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The eBook Insider
A guide for great reading from the Editors
and Authors of Alfred A. Knopf, Doubleday,
Pantheon, Nan A. Talese, Vintage, Anchor,
Schocken, and Everyman’s Library
Contents
Introduction
Best Books of the Year: A Round-Up
What Our Authors Are Reading . . .
A Selection of the Season’s Hot Titles
New Reading Group Favorites
Notable New Books
Mysteries and Thrillers
Sports and Adventure
Biography and Memoir
Nonfiction
Fiction
Read the Book, See the Movie . . .
Excerpts
Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey
C by Tom McCarthy
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar by Megan Stack
The Dead Hand by David E. Hoffman
The First Tycoon by T. J. Stiles
Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
The Confession by John Grisham
The Wave by Susan Casey
Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
The Tiger by John Vaillant
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Sum by David Eagleman
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear
and Larissa Volokhonsky
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To the End of the Land by David Grossman
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954–1981) With Attendant
Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes
by Stephen Sondheim
I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron
The Widower’s Tale by Julia Glass
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Introduction
Welcome to The eBook Insider, the perfect first stop to make along
the way as you fill your e-reader with wonderful books that you’ll want to
recommend to friends and adopt as new favorites. Instead of searching,
this is the one place where you can preview excerpts from award-winners
and blockbusters or peruse lists of the best books of the year. And it’s the
only place to find out what authors like Dan Brown, Carl Hiaasen, and
Nora Ephron are reading and recommending. If you love fiction, history,
biographies, mysteries, or thrillers, you’re bound to find just what you’re
looking for when you consult The Insider.
Happy reading!
Best Books of the Year:
A Round-Up
2010 National Book Awards
Winner for Fiction: Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon
Nominees in Fiction:
Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey [Read an excerpt here]
Great House by Nicole Krauss
So Much For That by Lionel Shriver
I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita
Winner for Nonfiction: Just Kids by Patti Smith
Nominees in Nonfiction:
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9/11, Iraq by John W. Dover
Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward by Justin Spring
Every Man in This Village is a Liar by Megan K. Stack [Read an
excerpt here]
2010 Man Booker Prize
Winner for Fiction: The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobsen
Nominees on the Shortlist for Fiction:
Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey [Read an excerpt here]
Room by Emma Donoghue
In A Strange Room by Damon Galgut
The Long Song by Andrea Levy
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C by Tom McCarthy [Read an excerpt here]
2010 Pulitzer Prizes
Winner for Fiction: Tinkers by Paul Harding
Nominees in Fiction:
Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniel Mueenuddin
Winner for Nonfiction: The Dead Hand by David E. Hoffman
[Read an excerpt here]
Nominees in Nonfiction:
How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy
The Evolution of God by Robert Wright
Winner for Biography/Autobiography: The First Tycoon by T.
J. Stiles [Read an excerpt here]
Nominees in Biography/Autobiography:
Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey [Read an excerpt here]
Woodrow Wilson: A Biography by John Milton Cooper Jr.
Winner for History: Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke
the World by Liaquat Ahamed
Nominees in History:
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City by Greg
Grandin
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 by Gordon S.
Wood
Best Books of the Year: A Round-Up
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The New York Times Ten Best Books of 2010
Fiction
The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie
Room by Emma Donoghue
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan [Read an excerpt here]
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Selected Stories by William Trevor
Nonfiction
Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha
Mukherjee
Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff
Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954–1981) With Attendant Comments,
Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by
Isabel Wilkerson
A Selection of the New York Times 100 Notable
Books of 2010
Fiction and Poetry
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, 1975–2010 by Edward Hirsch
Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross
One Day by David Nicholls
The Same River Twice by Ted Mooney
Solar by Ian McEwan
To the End of the Land by David Grossman [Read an excerpt here]
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan [Read an excerpt
here]
What Becomes: Stories by A. L. Kennedy
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Nonfiction
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick
Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim
Insectopedia by Hugh Raffles
The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron by Howard Bryant
The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean by Susan
Casey [Read an excerpt here]
Edgar Award 2010 Nominees, Presented by the
Mystery Writers of America
The Missing by Tim Gautreaux (Best Novel)
Talking About Detective Fiction by P.D. James (Best Critical/Biographical)
What Our Authors
Are Reading . . .
What was your favorite book this year?
CARL HIASSEN, author of Star Island recommends: The Tiger by John
Vaillant, is a terrific true story about the hunt for a man-eating tiger in
Siberia. Vaillant is a first-rate journalist, and this book is as much about
rural Russian culture and history as it is about the killer cat. [Read an
excerpt from The Tiger here]
NORA EPHRON, author of I Remember Nothing recommends: A Visit
from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. [Read an excerpt here]
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JULIA GLASS, author of The Widower’s Tale recommends: The best
books I read this year were all debut works of fiction, and I’m simply going
to have to name four, in random order: A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True by Brigid Pasulka; Extraordinary Renditions by Andrew Ervin; The
Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman; and Sum by David Eagleman. [Read an
excerpt from Sum here]
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, author of Tell-All recommends: Too Much
Money by Dominick Dunne. The author might be dead, but Lil Altemus
must live forever.
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DAN BROWN, author of The Lost Symbol recommends: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell because it brought into stark focus my own belief that no
success story is a solitary effort but rather a product of many unseen hands,
preordained advantages, and being in the right place at the right time.
Out of all the books you’ve ever read, which one would you
urge others to read?
CARL HIASSEN: Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, is a classic of American
satire. It’s almost a perfect novel, if such a thing exists. For those of you
who write humor (or try), Heller is the gold standard.
AIMEE BENDER, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: Of all
the books! Wow. That’s hard. Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke comes to mind,
because it’s a book about how to be a person, how to live. In a way, every
good book is like that to some degree, but that’s one that takes on heavy
questions and looks at them directly and very beautifully. But there are
so many.
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JULIA GLASS: One? Just one? You’ve got to be kidding! Well, okay,
how about any collection of short stories by the late Andre Dubus? When I
was learning the craft of fiction, he was one of my literary gods. Still is.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham. The book
and movie versions of this story perfectly complement one another. It’s a
lesson in how successfully a novel can be translated into a screenplay.
DAN BROWN: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. This prophetic tale
of a future dominated by globalization, genetic engineering, and mass narcotization is even more terrifying today than it was in 1932 . . . because we
can see it coming true.
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH, author of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency: W. H. Auden’s Collected Shorter Poems. Auden was, in my view, the
greatest poet to write in English for several hundred years. His poems are
as fresh and as relevant today as they were when he wrote them. His was
a marvelously humane voice that speaks to the reader in a most intimate
and compelling way.
What book are you looking forward to reading next year?
NORA EPHRON: War and Peace. I’ve never read it. [Read an
excerpt of War and Peace from the acclaimed new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky here]
AIMEE BENDER: I’m really looking forward to reading Great House,
the new Nicole Krauss book, and I loved the excerpt in The New Yorker, but
I also want to wait a little while so I can sidle up to it on my own terms.
JULIA GLASS: To the End of the Land, the new novel by David Grossman, is at the top of my list. It worries me how insulated most Americans are from the consciousness that our country is at war. I’m just as
guilty as the next person here, yet I am beginning to feel drawn toward
reading that keeps me mindful of what it means to be at war for those who
are directly affected. In the same vein, let me also strongly recommend a
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nonfiction book I read a couple of years ago called Soldier’s Heart: Reading
Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, by Elizabeth D. Samet. [Read
an excerpt from To The End of the Land here]
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: I am working my way through
Christopher Alexander’s four volume work, The Nature of Order. I hope to
read volumes 2 and 3 next year, having read volume 1 this year. Christopher Alexander is a professor of architecture at Berkeley. He is a visionary
who understands exactly where modern architecture has gone wrong and
who shows us how humane architecture is possible.
Which book would you most like to discuss with a reading
group, and why?
CARL HIAASEN: If I belonged to a reading group, it would be tough
to choose between the memoirs of George Bush (Decision Points) and Keith
Richards (Life). Seriously? It’s no contest – I’d pick Keith over W. any day.
I’d much rather talk about the opening guitar riff in “Jumping Jack Flash”
than the hidden charms of Dick Cheney.
NORA EPHRON: The Great Gatsby, because it changes every single
time you read it.
AIMEE BENDER: I’m rereading The Sound and the Fury right now with
a group of friends, and it is SO satisfying to read it now, a long time after
my very, very poor high school reading. It’s pure delight to talk about it and
puzzle through it and read it aloud, noticing and admiring and grappling
with what Faulkner is doing.
JULIA GLASS: So far, I’ve only browsed through it, but I’m excited
about Finishing the Hat by Stephen Sondheim. I listen to a few of his musicals quite often and am profoundly moved by some of his reflections on
marriage, love, and family—about life in general—as expressed through
his lyrics. I’m looking forward to reading about the way he works, specifically the perspective of Sondheim the wordsmith and the storyteller. I
don’t belong to a reading group, but I imagine it would be fascinating to
talk about Sondheim’s creative process with fellow fiction writers.
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: Beauty by Roger Scruton. Roger
Scruton is an immensely interesting philosopher who in this book defends
the concept of beauty and the validity of aesthetic judgement. Beauty has
come under profound attack in contemporary art: Scruton defends it and
reminds us that we should not be afraid to make judgments about what
is right and wrong and about what is beautiful and what is aesthetically
displeasing. He is not afraid of controversy, which would make for good
debate in any reading group.
A Selection of the
Season’s Hot Titles
In this long-awaited, stunning follow-up to the global phenomenon The
Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown demonstrates once again why he is the world’s
most popular thriller writer. Dan Brown’s beloved Harvard symbologist—
erudite, dashing, intelligent, and uncommonly clever—finds himself
in Washington D.C., in another page-turning mystery filled with secret
codes, puzzles, and the deadliest villain we’ve come across yet. [Read an
excerpt here]
At Home by Bill Bryson
From the beloved author of A Short History of Nearly Everything, a classic of modern science writing, a book about our homes—how they truly
work, how they got to be the way they are today, and the fascinating history
behind it all.
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With Ephron’s flawless balance of irreverence and wisdom, acerbic wit
and affection—a recipe that can only be perfected by a woman of a certain
age—I Remember Nothing says everything we’d been thinking but either forgot, misplaced, or never found the words for. [Read an excerpt here]
An electrifying new legal thriller from John Grisham—filled with the
intriguing twists and turns that have become Grisham’s trademark, this
newest novel will prove once again that no one keeps readers in suspense
like America’s favorite storyteller. [Read an excerpt here]
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Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer
The universally acclaimed, best-selling author of Into the Wild, Into
Thin Air and Under the Banner of Heaven returns with the harrowing story
of Pat Tillman, the NFL player turned Army Ranger who died under
friendly fire.
Stieg Larsson’s Best-selling Millenium Trilogy
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
A contagiously exciting, stunningly intelligent amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue. [Read an excerpt
here]
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The Girl Who Played With Fire
In the thrilling follow-up to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth
Salander, the troubled, genius hacker takes center stage.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
The hugely anticipated third installment of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy.
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Of Love and Evil by Anne Rice
Anne Rice’s magnificent Songs of the Seraphim continues with her lyrical
and haunting new novel of angels and assassins set in dark and dangerous
worlds—in our time and the 15th century’s high Italian Renaissance.
The long-awaited, critically acclaimed first novel from the author of
My Own Country-a stunning evocation of love, medicine, and twin brothers
linked by fate. [Read an excerpt here]
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Blind Assassin and The
Handmaid’s Tale: a landmark work of speculative fiction that’s impossible
to put down.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
In her finest work to date, the wondrous Aimee Bender conjures a girl
whose magical gift is really a devastating curse—she can taste the emotions
of everyone who has prepared the food she eats.
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The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt
From the Booker Prize-winning author, a thrilling new novel—shortlisted for the Booker—that spans the Victorian era through WWI: a riveting family saga about a renowned children’s book author and the passions,
betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves.
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The False Friend by Myla Goldberg
Myla Goldberg returns to Bee Season form with this fascinating psychological drama that has a simple set up—two eleven-year-old girls, best
friends and fierce rivals, enter a patch of woods. Only one comes out.
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World and Town by Gish Jen
A world-sized novel about a newly widowed Chinese-American woman,
a retired neuro-scientist, and a Cambodian refugee family, all starting over,
they hope, in a small American town.
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
The long-awaited new novel—a stunner of a book—by one of the most
heralded writers of the past thirty years. Set just after the “events of September, 2001,” about a young woman, twenty years old, from a small midwestern farm, making her way, coming of age. Under the novel’s languid,
easy-going surface, Moore’s deft, lyrical writing brings us up against the
heart of racism, the shock of war, and the carelessness perpetrated against
others in the name of love. This will be Lorrie Moore’s breakthrough
novel; the novel of our time.
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Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro
A new collection of wise, engaging, often startling stories from the author
of Runaway and “the best fiction writer now working in North America”
(New York Times Book Review).
The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
Julie Orringer’s astonishing first novel—eagerly anticipated since the
publication of her beloved short story collection How to Breathe Underwater
in 2003—is a grand love story, and a sweeping, magisterial tale of two
brothers whose lives are torn apart by war.
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The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk
The first novel from Orhan Pamuk since his Nobel Prize—a big, emotionally charged, culturally illuminating story of love and lust, family and
politics.
The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise by Julia Stuart
Brimming with charm, sparkling prose and undeniably unique characters, this hilarious novel set in the Tower of London has the transportive
qualities and delightful magic of the contemporary classics, Chocolat and
Amelie.
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Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead
From the Pulitzer and NBCC finalist, Whiting Award-winning author
of John Henry Days and The Intuitionist: a tender, hilarious, and supremely
original novel about a young African American boy coming-of-age in the
eighties.
Notable New Books
Mysteries and Thrillers
In this long-awaited, stunning follow-up to the global phenomenon The
Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown demonstrates once again why he is the world’s
most popular thriller writer. Dan Brown’s beloved Harvard symbologist—
erudite, dashing, intelligent, and uncommonly clever—finds himself
in Washington D.C., in another page-turning mystery filled with secret
codes, puzzles, and the deadliest villain we’ve come across yet. [Read an
excerpt here]
The Godfather of Kathmandu by John Burdett
Sonchai Jitpleecheep—the District 8 Royal Thai Police detective with
the hard-bitten demeanor and the Buddhist soul—returns in John Burdett’s
newest, most wildly inventive, darkly comic, and surprising novel yet.
Notable New Books
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Layover in Dubai by Dan Fesperman
The newest thriller from the author of The Arms Maker of Berlin and The
Prisoner of Guantánamo is as energized, unexpected, and of-the-moment as its
bedazzling setting: Dubai.
An electrifying new legal thriller from John Grisham—filled with the
intriguing twists and turns that have become Grisham’s trademark, this
newest novel will prove once again that no one keeps readers in suspense
like America’s favorite storyteller. [Read an excerpt here]
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The eBook Insider
The Third Rail by Michael Harvey
Michael Kelly—private detective, tough guy, lover of the classics—
returns in a new thriller that has him on the run in Chicago’s public transit
system, where a sniper is on the loose.
The Man From Beijing by Henning Mankell
The acclaimed author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries now gives us an
extraordinary stand-alone novel: a mystery that takes off into a sweeping
international drama.
Notable New Books
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Blind Man’s Alley by Justin Peacock
From the author of the Edgar Award-nominated legal thriller A Cure For
Night, a novelistically ambitious and compulsively readable novel set in the
(literally) murderous world of New York real estate.
Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End by Leif GW Persson
From the old Grand Master of Scandinavian crime fiction, the first in a
trilogy of critically acclaimed novels centered around the unsolved murder
of Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986.
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Rules of Betrayal by Christopher Reich
Dr. Jonathan Ransom and his undercover-agent wife, Emma, return
in another twisty, riveting, and unforgettable espionage thriller by the New
York Times best-selling author Christopher Reich.
The Gordian Knot by Bernhard Schlink
From the best-selling author of The Reader and the Gerhard Self mysteries, comes this classic noir thriller about love and deception.
Notable New Books
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Mystery by Peter Straub
In the second installment of Peter Straub’s acclaimed Blue Rose Trilogy, a young boy and an eccentric old man team up to solve a mystery
that’s been unsolved for many years.
The Dark Vineyard by Martin Walker
The second installment in Martin Walker’s Bruno series—in a mystery
focused on the wine business and environmentalism—and the same edge
and sensual appreciation of French village life that distinguished his Bruno,
Chief of Police.
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Sports and Adventure
Open by Andre Agassi
A remarkable memoir by one of the world’s great athletes—an indispensable inside view of the world of tennis that transcends its subject to
relate with stunning candor the amazing story of Andre Agassi’s life.
The Last Hero by Howard Bryant
The first comprehensive biography of Henry Aaron that chronicles the
social upheavals from the 1950s to the 1970s that would transform the role
of professional sports in our culture.
Notable New Books
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From Susan Casey, New York Times best-selling author of The Devil’s Teeth,
comes an astonishing book about colossal, ship-swallowing, city-destroying
rogue waves and the surfers who seek them out. [Read an excerpt
here]
Part riveting adventure, part extreme sports and 100 percent inspiration—Born to Run is a fascinating exploration of the crazy people for whom
a marathon is just not enough; it is also the story of a nail-biting 50-mile
race through the copper canyons of Mexico between a mystical Indian
tribe and America’s best ultrarunners that will leave you breathless. [Read
an excerpt here]
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Sports from Hell by Rick Reilly
The most popular sports columnist in America returns to nonfiction
with the ultimate in participatory sports journalism—an uproarious tour
of the most absurd competitions in the world.
The Baseball Codes by Jason Turbow
An eye-opening insider’s look at baseball’s unwritten rules, illustrated by
the game’s most fascinating characters and its wildest historical moments.
Notable New Books
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Biography and Memoir
A Journey by Tony Blair
As intimate and revealing a memoir of a political leader as we’ve ever
had.
My Reading Life by Pat Conroy
Bestselling author Pat Conroy celebrates the books that have shaped
him and shares the profound effect that reading has had on his life.
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First Family by Joseph J. Ellis
A fascinating portrait of Abigail and John Adams’ marriage in the context of the American Revolution by the best-selling, prize-winning author
of His Excellency and Founding Brothers.
The Hilliker Curse by James Ellroy
From the master of contemporary noir—self-proclaimed “Demon
Dog,” hailed by the LA Times as “one of the great American writers of
our time”—comes a memoir as intensely riveting as any of his novels: a
companion to My Dark Places.
Notable New Books
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Frank by James Kaplan
A publishing event: the definitive biography of Frank Sinatra. You think
you’ve heard it all, but you have not. Like Tina Brown on Diana and Peter
Guralnick on Elvis, Jim Kaplan goes behind the legend and brings us the
full story of a man who changed popular culture in the twentieth century.
Reading Jackie by William Kuhn
A revealing biography of the former first lady as an editor and her
career in publishing.
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Loretta Lynn: Coal Miner’s Daughter by Loretta Lynn
Loretta Lynn’s classic memoir tells the story of her early life in
Butcher Holler, Kentucky, and her amazing ascent to the top of the music
industry.
Why Not Say What Happened by Ivana Lowell
In this fascinating, original, and sometimes darkly humorous memoir
set in London, Dublin, and New York, Ivana Lowell reveals how stepfather
Robert Lowell was an all too brief anchor in an unconventional household full of tragedy, her struggles with alcoholism and stints in rehab, and
her closeness to her brilliant but tortured mother who kept one big secret
from her.
Notable New Books
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Blood-Dark Track by Joseph O’Neill
From the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of Netherland, a remarkable family memoir centered on Joseph O’Neill’s grandfathers—one
Irish, one Turkish—both of whom were imprisoned during the Second
World War.
The Bridge by David Remnick
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of The New Yorker—the most
thorough, even-handed, and brilliantly readable book about the man who
became the nation’s first African American president.
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Nonfiction
Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life by Karen Armstrong
Following on the success of Karen Armstrong’s best seller The Case for
God is this smart, new volume in which Armstrong explains how to practice the religion of compassion that her last books have preached.
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
A riveting account of Katrina and a shocking tale of wrongful arrest
and racism, Zeitoun is the true story of one Syrian-American, plucked from
his home and accused of terrorism, written by one of America’s most highprofile literary writers.
Notable New Books
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The Lost City of Z by David Grann
The Lost City of Z is journalist David Grann’s vivid portrait of an age of
exploration, of a brave and driven man obsessed by a jungle and a legendary city, and of Grann’s own efforts to unravel a deadly mystery several
centuries old.
13 Bankers by Simon Johnson and James Kwak
A lucid, authoritative, and timely account of recent U.S. financial history and how we can reform our troubled political economy, written by the
authors of one of the most informative news sites in the blogosphere.
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Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer
The universally acclaimed, best-selling author of Into the Wild, Into Thin
Air, and Under the Banner of Heaven returns with the harrowing story of Pat
Tillman, the NFL player turned Army Ranger who died under friendly
fire.
Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
A passionate call to arms against the oppression of women and girls in
the developing world told through moving personal stories.
Notable New Books
45
Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Bringing Chicago circa 1893 to vivid life, Erik Larson’s spellbinding
bestseller intertwines the true tale of two men—the brilliant architect
behind the legendary 1893 World’s Fair, striving to secure America’s place
in the world; and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his
victims to their death.
Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides
From the critically-acclaimed and best-selling author of Ghost Soldiers
and Blood and Thunder, a gut-wrenching, taut narrative about one of the
greatest tragedies in American history.
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Fiction
Star Island by Carl Hiaasen
In a hilarious new novel, Carl Hiaasen takes us back to Florida—to
hidden mangrove swamps and highly photographed hotels and clubs,
to acres both undeveloped and about to become over-developed—in a
wholly Hiaasenian tale of celebrity, vanity, greed, and the zaniest courage
imaginable.
Solar by Ian McEwan
Surprising, masterful, a literary event: a hilarious and brilliant new
novel from one of the greatest writers of our time.
Notable New Books
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The Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller
The mesmerizing new novel from The New York Times best-selling author
of last year’s explosive The Senator’s Wife—the story of four indelible characters whose lives intersect through the staging of a play.
One Day by David Nicholls
One Day is a brilliantly funny and moving novel, in the vein of Nick
Hornby and Helen Fielding. It’s 1988 and Dexter Mayhew and Emma
Morley have only just met. But after only one day together, they cannot
stop thinking about one another. Over twenty years, snapshots of that relationship are revealed on the same day—July 15th—of each year. Dex and
Em face squabbles and fights, hopes and missed opportunities, laughter
and tears. And as the true meaning of this one crucial day is revealed, they
must come to grips with the nature of love and life itself.
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Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross
An astonishing debut in which marriage, in all its perverse complexity,
is explored with fiendish intelligence and originality and mastery. Compulsively readable, Mr. Peanut immediately puts a new novelist in the front rank
of American writers.
Red Hook Road by Ayelet Waldman
Written by acclaimed author Ayelet Waldman, Red Hook Road is a novel
of two families, separated by class and place, whose lives become forever
entwined in the aftermath of a tragic wedding day. Unique and compelling, this book taps into Waldman’s best abilities as a storyteller.
Read the Book . . .
See the Movie
Now Playing: Read the Books That Inspire Movies
Currently in Theaters
Have you seen the Swedish films “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,”
“The Girl Who Played with Fire,” and “The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s
Nest?” Then don’t miss the trilogy that inspired them all: the Millenium
trilogy by Stieg Larsson. [Read an excerpt of The Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo here]
“Cool It,” a documentary based on the book by Bjorn Lomborg, Cool It:
The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming.
“Never Let Me Go” based on the best-selling novel by Booker Prizewinner Kazuo Ishiguro.
“The Social Network” based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by
Ben Mezrich, about the founding of Facebook.
Coming Soon: Don’t Miss Out on Reading These
Books Before You See the Movies
“Jane Eyre”: The must-read classic is coming to the big screen in March
2011. Based on the novel by Charlotte Bronte and directed by Cary Fukunaga from a screenplay by Moira Buffini, starring Mia Wasikowska (“Alice
in Wonderland”) as Jane and Michael Fassbender as Rochester.
“Mildred Pierce”: A five-hour miniseries based on the novel by James
M. Cain; starring Kate Winslet, Evan Rachel Wood, Guy Pearce; directed
by Todd Haynes (“Far From Heaven”) from his own screenplay with Jon
Raymond; produced by Ilene Landress (“The Sopranos”).
“One Day”: Coming in 2011, directed by Lone Scherfig (“An Education”) from a screenplay by David Nicholls; starring Anne Hathaway and
Jim Sturgess.
“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” The Girl Who Played with Fire,”
and “The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” based on the Millenium
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trilogy by Stieg Larsson, coming in 2011. [Read in excerpt of The
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo here]
The Novels Behind Classic Films
“The English Patient” (1996), based on the novel by Michael
Ondaatje.
“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (1998), based on the novel by Hunter
S. Thompson.
“Girl, Interrupted” (1999), based on the novel by Susanna Kaysen.
“American Psycho” (1999), based on the book by Bret Easton Ellis.
“All the Pretty Horses” (2000), based on the novel by Cormac
McCarthy.
“Memoirs of a Geisha,” based on the book by Arthur Golden.
“Atonement” (2007), based on the novel by Ian McEwan.
“No Country for Old Men” (2007), based on the novel by Cormac
McCarthy.
“The Reader” (2008), based on the novel by Bernhard Schlink.
“Revolutionary Road” (2008), based on the novel by Richard Yates.
“The Road” (2009), based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy.
“Up In the Air” (2009,) based on the book by Walter Kirn.
Excerpts
Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey
C by Tom McCarthy
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar by Megan Stack
The Dead Hand by David E. Hoffman
The First Tycoon by T. J. Stiles
Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey
The Tiger by John Vaillant
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Sum by David Eagleman
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky
To the End of the Land by David Grossman
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes by Stephen
Sondheim
Parrot and Olivier in America
Peter Carey
I had no doubt that something cruel and catastrophic had happened before
I was even born, yet the comte and comtesse, my parents, would not tell
me what it was. As a result my organ of curiosity was made irritable and
I grew into the most restless and unhealthy creature imaginable—slight,
pale, always climbing, prying into every drain and attic of the Château de
Barfleur.
But consider this: Given the ferocity of my investigations, is it not half
queer I did not come across my uncle’s célérifère?
Perhaps the célérifère was common knowledge in your own family. In
mine it was, like everything, a mystery. This clumsy wooden bicycle, constructed by my uncle Astolphe de Barfleur, was only brought to light when
a pair of itinerant slaters glimpsed it strapped to the rafters. Why it should
be strapped, I do not know, nor can I imagine why my uncle—for I assume
it was he—had used two leather dog collars to do the job. It is my nature
to imagine a tragedy—that loyal pets have died for instance—but perhaps
the dog collars were simply what my uncle had at hand. In any case, it was
typical of the riddles trapped inside the Château de Berfleur. At least it
was not me who found it and it makes my pulse race, even now, to imagine how my mother might have reacted if I had. Her upsets were never
predictable. As for her maternal passions, these were not conventionally
expressed, although I relished those occasions, by no means infrequent,
when she feared that I would die. It is recorded that, in the year of 1809,
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she called the doctor on fifty-three occasions. Twenty years later she would
still be taking the most outlandish steps to save my life.
My childhood was neither blessed nor tainted by the célérifère, and I would
not have mentioned it at all, except—here it is before us now.
Typically, the Austrian draftsman fails to suggest the three dimensions.
However:
Could there be a vehicle more appropriate for the task I have so recklessly set myself, one that you, by-the-by, have supported by taking this
volume in your hands? That is, you have agreed to be transported to my
childhood where it will be proven, or if not proven then strongly suggested,
that the very shape of my head, my particular phrenology, the volume of
my lungs, was determined by unknown pressures brought to bear in the
years before my birth.
So let us believe that a grotesque and antique bicycle has been made
available to us, its wooden frame in the form of a horse, and of course if
we are to approach my home this way, we must be prepared to push my
uncle’s hobby across fallen branches, through the spinneys. It is almost useless in the rough ground of the woods, where I and the Abbé de La Londe,
my beloved Bébé, shot so many hundreds of larks and sparrows that I
bruised my little shoulder blue.
“Careful Olivier dear, do be careful.”
We can ignore nose bleeding for the time being, although to be realistic
the blood can be anticipated soon enough—spectacular spurts, splendid
gushes—my body being always too thin-walled a container for the passions coursing through its veins, but as we are making up our adventure let
us assume there is no blood, no compresses, no leeches, no wild gallops to
drag the doctor from his breakfast.
And so we readers can leave the silky treacherous Seine and cross the
rough woodlands and enter the path between the linden trees, and I,
Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont, a noble of Myopia, am free to speed like Mercury while pointing out the blurry vegetable
garden on the left, the smudgy watercolor of orchard on the right. Here is
the ordure of the village road across which I can go sailing, skidding, blind
as a bat, through the open gates of the Château de Barfleur.
Hello Jacques, hello Gustave, Odile. I am home.
On the right, just inside, is Papa’s courthouse where he conducts the
marriages of young peasants, thus saving them military service and early
death in Napoleon’s army. It does not need to be said that we are not for
Bonaparte, and my papa leaves the intrigues for others. We live a quiet
life—he says. In Normandy, in exile, he also says. My mother says the same
thing, but more bitterly. Only in our architecture might you glimpse signs
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of the powerful familial trauma. We live a quiet life, but our courtyard
resembles a battlefield, its ancient austerity insulted by a sea of trenches,
fortifications, red mud, white sand, gray flagstones, and fifty-four forsythias
with their roots bound up in balls of hessian. In order that the courtyard
should reach its proper glory, the Austrian architect has been installed in
the Blue Room with his drawing boards and pencils. You may glimpse this
uppity creature as we pass.
I have omitted mention of the most serious defect of my uncle’s vehicle—the lack of steering. There are more faults besides, but who could
really care? The two-wheeled célérif èrewas one of those dazzling machines
that are initially mocked for their impracticality until, all in a great rush,
like an Italian footman falling down a staircase, they arrive in front of us,
unavoidably real and extraordinarily useful.
The years before 1805, when I was first delivered to my mother’s breast,
constituted an age of inventions of great beauty and great terror—and I
was very soon aware of all of this without knowing exactly what the beauty
or the terror were. What I understood was drawn solely from what we call
the symbolic aggregate: that is, the confluence of the secrets, the disturbing flavor of my mother’s milk, my own breathing, the truly horrible and
unrelenting lowing of the condemned cattle which, particularly on winter
afternoons, at that hour when the servants have once more failed to light
the lanterns, distressed me beyond belief.
But hundreds of words have been spent and it is surely time to enter
that château, rolling quietly on our two wheels between two tall blue doors
where, having turned sharply right, we shall be catapulted along the entire
length of the long high gallery, traveling so fast that we will be shrieking
and will have just sufficient time to notice, on the left, the conceited architect and his slender fair-haired assistant. On the right—look quickly—are
six high windows, each presenting the unsettling turmoil of the courtyard,
and the gates, outside which the peasants and their beasts are constantly
dropping straw and fecal matter.
You might also observe, between each window, a portrait of a Garmont
or a Barfleur or a Clarel, a line which stretches so far back in time that
should my father, in the darkest days of the Revolution, have attempted to
burn all the letters and documents that would have linked him irrevocably
to these noble privileges and perils, he would have seen his papers rise from
the courtyard bonfire still alive, four hundred years of history become like
burning crows, lifted by wings of flame, a plague of them, rising into a cold
turquoise sky I was not born to see.
But today is bright and sunny. The long gallery is a racetrack, paved
with marble, and we swish toward that low dark door, the little oratory
where Maman often spends her mornings praying.
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But my mother is not praying, so we must carry our machine to visit her.
That anyone would choose oak for such a device beggars belief, but my
uncle was clearly an artist of a type. Now on these endless stairs I feel the
slow drag of my breath like a rat-tail file inside my throat. This is no fun,
sir, but do not be alarmed. I might be a slight boy with sloping shoulders
and fine arms, but my blood is cold and strong, and I will swim a river
and shoot a bird and carry the célérif ère to the second floor where I will
present to you the cloaked blindfolded figure on the chaise, my mother, the
Comtesse de Garmont.
Poor Maman. See how she suffers, her face gaunt, glowing in the gloom.
In her youth she was never ill. In Paris she was a beauty, but Paris has been
taken from her. She has her own grand house on the rue Saint-Dominique,
but my father is a cautious man and we are in exile in the country. My
mother is in mourning for Paris, although sometimes you might imagine
her a penitent. Has she sinned? Who would tell me if she had? Her clothes
are both somber and loose-fitting as is appropriate for a religious woman.
Her life is a kind of holy suffering existing on a plane above her disappointing child.
I also am sick, but it is in no sense the same. I am, as I often declare
myself, a wretched beast.
Behold, the dreadful little creature—his head under a towel, engulfed
in steam, and the good Bébé, who was as often my nurse as my tutor and
confessor, sitting patiently at my side, his big hand on my narrow back
while I gasped for life so long and hard that I would—still in the throes of
crisis—fall asleep and wake with my nose scalded in the basin, my lungs
like fish in a pail, grasping what they could.
After how many choking nights was I still awake to witness the pale
light of dawn lifting the dew-wet poplar leaves from the inky waters of
the night, to hear the cawing of the crows, the antic gargoyle torments of
country life?
I knew I would be cured in Paris. In Paris I would be happy. It was the
Abbé de La Londe’s contrary opinion that Paris was a pit of vile miasmas
and that the country air was good for me. He should have had me at my
Catullus and my Cicero but instead he would drag me, muskets at the
ready, into what we called the Bottom Hundred where we would occupy
ourselves shooting doves and thrush, and Bébé would play beater and
groundsman and priest. “You’re a splendid little marksman,” Bébé would
say, jogging to collect our plunder. “Quam sagaciter puer telum conicit!” I
translated. He never learned I was shortsighted. I so wished to please him
I shot things I could not see.
My mother would wish me to address him as vous and l’Abbé, but such
was his character that he would be Bébé until the day he died.
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I was a strange small creature for him to love. He was a strong and
handsome man, with snow-white hair and shrewd eyes easily moved to
sympathy. He had raised my father and now I trusted myself entire to
him, his big liver-spotted hands, his patient manner, the smell of Virginian tobacco which stained the shoulder of his cassock, and filled me with
the atoms of America twenty years before I breathed its air. “Come young
man,” he would say. “Come, it’s a beautiful day—Decorus est dies.” And
the hail would be likely flailing your back raw and he would marvel, not
at the cruel pummeling, but at the miracle of ice. Or if not the ice, then
the wind—blowing so violently it seemed the North Sea itself was pushing
up the Seine and would wash away the wall that separated the river from
the bain.
The meek would not swim, but Bébé made sure I was not meek. He
would be splashing in the deep end of the bain, naked as a broken statue—
“Come on Great Olivier.”
If I became—against all that God intended for me—a powerful swimmer, it was not because of the damaging teachings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but because of this good priest and my desire to please him. I would
do anything for him, even drown myself. It was because of him that I was
continually drawn away from the awful atmosphere of my childhood home,
and if I spent too many nights in the company of doctors and leeches, I
knew, in spite of myself, the sensual pleasures of the seasons, the good red
dirt drying out my tender hands.
And of course I exaggerate. I lived at the Château de Barfleur for sixteen
years and my mother was not always to be found lying in her pigeonhole
with the wet sheet across her eyes. There was, above my father’s locked
desk, a large and lovely pencil portrait of my maman, as light as the dream
of a child that was never to be born. Her nose here was perhaps a little too
narrow, a trifle severe, but there was such true vitality in the likeness. She
showed a clear forehead, a frank expression, inquiring eyes that directly
engaged the viewer, and not only here, but elsewhere—for there would
be many nights in my childhood when she would rise up from her bed,
dress herself in all her loveliness, and welcome our old friends, not those so
recently and swiftly elevated, but nobles of the robe and sword. To stand
in the courtyard on these evenings with all the grand coaches out of sight
behind the stables, to see the fuzzy moon and the watery clouds scudding
above Normandy, was to find oneself transported back to a vanished time,
and one would approach one’s grand front door, not speeding on a bicycle,
but with a steady slippered tread and, on entering, smell, not dirt or cobwebs, but the fine powder on the men’s wigs, the lovely perfumes on the
ladies’ breasts, the extraordinary palette of the ancient régime, such pinks
and greens, gorgeous silks and satins whose colors rose and fell among the
57
folds and melted into the candled night, and on these occasions my mother
was the most luminous among the beautiful. Yet her true beauty—evanescent, fluttering, deeper and more grained than in the pencil portrait—did
not reveal itself until the audience of liveried servants had been sent away.
Then the curtains were drawn and my father made the coffee himself and
served his peers carefully, one by one, and my mother, whose voice in her
sickbed was thin as paper, began to sing:
A troubadour of Béarn,
His eyes filled with tears . . .
At this moment she was not less formal in her manner. Her slender
hands lay simply on her lap, and it was to God Himself she chose to reveal
her strong contralto voice. I have often enough, indiscreetly it seems now,
publicly recalled my mother’s singing of “Troubadour Béarnais,” and as a
result that story has gained a dull protective varnish like a ceramic captive
in a museum which has been inquired of too often by the overly familiar.
So it is that any tutoyering bourgeois and his wife can know the Comtesse
de Garmont sang about the dead king and cried, but nothing would ever
reveal to them Olivier de Garmont’s fearful astonishment at his mother’s
emotions, and—God forgive me—I was jealous of the passion she so wantonly displayed, this vault of historic feeling she had hidden from me. Now,
when I must remain politely at attention beside my father’s chair, I had to
conceal my emotion while she gave away a pleasure that was rightly mine.
Our guests cried and I experienced a violent repugnance at this private act
carried out in public view.
His eyes filled with tears,
Sang to his mountain people
This alarming refrain:
Louis, son of Henri,
Is captive in Paris.
When she had finished, when our friends remained solemnly still, I
walked across the wide rug to stand beside her chair and very quietly, like
a scorpion, I pinched her arm.
Of course she was astonished, but what I remember most particularly
is my wild and wicked pleasure of transgression. She widened her eyes,
but did not cry out. Instead she tossed her head and gave me, below those
welling eyes, a contemptuous smile.
I then walked, very coolly, to my bed. I had expected I would weep
when I shut my door behind me. Indeed, I tried to, but it did not come out
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right. These were strange overexcited feelings but they were not, it seemed,
of the sort that would produce tears. These were of a different order, completely new, perhaps more like those one would expect in an older boy in
whose half-ignorant being the sap of life is rising. They seemed like they
might be emotions ignited by sinful thoughts, but they were not. What
I had smelled in that song, in that room full of nobles, was the distilled
essence of the Château de Barfleur which was no less than the obscenity
and horror of the French Revolution as it was visited on my family. Of this
monstrous truth no honest word had ever been spoken in my hearing.
My mother would now punish me for pinching her. She would be cold,
so much the better. Now I would discover what had made this smell. I
would go through her bureau drawers when she was praying. I would take
the key to the library. I examined the papers in my father’s desk drawers. I
climbed on chairs. I sought out the dark, the forbidden, the corners of the
château where the atmosphere was somehow most dangerous and soiled,
well beyond the proprieties of the library, beyond the dry safe wine cellar,
through a dark low square portal, into that low limitless dirty dark space
where the spiderwebs caught fire in the candlelight. I found nothing—or
nothing but dread which mixed with the dust on my hands and made me
feel quite ill.
However, there is no doubt that Silices si levas scorpiones tandem invenies—if
you lift enough rocks, you will finally discover a nest of scorpions, or some
pale translucent thing that has been bred to live in a cesspit or the fires of a
forge. And I do not mean the letters a certain monsieur had written to my
mother which I wish I had never seen. It was, rather, beside the forge that
I discovered the truth in some humdrum little parcels. They had waited for
me in the smoky gloom and I could have opened them any day I wished.
Even a four-year-old Olivier might have reached them; the shelf was so
low that our blacksmith used it to lean his tools against. One naturally
assumed these parcels to be the legacy of a long-dead gardener—dried
seeds, say, or sage or thyme carefully wrapped for a season some Jacques or
Claude had never lived to see. By the time I pushed my snotty nose against
them, which was a very long time after the night I pinched my mother, they
still exuded a distinct but confusing smell. Was it a good smell? Was it a
bad smell? Clearly I did not know. Not even Montaigne, being mostly concerned with the smell of women and food, is prepared to touch on this. He
ignores the lower orders of mold and fungus, death and blood, all of which
might have served him better than his ridiculous assertion that the sweat of
great men—he mentions Alexander the Great—exhaled a sweet odor.
C
Tom McCarthy
The static’s like the sound of thinking. Not of any single person thinking,
nor even a group thinking, collectively. It’s bigger than that, wider—and
more direct. It’s like the sound of thought itself, its hum and rush. Each
night, when Serge drops in on it, it recoils with a wail, then rolls back in
crackling waves that carry him away, all rudderless, until his finger, nudging at the dial, can get some traction on it all, some sort of leeway. The
first stretches are angry, plaintive, sad—and always mute. It’s not until,
hunched over the potentiometer among fraying cords and soldered wires,
his controlled breathing an extension of the frequency of air he’s riding
on, he gets the first quiet clicks that words start forming: first he jots down
the signals as straight graphite lines, long ones and short ones, then, below
these, he begins to transcribe curling letters, dim and grainy in the arc light
of his desktop . . .
He’s got two masts set up. There’s a twenty-two-foot pine one topped
with fifteen more feet of bamboo, all bolted to an oak-stump base halfburied in the Mosaic Garden. Tent pegs circle the stump round; steel guy
wires, double-insulated, climb from these to tether the mast down. On the
chimney of the main house, a pole three feet long reaches the same height
as the bamboo. Between the masts are strung four eighteen-gage manganese copper wires threaded through oak-lath crosses. In Serge’s bedroom,
there’s a boxed tuning coil containing twenty feet of silk-covered platinoid,
shellacked and scraped. Two dials are mounted on the box’s lid: a large,
clock-handed one dead in the center and, to its right, a smaller disc made
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from ash-wood recessed at the back and dotted at the front by twenty little
screws with turned-down heads set in a circle to form switch-studs. The
detector’s brass with an adjusting knob of ebonite; the condenser’s Murdock; the crystal, Chilean gelina quartz, a Mighty Atom mail-ordered from
Gamage of Holborn. For the telephone, he tried a normal household one
but found it wasn’t any use unless he replaced the diaphragms, and moved
on to a watch-receiver pattern headset wound to a resistance of eight and
a half thousand ohms. The transmitter itself is made of standard brass, a
four-inch tapper arm keeping Serge’s finger a safe distance from the spark
gap. The spark gap flashes blue each time he taps; it makes a spitting noise,
so loud he’s had to build a silence box around the desk to isolate his little
RX station from the sleeping household—or, as it becomes more obvious
to him with every session, to maintain the little household’s fantasy of isolation from the vast sea of transmission roaring all around it.
Tonight, as on most nights, he starts out local, sweeping from two hundred and fifty to four hundred meters. It’s the usual traffic: CQ signals from
experimental wireless stations in Masedown and Eliry, tapping out their
call signs and then slipping into Q-code once another bug’s responded.
They exchange signal quality reports, compare equipment, enquire about
variations in the weather and degrees of atmospheric interference. The
sequence QTC, which Serge, like any other Wireless World subscriber, knows
means “Have you anything to transmit?”, is usually met with a short, negative burst before both questioner and responder move on to fish for other
signals. Serge used to answer all CQs, noting each station’s details in his
call-book; lately, though, he’s become more selective in the signals he’ll
acknowledge, preferring to let the small-fry click away as background chatter, only picking up the pencil to transcribe the dots and dashes when their
basic QRNs and QRAs unfold into longer sequences. This is happening right
now: an RXer in Lydium who calls himself “Wireworm” is tapping out his
thoughts about the Postmaster General’s plans to charge one guinea per
station for all amateurs.
“ . . . tht bedsteads n gas pipes cn b used as rcving aerials is well-kn0n I
mslf hv dn this,” Wireworm’s boasting, “als0 I cn trn pian0 wire in2 tuning
coil fashion dtctrs from wshing s0da n a needle mst I obtain lcnses 4 ths
wll we gt inspctrs chcking r pots n pans 2 C tht they cnfrm 2 rgulatns I sgst
cmpaign cvl ds0bdns agnst such impsitions . . . ”
Transcribing his clicks, Serge senses that Wireworm’s not so young: no
operator under twenty would bother to tap out the whole word “fashion.”
The spacing’s a little awkward also: too studied, too self-conscious. Besides,
most bugs can improvise equipment: he once made Bodner’s spade conduct a signal and the house’s pipes vibrate and resonate, sending Frieda
running in panic from her bath . . .
C
61
Serge moves up to five hundred meters. Here are stronger, more decisive signals: coastal stations’ call signs, flung from towering masts. Poldhu’s
transmitting its weather report; a few nudges away, Malin, Cleethorpes,
Nordeich send out theirs. Liverpool’s exchanging messages with tugboats
in the Mersey: Serge transcribes a rota of towing duties for tomorrow. Further out, the lightship Tongue’s reporting a derelict’s position: the coordinates click their way in to the Seaforth station, then flash out again, to be
acknowledged by Marconi operators of commercial liners, one after the
other. The ships’ names reel off in litany: Falaba, British Sun, Scania, Morea,
Carmania, each name appendaged by its church: Cunard Line, Allen,
Aberdeen Direct, Canadian Pacific Railway, Holland-America. The clicks
peter out, and Serge glances at the clock: it’s half a minute before one. A
few seconds later, Paris’s call-sign comes on: FL for Eiffel. Serge taps his
finger on the desktop to the rhythm of the huge tower’s stand-by clicks,
then holds it still and erect for the silent lull that always comes just before
the time-code. All the operators have gone silent: boats, coastal stations,
bugs—all waiting, like him, for the quarter-second dots to set the air, the
world, time itself back in motion as they chime the hour.
They sound, and then the headphones really come to life. The press
digest goes out from Niton, Poldhu, Malin, Cadiz: Diario del Atlántico, Journal
de l’Atlantique, Atlantic Daily News . . . “Madero and Suárez Shot in Mexico
While Trying to Escape” . . . “Trade Pact Between” . . . “Entretien de” . . .
“Shocking Domestic Tragedy in Bow” . . . “Il Fundatore” . . . “Husband
Unable to Prevent” . . . The stories blur together: Serge sees a man clutching a kitchen knife chasing a politician across parched earth, past cacti and
armadillos, while ambassadors wave papers around fugitive and pursuer,
negotiating terms. “Grain Up Five, Lloyds Down Two” . . . “Australia All
Out for Four Hundred and Twenty-one, England Sixty-two for Three in
Reply” . . . Malin’s got ten private messages for Lusitania, seven for Campania, two for Olympic: request instructions how to proceed with . . . the honor of
your company on the occasion of . . . weighing seven and a half pounds, a girl . . . The
operators stay on after the Marconigrams have gone through, chatting to
one another: Carrigan’s moved to President Lincoln, Borstable to Malwa; the
Company Football Team drew two–all against the Evening Standard Eleven;
old Allsop, wireless instructor at Marconi House, is getting married on the
twenty-second . . . His tapper-finger firing up her spark gap . . . Short, then long . . .
Olympic andCampania are playing a game of chess: K4 to Q7 . . . K4 to
K5 . . . They always start K4 . . . Serge transcribes for a while, then lays
his pencil down and lets the sequences run through the space between his
ears, sounding his skull: there’s a fluency to them, a rhythm that’s spontaneous, as though the clicks were somehow speaking on their own and
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didn’t need the detectors, keys or finger-twitching men who cling to them
like afterthoughts . . .
He climbs to six hundred, and picks up ice reports sent out from whalers: floeberg/growler 51n 10’ 45.63” lat 36w 12’ 39.37 long . . . field ice
59n 42’ 43.54” lat 14w 45’ 56.25” long . . . Compagnie de Télégraphie
sans Fil reports occasional light snow off Friesland. Paris comes on again;
again the cycle pauses and restarts. Then Bergen, Crookhaven, Tarifa,
Malaga, Gibraltar. Serge pictures gardenias tucked behind girls’ ears, red
dresses and the blood of bulls. He hears news forwarded, via Port Said
and Rome, from Abyssinia, and sees an African girl strumming on some
kind of mandolin, jet-black breasts glowing darkly through light silk. Suez
is issuing warnings of Somali raiders further down the coast. More names
process by: Isle of Perim, Zanzibar, Isle of Socotra, Persian Gulf. Parades
of tents line themselves up for him: inside them, dancers serving sherbet;
outside, camels saddled with rich carpets, deserts opening up beneath red
skies. The air is rich tonight: still and cold, high pressure, the best time of
year. He lets a fart slip from his buttocks, and waits for its vapor to reach his
nostrils: it, too, carries signals, odor-messages from distant, unseen bowels.
When it arrives, he slips the headphones off, opens the silence cabin’s door
to let some air in and hears a goods train passing half a mile away. The
pulsing of its carriage-joins above the steel rails carries to him cleanly. He
looks down at his desk: the half-worn pencil, the light’s edge across the
paper sheet, the tuning box, the tapper. These things—here, solid, tangible—are somehow made more present by the tinny sound still spilling
from the headphones lying beside them. The sound’s present too, material:
Serge sees its ripples snaking through the sky, pleats in its fabric, joins pulsing as they make their way down corridors of air and moisture, rock and
metal, oak, pine and bamboo . . .
Above six hundred and fifty, the clicks dissipate into a thin, pervasive
noise, like dust. Discharges break across this: distant lightning, Aurora
Borealis, meteorites. Their crashes and eruptions sound like handfuls of
buckshot thrown into a tin bucket, or a bucketful of grain-rich gravy dashed
against a wash-boiler. Wireless ghosts come and go, moving in arpeggios
that loop, repeat, mutate, then disappear. Serge spends the last half hour
or so of each night up here among these pitches, nestling in their contours
as his head nods towards the desktop and lights flash across the inside of
his eyelids, pushing them outwards from the center of his brain, so far out
that the distance to their screen seems infinite: they seem to contain all distances, envelop space itself, curving around it like a patina, a mould . . .
Once, he picked up a CQD: a distress signal. It came from the Atlantic, two hundred or so miles off Greenland. The Pachitea, merchant vessel
of the Peruvian Steamship Company, had hit an object—maybe whale,
C
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maybe iceberg—and was breaking up. The nearest vessel was another
South American, Acania, but it was fifty miles away. Galway had picked the
call up; so had Le Havre, Malin, Poldhu and just about every ship between
Southampton and New York. Fifteen minutes after Serge had locked onto
the signal half the radio bugs in Europe had tuned into it as well. The
Admiralty put a message out instructing amateurs to stop blocking the
air. Serge ignored the order, but lost the signal beneath general interference: the atmospherics were atrocious that night. He listened to the whine
and crackle, though, right through till morning—and heard, or thought
he heard, among its breaks and flecks, the sound of people treading cold,
black water, their hands beating small disturbances into waves that had
come to bury them.
Every Man in This
Village Is a Liar
Megan K. Stack
Cold dawn broke on the horizon outside. The bedroom door shushed
open, bringing the morning air and a warlord on predator’s toes.
I lay in a nest of polyester blankets and listened to his footsteps cross
the carpet. Every muscle pulled tight. You reveal yourself in breath, in the nerves
of your face. Count the breaths, in and out. He sat on the edge of the bed. Smooth
breath, relax your eyes, don’t let the lids shake. Then his calloused old hand was
stroking my hair, cupping my scalp, fingers dripping like algae onto my
ears and cheeks.
The warlord lived in Jalalabad, in a swath of Afghanistan where the soil
is rich with poppies and land mines, in a house awash in guns. People whispered that he was a heroin trafficker. His tribal loyalists clotted the orange
groves and rose gardens outside, AK-47s in dust-caked fingers. They said
he was ruthless in war, that his skin was scarred by an arrow. There was a
vague whisper about a legendary ambush, the warlord killing enemies with
his bare hands. And now those ropey hands were petting my hair, silent
and brazen.
I clung to one thing: Brian, the photographer, was in the bathroom.
Water slapped the floor. How long would his shower last, and how could
I escape the warlord’s lechery without offending him? The truth was, we
needed him. He was an enemy of the Taliban, funded by the U.S. government, making a play for power in the vague, new order that had begun
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar
65
when American soldiers toppled the Taliban government. I was a stranger
here, and he was my best source. He said he knew where Osama bin Laden
was hiding. And now he was petting me like a puppy; nobody could sleep
through it. The bed creaked. Stale breath sank in my face. Papery lips
pressed my forehead. I opened my eyes and tried to look groggy.
“What are you doing?”
“Sshhh.”
I struggled upright, cleared a phlegmy throat, and tried to sound dignified: “You are putting me into a very awkward position.” A black-andwhite movie line, spilling out in a moment of panic.
He smiled and reached for my face.
“Please don’t do that,” I snapped.
Then, suddenly, silence. The water stopped, the pipes fell quiet. The
warlord glanced around, stood, and slipped back out of the room.
Brian stepped out; his hair gleamed with water.
I turned my eyes to him and hissed: “We’ve got to get out of here.”
I had met Mohammed Zaman weeks earlier, in Peshawar—a cramped
kaleidoscope of a city perched on the last edge of organization and authority in Pakistan. To the west stretched the lawless tribal territories, the Khyber Pass, the Afghan frontier. Driven away by the Taliban, Zaman had
been living an exile’s life in Dijon, France, before September 11. Under
chilly French skies he’d pined after his family’s lands, the service of armed
tribesmen, and, presumably, the rich, fresh fields of Afghan poppy. When
U.S. jets started dropping bombs on Afghanistan, Zaman raced back to
Peshawar and holed up in a rented house, waiting for the Americans to
dispose of the Taliban and clear the path home—and eager to make some
money while he was at it.
I sat in the shadows of a taxi late one night, my face and head draped
in scarves, making my way through the jangling streets of Peshawar for
an audience with Zaman. I liked it, all of it, enormously—the poetry of
the place, the intrigue of war, imagining myself veiled in the back of a
clopping carriage, bringing secrets to a bootlegger. The warlord’s return
had drawn throngs of men for endless meetings; I picked my way around
the crowds on the lawn and sat waiting in a long drawing room. A door
opened and out marched an American diplomat I’d seen at the embassy.
His eyes skimmed mine and he hurried on, stone-faced. He didn’t like
being spotted there. I sat and watched him leave.
Zaman came out, tall and deliberate, face sagging from his skull. We
sat with tea between us, and I asked him to take me to Afghanistan when
he went.
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He was solemn. “I take your life on my honor,” he said from the heights
of his mountainous nose. “They will have to kill me before they can
harm you.”
A few days later, we set off for war. The sun sank as we drove toward the
Khyber Pass, storied old route of smugglers and marauders. Men pounded
through a field hockey match in a haze of setting sun and rising dust. “Dead
slow,” ordered a traffic sign. “These areas are full of drugs,” muttered the
driver. In my head shimmered gilded pictures of the Grand Trunk Road,
the Silk Road, Kim. On the edge of Afghanistan, stars crowded the sky,
dull and dense. We crossed the border and plunged into the enormous
uncertainty of this new American war. Forty Afghan fighters waited for us,
young men and boys nestled together in pickup trucks. They shivered in
the stinging night and gripped grenade launchers, chains of machine gun
rounds trailing from the trucks. We drove alongside the Kabul River, past
the shadowed bulk of mountains and tractors, along fields of tobacco and
wheat. At the edge of Jalalabad, the deserted dinosaurs of rusted Soviet
tanks reared from the ground.
In the core of the dusty night, we pulled up to his house. Zaman served
a feast and stayed awake with us, lolling on the floor around the vegetables
and lamb and spinning out long, fatigued stories. We blinked and yawned
but Zaman pushed on toward sunrise. He was selling his case even then,
from those earliest hours. Osama bin Laden had fled to the nearby White
Mountains, he said, to the caves cut into stone, to Tora Bora. The terrorist
and his followers still lurked nearby. If America was serious about this war
on terror, the terrorists needed to be flushed out. He could do the job; he
only needed guns, money, and equipment.
He talked on and on, weaving French into English, until the dawn call
to prayer rang from a whitening sky. His words melted together. My chin
was falling. I slept on the floor, and woke up in the new Afghanistan.
The first days with Zaman were easy. The stories fell like ripe fruit. But
when he tiptoed to my bed, I knew we had to scrounge for another roof.
There was nowhere to go but the Spin Ghar hotel, a crumbling Soviet relic
rising from tangles of garden and derelict trees. Rank smells wafted through
the cold corridors, over chipped linoleum, past cracked plaster walls. Mad
jumbles of bodies crowded the lobby—foreign reporters, Afghans, hired
gunmen in their robes and eye paint, all sprawled on the grass, smoking on
the steps, flooding over the balconies.
The electricity died that night, and gas lanterns shivered in the dark
cavern of the hotel dining room. Everybody was very quiet. There was
bad news.
Some of the reporters had set off for Kabul in a convoy that day.
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Two hours out of town, Afghan bandits stopped the first car and shot
the passengers dead: a Spaniard, an Afghan, an Australian. There was an
Italian woman, too, who was raped and then killed. The rest of the reporters squealed their cars around and came back to Jalalabad. The bodies
were abandoned on the road. It was the first lost gamble, and it pulled us a
little farther into war. Now we in the dark dining room were rendered survivors, the ones who hadn’t died. The faces swim out of darkness, painted
in wisps of gaslight. They are talking about the abandoned bodies, about
who fetched them. I feel empty. I have no reaction. It is a gap inside of me,
like putting your tongue where a tooth used to be. I know that I should feel
something; to feel something is appropriate and human. I stay silent so that
the others will not realize that I am gaping like a canyon. I am not absolutely sure this is real; it’s so very far from where we started. On September
11, I was in Paris, and then in Bahrain, an aircraft carrier, and Pakistan,
moving slowly, unconsciously closer to here, tonight. America is at war, and
we are all here too, at the edge of death, just like that, in just a few weeks.
And so we are on an island, and so the roads are a place to die.
In my room the darkness is thick as tar. My fingers can’t find a lock
on the door. I am groping when the door cracks forward with a grunt of
Pashto. I can’t see the Afghan man but I push at him, throw my arms into
the darkness and find flesh, drive him back. His cries are pure sound to me.
I don’t care. After Zaman at my bedside and reporters dead on the road,
this man cannot stay. Our American and Afghan words mean nothing
when they hit the other ear. We are stripped of all understanding, battling
in the blackness. I shove him into the hall and force the door closed against
the last pieces of him, a kicking foot, a grasping arm. Later on, I realize he
was probably the sweet-faced cleaning man who shuffled like a kicked stray
through the corridors at night. Later I laugh, a little embarrassed. But on
this night, I have vanquished. I lean limp against the door of my stinking
little cave, conqueror of misunderstood forces.
Back in Pakistan, before I crossed over into Afghanistan, somebody said
to me: “Every man in this village is a liar.” It was the punch line to a parable, the tale of an ancient Greek traveler who plods into a foreign village
and is greeted with those words. It is a twist on the Epimenides paradox,
named after the Cretan philosopher who declared, “All Cretans are liars.”
It’s one of the world’s oldest logic problems, folding in on itself like an
Escher sketch. If he’s telling the truth, he’s lying. If he’s lying, he’s telling
the truth.
That was Afghanistan after September 11.
You meet a man, and his story doesn’t sound right. You stare at him and
your brain is chewing away, and out of the corner of your eye something
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bizarre and fantastic trails past—a pair of mujahideen with their fingers
intertwined, plastic flowers glowing in black hair, winking and fluttering
with the kohl-rimmed eyes of two besotted lovers. And you can’t help but
look, but then all you can do is watch these strange peacocks, stunned by
the magenta homoeroticism of this dry, pious land. By the time you peel
your attention back and stop your thoughts from whirling, the man you
were trying to weigh out is long gone. Afghanistan was meaning washed
away in floods of color, in drugs, guns, sexual ambiguity, and Islam.
I met a young man who spoke Arabic and English, which was rare
and fancy for provincial Afghanistan. He had worked for bin Laden, and
I was certain his sympathies lay with the Taliban, with Al Qaeda. We sat
together and had long interviews. Later I found out he worked for the
CIA. They gave him a satellite phone, and he was calling in coordinates
for bombing targets.
Every man in this village is a liar.
Maybe that’s why nobody believed the warlords when they kept saying
that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora. A pity, because it was true:
Osama bin Laden packed his bags and fled into the mountain redoubt
near Jalalabad after September 11. The caves were his last stop before
he lost his substance and melted into the world’s most famous phantom.
Catching bin Laden was the first important thing the United States set
out to do after September 11. The job was bungled so thoroughly that the
war never really found its compass again. Here in eastern Afghanistan, the
Americans would begin to lose the plot.
Those days were deep with dimensions; conflicting things happened at
the same time, on top of one another. Kabul had fallen to the Northern
Alliance, but in the east, the war pounded on. The Afghans who’d opposed the Taliban were in a renaissance, and neck deep in the swirl of
their ancient clan rivalries. The warlords plotted tribal revenge, scrapped
for control of the heroin trade, lined their pockets and trolled for power.
They tossed enemies into moldy jail cells, and sold them to the Americans who were rounding up jihadis. If you asked them why, they’d smile in
chilling self-satisfaction and say, “He’s a terrorist.” Maybe it was true, and
maybe it wasn’t, but the days were slipping away too quickly for anybody
to quibble.
Jalalabad had been a headquarters for Al Qaeda, home to a training
camp and vast housing complexes built by the influx of Saudis, Kuwaitis,
Chechens—“Arabs,” resentful locals called the rich Al Qaeda members
who had taken up residence in sequestered communities. Osama bin
Laden, with his wives and children, called Jalalabad home years before
September 11. Now he huddled a few hours’ drive away in Tora Bora,
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the masterfully defensible cave complex built with CIA money back when
America was fighting the Communists instead of the terrorists. U.S. warplanes hammered the mountains, but their intelligence was coming from
Afghans who manipulated the firepower to suit their own interests.
I learned to count the fighter jets that passed overhead in my sleep.
There were no other airplanes in the Afghan skies; there was only the war.
When thin dawn light creaked into the room, I’d know that three warplanes had passed. I woke up knowing, and remembering nothing.
I have this memory, clear as glass: Sunset spilled all over the horizon.
In the velvet grass below the hotel terrace, the drivers were bent on their
prayer rugs, the guerrillas paced in the gravel, the palms and pines deepened in the dying light. Then a B-52 sliced a white gash into the sky. All of
the reporters and translators and soldiers stood still, stared at the heavens,
and waited to see where the bombs would fall. The planes thundered past
every day, but for some reason on that day we stood there in collective awe.
Maybe everybody had forgotten about the war for a minute, and then it
was there again.
One day, Zaman’s men brought the bodies of eight dead guerrilla soldiers down from the mountains and laid them out on the hospital floor.
Then he herded in a great swarm of reporters to gape and snap photographs. He stalked over the dead, face twisted with rage, railing about the
bombings. The Americans were killing peasants loyal to him, and now his
mujahideen. They must be using old maps, he thundered. Who is telling
them where to bomb? Do these look like Al Qaeda to you?
The dead men were skinny, all of them, muddy and ragged. One man’s
face had been blown off. Another lay with the back of his head gone, his
brains leaking. Filtered sunlight spilled onto the floor; the smell of death
was heavy. An American reporter fell on the ground and lay there crying.
I looked at her, and at the corpses. Intellectually, I knew that her reaction
was appropriate, but I felt disgusted by her weakness. Staring down at the
bodies, I felt numb, light, as if my own body might vaporize, as if I didn’t
need to breathe.
The dying were worse than the dead. They came down from the hills
in rattling caravans, slow as torture over bone-cracking roads of mud and
rock, bleeding all over the backseats of rattletrap cars. Three hours, four
hours, bright red lives seeping away.
They wound up in the dim wards of Jalalabad’s filthy hospital. There
weren’t enough antibiotics or antiseptics. Little girls who wouldn’t live
through the night were stacked two to a cot, covered in blood. A baby with
its head caked in scab and pus and one eye full of blood cried in the listless
arms of a young, young girl. A little boy who had lost his arms, his eyesight,
and his family lay motionless in the hot afternoon. The rooms smelled of
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sweat and infection; flies and woolen blankets. All of it coming down from
those American planes.
We drifted out of the hospital. In the car I tasted metal. After a long
time, Brian spoke.
“That was pretty bad.” He cleared his throat.
“Yeah.”
We looked out the window, and the driver turned up the music. The
sunlight and the dust were gilding everything to silver. The spindly dome
of trees cupped the road, bicycle spokes flickered and goats plodded in the
blue fog of exhaust. Afghans were rushing home from the market, arms
loaded with fresh meat and vegetables to break the Ramadan fast. The
hotel room was dark and cold. I opened a pad of paper and tried to make
some notes. This is what I wrote:
I didn’t mean to really see these things. I didn’t know how it would be.
Late one night, bombs fell on the village of Kama Ado, a tiny, isolated
hamlet of mud houses. I interviewed people who were hauled from the
wreckage. I wrote a story about it. I fell asleep.
By morning, my story wasn’t the same. Instead of leading with the news
of the crushed village, the top of the story had Pentagon officials denying
reports of the bombing. The first voice in the article was no longer that of
an Afghan victim. Instead, it was a Pentagon official who said: “This is a
false story.”
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the same: “If we cannot know
for certain how many people were killed in lower Manhattan, where we
have full access to the site, thousands of reporters, investigators, rescue
workers combing the wreckage, and no enemy propaganda to confuse
the situation, one ought to be sensitive to how difficult it is to know with
certainty, in real time, what may have happened in any given situation
in Afghanistan, where we lack access and we’re dealing with world class
liars.”
I read it once. I read it twice. Were we to believe the village had spontaneously collapsed while U.S. warplanes circled overhead?
Every man in this village is a liar.
Jalalabad slipped out of the Taliban’s hold as easy as a boiled tomato
loses its skin. No bloodshed, just a lot of abandoned buildings and cars,
ripe for the grabbing by guerrillas who rushed down from the mountains.
The mujahideen swarmed the streets, dirty children run amok in an empty
house. They were old and weary, or young and wild; the middle-aged men
were mostly dead. Mujahideen is Arabic for “strugglers,” but it’s understood
to mean “holy warriors.” In Afghanistan, they are the men with guns, the
ones who sleep where they lie and fight for their tribal patriarchs in a senseless string of conflicts.
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Stoned on hash and hopped up on war, draped in ragged smocks and
blankets, the young mujahideen lingered on every corner, fired into the
night skies to hear the guns scream in the empty streets. They imposed curfews, lit bonfires in the middle of the roads, and lorded it over the city until
sunrise. They beat people to feel powerful, to watch the peasants scamper
away from their clubs in the bazaar.
One day I was in an abandoned Al Qaeda compound with a French
reporter. We pored through trunks of documents and the mujahideen
stood around smirking at our interest in worthless paper. The sun was hot
and they were fasting for Ramadan, irritable and armed to the teeth. They
bickered, and then they were screaming and I heard the safeties click off
and looked up. Patrice let out a roar and lunged at them just before they
start shooting. “No, no, no!” he hollered. “You stop that! You will kill us!”
They looked at his white hair and slowly lowered their weapons in deference to his age and gender. Like lion cubs, they responded to shows of
dominance.
For a long time, it didn’t matter what happened. I was high on Afghanistan. The aching beauty of rock and sky, and the thick light smearing
everything like honey. The jangle of tongues, confusion of smells, every
human enterprise a cheap trifle of origami against this massive, unchanging earth.
War cannot be innocent, but sometimes it is naive. At first the fight
in Afghanistan felt finite and comprehensible. There had been an attack,
an act of war, and America responded with conventional warfare against
an objectively violent and repressive regime. You could disagree with the
choice to invade, you could question the sense and bravery of bombing a
country built from mud, but at least there was an internal logic, the suggestion of a moral thread, of cause and effect. And so we plunged forward,
and our eyes were bound in gauze. I was acutely aware that in witnessing
war I was experiencing something both timeless and particular. I expected
awful sights and I accepted them when they came. The war was an adventure and an exhilaration, an ancient, human force that had found its shape
for this country, in this age. Perhaps only by comparing it with all that came
later can I remember it as naive. Death was everywhere, in the fields full
of land mines, the villagers who hobbled without a leg, without an arm,
staring from crutches. When I came to Afghanistan I had decided to look
at the deaths of others, and to risk my own life. I had expected everything
from war, danger and blood and hurt, and the war produced all of it.
Afghans lived on the edge of mortality, its tang hung always in the air, in
their words. If death would come to us all, the Afghans couldn’t be bothered to duck. I was interviewing an Afghan commander one afternoon in
the mountains when somebody started shooting at us. I backed down the
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ridge, lowered myself out of the line of fire. “Can you please ask him to
come closer so we’re not getting shot at?” I asked the translator. The commander looked at me and laughed. He sauntered slowly down out of the
bullets smirking all the way.
“We are dust.” The mujahideen liked to say that. We are dust.
One day, a messenger came to the Spin Ghar hotel. Zaman was inviting
me back to his house for iftar, the sunset meal that broke each day’s fast
through the holy month of Ramadan.
Zaman was about to command the ground offensive in Tora Bora and
was therefore the closest voice I could find to an American representative. I
wanted the story badly enough to return to his turf, but I couldn’t go alone.
I needed a foreign man, somebody Zaman would feel tribally compelled
to respect. So I invited the AP reporter Chris Tomlinson. “Whatever happens,” I told him, “don’t leave me alone with him.”
A flicker crossed Zaman’s face when he saw Chris. We settled onto velvet cushions, and Zaman’s servants heaped the floor with steaming flatbread, biryani, crisp vegetables, a shank of mutton. Chris and I had our
notebooks at our sides, and we jotted away while Zaman held forth on the
ground assault.
Suddenly Zaman looked at Chris. “Would you excuse us, please?” he
said icily. “We need to talk in private.”
Chris stared at me, telegraphing: What should I do?
I glowered back: Don’t leave.
“Um, well,” Chris stammered, eyes flying around the room. He pointed
at the door to the terrace. “I’m just going to step outside and smoke a cigarette. I’ll be right outside,” he added, looking at me.
As soon as the door closed, Zaman announced, “You’re going back to
Pakistan.”
I laughed. “No, I’m not.”
“Yes. My men will take you there.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s a joke. I’m not leaving.”
“You can’t stay here anymore. Every time I see you, I forget what I’m
doing. You are making me distracted.”
Through the windows, I watched the lone red ember of the cigarette
float up and down the terrace.
“I’m sure you can control yourself,” I said slowly, trying to prolong the
conversation. He was sliding my way on the cushions, his body closing
the distance between us. His eyes were fixed on me, long face like a sly
old goat.
“I’m in love with you,” he said. “I love you.”
“You’re not in love with me!” I spat out. “You don’t even know me.”
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“I do know you,” he assured me.
I looked at him, his gray, dirty hair smashed down from his Afghan cap,
lanky limbs swathed in yards of shalwar kameez, crouched in slippers on the
floor.
“Look, I’m very flattered, but we are from completely different worlds.
Where I come from, you can’t just—”
He interrupted me.
“I want to see your world,” he said. “I want to go there. With you. To
know your family . . . ”
I imagined Haji Zaman, decked in tribal dress, sipping coffee on my
mother’s front porch in Connecticut, faithful AK-47 casually propped
against the rocking chair. Haji Zaman and I, holding hands, peering over
the rim of the Grand Canyon.
“It’s completely out of the question. And so’s Pakistan.”
With a sheepish look in my direction, Chris returned.
“Thank you very much for dinner,” my words tumbled out. “We have
to get going now, to write our stories.”
Zaman protested, but I was already on my feet, swaying unsteadily on
the pillows, tugging at the ends of my head scarf. We scrambled down the
stairs and burst out into the orchards and vegetable gardens hemming the
house, but the driver was nowhere to be seen.
“I can’t believe he left us!”
“It’s not too far back to town,” Chris said. “We can make it walking.”
“Do you remember the way?”
“I think so.”
The black night opened its mouth and swallowed us whole. Darkness
quivered before us, taut as a stretched canvas, demanding to be filled. Our
feet fumbled forward. I couldn’t remember the way; I hadn’t been paying
enough attention. I’d been letting myself get carried along in days, flooded
by experience, and now I was lost. Stars glittered overhead, brilliant scattershot. Beyond the road sprawled unseen fields, and land mines festered
in the dirt. Figures moved in houses. A flush of light bruised the edges of
black in the distance, and we kept walking toward it. The light grew and
swelled, a distant peach rising into the night. Finally we could see the road
ahead, the lights of cars swimming.
On the road, we flagged down a bicycle taxi. “Spin Ghar hotel, please.”
We climbed into the tiny carriage, and the man pedaled off. Everything was
color and light, chasing the black from my eyes. Music was playing somewhere, night rushing past. No steel car doors, no glass, no roof split us from
the world. The bicycle cab trembled over ruts, plastered with diamondshaped mirrors, gaudy with pink and blue and yellow paint. Strings of
coins jangled as we careened through the electric wildness of open air.
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The night pressed cool hands against my hot cheeks, ruffled my hair. Wind
caught in my throat and then I was laughing, laughing to think that luck
can change, just like that. The night was right there, choked with mysteries,
shadows sliding down rutted roads, smells of sweet and dank from cooking
pots, and the vastness of countryside. For a few minutes, death fell away,
and it felt like freedom.
The Dead Hand
David E. Hoffman
I. Epidemic of Mystery
“Are any of your patients dying?” asked Yakov Klipnitzer when he called
Margarita Ilyenko on Wednesday, April 4, 1979. She was chief physician at
No. 24, a medium-sized, one-hundred-bed hospital in Sverdlovsk, a Soviet
industrial metropolis in the Ural Mountains. Her hospital often referred
patients to a larger facility, No. 20, where Klipnitzer was chief doctor. Klipnitzer saw two unusual deaths from what looked like severe pneumonia.
The patients, he told Ilyenko, were “two of yours.” No, Ilyenko told him,
she did not know of any deaths. The next day he called again. Klipnitzer
was more persistent. “You still don’t have any patients dying?” he asked.
Klipnitzer had new deaths with pneumonia-like symptoms. “Who is dying
from pneumonia today?” Ilyenko replied, incredulous. “It is very rare.”
Soon, patients began to die at Ilyenko’s hospital, too. They were brought
in ambulances and cars, suffering from high fevers, headaches, coughs,
vomiting, chills and chest pains. They were stumbling in the hallways and
lying on gurneys. The head of admissions at Hospital No. 20, Roza Gaziyeva, was on duty overnight between April 5 and 6. “Some of them who
felt better after first aid tried to go home. They were later found on the
streets—the people had lost consciousness,” she recalled. She tried to give
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to one ill patient, who died. “During the
night, we had four people die. I could hardly wait until morning. I was
frightened.”
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On the morning of April 6, Ilyenko raced to the hospital, threw her
bag into her office, put on her white gown and headed for the ward. One
patient looked up at her, eyes open, and then died. “There are dead bodies,
people still alive, lying together. I thought, this is a nightmare. Something
is very, very wrong.”
Death came quickly to victims. Ilyenko reported to the district public
health board that she had an emergency. Instructions came back to her
that another hospital, No. 40, was being set up to receive all the patients in
an infectious disease ward. The word spread—infection!—and with it, fear.
Some staff refused to report for work, and others already at work refused
to go home so as not to expose their families. Then, disinfection workers
arrived at hospital No. 20, wearing hazardous materials suits. They spread
chlorine everywhere, which was a standard disinfectant, but the scene was
terrifying, Ilyenko recalled. “There was panic when people saw them.”
Sverdlovsk, population 1.2 million, was the tenth-largest city in the
Soviet Union and the heartland of its military-industrial complex. Guns,
steel, industry and some of the best mechanical engineering schools in
the Soviet Union were Sverdlovsk’s legacy from Stalin’s rush to modernize
during World War II and after. Since 1976, the region had been run by a
young, ambitious party secretary, Boris Yeltsin.
Hospitals No. 20 and 24 were in the southern end of the city, which
slopes downward from the center. Streets lined with small wooden cottages and high fences were broken up by stark five-story apartment buildings, shops and schools. The Chkalovsky district, where Ilyenko’s hospital
was located, included a ceramics factory where hundreds of men worked
in shifts in a cavernous building with large, high windows. Less than a
mile away, to the north-northwest, was Compound 32, an army base for
two tank divisions, largely residences, and, adjacent to it, a closed military
microbiology facility. Compound 19, which comprised a laboratory, development and testing center for deadly pathogens, including anthrax, was
run by the 15th Main Directorate of the Ministry of Defense. On Monday
April 2, 1979, from morning until early evening, the wind was blowing
down from Compound 19 toward the ceramics factory.
Inside Compound 19, three shifts operated around the clock, experimenting with anthrax and making it in batches. Anthrax bacteria were
grown in fermentation vessels, separated from the liquid growth medium
and dried before they were ground up into a fine powder for use in aerosol
form. Workers at the compound were regularly given vaccinations. The
work was high risk.
Anthrax is an often-fatal infection that occurs when spores of the bacteria Bacillus anthracis enter the body, either through the skin, ingestion or
inhalation. The bacteria germinate and release toxins that can quickly
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bring on death if untreated. In Russia, the disease was known as Sibirskaya yazva, or Siberian ulcer, because of the black sores that form when
it is contracted through cuts in the skin. In nature, the disease most commonly spreads through contact with infected animals, usually grazing animals such as cows, goats and sheep, which ingest the spores from the soil.
The inhalation variety is dangerous to humans. Breathing the spores into
the lungs can kill those infected if not treated. A single gram of anthrax
contains around a trillion spores. Odorless and colorless, the spores are
extremely stable, and can remain dormant for as long as fifty years or
more. For these reasons, anthrax was well suited for a biological weapon.
According to one estimate, 112 pounds of anthrax spores released along a
1.2-mile line upwind of a city of 500,000 residents would result in 125,000
infections—and kill 95,000 people.
What exactly happened at Compound 19 is still unknown. By one
account, a filter was removed and not properly replaced, and anthrax
spores were released into the air.
To the south, sheep and cattle in villages began to die. Anthrax had
been present in rural areas in the past, although it was not common. At the
same time, people started getting sick. The first records of those admitted
to hospitals came on Wednesday, April 4, when Ilyenko got Klipnitzer’s
phone call. “What was strange for us, it was mainly men dying, not many
women, and not a single child,” she said. Ilyenko began keeping records of
names, ages, addresses and possible reasons for the deaths, but she didn’t
know what was happening, or why.
On April 10, as the crisis deepened, Faina Abramova, a retired pathologist who had been a lecturer at the Sverdlovsk Medical Institute, was summoned to Hospital No. 40 and asked to autopsy a thirty-seven-year old
man who died over the weekend. He had been at Compound 32, the army
base with the tank divisions, for reserve duty, gone home to a nearby village and, for no apparent reason, became suddenly ill. Abram-ova, a spirited professional, was puzzled by the case. The man did not show classic
signs of influenza and pneumonia. But the autopsy showed infection of the
lymph nodes and the lungs. Abramova had also noticed the man suffered
from cerebral bleeding, a distinctive red ring around the brain known as
“cardinal’s cap.”
“We started thinking what other diseases may cause this pathology,” she
recalled. “We looked up the books, and we went through them all together,
and it looked like anthrax.”
That evening, Abramova attended a reception, which was also attended
by Lev Grinberg, her protégé, a young pathologist with thick glasses, black
hair and a beard. As they danced at the reception, Abramova whispered
to him that she had autopsied the man earlier that day, and diagnosed his
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death as anthrax. Grinberg was stunned. “I asked, where in our godforsaken Sverdlovsk can we have anthrax?” he recalled.
The next day, Grinberg saw the evidence for himself. He was instructed
to go to Ilyenko’s hospital. “I saw a horrible picture,” he recalled. “It was
three women, they had identical changes, sharp hemorrhagic changes in
their lungs, in the lymph nodes, and the tissue of lymph nodes was hemorrhaging.” Abramova took samples and materials from the autopsies.
Word of the outbreak reached Moscow. Late on April 11, Vladimir
Nikiforov, a chief of the infectious diseases department at the Central Postgraduate Institute, located within the Botkin Hospital in Moscow, arrived in
Sverdlovsk. Also arriving in the city was Pyotr Burgasov, the Soviet deputy
minister of health, who had once worked at Compound 19, in the 1950s.
On April 12, at 2 P.M., Nikiforov assembled all the doctors who had been
involved and asked for their observations and the autopsies. Abramova was
last to speak. She told him: anthrax.
Nikiforov, an eminent, courtly scientist who had studied anthrax
throughout his career, announced that he agreed with her. He reassured
the doctors it could not spread from human to human. But from where
had it come? Burgasov declared the source was contaminated meat from a
village located 9.3 miles from the city. No one spoke up. No one knew for
sure; the uncertainty was frightening.
In Chkalovsky’s neighborhoods, residents were told to watch out for
contaminated meat. A widespread vaccination program began; according
to Ilyenko’s notes, 42,065 people were vaccinated in the days that followed.
Broadsheet leaflets dated April 18 were distributed warning people not to
buy meat outside the stores, to watch out for anthrax symptoms such as
headaches, fever, cold and cough followed by abdominal pains and high
temperatures, and not to slaughter animals without permission. 7 Buildings and trees were washed by local fire brigades, stray dogs shot by police
and unpaved streets covered with fresh asphalt.
Ilyenko wrote in her notes on April 20, “358 got sick. 45 died. 214 in
Hospital 40.” She was not asked to relinquish her notes, and kept them
at home. The 45 who died at her hospital were only part of the story; the
total number of deaths from anthrax was more than 60 people.
Carried by the steady wind, the spores floated through the ceramics factory, south of Compound 19. Vladlen Krayev, chief engineer, was present
when the outbreak began among his 2,180 employees. He recalled that
the factory had a ventilator that sucked air from outside, pumping it into
furnaces, and provided ventilation for the workers. In the first weeks, about
eighteen factory workers died. The crisis stretched on for seven weeks,
much longer than might be expected, given the two- to seven-day incubation period for anthrax described in textbooks at the time.
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Grinberg recalled that Nikiforov made an unusual decision, ordering
that all the dead be autopsied even though government regulations prohibited autopsy for anthrax victims because the spores can spread. As Grinberg and Abramova worked through the long days, the two pathologists
began to take notes out of sight. They wrote these notes on cards, and
sometimes they wrote the official reports on carbon paper and kept the
copies. “No one checked,” Abramova recalled. The head of the regional
health department came and told them “not to talk too much about it, and
don’t discuss it on the phone.”
They conducted forty-two autopsies. They saw anthrax had damaged
the lungs and lymph nodes. Grinberg said he suspected inhalation anthrax
but didn’t know for sure. “Perhaps we didn’t know definitely, but we were
not talking about it much. Honestly speaking, we were very tired, it was
hard work, we had a feeling, myself for example, as if we were working
under war conditions. They were feeding us, bringing us meals, to the center at No. 40. There was a huge amount of chlorine. Disinfection was
done every day. And we were going home on the trams after the working
shift, and people were rushing away because we smelled of chlorine. The
way I remember it, on the 10th day, about the end of the second week, we
were thinking about keeping this material, that it should be preserved and
studied.”
Although it was prohibited, Grinberg persuaded a friend who was a
photographer to secretly take color photographs of the autopsies using
East German slide film. Abramova also preserved tissue samples.
In May, as the crisis eased, Nikiforov assembled all those who had participated in the hospital work and told them: the anthrax had come from
tainted meat. But quietly, he told Abramova to keep investigating. He
played a double game. In public, he was an official of the state, and loyal
to the official story. But he also gave the pathologists a private signal to hide
and protect their evidence. Nikiforov later died of a heart attack. “We are
certain that he knew the truth,” Grinberg said.
But the people of the Soviet Union and the outside world did not.
II. Night Watch for Nuclear War
The shift change began at 7 P.M. on September 26, 1983. Stanislav Petrov,
a lieutenant colonel, arrived at Serpukhov-15, south of Moscow, a top
secret missile attack early-warning station, which received signals from
satellites. Petrov changed from street clothes into the soft uniform of the
military space troops of the Soviet Union. Over the next hour, he and a
dozen other specialists asked questions of the outgoing officers. Then his
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men lined up two rows deep and reported for duty to Petrov. Their twelvehour shift had begun.
Petrov settled into a comfortable swivel chair with arms. His command
post overlooked the main floor of the early-warning station through a window. In front of him were telephones to connect to headquarters and electronic monitors. Out on the floor, beyond the specialists and their consoles,
a large map covered the far wall. At the center of the map was the North
Pole. Above the pole and beyond it—as it might be seen from space—
were Canada and the United States, inverted. Below the pole stretched
the vast lands of the Soviet Union. This was the path that nuclear missiles
would take if ever launched. The map showed the location of Minuteman missile bases in the United States. Petrov knew those bases held one
thousand intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads that
could cross the Arctic and reach the Soviet Union in thirty-five minutes.
On the main floor, a dozen men monitored electronic consoles with a singular mission: using satellites to spot a launch and give the leaders of the
Soviet Union an added margin of ten minutes’ warning, or maybe twelve
minutes, to decide what to do.
Petrov, forty-four, had served in the military for twenty-six years, rising
to deputy chief of the department for combat algorithms. He was more
of an engineer than a soldier. He liked the logic of writing formulas, often
using English-based computer languages. On most days, he was not in the
commander’s chair but at a desk in a nearby building, working as an analyst, responding to glitches, fine-tuning the software. But twice a month, he
took an operations shift in order to keep on top of the system.
When Petrov first arrived eleven years earlier, the station was new, with
equipment still in crates and the rooms empty. Now, it had grown into a
bristling electronic nerve center. Seven satellites orbiting above the earth
were positioned to monitor the American missile fields, usually for a period
of six hours. Each satellite was a cylinder six feet long and five feet around,
and sent streams of data to the command center. The brain of the center
was the M-10, the best supercomputer that existed in the Soviet Union,
which analyzed the data and searched for signs of a missile attack.
The satellite system was known as Oko, or “Eye,” but the individual
spacecraft were known to Petrov by simple numbers, one through nine.
On this night, No. 5 was reaching the highest point of its orbit, about
19,883 miles above the Earth. From space, it scanned the very edge of the
Earth, using infrared sensors to detect a missile launch. The satellite could
spot the heat given off by a rocket engine against the black background
of space, a delicate trick requiring the satellite to be in the right position,
steady and aimed at the distant point where the Earth met the darkness of
the cosmos. Of the whole fleet, No. 5 had the highest sensitivity, but its task
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was complicated by the time of day. The satellite was aimed at missile fields
that were passing from daylight to twilight during Petrov’s shift. Dusk was
often a blurry, milky zone that confused the satellites and computers. The
operators knew of the challenge, and watched closely.
Usually, each satellite picked up fifteen or twenty objects of interest,
and the computers at Serpukhov-15 examined the data on each, checking
against the known characteristics of a rocket flare. If it did not look like a
missile, the objects would be discarded by the computer and a new target
grabbed for examination. The computer ran continuous checks against
the data streaming in from space. The satellites also carried an optical telescope, with a view of the Earth. This was a backup, allowing the ground
controllers to visually spot a missile attack, but the images were dim—in
fact, special operators had to sit in a darkened room for two hours so they
could see through the telescopes.
On this night, satellite No. 5 was bringing in more data than usual.
Instead of fifteen to twenty targets, it was feeding the computer more than
thirty. Petrov figured the elevated levels were due to the satellite’s heightened sensitivity. They watched it closely as it approached the apogee of its
orbit, when it would be positioned to monitor the American missile fields.
At 10 P.M., Petrov paused for tea.
Petrov and his men had watched many test launches from Vandenberg
Air Force Base in California and from Cape Canaveral in Florida, as well
as Soviet test launches from Plesetsk in northern Russia. With the satellites,
they could rapidly detect the rocket’s bright flare moments after it rose into
the sky; they had seen a few tests fail, too. For all the years Petrov worked
at the early-warning center, they had been rushed. The satellite system
was put into service in late 1982, even though it was not ready. Petrov
and his men were told: it was an important project for the country, don’t
worry about the shortcomings. They will be fixed later, you can compensate for the problems, look the other way for now. Petrov knew why they
were in such a hurry. The United States and the Soviet Union threatened
each other with missiles on hair-trigger alert. The two superpowers had
between them about 18,400 nuclear warheads poised to be launched from
missiles in silos, on sub-marines hidden under the seas and from bombers.
And there were many smaller, or tactical, nuclear weapons arrayed along
the front lines of the Cold War confrontation in Europe. In the event of
a nuclear attack, a decision whether to retaliate would have to be made
in minutes, and enormous efforts were made by each superpower to gain
precious time for warning. With ground-based radar alone, which could
not see beyond the curvature of the Earth, the incoming missiles might not
be detected until the final seven to ten minutes of their flight. But with the
early-warning satellites, a launch could be spotted sooner. The Americans
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already had stationed their satellites to watch over the Soviet missile fields.
The Soviet Union was in a hurry to catch up. They rushed to build Serpukhov-15 and launch their own satellites.
A fear haunted the old men who ruled the Soviet Union, led by General Secretary Yuri Andropov, a frail and paranoid former KGB chief who
in the autumn of 1983 was suffering from kidney failure. The fear was a
sudden attack that might destroy the entire leadership in Moscow before
they could leave the Kremlin. If they could be decapitated, wiped out
without warning by a surprise attack, their threat to retaliate was simply
not credible. That is why Petrov’s mission was so important. The satellites,
the antennas, the computers, the telescopes, the map and the operations
center—they were the night watch for nuclear war.
Petrov heard the rhetoric, but he didn’t believe the superpowers would
come to blows; the consequences were just too devastating. Petrov thought
the Soviet leaders were pompous and self-serving, and—in private—he
was disdainful of the party bosses. He did not take seriously their bombast
about America as the enemy. Yet the furor in recent months had been hard
to ignore. President Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union an “evil
empire” in March, and only a few weeks before Petrov’s night at the operations center, Soviet Air Defense Forces had shot down a Korean airliner in
the Far East, killing 269 people.
Petrov saw himself as a professional, a technician, and took pride in
overcoming long odds. He understood the enormity of the task, that in
early warning there could be no room for false alarms. His team had been
driven hard to eliminate the chance for error. While they had tried strenuously to make the early-warning system work properly, the apparatus was
still troubled. A system to make decisions about the fate of the Earth was
plagued by malfunctions. Of the first thirteen satellites launched in the
test phase from 1972 to 1979, only seven worked for more than one hundred days. The satellites had to be launched constantly in order to keep
enough of them aloft to monitor the American missile fields. They often
just stopped sending data back to Earth.
At 12:15 A.M., Petrov was startled. Across the top of the room was a
thin, silent panel. Most of the time no one even noticed it. But suddenly it
lit up, in red letters: LAUNCH.
A siren wailed. On the big map with the North Pole, a light at one of the
American missile bases was illuminated. Everyone was riveted to the map.
The electronic panels showed a missile launch. The board said “high reliability.” This had never happened before. The operators at the consoles on
the main floor jumped up, out of their chairs. They turned and looked up
at Petrov, behind the glass. He was the commander on duty. He stood, too,
so they could see him. He started to give orders. He wasn’t sure what was
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happening. He ordered them to sit down and start checking the system. He
had to know whether this was real, or a glitch. The full check would take
ten minutes, but if this was a real missile attack, they could not wait ten
minutes to find out. Was the satellite holding steady? Was the computer
functioning properly?
As they scrambled, Petrov scrutinized the monitors in front of him. They
included data from the optical telescope. If there was a missile, sooner
or later they would see it through the telescope. Where was it headed?
What trajectory? There was no sign of it. The specialists who sat in the
darkened room, also watching the telescope, spotted nothing. The computer specialists had to check a set of numbers spewing out of the hardcopy printer. Petrov scrutinized the data on his monitor, too. Could it be a
technical error?
If not, Petrov ran through the possibilities. If just one missile, could it
be an accidental or unauthorized launch? He concluded it was not likely.
He knew of all the locks and precautions—and just one person could not
launch a missile. Even the idea of two officers conspiring to launch a missile
seemed impossible. And if one missile was launched, he thought, what did
that mean? This was not the way to start a nuclear war. For many years, he
had been trained that a nuclear war would start only with a massive strike.
He said it again, to himself: this is not the way to start a nuclear war.
He had a microphone in one hand, part of the intercom system to the
main floor. With the other hand, he picked up the telephone to call his
commanders, who oversaw the whole early-warning system, including the
separate radars. Petrov had to quickly reach his own conclusion; the supervisors would want to know what was happening. He had not completed his
own checks, but he could not wait. He told the duty officer, in a clipped
tone: “I am reporting to you: this is a false alarm.”
He didn’t know for sure. He only had a gut instinct.
“Got it,” the officer replied. Petrov was relieved; the officer did not ask
him why.
The phone was still in his hand, the duty officer still on the line, when
Petrov was jolted again, two minutes later.
The panel flashed: another missile launched! Then a third, a fourth and
a fifth. Now, the system had gone into overdrive. The additional signals
had triggered a new warning. The red letters on the panel began to flash
MISSILE ATTACK, and an electronic blip was sent automatically to the
higher levels of the military. Petrov was frightened. His legs felt paralyzed.
He had to think fast.
Petrov knew the key decision-makers in a missile attack would be the
General Staff. In theory, if the alarm were validated, the retaliation would
be directed from there. Soviet missiles would be readied, targets fed in
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and silo hatches opened. The Soviet political leadership would be alerted.
There would be only minutes in which to make a decision.
The siren wailed. The red sign flashed.
Petrov made a decision. He knew the system had glitches in the past;
there was no visual sighting of a missile through the telescope; the satellites
were in the correct position. There was nothing from the radar stations
to verify an incoming missile, although it was probably too early for the
radars to see anything.
He told the duty officer again: this is a false alarm.
The message went up the chain.
The First Tycoon
T. J. Stiles
The Islander
They came to learn his secrets. Well before the appointed hour of two
o’clock in the afternoon on November 12, 1877, hundreds of spectators
pushed into a courtroom in lower Manhattan. They included friends
and relatives of the contestants, of course, as well as leading lawyers who
wished to observe the forensic skills of the famous attorneys who would
try the case. But most of the teeming mass of men and women—many
fashionably dressed, crowding in until they were packed against the back
wall—wanted to hear the details of the life of the richest man the United
States had ever seen. The trial over the will of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the
famous, notorious Commodore, was about to begin.
Shortly before the hour, the crowd parted to allow in William H. Vanderbilt, the Commodore’s eldest son, and his lawyers, led by Henry L.
Clinton. William, “glancing carelessly and indifferently around the room,
removed his overcoat and comfortably settled himself in his chair,” the New
York Times reported; meanwhile his lawyers shook hands with the opposing
team, led by Scott Lord, who represented William’s sister Mary Vanderbilt
La Bau. At exactly two o’clock, the judge—called the “Surrogate” in this
Surrogate Court—strode briskly in from his chambers through a side door,
stepped up to the dais, and took his seat. “Are you ready, gentlemen?” he
asked. Lord and Clinton each declared that they were, and the Surrogate
ordered, “Proceed, gentlemen.”
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Everyone who listened as Lord stood to make his opening argument
knew just how great the stakes were. “the house of vanderbilt,” the Times
headlined its story the next morning. “a railroad prince’s fortune. the heirs
contesting the will . . . a battle over $100,000,000.” The only item in all that
screaming type that would have surprised readers was the Times’s demotion
of Vanderbilt to “prince,” since the press usually dubbed him the railroad
king. His fortune towered over the American economy to a degree difficult
to imagine, even at the time. If he had been able to sell all his assets at full
market value at the moment of his death, in January of that year, he would
have taken one out of every twenty dollars in circulation, including cash
and demand deposits.
Most of those in that courtroom had lived their entire lives in Vanderbilt’s shadow. By the time he had turned fifty, he had dominated railroad
and steamboat transportation between New York and New England (thus
earning the nickname “Commodore”). In the 1850s, he had launched a
transatlantic steamship line and pioneered a transit route to California
across Nicaragua. In the 1860s, he had systematically seized control of the
railroads that connected Manhattan with the rest of the world, building the
mighty New York Central Railroad system between New York and Chicago. Probably every person in that chamber had passed through Grand
Central, the depot on Forty-second Street that Vanderbilt had constructed;
had seen the enormous St. John’s Park freight terminal that he had built,
featuring a huge bronze statue of himself; had crossed the bridges over the
tracks that he had sunk along Fourth Avenue (a step that would allow it to
later blossom into Park Avenue); or had taken one of the ferries, steamboats, or steamships that he had controlled over the course of his lifetime.
He had stamped the city with his mark—a mark that would last well into
the twenty-first century—and so had stamped the country. Virtually every
American had paid tribute to his treasury.
More fascinating than the fortune was the man behind it. Lord began
his attack by admitting “that it seemed hazardous to say that a man who
accumulated $100,000,000 and was famous for his strength of will had
not the power to dispose of his fortune.” His strength of will was famous
indeed. Vanderbilt had first amassed wealth as a competitor in the steamboat business, cutting fares against established lines until he forced his rivals
to pay him to go away. The practice led the New York Times, a quarter of a
century before his death, to introduce a new metaphor into the American
vernacular by comparing him to the medieval robber barons who took a
toll from all passing traffic on the Rhine. His adventure in Nicaragua had
been, in part, a matter of personal buccaneering, as he explored the passage through the rain forest, piloted a riverboat through the rapids of the
San Juan River, and decisively intervened in a war against an international
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criminal who had seized control of the country. His early life was filled with
fistfights, high-speed steamboat duels, and engine explosions; his latter days
were marked by daredevil harness races and high-stakes confrontations.
It was this personal drama that moved that crowd of spectators into the
courtroom eleven months after his death, but more thoughtful observers
mulled over his larger meaning. Vanderbilt was an empire builder, the first
great corporate tycoon in American history. Even before the United States
became a truly industrial country, he learned to use the tools of ?corporate capitalism to amass wealth and power on a scale previously unknown,
creating enterprises of unprecedented size. “He has introduced Caesarism
into corporate life,” wrote Charles Francis Adams Jr. “Vanderbilt is but the
precursor of a class of men who will wield within the state a power created
by it, but too great for its control. He is the founder of a dynasty.”
Adams did not mean a family dynasty, but a line of corporate chiefs
who would overshadow democratic government itself. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gould, Morgan—all were just beginning their careers when Vanderbilt was at his height. They respected and followed his example, though
they would be hard-pressed to match it. Few laws had constrained him; few
governments had exceeded his influence. In the 1850s, his personal role in
Central America had been more important than that of the White House
or the State Department. In 1867, he had stopped all trains into New York
City from the west to bring the New York Central Railroad to its knees. In
1869, he personally had abated a panic on Wall Street that threatened to
ring in a depression.
His admirers saw him as the ultimate meritocrat, the finest example
of the common man rising through hard work and ability. To them, he
symbolized America’s opportunities. His critics called him grasping and
ruthless, an unelected king who never pretended to rule for his people.
Still worse, they saw him as the apex of a vulgar new culture that had
cast off the republican purity of the Revolution for the golden calf of
wealth. “You seem to be the idol of . . . a crawling swarm of small souls,”
Mark Twain wrote in an open letter to Vanderbilt, “who . . . sing of your
unimportant private habits and sayings and doings, as if your millions gave
them dignity.”
Perhaps there were those who understood that Vanderbilt’s true significance was more complex, even contradictory. How could it not be? His
life spanned a period of breathtaking changes, from the days of George
Washington to those of John D. Rockefeller (with whom he made deals).
He began his career in a rural, agricultural, essentially colonial society in
which the term “businessman” was unknown; he ended it in a corporate,
industrial economy. Neither the admirers nor the critics of his later years
had witnessed his role during the tumultuous era of the early republic and
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the antebellum period. They could not see that Vanderbilt had spent most
of his career as a radical force. From his beginnings as a teenage boatman
before the War of 1812, he had led the rise of competition as a virtue
in American culture. He had disrupted the remnants of the eighteenthcentury patricians, shaken the conservative merchant elite, and destroyed
monopolies at every step. His infuriated opponents had not shared his
enthusiasm for competition; rather, the wealthy establishment in that
young and limited economy saw his attacks as destructive. In 1859, one
had written that he “has always proved himself the enemy of every American maritime enterprise,” and the New York Times condemned Vanderbilt
for pursuing “competition for competition’s sake.” Those on the other end
of the spectrum had celebrated the way he had expanded transportation,
slashed fares, and punished opponents who relied on government monopolies or subsidies. To Jacksonian Democrats, who championed laissez-faire
as an egalitarian creed, he had epitomized the entrepreneur as champion
of the people, the businessman as revolutionary.
But the career that started early ended late, and the revolutionary
completed his days as emperor. As he had expanded his railroad domain
from the benighted New York & Harlem—annexing the Hudson River,
the New York Central, the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, and the
Canada Southern—he had seemed not a radical but a monopolist. His
role in the Erie War of 1868, with its epic corruption of public officials,
had made him seem not a champion but an enemy of civic virtue. He
played a leading part in the creation of a new entity, the giant corporation, that would dominate the American economy in the decades after
his death. The political landscape had changed as well. With the rise of
large railroads and the expansion of federal power during the Civil War,
radicals began to think of the government as a possible counterweight to
corporate might. Vanderbilt had remained as committed to laissez-faire as
ever; as he told the newspapers more than once, his guiding principle was
“to mind my own business,” and all he asked from government was to be
left alone. He never acknowledged that, as Charles F. Adams Jr. wrote, the
massive corporations he commanded gave him power to rival that of the
state, and that he became the establishment against which populists armed
themselves with government regulation.
Probably no other individual made an equal impact over such an
extended period on America’s economy and society. Over the course of
his sixty-six-year career he stood on the forefront of change, a modernizer from beginning to end. He vastly improved and expanded the nation’s
transportation infrastructure, contributing to a transformation of the very
geography of the United States. He embraced new technologies and new
forms of business organization, and used them to compete so successfully
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that he forced his rivals to follow his example or give up. Far ahead of
many of his peers, he grasped one of the great changes in American culture: the abstraction of economic reality, as the connection faded between
the tangible world and the new devices of business, such as paper currency,
corporations, and securities. With those devices he helped to create the corporate economy that would define the United States into the twenty-first
century. Even as he demonstrated the creative power of a market economy,
he also exacerbated problems that would never be fully solved: a huge disparity in wealth between rich and poor; the concentration of great power
in private hands; the fraud and self-serving deception that thrives in an
unregulated environment. One person cannot move the national economy
single-handedly—but no one else kept their hands on the lever for so long
or pushed so hard.
The spectators in that courtroom, then, could mark Vanderbilt down
as complicated indeed, even before the first witness spoke. Yet what pulled
them there was perhaps not so much his national significance as his strange,
powerful character, his mysterious personal life. Public rumor depicted a
home wracked by intrigue, spiritualist séances, and Vanderbilt’s controversial sponsorship of the feminist Victoria Woodhull and her voluptuous
sister, Tennie C. Claflin. What the public did not see was his emotional
complexity: his patient business diplomacy, his love for his first and second
wives (as well as his selfishness with them), and his conflicting feelings about
his often difficult children—especially Cornelius Jeremiah, who struggled
with epilepsy and an addiction to gambling. Contemporaries and posterity
alike often would overlook the very human, even sympathetic, side of the
imperious Commodore, attracted instead to the most salacious, scandalous, and overblown reports.
It was his final act that brought everyone into that courtroom, an act
that combined the personal and the corporate. He had built something
that he meant to last and remain in the hands of his own bloodline—to
found a dynasty in the most literal sense. To that end, he had drafted a will
that left 95 percent of his estate to his eldest son, William. William’s sister
Mary meant to break that dynasty by breaking the will, to force a distribution of the estate equally among the ten surviving children. Would she succeed? Each side would fight to define Vanderbilt; each side would seek out
its own answer to the enigma of a man who left few letters and no diaries.
Lord began to speak, and the crowd bent forward to listen, straining to
learn who the Commodore really was.
A CHILD, IT IS SAID, CHANGES EVERYTHING. For Phebe
Hand Vanderbilt, another child meant more of the same. In May 1794,
during the last month of her fourth pregnancy, her first three children,
Mary, Jacob, and Charlotte, ran about their humble house. Knowing the
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Vanderbilt tradition, she could expect many more to follow the unborn
infant in her womb. Continuity, not change, defined everything about her
existence, an existence that differed little from that of her parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents. She sat in wooden furniture hand-cut from
hand-hewn lumber. She wore clothes hand-sewn from hand-spun wool.
She washed cups and plates that had been spun on a wheel, and bottles
blown by a craftsman’s mouth. Looking out a window, she would see handbuilt wagons harnessed to teams of horses. Peering a little farther, she
could watch the sloops and ships that sailed by the shore just steps from
her door. And at night she would light the room with a mutton-fat candle
or a whale-oil lamp.
Phebe lived in a close wooden world made by human hands, powered by
winds and horse and human strength, clustered at the water’s edge. Most
of the technology she knew had been first imagined thousands of years
before. Even the newest inventions of her time—the clock, the printing
press, the instruments of navigation—dated back to the early Renaissance.
The “Brown Bess” muskets stored in U.S. arsenals and carried by British
redcoats had been designed in the 1690s, a full century before. Revolutions
were a matter for politics; the constructed world merely crept ahead.
Phebe lived in Port Richmond, that most ancient kind of community—
a farming village, its air pungent with the smell of animal manure and
open fires, its unpaved paths sticky with mud from the season’s rains. It sat
on the northern edge of Richmond County, better known as Staten Island,
a sprawling, sparsely occupied landscape of not quite four thousand souls
who still governed their affairs with town meetings. The islanders tilled the
steep green hillsides, let pigs wander and forage for themselves, and built
their houses close to the soft, swampy shores that crumbled into the kills—
the tidal creeks that wrapped around the island’s edges. Staten Island sat
like a stopper in the mouth of New York Harbor, separated from Long
Island by the two-mile-long Narrows, where the ocean decanted into the
bay. West of Staten Island stretched the mainland of New Jersey, and
across the length of the harbor sat Manhattan, a long and narrow island
that extended between the deep East and Hudson (or North) rivers like a
natural pier of bedrock.
An island is defined by its edges. Phebe looked across the water for her
husband’s return whenever he was gone, until he sailed up in his boat and
tied it fast. His name was Cornelius. It was a solid Dutch name, as was
Vanderbilt, and both were common around New York Bay. The first of
his family had arrived in America in 1650, when Jan Aertsen Van Der
Bilt settled in the Dutch colony of New Netherlands. In 1715, long after
the English had conquered the province and renamed it New York, one
of Jan’s descendants had crossed the water to sparsely populated Staten
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Island. That one move was change enough, it seems, for the family that dispersed and multiplied there. The ensuing generations lived out their lives
as farmers or tavern keepers, unmoved by the climactic North American
war with France in the 1750s, the outbreak of revolution two decades later,
the British occupation of their island, the triumph of independence, the
ratification of the Constitution, and the swearing in of President George
Washington in Manhattan.
Cheever: A Life
Blake Bailey
Chapter One
1637–1912
Many skeletons in family closet,” Leander Wapshot wrote in his diary.
“Dark secrets, mostly carnal.” Even at the height of his success, Cheever
never quite lost the fear that he’d “end up cold, alone, dishonored, forgotten by [his] children, an old man approaching death without a companion.” This, he sensed, was the fate of his “accursed” family—or at least
of its men, who for three generations (at least) had seemed “bound to a
drunken and tragic destiny.” There was his paternal grandfather, Aaron,
rumored to have committed suicide in a bleak furnished room on Charles
Street in Boston, a disgrace too awful to mention. One night, as a young
man, Cheever had sat by a fire drinking whiskey with his father, Frederick, while a nor’easter raged outside. “We were swapping dirty stories,” he
recalled; “the feeling was intimate, and I felt that this was the time when
I could bring up the subject. ‘Father, would you tell me something about
your father?’ ‘No!’ And that was that.” By then Cheever’s father was also
poor and forsaken, living alone in an old family farmhouse on the South
Shore, his only friend “a half-wit who lived up the road.” As for Cheever’s
brother, he too would become drunken and poor, spending his last days in
a subsidized retirement village in Scituate. No wonder Cheever sometimes
felt an affinity to characters in Ibsen’s Ghosts.
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Despite such ignominy, Cheever took pride in his fine old family name,
and when he wasn’t making light of the matter, he took pains to impress
this on his children. “Remember you are a Cheever,” he’d tell his younger
son, whenever the boy showed signs of an unseemly fragility. Some allusion
was implicit, perhaps, to the first Cheever in America, Ezekiel, headmaster
of the Boston Latin School from 1671 to 1708 and author of Accidence: A
Short Introduction to the Latin Tongue, the standard text in American schools for
a century or more. New England’s greatest schoolmaster, Ezekiel Cheever
was even more renowned for his piety—“his untiring abjuration of the
Devil,” as Cotton Mather put it in his eulogy. One aspect of Ezekiel’s piety
was a stern distaste for periwigs, which he was known to yank from foppish heads and fling out windows. “The welfare of the commonwealth was
always upon the conscience of Ezekiel Cheever,” said Judge Sewall, “and
he abominated periwigs.” John Cheever was fond of pointing out that the
abomination of periwigs “is in the nature of literature,” and it seems he
was taught to emulate such virtue on his father’s knee. “Old Zeke C.,”
Frederick wrote his son in 1943, “didn’t fuss about painted walls—open
plumbing, or electric lights, had no ping pong etc. Turned out sturdy men
and women, who knew their three R’s, and the fear of God.” John paid
tribute to his eminent forebear by giving the name Ezekiel to one of his
black Labradors (to this day a bronze of the dog’s head sits beside the
Cheever fireplace), as well as to the protagonist of Falconer. However, when
an old friend mentioned seeing a plaque that commemorated Ezekiel’s
house in Charlestown, Cheever replied, “Why tell me? I’m in no way even
collaterally related to Ezekiel Cheever.”
Cheever named his first son after his great-grandfather Benjamin Hale
Cheever, a “celebrated ship’s master” who sailed out of Newburyport to
Canton and Calcutta for the lucrative China trade. Visitors to Cheever’s
home in Ossining (particularly journalists) were often shown such maritime souvenirs as a set of Canton china and a framed Chinese fan—this
while Cheever remarked in passing that his great-grandfather’s boots were
on display in the Peabody Essex Museum, filled with authentic tea from the
Boston Tea Party. In fact, it is Lot Cheever of Danvers (no known relation)
whose tea-filled boots ended up at the museum; as for Benjamin, he was
all of three years old when that particular bit of tea was plundered aboard
the Dartmouth on December 16, 1773. Also, there’s some question whether
Benjamin Hale (Sr.) was actually a ship’s captain: though he appears in the
Newbury Vital Records as “Master” Cheever, there’s no mention of him
in any of the maritime records; a “Mr. Benjamin Cheever” is mentioned,
however, as the teacher of one Henry Pettingell (born 1793) at the Newbury North School, and “Master” might as well have meant school master.
Unless there were two Benjamin Cheevers in the greater Newbury area at
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the time (both roughly the same age), this would appear to be John’s greatgrandfather.
The ill-fated Aaron was the youngest of Benjamin’s twelve children,
and it was actually he who had (“presumably”) brought back that ivorylaced fan from the Orient: “It has lain, broken, in the sewing box for as
long as I can remember,” Cheever wrote in 1966, when he finally had the
thing repaired and mounted under glass.
My reaction to the framed fan is violently contradictory. Ah yes, I say, my
grandfather got it in China, this authenticating my glamorous New England background. My impulse, at the same time, is to smash and destroy
the memento. The power a scrap of paper and a little ivory have over my
heart. It is the familiar clash between my passionate wish to be honest and
my passionate wish to possess a traditional past. I can, it seems, have both
but not without a galling sense of conflict.
To be sure, it’s possible that Aaron had sailed to China and retrieved
that fan—as his son Frederick pointed out, most young men of the era
went out on at least one voyage “to make them grow”—but his future
did not lie with the China trade, which was effectively killed by Jefferson’s
Embargo Act and the War of 1812. By the time Aaron reached manhood,
in the mid-nineteenth century, the New England economy was dominated
by textile industries, and Aaron had moved his family to Lynn, Massachusetts, where he worked as a shoemaker. But he was not meant to prosper
even in so humble a station, and may well have been among the twenty
thousand shoe workers who lost their jobs in the Great Strike of 1860.
In any event, the family returned to Newburyport a few years later and
eventually sailed to Boston aboard the Harold Currier: “This, according to
my father,” said Cheever, “was the last sailing ship to be made in the Newburyport yards and was towed to Boston to be outfitted. I don’t suppose
that they had the money to get to Boston by any other means.”
Frederick Lincoln Cheever was born on January 16, 1865, the younger
(by eleven years) of Aaron and Sarah’s two sons. One of Frederick’s last
memories of his father was “playing dominoes with old gent” during the
Great Boston Fire of 1872; the two watched a mob of looters, the merchants fleeing their stores. The financial panic of 1873 followed, in the
midst of which Aaron—driven by poverty and whatever other devils—
apparently decided his family was better off without him. (“Mother, saintly
old woman,” writes Leander Wapshot. “God bless her! Never one to admit
unhappiness or pain . . . Asked me to sit down. ‘Your father has abandoned
us,’ she said. ‘He left me a note. I burned it in the fire.’ ”) After Aaron’s
departure, his wife seems to have run a boarding house to support her children, or so his grandson suspected (“If this were so I think I wouldn’t have
been told”), though Aaron’s fate was unknown except by innuendo. As it
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happens, the death certificate indicates that Aaron Waters Cheever died
in 1882 of “alcohol & opium—del[irium] tremens”; his last address was
111 Chambers (rather than Charles) Street, part of a shabby immigrant
quarter that was razed long ago by urban renewal.
According to family legend, Sarah Cheever was notified by police of
her husband’s death and arranged for his burial in stoic solitude, without a word to her son Frederick until after she’d served him supper that
night. Among the few possessions she found in his squalid lodgings was
a copy of Shakespeare’s plays, which came to the attention of a young
John Cheever some fifty years later, at a time when he himself was all
but starving to death in a Greenwich Village rooming house. Noting that
“most of the speeches on human ingratitude were underscored,” Cheever
wrote an early story titled “Homage to Shakespeare” that speculates on
the cause of his grandfather’s downfall: “[Shakespeare’s] plays seemed to
light and distinguish his character and his past. What might have been
defined as failure and profligacy towered like something kingly and tragic.”
As a tribute to kindred nobility, the narrator’s grandfather (so described in
the story) chooses “Coriolanus” for his older son William’s middle name,
rather as Aaron had named his older son—John Cheever’s uncle—William
Hamlet Cheever.
When asked how he came to keep a journal, Cheever explained it as a
typical occupation of a “seafaring family”: “They always begin, as most
journals do, with the weather, prevailing winds, ruffles of the sails. They
also include affairs, temptations, condemnations, libel, and occasionally,
obscenities.” These last attributes were certainly characteristic of Cheever’s own journal, though one can only imagine what other men in his family were apt to write; the few pages his father left behind were more in
the nature of memoir notes, benign enough, some of them quoted almost
verbatim in The Wapshot Chronicle as the laconic prose of Leander Wapshot:
“Sturgeon in river then. About three feet long. All covered with knobs. Leap
straight up in air and fall back in water.”* When Cheever first encountered
these notes, he found them “antic, ungrammatical and . . . vulgar,” though
later he came to admire the style as typical of a certain nautical New England mentality that “makes as little as possible of any event.”
* The parallel passage in Frederick’s notes reads as follows: “On the way [from Newburyport to Amesbury via horsecar] you saw sturgeons leap out of river—they were 3–4 feet
long—all covered with knobs.” One might add that, as Cheever suggests, his father was
quite diligent about noting the weather—always, for instance, in the top right corner of
the letters he wrote his son. Thus, from October 10, 1943: “Cold this am 45 [degrees] Big
wind from East No. East. Heavy overcoat—woodfire and oil kitchen.”
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During his hardscrabble youth, Frederick was often boarded out at a
bake house owned by his uncle Thomas Butler in Newburyport, where
he slept in the attic with a tame raven and relished the view from his window: “Grand sunsets after the daily thunder showers that came down the
river from the White Mountains,” he recalled, with a lyric economy his
son was right to admire. Life at the bake house was rarely dull, as Uncle
Thomas was a good friend of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and
the house served as a station for the Underground Railroad. John Cheever
often told of how pro-slavery copperheads had once dragged his greatuncle “at the tail of a cart” through the streets of Newburyport—though
Cheever always saw fit to call this relative “Ebenezer” (a name he liked
for its Yankee savor), and sometimes it was Ebenezer’s friend Villard who
was dragged, or stoned as the case may be. At any rate, the story usually ended with an undaunted “Ebenezer” refusing a government contract
to make pilot biscuits for Union sailors—and indeed, as Frederick wrote
in his notes, “[Uncle Thomas] said [biscuits] not good enough for sailors
of US to eat. Others did it made big coin.” John vastly improved that
part of the story, too: “A competitor named Pierce,” he related in a letter,
“then accepted the [biscuit] contract and founded a dynasty” that became
Nabisco, no less—which, for the record, was founded by Adolphus Green
(not Pierce) in 1898.
“Bill always good to me,” Frederick wrote of his much older brother,
who apparently filled the paternal vacuum, if only for a while. Bill “called
[him] down” when Frederick stepped out of line, and paid a friend—
Johnny O’Toole at the Massachusetts Hotel (“Very tough joint”)—to give
Frederick haircuts as needed. John Cheever always used his uncle’s more
evocative middle name, Hamlet, when referring to this rather romantic
figure: “An amateur boxer, darling of the sporting houses, captain of the
volunteer fire department ball-team”—a man’s man, in short, who, like his
namesake in The Wapshot Chronicle, went west for the Gold Rush. “[There]
isn’t a king or a merchant prince in the whole world that I envy,” Hamlet
writes his brother Leander in the novel, “for I always knew I was born to
be a child of destiny and that I was never meant . . . to wring my living
from detestable, low, degrading, mean and ordinary kinds of business.” By
the time the real-life Hamlet arrived in California, however, the excitement
of 1849 had faded considerably, and he later settled in Omaha, where he
died “forgotten and disgraced”—or rather he died “at sea” and “was given
to the ocean off Panama,” depending on which of his nephew’s stories
one chooses to believe. Cheever invariably described his uncle as a “blackmouthed old wreck” or “monkey,” since their occasional meetings were
not happy. “Uncle Bill, Halifax 1919,” John’s older brother noted beside a
photograph of a prosaic-looking old man rowing his nephews around in
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a boat. “Bill Cheever came from Omaha for a visit—the only time I ever
saw him. He wasn’t much fun.” A later meeting with John would prove
even less fun.
With Hamlet seeking his fortune a continent away, it was necessary for
young Frederick to help support the household. From the age of ten or
so, he “never missed a day” selling newspapers before and after classes at
the Phillips School, where he graduated at the head of his class on June
27, 1879, and was presented with a bouquet of flowers by the mayor of
Boston. In later years he’d wistfully recall how the flowers wilted before he
could take them home to his mother, and on that note his formal education
ended: “Wanted to go to Boston Latin,” he wrote. “Had to work.” For so
bookish a man (he spent much of his lonely dotage reading Shakespeare
to his cat), the matter rankled, and he’d insist on sending his sons to good
private schools while boasting—à la Leander (“Report card attached”)—
of his own high marks as a boy.
For the next fifty years, Frederick Cheever worked in the shoe business, always bearing in mind the fate of his poor father, whose life was
“made unbearable by lack of coin”: “The desire for money most lasting
and universal passion,” he wrote for his own edification and perhaps that
of his sons. “Desire ends only with life itself. Fame, love, all long forgotten.”
While still in his teens, he worked at a factory in Lynn for six dollars a week
(five of which went to room and board) in order to learn the business; a
photograph from around this time shows a dapper youth with a trim little
mustache, his features composed with a look of high purpose, though its
subject had glossed, “Look like a poet. Attic hungry—Etc.” John Cheever
would one day find among his father’s effects a copy of The Magician’s Own
Handbook—a poignant artifact that brought to mind “a lonely young man
reading Plutarch in a cold room and perfecting his magic tricks to make
himself socially desirable and perhaps lovable.” In the meantime, once he
turned twenty-one, Frederick began to spend almost half the year on the
road selling shoes (“gosh writer has sat in a 1001 RR stations . . . ‘get the
business’ or ‘get out’”), often bunking with strangers and hiding his valuables in his stockings, which he then wore to bed.
The Lost Symbol
Dan Brown
Prologue
House of the Temple
8:33 P.M.
The secret is how to die.
Since the beginning of time, the secret had always been how to die.
The thirty-four-year-old initiate gazed down at the human skull cradled
in his palms. The skull was hollow, like a bowl, filled with blood red wine.
Drink it, he told himself. You have nothing to fear.
As was tradition, he had begun this journey adorned in the ritualistic
garb of a medieval heretic being led to the gallows, his loose-fitting shirt
gaping open to reveal his pale chest, his left pant leg rolled up to the knee,
and his right sleeve rolled up to the elbow. Around his neck hung a heavy
rope noose—a “cable-tow” as the brethren called it. Tonight, however, like
the brethren bearing witness, he was dressed as a master.
The assembly of brothers encircling him all were adorned in their full
regalia of lambskin aprons, sashes, and white gloves. Around their necks
hung ceremonial jewels that glistened like ghostly eyes in the muted light.
Many of these men held powerful stations in life, and yet the initiate knew
their worldly ranks meant nothing within these walls. Here all men were
equals, sworn brothers sharing a mystical bond.
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As he surveyed the daunting assembly, the initiate wondered who on the
outside would ever believe that this collection of men would assemble in
one place . . . much less this place. The room looked like a holy sanctuary
from the ancient world.
The truth, however, was stranger still.
I am just blocks away from the White House.
This colossal edifice, located at 1733 Sixteenth Street NW in Washington, D.C., was a replica of a pre-Christian temple—the temple of King
Mausolus, the original mausoleum . . . a place to be taken after death. Outside the main entrance, two seventeen-ton sphinxes guarded the bronze
doors. The interior was an ornate labyrinth of ritualistic chambers, halls,
sealed vaults, libraries, and even a hollow wall that held the remains of two
human bodies. The initiate had been told every room in this building held
a secret, and yet he knew no room held deeper secrets than the gigantic
chamber in which he was currently kneeling with a skull cradled in his
palms.
The Temple Room.
This room was a perfect square. And cavernous. The ceiling soared an
astonishing one hundred feet overhead, supported by monolithic columns
of green granite. A tiered gallery of dark Russian walnut seats with handtooled pigskin encircled the room. A thirty-three-foot-tall throne dominated the western wall, with a concealed pipe organ opposite it. The walls
were a kaleidoscope of ancient symbols . . . Egyptian, Hebraic, astronomical, alchemical, and others yet unknown.
Tonight, the Temple Room was lit by a series of precisely arranged
candles. Their dim glow was aided only by a pale shaft of moonlight that
filtered down through the expansive oculus in the ceiling and illuminated
the room’s most startling feature—an enormous altar hewn from a solid
block of polished Belgian black marble, situated dead center of the square
chamber.
The secret is how to die, the initiate reminded himself.
“It is time,” a voice whispered.
The initiate let his gaze climb the distinguished white-robed figure
standing before him.The Supreme Worshipful Master. The man, in his late
fifties, was an American icon, well loved, robust, and incalculably wealthy.
His once-dark hair was turning silver, and his famous visage reflected a
lifetime of power and a vigorous intellect.
“Take the oath,” the Worshipful Master said, his voice soft like falling
snow. “Complete your journey.”
The initiate’s journey, like all such journeys, had begun at the first
degree. On that night, in a ritual similar to this one, the Worshipful Master
had blindfolded him with a velvet hoodwink and pressed a ceremonial
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dagger to his bare chest, demanding: “Do you seriously declare on your
honor, uninfluenced by mercenary or any other unworthy motive, that you
freely and voluntarily offer yourself as a candidate for the mysteries and
privileges of this brotherhood?”
“I do,” the initiate had lied.
“Then let this be a sting to your consciousness,” the master had warned
him, “as well as instant death should you ever betray the secrets to be
imparted to you.”
At the time, the initiate had felt no fear. They will never know my true purpose
here.
Tonight, however, he sensed a foreboding solemnity in the Temple
Room, and his mind began replaying all the dire warnings he had been
given on his journey, threats of terrible consequences if he ever shared
the ancient secrets he was about to learn:Throat cut from ear to ear . . . tongue
torn out by its roots . . . bowels taken out and burned . . . scattered to the four winds of
heaven . . . heart plucked out and given to the beasts of the field—
“Brother,” the gray-eyed master said, placing his left hand on the initiate’s shoulder. “Take the final oath.”
Steeling himself for the last step of his journey, the initiate shifted his
muscular frame and turned his attention back to the skull cradled in his
palms. The crimson wine looked almost black in the dim candlelight. The
chamber had fallen deathly silent, and he could feel all of the witnesses
watching him, waiting for him to take his final oath and join their elite
ranks.
Tonight, he thought, something is taking place within these walls that has never
before occurred in the history of this brotherhood. Not once, in centuries.
He knew it would be the spark . . . and it would give him unfathomable
power. Energized, he drew a breath and spoke aloud the same words that
countless men had spoken before him in countries all over the world.
“May this wine I now drink become a deadly poison to me . . . should I ever knowingly or willfully violate my oath.”
His words echoed in the hollow space.
Then all was quiet.
Steadying his hands, the initiate raised the skull to his mouth and felt his
lips touch the dry bone. He closed his eyes and tipped the skull toward his
mouth, drinking the wine in long, deep swallows. When the last drop was
gone, he lowered the skull.
For an instant, he thought he felt his lungs growing tight, and his heart
began to pound wildly. My God, they know! Then, as quickly as it came, the
feeling passed.
A pleasant warmth began to stream through his body. The initiate
exhaled, smiling inwardly as he gazed up at the unsuspecting gray-eyed
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man who had foolishly admitted him into this brotherhood’s most secretive ranks.
Soon you will lose everything you hold most dear.
Chapter 1
The Otis elevator climbing the south pillar of the Eiffel Tower was overflowing with tourists. Inside the cramped lift, an austere businessman in a
pressed suit gazed down at the boy beside him. “You look pale, son. You
should have stayed on the ground.”
“I’m okay . . . ” the boy answered, struggling to control his anxiety. “I’ll
get out on the next level.” I can’t breathe.
The man leaned closer. “I thought by now you would have gotten over
this.” He brushed the child’s cheek affectionately.
The boy felt ashamed to disappoint his father, but he could barely hear
through the ringing in his ears. I can’t breathe. I’ve got to get out of this box!
The elevator operator was saying something reassuring about the lift’s
articulated pistons and puddled-iron construction. Far beneath them, the
streets of Paris stretched out in all directions.
Almost there, the boy told himself, craning his neck and looking up at the
unloading platform. Just hold on.
As the lift angled steeply toward the upper viewing deck, the shaft began
to narrow, its massive struts contracting into a tight, vertical tunnel.
“Dad, I don’t think—”
Suddenly a staccato crack echoed overhead. The carriage jerked, swaying awkwardly to one side. Frayed cables began whipping around the carriage, thrashing like snakes. The boy reached out for his father.
“Dad!”
Their eyes locked for one terrifying second.
Then the bottom dropped out.
Robert Langdon jolted upright in his soft leather seat, startling out of
the semiconscious daydream. He was sitting all alone in the enormous
cabin of a Falcon 2000EX corporate jet as it bounced its way through
turbulence. In the background, the dual Pratt & Whitney engines hummed
evenly.
“Mr. Langdon?” The intercom crackled overhead. “We’re on final
approach.”
Langdon sat up straight and slid his lecture notes back into his leather
day bag. He’d been halfway through reviewing Masonic symbology
when his mind had drifted. The daydream about his late father, Langdon
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suspected, had been stirred by this morning’s unexpected invitation from
Langdon’s longtime mentor, Peter Solomon.
The other man I never want to disappoint.
The fifty-eight-year-old philanthropist, historian, and scientist had
taken Langdon under his wing nearly thirty years ago, in many ways filling
the void left by Langdon’s father’s death. Despite the man’s influential family dynasty and massive wealth, Langdon had found humility and warmth
in Solomon’s soft gray eyes.
Outside the window the sun had set, but Langdon could still make out
the slender silhouette of the world’s largest obelisk, rising on the horizon
like the spire of an ancient gnomon. The 555-foot marble-faced obelisk
marked this nation’s heart. All around the spire, the meticulous geometry
of streets and monuments radiated outward.
Even from the air, Washington, D.C., exuded an almost mystical
power.
Langdon loved this city, and as the jet touched down, he felt a rising
excitement about what lay ahead. The jet taxied to a private terminal
somewhere in the vast expanse of Dulles International Airport and came
to a stop.
Langdon gathered his things, thanked the pilots, and stepped out of the
jet’s luxurious interior onto the foldout staircase. The cold January air felt
liberating.
Breathe, Robert, he thought, appreciating the wide-open spaces.
A blanket of white fog crept across the runway, and Langdon had the
sensation he was stepping into a marsh as he descended onto the misty
tarmac.
“Hello! Hello!” a singsong British voice shouted from across the tarmac.
“Professor Langdon?”
Langdon looked up to see a middle-aged woman with a badge and
clipboard hurrying toward him, waving happily as he approached. Curly
blond hair protruded from under a stylish knit wool hat.
“Welcome to Washington, sir!”
Langdon smiled. “Thank you.”
“My name is Pam, from passenger services.” The woman spoke with an
exuberance that was almost unsettling. “If you’ll come with me, sir, your
car is waiting.”
Langdon followed her across the runway toward the Signature terminal, which was surrounded by glistening private jets. A taxi stand for the rich
and famous.
“I hate to embarrass you, Professor,” the woman said, sounding sheepish, “but you are the Robert Langdon who writes books about symbols and
religion, aren’t you?”
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103
Langdon hesitated and then nodded.
“I thought so!” she said, beaming. “My book group read your book
about the sacred feminine and the church! What a delicious scandal that
one caused! You do enjoy putting the fox in the henhouse!”
Langdon smiled. “Scandal wasn’t really my intention.”
The woman seemed to sense Langdon was not in the mood to discuss
his work. “I’m sorry. Listen to me rattling on. I know you probably get tired
of being recognized . . . but it’s your own fault.” She playfully motioned to
his clothing. “Your uniform gave you away.”
My uniform? Langdon glanced down at his attire. He was wearing his
usual charcoal turtleneck, Harris Tweed jacket, khakis, and collegiate
cordovan loafers . . . his standard attire for the classroom, lecture circuit,
author photos, and social events.
The woman laughed. “Those turtlenecks you wear are so dated. You’d
look much sharper in a tie!”
No chance, Langdon thought. Little nooses.
Neckties had been required six days a week when Langdon attended
Phillips Exeter Academy, and despite the headmaster’s romantic claims
that the origin of the cravat went back to the silk fascalia worn by Roman
orators to warm their vocal cords, Langdon knew that, etymologically,
cravat actually derived from a ruthless band of “Croat” mercenaries who
donned knotted neckerchiefs before they stormed into battle. To this day,
this ancient battle garb was donned by modern office warriors hoping to
intimidate their enemies in daily boardroom battles.
“Thanks for the advice,” Langdon said with a chuckle. “I’ll consider a
tie in the future.”
Mercifully, a professional-looking man in a dark suit got out of a sleek
Lincoln Town Car parked near the terminal and held up his finger. “Mr.
Langdon? I’m Charles with Beltway Limousine.” He opened the passenger
door. “Good evening, sir. Welcome to Washington.”
Langdon tipped Pam for her hospitality and then climbed into the plush
interior of the Town Car. The driver showed him the temperature controls,
the bottled water, and the basket of hot muffins. Seconds later, Langdon
was speeding away on a private access road. So this is how the other half lives.
As the driver gunned the car up Windsock Drive, he consulted his passenger manifest and placed a quick call. “This is Beltway Limousine,” the
driver said with professional efficiency. “I was asked to confirm once my
passenger had landed.” He paused. “Yes, sir. Your guest, Mr. Langdon, has
arrived, and I will deliver him to the Capitol Building by seven P.M. You’re
welcome, sir.” He hung up.
Langdon had to smile. No stone left unturned. Peter Solomon’s attention
to detail was one of his most potent assets, allowing him to manage his
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substantial power with apparent ease. A few billion dollars in the bank doesn’t
hurt either.
Langdon settled into the plush leather seat and closed his eyes as the
noise of the airport faded behind him. The U.S. Capitol was a half hour
away, and he appreciated the time alone to gather his thoughts. Everything
had happened so quickly today that Langdon only now had begun to think
in earnest about the incredible evening that lay ahead.
Arriving under a veil of secrecy, Langdon thought, amused by the prospect.
Ten miles from the Capitol Building, a lone figure was eagerly preparing for Robert Langdon’s arrival.
The Confession
John Grisham
The custodian at St. Mark’s had just scraped three inches of snow off the
sidewalks when the man with the cane appeared. The sun was up, but the
winds were howling; the temperature was stuck at the freezing mark. The
man wore only a pair of thin dungarees, a summer shirt, well-worn hiking
boots, and a light Windbreaker that stood little chance against the chill.
But he did not appear to be uncomfortable, nor was he in a hurry. He was
on foot, walking with a limp and a slight tilt to his left, the side aided by the
cane. He shuffled along the sidewalk near the chapel and stopped at a side
door with the word “Office” painted in dark red. He did not knock and
the door was not locked. He stepped inside just as another gust of wind hit
him in the back.
The room was a reception area with the cluttered, dusty look one would
expect to find in an old church. In the center was a desk with a nameplate
that announced the presence of Charlotte Junger, who sat not far behind
her name. She said with a smile, “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” the man said. A pause. “It’s very cold out there.”
“It is indeed,” she said as she quickly sized him up. The obvious problem was that he had no coat and nothing on his hands or head.
“I assume you’re Ms. Junger,” he said, staring at her name.
“No, Ms. Junger is out today. The flu. I’m Dana Schroeder, the minister’s wife, just filling in. What can we do for you?”
There was one empty chair and the man looked hopefully at it.
“May I?”
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“Of course,” she said. He carefully sat down, as if all movements
needed forethought.
“Is the minister in?” he asked as he looked at a large, closed door off
to the left.
“Yes, but he’s in a meeting. What can we do for you?” She was petite,
with a nice chest, tight sweater. He couldn’t see anything below the waist,
under the desk. He had always preferred the smaller ones. Cute face, big
blue eyes, high cheekbones, a wholesome pretty girl, the perfect little minister’s wife.
It had been so long since he’d touched a woman.
“I need to see Reverend Schroeder,” he said as he folded his hands
together prayerfully. “I was in church yesterday, listened to his sermon,
and, well, I need some guidance.”
“He’s very busy today,” she said with a smile. Really nice teeth.
“I’m in a rather urgent situation,” he said.
Dana had been married to Keith Schroeder long enough to know
that no one had ever been sent away from his office, appointment or not.
Besides, it was a frigid Monday morning and Keith wasn’t really that busy.
A few phone calls, one consultation with a young couple in the process of
retreating from a wedding, under way at that very moment, then the usual
visits to the hospitals. She fussed around the desk, found the simple questionnaire she was looking for, and said, “Okay, I’ll take some basic information and we’ll see what can be done.” Her pen was ready.
“Thank you,” he said, bowing slightly.
“Name?”
“Travis Boyette.” He instinctively spelled his last name for her. “Date
of birth, October 10, 1963. Place, Joplin, Missouri. Age, forty-four. Single, divorced, no children. No address. No place of employment. No
prospects.”
Dana absorbed this as her pen frantically searched for the proper blanks
to be filled. His response created far more questions than her little form
was designed to accommodate. “Okay, about the address,” she said, still
writing. “Where are you staying these days?”
“These days I’m the property of the Kansas Department of Corrections. I’m assigned to a halfway house on Seventeenth Street, a few blocks
from here. I’m in the process of being released, ‘re-entry,’ as they like to
call it. A few months in the halfway house here in Topeka, then I’m a free
man with nothing to look forward to but parole for the rest of my life.”
The pen stopped moving, but Dana stared at it anyway. Her interest
in the inquiry had suddenly lost steam. She was hesitant to ask anything
more. However, since she had started the interrogation, she felt compelled
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107
to press on. What else were they supposed to do while they waited on the
minister?
“Would you like some coffee?” she asked, certain that the question was
harmless.
There was a pause, much too long, as if he couldn’t decide. “Yes, thanks.
Just black with a little sugar.”
Dana scurried from the room and went to find coffee. He watched
her leave, watched everything about her, noticed the nice round backside
under the everyday slacks, the slender legs, the athletic shoulders, even the
ponytail. Five feet three, maybe four, 110 pounds max.
She took her time, and when she returned Travis Boyette was right
where she’d left him, still sitting monk-like, the fingertips of his right hand
gently tapping those of his left, his black wooden cane across his thighs, his
eyes gazing forlornly at nothing on the far wall. His head was completely
shaved, small, and perfectly round and shiny, and as she handed him the
cup, she pondered the frivolous question of whether he’d gone bald at an
early age or simply preferred the skinned look. There was a sinister tattoo
creeping up the left side of his neck.
He took the coffee and thanked her for it. She resumed her position
with the desk between them.
“Are you Lutheran?” she asked, again with the pen.
“I doubt it. I’m nothing really. Never saw the need for church.”
“But you were here yesterday. Why?”
Boyette held the cup with both hands at his chin, like a mouse nibbling
on a morsel. If a simple question about coffee took a full ten seconds, then
one about church attendance might require an hour. He sipped, licked his
lips. “How long do you think it’ll be before I can see the reverend?” he
finally asked.
Not soon enough, Dana thought, anxious now to pass this one along
to her husband. She glanced at a clock on the wall and said, “Any minute
now.”
“Would it be possible just to sit here in silence as we wait?” he asked,
with complete politeness.
Dana absorbed the stiff-arm and quickly decided that silence wasn’t a
bad idea. Then her curiosity returned. “Sure, but one last question.” She
was looking at the questionnaire as if it required one last question. “How
long were you in prison?” she asked.
“Half my life,” Boyette said with no hesitation, as if he fielded that one
five times a day.
Dana scribbled something, and then the desktop keyboard caught her
attention. She pecked away with a flourish as if suddenly facing a deadline.
Her e-mail to Keith read: “There’s a convicted felon out here who says he
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must see you. Not leaving until. Seems nice enough. Having coffee. Let’s
wrap things up back there.”
Five minutes later the pastor’s door opened and a young woman escaped
through it. She was wiping her eyes. She was followed by her ex-fiancé,
who managed both a frown and a smile at the same time. Neither spoke to
Dana. Neither noticed Travis Boyette. They disappeared.
When the door slammed shut, Dana said to Boyette, “Just a minute.”
She hustled into her husband’s office for a quick briefing.
The Reverend Keith Schroeder was thirty-five years old, happily married to
Dana for ten years now, the father of three boys, all born separately within
the span of twenty months. He’d been the senior pastor at St. Mark’s for
two years; before that, at a church in Kansas City. His father was a retired
Lutheran minister, and Keith had never dreamed of being anything else.
He was raised in a small town near St. Louis, educated in schools not far
from there, and, except for a class trip to New York and a honeymoon in
Florida, had never left the Midwest. He was generally admired by his congregation, though there had been issues. The biggest row occurred when
he opened up the church’s basement to shelter some homeless folks during
a blizzard the previous winter. After the snow melted, some of the homeless were reluctant to leave. The city issued a citation for unauthorized use,
and there was a slightly embarrassing story in the newspaper.
The topic of his sermon the day before had been forgiveness—God’s
infinite and overwhelming power to forgive our sins, regardless of how
heinous they might be. Travis Boyette’s sins were atrocious, unbelievable,
horrific. His crimes against humanity would surely condemn him to eternal suffering and death. At this point in his miserable life, Travis was convinced he could never be forgiven. But he was curious.
“We’ve had several men from the halfway house,” Keith was saying.
“I’ve even held services there.” They were in a corner of his office, away
from the desk, two new friends having a chat in saggy canvas chairs. Nearby,
fake logs burned in a fake fireplace.
“Not a bad place,” Boyette said. “Sure beats prison.” He was a frail
man, with the pale skin of one confined to unlit places. His bony knees
were touching, and the black cane rested across them.
“And where was prison?” Keith held a mug of steaming tea.
“Here and there. Last six years at Lansing.”
“And you were convicted of what?” he asked, anxious to know about
the crimes so he would know much more about the man. Violence? Drugs?
Probably. On the other hand, maybe Travis here was an embezzler or a tax
cheat. He certainly didn’t seem to be the type to hurt anyone.
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“Lot of bad stuff, Pastor. I can’t remember it all.” He preferred to avoid
eye contact. The rug below them kept his attention. Keith sipped his tea,
watched the man carefully, and then noticed the tic. Every few seconds,
his entire head dipped slightly to his left. It was a quick nod, followed by a
more radical corrective jerk back into position.
After a period of absolute quiet, Keith said, “What would you like to
talk about, Travis?”
“I have a brain tumor, Pastor. Malignant, deadly, basically untreatable. If I had some money, I could fight it—radiation, chemo, the usual
routine—which might give me ten months, maybe a year. But it’s glioblastoma, grade four, and that means I’m a dead man. Half a year, a whole
year, it really doesn’t matter. I’ll be gone in a few months.” As if on cue, the
tumor said hello. Boyette grimaced and leaned forward and began massaging his temples. His breathing was heavy, labored, and his entire body
seemed to ache.
“I’m very sorry,” Keith said, realizing full well how inadequate he
sounded.
“Damned headaches,” Boyette said, his eyes still tightly closed. He
fought the pain for a few minutes as nothing was said. Keith watched helplessly, biting his tongue to keep from saying something stupid like, “Can
I get you some Tylenol?” Then the suffering eased, and Boyette relaxed.
“Sorry,” he said.
“When was this diagnosed?” Keith asked.
“I don’t know. A month ago. The headaches started at Lansing, back
in the summer. You can imagine the quality of health care there, so I got
no help. Once I was released and sent here, they took me to St. Francis
Hospital, ran tests, did the scans, found a nice little egg in the middle of
my head, right between the ears, too deep for surgery.” He took a deep
breath, exhaled, and managed his first smile. There was a tooth missing on
the upper left side and the gap was prominent. Keith suspected the dental
care in prison left something to be desired.
“I suppose you’ve seen people like me before,” Boyette said. “People
facing death.”
“From time to time. It goes with the territory.”
“And I suppose these folks tend to get real serious about God and heaven
and hell and all that stuff.”
“They do indeed. It’s human nature. When faced with our own mortality, we think about the afterlife. What about you, Travis? Do you believe
in God?”
“Some days I do, some days I don’t. But even when I do, I’m still pretty
skeptical. It’s easy for you to believe in God because you’ve had an easy life.
Different story for me.”
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“You want to tell me your story?”
“Not really.”
“Then why are you here, Travis?”
The tic. When his head was still again, his eyes looked around the room,
then settled on those of the pastor. They stared at each other for a long
time, neither blinking. Finally, Boyette said, “Pastor, I’ve done some bad
things. Hurt some innocent people. I’m not sure I want to take all of it to
my grave.”
Now we’re getting somewhere, Keith thought. The burden of unconfessed sin. The shame of buried guilt. “It would be helpful if you told me
about these bad things. Confession is the best place to start.”
“And this is confidential?”
“For the most part, yes, but there are exceptions.”
“What exceptions?”
“If you confide in me and I believe you’re a danger to yourself or to
someone else, then the confidentiality is waived. I can take reasonable steps
to protect you or the other person. In other words, I can go get help.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“Not really.”
“Look, Pastor, I’ve done some terrible things, but this one has nagged
at me for many years now. I gotta talk to someone, and I got no place else
to go. If I told you about a terrible crime that I committed years ago, you
can’t tell anyone?”
Dana went straight to the Web site for the Kansas Department of Corrections and within seconds plunged into the wretched life of Travis Dale
Boyette. Sentenced in 2001 to ten years for attempted sexual assault. Current status: incarcerated.
“Current status is in my husband’s office,” she mumbled as she continued hitting keys.
Sentenced in 1991 to twelve years for aggravated sexual battery in
Oklahoma. Paroled in 1998.
Sentenced in 1987 to eight years for attempted sexual battery in Missouri. Paroled in 1990.
Sentenced in 1979 to twenty years for aggravated sexual battery in
Arkansas. Paroled in 1985.
Boyette was a registered sex offender in Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas,
and Oklahoma.
“A monster,” she said to herself. His file photo was that of a much heavier
and much younger man with dark, thinning hair. She quickly summarized
his record and sent an e-mail to Keith’s desktop. She wasn’t worried about
her husband’s safety, but she wanted this creep out of the building.
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111
After half an hour of strained conversation and little progress, Keith
was beginning to tire of the meeting. Boyette showed no interest in God,
and since God was Keith’s area of expertise, there seemed little for him to
do. He wasn’t a brain surgeon. He had no jobs to offer.
A message arrived on his computer, its appearance made known by the
distant sound of an old-fashioned doorbell. Two chimes meant anyone
might be checking in. But three chimes signaled a message from the front
desk. He pretended to ignore it.
“What’s with the cane?” he asked pleasantly.
“Prison’s a rough place,” Boyette said. “Got in one fight too many. A
head injury. Probably led to the tumor.” He thought that was funny and
laughed at his own humor.
Keith obliged with a chuckle of his own, then stood, walked to his desk,
and said, “Well, let me give you one of my cards. Feel free to call anytime.
You’re always welcome here, Travis.” He picked up a card and glanced at
his monitor. Four, count ’em, four convictions, all related to sexual assault.
He walked back to the chair, handed Travis a card, and sat down.
“Prison’s especially rough for rapists, isn’t it, Travis?” Keith said.
You move to a new town; you’re required to hustle down to the police
station or the courthouse and register as a sex offender. After twenty years
of this, you just assume that everybody knows. Everybody’s watching. Boyette did not seem surprised. “Very rough,” he agreed. “I can’t remember
the times I’ve been attacked.”
“Travis, look, I’m not keen on discussing this subject. I have some
appointments. If you’d like to visit again, fine, just call ahead. And I welcome you back to our services this Sunday.” Keith wasn’t sure he meant
that, but he sounded sincere.
From a pocket of his Windbreaker, Boyette removed a folded sheet of
paper. “You ever hear of the case of Donté Drumm?” he asked as he
handed the paper to Keith.
“No.”
“Black kid, small town in East Texas, convicted of murder in 1999. Said
he killed a high school cheerleader, white girl, body’s never been found.”
Keith unfolded the sheet of paper. It was a copy of a brief article in the
Topeka newspaper, dated Sunday, the day before. Keith read it quickly and
looked at the mug shot of Donté Drumm. There was nothing remarkable
about the story, just another routine execution in Texas involving another
defendant claiming to be innocent. “The execution is set for this Thursday,” Keith said, looking up.
“I’ll tell you something, Pastor. They got the wrong guy. That kid had
nothing to do with her murder.”
“And how do you know this?”
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“There’s no evidence. Not one piece of evidence. The cops decided he
did it, beat a confession out of him, and now they’re going to kill him. It’s
wrong, Pastor. So wrong.”
“How do you know so much?”
Boyette leaned in closer, as if he might whisper something he’d never
uttered before. Keith’s pulse was increasing by the second. No words came,
though. Another long pause as the two men stared at each other.
“It says the body was never found,” Keith said. Make him talk.
“Right. They concocted this wild tale about the boy grabbing the girl,
raping her, choking her, and then throwing her body off a bridge into the
Red River. Total fabrication.”
“So you know where the body is?”
Boyette sat straight up and crossed his arms over his chest. He began
to nod. The tic. Then another tic. They happened quicker when he was
under pressure.
“Did you kill her, Travis?” Keith asked, stunned by his own question.
Not five minutes earlier, he was making a mental list of all the church
members he needed to visit in the hospitals. He was thinking of ways to
ease Travis out of the building. Now they were dancing around a murder
and a hidden body.
“I don’t know what to do,” Boyette said as another wave of pain hit
hard. He bent over as if to throw up and then began pressing both palms
against his head. “I’m dying, okay? I’ll be dead in a few months. Why
should that kid have to die too? He didn’t do anything.” His eyes were wet,
his face contorted.
Keith watched him as he trembled. He handed him a Kleenex and
watched as Travis wiped his face. “The tumor is growing,” he said. “Each
day it puts more pressure on the skull.”
“Do you have medications?”
“Some. They don’t work. I need to go.”
“I don’t think we’re finished.”
“Yes we are.”
“Where’s the body, Travis?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Yes I do. Maybe we can stop the execution.”
Boyette laughed. “Oh, really? Fat chance in Texas.” He slowly stood
and tapped his cane on the rug. “Thank you, Pastor.”
Keith did not stand. Instead, he watched Boyette shuffle quickly out of
his office.
Dana was staring at the door, refusing a smile. She managed a weak
“Good-bye” after he said “Thanks.” Then he was gone, back on the street
without a coat and gloves, and she really didn’t care.
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113
Her husband hadn’t moved. He was still slouched in his chair, dazed,
staring blankly at a wall and holding the copy of the newspaper article.
“You all right?” she asked. Keith handed her the article and she read it.
“I’m not connecting the dots here,” she said when she finished.
“Travis Boyette knows where the body is buried. He knows because he
killed her.”
“Did he admit he killed her?”
“Almost. He says he has an inoperable brain tumor and will be dead in
a few months. He says Donté Drumm had nothing to do with the murder.
He strongly implied that he knows where the body is.”
Dana fell onto the sofa and sank amid the pillows and throws. “And you
believe him?”
“He’s a career criminal, Dana, a con man. He’d rather lie than tell the
truth. You can’t believe a word he says.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I think so.”
“How can you believe him? Why?”
“He’s suffering, Dana. And not just from the tumor. He knows something about the murder, and the body. He knows a lot, and he’s genuinely
disturbed by the fact that an innocent man is facing an execution.”
For a man who spent much of his time listening to the delicate problems
of others, and offering advice and counsel that they relied on, Keith had
become a wise and astute observer. And he was seldom wrong. Dana was
much quicker on the draw, much more likely to criticize and judge and be
wrong about it. “So what are you thinking, Pastor?” she asked.
“Let’s take the next hour and do nothing but research. Let’s verify a few
things: Is he really on parole? If so, who is his parole officer? Is he being
treated at St. Francis? Does he have a brain tumor? If so, is it terminal?”
“It will be impossible to get his medical records without his consent.”
“Sure, but let’s see how much we can verify. Call Dr. Herzlich—was he
in church yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. Call him and fish around. He should be making rounds this
morning at St. Francis. Call the parole board and see how far you can dig.”
“And what might you be doing while I’m burning up the phones?”
“I’ll go online, see what I can find about the murder, the trial, the defendant, everything that happened down there.”
They both stood, in a hurry now. Dana said, “And what if it’s all true,
Keith? What if we convince ourselves that this creep is telling the truth?”
“Then we have to do something.”
“Such as?”
“I have no earthly idea.”
The Wave
Susan Casey
57.5° N, 12.7° W
175 MILES OFF THE COAST OF SCOTLAND
FEBRUARY 8, 2000
The clock read midnight when the hundred-foot wave hit the ship, rising
from the North Atlantic out of the darkness. Among the ocean’s terrors a
wave this size was the most feared and the least understood, more myth
than reality—or so people had thought. This giant was certainly real. As
the RRS Discovery plunged down into the wave’s deep trough, it heeled
twenty-eight degrees to port, rolled thirty degrees back to starboard, then
recovered to face the incoming seas. What chance did they have, the fortyseven scientists and crew aboard this research cruise gone horribly wrong?
A series of storms had trapped them in the black void east of Rockall, a
volcanic island nicknamed Waveland for the nastiness of its surrounding
waters. More than a thousand wrecked ships lay on the seafloor below.
Captain Keith Avery steered his vessel directly into the onslaught, just
as he’d been doing for the past five days. While weather like this was common in the cranky North Atlantic, these giant waves were unlike anything
he’d encountered in his thirty years of experience. And worse, they kept
rearing up from different directions. Flanking all sides of the 295-foot ship,
the crew kept a constant watch to make sure they weren’t about to be
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sucker punched by a wave that was sneaking up from behind, or from
the sides. No one wanted to be out here right now, but Avery knew their
only hope was to remain where they were, with their bow pointed into the
waves. Turning around was too risky; if one of these waves caught Discovery
broadside, there would be long odds on survival. It takes thirty tons per
square meter of force to dent a ship. A breaking hundred-foot wave packs
one hundred tons of force per square meter and can tear a ship in half.
Above all, Avery had to position Discovery so that it rode over these crests
and wasn’t crushed beneath them.
He stood barefoot at the helm, the only way he could maintain traction
after a refrigerator toppled over, splashing out a slick of milk, juice, and
broken glass (no time to clean it up—the waves just kept coming). Up on
the bridge everything was amplified, all the night noises and motions, the
slamming and the crashing, the elevator-shaft plunges into the troughs,
the frantic wind, the swaying and groaning of the ship; and now, as the
waves suddenly grew even bigger and meaner and steeper, Avery heard a
loud bang coming from Discovery’s foredeck. He squinted in the dark to see
that the fifty-man lifeboat had partially ripped from its two-inch-thick steel
cleats and was pounding against the hull.
Below deck, computers and furniture had been smashed into pieces.
The scientists huddled in their cabins nursing bruises, black eyes, and broken ribs. Attempts at rest were pointless. They heard the noises too; they
rode the free falls and the sickening barrel rolls; and they worried about
the fact that a six-foot-long window next to their lab had already shattered
from the twisting. Discovery was almost forty years old, and recently she’d
undergone major surgery. The ship had been cut in half, lengthened by
thirty-three feet, and then welded back together. Would the joints hold? No
one really knew. No one had ever been in conditions like these.
One of the two chief scientists, Penny Holliday, watched as a chair skidded out from under her desk, swung into the air, and crashed onto her
bunk. Holliday, fine boned, porcelain-doll pretty, and as tough as any man
on board the ship, had sent an e-mail to her boyfriend, Craig Harris, earlier in the day. “This isn’t funny anymore,” she wrote. “The ocean just looks completely out of control.” So much white spray was whipping off the waves that
she had the strange impression of being in a blizzard. This was Waveland
all right, an otherworldly place of constant motion that took you nowhere
but up and down; where there was no sleep, no comfort, no connection to
land, and where human eyes and stomachs struggled to adapt, and failed.
Ten days ago Discovery had left port in Southampton, England, on what
Holliday had hoped would be a typical three-week trip to Iceland and back
(punctuated by a little seasickness perhaps, but nothing major). Along the
way they’d stop and sample the water for salinity, temperature, oxygen,
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and other nutrients. From these tests the scientists would draw a picture of
what was happening out there, how the ocean’s basic characteristics were
shifting, and why.
These are not small questions on a planet that is 71 percent covered
in salt water. As the Earth’s climate changes—as the inner atmosphere
becomes warmer, as the winds increase, as the oceans heat up—what does
all this mean for us? Trouble, most likely, and Holliday and her colleagues
were in the business of finding out how much and what kind. It was deeply
frustrating for them to be lashed to their bunks rather than out on the deck
lowering their instruments. No one was thinking about Iceland anymore.
The trip was far from a loss, however. During the endless trains of massive waves, Discovery itself was collecting data that would lead to a chilling
revelation. The ship was ringed with instruments; everything that happened out there was being precisely measured, the sea’s fury captured in
tight graphs and unassailable numbers. Months later, long after Avery had
returned everyone safely to the Southampton docks, when Holliday began
to analyze these figures, she would discover that the waves they had experienced were the largest ever scientifically recorded in the open ocean. The
significant wave height, an average of the largest 33 percent of the waves,
was sixty-one feet, with frequent spikes far beyond that. At the same time,
none of the state-of-the-art weather forecasts and wave models—the information upon which all ships, oil rigs, fisheries, and passenger boats rely—
had predicted these behemoths. In other words, under this particular set
of weather conditions, waves this size should not have existed. And yet
they did.
Born to Run
Christopher McDougall
FOR DAYS, I’d been searching Mexico’s Sierra Madre for the phantom
known as Caballo Blanco—the White Horse. I’d finally arrived at the end of
the trail, in the last place I expected to find him—not deep in the wilderness he was said to haunt, but in the dim lobby of an old hotel on the edge
of a dusty desert town.
“Sí, El Caballo está,” the desk clerk said, nodding. Yes, the Horse is here.
“For real?” After hearing that I’d just missed him so many times, in so
many bizarre locations, I’d begun to suspect that Caballo Blanco was nothing more than a fairy tale, a local Loch Ness monstruo dreamed up to spook
the kids and fool gullible gringos.
“He’s always back by five,” the clerk added. “It’s like a ritual.”
I didn’t know whether to hug her in relief or high-five her in triumph.
I checked my watch. That meant I’d actually lay eyes on the ghost in less
than . . . hang on.
“But it’s already after six.”
The clerk shrugged. “Maybe he’s gone away.”
I sagged into an ancient sofa. I was filthy, famished, and defeated. I was
exhausted, and so were my leads.
Some said Caballo Blanco was a fugitive; others heard he was a boxer
who’d run off to punish himself after beating a man to death in the ring.
No one knew his name, or age, or where he was from. He was like some
Old West gunslinger whose only traces were tall tales and a whiff of cigarillo smoke. Descriptions and sightings were all over the map; villagers who
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lived impossible distances apart swore they’d seen him traveling on foot on
the same day, and described him on a scale that swung wildly from “funny
and simpático” to “freaky and gigantic.”
But in all versions of the Caballo Blanco legend, certain basic details
were always the same: He’d come to Mexico years ago and trekked deep
into the wild, impenetrable Barrancas del Cobre—the Copper Canyons—
to live among the Tarahumara, a near-mythical tribe of Stone Age superathletes. The Tarahumara (pronounced Spanish-style by swallowing the
“h”: Tara-oo-mara) may be the healthiest and most serene people on earth,
and the greatest runners of all time.
When it comes to ultra distances, nothing can beat a Tarahumara runner—not a racehorse, not a cheetah, not an Olympic marathoner. Very few
outsiders have ever seen the Tarahumara in action, but amazing stories of
their superhuman toughness and tranquillity have drifted out of the canyons for centuries. One explorer swore he saw a Tarahumara catch a deer
with his bare hands, chasing the bounding animal until it finally dropped
dead from exhaustion, “its hoofs falling off.” Another adventurer spent ten
hours climbing up and over a Copper Canyon mountain by mule; a Tarahumara runner made the same trip in ninety minutes.
“Try this,” a Tarahumara woman once told an exhausted explorer
who’d collapsed at the base of a mountain. She handed him a gourd full
of a murky liquid. He swallowed a few gulps, and was amazed to feel new
energy pulsing in his veins. He got to his feet and scaled the peak like an
overcaffeinated Sherpa. The Tarahumara, the explorer would later report,
also guarded the recipe to a special energy food that leaves them trim, powerful, and unstoppable: a few mouthfuls packed enough nutritional punch
to let them run all day without rest.
But whatever secrets the Tarahumara are hiding, they’ve hidden them
well. To this day, the Tarahumara live in the side of cliffs higher than a
hawk’s nest in a land few have ever seen. The Barrancas are a lost world
in the most remote wilderness in North America, a sort of a shorebound
Bermuda Triangle known for swallowing the misfits and desperadoes who
stray inside. Lots of bad things can happen down there, and probably will;
survive the man-eating jaguars, deadly snakes, and blistering heat, and
you’ve still got to deal with “canyon fever,” a potentially fatal freak-out
brought on by the Barrancas’ desolate eeriness. The deeper you penetrate
into the Barrancas, the more it feels like a crypt sliding shut around you.
The walls tighten, shadows spread, phantom echoes whisper; every route
out seems to end in sheer rock. Lost prospectors would be gripped by such
madness and despair, they’d slash their own throats or hurl themselves off
cliffs. Little surprise that few strangers have ever seen the Tarahumara’s
homeland—let alone the Tarahumara.
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But somehow the White Horse had made his way to the depths of
the Barrancas. And there, it’s said, he was adopted by the Tarahumara
as a friend and kindred spirit; a ghost among ghosts. He’d certainly mastered two Tarahumara skills—invisibility and extraordinary endurance—
because even though he was spotted all over the canyons, no one seemed
to know where he lived or when he might appear next. If anyone could
translate the ancient secrets of the Tarahumara, I was told, it was this lone
wanderer of the High Sierras.
I’d become so obsessed with finding Caballo Blanco that as I dozed on
the hotel sofa, I could even imagine the sound of his voice. “Probably like
Yogi Bear ordering burritos at Taco Bell,” I mused. A guy like that, a wanderer who’d go anywhere but fit in nowhere, must live inside his own head
and rarely hear his own voice. He’d make weird jokes and crack himself
up. He’d have a booming laugh and atrocious Spanish. He’d be loud and
chatty and . . . and . . .
Wait. I was hearing him. My eyes popped open to see a dusty cadaver
in a tattered straw hat bantering with the desk clerk. Trail dust streaked his
gaunt face like fading war paint, and the shocks of sun-bleached hair sticking out from under the hat could have been trimmed with a hunting knife.
He looked like a castaway on a desert island, even to the way he seemed
hungry for conversation with the bored clerk.
“Caballo?” I croaked.
The cadaver turned, smiling, and I felt like an idiot. He didn’t look wary;
he looked confused, as any tourist would when confronted by a deranged
man on a sofa suddenly hollering “Horse!”
This wasn’t Caballo. There was no Caballo. The whole thing was a
hoax, and I’d fallen for it.
Then the cadaver spoke. “You know me?”
“Man!” I exploded, scrambling to my feet. “Am I glad to see you!”
The smile vanished. The cadaver’s eyes darted toward the door, making
it clear that in another second, he would as well.
The Tiger
John Vaillant
Shortly after dark on the afternoon of December 5, 1997, an urgent message was relayed to a man named Yuri Trush at his home in Luchegorsk,
a mid-sized mining town in Primorye Territory in Russia’s Far East, not
far from the Chinese border. Primorye (Pri-mor-ya) is, among other things,
the last stronghold of the Siberian tiger, and the official on the line had
some disturbing news: a man had been attacked near Sobolonye, a small
logging community located in the deep forest, sixty miles northeast of
Luchegorsk. Yuri Trush was the squad leader of an Inspection Tiger unit,
one of six in the territory whose purpose was to investigate forest crimes,
specifically those involving tigers. Because poachers were often involved,
these included tiger attacks. As a result, this situation—whatever it might
entail—was now Trush’s problem and, right away, he began preparing for
the trip to Sobolonye.
Early the following morning—Saturday—Yuri Trush, along with his
squadmates Alexander Gorborukov and Sasha Lazurenko, piled into a
surplus army truck and rumbled north. Dressed in insulated fatigues and
camouflage, and armed with knives, pistols, and semiautomatic rifles, the
Tigers, as these inspectors are sometimes called, looked less like game wardens than like some kind of wilderness SWAT team. Their twenty-yearold truck was nicknamed a Kung, and it was the Russian army’s four-ton
equivalent to the Unimog and the Humvee. Gasoline-powered, with a
winch, four-wheel-drive, and wide waist-high tires, it is a popular vehicle in
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Primorye’s hinterlands. Along with a gun rack and brackets for extra fuel
cans, this one had been modified to accommodate makeshift bunks, and
was stocked with enough food to last four men a week. It was also equipped
with a wood stove so that, even in the face of total mechanical failure,
the crew could survive no matter where in the wilderness they happened
to be.
After passing through the police checkpoint on the edge of town, the
Tigers continued on up to a dirt road turnoff that led eastward along the
Bikin (be-keen) River, a large and meandering waterway that flows through
some of the most isolated country in northern Primorye. The temperature
was well below freezing and the snow was deep, and this slowed the heavy
truck’s progress. It also allowed these men, all of whom were experienced
hunters and former soldiers, many hours to ponder and discuss what might
be awaiting them. It is safe to say that nothing in their experience could
have prepared them for what they found there.
Primorye, which is also known as the Maritime Territory, is about the size
of Washington state. Tucked into the southeast corner of Russia by the Sea
of Japan, it is a thickly forested and mountainous region that combines the
backwoods claustrophobia of Appalachia with the frontier roughness of
the Yukon. Industry here is of the crudest kind: logging, mining, fishing,
and hunting, all of which are complicated by poor wages, corrupt officials,
thriving black markets—and some of the world’s largest cats.
One of the many negative effects of perestroika and the reopening of
the border between Russia and China has been a surge in tiger poaching. As the economy disintegrated and unemployment spread throughout
the 1990s, professional poachers, businessmen, and ordinary citizens alike
began taking advantage of the forest’s wealth in all its forms. The tigers,
because they are so rare and so valuable, have been particularly hard hit:
their organs, blood, and bone are much sought after for use in traditional
Chinese medicine. Some believe the tiger’s whiskers will make them bulletproof and that its powdered bones will soothe their aches and pains.
Others believe its penis will make them virile, and there are many—from
Tokyo to Moscow—who will pay thousands of dollars for a tiger’s skin.
Between 1992 and 1994, approximately one hundred tigers—roughly
one quarter of the country’s wild population—were killed. Most of them
ended up in China. With financial assistance (and pressure) from international conservation agencies, the territorial government created Inspection
Tiger in the hope of restoring some semblance of law and order to the
forests of Primorye. Armed with guns, cameras, and broad police powers, these teams were charged with intercepting poachers and resolving a
steadily increasing number of conflicts between tigers and human beings.
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In many ways, Inspection Tiger’s mandate resembles that of detectives
on a narcotics detail, and so does the risk: the money is big, and the players
are often desperate and dangerous individuals. Tigers are similar to drugs
in that they are sold by the gram and the kilo, and their value increases
according to the refinement of both product and seller. But there are some
key differences: tigers can weigh six hundred pounds; they have been hunting large prey, including humans, for two million years; and they have a
memory. For these reasons, tigers can be as dangerous to the people trying
to protect them as they are to those who would profit from them.
The territory covered by Yuri Trush’s Inspection Tiger unit in the mid1990s was centered on the Bikin River. You can drive a truck on the Bikin
in winter, but in summer it has a languid bayou feel. For many of the valley’s jobless inhabitants, the laws imposed by the river and the forest are
more relevant than those of the local government. While most residents
here poach game simply to survive, there are those among them who are
in it for the money.
In 1997, Inspection Tiger had been in existence for only three years;
given the state of the Russian economy in the 1990s, its members were
lucky to have jobs, particularly because they were paid in dollars by foreign
conservation groups. Four hundred dollars a month was an enviable wage
at that time, but a lot was expected in return. Whether they were doing
routine checks of hunters’ documents in the forest, searching suspect cars
en route to the Chinese border, or setting up sting operations, most of
the people Inspection Tiger dealt with were armed. As often as not, these
encounters took place in remote areas where backup was simply not available, and they never knew what they were going to find.
Following perestroika, virtually everything in Russia went on sale, and
vast quantities of military ordnance disappeared from local armories. In
the course of their raids on the many anonymous hunting cabins that dot
the forest here, Trush and his men confiscated plastic explosives, TNT, and
12mm (.50 caliber) machine guns, robbed from armored vehicles. Trush
could not imagine what one would do with guns that size in the forest,
but the explosives were easier to explain: they were used in creeks to kill
fish en masse, or to blow bears out of their dens. The Asian market is less
interested in the intact skins or carcasses of bears than it is in their paws
and gall bladders; the paws go into soup, and the gall bladders are used
for medicinal purposes. In Primorye, in the mid-1990s, life, for man and
animal alike, was cheap, and corruption was widespread at every level of
government. During these years, Trush made busts involving high-ranking
police officers and members of parliament, and these were dangerous enemies for a person to have.
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Trush, however, was well suited to this work because he can be dangerous, too. Trush stands about six-foot-two with long arms and legs and
a broad chest. His eyes are colored, coincidentally, like the semiprecious
stone tiger’s eye, with black rings around the irises. They peer out from
a frank and homely face framed by great, drooping brows. Though frail
and sickly as a boy, Trush grew into a talented athlete with a commanding presence, a deep resonant voice, and an ability to remain composed
under highly stressful circumstances. He is also immensely strong. As a
young soldier in Kazakhstan, in the 1970s, Trush won a dozen regional
kayaking championships for which he earned the Soviet rank Master of
Sports, a distinction that meant he was eligible to compete at the national
level. It was a serious undertaking: he wasn’t just racing against Bulgarians
and East Germans. “I was,” he said, “defending the honor of the Military
Forces of the USSR.” In his mid-forties, when he joined Inspection Tiger,
Trush won a territory-wide weightlifting competition three years running.
This was not the kind of weightlifting one is likely to see in the Olympics;
what Trush was doing looks more like a contest devised by bored artillerymen during the Napoleonic Wars. It consists of hefting a kettlebell—
essentially a large cannonball with a handle—from the ground over your
head as many times as you can, first with one hand, and then the other.
Kettlebells are a Russian invention; they have been around for centuries
and their use clearly favors the short and the stocky. So it is surprising to see
someone as attenuated as Trush, who has the Law of the Lever weighted
so heavily against him, heave these seventy-pound spheres around with
such apparent ease.
Trush learned to shoot, first, from his father and, later, in the army. He
also studied karate, aikido, and knife handling; in these, his rangy build
works to his advantage because his long reach makes it nearly impossible
to get at him. He is so talented at hand-to-hand fighting that he was hired
to teach these skills to the military police. Trush’s physicality is intense and
often barely suppressed. He is a grabber, a hugger, and a roughhouser, but
the hands initiating—and controlling—these games are thinly disguised
weapons. His fists are knuckled mallets, and he can break bricks with them.
As he runs through the motions of an immobilizing hold, or lines up an
imaginary strike, one has the sense that his body hungers for opportunities
to do these things in earnest. Referring to a former colleague who went
bad and whom he tried for years to catch red-handed, Trush said, “He
knows very well that I am capable of beheading him with my bare hands.”
This tension—between the kind and playful neighbor, friend and husband,
and the Alpha male wilderness cop ready to throw down at a moment’s
notice—energizes almost every interaction. It is under the latter circumstances that Trush seems most alive.
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The deeper Trush and his men drove into the forest, the rougher the road
became. Once past Verkhny Pereval, their route took them through the
snowbound village of Yasenovie, a sister logging community of the same
size and vintage as Sobolonye. Here, they picked up a young deputy sheriff
named Bush, but his presence on this mission was more formal than practical. Bush was a cop, and tiger attacks were beyond his purview; however,
if there was a body, he was required to witness it. With Bush onboard, they
trundled on upriver.
It was already afternoon by the time they reached Sobolonye, an impoverished village of unpainted log houses that at first glance seemed barely
inhabited. Gorborukov was behind the wheel, and here he steered the truck
off the main road, such as it was, and plunged into the forest on a track
wide enough for only a single vehicle. Several inches of new snow had
fallen earlier in the week and, as they drove, Trush scanned the roadside for
fresh tracks. They were about fifty miles from the nearest paved road and
a couple of hard-won miles east of Sobolonye when they crossed a wide
and improbably located gravel highway. This road had been conceived
during Soviet times as an alternative to Primorye’s only existing north–
south throughway, which follows the Ussuri River north to Khabarovsk
(the same route used by the Trans-Siberian Railway). Despite handling
every kind of traffic, including transcontinental freight trucks, the Ussuri
road is poorly maintained and only as wide as a residential street; it was
also considered vulnerable to Chinese attack. This new highway, though
safer, wider, and ruler-straight, was never finished and so it is essentially
a highway to nowhere—in the middle of nowhere. The only people who
benefit from it now are loggers, poachers, and smugglers—pretty much
the only people around who can afford a vehicle. But sometimes tigers use
this highway, too.
There is an unintended courtesy in the winter forest that occurs around
pathways of any kind. It takes a lot of energy to break a trail through the
snow, especially when it’s crusty or deep, so whoever goes first, whether
animal, human, or machine, is performing a valuable service for those following behind. Because energy—i.e., food—is at a premium in the winter,
labor-saving gifts of this kind are rarely refused. As long as the footpath,
logging road, frozen river—or highway—is going more or less in the desired
direction, other forest creatures will use it, too, regardless of who made it.
In this way, paths have a funneling, river-like effect on the tributary creatures around them, and they can make for some strange encounters.
The last three miles of the journey were on a logging track so tortuous
and convoluted that even a veteran Russian backcountry driver is moved to
shout, in a torrent of fricatives and rolling Rs, “Paris–Dakar! Camel Trophy!” The road contoured east through the rolling woods, crossing creeks
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on bridges made of log piles stacked at right angles to the road. Two miles
short of a privately owned logging camp, Gorborukov took an unmarked
turn and headed north. After a few minutes, he pulled up at a clearing, on
the far side of which stood a cabin.
The cabin belonged to Vladimir Markov, a resident of Sobolonye, and
a man best known for keeping bees. The crude structure stood by itself on
the high side of a gentle south-facing slope, surrounded by a thick forest
of birch, pine, and alder. It was a lonely spot but a lovely one and, under
different circumstances, Trush might have seen its appeal. Now there was
no time; it was three o’clock in the afternoon and the sun was already in
the southwest, level with the treetops. Any warmth generated during this
brief, bright day was quickly dissipating.
The first sign of trouble was the crows. Carrion crows will follow a
tiger the same way seagulls follow a fishing boat: by sticking with a proven
winner, they conserve energy and shift the odds of getting fed from If to
When. When Trush and his men climbed down from the Kung, they heard
the crows’ raucous kvetching concentrated just west of the entrance road.
Trush noted the way their dark bodies swirled and flickered above the trees
and, even if he hadn’t been warned ahead of time, this would have told
him all he needed to know: something big was dead, or dying, and it was
being guarded.
Parked in front of Markov’s cabin was a heavy truck belonging to Markov’s good friend and beekeeping partner, Danila Zaitsev, a reserved and
industrious man in his early forties. Zaitsev was a skilled mechanic and his
truck, another cast-off from the military, was one of the few vehicles still
functioning in Sobolonye. With Zaitsev were Sasha Dvornik and Andrei
Onofreychuk, both family men in their early thirties who often hunted and
fished with Markov. It was evident from their haggard appearance that
they had barely slept the night before.
Judging from the density of tracks, there had clearly been a lot of activity around the cabin. Several different species were represented and their
trails overlaid each other so that, at first, it was hard to sort them out. Trush
approached this tangled skein of information like a detective: somewhere
in here was a beginning and an end, and somewhere, too, was a motive—
perhaps several. Downhill from the cabin, closer to the entrance road, two
tracks in particular caught his attention. One set traveled northward up
the entrance road at a walking pace; the other traveled south from the
cabin. They approached each other directly, as if the meeting had been
intentional—like an appointment of some kind. The southbound tracks
were noteworthy, not just because they were made by a tiger, but because
there were large gaps—ten feet or more—between each set of impressions.
At the point where they met, the northbound tracks disappeared, as if the
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person who made them had simply ceased to exist. Here the large paw
prints veered off to the west, crossing the entrance road at right angles.
Their regular spacing indicated a walking pace; they led into the forest,
directly toward the crows.
Trush had a video camera with him and its unblinking eye recorded
the scene in excruciating detail. Only in retrospect does it strike one how
steady Trush’s hand and voice are as he films the site, narrating as he goes:
the rough cabin and the scrubby clearing in which it stands; the path of the
attack and the point of impact, and then the long trail of horrific evidence.
The camera doesn’t waver as it pans across the pink and trampled snow,
taking in the hind foot of a dog, a single glove, and then a bloodstained
jacket cuff before halting at a patch of bare ground about a hundred yards
into the forest. At this point the audio picks up a sudden, retching gasp. It
is as if he has entered Grendel’s den.
The temperature is thirty below zero and yet, here, the snow has been
completely melted away. In the middle of this dark circle, presented like
some kind of sacrificial offering, is a hand without an arm and a head
without a face. Nearby is a long bone, a femur probably, that has been
gnawed to a bloodless white. Beyond this, the trail continues deeper into
the woods. Trush follows it, squinting through his camera while his squad
and Markov’s friends trail closely behind. The only sounds are the icy creak
of Trush’s boots and the distant barking of his dog. Seven men have been
stunned to silence. Not a sob; not a curse.
Trush’s hunting dog, a little Laika, is further down the trail, growing
increasingly shrill and agitated. Her nose is tingling with blood scent and
tiger musk, and she alone feels free to express her deepest fear: the tiger is
there, somewhere up ahead. Trush’s men have their rifles off their shoulders, and they cover him as he films. They arrive at another melted spot;
this time, a large oval. Here, amid the twigs and leaf litter, is all that remains
of Vladimir Ilyich Markov. It looks at first like a heap of laundry until one
sees the boots, luminous stubs of broken bone protruding from the tops,
the tattered shirt with an arm still fitted to one of the sleeves.
Trush had never seen a fellow human so thoroughly and gruesomely
annihilated and, even as he filmed, his mind fled to the edges of the scene,
taking refuge in peripheral details. He was struck by the poverty of this
man—that he would be wearing thin rubber boots in such bitter weather.
He reflected on the cartridge belt—loaded but for three shells—and wondered where the gun had gone. Meanwhile, Trush’s dog, Gitta, is racing
back and forth, hackles raised and barking in alarm. The tiger is somewhere close by—invisible to the men, but to the dog it is palpably, almost
unbearably, present. The men, too, can sense a potency around them—
something larger than their own fear, and they glance about, unsure where
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to look. They are so overwhelmed by the wreckage before them that it is
hard to distinguish imminent danger from the present horror.
Save for the movements of the dog and the men, the forest has gone
absolutely still; even the crows have withdrawn, waiting for this latest disturbance to pass. And so, it seems, has the tiger. Then, there is a sound: a
brief, rushing exhale—the kind one would use to extinguish a candle. But
there is something different about the volume of air being moved, and the
force behind it—something bigger and deeper: this is not a human sound.
At the same moment, perhaps ten yards ahead, the tip of a low fir branch
spontaneously sheds its load of snow. The flakes powder down to the forest
floor; the men freeze in mid-breath and, once again, all is still.
Since well before the Kung’s engine noise first penetrated the forest, a
conversation of sorts has been unfolding in this lonesome hollow. It is not
in a language like Russian or Chinese, but it is a language nonetheless,
and it is older than the forest. The crows speak it; the dog speaks it; the
tiger speaks it, and so do the men—some more fluently than others. That
single blast of breath contained a message lethal in its eloquence. But what
does one do with such information so far from one’s home ground? Gitta
tightens the psychic leash connecting her to her master. Markov’s friends,
already shaken to the core, pull in closer, too. The tiger’s latest communication serves not only to undo these men still further, but to deepen the invisible chasm between them—poachers to a man—and the armed officials on
whom their liberty and safety now depend. Markov’s friends are known to
Trush because he has busted them before—for possessing illegal firearms
and hunting without a license. Of the three of them, only Zaitsev’s gun is
legal, but it is too light to stop a tiger. As for the others, their weapons are
now hidden in the forest, leaving them more helpless than Trush’s dog.
Trush is unarmed, too. There had been some back-and-forth at the
entrance road about who was going to follow that grisly trail, and comments were made implying that Trush and his men didn’t have what it
took. Fear is not a sin in the taiga, but cowardice is, and Trush returned the
challenge with a crisp invitation: “Poshli”—“Let’s go.” One of Markov’s
friends—Sasha Dvornik, as Trush recalled—then suggested that Trush’s
team could handle it themselves. Besides, he said, they had no weapons.
Trush called his bluff by urging him to fetch his unregistered gun from
hiding. “This is no time to be confiscating guns,” he said. “What’s important now is to protect ourselves.” Still, Dvornik hesitated, and this is when
Trush offered him his rifle. It was a bold gesture on several levels: not only
did it imply an expectation of trust and cooperation, but Trush’s semiautomatic was a far better weapon than Dvornik’s battered smoothbore. It
also short-circuited the argument: now, there was no excuse, and no way
that Dvornik—with six men watching—could honorably refuse. It was this
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same mix of shame, fear, and loyalty that compelled Zaitsev and Onofrecuk to go along, too. Besides, there was safety in numbers.
But it had been a long time since Dvornik was in the army, and Trush’s
weapon felt strangely heavy in his hands; Trush, meanwhile, was feeling
the absence of its reassuring weight, and that was strange, too. He still had
his pistol, but it was holstered and, in any case, it would have been virtually
useless against a tiger. His faith rested with his squad mates because he had
put himself in an extremely vulnerable position: even though he was leading the way, he did so at an electronic remove—in this drama but not of it,
exploring this dreadful surreality through the camera’s narrow, cyclopean
lens. Because Zaitsev and Dvornik couldn’t be counted on, and Deputy
Bush had only a pistol, the Tigers were Trush’s only reliable proxies. Those
with guns had them at the ready, but the forest was dense and visibility was
poor. Were the tiger to attack, they could end up shooting one another. So
they held their fire, eyes darting back and forth to that single, bare branch,
wondering where the next sign would come from.
Behind the camera, Trush remained strangely calm. “We clearly see
the tiger’s tracks going away from the remains,” he continued in his understated official drone, while Gitta barked incessantly, stiff-legged and staring.
“ . . . the dog clearly indicates that the tiger went this way.”
Up ahead, the tiger’s tracks showed plainly in the snow, brought into
sharp relief by the shadows now pooling within them. The animal was
maneuvering northward to higher ground, the place every cat prefers to
be. “It looks like the tiger’s not too far,” Trush intoned to future viewers,
“around forty yards.” The snow wasn’t deep and, under those conditions,
a tiger could cover forty yards in about four seconds. This may have been
why Trush chose that moment to shut off his camera, reclaim his gun, and
step back into real time. But once there, he was going to have to make a
difficult decision.
In his professional capacity as senior inspector for Inspection Tiger,
Trush acted as a medium between the Law of the Jungle and the Law
of the State; one is instinctive and often spontaneous while the other is
contrived and always cumbersome. The two are, by their very natures,
incompatible. When he was in the field, Trush usually had no means of
contacting his superiors, or anyone else for that matter; his walkie-talkies
had limited range (when they worked at all) so he and his squad mates
were profoundly on their own. Because of this, Trush’s job required a lot
of judgment calls, and he was going to have to make one now: the tiger
is a “Red Book” species—protected in Russia—so permission to kill had
to come from Moscow. Trush did not yet have this permission, but it was
Saturday, Moscow might as well have been the moon, and they had an
opportunity to end this now.
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Trush decided to track it. This had not been part of the plan; he had
been sent to investigate an attack, not to hunt a tiger. Furthermore, his
team was short a man, dusk was coming on, and Markov’s friends were a
liability; they were still in shock and so, for that matter, was Trush. But at
that moment, he was poised—equidistant between the tiger and the harrowing evidence of what it had done. The two would never be so close
again. Signaling Lazurenko to follow, Trush set off up the trail, knowing
that every step would take him deeper into the tiger’s comfort zone.
A Visit From the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. Sasha was
adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on
the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vault-like door of a toilet stall. Inside
the rim of the bag, barely visible, was a wallet made of pale green leather.
It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing woman’s
blind trust had provoked her: We live in a city where people will steal the hair off
your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight
and expect it to be waiting for you when you come back? It made her want to teach
the woman a lesson. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling
Sasha always had: that fat, tender wallet, offering itself to her hand—it
seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the
moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to
the wind, live dangerously (“I get it,” Coz, her therapist, said), and take the
fucking thing.
“You mean steal it.”
He was trying to get Sasha to use that word, which was harder to avoid
in the case of a wallet than with a lot of the things she’d lifted over the past
year, when her condition (as Coz referred to it) had begun to accelerate:
five sets of keys, fourteen pairs of sunglasses, a child’s striped scarf, binoculars, a cheese grater, a pocketknife, twenty-eight bars of soap, and eightyfive pens, ranging from cheap ballpoints she’d used to sign debit card slips
to the aubergine Visconti that cost two hundred sixty dollars online, which
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she’d lifted from her former boss’s lawyer during a contracts meeting. Sasha
no longer took anything from stores—their cold, inert goods didn’t tempt
her. Only from people.
“Okay,” she said. “Steal it.”
Sasha and Coz had dubbed that feeling she got the “personal challenge,” as in: taking the wallet was a way for Sasha to assert her toughness,
her individuality. What they needed to do was switch things around in her
head so that the challenge became not taking the wallet but leaving it. That
would be the cure, although Coz never used words like “cure.” He wore
funky sweaters and let her call him Coz, but he was old school inscrutable,
to the point where Sasha couldn’t tell if he was gay or straight, if he’d written famous books, or if (as she sometimes suspected) he was one of those
escaped cons who impersonate surgeons and wind up leaving their operating tools inside people’s skulls. Of course, these questions could have been
resolved on Google in less than a minute, but they were useful questions
(according to Coz), and so far, Sasha had resisted.
The couch where she lay in his office was blue leather and very soft. Coz
liked the couch, he’d told her, because it relieved them both of the burden
of eye contact. “You don’t like eye contact?” Sasha had asked. It seemed
like a weird thing for a therapist to admit.
“I find it tiring,” he’d said. “This way, we can both look where we
want.”
“Where will you look?”
He smiled. “You can see my options.”
“Where do you usually look? When people are on the couch.”
“Around the room,” Coz said. “At the ceiling. Into space.”
“Do you ever sleep?”
“No.”
Sasha usually looked at the window, which faced the street, and tonight,
as she continued her story, was rippled with rain. She’d glimpsed the wallet, tender and overripe as a peach. She’d plucked it from the woman’s bag
and slipped it into her own small handbag, which she’d zipped shut before
the sound of peeing had stopped. She’d flicked open the bathroom door
and floated back through the lobby to the bar. She and the wallet’s owner
had never seen each other.
Prewallet, Sasha had been in the grip of a dire evening: lame date (yet
another) brooding behind dark bangs, sometimes glancing at the flatscreen
TV, where a Jets game seemed to interest him more than Sasha’s admittedly overhandled tales of Bennie Salazar, her old boss, who was famous
for founding the Sow’s Ear record label and who also (Sasha happened
to know) sprinkled gold flakes into his coffee—as an aphrodisiac, she suspected—and sprayed pesticide in his armpits.
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Postwallet, however, the scene tingled with mirthful possibility. Sasha
felt the waiters eyeing her as she sidled back to the table holding her handbag with its secret weight. She sat down and took a sip of her Melon Madness Martini and cocked her head at Alex. She smiled her yes/no smile.
“Hello,” she said.
The yes/no smile was amazingly effective.
“You’re happy,” Alex said.
“I’m always happy,” Sasha said. “Sometimes I just forget.”
Alex had paid the bill while she was in the bathroom—clear proof that
he’d been on the verge of aborting their date. Now he studied her. “You
feel like going somewhere else?”
They stood. Alex wore black cords and a white button-up shirt. He was
a legal secretary. On e-mail he’d been fanciful, almost goofy, but in person
he seemed simultaneously anxious and bored. She could tell that he was in
excellent shape, not from going to the gym but from being young enough
that his body was still imprinted with whatever sports he’d played in high
school and college. Sasha, who was thirty-five, had passed that point. Still,
not even Coz knew her real age. The closest anyone had come to guessing
it was thirty-one, and most put her in her twenties. She worked out daily
and avoided the sun. Her online profiles all listed her as twenty-eight.
As she followed Alex from the bar, she couldn’t resist unzipping her
purse and touching the fat green wallet just for a second, for the contraction it made her feel around her heart.
“You’re aware of how the theft makes you feel,” Coz said. “To the point
where you remind yourself of it to improve your mood. But do you think
about how it makes the other person feel?”
Sasha tipped back her head to look at him. She made a point of doing
this now and then, just to remind Coz that she wasn’t an idiot—she knew
the question had a right answer. She and Coz were collaborators, writing
a story whose end had already been determined: she would get well. She
would stop stealing from people and start caring again about the things
that had once guided her: music; the network of friends she’d made when
she first came to New York; a set of goals she’d scrawled on a big sheet of
newsprint and taped to the walls of her early apartments:
Find a band to manage
Understand the news
Study Japanese
Practice the harp
“I don’t think about the people,” Sasha said.
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“But it isn’t that you lack empathy,” Coz said. “We know that, because
of the plumber.”
Sasha sighed. She’d told Coz the plumber story about a month ago,
and he’d found a way to bring it up at almost every session since. The
plumber was an old man, sent by Sasha’s landlord to investigate a leak in
the apartment below hers. He’d appeared in Sasha’s doorway, tufts of gray
on his head, and within a minute—boom— he’d hit the floor and crawled
under her bathtub like an animal fumbling its way into a familiar hole.
The fingers he’d groped toward the bolts behind the tub were grimed to
cigar stubs, and reaching made his sweatshirt hike up, exposing a soft white
back. Sasha turned away, stricken by the old man’s abasement, anxious to
leave for her temp job, except that the plumber was talking to her, asking
about the length and frequency of her showers. “I never use it,” she told
him curtly. “I shower at the gym.” He nodded without acknowledging her
rudeness, apparently used to it. Sasha’s nose began to prickle; she shut her
eyes and pushed hard on both temples.
Opening her eyes, she saw the plumber’s tool belt lying on the floor at
her feet. It had a beautiful screwdriver in it, the orange translucent handle
gleaming like a lollipop in its worn leather loop, the silvery shaft sculpted,
sparkling. Sasha felt herself contract around the object in a single yawn of
appetite; she needed to hold the screwdriver, just for a minute. She bent
her knees and plucked it noiselessly from the belt. Not a bangle jangled;
her bony hands were spastic at most things, but she was good at this—made
for it, she often thought, in the first drifty moments after lifting something.
And once the screwdriver was in her hand, she felt instant relief from the
pain of having an old soft-backed man snuffling under her tub, and then
something more than relief: a blessed indifference, as if the very idea of
feeling pain over such a thing were baffling.
“And what about after he’d gone?” Coz had asked when Sasha told him
the story. “How did the screwdriver look to you then?”
There was a pause. “Normal,” she said.
“Really. Not special anymore?”
“Like any screwdriver.”
Sasha had heard Coz shift behind her and felt something happen in the
room: the screwdriver, which she’d placed on the table (recently supplemented with a second table) where she kept the things she’d lifted, and
which she’d barely looked at since, seemed to hang in the air of Coz’s
office. It floated between them: a symbol.
“And how did you feel?” Coz asked quietly. “About having taken it from
the plumber you pitied?”
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How did she feel? How did she feel? There was a right answer, of course.
At times Sasha had to fight the urge to lie simply as a way of depriving
Coz of it.
“Bad,” she said. “Okay? I felt bad. Shit, I’m bankrupting myself to pay
for you—obviously I get that this isn’t a great way to live.”
More than once, Coz had tried to connect the plumber to Sasha’s father,
who had disappeared when she was six. She was careful not to indulge this
line of thinking. “I don’t remember him,” she told Coz. “I have nothing to
say.” She did this for Coz’s protection and her own—they were writing a
story of redemption, of fresh beginnings and second chances. But in that
direction lay only sorrow.
Sasha and Alex crossed the lobby of the Lassimo Hotel in the direction of
the street. Sasha hugged her purse to her shoulder, the warm ball of wallet snuggled in her armpit. As they passed the angular budded branches
by the big glass doors to the street, a woman zigzagged into their path.
“Wait,” she said. “You haven’t seen—I’m desperate.”
Sasha felt a twang of terror. It was the woman whose wallet she’d
taken—she knew this instantly, although the person before her had nothing in common with the blithe, raven-haired wallet owner she’d pictured.
This woman had vulnerable brown eyes and flat pointy shoes that clicked
too loudly on the marble floor. There was plenty of gray in her frizzy
brown hair.
Sasha took Alex’s arm, trying to steer him through the doors. She felt
his pulse of surprise at her touch, but he stayed put. “Have we seen what?”
he said.
“Someone stole my wallet. My ID is gone, and I have to catch a plane
tomorrow morning. I’m just desperate!” She stared beseechingly at both
of them. It was the sort of frank need that New Yorkers quickly learn how
to hide, and Sasha recoiled. It had never occurred to her that the woman
was from out of town.
“Have you called the police?” Alex asked.
“The concierge said he would call. But I’m also wondering—could it have
fallen out somewhere?” She looked helplessly at the marble floor around
their feet. Sasha relaxed slightly. This woman was the type who annoyed
people without meaning to; apology shadowed her movements even now,
as she followed Alex to the concierge desk. Sasha trailed behind.
“Is someone helping this person?” she heard Alex ask.
The concierge was young and spiky haired. “We’ve called the police,”
he said defensively.
Alex turned to the woman. “Where did this happen?”
“In the ladies’ room. I think.”
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“Who else was there?”
“No one.”
“It was empty?”
“There might have been someone, but I didn’t see her.”
Alex swung around to Sasha. “You were just in the bathroom,” he said.
“Did you see anyone?”
“No,” she managed to say. She had Xanax in her purse, but she couldn’t
open her purse. Even with it zipped, she feared that the wallet would blurt
into view in some way that she couldn’t control, unleashing a cascade of
horrors: arrest, shame, poverty, death.
Alex turned to the concierge. “How come I’m asking these questions
instead of you?” he said. “Someone just got robbed in your hotel. Don’t
you have, like, security?”
The words “robbed” and “security” managed to pierce the soothing
backbeat that pumped through not just the Lassimo but every hotel like it
in New York City. There was a mild ripple of interest from the lobby.
“I’ve called security,” the concierge said, adjusting his neck. “I’ll call
them again.”
Sasha glanced at Alex. He was angry, and the anger made him recognizable in a way that an hour of aimless chatter (mostly hers, it was true)
had not: he was new to New York. He came from someplace smaller. He
had a thing or two to prove about how people should treat one another.
Two security guys showed up, the same on TV and in life: beefy guys
whose scrupulous politeness was somehow linked to their willingness to
crack skulls. They dispersed to search the bar. Sasha wished feverishly that
she’d left the wallet there, as if this were an impulse she’d barely resisted.
“I’ll check the bathroom,” she told Alex, and forced herself to walk
slowly around the elevator bank. The bathroom was empty. Sasha opened
her purse, took out the wallet, unearthed her vial of Xanax, and popped
one between her teeth. They worked faster if you chewed them. As the
caustic taste flooded her mouth, she scanned the room, trying to decide
where to ditch the wallet: In the stall? Under the sink? The decision paralyzed her. She had to do this right, to emerge unscathed, and if she could,
if she did—she had a frenzied sense of making a promise to Coz.
The bathroom door opened, and the woman walked in. Her frantic
eyes met Sasha’s in the bathroom mirror: narrow, green, equally frantic.
There was a pause, during which Sasha felt that she was being confronted; the woman knew, had known all along. Sasha handed her the wallet. She saw, from the woman’s stunned expression, that she was wrong.
Sum
David Eagleman
Sum
In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events
reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are
grouped together.
You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven
months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes.
For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a
toilet.
You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it.
Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it
through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.
But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping
your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an
airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch,
because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when
you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of
confusion. One hour realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Three
weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a
green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy.
Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two
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137
days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving
lost. Three days calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what
to wear. Nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two
weeks counting money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator. Thirtyfour days longing. Six months watching commercials. Four weeks sitting
in thought, wondering if there is something better you could be doing
with your time. Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons
and zippers. Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you
reshuffled the order of events. In this part of the afterlife, you imagine
something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is blissful: a life
where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do
not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to
the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.
Egalitaire
In the afterlife you discover that God understands the complexities of life.
She had originally submitted to peer pressure when She structured Her
universe like all the other gods had, with a binary categorization of people
into good and evil. But it didn’t take long for Her to realize that humans
could be good in many ways and simultaneously corrupt and meanspirited
in other ways. How was She to arbitrate who goes to Heaven and who to
Hell? Might not it be possible, She considered, that a man could be an
embezzler and still give to charitable causes? Might not a woman be an
adulteress but bring pleasure and security to two men’s lives? Might not a
child unwittingly divulge secrets that splinter a family? Dividing the population into two categories—good and bad—seemed like a more reasonable
task when She was younger, but with experience these decisions became
more difficult. She composed complex formulas to weigh hundreds of factors, and ran computer programs that rolled out long strips of paper with
eternal decisions. But Her sensitivities revolted at this automation—and
when the computer generated a decision She disagreed with, She took the
opportunity to kick out the plug in rage. That afternoon She listened to the
grievances of the dead from two warring nations. Both sides had suffered,
both sides had legitimate grievances, both pled their cases earnestly. She
covered Her ears and moaned in misery. She knew Her humans were multidimensional, and She could no longer live under the rigid architecture of
Her youthful choices.
Not all gods suffer over this; we can consider ourselves lucky that in
death we answer to a God with deep sensitivity to the Byzantine hearts of
Her creations.
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For months She moped around Her living room in Heaven, head
drooped like a bulrush, while the lines piled up. Her advisors advised Her
to delegate the decision making, but She loved Her humans too much to
leave them to the care of anyone else.
In a moment of desperation the thought crossed Her mind to let everyone wait on line indefinitely, letting them work it out on their own. But then
a better idea struck Her generous spirit. She could afford it: She would
grant everyone, every last human, a place in Heaven. After all, everyone
had something good inside; it was part of the design specifications. Her
new plan brought back the bounce to Her gait, returned the color to Her
cheeks. She shut down the operations in Hell, fired the Devil, and brought
every last human to be by Her side in Heaven. Newcomers or old-timers,
nefarious or righteous: under the new system, everyone gets equal time to
speak with Her. Most people find Her a little garrulous and oversolicitous,
but She cannot be accused of not caring.
The most important aspect of Her new system is that everyone is treated
equally. There is no longer fire for some and harp music for others. The
afterlife is no longer defined by cots versus waterbeds, raw potatoes versus
sushi, hot water versus champagne. Everyone is a brother to all, and for the
first time an idea has been realized that never came to fruition on Earth:
true equality.
The Communists are baffled and irritated, because they have finally
achieved their perfect society, but only by the help of a God in whom they
don’t want to believe. The meritocrats are abashed that they’re stuck for
eternity in an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives have no penniless to disparage; the liberals have no downtrodden to
promote.
So God sits on the edge of Her bed and weeps at night, because the
only thing everyone can agree upon is that they’re all in Hell.
Circle of Friends
When you die, you feel as though there were some subtle change, but everything looks approximately the same. You get up and brush your teeth. You
kiss your spouse and kids and leave for the office. There is less traffic than
normal. The rest of your building seems less full, as though it’s a holiday.
But everyone in your office is here, and they greet you kindly. You feel
strangely popular. Everyone you run into is someone you know. At some
point, it dawns on you that this is the afterlife: the world is only made up of
people you’ve met before. It’s a small fraction of the world population—
about 0.00002 percent—but it seems like plenty to you.
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139
It turns out that only the people you remember are here. So the woman
with whom you shared a glance in the elevator may or may not be included.
Your second-grade teacher is here, with most of the class. Your parents,
your cousins, and your spectrum of friends through the years. All your old
lovers. Your boss, your grandmothers, and the waitress who served your
food each day at lunch. Those you dated, those you almost dated, those
you longed for. It is a blissful opportunity to spend quality time with your
one thousand connections, to renew fading ties, to catch up with those you
let slip away.
It is only after several weeks of this that you begin to feel forlorn.
You wonder what’s different as you saunter through the vast quiet parks
with a friend or two.
No strangers grace the empty park benches. No family unknown to
you throws bread crumbs for the ducks and makes you smile because of
their laughter. As you step into the street, you note there are no crowds, no
buildings teeming with workers, no distant cities bustling, no hospitals running 24/7 with patients dying and staff rushing, no trains howling into the
night with sardined passengers on their way home. Very few foreigners.
You begin to consider all the things unfamiliar to you. You’ve never
known, you realize, how to vulcanize rubber to make a tire. And now those
factories stand empty. You’ve never known how to fashion a silicon chip
from beach sand, how to launch rockets out of the atmosphere, how to pit
olives or lay railroad tracks. And now those industries are shut down.
The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all
the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with
you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy, translated by
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Part Three, XV
At eight o’clock Kutuzov rode to Pratz at the head of Miloradovich’s fourth
column, the one which was to take the place of the columns of Przebyszewski and Langeron, which had already gone down. He greeted the men
of the head regiment and gave the order to move, thus showing that he
intended to lead the column himself. Having ridden to the village of Pratz,
he halted. Prince Andrei, one of the enormous number of persons constituting the commander in chief ’s suite, stood behind him. Prince Andrei
felt excited, irritated, and at the same time restrainedly calm, as a man usually is when a long-desired moment comes. He was firmly convinced that
this was the day of his Toulon or his bridge of Arcole.[1] How it would
happen, he did not know, but he was firmly convinced that it would be so.
The locality and position of our troops were known to him, as far as they
could be known to anyone in our army. His own strategic plan, which there
obviously could be no thought of carrying out now, was forgotten. Now,
entering into Weyrother’s plan, Prince Andrei pondered the possible happenstances and came up with new considerations, such as might call for his
swiftness of reflection and decisiveness.
To the left below, in the fog, exchanges of fire between unseen troops
could be heard. There, it seemed to Prince Andrei, the battle would
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141
concentrate, there an obstacle would be encountered, and “it’s there that
I’ll be sent with a brigade or division, and there, with a standard in my
hand, I’ll go forward and crush everything ahead of me.”
Prince Andrei could not look with indifference at the standards of
the battalions going past him. Looking at a standard, he thought: maybe
it is that very standard with which I’ll have to march at the head of
the troops.
By morning the night’s fog had left only hoarfrost turning into dew
on the heights, but in the hollows the fog still spread its milk-white sea.
Nothing could be seen in that hollow to the left, into which our troops had
descended and from which came the sounds of gunfire. Over the heights
was a dark, clear sky, and to the right–the enormous ball of the sun. Far
ahead, on the other shore of the sea of fog, one could make out the jutting,
wooded hills on which the enemy army was supposed to be, and something
was discernible. To the right the guards were entering the region of the fog,
with a sound of tramping and wheels and an occasional gleam of bayonets;
to the left, beyond the village, similar masses of cavalry approached and
disappeared into the sea of fog. In front and behind moved the infantry.
The commander in chief stood on the road out of the village, letting the
troops pass by him. Kutuzov seemed exhausted and irritable that morning. The infantry going past him halted without any command, apparently
because something ahead held them up.
“But tell them, finally, to form into battalions and go around the village,” Kutuzov said angrily to a general who rode up. “Don’t you understand, Your Excellency, my dear sir, that to stretch out in a defile through
village streets is impossible when we’re marching against an enemy?”
“I intended to form them up outside the village, Your Excellency,” said
the general.
Kutuzov laughed biliously.
“A fine sight you’d be, lining up in view of the enemy, a very fine
sight!”
“The enemy’s still far off, Your Excellency. According to the disposition . . . ”
“The disposition!” Kutuzov exclaimed biliously. “Who told you that? . . .
Kindly do as you’re ordered.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Mon cher,” Nesvitsky said to Prince Andrei in a whisper, “le vieux est d’une
humeur de chien.”
An Austrian officer in a white uniform with green plumes on his hat
rode up to Kutuzov and asked on behalf of the emperor whether the
fourth column had started into action.
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Kutuzov turned away without answering him, and his gaze chanced
to rest on Prince Andrei, who was standing close by. Seeing Bolkonsky,
Kutuzov softened the angry and caustic expression of his gaze, as if aware
that his adjutant was not to blame for what was going on. And, without
answering the Austrian adjutant, he addressed Bolkonsky:
“Allez voir, mon cher, si la troisième division a dépassé le village. Dites-lui de s’arrêter
et d’attendre mes ordres.”
Prince Andrei had only just started when he stopped him.
“Et demandez-lui si les tirailleurs sont postés,” he added. “Ce qu’ils font, ce qu’ils
font!” he said to himself, still not answering the Austrian.
Prince Andrei galloped off to carry out his mission.
Overtaking all the advancing battalions, he stopped the third division
and ascertained that there was in fact no line of riflemen in front of our
columns. The regimental commander of the front regiment was very surprised by the order conveyed to him from the commander in chief to send
out riflemen. The regimental commander stood there in the full conviction
that there were more troops ahead of him, and that the enemy was no less
than six miles away. In fact, nothing could be seen ahead but empty terrain
sloping away and covered with thick fog. Having ordered on behalf of the
commander in chief that the omission be rectified, Prince Andrei galloped
back. Kutuzov still stood in the same place and, his corpulent body sagging
over the saddle in old man’s fashion, yawned deeply, closing his eyes. The
troops were no longer moving, but stood at parade rest.
“Very good, very good,” he said to Prince Andrei and turned to a general who stood there with a watch in his hand, saying it was time to move
on, because all the columns of the left flank had already descended.
“We still have time, Your Excellency,” Kutuzov said through a yawn.
“We have time!” he repeated.
Just then, from well behind Kutuzov, came shouts of regimental greetings, and these voices began to approach quickly along the whole extended
line of the advancing Russian columns. It was clear that the one being
greeted was riding quickly. When the soldiers of the regiment Kutuzov was
standing in front of began to shout, he rode slightly to one side and, wincing, turned to look. Down the road from Pratz galloped what looked like
a squadron of varicolored horsemen. Two of them rode side by side at a
great gallop ahead of the rest. One, in a black uniform with white plumes,
rode a bobtailed chestnut horse, the other, in a white uniform, rode a black
horse. These were the two emperors with their suite. Kutuzov, with the
affectation of a frontline veteran, ordered his standing troops to “attention” and, saluting, rode up to the emperor. His whole figure and manner
suddenly changed. He acquired the look of a subordinate, unthinking man.
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With affected deference, which obviously struck the emperor Alexander
unpleasantly, he rode up and saluted him.
The unpleasant impression, like the remains of fog in a clear sky, passed
over the emperor’s young and happy face and disappeared. He was somewhat thinner that day, after his illness, than on the field of Olmütz, where
Bolkonsky had seen him for the first time abroad, but there was the same
enchanting combination of majesty and mildness in his beautiful gray eyes,
and the fine lips had the same possibility of various expressions, with a
prevalent expression of good-natured, innocent youth.
At the Olmütz review he was more majestic; here he was more cheerful and energetic. He was slightly flushed after galloping two miles and,
reining in his horse, gave a sigh of relief and looked around at the faces of
his suite, as young, as animated as his own. Czartoryski and Novosiltsev,
and Prince Volkonsky and Stroganov, and the others, all richly clad, cheerful young men on splendid, pampered, fresh, only slightly sweaty horses,
talking and smiling, stopped behind the sovereign. The emperor Franz,
a ruddy, long-faced young man, sat extremely straight on his handsome
black stallion and looked around him with a preoccupied, unhurried air.
He called up one of his white adjutants and asked something. “Most likely
what time they started,” thought Prince Andrei, observing his old acquaintance, and recalling his audience with a smile he was unable to repress. In
the emperors’ suite there were picked fine young orderly officers, Russian
and Austrian, from the guards and infantry regiments. Among them were
grooms leading the handsome spare horses of the royalty in embroidered
cloths.
As fresh air from the fields suddenly breathes through an open window
into a stuffy room, so youth, energy, and certainty of success breathed
upon Kutuzov’s cheerless staff as these brilliant young men galloped up.
“Why don’t you begin, Mikhail Larionovich?” the emperor Alexander
hurriedly addressed Kutuzov, at the same time glancing courteously at the
emperor Franz.
“I am waiting, Your Majesty,” answered Kutuzov, inclining
deferentially.
The emperor cupped his ear, frowning slightly and showing that he had
not heard properly.
“I’m waiting, Your Majesty,” Kutuzov repeated (Prince Andrei noticed
that Kutuzov’s upper lip twitched unnaturally as he said this “waiting”).
“Not all the columns are assembled, Your Majesty.”
The sovereign heard, but this reply clearly did not please him; he
shrugged his slightly stooping shoulders, glanced at Novosiltsev, who stood
nearby, as if complaining of Kutuzov by this glance.
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“We’re not on the Tsaritsyn Field, Mikhail Larionovich, where you
don’t start a parade until all the regiments are assembled,” said the sovereign, again glancing into the eyes of the emperor Franz, as though inviting
him, if not to take part, at least to listen to what he was saying; but the
emperor Franz went on looking around and did not listen.
“That is just why I do not begin, Sire,” Kutuzov said in a ringing voice,
as if to forestall the possibility of not being heard, and again something
twitched in his face. “I do not begin, Sire, because we are not on parade
and not on the Tsaritsyn Field,” he uttered clearly and distinctly.
All the faces in the sovereign’s suite instantly exchanged glances with
each other, expressing murmur and reproach. “Old as he may be, he
should not, he simply should not speak that way,” these faces expressed.
The sovereign looked fixedly and attentively into Kutuzov’s eyes, waiting to see if he would say something more. But Kutuzov, for his part, bowed
his head deferentially and also seemed to be waiting. The silence lasted for
about a minute.
“However, if you order it, Your Majesty,” said Kutuzov, raising his head
and again changing his tone to that of a dull, unthinking, but obedient
general.
He touched up his horse and, calling to him the column leader Miloradovich, gave him the order to advance.
The troops stirred again, and two battalions of the Novgorodsky regiment and a battalion of the Apsheronsky regiment moved on past the
sovereign.
While this Apsheronsky battalion was marching by, ruddy-faced Miloradovich, with no greatcoat, in his uniform tunic and decorations and
a hat with enormous plumes, worn at an angle and brim first, galloped
ahead hup-two, and with a dashing salute, reined in his horse before the
sovereign.
“God be with you, General,” said the sovereign.
“Ma foi, sire, nous ferons ce que qui sera dans notre possibilité, sire!” he replied
merrily, nevertheless calling up mocking smiles among the gentlemen of
the suite with his bad French.
Miloradovich turned his horse sharply and placed himself slightly
behind the sovereign. The Apsherontsy, excited by the presence of the
sovereign, marched past the emperors and their suite at a dashingly brisk
pace, beating their feet.
“Lads!” cried Miloradovich in a loud, self-assured, and merry voice,
obviously so excited by the sounds of gunfire, the anticipation of battle,
and the sight of his gallant Apsherontsy–his companions from Suvorov’s
time–marching briskly past the emperors, that he forgot the sovereign’s
presence. “Lads, it won’t be the first village you’ve taken!” he shouted.
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“We do our best, sir!” the soldiers shouted out.
The sovereign’s horse shied at the sudden shout. This horse, who had
carried the sovereign at reviews while still in Russia, also carried her rider
here, on the field of Austerlitz, enduring the distracted nudges of his left
foot, pricked up her ears at the sound of gunshots just as she did on the
Field of Mars, understanding neither the meaning of the shots she heard,
nor the presence of the emperor Franz’s black stallion, nor anything of
what her rider said, thought, or felt that day.
The sovereign turned with a smile to one of his retinue, pointing to the
gallant Apsherontsy, and said something to him.
XVI
Kutuzov, accompanied by his adjutants, rode at a walk behind the
carabineers.
Having gone less than half a mile at the tail of the column, he stopped
by a solitary, deserted house (probably a former tavern), where the road
forked. Both roads went down the hill, and troops were marching along
both.
The fog began to lift, and enemy troops could be dimly seen about a
mile and a half away on the heights opposite. To the left below, the gunfire
was growing louder. Kutuzov stopped, talking with an Austrian general.
Prince Andrei, standing slightly behind him, peered at the enemy and
turned to an adjutant, wishing to borrow a field glass from him.
“Look, look,” said this adjutant, looking not at the distant troops, but
down the hill in front of him. “It’s the French!”
The two generals and the adjutants began snatching at the field glass,
pulling it away from each other. All their faces suddenly changed, and on
all of them horror appeared. The French were supposed to be a mile and a
half from us, and they suddenly turned up right in front of us.
“Is it the enemy? . . . No! . . . Yes, look, he’s . . . for certain . . . What is
this?” voices said.
With his naked eye, Prince Andrei saw below, to the right, a dense column of French coming up to meet the Apsherontsy, no further than five
hundred paces from where Kutuzov was standing.
“Here it is, the decisive moment has come! Now it’s my turn,” thought
Prince Andrei, and, spurring his horse, he rode up to Kutuzov.
“The Apsherontsy must be stopped, Your Excellency!” he cried.
But at that same moment everything became covered with smoke, there
was the sound of gunfire nearby, and a naïvely frightened voice two steps
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from Prince Andrei cried: “Well, brothers, that’s it for us!” And it was as if
this voice was a command. At this voice everyone began to run.
Confused, ever increasing crowds came running back to the place
where, five minutes before, the troops had marched past the emperors. Not
only was it difficult to stop this crowd, but it was impossible not to yield and
move back with it. Bolkonsky tried only not to be separated from Kutuzov
and looked around in perplexity, unable to understand what was happening in front of him. Nesvitsky, looking angry, red, and not like himself,
shouted to Kutuzov that if he did not leave at once, he would certainly be
taken prisoner. Kutuzov stood in the same place and, without responding, took out his handkerchief. Blood was flowing from his cheek. Prince
Andrei forced his way to him.
“Are you wounded?” he asked, barely able to control the trembling of
his lower jaw.
“The wound isn’t here, it’s there!” said Kutuzov, pressing the handkerchief to his wounded cheek and pointing to the fleeing men.
“Stop them!” he cried, and at the same time, probably realizing that it
was impossible to stop them, spurred his horse and rode to the right.
A fresh crowd of fleeing men streamed past, caught him up, and carried
him backwards.
The troops were fleeing in such a dense crowd that, once one landed in
the middle of it, it was difficult to get out. Someone shouted, “Keep going,
don’t drag your feet!” Another, turning around, fired into the air; someone
else struck the horse on which Kutuzov himself was riding. Extricating
themselves with the greatest effort from the flow of the crowd to the left,
Kutuzov and his suite, diminished by more than half, rode towards the
sounds of nearby cannon fire. Extricating himself from the crowd of fleeing men, Prince Andrei, trying to keep up with Kutuzov, saw on the slope
of the hill, amidst the smoke, a Russian battery still firing, and the French
running up to it. Slightly higher stood Russian infantry, neither moving
ahead to aid the battery, nor backwards in the direction of the fugitives. A
general on horseback separated himself from the infantry and rode up to
Kutuzov. There were only four men left in Kutuzov’s suite. They were all
pale and exchanged glances silently.
“Stop those villains!” Kutuzov said breathlessly to the regimental commander, pointing to the fleeing men; but at the same moment, as if in
punishment for those words, bullets, like a flock of birds, flew whistling at
the regiment and Kutuzov’s suite.
The French had attacked the battery and, seeing Kutuzov, were shooting
at him. With this volley, the regimental commander seized his leg; several
soldiers fell, and an ensign holding a standard let it drop from his hands;
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the standard wavered and fell, stopped momentarily by the bayonets of the
soldiers around it. The soldiers began firing without any orders.
“Oooh!” Kutuzov moaned with an expression of despair and looked
around. “Bolkonsky,” he whispered in a voice trembling with awareness of
his old man’s strengthlessness. “Bolkonsky,” he whispered, pointing to the
disordered battalion and the enemy, “what’s going on?”
But before he finished saying it, Prince Andrei, feeling sobs of shame
and anger rising in his throat, was already jumping off his horse and running towards the standard.
“Forward, lads!” he cried in a childishly shrill voice.
“Here it is!” thought Prince Andrei, seizing the staff of the standard
and hearing with delight the whistle of bullets, evidently aimed precisely at
him. Several soldiers fell.
“Hurrah!” cried Prince Andrei, barely able to hold up the heavy standard, and he ran forward with unquestioning assurance that the entire
battalion would run after him.
And indeed he ran only a few steps alone. One soldier started out,
another, and the whole battalion, with a shout of “Hurrah!” rushed forward and overtook him. A sergeant of the battalion ran up, took the standard that was wavering in Prince Andrei’s hands because of its weight, but
was killed at once. Prince Andrei again seized the standard and, dragging
it by the staff, ran with the battalion. Ahead of him he saw our artillerists,
some of whom were fighting, while others abandoned the cannon and
came running in his direction; he also saw French infantrymen, who had
seized the artillery horses and were turning the cannon. Prince Andrei
and his battalion were now twenty paces from the cannon. Above him he
heard the unceasing whistle of bullets, and soldiers ceaselessly gasped and
fell to right and left of him. But he did not look at them; he looked fixedly
only at what was happening ahead of him–at the battery. He clearly saw
the figure of a red-haired gunner, his shako knocked askew, pulling a swab
from one side, while a French soldier pulled it towards him from the other
side. Prince Andrei saw clearly the bewildered and at the same time angry
expression on the faces of the two men, who evidently did not understand
what they were doing.
“What are they doing?” Prince Andrei wondered, looking at them.
“Why doesn’t the red-haired artillerist run away, since he has no weapon?
Why doesn’t the Frenchman stab him? Before he runs away, the Frenchman will remember his musket and bayonet him.”
In fact, another Frenchman with his musket atilt ran up to the fighting
men, and the lot of the red-haired artillerist, who still did not understand
what awaited him and triumphantly pulled the swab from the French soldier’s hands, was about to be decided. But Prince Andrei did not see how
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it ended. It seemed to him as though one of the nearest soldiers, with the
full swing of a stout stick, hit him on the head. It was slightly painful and
above all unpleasant, because the pain distracted him and kept him from
seeing what he had been looking at.
“What is it? am I falling? are my legs giving way under me?” he thought,
and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the fight between
the French and the artillerists ended, and wishing to know whether or not
the red-haired artillerist had been killed, whether the cannon had been
taken or saved. But he did not see anything. There was nothing over him
now except the sky–the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with
gray clouds slowly creeping across it. “How quiet, calm, and solemn, not
at all like when I was running,” thought Prince Andrei, “not like when we
were running, shouting, and fighting; not at all like when the Frenchman
and the artillerist, with angry and frightened faces, were pulling at the
swab–it’s quite different the way the clouds creep across this lofty, infinite
sky. How is it I haven’t seen this lofty sky before? And how happy I am
that I’ve finally come to know it. Yes! everything is empty, everything is a
deception, except this infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing except that.
But there is not even that, there is nothing except silence, tranquillity. And
thank God! . . . ”
To the End of the Land
David Grossman
When they get to the meeting point, Sami pulls into the first parking spot
he finds, yanks up the emergency brake, folds his arms over his chest, and
announces that he will wait for Ora there. And he asks her to be quick,
which he has never done before. Ofer gets out of the cab and Sami does
not move. He hisses something, but she can’t tell what. She hopes he
was saying goodbye to Ofer, but who knows what he was muttering. She
marches after Ofer, blinking at the dazzling lights: rifle barrels, sunglasses,
car mirrors. She doesn’t know where he is leading her and is afraid he will
get swallowed up among the hundreds of young men and she will never
see him again. Meaning—she immediately corrects herself, revising the
grim minutes she has been keeping all day—she won’t see him again until
he comes home. The sun beats down, and the horde becomes a heap of
colorful, bustling dots. She focuses on Ofer’s long khaki back. His walk is
rigid and slightly arrogant. She can see him broaden his shoulders and
widen his stance. When he was twelve, she remembers, he used to change
his voice when he answered the phone and project a strained “Hello” that
was supposed to sound deep, and a minute later he would forget and go
back to his thin squeak. The air around her buzzes with shouts and whistles
and megaphone calls and laughter. “Honey, answer me, it’s me, Honey,
answer me, it’s me,” sings a ringtone on a nearby cell phone that seems to
follow her wherever she goes. Within the commotion Ora swiftly picks up
the distant chatter of a baby somewhere in the large gathering ground, and
the voice of his mother answers sweetly. She stands for a moment looking
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for them but cannot find them, and she imagines the mother changing the
baby’s diaper, maybe on the hood of a car, bending over and tickling his
tummy, and she stands slightly stooped, hugging her suede bag to her body,
and laps up the soft double trickle of sounds until it vanishes.
It is all a huge, irredeemable mistake. It seems to her that as the moment
of separation approaches, the families and the soldiers fill with arid merriment, as if they have all inhaled a drug meant to dull their comprehension.
The air bustles with the hum of a school trip or a big family excursion.
Men her age, exempt from reserve duty, meet their friends from the army,
the fathers of the young soldiers, and exchange laughter and backslaps.
“We’ve done our part,” two stout men tell each other, “now it’s their turn.”
Television crews descend on families saying goodbye to their loved ones.
Ora is thirsty, parched. Half running, she trails behind Ofer. Every time
her gaze falls on the face of a soldier she unwittingly pulls back, afraid
she will remember him: Ofer once told her that when they had their pictures taken sometimes, before they set off on a military campaign, the guys
made sure to keep their heads a certain distance from each other, so there’d
be room for the red circle that would mark them later, in the newspaper.
Screeching loudspeakers direct the soldiers to their battalions’ meeting
points—a meetery, they call this, and she thinks in her mother’s voice: barbarians, language-rapists—and suddenly Ofer stops and she almost walks
into him. He turns to her and she feels a deluge. “What’s the matter with
you?” he whispers into her face. “What if they find an Arab here and think
he’s come to commit suicide? And didn’t you think about how he feels having to drive me here? Do you even get what this means for him?”
She doesn’t have the energy to argue or explain. He’s right, but she
really wasn’t in a state to think about anything. How can he not understand
her? She just wasn’t thinking. A white fog had filled her mind from the
moment he told her that instead of going on the trip to the Galilee with
her he was going off to some kasbah or mukataa. That was at six a.m. She
had woken to hear his voice whispering into the phone in the other room,
and hurried in there. Seeing his guilty look she had tensed and asked, “Did
they call?”
“They say I have to go.”
“But when?”
“ASAP.”
She asked if it couldn’t wait a little while, so they could at least do the
trip for two or three days, because she realized immediately that a whole
week with him was a dream now. She added with a pathetic smile, “Didn’t
we say we’d have a few puffs of family-together time?”
He laughed and said, “Mom, it’s not a game, it’s war,” and because of
his arrogance—his, and his father’s, and his brother’s, their patronizing
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dance around her most sensitive trigger points—she spat back at him
that she still wasn’t convinced that the male brain could tell the difference
between war and games. For a moment she allowed herself some modest
satisfaction with the debating skills she’d displayed even before her morning coffee, but Ofer shrugged and went to his room to pack, and precisely
because he did not respond with a witty answer, as he usually did, she grew
suspicious.
She followed him and asked, “But did they call to let you know?”
Because she remembered that she hadn’t heard the phone ring.
Ofer took his military shirts from the closet, and pairs of gray socks, and
shoved them into his backpack. From behind the door he grumbled, “What
difference does it make who called? There’s an operation, and there’s an
emergency call-up, and half the country’s reporting for duty.”
Ora wouldn’t give in—Me? Pass up getting pricked with such a perfect
thorn? she asked herself later—and she leaned weakly against the doorway, crossed her arms over her chest, and demanded that he tell her exactly
how things had progressed to that phone call. She would not let up until
he admitted that he had called them that morning, even before six he had
called the battalion and begged them to take him, even though today, at
nine-zero-zero, he was supposed to be at the induction center for his discharge, and from there to drive to the Galilee with her. As he lowered his
gaze and mumbled on, she discovered, to her horror, that the army hadn’t
even considered asking him to prolong his service. As far as they were
concerned he was a civilian, deep into his discharge leave. It was he, Ofer
admitted defiantly, his forehead turning red, who wasn’t willing to give up.
“No way! After eating shit for three years so I’d be ready for exactly this
kind of operation?” Three years of checkpoints and patrols, little kids in
Palestinian villages and settlements throwing stones at him, not to mention
the fact that he hadn’t even been within spitting distance of a tank for six
months, and now, at last, with his lousy luck, this kind of kick-ass operation, three armored units together—there were tears in his eyes, and for a
moment you might have thought he was haggling with her to be allowed
to come back late from a class Purim party—how could he sit at home or
go hiking in the Galilee when all his guys would be there? In short, she
discovered that he, on his own initiative, had convinced them to enlist him
on a voluntary basis for another twenty-eight days.
“Oh,” she said, when he finished his speech, and it was a hollow, muffled Oh. And I dragged my corpse into the kitchen, she thought to herself. It was
an expression of Ilan’s, her ex, the man who had shared her life and, in
their good years, enriched the goodness. The fullness of life, the old Ilan used
to say and blush with gratitude, with reserved, awkward enthusiasm, which
propelled Ora toward him on a wave of love. She always thought that deep
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in his heart he was amazed at having been granted this fullness of life at all.
She remembers when the kids were little and they lived in Tzur Hadassah,
in the house they bought from Avram, how they liked to hang the laundry
out to dry at night, together, one last domestic chore at the end of a long,
exhausting day. Together they would carry the large tub out to the garden
facing the dark fields and the valley, and the Arab village of Hussan. The
great fig tree and the grevillea rustled softly with their own mysterious,
rich lives, and the laundry lines filled up with dozens of tiny articles of
clothing like miniature hieroglyphics: little socks and undershirts and cloth
shoes and pants with suspenders and colorful OshKosh overalls. Was there
someone from Hussan who had gone out in the last light of day and was
watching them now? Aiming a gun at them? Ora wondered sometimes,
and a chill would flutter down her spine. Or was there a general, human
immunity for people hanging laundry—especially this kind of laundry?
The Girl with
the Dragon Tattoo
Stieg Larsson
A Friday in November
It happened every year, was almost a ritual. And this was his eighty-second
birthday. When, as usual, the flower was delivered, he took off the wrapping paper and then picked up the telephone to call Detective Superintendent Morell who, when he retired, had moved to Lake Siljan in Dalarna.
They were not only the same age, they had been born on the same day–
which was something of an irony under the circumstances. The old policeman was sitting with his coffee, waiting, expecting the call.
“It arrived.”
“What is it this year?”
“I don’t know what kind it is. I’ll have to get someone to tell me what it
is. It’s white.”
“No letter, I suppose.”
“Just the flower. The frame is the same kind as last year. One of those
do-it-yourself ones.”
“Postmark?”
“Stockholm.”
“Handwriting?”
“Same as always, all in capitals. Upright, neat lettering.”
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With that, the subject was exhausted, and not another word was
exchanged for almost a minute. The retired policeman leaned back in his
kitchen chair and drew on his pipe. He knew he was no longer expected to
come up with a pithy comment or any sharp question which would shed a
new light on the case. Those days had long since passed, and the exchange
between the two men seemed like a ritual attaching to a mystery which noone else in the whole world had the least interest in unraveling.
The Latin name was Leptospermum (Myrtaceae) rubinette. It was a plant about
ten centimeters high with small, heather-like foliage and a white flower
with five petals about two centimeters across.
The plant was native to the Australian bush and uplands, where it was
to be found among tussocks of grass. There it was called Desert Snow.
Someone at the botanical gardens in Uppsala would later confirm that it
was a plant seldom cultivated in Sweden. The botanist wrote in her report
that it was related to the tea tree and that it was sometimes confused with
its more common cousin Leptospermum scoparium, which grew in abundance
in New Zealand. What distinguished them, she pointed out, was that rubinette had a small number of microscopic pink dots at the tips of the petals,
giving the flower a faint pinkish tinge.
Rubinette was altogether an unpretentious flower. It had no known
medicinal properties, and it could not induce hallucinatory experiences.
It was neither edible, nor had a use in the manufacture of plant dyes. On
the other hand, the aboriginal people of Australia regarded as sacred the
region and the flora around Ayers Rock.
The botanist said that she herself had never seen one before, but after
consulting her colleagues she was to report that attempts had been made to
introduce the plant at a nursery in Göteborg, and that it might, of course,
be cultivated by amateur botanists. It was difficult to grow in Sweden
because it thrived in a dry climate and had to remain indoors half of the
year. It would not thrive in calcareous soil and it had to be watered from
below. It needed pampering.
The fact of its being so rare a flower ought to have made it easier to trace
the source of this particular specimen, but in practice it was an impossible
task. There was no registry to look it up in, no licenses to explore. Anywhere from a handful to a few hundred enthusiasts could have had access
to seeds or plants. And those could have changed hands between friends
or been bought by mail order from anywhere in Europe, anywhere in the
Antipodes.
But it was only one in the series of mystifying flowers that each year
arrived by post on the first day of November. They were always beautiful
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and for the most part rare flowers, always pressed, mounted on watercolor
paper in a simple frame measuring 15cm by 28cm.
The strange story of the flowers had never been reported in the press;
only a very few people knew of it. Thirty years ago the regular arrival
of the flower was the object of much scrutiny–at the National Forensic
Laboratory, among fingerprint experts, graphologists, criminal investigators, and one or two relatives and friends of the recipient. Now the actors
in the drama were but three: the elderly birthday boy, the retired police
detective, and the person who had posted the flower. The first two at least
had reached such an age that the group of interested parties would soon
be further diminished.
The policeman was a hardened veteran. He would never forget his first
case, in which he had had to take into custody a violent and appallingly
drunk worker at an electrical substation before he caused others harm.
During his career he had brought in poachers, wife beaters, con men, car
thieves, and drunk drivers. He had dealt with burglars, drug dealers, rapists,
and one deranged bomber. He had been involved in nine murder or manslaughter cases. In five of these the murderer had called the police himself
and, full of remorse, confessed to having killed his wife or brother or some
other relative. Two others were solved within a few days. Another required
the assistance of the National Criminal Police and took two years.
The ninth case was solved to the police’s satisfaction, which is to say
that they knew who the murderer was, but because the evidence was so
insubstantial the public prosecutor decided not to proceed with the case.
To the detective superintendent’s dismay, the statute of limitations eventually put an end to the matter. But all in all he could look back on an
impressive career.
He was anything but pleased.
For the detective, the “Case of the Pressed Flowers” had been nagging
at him for years–his last, unsolved and frustrating case. The situation was
doubly absurd because after spending literally thousands of hours brooding, on duty and off, he could not say beyond doubt that a crime had
indeed been committed.
The two men knew that whoever had mounted the flowers would have
worn gloves, that there would be no fingerprints on the frame or the glass.
The frame could have been bought in camera shops or stationery stores
the world over. There was, quite simply, no lead to follow. Most often the
parcel was posted in Stockholm, but three times from London, twice from
Paris, twice from Copenhagen, once from Madrid, once from Bonn, and
once from Pensacola, Florida. The detective superintendent had had to
look it up in an atlas.
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After putting down the telephone the eighty-two-year-old birthday boy sat
for a long time looking at the pretty but meaningless flower whose name
he did not yet know. Then he looked up at the wall above his desk. There
hung forty-three pressed flowers in their frames. Four rows of ten, and one
at the bottom with four. In the top row one was missing from the ninth slot.
Desert Snow would be number forty-four.
Without warning he began to weep. He surprised himself with this sudden burst of emotion after almost forty years.
Friday, December 20
The trial was irretrievably over; everything that could be said had been
said, but he had never doubted that he would lose. The written verdict was
handed down at 10:00 on Friday morning, and all that remained was a
summing up from the reporters waiting in the corridor outside the district
court.
Carl Mikael Blomkvist saw them through the doorway and slowed his
step. He had no wish to discuss the verdict, but questions were unavoidable,
and he—of all people—knew that they had to be asked and answered. This
is how it is to be a criminal, he thought. On the other side of the microphone. He
straightened up and tried to smile. The reporters gave him friendly, almost
embarrassed greetings.
“Let’s see . . . Aftonbladet, Expressen, TT wire service, TV4, and . . . where
are you from? . . . ah yes, Dagens Nyheter. I must be a celebrity,” Blomkvist said.
“Give us a sound bite, Kalle Blomkvist.” It was a reporter from one of the
evening papers.
Blomkvist, hearing the nickname, forced himself as always not to roll his
eyes. Once, when he was twenty-three and had just started his first summer
job as a journalist, Blomkvist had chanced upon a gang which had pulled
off five bank robberies over the past two years. There was no doubt that
it was the same gang in every instance. Their trademark was to hold up
two banks at a time with military precision. They wore masks from Disney
World, so inevitably police logic dubbed them the Donald Duck Gang.
The newspapers renamed them the Bear Gang, which sounded more sinister, more appropriate to the fact that on two occasions they had recklessly
fired warning shots and threatened curious passersby.
Their sixth outing was at a bank in Östergötland at the height of the
holiday season. A reporter from the local radio station happened to be in
the bank at the time. As soon as the robbers were gone he went to a public
telephone and dictated his story for live broadcast.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
157
Blomkvist was spending several days with a girlfriend at her parents’
summer cabin near Katrineholm. Exactly why he made the connection
he could not explain, even to the police, but as he was listening to the
news report he remembered a group of four men in a summer cabin a few
hundred feet down the road. He had seen them playing badminton out
in the yard: four blond, athletic types in shorts with their shirts off. They
were obviously bodybuilders, and there had been something about them
that had made him look twice—maybe it was because the game was being
played in blazing sunshine with what he recognized as intensely focused
energy.
There had been no good reason to suspect them of being the bank
robbers, but nevertheless he had gone to a hill overlooking their cabin.
It seemed empty. It was about forty minutes before a Volvo drove up and
parked in the yard. The young men got out, in a hurry, and were each
carrying a sports bag, so they might have been doing nothing more than
coming back from a swim. But one of them returned to the car and took
out from the boot something which he hurriedly covered with his jacket.
Even from Blomkvist’s relatively distant observation post he could tell that
it was a good old AK4, the rifle that had been his constant companion for
the year of his military service.
He called the police and that was the start of a three-day siege of the
cabin, blanket coverage by the media, with Blomkvist in a front-row seat
and collecting a gratifyingly large fee from an evening paper. The police
set up their headquarters in a caravan in the garden of the cabin where
Blomkvist was staying.
The fall of the Bear Gang gave him the star billing that launched him
as a young journalist. The downside of his celebrity was that the other
evening newspaper could not resist using the headline “Kalle Blomkvist solves
the case.” The tongue-in-cheek story was written by an older female columnist and contained references to the young detective in Astrid Lindgren’s
books for children. To make matters worse, the paper had run the story
with a grainy photograph of Blomkvist with his mouth half open even as
he raised an index finger to point.
It made no difference that Blomkvist had never in life used the name
Carl. From that moment on, to his dismay, he was nicknamed Kalle Blomkvist by his peers—an epithet employed with taunting provocation, not
unfriendly but not really friendly either. In spite of his respect for Astrid
Lindgren—whose books he loved—he detested the nickname. It took him
several years and far weightier journalistic successes before the nickname
began to fade, but he still cringed if ever the name was used in his hearing.
Right now he achieved a placid smile and said to the reporter from the
evening paper:
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“Oh come on, think of something yourself. You usually do.”
His tone was not unpleasant. They all knew each other, more or less,
and Blomkvist’s most vicious critics had not come that morning. One of
the journalists there had at one time worked with him. And at a party some
years ago he had nearly succeeded in picking up one of the reporters—the
woman from She on TV4.
“You took a real hit in there today,” said the one from Dagens Nyheter,
clearly a young part-timer. “How does it feel?”
Despite the seriousness of the situation, neither Blomkvist nor the older
journalists could help smiling. He exchanged glances with TV4. How does
it feel? The half-witted sports reporter shoves his microphone in the face of
the Breathless Athlete on the finishing line.
“I can only regret that the court did not come to a different conclusion,”
he said a bit stuffily.
“Three months in gaol and 150,000 kronor damages. That’s pretty
severe,” said She from TV4.
“I’ll survive.”
“Are you going to apologize to Wennerström? Shake his hand?”
“I think not.”
“So you still would say that he’s a crook?” Dagens Nyheter.
The court had just ruled that Blomkvist had libelled and defamed the
financier Hans-Erik Wennerström. The trial was over and he had no plans
to appeal. So what would happen if he repeated his claim on the courthouse steps? Blomkvist decided that he did not want to find out.
“I thought I had good reason to publish the information that was in
my possession. The court has ruled otherwise, and I must accept that the
judicial process has taken its course. Those of us on the editorial staff will
have to discuss the judgement before we decide what we’re going to do. I
have no more to add.”
“But how did you come to forget that journalists actually have to back
up their assertions?” She from TV4. Her expression was neutral, but Blomkvist thought he saw a hint of disappointed repudiation in her eyes.
The reporters on site, apart from the boy from Dagens Nyheter, were all
veterans in the business. For them the answer to that question was beyond
the conceivable. “I have nothing to add,” he repeated, but when the others had accepted this TV4 stood him against the doors to the courthouse
and asked her questions in front of the camera. She was kinder than he
deserved, and there were enough clear answers to satisfy all the reporters still standing behind her. The story would be in the headlines but he
reminded himself that they were not dealing with the media event of the
year here. The reporters had what they needed and headed back to their
respective newsrooms.
Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese
The Coming
After eight months spent in the obscurity of our mother’s womb, my
brother, Shiva, and I came into the world in the late afternoon of the twentieth of September in the year of grace 1954. We took our first breaths at
an elevation of eight thousand feet in the thin air of Addis Ababa, capital
city of Ethiopia. The miracle of our birth took place in Missing Hospital’s Operating Theater 3, the very room where our mother, Sister Mary
Joseph Praise, spent most of her working hours, and in which she had been
most fulfilled.
When our mother, a nun of the Diocesan Carmelite Order of Madras,
unexpectedly went into labor that September morning, the big rain in
Ethiopia had ended, its rattle on the corrugated tin roofs of Missing ceasing abruptly like a chatterbox cut off in midsentence. Over night, in that
hushed silence, the meskel flowers bloomed, turning the hillsides of Addis
Ababa into gold. In the meadows around Missing the sedge won its battle
over mud, and a brilliant carpet now swept right up to the paved threshold
of the hospital, holding forth the promise of something more substantial
than cricket, croquet, or shuttlecock.
Missing sat on a verdant rise, the irregular cluster of whitewashed oneand two-story buildings looking as if they were pushed up from the ground
in the same geologic rumble that created the Entoto Mountains. Troughlike flower beds, fed by the runoff from the roof gutters, surrounded the
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squat buildings like a moat. Matron Hirst’s roses overtook the walls, the
crimson blooms framing every window and reaching to the roof. So fertile was that loamy soil that Matron—Missing Hospital’s wise and sensible leader—cautioned us against stepping into it barefoot lest we sprout
new toes.
Five trails flanked by shoulder-high bushes ran away from the main
hospital buildings like spokes of a wheel, leading to five thatched-roof bungalows that were all but hidden by copse, by hedgerows, by wild eucalyptus
and pine. It was Matron’s intent that Missing resemble an arboretum, or a
corner of Kensington Gardens (where, before she came to Africa, she used
to walk as a young nun), or Eden before the Fall.
Missing was really Mission Hospital, a word that on the Ethiopian
tongue came out with a hiss so it sounded like “Missing.” A clerk in the
Ministry of Health who was a fresh high-school graduate had typed out
the missing hospital on the license, a phonetically correct spelling as far
as he was concerned. A reporter for the Ethiopian Herald perpetuated
this misspelling. When Matron Hirst had approached the clerk in the ministry to correct this, he pulled out his original typescript. “See for yourself, madam. Quod erat demonstrandum it is Missing,” he said, as if he’d
proved Pythagoras’s theorem, the sun’s central position in the solar system,
the roundness of the earth, and Missing’s precise location at its imagined
corner. And so Missing it was.
Not a cry or a groan escaped from Sister Mary Joseph Praise while in the
throes of her cataclysmic labor. But just beyond the swinging door in the
room adjoining Operating Theater 3, the oversize autoclave (donated by
the Lutheran church in Zurich) bellowed and wept for my mother while
its scalding steam sterilized the surgical instruments and towels that would
be used on her. After all, it was in the corner of the autoclave room, right
next to that stainless-steel behemoth, that my mother kept a sanctuary for
herself during the seven years she spent at Missing before our rude arrival.
Her one-piece desk-and-chair, rescued from a defunct mission school, and
bearing the gouged frustration of many a pupil, faced the wall. Her white
cardigan, which I am told she often slipped over her shoulders when she
was between operations, lay over the back of the chair.
On the plaster above the desk my mother had tacked up a calendar
print of Bernini’s famous sculpture of St. Teresa of Avila. The figure of
St. Teresa lies limp, as if in a faint, her lips parted in ecstasy, her eyes unfocused, lids half closed. On either side of her, a voyeuristic chorus peers
down from the prie-dieux. With a faint smile and a body more muscular
than befits his youthful face, a boy angel stands over the saintly, voluptuous
sister. The fingertips of his left hand lift the edge of the cloth covering her
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161
bosom. In his right hand he holds an arrow as delicately as a violinist holds
a bow.
Why this picture? Why St. Teresa, Mother?
As a little boy of four, I took myself away to this windowless room to
study the image. Courage alone could not get me past that heavy door, but
my sense that she was there, my obsession to know the nun who was my
mother, gave me strength. I sat next to the autoclave which rumbled and
hissed like a waking dragon, as if the hammering of my heart had roused
the beast. Gradually, as I sat at my mother’s desk, a peace would come over
me, a sense of communion with her.
I learned later that no one had dared remove her cardigan from where
it sat draped on the chair. It was a sacred object. But for a four-year old,
everything is sacred and ordinary. I pulled that Cuticura-scented garment
around my shoulders. I rimmed the dried-out inkpot with my nail, tracing
a path her fingers had taken. Gazing up at the calendar print just as she
must have while sitting there in that windowless room, I was transfixed by
that image. Years later, I learned that St. Teresa’s recurrent vision of the
angel was called the transverberation, which the dictionary said was the
soul “inflamed” by the love of God, and the heart “pierced” by divine love;
the metaphors of her faith were also the metaphors of medicine. At four
years of age, I didn’t need words like “transverberation” to feel reverence
for that image. Without photographs of her to go by, I couldn’t help but
imagine that the woman in the picture was my mother, threatened and
about to be ravished by the spear-wielding boy-angel. “When are you coming, Mama?” I would ask, my small voice echoing off the cold tile. When
are you coming?
I would whisper my answer: “By God!” That was all I had to go by: Dr.
Ghosh’s declaration the time I’d first wandered in there and he’d come
looking for me and had stared at the picture of St. Teresa over my shoulders; he lifted me in his strong arms and said in that voice of his that was
every bit a match for the autoclave: “She is CUM-MING, by God!”
Forty-six and four years have passed since my birth, and miraculously I
have the opportunity to return to that room. I find I am too large for that
chair now, and the cardigan sits atop my shoulders like the lace amice of
a priest. But chair, cardigan, and calendar print of transverberation are
still there. I, Marion Stone, have changed, but little else has. Being in that
unaltered room propels a thumbing back through time and memory. The
unfading print of Bernini’s statue of St. Teresa (now framed and under
glass to preserve what my mother tacked up) seems to demand this. I am
forced to render some order to the events of my life, to say it began here,
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and then because of this, that happened, and this is how the end connects
to the beginning, and so here I am.
We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose
beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the
common lot. I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a
physician. My intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself.
Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously,
in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will
heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound.
I chose the specialty of surgery because of Matron, that steady presence
during my boyhood and adolescence. “What is the hardest thing you can
possibly do?” she said when I went to her for advice on the darkest day of
the first half of my life. I squirmed. How easily Matron probed the gap
between ambition and expediency. “Why must I do what is hardest?”
“Because, Marion, you are an instrument of God. Don’t leave the
instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for ‘Three Blind Mice’ when you can play
the ‘Gloria’?”
How unfair of Matron to evoke that soaring chorale which always made
me feel that I stood with every mortal creature looking up to the heavens in
dumb wonder. She understood my unformed character.
“But, Matron, I can’t dream of playing Bach, the ‘Gloria’ . . . ,” I said
under my breath. I’d never played a string or wind instrument. I couldn’t
read music.
“No, Marion,” she said, her gaze soft, reaching for me, her gnarled
hands rough on my cheeks. “No, not Bach’s ‘Gloria.’ Yours! Your ‘Gloria’
lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made
possible in you.”
I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an
introspective field—internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of
the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a scalpel caused
coils to form in my belly. (It still does.) Surgery was the most difficult thing
I could imagine.
And so I became a surgeon.
Thirty years later, I am not known for speed, or daring, or technical
genius. Call me steady, call me plodding; say I adopt the style and technique that suits the patient and the particular situation and I’ll consider
that high praise. I take heart from my fellow physicians who come to me
when they themselves must suffer the knife. They know that Marion Stone
will be as involved after the surgery as before and during. They know I have
no use for surgical aphorisms such as “When in doubt, cut it out” or “Why
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163
wait when you can operate” other than for how reliably they reveal the
shallowest intellects in our field. My father, for whose skills as a surgeon I
have the deepest respect, says, “The operation with the best outcome is the
one you decide not to do.” Knowing when not to operate, knowing when I
am in over my head, knowing when to call for the assistance of a surgeon
of my father’s caliber—that kind of talent, that kind of “brilliance,” goes
unheralded.
On one occasion with a patient in grave peril, I begged my father to
operate. He stood silent at the bedside, his fingers lingering on the patient’s
pulse long after he had registered the heart rate, as if he needed the touch
of skin, the thready signal in the radial artery to catalyze his decision. In
his taut expression I saw complete concentration. I imagined I could see
the cogs turning in his head; I imagined I saw the shimmer of tears in his
eyes. With utmost care he weighed one option against another. At last, he
shook his head, and turned away.
I followed. “Dr. Stone,” I said, using his title though I longed to cry out,
Father! “An operation is his only chance,” I said. In my heart I knew the
chance was infinitesimally small, and the first whiff of anesthesia might
end it all. My father put his hand on my shoulder. He spoke to me gently,
as if to a junior colleague rather than his son. “Marion, remember the
Eleventh Commandment,” he said. “Thou shall not operate on the day of
a patient’s death.”
I remember his words on full-moon nights in Addis Ababa when knives
are flashing and rocks and bullets are flying, and when I feel as if I am
standing in an abattoir and not in Operating Theater 3, my skin flecked
with the grist and blood of strangers. I remember. But you don’t always
know the answers before you operate. One operates in the now. Later, the
retrospectoscope, that handy tool of the wags and pundits, the conveners
of the farce we call M&M—morbidity and mortality conference—will
pronounce your decision right or wrong. Life, too, is like that. You live it
forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to
the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.
Now, in my fiftieth year, I venerate the sight of the abdomen or chest
laid open. I’m ashamed of our human capacity to hurt and maim one
another, to desecrate the body. Yet it allows me to see the cabalistic harmony of heart peeking out behind lung, of liver and spleen consulting each
other under the dome of the diaphragm—these things leave me speechless. My fingers “run the bowel” looking for holes that a blade or bullet
might have created, coil after glistening coil, twenty-three feet of it compacted into such a small space. The gut that has slithered past my fingers
like this in the African night would by now reach the Cape of Good Hope,
and I have yet to see the serpent’s head. But I do see the ordinary miracles
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under skin and rib and muscle, visions concealed from their owner. Is there
a greater privilege on earth?
At such moments I remember to thank my twin brother, Shiva—Dr.
Shiva Praise Stone—to seek him out, to find his reflection in the glass panel
that separates the two operating theaters, and to nod my thanks because
he allows me to be what I am today. A surgeon. According to Shiva, life
is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn’t speak in metaphors. Fixing
holes is precisely what he did. Still, it’s an apt metaphor for our profession.
But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family.
Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll
leave much unfinished for the next generation.
Born in Africa, living in exile in America, then returning at last to Africa,
I am proof that geography is destiny. Destiny has brought me back to the
precise coordinates of my birth, to the very same operating theater where
I was born. My gloved hands share the space above the table in Operating
Theater 3 that my mother and father’s hands once occupied.
Some nights the crickets cry zaa-zee, zaa-zee, thousands of them
drowning out the coughs and grunts of the hyenas in the hillsides. Suddenly, nature turns quiet. It is as if roll call is over and it is time now in the
darkness to find your mate and retreat. In the ensuing vacuum of silence,
I hear the high-pitched humming of the stars and I feel exultant, thankful
for my insignificant place in the galaxy. It is at such times that I feel my
indebtedness to Shiva.
Twin brothers, we slept in the same bed till our teens, our heads touching, our legs and torsos angled away. We outgrew that intimacy, but I still
long for it, for the proximity of his skull. When I wake to the gift of yet
another sunrise, my first thought is to rouse him and say, I owe you the
sight of morning.
What I owe Shiva most is this: to tell the story. It is one my mother,
Sister Mary Joseph Praise, did not reveal and my fearless father, Thomas
Stone, ran from, and which I had to piece together. Only the telling can
heal the rift that separates my brother and me. Yes, I have infinite faith in
the craft of surgery, but no surgeon can heal the kind of wound that divides
two brothers. Where silk and steel fail, story must succeed. To begin at the
beginning . . .
Finishing the Hat
Collected Lyrics (1954–1981) With Attendant
Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges,
Whines and Anecdotes
Stephen Sondheim
Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd.
His skin was pale and his eye was odd.
He shaved the faces of gentlemen
Who never thereafter were heard of again.
He trod a path that few have trod,
Did Sweeney Todd,
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
If ever there was an example of “God is in the details,” it’s the line that
opens this show: “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd.” Detail 1: the use of
“attend” to mean “listen to” is just archaic enough to tell the audience that
this will be a period piece. Detail 2: the idea of a “tale” suggests that the
audience not take the story realistically but as a fable, and opens them up
to accept the bizarrerie of the events which follow; it also promises a story
that will unfold like a folk ballad, foreshadowing the numerous choruses of
the song that will pop up during the course of the evening. Detail 3: the
alliteration on the first, second and fourth accented beats of “Attend the
tale of Sweeney Todd” is not only a microcosm of the AABA form of the
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song itself, but in its very formality gives the line a sinister feeling, especially
with the sepulchral accompaniment that rumbles underneath it.
If all of that seems like the kind of academic hyper-analysis which
regularly shows up in studies of literary forms, I can assure you that even
if the audience is not consciously aware of such specific details, they are
affected by them. [Oscar] Hammerstein, in the Introduction to his book
Lyrics, wrote:
‘A year or so ago, on the cover of the New York Herald Tribune Sunday
Magazine, I saw a picture of the Statue of Liberty. It was a picture taken
from a helicopter and it showed the top of the statue’s head. I was amazed
at the detail there. The sculptor had done a painstaking job with the lady’s
coiffure, and yet he must have been pretty sure that the only eyes that
would ever see this detail would be the uncritical eyes of seagulls. He could
not have dreamt that any man would ever fly over this head and take a
picture of it. He was artist enough, however, to finish off this part of the
statue with as much care as he had devoted to her face and her arms and
the torch and everything that people can see as they sail up the bay. He
was right. When you are creating a work of art, or any other kind of work,
finish the job off perfectly. You never know when a helicopter, or some
other instrument not at the moment invented, may come along and find
you out.’
His point is well taken and well made, although if I’d known it at the
time, I could have suggested to him that the sculptor might have had
another reason for his painstaking attention to the top of her head: the
disassembled statue was lying on the ground in the middle of Paris for all
to see for months before it was assembled and shipped to America.
Hammerstein also claimed that the opening number is the most important song in a musical because it establishes tone, character, information
and everything in between. If that’s true (and it is), I would add that for
the same reason the first line of any song is the most important line in it,
which in turn means that the first line of the opening number is crucial to
an audience’s acceptance of everything which follows.
It was a lucky moment for me, therefore, when “Attend the tale of
Sweeney Todd” swam into my consciousness. As Tennessee Williams
wrote, “Sometimes there’s God so quickly.”
I Remember Nothing
Nora Ephron
The Six Stages of E-Mail
Stage One: Infatuation
I just got e-mail! I can’t believe it! It’s so great! Here’s my handle. Write me.
Who said letter writing was dead? Were they ever wrong. I’m writing letters
like crazy for the first time in years. I come home and ignore all my loved
ones and go straight to the computer to make contact with total strangers. And how great is AOL? It’s so easy. It’s so friendly. It’s a community.
Wheeeee! I’ve got mail!
Stage Two: Clarification
Okay, I’m starting to understand—e-mail isn’t letter writing at all, it’s
something else entirely. It was just invented, it was just born, and overnight
it turns out to have a form and a set of rules and a language all its own.
Not since the printing press. Not since television. It’s revolutionary. It’s lifealtering. It’s shorthand. Cut to the chase. Get to the point. It saves so much
time. It takes five seconds to accomplish in an e-mail something that takes
five minutes on the telephone. The phone requires you to converse, to say
things like hello and goodbye, to pretend to some semblance of interest in
the person on the other end of the line. Worst of all, the phone occasion-
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ally forces you to make actual plans with the people you talk to—to suggest
lunch or dinner—even if you have no desire whatsoever to see them. No
danger of that with e-mail. E-mail is a whole new way of being friends
with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in
short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without
it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an instant message from someone I almost know.
Stage Three: Confusion
I have done nothing to deserve any of this: Viagra!!!!! Best Web source for
Vioxx. Spend a week in Cancún. Have a rich beautiful lawn. Astrid would
like to be added as one of your friends. XXXXXXXVideos. Add three
inches to the length of your penis. The Democratic National Committee
needs you. Virus Alert. FW: This will make you laugh. FW: This is funny.
FW: This is hilarious. FW: Grapes and raisins toxic for dogs. FW: Gabriel
García Márquez’s Final Farewell. FW: Kurt Vonnegut’s Commencement
Address. FW: The Neiman Marcus Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe. AOL
Member: We value your opinion. A message from Barack Obama. Find
low mortgage payments, Nora. Nora, it’s your time to shine. Need to fight
off bills, Nora? Yvette would like to be added as one of your friends. You
have failed to establish a full connection to AOL.
Stage Four: Disenchantment
Help! I’m drowning. I have 112 unanswered e-mails. I’m a writer—imagine how many unanswered e-mails I would have if I had a real job. Imagine how much writing I could do if I didn’t have to answer all this e-mail.
My eyes are dim. My wrist hurts. I can’t focus. Every time I start to write
something, the e-mail icon starts bobbing up and down and I’m compelled
to check whether anything good or interesting has arrived. It hasn’t. Still, it
might, any second now. And yes, it’s true—I can do in a few seconds with
e-mail what would take much longer on the phone, but most of my e-mails
are from people who don’t have my phone number and would never call
me in the first place. In the brief time it took me to write this paragraph,
three more e-mails arrived. Now I have 115 unanswered e-mails. Strike
that: 116. Glub glub glub glub glub.
I Remember Nothing
169
Stage Five: Accommodation
Yes. No. Can’t. No way. Maybe. Doubtful. Sorry. So sorry. Thanks. No
thanks. Out of town. OOT. Try me in a month. Try me in the fall. Try me
in a year. [email protected] can now be reached at NoraE81082@gmail
.com.
Stage Six: Death
Call me.
The Widower’s Tale
Julia Glass
Why, thank you. I’m getting in shape to die.”
Those were the first words I spoke aloud on the final Thursday in August
of last summer: Thursday, I recall for certain, because it was the day on
which I read in our weekly town paper about the first of what I would so
blithely come to call the Crusades; the end of the month, I can also say for
certain, because Elves & Fairies was scheduled, that very evening, to fling
open its brand-new, gloriously purple doors—formerly the entrance to my
beloved barn—and usher in another flight of tiny perfect children, along
with their preened and privileged parents.
I was on the return stretch of my route du jour, the sun just gaining a
vista over the trees, when a youngster who lives half a mile down my street
gave me a thumbs-up and drawled, “Use it or lose it, man!” I might have
ignored his insolence had he been pruning a hedge or fetching the newspaper, but he appeared merely to be lounging—and smoking a cigarette—on
his parents’ hyperfastidiously weed-free lawn. He wore tattered trousers a
foot too long and the smile of a bartender who wishes to convey that you’ve
had one too many libations.
I stopped, jogging in place, and elaborated on my initial remark.
“Because you see, lad,” I informed him, huffing rhythmically though still
in control, “I have it on commendable authority that dying is hard work,
requiring diligence, stamina, and fortitude. Which I intend to maintain in
ample supply until the moment of truth arrives.”
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And this was no lie: three months before, at my daughter’s Memorial
Day cookout, I’d overheard one of her colleagues confide to another, in
solemn Hippocratic tones, “Maternity nurses love to talk about how hard
it is to be born, how it’s anything but passive. They explain to all these
New Age moms that babies come out exhausted from the work they do,
how they literally muscle their way toward the light. Well, if you ask me,
dying’s the same. It’s hard work, too. The final stretch is a marathon. I’ve
seen patients try to die but fail. Just one more thing they didn’t bother to
tell us in med school.” (Creepy, this talk of muscling one’s way toward the
dark. Though I did enjoy the concept of all those babies toiling away, lives
on the line, like ancient Roman tunnel workers, determined to complete
their passage.)
As for the youngster with trousers slouched around his bony ankles, my
homily had its intended effect. When I finished, he hadn’t a syllable at his
service; not even the knee-jerk “Whatever” that members of his generation
mutter when conversationally cornered. As I went on my way, energized by
vindication, I had a dim notion that the youngster’s name was Damien. Or
Darius. I put him at fifteen, the nadir point of youth. Had he been a boy
of his age some twenty years ago, I would have known his name without
a second thought, not just because I would have known his parents but
because in all likelihood he would have mowed my lawn or painted my
barn (gratefully!) for an hourly wage appropriate to a teenage boy’s modestly spendthrift habits. Nowadays, teenage boys with wealthy parents do
not mow lawns or paint houses. If they stoop to any sort of paid activity,
they help seasoned citizens learn to navigate the baffling world of computers and entertainment modules, charging an hourly wage more appropriate to the appallingly profligate habits of a drug dealer in the Bronx.
Damius or Darien might indeed have been the one to coach my own
seasoned self through the use of my new laptop computer (a retirement
gift that spring from my daughters), and to fleece me accordingly, had I not
been the fortunate grandfather of a very intelligent, very kind, adequately
well-mannered boy of twenty who was, at the time, an honors student at
Harvard. A “good boy,” as parents no longer dare to say, cowed by advice
from some celebrity pediatrician who’s probably fathered two or three litters with a sequence of abandoned wives. But that’s what Robert was, to
me (and still is, or is again, despite everything that’s happened): a Good
Boy, on the verge of becoming a solid, productive citizen. “My grandson is
a very good boy,” I used to say, with pride and confidence, especially within
earshot of his mother.
Robert had inherited his mother’s passion for science, and I had begun
to assume, with mixed feelings, that he planned to follow in her professional
footsteps. A successful oncologist in Boston, Trudy has become marginally
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famous as a media source whenever some new Scandinavian study pops
up to hint at anything approaching a cure. One day, watching her as she
explained a controversial drug to that life-size Ken doll on the six o’clock
news, it occurred to me that my younger daughter entered my living room
more often as a guest of NBC than as my flesh-and-blood offspring. I saw
Robert far more frequently.
Robert stayed in close touch with me as contractors, carpenters, plumbers, and electricians jacked up and tore apart my barn so that it could
become the new home of Elves & Fairies, Matlock’s favorite progressive
nursery school. (Simply to look out my back windows that summer felt
like spying on the public humiliation of a loyal friend, an ordeal I had
engineered.) When these callow strangers—few of whom spoke English by
choice—were not perpetrating their mutilations, buttressings, and vigorous
eviscerations upon that stately structure, they treated my entire property
like an amusement park. During breaks, they would kick a soccer ball back
and forth by the pond, and while there were plenty of other shady spots
in which to lounge, they ate their lunch on the steps of my back porch,
their laughter and indecipherable chitchat echoing throughout my house.
I could not even identify the language they shared. It might have been
Tagalog or Farsi.
Fortuitously, despite my protests, Robert had insisted on setting up an
e-mail account when he tutored me on the use of my laptop. After decades
at a job where the King Kong shadow of technology loomed ever larger
and darker over the simple work I loved, I had fantasies of a quasi-Luddite
retirement: I would revel in the pages of one obscurely significant novel
after another, abandoning the world of gigabytes and hard drives. Cursed
be the cursors; farewell to iEverything and all its pertly nicknamed apps.
In a word, ha.
That summer, as it turned out, I found my sleek, alarmingly versatile
computer a blessing—chiefly because it meant that I heard regularly from
Robert, who was working at a coastal conservation outfit up in Maine. He
kept me sane by sympathizing with my fury about everything from the cigarette butts and gum wrappers I found in the forsythia bushes to the dozens
of alien soda-pop cans I had to haul, along with my own recycling, to the
transfer station. Most insulting was the altered view from my desk: my copper beech so rudely upstaged by a large blue closet concealing a toilet.
That Thursday, finally, the blue john was carted away. The workmen
were gone. My good deed was coming to fruition, and I was determined
to put myself in a positive frame of mind. Yes, I was irritated by the youth
in the baggy trousers and all that he personified—but he was just one sign
among many that the world was changing its colors without my permission. Yes, I was apprehensive about the looming loss, possibly permanent,
173
of certain privileges I had long taken for granted: peace, privacy, and (my
daughter Clover had recently informed me) swimming naked in the pond
before dark. But I had been led to expect these vexations. And I was excited
to learn, from Robert’s latest e-mail, that he was now back in Cambridge,
preparing to start his junior year.
So when I came downstairs after showering, reading two chapters of
Eyeless in Gaza, and shooting an e-missive to my grandson inviting him to
lunch, I was almost completely happy to find my elder daughter in my
kitchen. Almost.
There she sat, at the same table where she’d started each day for the
first seventeen years of her life, eating a bowl of yogurt sprinkled with what
looked like birdseed, drinking tea the color of algae, and paging through
my copy of the Grange. For the past year, she’d been renting part of a house
across town, yet she continued to make herself at home without announcing her presence. I knew that I ought to feel an instinctual fatherly joy—
here she was, safe and hopeful at the very least, possibly even content—yet
most of the time I had to suppress a certain resentment that she had made
such a wreck of her life and then, on top of that, made me feel responsible
for her all over again.
Like her younger sister, Clover hadn’t lived under my roof since a summer or two during college—unless one were to count the recent period
(though one would like to have forgotten it) during which she had languished here after the histrionic collapse of her marriage. For six months,
until I helped her move across town and convinced my friend Norval to
give her a job at his bookstore, she had gone back and forth between my
house and her sister’s.
“Hey, Daddy.” Clover beamed at me. “How was your run?”
“Made it to the Old Artillery,” I said. (Wisely, she paid me no condescending compliments.)
She stood. “Can I make you a sandwich?”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Turkey? Peanut butter? Egg salad?”
“Thank you.”
Clover laughed her deceptively carefree laugh. At an early age, my
daughters learned that I do not like unnecessary choices, yet they tease me
with them all the same. My favorite restaurants—if any such remain—are
the ones where you’re served a meal, no questions asked (except, perhaps,
what color wine you’d prefer). You can carry on a civilized conversation
without being forced to hear a litany of the twenty dressings you may have
on your salad or to pretend you care what distant lake engendered your
rainbow trout.
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As Clover assembled my lunch, she told me in meticulous detail about
the last-minute touches she and her new colleagues were putting on the
barn to prepare for the open house that night. I sometimes wondered if she
could appreciate the depth of the sacrifice I was making—all of it for her.
While she twittered on about the final visit from the fire marshal, how
she’d held her breath as he peered upward yet again at all those hundredyear-old rafters, my attention wandered to the newspaper, open to the
police log. In any given week, the most notable incident in Matlock might
be Loud voices reported 2 a.m. on Caspian Way or Pearl earring found under bench
at train depot. But then there were such delectably absurd items as Woman
apprehended removing lady’s slippers from woods off Mallard Lane or Caller on Reed
St. complained wild turkeys blocked access to garage. A recent standout was “Bonehead driver” reported at food co-op transfer site.
That week, our fearless enforcers had coped valiantly with a Shetland
pony wandering free behind the public library, a 911 hang-up, the report
of a weird man on a bike riding along a perfectly public road, a complaint
about extensive paper detritus blowing across a hayfield, and a car left idling
for twenty minutes at Wally’s Grocery Stop. But then I came to the listings
for the previous Saturday, a day of the week that, in the police log, tends to
be dominated by reckless driving at the cocktail hour. This time, however,
the first entry for Saturday read, Motor vehicle vandalized and filled with vegetable
refuse reported at 24 Quarry Rd. at 6:05 a.m.
I burst out laughing. Clover stopped talking and turned from the counter to face me. “You find vaccination records a source of amusement?”
I tapped the paper. “This is priceless. Did you read this?”
She struggled not to look annoyed. Carrying a plate on which she’d
placed a sandwich made with burlap bread, she looked over my shoulder.
I read the item aloud. “ ‘Vegetable refuse’? Now there’s something
new.”
“You didn’t hear about that?” said Clover.
“How would I? I’m no longer on the soirée circuit. I’ve been branded
the town curmudgeon.”
“You have not. In fact, you are the town savior, in the opinion of
seventy-three parents arriving to see their children’s fabulous new school
this evening.”
“Until someone’s precious little Christopher Robin breaks a toe on the
flagstone walk or falls off that fancy jungle gym.”
Clover uttered a noise of exasperation, but she spared me the usual
dose of her newfound philosophy about the magnetic effects of negative
thinking.
“But this.” I pointed to the paper again. “This wins a prize.”
175
She sat down across from me and told me that some fellow named Jonathan Newcomb had awakened to find his brand-new Hummer filled with
corn husks. “Like, jam-packed with the stuff. And there was this big sign
pasted over the entire windshield, and it said, ETHANOL, ANYONE?
And they put it on with the kind of glue you can’t get off—in New York,
they use it to glue on notices when you don’t move your car for the street
cleaner.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“The police, Daddy.”
“No, I mean the ‘they’ who filled that car with corn.”
“Just the husks. Nobody knows.”
I laughed loudly. I might even have clapped my hands. “That’s the most
creative prank I’ve heard of in ages.”
Clover did not partake in my amusement. “Well, Jonathan is on the
warpath. He made sure they fingerprinted everything in sight. Like even
the hubcaps. He missed a plane, too. His company had an important
meeting.”
“Wait. Quarry Road? Isn’t Newcomb the fellow who put down three
acres of turf where all that milkweed used to grow like blazes? The field
where I used to take you and Trudy to see the butterflies? You know that
scoundrel?”
“He’s a dad,” said Clover.
I was baffled by this non sequitur until I realized she was referring to E
& F. No doubt Newcomb paid the full, five-figure tuition. Probably times
two, for a brace of hey-presto fertility twins.
“Can you imagine,” she said, sounding deeply concerned, “getting all
that corn silk out of the upholstery?”
“No. I cannot imagine that.” I used my napkin to conceal my smile.

here - Knopf Doubleday

Transcription

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