Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Introduction 5
Best Books of the Year: A Round-Up 7
What Our Authors Are Reading . . . 11
A Selection of the Season’s Hot Titles 16
New Reading Group Favorites 21
Notable New Books 28
Mysteries and Thrillers 28
Sports and Adventure 34
Biography and Memoir 37
Nonfiction 42
Fiction 46
Read the Book, See the Movie . . . 49
Excerpts 51
Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey 52
C by Tom McCarthy 59
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar by Megan Stack 64
The Dead Hand by David E. Hoffman 75
The First Tycoon by T. J. Stiles 85
Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey 92
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown 98
The Confession by John Grisham 105
The Wave by Susan Casey 114
Born to Run by Christopher McDougall 117
The Tiger by John Vaillant 120
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan 130
Sum by David Eagleman 136
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear
and Larissa Volokhonsky 140
4 The eBook Insider
Welcome to The eBook Insider, the perfect first stop to make along
the way as you fill your e-reader with wonderful books that you’ll want to
recommend to friends and adopt as new favorites. Instead of searching,
this is the one place where you can preview excerpts from award-winners
and blockbusters or peruse lists of the best books of the year. And it’s the
only place to find out what authors like Dan Brown, Carl Hiaasen, and
Nora Ephron are reading and recommending. If you love fiction, history,
biographies, mysteries, or thrillers, you’re bound to find just what you’re
looking for when you consult The Insider.
Happy reading!
Best Books of the Year:
A Round-Up
Nominees in Fiction:
Nominees in Nonfiction:
Nominees in Fiction:
Nominees in Nonfiction:
Nominees in Biography/Autobiography:
Nominees in History:
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City by Greg
Grandin
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789 –1815 by Gordon S.
Wood
Best Books of the Year: A Round-Up 9
Nonfiction
Nonfiction
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick
Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954–1981) With Attendant Comments,
Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim
[Read an excerpt here]
Insectopedia by Hugh Rafes
The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron by Howard Bryant
The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean by Susan
Casey [Read an excerpt here]
Out of all the books you’ve ever read, which one would you
urge others to read?
JULIA GLASS: One? Just one? You’ve got to be kidding! Well, okay,
how about any collection of short stories by the late Andre Dubus? When I
was learning the craft of fiction, he was one of my literary gods. Still is.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham. The book
and movie versions of this story perfectly complement one another. It’s a
lesson in how successfully a novel can be translated into a screenplay.
DAN BROWN: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. This prophetic tale
of a future dominated by globalization, genetic engineering, and mass nar-
cotization is even more terrifying today than it was in 1932 . . . because we
can see it coming true.
NORA EPHRON: War and Peace. I’ve never read it. [Read an
excerpt of War and Peace from the acclaimed new transla-
tion by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky here]
AIMEE BENDER: I’m really looking forward to reading Great House,
the new Nicole Krauss book, and I loved the excerpt in The New Yorker, but
I also want to wait a little while so I can sidle up to it on my own terms.
JULIA GLASS: To the End of the Land, the new novel by David Gross-
man, is at the top of my list. It worries me how insulated most Ameri-
cans are from the consciousness that our country is at war. I’m just as
guilty as the next person here, yet I am beginning to feel drawn toward
reading that keeps me mindful of what it means to be at war for those who
are directly affected. In the same vein, let me also strongly recommend a
What Our Authors Are Reading . . . 15
nonfiction book I read a couple of years ago called Soldier’s Heart: Reading
Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, by Elizabeth D. Samet. [Read
an excerpt from To The End of the Land here]
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: I am working my way through
Christopher Alexander’s four-volume work The Nature of Order. I hope to
read volumes 2 and 3 next year, having read volume 1 this year. Christo-
pher Alexander is a professor of architecture at Berkeley. He is a visionary
who understands exactly where modern architecture has gone wrong and
who shows us how humane architecture is possible.
Nonfiction
Fiction
Peter Carey
I had no doubt that something cruel and catastrophic had happened before
I was even born, yet the comte and comtesse, my parents, would not tell
me what it was. As a result my organ of curiosity was made irritable and
I grew into the most restless and unhealthy creature imaginable—slight,
pale, always climbing, prying into every drain and attic of the Château de
Barfleur.
But consider this: Given the ferocity of my investigations, is it not half
queer I did not come across my uncle’s célérifère?
Perhaps the célérifère was common knowledge in your own family. In
mine it was, like everything, a mystery. This clumsy wooden bicycle, con-
structed by my uncle Astolphe de Barfleur, was only brought to light when
a pair of itinerant slaters glimpsed it strapped to the rafters. Why it should
be strapped, I do not know, nor can I imagine why my uncle—for I assume
it was he—had used two leather dog collars to do the job. It is my nature
to imagine a tragedy—that loyal pets have died for instance—but perhaps
the dog collars were simply what my uncle had at hand. In any case, it was
typical of the riddles trapped inside the Château de Berfleur. At least it
was not me who found it and it makes my pulse race, even now, to imag-
ine how my mother might have reacted if I had. Her upsets were never
predictable. As for her maternal passions, these were not conventionally
expressed, although I relished those occasions, by no means infrequent,
when she feared that I would die. It is recorded that, in the year of 1809,
Parrot and Olivier in America 53
she called the doctor on fifty-three occasions. Twenty years later she would
still be taking the most outlandish steps to save my life.
My childhood was neither blessed nor tainted by the célérifère, and I would
not have mentioned it at all, except—here it is before us now.
Typically, the Austrian draftsman fails to suggest the three dimensions.
However:
Could there be a vehicle more appropriate for the task I have so reck-
lessly set myself, one that you, by-the-by, have supported by taking this
volume in your hands? That is, you have agreed to be transported to my
childhood where it will be proven, or if not proven then strongly suggested,
that the very shape of my head, my particular phrenology, the volume of
my lungs, was determined by unknown pressures brought to bear in the
years before my birth.
So let us believe that a grotesque and antique bicycle has been made
available to us, its wooden frame in the form of a horse, and of course if
we are to approach my home this way, we must be prepared to push my
uncle’s hobby across fallen branches, through the spinneys. It is almost use-
less in the rough ground of the woods, where I and the Abbé de La Londe,
my beloved Bébé, shot so many hundreds of larks and sparrows that I
bruised my little shoulder blue.
“Careful Olivier dear, do be careful.”
We can ignore nose bleeding for the time being, although to be realistic
the blood can be anticipated soon enough—spectacular spurts, splendid
gushes—my body being always too thin-walled a container for the pas-
sions coursing through its veins, but as we are making up our adventure let
us assume there is no blood, no compresses, no leeches, no wild gallops to
drag the doctor from his breakfast.
And so we readers can leave the silky treacherous Seine and cross the
rough woodlands and enter the path between the linden trees, and I,
Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont, a noble of Myo-
pia, am free to speed like Mercury while pointing out the blurry vegetable
garden on the left, the smudgy watercolor of orchard on the right. Here is
the ordure of the village road across which I can go sailing, skidding, blind
as a bat, through the open gates of the Château de Barfleur.
Hello Jacques, hello Gustave, Odile. I am home.
On the right, just inside, is Papa’s courthouse where he conducts the
marriages of young peasants, thus saving them military service and early
death in Napoleon’s army. It does not need to be said that we are not for
Bonaparte, and my papa leaves the intrigues for others. We live a quiet
life—he says. In Normandy, in exile, he also says. My mother says the same
thing, but more bitterly. Only in our architecture might you glimpse signs
54 The eBook Insider
of the powerful familial trauma. We live a quiet life, but our courtyard
resembles a battlefield, its ancient austerity insulted by a sea of trenches,
fortifications, red mud, white sand, gray flagstones, and fifty-four forsythias
with their roots bound up in balls of hessian. In order that the courtyard
should reach its proper glory, the Austrian architect has been installed in
the Blue Room with his drawing boards and pencils. You may glimpse this
uppity creature as we pass.
I have omitted mention of the most serious defect of my uncle’s vehi-
cle—the lack of steering. There are more faults besides, but who could
really care? The two-wheeled célérif èrewas one of those dazzling machines
that are initially mocked for their impracticality until, all in a great rush,
like an Italian footman falling down a staircase, they arrive in front of us,
unavoidably real and extraordinarily useful.
The years before 1805, when I was first delivered to my mother’s breast,
constituted an age of inventions of great beauty and great terror—and I
was very soon aware of all of this without knowing exactly what the beauty
or the terror were. What I understood was drawn solely from what we call
the symbolic aggregate: that is, the confluence of the secrets, the disturb-
ing flavor of my mother’s milk, my own breathing, the truly horrible and
unrelenting lowing of the condemned cattle which, particularly on winter
afternoons, at that hour when the servants have once more failed to light
the lanterns, distressed me beyond belief.
But hundreds of words have been spent and it is surely time to enter
that château, rolling quietly on our two wheels between two tall blue doors
where, having turned sharply right, we shall be catapulted along the entire
length of the long high gallery, traveling so fast that we will be shrieking
and will have just sufficient time to notice, on the left, the conceited archi-
tect and his slender fair-haired assistant. On the right—look quickly—are
six high windows, each presenting the unsettling turmoil of the courtyard,
and the gates, outside which the peasants and their beasts are constantly
dropping straw and fecal matter.
You might also observe, between each window, a portrait of a Garmont
or a Barfleur or a Clarel, a line which stretches so far back in time that
should my father, in the darkest days of the Revolution, have attempted to
burn all the letters and documents that would have linked him irrevocably
to these noble privileges and perils, he would have seen his papers rise from
the courtyard bonfire still alive, four hundred years of history become like
burning crows, lifted by wings of flame, a plague of them, rising into a cold
turquoise sky I was not born to see.
But today is bright and sunny. The long gallery is a racetrack, paved
with marble, and we swish toward that low dark door, the little oratory
where Maman often spends her mornings praying.
Parrot and Olivier in America 55
But my mother is not praying, so we must carry our machine to visit her.
That anyone would choose oak for such a device beggars belief, but my
uncle was clearly an artist of a type. Now on these endless stairs I feel the
slow drag of my breath like a rat-tail file inside my throat. This is no fun,
sir, but do not be alarmed. I might be a slight boy with sloping shoulders
and fine arms, but my blood is cold and strong, and I will swim a river
and shoot a bird and carry the célérif ère to the second floor where I will
present to you the cloaked blindfolded figure on the chaise, my mother, the
Comtesse de Garmont.
Poor Maman. See how she suffers, her face gaunt, glowing in the gloom.
In her youth she was never ill. In Paris she was a beauty, but Paris has been
taken from her. She has her own grand house on the rue Saint-Dominique,
but my father is a cautious man and we are in exile in the country. My
mother is in mourning for Paris, although sometimes you might imagine
her a penitent. Has she sinned? Who would tell me if she had? Her clothes
are both somber and loose-fitting as is appropriate for a religious woman.
Her life is a kind of holy suffering existing on a plane above her disappoint-
ing child.
I also am sick, but it is in no sense the same. I am, as I often declare
myself, a wretched beast.
Behold, the dreadful little creature—his head under a towel, engulfed
in steam, and the good Bébé, who was as often my nurse as my tutor and
confessor, sitting patiently at my side, his big hand on my narrow back
while I gasped for life so long and hard that I would—still in the throes of
crisis—fall asleep and wake with my nose scalded in the basin, my lungs
like fish in a pail, grasping what they could.
After how many choking nights was I still awake to witness the pale
light of dawn lifting the dew-wet poplar leaves from the inky waters of
the night, to hear the cawing of the crows, the antic gargoyle torments of
country life?
I knew I would be cured in Paris. In Paris I would be happy. It was the
Abbé de La Londe’s contrary opinion that Paris was a pit of vile miasmas
and that the country air was good for me. He should have had me at my
Catullus and my Cicero but instead he would drag me, muskets at the
ready, into what we called the Bottom Hundred where we would occupy
ourselves shooting doves and thrush, and Bébé would play beater and
groundsman and priest. “You’re a splendid little marksman,” Bébé would
say, jogging to collect our plunder. “Quam sagaciter puer telum conicit!” I
translated. He never learned I was shortsighted. I so wished to please him
I shot things I could not see.
My mother would wish me to address him as vous and l’Abbé, but such
was his character that he would be Bébé until the day he died.
56 The eBook Insider
I was a strange small creature for him to love. He was a strong and
handsome man, with snow-white hair and shrewd eyes easily moved to
sympathy. He had raised my father and now I trusted myself entire to
him, his big liver-spotted hands, his patient manner, the smell of Virgin-
ian tobacco which stained the shoulder of his cassock, and filled me with
the atoms of America twenty years before I breathed its air. “Come young
man,” he would say. “Come, it’s a beautiful day—Decorus est dies.” And
the hail would be likely flailing your back raw and he would marvel, not
at the cruel pummeling, but at the miracle of ice. Or if not the ice, then
the wind—blowing so violently it seemed the North Sea itself was pushing
up the Seine and would wash away the wall that separated the river from
the bain.
The meek would not swim, but Bébé made sure I was not meek. He
would be splashing in the deep end of the bain, naked as a broken statue—
“Come on Great Olivier.”
If I became—against all that God intended for me—a powerful swim-
mer, it was not because of the damaging teachings of Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau, but because of this good priest and my desire to please him. I would
do anything for him, even drown myself. It was because of him that I was
continually drawn away from the awful atmosphere of my childhood home,
and if I spent too many nights in the company of doctors and leeches, I
knew, in spite of myself, the sensual pleasures of the seasons, the good red
dirt drying out my tender hands.
And of course I exaggerate. I lived at the Château de Barfleur for sixteen
years and my mother was not always to be found lying in her pigeonhole
with the wet sheet across her eyes. There was, above my father’s locked
desk, a large and lovely pencil portrait of my maman, as light as the dream
of a child that was never to be born. Her nose here was perhaps a little too
narrow, a trifle severe, but there was such true vitality in the likeness. She
showed a clear forehead, a frank expression, inquiring eyes that directly
engaged the viewer, and not only here, but elsewhere—for there would
be many nights in my childhood when she would rise up from her bed,
dress herself in all her loveliness, and welcome our old friends, not those so
recently and swiftly elevated, but nobles of the robe and sword. To stand
in the courtyard on these evenings with all the grand coaches out of sight
behind the stables, to see the fuzzy moon and the watery clouds scudding
above Normandy, was to find oneself transported back to a vanished time,
and one would approach one’s grand front door, not speeding on a bicycle,
but with a steady slippered tread and, on entering, smell, not dirt or cob-
webs, but the fine powder on the men’s wigs, the lovely perfumes on the
ladies’ breasts, the extraordinary palette of the ancient régime, such pinks
and greens, gorgeous silks and satins whose colors rose and fell among the
Parrot and Olivier in America 57
folds and melted into the candled night, and on these occasions my mother
was the most luminous among the beautiful. Yet her true beauty—evanes-
cent, fluttering, deeper and more grained than in the pencil portrait—did
not reveal itself until the audience of liveried servants had been sent away.
Then the curtains were drawn and my father made the coffee himself and
served his peers carefully, one by one, and my mother, whose voice in her
sickbed was thin as paper, began to sing:
A troubadour of Béarn,
His eyes filled with tears . . .
At this moment she was not less formal in her manner. Her slender
hands lay simply on her lap, and it was to God Himself she chose to reveal
her strong contralto voice. I have often enough, indiscreetly it seems now,
publicly recalled my mother’s singing of “Troubadour Béarnais,” and as a
result that story has gained a dull protective varnish like a ceramic captive
in a museum which has been inquired of too often by the overly familiar.
So it is that any tutoyering bourgeois and his wife can know the Comtesse
de Garmont sang about the dead king and cried, but nothing would ever
reveal to them Olivier de Garmont’s fearful astonishment at his mother’s
emotions, and—God forgive me—I was jealous of the passion she so wan-
tonly displayed, this vault of historic feeling she had hidden from me. Now,
when I must remain politely at attention beside my father’s chair, I had to
conceal my emotion while she gave away a pleasure that was rightly mine.
Our guests cried and I experienced a violent repugnance at this private act
carried out in public view.
When she had finished, when our friends remained solemnly still, I
walked across the wide rug to stand beside her chair and very quietly, like
a scorpion, I pinched her arm.
Of course she was astonished, but what I remember most particularly
is my wild and wicked pleasure of transgression. She widened her eyes,
but did not cry out. Instead she tossed her head and gave me, below those
welling eyes, a contemptuous smile.
I then walked, very coolly, to my bed. I had expected I would weep
when I shut my door behind me. Indeed, I tried to, but it did not come out
58 The eBook Insider
right. These were strange overexcited feelings but they were not, it seemed,
of the sort that would produce tears. These were of a different order, com-
pletely new, perhaps more like those one would expect in an older boy in
whose half-ignorant being the sap of life is rising. They seemed like they
might be emotions ignited by sinful thoughts, but they were not. What
I had smelled in that song, in that room full of nobles, was the distilled
essence of the Château de Barfleur which was no less than the obscenity
and horror of the French Revolution as it was visited on my family. Of this
monstrous truth no honest word had ever been spoken in my hearing.
My mother would now punish me for pinching her. She would be cold,
so much the better. Now I would discover what had made this smell. I
would go through her bureau drawers when she was praying. I would take
the key to the library. I examined the papers in my father’s desk drawers. I
climbed on chairs. I sought out the dark, the forbidden, the corners of the
château where the atmosphere was somehow most dangerous and soiled,
well beyond the proprieties of the library, beyond the dry safe wine cellar,
through a dark low square portal, into that low limitless dirty dark space
where the spiderwebs caught fire in the candlelight. I found nothing—or
nothing but dread which mixed with the dust on my hands and made me
feel quite ill.
However, there is no doubt that Silices si levas scorpiones tandem invenies—if
you lift enough rocks, you will finally discover a nest of scorpions, or some
pale translucent thing that has been bred to live in a cesspit or the fires of a
forge. And I do not mean the letters a certain monsieur had written to my
mother which I wish I had never seen. It was, rather, beside the forge that
I discovered the truth in some humdrum little parcels. They had waited for
me in the smoky gloom and I could have opened them any day I wished.
Even a four-year-old Olivier might have reached them; the shelf was so
low that our blacksmith used it to lean his tools against. One naturally
assumed these parcels to be the legacy of a long-dead gardener—dried
seeds, say, or sage or thyme carefully wrapped for a season some Jacques or
Claude had never lived to see. By the time I pushed my snotty nose against
them, which was a very long time after the night I pinched my mother, they
still exuded a distinct but confusing smell. Was it a good smell? Was it a
bad smell? Clearly I did not know. Not even Montaigne, being mostly con-
cerned with the smell of women and food, is prepared to touch on this. He
ignores the lower orders of mold and fungus, death and blood, all of which
might have served him better than his ridiculous assertion that the sweat of
great men—he mentions Alexander the Great—exhaled a sweet odor.
C
Tom McCarthy
The static’s like the sound of thinking. Not of any single person thinking,
nor even a group thinking, collectively. It’s bigger than that, wider—and
more direct. It’s like the sound of thought itself, its hum and rush. Each
night, when Serge drops in on it, it recoils with a wail, then rolls back in
crackling waves that carry him away, all rudderless, until his finger, nudg-
ing at the dial, can get some traction on it all, some sort of leeway. The
first stretches are angry, plaintive, sad—and always mute. It’s not until,
hunched over the potentiometer among fraying cords and soldered wires,
his controlled breathing an extension of the frequency of air he’s riding
on, he gets the first quiet clicks that words start forming: first he jots down
the signals as straight graphite lines, long ones and short ones, then, below
these, he begins to transcribe curling letters, dim and grainy in the arc light
of his desktop . . .
He’s got two masts set up. There’s a twenty-two-foot pine one topped
with fifteen more feet of bamboo, all bolted to an oak-stump base half-
buried in the Mosaic Garden. Tent pegs circle the stump round; steel guy
wires, double-insulated, climb from these to tether the mast down. On the
chimney of the main house, a pole three feet long reaches the same height
as the bamboo. Between the masts are strung four eighteen-gage manga-
nese copper wires threaded through oak-lath crosses. In Serge’s bedroom,
there’s a boxed tuning coil containing twenty feet of silk-covered platinoid,
shellacked and scraped. Two dials are mounted on the box’s lid: a large,
clock-handed one dead in the center and, to its right, a smaller disc made
60 The eBook Insider
from ash-wood recessed at the back and dotted at the front by twenty little
screws with turned-down heads set in a circle to form switch-studs. The
detector’s brass with an adjusting knob of ebonite; the condenser’s Mur-
dock; the crystal, Chilean gelina quartz, a Mighty Atom mail-ordered from
Gamage of Holborn. For the telephone, he tried a normal household one
but found it wasn’t any use unless he replaced the diaphragms, and moved
on to a watch-receiver pattern headset wound to a resistance of eight and
a half thousand ohms. The transmitter itself is made of standard brass, a
four-inch tapper arm keeping Serge’s finger a safe distance from the spark
gap. The spark gap flashes blue each time he taps; it makes a spitting noise,
so loud he’s had to build a silence box around the desk to isolate his little
RX station from the sleeping household—or, as it becomes more obvious
to him with every session, to maintain the little household’s fantasy of iso-
lation from the vast sea of transmission roaring all around it.
Tonight, as on most nights, he starts out local, sweeping from two hun-
dred and fifty to four hundred meters. It’s the usual traffic: CQ signals from
experimental wireless stations in Masedown and Eliry, tapping out their
call signs and then slipping into Q-code once another bug’s responded.
They exchange signal quality reports, compare equipment, enquire about
variations in the weather and degrees of atmospheric interference. The
sequence QTC, which Serge, like any other Wireless World subscriber, knows
means “Have you anything to transmit?”, is usually met with a short, nega-
tive burst before both questioner and responder move on to fish for other
signals. Serge used to answer all CQs, noting each station’s details in his
call-book; lately, though, he’s become more selective in the signals he’ll
acknowledge, preferring to let the small-fry click away as background chat-
ter, only picking up the pencil to transcribe the dots and dashes when their
basic QRNs and QRAs unfold into longer sequences. This is happening right
now: an RXer in Lydium who calls himself “Wireworm” is tapping out his
thoughts about the Postmaster General’s plans to charge one guinea per
station for all amateurs.
“ . . . tht bedsteads n gas pipes cn b used as rcving aerials is well-kn0n I
mslf hv dn this,” Wireworm’s boasting, “als0 I cn trn pian0 wire in2 tuning
coil fashion dtctrs from wshing s0da n a needle mst I obtain lcnses 4 ths
wll we gt inspctrs chcking r pots n pans 2 C tht they cnfrm 2 rgulatns I sgst
cmpaign cvl ds0bdns agnst such impsitions . . . ”
Transcribing his clicks, Serge senses that Wireworm’s not so young: no
operator under twenty would bother to tap out the whole word “fashion.”
The spacing’s a little awkward also: too studied, too self-conscious. Besides,
most bugs can improvise equipment: he once made Bodner’s spade con-
duct a signal and the house’s pipes vibrate and resonate, sending Frieda
running in panic from her bath . . .
C 61
Serge moves up to five hundred meters. Here are stronger, more deci-
sive signals: coastal stations’ call signs, flung from towering masts. Poldhu’s
transmitting its weather report; a few nudges away, Malin, Cleethorpes,
Nordeich send out theirs. Liverpool’s exchanging messages with tugboats
in the Mersey: Serge transcribes a rota of towing duties for tomorrow. Fur-
ther out, the lightship Tongue’s reporting a derelict’s position: the coordi-
nates click their way in to the Seaforth station, then flash out again, to be
acknowledged by Marconi operators of commercial liners, one after the
other. The ships’ names reel off in litany: Falaba, British Sun, Scania, Morea,
Carmania, each name appendaged by its church: Cunard Line, Allen,
Aberdeen Direct, Canadian Pacific Railway, Holland-America. The clicks
peter out, and Serge glances at the clock: it’s half a minute before one. A
few seconds later, Paris’s call-sign comes on: FL for Eiffel. Serge taps his
finger on the desktop to the rhythm of the huge tower’s stand-by clicks,
then holds it still and erect for the silent lull that always comes just before
the time-code. All the operators have gone silent: boats, coastal stations,
bugs—all waiting, like him, for the quarter-second dots to set the air, the
world, time itself back in motion as they chime the hour.
They sound, and then the headphones really come to life. The press
digest goes out from Niton, Poldhu, Malin, Cadiz: Diario del Atlántico, Journal
de l’Atlantique, Atlantic Daily News . . . “Madero and Suárez Shot in Mexico
While Trying to Escape” . . . “Trade Pact Between” . . . “Entretien de” . . .
“Shocking Domestic Tragedy in Bow” . . . “Il Fundatore” . . . “Husband
Unable to Prevent” . . . The stories blur together: Serge sees a man clutch-
ing a kitchen knife chasing a politician across parched earth, past cacti and
armadillos, while ambassadors wave papers around fugitive and pursuer,
negotiating terms. “Grain Up Five, Lloyds Down Two” . . . “Australia All
Out for Four Hundred and Twenty-one, England Sixty-two for Three in
Reply” . . . Malin’s got ten private messages for Lusitania, seven for Cam-
pania, two for Olympic: request instructions how to proceed with . . . the honor of
your company on the occasion of . . . weighing seven and a half pounds, a girl . . . The
operators stay on after the Marconigrams have gone through, chatting to
one another: Carrigan’s moved to President Lincoln, Borstable to Malwa; the
Company Football Team drew two–all against the Evening Standard Eleven;
old Allsop, wireless instructor at Marconi House, is getting married on the
twenty-second . . . His tapper-finger firing up her spark gap . . . Short, then long . . .
Olympic andCampania are playing a game of chess: K4 to Q7 . . . K4 to
K5 . . . They always start K4 . . . Serge transcribes for a while, then lays
his pencil down and lets the sequences run through the space between his
ears, sounding his skull: there’s a fluency to them, a rhythm that’s spon-
taneous, as though the clicks were somehow speaking on their own and
62 The eBook Insider
didn’t need the detectors, keys or finger-twitching men who cling to them
like afterthoughts . . .
He climbs to six hundred, and picks up ice reports sent out from whal-
ers: floeberg/growler 51n 10’ 45.63” lat 36w 12’ 39.37 long . . . field ice
59n 42’ 43.54” lat 14w 45’ 56.25” long . . . Compagnie de Télégraphie
sans Fil reports occasional light snow off Friesland. Paris comes on again;
again the cycle pauses and restarts. Then Bergen, Crookhaven, Tarifa,
Malaga, Gibraltar. Serge pictures gardenias tucked behind girls’ ears, red
dresses and the blood of bulls. He hears news forwarded, via Port Said
and Rome, from Abyssinia, and sees an African girl strumming on some
kind of mandolin, jet-black breasts glowing darkly through light silk. Suez
is issuing warnings of Somali raiders further down the coast. More names
process by: Isle of Perim, Zanzibar, Isle of Socotra, Persian Gulf. Parades
of tents line themselves up for him: inside them, dancers serving sherbet;
outside, camels saddled with rich carpets, deserts opening up beneath red
skies. The air is rich tonight: still and cold, high pressure, the best time of
year. He lets a fart slip from his buttocks, and waits for its vapor to reach his
nostrils: it, too, carries signals, odor-messages from distant, unseen bowels.
When it arrives, he slips the headphones off, opens the silence cabin’s door
to let some air in and hears a goods train passing half a mile away. The
pulsing of its carriage-joins above the steel rails carries to him cleanly. He
looks down at his desk: the half-worn pencil, the light’s edge across the
paper sheet, the tuning box, the tapper. These things—here, solid, tan-
gible—are somehow made more present by the tinny sound still spilling
from the headphones lying beside them. The sound’s present too, material:
Serge sees its ripples snaking through the sky, pleats in its fabric, joins puls-
ing as they make their way down corridors of air and moisture, rock and
metal, oak, pine and bamboo . . .
Above six hundred and fifty, the clicks dissipate into a thin, pervasive
noise, like dust. Discharges break across this: distant lightning, Aurora
Borealis, meteorites. Their crashes and eruptions sound like handfuls of
buckshot thrown into a tin bucket, or a bucketful of grain-rich gravy dashed
against a wash-boiler. Wireless ghosts come and go, moving in arpeggios
that loop, repeat, mutate, then disappear. Serge spends the last half hour
or so of each night up here among these pitches, nestling in their contours
as his head nods towards the desktop and lights flash across the inside of
his eyelids, pushing them outwards from the center of his brain, so far out
that the distance to their screen seems infinite: they seem to contain all dis-
tances, envelop space itself, curving around it like a patina, a mould . . .
Once, he picked up a CQD: a distress signal. It came from the Atlan-
tic, two hundred or so miles off Greenland. The Pachitea, merchant vessel
of the Peruvian Steamship Company, had hit an object—maybe whale,
C 63
maybe iceberg—and was breaking up. The nearest vessel was another
South American, Acania, but it was fifty miles away. Galway had picked the
call up; so had Le Havre, Malin, Poldhu and just about every ship between
Southampton and New York. Fifteen minutes after Serge had locked onto
the signal half the radio bugs in Europe had tuned into it as well. The
Admiralty put a message out instructing amateurs to stop blocking the
air. Serge ignored the order, but lost the signal beneath general interfer-
ence: the atmospherics were atrocious that night. He listened to the whine
and crackle, though, right through till morning—and heard, or thought
he heard, among its breaks and flecks, the sound of people treading cold,
black water, their hands beating small disturbances into waves that had
come to bury them.
Every Man in This
Village Is a Liar
Megan K. Stack
Cold dawn broke on the horizon outside. The bedroom door shushed
open, bringing the morning air and a warlord on predator’s toes.
I lay in a nest of polyester blankets and listened to his footsteps cross
the carpet. Every muscle pulled tight. You reveal yourself in breath, in the nerves
of your face. Count the breaths, in and out. He sat on the edge of the bed. Smooth
breath, relax your eyes, don’t let the lids shake. Then his calloused old hand was
stroking my hair, cupping my scalp, fingers dripping like algae onto my
ears and cheeks.
The warlord lived in Jalalabad, in a swath of Afghanistan where the soil
is rich with poppies and land mines, in a house awash in guns. People whis-
pered that he was a heroin trafficker. His tribal loyalists clotted the orange
groves and rose gardens outside, AK-47s in dust-caked fingers. They said
he was ruthless in war, that his skin was scarred by an arrow. There was a
vague whisper about a legendary ambush, the warlord killing enemies with
his bare hands. And now those ropey hands were petting my hair, silent
and brazen.
I clung to one thing: Brian, the photographer, was in the bathroom.
Water slapped the floor. How long would his shower last, and how could
I escape the warlord’s lechery without offending him? The truth was, we
needed him. He was an enemy of the Taliban, funded by the U.S. govern-
ment, making a play for power in the vague, new order that had begun
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar 65
He was solemn. “I take your life on my honor,” he said from the heights
of his mountainous nose. “They will have to kill me before they can
harm you.”
A few days later, we set off for war. The sun sank as we drove toward the
Khyber Pass, storied old route of smugglers and marauders. Men pounded
through a field hockey match in a haze of setting sun and rising dust. “Dead
slow,” ordered a traffic sign. “These areas are full of drugs,” muttered the
driver. In my head shimmered gilded pictures of the Grand Trunk Road,
the Silk Road, Kim. On the edge of Afghanistan, stars crowded the sky,
dull and dense. We crossed the border and plunged into the enormous
uncertainty of this new American war. Forty Afghan fighters waited for us,
young men and boys nestled together in pickup trucks. They shivered in
the stinging night and gripped grenade launchers, chains of machine gun
rounds trailing from the trucks. We drove alongside the Kabul River, past
the shadowed bulk of mountains and tractors, along fields of tobacco and
wheat. At the edge of Jalalabad, the deserted dinosaurs of rusted Soviet
tanks reared from the ground.
In the core of the dusty night, we pulled up to his house. Zaman served
a feast and stayed awake with us, lolling on the floor around the vegetables
and lamb and spinning out long, fatigued stories. We blinked and yawned
but Zaman pushed on toward sunrise. He was selling his case even then,
from those earliest hours. Osama bin Laden had fled to the nearby White
Mountains, he said, to the caves cut into stone, to Tora Bora. The terrorist
and his followers still lurked nearby. If America was serious about this war
on terror, the terrorists needed to be flushed out. He could do the job; he
only needed guns, money, and equipment.
He talked on and on, weaving French into English, until the dawn call
to prayer rang from a whitening sky. His words melted together. My chin
was falling. I slept on the floor, and woke up in the new Afghanistan.
The first days with Zaman were easy. The stories fell like ripe fruit. But
when he tiptoed to my bed, I knew we had to scrounge for another roof.
There was nowhere to go but the Spin Ghar hotel, a crumbling Soviet relic
rising from tangles of garden and derelict trees. Rank smells wafted through
the cold corridors, over chipped linoleum, past cracked plaster walls. Mad
jumbles of bodies crowded the lobby—foreign reporters, Afghans, hired
gunmen in their robes and eye paint, all sprawled on the grass, smoking on
the steps, flooding over the balconies.
The electricity died that night, and gas lanterns shivered in the dark
cavern of the hotel dining room. Everybody was very quiet. There was
bad news.
Some of the reporters had set off for Kabul in a convoy that day.
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar 67
Two hours out of town, Afghan bandits stopped the first car and shot
the passengers dead: a Spaniard, an Afghan, an Australian. There was an
Italian woman, too, who was raped and then killed. The rest of the report-
ers squealed their cars around and came back to Jalalabad. The bodies
were abandoned on the road. It was the first lost gamble, and it pulled us a
little farther into war. Now we in the dark dining room were rendered sur-
vivors, the ones who hadn’t died. The faces swim out of darkness, painted
in wisps of gaslight. They are talking about the abandoned bodies, about
who fetched them. I feel empty. I have no reaction. It is a gap inside of me,
like putting your tongue where a tooth used to be. I know that I should feel
something; to feel something is appropriate and human. I stay silent so that
the others will not realize that I am gaping like a canyon. I am not abso-
lutely sure this is real; it’s so very far from where we started. On September
11, I was in Paris, and then in Bahrain, an aircraft carrier, and Pakistan,
moving slowly, unconsciously closer to here, tonight. America is at war, and
we are all here too, at the edge of death, just like that, in just a few weeks.
And so we are on an island, and so the roads are a place to die.
In my room the darkness is thick as tar. My fingers can’t find a lock
on the door. I am groping when the door cracks forward with a grunt of
Pashto. I can’t see the Afghan man but I push at him, throw my arms into
the darkness and find flesh, drive him back. His cries are pure sound to me.
I don’t care. After Zaman at my bedside and reporters dead on the road,
this man cannot stay. Our American and Afghan words mean nothing
when they hit the other ear. We are stripped of all understanding, battling
in the blackness. I shove him into the hall and force the door closed against
the last pieces of him, a kicking foot, a grasping arm. Later on, I realize he
was probably the sweet-faced cleaning man who shuffled like a kicked stray
through the corridors at night. Later I laugh, a little embarrassed. But on
this night, I have vanquished. I lean limp against the door of my stinking
little cave, conqueror of misunderstood forces.
bizarre and fantastic trails past—a pair of mujahideen with their fingers
intertwined, plastic flowers glowing in black hair, winking and fluttering
with the kohl-rimmed eyes of two besotted lovers. And you can’t help but
look, but then all you can do is watch these strange peacocks, stunned by
the magenta homoeroticism of this dry, pious land. By the time you peel
your attention back and stop your thoughts from whirling, the man you
were trying to weigh out is long gone. Afghanistan was meaning washed
away in floods of color, in drugs, guns, sexual ambiguity, and Islam.
I met a young man who spoke Arabic and English, which was rare
and fancy for provincial Afghanistan. He had worked for bin Laden, and
I was certain his sympathies lay with the Taliban, with Al Qaeda. We sat
together and had long interviews. Later I found out he worked for the
CIA. They gave him a satellite phone, and he was calling in coordinates
for bombing targets.
Every man in this village is a liar.
Maybe that’s why nobody believed the warlords when they kept saying
that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora. A pity, because it was true:
Osama bin Laden packed his bags and fled into the mountain redoubt
near Jalalabad after September 11. The caves were his last stop before
he lost his substance and melted into the world’s most famous phantom.
Catching bin Laden was the first important thing the United States set
out to do after September 11. The job was bungled so thoroughly that the
war never really found its compass again. Here in eastern Afghanistan, the
Americans would begin to lose the plot.
the masterfully defensible cave complex built with CIA money back when
America was fighting the Communists instead of the terrorists. U.S. war-
planes hammered the mountains, but their intelligence was coming from
Afghans who manipulated the firepower to suit their own interests.
I learned to count the fighter jets that passed overhead in my sleep.
There were no other airplanes in the Afghan skies; there was only the war.
When thin dawn light creaked into the room, I’d know that three war-
planes had passed. I woke up knowing, and remembering nothing.
I have this memory, clear as glass: Sunset spilled all over the horizon.
In the velvet grass below the hotel terrace, the drivers were bent on their
prayer rugs, the guerrillas paced in the gravel, the palms and pines deep-
ened in the dying light. Then a B-52 sliced a white gash into the sky. All of
the reporters and translators and soldiers stood still, stared at the heavens,
and waited to see where the bombs would fall. The planes thundered past
every day, but for some reason on that day we stood there in collective awe.
Maybe everybody had forgotten about the war for a minute, and then it
was there again.
One day, Zaman’s men brought the bodies of eight dead guerrilla sol-
diers down from the mountains and laid them out on the hospital floor.
Then he herded in a great swarm of reporters to gape and snap photo-
graphs. He stalked over the dead, face twisted with rage, railing about the
bombings. The Americans were killing peasants loyal to him, and now his
mujahideen. They must be using old maps, he thundered. Who is telling
them where to bomb? Do these look like Al Qaeda to you?
The dead men were skinny, all of them, muddy and ragged. One man’s
face had been blown off. Another lay with the back of his head gone, his
brains leaking. Filtered sunlight spilled onto the floor; the smell of death
was heavy. An American reporter fell on the ground and lay there crying.
I looked at her, and at the corpses. Intellectually, I knew that her reaction
was appropriate, but I felt disgusted by her weakness. Staring down at the
bodies, I felt numb, light, as if my own body might vaporize, as if I didn’t
need to breathe.
The dying were worse than the dead. They came down from the hills
in rattling caravans, slow as torture over bone-cracking roads of mud and
rock, bleeding all over the backseats of rattletrap cars. Three hours, four
hours, bright red lives seeping away.
They wound up in the dim wards of Jalalabad’s filthy hospital. There
weren’t enough antibiotics or antiseptics. Little girls who wouldn’t live
through the night were stacked two to a cot, covered in blood. A baby with
its head caked in scab and pus and one eye full of blood cried in the listless
arms of a young, young girl. A little boy who had lost his arms, his eyesight,
and his family lay motionless in the hot afternoon. The rooms smelled of
70 The eBook Insider
sweat and infection; flies and woolen blankets. All of it coming down from
those American planes.
We drifted out of the hospital. In the car I tasted metal. After a long
time, Brian spoke.
“That was pretty bad.” He cleared his throat.
“Yeah.”
We looked out the window, and the driver turned up the music. The
sunlight and the dust were gilding everything to silver. The spindly dome
of trees cupped the road, bicycle spokes flickered and goats plodded in the
blue fog of exhaust. Afghans were rushing home from the market, arms
loaded with fresh meat and vegetables to break the Ramadan fast. The
hotel room was dark and cold. I opened a pad of paper and tried to make
some notes. This is what I wrote:
I didn’t mean to really see these things. I didn’t know how it would be.
Late one night, bombs fell on the village of Kama Ado, a tiny, isolated
hamlet of mud houses. I interviewed people who were hauled from the
wreckage. I wrote a story about it. I fell asleep.
By morning, my story wasn’t the same. Instead of leading with the news
of the crushed village, the top of the story had Pentagon officials denying
reports of the bombing. The first voice in the article was no longer that of
an Afghan victim. Instead, it was a Pentagon official who said: “This is a
false story.”
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the same: “If we cannot know
for certain how many people were killed in lower Manhattan, where we
have full access to the site, thousands of reporters, investigators, rescue
workers combing the wreckage, and no enemy propaganda to confuse
the situation, one ought to be sensitive to how difficult it is to know with
certainty, in real time, what may have happened in any given situation
in Afghanistan, where we lack access and we’re dealing with world class
liars.”
I read it once. I read it twice. Were we to believe the village had sponta-
neously collapsed while U.S. warplanes circled overhead?
Every man in this village is a liar.
Jalalabad slipped out of the Taliban’s hold as easy as a boiled tomato
loses its skin. No bloodshed, just a lot of abandoned buildings and cars,
ripe for the grabbing by guerrillas who rushed down from the mountains.
The mujahideen swarmed the streets, dirty children run amok in an empty
house. They were old and weary, or young and wild; the middle-aged men
were mostly dead. Mujahideen is Arabic for “strugglers,” but it’s understood
to mean “holy warriors.” In Afghanistan, they are the men with guns, the
ones who sleep where they lie and fight for their tribal patriarchs in a sense-
less string of conflicts.
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar 71
ridge, lowered myself out of the line of fire. “Can you please ask him to
come closer so we’re not getting shot at?” I asked the translator. The com-
mander looked at me and laughed. He sauntered slowly down out of the
bullets smirking all the way.
“We are dust.” The mujahideen liked to say that. We are dust.
One day, a messenger came to the Spin Ghar hotel. Zaman was inviting
me back to his house for iftar, the sunset meal that broke each day’s fast
through the holy month of Ramadan.
Zaman was about to command the ground offensive in Tora Bora and
was therefore the closest voice I could find to an American representative. I
wanted the story badly enough to return to his turf, but I couldn’t go alone.
I needed a foreign man, somebody Zaman would feel tribally compelled
to respect. So I invited the AP reporter Chris Tomlinson. “Whatever hap-
pens,” I told him, “don’t leave me alone with him.”
A flicker crossed Zaman’s face when he saw Chris. We settled onto vel-
vet cushions, and Zaman’s servants heaped the floor with steaming flat-
bread, biryani, crisp vegetables, a shank of mutton. Chris and I had our
notebooks at our sides, and we jotted away while Zaman held forth on the
ground assault.
Suddenly Zaman looked at Chris. “Would you excuse us, please?” he
said icily. “We need to talk in private.”
Chris stared at me, telegraphing: What should I do?
I glowered back: Don’t leave.
“Um, well,” Chris stammered, eyes flying around the room. He pointed
at the door to the terrace. “I’m just going to step outside and smoke a ciga-
rette. I’ll be right outside,” he added, looking at me.
As soon as the door closed, Zaman announced, “You’re going back to
Pakistan.”
I laughed. “No, I’m not.”
“Yes. My men will take you there.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s a joke. I’m not leaving.”
“You can’t stay here anymore. Every time I see you, I forget what I’m
doing. You are making me distracted.”
Through the windows, I watched the lone red ember of the cigarette
float up and down the terrace.
“I’m sure you can control yourself,” I said slowly, trying to prolong the
conversation. He was sliding my way on the cushions, his body closing
the distance between us. His eyes were fixed on me, long face like a sly
old goat.
“I’m in love with you,” he said. “I love you.”
“You’re not in love with me!” I spat out. “You don’t even know me.”
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar 73
The night pressed cool hands against my hot cheeks, ruffled my hair. Wind
caught in my throat and then I was laughing, laughing to think that luck
can change, just like that. The night was right there, choked with mysteries,
shadows sliding down rutted roads, smells of sweet and dank from cooking
pots, and the vastness of countryside. For a few minutes, death fell away,
and it felt like freedom.
The Dead Hand
David E. Hoffman
I. Epidemic of Mystery
“Are any of your patients dying?” asked Yakov Klipnitzer when he called
Margarita Ilyenko on Wednesday, April 4, 1979. She was chief physician at
No. 24, a medium-sized, one-hundred-bed hospital in Sverdlovsk, a Soviet
industrial metropolis in the Ural Mountains. Her hospital often referred
patients to a larger facility, No. 20, where Klipnitzer was chief doctor. Klip-
nitzer saw two unusual deaths from what looked like severe pneumonia.
The patients, he told Ilyenko, were “two of yours.” No, Ilyenko told him,
she did not know of any deaths. The next day he called again. Klipnitzer
was more persistent. “You still don’t have any patients dying?” he asked.
Klipnitzer had new deaths with pneumonia-like symptoms. “Who is dying
from pneumonia today?” Ilyenko replied, incredulous. “It is very rare.”
Soon, patients began to die at Ilyenko’s hospital, too. They were brought
in ambulances and cars, suffering from high fevers, headaches, coughs,
vomiting, chills and chest pains. They were stumbling in the hallways and
lying on gurneys. The head of admissions at Hospital No. 20, Roza Gazi-
yeva, was on duty overnight between April 5 and 6. “Some of them who
felt better after first aid tried to go home. They were later found on the
streets—the people had lost consciousness,” she recalled. She tried to give
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to one ill patient, who died. “During the
night, we had four people die. I could hardly wait until morning. I was
frightened.”
76 The eBook Insider
death as anthrax. Grinberg was stunned. “I asked, where in our godfor-
saken Sverdlovsk can we have anthrax?” he recalled.
The next day, Grinberg saw the evidence for himself. He was instructed
to go to Ilyenko’s hospital. “I saw a horrible picture,” he recalled. “It was
three women, they had identical changes, sharp hemorrhagic changes in
their lungs, in the lymph nodes, and the tissue of lymph nodes was hemor-
rhaging.” Abramova took samples and materials from the autopsies.
Word of the outbreak reached Moscow. Late on April 11, Vladimir
Nikiforov, a chief of the infectious diseases department at the Central Post-
graduate Institute, located within the Botkin Hospital in Moscow, arrived in
Sverdlovsk. Also arriving in the city was Pyotr Burgasov, the Soviet deputy
minister of health, who had once worked at Compound 19, in the 1950s.
On April 12, at 2 P.M., Nikiforov assembled all the doctors who had been
involved and asked for their observations and the autopsies. Abramova was
last to speak. She told him: anthrax.
Nikiforov, an eminent, courtly scientist who had studied anthrax
throughout his career, announced that he agreed with her. He reassured
the doctors it could not spread from human to human. But from where
had it come? Burgasov declared the source was contaminated meat from a
village located 9.3 miles from the city. No one spoke up. No one knew for
sure; the uncertainty was frightening.
In Chkalovsky’s neighborhoods, residents were told to watch out for
contaminated meat. A widespread vaccination program began; according
to Ilyenko’s notes, 42,065 people were vaccinated in the days that followed.
Broadsheet leaflets dated April 18 were distributed warning people not to
buy meat outside the stores, to watch out for anthrax symptoms such as
headaches, fever, cold and cough followed by abdominal pains and high
temperatures, and not to slaughter animals without permission. 7 Build-
ings and trees were washed by local fire brigades, stray dogs shot by police
and unpaved streets covered with fresh asphalt.
Ilyenko wrote in her notes on April 20, “358 got sick. 45 died. 214 in
Hospital 40.” She was not asked to relinquish her notes, and kept them
at home. The 45 who died at her hospital were only part of the story; the
total number of deaths from anthrax was more than 60 people.
Carried by the steady wind, the spores floated through the ceramics fac-
tory, south of Compound 19. Vladlen Krayev, chief engineer, was present
when the outbreak began among his 2,180 employees. He recalled that
the factory had a ventilator that sucked air from outside, pumping it into
furnaces, and provided ventilation for the workers. In the first weeks, about
eighteen factory workers died. The crisis stretched on for seven weeks,
much longer than might be expected, given the two- to seven-day incuba-
tion period for anthrax described in textbooks at the time.
The Dead Hand 79
The shift change began at 7 P.M. on September 26, 1983. Stanislav Petrov,
a lieutenant colonel, arrived at Serpukhov-15, south of Moscow, a top
secret missile attack early-warning station, which received signals from
satellites. Petrov changed from street clothes into the soft uniform of the
military space troops of the Soviet Union. Over the next hour, he and a
dozen other specialists asked questions of the outgoing officers. Then his
80 The eBook Insider
men lined up two rows deep and reported for duty to Petrov. Their twelve-
hour shift had begun.
Petrov settled into a comfortable swivel chair with arms. His command
post overlooked the main floor of the early-warning station through a win-
dow. In front of him were telephones to connect to headquarters and elec-
tronic monitors. Out on the floor, beyond the specialists and their consoles,
a large map covered the far wall. At the center of the map was the North
Pole. Above the pole and beyond it—as it might be seen from space—
were Canada and the United States, inverted. Below the pole stretched
the vast lands of the Soviet Union. This was the path that nuclear missiles
would take if ever launched. The map showed the location of Minute-
man missile bases in the United States. Petrov knew those bases held one
thousand intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads that
could cross the Arctic and reach the Soviet Union in thirty-five minutes.
On the main floor, a dozen men monitored electronic consoles with a sin-
gular mission: using satellites to spot a launch and give the leaders of the
Soviet Union an added margin of ten minutes’ warning, or maybe twelve
minutes, to decide what to do.
Petrov, forty-four, had served in the military for twenty-six years, rising
to deputy chief of the department for combat algorithms. He was more
of an engineer than a soldier. He liked the logic of writing formulas, often
using English-based computer languages. On most days, he was not in the
commander’s chair but at a desk in a nearby building, working as an ana-
lyst, responding to glitches, fine-tuning the software. But twice a month, he
took an operations shift in order to keep on top of the system.
When Petrov first arrived eleven years earlier, the station was new, with
equipment still in crates and the rooms empty. Now, it had grown into a
bristling electronic nerve center. Seven satellites orbiting above the earth
were positioned to monitor the American missile fields, usually for a period
of six hours. Each satellite was a cylinder six feet long and five feet around,
and sent streams of data to the command center. The brain of the center
was the M-10, the best supercomputer that existed in the Soviet Union,
which analyzed the data and searched for signs of a missile attack.
The satellite system was known as Oko, or “Eye,” but the individual
spacecraft were known to Petrov by simple numbers, one through nine.
On this night, No. 5 was reaching the highest point of its orbit, about
19,883 miles above the Earth. From space, it scanned the very edge of the
Earth, using infrared sensors to detect a missile launch. The satellite could
spot the heat given off by a rocket engine against the black background
of space, a delicate trick requiring the satellite to be in the right position,
steady and aimed at the distant point where the Earth met the darkness of
the cosmos. Of the whole fleet, No. 5 had the highest sensitivity, but its task
The Dead Hand 81
was complicated by the time of day. The satellite was aimed at missile fields
that were passing from daylight to twilight during Petrov’s shift. Dusk was
often a blurry, milky zone that confused the satellites and computers. The
operators knew of the challenge, and watched closely.
Usually, each satellite picked up fifteen or twenty objects of interest,
and the computers at Serpukhov-15 examined the data on each, checking
against the known characteristics of a rocket flare. If it did not look like a
missile, the objects would be discarded by the computer and a new target
grabbed for examination. The computer ran continuous checks against
the data streaming in from space. The satellites also carried an optical tele-
scope, with a view of the Earth. This was a backup, allowing the ground
controllers to visually spot a missile attack, but the images were dim—in
fact, special operators had to sit in a darkened room for two hours so they
could see through the telescopes.
On this night, satellite No. 5 was bringing in more data than usual.
Instead of fifteen to twenty targets, it was feeding the computer more than
thirty. Petrov figured the elevated levels were due to the satellite’s height-
ened sensitivity. They watched it closely as it approached the apogee of its
orbit, when it would be positioned to monitor the American missile fields.
At 10 P.M., Petrov paused for tea.
Petrov and his men had watched many test launches from Vandenberg
Air Force Base in California and from Cape Canaveral in Florida, as well
as Soviet test launches from Plesetsk in northern Russia. With the satellites,
they could rapidly detect the rocket’s bright flare moments after it rose into
the sky; they had seen a few tests fail, too. For all the years Petrov worked
at the early-warning center, they had been rushed. The satellite system
was put into service in late 1982, even though it was not ready. Petrov
and his men were told: it was an important project for the country, don’t
worry about the shortcomings. They will be fixed later, you can compen-
sate for the problems, look the other way for now. Petrov knew why they
were in such a hurry. The United States and the Soviet Union threatened
each other with missiles on hair-trigger alert. The two superpowers had
between them about 18,400 nuclear warheads poised to be launched from
missiles in silos, on sub-marines hidden under the seas and from bombers.
And there were many smaller, or tactical, nuclear weapons arrayed along
the front lines of the Cold War confrontation in Europe. In the event of
a nuclear attack, a decision whether to retaliate would have to be made
in minutes, and enormous efforts were made by each superpower to gain
precious time for warning. With ground-based radar alone, which could
not see beyond the curvature of the Earth, the incoming missiles might not
be detected until the final seven to ten minutes of their flight. But with the
early-warning satellites, a launch could be spotted sooner. The Americans
82 The eBook Insider
already had stationed their satellites to watch over the Soviet missile fields.
The Soviet Union was in a hurry to catch up. They rushed to build Ser-
pukhov-15 and launch their own satellites.
A fear haunted the old men who ruled the Soviet Union, led by Gen-
eral Secretary Yuri Andropov, a frail and paranoid former KGB chief who
in the autumn of 1983 was suffering from kidney failure. The fear was a
sudden attack that might destroy the entire leadership in Moscow before
they could leave the Kremlin. If they could be decapitated, wiped out
without warning by a surprise attack, their threat to retaliate was simply
not credible. That is why Petrov’s mission was so important. The satellites,
the antennas, the computers, the telescopes, the map and the operations
center—they were the night watch for nuclear war.
Petrov heard the rhetoric, but he didn’t believe the superpowers would
come to blows; the consequences were just too devastating. Petrov thought
the Soviet leaders were pompous and self-serving, and—in private—he
was disdainful of the party bosses. He did not take seriously their bombast
about America as the enemy. Yet the furor in recent months had been hard
to ignore. President Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union an “evil
empire” in March, and only a few weeks before Petrov’s night at the opera-
tions center, Soviet Air Defense Forces had shot down a Korean airliner in
the Far East, killing 269 people.
Petrov saw himself as a professional, a technician, and took pride in
overcoming long odds. He understood the enormity of the task, that in
early warning there could be no room for false alarms. His team had been
driven hard to eliminate the chance for error. While they had tried strenu-
ously to make the early-warning system work properly, the apparatus was
still troubled. A system to make decisions about the fate of the Earth was
plagued by malfunctions. Of the first thirteen satellites launched in the
test phase from 1972 to 1979, only seven worked for more than one hun-
dred days. The satellites had to be launched constantly in order to keep
enough of them aloft to monitor the American missile fields. They often
just stopped sending data back to Earth.
At 12:15 A.M., Petrov was startled. Across the top of the room was a
thin, silent panel. Most of the time no one even noticed it. But suddenly it
lit up, in red letters: LAUNCH.
A siren wailed. On the big map with the North Pole, a light at one of the
American missile bases was illuminated. Everyone was riveted to the map.
The electronic panels showed a missile launch. The board said “high reli-
ability.” This had never happened before. The operators at the consoles on
the main floor jumped up, out of their chairs. They turned and looked up
at Petrov, behind the glass. He was the commander on duty. He stood, too,
so they could see him. He started to give orders. He wasn’t sure what was
The Dead Hand 83
happening. He ordered them to sit down and start checking the system. He
had to know whether this was real, or a glitch. The full check would take
ten minutes, but if this was a real missile attack, they could not wait ten
minutes to find out. Was the satellite holding steady? Was the computer
functioning properly?
As they scrambled, Petrov scrutinized the monitors in front of him. They
included data from the optical telescope. If there was a missile, sooner
or later they would see it through the telescope. Where was it headed?
What trajectory? There was no sign of it. The specialists who sat in the
darkened room, also watching the telescope, spotted nothing. The com-
puter specialists had to check a set of numbers spewing out of the hard-
copy printer. Petrov scrutinized the data on his monitor, too. Could it be a
technical error?
If not, Petrov ran through the possibilities. If just one missile, could it
be an accidental or unauthorized launch? He concluded it was not likely.
He knew of all the locks and precautions—and just one person could not
launch a missile. Even the idea of two officers conspiring to launch a missile
seemed impossible. And if one missile was launched, he thought, what did
that mean? This was not the way to start a nuclear war. For many years, he
had been trained that a nuclear war would start only with a massive strike.
He said it again, to himself: this is not the way to start a nuclear war.
He had a microphone in one hand, part of the intercom system to the
main floor. With the other hand, he picked up the telephone to call his
commanders, who oversaw the whole early-warning system, including the
separate radars. Petrov had to quickly reach his own conclusion; the super-
visors would want to know what was happening. He had not completed his
own checks, but he could not wait. He told the duty officer, in a clipped
tone: “I am reporting to you: this is a false alarm.”
He didn’t know for sure. He only had a gut instinct.
“Got it,” the officer replied. Petrov was relieved; the officer did not ask
him why.
The phone was still in his hand, the duty officer still on the line, when
Petrov was jolted again, two minutes later.
The panel flashed: another missile launched! Then a third, a fourth and
a fifth. Now, the system had gone into overdrive. The additional signals
had triggered a new warning. The red letters on the panel began to flash
MISSILE ATTACK, and an electronic blip was sent automatically to the
higher levels of the military. Petrov was frightened. His legs felt paralyzed.
He had to think fast.
Petrov knew the key decision-makers in a missile attack would be the
General Staff. In theory, if the alarm were validated, the retaliation would
be directed from there. Soviet missiles would be readied, targets fed in
84 The eBook Insider
and silo hatches opened. The Soviet political leadership would be alerted.
There would be only minutes in which to make a decision.
The siren wailed. The red sign flashed.
Petrov made a decision. He knew the system had glitches in the past;
there was no visual sighting of a missile through the telescope; the satellites
were in the correct position. There was nothing from the radar stations
to verify an incoming missile, although it was probably too early for the
radars to see anything.
He told the duty officer again: this is a false alarm.
The message went up the chain.
The First Tycoon
T. J. Stiles
The Islander
They came to learn his secrets. Well before the appointed hour of two
o’clock in the afternoon on November 12, 1877, hundreds of spectators
pushed into a courtroom in lower Manhattan. They included friends
and relatives of the contestants, of course, as well as leading lawyers who
wished to observe the forensic skills of the famous attorneys who would
try the case. But most of the teeming mass of men and women—many
fashionably dressed, crowding in until they were packed against the back
wall—wanted to hear the details of the life of the richest man the United
States had ever seen. The trial over the will of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the
famous, notorious Commodore, was about to begin.
Shortly before the hour, the crowd parted to allow in William H. Van-
derbilt, the Commodore’s eldest son, and his lawyers, led by Henry L.
Clinton. William, “glancing carelessly and indifferently around the room,
removed his overcoat and comfortably settled himself in his chair,” the New
York Times reported; meanwhile his lawyers shook hands with the opposing
team, led by Scott Lord, who represented William’s sister Mary Vanderbilt
La Bau. At exactly two o’clock, the judge—called the “Surrogate” in this
Surrogate Court—strode briskly in from his chambers through a side door,
stepped up to the dais, and took his seat. “Are you ready, gentlemen?” he
asked. Lord and Clinton each declared that they were, and the Surrogate
ordered, “Proceed, gentlemen.”
86 The eBook Insider
criminal who had seized control of the country. His early life was filled with
fistfights, high-speed steamboat duels, and engine explosions; his latter days
were marked by daredevil harness races and high-stakes confrontations.
It was this personal drama that moved that crowd of spectators into the
courtroom eleven months after his death, but more thoughtful observers
mulled over his larger meaning. Vanderbilt was an empire builder, the first
great corporate tycoon in American history. Even before the United States
became a truly industrial country, he learned to use the tools of ?corpo-
rate capitalism to amass wealth and power on a scale previously unknown,
creating enterprises of unprecedented size. “He has introduced Caesarism
into corporate life,” wrote Charles Francis Adams Jr. “Vanderbilt is but the
precursor of a class of men who will wield within the state a power created
by it, but too great for its control. He is the founder of a dynasty.”
Adams did not mean a family dynasty, but a line of corporate chiefs
who would overshadow democratic government itself. Rockefeller, Carn-
egie, Gould, Morgan—all were just beginning their careers when Vander-
bilt was at his height. They respected and followed his example, though
they would be hard-pressed to match it. Few laws had constrained him; few
governments had exceeded his influence. In the 1850s, his personal role in
Central America had been more important than that of the White House
or the State Department. In 1867, he had stopped all trains into New York
City from the west to bring the New York Central Railroad to its knees. In
1869, he personally had abated a panic on Wall Street that threatened to
ring in a depression.
His admirers saw him as the ultimate meritocrat, the finest example
of the common man rising through hard work and ability. To them, he
symbolized America’s opportunities. His critics called him grasping and
ruthless, an unelected king who never pretended to rule for his people.
Still worse, they saw him as the apex of a vulgar new culture that had
cast off the republican purity of the Revolution for the golden calf of
wealth. “You seem to be the idol of . . . a crawling swarm of small souls,”
Mark Twain wrote in an open letter to Vanderbilt, “who . . . sing of your
unimportant private habits and sayings and doings, as if your millions gave
them dignity.”
Perhaps there were those who understood that Vanderbilt’s true signifi-
cance was more complex, even contradictory. How could it not be? His
life spanned a period of breathtaking changes, from the days of George
Washington to those of John D. Rockefeller (with whom he made deals).
He began his career in a rural, agricultural, essentially colonial society in
which the term “businessman” was unknown; he ended it in a corporate,
industrial economy. Neither the admirers nor the critics of his later years
had witnessed his role during the tumultuous era of the early republic and
88 The eBook Insider
the antebellum period. They could not see that Vanderbilt had spent most
of his career as a radical force. From his beginnings as a teenage boatman
before the War of 1812, he had led the rise of competition as a virtue
in American culture. He had disrupted the remnants of the eighteenth-
century patricians, shaken the conservative merchant elite, and destroyed
monopolies at every step. His infuriated opponents had not shared his
enthusiasm for competition; rather, the wealthy establishment in that
young and limited economy saw his attacks as destructive. In 1859, one
had written that he “has always proved himself the enemy of every Ameri-
can maritime enterprise,” and the New York Times condemned Vanderbilt
for pursuing “competition for competition’s sake.” Those on the other end
of the spectrum had celebrated the way he had expanded transportation,
slashed fares, and punished opponents who relied on government monop-
olies or subsidies. To Jacksonian Democrats, who championed laissez-faire
as an egalitarian creed, he had epitomized the entrepreneur as champion
of the people, the businessman as revolutionary.
But the career that started early ended late, and the revolutionary
completed his days as emperor. As he had expanded his railroad domain
from the benighted New York & Harlem—annexing the Hudson River,
the New York Central, the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, and the
Canada Southern—he had seemed not a radical but a monopolist. His
role in the Erie War of 1868, with its epic corruption of public officials,
had made him seem not a champion but an enemy of civic virtue. He
played a leading part in the creation of a new entity, the giant corpora-
tion, that would dominate the American economy in the decades after
his death. The political landscape had changed as well. With the rise of
large railroads and the expansion of federal power during the Civil War,
radicals began to think of the government as a possible counterweight to
corporate might. Vanderbilt had remained as committed to laissez-faire as
ever; as he told the newspapers more than once, his guiding principle was
“to mind my own business,” and all he asked from government was to be
left alone. He never acknowledged that, as Charles F. Adams Jr. wrote, the
massive corporations he commanded gave him power to rival that of the
state, and that he became the establishment against which populists armed
themselves with government regulation.
Probably no other individual made an equal impact over such an
extended period on America’s economy and society. Over the course of
his sixty-six-year career he stood on the forefront of change, a modern-
izer from beginning to end. He vastly improved and expanded the nation’s
transportation infrastructure, contributing to a transformation of the very
geography of the United States. He embraced new technologies and new
forms of business organization, and used them to compete so successfully
The First Tycoon 89
that he forced his rivals to follow his example or give up. Far ahead of
many of his peers, he grasped one of the great changes in American cul-
ture: the abstraction of economic reality, as the connection faded between
the tangible world and the new devices of business, such as paper currency,
corporations, and securities. With those devices he helped to create the cor-
porate economy that would define the United States into the twenty-first
century. Even as he demonstrated the creative power of a market economy,
he also exacerbated problems that would never be fully solved: a huge dis-
parity in wealth between rich and poor; the concentration of great power
in private hands; the fraud and self-serving deception that thrives in an
unregulated environment. One person cannot move the national economy
single-handedly—but no one else kept their hands on the lever for so long
or pushed so hard.
The spectators in that courtroom, then, could mark Vanderbilt down
as complicated indeed, even before the first witness spoke. Yet what pulled
them there was perhaps not so much his national significance as his strange,
powerful character, his mysterious personal life. Public rumor depicted a
home wracked by intrigue, spiritualist séances, and Vanderbilt’s contro-
versial sponsorship of the feminist Victoria Woodhull and her voluptuous
sister, Tennie C. Claflin. What the public did not see was his emotional
complexity: his patient business diplomacy, his love for his first and second
wives (as well as his selfishness with them), and his conflicting feelings about
his often difficult children—especially Cornelius Jeremiah, who struggled
with epilepsy and an addiction to gambling. Contemporaries and posterity
alike often would overlook the very human, even sympathetic, side of the
imperious Commodore, attracted instead to the most salacious, scandal-
ous, and overblown reports.
It was his final act that brought everyone into that courtroom, an act
that combined the personal and the corporate. He had built something
that he meant to last and remain in the hands of his own bloodline—to
found a dynasty in the most literal sense. To that end, he had drafted a will
that left 95 percent of his estate to his eldest son, William. William’s sister
Mary meant to break that dynasty by breaking the will, to force a distribu-
tion of the estate equally among the ten surviving children. Would she suc-
ceed? Each side would fight to define Vanderbilt; each side would seek out
its own answer to the enigma of a man who left few letters and no diaries.
Lord began to speak, and the crowd bent forward to listen, straining to
learn who the Commodore really was.
A CHILD, IT IS SAID, CHANGES EVERYTHING. For Phebe
Hand Vanderbilt, another child meant more of the same. In May 1794,
during the last month of her fourth pregnancy, her first three children,
Mary, Jacob, and Charlotte, ran about their humble house. Knowing the
90 The eBook Insider
Vanderbilt tradition, she could expect many more to follow the unborn
infant in her womb. Continuity, not change, defined everything about her
existence, an existence that differed little from that of her parents, grand-
parents, or great-grandparents. She sat in wooden furniture hand-cut from
hand-hewn lumber. She wore clothes hand-sewn from hand-spun wool.
She washed cups and plates that had been spun on a wheel, and bottles
blown by a craftsman’s mouth. Looking out a window, she would see hand-
built wagons harnessed to teams of horses. Peering a little farther, she
could watch the sloops and ships that sailed by the shore just steps from
her door. And at night she would light the room with a mutton-fat candle
or a whale-oil lamp.
Phebe lived in a close wooden world made by human hands, powered by
winds and horse and human strength, clustered at the water’s edge. Most
of the technology she knew had been first imagined thousands of years
before. Even the newest inventions of her time—the clock, the printing
press, the instruments of navigation—dated back to the early Renaissance.
The “Brown Bess” muskets stored in U.S. arsenals and carried by British
redcoats had been designed in the 1690s, a full century before. Revolutions
were a matter for politics; the constructed world merely crept ahead.
Phebe lived in Port Richmond, that most ancient kind of community—
a farming village, its air pungent with the smell of animal manure and
open fires, its unpaved paths sticky with mud from the season’s rains. It sat
on the northern edge of Richmond County, better known as Staten Island,
a sprawling, sparsely occupied landscape of not quite four thousand souls
who still governed their affairs with town meetings. The islanders tilled the
steep green hillsides, let pigs wander and forage for themselves, and built
their houses close to the soft, swampy shores that crumbled into the kills—
the tidal creeks that wrapped around the island’s edges. Staten Island sat
like a stopper in the mouth of New York Harbor, separated from Long
Island by the two-mile-long Narrows, where the ocean decanted into the
bay. West of Staten Island stretched the mainland of New Jersey, and
across the length of the harbor sat Manhattan, a long and narrow island
that extended between the deep East and Hudson (or North) rivers like a
natural pier of bedrock.
An island is defined by its edges. Phebe looked across the water for her
husband’s return whenever he was gone, until he sailed up in his boat and
tied it fast. His name was Cornelius. It was a solid Dutch name, as was
Vanderbilt, and both were common around New York Bay. The first of
his family had arrived in America in 1650, when Jan Aertsen Van Der
Bilt settled in the Dutch colony of New Netherlands. In 1715, long after
the English had conquered the province and renamed it New York, one
of Jan’s descendants had crossed the water to sparsely populated Staten
The First Tycoon 91
Island. That one move was change enough, it seems, for the family that dis-
persed and multiplied there. The ensuing generations lived out their lives
as farmers or tavern keepers, unmoved by the climactic North American
war with France in the 1750s, the outbreak of revolution two decades later,
the British occupation of their island, the triumph of independence, the
ratification of the Constitution, and the swearing in of President George
Washington in Manhattan.
Cheever: A Life
Blake Bailey
Chapter One
1637–1912
Despite such ignominy, Cheever took pride in his fine old family name,
and when he wasn’t making light of the matter, he took pains to impress
this on his children. “Remember you are a Cheever,” he’d tell his younger
son, whenever the boy showed signs of an unseemly fragility. Some allusion
was implicit, perhaps, to the first Cheever in America, Ezekiel, headmaster
of the Boston Latin School from 1671 to 1708 and author of Accidence: A
Short Introduction to the Latin Tongue, the standard text in American schools for
a century or more. New England’s greatest schoolmaster, Ezekiel Cheever
was even more renowned for his piety—“his untiring abjuration of the
Devil,” as Cotton Mather put it in his eulogy. One aspect of Ezekiel’s piety
was a stern distaste for periwigs, which he was known to yank from fop-
108 The eBook Insider
must see you. Not leaving until. Seems nice enough. Having coffee. Let’s
wrap things up back there.”
Five minutes later the pastor’s door opened and a young woman escaped
through it. She was wiping her eyes. She was followed by her ex-fiancé,
who managed both a frown and a smile at the same time. Neither spoke to
Dana. Neither noticed Travis Boyette. They disappeared.
When the door slammed shut, Dana said to Boyette, “Just a minute.”
She hustled into her husband’s office for a quick briefing.
The Reverend Keith Schroeder was thirty-ve years old, happily married to
Dana for ten years now, the father of three boys, all born separately within
the span of twenty months. He’d been the senior pastor at St. Mark’s for
two years; before that, at a church in Kansas City. His father was a retired
Lutheran minister, and Keith had never dreamed of being anything else.
He was raised in a small town near St. Louis, educated in schools not far
from there, and, except for a class trip to New York and a honeymoon in
Florida, had never left the Midwest. He was generally admired by his con-
gregation, though there had been issues. The biggest row occurred when
he opened up the church’s basement to shelter some homeless folks during
a blizzard the previous winter. After the snow melted, some of the home-
less were reluctant to leave. The city issued a citation for unauthorized use,
and there was a slightly embarrassing story in the newspaper.
The topic of his sermon the day before had been forgiveness—God’s
infinite and overwhelming power to forgive our sins, regardless of how
heinous they might be. Travis Boyette’s sins were atrocious, unbelievable,
horrific. His crimes against humanity would surely condemn him to eter-
nal suffering and death. At this point in his miserable life, Travis was con-
vinced he could never be forgiven. But he was curious.
“We’ve had several men from the halfway house,” Keith was saying.
“I’ve even held services there.” They were in a corner of his office, away
from the desk, two new friends having a chat in saggy canvas chairs. Nearby,
fake logs burned in a fake fireplace.
“Not a bad place,” Boyette said. “Sure beats prison.” He was a frail
man, with the pale skin of one confined to unlit places. His bony knees
were touching, and the black cane rested across them.
“And where was prison?” Keith held a mug of steaming tea.
“Here and there. Last six years at Lansing.”
“And you were convicted of what?” he asked, anxious to know about
the crimes so he would know much more about the man. Violence? Drugs?
Probably. On the other hand, maybe Travis here was an embezzler or a tax
cheat. He certainly didn’t seem to be the type to hurt anyone.
The Confession 109
Dana went straight to the Web site for the Kansas Department of Cor-
rections and within seconds plunged into the wretched life of Travis Dale
Boyette. Sentenced in 2001 to ten years for attempted sexual assault. Cur-
rent status: incarcerated.
“Current status is in my husband’s office,” she mumbled as she contin-
ued hitting keys.
Sentenced in 1991 to twelve years for aggravated sexual battery in
Oklahoma. Paroled in 1998.
Sentenced in 1987 to eight years for attempted sexual battery in Mis-
souri. Paroled in 1990.
Sentenced in 1979 to twenty years for aggravated sexual battery in
Arkansas. Paroled in 1985.
Boyette was a registered sex offender in Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas,
and Oklahoma.
“A monster,” she said to herself. His file photo was that of a much heavier
and much younger man with dark, thinning hair. She quickly summarized
his record and sent an e-mail to Keith’s desktop. She wasn’t worried about
her husband’s safety, but she wanted this creep out of the building.
The Confession 111
Her husband hadn’t moved. He was still slouched in his chair, dazed,
staring blankly at a wall and holding the copy of the newspaper article.
“You all right?” she asked. Keith handed her the article and she read it.
“I’m not connecting the dots here,” she said when she finished.
“Travis Boyette knows where the body is buried. He knows because he
killed her.”
“Did he admit he killed her?”
“Almost. He says he has an inoperable brain tumor and will be dead in
a few months. He says Donté Drumm had nothing to do with the murder.
He strongly implied that he knows where the body is.”
Dana fell onto the sofa and sank amid the pillows and throws. “And you
believe him?”
“He’s a career criminal, Dana, a con man. He’d rather lie than tell the
truth. You can’t believe a word he says.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I think so.”
“How can you believe him? Why?”
“He’s suffering, Dana. And not just from the tumor. He knows some-
thing about the murder, and the body. He knows a lot, and he’s genuinely
disturbed by the fact that an innocent man is facing an execution.”
For a man who spent much of his time listening to the delicate problems
of others, and offering advice and counsel that they relied on, Keith had
become a wise and astute observer. And he was seldom wrong. Dana was
much quicker on the draw, much more likely to criticize and judge and be
wrong about it. “So what are you thinking, Pastor?” she asked.
“Let’s take the next hour and do nothing but research. Let’s verify a few
things: Is he really on parole? If so, who is his parole officer? Is he being
treated at St. Francis? Does he have a brain tumor? If so, is it terminal?”
“It will be impossible to get his medical records without his consent.”
“Sure, but let’s see how much we can verify. Call Dr. Herzlich—was he
in church yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. Call him and fish around. He should be making rounds this
morning at St. Francis. Call the parole board and see how far you can dig.”
“And what might you be doing while I’m burning up the phones?”
“I’ll go online, see what I can find about the murder, the trial, the defen-
dant, everything that happened down there.”
They both stood, in a hurry now. Dana said, “And what if it’s all true,
Keith? What if we convince ourselves that this creep is telling the truth?”
“Then we have to do something.”
“Such as?”
“I have no earthly idea.”
The Wave
Susan Casey
57.5° N, 12.7° W
FEBRUARY 8, 2000
The clock read midnight when the hundred-foot wave hit the ship, rising
from the North Atlantic out of the darkness. Among the ocean’s terrors a
wave this size was the most feared and the least understood, more myth
than reality—or so people had thought. This giant was certainly real. As
the RRS Discovery plunged down into the wave’s deep trough, it heeled
twenty-eight degrees to port, rolled thirty degrees back to starboard, then
recovered to face the incoming seas. What chance did they have, the forty-
seven scientists and crew aboard this research cruise gone horribly wrong?
A series of storms had trapped them in the black void east of Rockall, a
volcanic island nicknamed Waveland for the nastiness of its surrounding
waters. More than a thousand wrecked ships lay on the seafloor below.
Captain Keith Avery steered his vessel directly into the onslaught, just
as he’d been doing for the past five days. While weather like this was com-
mon in the cranky North Atlantic, these giant waves were unlike anything
he’d encountered in his thirty years of experience. And worse, they kept
rearing up from different directions. Flanking all sides of the 295-foot ship,
the crew kept a constant watch to make sure they weren’t about to be
The Wave 115
and other nutrients. From these tests the scientists would draw a picture of
what was happening out there, how the ocean’s basic characteristics were
shifting, and why.
These are not small questions on a planet that is 71 percent covered
in salt water. As the Earth’s climate changes—as the inner atmosphere
becomes warmer, as the winds increase, as the oceans heat up—what does
all this mean for us? Trouble, most likely, and Holliday and her colleagues
were in the business of finding out how much and what kind. It was deeply
frustrating for them to be lashed to their bunks rather than out on the deck
lowering their instruments. No one was thinking about Iceland anymore.
The trip was far from a loss, however. During the endless trains of mas-
sive waves, Discovery itself was collecting data that would lead to a chilling
revelation. The ship was ringed with instruments; everything that hap-
pened out there was being precisely measured, the sea’s fury captured in
tight graphs and unassailable numbers. Months later, long after Avery had
returned everyone safely to the Southampton docks, when Holliday began
to analyze these figures, she would discover that the waves they had experi-
enced were the largest ever scientifically recorded in the open ocean. The
significant wave height, an average of the largest 33 percent of the waves,
was sixty-one feet, with frequent spikes far beyond that. At the same time,
none of the state-of-the-art weather forecasts and wave models—the infor-
mation upon which all ships, oil rigs, fisheries, and passenger boats rely—
had predicted these behemoths. In other words, under this particular set
of weather conditions, waves this size should not have existed. And yet
they did.
Born to Run
Christopher McDougall
FOR DAYS, I’d been searching Mexico’s Sierra Madre for the phantom
known as Caballo Blanco—the White Horse. I’d finally arrived at the end of
the trail, in the last place I expected to find him—not deep in the wilder-
ness he was said to haunt, but in the dim lobby of an old hotel on the edge
of a dusty desert town.
“Sí, El Caballo está,” the desk clerk said, nodding. Yes, the Horse is here.
“For real?” After hearing that I’d just missed him so many times, in so
many bizarre locations, I’d begun to suspect that Caballo Blanco was noth-
ing more than a fairy tale, a local Loch Ness monstruo dreamed up to spook
the kids and fool gullible gringos.
“He’s always back by five,” the clerk added. “It’s like a ritual.”
I didn’t know whether to hug her in relief or high-five her in triumph.
I checked my watch. That meant I’d actually lay eyes on the ghost in less
than . . . hang on.
“But it’s already after six.”
The clerk shrugged. “Maybe he’s gone away.”
I sagged into an ancient sofa. I was filthy, famished, and defeated. I was
exhausted, and so were my leads.
Some said Caballo Blanco was a fugitive; others heard he was a boxer
who’d run off to punish himself after beating a man to death in the ring.
No one knew his name, or age, or where he was from. He was like some
Old West gunslinger whose only traces were tall tales and a whiff of ciga-
rillo smoke. Descriptions and sightings were all over the map; villagers who
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lived impossible distances apart swore they’d seen him traveling on foot on
the same day, and described him on a scale that swung wildly from “funny
and simpático” to “freaky and gigantic.”
But in all versions of the Caballo Blanco legend, certain basic details
were always the same: He’d come to Mexico years ago and trekked deep
into the wild, impenetrable Barrancas del Cobre—the Copper Canyons—
to live among the Tarahumara, a near-mythical tribe of Stone Age super-
athletes. The Tarahumara (pronounced Spanish-style by swallowing the
“h”: Tara-oo-mara) may be the healthiest and most serene people on earth,
and the greatest runners of all time.
When it comes to ultra distances, nothing can beat a Tarahumara run-
ner—not a racehorse, not a cheetah, not an Olympic marathoner. Very few
outsiders have ever seen the Tarahumara in action, but amazing stories of
their superhuman toughness and tranquillity have drifted out of the can-
yons for centuries. One explorer swore he saw a Tarahumara catch a deer
with his bare hands, chasing the bounding animal until it finally dropped
dead from exhaustion, “its hoofs falling off.” Another adventurer spent ten
hours climbing up and over a Copper Canyon mountain by mule; a Tara-
humara runner made the same trip in ninety minutes.
“Try this,” a Tarahumara woman once told an exhausted explorer
who’d collapsed at the base of a mountain. She handed him a gourd full
of a murky liquid. He swallowed a few gulps, and was amazed to feel new
energy pulsing in his veins. He got to his feet and scaled the peak like an
overcaffeinated Sherpa. The Tarahumara, the explorer would later report,
also guarded the recipe to a special energy food that leaves them trim, pow-
erful, and unstoppable: a few mouthfuls packed enough nutritional punch
to let them run all day without rest.
But whatever secrets the Tarahumara are hiding, they’ve hidden them
well. To this day, the Tarahumara live in the side of cliffs higher than a
hawk’s nest in a land few have ever seen. The Barrancas are a lost world
in the most remote wilderness in North America, a sort of a shorebound
Bermuda Triangle known for swallowing the misfits and desperadoes who
stray inside. Lots of bad things can happen down there, and probably will;
survive the man-eating jaguars, deadly snakes, and blistering heat, and
you’ve still got to deal with “canyon fever,” a potentially fatal freak-out
brought on by the Barrancas’ desolate eeriness. The deeper you penetrate
into the Barrancas, the more it feels like a crypt sliding shut around you.
The walls tighten, shadows spread, phantom echoes whisper; every route
out seems to end in sheer rock. Lost prospectors would be gripped by such
madness and despair, they’d slash their own throats or hurl themselves off
cliffs. Little surprise that few strangers have ever seen the Tarahumara’s
homeland—let alone the Tarahumara.
Born to Run 119
But somehow the White Horse had made his way to the depths of
the Barrancas. And there, it’s said, he was adopted by the Tarahumara
as a friend and kindred spirit; a ghost among ghosts. He’d certainly mas-
tered two Tarahumara skills—invisibility and extraordinary endurance—
because even though he was spotted all over the canyons, no one seemed
to know where he lived or when he might appear next. If anyone could
translate the ancient secrets of the Tarahumara, I was told, it was this lone
wanderer of the High Sierras.
I’d become so obsessed with finding Caballo Blanco that as I dozed on
the hotel sofa, I could even imagine the sound of his voice. “Probably like
Yogi Bear ordering burritos at Taco Bell,” I mused. A guy like that, a wan-
derer who’d go anywhere but fit in nowhere, must live inside his own head
and rarely hear his own voice. He’d make weird jokes and crack himself
up. He’d have a booming laugh and atrocious Spanish. He’d be loud and
chatty and . . . and . . .
Wait. I was hearing him. My eyes popped open to see a dusty cadaver
in a tattered straw hat bantering with the desk clerk. Trail dust streaked his
gaunt face like fading war paint, and the shocks of sun-bleached hair stick-
ing out from under the hat could have been trimmed with a hunting knife.
He looked like a castaway on a desert island, even to the way he seemed
hungry for conversation with the bored clerk.
“Caballo?” I croaked.
The cadaver turned, smiling, and I felt like an idiot. He didn’t look wary;
he looked confused, as any tourist would when confronted by a deranged
man on a sofa suddenly hollering “Horse!”
This wasn’t Caballo. There was no Caballo. The whole thing was a
hoax, and I’d fallen for it.
Then the cadaver spoke. “You know me?”
“Man!” I exploded, scrambling to my feet. “Am I glad to see you!”
The smile vanished. The cadaver’s eyes darted toward the door, making
it clear that in another second, he would as well.
The Tiger
John Vaillant
Primorye’s hinterlands. Along with a gun rack and brackets for extra fuel
cans, this one had been modied to accommodate makeshift bunks, and
was stocked with enough food to last four men a week. It was also equipped
with a wood stove so that, even in the face of total mechanical failure,
the crew could survive no matter where in the wilderness they happened
to be.
After passing through the police checkpoint on the edge of town, the
Tigers continued on up to a dirt road turnoff that led eastward along the
Bikin (be-keen) River, a large and meandering waterway that flows through
some of the most isolated country in northern Primorye. The temperature
was well below freezing and the snow was deep, and this slowed the heavy
truck’s progress. It also allowed these men, all of whom were experienced
hunters and former soldiers, many hours to ponder and discuss what might
be awaiting them. It is safe to say that nothing in their experience could
have prepared them for what they found there.
Primorye, which is also known as the Maritime Territory, is about the size
of Washington state. Tucked into the southeast corner of Russia by the Sea
of Japan, it is a thickly forested and mountainous region that combines the
backwoods claustrophobia of Appalachia with the frontier roughness of
the Yukon. Industry here is of the crudest kind: logging, mining, shing,
and hunting, all of which are complicated by poor wages, corrupt ofcials,
thriving black markets—and some of the world’s largest cats.
One of the many negative effects of perestroika and the reopening of
the border between Russia and China has been a surge in tiger poach-
ing. As the economy disintegrated and unemployment spread throughout
the 1990s, professional poachers, businessmen, and ordinary citizens alike
began taking advantage of the forest’s wealth in all its forms. The tigers,
because they are so rare and so valuable, have been particularly hard hit:
their organs, blood, and bone are much sought after for use in traditional
Chinese medicine. Some believe the tiger’s whiskers will make them bul-
letproof and that its powdered bones will soothe their aches and pains.
Others believe its penis will make them virile, and there are many—from
Tokyo to Moscow—who will pay thousands of dollars for a tiger’s skin.
Between 1992 and 1994, approximately one hundred tigers—roughly
one quarter of the country’s wild population—were killed. Most of them
ended up in China. With financial assistance (and pressure) from interna-
tional conservation agencies, the territorial government created Inspection
Tiger in the hope of restoring some semblance of law and order to the
forests of Primorye. Armed with guns, cameras, and broad police pow-
ers, these teams were charged with intercepting poachers and resolving a
steadily increasing number of conflicts between tigers and human beings.
122 The eBook Insider
Trush, however, was well suited to this work because he can be dan-
gerous, too. Trush stands about six-foot-two with long arms and legs and
a broad chest. His eyes are colored, coincidentally, like the semiprecious
stone tiger’s eye, with black rings around the irises. They peer out from
a frank and homely face framed by great, drooping brows. Though frail
and sickly as a boy, Trush grew into a talented athlete with a command-
ing presence, a deep resonant voice, and an ability to remain composed
under highly stressful circumstances. He is also immensely strong. As a
young soldier in Kazakhstan, in the 1970s, Trush won a dozen regional
kayaking championships for which he earned the Soviet rank Master of
Sports, a distinction that meant he was eligible to compete at the national
level. It was a serious undertaking: he wasn’t just racing against Bulgarians
and East Germans. “I was,” he said, “defending the honor of the Military
Forces of the USSR.” In his mid-forties, when he joined Inspection Tiger,
Trush won a territory-wide weightlifting competition three years running.
This was not the kind of weightlifting one is likely to see in the Olympics;
what Trush was doing looks more like a contest devised by bored artil-
lerymen during the Napoleonic Wars. It consists of hefting a kettlebell—
essentially a large cannonball with a handle—from the ground over your
head as many times as you can, first with one hand, and then the other.
Kettlebells are a Russian invention; they have been around for centuries
and their use clearly favors the short and the stocky. So it is surprising to see
someone as attenuated as Trush, who has the Law of the Lever weighted
so heavily against him, heave these seventy-pound spheres around with
such apparent ease.
Trush learned to shoot, first, from his father and, later, in the army. He
also studied karate, aikido, and knife handling; in these, his rangy build
works to his advantage because his long reach makes it nearly impossible
to get at him. He is so talented at hand-to-hand fighting that he was hired
to teach these skills to the military police. Trush’s physicality is intense and
often barely suppressed. He is a grabber, a hugger, and a roughhouser, but
the hands initiating—and controlling—these games are thinly disguised
weapons. His fists are knuckled mallets, and he can break bricks with them.
As he runs through the motions of an immobilizing hold, or lines up an
imaginary strike, one has the sense that his body hungers for opportunities
to do these things in earnest. Referring to a former colleague who went
bad and whom he tried for years to catch red-handed, Trush said, “He
knows very well that I am capable of beheading him with my bare hands.”
This tension—between the kind and playful neighbor, friend and husband,
and the Alpha male wilderness cop ready to throw down at a moment’s
notice—energizes almost every interaction. It is under the latter circum-
stances that Trush seems most alive.
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The deeper Trush and his men drove into the forest, the rougher the road
became. Once past Verkhny Pereval, their route took them through the
snowbound village of Yasenovie, a sister logging community of the same
size and vintage as Sobolonye. Here, they picked up a young deputy sheriff
named Bush, but his presence on this mission was more formal than practi-
cal. Bush was a cop, and tiger attacks were beyond his purview; however,
if there was a body, he was required to witness it. With Bush onboard, they
trundled on upriver.
It was already afternoon by the time they reached Sobolonye, an impov-
erished village of unpainted log houses that at first glance seemed barely
inhabited. Gorborukov was behind the wheel, and here he steered the truck
off the main road, such as it was, and plunged into the forest on a track
wide enough for only a single vehicle. Several inches of new snow had
fallen earlier in the week and, as they drove, Trush scanned the roadside for
fresh tracks. They were about fifty miles from the nearest paved road and
a couple of hard-won miles east of Sobolonye when they crossed a wide
and improbably located gravel highway. This road had been conceived
during Soviet times as an alternative to Primorye’s only existing north–
south throughway, which follows the Ussuri River north to Khabarovsk
(the same route used by the Trans-Siberian Railway). Despite handling
every kind of traffic, including transcontinental freight trucks, the Ussuri
road is poorly maintained and only as wide as a residential street; it was
also considered vulnerable to Chinese attack. This new highway, though
safer, wider, and ruler-straight, was never finished and so it is essentially
a highway to nowhere—in the middle of nowhere. The only people who
benefit from it now are loggers, poachers, and smugglers—pretty much
the only people around who can afford a vehicle. But sometimes tigers use
this highway, too.
There is an unintended courtesy in the winter forest that occurs around
pathways of any kind. It takes a lot of energy to break a trail through the
snow, especially when it’s crusty or deep, so whoever goes first, whether
animal, human, or machine, is performing a valuable service for those fol-
lowing behind. Because energy—i.e., food—is at a premium in the winter,
labor-saving gifts of this kind are rarely refused. As long as the footpath,
logging road, frozen river—or highway—is going more or less in the desired
direction, other forest creatures will use it, too, regardless of who made it.
In this way, paths have a funneling, river-like effect on the tributary crea-
tures around them, and they can make for some strange encounters.
The last three miles of the journey were on a logging track so tortuous
and convoluted that even a veteran Russian backcountry driver is moved to
shout, in a torrent of fricatives and rolling Rs, “Paris–Dakar! Camel Tro-
phy!” The road contoured east through the rolling woods, crossing creeks
The Tiger 125
on bridges made of log piles stacked at right angles to the road. Two miles
short of a privately owned logging camp, Gorborukov took an unmarked
turn and headed north. After a few minutes, he pulled up at a clearing, on
the far side of which stood a cabin.
The cabin belonged to Vladimir Markov, a resident of Sobolonye, and
a man best known for keeping bees. The crude structure stood by itself on
the high side of a gentle south-facing slope, surrounded by a thick forest
of birch, pine, and alder. It was a lonely spot but a lovely one and, under
different circumstances, Trush might have seen its appeal. Now there was
no time; it was three o’clock in the afternoon and the sun was already in
the southwest, level with the treetops. Any warmth generated during this
brief, bright day was quickly dissipating.
The first sign of trouble was the crows. Carrion crows will follow a
tiger the same way seagulls follow a fishing boat: by sticking with a proven
winner, they conserve energy and shift the odds of getting fed from If to
When. When Trush and his men climbed down from the Kung, they heard
the crows’ raucous kvetching concentrated just west of the entrance road.
Trush noted the way their dark bodies swirled and flickered above the trees
and, even if he hadn’t been warned ahead of time, this would have told
him all he needed to know: something big was dead, or dying, and it was
being guarded.
Parked in front of Markov’s cabin was a heavy truck belonging to Mark-
ov’s good friend and beekeeping partner, Danila Zaitsev, a reserved and
industrious man in his early forties. Zaitsev was a skilled mechanic and his
truck, another cast-off from the military, was one of the few vehicles still
functioning in Sobolonye. With Zaitsev were Sasha Dvornik and Andrei
Onofreychuk, both family men in their early thirties who often hunted and
fished with Markov. It was evident from their haggard appearance that
they had barely slept the night before.
Judging from the density of tracks, there had clearly been a lot of activ-
ity around the cabin. Several different species were represented and their
trails overlaid each other so that, at first, it was hard to sort them out. Trush
approached this tangled skein of information like a detective: somewhere
in here was a beginning and an end, and somewhere, too, was a motive—
perhaps several. Downhill from the cabin, closer to the entrance road, two
tracks in particular caught his attention. One set traveled northward up
the entrance road at a walking pace; the other traveled south from the
cabin. They approached each other directly, as if the meeting had been
intentional—like an appointment of some kind. The southbound tracks
were noteworthy, not just because they were made by a tiger, but because
there were large gaps—ten feet or more—between each set of impressions.
At the point where they met, the northbound tracks disappeared, as if the
126 The eBook Insider
person who made them had simply ceased to exist. Here the large paw
prints veered off to the west, crossing the entrance road at right angles.
Their regular spacing indicated a walking pace; they led into the forest,
directly toward the crows.
Trush had a video camera with him and its unblinking eye recorded
the scene in excruciating detail. Only in retrospect does it strike one how
steady Trush’s hand and voice are as he films the site, narrating as he goes:
the rough cabin and the scrubby clearing in which it stands; the path of the
attack and the point of impact, and then the long trail of horrific evidence.
The camera doesn’t waver as it pans across the pink and trampled snow,
taking in the hind foot of a dog, a single glove, and then a bloodstained
jacket cuff before halting at a patch of bare ground about a hundred yards
into the forest. At this point the audio picks up a sudden, retching gasp. It
is as if he has entered Grendel’s den.
The temperature is thirty below zero and yet, here, the snow has been
completely melted away. In the middle of this dark circle, presented like
some kind of sacrificial offering, is a hand without an arm and a head
without a face. Nearby is a long bone, a femur probably, that has been
gnawed to a bloodless white. Beyond this, the trail continues deeper into
the woods. Trush follows it, squinting through his camera while his squad
and Markov’s friends trail closely behind. The only sounds are the icy creak
of Trush’s boots and the distant barking of his dog. Seven men have been
stunned to silence. Not a sob; not a curse.
Trush’s hunting dog, a little Laika, is further down the trail, growing
increasingly shrill and agitated. Her nose is tingling with blood scent and
tiger musk, and she alone feels free to express her deepest fear: the tiger is
there, somewhere up ahead. Trush’s men have their rifles off their shoul-
ders, and they cover him as he films. They arrive at another melted spot;
this time, a large oval. Here, amid the twigs and leaf litter, is all that remains
of Vladimir Ilyich Markov. It looks at first like a heap of laundry until one
sees the boots, luminous stubs of broken bone protruding from the tops,
the tattered shirt with an arm still fitted to one of the sleeves.
Trush had never seen a fellow human so thoroughly and gruesomely
annihilated and, even as he filmed, his mind fled to the edges of the scene,
taking refuge in peripheral details. He was struck by the poverty of this
man—that he would be wearing thin rubber boots in such bitter weather.
He reflected on the cartridge belt—loaded but for three shells—and won-
dered where the gun had gone. Meanwhile, Trush’s dog, Gitta, is racing
back and forth, hackles raised and barking in alarm. The tiger is some-
where close by—invisible to the men, but to the dog it is palpably, almost
unbearably, present. The men, too, can sense a potency around them—
something larger than their own fear, and they glance about, unsure where
The Tiger 127
same mix of shame, fear, and loyalty that compelled Zaitsev and Onofre-
cuk to go along, too. Besides, there was safety in numbers.
But it had been a long time since Dvornik was in the army, and Trush’s
weapon felt strangely heavy in his hands; Trush, meanwhile, was feeling
the absence of its reassuring weight, and that was strange, too. He still had
his pistol, but it was holstered and, in any case, it would have been virtually
useless against a tiger. His faith rested with his squad mates because he had
put himself in an extremely vulnerable position: even though he was lead-
ing the way, he did so at an electronic remove—in this drama but not of it,
exploring this dreadful surreality through the camera’s narrow, cyclopean
lens. Because Zaitsev and Dvornik couldn’t be counted on, and Deputy
Bush had only a pistol, the Tigers were Trush’s only reliable proxies. Those
with guns had them at the ready, but the forest was dense and visibility was
poor. Were the tiger to attack, they could end up shooting one another. So
they held their fire, eyes darting back and forth to that single, bare branch,
wondering where the next sign would come from.
Behind the camera, Trush remained strangely calm. “We clearly see
the tiger’s tracks going away from the remains,” he continued in his under-
stated official drone, while Gitta barked incessantly, stiff-legged and staring.
“ . . . the dog clearly indicates that the tiger went this way.”
Up ahead, the tiger’s tracks showed plainly in the snow, brought into
sharp relief by the shadows now pooling within them. The animal was
maneuvering northward to higher ground, the place every cat prefers to
be. “It looks like the tiger’s not too far,” Trush intoned to future viewers,
“around forty yards.” The snow wasn’t deep and, under those conditions,
a tiger could cover forty yards in about four seconds. This may have been
why Trush chose that moment to shut off his camera, reclaim his gun, and
step back into real time. But once there, he was going to have to make a
difficult decision.
In his professional capacity as senior inspector for Inspection Tiger,
Trush acted as a medium between the Law of the Jungle and the Law
of the State; one is instinctive and often spontaneous while the other is
contrived and always cumbersome. The two are, by their very natures,
incompatible. When he was in the field, Trush usually had no means of
contacting his superiors, or anyone else for that matter; his walkie-talkies
had limited range (when they worked at all) so he and his squad mates
were profoundly on their own. Because of this, Trush’s job required a lot
of judgment calls, and he was going to have to make one now: the tiger
is a “Red Book” species—protected in Russia—so permission to kill had
to come from Moscow. Trush did not yet have this permission, but it was
Saturday, Moscow might as well have been the moon, and they had an
opportunity to end this now.
The Tiger 129
Trush decided to track it. This had not been part of the plan; he had
been sent to investigate an attack, not to hunt a tiger. Furthermore, his
team was short a man, dusk was coming on, and Markov’s friends were a
liability; they were still in shock and so, for that matter, was Trush. But at
that moment, he was poised—equidistant between the tiger and the har-
rowing evidence of what it had done. The two would never be so close
again. Signaling Lazurenko to follow, Trush set off up the trail, knowing
that every step would take him deeper into the tiger’s comfort zone.
A Visit From the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. Sasha was
adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on
the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose pee-
ing she could faintly hear through the vault-like door of a toilet stall. Inside
the rim of the bag, barely visible, was a wallet made of pale green leather.
It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing woman’s
blind trust had provoked her: We live in a city where people will steal the hair off
your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight
and expect it to be waiting for you when you come back? It made her want to teach
the woman a lesson. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling
Sasha always had: that fat, tender wallet, offering itself to her hand—it
seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the
moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to
the wind, live dangerously (“I get it,” Coz, her therapist, said), and take the
fucking thing.
“You mean steal it.”
He was trying to get Sasha to use that word, which was harder to avoid
in the case of a wallet than with a lot of the things she’d lifted over the past
year, when her condition (as Coz referred to it) had begun to accelerate:
five sets of keys, fourteen pairs of sunglasses, a child’s striped scarf, binocu-
lars, a cheese grater, a pocketknife, twenty-eight bars of soap, and eighty-
five pens, ranging from cheap ballpoints she’d used to sign debit card slips
to the aubergine Visconti that cost two hundred sixty dollars online, which
A Visit From the Goon Squad 131
she’d lifted from her former boss’s lawyer during a contracts meeting. Sasha
no longer took anything from stores—their cold, inert goods didn’t tempt
her. Only from people.
“Okay,” she said. “Steal it.”
Sasha and Coz had dubbed that feeling she got the “personal chal-
lenge,” as in: taking the wallet was a way for Sasha to assert her toughness,
her individuality. What they needed to do was switch things around in her
head so that the challenge became not taking the wallet but leaving it. That
would be the cure, although Coz never used words like “cure.” He wore
funky sweaters and let her call him Coz, but he was old school inscrutable,
to the point where Sasha couldn’t tell if he was gay or straight, if he’d writ-
ten famous books, or if (as she sometimes suspected) he was one of those
escaped cons who impersonate surgeons and wind up leaving their operat-
ing tools inside people’s skulls. Of course, these questions could have been
resolved on Google in less than a minute, but they were useful questions
(according to Coz), and so far, Sasha had resisted.
The couch where she lay in his office was blue leather and very soft. Coz
liked the couch, he’d told her, because it relieved them both of the burden
of eye contact. “You don’t like eye contact?” Sasha had asked. It seemed
like a weird thing for a therapist to admit.
“I find it tiring,” he’d said. “This way, we can both look where we
want.”
“Where will you look?”
He smiled. “You can see my options.”
“Where do you usually look? When people are on the couch.”
“Around the room,” Coz said. “At the ceiling. Into space.”
“Do you ever sleep?”
“No.”
Sasha usually looked at the window, which faced the street, and tonight,
as she continued her story, was rippled with rain. She’d glimpsed the wal-
let, tender and overripe as a peach. She’d plucked it from the woman’s bag
and slipped it into her own small handbag, which she’d zipped shut before
the sound of peeing had stopped. She’d flicked open the bathroom door
and floated back through the lobby to the bar. She and the wallet’s owner
had never seen each other.
Prewallet, Sasha had been in the grip of a dire evening: lame date (yet
another) brooding behind dark bangs, sometimes glancing at the flatscreen
TV, where a Jets game seemed to interest him more than Sasha’s admit-
tedly overhandled tales of Bennie Salazar, her old boss, who was famous
for founding the Sow’s Ear record label and who also (Sasha happened
to know) sprinkled gold flakes into his coffee—as an aphrodisiac, she sus-
pected—and sprayed pesticide in his armpits.
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“But it isn’t that you lack empathy,” Coz said. “We know that, because
of the plumber.”
Sasha sighed. She’d told Coz the plumber story about a month ago,
and he’d found a way to bring it up at almost every session since. The
plumber was an old man, sent by Sasha’s landlord to investigate a leak in
the apartment below hers. He’d appeared in Sasha’s doorway, tufts of gray
on his head, and within a minute—boom— he’d hit the floor and crawled
under her bathtub like an animal fumbling its way into a familiar hole.
The fingers he’d groped toward the bolts behind the tub were grimed to
cigar stubs, and reaching made his sweatshirt hike up, exposing a soft white
back. Sasha turned away, stricken by the old man’s abasement, anxious to
leave for her temp job, except that the plumber was talking to her, asking
about the length and frequency of her showers. “I never use it,” she told
him curtly. “I shower at the gym.” He nodded without acknowledging her
rudeness, apparently used to it. Sasha’s nose began to prickle; she shut her
eyes and pushed hard on both temples.
Opening her eyes, she saw the plumber’s tool belt lying on the floor at
her feet. It had a beautiful screwdriver in it, the orange translucent handle
gleaming like a lollipop in its worn leather loop, the silvery shaft sculpted,
sparkling. Sasha felt herself contract around the object in a single yawn of
appetite; she needed to hold the screwdriver, just for a minute. She bent
her knees and plucked it noiselessly from the belt. Not a bangle jangled;
her bony hands were spastic at most things, but she was good at this—made
for it, she often thought, in the first drifty moments after lifting something.
And once the screwdriver was in her hand, she felt instant relief from the
pain of having an old soft-backed man snuffling under her tub, and then
something more than relief: a blessed indifference, as if the very idea of
feeling pain over such a thing were baffling.
“And what about after he’d gone?” Coz had asked when Sasha told him
the story. “How did the screwdriver look to you then?”
There was a pause. “Normal,” she said.
“Really. Not special anymore?”
“Like any screwdriver.”
Sasha had heard Coz shift behind her and felt something happen in the
room: the screwdriver, which she’d placed on the table (recently supple-
mented with a second table) where she kept the things she’d lifted, and
which she’d barely looked at since, seemed to hang in the air of Coz’s
office. It floated between them: a symbol.
“And how did you feel?” Coz asked quietly. “About having taken it from
the plumber you pitied?”
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How did she feel? How did she feel? There was a right answer, of course.
At times Sasha had to fight the urge to lie simply as a way of depriving
Coz of it.
“Bad,” she said. “Okay? I felt bad. Shit, I’m bankrupting myself to pay
for you—obviously I get that this isn’t a great way to live.”
More than once, Coz had tried to connect the plumber to Sasha’s father,
who had disappeared when she was six. She was careful not to indulge this
line of thinking. “I don’t remember him,” she told Coz. “I have nothing to
say.” She did this for Coz’s protection and her own—they were writing a
story of redemption, of fresh beginnings and second chances. But in that
direction lay only sorrow.
Sasha and Alex crossed the lobby of the Lassimo Hotel in the direction of
the street. Sasha hugged her purse to her shoulder, the warm ball of wal-
let snuggled in her armpit. As they passed the angular budded branches
by the big glass doors to the street, a woman zigzagged into their path.
“Wait,” she said. “You haven’t seen—I’m desperate.”
Sasha felt a twang of terror. It was the woman whose wallet she’d
taken—she knew this instantly, although the person before her had noth-
ing in common with the blithe, raven-haired wallet owner she’d pictured.
This woman had vulnerable brown eyes and flat pointy shoes that clicked
too loudly on the marble floor. There was plenty of gray in her frizzy
brown hair.
Sasha took Alex’s arm, trying to steer him through the doors. She felt
his pulse of surprise at her touch, but he stayed put. “Have we seen what?”
he said.
“Someone stole my wallet. My ID is gone, and I have to catch a plane
tomorrow morning. I’m just desperate!” She stared beseechingly at both
of them. It was the sort of frank need that New Yorkers quickly learn how
to hide, and Sasha recoiled. It had never occurred to her that the woman
was from out of town.
“Have you called the police?” Alex asked.
“The concierge said he would call. But I’m also wondering—could it have
fallen out somewhere?” She looked helplessly at the marble floor around
their feet. Sasha relaxed slightly. This woman was the type who annoyed
people without meaning to; apology shadowed her movements even now,
as she followed Alex to the concierge desk. Sasha trailed behind.
“Is someone helping this person?” she heard Alex ask.
The concierge was young and spiky haired. “We’ve called the police,”
he said defensively.
Alex turned to the woman. “Where did this happen?”
“In the ladies’ room. I think.”
A Visit From the Goon Squad 135
David Eagleman
Sum
In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events
reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are
grouped together.
You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven
months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes.
For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a
toilet.
You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it.
Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it
through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.
But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping
your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months wait-
ing in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an
airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch,
because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your mara-
thon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when
you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of
confusion. One hour realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Three
weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a
green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy.
Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two
Sum 137
Egalitaire
In the afterlife you discover that God understands the complexities of life.
She had originally submitted to peer pressure when She structured Her
universe like all the other gods had, with a binary categorization of people
into good and evil. But it didn’t take long for Her to realize that humans
could be good in many ways and simultaneously corrupt and meanspirited
in other ways. How was She to arbitrate who goes to Heaven and who to
Hell? Might not it be possible, She considered, that a man could be an
embezzler and still give to charitable causes? Might not a woman be an
adulteress but bring pleasure and security to two men’s lives? Might not a
child unwittingly divulge secrets that splinter a family? Dividing the popu-
lation into two categories—good and bad—seemed like a more reasonable
task when She was younger, but with experience these decisions became
more difficult. She composed complex formulas to weigh hundreds of fac-
tors, and ran computer programs that rolled out long strips of paper with
eternal decisions. But Her sensitivities revolted at this automation—and
when the computer generated a decision She disagreed with, She took the
opportunity to kick out the plug in rage. That afternoon She listened to the
grievances of the dead from two warring nations. Both sides had suffered,
both sides had legitimate grievances, both pled their cases earnestly. She
covered Her ears and moaned in misery. She knew Her humans were mul-
tidimensional, and She could no longer live under the rigid architecture of
Her youthful choices.
Not all gods suffer over this; we can consider ourselves lucky that in
death we answer to a God with deep sensitivity to the Byzantine hearts of
Her creations.
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For months She moped around Her living room in Heaven, head
drooped like a bulrush, while the lines piled up. Her advisors advised Her
to delegate the decision making, but She loved Her humans too much to
leave them to the care of anyone else.
In a moment of desperation the thought crossed Her mind to let every-
one wait on line indefinitely, letting them work it out on their own. But then
a better idea struck Her generous spirit. She could afford it: She would
grant everyone, every last human, a place in Heaven. After all, everyone
had something good inside; it was part of the design specifications. Her
new plan brought back the bounce to Her gait, returned the color to Her
cheeks. She shut down the operations in Hell, fired the Devil, and brought
every last human to be by Her side in Heaven. Newcomers or old-timers,
nefarious or righteous: under the new system, everyone gets equal time to
speak with Her. Most people find Her a little garrulous and oversolicitous,
but She cannot be accused of not caring.
The most important aspect of Her new system is that everyone is treated
equally. There is no longer fire for some and harp music for others. The
afterlife is no longer defined by cots versus waterbeds, raw potatoes versus
sushi, hot water versus champagne. Everyone is a brother to all, and for the
first time an idea has been realized that never came to fruition on Earth:
true equality.
The Communists are baffled and irritated, because they have finally
achieved their perfect society, but only by the help of a God in whom they
don’t want to believe. The meritocrats are abashed that they’re stuck for
eternity in an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conserva-
tives have no penniless to disparage; the liberals have no downtrodden to
promote.
So God sits on the edge of Her bed and weeps at night, because the
only thing everyone can agree upon is that they’re all in Hell.
Circle of Friends
When you die, you feel as though there were some subtle change, but every-
thing looks approximately the same. You get up and brush your teeth. You
kiss your spouse and kids and leave for the office. There is less traffic than
normal. The rest of your building seems less full, as though it’s a holiday.
But everyone in your office is here, and they greet you kindly. You feel
strangely popular. Everyone you run into is someone you know. At some
point, it dawns on you that this is the afterlife: the world is only made up of
people you’ve met before. It’s a small fraction of the world population—
about 0.00002 percent—but it seems like plenty to you.
Sum 139
It turns out that only the people you remember are here. So the woman
with whom you shared a glance in the elevator may or may not be included.
Your second-grade teacher is here, with most of the class. Your parents,
your cousins, and your spectrum of friends through the years. All your old
lovers. Your boss, your grandmothers, and the waitress who served your
food each day at lunch. Those you dated, those you almost dated, those
you longed for. It is a blissful opportunity to spend quality time with your
one thousand connections, to renew fading ties, to catch up with those you
let slip away.
It is only after several weeks of this that you begin to feel forlorn.
You wonder what’s different as you saunter through the vast quiet parks
with a friend or two.
No strangers grace the empty park benches. No family unknown to
you throws bread crumbs for the ducks and makes you smile because of
their laughter. As you step into the street, you note there are no crowds, no
buildings teeming with workers, no distant cities bustling, no hospitals run-
ning 24/7 with patients dying and staff rushing, no trains howling into the
night with sardined passengers on their way home. Very few foreigners.
You begin to consider all the things unfamiliar to you. You’ve never
known, you realize, how to vulcanize rubber to make a tire. And now those
factories stand empty. You’ve never known how to fashion a silicon chip
from beach sand, how to launch rockets out of the atmosphere, how to pit
olives or lay railroad tracks. And now those industries are shut down.
The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all
the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with
you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.
War and Peace
Part Three, XV
Kutuzov turned away without answering him, and his gaze chanced
to rest on Prince Andrei, who was standing close by. Seeing Bolkonsky,
Kutuzov softened the angry and caustic expression of his gaze, as if aware
that his adjutant was not to blame for what was going on. And, without
answering the Austrian adjutant, he addressed Bolkonsky:
“Allez voir, mon cher, si la troisième division a dépassé le village. Dites-lui de s’arrêter
et d’attendre mes ordres.”
Prince Andrei had only just started when he stopped him.
“Et demandez-lui si les tirailleurs sont postés,” he added. “Ce qu’ils font, ce qu’ils
font!” he said to himself, still not answering the Austrian.
Prince Andrei galloped off to carry out his mission.
Overtaking all the advancing battalions, he stopped the third division
and ascertained that there was in fact no line of riflemen in front of our
columns. The regimental commander of the front regiment was very sur-
prised by the order conveyed to him from the commander in chief to send
out riflemen. The regimental commander stood there in the full conviction
that there were more troops ahead of him, and that the enemy was no less
than six miles away. In fact, nothing could be seen ahead but empty terrain
sloping away and covered with thick fog. Having ordered on behalf of the
commander in chief that the omission be rectified, Prince Andrei galloped
back. Kutuzov still stood in the same place and, his corpulent body sagging
over the saddle in old man’s fashion, yawned deeply, closing his eyes. The
troops were no longer moving, but stood at parade rest.
“Very good, very good,” he said to Prince Andrei and turned to a gen-
eral who stood there with a watch in his hand, saying it was time to move
on, because all the columns of the left flank had already descended.
“We still have time, Your Excellency,” Kutuzov said through a yawn.
“We have time!” he repeated.
Just then, from well behind Kutuzov, came shouts of regimental greet-
ings, and these voices began to approach quickly along the whole extended
line of the advancing Russian columns. It was clear that the one being
greeted was riding quickly. When the soldiers of the regiment Kutuzov was
standing in front of began to shout, he rode slightly to one side and, winc-
ing, turned to look. Down the road from Pratz galloped what looked like
a squadron of varicolored horsemen. Two of them rode side by side at a
great gallop ahead of the rest. One, in a black uniform with white plumes,
rode a bobtailed chestnut horse, the other, in a white uniform, rode a black
horse. These were the two emperors with their suite. Kutuzov, with the
affectation of a frontline veteran, ordered his standing troops to “atten-
tion” and, saluting, rode up to the emperor. His whole figure and manner
suddenly changed. He acquired the look of a subordinate, unthinking man.
War and Peace 143
XVI
from Prince Andrei cried: “Well, brothers, that’s it for us!” And it was as if
this voice was a command. At this voice everyone began to run.
Confused, ever increasing crowds came running back to the place
where, five minutes before, the troops had marched past the emperors. Not
only was it difficult to stop this crowd, but it was impossible not to yield and
move back with it. Bolkonsky tried only not to be separated from Kutuzov
and looked around in perplexity, unable to understand what was happen-
ing in front of him. Nesvitsky, looking angry, red, and not like himself,
shouted to Kutuzov that if he did not leave at once, he would certainly be
taken prisoner. Kutuzov stood in the same place and, without respond-
ing, took out his handkerchief. Blood was flowing from his cheek. Prince
Andrei forced his way to him.
“Are you wounded?” he asked, barely able to control the trembling of
his lower jaw.
“The wound isn’t here, it’s there!” said Kutuzov, pressing the handker-
chief to his wounded cheek and pointing to the fleeing men.
“Stop them!” he cried, and at the same time, probably realizing that it
was impossible to stop them, spurred his horse and rode to the right.
A fresh crowd of fleeing men streamed past, caught him up, and carried
him backwards.
The troops were fleeing in such a dense crowd that, once one landed in
the middle of it, it was difficult to get out. Someone shouted, “Keep going,
don’t drag your feet!” Another, turning around, fired into the air; someone
else struck the horse on which Kutuzov himself was riding. Extricating
themselves with the greatest effort from the flow of the crowd to the left,
Kutuzov and his suite, diminished by more than half, rode towards the
sounds of nearby cannon fire. Extricating himself from the crowd of flee-
ing men, Prince Andrei, trying to keep up with Kutuzov, saw on the slope
of the hill, amidst the smoke, a Russian battery still firing, and the French
running up to it. Slightly higher stood Russian infantry, neither moving
ahead to aid the battery, nor backwards in the direction of the fugitives. A
general on horseback separated himself from the infantry and rode up to
Kutuzov. There were only four men left in Kutuzov’s suite. They were all
pale and exchanged glances silently.
“Stop those villains!” Kutuzov said breathlessly to the regimental com-
mander, pointing to the fleeing men; but at the same moment, as if in
punishment for those words, bullets, like a flock of birds, flew whistling at
the regiment and Kutuzov’s suite.
The French had attacked the battery and, seeing Kutuzov, were shooting
at him. With this volley, the regimental commander seized his leg; several
soldiers fell, and an ensign holding a standard let it drop from his hands;
War and Peace 147
the standard wavered and fell, stopped momentarily by the bayonets of the
soldiers around it. The soldiers began firing without any orders.
“Oooh!” Kutuzov moaned with an expression of despair and looked
around. “Bolkonsky,” he whispered in a voice trembling with awareness of
his old man’s strengthlessness. “Bolkonsky,” he whispered, pointing to the
disordered battalion and the enemy, “what’s going on?”
But before he finished saying it, Prince Andrei, feeling sobs of shame
and anger rising in his throat, was already jumping off his horse and run-
ning towards the standard.
“Forward, lads!” he cried in a childishly shrill voice.
“Here it is!” thought Prince Andrei, seizing the staff of the standard
and hearing with delight the whistle of bullets, evidently aimed precisely at
him. Several soldiers fell.
“Hurrah!” cried Prince Andrei, barely able to hold up the heavy stan-
dard, and he ran forward with unquestioning assurance that the entire
battalion would run after him.
And indeed he ran only a few steps alone. One soldier started out,
another, and the whole battalion, with a shout of “Hurrah!” rushed for-
ward and overtook him. A sergeant of the battalion ran up, took the stan-
dard that was wavering in Prince Andrei’s hands because of its weight, but
was killed at once. Prince Andrei again seized the standard and, dragging
it by the staff, ran with the battalion. Ahead of him he saw our artillerists,
some of whom were fighting, while others abandoned the cannon and
came running in his direction; he also saw French infantrymen, who had
seized the artillery horses and were turning the cannon. Prince Andrei
and his battalion were now twenty paces from the cannon. Above him he
heard the unceasing whistle of bullets, and soldiers ceaselessly gasped and
fell to right and left of him. But he did not look at them; he looked fixedly
only at what was happening ahead of him–at the battery. He clearly saw
the figure of a red-haired gunner, his shako knocked askew, pulling a swab
from one side, while a French soldier pulled it towards him from the other
side. Prince Andrei saw clearly the bewildered and at the same time angry
expression on the faces of the two men, who evidently did not understand
what they were doing.
“What are they doing?” Prince Andrei wondered, looking at them.
“Why doesn’t the red-haired artillerist run away, since he has no weapon?
Why doesn’t the Frenchman stab him? Before he runs away, the French-
man will remember his musket and bayonet him.”
In fact, another Frenchman with his musket atilt ran up to the fighting
men, and the lot of the red-haired artillerist, who still did not understand
what awaited him and triumphantly pulled the swab from the French sol-
dier’s hands, was about to be decided. But Prince Andrei did not see how
148 The eBook Insider
it ended. It seemed to him as though one of the nearest soldiers, with the
full swing of a stout stick, hit him on the head. It was slightly painful and
above all unpleasant, because the pain distracted him and kept him from
seeing what he had been looking at.
“What is it? am I falling? are my legs giving way under me?” he thought,
and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the fight between
the French and the artillerists ended, and wishing to know whether or not
the red-haired artillerist had been killed, whether the cannon had been
taken or saved. But he did not see anything. There was nothing over him
now except the sky–the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with
gray clouds slowly creeping across it. “How quiet, calm, and solemn, not
at all like when I was running,” thought Prince Andrei, “not like when we
were running, shouting, and fighting; not at all like when the Frenchman
and the artillerist, with angry and frightened faces, were pulling at the
swab–it’s quite different the way the clouds creep across this lofty, infinite
sky. How is it I haven’t seen this lofty sky before? And how happy I am
that I’ve finally come to know it. Yes! everything is empty, everything is a
deception, except this infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing except that.
But there is not even that, there is nothing except silence, tranquillity. And
thank God! . . . ”
To the End of the Land
David Grossman
When they get to the meeting point, Sami pulls into the first parking spot
he finds, yanks up the emergency brake, folds his arms over his chest, and
announces that he will wait for Ora there. And he asks her to be quick,
which he has never done before. Ofer gets out of the cab and Sami does
not move. He hisses something, but she can’t tell what. She hopes he
was saying goodbye to Ofer, but who knows what he was muttering. She
marches after Ofer, blinking at the dazzling lights: rifle barrels, sunglasses,
car mirrors. She doesn’t know where he is leading her and is afraid he will
get swallowed up among the hundreds of young men and she will never
see him again. Meaning—she immediately corrects herself, revising the
grim minutes she has been keeping all day—she won’t see him again until
he comes home. The sun beats down, and the horde becomes a heap of
colorful, bustling dots. She focuses on Ofer’s long khaki back. His walk is
rigid and slightly arrogant. She can see him broaden his shoulders and
widen his stance. When he was twelve, she remembers, he used to change
his voice when he answered the phone and project a strained “Hello” that
was supposed to sound deep, and a minute later he would forget and go
back to his thin squeak. The air around her buzzes with shouts and whistles
and megaphone calls and laughter. “Honey, answer me, it’s me, Honey,
answer me, it’s me,” sings a ringtone on a nearby cell phone that seems to
follow her wherever she goes. Within the commotion Ora swiftly picks up
the distant chatter of a baby somewhere in the large gathering ground, and
the voice of his mother answers sweetly. She stands for a moment looking
150 The eBook Insider
for them but cannot find them, and she imagines the mother changing the
baby’s diaper, maybe on the hood of a car, bending over and tickling his
tummy, and she stands slightly stooped, hugging her suede bag to her body,
and laps up the soft double trickle of sounds until it vanishes.
It is all a huge, irredeemable mistake. It seems to her that as the moment
of separation approaches, the families and the soldiers fill with arid merri-
ment, as if they have all inhaled a drug meant to dull their comprehension.
The air bustles with the hum of a school trip or a big family excursion.
Men her age, exempt from reserve duty, meet their friends from the army,
the fathers of the young soldiers, and exchange laughter and backslaps.
“We’ve done our part,” two stout men tell each other, “now it’s their turn.”
Television crews descend on families saying goodbye to their loved ones.
Ora is thirsty, parched. Half running, she trails behind Ofer. Every time
her gaze falls on the face of a soldier she unwittingly pulls back, afraid
she will remember him: Ofer once told her that when they had their pic-
tures taken sometimes, before they set off on a military campaign, the guys
made sure to keep their heads a certain distance from each other, so there’d
be room for the red circle that would mark them later, in the newspaper.
Screeching loudspeakers direct the soldiers to their battalions’ meeting
points—a meetery, they call this, and she thinks in her mother’s voice: bar-
barians, language-rapists—and suddenly Ofer stops and she almost walks
into him. He turns to her and she feels a deluge. “What’s the matter with
you?” he whispers into her face. “What if they find an Arab here and think
he’s come to commit suicide? And didn’t you think about how he feels hav-
ing to drive me here? Do you even get what this means for him?”
She doesn’t have the energy to argue or explain. He’s right, but she
really wasn’t in a state to think about anything. How can he not understand
her? She just wasn’t thinking. A white fog had filled her mind from the
moment he told her that instead of going on the trip to the Galilee with
her he was going off to some kasbah or mukataa. That was at six a.m. She
had woken to hear his voice whispering into the phone in the other room,
and hurried in there. Seeing his guilty look she had tensed and asked, “Did
they call?”
“They say I have to go.”
“But when?”
“ASAP.”
She asked if it couldn’t wait a little while, so they could at least do the
trip for two or three days, because she realized immediately that a whole
week with him was a dream now. She added with a pathetic smile, “Didn’t
we say we’d have a few puffs of family-together time?”
He laughed and said, “Mom, it’s not a game, it’s war,” and because of
his arrogance—his, and his father’s, and his brother’s, their patronizing
To the End of the Land 151
dance around her most sensitive trigger points—she spat back at him
that she still wasn’t convinced that the male brain could tell the difference
between war and games. For a moment she allowed herself some modest
satisfaction with the debating skills she’d displayed even before her morn-
ing coffee, but Ofer shrugged and went to his room to pack, and precisely
because he did not respond with a witty answer, as he usually did, she grew
suspicious.
She followed him and asked, “But did they call to let you know?”
Because she remembered that she hadn’t heard the phone ring.
Ofer took his military shirts from the closet, and pairs of gray socks, and
shoved them into his backpack. From behind the door he grumbled, “What
difference does it make who called? There’s an operation, and there’s an
emergency call-up, and half the country’s reporting for duty.”
Ora wouldn’t give in—Me? Pass up getting pricked with such a perfect
thorn? she asked herself later—and she leaned weakly against the door-
way, crossed her arms over her chest, and demanded that he tell her exactly
how things had progressed to that phone call. She would not let up until
he admitted that he had called them that morning, even before six he had
called the battalion and begged them to take him, even though today, at
nine-zero-zero, he was supposed to be at the induction center for his dis-
charge, and from there to drive to the Galilee with her. As he lowered his
gaze and mumbled on, she discovered, to her horror, that the army hadn’t
even considered asking him to prolong his service. As far as they were
concerned he was a civilian, deep into his discharge leave. It was he, Ofer
admitted defiantly, his forehead turning red, who wasn’t willing to give up.
“No way! After eating shit for three years so I’d be ready for exactly this
kind of operation?” Three years of checkpoints and patrols, little kids in
Palestinian villages and settlements throwing stones at him, not to mention
the fact that he hadn’t even been within spitting distance of a tank for six
months, and now, at last, with his lousy luck, this kind of kick-ass opera-
tion, three armored units together—there were tears in his eyes, and for a
moment you might have thought he was haggling with her to be allowed
to come back late from a class Purim party—how could he sit at home or
go hiking in the Galilee when all his guys would be there? In short, she
discovered that he, on his own initiative, had convinced them to enlist him
on a voluntary basis for another twenty-eight days.
“Oh,” she said, when he finished his speech, and it was a hollow, muf-
fled Oh. And I dragged my corpse into the kitchen, she thought to herself. It was
an expression of Ilan’s, her ex, the man who had shared her life and, in
their good years, enriched the goodness. The fullness of life, the old Ilan used
to say and blush with gratitude, with reserved, awkward enthusiasm, which
propelled Ora toward him on a wave of love. She always thought that deep
152 The eBook Insider
in his heart he was amazed at having been granted this fullness of life at all.
She remembers when the kids were little and they lived in Tzur Hadassah,
in the house they bought from Avram, how they liked to hang the laundry
out to dry at night, together, one last domestic chore at the end of a long,
exhausting day. Together they would carry the large tub out to the garden
facing the dark fields and the valley, and the Arab village of Hussan. The
great fig tree and the grevillea rustled softly with their own mysterious,
rich lives, and the laundry lines filled up with dozens of tiny articles of
clothing like miniature hieroglyphics: little socks and undershirts and cloth
shoes and pants with suspenders and colorful OshKosh overalls. Was there
someone from Hussan who had gone out in the last light of day and was
watching them now? Aiming a gun at them? Ora wondered sometimes,
and a chill would flutter down her spine. Or was there a general, human
immunity for people hanging laundry—especially this kind of laundry?
The Girl with
the Dragon Tattoo
Stieg Larsson
A Friday in November
It happened every year, was almost a ritual. And this was his eighty-second
birthday. When, as usual, the flower was delivered, he took off the wrap-
ping paper and then picked up the telephone to call Detective Superinten-
dent Morell who, when he retired, had moved to Lake Siljan in Dalarna.
They were not only the same age, they had been born on the same day–
which was something of an irony under the circumstances. The old police-
man was sitting with his coffee, waiting, expecting the call.
“It arrived.”
“What is it this year?”
“I don’t know what kind it is. I’ll have to get someone to tell me what it
is. It’s white.”
“No letter, I suppose.”
“Just the flower. The frame is the same kind as last year. One of those
do-it-yourself ones.”
“Postmark?”
“Stockholm.”
“Handwriting?”
“Same as always, all in capitals. Upright, neat lettering.”
154 The eBook Insider
With that, the subject was exhausted, and not another word was
exchanged for almost a minute. The retired policeman leaned back in his
kitchen chair and drew on his pipe. He knew he was no longer expected to
come up with a pithy comment or any sharp question which would shed a
new light on the case. Those days had long since passed, and the exchange
between the two men seemed like a ritual attaching to a mystery which no-
one else in the whole world had the least interest in unraveling.
The Latin name was Leptospermum (Myrtaceae) rubinette. It was a plant about
ten centimeters high with small, heather-like foliage and a white ower
with ve petals about two centimeters across.
The plant was native to the Australian bush and uplands, where it was
to be found among tussocks of grass. There it was called Desert Snow.
Someone at the botanical gardens in Uppsala would later confirm that it
was a plant seldom cultivated in Sweden. The botanist wrote in her report
that it was related to the tea tree and that it was sometimes confused with
its more common cousin Leptospermum scoparium, which grew in abundance
in New Zealand. What distinguished them, she pointed out, was that rubi-
nette had a small number of microscopic pink dots at the tips of the petals,
giving the flower a faint pinkish tinge.
Rubinette was altogether an unpretentious flower. It had no known
medicinal properties, and it could not induce hallucinatory experiences.
It was neither edible, nor had a use in the manufacture of plant dyes. On
the other hand, the aboriginal people of Australia regarded as sacred the
region and the flora around Ayers Rock.
The botanist said that she herself had never seen one before, but after
consulting her colleagues she was to report that attempts had been made to
introduce the plant at a nursery in Göteborg, and that it might, of course,
be cultivated by amateur botanists. It was difficult to grow in Sweden
because it thrived in a dry climate and had to remain indoors half of the
year. It would not thrive in calcareous soil and it had to be watered from
below. It needed pampering.
The fact of its being so rare a ower ought to have made it easier to trace
the source of this particular specimen, but in practice it was an impossible
task. There was no registry to look it up in, no licenses to explore. Any-
where from a handful to a few hundred enthusiasts could have had access
to seeds or plants. And those could have changed hands between friends
or been bought by mail order from anywhere in Europe, anywhere in the
Antipodes.
But it was only one in the series of mystifying flowers that each year
arrived by post on the first day of November. They were always beautiful
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 155
and for the most part rare flowers, always pressed, mounted on watercolor
paper in a simple frame measuring 15cm by 28cm.
The strange story of the flowers had never been reported in the press;
only a very few people knew of it. Thirty years ago the regular arrival
of the flower was the object of much scrutiny–at the National Forensic
Laboratory, among fingerprint experts, graphologists, criminal investiga-
tors, and one or two relatives and friends of the recipient. Now the actors
in the drama were but three: the elderly birthday boy, the retired police
detective, and the person who had posted the flower. The first two at least
had reached such an age that the group of interested parties would soon
be further diminished.
The policeman was a hardened veteran. He would never forget his first
case, in which he had had to take into custody a violent and appallingly
drunk worker at an electrical substation before he caused others harm.
During his career he had brought in poachers, wife beaters, con men, car
thieves, and drunk drivers. He had dealt with burglars, drug dealers, rapists,
and one deranged bomber. He had been involved in nine murder or man-
slaughter cases. In five of these the murderer had called the police himself
and, full of remorse, confessed to having killed his wife or brother or some
other relative. Two others were solved within a few days. Another required
the assistance of the National Criminal Police and took two years.
The ninth case was solved to the police’s satisfaction, which is to say
that they knew who the murderer was, but because the evidence was so
insubstantial the public prosecutor decided not to proceed with the case.
To the detective superintendent’s dismay, the statute of limitations even-
tually put an end to the matter. But all in all he could look back on an
impressive career.
He was anything but pleased.
For the detective, the “Case of the Pressed Flowers” had been nagging
at him for years–his last, unsolved and frustrating case. The situation was
doubly absurd because after spending literally thousands of hours brood-
ing, on duty and off, he could not say beyond doubt that a crime had
indeed been committed.
The two men knew that whoever had mounted the flowers would have
worn gloves, that there would be no fingerprints on the frame or the glass.
The frame could have been bought in camera shops or stationery stores
the world over. There was, quite simply, no lead to follow. Most often the
parcel was posted in Stockholm, but three times from London, twice from
Paris, twice from Copenhagen, once from Madrid, once from Bonn, and
once from Pensacola, Florida. The detective superintendent had had to
look it up in an atlas.
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After putting down the telephone the eighty-two-year-old birthday boy sat
for a long time looking at the pretty but meaningless ower whose name
he did not yet know. Then he looked up at the wall above his desk. There
hung forty-three pressed owers in their frames. Four rows of ten, and one
at the bottom with four. In the top row one was missing from the ninth slot.
Desert Snow would be number forty-four.
Without warning he began to weep. He surprised himself with this sud-
den burst of emotion after almost forty years.
Friday, December 20
The trial was irretrievably over; everything that could be said had been
said, but he had never doubted that he would lose. The written verdict was
handed down at 10:00 on Friday morning, and all that remained was a
summing up from the reporters waiting in the corridor outside the district
court.
Carl Mikael Blomkvist saw them through the doorway and slowed his
step. He had no wish to discuss the verdict, but questions were unavoidable,
and he—of all people—knew that they had to be asked and answered. This
is how it is to be a criminal, he thought. On the other side of the microphone. He
straightened up and tried to smile. The reporters gave him friendly, almost
embarrassed greetings.
“Let’s see . . . Aftonbladet, Expressen, TT wire service, TV4, and . . . where
are you from? . . . ah yes, Dagens Nyheter. I must be a celebrity,” Blomkvist said.
“Give us a sound bite, Kalle Blomkvist.” It was a reporter from one of the
evening papers.
Blomkvist, hearing the nickname, forced himself as always not to roll his
eyes. Once, when he was twenty-three and had just started his rst summer
job as a journalist, Blomkvist had chanced upon a gang which had pulled
off ve bank robberies over the past two years. There was no doubt that
it was the same gang in every instance. Their trademark was to hold up
two banks at a time with military precision. They wore masks from Disney
World, so inevitably police logic dubbed them the Donald Duck Gang.
The newspapers renamed them the Bear Gang, which sounded more sin-
ister, more appropriate to the fact that on two occasions they had recklessly
red warning shots and threatened curious passersby.
Their sixth outing was at a bank in Östergötland at the height of the
holiday season. A reporter from the local radio station happened to be in
the bank at the time. As soon as the robbers were gone he went to a public
telephone and dictated his story for live broadcast.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 157
Abraham Verghese
The Coming
squat buildings like a moat. Matron Hirst’s roses overtook the walls, the
crimson blooms framing every window and reaching to the roof. So fer-
tile was that loamy soil that Matron—Missing Hospital’s wise and sen-
sible leader—cautioned us against stepping into it barefoot lest we sprout
new toes.
Five trails flanked by shoulder-high bushes ran away from the main
hospital buildings like spokes of a wheel, leading to five thatched-roof bun-
galows that were all but hidden by copse, by hedgerows, by wild eucalyptus
and pine. It was Matron’s intent that Missing resemble an arboretum, or a
corner of Kensington Gardens (where, before she came to Africa, she used
to walk as a young nun), or Eden before the Fall.
Missing was really Mission Hospital, a word that on the Ethiopian
tongue came out with a hiss so it sounded like “Missing.” A clerk in the
Ministry of Health who was a fresh high-school graduate had typed out
the missing hospital on the license, a phonetically correct spelling as far
as he was concerned. A reporter for the Ethiopian Herald perpetuated
this misspelling. When Matron Hirst had approached the clerk in the min-
istry to correct this, he pulled out his original typescript. “See for your-
self, madam. Quod erat demonstrandum it is Missing,” he said, as if he’d
proved Pythagoras’s theorem, the sun’s central position in the solar system,
the roundness of the earth, and Missing’s precise location at its imagined
corner. And so Missing it was.
Not a cry or a groan escaped from Sister Mary Joseph Praise while in the
throes of her cataclysmic labor. But just beyond the swinging door in the
room adjoining Operating Theater 3, the oversize autoclave (donated by
the Lutheran church in Zurich) bellowed and wept for my mother while
its scalding steam sterilized the surgical instruments and towels that would
be used on her. After all, it was in the corner of the autoclave room, right
next to that stainless-steel behemoth, that my mother kept a sanctuary for
herself during the seven years she spent at Missing before our rude arrival.
Her one-piece desk-and-chair, rescued from a defunct mission school, and
bearing the gouged frustration of many a pupil, faced the wall. Her white
cardigan, which I am told she often slipped over her shoulders when she
was between operations, lay over the back of the chair.
On the plaster above the desk my mother had tacked up a calendar
print of Bernini’s famous sculpture of St. Teresa of Avila. The figure of
St. Teresa lies limp, as if in a faint, her lips parted in ecstasy, her eyes unfo-
cused, lids half closed. On either side of her, a voyeuristic chorus peers
down from the prie-dieux. With a faint smile and a body more muscular
than befits his youthful face, a boy angel stands over the saintly, voluptuous
sister. The fingertips of his left hand lift the edge of the cloth covering her
Cutting for Stone 161
Forty-six and four years have passed since my birth, and miraculously I
have the opportunity to return to that room. I nd I am too large for that
chair now, and the cardigan sits atop my shoulders like the lace amice of
a priest. But chair, cardigan, and calendar print of transverberation are
still there. I, Marion Stone, have changed, but little else has. Being in that
unaltered room propels a thumbing back through time and memory. The
unfading print of Bernini’s statue of St. Teresa (now framed and under
glass to preserve what my mother tacked up) seems to demand this. I am
forced to render some order to the events of my life, to say it began here,
162 The eBook Insider
and then because of this, that happened, and this is how the end connects
to the beginning, and so here I am.
We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we nd a purpose
beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the
common lot. I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a
physician. My intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself.
Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously,
in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will
heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound.
I chose the specialty of surgery because of Matron, that steady presence
during my boyhood and adolescence. “What is the hardest thing you can
possibly do?” she said when I went to her for advice on the darkest day of
the first half of my life. I squirmed. How easily Matron probed the gap
between ambition and expediency. “Why must I do what is hardest?”
“Because, Marion, you are an instrument of God. Don’t leave the
instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instru-
ment unexplored. Why settle for ‘Three Blind Mice’ when you can play
the ‘Gloria’?”
How unfair of Matron to evoke that soaring chorale which always made
me feel that I stood with every mortal creature looking up to the heavens in
dumb wonder. She understood my unformed character.
“But, Matron, I can’t dream of playing Bach, the ‘Gloria’ . . . ,” I said
under my breath. I’d never played a string or wind instrument. I couldn’t
read music.
“No, Marion,” she said, her gaze soft, reaching for me, her gnarled
hands rough on my cheeks. “No, not Bach’s ‘Gloria.’ Yours! Your ‘Gloria’
lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made
possible in you.”
I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an
introspective field—internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of
the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a scalpel caused
coils to form in my belly. (It still does.) Surgery was the most difficult thing
I could imagine.
And so I became a surgeon.
Thirty years later, I am not known for speed, or daring, or technical
genius. Call me steady, call me plodding; say I adopt the style and tech-
nique that suits the patient and the particular situation and I’ll consider
that high praise. I take heart from my fellow physicians who come to me
when they themselves must suffer the knife. They know that Marion Stone
will be as involved after the surgery as before and during. They know I have
no use for surgical aphorisms such as “When in doubt, cut it out” or “Why
Cutting for Stone 163
wait when you can operate” other than for how reliably they reveal the
shallowest intellects in our field. My father, for whose skills as a surgeon I
have the deepest respect, says, “The operation with the best outcome is the
one you decide not to do.” Knowing when not to operate, knowing when I
am in over my head, knowing when to call for the assistance of a surgeon
of my father’s caliber—that kind of talent, that kind of “brilliance,” goes
unheralded.
On one occasion with a patient in grave peril, I begged my father to
operate. He stood silent at the bedside, his fingers lingering on the patient’s
pulse long after he had registered the heart rate, as if he needed the touch
of skin, the thready signal in the radial artery to catalyze his decision. In
his taut expression I saw complete concentration. I imagined I could see
the cogs turning in his head; I imagined I saw the shimmer of tears in his
eyes. With utmost care he weighed one option against another. At last, he
shook his head, and turned away.
I followed. “Dr. Stone,” I said, using his title though I longed to cry out,
Father! “An operation is his only chance,” I said. In my heart I knew the
chance was infinitesimally small, and the first whiff of anesthesia might
end it all. My father put his hand on my shoulder. He spoke to me gently,
as if to a junior colleague rather than his son. “Marion, remember the
Eleventh Commandment,” he said. “Thou shall not operate on the day of
a patient’s death.”
I remember his words on full-moon nights in Addis Ababa when knives
are flashing and rocks and bullets are flying, and when I feel as if I am
standing in an abattoir and not in Operating Theater 3, my skin flecked
with the grist and blood of strangers. I remember. But you don’t always
know the answers before you operate. One operates in the now. Later, the
retrospectoscope, that handy tool of the wags and pundits, the conveners
of the farce we call M&M—morbidity and mortality conference—will
pronounce your decision right or wrong. Life, too, is like that. You live it
forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to
the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.
Now, in my fiftieth year, I venerate the sight of the abdomen or chest
laid open. I’m ashamed of our human capacity to hurt and maim one
another, to desecrate the body. Yet it allows me to see the cabalistic har-
mony of heart peeking out behind lung, of liver and spleen consulting each
other under the dome of the diaphragm—these things leave me speech-
less. My fingers “run the bowel” looking for holes that a blade or bullet
might have created, coil after glistening coil, twenty-three feet of it com-
pacted into such a small space. The gut that has slithered past my fingers
like this in the African night would by now reach the Cape of Good Hope,
and I have yet to see the serpent’s head. But I do see the ordinary miracles
164 The eBook Insider
under skin and rib and muscle, visions concealed from their owner. Is there
a greater privilege on earth?
At such moments I remember to thank my twin brother, Shiva—Dr.
Shiva Praise Stone—to seek him out, to find his reflection in the glass panel
that separates the two operating theaters, and to nod my thanks because
he allows me to be what I am today. A surgeon. According to Shiva, life
is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn’t speak in metaphors. Fixing
holes is precisely what he did. Still, it’s an apt metaphor for our profession.
But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family.
Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it hap-
pens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll
leave much unfinished for the next generation.
Born in Africa, living in exile in America, then returning at last to Africa,
I am proof that geography is destiny. Destiny has brought me back to the
precise coordinates of my birth, to the very same operating theater where
I was born. My gloved hands share the space above the table in Operating
Theater 3 that my mother and father’s hands once occupied.
Some nights the crickets cry zaa-zee, zaa-zee, thousands of them
drowning out the coughs and grunts of the hyenas in the hillsides. Sud-
denly, nature turns quiet. It is as if roll call is over and it is time now in the
darkness to find your mate and retreat. In the ensuing vacuum of silence,
I hear the high-pitched humming of the stars and I feel exultant, thankful
for my insignificant place in the galaxy. It is at such times that I feel my
indebtedness to Shiva.
Twin brothers, we slept in the same bed till our teens, our heads touch-
ing, our legs and torsos angled away. We outgrew that intimacy, but I still
long for it, for the proximity of his skull. When I wake to the gift of yet
another sunrise, my first thought is to rouse him and say, I owe you the
sight of morning.
What I owe Shiva most is this: to tell the story. It is one my mother,
Sister Mary Joseph Praise, did not reveal and my fearless father, Thomas
Stone, ran from, and which I had to piece together. Only the telling can
heal the rift that separates my brother and me. Yes, I have infinite faith in
the craft of surgery, but no surgeon can heal the kind of wound that divides
two brothers. Where silk and steel fail, story must succeed. To begin at the
beginning . . .
Finishing the Hat
Collected Lyrics (1954–1981) With Attendant
Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges,
Whines and Anecdotes
Stephen Sondheim
If ever there was an example of “God is in the details,” it’s the line that
opens this show: “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd.” Detail 1: the use of
“attend” to mean “listen to” is just archaic enough to tell the audience that
this will be a period piece. Detail 2: the idea of a “tale” suggests that the
audience not take the story realistically but as a fable, and opens them up
to accept the bizarrerie of the events which follow; it also promises a story
that will unfold like a folk ballad, foreshadowing the numerous choruses of
the song that will pop up during the course of the evening. Detail 3: the
alliteration on the first, second and fourth accented beats of “Attend the
tale of Sweeney Todd” is not only a microcosm of the AABA form of the
166 The eBook Insider
song itself, but in its very formality gives the line a sinister feeling, especially
with the sepulchral accompaniment that rumbles underneath it.
If all of that seems like the kind of academic hyper-analysis which
regularly shows up in studies of literary forms, I can assure you that even
if the audience is not consciously aware of such specific details, they are
affected by them. [Oscar] Hammerstein, in the Introduction to his book
Lyrics, wrote:
‘A year or so ago, on the cover of the New York Herald Tribune Sunday
Magazine, I saw a picture of the Statue of Liberty. It was a picture taken
from a helicopter and it showed the top of the statue’s head. I was amazed
at the detail there. The sculptor had done a painstaking job with the lady’s
coiffure, and yet he must have been pretty sure that the only eyes that
would ever see this detail would be the uncritical eyes of seagulls. He could
not have dreamt that any man would ever y over this head and take a
picture of it. He was artist enough, however, to nish off this part of the
statue with as much care as he had devoted to her face and her arms and
the torch and everything that people can see as they sail up the bay. He
was right. When you are creating a work of art, or any other kind of work,
nish the job off perfectly. You never know when a helicopter, or some
other instrument not at the moment invented, may come along and nd
you out.’
His point is well taken and well made, although if I’d known it at the
time, I could have suggested to him that the sculptor might have had
another reason for his painstaking attention to the top of her head: the
disassembled statue was lying on the ground in the middle of Paris for all
to see for months before it was assembled and shipped to America.
Hammerstein also claimed that the opening number is the most impor-
tant song in a musical because it establishes tone, character, information
and everything in between. If that’s true (and it is), I would add that for
the same reason the first line of any song is the most important line in it,
which in turn means that the first line of the opening number is crucial to
an audience’s acceptance of everything which follows.
It was a lucky moment for me, therefore, when “Attend the tale of
Sweeney Todd” swam into my consciousness. As Tennessee Williams
wrote, “Sometimes there’s God so quickly.”
I Remember Nothing
Nora Ephron
I just got e-mail! I can’t believe it! It’s so great! Here’s my handle. Write me.
Who said letter writing was dead? Were they ever wrong. I’m writing letters
like crazy for the first time in years. I come home and ignore all my loved
ones and go straight to the computer to make contact with total strang-
ers. And how great is AOL? It’s so easy. It’s so friendly. It’s a community.
Wheeeee! I’ve got mail!
ally forces you to make actual plans with the people you talk to—to suggest
lunch or dinner—even if you have no desire whatsoever to see them. No
danger of that with e-mail. E-mail is a whole new way of being friends
with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in
short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without
it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an instant mes-
sage from someone I almost know.
I have done nothing to deserve any of this: Viagra!!!!! Best Web source for
Vioxx. Spend a week in Cancún. Have a rich beautiful lawn. Astrid would
like to be added as one of your friends. XXXXXXXVideos. Add three
inches to the length of your penis. The Democratic National Committee
needs you. Virus Alert. FW: This will make you laugh. FW: This is funny.
FW: This is hilarious. FW: Grapes and raisins toxic for dogs. FW: Gabriel
García Márquez’s Final Farewell. FW: Kurt Vonnegut’s Commencement
Address. FW: The Neiman Marcus Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe. AOL
Member: We value your opinion. A message from Barack Obama. Find
low mortgage payments, Nora. Nora, it’s your time to shine. Need to fight
off bills, Nora? Yvette would like to be added as one of your friends. You
have failed to establish a full connection to AOL.
Call me.
The Widower’s Tale
Julia Glass
of certain privileges I had long taken for granted: peace, privacy, and (my
daughter Clover had recently informed me) swimming naked in the pond
before dark. But I had been led to expect these vexations. And I was excited
to learn, from Robert’s latest e-mail, that he was now back in Cambridge,
preparing to start his junior year.
So when I came downstairs after showering, reading two chapters of
Eyeless in Gaza, and shooting an e-missive to my grandson inviting him to
lunch, I was almost completely happy to find my elder daughter in my
kitchen. Almost.
There she sat, at the same table where she’d started each day for the
first seventeen years of her life, eating a bowl of yogurt sprinkled with what
looked like birdseed, drinking tea the color of algae, and paging through
my copy of the Grange. For the past year, she’d been renting part of a house
across town, yet she continued to make herself at home without announc-
ing her presence. I knew that I ought to feel an instinctual fatherly joy—
here she was, safe and hopeful at the very least, possibly even content—yet
most of the time I had to suppress a certain resentment that she had made
such a wreck of her life and then, on top of that, made me feel responsible
for her all over again.
Like her younger sister, Clover hadn’t lived under my roof since a sum-
mer or two during college—unless one were to count the recent period
(though one would like to have forgotten it) during which she had lan-
guished here after the histrionic collapse of her marriage. For six months,
until I helped her move across town and convinced my friend Norval to
give her a job at his bookstore, she had gone back and forth between my
house and her sister’s.
“Hey, Daddy.” Clover beamed at me. “How was your run?”
“Made it to the Old Artillery,” I said. (Wisely, she paid me no conde-
scending compliments.)
She stood. “Can I make you a sandwich?”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Turkey? Peanut butter? Egg salad?”
“Thank you.”
Clover laughed her deceptively carefree laugh. At an early age, my
daughters learned that I do not like unnecessary choices, yet they tease me
with them all the same. My favorite restaurants—if any such remain—are
the ones where you’re served a meal, no questions asked (except, perhaps,
what color wine you’d prefer). You can carry on a civilized conversation
without being forced to hear a litany of the twenty dressings you may have
on your salad or to pretend you care what distant lake engendered your
rainbow trout.
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She sat down across from me and told me that some fellow named Jona-
than Newcomb had awakened to find his brand-new Hummer filled with
corn husks. “Like, jam-packed with the stuff. And there was this big sign
pasted over the entire windshield, and it said, ETHANOL, ANYONE?
And they put it on with the kind of glue you can’t get off—in New York,
they use it to glue on notices when you don’t move your car for the street
cleaner.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“The police, Daddy.”
“No, I mean the ‘they’ who filled that car with corn.”
“Just the husks. Nobody knows.”
I laughed loudly. I might even have clapped my hands. “That’s the most
creative prank I’ve heard of in ages.”
Clover did not partake in my amusement. “Well, Jonathan is on the
warpath. He made sure they fingerprinted everything in sight. Like even
the hubcaps. He missed a plane, too. His company had an important
meeting.”
“Wait. Quarry Road? Isn’t Newcomb the fellow who put down three
acres of turf where all that milkweed used to grow like blazes? The field
where I used to take you and Trudy to see the butterflies? You know that
scoundrel?”
“He’s a dad,” said Clover.
I was baffled by this non sequitur until I realized she was referring to E
& F. No doubt Newcomb paid the full, five-figure tuition. Probably times
two, for a brace of hey-presto fertility twins.
“Can you imagine,” she said, sounding deeply concerned, “getting all
that corn silk out of the upholstery?”
“No. I cannot imagine that.” I used my napkin to conceal my smile.