Surveillance

2

“DON’T YOU JUST love him?” Alida asked her friend Gail as they walked from Math to Spanish. “He’s so-o-o über-cute.”

They were discussing the new boyfriend of their favorite girl singer, Jessica King, who’d broken up with Dustin Kavanagh and was now going out with Steve Kunz, drummer for the goth band Deadly Nightshade. It was all over the news.

“Cute? You really think he’s cute?”

“He’s got tattoos all over his arms, and he paints his fingernails bright purple. Isn’t that like the essence of cute?” Alida was still experimenting with irony. Saying the opposite of what you meant was cool when it worked, but she had to put a lot of labor into keeping it going, and often, like right now, people just didn’t get it. She supposed being ironical was like learning to ski — you had to fall, clumsily and often, before you got the hang of it.

Gail squinched her face in disgust. “I think he’s…well, like kind of gross.”

“He’s the grossest,” Alida said, glad to get back to the plain talking. “That weirdo beard.”

“The lip ring. Yuck.”

“He’s really old.”

“His nose is way too big.”

“I don’t know what she sees in him. I mean, after Dustin.”

“It must be something we don’t know about. Maybe it’s like he really loves her and wants to make her happy, you know?”

But Alida was too distracted to care much about Jessica’s happiness. In Math, she’d found two new pimples welling up beneath the skin of her forehead, just below her hairline. The last Social Studies project was “The Making of Mountains,” about continental plates colliding, crumpling, and erupting over hot plumes and mantles beneath the earth’s surface. Something similar was happening inside Alida, with volcano-pimples like Rainier and St. Helens. For the last three nights she’d gone to sleep with her entire face slathered in Clearasil — she’d gotten halfway through the tube already, and her pillowcase was stiff with it — but the zits were back on the attack.

Too much other stuff was going on, too. Lately, she’d taken to hunting out the biggest, baggiest T-shirts she could find, to hide what was taking place on her chest. Breasts she could live with, but the fatty pudges that were starting to bulge down there were an embarrassment, and Gail’s chest was still lean as a boy’s. In the Adult XL Maui T-shirt that she’d borrowed from her mom, Alida, shoulders hunched, shrank from the intrusive gaze of strangers — she didn’t even want her mom to see. She was growing out her bangs. Soon she’d be able to hide, mysteriously, behind a safe curtain of hair through which she could look out, but other people couldn’t look in. This thought made her smile.

Gail pointed to the angled barrel of the spy camera that had just recently gone up over the double doors to the gym — one of the many that had appeared around school since the winter break. Gail gave it a cheesy grin, then stuck her tongue out at the lens. Alida tipped her head to avoid the camera’s violet cyclops stare.

“Are they listening to us, too?”

“You bet they are,” Alida said. “Every word. They hide microphones inside the walls, and in the lights and bathrooms and stuff. They’re the Watchers.”

Gail giggled and said softly, “Shit!”, then, “Fuck! You think they could hear that in the office?”

“They’re not in the office. They’re underground, in a secret cellar somewhere downtown. Men in raincoats, with sunglasses. Any time they catch someone goofing off, they report back.”

“Back where?”

“Just back. To their like headquarters.”

“Finn says they’re making a movie about the school. Like a documentary. He called it a ‘fly on the wall.’”

“Oh, yeah, that’d be a really, really great movie, with Finn in it and all. I can’t wait.”

“Finn weirds me out.”

“Me, too. Did you get the muffin for him?”

“’Course I did. I got three.”

They stopped short of the hubbub coming from Señora Benson’s room.

“You know what?” Alida said. “It could be a ploy. I mean, she could be hanging out with Steve just to make Dustin mad.”

From behind them came Señora Benson, a vast, dramatic figure in her swirling red-and-black-striped poncho. “Shoo! Shoo! Shoo!” she said, brushing the girls into the classroom.

“Buenos dias, muchachos y señoritas!” She spoke in a deafening singsong, upsy-downsy voice, like there were a thousand kids, not seventeen, in the class.

“Buenos dias, Señora Benson.”

Nobody liked her: Señora Benson was nutso.

THE WOMAN who came to the door was a graying blonde with wispy hair and a vague smile that seemed disconnected from the rest of her, and certainly had nothing to do with Lucy’s arrival. Explaining her appointment, Lucy saw alarm in the woman’s eyes.

Then her face cleared. “Ah, you’re the one who comes to lunch.”

There was a European tinge — German, or maybe Dutch? — to her accent. And was she the wife or the help?

Half turning in the doorway, she sang out, “Augie!” No reply. To Lucy she said, “He’s out there somewhere. Probably busy with his birds.”

Beyond the front door, colonial New England abruptly became California vacation rental: an enormous open space, awash with sunshine and overhung by cross-hatched yellow beams, in which the few sticks of furniture looked too old and small for their surroundings. Lucy took in a lonely couch covered in faded beige corduroy, mismatched rugs, a cane rocker, a rolltop secretary with dog-eared books behind glass. In another house, another time and place, these pieces might have fitted cozily, but here they had the forlorn shabbiness of enforced exile. The one concession to the lofty expanse of this unhomelike home was a very new-looking grand piano with something by Schubert on the stand.

“Are you the pianist?” Lucy asked.

“Me? No, him. He’s not too good yet. Plinkety-plonkety all day long. Scales!” She pronounced “Scales!” as if saying “Men!” with a sisterly wink at Lucy, yet her voice was fond.

They passed through sliding glass doors to the brick patio, where a lumpy pea-green cardigan was draped over one of the four Adirondack chairs and an American flag drooped in thick folds from an angled pole set into the back wall of the house.

“Augie?” She called again.

So they were Republicans — or was the flag just an island, waterfront thing? It looked brand new: no breath of wind or drop of rain appeared to have disturbed the virgin stitching of the stripes on the dimpled white fabric. In the lifeless air, it was as still as a sculpted marble flag on a war memorial.

“Where’s he got to? Augie? Company’s here!”

From around the corner of the house came a small man — shorter than his wife or Lucy — carrying a large pair of binoculars. His coarse white hair and bristly mustache were flecked with saffron.

“Hey there, how’s it going?” He exposed a set of teeth too gleamingly regular to be his own. His handshake, brief but fierce, was a little man’s handshake, making up in power for what he lacked in height. Lucy was reminded of something, but couldn’t quite place the memory.

Vanags set the binoculars on the slatted table next to a fast-disintegrating copy of Peterson’s Western Birds. “Birding,” he explained.

“My dad was a birder,” Lucy said. That same title — swollen, sun-bleached, leaking pages — used to live on top of the Jeep’s dash, and there was always a pair of army-surplus binocs in the pocket on the driver’s side.

“Know anything about gulls? I didn’t. When we first moved out here, all I saw was seagulls. Couldn’t tell ’em apart. I’m still a newbie, but I’m learning. Like a couple minutes ago, I figured that the little guy flying with a flock of black-headeds must be a Bonaparte gull — only a tad smaller, but with much paler undersides to his wings. I got a kick out of that. Made my day.”

“Bonaparte!” Mrs. Vanags said.

“My dad was a big sparrow man. He tried to teach me, but I could never see the differences.” Still learning to talk casually about him, she stumbled on a couple of words, fending off the image of Lewis Olson the rancher in his mania, brandishing the gun that killed her dad. “Fox sparrows, B-b-b-brewer’s sparrows, I tried to tell which was which but was sort of blind to them. That was in Montana.”

Fazed by the birding talk, Mrs. Vanags said, “You want coffee or anything?”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“We’ll holler if we need you, Minna.” Minna—would that be Wilhelmina? — looked grateful for this dismissal and faded back into the house. “Want to stretch your legs? Let’s take a walk along the beach before it gets hot as a pizza oven out there.”

The memory Lucy had been looking for suddenly came to her. August Vanags was the White Rabbit in the framed Tenniel print that had hung over her narrow bed in Miles City when she was a kid. They had the same albino nattiness: the rabbit with his fob watch and tightly furled umbrella, Vanags in pressed khakis and immaculate white dress shirt, the cuffs folded back to expose a few inches of forearm, as if he’d been delivered fresh from the dry cleaner’s. He wasn’t at all what she’d expected, this eyewitness to atrocity, victim of Hitler and Stalin. Nothing of that experience showed on his face. He didn’t even have an accent. The crafty, vulnerable little European ragamuffin in Boy 381 had turned into a dapper little American retiree. Lucy could easily imagine him in sun hat and Bermuda shorts, swanning around the local golf course in an electric cart — but in the camps? The refugee trains? The Nazification program? She felt a surge of ambition for her GQ piece: to connect boy and man, European and American, she’d begin out here on the patio, with “I’m still a newbie,” the bird book, the flash of false teeth, and her initial disconcerted impression of August Vanags as a sort of living conjuring trick, a work of implausible self-transformation.

She followed him across the browning remnants of the lawn, avoiding the exposed white sprinkler heads whose use had been illegal since early last year. Pulled up on a sand berm at the lawn’s end were two kayaks, one red, one blue, like painted seedpods. Both looked new.

“I love to be out on the water,” Vanags said, “but it scares poor Minna.”

Bleached driftwood logs had piled up at the head of the beach. Stepping gingerly over them, Lucy found her elbow cupped by Vanags’ helping hand. It felt as though he were gripping her by the bone.

The sea was out, leaving behind it miles of puddled sand laced with crooked little saltwater creeks. As they walked, Vanags named every bird he saw. “Herring gulls,” he said. “Common murres.” Aheron waded fastidiously on fuse-wire legs, doubled by its own reflection. “Great blue heron.”

The smoke cloud to the south over Seattle had lightened to a patchy, pearl-gray stain on the blue. “It’s magical out here,” she said. “I’d forgotten how beautiful it is.”

“Thank you,” Vanags said, as if sea, sand, sky, and wildlife were his own handiwork. “Look — more murres.”

As soon as they were out of direct sight of the house, Vanags reached into his shirt pocket and fished out a slightly bent cigarette. “Please don’t say anything to Minna.”

Lucy laughed. “You really think she doesn’t know?”

“It’s like being a gay in the military — don’t ask, don’t tell. She doesn’t ask, I don’t tell.” He lit up, infecting the salt air with the musty stink of blown smoke. “I must have smoked my first cigarette when I was four, I guess. At five, I was quite the tobacconist.”

She knew that from the book — the boy scavenging for butts, mixing the tobacco strands (“stringy brown boogers”) with dirt and sawdust, and trading his roll-ups for stuff to eat. In the perverse world of wartime, starving people would barter bread for a hit of nicotine. Near the top of Lucy’s long list of hopes for Alida was that she’d never ever learn to smoke.

“Ah — black guillemot. Over there.”

The wet sand was silver-bright, the bird a blobby, ducklike silhouette.

“You know Ernst Mayr the biologist, the guy who figured out the importance of geography in evolution?” It was Mayr, Vanags said, who came up with the idea that new species were formed when creatures of one species became geographically isolated from the rest of their kind, on remote islands, across oceans or mountain ranges. Separated from their cousins, they adapted themselves to their new terrain until they could no longer breed with members of their original species and became genetically distinct.

“He called it allopatric speciation.” With forefinger and thumb, Vanags flipped the burning tip of his cigarette into the sand and carefully restored the half-smoked remainder to his shirt pocket. “Allopatric — in another country, another fatherland. Mayr knew something about that: he came to America from Germany in the thirties, and dreamed up his theory when he was at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Know how he spent his first day in the city? He rode the subway until he’d mastered the entire system. Talk about Darwinian adaptation.”

Wanting to rid herself of a small rock that was painfully embedding itself in her left heel with each step, Lucy took off her flip-flops and went barefoot. Vanags studied her ankles, his white lashes blinking slowly over eyes of crackled china blue. The piggy, inquisitive eyes looked older than the man.

Catching her glance, Vanags said, “Hermit crab!”

A rather large whelk shell was traveling fast between her feet, propelled by tiny whiskery claws.

“Adaptation again. Clever little bugger, isn’t he?” Grinning, Vanags treated Lucy to a full-frontal view of his dazzling artificial snappers. “Dollars to doughnuts he killed and ate the poor old whelk to get possession of his property.”

She saw now that the sand was alive with unlovely creatures — beach hoppers hopping, clams squirting, dark squadrons of flies buzzing over stranded clumps of kelp. She trod on soft, heaped spirals of lugworm poop. Spotting a jellyfish almost underfoot — a yard-wide blob of thick diaphanous slime, wrinkling fast in the heat of the sun — she put her flip-flops back on.

“It’s critter utopia out here. No surf, and every tide brings in another haul of plankton. You gotta see it when the water’s up and we get the sea lions and porpoises and bald eagles. Oh, man — the bald eagles. I tell you, I’ve counted forty here at one time, when we’ve had the herring in.”

Sidestepping a condom, Lucy did her best to share Vanags’ pleasure in his new habitat. A familiar bird call came from quite a ways inland: Dee! Dee-dee-dee-dee! Kill-dee-a! Kill-dee-a! “Killdeer,” she said. “That’s a real Montana bird.”

“Yeah,” Vanags said complacently. “Those guys are like chump change around here. Hear ’em all the time.” He stopped to investigate a beached sea cucumber that looked to Lucy like a pimply turd. “Out here in the boonies, it’s easy to forget that we’re at war, huh?”

“War?”

But Vanags didn’t hear the question. “Of course, we miss the city. We don’t know too many folks on the island, but it has its compensations. Like this…” He inhaled the sea air deep into his lungs as if it were smoke from a joint, holding it in his chest before releasing it through his nose. “Ozone.”

“But everyone says you’re a recluse.”

“Me? No, this was CollierParnell’s idea. They wanted me to be a mystery man.”

“The publishers sent you here?”

“Well, kind of. First, when they got the boy book, they were going to send me on a tour. Twenty-one cities. I’d been looking forward to that — there’s a whole bunch of stuff I wanted to say that I couldn’t get into the book. Then we had a meeting with the big kahunas in New York, and they came up with this new plan. They put the kibosh on the tour — no interviews, no nothing. They said they wanted to let the book speak for itself and spend the tour moolah on advertising. Day it shipped, Minna and me went on a cruise — Seattle to Rio de Janeiro, thirty-six days. That was my editor’s idea: he said I’d get pestered half to death if we stayed in town. Had to change our phone to an unlisted number. When we got back from the cruise, the local rep told me about this house on Whidbey, and my editor talked me into buying it. ‘Better get used to it,’ he said: ‘You’re going to be a rich man now.’ You wouldn’t believe the trouble they went to, looking after us. All part of the marketing strategy is what they said — I tell you, they don’t do things by halves at CollierParnell.”

Lucy could imagine the scene at the publishers’ office. Counting on a ripely accented, gaunt, hollow-eyed Holocaust survivor, a figure of haunting telegenic pathos, they’d come face-to-face with this chipper and garrulous American know-it-all. August Vanags was unworthy of being the author of his own book. Put him on Larry King and he’d unsell Boy 381 at the rate of thousands a minute. They must have wanted to strangle him when they saw what they were up against.

Ahead of them, a flock of small, long-legged birds skittered across the glassy sand flats, came to a sudden stop, then raced off on a fresh heading, like panic in strict formation.

“Sanderlings.”

Far from evading journalists, Vanags had lusted to catch their ear, which was bad news for Lucy. She hated people who tempered the facts to fit the story, but the whole point of the GQ piece was supposed to be tracking down the famously shy and elusive historian. It was going to be tricky in the extreme to tell the truth and still have a story worth telling.

“I got to hand it to them. The CollierParnell people sure know their stuff. Six hundred thousand in hardback, jeepers! Guess how many copies my Yalta book sold in toto?” Vanags had a gruff, chirruping laugh.

Aiming diplomatically high, Lucy said, “Three thousand?”

“Five hundred and fifty. But that was the UW Press,” Vanags said, as if the geniuses at CollierParnell would have sold a million. “Took me eight years to write that book. I did the boy book in a month.”

“That’s amazing.”

“It seemed dead easy at the time. Scribble, scribble, scribble, like I was on automatic pilot or using a planchette. It pretty much wrote itself, with just the occasional shove from me. I never knew I had all that stuff in my memory. It was like whenever I sat down to write, more little doors would open inside my head. Every night I’d read what I’d written during the day to Minna, like a bedtime story, and that kept me going the next day — Minna had to have her story.”

“But she must have known most of it already.”

“Funny thing, she didn’t. I never talked to her about those times — hardly ever thought much about them myself, to be honest. Everything was news to her. A lot of it was news to me.”

“How did you—”

“Hello!” Vanags had veered suddenly off to the side. “Now what would you call that?”

The thing at his feet was the size of a football, hump shaped, the color of congealed blood. Lucy heard Vanags’ knees creak as he squatted down to get a better look. Whatever it was, it was the sort of object that Lucy would’ve given a wide berth to, belonging to the same unpleasant category as condoms, jellyfish, worm crap. But Vanags was fascinated by his find, which he prodded experimentally, as if to find out whether it would bite.

“That,” he said, “is really something else,” and rolled it over on its hump, exposing a sandy reddish underside.

“It’s incredibly ugly,” Lucy said.

“Ugly?” He seemed genuinely surprised.

“Sort of like a giant red potato bug.”

“My first thought was armadillo, I don’t know why.”

“Turtle?”

“Touch it.”

Lucy bent down and reached out a reluctant finger. It felt — as she had known it would — fuzzy and slimy in the nastiest possible combination. Leathery flesh or hard shell? It might be either. “D’you think it’s some sort of mollusk?”

“Mollusk.” Vanags savored the word. “Seems on the big side for a mollusk to me.” His own manikinishness made the whatever-it-was look enormous.

“You know those gourd things that people bring back from like the Seychelles?”

“Coco de mer.” His bridgework grin reminded Lucy, a little late in the day, of the comic obscenity of those gourds, their cheeky likeness to enormous vulvas. Cripes, she thought; she certainly hadn’t meant to send Vanags thinking in that direction.

He was weighing it in both hands. “What d’you think? Animal or vegetable? Dead or alive?”

“Animal,” she said. “Definitely animal.”

He stood up, still holding it.

“You’re not going to take that home with you?”

“Don’t you want to know what it is?”

Lucy laughed. “I think I could go without knowing and live.”

In the presence of this thing neither of them could name, she felt suddenly easy with the man. Watching him bear it tenderly before him, this weird childish trophy, she couldn’t help worrying for his immaculate shirt and pants. As they walked together on the sand, in step, on their short shadows, Lucy found herself telling him about the accident. She’d meant to say nothing — to put the whole business of the wrecked Infiniti on hold until after the interview — but now, with the sun hot on their backs and the house a mile off, it seemed natural to confide in him. She told about the couple in the lounge aboard the ferry, the flying car, the dreadful roadside aftermath, her stumbling performance with the young cop. Vanags nodded as he listened, every so often turning his face to hers: his blue eyes, which she’d thought of as piggy only minutes before, now struck her as kindly, searching, full of comprehension. But when she was through with her story, all he said was, “Yeah, that’s a dangerous road. Lot of people get killed on it, I hear.”

But then Vanags, at an age when he should have been in preschool, had been out on the streets robbing corpses. If such everyday horrors were hardwired into your character, of course the deaths of strangers wouldn’t seem that big a deal — which made it even odder to see him holding the globby red thing so protectively, like a baby.

When they reached the house, Minna was out on the patio, wearing an apron that said “Kissin’ Don’t Last — Cookin’ Do!” She said, “Nice hike?”

“Yeah, we had a blast,” Vanags said, showing his prize.

“Does he always bring stuff like that back with him?” Lucy said.

Minna eyed it with a look of doleful recognition. “Oh, yes.”

“Gotta keep it damp,” Vanags said, and disappeared into the house.

“The things he finds on the beach,” Minna said. “One day he found an octopus. Octopus!” She shook her head at the memory. “Been a long time dead, too. It was really stinky. Oh, Augie! That’s a new towel!”

Swaddled in the dripping bath towel, the thing bore an uncanny likeness to a baby — a very red, very angry baby, howling for a feed.

“Where’d I put my peepers?” Vanags said, and went to look for them, still carrying his precious charge, now cradled on one arm, the folds of the towel dropping from it like a christening shawl.

Peepers. The most un-American thing about August Vanags, Lucy thought, was his addiction to American slang, some of it so out of date as to be fossilized. To Minna she said, “You guys have kids?”

“No.” Minna drew the word out into a sigh, making Lucy regret the question. “Is hot!”

It felt like ninety now, and through the thin soles of her flip-flops Lucy could feel the burning bricks of the patio. “Another record. Every day now, it seems to break the record.”

Minna gazed into space. Her face appeared to go out of focus, then suddenly came back. “The greenhouse gases! Augie can tell you all about the gases.”

Lucy bet he could, and made a mental note to avoid the topic.

When Vanags reappeared he was wearing half-moon glasses and holding an open book. “You were right on the money — it’s a mollusk! Gumboot chiton. Biggest chiton in the world. Related to the limpet. Eats red algae. Cryptochiton stelleri. That’d be Steller, as in Steller’s jay and Steller’s sea lion. German guy worked for the Russians. Know about Steller?”

“Yes, a bit,” Lucy said, trying to forestall a lecture. “He was up in Alaska.” That pretty much exhausted her knowledge of Mr. Steller.

Vanags gently unwrapped the towel from around the chiton to show its flat bottom. “See? That’s his foot there. Feel the suction! This poor critter must’ve gotten washed off a rock someplace. I better take him back to where he belongs.”

As Vanags marched in short neat steps across the bald lawn toward the beach, Minna called after him, apparently from long and, Lucy guessed, unsuccessful habit: “Augie! Don’t be late for your lunch!”

AFTER THEIR LUNCH of incredibly disgusting chicken fajitas, Gail and Alida raced each other to the computer lab to find Finn. Weird as he was, Finn was a big figure in the lives of sixth-grade girls, who usually referred to him not by name but as “the Geek,” or just “Geek.” If you were building a website, sooner or later you’d find yourself armed with bribes in the shape of Jamba Juice smoothies, gum, doughnuts, dark chocolate (Finn would accept no other kind), Cheez-Its, or, like today, blueberry muffins, going in search of the Geek.

Finn wrote code. He could rattle stuff out in HTML and Java faster than the girls could write English when they were I.M.-ing. If Finn had a life, which was doubtful, it lay somewhere out in cyberspace. Even seniors consulted him, gifts in hand; you’d hear them saying in low, respectful voices, “How’d you get there, Finn?” and “Can you show me that again?” He sat through tech classes, scowl glued to his face, rolling his eyes when the teacher wasn’t looking. Mr. Orlovsky, Finn said, was “crap.”

Last week he’d done this really cool thing with Emma’s website. Emma had always had a picture on her home page of her house in Issaquah, with her entire family posed outside, right down to the aunts and uncles and cousins. It had been taken on her grandparents’ silver wedding anniversary. Finn had gone to work on it. Now the whole picture was alive with links: you’d click on a face and get taken to a biography, where you’d learn everything from their favorite color to their pet peeve. If you clicked on a window of the house, you’d find yourself inside that room — at least would be able to, when Emma finished taking photos, which was getting difficult because her parents were threatening to revoke her privileges for spending too much time on her website. This amazing interactive home page, shared in strict confidence with Gail and Alida, was so totally awesome that they had to have one for themselves.

In the computer lab, the Geek was sitting, or writhing on the stool at his usual monitor. Every kid in school recognized that spot as his personal territory at lunchtime. He had big springy hair, like an Afro, and a big ass to match. The moment the girls were in the door, he shut down the screen, like what he was doing was top secret, though the one time Alida caught him out, he was only finishing an e-mail, signing it “Love ya!!!! Finn.” Maybe that was his secret: whenever he sent e-mails to his girl clients, he always signed them FREAK.

“Hey, dude,” Gail said.

“So whaddaya got?” Finn didn’t turn around, just kept his eyes on the blank screen. He never looked straight at people; he’d talk to ceilings, walls, or windows, anything but the person who was trying to talk to him.

“Muffins.”

“Three muffins.”

“Blueberry?”

“What else?”

“Okay. Whaddaya want?”

He was incredibly rude. Puzzled that the website king didn’t have — or said he didn’t have — a website of his own, Emma had asked him why not, and got the answer, “Because I’m not a dumb-ass girl.” Hilarious. Still, you only had to see Emma’s new home page to swallow your pride and go buy muffins for the odious Finn.

He now had Gail’s site up on the screen, with a picture taken by her dad last weekend at her house over in Bellevue: Gail was smiling (she’d taken her retainer out for the photo) with her dog Sirius lying at her feet, his tongue hanging out like he’d just run a marathon.

“Sirius is so cute,” Alida said.

Finn surprised them both when he said, “You want a link on that dog?” He sounded almost interested.

Gail said, “D’you have a dog, Finn?”

“Not anymore.” A long string of code unfurled across the screen. “I’m more into horses now.”

“You go horse riding?” The idea of the Geek on horseback was so totally hilarious that Alida didn’t dare catch Gail’s eye.

“Nah,” Finn said, with his whiffling, sniggery laugh.

“Oh, horse racing, like Seabiscuit.”

“I really liked that movie,” Alida said.

“This host sucks.” Finn was hammering at a key with an impatient forefinger. “It’s a POS.”

“What?”

“Piece Of Shit. I could move you to WebspiderZ — they’re cool.”

“Don’t you dare!”

Finn had worked that trick on Pia — moved her site to WebspiderZ, where you couldn’t do anything without knowing code. So for a week or two Pia had become a slave to Finn’s peculiar moods and whims, then she’d gone back to FreeWebs, where she had to start over from scratch. Like Pia said, on WebspiderZ, Finn was the spider and you were the fly.

He heaved his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “Just my two cents. There’s a bunch of neat stuff you can do on Webspider Z.”

Parents were generally indulgent toward him. Gail’s mom called him Poor Finn, like Poor was his given name. According to the mothers, his dad was a foreigner who’d gone away to Europe and wasn’t coming back, so Finn had gotten some kind of eating disorder, which was why he was always pigging out on candy and muffins. To Alida, who didn’t even know who her dad was, this seemed less than a stellar reason for cutting Finn a mile of slack, but she enjoyed the grown-upness that came with thinking of the Geek as an unhappy kid whose extraordinary brattiness might not be entirely his own fault. “Going through a difficult phase” was how the parents put it, and Alida liked the ring of superior maturity in the words.

When the link to Sirius came up on the screen, she said “Good job, Finn,” as if she were a teacher and Finn her student.

“Cool,” Gail said.

“Oh yeah, this is like rocket science,” Finn said, but sounded gratified in spite of himself. “That dog — if you’ve got video of him, I could stream it for you.”

“You could?” Nobody Gail and Alida knew had streaming video on her website.

Finn talked megabytes and bandwidth, not to Gail but mumbling confidentially to the screen and keyboard. Seeing his back as he bobbed and squirmed in his seat you’d think he was wrestling with an octopus, the double roll of fat around his midriff rippling inside his black T-shirt, his tangled bush of hair jerking back and forth in hip-hop time. In class he was the motionless hulk at his all-boys table, but plugged into a computer he had this frantic, cartoonish animation.

“Finn, what happened to your dog?” Alida said. “Did he like die?”

His back froze in mid-squirm. “Nah. She just got advertised.”

“Advertised?”

“There’s a no-pets rule in the building, so she had to get put in the paper.”

“You mean somebody bought her?”

“Nope. She was free. Some woman got her. In North Bend.” He made it sound like North Bend was on Mars. More slowly than usual, he wrote on the screen, . “She was called Sugar,” he said.

Gail caught Alida’s eye. It was partly the way he said it, but the thought of the Geek with a dog named Sugar was kind of hilarious, and Gail’s whole body was trembling with the effort of suppressing a fit of the giggles. Cheeks bulging, staring bug-eyed at Alida, she put the back of her hand to her mouth to keep the laughter from bursting out.

Covering for her friend, Alida said, a little too loudly, “That’s really, really sad.”

“Duh!” Finn said. “Who gives a shit? It was only a stupid dog.”

Later, daydreaming through Social Studies while Mrs. Milliband went on about maps, Alida thought about her secret algebra project. People were always saying x when what they really meant was y. Everybody did it, usually to be polite — like the dozen times a day you had to say, “Cool,” out of politeness when something wasn’t cool at all. Sometimes the words people spoke were exactly like problems in algebra. Finn talking about his lost dog, for instance. Or even Alida herself, pretending to Gail that she had a crush on Eric because Gail said she had a crush on Blake.

Math was Alida’s favorite subject, and this semester she was seriously into algebra — tantalizing puzzles in which you used Elimination, Substitution, and Intersection to make unknown quantities reveal their true identities. Back in fourth grade, she’d been a whiz at story problems: John had five times as many apples as Mary, or Ben and Sara were working the snack bar at the school summer fair and selling hot dogs for $1.35 and sodas for 85¢, and Alida always had her hand up first, rapping furiously at the air even before the solution had precisely formulated itself in her head, confident that the right answer would come to her lips in time. She feared the world of the playground, where the rules kept on changing from one day to the next, but among numbers she felt gifted and secure. Each day now she saved her math homework until last, the better to enjoy her escape into this magical place where everything fit as snugly as a well-shot basketball dropping through the hoop. Working her way down a page of equations, she was engrossed and happy, letting numbers talk to her, watching k, and x, and y, and b, and c come out from behind their teasing disguises.

6 — 2y = 7y + 13 made immediate and satisfying sense, but what Alida really wanted was a system of human algebra. It’d be incredibly cool if you could figure people out like that, isolating their variables on just one side of the equation, adding positives to negatives to make zeros, until the problem disentangled into one clear statement: this means that.

When Susy walked to the bus stop at 3 mph, she missed the bus by 2 minutes, but when she ran to the stop at 6 mph, she arrived with 1 minute to spare. How far is the bus stop from Susy’s home? The simplest equations needed a whole bunch of hard data, like all the stopwatch and tape-measure stuff they’d managed to collect on Susy. Alida was working on that. She’d already opened a secret file on her mother, who was pretty crazy a lot of the time, and in less than two weeks had filled nearly twenty pages of a locked diary with scraps of significant info — like exactly how much wine her mom drank, and when; what she said when she got mad; when her period came; which route she took to school each day. Alida was logging every visitor to the apartment, the books her mom read, her conversations on the phone. Her mom could hardly go to the bathroom now without Alida registering the event. She was still way short of building any actual equations, but felt that with each new addition to the diary she was getting slightly closer to turning her mom into a soluble problem.

She could speak to nobody about the algebra project, for Alida knew that she was unhappily unique in finding other people’s talk and behavior so weird and difficult to read. Gail was never mystified by her parents — or by anybody else, so far as Alida could tell. All her friends instinctively understood things that Alida had to puzzle out. She might be smart at math, but she was dumb at human beings, and much acting and pretense went into hiding her peculiar stupidity from the rest of the world. Laughing at jokes that made no sense to her, having crushes on boys she didn’t even like, searching people’s faces for cues as to whether she ought to say x or y, Love it or Hate it, Alida usually succeeded in passing herself off as a normal kid: she alone knew the shameful effort that went into her daily performances, and the risk she ran of being unmasked as a pathetic fake.

“Alida?”

Her own name reached her as a slow-spiraling echo bouncing off the walls of a long tunnel, and it took a little while to connect the voice with Mrs. Milliband, who was looking down at her with the professionally tolerant smile of someone trained to deal with the severely handicapped.

“Uh…Mercator?” Alida said, and waited for the class to break out in mocking laughter at her dopiness.

“Right, Mercator. Now who can tell us what Mercator’s ‘Greenland problem’ is?”

Alida’s hand went up. In class, her hand often seemed to be out of her control, like an unruly puppy who couldn’t grasp the meaning of “Sit!” or “Stay!” She watched from a distance as it waved urgently at Mrs. Milliband. Everyone knew that on Mercator’s projection, Greenland came out far too big and Africa far too small.

“Let’s hear from one of the boys. How about…Finn?”

“Well,” Finn said, as if that were the last word as well the first that he had to say on the subject, then smooshed his face into an expression of agonized concentration. “If you peel an orange, it comes out like distorted.” Two boys sitting at his table tittered, but in a friendly way: surly, geeky Finn was popular with boys. “Well,” he said again. “The way Mercator did it, Greenland got all skewed. But Robinson came along and fixed it.”

A fly buzzed against the dusty pane of the tall window through which the sun streamed. The air smelled cooked and stale; the class, fidgety in the heat, heavy with lunch, limped through Mrs. Milliband’s lesson. Alida tried to concentrate, obediently imagining a lightbulb inside a colored glass globe, projecting the surface of the earth onto paper cylinders and cones, but with her mind adrift, she was soon elsewhere, thinking of algebra again.

She and Gail were best friends. But x + y = z was only one in a set of troubling simultaneous equations. Her mom hated Gail’s mom. She never said so directly, of course, but Alida could tell, from her frozen smiles and too-bright, tinkly voice whenever she dropped Alida off at Gail’s house and the two mothers spoke. So — z = a + b. It had started — Alida was sure of it — near the end of last semester, shortly before Mr. Quigley, the girls’ Language Arts and homeroom teacher, who was incredibly funny and nice, left the school. Mysteriously, Mr. Quigley was another variable in the problem. So was the fact that Gail’s family went to church a lot — they were Baptists or something. This much Alida had gleaned from observing her mom, but the puzzle was missing a bunch of essential data. Subtle questioning of Gail had added nothing new, and the one time Alida had tried to question her mom she’d met evasion and denial.

Elimination. Substitution. Intersection. As Alida watched the fly — a tiny frenzy of beating wings as it flung itself again and again at the glass — it appeared to grow, until she could almost see its bulbous red eyes and bearded, spongy mouth, like the monster flies in Microcosmos that had figured in her nightmares when she was a little kid. Memoryless, incapable of learning from experience, it would thrash against the window till it died.

Alida was engrossed in the fly’s stupid struggles when Mrs. Milliband’s voice broke through to her: “Azimuthal,” she said, and wrote the word up in squeaky yellow letters on the chalkboard.

Azimuthal. Alida loved ten-dollar words, and was glad to add this one to her collection, where it nestled beside such recent treasures as “egregious” and “collateral.” Even as she took in Mrs. Milliband’s official definition, which involved a flat card held against the surface of a globe, she was busy in another part of her head, making sentences. All through the long hot azimuthal afternoon.…All through the egregious azimuthal afternoon…

“SO HOW DID you guys meet?”

The Vanagses’ kitchen-dining area was a cool refuge from the heat outside. The posy of wildflowers in the vase on the table — poppy, iris, buttercup, dogrose — looked fresh-picked from the roadside that morning.

“In the bank.” Minna was putting the finishing touches to a risotto on the countertop range.

“She was the prettiest teller in the line,” Augie said — he was definitely Augie now — as he extracted a half-empty bottle of white wine from the fridge.

“I opened an account for him. He had his first check from the college and wanted me to give him bills for it. I had to explain banking to him. He knew a lot of history, but he didn’t know nothing about banking, poor boy. He was such an innocent.”

Or good at pick-up lines, Lucy thought. It was easy to imagine the un-innocent refugee-scholar playing the scene, and the girl clerk smitten by his artful mask of helplessness.

“I was still a greenhorn then.”

“He came nearly all the way across the country on a Greyhound bus. From Ann Arbor in Michigan.”

“Yep, rode the dog. Took five days before the interstates.”

Lucy, still puzzled by Minna’s accent, said, “But Minna, where are you from, originally?”

“West Seattle. I graduated from West Seattle High.”

But she said “vest” for “west.” Somehow, in the strange barter-economy of marriage, Minna had picked up her husband’s old accent, while he now spoke in the voice that must have once belonged to her. But since they’d come indoors, Lucy had begun to notice a distinct foreignness in Augie’s speech; not an accent so much as an academic, overprecise articulation, as if his English had been learned — rather too perfectly — from lessons on tape. In “rode the dawg” or “priddiest teller in the lahn,” Lucy caught a slight, actorish false note in the down-homey pronunciations.

“Join me?” Augie waved the chardonnay bottle. “Minna doesn’t like to drink at lunchtime.”

“Makes me go all dizzy,” Minna said.

“Sure.”

But Lucy was disappointed by the meager two fingers’ worth Augie tipped into her glass before putting the cork firmly back into the bottle and returning it to the fridge. A real drink was what she needed — enough to stop the dead couple from paying surprise calls whenever her attention lapsed. Just as she was sitting down at the table, she realized that Minna was saying grace.

“…for each new morning with its light, for rest and shelter of the night,” she recited in schoolroom singsong.

Lucy sneaked a covert glance at Augie, and saw he was sneaking a covert glance at her.

“For health and food, for love and friends, for everything thy goodness sends.”

“Amen,” Augie said, and sent a crooked, collaborative smile in Lucy’s direction.

In the scuffle of chairs, Lucy said, “Looks delicious!” rather too loudly.

“Minna’s an ace cook. Me, best I can do is terrorize the occasional steak.”

Minna passed Lucy the salad bowl. “That’s a wild salad.”

“Yes, isn’t it just!” Lucy said, and laughed, before she saw what Minna meant: dandelion leaves, chickweed, what looked like wilted stinging nettle.

“Minna loves to scavenge.”

“You’ve got to scavenge now, what with the war and all.”

“Sorry?”

“The war…” That vague look again: sometimes Minna was there, and sometimes she seemed to abruptly absent herself from her own face.

Digging into his greens, Augie said, “You rely on supermarkets for your food, you’re going to go hungry any day now. Do you have any idea how incredibly fragile the infrastructure of this country is — how easily it can be paralyzed by the enemy? Suppose in the next attack they hit four cities — Chicago, say, and Boston, and Houston, and Long Beach, all in the same hour. Okay, we close our borders, close our ports, order every plane out of the air: how long d’you think it’d take to clear the shelves of your local Thriftway in Seattle? Two days? Five? But then suppose that twenty-four hours after the first wave of attacks, they come in with truck bombs in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Miami…You better be up early, scavenging for dandelions, because sure as hell ain’t nuthin’ going to be working when that second wave hits.

“You know what mass panic looks like? Food riots? I tell you, it’s two attorneys, middle-aged guys, in ties and good suits, fighting in the street over a greasy chicken leg. It’s bodies on the sidewalk, rotting garbage, fires, the stink of feces everywhere. And gunfire. You go to sleep to gunfire, you wake up to gunfire. Then it’s just white noise.”

“New Orleans,” Lucy said.

“Yeah, New Orleans. That was a good reminder. Civilization is always just twelve, maybe fifteen hours away from barbarity. Doesn’t matter where you are — could be anywhere, could be Seattle — and less than a day is all it takes to turn a great city into a hellhole. Yesterday you were living in the world’s finest democracy, today’s it’s Mogadishu. The line’s that thin. Which is why we needed New Orleans.

“Trouble is, this country is reliant on a whole series of interlocking networks, and every supply line in every network is so old and brittle and squirrelly — it’s like living in a house full of the latest, most expensive stuff you can buy, but the wiring and the plumbing go back to the days of Theodore Roosevelt. Or before. Think about it: food, water, power — everything has to travel from somewhere else, and everything depends on everything else working. It’s crazy. We’ve got the slowest trains and the most flickery electricity in the western world: someone sneezes in a coal plant in Montana and the lights go out on Whidbey Island.

“It’s democracy. Joe Q. Public isn’t interested in infrastructure, doesn’t want to pay for infrastructure, won’t vote for infrastructure. Who’d vote for a politician who went to the people saying we gotta spend all these billions and billions of federal money on backup systems for these antiquated networks of ours? Can you tell me that?”

“Nobody,” Minna said. “Nobody would.”

Lucy suddenly saw that this was how mealtimes must always be in the Vanags household: Augie launched on a tirade, Minna fueling his rhetorical questions with mechanical answers.

“Right. Which is why we’re so vulnerable to the enemy. And don’t tell me”—he fixed his blue-eyed stare on Lucy as if she were a known dissident—“that our enemy doesn’t know our weakness. He does. It’s what he’s calculating on. He’s perfectly aware that the difference between everything working and nothing working is like that.” He snapped his middle finger against his thumb. “You really want to injure the United States — hurt us economically, socially, politically, maybe inflict a wound from which we won’t be able to recover — you go for the infrastructure. You don’t have to kill a lot of people. That’s the beauty of it: you just have to put a crimp on one network here, another network there, another over there, and bingo! you’ve got civil unrest, martial law, no food, no power, no water. Plus, you’ve got the biggest world recession in history, because you’ve just brought international trade to a screaming halt. Here, help yourself to Minna’s risotto.”

His smile was that of the conjuror producing the fourth rabbit from his hat.

Poor Minna. Lucy had been watching her while Augie talked. In the soft interior light, seen through the corner of an eye, she was still a beauty, in the ditzy, pliant 1950s mold. A Monroe type. Lucy was always seeing them in supermarket checkout lines, those fifties women, their old girl-faces hardened over the decades into surly masks of pure resentment. They looked cheated. Mouths trained to smile and simper had long given up the effort of appearing pleasant; bodies once dedicated to the pursuit of the hourglass figure had swelled into a sort of aggressive obesity, as if they’d taken to hogging down gallons of ice cream in deliberate revenge for the impossible part they’d been forced to play in the world. But Minna had not let herself go. Her face didn’t have that cheated look. Marriage to Augie must have given her ample cause to hit the Häagen-Dazs, but what should by rights have happened somehow hadn’t. Age had happened, of course, but to see Minna now was to see through a gauze screen the same pretty young bank teller she must have been when August Vanags first walked in with his check forty years or so ago — she’d just gotten blurrier. Lucy wondered whether Minna’s eerie girlishness should be put down to a defect in her character or a strength.

But there was no denying her skill in the kitchen. A gourmet chef might have been proud of Minna’s risotto: firm, moist to just the right degree, complexly flavored and generously laced with baby white asparagus and golden chanterelles that tasted of the woods. “This is genius,” Lucy said. “I wish you’d tell me the secret — whenever I try making risotto it always comes out as lumpy rice pudding.”

“Oh,” Minna said, with a flutter of eyelashes. “Is so simple. In this heat, I think people want only to eat light.”

Viennese, Lucy thought, her voice sounds Viennese.

“See, you don’t need big death tolls.” Augie was regaining command of the table. “Death tolls are good for show and symbolism, but you don’t take down a country this size by killing Americans. You gotta be cleverer than that — and we have a darn clever enemy. Look how he used our own technology against us on 9/11, turning our jetliners into his bombs. We gave him all the weaponry he needed. Only thing he had to supply was his own box cutters. Hey, we’re a generous nation, and we got a whole lot more stuff where those planes came from — computer systems, chemical facilities, power grids, wide-open food-supply chains, water treatment plants, creaky old railroads, and every one of those is a potential weapon if you know how to use it right.”

“He always talks like a terrorist,” Minna said, as if to reassure Lucy that her husband wasn’t improvising his own explosive device.

“No, I think like a terrorist. Somebody has to.”

“It’s the t-t-t-talk of terrorism that t-terrorizes me,” Lucy said, trying to muster her words. “Like these stupid TOPOFF dramas. I hate how the administration plays with us. You know, be scared, be very, very scared — but’s that’s okay, we’ll keep you safe, catch that plane, do that shopping. But watch out for the bogeyman! Sure, we’ll sometimes get acts of terrorism, like in Oklahoma City, but I don’t buy all the smoke and mirrors stuff. It’s so Wizard of Oz.”

“Ah, you’re a Christian Scientist!” Augie bared his false teeth in an alarming grin.

“No. Why?”

“Mrs. Eddy believed all disease was an illusion. A pity Mrs. Eddy died of pneumonia.”

Lucy bristled at his tone. “I don’t not believe in terrorism. It’s just that there are more threatening things — greenhouse gases, earthquakes, whatever. Like Seattle gets millions of federal dollars for mock terror attacks but can’t raise a federal cent for earthquake exercises, which is what it really needs.”

“Mrs. Who?” asked Minna.

“This is World War IV,” Augie said.

“World War what?” Lucy laughed. “You lived through World War II, and you seriously compare this to that?”

“I think the situation we’re in now’s as bad as 1939—worse, in a way. The world has changed. People have got to wake up to the complexity, the scale, the global nature of what’s happening. Unless we can win this war, I’m afraid we’re going to see the end of the modern nation-state, which — since I’m not of the anarchist persuasion — I happen to believe would be a catastrophe for mankind. So no, I’m not joking. I don’t think the destruction of our civilization is a laughing matter, funnily enough.”

He spoke in the dry, acidic voice of the classroom, and Lucy remembered Tad’s tight-assed prof who was gung-ho about Vietnam; strange that this victim of war should seem to be such an enthusiast of wars in general. Her glass was empty, and she cast a longing glance at the refrigerator door. “Really? The end of the nation-state?”

“You know how Max Weber defined the state, in terms of its monopoly on violence? We just lost the monopoly. You realize how big a deal that is? Used to be, only states had the armies and the hardware to go to war. This is the first moment in modern history when a bunch of private individuals have the power to take down a state. It’s like you, me, and Minna could get together and go mano a mano with the Pentagon — and what’s truly scary is we could win. Don’t laugh: the state’s set up to defend itself from other states, in the old-fashioned kind of warfare, but when it comes to fighting you, me, and Minna, the state’s clueless. Clueless!

“First off, it doesn’t know who we are. We’re everywhere and nowhere. We don’t wear uniforms. We don’t have a capital city they can bomb. They don’t know if we have a leader, even. They can’t negotiate with us. They can’t send the army, because we haven’t told them where the battlefield’s gonna be. Deterrence? Nope. Containment? Mutually assured destruction? Those things might work when you’re dealing with another state, but when it comes to dealing with the three of us at this table, they’re the wrong implements — like eating soup with a fork. Meantime, they know we have access to stuff that used to be part of their monopoly — chemical, nuclear, biological.”

Lucy joined the game. “And have we got it?”

“Doesn’t matter. We’ve got access. Look at all the nuclear material that’s been floating around on the black market since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Look at the anthrax lab at the U — suppose I have an angry molecular-biologist friend? The essential technology’s all around us, and the government can do very little — frighteningly little — to keep us from getting our hands on it, provided we have the contacts and the moolah. You want more wine in that glass?”

“Please.” This time the bottle stayed on the table.

Augie stabbed a chanterelle with his fork and waggled it at Lucy. “Now look at our enemy. He has the resources, the smarts, the manpower, and he’s hell-bent on attacking the United States and destroying our system of government, because he believes democracy is a blasphemy against his goddamn god.

“And we’ll help him do it. Americans take democracy for granted: they don’t stop to think how delicate and fragile it really is. He only needs to create the right set of circumstances, and we’ll finish the job for him. We’ll do the dismantling and rewrite the laws while he sits at home watching us on CNN, laughing his sorry ass off.”

Lucy was struck by the discrepancy between the size of Augie’s talk and the size of the man himself. His chair was too big for him, and his white mustache looked as if it had been gummed onto the face of an unhappy boy.

Minna said, “You should see our emergency supplies. We’ve got a roomful. We’ve got so much water, and rice, and beans. And…” Lucy saw sudden confusion in her eyes.

“More freeze-dried chicken à la king than you’d want to eat in an entire lifetime,” Augie said. “We just about filled the utility room.”

“My eleven-year-old would approve. She’s always lecturing me about earthquake preparedness. A flashlight and some bottles of Evian water is the best I’ve done so far. I was never any good as a Girl Scout, so I’d make a lousy survivalist.”

“You need duct tape,” Minna said, “and candles. Would anyone care for dessert?”

When lunch was over, Lucy offered to help load the dishwasher, but Augie led her upstairs to his study. Closing the door, he said, “You mustn’t mind Minna. She’s been having trouble remembering things lately — we’re a little afraid that Dr. Alzheimer may be paying us a call.”

Lucy had guessed as much. “I’m sorry.”

He looked out through a tall and narrow window. “Osprey,” his wan voice said.

From the modern California of downstairs, they’d walked into another century. Of all the weird architectural fantasies on Sunlight Beach Road, this room had to be the strangest — a long, warrenlike affair of molded, fussy-looking arches, nooks, alcoves, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and an old-fashioned fireplace, its grate piled with fir cones. And it smelled ages older than the house, a pleasing library scent of glue and must and paper fungus. Lucy had the unsettling, head-swimming sense that she’d been here before. Those arches. That oyster-white color. The small plaster bust on a shelf.

“It reminds me of somewhere,” she said.

“It should. It should.” The eagerness was back in Augie’s face.

Groping for the memory, she said, “It’s not…Monticello, is it?”

“Bull’s-eye! You know, you’re the first person to get it? But I guessed you might. Jefferson’s library. It’s kind of impressionistic. I gave a bunch of pictures to a retired architect here on the island, and he did what he could with the space. I was God’s gift to the contractors: we had them in for months, though they seemed to think I was a few sandwiches short of a picnic for wanting it. Tell me, is it insanely pretentious?”

“No, it’s charming.” It was the books that saved it, Lucy thought. They weren’t the kind that people bought for show; there wasn’t a leather binding to be seen. Wherever she looked, she saw more drab paperbacks, white spines gone yellow, titles in German and in Cyrillic lettering. Even when new they would’ve been cheap, shabby things; now they gave off a powerful whiff of the old, fallen Communist world in all its threadbare mediocrity. On Jefferson’s bookshelves, comically displaced, they gave the room an unexpected human warmth and messiness.

“When were you at Monticello?”

“My dad worked for a federal agency — the Bureau of Land Management. He took me on a business trip to D.C. once, when I was ten. He rented a car, and we spent hours and hours at Monticello. He loved the place. I was the bored kid who hated museums and thought D.C. sucked because there were no rides. I lusted after Disneyland, but I remember the library, and my dad squatting down to read the title of every book, the guard dogging him from shelf to shelf like he was a thief. That was cool to see.”

“I used to make weekend pilgrimages to Monticello when we lived in Washington.”

“You were teaching there?”

“No, I got a two-year leave from the U to work for the government, like your father. I was with the National Security Council.”

From Augie’s expression, Lucy gathered that the correct response to this would be to drop dead with admiration.

“In the Old Executive Office Building, on Seventeenth and Pennsylvania. Right next door to the White House. You must have seen it?”

“Well, I guess so, but—”

“Fabulous place. Like the palace of Versailles.” Going to his desk, Augie had to step carefully to avoid treading on the litter of new books on the floor around his chair. Most had the word “Jihad” on their jackets. Beside the closed laptop — and Lucy would have dearly liked to find out what was on its hard drive — an old Royal manual typewriter held a sheet of paper with a few lines of jumpy letters, just too far away for her to read them. A partially eaten stick of French bread lay by the typewriter, shedding crumbs.

He handed her a creased tourist postcard of the Old Executive Office Building, which to Lucy looked less like Versailles than a bad-taste Victorian railroad hotel. The picture meant nothing to her, but she said, “Oh, yes, of course. You’re right. It is fabulous,” thinking how strange it was that he should keep the postcard so close to hand, like a talisman. Lots of people liked to keep photos of their families in sight when they worked; what did it say about Augie that he preferred to commune with this hideous-looking government building?

He pointed to an attic window on the far right wing of the building. “My office was just behind there. A cubbyhole, really. I was a humble pen pusher on the East European desk, writing position papers for the higher-ups. But man, that was such a big thing for me. I’d just gotten citizenship, and I had a White House pass. Hey, I even got to meet the president.”

“You did?” Lucy was looking through the window beyond Augie’s desk: the incoming tide was glassing over the sand flats in the bay, the cloud over Seattle had gone, and there was a clear view southward to Mount Rainier, its snowfields mottled with chocolate patches where the glaciers were receding.

“Kissinger took me to see him. I’d been working on this project about the Sovietization of primary education in the Eastern Bloc. The Russians were putting big money into textbooks for the Czechs, the Poles, the Hungarians, and so forth, and I wrote a memo suggesting that we ought to be doing something similar, like financing textbooks for kids in France, West Germany, Italy, and England to promote the American way of life in the West. Somehow, Kissinger got ahold of my memo and called me to his office in the West Wing. He was seriously interested. Secretly, I disapproved of Henry Kissinger: I thought détente was the worst policy we could be pursuing right then. But to sit in his office, alone with the secretary of state — that was extraordinary. I was nervous as hell, of course, but I made a pretty good job of explaining my memo, and five weeks later, at three-fifteen in the afternoon, he took me to the Oval Office.

“I felt like Henry’s puppy — like I’d be whipped if I wet the carpet. The president of the United States! I’d been pulling all-nighters getting ready for this, and I’d overdosed on details. When Kissinger told me to speak, it all came out in a flood. I was telling the president about schools in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and how they were teaching history and civics there, but he wasn’t looking at me, or at Kissinger. He was gazing out in space, his face totally blank. I mean, he was elsewhere. Don’t know where. Might have been back in San Clemente…or China. I’d just gotten started on the Baltic states, and he sort of absentmindedly reaches into a drawer and pulls out a golf ball, which he rolls across his desk to me. It’s got the presidential seal on it, and his name. ‘Thank you, Mr. President.’ I’m so goofy, I go on talking. Couple minutes later, he produces a little blue leather box and pushes that across the desk. I open it, still talking, and it’s got cuff links in it. Then Kissinger gets out of his chair, and I realize the interview’s over. I never even got to mention my plan for Western Europe.”

“What on earth did Kissinger say afterward?”

“He said, ‘I’m late — I have to be in Georgetown.’ Those are the last words he ever said to me.” Laughing, Augie unwrapped the turned-back shirtsleeve on his left forearm and pulled out the cuff link. “There you are. Souvenir of my fifteen minutes with the president.”

Lucy took it from him. Nearly all the gold plating had worn to bare metal, and there was little left of the once blue enamel and presidential seal, but the stamped signature on the back, Richard Nixon, was still sharp. Quite why Augie should so treasure this token of his own humiliation was hard to figure, and she filed the question in her head for future attention.

“Nixon was a piece of work. For me, it was right place, wrong administration. I’d’ve given my right arm to work for Ronald Reagan.”

Reagan. Lucy had been a sophomore in college at Missoula when he was elected, and she had only to see his face on TV to want to chuck a brick through the screen. His horrible brown suits. The Brylcreemed hairdo that looked as if it should have gone out with giant finned fifties Pontiacs. This was the president who thought ketchup was a vegetable, that cow farts did more damage to the ozone layer than automobile emissions. She’d shuddered at his evil-empire talk, his star wars, his scary, vacant homeyness as he recited ghostwritten platitudes to the camera.

“Yeah, my liberal colleagues at the U used to look at me like that. The cultural elites of this country never did understand Reagan. But regular folks did, and so did the Poles, and the Czechs, and the people in the Gulag. They loved the man. Ask Sakharov, ask Sharansky.”

Lucy reminded herself that the business of a journalist was to be a sponge, not a sparring partner. “I’m a knee-jerk Democrat and Reagan freaked me out. I must’ve missed something, I guess.”

“He had this wonderful instinct,” Augie said. “He wasn’t an intellectual — didn’t want to debate ideas. He relied on gut feeling to tell him what to do, and somehow or other it was Reagan’s gut feelings that gave him the best grasp of the big issues of anyone then alive. He’d get it right, and right, and right again. Sure, there were stumbles: Iran-contra, I’ll give you that. But ninety-nine — okay, ninety — percent of the time, he was magic. ‘Open this gate, Mr. Gorbachev! Tear down this wall!’ He bugged the snot out of the intellectuals, but if you’d been living on the wrong side of that wall you’d have worshipped Ronald Reagan. He was funny, too. Know what he said about détente?

“‘Isn’t that what the farmer has with his turkey — until Thanksgiving Day?’ What a guy. If I had to give you one reason to respect Reagan, it’d be that he never took freedom for granted. Never. And when he saw evil in the world, he wasn’t afraid to call it out by name. But I expect you’re not much of a believer in evil, being a liberal and all.”

Lewis Olson? Lucy thought. Was Olson evil? Sick, yes. Repellent. Oozing with fatuous hypocrisy, trying to make her say the Jesus Prayer with him in jail. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to call even Lewis Olson evil. She shrugged and said, “I’m not religious.”

“Neither am I, but I know evil when I see it, and so did Ronald Reagan.”

Watching as he raised the old-timey Jeffersonian sash window by his desk, Lucy thought he was confusing things. Yes, as a child Augie had faced something for which evil was probably the only word, but when Reagan spoke of evil he was like an actor talking about bad hats in his old movies. Fact and fiction. Surely Augie, of all people, should see the difference?

He reached into his shirt pocket and produced the stub of cigarette he’d been smoking on the beach. “My afternoon gasper,” he said, with the conspiratorial wink that Lucy was coming to dislike, as if the two of them were plotting outside Minna’s ken. Perched on the window ledge, his feet barely touched the ground. He blew a plume of smoke out over Useless Bay, then ducked his head back inside.

“You make nice to me,” he said, “I’ll make nice to you.”

“What?”

“I sometimes think Americans are just too nice for this world. They assume that other people have the same inherent streak of decency they have themselves. It’s bred into the American character to appeal to the other guy’s good side — do unto others, and all that crap. But we have to deal with guys who don’t have a good side. Never did and never will. You think Stalin had a good side? Hitler? The fanatics who threaten us right now?” He took another suck on his cigarette, then immediately pinched out the burning tip and put the butt back in his pocket.

“D’you always do that? I’ve never seen anyone make a cigarette last so long.”

“I got a one-a-day habit,” Augie said. “You know what? I’ve seen people try to appease bears? Minna and me, we used to go camping up in the North Cascades. Fantastic country.”

“I’ve done—”

“Then you know how to haul all your food up to the highest tree branch that you can sling a rope over?”

“Yes,” Lucy said, though she’d always locked her food in the trunk of her car and hoped for the best. She and Alida had never encountered a bear.

“There’s signs posted all over warning about not leaving food out, but nothing stops dumbasses from making nice to the bears by giving ’em candy and french fries. I’ve seen it happen. And the quickest way of getting liquidated by a bear is to appeal to his good side. It’s taken us a long time to learn that lesson: it’s frightening that so many people in this country still don’t get it.”

Hands stuffed deep in pockets, hunch-shouldered, Augie glowered into his bookshelves. “I guess I’m being naive. What do I know? I’m still a rookie citizen even now. I can get teary just reading the Constitution. So when I see my country under threat, I want to reach for my musket and be a Minuteman.”

For a moment, Lucy saw him ridiculously sculpted on a marble plinth, his false teeth and peppery white mustache cast in heroic bronze, and smiled at the thought.

He seized on the smile. “It gets worse. I used to take Minna to see the Mariners. Some leukemia survivor kid’s singing ‘Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,’ and Minna’s feeding me Kleenex out of her bag. It totally chokes me up. Then I see the immigrants way up in the bleachers — the Chinese, Koreans, Ukrainians, Afghanis — and they’re all sobbing their guts out, you can see their shoulders heaving. They’re not crying over the little kid with leukemia, they’re crying over the national anthem and what it means to them. Might strike a native-born American as hopelessly sappy, but to someone like me…” He was blinking furiously as he spoke. “See, people like you’ve never known what it’s like to not be an American. It gives you a different perspective on things. It teaches you how easy it’d be for America not to be America anymore.”

Lucy had edged toward the desk, near enough to read what was written on the typewriter there, but could make out only one word, “Minna”; the rest appeared to be in German. “That’s what your book does,” she said. “I hadn’t thought about it quite like that, but what I loved about it, I think, was that it reminded me of stuff I’ve always taken for granted.”

“Never take it for granted,” Augie said. “It’s the littlest things. You know, not so long after I got to this country, when I was in grad school, I came across something E. B. White wrote about democracy during World War II. You know E. B. White? I memorized it on the Greyhound bus. We’d be traveling through little no-stoplight towns in the cornfields, and I’d look out the window and see people mowing their lawns, or reading the paper on the porch, or going to the store, or cranking up the car that wouldn’t start, and all I’d hear in my head would be E. B. White…”

He cleared his throat, threw back his head, closed his eyes, and recited. “‘Democracy is the line that forms on the right. It’s the don’t in “Don’t Shove.” It’s the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it’s the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half of the time. It’s the feeling of privacy in voting booths, the feeling of communion in libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It’s an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from the War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.’”

“I never read that — it’s beautiful,” Lucy said, but she’d barely heard the words, so distracted was she by the fact that Augie had spoken them in a throaty middle-European accent.

“E. B. White wrote that in New York in ’44.” He was back to being an American again. “Know where I was then? Town called Goslar — picturesque old place, full of steeples and church bells, right on the edge of the Harz mountains. I was learning to be a good Nazi.”

“You flunked.”

“Yeah. Got slung out of there for stealing. I was a pretty good thief, so I must’ve wanted to get caught, I guess. Goslar was too quiet for me — no planes, no bombs. I got spooked by the silence at night, and I was plain bored in the daytime. For me, it was too much like life with the Widow Douglas. I thought being a Nazi might be kind of fun, but it was no fun at all. I liked my crooked ways a whole lot better.”

A sudden ruckus sounded from beyond the open window — a dozen or so gulls fighting over some treasure at the tide’s edge in a manic flurry of wings, bursting the bubblelike quiet of the afternoon with peevish yelps and screeches.

“I think they must’ve found the gumboot-whatsit,” Lucy said.

“Chiton. I do hope not.” The look of slack-lipped anxiety on his face as he peered out the window was absurdly disproportionate to the occasion. He grabbed the loaf beside the typewriter and pitched it out toward the distant gulls. For a pint-sized retired professor he had an amazingly mighty right arm, and as Lucy watched the bread sailing high over the lawn she almost believed that it would land squarely in the commotion on the beach; but it fell short, as it must, and came to earth among the piles of driftwood by the twin kayaks on the berm — just close enough for a small flight of gulls to peel away from the main action to investigate. In the dead-still air, she heard their claws scrabbling on wood as they jostled for possession of the bread.

“It’s all right, I think. I’m pretty sure I carried the chiton farther out, so the tide should’ve covered it by now.”

“That bread was conveniently handy.”

“Fetish,” Augie said. “It’s a thing I’ve always had. Never could work without a loaf of bread close by me. I take one up every morning. It’s quite common, so I’ve read — Jews from the camps often do it. There was a time when I used to hoard them in drawers, but I got over that. Minna used to think it very weird when she kept finding bits of stale bread hidden under my socks.” His face clouded as he looked out at the fighting birds. “Gulls are one of the very few predators of chitons. It said that in the book.”

The huge bay was almost full now, the unrippled water like a film of Saran Wrap stretched tight from shore to shore. For a short second, Lucy caught a glimpse of rust-red at the epicenter of the gulls’ frenzy. She hoped that Augie hadn’t seen it, too. To distract him, she said, “I want to write about you, you know — for a m-m-m-m-magazine,” deploying her stutter for whatever slight charm it might be worth.

“You have great eyes, Lucille.”

EYE ON THE CLOCK, she drove back to the ferry as fast as she dared. Climbing the hill where the accident had happened, she slowed, readying herself for whatever might lie over the brow. Eerily, nothing at all was left of the shambles of a few hours before: no swerving black skid marks on the pavement, no muddy gouges in the roadside grass, no slivers of overlooked wreckage, nothing. Every trace of the event had been removed or wiped clean, and for a dizzying moment Lucy found herself wondering if she’d imagined it. So thoroughly had the emergency services done their job that it was as if they’d made the accident unhappen, turning it into a harmless trick of the morning light.

At the terminal, lines of waiting vehicles filled the parking area and there was a two-ferry delay on boarding. Security was out in force, with stone-faced soldiers and state patrol troopers with harnessed sniffer dogs. A red-letter placard at the head of each line warned drivers not to joke with security personnel.

A soldier probed under the Spider with a mirror on a short pole, checking for bombs. Another demanded ID.

She gave him her driver’s license.

“National ID?”

“I d-d-d-d-don’t have it yet.” No one she knew did.

“You know the deadline.”

“Yes.”

“Get it. Soon.”

A third soldier, this one female, said, “Out the car,” and brushed Lucy’s body head to toe with a metal-detecting wand.

She wasn’t tempted to joke with any of these characters, so much less human-seeming than their dogs, who at least showed some interest, even eagerness, as they stuck their heads inside trunks and jumped onto backseats. The handsome yellow lab bitch assigned to the Spider gave the car a thirty-second shakedown and found it innocent. Offering her a biscuit, Lucy thought, would likely get you shot on sight.

Through her flip-flops, the hot tarmac felt like a griddle. She dug her old linen sun hat out of the glove compartment and sat in the open car, torpidly watching the soldiers and dogs going about their business. You could never predict security: sometimes it was nonexistent, and then — usually at the most inconvenient times — it was everywhere around you, obstructive, tedious, intrusive, rude. No explanations were ever given; the authorities seemed to take sadistic pleasure in keeping the public in the dark.

They treat us like children. Whatever was going on, the grown-ups weren’t telling. Robbed of information, people childishly filled the vacuum with fantasy and rumor. Some saw the security apparatus as blatant playacting; others took it in deadly earnest. Lucy knew people so spooked that they now refused to fly, enter tall buildings, or cross long bridges for fear of being blown to bits by an enemy they couldn’t name — pure self-indulgence, in her view. But she had little more patience with those like Tad, with his oddly cheerful Internet conspiracy theories, his breezy conviction that the whole thing was a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a criminal administration on a clueless electorate. So she oscillated uncomfortably between being somewhat scared and somewhat skeptical, never quite one or the other: an agnostic on this as on so much else, a little envious of the true believers for their easy certitude.

She’d always had a problem with arriving at a confident point of view. In Lucy’s experience, almost every case had merit on both sides, and she had an unhappy knack of riling both whenever she incautiously threw in her two cents’ worth. Time and again she’d replayed the scene in the Miles City kitchen, her mother yelling, “You know what’s wrong with you? You have as much personality as a piece of blotting paper!” And when Lucy considered this accusation, found a speck of merit in it, and replied calmly that since her mother had such a superabundant personality, she’d never felt any great need to cultivate one of her own, she’d nearly been brained by a flying plate.

A ferry came, swallowed half the vehicles on the lot, and went. Lucy called Tad on his cell phone and found him home already: apparently the nuclear catastrophe had been called off early to allow rush-hour traffic through on Route 99. He’d been only slightly injured, he said, and yeah, sure, he could pick up Alida before six from her after-school program.

“So how’s Vanags?”

“Oh, he’s like, Reagan was the greatest president in history, and I’m like, Yeah…”

A mile off on the water, the ferry let out a belch of diesel smoke from its funnel, and for a split second Lucy imagined it shuddering from an explosion deep in its guts. How long would it take a ferry to go down?

“That’s our Professor Vanags.”

Putting the phone back in her bag, Lucy felt a stab of disloyalty to Augie; she’d said that only because it was the sort of thing Tad liked to hear. She needed to get August Vanags down on paper, but in the round, not as Tad’s cartoon reactionary. She propped her notebook against the steering wheel and scribbled, “presidential cuff links & presidential library,” then “gumboot chiton,” then “neediness,” then “Slang—dollars to doughnuts…peepers…put the kibosh on.” Looking up from the too-bright dazzle of the page, she saw she’d drawn the attention of a soldier with a glassy, incurious stare. When she made herself smile at him, his eyes drifted lazily, indifferently away.

There was a stir of activity in the lines as a blue Chrysler sedan with B.C. plates was escorted to the far corner of the waiting area, where a bunch of soldiers disemboweled it, pulling out heaps of decent-looking luggage, carpets, papers, headrests, tools, the spare tire. A book was passed from hand to hand, a silver thermos bottle held aloft like a rare trophy and carried to the nearby Humvee. One guardsman weighed in his arms a large cellophane-wrapped teddy bear, as if to price it; another, spread-eagled on his back on a wheeled sled, scooted underneath the chassis, flashlight waving.

The baseball-capped driver, flanked by unamused soldiers, weapons at the ready, was clowning for the crowd. Hopping from foot to foot, he shrugged and showed his palms in a dumb show of astonished innocence, all the time beaming at his audience with a chimpish grin. Heh, heh, heh! Look what I got into! Just my luck, huh?

Lucy was with the soldiers on this one. Had she been in charge, she’d have given the guy the works, too. Khaki-skinned, implausibly single, Canadian-plated, he looked like trouble incarnate, and shit-eating fraudulence was written all over that grin. She’d have turned him back at the border — and if he’d crossed at Blaine, why had he taken this devious route through Whidbey Island? She hoped the soldiers would hold him for a good while yet; she didn’t want to travel on the same ferry as that joker. Years back, she’d written a “Talk of the Town” piece about the arrest of Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian terrorist who’d planned to blow up LAX, at the ferry terminal in Port Angeles, and this guy looked like Ressam’s double.

Then she jolted into reverse. This was stupid “profiling”; no real bomber would so neatly fit the stereotype; and catching stereotypes was the ineffectual best that the army and police could do. Studying the man again, his pathetic jiggling dance, all she saw was bemusement and fear — the natural creaturely terror of someone entangled in the workings of an enormous, incomprehensible military machine. The guy looked like he was peeing his pants — and suddenly Lucy found herself with the ACLU.

He was still under military detention when the next ferry showed, wallowing like a hippo at the dock head. It took an age to empty, then, at last, the lines of cars began to move. As Lucy turned on the Spider’s ignition, she saw that the suspect was being allowed to reload his baggage into the Chrysler. Most likely, he’d make this ferry after all. Despite herself, she couldn’t help wishing the soldiers had held on to him for just five minutes more.

Climbing the crowded stairwell to the lounge, notebook in hand, she was back to thinking about August Vanags. Out on the gravel, saying good-bye, he’d looked melancholy at losing his captive audience. “Next time you must stay the night — and do bring your little girl. We have acres of space here, and Minna loves to have kids around.” It’d be no fun for Alida, but Lucy wasn’t above resorting to bribery and main force. Next time she’d bring her cassette recorder, small enough to nestle unnoticed in her bag, to collect Augie’s weird speeches on tape. After her New Yorker piece on Bill Gates came out, Gates himself had dropped her an e-mail complimenting her on her “great memory.” Little did he know.

She was looking around the lounge for a table where she could settle down to making notes when she saw them — the knotted pink silk scarf, the gold chain, the cashmere blazer, the man with his patrician drinker’s face, and the frail-looking wife, glossy real-estate brochure spread on the table between them. Lucy’s first thought was that by some miracle they’d survived their fatal accident, her second was that her own wits were deranged.

The woman, looking up from the brochure, gave her a faint, querying smile of uncertain recognition, which Lucy fought to return in kind before walking on and putting as great a distance as she could between herself and the couple whose lives she had so confidently terminated earlier in the day.

Well, of course, she thought, as she found a seat out of the wind on the deserted stern deck, there are a million different kinds of silver cars. They have a silver car, the Infiniti was silver — two and two make five. It was the sort of mistake anyone in shock might make. Except she wasn’t anyone. She’d always prided herself in questioning her own assumptions — how could she have been so fucking dumb? She wanted to weep.

Unpleasantly aware that she was no longer alone, she looked up and saw the man she now thought of as the terrorist. He appeared to be running a fever, or maybe was just trembling as a result of his ordeal. His hollow grin was still in place, as if he were wearing a monkey mask.

He stepped toward her. “Cigarette,” he said. “You want?” and held out a pack with an unfamiliar logo, probably Canadian.

“No,” Lucy said. Smoking had been forbidden on the ferries for years, though the ashtrays between the seats outside hadn’t been removed. She pointed at the NO SMOKING sign. The man looked around the empty deck, then winked at her. Turning away, cupping his hands against the wind, he made his smoker’s stink. After officiously shaking his match to kill the flame, he turned back to her. “You go to game?”

She allowed herself a brief sigh of irritation. “No. What game?”

“Blue Jays,” he said. “And Seattle Mariners.”

“I don’t follow baseball,” she said with crisp finality.

“Big Blue Jays fan.” The pest tapped the front of his cap.

Lucy made a show of setting her notebook on her knees and getting out her pen.

“Writing!” he exclaimed, making it sound a bizarre activity like pigeon racing or numismatics.

“Sorry. I’m busy, can’t you see?”

He took two steps back, puffed a gobbet of smoke in Lucy’s direction, and said, “Friendly!”

Getting up to go, she decided that she wouldn’t greatly care if they carted this guy off in shackles and cuffs to Guantánamo Bay.