Surveillance

10

“OH GOD,” Lucy said to Tad in his apartment, five minutes later. “It was word for word out of that scene in Pride and Prejudice when the ghastly Reverend Collins proposes to Elizabeth Bennett.”

“Or Titania and Bottom, except the other way around, if you see what I mean. Remember my Bottom, at the Rep?”

“I was in hysterics. It was like, oh Jesus! we’re really fucked now — at least Alida and me. The guy’s Chinese. I swear I read somewhere that to laugh at a Chinese man is practically punishable by death. I couldn’t have insulted the poor bastard more. He slammed the door so hard I thought he’d ripped it off the hinges. Then running down the stairs like a fucking avalanche. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! My stupid fucking fault. I just couldn’t control myself.”

Tad had his arms around her. “Everybody corpses sometimes. And it’s always the worst time. Love scenes and death scenes are the ones that bring it on. I corpsed once in the middle of Juliet talking sweet nothings about Romeo — I was the nurse, in drag. Just couldn’t help myself. It was terrible: I was in purdah for weeks.”

“Why did he have to pick me? I must be nearly twice his fucking age!”

“Well, along with all your other charms, he wants your citizenship.”

“What d’you mean?”

He told her about the Office of Vital Statistics, the call from the bank, the stolen Social Security number.

“Well, aren’t you the clever gumshoe? What are you going to do, then, turn him over to the INS?”

“Have you ever seen the INS jail down by Union Station? They’ve got hundreds of Hispanics locked up in there. You see them standing at the bars like animals in cages, crying, yelling out messages to friends and relatives. Every time I go past, my blood ices up. I hate the INS. I hate the INS more than I hate Lee, even more than I hate the fucking FBI. For pure, cold, bureaucratic cruelty, I’d give the INS a perfect ten. So no, not yet, not now, and if and when I do, I’ll hate myself even more than I hate the INS.”

“I don’t see the use of knowing he’s an illegal unless we can get him deported.”

“Try thinking like your new pal Kissinger. Lee’s got the bomb and we’ve got the bomb: mutual deterrence, mutually assured destruction. Détente. I kind of like the idea of playing Henry — Iago with a funny accent.”

Later, he told her, “I copied everything and put the papers in my bank, so you’ll know where they are. Just in case.”

She said, “I don’t see how we can go on living here, not after what happened.”

“So maybe we move out. But if we move, we move on our terms, not his.”

When she said we she meant Alida and herself; when he said we he meant the three of them — the family. Lucy was surprised by the comfort she took from that.

FINN, back in school, looked strangely older, paler, and even, Alida thought, a little thinner, though his smirk was permanently in place. His home PC had been confiscated, and he was forbidden access to the computer lab. The boys mobbed him with questions.

“The FBI don’t do juveniles,” Finn said, in the new vocabulary he’d acquired over the last two days. “It’s like federal law. They’re gonna send my papers to the state prosecutor. Guy’ll read ’em and see if he’s got a case.” He saw Alida on the outskirts of the group. “Who you staring at, dude?”

Even the teachers seemed in awe of his fame. There was no “Wake up, Finn!” or “Let’s hear from Finn — just this once.” Alida’s mom had shown her a whole article about Finn — again, he was disappointingly unnamed — in The New York Times that began right at the top of the front page: “11-Year-Old Hacker Has Experts Puzzled.” At morning assembly, the principal had warned the entire student body not to speak to reporters. Two policemen now stood outside to shoo away the TV vans that had tried to merge with the parents’ SUVs as they waited in line to drop kids off.

By the afternoon, Finn mania had begun to subside, and even Social Studies was interesting. Peter Puget had mapped exactly where he was on the Earth’s surface by using a sextant — Mrs. Milliband had brought one into the classroom — to measure the angle of the sun from where he stood on the Olympic Peninsula. He’d used a tray of reflective mercury as an “artificial horizon.” Alida couldn’t wait to get her hands on the sextant, which looked way cool with its swinging arm, its hinged mirrors, its protractor and micrometer. Listening to Mrs. Milliband talk, she thought navigation might turn out to be right up there with algebra.

“My husband’s a big sailor. One of the first things he taught me when we went sailing — this was back in the 1960s — was how to use a sextant.”

Which meant that Mrs. Milliband must be over sixty years old. Maybe seventy, even. Cripes! As old as Augie, or almost.

AT USELESS BAY, the weather — light showers and heavy overcast — was almost suspiciously normal for mid-April, coming as it did after the succession of heat waves and floods. It was how Lucy remembered springtime in the 1990s. She even liked keeping the top up on the Spider. Adose of normality was what she craved, and badly needed in order to handle this trickiest of weekends with Augie.

At dinner — a rich and winey boeuf à la bourguignonne that nicely fit the fifty-degree temperature outside — it was Augie who brought up the Freak virus.

“This kid—”

“He’s in my class, and his name’s Finn.”

“Really? Wow. So you’re on first-name terms with the infamous terrorist?”

Lucy said, “I think ‘terrorist’—”

“It goes back to what we were saying about infrastructure a couple of weeks ago.”

“Imagine, eleven!” Minna said to Lucy.

“Your friend Finn, it’s just a hop and a skip from doing what he did to crippling the country’s entire financial infrastructure. A sixth-grader! No offense, Alida, but if a sixth-grader can manage that, imagine what a bunch of determined Islamists could do. They’ve got college degrees from our own universities — Ph.D.s, a lot of them. They’re biochemists, physicists, computer engineers, you name it. They’re not peasants from the desert, but well-off professionals in their fields. They’ve got all Finn’s considerable skills and a whole lot more.”

“What are Islamists?”

“It’s a long story that I’ll tell you when we’re kayaking, if you like. For now, just think of them as men made mad by weird beliefs in a warrior god. Fanatics who hate America.”

“Okay.”

Lucy thought this rather less than okay, and had no desire to see Alida return from her kayaking trip converted to Augie’s peculiar brand of neoconservatism.

“Fact is, Finn deserves a medal for exposing how open to attack we are. I just pray we’re capable of learning our lesson from this, though I wouldn’t put a five-spot on that one. You think Internet Explorer’s vulnerable? You better think about the water supply, the electrical grid, the railroad system. And all I see is a lot of people who ought to know better blowing smoke up our collective hiney.”

“Augie!” Minna made a face at him across the table.

“My educated guess is that Alida’s perfectly familiar with the word ‘hiney.’”

Alida laughed. “I never heard that one, though, about blowing smoke up it.”

“It’s not a bad expression to learn. Most of politics consists of blowing smoke up people’s hineys.”

Over dessert — a chocolate and orange mousse, for which Augie brought out a bottle of Muscat de Beaumes de Venise — Lucy steered the talk around to Boy 381, the movie.

“They say it’s still in preproduction, whatever that means. I take no interest in it: my attitude to that deal was to grab the moolah and run straight to the bank. They bought it, so it’s their story now. They can turn it into fiction, which is all the movie’ll ever be. I’ll read a junk thriller on a plane once in a while, but I’ve never really cared for fiction.”

“You mean they’re turning your book into like a Hollywood movie?”

“You have to read it, Rabbit. It’s a bit like Anne Frank’s diary, about Augie as a boy, growing up in World War II. As soon as I’m done with my piece, I’ll lend it to you.”

“Steven Spielberg called him up on the phone,” Minna said.

“Once. A single, solitary phone call. They wanted me to be a consultant on the film, but I wasn’t having any of it. They can make up their own details. Besides, I have an irrational prejudice against southern California in general and Los Angeles in particular.”

Minna giggled. “He applied for a job at UCLA a long time ago and didn’t get it,” she told Lucy in a whisper meant to be heard by her husband.

“Like I said, the prejudice is irrational. How’s that piece coming, anyway?”

“Oh, I haven’t started writing yet,” Lucy said. “It’s odd — I find writing profiles harder and harder as I get older. It’s that conclusive tone they tend to have, as if the journalist has gotten to the bottom of the subject’s soul in a one-hour interview, and the piece is like the last word.”

“Woe to those who conclude!” Augie said.

“Montaigne?”

“Close, but no cigar. You got the language right, at least. Flaubert.”

“I thought you had no time for fiction.”

“It’s his letters that I like. They’re great. I’ve done little more than flip through Madame Bovary.”

“I prefer nonfiction too.” Alida was practically licking the last of the mousse from her plate.

“Like your mom said, you might try my book. It’s about a kid a good bit younger than you are now.”

“Okay, cool. And it’s your true story?”

“Sure, it’s everything I remember from being three to around nine.”

“Did you meet Adolf Hitler?” Evidently Alida believed that a person who got phone calls from Steven Spielberg must habitually have moved in high circles.

“Not personally, no. But I was in Germany when he was in charge.”

“Cool!”

“No, it was just about as uncool as you could imagine. Read the book, you’ll see.”

As Lucy and Minna were loading the dishwasher, Minna said, “You know, I haven’t seen Augie as happy as this in years. You’re such fun to have around, you and Alida. For me, too.”

Lucy felt like Judas.

ALIDA USUALLY slept in on Saturdays, but this morning she’d set the alarm for six-fifteen to catch the tide. Muffled in two heavy sweaters and her yellow anorak, she had to breathe in deeply to fasten the clips on her life vest. Augie, too, looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy.

They set off in a dank, gray, windless chill, the sound of each paddle stroke uncannily amplified by the dawn silence. In the days following her last outing, Alida seemed to have unconsciously absorbed the new skill; she paddled, as Augie said admiringly, “like a pro.”

They went farther out this time, letting the houses that rimmed the bay shrink behind them. Alida told Augie about Peter Puget and navigation by sextant.

“Yeah,” he said. “George Vancouver was a stiff, uptight guy. You wouldn’t want to get on his bad side, which was about the only side he ever showed. But Puget was quite different — a real people person. He got fascinated by the Indians, bartered with them, tried to learn their language and understand their customs, all that. He’d be a good guy to share a yarn with. I sometimes wonder what he’d say if he could see Puget Sound today. Okay, so obviously his eyes’d be bugging out on strings, but would he feel proud, or sad, or what, do you think?”

“I dunno. A little sad, I guess. Like we drove the Indians out and gave them bad diseases and stuff. Look! Dogfish!”

“Right. Just very, very junior members of the shark family. There’s nothing — nothing at all — to be frightened of.”

But she felt no fear. There were at least a dozen circling right beneath the kayaks in a fishy spiral. The light was insufficient to give them any color; they were dark shadows, each three or four feet long, up to their own business in a submarine world that wasn’t hers. She found herself watching them with detached wonder — just as a scientist might, she thought.

“See how they chase one another’s tails? Dogfish have the IQ of a medium-sized pumpkin.”

As the spiral moved, they quietly shifted their kayaks on the water to keep them in view. At some invisible signal, the shadows suddenly scattered and were gone.

“Wow!” Alida said.

“I love to watch critters in the wild — they keep one in mind of one’s own critterliness. IQ or no IQ, we’re not so different from the dogfish, really. Time to go back, or we’ll have to drag the kayaks way too far up the beach.”

LUCY WOKE violently from a bad dream. She’d stepped from the elevator to hear an explosion of noise from her apartment. When she walked in, she found it had been taken over by a weird crew of bums who were playing deafening rock music on boom boxes and snorting lines of devil’s dandruff from dollar bills. They’d torn down her pictures and covered the walls with lewd graffiti. When she told them to go, they laughed and sneered. She went to the phone to call 911, but the line was dead; they’d cut it off. A grinning bum with missing front teeth shook a broken bottle in her face. She screamed and came awake in the scented bedroom of the Vanagses’ house, fearing she’d woken her hosts. Or was it just a dream scream that hadn’t found an actual voice?

The dream seemed to her at once infuriatingly familiar and totally obscure. Then she remembered it was exactly the scenario promised by the landlord when he’d first talked about changing her lock. Now Charles O. Lee, comical and horrible in equal parts, had wormed his way into her dream life — an intolerable violation, fuck him. She the one! Absurd, of course, but when she recalled the landlord’s phrase, she felt like the victim of an attempted murder. She the one! No wonder he was visiting her in nightmares.

She quickly fell asleep again, and reawoke just past nine. Given Augie’s rigorous schedule, surely he ought to be practicing his Schubert now, but the house was quiet: no typewriter keys, no fumbled chords from the piano. In pajamas and bathrobe, she went barefoot downstairs to get coffee and bring it up to her room, but there Augie was on his piano stool, nodding his head as he listened to an iPod. Alida’s? She never lent her iPod to anybody except Gail.

“Hi!” He removed the earphones. “Alida’s out on the beach — I seem to go through a lotta sand dollars in the course of my research. I’ve been listening to her favorite band.”

“Oh, right, Green Day.”

“No, not Green Day, Fall Out Boy.”

Lucy had never heard of them. “Yes, of course. Green Day was like last month’s craze. So yesterday now. What d’you make of Fall Out Boy?”

“They’re…cool, I suppose.”

“If you say so.”

“We were out in the kayaks and saw a pack of dogfish. Not a peep of fright from Alida. She enjoyed watching them.”

“She’s at that age when they change so fast from week to week that you can’t begin to keep up with them.”

“She was paddling like a pro today. We had a fine time on the water.”

Lucy’s inner eleven-year-old stirred in her once again. Why did he never ask her to go kayaking? Well, he was smart enough to know she really didn’t want to — that was why.

Augie turned to assassinating Schubert, so Lucy, coffee in hand, went up to get dressed. She was sitting by the window scribbling Augieisms in her notebook when Alida came into the room, holding a book.

“Look what Augie gave me.”

It was a hardback copy — first edition, she saw — of Boy 381. A collector’s item, for it had gone through umpteen printings.

“See what he wrote in it for me?”

On the title page, he’d inscribed: “To my cool friend, Alida Bengstrom, with admiration, from your uncool friend, Augie Vanags.” Then “Useless Bay” and the date.

“Rabbit, you’re going to have to take extra special care of this. It’s valuable.”

“Valuable?”

“It’ll be worth several hundred dollars, at least. Especially after the movie comes out. We’d better buy a paperback for you to actually read. You should keep this in a safe place in your room.”

“I’m going to read it now.” Her tone of voice refused contradiction.

“What about homework?”

“We don’t have much this weekend, just some math. And I really, really want to read Augie’s book.”

When Alida left, Lucy gazed at her notebook, her mind devoid of every thought except the certainty that she shouldn’t have allowed things to turn out like this. The rats’ nest of work all tangled up with friendship had placed her in a hopelessly compromised position. Whatever she wrote after this weekend was bound to be untrue. She tried to accuse herself of having too many scruples, but decided that the opposite was closer to the mark: she had too few.

She stared blankly out the window, and the fast-receding sea looked as glum and gray as she was feeling now.

MINNA WAS on her regular daily path through the grasses and Scotch broom, her basket filling with greenstuffs for a lunch salad. She’d looked forward to having Lucy’s company, but Lucy was up in her room and Minna was shy of disturbing her. So she walked alone, letting her mind drift in whatever direction it chose.

This weekend took her back to the days when she and Augie were first married, and he used to invite his students back to their little rental house for end-of-semester parties. Minna loved these student parties, though she dreaded faculty ones, where the faculty wives were always asking her, “Where were you?” meaning “Were you at Bennington? Or OSU? Or Stanford?” Then she’d have to say she’d worked at Seafirst Bank. Then they’d ask what she did there, already looking for an excuse to walk away.

With students it was different — like it was with Lucy and Alida. But how they drank and smoked in those days! She had to fumigate the house after each party, but still was eager to throw the next one, where students introduced her to Ray Charles, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Dusty Springfield, the Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan, confided their love lives to her, and taught her to smoke pot. Augie never smoked any, but she loved how warm, colorful, and friendly the world seemed when she was high.

She and Augie used to go to the students’ own, even wilder, parties, on falling-to-pieces old houseboats and in joss-stick-smelling walk-up flats, and always the invites came directly to her, though of course Augie was asked to come along, too. She could still recall the students’ names — La Verne Geiger, Byford Starling, Melvin Kolar, Ron Schnowske, Betty Frailey, Kermit James, Arlo Fruin, Janet Bane…Strange how last week was hard to remember, when things so long ago were crystal clear.

Lucy and Alida somehow triggered these memories. Not that they were like students, but they’d brought with them into the house on Useless Bay some happy vestige of that mood. Minna wondered if Lucy liked Bob Dylan, then remembered her LPs wouldn’t play on Augie’s new stereo system. Minutes later, she recalled they’d got rid of them when they moved out here from Seattle. She’d wanted to hold a yard sale, but Augie had called in a charity for the blind to haul all their old junk away.

In the small stand of trees by the stream, she found three clumps of moist, honey-colored chanterelles. They’d go great tonight with the remainder of the beef burgundy. As she picked, she listened in her head to “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Dylan singing, “Something is happening but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?”

It was when Mr. Johnson was president, she remembered, and the students were burning their draft cards, that all the parties stopped.

AFTER LUNCH they were up in the Jeffersonian study. Lucy surreptitiously scanned the shelves for novels and war memoirs, but didn’t see a single one. Augie had been talking about his first days in America, first in New York, and then in Schenectady, where he’d “bached with” a Latvian-American widow.

“And the photo of you on the dust jacket — the one taken by Sergeant Cahan — you carried that with you wherever you went?”

“I didn’t have too many papers — you can imagine. The Latvian aid people in New York got together what they could, including that picture. I still have the old brown envelope. There isn’t much in it.”

“I’d love to see it.”

“Sure. I’ll dig it out for you. Remind me.”

“I don’t suppose the name Thetford means anything to you, does it?”

“Thetford…Only Thetford I know is a town in England. I think it’s in the Midlands — no, East Anglia. Minna and I, we vacationed over there once — I had to do some research, not on sand dollars, at the British Museum Library and the Bodleian in Oxford. We drove around the country as much as we could, and spent one night in Norwich.” He said Norwitch. “They’ve got a castle there, and a cathedral that Cromwell knocked around a bit. Thetford’s near Norwich, I believe. Seems like we drove through it but didn’t stop. Why do you ask?”

“Because an odd woman from Thetford sent me this.” She got the photograph from her bag. “She thinks it could be you.”

“Yeah, looks like me. Though it’s difficult to make out the face.” He took it over to the window, tilting it to catch the diffuse sunlight. “Why’d she send it to you?”

“Oh, you know. I’ve been trying to do some not-on-sand-dollars research.”

“Hey, what’s that? And there’s another, I think.” He pulled open the drawer of his desk and found a magnifying glass. “Look,” he said, pointing at the dirt in the background, holding the glass over it. “Doesn’t that look to you like a chicken?”

Preoccupied with the boy and the barbed wire, she hadn’t properly attended to the dirt. There was a distinct but out-of-focus chicken shape there, the same nearly black color as the earth.

“And there’s the other one.”

“You’re absolutely right.”

Augie laughed. “Couldn’t be me. If I’d been that close to chickens in those days, I wouldn’t have been lallygagging by that fence. I’d be wringing those critters’ necks.”

His tone was light, open, guileless. Lucy, certain now that she was looking at a picture of Juris Abeltins, no relation to August Vanags, felt giddy with relief. She said, “But isn’t it a weird coincidence — that boy, the wire, and all?”

“He looks like he’s living in the land of plenty. So why’s he all skin and bone?”

“He had a disease called coeliac. His name was Juris Abeltins.”

He corrected her pronunciation and said, “Latvian, like me.” He checked his watch. “Gotta go — date out on the water at four o’clock sharp.”

Looking out the window, she saw the sea was back. On the sand berm at the end of the lawn, Alida, in T-shirt and jeans, was buckling herself into a life vest. “Have a great paddle, or whatever one says.”

She preceded him down the stairs. At the bottom, he said, “Juris Abeltins! Well, whaddaya know!”

He moved to join Alida on the berm, while Lucy went in search of Minna.

FOR AS LONG NOW as it seemed he could remember, he’d spent nearly all his time brooding in his office suite. It was torture to him to drag himself on his rounds through the city on necessary business; he got through it as fast as he could, then drove back to Occidental Avenue to tend his wounds. He wasn’t awake and he wasn’t asleep — at once fully conscious and in the grip of a terrible dream. No distraction worked. When he tried to read, the words were foreign symbols on the page. The cartoons he watched were meaningless colored drawings on a screen. He noticed neither darkness nor light outside. He ate, pissed, and shat — the only punctuations of his unending, unendurable days. Nothing could divert him from the memory of the scene in #701, at which his whole being went rigid with fury and shame.

One thing he knew: he was through with people business. Parking lots were clean, uncomplicated by comparison, generating a revenue stream as pure and untainted as a river gushing from a mountain crag, while the people business was as contaminated as a pipe of swirling sewage, drenching him in filth from head to foot.

Strange to think that only days before he’d looked on the Acropolis with love and pride. Now he wanted it gone — obliterated, wiped off the face of the city. His sole slow-dawning satisfaction lay in the thought of a giant wrecking ball smashing into the building, Pow! and Pow! again, reducing it to a heap of splinters and brick dust.

He’d show those fuckers — all of them, and especially the bitch in #701. They could live in the street along with the rest of the scumbags, making fires in buckets, digging in Dumpsters, begging for quarters, crying, fighting, sucking on their stupid bottles. The street was where garbage in human form belonged. They could scavenge in the alley beside the smoking red-dirt mountain that would be all that was left of the Acropolis.

Where the building had stood, he’d gouge a massive underground garage, multistory, deep as he could go, then lease the space above to some big commercial interest — supermarket, maybe, or bank. Let them build. He wanted only to destroy, right down to the infected foundations of the apartment block.

Pow! He saw the wrecking ball arc slowly through the air, the collapsing walls, the explosion into dust. For the first time since his excruciating humiliation, Charles O caught a distant glimmer of what it might be like to be himself again.

LUCY HAD GROWN to anticipate with pleasure Minna’s regular graces before meals. The meals deserved them, and in her mouth the words “for health and food, for love and friends” sounded just right.

As soon as they sat down, Alida began asking Augie about his book. She was already ninety pages into it, and before dinner had told Lucy that it was “Good—really good.”

“And you were really there? Everything really happened to you?”

“Oh, yes, but of course it was all a long, long time ago.”

“If even some of that stuff happened to me, I would’ve turned out totally freaked and weird.”

“You don’t think I’m weird? I sure am — at least, if you ask some people. Your mother, for instance. She thinks I’m a fabulist and an exaggerator, that I make it up as I go along.”

Aghast, reddening, Lucy said, “Augie! That’s not true!”

He ignored her. Chuckling to Alida, he said, “You only have to see her face when I’m talking about the Islamist threat. She thinks I’m some nutty right-wing hyena. Oh, yes you do! Don’t deny it! Alida, can you pass your mom the wine? She spends far too much of her time reading The New York Times—either that, or I really am the madman she believes me to be.” To Lucy he said, “Don’t think I haven’t considered the possibility that my views may have been warped by my crazy childhood — yeah, it’s possible, but of course I hold them to be entirely rational.”

“To be honest,” she said, “I sort of envy you your views. The trouble with me is I’m an agnostic about everything.”

“I’m a believer. I’ve gotten to the age when it’s smart to buy into Pascal’s wager, but it’s not God I believe in. You know what I believe in.”

They ate in silence for a minute, then Augie said, “What Montaigne said about it? ‘The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, and the young know everything’—though of course that old geezer never got the opportunity to meet Alida, which was his loss.”

TO BEAT THE TRAFFIC, they set off late on Sunday morning after a light brunch, Alida doubly preoccupied in the passenger seat with her iPod and Augie’s book. It was like driving alone, and for once Lucy was content to be left in solitude with her thoughts, which began to tumble from her mind as soon as they’d made the right turn at the end of Sunlight Beach Road.

Magically, the piece she’d thought unwritable was unfolding itself inside her head. Woe to those who conclude! as Augie had said. Which was what was wrong with most feature journalism, her own included. Profilists were no better than the hacks who went on a week’s freebie in some five-star hotel in Venice, then came back to regale a credulous world with “their” Italy. The conceit of it! The idea that you could “capture” a city, a country, or a man in twenty-odd paragraphs; you might as well say you’d captured Seattle with a digital photo of the Space Needle, or, as Augie tiresomely insisted on calling it, the Space Noodle. The judicious tone, the summing up, the obituary-like placing of a terminal period at the end of your subject’s “life”—all flummery and hokum, the smoke-and-mirrors of the journalist’s trade. When she looked back on it, Lucy realized she’d tried to bury everyone she’d ever written about — Gates, Cobain, Jeff Bezos, everybody. Each piece had aimed at the finality of a tombstone. Here lies the body of…in five thousand words.

Well, not this piece. She imagined it rather as she expected a postmodern New York loft might look — all the beams and pipes of its construction, its artifice, would be not only exposed but highlighted. They, as much as August Vanags, would be its subject. It would be full of tourist snapshots of Augie on the patio, on the beach, lecturing a dinner table, up in his study quoting Montaigne and E. B. White, or out kayaking with Alida, who had to be in the picture, too. Augie with Minna, Augie trying to learn his Schubert sonata, Augie the European, Augie the American, Augie the neocon, Augie the nature-lover…But they would be just that — snapshots, nothing more, disjointed one from another like the capricious jumble of images that every camera-toting traveler brings back from a trip, some more in focus than others. They wouldn’t add up, wouldn’t form a narrative, because the narrative of this piece would lie elsewhere. The GQ guy had spoken of a “unicorn hunt.” She’d catch a multitude of glimpses of the elusive unicorn, but the piece would be about the comic intricacies of the chase, and its ultimate futility.

They were on the ferry now, but Lucy didn’t even remember parking on board, and there was no temptation to leave the car for the passenger lounge. Alida was as lost in her own thoughts as she was in hers.

She’d write about the journalist on the job: the phone call from the editor — the pen-in-hand race through the book — the rushed and skimpy library work — the routine Googling — the meeting with the subject — the leaps to judgment on the subject’s “character”—the amateur espionage — the rapid shifts of mood and mind — the gathering suspicions — the trespassing back and forth across the border between reporting and friendship — all that and more. Lucy saw, but would not write, herself in the third person, as a harassed, untidy, inept figure, floundering out of her depth yet always puffed up by her habitual old illusion that there must be something to be gotten to the bottom of.

There’d be no bottom to this piece, no key to the “real” Augie, no problems solved, no pseudo-urbane assembly of Augie in legible and transparent form on the page. Rather, readers would find themselves in the same position as the writer — perplexed, fascinated, engaged, and sometimes repelled by August Vanags — just as aware of their own shortcomings as she was of hers, aware that facets and surfaces were just facets and surfaces, and that, like the writer, they must not conclude.

For these inconclusive times, it would be a topically inconclusive piece, and the most ambitious thing Lucy had ever tried to write. Augie wouldn’t be hurt by it; she’d make him laugh at himself when he wasn’t laughing at her. The visits and kayaking lessons would continue — maybe even through the writing of the piece — and their growing friendship would not be damaged. Yet she’d tell the truth. Most of all, she’d tell the truth about journalism, which was that ninety percent of the time there was no real truth to tell.

When the Union Street exit came up, Lucy was out of breath with her windfall cascade of ideas. She wanted to get a rough outline of the article down on paper before it slipped from the present and became something she had to ransack her bad memory for. Entering the apartment, she ignored the red flashes on her answering machine and went straight to her desk, notebook in hand. She’d never felt more certain of what needed to be done.