Surveillance

6

“POOR KID — she thought she was in Jaws 4, and it was all my stupid fault.” Augie was making martinis. Alida, who’d come back white-faced, lower lip trembling, had taken herself up to her room to do her math homework. Minna, refusing Lucy’s offer to help, was in the kitchen doing something complicated and French for dinner.

“I like mine dry,” Augie called from within the house.

“So do I. My dad used to say that one bottle of vermouth should last a decade, if not two.”

“Man after my own heart. Olive? Twist? Both?”

“I’d like a twist, thanks.”

He was quite the bartender, buttling the martinis out to the patio on a silver tray.

“I’m so sorry about Alida.”

Lucy laughed, trying to put his mind at rest. “It’s a good lesson to learn, that there are sharks in the sea.”

“Before we saw the dogfish, she was happy as a clam.”

“How is it that clams got their reputation for proverbial happiness?”

“I don’t know — all that squirting, maybe? That looks pretty much like fun.” Augie peered into the depths of the house for a moment, found a half-smoked cigarette in his shirt pocket, and lit up.

The thought crossed Lucy’s mind that this smoking business was a bad-boy act staged expressly for her benefit. Beyond the labyrinth of drying sand flats, the sea was turning copper in the late afternoon sun. “Would it be okay to ask what you’re working on now?”

“You may not like the answer. It’s a salvo in the war you don’t believe in. Wearing my last remaining academic hat, as an adjunct fellow in international affairs at the Council on Foreign Relations, I’m doing something for them about how to combat anti-Americanism abroad, especially in the Muslim world.”

“Sounds like you have your work cut out for you.”

“I don’t want to seem a lard ass, Lucy, but I love this country, and it breaks my heart to see it turned into the most hated nation on earth.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

“We share a premise!”

“Oh, I think we share quite a few.”

Gusting smoke, Augie said, “The way I see it, every poor sap living under a dictatorship, when he dreams of being free he dreams of being an American. Most probably he doesn’t even know that himself. But it’s our freedoms he’s dreaming of, and in his heart of hearts he wants to be here on this patio, drinking martinis, talking like we’re talking now. He wants his press to be like our press, his elections to be like our elections. He wants our movies, our TV, our music, our automobiles, our standard of living. Syrian, Egyptian, Saudi, Indonesian — doesn’t matter what his nationality is — he dreams of being us, and if we can only waken him to that knowledge we can roll back this terrible tide of anti-Americanism that’s sweeping around the world.

“We got to invest, and invest big, in secular education in countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. We need a whole lot more scholarship programs in this country. But most of all, we got to open that guy’s eyes to what he’s really feeling. I’d like to believe that inside every would-be jihadi in a madrasa there’s a frustrated democrat trying to get out — and our job is to liberate that weak, uncertain little voice inside of him that talks of freedom and show it for what it is.”

So that was what the morning clatter of the typewriter was all about. “A pity we don’t set a better example, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?” He was burying his cigarette stub deep in the watered earth of a potted hibiscus.

“I mean we go yakking on about human rights, then we torture them in their own jails. We talk up freedom of the press, then close their papers down, or bribe them to print feel-good stories about us, written by us. If I were your poor sap living under a dictatorship, I think I’d more likely see America as a hypocritical tyranny than as the land of the free.”

“Oh, abuses happen. Just because you’re a democracy doesn’t mean you’re perfect. Some commander in the field makes a wrong call. A department head in Langley, Virginia, okays something that he shouldn’t. Of course it happens. But because we’re a democracy we get to hear about it, and that’s the difference. If you read The New York Times—not my favorite paper — you’d think that’s all that ever happens, abuse after abuse after abuse, and that’s part of democracy, too. Sure we make mistakes, but we make them in public, and correct them in public. Trouble is, with an open society like ours, outsiders looking in think, Hell, if they’re putting all this bad stuff in the papers, what else is going on that doesn’t make it onto the news? What they don’t understand about America is that what you see is pretty much what you get, and that in their countries The New York Times would have been closed down long ago for sedition and treason.”

“So what is your favorite newspaper?”

“I think The Wall Street Journal has pretty balanced coverage on the whole. But I wouldn’t want to lay a finger on The New York Times, any more than I’d want to lay a finger on Fox News. It’s the spectrum I care about, liberal and conservative — I want the whole nine yards. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a First Amendment nut, and I’ve lived under a regime where the only newspaper was called Truth. Sometimes, when I hear liberals talk, I have a dream: I’d like the ghost of Stalin to come back and rule the U.S. for, let’s say, three days, and after that we’d pick up the conversation where it had left off. Boy, you’d see those guys change their tune. ‘Tyranny,’ you say. Lucy, I can tell you in all sincerity that you don’t have the faintest inkling of what tyranny is.”

He was the host, she the guest. She twirled her martini glass around and around between fingers and thumbs. To the receding sea in the far distance she said, “You’re right, of course. I don’t. But I still find it very hard to stomach a lot of what my country is doing in the world right now.”

“I know. It’s partly a matter of age, I think. I envy you being still young enough to be so intolerant of imperfection. Me, I’ve hit that stage of geezerdom when you recognize that everybody and everything has its flaws. Deep flaws. I think of Thomas Jefferson. ‘All men are created equal and independent’—when he wrote that, if he looked down from his window up there at Monticello, he’d’ve seen his own slaves working out in the fields. Hypocrisy? And what about Sally Hemings? Or how viciously he trashed his rivals, like Hamilton and Burr, with lies and spin? He was a master of the dirty-tricks campaign, could’ve taught the Watergate burglars or Lee Atwater a thing or two. It’s only by a whisker that Jefferson comes out on the side of the angels, and he’s still my great American hero. He’s huge. You’ve read Montaigne?”

“No.”

“Good. He’s a writer best discovered when you’re old. Give yourself his essays on your sixty-fifth birthday, or your seventieth, and you’ll see what I mean. Anyway, Montaigne said that there is no man so good that if he placed all his thoughts and actions under the scrutiny of the laws he wouldn’t deserve hanging ten times over. Jefferson — even Jefferson — deserved to hang. Every president we’ve ever had deserved to hang.”

“Some more than others.”

“True, but when you judge this president, remember Jefferson. I believe this war we’re fighting is a just war, a necessary war, but just like in every other war we’ve made mistakes, some of ’em terrible ones. We’re only human. The president’s only human. Even on the most exalted throne in the world, we’re only sitting on our own bottom.”

“Montaigne again?”

“You got it.”

“But your war still seems so disproportionate to me. I mean, America against who, exactly? All I see is a bunch of mad criminals who obviously ought to be in jail for life without parole — and heaven knows we’ve lived with criminals long enough without trying to fight a world war against them.”

“Yeah, well, in 1941 you’d have been with Lindbergh, a fascist fellow traveler. Millions were. It was Lindbergh who sneered at FDR for trying to spread freedom and democracy by force of arms throughout the world. Sound familiar? Most everything I read in The New York Times these days sounds a helluva lot like goddamn Lucky Lindy. That’s something else that’s wrong with liberals — they’ve lost their memories.”

“You think Roosevelt would’ve backed the war on terror?” She meant it as a sarcasm, but Augie took it as a straight question.

“Sure he would. No doubt about it. We’re fighting the vilest movement on the face of the planet and the greatest threat to western civilization since the Nazis and the Soviets. They’re not ‘criminals’—they’re soldiers in an international army without a uniform, and they’re uniquely dangerous. I’ll tell you what Roosevelt would’ve said — exactly what he did say in a Fireside Chat in ’42…” He peered at the sky, apparently searching for inspiration, then shrugged and began to recite. “‘Those Americans who believed that we could live under the illusion of isolationism wanted the American eagle to imitate the tactics of the ostrich. Now, many of those same people, afraid that we may be sticking our necks out, want our national bird to be turned into a turtle. But we prefer to retain the eagle as it is — flying high and striking hard.’ Sorry about the eagle: there’s usually one up there, but we seem to be out of luck tonight. Care for another martini, or shall we go on to wine?”

The sea had disappeared completely. No wonder they’d called the place Useless Bay — low tide revealed it as all sand. The magnified sun stood right over the jagged, deckle-edged Olympics; it was going to be one of those butcher-shop sunsets.

“Wine would be nice — red, if you have it.”

Getting up from his chair to take her empty martini glass, Augie said, “There’s no conversation more boring than the one where everyone agrees.”

Emboldened by gin, Lucy said, “Montaigne.”

“Oh, smart-ass,” Augie said and walked chuckling into the house.

RATHER TOO MUCH deliberation had gone into the choice of books that filled the small bookshelf on the dresser in Lucy’s room: Emerson’s Self-Reliance and Other Essays, Mencken’s Prejudices, The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. Looking over the titles, Lucy thought they looked less like bedtime reading than a bedtime reading list. Augie’s politics were signaled by George F. Will, the only living author on the shelf.

Everyone except Lucy had gone to bed early. At ten, as they parted company on the landing, Augie had said to her, “‘Good night, America…and to all the ships at sea’”—another of his compulsive quotations, though she couldn’t fathom why Walter Winchell had to be dragged into it.

She considered going downstairs to fetch herself another glass of wine, but even in this millionaire mansion, the walls were thin and every sound carried; she’d heard the murmur of voices from Minna and Augie’s room, and didn’t want to be fingered as a solitary late-night drinker.

Thinking of Augie’s quotes made her remember that one of her dad’s favorites was from Ambrose Bierce: “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” She pulled out The Devil’s Dictionary and looked it up. Disappointingly, the long entry under “War” didn’t have those words or any that remotely resembled them, nor did “Geography.” She was certain that he’d attributed them to Bierce, so he must have written them someplace else.

In the pink armchair by the window, she scribbled a few lines into her ring-bound notebook, memory prompts like “Hudson Hornet,” “Good with his hands,” “Lindbergh,” “FDR eagle.” The sea had come back and filled the bay to the brim; a hazed three-quarter moon silvered the tarry water, which lay as still and silent as a mountain lake, not the smallest ripple breaking on the sand. Distracted by the view, Lucy abandoned her note-taking and turned out the lamp to better enjoy the play of moonshine on the sea. Quietly as a burglar, she released the window catch and raised the sash to freshen the air of the room, which was rank with the smell of lavender Febreze.

From behind the Sheetrock wall, she heard a yip-yip-yip-yipping sound like the muffled barking of a puppy, becoming less muffled by the moment, then a sobbing cry: “Au-gie!”

Strange. Minna’s apron, from which she was rarely separated, said that kissing don’t last, cooking do. Not true for Minna, apparently: lucky her. Pushing seventy, she was still coming like a twenty-year-old, which was a very great deal more than Lucy could say of herself.

Maybe it was the stimulus of having strangers in the house. Or maybe — but the idea of Augie being turned on by Alida in her Lolita sunglasses did not bear thinking about. She switched on the lamp and forced herself to plow through Ambrose Bierce, beginning at the beginning.

ABASEMENT, n., A decent and customary attitude in the presence of wealth or power…

AUGIE BROKE OFF his excruciating piano-playing to say, “Would you like to take another shot at kayaking later on this morning?”

“Well,” Alida said, “I’d really like to, but I’ve got this really big load of homework.”

She’d slept badly, haunted by the image of the enormous brown dogfish stealing beneath her, triangular fins outspread, a predator on the hunt for warm flesh. She’d read, she’d listened to music, then she’d dozed, only to be woken by what she thought was a scream in the unfamiliar country darkness outside. Body tensed, she’d dared herself to listen to murder, but heard nothing more. She told herself that the scream must have happened in a nightmare already forgotten, and reached for her iPod again, drowning her racing thoughts with the sound of Good Charlotte singing “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” “Emotionless,” and “My Bloody Valentine.” It had been nearly two A.M. before she’d finally dropped off.

It was cowardly of her to be so weirded out by the dogfish. She badly wanted to recover her pleasure in paddling the kayak, the blissful feeling of command and control, and it was truly feeble to allow a stupid fish to spoil what had been just yesterday a revelation and a joy.

She said, “You can go.”

What she really meant was that if she saw Augie putting on his life-jacket and dragging his kayak down to the water, she might be unable to resist joining him. Impossible to explain that to him, but she hoped against hope that he’d somehow get it by osmosis or something.

He didn’t. “Well, maybe I ought to follow your example and do some homework of my own. What’s yours?”

Crestfallen, she said, “Oh, we’ve got this project for Humanities.”

“What’s the project?”

“It’s on heroes. We have to pick a hero and write about them. It’s not that big a deal, and it’s not due till Friday.” Maybe he’d pick up that cue.

“So who’s your hero?”

This wasn’t going at all as she’d planned. She shrugged and said, “Anne Frank,” trying to make it sound like the most boring topic on Planet Earth.

“Anne Frank!” He swung around on his piano stool. “Yeah, she’s a fine hero. You’ve read the diary, right? You remember where she writes, ‘My first wish after the war is that I may become Dutch’?”

“Kind of.”

“That really interested me — Anne’s impatience with her own Jewishness, her longing to be just Dutch. Lot of people have tried to gloss over that part, but I think it’s important. What’s your take on it?”

“I dunno.” She didn’t have a “take.” She wanted Augie to take her kayaking.

“Remember Mr. Dussel, the dentist? Praying all the time in yarmulke and shawl? That really turned Anne off. She didn’t want to be Jewish, she wanted to be Dutch.”

“I guess so.” Alida was more interested in stuff like Anne having her first period, and her boyfriend Peter, than in this Dutch-versus-Jewish business, which she hadn’t even noticed in the book.

“What I admire so much about Anne Frank? She thought for herself. She always had her own point of view, and could be kind of spiky, which gets up the nose of all the people who’ve tried to sweetie-pie her into the classic Jewish victim. I think she was a bit like you.”

Alida blushed. In a recurrent fantasy, she liked to believe that she was Anne Frank, and that the seventh floor of the Acropolis was the secret annex at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam. It was amazingly discerning of Augie to have spotted the resemblance. She said, “You’re kidding, right?”

“Alida, I wouldn’t dare to kid around with you.”

She was trembling on the edge of admitting that she’d like to go kayaking, but Augie had to be the one to take the initiative. “Well, I guess I’d better go upstairs and do my homework….”

“You gotta do what you gotta do. Hey, I’d love to read what you write about Anne Frank, if you feel like showing me.”

So Alida went up to her room, raging at herself for her own sucky chicken-heartedness. Those stupid dogfish: she really, really, really hated them — especially in daylight, with the sun on the water, where she should have been.

“OH, MY MOTHER WAS — she is! — the bane of my life.” Lucy was driving Minna to Ebey’s Landing. “She lives in Florida now, Coral Gables, two blocks from the Miracle Theatre. She’s a big theater freak. When we lived in Montana, she started this amateur company, the Miles City Players, so she could play all the plum parts. She used to rent the high school auditorium and strut her stuff as Antigone, Hedda Gabler, Cleopatra, Blanche DuBois, and God knows who else. ‘Someone has to bring culture to the West’ was how she put it. She was born in England, and though she left when she was three, she’s always liked to pretend she’s a Brit. Nobody much ever came to her plays, except for family members, and we’d sit in that vast auditorium, listening to my mom roar out her lines to a nearly empty house. I doubt if anybody else in the West did more to put people off culture for good. If you saw her play Hedda Gabler, you’d want to go off and strangle Ibsen at birth. Of course I just saw it as my own humiliation, and I’d sit there beside my dad trying to make myself invisible.”

“You sound awfully hard on your mom,” Minna said.

“Oh, I am — and how. She was a lesson in how to be a bad mother. I was just about Alida’s age when she told me I had a personality like blotting paper. Can you imagine? I think of myself saying something like that to Alida, and I have to laugh.”

“Parents were different then.”

“None was more different than my mom. She gave my dad a hell of a time, too, for dragging her out to the sticks — which he didn’t. She was on a big nature kick when they moved, reading too much Thoreau and Gene Stratton-Porter, and by the time I was in junior high he and I were in a sort of defensive alliance against her. But I still visit with her once a year. Nowadays she creeps Alida out. She’s the original Wicked Witch of the East.”

“But she is your mother.”

“Yes, and you can see how I take after her, too. Tirading on like this, I sound exactly like her.”

Minna laughed. “I sometimes like to have a good tirade myself.”

“Who do you tirade about?”

“Well, it used to be the branch manager at the bank, but now it’s Augie, mostly. Poor Augie. You know how marriage is.”

“Actually, I don’t. I’ve never been married.”

“Oh, I thought—”

“No, Alida just sort of happened. All by herself — almost.”

“But she still sees her dad?”

“No. They never…got acquainted, you could say.”

“That must have been brave of you.”

“Or just plain selfish. Like I told you, I take after my mom.”

Minna patted her leg. “I think anybody who has a baby by herself is brave.”

“Thank you, Minna.” It was the wind in the open cockpit, surely, that caused the momentary prickle of tears in Lucy’s eyes. She blinked, dropped into second, and accelerated hard out of the bend. “My one big sorrow is that my dad isn’t around to see her now.”

At the crab pen — a makeshift pond sheltered by a tent of flappy plastic sheeting — Minna was as choosy as she’d been in the produce department. In the crowded shallow water, Dungeness crabs were clambering on one another’s backs and clawing fretfully at the air with their pincers. Guiding the crabber with his net, Minna pointed — this one, no that one, or the one over there. Lucy tried and failed to figure out her principle of selection; crabs were crabs to her, though Minna clearly knew otherwise.

They came away with four, two to a bag, and even with the engine turned on, Lucy heard the dry scrabbling of claws in the trunk. Could crustaceans — in darkness, out of their element, destined for the vat of boiling water — feel terror? She was glad to get the car in gear, step on the gas, and drown the noise.

Minna said, “Do you want to talk about your dad passing?”

“Yes. Yes, I think I do. The guy who shot him was crazy. He was being treated for schizophrenia but was off his medication. He had this lousy little twelve-section ranch, a mess of rusted-up old farm machinery. He’d come back from hunting when my dad drove up, was just taking his gun out of the gun rack in his pickup. I think my dad was invisible to him. All he saw was the Bureau of Land Management Jeep, the federal government, and foreclosure. That’s what he pulled the trigger on — I’m certain of it.

“But what hurt, almost as much as losing Dad, was the trial. They held it in Billings instead of Miles City where everybody knew my dad. They started out talking murder in the first degree, then whittled the charge down to involuntary manslaughter on grounds of diminished capacity.

“Okay, I could’ve accepted that. He was crazier than a hoot owl. But it was the jury that got to me — they were on his side. If the judge had let them acquit, they’d have acquitted. It was like to them my dad was a fair target, and Lewis Olson was this folk hero for standing up to the federal government — which is how a lot of people in Montana think. My dad wasn’t my dad: he was Washington, D.C., a federal agent, and Olson was Robin Hood.

“They gave him four years, and he was out in two. I broke down when I heard the sentence. My dad was the kindest man. He loved the ranchers, loved the land, and it was just unimaginable to me how much those strangers hated him.”

“I think, if it had been my dad,” Minna said, “I’d’ve wanted to see him go to the electric chair.”

“Or just locked up for life. But it gets worse. I went to see him in the jail — I had this stupid idea it might bring ‘closure.’ I was even going to write a piece about it, you know, a daughter reconciles herself with her father’s killer: I was like, ‘This is my therapy, and The New Yorker will pay ten grand for it.’

“He’d gotten religion in the penitentiary. He had this mad seraphic smile and sort of vacant eyes, like he was some kind of goddamn saint. He tried to make me go down on my knees with him, in the fucking visitors’ room, and say the Jesus Prayer with him: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ I mean, not just once, but over and over and over. He’d murdered my dad, and here he was, telling me to confess my sins to him. That’s when I would’ve happily pulled the switch on the electric chair.”

“Funny how really bad people — the most horrible people — always think they’re good people at heart. And they do, too. I’ve seen that.”

“He told me that if I came over to Jesus, I’d meet my dad in heaven. Like it was going to be him and me and my dad, sitting around some celestial campfire, reminiscing about old times on the prairie.”

“You’ve told Alida all this?”

“No. She knows her granddad was murdered, but not about the Jesus stuff. She doesn’t know Lewis Olson keeps on writing to me — just to warn me that if I don’t repent I’ll never see my dad again. Then he brings me up to date with his stupid news, like he and I are family. Blue envelopes and block capitals. The sight of a blue envelope in the mail makes me want to vomit. I have a Google Alert on his name, hoping to see his death notice in the Billings Gazette or whatever. But you’d be amazed how many Lewis Olsons there are. Mostly I get the latest dope on some New Zealand glass artist.”

Again, the island was too small for the conversation; again, Sunlight Beach Road came too quickly into view. But even though — or, rather, because — Lucy had done all the talking, she’d found out one thing crucial to the GQ piece: why Augie married Minna.

ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON in the Dew Drop Inn on Aurora, Charles O was waiting for his girl to come out of the bathroom.

She was good and old, this one — as old as Lucy Bengstrom, maybe even older. “Hi, I’m Estelle,” she’d said when she stepped into his pickup. It was a made-up name. Last week’s girl had called herself Dolores.

“I’m Don,” Charles O had said.

“Hi, Don,” she’d said, hitching her skirt up to show her thigh. He saw her appraising the leather upholstery, the premium stereo, the power seats, the AC.

She sure took her time in the bathroom: lot of water running and the toilet flushing. Still fully clothed, he sat on the edge of the waterbed, lightly bouncing, waiting for his date.

At last she came out, in her underwear — red bra, red panties, black stockings and a lot of hooks and elastic to hold them up. She turned around, cocked her fat ass up at him, big meaty buttocks bulging out from the lacy stuff that barely filled her crack, looked over her shoulder, and said, “How you like me, Don?”

“Lookin’ good, Estelle.”

“I like Asian men. They keep themselves clean, not like Americans. I’m big on personal hygiene. I mean, what with all the DSTs nowadays, you gotta be clean, right?” She perched herself on his knees, arm around his neck, then reached for his pants. “Hey, your little elvis, he’s got wood.”

She unzipped him, easing his pants down to his knees. He liked the motherliness of her as she swabbed his dick and balls with a Wet One.

“What a big elvis he’s getting to be.”

Charles O knew the drill. He handed her the condom that he’d taken from its wrapper when she was in the bathroom. Gently, skillfully, she unrolled the latex sheath down his dick, as if she was hanging wallpaper. Then she put her lips to the teat of the condom, teasing him.

“Does little elvis want to come in my mouth?”

This was what the old ones were good at. They liked to play around, to pretend. Charles O liked that.

“Is he going to be a good little elvis today, then?”

It was like his entire being had gone into his dick now: he was his dick. “Yeah,” he grunted. “Yeah.”

She had him all in her mouth now, licking, sucking, squeezing, as if she had a whole bunch of baby chipmunks working overtime inside there.

As she labored on him, he thought of Lucy Bengstrom. Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, Lucy!

“Oh, you’re a quick one, aren’t you, honey? Was that nice? I like a quick man.”

He went to the bathroom to rid himself of the Trojan and wash up. When he came back, Estelle said, “I only go hoing for my little daughter. Sharon’s ten. You’d like her. She’s doing great at school.”

“Where she at now?”

“I got an aunt looks after her on weekends. In Shoreline. That’s a nice neighborhood. You know Shoreline?”

She was chatty, this one. He shrugged. “Yeah, I been all around there.”

“I gotta go to the little girls’ room,” she said. “You wait there. Turn on the TV. We could watch TV together.”

Impatient to settle up with her and get back on the road, he paced the room, wondering why she trusted him to stay. Then he saw her watching him through the just-open bathroom door — her eyes on his every move as she pulled up her skirt and tucked her shirt into it. She had him covered.

When she came out, she was smiling. He hadn’t noticed her bad teeth before. She said, “I got an idea, Don. I’m really hungry. I thought, you and me, we could go out to lunch someplace, somewhere fancy, like with a cocktail lounge, you know? Like we were on a date date. Then after, maybe I could do your little elvis again — wouldn’t cost you no more, ’cept for the lunch, and you could give me like a gratuity?”

He was sufficiently tempted to check the time on his watch. “Nah. Too much business I got to see to.” He handed her three twenties, as agreed.

They parted company at the door, Charles O to his truck, Estelle to the street. She was almost at the corner of the motel when she turned around and called, “Don?”

“Yeah?”

“And fuck you too, honey.”

He was laughing as he switched on the ignition. What a ho — drive two stoplights down Aurora and she’d be gone forever from his mind. Yet the good blow job had only further imprinted the beckoning thought of Lucy Bengstrom. He didn’t want hos no more, he wanted her. Lucy! Just thinking her name made his dick begin to twitch again.

He turned on the stereo.

“Next, when you attain deep understanding about the three circles of your Hedgehog Concept and begin to push in a direction consistent with that understanding, you hit breakthrough momentum and accelerate with key accelerators…”

The deep, confident, moneyed voice filled the cab. Breakthrough momentum—that was where he was at, and Lucy Bengstrom was part of it. Half listening, half dreaming, he was struck by an idea so new to him that it took several blocks to recognize it for what it was, or what he presumed it must be. Love, never an item on his agenda, and a term so far outside his usual vocabulary that he classed it along with such other dim abstractions as “amortization” and “fee simple,” had at last caught up with him in the shape of the tenant of #701 in that big flowery dress of hers. Crossing the Aurora Bridge, Charles O felt suddenly, mysteriously gifted.

LUCY WAS GLAD that Alida had been upstairs in her room when the live crabs had been slid, claws flailing, into the massive pan of raging water, each letting out a desolate whistling sigh as it met its death. At lunch, Alida was engrossed in managing the novel implements — the hinged crackers in the shape of claws, the slender two-pronged forks for teasing the flesh out of the shells.

“So how goes the homework?” Augie said.

Alida looked up from her splitting and crunching. “Oh, I finished it. It was pretty easy. I found the part where Anne says she wants to be Dutch, and put that in.”

Lucy didn’t know what she was talking about. “Who’s this, Rabbit?”

“Anne Frank.”

“We were talking about her earlier,” Augie said.

Alida never discussed her homework with Lucy.

“It’s an interesting question,” Augie said. “Was Anne Frank an emblem of the human spirit in general, or was she the archetypal Jewish victim? Her father, Otto, always claimed her as the first. This guy Meyer Levin tried to turn her into the second. There’s been a big battle over the possession of her memory, so by now there are two different Anne Franks — maybe more.”

This was Alida’s homework — multiple Anne Franks? “I thought you didn’t like memoirs,” Lucy said.

“And here’s why. Otto Frank’s Anne is one person, Meyer Levin’s is another. You read her diary through Otto’s eyes, then through Levin’s, and they’re two different books entirely. One’s about the trials of humanity, the other’s about the suffering of the Jews. Memoirs are always tricky that way.”

“Augie, I was thinking…”

“What were you thinking, Alida?”

“Well, like if we could go kayaking after lunch?”

“Oh, Rabbit, there’s no time. There’ll be long lines at the ferry, particularly in this weather. You’ve got school tomorrow. We have to get away in less than an hour. I’m sorry.”

Alida’s face went pinkly limp with disappointment.

“Hey, talk your mother into coming next weekend, we can go then.”

“Oh, Mom, can we? Please?”

Lucy was aware of a whole battery of alarms going off inside her head. August Vanags was her subject, her paycheck; he was food and rent. She needed distance to get him in perspective, to hold him coolly at arm’s length and not get drowned in this warm tide of hospitality — a tide, she feared, that issued from his and Minna’s loneliness. In the case of Bill Gates, she’d won two one-hour sessions, three weeks apart, and that was about right. In the case of August Vanags, it felt as if she and Alida were moving in. Her piece was in danger; she must get her priorities straight.

“Rabbit—”

“Oh, yes, we’d love to have you over,” Minna said.

“Of course we’d love to come, but…can we talk about it later, on the phone?”

“Take your time,” Augie said. “No urgency about it. We’re on island time here.”

It was the second time he’d said that, and Lucy always found the phrase faintly annoying. Even people who lived on Bainbridge used it, smugly, to insinuate that the most technical of insularities was some kind of moral virtue to be paraded over mere mainlanders.

They left the house at 2:30. At 2:31, Alida began campaigning for a return to Useless Bay on Friday.

“Oh, maybe, Rabbit, maybe…But it’s difficult.”

“Why is it difficult?”

“It just is.”

In response, Alida wired herself to her iPod and turned the volume up so loud that Lucy could hear the thin, tinny dribble of teenage nihilism coming from the earphones.

“Sorry! I know that’s a lousy answer!”

Tinka-tinka-tinka-tinka-tinka-novocaine.

“Alida?”

But there was no reaching her. She might as well have been in Idaho, lips twitching to the lyrics, eyes half focused on the middle distance, left foot tapping in the footwell. She was gone.

There was a three-ferry wait at the terminal, where Alida tried to make overtures to a sniffer dog and was repulsed by its handler. Lucy made notes. “Memoirs are always tricky that way.” Talking of Anne Frank, had he really been speaking of himself and of multiple August Vanagses? She saw no obvious connection, but it was too hot to properly think. Ferry came and ferry went. The low-tide reek of drying bladder wrack grew steadily stronger as the water sank around the harbor pilings. The waiting cars kept their engines running for the air conditioning, filling the dead air with their fumes. At last the line began to move, and aboard the ferry there was blessed cool.

They sat by a window in the passenger lounge, next to a bulkhead. Alida — still wired — pointed approvingly to a framed notice that boasted, THIS FERRY IS POWERED BY SOYBEANS — BIODIESEL FUEL IN USE. Lucy responded with a thumbs-up sign and went on making notes. Maybe she’d have to learn sign language if she was to keep in meaningful communication with her daughter.

Halfway across Discovery Passage, she noticed for the second time the man in the Hawaiian shirt, jeans, and tightly buttoned poplin summer jacket. His tourist getup was at odds with his purposeful stride down the rows, eyes swiveling from passenger to passenger. On the instant that he registered Lucy and Alida, he appeared to cancel them from his attention. Then she saw the bulge in the jacket under his left armpit: a holstered sidearm.

An undercover marshal. Until now, she’d believed these guys were figments of Tad’s paranoid imagination. He claimed he’d seen them everywhere — on buses, ferries, and “all over” Pike Place Market. Sometimes he called them Stasi, sometimes just the secret police. Yeah, Tad. Go, Tad, go. She’d paid no attention. Now that she’d seen one for herself, she felt rebuked, like a doubting Thomas. Over her shoulder, she watched the man on his unrewarding beat. Whom was he hoping to catch? Bin Laden, returning from his weekend hideaway on Whidbey Island? Or perhaps his whole point, in his loud vacation gear, was not to observe but be observed, the watcher watched, as she was watching now.

“It happens slowly,” Tad had said, “so slowly you don’t see it happening. You think you’re living in a democracy, then one morning you wake up and realize it’s a fascist police state, and it’s been that way for years.”

But that was Tad, speaking from inside his world of dark “intel” and crazy theories garnered from the Internet. On the day Ronald Reagan died, he’d said matter-of-factly that of course Reagan had been dead for months, if not years, and that they’d been keeping his corpse on ice in readiness for a political emergency. They’d chosen to announce his death on that particular day in order to divert attention from some pickle that the president had gotten himself into over in Europe. All this Tad said as flatly as if he were reporting the weather forecast, which had made Lucy wonder for a moment if he might be clinically insane.

Whenever Tad got going on the federal government, Lucy bristled with unease. It was too damn close to Lewis Olson, his knee-jerk conviction that everyone in Washington, D.C., was conspiring to subvert the Constitution and enslave the American people. It was cheap and dangerous thinking, and she couldn’t count the hours she’d spent railing back at Tad, telling him he was no better than the Montana Militia with their kooky crap about black helicopters and the New World Order. “You and John Trochmann,” she said, “you’re like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.”

The guy in the Hawaiian shirt had taken a seat on the far side of the passenger lounge. Tiring of his search for terrorists, he was staring, or pretending to stare, at the crisscross wakes of pleasure boats as they stormed around the glassy sea. If they had undercover marshals on planes — which Lucy thought was okay, even reassuring — why shouldn’t they put them on the ferries? Just because you saw the occasional plainclothesman with a concealed gun didn’t mean the country was turning into a police state. The trouble with Tad was he had no sense of proportion. Michael had been the one with common sense, and after he died poor Tad, more often out of work than in, had tried to lose himself in cyberspace, where he was natural prey to all the psychos out there with their hot little secrets and spurious insider dirt.

On I-5, traffic was backed up from the checkpoint for the best part of a mile. Stewing in gridlock, Lucy was reminded of another of Tad’s unlikely stories, expounded over dinner as if it were gospel. There was a huge program to renew reflective lane markers on highways, ostensibly the baby of the Department of Transportation but known by Tad to have originated in the National Security Agency. These weren’t just any old lane markers; they were clandestine — you might say clairvoyant — lane markers that would track the number, make, and color of your car as it went by. When the system was complete, they’d be able to track the exact movements of every vehicle in the U.S. It was, Tad said, all done by microchips and wireless technology.

“Microchips? How could microchips do that?”

Tad, wearing the lofty smile of the privileged initiate, said, “You’d better ask the NSA that question.”

The uniformed boys at the checkpoint, faces red with sunburn, were surprisingly polite, considering the tormenting weather. One asked Alida what she was listening to.

Alida removed an earphone to say, “Good Charlotte. ‘Young and Hopeless.’”

“Cool. Okay, ma’am. Drive safe.”

Definitely not the manners of a police state.

She took the Union Street exit and drove into the muggy haze of downtown.

“Temperature inversion,” Alida said, at last breaking the long silence of the ride.

“What?”

“When warm air gets trapped by even warmer air in the upper atmosphere, so it can’t rise and all the pollution has nowhere to go. You know that just living in Seattle’s like smoking twelve cigarettes a day? I bet today it’s like smoking thirty. Yuck!”

“I never heard the cigarette thing.”

“We did it in Science. It’s really, really scary.”

“I’m afraid science is scary now. It never used to be. When I was in junior high in Miles City, it was always about exploring the wonders of the world. It’s so different for you guys — exploring all the terrors.”

“Thirty cigarettes a day. It’s the particulates in the air. You know what?”

“What, Rabbit?”

“Tonight, can we get pizza?”

ENTERING THE APARTMENT, Lucy was immediately aware of something odd and wrong, though what that something was she couldn’t place. Then she saw that her wilted lilies in the vase on the table had been replaced by fresh tulips. That would be the ever-thoughtful Tad, who had a key to 701 as she had a key to 704. But it wasn’t just the tulips. She scanned the living room and fixed on the bookshelves: her small library was all out of order, with many of the books stuffed in backward, spine first. It looked like some ham-fisted ape had been at work, wrecking her careful alphabetizing, with Kathy Acker where Virginia Woolf should be. Outraged and bewildered by this weird invasion — violation — of her territory, she cast helplessly around for an explanation until she remembered the landlord’s promise to attach her shelves to the wall.

She pulled out an armful of books and saw the new screws, neatly countersunk into the wood of the Pepsi crates. How could anyone go to such trouble, yet show such blatant contempt for her books? It would take hours and hours to put them back in order.

He had no right…

Yet anger with the landlord contended with a wary lightening of the heart, for if he was really bent on eviction, why on earth would he bother to anchor his tenant’s possessions so securely to the building? Each crate was now attached to the wall by four big silver screws. Stolen night by night from outside the grocery store in Missoula, lightly sandpapered, and brushed with four coats of Varathane, the Pepsi crates had traveled with her since her sophomore year of college.

“Rabbit, what are four eighteens?”

“Seventy-two,” Alida called back from her room.

How long would that have taken him? More time than it was worth, surely. One screw per crate, two at most, would have done the job, but he’d created a structure of such rigidity and permanence that it would take the total collapse of the Acropolis to shake these shelves from the wall. If that was any indication of how her tenancy stood in his eyes, she ought to be delighted with his work, despite the shambles he’d made of her books.

“Are you busy, Rabbit? I’d love for you to come and help me in here if you can.”

“Oh my God, what happened?” Alida said when she saw the bookshelves.

“Our helpful landlord.”

“Oh, right — I remember, like earthquake retrofitting. He said he’d do it over the weekend.”

“I’d forgotten all about it.”

Admiring the exposed screw-heads, Alida said, “Cool.”

“You know what? I don’t think we’re going to have to live in the Spider. I think it’s a good sign. But he’s made one hell of a mess.”

Together they set to work, emptying the shelves and putting books back in order. The landlord’s indecent haste was everywhere in view: paperbacks with their covers creased back, torn dust jackets, here and there a broken spine. Filing Marge Piercy’s Braided Lives alongside Eleanor Pierce’s All You Need to Know About Living Abroad, Alida complained of the promiscuous mingling of fiction and nonfiction.

“You ought to use the Dewey decimal system.”

“What? All those numbers…943-point-blah-blah-blah? You have to be kidding.”

“It’s really logical. The thing about Dewey is like there’s a special space for every book that’s ever going to be written, and for subjects that nobody’s even dreamed up yet. It’s über. The Dewey system reaches to infinity.”

“Where did you learn all this, Rabbit?”

“Mrs. Markowitz, she’s the school librarian. What you have to remember about the Dewey decimal system is it always goes from the general to the particular.”

“Which is the exact opposite of how my mind works.”

“My favorites are the 500s and the 900s. Like 943 whatever? I know that’s history — the history of somewhere. Europe, maybe — I dunno.”

“The things you teach me.”

“It’s never too late to learn.” Alida’s voice was pure schoolmarm as, standing on a stool, she slotted Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution next to the now doubly unfortunate Ms. Acker.

Every book was back in place, and Alida on the phone to the pizza joint, when Tad made his one-two-three rap on the door. “I saw the car,” he said. “Don’t tell me — you had the weekend from hell.”

“Actually, no. We—”

“Tad!” Then, into the phone, “Wait!” then to Tad, “Goat Cheese Primo?” then back to the phone, “Can you make that a three-way large — with Original, Brooklyn Bridge, and Goat Cheese Primo?” In the last few weeks Alida had taken command of all telephone orders: she now dispatched them with the alarming authority of a career waitress hollering to a short-order cook.

“Oh, dear,” Tad said to Lucy. “I’d so hoped we could share. My weekend has been such a succession of humiliations, I can’t tell you. I’ve been spending all today in the time-out corner.”

“Why the gay voice?” Alida said as she went to hug him.

Tad laughed. “Because I’m being a self-hating old fag is why. How was it, Ali? You have an okay time?”

“It was good.”

“Alida went kayaking,” Lucy said.

“You fall in? The only time I went kayaking, I spent the entire time falling in.”

“No, but I got really freaked out by the sharks.”

“Oh yeah, those famous Puget Sound sharks.”

“No, really. This shark — it was this big.” She stretched her arms out as far as they’d go. “It went right under my kayak. Augie saw another. He said there were usually hundreds of them. They’re called dogfish, but they’re really sharks, and cousins of the Great White. They hunt in packs, like wild dogs, and they can give you a real bad bite.”

Tad flashed Lucy a What the fuck? look, then said, “How far out was this?”

“Oh, not far.”

“And he told you there were hundreds to a pack, and they’d attack you?”

“He said if they felt threatened.”

To Lucy, Tad said, “You weren’t there?”

“No, I was back at the house, but—”

“He was messing with your head, Ali.”

Lucy heard this as the exposed tip of an iceberg of anger, but luckily Alida didn’t seem to catch it. She said, “The one I saw, it was like this brown color, and it was so close. I mean, I could have like touched it with my paddle.”

“Dogfish,” Tad said, “are totally harmless. They’d no more attack you than a guppy or a goldfish would.”

“But Augie’s like this big expert on nature.”

Tad let the subject drop, but the sharks cast a long inhibiting shadow over dinner.

Alida excused herself early from the table, which was unusual for evenings when Tad was there, asking if she could watch The Incredibles on the DVD player.

“Sometimes I hate journalism,” Lucy said. “Especially profiles. The more friendly you get with a subject, the more you feel like a spook.”

“We’re all spooks now. Look at the way people Google prospective dates. Everybody’s trying to spy on everybody else. At least you know you’re a spook, which is something. Most people are in denial.” He stared gloomily at his untouched glass of white wine. “You ever played with Google Earth? I zoomed in on the Acropolis and you could see everything — the chimneys, the water tank, the skylight in the hall, the place where the tar paper’s ripped on the roof, both our cars in the street, the guys in the alley, the manhole covers…everything. What this means? You’re thinking of dating a guy, you enter his address on Google Earth, and you can check out his house, how he keeps his yard, whether he should take out a loan to redo his roof. You can practically see into his bedroom and go through his underwear drawer. Everybody does it. And if we can do that, just think what the boys in Yakima can do.”

“Yakima?”

“Yakima’s the western headquarters of the NSA, the No Such Agency. I’ve seen the NSA setup there, at least the domes and dishes. It looks like a farm of humongous white mushrooms. It’s the ECHELON system. You send an e-mail, you make a phone call, ECHELON’s looking out for keywords. They use a program called Dictionary, a global search engine that does continuous roving wiretaps, going through millions of messages at a time. If you’re buying fertilizer in bulk, or want to take flying lessons for jetliners, you can count on your message landing up on somebody’s desk in Yakima. And if you say ‘jihad,’ they’ll be right inside your room before you can hang up the phone.”

Alida froze the picture on the screen to go to the bathroom. Tad said, “Look…” then stopped himself. “Let’s leave it till later.”

Lucy, thinking of the bored marshal on the ferry, said, “I think you overrate their competence. I mean, if their technology were that clever, wouldn’t you expect them to be a little better at their job? Read the 9/11 Report — it’s not about masters of espionage, it’s about a bunch of doofuses chasing one another’s tails.”

Alida, returning, said, “What are you talking about?”

“Doofuses and mushroom farming,” Lucy said, pouring herself a third glass.

“Cool.” Alida clicked the remote to liberate The Incredibles.

“We used to spy on the Russians, on their military and politicians, but now we’ve turned all that equipment — plus a whole lot more — on ourselves, on ordinary American civilians. You realize what we’re looking at here? This is the machinery of tyranny.”

That word again. “Oh, Tad, we’ve got an army. Armies are machines of tyranny. So are police forces. It’s not the machinery that makes tyranny, it’s how it’s used and who’s using it. Look, if your mushroom things can detect a terrorist attack before it happens, which I have to say they don’t seem too hot at, then I’m all for them. I mean it’s not as if the mushrooms belong to Joseph Stalin.”

“No? I wouldn’t bet the farm on that.”

“I wish I could get you in the same room as August Vanags. You’d make a great double act.”

“Vanags!” Tad glanced across at Alida, who was lost in her movie. “He’s just like all those Euro-types, like Kissinger and Brzezinski. They come over here from the old country, then they try running things like they were scheming away back home in rat-ridden Vienna, or wherever.”

“Actually, I think he’s the most American American I’ve ever met.”

“Actually,” Tad lowered his voice to a confidential mutter, “I think he’s what our charming landlord would call a scumbag son-of-a-bitch.”

“Which reminds me,” Lucy said in as airy a tone as she could muster. “I forgot to thank you for the tulips.”

AS SOON AS The Incredibles ended, Alida was sent to bed. Her mom came in for a snuggle, but Alida pretended to be asleep. She now stood at the door in her baggy Hotel Honolulu T-shirt, ear pressed to the wood, though there was hardly any need for that since the voices on the other side were rising steadily in pitch.

“I was there,” her mom was saying.

“Maybe I see it more clearly than you do because I wasn’t there.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“You heard what she said. It’s not something you can argue about — it’s plain as daylight. All that bullshit about sharks? The guy’s a raving sadist.”

“Oh, Tad, you’re making your usual goddamn mountain out of your usual goddamn molehill. I mean, why the hell would he want to do that?”

“I don’t know. Because he’s a power freak? Because of something in his fouled-up European pathology? Because frightening kids is the nearest he can get to fucking them? You tell me. You’re his new friend.”

“They went kayaking. They saw a dogfish. End of story.”

“You’re totally deluding yourself. He took her out there for one reason: to scare her shitless.”

“It’s not true!” Alida flung the door open and stormed into the living room. “It’s not true!” Her whole body shaking with fury, she stood her ground, glaring at Tad. “He so did not.” She felt her lower lip trembling, out of her control. “I love Augie.”

In helpless tears now, she found herself in Tad’s arms, gagging on her sobs like she was throwing up.

“Ali, Ali, Ali.” He was stroking her hair.

“It’s not true.”

“Okay, okay, so I was wrong.”

But she didn’t believe him: Tad was saying that just to humor her, he didn’t sound like he really believed that he was wrong, and even in his arms she felt the nub of anger still burning inside her. She had the sudden sense that in the last minute she’d arrived at some new place in her life — somewhere colder, grayer, more inhospitable than anywhere she’d ever been before.

Hands gripping her shoulders, Tad held her at a distance, but she couldn’t meet his eyes. She was staring straight ahead, into his white shirtfront, now all mussed up by the imprint of her face, a blurry mask of snot, tears, and flesh-tinted Clearasil.