And so here is the completed version of Book One, with all four seasons in one convenient microwaveable morsel, just heat & eat. With Peet’s Major Dickson blend, of course. For some reason I think Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon will take you where you need to go as you read this one, but if you lean towards country try out Lainey Wilson’s latest, Whirlwind. And I really don’t know why, but I finished out Winter while listening to a fairly obscure work from 1951, Aaron Copland’s Concerto for Clarinet and Strings (with Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello), featuring Benny Goodman on the clarinet, and the 2024 remaster is now on Apple Music.

So here she be, two of the final five characters in TimeShadow you haven’t met yet. The first three seasons ended up at 70 or so pages but as I worked on Winter heavy revisions were made on the first three seasons so you may need to revisit those if you run into inconsistencies.  The final version ended up at 177 pages, so this one will take a few cups of coffee.

Have fun.

The Seasons of Man

Book One: The Aviator

1. Spring

For as long as he could remember, the boy had relied on his oldest sister for almost everything. Her name was, Claire, and she was the good sister.

Because she was definitely not the bad sister. That was Ann. Ann was the bad one. The evil sister, if you are given to believing in such things as good and evil, for this is a tale of good and evil. Good where you expect to find goodness, and evil, of course, where you least expect it. 

Ann had tried to smother the boy once upon a time, when he was very small, and those helpless moments of infinite suffocating stillness had formed his earliest, and most vivid memory. Trying to breathe while she pressed his face down into a sofa cushion, laughing all the while, before Claire came into the room and pushed Ann away. Then Ann was screaming and crying, because the evil inside Ann knew the sound of her distress would bring their father running. And he could just barely remember Ann telling their father that Claire had been trying to kill him, and that, for some reason, didn’t make sense to him, because his father believed the lie Ann had told him. He always did, too, whenever Ann did something like that. And then their father would punish Claire, yet somehow he was always punishing Claire for the things Ann had done. That Ann did and always got away with. 

And while the boy grew to love his sister Claire, it took many years for him to fully understand the toll exacted on her. To the boy she seemed a resolute paragon of strength and virtue, and he never sensed the hard, brittle edges of the damage done to her.

And yet for years and years the boy wondered why Claire had bruises on her legs and arms, and it took years and years for him to understand that his sister Ann enjoyed what she had done to them all. And to understand the enormity of the injustice done by his father, with his belt out as he towered over the little girl trying to hide in the shadows of her bedroom. And the enormity of the injustice Ann was prepared to visit on all their futures. 

He would go to Claire’s room and find her under the sunny window under the dormer, to her favorite spot just inside the protective shade of the pecan tree outside her window, and she would take him and hold onto him so protectively. And yet, he never understood why she clung to him so possessively. So fiercely, with her eyes so full of vacant fear.

Later, when he was older, when he did something wrong, even before he could fess up to it Claire would come and take the blame. She had taken on the role of his protector and couldn’t shake loose of her sense of duty to him, even when she knew the consequences were dire. 

She seemed destined to remain his protector until she took her last breath, and one day he asked her why she did.

“I have to, you see? I have to stop you from falling…you, and the flowers.”

“What flowers?” He asked, because he didn’t understand.

Some nights the boy could hear his father in Ann’s room. Speaking in low, familiar tones that somehow seemed all wrong. Years later the boy understood, or at least he thought he did. At first he thought his father had been seducing Ann, but it was only much later that he finally understood the seduction had been the other way around. It took the boy that long to understand that some people are born evil, that this person’s moral universe does not align with goodness. That some are born with an innate understanding of human weakness, and an understanding of how easy it is to exploit that weakness.

So Ann was gifted in seduction and manipulation – yet oddly enough in little else, and in time even those gifts would betray her, as they would betray them all.

Yet Claire was gifted in ways few people could understand. In ways Ann never would, and in ways none of them ever expected.

For, you see, Claire understood music. The gift, if you will, of what lies both within and beyond music. And she was tempted to give this gift to her little brother.

The piano came to her as easily as breathing does to most, and her face could not be pressed into a cushion long enough, nor her arms bruised enough, to smother that understanding. Not even Ann could take her gift away, though she tried hard enough. Yet, and herein lies a conundrum of the human condition, their father was understanding enough to see that Claire possessed such a gift, and with this understanding he did all he could to help his daughter gain mastery. Because she needed his kind of help, the help only a decent father can provide, and even her father could see and feel and understand her need. Yet, even as the boy grew, this human conundrum took flight, as Ann and their mother became a kind of warped team. Because it seemed as though their job was to destroy Claire, and then the boy. Claire and her music, the boy and his dreams. It became a kind of spirited game for them. Birds of a feather, you might say.

The boy wasn’t particularly bright in those days, not like Claire was, but he was persistent. He’d liked to draw even as a toddler, and that was about all his teachers thought he had in the Smarts Department. He was always drawing, from pre-school through the earliest grades in elementary school. The usual stuff, too: airplanes and, naturally enough, space ships, because science fiction movies were all the rage and all the other boys in school watched that kind of stuff. But then he got interested in drawing houses. Houses he’d never seen. Houses so intricately complex that even his teachers began noticing that something more than a little unusual was going on with this boy. 

‘Where do you come up with all these ideas?’ the boy’s teachers asked.

“I don’t know. I just see things.” 

‘I see them in my mind, like they are a memory,’ he wanted to say – but he already knew better. Knew better than to tell these grown-ups such things, because he already understood that succeeding in school meant conforming to the narrow expectations of his teachers. And, anyway, those August Spirits would have never understood.

But when Claire asked him about a particularly detailed drawing one day, he told her.

And he wasn’t so very surprised when Claire said she understood.

Because she had her own memories, of places she had never been, and she went there too. Usually when their father was home.

So it turned out they both had places to run. Because in the end it really wasn’t safe in their father’s house. 

What Claire called the House of Pain, and later the House of Death.

+++++

Maybe it wasn’t really his fault.

He came home from the war and no one recognized him.

William Tennyson had always been the life of the party. The high school quarterback, the good looking guy who always brought the cutest girl to the dance. And though he was popular he was also smart as hell. A real Ivy League kind of smart, very good at math and the sciences, and all his teachers just knew he was really something special. Yes, Bill Tennyson was going places; everyone was sure of that.

While most boys his age were content to drink on weekends, Bill Tennyson could not be bothered. While a few caroused around with a different girls on Saturday nights, Tennyson seemed to prefer the company of just one girl, a very bright, and very religious girl by the name of Doris Sawyer. Her father was a Methodist minister, and both father and daughter were frail, nervous creatures prone to fits of overzealous evangelizing. So while Bill and Doris were an item, the mature, reasonable kids that all the other parents liked to dote on, there was a kind of elemental inconsistency about the relationship.

His life was grounded in numbers, in science, while her’s drifted in and out of mysticism, caught up in the web of the internal contradictions of her beliefs.

So it was something of a surprise to Doris and all their friends when, after everyone graduated from high school and the gang set off to USC or Claremont, that Bill Tennyson got on a train and went east, to Princeton. To study physics. Doris of course went to a Methodist university down in Dallas, ostensibly to study English literature and the Good Book, but those who knew her best knew she was more likely going to look for fresh meat. She had matured into a young woman of almost surreal beauty, but there was something quite unattractive lurking under the surface of her Patrician features.

Princeton was as different from California as Bill Tennyson had hoped. There were no subtle racisms and class distinctions, nor were parochial attitudes in fashion, and because of current events, there was a sense that the world stood on the precipice of something horrendous. Europe was falling into the labyrinth once again, but so too was Japan, while many at home simply chose to look away. 

And for the first time in his life, Bill Tennyson wasn’t the smartest kid on campus. He was, in a sense, one among many, yet even so a handful of Tennyson’s more observant professors took note of his keen sense of curiosity, something deeper that his quiet, studious nature often obscured. Yet he was even here a kind of Golden Boy, still the quarterback but now he was more the blond haired and blue eyed All American jock. Girls in town took note of him, yet he remained curiously uninterested.

All this came to a head in the summer of 1940, when the Luftwaffe appeared high over the English Channel. When the despair of the Great Depression, which had for a time given way to a fashionably virulent isolationism, finally took note of the disastrous events unfolding in Europe and Japan. Now, as a result of rumors emanating from Copenhagen and Heidelberg, big ideas were brewing deep within the scientific community at Princeton.

And so, soon enough and as William Tennyson’s luck would have it, the All American kid came to the attention of a peculiar, rather otherworldly old man. The old man was a Jew, and a recent émigré from Germany who had only just become an American citizen. An older man, and a physicist of some modest repute. His name was Albert Einstein, and the old man promptly cast a spell on Tennyson.

Under Einstein’s tutelage Tennyson continued as a graduate student at Princeton, but he soon departed for mysterious places with names like Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. The boy became so deeply enmeshed in the universe of numbers that the true dimensions of the universe began to fade away.

+++++

Not one of Bill Tennyson’s friends knew what he had done during the war, only that when he returned home after Japan’s surrender, he came home wearing the uniform of a full colonel in the Army Air Force, complete with the wings of a pilot. He came home a pale, gaunt shadow of his former self, and while he never spoke of his experiences during the war, he tended to drink now, and much more than was considered fashionable. He usually drank scotch whisky, and often before five in the afternoon.

They also noted that their old friend was working for an aircraft company that had just opened a massive new plant in Burbank, and this company was also constructing a truly huge facility up in the desert, on an ancient, dry lake lakebed. Yet no one really knew anything about what Bill was working on, because no one who worked for that company ever talked about what they did. 

So of course people were beginning to talk.

From time to time all the old gang got together and the boys cooked steaks on grills in their backyards and the same girls made their salads and side dishes and everyone talked about the good old days before the war, and yet even then Tennyson was tight-lipped about what went on in Burbank or up there in the desert. He did, however, drink more than his fair share of scotch whisky, which caused his old friends to talk behind his back.

And it was at one of those infrequent backyard get-togethers that Doris Sawyer waltzed in and everyone ooh’ed and ah’ed as she sashayed through her moment of victory, because she looked just like she did in all those motion pictures she was making over in Hollywood.

And though William Tennyson had seen not even one of her movies, he could not ignore the look in her eyes.

Oh, those eyes.

+++++

The boy pulled the sheets up over his head and tried to make himself small, something he always did when he heard his parents yelling at each other. Something he did most nights these days, but he knew that soon the worst would be over. His dad would threaten to leave again, and his mom would say something like “Go ahead! Just see if I care…” And then he would hear his dad storming down the stairs on his way out to his car, then tires screeching as his father backed out of the garage and down the driveway. Tires screeching and then the shaking would begin, because for a few minutes his mother would laugh – until she began crying. Then he could hear her on the telephone and a little while later he’d watch from his window as she went out the front door and walked out to the street and got in a car with someone. And it was always the same car, a Jaguar. A little convertible sports car. Silver colored, and with a tiny light that came on when she opened the door and climbed in. When he saw the same man. An actor, a famous one.

His father returned a few hours later and he usually went straight to Ann’s room, and a couple of times he heard funny noises coming from behind the closed door to her little room. Claire would poke her head out of the doorway to her room and tell him to go back to his room, and even then he knew she was trying to protect him. But from what? He did not understand such things.

But he remembered one night for the rest of his life, even though he didn’t find out what happened until the next morning.

Because his mom didn’t come home, not like she usually did. She wasn’t in the kitchen, and nobody was making breakfast. Because she had died in a car accident that night, somewhere out on Sunset Boulevard near a place called Malibu, but he didn’t know that yet.

His father came to school later that morning and he was called to the principal’s office. 

Everyone was so worried for him, and that felt strange as he’d been scared to death – because being called to the principal’s office usually meant you’d been caught doing something very wrong. And he grew even more worried because in his experience the only person who’d ever cared about him was Claire, and she wasn’t there in the office. But his dad was, and that scared him more than anything else. And that was when he learned about what had happened to his mother.

And a few days later he’d been dressed up in a black suit, his very first, and he went to his very first funeral, too. His dad’s friends came, and a whole bunch of people his mom had worked with came, and while the boy thought he understood what the word death meant, he didn’t, not really, not until he saw her shiny casket being lowered into the earth. His dad was crying, and Claire was too. Yet Ann wasn’t, and at first he’d wondered why. She’d had an odd little smile on her face, and a kind of meanness in her eyes that he just couldn’t understand. No, he never understood that at all, though he never forgot that moment.

+++++

It seemed, for a while, that throwing himself into his work was the answer.

He had been tasked, during the war, with helping engineers at Boeing understand the theoretical dynamics of an atomic detonation, and how to ready the B-29 to stand up to the effects of the blast. But the deeper the team got into the problem it seemed that more and certainly more complicated issues arose. What was the optimal IP for the bomb run, what about the best speeds and altitudes for the drop? And egress? High altitude, or low? How would these effects change at various yields? Yet no one knew, not exactly, just how big the reaction would be, how effective the bomb would be. Dozens of physicists in New Jersey and Illinois were scrambling to come up with a meaningful set of parameters, but Tennyson knew that, at this point in the project, these questions were being reduced to a series of very educated guesses. Hell, it hadn’t even been known how far along the Germans were, or even if Roosevelt would use the weapon to hit Berlin first, then Japan, so balancing pressure waves and spar deflections had almost seemed premature.

And now, fifteen years later, he was still at it. The blast effects of the latest warheads, the big hydrogen devices, had barely been factored into the wing designs of Boeing’s first two jet-powered bombers, the B-47 and the much larger B-52. Further complicating matters, the B-52 had been designed as a high altitude delivery system, but now the Air Force was testing them at high speeds and at altitudes low enough to burn the ass off a prairie dog.

Tennyson was also teaching at Cal-Tech, while also working at Edwards Air Force Base on projects Blue Band and Quick Clip, the first real efforts to address the accelerated stress fractures and general wing fatigue that high-speed, low altitude flight produced. And just as the latest hydrogen warheads were entering service, further complicating his team’s calculations.

As these things so often are, what Bill Tennyson was not doing was attend to his children. He found it convenient to move from Beverly Hills to Pasadena so he could get to campus without fighting traffic, and Claire was old enough to notice the change in their new neighborhood. And Tennyson soon lost touch with his old circle of friends again, and within a year of becoming a widower he entrusted his kid’s upbringing to a series of English or Scottish nannies, each vetted by the FBI because of the nature of his work.

He drank more, at least until his drinking became a security risk, and then he turned to pills. Uppers and downers, reds and whites. Whatever got the job done. He never understood the trauma his wildly swinging moods left on his kids, especially Claire, but then again he just didn’t think of them very much at all. His work was simply too important.

In order to fully appreciate the nature of that beast, it must be said that he’d gone through flight training in 1943, earned his wings, and had even flown three missions in early ’45 – testing the first modified B-29s. In the late 1950s he qualified in the Buff, or the B-52, and flew training hops over the pole from Spokane to England – again, testing their latest wing modifications.

William Tennyson viewed his children as something of an accident, as needy little creatures he’d neither wanted nor needed. He viewed humanity as doomed and had convinced himself that bringing children into this world was an exercise in cruelty, and sometimes he even believed that was true. The women he met confirmed his bleak assessment of humanity’s future; each seemed like hyper-manipulative head-hunters, hedonists looking for a free ride and a consequence-free life along their way to endless money. Nannies came into the children’s lives and, while nice enough, most just wanted a year in sunny Southern California before moving back to the UK. Most dreaded working for Tennyson after just a few weeks, and all felt terrible for his children. Few were emotionally nurturing enough to make a difference.

Yet all the while, Claire continued her studies with the piano. At one point, when she was seven, she began writing music, and word of her abilities soon spread. Not merely gifted, her work was evaluated by musicologists and concert pianists, then famous conductors looked them over. One piece, a modest piano concerto, was recorded by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, yet through it all Claire remained quite grounded. Her most cherished role remained looking after her little brother, still protecting him from their sister Ann.

One evening she was sitting at the piano in the little den off the main living room, and little Bill was – as was most often the case – sitting on a small sofa across from her, lost within an impressionist’s landscape of shadows as she played the Clair de lune, which was his favorite piece of music by far. She played the piece slowly that night, oh so slowly, and it seemed she had never played with such restrained passion, or with such anguish, and he wondered why even as he fell into that place her music always took him. The Clair de lune always left him adrift, like he was floating in some ethereal place, a place not quite real, yet not quite unreal, either. It was like, for a moment, he existed in this someplace else, like he was falling through time.

“It feels like I’m in a field of flowers, Claire,” he told her once.

And she had nodded, because she had seen them too. “Flowers in autumn, in the moonlight,” she told him then. “Just before winter. Before the snow comes for them.”

Because even then, if only inside her music, they would come for him and take him to a safe place to sleep. To the sleep only her music gave them. Safe, because Ann couldn’t get to them while they were safe in their hidden sleep. Safe, because even their father couldn’t find them while they were hidden away there. 

Yet Claire knew the way.

In fact, the dream was remarkably consistent. As he fell away within the phrasing of her music, as the soaring epiphany of Debussy’s resolution arrived, in this dream he woke inside a landscape of searing white, white like the surface of the brightest moon, and Claire was always at his side, holding his hand. Her music was still beckoning him on, even though there was no piano in this place. 

And within moments of their arrival, the two were surrounded by what looked like giant pink butterflies, only these butterflies had faces. Human faces, or almost human. The eyes were different. They had owls eyes, golden-amber eyes, and small beaks where a nose might be. The butterflies gathered ‘round, hovering and inquisitive, and the first time they arrived it was as if the butterflies were not quite sure if the boy and the girl were real. The light there was so bright it hurt, the glare so uncomfortable he had to shade his eyes with his cupped hand, yet the air was comfortably cool, and gentle breezes caressed his face. Then the butterflies would come closer still. Air from the gentle motion of their wings came as Claire’s music had, but then he looked away and was soon adrift in the familiar warmth of his bed. His room was dark but for the light of a full moon, yet he really wasn’t in his bed and he wasn’t really in his room. No, just now one of the butterflies was next to him – oh, she was so close now – and it felt like her mind was inside his. She was wordlessly asking questions and he was answering, too, as wordlessly. Why were they here, she was asking? How had they come?

And he couldn’t understand the questions, or where the words were coming from, let alone the answers she sought. After all, this was a dream and dreams weren’t real, yet this didn’t feel like a dream, or even look like the dreams he usually had. And certainly didn’t feel the way his other dreams usually felt.

Then he saw Claire. She was there right beside him, and she was dressed just as she had been a moment ago, while she sat at the piano. 

So this couldn’t be a dream, could it?

But Claire didn’t look surprised, and that was what he remembered most after that first time. That look in her eyes. The look that said she had been here before, and somehow he understood that the weird butterfly people were her friends. They wanted to be his friends, too.

And that scared the hell out of the little boy.

+++++

Bill Tennyson started flying again soon after the move to Pasadena, “to save time flying up to the desert,” or so he said. He purchased a Bonanza and later a new Baron, a 56TC fully equipped for instrument flight. Pressurized cabin, four seats, very fast. He kept the airplane at Hollywood Burbank, and as his boy was getting old enough, and his legs long enough to reach the rudder pedals, he started teaching Bill Jr. how to fly.

But he soon noticed the boy seemed distracted all the time, like he just couldn’t concentrate. Though the boy almost seemed interested in flying, when his son was at the controls he seemed to daydream and quickly lost situational awareness. And he realized with some sadness that his son was a stranger.

Then the two of them flew over to the Grand Canyon one Saturday morning, and Bill Sr. flew them down into the canyon, following the course of the river for a while before climbing back up above the south rim and turning for the airport just south of the big National Park hotels there. He landed and then rented a car and they drove to the El Tovar Lodge, and they had lunch overlooking the vast canyon just beyond the glass.

Bill studied his son as they looked over the menu. He seemed bright enough, often even inquisitive enough to be a good student, yet his grades were poor, and all his teachers said he seemed distracted. Like he was daydreaming as he drew. some kind of alternate reality. Sometimes that reality seemed to have exquisite detail, so much detail it was alarming. They recommended counseling, and of course, treatment.

“What did you think of the canyon?” Tennyson asked his son.

But the boy shrugged off the question and looked away, off beyond the dining room.

“Bill, what are you thinking about?” he asked.

And again, the boy shrugged. “Nothing,” he did finally manage to say.

“No one thinks of nothing, Bill. Why won’t you talk to me?”

His son turned and looked at him. “Because we’re afraid of you.”

The words stung, and Tennyson looked out the window for a moment. “Could I ask why?”

“Why? You mean you don’t know?”

He looked at his son again, repulsed by the sight of the loathing he felt in his boy’s eyes. “No, I don’t know. In fact, I don’t understand anything about you.”

“How could you? You’re never around, and when you are you’re drinking and you get mean. So we hide, we disappear. Even Carrie knows enough to hide when you start drinking.”

Carrie was their latest nannie. Nannies had recently tended to last just a few months before fleeing in despair.

“Because of my drinking? You hide because of my drinking…?”

“That, and the things you do with Ann.”

Bill looked away, acutely embarrassed. “What do you mean by that?” he asked.

His son looked away again, and though he didn’t like where this talk was going his father had started it. “Claire and I, we see you when you get on top of her. We hear the things you say to her.”

Tennyson stood abruptly and left the table, leaving his son alone with not another word said. He returned to the table a few minutes later to find his boy staring out the window, crying. 

“Would you like to go live with your grandmother?” he said after he sat. 

“No, not really. Not unless Claire could come with me, anyway.”

“All three of you. Together.”

“Then no. Not if Ann comes. Nothing would change.”

“What do you mean, Bill?”

“She twists everything, Dad. She makes everything bad.”

“How do you mean?”

So he listened as his son talked about how Ann did bad things and then blamed Claire. Or about how she set up him and then blamed Claire. He was specific. He told his father everything, and the weight of his words began to crush his father.

So Tennyson asked the waiter to bring him a scotch and water.

“That’s what you do, Dad. You start drinking that stuff and then you get mean. That’s when we hide. But I don’t have anywhere to hide here,” his son said quietly. “I just want to…”

“Where would you go, Bill? If you could go anywhere you wanted, where would you go?”

“Claire and I go there all the time. It’s safe there.”

“What? Where do you go?”

“I don’t know where it is, but we go there a lot. We have friends there, too.”

“I don’t understand. You don’t know where this place is? How far away is it? How do you get there?”

But his son just shrugged. “I think they found us. Or…they found Claire, anyway. She takes us there, with music.”

“What do you mean?”

“She plays a certain song and we go there.”

“She plays a song? You mean on the piano?”

“Yes.”

Tennyson was now convinced his son had experienced a psychotic break, but could two people experience the same events? Could they share a delusion? He didn’t remember enough psychology to discount such a thing, but his gut told him that, while it might be possible, such a shared event would be unlikely. His son was either making this up or something strange was happening, and he tried to remember if there was a psychologist available at work when he had a sudden thought.

“Bill, do you think Claire could take me there, too?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“You said you have friends there? Who are they?”

“I don’t know.” There was no evasiveness, no looking away.

“They don’t have names?”

“No. They don’t talk, either, but I hear their thoughts.”

Tennyson looked at his unfinished lunch, which suddenly looked very unappetizing. His son’s food was untouched. “You want to spend the night here, or you want to fly home?”

“I’d like to walk around here, if that’s okay.”

“Sure, let’s do that.” Tennyson paid the bill and they walked out to the pathway that ran along the rim overlooking the canyon, and soon both regretted not having heavier coats handy. “Damn, it sure has gotten colder,” he said as they walked along. His son pointed to the deep blue clouds advancing over north rim, and they saw lightning flicker there, and several seconds later heard the deep, rumbling thunder of colliding air masses.

“It probably won’t be safe to fly, Dad.”

“Glad I reserved a room. What say we try and go find a store that sells coats!” His son looked up at him and smiled.

“Might be a good idea. I think it might snow.”

The pinks and greens of the north rim disappeared behind white veils of slanting rain, and the air turned much colder as they walked along. More lightning, then the thunder grew closer, the warning wind blowing through the stunted piñon pines along the rim. They ducked into the old Lookout Studio perched right along the rim just as the first squall hit, and watched as the storm settled over the lodge, tall pines hissing and swaying all around them. A sudden sharp crack, lightning crashing down nearby, hair standing on end…

When the front had moved through, they walked back to the lodge in heavy snow and made their way to the fireplace under the massive timber rotunda.

“Well, that was interesting,” Tennyson’s son said.

“Interesting?”

“Yes. The colors, and the sounds. And especially the trees, the way they sound in the wind, because it almost seems like they were talking to each other.”

“The trees? Talking to each other?”

His son nodded his head. “Yes. Couldn’t you hear them?”

“I heard the wind in the trees, yes.”

“I think that’s how they talk to each other. And maybe they use different scents.”

“Interesting. How’d you come up with that idea?”

His son shrugged. “I don’t know. It seems like they need to talk, and maybe that’s how they do it.”

“They need to talk?”

“Sure. Everyone needs to talk.”

“So, trees are like people? They need to talk?”

“They’re alive, aren’t they? And maybe they get afraid too, like when storms come.”

“Were you afraid?”

“No, I think it’s kind of exciting.”

“When I was your age, I thought so too. There’s something almost magical about storms.” He paused and looked into the fireplace and, as he always was, he stared, almost mesmerized by the glowing embers under the flaming logs. “But you’re afraid of me? Right?”

His son nodded his head, and this time he didn’t look away.

“Do you think you could ever not be afraid of me?”

“No,” his son said, “never.”

“Mind if I ask why?” Tennyson said, but he was unsettled by the sudden, icy contempt he saw hiding behind the lonely boy’s eyes.

+++++

Tennyson had been assigned to Project Silverplate in August of 1943, just days after it was formally authorized, and for the next two years he shuttled endlessly between the Naval Proving Grounds in Dahlgren, Virginia, to the labs at Los Alamos, New Mexico, as well as the engineering offices at Boeing in Seattle, Washington. As time passed, he spent more and more time at the Boeing B-29’s production facility located at the Martin Aircraft plant at Offut Field, just south of Omaha, Nebraska.

Initially assigned to work on strengthening the -29’s wings, he soon determined that the original wing’s structure could handle any loads from the blast waves of an aircraft flying above 20,000 feet. The physical size of the first two bombs, however, dictated major redesigns of the aircraft’s bomb bay and release mechanisms, while the safeties required to arm the weapons were also proving troublesome.

Two years later, flying 31,000 over southwest Japan, Tennyson crouched between the co-pilot and flight engineers’ seats in the Necessary Evil, one of three B-29s flying that first mission, photographing the fused air-burst 1,600 feet above Hiroshima. A film crew recorded the event just a few meters away, and the blast effects were minimal so high above the city. It was a Monday morning at 8:15, and Tennyson looked down on the city of 345,000 as his B-29 flew in a loose formation beside the Enola Gay; he blinked and turned away as the image of that blinding flash seared itself into memory. He had no way of knowing that 70,000 human beings had passed in that instant, and that over the next several years more than twice that number would die from the effects of radiation and indirect blast damage – but he’d had the presence of mind to take several images of both the blast and the Enola Gay’s structural reactions in the seconds after, so in the end he’d considered the day modestly productive. He never considered the moral implications of the mission.

Perhaps that was naive.

+++++

Tennyson and his son returned to Burbank, and to their home in Pasadena, the next day, and once again his son seemed only modestly interested in flying the aircraft. The Baron has an immensely strong airframe, and has an unusually stout wing assembly. Taking note of little Bill’s apparent boredom as they flew above the Mojave, Tennyson gently pushed the nose over and advanced the throttles, and when the Baron’s airspeed hit 180 knots indicated he applied heavy right aileron – and held the yoke hard over until the Baron was flying inverted.

His son screamed – not with terror but with pure joy – and Tennyson rolled out and pushed the nose over…until they were flying above Palm Springs, California so low that the police were called by several alarmed homeowners. Then back on the yoke and back up into the clouds, the G forces so heavy his son could hardly move his arms. Tennyson slalomed between puffy white cumulus clouds, then slammed into a few and he could see the goosebumps form on his son’s forearms as icy cold mist coursed through the little aluminum air vents on the overhead panel. They flew over their house in Pasadena before settling down and landing in Burbank, and by the time the dust settled that afternoon little Bill was certain he wanted to be a pilot, too. 

Just like his dad.

Just like his dad.

+++++

Bill Jr., just like his sisters, attended to the Chandler School before moving on to San Marino High School. He was the only freshman in high school with a pilot’s license, and when his senior year began he was a certified flight instructor, or CFI. And he had his own airplane, a ten year old Beech Bonanza that his father gave him on his sixteenth birthday, and soon he spent most of his free time giving lessons to friends. In the process he built hours and hours of flight time, and when anyone bothered to ask what he wanted to do after college all Bill Jr would say was “Fly.”

Just like his dad.

Claire had, on the other hand, disappeared deeper and deeper within her music, and she visited the butterfly people whenever they called out to her. Bill, however, began to distrust them, to distrust their very existence. To do so, he had to doubt his perception, the very nature of the world he’d known and thought he understood, but there soon came a time when he was no longer able to believe all that had ever happened. If he’d asked himself when that happened, he might have admitted that his trip to the Grand Canyon marked his turning away. And, he had to admit, the Grand Canyon had become something like his spiritual center, if he’d been willing to admit that there was indeed something like a spiritual existence.

But while the canyon always seemed to pull at him, he never once considered why.

When he first started his formal pilot training, he did his very first solo cross country flight from Hollywood-Burbank to the little airport near the South Rim, where he’d first flown with his father. When, a few years later, he flew with friends he usually took them there, dipping down low and flying along the course of the Colorado River before landing at the same airstrip. Claire had, by his last year of high school, been studying music on a more formal level, first in Boston and then in New York, so one Thanksgiving he flew all the way across the country to celebrate the occasion with her at their grandmother’s place on Martha’s Vineyard.

No one was very surprised when Bill Jr was appointed to Annapolis, nor were they caught off-guard when he went to Pensacola to earn his wings. The family came to Florida for his graduation, and for the celebration that followed, and while Bill Jr wasn’t so surprised by the way his sister Ann hung on his father’s arm, he was dismayed to find that Claire looked emaciated, almost skeletal, and her skin appeared almost yellow in some places and gray in others. He danced with both his sisters to the subdued music of a piano trio at a local country club, resplendent in his Service Dress White uniform, and when he held Claire she seemed little more than a wraith in his hands. His father beamed, so proud of his son that it almost hurt, as ever completely unaware of the lingering damage done to his firstborn.

A year later Bill Jr reported for duty aboard the USS Constellation, the carrier’s air wing then carrying out strikes and air superiority missions over North Vietnam. Two months later, Bill Sr received a telegram from the Secretary of the Navy informing him that his son had been shot down and was presumed killed. 

The truth of the matter was somewhat less clear.

II. Summer

A gray and green Lockheed C-141 touched down at Travis Air Force Base late in the afternoon, and as the lumbering jet taxied to the ramp William Tennyson watched impassively, just behind his two daughters. They stood just behind a low chainlink fence, noting that a hearse and several ambulances were waiting nearby, not quite out of sight. The aircraft’s massive wings, mounted on top of the chunky fuselage, drooped precariously, all four turbojet engines barely spooling as her pilots steered her to a stop. The rear clamshell doors parted silently and a massive gray cargo ramp lowered to the concrete ramp. The hearse from a nearby funeral home was summoned, then one of the ambulances; moments later corpsmen walked down beside the first of five stretchers, loading the first of the just released, and very ill, POWs into one of the waiting transports. 

At the same time, an air-stair on the jet’s left side opened and uniformed men walked out into the late afternoon sun, many shielding their eyes as they turned and looked for the gallery of waiting families just a few hundred yards away. But first the ambulatory men had to run a gauntlet of political dignitaries, then wade through a canyon of network television crews, and only then did the mostly Air Force and Navy airmen reach their waiting families.

Bill Tennyson Jr was in this second group, and when his sisters started waving frantically, Bill Sr looked at the line of men expecting to see a motley collection of stunted scarecrows, yet he was surprised to see that his son, his boy, looked remarkably healthy, if a little underfed. Indeed, many of the men looked to be, on the surface, anyway, reasonably fit. This was, however, the third, and final, repatriation flight, and this group had been held in captivity the shortest length of time. Still, Bill Jr had been at the Hanoi Hilton for more than a year.

The men, most of them aviators, had already been debriefed in the Philippines, and most had been “interrogated” by shadowy figures from one of the intelligence agencies, mainly to collect information on their treatment while in captivity. Some had needed emergent medical care, some just needed vitamins and antibiotics. All needed to see their families.

Bill Jr saw Claire first, and the first thing that went through his mind was that she looked far worse than most of the men on the airplane. Haunted, dark circles under her eyes, clothing that looked three sizes too big, and with her hair a frizzy mess he wondered what had happened to her while he was away. Ann looked like Ann, with her psychopaths darting eyes and faintly mocking smile still plain to see. Yet his father looked the most out of sorts, like time had worked a number on him. Or Ann had.

When he got close Claire ran into his arms and most of the families around them thought they must be husband and wife, but no, they soon saw that such was not the case. Claire was sobbing as she held onto her brother, and Bill ran his fingers through her hair and held her close. He watched as Ann looked at them, the same undercurrent of anger and jealousy in her eyes that he’d always seen. His father, however, wiped a tear from his cheek as he looked at his children – then their eyes met.

This was a moment of quiet understanding between men. His father’s eyes asked if he was okay; Bill smiled and nodded with his eyes, and that was all it took. After the formalities were over Bill Sr drove his family into San Francisco; they spent several days in the city before returning to Pasadena and they talked about everything and anything but the war. Claire was teaching at USC, Ann was working for a bank in New York City. His father was still teaching at Caltech, still working at Edwards Air Force Base, only now he was a one star General in the Air Force Reserve. He had briefly given up flying after receiving the telegram notifying him of his son’s death, only to start again when he learned his boy was alive. He was also currently working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on something he called the Deep Space Network, but he didn’t care to elaborate. Bill Jr shocked his father when he announced he was planning on spending at least five more years in the Navy, perhaps more, but his father wisely just nodded and smiled. 

He and Claire had walked around one afternoon while in San Francisco, spending time at Fisherman’s Wharf and Golden Gate Park, and while she talked Bill watched her closely. Especially her hands. She clinched her fingers up into a ball, usually when she talked of Ann or their father but sometimes when she talked about feeling alone, lost and alone, when she’d learned of his death. And how she’d almost felt reborn when she learned he was still alive.

She spoke in quiet, hushed tones, however, when she spoke of visiting the butterfly people.

“They told me you were alive,” she told him in a sudden rush of words, “but I didn’t believe them. The Navy wouldn’t have sent that telegram if they weren’t sure, but then they took me there…”

“They took you…where?”

“To your cell, at that POW camp.”

He’d stopped walking, looked around to see if anyone might have heard her, then turned to look at her. “You’re know how I feel about this, right?” he’d said with a scowl.

“I had to know if it was true,” she sighed.

“And you didn’t say anything to Dad?”

She shook her head. “You know I never talk to him about that.”

He relaxed a little, and turned to resume walking. “What else did they show you?”

“The night you were shot down. Taken prisoner. What happened to you after that,” she said quietly. “Colonel Thao. What he did to you, to all of you.”

He stiffened but nodded. “He’s evil. I always hoped that somehow we’d bomb the camp, that he’d be killed. It didn’t matter if I got killed. Only that the bastard died in the most painful way imaginable.”

“I know. They showed me some of the things he did.”

“To me?”

“Yes. And to a few of the others. And some of the guards you talked to.”

“They weren’t all bad, I guess. A few of the guards were almost nice, but we never knew if they were running a ‘good cop, bad cop’ op on us. Pretty soon we started communicating with each other in code and we figured out who the real bad actors were.”

“But Thao was the worst,” she said. “I sensed that. Why are you going to stay in the navy?”

“Because I like the life. Being at sea. Flying. Serving my country.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t look well, Claire. What’s going on?”

“The places they take me. The things I’ve seen.”

“Such as?”

“Stuff that hasn’t happened yet, Bill. Bad things. Bad people.”

“They’re letting you see…ahead?” he said, aghast at the very idea.

“Yes.”

He shook his head. “Don’t tell anyone what you see, okay? Not even me.”

“You know I won’t. But…they were curious. They want to talk to you.”

He stiffened. “About what?”

“About what happened to you over there. They don’t understand.”

“I don’t trust them, Claire. I wish you weren’t so open to them.”

“Bill, I’m going to move here, to the City. There are others here. Others like us. I want to be close to them…”

“It’s dangerous, Claire. Who knows what their motives really are?”

“They just want to understand us better.”

He shook his head, looked away. “That’s what bothers me.”

“Don’t be paranoid…”

“Did you somehow forget what I do for a living? You know, like I drop bombs and kill people? Why would they want to know me better unless it’s to understand our capabilities.”

She sighed. “I don’t sense that, Bill.”

“What do you sense?”

She looked away, and her eyes became suddenly evasive. “Sometimes I think they’re judging us.”

“Oh, gee, and that’s supposed to be comforting?”

She shrugged. 

“I guess they think Colonel Thao is a shining example of our humanity…”

She grinned. “Maybe.” She turned and stared into his eyes, smiling again. “Or maybe they think you are.”

He had to smile at that, too. “Oh, man, if that’s the case then we really are in knee-deep shit.”

“Where are you going from here?” she asked.

“Whidbey Island, I think.”

“That’s where you were before, right?”

He nodded. “Yeah. More of the same.”

“Then what? Back out to another carrier?”

“Maybe. In the debrief they told me they’d like me to go through instructors training, start training pilots new to the Intruder.”

“But Bill, the war’s over…”

“This one is.” His voice was flat, his meaning clear.

A shiver ran down her spine. “Is that all we are? Moving from one war to the next?”

“In the end, maybe it is. The old saying they keep drilling into our head is ‘someone always wants to take your stuff.’ Either someone stops that from happening or, well, I guess you know the rest.”

“Someone always wants your stuff. Wow. That’s one way to look at us.”

He nodded. “Maybe not the most flattering portrait of humanity, but I think it’s proven to be pretty accurate. But that’s what evolution means, kiddo. We evolve or, well, we don’t. If we don’t, I guess we disappear. I’d rather that didn’t happen to us, you know?”

“So, you keep flying…for how long? What comes after that?”

“Oh, you know, work for an airline, or run guns to South American revolutionaries.”

“You do know you’re lucky to be alive, right?”

He nodded. “It took some flying,” he sighed. “Wings shot all to hell, my BN bleeding out faster than our hydraulic fluid, two in the morning in a thunderstorm.”

“Did you really crash?”

“No, not really. I got the gears down and put her down on the first thing that looked long and straight. Turned out to be an unpaved road. Tore off a wing, big fire. I pulled my BN out just before fire hit the cockpit, and about that time it started raining police. They were pretty mad, too. I pulled a pack of Camels from my BNs flight suit and they mellowed down a little, at least until one of Colonel Thao’s goons showed up. Then the night turned kinda dicey.”

“You’re beginning to sound more and more like Dad.”

“Fuck. You’re kidding, right…?”

She shook her head. “Just don’t marry an actress and you’ll be okay.”

“Me? Marriage? I don’t think so…”

“Oh, you’ll get married, and soon.”

“Why? What makes you say that?”

“Well, you signed up for the War Corps, not the Peace Corps, and you sure didn’t sign up to become a priest…”

“How do you know I’m not, you know, a homo?”

“You? No way.”

“You sure?”

She nodded. “I had to clean out your room after Dad got the telegram. Your collection of girlie magazines is safe, by the way. I boxed ‘em up and got them up to the attic before anyone found them.”

“Whew, thanks.”

“See, you ain’t gay, bucko.”

“Gay?”

“That’s what they’re calling homosexuals these days.”

He shook his head. “You know, there were girls in Annapolis, townies I mean, but it felt like I hardly ever left campus. Especially not the first two years.”

“I know. I got your letters.”

“Anyway, sneaking a Playboy onto campus was like grounds for expulsion, and I was either studying or shining brass til three in the morning and never had time…”

“You’re still good at changing the subject, Billy.”

“Please don’t call me that…”

She smiled. “I will if you’ll talk about girls and getting married.”

He smirked and then feigned anger but Claire wasn’t buying it. “I doubt Whidbey Island is a hotbed of action, Claire…”

“You never know…?”

“Yeah, I do know. I spent eight months there, remember?”

“So, call Pan Am or TWA, get a real job…”

“Actually, I need more time in jets. Like fifteen-hundred, two thousand hours more, maybe a lot more…”

“With your background? Seriously? Have you tried?”

“I haven’t really been in a position to do that lately, and besides, do you know how many pilots are hitting the job market right now? Just about everyone coming home is cashing out, hitting the private sector, and the Navy isn’t exactly clamoring for new pilots right now, either.”

“But they asked you to be an instructor, right? Why, Bill?”

He shrugged.

“Because you’re a good pilot, Bill. That’s why.”

“I’m sure you’re trying to make a point here, but I’m not quite sure what that is.”

“Oh come off it. The Navy represents the safe choice, Bill, and it also means you can put off looking for a girl a little longer…”

“Why are you so sure that getting married is the be-all of human existence? I mean, I don’t see any rings on your fingers…”

“C’mon, Bill, I’m not date-bait now and I never will be. You and Ann got Mom’s looks, and I look like I wandered out of Auschwitz…”

“You do not…”

“Yes, I do. Don’t be patronizing, Bill. Not to me, okay?”

“You’ll find somebody, Claire.”

“Okay. If you say so. More to the point, though…”

“I hear you.”

“Did you sign the re-enlistment papers yet?”

“No. No, they told me to think about it for a few weeks.”

“So, I’ll move up here to the city and then you can get a job flying out of San Francisco. We’ll bunk-out together, at least until you get your act together – and get yourself a wife…”

“You have a job up here, or what?” he asked, ignoring her last jab.

“Yup,” she said with a curt nod. “A teaching gig, a couple of offers from recording studios, maybe some concert work. I like it up here, Bill, and I’m really beginning to detest LA.”

“I always saw you ending up in Boston. You seemed happy there.”

“Because I was. But just getting away from Dad and Ann…that’s what really…it felt like a big weight was lifted from my soul, ya know?”

He nodded. “She’s not getting any better, I see.”

“She still has him wrapped around her little finger. Anything she wants, she gets. I think it’s called transactional psychopathy on the narcissistic personality spectrum.”

“Oh, swell,” he sighed. “So, if there’s a name for it, that must mean there are more just like her out there.”

“She’s a chameleon, Bill. Lots of psychopaths are. They show you what you want to see, tell you what you want to hear, because that’s how they understand the world. If they want something from you they watch and observe, find the chinks in your armor. Your weak spots, where you’re most vulnerable. Then they move in…”

“For the kill, don’t you mean? And let me see here, you want me to get married, right? No thanks, kiddo.”

“Your job is to find one of the good ones, Bill.”

“You make it sound like war, Claire. And I’ve had enough war…”

“Oh? And yet you want to sign up for five more years in the War Corps? Am I missing something, Bill?”

Both missed the Old Man walking behind them through the park.

+++++

Bill Sr flew his family back to Hollywood-Burbank the next day, yet the reality was that his son did most of the hands-on work. His son had not flown in almost two years, yet the still had the touch. The touch that defines a real pilot. Gentle, precise, confident. And though Bill Jrs approach was too fast and his landing hard, his father had to laugh.

“You do recall that this is not a carrier,” Bill Sr said as his Baron slammed down the numbers. “No tail hook, no arresting wires? No need to fly such a hot approach…”

“Oh yeah, sorry.”

“You’re going to have to get back into the groove, son. Every motion, remember…smooth…just like you got a handful of eggs.”

“Right, Dad.”

Bill Sr did the drive out to Pasadena, and he remained in a talkative mood. “You still playing golf?”

Claire rolled her eyes. “Uh, Dad, I don’t think they had many golf courses in Hanoi…”

Bill Sr rolled his eyes. “I know that! I was just wondering if he kept at it back in Maryland.”

His son scowled. “Not much time in school for that, Dad. Sorry.”

“You feel like trying your hand later this week?”

“Uh, with you?”

“Yes, with me!”

“Where?” 

“The Annandale course.”

“They finally let you in, huh?”

His old man beamed. “Yup, took a while, and some serious arm twisting, too, but…”

“Yeah, Dad, I’d like that.”

Ann looked distressed, Claire bored while ‘the boys’ talked, but then Claire realized her father was driving to the country club. “We going there now?” she asked.

“Just for lunch. Thought it might be a nice way to slip back into city life…”

“Dad, all I’ve got are my khakis. I can’t go out dressed in my duty uniform.”

“I don’t think, given present circumstances, that anyone there is going to put you on report.”

“Yessir.”

It turned out that Bill Jrs ordeal had been a pretty big deal amongst the membership, and quite a few were on hand to welcome the aviator into their club. Even the girls were tolerated, just this once. As he was still technically in uniform, Junior refused alcohol and was more than happy to slam down real, honest-to-god Coca-Cola all during lunch, standing and greeting each member as they dropped by their table. More than a few wanted to play a round with him, and it seemed everyone wanted to know what he was going to do now that the war was technically over.

But William Tennyson, Jr., found the whole day slightly unsettling. Not even a week before he’d been rousted from his sleep and told to vacate his cell. A few hours later he was walking up the rear loading ramp into a C-141’s cavernous cargo hold, and someone mentioned this bird was called The Hanoi Taxi. A couple hours passed and he deplaned into the oppressive humidity of Subic Bay, in the Philippines, but not a day passed and his group was off to Pearl Harbor on the next leg of their journey home. Two stretcher-borne men were unloaded while Hanoi Taxi refueled, then the jet lumbered off to Travis AFB – and home. 

But at the club, it wasn’t so much a case of culture shock as it was the complete lack of awareness among some of his father’s friends that there had actually been a real war going on. There’d been no rationing, no savings bonds or the image of Rosie The Riveter to drive it all home – as had been the case during the Second World War – and so hardly any reason at all for the country club set to pay attention to events in Vietnam…until he’d been shot down and reported KIA. Then it seemed only then had the war actually touched all their lives, and yet Bill Jr picked up an undercurrent of resentment from a few of these men. It was like they’d been perfectly content to ignore this war, like the sacrifices endured by so many actually meant very little to them, and his presence among them was not simply an unpleasant reminder, it was also an unwelcome repudiation of their comfortable ambivalence.

Claire picked up on the vibe, too. And so of course she had to comment.

“This war was different,” she sighed as she clasped his hand after an especially obsequious yet unmistakably snarky man his father’s age dropped by their table. All the fat man wanted to know was what Bill planned to do now that he was home. When Bill mentioned returning to the Navy the man had literally sneered before walking off, shaking his head in disbelief. She continued as they watched the fat man disappear: “There wasn’t a Pearl Harbor moment, just Walter Cronkite reading off body counts night after night before droning on about Kissinger’s latest failed attempts to get the North Vietnamese back to Paris.”

“To Paris?” he asked, clearly confused.

“The so-called peace talks were held there,” his father grumbled. “Damn shame. They never turned you boys loose to take it to them. We could’ve bombed them back to the Stone Age in one night, but neither Johnson nor Nixon had the balls for that. Instead, we sent fifty thousand young men to an early grave…”

Claire shook her head. “Dad, I think the North Vietnamese buried a few million of their people as a result of our involvement in their civil war…”

“Oh, Claire, don’t give me that Jane Fonda crap. That bitch was wrong to go over there, wrong to get involved when our boys were fighting there.”

“Dad,” Claire continued, “I think she was trying to stop our boys from being killed.”

“Yeah? Well, she’s nothing more than a useful idiot. Another commie-useful idiot.”

Claire turned to her brother. “Sure you don’t want something stronger?” she asked as she downed her third Bloody Mary. “God, I hate this place,” she muttered under her breath.

They played four rounds of golf over the next week, the first two in a wheezing Cushman golf cart, the next two on foot, and oddly enough Bill Jr found himself enjoying the exercise immensely, despite the overwhelming smog in the air. He talked to the retention officer up at Whidbey Island NAS a couple of times, between talks with TWAs personnel office at their flight academy outside of Kansas City. They wanted to fly him out for an interview, and both Claire and his father were ecstatic. Ann scowled then hopped on her broomstick and returned to New Jack City.

So he went to Kansas to have a look around, and a line captain showed him their new simulator facilities, including one of the first full-motion simulators in the world. After two days at the facility they offered him a position: First Officer (trainee) on the brand new L-1011. The whole situation was too good to be true, and everyone at the academy knew it. Yet they gave him 24 hours to accept or decline the offer, and the patient old line captain explained the facts of life to Bill – off the record, of course – which went something like: “You do know that if you decline the offer you’ll never get another chance at TWA.” And, oddly enough, that clinched the deal for Tennyson. Not only was the money good, but the routes he’d get to fly sounded interesting – especially after his life behind bars in Hanoi.

Flying the L-1011, the captain told him, would mean being based in New York and flying to either London, Paris, or Frankfurt, and possibly Rome and Athens in the near future. On a personal level, the job also meant a serious salary with one of the best airlines in the world. He’d be in training for months and if he washed out he wouldn’t be able to crawl back to the Navy, but the stress of flight instruction had never been a problem for him before. 

So, he sat in the parking lot outside the flight academy for a few minutes, mulling over his options, and his future, then went back in and signed on the dotted line. The next class started in three weeks and never once looked back.

Because looking back wasn’t in his nature.

With his future out of the way, he flew up to Seattle and signed all the relevant paperwork and was as suddenly a civilian again. Yet…when the reality of that moment actually hit him, he felt almost lost – and maybe even a little alone – for perhaps ten minutes.

+++++

And, perhaps not coincidentally, the dream started that night, during his last night in Seattle.

As sleep came he was soon back in his cell. The smallest details were present, like unwelcome visitors from the darkest recesses of memory: the tiniest slit of a window high up on the beige brick wall. Thick iron bars rusting on the ends, the blue-grey paint turning mottled red. The gray paint on the iron door peeling, the damp concrete floors slick with blue-green mildew that felt like cold snot. A single lightbulb dangling from a long cord in a round caged enclosure suspended from the dank timbered ceiling high overhead, the light too high to reach – so casting too little light to see the cockroaches in the shadows. A sleeping mat rolled up on the floor in one corner, an old wood bucket in another. Nothing else. No sink. No running water. No toilet but for the bucket, which if he behaved he would be allowed to empty – once a week.

As his dream came he looked around and began to cry. ’Nothing else but me in that hole. And I lived there for how many years?’

Wasted years. Years of pain, the isolation more painful than the pain Colonel Thao inflicted almost daily. Sadistic pain, pain with no purpose. And even in the dream he felt the pain.

But then she was there, in the cell beside him. The tall pink butterfly with the owl’s eyes.

Talking to him. Examining his wounds. Then treating him. Always the empathy and compassion of a friend.

The next morning after that happened the guards had been stunned by his appearance, and they wanted to know the how and the why of it, yet most of all the who. Who had treated him? Colonel Thao had been promptly summoned, another savage beating followed, and that time he was sure the bones around his left eye had fractured.

And that night she came to him again. She asked questions, she treated his wounds, and the next morning the exasperated guards summoned the colonel – again. Another savage beating – but this time the butterfly hovered unseen just above the colonel, and each bloody wound disappeared almost as soon as it was inflicted. The colonel and the guards were staring in mute disbelief, then they shrunk back against a wall, regarding him suspiciously – like he was something other than human.

Then the colonel began asking even more pointed questions.

“How you do this? This not normal…”

And then in the dream Thao takes out a machete and hacks off his arm, and all his tormenters jump back when his severed arm floats through the and reattaches itself. Then Thao hacks off his head, and he watches from within his own severed head as it rolls on the floor before it drifts back up and reattaches itself to his sundered neck. Thao pulls out a revolver and shoots him in the face, and the bullet bounces off his forehead and falls harmlessly to the damp floor. He looks at Colonel Thao, his eyes full of pity as he regards the poor man lost inside all his hatreds, then he looks up at the pink butterfly and smiles. She smiles back, and in his mind she tells him that he is learning well, that he is making good progress.

“What?” Bill Tennyson said as he woke up. “What did you say?”

“I asked if you were making progress, in your classwork?” his father said again. “You sounded kind of dejected on the phone.”

“Oh. I had a ding on my last check-ride.”

“Altitude hold again?”

Bill Jr nodded. When flying an instrument approach you have to hold your assigned altitude to  within plus or minus fifty feet, and blowing past those limits was a major error, a ding. And it was three strikes and you’re out, too. “Yeah, but it was a simulator check so it didn’t count.”

“Everything counts on a check ride, son. Don’t you ever forget that.”

“I know, I know.”

“I hope you do. When’s your next hop with the examiner?”

“Friday.”

“You’re done with all your classwork? Exams all signed-off?”

“Yup.”

“Know your scores yet?”

He nodded. “No mistakes. One hundred percent. But turns out that’s normal here.”

“No surprise there. TWA has the best pilots in the industry. Any boys from the Navy in your class?”

“A few. Some Air Force pukes, too. A couple of civvies made the cut, and there’s crew training for Air Force One here, too.”

“Really? They’re training with you guys?”

“Same building. They’re using the new full motion 707 simulators. Well, like you said, TWA is the best.”

His father nodded as he carefully watched his boy. “You look tired. Sure you have time to grab dinner?”

“Yeah. There’s a decent place not far from here. Huge ribeyes. I mean like 40 ounces.”

“You’ve got to be kidding…”

“No sir, but I’m not sure who orders ‘em.”

“Fat slobs marching headlong to their early grave, that’s who…” his dad snarked.

‘An early grave…now why does that click?’ the little voice in his head asked. ‘Didn’t Thao say that to me once? That he was going to send me to an early grave…?”

Or had he said that in the dream?

They ending up at an old honky-tonk downtown that served pretty good barbecue: “Legendary!” proclaimed the  hand-paintedmenu posted above the counter. He ordered a root beer and his old man drank iced tea, which was interesting even if he didn’t ask his dad about it. They talked the low-key talk of pilots, one-to-one, man-to-man and not the usual father son crap he dreaded, until then the subject of Claire came up.

“Apparently,” his father began, “she’s been seeing a shrink.” His father looked down at his hands and sighed. “Turns out she’s not doing too well.”

“What does that mean, Dad?”

“She, uh, apparently tried to take her own life.”

“What? When did this happen?”

“Last week. Saturday, actually. Apparently she, uh, took some pills, then called a friend to talk. Fortunately this friend called the paramedics.”

“Where was she?”

“Home. Her bedroom.”

“Where were you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“At the club.”

“And Ann?”

His dad looked away. “She was home, too.”

Bill Jr didn’t know what to say, but he felt his anger boiling over. “Dad, are you even aware of how Ann plays you. How she sets up Claire to take the fall, and how you always get sucked into her dramas?”

His father nodded his head, but he did not look up to meet his son’s eyes. Maybe he already knew what he’d find, but his son had had enough. “I need to fly home. Where is she, Dad?”

“No. You need to stay here. Finish what you’ve started. If you bail now you’ll be lucky to find a job flying cargo in Africa.”

“So, is this why you came? To tell me and then…”

Again, his father just nodded his head. “You finish here in ten days. Claire should be home by then, and…”

“Why was Ann home, Dad?”

“She had business downtown. She frequently does, you know, and she usually stays at the house.”

“I don’t want her around, Dad. Not when I’m there.”

“You hate her, don’t you?”

“Yeah, since the first time she tried to kill me.” Bill Jr suddenly felt ill, because now he wasn’t sure of his father’s reasons for being here. “You know, Dad, sure, you could say I hate her, but that really just barely scratches the surface.”

“She tried to kill you?”

“Oh come on, Dad…” Bill sighed, then he recounted all the times she tried, and finally spelled out his father’s role in enabling Ann’s schemes, and William Tennyson listened to it all, then stood and walked out to his rental car. Bill followed, and got in the passenger seat while his father fumbled about for the car keys.

“You want me to drive?” he finally asked his shaken father.

“Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?”

“You never listened, Dad. I don’t think you could hear us, because Ann’s always had you wrapped around her little finger. But the worst part was, or is, that you seem to like it that way. Claire and I learned not to talk about it a long time ago – because that only made things worse.”

“So, what, you two just suffered in silence? Was I that bad a father?”

“I can’t answer that one, Dad.”

“But I can. Right? Isn’t that what you’re saying?”

“More like I’m telling you to take a long look in the mirror, Dad. Ann is your poison. She’s been poisoning you all her life. To get what she wants, even if she doesn’t really know what she wants.”

“Just to control me. I’ve known that, I’ve always felt that coming from her.”

“And yet you played along, didn’t you?”

“I know you won’t understand this, son, but I never felt like I had any self control when I was around her. It’s like she has this power…over me. I can’t…I can’t resist her, Bill. I’ve thought of all the ways I might have, but when she comes at me all my resolve just disappears…”

“Is it sexual, Dad?”

His father stiffened but then, recognizing imminent defeat, he just wilted away and nodded. “Even when she was little, Bill, she knew all the right buttons to push, all the soft parts to exploit. I’ve…I’d never been around anyone like her.”

“Was Mom like that?”

His father shook his head. “She was manipulative, sure, but your mother was nothing like Ann. Ann is…”

“She’s evil, Dad.”

His father nodded. “Whatever happens, son, don’t ever trust her. It’ll look like she’s coming at you from one direction, and the next she’s coming at you from the other, usually from behind. And she knows how to hit you when you’re not looking.”

“What did she do to Claire this time, Dad?”

His father shrugged, then looked ahead – his eyes lost and alone. “I don’t know. Perhaps this doctor will get to the bottom of it.”

“Where’s Ann now?”

“Mexico City I think. The bank is opening a new branch there.”

“And so she’s still fucking her way to the top.”

His father turned to him and sighed. “Finish what you’ve started, Bill. What’s done is done. I’m going to try and put things right, between Claire and me. She was looking at a place up in The City, and I think I’ll go up and get that arranged.”

Bill shook his head knowingly, because in his father’s moral universe money always set things right. Screw up your daughter, buy her a house. Or a car, or a horse, or whatever else might purchase a clear conscience. No guilty conscience meant absolution with no lingering aftershocks. So QED, that problem solved. Call the pro at the club and set up a tee time for the next round. Move on. Never look back.

Like father like son.

+++++

The idea of living in the same city as Ann proved an insurmountable hurdle; he simply could not, so would not do it – yet he had a difficult time coming up with an excuse that the crew billeting people would swallow. When he explained his dilemma to Gene Jenkins, one of the captains he regularly flew with, the old timer recommended getting a place out on Long Island: “Easier commute and no need to go into the city, so no need to think about her.”

“But like…where?” 

“Oh, there are some apartments near JFK, but you ought to try and rent a house. Prices are not to bad in Rosedale right now, and every now and then a duplex comes up over by Springfield Park. Nicer still if you don’t mind the commute, check out Oyster Bay up on the north shore. A little more money but a better investment, and I know a realtor up there if you want her number.” The old captain just grinned as he said that, but Tennyson didn’t catch that.

“Where’s it…uh, how bad is the drive from there?”

“Oh, I guess you could drive, but it’s easier to just get on the train. Crew shuttle stops at the station in Jamaica, and as you well know the shuttle brings you right to the lower level dispatch office.”

“Oh? That sounds interesting.”

“Might work for you, at least until they start using the L-10 on the Logan to Heathrow run. Give it a year and I bet that’ll be up and running.”

“You think I should put in for it?”

The old captain shrugged. “I like New York, and I like flying out of Kennedy. And my guess is they’ll start adding even more routes in a year or so. Chicago and the west coast feeding to our runs out of both Kennedy and Logan. You’re a Southern California native, aren’t you?”

Bill nodded. “Family in LA and San Francisco.”

“Pretty good chance you could get a slot out of SFO. My bet is LAX will be 7-4s and 707s for the time being, or, hell, you just might like JFK.”

“Never spent much time around Boston.”

“It’s nice – if you know where to go, but it can get pretty rough if you wind up in the wrong neighborhood. The Irish on the south side…man…you talk about mean…”

“Oh? You run into trouble there?”

“You could say that, but when I was your age I was pretty rowdy.”

Bill laughed, if only because it was hard to imagine Captain Jenkins ever being rowdy – or doing anything even remotely fun. After they landed at Kennedy, Jenkins gave him the realtors name and number, and the old man even asked if he could call ahead, let her know he’d be calling.

“Sure, thanks. The sooner I can get out of that hotel the better.”

“You’ll save some money, too. Always put some money away, out of every paycheck.”

“Okay, Dad.”

“And screw you. And, oh, I’ll do the ‘meet and greet’ while you handle the paperwork,” Jenkins said as he grumbled his way past the flight engineer and out to the forward door to chat with the deplaning first class passengers. ‘Everyone hates to do paperwork,’ Bill sighed. ‘Well, some things never change…’

+++++ 

His hotel was a short walk from the Long Island Railroad’s Jamaica Station, so he hopped on the train running all the way out to Oyster Bay, passing through the old monied villages of Glen Cove and Matinecock along the way. It was a gray day out and bitterly cold, while the greens of summer had given way to the reds and golds of October, yet these low clouds seemed oppressive, like a harbinger of all the slush and ice that loomed in the winter just ahead. 

Soon the gated mansions gave way to more modest homes, then the village itself came into view. Colonial era houses and frugal fishermen’s homes now dotted the way ahead, and by the looks of many of the colonial houses they were the real thing. There were some Shingle Style mansions on the water visible in the distance, and big red brick ersatz colonial mansions dotted the closest shoreline. Then he saw a sandy beach on the left and a pond off to the right, even more modest homes and then boatyards and fishing boats resting in the harbor. The station itself was little more than a siding with bare platforms on both sides of the tracks, and as it was midday there was almost no one on the train so he was relieved to see a silver Mercedes 300D waiting for him in the station parking lot. As his train slowed to a noisy, jolting stop he saw a woman emerge from the sedan, and a rather handsome one at that. Rich. Cultured. And she looked bored as hell, even from a distance.

He stepped out of the warm train into the biting autumn wind coming in from the north, right off the white-capped waters on Long Island Sound, and right away he knew this place would be as cold as could be in just a month or two. 

And Gloria Betancourt was as cold as could be, too, and she wasn’t going to wait for winter to let him know. 

“You must be Bill,” she said, her voice dull, matter of fact yet pleasant – in a professional realtor kind of way. “Let’s get you in out of this chill, shall we?”

He went around and got her door and she seemed oddly annoyed by that, then he climbed in the right front as she handed him a slim file folder, with, he assumed, a few rental properties to look over.

“So, Bill, Eugene tells me you’re a First Officer, and that you’re flying with him from time to time?”

“Yes Ma’am,” he replied in his best navy ensign’s voice.

“I know your pay isn’t all that great right now, so why don’t you tell me what you can afford?”

That was direct, he said to himself, and the tone of her voice was not just a little condescending. “Oh, I don’t know, what do those big places on the water go for?” he said with a grin.

She smiled. “Homes here in the village are in the fifty to ninety thousand range. The houses out on The Neck and Centre Island are quite a bit more.”

“How much more?”

She squirmed in her seat, not sure if she wanted to put up with this much longer and wondering if one of the new associates in the office would take him off her hands, so she made some idle small talk while she wheeled the Mercedes through the village to her office. “Why don’t we go in and get some coffee, and I’ll have one of my associates go through the listing book with you while I make some calls.”

He nodded. “Fine. Lead the way!” He walked behind her, admired her shapely legs for a moment, until they reached the door to her office. Which was located in a little gray-shingled saltbox that had once been a house, neat and tidy, too, with a receptionist and a couple of girls his age on the phone. Gloria waited until one was free then introduced Bill to one of the girls, her name Liz Parker, who she described as “One of my bright stars!” Gloria added this with a knowing wink.

Bill sat and Gloria disappeared into an office, shutting the door behind her.

“So? What can I help you with, Bill?”

“How about you show me around town, take me to a few of the decent neighborhoods, show me things like libraries and parks, just things like that.”

“Okay. Sure, we can do that. You have a price range in mind?”

He shook his head. “No, not really. Just show me around, take me to a few neighborhoods you wouldn’t mind living in, show me the areas to steer clear of, that sort of thing.”

Liz was wearing a dress but, he had to admit, she looked like she was dressed a little out of character, like she was more at home in jeans and an old flannel shirt. He followed her out to her car, a mustard colored Ford Pinto, and he helped her in then went around and hopped into the car. He noted it was tidy and he tried not to watch her while she drove around town, pointing out the library on Main and then Roosevelt Park, “Because Teddy Roosevelt lived here!” then they drove past the high school.

“Wow, now that’s a monstrosity,” he said as he took in the massive red brick building.

“Oh,” she said, and he noted she sounded a little hurt by that, “why do you say that?”

“It’s a mesh-mash of incongruent styles. Gothic and neoclassical elements don’t complement each other, but the Tudor arches are over-the-top. It looks like the architect reached into his bag of styles and started randomly pulling out things…”

“Oh, are you an architect?”

“No, but I was really into it when I was a kid.”

“What do you do now?”

“I’m a pilot.”

“Oh? Like airliners, that kind of pilot?”

“Yes. I take it Gloria didn’t brief you?”

Liz laughed. “If Gloria thought you had any money at all she’d fly you to the moon and back. She figured you don’t, so here we are…”

“Do you have any listings of your own?”

“Me? Oh, just a couple.”

“Show me one.”

She laughed a little. “Okay. I’ve got a nice one, well, it needs some TLC but it’s still solid, right over here on Pearl,” she said as she flipped her turn signal and turned from Main onto Pearl.

“Now that’s an interesting building,” he said, pointing at the ornate Carpenter Gothic Revival building to his right.

“Oh yes, that’s First Presbyterian. I think the building is from the 1870s. And here’s my listing, right across the street.”

“Cute,” he said as she stopped and pointed to a gray two-story house. “Nice front porch. American Gothic. I like it. Can we see it?”

“It’s vacant, so sure…but it’s a hundred and ten thousand. Could you qualify for that?”

He nodded and shrugged at the same time, but then he turned and looked at her as he smiled. “You never can tell.”

“Okay, well, it’s on a lock-box so we can go right in if you want.”

“I want.”

“Okay.”

“So, tell me about it.”

“Uh…okay, right, well, we have three bedrooms up, two baths, one up and one down, and the kitchen has a great butler’s pantry. Great dining room, too. Really big with a great view of the back yard.”

“You said it needs some tender loving care? What’s wrong with it?”

“The hardwood floors, they’re in bad shape, and the kitchen needs an update. The appliances are pre-war, and the heating system is ancient. It’s an estate sale so the family might just want to take the money and run, if ya know what I mean?”

“You know the family…?”

She looked away. “Oh, everyone knows everyone around here, Bill. No one locks their doors. The mailman puts your mail inside the door if the weather’s bad. Kind of the way things used to be, I guess. At least that’s what everyone says.”

She seemed nervous as she walked up to the door and fiddled with the lock-box attached to the front door knob, and as he watched her shaky movements he wondered what was going on. “So. You went to high school here. What about college?”

She nodded. “Yale. Two years.”

“What did you think of it? College, I mean.”

She looked down, didn’t answer the question but opened the door and walked on in; then, without missing a beat she began walking through the living room to the kitchen, describing things in intimate detail as she walked him around and through the rooms, and she even pointed out a few of the special features.

The bedrooms were small, both bathrooms antiquated, and the kitchen was indeed in need of a total makeover, but Liz was correct about one thing: the bones of the house were solid and it was charming, and with a few judicious upgrades the house would make a solid investment.

Then once again she asked about his finances.

“You like movies?” he asked, and judging by her reaction the question must have felt kind of out of the blue. “I mean old movies, like from the 40s and 50s?”

“Oh, yeah. You mean like Casablanca and all those?”

He nodded. “Ever hear of Doris Sawyer?”

“Of course. Who hasn’t!”

He smiled. “Well, she was my mother.”

She wheeled around and looked at him. “No way!” she cried.

“Way,” he replied, smiling.

“Isn’t she the one who died…oh, uh, I’m sorry.”

“Not a problem. Anyway, she left us, her kids, money in a trust and my dad is like the world’s best at managing money, so the price of the house doesn’t bother me…”

She was growing wide-eyed as he spoke, then tears welled up in her eyes.

“What’s wrong?” he asked – just before she turned and ran out the back door and into the tree-lined backyard. He watched her standing out there, her arms crossed as she looked up into the pines, thinking it better to give her some space. So he turned and walked upstairs again and looked at the bathroom, in his mind drawing the perfect solution in the limited space afforded, then he looked at the biggest bedroom again. One tiny closet, and all three bedrooms shared that one tiny bathroom, as was customary in mid-19th-century homes. He could keep it as is or he could enlarge the bathroom and create two larger closets by eliminating the smallest bedroom, but as he walked around he found the proportions of the rooms kind of pleasing. They fit the house, and more importantly the character of the times, and in his mind it was better to preserve than to destroy. 

She was waiting for him in the living room by the front door, and he could tell she had been crying…

“Sorry about that,” she said reflexively. 

“Sorry…for what?”

“Look, I grew up in this house and I can’t afford to keep it and it’s just kind of hard to think of letting it go…”

“Been in your family a while?” he asked.

“Yup. My great-grandparents built it in 1878. My father grew up here, and me and my sister did too.”

“Why can’t you keep it? Your parents didn’t leave any other assets?”

She shook her head. “No. My mom ended up in a nursing home. I think that ate up all their money, and then some.”

“Debts to pay off, I take it?”

“Something like that, but look, ethically I’m not really even supposed to be showing this house to you. Technically it’s my listing, but Gloria should be showing it to you.”

“Will you get in trouble?”

She nodded. “I’m still kind of on probation, so yeah.”

“Okay. Why don’t we head back to the office and you tell her you drove me by the house and I’d like to see it. Maybe you can tell her about my mom and all that. Think she’d be interested?”

Liz smiled. “Are you, like, impulsive or something? You don’t even know the area, let alone what kind of people live around here…”

“People are pretty much the same wherever you go…”

She looked pensive, yet at the same time evasive before she spoke: “No, Bill, the people around here are different. Some are really different. You’ve got the locals, then you’ve got the people from the city who come out for the summer, or for a weekend, people like Gloria. They live in the big mansions and the live in all the little cottages around here, the rich and the little people who take care of the rich.”

“Yeah, like I said, people are people and that’s pretty much how things were where I grew up. Beverly Hills and Pasadena, and then there was Watts and South Central, so yeah, I know that story all too well.”

“Yeah, I guess maybe you do.” There was something in her eyes in that moment. Something he couldn’t quite put a finger on, but maybe it was vulnerability and loneliness. Yes, that described what he saw, or thought he saw, in her warm brown eyes.

“So, let’s go pull the wool over Miss Betancourt’s nose. Okay?” he said, trying to pull her out of her funk.

“Okay!” she agreed.

“And…one more thing.”

“Oh?”

“Could I take you out to dinner tonight?”

+++++

A week later he flew out to San Francisco after he got in from his latest trip to Heathrow. Claire was home. In her new home out beyond the Presidio. And she had called, asked him to come out because she was going shopping for a new piano and, she pleaded, she needed his help. He was dubious, but as soon as he cleared customs he grabbed a snack then ambled out the domestic concourse to catch the evening flight to SFO.

It was an oldish 707, the 320c variant with long legs, and as he wanted to sleep he declined the offer of a jumpseat and instead settled into a vacant seat in first class. He was still in uniform so quickly hung his company jacket up and slipped on a black cardigan, skipped the champagne and reclined his seat as soon as the gears were up. He woke up on short final, the strobes on the wingtips pulsing in low clouds as the jet descended in a light fog – which, he thought, was exactly how his jet-lagged brain felt. He looked at his watch. Ten minutes early. He nodded and shut his eyes and napped as the Boeing taxied to the gate. He waited until everyone up front was off then walked up the Jetway and sure enough…despite having told her not to, Claire was there waiting for him.

And this time she ran into his arms. Very upset. Very happy to see him. And maybe a little contrite for the whole psychiatric episode.

And she had come for him in the Porsche. His Porsche, actually, but he’d decided to keep it out here for now. She rarely drove but she just managed the car despite the stiff clutch, so she asked him to drive back into the city. Despite being tired he demurred and took off from the short term lot just outside the old Art Deco terminal building. He took the 101 through the city almost all the way to the Golden Gate, then turned south on Highway 1 before getting off for the last bit out to Sea Cliff, to her new house. The house the money from her third album had bought. It looked like an Italian Mediterranean villa perched high on a cliff 200 feet above Baker Beach to the right and Mile Rock Beach to the left, and, she said, when the fog was out you could just see the Golden Gate Bridge, which still looked red to her. She fixed coffee and they went out onto the patio and listened to the surf a few hundred below, somewhere down there in the night.

“Glad you could come,” she finally said. 

“For a piano? Really?”

“Yes, but when you see it tomorrow you’ll understand. It’s terribly expensive, Bill, but the sound board is magnificent, and the tone…”

“You know, you describe a piano the way most people describe a ribeye steak…”

They both laughed at that. She’d grown up with a used Baldwin that had seen duty in a West Hollywood piano academy as well as a jazz joint on the Sunset strip. And it was still in Pasadena, in her father’s living room. Right where the damn thing belonged, she liked to say.

“I think I’ve found a very special instrument, Bill.” She looked hopeful, expectantly so.

“Claire, you could play a trashed upright and it would sound special…”

She took his arm and leaned into him. “I’ll never be able to marry, you know. I need you too much to let a husband come between us.”

“That’s for damn sure. So, when’s the last time you ate?”

“You mean food?” she said sarcastically. “I have no idea.”

“Okay. Off to the kitchen. It’s spaghetti and meatballs time, kiddo.”

+++++

They drove over to Golden Gate Park late the next morning, just a little before noon, really. Bill was jet lagged and the additional change from the east coast to the west wasn’t helping matters, yet he’d gotten up before her and fixed French toast and scrambled eggs, then squared away the kitchen before taking a hose and a chamois to his car. “I’ve never seen so much dust…and salt! My God…the amount of salt in the air must be incredible.”

“Everything corrodes up here really fast,” Claire said as she helped dry the 911’s sloped front bonnet. “It’s the surf.”

“Hell, this thing is going to rust out before I put five hundred miles on it.” He finished buffing out the chrome then popped off the Targa top, and when they’d cleaned up and redressed they drove through the park to Lincoln Way with the top off, enjoying the autumn warmth. When they passed Kezar Stadium she told him to start looking for a parking space. “Where are we going?” he asked.

“There,” she said, pointing to a low slung storefront, the building sage green and with big windows illuminating the showroom within. And the sea-blue sign above the windows said Rosenthal Music Company + Copenhagen + San Francisco.

+++++

There were the usual entry level instruments near the front of the piano showroom, and even one or two Steinways, but Claire led him to a smaller room located off a dark corner. Finished-up rather like the typical living room in an upscale home, complete with a sofa and two sumptuous lounge chairs, there was an ornate instrument in the cozy room, lit by two recessed can lights set to an easy on the eyes glow that made the room feel like late night. An old man was waiting for Claire in the room, and he smiled when he saw Bill, then came up and introduced himself.

“You must be the brother I keep hearing about. William, is it?”

“Bill,” he said, smiling.

“And I’m Saul. Saul Rosenthal.” The man spoke good English but did so with a rather thick Danish accent. He was dressed modestly but, Bill noted, with the cultured restraint of old money.

Then Bill turned and looked at the piano and he was simply overwhelmed at the intricate detail he saw. Each of the three legs was formed by standing herons made of cast bronze, but the other supporting details were straight out of fin-de-siècle Viennese coffee house architecture, a style that, while similar to Prairie Style elements actually predated Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie ornamentation by several decades. There were hints of verdigris in the bronze work, and so many different species of wood had been used that upon first sight the whole seemed overwhelmingly complex. Maybe too busy. But he stood back and reexamined the instrument from different angles and suddenly it all made sense, all the design elements came together…

“This is, I don’t quite have the words,” he whispered as he stepped closer and ran his fingertips lightly over the various surface textures. “It almost feels alive. Tantalizing, perhaps. Like she’s waiting for someone to come along and set her free.”

Claire smiled and nodded to Rosenthal. “See, I told you he would understand.”

Saul nodded appreciatively at Bill. “So you did,” he said wonderingly.

She turned to her brother. “It’s the only one, Bill. The only one of it’s kind.”

“Do I even want to know the price?” Bill asked as he went and ran his fingers along the keyboard. He knew Bösendorfers were pricey, literally usually twice the price of a Steinway, but the sheer production costs of this piece had to be beyond stratospheric.

“Probably not,” Claire sighed. “I just wanted to know what you think of it.”

“I’d say she’s worth the price on investment grounds alone,” he said, “but how does she sound?”

“Magical,” Rosenthal said, his eyes twinkling as if he alone was in on an inside joke.

“When can you deliver it,” Bill said more than asked.

“We can get everything ready by next Friday, and I’ve outlined steps you’ll want to take before we arrive and set it up.”

“Such as?”

“Humidity control, air filtration, and I’ll need to look over placement in the room as well. The acoustics of this instrument are demanding, and so the placement precise.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. She might sound flat if not placed just so, but I’ll know more after I examine the room.”

He turned to his sister. “Where did you want to put it, Claire?”

“That little alcove off the living room. The room with the view you like.”

He nodded as this little showroom was about the same size. “That ought to work. Sorry I can’t be here next weekend.”

“Oh?” Rosenthal said.

“Yes, sorry.”

“A pity,” the old man said. “Well, shall I go ahead with setting up the delivery?”

Claire looked at him, her eyes hopeful.

“Yes. Let’s do it.”

“Splendid,” Rosenthal said, leading them to his office. “Your sister explained that you handle all her business affairs. How nice to be so trusted.”

Bill shrugged off the compliment, taking the invoice from the old man’s hands as he sat. His eyes went round as he looked at the figure she’d been quoted. “This can’t be correct,” he said, his eyes now shifting to Rosenthal’s. “I can’t help but mention that I just purchased a house on the north shore of Long Island Sound for less than this. Is this the best you can do?”

Rosenthal smiled graciously and steepled his hands. “How about ten percent?”

“How ‘bout twenty,” Bill countered.

Rosenthal extended his hand, and Bill wondered how much lower he could have gone – but he could see that Claire had been mortified by his dickering. Which was, when all was said and done, why he was handing her affairs. He did the math in his head and wrote out the check and signed it, then handed it to the old man – who bowed smartly and slipped the check into a black leather wallet, and this went into a pocket inside his jacket.

“When will you be back in the city, Mister Tennyson?”

“I’ll see if my schedule allows something in three weeks.”

“I should very much like to see your reaction to the sound she produces.”

“I’m looking forward to that as well.”

As they left the shop Bill looked at his sister, at the smile on her face, for that was, in the end, what this had been all about.

Across the street an Old Man in a green loden cape smiled as well, then he tapped his ornate cane on the sidewalk twice and walked off into the park. Thunder rolled in there distance.

+++++

The dream that night was especially bad. Colonel Thao again, Thao and his hideous house of horrors. Thao, presiding so proudly, and so efficiently over the Hanoi Hilton. His prison camp, the misery he inflicted was his and his alone. He was the architect of misery. Misery made of blood and sweat as much as it was of brick and mortar.

Thao began again. The torturing. Pure evil, as relentless as it was pointless, as surely all evil must be. The beheadings, the astonished amazement as heads reattached, all of it endlessly repeating, forever looping over and over and over. Because in this dream, as in life, blood was never in short supply.

He woke and went to the kitchen for a glass of water and saw Claire out on the patio overlooking the rocky beach far below, standing atop the low stone rail that marked the end of terra firman and the beginning of the abyss. Her arms stretched wide, her face bathed in moonglow, one foot over the edge, indecision hovering over the moment like a guillotine, or Thao’s machete. For a moment he wondered if he was still dreaming, but no. This was real. This was really happening.

He walked gently through the open door and across the cobbled patio and reached for her hand.

She turned to him, her long brown hair streaming in the freshening wind coming through the Golden Gate, filaments of her hair backlighted and shimmering in the moonlight. He said not a word, then stepped up onto the wide stone wall beside her and looked out over the sea.

“Isn’t life spectacular?” she asked, her voice full of wonder.

He squeezed her hand gently and looked up at the moon. Suddenly he felt unbalanced but as quickly he felt her reach out and steady him, as always the big sister protecting her little brother.

“Come on,” she whispered. “We’d better get you down before you fall and take me with you.”

He smiled inwardly, knowingly, and followed her down to the patio. “I was going to get some water,” he said when they were both back on solid ground. “Want anything?”

“Coffee, I think.”

He looked at his watch and nodded. It would start getting light out in about a half hour, and he’d already packed for his flight back to Kennedy so he had time. “Coffee it is,” he said as he led her back inside the house.

“I hate it when you leave,” she said drearily.

“Me too.”

“Can’t you transfer here?”

“I might be able to but it’ll be a few years. And I do seem to recall buying a house back there.”

“You haven’t told me about her.”

He turned and looked at her. “Who?”

“You can’t keep things from me, little brother. Especially the big things.”

“I haven’t met anyone important, Claire, other than the realtor who sold me the house. I took her out for pizza and we talked for a while.”

“Is she nice?”

“She seems nice, but dark clouds line the horizon and I’m not sure I want to…”

“To take care of another crazy bitch?”

He chuckled. “No, no, I’m not sure I want to get involved until I’m somewhere I can settle down. And not until I can see myself settling down.”

“And…? What’s the most important reason? The real reason…?”

He grinned. “I know, I know, I need my big sister’s seal of approval.”

“Right you are! So, when are you going to bring her out here?”

“You are relentless, aren’t you?”

“I can see it in your eyes, Bill. I can see her written in your eyes, and there are like little footprints written all over your soul, too. Are they leading her to you?”

“To me?”

“Or to wherever she wants to take you.”

“Sounds awfully one-sided, Claire.”

“C’est la vie, Bill.”

“Tu as l’air si sûr de toi. Pourquoi?”

She shrugged off his question, watched him move as he made coffee. “Are you all packed?” she finally asked as he handed her a fresh cup.

“Yup. Last night. Want to drive me, or should I call a taxi?”

“Would you mind so much if I begged off this time?”

“No, not at all. I know you hate that car.”

She smiled. “No I don’t. That car is so you, Bill, and how could I hate that?”

“Maybe we should get something you can drive?”

“No, there’s no need. I hate driving as much as you love flying, and besides, I don’t mind taking a taxi.”

“Are you ever going to go out on a date?” he asked, raising the specter of some old, long simmering insecurities.

“No. Are you?”

“If the right girl comes along, yeah.”

“Same here,” she said obstinately. “But the problem with that, oh brother of mine, is that the right girl already has come along, but you won’t admit it.”

He shook his head. “Man, you are stubborn.”

“So, have you seen our dear sister yet?”

He shook his head. “Not likely. I don’t feel like going to prison. Again.”

“You’ll have to make peace with her some day, no matter how much the idea repulses you.”

“Doubtful.”

“Dad isn’t going to live forever. I mean, you do know that, right?”

“That tends to happen to us all, Claire, whether we care to admit it or not.”

“Oh, you could go all religious on us, prattle on about salvation and the afterlife.”

“Me?” he asked, his face impassive.

“It could happen.”

“And lightning could strike you in the ass the next time you walk down to the beach…”

She scowled at that. “Don’t be vulgar, Bill. It doesn’t suit you.”

“If you say so.” They looked at one another and laughed, then he finished his coffee and called for a taxi, and as the run from Sea Cliff to SFO was a pricey one, the driver made it out in record time. He went to his bedroom and got his grip, then went to the door to say his goodbyes.

She stood on her tip-toes and hugged him. “Thanks for coming on such short notice,” she said as she started to cry again.

“Let me know when the piano gets settled into her new home. I’ll shoot for two weeks from next Friday.”

She walked with him out to the red and yellow taxi, taking his arm in hers. “You never told me her name, you know?”

“Liz.”

“Liz. I like that. Bring her with you next time.”

He shook his head and grinned as he got in the cab’s back seat. “You’re never going to drop this, are you?”

“Only when you do.”

+++++

The next afternoon he caught the crew bus out to T5 and made his way to the dispatch office; he picked up the weather briefing and the anticipated fuel load-out, then walked through the terminal to gate 7, not bothering to check and see who was flying left seat that evening. The TriStar was coming off a maintenance check and had just been towed to the gate, and as soon as the Jetway was docked he made his way out to the closed door and then into the cockpit. First things first. Get the shore power online then the Carousel IV-Bs spinning up, ready to input their IRS settings, their Inertial Reference Settings that would tell the inertial navigation system where the nose of the aircraft was. The flight engineer soon walked in and settled into his seat behind the little desk at his station, then the engineer woke up all three primary electrical buses and checked power to the APU while Tennyson walked out of the cockpit and down to the ramp to begin his walk-around. Nose gear first. Check the brake lines for leaks, the tires for tread depth and pressure. Over to number three, check the fan blades then open the inspection door and get a light on the sight gauge, confirm oil and hydraulics for leaks. Head back to check the APU, then around to number one, and finally the mains. Fuel Boss waiting for a signature. Captain Jenkins coming down the stairs to check every item he had just done on his own walk-around, and as usual, the captain signed for the fuel once he’d cross-checked the load against the manifest from dispatch.

Passengers were loading when Bill walked back up the Jetway stairs, so he stopped and talked to a few of them, inviting a couple of twin boys up to the cockpit to take a quick look around. He let them sit in his seat and when Jenkins came in the old man told the other boy to take the Captain’s Chair, the left seat. The boys left a few minutes later, wide-eyed and talking excitedly to their grateful parents about how cool it was up there.

Jenkins asked the lead flight attendant where the boys were sitting, then he turned to Bill. “Once we get up to cruise and after everyone’s been fed, bring them back up here and let them see the panel at night. That always wows them…”

Bill smiled. “You opening up a flight school? Drumming up business?”

Gene smiled too. “One of the perks of the business, Bill. Opening eyes. You never know how big an impression you’ll make. Maybe turn a life around, or help a family through a rough patch.”

Bill studied Eugene Jenkins’ face as the old man spoke. He sincerely wanted to be an ambassador to the career path, and to TWA. What he was doing was priceless, quietly and in a way few corporate types could fathom. Bill appreciated that and let his Captain know it.

“So, Liz told me you bought her house on Pearl?”

“Yessir. Looks like we’ll close next week.”

“Janet and I have been going to the church across the street from you for a while now.”

“Beautiful building.”

“Have you been inside?”

“No sir, not yet, but I’d like to after I get settled in.”

“We’d love to have you join us one Sunday,” Jenkins said casually.

“I’d like that, sir.”

And curiously, with that said the old man relaxed a little. Had he now assumed his FO was a true believer? – and as Bill watched he assumed that in Jenkins’ world being a Christian was a Very Good Thing. “What did you think of Liz?” Jenkins asked a few minutes later, as they worked through the pre-engine start checklist.

“She seems, oh, I don’t know the best word to describe her, but maybe really sweet. We went out for pizza last week.”

And Jenkins relaxed further as he began to talk about her. It seemed that Liz was like family to Gene and Janet and the rest of his family, and she’d been their kid’s babysitter for years. She had been an integral part of many family gatherings, and had even been included on a couple of family camping trips through the church’s youth program, and Bill was getting a clearer picture of both this captain and the girl he’d asked out to dinner.

“Yeah, she went through a rough patch a few years ago. She dated just one fella all the way through high school, and when she went off to Yale he went into the Warrant Officer Training Program, went down to Texas and learned how to fly helicopters. Well, the boy went to Vietnam and didn’t come back, and then she went to pieces. His name, by the way, was Ross Betancourt.”

Bill stopped what he was doing at that point and looked at Jenkins. “Gloria’s son?”

“Yes. Yes, that’s a fact. And when Elizabeth’s father got sick Gloria stepped in and helped pick up the pieces. Helped Liz get her real estate license, got her working in the office. Janet and I took her to Paris last spring, anything to get her out of this dark place she’s been in. How was she with you?”

Bill told her about her brief breakdown when showing the house and Jenkins nodded. 

“That sounds about right,” Jenkins said, then he was all business again as the TriStar was pushed back from the gate and they went through the engine start checklists. Their takeoff and climb out were practiced, and as the airliner passed the southern tip of Greenland Bill went back and brought the twins forward. They took turns sitting in the right seat and looking at the panel all lit up at night really got the kids going, and standing there watching them Bill wondered what having kids of his own would be like. Settling down and starting a family was simply something he’d never given much thought to, and in a way he’d always assumed that was something he’d never do. And, he had to admit, memories of his parent’s fights had left painful scars, but watching these kids left him wondering: ‘It didn’t have to be that way.’ Watching Captain Jenkins interacting with the boys got him to thinking, as well. Jenkins was a natural. He had a knack for getting these kids interested, for sparking a sense of wonder, then letting the boys’ curiosity run free. He answered questions in a way that made the boys think about the next part of the equation. And, of course, Jenkins had Junior Pilot wings to give to them before they left the cockpit, and he even pinned them to each boy’s shirt.

“So, you have any plans tonight?” Gene said after the boys were escorted back to their seats.

“No, but I wanted to go to the Imperial War Museum, look at some of the Battle of Britain displays.”

“You haven’t been yet?”

“Nope.”

“I go there a couple of times a year, at least when I stay in the city.”

“There’s hardly enough time to do anything on these layovers, you know?”

Jenkins nodded. “We’re not tourists, Bill.”

“That’s for damn sure,” their flight engineer sighed.

“What are you doing today, Roger?” Gene asked.

“Sleeping. Twenty hours, nonstop. I just came in from Frankfurt.”

A half hour later Jenkins wiped some sweat from his forehead then shook his head as he turned to Bill. “I’m gonna hit the head. Your airplane.”

Bill nodded and donned his oxygen mask, put his hand on the yoke as the motor under Jenkins’ seat whirred and his seat slid aft, then he watched to make sure Gene’s legs or feet didn’t hit anything on the way out before returning his attention to the panel.

A moment later something caught his eye high and to their left and as he looked a great splash of green and purple washed across the sky. “Damn, look at that! That’s a bright aurora…”

The engineer nodded. “We’ll lose HF soon, I betcha.” 

That meant being out of radio contact until they were much closer to Iceland or Shannon, Ireland, but these blackouts happened frequently enough to not be a big deal. He turned back to the panel and noted their location on the inertial navigator.

“How far are we from Iceland?” the FE asked.

“About 270 miles, just about due south of there now. Why?”

“I hate it when the high frequency band is down, especially when we’re out this far.”

The intercom chimed. One of the flight attendants calling from the forward galley. 

“Yo,” Tennyson said.

“Bill, there’s something wrong with the captain…I think he’s having a heart attack.”

“Did you see if there’s a physician onboard?”

“There isn’t, not even a nurse.”

He turned to the engineer. “Roger, go check on the captain.”

Roger was out the door in an instant, and Tennyson pulled out the airway chart covering this part of the North Atlantic Ocean. He looked for Keflavik in his Jeppesen, then entered waypoints into INS-2. The intercom chimed again.

“Yo,” Tennyson said.

“Bill?” the stewardess on the intercom said. “Roger is doing CPR. I don’t know what to do.” The girl sounded stressed, not quite hysterical but headed that way.

“Make sure any passengers who’ve seen anything are kept informed and let them know we have plenty of qualified crew on board. And Betsy, keep it together, okay? That’s your job right now.”

“Right. Okay, Bill.”

He got up and moved over to the left seat and entered the waypoint data into the captain’s INS, then executed the course change. Next, enter Keflavik’s radio and VOR frequencies, and he tried Keflavik approach on the radio. Nothing.

Perhaps ten minutes later the flight engineer returned to the cockpit and when Bill saw his ashen face he didn’t even ask. He looked away and shook his head, then turned to Roger as he sat. “Get up here and start scanning, would you? We’re crossing the westbound tracks now.”

“Anything on VHF?”

Bill shook his head as he pointed at the waypoint data on the INS. “Frequencies are entered. Start checking again at 125 miles.”

The intercom chimed. Betsy needed help moving Gene’s body to the galley on the lower level.

“You can handle that, Betsy,” Bill said, cutting her off.

The TriStar was at thirty one thousand feet above the Atlantic, and he’d need to begin their descent soon. “How much fuel do we have?”

“We’re okay…we’ll be about twenty under our max landing weight.”

“Okay.”

“You doing okay?” the FE asked.

“Yup, I’m nominal.”

“Nominal, eh? Haven’t heard that one in a while.”

Tennyson watched as the VOR twitched, then locked-on to the beacon at Keflavik. “Try ‘em now,” he said to Roger.

The NATO controllers in the tower responded on their next call, and Bill advised the controller of the situation onboard. Current conditions at the airport were vintage North Atlantic winter: forty knot winds with gusts to fifty-five and a very heavy snow falling. 

“Keflavik, TWA 12, you have any clear runways down there?” he asked.

“Runway zero-two is open but marginal, currently with about three inches of snow over patchy ice.”

“Okay, can you set up a PAR approach for us?”

“Roger, precision radar approach approved. Will you need any equipment standing by?”

“Just a, well, I guess a coroner, or whoever you have available.”

“Was it a member of your flight crew?”

“Yes, it was the captain.”

“Understood, -12, I’ll get the latest weather updates to you in a minute.”

Technically, the L-1011 had the first FAA approved ‘autoland’ system in domestic commercial operation, but the Collins FD-108 Flight Director still needed accurate setup to function properly, and Tennyson didn’t yet feel like trusting the autopilot to handle a heavily loaded aircraft under such challenging conditions. He was used to working PAR approaches from his carrier training, and the command bars inside his main attitude display made following the localizer and glide slope an intuitively easy chore; all that was left now was to enter the radio frequencies needed.

“TWA 12, Keflavik approach, plows hitting the runway right now, estimate runway clear in one five minutes. Base medical will handle the transfer. Assume you’ll need to refuel, or will you be parking for the night?”

“Uh, Keflavik, we’ll need to call company dispatch but we won’t be taking off without a full flight crew.”

“Understood, twelve. Squawk 1244 and report passing twelve thousand on the inbound.”

He acknowledged and focused on the HSI, watching the autopilot’s inputs on the course deviation indicator, and he called in when the aircraft reached 12,000 feet.

“Roger, twelve, turn left to zero-two-zero and descend to seven thousand, report picking up the localizer.”

“TWA 12, left to 020 and descending to seven thousand.”

He watched the stars disappear as the TriStar entered the solid layer of cloud. “Okay, let’s get bleed air to the nacelles,” he said as he made sure the pitot tubes, the critical speed measurement probes mounted just under the windscreens, were being heated, as well. Snow was streaking by the cockpit windshield, the glass so cold the snow couldn’t stick. Company procedure was to use heat to slowly heat up the glass, to, theoretically anyway, keep it from shattering.

“TWA 12 at seven,” he called in a few minutes later.

“Roger, 12, come left five, descend and maintain five thousand.”

“Twelve, left five and 5,000.” He turned to the FE: “I think the glass is warm enough now to use full heat.” He then picked up the intercom and switched to ship-wide. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is First Officer Tennyson. As you know we’ve had a medical issue and I wanted to let you know we have diverted to Keflavik, Iceland. Conditions there are just awful, but we’ll be on the ground in about ten minutes. As soon as we know what’s going on with the remainder of your journey one of us will let you know. That will probably happen once we’re in the terminal, so hang on, we’ll let you know as soon as we can. Flight attendants, prepare the cabin for arrival.”

The aircraft pitched up and to the left as a strong gust hit, and after the autopilot countered with immediate inputs to correct, Bill nodded his head appreciatively. “Not bad, not bad at all old girl,” he said just loud enough to be heard.

The FE chuckled. “You do know that this old bird has about 400 hours on her, right?”

“Yeah, don’t you just love that new airplane smell…?”

+++++

A replacement crew flew in on Icelandic Airlines later the next morning, and both he and Roger returned on the next Icelandic flight to Kennedy. And they stood on the ramp while Gene’s coffin was loaded in the forward cargo hold, then boarded the DC-8. Almost everyone in coach was smoking pot and by the time they landed in New York he felt higher than a kite. They went straight to the dispatch office and were interviewed by company lawyers and investigators from the CAB and the NTSB. Later that evening he made it to his hotel, and he called Liz to let her know what had happened.

“I know,” she said. “Gloria told me this morning. Someone from the airline came by and told Janet, and she called Gloria. Do you know what happened?”

“No, not really, but we think he had a heart attack. He seemed fine up until he got up to use the restroom, and I guess it hit him in there.”

“There was something about it on the news earlier this afternoon. They mentioned you.”

“Oh, great.”

She laughed at that. “So, how are you doing?” she asked.

“All things considered, I guess I’m okay, but it hurts. Kind of knocked the stuffing out of me for a minute, but losing control ain’t in my job description, ya know?”

“I guess not.” She paused and it felt like she wanted to ask him a question…

“So, I know it’s not the right time to ask, but how about dinner?”

“When?” she asked, and he could hear the relief in her voice.

“Tonight?”

“Yeah, sure. You want to go to that seafood place?”

“Sounds good to me. I’ve got to shower so I’ll be out on the 5:40.”

She met him at the little station in her mustard yellow Pinto and she drove him east along the shore to the harbor in Huntington, to an old clam shack that had been there since forever and they drank frosted ‘schooners’ of ice cold beer and had fried clams and cod, and even though it was very cold outside they walked along the waterfront for a while, and he never pushed her to talk about more than she wanted. No talk of her boyfriend, of her relationship to the Betancourt family, or even to Gene and Janet Jenkins.

Indeed, she always seemed to be walking along a razor’s edge, with defiance on one side and a stuttering vulnerability on the other. After her second beer she loosened up a little, yet in short order she became brittle and then a little mean. Little sarcasms at first, with a quip about the ‘hero pilot’ rounding out their evening. She dropped him at the station in time for the last train into the city and when he settled into the seat on the train he felt a little relieved to have escaped intact. He decided that if he did in fact take her out on another date he would take her to see The Exorcist.

+++++

He drew up plans for a minor kitchen remodel and engaged a contractor, and after the house on Pearl closed he bought some furniture and moved in. Liz and Gloria came by early that evening, Liz hopeful and Gloria grateful, and they came bearing gifts of flowers and freshly baked cakes. He did his best to entertain them but in truth he was growing wary of Liz. She was obviously smart but had a mean streak, and the obvious parallels to his sister Ann were growing more obvious by the hour. Yet he’d purchased her family’s home, so…why? Had some part of him wanted her? As a mate? When that wasn’t a rational choice? Was buying the first house he walked through rational, or just impulsive? He had to admit there was a part of him that had wanted to impress her. Yeah, Liz, but maybe Gloria too.

And the thought bothered him. Enough to suddenly question all his motives.

He’d spent enough time in Hanoi to understand human depravity, and he’d been bullied by his sister Ann long enough to realize that some people were indeed born just plain mean, but he’d had very little experience with good people. Claire was, in her way, a kind soul, and her kindness resided in her ability to see and understand when something was wrong. He’d learned that from her, too, yet he had a difficult time seeing Claire as a good person. He now saw her as damaged and in need of help, that she needed someone to watch over not just her finances but also her general wellbeing. 

Watching Gloria watch Liz was illuminating, too. Gloria had taken over the role of mother-protector after the death of Liz’s father, and even as they walked through his new home he saw how protective she’d become. But…why? And why was Liz so vulnerable?

As he watched them he began to understand that both women were simply needy. As in: Gloria needed to be a mother, and Liz needed one. The dynamics of a caretaker and an invalid. Was the mean streak he’d seen in Liz a manifestation of that neediness, or simple resentment at having been shoehorned into that role. In other words, was Liz even salvageable?

But, he asked himself as they moved around the old kitchen, looking at his plans for the remodeling, why did he even care? Liz was cute in a way, but Gloria was prettier, more exotic. She moved with an assurance borne of living around great wealth all her life, and she dressed the part. Elegant and sexy best described her, like her Mercedes, while Liz was beginning to seem more like her Pinto. On the surface maybe reliable and cost efficient if rather plain – once you saw through her initial charms.

He offered them ginger ale and soon saw them on their way, then turned to unpacking the things he’d had shipped out from Pasadena. The Bell Telephone installer came out and hooked up his phones: one in the kitchen, two downstairs and two up, then he added a third in his bathroom because hey, you never know. One thing about being in the business he was in, he couldn’t miss a call from dispatch. He was wondering what to do for dinner when the phone rang.

“Yo,” he answered with his characteristic greeting.

“Yo?” Gloria Betancourt said. “Odd you would say that. Where did you pick that up?”

“Gloria? That you?”

“Yes. I need to come over.”

“Okay. I guess you know the way. The front’s open.”

A few minutes later her Mercedes pulled up out front and she marched in like Patton through Sicily and found him in the kitchen. She walked right up to him and kissed him, hard, her right hand burrowing down until it reached pay dirt. She had his belt unbuckled and his pants down on the floor and was kissing him ferociously, then she was on her knees, taking him in her mouth and not stopping until she had finished him off. With that accomplished she got his pants off and dragged him up the stairs like a leopard dragging a kill up into the trees, and once she’d thrown him down on his new bed she mounted him and didn’t get up until they’d torn each other apart.

To say he was stunned by her feral intensity and by the repressed nature of these events would be coy. And given that he’d been with just one girl in high school, and no one since, he’d had no trouble getting into the groove and staying in the game. They walked to the shower together after several hours and once under the hot water she tore into him again, both soon lost inside an insatiable lust that neither knew had existed – at least not until their heartbeats had joined. Yet what passed between them soon felt more like something trivial. He dried her and she redressed while he dried off, yet when he came out of the bathroom she was gone.

“Well, I will be goddamned,” he muttered as he went to the ringing phone. It was dispatch, and they needed him to come in.

“Of course,” he muttered after he’d hung up. “The perfect end to a perfectly weird day.”

Then the doorbell chimed and Liz was standing there, in tears. “Gloria was here, wasn’t she?”

“What?”

“Gloria. I can smell that bitch on you,” she said as she turned and walked out to her little yellow Ford. As she sped off she flipped him the finger, and he went upstairs to get a freshly pressed uniform ready to go, then he went back to the shower and scrubbed his face once again.

+++++

Rosenthal and Claire had placed the Bösendorfer just so, tucked in one corner of the study off the living room so that she could catch the afternoon light falling on the Golden Gate Bridge, and he had to admit that the Viennese motifs embedded with the various design elements seemed to go with the space. Even though there was an obvious Italianate influence in the home’s design, there was a see-through fireplace between the living room and the studio that contrasted nicely with the green slate floor, and that lent the space a kind of white-washed Bauhaus austerity. Books on mahogany shelves lined the walls and made for a subdued, almost muted acoustic environment, but that too seemed to fit both the instrument and his sister.

She had just finished her Fourth Piano Concerto and was practicing for an upcoming series of performances from San Francisco to Munich, culminating in a performance at the coming summer’s music festivals in Salzburg and Spoleto, and she had at first seemed busy and distracted when he came out a week later. Yet soon enough she noted the change that had come over her little brother.

“What on earth have you done now?” she asked after their usual pleasantries were over.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I know that look,” Claire added.

“What look?” he said, amused yet suddenly feeling a little defensive, too.

“Oh, kind of like the cat who ate the canary look, oh-brother-of-mine.”

“And is that because you have an overactive imagination, or what? Oh-sister-of-mine?”

“What’s her name? It sure wasn’t Liz.”

He looked down. “No, it sure wasn’t,” he sighed.

“And?”

“She’s the broker that oversees Liz, and who was the mother of her boyfriend.”

“Her boyfriend?”

“Helicopter pilot. KIA.”

“Oh, William. You’ve become heartless, just like our sister.”

That stung and he turned away. She reflexively came to him, put her arms around him from behind. “You can’t treat these things so cavalierly, Bill. Sex isn’t meaningless, you know. It isn’t about physical conquest. Or don’t you know that?”

“Claire, it was more the other way around…”

“Ah, the old ‘…a stiff prick has no conscience…’ defense. Really, Bill? I expected more from you.”

He explained the encounter in more detail, a little more detail than was necessary, and she backed off a little. Still, she seemed disappointed in him and he wondered why.

Then he asked her, point blank.

“Because like I mentioned last time you were here, I guess in my fantasy world you’d come and stay here with me, take care of me.” She’d watched the look of growing horror in her brother’s eyes and felt more and more isolated as he turned away. 

“You know, it’s not like it wasn’t bad enough that dear old Dad had a think going with Ann, but now you’re telling me…”

“No, I’m not. Nothing like that. I’ve always taken pains to keep the worst of Ann and Dad away from you, haven’t I? How could you even think that…?”

“Aren’t you asking me to spend my life with you? To take care of you?”

She turned away. But she nodded her head just a little, like now she was ashamed of the very idea.

He went to the entry and picked up the suitcase he’d just put down, and then he went to the garage and threw it into the 911s front boot. He looked around and shook his head, then opened the garage door and backed out the driveway, then out onto El Camino del Mar. Claire came out and watched him drive away from her house, then she smiled and went back inside – to that luscious new piano. She was sure she’d done the right thing, too.

After all, he was having such a hard time cutting loose from their past.

III. Autumn

The dreams grew less frequent, and with the passage of time, the shadows longer. Colonel Thao disappeared entirely. Tracy, his wife, became more important to him as time passed, as did his children. There appeared to be no purpose to his most recent dreams, indeed, they often felt like unrelated pastiches of lives that might have been but never were. Because there had been nothing revelatory hidden within his most recent dreams, at least nothing that he understood as such, so his dreams remained a mysteries with no solutions. Then one night he drifted alone on a calm sea and one of the pink creatures suddenly appeared and hovered nearby, just staring at him. He’d felt a cold breeze and turned to see volcanoes erupting along a far horizon, and in a panic he’d spun around in the water, realizing he was alone and suddenly painfully aware of his loneliness. 

A fin circled nearby, glistening black and smooth in the liquid sunlight. An orca drifted along lazily until it apparently decided to come closer, perhaps to check him out – and as suddenly the animal surfaced and he found himself eye-to-eye with a deep brown iris, the whites of the animals eye, the sclera, streaked with delicate capillaries, and he was surprised to realize that the animal had eyelids. Its eye was, in fact, just half open. Then he felt more than heard clicking and turned to see several more orcas, and they all seemed to be studying him intently. The pink creature was hovering above them, studying the orcas’ reaction to him, and once he thought the big creature nearest him was trying to tell him something. It had come closer, closer to Tennyson’s face, close enough for Bill to lean in and hear the orca’s breathing, the sharp thud of it’s blowhole opening and closing, and even to feel it’s heart beating to a mysterious rhythm all its own.

The same dream came and went over the years, yet the big orca always seemed to come close and study him. In a recent dream, however, he’d turned to the sound of the erupting volcanoes and the orcas didn’t appear. He turned and turned, looking and then hoping they would show themselves, but…no, they were nowhere to be seen. They had left him. And as suddenly he noticed that the sky was red and the water felt different. He looked up, up beyond the red sky and he saw a huge planet. A large, ringed, blue gas giant and he realized this ocean was on a moon, a moon orbiting the gas giant. And then the pink creature appeared and she was smiling almost lovingly at him as she hovered overhead. 

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Don’t you know?”

“No? How long can I tread water?” he asked.

“As long as you must. Forever, if need be.”

And then he would wake, bathed in the cold fear of that distant sea.

William Tennyson, Jr., was soon coming up on his 20th anniversary working for TWA, and he had been flying the TriStar all the while. Captains had come and gone, some friends as well, and first officers too, but for better or worse, for richer or poorer, TWA had become his life. The glory years had come and gone, too, as corporate raiders decimated the airline’s most profitable assets, her gate assignments at Kennedy and Heathrow, and these days the remnants of the once mighty carrier were operating out of Lambert Field in St. Louis. TWA still flew to Europe but now their most profitable European corridors were out of Boston to places like Zurich, Paris, and Frankfurt, yet now those planes flew nowhere near capacity and the vultures were circling high overhead.

He’d met his wife, Tracy Hillermann, after working at TWA for two years.

He had been flying New York to Zurich for almost a year, spending his downtime in the Swiss city walking along the Limmatquai, occasionally going to the main station and taking random trains out of the city to unknown villages, and once on the ground he was exploring, searching, trying out obscure trails or out of the way cafés.

On one flight to Kennedy from Zurich he walked back to the galley mid-flight, primarily to stretch his legs but also to get some coffee. There were the usual suspects gathered there, FAs he’d worked with dozens of times over the years, but there was a new girl working up front under the watchful eye of a training supervisor. This happened often enough, so often he rarely took note of these new hires. Until this girl turned and he got a good look at her. Looking at her was literally heart-stopping, and he couldn’t remember running across a prettier girl – not ever. Not exactly tall, maybe five foot-eight or so, and he knew she was in shape just by looking at her. Yet it was her eyes that nailed him. 

But isn’t that always the case?

So he did what he always did. He had tried to ignored her.

He was a senior FO by then, and still conspicuously single. And the girls usually talked about that ‘single guy up front’ when they were working the same flight with him. A few of the single girls had tried to get him at least interested, yet he rarely responded to them with anything more than a polite smile. Some gossiped, of course. He had to be gay – that was one of the more malignant rumors he’d heard – but there were others. And yet, he had to admit, he simply didn’t care.

He had carried on with Gloria Betancourt for a while, until he grew tired of the emotional conditions she’d imposed on their affair. She refused, she told him one evening, to get more deeply involved. She’d done that twice and it hadn’t worked out, and besides, Bill was fifteen years younger so it was just impossible. Then she laid out the bare truth: All she wanted was the occasional fuck, and the rougher the better. He did take her to Paris for a long weekend but the same constraints applied; she had no interest in doing the usual romantic things together, no crepes at midnight by the Cluny, no walks hand in hand through the Tuileries. After that miserable weekend he began pulling away, and soon enough she stopped calling. Liz never, not even once, called or dropped by, and he was happy enough with that outcome. As beguiling as she might have once been, he’d seen only danger ahead, even though he’d been tempted.

He had majored in aeronautical engineering at Annapolis, and while not the greatest student he had at least maintained High Honors at graduation, and soon enough he found himself wanting to return to school. The best option academically was either CalTech, Berkeley, or MIT, but he wanted to stay on the East Coast so applied to MIT. And he was accepted. That had meant completely rearranging his life, from where he lived to where he was home-based, but Boston Logan was not simply the obvious choice, it was his only option if he wanted to resume school part time.

Coordinating the move with his change of assignment proved easier than expected, and it only took him a few weeks to sell the house on Pearl, then he spent more than he wanted on a just remodeled walkup on the corner of Chestnut and Willow, near Beacon Hill. The house, a narrow five story walkup, had been built before California was even a state and someone had recently spent real money updating the old structure. He now had no yard at all, and he’d had to find a garage to simply house his old Porsche, yet he was happy with the location and working with dispatch he’d been able to get a schedule that allowed him to return to school on a part time basis.

But even after moving to Boston he still got calls to work flights out of Kennedy, which meant hopping on a shuttle to New York, which often meant sitting in the jumpseat of overcrowded 727s making the half hour flight. And on one of those spurious assignments he saw Tracy Hillermann. And he – tried – to ignore her.

+++++

“Hi there,” she said as he stepped into the galley area in front of First Class. “Can I get you something?” Her accent was pure Texas yet she didn’t look like she’d grown up on a ranch. She was more Dallas, that so-called Paris on the Prairie, and even a close look revealed that she came from money. The little gold Rolex on her wrist, the perfect teeth and clear skin, and a subtle perfume sparingly applied. Her uniform, even after serving lunch, was perfect. In other words, she cared how she presented herself and that came from upbringing. Then again maybe she was simply on her best behavior because she was being graded.

“Howdy,” he replied. “Coffee, please.”

He’d leaned against the galley counter and watched her work. Not self-conscious at all. Her motions sure, not hesitant. Her figure perfect, her eyes killing him when she looked his way.

“You take it black?” she asked with a warm smile. Not fake, he observed. Real warmth.

“No, not this battery acid. As much cream and sugar as you can lay your hands on.”

She had smiled again, and politely too, as she handed him the cup and a spoon to stir, then their eyes had met once again and she held him there for a long moment.

Strange how one moment can change the arc of a life. Interesting how one moment can change the course of a lifetime.

After they’d parked at the gate he wrapped up the ‘meet and greet’ routine as passengers deplaned, he helped a couple of the flight attendants with their bags before he got Tracy’s out of the crew’s luggage compartment.

“Thanks,” she said as she took the rolling bag. And there it was, he said to himself, that good eye contact once again. No evasion, no wariness.

“You are welcome,” he replied, their eyes still locked.

Crew usually walk to customs together and they did so that evening; he helped her with her rolling bag as she fumbled for her passport and, as he usually just carried a small fold-over to keep his uniforms reasonably neat, he slung that over his shoulder then helped her through the terminal – until they reached the dispatch office.

He had to go in and finish up paperwork so he turned to her. “I have some stuff to do in here,” he as he stopped outside the door, “but if you wouldn’t mind waiting a few minutes I’ll help you out to the shuttle.”

A couple of the other FAs did a double take when they heard that, and yet Tracy just smiled a little as she sized him up again. “Sure. You doin’ anything tonight?” she’d asked, blowing them over.

“You want to grab something?” he asked, his heart skipping a beat.

“Sure. Sounds good.”

And so they went out. Things clicked and they started seeing each other. Every now and then, and then a lot. She applied for a posting in Boston and got it. She began flying from Boston to St Louis to Fort Myers but it was a start. She moved in with him a few weeks after that and she was the first to mention marriage and maybe having kids and he knew right away that she was the one to do that with, to do the whole family thing. Her father did indeed own a ranch down in the Texas Hill Country, but while he ran cattle he had a foreman on site to handle the day to day, so he was a weekend rancher at best.

Because Ted Hillermann was a banker, and he owned car dealerships in five states and was known around Dallas for having started with nothing and had then worked his way up to the top. Tracy was, by the way, the apple of his eye, his pride and joy. Her father came up to Boston to meet Bill when it looked like things were turning serious, but the most obvious issue was that of age. Tennyson was now in his late 30s, but Tracy was just 24. Ted Hillermann had been a little less than impressed with that and so had engaged the services of an investigative firm to dig up some dirt on Tennyson, only to read the synopsis and drop all his objections. The kid, in his eyes, seemed like the real deal.

After securing Ted’s permission, Bill got down on one knee and asked for her hand and it was as simple as that. Over and done with, a little slicker than eel snot. Of course he invited his father and sisters to the wedding, and of course they came to the Methodist Church in Highland Park, and to the reception at the Dallas Petroleum Club. Tracy had wanted to honeymoon in Tahiti so off they went, spending the first two days of their marriage sitting in airplanes, staring at the shadows of clouds on the dappled sea six miles below, both wondering if what they had just done was really the right thing to do…?

But don’t all newlyweds?

They spent a few days on the main island, wandering around the streets of Papeete poking their heads into shops and art galleries, eating French food a million miles from France yet really right in the heart of it. And one day they found themselves walking along the waterfront, looking at all the sailboats tied off in neat, orderly rows, with sunburnt sailors everywhere they looked.

“I wonder what that’s like?” said the girl from Paris on the Prairie as they looked at sailboats from California and Seattle, and from Germany, the Netherlands and, of course, from France. “All alone out there, thousands of miles from land, just the sea and your boat?”

Bill nodded. “I used to watch boats just like these heading out the Golden Gate when I’d visit Claire. Some of them turned left and headed down the coast, but every now and then you’d see one just heading straight out, like due west, pointing towards Hawaii. One weekend we watched the start of a single handers race from her house. Ten boats heading to Hawaii. Ten people out there by themselves. I wondered what that must feel like, thinking that your life is so important and then you’re out there in a storm at night and realize that the universe really doesn’t think too much of you, if at all. I wondered how small the world would feel when it got reduced to a few square feet of boat underfoot. Maybe how small those sailors started to feel when civilization just disappeared in their wakes.

So they’d gone down to the docks and found a couple of people working on their boats and asked them all the usual questions. ‘Where are you coming from? Where you headed next?’ And of course, ‘What’s it like out there?’

And she had asked a rather bohemian looking man from Portland, Oregon that question, and he had turned thoughtful and looked up at the sky then at her before answering. “Everyone has a different experience of life on the open ocean, I guess? Every voyage is defined by the usual sunsets and storms, the uncertainty of standing watch at night when it’s so dark out the sea and the stars just seem to blend in. But then there are the mountains along the far horizon, and everyone has their own take on that too, but everyone has to confront their truest self out there, you have to come to terms with yourself – as you are in that moment – because your first landfall after a long crossing will tell you all you need to know.”

Bill looked at the man’s boat. There were tools and nuts and bolts scattered everywhere yet there appeared to be an underlying order within the apparent chaos. “What are you working on?” he’d asked.

“Oh, the Monitor, the self-steering wind-vane, keeps sheering two bolts on it’s mounting plate.”

“Too much stress on the plate,” Bill said. “Maybe the bolt is too small, or the mounting holes might have been drilled at an incorrect angle?”

And so the three of them spent the next two hours remounting the self-steering gear on the stranger’s boat, then they took their new friend out to dinner. They talked boats and trips the man had taken and where he might go next. He’d been an engineer for Hewlett-Packard until he’d had enough, and then he’d chucked it all, bought his boat, a 34 foot Pacific Seacraft, and spent a few months fixing her up before he sailed to San Diego and then on to the Sea of Cortez. He’d spend a few years in Mexico then set out for Panama, the Galapagos Islands and finally, he’d laid out his course to French Polynesia and off he went. He’d been to Fiji and had just returned to Papeete, where he’d had his boat hauled out for Typhoon season and gone back to the States. Now, he said, he was heading south to New Zealand, and then he just didn’t know. He wanted to go to Japan but had heard cruisers weren’t really welcome, but what about Alaska? Or the Seychelles and South Africa? The world was, quite literally, just out there, quietly waiting for those with a sense of adventure.

Again, it was just one of those moments where the arc of life shifted just a little, shifted perhaps into the wildly unpredictable, but Bill Tennyson was just beginning to find that out about Tracy. There wasn’t a mountain she didn’t want to climb or a trail she didn’t want to take. And now, suddenly, there wasn’t an ocean she didn’t want to cross.

Yet she had always wanted kids, too. At least two, and he knew where that came from.

When her father, Ted, had ‘The Talk’ with him at the wedding reception, among other things he’d told Bill that he had wanted “at least a dozen kids, all boys,” but that his wife had died when Tracy was little. So he’d ended up with Tracy and had somehow been more than happy with how things turned out. “Some people,” he said, “go where life takes them, you know, they go with the flow. But I couldn’t do that, Bill. I’d always grabbed life by the balls – and then I made what I wanted out of it, but dammit, once I held that little girl in my arms, well sir, that was it. After her mother passed, Tracy became my reason for living and pretty soon, wouldn’t you just know it, I was hanging on for the ride just like everyone else. Going where life had decided to take me. So, Bill, you have to realize that there are things out there you just can’t fight. Some things are gonna be bigger than you. And, yeah-yeah, I see the look in your eyes, but listen to me now, ‘cause this is important. What I’m sayin’ is sure, yeah, you can fight it all you like, but in the end you’d better learn how to hang on.”

So Bill Tennyson stood beside his wife, standing there above the docks looking down on rows and rows of sailboats tied off in that faraway marina, their masts clanging as they rolled in the swells of waning breezes. He watched her looking at all those dreams tied off down there in that little marina, and while he had to admit that he really didn’t know her very well yet, he was sure about one thing.

His life with Tracy was about to get interesting, and it would never be predictable.

+++++

Tracy was a good mother, and conscientiously so. She worked at it. Worked at it because motherhood was something completely foreign to her. Her mother had passed from breast cancer when she was quite young; coincidentally at almost the same age as Bill when he lost his mother. As such, both could not rely on memories of their mothers as role models; their mothers imprinted little save what was passed on during a time when memory is capricious, more fleeting impression than solid foundation.

The first of two girls was born after Tracy and Bill had been married a year, the second hardly two years later. By the time Doris and Evelyn were finishing high school, Bill was seriously considering retirement – now that he’d earned his PhD in aerospace engineering, and now that TWA had been through multiple bankruptcies and, just the year before, the Flight 800 tragedy had rocked the airline. Load factors on their remaining all important routes to Europe were falling, and analysts were saying it was now just a matter of months. Bill was young enough to start a second career, yet he did not want to give up flying.

Years ago he had let go of his animosities long enough to call his sister Ann, first for the wedding and then just before Doris was born, inviting her up to Boston for a baby shower – at Tracy’s insistence. Claire had therefore refused to come – until Tracy intervened and talked to her, literally almost begging Claire to come. There had been a minor rapprochement for the occasion, and soon there was talk of a big family reunion.

And Tracy decided to make that happen, because, to her, family had become the most important thing, and everything was soon set up by Tracy. Her father flew in for the occasion, as did Bill’s family, then everyone drove up the coast in rental cars and enjoyed a week together at a waterfront lodge on the Maine coast.

Both fathers were of course by now retired, though both ‘kept their hand in the game’ – as time permitted. They talked about colonoscopies and constipation, the bane of old men everywhere, and of course of friends who had recently passed. Both were avid golfers, so they played the course at the Samoset Resort every morning as soon as the course opened, and ‘in due course’ getting to know one another. Bill Jr, meanwhile, mediated encounters between his sisters and still managed to play a round with the patriarchs when he wasn’t mediating arguments between Doris and Evelyn. Or Ann and Claire. As a result, he developed a wary respect for the role estrogen had played in the development of civilization.

But this first week together in June soon became a new family tradition, a sort of coming together that allowed a new level of familial cohesion to take root. “For the girls’ sake,” became Bill’s rallying cry to Claire and Ann. At the end of each week the family had their picture taken in front of the huge stone fireplace in the main lodge, and soon there were five such pictures on the wall in Bill’s study, then ten, then fifteen…

There was always a Sunday Brunch at the lodge, a sumptuous affair complete with a piano player grinding his way through a tired repertoire of jazz standards, and despite this grinding music the family always enjoyed their buffet together, usually just before returning home. And the year before Doris graduated from high school the family came together again, and here the arc of Bill’s life, indeed, all their lives seemed to shift again.

At one point during brunch, the pianist, a grizzled old man who seemed as bored as his playing, launched into a savagely fast rendering of the Claire de lune, and at that point Claire had simply had enough. She stood in an angry huff and went to the pisno and lit into the poor hack, berating him in front of everyone in the dining room.

The hack, of course, did not recognize Claire Tennyson. Though she was by then an accomplished concert pianist and noted composer of classical works, and more recently had one Oscar winning movie score to her credit, when he told the overbearing woman to take over if she thought she could do better, he was in for an unpleasant comeuppance.

Claire pushed him aside and began again, and she floated lazily into the piece, just as she always had, playing so softly, and so lovingly that everyone in attendance simply stopped eating and slowly began to listen to what was unfolding. Murmurs of recognition soon drifted among the more attuned diners; by the time she finished the piece word had spread and the room burst into applause. Claire smiled, faintly if appreciatively, then turned to the old man who’d butchered Debussy and scowled at him, a withering, knowing takedown from one professional to another. She then returned to the family’s table and rejoined the conversation as if nothing had happened…

…yet something had…

+++++

Her brother was still sitting there at the table, yet in truth he was far, far away.

+++++

He was, in fact, on a sailboat – resting at anchor in an unrecognizably small harbor far, far from Maine. The water was the color of turquoise verging on silver, a light trade wind was sifting through his hair and the sun was beating down on his forehead. He turned and looked at the island, at the palm trees – most of these palms not tall but low, stunted things – that lined the harbor, and a few hundred feet away the turquoise shallows dropped away to reveal a deep cobalt blue that took his breath away. Tracy was on the beach, waving at him, then calling out to him, yet he could not make out what she was saying.

He felt a familiar presence and turned away from Tracy, and yes, the pink butterfly creature with the owl’s eyes hovered just a few feet away from him, her delicate face perhaps five feet from his own, and she was regarding him silently, almost quizzically.

‘Why have you come back to us,’ the pink creature seemed to say to him, the voice as ever unheard yet as clear as any ever spoken. ‘Was it the music that sent you?’

“I’m not sure I know,” he replied. “I was with my…with Claire…and then, yes, I was inside the music…”

‘You have denied this place for so long, yet you chose to come now. Why?’

“I…chose? But…how? I’ve never been here before…and I didn’t choose anything.”

The creature’s eyes smiled, her head tilted quizzically. ‘Oh?’ she said. “Are you so sure?”

He turned and looked further up the shore, and he thought he saw Claire standing there, but no, the woman he saw there was impossibly old. He heard another voice nearby and now a rising tide of panic hit as he wheeled around to this new voice. Another woman was waving at him from a boat anchored no more than 50 yards away.

“Dad, are you alright?” the stranger called out.

He didn’t know what to say, because, after all, this was a dream, wasn’t it? But…who was this other woman? She wasn’t his daughter…she was a…a stranger? Yet why did her voice seem so familiar?”

But by then he’d remembered that he had never smelled things in his dreams before, yet right now he thought he could pick out the scents of bread baking in the nearby village, and then all the fresh flowers blooming on shrubbery along the beach.

“Dad?” the woman called out again.

“Yo! I think so,” he replied. “Actually, I’m not sure…”

Within seconds the woman had jumped down into her Zodiac and started the little Yamaha outboard, and as Bill watched he shook his head because boats and motors didn’t have brand names posted so vividly in dreams. Or did they? Or could this be what was called lucid dreaming?

Yeah. That’s it.

By now Tracy was running to their own inflatable, untying the painter from a palm tree and pushing off from shore. She started the motor and was now racing out to their boat…

“Our boat?” he asked the universe. “When did we get a goddamn boat? And when did I buy that inflatable?” He watched as these normal yet surreal feelings kept unfolding all around him, and the feeling of panic became pervasive and suffocating, an all encompassing nightmare. “But…didn’t I buy the Zodiac in Newport, at the boat show a couple of years ago?”

Now. Then. If. How. Separate. Realities. Superimposed. Not. Possible.

Why? Not?

His thoughts seemed to come in molten waves as he fell back against the companionway and then slid against the coaming. 

“This isn’t right. Something doesn’t feel right.”

Again, the rising tide of bile. The empty panic of nowhere left to hide.

He sat up a little, took a sip of peach nectar from the clear blue drinking glass in the cupholder on the binnacle. There was condensation on the glass, and the nectar tasted fresh, just like Tracy had made it this morning. Because he remembered seeing her do just that. A million years ago. Or…was it a billion?

And then he saw his hands. They were the age-spotted hands of an old man, and nothing like his own. But no, there was the scar on his left forearm, the scar a remnant of his crash landing outside of Hanoi – fifty years ago, then he was perspiring and disoriented as his Intruder skidded through a small village, shocked people scrambling to get out of the flaming wreckage that was spilling through their homes. So he looked at the condensation on the blue glass before he finished the nectar and then he leaned forward, resting his head in his outstretched hands. He felt someone caressing his shoulders and expected to see Claire after their mother stopped screaming at their father and when he looked up he saw the pink creature was now sitting by his side.

‘Are you tired?’ he felt her ask.

“Tired? I don’t…I don’t think so…?”

‘Death is near. Would you like to go there now and rest?’

“What? Hell no! Who wants to go to death?” he asked angrily.

And as suddenly came a blinding flash and he was back at the table with his family in Maine, and his father was standing to help Claire into her chair.

“Dad, are you alright?” his daughter said, her voice repeating what the woman on the boat had asked not two minutes ago.

He looked up, startled, still feeling disoriented. He leaned back in his chair and sighed, then shook his head. “You know, I think I’ve eaten too much,” he barely managed to get out.

“You don’t say?” his father shot back sarcastically. “I’m not sure there’s anything you haven’t eaten this morning…”

“The food here was unusually today,” Ted said as he signed the check – over the strenuous objections of Bill Sr.

“Dad?” Tracy asked. “You still driving up to Southwest Harbor tomorrow?”

Ted nodded. “I have an appointment up there at one. They recommended I stop for lunch at a place called Beal’s Lobster Pound. Supposed to be right by the Coast Guard Station. They unload the lobsters right there, come straight from the boat to the plate…with a brief stop for cooking, I suppose.”

Bill Sr. looked from Tracy to Ted. “You have what kind of an appointment, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Boatbuilder. Hinckley. They started making a little runabout called the Picnic Boat a few years ago, and I’d like a decent little boat to use at the new cottage.” His little cottage was in Naples, Florida, and Bill Jr had learned that this little cottage had approximately twenty thousand square feet of living space, and of course had its own boat dock facing Naples Bay. Gordon Pass, the main entry into the bay, was literally just seconds away, and the views were great…

“Sounds fun,” Bill Sr. said. “Mind if I tag along?”

So quite early the next morning everyone skipped the continental breakfast and headed down to their small fleet of rental cars and set off for Acadia National Park; they made it to Beal’s just before noon and they tumbled into the unassuming gray-shingled building only to be confronted by rows of galvanized tubs absolutely crawling with lobsters. 

Or bugs, as the locals called them. 

There were one pounders and two pounders, and then there were the big ones, then the really really big bugs, and these older, wiser bugs had pushed themselves into the corners of the tanks to better conceal themselves. And a smart looking teen stood behind the counter, waiting for these new arrivals to pick the bug, or bugs, of their choice.

Ted, and as a Texan perhaps this was only predictable, zeroed in on a huge, defiant looking thing and pointed at it. “Is that the biggest you got?”

“It is right now,” the freckle-faced girl behind the counter replied. “You want me to weigh him?”

“Go ahead, if you please.”

The girl reached in and picked up the creature, whose telson, or tail-fan, was now flapping wildly about. Perhaps the creature saw the look of intense delight in Ted’s eyes as the girl said “He’s a four pounder.” And so, with his sentence entered into the proceedings, perhaps the poor creature knew his time had come. Even so, he’d decided he was going to put up a fight.

He lost.

And everyone in turn pronounced sentence on the bug of their choice but for Claire. Ever the empath, she simply could not look an animal in the eye knowing that she was going to kill it and eat it, so she settled for a Cobb Salad with blackened haddock instead.

Bill Jr picked a two pounder, and was stunned by the sheer size of the corn-on-the-cob that came with the large red bug, its back now arched in steamed agony. He carried his paper plate out onto the deck overlooking the picturesque harbor, and the sight of the harbor, and all that food, simply took his breath away. He’d traveled the world and yet he had never been to Maine, let alone this part of the Down East coastline, and right then he was wondering why he hadn’t.

There were several small wooden piers jutting out over the water, none particularly big but each in their turn quite interesting, almost charming. Fishing boats came and went from the fuel dock, while lobstermen unloaded their catch just under the wooden deck where he sat. Gulls flew overhead, hoping to snag an errant morsel that might accidentally fall from one of the tables. The sky was blue, as blue as a bluebird, and little cotton-candy clouds scudded on their way high overhead.

He felt something hit his shoulder and turned to see seagull shit running down his arm. He shook his head then wiped the stuff off with a moistened towelette before turning to his plate.

Ted’s bug had started out a huge, mottled thing of mainly indecipherable colors in the reddish-black range, but now the just-steamed beast was as red as a fire engine. Ted was salivating as he cracked a claw, extracting the meat with a lobster fork and dipping it in freshly melted butter. No one said a word as they feasted on bug meat, steamed corn and new potatoes, and everyone had blueberry soda and a thick slab of blueberry pie with a tennis ball sized scoop of locally made vanilla bean ice cream – before they groaned their way out to their rental cars in bloated agony.

Though the Hinckley yard was nearby, literally just across the small, horseshoe shaped harbor, it took fifteen minutes of fighting through the village’s overcrowded and almost painfully narrow streets to get there. With Ted and the girls in one car and Bill Sr and Claire following, Bill Jr fell in behind them with Ann in the back seat of his car. Tracy, of course, knew a little about the toxic family dynamics of the Tennyson household, yet she’d had no trouble embracing Ann as the sister she’d never known.

And Ann had embraced the role. Indeed, after eighteen years the two of them were chattering away like best friends, because, not too surprisingly, they were. They carried on about how stuffed they were and how they planned to play tennis tomorrow “all day long, or we’ll never fit in our clothes…” Bill cast nervous, sidelong glances at Tracy, and occasionally looked at Ann in the rearview mirror, wondering what the hell had happened to his life. Had All That Hate Been For Nothing?

Claire, for her part, was still fuming, even after so many years had passed, distressed that Tracy had taken to Ann like a duck to water. Jealous didn’t even begin to describe how she felt, yet she’d felt her brother go back to the pink creatures while she was playing the Claire de lune at brunch the day before, so she’d reached out and followed him. She’d found herself on a small street, little more than a paved, one lane track that meandered along a manicured waterfront. She was surrounded by palms and rows of frangipani, fragrant with magenta blossoms, and sloped, grassy lawns that led down to the water’s edge. She’d felt warm under the clear afternoon sun, and it took a moment but she soon recognized this place. Tall reeds topped by lavender blossoms blocked her way to the water, but then she saw a much older Tracy standing just ahead, waving to a man on a sailboat. Black hull, white cove stripe and a green bottom, the sailboat was not a hundred yards offshore and it lay at anchor on calm waters the color of a shallow swimming pool. Then she recognized Bill standing there, though he too appeared much older in this place. He turned and seemed to fall into a seated position in the shade of a protective canvas bimini, and Tracy ran to a small rubber boat and sped out to him…as too did another woman from a nearby sailboat… 

“Who is that?” she asked.

…Then one of the pink creatures was beside her, hovering a few feet above the grass. ‘You must return, and quickly,’ the creature thought to her. Tracy nodded, and had instantly returned to the brunch at the Samoset. She had never imagined her brother so old, or so fragile, and the sight had both shocked and depressed her. 

Now she turned around and watched him maneuvering the car through the congested village, trying not to run over one of the hordes of tourists walking about as if in a food-coma, yet sure that something important was about to happen.

When the cars had parked at the yard and Ted had disappeared inside the front office, everyone got out and stretched in all their postprandial dismay, with Ann remarking that she was sure she had ‘gained at least ten pounds so far this weekend.’ Bill Sr walked past a few boatsheds down to a long pier, and he began walking out the sloping ramp that led down to where several boats were tied up. His son and daughters and granddaughters followed, though they all walked ponderously – with their lobsters suddenly having the last laugh. Someone farted and everyone turned and pointed at Ann, then Tracy, then everyone laughed nervously. Even Claire.

There were several fancy motorboats tied up out there, as well as two sailboats. A family was loading groceries and other provisions onto one of the sailboats, a pretty red-hulled sloop with the curious name Heist, while the second, almost identical black-hulled sloop, named Argos, lay just beyond. This boat looked brand new, and Bill Sr thought she was drop-dead gorgeous.

And so did Tracy. Ann too.

When Claire saw the boat she flinched and turned away.

And when Bill Jr saw the sailboat he staggered back as if he’d just taken a left hook to the chin.

+++++

“I guess I tripped on something,” he said as he stood and dusted himself off. Tracy took him by one arm and Ann the other, and they helped him over to a nearby bench.

“What happened here, son?” his father said as he walked over to investigate the commotion.

“Nothing, Dad. I think I just, I must’ve tripped on something.”

“Good thing you didn’t fall in the water,” Bill Sr said.

“Why?”

“Well, look over there, would you…?”

Everyone’s eyes shifted to a dark sheltered tidal pool formed by mottled rocks, the black water full of kelp, and then at the large orca there. He must’ve been a male…if the size of his head was any indication…because it seemed massive. And the orca was staring at them, or, more specifically, he was staring at Bill Jr.

“Oh, he seems almost tame,” an old man walking beside Ted said, just as the two men came out to join the group on the pier. “Been here a week or so, too. The tourist boats have been having a field day with him, but he’s just been hanging around near that tidal pool, almost like he was waiting for someone.”

Claire turned and looked at the orca, and the orca’s gaze shifted to hers. “Do they usually come in so close?” she asked.

“No, no they don’t. As a matter of fact I can’t recall one ever hanging around the here this long, and never so close to our pier.” The man with Ted then walked over to one of the motorboats and pointed. “So, Ted, this is the Picnic Boat I told you about,” the old man said as he ushered Ted over to the graceful, deep red hulled motorboat, leaving Bill Jr and Tracy to walk over and admire the black hulled sailboat once again.

“I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in my life,” Bill whispered to her.

“She is something,” Tracy replied, “but she’s so big! What do you think, how long?”

“Got to be 40, maybe 45 feet.”

“Remember that Swan we saw last year at the boat show?” she asked.

“Yeah, she was pretty, but…” he said, thinking ‘– in the same way a Ferrari can be pretty. Functional for one thing, impractical for anything but racing.’

“But yeah, she was pretty bad down below. Remember that companionway? It was so steep….it almost felt like a ladder…”

They paced up and down the pier looking at the black-hulled yacht as if entranced, as perhaps they were, until Ted and the old man came back to rejoin the little group.

“What model is this?” Tracy said, pointing to the black-hulled sailboat.

“Oh, that’s a Sou’wester 42. Nice boat, too.”

“How hard is she to sail?” Tracy asked.

“Oh, not very. She’s setup for singlehanded sailing. See the mast? The sail is rolled up inside, and it furls electrically. The foresail furls, too. Everything controlled from the cockpit. Too bad, a sad tale behind this one.”

“Oh?” Ted said. “How’s so?”

“Oh, well, we took the order for her about a year ago. The buyer came up several times while we were building her, made a bunch of requests for modifications. He got it just right, too. Prettiest one we’ve built in a long time, but about two months ago he passed on. Never got to sail her. Damn shame, too. It was like he poured his soul into that boat.”

“So, you mean she’s for sale?” Ted asked.

“Oh, yeah, actively, though we just listed her a few days ago. We wanted to get her into the water and fully commissioned before we brought her to market.”

Bill Jr walked over and looked at the yacht’s name again. Argos. ‘Now where do I know that from?’ he asked himself. He looked to Claire because he was sure she’d know, and now she was looking at him, then the sailboat, so he walked over to her. “Argos? I can’t remember where I know that name from.”

She smiled, shook her head. “The Odyssey? Odysseus’s faithful dog? When he returns home to Ithaca he comes disguised as a beggar, but Argos recognizes him despite the passage of time, and his disguise. And as soon as this faithful companion knows his master is still alive he promptly dies.”

“That’s it. I remember now, Miss Tompkin’s classics class, wasn’t it? Argos is faithful while Penelope has been, well, besieged with suitors, and no one recognizes Odysseus…”

Tracy was standing by her father, whispering in his ear, then Ted turned to the old man.

“How much for both of ‘em?” Ted asked.

And without missing a beat the old man looked at Ted, then at Tracy, then he nodded his head knowingly and smiled. “Well, let’s go up to the office and run some numbers.”

+++++

Ted sat across from Bill Jr at dinner that night, just the two of them for their last night at the lodge. He seemed amiable enough, but as soon as he’d ordered a Jack Daniels, neat, he turned serious.

“Look, Bill, I need you to take some time off from work. Say a month, maybe six weeks, and help me bring that Picnic Boat down to Florida. I’ve got the route all mapped out, and I’d like to leave in August…”

“Ted, that’s right in the middle of hurricane season…”

“Yeah, but that boat can outrun a hurricane, and anyway, I have no intention of going offshore. Just marina to marina, one day at a time, taking the ICW most of the way.”

“All August?”

“Yup.”

“Ted, Doris is starting her last year. Don’t you think I should be home for that?”

“Oh, don’t give me that crap. She’s eighteen and tough as a boot. Besides, you look like you could use some time away from all that estrogen.”

Bill laughed a that, but he was also a little taken aback by all that had happened during this last day, and it must’ve shown.

“Next, I want to talk about Argos.”

“Okay,” Bill said, still a little flummoxed that Ted had bought a sailboat, too.

“She’s going to be documented in an LLC, but in our names. You, me, and Tracy. It’s just a tactic, a way to pass her on to you two. Depreciate, then depreciate some more, avoid all those inheritance and gift taxes, but she’s yours now. Yours and Tracy’s. I made arrangements to keep the boat at the marina up there in Southwest Harbor for the rest of the season, then they’ll put her in heated storage over the winter. I’ll assume by next year you can make all your own arrangements, because I know you two will have your hands full for the rest of this summer.”

“Yessir, I imagine so.” His heart was racing now.

“Item two. Tracy tells me you’re thinking of retiring soon.”

Bill nodded his head. “Yessir?”

“What are your plans, assuming you do retire?”

“I’ve got a standing offer at Raytheon, another at Orbital Sciences.”

“Give up flying? You sure you want to do that?”

“No sir, I’m not at all sure I want to do that, but TWA ain’t exactly breaking any revenue records right now, if you know what I mean…”

Ted snorted. “Oh, hell, that story was written a long time ago. TWA will be snapped up within months, maybe a year, and probably by United but maybe American. You could stay on with one of those, of course, but…”

“But the L-1011 is being phased out. Delta is the only other major carrier still using them, but they’re getting old.”

“So if you’re going to keep flying you’d need to get a new type rating.”

“I know,” he said with a nod. “And that would mean losing seniority, and that means losing the flexibility I’ll need…”

“You do know, of course, that Orbital Sciences bought a TriStar a couple of years ago?”

“Yes, I heard something about that.”

“You might be able to do both, you know? Engineering, while still keeping a hand in the cockpit.”

“Yessir.”

“Ah, I see you’ve already thought of that.”

Bill nodded. “Everything going on there is classified right now, but yes, I’d have to go down to Patuxent, go through test pilot training.”

“Sounds right up your alley, Bill.”

“Yessir. I, uh, really don’t know what to say about Argos, sir.”

“Look, Bill, you can call me Ted. You can even call me Dad if that floats your boat, but please, knock it off with the ‘Sir’ stuff, okay?”

Bill nodded. “I’ll try. Ted.”

+++++

Ted and Bill made their trip south, and despite the dissimilar trajectories of their lives they got along well enough before the trip even began and so seemed destined to become fast friends. They left Southwest Harbor on a crisp summer morning, taking the old white lighthouse on Great Duck Island to port, anchoring out their first night out in Burnt Coat Harbor on Swan’s Island. The next day was brutal, with a fresh wind out of the northeast bringing whitecaps and a seasick-inducing roll that saw both men leaning over the rail, feeding the fish the remnants of their breakfast. On the advice of the old man at Hinckley, they ducked into the Fox Island Thoroughfare and anchored in a deep, protected cove just across from the village of North Haven. Taking the Zodiac dingy to the rocky shore. Both men jumped out of the dingy and fell to the ground as soon as they reached land, wanting to embrace anything that was rolling…and heaving. After putting down a fair measure of single malt, and with nothing to eat save a few saltines, they slept the sleep of the dead that night.

And his dream returned.

Leaning on the coaming of the sailboat, he suddenly knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was on Argos, and the boat had to be anchored somewhere in French Polynesia. The woman on the sailboat next to his called out again, “Dad, are you okay?” and he looked, realized it was his daughter Doris on the sailboat she had bought in Seattle years ago. She had retired when she was in her 30s and had a chunky, almost indestructible 37 footer and she had singlehanded down the Pacific coast to Cabo, then jumped to the Marquesas. She had met up with them when Argos arrived in Tahiti after a long passage from Panama City, Panama.

Then the memory of it all grew clear. He and Tracy were on their second circumnavigation. They’d gone east-around their first time around, going to Nova Scotia, then Scandinavia and the Baltic before taking the shortcut to the Mediterranean through the canals of France. East to the Suez then the Red Sea, the Maldives and Sri Lanka before hitting Phuket and Singapore on their way to Japan. With some difficulty they had sailed through inland seas and deep inlets all the way to Hiroshima. 

In his dream now he found himself there with the pink creature once again by his side. The city looked beaten down and war torn and she had pointed to the sky, to the three silver bombers approaching the city. He had stared at the aircraft knowing that his father was in one of them, and that the bomb that he saw falling was going to be cataclysmic, rupturing not just atoms but the shape of all their futures. Then a bright flash and the pressure wave that followed. The raging fires, the sundered lives, death everywhere – and when the pink creature turned and looked at him just then he saw the question in her eyes.

‘You knew of this, yet you followed your father and began working to make these weapons even more devastating.’

He had nodded and in the next instant found himself back on Argos, back in the Gambier Island Group, anchored off the village of Rikitea on Mangareva Island, and he knew he was having a stroke.

+++++

Doris graduated high school at the top of her class and went on to NYU. Evelyn struggled to compete in her sister’s shadow, though Bill tried to manage her ego while wrapping up his career at TWA. After Doris left for college he spent more time with Evelyn, took her sailing on Argos and even took her flying a few times, yet she seemed to lack something he thought of as curiosity. She seemed to live entirely in the moment and so had little regard for the past or her future. She watched movies of the moment, car chases and dinosaurs seemed to grab her attention while nothing in school ever did. She graduated from high school and had no interest in college; indeed, she had no interest in leaving home. She began to overeat, to get fat while she refused to clean up after herself, and he had to process that. Somehow she had come of age in the shadow of a beautiful mother and a brainy sister and rather than compete she had withered into this brittle thing, what he considered a shell of a human being.

When he no longer knew what to do, and after it became apparent that even Tracy had reached her wit’s end, he did the only thing he knew to do.

He called Claire.

“I wondered when you’d asked,” was almost the first thing she said when he called.

“You did?”

“She’s a lost soul, Junior Birdman.”

“You know I hate it when you call me that.”

“And that’s precisely why I do.”

“Look, can you give me some insights?” he asked.

“Sure. Send her to me for the summer.”

“Oh, God no. Really? What are you going to do to her?”

A week later Evelyn boarded an American flight to San Francisco, and as he watched her plane take off from the upper deck of the parking garage at Logan he felt sad, a defeated failure.

+++++

Ted was at the helm, bill standing up on the Picnic Boat’s foredeck waiting to throw a line to the boy on the dock. When he heaved the line the boy grabbed it and made it fast to a cleat on the stone quay, then Ted jump off and took the stern line to a bollard. A few minutes later, Ted’s Picnic Boat was tied off in Ego Alley, a narrow inlet off Annapolis Harbor where the city docks were located. Bill was soon tripping down memory lane, staring at the Halsey Field House about a hundred yards from where he stood, lost in echoes of his time as a Midshipman at the Naval Academy. 

They spent  five days tied up in Annapolis, one afternoon at the Preble looking at ship models and two days at a dermatologist’s office getting skin cancers diagnosed and removed from Ted’s nose and ears. The finally took off down the Chesapeake with Ted sporting a variety of bandages on his face and with Bill trying out a variety of sunscreens.

After slipping through Norfolk in deep fog, with the docked row of aircraft carriers silhouetted  in the sunrise, the Hinckley turned off the main artery of the Intra-Coastal Waterway and entered the Great Dismal Swamp Canal, the nation’s oldest manmade waterway and George Washington’s first public infrastructure project, and they both looked back at their experience in the trees as one of the highlights of the trip. Sailboats, fellow travelers along the migration route, motored along with their masts brushing through the overhanging trees, the deep brown tannin rich waters of their bow waves staining their prows, in effect marking their passage through the canal.

Staying overnight in Wrightsville Beach, grazing on seafood and ice cold beer until the wee hours, talking with fellow cruisers about the known hazards just ahead and many of them commiserating with Ted and showing off their own scars from skin cancer. Shrimp and grits in Charleston, South Carolina, walking among the gardens in Savannah, Georgia, getting a too close  for comfort look at nuclear submarine at St Mary’s inlet just before they reached Florida.

After their time on the water was at an end, Bill began to look back on their passage as an interlude, perhaps not so peaceful but enlightening. He’d picked a battered copy of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha at a used book store in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and he’d started to see his journey with Ted as a mystical series of encounters with others they met along their path. 

The disgruntled newly retired millionaire on his big Hatteras complaining about everything he’d seen and everyone he’d met on his months long journey. The kids with almost nothing to their name but their dilapidated old sailboat who were having the time of their young lives. The sun-broiled almost ancient hands of fishermen they met in the middle of the Chesapeake who asked if they wanted some fish, the lobster pots in Maine blocking every channel. And everywhere, the U.S. Coast Guard, always helpful, sometimes menacing, but seemingly ever-present. So many juxtaposed worldviews, a world of incongruent expectation.

They’d cut across Florida, taking the Hinckley from Stuart through the Okeechobee Waterway to Fort Myers, then the last thirty miles just off the sugary white beaches on their way to Naples. And Ted’s cottage off Gordon Pass overlooking Naples Bay had lived up to Tracy’s description. Huge, almost garish, the architect had obviously been from South Miami Beach, with pink and white the predominant colors on the exterior and the interior a riot of senseless pastels and randomly scattered rooms, all this in one discordant pile of white tile that just screamed FLORIDA. Bill had smiled his muted approval until he stumbled across a swimming pool right where he’d expected to find the dining room, and then he saw that the kitchen was sunken to the same level, and that also shared a long glass wall with the pool. “So,” he said to Ted, “you can cook breakfast in there and serve it at that counter there, right there in the pool?” 

Ted beamed and replied that it saved time that way.

Bill flew back to Boston in time to help Doris to her dorm in New York City, and found out he’d been accepted in the test pilot program at Patuxent River NAS, and as suddenly he realized that time did indeed possess vastly different textures, just like Ted’s sprawling cottage. Perspectives differed in one kind of time versus another. Everything about the world had slowed down out there on the water with Ted, but now that he was home he was back inside the perpetual motion machine of modern life, always moving purposefully towards something which often turned out to be nothing at all, all the while never just enjoying the moment. Another year passed, another year with the family at the Samoset in Maine, and he’d looked at his life, and Ted’s, and looked at the results of living in their shared perpetual motion machine. 

Did he really want to end up there? Always taking time for granted, never living in the moment? He reread Clavell’s Shōgun, dwelling on Mariko-san’s descriptions of making time stand still, of learning to watch a rock grow, about Wa, or harmony, and when he looked at his daughter Doris he saw echoes of her grandfather, and yet with a start he recognized his mother and Ann lurking inside his own flesh and blood. Evelyn happier while Doris was turning into a psychopath… ‘Oh,’ he wondered as he tried to find sleep that night, ‘what did I do…?’

‘Maybe it’s just genetics?’ he usually told himself, trying to let himself off the hook. 

Evelyn had come back from San Francisco in time for the family’s trip to Maine and she had seemed different, happier those first few days on Argos. Changed, almost happy. But after a few days around Doris all the resentment blossomed and flowered and took root again, and Evelyn usually sat up on the foredeck, her legs dangling off the deck as she stared off into infinity. Until one day, anchored in Smith Cove, just east of Castine, Maine. The cruising guide mentioned that Captain John Smith – of Pocahontas fame – had anchored in the cove to ride out a storm during his second sojourn in the colonies, when he was mapping the northern New England coastline in some detail. As she sat staring down into the black water, she noticed a rippling at her feet and almost screamed when a small orca appeared.

Bill had seen the two of them, Evie and the orca, and quietly took a picture of the moment. He eventually gave a copy of the photograph to a friend who painted landscapes, and she gave him an impressionist’s interpretation of the moment. As soon as he had it framed, the painting graced the saloon bulkhead above Argos’ varnished teak table. 

That evening, after her encounter with the orca, Evelyn asked her dad if the two of them could talk. “In private,” she’d said.

So they had made their excuses and jumped in the Zodiac and puttered over to Sheep Island, right in the middle of the cove, and they found some rocks and watched the sunset as a couple of big schooners sailed into the cove. Bill found the sight of the old sailing ships jarring, even as packed to the rafters with tourists as they were. Relics of an extinct era, as the two schooners dropped anchor time had seemed to turn inward on itself, and as the evening gave way to night shifting amber reflections of oil lamps on the water fought with the stars for their place in the here and now.

“Dad?”

“Yo.”

“I want to go to school in San Francisco this year.”

He swallowed hard, not sure how to handle this one, but he thought Tracy needed to be in on this conversation. “Oh?” he did just manage to say.

“I need to spend more time with Aunt Claire, and I really like it out there. I feel like I fit in.”

“How so.”

“Well, for one thing Claire is teaching me the piano, and I’m really getting into it.”

“And?”

“I like the people out there. Boston is so…uptight and strait-laced…and I’ve never felt more alive than when I’m out there.”

“Have you talked to your mother about this?”

She crossed her arms over her chest, and he gathered it wasn’t because she was cold. “I can’t talk to her, Dad.” She sighed, looked into the water and he thought she looked lost in time, like she didn’t belong in this time. “I guess I’ve never been able to,” she added quietly.

“Yet you can talk to me? Am I that big of a pushover, Kiddo?”

“No.” Again, the hesitation. Time, on a precipice. Then: “Mom has never loved me, Dad. I know you don’t look at it that way, but…”

“Oh, come on, Evie, I don’t know how you can say that…”

“Because Claire showed me, Dad.”

He looked down, now utterly defeated. There was no reason to put on airs, no reason to deny it. Claire had violated her oath and taken his daughter over the threshold… “I see,” he finally whispered, clearly wrestling with the implications. “Where else have you been?”

“In the operating room when I was born. Right after you passed out. Mom screaming how much she hated me right there in front of all those doctors and nurses. All of Dories birthday parties when Mom told her that she was her secret favorite. All the times when you weren’t around, Dad, when you were off in London and Paris or God knows where else, when Dorie and I got in arguments and Mom took her side. Dad, she always took her side. And you never saw that. You never saw a thing those two did to me.”

“I don’t know what to say, Kiddo. I really don’t, because sorry seems inadequate…”

She looked at him and nodded. “Apology accepted, Dad. You know, Claire says we see what we want to see. Even when things are nothing at all like what we think. We delude ourselves, we chase our illusions until we finally reach the moment of our final reality. The reality we can’t deny any longer.”

The frothy weightlessness of summer had just vanished, the timelessness of being on vacation was gone now, vanished on sylvan breezes borne on yesterday’s passing, carried away on the gossamer wings of denial. “And what do you think I’ve been denying?” he said.

“Dorie has always been Mom’s favorite. I’m think I’m yours, or will be yours, because I think you can relate to the things I had to put up with Ann, and maybe with your mom and dad. And I think because sometime you kinda resent Mom.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

“I think so, Kiddo.”

“I think you also think that Doris is becoming more and more like Ann, and that scares you.”

Some people from one of the schooners rowed over to the island with a fire pit and some logs, and they invited Bill and Evie to come and makes s’mores with them. They sat with these strangers under the stars and everyone talked and laughed and then laid back and listened to the snaps and pops of the fire until there was nothing left but the red glow of fading embers, and only then was it time to head back to Argos.

Tracy was asleep when he went in to check on her and then he realized it was after one in the morning; he grimaced and shook his head, then grabbed a blanket and a pillow and went topsides to sleep in the cockpit. He saw Evie on the foredeck again, talking to someone in the water.

He decided he really didn’t want to know.

+++++

But he was back in time for his next ride on the perpetual motion machine. Putting in for his retirement from TWA, making sure that all the necessary retirement accounts he’d set up over the years were ready to receive his retirement and pension payments. Yet even before all this was finalized he was working at Orbital Sciences, developing satellite payload delivery systems. 

And taking Doris back to New York before getting on the long flight to San Francisco with Evie. It was easier this way, enrolling her in school out there, setting up a bank account for her – an account that he could access and monitor because she was still a minor. He went down to check in with his dad and they played a round or two and shared war stories with a bottle of single malt. For the first time he could recall his father talked about that day, that early morning over Hiroshima, and he finally understood why his father drank so much.

He never mentioned the things he and Evie had talked about, nor did he mention this to Tracy. Those feelings of Evelyn’s, he knew, had to remain locked away, for now anyway. He loved Tracy and Doris and he always would, but he told himself that maybe some secrets are better left hidden away.

Even after he’d retired from TWA he managed to keep his hands on a TriStar, because the company had adapted the L-1011 to carry a small rocket on it’s belly and once at altitude launch a small payload to orbit. As this was a relatively new technology he’d needed to attend test pilot school just to learn the appropriate testing protocols, but he found the process exhilarating, especially go through live launches. 

Because, he admitted to Tracy one night while they watched Letterman on late night, flying was still the bees knees to him, one of the things that had given meaning to his life. She had felt somewhat dismayed by the remark because in 25 years together he’d never once said that, yet despite the lingering sting she thought she understood what he meant.

So many secrets. She wondered what else he was keeping from her.

But as they sat there one beside one the other in that cathode glow, she understood now that they both had so much to unlearn.

Would there be time, she wondered?

+++++

Claire called just a few weeks after Bill returned to Boston. Their father had passed earlier that afternoon, and of course while playing golf, so at least he’d died happy. She recounted a friends version of events, of how he’d simply stepped out of his golf cart on the eighteenth fairway, chipped up to the green on his way to a solid birdie, then dropped where he stood. No warning signs, in perfect health – for his age, anyway. As in: here one minute and gone the next. 

Or, as in: Time. Just. Stopped. For William Tennyson Sr, anyway.

Everyone flew to LA for the service, and then the next day, Bill, who was the executor of his father’s estate, read the old man’s last will and testament. Out loud to his sisters at their father’s insistence, in the presence of Bill Sr’s attorney. All assets to be liquidated and divided equally between Doris and Evelyn, yet those funds to remain In Trust, untouched until his granddaughters reached 35 years of age. Only one exception: a medical emergency with no other way to provide for care. Claire and Bill could have cared less, but Ann was livid. Bill smelled trouble, then he remembered his father’s final admonishment concerning her: Never. Trust. Ann.

 And the three siblings left the lawyer’s office with no apparent ill-will, yet Bill smelled the lingering financial animosities trailing in Ann’s personal perfume. Which was, when all was said and done, exactly what his father had told him to expect. But the Will was an iron-clad instrument perfectly executed, so he would have to play another game of Wait and See with Ann, endure one last snake-dance with her before he could finally be done with her.

Because, in truth, he wanted to be done with her.

He remained at the house in Pasadena to get it in order and ready to list, and after the movers had cleared out the things Ann and Claire wanted, he went upstairs to his old bedroom and stood in the empty room looking around, remembering the time he had spent there. His room had been trapped between his parent’s room and Ann’s, so he had been a non-stop witness to his mother’s screaming infidelities and his sister’s innate depravity. 

Then looking at the room’s built-in bookshelves he found a Playboy from 1968 still lingering in all its dust-bound glory, one that Claire had somehow missed, and he smiled, then went up to the attic to look around. The emptiness smelled of cedar shingles and cardboard boxes full of unused Christmas tree ornaments, like a warehouse full of forgotten things and broken dreams. He wondered where his prized collection of Playmates was going to end up – in a landfill, perhaps, or maybe stashed under some other teenager’s bed, just waiting for one more call to duty?  

For a moment he thought he could hear his mother and father fighting and then his father running away one more time, doing exactly what his mother had wanted him to so she could carry on with her secret dalliances, then he remembered his father coming back after his mother had fled, the quiet sounds he’d made sneaking into Ann’s room. Suddenly he felt guilty as he wondered how Ann was coping with her release now that he was finally gone. Maybe she’d finally be able to let go, but the last few times they’d been together in Maine he’d seen the look in her eyes. She didn’t want revenge, she’d wanted retribution. And that left him with a sour feeling in his gut.

Claire, on the other hand, still had issues with Ann and disliked being anywhere near her. That would never change, but he had to wonder given the things Evie had told him.

A few months later, just before summer, Tracy and Bill moved Argos to a marina south of Providence, Rhode Island, which allowed them to take her out on weekends from April to October, usually on long weekends. Tracy remained at TWA until it was absorbed by American Airlines, and then found herself at loose ends. American offered her a job at their flight academy in Dallas training new hires at the flight attendant school, but in truth she was ready to move on. During the family’s next summer on Argos, one evening they were at anchor in a small cove opposite the village of North Haven, just off the well-traveled Fox Island Thoroughfare, Doris and Tracy engaged in rinsing off several bugs they had just bought from passing lobstermen, when Doris asked her mom what she was going to do now that she was at a crossroads.

“You’d make a great teacher, Mom. It wouldn’t take you long to get certified.”

“No interest,” her mom sighed as she turned to fill an eight quart stockpot with seawater and white wine. She set the pot on a burner and tossed tarragon and basil into the water, then leaned against the galley counter waiting for the water to come to a boil. “The fact of the matter, Doris, is that I’m tired of the grind, of the rat race, and I’m really really tired of your father being away all the time…”

And Bill was at that moment in the 42s aft stateroom, almost upside down with his head in the engine compartment, struggling to close a balky raw-water intake so he could clean out the raw-water strainer, and even though the door to the stateroom was closed his head was just a few inches from where Tracy stood, and he could hear every word said in the galley, even those things Tracy might not have wanted him to hear.

So, he listened and he suddenly realized that all things must come to an end. Even the best things, the things he had so often taken for granted. He sat up and looked around the Hinckley’s stateroom, then sighed as the moment passed.

Then he felt a soft bump against the hull, and then the clicks of a nearby orca calling it’s pod.

IV. Winter

“Four-zero Sierra Charlie, you are clear to land on runway one-five, wind one-niner-five at one-two, ceiling five hundred with light rain, report on the localizer.”

“S-L-F 4-0-Sierra-Charlie has the localizer, clear to land 1-5,” Tennyson said. He had been the pilot in command this morning for the launch of the latest Pegasus air-launched multistage rocket. Slung beneath the belly of an L-1011 built in 1974, Pegasus was carried to flight level 3-9-0, 39,000 feet above the Atlantic, and towards the rocket’s orbital insertion heading – preparing for countdown and release. Tense minutes passed as range safety officers made sure all commercial traffic had been vectored out of the rocket’s trajectory, and as all the systems onboard Pegasus were still in the green. He listened intently as the countdown reached T-minus 4:00minutes, preparing the cockpit for launch, then he tensed as the final ten seconds counted down. At “Zero!” the rocket dropped approximately 500 feet and Tennyson had gently banked the TriStar to the right and descended out of the rocket’s flight path, then he turned the aircraft so onboard sensors could track the vehicle as it ascended. He heard clapping and applause a few minutes later so knew they had a good bird. This morning’s launch had taken place off from the Canary Islands and the Orbital Sciences crew had celebrated another successful launch. In control rooms behind the cockpit and on the ground mission controllers monitored the placement of satellites while Tennyson and the flight crew flew back to and prepared to land at the Kennedy Space Center’s Shuttle Landing Facility on Merritt Island, just north of Port Canaveral, Florida.

He watched glide-slope capture on the flight director, nodded in satisfaction as the autopilot corrected for a little down-draft, then as the auto throttle maintained speeds right on the correct descent profile, but at 1500 feet MSL, or above mean sea level, he switched off the AP and took the controls.

“Flaps thirty,” he said to his FO for this flight, Tom Collins.

“Thirty.”

“Gear down.”

They listened as the nose gear whirred and clunked, then waited for the three green lights on the panel that indicated proper extension. The noise level in the cockpit increased as the nose gear significantly increased the TriStar’s drag through the slipstream. 

“Three green,” Collins said.

They quickly ran through their last pre-landing checklist even as Tennyson flew the last seconds of the approach through dense clouds and rain, the high intensity runway lights coming into view about ten seconds before touchdown. When the mains hit spoilers popped up from the upper surface of the TriStar’s wings and Tennyson applied even pressure to the brakes with his toes, and then he allowed the aircraft to slow gently through 80 knots before cleaning the wing. There were no taxiways here, just a straight runway leading to a small turnout where families usually waited to greet returning Space Shuttles. Just beyond that small apron Orbital Sciences maintained a hangar for the L-1011, and Tennyson taxied to the ramp in front of the hangar and then ran through the TriStar’s shut-down sequence while ground carts attached umbilicals. An truck mounted air-stair drove up to the port forward door and within a few minutes most of the people had de-planed. Most, except the flight crew. Now came the endless paperwork required by NASA to document all phases of their flight, and this took another hour – as the ground carts underneath the aircraft provided the power needed to run the air conditioning and electronics.

After a night in a Marriott in Cocoa Beach, he drove up to Jacksonville and hopped on a Delta flight to Atlanta the next morning, then another going to Boston. Tracy was on the telephone as he walked into the old walkup on Chestnut Street, and she looked pale, almost terrified, as she listened to the voice on the other end. 

Bill immediately put his suitcase down and walked over to her, and he sat beside her as she looked up at him, tears in her eyes and unspoken grief fluttering over her like the wings of dark angels.

“He just walked in. Could I let you talk to my husband now?”

She handed the telephone to him, the long coiled cord dangling across her lap. “Bill Tennyson here,” he said calmly.

“A-ah, Mr Tennyson, this is Detective Harwood, NYPD Homicide. I understand you were not home the past week? Is that correct, sir?”

“That is, but what’s going on?”

“Where were you last night, Mr Tennyson?”

“Let me rephrase my last question, in case you didn’t understand what I said. What the hell is going on?”

Tennyson could hear the man scribbling notes, then: “Uh, is Miss Ann Tennyson your sister?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Mr Tennyson, she was found earlier this morning in an alley near Central Park. She was taken to a nearby hospital where she was pronounced dead. That was at five thirty eight this morning. Could you tell me where you were at that time, sir?”

“I was leaving the Marriott Courtyard in Cocoa Beach, Florida, to catch a flight home.”

“What were you doing down there?”

“Launching a rocket.”

“Oh.”

“Do you have any suspects or leads, Detective?”

“Nothing solid, sir.”

“Where is my sister now?”

“The Medical Examiner’s, sir. Will you be coming down?”

“Yes, as soon as I can get some things together and repack. Could I have a number to call to get the information I’ll need…”

He listened and took notes after Tracy handed him a notepad, then he scribbled furiously until he hung up the phone. He shook his head then dialed Doris down in her dorm at NYU.

“Dad? Is that you?” she groaned, just waking up at two in the afternoon…

“Yes, Sleepyhead, it sure is. Your mother and I are coming down as soon as we can get to the airport. Something’s happened to your Aunt Ann. You get yourself together and we’ll call you when we get to LaGuardia.”

Doris was wide awake now. “Dad? What’s happened?”

“We’ll talk when we see you. We’ll pick you up outside of the dorm.”

He rang off and stood, then turned to his wife and shook his head. “How long will it take you to get ready?” he asked.

“Give me five minutes. Want me to throw some things in your suitcase?”

“Please. I need to get some reservations going.”

She nodded and walked to get his suitcase on the way to their bedroom, then he took out his Amex Platinum Card and dialed the Concierge Services number on the back of the card. 

He listened to the girl run through her canned greeting impatiently, then let go: I have a family emergency in New York City. I’m in Boston and need to fly into LGA, get a rental car and I’ll need a suite at the Marriott in Soho for a week.” He gave her his card number and listened while she got to work; she had everything prepared within five minutes, and she read off his confirmation numbers while he wrote. Tracy came out of their bedroom as he hung up from calling for a taxi, and he helped her carry her suitcase down to the street. Twenty five minutes after walking in his front door he was on the way out, though his gut was churning now.

When they made it to the Crown Room Lounge at Logan he called the same girl at Amex again.

“I don’t know if you can do this,” he began, “but do you know those new Motorola Flip-phones?”

“Yessir?”

“Could you arrange for me to pick three of them up when I get to the Marriott?”

“Yessir. I’ll have them there for you when you arrive.”

“You are an angel. Thanks a million.”

He rang off and grabbed some coffee and some kind of cinnamon roll that seemed to have been baked at a factory in Scranton Pennsylvania maybe five years ago, then they walked out to their plane and boarded. Fifty minutes later they walked out of the grim businessman’s shuttle and made their way to the rental counter, and soon they were approaching the dank warrens of midtown Manhattan. 

And Bill was frantically trying to remember the best way to the university. 

And failing. 

Again. 

“Tracy? You remember the way?”

His wife smiled…the great navigator had lost his way. Again.

“Get off on the FDR, go through the South Street Viaduct, then get off on Canal Street.”

“ How do you remember that crap!” he snarled as someone cut him off. “God, I hate this fucking city,” he snarled as he fought his way through snarling hordes of kamikaze taxi drivers to Washington Square, and there was Doris, standing just outside the entrance to Lipton Hall.

Doris waved when she saw her mom then hopped into the Lincoln’s back seat. 

“What’s the best way to the Marriott,” he growled without even saying hello.

Hiding her disappointment, she navigated them away from Washington Square the few short blocks to the Marriott. There was no one to help with their luggage and no valet, so he drove around until he found a garage and was stunned to see the rates.

“Eight-five dollars a day?” he screamed at the attendant. “You happen to know where the parking is for the Marriott?”

“They validate,” the bored Sikh woman behind the glass said, stifling a yawn.

He stomped back to the lobby and Amex had taken care of all his check-in paperwork, and as he finished in a sales rep from Bell Telephone came up and introduced himself, then helped them activate their new phones, and he had their new numbers ready, too. After the rep showed them how to call each other, the man smiled at Doris on his way out, and Bill called the Detective Bureau to check-in Detective Harwood, who was by now off-duty. His call was transferred to a Detective Washburn, who advised he would be en-route to their hotel to speak with them. After the cop hung up he dialed Claire’s number at the Sea Cliff house and Evie picked up the phone.

“Hi Pops! What’s cookin’?”

Oh dear God, he thought, she been in California too long. “Get Claire, would you?”

She came on a moment later. “Bill? What’s wrong?”

“I’m in New York. Ann’s been murdered.”

A long pause followed. “You need us to come?”

“Yeah, you have something to write with? Okay, here’s your flight information.”

He rode up the elevator in silence then walked straight to the suite’s living room and sat to let his brain take a moment off. He looked up, saw that the suite had a huge terrace and now sun was settling over the Hudson. The sky was clear, aside from the few stray clouds over the western horizon, and when Tracy brought him a glass of sparkling water he took it gratefully and looked at her as she sat on his lap. 

“You doing okay?” she asked carefully.

He shook his head. “No. I am flat out exhausted, Tracy…and running on empty doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel. I didn’t sleep well last night, and, well, I have a bad feeling about this whole thing.”

“You…what thing?”

He shook his head as he sighed. “Oh, hell, maybe I’m just tired. Let me lean back and shut my eyes for a minute. Come get me when that cop gets here…”

She got off his lap and it seemed like he was asleep before she’d made it to her feet, so she and Doris went and unpacked their suitcases in one of the three bedrooms. Once in the room Tracy closed the door and she began filling in the blanks, telling Doris what little they knew so far…

And Doris seemed to fall back a little when she heard the news, then she stepped back and went to a window, looked at the sun setting and the lights in Jersey sitting winking on. She then looked down before she turned and looked at her mother. “I knew something like this was going to happen her, Mom…”

“What? Why?”

“Don’t tell Dad, but I think she was into some really dark stuff…”

“Dark stuff? What on earth do you mean by that, Dorie?”

“I mean,” she began, but then she looked away – as if she had just re-entered a demon-haunted world – and she walked over to a little armchair and sat. “Mom, Ann was into a really strange scene. I mean S&M, Mom, real kinky shit…”

A suddenly wide-eyed Tracy blanched and stumbled back into a chair. “Dorie? What are you saying? You’ve got to be kidding…” Then she took a deep breath as the next most obvious question came to her. “Doris? How do you know? Did she tell you about it?”

Doris nodded. “She told me. Then she convinced me to come with her to a few of the scenes she went, and I think it was someplace she regularly went, I guess.”

“How many times did you go, Doris?”

“Just once, and I left as soon as I saw what was going down…”

And just then her father walked into the room, his eyes like focused lasers beams, his malignant fury now focused on his daughter.

“Do you know anything about this, Doris? About what happened?”

“No, Dad. All that happened last year. I knew it was dangerous, and I…”

“Dangerous?” he said, his grumbling, almost feral voice taking complete charge of the room.  “How was it dangerous?”

“There were powerful people there, Dad. I mean Rich. Like rich beyond your wildest dreams, and Ann told me these men do what they want. Anything they want, Dad.”

“Are you saying they kill people at these scenes?” he growled. “For kicks?”

She shook her head. “No, but I saw an altar there Dad. It looked like maybe they were sacrificing animals there, but Ann it was mainly for sex…”

“Do any of these people know you, Doris? Know you, as in know they where you live, or what you do?”

She nodded. “Maybe,” she said, her voice weak, now far away and almost beyond his grasp. “Why?”

Tracy looked at him yet right now his face was a mask, his emotions locked away, out of sight. “Bill? What are you thinking?”

The suite’s doorbell chimed. “That’ll be the homicide detective, Doris.” He was staring at her now with unbridled anger roiling his features, but he turned his attention to his wife as he started for the door. “You two stay in here. Doris? You will not say a word about any of this until I knew more. Not to another soul. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, Dad. I understand.”

‘This is a nightmare,’ he said to himself as he turned and walked out of the bedroom, shutting the door behind as he walked across the suite to the door, ‘and I am so ready to wake up now…’

+++++

He took a taxi to Liberty International in Newark to pick up Claire and Evelyn, and by that point it was past midnight and he was beyond exhausted. They were, however, the first off their United 767 and luckily their bags were among the first to pop out of the chute and onto the revolving carousel, and they were back at the Marriott by two in the morning. Claire and Evie were, of course, on California time so weren’t even remotely tired. The first thing they did was to call room service, and Claire ordered piles of club sandwiches and gallons of coffee.

She assumed it would be a long night, and this gave Bill time to go over the day’s events in his mind, and to process what Doris had just told him. In a way, he told himself as he looked back over her life, Ann’s demise was almost predictable. Ann had always been sexually manipulative so sadomasochism must have seemed like the next step to her. She could manipulate men to her heart’s content in that setting, and who knows, maybe every head she fucked with actually enjoyed it.

‘But…what if she went too far?’ he asked himself. ‘Or what if she tried to extort someone?’

That might have set things in motion, events beyond her control. He shook his head when he remembered how all her seductions had been about control. About getting what she wanted.

‘But doesn’t everyone do just that…in one way or another? Don’t we always seek to control the narrative, even if that involves challenging our moral compasses?’ Again and again his mind sifted through memories of her, how she’d routinely set Claire up to take the fall and she’d willfully lied and distorted the truth to achieve her ends, and her means always justified her ends, achieving control over their father. But if she was involved with the very powerful, which was more than possible in this city, what might have happened to her if she crossed the line, violated a taboo? What if…

‘What if…what if…what if…what we need are facts…’ he muttered out loud.

Claire was sitting beside him now, watching him, but he’d been so lost in his thoughts he hadn’t seen her.

“What facts, Bill?”

“Oh, hell, you’d better let Doris tell you. My mind is a mush right now.”

“You look tired.”

He nodded, leaned back in the patio chair and sighed.

Claire looked at Doris while her brother drifted off, and as she recounted all she’d told her parents Claire began to feel sorry for the girl, sorry for her falling into Ann’s orbit, and sorry for where this journey had taken the family, because one more time Ann was controlling the families dynamic. Even in death.

She that she had seen Bill distancing himself from Doris, and that couldn’t happen. Doris had always been bright and an extrovert, but what would happen to the girl if her father emotionally abandoned her? Yet even as she spoke, as she recounted some of the powerful people Ann had told her participated in these things, another thought entered her mind. What if Doris was lying now. What if she had been involved in more than she was telling them now. If that was true, and if Doris was a know associate of Ann’s, what immediate danger might she conceivably be in.

Claire looked from her brother to his wife, and she felt a sort of cool detachment coming from Tracy, like she was only mildly interested in all this, and – just perhaps – she thought that Bill was blowing this out of all proportion, coming down to hard when a soft touch might be more productive.

Claire, on the other hand, thought nothing of the sort. As she listened to and watched Doris recount the things Ann had allegedly told her, something wasn’t ringing true.

And in a flash, Claire suddenly felt danger lurking everywhere around them, and then she realized she had the moment they’d left the airport in Newark. Tracy, she reminded herself, had always considered Doris her favorite, and acting in loco parentis with Evelyn, she understood such inherent bias led to extremely unpredictable outcomes. Tracy had always been cute – like Ann. Doris was by far the cuter daughter, and what feelings had that imparted? In conversation, Tracy had often proven to be dull and unimaginative, and Claire had always put that down to coming from new money. Did Tracy, Claire wondered, possess any real understanding of human depravity? Were the things Doris was relating even mean much to her mother?

Claire now knew that Evelyn despised her mother almost as much as she despised had her sister Ann, yet because Claire had taken the time to understand where that anger came from, she now regarded Tracy and Doris as close cousins to the sort of person Ann had always been. Some people, she knew, were just better at concealing their truest selves. Some people were chameleons. And they became that way out of need.

Why had Tracy? 

She turned her gaze to Doris again, and now she could feel deceit boiling away inside of the girl, almost magmatic guilt waiting to erupt and spill out over her family, ruining all their lives. So Claire took a deep breath and began.

“You know what, Doris? I don’t believe a thing you’re saying?”

“What?” Doris replied, her left eye twitching.

“I don’t believe you. You’re lying.”

Tracy moved to protect her daughter.

Claire wasn’t going to let that happen. 

“Tracy, sit down,” she declared.

There was something in Claire’s voice that Tracy recognized, something she thought of as the power of an inherent, self-evident truth, and that stopped her in her tracks. 

Claire remained focused on Doris, her eyes now savage, vengeful: “Where were you when all this happened?” she said, her eyes leveled on Doris.

“When what happened?” Doris shot back.

“When my sister was murdered. Where were you?”

“In my room, at the dorm.”

“No, you weren’t,” Claire stated, her voice the incisive, matter of fact words of a magistrate pronouncing sentence. “Stop lying to me.”

“Excuse me?” Doris said, unsettled by this unexpected attack.

“You were with Ann. Now tell me where you were.”

“How do you know where I was?”

Bill turned and looked at his sister. He recognized something in her voice, the same voice she had used to confront Ann with her misdeeds, even when their father wouldn’t listen. He felt Doris beseeching him, asking him to help her, and he could feel the manipulation in her eyes.

“Doris, if you know more than you’ve told us now is the time to just let it go.” His eyes were still as unforgiving, yet he recognized she needed a lifeline. “If you hold onto this, if you’re keeping something important from us, over time the guilt will tear you apart. It will end up tearing this family apart, too. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, Dad, I do.” She was looking down now, and he could see the tears falling from her face hitting the tiles below, so he came and sat by her side, put his arms around her and gave her a gentle squeeze.

“What do we need to know, Dorie? What did Ann get you all messed up in?”

Doris looked up as if lost and alone, then she just shook her head and took a deep breath.

“Ann called me a lot my first semester. Came by when I didn’t have class, took me out to lunch or dinner, and we even spent a few weekends together that year. She took me up to Vermont, to Woodstock when the leaves were turning, and up to Stowe that January, to go skiing. She was so sweet, you know?”

He nodded. “In my experience…well, if she was acting like that it was because she wanted something from you.”

Doris nodded. “My second year we went out dancing a few times. And drinking. Sometimes with her friends…”

“Men?”

“Yeah, Dad. Men.”

His lips quivered. His sister had been grooming her, and when he looked at Claire he could tell she had already surmised that. “Sex?” he asked.

“Yeah, Dad. Sex.”

“Older men?”

Doris nodded. 

And Claire leaned in now. “And when did Ann start taking you to these S&M parties?”

“Not long after.”

“Doris, what happened at these parties?” Claire asked, now the patient, and sympathetic interrogator.

Doris looked away, lost in the cascade of memory the question had released.

“Doris?” Claire repeated gently, her voice little more than a whisper. “Come back to us, okay? Don’t go there? Don’t let Ann keep you there. You have to let it go. You have to let her go…”

More tears. The eternal struggle between truth and denial. Between deceit and bearing witness.

And so Doris began an exposition of the things she had seen and done. The orgies, for months every Saturday night, the scenes lasting hours and hours. Men jacked on speed and Viagra, most of the women she saw were on ‘ludes or coke. Some weekends she was the dominatrix, some she was the submissive. Ann told her it was so that she could get in touch with her inner self, her repressed feelings, but that in time she would know who she was and could choose one or the other. And as she spoke it didn’t seem to Bill all that big a mystery, because almost immediately she knew she was a top, or a dominatrix. Just like Ann.

Now almost in a trance, Doris described the things she had experienced, the things she had done to an with both men and women, and then she’d dropped another bombshell. She related how she had increasingly seen herself as being bisexual – while also ferociously dominant. She couldn’t date boys any longer, not at school now, not anywhere, because she simply could not filter out what she had become. All her interactions with boys in her classes had turned toxic as she felt herself becoming more and more like Ann. Because, Bill understood, Ann was all of these things, too.

And all the while Bill was staring at his daughter. He saw her, in a way, but he realized there is nothing within her he understood. She had, in her way, taken Ann into her soul and become a repudiation of everything he had stood for all his life. Even worse, Doris’s feelings for him are written in the blank stare of her gaze when she looked at him, and it was clear she had become Ann, incarnate. 

Claire thought that Doris had embraced darkness, and through her questioning the veil had been pierced and cast aside. She had suddenly found herself staring into the hollow gaze of pure evil, though Bill no longer looked at the world in such terms. Yet no longer was that truth something Doris could conceal. No, the simple truth was that this new reality was just the latest chapter Ann had visited upon their lives, all their lives, so now the family had to come together to understand the implications of Doris’s descent. 

More importantly, Claire realized she’d have to help her brother prepare for all the unknown consequences yet to come. If someone had killed Ann and her death was related to her activities, Doris was likely in danger. If the person or people involved were as powerful as Doris implied, that danger could take on many dimensions.

Claire turned and looked at her family.

Tracy was just standing there, open-mouthed and aghast, and Claire watched as Tracy turned away from Doris, moved protectively, instinctively, towards Evelyn. 

When he could stand it no longer, Bill turned from the sight of his daughter, turned to walk onto the terrace outside the suite’s living room, and Claire shook her head before she followed him.

“I had to do it, William. For her sake, as well as our own.”

He turned to face her, frightened for his daughter and her ability to deceive herself. “My god, Claire, do you understand what she’s done? Do you have any idea?”

“I think we have barely pierced the veil, William.” And with that she turned and looked behind him, scowling imperceptibly.

And without quite knowing why he knew. He could feel her behind him.

The pink creature. She was hovering there in the air behind him, several feet above the patio. Regarding him with detached curiosity. As a scientist might, he thought. Perhaps how a scientist might regard a new species of bacteria.

But then she disappeared.

Just as Tracy came out onto the terrace.

“Was someone with you?” she asked as she came up to him.

“No. Just me and Claire.”

“I thought I saw someone else out here.”

“No, Tracy,” Claire said, “it’s just us and our little nightmares out here.”

Tracy shook her head then came close to her husband and leaned into him, then she laid her head on his shoulder. “Bill, what are we going to do about this…?”

“That depends. We can do the right thing and tell Harwood what we’ve learned…”

“But…?”

“Yes. But. There’s nothing she’s told us that he won’t figure out on his own. Sooner or later, anyway.”

“You don’t think Doris is in danger, do you…?” Tracy added.

“I have no idea, Tracy. What does your gut say?”

“I’m a little frightened right now, Bill…”

“That’s the unknown knocking on your door,” Claire sighed. “I’m not sure I like the way that feels, either.”

“I thought I knew Doris,” Tracy sighed.

“So did I,” Bill said with a shrug.

“How could we have been so wrong?”

“I don’t think you were,” Claire said.

“What does that mean…?” A suddenly suspicious Tracy replied.

“What I see right now,” Bill interjected, “is that Doris was pulled into something like a black hole. The only mistake anyone made, that I made, was ever letting Ann get anywhere near her.”

“But how could you…?”

“Evil always seeks to undo goodness,” Claire said. “But think about it, Tracy, evil can’t just destroy goodness, it has to get goodness to destroy itself. Ever since I…we…we’ve known Ann, we always knew she was pure evil. Bill knew instinctively when he was very young…” 

“And you were the one that always had to deal with the consequences of Ann’s manipulations,” Bill added. “Our home was a toxic stew when growing up and I knew that, yet I let Doris come here, to New York. I let her fall into Ann’s hands, but Doris wasn’t strong enough to resist her. She’s always been kind of gullible, you know? Intelligent, but not street smart, if you know what I  mean.”

“We tried to protect her from all that, Bill,” Tracy said, exasperated. 

“In the end, Tracy,” Bill sighed, “I’m afraid Doris was simply weak.”

“Could all this…just be a dream?” a wistful Tracy asked.

He shook his head as he shrugged. “Or a dream within a dream, maybe?” He scoffed, turned away. “Hell, I don’t know, Tracy, I really don’t, but it doesn’t really matter, does it? What you’re asking is what if all life is really nothing more than a dream?”

Claire looked at him, wondered how far he would go with this. 

“You know, we can’t exactly measure consciousness, or the unconscious, yet we can experience it, right?” He paused, gathering his thoughts. “But what if consciousness is nothing more than energy? If that’s the case then we can experience energy? At least we could if that’s true, so take it a step a further. Somehow, here we are, deep within streams of intersecting fields of energy, and these streams become this thing we call consciousness. Maybe, who knows, because that means our lives exist as a field-state, maybe not on the same energy level as our dreams but maybe sometime those field-states intersect. And maybe they interact.”

“You sure you’re not just describing female intuition…?” Tracy said with a smile.

He looked at her and smiled too. “When was the last time we stayed up all night and watched the sunrise together?”

“Last summer, on Argos. Block Island, Great Salt Pond.”

He nodded. “Of course.” He sighed as he took her hand. “That was a kind of dream, wasn’t it? Or it feels like it right now, so what’s the difference between a memory and a dream? Yet they both exist inside us, right? Because we shared the experience…”

“The two of us. Okay, I get that. But what about my kind of dream? Mine was probably different.

“Unless somehow they interact,” Claire said, smiling. “What you just called intuition might really be a consequence of these interactions.”

Bill nodded.

“But Bill knows what I want to do. He understands that.”

“You ready to do that?” he asked.

“Do what?” Tracy said as she turned to face him.

“Sail off into the sunset?”

“I’ve been ready to do that for a long time, Bill. In case you haven’t noticed.”

“Oh, I’ve noticed. I just wasn’t ready to accept the reality of that.”

“But you are now?”

He sighed. “Yeah, maybe I am.”

“But that just became impossible, didn’t it?” Claire said.

Bill nodded. “We’re going to have to clean up Ann’s mess before we do anything.”

“We are?” Tracy asked.

He shook his head. “I am. And Claire.”

“Bill? If this is…if the kinds of people you think are involved…if the really are…”

He looked at her and smiled. “Never underestimate what Claire and I can do, Tracy.”

“What does that mean, Bill?”

He smiled, but he didn’t immediately answer the question, either.

“Bill?”

“Tracy, the less you know about this the better off you are.” He saw the question in her eyes. “You’re going to have to trust us on this.”

“Us?”

“Claire. And me. This ain’t our first rodeo, girl.”

Evelyn came out and walked over to them. “Geez, how can you guys stand it out here? It’s so frickin’ cold out…!”

“Evie,” her father said as he slowly came to terms with her new mannerisms, “you’ve been in California too long. It’s beginning to warp your ability to speak English.”

“Chill, Dad.”

“You’re not too old for a spanking, either.”

“Why start now, Dad? You’ll mess up your halo.”

“You’re right. Never thought of it that way.”

Claire walked to the low brick wall. It looked to be about four feet tall, a border of reddish-gray brick with a tubular gray metal railing along the top, and the style blended in with the rest of the building’s semi-modernist architecture. She stood at the rail and turned her face into the breeze and seemed to float there for a moment, like she was measuring the moment. “Bill, does something feel strange to you?” she said as she turned to him.

He nodded. “I’ve felt something all day, but I think the feeling is getting stronger. It feels like something terrible is going to happen, Claire. And it’s going to happen right here,” he said as he pointed at the city. He too turned his face into the breeze and held his arms out wide, his face tilting a little as the building sensation fear washed over him. “Oh, what is that?” he cried. “I can feel it but I can’t see it…”

Tracy was regarding him suspiciously; she stepped back from him, unsure of this odd, new sensation. It felt like she was longer sure who he was…or even what he was…but she told herself that was ridiculous.

Bill turned and walked over to one of the patio chairs and mumbled something about being hungry and needing sleep, but he was also rattling on about how he was afraid to sleep and for a moment Tracy thought he was descending into madness. Then he turned to her. “Is there a room service menu in there?”

“Yes. I’ll go get it…” Tracy said, eyeing him nervously.

As Tracy left the patio he turned to Claire. “Do you know what’s going to happen?”

She shook her head. “We’re safe here, for now. I can’t see anything beyond that, Bill. It’s too dark here.” She looked away, unsettled as she looked at the city and the waters of the Hudson River. “Where’s Argos right now?”

“Rhode Island, just south of Providence.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

He nodded and quickly said “Yeah” just as Tracy came out with the the room service menu. 

He was in luck. They had Eggs Benedict.

+++++

He ate first, then showered and put on fresh clothes, yet the feeling of oppressive darkness was growing by the minute. It felt like an all-encompassing evil had gathered and was spreading everywhere he looked. Without thinking he packed his suitcase as the feeling grew, then he went back out onto the terrace to find Tracy. 

Claire was out there with Evelyn, but now Evelyn was shaking like a leaf.

He walked up to her but Claire stopped him.

“She’s like you were, Bill, once upon a time. She’s learning to see. She’s always been able to, she just didn’t know how to focus.”

Evie turned and looked at him, her eyes red-rimmed and tear-streaked. “Daddy? Do you feel it too?”

He nodded. “It’s almost here.” He went over to the wall once again and looked out over the river, at the city once again deep inside its very own perpetual motion machine, and right then he heard smoldering evil in the air.

It came on as a low whistling hum, almost like the high-pitched howl of jet engines at full thrust.

The American 767 shot by just a few hundred feet overhead and he instinctively ducked as the noise hit, then he turned and stood transfixed as the aircraft and all those terrified souls onboard flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. They were so close that the explosion very nearly knocked them all off their feet. Claire was visibly shaking now, Evelyn fell to the patio floor and started screaming as a long series of explosions rocked the city. Bill stood watching, his fists balling and releasing, contracting and extending as he watched the fuel-air combustion spread, and how glass and debris arced out from the two visible sides of the tower. 

Then Tracy came and held onto him. “Oh God…oh God…all those people…”

“It’s gotta be Bin Laden again,” Bill growled between gritted teeth as he watched black smoke pouring from the wound on the side of the building. “It’s just gotta be that fucking coward.”

Claire turned to her brother, and with her voice shaking she managed to say just two words: “Argos. Now,” before she fell back into one of the patio chairs and starting gasping for air. A few minutes later she stood and pointed at something low over New Jersey: “Bill…what is that?” she asked as the darkness came for them once again.

Everyone stood transfixed as a second 767 arced through the skies like an arrow before it penetrated the South Tower. More flaming debris rained down on Lower Manhattan, darker gouts of black, sooty smoke poured out of the second strike and suddenly it seemed that the only sounds coming from the island were frantic sirens and waves of endless screams.

“Everyone grab a bag and head for the elevators. I’m going for the car and I’ll pull up in front…” He stopped at the front desk and settled his account, then followed his family out into the chaos.

The streets were full of running men and women, most dressed for another day at the office. Now most everyone was covered with the tattered remnants of fluttering debris, some had visible wounds on their faces, everyone was running and stumbling away from the towers, panic in their eyes as they searched for help. Firetrucks approached, their wailing sirens and blaring honks adding to the pandemonium, yet everywhere he looked it seemed that no one knew what to do. 

He made it to the parking garage and found no attendant on-duty and the barricade raised; he made his way to the car and drove to the hotel’s lobby entrance. Everyone piled into the Lincoln in a blind rush. More sirens, more ambulances arriving on scene now, cops everywhere trying to get some kind of perimeter established. Bill turned against traffic on an almost empty one way street and then turned away from the carnage, taking 6^th Avenue north and away from The Battery. Once in the Queens-Midtown Tunnel he was on 495, then the 278 to the 95 and he was out of the city heading to Argos.

+++++

Some segments of the aviation community recovered after the events of 9/11 faster than others, but generally speaking air travel collapsed afterwards. For a while fuel prices soared and international travel collapsed, none of which impacted operations at Orbital Sciences. Tennyson was working both sides of the fence by then, spending more than 90 percent of his time working engineering problems  related to Pegasus launches, the rest of his time supervising the maintenance operations of the TriStar and maintaining current with his training.

He had developed a reputation for being one of the better L-1011 training captains in the country, though by the early 2000s TriStar operators were dwindling as airframes aged-out and were replaced by more economical new aircraft. The L-10, as the community referred to the TriStar, was also one of the last commercial airliners whose cockpit was full of so-called “steam gauges,” or round instruments with mechanical internal workings. Newer aircraft operating systems were utilizing GPS waypoints to navigate in 3-D space, while aircraft such as the TriStar, older DC-10s and early 737 models all still utilized older technology, and in the case of the 737 many were still operating with only radio-based aids to navigation, which had seen only modest, incremental improvements since the second world war. The TriStar was now one of the last commercial aircraft in service that was equipped to handle a full Category III Autoland – or – to be able to shoot an NDB, on Non-Directional-Beacon approach, which, having been developed when air mail was flown in bi-planes, remained one of the most primitive types of foul weather approaches still in relatively common usage.

As the events of 9/11 gave way to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and with the subsequent activation of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, civilian airlines were increasingly called upon to move troops from the United States to staging areas in the Azores, Italy, and Turkey. Many of there airlines were charter carriers or air cargo operators, and more than a few of the CRAF fleet was made up of L-1011 TriStars, but because fewer mainline carriers still used this aircraft there simply weren’t enough line pilots to meet the immediate need.

Bill Tennyson was still years away from the mandatory retirement age and because he was so well known within the tight-knit TriStar community it wasn’t long before someone approached him about flying a small number of flights. Many of the TriStars in use were ex-TWA aircraft and so familiarity wasn’t really an issue, although different carriers maintain different FSMs, or Flight Standards Manuals, to spell out corporate specific procedures, but Tennyson would be flying with line pilots, not taking their place, and besides, he was in fact still a fully rated instructor on the L-1011.

Which was how he came to be in the front office of several old TWA TriStars, aircraft he’d last flown when Bill Clinton was in office, even before Monica Lewinsky came on the scene. He’d be at Pope Army Airfield one day, then maybe a week later at MCAS New River, picking up a couple hundred soldiers or marines, carrying them to their overseas staging area, and sometimes bringing troops home. Every now and then, though rarely, he carried special forces teams and their support staff all the way to Saudi Arabia, and a few times even farther east. By that point his world had been reduced to series of number strings, GPS coordinates and runway lengths, automated balanced field length calculations based on anticipated density altitudes. His mind once again consumed by fuel load versus burn and reserves on approach.

And these things kept him from thinking about Doris as much as he had. Wasn’t it bad enough to lose your sister like he had? Had Ann really needed to drag his daughter down that same path? Had her hatred of their father led her to destroy everything their parents created? 

Yes, he had to admit that maybe it had, but why had she never been able to account for her own actions? Was that truly the nature of her dis-ease? Her inability to see herself as she truly was? Or, he wondered, were people generally incapable of such self-analysis?

He remembered his family’s crazy drive from Manhattan just after the towers were struck. Traffic was insane, and he’d come to think that was the best and only way to describe the way people had acted. Supreme self importance, like where such people were headed was the only thing that mattered to them now, and everyone simply needed to get out of their way. Yet why had traffic on Interstate-95 seemed like the epicenter of all that insanity? People stuck in traffic pulling out their hair, banging their fists on their car’s steering wheels, abject anger everywhere he looked. He’d found himself wondering what these same people would be like if the air raid sirens of an imminent atomic attack sounded? How different would they be than the people of Hiroshima that his father had seen and photographed that August morning?

The price of gas had doubled in the first few hours after the aircraft hit the towers, then staples on grocery store shelves had disappeared, and soon everyone he encountered seemed personally stricken by the attacks – but as far as he could tell no one he met had actually been near the towers, and not one was injured. No, what he had witnessed was mass hysteria. Truckers in Arizona running Arabic looking drivers off the road, in one case killing a man in bare-fisted rage. One group of men in Mississippi on the evening news had been screaming into the camera that they wanted to find and kill as many ‘Ragheads’ as they could, but why? Why so much hate? Why was no one taking the time to ask why had this happened?

Where, he wondered, was the dividing line between mass hysteria and mass psychosis.

It was obvious to him that a handful of Islamic fundamentalists had embraced a kind of hysteria, but what if they had indeed become functionally insane? Could that insanity spread to an entire country, or within the adherents to religious community? If so, what would keep that from spreading? Anywhere? Everywhere?

Once everyone was safely on Argos all those things had simply seemed like something remote and far away, like something he’d left behind. Even as overcrowded as they were on the boat, Tracy had plotted their course to Block Island, to the Great Salt Pond again, and they stayed safely at anchor there, going into the little village to grab a cheeseburger a couple of times but otherwise just remaining away from their fellow man. Claire had snagged a room at one of the B&Bs and everyone showered, but then things died down, the insanity passed, and so they’d returned to the marina. 

He called Amex again and they’d hopped on the Acela and returned to New York to take care of Ann’s affairs, and to get Doris packed up. He arranged for a funeral home to pick up Ann’s cremated remains and the family had decided he needed to find her papers to figure out what she’d wanted done with them. With a file folder full of notarized death certificates he’d visited her office, then three banks before finding the one box with her papers safely filed away in a safety deposit box. He found nothing, no will, no directives of any kind, just a bunch of small black books in dated envelopes. 

Sitting in the secure room inside the bank he read through them, growing more concerned with each entry he read. These were, he soon realized, diaries of all her depravities. She’d named names, too. Famous names, important people. She’d documented dates and venues, too. She’d even diagramed the human sacrifices she’d supposedly witnessed, and the more he read the more convinced he grew that these were the scribblings of a lunatic. Still, there was enough information in these books to end more than a few high-profile political careers, so he did what he thought best. He put them back in their envelopes and these he put in his briefcase, and after he’d consolidated all her accounts into one, he took all the information he’d uncovered to his own lawyer in Boston.

“Nolan, I’d like you to read through these right now, because I need some advice.”

“Bill, it will take me a few hours to read all this. Two at least? You sure I need to do this?”

Tennyson nodded. “You’ll understand after a few pages.”

So Bill sat in his lawyer’s office, watching the man’s reactions as he turned page after page of Ann’s telling of her activities, a couple of times reaching for a bottle of antacid tablets, chomping them down like peanuts, all the while taking notes. Three hours later the attorney had looked up and nodded. His hands were shaking.

“You say she was murdered? In midtown?”

Bill nodded.

“My advice is this. Let me burn this material. All of it. If you turn this over to law enforcement there’s no telling where this information will end up, but I’d assume the people listed in here will assume you’ve read it and that you are therefore a threat to them. They might do nothing, or they might arrange for you to get audited by the IRS every year until you die. They might kill someone else in your family. Or you. My point is there’s absolutely no telling what such people might do, really, but in your position I’d assume the worst.”

He nodded. “I assumed as much.”

“Do you have an offramp?”

“A what?”

“If the worst happens, what would you do?”

He shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“Good way to get killed, Bill. You, and maybe your family, too. What you need is an offramp. A way to disappear in a moments notice. Without leaving a trace, by the way.”

“I take it you do? Have an offramp, I mean?”

Nolan smiled. “Several,” the man smiled as he steepled his fingers mischievously.

“Could you set one up for me?”

Nolan shook his head. “That defeats the purpose, Bill. No one, I repeat no one should know any of these details. I can give you guidelines, but the specifics will be up to you, and it will require some legwork.”

“How’d you learn about this stuff, Nolan? I mean, there’s not some kind of class in law school on this stuff, is there?”

His lawyer shook his head. “No, there isn’t.” 

“Do I even want to know?” Bill asked reluctantly. Then Bill remembered Nolan had ‘worked for the government’ once. In some kind of law enforcement that worked overseas a lot.

“No, you don’t.”

“Okay. Well then, burn it. Burn all of that goddamn’d stuff.”

Of course, Bill had made photocopies of everything. Just in case.

+++++

“I’m so tired of this new schedule I can’t even think straight anymore,” Tracy sighed. Instead of retiring, and instead of taking the teaching position at the American flight attendant’s training academy, she’d opted to continue flying. As her seniority had transferred, thanks to her union contract, she’d managed to remain based in Boston and had the status to bid on the Logan to Charles De Gaulle run, because she simply loved Paris. Over the years she had learned the language and so she often helped younger FAs get around the city. She and Bill had taken frequent breaks there, often just spur of the moment getaways when he was still with TWA, and she could still put those short-notice vacations together. Two hours after he left Nolan’s office, he asked her to do just that. And that was where they were this morning, walking along the Seine looking across the water at the intricate, 13^th-century traceries on Sainte Chapelle’s lone gothic spire.

“What are your retirement options at work?” he asked his wife.

“Depends,” she retorted. “How much longer are you going to work?”

He looked down at the sidewalk, reluctant to open this can of worms again. Ever since 9/11 she’d been ready to cut loose and sail away, yet something had been stopping him. Something beyond the lingering doubt of becoming a full-time liveaboard sailor. Because, his thinking went…where would we go? What would they do once they got there? And why? Why slog it out on a boat for weeks at a time when they could literally go anywhere in the world, and be there in hours, not weeks.

But that argument meant nothing to her, and as their situation had changed he doubted the wisdom of staying in Boston. But why take off on a boat? Would they be safer?

The journey meant more than the destination, she always said. The sense of accomplishment, she maintained, would become the real reason for taking these trips on Argos.

He’d remained dubious. But not so much right now.

Still, he was not sure of himself where sailing was concerned.

Because, for one, he loved his half hour showers in the morning, after his five mile run. He’d been running since high school and became something of an addict at Annapolis – where running was the norm – and he could still grind out five miles in under 40 minutes if he had to. Second, he enjoyed sailing…on clear days with light winds. They’d been caught out in a minor storm before, making the trip from Nantucket back to the marina when a sudden storm hit, and he didn’t like it out there under those conditions. Tracy, on the other hand, loved it. Loved it! While Argos could take nasty weather with ease, the feeling of being so exposed bothered him.

And taking a long trip meant cutting ties to home. Being out of communication range. Being…alone. And while Tracy almost seemed to long for solitude, he liked the camaraderie of the cockpit or the engineering teams he’d recently been assigned to work with.

But then there was the dream. That dream. The island. The palms, Tracy in the Zodiac rushing out to Argos. The other woman, the stranger. And then there was that pink creature, always there, always studying him. And Claire. She wasn’t talking about it these days, but she was concealing something big. From him. And that really bugged him.

He’d woken in a sweat that morning only to find white sand in the bed…sand from his feet. He’d never had a problem at this hotel before, the he realized that his sweat smelled like sunscreen.  But he hadn’t used sunscreen since last summer, in Maine. And then after he’d looked in the mirror he’d found his face red from recent exposure to a lot of sunlight. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Because when he was standing there, looking at himself in the mirror over the basin in the hotel bathroom, Tracy came in and she was absolutely sunburned. As in: to a crisp. And it was January. In Paris. And then they’d stared at one another in that little mirror almost in a state of shock…

“I was having a dream,” he began. “We were anchored off some island and it felt like, oh, I don’t know, maybe somewhere in the tropics…”

“And you had just slumped over in the cockpit, you are on Argos…”

“What?” he cried. “Are you saying you had the same dream?”

She nodded. “You’re on Argos and Claire and I are walking back from the village with fresh bread…”

“You can’t mean it. We can’t be having the same dream?”

She nodded, the wonder of the moment almost overwhelming. “We’re on Argos,” she sighed. “Claire and Evelyn are on Moonlight…”

“Moonlight? What the hell is…”

“Claire’s sailboat. Just like ours, but with…”

“…a white hull?” he asked.

“That’s right. A Hinckley, a 42 like ours.”

He snorted derisively. “Claire? On a sailboat? Man, that’s some kind of dream…”

“How long have you been having it?” she asked. “The dream, I mean?”

He shrugged, shook his head. “I can’t remember the first time, but it was a while ago…”

“How often?”

“Oh, man, I can’t…well, maybe once a month, maybe more…”

“It started a year ago,” Tracy said. “Sometimes once a week. It’s funny, Bill, because at first I thought it was something like repressed desire coming out in that dream…”

They usually had breakfast across from their hotel, the Hotel Saint-Louis en L’Isle, a little place located on the Île Saint-Louis, at a small crêperie, then they took their usual walk across the Pont Saint Louis to the walkway along the south side of the cathedral, across the Pont au Double to the old Shakespeare & Company Bookstore. Coffee was next, then when the weather cooperated, find a bench in the Square René Viviani before continuing along the Quai Saint-Michel to the Pont Saint-Michel, over to walk through Sainte Chapelle before returning to the hotel for some intramural sports between the sheets.

But today had been different.

The weather had been ferociously uncooperative, the north wind creating whitecaps and spume on the Seine, and after the revelation about the shared dream they’d been having, they stopped by the bookstore and looked for anything by Freud or Jung about interpreting dreams, then beat a hasty retreat back to the hotel. 

Down to the basement they went, to the barrel-vaulted restaurant for coffee and croissant, then up to one of the sitting rooms off the lobby to talk.

“We love it here,” he finally said, “so why don’t we buy a little place here on the island and retire?”

She crossed her arms and her lower lip jutted out a bit. “If that’s what you want, then by all means. I hope you enjoy your dotage here.”

He nodded, quietly accepting this defeat. “So, you have an itinerary all mapped out in your head, I take it?” he asked.

The lip retracted a little, her arms opened to accept his surrender. “I want to do the coconut run,” she said defiantly, daring him to object.

“You mean Tahiti? The South Pacific?”

“I do, yes.”

“You wouldn’t be content with, say, Bermuda for a week or two?”

She shook her head.

“What’s with Claire and the boat…in the dream?”

“I don’t know. Have you asked her?”

“Hell no. She’d laugh in my face if I told her we were having the same dream, let alone…”

“May I make a suggestion?”

He hesitated, his brow furrowed as he wondered where her next line of attack would carry them. “Sure. I guess,” he sighed, resigned to the inevitable.

“Why don’t you call her and ask?”

“How’d I know you were going to say just that?”

“Are you getting clairvoyant as you ripen?” she asked, still relishing the fact that she was almost fifteen years younger than he, and not at all hesitant to rub his nose in it – when or if necessary.

“Ripen?” he sighed. “You aren’t exactly a spring chicken, you know?”

“And that’s my point, Bill. We wait ten more years and will we, will you even be able to make a trip like this?”

“I can’t answer that, Tracy. No one can.”

“And that’s precisely my point, Bill. We can, right now. You and I. Together. The trip of a lifetime. Together.”

“You mean…leave now?”

“In late April.”

“Full time, I take it?”

She nodded. “A clean break,” she added, perhaps more brightly than necessary.

A woman from the reception desk approached their table, and Bill looked up expectantly.

“Dr Tennyson?” the woman said.

“Yes?”

She handed him a note as she spoke. “The caller said that it was most urgent that you return their call,” then she left them in perplexed silence while Bill opened the envelope and skimmed the contents of the message.

“Nolan,” he said.

“Your lawyer?”

He nodded as he pulled out his Motorola. “No signal here. I’ll go up to the room.”

“Let’s both go. I need to freshen up.”

Their room was on the top floor and had a small terrace that looked out over Notre Dame, and as it also had excellent cell phone reception he looked at his watch and nodded, then dialed the number on the message.

“Bill? That you?”

“Nolan, yes, I just got your message.”

“Whew, thank God.”

“Nolan, what’s wrong?”

“Bill, I don’t know how to…but…well…Doris is, well, she’s dead. Apparent suicide, but the detective I just spoke to said it looks staged, like a professional hit…”

Tennyson sat on the edge of the bed, then slid to the floor, his world suddenly spinning out of control, everything he’d wanted out of life now slipping from his grasp. Tracy came running out of the bathroom and found his telephone on the carpet, so she grabbed it…

“Hello? Nolan? This is Tracy, what’s happened?”

So the attorney recounted what he knew so far, what the police had deduced in the earliest stages of their investigation. Then he added: “Look, Tracy, I’m not at all sure that you two are safe here. Whoever did this defeated the security system in your place, and that took planning and resources. Professional level resources, if you get my drift.”

“Nolan, what are you saying?”

“Someone knew where the safe in the basement was located. They made it in, defeated the security mechanisms to get to it, then closed it. Do you know if, well, ask Bill if he kept a copy of Ann’s diaries, would you? Right now, please.”

She did. “Nolan, he says he didn’t. Why? What was in them?”

“He hasn’t told you?”

“No. Not one word.”

“Bill still has a sister, correct?”

“Yes? Why?”

“Well, it’s not inconceivable that she could be in some danger, as well…”

Tracy listened, asked if there was anything else they needed to know…

“Tell Bill now’s the time to take that offramp. He’ll understand, Tracy.”

“Okay, Nolan. I’ll tell him. Thanks.”

She rang off then dialed Claire’s number from memory; when Evelyn answered she spoke forcefully without going through the niceties: “I need to speak with Claire,” Tracy told her daughter, “right now.”

Evelyn knew that tone of voice and ran off to get her aunt.

“Tracy? What’s happened?”

She told her. Everything Nolan had just told her, including the possibility of further danger.

Claire listened, and despite the heartache she knew now was not the time to give in to despair. “Where’s William?” she asked. 

“On the floor. Basically, I think he’s gone catatonic on me, Claire.”

“Put the phone up to his ear, would you?”

Tracy could hear the sudden stream of invective swearing coming from Claire’s end from two feet away, and Bill’s eyes flickered and came back to life. Suddenly he grabbed the phone from his wife and brought it up to his face.

“Claire, are you still having the dream?”

“Yes,” she said. “Why?”

“Tracy is too.”

“Bill, so is Evelyn.”

“Oh for pity’s sake, you’ve got to be kidding me! Claire…what’s going on?”

He could hear the hesitation in Claire’s voice as she spoke her next few words. “Bill, have they been in contact with you?”

“Who?”

“Bill, we don’t have time for this right now…”

He sighed. “Yeah Claire, the tall one is in the dream.”

“The pink?”

“Yeah.”

“Any others?”

“No. Just her.”

“Ask Tracy is she’s seen anything unusual, like some kind of pink creature…”

He did. She had not.

“Bill, has she ever tried to say anything to you?”

“No, bot in a long time. Now she just looks at me like she always has, like she’s watching my reactions to something. Wait a second…no, that’s not right. One time she asked if I was ready, ready for death, then I woke up…”

“Where you at the island?”

“The island? Hell, it was an island, but what do you mean by ‘the’ island?”

“If we’re having the same dream it’s likely an implanted memory, Bill. I have to assume it’s the same for all of us, because, well, nothing else makes sense…”

“Claire, nothing about any of this makes sense…but what I want to know is what are you doing on a boat? You’ve never even had a rubber duck in a bathtub, let alone a…”

“Moonlight, right?” Claire asked. “White hull, red stripe just above the waterline? Is that in your dream?”

“Yup. She’s a Hinckley Sou’wester 42, like Argos. And I mean just like Argos except for the hull color.”

“Bill, uh, Evie and I were at a friend’s birthday in Sausalito last weekend at a place on the water. We went out to look at boats before we drove home and there was a sailboat there called Moonlight. It looked just like yours.”

“That sounds about right.”

“Bill, she was for sale.”

“Look, I’ve got a bigger problem right now. My lawyer thinks it might be dangerous for us in Boston, but we’ve got to go back there for, well, you know…”

“I agree.”

“I don’t know what to do, Claire…”

“Bill, I’m so sorry this had to spill over onto your family. That Ann had to spill over on you like this again, but you have to take care of Tracy now. But I agree, something still feels wrong, and if we get together for a funeral that might just make it easy for whoever is doing this. You do what you have to do right now and I’ll take care of Evie until we can meet up.”

He paused while he thought of an idea, then he just spit it out: “Claire, do you think she’d help us?”

“The pink? Wow, Bill, you go from not wanting to have anything to do with them to full-blown dependence. You sure you want to go down that path?”

“No. Just asking.”

“Look, Bill, I don’t think they want to get involved, but then again I’m not sure why they singled you and me out in the first place, but I do know we’re not alone. There are others, Bill. Like us. I think they’re in contact with a few of them here in the city.”

“It was just a thought, Claire.” 

“Do you have a plan?”

“No. I have an offramp.” 

She did not know what that was, so he explained it to her, in great detail.”

+++++

Just before two in the morning, StarGazer, Orbital Science’s L-1011, settled onto final preparing to land at the old air force base in Westhampton, New York. Runway 2-4 at the airport was over 9,000 feet long and so more than long enough to handle the TriStar, but after touchdown the jet taxied to the ramp and barely stopped before it turned and made for the runway again, pausing briefly to run-up the engines before taking off again. Total time on the ground: less than 5 minutes. No one, not even the people in the control tower, saw the two people exit via the lower level airstairs, and no one saw them walk over to a small private jet parked well away from any lights. The Cessna Citation took off ten minutes after StarGazer and turned northeast towards Block Island, Rhode Island. By five that morning Bill and Tracy were onboard Argos; they left their mooring in the pond and cleared the island by 0530; they plotted their course, 145 degrees true, and calculated their distance, 615 nautical miles, to the entrance buoy off St George’s, Bermuda and raised a double-reefed main and a storm staysail, proceeding into the North Atlantic. It was, of course, still January, and the seas off the New England coast were raging.

Tracy was at last fully in her element, howling with glee as Argos slammed into 12 foot seas, the Hinckley cutting through them like a scalpel. Bill, however, spent the first two days hunched over the lee rail, blowing beets out his nose and cursing the day he’d met his wife. On day three and now deep within a warm eddy in the Gulf Stream, the seas fell into a dead calm and life on Argos calmed down a bit. Bill managed to hold down some broth. A few hours later it was ramen in more broth. Tracy was exhausted and fell into the berth in the aft cabin and slept like the dead, only to be jolted awake when Bill’s watch ended, when the ship’s bell signaled the change of watch. He’d managed to cook bacon and eggs for lunch and held them down, and once he started eating and sleeping regularly he started to regain his strength.

With the calm seas they began to see more marine life. Dolphins swam in their bow wave and in their gurgling wake, flying fish landed with a slap on the deck and Bill tried to pick them up and toss them back into the sea before they died. 

And early one morning the orca appeared.

But it wasn’t just some random orca, it was the orca from Southwest Harbor, the same big male. He looked at it now and thought it had to be at least twenty five feet long, maybe more, and his girth was astonishing, and he’d watched it swimming alongside Argos for at least an hour and it soon felt like the orca was some kind of sentinel, like he was watching over them. 

‘Or is it just me?’ 

What was this connection? Where had it come from?

On the fifth day out they called Bermuda Radio and checked in for clearance to the harbor at St Georges; on Day 6 they refueled and reprovisioned and immediately took off for the Turks and Caicos, and almost immediately the orca took up his station a few hundred feet aft. 

They took on more fuel at West Turk, and Bill loaded more fresh seafood aboard before casting off the next day for the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti. Rather than stop in Jamaica, Tracy had wanted to sail directly to Panama while Bill had wanted to stop in the Caymans to do some banking – and that took precedence. He called a Panama Canal agent from there, prepared the way for their passage through the canal, and he enjoyed a few days of long, blissful showers before heading south again.

And once again, when they were back in deep water, the orca reappeared. Always hanging back, always keeping a watchful eye on Argos. Or was it watching him?

After their arrival in Colon, they checked in with the agent and got their transit papers. Even so, they had to wait three days in an insect infested marina west of town until their scheduled reporting time and place, whence they were boarded by a pilot who scowled in frustration when he saw the size of the boat he was in charge of for his next passage through the canal. Tracy did her best to feed him well and late on the second day they dropped him off. The pilot left and Argos made for the next marina, this one on the Pacific. More fuel, two long trips in rental cars to stock up at local grocery stores. Two calls made, one to Claire.

Fully provisioned again, this would be their longest crossing yet, 3600 miles from Panama City, Panama to Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands. Bill had expected more of the same, more endless storms and sleepless nights, but the reality of this next passage soon became one of long, languid days spent under equatorial sunlight, finding cool shade and reading a book, or working down below in the early morning, baking bread without heating up the cabin too much. Bill tried to catch fish a few times, only managing to snag a blue shark on his first attempt, and that poor creature convinced them both that it did not want to be eaten – before thrashing the side of the hull and swimming off in anger. Dark, fast moving squall lines, rain-streaked and fierce, came on hard and disappeared as quickly, rarely kicking up waves or swell, and while each storm forced them to reduce sail, the cool rain felt nice. A few times the rain fell just long enough to wash their hair and to quickly rinse away the soap, yet ten minutes later the sun would come out again, ready to roast them dry. 

And all the while the orca swam along, quietly on guard.

One night in light air Bill saw the lights of an airliner high overhead and he just stared longingly at the sight until the blinking red anti-collision lights disappeared over the far horizon, leaving him to grumpily shake his head in disgust – when he dryly noted their current speed was topping out at a blistering 4.2 knots. Then a few hours later and without warning, they had to change course in the middle of the night to avoid being run down by a huge cargo ship – and whose crews did not respond to any calls on the VHF radio. The next morning another tanker passed by so close that Bill could plainly see that not a soul was manning the bridge – it was simply plowing its way across the open ocean on autopilot. Then, as they entered and sailed across one of the main shipping lanes between North America and New Zealand, they dodged shipping containers that dotted the seas all around like roadside litter. On a whim, Bill lowered sail as they approached one of the steel behemoths, a blue container streaked with rust, and as the seas were calm he hopped aboard and just managed to open an inspection port. When he used a flashlight on the cargo within he saw hundreds of boxes of high priced audio speakers, the contents of the container probably worth hundreds of thousand of dollars, and it was floating out there in the middle of the Pacific, just another container abandoned and waiting for rust to claim it. One afternoon they counted more than forty containers, little triangular bergs jutting from the surface on the mirror calm seas. What would happen, he asked Tracy, if they were under full sail in a stiff breeze in the middle of the night – and they hit one doing eight knots? Easy answer, that: they’d get to try out their new life raft. 

Bill tried to adjust the radar to pick them up but the radar targets were just too small to see unless the seas were dead calm and they kept the radar range at an eighth of a mile. Maybe, he wondered, some kind of sonar would work, but both decided they needed the radar set to 24 miles to spot tankers and cargo ships, as these were the greater danger. 

Or were they?

Yet all the while the orca remained on station, as always just a few hundred feet behind Argos. When the seas were calm his glistening black dorsal fin would pop up and scythe along before disappearing again, and a few minutes later it would reappear. In rough seas he was harder to spot and Bill had to really concentrate, but no, on the crest of a wave or deep in a trough that dorsal fin would pop up, like a metronome beating to a rhythm all its own.

Hiva Oa appeared when and where it was supposed to, a pale green mound hovering above the thermals in the distance, and that morning a small green and yellow bird visited them, perching on the dodger above the companionway, looking nervously about while it rested. Bill filled a cup with fresh water and set out some sunflower seeds and the little guy sat for a quick snack then off it went. As if on cue a pod of dolphins appeared and surfed on Argos’ bow wave, Tracy leaning over and slapping the hull just above the curling water, hoping to get one of them to come close. They surfed alongside for a few minutes and then were as quickly gone. Another sailboat appeared on the horizon, apparently leaving the island and headed west, and the sails soon disappeared behind an approaching squall. Tracy called on the radio to check in and got permission to approach the island, but there was no fanfare, no greetings by flower carrying natives.

Later that afternoon they anchored off the village of Atone in forty feet of clear green water; Tracy hoisted their amber Q flag, or Quarantine flag, to indicate their’s was the vessel that needed to be checked by officials. Once cleared-in, they spent the next two days taking on water and always more fuel, and, finally, more fresh fruit and seafood, then they set out for Rangiroa in the Tuamotus Island Group.

Bill had learned that planning wasn’t about creating rigid schedules and sticking to them, instead it is about creating options. Rigid schedules tied you to a route, to another schedule, and such schedules compromised the very reason for cruising. When you’re out there and see something new, something interesting, or if you meet people worth getting to know better, schedules destroy such opportunities. Good planning, on the other hand, makes it possible to have the supplies and resources on hand to explore unforeseen options as they appear, so if he thought the next leg of the journey might take 20 days, he provisioned for 60.

Yet timing is everything on a sailboat, especially when approaching the entrances to harbors, but this became even more critical when attempting to enter the very narrow pass they found off the village of Avatoru, at Rangiroa Atoll. Avatoru is easiest navigable channel into the atoll’s central lagoon, and at its widest it’s about 200 yards and over a hundred feet deep in the center of the channel, but the way ahead narrowed considerably as Argos approached Motu Tara, an islet in the dead center of the pass. Depth hadn’t been an issue but as they approached Motu Tara the depth quickly shoaled to ten feet, then eight. Tracy began a slow turn to port, or to their left, and as they’d entered the pass when the tides were turning, water was pushing Argos along, accelerating as it was constricted in the narrowing inlet. Their speed picked up rapidly and Argos teetered on the edge of uncontrollability, but just as suddenly they were through, spit out into the deeper waters of the lagoon off the village.

But nothing had prepared them for what they found.

The lagoon at Rangiroa is immense, and at 45 x 15 miles it is larger than the main island of Tahiti, and yet the waters are of wildly varying depth. The waters are, however, crystal clear and of a perfect depth for scuba divers of all abilities. Sea life abounds in the relatively shallow waters bear the atolls coral lined shores, yet depths up to 115 feet are not uncommon just a few hundred feet from the village. And so the orca following Argos slipped in unnoticed.

Scuba divers in big Zodiacs roared by, heading for the pass at the turn of the tide so the divers could get up close and personal with the white tip reef sharks that cruised the waters off the inlet, and as Tracy went up to the bow to drop anchor she waved at the divers as they passed. After Bill backed down to set the anchor he joined her forward, looking at the village and the water beneath Argos.

“It’s like we’re in a swimming pool,” she sighed as she scanned the shoreline about 50 yards away.“And there’s supposed to be a market not far from the dingy landing.”

“I could care less” he growled sourly. “I want a hotel room that doesn’t move every time a wave hits, and a shower with an endless supply of hot water. Beyond that, I really don’t give a flying fuck what else is here…”

“There’s also a place to get a massage,” she snickered.

“Now I could get behind some of that,” he grinned. “Where?”

“Maybe they do ‘happy ending,’ Bill?”

“That’s your job, kiddo.”

“Not with this sunburn, bucko.”

“Okay. One massage with happy ending, here I come.”

“You are awful.”

+++++

They told officials in the village that they planned to stay a few days, but they ended up staying several months. Bill found an interesting hotel near the airport that fronted the lagoon, complete with thatched roof bungalows right on the water. They moved Argos so she lay at anchor within easy swimming distance, and he stayed there while Tracy flew to Papeete to visit a dermatologist and gynecologist. With little else to do he started taking scuba diving lessons while she was away, and when she returned they finished the class together. Soon they were going on shark dives off the pass, then spending hours on end snorkeling around the vast lagoon around Argos almost every day. 

And he swam with the orca as often as he could, though he took pains to keep that part of his life out of sight.

And to those who saw the couple perhaps the only thing that might have come to mind was that they were two middle aged Americans out enjoying the fruits of their labors. They appeared happy and seemingly without a care in the world, though of course such was not the case.

They were still on Bill’s offramp, slowly but surely disappearing from view. All the while looking for people who might be following them. Stalking them.

And yet at the same time, while all this had been happening, one other part of the plan was coming together far, far away.

Claire and Evelyn and, of all people, Tracy’s father Ted were at that time on Moonlight, the other Hinckley Sou’wester 42. Claire and Evelyn had sailed from Sausalito to Santa Barbara, California, then mentioned that they were on their way to San Diego and Baja, but they stopped at Avalon, the old casino village on Catalina Island, and Ted – now in his 70s – was waiting for them on the town dock – with his new girlfriend. Soon, with their duffels stowed, the four of them set out for Honolulu. 

This was something new for two of them, for Claire and Maria Cantrell, Ted’s friend. Evelyn was by now an experienced, and competent, sailor, while Ted was comfortable with boats and the sea, so Evelyn took Maria and Ted stuck with Claire when each pair stood watch. Evelyn was a good teacher when she was interested in the subject matter, and the crew of Moonlight soon grew comfortable with their new routines. Eighteen days later they arrived off Diamond Head.

With that leg out of the way, Claire and Ted managed the refueling and taking on water, while Evie and Maria did the grocery shopping. Once everything was stowed Moonlight set out for Rangiroa. 

Claire had scoffed at the idea when Bill told her the bare outlines of his plan, yet she had seen the logic behind it. Disappear for a few years, let things die down, then she could return to San Francisco, Ted to Naples, and Evelyn could set out on the boat for a life of her own. Things would blow over. Life would return to normal.

Yet Claire had been devastated by Doris’ murder, probably because she felt it had been preventable. Doris had been the weak link in the chain, the easy mark, and as Boston had been so close to New York, and the connections between the two cities so solid, the danger had never really gone away. Maybe Doris had realized how tenuous her situation really was, or maybe she finally just didn’t care, but she had exposed herself to the wrong people and had put all her family at risk. 

Or maybe Doris had been, in the end, too much like Ann. Within the confines of Claire’s worldview, evil had taken root in Doris, just as it had Ann, but that was because Claire looked at the world as equally divided between light and dark, or good and evil. And the truth was she always had. Bill had too, at least until he went to Annapolis, then he increasingly saw the world in more transactional terms. 

More relevant, Bill had increasingly felt like calling someone Evil was intellectually lazy. By calling someone innately evil you eliminated the possibility that things like upbringing made no difference. If someone was evil, well then…case closed! But it that was so, what about goodness? If some people were innately evil, didn’t follow that others might be innately good?  Or were good and evil simply constructs of the mind? Yet hadn’t he always thought Ann was evil. Who had taught her that smothering her baby brother was fun, or good? How had she developed the ability to seduce their father, when she was not even ten years old? Surely their mother hadn’t taught her that? By the time he had taken the required Intro to Psych at Annapolis, and so after he returned from Hanoi, Bill saw his sister Ann as a psychopath, as someone who thrived by exploiting the vulnerable, and so the best way to deal with her was to become invulnerable to her predations. How best to do that? Keep her at arm’s length, or, really, to stay as far away from her as possible. And yes, he’d had the good sense to keep his daughters away from Ann’s malign influences while they grew up.

Until he didn’t.

Until he’d let his guard down. First in Maine, then when Doris left home for NYU.

And Claire saw that capitulation as Bill’s greatest moral failure. His purpose, indeed, his duty as a father required that he protect his children while they were still learning their way, and he’d abdicated that responsibility when it mattered most, just when Doris was taking her last steps into adulthood. She’d never been married and never had children of her own, so she’d never considered that at some point parents simply have to let go. Failure to do so, in Bill’s mind, would lead his children to a life of dependence, either on him or on their mother.

And Claire had been so angry with him that she had at first screened out his latest rantings about taking some kind of Offramp. At least she did until she’d talked to Evelyn about what was now at stake.

It had been Evelyn’s idea to buy Summertime, the Sou’wester 42 in Sausalito, and to take the offramp her father was suggesting, but the idea to meet up with her parents in the middle of nowhere was Bill’s. Again, as she’d grown up on Argos sailing was not that big a deal to her, and because her father had taught her everything about Argos, maintaining a boat of her own did not present insurmountable challenges. And in time Claire had come to see the logic in this kind of escape, because just about any other manner of international travel left lengthy paper trails.

But then Ted called Claire when he couldn’t get in touch with his daughter, and he was worried now as he too had seen signs that people were following him around Naples, and on two occasions he had seen a strange boat cruising by outside his house – in the middle of the night. He was now more than concerned, so he’d called Claire. 

Soon it became a matter of coordinating the outlines of the offramp without giving too much away, which had meant Ted visiting Claire a couple of times to set up dates and times.

So one day Bill and Tracy were sitting in the cockpit of their Hinckley enjoying some fresh veggies from the market when a white hulled sister-ship sailed in through the pass and anchored off the village. Tracy had looked at Bill and both had simply smiled, even though Tracy heaved a sigh of relief. Now she had her family by her side so all was right with her world. 

After Claire raised the Q flag and customs cleared them, everyone went ashore – and the first thing Claire did was to get down on her knees and kiss the earth, vowing to never step foot on another boat as long as she lived. That lasted about an hour, and after dinner she gladly went back to Moonlight and fell into a deep sleep.

But so too did they all.

And once again the dream came for them, all of them but Ted. They had gathered on Argos the next morning to make plans for the day when Maria, Ted’s new girlfriend, claimed she’d had the weirdest dream during the night, and that she had seen strange things in that night. 

“Strange? How so?” Bill asked, but he already knew the answer.

“I was on the boat,” Maria said, pointing at Moonlight, “but it was anchored, well, not here, but it felt so real…so real…and…until this thing appeared. Like a pink fairy, but huge. And the face was off. Really different…”

Claire looked at her, then at Tracy. “You had it too, Tracy?”

Tracy nodded. “Yes. Bill slumping over, everyone rushing out to him…”

Ted suddenly looked upset as he coiled away from Claire and Tracy. “The same dream? Oh, come on! What kind of bullshit is this!”

Claire turned to Bill, then Evelyn. “You both had it again?” she asked.

And both nodded.

“I felt death last night, for the first time,” Bill sighed. “The Pink was sitting by my side again, asking if I was ready. And this time I didn’t try to run away from her question.”

“What happened to you, Dad?” Evelyn asked, now concerned because in her dream all she could see was her father slumping over.

“I was getting cold all over and then I was back in the cockpit falling towards the sea. The same two sailboats far below but getting closer as we fell to earth…”

“And then?” Tracy asked. Ted was looking at Bill as if he’d suddenly sprouted two heads.

“And then…nothing. Just the cold.”

Maria was shaking her head, trying to come to terms with what she was hearing. She was younger than Ted by almost 20 years, but when they met Ted said that ‘something inexplicable had clicked between them.’ He mentioned that he was going on a sailing trip with friends and out of the blue he’d asked her to come along. Ever the empath, Evelyn had accepted her with open arms, but Claire had regarded this stranger warily. They were, after all, trying to keep away from strangers.

Soon everyone had settled at the cockpit table and everyone was staring at the breakfast tacos Tracy had just made, not sure what to say next. “It felt so real, Dad,” Evie said, looking directly at her father, as if looking to him for reassurance. “I was watching you on the boat, which was normal enough, I guess, but then you were in a jet, back in one of those big things you used to fly…”

“I saw that too,” Maria said, shocked by the realization – because she had just met Bill the day before and was now dreaming of him? “You were out over the ocean but coming into land. At night. And I could see the lights of a large city ahead, far ahead in the distance. Then everyone was screaming…”

“You were falling,” Tracy sighed, looking at her husband, “falling towards the ocean. I could see two sailboats below, and the airplane was falling right towards them.”

Claire looked around and nodded, then she’d looked at Ted. “What about you, Ted? Anything?”

He shook his head as he added pineapple salsa to Tracy’s tacos. “I never dream,” he’s said, his voice flat, dull, emotionless, “so I can’t even relate to what y’all are talking about…”

“Never?” Bill asked, incredulous.

But Ted had just shrugged it off. “Maybe I was just wired differently at the factory,” he added ruefully.

“Bill?” his sister asked. “Did you see the boats, too?”

Bill shrugged. “I didn’t see anything, Claire. I just had a dream, remember?” he sighed.

“Uh-huh. What did she say to you?” Claire continued.

Bill had looked down and tried to hide the sudden revulsion he felt. “I guess so, yeah.”

Claire looked around the group, her eyes lingering on Maria as this new member of the group asked the next question. “What happens next?”

And everyone but Ted and Maria looked away, as if no one was willing to even look at Bill, who looked pained as the dream replayed in his mind. Falling, he was always falling, it was so cold. And who was in the two sailboats? Was he leading them all to their doom? Or had they been doomed by his fate? 

What had Freud said about falling dreams, Claire asked herself? Falling was the so-called manifest content of a dream, while the latent content, or the symbolic undertones of the dream, represented repressed feelings such as a loss of control or helplessness surrounding life events. Fear of failure, of feeling vulnerable. In other words, everything that everyone in the group had been feeling for months, really since they’d had to come to terms with Ann’s murder. Yet Bill, not Ann and not even Doris had become the locus of their feelings.

But why?

What was Bill to Maria but a stranger? Why had he come to personify their fears?

Then Maria spoke. “Who is that tall, pink creature?”

“Oh, God, I can’t take this anymore…” Bill sighed as he stood and walked forward to the bow. He swung out and hung onto the forestay, his feet on the bow but his body leaning far out over the water, and he was staring straight down into the turquoise water, of course, just as the orca swam by, perhaps ten feet beneath the surface. He watched it swim away, but then it circled back and returned to Argos, slowly turning on its side and coming to a stop directly under him.

“What do you want with me?” he whispered. “Why have you been following me?”

Images of stars filled his mind, vast fields of stars studded with pinkish nebulas.

“What are you telling me?”

More stars, then planets. 

“I don’t understand?”

The orca surfaced and cleared his lungs, still resting on its side, motionless but for the comings and goings of the water around him, his deep brown eye focused on the human.

And just then Bill dove off the bow into the water and everyone onboard ran to the lifelines and looked down at him. At Bill and an orca, face to face, side by side, eye to eye.

“What in God’s name…?” Ted sighed, stunned by the sight. “Isn’t that the same one we saw in Southwest Harbor? The markings around the eye sure look the same…?”

“Because it is,” Claire said, her voice tinged with a finality that suddenly felt very out of place.

“How many years ago was that? Almost ten?”

Bill looked like he was in a trance. So too, for that matter, did the orca. Only the differences in size seemed to matter right now, as Bill was absolutely puny compared to this massive animal. Bill’s head looked the size of a melon, while the orca’s was more like a small car; Bill looked naked and alone down there…

…but then the orca swam away, and Bill turned over on his back and simply lay there, afloat, his eyes unblinking, his body inert…

Evelyn and Tracy dove in together and swam to him while Claire went to the boarding ladder amidships and dropped it down along the hull. She and Ted waited there to help, never taking their eyes off Bill, and then helped pull him back up on deck.

And as the group worked they learned that Maria had been an RN, a registered nurse.

A nurse in an oncology center, taking care of patients receiving chemotherapy, at an infusion center. And that was where she had met Ted. Taking care of him while he received chemo.

For a cancer he had largely kept to himself. Especially from his daughter.

And as Tracy received this news, and as she tried to process her father’s mortality, she was covering Bill with a beach towel as echos of his mortality echoed through her mind. Getting his clothes off and drying his skin, the skin she had held onto and loved half her life, she realized she had always assumed Bill would always be there. No his skin felt precious and infinitely fragile, like something to be cherished – cherished while it was still here. When she looked at her father in minute later she spotted the signs she had, perhaps, willfully suppressed. His skin on his fingers now almost hard, his eyes sparkling, yet haunted. 

Ignoring Tracy, Maria professionally assessed Bill, at one point holding an eye wide open to check his pupils, yet what she saw made her jump back and scream.

“Look at him!” she cried as she fell into Ted’s arms. “Look in his eyes!” she hissed as she turned away from the sight.

Claire went to her brother’s face and sat beside him, then she looked down. This was something new, she thought, but not totally unexpected. After living with the pinks shaping her life she was used to the unexpected.

But his eyes were full of stars, endless vistas of countless stars, so Claire turned to the orca swimming nearby and went to the rail, reaching down to it, hoping to make contact.

Stars soon filled her eyes too, then the pink creature appeared for a moment and Claire understood that things were coming to an end. Their lives, their deaths, all of it, everything, everywhere. Coming to an end.

How long do we have? she asked.

But the pink creature had already disappeared, and even now the orca was making for the open ocean beyond the pass. She watched it go feeling almost bereft and forlorn, and, for the first time in her life, utterly alone.

+++++

Yet in a way Bill and Tracy had come full circle, even though it had taken them 25 years to get back to where this dream really began. Walking along the boardwalk between the little Papeete Marina and the Place Jacques Chirac, Bill and Tracy stood amongst a group of people gathered there to watch the setting sun, the orange orb silhouetting the jagged spires on Mo’orea, the sky an impossible layering of purples and lavenders above the pink horizon. Lightning flickered in distant clouds somewhere to the north, and the warm breeze caressing them almost tasted of rain.

Tracy had cancer. That was the short version. The longer, more complicated version of her story was that her immediate treatment involved surgery, but then a rather complex regimen of chemotherapy. This might last three months but could possibly continue up to six months, yet the odds were better than ninety percent that her disease would be permanently cured. If, on the other hand, she was in that last ten percent group and the disease returned after the first round of chemo…well, this was something neither wanted to talk about. “PMA, Bill. Gotta keep smiling, even when it hurts!” Tracy kept saying. “Positive Mental Attitude,” she’d add, for emphasis. “Anyone could die,” she liked to add, “but you really gotta want to live!”

But just now, watching her watch this sunset, Bill regarded the simple miracle of her.  The shape on her hands, the graceful nature of her smile. The blue color of her eyes, blue flecked with green and gold, the gold an echo of her hair, and as he looked at her he still felt humbled that she had said yes when he asked her out that first time. Back at JFK, right after clearing customs. How had he ever been so lucky? He reached up, caressed the side of her face. “I love you so much,” he sighed as she turned and looked into his eyes.

She nodded, trying to sound reassuring. “Don’t be afraid, Bill. I promise you, I’m not.”

He smiled. “If you’re not, Baby, then I’m not.”

They walked over to the Polyclinique Paofai early the next morning, listened as two oncologists  and a surgeon laid out Tracy’s treatment options, because in the end Tracy had decided to stay in Tahiti, and said he Bill understood, or at least he thought he did. Tahiti had become larger than life to Tracy, not merely a place or a destination; the islands had instead become a calling, a type of instinctual yearning, what he now knew was an end in and to themselves. Tracy possessed a yearning to explore, “to see more of this world than time affords the timid,” as she’d put it once, especially when she was on Bill’s case about putting off the journey. 

But that didn’t explain her desire to stay here for treatment. Even her oncologists were a little surprised by the decision, and after they left the clinic Bill decided to ask her why she felt so strongly about this place.

“Maybe we’re drawn to the places of our death, Bill. Did you ever think of that?”

“Drawn? To death? I mean, maybe – I’ve heard of people with a death wish, but…”

“Maybe I put that wrong,” she said, stopping him mid-sentence. “But no, well, maybe we’re drawn to the place we’d like to be when we pass…”

Bill nodded as he choked back a rising tide of bile. “I’d like to be in Delmonico’s, in New York, eating a Porterhouse. And I want to face-plant into a bowl of steaming creamed spinach.”

“Asshole.” At least she said that with a smile.

“Hey, I can hope, can’t I?”

“Seriously Bill, is food all you ever think about?”

“Depends on the time of day.” He looked at her as she shook her head and heaved forth a loud sigh, the exact same way she had when the kids got on her last good nerve. “Tracy, look, there was a lot of tension in that office…you could cut it with a knife…and I just wanted to…”

She nodded her understanding, held up a hand to stop him. “Okay, Captain America, I hear you. Still, if you wouldn’t mind talking about things, you know, as they stand right now…”

“As they stand?” he sighed.

“I can’t get that goddamn dream out of my mind, Bill. And you, in that falling airliner, the two boats below…”

He shrugged with his eyes, shook his head as he fought to control the images that were coming to him. “Images of stars,” he said, his voice so quiet she barely heard him.

“Stars? You mean…”

He nodded. “Something to do with that whale…”

“Bill, he’s not a whale.”

He scowled again. “Are you telling me you don’t want to go back to Boston because you want to die here?”

“Why would I go back to Boston, Bill? Seriously? I mean, why did we leave?”

“Okay, okay, but why not Auckland?”

“Why not here, Bill? You don’t like the surgeon?”

“No, it’s not that…”

“Then why? Because she’s not white?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“She went to school in France, Bill. She trained there. She’s qualified. So what’s wrong with that?”

He looked at her, concerned. “Tracy? Are you okay?” She turned away – hiding sudden tears – but he came up from behind and wrapped his arms around her, rocked her gently in his arms as he kissed the top of her head. “I’m sorry, babe,” he said as he held onto her. “That was obtuse, even for me.”

“Damn right that was insensitive. Man, Bill, you know…for a sensitive guy you can really be a dickhead…” She began rubbing his forearms, letting him know she accepted his apology, then she turned to face him. “So, you want to go out for breakfast, or go back and cook me breakfast in bed?”

“That place there, right across the street, smells just like heaven. Want to check it out?”

+++++

Tracy had been in the hospital for almost a week. Her white counts were low and her doctors wanted her out of circulation while they transfused her. Infections, they said, could have fatal consequences.

Nearing the end of her first round of chemo, scans had detected enlarged lymph nodes in her lower back, all around her pelvis and spine. There were, her lead oncologist stated emphatically, no overt signs of metastasis – yet. The way she spoke said it all. Tracy’s chemo wasn’t doing the job.

He was walking back to Argos when he saw an airliner on final approach to the airport on the far side of the little harbor, an old TriStar in the blue and white livery of ANA, or All Nippon Airways, only the airlines name had been painted over. The air was rather calm but the pilot was struggling, the aircrafts right wing dipping so low on touchdown that it almost touched the runway, and he shook his head in disgust. Whoever was flying the old bird didn’t know their stuff. 

Evie and Claire were waiting for him in the cockpit, and as he climbed onboard he saw they’d laid out a breakfast of croissant and what smelled like a carafe of rich black coffee. Fresh fruit and cheese, too. And yet he still did not feel like eating. 

He hadn’t for weeks now. Ever since Tracy began deteriorating as the effects of the chemo tore through her, weakening everything about her – other than her will to endure. He worked on boat-chores, the never ending to-do lists that all sailors put up with to keep their vessels running, or he walked over to the hospital…with his head down and his hands in his pockets.

But that hadn’t kept Evie from trying. 

There were a few really good bakeries nearby – this was, after all, France…or a part of it…so bakeries were in the town’s cultural DNA. Once Evie figured out who had the best croissant she figured she’d discovered the secret of life, or at least her father’s life, because he had always been mad about croissant with Nutella and bitter orange marmalade. And, she now understood, it was called French roast for a reason.

Her father smiled as he stepped over the coaming and into the cockpit, and he sat wordlessly and poured coffee from the carafe, cupping his hands around the warmth as he looked down into the deep black within.

“Dad? How is she?”

He shook his head, looked away. Thunderstorms lined the northern horizon, the remnants of a typhoon almost a thousand miles north of the island that was still barreling its way across the Pacific, heading for Guam and Taiwan. “Anything new on the morning weather report?” he asked as he watched lightning flickering in the angry clouds.

Claire looked at him and nodded. “Nothing new. Nothing expected to come this far south.”

He nodded. “How’s Ted?”

“The same.”

Ted’s cancer had never really gone away, but a few weeks after their arrival in Papeete it had come roaring back with a vengeance. And it hadn’t been lost on anyone that both father and daughter were fighting the same devilish foe. Or that just now it seemed that both were losing their war.

But as he sipped his coffee the old TriStar taxied to a rarely used ramp at the airport and an ambulance approached as an old air-stair was pushed in place. The forward door opened and Bill could see medics rush up the stairs, and a few minutes later one of the flight crew emerged and stood out there, arms crossed, face turned into the wind. A few minutes later a gurney appeared, then the medics and firemen helped wrestle it down the stairs. Whoever was on the gurney, he saw, had apparently passed in-flight, as sheets were pulled up over the person’s head. If the captain had passed, he thought, that would account for the crappy landing. An hour later the TriStar was sealed up tight, and, it seemed, not going anywhere. Perhaps its journey was at an end, too.

He finished his coffee then filled the water tanks from the public supply, then he made his rounds. Check battery charge and voltage. Check the bilges for leaks. Then the raw water strainer and the Racors beside the old Westerbeke diesel. Turn on the engine for bit, check the exhaust for the traces of white smoke he’d seen a few days ago. Nothing. Walk the deck, check the standing rigging and their mooring lines, then head downstairs to fill in Argos’ logbook.

He took comfort in such things these days. The minutiae that demonstrated his attention to detail had not slipped from his grasp. Because he was concerned that it might.

He had been depressed before. Not bad, but bad enough. After Doris. When it felt like the whole universe had fallen into an infinite darkness. And Claire had, as she always had, come to his rescue one more time.

“This is situational, Bill. It’s not biochemical. There’s nothing wrong with you, nothing that any other human being would feel in the same circumstance. It’ll pass…”

And it had. Life, he kept telling himself, just goes on and on. What had the ground-pounders said in the Nam? Lead, follow, or get out of the way? Wasn’t that the essence of living? And he’d always been a leader, hadn’t he? Since his third year at Annapolis? In his squadron? Even in the Hanoi Hilton, when Colonel Thao tried to beat him down. Lead by example. Lead when everyone around you is giving up. Because that’s just what you do.

He wasn’t ready for the dream that night.

The TriStar’s systems failing one by one…electrical…hydraulics…the only thing left were the engines and they were responding but when he looked up all he saw was onrushing water, windswept waves and two sailboats filling his view out the windshield before…

And then she was there. The pink creature. Her amber owl’s eyes searching his, probing his reaction to the moment of his death. Even if it was just a dream.

Just a dream.

Just a dream?

What was life but a dream?

‘Is that what you really think?’ she asked.

‘I’m not sure. Maybe.’

‘Why do you wake up?’

‘Because I’m afraid…?’

‘What are you afraid of?’

‘Death. Not existing. Infinity without awareness. Nothingness.’

‘Do you remember Captain Phelps?’

‘How do you…you mean my ethics prof at Annapolis?’

‘Yes.’

‘How could you possibly know…?’

‘I read your thoughts and experiences as you might a book.’

‘Everything?’

‘Everything of consequence.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Everything chemically encoded into long term memory.’

‘Ah.’

‘During his first lecture you seemed to experience a kind of revelation. Do you remember what that was?’

He nodded. ‘Yes, of course, his thought experiment.’

‘Tell me what you remember.’

‘Imagine the universe, he said to us. The universe in all its infinite glory. Now imagine all that being swept up in a dustpan and put into a suitcase. All of it. Everything. And then imagine snapping your fingers and even that suitcase is gone. Then, he asked us what would remain?’

‘And you raised your hand, did you not? What did you say to him?’

‘I said nothingness cannot exist, or something like that, because nothingness implies observation, and with nothingness there could be no observer.’

‘And what did Professor Phelps say? Do you remember?’

‘He asked us something like: “What if God is the only thing left?” But for that to be true, that would mean that God is nothingness. Therefore everything is nothingness. Even God.’

‘Do you remember how that made you feel?’

‘Empty. Hollowed out and breathless. Like a punch to the gut.’

‘Do you think he was incorrect?’

‘I didn’t then.’

“And now?’

‘I think he was a fool.’

‘So, you do believe in nothingness?’

‘Do you have a name?’

‘My name is of no importance.’

‘That doesn’t feel right to me?’

‘Why?’

‘Because you know everything about me…’

‘No, I don’t. If that was true I would not be here.’

‘Here? But I’m dreaming all this so how can you be – here…?’

In the next instant he was in the water and the orca was next to him, and even in the dark he could feel its deep brown eye regarding him…but now the pink creature was beside him. In the water. And she was still staring at him.

“Is this real enough for you?” she asked, and he heard her voice now, very near, almost intimate. She was, he realized, no longer just a detached series of thoughts in his mind. This was real.

Then the memory, or was it a dream, appeared and he spun around in the water, saw the turquoise waters and dark coral heads from the harbor in the dream, then the two sailboats at anchor and his wife in the Zodiac rushing to him after he slumped over in the cockpit, all of it as real as real could be.

“Where am I?” he asked the pink creature.

“This place? Don’t you know?”

“No, of course I don’t know! I’ve never been here before, so how could I know?”

She regarded him cooly, dispassionately. “This island was called Mangareva. It was not from where you were a moment ago. It was in a place once called the Gambier Island Group.”

“So whoa, wait a minute, are you telling me you’re showing me the future, or the past?”

The pink creature smiled inscrutably, never taking her eyes from his. “No, I am not allowed to do that,” she finally said, then she paused as she experienced his feelings for a moment – before quietly adding: “But he can.” She said that, of course, smiling as she pointed to the orca.

+++++

Walking back from the hospital early one morning, a few days after his encounter with the pink creature, he was hardly able to think. Evie was pressed into his side, crying softly. Her mother was in that 10 percent, the group with a poor response to chemotherapy. There were two new solutions that, after having secured FDA approval, might be available soon, so Tracy’s oncologists remained hopeful.

Claire was waiting for them on Moonlight, and while she had made breakfast for them she appeared agitated as Bill stepped aboard, and she immediately pulled him aside and led him up to the bow. “There’s been a man walking by,” she said anxiously, “and he looks like trouble.”

“Trouble?” he replied. “You mean…?”

She nodded. “Not a local, dressed in a suit, carrying a briefcase. That kind of trouble.”

“Okay,” he said as he looked around the little marina, not sure how seriously to take this. “How’s Ted?”

“The same. On that new laptop of his, writing all the time now.”

“Writing?”

“Instructions to lawyers. That kind of thing. He’s even got email running onboard now.”

“No kidding? I didn’t know he was so tech-savvy…?”

“Are you serious? Bill, he re-wired the nav station just for fun on the way to Hawaii. He’s still improving stuff, and I’ll tell you what…the man knows his stuff.”

Her eyes darted suddenly, and she stepped behind her brother as she stared intently at the stranger – and he appeared to be walking directly towards Moonlight.

“He’s coming, Bill. He’s about twenty yards from us, looking right at you.”

“Still carrying a briefcase?”

“Yes?”

“Which hand?”

“Left.”

Bill turned around slowly and he regarded the stranger carefully, looking for unusual bulges under his sport coat, or perhaps on his belt – but nothing seemed out of the ordinary as he walked up to Moonlight’s stern.

“I say,” the man said, his British accent refined, old school, “is that you, Captain Tennyson?”

“Dawson?” Bill said, surprised to see someone from his days flying to and from Heathrow. “Terrence Dawson? What the devil are you doing here?” He walked back to the stern and extended a hand. “Come aboard. We’re just having breakfast.”

“Oh, bother! Should I come back in an hour?”

“Nonsense. Join us! Tell us some lies that involve bawdy women and scotch whisky…!”

Terrence had a stiff upper lip borne in London’s Hyde Park neighborhood, and he was as Patrician as they came. He’d been flying for BOAC when Bill first met him, and he’d come to Kansas City for his initial and recurrent training over the years, and they’d spent hours together in both the simulator and the classroom. On more than one occasion Bill and Tracy had taken Terrence out to dinner in Boston, and they’d been to the Dawson house in Surrey a few times.

Seeing this, Claire relaxed and went down to the galley to prepare her scrambled eggs, and Evie went down to help.

“Bill, I’ve heard rumors about Tracy. Is she alright?”

He shook his head and they both let it be. “So what on earth are you doing out here?”

“Looking for you, as a matter of fact.”

“Me? Do tell.”

“Well, I’m with Marshall Aerospace…”

“That’s the outfit in Cambridge doing TriStar mods for the RAF, right?”

“Just so, and that old ANA bird parked over there is now the property of Her Majesty’s Royal Air Force. She was being ferried from Malaysia when the captain passed en route, and the FO just managed to get her down here before skedaddling back to Kuala Lumpur. They sent me out but I learned a few days ago that you were here, taking care of Tracy. Anyway, I thought I’d come and see if I could twist your arm long enough to help me fly that crate back to the UK.”

“Terrence, I’d love to help but…”

“Now before you say no, I’ve got it all planned out. Leave on Friday, we refuel in Miami, arrive at Cambridge late afternoon on Saturday. We can get your return on Air France Sunday afternoon and you’ll be back Tuesday…”

“Terrence…”

“Your medical is still good and believe it or not your still listed as Orbital’s Chief Pilot, so there’s no issue with entry or insurance, and the thing is, Old Boy, that we’re losing tens of thousands of pounds every day that airframe sits here, so I can hand you a decent paycheck for your troubles.”

“How much qualifies as decent these days. Old Boy.”

“How does fifty sound?”

“Pounds, or dollars?”

“Pounds, of course. Are you in?”

“You have an engineer?”

“Two, actually. Both RAF, air engineers they call them. And we’ll have an RAF co-pilot with us for relief. All the other qualified L-10 drivers have been snapped up for this business in Iraq.”

“I can imagine. ATA must be making some serious money right now.”

“Quite. That’s why the MOD snapped up this airframe.”

Claire carried up platters of eggs and croissant and fruit, then still sizzling bacon appeared and the three of them sat around the cockpit table while Evie, Ted, and Marie ate down below. Claire seemed interested in their conversation, but Bill knew better. Any discussion involving airplanes bored her to tears, but as she was standing in for Tracy she played the doting sister.

“Well, what do you say? Are you in?”

Bill shook his head. “I just can’t, Terrence. Not with things as they stand right now.”

Terrence nodded. “And what if I could pay you a hundred?”

“For three days work? You’re joking…”

“Look, Bill, we’re in a bit of a fix. I’m not current, haven’t flown in almost ten years. I can’t take the left seat and, actually, you’re the only available pilot. And Bill, a hundred large doesn’t drop in your lap like this just every day…”

Ted had been listening and he came up the companionway. “Bill, go ahead. I’ll hold down the fort here, so go and make some money.”

Bill looked at Ted, then Terrence. “Well, have you had a good look at her?”

+++++

He walked up the air stairs and into the upper galley, and dropped his overnighter there. He looked around, immediately saw that all the first class seating had been removed, and only five rows of coach seating remained, and those were the over-wing emergency exit rows, and that made sense. The forward galley was a shambles so he could only imagine what the lower level galley looked like. He walked aft, noted that the wall cladding had already been removed just ahead of the aft galley, but the pressure bulkhead behind the heads looked good, with no corrosion visible anywhere he looked.

He heard the RAF engineers working in the lower level galley as he walked up to the cockpit, and Dawson was already in the right seat, arranging his checklists and fiddling with the flight manifest and fuel load out. One of the engineers walked in and nodded to Terrence.

“Ground cart is a go,” the engineer said as took his seat behind Dawson. “You can go ahead and power up the INS. And oh, here’s the inertial reference,” he added, handing over a chit with their latitude and longitude scribbled on it.

A minute later the APU was starting and all four electrical buses came online, so Bill went back down to the ramp and began his walk around. 

“Funny how fast it all comes back,” Terrence said as he walked up.

“Who was using this one, Terry?”

“Oh, it went from Eastern to British Airways to ANA to Thai, then back to ANA. They were going to convert it to a cargo hauler but decided not to, and that’s when we picked her up. She just had her C-check and the engines just had their hot sections replaced. Her bones are good, anyway.”

Bill shrugged. “Panel looks in decent shape,” he said as he walked up to the nose gear. “Any word about why the FO had so much trouble landing her?”

Terrence chuckled when he heard that. “The kid had about 300 hours total time and maybe a half hour of instruction before takeoff. I hear the engineer flew of the approach, and he wasn’t exactly qualified, either.”

“Lucky they didn’t break anything…”

“Oh, did you see the landing?”

Bill nodded. “Dreadful. No roll control at all. I wonder why they just didn’t let the plane shoot the approach…?”

“You’d have to assume they knew how to set that up…”

“Neither of them did? Seriously?”

“We were very lucky they didn’t crash.”

Bill stopped and looked up at that, then shook his head. “What happened to their captain?”

Dawson shrugged. “Report lists heart attack, but who knows? But that’s right…I recall that happened to you once?”

“Yes. That was a bad night.” He sighed as he remembered the call from the galley, then diverting to Iceland, then all that drama in Oyster Bay. But then he met Tracy and his whole world changed in a heartbeat, so one life came to an end as another really came together.

“Well, this’ll be a walk in the park.”

Bill smiled as he keyed the mic. “Faa’a Ground, Romeo Alpha One on ramp x-ray-delta one, ready to start one.”

“Romeo Alpha One, clear to start one.”

He worked through the checklists, kind of amazed how it was all coming back. He’d lived so much of his life in this cockpit…it was like muscle memory…everything was engrained in the circuitry of his mind…and the script he recited up here was a language unto itself. A stranger listening to these short, clipped phrases wouldn’t recognize half of what was said, but Terrance spoke the same language they’d learned together two decades ago in a classroom in Kansas and that made all the difference. They had literally roamed the earth after that, like sea captains of old. Athens in the morning. Rome for lunch. Dinner in New York. All in a day’s work.

“Romeo Alpha One, clear to taxi to T1, hold short of the runway for the Air New Zealand 744.”

“Romeo Alpha One, to T1 and hold short.” They watched the heavy on short final to runway 22, then it touched down and its reversers roared as the 747 passed them. Because the airport was so constricted by geography there were no taxiways parallel to the runway, necessitating a long taxi out the runway then a turnaround at the end to point into the wind, and after the heavy passed the tower gave them clearance to taxi out the runway to the turnaround. This was more than a mile away and at 12 miles per it took a while, and the flight engineer working the panel behind Terrence seemed to be humming a tune, apparently already bored.

“Nice day,” Terry said absently, then: “What’s it like living in paradise, Old Boy?”

“I’ll let you know when I get there,” he replied caustically.

“And on a boat, too. Funny, William, but I never took you for the type.”

“They type?”

“Oh, you know, run away to see the world, run drinks under palm trees and all that.”

“You’ve clearly not spent a lot of time on boats,” he sighed.

“Oh? So it wasn’t what you thought it would be?”

“Terry, when has life ever been what you think it would be?”

“Too true.”

As the TriStar approached the turnaround he thought he could see Argos and Moonlight almost dead ahead, and as he used the nose wheel paddle to steer through the turnaround he looked up for a split second and could just see the hospital where Tracy was…

‘Oh, my love…?’ he sighed, an image of her in the tiny room with bags of IVs hanging from the little metal tree…

“Romeo Alpha One, climb to 3000, turn right to zero-four-zero, contact oceanic departure one three five decimal three.”

“Uh, One to three thousand, right to 040, departure on thirty-five-five.”

He changed the frequency and checked in.

“Roger, Romeo Alpha One. Cleared to flight level two one and Victor Airway one-niner-four.”

“One to level 2-1, Victor 194, Romeo Alpha.” He engaged the autopilot, watched the flight director for a moment, then leaned back as the computer took over, massaging their rate of climb to eke out the optimal burn, then he looked at Terrence. “She seems solid enough,” he said, nodding approvingly.

“Lockheed built good ships, William. A shame they quit the business.”

“Last of her kind.”

“So, I’ve been wanting to ask, but why did you quit?”

Bill shrugged. “Tracy wanted to get out and see the world from ground level, and I think once our youngest moved out she thought that, well, this was the time to make it happen.”

“Sorry about all this, William. Truly sorry. Such a vibrant soul. But you’ll be back before you know it.”

Bill smiled. “She is that.” He loved the view from up front, and he always had. Learning with his dad, buzzing rafters on the Colorado as they flew through the Grand Canyon, tearing across the Mojave at almost 200 knits indicated so low they kicked up dust behind the Baron. Flying into Heathrow, looking down at Big Ben through puffy grey clouds at six in the morning, or the amazing green patchwork of fields and forests coming into Frankfurt. And now, nothing but blue. Blue skies and the deep blue sea. He’d cross this patch of the Pacific in a few hours, but not long ago he’d crossed the same ocean and it had taken weeks. Most people, he thought, measured travel through the destinations visited – and rarely the journey itself. Argos had taught him the meaning of both.

“Did anyone load something to eat in the galley?” Terrance asked the engineer.

Yes, they had. In face, they’d picked up some passengers for the trip. Four engineers working on some kind of radar array returning to home, and a dozen or so RAF personnel headed back to their squadron in Oxfordshire, at Brize Norton. With so many aboard they’d had to take on one flight attendant, and with that came complete meal service. “And I had that Italian place by the Hilton pack a picnic basket for us,” Terry added. 

There routing took them past Tahuata and then Acapulco, then Veracruz before coming in over the Everglades on their final into MIA. After their mandated rest period they’d fly over Freeport on their way to Bermuda, then pass Cork to their north on the way to Cardiff and Bristol before entering their final routing to Cambridge, just north of London.

But just now, right off their starboard wingtip, were the islands where his father had, for a time, worked. Testing the second generation of atomic warheads, then the first hydrogen bombs. So many people displaced. So much cancer. But these days cancer was everywhere. Not surprising, he said to himself, given the radiation and chemical soup we lived in. He looked to the left, thought he could just make out a couple of boats far below and he remembered the anger he’d felt that night, watching an airliner overhead and then looking at his speed readout on Argos.

“Different means to the same end,” he said aloud.

“What was that?” Terrence asked.

“Oh, nothing. My mind was wandering.”

“I was thinking about that barbecue place in Kansas City,” Dawson added. “What was the same of that place?”

“The old place?”

“Oh yes, that’s the one!”

“Rosedale. Out on Southwest Boulevard.”

“I dream of those ribs, William. And the fried green tomatoes. Outstanding! Nothing like it!”

He smiled, because that’s where he’d taken his dad that time he flew out, ‘that night when I was thinking about quitting.’ His father had his flaws, and they were big ones, but his heart had always been in the right place. At least until it finally gave out on him.

The lights of Acapulco appeared, twinkling like Christmas tree lights in the distance, then Puebla, with the looming lights of Mexico City to their north and Veracruz dead ahead. As they approached Campeche Bay he pulled out the Enroute Charts for the western Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, and began thinking about their approach into Miami. It would be in the middle of the night so few passenger aircraft but tons of trash haulers, or air cargo jets, usually DC-10s and older 747s, so a lot of Heavies in the pattern.

Terry had eaten his way across the Pacific, snacking on carpaccio with shaved Parmesan cheese that stank up the cockpit for hour. Then, of course, Terry had started farting. Gentle little tree frogs at first, but after a pile of lasagna made its way into the mix big rumblers hit, and hit hard. The flight engineer excused himself after a bad one, and Bill had grimaced and looked away.

“Terry? What the fuck is wrong with your gut?”

“Had my gall bladder cut out. Nothing works anymore.”

“Well, something’s working, and it don’t smell right.”

“I know. Sorry.”

A few minutes later the cockpit began to reek of burnt sulphur and limburger cheese, so Bill double checked the AP then got out of his seat and went aft to get the relief pilot to take his place for a while, but when the poor bloke walked in he gagged once and retreated.

“What the foockin’ hell happened in there,” the Irishman cried. “Who took a foockin’ shite on the floor?” He turned and vacated the cockpit, howling in disgust as he retreated. “No foockin’ way, mate. I ain’t goin’ in there with no fookin’ pig!”

Bill sighed as he rummaged through the fridge in the galley until he found some kind of sandwich that looked recently made, so he unwrapped it and took a tentative sniff. He tossed it in the trash then returned to the cockpit.

“Terrence? You can stop now,” he said as he stepped into his seat, but Terry hadn’t answered.

He was holding onto his side, and his forehead was slick with running sweat.

“Terry, where does it hurt?” Bill said. The flight engineer heard the tone in his voice and leaned forward, grimacing as another fart ripped through the cockpit, the smell now beyond putrid.

Terry pointed to the lower right part of his belly and just managed to say: “Sharp. Pain. Intense.”

He turned to the FE then and looked at the kid. “Okay, get someone to give you a hand, then get him in back. Fold up some armrests and lay him out, and see if there’s a first aid kit onboard with a thermometer.

“Right.”

The Irishman came in a few minutes later and took Terry’s seat on the right side. “Whoot’s with Terry? Got any ideas, Mate?”

“My guess is a hot appendix,” Bill said as he checked their position. Now out over the gulf, it was a coin toss between MIA and Corpus Christi, because he sure wasn’t going to take Terry to Cuba.

The FE returned, red-faced and winded. “His temp is 103 on that thermometer. I assume that’s in Fahrenheit?”

“You best hope so, Mate,” the Irishman snarled, “otherwise he’ll sure enough be cooked well-done, and soon, too.”

Bill rolled his eyes. “Man, I’d kill for a can of air-freshener.”

“Yeah, them was stinkin’ up the place, alright.”

An hour out of Miami, still out over the gulf and well north of Cuba, he called TRACON and declared he had a medical emergency onboard and expedited clearance into MIA, and sure enough about ten minutes later a Navy F/A-18 appeared off their right wingtip. That was the norm since 9/11, when all emergencies generated an intercept anywhere near the continental ADIZ. 

Key West appeared, then Homestead. The sky was clear, the full moon shimmered off streaks of water in the Everglades.

“Romeo Alpha One, Miami approach, descend and maintain seven thousand, come right to zero-niner-zero and one-niner-zero knots.”

“Descend maintain seven, right 090, and 190 knots for Romeo Alpha One,” Bill repeated, and he entered the new heading in the flight director and the L-1011 began a gentle turn to the right…

He heard a loud thud, then in the next instant the grinding of metal on metal followed by the sound of inrushing air. The Irishman was looking out the right side windshield, his face illuminated by fire. “Half the fookin’ wing is gone!” he shouted, trying to make himself heard over the sounds made by the disintegrating aircraft.

“Fire in three!” he called out, and his co-pilot’s training kicked in. “Come on. Let’s work the problem…”

“Fire three,” the co-pilot answered.

“Okay, I’ve got pitch and yaw but no roll…”

The TriStar began rolling to the right. Ailerons did not respond.

He applied left rudder and the aircraft crabbed, slowly responding until…

More metal tearing away, then the sounds of inrushing silence as the cockpit ripped away from the fuselage. The flight engineer had disappeared and the Irishman was screaming but there was nothing but silence now as his brain began processing the moment.

‘This is it. All that I am, all that I was, is coming to an end.”

He looked around the shrieking remnants of the cockpit and for a moment he could just make out a large segment of the aircraft not so far away, on fire and slowly tumbling in the darkness, then the remnants of a Navy fighter breaking apart into a billowing orange blossom. And so it was, the last thing Bill Tennyson experienced was the sight of two dangling parachutes between clouds, and he wondered if the pilots would be okay as they fell gently to earth, falling like the last flowers of autumn in the moonlight…just before the coming of snow.

Coda

He heard her voice. Far away. Calling his name.

He opened his eyes and realized he’d been napping. He stood, the boat’s steady motion almost reassuring. Something was wrong. A pain in his chest. He shook it off, then went to the head to get the bottle of baby aspirin, but the medicine cabinet above the sink in the head was empty. He went to the galley and opened one of the cabinets behind the refrigerator, but it too was empty. He turned, sat at the chart table and flipped the breakers. Nothing. He turned on the chartplotter and the screen remained black. He stood again and went to the mahogany steps of the companionway ladder and climbed up into the cockpit and Tracy was there, with Claire on the little road perched above the water’s edge.

“That feels better,” he said to no one in particular. Then he looked down at his hands. Age spots everywhere, the texture of his skin looked almost like burnt parchment.

“Dad? Are you okay?”

He turned to the voice, thought he recognized Evelyn yet she had to be about his age, maybe in her fifties, but he nodded even as he slumped back onto the cockpit seat hard by the companionway. He knew what came next. Tracy hopping into the Zodiac then rushing out to him. Evie too. She would be jumping down into the Zodiac tied off Moonlight’s stern, starting the little Yamaha and motoring over…

He sighed deeply, massaged the muscles above his right breast, then leaned back, waiting.

Then she was beside him.

The pink creature.

And she was sitting by his side, then running her fingers through his hair.

“Do you still not want death?” she asked, her voice so sweet and gentle, so understanding. “Even after all you’ve seen and done?”

“No, I want life. I want to live.”

“Why?” she asked.

“What do you mean, ‘Why’?”

She touched his chest and the pain went away, and with the passing he felt strangely different. He looked at his hands and the skin was smooth and supple. His vision seemed better, too, so he sat up and looked around.

The sky was strange. Almost pink along the horizon then turning redder and redder as he looked up, but the sky overhead was dominated by the sight of a vast blue gas giant, ringed like Saturn, its atmosphere roiled like Jupiter’s. 

He stood and it felt like his head was in a vice. The air pressure was different. Heavier. He looked around again and Claire and Tracy and Evelyn had disappeared, but this place was different. 

He was anchored well offshore, several hundred yards from the water’s edge, but he saw a field of wildflowers and another field that looked like wheat. Beyond that, a long line of trees, and bright lights flashing beyond this forest. To his left…a vast range of snow capped mountains, and when he turned to look behind Argos he saw several small islands. He turned again and looked past the bow to a headland in the distance and it appeared to rise gently above the fields of wheat and wildflowers. 

But there was a settlement on the headland, and the buildings looked faintly Japanese, like one of the tightly clustered villages one might have run across in medieval Japan.

Then he heard someone whistling and turned to the sound.

Two men were walking along the shoreline, and a Golden Retriever was running back to them through the field with a stick in it’s mouth. The two walked slowly, obviously deep in conversation, but soon enough one of the men was clapping, then slapping the tops of his thighs as the retriever returned to his side. He watched as the man praised the pup, then took the stick and threw it again, only now both turned and looked at Tennyson on his sailboat. And then they waved. At him.

William Tennyson had not the slightest clue what to do, so he waved at the two strangers.

“Where am I?” he asked the air around him.

“Where you were,” can an unexpected reply.

It was the pink creature again, hovering a few feet above him. He turned his head slightly and looked into her eyes. “I am where I was…was? And just when was that…?”

“None of that matters now,” she said, her eyes smiling, “but you must pay close attention to the world around you.”

“Okay, sure, but why am I here? Did you bring me?”

“I did not.”

“Excuse my stupidity, but if you didn’t, who the hell did?”

She pointed down at the water, to the orca waiting expectantly there. “He did.”

“Hey Bill,” shouted one of the men on the path beside the sea, “come on! Let’s get going!”

He wheeled around to face the voice, now utterly confused. “Who is that?”

“You don’t recognize him?”

“Uh…no…I…oh crap, is that Dad?”

“It is.”

“And that whale brought him here?”

She shrugged. 

“Can you at least tell me one thing?”

“If I can.”

“Is this heaven?”

“No.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”   

“Afraid?”

“Uh, well, am I dead?”

She laughed gently at the question. “You look alive to me, William.”

He turned to his old man and shook his head, then looked at the creature again, confused. “Is my mom here?”

“No, she was not needed here.”

“Needed? I don’t understand…”

The creature smiled as she bowed, perhaps a little obsequiously. “We saw no reason we you should.”

“Who is that with Dad?”

“Oh, his name was Henry. You have much in common.”

“Did I know him?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

His father waved again and seemed to say something…

He turned back to the men on the shoreline and shouted “Sorry! What?”

“Come on, get the lead out! We’ve got work to do.”

He looked around again only to find that the pink creature was gone again. There wasn’t an inflatable tied off the stern and he had no idea what the water temperature was…so how was he supposed to get ashore.

But then the orca swam around to him and it seemed to be waiting for him to make up his mind.

He dove in and found the water refreshingly cool, neither too cold nor too warm, and he tasted it tentatively and thought it less salty than he remembered, and the water hardly burned when it splashed in his eyes. He got his bearings and swam to the orca’s side, then put his face against the orca’s, his ear pressed hard against the smooth black skin. He listened for the longest time, listened as the universe opened up to him, then he turned to his father and smiled.

© 2025 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkühnwrites.com | this is a work of fiction, plain and simple, which could mean that the names of the guilty have been changed to protect the innocent. Or not. And yes, this has been but one more part of the TimeShadow sequence, and this sequence of the arc, Book One, will be followed by two more. As always, thanks for coming along and we’ll see you next time.

Last part here, a few twists, time for tea I think.

Music matters? Even In The Quietest Moments. Then When the Levee Breaks.

Part III: Truth

Sara Rosenberg was an anomaly. An aberration. She was Jewish, a progressive white liberal, a Democrat, and the valedictorian of the latest class to graduate from the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police’s rigorous Academy. She was physically fit and tough, both physically and emotionally. At five foot six inches and 110 pounds, she was about average height for female graduates of the academy, and a little lighter than that average. She was all muscle and ran a six-minute forty-second mile. Long blond hair and freckles, blue-green eyes over a pleasant enough smile, most considered Rosenberg cute, and most of the guys in the academy had tried hitting her up for dinner or a movie and been shot down. With no known boyfriend, it didn’t take long before the rumors started: she didn’t have a guy so she had to be a rug muncher.

Sara Rosenberg grew up in a progressive Jewish American family, which meant that she went to temple a couple of times a year, but only if absolutely necessary. Her parent’s home was in the Fox Chapel neighborhood, on Fairway Drive overlooking the Pittsburgh Field Club’s golf course. Everyone in her family was liberal, everyone watched MSNBC and everyone looked forward to Rachel Maddow’s nightly take on the state of the American political landscape. She was a graduate of the Shady Side Academy, with highest honors. She aced the SATs with a 1600 and had offers from Harvard and Princeton. She decided to stay in Pittsburgh and took a degree in History at Carnegie Mellon. She’d been exposed to public service in high school, at Shady Side, doing everything from working in homeless shelters to riding with ambulance crews and Pittsburgh cops.

And it was riding with the cops that had stuck with her.

It was plain enough to see that the world was coming apart at the seams everywhere you looked, but somewhere along the way Sara Rosenberg had decided that enough was enough. The world didn’t need more teachers or more accountants or lawyers. Pittsburgh needed cops. The bureau had been designed to function with about a thousand sworn officers on the street but by the mid-2020s that number had slipped to six hundred. The police were confronting deteriorating conditions throughout the city just at the time when young people had tuned out. To say that things were bleak was an understatement, but the commitment to public service inculcated at Shady Side, when combined with the experiences she shared during her many ride-alongs with Pittsburgh’s finest had been enough to make the decision easy.

Her parents were stunned. And furious.

They’d always assumed Sara would go to med school, preferably at Harvard where both her parents had studied. Becoming a cop was so far beneath their expectations that they both simply began to tune their daughter out.

And Sara knew then that she’d made the right choice.

Academy was tough, the hardest thing she’d ever done. Physically demanding, emotionally draining, yet most of the academics required little more than rote memorization and was not all that demanding. Tests were, however, stressful, because failure meant dismissal. Her academy class was interviewed by the local NBC affiliate for a segment on recruitment challenges faced by law enforcement agencies in Allegheny County, and when the reporter discovered who she was and that Cadet Rosenberg’s parents were the Rosenbergs of the Rosenberg Cardiovascular Clinic and that she had grown up in Fox Chapel…well…the story changed a little after that. It soon became a story about how everyone had to do their part, pull their weight if the city was going to survive the onslaught of criminal immigrant gangs invading the city. Sara did her best to answer all the reporter’s questions but hated being in this spotlight. But people recognized her after that, and some people even came up on the streets and thanked her.

Used to being the best at whatever she started, she took highest honors in the 33-week-long academy, and she thought she was well prepared to face life on the city’s mean streets. In order to find out whether or not this was in fact the case, she was slated to finish out her year of training by riding for three months with three Field Training Officers. First up, a month on Third Watch, or Evenings, working from four to midnight, then First Watch, or Deep Nights, from midnight to eight, and finally to Second Watch, or Days, from 0800 to four in the afternoon. At the end of that three-month rotation, she would ride with one of the department’s senior FTOs for a week, this being the last test before being cut loose and assigned to a precinct, or Zone.

All the senior FTOs had reputations. Some were on the mean side and these liked to create a tense, high-pressure atmosphere and see how the rookie handled stress. Others were the exact opposite, easy-going, almost laid-back officers who were no less observant, often taking their rookie to high-pressure encounters and seeing how they handled the change. There was a third type, as well. Cerebral. Nonjudgmental. Cold. Calculating. And almost all-knowing but like an empath, able to read people – like a book. There was only one FTO in the department like this third type, and he had a reputation. A bad one. Few people were assigned to ride with this FTO because few could take the pressure, and in the end, few rookies met his standards and ended up leaving the department.

Thomas Jefferson Warren, also known as Doc, was this third type of FTO.

He was an eighteen-year veteran of the department and the word around the academy was he’d been a Green Beret over there, in Afghanistan and Iraq. He’d been a medic and that was why people called him Doc. He was educated, had a Master’s degree in something esoteric, and apparently was still single and unattached, though in his mid-to-late 40s. He’d worked with the feds on an anti-gang task force and on drug interdiction programs with the DEA. He taught Aikido and the department’s street survival course and had been a motorcycle officer for five years before moving back to patrol after an accident. Most of the female officers in the department thought he was a hunk, which meant that most had tried to go out with him. None had succeeded. Word was he lived alone and spent all his off-duty time working one-on-one with kids before they got scooped up into livin’ the life. The word on the street was that no one in the department knew more about the city’s gangs than the Doc, so riding with him meant instant immersion in how gangs operated, and that meant working either in Zone 3, aka Shit City, or the projects and the hood around Garfield in Zone 5. And those two areas were parts of the city where cops were always walking on very thin ice.

And yet the Doc seemed welcome in the ‘hood.

Sara Rosenberg wanted to know why the Doc was so warmly accepted there, and how he’d pulled that off, because like everyone else she didn’t understand?

+++++

And yet when she first saw Thomas Jefferson Warren that afternoon he seemed disheveled, almost exhausted, like he’d been up for days. His eyes were red-rimmed and rheumy; his uniform looked slept in. This first impression was not at all what she’d expected.

She was already in their assigned patrol car, an almost brand-new Ford Explorer, silver and black with yellow accents. Parked under bare trees in the Zone 5 precinct parking lot at Washington and Highland, she was filling out the header information on their DAR, their Daily Activity Report, in the process making sure the computer terminal situated between the two front seats was linked to the computer in central dispatch.

Warren was walking out of the station with his briefcase, and her second impression was that this guy didn’t look like some kind of bad-ass special forces kung fu warrior. No, this old cop had gray hair and was as thin as a rail. Thin, as in sickly thin, like maybe too much exercise or not enough food. Or both.

The Doc opened the rear hatch and put his briefcase back there, then slammed it shut and went up to the front passenger seat. “You inventory the vehicle?” Warren asked softly.

“Yessir. Good inventory. The 870 and the M4 both checked, safeties on, rounds chambered.”

“Spare battery pack for your radio?”

“Uh, no sir. Do I need one?”

He nodded. “Yes, always.” His voice was distant, careworn and distant. Like ‘why don’t you know this already?’

“You want me to go back in and get one?”

“I brought two. I won’t tomorrow.” His meaning was clear, and he was letting her know she was still green, still a rookie.

“Yessir. Understood.”

“Okay. South on Washington, to Bennett. Hang a left and go slow, real slow.”

“Yessir. Did I miss something at briefing? We looking for something?”

His cell phone chirped, his personal phone, and he answered. “Tugboat. Go,” he said, then he listened, starting to cry at one point and a few seconds later he hung up.

“Sir? You alright?”

“Do I look alright, rookie?”

“No, Sergeant. You look upset.”

“Yeah? Well? So you have astute powers of observation, rookie. Any chance you know how to drive, and if so, would you? I’ll sort this shit out.”

She put the Ford in drive and turned out of the parking lot onto southbound Washington Boulevard. Traffic was afternoon rush hour heavy, thunderstorms had blown through an hour ago but the streets were wet, the air humid, lost somewhere between cool and turning colder. Third Watch units checking into service, dispatch already on the air, sending units to calls that they’d been holding during shift change. Accidents, a couple of bad ones. An in-progress burglary. An old man, naked, standing in the middle of the intersection at Broad and Center, screaming about the coming apocalypse to shoppers coming out of the Target there, paramedics already in route. The usual crap. Endless. Just fucking endless. And most of all, most of these calls were mindless. Stupid people doing stupid shit. Endlessly. Mindlessly.

Warren looked at his watch. One of those ‘smart’ watches stupid people suddenly couldn’t live without. An alarm had buzzed on his wrist, his pulse was almost one hundred so he leaned back, shut his eyes and did a minute of deep breathing exercises. “Okay, Rook, coming up on Bennett,” he sighed after he stifled a yawn. “And remember, go slow.”

“What are we looking for?”

“We aren’t. I am. You keep your eyes on the road and try not to run over anyone.”

She looked away, suppressed the desire to tell him to fuck off. For the last three months everyone she rode with had wanted to let her know just how dangerous and inexperienced she was. Not just her, but every rookie just out of the academy. But she already knew that. Already understood that academy was just the first step. And she had desperately wanted to earn her FTO’s trust, to show them that she was ready to watch and listen and learn, so why did these so-called training officers want to belittle her. Was it like in the Kubrick film about the Marines? Full Metal Jacket? Did belittling rookies, stripping each recruit’s ego bare, in effect dehumanizing them, and then rebuilding each one in the image of their drill sergeant, really make for better Marines? Or, in this case, cops? Apparently these FTOs still thought so, but this new one, Warren, was supposed to be different. He was the FTO who could wash her out with the wave of a hand, just because. His reputation, and the respect he commanded throughout the department – and around the city – was immense. She wanted his respect, of course, but wasn’t sure what she needed to do to get it.

“Slower,” Warren said. 

She tried to see what he saw but nothing registered.

“Okay. Right on Lang,” he added, speaking so softly she could hardly hear him now.

A couple of blocks and as they approached the St. Charles Lwanga parish church he looked around attentively. “Turn into the lot across from the church, real slow, and stay close to the fence.”

As she turned into the lot she saw a black kid, sitting with his back up against a gray vinyl fence, almost invisible in the overgrown corner. 

“Stop. Unlock the doors.”

The kid stood slowly and walked up to the Ford, got in behind Rosenberg. Warren turned and looked at the gangbanger; Sara Rosenberg just sat there, eyes scanning.

“How ya doin’, Broadway?”

The kid shook his head. “It’s bad out here, man. These Trennies, man, they be some mean shit.”

“You guys behind the hit?”

“Yeah man. They was waitin’ for us. You know how many of my homeys got dead?”

“Four. Last I heard, anyway. Three more in ICU, not looking real good.”

The kid shook his head. “They got my crib, shot it up good. Kid next door, his grandmother got hit too.”

“She need help?”

“No, Doc, she dead. What about Dres’?”

Warren nodded. “Yeah, it was his daughter.”

“Oh, man, that’s the shit.”

“What about the kid’s grandmother? Where’s the body at?”

“Trennies took the body, man. Like no crime, ya know?”

Doc nodded. “You got anything new?”

“Yeah, Doc, yeah. They got two more kids in they basement, more of that cuttin’ up shit goin’ down.”

“When was their last shipment?”

“Thursday. Last two Thursdays.”

“What about the kid next door to you? He okay?”

“Naw, man, he fucked up. Lost his mama in a drive-by, now this shit. Doc, he be like twelve, ya know? Go to school and all that shit. Don’t seem right, ya know?”

“Where is he now?”

“He hidin’, Doc. They after him.”

“Why?”

“He saw they faces, man! They gonna git him too so he be hidin’ deep now.”

“There’s too much rain now, Benny. He can’t stay down there.”

“It ain’t da rain, Doc. It da snakes and shit. Warm down there, ya know?”

“You with him?”

Benny Broadway nodded. With his gang decimated he had nowhere left to go but the sewers and nobody trusted the cops enough to go with them. Not even the Doc.

Warren pointed at the church across the street. “You need something to eat or just want to get out of the cold, Father Boyle will help. Door on the back, three knocks, pause, then one more.”

Benny nodded. “You gonna git them Trennies, Doc?”

Warren didn’t answer the question. “We’ll be back later, like around nine or so, if you need anything.”

“Couple of burgers if ya can, Doc. And something to sleep in.”

Warren nodded. “Okay. Be careful, Benny.”

Rosenberg watched as the kid slipped out of the Explorer, even here taking care to be quiet, to move quickly into the shadows.

“Okay,” Warren said to her, his voice now even softer, “up to Frankstown, take a right.”

She u-turned out of the parking lot and turned left, headed north. “You wanna tell me what’s going on?” she said sarcastically. “Or would you rather I be a good little girl and just sit here with my mouth shut?”

He ignored her, then pulled out a small UHF radio, one that was definitely not department issue. “Tanker, Tugboat.”

“Tugboat, go.”

“15-25, echo-1”

“Echo-1 received.”

Warren put the radio away and started scanning the road ahead. For lookouts, primarily, but also for anyone who looked like they might be flying a drone.

Rosenberg sighed, paid attention to traffic and kept her mouth shut. Warren was obviously working some kind of undercover op and she wasn’t going to be in the loop, at least for now, and she assumed he was playing her, seeing how she responded to these unconventional moves.

“Speed up a little, and look off to the left.”

“At?” she asked.

“Anything. Just look left.”

‘Now what?’ she wondered.

“Okay, slow, then right on Hale, then hang another right, on Kelly.”

“What going on?”

“Lookouts. Mexicans. With radios.”

“Where? I didn’t see anything…”

“I know.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You don’t know what to look for, but you’re doin’ fine.”

“What? You mean, just sit here and look dumb?”

He nodded. “They know our patrol routes and routines, they know me and they know who’s riding with me this week, which means they already know who you are.”

“What? What are you talking about? How do you even know shit like that?”

“Because that’s what they do everywhere. Penetrate the locals. Get their people inside. Usually dispatchers, PSOs, sometimes just buy cops on the inside. They start gathering intel before they move into an area.”

“What did you mean by they know me?”

“You. Your family. Your parents are rich so they know not to bother trying to compromise you, but you’ll make a pretty good target if they want a hostage or to make a statement.”

“A statement?”

“Yeah, kill you, to send us a message to back the fuck off.”

“What?”

“Doesn’t matter now. They’ve probably got a file on you and your family.”

Sara Rosenberg suddenly felt sick to her stomach.

“Don’t worry, kiddo. You’re not alone, not by any stretch, but I’ll need you to pay attention when I talk. No daydreaming, no inner voice shit. Listen. When I tell you stuff you gotta listen to everything I say. Okay?”

“Got it.”

“We’ve been working Tren de Aragua in Pennsylvania for a while, a couple of years, anyway. They absorbed parts of the Sinaloa Cartel on the North Side last year, and that marked their first big move into the city. We’ve been on ‘em ever since.”

“Who’s ‘we?’”

“The feds and the locals in the task force, and the relevant state agencies.”

“Do you know if what you said about my family is fact?”

He shrugged. “We’re never one hundred percent sure of anything, Rosenberg, at least not until we get one of their captains. Sooner or later we get our hands on someone who’ll sing.”

“You mean, like, what by that?”

“People always talk, Rosenberg. And their MO is the same, wherever they go. Penetrate the locals, find out who’s vulnerable, who’s broke, which cops gamble or do drugs, where the weak spots are inside local agencies, identify high value targets. The LAPD mapped all this shit out 20 years ago when they penetrated the cartels; Tren de Aragua is just following that playbook. Same shit when they move into a new neighborhood. ID the key players, the lookouts and mules, where meth is cookin’ or who’s cutting horse, and with what. ID the weak spots, the vulnerabilities, then take out the mules, cut off supply, negotiate with leadership and decapitate if they don’t go along.”

“You make it sound like a formula…”

“It is. The funny thing is…the same shit is goin’ down in Afghanistan, in Myanmar, Central Africa, you name it. It’s the basic counter-intel playbook. Nothing new. Man, it sucks when they don’t follow the playbook, sucks the big one when they pull off a surprise, even a little one. That’s when people get fuckin’ hurt.”

“Funny? You think this is funny?”

“Yeah, sure. Funny. Funny, as in funny as Hell. I’ve been doin this shit for more than 20 years and it never changes, they were doin’ it in ‘Nam and before we got there, too. And everyone says the spooks were financing their war and then brought it home to pay for the next one, but I doubt that’s true. Anyway, one way or another the stuff came home to roost, and we’ve been fighting it on our streets ever since. Like a poetic injustice, ya know; it’s a disease that never goes away. Like a wasting disease, eating us from the inside out.”

“I had a professor, an intro to international relations. Her thesis is that drugs have always been used by governments to control low income groups. Here, in France, all over Southeast Asia.”

Warren nodded. “Yeah, and one more time the whole thing is so tragic it’s funny. Like the Democrats were above that kind of shit. Right. And now that’s come back to bite ‘em in the ass.”

“Like a genie, once she’s out of her bottle you can’t get her back in. Why the Chinese keep flooding the market. No way to tear apart a society faster than to flood it with drugs.”

He looked at her and nodded. “You did History, right? At Carnegie Mellon?”

“Yup.”

“Okay, make a right here, keep an eye on the Yukon behind us.”

“The white car back there?”

“Yup. You gotta start memorizing front grill patterns. Helps you ID the soldiers they put on your tail. I think we just picked up Beni Navarro,” Warren said, reaching for the UHF radio. He flipped it on, then keyed the mic: “Tugboat, Lighthouse. Gonna need an airedale. Bravo November, black is white. Repeat, black is white.”

“Lighthouse received.”

“Excuse me,” Rosenberg said, “but what’s going on.”

“We’re moving a drone in to take a look at our tail.”

“Who’s this Ben Navarro?”

“Beni. He’s head of Tren de Aragua in Pennsylvania and Ohio, hangs out mainly in Pittsburgh these days, and Cleveland. Nasty son-of-a-bitch, right now he’s moving into Homewood and Hamilton, pushing out the Crips. Dos Hermanos. You’ll hear that a lot, the Lemon brothers, Porfirio Limones and his brother. We think his name is César. They just bought six houses on Oakwood, we’re picking up indications they’re tunneling up there, setting up a distribution network and safe houses.”

“What? Tunneling? Are you kidding?”

“Lighthouse, Tugboat, eyes on target, imaging now.”

“Roger,” Warren said.

“Lighthouse, Tugboat, positive ID on subject Lincoln Paul behind the wheel, Bravo November right front, two more in rear, thermal image only at this time.”

“Okay Sara, speed up a little, then turn on the overheads.”

“You wanna run code?”

“No siren for a minute; if they don’t break off we’ll go code-3 and see if that won’t shake ‘em.”

She accelerated to 50 miles per hour and turned on the overhead strobes, and almost instantly the white Yukon broke off and turned off on a side street. Warren keyed the mic again: “Tugboat, Lighthouse, follow target, track to and ID destination.”

“You want to slow down now?” Sara asked.

“Go to code-3, take Washington to the Highland Park Bridge, go to code-1 in a minute or so.”

She flipped on the siren and sped up, turned right on Washington and went silent about a minute before they passed the Zone 5 station. She slowed to 30 and kept in the right lane. “I think we picked up another tail,” she said, “when we turned on Washington.”

“Turn into the station, now.”

She just made the turn and Warren watched as a silver Suburban passed by, the driver staring at them as the large SUV roared past. There were at least four men in there and he was sure at least one of them had a rifle. 

“Okay, get behind them,” he said, hanging on as she whipped the Ford into a tight u-turn, busting back into the northbound lanes, the silver Suburban now almost a half mile ahead. “Tugboat, Lighthouse, northbound Washington, silver Suburban ahead, armed men inside, now at the curve, now westbound towards the bridge.”

“Who’s Lighthouse?” Rosenberg said.

He ignored her. “Okay, they’re going for the bridge, northbound on Highland Park.”

Lighthouse acknowledged.

“Lighthouse is the command center, DEA/FBI anti-gang task force. They’ll be moving the Predator now, get eyes on the license plate.”

“The LP is 789 IPG2,” she said.

“You saw it?”

“Yeah, of course.”

He read off the info to Lighthouse and entered the data on the Ford’s mobile data computer, and the registration came back to a plumbing supply house out by the airport.

“That figures,” Warren sighed. 

“Why?”

“They’ve got several cars plated there, some they use for legit work, others less so.”

“How close do you want me to get?”

“Two hundred yards for now. Lighthouse, subject vehicle now turning east on 28.”

“Airedale has the vehicle, you can break off now.”

“Roger.”

“Why aren’t we going to follow them?” Sara asked.

“We know who they are, where they’re going, so why provoke a confrontation when they’re not carrying product. They are sending a message. They know who you are and they’re letting us know they know, so like I said, you’re a target now, which means they know all about you and your family. We’ll have to put details on your father’s house and on their clinic, but we’ve got dozens of people under protective details right now, just here in the city.”

“I can’t fuckin’ believe this,” she sighed. “I don’t know you from Adam but you’re telling me a cartel knows all about me and my family?”

“As soon as you were assigned to ride in Zone 5, yeah.”

“Which means the department is penetrated?”

“You obviously weren’t listening to me.”

“I was. I just can’t believe it.”

He shook his head. “The reason these guys are doing so well is that most of their leadership has military experience, and when they need training they get it from the best. Retired Mossad. Wagner. Even retired Army. Just because they’re mean and ruthless doesn’t mean they’re stupid. By the way, in present circumstances, stupid means not learning from your mistakes.”

“You talking about them, or me?”

“If the shoe fit…”

“You saying I should quit?”

“Not at all. I am saying if you want to play in this league you need training. You need more training, more school, new skills.”

“Such as?”

“Put in two years here then go to the feds. Spend five years with them, more if you like the work. Come back here and make a real difference. You’ve got the basics down, now you need to sharpen your instincts, get to know the street. What goes down there, how people survive. You grew up riding horses and going to country clubs and summer camps. The street is an abstract concept to you right now so you’re dangerous, to yourself. If you want to change that, let me know by the end of our week together. If you don’t, no big deal. Go to traffic and work wrecks, or go to CID and work homicide. If you want to work gangs, let me know.”

“I can already answer that one. I’ve never been interested in gangs, and I’m still not.”

“Okay. What are you interested in?”

“Just patrol. Working a district.”

“The street, you mean?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Where? Fox Chapel? Where you grew up?”

“No, not at all. Here in the city.”

“And if the streets are being taken over by gangs, just where does that leave you?”

“Is that what it comes down to?”

“No, not really. You could work a beat downtown or over on the strip, do traffic control, take reports, put in your twenty, maybe get married along the way, have a couple kids. No shame in that. Then again, not too many History grads from Carnegie Mellon join the bureau. With your GPA you ought to be at Harvard or Georgetown but you’re not, so there must be something else going on.”

“You read my file?”

“And your transcripts. I even talked to a few of your professors.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Nothing but good things to say about you, too. Though everyone I talked to was disappointed in your decision to join the force, said it was a waste of talent. So you tell me. Is it?”

“Is it what?”

“Is this the best possible choice for Sara Rosenberg? Could she do more meaningful things, such as, say, become a physician like her parents? Or a lawyer? Or work for the FBI or CIA?”

“Or…why not just be a housewife? Is that what you’re telling me?”

He grinned. “Pretty big chip on that shoulder, Sara.”

“Or maybe I should run off and be a stripper? Huh? Would that make you happy?”

He laughed at her anger, shook his head as he looked out the window at the passing landscape. “Never considered that one, Sara. You’re cute, but somehow I don’t see you dancing.”

“I’m cute?”

“Yeah, of course you’re cute. You not notice that before?”

“Me? No, not really. I always thought I was kinda frumpy.”

“Frumpy? Now I haven’t heard that one in a long time. Frumpy, huh. I’ll have to think about that. No. No way. You’re cute, not frumpy.”

She glanced at him quickly then back at the road ahead, and she shook her head, too. “You look almost like you’re sick. Way too skinny. Are you?”

“Am I what? Sick?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You been to a doc recently?”

“Few months ago, but I run, Sara. I mean I do marathons and triathlons, stuff like that.”

“Oh. I guess that would explain it, but even so you look pale. Like I said. Sick.”

“Okay. I’ll get a checkup.”

“Thanks.”

“See? Your instincts are maternal, protective, and grounded in empathy,” he said. “Like you’re a born physician.”

“Why are you pushing that on me?”

“Because you look out of place, the uniform doesn’t look right on you.”

“Wow, Warren. That’s harsh.”

“Call me Doc, would you? All my friends do.”

“We going to be friends?”

“Never know.”

“Why Doc?”

“Medic. The name stuck.”

“Now there’s some major league irony for you, ladies and gentlemen!”

“Yeah, ain’t that the truth.”

“So, why didn’t you go to med school?”

He sighed, leaned back a little and looked ahead, then at the computer screen between them. “Tugboat, Lighthouse, is the target on 76 now?”

“Affirmative.”

The sun was going down and darkness was coming on fast. He looked at his phone, checked the current temperature and the forecast for the night. “Shit, going down to 20 tonight. Hard freeze.”

“Yeah? What are you thinking?”

“Those two kids, hiding down in the sewers in sub-zero conditions. Weather will kill them before the Trennies can get to them.”

“Options?”

“None that would be worth a damn. Get ‘em to a shelter and they’d get it there. Take ‘em into protective custody and odds are someone on the inside would get to them. Best option is probably sleeping bags and a small camp stove with some food, but now I’m not so sure we didn’t blow their cover.”

“You think we might have led them to the kid?”

“It’s possible.” He double-checked the time again, seemed to make up his mind about something. “Tugboat, Lighthouse, code zebra.”

“Lighthouse, Tugboat, four hours.”

“Tugboat to all units, stop repeat go. Say again, stop repeat go.”

“What was that all about?” Rosenberg asked.

He turned and looked at her. “So, what do you want for dinner?”

“What?”

“You like Thai? The place on Ellsworth is in-district.”

“What?”

Doc shook his head, sighed. “Man, you got to put shit where it belongs. Compartmentalize, prioritize. Time management. Our slot to eat begins in twenty minutes, miss that and you won’t eat ’til tomorrow morning. We’re going to be writing reports all night as it is…”

“What? Wait, how do you know that? We haven’t even been on one report call.”

“It’s early, Rookie.” He looked out the window and a chill ran down his spine. “And our night hasn’t even started yet.”

+++++

After dinner, green curry and spring rolls times two, he took over driving. After checking back into service he waited about five minutes then called in again: “3 X-ray 77, show us out sixty-one Union Charlie.”

“2130,” dispatch replied with the time checked out.

“I’ve never heard that one before. What is it?” Sara asked.

“We’re checked out on a special assignment, narcotics related.” 

He was pulling into the massive homeless shelter at Lincoln and Trenton, then under the carport. “Wait here,” he said as he got out of the Explorer and disappeared inside the door that read Men’s Shelter. He came back about five minutes later with two trash bags full of stuff, and he put these in the rear cargo compartment. Back behind the wheel he took off for the ‘hood again.

Rosenberg knew now not to ask. ‘Just sit back and pay attention,’ she told herself. 

And a few minutes later he pulled out the little UHF radio. “Tugboat, Lighthouse. Has the party started yet?”

“Lighthouse. Party started.”

He put the radio away then turned on Oakwood and drove by the Limones brother’s house slowly, giving their lookouts time to respond, then Warren turned down Hamilton before making a left on Hale, but he stopped at Mumford. There was a plumber’s van parked outside the little Baptist church, and Warren looked up at the top of the three-story crenelated tower and her eyes followed his. Two men were up there with some kind of tripod mounted device, but he made a left on Mumford and drove back up Hamilton until the Ford was facing the Limones house again.

“Do you smell gas?” Doc asked.

She rolled her window down and took a sniff. “Yeah, I do.” 

He made a right on Oakwood. “Call it in, would you?”

She got dispatch, told them to call the gas company and the fire department, and Warren made another turn, right this time, and he circled around to the little church again and parked behind the plumber’s van. She saw the men up there again, only now the two men were aiming a bright green laser at the Limones’ house.

“You’ll want to shut your eyes now,” Warren said, and as she turned to look at him a concussive roar filled the night sky. She turned in time to see a huge fireball erupting from the Limones’ house, then heard windows shattering all over the neighborhood. A second later the house next to the Limones house went up in a second concussive blast, then the next house went, and the next.

“Jesus Fucking Christ!” she yelled. “What the fucking Hell was that!?”

“Gas leak,” Doc said as he watched the two ‘plumbers’ hop in the van and drive away. “You better call it in. Advise four houses are involved.” He drove over to Hamilton and got as close to the raging inferno as he dared, then he stepped out of the Ford, pulling out the UHF again and calling it in. “Tugboat, Lighthouse, Charlie Echo Paul high order zero.” He put the little radio in his coat pocket and watched as the first fire trucks arrived on scene, then he leaned in and spoke to her. “Okay, let’s go take some notes for our report.”

She looked at him, shellshocked. 

“No? Okay, why don’t you just sit there. I’ll be back in a few.”

She sat there for a minute then got out and followed him up Hamilton. Warren was up there talking to the Fire Department’s on scene incident commander, telling him about the gas leak, and she listened to his explanation with a growing sense of unease. Like he was lying his ass off. And the Assistant Fire Chief was doing his part, taking information he knew was a lie and dutifully writing it all down. Four pumpers were on scene now, flooding the hillside with water and fire retardants, getting the four fires under control, and she looked around at all the gawkers that were gathering on the sidewalks across the street from the blazing houses, then she looked back through the trees, noted the clear sightline between the little church and the houses.

Sara Rosenberg had zero military training. She had never heard of a laser guided bomb, had no idea what kind of ground or aerial support was required to use these devices, but any idiot could smell the air and this air smelled all wrong. Strong chemicals lingered in the air, but once again she had no idea what it was she was smelling, or where this foul odor had come from. 

Could it have come from a gas leak? Sure. Maybe.

‘Just what the hell was that?’ she asked herself. ‘Who were those guys up there? Why was Doc so interested in them?’

Yet she had no idea she was being played.

Several vans appeared, local TV stations. Cameramen got out and set up tripods, reporters roamed the crowds, looking for eyewitnesses. One of them spotted Sara; this reporter had done the first in-depth report about Sara in the academy and immediately recognized her. Warren watched this and smiled.

The reporter was just doing her job, the narrative was simply being massaged a little in real time, shaped as circumstances warranted. Doc watched the interview, noted how easily Sara slipped into the role. Authoritative, easy going in front of the camera, a natural.

“So what can you tell us?” the reporter asked. “Do you know what happened?”

“My partner and I were patrolling the area and we smelled gas. We called it in but less than a minute later this house went up, then the next three, over there. As soon as these fires die down a little we’ll search for survivors…”

‘And there won’t be any,’ Warren said to himself as he walked over and stood behind Sara. Very deliberate. Very visible. When regional leaders of Tren de Aragua saw him standing there they would understand that this was no gas leak. They would understand that they needed to pull out of Pittsburgh, move on to greener pastures – while they still could – because the gloves had come off. This was just the next phase in the constantly evolving war on drugs, but things change. They always do.

+++++

Back in their patrol car. Sara behind the wheel again. Still clueless.

The UHF radio in Warren’s pocket chirps. Incoming call. He pulls it out, puts the earphone in his right ear, away from her. “Tugboat. Go.”

He listens. His jaw clenches. He pulls out a notepad and starts writing.

“Just three?” he asks. “Okay. On our way.”

She looks at him as they pull up at a traffic light.

“Turn here,” he commands.

“Left?”

“Yes, left.” Anger, frustration. But way more anger. “Wood to Moosehart, turn right and go up the hill.”

Soon they are patrolling behind the house on Oakwood. And it soon becomes clear that three vans are up here searching, too. Dark gray vans, no windows. They stop at a stop sign and one of the vans pulls up alongside, driver’s door to driver’s door. Window rolls down in the van. 

“Window down, please,” Warren tells her. She complies.

Sara hears radio chatter. The van’s interior is dimly lit – blood red.

The driver speaks. He ignores Sara. “He’s in the silver Yukon, on 76 eastbound.”

Warren crosses his forearms over his chest and scowls, then he nods. “Parker know?”

“Aye, sir. You want him? Need to talk to him?”

“No, not necessary.”

The van drives off. Sara sits there, speechless. “So, Navarro got out?” she asked.

He looked at her slowly, carefully, measuring her, then he nodded. “They’ve got tunnels all under this hill, safe houses everywhere. He must’ve been down there in one of them.”

“When the bombs hit, you mean?”

He made eye contact again, as he turned up the heat on the AC panel. “Getting cold out, isn’t it?”

“You enjoy speaking in metaphors, don’t you?”

“No, actually, I’m cold.”

“Oh. Why don’t you put a heavier coat on?”

“Forgot to bring it.”

“That’s a rookie’s excuse, Warren,” she said, smiling.

“Ain’t that the truth. So, I asked you earlier, where do you see yourself in a few years.”

“I said I wasn’t sure yet, didn’t I…?”

“That you did.”

She’d made up her mind an hour ago, but here it was. “I want to know what you know. I want to be able to pull off what you just pulled off.”

He sighed, nodding his head as he slouched back in his seat. “After I came back from The Stan…”

“The what?”

“Afghanistan. After I came back to the city I enrolled at Pitt. Sociology. I was so sure I wanted to go into social work. You know. Make a difference. Man, there were drugs everywhere, and everywhere we went we ran into that shit. Homeless people? Homeless because of drugs. People getting out of prison? In prison on drug charges. Even when a crime wasn’t obviously about drugs you could dig a little deeper and find out drugs were behind whatever it was that landed them in jail. And the cops, they’re like the little Dutch boy with his fingers in the dyke, ya know. You plug one leak and two more start on the other end of the dam. Every time we thought we’d made progress another torrent would break open and wash away all our progress, and pretty soon we realized there was no way to keep up. You know, back in the 90s there were more than a thousand cops in the bureau; now there are barely six hundred. Kids aren’t interested, even though the money these days is pretty good. Same with the armed services. Can’t meet enlistment goals, sometimes by fifty percent. We can’t fill an academy class. Used to be 40 in a class, then 30, and now it’s 20-something.”

“I know. That’s why I…”

“I know that’s why you joined, Sara. Believe me, I know. But we need 300 more just like you and that ain’t happening. And because it’s not happening we’ve had to change tactics. Another executive order, from the White House. Get the drugs off the street. At any cost. And this order is off the books. Secret. Go after the dealers and if that doesn’t work we’ll go after the end user, but Sara, there aren’t enough jails in the world if we go down that road. We have to make this work or society is going to be fundamentally altered. As in militarized.”

“Logical,” she said. “And probably inevitable. Half the country has been sliding down into the sewers for damn near a hundred years, ever since the Chinese started flooding California with opium.”

“Yeah, I know. They did it to the British in Hong Kong, and then in Burma and India. And it worked, too. The Brits are gone from Asia now, and pretty soon we’ll be gone from the world stage, unless we can turn this ship around.”

“So,” she said, “what you’re saying is that action speaks louder than public policy pronouncements, feasibility studies, and congressional subcommittees. Is that about right?”

Warren took out his cell phone and quick-dialed a number. “You still up?” – then – “Mind if I come over?” He rang off and turned to her, then nodded his head. “I want you to meet someone.”

“Okay. Now?”

“Yeah. Your old neighborhood. Raynor Road. Let’s go.”

It took a half hour but he directed her to a huge estate behind a stone wall, entry blocked by a motorized wrought-iron gate, open at the moment, and the reason why soon apparent. There were a half dozen black Suburbans parked beside the massive three-car garage, and at least one armed guard standing beside every window or door Sara could see. She parked the Explorer and followed Warren up to the front door; the door opened before they reached the brick porch and Sara immediately recognized Senator Andre Lutz. His wife, Judge Amari Brown-Lutz, was by his side. Both were distraught.

But when Dre’ Loos saw his old friend he came forward and the two men hugged. Both were soon crying; Sara Rosenberg was confused. She followed the men into the house, noting that the judge had suddenly disappeared. They walked into an immense living room, a huge, lighted swimming pool visible on the far side of the room, on the far side of the largest windows Sara had ever seen. Her father’s house was not far from this place but it wasn’t even half this size, so she was kind of impressed. The furnishings were kind of ‘country-French’ and quietly elegant, the art on the walls looked expensive, like they’d be in museums one day. Federal agents with earpieces dangling stood by the windows, another was just visible out by the pool wearing night vision goggles.

Judge Brown returned with two young boys in tow; when they saw Doc Warren they ran across the room and jumped into his outstretched arms as he knelt to catch them. The judge introduced herself to Sara, then the Senator did, as well.

“We’ve heard so much about you,” Andre told her. “We were hoping we’d get to meet you, just not under these circumstances.”

Warren stood and kind of coughed a little, interrupting his friend. “Dre’, she’s still in the dark about Alex. I’m still getting her up to speed.”

“I thought she started with you last week?” he said, startled.

“No, sorry, but this was her first night riding with me.”

“Ah.” The Senator turned and faced Sara, his eyes boring into her. “How was it out there tonight?”

“Informative, to say the least. And instructive. Sergeant Warren is a good teacher.”

“Always has been,” Dre’ said. “Would either of you like something to drink? Ginger ale, a Coke?”

Both shook their heads; the two little boys were clinging to Warren, begging for attention. He knelt and picked them both up and walked to the windows that looked out over the swimming pool, leaving Sara with the Senator and his wife.

“So, the story here is they got our daughter about three weeks ago. I was in D.C. and our nanny was supposed to pick up Alex, uh, Alexandra, from kindergarten. Turned out the girl worked for this Navarro character, for Tren de Aragua. We got a ransom note a few days later. We learned last Friday that they killed her…”

Judge Brown excused herself, walked off into the house.

“My wife is not taking this well. She feels it was her fault.”

“Why?” Sara asked.

“She’s refused protective details for over a year, ever since we started getting threats from them. I don’t think any of us ever figured they’d go after our kids. That’s always been off limits, but these guys have been rewriting the rules for a while now. Well, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The President has said ‘no more,’ no more Mr Nice Guy. Use whatever means are necessary. So tonight was our first move.”

“Are we going to wait for them to respond?”

Dre’ shook his head. “No. We’re moving against them in Florida and Texas tonight, too. Tomorrow the attacks will escalate to known hideouts in Venezuela and Panama. We’re also coordinating with agencies in Spain and Portugal, and we’ll be hitting them there this week.”

“I’m sorry about your daughter, sir. I, well, I don’t know what else to say.”

“I appreciate that. All in all, we just wanted to meet you, but after you’d been with the Doc for a week…”

“Tonight pretty much decided things for me, sir. I’m all in.”

“Well, you finish up your week with Thomas and we’ll have our conversation then.”

“Thomas, sir?”

When he heard that, Senator Lutz started laughing until he was red in the face.

+++++

“He said I’m supposed to call you Hooker from now on.”

“Oh he did, did he?” Warren sighed.

“Why? Why Hooker?”

“Oh, who knows? You’re not, by any chance, a William Shatner fan, are you?”

“Who’s that?”

Warren smiled and looked out the window as she steered the Explorer over the Highland Park Bridge one more time on their way back to their district. “You know, I’m not sure.”

“Oh. Okay. Those kids sure seem to love you…”

“I’m their Godfather.”

“Really? How’d that come about?”

“Dre’ and I go way back, all the way to grad school.”

“In sociology? Both of you?”

“That’s a fact.”

“So, you knew Alexandra?”

“Yup.”

“Well?”

“Yup.”

“And you don’t want to talk about it, right?”

“Yup. I do want to get those sleeping bags over to the boys.”

“Back to that church?”

“Yup.”

She shook her head and drove back to the ‘hood, to the empty church parking lot, and as they pulled in she was the first to see the boy. He was face down in a pile of leaves, and the boy wasn’t moving.

“Oh, goddamn, no,” the Doc sighed, grabbing the M4 carbine from under his seat and then running over to the body.

He rolled the still-warm body over, and saw the catastrophic bullet wound in the center of Benny’s forehead. “Turn off the headlights, now!” he shouted. “Get the 870 after you call us out on a homicide at this location, then take cover…”

The window inches behind her head exploded; a split second later the sound of the gunshot arrived and she felt little chunks of tempered glass rain down on her back as she ducked low and pulled her door to. Another round slammed into the dashboard and bits of plastic splintered the back of her neck as she reached for the radio’s mic.

“3 X-ray 77,” she yelled into the mic, “33 our location, shots fired at our squad, one vic on the ground…”

Another round slammed into the Ford’s door and everyone listening heard her scream in pain as the bullet tore into her thigh. She pulled herself over the center console and out Warren’s door, then turned and pulled the Remington 870 out.

“You hit?” she called out.

No reply. 

Two more rounds fired, then four more, different sound from this one. Four more of the same, then two more. Sirens converging. A helicopter getting closer. She pulled out her hand unit and tried to talk: “3 X-ray 77, I think I’m hit…”

Sirens getting close, engines under heavy acceleration. Tires squealing, Someone over her, moving her gently. She opened her eyes and looked up, saw Warren bent over her legs and wondered when she’d fallen. She tried to say something, anything, but everything was turning cold and white and she hated to admit it just then, even to herself, but she was starting to feel a little afraid.

Coda

Damarius King was at a crossroads, because he’d never seen anything like this. Never, in all his thirteen years. The Christmas tree was huge. The number of presents under the sagging branches was perplexing. Daunting. Because some of them had his name on them. Nothing made sense here, like sometimes his dreams made no sense.

He’d always loved football and knew he was supposed to love the Steelers, but like everything else in this place he didn’t understand why. Because he had two brothers now, even though they weren’t really his brothers. He had a mother, too. A real mother, even though she wasn’t really his mother. But bestest of all was his dad, even though he wasn’t really his father. But his dad had been a Pittsburgh Steeler and that made up for a lot.

He’d never had a big dinner on Christmas Eve, had never watched old TV shows about Christmas, and everyone had looked around like they were kind of sorry when he told them this was his first Christmas tree. His grandmother had never been able to afford a tree, or even Christmas presents, for that matter. He was sorry he’d mentioned it because he didn’t like that look on their faces, that look caught somewhere between pity and regret. Every time he saw that look on their faces he felt like he didn’t really belong here, even though his new dad said he did.

He was sitting beside the tree now, looking at the lights. His little brothers were sitting beside him, staring at the tree then looking at all the presents spilling out onto the floor, and his dad was sitting in a chair not too far away, looking at the tree with grim satisfaction etched across his face. Weird music was playing, some old man dreaming of a white Christmas. His mom came in with hot chocolate and he loved that stuff, then she went and sat with her husband. 

A while later and his dad said it was time for bed and he followed his brothers down the long hallway to their bedrooms. There were big windows here, windows with real glass that didn’t need to be boarded up because no one shot up this ‘hood. He had his own room now, too, and his own computer. He had a nice collection of astronomy programs on it and he was learning the names of all the constellations, and the names of all the planets in the solar system. His dad had taken them all to the planetarium and that had been the best day ever, and when he got lonely he looked at the pictures he’d taken that day and he remembered his grandmother at times like that. He remembered the drugs and BennyB and those last three or four nights in the sewer after she was killed.

How Benny had told him to stay put, to not leave the sewer no matter what he heard. Then all those gunshots, all that screaming. Helicopters and those lights that were so bright they almost looked blue, sirens and more gunshots. He’d climbed up that rusty old ladder and looked around and it had been snowing then. And someone was looking for him, calling his name. A cop, an old white guy, and the sun was starting to come up then and the cop had seen him.

And everything had started to change after that.

The old cop. He’d made all this happen. Uncle Doc.

Damarius King still didn’t understand, and while he liked having a room all his own in a way he liked his old room better. He’d been able to lay there in his old room and look up through the shattered ceiling at the stars, and he missed that.

+++++

His brothers got him up early. Way too early. Some shit about Santa Claus.

And they couldn’t go to the living room yet, couldn’t go see the presents under the tree. Mom was making pancakes, huge suckers bigger than a Frisbee. And bacon. And oh God, the maple syrup…that stuff was so good.

And then Uncle Doc came in with his girlfriend, Sara. She was still walking with a cane and she wasn’t a cop anymore. She was going to go back to school to be a doctor. Uncle Doc came over and hugged his mom, then the same with his dad, then he came and sat down beside Damarius.

“How you doin’, kiddo?”

“Good.” He didn’t know why, but he still felt small next to his uncle, almost afraid to talk.

“Looks like some good presents out there. You must’ve been a good kid this year.”

Damarius nodded.

“I got you a present too, if that’s okay…?”

Damarius looked down and shrugged. Warren looked at Dre’ who just shook his head.

They went out to the tree after that and Damarius saw a big orange telescope over by the window that hadn’t been there last night, and his uncle told him Santa had brought it for him because he’d been such a good boy and that didn’t make sense because why had Santa never come before? Had he been bad? And what was he doing now that made him good?

He had other presents. A Steelers helmet, a real football just like the pros used, some new programs for his computer. Math programs, and more science stuff like an atlas of the Moon and he couldn’t wait to get them loaded but that telescope seemed to be calling his name so he went over and looked at it. And Uncle Doc came over too. He explained how everything worked.

“Will you come over and help me use it?” Damarius asked.

“Sure. Sure I will. You know it, kiddo.”

“Like tonight?”

“If the sky’s clear, sure, but we don’t have to wait until tonight. You’ve got a special filter that lets you look at the sun.”

“I do?”

“Yup. Sure do. I made sure Santa brought you one, ‘cause you’ve been such a brave kiddo this year…”

“Brave? What do you mean?”

“Well, lots of bad things happened, right? And you didn’t give up. You kept trying hard in school, and you’ve been trying real hard ever since that night…”

“That was a bad night.”

“Yes it was,” Doc sighed. “Yes, it surely was.”

Sara was watching them and there it was, the reason why she loved Doc, and always would.

+++++

MaryAnn and Aaron were in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on their Christmas Dinner. Sarah Caldwell was in her room, still getting dressed, still stressing about her clothes. She finished her hair and then went downstairs. She plugged in the lights and their Christmas tree came back to life, though all their presents had been cleared away.

The little bell rang and Sarah scampered off to his room.

Peter Wells looked regal, though he habitually wore turtlenecks these days – to hide the scar on his neck. Still, he had that manner about him. Wealthy, like a patrician. And wealthy people wore navy blue cashmere turtlenecks, didn’t they? She helped him into his wheelchair and pushed him out to the living room, to the big window next to the Christmas tree.

“You three did such a marvelous job this year,” Peter Wells said as he gazed up at the tree, “I do so hate to take this one down. Maybe we could leave it up for a while? To the New Year, perhaps?”

“There’s no law that says we can’t,” MaryAnn said as she carried a platter of something to the dining room table.

“I’m with you, Dr. Wells,” Aaron sighed. “You know, they grow on you.”

“When are our guests arriving?” Peter Wells asked.

“They should be here momentarily,” MaryAnn said. “They’re just looking for a parking place.”

“And what have you two been up to down here?” Wells asked. “It smells just heavenly…”

Aaron and MaryAnn smiled. “Gravlox, lobster bisque, endive salad, and prime rib.” Mary Ann sighed seductively, adding coquettishly: “And a special treat for dessert.”

“Dear God, how on earth could anyone top that!” Wells smiled expansively, as always admiring MaryAnn’s skills in the kitchen, and letting her know how much he appreciated them. And her.

The doorbell chimed and Sarah took off, and came back a moment later with the evening’s guests of honor, Sergeant Thomas Jefferson Warren of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police and his fiancé, Sara Rosenberg.

“There he is!” Wells cried. “My hero!”

Warren looked down and shook his head, his arms full of Christmas presents he’d wrapped himself; he carried the loot over to the glittering tree and put them there. “None of that hero stuff tonight, Dr Wells. I was just doing my job and you know it.”

“Such modesty does not become you, my lad. If not for you at least two of us wouldn’t be here to enjoy this night, and you have our eternal thanks, young man.”

Warren walked over and took his new friend’s hand. “Right place at the right time, sir. Now, how are you doing.”

“Me? I’m doing quite well, thank you. Yes, quite well. And Miss Rosenberg, you’re looking elegant tonight, and walking much better than the last time I saw you.”

“I am, thanks,” Sara said. “Still, I have days…”

“Ah, yes, don’t we all,” Wells replied warmly. “Now, would either of you care for something warm, or perhaps something with a little kick to it?”

Soon they were all gathered at the table, enjoying the feast MaryAnn had prepared, then the conversation turned to more recent events.

“So, Sergeant Warren,” Peter Wells said, and he always addressed Doc formally when the Senior VP of Intelligence for the Rand Corporation wanted to discuss matters of state, “now that the president has invoked war powers how are things progressing?”

“Well sir, the so-called ‘soft war’ in Mexico has been partially successful. The Juarez cartel in particular has been hammered into irrelevance, but our insertions have been limited to cross-border ops so far and that limits us to moving only about a hundred miles into the interior. What many in Washington don’t understand is the terrain in the northern Sierra Madre has many of the same characteristics as the foothills west of Da Nang, in Vietnam. This is air-cav territory, sir…”

“Yes, I know, I know, but I’m more interested in progress here in our cities.”

“That’s harder to quantify, Dr Wells. Using Predators and Reapers over our cities has generated some serious political pushback, despite recent successes. For example, our strikes out on Oakwood were more than effective. Those deep penetrator warheads got down to the depth where most of their tunnels were located, and as you’ll recall, we sent in Delta Force to take out the rest of the Trennies in the area…”

“How many got away?” Sarah Caldwell asked.

“The two that jumped you, Dr Wells, including their regional leader and his kid brother…”

“And that was good shooting, Sergeant,” Peter Wells said.

“I’m still not sure how I did that,” Warren sighed. “That ball lightning…man…that scared the crap out of me…”

“You’re not the only one,” MaryAnn added, a shiver running down her spine as she remembered bailing out of the Subaru to help the stricken Wells, only to see that thing floating across the lawn and vaporizing Navarro.

“Anyway, We had about fifty Delta Force operators working Hamilton and Garfield going door to door, house to house, and it was just like Fallujah. Cartel and Crips dug in like ticks.”

“What was the final tally, do you know?”

Warren nodded, cleared his throat. “Sir, these figures are still classified.”

“You can speak freely here, Sergeant. We’re among friends.”

Warren looked down, and nodded. “Aye, sir. We lost twenty men, and took out 270-plus. Most of that latter figure includes gang members under 17 years old, all heavily armed but undisciplined and with no effective leadership cadre. Unsophisticated, I guess you could say. No booby traps, no hidden mines. It was a straightforward op, sir, but we’ll never really know how many of those people were collateral kills. Several elderly women are in that body count, all unarmed…”

“But do you have any proof that our men killed them?”

“Not really, sir. Most of the gang members were using the 5.56 NATO round, same as our guys, so there wasn’t any real way to differentiate at autopsy.”

“And if not for you, Sergeant, I would have been on the coroner’s slab. Don’t you ever forget that? We’ve been at war for three decades, only we’ve just now responded. It will take time to root these invaders from our cities.”

“I know, sir.”

“Now, how was the boy? Damarius?”

“I guess I’d call it PTSD, sir. He’s still withdrawn and suspicious…”

“You must learn to put yourself in his shoes, Thomas.”

“I know, sir. Still, it’s difficult. His experience of our world was limited…”

“From the photographs I’ve seen, Thomas, those people were living almost like animals. Fearful and in hiding, not sure where the next barrage would come from. Who was a friend, who was a predator? Impossible way to live, really. We can’t have an engaged democracy while people are living like that.”

“I think this will be the work of generations, sir. If we have the political will to restore these people’s lives and not to simply blame them and shove them aside.”

“Oh, that will happen,” Wells said, “but then again I’m a pessimist when it comes to the relations between races. And it’s not just our problem, is it?”

“No sir. Immigration crackdowns in Europe have proven that beyond any reasonable doubt.”

“Oh, it’s not limited to just Europe, Sergeant,” Wells sighed. “Religious intolerance plays its fair share, too. And it’s odd, don’t you think, that no one offered to take in the Palestinians?”

“Nobody wants that kind of trouble, sir.”

“Exactly. But is that not racism?”

Warren smiled. “No sir, it’s realism.”

Wells smiled too, steepling his hands over his chest as he looked at the police officer. “Realism has always been a loaded word, Thomas. Rooted in the word reality and so often at odds with words like idealism, and even pessimism, yet how do we proceed if we don’t first acknowledge the reality of the current situation. I fear most of all that we don’t have time to waste coming to terms with all our inadvertent climate modifications, to adjust policy to meet the realities of the current situation. Fighting wars wastes the time available. These conflicts distract us from the work that needs to be done to mitigate what we can, while we still may. We must build resilience and sustainability as we confront this future, and not fight endless brush wars…

And in an air conditioning duct above the dining room table, a small blue sphere no larger than a mote of dust listened to this exchange. The listeners far, far away took note of what was said – and wondered what to do next.

(c)2025 adrian leverkühn | abw | this is fiction, every word of it.

 

 

 

Next part of the story, and don’t give up on it just yet.

Music? Slack Hands, by Galliano. Yeah, you heard right. Just go with it. Maybe put it on repeat while you read, maybe try something stronger than tea this time, too. Round this out with some Summertime, just because Wakeman does it better than just about anyone these days.

So right, off we go, into the second of three parts.

Part II: Temperance

He wasn’t a little kid anymore, but he still wasn’t exactly a teenager, not quite. At 12 years old, Damarius King was at a crossroads and he wasn’t really up to making decisions like this – yet he was smart enough to know it. He’d seen a lot already, more than someone his age should have. He was living with his grandmother right now, and he had been for a few months, but she wasn’t much better than his mother. And he was smart enough to understand that, too. The thing is, he didn’t want to end up like his mom, or his grandmother, or like any other people he knew around the ‘hood.

He’d actually done pretty good in school, until this year, anyway. A couple of good teachers along the way had gotten through to him, got him to look past the gangs and their drugs, the gangs and their guns, and the gangs and the way the new cartels were shaking things up. There’d always been gangs in The Five, as this part of Pittsburgh was called, but for the most part, it had been a Bloods and Crips deal. Maybe a few members of the Vietnamese gangs were still hanging on, but those gangs were old school now, almost gone and hardly anyone remembered them. The Latino gangs had never really been a factor – until recently. Yet for as long as Damarius had been around, the cartels had been right in there, too.

Never really organized, though, not on Hamilton Ave. But that was starting to change.

Gangs were usually neighborhood affairs, at least they used to be, and to Damarius King that was exactly what they were. No more, no less. A few kids worked the block, protection money, running bets to bookmakers. Making sure young girls were kept busy. That’s the way it had always been. And that was true enough now. Gangs had always been around. In Ireland and Sicily. In Londontowne and Shanghai. Osaka, Edo, Saint Petersburg. New York and Philadelphia, then Chicago, where a new twist emerged. Gangs that formed in these states prison systems remained intact, and a few of them merged with the Vice Lords Nation, a ‘charity’ ostensibly operating as an anti-poverty outreach program in and around the slaughterhouses clustered around the rail yards found in Chicago’s South Side.

There was a saying back in the sixties, a euphemism popularized by black radicals, that goes something like this: ‘The whiteys who came to America landed on Plymouth Rock, but Plymouth Rock landed on us, and we’ve been carrying it ever since.’ There’s a lot of anger and frustration tied up in those words. Maybe some nihilism, too. And it’s important to understand where that anger comes from. It’s too easy to just say that some people are racists and leave it at that. It’s also too easy to say that the Africans imported to the Americas simply could not, or would not integrate into mainstream society, for whatever reason racists, and racists not just limited to the American South, implied.

More than anything, for these African Americans all the promise of the Fourteenth Amendment was as yet unrealized, and all the blood spilled in the American Civil War did not lead to a just resolution, yet by the time JFK came along American society seemed – seemed – ready to close the deal. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was crafted to be the instrument that finally shattered the last shackles of slavery. LBJ, with his background teaching migrant farm workers in the Rio Grande Valley, fully enjoined this War on Poverty. Yet within a few years, as prominent African American leaders were being gunned down or lynched, more wars loomed on the horizon. Vietnam first, then Nixon’s War on Crime, which led to waves of mass incarceration. This was followed by Reagan’s War on Drugs, with even more people being incarcerated. More people meaning African American men. From the late 60s through the early 80s, the basic premises of the Civil Rights Act were whittled away, and the generational idealism of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream devolved into a spirit of revolutionary suicide as dispirited young black men faced down police wherever they went.

And, not coincidentally, that period marked the emergence of the first two organized black gangs in North America, with the formations of the Bloods and the nearby Crips in South Central Los Angeles. And, again not coincidentally, these gangs first formed on the neighborhood level, just as almost all gangs always have, yet these two new gangs were being politically and militarily energized by a constant stream of young men being released from prison.

My, how the pendulum swings.

In simple mechanical systems, the momentum of any given part of the system is conserved unless acted upon by some external force. In practical terms related to gang warfare, this is best expressed as action equals reaction, or, to put it in more succinct terms, if you fuck with me I’m gonna fuck with you.

In this worldview, The Man is the system and the system has declared war on you. And in this war, local police officers are the foot soldiers of The Man’s occupying army. So…action, reaction.

And yet Damarius King knew absolutely nothing about this. Rather, he had been taught to distrust authority, any and all authority, and so with that worldview drilled firmly into his mind, about the only authority he ever saw could be found driving around the ‘hood in a Ford Explorer, and the whiteys inside those police cars apparently liked to fuck people up. Give ‘em an excuse and they’d kill you, too. Damarius knew that was true because he’d seen it happen, and more than a few times.

This is a worldview, of course, that is completely at odds with popular perception, the popular perception of mainstream America, anyway, because most people in America cannot relate to that earlier idea about Plymouth Rock. Most people learn all about the Mayflower Pilgrims and their arrival in the New World, and starting in first grade, too, and those happy early lessons focus on rosy images of peaceful coexistence with friendly natives culminating in a joyously big Thanksgiving meal, with the ‘Indians’ being the invited guests of honor at the party. The idea that from the very beginning these settlers brought slaves with them seems foreign, out of place, and so probably, on some level, just not true, so the very idea that a kid like Damarius King might be carrying around a chip of Plymouth Rock on his shoulder seems inconceivable. Besides, that kid probably doesn’t even know where Plymouth Rock is. Ya know?

Damarius lived in a red brick row house on Hamilton Avenue. The windows on the ground floor had been boarded up with plywood for so long the wood was covered with black mold. Windows in the two upstairs bedrooms were covered with aluminum foil in the summer, to help keep the heat out, and with trash bags and blankets in winter, to keep the snow out. He slept with his grandmother in the rear bedroom because bullets peppered the bedroom up front from time to time. When his grandmother’s check came from the government they bought food; if there was enough left over she paid the electric and water bills. Neither had seen a real doctor in years, just a nurse at the free clinic. Many of their neighbors died during the Covid thing, whatever that was, but they didn’t get sick.

She’d made sure he went to school, too, even after Covid, and Damarius could read some, and write a little, too. When the police drove by they looked at him from time to time, but they didn’t smile, and they sure didn’t wave, and he didn’t understand. He’d asked his grandmother once and she didn’t want to talk about it, so he asked his teachers at school. Again, he just didn’t understand why they turned away from his question. One of them, Miss Millet, even cried when he asked.

He liked to go fishing with Mr. Jenkins. The old man had fishing poles and sinkers, and those red and white things that bobbed up and down when a fish bit the hook. On Sundays they’d catch the bus and ride over to the water; Mr. Jenkins called it the Monongahela River, and they’d walk down the steep banks, careful of the snakes that rattled, then fish all afternoon. Mr. Jenkins shared what he caught with Damarius so he and his grandmother could enjoy some fresh caught fish, and those days were the best he’d ever known.

There were other kids in the neighborhood, of course, but most of them had guns and didn’t seem like they were interested in baseball or football or the other things Damarius liked, but that was okay. They didn’t bother him if he didn’t bother them, and besides, his grandmother told him to keep away from kids like that. They were trouble, she said. And she was usually right about stuff like that.

Things got weird after the virus. 

The police had gone over to some man’s house over on Garfield Street and the man shot at the police, then the police shot at the man’s house. According to something in the newspaper, the police shot that house 4,000 times, and they killed the old man in the house. He was wrong in the head, too, at least that’s what Damarius heard. He’d seen that before, too. Lots of times.

Police cars didn’t come to Hamilton Avenue often. In fact, they only seemed to show up after something bad happened, usually when someone was shot or after a ‘drive-by.’ Drive-bys were the worst, and that’s how the boards on the front window got shot up and why his grandmother stayed off the front porch, and maybe, he thought, that was why the police didn’t wave at him when he waved at them.

Maybe because it wasn’t easy to keep score on Hamilton. You could always find the Blood Gang (Gangster Bloods) working the area, which meant the Crips would be there too. But you could find members of Pirus working the corners on weekends, but Damarius knew that the Black Disciples, and the Renegade Black Disciples, not to mention the Blue Fin Disciples, the Gangster Disciples, the King Cobras, the Renegade Gangster Disciples, the Renegade Insane Racine Boys and the Renegade Insane Campbell Boys showed up too, and that’s when the action picked up. But every now and then the Insane Black Souls would turn up, or the Almighty Latin Stones, or maybe the Arkhos Flip City Kings or the Convict Gang, or even the Law Gang which, believe it or not, was an actual gang and not related to the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, which was a different kind of gang. 

But now there were some new kids on Hamilton, and these new guys were mean as snakes. They weren’t black but they worked the night, and they weren’t playing around. The usual kids that worked the corners, the usual black kids, were disappearing. Sometimes their bodies were found and sometimes they weren’t, but the word was when a body was found there wasn’t a head attached anymore. Word was, well, someone was collecting skulls.

One of the Crips in the neighborhood lived in the house next door, the row house on the end, right next to the boarded-up store on the corner of Hamilton and Collier. The crips in the ‘hood looked up to Benny Broadway and he sort of ran this part of Hamilton, and the vacant lot across the street was his. He kept a couple of girls in the old store, and even a couple of old mattresses for guys not content with some head, so Benny had a couple of kids working as lookouts and at least one kid picking up new product, leaving him to keep an eye on the street. You never knew when the competition would show up, or what kind of crew might be in the next car, so Benny had guns stashed all over the place, just in case.

But Benny had lost kids recently, to that new gang working the end of Hamilton, out where it ran into Oakwood. There were good trees on Oakwood, good places to hide – if you could handle the rattlesnakes – but now this new group was inching closer to Benny’s territory. So Benny dialed up the chain of command, pulled in some reinforcements, and last weekend Benny and this crew drove out to Oakwood and shot up a couple of these new guys, and they brought one of them to Benny’s house.

Of course Damarius heard everything.

There were two new groups looking to push the Crips off Hamilton. One was MS-13, and even Damarius had heard of those guys, but the second group? Damarius hadn’t heard the name before, but Benny seemed shaken when he heard the name, and even listening through the walls, Damarius could hear the fear in Benny’s voice. In fact, he sounded scared.

The name was Tren de Aragua, and Benny’s informant said they liked machetes, and that they liked to look their victims right in the eyes as they killed them. The kid also said he knew where they kept the skulls.

+++++

Dos Hermanos. That’s what they went by. The two brothers. César and Porfirio Limones. The Lemon brothers and they were mean, even by the usual standards on Hamilton Avenue. Word on the streets was they’d taken a girl and used her for a few days, then cut her tits off before they took her head. In order to become a part of their gang you had to do the same, so now the cops were investigating a bunch of disappearances of girls all over the east side.

So far they’d left BennyB alone. Benny was small time, not worth the trouble, but now the word was the Lemon Brothers were planning on moving in, so Benny was on to his brothers in the Crips. A war was shaping up, and Benny was looking for kids on Hamilton, new blood to take the place of the kids he’d just lost. 

“What about Damarius?”

Benny Broadway wasn’t sure about Damarius. The kid seemed smart enough, but in a way he seemed slow, slow like he was a retard, ya know? Still going to school, and who the fuck did that? Damarius wasn’t the type you could count on when things got bad, and he didn’t need that kind of trouble. Then again, if the brothers moved in they tried to recruit him, and if Damarius didn’t go along, they’d probably kill him.

But he was already running low on shit. That meant he needed to get some bucks together, try to line up some product from his brothers uptown. Out here on Hamilton, meth and cocaine were done; what he needed now was some Chinese food and brown sugar, what others called fentanyl and heroin. If he was flush, he tried to keep some footballs on hand for whitey in his BMW, which was also known as Xanax, because whitey loved that shit, couldn’t get enough of it. If whitey had some trim up front, he might want to get out of the car and try to score some ‘roofies,’ otherwise known as Rohypnol, to mix with some booze to put the girl out, guarantee an easy score. He sold a lot of that shit come Friday night, all year too.

See, Benny Broadway was just a businessman, just trying to take care of his customers – the best way he knew how. And like any other businessman, he needed shit to sell, and a network of people to help make it go down easy.

Benny looked at his phone, checked the time. Damarius would be getting off the bus soon, up at Homewood, and he’d try to get to him on his walk home. It was time to get the kid involved.

He saw the school bus, saw Damarius struggling with his book bag, and that was perfect. He’d go down and help him carry the load, because wasn’t that exactly what he was about to ask the kid to do? To help carry the load? To start carrying product from the drop-off to his crib?

+++++

César Limones looked out the window, looked right down Hamilton, and even from here, in this shitty old house on Oakwood, he could see that shithead Benny Broadway walking up to a little kid. Kid was carrying something, too. Probably loading up for the weekend. So Broadway already had a new soldier? Too bad for the little kid.

Benito Navarro, though he was called Navi by close associates, pulled up across the street and parked his ride, a shiny new Chevy Tahoe, on the sidewalk. The truck was white as a cloud, all the glass blacked out but chrome everywhere, even the wheels. César watched Navi carefully, looked at his coat, especially up by the armpits, looked for the bump that meant he was carrying. Usually a ghost, but sometimes a blade. Navi had a source, someone printing up Glocks with no serial numbers, and he was supposed to be bringing some today. These ‘ghosts’, or ghost guns, had really changed things because they made guns easier to toss. Spray some silicone on the grips and trigger and no fingerprints, too. And yeah, Navi popped the tailgate and grabbed a gym bag, then looked around before he turned and walked over to the new house.

Big concrete steps led up the steep little hill, and afternoon sunshine was flooding the broad front porch with warmth. Porfirio was out there, basking. The brothers missed home, missed the sun and the warmth, and right now Pittsburgh was anything but warm. After two years in Florida, Pittsburgh was fucking hell. But Pittsburgh had money, and Pittsburgh had kids. Lots of kids with money, and all those kids wanted what the brothers had.

César and Porfirio had grown up on Venezuela’s north coast, above the small fishing village of Puerto Cruz. The family had a farm along the river, the El Limon, but when opportunity called the brothers listened. Soon they were selling to the sailors at the naval base in Puerto Cabello, then they hit the big time, selling cocaine in Curaçao and Aruba. During some time in Tocorón, they made it into Tren de Aragua. Now they were Navi’s enforcers, his captains. 

They were supervising the construction of a network of tunnels in the hill that ran alongside Oakwood, and up the hill to more houses on Sickles and Fargo. Many of them were boarded up, condemned, and perfect to stash product that was always coming in. This area was perfect. The alleyway behind the house was an overgrown mess, a tangle of vines and shrubs, and a couple of the houses along the alley had garages in back and they were moving stuff in during storms, backing right into the garages and moving shit down into the basements, and then into the tunnels for distribution. The trick was to never let the Five-O pick up a pattern, always keep ‘em guessing. If they got too close, well, too bad for them.

Navi had a girl in the basement, some kind of payback going down. Girl’s mother was a judge, but a stupid one who ignored warnings. She didn’t have protection, not even for her family, so the girl been an easy mark, no problem to pick up. They’d had her for a week and so far there hadn’t been anything in the papers or on TV. Then a spoofed call from a house out by the airport, a botched rescue attempt by the locals and the FBI, and Navi had watched from afar, smiling. They’d tried to fuck with him, so now it was time for some payback.

When Benito Navarro made it up the steps he greeted Porfirio and handed off the gym bag to César before he went down to the basement. They had a bench grinder set up down there, and other tools, too, but Navi started in on his favorite machete, working the edge until the cold steel was as sharp as scalpel. Then he went into the tunnel to start in on the girl.

It took about an hour, and the only thing left was one of the girl’s hands. Navi mixed up something he said he’d learned from an Israeli spy, something he called caustic soda, and he’d chopped up the girl and put her in a vat of the stuff. In a few days, there wouldn’t be anything left but brown fluid and bone fragments, but you could turn the bones into sand just by rubbing them between your fingers. He took the girl’s hand and later that evening mailed it to the judge at her home, using the judge’s favorite restaurant’s address on the shipping label.

+++++

Dre’ Loos was an imposing man, and in more ways than one. At six feet six inches, he was considered tall, and he carried his almost three hundred pounds on a frame of solid muscle. Most people remarked that he looked like a professional football player, but that was probably because he had been, once upon a time. He’d played for the Oakland Raiders then the Pittsburgh Steelers back in the 90s, and after Andre Lutz retired, in ’05, he stayed in the city. He was bald now, his head the kind of shiny bald you could spot from across a crowded room, and only the beard he wore gave away his age. These days it was turning a little white, you see. Not that it mattered.

Dre’ had grown up in the city so coming back to the Steelers had been like a dream come true, because, he liked to say, what most people didn’t get was that Pittsburghers loved their city, and with a passion most people just didn’t get, and never would. He’d gone to Penn State where he developed into a formidable middle linebacker – most considered him downright mean – so he was a perfect fit for the Raiders’ brand of football. When he began to slow down he found himself back in Pittsburgh, and while he managed to play five more years everyone still considered him mean as a snake.

The Steelers public relations department got Andre hooked up with the local United Way chapter, and he got involved with crippled kids, then sick kids. Kids born with club feet or cleft palates, kids with cancer, kids that had been burned in terrible accidents. He used his fame to help the United Way raise money for these kids, and the experience changed him. Pretty soon, most people could see Dre’ for what he really was: a real gentle giant and one with a heart of gold. 

Yet a lot of people saw Dre’ as an angry black man, a radical with that chip on his shoulder.

While at Penn he took a sociology class and the subject interested him; after a few more classes he declared Sociology as his major. He took psych classes too, enough to take a minor in Psychology, and he graduated with high honors before heading out west. Right after he retired he went over to the Graduate School Admissions Office at Pitt, and, of course, everyone there knew who he was. And everyone there was shocked when he told them he wanted to go back to school. He had a degree in Sociology with a minor in Psych and, he wondered, how could he best put his skills, and his interests, to use. To best use, he said, because he wanted to get involved to stay involved.

Social Work, they said. Start there. Maybe go for LCSW certification, as in Licensed Clinical Social Worker. He could go onto any number of organizations from there, and he could go into policy planning or get involved with people in need – in one-on-one settings. There were tons of opportunities, more for someone like him. He started classes when the next term started, and everyone in his classes, even his professors, knew who he was. Some wanted autographs, some even brought jerseys to class, asked if he’d sign them – and he always did. With a smile. Because he really was just a gentle giant.

Dre’ kept working out, taking care of himself just like he always had, and every afternoon, right after class he went to the gym on campus and lifted for a while, then went for a five-mile run. Pretty soon he recognized a guy from one of his classes, a little younger than him but another guy really in shape. TJ Warren. He’d gone to Pitt and right after 911 had gone into the Army. Picked for Ranger School, he was chosen to go through further training, first for Special Forces, then the 18D program, to become a Special Forces medic. Soon everyone was calling him ‘Doc,’ and most everyone still did.

And pretty soon Doc and Dre’ got to talking in the gym, sharing experiences. Working out together, running. Working on classwork, soon becoming friends. Then best friends. When Dre’ hooked up with a girl and marriage was on the way, he asked Doc to be his Best Man, because that’s how close they’d become.

Doc was Catholic, and Catholic with a capital C. He wasn’t sure what path he’d take but he was pretty certain he’d end up going to seminary, sooner or later becoming a priest, one way or another. Dre’ started going to church with his friend, started getting into it. The God thing. Doc said he wasn’t looking for answers, that life was a mystery, and that God was just one way of looking at all those mysteries, and of maybe trying to understand your place in the grand scheme of things. Doc never talked about girls, at least not like most guys talked about girls, but he wasn’t gay, either. 

“Dude, you celibate or something?” Dre’ asked one afternoon while they jogged up what would have given pause to a mountain goat.

“No, of course not.”

“You ain’t gay, and you ain’t got no girl, so what’s the score?”

But Doc had just shrugged. “If the right girl comes along, then…who knows?”

“You been with a girl, right?”

“Do my mother and sister count?”

“Fuck no, mother fucker!”

“You mean, like a girlfriend?”

“I mean doin’ the deed, the hunka-chunka, gettin’ down and dirty, man.”

“Oh. That.”

“So?”

“Yeah, Dre’, I’ve done the deed.”

“And, like, you liked it, right?”

“What’s not to like?”

“So, shouldn’t you be out there perpetuating the species? Maybe havin’ some fun before you take them vows?”

“Like I said, if the right girl comes…”

“Man, you fucked in da head. You, like, know that, right?”

Doc pulled ahead, his legs churning like pistons. “As long as I got you here to remind me,” Doc tossed off over his shoulder as he sprinted ahead, “I’m pretty sure you’re not going to let me forget.”

+++++

Benny walked up to Damarius and they exchanged hand signals, acknowledging they lived in the same hood, and Benny reached out and took the heavy book bag off the kid’s shoulder.

“Man, what you got in here? Feels like bricks or rocks or something…?”

“Just books.”

“You ain’t got no stuff? No Bombers? You ain’t carryin’ for nobody?”

Damarius wondered where this was going. BennyB never, ever acted nice unless he wanted something, so Damarius was already on guard. “No, just books.”

“So, you still learnin’ what the man tell you to?”

“Miss Murphy is my teacher.”

“Okay. So, you learnin’ what this bitch tell you?”

“Benny, I got to get home. I got to give my grandmother her shot.”

“Man, what you shootin’ her up with? I hear there’s some Mexican Brown comin’ in…”

Damarius shook his head. “Insulin, man. I give her insulin shots.”

Benny didn’t have all day so he pressed his case. “Look, D-mar, you wanna make some hard cash, like a lot of it?”

Damarius shook his head. “You mean like Bobby, don’t you?”

Bobby was the mule who’d disappeared last week. “Yeah. You know about that shit?”

Damarius nodded carefully. “Everyone around here knows, Benny, but…”

“But what?”

Damarius looked down, still not sure he wanted to tell Benny, but what he’d overheard might save his life, so that decided it. “There’s some shit going ‘round school. I heard some of it at lunch. You know those Tren guys? That new cartel?”

Benny started to turn and look up Hamilton to Oakwood, but Damarius was quick to stop him. “Don’t be lookin’ up there man, ‘cause they lookin’ right at you. The red brick house, right up at the end of the street, they in there and they watchin’ everything you do. Guy I know lives just down the hill and he’s seen ‘em. They use them glass things, them things you hold up to your eyes to see far away and they been watchin’ you for a while.”

“You shittin’ me, D-mar?”

Damarius frowned. “Another dude, white kid, he live up on Singer, like right behind them, and he seen ‘em doin’ weird shit in da middle of da night, and his old man has seen some of this shit too. ‘Bout a week ago, middle of the night, he seen ‘em takin’ Bobby in they house, and he was all fucked up, Benny. I mean like dead fucked up. His father thinks they diggin’ under the house, like they got trucks comin’ at night haulin’ dirt out of the house. I mean like in da middle of da night, and why would they be doin’ that, Benny?”

BennyB looked at the kid with mean, angry eyes. “You ain’t fuckin’ wit me, is you? You ain’t fuckin’ wit my head?”

Damarius looked at Benny, looked him right in the eye as he shook his head. “No way, man. I ain’t gonna haul no shit for you, but that don’t mean I want something bad to happen to you…”

“Alright, D-mar. We straight, we straight. You say you know both these kids? Like from school?”

Damarius nodded. “Das right.”

“Okay. Thanks, bro,” Benny said as he gave Damarius his book bag. He looked away, then spun around and walked off. Damarius walked to his grandmother’s but once he was inside he looked at Benny in the vacant lot across the street. He was behind some bushes, between a dumpster and a concrete block wall, talking on his phone.

He knew it then. There was going to be another drive-by tonight. The Crips were going to hit those Trens, and that meant there was going to be another war. How many this time? How many kids would die this time? Didn’t anybody want to stop this?

Well, it was time for him to start watching the street again. Just like he always did. Watching and listening. Watching and waiting kept you alive. If you stuck your head in the sand you died, simple as that. And that meant it was time to move some more stuff between the walls and where his grandmother slept. Anything to stop the bullets, ya know?

He went into the house, the same red brick row house he’d lived in since his mother got killed in a drive-by. He went to the fridge and picked up a fresh vial, then walked upstairs to her room. She was in an easy chair, snoring gently. He went over and got her meter, then bent over and got to work. Get a test strip in the meter, swab a finger. She hardly stirred as he went about it, so used to his kind, gentle ministrations that now she almost took his easy-going kindness for granted. The lancing device popped and he got the sample on the test strip and waited for the little meter to do its thing, then the results popped up on the tiny display.

“325, Grandma. What you have for lunch…a candy bar again?”

She nodded and he grumbled as he looked at the sliding scale, drawing her insulin then swabbing the soft part of her upper arm. He knew how to do it so the needle didn’t hurt and she hardly felt it this time, too. A minute later she was snoring again, asleep in the same old recliner she almost lived in these days.

He looked around, then started stacking whatever he could between the walls and her chair.

+++++

Last semester. Internships. Dre’ working at an outreach center on Garfield, working the work with kids already fallen through the cracks, livin’ low on the street. Girls turnin’ tricks at twelve, boys too. Anything to make a buck, maybe buy something to eat. Or something to shoot. Didn’t much matter, the hole in their stomach never really went away. Meth was the thing on these mean streets, little burglaries still an equal opportunity employer.

Still runnin’ with the Doc, too. Now Doc was working with some Catholic charities, doin’ pretty much the same shit. Three times a week they got together and lifted, ran the hills. Dinner, usually with the three of them. Beverly, cool woman, lawyer. Now she was his wife. She loved the Doc too, was always tryin’ to find him a woman. Said he’d be a good dad. The dude was takin’ philosophy classes now, gettin’ all intellectual but he was still grounded. But wound up tight, ya know? Like real tight.

You didn’t find a kid that needed help; the kid found you. Some kids wanted help, wanted off the street, and knew there had to be a better way. But there were boundaries, maybe too many boundaries, and never enough money. He’d put his money away, too. All that money from twelve years of football, invested, then in ’08 came the crash, and that hurt. Hurt big. He had his house, nice house, nice neighborhood, and Bev was making decent money downtown in the D.A.s office. Prosecutor. Tough job, hard money, but they kept their head above the water.

Graduation. Both he and the Doc with highest honors. Which way to go now? United Way wanted him and was offering good money, but Dre’ wanted to keep on goin’. Get his doctorate, maybe teach. But every time he thought like that he saw those kids, the kids that wanted help, and weren’t they the reason he’d started down this path? Did the system really need another teacher when he was so good with the kids? It wasn’t like the work made him happy, because when you lived with these kids happiness was rarely part of the deal. Maybe he was satisfied. Satisfied when he pulled a kid up just enough to teach them how to help themselves. One life at a time.

Too many gangs. Like maybe a thousand just here in the city. Some no more than a few kids on a block, but they were gangs. Some had links to national gangs like the Bloods and the Crips, some were just extended families fightin’ to survive in their little corner of the universe. One thing they had in common, though. All these kids had fallen through the cracks of a system that didn’t know it was broken, and there weren’t nobody tryin’ to fix what needed to be fixed. Only way to fix this shit was from the inside. 

“One city, one ‘hood.”

That was it. He had to get these kids together. Rebuild the city, one neighborhood at a time. Get everyone together, on the same page. These kids needed more than drugs. They needed a new reality, not a way out. Hope. The kind that ain’t just a slogan you hear every four years.

He and the Doc, lifting one day, then getting ready to run.

“What would you say if I told you I wanted to run for office?” Dre’ asked his best friend in the world.

Doc stood up straight and nodded. “I can see that happenin’, man. You’d be good.”

“Would you vote for me?”

“Fuck, bro, you were a Steeler. Everybody’ll vote for you.”

“But would you?”

“As long as you keep up with the whole deodorant thing, then yeah, maybe.”

“Doc. I’m bein’ serious man. Be straight, alright?”

Doc turned and looked at him, shook his head. “Man, you need me, I’ll be there. Alright? Like any time, anyplace.”

Dre’ swallowed hard, nodded then turned away. “Yeah man, I hear you. What about you? What you gonna do now? Still thinkin’ ‘bout going to med school?”

Doc shook his head, looked down at the city. “You ain’t gonna like this, Dre’, but I’m taking a different path this time.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

Doc shrugged. “I started lookin’ into it a few months back, took the civil service test, went through the process. I got into the police academy, Dre’. I think I’m gonna go that way, see what I can do on that side of the street.”

Andre nodded. “Yeah, I can feel you doin’ that. You’re a warrior, man, always will be, I guess.” Dre’ looked at his friend and smiled, and in a way he felt happy for his friend, despite all the shit he was about to go through. “Yeah, you’ll be a good cop. I feel that, ya know? When you start?”

“Three weeks. Then 33 more in the classroom. I think three months more after that, riding shotgun with a training officer.”

“So a year? Man, you down with that?”

“I’m spinnin’ my wheels, Dre’. Gettin’ nowhere fast. I don’t understand what’s happenin’ out there, but things are broke. Broke bad. And I know one thing now.”

“What’s that?”

“I ain’t no social worker, Dre’. And neither are you.”

“I know. I’m feelin’ it too. This is, hell, I don’t know, like takin’ Band-aids to a knife fight. Ain’t no way to put things right. Still, I was hopin’ you’d do the medicine thing. You’d be real good at that, Doc.”

“I’m keeping up with my ratings, only through the fire department now.”

“So, you’ll like be a cop – and a paramedic?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“Yeah. That fits. All you be needin’ is that red cape and all.”

Doc sighed, shook his head as he grinned. “And I’ll never be a Pittsburgh Steeler, Dre’. Don’t be telling’ me about capes, ‘cause you wore the biggest there is. You can make a difference. Hell, you will a difference.” 

They ran longer than usual that afternoon. Their twelve-mile run, down to the river…

© 2024 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | this is fiction plain and simple, and nothing but. (gang names, drug slang both from DEA source material, not classified)

New Year, new story. Inevitable, I reckon. And I am going to do my level best to keep my mouth shut about current events. All that seems a pointless expenditure of precious oxygen. That said, perhaps a little Yes music today? The More We Live, Let Go?

About 12 pages here. Perhaps time for tea.

Three Rivers

Part I: Tolerance

Peter Wells was a morning person. He routinely got up an hour before sunrise just so he could shower and dress in time to watch the darkness of night give way to the budding light of a new day. He particularly enjoyed those partly cloudy mornings when the rising sun created sunbursts of radiant light vaulting toward heaven, and he often wondered if that light did indeed reach God.

Yet he understood that was a meaningless question.

For Peter Wells was a complicated man. He was an educated man. And Peter Wells was a lonely man. By choice, and circumstance.

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania just after the Second World War, Peter Wells had never known a moment of physical discomfort in his life. He had never been sick, never been a patient in a hospital so took pride in the simple fact that he had all his original pieces and parts. Even his wisdom teeth. He had never known hunger, had never been abandoned by a parent or a friend, and had never been without the means to provide for himself. He had, in fact, been what most of those who knew him thought him to be: simply a wealthy man. Wealthy in the extreme.

Oh, but never idle.

He had never, to his knowledge, wasted one moment of his time. Indeed, he simply could not abide those who wasted time – his time or even their own.

Peter Wells was also a rather fastidious man. He bought his suits and shirts and shoes at the same shops his father had. And, presumably, these shops had served his grandfather as well, for these businesses had been in the neighborhood at least that long. The same went for all his possessions, really. He saw no need to strike out on his own, to make some kind of statement, or to parade around like a peacock. His one concession to that rule, however, was his automobile, a Mercedes 500SLC his father had given him when he completed his undergraduate studies. Though the Mercedes was now 42 years old he still drove it from time to time, when he chose to drive at all. Which was infrequently.

He belonged to all the right clubs, Longue Vue and Rolling Rock chief among them, and he kept a chestnut at an equestrian center near Rolling Rock for their fall outings

Oddly enough, he had lived in the same place for almost that long, in a two-floor condominium on Dithridge Street, in the North Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Sandwiched between the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, each about a mile or so distant, the Hampton Hall condominium building was an older property with quaint Tudor styling and a convenient location for those who worked at either Pitt or Carnegie-Mellon. 

Of more importance, his two-story penthouse possessed a spectacular view of both the Heinz Memorial Chapel and St Paul Cathedral, two of the most impressive neo-Gothic structures in the Americas. And both were within walking distance of not just his home, but his office, as well.

Peter Wells loved to walk. He despised most automobiles, most of all those which imbued passing fads and fancies. He appreciated understated elegance, and he appreciated people who appreciated understated elegance almost as much as he despised the aimless, flashy boorishness of youth.

Peter Wells stood beside the window in his dining room, entranced with this morning’s light. Amber-hued tendrils bathed St Paul’s twin spires, while slate gray thunderstorms building to the south lent an apocalyptic air to the blue morning light. He felt a shiver run down his neck and then the goosebumps came – and as he usually did, he wondered why. He felt something lurking in the shadows, something predatory and feral, yet something completely unknown, and so, perhaps, unexpected. As he watched, lightning flickered within the passing cloudscapes and time seemed to stop, and again, he wondered why.

Peter Wells was the product of another time, yet a time not yet forgotten. A time of privilege and of a chivalrous, if misbegotten, misogyny, as well as a time of lingering, malevolent racism. But it was also a time of great wealth and privilege, and yes, a time of savage, widespread poverty. His maternal grandfather had been into railroads and banks; he had in fact owned several of each; his father had returned from the Second World War as something of a hero. A pilot before the outbreak of war, Preston Wells had flown B-17s during two tours. Stationed in Britain, he had participated in 50 missions over France and Germany from 1943 through the end of hostilities. When Colonel Wells came home from Britain he married his high school sweetheart and declared his true intentions; he wanted to fly for a living – yet this was something his new father-in-law would neither understand nor allow. Instead, Preston Wells received an airline as a wedding gift, to go along with his managerial position downtown working for the Pennsylvania Railroad. But of course, within a year he was working out at the airport, coming home after midnight with grease under his fingernails. Soon he was flying DC-4s from the frozen north to sunny Florida, and by the time he retired the Pennsylvania Railroad was dead and gone, while his airline was flying 747s to Europe and the Orient, in addition to the sprawling domestic route network he had pioneered.

Peter Wells knew nothing about the Pennsylvania Railroad – other than his grandfather had made a bunch of money from his interests in it over the years, somehow, before he passed. He’d taken trips on the Pennsy, of course, to New York and Chicago – before Amtrak took over. After Amtrak took control of the bastardized Penn-Central’s passenger operations, his mother’s side of the family refused to get on the ‘new’ Broadway Limited…their refusals grounded in a mortal loathing of anything that smacked of socialism.

Peter Wells attended The University of Pittsburgh and studied international relations, concentrating on Russian studies. After graduating – at the top of his class – he went to Boston, to Tuft’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy before moving on to the Department of State. After additional training, he was posted to Moscow, in 1978, just before all the excitement in Iran and Afghanistan. He remained in Russia through 1996, returning to Washington to take a position in the White House during Clinton’s second term, and after Bush won in 2000 he returned home, and to his beloved view of the Heinz Chapel. He took a teaching position at Pitt, as well as the house Russia specialist at the RAND Corporation’s Pittsburgh office, conveniently located a five-minute walk from his front door.

He played golf regularly and always walked the course, whether at Longue Vue or Rolling Rock, and on Saturday he always, come rain or shine or snow, took his chestnut out for a ride. He walked to his classes at Pitt, and to his office at RAND. He walked to his beloved Heinz Chapel at least once a week, and he preferred to walk to restaurants whenever feasible. His Mercedes did not yet have twenty thousand miles on the odometer, a fact he was most proud of. 

Peter Wells was soon fully engaged in the ongoing efforts to revitalize Pittsburgh after the long decline and sudden collapse of the steel industry in the city. He was invited to serve on the boards of directors of several local charities and businesses, and he was admired throughout the upper tiers of Pittsburgh society as a fully engaged member of the dynasties that had guided the City for well over a hundred years.

The neighborhood around his home wasn’t particularly wealthy; it was, rather, a typical urban area that catered to two large, highly regarded universities; in some respects, the Oakland neighborhood was not unlike the Cambridge area around Harvard and MIT in Boston. Less desirable neighborhoods, however, bordered the Oakland area, particularly just north of his residence, as formerly middle-class areas fell into disrepair. Two of these neighborhoods were increasingly being overrun by gangs selling narcotics, and fully radicalized Islamic militants were not unheard of in these blighted neighborhoods.

Peter Wells was no longer a young man, neither was he middle-aged. At 75 years old, he was considered elderly, yet it was not in his constitution to bow to age. He was teaching two courses this semester, one on the history of Russian literature and the other, in the graduate school, concerned Russian foreign policy objectives in the Putin era. He led two teams at RAND, both concerned with American foreign policy objectives in both Russia and the Baltic.

And Peter Wells was a bachelor. He had never married, nor had he been involved personally with anyone, at least not that anyone could recall, so the Wells line would end with him. Oddly enough, he thought this was as it should be, for despite current trends he held a dim view of Gilded Age politics, whether in the 1880s or the 2020s. He was a Democrat and he believed in democracy, and not unlike many with similar views, as the election of 2024 approached he despaired for the future of his country.

+++++

Dressed as he always was, in a pressed black suit with a white button-down oxford cloth shirt adorned with black wingtips and a pale yellow tie, Peter Wells put on his camel hair overcoat and, after consulting the Post-Gazette’s forecast, decided against an umbrella – though he knew this was risky. Rain, and potentially heavy thunderstorms, were in the offing later in the afternoon, but his foreign policy class concluded at noon, his office hour at one-thirty, so that ought not present a problem. 

It was but a short walk to his classroom, located in the University’s Cathedral of Learning, in room 153, the Russian ‘Nationality Room’. His walk took him past Heinz Chapel and as always he stopped for a moment to admire the building’s gorgeous symmetry – and its sublime theological messaging. The chapel was the equal to any in European Christendom, and that such a thing had sprouted above the Allegheny River was a testament to the vision of the city’s benevolent founders, his own family chief among them. When he thought of such things, which happened more frequently these days, he was filled with a peculiar mixture of pride and humility – and, perhaps, not unrealistically so. His grandfather had brought the Pennsylvania Railroad to the city, and had helped in the creation of this university and the medical center. Peter Wells had good reason to be proud, and as a crisp autumn breeze buffeted the quad beside the chapel he gathered his overcoat tightly around his neck and set off across fields of slumbering grass to his classroom.

+++++

As he always had, Wells had assigned Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks to the students in his graduate seminar. The novel concerns the decline of a merchant banking family in nineteenth-century Lübeck, one of the original Hanseatic city-states of the medieval European world. The decline of the family over four generations, with each successive generation falling deeper into moral and physical dis-ease, had been crafted not only to depict one family’s descent but to allegorically present the predictable decline of autocratic regimes, with each succeeding generation of leaders falling deeper and deeper into their own dis-ease. Using this allegory as his guide, the American diplomat George Kennan had, in one of those key inflection points in History, used the model presented in Buddenbrooks to chart the decline of the Soviet Union. He did so in 1947, in the so-called X Article, published in the July issue of Foreign Policy magazine. In The Sources of Soviet Conduct, Kennan presented the policy of strategic containment, advising his readers that by using the patient application of judicious amounts of limited military power to contain Soviet expansion, the West could frustrate the Kremlin’s plans to export communist ideology around the world. Kennan postulated that the life of the Soviet Union could be measured in the passage of four generations, and he predicted the Soviet system would collapse in the 1980s, perhaps as late as the early 90s; writing from his vantage point in 1947, Kennan’s work was beyond prescient. It was, Wells thought, inspired.

And now a new generation of diplomats was needed to combat Putin and the new generation of autocrats taking root around the world, and Peter Wells now thought that it was his mission in life to do just that.

+++++

After class, Professor Wells sat for office hours, which usually meant getting caught up on waiting correspondence, but today he actually had a student waiting for him when he arrived. Her last name was Caldwell. That much he remembered. And she stood when he came into his ante-room and asked if she could talk to him. He smiled, barely, then unlocked his office door and held it open for her.

“Do come in, Miss Caldwell.”

Impressed that he had actually remembered her name, she nodded and walked into this storied inner sanctum. It was, she soon saw, as amazing as she had heard. The room was solid oak, everywhere. Deep, pictured-framed paneling, three vast walls of shelves lined with books. A palatial desk of dark oak, and it too was massive. Even the room’s entire ceiling was made of oak, the space criss-crossed with deep beams. The room was overwhelming, just like the man. She’d been afraid of him before the seminar had even begun; his reputation was that of a fierce taskmaster who brooked no fools in his classroom. She knew he was ancient yet she thought him elegant, too; tall, thin, and yet muscular, with longish hair now white as snow, and always dressed like someone caught out of time, totally from another era. He was, in other words, the exact opposite of her father and both her grandfathers.

She stood as he made his way around the massive desk to his chair, a dark green leather thing that also looked like something from another period, until he indicated a chair. “Please, make yourself comfortable.”

“Thank you for seeing me, Professor Wells.”

He shrugged. “That’s what office hours are for, Miss Caldwell. Now, what might you need to talk about?”

“I know it’s early in the term, but I was thinking of applying to the Fletcher School next year and I wondered if I could talk to you about it?”

“It?” Wells growled, turning red in the face. “What on earth does ‘it’ mean?”

“Uh, the school. You know, what it’s like, what it takes to succeed there.”

“You must love indefinite pronouns, Miss Caldwell. Are you interested in diplomacy, perchance?”

“Yes, I think so…”

“I see. Well, there is no place in diplomacy for indefinite anything. You must strive for absolute clarity in everything undertaken, and everything said. Everything. Whether in writing or spoken. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Professor Wells.”

“Now, would you care to rephrase your request?”

By the time she left his office Sarah Caldwell had almost been reduced to tears, yet Wells had spent a good half hour building her back up, reforming her confidence in herself, and she left feeling very much better about deciding to meet with the old lion. She was still terrified of him, but she had seen something unexpected in him too, something like an easily accessible wisdom. And she wanted to understand where that came from, and how she too could develop her own wisdom.

+++++

Just before his office hours ended, the department secretary advised that the Dean had asked if Dr. Wells could come up to his office, so Peter Wells put away the classroom notes he had been working on and closed up his office. He took the elevator upstairs to the humanities office and stopped to admire the view of the city spread out before him, here atop this glorious Cathedral of Learning. How profound were the aspirations of his forefathers that they would have the audacity to even conceive of such a thing, but then they had gone ahead and done it. There was nothing else like this building in America, perhaps even the world, but then again the people who built this city never stopped with the impossible. The impossible was merely that which they had not yet tried.

And those rivers! The Allegheny and the Monongahela joining in the city center to form the mighty Ohio. How perfect for the ends these titans had hoped to achieve, fleshing out this New World, taking veins of ore and their furnaces pouring rails that shot out like arteries across a naked continent. He hated to admit it, even to himself, but these furnaces of Manifest Destiny had built the world that all the Sarah Caldwells out there now took so casually for granted.

+++++

His team at RAND awaited him on the third floor. Acolytes and disciples of pure data analysis, they were scheduled to go over the latest output figures from a cluster of arms factories east of Moscow, in the foothills of the Urals. Some figures were estimates, others came from ‘friends’ that Wells had made over the years. Friends that were concerned about the trajectory of recent events. His teams’ work would go straight to the NSC, and, if warranted, to the White House. All his analysts had been students of his at Pitt, but only the best and the brightest were asked to apply here. All but one had been on the team for fifteen years.

And that worried Peter Wells.

He had experienced firsthand how many incoming freshmen could barely string enough words together to form a coherent sentence. Few had ever read even one complete book; they had instead been provided with anthologies of prominent works that contained ‘highlights,’ so instead of reading books by F Scott Fitzgerald or Mark Twain they had often read no more than two or three pages from one of the assigned authors works. Raised on video games and their walls adorned with participation trophies, these new students had not the slightest ability to concentrate on anything that wasn’t flashing and beeping in their hands. More troubling still, they knew almost nothing of the world around them, aside from the location of the nearest sushi bar or, perhaps, where the nearest phone store was located.

So when he was confronted with a graduate student like Sarah Caldwell…? Well, he sat up and took note. He would cultivate her, bring her along on visits to RAND, pique her curiosity a bit, and see where things went from there. If she indeed had the intellectual grit he would indeed write the inevitable letters of recommendation she would need to get into the Fletcher School, or Georgetown, or, heaven forbid, the Kennedy School.

But, he had to admit, time was running out. He figured he might be able to teach for five more years, assuming his health held. And RAND? He was already down to just two afternoons a week, the bare minimum needed to produce meaningful intel, but for how much longer could he do so? Could he, in all fairness, try to mentor a girl like Sarah Caldwell when he might not last the time needed to see her assume productive duties at State or the NSC? Or here at RAND?

He looked out the window across the street to St Paul Cathedral, its twin spires deliberate copies of those that formed the magnificent cathedral in Köln, Germany. There was something about them, and every time he looked at these spires he was overcome by the same feeling. He had spent a brief period working at the embassy in Bad Godesberg, just south of Bonn on the banks of the Rhein, and on his days off he walked the region. One spring day he was walking near the small village of Oberpleis, just east of Bonn, while keeping an eye on two thunderstorms. He was walking through parts of what was then called West Germany, and he remembered that Napoleon had marched across the same plateau almost two hundred years before, and he was looking down a broad Rhine valley at Cologne, or Köln, at the cathedral there. He had to have been fifteen, maybe twenty miles away from the cathedral, but even from that distance, those twin spires had captivated his imagination. Had Napoleon looked down on the city from this vantage point? Had he seen much the same thing? Those twin spires? If so, what had he felt? What had run through his mind? And what of Beethoven? He had been born in Bonn, and had walked those very same hills and vales, and not long before Napoleon. Had he gazed in wonder at those two spires? To, perhaps, escape the abuses of his alcoholic father?

But when Peter Wells stood out there on that grassy plain as thunderstorms danced near and far, he felt caught up in the flow of time, in the ebb and flood of history, if only for a moment. He had never shared those moments with anyone because, in a way, those feelings had frightened him. There had been a hallucinatory element to that moment, a split second when he had felt himself actually standing out there in the early nineteenth century, and the feeling of disorientation had felt like a rip running through the fabric of his conscious awareness of time and place. He’d felt lost, lost in time, if only inside those few, fleeting moments – yet those moments were most precious to him. Perhaps as important as any he’d had.

+++++

He left his offices promptly at six, but hesitated when he stepped out onto Fifth Avenue. He hadn’t had much of anything for breakfast and no lunch at all, so now he was hungry and he didn’t feel like cooking. He turned around and looked down Craig to the little crêperie there and smiled. A spinach crêpe sounded nice, with a glass of something quiet, a riesling, perhaps, or a Piesporter if they had one. And a salad. He walked down and sat at his favorite table and looked at the specials chalked on the board, then tried not to appear too surprised when Sarah Caldwell approached his table, with pen and paper in hand. ‘Working here as a waitress?’ he thought as she walked up and smiled.

“Well, well, so we meet again,” Peter Wells said. “I take it you work here when not attending to your studies?”

“You got it, Professor Wells.”

He grimaced. “Just Peter, if you please, when off campus. You’ll blow my cover,” he added with a disarming smile of his own.

“Sure thing, Pete. Watcha havin’?”

He laughed at that. “Touché!” he said at her thrust.

“So, Peter, let me guess. You’re a German beer and ham and cheese guy, right?”

But he shook his head. “Hardly. A glass of riesling, a small Greek salad and two spinach crêpes.”

“Extra kalamatas on the salad?”

“Am I so transparent?”

“I can read you like a book, Doc.”

“I see. Well then, I suppose I’ll need to remember that.”

He smiled and she smiled right back at him, then she turned and thudded off to the kitchen. Perhaps it was those heavy, black Doc Martens shoes she wore? She brought his wine and salad, then his crêpes, and then she left him to eat in silence. When he had finished and after she’d cleared his table she came over and sat across from him. “So, crêpes au Gran Marnier for dessert?”

“Are you insane?” he cried. “After that meal!”

“Doc, you ate enough for a bird. A small bird. And anyway, when’s the last time you indulged?”

He sucked in a deep breath and looked away, lost in thought. “You know, the last dessert crêpe I had was from a little street vendor near the Sorbonne.”

“And how long ago was that?”

“Ah, well, probably sometime back in the early Pleistocene, but don’t quote me on that.”

“So…?”

“Alright. One crêpe, and just one, if you please.”

“Cappuccino?”

“Oh, why the Hell not?”

And this became their routine. He came to the crêperie twice a week and she took his order twice a week. Academics never intruded on their time, but he watched her. Watched her when she dealt with strangers and with the crêperie’s owners. She was good with people, easygoing and friendly when friendliness was called for, yet calm and collected when things got busy. When he came in later than usual she wondered where he’d been but had the good sense not to ask, and he appreciated that, too. One evening, one of the late arrivals, she stopped by after she’d cleared his table and sat heavily, and he could see that something was wearing on her.

“What is it, Sarah? What’s happened?” 

“Does it show?” she replied.

And he smiled then: “I can read you like a book, kid.”

Which brought a smile to her face. “You remember that, huh?”

“I remember everything,” he’d said, and he’d meant it, too, because it was the truth.

“Everything, huh?”

And he’d nodded. “Everything.”

“Okay, wise guy. What was I wearing in class last Tuesday?”

“Jeans, Levis I think. A yellow Pitt sweatshirt and pink Converse hi-tops. Little socks, pink, with cats on them.”

“Jesus Christ,” she mumbled.

“I never met the man, but I understand he was quite bright.”

“Why do you stop and stare at the chapel?” she asked quietly. And seriously.

“You’ve noticed, have you?”

“I notice everything, Doc. Every little thing.” His eyes smiled at that, and she enjoyed the way his eyes sparkled when he smiled at her.

“I think it’s the sense of accomplishment more than anything else. That we can create such enduring beauty when we set out to, which leads me back to my original question. Something’s bothering you, and I’d like to know what that is.”

“The chapel led you back to that, huh?”

“Oh, yes, very much so. Anytime anyone tries to evade a question by changing the subject, well, that always gets my complete attention.”

“I’m losing the roof over my head, Doc. I’ve been sharing a place, splitting the rent with a friend but she’s getting married and that’s that. I’ve got to find a place by the end of the month, but so far nothing affordable is popping up.”

“The University’s housing office can’t help?”

“Not much, at least not in the middle of the term.”

“I used to let out the rooms on the second floor of my place, had them listed with the housing office for years. Stopped doing so a few years ago.”

“Yeah? Affordable?”

“Oh, quite. You see, I traded room and board in exchange for housekeeping services. In other words, I kept the kitchen well stocked and expected a spotless house and two meals a day, five days a week. Interested?”

“Are you kidding?”

“No, not in the least. The only thing is that I’d need to re-list with student housing. That affords both of us some protection, in case one of us turns out to be an axe murderer or something.”

“You don’t look the part, Doc.” 

“Nor do you, Sarah.”

“That means I could quit waiting tables…”

“I rescind the offer!”

“Well ain’t that something…”

“What?”

“You like me, don’t you? I mean, just a little?”

“I do. Yes, Sarah, I do. You are without a doubt the best waitress this place has ever had!”

+++++

So Peter Wells listed his three vacant rooms with graduate student housing, and under the same conditions he always had. Even before the Thanksgiving break his rooms were taken again, with Sarah Caldwell taking the largest. Though Wells was himself a fastidious housekeeper he appreciated the new help, especially in the kitchen. His new ‘tenants’ in the other two rooms were both second-years in the medical school, and one of these, a sweet girl from Louisiana named MaryAnn Albright, was an excellent chef, though with a strong Cajun background, her meals had a kick he wasn’t used to.

And so without any real planning on his part, Peter Wells had a kind of new family around; while many considered Wells a closet misanthrope nothing could have been further from the truth. He enjoyed having people, especially bright young people in the house again, and he enjoyed getting to know their routines and idiosyncrasies.

The girls wanted to put up a tree for Christmas and he went out with them, helped them pick out a tree and get it set up in the living room on his floor and, as it seemed none would be going home for the holiday this year, he went out and bought presents to put under the tree. When he overheard Sarah talking to MaryAnn and Aaron, the third inmate in this new asylum, about wanting a puppy but being afraid to ask, Peter broached the subject the next morning.

“You know what we need around here?” he said at breakfast that Saturday morning. “We need a big, fat puppy. How would you all feel about that?”

To Sarah Caldwell, this all seemed to be too good to be true. She’d had a tough upbringing; divorce, her mother’s alcohol problem, her father’s absence from her life, and suddenly Peter Wells was becoming the family she’d never had. Now her life had, she admitted to her roommates more than once, never been better.

The week before Christmas they hopped in Peter’s ancient Mercedes and drove out to a breeder and when one particular Bernese Mountain Dog puppy covered Sarah with sloppy kisses Peter Wells smiled almost like a father, or, perhaps, maybe more like a grandfather. Sarah held the pup in her hands all the way back into the city, and watching her, Peter realized he had never known such happiness.

The realization left him breathless, and full of a gentle regret.

Christmas Eve was priceless. MaryAnn cooked, Aaron hauled split logs up to the fireplace, and Sarah tidied up the big living room on the main floor, stopping every now and then to wipe-up puppy-piddle from the hardwood floors. The little group ate in the formal dining room then sat in front of the television and watched A Charlie Brown Christmas before settling in to watch White Christmas by the fireplace.

At midnight, Peter poured four flutes of a rare Champagne and they toasted the occasion before heading up to bed, and everyone gathered around the Christmas tree early the next morning for presents. The girls gave Peter scarves and neckties and he laughed at their audacious choices – one necktie featuring the lyrics of the Beatles Back in the USSR in gold splashed on a crimson silk background. Peter had wrapped presents for them, little things he’d overheard like headphones and iPads, but he also handed a small box to Aaron.

“You open this, Aaron, but this gift is for the three of you.”

It was a key fob for a Subaru.

“I’ll keep the car in my name and pay the insurance, but it’s for the three of you…to run errands or to go to movies.” They went down to the lot beside the building and he showed them around their new car, and he watched like any proud parent might as they made appreciative noises and tinkered with the settings.

All in all, it was a good day, and Peter Wells felt most pleased.

+++++

One morning early in the following spring, Peter Wells stood by the window watching thunderstorms building in the distance and he smiled. Storms brought water and water was life. Water brought green grass and blooming flowers and nourished budding trees, and yes, all those were wonderful things, but what he loved most about storms like these was their drama. The building clouds, lightning jumping about, the potential danger that often accompanied such storms, especially this time of year. He recalled the great stories his parents had read to him when he was just learning to read, about the mythologies surrounding the gods who lurked about in such storms. He looked at these freshening storms and could feel his mother by his side, hear her voice as she read to him, feel the mystery once again. How easy it had been to believe those stories, how difficult they were to unlearn, even now. How easy it was to believe in things we could not see.

MaryAnn was cooking, Sarah and Aaron setting the table. It was Eggs Sardou this morning, a beautiful creole breakfast of poached eggs, artichoke bottoms, creamed spinach and Hollandaise sauce, served with a strong chicory blend from New Orleans. He pulled himself away from the storms and drifted to the table, as ever in awe of MaryAnn’s skill in the kitchen. “If you keep this up I’m going to explode,” he sighed as he looked over the table. “Even so, I will pass with a smile.”

He looked at his little family just then, if that’s what it really was, with a sense of detached awe. Did these kids just seem to want to take care of him, or was there something deeper going on? MaryAnn had been an enigma, for a few weeks, anyway. She was plump, not fat, but time and a few babies would see her blossom into a large woman, yet she professed to want a career in internal medicine and had pointedly mentioned she never wanted to marry. So yes, she was a contradiction, one not unlike many of the undergrads he taught, and he always seemed to find less-than-happy childhoods behind many of these choices. Strange, too, because his childhood had been more than happy and yet he’d made the same sorts of decisions, and as a historian, he wondered what academics a hundred years hence would make of the early 21st century. This was, after all, the era of grievance-filled politics, or supposedly so, anyway, yet he couldn’t recall any era that wasn’t filled to overflowing with similar grievances. Was it the volume of information these kids had to deal with, or the cognitive dissonance that resulted from so many competing narratives?

Aaron had already turned into Wally, Beaver Cleaver’s older know-it-all brother who always seemed to lend a steady hand until Ward, their father, showed up to provide fatherly wisdom and a handy resolution to the problem at hand. The odd part about it? MaryAnn doted on Aaron. She acted just like a heat-seeking missile around the boy. Was it genetic programming kicking-in, as perhaps some kind of maternal drive seeking fulfillment? But recently he’d been picking up similar vibes from Sarah, too. Like maybe she had a thing for Aaron, too. Was there trouble brewing?

He had already dressed for the day and planned to walk to the chapel for morning services. He’d never been particularly religious but had gone, when the impulse hit, simply to participate in the communal rituals that had, for centuries, bound people together. And yet, lately, he’d been doing so with increasing regularity. ‘Isn’t this an elective affinity?’ he wondered. ‘But if so, why now? Is it the kids? Am I responding to some need in them, or is it just because I’m getting old?’

MaryAnn planned to take the Subaru out to Costco to do some shopping, and Aaron wanted to tag along; Sarah needed to go to the library to plow through items on a reserve reading list. After their plates were cleared and the dishwasher loaded, they all headed to the elevator and down to their appointed rounds.

Peter Wells stopped to check his mailbox while MaryAnn and Aaron walked off to the Subaru, while Sarah took off out the front door, heading to the library. Peter followed her out a moment later, his practiced eye suddenly drawn to the building thunderstorms now towering over the city, probably just now reaching the three rivers. He saw Sarah up ahead, already crossing Fifth Avenue at the light, but turning now to walk towards the chapel and the shortcut across the quad to Hillman Library.

He saw them in the next instant. Two boys, young, probably teenagers, but something about them looked off because it seemed like they had very deliberately fallen in behind Sarah after she passed the shadows they’d been lurking in.

She crossed Bellefield and made a left along the sidewalk beside the hedgerow and he quickened his pace to catch up, but the light caught him and he watched, now helpless, as the two boys jumped her from behind and pulled her behind the hedge. 

Maybe it was adrenaline. Maybe it was testosterone. 

Maybe it was pure rage that mindless hooligans would defile both a gracious young woman and the University, and not far from his beloved chapel.

He darted through traffic as he ran after them, and arrived just in time to push one of the boys off Sarah. Then the other boy, dark, swarthy, and with malevolent pale silver eyes, pulled out a pistol…

…just as the earth shook under the hammer blow of an immense crack of thunder. The kid flinched and pulled the trigger just as a shattering crack of lightning struck the chapel’s steeple; bits of molten metal arced through the morning sky as cascades of sparkling embers settled over the quad…

…Peter Wells was aware of falling. Then the pain registered. Pressure, hot boiling pressure. Radiating down his left arm and up his neck, settling behind his eyes. He was aware of hitting the grass, of his flaccid head bouncing off the turf, but now he could see his beloved chapel in the distance, yet something looked wrong. The air was on fire. Sarah was on her knees, crawling towards him and one of the boys was staring from Sarah to him to the other kid, the kid with the pistol in his hand…

…and that’s when the sphere appeared. Out of the trees. The shimmering orb fell to the ground but stopped short and hovered there, then it advanced on the boy with the pistol. Peter Wells couldn’t believe his eyes.

“That’s ball lightning,” he whispered as recognition penetrated the last remnants of consciousness. The lightning drifted across the grassy quad like it was drawn to the boy, or was it to the pistol in his hand? He wanted to shout out a warning but couldn’t. Drop the pistol and break the ground circuit! You’ll be safe then!

But the boy froze and then started shooting at the hot sphere.

And the sphere simply ran into and then through the boy, whose body simply exploded. Only his hands and feet remained, and Sarah Caldwell started to scream and cry.

But Peter Wells was up there in the clouds now, looking down on the world his father and grandfather had helped build. He watched as a white car pulled up on the curb, and he recognized MaryAnn and Aaron running to the stricken man on the grass, but his mind was on the three rivers now, and where they might take him.

© 2024 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | this is fiction plain and simple, and nothing but. And here ends part one, of three.

Perhaps more Yes is in order here. Close to the Edge might do the trick.

 

There’s an old saying that goes something like this: History never treats kindly those who try and rush her. I suppose the same can be said for baking a cake, or writing a story that contains multiple diverging storylines. A story that took shape in my mind almost thirty years ago, deep in the middle of the night while standing watch on my first real sailboat. So many things roamed through my mind, and yet the startling thing about all this is that I remember the night, and that story, with absolute clarity. The process of putting this together has been like building a model sailing ship from scratch (and I’ll not mention that I tried that once, which is why I took up writing).

Music matters all the more these days, because everyone needs some Help from time to time.

5.19

“There’s no way you’ll ever get me to kill anyone,” Henry Taggart said to Frank Bullitt.

Roosevelt took his seat at the head of the conference table and looked at Taggart with a weary sigh. “Tell me something, Henry,” Roosevelt said, his almost high-pitched voice raspy from too many years of smoking unfiltered cigarettes. “From the perspective of your place in time, you understand Adolph Hitler’s actions in the second war to be monstrous. Would that be a fair assessment?”

Taggart nodded. “Yes, of course. Who wouldn’t come to that conclusion?”

“Well, obviously the members of Hitler’s inner circle didn’t seem to think so,” FDR muttered, “but that’s neither here nor there. The point I’m trying to make is elementary, Henry. If you could go back in time and, say, kill Hitler when he was a child, or even kill his mother or father, you would kill that monstrosity, that virus, before it ever had a chance to take root. You’d save tens of millions of people from the misery of genocidal warfare, a human misery grounded in one man’s tortured ego. Are you telling me that, if given the opportunity, you’d not go back in time and do just that?”

Taggart nodded. “That’s correct; I would not.”

“Why?”

“Murder is evil. You don’t stop evil with evil. You only become evil.”

FDR looked at Taggart and nodded. “And if a madman breaks into your house in the middle of the night and he’s about to kill your sleeping children with a hatchet, would you allow him to continue, or would you try to stop him, even if that meant killing him.”

“I’d kill him.”

“So you don’t really believe in a blanket prohibition against killing, do you?”

“Obviously not, but one circumstance is exigent, the other enters the realm of the hypothetical.”

“How so,” Roosevelt said.

“Your belief is that one man alone, in this case Hitler, was responsible for all the suffering in Europe in the Second World War, but isn’t that naive?”

“Naive?”

“Sure. I mean, look at it this way. You’re saying the Holocaust was the result of one man’s obsession with Jewry, yet a huge percentage of the people in Europe were anti-semitic. Hell, they still are, or were when I was last there. And no matter what, Hitler alone didn’t make the Holocaust happen…”

“But if you removed him from the equation…”

“My completely uneducated guess, Mr Roosevelt, is that it would have happened anyway. If I remember correctly, Germany was being crushed by reparations and hyperinflation, not to mention industrial policies being rammed down their throats by Britain and France. Jews had been scapegoated into taking the blame for all this, and in the Nazis retelling of this story, the Weimar Republic became a Jewish construct because a few of the leaders of the Republic happened to be Jewish, so the republic took the fall. But again, if I remember my history, the same thing had happened in France like sixty years before, which leads me to think that when bad stuff happens in Europe, the standard European reaction has been to blame it all on the Jews, so what I’m saying is if you went back and killed Hitler the odds are still real good that someone else would come along and light the exact same fuse.”

Roosevelt looked down and nodded. “Maybe so, Henry. Maybe you’re correct, but I’m still not convinced, but then again History has put me in a fairly unique position. I’ve had to learn to live with the decisions I made, which were made with the best information I had at the time, yet I’ve been holed up in that office over there reading and rereading the pertinent histories of the war and I’ve been stunned by how many mistakes historians thought I made. Some of these things I can refute, but others make for very uncomfortable reading. For instance, if we’d had better intelligence on the Wannsee Conference, might we have picked up on other signs regarding the construction of these death camps? On the other hand, there were apparently hundreds of antisemites in the War Department who were simply quashing the earliest reports…”

“You did the best with what information you had, sir.”

“Precisely my point, Henry. You view this Sorensen girl as damaged goods, a Daddy’s Girl? Is that about right?”

“Yessir.”

“And now we know that she, like Harry and Frank here, has developed the ability to jump around through time. And her father knows this and plans to use her to do something. This something we do not quite understand yet, but we first assumed it had something to do with the sinking of the Titanic. Now we have reason to believe she’s going after the battleship Bismarck, in May of 1940. The what and the why still elude us, but let’s assume for a moment that she’s successful. Everything will, in an instant, change. All history after that moment will change. Are you following me, Henry?”

“Yessir?”

“Excellent. Now, what would you make of this if you were given to understand that Adolph Hitler was once again alive, in the exact same way that I am alive in the here and now. And what if you were given to understand that Mr Hitler is once again calling the shots.”

Taggart looked at the faces around the room, looking for signs that this was some sort of Princeton debating society hypothetical, but no one was smiling. “Is this for real? I mean, are you on the level?”

“Oh yes, quite,” FDR sighed as he took a pipe out of his vest pocket.

“Well…fuck,” Taggart sighed.

“Precisely, just so. You took the words right out of my mouth, Henry. Now, what do you propose we do about it?”

+++++

“Does anyone know how she developed the ability to time travel?” Taggart asked after Roosevelt and one of his aides left the conference room.

One of the other men in the room, someone name MacKenzie, nodded and spoke first. “There’ve been experiments going on in the field for decades,” MacKenzie said. “The first, oddly enough, came together after several unexpected results were discovered in another line of enquiry, and in Canada. A professor at Laurentian University, a neuroscientist by the name of Michael Persinger, was doing temporal lobe studies, eliciting what some subjects called contact with God when his subjects used something called a Koren helmet. Subjects predisposed to religious experience sensed God, while those not so inclined still felt some kind of presence, and both types entered into a very relaxed state…”

“Is that the so-called God helmet experiment?” Taggart asked.

“Yes, exactly. Later experiments in neurotheology, using induced electromagnetic fields, yielded similar results, with some subjects reporting out of body experiences and, more to the point, out of time experiences.”

“You mean time travel, right?”

“Yes, and no. There were reports, I believe, of a generalized feeling of being in some other time reference, but nothing specific was mentioned in the literature about travel.”

“You know, it’s strange, but I think I felt something like that once.”

MacKenzie nodded. “In the ARV. I’m not surprised. That craft employs a massive electro-magnetic coil…”

Henry was sitting bolt upright in his chair now, listening intently as MacKenzie spoke. “Excuse me, but who the Hell are you, and how the fuck do you know about that?”

MacKenzie leaned back in his chair and crossed his hands over his gut. His eyes met Taggart’s and he did not look away. “Because I sent you and Rupert Collins to Kamchatka, to the Sukhoi facility, to steal that vehicle.”

Taggart’s eyes blinked rapidly as his blood pressure spiked. “So…you killed me. And General Collins. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“We didn’t know about the radiation leak, son, but yes, it was my decision. And Rupert concurred, in case you missed that.”

“Is that why he went with me?”

MacKenzie nodded. His eyes never flinched, never looked away. “You weren’t the first men I send to their deaths, Mr Taggart. When the responsibility is yours, well, you don’t know that death is a certainty, but it’s always a possibility.”

“So, it just goes with the job, huh?”

“You could say that,” MacKenzie said, his head canted quizzically. “I never got used to it, no one does, but even so, bad stuff happens. I hated that most of all, the not knowing…”

“You should try dying from multiple metastatic neoplasm disease. Now that was fun.”

MacKenzie nodded. “I understand your anger. Try putting yourself in my shoes when you get a chance.”

“No thanks, I’m trying to quit,” Taggart said with a grin, suddenly walking away from the table and out onto the hangar deck.

He looked around, saw Ellen Ripley standing by the shuttle she’d piloted from Pak’s ship, and noticed she was working with a tech on something in the shuttle’s instrument compartment so, not knowing anyone else here he walked over to her.

“Say,” he said as he stopped in front of her, “you wanna go somewhere and get laid?”

She turned to face him, the expression on her face unreadable, but he didn’t see her fist balling up behind her back. Nor did he have time to react when her haymaker came. He flew back and skidded across the studded metal floor, and though he was seeing stars he sat up and flipped her the middle finger. “I take it that means no?” he said, adding: “What? You a rug-muncher, or something?”

He saw her turn and face him again, then she was walking his way, with what looked like a ten kilo crescent wrench in her left hand.

“Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate’s life for me,” he sang as he stood and made for the nearest airlock.

+++++

Roosevelt and Nimitz watched all this, of course, on the Gateway’s internal surveillance net, and Roosevelt wasn’t happy about what he was watching.

“Just like his dossier, Chester. No impulse control, erratic, and he uses humor too much…”

“He’s deflecting, Mr President. Just immature, yet I see something in him. Something durable, maybe even dependable.”

“Oh?”

“The truth of the matter is, Mr President, that half the pilots we had at Midway could have been described just as you did Mr Taggart. What remains to be assessed is his ability to make good decisions under pressure, but to tell you the truth I don’t think we’ll have that luxury. Sorensen had too many irons in the fire, sir. If this doesn’t work out, he’s going to try again. And because the Grays are watching, and waiting to see the outcome, Sorensen may act instantly, and without warning.”

“What are you trying to say, Chester?”

“I think it’s time we consider taking out Bariloche. Get Hitler, Sorensen, all the bad apples in one stroke…”

But FDR shook his head. “No, Chester, someone always gets away, and you’re forgetting Peter Weyland. Some unforeseen element always gets missed, so when you show up they’re gone, or they’re ready for you. And don’t forget, in this context surprise is almost impossible.”

“In this context, sir?”

“We’re playing 4-D chess, Admiral, not checkers. Our adversary can, and will, jump around in time to evade us if he thinks we’re coming. It’s just a matter of time before they can, you know.  This Sorensen girl points to that one simple truth. Besides, we have one critical advantage right now. They don’t know where we are, but more importantly they don’t know when we are. And I’m more worried about losing that advantage than anything else. What did Captain Ripley call that detection device? The one Dr. Balin is working on?”

“Hyperspectral Data Detection. It looks for E-M signatures beyond the UV and IR spectra.”

“Quantum something, I thought?”

“Yessir, it picks up radical shifts in quantum entanglement. Disruptions in time are the most likely cause of that, so the presence of a time traveler can be inferred by such a shift.”

“I’m afraid I’ll have to take your word for it, Chester. Just the thought of it makes me long for an ice cold martini. Why is there no gin on this vessel…now what’s he doing?”

Nimitz saw Roosevelt was watching Taggart on the screen again, so he looked too…

+++++

Taggart was walking aimlessly down the main A Deck corridor, but he’d just stopped at a large viewport that looked out over the port-side hangar deck. His head was down and he was leaning against the window, and he appeared to be talking to himself.

“Can we pick up the audio feed?” Roosevelt asked Nimitz.

In the next instant the image shimmered and turned to static, then a strange new General Quarters alarm started ringing throughout the Gateway complex.

“That’s the HDD alarm, Mr President. There’s a traveler onboard the ship.”

Roosevelt nodded. “There. Right there. It’s that woman, Chester!”

Nimitz studied the screen, and it only took a moment before he recognized her. It was Deborah Sorensen, and somehow she’d just discovered their whereabouts. “It’s her, Mr President. The Sorensen woman.”

They watched as Taggart jumped back in surprise, then as she ran into his arms, and a few seconds later they both winked off the screen and out of the present. And just like that, just that fast, they were gone.

Roosevelt took a deep breath and looked away, clearly angry. “Well, Chester, it looks like we’ve just lost the initiative. It’s Pearl Harbor all over again. Recommendations?”

“We get you to Hyperion, for one. Then we disperse our ships.”

“What about Pak and his people?”

“Until we’re sure they haven’t betrayed us, I suggest minimal contact.”

Another alarm started blaring.

“Now what?” FDR said as Nimitz switched screens to the command net in the Gateway’s CNC center. Radar screens were resolving new plots, sensors were busy classifying the new contacts, and mid-level officers were analyzing all this data as it streamed in. They watched Denton Ripley run into the CNC, watched him watching the situation develop before he walked over to an intercom. The intercom here in Roosevelt’s study chirped and Nimitz picked up, then switched the call to a large, wall-mounted screen.

“We’ve got about thirty ships inbound,” Admiral Ripley said as they watched another much larger wave of ships appear onscreen, then another. “Okay. Now developing tracks on one hundred twenty starships, all approaching Earth and it looks like at their current velocity the first wave should reach their orbital insertion points within three weeks.”

“Can you tell who they belong to, Captain?” Nimitz asked.

“We can infer they’re Weyland-Yutani ships, Mr President, so this is the Co-Dominium’s fleet, the new fleet we’ve been hearing about. Their fields are still up and the first, smaller group came in through the New Chicago jump point, while the larger fleet jumped from New Sparta.”

“There’s nothing of consequence left on Earth, Mr President,” Nimitz said, “so they’re here for you…”

“I disagree, Admiral Nimitz,” Ripley said. “My fleet is all that stands between the Co-Dominium and complete control of this part of the galaxy. It makes the most sense strategically that they’ve come to take it out.”

“So what are you suggesting we do, Admiral Ripley?”

“Formalize our relations with the Pak. Get out of here before the Co-Dominium arrives.”

“Abandon Earth, you mean?”

“Sir, there are only a few areas of arable land in the southern hemisphere right now. Current indications are solid that the planet is about to enter an extended period of almost complete ice cover. Parts of Australia and New Zealand, and the two capes might remain ice free, but there won’t be enough room to sustain any kind of industrial civilization for hundreds of years. Pak has identified dozens of worlds we could go to, and…”

“What about the people on Mars,” FDR sighed, “and out in the asteroid belt? Are you suggesting we leave them to the Co-Dominium?”

Ripley looked down, shook his head. “Mr President, we simply don’t have enough ships to move several hundred thousand people out of the solar system, and we never will, especially not in the time we have available.”

“Which leaves us with only one viable option,” Roosevelt muttered.

“Are you sure you want to do this, sir?” Nimitz sighed.

“No, of course I’m not sure, but it seems to me the best possible solution, given current circumstances.”

“Alright. I’m afraid I agree.”

Roosevelt turned to the screen, his voice grew cold and hard. “Admiral Ripley, gather the necessary personnel and commence Operation TimeShadow.”

“Yes, Mr President.”

“And get me a shuttle, will you? I need to go have a chat with our friend.”

+++++

And so, here ends First You Make a Stone of Your Heart. This story © 2025 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | and as usual this is a work of fiction, plain and simple, and nothing but. The third, and final part of the tale will conclude in TimeShadow.

If you’re still here, well, Tomorrow Never Knows just might do the trick. Adios for now.

So the beat goes on. Confrontations loom. Volcanos erupt. News at eleven.

Music matters? I thought this was interesting. Then again, so is this.

5.18

Deborah Sorensen never really understood why she visited the Titanic, let alone how it happened. These experiences just came to her, and she had no apparent control over them. Yet her father had pointed out one condition that seemed to be a common denominator: she ended up in a shower each time one of these events happened, and her arrival in the shower was followed by a rush of seawater and, usually, remnants of shattered icebergs. But…why the Titanic?

She had been sitting in her stateroom onboard the Disco Volante lost in thought, and had been since leaving the shipyard. She now understood a little about Harry Callahan and how he’d mastered using some sort of tonal inducement to enter the necessary mental state for a jump, but she had no idea what he did or even what his abilities were, and if she was going to be completely honest with herself she remained in the dark about how she’d managed her Titanic viewings.

“But they aren’t really viewings,” she said to herself. “Somehow…I was going there. The seawater and the ice are proof of that…”

No. She wasn’t simply viewing, she was traveling through time. Her first experiences had taken place in Los Angeles, and the location of Titanic’s sinking had been more than 3,600 miles distant – yet she’d been there, and at the moment of impact each time she’d been. 

There was a 21-inch chartplotter on the wall above the desk in her stateroom and she could plainly see the Disco Volante’s position on the current chart as the little ship advanced westward across the Mediterranean. Corsica was now almost 200 miles behind them, but her mind ranged over the chart and soon settled on Naples Bay. She’d never been to Italy until a week ago, yet she’d always wondered about Pompeii and what those first shattering moments must have been like. To have lived through such a thing…what must it have been like?

The earthquakes. Small, but increasing in frequency. Puzzlement, maybe? Had people grown so used to Vesuvius’s rumblings that they just stopped for a moment then got back to what they were doing. Maybe one or two people looked up at the mountain, before…?

She read a passage online from Pliny the Younger’s account, an eyewitness report from someplace called Paestum, a village south of Vesuvius. People there felt the earthquakes but late in the afternoon on that fated day they heard an uncommonly violent explosion – the type of explosion not at all common 79 years before Christ came along – just before Vesuvius blew it’s top, literally. The volcano had erupted before, of course, but never like this, and as people came out of their houses, or turned in the market square and looked past the Temples of Hera and Athena, she imagined they would have stood in awe as great gouts of cloud and lava jetted into the evening sky.

She closed her eyes as she tried to imagine their surprise, or their horror, and she felt a tremor of recognition as the Disco Volante rolled atop a large swell. She felt that familiar wave of nausea she had always felt on the first day or so of a long passage, and she knew the best thing she could do would be to get to the rail and focus on the horizon…

…but when Deborah Sorensen opened her eyes she saw she was no longer aboard the Disco Volante; no, now she was standing in an open air market surrounded by men and women, most wearing rough togas and crude leather sandals. A startled boy herding goats jumped back when he saw her appear out of nothingness, and he cried out in a language she had never heard before, and in the commotion several people turned to the sound of his despair.

They saw a woman easily a foot taller than the tallest man among them, and she was wearing strange gray pants and vibrant yellow things on her feet, but the strangest thing of all was her tunic – a maroon and gold thing with peculiar writing on it, and an image of a warriors head emblazoned across the front. Stunned first by the earthquakes rocking the area throughout the afternoon and now the sudden appearance of this Goddess, they watched as she pulled something from inside her clothing, and then, aiming some kind of device at the village, she swung the thing in her hand slowly in an arc…

…but just then Vesuvius let go…

Deborah watched as several hundred feet of the summit literally disappeared in the concussive explosion; smaller house-sized rocks vaulted into the sky while much larger fragments of rock and snow started rumbling down the southeast side of the volcano. Steam vents opened near the summit, and lava began streaming out of dozens of long, narrow slits under the new summit, and just then another earthquake hit, this one bigger than anything Deborah imagined possible. The ground underneath her feet seemed to come alive, the air seemed charged with impossible energy as a high-pitched grinding sound penetrated the core of her being. And then, another explosion.

She thought it must have been an atomic bomb detonating nearby, but no, it was Vesuvius, coming alive again.

An impossible column of roiling, dark gray clouds was boiling up into the evening sky, and she realized the sound had hit several seconds after this latest eruption began, but most of the violent energy was now on the northwest slope of the volcano and so just out of view. Another equally cataclysmic eruption began, another equally thunderous clap of explosive energy hit her and she realized she was no longer standing. No one was standing. And yet everyone was staring in open-mouthed fear not just at the erupting volcano, but at her.

She had obviously made the mountain explode and now everyone around her was drawing back from this strange creature, for they were clearly terrified by this sudden appearance of one of the Gods…

She looked at her iPhone, saw that it was still recording so she aimed the camera at the erupting volcano then hit the red button on the screen to stop recording, then she powered-off the unit before she put it back in a pocket. The boy, the young shepherd, was now kneeling at her feet, his outstretched hands palms-down on the cobbled stone square, and then another explosive gout of lava and flame erupted from the seething fissures as she watched, yet most of the men and women gathered there were pointing at her, awestruck that a God had come to them. Then a handful of the woman cried out and ran away, the overwhelming despair of the moment suddenly filling their eyes with pure adrenaline-charged terror.

“Oops,” Deborah sighed…

And in the span of a human heartbeat she was back on the Disco Volante, only now she was on the foredeck – while flaming embers and black ash rained down on her. She saw the man at the yacht’s helm scream and jump back, then she heard his voice over the ship’s intercom.

“Emergency! Fire on the forward deck. All hands to fire stations!”

She wondered where the fire was, until she looked down and saw flames licking at her face.

Henry Taggart looked around the cubicle, his entire world in the here and now, still not really knowing what to think. The blue walls, blue as in the shifting colors of the sea, gently curving and with one large viewing port in the exterior wall. The moon, Earth’s moon, filled his view, and when his eyes had first opened here he had looked out over the stark shadows cast by the jagged peaks of Shackleton Crater near the South Lunar Pole – and he’d never been as afraid in his life.

A man, well, maybe not a man, had been standing at his bedside, looking at what just had to be medical instruments of some kind, only this man had to be eight or nine feet tall, and his skin was pure white. White like snow was white, yet his eyes were as black as night. All in all, the man – or was he a man? – reminded him of Michelangelo’s David, that statue he’d seen once in Florence, yet its actions were human, his mannerisms were too. But he – it? – certainly wouldn’t be speaking English.

That was when he’d first noticed the viewport, and the moon beyond, and right then he’d wanted to scream. Then again, he remembered all the times growing up in Newport Beach when he and his friends had rumbled up to Anaheim and gone to Disneyland, and how he’d always run straight to Tomorrowland, right to the Mission to the Moon attraction. When the Douglas Corporation took over ‘the ride’ from TWA they’d added a realistic Mission Control room, complete with animatronic technicians manning the consoles, and then there was the ride itself. Blasting off and looking down at the receding Earth, then looking up at the moon as it got closer and closer, but then with Armstrong and Aldrin everything had changed, and for a few years anything had seemed possible.

And now, here he was. Looking down on the moon. In orbit in some kind of space station built by…who, exactly? He wasn’t sure. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to know, either.

All he’d known, up until a few minutes ago, was that he was half-past dead, his body eaten up by cancer, and now some creature had him hooked up to weird looking medical instruments and it was injecting something that looked an awful lot like that silver liquid, was it mercury? that they’d used in oral thermometers when he was a kid. Whatever it was, the fluid was thick as concrete so they’d had to insert a catheter into a fat vein under his collarbone and the stuff burned like hell going in and all of a sudden he didn’t want anything to do with this place!

He started to move but found he couldn’t. He couldn’t even move his hands.

Then the real panic set in.

The instruments beeped once and the creature looked down at him. “Please relax,” it said, but the inflection, or was it the syntax, was all wrong. Taggart wanted to ask it a question but while his mouth moved a little he couldn’t form words – and then his panic ratcheted up a notch.

And the creature really didn’t like that. It took out some kind of doohickey that looked like an old metal tire pressure gauge and then held the thing up against his forehead, and he felt himself falling again, falling into an infinite darkness, just like he was falling down into those shadows on the moon.

+++++

When his eyes opened he looked around at little bumps and protuberances on the ceiling and it hit him then: ‘Wherever this is, it isn’t human.’ The scale of things was all wrong, and then it hit him: this placed smelled, and bad. Like dirty feet that had been camped out in the same pair of sneakers for about six months. Sharp, acrid filth, in other words. He hadn’t noticed before, but then he remembered: his sense of smell had been compromised for months, well before they’d arrived in Paris. Maybe right after Amsterdam, after the bomb.

He tried to wiggle his toes and to his surprise they felt fine, so he experimentally flexed his wrists. Both hands responded, and he felt a wave of euphoria wash through his sense of anticipation. He lifted his head and that worked too, so he pulled his arms up a bit and lifted his torso up on his elbows and looked around. His head felt clear, clearer than it had in months; no headache, no blurry vision clouded his sight, so he lifted his legs and saw them respond under the thin transparent membrane that served as a sheet. An alarm chirped and a moment later Michelangelo’s David walked into the cubicle again, and the statue actually smiled at him when it saw he was awake.

“Look better. How feel?”

“Good. I feel very good. What did you do to me?”

“Bad cells, gone now. Body can heal.”

“Bad cells…?” Taggart sighed. “You mean the cancer?”

“I mean bad cells. Errors in replication, fixed.”

Taggart’s eyes welled up as he struggled to regain his composure. “Where am I?”

“This ship belong Pak. Your people close.”

“My people?”

“Your people coming. You go ship. Your ship send shuttle. Soon come.”

“My ship?”

The creature pushed one of the bumps on the ceiling and the transparency holding him in this ‘bed’ disappeared, and after a slight electric jolt Taggart felt himself floating free, drifting up towards the ceiling. Another wave of panic came for him but the creature grabbed his arm and pulled him over to the viewport. “Ship there,” it said.

Taggart shrank from this new world. This Pak, whoever he was, had a ship that was at least two miles long, and the flight deck below this viewport had at least a thousand shuttles docked in neat, orderly rows. He could see some kind of orbiting space station, minuscule next to Pak’s ship, just beyond the flight deck, and it too was orbiting the Moon, and there were several small ships docked to this station. What had to be his shuttle was drifting between this space station and Pak’s ship, slowly heading this way, and right now he could see Earth in the distance, well beyond the Moon.

“Do I have any clothes?” Taggart asked.

The creature looked at a display on his wrist, and Taggart assumed it was a translating device of some sort. “No. Shuttle bring.”

“Do you have a name?”

Again, it looked at the device on his wrist and nodded. “Yes. I am Physician. Much pleased treat you.”

“My name is Henry. Much pleased being treated.” He looked out the viewport and saw the shuttle was much closer, and that it was headed to a docking port above this room, which was itself above the massive flight deck, so all things being equal he had to be in some sort of tower that overlooked the rows upon rows of docked shuttles. He found it difficult to move again, but then realized that movement in zero-G had to be radically different from walking about on land, and this ship was most definitely in zero-G. He pushed off the wall beside the port and went sailing across the room… “Oh, shit,” he cried, but the physician deftly pushed off and caught him.

“Maybe sit best,” it said.

“You got that right.” The creature deposited Henry on the slab that seemed to be the equivalent to a bed, and with another tap on the ceiling a field of some kind settled over Taggart and he was glued to the surface again.

“I go, bring human,” the physician said as it disappeared into the corridor beyond his cubicle, and it seemed that now his bowels were getting with the program and kicking into gear. He looked nervously around the cubicle for something that resembled a toilet, then started to sweat…

A few minutes passed and a girl, a human woman entered and the look in his eyes must have said it all.

“You feeling alright?” the woman said.

“Poop-chute is waking up, fast. I gotta go something fierce, and soon.”

She went to the wall and hit a protuberance and something that might have been a toilet, in a Daliesque nightmare, morphed out of the wall. “There ya go, Sport,” the woman said. “Hope you don’t need privacy. They aren’t real big on that here.”

“Uh, is that a toilet? It looks, well, kind of alive?”

“It is. It’s an organism, been genetically altered to absorb waste. It excretes pure protein.”

“Right. And how does it do its thing?”

“Just sit on it.” She reached up and hit the protuberance on the ceiling and he drifted free, then he pushed off and rocketed over to the wall above the…toilet. “Whoa there, cowboy! You don’t need much force to move around up here,” she said as she grabbed him, then she helped get him settled on the…toilet.

The…organism wrapped itself around Taggart’s midsection, then he felt warmth down there. Everywhere, as a matter of fact. 

“Just relax,” the woman said, smirking. “I know, it takes some getting used to.”

Taggart’s eyes crossed as something grabbed his penis, then his eyes shut when he felt something form-fitting around his anus. “This ain’t right,” he just managed to say as his bowels cut loose.

“Beats shitting in your spacesuit in zero-G,” she deadpanned.

“I’ll take your word for it,” he moaned. “You bring some clothes for me?”

“In the shuttle.”

He shook his head. That meant he’d get to strut through this ship in his birthday suit, but one more indignity surely wasn’t going to make a difference now. “Great,” he sighed. “So, what do they use for boom-wad up here?”

“Boom-wad?”

“You know…toilet paper?” an exasperated Taggart sighed.

The woman laughed at that. “Never heard that one before. Just hang on tight, because it’ll…”

But Taggart’s eyes crossed again as the organism set about cleaning him up. “Oh, no way man, this can’t be right…”

+++++

“So,” Henry asked the woman as she helped him into his seat in the shuttle’s tiny cockpit, “you gotta name?”

“Ellen,” she said as she struggled with one of his shoulder harnesses. “And you’re Henry, right?”

“Taggart. Just call me Taggart, okay?”

“Well then, I guess that makes me Ripley.”

“I think I like Ellen better.”

“And what if I like Henry more?”

Taggart sighed. “Then Henry it is,” he said as he held out his hand. She took it and smiled as she worked her way into the pilot’s seat to his left. “You fly this thing, too?”

She nodded as she worked switches on the overhead panel, then she shot a ‘thumb’s up’ to one of the creatures standing inside the nearby airlock, and a second later he heard the shuttle disconnect from Pak’s ship. Ripley hit the thrusters in the shuttle’s nose, and the big central display kept updating the shuttle’s vector as it swung away from the massive ship’s gravity well, but Taggart didn’t recognize the technology on the shuttle’s panel.

“You mind if I ask a personal question?” he said.

“No. Fire away.”

“What year is it?”

Ripley looked at him and smiled, but she didn’t answer the question.

“So, I’m not supposed to know, is that it?”

“I’m not sure that’s been decided,” Ripley replied. “Anyway, you’ll be briefed when we get to the Gateway.”

“The Gateway?”

“That space station,” she said, pointing to the odd looking jumble of cubes and toroids dead-ahead.

“Are those ships docked to it, or part of the station?”

“It is hard to tell, I guess,” Ripley said. “But yes, there are two ships docked there right now.”

“When I, when I was about to die we hadn’t even made it back to the moon.”

“I know. A lot’s happened, I guess. Still, I can’t even imagine what you must be feeling.”

“Other than freaked out by that toilet thing?”

“That scared me the first time I had to use one.”

“Scared? You were scared?”

She looked at him quickly and nodded, then got her eyes back on the central display. “Yeah, scared.”

“I can’t imagine you being scared,” Taggart said with a brief shrug.

“Oh? Do I look that tough?”

“No. You look confident.”

She looked at him again and smiled. “I read your file. You’re kind of an anarchist, aren’t you?”

“Me? An anarchist?”

“What they called a tech bro? Didn’t believe in much, no close attachments?”

Taggart nodded. “Yup. That’s me. No close attachments.”

“Well, at least you’re looking better now.”

“You’ve seen me before?”

“Yeah, a couple weeks ago one of the Pinks deposited you on the hangar deck and disappeared. You were just about dead, too. The medics onboard didn’t know what to do so the decision was made to get Pak’s people involved.”

“Who are they?”

Again, Ripley just shrugged. “We’re not really sure who they are…yet. They appear to have taken our side…”

“Side? Is there a war going on?”

“Isn’t there always?” she smirked. “Anyway, urPak got you to his father’s ship and we didn’t hear much for about a week. After Pak told us you were going to make it, well, we’ve been trying to figure out why the Pinks brought you to us.”

“Pinky.”

“What?”

“Pinky. One of the Pinks. She’s been protecting me for years.”

“Sorry, got to concentrate now…” she sighed, lining up one set of vectors with some kind of landing approach aid on the display, and suddenly this Gateway didn’t look so small, and neither did the ship docked overhead.

“Hyperion?” he said, reading off the name painted near the ship’s stern. 

“That’s right,” Ripley sighed, struggling to match vectors on what appeared to be the approach’s vertical axis and then, when the shuttle was perhaps a quarter mile out a huge hangar door opened, revealing a fairly large shuttle landing area actually inside the station. Men in spacesuits were inside the hangar, and Taggart realized the shuttle he was now in was actually like some kind of four man craft, because there were two really large shuttles inside this hangar. “The Gateway is much older than Hyperion and was built to handle the first shuttles transiting to and from Armstrong Base…”

“Armstrong Base?”

“The first American base on the lunar surface.”

“Ah. Of course. You know, when I was a kid I went to the moon every month or so.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. At Disneyland, the first one, in Anaheim.”

“I haven’t been?”

“To Disneyland?”

“To Earth.”

He looked at her again, not sure if she was kidding or not, then, deciding she wasn’t, Henry Taggart thought better of asking her any further questions. He was already sure he wouldn’t like the answers.

+++++

He was sitting in a conference room by himself. Earth appeared to be about the size of a kid’s marble when held at arm’s length, and the pale blue dot rotated into view about every two minutes. At least, he said to himself, up was up inside this room, and down was down. The gravity here onboard the station was, Ripley told him before she left him here in this room, about eighty percent of Earth’s, so walking was not only possible, it was also almost effortless. Playing football up here would be, he thought, hilarious.

A door opened and two military types ambled in and took a seat; a moment later two short men in civilian clothes entered and sat across from him, and one of these, the younger one, was staring at him. This character had short blond hair and looked like he’d been plucked right out of the sixties: houndstooth sports coat, Levis, old school Adidas sneakers, RayBan Wayfarers on his forehead. Piercing silver blue eyes that looked like laser beams, and those eyes looked angry, too.

And then Harry Callahan walked in and he didn’t know why, but the sight made Henry Taggart bust out laughing. Callahan stopped dead in his tracks and looked at Taggart like he’d suddenly grown a second head.

Then it hit him. Callahan looked like he was about thirty years old, and the last time he’d seen him Callahan had been much older. Like fifty years older. Taggart stopped laughing, then crossed his arms over his chest.

Then two Navy admirals walked in – just ahead of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Who appeared to be about thirty and who was walking, not in a wheelchair.

Taggart looked away. Looked at the Earth coming onto view again. He felt light-headed, like he was lost inside a dream…

“This the man, Callahan?” Roosevelt asked this much younger version of Harry Callahan.

“Yessir, it is.”

“Detective Bullitt? Anything you want to add to your report?”

“No sir, not at this time.”

“This ship she’s on? It was still in the Mediterranean? I mean, when you last saw her?”

“Yessir. She made a jump, apparently to Vesuvius around the time of that big eruption. When she returned her clothes were on fire.”

Roosevelt turned to Taggart. “Detective Callahan tells us you were once close to Miss Deborah Sorensen? Is that about right?”

Taggart was speechless. “Excuse me, but are you Franklin Roosevelt?”

Roosevelt looked around the room, exasperated. “Has no one briefed this man?”

Shrugs all around. Everyone was suddenly avoiding eye contact, too.

“Well, dammit,” FDR grumbled, “why am I not surprised?” 

“I knew her,” Taggart said, trying to take some of the heat. “What’s she done now?”

Roosevelt wheeled on him. “What are you implying, Mr. Taggart?”

“Deborah was kind of a world class screw up, sir. Like everything she touched turned to shit. A dilettante.”

“More money than sense? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yessir. Classic case. Sweet as could be but absolutely no self understanding.”

“Easily manipulated?” Roosevelt added.

“That’s right,” Taggart said, stifling a burp.

“You alright, son?”

“I haven’t eaten in…well, I don’t remember the last time I held down food.”

“You were pretty sick when you got here. Some kind of cancer, they tell me. How are you feeling now?”

“Great, sir. Never better.”

“Pak’s people are world class,” Roosevelt said, missing the irony completely.

“Does anyone know what they did to me?”

Roosevelt turned to one of the naval officers. “Captain Ripley? Care to explain?”

The younger of the two officers nodded and stood. “Pak’s civilization has mastered all forms of genetic manipulation. When they go after cancerous disease they simply go after replication errors, but you’ll soon begin to feel other effects, as well?”

“Oh? Such as?” Taggart sighed.

“The first thing is you’ll feel younger. You’ll also feel, well, more easily aroused…”

“Sexually, you mean?”

“That’s correct,” Captain Ripley said, smiling a little impishly. “And you’ll perform better in that department, as well.”

“Oh,” Taggart deadpanned, “joy. I can hardly wait. So, when will the disease return?”

“It probably won’t,” Ripley said, confused by Taggart’s reaction. “You’ll likely live without any further disease for the rest of your life.”

“Great,” Taggart sighed, clearly depressed by this news. “Now, can anyone tell me why I’m here?”

“Detective Bullitt?” Roosevelt said. “Care to tell our guest?”

Bullitt stood. “I’m going to take you there, get you as close as I can. You’re either going to talk her out of her current mission or you’re going to have to kill her.”

© 2024 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | this is fiction plain and simple, and nothing but.

Oh yeah, try this if you’re feeling lost.

Another brief section today, nothing fancy, nothing too startling. Music? The Who’s Bargain.

5.17

Deborah Sorensen walked around the stateroom of her new home, an almost 50 year old Feadship – that had seen better days, probably 20 years ago – with a sense of foreboding. The upper decks aft of the bridge had been gutted, at least on the inside of the superstructure, so while outwardly the yacht looked unchanged, this was in fact far from the truth. The main salon and galley were gone, but so too was the sun deck with it’s hot tub on the deck above; it it’s place she saw heavy Cor-ten steel plate on the decks and walls that had been freshly installed and crudely painted with gray primer, leaving only the barest framework of a ceiling in the main salon. Two container-sized launching tubes would be placed in this new open space once the yacht arrived in Rio de Janeiro, and only then could their real mission begin.

Her father had made his case and in a way she had agreed with him, agreed with his reasoning for this action – but also his reasons behind the formation of the Eagle Group. The group was, he’d told her, nothing more than a collection of concerned businessmen working in concert to manage a vitally necessary contraction of population pressure, resource depletion, and environmental degradation. All of these things were now self evident, but they had been for decades and nothing had been done. And she’d had to agree – because even to her conditions were already terrifying – and growing worse by the day. So, what was the best apolitical anodyne? 

Instead of a protracted period of decline and collapse, a period that could, literally, play out over a hundred years – or even longer, the founding premise of the group was to accelerate this collapse. Do it now, quickly, so that there would remain a nucleus of humanity left to start over again. To get it right the second time around.

Looking back on her father’s life from her current place in time she was stunned by his prescience. Her father had, almost by himself, foreseen the consequences of explosive population growth and calamitous resource extraction back in the 1970s, and instead of sitting idly by and doing nothing he had acted. He’d created the Eagle Network to prepare the way ahead, to desensitize select groups of people, to help prepare them for the difficult choices ahead.

She had been blown away by the scope of what she heard from him. The Eagle Network had morphed into a sprawling effort to accumulate political power to further the ends of the group, to manage the contractions ahead, but along the way the group had accumulated enemies, too. And now these enemies were gathering, about to act, but the group had developed a new, very bold way forward.

Her father had carefully watched the way, as a child, she’d developed her own unique abilities. She could not only ‘see’ other places and other times, she had also left the current timeline and repeatedly journeyed back to 1912. But where else had she gone? And when else had she gone? He soon understood that these first journeys had been involuntary, that she’d had no control over when or where she went, or even the timing of these events – until she’d met that orca, in Tahiti. An old male orca, and he’d shown her how to harness her abilities, to direct her energy. 

And Ted Sorensen had been terrified of her ever since.

She’d thought herself special – for a while, anyway – until she realized that there were a handful of other people with this ability, and then she’d learned that this pool of people was constantly growing. Slowly, at least in the beginning. But when would this ability reach a kind of critical mass? When would it go from fringe to mainstream? And what would be the consequences of at first hundreds of people jumping around through time, altering timelines, to eventually more and more people jumping?

Absolute chaos would result. Time itself would become meaningless. 

And then her father had told her one last self-evident truth, the one truth that had rocked her conception of reality to her core.

This incipient chaos held growing implications not just for life on Earth. Conceivably, life everywhere in the solar system would be impacted. And then members of the Eagle Group, her father among them, had been contacted by an off-world civilization, and the final implications of this growing ability had taken on alarming new dimensions.

Not only was life on Earth at stake, but now members of the Eagle Group understood that these growing abilities threatened life through not only the galaxy, but conceivably even the entire universe.

And now the universe was reacting. Much like antibodies swarm to attack an infecting micro-organism, a vanguard of off-world, spacefaring civilizations had been monitoring developments here on Earth, and perhaps for thousands of years. Once humanity’s incipient abilities became apparent to them, one by one they started to watch us more closely – and to then draw up their contingencies.

But this period of monitoring was rapidly coming to an end.

And now, Ted told his daughter, at least one of these off world civilizations was preparing to act.

But members of the Eagle Group had convinced this group to delay taking any action – for now. Because the Eagle Group had a plan, a new plan. The Group was going to act decisively to rewrite recent history, to put an end to not only explosive population growth but to put an end to the ability of some people to bend the laws of time.

But this was proving to be the most difficult part of her father’s plan, yet now Sorensen thought he had the solution.

He was going to bait a trap. Get everyone with this ability into one place, and then destroy them all.

And if the Group failed, the Grays would act. Quickly, and decisively. 

“How?” she’d asked her father.

“They will use the Earth to destroy the Earth. That’s all we know, Deb. If we fail, they will act.”

“So, if I understand what you’re saying, you want me to use my abilities to change our history? Is that about the size of it?”

“Yes.”

“Have you thought about what might happen to us? I mean, all of us?”

And when she looked at her father he’d started crying, crying as deeply as she’d ever seen anyone cry in all her life, and yet the true depths of his love had shone through this despair. 

And in that moment she could finally see the way ahead, her destiny, what she’d been born to do, and the journey she was doomed to fulfill. 

Perhaps, she said to herself, this path led to oblivion. She could feel that in her bones now. Perhaps there was no other way to change the world, but thanks to her father she could see that now. People would never act on their own. People had to be led.

By men like her father.

+++++

Baris Metin watched as America Eagle pulled away from the wharf, Captain Mendelssohn still steaming for Marseille to take on fuel, and this had left him nominally as the new captain of the Disco Volante. His contract with the Eagle Network had been amended to take account of his new rank – and he was more than pleased with this new salary – but this woman – a woman! – was officially in charge of the vessel. Peter Weyland himself had made that much clear to him.

She’d come onboard and gone directly to her stateroom, the last untouched space on the yacht that still retained all of her former glory, right down to the solid gold bathroom fixtures and mirrors on the ceiling over the king-sized bed. The yacht’s large engineering and deck staff was still onboard, but only a lone cook and two stewards remained, though they were here to look after the woman. 

Yet she’d not left her stateroom once since boarding.

The inter-phone chirped and he picked it up.

“Bridge here,” Baris said.

“Captain Metin?” the woman said.

“Yes, speaking?” He noted her voice carried the weight of someone in charge.

“Please set a course for Gibraltar that takes us north of Corsica and just south of Minorca, and get underway at once. Please maintain radio silence for now, so shut down the AIS for now, and all personal cellphones are to be switched off.”

“Yes Ma’am,” he’d just managed to say before the line went dead, so without thinking he dialed up the engine room. “Prepare to get underway,” he told the Chief Engineer before he rang off. He pulled up Corsica on the huge, though quite old, Raytheon chartplotter and studied the coastlines of Corsica and Minorca; there were few obstructions on the north coastline of Corsica aside from a few charted rocks off the northwest point, off the tiny island of Giraglia, and he’d keep those well to port when he passed Corsica. Then there was nothing but 320 miles of blue water to the island of Minorca, off the southern coast of Spain. Assuming there were no mechanical issues or need to refuel there, the last leg to Gibraltar was another 610 miles, so call the entire trip roughly 1200 miles, and the Disco Volante’s range, according to her logbooks, was 33-to-3,500 nautical miles, so refueling wouldn’t be necessary.

The Disco Volante’s ‘X-O’, or executive officer, was an eager kid from Buenos Aires whose great claim to fame was taking some kind of seamanship courses when he was still in preparatory school. Still, Baris saw that Diego Gardel was bright and eager to learn, but more importantly he understood that the kid was what he had to work with right here, right now. In a way, he told himself, the kid was probably a test, and as such he knew that Peter Weyland would judge him by how well he handled the kid. 

‘Tough, but fair,’ he reminded himself, the same way his best mentors in the navy had handled him.

Gardel had been on American Eagle for a long time. If the kid had a problem it was conceit, because with his blond hair and blue eyed good looks women considered him irresistible, and Baris thought the kid was vainglorious in the extreme. The scuttlebutt was that the kid was banging Britney and one of the other female stewards onboard, and Baris assumed that was why the kid had been transferred with him. With no female crew members onboard the Disco Volante…the kid would cause no more problems for Britney, and therefore Dr. Weyland.

The inter-phone chirped again and he picked up: “Bridge?”

“Ready to get underway down here,” the engineer said.

Baris chafed. The engineer should have addressed him as Captain, so the man was testing him, staking out his turf. “Who are you addressing?” Captain Metin snarled.

But then the line went dead.

He turned to Diego. “Please go to the engine room, Mr. Gardel. Have the engineering crew report to the bridge.”

“Aye, Captain.” The kid grinned and scampered off down the stairs.

Then he did as he’d been told; he called the chief steward and reported the transgression.

And now the chief steward was on the bridge as the chief engineer slouched his way up the stairs and onto the bridge, obviously taking his time, pushing the limit for all it was worth. His underlings appeared equally unenthusiastic

And before Baris could say a word the steward took out a silenced pistol and shot the engineer in the head. The man dropped like a sack of rocks and the other crewmen jumped to attention. But not Diego, Baris noted; no, Diego simply pulled the fallen engineer out of the way, making room for the steward to address the silent men from the engine room after he told them to come all the way up the stairs.

“Insolence on this ship will not be tolerated,” the steward said. “This man is the captain, and this is the executive officer, and when you address them, you will address them as such, by rank. It is Captain Metin, and X-O Gardel, and I understand this is something the former chief engineer decided not to do. So just a word of warning; we have an important mission to complete and we will maintain proper discipline for the duration. You will be paid handsomely, of course, as per your contracts; but break ranks and you will meet the same fate as Mr. Bartok. Any questions?”

There were none.

“Now, who among you feels ready to assume the chief’s duties?”

One man raised a hand.

The steward nodded at the man. “Miller, isn’t it?”

“Aye, sir.”

“You are now the chief engineer.”

“Aye, sir. Thanks you, sir.”

“Captain?” the steward said, turning to his ashen-faced ‘captain’. “Any further orders for your crew?”

“Prepare to get underway, Chief Miller,” Baris Metin said to the man, though he felt ill and that his world suddenly made no sense. “And everyone is to switch off their cellphones.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Dismissed,” Baris added, though he was not at all sure what the hell was happening on this vessel, but sure he wanted nothing more to do with these people. He watched as the steward and Diego pulled Bartok down the stairs, then he turned to the helm, doing his best to ignore the spreading pool of blood on the teak and holly floor underfoot. “Cast off all lines,” he said to the deckhands over the intercom; the three deck hands sprang into action, and a few minutes after American Eagle cleared port the Disco Volante followed in her wake. An hour later Baris changed course, making for their first waypoint.

When the kid returned to the bridge he sat silently, though he was looking at Baris with a strange grin in his eyes. “You want me to get that stuff off the floor?” the kid asked.

“Sure. Why not.”

“No problemo,” the kid said, still smiling. “This your first time?” he added.

“First time for what?”

“Company discipline. It can be a little harsh.”

“Harsh?” Baris said sarcastically as he pointed to the spreading stain. “Is that what you call this?”

“Yeah,” the kid said as he got a mop and some disinfectant from the cupboard opposite the stairwell, “my grandfather’s been with the group since the early days. He said it’s always been like this.”

“A television network? Really?”

“No, no, not the networks, the group. You know, the Eagle Group?”

“Oh,” Baris said, but he’d been in intel long enough to know when and how to play along. “How long have you been in – the group?”

“Oh, all my life, really. I grew up on the main campus.”

“Oh, that must’ve been interesting. Have you always been interested in boats?”

“Yeah. I belonged to the Youth Corps, and we had a big boating program. I learned navigation and stuff like that when I was ten years old…”

“At the main campus? Really?”

“Yeah. When did you do your initiation?”

“I haven’t been yet.”

The kid stopped what he was doing and looked at Metin suspiciously for a moment, then finished cleaning the floor before he disappeared down the stairs.

Baris usually felt good when he returned to the sea, but not today. After setting the autopilot when the ship reached its starting waypoint, he cycled through all the CCTV screens, looking at the crewmen in the engine room for the longest time. None of them had seemed particularly surprised when their chief was gunned-down right in front of them, and he wondered why. A few minutes later he watched the kid and the chief steward dump the engineer’s body overboard, then he watched the kid mopping up more blood on the aft deck and swim platform, and with that same vacuous smile on his face.

‘A campus? Something called the Eagle Group, with a campus.’ His mind was racing, chasing shadows while thinking about all the things he just didn’t know, yet one thing was certain. These weren’t good people; in fact, when he looked around this ship he felt nothing but evil and suddenly something like cold dread gripped his heart. ‘Why gut the ship aft of the bridge? Why had he been instructed to make this journey with the AIS switched off? And who the devil was that woman in the main stateroom?’

He cycled through pages on the chartplotter and stopped at the main radar screen. He saw a contact dead ahead and about ten miles ahead so picked up the binoculars and took a look.

It was American Eagle. And a large helicopter was landing on her helipad.

He put the binoculars down and looked around the bridge; suddenly he felt small, and very alone. 

And he wished he could talk to his brother, but radio silence meant no phone calls allowed and he didn’t want to end up like the chief engineer – in a spreading puddle of blood on his way to a watery grave.

© 2024 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | this is fiction plain and simple, and nothing but. And no, no…We Won’t Get Fooled Again.

A short riff today, just a little connective tissue so hardly time for tea.

Music? Sure, why not? Have a go at some well aged Cream, a little well worn Badge.

5.16

Baris Metin got Peter Weyland to the shower on American Eagle’s aft deck and then to his stateroom, and there he left him with Britney, Weyland’s personal assistant, before he made his way up to the bridge. He wanted to go through all the security camera footage, and quickly, because he still couldn’t believe what he’d seen.

Metin had been keeping an eye on Weyland, wanting to be ready when Weyland and his new guest left the restaurant, but then he’d seen Weyland and the woman disappear while seated at their table, only to reappear not quite a minute later, preceded by a flash of blueish light and a thunderclap – inside the restaurant! – and then the two of them were flowing through the air down to their table and onto the patio floor. He’d been too stunned to move – until he’d seen them thrown out of the restaurant and started their way to lend a hand.

He cycled through the CCTV camera views from the aft deck until he found one with a clear vantage point of the patio, then he rewound the playback about 15 minutes and watched intently. ‘Good, but not great,’ he sighed, but the next camera’s sightline had been perfect. He played the event over and over, then he inserted a thumb drive and transferred a copy of the file.

The engineer’s mate, Heinrich, came in from hanging Weyland’s latest acquisition in the owner’s stateroom, and Baris played the event for the Austrian – who simply shrugged before he retreated down the access way to the engine room, and all without saying a word. That shocked Baris almost as much as the event in the restaurant, and it left him wondering…why? Was Heinrich simply dull? Did the man lack imagination? Or had he already seen so much while working on this yacht that this was just one more bolt out of the blue – and so nothing to get worked up about?

So just who the hell was this new passenger?

Captain Mendelssohn came onto the bridge in a huff. “Prepare to get underway,” he muttered.

“What? I thought we were staying the night?”

“Plans change.”

“What about our fuel?”

“We’ll refuel at the yard,” Mendelssohn said angrily. “Now, go and standby on the stern.”

“Aye, sir.”

It took a few minutes to get the fuel pre-heated and polished, but soon both MANN diesels rumbled to life – though in truth you could hardly hear them anywhere on the yacht – and after the engines heated a little Mendelssohn gave the order to cast off all lines. American Eagle moved slowly, almost imperceptibly through the tiny harbor, and Baris helped secure their lines and fenders before returning to the bridge…

…but he stopped on the bridge deck and looked at three men swimming in the crystal clear water off the little rocky headland to starboard. He was a little surprised, as it seemed that at least one of the men was talking to a dolphin.

+++++

Spudz MacKenzie  was simply annoyed. 

One moment Frank Bullitt had been talking to him and the next he was gone. No preamble, no warning, just here one moment and gone the next. Callahan had pulled the same stunt a few times, and he’d been just as annoyed.

Yet he was learning to see there was a kind of meaning behind their mayhem. They’d ‘seen’ something, as hard as it still was to wrap his head around the concept. The CIA had been conducting ‘remote viewing’ operations for decades through Operation Grey Fox, and he’d read synopses of several viewing operations, including the retrieval of an America General kidnapped by the Red Brigade in Italy, that had convinced him that there was something to this stuff, yet at heart he remained a skeptic. Just the idea that someone could close their eyes and concentrate – and then listen in or even see conversations taking place halfway around the world – had clouded and befuddled his sense of reality.

Obviously, both Callahan and Bullitt were doing so, whether they were consciously aware of the process or not. MacKenzie had seen enough now to accept this new reality, and he hated it.

And, sure enough, about a minute later Bullitt reappeared inside the VW Golf, and MacKenzie did his best not to jump out of his seat.

“God damnit! Can’t you at least warn me when you’re going to do that?”

Frank grinned sheepishly. “Sorry. No. Sometimes when I get these flashes, well, if I don’t act I lose it.”

“Flashes?”

“Yeah, that’s about the best I can do to describe it. I saw Sorensen, uh, Deborah, make a jump. She was with Peter Weyland, and that’s Junior, not Senior, and I think they were in Italy. A restaurant, they were in a restaurant called Lo Stella, and when they returned she followed Weyland onto a yacht. Big fucker, too, maybe two hundred feet. Name is American Eagle. It was cool outside, some leaves turning, small harbor, I mean real small.” Bullitt looked over, saw Spudz entering a name into a search window and a moment later he nodded. Restaurant by that name in Portofino, Italy, and he held up his iPad and showed Frank the posted images of the place.

“Yup, that’s it.”

“It’s too early for the leaves to be turning there,” MacKenzie muttered under his breath – as he pulled up an AIS tracking program, one used to track maritime movements globally. “American Eagle,” he mumbled as he hunted and pecked his way across the little virtual keypad, and a few seconds later he nodded. “Currently near Izmir, that’s in southwestern Turkey…and God Damn!” Spudz screamed as Bullitt disappeared again. “Fuck! I hate this shit!”

It wasn’t just that Harry and Frank were zipping everywhere with just a thought, no, they were jumping through time as well. Back in time, and even into the future, as improbable as that at first seemed…and then it hit him.

Frank had just said he’d watched Deborah Sorensen make a jump, so did she too possess these capabilities? His stomach rumbled and he pulled out a roll of Maalox tablets and popped two of the antacids onto his tongue…when just like that, Bullitt was back again.

“They left Portofino but just went a few miles across the bay, to a place called Sestri Levante, to something called…” he was saying as he pulled out a tiny notepad, “…the Cantiere navale di Riva Trigoso.”

MacKenzie sighed. “That’s a Fincantieri shipyard. What are they doing there?”

“Sorensen, uh, Deborah, transferred to another yacht waiting there. I think maybe some modifications are being done? – and Weyland sent one of the ship’s officers with her. A young kid, maybe Turkish or from the mid east. Anyway, she’s onboard now and on her way to Rio.”

“Rio de Janiero?”

Bullitt nodded dryly as he rolled his eyes. “Yup. That’s the one.”

MacKenzie leaned back in the Volkswagen’s seat and sighed as another piece of the puzzle slipped into place, then he started the motor and drove back to airport outside of Bariloche.

“Why are you returning the car? You could just leave it in town, you know?” Bullitt asked.

“Because I put it on my credit card,” Spudz grinned.

“Leavin’ a paper trail, man. You shouldn’t do that, ya know?”

Mackenzie turned to an almost microscopically small blue sphere floating in the narrow space between the rear view mirror and the car’s headliner, then he nodded and said “Abracadabra”; a woman walking from the car rental return office watched as two men inside a dirty VW disappeared right in front of her of her eyes. She stopped in her tracks but did not seem in the least surprised, then she pulled out her cell phone and made a call.

+++++

Ted Sorensen picked up the phone and looked at the display; the call was from the security office in town so he answered.

“Yes?”

“Security at the airport witnessed a jump, at the airport, in the car rental return.”

“Leased to?”

“Last name MacKenzie, first name Everett. Annapolis, J-2, SecDef, last seen in Georgetown, South Carolina on his yacht. Name is Amaranth, current location unknown.”

“So they’ve shut down their AIS?”

“Yessir.”

He said not a word but merely hung up the call and speed-dialed the Reichskanzler’s office. “Sorensen here. I need a meeting of the executive committee first thing in the morning. Yes, this concerns Dr Weyland too, so he’ll need to attend, as well.” 

© 2024 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | this is fiction plain and simple, and nothing but.

You might top this off with Here Comes the Sun, just to see how sharp your memory and listening skills are.

Ah yes, so Happy Christmas and Merry New Year, or…have I got that wrong…?

A modest chapter today, long enough for a cup of tea, too brief for popcorn. A few zigs where zags might have been expected, but c’est la vie.

Seen this bit of wordplay, or should we say Coldplay? Not a helluva lot to say after that, you know?

5.15

He closed his eyes as even the images came for him. Honfleur, Amsterdam, Paris at Christmas. Rupert and his Swan. Dina and Rolf. 

Then he heard that music. It played and played, the same nightmare soundtrack. He tried to turn away from the sound but now it was everywhere: ‘Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirates life for me…’

“Oh, no, not again…” Henry Taggart moaned as he opened his eyes and looked around, and then his mind connected with the ancient female by his side.

‘Others call,’ he heard the orca say to him.

Then the images, again. People he’d never seen, places he’d never been.

“This is absurd,” he said to the old orca. “Everything is meaningless here.”

‘You see only one. Must see many.’

“Many what?”

Her face slipped underwater and in an instant the old orca was gone. He looked around, saw only darkness. No land. No ships or sailboats.

But overhead?

He saw Orion. At least it looked like Orion. Only here, the massive hydrogen clouds were closer than close. He felt like he could reach out for one and grab hold… 

“This can’t be right,” he sighed, and in the blink of an eye he was in the Seine again. Honfleur just a few yards away. And the water was cold as hell. People on the shore, in that park, were waving at him. He grew lost in waves of remembering. Cancer. Dying, then death.

So? This is death?

‘You see only one. Must see many,’ the old orca said again.

He jerked around, saw his old friend. “Why? Why can’t they leave me to my death?”

‘Need great. Time breaks.’

“Breaks? What breaks? What do you mean?”

‘Great pain for all. Must go.’

More images came. Sea battles between great navies, but with strange vessels like Greek triremes in one image, then Ohio-class ballistic missile subs in the next. Then men on horseback charging helicopters, men in starships battling vast swarms of black, insect-like monsters…

‘Understand? Time breaks.’

“Understand.”

‘Others call. Must leave.’

Taggart looked around again and saw only stars, millions and millions of stars. First there was no pattern, no movement, then there was nothing but movement. The stars began to swirl, forming little clusters. Clusters began to swirl, forming new groups, new clusters, and for a moment he thought he was looking at the formation of the universe, like time had reset and everything was starting over, then he saw the pink sphere and her careworn eyes searching for his.

+++++

“It’s going to happen, you know, and there’s nothing you, or anyone, can do to stop it.”

Deborah looked at her father as he paced around his library, and now she was sure he was as mad as a hatter.

“Look at them, Deborah. Just look at them!” He pointed at a wall of television monitors, dozens and dozens of news feeds coming in from all around the world, each feed full of descriptions of chaos and mounting human misery. Climate breakdown, innumerable hordes of people from undeveloped countries fleeing to the industrialized north, civil wars, famine, disease literally raging on every continent save Antarctica. Trump’s walls overrun. Helicopter gunships patrolling the border with Mexico, on some days hundreds of people killed trying to push their way past border checkpoints. Saudi Arabia’s grand experiments in planned megacities collapsing under the energy demands of 140 degree temperatures – at night. People from southeast Asia making their way north, first into China, then pushing their way to Siberia, anything to escape the broiling humanity falling by the wayside. “At any one moment now almost three billion people are on the move, trying to escape the heat, or trying to move inland as coastal cities disappear under rising tides. Snowpack disappears, rivers and reservoirs turn to sand, and farmland blows away. Where will it end, Deborah?”

“And yet here you are,” she said, “stoking the fires…”

“Governments have failed us, Deborah. Democracy has failed humanity.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t.” Ted Sorensen turned and looked at his daughter. “You don’t because you can’t. You were brainwashed from the beginning to see democracy as the lone just path, the righteous way to freedom, even as democracy stripped your freedoms away one by one, even as democracy tried to sell itself around the world as the only way forward. And Hell, why not? The Marxists were out there doing exactly the same thing, and failing just as miserably…”

“And your television networks are somehow going to…”

“Yes? Go on?”

“You’re going to fix all this?”

“Fix it? Hell, no, we’re not going to fix it, but that’s the point, Deborah. These systems can’t be fixed, yet we’re locked into perpetual combat between these two competing socio-economic models,  between capitalism and communism, and between these two ways of thinking about civilizational progress.”

She shrugged. “So, what are you up to?”

“Ever hear of the term ‘accelerationism?’”

“I’m not sure. Maybe some kind of alt-right thing?”

Sorensen sighed and looked away. “They borrowed the term, I think, but what I’m talking about originated in the 70s, but rather than describe the term I’d rather ask that you read a couple of books and essays.” He went to the reading desk in his library and picked up three books, then carried them over to her.

“Homework again, huh Dad?” she said as she took the books from him.

He smiled. “You might think of them as such, but I would hope that you find something in these words more of interest to you. Now, we’ve got dinner to think about. Does trout amandine sound about right? With a spinach soufflé? And I have a Chilean Riesling that really is quite special.”

She looked at one of the books and groaned as it was in French: Capitalisme et schizophrénie. L’anti-Œdipe, then she looked up at her father. “Is this some kind of medical text?”

He smiled. “Not hardly, though one of the authors was a psychoanalyst. The other was a philosopher, and together they came up with a very different way of looking at the world.”

She put that book down and looked at the second, a book of essays. “The Dark Enlightenment, by Nick Land,” she said. “And what is Mr Land selling?”

Her father smiled again. “The idea that freedom and democracy are in truth antithetical to one another.”

“Oh? Truly?”

“Yes, truly. And he maintains that capitalist corporate power makes the best organizing principle for a working society, because that type of culture best leads to true freedom. That may sound fringe, but Peter Thiel, as I’m sure you’ll recall, mentored a younger J D Vance before he drove these two books straight into Republican orthodoxy, and then right into the White House.”

“I see.” She put this second tome down and looked at the third. “The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, by Benjamin Bratton? Okay, what’s the low-down here?”

“Bratton discusses how rapidly evolving information technologies undermine what are in fact ancient ways of organizing societies, and how these anachronisms are being distorted into irrelevance by rapid advances in these technologies.”

“Sounds yummy.”

“Oh, hardly, yet the process has been underway since long before you were born.”

“And so you, and this whole Eagle Networks thing, have been…?”

“Collapse is inevitable, Deborah. We’re just helping things along, trying to guide events to, hopefully, influence a just outcome.”

“You make all this sound so benign, yet…”

“Yet what you’ve seen to date hardly seems benign.”

“That’s about right.”

He nodded gently, then walked over to a large window that looked out over a huge lake, and to a spectacular mountain range in the distance. “That’s because what was first envisioned started out in one direction, but this has been – well, I’ll put it to you this way – in any organization that manifests great power, there will always be power struggles…”

“And there’s one going on now?”

He nodded. “Yes, yes there is. And a very big, very dangerous situation is developing.”

“Dangerous? How so?”

“Unpredictable. Things are rapidly becoming unpredictable, and I fear all this effort will soon dissolve into unrestrained chaos.”

“Dad? Are you saying you need my help?”

Ted Sorensen looked away, tried not to remember the nights when she was little. Those terrible nights when she had disappeared while taking a shower, only to reappear minutes later inside a cascading rush of shattered sea ice and cold seawater, and then evidence that she had visited the Titanic in the moments just before that fateful moment. “I do,” he sighed. “Very much, as a matter of fact.”

She got up from her overstuffed reading chair and went to him. “Do you know that’s the first time you’ve ever said anything like that to me, Dad. I don’t know what to say.”

He took her hand in his, though his eyes never left the mountain beyond the lake. “I know, Deborah.” He shivered, then shook his head. “I’m afraid it won’t be the only time. I know this will be difficult, but you need to trust me; things are not quite as nefarious as they might at first appear to be.”

“Okay, Dad. What can I do to help?”

“I need you to meet someone. An associate and, I dare say, a good friend of mine. His name is Peter. Peter Weyland.”

+++++

Baris Metin Didn’t need binoculars to see that the tiny harbor was too small for American Eagle, but as Dr Weyland wanted to tie up at the stone quay, it was Captain Mendelssohn’s job to maneuver the huge yacht into harbor, to get the job done. And to make matters worse, Weyland was on the bridge this morning, watching them both. Baris adjusted the forward scanning sonar to get a better picture of the shoaling seafloor ahead, while Captain Mendelssohn used the joystick to make tiny course corrections. ‘Eagle’ was a hundred and seventy feet long and her keel was fourteen feet beneath the waterline, yet the water’s depth at the quay was just sixteen feet. The bigger problem was the turning basin near the quay, which simply wasn’t large enough to handle a boat this length.

“Captain,” Baris sighed under his breath, “I really do not recommend you do this.”

“Why is that, X-O?” Weyland snarled, stepping closer now, right into Baris’s space.

“Sir, there are too many small vessels moored near the turning basin, and even without them in our way this ship is simply too long.”

“And what do you recommend we do about that, X-O?” Weyland said, now somewhat less annoyed.

“Anchoring out would be safest, sir. Or we could back down through the harbor, all the way to the quay.”

Mendelssohn shot him a quick, sidelong glance. Backing a yacht through this crowded harbor would mean relying on video cameras and all the other instruments up here on the bridge while using the aft docking station above the swim platform to actually maneuver the ship. Doing so wasn’t impossible, merely very difficult, but this would also be a good test of Metin’s skills – and he knew that was exactly what Weyland wanted out of this exercise.

“I want to be tied stern-to the quay,” Weyland growled. “You’ve been working up here for a month now. Do you think you can get me there or not?”

“Yessir, of course I can. Captain, permission to go to the aft steering station?”

“Go ahead, X-O,” Mendelssohn sighed, more than a little surprised and grinning as Metin left the bridge.

Weyland waited a moment then turned to Captain Mendelssohn. “So, you’re sure he can pull this off?”

“If I didn’t, sir, I wouldn’t even let him try.”

“This really is a beautiful setting. I wonder why I haven’t come here before…?”

“Well sir, Portofino is a little touristy, on the beaten path, I guess you could say. We’ve always tried to steer clear of such places.”

“Sorensen’s orders, I take it?”

“Yessir.”

“And so here we are, sent to fetch his daughter…”

Mendelssohn opted to remain silent, and he sighed in relief when Weyland went out onto the starboard bridge deck, no doubt to watch all the people in the tiny village staring up in awe at his massive ship. Vanity, pride, whatever you wanted to call it, Weyland had it – in spades.

+++++

Weyland stood on the aft deck, watching Metin extend the hydraulic passerelle to the quay, in spite of himself admiring the man’s skill. Metin seemed in his element out here, happy, almost content. He walked over to the starboard rail and looked down on three sailboats docked at the quay, and he waved absently at an old man and a springer spaniel on the closest one, then strode off ‘Eagle’ like he was Patton taking Sicily once again.

Mendelssohn followed him down the teak passerelle with the Ship’s Papers, off to the harbor master’s office to take care of those tedious formalities, so he took a deep breath, admired the autumn sun and all the angled shadows retreating from the piazza. He looked at his watch, saw it was not quite noon so figured he had at least a half hour before Deborah Sorensen arrived. He walked over to a gallery, saw several interesting paintings on display through the window so went inside. A few mundane abstracts, a handful of predictably banal harbor scenes by local painters, but an odd piece tucked away in a small alcove all by itself. The painting was small, perhaps ten inches square but even from across the room he could see that this painting was the work of a master. It was of a small cottage framed by lavender and azaleas, very simple, but he could tell it was something special even before he saw the artist’s name. “A Sisley? Here?”

An old woman walked up behind him, yet she remained at a discrete distance and said not a word as she watched the man appraising the work, and after a few minutes he turned to her.

“If I may,” the man began, “has this been authenticated?”

“Yes, sir. By Merritt at the Royal Academy in London, as well as Sartre at the Louvre.”

“Where on earth did you find it?”

“He gave it to a friend who eventually moved here. The family has decided to part with it.”

“Do you have the letters of authenticity?”

“Of course. I’d be happy to get them if you’re an interested party.”

“If I may be so indelicate, what is the asking price?” She handed him her card. The price – fifteen million euros – was engraved on the rear. He took out his iPhone and snapped a picture of the painting then forwarded the image to a number in Geneva, and while he awaited a reply he asked to see the letters. He imaged these as well, and sent them on to Geneva. A few minutes later he had his answer, so he turned to the woman again. “I’ll need payment instructions, if you please?”

The woman opened a leather-bound portfolio and handed Weyland an engraved card from Credit Suisse, and he imaged this and sent this addition on to Geneva, then he called Britney, his personal assistant on the yacht, and told her to have Heinrich in engineering prepare lighting for the painting this afternoon, then he turned back to the woman. “Could you recommend someplace for lunch?” he asked.

“Yes, of course. Just next door, the Lo Stella. I’d be happy to call and tell them you are coming.”

“Would you? Thanks so much, and for your understanding.”

“It has been my pleasure.”

“Call my assistant when you’re ready for her to pick up the piece,” he said, handing the woman a card with his assistant’s information. “Her name is Britney, by the way.”

“Very well.”

“Well, thank you, and good day,” he said before he abruptly turned and walked out the door. He saw the sign for the Ristorante Lo Stella and decided to give the woman a moment to make her call, knowing that word of his purchase would spread like wildfire through the tiny village. He walked down the quay towards the boats moored at the far end, where he’d seen the old man and his dog earlier, and soon he saw the man’s boat was named Diogenes, and that brought a smile to his face as he walked along to the next boat. This one was named Springer, and it was locked up tight. The next boat in the line was named Sonata, and he heard someone playing the piano below and wondered what the tune was. He’d never heard the piece before – which he found strange as he thought he was well versed in the classical canon. He saw a young woman in blue surgical scrubs come up the companionway a moment later, and she made her way out of the boat’s center cockpit to the rear of the boat then walked down the passerelle and onto the quay. He smiled at her as she passed, taking note of the stethoscope around her neck, then he turned to watch her walk through the village. He looked at the yacht’s stern again and found her homeport – Annapolis, MD – painted on the port quarter, and that surprised him. He shook his head and walked back to American Eagle’s stern, perturbed that this Sorensen girl was already ten minutes late. 

A tan Mercedes taxi appeared almost as if on cue, and the taxi came right to him. The well dressed driver, an ancient man of indeterminate origins, stepped out and opened Deborah’s door, then collected her luggage from the boot before he got back behind the wheel and disappeared.

“Miss Sorensen, I assume?” he said to the woman. He noted she was almost attractive, but she affected the studious academic airs of the perpetually insecure – right down to her round, tortoise shell eyeglasses and frumpy, worn out Doc Martens. Her smile was rather nice though her skin had the appearance of someone who had spent too much time out under the sun, and for some reason he thought her hands looked strong. ‘How odd,’ he thought.

“Yes, and are you Peter Weyland?”

“I am Dr Weyland, yes,” he said stiffly. “I’ve not had lunch yet and wonder if you’d care to join me?”

“Sure. Airline food still bites the big one, so I’m game.”

Weyland’s eyes twitched as her boorishness penetrated. “Ah, well, excellent. Do follow me.” After this suburban drone’s performance he was ready for a little fawning deference, so hoped the woman in the gallery had indeed called the Lo Stella. He walked under the green awning and noted the salmon colored stucco and green trim, even on the tablecloths here on the patio, and as an immensely old man approached, obviously the maitre’d, he sighed when he saw a complete absence of interest on the man’s face. Indeed, the man had a regal, almost leonine countenance that seemed to defy easy characterization. Ivory colored slacks, white shirt, subdued gold tie under a pale blue sport-coat, Weyland thought the old man exuded raw energy and was not at all what he’d been expecting.

“Dr Weyland, I presume?” the old man asked as they walked up. His smile was genuine, his eyes magmatic, full of hot power.

“Yes?”

“I see there are two of you? Would you care to sit out here on the patio this afternoon, or in the dining room?”

“Deborah? Any preference?”

“Out here would be great. I’ve been cooped up in airplanes for the last twenty hours…”

“Would you prefer some sun?” the old man asked, his concern obvious.

“Maybe, yes. That’d be great…”

The old man walked them down to the far end of the patio and pulled out her chair and helped her get seated, then he pulled her napkin from the table and handed it to her. “Champagne for you this afternoon?” he asked Weyland. 

Weyland nodded. “Have you Taittinger, the Prelude Gran Crus?”

“Of course,” the old man said as he handed over menus before he walked away.

“Strange man,” Sorensen said. “Something in the eyes, I think.”

“Indeed. What did you see?” he asked.

“I’m not sure, but I’d say there’s more to him than meets the eye.”

“More what, do you think?”

“Power? Maybe the ability to facilitate, no, that’s not right…perhaps to meditate between warring factions?”

“I felt rank hostility.”

“Do you want to leave?” she asked.

“No. I want to understand.”

“Perhaps he simply hates tourists?”

“No, this is something deeper, like he’s done…like he’s hiding something monstrous. Something he’s done…in the past.” 

A younger waiter returned with their champagne and took their orders, and curiously enough the old man was nowhere to be seen. 

“So, did your father take you to the campus?”

“Yes, and I’ve been to the Wolfsschanze and the Berghof. He wanted to get me up to the Kehlsteinhaus but we ran out of time.”

“Indeed. You must’ve made quite an impression on a few people.”

She shrugged. “I found the facilities quite fascinating, especially the engineering campus.”

“Oh? Why fascinating?”

“Seriously? Well, for one thing, how about particle accelerators larger than CERNs. And, oh yeah, working ion drives for starships. Not spaceships, mind you, but starships…”

Weyland smiled because he hadn’t expected this reaction, or this level of exposure. He’d been expecting some kind of droning, daft airhead with no understanding of science at all, yet this woman seemed to be at least conversant in a few of the more important subjects being tackled in Argentina. Still, their work in New Zealand and French Polynesia had to remain off-limits, and he was to be the firewall that kept such secret projects from her. He shrugged as he innocently held his hands out: “If not us, then who?” he said, paraphrasing Hillel the Elder with a sly grin.

“I liked the Nick Land essay,” she said more seriously.

“Did you indeed?”

She nodded. “Any fool can look at our southern border and see how completely government has failed, but that’s just the most glaring example.”

“All democracies collapse,” Weyland said with a shrug, “and always under the weight of their internal inconsistencies. It is inevitable, but nevertheless America had a good run; she postponed the inevitable longer than most expected.”

“Longer than you expected?”

“My feelings are irrelevant.”

“Which means they are anything but,” she countered.

“Please don’t patronize me, Miss Sorensen. I’ve little tolerance for such obsequiousness.”

“Oh, that I do not doubt,” she said, the tone of her voice a direct challenge.

“Listen, I’m not sure I like the…” he started to say, but he stopped in mid-sentence when she closed her eyes and held her hands out to him.

“Take my hands,” she whispered.

“I’ll do no such thing…”

“Take my hands, now,” she said, her voice suddenly full of latent power, “and close your eyes.”

Curious now, he reached across their table and took her hands, and in the next instant he felt it. Nauseating vertigo, his heart spinning in a vacuum, then bitter cold. A deep, biting cold.

Then: “Open your eyes,” he heard her say.

And when he did he saw that he was at sea on a great ocean liner, now perched in a crow’s nest atop the ship’s foremast, and they were in deepest night. The ship was moving fast, fast enough to make his eyes water, and as the tears ran down his face they froze to the skin under his eyes. There were young men below playing some kind of football on the foredeck, and when he turned he saw the officers on watch talking to the helmsman inside the bridge.

“What have you…”

“Look there,” she said, pointing dead ahead.

He turned and in a heartbeat saw the iceberg. He heard the lookouts screaming “Iceberg, dead ahead,” and Peter Weyland forced himself to watch as his looming death approached. His heart was racing now, he urinated uncontrollably, and he fought the impulse to hide his eyes as the Titanic slammed into her appointment with destiny, then he turned to Sorensen, his voice full of panic, and he screamed “Get me out of here! Now, please!”

“Are you begging me, Dr Weyland? Begging me for your life?”

“Yes, please, I’m begging you! Get me away from this place!”

And in the next instant he felt himself crashing through furniture on the ristorante’s patio, this followed by huge, cascading waterfalls of near-freezing water and ragged chunks of blue ice that came crashing down with them. He heard screaming, saw the other people seated on the patio get up and run out onto the piazza, a few of them drenched from head to toe, then he took stock of his own situation: soaking wet and shivering, cuts on his forearms from the falling ice, and his heartbeat was still wildly out of control so he started taking deep breaths as he closed his eyes again.

But then the old man appeared.

And he walked straight up to Deborah, the fury in his eyes manifest, and as yet unspent.

“You must not do this here!” the old man hissed. “You must control these things!”

Weyland looked up at the old man, feeling like the bastard had suddenly grown two heads. “What did you say?”

“I said nothing to you, fool! Now the both of you, leave immediately, or there will be consequences!”

The words hit him like sharp physical blows and he shook his head, tried to clear his mind. “Who the devil do you think you are!” Weyland snarled as he pushed himself up from the floor, and now he turned to let the old man have it…

Until he saw the maelstrom in the creature’s eyes, a building cyclonic fury he had never seen before, not in anything, or anyone. The old man’s form was shimmering now, and raw, white gold power seeped from his skin, burning the air. Then the old man seemed to grow before their eyes, and he leaned close, his eyes dripping with molten malice: “Leave – while you still may. While I still let you…”

Weyland started to say something but he felt Sorensen take his hand and literally pull him away from the old man, then she was pulling him towards American Eagle. There were people waiting there, waiting for Weyland, she surmised, and when they saw him being pulled out of the ristorante they ran to his aid.

“Get him to a shower,” she said to them, clearly winded. “A hot shower, as fast as you can!”

Which turned out to be right there on the aft deck. Baris Metin popped the little cabinet door open and pulled out a shower head on a long metallic hose, then turned the hot water on and waited for it to warm, then Britney and Deborah held Weyland’s shivering body as the water poured over him, the bitter cold floating away on clouds of steam.

+++++

Ludvico – the Old Man – watched all this from his ristorante’s patio, a smile on his face. Two waiters walked up to him to see if he was alright, while others worked to clean up the ice from the floor and move all the ruined furniture from the patio. He saw the concern in their eyes and nodded.

“I’m alright now,” he sighed.

“Patron? What was that all about?”

He looked at the oldest and shook his head. “Have you ever killed a Nazi?” he asked the boy.

“Patron?”

“No, of course you haven’t, but what a pity. I did love doing so, once upon a time.”

The boys stood back and watched as Ludvico went to the cloakroom; he came out a moment later in his green loden cape, and he also had his cane, the fancy wooden one with the silver filigree, and that could only mean one thing…

“I know it’s a little early for passegiatta, but I think I shall walk out to the rocks.”

Ludvico walked along the Molo Umberto past the dozens of little motorboats tied-off to the ancient stone sea wall, and then he came to Diogenes, to Malcolm Doncaster hunting and pecking his way across his little laptop’s keyboard. “Good afternoon, Poet!” the old man called out to his friend.

Startled, Doncaster looked up and smiled when he saw his Ludvico. “It’s a little early for passegiatta, isn’t it?”

“Not today,” Ludvico sighed. 

“Ah, yes indeed. Well, I suspect Elsie is in need of a little exercise. Care for some company?”

“Yes, please. Ah, Berensen, is that you, my friend?”

Lev stood from Sonata’s cockpit table and shut down his laptop. “Who is that asshole?” Podgolski said, pointing at American Eagle.

“Oh, just your basic run-of-the-mill Nazi,” Ludvico said, smiling broadly now.

“Here? Now?” Lev said, now getting into the swing of things. “My, my, where’s Mel Brooks when you really need him…?”

“Come on,” Ludvico sighed, finally relaxing a little, “we’re going out to the rocks.”

“Should I bring towels?”

“Damn right you should,” Doncaster growled, his bulldog jowls flapping on the breeze. “And one for the dog, damnit all!” 

© 2024 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | this is fiction plain and simple, and nothing but.

Okay, take me to the pilot, wouldya? Or, maybe we should be walking the dogs?

In the wake of The StarLight Sonata, posted last week, I thought a refreshed version of Passeggiata might be welcome, as the two are inextricably linked. On deck now, and hopefully ready to go by Christmas, with be the next section of First You Make a Stone of Your Heart, this next part dealing with Harry C and the German battleships in the Denmark Straits.

Music matters, of course. Let’s take the high road this time, something quiet to play while you read. Try Rick Wakeman’s latest, Yessonata, a musical journey of remembrance embracing his years with Yes.

Right. Off we go…

Passeggiata

The man lay slumped over the wheel in the cockpit of his sailboat; he lay utterly exhausted, salt-encrusted, and his body trembled from cold and hunger. He had just completed the crossing from Marseilles, France to Portofino, Italy in late October, a decidedly foolish thing to do given the weather forecasts, and perhaps all the more foolish as he’d made this journey on his own. But soon after leaving the old city, the crossing had turned into a procession of winter storms as cold fronts backed-up to the arctic came barreling down from the north, dumping snow in the Alps and gale force winds across the Mediterranean basin. The man’s boat, a heavily built sailboat of some forty feet, had been up to the task, but the man had hardly known what he was doing in a boat six months ago, and wasn’t as yet what most people would call an accomplished sailor. About eight hours out of Marseilles, when the first gales slammed into his boat, the man began to question his own sanity; his erstwhile friends back in Connecticut had been asking that question for well over a year.

The boat’s deck was now a tangled mass of water-logged lines; the cockpit was no less a shambles. Hatches and port-lights, long dogged to seal out the weather, remained closed; the scraps of a half eaten sandwich lay smeared in the corner of a cockpit seat beside the man. Not long ago, just moments before the sun rose that morning, the boat had sailed into the little harbor and the man had taken up a mooring ball; now exhausted, the man had then hoisted his yellow quarantine flag, stumbled back into the cockpit and promptly fallen asleep. Now, two hours later, just as a blue Customs launch pulled alongside, the man was in exactly the same place.

The uniformed man in the launch held out his hand to stop from hitting the American’s yacht as he pulled alongside, then he tied-off to one of the mooring cleats while he looked at the sleeping man. The man was snoring like an old Fiat in need of a new exhaust; sharp metallic notes dripping with exhaustion filled the empty harbor, and the official could almost feel sorry for the man, for the sea makes brothers of all men.

“Eh, excuse me,” the official said. “Sir! Excuse me!”

The man didn’t react at all, except to turn his head a little and snore a bit louder.

The official hated to do it, but he simply had to wake the fellow up. He reached down and picked up a compressed air horn that produced a nice heart-attack generating horn-like screech and pulled the trigger. The effect was instantaneous, yet not quite what the official had hoped for.

The sleeping man launched upwards and smacked his head on the awning covering the cockpit, then without skipping a beat he stumbled backwards and tripped over the aft coaming and rear-somersaulted into the water. The man hit the water with a loud slap that, to the official’s practiced ear, sounded rather like a large fish leaping from the sea. The man sputtered to the surface and looked around with wild-eyed astonishment while spitting water from his mouth; the official hurried over to lend a hand – but was as quickly pulled into the water. He too landed with less than graceful form, and he too popped to the surface looking somehow both indignant and embarrassed. The two men swam and sputtered, a small crowd gathered on the promenade pointing at the sight and laughing, and then both men started laughing as they treaded aimlessly about the still morning water.

“Who are you?” the sailor asked when he finally caught his breath.

“Customs and Immigration. May I see your passport, sir!” Both men started laughing again. Another launch from the harbormaster’s office came out and helped them back into their boats.

The official leaned over to the man, now in his boat. “Sir, perhaps you would meet me in that building there in about an hour?” He was pointing at a small building on the waterfront with a flag flying over the front door.

“Yeah, I think I can manage that. About an hour, you say?”

“Si. Now, excuse me, please. I must go and find some wet clothes.”

The man looked at the official just as he caught his words; they looked at one another and laughed again, then the official took off. The man looked around his boat and shook his head.

“Ain’t life grand!” he said as he pushed open the companionway hatch. He disappeared into the cabin below, whistling a Gershwin tune.

+++++

Later that October day, Tom Goodwin left the mooring ball in the middle of the harbor and backed his boat down into a small space between two sailboats right along the harbor wall, under some overarching trees. It was a choice spot, and open now only because it was no longer ‘high season’; all the mega-yachts and beautiful people were gone with the change of season, gone to St Moritz and Davos or Tortola and Antigua. Portofino had survived yet another season of tourists and high intrigue and was even now reverting to type, becoming just another sleepy seaside village peopled by families who have known each other for generations, families bound by tradition as music is bound to the soul. Goodwin tossed two sets of lines to a couple of kids on the stone quay and watched as they expertly made them fast; Goodwin then walked forward and tied off the bow to a pair of mooring posts set in the water about fifty feet off the wall. He finished, then turned and looked around.

The Mediterranean pastiche that came to him now held him in deep embrace. All was pastel ochre and pink, ancient rooflines of terra cotta and the hotels and shops and market stalls hovered under turquoise awnings, while white umbrellas shaded sidewalk cafes like tall daisies. Tall, slender trees stood just behind the village, all still tinged with the green fullness of summer. Chestnut-forested hillsides dotted with palms beckoned from the surrounding hills, and rococo villas hidden within these forests stood perched on cliffsides as if ready to take flight and soar above it all. A little scooter, pink and sputtering, emerged from an unseen alleyway, and the girl rode along with her impossibly long brown hair streaming behind; she turned a corner and disappeared, another story untold. Cool breezes rippled across blue water like the heartbeats of these villagers, carrying scents of pine trees and garlic frying in olive oil and basil, of life and love adrift on currents of endless time. 

“I’m in heaven,” the man said. “I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

“Maybe, maybe not, but enjoy it while you’re here,” said an unseen voice that came from the boat to his right. English accent, he guessed. Educated. He turned to look, saw a little man, white haired and at least seventy years old, sitting in the cockpit of the other sailboat.

“Sounds like good advice,” Tom Goodwin said. The man was setting out a teacup next to the newspaper rolled up on the cockpit table, a plate of scones and preserves rested on the table already.

“That was quite a show you put on this morning. Afraid you might not have been too happy with your reception here.”

“I was dead tired. Were you watching?”

“Oh, anything new around here this time of year passes for entertainment. Quite a crowd, actually, I’m sure you’ll be on Youtube. Where’d you come in from?”

“Marseilles.”

“Oh? Kind of stormy out, wasn’t it?”

“Yes it was. One right after another.”

“You alone?”

“That’s a fact.”

The old man whistled and rolled his eyes. “Bet that was fun.”

“Took the words right out of my mouth.”

“So, before Marseilles; where’d you come from?”

“Oh, well, Connecticut, in the States, then Bermuda, Gibraltar, and Barcelona. Left last April.”

“And alone? All of it?”

“Yes indeed.”

“I see,” the old man said, though he really didn’t. The trip just described was difficult enough – he’d sailed the same route himself many times over the years – but to do so without crew to back you up was almost suicidal. “Well, where will head from here?”

“Going to winter over here, then head east.”

“East?”

“No real itinerary yet.”

“I see. What’s the name of your boat about?”

“Springer? Oh, just a dog thing.” Goodwin thought the old guy was asking a lot of questions, but maybe he was just curious, or worse still, lonely. He didn’t want to ask a question himself and get the old fella started if that was the case.

“Oh, really? Mary Ann! Come on up here! We’ve found you another Springer nut, and right next door!”

Goodwin heard a tea kettle whistling down below; soon a head popped up the companionway and looked his way. “Hello there,” the woman called out. “Be up in a moment. Would you care for some tea?”

Goodwin was starved, hadn’t eaten since the aborted sandwich last night. “That’s very kind, Ma’am, but I haven’t eaten since yesterday. Probably best not to throw hot tea down first thing on an empty stomach.”

The woman went wide-eyed, then turned stern and motherly: “You get over here right this minute, young man! Malcolm, help me with the tea!” The head popped as quickly back into the darkness, and Goodwin listened as plates rattled about down below. He’d had the distinct impression he’d just seen a turtle pop up out of the other boat.

“Best not cross the Admiral,” the old man said. “Not good for your health. Here now, toss me a line so we can get rafted-up.”

Goodwin tossed a line over and the old man pulled the two boats together, then he climbed over the lifelines and down into the other cockpit. Waves of cinnamon and fresh-baked bread swirled about in the air, and Goodwin felt himself growing acutely hungry as he settled under the low white awning and took a seat just out of the sun.

“Something smells wonderful,” he said, his head reeling as the unfolding scene washed over him. Sitting in an Englishman’s boat in an Italian harbor, the sun warming his neck as cool breezes stirred his hair, and overwhelming beauty everywhere he turned . . . 

The woman passed a tray up the way, a small pitcher of cream followed a moment later, then she too came up into the cockpit. Seconds later Goodwin heard the ticky-tick sound of a dog below, then a brown nose popped into view and took a tentative sniff around, then looked at him. A little Springer Spaniel – not even a year old, Goodwin thought – hopped into the cockpit and took an obedient seat between the man and the woman.

“I’ll be damned,” Goodwin said. He held out his hand and the pup looked at him nervously, gave a little growl.

“Now Elsie, you know better than that!” the woman said. She held out her hand to Goodwin. “Mary Ann Doncaster. And I suppose Malcolm has yet to introduce himself?”

The old man glowered.

“Just getting around to that, Admiral. No rush now, is there?”

“Tom Goodwin,” he said as he took her hand. “Sure appreciate the invitation.”

“Well now, Mr Goodwin, you’re as white as a ghost and look as if you’ve not had a thing to eat in a week.”

“Close. I think a held some soup down a couple of days ago.”

“Mary Ann, Tom just sailed across from Marseilles. Alone, I might add.”

“Indeed.”

There was that word again, Goodwin thought to himself as he smiled. “It was a rough crossing.”

She nodded at his understatement, poured tea in his cup. “It’s English Breakfast. Cream and sugar?”

“Be fine, Ma’am.” He watched as she fixed the tea, then as she uncovered some freshly baked bread. “I smell cinnamon.”

“Cinnamon and walnuts,” Mary Ann Doncaster said.

Goodwin took some tea, then a slice of the hot bread. “This is heavenly,” he said before he could finish chewing. “Really, really good!”

“The Admiral’s as fine a cook as there ever was, that’s for certain,” the old man said. “So, Mary Ann, Tom left the States last spring, came by way of Gibraltar. . .”

“You have a Springer Spaniel, Mr Goodwin?” interrupted the Admiral. 

“I did. She passed about a year ago.”

“I’m so sorry. It’s very difficult.”

“Yes.” Goodwin looked away. He still missed Sara. “I have a painting of her down below. You’ll have to come take a look at her sometime.”

“This is our Elsie,” she said as she patted the pups head, “and we’d be delighted.”

Malcolm Doncaster rolled his eyes. “Oh, good grief Mary Ann. You carry on about that dog like most folks carry on over their children. Give it a rest now, would you?”

“Where do you walk her? I mean, I know where, but isn’t it a problem, you know, when you’re out at sea?”

“Oh, goodness me,” the old man said as he stood. “The only thing worse than a dog nut is when two of ‘em get together! Pass down the dishes when you two finish up, right?”

“Sorry about that,” Goodwin said. “I’d best be going. I have to clean up that mess over there,” he said, pointing at Springer, “before it starts to stink.”

“Oh yes, you must. Certainly before Passeggiata. But do finish your tea.”

“Passeggiata?”

Mary Ann Doncaster looked at Tom Goodwin and smiled. “Oh, you’ll find out soon enough. Sooner or later we all do. It’s the secret of life.”

“Ah, well, I’d better get to it then, and thanks again for the tea. And nice to meet you too, Elsie.” He looked at the spaniel again, her little tail thumping on the teak; she grinned now at Goodwin with happy brown eyes. He smiled back at the pup and blew her a kiss before hopping onto his boat and getting to work.

+++++

“So, Paulo, I heard you made a big splash at work this morning!” Toni Moretti said to his big brother.

“Not as big as the American did!” his brother Paulo, the Customs official, replied. “But don’t get me wrong. He is a nice man, this doctor.”

“He is a doctor?”

“Yes, Tom Goodwin. Some big-shot heart doctor from New York City, I think. He quit, too.”

“What do you mean, he quit?” Maria Theresa Moretti said, suddenly alert. The frail old woman, their mother, had said nothing at all during lunch, but suddenly she seemed intensely interested in what Paulo had to say.

“I did not ask him why, Mama. The form has a place to enter one’s profession, Mama, that is all. Would you like me to go ask him, Mama? After lunch?”

“Don’t speak to me in that tone of voice, Paulo, or I shall beat you senseless!”

“Yes, Mama,” he said with mock deference. “Anything you say, Mama.”

She leaned forward and playfully slapped his face and laughed, and he laughed too. “Oh, I am turning into a silly old woman, aren’t I?”

“Silly, Mama?” Toni said. “You? No, never.”

“But old, Mama? You are as old as Vesuvius . . .”

“And as hot-tempered!” Paulo and Toni said together, as they had a million times before.

“Oh, you two!” She laughed with her sons, and as always enjoyed the smiles on their faces, the love in their hearts. She took a bit of cheese from her plate, and some wine, then sat back and looked out the window, down on light midday traffic as it slipped by on the Via Duca degli Abruzzi. She looked thoughtful, almost lost in thought as a cool breeze drifted through the room and across the fleeting memories of her life in the village.

The boys cleared the table and walked into the little kitchen, began doing the dishes.

“She seems okay today, eh Paulo?” Toni asked quietly.

“Yes. Her memories have come to keep her company today. That is always good.”

“God, I would hate to have my memories stolen from me. That is the cruelest fate I can imagine.”

“Well, perhaps everything happens for a reason, perhaps only the good memories will remain, those memories that keep the best company.”

“That would be nice,” Toni Moretti said as he looked at his mother. “When does Margherita get off tonight?”

“Things are slow at the hotel. Perhaps in time to walk with us tonight.”

“She would love that. But . . .”

“I know, I know . . . I will walk by the hotel on my way back to work and see the Ice Princess. She has been too hard on Mama, and for too long. Her life should be so perfect, you know?”

“Well, that stuff in Florence doesn’t seem to matter so much anymore, Paulo; perhaps it is as you say. Perhaps everything happens for a reason. Perhaps the good memories will stay the longest.”

Paulo walked back into the living room and sat beside his mother, held her hand while she looked out the window. 

“Mama, I’m going back to work now. Don’t forget to wear your shawl tonight. It will be cool again this evening.” He leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead.

She reached up, stroked his face. “And you, Paulo, try not to pull any more rich Americans from the sea. They can take care of themselves.”

“Yes, Mama.”

+++++

Margherita Moretti had watched her little brother fall into the sea that morning, and she had turned black inside later that morning when some of the hotel staff came by and reminded her that her two brothers were still regarded as the town idiots. And that was typically her coworkers’ attitude toward her on a good day, when the snobby bastards were feeling charitably disposed. 

Margherita worked the reception at a small waterfront hotel; the least expensive room had priced out at just less than one thousand euros a night in high season a month ago, but now the best room in the hotel could be negotiated down to under a hundred on an off-season weeknight. And for weeks now, with the local economy doing so poorly, almost all the rooms had been empty for over a month. The owner was getting nervous, and rumors were flying that staff might be cut before Christmas.

She brought her lunch today from the little apartment she kept just a block away, yet she had not taken time off to eat; rather, she had gone to the back office and begun working on the night audit while one of the housekeepers sat at the front desk. So many mistakes to correct . . .

“Hi, how are doing today?” she heard her brother Paulo say as his head popped in the door. 

She looked up at him. “Fine. Enjoy your swim?”

Paulo reddened. “Is there no one in town who hasn’t heard of my great accomplishment?”

“If there is, I haven’t heard about it.”

“Oh, thank you, dear sister. Yes, thank you so very much.”

“Don’t mention it. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“I want you to come walk with us tonight. You know it would make Mama happy, and perhaps it would give you some measure of happiness as well.”

“Paulo. You and Toni have asked me a hundred times, and a hundred times I have said ‘no’; so now I must ask you: when will this stop? Why can’t you understand, I will never speak to that woman again!”

“You ask me this? I can’t understand this because she loves you so much, and I know you love her equally. You could not hate her so without loving her, and you know this! And now she is locked away inside a prison within her own mind, and cannot even remember those days that hold you back. She only remembers yesterday, and maybe forty years ago. There is nothing in between. Only the love remains. And it remains for you to find, while you still may!”

“Hah! I hope one day, before it is too late, you and your brother grow up!”

“Ah. And do you know what I pray for? I hope that one day a ray of sunshine penetrates the darkness that has stolen your heart, that has taken love from your soul and run far away with it. I want to know what turned your heart to ice.”

“Bravo, Paulo! Bravo! Attack the victim! Never the attacker! My, what a strong man you are!”

“I am not attacking you, sister. I am asking you to find forgiveness in your heart before the darkness you have embraced eats you alive.”

Paulo turned and walked out of the hotel, stopping just once to look at the American on his boat across the little harbor, just as a group of workers from Margherita’s hotel walked by. 

“I wonder?” Paulo said aloud. “If I had such money as that, would all the cares of my little world disappear?” 

“Don’t worry about it, Paulo! That will never happen!” 

He heard them laughing as they walked off. He turned and looked after them as they walked across the Piazza, a smile on his face.

+++++

“Here’s some more, Malcolm, in the Times,” Mary Ann Doncaster said.

“Well, well, and what’s the latest scoop on our esteemed doctor?” He had been working on the generator under the cockpit since lunch and was tired, grease-streaked, and in need of a long shower. 

“Never married, went to Stanford and worked under some chap named Shumway. Let’s see, worked at a heart institute in Houston for a while, then moved to New York City. Says he was instrumental in starting a program where a bunch of Yank doctors travel down to Mexico and Costa Rica each summer and provide free medical care out in the bush. Nothing about his leaving, or why.”

“You are an incorrigible gossip, you know that, don’t you dear?” He watched as she scrolled down the screen, thinking what a terrible scourge StarLink was proving to be.

“Ah, this might be something. Another item in the New York Times . . .” she clicked away then bent close to the screen: “. . . from last year . . .” She read for a while, and Malcolm heard her exclaim “oh, my God…” more than once while she scrolled down the page. She finished, went back to Google and refined her search, opened up a new page. 

“The poor man,” she finally said, closing the laptop. Malcolm saw she seemed upset.

“And?”

“And nothing, you lout!”

“That’s hardly fair, Mary Ann!”

“And you call me a gossip! My, this poor boat is going to sink under the weight of so much hypocrisy!”

“Bah! I’m going to go up to the showers and steam this muck off. What time do you want to do dinner?”

“I suppose that depends on how long Passeggiata is tonight. And why are you always in such a hurry to eat, anyway? You should go take a long walk…”

“Oh, bugger off, you wench!”

“Bugger off your own fat self!” She laughed as she listened to him stomp up the companionway steps, then stub his toe in the cockpit.

“Stop your laughing down there, woman!”

She sat and thought about what she’d read. Best not let the man know she’d been snooping about his personal history, she thought. 

“Or should I?” she said out loud. “Maybe he needs someone to talk to.” She felt Elsie come close and drop down by her side; she reached down and started to scratch her behind the ears. “Or maybe he needs something else.”

+++++

Gershwin’s Summertime wafted up through an open hatch, and Tom Goodwin drifted along with the melody while he washed the foredeck with a brush. He looked over his shoulder at the sun; maybe a half hour before it slipped behind the trees. Time to start thinking about dinner . . .

He was aware someone was staring at him and he felt the familiar pain of intrusion. He finished washing off the chain rode and the windlass, then bent down and with a chamois wiped the chrome dry. He sprayed some Boeshield on the exposed chrome and moving parts, then began cleaning his cleaning supplies.

He felt something cold on his calf muscle and jumped, then turned and saw Elsie sitting beside him. Her tail swished the deck to the tempo of a million ancient instincts and he knelt beside her again. This time she didn’t growl. In fact, she flipped over on her back and presented her belly to him, and Goodwin laughed while he started to rub her soft pink skin. The tail started thumping away in earnest now, and soon the pup let slip a long, deep sigh of pure contentment.

“So that’s how it’s gonna be, Elsie-girl?” He sat down beside her, oblivious to the water on the deck and looked away to the village hovering over the sun-dappled inner harbor. The air was almost, just almost warm; faint traces of winter tickled around the edges of this forgotten corner of the world, but for now all he could feel was the familiar, easy love between man and dog.

“Oh, there you are!”

Goodwin came back to earth, jolted by a woman’s voice.

“Is she bothering you?” Mary Ann Doncaster asked.

“No, not at all. Think she just needed a little belly rub.”

“Don’t we all!” the woman said.

“Yeah, I guess we do?”

“What was your girl’s name?”

“Sara.”

“Did you say you had a picture of her?”

“Yeah, if you’ve time come on over.” 

As the boats were still rafted together the woman had no problem leaping across, and Goodwin was amazed that someone obviously in her seventies was still so nimble. He stood and walked back to the cockpit, then opened the companionway hatch and led the way down.

[time to change the record yet? Try Paul Simon’s latest Bad Dream, then you can follow that up with Antonia, from Pat Metheny’s Orchestrion Project.]

“Oh my!” the woman said when she turned and looked at the main cabin. “What a beautiful space! I’d never have the patience to oil so much teak. Too much work for me!” She walked over to the painting mounted on the bulkhead. “Ah, so this is Sara?”

“Yes. I had it done when she was about seven.”

“Is it oil, or acrylic? You know acrylic doesn’t hold up too well on boats?”

“Oh, yes, so I’ve heard. It’s oil.”

“Lovely. I love the way he captured her eyes . . . the light in her eyes.”

“She, actually. Margaret Betancourt, out on Cape Cod .”

“Was she a friend, Dr Goodwin?”

Tom Goodwin froze, his expression reflected icy anger. He’d not mentioned to anyone his profession, save on the clearing-in form he’d filled out in the Harbormaster’s and Custom’s office . . .

Yet the woman seemed unapologetic. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry . . .”

“So, what else did you find out?”

She looked away.

“I guess maybe it was foolish to think I could run away from everything.”

“Or perhaps it was foolish to think you needed to.”

Goodwin looked at the woman for a moment, still angry. Yet now she met his gaze unflinchingly, not at all willing to back down.

“So, what’s this pasa-gia thing?” he sighed, changing course.

“Oh yes, the Passeggiata? The evening stroll, Dr Goodwin. Most everyone dresses and takes a stroll along the waterfront, usually through the Piazza, before they head off to dinner. It is a time to reflect on the day, on life, to talk with friends and family, and I suppose there’s a little see and be seen about the whole thing, too. And also, for some it is a time to pass on gossip.”

“Gossip. I see.”

“You needn’t worry, Dr Goodwin. I should much rather talk to you about this remarkable dog,” she said as she turned again and looked at the painting. “And perhaps the love you shared with her.”

Goodwin looked up at Elsie in the cockpit. “I’ll need to find another Springer one of these days.”

“Soon, I should say. Indeed, you should do so without wasting another day.”

“Probably easier said than done over here.”

“No, not at all. We bought Elsie here last winter. A decent breeder near Positano. English chap, Italian wife. High up on a mountain, remarkable view. Perhaps they’ll have a litter soon? Would you like me to check?”

“Well, that’d certainly give us something to talk about. But I think I should change into some dry clothes first.”

“Ah. Malcolm went up to the showers; he should be back soon. We’ll wait for you.”

“Right. See you in a bit.”

She left him to it, yet her pup remained in the cockpit. Goodwin looked at her, she looked at him, expectantly. “Well, come on down, I’m not gonna bite!” he said to her.

The dog hopped down the companionway ladder as if she’d done so a thousand times and walked over to one of the settees; she turned and looked at him again.

“Oh, by all means. Make yourself at home.”

Elsie hopped up onto the green leather settee and turned around several times before finding just the right spot, then she plopped down with a long sigh and put her face on her outstretched paws and looked up at him.

“I won’t be a minute.”

The dog looked at him, her head canted to one side just a little.

“Really. Just hang on. I’m sure we can find some nice unspoiled grass out there somewhere.”

Her tail thumping now, Elsie grinned when she looked up at the man, for this one wasn’t as stupid as she’d once thought.

+++++

Margherita walked across the Piazza and up the Via alla Chiesa, then she stopped outside her mother’s apartment and looked at the old door. She hesitated, as if the familiar surfaces were a harbinger of pain, or an omen, then rang the bell and waited while one of the boys bounded down the stairs and opened the door. It was Toni, and when he saw his older sister he started to cry, then flew into her arms and hugged her.

“Come, come up,” he finally said, and he gently pulled her up the stairs as if he’d not seen her in decades.

“Mama, look who has come!”

Their mother sat as she had earlier in the afternoon, still lost to the world inside her apartment, as if she was in quiet contemplation of the sea, because staring out the window into the infinite mirrors of memory was where she preferred living now. 

And then Margherita walked over to her mother’s side.

“Mama?”

Silence. A ticking clock, a quarreling couple on the street below, dogs barking somewhere on the far side of the piazza.

“Mama?”

“Did you see your brother this morning?” her mother replied.

“Yes, Mama.”

“He looked so nice in his uniform.”

“Yes he does, Mama. How are you feeling today.”

“And then he had to fall in the water. At least you taught him how to swim. You were always so good to him. So good.” She looked up at Margherita, a tear ran down her cheek. “It is going to be cool this evening. Did you bring a shawl?”

“No, Mama, but I have a sweater.”

“You must wear one of mine. You are old enough now to wear a shawl when you walk.”

The door opened, Paulo walked up the stairs and into the room. When he saw his sister he stopped, then looked up and smiled, as if to God Himself: “I see some prayers are answered after all,” he said quietly.

“Yes,” their mother said, “God listens when you speak from the heart.”

Margherita knelt and lay her head on her mother’s lap, held back tears when she felt her mother’s arthritic fingers drifting through her hair. Even her dress smelled as it had so many years ago . . . rose and eucalyptus, maybe a little garlic that always seemed to just miss her apron, warm bread from the oven, ready to be dipped into olive oil with crushed basil.

“Mama,” Paulo said, “are you ready?”

“Yes. It will feel good to walk. Perhaps we might go down to the water tonight?”

“Yes, Mama. Of course.”

They made their way down the stairs and stepped out into the brisk evening air. Paulo wrapped his mother in her best black lace shawl then took her hand. They walked toward the Piazza, toward still waters turning black with the coming of night.

+++++

“So what is this passeggiata? A stroll, you said?” Tom Goodwin asked Doncaster.

“Tom, it is, in a nutshell, the essence of Italy.” Malcolm was helping lift Elsie from the boat to the stone quay.

“Malcolm, must you always be so obtuse?” his wife said.

“Yes, I must,” the old man grumbled. “In fact, I think it’s a deep-seated need. Come to think of it, I think this need developed right after I met you.”

“That explains a lot. Like the past forty one years.” Mary Ann shook her head. “Come on, Elsie.” She turned toward the Piazza and the pup fell in dutifully beside her.

“She’d be happier if it was me on that leash,” he growled.

Goodwin laughed. “You think?”

“Anyway, there are about a dozen definitions in the dictionary, and not one gets to the core of the matter. I guess if you had to distill it down to the bare essentials, it means to take a stroll in the evening, but that kind of simplification always skips over the heart and soul of the thing.”

“Simplifications usually do.”

“I’ve been watching these people for years now, decades, really, and just when I think I’ve got a handle on things some new aspect comes into focus. I guess first and most importantly it’s best to think of the passeggiata as a ritual grounded in deep tradition, and as such it’s taken on an importance, a meaning to these people well beyond simply taking a stroll. You hear some people refer to it as seeing, and the corollary, being seen. For some it’s simply ambling down to a favorite bench and watching the sunset, or the world passing by. But I’ve come to see the acts as something more elemental, and perhaps more vital: evening is that time between day and night, right? It is a time of passage, a crossing of boundaries. Not simply passive observation either, but active participation in this communal passage, from day to night. The people come together and share this passage, from day into night, from the promise of another day’s work to the solace of family, or to a lover’s embrace, but I believe this shared aspect, this feature of their communities, helps hold this culture together.”

“Malcolm! You’re a poet!”

“Hardly, though I taught literature at King’s College, I’ve had little to say that hasn’t been said before. Others were far better than I might have ever been.”

“Cambridge? That’s kind of like the big leagues, isn’t it?”

“Piffle. I retired almost twenty years ago. Mary Ann was a reporter for the FT in London, she mainly covered the Middle East, the wars in Lebanon and the Golan, mainly. Between the two of us we’ve managed to come to terms with the world. We both write all the time, and she has Elsie while I have Diogenes.”

“Yes, I meant to ask, he was the cynic, right? Why him?”

“Ah, well, let me digress . . . oh, look, there’s your swimming companion!”

“Oh, the guy from Customs. Right. Didn’t recognize him out of the water.”

Goodwin felt a little self-conscious as they approached, and a shy smile crossed his face.

“Ah, Doctor Goodwin,” the man said when they had closed the distance. “And I see the imminent Doctor Doncaster has conveyed to you a most vital tradition. Oh! Excuse me, I am Paulo Moretti, you remember? This morning? Yes, and this is my family, my brother Toni, my sister Margherita, and my mother.”

“Pleased to see you again, Paulo, and perhaps we could avoid taking another swim,” Goodwin said lightly, but in truth he could hardly make out the two women behind Moretti. “And nice to meet you all.”

The old woman leaned forward and pulled on Paulo’s sleeve; he turned and she spoke softly in his ear.

“Eh, excuse me, Doctor, but my mother wants to know from where you have come. Excuse me, she is most direct, but full of an insatiable curiosity about people and their journeys on sailboats.” 

“I see.”

The old woman came forward and took Goodwin by the arm and started to walk with him. “Margherita, walk with us, please, and translate.”

“Yes, Mama.”

And that was when Tom Goodwin first laid eyes on her, when he for the first time truly beheld Margherita Moretti. His heart skipped a beat and his vision clouded. The ancient Piazza was lit by gaslight and pale candlelight from restaurants scattered about, and the soft light caught her face, carrying an impression of ethereal beauty on the evenings soft, honey-suckled sea-borne breezes.

Her mother began speaking in rapid, soft Italian, and as quietly all of them – the Morettis, the Doncasters with their springer Elsie, and Tom Goodwin – were fixed in common purpose – joined together in this passage – as they walked off as one into the coming of night. 

They walked quietly, perhaps reverently, spoke of things that had filled their day, and Tom Goodwin listened to this music of the night. Paulo’s mother asked about Tom’s family, where they lived, what they did, polite talk, ‘getting to know you’ talk.

They walked from the Piazza along the Molo Umberto, listened to the water and the wind in the trees above, to their footsteps on old stones underfoot, and to each other. Their talk was punctuated by an occasional nod from passersby, or a tug on a shawl as cool air washed away the remaining warmth of the day. They paused to turn and look at the lights of the village dancing on the starlight-dappled water, and it seemed that now there was life coming out to dance in the night, each creature obeying instincts all their own.

Mary Ann led the group, or perhaps Elsie did the honors, along the quay toward the winding, overgrown road that ambled out to the Punta del Coppo, out to fresh new horizons and the call of wild grass. Elsie scented her way with nose to the ground and as one they followed, following old roads with new friends, but Elsie could already tell there was something new and wild in the air, something that to her felt eternal and yet beyond understanding. Elsie stopped from time to time, looked around or caught that scent on a wayward breeze, then as suddenly, as if heeding a distant call, she led them under overarching trees and beside thick brambles, with the sounds and scents of the harbor just a few feet to their left, though the water was hard to see now. The pup felt wild dancing spirits and dark furies on unseen breezes coming off the sea, as if a kind of Walpurgisnacht had filled the darkness around the group. Tom Goodwin thought he heard music coming from the sea and felt a little confused.

But to what purpose? Why were these spirits afoot? Was it because this was the 31^st of October? Were there evil spirits in the air, perhaps lying in wait? This was beyond Elsie, of course, for such creatures never guess, yet this feeling she had, that this spirit was alive in the night, was up there in the trees, and it seemed to stay close to the group, like whatever it was, this spirit was following them as they walked out to the point. 

She watched Goodwin, and occasionally she looked at this other female, the youngest one. Was there some purpose guiding her? Was it her spirit that drifting on these breezes, or something even the human was unfamiliar with? Elsie could not tell, at least not yet.

Margherita walked beside her mother, their estrangement fading with each step they took from their home; Tom Goodwin walked beside Margherita, looked at her from time to time when she asked a question, hoping she would look at him again, speak to him with her own voice, but he listened to her mother’s questions and answered them as best he could . . .

“Were you happy in New York . . .”

“Did you enjoy medicine . . .”

“Why did you choose to leave . . .”

These were the questions he had avoided asking himself for quite some time, yet now he answered them without hesitation; the ‘where’ of her questions, the ‘who’ and the ‘how’ – his answers all came so easily . . . yet none of the old woman’s questions seemed to get to the point, the point Mary Ann had uncovered earlier that afternoon. 

“Perhaps it was just foolish to think you needed to run.” Isn’t that what she’d said?

Indeed. Why had he run? Or did his reasons really matter anymore, now that his other life was so far away? Perhaps it was just this old woman’s sense of propriety, but there seemed to be a boundary she did not want to cross. A sense of tradition had already defined the contours of this passeggiata, and this tradition limited just how far the old woman could go to get at his truth. And, it seemed to Goodwin, she would go no further. The rules of passeggiata are inviolable.

“And what of your parents,” Maria Theresa asked, and her daughter translated.

“My mother passed recently,” he replied.

“And your father?”

“He’s retired. He works on his parent’s old farm.”

“I feel something in your voice, Tom,” she said. “Some trouble. Some trouble with your father, perhaps?”

“Yes, trouble. He wanted me to operate on my mother and I told him that I could not, that such a thing was not ethical. She passed away and he blamed me for her death.”

“Is there truth behind his anger? Are you blameless?”

“I tried to explain the moral dilemma I faced as a physician, but he just wouldn’t listen.”

“So, he closed his mind to the truth? Is that what you are telling me?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Without truth,” he heard the old woman say, “there is nothing, don’t you think?”

“I agree. Nothing.”

They came to a large tree, its huge overhanging branches reaching out over the sea, and the road turned to unpaved trail ahead. Yet the way ahead was dark, the trail rarely used, and to Goodwin the footing looked dangerous in the dark – with the trail carved out of a sheer face, and a steep drop to the sea on their left, and to the right an ivy covered wall. 

Was it too dark? A little too unfamiliar, even for the people that called the village home?

The old woman peered into the darkness and pulled her shawl close, like this was a boundary she was unprepared to cross this night. “Toni, take me home now, please. I grow tired.” She saw shadows crossing in the air, and she did not want to tempt these spirits. Perhaps she knew them too well?

“Mama, sit down, here, on the bench.”

“No, Toni. I want to go home now.” Shadows were gathering, watching for signs of weakness. . .

“Okay, Mama.”

“Paulo, you keep your sister company. Now go on, or you will never catch up to that dog!” She turned and Toni took her arm; they turned back here and walked together back to the village. Away from the forest. Away from all those daunting shadows.

Paulo shrugged. “She used to be able to walk out here.”

“She has aged so much, Paulo,” Margherita sighed. “I felt frightened when I saw her. Frightened that time has passed too quickly for her.”

Goodwin listened politely to this exchange – in Italian, of course – as if he could understand every word, yet in a way he could guess at the contours of their emotions, simply by the way their words ebbed and flowed. Remorse, regret, the passing of time, the coming of night, and most of all, sharp concern . . . these he knew as the great universals of life – our common denominators, and such concerns sound the same in any language.

“Has she been seen be a cardiologist?” Goodwin asked, interrupting the ebb and flow of their exchange.

“What?” Paulo Moretti said.

“Has she seen a cardiologist, a heart specialist?”

“Not that I know of,” Paulo said.

“What do you see, Doctor, that makes you ask this question?” Margherita asked. She was looking at him directly now, and he turned to look at her in kind.

“Her lips were turning blue, and her fingernails. And her ankles are swollen.”

“But this is what it means to grow old,” Paulo interjected.

“Shut up, Paulo. You were saying, Doctor Goodwin?”

“Well, I might be off base here, but with her age I’d like to run tests for congestive heart failure, perhaps right sided heart failure, or check for mitral stenosis. These could be fixed, easily, maybe with medication. How’s her memory?”

“Poor,” Paulo said, listening attentively now.

“Has she been tested for Alzheimers?”

“No, at least I don’t think so.”

“Had an ultrasound of her neck?”

“What is this?” Paulo asked.

“A test that looks at her carotids, and the other vessels in her neck. If there is blockage, that could hurt her mental ability or even cause sudden behavioral changes, and this, too, could easily be repaired.”

“But she is eighty five years old,” Paulo said.

“So?” His sister cut him off. “Would it be hard to find this information? Are there tests?”

“Yes, easy and inexpensive, too. One visit to a specialist ought to provide the answers.”

“Could you go with us?” she asked.

He looked at her, at the concern in her eyes, and he felt their relationship being redefined by his past, redefined in ways he did not like or want. Yet he was also aware that his past was growing increasingly more relevant with each step he took with this woman by his side 

‘But I am who and what I am,’ he said to himself, remembering the look in Mary Ann Doncaster’s eyes earlier that afternoon.  ‘And there are things you will never understand,’ he heard an unseen voice say, ‘because you have not the will to examine your actions!’ He looked around, unsettled.

“Let’s continue walking, shall we?” Paulo said. “That dog will have dragged the Doncasters all the way to Rapallo if we don’t move along!”

Margherita still held Goodwin in her eyes, but she turned to walk, she too turned towards the dancing spirits in the darkness.

Goodwin turned as well, but he held her eyes in his. “If you need me, of course I’ll come with you.”

To Paulo these words meant nothing, but to Margherita – they shattered her world. She felt weakness overcoming her ability to speak or walk. She was Gretchen to this Faust, lost to the magic of this night as it unfolded around her. Or perhaps she was simply lost in her need of his knowledge…

“Thank you, Doctor.” She looked ahead but the memory of the look in his eyes dominated her, made her unsteady as she walked. Paulo moved ahead as if without a care in the world, leaving his sister adrift in the wandering eddies of her hope and confusion.

“Do you live in town?” he asked after they had walked awhile.

“Yes, not far from the Piazza.”

“This is an amazing place. It’s as though time has somehow stopped here.”

“Ah, yes, that is easy to say now, but two months ago you would not say so. Portofino is full of the beautiful people, the very rich, all summer long. Everything has become pretentious, overwhelming, and life becomes conspicuous here. Too many people trying to impress one another, too many people trying to be anything but who and what they are.”

“Oh? What is that?”

“Pardon? Oh, it is just an expression. I don’t know. Too many pretenders, I think, too much money and too little understanding of how such things corrupt reality.”

“I guess it’s just a sign of the times.”

“I think this is not a very good time, no?”

Goodwin laughed. “I think that about sums it up. So, do you work in town as well?”

“Yes,” then she bit her lip and laughed. “And I saw you go swimming this morning, too!”

“That figures. For some reason I’d be surprised if you hadn’t.”

“Actually, I saw you come in this morning, your boat drifted silently, like magic. While I walked to work. Your boat seems very nice, almost, I don’t know the word, but stately comes to mind. Can you call a boat that?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Anyway, I watched, then as you fell asleep. You looked very tired.”

“I still am.”

“Oh, excuse me. Do you want to return?”

“No. No, the air out here feels wonderful, almost like magic.”

“Magic?”

“Yeah. Well, I don’t know, something special.” He felt stupid, unable to understand what was happening as they walked.

“So many stars out tonight,” she said. “Ah, look! Tis that the Hunter? The archer?”

“Orion? Yes it is; this is Orion’s time in the sky.”

“Are you a hunter, Doctor Goodwin?”

He slowed, looked away for a moment. No, he wanted to say, I’m the prey . . . I have been all my life. “Miss Moretti, I suspect, well, I’ve hunted Death all my life, tried to push Him away from people for as long as possible . . .”

“But does Death hunt you, Doctor?

“He hunts us all, Miss . . .”

“Please, you must call me Margherita. Please.”

“Alright. I like that name, by the way. It’s . . . pretty.”

“Ah, yes, I guess I deserve that! So, you hunt Death. Then there is something I don’t understand. Why have you stopped – why did you quit medicine?”

“Oh, I think it’s the other way around. Medicine quit me.”

“Excuse me? What does that mean? How could something so vital become so corrupt?”

He laughed again. “I don’t know, but that’s a very good question.”

“And, is there a very good answer?” Her voice held him, yet at the same time it soothed him.

“When I figure that one out, I’ll let you know.”

It was her turn to laugh. “Yes? I will look forward to hearing this.”

“Are you two going to catch up?” It was Paulo, already lost in the darkness ahead. They could hear Elsie barking in the distance, Mary Ann calling the dog’s name. “That dog is almost out to the rocks!”

“Go on ahead, Paulo,” Margherita called out. “We’ll be along.” 

Goodwin stopped, looked east across the water toward Santa Margherita Ligure and Rapallo; the loom of their lights had settled over the distant hills now as an amber mist. “My God, what a sight.” ‘Magic?’ he thought. The waters, he felt, seemed to breathe magic, like time meant nothing out here. Had this view of the coast looked similar a thousand years ago? Two thousand? He imagined it had.

“Do you know, the worst part of living here is taking all this for granted. When the newness leaves, so too will its hold on your heart.”

“But don’t you find some measure of that feeling once again, when you experience newness through the eyes of another?”

“Perhaps I have lived here too long. I traveled from here but one time, a long time ago, yet it was not a happy experience so I returned.”

He watched the darkness fall over her, saw her recede from the present back into the pain she alluded to – and that, perhaps, she had denied ever since. He started walking again, and she fell in beside him, though because of the trail she walked a little further ahead of him now. He bent down and picked up a flat sock and tried to skip it across the water, but he laughed when it plopped noisily into the stillness, and he watched as ripples marched off into the distance.

“I had a boyfriend, you see,” she began, out of the blue. “My father liked him, but my mother said he was no good. We ran away. To Fiorenza, eh, to Florence. That was the beginning of all my bad times.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, it is not so important now. Mother refused to speak to me for years after I came home. I found work and so has it been ever since.”

“What happened to the boy?”

She looked away, walked along silently. Then: “Have you been to Florence, Dr Goodwin?”

“Yes, long ago, when I was in college. I was with friends, but just that one time.”

“Is it not a most beautiful city?”

“Yes, I would say the things I saw were, well, maybe powerful is the best word to describe the Duomo. I would love to go back someday, when time was not so constrained.”

“You should.”

“What about you? Would you ever return?”

“No, not ever.”

That boundary was clear, and he felt no need to ask more.

“Mrs Doncaster thinks I should get a dog. To keep me company.”

“I find it strange. Yes, strange, that someone would sail alone so far, and for so long. Do you enjoy keeping an animal?”

“I, well yes. I had a Springer Spaniel, just like Elsie. I lost her a year ago.”

“Ah. That explains it.”

“Explains . . . what?”

“You do not want to dishonor her memory, do you? To take another so soon?”

“I suppose not. I didn’t know how a dog would do on a boat, on such a long passage. I know of people who have taken cats on such trips. But dogs are another matter. I think it might be cruel.”

“Perhaps, then, you should find a woman?”

“Ah, well, perhaps, but I think a dog would be less trouble!”

They laughed. Her cares, he saw, seemed to fall away when she laughed.

“You are right, and most wise! Yes, we are too much trouble to love.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s a matter of finding the right person, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” she said. “But that is often no easy matter, to find such a person.” She looked away again, and then she looked down, unsure of the way ahead, of what to say now.

“I guess you have to be open to love when it comes.” Now he found that he could not look away from her.

“Open, yes. And to follow. Follow with your heart.” And she turned to look at him.

There it is, Goodwin told himself, the meaning of this night now seemed clear. 

Would she listen to them when they spoke to her? Could he see the truth of his existence? Or would these spirits not allow this to happen?

He heard panting and light paws running their way on the stone trail, and soon he could just make out Elsie running through the darkness. She came up to them and circled ‘round, then she sniffed his legs. He bent to rub her and felt she was soaking wet.

“My-my, Elsie, you’ve been swimming!”

“Oh, Lord!” Margherita exclaimed. “I hope the Doncaster’s are not, how do you call it, skinny-dipping again!”

“You’ve got to be kidding me! Aren’t they a little old for that kind of nonsense?”

“Old? Why do say that, Doctor Goodwin? Why would it be any less fun tonight than fifty years ago?” She was smiling, yet she was serious, too. They resumed walking, the trees gave way to rocks, and the sea beyond was still, expectant, and unrepentant. Soon they could hear people talking just ahead, then splashing and laughing in the water.

“Well, for one thing,” Goodwin continued, “the water’s too damn cold!”

“And if anyone should know, it would be you!” Another laugh, another smile.

“Oh, thanks so much for reminding me once again!” he said while looking at her dark hair flowing in the night. He could feel himself getting lost in that hair . . .

Elsie ran back when they caught up to Paulo; the Doncasters had rolled up their pants and were wading in a little rockbound tidal pool. Elsie jumped back into the water and Mary Ann yelped when a wall of spray drenched her.

“So how is it?” Goodwin called out. “Still cold?”

“Come in and find out!” Malcolm replied “Again!”

“No thanks, I’m trying to quit.”

“Bah! Paulo? What about you?”

Elsie jumped up on a rock and shook herself off, further drenching the Doncasters.

“Good girl, Elsie,” Goodwin said, “you go get ‘em!”

“Eh, no thank you, Dr Doncaster. Once today was enough. Perhaps tomorrow I will feel the need. Today I still feel like the fool…”

“You are not a fool, Paulo.” Margherita said as she took off her shoes and rolled up her pants, then scooted from the road down a steep slab of rock to the little pool. She stepped in and smiled. “It is not so cold! Come, Paulo!”

Goodwin made his way down to the water’s edge and reached down to feel the temperature. “Bullshit!” he cried, just as Elsie sprung from the rock back into the water. A wall of seawater rose and coated both Goodwin and Margherita; now everyone laughed and cheered, even Paulo, who had escaped most of this drenching.

Goodwin started to unbutton his shirt and Margherita stepped back, watched him cast it aside. He undid his belt and pulled his trousers off and threw those up on the rocks as well, then walked through the pond and up a low wall of rocks. The sea in front of him was deep here, and he dove into the water and came up floating on his back; he paddled around for a moment then looked up at everyone.

Mary Ann Doncaster was buck-naked now, and she came up on the rocks and dove in as well, then swam out to Goodwin.

“See what you’ve started!” she said. “My, it is a bit brisk out, isn’t it?”

“I think we should have brought towels,” Goodwin sighed, then he turned at the sound of a large splash.

“Bravo, Paulo,” Margherita shouted, and sure enough Paulo Moretti burst from beneath the waves and paddled over to Goodwin and Mary Ann. He said something quite unintelligible into the night, but Mary Ann laughed, replied to him in Italian and they both laughed.

Malcolm was next. Goodwin watched is the old man’s pasty white body emerged from the pool, and laughed expectantly when Malcolm held his nose and hopped into the water like a little boy.

“Bravo!” “Good show!” 

“My God in Heaven!” Malcolm shouted when he burst to the surface. “I think my balls just ran somewhere up around my navel! It’s bloody cold in here, Mary Ann!” He too paddled out into deeper waters.

Everyone turned to Margherita.

“Well?” Paulo called out, daring her.

“Well, what?” she called back, her tone urging him to back off.

“You must come in!” her brother taunted.

“And you are crazier than I thought!”

“Come!”

“NO!” 

Elsie came to the edge and looked at the four of them treading water, then back at Margherita; she barked once then hopped off the rock into the water and swam out to Goodwin. His feet were firmly planted on a slippery rock, his head well above the water’s surface, so he was able to hold Elsie when she came alongside. She of course looked at him adoringly and licked his face.

“My God,” he heard Malcolm say, “I do believe . . .”

Goodwin turned and watched as Margherita, her nude form a moon-silvered-glow, dove gracefully into the water.

Everyone hooted and hollered and splashed about as she too swam out into deeper water, and Elsie only added to the commotion by howling at the moon.

Goodwin looked at Margherita as she came close; her hair was sleek and shiny now; when she’d surfaced the water had pushed her hair back into a smooth black stream that fell straight down the middle of her back, and just then little drops of water on her forehead caught the moonlight. Goodwin thought they looked like diamonds scattered through her hair.

But just then Tom heard a thrashing in the water behind him, and someone gasped.

“Quiet!” Malcolm hissed urgently. “Everyone be quite still.”

Goodwin turned, saw the fin slicing through the water, then another, and another.

Elsie barked. The fins turned toward the sound.

The first fin arced lazily forward, then a dolphin’s grinning face broke the surface and rose into the moonlight. The rest of the pod came forward and slipped among the humans, members breaking the surface from time to time just long enough to look at the amazed people before slipping back under the surface. The first one, however, remained near Goodwin; indeed, this one seemed to be staring right into Goodwin’s eyes. Elsie let slip a low growl, so the only dolphin drifted closer, taking her in, too.

“It’s alright, Elsie,” Mary Ann said softly, apparently now quite nervous. “Easy, girl. No barking.”

Unconvinced, Elsie looked at the gray face looking at Goodwin; she clung to him fiercely now, dug her paws into his shoulders and began to tremble. The face came ever closer, now little more than a foot away.

Goodwin could hear the dolphin’s breathing clearly now, even the faint thudding sound of its blowhole opening and closing, and without thinking he held his open hand out towards the dolphin. The dolphin turned slightly, looked at Goodwin’s hand; that decision made, the dolphin closed the last few inches to Goodwin and held it’s pectoral fin out, touching Goodwin’s hand; it looked at him for several seconds more, then slipped quietly beneath the surface of the still water and was as quickly gone.

Goodwin noticed that Elsie had stopped trembling, and now he was sure that he’d been holding his breath.

“Good God!” Malcolm sighed. “I don’t believe it! I saw it, and I still don’t believe it!”

Elsie pushed off now and swam to Mary Ann’s side; she’d obviously had enough excitement and the two of them made their way back to the rocks; Malcolm followed, then Paulo did as well.

Goodwin remained frozen, looking out over the water as if waiting for something.

He felt Margherita draw close behind, felt her breasts rub against his back, then he felt her hand on his shoulder. Still he did not move, and she hardly breathed.

He was first to see the fin again, but this time there were just two of them – side by side – moving through the water.

Tom held both his hands out now, watching and waiting, expecting? – what? he had no idea; he felt Margherita reach around with both hands, reach around and hold onto his chest, and suddenly he was acutely aware of her body pressed to his.

The first dolphin returned as before; it rose from the water slowly and looked at Goodwin. Silence followed, then an incredible stillness, with only the faintest note of swishing water passing between them. Of the hot breath of a million cycles, of the cycles of instinct and listening, Goodwin knew nothing at all.

The second dolphin’s face slipped quietly from water and into the moonlight, and this one looked at Goodwin, then at the woman on his back. They came closer still, and in a blinding instant Goodwin felt rocked by images that streamed through his mind’s eye. Hundreds of images, and none had anything to do with him or his life. Images flickered, some resonant, others completely foreign to him, and without context he began to feel like he was drifting through time. Then, and more disconcertingly, he began to feel like these flickering images were indeed images of him.

Then, quite suddenly and without warning, he suddenly felt aroused. In the next instant he was even more aware of the woman pressed into his back. The feel of her, the heat of a thousand cycles of instinct, listening to her breathing as more images streamed through his mind’s eye. Where were these things coming from? And this sudden need – what had brought that on? 

The two dolphins came forward and touched Goodwin’s outstretched hands, and he was hit with a lightning-like surge of understanding. The first dolphin stopped and stared into his eyes then as quickly slipped under the water and disappeared. Goodwin’s mind reeled under a new assault of neural images that came to him, images that left him raging with desire.

Then Goodwin felt Marguerite’s trembling through the hot skin on his back, but was her discomfort coming from the coldness of the water around them? Or was it from the symmetry of the encounter?

“Did you feel something?” she asked.

“I still am. And I’m seeing things, too.”

“I am too. Look at me, please.”

She loosened her grip and he turned to face her, then he felt her nakedness conforming to his own, and he looked into her eyes. She leaned into him, kissed him fiercely, then she quietly reached down as she lifted a little, then she eased down onto him.

He felt the warmth of the all encompassing warmth of her womb and in the next instant they fused in the ebb and flow of a universe now beyond their understanding. Her hands moved over his shoulders with instincts driven by a million cycles of need; he put his hands around her waist and pulled her closer still.

Only then was he aware of them, of the two dolphins. They were circling them in this new union, protecting the sanctity of the joining they alone commanded, enjoining these two creatures to the music of the cycles, to the music of the universe.

Goodwin felt first one, then the other as they swam closer and closer, and finally as they brushed against the back of his legs he felt a dizzying metamorphosis. He felt them brush against Marguerite, felt her stiffen through the pulses of the bodies that touched them, then came a new packet of visions. Stars, stars everywhere. An explosion of stars rising from the water, stars surrounding them, stars moving to their most ancient song.

And then, for just a moment, Goodwin felt like he was no longer of his body. He felt some other part of his self taking flight among the stars, and yet for some reason he did not feel lost or alone, and he opened his eyes. Points of light emerged from the water; one or two at first, then a steady stream – followed by an explosion of light as the pinpoints of light began swirling around them. He was, he just understood, no longer in control of his body. He had left it behind as the stars came to him…

In time she began to slow, yet she had no comprehension of the moment. Goodwin did as well, and for a moment he thought that maybe they were returning to the earth from a journey among the stars, but then he vaguely felt that such an idea was preposterous. More than preposterous; it was delusional. Then she placed her mouth on his and he felt sudden warmth chase the coolness from the water around them, and one by one stars began to fade away; the two dolphins drifted in a release of their own as they stared at the two creatures.

Goodwin held her for the longest time, they kissed once again, then they slipped apart. He put an arm around her waist and turned toward the rocks. The Doncasters and Elsie stood transfixed in the moonlight, but so too did Paulo. Everything about the moment was naked and silent – as if they had just witnessed the first day of creation. Yet there was no context for this union, for their passage, and confusion reigned.

Yet Goodwin did not feel uncomfortable or ashamed; he simply did not know what had happened, let alone why. His mind stuttered, feeling that something beyond human understanding had been commanded of him, and this thing had been enfolded into human experience. He felt different, almost altered, and if there was an opposite to feeling alone, this was the feeling that washed over him now.

He used his hands to paddle over to the rocks and there he reached back to help Margherita climb up to the trail in the moonlight; Mary Ann passed their clothing and left them to dress in silence, then Goodwin and Margherita stood by the group; soon, hand in hand and without saying a word, they followed theirs friends back into the village.

Elsie turned and looked back at the sea, to the hot beating hearts that dwelt there, then she turned and looked at Goodwin. Her eyes were still full of stars that she alone could see, in fact stars seemed to be clinging to Goodwin. She smiled at the creatures in the sea because she understood, she smiled because these human had over time lost sight of something elemental, and only now, deep in the womb of the sea, had they regained something precious. Would they hold onto this gift as they might each other? Would this rebirth be lost in the light of day? Elsie would have to wait to find the truth of the moment.

Elsie turned and walked alongside Goodwin, settled in beside the two of them as they walked. Every once in a while she looked up at him, at the music still in his eyes, and she smiled.

Goodwin listened to the crunch of his shoes on the old, crushed-stone trail, to the rippling water below, to the tides finding land once again; he walked gently now, regaining his usual reserve. He heard gentle breezes drifting through trees overhead, and when he concentrated he could smell deep tidal airs running silent fingers through the night. The moon, now high in the vault of her sky, cast silver through the trees, and Tom Goodwin could make out the shadows of his new friends on the road as they walked to the boat along the quay he had called home for eight months.

But more than anything, Tom Goodwin felt the dewy fragments of Margherita Moretti’s body washing across his soul, the intensity of their sudden union coursing through his veins like a simmering fire. She walked by his side, walked there now as if she always had been by his side, and always would be. They had walked out of the sea ten minutes ago, and had known each other for – perhaps – an hour or so, yet wild magic in hazy mists of their own design had cast a spell on this little group. Now everything around him felt different – indeed, was different: the trees felt alive in a way he had never known, the sea breathed with manifest purpose. The moon arcing through the ink-stained night still cast its light with silent indifference, yet her shadows gliding over silver stone seemed borne of redemption. What had happened out there in the sea? A consecration? Or had someone died – and was even now waiting to be reborn? As Goodwin walked along, these thoughts raged as his scientist’s worldview collided with these surreal events.

Her arm was entwined in his, her side pressed comfortably against his, almost like she belonged there, that she was a part of him. He could smell her from time to time, smell the intimacy of their union mingling with the primeval flows in the air, from the wind and the sea. He thought once that she had washed over his thoughts like these tides: subtly, perhaps predictably and immutably – like their footsteps in the night had taken them to that point with purpose – but what that purpose was he just couldn’t fathom.

He saw the pup, saw her look up at him and he couldn’t understand at first, couldn’t see what it was she was looking for, but after a few minutes it felt to Goodwin like she was looking at something that had just changed before her eyes, changed into something else – something new. The dog didn’t doubt her own perception of these events, he could see that much with his eyes now; no, he could see that she doubted his perception of events! Did he have it in his soul to understand the consequences and the workings of la forza del destino? Or was destiny ever so simple as to invite understanding?

As the minutes passed, as they came closer to the village and further from the depths of their encounter off the rocks, Goodwin was held by the coolness of the air and the water. His clothes were wet, he felt a sudden chill in the air, felt this same chill overtake Margherita and Paulo and the Doncasters. It was as if the further they walked from the precise location of their union the colder they became, as if the fire they had started was in danger of fading away uselessly into the darkness. 

He felt her tremble and he held her tightly.

“We’re not far now,” he told her.

“Tom?” he heard her ask.

“Please stay with me tonight.” he heard himself respond. 

“How did you know that I was thinking just that?”

“Where else could you stay now?” he wondered.

“Does it seem so clear to you? Have you felt something beside us as we walk?”

“I’m not sure what this feeling is,” he said, “but it’s here, and it feels real to me. Beyond that, I don’t have the words to describe what this feeling is, Margherita. Maybe, I don’t know, but it’s like I felt something coming from them, like they were guiding us, but then I felt for a moment out there like I was drifting through time.”

“Yes, there seem to be so many things alive in this night, there seems to be so much purpose. It is hard to contradict such feelings when they feel so elemental.”

“This dog understands. I can see it in her eyes.”

“Yes. I saw her looking at you in the water, when that animal first came to you. The dog was with you. I could have sworn the dog was talking to the fish, to that dolphin.”

“Really? That’s kinda off the wall, isn’t it?”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, nothing,” he sighed. “This whole thing feels other-worldly, like the further we get from the rocks, the more it feels like it didn’t happen.”

The dog looked up at him, then bounded on ahead.

“Tom, I don’t think she appreciated that comment.”

“Obviously.” He could see his boat ahead moored there next to the Doncaster’s, under those brooding, overhanging trees, and he began to wonder how the rest of the night was going to take shape. He felt exhausted and hungry the closer he came to the village, the feelings lingering from their encounter in the sea were fading fast now, moving back into the shadows – as if these spirits could not take being exposed to the light for any length of time. 

Who was this woman by his side? She was a stranger, yet something impossible had just happened between them. Something neither real nor surreal, something beyond imagination or understanding, and yet it had happened between the two of them. The realization hit him like a physical blow, winded him as seemingly insurmountable contradictions rolled underfoot.

“Obviously,” he said again. “I think I need to change clothes. Would you like to come aboard? I could make us some coffee?”

“Oh, dear doctor, I think I too must change into something dry, but . . .”

“But, would you meet me for dinner?”

She seemed to drift on the implications of his offer for a moment, then came to her decision standing there on the quay. “Do you see that building there, by the two street lights, just there? That is the Ristorante Lo Stella. I will meet you there in one hour.”

“Alright.”

“And doctor, bring your friends, would you? They seem very nice.”

“Yes, I’ll ask them.”

They came alongside the boats; Malcolm and Mary Ann were already onboard Diogenes, but Paulo was waiting for his sister, standing in the pale flickering light of an old gaslight on the quay.

“Paulo?” Goodwin said, “would you join us for dinner tonight? Your sister has recommended a place we meet in an hour.”

“Si, doctore, that would be nice. We have, I think, much to discuss about this night.”

Margherita seemed to turn ever so slightly away from them when she heard that, then she disengaged from Goodwin’s arm and stepped away, stepped out of the light and back into the shadows. “I will see you both in an hour. Ciao!”

“Yes. I will see you in an hour,” Paulo said as he turned to walk back to the village. 

Goodwin stepped onto the Doncaster’s boat to cross over to Springer; Malcolm was sitting in the cockpit surrounded by complete darkness, as if waiting for him. He already had coffee on the table and was wrapped in a blanket, apparently still quite cold.

“Ah, there you are! Getting things together, are we?”

“I’m not sure.”

“No, of course not. I don’t suppose I would, myself. Odd, wasn’t it? That animal?”

“Odd? I’m not sure ‘odd’ covers it, Malcolm. Matter of fact, I’m not sure about much of anything right now.”

“Quite right. No reason to be. A complex situation, perhaps more so than you might imagine.”

“Oh? What are you . . .oh well, you’re both invited to dinner. In an hour.”

“Sorry, Sport, but Mary Ann ducked into the head and said she’s straight for bed.”

“Would you join us, then?”

“I’ll ask the Admiral when she gets out. Right, now, you’d better get to it.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Goodwin stepped across to Springer and opened the companionway; he reached in and flicked on a light and disappeared below.

Doncaster looked at the village for a while, then turned to look back toward the rocky cape where they had been not a half hour ago. Still perplexed, he dropped below to talk to Mary Ann, now as confused as she had been. Maybe more so, given what he already knew.

+++++

Goodwin and the Doncasters – both of them, as it happened – walked over to the glowing ristorante and stepped inside, into the warmth and light of another world. Paulo was already there and he had a table already; he waved at them as they walked in the door.

Goodwin took in the scene: this place was like any one of a million nice, upscale Mediterranean dives that had seemed to sprout up all over the lower east side with nauseating regularity, but this was, he told himself, the real thing. The mood of the room was delicate, almost subdued, elegant – as in very Old World. The room’s lighting, an amber-hued crystalline mist, cast warm shadows that only seemed to hint at deeper mysteries, like those waiting outside in the darkness beyond such warmth as this.

Goodwin made his way between tables as he followed the Doncasters to Paulo, and was surprised to see the young man dressed imperiously in black suit and tie. He felt a little out of place in his habitual khakis and polo shirt, and he really regretted leaving his soggy Docksiders on. 

He took Paulo’s hand. “Nice place. Looks like they have decent food.”

“It is a nice place, doctore. The octopus is the best in town.”

“Octopus?”

“Oh I say, Goodwin!” Malcolm said. “Remember, when in Rome . . .”

“Oh Mal, do shut up and leave the poor man alone!”

“Aye-aye, Admiral.”

“So, Paulo,” Mary Ann ignored her husband now, “where is that delightful sister of yours.”

“Here,” Margherita said, now walking in behind the Doncasters. Goodwin stood and held a chair out for her, and she came and sat next to him. “Sorry, I am running a little late.”

“You look beautiful,” Goodwin said, and everyone smiled knowingly when he blushed. They looked at one another and an awkward silence fell over the table.

“So, doctore, you have not had octopus before?”

“No, Paulo, I’m afraid not, unless you count calamari.”

“No, no, no! Calamari is bait! You are in for a rare treat tonight, doctore. You will see.”

“Paulo,” Margherita said, “just because this is your favorite, you must not force it upon the doctore; you must let our guests choose.”

“But . . .”

“Oh, really Tom,” Malcolm interjected, “anything they serve here will be excellent. Sit back and relax.”

Mary Ann looked around the table. “I don’t want to talk about food. I want to talk about what happened out there tonight.”

An ancient looking man came and dropped off a wine list, asked if anyone cared for an aperitif. Paulo asked the weathered old man to bring a bottle of house red, then settled-in to look at Mary Ann and the elusive thoughts she had just so indelicately tossed out into the open. “What is there to talk about,” he stated. “We saw what we saw. There must be an explanation in nature, that is all.” He seemed embarrassed, perhaps because he had stood by silently, helplessly, while events unfolded in the water, but he looked down at his own imploring hands now as if asking, no pleading, with his companions to drop the matter.

“I don’t know, Paulo. Something unusual happened out there.” Mary Ann said, placating him, easing him into the topic. She needed an ally, and though the young man seemed reluctant to talk about the encounter, she sensed he was just as deeply intrigued by the event as she was. And there was family honor to consider, as well…

Yet she could not see the fear behind his eyes. The hidden history of this moment.

The old waiter returned with a bottle and opened it. He poured a little and arched an eyebrow; sniffed the cork tentatively, held the glass up to the light and frowned, then walked back to the kitchen.

“This is not something that happens everyday, Paulo, or is it?” Mary Ann wasn’t going to let the matter drop. “Have you heard of something like this happening before?”

Paulo looked away.

Mary Ann grew stern, unrelenting. “Paulo? Won’t you answer me?”

The waiter returned with another bottle and held it to the light.

“Oh come on, Mary Ann,” Malcolm said, “leave the man alone. Two fish came up and played with Tom and Margherita. That’s all it was.”

And with that the old waiter’s hands began to tremble, his eyes darted about the people around the table.

“Excuse me?” the old waiter said as he pulled the cork. “What did you say?”

“Tonight, off the cape, two dolphins came up to Dr Goodwin here,” Mary Ann recounted, “and then Margherita joined Dr Goodwin and these fish circled them for a while, then they swam off.”

The old man handed the bottle of wine to Paulo. “You pass this around Paulo.” He took a chair from another table and sat down next to Goodwin. He looked at Goodwin for a moment, then at Margherita.

“Was there a union between the two of you? An unexpected joining? Perhaps more than unexpected, like out of the blue, a bolt of lightning?”

Margherita looked away, acutely embarrassed.

“That about sums it up,” Goodwin said with a nod; he looked at Mary Ann and Paulo for confirmation. 

“I see. Well, you know,” the old man said, his voice now subdued yet full of ancient purpose, “many people think the name Portofino means something like ‘fine port,’ and though of course it is a fine port, such accounts are not accurate. Quite wrong, in fact. Yes, quite wrong.”

He looked around the table slowly, looking at each of them in turn.

“Pliny the Elder tells us from that most distant past of an altogether different origin, and events recorded in History have, as I’m sure you know, a way of repeating over time.” He looked at Paulo again and frowned: “Eh, Paulo, I told you to pour the wine! Now, get to it!” He turned to a boy coming out of the kitchen: “Giuseppe, please ask Marco to come here! Now, please!” He clapped his hands twice and the boy darted back into the kitchen. He drummed his fingers on the white linen tablecloth impatiently until a man in chef’s attire came to the table. 

“Si, patron?”

“Bring us dinner. And nothing too heavy, please. We have a long night ahead.”

“Si, patron!” The chef turned and hurriedly left the table.

“He is a good cook, but, eh, what is this word . . . he is a little full of himself? Yes? Too proud of his creations?” 

The old man looked around the table again: everyone was looking at him expectantly.

“Anyway. Pliny the Elder. Yes. Pliny tells us that this village was, from Roman times, known as Portus Delphini, which you, Mister Goodwin, would call the Port of the Dolphins.”

“Eh, Ludvico, but this is doctore Goodwin,” Paulo corrected the old man. “He is a physician, from America. And a heart surgeon.”

“Oh, really? But isn’t he the man you went swimming with this morning, Paulo?”

Goodwin smiled when Paulo looked down at the table; he saw the poor fellow grimacing and shaking his head as he muttered a few more choice, unintelligible words under his breath. 

“This will never be at an end, never,” Paulo said, looking up with a warm smile on his face. “I am ruined.”

“Aren’t you always? Anyway,” the old man, Ludvico, continued, “there have always been dolphins in this sea, eh, what is your word, doctore? This gulf we call the Tigullian Sea. We have always been fishermen here, in this village, and long after the Arabs and the rich tourists leave us, this is what we shall be again. We are linked, yes, this is the word? Linked to the sea, okay? Over many thousands of years. And as we have come to depend on the sea for our lives, so too the sea has had other gifts to bestow upon us.”

The old man took his glass and passed it to Paulo. “Do I have to ask again? Some wine, please, Paulo, or we shall all die of thirst!”

“I asked Paulo if the things we saw tonight have happened before,” Mary Ann interjected. “That seemed to upset him, you – Paulo, and I wondered why?”

“It is only legend,” Paulo replied. “An old story told to the school childrens. Nothing more.”

“And, what is this legend?” Malcolm asked, the twinkle in his eye evidence enough that he was through waiting, however expectantly, for the keys to this kingdom.

“Let us come to that later, professore,” Ludvico said. “First, we shall have some oysters and Pinot Grigio.” He clapped his hands and the chef wheeled out a cart heaped with fresh shellfish on  mountains of ice. Another boy brought fresh glasses and ice cold bottles of wine. The old man looked at Paulo and sighed, then decided he’d better pour this round.

The chef shucked oysters and put them on plates next to shrimp and lobster tails and, Goodwin saw, slender bits of what had to be octopus. He tossed off the rest of the red and shook his head, wondering what such a beast would taste like. 

When everyone had been served Ludvico looked at them all and smiled. He picked up his glass. “To your health,” the old man began, and the others raised their glasses. Next, he looked at Goodwin, then at Margherita. “And to the miracles of time!”

“To health and time!” everyone said.

“Indeed,” Doncaster sighed – under his breath.

The old man put down his glass and looked at his hands for a moment; he shook his head as if what he saw there was very disagreeable to him. “It is nauseating to get old,” he said. “My eyes see the same world they saw when I was young. But then I see these hands, or my face in the mirror . . .”

“So what of this legend, kind sir?” Mary Ann asked again in her reporter’s questing voice, for she was now clearly exasperated and wanted to get to the bottom of this story.

“Ah, yes. You are all educated people, at least I assume so. You all know that throughout human history, dolphins have turned up in various mythologies. True?”

“Of course,” Malcolm Doncaster said pedantically. “But  that begs the question; do we see merely shadows on the wall, Ludvico. That is the more important question. Will men ever emerge from the shadows? Can our eyes stand the sight of truth?”

“Eh, professore, this is not an evening for Plato. No, my old friend, this night belongs to Bacchus, to Dionysus.”

“My point exactly, Ludvico. How can we see what we do not know. There is no context. Believing and knowing are much the same thing, you understand, but only to the uninitiated. For without knowledge, belief is a very shallow vessel indeed.”

Paulo looked around the table nervously, first at his sister, then at Goodwin. This day, which had begun in such innocence and pleasure, was even now turning toward something beyond his understanding, toward something he suspected was beyond all their understanding. All except Ludvico, that is.

“So, professore,” the old man continued, “you would not believe you saw Him tonight, in the sea, would you?”

“Dionysus? Don’t be ridiculous!”

“Ah? So, then we are left with the cave, the shadows. Indeed, perhaps this will be harder than I expected.” The old man took his glass and emptied it in one long pull and poured himself another. “Anyway, Mary Ann, dolphins are inextricably linked to this village. And as I have told you, our people have always looked to the sea for our living. No, for our very survival. It is said that when times have been hardest, when plague or famine or war have taken our men from the boats and the women have had to take to the sea, the dolphins have come to our aid. They come and drive fish into the net, they tend to women who fall into the sea, and they have even come to the aid of warriors lost in the sea. And as such, our families have survived. For thousands of years it has been against the laws of our land to kill a dolphin, and in years past, indeed until quite recently, this was a crime punishable by death. They were as the Gods, and we knew this on a very elemental level! Not so today. No, not at all today. Today we despair to worship anything that money cannot so easily afford.”

“Just so, Ludvico, but you digress. In fact, isn’t there that remarkable tale of Dionysus and his Etruscan captors? If I’m not mistaken, wasn’t that supposed to have happened nearby?”

“Si, professore. Yes, as you say, just so, for that tale leads us to the heart of the matter. Dionysus was captured by pirates who mistook him for a nobleman, a prince, perhaps. They would hold him for a ransom, no? But Dionysus waited until they were far out to sea before he struck. He caused their boat to turn to vines, the oars the sailors used turned to serpents in their hands as they rowed. In their panic the pirates jumped into the sea and began to drown. But Dionysus took pity on his captors, on these stupid mortals, but in his pity he turned them into dolphins, and then he commanded them to come to the aid of humans for the rest of their days on this earth. Surely I do not have to recite all of the stories of seamen being rescued by dolphins to a table full of sailors?”

He finished his glass of wine while he looked around the table, then he shrugged and poured himself another. And now he took a deep breath before he continued. “And so, professore, since that day at least dolphins have been an intimate part of our life here in Portofino. They have helped our fishermen, they have helped sailors who have fallen off their boats make it back safely to their homes. All true.” He looked at his hands again and sighed. “But there has been so much more to this story, Malcolm, that even you do not know.”

“I understand that, old friend, and that’s why we’ve kept coming back, Ludvico. Year after year. This has become something of a quest for me, as you know. For many, many years.”

“As I well know, my friend. Yet there was never reason to tell the tale until now, until tonight. You would not have understood, you see, without context. You could not, you must understand, because you could not see all there was to see with your heart.”

“Is it just me,” Margherita said, “or is there something unusual about this night?”

“Yes,” Malcolm said, “yes, Margherita, I feel we are about to enjoin our mythologies tonight.”

“Oh God, no,” Mary Ann rumbled. “Welcome to Mythology 101, starring Dr Malcolm Doncaster!”

“Oh bah, Mary Ann! Really, must you always be so belittling!”

“Why yes, lovey, I must. It is a great need of mine to be as obtusely belittling of you as I possibly can, especially when you set off to launch into one of your blasted tirades! You see, my dear, it is my lot in life to serve you your daily ration of humble pie!”

“Bah! Woman!”

“You two are simply amazing,” the old man said. “I have known you both for twenty years – have I not? – and in all those years you have never changed. Never! This drama of yours is endless.”

“Nor shall we, Ludvico!” Malcolm said. “Now get on with it. I’m ready to hear this.”

“My, my, professore! Such haste! Well, as I’m sure you know, accounts in our deepest mythologies depict dolphins as messengers of the old gods, but particularly in the service of Poseidon, or Neptune, as the case may be, and our dolphins were charged to run errands for the Gods, often to warn sailors of impending danger . . .”

“Holy shit!” Goodwin said. He turned pale as a memory overtook conscious thought.

“What’s that?” Malcolm jumped at the exclamation and turned to Goodwin. “Here now! What on earth’s the matter with you?”

“Something just came to me.” He looked shocked as deeper insight gathered in the air around him. “Right after I left the states, as I was entering the Gulf Stream a pod of dolphins came alongside. I took photographs of them, as a matter of fact, a lot of them. Anyway, one of them seemed very agitated, slapped his tail a lot and swam alongside, standing right out of the water, swimming backwards and chattering away at me like he was trying to talk, trying to tell me something. That’s what I thought at the time. Anyway, about an hour later the entire sky behind me filled with dark clouds and lightning, and a really vicious squall came up. I mean fast. Barely had time to get the boat ready for it. Funny, too, though it was really strong it lasted only minutes, not even ten minutes, and then it was gone. All this happened in the early morning, the sun came out from behind the clouds a few minutes later, and then just like that the dolphins were back, and I had the distinct impression that they had come back just to check on me. The same one swam beside me for several minutes. We stared at one another. I remember his eyes.”

Ludvico nodded. “I would like to see these pictures you took, doctore.”

“Why?” Doncaster asked, suddenly intrigued.

But the old man only smiled, then took another sip of wine.

Tom looked shocked: “You don’t think it’s the same one, the one out there tonight?! That’s just not possible!”

“Not impossible, doctore Goodwin,” the old man said. “Improbable, perhaps, but not impossible. What do you think, Malcolm?”

But Malcolm would not be put off: “No, no, Ludvico. I will wait until I have seen these photographs.”

“Your skepticism is understandable, professore, but while such images may help prove a point, several more must be made before we achieve an understanding. Still, these mysteries have endured for millennia, so perhaps we can afford to wait a little longer for the clarity you seek.”

Margherita looked around the table, feeling confused. She had been holding Goodwin’s hand for some time, at least until the wine started flowing freely around her, yet now her feelings were wrapped in turbulence, like falling into a void. Their simple lovemaking earlier in the evening had grown into something distorted and otherworldly, and was even now turning into the grotesque parody of an academic lecture. She wanted to leave, to go out under the stars and cry . . . but there was something in Ludvico’s voice that held her, held her as if she was a moth to his flame . . .

“Well,” Goodwin said, “you’ve got my attention. Do go on.”

“Yes? I choose to believe there is something to this as well, my friend,” the old man said. “Yes, we know from our history the truth of the assertion: dolphins help men. They do so with apparent purpose. Did you know, doctore, that alone among all animals, only dolphins look at themselves in a mirror with a sense of recognition? Self awareness, doctore! Awareness of others in the context of selfhood! Think of the implications! Where did this charge come from, this desire to aid humans in need? Dionysus? Why do they continue to be so inclined when faced with so much human malevolence to their kind? No, no, we will find no simple explanations to suffice here, doctore.”

Malcolm Doncaster was frowning now, deep in thought. He was searching his memory for . . .

“Now, before the next part of our dinner arrives, somebody must tell me exactly what happened in the sea tonight.”

Margherita felt the overwhelming desire to run now, but she remained fixed in her chair as if held there by forces beyond her control. She felt Goodwin’s eyes on hers, felt herself grow hot and flush with embarrassment.

“Margherita,” the old man said. “You must drink some more wine or this evening will grow intolerable for you!”

“I am not so thirsty as you,” she replied, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “So sorry.”

“But it is not from thirst that I drink, Margherita. There are things we need to say to one another tonight, and it is not so easy sometimes to talk with strangers. So please, Margherita, drink some wine. It is good wine. It will cause you no harm.”

She tossed off her glass and held it out petulantly, waiting for it to be refilled. “It is indeed fortunate that this is a good Grigio, Ludvico. And because I get tipsy most easily, I hold you responsible for my actions tonight!” She tossed off this second glass and held it back out. “More!” she said, and Ludvico filled her glass. 

Paulo looked mortified, as if he suddenly knew where this evening was headed. The implications of such a public familial breakdown terrified him.

A course of broiled sea bass arrived and was served with a small risotto of truffles and shaved Emmentaler, and everyone turned to the food as an escape from the hazy implications that drifted lazily in the air above their table.

The thought hit Goodwin and Mary Ann at exactly the same time, but she beat him to the punch. “Assume for a moment,” she began, stabbing the air with a fork, “that the two dolphin we saw this evening are residents of this area. If that dolphin you photographed off the Gulf Stream is the same one that came to you tonight, I’d say the implications would be beyond staggering. Wouldn’t that imply some larger purpose?”

“Ah, si,” Ludvico said. “Very much, purpose, yes. Perhaps – more than purpose.”

“How so?” Paulo asked.

“Well, a dolphin, or a pod of dolphins from Portofino,” Mary Ann continued, “ventures across the Atlantic to warn a sailor of an approaching storm, then checks on him afterwards? And then disappears? This sailor then comes to Portofino where he is approached – in these waters, mind you – by the very same dolphin, and then this dolphin compels two people to make love.”

“Why, Paulo, the implications of this are as clear as day!” Malcolm almost shouted. “That animal knew where Doctor Goodwin was headed months ago, and he knew where this storm would form, and when.  And, mind you, this dolphin needed to act – perhaps – well before even Dr Goodwin was aware of his destination or route! The inescapable conclusion would be that this dolphin is, or was, protecting Doctor Goodwin! He has knowledge of, or understands the movement of people derived in a manner completely beyond our understanding of space and time! Margherita, my dear! What’s wrong?”

The young woman was trembling, holding on to the edge of the table as if her world was spinning violently out of control. Wide-eyed, turning pale, now everyone could hear her frantic whispering: “This cannot be . . . it must not be . . . no, it must not be . . .”

But Paulo had been growing visibly upset, slowly at first, but suddenly he reached his limit: he shouted, slammed his hand down on the table. “No! Enough of this! Margherita! Come with me, now! We must leave!”

Her eyes full of remembrance, and terror, Margherita began to shake and cry. And then Goodwin instinctively put his arm protectively around her.

Ludvico stood and with both hands on the table leaned toward Paulo. “You must not interfere! Go if you must, but do not interfere, Paulo. There is too much at stake here!”

The Doncasters looked at one another, astonished by the old man’s words, then they looked at Goodwin and Margherita. Though she was rattled now, Mary Ann stood and went to Margherita’s chair.

“Come with me, dear. Let’s go wash up, shall we?”

Margherita came back to them, looked around the room as if to make sure of her surroundings, then she stood and left with Mary Ann.

“Paulo, sit down!” Ludvico said, but Paulo just stared at the old man. “Sit down, you fool!” He pointed at the table while he glowered at the young man. “And doctore? Perhaps you would be so kind as to go find this photograph? Would be a good idea, no?”

“By all means,” Malcolm said, “go. In fact, I’m going with you, sport. Anyway, I find myself in dire need of some fresh air right now. Don’t you?”

Goodwin pushed himself back from the table and stood. He looked from Paulo to the old man and back again, saw the contours of their faces and was rattled by the growing implications he was just now beginning to fathom. “Yes. A good idea,” he said absent-mindedly. “Okay, Malcolm, let’s go.”

When the others were all gone, the old man looked at Paulo with sad eyes, for sad thoughts filled his heart. ‘So much to tell the boy. So little time.’ He sighed, shook his head. “So many things you could have been,” he said almost silently, though very much like a prayer. “Why did you have to become the fool?”

The boy looked down, still completely unaware of the betrayals that had defined his destiny.

+++++

“So what do you make of all this?” Goodwin asked Doncaster once they were safely outside the ristorante. “And what was that stuff about you being on some sort of a quest?”

“Ah, well, come on Tom, let’s get those photographs, shall we? My interests here are probably of interest to only a few old, moldy academics. Now, just how big are these photographs?”

“Well, they’re still on the card, so I thought we could download them onto my laptop and show them that way.”

“Can you print them up later, if necessary?”

“Yes, of course. I have a printer onboard, or we could send them out.”

“Smashing! Good show!”

“You know Malcolm, you’re a hoot.”

“Only when absolutely necessary, old boy.”

“Yeah, I kinda figured that.” As the tide was now out Goodwin hopped from the quay down to Diogenes, then he made his way over to Springer. He dropped down the companionway and rummaged around until he found his camera bag, then took the CF cards to the chart table and powered up his MacBook.

“Might I come below?” Doncaster asked, his face peeking down from the cockpit.

“Yeah, sure. Of course.”

“Holy Mother of God!” Doncaster said as he stepped below. “They must have felled whole forests to build this boat, Goodwin! It’s bloody fantastic!”

“What? Oh, yeah. Thanks.” 

“Is this teak?”

“No, cherry.”

“Who built it?”

“It’s a Tartan 4400. She’s strong, and I think she has good lines for a deck salon.”

“She’s just beautiful, and I am green with envy.”

Goodwin slipped a card into the port on his MacBook and opened the catalogue. “Whew! This is the one. I was afraid I’d have to sort through a dozen cards to find the right one, but I dated them.” He tapped a few keys and images flooded onto the screen; when he found the batch he was looking for, he downloaded them and then put them into a slideshow. He closed the laptop, then looked up. “Okay, that’s it. Let’s boogey!

“Boogey? Dear God! Are you one of them? A real honest to god Hippie?”

“Yeah, Malcolm, that’s me. Peace, love, dope, and keep on truckin’!”

“You must have gone to school in California, no?”

“Yup, now come on, let’s get back.”

“You don’t want to watch it first?”

“Doesn’t matter much, Malcolm, does it? I mean, without some record of what the one here looks like, there’s no real proof, is there?”

“I think Ludvico already knows. In fact, there’s something odd about his performance, if you know what I mean?”

“Oh? Well, no, I don’t know.”

“I’ve known him for nearly a quarter century, Tom, but he hasn’t aged a day. And, watch his eyes. At times they are like diamonds, while at others as normal as you’ll ever see.”

“After those damn stars tonight, nothing would surprise me right now, Malcolm. Not a goddamn thing.”

+++++

Alone now, Maria Theresa Moretti sat by the open window that looked out over the dark sea, her black shawl wrapped loosely about her shoulders – to ward off the night air, perhaps. She had been sitting in the chair since coming in from Passeggiata earlier in the evening; now she watched moonlight dancing on tiny waves in the harbor below. She had, she thought, so much to be grateful for. Only that one dark spot on her soul remained. Would that time have allowed, she would have drifted on waves of stillborn hope by his side.

She had not seen the encounter off the cape; her eyes were no longer good for seeing things so far away, but she had known on the most elemental level imaginable, the level of instinct, what was going to happen out there in the darkness, and between whom. She leaned back in her chair, looked at the inconstant moon and the many moods that swung in her orbit, and then she smiled.

‘Yes, it is good to have so many memories,’ she thought, ‘even the bad ones.’ Their chance glancing warmth is often a comfort, even when all that remains of darkening seas is the final coming of night.

Toni, her youngest, brought her a cup of tea from the kitchen, and the warm china felt good on her hands. Cool breezes drifted in from the sea, parted the sheer curtains over the windows of her world, and like the petals of flowers opening she could smell him coming on the wind once again. She could smell the sea, feel the cool breeze that had pushed them together seventy years ago. She closed her eyes, saw all the world falling into the sea, and him in all his flaming glory. She heard explosions echo through corridors of memory, fires consumed by the sea, the never ending ruin of war dancing to ghostly anthems beyond her memory. The men who came to her in their need marched to those anthems, just as the men who were taken away to march into the fires of Hell had. Yet the memory of him, and of that one impossible day – that alone made her days bearable even now. 

Oh yes, there would always be that day. That day of distant miracles. The day he fell from a burning sky, the day he came to her on flaming wings. The day he passed away and was reborn.

+++++

Goodwin and Doncaster walked back to the ristorante in silence, then to their table. The rest were all there, waiting. Mary Ann and Margherita were seated next to the old man, though the younger woman’s face was red from too much wine and the all-consuming fire of too many conflicting emotions. Paulo was still there too, still looking concerned for his sister and dreading the looming possibilities the night held. Goodwin sat down, put his laptop on the table as a lawyer might when preparing to present damning evidence to the jury… 

The old man looked at the computer, his eyes full of dancing mischief. He took another sip of wine. “What is this machine? This is not a photograph.”

Goodwin explained; the old man listened politely to descriptions of digital cameras and compact flash cards, but he dismissed such folly from his table with an errant wave of his hand.

“I see,” the old man said as Goodwin’s technical explanations fell to the ground, like just another modern illusion. “So, this is as it must be, of course. Things change, and I assume for the better, but nevertheless we must begin our journey now, for time grows short.” He looked around the table. “Obviously, I have not seen Dr Goodwin’s photographs before, but I am going to hazard a guess. I am going to say that the dolphin the doctore saw, the one so agitated as to warn him of the coming storm, has two small scars on his left side, not a half meter behind his left eye. He will have two dark spots, small but nevertheless visible, under his right eye. And I am going to guess that the doctore’s talisman is indeed a native of these waters.”

“Preposterous!” Malcolm shouted.

“Now lovey,” Mary Ann chided, “try not to be such an ass!”

“Bah!”

“Must I stay for this?” Paulo asked.

“Si, Paulo, I would like you to stay. I don’t know why, but you were there at the cape tonight, so you have had a part to play in this drama. Now if you please, Doctore Goodwin, may we see these photographs?”

Goodwin opened the laptop and the slide show started; he turned the screen so everyone could see, and yet the old man leaned ignored the presentation. The first image that came up was of Goodwin’s friends on the dock waving as he pulled away from land at the beginning of his voyage across the Atlantic, then a few more images of friends following him out to sea for a few miles, for a few last goodbyes, then several of a very dramatic sunset followed. The very next frame was of a dark sea, of torpedo shapes beside Springer as the boat pushed through heavy seas. The dolphins in the image were dark grey on top and shockingly white below, a few had specks of dark coppery brown down their sides. The light wasn’t good but the images were in sharp focus, and Goodwin cycled through them until Malcolm called out: “Stop! There!”

Goodwin turned the screen a bit so he could see better; the photograph showed the dolphin who had warned him, and it was plain that there were no scars or spots in the relevant areas on his left side. “So, nothing! This isn’t him,” Goodwin said smugly.

“No, no,” Ludvico said, now clearly enjoying himself, “not her! Him! Look at the one behind!”

Godwin looked at the photograph again; he looked at the dolphin behind the one busily warning him. The image was of the right side of this other dolphin, and two dark spots were clearly visible under the eye as the animal just barely arced out of the water. 

“Coincidence!” Doncaster shouted. “Nothing but bloody coincidence!”

“Perhaps,” the old man said. “We need to see more of this dolphin, eh doctore. Surely there is another photograph?”

Goodwin resumed the slide show. The alleged female was visibly agitated in many of the images, and Malcolm made a snide comment on the resemblance of this dolphin to Mary Ann. This earned him a round of laughter and a swift kick under the table.

The next image came and everyone gasped. Goodwin paused the slide show and zoomed in on the image. There was no doubt about it now; there behind the left eye were two old scars, probably made by an encounter with a propeller years ago. Goodwin looked at the old man; he wasn’t even looking at the image . . . he was eating cheese and reaching for his glass of wine.

“I will be damned,” Doncaster said quietly.

“Oh, surely not, Malcolm,” the old man said. “You’ve led an honorable life.” He smiled at Doncaster, then looked at Margherita. “My dear, you recognize him, don’t you?”

“Si.”

“It is the same one, from all those years ago?” he continued.

“Si, I believe so. But how can this be?”

“And was this the same one you were with tonight?” the old man asked.

“I am not sure. I could not see him so well,” Margherita said.

“I could,” Goodwin said. “and it’s him alright.”

“Are you certain, Goodwin?” Doncaster said. “I mean, absolutely certain?”

“Yes, I am. But Ludvico, what were you saying when you asked Margherita if this was the same one, from many years ago?”

“Oh, I imply nothing, doctore,” the old man said impishly. “It was merely an observation of fact.”

“Margherita?” Doncaster asked. “What does he mean?”

She looked around the table uncertainly. Paulo was ashen-faced, his beliefs already shaken to the core; Mary Ann was erect in her chair staring off somewhere into the infinite. Malcolm was leaning forward, resting his forehead in his hands as if nursing a sudden headache. The old man had resumed picking at his food, though he still had an enigmatic smile on his face. Only Goodwin was looking at Margherita now, and she saw in his eyes that he alone was on the verge of understanding.

“Yes, Tom. Many years ago, when I was twelve, no, thirteen, I was fishing with my father on his boat. My foot was caught in a net as it was thrown into the sea, and it pulled me in. The men on the boat did not see this happen, not even Papa was aware of what had happened.” She looked down now, down into the well of her past. “I remember the water, how clear it was, the nets spreading out above and around me, my ankle caught in the line. I remember most the sunlight and how it filtered down through the water, and I could see Papa’s boat, the propellers as they turned in the water, the bubbles behind the boat as it moved away. But I was never afraid. It was peaceful. I knew I was to die then, and there was nothing for me to do. Then I felt him. Not rude or subtle, but I remember his eyes, the way he looked at me. I knew what he wanted me to do. I put my hand on his great fin and he pulled me to the surface, he swam alongside Papa’s boat until one of the men saw me. Papa jumped in and cut the line from me. The dolphin was gone by then; he left as quickly and as silently as he came.”

She had to stop talking as the gales of memory tore through her, and she felt like she was falling into the sea again, and, once again she felt lost in her powerlessness as time moved away from her.

“And you’re saying, if I understand you correctly, that this is the same one?” Goodwin asked, pointing incredulously at the screen. “This dolphin, here with me in the Atlantic last May, is the one who saved you? What, how many years ago?”

“Si, doctore, and yes, it was many years ago. Yes, almost twenty. And yes, he is the same.”

Goodwin slumped backwards in his chair, sighed heavily as the weight of all these implications settled on his soul. ‘How is this possible,’ he muttered to himself.

“Yes, doctore Goodwin. This encounter you had was no accident of chance.” Ludvico pointed at the laptop with his fork, and for all the world Goodwin had to stifle the laugh that spread through him when he saw the old man so, for he looked then like an old statue of Neptune he had once seen.

“Alright,” Mary Ann asked, clearly full of subdued anxiety. “I have a picture of these events in my mind, but Paulo, why would you not tell us what you knew about this . . . ?”

“Because,” the old man interrupted, “Paulo doesn’t know the story in its entirety. He has played but a minor role in these matters. At least so far.”

“Now what does that mean, Ludvico?” Malcolm asked. “This is riddle upon riddle without end!”

“Eh? Sorry, professore! Perhaps we will achieve clarity before the sun rises. Perhaps not. It is as you say; we are denizens of the cave, not inclined to accept some truths, even in the light of day.”

“Clarity! Who’s talking about clarity? We’re talking about purpose! Purpose beyond our understanding!”

“Just so, professore. But I do not want Paulo to talk of his role in these matters just yet.”

Goodwin continued to stare at the old man. It was as if by association with these mysteries that he could just see the skin of the old man ripple and reform right before his eyes; he could fathom another form lying just beneath that which was apparent to his senses. It was only an impression, an impression of huge blue eyes and bright red wavy hair, but it wavered in the air for a moment and was as suddenly gone. He shook his head, told himself he’d had too much to drink while he reached for his glass. But the visage held him, caught somewhere at the very boundary between instinct and memory . . . or, perhaps, survival.

“And what is your role in these matters, Ludvico?” Tom Goodwin asked.

The old man turned toward him slowly, the smile on his face gentle, knowing, and full of incomprehensible power. “It is your time, Tom Goodwin. Your time to finish what was begun. I am just a simple guide, that is all. Do not fear me.”

Goodwin shook his head. “Nope. Sorry. I’ve had enough. It’s been a long day and I’m tired, and now I’m going to bed.” Goodwin shut the laptop and stood. “It’s been a slice,” he said too quietly, “and would somebody let me know what I owe for this shindig? Okay, I’m out of here.”

“Tom,” Margherita said, an edge of sorrow in her voice, “you must not leave me here.”

“Then come with me. Now.”

“She cannot, Tom.” Ludvico continued to smile benignly at him, but now there was a hint of power gathering behind his eyes, and in his voice.

“And why not?”

“Tom, sit down,” Ludvico sighed. “Sit, please, and tell us why of all the places in the world you could have chosen to run away to, why you chose to come here, to us. To this village, this harbor.”

“I didn’t run from away from anything!”

“No, indeed not, Tom. I implied you were running toward something, no?”

“Bullshit!” he yelled as he slammed the table with his fist. “That’s pure bullshit!”

“Is it, Tom?” Ludvico said as calmly. “Tell us, please, were you running from the truth, or to the truth?”

Goodwin sat, sighed as defeat caught him unawares. “I don’t know anymore,” he said, clearly exhausted. “I don’t know anything about my life anymore.”

“Tom?” It was Mary Ann speaking now. “Does this have something to do with what happened to your mother? Between you and your father?”

Goodwin looked at Mary Ann, his eyes accusing her of an immense betrayal.

“Tom. Doctore Goodwin. Tell us of this. It could be critical.”

Goodwin looked from Mary Ann to the old man. “Why? Critical?”

“Let me come to that after you tell us of this struggle between you and your father. Please Tom. Do not fail us now. We are so close.”

“Close?”

“Yes, Tom. Close. Close to the truth. To a resolution too long in coming, too long denied.”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Goodwin said.

“I know, Tom. You are too close to just one part of the story. Too close to history for understanding. I have seen this story unfolding for years, and I have seen the hearts of many people touched in its telling. And this story is too big to be about just one person, Tom. But you are obviously a key piece of the puzzle, and we need to understand why. We need to know why you were chosen.”

“Chosen?”

“Yes, Tom. How did these events choose you, and why were these dolphins out there to assist you – if not to protect you. To what end? Or from what?”

Goodwin sighed, closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. “My mother was ill, her heart was failing, she wanted me to perform the surgery. I refused, unsound medical practice to operate on family members. She insisted, then so did my father.” Goodwin was lost as these memories washed over him, as tears tried to form in his eyes. “I continued to resist, colleagues supported my decision, we found others to perform the surgery and yet my mother refused, and so in the end I relented; she went into SCD, sudden cardiac death, and she died before we could get her to the O.R.” Goodwin cried now, cried openly, then savagely. “My father condemned me, disowned me, told everyone that I had murdered my mother, his wife. I left my practice. Left my life, rather than face his hatred any longer.”

“Yes. He was always hot tempered.”

Tom Goodwin looked up, stunned, as he reeled under the implications of the old man’s words; his world turned grey as distorted tunnel vision defined his view of the old man. 

“You know my father?”

Everyone around the table turned to look at the old man.

“Yes, Tom. There was a time when I called your father my friend.”

Mary Ann Doncaster’s mouth fell open; Paulo shook his head, a bead of perspiration formed on his brow. 

“Oh, this just gets better and better,” Malcolm muttered. 

“The seventh of July?” Margherita sighed. “1943?”

“Precisely, just so,” the old man said as he smiled at her. Goodwin flinched as the date hit him.

“Alright, I’ll bite,” Malcolm said. “What happened in July of 1943?”

“My father’s B-24 was shot down,” Goodwin said stonily.

“Go on,” the old man said, but he was looking at Margherita now, concern in his eyes dancing like a wildfire before savage winds.

“His unit was based in North Africa; they were flying raids all over southern Europe. He never talked about it much, but one day over northern Italy his plane got shot up pretty bad. I think he said he was trying to get to Corsica or Sardinia, he didn’t have enough fuel to return to his base. A German fighter jumped him somewhere near Genoa, the gunners still alive in his airplane held the fighter off, but it managed to shoot up the plane some more. The surviving crewmen bailed-out over land; Dad bailed-out somewhere over the sea and partisans hid him until the invasion forces reached the area. Then he went back to flying and finished the war, as a matter of fact, bombing Dresden and Berlin.”

“And did he continue to fly after the war?” the old man asked, though he was still looking at Margherita.

“Yeah, he flew for TWA until he retired.”

“And did he ever talk about the day he was shot down? The things that happened to him that day? Or about his time with, as you say, the Partisans?”

“No, not ever. Refused to, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, no, don’t tell me . . .” Malcolm groaned.

“Yes,” the old man said. “I watched him falling, from right over there Tom, from that window. His parachute was on fire, and he hit the water at an incredible speed. There, right off the cape about a kilometer.”

“Oh, no . . .” Doncaster too grew visibly upset, he too began to sweat as implications danced all round the room.

“Yes, Malcolm. A dolphin brought him to our harbor. To a boat that was moored exactly, Tom, where your boat was this morning. Where you were, if I may be so indelicate, when you so graciously fell into the sea. And to that end, I suppose we should thank Paulo for his part in this drama. Eh, bravo, Paulo!”

“Yeah, glad I could be of help. Now, fuck off!”

“There’s an odd symmetry about that, don’t you think, Tom?” Doncaster croaked.

“You know, Malcolm, you continue to be a master of understatement.”

“Thank you so very much.” Malcolm was rubbing his temples now.

“Wasn’t he hurt,” Mary Ann asked, “in the fall?”

“Yes, but not so badly. He was tended to by a young woman in the village who had begun nursing school before the war. She came home to be with family when America was pulled into the war. Your father fell in love with her, Tom.”

“Who was she?” Goodwin asked. “Is she still alive?”

“Oh, very much so. In fact, you walked with her this evening.”

“Mrs Moretti? Margherita’s mother! Oh, come on now! You can’t be serious!”

Paulo had been very still in the moments leading up to this exchange. “Oh si, doctore Goodwin, this is most serious. Of that I can assure you.”

“My father and your mother! Does that . . .”

“Oh, no, no, doctore,” the old man continued, “Margherita is in no way related to you.”

“I feel sick,” Goodwin said. “Excuse me . . .” He stood and left the table, walked out into the night. Margherita looked at Goodwin as he left, then looked at the old man.

He nodded to her, “Yes, go to him. He is confused now so be careful not to offend him.”

Margherita followed Goodwin out into the night. She walked onto the Piazza and looked around, her eyes adjusting to the darkness. She saw him sitting along the quay, his feet dangling just above the blackness, looking into to sea. She walked over to him and sat down, put her head on his shoulder. He didn’t pull away. She could feel the heat of his soul’s fire on her skin, she could hear his heart beating to the music of the spheres. It was a good, deep steady heartbeat, strong, his song full of life and, she now knew, full of love.

“This must not be easy for you,” he said to her, though his soul felt heavy and careworn.

“I never had any idea, about your father, I mean.”

“Neither did . . . I mean, who could know all this stuff?” He drifted for a while, thoughts of symmetry crossed his mind’s eye . . . “Can you, would you tell me about your father?”

She nodded. “He was a fisherman. From Rapallo. I think he was a very complex man who yearned for the simple life, for simplicity. He went to university to become a lawyer, yes, right after the war, but he stopped for some reason. Nobody knows why. He went to work for a fisherman, worked for years making barely enough to eat. Then he met my mother, moved to our village and went to work for my grandfather, on my grandfather’s boat. When my grandfather died he took over. He had married my mother by then; that was, I think in 1953. He developed cancer in his lungs and died. In 1982.”

“So your mother never mentioned my dad?”

“No.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, when were you born?” he asked.

“1964. The seventh of July.”

“Oh, so twenty one years to the day. You know, the number seven keeps popping up. Weird.”

“I did not see that.”

“Probably not important. What about your brothers? When did they come along?”

“Paulo in 1967, and Antonio in 1970. Yes, I see what you mean about the number seven. What does this mean?”

“Beat’s me. Numerology was never my thing, but I know a lot of people who read a lot into numbers. Twenty one years after your mother met my father . . .” 

“Can this be coincidence?”

“Two ways of looking at the world, Margherita. Things either happen for a reason or they don’t. If you believe things happen for a reason, then I guess you believe in God, or something like God. If nothing has a reason or purpose, then I guess you don’t believe in things like that. But then there are the people like me; people who can’t make up their minds.”

“It would be impossible for me not to believe in God. I cannot imagine death without believing there is something more. If I knew there was nothing more, I think I could not live a sane existence. If there would be a world without reason – or purpose, as you say it – then right and wrong, good and evil, all these things our souls struggle with would be without purpose. Do you think this possible?”

“Margherita, I’ve been a physician for almost thirty years. A scientist, and I mean hard core science. And I hate to say this, but in all that time I’ve never seen one thing that made me think there was a divine plan. Why does this innocent baby die while the drunken criminal who kills him lives a long, carefree life. Or just look up at the sky. Imagine the incredible distances involved between us and that smudge in Orion’s belt. And that smudge is alive with stars being born right this instant! The impossible scale of it all defies even the idea of a deity!”

“Yes, we are small,” she said, but he could feel the warmth in her voice, “yet still we believe that our problems are so big.”

He put his arm around her shoulder. “How do you feel about tonight? About what happened to us out there in the water?”

“How do I feel? I don’t know the right words, but let me say that I felt it was commanded of us. I know that sounds stupid. But I felt purpose – yes, that is the word. I felt there was a purpose in what we did, yet I feel something much more important to me, happened to me. To us.”

“And . . .”

“I think we, you and I, were brought together. And now we know this was for a purpose, yes, for some reason. We did not join just to then fly away on the wind. . .

“Yes, I know. Your mother, my father; all that seems impossible, but what happened? Did something happen between them, or did something go wrong? Is that why we were brought together?”

“That would explain much, wouldn’t it? Perhaps Ludvico knows.”

“Who is he? This Ludvico? Is he a relative?”

“No, but he has loved my mother since she was a little girl. They were in school together. Then the war came. His brothers went off to fight, but he was yet too young and remained to help with the boats and the ristorante. He loved my mother, or so she has told me, but then something happened.”

“Yeah. My father happened. He, what did he say, fell from the sky?”

“Si, yes. From the sky. Like an angel.”

“If there’s one thing my father is not . . .”

“Tom! Quiet!! Don’t move . . .”

“What is it,” Goodwin whispered.

“Look down, there in the water. By your . . .”

“Oh, no . . .”

The dolphin was there, on his side. He was quite still now, his black eye looking up at them, the two scars plainly visible in the waning moonlight. Goodwin could hear its breathing again, could see lights from the village reflected in its eye – or was it the stars he saw reflected there? 

“What do you want?” Goodwin asked. “What do you want from me!?”

The dolphin continued to look into Goodwin’s eyes.

“Do not speak now, Tom. Just let him be.”

The dolphin raised his head from the water slightly, then slipped under and was gone.

“I think I just wet my pants,” Goodwin said.

“You ain’t the only,” Malcolm Doncaster said.

“How long have you been standing there!” Goodwin said, his anger welling up.

“I was just coming out to ask the two of you to come back inside when I heard Margherita telling you to be quiet. I stopped dead in my tracks until I heard you talking to it, then I came forward. When he saw me, by God, I think that’s when he slipped away. Could you see his face, Goodwin? The scars or the spots?”

“Two scars, left side.”

“You know what, Tom? I’m getting too old for this kind of thing.”

Goodwin laughed. “Okay, smart-ass, why don’t you tell me what exactly would be a nice age for dealing with this!”

“I see your point.”

“Good. I’m glad. That means I’m not the only one going nuts out here on a dock at half past whatever! And I’m not drunk enough for this kind of bullshit, you know, Malcolm? It’s time to go and get good and pissed!”

“Here, here. I second that.”

“Would you two shut up,” Margherita said.

They turned and looked at her; she was staring out at something in the little harbor.

“They are both here now,” she said. “There, Tom, behind your boat.”

“I say, Goodwin, I think she’s right.”

He looked at the moon-dappled water . . . it was hard to make anything out . . . but yes, there, about ten yards aft of Springer, a dark shape moved through the water, then another.

“Alright, Doncaster. Go and tell the others. Watch from the windows, but don’t come out. Margherita, will you come with me?” He stood, held out his hand and helped her up; she just nodded, then they walked away from Doncaster and the ristorante, and on around the quay to Springer. The closer they came, the more apparent it was there were two of them circling behind his boat.

“I am not so sure I want to do this, Tom.”

“Yeah? Well I’m absolutely sure I don’t want to do this!”

“So why . . .”

“Oh, Margherita, they’re here. They’ve come for us. After what I’ve heard tonight I’m not sure there’s not a goddamn UFO out there somewhere, and these two clowns are here to escort us up to their mother-ship!”

He heard her giggle, and he started to laugh.

“Tom Goodwin! You are a crazy man, but I think I am going to be in love with you!”

Goodwin stopped, looked down at her face, at the moonlight in her eyes, and he kissed her. Gently at first, but soon with a force, a passion that left him breathless. He could taste wine on her tongue, feel the intensity of her response in his chest.

Suddenly she pulled back from him, but she was smiling and held out her hand.

“Come! Let’s go to them!” she said as she pulled him along. 

He couldn’t resist the pull of her smile, so he ran along beside her until they came to Diogenes; he jumped on board and turned to help her, then made his way through the cockpit and stepped across to Springer. Margherita had a little difficulty making it over to the rail but he guided her over, and soon they were sitting on his swim platform, their bare feet dangling in the cool darkness.

She felt it first and jumped, then laughed as she gripped his arm. “Their skin is so smooth,” she said finally.

Goodwin could just make out the cool grey form as it slid by a few feet underwater, then one of the dolphins burst from the water like a rocket and arced up into the night sky, spinning as it climbed; this one came down on it’s back, creating a huge splash and a wave that washed over Goodwin and Margherita.

The acrobat slipped alongside Goodwin’s feet, just lightly rubbed along the soles of his feet, then turned and surfaced next to the platform. Lying silently on his side, two scars still clearly visible in the starlight, the dolphin continued to stare at Goodwin. Then another dolphin surfaced and assumed the same position just beside the first. 

Goodwin lifted himself off the platform with his hands a little, then slid into the water.

“Tom! What are you doing?”

“I have no idea!”

“You’ll freeze to death! Get out!”

Two Scars came alongside Goodwin, rolled and presented his pectoral fin, so Goodwin took it. 

His first thought was that this was almost like sailing. Moving silently, swiftly through the water, he held onto the fin as the dolphin slid silently out the harbor, only once turning to look back at Margherita on the boat. 

It was over almost as soon as it had begun. Two Scars and Goodwin were back off the cape and the waters where he and Margherita had joined earlier. Now he left Goodwin standing in waist-deep water but continued to circle slowly a few meters away, as if waiting.

It wasn’t long before Goodwin understood.

He heard Margherita’s laughter, saw her head and shoulders gliding through the water towards the cape.

“What, you didn’t have enough of a show earlier? You want more, you little pervert?” Goodwin quipped. Two Scar squirted water in his face then slid beneath the water; Margherita came alongside and slipped from the other dolphin’s back.

“Well, this seems clear enough,” she said as she drifted over to Goodwin.

The two dolphins surfaced side by side, began to circle the two humans in the water.

“Yes, clear enough.” Goodwin looked into her eyes as she climbed onto him again; he managed to push his khakis down, then his skivvies. She had her arms around his neck in an instant, and she lifted herself expectantly. She had the barest panties on; he slid these aside and entered her in one slight movement, and he felt the closeness of her as a knife comes home to its scabbard. 

She arched backwards, looked over her head at the water above, felt the two swimming beside her, joining in their dance, their sounds together joining in new music. She rocked forward, her eyes half closed as the ecstasy she felt spread from her loins through her body; it was as if she was riding a wave, then wave upon wave built and crested as she rocked and arced through the starry night. 

She could feel them now, both of them . . . swimming furiously around the womb of the night, the sea turning into a milky brine as seeds of a million lost generations mingled, as if inside this primordial moment both purpose and destiny would finally be allowed to fuse.

She looked at Goodwin, at the look of bewildered intensity on his face, and she was aware that she was swaying now from side to side as the water carried her to and fro like the tattered remnants of seaweed on the tide.

One of the dolphins lay by her, adrift, dozing on the surface, and she reached out to touch it. She ran her hand along its side, felt deep muscle under smooth skin, and she was amazed by the colors it took from the night. The last of the night’s stars fell on the dolphin’s skin and glittered like tiny emeralds, the first warming rays of the sun were still far away, but amber-winged warmth cast pale light on this skin, while the cool grays of seaborne skin melted into the heart-fires of this new creation. Then she felt the tender arms of sleep carrying her away . . . away into the last of the night’s darkness . . . the last moments of this fusion.

And then the points of light returned, and Goodwin couldn’t help thinking that they looked like stars, even as the stars came and engulfed the night.

[okay, time to change the soundtrack again: Back to the 70s, back to some ELP. Still…You Turn Me On, as a matter of fact, then while we’ve got ELP on the brain, let’s Take a Pebble and see where we end up.]

0530 hours, 07 July 1943

98th Bomb Wing, United States Army Air Corp Eighth Air Force

Terria Air Base, south of Benghazi, Libya

Twenty-four B-24 Liberator long-range bombers lay scattered in loose formation, lined up on hard-packed desert sand like ghosts in pre-dawn silence. Dozens of men swarm around the ungainly beasts – loading bombs and .50 caliber ammunition and hundreds of gallons of gasoline into the wing-tanks of each. Mechanics drift among the aircraft, signing-off on repair orders, going over hasty modifications needed to repair battle damage. Maintenance technicians are checking tire pressures and oil levels, while aircraft gunners walk stay far enough away from the fuel-laden Liberators to smoke one last cigarette. The last bombs and bullets go up into the low-slung bomb bays while boys climb ladders to scrub down the faceted cockpit glass. The sun is still well below the horizon yet already the day feels hot as hell; men all over the base are beginning to sweat as fear and exhaustion mingle with smoke-stained coffee and nervous stomachs. The earth has not had time to radiate all the heat absorbed from the days before, and there’s been no measurable rain in the region in 93 days.

Pilots are walking from the briefing hut, climbing into Jeeps and trucks, riding out to their assigned aircraft while they organize briefing notes and memorize the day’s call signs for today’s mission. A Jeep stops in front of a B-24J named “Hell’s Belles”; the name is crudely painted in red and yellow just under the cockpit windows, the words so framed by the arced bodies of three lingerie clad women thrusting her breasts forward in apparent defiance of anyone or anything in authority, each proudly thrusting their middle fingers – presumably at Adolf Hitler. The pilot and co-pilot step from the jeep as it rolls to a stop; they wordlessly begin their pre-flight inspections of the aircraft, checking-in with crew chiefs, signing repair chits, then checking fuel and oil levels and tire pressures as they make their slow way around the aircraft. Their “pre-flight” takes a fifteen minutes.

The co-pilot, a lieutenant from Freer, Texas by the name of Hank Needham, is a lanky blond haired fellow with a crude joke always at the ready and a steady, easy going smile always on hand, though his mouth is always graced by a thoroughly chewed toothpick, dangling from the right corner of his lips. He walks under the right wing shining a flashlight into exhaust pipes and the landing-gear and wheel-well, opens a tiny fuel valve beneath each wing tank and checks the color and smell of the fuel in each tank. With his walk-around complete, Needham walks over and looks at the chit the crew chief holds out, waiting for his signature.

The pilot, a captain hailing from a small town just outside of New London, Connecticut, is a lean, auburn haired man whose face is dominated by a mustache the size of California; his name was Paul Thomas Goodwin. He turned twenty four years old at midnight; Needham and the other members of Hell’s Belles’ crew gave Goodwin a box of cigars and promised to get him laid when they returned to England in the fall. Goodwin has the reputation of having bedded very nearly every single woman in southeast England in the four months his group had been posted there, and he had now been without a woman for almost a month. He was, quite understandably they thought, in a very foul mood after he walked well away from his Liberator to light up his first cigar of the day.

Goodwin has been similarly occupied checking the left wing’s major orifices and tanks, and now satisfied that his Liberator is indeed airworthy he finished his cigar then climbed into the entry door aft of the left wing and made his way up to the small cockpit. He stopped long enough to hand a list of radio frequencies and call signs off to the radio operator, then crawled to the cockpit and slipped into the left seat. He pulled out the stiff cardboard takeoff checklist and hit the switch to turn on the batteries, then he put up his flashlight and began flipping buttons and setting dials, squinting until his eyes grew accustomed to the pale red instrument lighting. He heard his co-pilot clambering up from below while he set the fuel tank selector switch to “ALL”, the normal position for take-off, then he used his flashlight to check the positions of the trim tabs, located low on the aft side of the boxy throttle quadrant.

“All set, Queer?” Goodwin asks. The co-pilot has acquired his inglorious nickname quite naturally: Queer rhymes with Freer, as in Freer, Texas, his hometown, so he is called the Queer from Freer whether he likes it or not. His full handle is ‘Hangin’ Hal, the Queer from Freer,” and being said reverentially in some corners of the base, because the moniker allegedly has something to do with the Queer’s rather sizable implement, which was rumored to hang down somewhere south of his kneecaps. Women all over East Anglia were said to be in total awe of The Queer’s equipment. 

Needham settled into the right seat, as always taking great care not to mangle his equipment on the way down.

“You betchca, Cap,” the Queer said. “Good as gold.” Needham finished out his part of the pre-flight checklist then told Goodwin he was ready. “How ‘bout you.”

“Calm down, willya? You’re as nervous as a fart in a frying pan this morning…”

A crewman on the intercom came on and advised: “Captain, all set back here.” 

“Roger. That means put up the girly magazines, Perkins, and our happy reminder for the day is what, Jackson?”

“No smoking, Captain.”

“And why is that, Turner?”

“‘Cause them gas tanks in da wings, day be leakin’ like shit all da time.”

“Right. Perkins, roll the bomb bay door up for take off, and as soon as you start smelling fumes, roll us about four inches to vent them out.”

“Roger that, Cap.”

Goodwin saluted a ground crewman below and once men with fire extinguishers were in place he started his number two engine, the engine closest to him out on the left wing. Needham monitored pressure gauges and temperature readouts while Goodwin started the remaining three engines, then they sat, waiting, waiting, always waiting until the Mission Commander signaled “GO!” and the lead B-24 moved off towards the runway.

After months of practicing extreme low level flying in both England and North Africa as part of their ongoing preparations for Operation Tidal Wave, today’s mission was straight forward, some considered it a predictable next move, so the obvious concern was that  anything but routine. The big mission was still a month or more off, maybe longer. At least everyone hoped it would be longer. Today was just a warm up for the main event.

This morning a diversionary wave of six B-25s was going to make a run at a railway yard on the north side of Milan; the main formation was going after another much larger manufacturing and railway complex on the south of Milan. It was hoped any German or Italian fighter aircraft would be drawn off to chase the B-25s out over the Med and leave the slower, much heavier Liberator’s unmolested on their lumbering run-in to the target. The fact that the last one hundred miles of their bomb run would be made at tree-top level was a new wrinkle, and it was hoped this new dimension would catch the defenders completely off-guard. So far, however, the city’s defenders had been quick to adapt to new tactics…

As a squadron commander, Goodwin’s Liberator would be number three in line for takeoff this morning; when the white flare launched from the tower, the Mission Commander started down the crude taxiway, following the B-25s to the engine run-up area near the end of the so-called runway. Goodwin followed the second Liberator, keeping about a hundred yards behind. Blowing sand was a real problem operating from unimproved North African airfields like Terria…

“I heard that actor was going to be joining us,” Needham said.

“Oh? Which one?” Goodwin replied.

“Oh, you know, that tall skinny one that was in The Philadelphia Story? I can’t remember his name right now…”

“Jimmy Stewart. Yeah, I heard he was still up in England. Supposed to be a good pilot. “What the manifold pressure on 3?”

“Jumping a little again.”

“New gauge, right? That means we picked up some sand. What’s the cylinder head temp?”

“Still in the green.”

“Flaps?”

“Set to take off.”

“Cowl flaps?”

“Set…”

Takeoff and climb-out went as scheduled and the formation took bearings and rumbled off toward the east coast of Italy some ten minutes after six in the morning. They climbed slowly to twenty thousand feet then, as they burned off more fuel, the formation edged higher, finally leveling off at twenty-four thousand feet. The heavily loaded bombers were struggling to maintain a ground speed of 165 miles per hour as the formation headed for the Adriatic, between Gallipoli and Corfu. The plan they had been briefed-on called for the group to turn west just south of Venice at high altitude, then dive for the deck about a hundred and fifty miles out from Milan, then make a straight run in to the target at maximum speed. The departure plan was simply to make for Genoa, then Sicily, where the Allied invasion beachhead was already well established; if all went well the group would make it back to Libya in time for a quick game of baseball. Total mission time was slated for a little over eight hours. At least, if all went well.

It was a ‘bluebirds’ day – not a cloud in the sky – and even as the group headed north they could see off to the west huge billowing clouds of burning munitions and fuel supplies that Allied bombers had hit during the night somewhere on the north coast of Sicily; the sun was not yet high enough to obscure the yellow-orange glow of the myriad fires burning through these supplies, now so critical to the German’s defense of the island. Goodwin smiled at the sight: someone had done a pretty goddamn good job last night. 

The rising sun lit off cloud tops like soft yellow candles as the formation droned northward across the Mediterranean toward Taranto. The men on Hell’s Belles passed around cool sandwiches and drank stale coffee from pale thermoses; soon enough Bari, and then Ancona slid by, and while the weather was holding humidity levels were high. There was now a fat grey haze far off the left side of the formation; land was down there, lost in that haze, and there were German fighter in that haze, looking for them. 

As they grew closer to Ravenna and the Adriatic coastline of Italy, crews grew increasingly nervous as the droning group passed over the shoreline far below, even as navigators took quick fixes on distant landmarks and refined their positions. Ferrara next formed out of the mists ahead, and while the possibility of real airborne opposition loomed menacingly, mercifully no one saw any aircraft – friend of foe – in the sky ahead of or around the group. Soon, with Verona just visible under coppery layers of late morning haze, the formation turned hard left and dropped like a stone toward the Po River valley, pilots opened throttles to the stops as their aircraft settled in just a few meters above the treetops, and the bombers thundered toward their bombardier’s Initial Points – which marked the beginning of their final run-in to the target.

Goodwin was in his element down here ‘in the weeds’; he loved low altitude flying, the danger, the immediate – and final – consequences of making any mistake excited him, made him feel more alive than anything he had ever done in his life. He kept one hand on the throttle levers, the other on the wheel, his feet jockeyed the rudder pedals furiously as the B-24 plowed through ground thermals and air currents and prop-wash from the four aircraft just ahead. He rarely scanned the instruments, instead kept his eyes fixed on the aircraft dead ahead and – peripherally – the ground rushing by barely one hundred feet below. At almost two-hundred-twenty miles-per-hour in the thick roiled air, the ride was intensely rough and gunners in the back of the aircraft vomited out their gun-ports, sandwiches and coffee drifting down onto the treetops – and the cowering, upturned  faces of the completely astonished people the low flying formation passed.

The formation achieved complete tactical surprise that morning; as expected, enemy fighters had been drawn to the coast and ground defenses simply couldn’t engage targets coming-in at this altitude. As the miles reeled by, as the railway nexus grew ever closer, the pilots and Mission Commander knew they had pulled it off.

The bombardier in Hell’s Belles called the IP, but Goodwin would continue to fly the aircraft to the target because of the low altitude; dropping the bomb load would be called by the pilot as Goodwin had the best sense of orientation and drift to the target from his vantage point, mainly because bomb sights were useless at this altitude. Perhaps the biggest danger the men now faced came not from enemy aircraft or anti-aircraft fire, but by the bombs dropped from aircraft immediately ahead. Bomb fragments and flying debris thrown violently into the air from bombers just ahead would become as deadly as any other hot metal fired at them in anger, and simply because at this altitude and at this speed their bombs would impact and detonate just milliseconds after being dropped.

Goodwin got word from his bombardier that the target was now less than ten miles ahead – just barely a minute away now. He pulled back gently on the stick and the Liberator climbed ever-so-slightly, up to maybe a two hundred and seventy feet above the ground, and he commanded that the bomb bay doors be opened. Flak started popping above the formation, then gunners on the ground lowered their aim and began firing into the formation, oblivious to the danger this presented to their own forces on the ground. 

Goodwin saw bombs dropping from the aircraft ahead – “too soon, goddamn it!” he yelled – and a wall of flame-filled dirt filled his view over the instrument panel. Now, instead of seeing the onrushing world just ahead he saw black clouds filled with shredded boxcars, flaming fountains of twisted rail and molten meat. As rock and timber, the sinew of this railway yard filled the air, he heard shattering glass and metal slamming into his aircraft, he smelled cordite and scorched earth as smoke poured into the cockpit and his eyes watered reflexively as the stench washed over him. 

He instinctively pickled the bomb release switch on his wheel, felt the aircraft lurch as the load fell away, and he rushed to trim the elevators so to keep the Liberator from shooting up uncontrollably into the flak-filled sky. As suddenly, Hell’s Belles cleared the wall of cloud and roared into open skies. The lead aircraft, just ahead and to his left, burst into flame and disappeared behind him in an instant, black cotton balls full of death paved the way ahead, so he jinked up and right, down and left, left rudder, right rudder, hug the ground, pull up . . . the men behind held on as Hell’s Belles corkscrewed through the air – still miraculously unscathed.

Goodwin looked left; there were no other aircraft in sight . . .

“Queer! We got anyone on us!”

Silence.

Goodwin looked at his co-pilot. The boy was slumped over to his right, his head leaning against shattered glass, blood and bits of brain were splattered all over the the right side of the cockpit.

“Shit! Needham? You with me?”

He called on the intercom for someone to come up to the cockpit and move Needham’s body from the controls; someone – he didn’t have time to look – came forward and muscled the body aft; again he called, this time for the bombardier to come up and sit beside him and help scan the horizon for enemy aircraft.

“Bandits!” he heard over the intercom. “Nine o’clock high! 190s comin’ down, skipper! Large formation!”

Goodwin looked high over his left shoulder; he could make out yellow spinners on the diving Focke-Wulf 190 fighters as they sliced downward through the clear sky above his formation. He slammed the throttles forward again, dove as far down into the weeds as he dared and concentrated on sudden obstructions that popped up ahead and shot-by at dizzying speeds. Gunners began calling targets, machine guns hammered the sky and the air filled once again with scorched gunpowder and raw fear, now mixed with testosterone-drenched adrenalin, vomit and piss.

20mm cannon rounds slammed into Hell’s Belles just aft of Goodwin; he heard screaming, then black smoke filled the air. The aircraft began to yaw left, he slammed in right rudder and looked out over his left shoulder: the number one engine was simply gone! The entire engine cowling and structure had been shot away; now, flame-licked soot raced away from the wreckage into the slipstream. Another burst of machine gun fire from his gunners behind, someone yelling “Got him, I got the bastard!” and Goodwin methodically toggled the number one fire extinguisher and dialed in some aileron and rudder trim to compensate for the yaw inducing drag of the blown away engine.

He turned south toward Genoa and Corsica, slowly nursed his altitude back up to two thousand feet as the German fighters fell off to refuel. Pavia drifted by, then Piacenza and Parma, all off to the left, while survivors of the formation closed-up behind Hell’s Belles. Goodwin was now in tactical command of the group, and he signaled for the formation to tighten up. They would head for Sicily, where the closest Allied forces were located. If anyone had to ditch or was forced to land before making Libya, they could try for Sicily. Goodwin worked up a rough course toward Bastia, on the northeast coast of Corsica; from there he would lead the group on to Palermo, then toward the Libyan coast, and, be it ever so humble, home.

The Ligurian coastline loomed ahead, Genoa lay just off to the right buried under vast thunderheads of storm clouds that had ominously climbed to well above forty thousand feet in the intense summer heat. The way ahead was now choked with building cumulus clouds, some towering so high Goodwin couldn’t make out the cloud tops from his altitude. Soon he was weaving the formation through tight white canyons of vaulting clouds, and the ambient turbulence became more pronounced with each passing minute. Each time the Liberator shook it sounded to Goodwin as if someone was throwing a metal toolbox into a brick wall; each concussion was followed by jarring rattles and cascades of loose metal detritus finding its way back into the aircraft’s belly.

Goodwin was aware of a flash, then a volley of 20mm cannon fire tore through the Liberator; fire engulfed the right wing and smoke poured once again into the cockpit . . . but this time Goodwin smelled raw gasoline . . .

“Get ready!” he called out. “Assume bailout stations!”

Goodwin pushed the nose over while he armed and fired all the primary and secondary fire extinguishers. Hell’s Belles dove down into cloud . . . the pure white interior of the cloud grew soft and cool as sunlight retreated into memory. A matter of pure chance now, the cloud’s moisture added to the fire suppressive chemicals flooding the blazing wing, and almost instantly the fires were out. Goodwin looked at his engine instrumentation – only the number two engine remained and there was now almost zero fuel left in the tanks. Hell’s Belles was going down, and going down fast.

+++++

Ludvico Ferrante hated the Germans occupiers, especially the officers. Everything about them. He hated the imperious way they ordered the villagers about, the strutting air of superiority they assumed when coming into his father’s ristorante, their boisterous pretensions of being the ‘master race’ . . . all of it, all of their imbecilic Teutonic braggadocio . . . and yet most of all, he hated Major Gunther Weber with a fury that would fire his soul until the end of time. In Ludvico Ferrante’s mind, Italy would never live down the shame of having allied itself with these Hitlerite scum; the only way to regain any measure of self respect would be to help throw these thugs out of his country. 

And this he intended to do.

Ludvico was just this day eighteen years old, yet here he was, in the ristorante as he was everyday and the day before, serving seafood from his father’s boats to German officers and the wives and mistresses of the rich Austrian industrialists who still came to Portofino despite the war. Portofino had been held in highest regard among Germans since Goethe roamed the area as a young man; it had become something of a ritual for the sons of wealthy German bourgeois families to find their way to Rapallo or Portofino as a part of their education, a part of seeing how decadence tempted and distorted the Real German Man, swayed him from material achievement into diseased decadence. But oh how fun it was to be tempted! How rich it felt to be decadent, even if only for a summer!

But Gunther Weber was something else entirely.

“We Germans are your allies!” he had heard time and time again from Weber, but that was before he and his men had raped half the women in Portofino, and as often as not at gunpoint, and in the company of a half dozen or so other willing ‘noble allies’. Now, with the Americans in Sicily and the invasion of the Italian mainland rumored to be just days away, Ludvico and hundreds of other men and women in the area were forming partisan bands to wage guerrilla warfare against the Germans until the Allies could reach the area.

‘How easy it would be,’ Ludvico said to himself, ‘to slit this man’s throat right here, right now!’ Or poison his soup, place a bomb in his car! Now, today . . . right now! ‘Do it!’ he told himself. ‘Now!’

Though there were others in the ristorante, including two other German officers, Ludvico went to a cutlery case and pulled out a long knife used to filet fish table-side. He was going to carry it over and place it on the serving cart next to Weber’s table, put it there and then, when the time was right . . . strike!

“You! Boy! Bring us more bread, and some real butter . . . none of this ersatz crap!” Weber pointed at Ludvico with his steak knife in his hand, the malevolence in the gesture total and unmistakable. “And another bottle of wine, you idiot!” He turned to the woman sitting at his side, a local whore too used to the good life to refuse this crude pig. “That little shit!” Weber continued, “I’m going to have to beat some common sense and good manners into him before too long . . .” 

Ludvico carried the knife to the cart and placed it there, and was going to turn from the window and go to the kitchen when he saw it in the skies over Rapallo. Fire! Fire and smoke! At first it was too far away, there was no sound . . . only an intense, blinding light . . . but soon he heard it . . . the unmistakable sound of a stricken airplane, engine catching and sputtering, even though the noise was still far off, far across the bay. He could feel the German’s eyes on the back of his neck, heard his chair scraping back on the stone floor, soon felt the man’s dark presence by the window next to him.

Weber looked at the flaming aircraft, saw parachutes like trailing petals fall from within the roiling black plumes and settle on errant breezes toward the sea. Ludvico looked at Weber’s face for a moment, saw the hard set of the man’s jaw, the anger and hatred flaring from red, bull-like nostrils, pale grey eyes watching, calculating, hoping that death would claim these desperate men and so not interrupt his lunch, or his afternoon with this slut du jour now simpering at his table.

Weber called out to the two officers seated near the patio door, told them to take a detachment of men toward Santa Margherita Ligure and see to it that any survivors were rounded up and brought to him this afternoon. “NOW!” Weber shouted, and the two men jumped and ran out through the piazza to a waiting truck.

Ludvico reached down, picked up the knife then drove it into Weber’s neck with ferocious intensity. He felt the blade slice through the larynx, felt cold steel against sinew and bone, and he twisted the blade while he watched with satisfaction as Weber turned to look at him. Weber fumbled for the pistol on his belt but Ludvico slashed the blade mercilessly through the German’s neck; blood filled the man’s mouth and sputtered into the air when the knife was withdrawn.

“Excuse me, Sir, while I just go and fetch your bread and butter,” Ludvico said, then he walked over to the whore and drove the knife through the woman’s breast, into her heart, holding his hand over her mouth while he did.

“Vico!” he heard his father screaming. “What in God’s name are you doing!”

The son turned to the father as the son became the father, and as he looked at the cowardly old man he felt a wave of sympathy wash over his soul.

“Help me, father. Let’s get them to the boat, now, before someone comes!”

“What?!”

“Father! Move! We must move them before it is too late!”

His father ran into the kitchen with terror in his eyes; one of the cooks came out a moment later and looked at Weber’s body, then at the whore’s.

“Eh, Ludvico! Don’t you know how to stick someone without making such a fucking mess!”

Though he might have expected any number of responses to seeing what he’d done, Ludvico never expected this one. Trini LaFortuna was a rogue, almost a harlequin, though also a great cook, but Ludvico had never once suspected Trini was with the partisans. And Trini had never suspected young Ferrante had the balls to pull off something so utterly brazen and – heroic!

The two young men wrapped the German in an old linen table cloth, then the whore, then they carried the bodies out to the cart the used to bring fish up from the docks to their market stalls. They dumped the bodies in the cart, covered them with garbage – fish guts and cans and scraps of beef and vegetables – and while Trini went back inside to mop up the floor and straighten up the rest of his mess, Ludvico rolled the cart down to his father’s fishing boat.

He looked once toward the sea while he unloaded the cart into the ice well under the deck.

Nothing. He could see little, if anything, of interest out past the cape, just a line of black thunderstorms headed south across the bay. Of the darkness that had settled over his heart . . . he could see nothing at all.

+++++

Paul Goodwin felt the last series of blasts shake Hell’s Belles just as he ordered his crew to start jumping; the next thing he was aware of was hurtling through the sky free of the aircraft. He had no idea if he had jumped or if the aircraft had exploded and he’d been thrown clear; whatever had happened it didn’t matter now, he knew he was falling inexorably seaward and he had but moments to deploy his parachute before he hit. Cold, powerful gusts from the storms slammed into him, tumbled him, and he fought to get his hands on the metal release and pull. He was aware just once during these first frantic moments that his flight suit was scorched, indeed, parts of it still seemed to be aflame. Concussive waves of thunder crushed the air from his lungs, the hair on his arms tingled as sheets of lightning arced through the air all round his falling body, yet now all he could think of was that he might be on fire!

He found the release and pulled, clouds of silk trailed skyward and opened, Goodwin’s body jerked and twitched as the ‘chute opened, and suddenly he was aware that the fabric of his flight suit around the neck was hot, and suddenly he could smell flesh – his flesh – burning. The pain was instantly unreal, excruciating, and he beat at the unseen furies with his gloved hands, writhing and screaming in anguished frustration . . . and then he looked up.

Glowing traceries of fire raced up the nylon lines toward his parachute, one by one the lines began to blacken and snap; soon little patches of flame erupted on the ‘chute itself. ‘This is a fucking nightmare!’ he told himself . . . ‘I’m going to wake up . . . right fucking now! Time to wake up . . . Time to wake up . . .’ 

But the nightmare didn’t end.

He looked down between his feet at the sea. He could see individual waves now, white-capped storm-driven waves cresting and breaking everywhere he looked, wind-driven foam racing away with his last hopes and dreams – and he looked up one last time to see the last remnants of his parachute burst into flame before he felt the sudden jolt of acceleration that pronounced his onrushing death. He watched in helpless wonder now as the once serenely remote sea reached up for him, ready to smash the spark of life from his body. In one last act of defiance, Goodwin spread his arms and legs wide, tried to make his body produce as much drag as possible, then, just seconds before impact, he straightened his body, streamlined his form as rigidly as he could – his toes pointed down, one hand over his nose, the other pointed straight overhead as if beseeching a just God to show just the tiniest bit of mercy on his soul . . .

He felt nothing, absolutely nothing of the impact. His first awareness was of cool water soothing his burned neck, salt water flooding his nose, stinging his lips. He pulled at the cord on his Mae West and – nothing happened! He remembered something from flight training, what was it? Follow your bubbles, push hard for the surface and follow your bubbles! His lungs began to burn, his eyes too as salt water flooded over them, but he found after a moment that the stinging stopped once he blinked his eyes a couple of times and the pH balanced out. He looked up, saw the roiled surface just above his head and he burst into the air and sucked down as much as he could before a wave rolled over and tumbled him mercilessly back down into the sea. He kicked his way back to the surface again, found the manual inflation tube on the Mae West and began blowing the damned thing up. He chose a few angry words, hurled them carelessly at God when the Mae West proved totally defective, and then he began treading water. His best hope now was to stay afloat long enough for a German patrol boat to come looking for his body.

Within a few moments the worst of the storm passed, the sea even began to lay down a bit, and as waves rolled-by he looked from the crests toward land, tried to gauge how far away it might be to the nearest bit of shoreline. Storms obscured his view to the east and south, more storms appeared ready to roll down from the north, and only one small parcel of land was just barely visible off to the west. Trees were not individually visible, so he assumed land was at least five miles away, maybe more. 

“Well, fuck,” Goodwin said aloud. “It’s either swim or die. So come on, Goodwin, let’s get to it!”

On the next crest he got his bearings and began swimming. It felt good at first, the movement kept him warm, and the sea grew less agitated as time passed. Soon he convinced himself he could make out trees and a few castle-like villas perched on distant hillsides, but he also began to get a better angle on the distances involved. He was still at least four or five miles offshore, and now he could tell that strong winds were blowing him away from land! Every stroke he took seemed to set him back further, and he soon grew dispirited, then angry. 

He turned on his back to rest, stroked along slowly looking up at black-bellied clouds as they raced by just over head, just out of reach. How easy this would be, he dreamt, if he could just reach out and grab a cloud and be pulled along. He began to feel the storm-chilled waters seeping into his bones, his teeth began to chatter, and he reached up for a passing cloud, tried to grab onto it . . . and fly again . . .

Water washed over his face, into his eyes, and he lazily spit the water from his mouth as he paddled now slowly in aimless circles. Time passed, waves rolled by, yet in the end Goodwin felt himself slowly giving way to a softly beckoning voice, to the ever seductive call to the sweet release of sleep . . .

+++++

Ludvico and Trini cast off their lines and pushed the boat away from the stone quay and drifted out into the harbor, then Trini started the old one-cylinder diesel and steered clear of all the scattered harbor moorings on their way out of the harbor. The boat slipped past the cape and into the bay; they waved at a group of German troops manning an anti-aircraft emplacement in a concrete bunker near the lighthouse, and they watched as the troops looked at them through binoculars before they waved back. They continued well offshore and threw nets over, began to fish – or at least they hoped they appeared to be fishing. When they were far enough away that no one could see them, they lifted the bodies from the bait-well and wrapped them in old rusted chain, then rolled the bodies into the sea and watched them sink into the blackness.

They set more nets, ran back and pulled in the first line and landed what was actually a pretty good haul of mackerel and sea bass. They kept at it for another couple of hours, then brought up all their nets, packed the haul in ice, and with tired muscles and wicked grins turned back toward the harbor. Trini lit a cigarette and checked his compass course, took a drag and let the fag settle lazily in the corner of his mouth. Smoke trailed from his nostrils as cold wind blew through his hair; Ludvico set about cleaning trash from the nets and mending all the small tears and frayed lines that inevitably cropped up after an afternoon’s fishing.

They waved at the Germans again as they closed on the cape; Ludvico stood by the cockpit ready to head for the bow and snag their mooring buoy for the night. He was tired, but the adrenaline from the kill still rushed maddeningly through his veins, alternately confusing, then washing over him like jittery fingers. His eyes watered in the chill air, and he reached up and wiped them dry with a careless knuckle from time to time, and once he thought he saw something in the water, so he rubbed his eyes once again and looked again.

There. Something yellow.

And it’s moving.

“Trini! Look! There, by the entrance marker! What is it?!”

Trini backed off the throttle and the boat settled bow-down into the water as it slowed; he craned his neck out the cockpit and looked. He saw it, rubbed his eyes then looked again.

“It’s moving!” Ludvico shouted.

“Shut your goddamn mouth, or every German between here and Rome will be down on our ass before we can get tied off!”

Ludvico went forward, held on to the rail as the boat pushed through the last of the wind-driven swell, and then he saw it.

The yellow he had seen was a life vest, the type worn by airmen; now he saw the airman was alive, indeed awake, and – he was holding onto the dorsal fin of a dolphin! The man looked at him and smiled, shot him the ‘thumbs up’ so typical of an American, and Ludvico turned, looked at Trini to tell him to get between the man in the sea on the people on the quay. Trini’s mouth hung open, the cigarette dropped from his mouth, then he caught Vico’s gestures and tried to listen to what was said. Finally he nodded, maneuvered the boat alongside the man in the water and shielded him from view; Vico knelt beside the man and talked to him while he pretended to work with his lines, told him his plan, and Trini slowed as they approached their mooring. Vico took up the mooring pendant and tied off the line, motioned to the airman, asked him to get off the animal’s back – and the man did so, though obviously with no small amount of reluctance. The dolphin circled the man once, twice, surfaced between the man and the boat; the man reached out, rubbed the dolphin’s face with intense affection, and to Vico it was obvious the dolphin understood the feelings and meaning behind the man’s movements. 

The dolphin appeared to nod his head, then looked at the man one last time and slipped silently into the blackness, and was as gently gone.

Ludvico spoke enough English to at times make a complete fool of himself, but today he somehow managed to make his thoughts clear. He got the American aboard, told him to go into the tiny cabin and wait; they would bring him dry clothes and food as soon as they could, move him off the boat in the night and up into the hills. Trini hollered to men on the quay; one of them rowed out to pick-up the two men.

“Go now, below!” Vico said. “Blanket downs below, gets warm. Engine warms. Be backs soon.”

Paul Thomas Goodwin slipped below, found a pile of rope and lay down on it. He found a blanket and pulled it over his body. He dug some chocolate out of his flight suit; it was soaked but still, ‘thank God!’ tasted like chocolate! He found an orange and some bread in a little bulkhead mounted cupboard and ate those as well, and fell asleep without one more thought of the day’s events.

Vico and Trini made it ashore and walked toward the ristorante, only to pause when they saw dozens of uniformed Gestapo milling around outside as if waiting for something, or someone. The two men drifted into shadow, watched as a group of Germans hauled his father out of the ristorante and threw him into the back of a truck and drove off into the night.

Vico looked at Trini, then after his father as the truck disappeared into the soft fog that was just settling over the harbor, and the village. Then he looked back at the fishing boat.

“We could maybe trade the American for your father,” Trini said.

“No.”

“But they will kill . . .”

“No. We must hide until we can get the American off the boat. Then we must get up into the hills.”

“But . . .”

“Trini, do as I say. There is no time to argue. Let’s get food and clothing and some rest. Come, we will be at it for a long time tonight.”

“But where can we go?”

“I know a place.” And he did. He knew she would take them in, knew she would help. He turned toward the darkness and made his way into the night.

[Yup, one more by ELP: Closer to Believing, then no more ELP, I promise.]

07 July 1943 2320 hours

Portofino

He was floating now. Of that much he was sure.

He knew he had been asleep for what felt like hours, then again it might have been minutes – or days. He simply had no point of reference anymore, only the sensation of floating. But his back was sore, he knew that much too, and after his head cleared he reached down to find what was causing the pain. He felt a huge coil of damp rope against the damp wooden hull planks. The rope was slick with sea-snot but still as hard as a rock.

‘Yes, that’s it. Oh . . . pain . . . move . . . my God! What is that smell?’ 

He wrinkled his nose; this darkness was rich with gut-twisting smells of old fish and even older seaweed mixed in with what had to be diesel fuel dripping into a bilge full of black, scum-filled water. This world, this little womb Goodwin found himself in, was almost completely devoid of any and all light, his only frame of reference was the opaque sound of water lapping against the hull, then echoing all around him. Somewhere far away a bell was clanging in the night, perhaps atop a buoy rolling on an unseen breeze, and memory came back as if borne on an inrushing tide.

Of course he was floating. He had been afloat all day. 

First on hell-borne wings, his descent looking up through burning silk at storm ravaged clouds, and then, finally, on endless, storm-tossed seas. Yes, the sea. Floating on the sea. Cold sea-fingers reaching from the depths, drawing ‘round his soul, pulling him from life on vaulted clouds into darkness, cradling him in soothing embrace, each afraid to let go. He remembered the inevitability of it all; surrender had seemed so logical, if the easy thing to do. He remembered sinking yet with his eyes open, and he saw cool gray water, the sun just a receding memory of blue-filtered ripples echoing like memories of happier days. Like he was running in lazy circles through flower-tossed fields. He could see his mother standing outside the house, trees swaying in warm summer breezes, leaves dancing in silver-green music, and she was calling out to him . . . calling him . . .

In his heart he could smell cookies and milk, his mother working in the kitchen, his father out in the fields . . . a cold nose rubbing against his leg . . . he looked down, saw his best friend in the world, the dog he had always called Ready . . . because he always was . . .

The old Springer’s nose was white with age, his eyes clouded by milky lens that could only have been earned by thousands of afternoons running under carefree skies be his side, and yet Ready was rubbing his cold nose against his legs insistently now, his little stump of a tail wagging in excited purpose, that low growl he used to tell the world he had something to say, ‘and you’d better listen if you know what’s good for you . . .’

The cold nose slammed into his side again, but harder this time, and he turned, saw he was sinking deeper into the sea, felt the loneliness of solitary death surrounding him and, there is was . . . a cool grey form gliding by just in silence, a black eye following him, looking at him, measuring him . . .

The dolphin came closer, rubbed against Goodwin’s body, its gracefully arced dorsal fin thumping into him as it flew by. The dolphin turned again, seemed perplexed, then drifted by again, closer still, slowly . . . 

‘Take it . . . see me . . . you can be free of this . . .’

Goodwin reached out, took hold of the offered fin and rose gently back into the light and air of his beginnings. He held onto the dolphin as air rushed into his starved lungs, his body draped over the dolphin’s cold gray back, and as he drank in ragged breaths he began to cry. From joy or sorrow he couldn’t tell, yet to the others his song remained pure. He felt the others rise in the sea quietly by his side, and he turned, looked with vacant uncomprehending eyes at the other dolphin laying there – looking at him, then he saw another and another. They were all looking at him, listening to him, taking the measure of his song. He grew silent, watched them as he might have watched a mirror held up to his dreams – and in that uneasy instant he grew as silent as a crying child might when confronted by the profoundly unknown.

He looked around . . . now there were seven of them in the water beside him . . . each silently looking at him . . . their silver-watered forms seemingly aglow with electric expectation . . . 

The seventh dolphin, a small pale creature with luminous eyes drifted forward, came up to him and rested its slender snout lightly on his shoulder. He could see a golden worm attached to the dolphin’s eye, a weeping sore surrounded the wound. Goodwin fished in his flight suit and pulled a little metal first aid kit out and opened it. With tweezers in hand he removed the parasite; he opened a tiny silver tube of sulfa ointment and put some on his finger, then rubbed the medicine into the flesh around the eye until it disappeared into the animal’s hide. He stroked its forehead tenderly; the small dolphin rose a bit and opened its mouth, and smooth sounds drifted across the waves as she proclaimed his fitness to the skies, and her group assented, dropped back into the sea, and as suddenly Goodwin was alone again.

The largest one reappeared a moment later and presented its dorsal fin again; Goodwin reached out and held on, his cool body absorbing warmth from the vast flank of pulsing muscle against his belly. They began moving toward land.

“Now I know what it feels like to be a torpedo!” he said after plowing through a couple of large waves, but soon he got into the rhythm of the animal’s motion through the water and in time ducked and breathed with some measure of this new music. He saw land growing near and realized he didn’t want this time to come to an end . . . the longer he remained on the dolphin’s side the more intensely he wanted to stay with the animal, to be with this animal . . . to become one with this animal. He sensed that the dolphin felt much the same way, only perhaps . . . differently . . . he felt the animal wished to be human, longed to walk among trees and flowers again and again and again . . .

Soon Goodwin saw a boat ahead, a man on the foredeck framed by purple clouds and an apricot sun was looking at him, clearly stunned by what he saw. As they came closer, Goodwin smiled at the man and shot him the ‘thumbs up’: I’m real – he wanted to say – and I’m going to be your friend.

Now, in the cold and damp of the rocking boat Goodwin felt disoriented and alone, but worst of all he felt an immediate need to relieve himself. He had seen soldiers on the beach and on the quay and he didn’t want to expose himself to scrutiny or in any way reveal his location; he knew the consequences would be disastrous for not only himself but the men who had offered him this refuge. Now he faced a stark choice; get back in the water or foul himself . . .

He heard – something – thump along the hull, then again. He didn’t hear any voices, but again something soft colliding with the boat. 

Was it the men? 

Had they returned? 

He froze, listened to every sound in the darkness, but soon his heartbeat was drowning out everything as his pulse hammered through his head. The need to relieve himself became overwhelming in the cold darkness, and with each new bump against the hull the pressure built and built. Finally he could take it no longer . . .

He gently pushed back the companionway door and slipped into the back of the boat on his belly. He crouched next to the gunwales and raised his head, slowly looked around. The village was almost dark, only a few lights flickered behind old yellow curtains; he raised himself up and slid over the side as silently as he could into the cold darkness.

Sudden light flooded his eyes, he heard voices, German voices yelling menacingly nearby, then gunshots. The water by his face exploded, bullets slammed into the wooden boat behind him and he pushed himself down into the blackness . . . 

And there he was . . . waiting . . .

The dolphin swam alongside again and Goodwin latched himself to the proffered dorsal fin and the two of them rocketed out of the harbor, breaking back into the night air with the harbor several hundred yards behind. He smiled now, his gratified relief immense, and he hoped the fast flowing currents had washed all the pee out of his flight suit. His obscured feelings surrounding the day’s encounters returned with overwhelming intensity, this feeling of being alive, this sudden joy, was all a mystery. This animal was his friend, and was looking out for him. Why? How?

And still his friend kept swimming, swimming toward a spit of land ahead and to their right. Soon he was among slippery rocks, the water shallow enough to stand in, the harbor now so far away no one could possibly see him.

Had the dolphin been thumping the hull, trying to warn him? The thought hit him like a blow to the stomach. Not possible! Everything that had happened that afternoon was impossible, and yet – here he was. 

The large dolphin drifted lazily on the surface just a few yards away, staring, then Goodwin felt another body closer still. He turned, saw the smaller dolphin, the one with the wounded eye, and when their eyes met she came to him, placed her snout on his shoulder again and seemed to sigh. He held her in shocked surprise for a while, then she slipped under suddenly and was gone again.

Lightning still danced across the far horizon, distant thunder rumbled through the sea. Had she seen something?

Goodwin heard footsteps on the rocky beach and flattened himself against the black granite and held his breath. They seemed like aimless footsteps, the footsteps of a wandering soul taking in the remnants of another storm-tossed day. He chanced to look, wanted to get an idea of what he was up against . . . He slipped upwards, his eyes lifted just above the kelp-crusted rocks . . . and his breath slipped away into the night like a prayer . . .

She was taking off the last of her clothes now, standing on the rocks in her panties and tattered black stockings looking out upon a pitiless sea; soon she sat and peeled these last bits of another life from her skin and slipped first one foot, then the other into the inky black wetness. She walked out into the water not ten feet away from Goodwin, walked past him and kept moving silently as if to her death, and then it hit him. 

She had come to her end. Was this night to be of endings? It was too cold out in this night air for a leisurely swim, with the water now uncomfortably cold, the sun’s warmth so long departed. 

She was committing suicide! 

He couldn’t stand by and watch this unfold silently; he had to act, and that being his nature, he did just that.

He pushed himself away from the rocks, slipped through the water until he came to her and he reached out, touched her shoulder. If he had expected surprise on her face he was disappointed. The woman, perhaps his age, perhaps a little younger, reacted to his presence with barely the slightest shimmer of recognition, her eyes felt black and lifeless, her skin slack as if she had already moved on and so was in the eyes of God now beyond redemption. She pushed his hand away, walked further into the sea. She never said a word.

The large dolphin moved to block her way and the woman stopped, moved away from it as if she was now afraid, then another dolphin appeared, and another – until soon all seven were around her, boxing her movements. The woman turned, looked at Goodwin, began speaking in Italian as her confusion rent the air; Goodwin put his fingers to his lips and she instantly understood, and in that moment of pure silence she become unimaginably beautiful, and completely full of wrathful vengeance. 

They both heard the voices at the same time. More Germans, he guessed, and probably looking for him, too. Goodwin pushed himself from another rock and drifted to her side, took her arm and pulled her back into the shadows. He turned, looked where the dolphins had been and saw now only a smooth black sea.

Voices, hard angry voices, flashlights sweeping silvered water, footsteps on gravel, laughter, footsteps receding into the night, voices falling away on dying breezes.

And then . . .

The woman’s cool skin on his, her teeth beginning to chatter as the cold penetrated her bones. He took her in his arms and rubbed her vigorously and she held him, put her arms around his, her face on his shoulder, and then she sighed. To Goodwin the symmetry was complete, and astonishing. She grew calm as if taking energy from him, but soon she pulled back from him, looked into his eyes for a long moment, a silent moment pregnant with swirling purpose, then she leaned into him again and put her face on his shoulder again. 

Forces unseen and unseeable drifted on the surface of the water and coiled around the man and the woman, pulled them from the rocks into deeper water as if to wash the woman’s wounds in this man’s embrace. She held his face, now, oh now, instantly aware of unimaginable impulses gathering in the waters all around, and she leaned into him again, this time her mouth on his, breathing the breath of his breath, kissing the kiss of his mouth. Soon it was as if the water around them boiled in furious abnegation of human frailty; she reached down, took him in her hand and squeezed him roughly, his hands sought her downy smoothness and he entered her easily. She leaned back, unzipped his flight suit, pushed it down over his shoulders and down his body, took him in her hands and dragged her fingernails into the stiffening skin and squeezed again, hard. He gasped as she rose in the water and lowered herself on him, his surrender complete as other bodies in the water began spinning furiously around this new union.

They were there again, all seven of them. Looking on almost tentatively, almost reaching out to touch them, they had formed a rough circle around the man and the woman and they watched carefully, as measuring their choice. The small one, the female Goodwin had helped earlier, drifted closer and rubbed against him, then began to swim around the humans slowly, soon almost continuously in contact with both of them. Another one came forward, this one larger than the female, and he moved in beside this apparent mate and swam by her side.

Goodwin felt them rub across his back and his legs occasionally, but they were intently focused on their own dance now, leaving Goodwin and the woman alone in the vortex they were creating. He felt a lightness of being warping the air around them, the water grew warm and intensely briny as electric impulses arced between the woman and his groin, he felt her stiffening, her back arcing like lightning, her legs behind him now, pulling his legs closer to her as he his own storm approached. He twisted under her vaulting need, his back arched and he exploded into her, wave after wave flooding into her . . . until the drifting began . . .

He was aware the two of them were as seaweed drifting in the currents of a sunless sea . . . almost like two flowers dancing on mountain breezes . . . they swayed and swayed and swayed within the invisible currents, the power of their union dissipating into the towering vault of the heavens above. 

The sand . . . the stars . . . and all that lies between . . .

They returned to the sea, to the cool air and the chilled water, and as each became aware of the other, still within this deep embrace, they looked at one another, she in a state bordering on pure panic. She pushed off him, swam away with her back to him, covered her breasts under crossed arms, and he watched her retreat into these moon-kissed rocks. Soon he heard her crying and he remembered her coming to the water, the agony and anguish and the total despair of their meeting and all that had happened in this day. 

What of her day? What had murdered her soul this day?

He reached down into the blackness and pulled his flight suit up, covered his body with the armor of his profession and zipped it closed. 

Movement . . .

He saw men on the rocks, their black form silhouetted against the distant village as they jumped from rock to rock, closing in on his position steadily. He slipped through the water toward the woman; she turned and started to speak but saw his anxiety and followed his eyes into the darkness.

Yes . . . she saw them too. 

She slipped deeper into the water as he drew beside her, and she felt him pulling a knife from a scabbard on his ankle. He sank down next to her, their noses just clear of the surface of the water, and then they waited. He could see the men clearly, two of them at least, crouched low and moving smoothly among the rocks as if looking for someone, or something.

They came to the girl’s clothes; one of them held something to his face and he felt the girl’s embarrassed jerk as she turned away. The men moved their way now, still slowly, still so low to the rocks they almost – almost – blended into the blackness.

“Maria . . .” he heard one of the men whispering loudly. “Maria . . .is that you?”

Goodwin could just make them out now; they were the two men from the boat.

“Over here!” Goodwin whispered. The closest man turned at the sound in the water and crept their way; he stopped short when he saw the woman in the water, her pale nakedness standing like an insinuation in the pale light of the storm-lined moon.

The kid leapt at Goodwin, the knife in his hand slashing at Goodwin’s throat as he landed on him. Goodwin rolled under the scrawny kid, held him by the neck and pulled him under, twisted the knife from his hand and pulled him by the hair back into the air. 

The kid started to yell and Goodwin drove his fist into the boy’s sinewy neck; the boy sputtered and coughed, tried desperately to catch his breath while Goodwin held on to him.

The woman came over and took the boy from Goodwin’s gripping hands and began talking to both of the newcomers in soft soothing tones; words Goodwin couldn’t understand, but her tone conveyed sorrow and understanding and resignation.

Goodwin turned, saw another man standing over him.

“Hi,” the man said. “You American flyer?”

“That’s the rumor, bucko.”

“What?”

“Yeah, buddy, that’s me. I drive big plane that go boom-boom.”

“Sorry?”

“Yes! American pilot!”

“Oh, si, good. You comes us go hills yesterday sleep goats.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“Sorry?”

“Yes. Good. We go sleep with goats. Really. Sounds like fun.”

“Fun? Maybe no, but you come anyway, yes? What happen Ludvico?” The man was gesturing at his friend, who was – still – choking in the water.

“Ah. Ludvico slip on rock and fall on face.”

“Eh, fuck you mother, goddamn Yankee!” Goodwin heard the kid – Ludvico? – croak between gasps.

“What Vico say?” the other man asked.

“He says he wants to fuck my mother.” He heard the girl laughing at that one . . .

“Sorry?”

“Shit, pal, don’t sweat it. My mother can handle him.”

“Sorry? Cans speaks slowly?”

Goodwin hauled himself up onto the rocks. “We go find goats now. Germans there.” He pointed down the beach.

“No Germans,” the man smiled as he mimed slitting throats.

“Fantastic!” Goodwin said, now terrified. These clowns would have an entire Panzer Division crawling around here by first light. “Please go find goats now. Now please.”

The man started speaking in rapid fire Italian to his friend in the water, then he leaned down to help the kid out. Only then did this one see the woman in the water was as naked as the day she was born, and he stared at her breasts while he licked his lips.

“Go get clothes,” Goodwin said to the man while he helped the other kid stand. Goodwin could already see a nasty bruise forming over the front of the boys neck, and he felt bad for unloading on him so hard. He told himself that was better than getting his own throat cut. The kid had meant business!

The other man returned, held the woman’s clothes out to Goodwin, but Goodwin handed them over to the kid and walked away carefully across the slippery rocks toward the beach. He was cold now, real cold, and hungrier than he’d ever felt in his life. He still had, he hoped, a little chocolate in his flight suit; he felt for it but it was gone, probably, he thought, lost in the water. The two men came up a minute later, the girl right behind them, and they started looking for her shoes. All the while she talked to the kid in low, soothing tones, but he dismissed her brusquely; his pride had obviously been badly wounded on many levels by this encounter, and he had to put the girl in her place now.

“Jesus, kid, just give her a little respect,” Goodwin said quietly. “She’s had a pretty rough night herself.”

She heard him, but if the kid had he didn’t let on. Goodwin saw her turn and look at him, and he could just make out the smile on her face. He walked over to her. 

“You speak any English?” he asked.

“Yes, I do.” She spoke with an English accent, which struck him as pretty funny until he realized that’s probably how she learned the language.

“We need to get out of here, and fast. This kid says they killed some Germans on the beach, and we don’t want to be anywhere around here when the goons find out or we’ll be up Shit Creek without a paddle.”

“Sorry? Where is this Shit Creek? I do not know this place. But you . . . do?”

“Yes, Ma’am, I’m well acquainted with the place. It’s right down there, right by those dead krauts. And we need to get away from here, pronto, ‘cause we don’t want to be here when those bodies are found!”

“Oh, si, pronto! I understand. Yes, we go fast.”

The kid came up and gave the girl her shoes. She held onto Goodwin’s shoulder while she slipped them on, and this, Goodwin saw, infuriated the kid further.

“Come,” she said to Goodwin, “we go now.” She turned and rattled off a stream of instructions to the men and they fell in behind her. Goodwin fell in behind them all, bringing up the rear. He turned once as they made their way into the trees and the safety of the shadows, then he turned and looked at the rocky waters off the cape.

Yes, they were still there . . . just offshore . . . watching, and waiting . . .

+++++

He came to know her as Maria Theresa. Just that, and only so

She was beautiful, so beautiful that some days it hurt, really hurt to simply look at her. Goodwin felt himself falling in love with her from the very first moment he saw her in that first morning’s light. Her auburn hair drifting among graying leaves of sleeping chestnut trees as she slept on the ground that morning . . . her willowy legs as she climbed silently, fearlessly into the rocks, ahead of them all . . . leading them into the hills . . .

She took them through deepest wood to a small farm. These people were good, she said, she had cared for their children once when she was still in school, and they would help. And these people had indeed been good, they helped Goodwin and Vico and Trini . . . and Maria Theresa every way they could. They shared what food they had, helped them move off into the woods and build shelters among the rocky cliffs that overlooked the sea. They helped keep the small group fed, and when others from the village began winding their way up into the hills, these simple friends vetted them and put them in contact with Maria’s Group if not found wanting.

And that, after just a short while, was how the group came to be known: Maria’s Group. Vico and Trini and Paul Goodwin followed her everywhere, protected her, and soon followed her orders. They scouted groups of Germans who still often vacationed in Portofino, still came for the sun and the sea despite the American invasion that was marching relentlessly up the shinbone of the Italian boot, and when a particularly high-ranking officer visited they slipped through the night silently and took his life. They drifted like shadows in the night and spiked guns, filled petrol storage tanks with sugar and honey, started small landslides that denied German trucks access to the more remote areas around the villages and farms on the peninsula, and they cut communications lines and power lines and the throats of more than a few officers who ventured from the safety of numbers for a final walk in solitude.

She had been raped that night, Goodwin learned later. That night of fierce unions.

Two men, two Germans had come upon her walking home from the clinic where she worked, and they took her right there in an alley off the Via Roma. Not roughly, not savagely, just two drunk kids far from home and full of themselves, full of the power and fear their uniforms conveyed upon the helpless and the ignorant, they took her into the shadows and ripped her nurses uniform from her body. They were clumsy lovers, not rapists, just desperate, shy pretenders, but they had taken something from her, something precious and vital, and in the emptiness of their passage through her life, she found her heart had filled with shame.

She ran to the sea seeking release.

She ran in shame to the sea and found Paul Goodwin, and her soul’s ease.

+++++

By August most Germans left the area as the American Fifth Army prepared to leap from Sicily to the Italian mainland. Besides, it was no longer safe for them on the little peninsula, and with the looming invasion troops could not be spared to search the hills for partisans. By September, far off in the distance, far to the south, far beyond what villagers in Portofino could see, the drumbeat of distant cannon filled the earth with blood and then even more blood, cities were cast aglow not from lights but from fires reigned down upon them by rampaging hordes of American bombers. Soon the sky all around southern Italy shook from distant thunder by day, nights were dominated by hell-spawned fire, and Paul Goodwin looked wistfully to the sky for signs of the advancing columns of destruction, for he knew wherein his destiny lay.

He loved her, but she could never be his. 

The sky was calling, always calling. 

He would leave soon. And he would never return.

+++++

Most wars end, some are destined to play out through the ages as never ending conflict fuels ever-widening disparity, and perhaps the Second World War falls into this latter category, for while the war ended in magnanimous glory for some, for others, their stained world withered away on the parched edges of fleeting prosperity. For still other souls, destiny is held in abeyance, and they must wait for redemption.

For Maria Theresa, her war ended when the American Fifth Army drove northward toward Genoa in the final weeks of the European war, but Paul Goodwin had disappeared months before when an advance group of American Pathfinders swept through the area. One day he had been an integral part of all their lives, and the next day – he was simply and irretrievably gone. 

Two months after their first joining she miscarried, but she kept this knowledge from everyone. Whatever it was that had been growing inside of her, this being was in a moment of contractive release gone, and with it some part of Goodwin she had longed to hold on to forever. Or had it been a part of Goodwin? Could it have grown from the wanton seeds planted by two German boys? 

Or. Had some purpose been violated that night? Had destiny come for her too late?

Vico drifted from her life for a while, but he always remained nearby, just out of sight, as if he was checking on her, keeping her safe. She met another man and married him, and in time she resumed nursing, even once thought of trying to go to medical school. But time slipped by quietly, gently, and for one who had lived with two hearts of war-ravaged love beating so savagely under her breast, she gave in to the vagaries of time and fell into the comfortable hands of a simpler life. 

She gave birth to a daughter one hot July night, and very nearly died from blood loss, but the little girl’s presence in her life renewed her sense of purpose. She had to admit to herself even then that she missed Paul Goodwin, that she thought of him, dreamt of him, longed for him. She longed to feel him again, feel his hands on her face, his mouth on hers. She walked from time to time, on her Passeggiata, through the village and out to the cape. She looked out over the cobalt water, longing to feel him again, there, at the water’s edge. 

She had longed to see – them – as well, but she never saw anything even remotely of interest after he left. It was as if her life had been left out to wither under the sun. She wondered when the winds would gather and carry the cold dust of her life away.

But other winds were gathering.

And headed her way.

Paul Goodwin remained in the Army Air Corp through the end of the war, and like many pilots returning home to the explosive economic prosperity of post-war America, he began looking for work with airlines ramping up services all around the world. After sixteen long years of depression and war, and with an economic outlook almost alien to most people in the United States, times were indeed good, and promised to only get better. Goodwin made the rounds – American, Braniff, Pan Am, but joined Trans World Airlines after talking with pilots who already worked for the company. Within a year he was flying Constellations cross country, from New York to San Francisco, and he fell in love with the City by the Sea and decided to make it his home. It was a decision he never regretted. He bought a nice cottage in Menlo Park on a lark, and times were indeed good. Life was sweet, and the past receded from view.

From time to time he thought of Maria Theresa, but the whole thing had always looked impossible to him, and now – with time and distance to comfort his decision – his renunciations took on a fixed air. The two of them were far apart in so many ways – in almost every way, when we sat down and really thought about it – that after a couple of false starts at contacting her he simply gave up on the idea of going back to Italy and finding her. He put her out of his mind, and in the end he moved on.

But there was always something there, waiting in gray shadow lost somewhere in the farthest reaches of his mind. It was like an itch that couldn’t be scratched, he just never could reach it, never could put his finger on exactly what it was about the entire episode that simply would not – or could not? – leave him alone. Once when flying over Connecticut the thought hit him, that perhaps he had one true destiny and he’d turned his back on it. But what did destiny mean? ‘Indeed,’ he told himself, ‘we make our own destiny.’ 

A friend, Pat Patterson, who worked for an accounting firm downtown invited him to lunch one Saturday at the San Francisco Yacht Club; they had a ripping good time tossing off fierce rum drinks and flirting with a couple of waihinis and before too long Patterson asked Goodwin if he’d ever been sailing. “Nope, sure haven’t,” he said, and then they were off to the races, literally. 

Drunk as two skunks, Goodwin and Patterson and the two young women did their level best to kill each other out on a blustery San Francisco Bay, yet still managed to come in a respectable second place. Patterson reportedly went off with one of the girls, while Goodwin married the other one three weeks later.

Her name was Doris Matthews; she had graduated from UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall Law School in 1944, and after a stint in the San Francisco DAs office where she prepped for the Bar, she went to work for an old name firm in The City. On a lonely Friday afternoon in September one of the girls in the office came by with an invite to go to a swank yacht club the next day with an old sweetheart, and he had asked her bring a friend along. 

Sure, why not. Nothing better to do.

And so the worm turned.

It turned out, as these things sometimes do, that Miss Matthews had had a long standing affair with such old reliables as Jack Daniels, Cutty Sark, and Gilby’s, and for a little bit longer than quite a while, and getting married didn’t really staunch the flow. And Doris was a mean drunk, too, and could be something of a bully when she went out beyond the edge. Which, as it turned out, was just about every night.

In 1950 the Goodwins had a baby boy. Thomas they called him – Tom as he grew older, and Tom was a serious kid, abnormally bright as it turned out, which was a good thing, considering. Tom figured his mother out – all the games she played, the outright lies she hid behind her drinking, the self-deluding half-truths she foisted on her husband – by the time he’d left kindergarten. He figured out his father hated his mother a few years later, and by the time he started high school he was on a first name basis with more than a few of his father’s stewardess/mistresses. 

Paul Goodwin left the military with profound respect for words like duty and honor, and had made a solemn oath when he married Doris Matthews. He could not imagine in his wildest dreams violating something so sacred. He was in it ‘til death do us part, and his son grew up hating him for this one simple failing, simply because of the implicit dishonesty that lay behind all his father’s preposterous infidelities.

When he was thirteen, she managed to pour herself behind the wheel of her Mercedes one dark and stormy night and, driving home from the country club at one in the morning, ran a red light and slammed into the passenger side of a little Chevy Corvair. A little girl died in the accident, and his mother managed to pull every legal string she could and walked away unscathed, at least in a legal sense. She became something of a pariah in San Francisco and begged Paul to transfer to New York.

Paul’s parents were getting on by that time, and were thinking of selling the family’s old farm outside of New London. In a nervous fit Paul sold the house in Menlo Park, bought the farm, transferred to New York, and in January 1966 found himself flying 707s from Kennedy to Rome Fiumicino and back several times a month. Doris began seeing other men while Paul was away on the now much longer trips, and Paul had to admit to himself by that point he really didn’t care. He let her go, let her sink as far down into the night as she dared.

Maybe this life was inevitable. Maybe by turning his back on what had seemed his first best destiny, some force aligned with God only knows what had conspired to visit unhappiness and strife upon Paul Goodwin’s broad shoulders. At times, he admitted to himself, that’s what it felt like.

And while he loved flying to Rome and used his layover time in the city to walk her storied ruins, Paul managed to find every reason in the world to stay away from Portofino, and for a year he did. 

And yet oddly enough it was his son who forced the issue.

Tom Goodwin was increasingly viewed as an academic prodigy by his teachers and peers; he graduated from high school at fifteen and had offers to attend all the best eastern school. He chose Stanford in California simply because it was close to where he grew up – The City still felt like home to him. Paul understood the feeling; he bitterly missed San Francisco and the wild sea that surrounded The City.

On Tom’s high school graduation, Paul offered to take his son to Rome and, he was taking a few weeks off from work to make it a big deal; the two of them would tour the Italian countryside together, get to know one another better. A real father and son trip, and this was something the two had never experienced. Doris thought it a grand idea and promptly booked two tickets to Acapulco.

The ‘boys’ – as Doris derisively referred to them now – left in late June. They spent a few days in Rome then hopped a train to Florence. A couple more days following in Michelangelo’s footsteps, then north to Venice – which Paul had always wanted to see, but Tom took absolutely no interest in – then they were off, on to Genoa.

It was in Genoa that Tom saw photographs of Portofino on travel posters in the train station, and he told his father he’d really love to see the village; he’d read good things about the place. Tom was unconcerned with the subtle shift in his father’s voice when he heard the very name Portofino, but Tom thought nothing of it once they were on the little red bus winding southward through chestnut covered hillsides. 

Paul looked at the passing hillsides with clinched jaw and knotted muscle; as they drew near the village he could see goat trails on hillsides he’d run down at night while being chased by German patrols – he could still smell their fear in the air! Another group of rocks where they’d jumped a squad and Vico had been shot in the gut, the grueling climb back into the hills with the boy draped over his shoulder was still as fresh in his memory, as if it had happened last week. Tom looked out the window at rocks and trees and cliffs, and finally, the sea, while his father tried to hide from this wounded landscape by staring stonily ahead, but there was nowhere to hide. When he closed his eyes, when he tried to close this landscape away from his soul, everything came back in nauseating, vivid detail just that much sooner.

There would be no running this time, Paul Goodwin knew. 

He had come for his reckoning. Fate and destiny had conspired to make it so.

The bus dropped them in the piazza a little before noon on the Seventh of July, 1966; the air was hot and still, few tourists were about, and Paul walked over to a small inn and inquired about rooms while Tom stumbled along the quay looking at fishermen tending their nets and over the shoulders of artists working feverishly away in front of pastel tinted easels. His father came out, joined him, looked around the harbor with him for a while, then they moved off to a ristorante for lunch.

Ludvico saw Paul from the kitchen and very nearly passed out. He stumbled backwards as if he’d been slugged, and indeed he felt as if the breath had been crushed from his body. He fought the impulse to go to his old friend; not sure who the boy was and what they were doing he decided to wait and see if Goodwin sought him out. Was it a coincidence he had come to this ristorante to eat?

But no, they left after lunch and walked away along the highway east of town, apparently marveling at villas seemingly hewn from cliffs perched high over the water below, and at the endless cobalt sea that spread out beyond the little harbor. Vico followed them, listened to them, watched as the young boy pointed at a pod of dolphin that had just entered the harbor, watched as his father, for Paul was the boy’s father, staggered backwards at the sight of the dolphins as if he was having a heart attack, and Vico bolted from his hiding place and ran to his friend’s side and knelt beside him on the dusty road while the boy sat beside his father.

“Dad! Dad! What’s wrong?”

“Eh, it’s okay boy. It’s just too hot out this time of day. We need to get him back to town.”

“Vico? Is that you?”

“Si, Paulo, me. Just me.”

Goodwin sat up and took his friend in his arms and held him. He cried for what – to his son, at least – seemed like a very long time. Then his father did the damnedest thing; he stood up and brushed himself off, shook his friend’s hand and without saying another word walked back to the village and into the hotel.

Tom looked at his father walking away, then at the other man. He wanted to ask the man questions, for questions were hanging in the air apparent, waiting to be asked, waiting to be answered, but he took off after his dad. He waved once to the man, but never saw the tears in the man’s eyes. The episode echoed in young Tom’s mind for an hour or so, then was as quickly gone.

He went up to a Spartan room and found his father; he had simply come in and slipped off his shoes and gone to sleep; Tom flipped through a copy of Goethe’s Torquatto Tasso until he could stand it no longer. He grabbed a pair of swim trunks and headed down to the sea.

He walked out a road until he came to a rock-strewn cape. Blue water filled rocky bowls rimmed with deep black granite walls. It was the most inviting water he’d ever seen, and wordlessly he slipped his shoes off and made his way down to the water’s edge. For one moment he thought he saw a dolphin in one of the pools, but as he made his way down to the water’s edge he saw only cool blue pools waiting for him, and he dove in.

He had dinner with his father later that evening, and Tom talked about his walk out to the cape, and about swimming in the amazing clear blue water, but for some reason his father remained quiet and contemplative throughout the meal, almost inattentive – if not quite distant. Tom never mentioned the episode on the road, and his father never brought it up again. Only once during the meal, when Tom mentioned having seen a dolphin in close among the rocks did his father react, and then not as he’d expected him to. His father’s hands shook, he looked away as if distracted by a million memories hammering away at his soul, and a tremor crossed his face like a brief summer thunderstorm crossing prairie seas. An odd thought pressed in on the young man, some sense of recognition perhaps, but the thought left him as quickly as it had come, leaving only a vague impression of its passage. 

Their dinner passed pleasantly enough, though in time it too would pass quietly into the recesses of memory. Tom, now quite exhausted after his long afternoon on the rocks, said goodnight to his father and walked across the piazza to the little inn and up to the tiny bedroom. There was little about the day to hold his attention now aside from his father’s roadside collapse, but years later – when he was applying to medical schools – he would mention this episode as instrumental in his decision to pursue medicine. He had felt helpless there by the sea, powerless to meet his father’s immediate need, and that one impression was all that remained of the day. 

The father told the son as they parted at dinner that he was going to take a stroll – a Passeggiata, he called it – before coming to bed. He finished the bottle of ice cold Pinot Grigio and fired off a cigar while he sat back thinking about the day, about his reluctance to seek out his compatriots, and all he could think was that his renunciation those so many years ago had been total and complete. To seek out these people would be an abnegation of all his earlier reasoning, an admission of profound error on his part. 

As he sat watching cigar smoke curling up toward the ceiling the realization that his reasoning had in fact been faulty washed over his soul, his renunciations had in fact been renunciations of the very best part of his life. His refusal to talk about these events with anyone else was simply a reflection of his inability to deal with the inherent contradictions of his choice. While he had taken the easiest way out, out was in fact slowly poisoning his soul. 

And in Doris, he had found the perfect mate with which to kill his soul. Wasn’t that too funny?

He walked out of the ristorante down to the quay, and he looked into the familiar black water halfway expecting to see one of the dolphins waiting for him there, but he saw only his own vapid reflection rippling across the water. He kicked a pebble into the water and watched ripples form and spread a little way across the harbor, and he saw the first amber edge of the moon rising far off to the east. The air was calm, almost still, as he looked at the moon through lines of distant trees; soon it was rising, casting its bilious glow across the old stone quay as if it was painting a scene for him, and he watched the harbor take on velvety amber-hued glows as she rose on her way across the heavens.

He walked off toward the cape. There was no reason behind his choice, nothing, not even instinct could absolve him of the trespasses he sought. 

And little had changed, he saw. The road along the quay was as it had been twenty something years ago, even the smells were the same. The chestnut and linden, the wayward pine, the iodine rich smell of tides, garlic and peppers frying in olive oil . . . they were all there, all unchanged, never becoming . . . just always . . . being. 

And just within range of memory, that almost silent whisper: Why? Why? Why?

Trees arced overhead, stars could just barely be seen floating between wayward branches that hung out over the water, and by the light of this flickering starlight he walked quietly onward. It still seemed as though he knew every rise and bend of the trail out to the cape, every tree felt like a companion he longed to reach out and touch again. He wanted to cast aside all his repudiations, open his arms to time and hold those memories again. But would they let him?

He turned at last to the clear stretch of road that drifted lazily by the cape on its way to the lighthouse, and even all of the old black rocks were as he remembered them. They stood like sentinels guarding the way to the water’s edge, as if it was their purpose to deny the sea to all who came seeking an impure absolution. The sea smelled the same, waves still washed ashore in hypnotic rhythms all their own, and she sat there as he had expected her. Quiet diffidence, purpose and resolve lashing the air like a cat’s tail, an indifference to indifference bathing her features with holy purity.

He walked to her.

Sat on ancient stones next to her. 

He took her hand, carried her skin through deep sea breezes to his mouth and he smelled her, remembering the remembering as a singer sings the song of life. 

He started to speak but she silenced him.

They were waiting. All seven of them. She pointed at the sea and he followed her hand as he always had, as he always would.

She stood, dropped her sweater to the ground as she walked to the water’s edge. When her nakedness was complete she slipped into the water and walked out among the rocks and waited.

The moon stood in silent witness to this union. The seven moved in with explosive purpose, swirled and danced in time to their ancient music, delirious purpose long denied gathered impossible forces in the air and released spent fury into the night, and all was as it should have been long ago, and as it would be again and again as the stars in their courses circled overhead.

+++++

Paul and Tom Goodwin left the village early the next morning, bound for Rome and after an ungodly number of hours aloft, home. 

Tom Goodwin would always remember the time with his father as the best time they ever had, perhaps even the best time of his life. Over time, he remembered little of their time in Portofino, the dinner at the quaint ristorante stood out for a few years, his father’s collapse lingered for perhaps a few years longer still, but in time all these memories left him with little beyond the gauzy blur of their leaving. Key moments hidden in the fabric of time, perhaps, but faded nonetheless.

As the bus pulled away from the village, Paul Goodwin looked out the back window as dust swirled in harmony with his feelings. Maria and Vico stood there, as always just in shadow, and he waved at them as they each faded from his life once again. He saw Vico put his arms around her, he was there holding her as she cried, then the bus rounded a curve and the village was gone.

Nine months later Paul’s son would be born, and Maria Theresa named him Paulo.

[Hi there. This is the voice in your head speaking, telling you it’s time to change the record again. How ’bout something light for a change, like maybe: On The Loose, by Saga. Or how about a trip down Baker Street, you know, by Gerry Rafferty? That not enough? Well then, try Rashida, by Jon Lucien. Now, back to your regularly scheduled program…]

Yesterday

Portofino

Margherita drifted in milky ways, her still loins afire, her solitary mind reeling free of merest earth, soaring in canyons of white cloud as cool air ran through her hair like a million naked fingers. She felt him still buried deep inside her, deep inside the womb of this night, as she swayed in cool currents of what had been the cradling sea. Her hand was resting on a dolphin’s back, her mind in flight, now faraway. She began to feel the passage of time as something distinct, yet unreal; it was as if she was drifting through time and space with this creature as her guide, or was he her guardian? Everything was clear to her one moment, the next she felt the anomie of cloudscapes vast and willowy with ambiguous purpose. Purpose and knowledge were unknowns in this landscape, she had only the gray flesh of instinct by her side now, and nowhere was everywhere all around her. 

Flat, bare trees rose from the withered backs of scorched plains far below as she sailed between white clouds in cobalt skies; a red church formed in the air beside her, deep red blood ran down baked stone steps, fell into parched soil miles below. Beings unknowable swam through the air, looking at her, looking at the fire in her womb. She became self conscious and humble, then proud and defiant. She yearned for independence and knowledge, longed to be as the clouds, yet she understood her purpose as the keeper of this fire. 

She was holder of the future.

She felt hands on her shoulder, fingers drifting through her hair, chills running down her spine like drops of cold rain. Words, his words, looking for her, searching the clouds, calling her name, coming for her on emerald wings. 

She did not want to leave the clouds, there was so much here she didn’t understand. For one so willing, there was so much more to explore.

She heard him calling her name again, or was it the wind? 

Who? Who am I? Why am I here?

Who was this man from that other world. This man who commanded nothing but her heart.

“Margherita?”

Tendrils of distant cloud held her fast to the dream.

“No . . . not yet . . .”

“Margherita? Come back to me?”

Still she resisted . . . “so much here to see . . . to understand . . .”

“Please . . . come . . .”

She felt cool hands on shimmering, water-kissed skin, warm words bathing her soul, caressing wounds she had long thought healed. 

She opened her eyes. 

He was there.

“Where are you?” Tom Goodwin asked. His eyes were kissed by fire, his soul buffeted by raging gales of doubt . . . and she saw clouds in his eyes . . . as if . . . the dream had not come to an end.

She could only shake her head, tears unbidden welled and dropped like soft rain on his chest, and she squeezed tightly with her arms and legs, held her loins on his need as if all life depended on this union. Could he understand? Could mere words reveal what she had seen, what she had felt? If words did not yet exist to reveal this landscape, how could even she understand what was to come?

“I’m alright,” she heard herself say. “I was sleeping, dreaming . . .”

“So is our friend here.”

She looked at the dolphin lying next to them. Its warm skin radiated unknown joy, its eyes were demurely fixed on both of them. The dolphin opened her mouth and water filled the pink-gray space, she closed her mouth and water spilled between her teeth back into the sea.

“What does that mean?” Margherita asked the dolphin. “Tell me.”

The dolphin rolled her body around them and seemed to sing for a moment, then drifted through rocky pools back into the open sea. 

“I do not understand,” Margherita said softly. “I cannot see. Only shadow . . . ”

“I can. You’re cold and going into hypothermic shock. We’ve got to get moving.”

“No. Stay . . . must go back . . . ”

Goodwin slipped out of her, pulled her back to the shore, lifted her gently up onto the cold rocks. Her body was glowing in soft blue-white hues under the fading moonlight; Goodwin could see the first amber streams of sunlight coming from across the bay, and he gathered their clothes and helped her into them. He stood against the darkness, helped her stand and held her to his warmth, rubbed his warm body against hers, felt her flaccid muscles wilting in the cold beyondness . . .

“Come on, let’s walk,” he said as he led her through the rocks toward the gravel road.

Elsie was sitting up there on a wide flat rock by the side of the road; apparently she had been waiting for them. She came up to Goodwin and licked salt from his ankle, then fell in beside him as they all walked back to the village. The little springer stayed very close to Goodwin, almost protectively so.

They came to the quay, then upon Diogenes. Malcolm was sitting in the amber fingers of the sunrise, waiting, in the cockpit. He helped Goodwin and Margherita aboard, called down to Mary Ann. Tea and fresh-baked bread appeared, and Goodwin marveled at the prescience of true friends. The bread warmed Margherita, the tea restored the color to her face.

“I am so sleepy,” she said.

“No doubt,” Malcolm Doncaster said. “It’s after six in the morning.”

“You can sleep here,” Mary Ann said, and Elsie growled. 

“Or not!”

“Let’s get her over to Springer,” Malcolm said, and Elsie jumped across to Goodwin’s boat, circling anxiously and barking while she waited for them.

“Well, she seems to think that’s a fine idea!” Mary Ann grumbled, now clearly a bit miffed. 

“She’s been sticking right to me ever since we got out of the water,” Tom said. 

Goodwin pushed the hatch back and helped Margherita down the steps, then into the shower. He went to the electric panel and flipped switches; back in the head he turned on the water and let it warm, then helped her out of her clothes.

“Oh God, that feels so good,” she said as the warmth hit her.

She held on to a grab rail and he rubbed her body with soap, massaged her back and neck, then her breasts and legs. Her head bowed as if in prayer, the hot water ran through her hair, down the cleft of her back; Goodwin continued to rinse her body until the water cooled, then he turned it off and began toweling her supple nakedness. She bent like a sapling in the breeze to his touch, her just warm skin now pliant and yielding; and she began falling. 

Sleep came, powerful dreaming. Endless. Like the stars overhead.

+++++

They surfaced for lunch, Elsie by Goodwin’s side, and they walked the few steps to the piazza and sat under the November sun on the terrace outside Vico’s place. They ordered Campari and soda, and plates of cheese from a young waiter, and also what fresh fruit there was to be had, and some crusty bread. They ate silently, Vico came by once and smiled quietly, respecting their need of this time to come to whatever understanding there was to be had from this union. He seemed concerned, almost fatherly to them both, as if he alone knew what had been commanded of them, and the sacrifices that had yet to be asked.

Elsie lay across Goodwin’s feet – as if by the force of her will alone she was now holding him to the earth. She reminded him more and more of Sara, and he missed his old girl; Elsie looked up at him with those same liquid-brown eyes, and he knew she held his heart – beyond all human understanding – in her gaze.

As they ate Goodwin saw an artist nearby on the piazza sitting at her easel, and even from their table he could see Springer and Diogenes on the canvas. When they left their table he walked down to the water’s edge and looked at the composition: under autumn skies the two boats lay to their moorings by the quay, clear skies and crisp winds rippled the water. Just aft of Springer seven dolphins formed a circle in the water.

He looked at the artist, an older woman – perhaps in her seventies, maybe older – sitting on a wooden stool laying paint out on an ancient mixing board.

“Did you see dolphins in the harbor this morning?” he asked her after the shock faded.

“Oh yes,” the woman said through a thick Scandinavian accent. “They were behind the boats for maybe ten minutes this morning. Very unusual, don’t you think?”

“I’d like to buy this painting when you finish,” Goodwin said. Elsie was at the easel looking up at the canvas, silently looking at the shifting colors in the sunlight.

“Ah. Well, you see, I do not paint to sell. This is just for my pleasure.”

“You’re very good if I may say so, but you see, that is my boat, and I, uh, have seen those dolphins before. I would very much like to have a painting to remember this by.”

The woman turned and then shaded her eyes as she looked up at Goodwin, her silver eyes were most shockingly clear but could not hide the simple honesty of her face. She looked at Goodwin for a long while; it felt to him as if she was taking stock of him, seeing if he was worthy of her experience.

Finally she bowed her head slightly. “Very well. Come back in an hour or so. If you like what you see, perhaps we can come to terms.”

Goodwin smiled at the woman. “Alright, an hour then.” He turned to walk away and Margherita and Elsie fell in beside him. They walked away from the boats, along the opposite side of the harbor, until they came to a jewelers. Goodwin walked to the window, saw a white gold necklace with a dolphin pendant attached; he went inside and asked to see it. Elsie came right in with them.

“Do you like it?” he asked Margherita.

She held the necklace to her chest and looked at her reflection in a mirror the proprietress held up to her. “It’s very lovely,” Margherita said. “Truly very lovely.”

Goodwin fished some euros from his pocket and gave them to the woman, then helped Margherita fasten the chain behind her neck. He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. Margherita blushed, for obviously in such a small town she was no stranger to the woman. They walked back out into the fading sun; Goodwin could see the woman still painting by the water at the head of the harbor.

“I need a hat!” he said out of the blue. Elsie looked up at him with puzzled eyes.

“A hat?”

“Yes, a hat! My head is going to get cold. Winter’s just around the corner, and I don’t have a hat!”

“Come,” Margherita said, and she led him across the piazza, then up a small lane. She stopped at a window display overflowing with hats of every description. “Presto! Avanti!”

They went into the little shop; an ancient man came out from behind an emerald curtain, saw Margherita and smiled. Goodwin could not keep up with the staccato bursts of Italian that filled the close shop, but more than once he thought the old man looked like the Wizard of Oz. Margherita turned once to Goodwin and he could just make out a word or two about winter and a few disparaging words about men growing bald from her. The old man laughed, took Goodwin by the arm and led him to a shelf full woolen berets. 

“These not so undistinguished for you?” the man asked. “Try the camel color.”

Goodwin did, and they all laughed. Margherita covered her eyes.

“What about those,” he asked, pointing to some broad rimmed berets on an upper shelf.

“Those common in Catalan. Mountains around Barcelona. Religious men. Not so much here, but very practical.”

“How ‘bout a black one?”

The man got a step-ladder and climbed up and handed one down to Goodwin. It fit perfectly, and felt wonderful.

“This’ll do nicely!” he said. Elsie looked at Goodwin and barked.

Margherita fired off another burst and the two laughed together for a log while. Goodwin paid and thanked the man; they walked back toward the piazza, the sun was now well down and casting long shadows on the water. They walked out onto the piazza and he that saw the woman was gone.

Goodwin frowned. Elsie barked, they turned to see her pointing at a café.

“There she is,” Margherita said, “getting coffee in the bakery.”

They walked to the café and into the warmth and took a seat next to the painter, and again Elsie planted herself across Goodwin’s feet.

“I’m sorry I could not wait, but my hands…” she held out her fingers – they were white now, her hands apparently numb from the cooling air as the sun left her.

Goodwin took her hand in his and looked at it closely. He pressed his thumb against one of her fingernails, watched it color; then did it again while he looked at his wristwatch. He looked at her blue-tinged lips, then into her eyes.

“Yes, I know,” the woman said. “There is nothing to be done, or so they say. I am an old woman, and this is my life.” She looked wistfully at Goodwin. “So, you are a physician?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Well, here is your painting. What do you think?”

Goodwin was astonished. It was a Monet in texture and color, very much an impressionist’s work, and the canvas had revealed a great talent. He looked at the woman and was surprised to see her crying.

“What . . .”

“Oh, Doctor, it was just the expression on your face. No artist could wish for more.”

“I really must pay you something for it. It wouldn’t be right . . .”

She looked at him for a moment longer, as if making up her mind.

“Alright,” she finally said. “This is my price, and it is non-negotiable. I want you to take me sailing on your boat.”

Goodwin smiled. “That would be my honor.”

“You see, I have not been sailing since I was a little girl, with my father, near Orust. I would love to feel the sun on my face, the wind in my hair on the sea . . .”

“You have only to name the day, and we’re yours.” 

“I am staying at the inn across the way,” she said, pointing. “I will be here until Spring, so any day the sea looks promising, let me know. Room forty three.” The woman’s face sparkled now, her eyes animated by the simple joy of a faraway summer’s day plain to see, as if joy itself had once been etched within the ways of her soul.

“Will do. By the way, my name is Tom Goodwin, and the boat is named Springer.”

“I see. Perhaps for your friend here?” She leaned over and rubbed Elsie’s head. “And I am Trudi,” she said as she held out her small hand. “And if I may, I need to put a few finishing touches on this, and some varnish. A few days at most.”

“Well, I can’t thank you enough, Ma’am . . .”

“Trudi now, please, Tom.”

He smiled. “Yes. Just so. Thank you, Trudi. I’ll treasure this forever, I promise.”

“Forever is a long time you know, for such a promise, Tom Goodwin,” she said. Her silver eyes seemed alive with sudden purpose. “Or perhaps not?”

Goodwin looked at her again. The old man, Ludvico . . . was he a wizard? And this woman was alluding to . . . what? Timelessness? Who was she?

“Yes, perhaps it is as you say. Let me say then that your work has touched me. Will that suffice?”

“Oh yes, Tom Goodwin. You will make an old woman’s heart sing!” Her radiant eyes seemed to grow more alive with each passing moment. Margherita took Goodwin’s hand.

“Well . . .” he began.

“Yes, you must go now. The night awaits.” Her smile lingered as they turned to leave.

They walked out of the bakery into the deepest blue of evening, Goodwin’s floppy beret making a huge hit with people just out now for Passeggiata. Only Elsie seemed to have reservations about the hat; she looked at him now with the hat on and turned away, then sneezed twice.

“Tom, I must go to my apartment tonight. I have to work tomorrow.”

“I know.” He looked away. “Well, you could stay with me? We could go and get some of your things?”

“Tom, this is a small village, and I would do nothing to shame my family. . .”

“I know . . . uh, understand.”

“No, Tom, please do not feel sad about this. This is not America.”

“Right. How about dinner later? At Vico’s?”

“I’ll see you there at eight, alright?” She squeezed his hand.

“Yes.” He felt the skin of her skin on his soul, and suddenly he felt like he wanted to know that touch for all time. He could not bring himself to let go of her, even as he felt her pulling away.

“And bring your girlfriend!” Margherita said, bending down to scratch Elsie’s ears. The Springer moaned and rolled her eyes back as she drifted back into the bliss-zone, and they both laughed.

“See you in a little while, Tom. And thank you,” she said as she lifted the pendant from her chest. “It means something, yes?”

“Yes. Very much. It means . . .”

“Tom,” she said gently. “Not now. We must talk later. We have much to say.”

She turned and walked around a corner and was gone.

Elsie looked up at the hat and sneezed – again.

“I know, girl. I know.”

He walked back to the boat, his new shadow trotting along by his feet.

+++++

“Hey, Tom, glad you got back when you did; there’s a big storm brewing over Venice, coming across from the east,” Malcolm said as he watched as Tom and Elsie hop aboard Diogenes. “Harbormaster came by an hour ago and said we’d probably better head over to Rapallo first thing tomorrow morning, before this storm hits.”

“When’s it due?”

“Late afternoon, thereabouts.”

“It’s only a couple of miles over, right?”

“Just a gnat’s ass less than three. Right.”

“When you gonna head out?”

“I’d say 0800 or thereabouts.” Malcolm reached down and scratched Elsie behind the ears. “She been with you all day? Mary Ann is getting a little green about this, you know?”

“Yeah. Been sticking right to me – all damn day long – like stink on shit.”

“Pardon me?”

“Never mind. Uh, we’ll have to move too, right? You can’t move until I do, isn’t that about the size of it?”

“Right. We could move across together; it’s a lovely trip over, you know, if a bit brief. Will you have someone with you?”

Goodwin knew Doncaster was thinking about Margherita, but in fact Goodwin was thinking of Trudi. “Not sure. Maybe, but I’ll have to check first. Wanna come up to Vico’s for dinner?”

“Ah, no, not tonight. Mary Ann picked up something at the market. She might also like to see her dog, however, if the two of you don’t mind.”

“Hey! I didn’t ask her to tag along!” Goodwin thought the comment a little brusque. “Please! Be my guest!”

“Now, now, Tom. Didn’t mean to stir anything up . . .” but Goodwin had already scooted across to Springer and was down the hatch before Doncaster could finish his sentence. 

Goodwin walked over to the electric panel and shut off the water maker and checked the battery charge from his solar panels, then hopped into the shower and stood under the hot water for a couple of minutes. He washed his hair – all the time thinking about how good it had felt to hold her hair in his hands, to feel slippery warm soap running through her hair, the water splashing off her skin . . .

“Oh, I got it bad,” he sighed as he shaved.

He dressed and walked over to the little inn and had the reception buzz Trudi’s room; she came down and Goodwin told her about the plan to sail the boats to Rapallo tomorrow morning. “I’m single-handing, so I’d be glad to have the company,” he finished saying.

The old woman looked up at him, her silver eyes almost mesmerizing. “Yes, this sounds wonderful. What time would you like me to come?”

“Probably be best to plan on leaving the harbor about O-seven thirty or so. Is that too early?”

“Oh my, heavens no. I’ll have been up hours by then. Can I bring anything?”

“Probably best to bring a hat, maybe a jacket, and some kind of tennis shoes.”

“Fine. Nothing else?”

“No,” he said as he looked into her eyes. “Well, I’ll see you then, unless you’d like to join us for dinner?”

“Ah, no, perhaps I’d better get some rest. But thank you.”

Goodwin smiled. “Alright, perhaps another time. See you in the morning.” He headed over to Vico’s and found the old man had already set aside a large table for him.

“Margherita has called. She had to go over to her mother’s. She’ll be over as soon as she can.” Vico began reciting the day’s freshest items, but Goodwin held up his hand and stopped him.

“Ludvico? Do me a huge favor and just bring whatever you think she’ll like, alright? Whenever I come in here, don’t even ask. I trust you completely.”

The old man smiled. “You are very much your father’s son, you know that, Tom?” He walked away, leaving a thousand questions hanging in air. 

He could see the harbor from his seat, Springer and Diogenes off across the water. Lights on down below, the lingering warmth of fresh bread and meat pies deep within Diogenes, forms and shadows drifting across the water. There was Elsie sitting on the foredeck, looking across the water at him looking at her, a slate black dorsal fin slipping lazily through the water below. 

‘And Vico? How did he know father so well? How could he know I am so much like my father? How does he know so much about him, and me?’ Goodwin had yet to make connections to his own hazy memories, perhaps because there had been so much time between the present and that past.

Margherita and Paulo came into the dining room; Goodwin looked around as he heard them enter and noticed he was the only one dining in the ristorante tonight. Vico waved at them as they came in, then walked their way when he saw their faces. 

Goodwin saw it too.

“Tom, Mama feels poorly, she says it’s getting hard to breathe.”

“Isn’t there a doctor in the village?” Goodwin said. He saw Margherita’s face fall with her expectations, the illusions she had built up about him crumbled away to dust.

“No, just eh-a, what you call it, a medic,” Paulo said haltingly. “Tom, please, just come see if we need to calls for ambulance, eh?”

“I’ll go get my car,” Vico said, and his voice carried the weight of great authority now. “Thomas, you go now with – Paulo. If we need to take her to the hospital we can all go together.”

Goodwin pushed back from the table, thinking how little he wanted to get involved in a medical dilemma here. He wasn’t licensed to practice medicine in Italy, and in some countries Samaritanism was considered criminal. He wondered as he ambled out of the ristorante into the night if his malpractice insurance would cover anything that might arise . . . but then, no, he knew it wouldn’t.

He followed Paulo up the hill and around a corner; Margherita had apparently gone with Vico, and this surprised him. It might have surprised him further to know that Vico was saying even then how much like the father was his son, even if the old man said this under his breath. He fought off memories of distant nights, memories that swept through his village like a cold wind.

Paulo opened a door that led to a narrow stairway, and Goodwin wanted to cover himself from the wounded stares of a thousand ghosts that seemed huddled by the doorway. He shook his head, walked up the stairs behind Paulo, this stranger he had pulled accidentally into the sea, but as he walked into the apartment he found he had just walked into another world.

It was a warm world, color and smell collided with memory in this room and had created something completely foreign to Goodwin. It hit him instantly. Love and family. The feeling was everywhere, it was all around this place, it bathed the air inside the apartment with the softness of gently formed memory, of easy laughter within these walls and the safety of a warm embrace. It was all here now, the warmth of those who loved honestly, and had done so all their lives. It left Goodwin feeling empty, and somehow hollow as memories of his own mother came back.

She was sitting by a large window in an overstuffed chair that wore her memories with an easy grace. She was gasping for air, not panicked, not afraid, but simply waiting for death to come like a promised friend. 

He rushed to her side, his fingers seeking her pulse first in her wrist, then her ankles, and finally,  the carotids in her neck. He pressed her fingernails and shook his head.

“Mrs Moretti? Can you hear me?”

“Paul? Is that you? Have you come back to us?” Her accent was thick but the words unmistakable. Goodwin brushed aside the shock of her words, even as hidden implications beat the air overhead like the wings of angels watching from above.

“Mama!” Paulo said in Italian. “This is doctore Goodwin. Tom. He is Paul’s son. Mama, how are you feeling.”

“I am ready to sleep, my precious boy.”

“No, Mama. Tom is here, we will take you to the hospital!”

She turned her eyes to the water and smiled. “I am coming,” she said to the water.

“Paulo, let’s get her downstairs. Do you have any oxygen here? A bottle of oxygen?”

“No.”

“What about this medic? Is there an ambulance here in town?”

“Oh, si, not far from here . . .”

They stopped at the little medic’s station and borrowed a bottle of oxygen, the offended medic placated only when Vico pulled him aside and explained who Goodwin was. Paulo drove expertly though blindingly fast through the hills toward Genoa – “There are no heart people in Rapallo worth shit!” Vico spat, apparently from experience – and they made it to the hospital there in less than an hour. 

Paulo ran to fetch a wheelchair. Tom kept by Maria Theresa’s side while Vico and Paulo talked to nurses and physicians in the emergency room; he kept asking for this and that and getting in the nurses way, angering them, until . . .

“Tom Goodwin! You lazy no-good bum! What the devil are you doing here!”

Goodwin spun around, saw the tumbling girth of Jon Santoni rumbling down the corridor his way. “Jon! Sonofabitch! What the devil are YOU doing here?”

“Me? I work here. The better question is, what are you doing in MY hospital!” He roared as he laughed, and appeared genuinely happy to see Goodwin.

“Trying to keep your skinny ass out of trouble, as always!” Santoni looked something like Pavarotti, except he was bigger. Much bigger. He came over and gave Goodwin a hug and kissed his cheeks, then turned serious.

“What’s this about, Tom?” he asked, pointing at Maria Theresa.

“Friend of the family. I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop in, and, well, here we are.” They huddled away from Vico and Paulo and Margherita and he began talking, and a few minutes later Santoni walked over to the nurses station and got on a telephone. Soon he was yelling, then spoke in quieter tones for a while, then turned and nodded to Goodwin.

“Let’s go Tom. Tell the family to go to the waiting room outside the surgery on the fifth floor.” Nurses now looked at Goodwin like he was the Pope’s brother; they smiled at him deferentially as he walked over to Margherita and Paulo and Vico.

“Pretty much what I expected,” he said to Vico as he explained what the first chemistries had found. “We’ll take some pictures and confirm, then go in and fix it.”

“Tom? Who is that man, the big one?”

“Jon? Great cutter, uh, surgeon. He did a cardiovascular fellowship in Houston under me a few years ago. He’s probably the best heart man in Italy. Lucky he was here.”

“And you trained him?” Vico said, thunderstruck. “It seems fortuitous breezes are dancing all around Portofino these days, don’t you think?”

Goodwin nodded. “I suppose so. Anyway, fifth floor waiting room. Probably several hours before we know much. Take those two out for coffee or something. Ciao.”

Vico held out his hand, took Goodwin’s hand in his and seemed to search for the right words. They looked at one another for a long time, then Goodwin turned and walked away.

Vico looked at Maria Theresa’s children and at the fortunes of her lifetime; how odd, he thought, that in the blink of an eye all this becomes as dust, ready to lift on an errant gust and settle on new currents for another journey. “Come. Let us find some food and talk for a while. It will be a long night, and we have much to be thankful for. Miracles are alive in this night!”

Margherita walked in stunned silence. The night had become a waterfall of conflicting emotions, all feeling obscured in white mist as hope and expectation dashed on rocks blackened by clouds of anger-borne confusion. Now everything seemed upside down, she was tumbling on vaulted airs, nothing made sense as everything seemed to have grown like gray ivy within a tapestry of lies. One thread had been pulled and now all her feelings were unraveling.

+++++

Elsie lay quietly on the swim platform, a Springer on the Springer. She looked into the black eye lying so still now; she could sense loneliness and fear in the dolphin, and she wanted to comfort him. She eased forward and slipped her paw into the water; the dolphin blinked slowly and came to her, rubbed his nose against billowing fur and the smells of black earth, and he drifted in the nether currents of distant suns, worried about his old friend.

+++++

In a distant room an anesthesiologist slipped a needle into Maria Theresa’s wrist and she watched as darkness fell all around her. She smiled as darkness wrapped her in soft embrace, she smiled when she heard his voice from far away, and when she saw his face. She was surrounded by vast clouds for a time, and at times she could see everything that had happened clearly. He was coming for her, and he was smiling now, even as darkness came.

+++++

Jon Santoni walked into the waiting room just before three in the morning; his green scrubs were blotchy-wet from sweat around his neck and arms. He wore a naturally jovial expression almost always on his round face, but not this morning. He was too tired for such a performance just now. He came and sat by Ludvico; Margherita and Paulo sat beside Vico, and even Toni had made it to the hospital after he got off work. They sat silently, expectantly, but Toni seemed distracted and agitated.

Santoni pursed his lips, tried to think of the best way to tell these people what he had just seen. He knew words would fail him. They always did in times like these.

“We lost her twice, you see,” he began slowly, “and both times Tom pulled her back. We were missing something. Something important.”

Margherita’s eyes filled with hot tears, Paulo’s hands trembled.

“Her pressure kept falling, you see, like there was a perforated artery, but we couldn’t see anything. He replaced the mitral valve . . .”

“Doctor! Is Maria alive!” Vico was livid, shaking with rage.

“Oh, yes. And I’ve never seen anything like it. He had his hands around her heart, he was feeling it beat in his hands, and then he knew. He just knew. He had me finish up with the heart then went into her leg. She had a small aneurism in her femoral artery. Impossible to detect. Yet he felt it, goddamn it, while he was holding her heart! It is not possible, yet I watched this happen. The anesthesiologist is dumbfounded, quite shaken up, really. He said he could feel the pressures from her femorals were off, somehow wrong…”

“Mama is okay?” Toni said, wanting to believe what he was hearing but not exactly sure what the doctor was saying.

“Yes, your mother is fine now. Tom has fixed the valve and cleared out the left carotid artery, which was almost completely blocked. Then the artery in the leg . . .” Santoni’s voice trailed away into the coffee-drenched air. 

Paulo was wrapped around his sister’s neck, crying almost hysterically, yet quietly. Vico sat back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling; he crossed himself once and wiped a tear from his cheek.

“She’s going to be alright?” Toni said, and it was more a statement than a question.

“Oh, yes, young man. In fact, she may be better than alright. I suspect her memory will be better, and she will be able to walk more, in fact, when she gets better she should walk a lot more. This will help her heal.”

“You said you lost her? Twice? What happened?”

“We could not find the source of this drop in pressure. We tried to increase pressure with medicine, but this only made the aneurism worse. If Tom had not discerned this when he did, she would not have survived. You must excuse me, because it is this I do not yet understand. He knew right where to go. It was as if someone told him. I have never seen anything even remotely like this. So, if you all will excuse me, I will go back and help Tom. But he wanted you to know where things stand.”

“Thank you, doctore,” Vico said, but Paulo jumped up and gave the physician a hug.

“Eh, no kissing the cheeks young man, or I will have to shower before I return!”

Paulo looked embarrassed, stepped back, and the round man walked back into the surgery. 

“Many prayers were answered tonight,” the old man said to himself. “And there will be time now to repair that which has been broken for so long.”

+++++

Mary Ann Doncaster sat on the swim platform by Elsie; they both looked at the dolphin circling lazily just a few meters away. There were still a few stars overhead, but already the eastern horizon was filling with the wispy gold tendrils of the coming storm. A few clouds were red-tinged and angry, running ahead of an imperturbable sun from the clutches of the storm. She loved these early mornings, just as the sun chased away the last of the night.

“I wonder where Goodwin is?” Malcolm said as he came up into the cockpit. “Blast it all, I’ll need a sweater out this morning. Who told us it never gets cold here?”

“Did you put the water on?” Mary Ann asked as he smiled.

“Yes. Warming some scones, as well. Is that fish still out there?”

“Yes he is, and he’s not a fish!”

“Well, yes, I’m sure of that! Would you like some jam with yours?”

“It’s almost as though he was waiting for something, you know, Malcolm? Or someone.”

“Excuse me!” A woman’s voice clipped the air.

Malcolm jumped, turned toward the voice on the quay. “Right-O, and what are we about this morning?”

“Dr Goodwin invited me to sail with him today, to Rapallo. Is he up yet?”

“Not here right now!” Mary Ann said from the swim platform. “But please, come aboard.”

Malcolm helped the newcomer up onto Diogenes and led her across the cockpit to Springer. “Name’s Doncaster, Malcolm Doncaster,” he said while he helped the other woman onto Goodwin’s boat. “And that’s my wife Mary Ann back there, bothering that silly fish.”

“Pardon me?”

“Come, have a look.” He helped the old woman back to the stern rail.

“Hello there,” Mary Ann said.

“Yes, hello,” the woman said as she saw the dolphin circling down there beneath Tom’s boat. She too sat down in bewildered silence as she looked at the dog, the dolphin, and Mary Ann. “How long has it been down there?”

“All night, as best I can tell.”

“Oh, my name is Trudi.”

“Well, right then,” Malcolm said. “Tea for three it is.” He slipped quietly back into Diogenes and could be heard cussing and rummaging away down there.

“He seems, I don’t know the right word, but he seems sad,” Trudi said as she watched the dolphin.

“Disconsolate was the word that came to mind, but yes, sad. Preoccupied and sad.”

“Is that a dog with . . .”

Elsie turned to look at the other woman; once satisfied she remembered her from the day before she turned back to the Two Scar.

“This is Elsie.”

“Ah, yes. We’ve met.”

“Have you indeed? When might that have been?”

“With Dr Goodwin. Yesterday.”

“Ah.”

The dolphin raised its head from the water and stood almost straight up, one eye cast on the village across the harbor.

“What now? Mary Ann sighed.”

A beige colored Mercedes taxi whipped onto the piazza and raced across to the quay and came to a skidding halt by Diogenes; the back door opened and a completely shell-shocked Tom Goodwin emerged. They watched as Goodwin paid the driver, said something off-color and laughed at the reply.

He walked down to Diogenes muttering something about frustrated Formula One drivers being allowed to operate taxis, then he hopped aboard; Malcolm popped up from below when Diogenes began rocking.

“Oh, so you made it after all. Good show! Help me with these scones, would you?”

Goodwin received the platter of fresh-baked scones and laid them out on the cockpit table; Malcolm followed with tea and cream.

“My God in heaven!” Malcolm exclaimed when he climbed up into the cockpit. “You’re – you’re covered with blood!”

“What?” Mary Ann said. She stepped down into the cockpit and looked at him. “Good grief, Tom! What are those, anyway; surgical clothes?”

Goodwin looked down at his scrubs and shrugged. “Yeah. Sorry. Long night.” He stood up and made to leave.

“Tom, sit down!” Malcolm spoke up now. “What on earth have you been up to?”

“Uh, don’t really want to talk about it now.”

“Really, Tom!” Mary Ann shot back. “What have you been up to?”

“So, sport,” Malcolm interceded, “you up for this today?”

Goodwin looked at Trudi. “How about you? Interested in a little adventure?”

“Sounds delightful!” she said admiringly. “When do we start?”

“Well, let’s eat a bit first!” Malcolm said grumpily. “Fresh from the oven and all that, you know.”

“You and your stomach, Malcolm! Really!”

“Bah! Woman!”

“Mary Ann! But I thought you were the baker! You mean, he’s . . .”

“Right, sport. And don’t you say a word, either!”

Goodwin laughed with Mary Ann and Trudi. They sat in Diogenes’ cockpit and watched warm glows struggle behind the dark-rimmed clouds closing in on the far horizon; after a few minutes Goodwin stopped, his eyes locked on the water behind the boats.

“How long have they been here?”

“They?” Mary Ann said as she turned. “Oh my word. Now what?”

Elsie sat up on the swim platform, her ears now standing almost straight up as she watched seven dolphins swimming in a circle just a few yards away.

“One of them was here all night, Tom,” Malcolm said. “Elsie sat out here with it all night, never moved as far as I can tell.”

Without saying a word Goodwin stood and walked to the edge of the transom; he pushed off and made a gracefully silent dive right into the middle of the formation. He came up and began treading water; his companions gathered wordlessly at the rail, wondering what had gotten into him.

Two Scar came to Goodwin and rolled over on his side and stared into Goodwin’s eyes.

“She’s alright, boy. You understand me, don’t you? She’s fine now.”

The dolphin drifted into Goodwin and put his nose on one of the blood soaked stains. Everyone could hear the dolphin moan, but then another dolphin came in close and did the same thing. Two Scar moved off but kept close to Goodwin; all of them came in and did the exact same thing, then one by one they left the harbor. 

All but Two Scar.

He came back to Goodwin, put his forehead against Goodwin’s face, and Tom stroked it softly, said gentle words while they held each other in the water.

Goodwin turned when Two Scar slipped into the darkness; only then was he aware of the crowd that had formed. Not only the Doncasters and Trudi; now he saw at least a dozen people on the far side of the harbor were looking at him, even more on the quay behind Springer.

“Oh good grief!” he said as he paddled over and pulled his tired body up onto the swim platform. His neck felt hot and stiff, his head full of a dull ache that pressed in like a vice, and he took the towel Malcolm handed him and dried his face.

“What was that all about?” Trudi said in her clipped nordic accent.

“Don’t ask,” Mary Ann replied. “Do yourself a big favor, and just do not ask!”

Malcolm laughed while he cleared dishes. “You’ll have an interesting talk with Tom, no doubt. But I don’t think you’ll learn anything. I certainly haven’t.”

“But . . . were they talking to one another?” Trudi asked. “It looked that way…?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t.”

Goodwin climbed down onto the swim platform and sat next to Elsie. He put his arm around her while she licked salt water from his arms, and Goodwin looked out to sea. He saw Two Scar looking at him from several hundred feet away and Tom waved. Elsie sat up and licked his face.

+++++

Santoni led them into the intensive care unit, cautioning Margherita to not let what she saw alarm her. It always looked, he told them, much worse than it really was.

She lay on her back, a green plastic ventilator covered her mouth and nose, and her eyes were taped shut with thin strips of tape. She was loosely covered with thin white sheets; lines and tubes sprouted from every part of her body. Margherita gasped and turned away when she saw the angry red line of tape and staples holding her mother’s chest together; Paulo walked to his mother’s side and took her hand and stroked it gently.

“Mama, we’re here. All of us, Mama. We love you. We’re going to help you get strong.”

Her hand was lifeless, unresponsive, yet machines overhead pulsed and whispered, each singing their own peculiar music of life, now a simple melody of hope and renewal. Paulo looked at the machines as a reflection of his mother’s life force, he held on to the hope fused inside these pulsing electrons, simply because what he saw lying in the bed frightened him beyond all understanding. He could not imagine a world without his mother in it. The mere thought was almost unendurable. 

Vico held Margherita by his side, and together they walked forward until they came to her bedside. Margherita’s lips trembled, her eyes twitched and watered, and the old man held her tight to hide his own fear. 

Of them all, only Toni seemed outwardly remote and untouched by the pain before him. He was numb, almost in shock. He was her baby boy, and always would be.

+++++

Springer left the still harbor under power; as soon as she cleared the cape Goodwin unfurled the main and fell off the wind. He rolled out the staysail and cut the engine, now all was quiet except for slowly building winds and water parting before running along the hull, joining again behind him in a softly gurgling wake.

Goodwin watched as Diogenes motored along the direct line to Rapallo; either Malcolm had grown tired of sailing or was below baking bread. Mary Ann was at the tiller staring ahead. Whatever the reason, it was a glorious morning to sail and Goodwin felt renewed after the long night in surgery. It was a pity the Doncasters had lost sight of this simple pleasure. He twisted his head from side to side, his neck still stiff and hot.

Trudi remained silent, lost in memory as they started sailing. Her long gray hair streamed behind in the breeze, faint rays of pale yellow sunlight struggled from behind faraway clouds to wash over her, and she held her face in the bronze light, her mouth parted ever so slightly as if trying to drink in every last molecule of time. 

She turned to Goodwin. “May I go forward?”

“Sure. Just remember to keep hold of something as you walk.”

She nodded, staggered forward holding on to lifelines and little rails over the dorades until she came to the bow pulpit. She sat with her feet dangling over the side, and for all the world Goodwin thought she looked like a young girl again. 

Joy is such a simple thing, he remembered. Why do we grow away from it? Why do we grow so reluctant to embrace it?

He heard her squeal, saw her point at the water, and there they were, all of them.

Seven fins arced alongside Springer, dark gray darts slipping through the water with the barest sound, though he could hear their blowholes working. Two Scar settled aft beside Goodwin, the dolphin’s grinning face alive with the pure joy of spinning through silver seas, living life on the crest of a wave. Goodwin smiled at Two Scar and he replied by jumping high into the air, skipping across the sea like a flat rock thrown by a kid.

Trudi came alive. She leaned into the pulpit and smiled and laughed, then lay along the gunwale, her hand reaching down to the sea. A fin sliced through the water, came to her seeking hand and in a sudden burst ran up and surfed on the bow wave for a moment, Trudi’s hand resting on the dolphin’s back. The dolphin slipped underwater only to fall back and run forward to the bow wave again and again. It was a game, it was joy, and they both loved it.

After perhaps a half hour, Two Scar came alongside. He seemed agitated; Goodwin looked to the far horizon. Angry black clouds seethed, lightning flashed beyond the far mountains. He turned to Two Scar and nodded understanding.

“Alright! We’ll head in now!”

He called Trudi, asked her to come back to the cockpit. When she was settled in he came about and made his course for the breakwater at Rapallo. Springer now pushed into building seas, roiled water arced through the air and fell back on them when she bulled her way through the really big waves. Goodwin looked at Trudi; she still seemed like a little girl full of the gentlest expectations – her radiant face freed from all the cares time had visited upon her.

She turned and looked at Goodwin.

“Thank you,” she said.

“No, Trudi. Thank you,” he said, then he took her hand and squeezed it.

+++++

Malcolm took Springer’s lines as the boat pulled into the marina, Mary Ann helped Trudi cross to Diogenes while the men sorted out docklines. Elsie seemed happy to see Goodwin; she jumped over to Springer and went to the rail where Trudi had lain with the dolphins; she sniffed around and looked back at Goodwin, her tail thumping away on the deck. 

Dark gray clouds scudded in low over the city, rain began falling, and even behind the protective mole ragged gusts were stirring up choppy-rolling waves. Masts clanged as wind whipped through the aluminum forest, owners scurried about making lines fast while others sat in their cockpits drinking wine and watching all the activity with quiet, knowing smiles on their smug faces. 

After things were stowed below Goodwin went to Diogenes and had tea, then called a number on his cell phone. He spoke cryptically in terse medical terms to the voice on the other end, nodded his head a couple of times. 

“Alright, Jon, let me take a nap at least. Then I’ll grab a taxi and come up. What? Alright, suit yourself. Down inside the mole, right behind the seawall. Green hull, sailboat, name on the stern is Springer. I’ll leave the hatch open so come on in.”

Everyone was looking at him – again – now full of manifest curiosity.

“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell us what that was all about?” Malcolm pleaded.

“Margherita’s mother. She crashed last night. Had to go in and fix a few things.”

“Crashed?” Malcolm said.

“Go in?” Mary Ann stated. “You mean . . .”

“Yup.”

“Aren’t there licensing issues? How, uh . . . ”

“Yup, and don’t ask.”

“I see,” he said.

“Good. Now, can we drop it?”

“Right. So, how far off did you two go? We almost lost sight of you.”

“Well, when we tacked back in toward Rapallo we were about five miles out.” Goodwin rolled his neck, tried to get the kink out again.

“Yes,” Trudi added, “it was glorious. The dolphins came and swam with us for what seemed like forever. I even touched one!”

“Two Scar?” Malcolm asked. “Was he there?”

“Yup.”

“Two Scar?” Trudi asked. “What . . .”

“Hey, hate to break this up, but I’m going to go get some shut-eye; y’all tell her whatever you want. Just let me get some sleep, okay?” Goodwin slipped below and into the shower and let the water run on his neck; after a quick hot one he toweled off and put on a dry t-shirt, then flopped down on his berth and dropped off into a deep sleep. He was aware, in those last few glowing moments of consciousness, of a furry ball of warm dog curling up next to him. He felt a cold nose press against his and smiled.

“Tom . . . Tom . . . you can wake up now.” It was a woman’s voice, Swedish accent. “You have a guest. Tom. Wake up . . .”

“Do I have to?” He was aware of his neck . . . it felt stiff, and hot . . . 

“Yes. Dr Santoni is here. We’ve been talking for an hour. He asked us to let you sleep, but he must go back to the hospital soon, and he wants you to accompany him.”

Goodwin felt the woman’s hands running through his hair, and his eyes popped wide open.

“Tom,” she said again, this time ever so gently, “Thank you for this morning. These memories I will always cherish. Tom? But you feel hot. Go wash up with cool water.” 

He listened as she walked up on deck; he heard swarms of voices buzzing about, almost as if a party was in full swing. He sat up and felt hair all over his face and mouth and began picking Springer hair from his lips and beard as he stumbled into the head. He washed his face, looked at his reflection in the mirror; his eyes were blood red and he felt hot – impossibly hot. He took a thermometer and stuck it under his tongue and padded into the galley. He pulled out a bottle of frigid mineral water, felt a line of sweat forming on his brow, then took the thermometer and held it up to a light.

“102.4 – well, fuck!” He walked over to the companionway, made eye contact with Santoni and held up the thermometer.

“What is it?”

Goodwin handed Santoni the thermometer. “See if you see what I see, then wash your hands!”

“Shit! You better lie back down.” Santoni got on his cell phone and called his hospital. When he finished he came and sat in the saloon across from his old friend and mentor. “I just added some antibiotics to Mrs Morrettis cocktail, and I’m having a nurse come down and draw blood. Have you any acetaminophen? And where do I put this thing?”

Thermometer in the head, tube on counter. Tylenol in the cabinet over the sink. You know, I feel like shit.”

“I’m not surprised. When did you first feel this come on?”

“About five minutes ago. No. My neck’s been stiff all morning.”

Santoni looked at Goodwin with narrowed eyes, rinsed the thermometer off and stuck it under Goodwin’s tongue. He looked at his wristwatch and felt Goodwin’s pulse. After another minute he looked at the thermometer and shook his head.

“Okay, that’s it. We’re going to the hospital. Let’s go.”

“What is it now?”

“Over 103. Now let’s go. This isn’t good, and you know it. You say your neck is stiff?”

“Jon? I think you’d better call an ambulance…” Goodwin’s world grew faraway and misty, he felt the earth reaching up for him, and it felt for a moment like he was falling . . .

+++++

He woke in the night; he could see someone sitting in a chair by the window inside a tiny, antiseptically bare room. The world smelled of strong disinfectant and garlic. He smiled, tried to lift his head from the starchy pillow and the pounding began . . .

“Crap-almighty! Son of a bitch!”

A small bedside lamp flipped on; Goodwin shielded his eyes: “Youch! Bright! Off!”

“Tom? Oh, thank God!”

He turned, saw Margherita in the brilliant light, saw tears on her face and in her eyes.”

“Hey, kiddo. How’s your mom doing?”

“Tom! Tom! You . . . she’s fine, she’s doing just fine. Going home tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? No way. It’s way too soon for that. She needs at least two weeks . . .”

“Tom. You’ve been here almost two weeks. In a coma until three days ago, then the medicine began to work. We’ve been very worried, Tom. Very worried.”

Her words drifted around the perimeter of his consciousness for a moment, then worked their way in. “Two weeks?”

“Yes, Tom.”

A nun came in and looked at Goodwin and smiled, then ducked quickly out of the room. She came back a few minutes later with a glass full of water, crushed ice and a straw.

“Drink this,” the old woman said. “Slowly, doctore, slowly.”

“Gad, my mouth tastes like a barnyard!”

Santoni came into the room a few minutes later.

“Eh, so the lazy no good bum decides to wake up, does he? About time!”

“Jon? What the hell . . .”

“We’ll talk about all that it in a while . . . later, alright?” He was looking from Goodwin to Margherita surreptitiously, as if there was a secret he wanted to guard.

“Yeah, sure. How’s Mrs Moretti?”

“Great, Tom. No problems. Now you? Tell me how you feel.”

“Weak. And my head hurts.”

“From the spinals. Sorry.”

“Jeesh! How many did you do?”

“Several, my friend. Meningococcus, you understand?” Again Santoni averted his eyes while he spoke quietly.

“Meningitis?”

Santoni nodded. “We have been feeding you Ceftriaxone through a central line for quite some time now, and some Vancomycin too. To be on the safe side.”

“No wonder I feel like shit.”

“Yes, no wonder. Warmed over shit, too. Now you excuse me, okay Tom. I got to go and get ready for surgery.”

“What time is it?” 

“Eh, Margherita? You get him up to speed on things, okay. I see you in a while, Tom.”

“Up to speed? On what?”

“Tom, we didn’t know how ill you were, if you were going to make it. We didn’t know what to do.”

“And? Why do I get the feeling you’ve left out something important here?”

“We, uh, well, we called your father?”

“You didn’t. Please, God, tell me that you didn’t.”

“Vico did. Yesterday. They talked some.”

“Is he here?”

“No. He’s coming Friday. Four days from today.”

“Swell.” Goodwin shook his head as contradictory impulses flew through his mind. “Oh, well, c’est la vie. Comme il faut . . . oh, excuse me . . . this is as it should be, I suppose. Too many pieces of the puzzle missing. Anything else I need to know?”

“Elsie will not leave your boat. It is still in Rapallo, and the Doncasters stay there too. The woman Trudi stays there too, with Elsie.”

“Swell.”

“What does this word mean? This swell.”

“Huh? Oh, something like ‘oh, great,’ but a close cousin of ‘fuck,’ ‘shit,’ ‘damn,’ and ‘holy Mother of God!’”

She laughed and Goodwin thought once again how good it felt to hear her laughter; it washed over him and made the pain in his head roll away for a moment, but he could see she was holding something back from him.

“Now, what aren’t you telling me?” He looked at the reluctance in her eyes, reluctance, and a little mischief. “You’re not telling me something. What?”

“No, Tom. You have enough on your mind now. With your father coming.”

“Don’t try to protect me, Margherita. Not me.”

“Why shouldn’t I? I love you,” she exploded. “I love you so much it hurts to breathe when I am away from you. I cannot go to work, I cannot eat, I cannot leave this room, and I will not until you are well, or . . .” She looked away, embarrassed by her outburst.

“Or what?” Tom seemed quiet now, almost embarrassed as well. “Margherita? What won’t you tell me?”

“I think I am with child.” She looked at him, measured him. “I think I am with our child.”

He looked at her for a long time, held out his hand to her and she leaned into him, put her face on his fingers. He closed his eyes, and was soon asleep.

She heard his breathing slow, heard the gathering quiet take the room again, and she pulled back and looked at him.

He was smiling. Softly, gently smiling.

And she understood. Everything was beginning to make sense.

May, 1968

Portofino

Dino Moretti backhanded Maria Theresa and she flew across the kitchen, landing in a ragged heap in a far corner. Her stinging face, already bruised from several blows over the past week, hurt beyond words. The tears she cried came from a place inside she’d never known existed. They came from a despair unknown to her, and these mute feelings tore her apart.

Dino Moretti wasn’t a simple dullard; even though he had lived in denial of basic truths for several months now, the urge to destroy Maria Theresa grew stronger each time he looked at the little bastard, this little child Paulo. The boy wasn’t his – he knew this beyond all measure of doubt – and as far as he was concerned everyone in the village knew this as well. He knew this because he hadn’t made love to his wife since Margherita was conceived, and unless someone was willing to come forward and make a good case for Immaculate Conception, the boy’s origins were far from clear. 

But he knew the truth. Oh yes, he knew . . .

Vico had done the deed. That was it!

Ludvico would always love Maria Theresa. He always had, and always would. 

Vico had done it! He must have . . .

Earlier that day, Moretti vowed before God he would kill Vico, and Maria Theresa had grown so full of despair she had let slip all restraint and simply laughed violently at the little man. She had no other emotions left inside by that time; she simply let go of her fear and laughed – even as she wept, she laughed. She felt hollow, like she was drifting, slowly drifting toward the looming precipice of a far away oblivion.

Had she wanted this to happen?

“It’s not Vico, you fool,” she said softly, reprovingly, and he had slugged her in the belly, hard, his face red, the veins in his neck pulsing with tireless venom. He circled the room out of his mind, circled like a shark sensing fresh blood in the water, all the while his anger coiling like a snake, readying for the next strike.

‘Why did I smile at him then?’ she asked herself later.

“You lying whore!” he yelled when he kicked her in the gut again. Then he too began laughing. “So, the jokes on me, eh? You fucking whore!” He lunged forward, his foot lifting, drawing back . . .

Maria – doubled over in pain – raised her hands to defend herself from the next blow, but it never came. She heard someone banging on the door and Dino, his blood boiling, went to answer it; she crawled into the bathroom and locked the door, all the while gasping from a sharp pain in her chest. She heard sharp words, a struggle, fists and furniture breaking . . . footsteps running down old wooden stairs, other footsteps coming toward the bathroom, someone knocking on the door softly, gently . . . a voice so full of love and compassion . . . a voice full of mystery and not lacking in imagination . . . a voice from her most cherished past . . .

“Maria, it’s me. Open the door.” She heard Paul Goodwin’s say, and she fell to the floor, weeping.

+++++

Their’s had been a conspiracy of silence. The ties that bind had grown very strong over two lifetimes. Love endures anything but neglect, and yet Vico had never once relinquished his complete devotion to Maria Theresa. His love was simple and pure, a vow to himself beyond release

Maria held Vico to her secret after the first ‘reunion’ with Goodwin. Paul must never know, she told him, because she could not, would not use the child to bring him here against his will. He would come, she maintained, when he was ready to listen to the truth they had discovered. He would come when he was ready to listen to the music of the night, to simple chords of destiny, to the music of this unknown calling.

Then the beatings began. Everyone in the village knew the shame over their house, but not the cause. First she became an outcast, then grew ever more reclusive.

Vico thought of his friend in faraway America, thought of their momentary roadside encounter, and of Goodwin’s fair-haired son. Could he keep the nature of her secret from them? Could he find Goodwin and tell him and not betray the conspiracy? Vico knew where Paul Goodwin worked now, and he struggled with loyalties and desperate need; in the end he called Goodwin, and talked to him within these limits. He kept to his part of the conspiracy, he made what case he could. He pleaded, he waited.

And Paul Goodwin came to Portofino again. He came as if on wings afire, full of seething rage and unrequited fury. He came in love, for love had called once again.

+++++

Goodwin rented a small apartment above Vico’s family’s ristorante; they moved her and the two children there in the dead of night. Goodwin and Vico found a couple of tough guys to tell Dino if he came around or touched Maria Theresa again his body would never be found. The message was delivered with quite a bit more force than asked for, and Dino Moretti faded from the scene for a few years. Maria Theresa began to mend, at least in body. Goodwin had saved her; she always knew he would. Her sense of destiny was so sure-footed; hadn’t he always followed her through the rocks?

But Vico saw over the coming weeks and months that something inside her soul would never mend, and that something was her unrequited love for Paul. Goodwin did not remain in Portofino, he remained true to his former self. He was never around for more than a day at a time, he followed the dictates of his schedule; he always flew home to New York, to his family. And when those days of his various returns came more infrequently, Maria Theresa simply lived all the more for them; it was as if she stopped breathing between his visits, and came to life again when he returned to her. Paul brought toys from America for the children, he took her to Rome and Florence more than once, and finally one summer day in July of 1969 they went to Venice. They made love in a little hotel above a canal as they’d always hoped they might. 

Their’s was a passion borne of other-worldly need, simple, pure, with no guilt possible because the reason of their union would always be beyond the laws of man. All the mystery came back in their newfound lust, but there was still something missing . . .

One afternoon he talked of leaving his wife, of bringing Maria to America, and while he talked she saw the naked futility of his plans. She could never leave the Port of the Dolphins, and his first best destiny remained there with her as well. If only he could see this simple truth…

He would not hear of it, however. He could never leave America, his life was his work. While Goodwin considered their past an un-reconciled debt, he never considered what he asked of her unfair because he could not see the vital connection of Maria Theresa to the sea, or to the music they had played. He simply could not believe that asking her to leave the village was relevant; she would have her children, and him, together, united at last to make a better life. She did not feel this true to the destiny she felt in her soul, and grew bitter with what she considered his indolent selfishness. When they returned to Portofino she told him to leave her, to go live his life – such as it was – in America. She would move on, she told him, and he should do the same.

Utterly defeated and now truly alone, Goodwin left. And he never returned. He saw his son move off to college, then medical school, and he resolved to stay by his wife’s side, because that was his duty.

Nine months after their trip to Venice, Antonio Thomasi Moretti came into the world, a few months after Dino Moretti returned to the forgiving arms of his wife.

+++++

If Paulo and Toni Moretti never knew their real father, Margherita most certainly did know hers. After his return a beaten man, before Toni came into the world, he was true to his word and never once raised a hand to Maria Theresa. He simply turned his insidious, tortured soul’s demented attentions on his daughter. 

He never lifted a hand to hurt her; he didn’t need to. He knew which words cut the deepest and he used them frequently. Margherita learned to bleed in painless agony. When Maria Theresa made a new dress for her, she knew she could count on her father to belittle her appearance. When she brought home good reports from school, she knew he would undermine her confidence in other ways, tell her how stupid she really was, how meaningless education was for a girl. It was predictable, she knew what was coming, always, but she never knew why. She never understood why he hated her so, and why, through it all, she continued to love him. Her life wasn’t fair, it just was.

And yet there was something deeper amiss; she had faint memories of another man in the depths of memory, a man who had helped her mother, who stood by her for a time, and she asked her father about this one morning. He surprised her, too. He didn’t try to humiliate her, he didn’t belittle her question. 

No. Instead the veneer shattered, his walls fell. He broke down and cried until only salt fell from his eyes. And in her surprise she went to him, she held onto this man who was her father, and while she didn’t understand why, she felt his pain. She felt vultures’ wings of betrayal beating the air everywhere around her, the concussive ripples flowing through her own heart like dizzying waves of recrimination. But now, with her arms around her father, with his scratchy fisherman’s beard resting on her head, she held him and told him that she loved him, and the beaten man crumbled into salt-laden dust before her eyes. 

In the weeks that followed, the little man was reborn. He finally found love in his heart, and that was the last place the man had expected to find it. He could not do enough for his daughter, no dress was too good for her, he took her everywhere – fishing, and to the market to sell their catch; those were their favorite days – and in time little Paulo came to know some small measure of this love, though within the tortured limits of his ‘father’s’ newfound abilities. As such, time held the Moretti family in tender hands, for they were all fragile, wounded creatures. In this tender, wounded hold, time passed as a bloody carcass dragged along a rock-strewn road in a tired beast’s mouth.

Toni, as he grew older, never went near the man; boundaries borne of instinct were as solid as any stone wall in this youngest boy, and he remained by his mother’s side whenever Dino Moretti came home. He watched his mother and he learned one simple truth: that man was not to be trusted. Before he was five years old he hated Dino Moretti, and his feelings never changed over the years. Not even after her father pulled his drowning sister from the sea.

Once, when his voice had started to change, he asked his mother one simple question –“Is he my father?” – and Toni never once forgot the look in her eyes. Warm, sympathetic, and yet full of sorrows he knew he would never understand: “Of course he isn’t. How could he be?” 

He looked at her in a new, very different way after that one solitary moment in time. In one shattered instant he understood everything. He understood that she had learned the nature of Moretti and turned away from all his hate and fear. Turned away, he knew, to something he didn’t know but could faintly understand. 

Yet there were, he found, limits to what she would tell him. Her conspiracy remained intact.

But, even so . . . her words haunted him.

“How could he be?” He always heard those words when he saw Dino and the irony humbled him, filled him with cloudy incomprehensions. He, Toni, was not of that man, she was telling him, he was not of Dino’s violence and ignorance, not of his blind shame and simpering rectitude. He, Toni, was Different. Better than Dino Moretti.

But – who was he of? He came to define his life in terms of what was missing from his life, and so he grew up incomplete, searching.

And yet, he understood the one vital piece of the puzzle. Dino was not his father. The other piece, that most important piece, remained an unknown, a song unplayed in the light of day. He drifted between wanting to know, and of being afraid of knowing. It was a sour split that left bitter wounds and, in time, the cause of many sleepless nights.

One night Dino attacked his mother, not with fists but with words, and Toni picked up a kitchen chair and broke it over the man’s back. Paulo came and pulled them apart, and this became the pattern that would define their childhood. Paulo took Dino’s edicts as accepted wisdom and never questioned them; Dino was – after all – Paulo’s father. Wasn’t he?

Wasn’t he? 

Surely that was why his brother always took his ‘father’s’ side.

Yet soon Toni could see the truth behind this lie, it was right there in front of him like an old wound that refused to heal. The old fisherman embraced Margherita as his own, so obviously, in the young boy’s mind, she could be nothing else. But there was a distance between Paulo that was never bridged, no matter how many times his older brother stuck up for the old man. It was their pattern, and as such Toni became an unwitting party to their conspiracy, and the split within deepened.

He could see it now, he knew it was so in his soul, but Paulo either could not or would not see anything beyond what he wanted to see. He clung to his ‘father’ despite the man’s familial agnosticism, he rejected his mother’s tenacious love because he sensed only the lie, not the substance of the conspiracy. Paulo wanted to believe Dino was his father, he had to believe in this, in his construct of ‘father’, because for him there was nothing else beyond this paternity. He was Paulo Moretti.

The very opposite was true of Toni. Truth was truth, no matter the pain, and his mother was truth. And in the end as he knew it would, Toni could not countenance deceit when they were forced to choose sides. Paulo chose to keep faith with his ‘father’. For Toni, there was no choice.

Paulo was a fool. A blind fool, Toni knew, but a fool nonetheless. There was no truth in the boy’s choice, only desperation. There wasn’t love, only fear.

In yet time, the only desperation Toni felt was when he looked at Margherita and Dino Moretti when they were together. He wanted what she had. He wanted his belonging to be complete.

Then something happened. Something terrible, yet something miraculous.

One evening Maria Theresa walked to the cape, and Toni followed her.

He saw her dance to the music of the night.

Portofino, 1983

He was thirteen years old and very skinny; neighbors thought he was prone to anger and was, more often than not, just a little depressed. Toni Moretti hated the man people called his father as much as he revered his mother, and he was angry. Then he was depressed. And the only thing he longed for more than his mother’s love was to find the knowing smile on his true father’s face. He wanted to know the story of his origins, the real story, the true story – not the fictions repeated at Christmas and on birthdays – and he grew increasingly obsessed with the fiction that had entombed him for so many years. The older he grew the farther away truth seemed to slip, the more uncomfortable became the fiction his past was cloaked within. These clinging fictions were suffocating him, burying him under the weight of false illusions he’d had no role in creating. He looked at the relationship his sister Margherita had with Dino Moretti and balanced that against the idle foolishness his brother Paulo held for the same man, and inside dark moonlit nights deep in his bedroom he performed a simple ritual calculus, forever coming to the same answer: 

He needed to know his father, and his mother refused to tell him anything of the man.

Why?

What was so bad about the man? What was so bad as to warrant this deception?

Over the last year his sister Margherita had fallen in love with a musician from Avignon, France. The boy, Marc Duruflé, had performed with a something less than energetic rock band the previous summer at an arts festival and had taken to the simple beauty of the village; he stayed after he found a job in the fall teaching music at the local school, and there he met Margherita. This was her last year attending the village school, and she planned to go to university in Genoa the next year. She seemed possessed of a boundless intelligence, yet her mother feared the girl was troubled by the same restless grip of wanderlust that had plagued her father when he started law school. She was afraid she would only try to destroy herself along false paths to easy heights.

Soon claiming to be in love with Duruflé, the eighteen year old girl fast passed restlessness and fell into the easy grip of full blown rebellion. Perhaps fomented as a means of escaping the grip of life in a small village, or perhaps simply to hurl retribution in her mother’s face for the harm she had done Dino Moretti over the years, Margherita flaunted her relationship with the young musician in every face she came upon. Dino smiled, and while not unaware of the ironies his daughter’s sordid affair presented, when he saw the distress Margherita caused his wife he could only encourage the relationship to deepen. As mother and daughter drifted deeper into conflict he sat back and watched everything around his home fall apart, and he smiled ever more deeply as wounds so lightly veiled by the tattered fabric of lies began to come apart in their family’s vernal gales. Perhaps as the man always had, his self-destructive impulses held sway over this great unraveling, and when it was finished only his bitter smile remained. Margherita and the musician fled to Florence for a ‘reunion tour’, and as a result she never went to university. Dino Moretti’s vicious little circles began to draw to their logical conclusion when Maria Theresa fell into the bottomless despondence of this loss. 

Toni Moretti watched the man closely during this time; he saw the pettiness and vindictiveness in the man as these events consumed his mother. Worse still, all the man’s vacuous self-absorbed anger for Maria Theresa billowed forth and was released in venal fury, and all in the apparent purpose of destroying the one good thing he had created with his life. He was consumed with destroying his own flesh and blood. The man so obviously hated himself he could see no other end to his ruined life. 

Toni became aware of the concept of destiny during this time, and while he began to feel sorry for the man, this only caused him to think more about what his own might be. He knew, somehow, that his destiny was bound completely to his real father’s. But how?

Watching this tragedy unfold filled-in one vital part of Toni’s equation, the why of things. Why his mother had once turned away from the man. But why had she taken him back, only to betray the man again and again? Had his mother simply always hated Dino Moretti, or were there even greater betrayals lurking in the shadows?

Toni began to wonder: just who had betrayed who? The why of things slowly faded from his thoughts.

A few weeks after Margherita left with Duruflé, Dino Moretti moved out of the little apartment Paul Goodwin had rented for Maria Theresa. So complete was the little man’s triumph, he even kissed her goodbye.

+++++

After Margherita’s stormy departure Toni stayed close to his mother. She was at a complete loss now, her eyes full of anger and doubt, helpless to control events spiraling out of control. She began to sit by the window in her apartment and look out at the sea beyond the cape for hours on end, and Toni began to understand that she was not simply looking into emptiness; she was, rather, waiting for somebody, waiting for – it seemed – a sign. He saw latent purpose in her eyes as she watched the sea, and in time he saw unrequited longing drifting away in the hours of her mind.

She began to take her Passeggiata in the evening once again, but now always alone, and always by walking slowly across the piazzeta as if lost in thought. As she walked, as the sun set around her, she invariably made her solitary way slowly along the quay and on to the cape beyond. She resumed these walks by herself, and she wanted no company, she said. She wanted to be alone with her thoughts, and for a while Toni relented and did not follow; he contented himself with watching her walk from the window above the harbor, his heart full of worried concern and looming curiosity. 

Toni began to think these walks were a form of penance, her solitude the only company she could bear, but there was something more to it that eluded him. Everything about their life had come undone, and in this unforeseen turbulence nothing was as it seemed.

Paulo would begin to cook their dinner when his mother left the apartment, these times when Maria Theresa left on her stroll, and as such he naturally assumed a role Dino never could have. Paulo tried to establish a sense of order in the house because, he said to himself, Toni and his mother needed it. Toni, of course, knew better. Toni knew that Paulo needed this sense of continuity, if only because he missed having Dino about. There was comfort in order, Toni saw, but no truth to be found in those harsh new shadows.

In time, Maria Theresa’s walks grew longer and Toni began to worry about her wanderings, for he simply had no idea of all the tortured trails his mother had walked in the night through the hills around the village. He did not know the toughness of the woman inside, of the Germans she had summarily dealt with, of the memories that even now stalked her in the night. He saw only wounded despair on her face, the emptiness of Margherita’s flight and the lingering echoes of Dino’s expulsion; as such, he only saw the empty nature of her longing as it remained now – as an untold myth – a tale that remained as unswept dust on the floor. He had no idea of the things that had been taken from his mother during the war, and the things she had turned her back on in the turbulent years since. Her conspiracy had protected him most thoroughly, and yet like dust was always underfoot, silent and unannounced.

One summer night when the July moon was full, she had not come back by dinner and Toni grew worried; as the evening passed into night a sense of foreboding filled the little apartment. Soon he was unable to tolerate his mounting anxiety and he left Paulo cooking in the kitchen and ran out onto the crowded piazzeta. He looked around helplessly at the noisily milling crowds, then ran across the old stone plaza and along the quay and on into the deepening shadows that defined the way out to the cape.

The air felt strange once he was in shadow, strange, almost electric, like the night was eager to return to this landscape and claim a prize long held from its grasp. Toni walked slowly as he drew near the cape, he slowed not because his concern had withered; rather he felt dark force gathering in the air beside him as he walked. He felt like he was being watched, and the hair on the back of his neck danced in the suddenly close air, then stood on end. He could just see moonlight dancing on the waves through the trees ahead, hear water weaving through rocks and a retreating wind snaking through the lush summer leaves overhead, and soon, above all else he felt looming energy coiling in the air all around this place. He left the trees and came out into the moonlight and stumbled to a stop.

He saw his mother’s clothes piled on a rock and his mind filled with dread pictures of tormented ends. He looked as best he could, looked on the rocks and down to the sea, but even then he could not see her, so blind was his need. His heart was consumed with certain knowledge; she had come here to kill herself in the sea that night, and he could feel in the air that this was not the first time she had come to this place to do so. Death had been stalking his mother and he did not understand why.

He hurried toward the sea then stopped again.

There she was. There, in the sea.

He stood in open-mouthed shock as he watched his mother’s luminously naked skin glowing in the sea. Her arms were outstretched, floating on the surface, her gray hair coiled on the surface and drifting in lazy arcs. All was just in silence; only the barest eddies came in from the sea to kiss the shore, and these did so hesitantly – as if they did not want to disturb what was about to unfold.

He saw the fin slicing through the water and he wanted to shout a warning but something gripped his throat and held him in silence. The form slid through the water and came to his mother with ferocious intent – or so it seemed to the boy – and it drew round her as if readying for the feast. Then the form resolved into shapes benign and soothing and he relaxed; he saw the black eye from where he stood on the rocks, he saw the dolphin rest on its side by his mother. They looked at one another, the woman and the creature, and they held a trust the boy had never seen before. He saw the dolphin rest its nose on her shoulder, saw her arms take hold of the creature and he heard her cry into the night. It was a sound he had never heard before, and it shattered his soul.

He listened to the sounds of her pain and they withered the flesh of this night with green fire. Her wails came as putrid agony to the chaste, waiting night, they came as rotted dreams oozing from the wounds of her private Hell. The boy beheld all this, and began to cry.

She held the animal and became as crystal; she shimmered and wavered in the moonlight as all the agony of her broken dreams came for her in the water, came to collect a debt long due, and the animal took her pain and held it up to the moon.

And Toni could hear the meaning of this union as his mother’s cries filled the night.

‘Destiny is not your enemy,’ he heard the wind and the water say. ‘You cannot fight her. And you must not turn away from her. You must find her, and never let go again. You must find her even if it kills you. ’

Toni looked down at his mother in the sea and he began to see how her life had unraveled. He could now as well feel his father in the air and in the water, and somehow it was all bound up in the creature by her side. He could see now that she had not come here seeking death. Rather, and of this he was quite sure, she had come seeking a renewed affirmation of life. The creature by her side in the water was her link to the very essence of life, a silent gray sentinel who had come to guard her dreams and guide her destiny. And as surreal as the scene was, to young Toni everything now made perfect sense.

He slipped from the rocks and made his way back into the village. 

He never told his mother what he had seen, what he had watched. And what he had come to know about her truth.

And Toni never saw the other eyes watching him. Eyes both in the sea, and on the wind. He never saw the old man’s eyes watching from behind dark trees, or the smile on the man’s face as he watched the young boy walk back into the circle of life.

The old man smiled at the water, and if the water smiled back at him, well, that was between the old man and the water.

Ospedali Civili Di Genova

Tom Goodwin sat up in the hospital bed, his back propped up on a stack of stiffly over-starched pillows, looking at Margherita as she slept in a recliner by the window. His head felt better now that he’d managed to get some solid food down earlier that evening, but he still felt light-headed whenever he got out of bed, and his forehead pounded if he tried to stand. He’d lost fifteen pounds in two weeks and was still as white as the sheets on his bed. He reached across for the cup of crushed ice on the bedside table and knocked it over; water spilled and the cup fell to the floor, waking Margherita from a light sleep.

“Sorry,” Goodwin said quietly while trying to get up from the bed.

Margherita opened her eyes and looked around the room; it felt to her like bad memories were alight in the room, their beating wings filling the air over her head with hollow echoes, filling this room with dreadful purpose. She saw Tom struggling to sit up in the bed, and water running off the bedside table onto the floor, and she pushed herself awake. She tossed a washcloth on the table and some napkins on the floor, then stood up beside Goodwin and helped him sit up.

“Tom, take deep breath.” She caught his wooziness while she looked at the clock on the wall. “It’s time for the medication. I am getting the nurse now.” She rubbed her eyes while she left the room; Goodwin held onto the bed – the world resolutely refused to stop spinning despite his best efforts to stop it – and he looked down at his bare feet swinging just above the cold tile floor, trying to hold a fixed frame of reference.

The night nurse came in and Goodwin groaned. The woman looked like a professional wrestler and was usually about as pleasant, but what really made her attractive, Goodwin thought, was the dark mustache. It matched the circles under the woman’s eyes, and her dark mood. She spoke only a little English, and relied on Margherita to translate when necessary. 

“Good evening, Nurse Ratchet,” he said with his nastiest sarcastic smile plastered on his face. The woman looked at him helplessly and shrugged while she slipped a thermometer under his tongue; an orderly came in and mopped the floor while the nurse continued taking his vitals. She took the probe out of his mouth and read the numbers, wrote them down on his chart, then flipped over to read through the orders once again. She scowled, walked out of the room, and Goodwin sighed.

“She’s so talkative and lovely,” he said as Margherita came back into the room. “I think we’re going to be good friends. Maybe even lovers.”

“Shush!” Margherita smiled as she put her finger to her lips. “She doesn’t want you to know, but she thinks you have a cute ass.”

“I do have a cute ass.” Goodwin smiled as she came back in and resumed her place by the window. “I think I remember you telling me just yesterday how cute my ass is.”

“You are insufferable, you do know that, don’t you?”

“Absolutely. Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

She said something in rapid-fire Italian and laughed, so he smiled, but then rubbed his temples with his thumbs; soon he lay back on the bed and a chill ran through his body. Another nurse – probably an aide, he thought – came in with a fresh cup of ice water and a half dozen pills and Goodwin tossed them down.

“I’d kill for a Coke,” he said, and the nurse nodded and left.

“Are you feeling any better?” Margherita asked.

“Actually, I don’t think so.” He reached up and felt a bead of perspiration forming on his forehead. “Feeling kind of clammy again.”

“Clammy? What is this?”

“Hot and sticky. Fever. I think it’s coming back.” Nurse Ratchet came back into the room; with a saline-filled syringe in hand she came over and flushed out the central line protruding from under his left collar bone, then swabbed off the fittings on a new I.V. bag and hooked it up. She checked the drip rate and made a note on her omnipotent and omnipresent chart. The aide brought in a cup of Coke and more ice.

“Coke good. You drink lots tonight, yes?” She looked down at Goodwin, her coal dark eyes full of unexpected compassion.

He didn’t know why, but her eyes choked him up. They caught him off guard, and he felt himself starting to tear up. The nurse ran her fingers through his hair and smiled at him. He raced to put up the wall, raced to hide his feelings. “So, what is it tonight? More Vancomycin?”

“Si, doctore. You temp – ah – your temperature is high again. I get you ready for another lumbar puncture later . . .”

“Oh! Goddamn, fuck no, not another. . .” Goodwin started crying openly now, and Margherita came to him and took his hand in her own.

The nurse looked at Margherita, her smile traced with grim lines that radiated strength. “He be okay,” she said in English, if only to reassure him. “You going be fines again.”

Florence, 1984

‘Why am I here?’

Margherita Moretti kneeled over the washbasin as another wave of nausea washed over her sweating face. She shuddered and closed her eyes as the bile crept up her throat again; while this wave passed she looked at her reflection in the mirror with barely concealed contempt nauseously filling her heart. She knew she was pregnant but the sickness was coming in nonstop waves now, and the smudged mascara lining her eyes felt preposterously out of place. She thought she looked hideous, and found the idea mildly amusing.

‘Why am I here?’ she asked herself again, here in this preposterously tiny restroom. Here as she struggled to hold down another rising tide confusion. 

Marc was rehearsing for the big gig tonight; his group was going to perform on a hotel rooftop down by the Ponte Vecchio. Record producers were going to be there, and everyone was excited that this was the big break they’d been hoping for. 

Marc’s skills as a keyboardist had grown over the past year, and his group was becoming famous around Florence and much of northern Italy, so much so that they had been billed to open for Emerson, Lake and Powell on their upcoming European tour. They were even making money occasionally, and living the high life all the time. 

They were, Margherita knew all too well now, living too high most of the time.

The hotel room they’d checked into two days ago smelled of pot and whiskey, piles of filthy sheets lay on the floor in a ragged heap. She looked at the mess and stifled another heave, then ran her hands under the tap, wiped her face clear of sweat and even tried to clear the black smudgy circles from around her eyes. She stumbled into the room and slipped on fishnet stockings and red thigh-high boots, a short skirt of violet suede topped by a black leather vest. Nothing else covered the rest of her body, and her breasts jutted out proudly. She put on fresh lipstick and touched up her eyes, then hurried back up to the rooftop.

Marc and the guys were running through their progressive rock version of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Aquarium sequence from The Carnival of the Animals; the piece had justly put them on the prog-rock map and their hopes of landing a recording contract tonight rested solely on how they performed the piece. Now, she watched as Marc ran his fingers over the keyboard – amazed, as she always was, at his daring virtuosity. She watched his long, slender fingers, thinking as she watched of how he played her body with the same precision, and she trembled at the thought of their making love again and again for all time. 

As she listened to the upright bass and the piccolo and the mandolin layered over guitar and drums, she knew the boys were sitting on the cusp of greatness, and she marveled at the sudden turn her life had taken. Just a little more than a year ago she had been festering in that little village, her duplicitous mother infecting everything around their house with her treacherous lies and vacillating half-truths. How had her father put up with her nonsense for all these years! But she had left all that behind now, and she felt like she was making her own run for the stars. She’d never once looked back, and never would, she told herself. She didn’t care if she ever saw any of her family again, and she’d told them exactly that.

The boys finished rehearsing and everyone made for their room – to ease up for a while before the big gig tonight – to take another quick trip together, so to speak.

And while it wasn’t a quick trip, it most certainly was a weird one. And almost a bad trip. . . 

Whether it was the acid they’d scored from some kids at the university or the heroin a drummer from L.A. gave them, Marc got seriously fucked up while Luc, the group’s vocalist, went out on a catatonic tour of the Milky Way for a few thousand years. When they were called to the rooftop as night fell over the city, they stumbled onto the stage and into the light and never once looked back.

Of the critics who attended the performance that night all were unanimous in their utter astonishment at the groups explosive virtuosity, the serious, indeed profound musicianship on display, and the almost painfully beautiful rendition of Saint-Saëns’ Aquarium. Agents swarmed over them after their performance – but these parasites parted as representatives from Atlantic Records surrounded the boys. It was a new day now.

And two days later the boys were in L.A.

Margherita remained in Florence for a few days, then decided to head to Genoa.

She called Marc a week later, and he told her how well things had been going. 

She asked what all these changes would mean. What would all these changes meant to their relationship?

He told her he’d been thinking a lot about these things, and it wouldn’t be fair to make her go through all this Hollywood crap, that life was getting too complicated, and that it would be best to end things now. 

Margherita felt violently ill the next morning. She was spotting and her belly was hot and tender. She took a taxi to the nearest hospital; later that afternoon she miscarried. She took a bus back to Portofino a week later and moved into a little flat Vico found for her. She took a job cleaning hotel rooms and disappeared into the anonymity of the life that had claimed her. 

And she remained good to her word and never told anyone in her family she had returned.

There was no need, really, and she knew it. 

She was going round and round; it was like she was on a carousel, and there was no way to get off.

+++++

She listened to Goodwin as he slept; she could hear the little trembles that shook his lips when he took a breath and she tried to smile. She looked at the half finished Coke on the bedside table and watched as little silver drips cued up at the bottom of the I.V. bottle and fell into the tubing that ran silently into his chest . . . and as she watched she felt utterly devoid of even the simplest hope. It was as if she was watching him die right before her eyes, yet she understood that wasn’t really the case.

Maybe it was because the room smelled as it had twenty years ago. This building made her skin crawl every time she saw it – even from a safe distance – and to even bring to mind the simplest awareness that she was pregnant again and suddenly the world had crushed in on her from every direction. She felt like she needed to run every time she walked the corridors of this personal Hell, but there was no where to go but back to Goodwin and to the hope she prayed would find her.

So the carousel just kept spinning, there never seemed to be enough time to get off, and she felt as if her life was becoming bound up in circles beyond her understanding.

As she watched, sweat soak through his gown and she started to cry.

+++++

Paul Goodwin lifted his suitcase up onto the scales; the check-in agent tisk-tisked and shook his head. “Three pounds over, sir. That’ll be seventy five dollars extra, sir.”

Goodwin smiled at the agent and put down the cash; he just managed to keep his mouth shut. He was enjoying this too much.

“I see you requested a window seat, sir. We can accommodate that request, but that will be an additional fifty dollars. Premium seating, you know.”

“Really? Is the flight full?”

“No, sir. Shall I find you a cheaper seat?”

“Oh, no. Heaven forbid. I’m sure all your customers must love being ripped off like this.”

“Sir, please watch your attitude. We’re required to report all abusive remarks to the TSA.”

“Yes, I imagine you are.” Goodwin slipped a few more bills on the counter. “That enough? Anything else you can get me for?”

The agent smiled as he printed up the boarding pass, his sense of victory apparently complete, then he reached down to put the baggage tracking bar-code on Goodwin’s bag.

“I thought I was headed to Rome?” Goodwin said, now enjoying this game even more.

“You are indeed, sir.”

“Oh. Well, I wonder if you might put the correct airport designator on my luggage. You’ve got mine headed for Roanoke. Last I heard, Rome was in Italy, not Virginia.”

“Oh! I am so sorry, sir. Let me fix that for you!” The man smiled as before, but Goodwin could see he’d deliberately made the switch. And the agent knew he’d been caught.

“Thanks. Oh, by the way, could I have your name please, and employee I.D. number?”

“Sir?”

“Well, see, I used to fly these things for a living, and for some reason they asked me to perform random courtesy inspections of staff whenever I fly. You know, fill out reports on folks who’ve been, well, helpful. You know what I mean?” He pulled out his corporate I.D. and flipped it open so the man could read it. “Actually, it’s about the only thing I like about being retired.” His eagle’s eyes were leveled now, boring right into the agent’s. Goodwin wrote down the man’s information slowly, carefully, drawing out the agony as long as he could.

“Sir? Could I move you up to business class? No charge, of course!” the agent laughed knowingly at this little humor.

“No, that’s alright, Bruce. I’m sitting up front tonight. Jumpseat.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bruce?”

“Sir?”

“I hear they’re hiring at Wal-Mart.”

Goodwin turned and walked off toward security. He whistled an old Disney tune as he got in line.

+++++

Trudi Blixen sat in Springer’s cockpit, Elsie draped across her legs. She scratched behind the pups ears almost absent-mindedly while she looked at the water behind the boat – even now almost expectantly. Several times the big male dolphin – the one with scars behind his left eye – had shown up and looked around for a minute before moving on. There was no pattern to these appearances, but she had seen him three or four times, at least. Mary Ann Doncaster also seemed to imply there was nothing at all unusual about this, and this assertion had flummoxed Trudi. She had been quite dumbfounded by comments from the members of this little circle of friends made about their associations with these dolphins, and she had become all the more intrigued when the one Malcolm called Two Scar began showing up in this crowded marina.

Then there was the matter of the Doncaster’s dog, Elsie. Despite the fact that Tom Goodwin was laid up in the hospital, the dog would not leave Goodwin’s boat except to do her business. Then she pulled and strained to get back to Springer and seemed almost physically pained until she got back to Goodwin’s bunk. After settling-in there for a while she’d be fine with climbing back up to the cockpit to resume her watch for Two Scar.

The first time the dolphin appeared she heard the dog jump down onto the swim-platform, and she’d run up from the galley to investigate. The dolphin and Elsie had been only inches apart and were staring intently at each other. She looked at them for a moment and was left with the impression that the two had – somehow – been communicating. Each subsequent time the dolphin appeared the two went through the same ritualized greeting.

‘There’s a link between these animals and Goodwin,’ she told herself one afternoon after a particularly long encounter. ‘He’s come to see if Tom’s back from the hospital!’ 

It was like peeling an onion! Remove one layer and another layer appeared!

“How very strange indeed!” she said to Elsie that evening. The dog looked at her and smiled, then turned back to look into the black water.

+++++

Paul Goodwin arrived in Rome early Friday morning. He made his way to the train station and hopped onto the first express to Genoa and bought his ticket on board. After the train cleared the city he made his way to the café car and took a seat. A waiter approached and asked him what he wanted.

“Coffee. And keep it coming until we pull into the station.”

The waiter had no idea what the disheveled American had asked for, but from the looks of him he could guess.

Goodwin looked out the window as the landscape slipped by smoothly; once out of the urban nightmare, he thought it still looked pretty much the same it always had. One thing was unchanged, and that was the sky. There was always a hazy tan quality to the sky around Rome that had bothered him for years

Coffee came and he took a sip and scrunched up his nose: “Battery acid! God I love Italy!” 

The waiter stomped off – hating anything and everything about Americans.

He looked as the coast came into view, and at the incredible blue water that still seemed so full of mystery.

And he knew they were out there, waiting for him.

He just wasn’t sure what he was going to say to them.

Early December

Rapallo

Elsie lay in the cockpit of Goodwin’s boat; she was curled tightly in a ball, warding off the bitter cold winds that had come down from the mountains just above the harbor during the night. Cold air had settled uneasily on the water, and a light snow had just begun falling when her ears perked up; she heard movement below and her little tail began thumping to the beat of waking life.

She jumped as something fell below.

“Goddamn it all! Shit! Who in their right mind would live on a Goddamn boat!”

Elsie’s head tilted to one side as she listened to the old man grumbling below. She jumped again when companionway hatch slid open, but she smiled when she saw Paul Goodwin climbing up into the cockpit. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and a pipe in the other.

“Goddamn it! Snow! Fucking snow, on a goddamn sailboat! Ain’t that just fucking great!” 

Elsie looked at the old man, at the ragged trails of foggy steam that wafted from his nose, then she looked away quietly, looked back into the water behind the boat.

“So. You’re still here, are you?” Goodwin sat down beside Elsie and scratched her neck. The dog looked up and her smile reached him. “Well, you don’t mind if I have a smoke, do you girl?” Goodwin opened his tobacco pouch and got to it, pausing once to drink some coffee.

“Good morning!” 

Goodwin turned when he heard the voice, saw the English couple in the boat next to his son’s. “You say so. Seems kinda cold to me. I keep seeing these posters for Sunny Italy in my mind, and somehow this don’t quite jibe with that.”

Malcolm Doncaster laughed. “Quite. Happens a couple of times a year. Mind you, the snow will be gone by noon, so don’t let it bother you too much.”

“Oh, I’m used to snow alright. Was just hoping to get a reprieve.” Goodwin lit his pipe and puffed on it until satisfied he had it right. “So. You know my son? When did y’all meet up?”

“We met in Portofino. About a month ago. Our girl here seems to have adopted him.”

Elsie looked at Doncaster, then at Goodwin.

“Who was that woman on the boat when I got here? Did I run her off?”

“Ah, Trudi Blixen; well, she’s down below with Mary Ann right now. Yes, well, she’s been staying on board since Tom – uh, well, took ill.”

“Crap! I didn’t mean to. . .”

“Not to bother. She has a place in Portofino, and she was just staying here until Tom gets back on his feet. Seems, however, that our dog won’t leave his boat, and was apparently staying aboard to keep her company.”

“Company?”

“Yes, well, it’s complicated.”

“Uh-huh. It’s been my experience that things around here can get a bit more than complicated. And in a hurry, too.”

“Indeed so,” chuckled Doncaster. “Yes, quite. And perhaps more than we know. So, how about some breakfast? Scones and jam?”

Goodwin took the pipe from his mouth and tapped it against the side of the hull; burnt tobacco settled down on the water like old snow, then drifted down into the inky blackness and out of sight. “Don’t mean to be rude, but I’m going to run back to the hospital straight away.”

“How’s Tom doing? I haven’t seen him since he was down here.”

“Well, you’re welcome to tag along. I could use some company.”

“Really? Splendid. I’ll just go check with the Admiral.”

The hair on the back of the dog’s neck stood on end, and she began to let slip a low growl. Goodwin turned and looked at her, saw she was looking at the water and followed her gaze. A tremulous ripple – dark gray and barely visible under the pewter stained water – gave way to winter winds and disappeared into shapelessness. Goodwin had the impression he’d been watched for some time, and though he wanted to dismiss the idea as ludicrous he knew he couldn’t. 

They wouldn’t dare just leave me be, he told himself as he looked for echoes in the chaos.

The dog turned and looked at Goodwin, and he felt her eyes on him now. He thought she seemed skittish, almost worried, before she hopped down the companionway and disappeared into Tom’s cabin.

“What the Hades is going on here?” Goodwin followed the pup below, suddenly remembering he hadn’t brought any clothes for this unexpectedly cold weather.

+++++

Tom Goodwin sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes with the tops of his knuckles; the lids felt crusty and his eyes burned, but even so he felt a little better this morning. Margherita was asleep in her chair by the window and Jon Santoni was hunched over a pile of lab reports chewing on a plastic ball point pen. The hospital room was beginning to feel like home, and Goodwin knew this was not an encouraging sign. 

And then there was his father.

Seeing his dad for the first time since their blowout a year ago had filled him with a tenderness he simply hadn’t expected. In the past year the old man had gone from spry to beaten; he seemed like a pale copy of the man he remembered and the sense of impending mortality was palpable about him. It left Tom feeling breathless and a little lonely.

“I wonder how I must look to him these days?”

“You say something?” Santoni said.

“Hm-m? Oh, crap, I was just wondering how bad I look. Thinking about Dad, I guess.”

“Oh? I’d say right now you two look to be brothers. In fact, I’d say he looks like your younger brother.”

“Thanks a lot, dickhead.”

“We aim to please.”

“Yeah? Well, if I have to eat any more frozen hospital lasagna you can wheel my ass down to the morgue. Crap, I thought American hospital food was for shit, but y’all got bad food down to a science in this place!”

“Tom! Look out the window! You want good food, try that place right over there. They make a carbonara that will make you weep it’s so good.”

“Yeah? Fine. Eat spaghetti and cry. Great. What’s your point?”

“The point, Tom,” Margherita interjected, “is to get well enough to rejoin the world.” She yawned and stretched and sat up in her chair.

“Exactly!” Santoni chimed in. “Look out that window, Tom. The world is still out there, waiting!”

“Geesh, guys! Does it look like I’ve given up or something?”

“I wasn’t so sure a few days ago, Tom.”

Goodwin looked at Santoni and frowned. “How did my dad look to you?”

“Like he could whip your ass.”

“Really? I thought he looked kinda rough around the edges.”

“When I’m eighty seven I hope I’m that rough.”

“He’s a pistol, alright.”

“Tom, he’s a fucking cannon. A force of nature. You know, that makes me wonder? Are you sure he’s your father?”

“Fuck off,” Goodwin said while he started laughing, then he turned to Margherita. “Did he say he would come back this morning?”

“Oh, si, yes, he said first thing. I think when he saw you he was most afraid, Tom. You slept for a long time while he was here.”

“I don’t really remember talking to him. Just his eyes. How tired he looks. Old.”

“Just point of view, Tom,” Santoni said. “From over here you look as old as the Coliseum.”

“You know, when I get out of this bed I’m gonna have to beat you senseless.”

“That’ll be the day.”

Goodwin swung his feet from the bed as he pushed himself up. He turned pale and started to sweat; Santoni came over and held Goodwin up.

“Easy now. Deep breaths, Tom. Slow, deep breaths.”

“Well,” Goodwin said between gasps, “you’re safe. At least this morning.”

“Sure, sure,” Santoni said as he slapped his friend on the back. “There is one thing we really need to do this morning, Tom. And I mean this.”

“Yeah?”

“We need to get you into the shower. Fast. And maybe Margherita could find some cologne.”

“Swell. Just swell. And here I thought it was you stinking up the place.” 

+++++

Maria Theresa walked along the quay with Vico as the last of the night’s light snow drifted down on waiting stone. She watched flakes as they hit and melted and thought of all her life’s hopes and dreams. Were they so dissimilar? So proud in flight, so resilient in that moment of contact, and then what – nothing? Was there really only nothingness waiting after dissolution? Could our dreams not survive?

She felt Vico’s arm around her shoulder, felt his love as it had always been. Steadfast, almost eternal. Patient. 

“There is a reckoning coming, my old friend,” she said to him at last.

“Yes.”

“Did you see Paul?”

“Yes. He seems as young as yesterday.”

“Ah. As do you.” She looked at dark striated clouds scudding silently, quickly through the treetops on the hillside. Everything felt close inside this gray dawn; it was as if the village had drawn inward around itself – as if to avoid being caught in the rush just overhead. Even the stones they walked upon seemed to have withdrawn from the streaming current, and Maria Theresa felt the world had turned in on itself, and all that remained was held in these ambivalent shades of streaking gray. 

“What do you want to do?” Vico asked.

“About?” She walked slowly now, and quietly, yet she wanted to grab onto one of these clouds and fly away.

“Seriously?” he asked, while trying not to laugh. “Perhaps I should not have asked.”

“Yes, perhaps.” She stopped and looked out past the harbor to the cape, to the darkness out there, to the darkness that always seemed to be always waiting. Were there answers to be found out there beyond the gray? Could she find them here, in this village, among all the little men who had defined her life? Or would the answers find her?

“Would you like me to take the boys into Genoa today?”

“No.” Perhaps, she told herself, it would be best to stop looking for answers. ‘What if by trying all my life to look for some kind of perfect life I had simply avoided the question; what if sometimes life has to come looking for you?’ 

“Maria, may I take you to see him?”

She turned and looked up at her oldest friend, at his blue-gray eyes and at the last strands of auburn in his wild silver hair. She put her hand on his face and felt his skin, the lines she had watched march across his face seemed as familiar to her as the trails on the hills outside the village. “You always loved me, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Always.”

“Then let him come to me. Or not.”

“And the boys? If he chooses not to come, what of them?”

She shrugged as if dismissing the impossible, then turned toward the black water and walked to its edge. She leaned over and looked down as silver echoes washed against the stone. There in the dancing fragments she saw scattered bits of her reflection suspended over infinity, little shimmering echoes of time cast aside to drift for a while before fading away into the night.

She smiled, then watched as her reflection drifted away silently.

+++++

Paul Goodwin stood in the head looking at his reflection in the tiny mirror while he knotted his old red bow tie, then he looked down at his hands. Age spots and yellow fingernails, white scars from a couple of skin cancers removed from the back of his right hand – everything about these hands said they were his – but they didn’t belong here anymore. He still saw his hands resting on the black Boeing yoke, still felt a tenuous link to those old 747s his hands had guided for decades. 

“Getting old is the silliest thing in the world, girl, and don’t let anyone tell you different.” He heard the pup move, knew she was looking at him. He focused on finishing the knot before turning to meet her gaze. “You know, you remind me of Sara. That’s her on the wall there.” He pointed at the painting and looked at it again; he always looked at it – and it always tore him up.

He hadn’t had a dog since growing up on his parent’s farm outside New London, and in a fit of nostalgia one day he’d came home with a little Springer pup, a male so patently clumsy, so patiently good natured, the only name he ever thought to call him was Ody. Doris had immediately fallen in love with the beast and insisted on getting Ody a female companion and, dogs being dogs and less inclined to follow the more inane social conventions of others along the Connecticut shore, the two decided to pop out litter after litter of little brown and white puff-balls every other year.

Ody and Lady grew into a force of nature, they held the Goodwin’s marriage together, gave both Doris and himself no small measure of joy and, in the end, more than a little purpose. With Tom on his own and retirement proving to be an unendurable bore, Goodwin threw himself into whelping boxes and one day finally built a real honest to Pete kennel. He started to train Lady and took her to a show once, but hated all the stilted pompousness and the preening, self-centered dogs. In the end he took to the fields with them both and simply let them do as nature intended. Though the farm had fewer than two hundred acres they roamed the woods together ceaselessly.

Sara had been the first pup from the first litter, and Tom had been home visiting when she popped out into the world. Lady had chewed the umbilical too close and the newborn had started to bleed out. Doris called and Tom came, looked things over for an instant, then disappeared as quickly as he’d come. He came back a moment later with hemostats and suture and stitched the wound shut, and from that moment on Sara had been his. He had been the first to hold her, first to pick her up and feel her soft tongue on his nose, and it had been love at first bite. Two months later she was at her new home in Houston, if, Goodwin thought, that glittering glass and steel box could rightfully have been called home, but Tom slipped into the physician’s groove and time passed quickly.

Ody found a rattlesnake one afternoon and Paul held him while the vet put him down. Goodwin held his friend so tightly as he passed, he cried so long and hard into the nights that followed that even Lady couldn’t console him. Goodwin grew distant for a while; when winter came he started taking Lady for long walks again, but everything was different now. He rejoined the living but seemed to keep everyone at a distance. When Lady passed a few years later, Goodwin had insulated himself from his emotions so completely he didn’t say a word when she didn’t come for him at four in the morning to go outside.

Doris wanted to get another pair but he wouldn’t have it. She consequently reacquainted herself with Jack Daniels and he found a rocking chair on the front porch to call his own. Each in their respective corner, they waited uneasily for the match to resume.

Then Tom moved to New York, and Tom brought Sara. 

Standing their in Springer’s head, Paul looked down at Elsie and he saw Sara and Lady staring back at him. All that love and devotion. . . where had it gone if not back into the universe? Yet, curiously enough, he saw that some characteristics and traits had been passed down intact from one being to the next, like genetic memory drifting on inter-dimensional breezes connecting yesterday and tomorrow, and he wondered if any of that was even remotely possible, or just a bunch of New Age hooey.

The hair on Elsie’s neck stood on end and she bounded up the companionway steps and right down onto the snow covered swim platform; Goodwin followed her through the cockpit and leaned over the rail.

It was Two Scar. He stood motionless in the water and looked up at Goodwin. Elsie pawed at the water and the dolphin eased closer to the transom; Goodwin climbed over the rail and down onto the platform, then knelt there to look into those black eyes and soon he felt as if he was drifting in time. He could smell Hell’s Belles on fire again, could hear screams rippling through the foul air as bullets tore through the nose of the Liberator, and he could feel the storm roiled air as his parachute opened so briefly – and then in a blossoming of flames he was falling again, falling down into the sea. Or had he been drifting, drifting down into that other dimension. Because there he was, this being who was to become his friend.

He reached down and rubbed the top of Scars beak, and the dolphin’s body leaned slightly into the sea before spinning slowly, spinning as if in remembrance of other meetings on other days. Then the dolphin stopped and looked into Goodwin’s eyes again. There was sadness in Scar’s eye, and Goodwin was immediately filled with an awareness of vast time passing, of his time in this life passing rapidly from his grasp.

The small female, she of the wounded eye, appeared beside Scar and looked up at Goodwin before finally pushing the male aside. Goodwin leaned close as she stood to meet him; he reached for her as she placed her nose on his shoulder and he whispered to her as she hovered there. Two Scar circled slowly for a moment, then slid beneath the water and was gone; the little girl drifted back and looked at Goodwin almost longingly, as if there was more that needed to be said between them, but she too slipped beneath silvered ripples and was gone.

“It’s alright, Lady,” Goodwin said, still drifting on nether currents. “Everything’s alright now, old girl.” He scratched Elsie’s head for a moment as memory washed over feelings of drifting through time, as union and reunion coalesced above the dancing water. He looked down, saw his reflection on the soft contours of the still water and then reached down to touch it. 

He saw Maria Theresa’s face as he got closer to the water. He saw her soft smile waiting – just at the edge of memory. His hand dipped into the water and she disappeared.

+++++

Tom stood under the shower and let hot water beat down on his neck; he felt weak, dizzy, and the hospital bed seemed to call out to him. He leaned into the wall and took a deep breath.

“Are you alright in there?” Santoni called from the main room.

“I feel like shit,” Goodwin said weakly.

“Well, at least you won’t smell like it,” Jon said as he came into the bathroom. “Wrist.”

Goodwin stuck his arm out from behind the vinyl enclosure and felt his friend take his pulse. “Jon, I don’t feel right.”

“Yeah, let’s get you back in the sack.”

“How was the LFP?”

“Crappy.”

“Uh, gee, think you could be a little more specific?”

“No.”

“I think you ought to take a couple of pictures of my heart.”

“What are you thinking.”

“Endocarditis. Bacterial.”

“Uh-huh. The vector?”

“Man, you’re sure a talkative son of a bitch today.”

“Yep.”

“Hand me a towel, would you?”

“You’re still feeling light headed?”

“No, Jon, I’m feeling cold. I need a towel, and I need someone to turn up the heat in this mausoleum. Geesh, how old is this building, anyway?”

“Have you felt your carotids?”

“No. Have you?”

“Yeah, and we did a transthoracic echocardiogram last night. Had to put you out for a while.”

“Really? And?”

“You’re right, as always. Endocarditis, probably nosocomial, at least using the Duke Criteria, and there’s some growth on the right side valves.”

“Streptococcus viridans?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s great. Just great. Add Penicillin yet?”

“In your last bag.”

“No wonder I feel like crap. What about the . . .”

“It’s not responding well, either.”

“Did you talk to Margherita?”

“Yes. But I think she already knows.”

“So that’s it. Wow, help me back to the bed, will you?”

Tom looked at Margherita as he shuffled back into the room; he could see she had had a tough night. Her eyes were puffy and red and the smile she wore seemed forced. He sat down on the edge of the bed and took a deep breath.

“I’m glad you’re here. Both of you,” he managed to say as he lay back on the bed. The back of his head still seemed almost on fire as he felt the cool sheets touch his neck, and he looked up at the ceiling for a while, then out the window. “Is it snowing?”

“Yes,” Margherita said. “It has been since the middle of the night.”

“Jon, we’ve got some work to do. Do you want to go in and clean the valve?”

“Let’s give the meds a chance to work. That’s my first advice. And do another round of Vancomycin. Let’s give it a week and see.”

“Alright. Margherita? What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Do you want to sit here while I do this?”

She looked away, suddenly unsure of herself, afraid she was about to be sent away again. “I don’t want to leave you, Tom. Not ever.”

“Jon, see if we can get a rollaway in here. She can’t sleep in a chair forever.”

“Alright, Tom.”

“And I’m going to need to do something about the boat. It can’t stay in that marina all winter. Margherita, talk to Malcolm and Dad about moving her back to the village. Maybe – what was her name – Trudi? – maybe she can help sail her back. See if Vico can arrange to have her hauled if the weather looks dicey.”

“Okay, but are sure you want me to help sail her?”

“You’d better get used to it. You might end up living there for a while, you know? And did I hear correctly? Did someone say Dad was going to sleep out there last night?”

“Yes.”

“Sweet Jesus! What about Trudi? Wasn’t she still staying there? With the pup?”

“I don’t know, Tom, but I think so.”

“Now wouldn’t that make a fine kettle of fish!”

“What?” Margherita didn’t understand, couldn’t see the implications he was laying out.

“Tom,” Santoni said, “I’m thinking maybe we ought to limit the number of people coming in here. You know, something just short of quarantine. Give these meds a chance to do their thing.”

“Your call, Jon, but I’ll need to talk to Dad sometime today.”

“Gloves and masks ought to do for now,” he replied. “And Margherita, you better mask up when you two rub noses for the next couple of weeks.”

“Sounds fun.” She turned and looked out the window, and into the hills to the south.

+++++

Paul Goodwin climbed back into the cockpit and jumped when he saw Trudi standing by the companionway. She had a little Leica in her hands, and had apparently been taking photographs while he met with the dolphins. Now he scowled when he saw her standing there; it was as if the woman was trying to feign nonchalance, and it pissed him off.

“Are you a part of this, too?” she asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“These dolphins. Between Tom and Margherita?”

These words slammed into Goodwin and knocked him off his feet. He reached back as he staggered onto the cockpit seat beside him: “What did you say?”

“I’m sorry . . .”

“What did you mean by that? What’s . . . is there something going on with Tom and this dolphin?”

“Oh! Really, I’m sorry, but perhaps I spoke out of turn. Perhaps you should speak to your . . .”

“I can fill you in, Mr. Goodwin,” Malcolm Doncaster said as he came up into his boat’s cockpit, “while we ride into town.”

“No Goddamn it! Tell me now! What’s going on?”

“Perhaps,” Doncaster said easily, too easily, “it would simplify things to tell you that Ludvico has already talked to us about events in 1943. And there’s a lot that’s happened in the past month you may find disturbing.”

Paul Goodwin held onto the lifelines – it was as if the boat was caught out at sea in a raging storm, not tied off in a marina – and his every instinct screamed that nothing was as it appeared any longer. Now, everywhere he looked things felt out of place, disjointed, almost as if fractured from what he had once called reality. The boat felt oddly tilted – as if the stupid thing had reoriented itself another plane – and even these people appeared ragged and unsettled, like they were of another world and trying unsuccessfully to fit in this new one. This new world was a bleeding compound fracture compared to the old . . . which now looked like old bones set at odd angles and suddenly warning lights were screaming discontinuity . . . discontinuity . . . discontinuity . . .

+++++

He came back to that other world while sitting in the blue bus as it rolled and lumbered through the hills toward Genoa; Malcolm Doncaster sat across the aisle from him, reading a well worn paperback, rubbing his eyes from time to time and looking out frosted windows as winter-borne tree-scapes rolled by in a silent, gray procession. 

An old woman, by the window, sat next to him. She stared at the trees in silence, her body bouncing into his as the bus traveled down this ancient road.

“You say you spoke to Vico, about 1943?” were his first words in over an hour.

“Yes. About a week ago, after the first encounter.”

“What happened. I mean, with Tom.”

And Doncaster took a deep breath, then talked to the old pilot. He talked of Tom Goodwin’s journey from America, of meeting the dolphins off the coast of Connecticut, of Tom’s arrival in Portofino, and his first union with Margherita, and lastly, and most importantly, he talked slowly of Vico’s conversation with the group over dinner, telling them of Paul Goodwin’s arrival during the war in 1943 on flaming wings and a dolphin’s back. Doncaster told Goodwin everything he remembered, everything Vico had told them, and yet Doncaster could see that the pilot didn’t seem to know a thing. He’d left in ‘44 and been flying in the dark ever since.

Paul Goodwin wasn’t relieved; rather, he felt an odd, dissociated sadness, as if his one, unique truth was going to slip quietly from the deepest reaches of memory into the nothingness that awaits when words lose their meaning. Then, after all the concern for his son that had been so overwhelming the past week, suddenly – after hearing about Vico’s involvement in the telling of his tale, he thought of Maria Theresa.

“How is she?” he said a million years later.

“What’s that? Who?”

“Maria. How is she?”

“We can drop in on her, if you like. She’s back in the apartment. Her boys are taking care of her.”

“Boys?”

“Yes. Two boys; Paulo and Toni.”

“Paulo?”

“Yes.”

Goodwin’s hands started shaking, his eyes filled and he turned away from the truth once again.

The old woman by his side turned. She had been dozing a little; her head had once settled on Goodwin’s shoulder when the bus bit a bump in the road, and she had woken for a moment and excused herself, then promptly fallen asleep again. Now she was awake and looking a Goodwin in his grief, and she handed him some tissue for his eyes.

“Thanks . . . grazie.”

She nodded, then put her hand on his. “What you seek is not real,” the old woman said. “And yet, neither is it unreal. What you seek resides beneath even the unconscious. You seek the instinctive. The mystery of instinct that guided your life.”

“What . . .?”

“You must turn away from certainty now, as my sweet Odysseus was once compelled to, and you must turn and face the end of one journey even as you begin the next. And remember this one simple thing about mystery, as you begin this journey. Your first destination is doubt. Always doubt. Doubt was written in your heart.”

Goodwin sat in appalled silence as the bus began slowing inside a little mountaintop village. The woman began to stand as the bus rolled to a stop beside a tiny chapel. Goodwin stood as well and cleared the way for her, helped her with a heavy parcel down the narrow aisle. He went down the steps and helped her down with one hand, and he looked at her breath in the cold snowy air; he saw there was something pale and tremulous in her breath, something insubstantial, and yet he felt small when he looked at her. She was looking into his eyes when she began speaking again.

“There isn’t time to waste, Traveler, so do not waste any in doubt and sorrow. You must go now, and hurry, for you carry a heavy burden.” She held out her hand, and Goodwin took it.

“Who are you?”

“You must listen. There is a debt. You must not turn away. And you must listen with your heart.” She squeezed his hand, and there were tears in her eyes now as well. “Now go, Traveler, while time yet smiles on you.”

Goodwin backed up into the bus while he continued looking into the woman’s eyes. They were fierce – yet gentle, like the woman had known man and accepted his sorrow and joy in equal grace. As the bus lurched into gear and moved away, Goodwin stooped and watched her turn and walk up an alley beside the chapel until she was gone. 

He returned to his seat and sat. ‘This is impossible,’ he said to himself.

“What was that all about?” Doncaster said.

“I haven’t the slightest fucking idea.”

“My God man, are you crying? What on earth happened just now?”

“I’m not sure, but I think I just spoke with God.”

“Bah! That’s what all women would have us think! Here, have a scone.”

(excerpt from Malcolm Doncaster’s journal)

Aboard Diogenes, Portofino Harbor

Christmas Eve

I have often felt that without some meaningful context, the symbols that define the most important passages of our lives – indeed, the most vital passages – are rendered incomprehensible without the addition of meaningful context. So it has been with all I have studied the past four decades, and as such, this contextual rendering of life is what I have come to know best about this life. This worldview has been fixed in my mind, and I find it inconceivable to consider any further reduction, and not just (perhaps) because I find it uncomfortable to do so. No, rather I think it has always been fixed in my mind because the facts of our existence have always seemed to point to this conclusion. Symbols take on significance, therefore, only in terms of time and place. The power a symbol manifests may accrue and pass down through the ages, true enough, but without its original rendering in our midst, symbols too often devolve into mere art. The crucifix without an understanding of Rome and the teachings of a Jewish carpenter would become little more than a passing curiosity; the swastika, without an understanding of Hitler’s impact on Germany and Europe, would remain a footnote in studies of comparative Eurasian religions.

I point this out to whoever might take the time to muddle through these ramblings simply to make one point before venturing onward: what has happened in and around Portofino the past seven weeks is, to me at least, without precedent. Much of what has occurred did so in terms I would hazard to say did so on a purely symbolic level, and yet as such I can offer no reasonable context to frame these events. So, given what I have said above, it would seem fair to conclude that – on a symbolic level – much if not all of what has transpired can only be rendered in the ambiguous shades of the incomprehensible.

Sorry, but there you have it.

As I relayed in my entry re: 14 December, we (this being Paul Goodwin and myself) rented a beastly Fiat and brought Paul’s son Tom back to Portofino and to his yacht, ‘Springer’. After several weeks hospitalization, and with scant improvement or progress noted by medical staff in Genoa, Tom decided to return to his vessel. No one has said as much, but all of us have considered, at least privately, that he has done so in order to pass in comfortable surroundings. Tom is indeed now a very ill man, and his father has been much preoccupied with this unfolding tragedy.

Our poor Elsie remains unashamedly attached to Tom, and unnaturally so, I might add. She will scarcely leave his side now, and remains below with him constantly. Like Tom, she barely eats and comes ashore but once or twice a day. Needless to say Mary Ann has been completely knocked for a loop by this development.

Both the Goodwins, however, manage to get out for Passeggiata most afternoons, and yet, as far as I know, there has yet to be a meeting between Paul and Maria Theresa Moretti. There seems to be some force holding them apart. They are like two magnets. The closer they come to one another the more some invisible force causes them to repel one another. Only Vico seems to hold the faintest lines of communication open between them, and of course this remains an unknown to me.

Anyway, about these strolls. We managed to get a wheelchair for Tom a few days ago, as he’s struggled the past two evenings to finish a walk around even the piazzeta, and as he seems unwilling to concede this simple ritual we all pitch in and help as best we can. He’s a fighter; at least I know that much is true. There seems to be little else I can be sure of these days. All of our lives seem to have become bound-up in this developing mystery, yet I can fathom no purpose. No, not yet.

And poor Margherita! Though she has yet to show, she is desperately pregnant and violently ill most mornings. I do not know her history, but still waters run deep. There is a story to be told, I am sure, so no doubt Mary Ann will attach herself to the poor girl. Poor Tom seems beside himself with grief for this child it seems he’ll never know.

Ah, wretched love! We hurry through life, buffeted constantly by misfortune and exhilaration, the known and the unknowable, but it seems we are always caught off guard by love. In our confusion, our hearts are blown wide open, and yet it is within this tormented wreckage we find love. Love commands us, love guides us, and in the end, I suspect, it is love that consumes us.

So. Tonight our dear Ludvico has invited us all the ristorante. For, one supposes, Christmas Eve and all that humbug, yet Tom has insisted on going. My God! I think back just a few weeks and I see a man so much larger than life. Today he is withered and weak, his skin mottled yellow from damage to his liver done by the deadly barrage of antibiotics he has endured. And I have watched Paul and Margherita wither by his side as the inevitable comes stealing through his wilting twilight. Death seems to be lurking in the shadows even now, and this beautiful harbor seems aware of the coming darkness. 

I long for the lingering warmth of October, before all this madness came for us on winter-borne wings.

+++++

It was dark when Paul Goodwin began pushing his son across the piazzeta; the cold stones were black and wet from a light rain, a dazzle of holiday lights sprinkled the luminous stones with jeweled light. And yet, the air was faintly still; the harbor an inky reflection of a brooding winter’s sky. A star could just be seen peeking between retreating clouds beyond the hills to the east, and Goodwin knew the night would soon grow cold.

“Not exactly how I pictured Christmas on the Riviera,” the father said to his son.

“Would you stop here please, Dad? I want to look at the water for a moment.” Paul turned the chair toward the harbor, to the gulf beyond the cape, and Tom closed his eyes and took a deep breath, imagined he was free once again, sailing, slipping through sun-drenched waves on his way to wherever his heart felt like taking him. He wanted to find a cloud and chase its shadow across the sea, turn and listen to hopeful gulls trailing in his wake, feel the sun on his neck and the cares of this life peeling away like brittle paint. But above all else, he wanted to hold the life growing in Margherita’s womb, he wanted to hold this life in his hands and know, really know, that he would leave something of himself to this world.

He opened his moist eyes and looked out over the water at distant lights and receding dreams. 

“So much to do,” he said. “So much time wasted.”

“Yes,” his father said.

Tom looked at the cape, at the rocks, and he wondered where They were. Were They out there even now – waiting? He looked at the water, into the blackness, and beyond – into the hall of mirrors that had been his life – and he found himself alone on a sunless sea, drifting, waiting. The solitary star shone down on him, fleeting photons tickled his mind’s eye, and he found himself thinking of another shining star, on another “Christmas Eve”. He shivered once as the thought rolled past like distant thunder, even as he felt the chair turn again and rumble on across the piazzeta, and he pulled himself back from the edge as he pulled a little blanket close to his neck.

He opened his eyes and looked up. Margherita was waiting by the door, and he could see Paulo and Toni walking along slowly, a stooped woman by their side.

“Oh, God no,” he heard his father say. “No, not tonight.”

“Dad?”

“Yeah, Tom?”

“I love you, Dad.” He heard his father take a deep breath, heard him clearing his throat, then:

“And I’ve always loved you, Son. Always.”

“Lean on me tonight, Dad. Whatever it is, we’ll get through it.”

“Yeah? You think so? I’m not so sure . . . what this night has in store for us.”

“It doesn’t matter, Dad. Come on, they’re waiting for us.”

They came in from the cold and the darkness, came into the glowing warmth of this other world. Within this honeyed labyrinth of friends and family, deep inside this most special night of birth, this night was to be a coming together.

But it was not lost on Tom Goodwin that they had all come to celebrate a death, as well.

+++++

‘Is it time?’

‘The moon is not ready. We must wait.’

‘I can wait no longer.’

‘You will wait.’

‘Yes. I will wait. But I am ready.’

‘They are not ready. He is not ready. Patience.’

‘I will wait.’

‘Yes. Watch the rocks grow. Listen to the stars. You have waited this long.’

+++++

The ristorante was not quite empty; a few tourists sat by windows looking out over the harbor, but they were well away from the table Vico had prepared for the group. He had even put up a few holiday decorations, nothing ostentatious and in keeping with the rather upscale atmosphere of his place, and Handel played at a discrete level up among the exposed beams overhead. Smoke from a wood fire lightly perfumed the air, garlands of pine and chestnut left trace enough to stir even the most hardened memory.

Paul sat between Tom and Maria Theresa at the round table; he sat in resolute silence, looked down at his hands constantly, oddly enough, thinking about an ancient woman on a bus a few weeks ago. Margherita sat next to Tom, while Paulo and Toni lounged across the table; the two ‘boys’ were speaking with Trudi Blixen in hushed, conspiratorial whispers. Paul looked at Trudi and gasped; she was a younger version of the woman on the bus, and he fought to contain the implications of her presence here.

Malcolm and Mary Ann drifted in, as was their custom, about ten minutes late; Mary Ann had Elsie in tow on a soft leather leash and she led the pup over to Tom’s chair and looped tether to frame. Malcolm sat next to Tom and Mary Ann took the chair next to Trudi; Vico sat next to Maria Theresa. Wine came, then a Christmas soup.

“Tom, you will be delighted to know, there is not one octopus hidden anywhere in this soup.” Vico smiled as he looked across time and space at the emaciated physician, he smiled to hide the sorrow he felt when he beheld this man now so reduced. “But alas, I give you fair warning, the salad may be less tame.”

“Octopus?” Paul said, making a face. “Really?”

“Not you, too?” Malcolm chimed in. “I hope I’m not the only one around here who likes octopi.” He looked at Paul and Tom; they both shook their heads and frowned. Their resemblance to one another was complete. “Oh well, like father, like son.”

Maria Theresa looked at her two boys; Paulo seemed blissfully unaware of the implications beating the air, Toni was on the razor’s edge – waiting to bleed. She wondered how long he would last, and what he would do with the truth.

“So old friend,” Maria said, “what soup have you made for us tonight?”

Vico looked at Maria, took her hand and kissed it. “Do you remember the bisque you once taught me? The lobster, with saffron and basil – just a trace of sherry? I have not made it in years, and yet I thought tonight it was time.”

Maria squeezed his hand and smiled. Everyone leaned in and sampled the bisque.

“Wow! That’s damn fine soup, Vico,” Paul said. “Damn fine.”

Tom smiled and looked at his father – so intent was the old man ignoring Maria it was becoming almost comical – then he looked to Maria. It was so hard sometimes to have held a persons beating heart in his hands – and then to see them again in another context. “Ma’am, as your cardiologist, I can’t recommend this stuff, so why not just hand it over to me. I’ll be happy to finish it for you!”

“Perhaps tonight you will indulge me, Thomas.”

Tom smiled, and he felt happy to have helped in her time of need, but Toni froze when he heard Tom’s full name, and the razor slipped through his fingers – again. Vico watched Tomasino carefully, ready to move, but the boy remained tentative, drawn-up on the balancing act that held them all this night.

They ate in silence – each lost in thought. Vico was comfortable as the Ringmaster in this, Paul Goodwin’s circus – or was it Tom’s? – but above all else he wanted this last evening to go smoothly.

But Elsie could take it no longer; she sat up and looked wistfully at Tom until he felt her eyes seeking his. He looked at her and smiled back, took his spoon and found a piece of lobster and gave it to her; Vico looked discreetly pained. Elsie sighed in frustration, yet resumed her place curled up on Tom’s feet. All was as it should be, the pup thought. Almost. She looked out the window, out to the water beyond. 

Were they coming?

Would they come?

“Mama?”

Vico looked at Toni and bit his lip. 

“Yes, Toni?” She looked across the table at her youngest son and smiled inside. “What is troubling you?”

“Is Paul Goodwin my father? Is Tom my brother?”

Silence enveloped the table, even the candles in their glasses seemed to hesitate in breathlessness. 

“Yes. Of course.”

“What!?” Paul and Paulo cried in one gasped breath. Paulo pushed back from the table, seemed to hover over plains of indecision like a vast and gathering storm, then he reached out and steadied himself on the table.

“Are you telling me,” Paul Goodwin said while he looked at Toni, “that that boy is my son?”

“Oh yes, Paul,” Maria Theresa replied. “They are both your sons.”

The words slammed into Paulo and he reeled under the blow; his breathing became thin and raspy-quick, he looked up at those around the table and saw they were floating incorporeally at the end of a long, dark tunnel. The man in the wheelchair – what was his name? – was looking at him closely, studying him. Why? 

Paulo turned and looked at his brother; the boy’s head had fallen and his body shook as gales of grief-borne tears ravaged his soul. Doubt swirled through the air as if this gathering had become a séance, and Paulo was struck with the feeling that this was only right – as all the dreams and memories of his childhood had just been murdered. He stood and walked from the table and out into the night.

Vico followed him.

Toni turned and saw his brother leaving, then looked at Paul and Tom. “I knew it was you. I knew it.”

Tom Goodwin pushed his wheelchair back from the table and patted his leg; Elsie jumped up on his legs and curled up protectively; she looked around the table as if assessing the threat to her charge. 

“Toni?” Margherita said quietly, “Why do you say that? What made you think that?”

He looked at his mother, at the pure love in her eyes, then at his sister. “Because he knew, Margherita. Dino knew, and he hated us. He hated us, me and Paulo, and he hated Mama. And every time I looked at him I knew he was of no relation to me. I could feel it in my bones, in my heart. All my life I have wanted to know. Tonight I know, and now I am sad.”

“Sad?” Tom Goodwin said.

“Yes, Tom. I am sad. I am sad because I do not know you now, tonight, and because I never had the chance. Because I did not know my father, I did not know his love. I am sad because all that time has passed us by, it was wasted, and we can never get it back.”

While the boys’ words swirled around the room, Maria Theresa reached under the table and took Paul’s hand in her own; in that moment she felt him crossing through time for her, she felt the strength of his soul gathering in the night. She saw his back straighten, his brow furrow, his lips grow firm with resolve. He squeezed her hand once more, then stood.

“Come on, Toni; let’s go find Paulo.” He walked around the table and stood beside his youngest son and waited; the boy stood and looked into the eyes of this man who might have been his father, he looked with uncertainty in his eyes, then the two of them walked from the ristorante.

Margherita turned to look at her mother. Tom looked at her with concern.

“How did this happen, Mama? What have you done?”

“I suspect these things happened for the simplest of reasons,” Trudi Blixen said. “I suspect your mother was in love.”

“But she was married!” Paulo cried.

Trudi shrugged. “Marriage so often has little to do with love, child. Love comes and the heart follows, and true love never fades. Love is not bound by time or circumstance. Surely you know this much of life.” She looked at Tom with ancient wisdom smoldering in her eyes.

Paul and Vico returned with the two boys and sat. Paulo looked angry, Toni still looked sad.

“I only know Dino died a broken man!” Paulo said quietly as he settled into his chair. He saw something in the old woman’s eyes that gave him pause, and he backed away from the abyss.

Maria Theresa turned from Paulo back to her daughter, nothing left but simple honestly on her face. “Your father was a broken man long before we met, Margherita, long before he became your father. After Paul left, I chose to isolate myself from this world; then, when I found this had taken me away from life, I wanted to fix the world. Of course I could not, but then I met your father, soon after he had quit and ran from law school, and then I wanted to fix that one, poor broken man, but I could not do even that. When someone is broken – as that man was broken – when all his choices have sundered happiness from his life, people must find it within themselves to make right what is wrong. This your father could not do, because, I suspect, he chose never to live his life on his own terms. His life was always defined by others, and he could not see his way clear of the scorn that followed. He turned inward, turned in on himself and his choices ate away at his soul until only darkness remained. You of all people should know this, Margherita. In the end, he could not love – he could not love even you.”

Mother and daughter looked at one another through a dead man’s lingering, gloaming silence; each was afraid to walk in the shadow of that darkness – yet they had walked there, and for almost all their lives. Now they both remained scared of the stain his passing had left on their soul. They could choose now to continue on his path, they could set out to destroy one another, or they could resolve to choose a different path. That much was in the air around them, and . . .

Elsie ignored this exchange. She was focused on Tom. She felt his breathing grow shallow, his skin pale and cool, and she watched his eyes carefully now. They seemed unfocused, diffuse, full of drifting mists.

She knew his passage was coming – she had seen it so many times before – but there was so much to do now. She sat up and licked Tom’s face.

“Tom?” Margherita said when she saw the pup. “Tom?”

He lifted his eyes and looked at Elsie, then turned toward the voice. “Hm-m . . .”

“Tom, are you alright?”

“Yep. I don’t think I should have any more wine, though. I feel – sleepy.”

“Have some water, Tom.” She looked at him closely; his face was red and perspiration was beading his face.

“Where’s Dad? Did he come back yet?” 

Margherita put her hand on his forehead – he was burning with fever again – just as Paul came over to the wheelchair and knelt beside his son.

“Tommy?”

“Dad. Need to go to the rocks now. Got to get to the water.” Trudi looked at him closely, her eyes full of hope . . . and sadness.

“What? Why?”

“Have to get in the water. Now.”

Margherita stood and got behind the chair; she began to move it but Paul stopped her.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“He . . . we must take him!”

“Are you out of your cotton-picking mind? It’s thirty degrees out there. There’s gonna be ice on the rocks before too long, and the water out there can’t be much warmer.”

“Do not interfere!” Blixen said softly, and Goodwin turned to her.

“Dad. Let’s go.”

The father looked at the son, then at the Danish woman. There was purpose between them – unknown – unknowable – purpose gathering in the air – waiting for release.

Margherita began pushing the wheelchair and Paul turned to get the door.

Paul led the way, Maria Theresa walking silently at his side; Margherita walked behind Tom, pushing the chair along the bumpy stone quay. Elsie walked along quietly by the wheelchair, but the Doncasters gave up and retreated to Diogenes. Vico and the two brothers were far behind – catching up even as distant reconciliations pulsed in the air around them. Vico seemed particularly disinterested and tired.

If anything, Paul thought, the air had grown more still as the night deepened; even now, as they walked along the water’s edge, darkness seemed to have drawn in upon itself – it was as if the night was collapsing inward, drawn past an unseen event horizon and rushing towards the unknown. Wispy tendrils of fog began running across the water, a cold breeze rustled in the limbs overhead. 

Paul turned to look at his son – his oldest son, his first son – and his thoughts seemed to come more slowly. The boy was wrapped in a blanket from the boat, his face and hands were now a blinding, stark white stain glowing in the night. These spectral features seemed to waver in the air, as if his son’s hold on the present was loosening; soon Paul couldn’t even make out Tom’s hands crossed on his lap. Was it the tears in his eyes? 

Paul saw Margherita wipe a tear away, only then could he feel the tears clouding his eyes. He moved as if to go back to push the chair . . .

. . . Maria Theresa grabbed his arm. “No, Paul. This is their journey now. Let it be so.”

He nodded as he caught his breath. Maria reached down and took his hand, and Paul was both shocked and relieved to feel her skin on his once again. Her skin felt the same now, here, in this darkness, as it had a half century ago, the same electric recognition of skin on skin, the same flooding warmth of contact renewed, the same enduring feeling of wonder, even awe – everything was the same, and yet – right now nothing was.

What had once been a beginning was, he felt, soon to be at an end. That was, he suddenly understood, why this night felt so implosive. Even the bare trees that lined their way seemed to stand aloof in the darkness – not as sentinels, but as the last witnesses to a drama that had been playing out in their shadows for centuries.

Paul could hear the sea ahead, hear water washing through tidal pools in endless rhythm, and suddenly he wanted to turn and run . . . turn and run away from all the mistakes he had made in his life . . . but they were all here now . . . all beside him in the darkness . . . and he realized there was nowhere to run but to the truth of the resolution coming for them. If there was to be redemption, he would have to face the full fury of the choices he’d made.

+++++

Footsteps on dewy sand. Fog, drifting fog, swirling underfoot. Only a handful of trees ahead . . . now all that remains are the rocks ahead. And what lies beyond? Only a vast, impassive sea, and hot blood hiding under a veil of silence . . .

“Oh, God! I don’t want to lose him!” The father’s cry comes as a whisper, but he is not surprised when he hears it as a prayer. He feels Maria’s hand tighten around his own; the smooth, eternal peace of her skin on his . . . ‘Was that my truth all along? Did I choose annihilation over life? Why? . . . Why?’

The road turned away to the right and he looked down other roads into the darker ways of memory. He could still make out German troops standing near the lighthouse, still just in shadow, waiting to find them and take them to the Gestapo. He looked out to sea, and he could smell cordite and gasoline as he fought to keep Hell’s Belles from falling out of the sky . . . and then he felt himself floating free again . . . drifting through that storm . . . waiting for death to find him . . .

He stopped by the rocks he knew so well, their ebon presence defined the way ahead – but he could not leave the road . . . No, not yet. There was too much to say. Too many prayers left unsaid . . . So little time . . .

He heard footsteps drawing near, soft wheels rolling across sand-drifted stone. Breathing . . . His breath . . . Maria’s . . . he turned to her, saw her looking up into his eyes.

“Are you ready?” she said.

“No. Perhaps I never was.”

“The choice was never ours to make, Paul.”

He felt the truth of her words and nodded; in the darkness – distant trees were to be his only witness.

The wheelchair stopped on the sand; Paul looked at Margherita, then at Tom. All purpose was unspoken now. Vico and the two brothers soon walked up; the pain of betrayal was etched in the lines around Paulo’s eyes, Toni’s face remained a blank mask. Only Vico seemed to fathom all the implications of this gathering, and yet he seemed to hover back from the group just a little, as if waiting for something . . . or someone, to appear.

Silence.

Water growing still beneath a dying breeze. 

Vico turned and spoke to someone in the shadows.

Trudi Blixen came forward, carrying a package. She came to Tom and stood beside him.

“I wanted you to have this for Christmas,” she spoke softly, knowingly, to him. She handed her gift to Margherita, who took the wrapping off carefully. Vico took out a flashlight as the paper fell away; he directed its light onto the offering. It was the painting she had made of the harbor, only now a man – Tom Goodwin – stood aft onboard Springer, apparently, obviously, talking to a dolphin in the water behind the boat. 

It was perfection, and everyone gasped at the truth inside the image.

“My goodness,” Tom whispered coarsely. His hands shook as he leaned forward to take the framed work in hand. He studied the image for a long while; everything was perfect – no, more than perfect. Everywhere he looked, emotions embedded within color sprang from canvas to mind. No detail was omitted; no detail failed to stir memory. Joy . . . longing . . . simple understanding . . . the power of love . . . every stroke of the brush washed across his soul.

“My God, what beauty you’ve created,” he said; then Tom turned to his father. “Dad? Hang this on the bulkhead, will you; beside Sara’s painting. It will go perfectly there.”

“Alright, son.”

“Trudi,” he said as he turned to look at the woman, “I don’t have the words to thank you for this, but you captured a precious moment. Wondrous. A wondrous story, forever. Thank you.”

“It was a gift to me as well, my love. It was a gift to find you again, to see you once again with the sea . . .”

Paul watched the woman’s form ripple in the air; again the woman aged before his eyes – the woman on the bus! – and then as suddenly she appeared to shimmer in the air and take the form of a very young girl. 

“Who are you?” Paul said as he thought of the ancient woman on the bus. “I know you . . .” he said softly, quietly, as memory ran into the darkness. How could she be here, now, before his eyes again. What did it mean – and why did he already know the answer to that question? He stepped forward, looked into the woman’s eyes; those who had been standing near her took a step away as her form shifted once again – and the air around them shimmered as recognition danced on the breeze.

Tom Goodwin – whose eyes had been fixed on the painting in his hands, turned to look at the woman: “She is Anticleia, father,” Tom said. “She is my grandmother.”

“Thomas! Who . . . what the hell are you talking about?” Paul reeled as memory crashed like storm driven waves on rock. He squinted, looked at the woman . . . 

. . . The old woman shifted again before his eyes; the air grew warm and softly close, and Paul struggled with feelings of recognition and overwhelming fear. He stepped closer still, reached out to touch the woman. When he touched her arm a torrent of lost understanding filled his mind; Paul recoiled as if physically stunned, he stumbled backwards and fell to the ground. He felt dizzy, breathless . . .

“My . . . you are my mother?” Paul Goodwin said as he gasped for breath.

Anticleia’s form shifted once again. She knelt beside Tom, her love for the boy now a radiant force that lit the night, the wonder of her being filling his face with joy. She stroked his face with her hand, held time in abeyance with her smile. “Ah, my precious Telemachus. It has been so sweet to see you again.”

Paulo and Toni came close; they could not understand a word of what had been said. They looked at Margherita; she too looked perplexed.

“What did they say?” Paulo leaned over and asked his sister.

“I do not know . . . I see them speak . . . I hear words . . . but I cannot understand them. Something . . . something is stopping me . . .”

Toni tried to move closer, but Vico stepped forward and blocked his way. “Do not interfere,” he said again.

“But . . .”

“You must not interfere.”

Toni looked down at his – what? – his father? Now his father’s form rippled and shifted and he felt his world collapsing inward around him. He fell to his knees, crying, reached out with both hands: “Papa! Papa! No! Not now!” 

Paulo darted past Vico and ran to his mother’s side; she held out her arm and held him protectively. “What is this?! What is . . . NO!” His scream filled the night, and Paulo too fell to the ground as tears burst forth and washed down his face; Maria Theresa knelt beside him and comforted him. “No! What is happening?! No!”

“Mother?” Margherita said, suddenly very cold, and she saw her mother drifting away; then she turned to Vico: “What is this? What is happening?”

“It is now as it has always been. As it must always be.”

“Vico? What? What do you mean? What are you saying?”

“It is his time of death . . . and of . . .” 

There was a pulse, a charge ripping through the air, then the devastating crack of thunder just overhead.

She jumped and turned at the sound, saw her brother; she watched as his body stiffened – it was as if he had turned to stone. Or had he had fallen – into what – into a deep sleep? 

“Paulo!” 

She cringed, turned away from the sound – again; thunder rang in her ears again . . . and now Toni was rigid, motionless – his eyes wide open, lifeless. Elsie – transfixed – remained next to Tom in the wheelchair.

“What is this!?” Margherita screamed. She turned to her mother . . .

Maria Theresa was still now; it was as if she had been caught between two heartbeats – and she had simply – stopped. Tears filled Margherita’s eyes, she ran to Vico, stood in his face: “What is this? What is happening?” She beat his chest as grief came to her, but even as her rage burned out of control, he took her in his arms and held her. “Why . . . what . . . has been done here?”

“You must watch now. It is rare that they let one watch. Be quiet, and do not try to stop this, whatever you see, whatever you feel.” He turned her body to face the glowing forms and she opened her burning eyes.

A ghostly man – was it Tom? –stood up from the wheelchair, the old woman – Anticleia? – at his side. What must have been Paul Goodwin was already waist deep in the sea; he continued onward until he was in water up his shoulders, and there he stopped. She saw him, she heard him speaking into the night – was it an invocation? – then she knew – knew – what was coming next.

Tom and the ancient woman walked slowly to the water’s edge – Elsie by his side; they slipped quietly, wordlessly into the blackness; as they walked the water glowed around their receding nakedness. Elsie waded in, paused, barked, then stepped back onto the rocks and sat. The pup seemed anxious, alert. Margherita held her breath, bit her lip, she watched . . . The three of them together in the water – waiting – waiting . . .

She felt them before she saw them: two, no three dolphins moving into view – and she could see Two Scar now; he went directly to Paul Goodwin. Another – one with a golden eye – stopped beside Anticleia and rolled over. The third circled Tom Goodwin several times, then withdrew out to sea. Paul put a hand on his son’s head; he spoke quietly – then stood aside. Anticleia did the same, though she left a garland draped over Tom’s shoulders before she moved off.

Tom stood alone in the water now, his arms stretched out, floating on the water’s surface. Margherita watched wordlessly, fear building in her heart; but she was unable to understand anything she saw. 

‘So dreamlike . . . I’m dreaming . . . I’m asleep . . .’

Elsie standing now. Looking out over clearing fog, on point.

Movement. What? There!

She saw the dorsal fin moving toward Tom, its speed incredible, terrifying. The third dolphin – coursing through the water directly at him – it’s speed now mesmerizing – simply impossible . . . 

She expected to see the animal veer away at the last moment, but no, that did not happen. She felt the collision in the very marrow of her bones, shielded her eyes from the blinding light that ripped through the fabric of her being as . . . as . . . she felt . . . herself . . . falling . . . falling . . .

+++++

She felt the sun on her face before she felt a hand shaking her awake. She heard a dog barking. Water . . . surf on rocks. A chilly breeze drifted across her face, her hair washed across her eyes as she opened them. She looked up, brushed hair from her face . . .

It was her Paulo. She could feel the anxiety in his eyes, even his movements to wake her were filled with hesitation and fear.

“Wake up,” he said again, softly. “Margherita! Wake up!”

“Let her sleep, Paulo.” Toni’s voice, still half asleep.

“But you, we, we must go home now.”

“Where’s Mama?” she heard Toni say.

“Down by the water, with Goodwin.”

Margherita’s eyes popped wide open. “Paul – Goodwin?” she said. “Is he here?”

“Where else would he be,” Toni asked, his voice full of nervous confusion. “Really! You should go back to sleep!”

“Where’s Tom?” she said anxiously as she sat up. She was lost, trying to remember something important, but her memory was a black hole.

“I don’t know. He wasn’t here when I got up.”

“Paulo? Have you seen him?”

“No, but maybe Vico and the Danish woman took him back last night.”

She looked at Paulo; he was scratching his head as if trying to remember something. She heard voices out on the rocks and stood up – too quickly. She felt light-headed, almost dizzy; she held her hands out to steady herself. Through squinted eyes she could make out Paul and Maria sitting on a gently sloping rock, their feet dangling in a clear blue pool.

Paul saw her and waved.

She returned the wave, stumbled down to them. Now she could see her mother was asleep on his shoulder.

“Nice morning,” Paul Goodwin said quietly in his bristly aviator’s accent.

“Yes, yes it is. Have you seen Tom?”

“Nope. Not since . . .”

“No? Do you know where he is? Paul – Mister Goodwin?”

Goodwin shrugged, looked out to sea. “I don’t know. I thought he must be up there with you.”

Margherita shuddered as the incongruity of his reply washed over her. What could all this mean? She looked around. Tom’s wheelchair was up in the grass, by the trees. Toni was standing up now, rubbing his eyes. Paulo was standing as well, looking back down the road that led to the harbor. She saw him waving at someone and her heart lurched; she ran up the rocks, knowing she would find Tom.

But it was Vico. He had a basket in one hand, some blankets in the other.

She ran to him, her mind searching, her eyes seeking Tom.

“Have you seen Tom?” she said breathlessly when she reached Vico.

He smiled: “I brought some croissants, and preserves. Strawberries, too. And Champagne. Merry Christmas!”

Margherita stood before the old man, she blocked his way as confusion rumbled from some place deep beneath her feet: “What?! Christmas?! Yes, but have you seen Tom?” Her voice shook as fading memory lifted into the air, her world tinged with looming hysteria.

He looked down at her, his moist, ancient eyes full of sympathy. “His suffering is at an end, child” Vico said quietly, his voice barely a whisper. “All is as it should be. Come, sit with me.” He was reaching for her . . .

“M-mm . . . uhn – no . . . no . . .” she tried to say more but her throat felt like it was being squeezed; she felt herself standing on her toes, her body twisting as if to cut off the scream she felt building in her gut.

She felt his hand on her shoulder; she was being guided to the rocks. Paulo and Toni looked at her and rushed to her side, helped her sit down on the rocks.

“What’s wrong with her?” Paulo cried. “Margherita? Vico, what’s wrong?”

“It has been a long night. She is tired . . .”

“Tom . . .” she said. “Tom is dead.”

“What!” Toni shouted. “What are you talking about? When?”

“Oh, come now,” Vico said. “You must all relax. Life goes on. Have a strawberry.”

“What!” Margherita said, her incredulous voice strained by the man’s obtuse deceptions. “A strawberry!”

Vico looked hurt. “Yes. Why not? They are ripe, fresh, and it is Christmas, is it not?”

“Are you mad?” Toni shouted. “Christmas!? Are you out of your fucking mind!? Where’s Tom?!”

Vico’s form rippled and shifted in the air, his skin grew transparent. An older, more powerful form shimmered under the old man’s skin – and was as quickly gone. “No. I am not mad,” he said as he looked out to sea. “You must understand; I too am tired.”

“Who . . . what are you?” Paulo said, his voice quivering with barely contained fear. Toni stood beside him, staring at Vico’s face. He felt lost, alone, afraid . . . 

But the old man looked at them, care in his eyes: “What do you mean, Paulo? I am Ludvico; I am your mother’s friend.” The old man seemed to stiffen, dark resolve simmered beneath his furrowed brow. The man’s visage rippled and reformed again: “I have held you on my lap since you were a child! You would ask who I am?”

Margherita stood and faced him. “I think it is a fair question. Who are you?”

The old man grew rigid, fury pulsed through the veins of his neck and face and, as if dark storms had suddenly gathered in the sky, the air around them grew charged with electric dread . . . and yet, as suddenly, the man – Vico – appeared to relax, a smile parted his face and he began to laugh. He laughed so hard he began to cry; soon Paulo began laughing, then Toni. Confusion shook the earth under their feet.

Vico held out his hand and gently stroked Margherita’s face while he caught his breath. “I have held you too, on my lap – when you were younger still. Look into my eyes, Margherita . . . do you say that you do not know me? You do not know who I am?”

Margherita felt more people by her side; she turned, saw Paul Goodwin and her mother. They stood silently, questions on their faces. Even Elsie, sitting by Paul’s feet, was looking up at him – an oddly confused smile on her face. 

“Margherita,” her mother said. “It has been a long night. Let us go home. I will . . .”

“But I have food here!” Vico said, looking out at the sea again. “Sit down, all of you, and rest for a while longer.”

“Why?” Margherita asked, her voice now full of dread. “Why do you want us to stay here? What are you . . .”

“Because, my dear, these are fresh strawberries! Do you know how hard they are to find? At this time of year?”

“But Tom? Where is Tom?”

Paul stepped closer. “What do you mean, ‘where is Tom?’ Isn’t he up here? With you? The wheelchair . . .”

Vico stepped aside, laughing, and walked over to a patch of grass and laid his blankets down in the sun. He sat, opened his basket, began pulling out fine china plates and delicate crystal flutes. Fresh baked croissant, orange marmalade, chocolate spread . . . and strawberries . . . huge, red-ripe strawberries – bigger than anyone had ever seen. When he had set these things out he turned to them, opened his arms: “Come! Eat! All is as it should be! You can relax now!”

Paul came, sat on a blanket. Maria took her daughter’s hand and joined him.

“Paulo, Toni, do not make me ask again. Come!”

They came, they sat. Vico passed around flutes, then he opened champagne and charged their glasses

“Merry Christmas!” the old man said as he held his flute up.

Nobody moved. Nobody. 

Except . . . Paul Goodwin, who held up his flute.

The others were still, their open eyes lifeless and remote.

“Ah, thank you,” the old one said to Paul. “I must be losing my touch.”

Paul looked at the somnambulant group and shook his head. “No, old friend, it is I who should thank you. It was a beautiful night, was it not?”

“Ah. Yes. Could you hear the stars?”

“Yes. Sublime.” Goodwin looked up at the sky. “They sang well, my friend.”

The old man looked proud. “We must leave, soon.”

“Yes. Where is your grand-daughter? I haven’t seen her.”

“Anticleia?” The old man shrugged. “Who knows. Probably painting again.”

“It is a nice rendition.”

“Yes. She grows better with time.”

“Maybe you should try.”

The old man chuckled: “Me? Haven’t I better things to do? Or have I become so irrelevant?”

Goodwin laughed too, then he looked out over the sea. “Is it time?”

“Yes, I think so.”

Goodwin began to stand, but the old man reached out, stopped him. “Wait. Hand me the strawberries.”

“What? Oh no, what are you going to do?”

“Let’s put one in each of their glasses. When they wake up they’ll pee all over themselves!”

“You’re incorrigible, you know that, don’t you.”

Hermes laughed as he reached for a strawberry. It was a nice, big, fat one.

+++++

(excerpt from Malcolm Doncaster’s journal)

Aboard Diogenes, Portofino Harbor

Christmas Morning

I hate growing old. The mystery, the very magic of life seems to fade with age. Time seems to unravel all those precious gifts that youth bestowed, and she leaves only memories to keep us company as winter comes. Cliché, I know, but Christmas is a time of clichés.

Well, dinner last night was a bust. Before we could get the soup down the balloon went up! Talk about your holiday cheer going up in flames! 

Who would have thought old Paul Goodwin had it in him to father not one! but three boys! And nobody knew a goddamn thing except Mama. Mama-mia!

Anyway, Mary Ann and I sat up and brought the day in with a nice brandy; everything was quiet on Springer. We turned in about 0100; assumed everyone returned to the ristorante, particularly as Elsie never came back and we never felt or heard anyone all night.

Mary Ann got up at 0700 and opened our presents (can’t quite give up that tradition, can we!) in the cockpit. Chilly morning; must have been a fog out last night – the deck was wet, almost like we’d had rain. 

At any rate – along about 0800 here comes the group – Vico walking ahead, and pushing an empty wheelchair! Everyone there, but no Tom. That got our curiosity going!

Mary Ann went to meet Margherita, who seemed to be in quite a state! Lots of animated chatter! Bah! Women!

At any rate, everyone save Vito and Maria Theresa came aboard, they were all blathering away about Tom being gone – dead, Margherita said (if you can imagine that!) – and, well, everyone was in quite an agitated state, let’s just say that and be done with it. Paul had a truly magnificent painting of Springer with him, which he took below, and the odd thing was that he didn’t seem the least bit perturbed by all the commotion. I suppose it’s all those years flying, learning to deal with emergencies and all. Calm as a cucumber.

So anyway, Paulo is up on deck and just frantic, frantic! Going on about needing to call the police and the coast guard, how he would lose his job! Oh, the poor boy. Mary Ann and Margherita sat in the cockpit; we gave the girl some coffee and she was just blathering away like a machine gun, and Toni! – he was beside himself – going on about how he never had a chance to know this new brother and on and on – when Tom up and pops out of the water on Springer’s swim platform – and as naked as the day he was born!

Of course Margherita faints dead away! Toni falls to his knees and starts praying for all he’s worth, but – and this is the best part – poor old Paulo races across and for all I know was going to hug poor Tom, when bam! – he trips just as Tom is climbing into the cockpit. There they went, another rear summersault, and perfect form, mind you – five point zero – and then there they were, sputtering about and laughing and carrying on like two children again. Toni got in to the spirit of things and jumped in – which would’ve been all fine and dandy except the poor sod can’t swim worth a damn!

And Paul! Just standing up there in the cockpit, looking down on his three sons. What a story his grandchildren will hear. As for me? I think it time to move on soon; this endless quest to immerse myself in all things Greek has been fun, but perhaps it’s time I grew up, did something useful. Hard to believe an old codger like me could still be gallivanting around the Mediterranean wasting his time chasing after moldy Gods no one has cared about for two thousand years. 

It makes me curiously sad, however. I wonder what happens to a God when people stop believing in him. Perhaps they just fade away, drift off into obscurity. I don’t know. Perhaps, if he was really clever, he’d find a way to come to a place like this. I can’t imagine a better place to spend eternity than right here. 

So yes, all in all it was quite the Christmas!

Addendum

Onboard Diogenes, 1930 hours

Just wanted to add a note to what has been an astonishingly dull day. I was out on the quay taking Elsie for a walk before dinner when out of the blue a couple dozen strawberries rained down on my head! Not a soul around, either, but I did hear someone laughing. I hope I can catch ‘em at it; I’ll tell the cheeky buggers to sod off! 

Bah!!!

[Sorry, that voice in your head again. Change the record time. Time for some Cat Stevens. Start  with If I Laugh. Then, Stephen Stills, Do For The Others.

+++++

Epilogue:

Seven Years Later, an afternoon in early April

Portofino

Paul Goodwin walked down the quay under the trees, holding his granddaughter’s hand – as this was his fondest desire. The promise of spring seemed alight in the air – the first real warmth of the season kissed the sea breeze in its passage through the majestic trees budding overhead, and the old wanderer felt it a miracle to be alive on a day like this. He loved this land, this harbor, these people, and he loved calling the village home – as he had now for more than seven years. He couldn’t fault Tom’s logic, either; his family was here now, he could best be true to his life only in this village, surrounded by the people who loved him – and by the people he loved.

His granddaughter Penelope was now, of course, the light of his life. Though he had finally married Maria Theresa, she had passed quietly almost five years ago, and in the emptiness that followed he had found first solace, then redemption in the little girls smile. She played his heartstrings mercilessly, however, though he loved every minute of her song.

Though Paul was now ninety six years old, he still walked out to the cape almost every afternoon with her. Most sunny days he waited outside the village school for her, and they walked together slowly, quietly, usually out to the cape, but sometimes just home, where he spent countless hours helping her study. Though Margherita would never understand this passion, Paul always seemed to return to the classics, to the myths of Gods now long gone from the world. Not surprisingly, Paul encouraged the little girl to take on an active fantasy life. Some days she demanded he call her Athena.

He always smiled when she did so.

They made it to the rocks at the cape that afternoon and walked carefully down to the waters edge. Most days they spent this time in silence, just looking out at shadows of clouds running across a sun-dappled bay, but from time to time they would slip quietly into the water, and a special friend would join them. Penelope thought those days were the best.

Today, Penelope’s father was sitting out on the rocks, watching, waiting . . .

Paul and his granddaughter made their way slowly out among the rocks and sat down beside Tom Goodwin.

“Hey, Dad,” he said, then: “How-ya doing, Muppet?” He put his arm around her and gave her a gentle squeeze.

“What are you doing out here, son? Little early for you to be in, isn’t it?”

“Hm-m, oh, no. They’re doing some work on the electrical system in the O.R.; no surgery this afternoon. I get to play hooky.”

“Lucky you.”

“Si, papa, you’re lucky! I had to go to school!”

“Yeah, Muppet, you’ve got it rough! Better let me give you a kiss!” He smiled and she leaned over, and he kissed her on the top of her head.

“Anything wrong?” Paul said.

“Hm-m, oh, no. Just felt like a beautiful day. Too nice to sit in the office and do paperwork.”

“I hear that.”

“Dad? What is it about this place? Something so . . . I don’t know . . .”

They looked out at the sea and the clouds for a long time. 

“Tom, there’s so much more here than we can see. You know . . .”

“Yeah,” Penelope interrupted. “Last week we saw a lady with no clothes on swimming, didn’t we, grampa!” 

“That we did, Muppet. Hell of a sight it was, too.”

“Who did you say she looked like? Moby . . .”

“Moby Dick, Muppet,” Paul said as he chuckled. “The great white whale.”

“Musta been a real looker, dad.”

“At my age, Ace, the fu – uh, well – Queen Elizabeth still looks pretty hot, if you ask me!”

“Papa, did grampa say the ‘F-word’?”

“Nope.”

“The Hell I didn’t!”

The two men laughed. The Muppet frowned.

“You know, Tom, sometimes I see the color of our skin, and the color of theirs,” he said as he pointed at the sea, “and in the imagining I find a new color, something unique, and maybe it’s not even of this world, but it’s here, and it’s ours – whether we like it or not. Hell, I don’t know, maybe it’s just the color of life. Maybe in the coming together of lives we are destined to create something new, but the creation holds the essence of the old in its heart. I guess it’s that way with all life.” 

“The circle of life,” Tom said. “I . . .”

“The Lion King!” the Muppet yelled, clapping her hands. “Yippee!”

“That’s right, Muppet. The Lion King.” Tom squeezed her again.

“Yeah, and not that Sundiata Keita character, either. Never could stand that fellow. His eyes gave me the willies.”

“What?” Tom and the Muppet said as they looked at the old man.

“Oh, nothin’, Muppet. Nothing at all.”

+++++

c. 1200 BCE

On the island of Ithaca, in the Ionian Sea

Penelope and Anticleia walked along the edge of the cliff, and the restless cobalt sea not far below tossed gentle waves recklessly ashore. Telemachus played along the shore, hopping from rock to rock with the careless abandon any seven year old would recognize and call his own. Penelope watched her son without a care in the world; he was a strong swimmer, and loved the sea. A slave stood near the beach, charged with looking out for the boy. Penelope turned to her mother-in-law and took her hand. They walked up the trail to the main house.

“It’s so lovely to see you again,” she said, though in truth that was the last thing on her mind. She was burning inside . . . as the news from Athens was not good.

“And Odysseus? How is he?”

“Oh, he is fine.”

“What has he to say about Anatolia?”

“The Teucrians? He says there will be war.”

“Will he fight?”

“Menelaus may compel him.”

“But the oracle!”

“Yes.”

“This is madness! He is too old!”

“It would be best if my husband did not hear you say that.”

He stood by the house talking to a stonemason about repairs he wanted made to the wall, but he heard them come, turned toward them as they drew near, and he waved at them . . .

The ground rumbled, the earth heaved, Penelope and Anticleia were hurled to the ground; Odysseus knelt and reached out to steady the mason before the old man fell, then he hurried to his wife and sheltered her with his body.

Soon the ground grew silent and Odysseus helped the women stand.

A sudden wind came, then dust and sand filled the sky. 

A scream. Far off; from the sea.

“Telemachus!” Penelope cried. “He is on the beach!”

Odysseus understood; he ran down the trail as the wind died; he could see the water receding even as he made for the path through the rocks to the beach. He came to the edge of the cliff and looked out to sea.

The wave was monstrous, at least half the height of the cliff. Odysseus could see exposed beach now far out past the rocks; the land now possessed earth that belonged to the sea. A dark omen!

Odysseus groaned. The wave was coming ashore with frightening speed, roaring like a lion as it advanced. He saw the slave running out among sea-urchins and starfish; Odysseus looked out to sea and could just make out his son’s head and waving arms.

“Too far,” he said, feeling the trap spring on his heart. He started down the trail but stopped; the wave was almost ashore. Just a few more moments . . .

He stood, paralyzed, as the wave rose behind his son – Telemachus simply disappeared under the sea as it passed. The slave saw his position clearly now, the danger he was in, and he turned and ran back toward the beach . . . but he was not that fast.

The wave rose higher; as the water rushed in it pulled the slave into its maw – Odysseus leaned over the edge and watched as the man was dashed against the cliffs below his feet. A wall of white thunder rose into the air before him; Odysseus fell back from the hissing water but was drenched nonetheless. He heard Penelope and Anticleia not far away, and he turned to protect them from the falling wall of water.

Soon they heard the water receding. Odysseus rushed to the edge again and saw the slave’s shattered body as it was washed out to sea. Telemachus was nowhere to be seen.

Penelope cried out in sodden anguish; she fell to her knees and beat the earth with her fists until they started to bleed. Her mother-in-law knelt beside her, trying to comfort her despite the dread that filled her own heart. Odysseus ran down the trail; when he reached the beach the sea had reclaimed her holdings. Odysseus could see the slave’s pulpy body lifting beyond the surf and he knew it would not be long before the sharks came. He made his way through the rocks and dove into deep water; he began to swim out to sea – but he stopped.

Telemachus was flying through the sea, riding on the back of a . . . a dolphin, and Odysseus  could see the smile on both their faces.

+++++

It was seven years later when Odysseus marched into battle at Troy. He carried a shield, and on that shield there was engraved a dolphin. Whether deliberately made or the result of battle, no one could say, but there were two scars behind the dolphin’s eye.

this version © 2024 Adrian Leverkühn | ABW | this was fiction, plain and simple.

Hope you enjoyed the trip. Of course, you could listen to some ELP. As in Emerson Lake and Powell (not Palmer). Try their Mars, Bringer of War, or Touch and Go to wrap things up for the day.