Admittedly, I kept her going back and forth, in order to ensure that Olga or Elsa would forever orbit near, and she was thus engaged in fetching me one of several Bloody Marys when the worst of all eventualities came to pass, namely the sudden unavoidable appearance of my beloved wife, my plighted troth, whose search party had now returned to the golf club. There were some raised voices at this point. I clung desperately to the table. But soon I was obliged to cut short my luncheon.
6. Hospital Preparedness in the Event of an Emergency Featuring High Casualties
The foregoing took place over the course of one Saturday in late September. I mention the day in particular because weekends in the off-season can be notable for a certain romance of emptiness. You walk the muddy track of the bird sanctuary up island, and it’s just you and the migratory flocks. There is the occasional gun burst of the good old boys with their hunting dogs chasing after the pheasant with which they stock the local brush. Be sure you’re wearing high-visibility gear during these months.
Yet if the weekends are noteworthy for cable-knit sweaters and fires in the fireplace and mulled cider, the middle of the week is a wasteland, as anyone will tell you. The contractors hasten to and fro in their panel trucks, well over the posted speed limit, on their way to do cut-rate work for which they overcharge. The unemployable sector of the island plans its evening benders, just the way the aristocracy does. There’s no movie theater, and the two or three stores that remain open in the winter open and close in the space of an hour or two. You can easily pass five days without talking to anyone who is not the postmistress or the woman who sells newspapers out of the coffee shop. They are each personal friends of mine. Still, after some chat about the weather or the local gossip, these conversations can inevitably grow repetitious. Why then would I stay? Why would I remain here on the island when I could just as easily relocate to a verdant suburb in the Nutmeg State?
A month passed, a month in which it became apparent that I was now intimately involved with a conspiracy that threatened not only the island but also the very liberties we so cherish. By this I mean I was, during an interval of some days or weeks, forcibly restrained and incarcerated in some medical facility on the mainland. During this time, I did have periods in which it is fair to say I had something like visions. Some of these were patriotic visions, eagles crushing various opponents, plucking out the eyes of snakes, and so forth, and there were also periods when I imagined I heard the muezzin calling for prayer in a strange guttural tongue. Unfortunately, I was forced to take a sedative in order to aid me in this medical convalescence that I didn’t believe was justified. Phantom lights. Strangers calling me by my given names. Conversations with the dead.
I had visitors, and while I want to believe that my wife had and has my best interests at heart, I am not always sure that this is the case. It was Skip who convinced me that I should cooperate with the medical experts who were overseeing my affairs. Skip didn’t actually say these things, because he is a man of few words, but it was obvious that Skip, who grows uncomfortable with any kind of change, was upset with the idea that I was not coming home with him and my wife, Helen, whose real name is not actually Helen. It was Skip who suffered when we were not taking our daily walks to the park, nor were we visiting the store together, nor were we pausing occasionally over the cartoon channels on our way to the twenty-four-hour cable news networks. Grudgingly, I agreed to partake in the proffered treatment. Or, rather, I woke one morning and found that I was already participating, whether I meant to or not.
It was determined that there were fewer “temptations” on the island, especially in the middle of the week. I was, therefore, returned to my island address. Among my many dispiriting obligations in this period were meetings of a certain kind at the Unitarian Universalist church. The nefarious modernist architect (alluded to earlier) designed this edifice. He managed, in fact, to make our Unitarian Universalist church look startlingly like an enormous gravestone.
My wife drove me to the first such meeting.
Perhaps it is important to describe my beautiful wife of forty-eight years, Helen Morehouse Van Deusen. Helen has bad feet, as I have earlier mentioned, and she is too skinny for her own good, but she dresses like this is a day on which to be elegant, no matter which day it is, and this likely means that she wears too many dark colors for our island, which generally prefers the bright shades favored by depressive grandmothers and preteens. My wife is never without a certain dark red lipstick and she always wears pumps. She does not play golf.
My wife is a reader; she always has her nose stuck in a book, and had I been smarter, I would have asked her if she had ever read Omega Force: Code White, by Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell. In this way, I would have gauged her knowledge of the danger that hovered all around us. However, my wife does not often read books such as Omega Force: Code White. She is more likely to be found with a novel from the nineteenth century in which a bad husband is traded in for one who rides well and has an annual income (from a dead uncle) of thirty thousand pounds a year. She does not take out books from the island library because the island doesn’t stock the sort of fare she prefers. She buys the books from a used-book shack on the mainland, and she lingers over them with a glass of white wine that never seems to be completed, and then she takes her fluffy Pekingese, Winston, and goes for a walk on the lawn. She needs to quit smoking but has not done so yet. She likes to invite young couples for the occasional lunches, and she likes to regale them with tales of artists we have met, none of whom I can remember.
If my wife served as a foreign espionage agent, then she did so unbeknownst to me. If she were a foreign agent, then she was the best-dressed late-middle-aged foreign espionage agent ever in the history of the United States. To my knowledge, she did not know karate chops or kicks, could not garrote a Pakistani fanatic, and would not be willing to drink red sorghum beer or yak butter tea in order to impress local warlords of the Nile River Basin or the Communist Nepalese.
In the car, out in front of the Unitarian Universalist church, my wife said, “James, promise not to bother them with all these ideas of yours.”
Now, it’s possible that the seizures I’d been having had ushered in aphasia. If you believe the medical personnel, I did suffer from brain wave anomalies that could spontaneously clear up under certain ascetic conditions. It’s also possible that I’d had more serious problems during the inaugural period of my researches than originally known. It’s possible that I’d begun to have a rare and mysterious mood disorder, owing to the fact that I felt I knew certain things and was prevented from investigating further by the medical establishment. Whichever the cause, I had found for a time that it was no longer important for me to respond when addressed by most people, among these my wife.
“James, you can fool everyone else, but you cannot fool me. Are you going to feel that you have to talk about your crackpot nonsense? I have no objection to your believing Whatever you want to believe, but I don’t want you making life difficult for me by creating a reputation for yourself as a—”