Words of Danny O'Bigbelly My idea of a good time

Nearly thirty years ago, I was a freshman in college.

It’s hard to fathom now, but things were a bit different back then.

In order to keep track of who was whom and in particular who was entitled to eat in the freshman dining hall instead of one of the other dining halls, each student was given a sticker to attach to his or her student ID card.  The way that the stickers were assigned was simplicity itself: there was a roll of stickers, numbers 1 through 1600 or so; one for every member of the class, and the first time someone went to the dining hall, the checker would look up their name in a big book and discover whether or not they should be there.  If so, then the checker would peel off the next sticker on the roll and put it on your ID card, and then she (it was always a woman, as far as I can remember) would write down the number next to your name.

Every subsequent trip to the dining hall, you would flash your card to the checker, and she would read off the number and then check off the corresponding box on an enormous matrix that covered most of the desk in front of her, and make a tick mark in a pad to count how many students had eaten at that meal.

This ritual was repeated every semester.  The stickers needed to be replaced every few months.  They were color-coded, and so at some point your color would be wrong and it would be time to get a new sticker.  The lines at the checker could be quite lengthy during those periods, except when there were two or more checkers working in parallel–some handing out new stickers, and the others checking off students who already had their stickers.

I was a chronic early riser.  Early to bed and early to rise was always my way, which means that I missed a lot of interesting things that happened in the small hours of the morning, but I also got the treat of having the campus almost all to myself very morning.

I was one of the few regulars at breakfast every morning.  I rarely missed breakfast, and I was rarely even late.  In contrast, I think that many of my classmates weren’t even aware that breakfast was served.

When I say that I was usually early at breakfast, I mean this in the most literal way.  The first semester I got sticker number 0002.  The second semester, sticker 0003.  I never discovered who got the lower-numbered stickers, despite trying to sneak peaks at the cards of the other early birds.  Initially I figured that whoever got their number before me on the first day of the semester would probably be another early riser, but I never found them.  Eventually I formed a different hypothesis: the first number or two on each roll was damaged by being near the edge, and therefore maybe I really did get the first number.

It was strange eating alone in such a cavernous hall–and cavernous is the only want to describe it, with fifty-foot ceilings, dark walnut paneling, lit poorly by chandeliers constructed from the countless antlers of creatures slain by Teddy Roosevelt, according to the local legend.  I was never really alone, but I often had a row or two of long tables between myself and the next person.  Most of us early birds weren’t terribly social.  In fact, some of them seemed positively antisocial, and I left those people alone, but sometimes I would try to join people who made eye contact and gave me the sense that they wanted someone to talk to, unless they were already muttering to themselves.

I didn’t make the cut with a lot of my potential conversation partners.  If it was pretty clear that they preferred to eat alone–or at least not with me–then I wouldn’t force myself on them again.  Because I’ve always been sort of a gawky, awkward nerd, and never a particularly scintillating conversationalist, this turned out to be a fairly high percentage of the people on whom I inflicted myself.

There was one woman who was somewhat social, and I ended up sitting with her fairly often–maybe once every week or two.  She was from a town that I’d never heard of that was only an hour or so away from the town where I grew up, so we almost knew some of the same places, but not quite.  The malls I went to were not the malls she went to.

She must have been one of the smallest people in our class–perhaps she was a precocious fourteen-year-old or something like that.  I never asked; “Why are you so petite?” seems like one of those questions that is never appropriate.  She was pre-med, and I imagined her as a doctor some time in the future, doing rounds in a hospital, barely tall enough to see her patients over the edge of their beds.

She wore puffy sweaters and knit scarves, as were the fashion of the time, and no time before or since.  She often wore a skirt, which was not the fashion of the time.

We didn’t develop a close friendship and I don’t think I saw her more than a few times outside of the dining hall.

A few weeks, I got my class report–a large book where my classmates list their accomplishments over the last few decades (a very impressive set of accomplishments), accompanied by photos both from our freshman facebook and recent lives.

I started to leaf through it, looking up old friends.  The photos and reminiscences of people I’d forgotten I’d ever known brought back many memories.

I wondered what had happened to the petite pre-med with whom I’d shared so many breakfasts, and tried to look her up, but then I realized that despite my clear memory of how the checkers handed out the stickers for our IDs–a procedure that I only saw twice–I couldn’t remember any part of her name, or even clearly remember what she looked like.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that I went into computer science instead of political science.

One of the challenges that I face on my treadmill odyssey is keeping my mind occupied.  I’ve got books, and a Kindle, and television (which I can tolerate in small doses), but the best thing that I’ve found so far is to watch sub-titled movies or television shows on my little Sony Dash.  The Dash looks nice, and having the subtitles means that I can follow the dialog without turning up the sound so much that it bothers the other occupants of my home.

The next challenge, of course, is to find the a steady supply of subtitled shows to watch.  The best solution that I’ve discovered–although I will gladly take suggestions for better solutions–is watching serial anime from Japan.  Each episode is short enough and peppered with enough commercial breaks that there is always a convenient breaking point if I need one, but the episodes are entertaining and tie together into long story arcs that give me some motivation to stay on the treadmill and keep watching.  I’ve even been tempted to watch some of them when I’m not on the treadmill, but this would set a dangerous precedent.

I’ve written before about Trigun, a story that revolves around Vash, a peerless gunman with a heart of gold, a $60,000,000,000 (yes, that’s the correct number of zeros) bounty on his head, a complicated and troubled past, and a brother who has a small army of minions, weapons of mass destruction, and concrete plans to kill every man, woman, and child on the planet except himself and Vash.  It’s exactly the sort of story that Homer would probably come up with, if Homer had spent more time thinking about space colonization, donut-loving gunslingers and the difficulties of running a successful insurance company when some jackass is nuking cities now and then, and less time trying to find ways to blame the gods or men who don’t pay enough attention to their wives for every little thing that goes wrong.  In any case, there’s enough grist in this setup to keep the mill grinding in a lively manner for about ten hours–probably longer.  I understand the books went on for quite a bit longer than the show, but I’ve never tried to find them.

One of the mysteries of Trigun is why it is called “Trigun” at all.  There aren’t any characters or anything else named Trigun and as far as I have been able to tell the word never appears anywhere in the script.  The answer, I believe, is because Vash has three handguns.  The first–and the only one that nearly anyone ever sees–is an enormous .45 LC breaktop that he wears on his hip.  (Don’t bother telling that there’s no such gun, or that making a .45 breaktop would never work because the stress on the hinge would be too much–it’s a frickin work of fiction, there’s advanced technology involved, and I just don’t care.)  Despite his global renown as a gunman, this gun is often unloaded, broken, in the shop, or packed away somewhere safe.  If you want to see what he can do with it, you’ll have to wait until episode 5 to see him actually fire the thing, but it’s worth the wait–the sequence where the faces of the hostages Vash is trying to protect are reflected in the barrel of his revolver when he draws it for the first time deserves some sort of award and will probably be stolen by other directors ad nauseum. The second and third guns are revealed much later, but I won’t spoil it any more than that.

OK, I know nobody ever clicks on the links… so I’ll have rehash them for you. By the time we see Vash actually shoot a gun for the first time, people are starting to doubt that he’s who they thought he was because he just seems like a goofy kid, not a terrifying, merciless gunslinger who kills in the blink of an eye, but then, for reasons that are not germane to this discussion, he pulls his gun as he is diving headlong to the ground and fires five shots before he hits the ground, each perfectly hitting his target, which is the size of a fist and is hurtling past at 120 miles per hour.  There is some who believe that the fifth bullet left the gun before the first bullet strikes the target.  It all happens so fast that it takes forty seconds of super slow motion to cover less than 1.5 seconds of real time.  Thus it is established that Vash has skills.

Similar to Trigun, there’s no clear reason why the serial Bleach is named “Bleach”, except perhaps that the main character has hair color that looks suspiciously like something that required L’Oreal’s deep involvement.  I am not the only person who has pondered this mystery; apparently it is a question that comes up quite often, but the creator of the story has never publicly offered any reason other than that he thought the name was pretty cool.

After a few minutes of the first episode, in which Ichigo, a typical teenage boy, banters with the ghost of a young girl who recently died but has who not yet passed over into the next world, the viewer begins to suspect that this will not be a formulaic teenage comedy of manners, but might instead take a different path.  Then a demon appears, apparently eager to consume the girl’s fresh soul, but it is foiled by Rukia, who, it can be said with complete accuracy, both floats like a butterfly and stings like a katana-carrying, samurai-trained killer bee, who dispatches the demon and saves Ichigo and the dead girl.  I was a little surprised that Rukia didn’t follow up on this introduction by mentioning that she was out of bubblegum, but I guess that’s not part of bushido, and it can also be explained by the fact that she didn’t know that Ichigo, unlike most humans, can actually see her.   Anyway, from there things just continue on from there in a perfectly logical manner.

Bleach is a typical love story–well, I assume that there’s love at some point, although I’m still less than half of the way through and the central protagonists are not currently on speaking terms–between Ichigo, an average teenage boy who can see dead people and who is pursued by demons and Rukia, an ancient yet cute reaper of human souls, also known colloquially as a death god.  It’s pretty much a rehash of Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo is a regular guy, and Juliet is a supernatural entity from the world beyond death whose brother is more or less a Tybalt-like jerk, if Tybalt had a talking sword that transforms on his command into a swirling maelstrom of 1,000 all-shredding steel cherry blossoms.  Their relationship is not made easier by the cultural tension between Rukia’s supernatural cohort and Ichigo’s high school buddies, and the fact that they are all pawns of powerful forces conspiring to destroy the twin universes of the living and the dead certainly keeps everyone on their toes, but before you can say “Harry Potter” Ichigo is sneaking off into the spirit world to run errands for Rukia (after loading a spare soul into his body so his friends and family won’t know that he’s gone, naturally) and Rukia takes the form of a human so she can steal Ichigo’s sister’s clothes and impersonate a 15-year-old transfer student in order to hang around with Ichigo and his friends during the day.

One of my favorite things about Bleach is that each named character has a signature hairstyle and look.  I believe that a lot of thought went into this, and it’s spawned a cottage industry of sorts to cater to people who want to look like the characters.  Pick your favorite Bleach character and do a search, and I’m confident that you’ll find people dressed up like that character and/or who are eager to help you dress up as that character.  Be aware, however, that there are no exceptions to Rule 34 and I can’t be held responsible for what you find.

But I digress.

Maybe next time I’ll explain where I was going with all this, but it’s time to greet the dawn by watching a few more episodes and walking a few more miles.

Perhaps as a response to my essay about Tommy on Sunday, readers have brought to my attention a new group that they predict will be the next super monster group of rock.  As they put it, this group will be huge, epic, historic, and mammoth.

This group is in its formative period, and is changing names on a daily (perhaps hourly) basis.  I can certainly appreciate the challenges that any group has on choosing a good name, given the current emphasis and expectation that group names be short, easily remembered, and contain a sexual innuendo, a euphemism, and a snide reference calculated to annoy fans of other generations and/or types of music.  This is why “The Rolling Stones” will never be as great as “The Beatles”, and why both bands were trumped by “The Faces”, “The Who”, “Kiss”, and the exquisitely named “Yes”.  The additional requirement–that the name not already be in use–is the real killer, however, because after decades of mining the vernacular, all the good ones are taken.  This leads to disastrous names composed from the names of the artists, which in turn leads to desperate measures such as artists changing names to avoid conflict, making up names to sound cooler, stealing names from songs, or even more drastic steps.

When their name has remained the same for more than a week, I’ll be happy to share it, but in the meanwhile all I can tell you is that the group desires to have a very short name, because a short name appeals to their core and over-arching goal, which is to be the “greenest” band in the world, and a short name will help to achieve that goal by reducing the amount of ink on their posters, dye on their t-shirts, light bulbs on their marquees, and time required to google them.

I spoke Tuesday with several members of the band during breaks from a rehearsal that took place in an unheated and poorly-lit Boston-area studio, where they are rehearsing for their premiere performance, which is tentatively scheduled for the late Spring, when it is warm enough to play outside or in the subway without, as they put it, “freezing their asses off.”  They asked me to keep their identities anonymous, at least until they choose appropriately memorable and copyrightable stage names, and so instead of their given names, I will use names based on their favorite cookies.

While Snickerdoodles and Necco worked out some of the details with Double-stuffed Oreo, Congo Bar explained to me some of the implications of the group.  She explained that they only play acoustic instruments, made from long-lasting, non-toxic and renewable materials that can be constructed using low-carbon offset techniques.  Thumb-print, the lead guitarist, for example, plays a guitar made from wood and bamboo, with a fretboard made of puka shells (no, neither one of  us knows what they are either) and strung with catgut strings, created from the intestines of contented pigs that have died a natural death after a long life consuming a diet composed only of garbage.  Some of the other members of the group play only virtual instruments, or conserve energy by simply appearing on stage, looking good and providing emotional and spiritual support for the members who, in the service of their art, do suffer the guilt of consuming natural resources; despite her best efforts, Ginger Snap, for example, has been unable to find a saxophone that is not constructed from metal, and nobody has any idea where to find a microphone that doesn’t require wires, batteries, or both.

The group does not perform live concerts, due to their concern about the resources required to transport themselves and their audience to and fro and amplify their instruments, the noxious chemicals required to clean up after a typical rock event, and the toxic, non-biodegradable karma exuded by ticket scalpers.

They do not release recordings of their music on CDs or LPs, but instead only release their music for digital download, and encode their music using lossy and some would say crappy MP3 parameters designed to favor conservation of bits rather than fidelity.  They do not use any sort of DRM, but instead make it easy to share and download their music from any source, which means that it is not necessary to permanently allocate storage for their music.

Their music is engineered to sound good at low volume; the group estimates that the environmental impact of listening to their entire catalog will be less than that of listening to the full-length single of “Highway to Hell” played at appropriate, window-rippling loudness.  In fact, they believe that if they make their songs simple and quiet enough, then their fans can easily commit them entirely to memory and reproduce them at will, without any electronics at all but simply through a combination of clapping, humming, and facial expressions.

I later spoke with Peanut Butter, the manager, light technician, roadie, backup-vocalist, and chief hype officer for the band, about sex and drugs, the other two pillars that hold the rock-and-roll world erect.  Peanut Butter explained that these subjects were the focus of much ongoing discussion, and he was not sure that consensus had yet been reached, and therefore was very careful to qualify his remarks as reflecting his own views, and not necessarily the view of his bandmates.  As far as drugs and other mind-altering substances are concerned, the group restricts itself to chemicals that can be produced through natural or semi-natural processes.  Alcohol is permitted, as are mushrooms and mescaline.  Marijuana is permitted, but the band only permits themselves to get baked via baked goods, such as cookies or brownies–smoking is strictly forbidden, because of the obvious impact of the smoke on the environment.  Heroin is off the list, at least until fair-trade heroin is available, and not even this bunch is stupid enough to try meth.

The subject of sexual mores is clearly one that the band has not resolved, and opinions are still somewhat divided on key issues.  Peanut Butter believes that sex is simply ecologically indefensible and has chosen to remain celibate, while Snickerdoodles, who is gay, believes that only homosexual sex is environmentally friendly, because there is no possibility of offspring.   Necco and Thumb-print, who are straight, have stated for the record that although they are uninterested in personally participating in gay sex, they would have no objection if Ginger Snap and Congo Bar, the two female members of the group, happened to turn out to be bisexual, especially if they are permitted to watch.

Necco, who is perhaps the most out-spoken of the group, did speak strongly on the subject of groupies:  “Although in some sense groupies are a renewable resource, they’re really an enormous, unsustainable burden on the environment.  It takes anywhere from eighteen to twenty-five years for a groupie to reach maturity, and even then only one in ten or maybe one in a hundred groupies make the cut, and then typically only for a short time.  It’s an enormous, senseless waste!  Much worse than eating beef or wearing leather.   We completely reject the culture of disposable groupies.”

Peanut Butter, claiming to speak for the rest of the group, wanted to make sure that my readers know that Necco “can sound like a real douche-bag sometimes, although he has a heart of responsibly-mined gold.”

It wouldn’t be right to neglect to mention my appreciation for the fact that my wife has stoically endured several iterations and variations of Tommy over the last forty-eight hours.

It wouldn’t be right.

There’s a story that has been told a thousand times, eventually becoming a self-parodying idiom: a kid goes to see a rock concert, gets inspired, buys a guitar, learns to play, becomes a rock star, and inspires the next generation. It certainly is plausible; the fruits of early rock music were fairly low-hanging, the glamor obvious, and the path to success short enough that a good concert could conceivably give a teenager with nascent musical abilities enough of a push to start a career. It doesn’t take much imagination to imagine how a repetitious rhythm, a few chords and simple lyrics might inspire a group or maybe two, which might in turn spawn variations, deconstructions, loving homages, and composites that reference several earlier generations.

There’s another story, however, which is much rarer. It’s the story of a person who goes to see a rock concert, gets inspired, walks out of the theater with a new and better understanding of themselves and their place in the world, and this feeling has enough inertia to sustain him or her through major life events over the next few decades. That’s the sort of story that people tell about seeing The Who perform Tommy live.

Tommy, which has been called the first true “rock opera” (although in its original form it didn’t really satisfy many of the canonical criteria for opera, the later film and Broadway incarnations of the music and story arguably may), is an intricate and rich tapestry of great complexity, knit together into a musically cohesive structure of nearly flawless majesty. You could think of its components as a sort of musical Noah’s Ark: everything needed to repopulate the rock world in the case of some sort of musical catastrophe is included, but there’s also nothing extraneous or gratuitous. The nuance and subtlety of the music was lost on some reviewers, who were distracted by the reputation of The Who as the loudest performers in a cohort known for a profound lack of restraint.

The plot of Tommy doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but that’s not really a problem because it’s just a delivery vehicle for the points that The Who wish to convey. Many of the listeners of the individual songs or medleys from the album don’t even know that there’s a story, or would be hard-pressed to explain what it might be. Fixing the story so that it seems plausible or realistic would simply add a bunch of unnecessary baggage that would take time away from the real points; nobody ever criticizes the parables in the Bible because they lack context, character development or even names for most of the major characters, just as nobody cares that Batman, Iron Man, and The Green Hornet are all essentially the same story. The story is just a scaffolding.

When the eponymous Tommy was a young boy, he witnessed something awful and fraught with lasting and dire implications, but was told by his parents to pretend that he didn’t see or hear anything, and that he mustn’t ever tell anyone. Tommy acts on this command far too literally and without proper qualification, thereby becoming deaf, dumb and blind. While the Beat generation was trying to batter down the doors of perception and explore what lay further, Tommy was caulking his shut. Alone with his thoughts, Tommy was given much time to think, and much to think about, and he eventually attains a state of limited enlightenment.

In the meanwhile, back in the real world, people are beginning to suspect that Tommy is not physically crippled, but that his isolation is self-imposed. This is particularly obvious when Tommy demonstrates a nearly prescient aptitude for the game of pinball, a game which usually requires a keen eye and hearing, but which, in Tommy’s case, he is able to play entirely by touch, and perhaps, as his vanquished opponents conjecture, by sense of smell.

The song Pinball Wizard, which illustrates this part of the story, which was allegedly added to Tommy as a quickly-written afterthought (to lighten the mood of the overall piece, which was seen as too dark and serious), and which the Pete Townsend, its composer, called “the most clumsy piece of writing [he’d] ever done”, became an enormous pop hit and radio hit as a single, even though the lyrics make absolutely no sense without context. One must wonder whether Townsend is being self-deprecating, or perhaps is simply so facile at his craft that his worst is better than most composers best–after all, if you asked Beethoven to choose his least favorite symphony, he’d have to pick a number from one to nine. In any case, the chord progression over a droning, pulsing tone at the beginning of the song, and the vivace strumming that follows is immediately recognizable, more than forty years later. In fact, I would wager that most listeners could recognize this song from the first three notes, played by any performer, on any instrument, at any reasonable tempo, simply because so few other composers use this structure. Certainly by the time the intro is played–a sequence of consisting of sixteen unique chords–anyone who isn’t tone-deaf and amnesiac and has been in the vicinity of a radio during the past forty years is likely to be able to recognize the song.

Most concert footage of The Who focuses on Roger Daltry, the singer, or on Pete Townsend jumping around and windmilling his guitar, or on Keith Moon doing things that defy analysis–although it’s great fun and rewarding to try–so it’s hard to figure out what Pete Townsend is doing to produce those sounds. In particular, there’s one moment important phrase change in Pinball Wizard when the guitar chords seem to transition impossibly far in an impossibly short period of time–through a suspended chord, but not to its resolution, but instead another suspended chord in a different, much higher position. It seems impossible to play, and watching someone with great technical proficiency play it at full speed, with the camera focused on his fingering, is even more impressive–at least at first glance (the change is around the thirty-second mark).

The truth, as explained by the talented and articulate Peter Autschbach in this clip, is that what appears to be resolving into the next chord is not a conventional chord at all. It’s the sound of the pick being strummed across all of the strings open, as revealed clearly at the 3:15 mark. It’s not something that one would ordinarily expect to find in a piece of music, but it fits here. Perhaps Townsend never got around to finishing this part, and just wanted to keep the cadence going while his hands shifted for the next chord, or maybe there’s another message: simplicity suffices. There’s certainly a message here from Tommy, who, though apparently blind, can play pinball with nearly supernatural skill–just as many of us are able to accomplish amazing feats of skill and cognition, whether ingenious engineering marvels or scintillating blog entries, while still being utterly oblivious and ignorant of so much that is going on around us.

Tommy eventually breaks free of his self-imposed exile from his senses, and reveals his enlightenment to his pinball followers, becoming a somewhat messianic figure in their eyes. Tommy is a gracious, although very skeptical and somewhat cynical, spiritual leader; his growing number of disciples beg for spiritual guidance, but he offers little. In stark contrast to the other self-proclaimed messiahs roaming the landscape of the mid-sixties, Tommy is a reluctant messiah, and makes few promises. After all, as he points out, he doesn’t have anything to say that hadn’t been said, and said well, by the messiahs who came before–and if Jesus et alia hadn’t been able to teach them, then why should they expect him to do any better?

The song I’m Free details this transition (if “details” is the proper word, since the lyrics are shorter than my description of them), and contains another item of musical inspiration. When the music begins, it seems to fit the triumphant moment–a strident, simple melody, in march tempo, played by the guitar. All goes according to expectations for the first four seconds or so, until the rest of the instruments and the singer join in, and it becomes apparent, after several seconds of readjusting where the listener believes that the beat falls, that the melody the guitar is playing is syncopated and ahead of the beat. By the time the phrase repeats, we’ve completely forgotten we were ever confused, but I defy anyone, no matter how many times they’ve heard this song, to get the count right for the first eight bars without careful concentration. Tommy is an eighth-note ahead of us, but that’s it. It’s enough to confuse us at first, but it soon becomes delightful.

The Who weren’t playing hard-to-get messiahs. Unlike some other groups, who claimed some spiritual insight, or at least to be well-intentioned, the message from The Who is always grounded in a gritty, cynical view of society and the world we live in. One need look no further than their overshadowed, underappreciated later masterpiece, Quadrophenia, in which gangs of teenagers, unified by race, religion, geography, income, social status and other beliefs, ostracize and murder each other over differences of opinion regarding haircuts, jacket styles, and musical preferences. If it’s not one thing, it’s another; people will always be able to find a way to make themselves miserable, unless they all devote all of their energy to fight against this most basic of human tendencies. But even good intentions are not always enough; when the live performance at Woodstock of excerpts of Tommy was interrupted by Abbie Hoffman, who attempted to grab a moment of stage time to speak about a social issue he thought should be of wide interest, Townsend explained, in unambiguous terms, that he didn’t wish to concede the floor, and underscored the point by clubbing Hoffman off of the stage with his guitar. While there is some question about whether this event was accurately reported by the media, the fact that it is widely believed and reported as fact is as important as the truth. Assuming that it is true, Hoffman probably was fortunate that Townsend got to him before Moon or Entwhistle–especially if Hoffman made the mistake of reminding them of plumbing fixtures. The Who might have been spiritual gadflies, but they certainly never claimed to be spiritual leaders and nobody ever mistook them for saints.

Tommy’s disciples and followers soon leave him, abandoning his path to spiritual enlightenment after realizing that self-sacrifice and hardship are required. Tommy is alone again; he can see, hear, and speak, but there is a question about whether anything has actually been gained. In the final song, Tommy pleads with the world to “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me” and he explains that although the inspiration he provided to his followers might have been ephemeral, the inspiration that he gained from them is eternal:

Listening to you, I get the music
Gazing at you, I get the heat
Following you, I climb the mountain
I get excitement at your feet
Right behind you, I see the millions
On you, I see the glory
From you, I get opinion
From you, I get the story

The lyrics repeat as the song builds in volume, passion, and tempo, più mosso alla doppio movimento. By 3:20, Townsend is windmilling; at 4:10, I start to really worry whether Daltry will survive another verse, but the song ends after five minutes simply because there’s nowhere left to go. The song is over, the instruments are silent, but the performance is not complete without the final footnote. As Townsend, almost shyly, thanks the audience for their applause, we realize that these aren’t only the words that Tommy wants to tell his former followers–they’re the words that The Who wants to say to us, and the words that we could be saying to each other.

A few years ago, when I was writing something I don’t even remember anymore, I needed a name to use in a story. Because of the parameters of the story, it needed to be the name of a well-known, young, somewhat exotic, attractive, successful, and completely unobtainable female. The canon was to use Jessica Alba, Paris Hilton, or that actress from Battlestar Gallactica (choose your favorite), but I decided to go a different route, as I tend to do. I picked Guo Jingjing, and I’ve been using her name ever since.

So, who is she? Guo Jingjing was one, if not the, preeminent 3-meter springboard diver in the world up until her (alleged, but not certain) retirement last year.

I misjudged on the “well-known” aspect. She’s a household name to millions of people, but if you’re reading this blog, chances are that you know only a few of them–perhaps none other than myself. Tabling that aspect for a moment, let’s go down the list and see if she qualifies:

She’s young; well, 29 seems young enough to me. She was younger a few years ago. Plus, as a diver and professional athlete, she has a physique that defies time.

She’s somewhat exotic; with a name like Jingjing, she doesn’t really need to do anything additional to qualify.

She’s attractive enough to have a successful modeling career; these things are subjective, of course, but many people think she looks good.

She’s successful; her product endorsement and modeling careers have made her one of the wealthiest women in the PRC, according to what I’ve read. She moves a lot of Wheaties, among other things. In her core competency, she won individual and/or synchronized events the world cup in 1999, 2000, 2002, and 2004; the world championships in 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009; the diving world cup in 1995, 2000, 2002, and 2004, and gold medals in the Olympics in 2004 and 2008. She has a heap of other medals from the most competitive events in the world of diving, but these are the highlights.

Finally, she’s unobtainable in the way that only a person from the other side of the world, who speaks no languages that I know, has her own security detail, is considered a state treasure of China, and has a jealous playboy billionaire boyfriend can be.

We all know that sometimes a modicum of success (or even no success whatsoever, but simply being in the right place at the right time) can be leveraged by a savvy agent into an enormous career. Is Miss Guo really that good, or does she just have a good marketing department?

She really is that good.

Consider her performance in the 2008 Olympics. In Olympic Women’s Springboard, each diver performs five dives per round. At this level of competition, each dive is crucial; a single error can cause a diver to drop several places in the rankings. A dive that does not match the basic elements of its description–a so-called ‘fail dive’–can eliminate a diver entirely.

By the third and final round, there are only twelve divers remaining. Each round starts with a fresh new score sheet; an outstanding score in the first round will not save you from mistakes made in the second round, and nothing can save you from mistakes made in the third.

It would be tempting to say that if Miss Guo had entirely flubbed one of her dives in the last round, throwing away 20% of her score, she would have still won, but that simply wouldn’t be true. That would be analogous to playing basketball or hockey a man short.  At this level, nobody can afford to sacrifice 20% of their score. She was competing against the best divers in the world, a cohort who could hold their own against any team of divers in history.

She would have finished sixth.

I recently joined yet another social networking site. It’s a small site that was formed last year as a home for expatriates from another site, now defunct, and a few other sources. I hesitated to join, because I am a little uncomfortable with the by-laws of the site, which are whatever the founder/sponsor/editor of the site thinks they ought to be. There’s no need to dwell on the details, except to say that I feel more at home on sites that are more aligned with the premise that I can do pretty much whatever I want. When a site has, as this one does, a zero-tolerance policy about violations of rules defined in overtly subjective terms, then it’s inevitable that I’ll be given the pumpkin eventually. The challenge is to see how long I can behave myself first.

As is customary on such sites, I posted a self-introduction soon after joining. These self-introductions are usually extremely formulaic:

My name is so-and-so.
I live in this place.
I work at this kind of job, or used to work and am retired or am between jobs.
I have the following religious/political/etc beliefs.
I will/will not tolerate the following deviations from my beliefs.
I am interested/uninterested in meeting partners for romance/sex/hook-ups/bridge.
The following quote summarizes my philosophy.

After this there is rambling discussion of other salient life experiences and whatnot. This is where you mention that you’re a vegetarian, or an ex-marine, or believe in fairies, or have a blog, or any sort of uncategorizable whatnot or fringe beliefs that might set you apart from the rest of the herd.

Anyway, I hate things that are formulaic, so I decided that mine would be a little different. But not different enough so as to be completely foreign, of course.

I’ve been around these sites to know what the usual subtexts are, and a few other useful tidbits. These are reflected in my introduction, albeit obliquely.

Another thing that I’ve learned on these sites is to save everything you’ve written that you might want to reference in the future, because sometimes things happen to things you post on the web. There might be a glitch, or the site founder/sponsor/administrator might expunge your post because it’s off-topic or posted in the wrong manner, or you might be on open.salon.com, where deleting other people’s posts is considered fair and civil.

Anyway, I kept a draft. I hope you’ll like it, because it’s all you’re getting today. The next chapter of AQoLC is a mess, and I’m feeling too charitable to release it yet. Maybe tomorrow, more likely Sunday.

Please allow me to introduce myself

Some odds and ends that you might find interesting or useful to know prior to any future interactions we might have (after all, forewarned is forearmed, as my eighth-grade history teacher, Mrs. Bush–no relation to any recent presidents–used to say):

• I’m happily married, and plan to stay that way, so please keep in mind that when I flirt with you I am not really interested in having sex with you, unless you are a perfect match for me in every possible way and can absolutely prove to me that my wife (who is somewhat computer savvy and shares a computer with me) will never find out, ever. Also it would be best if I never found out either, because I’m the sort of person who would feel very guilty and eventually break down and confess the whole thing to my mistress, who is a bit melodramatic and fickle, and would be so pissed off that she’d be certain to tell my wife, and then the shit would really hit the fan when she told my parents, and I’m just not into that much drama. My eighth-grade history teacher, Mrs. Bush, used to call this a “no-win clusterfuck”, which, if I understood her meaning correctly, is the bad, undesirable sort of clusterfuck.
• I enjoy writing short fiction, such as most of the previous paragraph.
• I’ve been told that I have the mind of a philosopher, the thoughts of a poet, the wisdom of a plagiarist, and the heart of an angel, although probably an angel who spent too much time at the pasta bar and not enough time doing cardio at the gym–but not by anyone whose opinion matters. My eighth-grade history teacher, Mrs. Bush, used to call this “fainting with damned praise,” or something like that.
• I have several advanced degrees in computer science and related fields, including at least one from a university that doesn’t advertise in the back pages of People Magazine, and so I know how computers are supposed to work and how they can work, which means that when I try to use applications like Microsoft Excel, two things usually happen: first, the computer gets so wrapped around its axle that any attempt to fix things or even remember exactly what I’ve done is a complete waste of time and it is usually best for all concerned to curtail the attempt and simply encase the hard drive in a concrete-lined lead sarcophagus and dump it into the Marianas Trench, where it will pose no further threat to mankind, and second, I need to go away and spend some time in my happy place with a bottle of scotch, a bowl of Cheetohs, and a copy of Caddyshack. This is what Mrs. Bush, my eighth-grade history teacher, used to call a “coping strategy.”
• I have sort of a thing for Guo Jingjing. If you don’t know who she is, that’s OK. All you need to know is that whenever I mention her, if you roll your eyes, my attention, which has been graced with a gnat-like attention span, will soon fixate on some other topic. If you’ve been on these social web sites for a while, the process of rolling your eyes and counting to ten will, I expect, be old hat to you. If not, you might want to practice it a few times. It’s one of the sort of things that my eighth-grade history teacher, Mrs. Bush–who must have been mercilessly teased for her name at various points in her life–would call a “valuable life skill.”
• I am a very private person, who communicates with the outside world only in short, carefully constructed sentence fragments. If at all.

It’s great to be here.

Saturday, 3:45pm

Brad approach the causeway from the east and saw other cars already crossing. The water didn’t look deep, so Brad decided not to wait.

A few moments later, he arrived at the cabin. Sally’s jeep was in the driveway, but Victor’s car was missing.

“Hello?” he called into the house, but there was no answer. Brad was not surprised or concerned; it was a beautiful day, and the beach was only a short walk away. He would have been more surprised to have found them all inside on such a beautiful day. Perhaps Sally and Judy were at the beach, or perhaps everyone had gone for a drive in Victor’s car.

He thumbed open his cell phone and called Sally’s phone, and immediately heard her phone ringing in the dining room. He walked to the dining room, and saw the remains of a nearly-complete game of Scrabble on the table, and one of Judy’s sandals.

Sally wasn’t here, and she didn’t have her phone. This was mildly inconvenient, because it meant that they had no way to contact each other. Without concrete plans for dinner, Brad guessed that his safest strategy would be to wait at the cabin until they returned or called. Even if he couldn’t call them, they could call him; Victor or Magda probably have their phones, and Sally could use one of their phones to call him.

Brad made a mental note to get Victor and Magda’s phone numbers and program them into his own phone when they returned. In the meanwhile, he could do what he had come home to do: shower off the salt and sand, change into dry clothes, grab a beer, and sit on the deck, watching the light breeze make the scrub pines sway slightly. If he got bored, he could poke around the kitchen, learning where key tools and provisions were kept; every year they rented this house the equipment in the kitchen changed somewhat, and often there were drastic changes in where things were located. After a frustrating evening two years ago, when he had lost most of the hair on his right hand and forearm flipping burgers for ten minutes with a pie cutter while Sally searched the kitchen for anything more closely resembling a metal spatula, eventually finding them under the sink behind the recycling, Brad always remembered that pre-meal reconnaissance is essential to happy and harmonious summer rentals.

As Brad contemplated his pleasant plans for the afternoon, he heard the screen door to the kitchen bang closed behind him. He turned and saw Magda standing in the doorway, taking off her sandy flaps.

“Mister Brinta, can you do me a favor?” Magda asked.

“What is, it Magda?”

“My father left his car down by the causeway. He’s worried that the tide will come in farther and the car will sink into the marsh, or something. He called a few minutes ago and asked me to ask you to drive it back up to the house, if you came back.”

“Where are they?”

“Your wife and daughter went with my father down to the causeway, and then they went for a walk to the bird sanctuary. When the tide came up, it came up to the sea wall, and they couldn’t come back the way they’d came, and so they decided to follow the beach around to the next access path.”

“They’re going to be gone for a while, then. It’s a long walk, around most of the island. But I’m sure they’ll have the sense to cut across someone’s land, if they get caught by the tide–although by this point, the tide has been going out for two hours, so they really shouldn’t have any problems. His car will probably be fine.”

“Still, could you help me get it?”

“It’s a long walk. Give me a moment to change. I got soaked sailing, and it’s not comfortable walking like this.”

“OK.”

Magda toed her flaps back on, and returned to the back deck while Brad quickly changed. When he stepped back out onto the porch, Magda was waiting.

“You know,” she said, “I had an idea. We could drive down to the causeway, and then you could drive my father’s car back, and I could drive yours. I know how to drive.”

“Then why don’t you drive your father’s car?”

Magda smiled mischievously. “My father has told me that I shouldn’t drive his car when he’s not around–but he never told me that I shouldn’t drive your car.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s what he meant, however.”

Magda frowned. “OK. Well, let’s take the bikes then. We can put them in the trunk and drive back.”

“I can do it by myself, if you give me the keys,” Brad answered.

“Victor left the keys in the car. He does that, you know. But I want to go. I’m bored. I’ve been stuck here all afternoon with nothing to do,” Magda responded, with a teenage-pout tone.

“Well, OK,” Brad acquiesced, unconvinced that this would alleviate her boredom.

There were two fat-tired, single-speed bikes in the garage. Ordinarily Brad would have refused to ride without a helmet, but his ordinary concerns were attenuated by the thought that the road was mostly sand and gravel, and there was very little traffic.

The bike was uncomfortable, but Brad enjoyed riding through the scrub pine forest. He wondered if he would have a chance to go for a ride with Sally later–she’d probably enjoy it also. Victor and Magda could watch Judy, perhaps, and he could have some time alone with Sally, something that had been too rare recently.

They coasted down the slope from the crest of the dune above the causeway, and Brad saw Victor’s car parked off the road, to the right, along the lane that lead the Audubon Bird Sanctuary. Brad realized why he hadn’t noticed it as had driven past it a few moments ago–it was a relatively low car, and had been hidden by a tall stand of cat-tails.

Brad also noticed that there was a police car parked next to Victor’s car, and a police officer was standing in front of the car, making notes on a pad.

Brad dismounted and walked his bike over to Victor’s car, while Magda hung back. She appeared concerned.

“Is there a problem, officer?” he asked.

“Is this your car?” the policeman responded.

“No, but it belongs to a friend of mine. Is there a problem? Is it illegal to park here?”

“No, it’s not illegal. A bad idea, maybe, if he leaves it here when the tide comes back in.”

“OK, no worries then. I’ll make sure it gets moved before then. I just got a little worried because it looked like you were writing up a ticket.”

“Just noting down the license plate. This car, or a car just like it–which I doubt, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a car like this one–was videotaped driving recklessly earlier today.”

“Can you cite someone for that? I mean, from evidence on videotape? If you can’t see their license plate on the tape?” Magda asked.

“Why do you think we couldn’t make out the license plate in the video?” asked the officer.

“Just a guess,” Magda replied. “Because if you could, then you probably wouldn’t have just said that you weren’t sure that this the same car, and you probably wouldn’t be writing down the license plate number if you already had it.”

“Besides, there are lots of cars that look like this,” Brad commented, disingenuously. “It was probably someone else. And my friend isn’t the kind of person who would drive recklessly–I’ve never seen him do anything reckless,” he added, truthfully.

The officer frowned. “Look, there was a strange incident here earlier. If your friend parked his car here this afternoon, then maybe he saw something. I’d really like to talk to him or her about it. Your friend didn’t do anything wrong, but if we was here an hour ago, I’d really like to talk to him.

The officer handed Brad his card.

“I’ll be sure to tell him, Officer Doherty,” Brad answered.

Brad and Magda watched as Doherty climbed into his car and slowly drove away across the causeway, toward Route 6.

“I have sort of a random question for you,” said Magda. “How long do you think it would take to drive from here to New York?”

“New York City? About five hours, maybe six, depending on traffic, and how you drive. Maybe longer. I’ve never done it, but we could ask around. A lot of people come up from New York to the Cape. Why?”

“I have a friend who is thinking of coming up for a day, but she didn’t know how long it would take.”

Brad waited until the police car was out of sight before approaching Victor’s car.

“It’s open,” Magda told him. “He always leaves it open.”

Magda opened the trunk and Brad put his bike in. The trunk was surprisingly large, and he guessed that Magda’s bike would also fit.

“Do you want to ride back on your bike, or would you rather ride in the car?”

“The car is fine. Besides, I have to show you how things work in the car. It’s a little weird,” Magda answered, piling her bike on top of his and closing the trunk.

Brad climbed into the drivers side, and shut the door. Magda opened the passenger side door a moment later, and slid in. Brad looked at the controls. They all looked familiar.

“Where are the keys?” Brad asked.

“There aren’t any,” Magda said, with a slight taunt in her voice.

“Then how do I start the engine? Is there a button to push, or something?”

“You don’t start the engine–I do. And there isn’t a button.”

Brad realized that the engine had already started. It was nearly inaudible and the car barely vibrated. Brad was impressed by the engineering finesse this represented. His curiosity about Victor’s car was growing.

“Neat. But seriously–how did you start the car?” Brad asked, scanning the dashboard for anything that looked like a starter.

“Mister Brinta, I’m really sorry about this…” began Magda and with a sudden movement that startled Brad, she reached out with her left hand and placed it on top of Brad’s right hand on the steering wheel.

Brad’s arm prickled numbly like it was asleep. It was not an unpleasant feeling, but when it tried to move away, he found that he was completely paralyzed.

“I didn’t know exactly what to do,” continue Magda. “My father… Let me try again. I’ve been dishonest with you, but I promise that I won’t do that again. There was an accident in the cabin, and Judy was hurt. She needed to go to the hospital right away. We took her. She needed to see a very special doctor, and so she needed to go to a hospital in New York. She’s there now. They’re taking good care of her, and your wife is there too, and she’s fine. My father sent me back here to tell you what happened, and to bring you to the hospital so you could be with them. I would have taken you sooner, but things got complicated, with the police and the air force and the FBI, and some other things, and I didn’t know what to do. I’m going to take you there, but I’m afraid that if you show up in New York less than five hours after that policeman recorded you here with his dash-cam, there will just be more questions. I think my father is already in trouble, and I don’t want any more questions. I know that you’re anxious to see your wife and daughter, but I need you to wait, but I don’t want you to freak out worrying for five hours, and I have some other things to do, so I’m going to have to ask you to fall asleep for a moment. I’ll tell you more later, while you’re asleep.”

I’m asleep, Brad thought. I’ve fallen asleep lying on top of my arm, I’m having a very strange dream, and it’s time to wake up.

The honk of a car horn awoke Brad abruptly. He was at the wheel of his car, parked on the roof of some sort of parking structure. The sky was dark. He checked his watch, and saw that it was 9:00pm. In front of him, he could see the skyline of a great city silhouetted against the last light of a purple sunset. After a moment of utter disorientation, he remembered everything that Magda had told him, and knew exactly where he was.

Judy had come out of surgery two hours ago. The surgeon thought that the danger was past. Sally was in a waiting room, reading a magazine. To get to where she was, the quickest route would be to walk down the aisle of cars to an elevator, take the elevator to the second level, walk across a footbridge, then down a set of stairs, through the entrance to the hospital, past the gift shop and a coffee shop, take one of the elevators to the fifth floor, turn right, go through a pair of double doors, down a long hall, then turn left, and then right again.

Brad got out of the car and started walking.

Saturday, 6:27pm

Knox watched Victor on one of the monitors in the observation room. The room had eight closed-circuit television cameras; one wide-angle camera at ceiling height at each of the four corners, two ordinary cameras six feet off of the floor on the wall opposite the seat occupied by Victor, arranged in such a way to provide full coverage of someone being questioned without being obscured by the head of the questioner, and two wide-angle cameras installed in the floor beneath the table in order to observe any action that the subject might attempt to conceal under the table.

None of these cameras were visible; they had been installed in such a way that made them extremely difficult to detect, even by someone who knew exactly where they were.

There were also two visible cameras, with very visible lights that indicated whether the cameras in the room were recording, but they were not attached to anything. They were simply let the subject know that he or she was being observed and possibly taped, but beyond that, they were expendable props. Violent subjects, if given the opportunity, often tried to break them, and so their purpose was best served by being cheap, rugged, and unnecessary.

Knox suspected that there were additional cameras that he didn’t know about, that were used to oversee interrogations and confirm that the rights of the prisoners were preserved. Knox wasn’t sure whether these cameras existed, or where they were, but he liked to think that they existed and that someone was watching, both for the sake of the subject and his own.

Knox watched Victor for a long minute. Victor was seated at the table, his arms folded on the table, pillowing his head. A faint and intermittent snoring could be heard through the monitor.

“Do you think he’s really asleep?” Knox asked the attendant on duty, whose job it was to closely watch over Victor.

“Don’t know. If so, it’s the first time I’ve seen anyone fall asleep in the room. Pass out, yes, I’ve seen that. But this is the first time I’ve seen someone take a nap.”

“How long has he been like that?”

“About five minutes. When he was brought in about fifteen minutes ago, he sat at the table. He didn’t pace. He looked all around the room, very slowly. Carefully. Methodical is the word. Then he whistled to himself for a few minutes, and then took a nap.”

“Nerves of steel?” Knox conjectured.

“No. No nerves at all. None of the usual stress body language. Just napping.”

“Well, he’s a strange one.”

“What’s he here for?”

Knox thought for a moment before answering.

“He flew a helicopter into restricted airspace, and he flew very recklessly. He doesn’t have a pilot’s license, at least none that’s valid here. And the helicopter was painted to look like a Coast Guard helicopter, which is illegal, although I don’t know whether he had anything to do with that, or whether it’s helicopter or whether he happened to ‘borrow’ a helicopter with that paint job. There’s also some other strange stuff, too.”

“Just took a helicopter out for a joy-ride, then?”

“No, not exactly. He was bringing a kid and her mother to Bellevue. The kid was hurt and needed to get to an emergency room right away.”

“Seems like overkill to hold him, then? I mean, if it was a mission of mercy?”

“There’s something more to it. A few really odd details. I don’t know if we’re going to charge him with anything serious, but I don’t want to let him just walk away without giving us some answers.”

“Odd details? C’mon. Like what?”

Knox decided to omit several of the details, because he hadn’t convinced himself that they were true. He decided to focus on the helicopter.

“OK, here are some odd details. First, the helicopter is strange. We don’t know what kind of helicopter it is. It is similar to a Coast Guard Dolphin, but the resemblance is mostly superficial. The dimensions are different, and a bunch of other things are different. We’ve got databases of this stuff, every model of helicopter that’s come off an assembly line for the past fifty years. Either this helicopter was intentionally modified–which raises the question of why someone would do that–or else this is a one-off that someone built on their own. It doesn’t make much sense; if someone wanted this helicopter to look more like a Dolphin, then they could have made it look more like a Dolphin. That wouldn’t have been hard.”

“Second, the controls on the helicopter were very odd. I don’t know that much about helicopters, but this is what I’ve been told. Nearly all modern helicopters have the same control layout, just like modern cars, which is why a driver who knows how to drive a Yugo can hop into a Porsche and drive it immediately without learning a new set of basic controls. This helicopter is totally different, and the controls don’t make much sense to any of the pilots we’ve asked.”

“Finally, the mystery of the strange controls might have something to do with this. I think that maybe this guy didn’t actually fly the helicopter at all, because thirty minutes after he landed, and after we’d brought him in for questioning, the helicopter took off and flew away. By itself. We know that there wasn’t anyone in it.”

“OK, that’s weird. But can’t you just track it and find out where it went?”

“One more thing, and this one’s the icing on the cake. We can’t track it. It has the radar cross-section of a frisbee, and we lost it when we lost visual. We called in other assets–some jets out of McGuire–but by the time they got here, it was gone. It went down the harbor, through the Narrows, and then it was gone.”

Knox paused for another moment. “We’ve got a custom-made, unidentifiable, remote-controlled stealth helicopter flying around somewhere masquerading as a Coast Guard patrol helicopter. And lots of questions that sleepy-head in there might be able to answer.”

“OK, I can see why he’s not going to be leaving any time soon.”

Victor rubbed the back of his head and then exhaled, puffing out his cheeks.

“You know, it’s a little funny,” remarked the attendant. “Usually it’s the subject that’s nervous, not us. But this guy doesn’t seem to have a care in the world, and we’re the ones who are acting worried.”

“Yes, I know. And that’s something that makes me even more worried.”

Knox turned, exited the attendants booth and walked down the short hall to the entrance to the interrogation room, and entered. As he crossed the room and sat down in his chair, Victor stirred, stretched, yawned, and then seemed fully alert. Victor sat up, with his hands in his lap.

“I apologize for falling asleep,” Victor began, “But this room provides little in the way of stimulation or amusement, and I have had an exhausting day.”

“I am Special Agent Artemus Knox, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in case you have forgotten.”

“Yes, I remember from our earlier meeting.”

“As you expected earlier, I have many questions for you.”

“I understand completely. But first, Special Agent Artemus Knox, I hope that you will permit me to ask a small favor. Do you know whether Sally Brinta and her daughter Judy–the two ladies who accompanied me on the helicopter–reached the hospital? Will Judy be all right?”

“I know that they made it to the hospital, and that Judy received treatment. I apologize that I do not have more information at this time, but I find out what I can and let you know.”

“If I answer your questions.”

“No, Mr. Denebola, I will tell you what I can as soon as I can.”

“I shall be grateful.”

“Now, Mr. Denebola…”

“It is actually Doctor Denebola, or Professor Denebola, although if you prefer to address me without honorifics you may call be Victor, or Mister Denebola. Any of those is fine, although I thought I should mention my honorifics because it may help you in your and your colleague’s efforts to prepare my dossier.”

“Thank you, Professor Denebola. Now, I would like you to tell me, briefly….”

“I apologize for the interruption, Special Agent Artemus Knox, but before we begin, I wish to suggest that you move your chair over to the left by about ten inches. You are blocking one of the cameras.”

Saturday, 2:35pm

When Knox arrived at the 34th street heliport, there were already two squad cars and an ambulance waiting in the parking area. He had no idea who had summoned the police units, and was half-surprised to see the ambulance. Apparently someone did not believe that this was a hoax and was taking the phone call seriously.

“Wait here,” Knox told the driver, and emerged from the car. He waved to the policemen to follow him, flashed his badge at the guards at the entrance to the fenced-in landing area, and skirted the northern-most pad until he reached the fence that marked the eastern border of the heliport, overlooking the East River.

Knox had always questioned the sense of having a heliport that was nearly beneath the FDR. Early one autumn morning he had been driving along the FDR and had been astonished to see a helicopter hover next to the highway for a moment, and then slowly descend until it was entirely out of sight. As he stood here, on the side of the heliport that was farthest away from the highway, he could only conclude that it was insane. Three of the five pads were occupied, and the helicopters in those pads, which were not particularly large as far as Knox could tell, seemed to nearly fill the pads. It would take great skill–and an absence of unpredictable gusts of wind–to land safely in such a narrow space, with only yards separating the approach path from roaring traffic.

Knox considered his options. He still had no firm plan about what he was going to do if a helicopter appeared, but he felt that it was important nevertheless. His conversation with the Westbury TRACON had been unsettling–mid-way through explaining who he was and that he was interested in the presence of any emergency flights or other flights without filed flight plans through the controlled space between Islip and Manhattan, especially anything resembling a helicopter, the admin he was speaking with interrupted him to say that there was a high priority situation that all the controllers needed to attend to, and had abruptly hung up. Knox wondered whether his situation might be linked in some way to whatever crisis the Westbury aircraft controllers were suddenly facing.

Knox hoped that a Coast Guard helicopter would appear and land. It was the most benign outcome he could imagine; if the 9-1-1 call had been a practical joke, then he would probably be given the task of tracking down the prankster as a reward for overreacting, and if the 9-1-1 call had been a diversion from some sort of terrorist incident, he suspected that he would be blamed for not have acting more aggressively on his hunch.

The more Knox thought about what he planned to do, the more he realized that the reason he was at the heliport was because ever since he had heard the recording of the 9-1-1 call, he had had a profound desire, which competed with his job priorities, to do whatever he could to help the injured little girl mentioned in the call. If there was a helicopter coming that was filled with explosives, he had done nothing to impede it from approaching the city. If there was a terrorist attack coming, he was in the wrong place, doing the wrong things, making the wrong decisions.

He was only here to help the girl, and he didn’t understand why.

Knox’s phone rang, and he answered it reflexively. It was his office. All agents were immediately summoned to the office–something that hadn’t happened since 9/11. Knox acknowledged the message, but remained. He couldn’t bring himself to leave immediately.

Knox’s phone rang again before he had a chance to replace it in its holster. It was a response to a message he’d left earlier, and the caller wasted no time. There were no Coast Guard helicopters operating in the area, none had been involved in a rescue or medevac that day, and certainly none inbound to Manhattan, with or without injured passengers. All helicopters from Maine to Norfolk were accounted for; any helicopter he saw with Coast Guard colors flying over Manhattan would be an impostor. Knox thanked the caller and hung up.

Knox knew that all the evidence was that he was being a fool, but he couldn’t resist the urge to make one last scan of the horizon, looking for any aircraft coming toward the heliport.

As he looked to the northeast, he saw a helicopter approaching, fast and low. It seemed to take only seconds from the time that Knox could see it until he could see it clearly. It wasn’t one of the large Coast Guard helicopters; it looked like one of the mid-sized patrol craft. Knox could not make out any markings, because it was coming nearly straight for him, but the front appeared to be the same orange pattern as a standard Coast Guard aircraft.

There was no question that the helicopter was coming straight toward the heliport, but it was coming in much too quickly to land. For a moment Knox thought that perhaps the helicopter was planning to overfly the heliport and crash into the buildings on the far side of the FDR, but at the last minute the pilot made a maneuver that startled Knox both its consummate skill and apparent disregard of safety. The helicopter pivoted so that it was flying backwards, and then the pilot dipped the nose at full power, bringing the helicopter to a full stop in less length than Knox would have believed possible. The skids hit the pavement and didn’t slide an inch as the pilot leveled the helicopter and cut the power to the main rotor. The helicopter came to a complete stop in the exact middle of pad four, between two other helicopters and at the far end of the landing area.

Knox was amazed to the point of immobility when he realized that the pilot had flown the last seventy-five yards backwards, under full power, without being able to see where he or she was going, without any apparent correction, to land perfectly.

“Crazy motherfucker can fly that thing,” said the policeman standing next to Knox, perfectly expressing Knox’s impression and providing him with the words he would later use as his own to describe that aspect of the incident.

Knox approached the helicopter at a dead run, but by the time he had reached the pilot’s side, the pilot was already standing on the pavement. Next to him stood a woman who was carrying an unconscious girl wrapped in a blanket. The woman looked stunned and frightened, but hopeful. Knox thought that she looked as if she was glad to be back on the ground.

The pilot, a middle-aged man incongruously dressed in a long-sleeved canvas shirt, cargo shorts, and sneakers without socks, addressed Knox immediately and with urgency.

“This girl needs medical attention. She must be taken to Bellevue hospital for immediate treatment.”

Knox motioned to the policemen. One of them took the girl from the woman and carried her quickly to the waiting ambulance. Knox watched as the EMTs loaded the girl and the woman into the ambulance, almost forgetting the pilot for a moment. His attention was drawn back to the helicopter when he heard the loud thump of the helicopters doors swinging closed. When he heard the doors close, Knox had expected that the pilot had locked himself in the helicopter and was about to try to fly away again, but he was surprised to find the pilot standing in front of him instead.

“I suppose you will introduce yourself in a moment, with your credentials,” said the pilot. “I will begin. My name is Victor Denebola, and I expect that you have many questions for me.”

Saturday, 2:42pm

Saleh bin Tariq bin Khalid Al-Fulan, known to his neighbors as Sal, carefully scanned the air above the tidal marsh south of the Lieutenants Island causeway, looking for anything unusual. He had been watching patiently for nearly ten minutes, but had seen nothing. His sons were busy in the garage, packing their equipment into his oversized SUV, but they were expecting Saleh to summon them at any moment.

Saleh sat on the deck behind his home, sweeping the horizon with his binoculars, lemonade at the ready. His camcorder lay waiting on the table. The red-winged blackbirds would come, if he was patient. He would be ready to film them when they did.

If Saleh had been looking in the wrong direction, he wouldn’t have seen the incoming strike eagle until it was past him. Although the F-15E had slowed considerably since crossing the lost island of Billingsgate, it was still covering more than a mile every four seconds, traveling at nearly twice the speed of sound. Between the moment Saleh noticed a disturbance in the haze over the harbor until the time he was able to identify the distinctive twin-tail design, the plane was almost upon him.

“Holy shit!” he muttered.

The plane was coming at less than 1000 feet, and was rolled on its side as it passed. The plane arrived before the sound, a tremendous explosive boom, and Saleh barely had time to cover his ears. He watched as the plane banked to the left, turning sharply north toward Indians Neck and the town pier. Saleh watched as the plane completed its turn, and knew that he wasn’t the only one watching. The entire population of the town was probably watching the skies.

“What the fuck was that?” asked Hassim, Saleh’s younger son, in a very unusual use of obscenity.

Saleh turned to answer, and therefore didn’t see the second eagle, which passed over his head just a few seconds later and then banked to the right in a long, sweeping curve encompassing South Wellfleet and much of Eastham.

When the thunderous sounds of its engines had diminished enough to make conversation possible, Saleh answered his son.

“Those are F-15’s, probably F-15E’s, from what I can see. Strike aircraft. What they’re doing here, I have no idea. But it must be something important. Something is happening. They would never fly so low, so fast over the Cape without good reason. They’re looking for something.”

The boys watched, interested. The two eagles rendezvoused over Great Island and climbed to a slightly higher altitude and began flying, at much slower speed, in patterns over the area. After a few moments, the boys lost interest and returned the garage.

After another minute, Saleh was certain that their patterns were centered on his home. He was not surprised several minutes later when a Wellfleet police car came racing down the road and made a quick stop in front of his house. The causeway was flooded, and Saleh was used to having company when the causeway was impassible.

Officer Dick Doherty, who knew most of the year-round residents in the area, emerged from his car, cradling his shotgun, and shouted up Saleh. “Hey, Sal–have you seen anything unusual today?”

Saleh was tempted to answer that he’d never seen anything more unusual around Wellfleet than Dick carrying his shotgun, but knew that it was not a time for joking. The sight of a Wellfleet police officer with an unholstered weapon, much less a 12-gauge full-choke shotgun, was chilling.

“You mean the planes?” Saleh asked.

“No, before the planes. Something around ten or fifteen minutes ago, maybe twenty. A bunch of people setting something up, and then leaving quickly. Maybe with a truck.”

“Nobody has come across the causeway for more than an hour. Flooded, you know.”

Doherty shook his head. “Anything unusual at all?”

“Does this have something to do with the planes?” Saleh asked.

Doherty puffed out his cheeks. “Look, there’s something serious happening, and it might have something to do with something here.”

Saleh had rarely heard such a vague statement of the obvious, but he let the point go.

“Does it have something to do with the helicopter?”

“What helicopter?”

“Come up. I’ll tell you about it.”

Doherty quickly walked up the short path through Saleh’s yard, and then up the stairs to the deck. Saleh noticed that he was still carrying the shotgun.

“I hope you have the safety on,” Saleh remarked. “Firearms make me uncomfortable.”

“It’s safe,” answered Doherty. “Now, tell me about the helicopter. When did you see it?”

“About ten or fifteen minutes ago. I can check the exact time, if you like,” Saleh began, gesturing to the notebook of observations he kept at hand. “I was watching the marsh, looking for a new pair of red-winged blackbirds, when I heard a helicopter come in from the north, following the beach of Indians Neck, and then over Loagy Bay. I heard it coming before I could see it.”

Saleh paused, gathering his thoughts.

“It got my attention because it was going very quickly–unusually quickly, and low.”

“What kind of helicopter was it?”

“It looked like a Coast Guard helicopter, painted orange and white, but larger. Bigger than an H-60, I mean. It looked more like an H-53–you know, maybe a Pave Low bird.”

Doherty shook his head. Saleh could tell that these designations had no meaning for him.

“An H-60 is the largest helicopter that the Coast Guard uses, around here. The largest one I know about, anyway. It’s a large helicopter by most standards, but it’s not as large as a Pave Low–which you might have heard of by its nickname, the “super jolly green giant”, and I don’t think it’s large enough to do what this helicopter did. I don’t know whether it was a Pave Low, because it had a different configuration than any Pave Low I’ve seen. But those details may not be important. What is important is that this very large helicopter came barreling over the bay, no more than twenty feet above the marsh, then turned and hovered for a second at the base of the causeway, facing directly east.”

Saleh paused again, gathering his thoughts.

“You know, until you showed up, I thought maybe somebody was making a movie or something. I thought maybe the helicopter and the planes were part of an action sequence or something. Because what happened next seems like something out of a movie–and not a very realistic movie.”

“Keep going. This sounds interesting,” urged Doherty.

“The helicopter hovered there for a second or two–and I really mean just a second or two–and then this big car came shooting through the gap in the trees at the top of the dunes, really moving. Recklessly fast. Even though the helicopter was right in the middle of the road, the car kept coming. At the same time, the helicopter dipped down so that it was almost on the road, and then I couldn’t see the car because it was behind the helicopter. Then the helicopter suddenly wheeled away, heading southwest at full power, and the car was gone.”

“What happened to the car?”

“It must have driven up into the bay of the helicopter.”

“Is that possible?”

“I don’t know. Pave Low’s do have a tail ramp. Something could drive up into them, but I have no idea if a car would fit. In any case, it would be an incredibly dangerous and stupid thing to do, to drive a car up a loading ramp that fast, and even more dangerous for the pilot to fly away before it was completely secured.”

“But you’re sure that’s what happened?”

“Well, I don’t know. It was pretty hard to see from this distance. All I know is that the car was there, and then the helicopter obscured it, and then it was gone, and the helicopter hauled ass out of here.”

“You wouldn’t be kidding me, would you? This is serious.”

“I understand your skepticism.” Saleh smiled, and gestured toward his camcorder. “Fortunately for my credibility, I happen to have recorded it.”

“I’m going to need that tape.”

“I understand. I’d like it back when you’re finished. In the meanwhile, can you tell me what’s going on?”

Doherty looked away for a moment.

“Sal, I can’t tell you what I don’t know. We got a call to come look for anything out of the ordinary in this area. I figured I’d check with you, because you’re always out on your deck in the afternoon. If something unusual was happening, you’d probably see it. And maybe even film it.”

“Out of the ordinary?” Saleh looked doubtful.

“OK, there’s a little more to it than that. The air force thinks they detected missiles being launched from somewhere nearby. In fact, they put the launch site somewhere on the causeway. Did you see anything like that?”

“Nothing.” Saleh shook his head. “Yes, that is is serious. But what would they be shooting at, here?”

“They think maybe the President. He’s on Martha’s Vineyard this week.”

Saleh whistled. “Shooting missiles from here? That’s crazy. You would think they’d try from somewhere closer. Less warning and all that. And there’s no escape from the Cape. They’re trapped here, if they close the bridges and the airports. Trying to escape by boat would be ridiculous.”

“Well, that’s what makes terrorists terrifying. They don’t do what you think they’re going to do.” Doherty rubbed his brow for a moment.

“Well, I best get going. I’m going to check around, to see if anyone has seen anything. You tell me if you hear anything.”

Saleh unloaded his camcorder and gave Doherty the cartridge. “Things are going to be a little busy around here for a little while, aren’t they?”

“I wouldn’t want to be in any hurry trying to get off the Cape today, that’s for sure.”

“Good luck, Dick.”

“Oh, and I should tell you. You’ll probably have more visitors later. People who will ask more questions. It’s nothing personal. It’s just because you’re here, not because…”

Saleh knew what he meant. “Of course.”

When Doherty was gone, Saleh called to his sons. “We won’t be going to the beach today. We’ll be staying home. I’ll be in the family room, watching the TV. There may be important news today.”

His sons exchanged a puzzled look. Saleh rarely watched TV, and usually seemed to revel in his intentional ignorance of television news, preferring to read the paper every few days. Saleh’s opinion was that if the news was really important, it would still be important in a few days, and it was better to read a well-written summary written after the fact than watch interviews with people who were still trying to figure out what was happening.

Saturday, 2:36pm

Forty-five thousand feet above the Atlantic and twenty miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, Captain Brian “Pierogi” Pierson completed a slow turn to the north. Through the canopy of his F-15E Strike Eagle he could see, through a layer of broken clouds several miles below him, the outline of Martha’s Vineyard to north and Nantucket to the east.

“Nice view,” commented his WSO from the back seat. Brian was used to it; his WSO said it every time the islands were both in view. It had started as a joke and was now, after several hours, part of their ritual.

Since 9/11, there had always been at least one pair of Strike Eagles tracing endless ovals over the Atlantic south of Long Island and east of the New Jersey coast. They could loiter here, largely unobserved, and yet be over Boston, New York, or even Philadelphia in a matter of minutes.

Brian and his wingman were had flown this patrol many times, but rarely so far to the east. This week was unusual. The President was vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, and that meant a shift in coverage to the east, so that the pattern was centered twenty miles south of Martha’s Vineyard.

It also meant that there was more activity in the air than usual. Brian knew that there were two F-22’s flying a similar pattern, closer still to Martha’s Vineyard and twenty thousand feet below him, and an AWACS plane flying above them all, in its own pattern directly above the island. Brian scanned for them, but knew that even his extraordinary vision would be unlikely to be able to spot planes painted to match the clouds at that distance.

As long as the AWACS and F-22’s were there for the sake of the President, Brian was under their command. This meant boredom for Brian, his wingman and their WSO’s; usually their commander could be counted on to provide at least one interesting training exercise per weekend, but when they were standing watch over the President, Brian expected–and hoped for–nothing except endless ovals for several hours. The high point of the day–mid-air refueling–had come and gone, and there was probably nothing else on the schedule.

“Status check,” Brian said into his radio mic. Brian began a gauge check, walking through a mental list of readings to check and compare with their proper values. He knew that the electronics of his aircraft would warn him if they detected any serious problems, but he also knew that the electronics could fail. He knew that his WSO was doing the same thing behind him. In a few moments, they would each respond.

“Standby for flash message,” came an unexpected answer. Brian recognized the voice of the Colonel on the AWACS. He’d heard his voice before; it had always been cool, mechanical, and nearly emotionless. It was not emotionless now; Brian heard fear in his voice.

In a fraction of a second, Brian became completely alert, in a way that few people other than strike pilots can achieve. A flash message meant that something very important was happening, and Brian was about to become a part of it.

“Eagles, Lassie mission course 050, range 50 miles.”

Brian began his turn northeast before the Colonel had finished his sentence.

“I have the lead,” Brian announced to his wingman as he finished his turn and rolled into a steep dive to help his plane gain speed, and then engaged the afterburner. The powerful engines accelerated the plane ferociously.

“Launch estimated three minutes ago,” continued the Colonel. “Sending approximate launch coordinates.”

Despite his training, a chill went down Brian’s spine. Lassie was the mission code for launch site suppression strikes–the polite military euphemism for killing the crew and destroying the equipment of a missile battery before they could launch their missiles, or before they could escape if the site wasn’t detected before launch. Brian had flown Lassies during the second Gulf War, and knew that it was always a race–the Air Force could usually detect a launch and direct strike planes to the site within ten minutes, but their enemy was often able to flee the site and evade pursuit in little more than six. That was in the desert, where there was little cover. Brian looked at his course and realized that he was heading to the northern end of Cape Cod, much of which was blanketed in thick pine forests and other places to hide.

Brian knew that he had only a few moments to cover the fifty miles if he was to have any hope of catching the missile crews at the site, but he also knew what his aircraft could do. He could cover the fifty miles in less than three minutes. He was already five miles north of Vineyard Haven before the sonic boom from his plane startled the tourists arriving on the ferry.

“Multiple subsonic cruise missile launches detected. Probable target near Chilmark.”

Brian had never been to Martha’s Vineyard, and did not know its geography, but he recognized the name of the town from a newspaper story he’d read that morning. The President was there today.

“Configure radar for booster plume detection,” Brian said to his WSO. Although cruise missiles were very hard to detect and track once launched, their launch sites were relatively easy to spot because they typically used a solid fuel booster to gain initial speed, and the propellant used by these boosters was easy to detect. If it wasn’t too windy at sea level, they’d have a good chance of finding the site very quickly. The only question is whether the enemy would still be there.

His WSO acknowledged the order. There was ice in his voice. Someone was throwing missiles at his commander in chief, and that someone was going to pay.

Windows rattled as Brian made landfall on the Cape and crossed over Hyannis at more than twice the speed of sound. A moment later he was back over the ocean, this time over Cape Cod Bay, shattering the peace of the sheltered beaches of Dennis and Brewster.

His wingman dropped back; Brian’s role as lead was to find the launch site as quickly as possible and locate the crews, but was difficult to attack ground targets precisely at high speed. That was the job of his wingman, who would trail behind him at a slower speed and be ready to attack any targets Brian identified.

Wellfleet harbor loomed before him as Brian and his WSO silently ran through their checklists: look for roads, look for groves, hollows, warehouses, any other hiding spots. In this environment, there was a possibility that the crews might flee by boat, but it was unlikely. The first thing to look for was a truck or a group of vehicles heading in the same direction, or perhaps a large helicopter leaving the area.

Saturday, 2:34pm

Dedi Perlman texted while she walked. It was a bad habit, and she knew it, but texting had become one of her primary modes of interacting with her daughter, and the walk from Bellevue to the Union Square subway station constituted most of her free time. At work, she couldn’t text, and in the tunnels of the subway, the reception on her phone was unusable. From the moment she entered the station until she emerged from the station down the block from her home, she knew that she’d receive no messages. It wasn’t uncommon for there to be four or five messages from her daughter queued up by the time she emerged onto the street.

After a lifetime living in Manhattan, Dedi felt safe on the lower east side, and did not worry about the stories she had heard about muggers targeting people who paid too much attention to their phones and not enough to their surroundings. She was more worried about the kids on skateboards in Union Square; she barely avoided collisions with them on several occasions. The skateboarders were out in force today, enjoying the beautiful weather.

As she approached the entrance to the station, Dedi was focused on her attempt to finish a text to her daughter, asking her whether there was anything she needed from the grocery store and to please empty the cat tray before Dedi returned home. As she pushed the send button, she looked up just in time to avoid walking into a woman who was emerging from the entranceway.

“I’m sorry; excuse me,” Dedi apologized, expecting no response, but acknowledging that it was her lapse that lead to the near collision.

The woman stopped in front of her, effectively blocking the entrance. She was not a large woman; average height but thin, and with long, white hair. She was dressed well, in a long gray skirt-jacket. Dedi expected to be mildly harrangued, but not physically assaulted.

Dedi was relieved, but not put off her guard entirely, when she noticed that the woman was smiling.

“It’s polite of you to apologize,” the woman began, trailing off in mid-sentence.

“Oh, you’re Doctor Perlman!” she resumed, in a more animated tone. “We’ve never met; so don’t worry that you don’t recognize me. But I remember that you gave a talk in Boston six years ago, on rapid the diagnosis of traumatic injuries of the brain, and three years ago on surgical techniques to relieve stress due to swelling of the temporal lobe and improve the healing process from skull fractures over the surface of the temporal and parietal lobes. I believe that talk was in Los Angeles–but it was very similar to the one you gave later that month in Denver, and I might have them confused.”

Dedi didn’t remember much about the talk she’d given in Boston, but she did remember the talk she’d given in Denver. It had been a small seminar–no more than a dozen attendees. This woman hadn’t been one of them; Dedi would have remembered.

“I find your work on traumatic head injuries very interesting,” the woman continued, reciting a list of publications, some of which Dedi could scarcely remember writing.

Dedi began to suspect that she was dealing with a lunatic. This woman appeared to have an obsession with head injuries, and, what was worse, seemed to know quite a bit about her.

The woman paused for a moment, and when she continued her tone was more subdued. “You probably think I’m a little crazy, stopping you like this. But I was just reading some of your papers recently, and then bumping you into the street was like some kind of serendipity. I’m sorry to have kept you, but I feel very lucky to have met you!”

The woman paused again. “Are you going to answer that?”

Dedi realized that her cell phone was ringing. She turned away, shielding the screen of her phone from view–a habit most doctors learn in order to preserve the appropriate level of confidentiality for information about their patients. Dedi didn’t recognize the number, but recognized it as an opportunity to release herself from this strange conversation.

“Please excuse me; I have to take this,” Dedi said, turning back to the woman.

The entranceway was empty. Dedi was alone.

Saturday, 2:29pm

Sally was too stunned to move, but Victor was on his feet before Judy stopped moving. He leaped over the table with surprising grace and in two quick steps was crouched next to Judy, but Magda was there even before him. She looked for a second at Judy, and then turned to Victor, silently shaking her head.

Victor turned back to Sally. “She is alive,” he said, “but she is badly hurt. We need to get her to a hospital immediately.”

Sally’s heart sank and she was gripped by terror. “Oh god, we can’t. We can’t get her off the island. The tide is in! The causeway is flooded. We can’t get off the island for another hour, maybe two. Not even in the jeep.”

“We can’t wait. We may only have minutes.” Victor seemed to be speaking to himself. “We need to go now,” he muttered.

“Victor, you mustn’t,” Magda said, in a quiet but stern voice that surprised Sally and frightened her nearly as much as Judy’s limp form.

Sally looked at Victor. “Mustn’t do what? What do you mean?” There was more than a hint of hysteria in her voice. She tried to stand and was nearly overcome with dizziness.

Victor looked puzzled, as if he wasn’t sure how to answer, and then the moment was broken by a ring from Victor’s cell phone. Sally recognized Adrianna’s ringtone. Before answering, Victor spoke. “Magda, you know that it’s already done. And you know that I need your help. Judy needs your help.”

Magda’s features melted from defiance to acceptance. “Yes.”

Victor opened the phone, lifted it to his ear and, without pausing, said “Call me in the car in thirty seconds.” He immediately closed the phone again and put it in his pocket.

“Sally, we are taking your daughter to the hospital. I need you to come with us. She will need you there. We are leaving now.”

Sally couldn’t answer. She tried to force herself to think, to come up with a plan, to do something, but her mind was consumed with terror. Her legs felt like rubber and a rushing noise filled her ears. She recognized that she was about to faint, and the realization of her helplessness only added to her panic.

“Magda, take Judy to the car. I will bring Sally. Go.”

Magda lifted Judy and carried her out the door with a strength that surprised Sally, even as she battled her terror.

Sally reached for her cell phone, but it wasn’t in her pocket. Maybe she’d left it in the car, she thought. There was no time to look. She rose from her chair and started toward the kitchen, where there was a phone on the wall. She would call 9-1-1. She tried to convince herself that someone would know what to do.

Victor intercepted her and guided out the front door.

“There’s no time,” he said, inferring her intent. “We’ll call from the car.”

Victor supported Sally under her arm as he guided her down the path the driveway. Victor’s car was unlocked. Sally watched Magda ease Judy’s limp form into the back seat and stretched the seatbelt across it. Magda then ran around behind the car to the opposite door, where she climbed in and strapped herself. She cradled Judy’s head in her lap.

Victor lowered Sally into the front seat, and then quickly ran around to the other side of the car and climbed into the drivers seat. Sally was still in a state of deep shock. She watched impatiently as Victor quickly fastened the five-point harness–the first she had ever seen in a passenger car. She wondered how to fasten her own, but when she looked down, she discovered that she was already strapped in. She had no memory of fastening it.

Victor started the car. It made a low rumbling noise that Sally did not remember from earlier, when she had noted how quiet Victor’s car had seemed. She imagined that the exhaust pipes or muffler had already been eaten away by the salt water Victor through which had driven earlier, but she knew that this could not possibly have happened so quickly, and thinking about the causeway reminded her of the futility of trying to drive to the hospital, or anywhere else. The tide was up. The causeway was flooded. Her daughter was going to die before she could get help.

“Call 9-1-1! Maybe they can send a helicopter, or a boat. Something,” Sally pleaded. Victor did not reply.

The car phone rang. “It’s her,” said Magda. Victor tapped a button on the steering wheel and the ringing stopped.

“Where are we going?” Victor asked, backing quickly down the driveway, his head turned to look through the rear window. Halfway down the long driveway, Victor and turned the wheel suddenly and tapped the brakes. The car seemed to pirouette and suddenly the car was facing in the opposite direction, accelerating toward the road.

“New York City, Manhattan, 34th and 1st Avenue Heliport,” answered Adrianna.

“Boston is closer,” Victor replied. “Saint Elizabeth’s is very good, and there are other emergency rooms even closer.”

“The injury is too severe,” Adrianna responded. “The doctor you need is at Bellevue. There is nobody better closer than San Francisco. Tell Sally to be brave, and tell Magda it’s OK.”

“They can hear you,” Victor answered.

“Sally, you must be strong. Help is coming. Don’t panic,” Adrianna said. Sally felt her panic subside. There was something inexplicable about Adrianna’s voice that calmed Sally and gave her unexpected hope.

A cloud of dust seemed to chase after them as Victor accelerated down the washboard road. Sally knew that the narrowness of the road exaggerated the speed of the car, but she knew that they were traveling at a dangerous speed. The branches overhead flew past like the blades of a fan.

“Things are arranged,” Adrianna continued. “Magda will know what to do. I will tell you more in a few minutes, but right now you must focus on driving.”

Magda spoke from the back seat. “Judy’s bleeding from her ear. Hurry.”

“I’m hurrying,” Victor answered coldly.

Sally shouted, in desperate rate. “Call 9-1-1! We can’t get off the island,” Sally said. Terror began to eat away at her calm.

“We can get off the island,” Victor answered. “That won’t be a problem.”

The washboard rhythm of the road had stopped; they had reached the paved part of the road that lead to the causeway. The car felt like was skimming above the road. It seemed to Sally that Victor had been accelerating ever since leaving the driveway. She suspected that they were traveling faster than she had ever gone in a car.

“There’s no way this car can make it across the causeway,” Sally continued. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Manhattan is more than two hundred miles from here! And stop driving like a lunatic! You’ll get us all killed!”

“Sally, you need to trust me,” Victor responded.

The car shot into the open, emerging from the shady scrub pine forest into the bright sunlight at the crest of the dune above the marshes that bordered the causeway.

An enormous orange and white helicopter was hovering a few feet above the road to the causeway. Behind the helicopter, Sally could see that the causeway was flooded for half a mile.

Sally’s hands shot forward to the dashboard, anticipating Victor’s desperate attempt to stop before he crashed into the helicopter that blocked the causeway, and then she realized that Victor wasn’t trying to stop. The car continued to accelerate directly toward the helicopter, and Victor appeared to be be smiling.

Sally closed her eyes and tried to pray.

Saturday, 2:25pm

Sally placed two tiles on the board. “Seven. I’m afraid that doesn’t open things up much,” she apologized, updating the tally.

“I’m no worse off than I was,” Victor grumbled, and kneaded his temples for a moment.

Victor contemplated the letters that luck had given him. His narrow lead was threatened by a Q and J that had no apparent use.

“The letter fairy is toying with me again,” Victor muttered.

Sally chewed on the end of her pencil, lost in thought, beset by vowels.

“We don’t have to finish the game,” Sally answered.

“No. At this point I consider it a challenge. I am past the point of caring whether I win or lose, but I feel compelled to find a way to get rid of this trash.”

“You were mentioning something about Leonid a moment ago. How do you like working with him in your lab?” Victor asked, to distract Sally from how long it was taking for him to make his move.

Sally inadvertently rolled her eyes. “Well… one of my grad students once told me that they think he’s an alien from a very advanced and enlightened civilization, and that he has been sent here to share some of their wisdom with us, and to guide us, to help us get past our backwards, primitive problems.”

Victor smiled. “What do you think about that theory?”

“Well, as a scientist, I’m forced to consider any theory that explains the facts. He is brilliant, there’s no question about that. But he’s brilliant in a weird way. I mean, we both know a lot of smart people at the University, of course. But he seems to just know things, almost off the top of his head, that the rest of us need days to figure out. If he was an alien, that might explain it.”

“I don’t think that theory would last long in a fight against someone armed with Occam’s Razor,” Victor laughed. “Why would an advanced civilization go to all the trouble to send a secret ambassador an enormous distance across the vast, lonely gulfs of interstellar space just to enlighten the human race in such a convoluted, roundabout way?”

“Ah, he had an explanation for that.” It was Sally’s turn to laugh, and then blush slightly. “They sent him across the vast, lonely gulfs of space because he’s an asshole and they don’t want to deal with him, and they convinced him to keep his identity a secret so that he wouldn’t embarrass their species. You know, just in case our civilizations cross paths again.”

“So he’s an asshole?”

“Well, maybe, sort of. He’s not mean-spirited, but he gets on peoples nerves. He lacks people skills.”

“I’m sorry. I thought he would fit in well with your group. I’ve known Leonid for a long time, and didn’t expect a problem.”

“Well, you know, we probably wouldn’t have hired him if it wasn’t for your recommendation.”

“I hope it hasn’t ruined my professional reputation.”

Victor rearranged his tiles, but no ideas came to him. They still looked hopeless. He scratched his head and popped one of his knuckles.

“You could exchange tiles,” Sally suggested.

“There’s no point. The bag is almost empty. I’d just get my own letters back. Or, even worse, I might get the K that is hiding somewhere. Unless you already have it.”

Sally stuck out her tongue at Victor. “A proper lady does not talk of such things.”

Sally cocked her head; she could hear the girls coming back up the path from the beach.

“Let’s just call it a game. I hear the girls coming.”

“Yes, let’s. I don’t want them to see a grown man in this condition.”

As Sally reached for the bag to put away the tiles, she could hear the girls running across the wooden floor of the deck behind the house. “You can’t catch me!” Magda yelled, followed by Judy’s answering giggle.

The screen door banged open and Magda burst into the family room. With a giggle, she dove behind the couch to hide as Sally and Victor watched. A moment later, Judy charged through the same door. As she crossed the sill, the toe of her flip-flop caught on the door sill. She staggered forward into the room, arms out, onto the floor. As she fell, the side of her head hit the corner of the coffee table with a dull thud. She looked dazed for a moment, and then her eyes lost focus and her body went limp. One of her legs twitched twice, and then she lay still, eyes open, staring at nothing.

The room was silent for a moment, until the screen door swung shut with a bang.

Saturday, 2:15pm

It was policy to always have someone in the office, watching over the incoming messages, and ready to react to any developments. Special Agent Artemus Knox didn’t mind working the Saturday shift. There was no telling when some vital information might arrive, and the relative quiet of the weekend gave him time to think and piece together patterns that he might otherwise have missed.

The New York City dispatchers knew Knox, and knew that always wanted to hear the strange calls, and they knew to contact him whenever something odd came in.

Knox was sitting at his desk in lower Manhattan when his cell phone buzzed. He clicked the earpiece he habitually wore.

“Yes?”

“Artie? Got a 9-1-1 for you. It came in about five minutes ago. There’s something odd about this one. A few things, really. Here’s the audio… hang on for a second.”

While the caller set up the playback, Knox fished out the small pad and pen from his pocket he habitually carried in his back pocket and prepared to take notes.

“9-1-1 emergency dispatch. This line is recorded. What is your location and emergency?”

“What? Hello? Hello? I’m losing the signal. Hello?”

The call ended.

“And that’s all. He never called back.”

“Traced the call?” Artemus asked.

“Yes, back to Long Island, a cell tower near Eatons Neck. The service code does belong to a crew member there; Charles Jones. But it didn’t change towers during the call. If the helicopter was moving quickly, it probably would have, but maybe not. Doesn’t mean much, probably. Tried to call back; no answer.”

“Sound quality was awfully good.”

“The new 9-1-1 systems; they’re really something. Cuts down on lawsuits if the jury doesn’t have to argue about what they’re hearing, you know.”

“I mean, it was awfully good quality for a cell phone call from a helicopter. Aren’t helicopters noisy? Come to think of it, I didn’t hear anything in the background at all.”

“Yeah, I told you it was a funny one. I’ve got the number, if you want it.”

Knox took down the number, thanked the caller, hung up, and scribbled down a few notes on his small pocket notebook. Then he slouched back in his chair, laced his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling for ten seconds.

Knox reflected that this one was strange. A cell phone call from a coast guard helo crew member with a broken radio, bringing in an injured girl. That was somewhat out of the ordinary, but the fact that the caller had requested a specific doctor and planned to land at an unusual hospital–there were several closer emergency rooms with helo pads–was very strange. Perhaps it was a prank?

Knox turned and idly typed the service code from the call into his terminal. It was a valid code, but it didn’t belong to a helo crew member. It belonged to Charlie Jones, an engineer on a Coast Guard utility boat, currently assigned to Station Eatons Neck. At least that part made sense, even if nothing else did.

If this was a prank, someone was going to be in very hot water about misusing their service code. The station was correct, but something didn’t feel right. He felt sure that there was something he was overlooking.

Knox brought up a satellite image of the Coast Guard station. He zoomed in until he could easily make out the individual buildings and short docks, but he couldn’t see a helo pad.

Thirty seconds later, Knox punched the number for the switchboard at Station Easton Neck into his cell phone. After a long wait for someone to answer, Knox had a brief conversation with the incredulous crew chief, who clearly expressed his opinion that Knox was pulling his leg. No, they didn’t have a helicopter; they weren’t in the middle of rescuing anyone; everyone on the crew, including Charlie, had been at the station all day.

Knox thanked the chief and hung up. Perhaps it was a prank, but something still felt wrong.

Knox remembered a briefing he’d attended, a few years earlier, on likely terrorist attack scenarios in the wake of 9-11. The presenter had highlighted FDR drive on the lower east side. At first Knox thought he was going to talk about the United Nations Plaza, but he had been mistaken.

“If you want to hurt a city, not just hurt it but inflict lasting pain,” the speaker said, “One way to increase the suffering is to disrupt the support system for the first responders. The first responders themselves are usually dispersed throughout the city, so they can be near their areas of responsibility, which makes them easy to target individually, but hard to target as a group or as a capability. Many of the support systems, in contrast, are highly centralized. For example,” the speaker went on, highlighting the East Side with his laser pointer, “here we have a high percentage of the emergency rooms, operating rooms, and critical care facilities in the city, all within a few blocks of each other, centered around the NYU medical campus. And this is an easy target, for a serious attacker, because, most of these buildings have easy access and a clear field of fire from the East River.”

Knox wondered how many unaccounted-for large helicopters there might be in the world. It would certainly be easy to load one on a container ship, and then launch it from the deck from just offshore. It could reach anywhere in the triboro area in a few minutes. Paint it orange and white, and it could get even closer to any target before anyone thought twice about it.

Knox next throughts were about how much static weight a Sea King helicopter could carry. Four tons at least, he thought; perhaps more in an emergency–or if the helicopter was stripped, or if it was a one way trip.

How much of Bellevue would be destroyed by four tons of Semtex or C4? Knox was certain that he didn’t want to find out.

A minute later, Knox was running for the elevator. He didn’t have a clear plan, but he had already decided that he was going to be at East 34th Street in fifteen minutes. There was something oddly compelling about the record 9-1-1 call he’d heard; even though he couldn’t understand exactly why, he wanted to be there when the helicopter arrived.

His cell phone didn’t work in the elevator. Knox waited for the doors to open again, with his finger over the call button, poised to call the Westbury TRACON. As he waited, he had a moment to think.

If it’s a terrorist attack, he wondered, why did they call to say that they were coming? It wasn’t really tip-off; it was too vague for that. There were other channels for such things. And why did this attack differ so much from the usual profile: afternoon instead of morning, weekend instead of weekday? This wasn’t the best time to catch a lot of doctors and nurses at the hospitals–a weekday morning would have been much more effective… unless, of course, the whole point was to be unpredictable.

But the most unusual detail puzzled Knox more than the rest, and he suspected that it was the key to the entire mystery–or prank. Why did the caller ask for a specific doctor? Who is Dedi Perlman?

Knox debated with himself about whether to call Bellevue or Westbury until the elevator door opened again. As he rushed across the lobby and into the waiting car at the curb, his phone dialed Westbury.

Hi, it’s me again; the author.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the story up to this point. What you’ve read up until this point follows the storyline as I originally wrote it, many years ago. The original story ended shortly after this (well, about eight pages after this, and about twenty minutes later in terms of the time that elapsed in the story).

But the story didn’t age well.

The problem with the story is that it takes place in the present (well, plus or minus a few months, so it can take place in the summer). The present has changed. If I wanted to keep to the original storyline, it would have to take place in the past–before September 11, 2001.

When I picked up the story again in 2002, I realized that it was no longer plausible. The events couldn’t unfold in the way they do in the original story in the post-9/11, DHS, USPATRIOT Act world. I had to take that into account, because otherwise the story wouldn’t make any sense.

For example, in 1998 I could write a story about a dark-skinned, bearded young man traveling from Sudan on a plane destined to La Guardia, who is having trouble adjusting the inserts he wears in his shoes to make in look taller, because he’s heard that Americans are all tall and he wants to fit in with his new classmates at NYU. I can’t write that story now. It would end with the man in Guantanamo, instead of ending happily with a parable about diversity.

Of course, being a work of fantasy, these events probably couldn’t unfold anywhere anyway, but if they did unfold in this way, then people would react to them differently, and their different reaction would make the story go off in a different direction. Because the story after this point is all about the way people react to unexpected and stressful situations, I had to go back and fix it.

And so I did.

And so you can add to the list of things that 9/11 made worse this story, which, I will admit once again, was never particularly good anyway.

If you want to imagine what the original story was like, skip over all of the rest of the story until you get to the story that Sally tells Knox, and then imagine that she isn’t telling it to Special Agent Knox, because Knox wasn’t in the original story. The original story did not require the involvement of the FBI. Stories with happy endings rarely do.

Saturday, 2:05pm

Charlie Jones didn’t really enjoy playing bridge. Hearts was his game. He liked poker, but knew he wasn’t very good at it, and he couldn’t afford to lose. Variety is the spice of life, or so he’d heard, and the guys wanted to play bridge, so bridge it was.

The crew at the Eatons Neck Coast Guard Station didn’t have much to do this afternoon. Charlie and the crew would take the boat out for a patrol down the Sound in an hour or so, but until then there was nothing on the schedule except cards. Morning maintenance was finished, and the boats and the stations were spotless. A few mild rainshowers that morning and a forecast of more on the way had convinced most of the day sailers to stay home today, even though the forecasts had been proven wrong. The clouds were unthreatening, and the sun frequently broke through. The wind was steady from the west, and it was clear enough that Charlie could see all the way across Long Island Sound to Cove Harbor, but he could only see a handful of boats under way.

Charlie fanned his hand again, scratched his head, and considered his bid.

“Pass,” he declared, and watched as heads nodded in response around the table. “Well, I’m the dummy. Again. Don’t believe me? Well, take a look for yourself.” He laid down his cards.

“I’m gonna get a pop from the fridge. Anyone want anything?” Charlie asked. His chair creaked as he pushed away from the table and his crewmates shook their heads without looking up from their cards. Charlie pushed back from the table and walked to the kitchen.

As he entered the kitchen, Charlie took a moment to enjoy the view. The station was perched on the top of a dune that sloped down to the beach, and the kitchen, on the northern side of the station, was equiped with large windows. Standing at the kitchen counter, Charlie had a panoramic view of the dunes, the beach, and Long Island Sound.

The beach was empty, as it almost always was. It was well over a mile to the nearest public parking, Asharoken Beach, and there wasn’t much reason to walk this far. In the morning, and sometimes in the late afternoon, there were joggers who ran the beach, but in the middle of the day it was unusual to see anyone on the beach. It was empty now.

As he opened the refrigerator, Charlie’s cell phone rang. He didn’t recognize the incoming number, and the area code was unfamiliar. He pulled a bottle of rootbeer out of the fridge before answering, and let out a small sigh of exasperation as he considered his options. He thought it was probably a telemarketer, maybe from an offshore boilerroom company, but he knew that if he didn’t answer it and tell them to buzz off, then they’d only call back again, and probably at a less convenient time. Charlie realized that he didn’t really have anything better to do than to answer the call.

Charlie closed the fridge, turned again toward the window, flipped open the phone, raised it to his head, and answered “Yeah”.

There was a woman on the beach, no more than thirty yards from the window, almost at the top of the dune. She was facing Charlie. He was certain that she hadn’t been there a moment before. Charlie had the eerie feeling that she was the person who had called him, although she didn’t appear to be holding a phone.

Charlie felt the small hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

“Please don’t hang up,” the caller asked. It was a woman’s voice. “I need your help.” There was sound in the background, behind her voice. It was a sound that Charlie recognized–the sound of a cellphone being used on a windy beach.

Charlie tried to take a step toward the window, but he couldn’t move his feet. He tried to speak, but found that his tongue was frozen as well. All he could do was stare at the woman.

She had a slender build, and was average height. She was not dressed for the beach or the weather; she wore a long grey wool skirt and jacket over a pale blue blouse. Her hair was long and pale, and moved in the breeze much more than Charlie expected. Her eyes were pure black, and her lips were thin and nearly colorless. Her skin was very pale and her face, from what he could tell from that distance, had a vaguely Eastern-European look. Charlie would have guessed her age at between forty and fifty.

“I need help placing a telephone call. It’s very important,” the voice continued.

Something about the voice mesmerized Charlie. He stood motionless, watching the woman. He only wanted to hear what she had to say next.

“I understand that what I’m asking might cause you some inconvenience,” the voice continued, “But it will help someone very important to me, a young girl in great danger. She will die if we don’t help her. Will you help?”

Charlie desperately wanted to answer yes, but his voice seemed frozen and he could only manage the slightest grunt.

“Good,” the voice responded. “I’m very happy that you will help.”

The woman on the dune smiled. It was a warm and pleasant smile. Charlie felt certain that he had made the right decision.

“Thank you. I promise that I will not forget this favor,” the voice said.

“Who…” Charlie managed to croak, trying to ask the woman her name.

“You can call me Adrianna.”

Charlie felt a moment of vertigo and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, the woman was still there, still looking through the window at him. She was smiling again, but it was a troubled smile. As he watched, the woman on the dune began to turn away.

Charlie tried to speak, but still could not. His mind raced with questions he wanted to ask the woman on the phone, but he was unable to ask them. He wanted to know if she was the woman on the dune. He wanted to know her name, how she had come here, why she had called him on the phone instead of simply calling through the window, how she had gotten his number.

Charlie realized that the phone in his hand was silent. She had hung up.

He found himself free to move again, and pressed the redial button, but nothing happened. Charlie checked his phone and found that the call history had been deleted. He didn’t have her number.

When Charlie looked up again, she was gone. He rushed to the window, but there was no sign of her on the beach, and nowhere she could have possibly gone.

There were no footprints in the sand on the dune.

Charlie realized that his hands were shaking. He wondered whether he’d had some sort of hallucination, and what it might imply about his mental and physical health. An hallucination couldn’t have deleted his phone history, however, so maybe it was something more serious.

But he found that he couldn’t make himself worry about it.

He walked back to the card game and sat down.

“Who were you talking to in there?” asked his bridge partner, without looking up.

Charlie shrugged. “I dunno…” he began and then trailed off. Charlie couldn’t remember saying anything. He’d only remembered hearing the woman’s voice through the phone.

“And you were gone for a while…”

“I was?” answered Charlie, surprised.

His partner looked up, saw Charlies face, and was immediately concerned.

“Damn, Charlie; you feeling OK?”

“What do mean?” Charlie answered.

“You’re as white as a sheet. You look like you’ve seen a ghost or something.”

Charlie shook his head. “No, I’m OK.”

Last week was the start of the Big Test of our system by the Customer. Our project group had been preparing for it for months. It was a difficult system to build, with many technical challenges. In some areas, I believe that we can claim that we moved the state of the art forward. We worked long hours, turning ideas into a working artifact.

The Big Test was scheduled to last for ten days. The Customer had asked for something ambitious, and we believe that they expected our system to fail some or perhaps many of the tests. If it failed a test, they’d tell us, and then they’d give us an opportunity to try to fix it, and then they’d try the test again, and perhaps it would fail again, and we’d tweak it again, and then finally it would get through that test, and this would continue through ten long and potentially sleepless days. At the end, they’d count up the number of tests we passed and the number of tests that we’d failed, and give us a little time to write a report about what we thought we might be able to do about the failures if they gave us more time.

I wondered whether I’d spend Thanksgiving doing a postmortem on the parts of the system that were my responsibility.

That’s not what happened.

The Big Test was over in three days. The Customer tried their tests, and they all worked on the first attempt, except for two that had a small problem. The team in charge of that area quickly found the problem and addressed it; the Customer has promised to look at the changes, but they do not seem to be in any particular hurry. The Customer has told us that they believe that the system is fundamentally sound and that the problems they uncovered are of only minor significance.

The rest of the week was relaxed. We spent it addressing some issues that we think the Customer will want to see soon, or that we were surprised that they didn’t test–they might change their mind. Technically, the test period is not over, and the Customer is within their rights to invent and run new tests, although nobody really believes that will happen.

This morning–Saturday morning–I awoke early. My mind was filled with ideas for new tests, new improvements, enhancements to the existing system. The documentation is not good; I could rewrite it. One of the control dialogs has a different dialog model than the others; I could fix that so that users wouldn’t see that rough edge.

The Customer is happy with the system, but I know that it’s not perfect. And so I wake up early on a Saturday and consider going into work. Not because I think I can make the system perfect–I know better than that–but because I believe that I can make it better.

But this story isn’t about me. I am only one member of the team that built this system, and I’m not the smartest, nor the hardest-working, nor the most important. I don’t have any irreplaceable skills. My main qualification for being on the team is that I want the system to be something worthy of pride, but the team isn’t successful simply because I have a mild obsession for working past Good Enough.

It’s successful because we all do.

Saturday, 12:55pm

Sally had already parked her Jeep in front of the cabin by the time Victor pulled his car off of the sandy, bumpy road onto the even bumpier driveway. The dusty haze her car’s passage had raised was still settling when Victor parked behind her. He could see that she was still sitting at the wheel, with Judy behind her in the back seat, also motionless.

Victor shut off his engine, and unclipped his seatbelt. He expected to hear his passenger immediately unfasten her seatbelt as soon as he unclicked his own, but there was nothing but silence from the passenger beside him. He turned his head and saw that seemed to have fallen asleep–but Victor was certain that she was only pretending. As he watched, her lips curled slightly in a sly but unintended smile.

Victor briefly considered tickling her with a quick poke to her stomach, but decided that she was getting too old to find that amusing. There must be some age, Victor thought, at which it is no longer appropriate to tickle your daughter when she asleep, and Victor guess that Magda might be past that age. She wasn’t a little girl any more.

In any case, there was no need to disturb her; there was no hurry. They were on vacation, and had no plans for the rest of the day beyond a vague notion that at some point in time they might get some dinner.

Victor opened his door, climbed out of the car, stretched his back for a moment, and then walked towards Sally’s jeep. Sally and Judy still hadn’t moved. As he reached them, he noticed that their eyes were closed, and Sally’s hands were still on the wheel.

“Is everything OK?” Victor asked.

Sally opened her eyes and smiled at Victor. “Everything is fine,” she answered.

“When you didn’t get out of the car, I was a little surprised. Are you waiting for something?”

“Oh, that. It’s… Well, it’s so quiet here that Judy and I started a tradition last year of just sitting in the car for a moment until we get used to it. When we’re driving along the road, it seems noisy, with all the gravel and bumps and everything, but when we turn off the engine, it’s suddenly so peaceful. We like to savour it.”

“It’s savoury,” added Judy, solemnly.

“Then I’m sorry I spoiled it by driving up behind you, and then interrupting your savoring.”

Sally smiled again. “Don’t be.”

The wind rustled softly the scrub pine forest that surrounded the house. Victor could hear the faint drone of an unseen fishing boat slowly traversing the channel out of Wellfleet Harbor, at least a mile away.

“It is very peaceful here,” Victor said. “Very peaceful. I’d like to thank you once again for inviting me and Magda to the Cape, or ‘Down the Cape’ as you called it, for the weekend. We’ve been having a wonderful time.”

“It’s our pleasure. We’re glad you could come, but sorry that Adrianna couldn’t make it,” Sally answered.

Victor shrugged. “I’m sure that she would have enjoyed it, but when she’s on travel…”

Magda still in the car?”, Sally asked, after a long moment.

“Yes; I think she’s pretending to be asleep. I wouldn’t mind a nap myself, honestly. I think I am going to sleep very well tonight. If I make it until then!” Victor answered, with a laugh.

Sally turned her head and looked at Victor’s car. It was a large but low-slung four-door coupe. The door sills were wet and there were splashes up almost as far as the windows.

“I’m sorry you car getting wet like that,” said Sally. “I lost track of the time, and we’re lucky we got across the causeway. I don’t think about it too much in the jeep, but I should have been thinking about your car.”

Victor shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. There’s not much that can be done about it now. There probably isn’t more salt in that water than what I get off the street in Cambridge in the Winter.”

Sally swung open her door and climbed down. “We’ll be stuck here on the island for at least a few hours now. In an hour or so, when the tide comes over the whole causeway, I wouldn’t even try to take the jeep across.”

“Then I guess we won’t be seeing Brad for a while?”

“Not unless he decides to sail up to the beach. But don’t worry; he doesn’t mind. He never gets tired of sailing.”

Sally looked again at Victor’s car, thinking that her husband would have been much more worried about his car getting wet than Victor was. She looked again at the logo on Victor’s car, trying to remember where she had seen it before.

Cars had never held much interest for Sally, so she was neither particularly surprised nor curious about not recognizing it the first few times she had seen it. If asked, Sally would have said that she thought that it looked very tasteful, perhaps even beautiful, and like a car that would comfortable to ride in, but without being gaudy, flashy, or noisy. Beyond that, she hadn’t given it a second thought until earlier this afternoon.

After Victor had parked his car in front of the restaurant where they had eaten lunch, Sally had noticed that some people–mostly men or older boys–turned their heads to look at it as they walked past. More than a few stopped and looked at for a few minutes, as though mesmerized, before continuing on their way. Several took photographs. Victor’s car clearly aroused their curiosity, and that, in turn, aroused hers, so she had begun to pay more attention to the people who paid attention to the car.

Through the open window of the restaurant, she had heard two teenagers discussing it; one opined that it was an old Maserati, and therefore a maintenance nightmare disguised behind very nice sheet metal, while the other believed that it was a Bugatti or possibly a very rare Aston-Martin, and in either case extremely rare and expensive. She also heard one man say to his partner as they walked past that he thought it was a Maybach, which meant nothing at all to Sally. She thought it probably wasn’t any of those, but she didn’t know why she thought that. The car looked somewhat out of place here, covered in dust splashed with water, at the end of a sandy driveway, but Sally had seen odd or unusual cars her before.

As Sally looked again at Victor’s car, Magda’s door opened with a creak and a long bare leg emerged and toed at the sand in the driveway for a moment. After a moment the rest of Magda followed. She blinked for a moment in the sunlight and then, in a stylized and well-rehearsed movement, pulled her long black hair back into a ponytail with her left hand and fastened it in place with a scrunchy in her right.

“I don’t think I’ve ever eaten that many clams before in my life”, Magda groaned. “I think I’m done for the afternoon. I just want to take a nap.”

“I don’t think you’ve even seen that many clams before in one place”, answered Victor. “But I’m afraid your commitments for the afternoon are only beginning. You promised that you would play with Judy. If memory serves, she has some hermit crabs that she would like you to meet.”

With a giggle, Judy bounced down from her perch in the jeep, grasped Magda’s arm, and led her off toward the house.

“It’s very sporting of her to play with Judy like that,” remarked Sally.

“Don’t let her teen-age attitude fool you. It’s just an act. Magda adores Judy. I think she secretly wishes she was seven again, instead of fourteen.”

“And you probably wish the same thing.”

“You know what they say: raising a girl is a lot easier than raising a boy, but raising a young man is easier than raising a young woman.

There was a long shriek from the direction of the path that wound through the dunes and down to the beach. Victor looked alarmed for a moment, but as the shriek degenerated into giggles the tension eased away from his body.

“I suppose it was only matter of time before Judy discovered that Magda is ticklish. Or perhaps she has discovered Magda’s true feelings about hermit crabs.”

“These things are very important to a seven-year-old.”

“I’ll ask her later if you’re ticklish anywhere accessible.”

Sally blushed slightly, and Victor continued on.

“But in the meanwhile, Sally, I ask you to consider the possibilities provided by our situation. Your husband will not be back for hours. My wife is out of town. Our children have run off and might not return for hours. It is too soon to begin thinking about dinner, except in the most abstract terms.” Victor smiled widely. “How shall we pass the time?”

Sally smiled demurely in return, but there was a sparkle in her eye.

“It seems wrong… but I know what you want, and you know that I can’t say no. Brad wouldn’t mind. He wouldn’t leave us alone together, if was concerned. He knows about our history.”

Victor raised an eyebrow.

“And he knows that we… He knows that I have needs. He tries to fulfill them, and I love him for it, but I know he doesn’t enjoy it. He’s not like you. So I think he’s giving me tacit permission. Encouragement, even. After all, he can’t actually enjoy just sitting there on a wet piece of fiberglass, wrestling with a rudder or a sheet, or whatever it’s called, all day, can he? I believe that he’s staying away–sacrificing himself–to create this opportunity.”

“Maybe he’s just testing you.”

“You don’t know Brad. He doesn’t feel threatened by you.” Sally paused. “Well, maybe by your car,” she added, almost as an afterthought.

Victor raised his eyebrows.

“I never really put this together before, but when Brad meets another man, the topic of cars always seems to come up. Always. I think it’s so Brad can mention the ’68 Stingray he’s restoring. But Brad has never mentioned his Stingray or talked about cars with you, at least not when I’ve been there. Your car must be something special.”

Victor gave a short laugh. “My car? This thing? It’s a reliable and practical transportation; some style, a little comfort, but nothing exciting.” He shook his head. “Now, a Stingray–that’s a fun car. A very nice toy. I’ll have to ask him about it.”

Victor gave another short laugh, and then continued, with a wistful tone. “When Magda came, I knew I needed something suitable. A family car.” Victor looked wistful for a moment. “You should have seen the vehicle I had when I was single. That car would have made Brad’s eyes pop out. And the way I used to drive–a little reckless, I confess. He’d never leave you alone with me if he’d seen me driving that car.”

Victor laughed again and shook his head.

Sally ignored the digression. She was not interested in cars right now. “But if you and I start again… Will we be able to stop? Or are we stepping onto a slippery slope here?”

“One way or the other, I’m heading back to Boston tomorrow morning,” Victor answered.

“Yes, and then I’ll see you at the office on Monday! And I don’t want to end up sneaking off at lunch with you once or twice a week, like the old days.”

Victor nodded solemnly. “It would be a scandal, if word got out. People say the most outrageous things.”

Sally shook her head, indicating that her point had been missed. “Would that really be the worst thing that could happen?” she asked.

Victor shrugged. “Adrianna? Sally, you don’t know my wife very well. She has very traditional values on many matters, but she has never asked for exclusivity. She would be more threatened if you and I had some sort of, well, let us say, intimate emotional commitment.”

Victor paused. “I am more concerned about the children. I would not want to lose Magda’s respect. What if they catch us in the act?”

“I think they already suspect. And who knows, maybe they’ll learn something,” Sally said with a wink. “I can’t keep Judy in the dark about these things.”

“I surrender! You know that I can’t say no to you. I never could. I’ll get the Scrabble board.”

Continued in part 3! When I get around to it!

A few nights ago, after an extremely long day at the office (crucial deadlines looming) and a late dinner followed immediately by trying to get some sleep, I had what I term, in my loose use of the terminology, a weird dream.

I sometimes wonder about what other people dream about, or what their dreams are like. I don’t usually don’t remember my own dreams, and when I do it’s not in much detail. It doesn’t resemble dream sequences from shows that I see television, and in no way whatsoever resembles any part of the movie ‘Inception’. My assumption is that other people don’t talk about their dreams because their dreams are also, like mine, remembered poorly (if at all) and generally not interesting to a wide audience. On the other hand, my assumptions must be tempered with the unequivocal fact that I have a long and colorful history of equivocal and wildly incorrect assumptions.

In my dream, I am riding in the front seat of a Nice Car. Sitting next to me is a Woman who is not my wife. She is sort of leaning up against me, in the manner that one stereotypically sees in the front seat of pickup trucks with bench seats; boyfriend driving, girlfriend with her head on his shoulder.

To make matters interesting, I’m in the passenger seat, and the woman is supposed to be driving, but she’s not. She’s practically sitting on my lap. I look over to the driver’s seat; nobody is driving. The car is moving, in traffic. I see other cars passing in the opposite direction. We are on a highway. The car begins to drift into the oncoming lane, and then drift back toward the shoulder. I wonder whether I can snake my foot over to press the brake, or maybe get my hand on the wheel, but they seem too far away. I believe that this is a matter of increasing urgency, and I am about to bring this to the attention of my traveling companion, when the dream shifts to a new location.

My dreams don’t have a lot of continuity. They tend to jump from place to place. You might have inferred that aspect of my personality from reading my blog.

I am walking into the lobby of a Fine Hotel, carrying a guitar case in each arm. The revolving door presents a momentary challenge, but I know what to do. I am slightly baffled by the situation, since I do not play guitar–although I once put in a great deal of earnest effort practicing, the simple truth is that I have no knack for guitar whatsoever. But I let the dream run its course.

In the lobby, I run into an Old Friend. He is also carrying two guitar cases. This is not completely surprising, because he actually owns several guitars, and plays guitar well, and is serious about it.

We ascend an escalator.

“Are you here for Bring Your Own Axe Night?” he asks.

I shake my head. I don’t really have any idea yet why I’m here, but that certainly isn’t it. I was unaware of this event until he mentioned it.

When we reach the top of the escalator, I notice many musicians wandering around with their instruments, warming up. Chairs have been arranged around a podium for the players, but not many are seated yet. More are arriving by the moment.

“It’s a lot of fun,” my Old Friend remarks. “You should come.”

“I don’t really know how to play guitar,” I respond, hoping that my friend will not ask why I am carrying them. “I’m only really good at saxophone. I have an alto I could bring.”

“Well, let’s ask the Maestro whether we need another alto,” he answers.

The Maestro appears. He clucks his tongue. “No, we have plenty of altos,” he says in a disappointed voice, waving his hand in the direction of a row of saxophonists who are arranging themselves in one of the rows.

I am tempted to point out that telling someone that they can’t participate for such a reason is contrary to fundamental premise of Bring Your Own Axe night, but I do not. I am on unfamiliar ground here. Perhaps my Old Friend was just joking when he said that it was a Bring Your Own Axe event. Maybe this is a Serious Group With Actual Standards.

“That’s too bad,” I say. “However, I also play tenor.”

This is technically true. I do play tenor, and baritone, although I possess neither and usually deny that I can play baritone for the simple reason that I believe that the expression “having a millstone around my neck” is a thinly veiled euphemism for playing bari in a marching band. Tenor, however, is a pleasant instrument; it sounds good, and the parts most arrangers assign to tenors are usually very easy.

“No; I’m sorry,” answers the Maestro. “We already have a tenor,” he says, gesturing toward a man who is assembling his instrument nearby.

I sigh in resignation and turn away. It is clear that I am not welcome here, for some unspoken reason. To turn away a notable alto player from Bring Your Own Axe night on the flimsy pretext that there are already too many altos was a strong hint, but this is even stronger. The idea that a group could possibly have too many tenors is bizarre and borders on the offensive, but I’m prepared to let that slide on the basis that many Maestros are bizarre and border on the offensive anyway, so that’s not what makes me turn away. What makes me turn away is that the man is assembling a baritone clarinet.

When I awake, I tell my wife my dream and that I wonder what it might signify.

“It’s obvious,” she says. “You want to leave me, and then go and have make-out sessions in a car with another woman, and join a band and travel the world collecting groupies with Old Friend. It’s the usual midlife crisis bullshit.”

If she is correct, then I must confess that I am very disappointed in myself. Certainly I can imagine a better, more fulfilling fantasy than running away with a woman who is such a poor driver, or joining a band whose leader cannot tell the difference between a baritone clarinet and a tenor saxophone.

“By the way,” my wife continues, “You never did tell me what you want for your birthday or Christmas. If you don’t give me a list, you’ll just get socks or something like that.”

“A tenor saxophone would be nice,” I answer.

Whenever I give an interview, there are one or two questions that nearly always come up, and that I always avoid answering in any direct manner. It has become almost a running joke. They’re not deep, important, or even particularly interesting questions–just the sort of ordinary, obvious question that an interviewer might use to break the ice, to establish some sort of context, before diving into deeper topics. If I’d answered these questions the first time they’d been raised, then I’m fairly sure that nobody would have asked me them again–at least, nobody who had done their homework and read my earlier interviews before picking out their own questions.

Perhaps because of my initial evasion, however, the opposite has happened. I may be imagining things–I often am–but I think that it’s plausible, from the evidence on hand, that everyone who does do their homework and reads my earlier interviews sees that I’ve dodged these questions, and therefore tries, each in his or her own way, to get the answer that I have denied to their colleagues. Perhaps they suspect that there’s something interesting behind my evasiveness, or perhaps their interest is not about me at all, but instead is a sort of friendly rivalry among themselves to see who will get me to spill the beans, even though my beans tend to be more interesting un-spilled.

It’s gotten to the point where it’s become a bit silly. I don’t generally mind a little silliness, but in this case it’s drawing attention away from what I really want to discuss during my interviews, which is, as I have asserted on several occasions, usually whatever pops into my mind that day. Trying to steer the conversation toward something that I don’t really find interesting or worthy of discussion is a distraction that takes time and energy away from topics that I believe, if only perhaps for a fleeting moment, to be more interesting and worthy of discussion. Therefore, I’ve decided to attempt to lay the matter to rest once and for all, and do so here, in my blog, to be fair and not show preference to one interviewer, critique, or host over another.

Before doing so, however, I feel obligated to layer yet another level of parentheticalness to this essay: if you have no idea what I am talking about, and have never read any of my interviews, or heard me ramble on in my dull monotone for my seven minutes on some quickly forgotten radio talk show whose tape was recycled the next day after it aired, you haven’t missed anything. Nothing. You were wise to have spent the time doing whatever it was you were doing instead of becoming sucked in to my personal zeitgeist. Having no foundation in this subject is a positive symptom of living a good, productive life. Whatever discomfort you might be experiencing from temporary confusion will end abruptly before the end of the next paragraph.

The question (or questions, depending on how they are phrased) is how I came up with the characters of Victor and Adrianna, protagonists of my “Lonely Peony” novels, and Artemus Knox, a recurring and unexpectedly popular character in the “The Poodle Millennium” stories.

If you haven’t read any of these, don’t worry; they are not required reading. If you have no idea who these characters why these characters might be interesting, don’t worry; they’re not. Their only significance comes from my reticence to reveal their origins.

I hope this won’t be disappointing, but there’s not much to reveal. I don’t know where I get the ideas for my characters, except from the ones that are shallow caricatures of people I actually know, or characters I steal from the legions of better authors but less popular authors, and these are not either. Not consciously, anyway.

Here’s what I can explain in a way that isn’t a complete fabrication.

For many years, my wife and I used to rent a house on Lieutenants Island in the town of Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, for our summer vacation. It’s a very pretty area–like many of the surrounding areas–but it has one characteristic that is a bit unusual. As the name implies, it really is an island, and is connected to the rest of the Cape by a low, straight causeway across a salt marsh. When the tide comes in, the road is submerged, and the island is cut off to traffic. There’s a nice photo of the causeway here. Depending on the phase of the moon, and the wind, and whatnot, the road can be impassable for as long as two hours before and after high tide.

When it was just the two of us, being cut off from civilization for a few hours every day was not a problem. In fact, it was a bit of fun, sometimes, because groups of people stranded at either end of the causeway were known to throw impromptu parties to pass the time. It was considered a minor social obligation to have something in the trunk of your car to contribute to such an event–a few plastic cups and a bottle of bourbon, or something similarly festive and non-perishable.

Once we had kids, however, our view of the world changed. I became nervous about being trapped on the island with a child who urgently needed something not available on the island–with the most obvious and urgent need being medical attention.

As an aside, this phobia was even more extreme with respect to our favorite winter vacation spot–a tiny island in the Caribbean that was, in good weather, hours by boat away from the nearest thing that had an even passing resemblance to an emergency room. Before we visited for the first time, I didn’t know how remote it was, but by the time we were docking at the island (and I’d been feeling that we were getting farther and farther off the map with each passing hour) I was more than a little bit worried. “What if one of us steps on a scorpionfish? What’ll we do then?” I asked my wife. “Don’t worry; they’re rare, and shy. The odds of even seeing one are negligible.” I put it out of my mind, and ten minutes after we arrived, I was wading in the water off the beach, fiddling with my snorkel gear. I put the mask on my face, and bent down so that it was in the water. The water was perfectly clear, and I could see a huge school of brightly-colored fish swimming around me. They were so beautiful and mesmerizing that it took at least a minute before I noticed the scorpionfish six inches from my left foot. We have no immediate plans to vacation there with our children.

So, the genesis of these characters is the story that follows below; a daydream that sprang from my phobia of what might happen if one of my children was in desperate, unanticipated need of medical care, coupled with a huge amount of wishful thinking and reading far too many science fiction novels as a kid.

Not very exciting, I’m afraid, and the story is sort of a clunker, but hey, this is my blog. I don’t have to convince a publisher that people will pay to read it, or even that’s it’s a good story.

Nevertheless, I hope you’ll enjoy it, as I slowly cut and paste it here, after making an editing pass or two over it.

Here’s the latest one of the quiz virus things to hit my mailbox. It’s a nice cop-out from having to think up an original topic; I can just answer the questions and call it a blog entry. I especially enjoy that the instructions set a concrete time limit and specifically discourage any deep thought. I promise to obey both the letter and spirit of these instructions.

Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets included) who’ve influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

1. JRR Tolkien.
   If I have to explain…
2. Richard Halliburton.
   A real-life adventurer. Everyone should read his ‘Book of Marvels‘ at the proper age. At least, that’s what I keep telling my kids…
3. Fritz Leiber.
   Trashy fantasy pulp fiction that I couldn’t get enough of as a twelve-year-old.
4. Whoever wrote all those Tom Swift books.
   I don’t know why this popped into my head, and I guess I’m not allowed to think about it too long. I didn’t read many of these, but they set the standard for hard-core bullshit science fiction for years to come.
5. Thomas Pynchon.
   Of course.
6. Richard Brautigan.
   I don’t have time to explain how awesomely awesome his awesome writing is. He writes like Pynchon with a page budget.
7. Ursula K. Le Guin.
   I liked the EarthSea concept very, very much. Except for the last two books, especially the last one, which is remarkably horrible and undermines everything that came before. Still, it was a good twenty-year run.
8. P.G. Wodehouse.
   This requires no explanation.
9. Neal Stephenson.
   ‘Snowcrash‘ and, to a slightly lesser extent ‘A young lady’s illustrated primer‘ are masterpieces. You should go read them right now. I’ll wait.
10. Anthony Trollope.
    Someone told me I should like his writings, and perhaps that why I did. I was impressionable for a few moments, during sophomore year in high school.
11. Jack Kerouac.
    Let’s have some fun here, shall we?
12. T.S. Eliot.
    I kinda liked some of his poems.
13. Stephen King.
    I read the first part of ‘The Dark Tower‘ when it was published in Fantasy and Science Fiction back in 1978, or some such, and thought it was great and wanted more. Unfortunately, I didn’t make note of the author, and therefore it took about twenty years for me to figure out that there were more books. It took King almost twenty years to finish the story, however, so it all worked out nicely. Unfortunately, the final book should never have been written. (Stephen, you might want to have a chat with Ursula about the temptation to try to wrap everything up nicely with a bow on it–it’s seems to be a really bad idea.)

Well, I’m out of time and ideas.

A few careers ago, an author named Geoffrey Moore wrote a book named “Crossing the Chasm”. The topic is market penetration of products of a new or somewhat revolutionary nature. At first, it seems, there are people–the so-called “early adopters”–who will try and sometimes even buy a product just because it is new and novel. They like things that are new and novel, even if that’s all they are, because they are risk-takers and want to be ahead of the curve. Unfortunately, there aren’t all that many of them, and they don’t have a lot of money, and they don’t like to spend it. Selling to them is a terrible business model.

A mature and well-positioned product, on the other hand, can be effectively marketed to the masses. It is not frightening or risky. It might seem flashy or cutting edge, but only in a superficial way. It’s a safe bet, because its utility is easy to describe and understand.

A great example of this is the iPod. The iPod was not the first portable digital music player–not by years. At no clear point in time has it the best in terms of sound quality, nor has it been the least expensive, when compared to its ever-dwindling cohort. What it has always been, however, is the safe bet. Using earlier MP3 players felt almost like a shady, illicit activity. Music was typically acquired and downloaded into them via processes that might even have been illegal, at least according to the RIAA. But Apple made it all legit, by providing all of the software, in a branded package, to rip CDs and/or buy music directly over the web for the sole purpose of loading onto an iPod. There were no hand-written instructions cribbed from back-alley chat rooms to follow, no additional software that needed to be acquired from strange ‘open source’ bazaars. Just push your favorite CD into the slot of your mac, and before you know it, the music is magically installed in your iPod.

The trick of high-tech marketing, or at least the trick espoused in “Crossing the Chasm” is to leverage the funding and feedback available from the risk-taking early adopters to get your little start-up (or your product, or what have you) across the chasm that separates the early-adopters from the plump, profit-laden mass market that lags behind, eschewing anything risky or unfamiliar.

At least, that’s what I think it’s about. I vaguely remember a very expensive consultant lecturing about it to the staff of the small startup at which I worked in the early 1990’s. We didn’t make it across the chasm. I believe that one of the reasons that we didn’t was because of the large amount of money that we spent on very expensive executive training taught by very expensive consultants who all were old, dear friends of our CEO, who knew nothing about our product but was brought in by the board to lead us because of her incredible marketing savvy, even though it turned out that what she was best at marketing was herself.

But I’ve never had a head for business.

I saw most of a movie last night on the telly. The name of the movie is “The invention of lying” (if I remember correctly, which is always a bit of an issue). After I was able to get past the confusing question about why the main character has a different (English?) accent than the rest of his friends, neighbors, and most of his family, and why none of them at all seem to have a Lowell accent (which, since it is near my home, I immediately recognized as the locale where the movie was shot), I found the movie mildly amusing.

The plot of this movie is simple: it takes place in a world which is notable in that its inhabitants (in addition to possessing wildly inconsistent accents and speech patterns) cannot say anything other than the truth. Anything anyone says is taken as absolute truth, because nobody can say anything that is not.

The protagonist discovers, under a great deal of duress, that he has a unique gift: he can say things that are not true. In fact, he can say anything at all, no matter how ridiculous, and everyone will believe him, because everyone else in the world takes everything at face value.

That would be an interesting premise for a comedy, but this movie is not so simple. There’s another aspect to this world, which is even more important: not only does everyone speak the truth, but they do so without any apparent consideration for the consequences of their utterances. They do not have unexpressed thoughts. The simple kindness of not telling someone the truth about how ghastly their outfit is, or that their parents are old and about to die, or that they don’t like working with you, is impossible. They say whatever is on their mind–no matter how cruel, nasty, or inappropriate. For example, when the protagonist thanks a woman he has invited to dinner for joining him, she says, with a smile on her face, that he is unattractive (both physically, financially, and emotionally), she is out of his league, extremely unlikely to ever talk to him again, and he will probably not get even so much as a goodnight handshake from her–and he accepts this as a fact, although it hurts him to hear it.

This movie is about more than the invention of simple deceit. It is about the invention of white lies; the invention of sensitivity and the art of choosing ones words for the benefit of both the speaker and the listener–an art that we seem to be losing.

Faithful readers of my blog, and unfaithful readers who I have forced to endure my long-winded ramblings, know that I’ve been working on a “novel” for nearly a year. I put a big chunk of it up on a web site populated by aspiring authors (and, it appears, their many ghost accounts), and received some interesting feedback about the narrative structure. The narrative structure is a bunch of memories, in a seemingly arbitrary order, strung together by a larger and roughly linear series of framing events. People did not like this, because they wanted things to happen in order. Chapter three should happen after chapter two, and that sort of thing.

Maybe, but maybe not. Perhaps if I explain what this book is really about–or at least what I intended it to be about–it will help. Perhaps I can accomplish in a brief blog post what I couldn’t accomplish in a novel.

I forget things; everyone does. At this point in my life, I’ve forgotten much more than I remember. What’s interesting to me is what I do remember–what makes a particular memory persistent, while other memories are gone in a few days. Sometimes the difference is baffling: memories of dramatic, important events disappear while memories of events that seem to have little significance linger and last. And then there are secrets, which seem to be remembered even longer; perhaps they are precious because we know that when they are forgotten, nobody else will remember them and they will truly be gone.

I decided to structure the book around the process of forgetting. It starts with the things that will be forgotten first–even though they might seem memorable–and ends with the last things remembered. It begins with the ephemera and ends with the indelible.

But I’m thinking of switching it around again, to get more readers.

Several months ago, a friend recommended ‘Open Salon’ (open.salon.com) as a place to write, be read, get feedback, and be part of a community of writers. I gave it a try. It didn’t work out as I had hoped, and overall it was a somewhat negative experience for me, although other people seem to enjoy spending time there.

I could write about what I think is wrong with Open Salon (or “OS”, as it is known to people who like to acronymize everything possible), or at least why it doesn’t appeal to me, but I can’t think of anything constructive to say yet. Perhaps later.

In the meanwhile, I’m going to excerpt some of my surviving posts from Open Salon and post them here, for the benefit of future Danny O’Bigbelly scholars. Some of these postings are in response to other postings or open calls for essays, and I realize that without context, they’ll probably just seem like random and arbitrary self-indulgent ramblings of an incoherent mind, instead of what they really are–precisely targeted, timely and topical self-indulgent ramblings of an incoherent mind.

Fair wages for illegal aliens
June 23, 2010

I don’t usually rise to the bait when my more radically conservative friends post links to astigmatic polemics, but I will today. As a moderate, I feel that they need a nudge in the right direction.

The newest thing that they’re focussed on are the stories coming out of Washington. Hilda Solis, the Secretary for Labor, and long-time advocate of low-wage earners, has mentioned in a public service announcement that all workers in the USA, documented or not, should be paid “fairly”

The focus of the announcement is that the government can help wage-earners who are not being paid fairly, but many people who saw it (or people who didn’t, and are just reacting to reactions of others) imagine that this is nothing more than a gift by Obama to illegal immigrants, who will all suddenly be earning minimum wage.

They’re wrong.

This announcement is a call to arms against companies that methodically recruit, hire and exploit illegal aliens.

This is a brilliant idea, and will do more to curb the influx of illegal immigration than building walls, hiring more border guards, or attempting to legalize illegal search and seizure.

It’s not complicated. Illegal aliens come here because they can find jobs. They can find jobs because employers are willing to hire them, even though employers do face certain risks in employing illegal aliens. The employers are willing to take those risks because the aliens are willing to work for less pay and benefits than Americans.

Take away the financial incentives for hiring illegals, and introduce new laws that provide additional ways to penalize companies that hire illegals, and the jobs go away.

Regretting things undone versus things done
July 28, 2010

Someone once wrote that in old age, most people have much more regret about the things that they hadn’t done than about the things they had.

I’m pretty certain that whoever wrote that wasn’t thinking about facebook status updates, however.

The genius of Donald Fagen
July 29, 2010

I was going to write an essay praising the genius of Donald Fagen’s music and lyrics, but then I realized that this would be as effective as drawing a smiley face with my pinky in the dust on the rear window of a Suburu station wagon to praise the work of Picasso.

Good intentions are not enough–one must also have skill and the medium.

I have a video camera, for what that’s worth
August 4, 2010

But just because I have a video camera doesn’t mean that I’m there when my daughter learns to ride her bike.

A lot of interesting things happen when I’m not there.

And when I am there, I often forget the camera anyway.

The obvious confession
August 24, 2010

There seems to be a lot of discussion on OS about identities, pseudonyms, noms de plume, and, in a related vein, charlatans of various sorts. I feel that I have a serious responsibility to participate in this discussion, because obviously these discussions are really all about me.

“Danny O’Bigbelly” is not my “real” name. It is, however, the name by which I am known on the web, where by “known” what I mean is “the name associated with me by the several people who have heard of me.” In cyberspace, it’s more real than my real name, which you would never recognize (and which, ironically, sounds even more like a pseudonym than “Danny O’Bigbelly”).

I do not have multiple identities. I have opinions about people who do have multiple identities here, but I’m sure you’ve already made up your mind what you think, and I will not claim that my opinions are better considered than your own. While I’m fairly confident that people who “rate” their own posts cry themselves to sleep–if they can sleep at all–with shame every night, I’ve never actually seen them do it. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking that the thought of contrition would enter their heads, but I enjoy the image of guilt slowly turning them inside out.

I don’t write under my own name for two reasons. The first is professional: I can’t write anything under my own name, for reasons that have to do with the conditions of my employment, except on a small number of topics. It’s too much of a pain in the ass to deal with the review process every time I want to write a few sentences in my blog, although it would dramatically increase the number of my readers if it had to go through the legal department.

The second is personal: my wife would be very unhappy if any of the things I write about were ever associated with her, and when she is unhappy, I am unhappy. She makes sure of that.

The more things change
August 7, 2010

You might wonder, as did my wife, why I bought a 1955 encyclopedia at a yard sale last week, when there are perfectly adequate encyclopedias available online or at the local library.

It’s because I’m interested in the way that people write and think about key topics or seemingly pivotal historical events has changed over time.

And how it hasn’t.

Challenges of being a parent
August 26, 2010

It’s tough being a parent these days, raising children in a world where the best movies about surfing star Keanu Reeves or animated penguins.

Children need role models.

Those were the days
September 26, 2010

Flipping through the channels recently, I saw a few minutes of a James Bond movie from the 1980’s, back when Roger Moore’s stunt doubles still looked plausibly like him.

The simple pleasures are the best
September 28, 2010

If there’s a simpler, more profound, and pure pleasure than writing a heartfelt, sincere, and perfectly-crafted response to the thoughts of another human, posting it for all to see, and then having him or her capriciously delete it, I’d like to know what it is.

No, seriously; I’d like to know what it is, because this seems a little too much like total bullshit.

In search of lost comments
September 29, 2010

When people leave OS, their comments disappear as well, but their comments leave behind evidence of their truncated existence: the total number of comments on each post still counts them. The number of people who comment on my posts is small enough so that this is very easy to see. If the thingamabob says that there are three comments on a post, and there are only two in view, it’s obvious.

I don’t have any data on the OS membership as a whole, so I can’t say whether my readers are more (or perhaps less) likely to quit, but it’s clear that people who comment on my postings do tend to vanish. Please take that into consideration.

Rethinking my strategy for using craigslist
September 30, 2010

I tried to sell some stuff on craigslist, but the people who answered the ads were a bit odd and it made me uneasy to let them come to my home. The next time I want to get rid of a set of red leather chaps, an inflatable Bullwinkle doll, or an XXXL latex bodysuit, I’m just going to donate them to the local church’s rummage sale.

Graced with a touch more arrogance, I would call this “The Best of Wellfleet, 2010”, but I just can’t summon up the necessary chutzpah right now. I’m not in a good position to determine the best that Wellfleet has to offer. I haven’t been to every restaurant or ordered everything on the menu, even though it sometimes feels (and more often looks) as if I have, so I’ll just focus on what I’ve liked best, without attempting to foist off my preferences as absolute truths.
This is a list of things that I’ve liked the best this year. You are free to disagree; by the time you read this, your arguments will mean little to me, since I will have returned from the Cape after my annual summer jaunt, but if there’s something that you want to get off your chest, please, by all means, make yourself welcome. I enjoy being a facilitator.

We should begin with the basics: best fried seafood. There are several stellar purveyors of fried seafood in the Wellfleet area, and picking a favorite is a question of arbitrary personal taste–which, fortunately, is exactly the sort of personal taste I have. I give this title to “Moby Dicks” (fried scallop platter) and “The Beachcomber” (fried calimari platter). Neither of these will leave you disappointed in any manner, unless you ordered something else and received them by accident.

You will note that I did not begin my list with a discussion of fried clams. This is no accident. There are two reasons for this. First, I do not eat fried clams. I have found that eating fried clams (or oysters, or perhaps any other entire mollusk) upsets my stomach later, for reasons that I have not taken the time to investigate, because I’ve found that I can live a happy, fulfilling life without them. There are always scallops, shrimp, calimari, lobster, abalone, or fish to fry.

The second reason is, perhaps, more important. The best fried clams in the world are served at Woodmans in Essex (about three hours away by car, for you out-of-state readers) and having eaten their clams in the past, I am doomed to find all other fried clams to be a pale imitation. But, as long as we’re on the subject, clams aren’t even the best thing about Woodmans. The best things about Woodmans are, in descending order of awesomeness, their fried native tiny shrimp, and their onion rings. I will not order these anywhere else, because the result is, at best, both heart-breaking and artery-clogging.

The best nachos are at The Beachcomber. No other nachos that I’ve had in Wellfleet are even worthy of the name, but the nachos at “The Beachcomber” are the balls. Don’t order them unless you’re either in a large party, or plan on having them as your entree, or are a fat, greedy pig, or all three, because they are far too much food for a simple appetizer. The Beachcomber does not skimp, and you’ll want to eat every bit of it, because the balance of ingredients is perfect. There are no cheeseless pockets of chips hiding in the bottom. There is no place that the salsa and chili have not penetrated. It’s all good, and they give you enough to feed a small family with growing children.

The best music and atmosphere also goes to The Beachcomber. I believe that I can assert, without fear of contradiction, that they also have the most alluring waitresses. It is a bit of local sport to watch Men of a Certain Station in Life flirt with the waitresses, who, by virtue of their position, interact daily with men who are younger, hipper, more intelligent, richer, and more charismatic than a forty-something with kids in tow could ever hope to be. Personally, I do not engage in this sport, mostly because I do not like to see people make fools of themselves, but also because it would take valuable time away from oogling the hot redhead who works behind the bar, who is considered by many to be a living national treasure.

Best french fries goes to The Lighthouse. The Lighthouse also wins for the best clam chowder. I surprise myself by giving The Lighthouse the best for anything (except most convenient location on move-in day) because their kitchen has been very inconsistent for the last several decades. When we started going there, which was right around the time that most of the current wait-staff was born, it was very good, and every year we went there, we saw the same staff, serving the same menu. Then it went into a decline, somewhere around twelve years ago, and never seemed to recover. We believe that the ownership changed hands at least twice, if not several times, because the faces seemed to change every year or two. Now they seem to be different almost every time we go, and the menu often changes as well. We have had some truly disappointing meals there in past years, but this year, they seem to be back on their feet. We don’t eat there as much as we used to (since there are no so many other options that we know well), but perhaps this will change, if their positive trend continues. Their basics are good this year, but do yourself a favor and do not order the nachos, and on Thursday, aka “Mexican Night”, stay far away.

You might ask yourself why we continue to eat at The Lighthouse after being disappointed several times in the past. I shall briefly explain. One item that has remained constant on their menu is Portuguese Kale Soup, and my daughter is crazy about Portuguese Kale Soup. Is it any good? I cannot say, but I know that she likes it very much. I have never ordered it, since I am not a fan, but its continued presence on the menu ensures that we will eat there at least once per visit.

Best sushi goes to Mac’s Shack. I’m not aware of any other sushi in the neighborhood, but they’d probably win anyway. It’s extremely respectable sushi. A traditionalist might find fault with a sushi bar that plays reggae music and also serves umbrella drinks and boiled lobster, but I say nuts to them. This is Wellfleet, not Tokyo.

The rest of the menu at Mac’s Shack is also extremely strong, and I would probably eat there much more frequently if my family occupied a higher tax bracket. I do recommend staying away from their stuffed lobster, because stuffed lobster, unlike revenge, is not a dish best served at or below room temperature, and that is how I have perceived their stuffed lobster both times I have tried it–after the first bad experience, I thought perhaps that it was just a fluke and I would be safe ordering it again, but now I am convinced of the opposite. But again, I am spoiled, perhaps, because in the back of my mind I will always be aware that the best stuffed lobster in the world was available only at the restaurant at Drake’s Anchorage in the British Virgin Islands, and only up until around 1996. It was, as far as I could tell, transubstantiation of lobster, cheese, sherry, and bread crumbs. It’s my own fault for being disappointed; I should know better than to ever order stuffed lobster again, anywhere.

Best daily special: Moby Dick’s scallop sandwich: broiled scallops wrapped in cheese and bacon on a philly roll; delicious, and as one of the less expensive items on the menu, an utter bargain, especially if your health plan covers angioplasty. It’s a daily special in name only, as far as I can tell–it’s been on the board every time I’ve gone there, as far as I can remember. But let’s see past this detail and focus on the deeper truth: it’s almost always a good bet to order off the special board around here. Most of the restaurants on the Cape have menus that appear to be dictated by some unfathomable but unbreakable set of commandments: thou must serve chowder, bisque, boiled lobster, fish sandwiches, fried this, broiled that, raw something else, and chicken fingers for the kids and Caesar salads for people looking for leafy vegetables. The loophole in these laws is in the daily specials, which can be almost anything. These are the things that the chefs want to cook; these are the things the owners want to offer in order to differentiate themselves from their cohort. Order them, as long as they are not outlandish. You will rarely be disappointed. Although please keep in mind my earlier advice about Mexican Night at The Lighthouse.

Best authentic beach fare: Mac’s Seafood, of course. It’s the only place to get seafood that’s actually on the beach. If you want to eat fried shrimp or squid with sand between your toes, it’s the only game in town. Plus, it’s got ice-cream. The perfect place to amble to after a hard night of square dancing on the town pier, which, for some reason, was apparently canceled last Wednesday. Maybe it was the rain. I’ve heard that there are people who don’t like to dance in light rain, but those people are meek, weak and without moral fiber.

Best place for the family: The Bookstore Restaurant. It’s got something for everyone, plus it has the Town Beach across the street (aka the one beach in Wellfleet where you can park for free), the playground, the skateboard park, yoga on Thursday, Shakespeare on Monday and Tuesday (or something like that), and there’s actually a bookstore right next door. Also a pub, should circumstances require it. A word of caution: the bisque is too salty–resist the temptation. Also, there’s some sort of seafood fettucine alfredo dish on the dinner menu that should be ordered only with care and by people with ravenous appetites, because it is both utterly delicious and far too much food for any normal person to consume. I’ve heard some people claim that the way to avoid weight gain after a large meal is to walk home afterward, but in this specific case, I doubt that this advice is sufficient, unless one walks home pushing their car in front of them, with the parking brake engaged, and home is somewhere in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. In simple terms, you might want to consider sharing this entree.

Best places to go with a big crowd of noisy, boisterous people or unruly children: Arnolds (in Eastham), PJs, The Wicked Oyster, Winslow’s Tavern, and half a dozen other places up and down Route 6. Arnolds is genuinely good, and they have miniature golf and ice cream on the premises. PJs is reputed to have the best fried clams on the Cape. The Wicked Oyster is supposed to have the best oyster stew, or something like that. Winslow’s Tavern has fought hard to win its reputation for the most pretentious wine list. These are all decent places about which many people have extremely nice things to say. There are also places that are new and about which I don’t know much, such as Pearl or The Flying Fish, but have been positively reviewed. I think everyone should try these other restaurants–at least, enough people should go to them to keep the wait to be seated at my favorite restaurants tranquil and pleasantly brief.

I get nearly a hundred emails each day, not counting spam or other stuff that gets filed or thrown away before I see it. I am not unusual in this regard; I know people who get much more.

I’ve gotten a lot of email every day for a long time. I’ve been using email since before most people even knew it existed–back before The Web was The Net, and email addresses had exclamation points in them.

But things have changed in the last few years.

I used to get mail from people, and it used to be addressed to me. Now nearly all of my mail is from corporate entities, addressed in bulk to their customers whose profiles satisfy some criteria, or updates from friends addressed to everyone in their address books. Outside of work, I rarely get email that addressed only to me (or a small set of my cohorts), or that justifies a personal answer. It’s unusual when I get more than two or three of these per day, and even more unusual when they’re from anyone except my family or a small group of close friends.

From what I have heard, I am not unusual in this regard either.

We’ve stopped writing to each other, and started broadcasting. Because we’re broadcasting (whether tweeting, updating our facebook status, or writing blog entries), our messages are not personalized to the recipient; they are broad and generic. And, thanks to things like retweeting and ‘liking’ things on facebook, the messages often aren’t even our own. We’re becoming scripted.

We’ve become a karaoke culture–we sing other people’s songs to a room filled with a mix of friends, who might not be listening, and near strangers, who might. We are surprised when there is any response to our singing other than polite applause at the end, because we usually don’t invite much interaction.

I don’t like it, and I’d like to see the trend reversed. Or at least I’d like to see it fought against.

I realize that it might seem ironic to write a blog entry about how much I don’t like blog entries, but misses the point. Blogs, facebook updates, tweets, etc, all have their place. They’re useful for announcing things, and that has true value. But it isn’t as intimate or as influential as an actual interactive dialog. Have you ever changed your mind about an important issue because one of your friends tweeted their opinion about it? I hope not. Have you ever had your position on an issue changed by having a personal conversation with someone who holds the opposite opinion? I would expect so.

So, here’s a suggestion. Walk through your contact list, and send to whomever you like a short, personal note. You can make a generic template–it’s not cheating. Just make sure that it’s clear that it’s from you, addressed only to them, and that you would like to hear from them.

Let’s start corresponding again.

Here’s how my typical workday begins.

I drive to a parking lot behind an unmarked, almost unlabeled building. It’s the sort of building people drive by all of the time, without even noticing that it’s there. It appears abandoned; all of the windows are shuttered.

The parking lot is filled with nondescript cars. None of them are painted bright colors, none are excessively sporty, but all are in good repair. None are new, and none are old. They have only the most bland and common decals and bumper stickers. None of these cars are worth a second glance. A moment after you’ve seen them, it’s hard to remember anything about them.

As I get out of the car, I often see young men wandering around the parking lot. Sometimes there is a woman or two, but usually it’s only men. I often see them, but not always. They move around the neighborhood according to some pattern that I don’t know. Sometimes they move around in groups of two or three, or sometimes there will just be one, standing in a fixed position. But they are never alone, even if they appear to be–they are always talking to someone else on the wireless headset that they always appear to be wearing.

As they walk, the men make notes on small pads, and sometimes I see them taking quick photos of the cars in the parking lot, the cars driving by, people walking by on the sidewalk, the other buildings in the area, the weather, and sometimes nothing at all.

Their activities have drawn the attention of passing motorists and pedestrians. The local police have been summoned several times, by people concerned about the odd behavior of these men, who wander around the area at all hours, muttering messages into their headphones, and wearing strange, bulky outfits that include odd-looking vests, even in warm weather. I’ve never witnessed one of the encounters with the police, but I know none of the men have ever been arrested, taken into custody, or even cited, and I doubt that any of the encounters ever show up on a police log.

The only entrance to the building is in the back, away from the street. There are other exits, but they’re difficult to see from the outside. As I walk to the entrance, I often pass some of the men. I know many of them by name, and they all seem to know exactly who I am, and sometimes we exchange pleasantries. All of them have college degrees, and many have advanced degrees of one sort or another. They are clean-cut and fit, but they always look a little tired.

I am aware of being monitored by several video cameras as I approach the building. It doesn’t bother me.

To get into the building, I have to use a magnetic cardkey. There is no receptionist. I hold my cardkey up to the door, a small light by the lock turns green, and the door is open for a few seconds. The door opens into a small foyer, and then there is another door like it. Behind the second door, there is a short hall, with rooms on either side. The first room after the second door is a large room, with a big table in it. This room is almost always occupied by a group of younger, less clean-cut men and women. They are usually playing cards, but I’ve also seen them playing monopoly. It’s clearly just a way to kill time. When they’re in the room, they have nothing to do until they’re summoned. Every once in a while, I’ll see them all leave the room together and head out the door. I don’t know how often this happens, because I don’t spend much time in the hall, and I don’t know where they go. Usually when I pass the room, they’re either playing cards, or else the cards are laid down on the table as if they had been interrupted in the middle of a game.

Farther down the hall, there are several doors. Most are unmarked. My work is behind one of them.

To open the door, I have to dial a combination. The door opens onto a small area. Inside the small area, I remove all of the electronic devices I carry and place them on a shelf. I remember to turn up the ringer on my cell phone to its highest volume, to increase the probability that I will be able to hear it, because I have to leave it on the shelf and can’t carry it with me.

On the other side of the small area is a second door. This one is heavier, and requires dialing two combinations, which are both different from the combination of the outer door. It usually takes me a few tries to open them–they’re tricky, and very sensitive to any variation in timing.

I open the inner door and enter a larger room. There is a small sheet of photographs hanging by the door–photos of everyone who has the codes to open the door. It is largely unnecessary at this point, at least for the people who work in the room, because everyone who works in the room knows everyone else. An unexpected visitor will provoke a rapid response.

I sit down at a desk (desks are not assigned, although more often than not I end up sitting at the same desk) and key in my combination in order to access my files. Everyone with access to the room knows the combination to the door, but I am the only person who knows this combination.

After I unlock my files, I still can’t access the current project information until I key in another, longer, trickier combination. Then I can access the latest information. I am ready to begin work.

And then I realize that I’ve left my lunch at home.

If this all sounds exciting, it’s merely because I’ve been disingenuous, and you’ve filled in the missing details in a way that makes them seem more interesting than they really are.

Here’s the truth.

The building I work in is inexpensive to rent. This appeals to my employer. It doesn’t bother me.

The parking lot is filled with cars owned by engineers. Engineers drive sensible, boring cars, for the most part. We don’t make statements with our cars, or other things we can buy. We make statements about ourselves by what we create.

The men wandering around the parking lot and the surrounding area are testing a new wireless communication system that involves voice and video. Most of them know me because I used to work on something related to that project. They do get visits from the police fairly regularly, because many of the things they do during testing can be interpreted in a suspicious manner.

The people who play cards in the conference room are interns. The project they are working on requires large numbers of people, but not all of the time. It’s somewhat sporadic and unpredictable, so they sit around and kill time until they are summoned to do whatever it is that they do for a few hours.

There is no number outside the door to the room where I work because the hall was recently painted and the numbers haven’t been put back up.

The room where I work is locked because the customer is concerned about the sensitivity of the data we are using and creating. It’s not some sort of top-secret bunker. This is a fairly ordinary set of safeguards for protecting sensitive personal info. Ditto with the keys protecting the data.

And I’ve been feeling guilty about leaving my lunch at home for years. I really should bring in my lunch more often. The cafeteria food is overpriced and not very healthy.