The two of them watched him. "I could call you," Eric suggested, "'officials familiar with the circumstances.' I wouldn't have to say 'local officials' if you didn't want me to. If the Coast Guard investigated, I could say 'Homeland Security officials.'"
"They couldn't kill it after that, could they, Charlie?"
"Trust me," Eric said. He gave the captain his card. "I'll be in touch."
Being led tenderly up the gangway, the Secretary was sure he spotted wise guys in the crowd. Some were taking photographs with their cell phones. Agents advanced on them threateningly. A reporter on the dock was wrestling an agent for his laptop.
"How do you like it now, gentlemen?" the Secretary called merrily to the people on the dock. That, he happened to know, was what Hemingway used to say to wise guys.
In a day or so, Eric sneaked back onto the island to interview his eyewitnesses. Taylor refused to speak to him. Annie also refused. But in the end it was Annie, working day and night at the island paper, who got her version of the events in print before anyone else. Annie's version was extremely partisan but convincing enough for the paper's owner to triple the print run and sell copies on the mainland. Blogs picked it up before the mainstream press did, together with YouTube videos of the Secretary's tantrum. The package was a great success.
A magistrate dismissed the charges against Taylor on the grounds that he had only passed a remark. The Sorenson-Shumways were not litigious and sought no settlement, although they were irritated to discover that in common law the king could do no wrong.
The public relations people at Defense were unable to keep the story under control. The plenitude of YouTube scenes provided evidence more vivid than any description of Annie's or Eric's ever could. In them, the Secretary railed against the CIA and its collaborators, who were mainly Filipino Mormons from Panay, paid handsomely to spy on him.
His mission completed, Eric left the island forever and never saw Annie or Taylor again. Six months later in India he was reunited with Lou, who explained ectomorphism and its relationship to alcoholism and mayhem. Eric and Lou went to Bali together, and then Eric went back to Possibilities.
The Secretary resigned his cabinet post and returned to private life, working on his poetry and translations. Presently he was reported ill, resting at a naval facility near Baltimore. The facility was a twenty-story wedge of brick, almost winged in shape, red brick wings folded each over the other. It seemed capable of some kind of ungainly sudden flight that would appall and unsettle witnesses. Its wings hovered over a courtyard a hundred feet below. The Secretary's accommodations had an exhilarating view of the sky too.
The Secretary's special labor in the months following his embarrassing exposure to the press had been translation. He had been working on little reading costumes calculated to charm an audience, making crowns, transliterating the Greek alphabet. He had fashioned a pillowcase with an eye torn in it for his poem about Cyclops, Poseidon's son:
Blinkered child of sea and sky
Made weak by the sly man'S trickery,
Conniving Odysseus laughs and chooses,
Leaves to you the cursed, the defense of island realm, resounding cavern.
Defending your island, your realms your caverns resounding.
Then one day he took it to their faces, a banner short and sweet, and on it read: APOTETELEMENON! A strange device to the cowards — Mission Accomplished! Yes, strange to this one and that one, cowards and defeatists! Mission Accomplished, or something close, Victory!
"Nobody's killing me now," the Secretary screamed. And raced them to the window again. It was a close-run thing, but he was overtaken and put to bed.
From the Lowlands
LEROY TRAVELED EAST into the high country pursued by little sense of sin. He had made a lot of money being no worse than anyone else in the San Francisco Peninsula data business and in his way contributing a lot. He had gone early to Silicon Valley; he had lived with his first wife in a bungalow, a tiny place in the bamboo near the Stanford golf course. She had worked as a keypunch operator for Bank of America, and he was hired by Lockheed as an analyst.
The place he was headed for was high in the Mountain West, a second home so far upstream on a river called Irish Creek that past it the canyon went to ground. The gorge was still two hundred feet from rim to riverbank, but beyond Leroy's it sank from sight and became a descent into the heart of the high desert. Here the mountain sheep had nowhere to go but down to escape danger, and they had learned over generations to leap from the exposed crags when startled, and disappear into the shadows and scattered sunlight of the sunken canyon.
In some ways the house Leroy had built — or caused to be built — reminded him distantly of the bungalow in Menlo Park. It was much larger, to say the least, and it had a swimming pool. But it accorded with an old need that he was not at all ashamed of: being close to the land. It stood at the far end of the only access road, a mile and a half beyond where the paving ended. Approaching his house the track was only surfaced and sealed. Paving, the realtor had sworn to him, would come soon. When he had spent a few weeks in the house he was not sure he required paving, which would mean his road's extension and more development along the canyon.
Decades before, Leroy had happened by a university research center on one of the rare Saturdays when he was free from Lockheed, and had seen some acquaintances from the company playing with computers. They were the old computers of that time, which, people joked, looked like the Dnepropetrovsk hydroelectric dam. His friends were playing a primordial war game, dogfighting with virtual spaceships, blasting each other's entities on the screen. They were whooping and dancing and having enormous fun. Leroy thought it looked like fun too. He was as fun-loving as anyone, though he liked practical jokes most. He loved what had once been called the put-on, in his own definition of it. For example, on his BMW there was a bumper sticker that read: LOST YOUR CAT? CHECK MY TREADS.
His mountain property had two levels, both of them set well back from the river so he could assure himself that he was not like the reckless householders downstream. Some of them had balanced themselves on picturesque but heart-stopping outcrops, where they could crawl to the edge of their decks and look down over the rim into swirling white water. Leroy never failed to see, in his imagination, their terrifying fall into the canyon, houses and Franklin stoves and heritage tomatoes and trophy wives in a fatal descending whirl.
Leroy and one of his friends from the company were among the young men who employed the principles of the early computer game to establish their electronics company. They called it "electronics" at first, but it became ever so much more. He and the friend, whom he called Dongo, prospered. Life on the San Francisco Peninsula was good; he and Dongo could smoke dope and pick up chicks at Kepler's and party. Everyone had a beard and grew their hair long; it was a statement. You could laugh at the nine-to-five dorks from IBM with their white shirts and scabby close shaves. They laughed back, but not for long when their scene looked like it was going under. Then he and Dongo would sing a song about the IBM types that went:
They're drowning in the lowland, low land low,
They're drowning in the lowland sea.
It had been a long time since those days, but every once in a while the song came back to Leroy. As the drive to his house took him over the high prairie, the sweet land smelling of sage and pine, the plain disappeared into a dizzying impossible perspective that ended where the white-clouded, snowy, sawtooth-shaped peaks rose. Approaching the head of the valley, he hummed and sang "drowning in the lowland sea," not really thinking of IBM or Dongo or the First Girl or anything much. Just sort of singing along with the tumbling tumbleweed.