively and with alarm. A few sheets were stapled together in pairs and two seemed to be lists of addresses, though as they were written in a script I thought might be Arabic, I couldn’t read any of them.

I put the folder back in the safe, but left the door open, and went thoughtfully outside again into the sun. The cattle turned their heads to watch me. Several of them mooed, several more made slopping pats of steaming waste. As a day’s entertainment, they were hardly a riot.

Counting, I found I had four exposures left on my reel of film. I changed my mind and took one view of the cattle, including in it as many different breeds as I could find grouped in one place. Then I went back to the safe, to sort out which three of the papers in the folder were most worth immortality.

Trying to assess them all carefully out in bright daylight made the choice no easier, but in the end I settled on four of them, photographing two separately, and the last two, side by side. The film ran out after that last exposure, and to my frustration the automatic rewind stopped and stuck at the place where I had cleaned off the mud. There was no way of knowing if any pictures at all had survived, though I didn’t think it mattered enormously if they were ruined. However, to save it from any further rain, I tied the camera by its strap to a convenient beam near the safe, high up and out of reach of cows.

I wondered, as I put the papers back in the folder and the folder back in the safe, whether or not I should leave everything locked in as I had found it; and I did so chiefly to keep the papers away from the cows, some of whom had come after me with so much curiosity that they were crowding the doorway and trying to push themselves and their big heads inside. I shooed them out again, but in a strange way I was glad of their company, and was not as lonely as I would have been without them.

The day seemed endless, and nobody came.

Twelve hours of darkness. A long time until dawn.

I slept in brief patches, uncomfortably, and woke finally in the early grey light to the sole comfort that in the setting sun’s rays the evening before, I had seen a gleam which had proved to be an empty soup can wedged into the ruins of one of the houses, and although it was misshapen and filled with dusty debris, it made a better milk carton than the camera case.

The cows had given me supper, and also an early breakfast, and then they moved off in a herd as if of one mind towards the runway, where they put their heads down to the grass, and kept it both fertilised and short.

When the sun rose it was three days since Kris and I had flown out of Grand Cayman.

The eye of Hurricane Odin, after travelling north-west for three days at 7 miles an hour, might at that moment, I thought, be raising gales and storm surges along the Cayman shores. It wasn’t reasonable, I told myself, to expect anyone in those circumstances to come looking for foolhardy aviators who had most certainly crashed at sea.

I put together a rough low seat of timbers in a place that would afford shadow when the sun was highest, and sat there to give my still bare feet a respite. Cuts, scratches and insect bites round my ankles itched abominably and refused to heal. I went through a long morning of self-pitying depression, unable to believe I would have to spend much more time there and unwilling in consequence to start building a bearable way to live.

I thought of my grandmother who, apart from any anxiety she might have had if anyone had told her I was missing, would certainly have issued brisk and bracing instructions along the lines of, ‘Perry, build yourself a house, filter some drinking water, weave some sandals, look for coconuts, keep a log of the days, go for a swim, don’t mope.’

She had never complained, neither when her legs stopped working, nor ever since. She had taught me always simply to bear as best I could whatever could not possibly be put right; and in that category she had included my lack of father or mother.

She wouldn’t think much of my spinelessness on Trox. Her presence sat with me at midday in the patch of shade, sympathetic but unforgiving. It was my grandmother therefore who prodded me that afternoon into walking to the other end of the runway, shoes or no shoes, and I came across a way down to a white sandy beach there, from which I swam, pitting my diminished strength against still heavy rough surf, but feeling clean and refreshed afterwards.

Down that end of the island there was a veritable forest of snapped-off hardwood trees as well as uprooted coconut palms and the stripped remains of what I guessed were broad-leaved banana trees. By scavenging I found two viable coconuts and, still attached to its stalk, a full grown ripe mango: a feast.

But the blue sky remained empty, and no one came.

By the next morning even the grey tossing sea had returned to Caribbean blue.

To pass the dragging time, I took the folder of papers out of the safe, and in the sun sat staring at each one separately, trying to make even the smallest sense of languages I couldn’t read. The nearest I came to recognition was a paper I guessed to be in Greek, on account of the symbols Omega and Pi.

All the papers were scattered with numbers, and where numbers occurred they were written in the script known as Latin, or otherwise ordinary English.

Eventually, letting ideas drift, I thought that some of the bunch might be an inventory, a stock-taking, of round-the-world species and quantities, possibly of the mushrooms that had once grown in the now blown-away sheds.

Fine, I thought, but why the Geiger counter?

I replaced the folder and spent an idle hour listening to irregular but fairly frequent clicks as I walked around the dead village raising live evidence of radiation.

I expected the counter to count since background radiation was all around us all the time, a combination from naturally occurring radioactive material in the earth’s crust and ‘cosmic rays’, high-energy particles arriving from outer space emitted by the sun about ten minutes and ninety-three million miles ago.

But there seemed to be rather a high count rate near to the bases of the blown-away houses. High count rates were not unusual. Residents of Aberdeen, the Granite City of Scotland, experience a higher background than normal as granite contains many radioactive atoms. I looked around me and tried to remember what my pal in Miami had said: ‘Constructed of bird droppings, guano, coral and limestone rock.’ Were bird droppings radioactive? No, I thought not.

Putting the rod near the cracks in the concrete floors raised an endless stream of clicks; clicks so fast that they coalesced into one sound.

I thought of radon. Radon gas could be a problem the world over as it was produced by the decay of naturally occurring uranium in rocks and seeped unseen and unsmelled into people’s homes, giving them cancer. But, I thought, radon needed an enclosed space to congregate and the hurricane had ensured there were no enclosed spaces left. And besides, limestone had little radioactive uranium in it to decay.

So what was causing the count? Was this perhaps why the islanders had left: not because of Nicky, still less because of Odin, but because they feared the radioactivity under their feet?

If the Geiger counter was energised round the houses, it practically took off over the outlined remnants of the foundations of the mushroom sheds. Frowning, I made a long detour down and off the runway to see if the cattle en masse were emitting strong radioactivity too, but to my relief they weren’t. I hadn’t, it seemed, drunk quantities of radioactive milk.

Eventually the Geiger counter lost its attraction as entertainment and I restored it to the safe. The folder lay there also, each sheet familiar but reproaching my lack of scholarship.

I closed the safe and locked it, and again in the idyllic air I added one more piece of wood to a growing line. Each piece of wood represented a day, and at that moment there were four of them. Four long days and longer nights.

Despair was too strong a word for it.

Perhaps despondency was better.

When they came for me, they came with guns.