WICK

CHAPTER 1

People aren’t meant to live in cages. Though their first sensate experience comes from inside the warm enclosure of the womb, that is not their natural state. Their first true experience of the world begins the moment they are pushed out of that embrace. It is in that adrenaline-fueled rush into the open air of freedom that they gasp their first breaths and begin their lives anew.

It is odd, then, that individually they yearn for freedom, but in numbers they seek control. From the moment of their birth — that moment when they open their eyes and look up with blurry focus into the faces of their mothers — humans find a world that is hostile to their freedom. Their natural curiosity is checked as soon as they gain language. When they take their first tentative steps, they are curbed on all sides. Even when this is done for their benefit, it carries the seed of authority. “Don’t touch that, it will burn you” becomes “because I said so, that’s why.” Guidance piles into guidelines. Structure morphs into stricture.

This is not a new story; there is nothing new under the sun. Though it is recreated in each generation, the formation of social sensibilities in the hearts of individuals is the well-worn path upon which societies tread, and on which Empires rise and fall. If the world does its job well, if the masses of individuals learn their places, then young children grow into youths and then become adults who not only accept artificial and arbitrary restraints but, joining the teeming crowds, are pleased to impose these shackles on themselves and others.

Good sense and benevolent law, designed to promote peace and freedom from without and to gently nurture from within, are subtly replaced by systems of power and control, imposed for the benefit and propagation of what can only be called The Hive Mind. It’s a tale as old as time.

Regret. Missed opportunity. Doubt and loss. Failure and limitation. In the end, people lovingly polish the silvered bars and oil the locks and chains of their own prisons. Sitting inside their cages, both those of metaphor and reality, they look out between the bars and imagine what they might have been. Everywhere men are born free, the philosopher says, and everywhere they are in chains.

It is difficult to see this in the machinations of a city, where each individual acts freely—or believes himself to do so. It is comforting to think that there is a qualitative difference between the choices one makes regarding which fashions to follow and which products to buy, and the stampede of a herd of cattle. Yet, Tolstoy wrote that, even in those historical moments when men look back and see patriotism and sacrifice as the driving forces of history, “the majority of the people paid no attention to the general course of events but were influenced only by their immediate personal interests.” In the stream of time, as cultures and societies stampede to destruction, so few are willing to identify their prisons or recognize their chains.

Clay Richter had decided he’d had enough of that.

Tuesday

People aren’t meant to live in cages, he thought, as he locked the door of his Brooklyn brownstone for the last time. He was standing at the head of a stoop, his back to the world on the morning after the worst natural disaster around here since anyone could remember. As he pushed the key in the lock and turned it to the left, the motion in his wrist and the anticipatory swivel in his hips and the turning in his shoulders felt good on the balls of his feet. His body was fluid and light. A cool, pervasive wetness hung in the stirring air and he felt, for the moment, as if he were one with the natural elements, and this feeling made him smile.

Clay turned and paused to look around. He felt like he was making a prison break. Was anyone watching his flight? Would anyone notice the tangled sheets he’d tossed and turned on the night before as the storm raged outside his window? Upon waking, he’d simply stripped the sheets from the bed and balled them up, tossing them out the window, where they now lay on the curb among the branches and leaves that had fallen from the sky as Sandy roared her way through the tri-state area. They lay there like a rope, knotted and tangled among the debris.

You make your bed, you lie in it, he thought. For the first time in years—since the day that he’d received the call from Cheryl that had changed his life forever—he was done with lies. When his feet touched the floor that morning, the cool grainy texture of the hardwoods pressing against the soft pink flesh of his soles, he knew that he would have the courage to tell himself the truth. He had to get out of his cage if he was going to have a life.

He took a deep breath of the thick moist air and stepped down to the gate. The world was numbly bustling about, surveying the damage, as he lifted the latch and stepped onto the sidewalk. People were haltingly filing past in gauzy disbelief. Some whispered in hushed tones, others were nervously sharing bits of news. “Did you see the tree that fell across Bond Street? My God, have you ever seen anything like this?” Others simply walked and stared, too dumbfounded to do anything else.

The streets were not full now like they had been just two days earlier, when passersby talked in excited tones, daring the forecasters to be right. Then, they’d been almost celebratory as they walked by in pairs along the sidewalks, carrying their cases of bottled water and their bags of batteries and flashlights. “They always hype these things you know…” they’d said. “I remember during Irene they told us to stay indoors, and they closed down the subways, and even cancelled schools, and for what?” Now, the damage was done and they knew the answer to that question.

Clay stood for a moment and fingered the key, rubbing its smooth, worn face, as he felt the mist form droplets on his face and liked it. He was tempted to simply hang the key on the spires of the black wrought iron fence and walk away. He thought of Otis, the town drunk from Mayberry—how he’d stumble into the jailhouse after a bender and reach for the key on the hook for a cell that he had designated as his own and let himself in and out as he pleased. Otis. I won’t be coming back but maybe some other sucker could use it, he thought. Then he changed his mind. He preferred to throw the key in the Hudson—a solemn and solitary protest against the willful confinement of urbanism. He felt the key fall heavily into his coat pocket as he stepped into the street.

If anyone was worried that one of their fellow inmates was escaping they didn’t give a visible sign. Not even Mrs. Grantham, that inveterate snoop, was peeking through the curtains of her cell. She was probably sitting on the edge of her couch, rubbing her hands together in that way she did, watching her cats eat their breakfast. Clay had sat with her on many mornings, locked in the interminable stillness behind a door laced with chains and deadbolts. Only moments ago, passing her door he’d thought, “Should I check to see if she’s OK?” but then he’d thought better of it. No way would that conversation have gone for less than thirty minutes. Even now, with the storm, he’d have had to hear about how one of the neighbors had committed some imaginary wrong, or how her daughter hadn’t called. For years he’d watched her hobble up the steps of the brownstone they shared on Dean Street, hunched over by the weight of her cares but unwilling to do anything about them. He’d always liked her in an odd way, in that way one humors a crank, but now as he made his break for freedom, he felt nothing but a vague sense of pity. Like Otis, she was the warden of her own confinement, drunk on the wine of the world’s expectations and neglect, and unable to put down the glass. She’s a prisoner, Clay thought, everyone around here is.

The boots on his feet felt tight and fine as he walked along Dean and turned north onto Court, which he would follow until he reached Borough Hall. He congratulated himself on his prescient cleverness, having bought the boots used (therefore already broken in) at a thrift store down the street a few weeks before anyone had ever even heard of Sandy. They were purchased on a whim along with the hiker’s backpack he now had strapped to his back, on a day when an ill-defined sense of foreboding that had haunted him for weeks had suddenly caused him to scratch an itch.

On that day, while walking home from work, he’d stopped in front of the shop’s window, halting out of spiritual necessity as much as any real physical need. In the shop he found both items neatly shelved in separate sections and was drawn to each for reasons that he couldn’t fully explain. Probably some hipster had used them on a summer trek across Europe, only to sell them when the rent was due. Both were high-quality items, with rich, supple leather, and they were exactly what he would have bought for himself if he’d gone in search of new ones. Now, making his way uptown, Clay liked the feel of their weight as he stepped around the debris scattered along the street.

His impromptu plan was to cut across Brooklyn Heights to the Promenade and walk along it to its end merely to see the damage from that elevated perspective. Then he’d make his way due north, over the bridge into Manhattan, into Harlem, and, if all went well, he’d just keep going. Out of the city. Away from this prison. Far from the Madding Crowd. He was ultimately headed home to the farmhouse in Ithaca. Home. The place where he’d shared life with Cheryl and his beautiful girls before the accident.

Despite the certainty of his goal, a feeling of foreboding still gnawed at his stomach as he weaved around the odd fallen tree or nodded to the occasional passerby. He chalked the strange feeling up to a claustrophobic sense of needing release from the city. He breathed in the morning air and kept moving.

He thought about that word… home. Home was where there was a certain tree at the edge of the field across the road that led to the front porch. That lovely tree was the first thing he and Cheryl saw as they rounded the sweeping curve of the country road on the day they first viewed the property. She’d taken one look at it as they drove into the driveway and said she was ready to buy if he was.

In a forest thick with trees, that single, solitary tree had always been his favorite. In it he’d hung that lazy tire swing, which had taken him much longer than it should have to accomplish. The branches reached so high that his rope would not loop over them no matter what angle—or how hard—he threw it. He’d finally succeeded by tying a bucket to the end of the rope to give it weight so that he could launch it over a branch and then lower it slowly to the ground. Then, reveling in this victory, he and Cheryl had sat on the lawn and watched the girls play in the sprinklers and push each other in wide arcs under the broad, shading limbs. Now as he made his way through Sandy’s wake, he wondered if that tree was still standing.

Clay was struck by the almost usualness of it all as he moved through the street. Shopkeepers were busily sweeping their sidewalks, pushing the debris into the curb, then arching their backs to relieve the tension from the motion. Women in slickers walked their dogs, stopping to talk in little groups as their children toddled along after them.

Of course, there was the occasional limb, twisted and broken from the terrifying winds of the night before, but he was surprised that his neighborhood had not suffered more damage. Sometimes in the midst of the tempest a leaf lays still and is not tossed and therefore suffers, as we all do, from a lack of perspective.

He had listened to the radio through the night as winds howled and lights flickered but had not yet seen any proof of the kind of apocalyptic damage the reports were describing. He had long since given up television in an effort to cut himself off from the endless assault of technological input, and thus had not seen the images of houses pushed from their foundations and fires burning out entire city blocks. The reports had stopped just short of saying that the world had come to an end, but what they did not say they always implied. Here, however, he found that life was creeping onto the streets. There were occasional cracked windshields on occasional cars, and street signs and shingles and leaves tossed about, but nothing like what he had expected to find. The winds were still gusting and the rain came in sheets as he cut between Boerum and Cobble Hills, and he found himself glad that he had been on higher ground when the storm hit.

From the Promenade he could begin to make out the reason for the heated reporting. Sea trash lay down along the waterfront greenway, and trees were uprooted on the paths. From the height of the visible waterline, he imagined—though he could not see from his vantage point—that other low-lying areas of Brooklyn were crushed by the weight of the water. Sure enough, as he walked, he heard conversations from people huddled in groups. Red Hook, Gowanus, and DUMBO had been submerged in water and debris. Rumors and rumors of rumors were shared about the devastation and its aftermath. People talked of water rushing into homes as fast as the inhabitants could gather their things and rush out.

It was disconcerting to hear the flurries of conversation and watch the waves that had now receded back within their banks. The surge had sent six feet of water flooding onto the street during the night, but now, the waters were roiling past, and the murmurs of the people silenced the water’s burblings. Clay did not join the conversations. He merely wove in and out of the scattered groupings and watched the people watching. He stopped only occasionally to take a picture or to look out over the East River, but he had not come to dawdle and gawk, or, as so many of the others around him had, to lament the destruction of their city and gird themselves to rebuild it once again. He had merely come to witness nature’s powerful force firsthand and then walk into the wilderness to join it.

At the end of the Promenade he stood along the railings and took a final view of the New York City skyline. It was beautiful in its graphic simplicity, its skyscrapers formed like architectural representations of the ups and downs of stock market shares that were so closely tracked just over the river. Still, as he stood and took it all in, Clay couldn’t help feeling that the concrete and steel rising into the dense grey clouds rushing overhead were more dangerous than the storm that had just passed. The storm spent its fury in the space of a single night, but the weight of the oppressive city had strangled men since the days of Cain, and would, it seemed, go on doing it forever.

Turning on his heel, Clay headed west and cut along Orange Street on the northern end of the neighborhood he’d just circled. He wound his way back through the grid of streets and passed along Pineapple Walk to the Cadman Plaza and then through the great lawn of the War Memorial. Trees and branches and leaves littered the streets, mixed with odd bits of siding and shingles that had come slicing down from the sky. The cumulative effect of the damage began to make an impression. Trees that had been young when Henry Ford was scratching out ideas for assembly lines had toppled over to crush the products of his imagination. Buildings that had been built before Coolidge took office were pock-marked with evidence of windfalls.

Clay stepped around and over and through the storm’s fingerprints like a cop who had no respect for a crime scene. Thick wet foliage clung to the soles of his boots, but he shook it off as he kept moving. He was walking with a purpose now.

He walked into Whitman Park — nestled, perhaps ironically, perhaps not, in the shadow of New York’s Emergency Management office. He snapped the clip around his waist meant to hold some of his backpack’s weight off his shoulders, and slid his arms out of their straps. He dropped the pack to the ground and spun it around and unzipped a front pocket. He reached inside and took out an energy bar and sat down on a bench nearby. He had come to pay respects to the poet who had written in a time when Brooklyn could still be called rural. It was not just a passing indulgence. When he had packed his bag several days before, he put in only the items he felt he’d need for the journey—a change of clothes, a small box of matches, a few small bottles of water, and a Walkman radio with an extra pack of batteries. He didn’t bring any food except a few energy bars, figuring that he had money and could buy whatever he needed along the way. He wasn’t survival camping in the outback after all, and he wanted to minimize the weight he’d have to carry. He’d been forced to make a decision about which books he wanted to bring. A well-worn copy of Leaves of Grass had been one of only two to make the cut, the second being Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. The former was to remind him to live life, the latter that, even if he failed the first, the earth would still abide. He was serious about traveling lightly. He hadn’t even brought his cell phone.

It was Cheryl who had taught him to love Whitman. Before the girls came along, they would sit out under the stars on a blanket at the farmhouse and she would quote When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer. It was partly those moments, the biggest part, that had brought him to Brooklyn in the first place after she and the girls had died.

He’d moved into the city because he had grown tired of wandering around the farmhouse, watching the dust motes drift through the early morning light, listening for the stirrings that would never come again. He had moved to the city to experience firsthand what she’d always admired from afar, in the hope that, by losing himself in the blur of faces, he could somehow lose his memory. Try as he might, though, he’d not been able to love Brooklyn, perhaps because, try as it might, it had not been able to make him stop loving her.

He thought back to the day that the call had come in. Frightening silence—all but the labored breathing of his beautiful wife. Cheryl and the girls had been in Boston visiting her parents when they’d driven back through the tunnel on their way to Logan. Clay had stayed behind to lay new tile in the kitchen, and he was just putting the finishing touches on the grout when he heard the phone ring. Seeing her number pop up, he had cheerily picked up and made some crack about their sleeping late and missing their flight. There was dead silence on the other end, except for the sound of his wife wheezing and slowly pushing out that she loved him. She whispered that there had been a terrible accident. Something had crushed the car. She didn’t know what and didn’t know if they would make it. He gripped the phone in confusion and desperation and began to cry into it helplessly. Baby? Baby? Oh, God… Baby?! Are you there? The noises of chaos eventually rose to overtake his wife’s whispers and then the line had gone dead in a horrible screech of metal.

The next hour, the longest of his life, was spent on the phone with area hospitals, and police and fire departments. No one could tell him anything. Eventually, he got a call from Mass General, an Officer Somethingorother. “Mr Richter…” The tone in the voice told him all that he needed to know.

The rest had been a blur of details. A concrete panel had come loose from the ceiling in the Big Dig tunnel just as his wife had passed underneath it. The resulting blow had caved in the driver’s side compartment and sent the car careening into the walls of the tunnel. His wife had survived the initial crush, but his two daughters had been thrown from the vehicle. All were now gone. He would need to come to Boston to identify the bodies.

Clay thought of that moment a thousand times since that day, but it never stopped leaving an ache. It was a still-opened wound. It left a pang now as he took the last bite of his energy bar and stood up and slipped on his backpack. He knew it was foolish to wish that it had happened to him, as though the wishing could somehow alter the hands of fate. It was the kind of thinking that led to a comment he’d heard a man make while walking along the Promenade. The man had been walking with a friend and shaking his head in disbelief, when he stated, “I was watching the news on CNN about New Jersey, and I almost feel guilty that those poor people got hit so hard when we didn’t.” Clay thought this was exactly that kind of death wish thinking that life in the city promulgated and that he was now escaping.

He came out of the park and jogged quickly north to Prospect where he ascended the stairs to the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge walkway. Looking up at the thick, twisted cables that formed a warp and weft like a net in the sky, he thought they looked as much like a snare as they did a support. The granite and limestone towers rose in their neo-Gothic austerity across the span of the two shorelines. The waters swirled past in their still dangerous attitude that, even at that moment, had shut down the tunnel servicing the subways and the ferries offering conveyance.

The bridge stood massive in its impact and arrogance, having just laughed off Sandy like she was a bad joke. Untold “Wonders of the World” had come and gone like so many flowers in a summer field, only to disappear into the dusts of history. Some, like the Lighthouse of Alexandria, had lasted millennia, while others, like the Colossus of Rhodes, had lasted but the blink of an eye. In the modern age, the bridge had done better than most, outlasting other suspension bridges due to its deck and truss engineering. It had even housed, during a time when the Cold War was raging across the land, a bunker intended to outlast a nuclear bomb. Now, as Clay stood before it on the morning after the storm, he couldn’t decide whether its towers looked more like watchtowers seeing out into the future, or guard towers of a prison.

Always leave yourself a way out. His father had told him that one day, a lifetime ago, when he’d watched the old man playing cards with a group of his buddies. He had watched his father draw hand after hand of bad cards and yet, at the end of the night his old man hadn’t lost any money. “Life doesn’t owe you anything, but you don’t have to take it lying down, son. Sometimes, the only thing you can do is to walk away, but always leave yourself a way out.”

The lesson had stuck. Though Clay didn’t know what was ahead of him, he was certain that he no longer wanted what was behind. Frost wrote that the best way out is always through. Clay was thinking something like that as he turned up his collar against the cold, whipping winds, and set out across the bridge.

CHAPTER 2

The rich, deep voice of Johnny Cash came blasting out of an old school boombox. It was one of those black-cased, dual deck affairs with the chrome rimmed speakers and thin sliding buttons. Made it look like a ’65 Plymouth. Heightening the effect, the box was strapped, with a variety of hooks and multicolored bungees, to the handlebars of a broken-down bicycle that was slowly weaving in and out of pedestrian traffic. Johnny Cash’s voice asked how high the water was, echoing a refrain heard throughout the area on that day.

The man on the bicycle wore bright orange pants and a long trailing coat made from a textured fabric that might have looked better on a vintage couch. It was mostly green, the coat, but it was hard to tell for certain with its sun-faded pattern and the fact that much of it was covered by the man’s long red hair and a beard that was graying on the ends, spilling out of his neck.

Something in the cool misty air made Cash’s voice ring out with an otherworldly clarity. It amplified the gospel choir hum underlying the voice and the dum-thwacka-dum of the guitar’s choppy train strokes. When the key shifted higher, the voice might have been in the room, if it had been a room.

The red-haired man moved in meandering undulations past the people who were turning to watch him. He was barely even pedaling, merely turning the handlebars and letting the natural momentum of the bike carry him forward, until he came to a stop at the foot of the brownish grey tower. Clay watched him as the man squinted his eyes and peered up at the sky to the clear patch of grey that was framed by the parallel lines of the cables. A helicopter came into the space and circled around and then headed back up the river.

Clay had always loved the city’s misfits, even if he preferred to take them one at a time. The man leaned his bicycle against the tower’s sides and reached in a pocket and pulled out a handful of balloons. Balloons? Then he knelt down next to a small, curious boy, whose mother was busy talking to another man as they looked out over the river. She didn’t notice the boy reaching for her hand.

“What’s your name, little man?”

“Gareth.”

“Were you scared last night in the storm?”

The little boy began to nod, but Clay could see his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t like the implication, even at his age, but he was mesmerized by the man’s beard and the colors in his clothing.

“Or maybe… You were brave?”

The boy’s eyes lit up. This was more like it. “Bwave.”

The man took a balloon and pumped a lungful of air into its long curved shape, then began twisting it into a circle. Then he took another and asked the boy what was his favorite animal. Puppy. He twisted the balloon into a zig-zag shape that rose up from the circle and curled up at the end. It looked nothing at all like a puppy. If anything, it looked like one of those graphic blue waves found on a surf shop door. The little boy didn’t mind, though, and the man reached up and placed the balloon like a crown on the boy’s small head.

As he did so, the woman looked down and smiled, and another young boy, older than the first, came up and asked for an elephant. The man quickly fashioned the exact same hat. He handed it to the boy.

“Hey… That’s not an elephant,” the boy said, in obvious disappointment.

“Little fella, if you’d seen what I saw last night, you’d think that everything looks like a wave, too,” the red bearded man said, and he reached up and patted the boy on the head.

He stood up, and Clay, who had stopped to watch the show, laughed out loud, causing the man to turn and bow. As he did so, his hair poured out onto his chest. “Pat Maloney, at your service,” the man said. The song on the boombox, which had repeated at least once, maybe twice, while Clay stood there, wound down to its final thrum.

Clay reached into his pocket and pulled out a dollar. He extended it to the man but was waved off. The man told him he wouldn’t know what to do with it, that he lived by the seat of his pants. “Consider the lilies, my friend. They neither toil, nor spin…” Clay found the man charming and believed him. They stood for a while and talked as the clouds and the waves and the people rolled by.

The man told Clay that he had passed the storm in a shelter at a nearby high school. He’d wanted to stay in the streets, just for the experience, but he’d gone down to Battery Park in the afternoon (“To see if our lady was still standing…”) and the water washed up over the barricades and came up to the bench he was standing on. “I decided it didn’t make sense to die yet.”

They began to walk and, as they did, they talked about everything under the sun. Clay was surprised at the man’s knowledge. He quoted Russian poets as easily as he did the stock pages. Clay found him intriguing, and asked if he had a secret, if he was actually some trust fund millionaire in hiding or maybe a journalist on undercover assignment. The man shook his head and said no. “You are assuming that I am homeless,” he said. “And in that you’d be correct. But who isn’t? In fact, there are a lot of people who are going to be homeless now. This storm is going to wake people up.” Clay didn’t tell him that it had already done so for him. “Do I have a secret? No. I celebrate myself and sing myself. And what I assume, you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Again, Clay didn’t tell him that he knew Whitman well and appreciated the sentiment, and the man, in turn, didn’t seem to care what Clay knew or didn’t know. Not once as they walked over the bridge to Manhattan did he ask Clay where he was going. He didn’t have the need to find out. Nor did he explain why he was walking with Clay in the direction he’d just left. He just walked and talked, pushing his bicycle along, simply passing the time with a friend.

Clay had met such people before, but never one quite so lucid. They seemed to live in the shadows of the city, just biding their time, willing to drop everything and follow where life leads. Clay had wondered how people like this man made it, somehow able to string along with nothing in a city that taxed you in the morning when you stepped out your door. He himself had struggled to bring the ends together, even with the settlement he had received from the contractors responsible for the death of Cheryl and the girls. Clay imagined that the man with the red beard had simply decided the world of material reality could do nothing to help or harm him.

Clay once had a college professor tell him, as they walked across a parking lot next to a McDonald’s, that with the knowledge he carried around in his head he could flip burgers and be happy. Clay decided that this man had made much the same decision.

They came to a box for the exit that drops down over Park Row. Clay told the man that he was getting off there and the man reached down and fiddled with the buttons on his boombox. The voice of Johnny Cash began to sing about how he kept a close watch on his heart, how he kept his eyes wide open.

“I like your tunes, by the way,” Clay said.

“Oh, you like Cash?”

“I do. I especially like his prison stuff.”

Clay paused for a moment, wondering if he should share any more with the man, and the man took the pause as a sign. “Yeah, I wonder whether those guys over there still like it or if they have switched to Jay-Z.” He motioned with his thumb over his shoulder to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, just visible over the barrier of the walkway, nestled in among a jumble of buildings down the street. “I don’t know,” Clay said, “I guess a little of both.” The man laughed. “I noticed you didn’t have to ask me what I meant… that’s OK. I like a guy who has done a little time. I think it does something to clean out the soul.”

Clay didn’t tell him that he was right, that he once had a few unsavory days after Cheryl was gone when he turned to drink a little too hard and got tired of some guy running his mouth. Nor did he tell him what he’d been thinking about the city, or why he had to get out. All that was behind him now, and he didn’t feel the need to talk about it.

“You know,” Red Beard said, “many of those people are political prisoners, jailbirds of circumstance who just happen to find themselves on the wrong side of whatever 51% of the people have decided is wrong at a particular time in history. Walk around drinking laudanum on the streets in 1850 and you’d fit right in. Get caught with some Vicodin not prescribed to you in 2012 and you’ll likely get to see the inside of a jail cell.” The man went on, seeming not to notice that Clay was fidgeting with his hands in his pockets. “Even some of the most violent prisoners are sometimes prisoners of circumstance and epoch. Rats in cages will turn on each other violently… for no other reason than they have nothing better to do. And stealing? Ha! Well, that, too can be relative when bankers are handed trillions in bailout dollars—money printed for the purpose by the government—to patch up the hole left after they lost trillions on risky speculation in derivatives.” The man stopped and looked at Clay intently. He wanted Clay to pay attention, to hear him. “You can be the little Dutch Boy and stick your finger in the dam, or you can lay back and watch the dam burst, learn to swim, get baptized in the wash. Me? I got my floatin’ shoes on. I’m going to learn to walk on water.”

Clay wanted to hug him, but didn’t. He reached out instead and put his hand on the man’s shoulder, feeling the frayed textures against his hand and gave the shoulder a squeeze. The man looked at Clay and, for the first time since they had begun to talk, flashed a hint of some vulnerability. Something in the eyes.

“I wish you well, my brother.” Red Beard smiled at Clay and looked down. He stepped onto the pedal and pushed himself up and over the seat. Steadying himself, he steered the handlebars toward the city he’d just come from and began to roll slowly down the hill… and was gone.

Clay took a quick detour through Wall Street. It was an extra bit of walking, but he didn’t mind. He had heard on the radio the night before that downtown had been destroyed, and he wanted to see it for himself. Not that he had any love for the place, or had spent any real time there. It was more like a morbid curiosity. Wall Street was the engine that generated the city, one of them anyway, the most powerful, and he liked the idea that the money centers that the man with the red beard had just spoken about would now have to fix a few leaks of their own. He imagined the headline in the dailies over the next several days: Manhattan Annoyed. Queens Destroyed. Quick! Fix Manhattan.

There was something else out there in the city that he was trying to identify. Worry. Maybe not worry. Concern. It was a taste in the air, palpable but light and airy, like the smell of ink and leather in the lobby of a nice hotel. You could barely make it out, but it was growing.

Not that any of the hotels smelled like ink and leather at the moment. In fact, they smelled like seaweed. Wet sea trash spilled across the sidewalk, pushed up the streets four and five blocks in, when water that would drown a man had poured across downtown. It had settled into the cracks of the cobblestones, reminders of an earlier age, salty and toxic and rank. Vegetation, where it existed among the concrete and steel, bent over and clung to the earth, already beginning to turn yellow from the chemicals.

Clay watched the men work in their bright yellow jackets and orange helmets and bulky police and fire gear. He stepped around the occasional yellow tape and bright orange cones, walking as if he meant business. He passed like a ghost among the men who were too busy stringing hoses from the buildings out into the street to notice him. Generators purred, pumping the water that had flooded the buildings onto the sidewalk where it splashed in fan shapes onto the concrete and poured over the curb and ran down the street and into the drains and back towards the sea.

Carpets on floors of banks and insurance companies steamed and fogged the insides of windows, making it impossible to see out into the street, into the future. Con Edison men stood drinking coffee, waiting for their turn in the buildings. Where did they get the coffee? There isn’t a shop in sight open. Police sat in cars or on the hoods of cars, watching the men do their work.

Italian and Arab men picked through their stores, lifting the thick wet boxes that had washed across the floors, spilling out their contents, and carried the boxes, dripping and coming apart, out into the street where they piled them in asymmetrical heaps. Chinese women swept the floors of their taco stands.

Clay walked through the wet steamy mess with an economy all his own, cutting down side streets, dipping in alleys, winding through the maze of trucks lining the curb. When he’d seen enough, he came out on Broadway and headed toward midtown.

The city was quiet in a way that made him feel like he might be in the middle of a Twilight Zone episode. Here and there a siren would chirp and out of a radio somewhere—battery powered?—a news reporter talked about the election, how the candidates for president would deal with the aftermath of the hurricane. Altogether the city sounded quieter. Muffled. Different.

Clay felt good. Not emotionally, maybe, but physically. His joints were loose and the gear on his back felt light, and lightly carried. The walk was invigorating, and he felt a small bead of sweat run down his chest in the space between his skin and the fabric of his shirt.

A small delivery truck rumbled by, and a distinctive squeal came from the brakes as the driver drove two-footed—simultaneously pressing the gas and the brakes. Clay heard a shop owner comment that power wasn’t the only problem, but that gasoline was about to be really hard to come by.

As he made his way uptown, he shifted his path back and forth like a ship captain tacking to follow the stars. There were avenues that were closed off here and there, and as the chaos of downtown resided, there were police officers who wouldn’t allow passage. He stopped for a moment at one point and looked back down 5th Avenue towards the Flatiron Building that stood as a timeless waypoint emphasizing the city’s rigidity. He kept moving, a fish swimming upstream through the now fluid events and persons.

A woman in a business suit, looking out of place today for some reason he couldn’t quite pin down, asked Clay if he had a cell phone she could use to make a call. She explained that her battery had died, that she couldn’t find power, and held the unit up to him like a defunct passport. It was her lifeline. It was her life. He shook his head no and shrugged apologetically. She looked at him as if he were an alien.

Had he heard that a building had collapsed in the West Village? Had he heard that the subways might be out of service for months? Did he know where you could get some coffee? Strangers who would normally pass him on the street without looking up now stopped him and sought information. Was it the backpack that made them think that he might know? As they passed, they shared their own news. Bits of gossip reached him on the air, some of it trivial, some of it ludicrous, some of it frightening with bluster.

Sidewalks could tell tales that would make men blush on any normal day. There was something about walking through the city after the storm that made Clay feel like a voyeur. People were out in the streets, stripped of their pretensions. It was like when the city gets hit by a snowfall and everyone comes out in community, but now they had a slight helplessness in their eyes. A homeless man passed Clay and asked for a cigarette. He was used to despair.

Tree branches were down in the park, and leaves, many of them still green, stuck to the damp sidewalk in clumps and lay thick in the gutters and along the foundations of buildings. Across the occasional street lay a fallen tree snapped at the trunk, the roots still buried under concrete. Workers were climbing over the debris like ants, carrying it away to some field somewhere to be stacked and mulched.

After disasters, people usually come together. It happened after 9/11, and Clay could sense it happening today on a smaller scale. There wasn’t the terror that had been present on that day, with its overwhelming reality of the apocalypse hanging in the air in dust and cancer and ash and death. 9/11 had been huge and monumental and devastating. It had fundamentally changed the world, and this was nothing like that. Still, Clay could sense the beginnings of an inkling that something was in the air. He just couldn’t identify it quite yet.

A few more blocks up 5th Avenue and there on his left as he passed by was an ice cream vendor who had just opened up his cart and was giving away his ice cream for free. Maybe he couldn’t keep it frozen, or maybe this was his way to lift spirits, but a sign lettered by hand with a thick, black Sharpie simply said FREE. People stopped and talked and licked their cones and shivered in the damp.

Walking faster now, block after block disappeared behind him, and above 34th Street, just past the Empire State Building, he noticed that the power was up. It became apparent first by the street lights, and the traffic plugging the avenue. Life seemed almost, but not quite, normal. Normal. A funny word. What is normal anyway? Clay had recently read a UN report that claimed that over 1/2 of the world’s population now lives in cities, and cities are almost inevitably located on coasts, along fault lines, in areas where major disasters are most likely to occur. Is that normal? He’d spent some time thinking about the implications of this. It was one reason for his flight. Millions of people living on top of one another in an artificial system, supported by a crumbling and unsustainable infrastructure, provided for by criminally deficient food grown on industrial farms and shipped thousands of miles on government roads. This is not civilization. It is madness. He watched the cars, piled up like toys in the streets, emitting their fumes into the fast rushing clouds, carrying their overheated toxins into the atmosphere, readying the next storm. If this is going to be normal, he thought, where does one go to hide from it?

A sign said, “Free Juice, We’ll Share.” But it was not fruit juice that was being given away. A power strip ran from an extension cord somewhere inside a coffee shop, and every empty outlet was filled with plugs and cords leading to phones and devices. One man was sitting at a laptop, trying to check his Facebook page. The life-blood of modern society. People had walked up from Downtown looking for power and news and normal. A woman asked the man if he was almost done and then walked inside to tell the owner that he ought to limit how long people can hog the power.

Mid-town. Here some business was going on, and there was a whole lot less damage. A yellow cab pulled over to the curb just north of 42nd Street, opposite the library. Its doors opened and passengers spilled out onto the sidewalk. They looked like clowns piling out of a Volkswagen. Four, five, six fares, squeezed into a single cab. More fares piled in, and the Jamaican driver smiled at him and said, “You want to ride in this cab, mon, you got to get on top!” Clay laughed a little, smiled, and just shook his head. He was walking out of Gomorrah.

At the end of the block on east 43rd, Clay stepped into Little Italy Pizza. It was clean and bright and open, and he bought a slice so he could use the bathroom, which was something he’d increasingly needed to do. He set his backpack on the ground and felt his shoulders roll in their sockets. Pausing to eat his slice, he listened to voices and stories for a moment, and as he did, the veneer came off of everything. Clay realized that he was living one of those moments in time when an entire society or culture experiences some event at the same time. Like the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or VJ Day, or Kennedy’s assassination. Or 9/11. Maybe this wasn’t that big. Maybe it wasn’t even as big as Katrina. But it was big in a way that mattered. A kind of widespread ground zero had been slung across the city; and beyond that, the state; and beyond that, the tri-state; and beyond that, the nation. It was the nature of such things. The farmer in Iowa pays for the recovery in New York through his taxes and his grain. As the government has increasingly turned to the declaration of ‘national’ disasters, and as the course of societal events has increasingly led to the likelihood of disasters, both natural and man-made, there is a kind of shared experience that attends to these things. And nature had outdone herself here in providing reason for the focus. The enormity of the timing of his escape really began to occur to him for the first time.

One very energetic woman in a bright red jacket was telling her husband that the HMS Bounty (“a by-god, full-on 18th century sailing ship”) had sunk off the Carolinas, and that a freighter was now in the middle of Staten Island, and that the Boardwalk in Atlantic City had floated out into the ocean. Clay thought about news that was occurring elsewhere during the storm, as people were focused on their immediate locations. Being cut off from the world, how would people deal with the world at large? Or would they care to? What would happen in the upcoming elections? He wondered about news that would slip through the cracks in this moment, how nations would prepare for war against other nations, how children would be snatched from their parents, how celebrities would shill for their causes. He wondered how he would know these things without the woman in the bright red coat to tell him.

Outside again, Clay started to walk, and for the first time he began to feel tired. Even in his well-broken-in boots his feet were starting to hurt a little. Noon was moving into afternoon, which would then slide into evening, and it occurred to him that he wasn’t making good time. If he kept on walking at this pace, he was going to be in Harlem at dark fall, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He wondered if looting or riots might start, and if they did, would they be confined to the areas currently without power? Things have a way of falling apart, and Clay wasn’t sure he wanted to be out in the street if and when they did. He lengthened out his stride and made an effort to put the city behind him.

CHAPTER 3

Clay walked into Harlem in the late afternoon. He was tired in his bones and began to feel a chill. He’d walked the last several miles along the avenue deep in thought, past St. Patrick’s Cathedral on his right and NBC Studios on his left, past the long stretch of glitzy stores with their high-end commercial excess, past the high-rise mansions of Central Park East with their celebrity tenants and media moguls, and past the row of museums housing the world’s great treasures. None of these worlds felt real to him in their religion of consumerism and stilted aesthetic tastes. Even Central Park, with its languorous urban sprawl, felt false in comparison to the experience of sitting on the front porch swing at Ithaca in the early light of fall and listening to the green frogs greet the sunrise. He was feeling alienated and tired. He needed to find rest.

As he came around the northernmost end of the park, he walked into the small, circular amphitheater where Duke Ellington’s statue stands as a testament to the meeting of two worlds, and sat down on the concrete risers. He undid the straps of his backpack, shook himself out of the harness, and flexed his feet inside his boots, feeling the tension in his calves tighten and then release.

He looked up at the sky and tried to estimate the hour, then figured how much further he could go before he’d have to find shelter for the night. He had hoped, when he started out in the morning, to make it to the George Washington Bridge, but he’d badly overestimated himself and he’d spent too much time sightseeing. He was just over halfway there—maybe three-fifths—and it would be dark soon. He didn’t relish walking through Washington Heights late at night, particularly without knowing exactly what he would find when he got there. He was flying mostly blind, and the area was known to be questionable, even on a good day. No need to turn this into a suicide mission. Maybe I should just stop at the Y, he thought, and start again fresh in the morning.

As he sat and caught his breath, a young black man, somewhere around 14 years old, Clay guessed, came rolling up 5th Avenue from the direction Clay had just come. He was riding a longboard skateboard, and the syncopated sounds of the wheels striking the cracks of the sidewalk were deeper than one might have expected. Kerthump, kerthump… kerthump, kerthump. Clay watched him as he stepped off the board at the curb and flipped the end up to his hand, carrying it like a cane into the small park. He walked to the foot of the statue and looked up as if he was trying to peer over the open lid of the grand piano the composer was standing at and into the heart of the strings. He was tall, with thin hands and sharp cheeks, and had the earliest beginnings of what might eventually become dreadlocks, his hair twisted in tiny knots at the roots. The earbuds in his ears were obviously playing some song with deep syncopation like the kerthumps of the skateboard wheels, but it sounded, from where Clay was sitting, like jazz rather than hip-hop. He drummed his fingers on his skateboard and then became self-aware and noticed Clay looking at him, causing him to flash a sheepish smile and set his board on the ground and push off in a running start. Clay turned his head to watch him as he moved across the walk between the tree lines and jumped over the curb and crossed the street and headed west along 110th.

Clay scratched his face and felt the beginnings of a beard, just the hint of stubble from this morning. He lifted his arms above his head, felt his shoulder pop and his back muscles ache, then he stood and shook out his legs.

Clay walked up Malcolm X Boulevard and into the heart of Harlem. He was tired of cataloguing trees and fallen branches. There weren’t even that many around here. For once, it seemed, nature had spared those who were often hardest hit by the problems of the city. The electricity was running, people were going about their business, and life seemed as close to usual as possible. He was glad to be walking under a broad expanse of sky, even if it was turning to a bluish hue as dusk began to settle behind the still grey clouds.

As he came to about 120th Street, he dipped into a small bodega. He walked through the store towards the back to get a bottle of water from the cooler, and he could hear a conversation over the racks, near the counter, between two flirtatious youths.

“Oh, come on, you know you want to… give me your number, baby…”

“I’ll tell you what I’m going to give if you don’t leave me alone, Papi… the back of my hand!”

“There, see, you called me Papi. Come on, baby. Give me your number.”

Clay came around the aisle and saw the young man from the statue leaning over the counter on his elbow, flashing his most confident smile. The girl blushed and noticed Clay and turned away from the young man to help him. “Oh, don’t mind him. He’s just trouble, that’s what he is,” she said.

“With a capital T,” the youth chimed in, and then, noticing Clay from the statue, seemed to straighten up a little.

“You’re the guy from Duke Ellington.”

“Yes. I am indeed, that very same guy. How are you?”

“Good, I’m just trying to get a little notice here. Hey, where’re you walking with that backpack?”

“Home. Where are you going with your skateboard?”

“The same, and I guess I better be off. Where’s your home, mister?”

“Mister? Now, don’t be calling me mister. I’m not ready to be called mister just yet. I’m going to Ithaca. Upstate. Ever been there?”

“Nah, but my mom has a friend in Woodstock. Is that anywhere close?”

“Ehh. Not really, about a 150 miles.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t get out of the city much.”

“Well, you should, there’s a whole big world out there.”

“Yeah. That’s what I hear. Maybe I’ll get a backpack and head out myself one day.”

“Well, there are worse things to do.”

With that, Clay paid the bill, smiled, and walked out. As he did, the youth, too, gave up his flirting and grabbed his board where he’d left it leaning against the door.

He walked out just as Clay opened the top to his bottle of water and leaned his chin up and back to take a swig. He gave Clay a little wave that made him seem much younger than the conversation they’d just shared, and then turned back up the street.

He dropped his board and took a running start, landing thick on the deck, then he rolled across the sidewalk. (Kerthump… kerthump.) He gave his board a little jump as he rolled off the curb and out in the street, where he was promptly hit by a car.

Clay had been the first one to reach him. The car itself had come to more or less an immediate stop, but the driver was so stunned by the body flying onto her hood that she’d been paralyzed into inaction. The boy, for his part, had rolled up onto the windshield and had come sluggishly to a stop before jumping down from the hood and trying to act as if nothing had happened. The board was broken under the wheel of the car, and the boy’s painful grimace as he hit the ground showed that more than his pride was hurt. He hopped on one foot as Clay reached him and lifted him up to support him while helping him onto the curb. A small crowd gathered of a few straggling pedestrians who stretched their necks to see if anything was worth seeing, then moved on when it became apparent that no blood had been spilled.

Clay sat the boy down on the ground and inspected his foot. It appeared as if the ankle had been sprained badly, but there didn’t seem to be any broken bones. The ankle was tender when he offered resistance and already it was beginning to swell and turn slightly blue. The boy wouldn’t be able to walk.

“Oh, my mom’s going to kill me,” the boy said. “She just bought me that board.”

“Oh, I’m certain that she won’t do that. That would be murder. Up you go, come on,” Clay said. “Let’s go, I’ll help you walk. Lean on me.”

“But mis–” the boy caught himself.

“Clay.”

“But Clay, I don’t want to stop you from going home.”

“I’m going that way, anyway—”

“Stephen.”

“Stephen… I might as well stop a murder.”

They hobbled along the street, this odd pair, like two soldiers escaping the front. Never leave a man behind, Clay smiled to himself. Always leave yourself a way out, and never leave a man behind. He wondered what others around them thought. Normally, he was a believer in what Eleanor Roosevelt once said: you wouldn’t worry what other people thought of you if you only knew how seldom they do. But, in this case, from the looks they received as they straggled along, he felt it safe to make an exception.

Turning west on 132nd, they limped for half a block before coming to a narrow space between two buildings that opened through a gate. “She’ll be in here,” the boy said as he left Clay’s shouldering support and tried to make his way into a garden. Clay followed closely, with his arms out extended as though he were carrying some gift to meet a queen.

“Mom?”

Clay saw the woman stand up from the edge of a flowerbed where she’d been kneeling and pruning, and turn around with an attitude that she’d obviously rehearsed before. She was tall and thin, like her son, with an angular face, and hair bundled up in a knot till it spilled down her back in long ropy twists. She was, despite her initial look of perturbation standing there among the still blooming fall flowers, beautiful.

“Mom, I had an accident. This man here, Clay, helped me get home.” The woman’s face softened, and her features dissolved into concern. Only then did she notice Clay standing there behind the boy, sticking out like a thread on a homemade sweater.

“Wha’ happened?” the woman said as she moved toward the boy, not hurriedly, but deliberately, and with tenderness. She smiled at Clay, and he wondered about her accent. It was obvious and surprising, made more so by her son’s lack of the same.

“I got hit by a car. I’m OK!” he quickly added. “I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

She moved toward him and took him in her arms and held him like she wouldn’t let go. Clay stepped backwards and glanced down before looking up into the woman’s face as she opened her eyes and took him in.

“Mister…”

“Call me Clay.”

“Thank you. I don’t know who you are or why you were in the right place at the right time, but thank you for helping my Stephen.”

“It was no problem ma’am. He needs to get off that foot though. He sprained the ankle pretty badly.”

“Yes, of course,” the woman said and then helped the boy out of the gate and up the stairs of the adjacent house. “Where you going?” she said as Clay turned on his heel, as if to leave. “I’ve got to get on,” he said, noticing the dark in the sky.

“Nonsense, you’ll stay and have dinner.” Clay didn’t know whether it was something she’d seen in his eyes or the fact that he carried the backpack, but she’d summed him up in the space of a glance, and he could tell that arguing would be futile. He was hungry. That settled the matter.

He undid the slips of his harness and dropped his pack to the ground, picking it up by a handle on top, and followed them up the stairs.

The room was clean and bright, warm and warmly designed, with numerous books lining shelves that extended the lengths of the walls. Clay stood and examined them as the woman disappeared in a room down the hall with the boy. The titles were those you don’t normally find on an American bookshelf, with names like The Female Poets of Great Britain. Many of them were old; all of them were worn. In the spaces between the books, there were also odd little eclectic items. Fossil samples, butterflies in cases, the exoskeletons of insects, and the like. Sprinkled through the displays were black and white photos of the woman and her son, neatly-framed, showing them in various poses in mostly unidentifiable locations, each more lovely than the others. The walls were lined with impressionist renderings, some with warm blotches of color seemingly haphazardly arranged to create an effect of chaos, others carefully, meticulously set with parallel lines and grids of intricate color. Clay seemed to recognize something in them that he couldn’t yet make out, and he was trying to decide what it was when the woman came back into the room.

“Oh, that boy is such a naughty one. Lord knows I love him, but he does know how to give me a headache.”

“I know,” Clay said, “I had girls of my own…”

The woman heard his voice trail off and seemed to immediately understand. “I’m sorry,” she said. Clay waved her off, as is if to say, Thank you, but no need to be sorry.

“Who’s the artist?”

“Those are mine. You like them, eh? They are meant to represent the lines you find in nature in the smallest detail. I was a painter before I became a landscaper. My first love, however, is botany. It seems a nice way to combine both.”

“Oh, wow. These are nice.”

“Thank you. I studied at the Cooper Union. It was the reason I came to this country.”

“From?”

“I’m a Trini. And I hope you like Trini food. Stephen tells me that you’re on a journey?”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m going back to my farmhouse in Ithaca.”

“Oh? To inspect it for damage from the storm?”

Clay nodded his head no. “To live. I’m going home for good.”

“Ahhh. A fugitive. Or is it a refugee? I’m going with fugitive. Well, Mr. Fugitive, take your pack and go down the hall to the second door on the left. You’ll find a clean towel and you can make yourself at home.”

“Oh, I appreciate it, and I’ll certainly eat your food, but I couldn’t—”

“Nonsense. You can, and you will. You’re not going to make it to Ithaca tonight, and you don’t want to be out in these streets.”

Clay could tell that it would be better to save his breath with this woman. “Well, thank you.”

“No thanks needed. You took care of my boy. It is I who should be thanking you. My name, by the way, is Veronica. Dinner will be ready in half an hour.”

Clay walked into the bedroom and lifted his pack onto the bed. Unzipping its large front pocket, he began pulling the items out one at a time. The small water bottles he’d brought were all gone. He still had the matches and three of the energy bars. The rest of the things he pulled out, organizing them on the bed. The last of these items, a small stack of papers he had rolled up like a telescope, was crinkled from the trip. He slid the rubber bands off the ends and straightened the papers with his hand. It was a small, typed manuscript of poems that he’d once written to his love. He’d spent many hours writing poems, both before and after Cheryl and the girls had gone. Not all of them were ‘love poems’ per se, but all were, in some way, sincere declarations of his undying devotion. Some of them were about things he saw, or thoughts that he’d had, but all of them were motivated by his loss and his love for his wife and children. At one point he’d considered having them published, but had never had the courage to submit them. They were really just exercises in adoration—of life, of love, of the home he’d once known with his family. Now as he caressed the pages, standing there in this home where a mother and son were still together, still able to touch each other’s faces and hear each other’s voices, he smiled as he thought about how his daughters might have sassed some boy like the girl in the bodega had. He yearned for Cheryl and the brush of her hand against his cheek, remembering the way she sang when she cooked dinner.

The warm water felt good on his body after the long day of walking, and soothed his tired muscles. Clay stood under the stream and pushed his hands across his face and through his hair. Steam filled the air with fog, and he wondered whether this would be the last shower he’d have for a while. There was simply no telling once he got back on the road, but he liked the uncertainty. That was part of the adventure, walking out into the world without knowing what would happen next. He reached and twisted the knobs, feeling the warm spray slow to a trickle and then a drip and then he stepped out into the softness of the towel.

Coming back to the room after having dressed in a fresh pair of blue jeans and a t-shirt, Clay found that Veronica had gathered his clothes from the floor, and he heard the machine in the hallway filling. Thoughtful. He’d have never asked, and if anyone else had done it, he might have found it intrusive, but something in her way made him feel comfortable with the gesture. He was glad to be in this home at this moment rather than walking in the dark toward God knows what. He came out of the bedroom and passed through the hall and made his way again into the living room.

The house was filled with a warm, tempting aroma of food and life, and he felt the hunger in his stomach tumble, and that feeling pleased him too. He looked across the room and saw Veronica with her back turned to him, her long twists of hair flowing across her back as she moved around her kitchen.

“I appreciate this. I really do.”

“No worries. It’ll be nice to have company for dinner. I took the liberty of washing your clothes. I hope you don’t mind. I tried not to be too snoopy.”

“No, not at all. And thanks. I’m afraid I am putting you out.”

“Hmmph,” she said, and went back to cooking. She told him it’d be ready in a minute.

Clay had once heard that the best way to tell if you’ll get along with someone is to question their tastes in music. He walked across the room to a small stereo, where the woman had CD’s lined along the window.

“You like The Mountain Goats?”

“Yes, I like John Darnielle’s passion, and his lyrics. I even like his religious album.” When she said this, she made quotes in the air around the word “religious,” and Clay knew exactly what she meant—that the album had not really been religious, and that anyway, all his music was suffused with a kind of respect for such sensibilities, and that anyway, one man’s religion was another man’s folly. He understood her meaning as certainly as if they shared a secret language, which as fans, they kind of did.

“I saw him in October at the Bowery Ballroom,” Clay said.

“Yeah? Yudehdedaedadiwahdehdowndeh?”

“Ummm. What?”

“You deh… de day… dad I… wah deh… down deh?”

“Oh, yes, I guess I was. Wasn’t it great? It’s a surprise I didn’t see you.” He blushed because he realized that he had just as much as said that she was hard to miss with her long black hair and her striking features. His blushing made her blush, and she smiled, reaching up with her hand to cover the smile.

“Yes, well it’s a surprise that I wasn’t seen.”

The meal consisted of something she called “buss up shot” which was a light, flaky dough cooked in ghee butter (“because it looks like a busted up shirt,” Stephen said, as if that somehow explained everything.) Veronica set out three separate bowls with each having a separate dish of chickpeas and spinach and curry chicken. “Just tear off a piece of the bread and wrap it around a bit of these and put it your mouth,” she told him, “and if you’re feeling brave, try a little pepper sauce.” She pushed a small bowl of some condiment across the table, from which extended a spoon.

Clay was feeling brave although Stephen apparently wasn’t, and after his first bite he realized why. He reached down and gathered a bite of chickpeas in the dough and poured a bit of the sauce from the spoon and ate it. His mouth was set aflame with a sensation he hadn’t quite felt before. His eyes and nose and mouth began to water. Veronica and Stephen began to snicker and then finally busted out laughing as Clay wiped his face. “I told you that you’d better be brave, Mister, but I didn’t say be stupid! Just a drop, Clay. Just a drop.”

“Yeah, well you left that part out, Veronica.” He choked for a moment and then felt the taste of the food kick in, and reached in for another bite.

It was the best meal he’d had in months. The company, the food, the warm cup of coffee afterward — Clay found himself thoroughly enjoying the whole experience. They sat and talked about the storm and how Veronica had come to this island from another island, from a small town outside of Port-of-Spain.

“There was a hill there you could drift down forever,” she said. “Just get on your bike in the morning and begin rolling downhill, never once pedaling, and not stop until the sun was setting. Of course, then you had to walk back up!”

Clay told them that he’d once climbed a tree in his forest in Ithaca to see the sunrise, and as he was watching it come over the horizon, it had been so beautiful that he lost his balance and fell out of the tree and hadn’t landed until evening. “Of course, most of that I’m making up,” he said, “but, hey, what good is a story if it is entirely true?” They all laughed and the bowls slowly emptied.

After they finished, Clay helped Veronica clear the dishes from the table and Stephen went into the living room to turn on the TV. The news of Sandy’s devastation was on every channel, and they gathered around for a moment to watch. The video of destruction was sobering—of roller coasters falling into the sea and smoke rising up from cinders and waters rushing over streets and sand piling up on the barriers or being washed out to sea. It seemed like a million miles away now even if some of it was right outside the door.

“You sure you want to go back out into that?” Veronica asked.

“That’s exactly what I am leaving,” Clay said.

“Yes, I see your point. Well, then you better get some rest, Clay.” With that, she got up and excused herself, and as she turned to leave, she looked back over her shoulder and asked, “You a Republican, Clay?”

“Tonight, ma’am, after that meal… I’m whatever you want me to be.”

“I’ll put you down as a political agnostic, which is good enough for me,” and with that she said that she had to go out to run a few errands. She went back into the hall and came out with a bag and told Stephen to watch over their guest. Then she let herself out, and the two of them sat for a bit, watching a few minutes more of TV.

In between the reports from the storm, the talking heads were already looking for the next big story. The election dance was playing itself out in real time, and both sides seemed to be wondering how to best use the destruction and death and suffering to insure their ascension to power. Vladimir Putin in Russia was strengthening his hold on the former Soviet Republics, and political dissidents were joining the press in accusing his government of killing or silencing his opponents. A video showed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton trying to thread the needle between these two storylines, saying that Russia was secretly moving to rebuild the former Soviet Union, and that the incumbent candidate leading America would not sit idly by and let that happen. After just a few moments of politics and world news, the scenes shifted back to local destruction and loss and calls for the government to help those who found themselves in dire need.

After a while, shaking his head thoughtfully, Stephen stood up and walked towards the television. “Do you mind if I turn this off?”

“Not one bit,” Clay replied.

“Listen to some music?”

“Sure,” Clay said, as the boy walked over to the stereo and pulled out a CD, slid it into the player, and pushed the button. The somber, soulful cry of Ellington’s Harlem Nocturne came plaintively out of the speakers. The music stood in sharp contrast to the day’s events with its peaceful, swinging somnambulism.

“I figured you liked Duke Ellington.”

“I do,” Clay said.

And the two of them listened to its end.

Wednesday

Clay slept like a rock.

When he woke in the morning, he was feeling refreshed and happy, the weariness of yesterday’s travels washed away by peaceful rest. He put his feet over the bed and dropped them to the floor, then put on his jeans and shirt. He pulled a lambswool sweater on and then his socks and boots. He stepped out into the hall and smelled eggs, and the heavenly scent of coffee in the air. Veronica was standing at the stove tending the eggs, humming to herself, doing a lazy sway while she did so. As she heard him enter, she turned around. “Good morning, Mr. Fugitive.”

They sat and ate in a silence—more out of respect for the memory of the night before than for sorrow at their imminent departure. After the meal, they spoke. Clay talked of tending his garden in the spring. Veronica told him that she couldn’t wait that long and that she had to get some newer plants covered in her garden that day. At the end of the meal, Clay began to return to his room to pack for his trip, and Veronica stopped him by holding out the bag that she’d left with the night before.

“I hope you don’t mind. I said I didn’t snoop too much, but when your stuff was out on the bed yesterday I saw that your gear is entirely unsuited for the journey ahead of you, you foolish man.” She winked. “Even with the stuff I got for you, your supplies are insufficient for such a journey,” she hesitated, “…if… if things were to go bad, you see?”

Clay nodded his head. He didn’t want to interrupt, and he figured she was just concerned with his welfare.

“I would hazard a guess that your skillset probably is insufficient as well, Clay, and a stranger should be forgiven for thinking that you’ve embarked on your journey hastily, and ill-prepared…,” she smiled, trying to soften the blow, “…but with the things I’ve added to your pack, I’m hoping that you’ll get home alright.”

Clay nodded again, and returned her smile.

“I like the books you’ve chosen to carry with you, Hemingway in particular. He got at the notion that the earth is more powerful than we imagine. We’ve seen evidence of that recently. But because of that, you can’t go traipsing off into the woods with a single change of clothes and some energy bars and books and nothing else. Take these. I got you some bottles of water for your thirst and a Mylar blanket to keep you warm and a fishing kit to keep you fed. I keep a bunch of wool military blankets on hand for emergencies and cold nights, so I rolled one up for you and put it in your pack with your clothes. You never know what you will find out there, Clay. In case you find something dangerous, here is a knife that belonged to my husband. I put a flashlight in your bag too, and oh, and something else… it’s in the small blue box. Don’t open it until you get home. It won’t do you any good ‘til then, so I wrapped it to keep it dry.”

Clay looked down in the bag and suddenly felt a wave of emotion for this woman who had done so much for him. All he’d done was what should be expected from a man, but she’d really extended herself in hospitality and courtesy. Clay was moved.

“What’s this?” He reached into the bag.

“Oh that. Yes. Well, I have probably overstepped my boundaries. I saw on your bed the stack of poems. I shouldn’t have looked, but I did, and I’m not sorry. I have a friend who once owned the Huemanity Bookstore here in Harlem. One of the last great independent bookstores in the city. The kind of place that, were he around today, you might find Langston Hughes reading his poems to a group of young toughs. A beautiful place. Anyway, she closed the shop down because she realized people wanted to drink coffee more than they wanted to buy books. She’s now opening a café, but she’s still trying to find a way to have both. So, she bought an Espresso Book Machine, the first one in Harlem. It binds your books right on the spot. She’s planning to open in the spring and we were talking about the machine the other day, and then I saw your poems and… she hopes to have people come in and write their books over her coffee and then bind them and go back out into the street. I called her last night and asked her if she minded if I used it. This is the first book bound on it.”

Clay looked at the cover. The Poems of C.L. Richter. A tear formed in his eye.

“I hope you don’t mind. I read a few. I know…”

Clay choked back a tear. “No. I don’t mind,” He looked at her and realized that what she really meant to say was: I know. I’ve lost someone, too.

He put the book back in the bag and stood there for what seemed like the beginning of forever. He smiled and told her that if she ever got to Ithaca, she and Stephen had a home in his forest. She reached out and gave his hand a squeeze, and then they both turned away, him to his packing, her to her gardening.

The rest of that day was spent in a blur, as if in a dream. Clay bid Veronica and Stephen good-bye and made his way to the bus line that would carry him up to the George Washington Bridge. He walked across the expanse and, as he had planned, he threw his key in the river, watching its slow mournful arc until it disappeared behind the webbing of girders and concrete and fell through space to land with a splash that no one could hear.

Once he was in New Jersey, he walked for hours and hours along what passed for the back roads, 4 and then 17, past the slow-changing landscape that morphed from urban to suburban. He passed fields and farms and golf courses and shopping malls and industrial wastelands and streams.

At the end of the day he checked into a small hotel just outside of Suffern. He found his room and lay down on his bed and rested his weary feet. Just before he dropped off to sleep, he reached into his bag and pulled out the copy of his book that Veronica had made for him. Opening it to the first page, he noticed that she’d placed in it a folded slip of paper. He opened it up and read the following poem just prior to slipping away.

CHAPTER 4

Cheryl was twenty-three when he first experienced her in the cafeteria at TC3. TC3 was what everyone called Tompkins Cortland Community College, and so Clay had learned to call it that too. He’d tried, for a while, to get his friends to call it The Cube, and he still liked that nickname, or maybe “TC-cubed” was a better one, but it hadn’t really caught on, so he went along with the flow.

Anyway, Cheryl was working part-time in the cafeteria as a cashier. After four years spent running around Europe with Bohemian girlfriends, staying in hostels and photographing everything in sight, Cheryl had only started college a year earlier at the ripe young age of twenty-two. She caught Clay’s attention one day near the beginning of the fall semester when she was on her first day of work and he was going through the line to pay for his lunch. He always had the same lunch, consisting of one roast beef sandwich (extra mustard), one bag of chips, and a single chocolate chip cookie. He was a creature of habit, but not of stone, and so that day, to mix things up, he’d decided to go through the pay line with the pretty young girl at the cashier counter.

Most love stories start in one of two ways. There is the “Hollywood” way wherein two polar opposites are forced to work together on a job, say, or a bank heist or an unavoidable outing with children. It can be anything really. It doesn’t have to involve a job or a bank or children. It could involve planning brunch for a friend’s wedding party, or setting out on a mission to Mars. The point is the two people involved initially hate one another. With a passion. Until somehow and one day the tension is too much (and too obvious) and they share an awkward kiss. After the kiss, sometimes accidentally achieved while both are specifically trying to avoid having anything to do with each other, they are forced to realize that they are mutually attracted. That’s when the music cues and a love story begins.

The “real world” way that lovers meet, the second kind, usually starts with a shared look from across the room. There is nothing of loathing or hatred in it. In fact, usually, the look is followed by the man being immediately and lethally struck down by the woman’s ethereal beauty. Slayed by Cupid, he can do nothing else, from that point on, but pursue the woman until he captures her heart. There is no soundtrack, save that one in the heart, but in this kind of story, the man’s heart skipping and the woman’s cheek blushing give hint of the music to come.

Or something like that. Either way the story is familiar.

Neither one of these well-worn paths was the route to romance trodden by Cheryl Woolsey and Clay Richter. Instead, it came down to the cost of a roast beef sandwich.

The total price for his meal on that blessed Monday—his first day with Cheryl in his life—was $6.25, and he paid for it with a crisp, new $10 bill. She did her magic with the cash register and promptly handed him his change. $2.75. Looking him directly in the eye and smiling innocently.

He looked at the pile of money in his hand—fully $1.00 short of what he was owed—squinted his eyes threateningly at her, harrumphed, and then moved silently on to a table to eat his meal in defeat. He did not once look back at this thief, this grifter, this circus con-woman with her big floppy Burberry and her skinny long legs and her dark heart hidden behind a too-ready smile. Who wears a Burberry hat, he thought, in-doors? And he ate in a kind of plotting silence.

The next day, Clay, seeing Cheryl perched on her wooden stool at the register on the far end of the lunch line, purposefully placed on his tray the exact same items that he always had and went through the line as he had the day before. Reaching the register, he placed his food before her and, once again, Cheryl smiled at him sweetly while blatantly and fearlessly stealing a dollar from him. He looked down at his $2.75 in change, grimaced indignantly, thrust it into his pocket and went to his table to eat his meal.

It was all he could think about. He was obsessed. He didn’t study that night at all.

The following day, the pattern continued, only this time, after receiving his change minus the dollar Cheryl had again stolen from him, he smiled back at her sweetly, pocketed the change, then reached over and picked up a roll of mints (priced at $1) and stuck them in his pocket with his change. He winked. At that, her eyes narrowed a bit and they shared a long and knowing stare before he finally retreated to his luncheon table.

The fourth day of this unique courtship with Cheryl, Clay loaded his tray with the identical lunch items, and she rang up the sale on the register. He noticed that the bin of mints had been removed from the counter, an obvious sign of one-upsmanship. He could see it behind the counter, just beyond his reach, almost as if someone had calculated his height and the stretch of the fabric he would be wearing that day, and had gone through the motions to calculate the lean of his body, the inclination of the packaging. The mints had been put… just… beyond… his reach.

Without so much as a pause, he reached into his pockets and pulled out the exact amount he owed. $6.25. Nothing more, nothing less. He counted it out quite deliberately making a show of each bill, then slowly dropped the change in the center of the bills, letting the last quarter drop dramatically from his hand and roll slowly in a lazy circle on the formica before it began to spin, increasing its speed as it collapsed, dying slowly and dramatically and rhythmically on the countertop. Clay smiled, nodded his head in victory, and then began his triumphant walk towards his table. It was then that, without warning, he was struck in the back by a hastily thrown roll of mints. He turned around slowly, and balancing his tray in one hand, he casually bent down and picked up the mints. Snapping a single mint out dexterously with one thumb, he popped it into his mouth, winked again at Cheryl, and went to the table to eat his lunch.

Not long after what became known as The Mint War, he met Cheryl in the campus bookstore. He smiled at her and she smiled back and the first word she ever said to him dropped from her lips.

“Jerk.”

“Thief.”

“Meanie.”

“Reprobate.”

They stood and smiled at each other. Smiles of shared affection. The rest, as they say, is history. Not even a year later they were married, and they had a hard and fast rule after that. No stealing. Even if she was only doing it out of psychological curiosity—to see who would notice.

Thursday

Twenty years had passed since that meeting, and here he was, a lonely widower, staring up at a filthy, water stained popcorn ceiling in a cheap motel room. The weight of the last few days suddenly hit him. God, or Fate, or inertia or chaos—whatever ruled the world—had led him to this place in a conspiracy of silence, simply standing by and watching as his life transpired. He suddenly felt melancholy, sad, and alone, like he was moving to an end, but the purpose of that end suddenly seemed less clear.

He knew that getting home would help everything. Having just been in a real home with Veronica and Stephen had reminded him of what he was missing. But, he also knew that without the people in the house to make it a home, he would still be wandering the rooms like before, listening for the sounds of others.

He put this thought out of his head. Sometimes giving in to thoughts makes them become self-fulfilling prophecies. He willfully meditated, instead, about what he would do when he got to Ithaca. Maybe he would get a milk cow—he always liked Jerseys—and some goats and chickens. I could do that, he thought, as he finally began to stir from his reverie, to shake the morning cobwebs from his head. He had no real sense of freedom yet, but the idea that there was a future for him, and that the future involved home and peace, made him smile. Still a bit of a journey, he thought, but the only way to get there is a step at a time.

He took stock of his body, particularly his legs. Tight. Muscles sore, but in a good way. His feet hurt. I should have done this six years ago rather than lock myself away in that urban prison. But, I can still do this. I can. Man, it would be so beautiful to have Cheryl and the girls with me… but I don’t.

He knew there would be no water in the tiny bathroom, but he couldn’t help trying the rusted faucet anyway. After check-in, the managers had brought in a couple of buckets of dirty, rusty water to be used only—they had carefully explained several times—to flush the toilets. He still had the three bottles of water Veronica had given him back in Harlem, so he used a judicious amount out of one bottle to splash water on his face and brush his teeth. There were three energy bars left in his side pocket, so he ate one of them, and for some reason that he couldn’t rightly identify, he wasn’t able to get himself to throw the metallic wrapper away. He folded it carefully and stuffed it into one of the side pockets of the backpack. Why did I do that? He couldn’t really say. There was some need to conserve now, to make everything count, as if whatever materials had come his way had done so for a reason and he had a responsibility to make them count. Or perhaps he was just getting nervous. Maybe what had happened with Sandy was not the end, but just the beginning. Maybe things were going to spiral downhill in the aftermath. He remembered the Christmas blizzard of a few years back, how some of the stores had run out of food in an astoundingly short amount of time, making shopping in them like walking through a Soviet-era bread line. After that storm, you had to be happy with whatever could be found on the shelves and not ask questions—just pay for whatever was available, and be glad you got it.

The long walk out of New York had affected him, and the cheerful optimism of the morning before had fled. Seeing the blank and fearful faces of people he’d passed in the gas lines yesterday replaced the optimism with a feeling of—what was it? Dread? He’d watched a man throw hot coffee through the open window of a van at a woman with her children in tow who had tried to cut in a gas line. He had seen police cars and fire trucks and ambulances rushing down country roads, and National Guard helicopters flying overhead. He had heard the words “war zone” used far too frequently to describe too many places along his route. It felt like the eye of the storm had passed and the winds were now reforming, only this time they were driven by people’s hot air and their ungracious impatience. “Blow, blow thou winter wind,” Shakeapeare wrote, “thou art not so unkind as man’s ingratitude.” Clay worried that if that ingratitude turned nasty, things could go downhill fast.

After packing up his things and tightly lacing his boots, he strapped on his backpack and stepped out into the bright sunlight of Day 3 of his walk. He stretched a little and took in his environment, noticing the cars in the parking lot and even a couple of tents on the greenbelt leading into the motel. I’m not the only one on foot, he thought.

Despite the sunshine, the day was cool and brisk and portended change. Maybe it was the warning that Veronica had implied (“Not everyone is as nice as you are…”), but he got the sense that something was out there, something dangerous, or at least something with that kind of potential.

Thinking this as he stepped outside, Clay didn’t want to get caught up in chit-chat or to engage with any of the assorted characters that were milling about outside of his motel room as he stepped across the parking lot toward the lobby to return his key. There was a man who looked like he could have been a travelling salesman, wrapped up in tension and angst and jargon, talking in loud tones on a phone with someone who didn’t show sympathy for the fact that he might not get to his next appointment, and if he didn’t that he might not make his number, and if he didn’t that he might not keep his job. There was a man who walked around his eighteen-wheeler, flexing his tattooed arms and checking the cables to see if his load had loosened in the night and that his tires were all inflated, all the while glancing across the lot to the window of a diner where a waitress stood taking orders. Neither of these men, nor any of the other people who were milling about, were dangerous in themselves. Rather, it seemed that the environment, the system, the whole machine made up of the sum of its parts, was the problem. It was like an engine knocking but you couldn’t really tell from where or what piece needed replacing.

Clay couldn’t help noticing, despite his general unwillingness to put up with any foolishness this morning, the guy two doors down from his room. He was sitting on the tailgate of a pickup, cutting up fruit with a pocketknife and sticking the pieces of apple in his mouth. It would not be an exaggeration to say that he looked out of place.

The man was possibly in his 50’s to early 60’s, but fit, trim, wearing starched and faded blue jeans and cowboy boots. Wherever he was, Clay thought, this man was there on purpose. He wore a dark brown cowboy hat and a starched, blue dress shirt, and he smiled from under his heavy mustache and waved at Clay. He indicated with his pocketknife as pretty and matter-of-factly as you please that Clay should come over there and eat some fruit. Even as he did so, he had a look of indifference on his face, as if to say, “Suit yourself. If you want some, it’s sitting there waiting for you.” In some odd way this indifference was reassuring.

Clay couldn’t imagine why he would be responding affirmatively to a man waving a knife at him, but almost without any conscious thought or hesitation he strolled over to the back of the pickup and stood there uncomfortably with his hands in the pockets of his coat. He shifted in the backpack and looked at the man, and then at the fruit, and then at the dust on his boots.

“Get you some fruit,” the man said, smiling in a way that you could only really identify because of the wrinkles near his eyes. It was impossible to see the smile itself because a mustache extended down over the man’s mouth, obscuring it from view. Clay stared at him for a few seconds. The man looked like Sam Elliot, he decided, although, even as he decided this, he wondered why every cowboy in the world somehow looked like Sam Elliot. Still, the impression was unmistakable. He sounded remarkably like him too, with his deep gravelly voice and his as-yet-unidentified southern drawl.

“Go on. You look like you could use some, and fruit might get hard to come by here pretty soon.”

Clay hesitated for a moment, like a dog that’s not sure whether a man is going to kick him or pet him, and then he moved forward and took a chunk of apple. He stepped back to his safe spot and took a bite and started to chew.

Sam Elliot looked at him and smiled with his kind blue eyes, mindfully chewing on his own piece of apple. The two strangers awkwardly continued in this manner for what seemed like a very long time. In reality it was only a minute or so, but it seemed like it took forever, the two of them sitting around eating apples together like strangers who’ve met in the parking lot of a cheap motel after the worst natural disaster in memory. Breaking the moment of profound silence, the older man looked around and motioned to nowhere in particular with his pocketknife. “I’m Clive Darling.”

Clive Darling then looked around and nodded towards the tents on the greenbelt. “Things seem peaceful and serene now, but they probably won’t stay that way for long.” With that, he narrowed his eyes and wiped his mustache with his thumb and forefinger. “Most everyone here is out of gas. Even the stations that still have power are plumb out, and the last few stores I stopped in have been nearly stripped bare.”

He looked back at Clay and sighed deeply. “This is that moment when things could go either way. If things go bad, some of these folks might get right desperate and things could get ugly.”

Clay didn’t tell him that he’d had some of the same thoughts.

“I give it 48 hours or so, and then it probably won’t be safe on the roads after that. Least, not if things get worse.”

Savannah, Georgia. That’s how Clay pegged him. His accent was right out of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It was that slow, but exceedingly proper southern drawl, the one that made people sound rich but not stupid and caused anything they said to come across as critically important and wise no matter what it was they were saying. With a Savannah accent, one could say, “I do believe I’ll go pick a peach from that tree over yonder,” and it would sound as important and fascinating and even historical as, “Why don’t we all gather together and just open fire on Fort Sumter?” It was the kind of accent that had import.

Clay took in more of the picture. Clive was rich, or at least he looked it. You could tell from the way he handled the knife, the way his shirt was tucked, the angle of his hat. Very particular, like a man who had leisure to worry about such things. Despite the fact that he looked like he was used to having money, Clive seemed comfortable eating apples from the tailgate of a $50,000 pickup truck. Maybe he made his money in cattle, say, or corn or lumber. Maybe he was used to watching from a ridge, up high somewhere along a look-out, as the workers in some valley below pushed the livestock or the produce or the timber into trucks that would haul them away to market. Maybe he sat and ate apples as he figured out profit margins and devised economies of scale. Maybe, or maybe not. Sizing people up isn’t a science if you don’t get paid for it, Clay thought. Nevertheless, the man was impressive in a way that could not be denied.

“Clay. Clay Richter,” he said, smiling back and nodding his head. He wasn’t ready to shake hands with the man, mostly because of the knife, but he was ready to make conversation.

“Richter?” Clive said, smiling. “Hmm… Kraut?” Seeing Clay’s eyes narrow a bit, he added, “Oh, don’t mind me. I’m one of those old fellas that just blurts out whatever he thinks without passing it through some filter. What I meant to say is—are you of German extraction, sir?”

“Way back,” Clay answered, showing that he wasn’t offended at all. “My grandfather on my father’s side came here in 1929 to escape… things going on in Germany.”

“He a commie?”

Clay laughed this time. “No. He was a Republican, in the Charles Lindbergh mold of Republicanism. He may have been a fascist, but he certainly didn’t like or approve of Hitler.”

“My kind of guy,” Clive said, laughing at his own joke. “Where you headed?”

“Upstate. Not far from Ithaca. Escaping the city,” and before he could stop himself he added, “and not because of the storm.” For some reason, Clay, who had been so reserved in his interactions with people along his journey—even with Veronica, despite her kindness—found it easy to talk to this cowboy.

“Hmmm… a mystery. I like it. So you’re the grandson of a fascist and you are starting off on your Luddite life in the wake of the worst hurricane to hit New England in recorded memory. Interesting, to say the least.”

Clay looked down at the ground and kicked a pebble with the toe of his boot. He watched as the pebble rolled across the pavement and came to rest under the treads of one of Clive’s brand new tires. “Maybe it’s not quite like that,” he said through a grin. He didn’t know why he felt the need to open up to this old guy and spill the beans, but he did. “I’m just heading home. I’ve been gone a long time, and I’ve had enough of cities and consumerism and the whole charade of progress.” He paused for a second. “And if I hear another word about this election, I’m seriously going to snap. In fact, that’s been one of the few benefits of the storm… it has changed the subject off the horse race.”

“Like I said — a Luddite!” Clive nodded and laughed straight from the belly, “and an anarchist to boot!”

“I haven’t thought it out that far yet, but maybe I’m heading in that direction.”

“Well, maybe you should have said that when I asked you which way you were headed,” Clive said, folding the knife and putting it back in the front pocket of his jeans.

“Maybe I should have,” Clay nodded and shifted the backpack on his back, nervously pretending to adjust the straps. “Oh, and thank you kindly for the apple.” He hesitantly turned to leave still feeling like he shouldn’t, or maybe it was that he didn’t want to.

“Well, hold on there a minute, Ned Ludd,” Clive said, wiping his hands on his jeans and tidying up the tailgate. “I’ve got enough gas to get us down the road a bit. I know you’re not an axe murderer because, well, I just know, that’s all, and because you were willing to take an apple from a guy with a knife. That makes you either stupid, brave, or insightful, and I don’t think for a minute that you’re stupid. So that leaves brave or insightful. Either of those makes you better company than most of these jokers on the road. I like a little conversation when I drive. So what I’m saying is… are you up for a ride?”

Clay hesitated.

“I don’t know how much gas I have left in the tank, but hopefully it will get us to Liberty, which should cut your walk down quite a bit. It’ll save you two to three days of walking, at least, maybe more. I’ve got another—well, let’s just say—another form of transportation picking me up in Liberty. But I might be able to get you that far. And anyway, at one of the stores I stopped at last night they were saying that there’s another storm coming. Don’t know nothin’ about it, but they said it could be bad. So what do you say, young Mr. Ludd. Would you rather hoof it than keep an old man company?”

Clay looked around. Maybe Clive was right. He’d heard about things turning south really fast after a natural disaster, and Clive seemed like a nice enough guy, even if he was peculiar.

Clive looked at him, shrugged, and said, “Well Ned, if you insist on walking, let me give you some more fruit for your bag.”

“I’ll ride, Clive.”

“Well, then! Good. Let me get my gear and we’ll saddle up.”

The ride was smooth and nice, and the pickup truck was plush and comfortable. The conversation was as peculiar as Clive but in a way that Clay was growing used to. Clive was a regular fountain of information, and he seemed to know more about disasters and psychology and the ins and outs of social disintegration than a cowboy from Georgia should. He wasn’t exactly sure how much cowboys should know about such things, but he was pretty sure that Clive knew more.

Just outside of Sloatsburg they passed a couple of cars on the side of the road with the hoods lifted. The flashing hazard lights on both of the cars said they had been recently abandoned. “Probably out of gas,” Clive said matter-of-factly. “When they write the epitaph on this civilization it will read, ‘They Ran Out of Gas.’ And speakin’ of, we’re getting low on petrol ourselves,” he added, “but this ol’ truck’ll go a long way on empty.”

As they drove, they passed occasional walkers and hikers, and Clay turned to look into their faces and tried to read their thoughts. Where are they going? How far do they have to go? What are they leaving behind? He wondered whether people had thought the same things about him yesterday when he’d been walking on the long road. His mind visited memories of news clips about refugees in war time in places like Rwanda and Sudan. Displaced and fleeing. He thought that he just as easily might be a refugee on this same road, and he wondered whether catching a ride could mean the difference between life and death for some of these people. He wondered to himself if maybe they should stop and pick some of them up.

Clive answered his thoughts, as if he had heard them. “We can’t pick them up, Ned Ludd,” he said, sadly. “I know I picked you up, and it seems the neighborly thing to do and all, but we’re going to float into Liberty on fumes, if we make it at all. Besides, like I said, some of these folks ain’t gonna be nice to be around starting pretty soon. You don’t have time to eat an apple with each one of ’em and size ’em up on the side of the road.”

“I understand,” Clay replied, and he really did. He liked to think of himself as the helpful and friendly kind, but he really just wanted to get home. And anyway, if they couldn’t find more gas, the truck wasn’t going much farther. They’d be refugees themselves soon.

“Listen Clay,” Clive said, all of the sudden speaking very seriously, “this whole world exists in a hologram of civility. If you don’t mind an ol’ cowboy quoting Thoreau… Thoreau said that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’, and that was more than a hundred and fifty years ago.” Clive waved his hand outward, indicating everything. “This is all pretty simple, even for an ol’ horseman, and I hope I don’t bore you with my opinions, but this world has a long history of empires rising, followed closely by empires falling. Believe me, they make a bigger mess falling than they ever made rising.”

Clay looked at him and thought for a moment about the red-haired man on the bike and how he had not recognized the resemblance before, but he sure did now.

“Do you mind me waxing philosophic, Clay? We’ve got some time to pass, and I’ve got this speech memorized, and perhaps I can put words to some thoughts you’ve had yourself. Judging from what you said earlier, I mean, about the city and consumerism and such.”

Clay looked over at Clive and just rolled his left hand with his forefinger extended in a small loop like he was rolling the tape forward, indicating that Clive should continue. Clive smiled, and did.

“Man always starts simply. He works the ground, raises his crops, tends his animals, and loves his family. His children, who probably didn’t work too much to build the farm, don’t generally recognize the same value in it, and they work it only begrudgingly. His grandchildren hate the farm, and either they or their children move to the city and end up automating the world. They can’t be blamed much. It’s in the nature of things. They build up a system of just-in-time delivery of goods made widely available and priced cheaply through the coercion of economic power and the largesse of wars of conquest and mechanization. They think they’re building on the family legacy when really what they are doing is destroying.”

Clive smiled at Clay, and continued, “You with me? What I’m saying is: that’s the history of America, brother. I don’t mean to speechify even though I do, but this ain’t the first time we’ve seen this rodeo. Man’s been down this little trail before. Just go ask the Greeks and the Romans. Folks that think we’re on to something new ain’t been paying attention. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but when it was built, it was built on the back of the countryside, and it sucked out the life from the country to feed its appetites. Your politicians, be they Democrats or Republicans, fight over the fumes of the excess once built up by the hard work of families and the labor of farmer poets. The bankers and factories eventually sell everyone weapons so they can kill one another because there’s good money in that, no denying it. Then one day, after the fires go out and the stench of death wafts over the planet, the survivors start over, and a man works his piece of ground, raises his crops, tends his animals, and loves his family. Then we’re off running to the next go-round. You got me?”

Clay sat silently for a minute, thinking and looking forward through the windscreen then back to Clive at last. “You have given this speech before. Go on,” he said.

Clive reached forward and tapped on the gas gauge, shaking his head. “Oh no, I’m not really trying to convert you or anything. Don’t think that. Besides, I have the feeling we are already on the same page. This ain’t a recruitment. I’m just sayin’ that there’s some things coming down, Clay. Real soon. Maybe even now, today, this minute. And when these things come down, you don’t want to be in the city. You don’t want to be in this truck on this highway neither. You want to be far away from the masses of people living their lives in quiet desperation. Anyone whose life is dependent on the system—what did you call it? ‘Cities and consumerism and the whole charade of progress?’—you just want to be as far away from that person and that charade as possible. Especially when those people live in bunches, stacked on top of one another in those cities and suburbs like a house of playing cards set to tumble.”

Clay nodded his head, thinking. He looked out the window and watched a hawk swoop across the sky in a long lazy circle, coming to rest in the top of a barren pine, his large wings dropping and turning in a way that made his tail turn under him, sending his body upright. “I can’t say I disagree with you much Clive, but then, you somehow already know that about me. These are things I’ve thought for some time now. In fact, some of that is the reason I’m heading home.”

“Well,” Clive said with a smile, “I kinda did know that about you. That’s why I called you ‘brother’.”

They rode in silence for a time, noticing aloud to one another the increase in foot traffic on the sides of the highways. It was going in both directions now, and there was a look of urgency on the faces of the passing strangers. Every now and then they’d come upon a fallen tree or a collapsed billboard or some other damage from Hurricane Sandy, but all-in-all things seemed remarkably peaceful, considering.

It was becoming painfully obvious that gasoline was going to be a huge problem. Every station they passed was lined with cars and people holding gas cans. Many truck stops and filling stations had large 4’ x 8’ pieces of plywood out by the road that read, “No Gas!” in bright-colored spray paint. Clay thought that there ought to be no reason for stations that have electric power to be out of gas.

Clive looked over to him and shook his head. “Pumped dry by thousands and thousands of scared folks and profiteers along with a few intelligent folks who see that things might go bad. They’re all getting every drop of life-blood they can get. You can tell what people love and need the most when you see what they rush to get or save when bad things happen. This society is hooked on gasoline and electricity. It is the vital drug of this culture. Crack cocaine isn’t even as addictive to the wide world of people grown dependent for their very lives on stuff like cellphones and video games and other gadgets. Stuff that hadn’t even been invented when Thoreau wrote Walden, or when the first bridge was built across the Mississippi up in Minneapolis.” He paused, letting that sink in.

Clay rode along silently, watching a handful of refugees sitting on a fallen tree on the shoulder of the road smoking cigarettes and cutting up. He wondered whether they had just met, or if they’d been traveling together. He was thinking about what Clive was saying, but didn’t know exactly what he thought about it… or even what Clive wanted him to think about it.

Clive glanced over again, noticing Clay’s pensive look, and said, “Oh, I know! I know! I’m a hypocrite. We all are. I use the tools that are available to me, even while my mind and my heart wars against ’em.” He leaned forward, stretching his back and re-adjusting the seat belt across his chest. “But what I’m saying is no less true whether I’m a hypocrite or not. This age-old social experiment in empire building and civilization is heading for a very big crash—just like Athens and Rome before it—and I have to tell you brother, it’s coming really soon. There ain’t nothing new under the sun.”

As he finished this last sentence, Middletown, New York appeared, and Clive pulled the truck off at the next exit. He was going downhill, so he cut the engine off and coasted for almost half a mile before pulling into the parking lot of a small, family restaurant with a sign out front that said, “Sorry. We’re Open”.

Inside they sat down in a wide booth covered in maroonish pleather, and were met there quickly by a woman in an apron upon which the name “Madge” had been embroidered in thick green thread. A waitress in a hurry with a pen and paper at the ready. “We have turkey sandwiches and coffee. No water. That’s what we have,” she said. Madge looked at them impatiently and was already walking away when Clive said, “We’ll each take two of everything that you just said.”

When Madge showed up ten minutes later with the food, Clive asked her if anyone in town had any gas. Madge just shook her head negatively and said, “Twenty-five for the sandwiches and coffee, and exact change will be appreciated if you got it,” and she was gone before either of the men could say a word.

Clive pulled out his wallet before Clay could even reach for his own stash of money, and threw a fifty down on the table. “I got this, Brother Clay. And she can keep the change because that paper money will be worthless in a week anyway.” Clay thought the comment was strangely specific, but the two were back on the road before he could ask Clive about the tip or the comment on the impending worthlessness of cash. Just as he was about to do so, the old man started up the conversation where he had left it off.

“I’m a self-made man, Clay, and I don’t mind sayin’ that I’m rich by worldly standards. I made most of my money in cattle and land over thirty years ago, and I’ve had those thirty years to learn about money and what it will buy and what it all means. I made my money honestly, or as honestly as a man can make money in this system.”

“I’m sure you did,” Clay remarked, not really sure, but wanting to keep Clive talking.

“But I’m also something rare in this system, and I don’t mind sayin’ that either.” Clive continued while intently studying the gas gauge and, for a moment, comparing what he saw with some figures he had scratched on a notepad he kept in his front shirt pocket. “I’m reflective… that’s what I am. What I mean by that is that I don’t just take life as it comes floating along without thinking, like Thoreau’s ‘mass of mankind’. You get what I’m saying, Clay? I think about things, and I study, and I read. That’s why I say that it didn’t have to be this way. We could have learned from every other empire in the history of the world. We could have avoided the pitfalls that were inevitably going to follow industrialism and urbanism.” He banged his knuckles lightly on the steering wheel, emphasizing his point, before returning to it. “We didn’t have to give in to the silent rule by an oligarchy of bankers and politicians and corporations. We could have avoided the dialectical thinking forced upon us by statists of every stripe, Clay, but we didn’t. And when this is all over—and I mean to say it will be real soon—but when it’s all over, there will be some obvious bad guys. And the people who still live will want to blame them. But Clay, here’s the point—the blame is in ourselves. That’s where it is. In ourselves, Ned Ludd.”

“Ok,” Clay responded, stunned a bit by the seriousness and solemnity of Clive’s tone. “I can see that you are a pessimist, and in some ways I am too. So maybe we are brothers of a sort. But I have to ask you why you say that paper money will be worthless in a week. The rest of that… that moving monologue… it was all kind of general and philosophical, but the part about greenbacks being worthless in a week. In a week? That’s pretty specific.”

Clive smiled. “Well, Ned Ludd, perhaps I was being dramatic. And sometimes rich people make the mistake of being reckless and profligate in order to make a point. I apologize for that, although I hope, even if I’m wrong, that I was still able to help ol’ Madge out a little bit.”

The sound of the gasping of the motor interrupted the conversation, and Clive guided the truck over onto the shoulder, coasting as long as he could before throwing the truck into Park.

“I reckon that’s it, Clay,” Clive said, opening his door to climb out. “We’re on foot from here.”

The two gathered their belongings. Clive already had everything he needed stuffed into a large, army green duffel before Clay met him at the back of the truck and reached in the bed for his own backpack.

“Looks like we’re five miles from Liberty, where I catch another ride, Ned,” Clive said, smiling with his eyes as he threw the duffel onto his back, the strap stretching across his ample and muscular chest. “I’d love to give you a ride all the way to Ithaca, but I can’t, but if I could I would. I may be rich, and I may come off as a freebird, but I do have places to be and in some way I am responsible for people who don’t always appreciate my freebird tendencies.”

“No problem, Clive,” Clay said. “I’m just glad for the company.”

The two walked silently for a few minutes, before Clay broke the silence. “So, what do you think is going to happen next, Clive?” he asked. Clive was a great guy, and a deep thinker, but Clay didn’t believe for a minute that this man had made all of his money just on cattle and land. Nor did Clay think that Clive had gained all of his knowledge and information just reading books. He didn’t know why he felt this way, but there was something about the man that made Clay think that his travel partner knew even more than he was letting on.

They took a few more steps before Clive spoke, and when he did, his accent seemed to have disappeared, and he spoke with clarity and purpose and intent. “I think we’re about to get hit, Clay. Hit real hard. There’s more to this than you can possibly know, and it is likely you will think that I’m crazy after I say it, but what have you got to lose in listening to an old man? We’ve only got five more miles together, it seems.”

The two men watched a lady walk past them in the other direction, pulling two small children in a large plastic wagon. Clive tipped his hat to the lady, but she didn’t notice, or maybe she just ignored the gesture. “I’m heading to Canada,” Clive continued. “My people have a place in Nova Scotia that we’ve been preparing for a dozen years. We’re set up there to ride out what comes next. Got another place—a farm—down in PA. May end up there, we’ll see. We’ve been expecting this for a while.”

“Expecting what?” Clay asked, half afraid of the answer. Up ‘til now he’d thought that he and Clive had in common a kind of rejection of urban life, but this sounded like something more, something like one of those crazy survivalist things where people move off into the woods and build bunkers. He had certainly felt a weird aggression in the last several days, but Clive was talking like there was something much bigger than just social unrest in store.

“Well, there’s a theory, Clay—and it’s way more than a theory, let me tell you—but there is a theory, held by a lot of people that know things in this world, that the Soviets faked their collapse back in ’92.” Clive paused and looked at Clay for effect. Clay swallowed his tongue and said nothing. He simply walked in silence, as if in invitation for the old man to continue, which he did.

“Now, I can’t expect you to believe that based on the mere utterance of a sentence by a stranger on the side of the road, but believe me. There is a lot to it. I could go into reasons, but I’ll just give you one. Did you know that just a couple of days before Sandy hit, the Russians ran a nuclear submarine off the east coast of the USA?”

Clay thought of the woman in the red dress. “No, I didn’t know that, but what does that have to do with anything?”

“Well, it’s just an anomaly that makes you wonder. Why would a country that long ago gave up its dreams of empire risk a high cost naval instrument in such turbulent seas? Why then? Why there? Why do it at all, in fact, if you’ve given up dreams of empire?

“Anyway, according to the theory, they gave themselves 20-25 years to accomplish an important task. Prior to the ‘collapse’ they couldn’t import a speak-n-spell from the west, and their economy was in tatters, and their whole system was a joke. They’ve now had twenty years of receiving Western aid and technology, all the while letting America lash about as the lone superpower, exhausting her resources, her economic and moral strength, and the good will of the rest of the world. The theory says that once the right confluence of events comes to pass; when America is weakened and divided and suffering from losses abroad and disasters at home; when she is at her most vulnerable—well that is when the old guard of communists in Russia will strike.”

Clive waved outward with his left hand then brought the hand back to rub his mustache and readjust his hat. “I’m assuming it will be some kind of EMP strike, but it could be anything from that all the way up to a full nuclear attack.”

Clay stared out at the road as they walked. Cars seemed to be going by faster, and the drivers avoided eye contact as they sped on their way. “And you believe this attack is imminent?” he asked.

“No, Clay,” Clive said matter-of-factly. “I know it is imminent.”

“You know it is imminent — like when my grandmother knew it was going to rain—or you know it is imminent, like in… you have absolute knowledge that this is going to happen, that it is about to happen?”

“Let me ask you a question, Clay,” Clive said, stopping for a moment and looking Clay in the eye. “When your grandmother said it was going to rain, not when she just kind of wondered aloud, but when she said to come inside because it was about to rain… was your grandmother ever wrong?”

“No.”

They walked on in silence for another mile before Clay could find the words to say something, anything, about what he had heard. “I guess we’ll know soon enough, won’t we Clive?”

“Yes, we will Ned Ludd.”

Clay looked at the old horseman who seemed to strain not at all against his heavy burden. More miles washed by as they walked in silence, and the older man didn’t tire in the least. Clay wondered how anyone could be so certain about anything in this life and after a while he didn’t care if Clive was right or wrong. It was refreshing to meet someone who plowed forward and who was certain of his direction and goal. There was a kind of inspiration merely from being in the presence of certainty.

Clay finally broke the silence. “So you’re saying I shouldn’t get that hybrid car I’ve been wanting, and that maybe I shouldn’t depend on my electric stove?”

They both laughed, and Clive winked at him, his eyes smiling like before. “I’m saying y’all don’t even call the power company to get the power back on!” The Savannah accent was back.

Just outside of Liberty, they left the highway, and Clive led with purpose through a copse of trees that brought them to the entrance of what looked like a Golf Course. Looking around, Clay saw the sign that read Grossinger Country Club and noticed that Clive seemed to know the grounds.

The place was eerily abandoned, and Clay figured that no one was playing golf with everything else that was going on in the world. They sat down near the driving range and talked and rested, and after about thirty minutes of chit-chat about things less important than the end of the world, Clay heard the thump-thump-thump sound of a helicopter coming towards them from the north.

The helicopter landed out in the open on the driving range. The chopper was a big one and expensive, a play toy of the rich and famous and of top-level bureaucrats. Clay had seen choppers like this on television shows—usually landing on some rooftop in Manhattan to ferry billionaires to airports and distant garden parties.

Clive held his hat down from the wash of the rotors and turned to Clay while he threw his bag over his shoulder. “You can come with me Ned Ludd. We’ve always got a place for our brothers.”

Clay looked at the helicopter just as a man in some kind of uniform got out and opened the rear door. Looking back to Clive, Clay shouted through the storm of noise, “I appreciate the offer Clive, really I do, but I’ve got to get home. That’s been my plan for some time now, and I want to see it through. Besides, I don’t want to be in that thing when the EMP hits.” He smiled at Clive as they shook hands.

“Well, neither do I, Ned Ludd, but I’m praying I’ll get home safely too.” As he said this, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card and handed it to Clay. “When you get home… if things haven’t crashed before then, give me a call and let me know you made it safely.” Once again, the accent seemed to have vanished, but it was hard to tell with the whirr of the rotors. Clive turned to walk away, then turned back and said, “I like you Ned Ludd. I hope you do alright.”

Clay was going to answer him, but he was gone, and in seconds the helicopter lifted into a sky that had grown cloudy and gray in just the last few minutes. He waved instead, and Clive, looking out through the window, gave him a sharp salute as the chopper pulled away and headed north into the lowering clouds.

CHAPTER 5

Two and a half hours later, as he walked alone northward on the highway, the sun was dropping into the western sky, and the temperature, which had been moderately cool throughout the day, sank with the sun. The weather had begun to turn right about the time that Clive had climbed into his millionaire copter, and the clouds had slowly lowered until they almost seemed to brush the tops of the trees.

Clay thought about that strange encounter as he walked along. Before flying off to his apocalyptic retreat, Clive had mentioned in passing that another storm was coming. He had, of course, spoken in those strange tones about a storm of political intrigue, but there had been something more, an actual weather report of a blizzard or something. Clay had taken out his radio from a side zipper pocket in his backpack, but he’d not been able to get any reception from the few radio stations that still seemed to be transmitting. For a very brief moment, he’d locked onto an AM station from the city, but all they talked about was the upcoming election and the damage on Breezy Point. Nothing of value to him now, nothing of storm movements and forecasts. The station bled away and he was left with scratchy silence.

He flipped up his collar and wiggled his toes inside his boots. It was getting cold now. His very thoughts were getting cold. The smooth, languid restfulness of the walk through the city, the warm seclusion of Veronica’s house, the heated intrigued of the luxurious cabin in Clive’s truck—all that was gone now. His thoughts became sluggish and brittle. He felt his blood move slowly to his extremities and back again to his heart, the movements growing shallower with each successive circuit. He felt the cold first in his fingertips, then his knuckles, then his digits, then his hands.

After Clive’s departure, he walked back to the highway from the Golf Course, heading north-northwest again along the eastern bank of the highway, passing walkers and worried hikers carrying gas cans and sacks and sometimes children. He passed more and more people along the highway. Where were all these people coming from? Some nodded a lukewarm greeting, but most just kept their head down, walking purposefully, their breath pouring out before them like spirits.

As the temperature dropped, and coinciding with the change of the weather and the impending darkness, the number of people on the road—in cars and on foot—had diminished as well, until only now and then did he see anyone else on the road. “I’m going to be cold tonight,” he said aloud, though there was no one around to hear him.

The animals are acting funny. The thought occurred to him, and he didn’t even know why he had the thought, or what it meant. He remembered having this thought a few days before Sandy hit, watching a group of swallows range through the sky, then land in a tree overhead and screech. Now he didn’t hear any birds at all. He could not even hear a dog bark anywhere in the distance. Maybe another storm IS coming.

He passed what might have been a very small hamlet on his right off the access road and, as he did, he hearkened back to Clive’s warning about how people were going to get edgy and dangerous on the roads as time went on. Veronica had said as much to him too, without all the political context. He knew that this was probably true, and not just because Clive and Veronica had said it. He had watched what happened in and around New Orleans only days after Hurricane Katrina, and many of the books he’d begun reading lately, books that fed his discontent with the city, had talked about what might happen in any urban society when people started getting restless after a major event. The line between order and chaos in society could indeed be a very fine one, and the threads that made up that line seemed increasingly strained already. If a blizzard did more to cut off access to gas and groceries and electricity and normal, it could put that social fabric near the breaking point.

Clay had never been a doomsday survivalist, or a doomsday anything, but he was interested in alternative viewpoints. As he had explored a number of these different viewpoints online, and in a bookstore around the corner, he’d been surprised at how many of them actually made some sense. Even Clive, with his apocalyptic vision, had said some things that seemed to resonate. Clay wondered why he was drawn to these kinds of outsider visions. For example, one particular book he’d read in the weeks before the storm had been written by a neo-Amish separatist. He knew that this was a stretch for a guy in Brooklyn. How could he have explained to his friends at the coffee shop that he was reading a book by this guy in Texas named Jonathan Wall who had suggested that a major disaster would eventually strike that would be the straw that would break the camel’s back? Wall stated that such a disaster could begin the precipitous tear in what he believed was an ‘artificial veil of civility’ that perilously held Western Society together. How could Clay even explain to his friends that he was reading a book that dared question the industrial and cultural foundations of the modern society?

No matter. He would be home soon in his farmhouse in Ithaca, and the world could crack open and swallow the city whole, using Texas for desert, and he would be secluded in his forest. He watched his breath form in front of his face and felt his brain congeal around this thought.

Clay decided that he should get off the road, if only to be removed from the possibility of meeting strangers that might be unpleasant. Walking on the back roads might take him several more days to get to his destination, but, in the end, his goal was to actually arrive at that destination, and now he figured his odds of doing so increased in direct negative proportion to the number of people he would encounter on the way. Leave yourself a way out, he thought, that lesson still in his mind. Don’t get trapped!

He walked another mile past the hamlet, then veered to his right to cut through a wooded greenbelt. As he did so, the cold wind began to blow more forcefully, and darkness fell around him like a cloak. He crossed over the northbound access road and headed into some woods that ran alongside the road.

He began to shiver. He wasn’t a survivalist by any stretch of the imagination, but he did know a few things he’d picked up here and there by watching survival shows on the Discovery Channel. He suddenly found himself thankful for those long hours he’d spent sitting in front of the television after Cheryl and the girls had died. He had never been out in the wilderness much, but he had imagined it happening, and he thought that this was half the battle.

In the backpack, he still had the rolled up woolen blanket that Veronica had stuffed in there, and the Mylar survival blanket, folded tight into a small square, still in its plastic wrap, was safely stowed in the side pocket of his pants.

His coat was supposed to be rain proof, and his boots were excellent for hiking. They should keep his feet dry, even if the weather did turn bad. He sent up a little thank you to the heavens for bringing the strange confluence of events to this point. He was truly out in the wilderness now, and he felt ready to face whatever came.

After another thirty minutes of walking northward and away from the highway, the darkness deepened as the heavy clouds dropped down and became fog. No light made itself available to assist him in his efforts to navigate the woods. He stopped, and reaching into his backpack he pulled out the small flashlight Veronica had thought to pack for him. He was so very grateful to have met her and to have talked with her. He made a mental note to send her a letter or postcard upon reaching home, to thank her for her kindness, and now—for likely saving his life.

The woods have been frightful for millennia. When Hawthorne wrote, he made them the seat of mysterious evil. Children’s fairy tales often take the protagonists deep into the forest to teach them a moral lesson in goodness. Thoreau went into the woods to redeem them, but he was only a stone’s throw from civilization and had a cleaning woman come round once a week to do his laundry. Now, as Clay walked deeper into the dark of the forest, he thought through the cold in his feet and the chill on his face that the forest could frighten as well as comfort. He held onto this thought as the cold made his thinking disjointed and his actions more mechanical and instinctive.

He looked around for some high ground and found some in a close growing copse of pine trees and figured that the bed of pine needles under them would make as good and comfortable a bedding as he might otherwise have concocted.

At that point, he got to work making a shelter, working mainly with scattered memories from books and television shows he’d read and seen over the last couple of years. From pine branches he built a shed roof lean-to, open to the south, covering the north wall thickly with more branches that were heavy with needles. When the lean-to roof was dense enough to block the breeze, he built another wall, this one straight up and down, about three feet from the open front of his little hut. He started with two stout branches, pounded them into the ground about four feet apart, and then wove thinner branches between them like wicker. Against this wall he leaned more greenery and branches to make it both a heat reflector and wind break should the wind shift around to the south.

Next he began digging a small trench with his hands and his pocket knife, and eventually a small scoop that he quickly carved from the wide end of a fatter branch with Veronica’s knife. The trench ended up being about ten inches deep, and almost a foot across, and it ran parallel to, and within eight inches of, his heat reflector wall.

Despite the dropping temperatures, he began to sweat from the exertion, and he reminded himself not to let himself get too wet. Hypothermia was now his most immediate enemy and could start very easily were he to get damp in these temperatures. By about eight or nine o’clock, he had the trench finished, and he figured it must be in the high 30’s Fahrenheit outside, and the air was damp and thick and the fog obscured anything from his view that was more than fifteen feet away. A stiff breeze began to pick up from the north as he walked around the campsite picking up rocks to fill in his trench.

He’d learned most of this method from reading the story of a survivalist (he could not recall the man’s name) who had been traveling in the mountains of Turkey during a winter storm. The survivalist had nine or ten locals with him who knew the area and who constantly laughed at him and ignored his warnings when he told them that a blizzard was going to come through the mountains overnight. The survivalist built what he called a “fire bed,” while the Sherpas (for lack of a better word to call them) laughed at him and called him names in their own language. The story ended with the man waking up in the morning after the blizzard and finding all of the Sherpas frozen to the ground and dead. While Clay didn’t expect it to get that cold on this night, he wasn’t taking any chances. It was November, and who knew what kind of storm might be heading his way.

Using the small box of matches he had put in his backpack and some lint pulled from the wool blanket, along with some dried leaves and pine needles, Clay soon had a roaring fire going in his fire bed on top of the rocks he’d spread in the trench. The fire would heat up the rocks, and eventually, when the coals were ready and spread over the whole trench, he would bury the lot again with six to eight inches of soil, pack it down, and on top of this warm ground he would make his bed.

He was pleased with himself and smiled and even laughed a little when the whole exercise of building the fire bed actually worked. As the fire crackled and snapped, causing one of the rocks to explode from the heat, Clay huddled in the wool blanket and warmed himself by the fire.

Despite the fact that he had walked a good portion of the day, he wasn’t overly hungry. He’d eaten the two turkey sandwiches in Middletown, which, though it seemed to be too much at the time, served him well to get him this far. He decided to bed down with the little hunger he felt from not eating supper, saving the two remaining energy bars for tomorrow.

After covering the trench with soil, he had packed it down, stomping it with his boots, feeling the heat from his soles come up into his toes. He took off his jacket and his pants (that’s what the books said to do), wrapped himself in the Mylar blanket, covered that with the woolen blanket, and then carefully placed his coat and pants over the top of that. Figuring that the more layers he had the better, he put his spare set of clothes (the set that Veronica had washed for him) on top of the whole pile to complete his heated cocoon. Twenty minutes later he was surprised by how warm he was. The night would grow colder, he was certain of that, but now he felt happy and content that he would make it through the night no matter how cold it got. If a guy can make it through a blizzard in the mountains of Turkey, surely he could make it through a gentle freeze in mid-state New York.

He closed his eyes and listened to the wind. It whistled through the treetops like a siren’s song.

He woke up during the night and didn’t have any idea what hour it was. He was still comfortable enough, but it was definitely getting colder and everything around him was damp. He couldn’t see in the darkness except to make out the shape of his shelter and the nearby wall of his heat reflector, but he could hear well enough. Only occasionally he would pick up the growl of a car going by on the distant highway, or the low rumble of a faraway train or truck. Once or twice he thought he heard an animal prowling around his camp, and for that reason alone he was glad he had not eaten anything for supper before lying down to sleep. The smells of his camp shouldn’t attract any predators.

He lay there for what seemed like an hour in the blackness thinking about Cheryl and the girls and camping trips with them up near Saranac Lake, or that one summer that they spent a miserable, rainy week in a campground near Niagara Falls when everything went bad and he and Cheryl had quarreled incessantly. He felt the familiar pang of loss and thought through the many things he should have said to her, and what he would give for just a moment of her telling him he was wrong.

As a boy, he’d camped and fished as much as most people his age, and once, at about ten years of age, he’d accompanied his parents on what was intended to be a long hike down the Appalachian Trail. The rugged adventure part of the trip had come to an abrupt end when he had haphazardly tossed a crab apple core at a distant tree, only to have a bear cub drop out of the tree, scaring them all nearly to death. His father had bravely and calmly backed the family slowly towards the car, all the while praying aloud that the cub’s mother wouldn’t show up looking for her offspring. She didn’t, and they spent the rest of the vacation playing “spoons” and “hearts” from the safety of a cabin overlooking the river. The cabin was close to the woods, but closer still to an old store where he’d convinced his mom and dad to take him to buy Dr. Peppers and Moon Pies. He imagined the taste of Moon Pies and wondered if they still made them.

Clay lay there in the dark and considered whether he’d already reached the extent of his camping and survival know-how. Maybe he’d blown his whole compendium of knowledge on the fire bed. He felt pretty confident that he could fish with the little survival fishing kit he’d found in the backpack (another thing for which he intended to thank Veronica), and he might be able to snare some dumb animal with his shoelaces (something else he’d learned on television), but his best bet was to find a backwoods store somewhere where he could use his ready cash to stock up on food. One fire bed did not make him Jeremiah Johnson. He tried to remember the plot of that movie but kept getting it mixed up with the one about Grizzly Adams.

His thoughts drifted over to his meager water supply, and he remembered that of all of the issues and categories of survival needs, water was always supposed to be the first and most important. Just as this occurred to him, he noticed that there was moisture covering the lean-to (and everything else), and he saw several places where, near the corners of the lean-to, water was dripping in constant drops. He pulled back his covers and reached into his backpack for the two empty water bottles he had stored there. Boy is it cold!

After setting the empty bottles to catch the drips, he decided to drink the third bottle of water completely down, since he felt sure the three bottles would fill up overnight, provided the thick, moist air didn’t freeze before morning.

With all three bottles emptied and catching water, he climbed back under his covers and pressed his body down as hard as he could against the warmth radiating up from the fire bed. What time is it? He didn’t know, and before long he was asleep again.

Friday

Morning came and he was up just as soon as the gray of daylight replaced the black of night. He figured it to be sometime between six and seven o’clock, but he couldn’t be sure. The air was clear of fog again, though the clouds were thick and threatening, and he noticed that the temperature must have turned freezing, or very near it. There was a thick frost on everything, and his water bottles had a paste of fog building on the inside. They had ceased to catch water. Of the three bottles he was able to combine them to fill two completely, with a swallow left over for breakfast. His work had netted him 32 full ounces of good drinking water. He was satisfied with that.

Everything was wet. Even his coat, pants, and his spare set of clothes were soaked completely through. He spent the next hour trying to start a fire but was unsuccessful due to the damp. Many of his now precious matches had simply crumbled as he struck them against the box, and the wooden sticks had torn along the strike side, leaving a dangerously small patch of grit. He knew there had to be a trick to starting a fire in the wet, but he had wasted half of his matches, and nothing he carried or could find would catch fire in the thick, humid air of the morning. Even the sticks of the matches wouldn’t burn, and when they did, he’d held them under a piece of wool or a corner of a leaf, until they’d burned down to his fingers. If only I knew more about survival…

His first plan was to put on the damp clothes and hike back to the road, but, deliberating on this idea, he talked himself out of it. He’d made a decision to leave the road for a reason, and that reason was still viable. It was likely that the highway would become increasingly unsafe as time passed, and he didn’t want to go back there. While he could not know what conditions were actually like back on the main highway, the logic of his original decision hadn’t changed. Clive had rambled on about other, less natural, disasters, and while he was skeptical of these, they’d left an ominous feeling in the pit of his stomach. He decided that his trajectory should be away from, and not towards, other people.

Next, he decided that he would just stay put awhile, hoping that the day might clear up and that his clothes and coat and blanket would dry more as the day wore on. He shivered as he thought this. He wasn’t sure how much patience he would have if, after some time, the sky and weather showed no positive changes. As he pondered his situation, and, seeking any warmth he could find, he instinctively put his hand down onto the dry earth under where his bed had been, and he felt the faint heat still radiating from the ground.

A light went on in his head, and he began to dig, first with his hands and then with his wooden scoop, until he had reached the layers of ash and burnt material left over from the fire. Pushing around in the charred remains with a stick he found some coals, still red hot, and now that oxygen was available, they were glowing—even more so every time a breeze blew by. Some of the other lumps of wood, having been starved of oxygen in the covered trench, had become perfect little pieces of charcoal.

Clay jumped to his feet and began to look around for anything… anything… that would burn. On the leeward side of a small hill, he found a place where leaves had swirled and had stacked up quite deep. He pushed off the upper damp layers and found drier leaves underneath. He grabbed a handful of these and rushed back to his shelter as fast as he could. Using the red coals and the dry leaves, he was finally able to kindle a fire, and, after adding successively larger pieces of twigs and branches and the charcoal from the fire bed, soon his fire burned warm enough to dry some of the firewood he’d collected. Before long he had a good and warm fire by which to dry his clothing and his blankets.

Two hours later, his clothes were dry and he was hiking again. As close as he could figure, he was going nearly due north. The weather had not gotten any better, and he was so thankful that he had been able to start a fire, feeling that perhaps he had saved his own life this morning. Whether that was true or not, it made him feel good to think it to be true. After forty-five minutes of walking among the trees, he was warming up and feeling strong, despite his lack of food.

He passed between two farms that looked to be a half mile apart and noticed that there was a minor state road running by the farms in what he hoped was a northerly direction. He revisited his internal debate about staying off the highways but rationalized that this was a little-used paved road and that it would be much safer than the highway he’d already fled. He wasn’t sure he still believed in luck, but he thought he should be able to gain a mile or two quickly traveling by road and that it was less likely that he would run into troublemakers this far into the Catskills. After arguing with himself and the spirit of Clive Darling for a good five minutes, he gave in to his need for speed and started walking along the highway.

An hour later, Clay stopped next to a pond to the east that was within sight of the roadway. In the distance, he could see what appeared to be a farm or some habitation or business — he couldn’t be sure — on the far north side of the pond. The day was dark and gray enough, and he was hungry enough, so he decided to stop and fish awhile along the southern edge where the forest came up to the edge of the water. If trouble appeared or anyone was coming his way, he knew he could disappear quickly into the stand of trees. He wondered at his creeping paranoia and suspicion. What was the reason for this caution? But then he went back to what was becoming for him first principles. It made sense while hiking across strange terrain in a place where hunters or farmers might carry guns to leave himself a way out.

Clay took a few moments to rest and felt the hunger clawing at his belly. He decided to eat the two remaining energy bars, but saved a chunk from the second bar, rolling the doughy material into hard balls to use for bait. Again, he saved the metallic wrapping from the energy bars, but tore off a small section that he then shredded into smaller pieces to serve as something of an eye-catching lure to go along with his bait.

He tied one of the hooks from Veronica’s fishing kit onto the small roll of fishing line, and then threaded a piece of the metallic wrapper from the food bars onto the hook. On went the little ball of energy bar, and then another piece of the metallic wrapper. Clay had no idea if this little experiment would work. The drab grayness of the day might keep the metallic paper from catching any light or the attention of any hungry fish, but it was all he could think of, so he set himself to the task.

Looking around the edge of the pond, he found a small piece of wood, about three inches long, which would serve as a float or bobber for his line. He tied this bobber about two feet up on his fishing line and then, letting out more and more of the line, he threw the hook, line, and bobber out into the pond, holding tightly to the small roll of line. Clay sat quietly for maybe ten minutes, holding the line almost breathlessly. Before long, though, the cold of the day gripped him, and his patience for holding the line grew thin, and he wrapped his end of the line around a heavy rock and stepped into the trees to lay down for a rest.

He found a good straight tree along the edge of the pond that would block him from view if anyone were to look this way from the road. He was still within sight of his line as he collapsed against the tree, tired from the exertions of the morning. The air was really starting to bite with the cold, and he felt the moisture level rising in the air, and he began to sense a wicked cold coming his way. His eyes were closed for what seemed like seconds when suddenly the air was filled with a fine mist, and he grimaced and furrowed his brow hoping that he wasn’t about to get the worst of his current dreads—any combination of rain, sleet, or snow. His earlier good mood and self-satisfaction degraded along with the weather.

He closed his eyes for a moment, silently crying out for wisdom to the spirit of Clive Darling, or the gods of chance and fortune, or even the blessed God of Heaven, anyone who might hazard to hear. Receiving no response, he blasphemed the lot of them and peeked through one eye and saw that his bobber was no longer visible. Crawling to his feet in the mist, he rushed over to his line, pulled it in, and saw that he had indeed snagged a fine fish.

The little ten-inch brown trout was wiggling gamely on the ground, and Clay reached over and picked it up by its jaw, holding it out to inspect his catch. He had never even heard of anyone catching a trout on an energy bar, figuring that they usually ate flies and things that were on the top of the water. But hey, why look a gift fish in the mouth? He chided himself for making such a silly joke but then forgave himself because he was hungry and slightly delirious. Then he looked the fish in the mouth and removed the hook.

He knew enough to gut and scale the fish, which he did with his pocketknife on the flat rock he had used to weigh down his line. After this task was finished, he wrapped the fish in the plastic wrapping from the Mylar blanket—You see, it makes sense to hold onto everything! he thought—and slipped the fish into the side pocket of his pants. He’d cook it when he could get to a place where he could start a fire.

Despite the damp and cold, Clay made sure to carefully wrap up his line and put it and the little hook back into the little emergency fishing case. All of his stuff stowed again in his backpack, he washed his hands in the pond and then headed into the forest to find a place to build a fire and warm himself.

Sometimes errors of judgment—whether from ignorance, pride, or even stupidity—pile themselves on top of each other until they are left to be catalogued and surmised only later by the people who find the bodies. Other times, men’s lives are spared by luck, or chance, or divine providence, and they live to compile and analyze their errors themselves. In either case, when individuals reckon themselves lost, lacking a map, they often turn inward for the answers. They stumble forward with limited information, having finite senses and reason, and the hope that springs eternal in their breast either leads them further into, or out of, the wilderness. They attribute everything behind them to happenstance and everything before them to be subjects for their cunning and skill. And, all the time, the world spins on. We, of all people, can forgive honest strivers their mistakes and blunders, but nature and reality are often less forgiving. Some mistakes you only get to make once, and most of us are too limited to know exactly which of our own errors might turn out to be fatal.

The ground Clay traversed grew increasingly rugged, and the fine mist turned first to tiny sleet pellets, and then into snow as he trekked through the forest. He was looking for something—he knew not what—but some kind of natural shelter of rocks or trees wherein he could hide from the wind and snow. He didn’t like his chances of building another lean-to and fire bed in this weather, and he knew he felt better and warmer when he walked, so head and face down he trudged into the forest looking up now and then to see if his place of rest had been found.

All of this time, Clay had thought he was walking north, but he was actually walking east-northeast—away from his goal, and deeper into the forest. The snow started to stick and his thoughts stuck together too, but he had a fresh fish in his pocket and water in his backpack, and he believed that all he needed was shelter in order to find his happiness again.

A couple more miles and he crossed a snow covered road of some sort. Small, probably a logging road or a fire road, he thought. It didn’t seem to head anywhere better than where he already was. He guessed (wrongly) that the road headed back west so he just crossed over it and kept walking back into the forest on the other side, maintaining what he thought was his northerly route. After a while, walking as straight as he could manage in the conditions, the wind died down and the flakes turned into the big wet kind. The Inuit have a name for this kind of snow, but Clay didn’t.

The whole country began to look beautiful and peaceful to him, and he paused for a moment to look at it more closely. The hills rose around him, more sharply here, and he marveled at the charms of the place. He recalled, very vividly, a memory of the distinctive and poignant quiet he had known in the winter, in the woods, in Ithaca. Cheryl had been at his side as they watched the flakes fall and one caught on her nose as he bent forward to kiss it off. Now, Clay looked out over the countryside and saw the snow settling in the branches in their beautiful crystalline purity and grew lost in the moment even as God looking down from his heavens would have seen him lost in the white of the world.

He saw a remarkable hill a hundred yards to his right, and it struck him that this might be just what he was looking for. As he got closer, he made out at the top of the hill some huge rocks and boulders, and he ran toward it and shouted into the sky. He skipped most of the way with his hands thrust into the air in victory, like Rocky ascending the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum.

Coming up to the low hill, he climbed it quickly and confidently and found a small, somewhat sheltered area behind a large rock. He clumsily attempted to cross himself in celebration—not even knowing why or what that genuflection really meant. He wasn’t religious, but if he got through this and found his way home, he promised to praise Clive and Veronica and all of the other gods for the rest of his life.

He rested for a few minutes, tasting the cold with his tongue and embracing the vitality brought on by adrenaline and the chill now bracing his back, then he pulled off his backpack and set himself the task of trying to start a fire. He gathered together some twigs and a few scattered needles and leaves and piled them along the base of the rock. Then he pulled off some lint from his wool blanket, just as he had done the previous night, and confidently arranged everything in order so that all would be at hand when it was needed. He fished the matches out of the pack, noting that he only had seven or eight left. “This ought to be easy,” he said to himself aloud and immediately regretted it. Though he was confident after the previous successes that all should go well for him again, he’d already learned not to take that success for granted.

Striking the first match, he had barely touched it to the small roll of wool fibers when the breeze, swirling around the rock, blew the match out. Clay cursed, and then tried again. This time the match blew out immediately, never even reaching full flame before it was snuffed out by the wind. Clay turned his back from the direction he thought the wind was coming and struck the third match only to have it blow out when a stiff, frigid blast snuffed the flame again.

He never started the fire. His hands were too cold to fully cup around the flame and his fingers too stiff to do anything more than the perfunctory motions of striking. He tried every possible combination of wind blocks with the remaining matches, but each, in turn, was blown out by the wind. Clay slumped back against the rock, cursed loudly once again, then huddled into himself trying to think of what to do next. His stomach ached in response to his hunger and his mind was muddled by the cold.

He went through his options. Back to the forest road… but where did it lead? That road seemed (to him) to be heading in the wrong direction, and what if it just went on interminably into the forest preserve? There was no “pro” except that it was a road and that the walking might be easier. Look for another answer. Back the way he came? All the way back to the pond? There was a house or something there! But what were the chances he could find his way back? He looked over the low rocks in front of him and couldn’t even see the footprints that had followed him the last few yards up the hill. He’d come miles, and if he did find his way back (which was doubtful), who says that he’d find any help there? Besides, Clive had infected Clay with an onset of paranoia, and in his cold and cloudy thinking he figured he’d just as likely find trouble going backward as forward. Keep walking? That seemed to him to have the greatest promise. The geography was getting more rugged, which meant he could find a good shelter or a cave. To his thinking, he might find a home or cabin or safety and warmth by accident walking towards home and Ithaca as easily as he would find it going in any other direction.

Climbing back down from the hill, he was a much different man than the victorious one who had taken it by infantry charge only minutes earlier, and he was met with the enormity of his defeat upon clearing the base of the hill by a frozen gale of snow and cold that caught his breath away with its intensity. For the first time the words formed in his brain, and the reality of it crystallized before him. I might die.

The next few hours were away and beyond all that Clay had ever imagined a blizzard could be, and lightly clothed and almost past shivering, he struggled forward against the wind and piercing snow, step by frozen step. His mind was not functioning properly, and he heard voices around him but could not find the strength to search for them. He heard Clive say “Nor’easter,” but some part of his mind knew that Clive had never said “Nor’easter” to him, and that Clive was somewhere in Nova Scotia drinking cocoa by a hot fire. He heard Veronica lecturing him about fleeing and cowardice, and he knew that, too, had not happened, but in his mind the manifestation of this lecture was as certain as the blizzard, and crueler and infinitely angrier. He heard Cheryl, but could not make out her words, and his mind visited Jack London’s books and Andy Taylor’s Mayberry, and tales of political intrigue and philosophies of the imminence of death. His mind seemed to swirl out of control and rise up from his being and surround him on every side.

He did not know, and had no way to figure, how long he had been walking, and he began to keep time by how far down he still had feeling in his legs, and how much of his face and hands still reacted to stimuli from his brain. Still, he kept struggling forward. Once, he discovered that the thing that always seemed to happen in the books about blizzards or climbers on Mt. Everest was actually true. Without knowing how he had gotten there, he was lying down. He began to feel warmer and sleep started to steal through him. His mind was of two parts—the one side against the other—arguing in his head that he should both go to sleep and get the hell up and start walking. The dreamlike state that was stealing upon him made everything light and beautiful even as the small voice in his head screamed that his body was shutting down and that if he went to sleep he would never wake up.

Struggling to his feet was like pressing against frigid death, and he noticed through the snow that the day had grown darker and that night was falling. How long had he lain there in the snow? Doesn’t matter now, keep walking or die, the man with the red beard on the bike had said. Dusk and then night fell like a weight, and his mind started to slip in step with his feet, and coming upon a particularly steep decline, he tumbled forward, rolling head over heels down a slope, where he came to rest against something that his brain had trouble identifying. Looking up to the sky and darkness, he saw in what may have been a single, blue shaft of moonbeam what seemed like an infinite regress of netting. Was it the bridge? No, it was lighter in texture, in weight, and it held him as he leaned against it. Not cables, but what? Chain-link. Rising into the heavens and curving out over his head in a series of barbed-wire overhangs. Chain-link, and a sign hanging on it. It took him a few seconds to realize that he had stumbled into a fence and that maybe he was saved.

Crawling to his deadened and icy feet with the help of the chain-link savior, he got himself upright and tried to read the sign but could not manage it through the snow and ice and dark. He tossed his backpack to the ground and found that he had not the dexterity to open it with his frozen hands so he managed it with his teeth and then reached in and took hold of his flashlight in his paw of a hand, and, struggling to get it to come on, he finally achieved it and shone the bright light at the sign…

He looked again and saw that the fence was topped with loops of razor wire, and looking around now with an increase in attention born of adrenaline and fear and the possibility of salvation, he noticed that there was no light in any direction. There was only the faint gray-blue light that snow gives off when there is some moon to be seen. He could not see the moon and he could barely see at all. There! Maybe he imagined it— in the distance the outline of a building maybe a hundred yards away inside the fence. Something institutional.

He started to stumble down the fence line and tried to shout but found it difficult. After fifty yards or so he came across another sign that repeated the warnings and the threats of death and worse if he did not stay five-hundred yards from the fence. Another fifty yards and he came upon a section of fence that had obviously been demolished by a succession of falling trees—damage from Sandy or maybe the Nor’easter, if that is what this was.

Disregarding the warnings, because being shot, at this point, seemed to him like a deliverance, he stumbled through the opening in the wrecked fence provided by the toppled trees, and steadying himself against one of these trees, he bowed his head, trying to gather together the strength to make it to the building he could now see in the distance.

Don’t get trapped! His father called to him through the cold. He squinted and looked into the shadows. How could he consider, even in this moment of delusion, crippled by fear and terror, a suggestion to turn back? The irony. Those who would find the body would write down in their notebooks that their investigation had shown he had eschewed the salvation of one prison while fleeing from another. He was hysterical in his panic for his life.

Adrenaline and hope and fear will only get you so far, but together these forces were enough to get him across the battlefield of blowing snow and frigid winds, and when he blinked again he was huddled up against the building and struggling to clear his brain enough to think of what to do now. His victories had come in steps. First he had made it to a fence he did not know was there. From there, he had made it to a threshold in the fence that he could not have even imagined would be there. Now he had made it to the building. Could he find an entrance? Blind luck had gotten him this far, why give up on it now?

He placed his left hand against the building, and as he struggled forward, he kept his frozen fingers in contact with the structure so that his mind wouldn’t forget where he was and would remind him that warmth and salvation were somewhere within that wall. Struggling through drifts and the swirling snow, he collapsed twice, but will and the touch of the wall kept him going as he resumed his trudging. After a few minutes, he noticed a break in the endless expanse, and hurried to the breech as best as he was able. He fell forward and flung himself into an enclosure of heavy cinder blocks and came face to face with an unmarked steel door, painted black—all but for a window placed 2/3 up its height.

He was out of the wind and snow now, and the blessed relief washed over him for a few seconds. Hope began to spark, ever so lightly in his breast, and he shouted out towards the window, not knowing what he said. The window was made of glass, thick and foreboding, crisscrossed with chicken wire and probably shatter proof. Is this a prison?

He shouted again and banged on the glass with his hands, and then screamed even louder with the pain that shot through him into his brain from the impact of his frozen hands on the glass. “HELP ME!” he screamed again and again, as tears, unbidden, began to fall down his face.

The hope that had burned brightly for a mere moment began to dim again after several minutes of banging and screaming. His head slipped down towards his chest, and he noticed for the first time, incongruently, that he now had a beard. He hadn’t shaved in a week. Had it been a week? He noticed because his tears and snow and ice had frozen into it. He closed his eyes. He was under shelter and out of the worst of the weather, but it was well below freezing, and again the specter of death seemed to darken his thoughts. He thought about praying but gave up on the idea. Why start now? He opened his eyes again and looked up, and he saw a light fixture in the ceiling of the entranceway. He looked at it, and as he did, the thoughts only murkily working their way through his brain, he knew he was going to die, but he hoped his last hope that that singular light would come on… and when he did—or as he did—inconceivably, the light blinked on.

CHAPTER 6

Clay pounded on the door, screaming. With his face frozen, his shouts sounded mostly incoherent, even to himself. Somebody here? Somebody hear me! The meaty side of his fist felt dead as it landed with cold steel thuds. He gasped for air. Ceasing his struggles for a moment, he leaned on the door, catching his breath. It is so cold. My being is cold. His thoughts felt like gel in his skull.

There was a small sign next to the door that he missed before but now, with the light, he could see it. It was written in what looked like Russian. Russian? He looked again. Really? Really. There it was. It was unmistakable. There were letters that seemed to be backwards, and others that were clearly not English. Brain freeze. People suffering from hypothermia often report confusion in their thinking. That has to be it. He blinked and tried to refocus. What was he doing? Oh, yeah.

He returned to the futile pain of pounding his fists on the door. He kicked it with his boots, feeling the dead vibrations of the cold shimmer through his leg. He screamed as loud as he could and kept screaming and kicking until, from somewhere—some interminable distance away—he thought he heard a faint sound. Shussle. Click. There it was again. Shussle… Click.

The sound grew closer. It grew closer still. He could hear it through his own pounding and the kicking but the command from his brain to cease his protests had not yet reached the rest of his body. Seconds later, he saw light through the window and watched an inner door open into the small vestibule behind the window. He heard a faint, unrecognizable noise, and then a face appeared at the small, square opening, looking out at him. The face stared at him awhile, squinting its eyes and shaking its head. No voice could be heard, but he could tell from the round and exaggerated syllables the face made with its mouth that it was shouting, “Go away!”

Clay pleaded to the face. It was a man’s face, and a man should have compassion, shouldn’t he? His thoughts marched through the muck of his mind before spilling out of his mouth in his cold and frozen language. “Hypothermia,” his tongue spat out. Somewhere in his brain he thought that this should be enough, but he forced his face to form more words. “C’mon! Dying! Need Help! Nowhere… to… go. Can’t go! Need to warm up, that’s all. Don’t leave me out here, man!” He didn’t know if the words were intelligible or not. He didn’t know if they could be heard, but this is what his brain told him he was saying.

The face of the man in the window refused. It shouted back, and Clay could now hear a voice, although the sound was muffled and distant. “This is a secure facility! No one is allowed in here. You need to go away! You can be arrested or shot. Just go away!”

Clay laughed. He was hysterical. “Arrest me then! Or shoot me,” he shouted, laughing heartily through his weakened state. He hoped that the face could hear him. He had to will himself to concentrate. “Arrest me! Please.” Then his voice dropped to a whisper, and he leaned his head on the glass. “I’m dying. I’m as good as dead anyway.”

That’s it, he thought. I’ll just die right here. Yelling again, he made his closing plea. “If you don’t let me in, I’ll just die right here in the doorway. Then you’ll have to deal with my body in the morning!” Each word was exaggerated in elongated, shallow syllables. “If you don’t open up right now, I am going to lie down here and… I’ll die, man. I’ll just go to sleep…”

As he said those words he felt a bone-aching tiredness wash over him like he had never felt before. Sleep. He looked at the face in the window, and a Whitman quote streamed forth out of him before he could even think of why he remembered it: “I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.” He shouted the line at the face in the window and the face looked back, as if it was considering how beautiful death might be, how lovely it would be to see it. Then the face dropped out of the window and disappeared.

Clay felt his whole body slump and suddenly recognized the tension that had gripped him while he had been pleading for his life. He strained his eyes in the mix of dark and light and shadow, looking around for the best place to lie down and die. Going painfully to one knee on the frozen concrete, he was just about to sink into the snow when there was a rattle of keys at the door. The lock turned and the door slowly opened. Clay turned to look behind him but was instantly blinded by the light as he stood to his feet. He heard the voice that had just been shouting from behind the door.

“Get in here. Quickly.”

“Thank you,” Clay muttered, stumbling through the doorway before the body of the man at the doorway. “Thank you.”

“Listen, pal,” the man said, dipping his head in an attempt to look Clay in the eye. “I don’t know what you’re doing out in this mess, and I really don’t care. Don’t ask me for anything, don’t ask any questions, and only speak when you’re spoken to. You got it? I can get in big trouble for letting you in here. You got any weapons?”

“No.”

“You have any warrants?”

“Any what?”

“Warrants. You wanted for anything?”

“Ummm. No, sir. Nothing I know of.”

“Don’t be cute. You do or you don’t.”

“No. I don’t.”

“Well, that’s good. At least that’s something. OK,” the man said, pointing to a chair across the tiny vestibule. “Sit over there and be quiet.” Clay stumbled to the chair, almost falling from the weight of his burden as the heat from the room rushed into his body. The man lifted Clay by the arm and helped him out of his backpack.

The man was tall, solidly built, and clearly not very happy. His hair was thin and wispy and brown and he spent a good deal of time trying to cover that fact, if the swirls on his head were any sign. He wore black fatigue pants and a black windbreaker with the word SECURITY printed on the back in yellow. He looked Clay up and down, then unzipped the backpack and rifled through it for a minute.

“Anything in your pockets?” the man asked, brusquely.

“A fish,” Clay replied without thinking, only then remembering that he still had the brown trout in his pants pocket.

“A fish?”

“One brown trout, sir. Gutted and scaled. Possibly frozen.” Silently he got permission to pull out the fish. Clay extracted the fish, still wrapped in the plastic bag.

“I won’t even ask what that is all about.”

The man looked at Clay from head to toe again, then did a quick and cursory pat down before shaking his head again. “A brown trout. Now I’ve seen everything. Ok, man, here is the deal. I’ve got a holding cell here by my office. You can use it for tonight, but you’ll be unceremoniously kicked out of here in the morning. And I mean it. I can get you some coffee and a little bit of food. Maybe I’ll cook your fish. I might even be able to dry your clothes. But you are out of here in the morning even if hell itself has frozen over, you understand?”

“Yes, sir. Out in the morning.”

“Ok, then. My name is Todd, Todd Karagin, Officer Karagin, but you can just call me Todd,” he said. He turned and walked back through the second door, indicating that Clay should follow him. He continued talking as he walked. “This place is a juvenile detention facility, but don’t let that make you think you’re in a day care. This facility is for long-term, hard-core criminals. Murderers. Rapists. That sort of thing. This ain’t Oliver Twist. Some of the people in here will cut you up like you cut up that fish.”

Clay tried to look around as he shuffled after Todd, but he shivered so much that his teeth ground together and his vision vibrated and was cloudy and dark.

“I am… Cl.. Cl… Clay. Sorry. I’m very… cold.”

“Ok, Clay,” Todd said, leading him down a small hallway before stopping to open a series of locks on a door. He motioned Clay through and Clay walked along the hallway feeling the thaw in his face as he worked his jaw to get back his feeling in it. “Here we are. In here.” He felt a hand on his shoulder as Todd guided him into a lighted cell to his left. “Let’s see if we can get you warmed up. We call this place ‘The Tank’. It’s your standard temporary holding cell. There’s a heavy blanket in here and a pillow. Strip your clothes off and wrap yourself in the blanket. I’ll go get you some warm clothes you can wear. I hope you don’t mind prison orange.”

“No…no… no, sir. I don’t mind,” Clay said, though something in him did mind just a little.

He looked around the cell. It had a large, thick, reinforced glass window that ran the length of the hallway, and the cell itself was approximately eight feet long on each wall. The bed was a concrete slab built into the opposite wall, and there was no sink. There was a small stainless steel toilet built low to the ground. No mirror. The mattress was a thin foam pad, covered in cloth, and stained from who knows what. On the mattress were a folded army blanket and a pillow in a clean pillow case.

“Listen, Clay,” Todd said sharply, “I have to run and get you some clothes from supply. Here is the way this works. I’m not going to lock you in, but you need to know that I’m helping you out at huge risk to myself and my own future. I like my job, so until you walk back out that door, I’m God to you. I am the law and the testimony in this place.” He stopped speaking for a minute, and looked at Clay shivering before him.

“You a Democrat, Clay?”

“Man,” Clay shook his head, stomping his feet and shaking his hands from the cold and shivering uncontrollably, “I’m… I’m whatever you say I am until I leave here, Officer Todd.”

“Just Todd. Good. The election’s in four days. Could go either way, don’t you think? It don’t matter much to me who wins, though. We’ll still be here doing our thing.” His voice trailed off, causing Clay to wonder whether he might have some deeper meaning. Then the man snapped to and said, more in command than suggestion, “Alright, get out of those wet clothes and I’ll go find you something dry.”

“Thanks again, Todd,” Clay said to the man’s back as he sat on the bed and watched the word “SECURITY” in bold yellow walk out of the cell and then turn to the right, only to take an immediate left and disappear down a darkened hallway.

A split-second later, just as Clay started to clutch at his clothes and the pain in his fingers shot through with warmth, Todd re-appeared in the light, the circular orb in the ceiling making his face look ominous and shadowed. He raised his voice to call Clay from the hall, through the window. “Listen, Clay. I’m serious. There’re some bad actors in here. Don’t go nosing around. Stay put. Don’t make me sorry I let you in.”

“No problem, Todd,” Clay nodded, even as he wondered why Todd felt it so necessary to stress the point.

Why so much security for children?

Clay stripped off his cold, wet clothing, and when he was naked he wrapped himself in the wool blanket. It felt good to have something against his skin that was not frozen and wet. He began to shiver again, and some of the shivers went down the whole length of his body and even hurt as his lower back shook furiously.

He sat for a moment and felt his heart pump and tried to inspect his fingers and toes for frostbite. As he did so, some faint but transient insight blinked on in his brain… what was it? What was that thought? His mind struggled against the cocktail mix of senses and emotions that churned inside him. Confusion, on the rocks, but with a warm radiant buzz, shaken, not stirred. He felt drowsiness and apathy and a strange sense of pain, comfort, and victory. Groggy, almost as if he had a concussion, and his brain hurt when he tried to focus too hard on one thing. He felt thrilled to be alive, but he was overwhelmed with worry and fear. Looking around again, he heard a small voice scream silently inside himself as the flash of insight clarified for him again. This is a cell! Don’t stay in here! You might be locked up, trapped, with no way out!

He dismissed the thought as quickly as it formed. He wasn’t here as a criminal or some offender. He was a guest. Even Dad would understand that. He pressed his fingers through his newly-grown beard. He could leave right now if he wanted to. Can’t I? Sure I can. But he didn’t want to. Not yet. He had almost died in that storm.

The room was of cinderblock construction, painted institutional white with light green trim that looked like someone had painted it in a hurry. Or maybe the workmen had painted it with their feet. That was something his dad always said when he’d done subpar work… Did you do that with your feet? It was sloppy in its lines and drips of paint were scattered along the edges of the floor. It made him feel claustrophobic so he moved over into the doorway and from there he took a step out into the hallway.

Across from him stood another locked doorway—like the exterior door through which Todd had brought him into the facility. The window on the door was also crisscrossed with chicken wire. The hallway adjacent, which Todd had walked down before disappearing into another set of locked doors, was dark except for some very low emergency lighting inset into the ceiling about every ten feet. The hallway was about twenty yards long. The hallway where he stood as he stepped out of his cell continued another twenty feet or so to the right, where it was bisected by another, similar door. Was this the door he had just walked through? He suddenly found himself disoriented. Through the glass he could see the hallway continued about twenty feet, where it terminated at a third door, from which light poured forth.

Ten feet from Clay’s cell, on the left, looked to be an office, the kind you could pass right through into another part of the building. Clay listened down the hallway but heard no noise emanating from there. He had presumed (with a cloudy head and very little real information) that Todd must have disappeared into a security office, and passing through it there must be a hallway that opened into another part of the facility. Standing in the hallway, the facility reflected and multiplied eerie silence. There was no sound, save the sound of his breathing.

Standing barefoot on the highly polished floor he tried to focus his thoughts, choosing for the moment to think of warm things—the sun on his face through the bay window in the old farmhouse, Hemingway at a bullfight in Madrid eschewing the more expensive “la sombra” (shade) seats, to sit in “el sol” (the sun)… his fire bed last night… was that just last night? When had he seen Clive? Yesterday? Was that yesterday? It seems like a week ago, now. His brain hurt and confusion overwhelmed him again.

Hypothermia was funny, in an unfunny way. He could remember some things, things he didn’t even try to think of, with alarming clarity, and others were all scrambled up like eggs in his brain. He heard his father saying, “You have to play the cards you are dealt, but leave yourself a way out.” He tried to remember what Clive looked like. A moment later, after a struggle, he said, “Sam Elliot,” but no one was around to hear it.

He walked forward, unthinking, just moving in order to create some modicum of warmth. Unconsciously he started to jog in place, but doing that made him feel precariously balanced and he feared he might slip on the shiny surface of the floor, so he stopped and just rocked back and forth, trying to use his thighs to produce some element of heat for his blood. He looked up into the window across the way, and then his eyes focused for a second and he moved forward again, looking down the hall and through the second door towards the bright light in the distance.

As his eyes focused, he noticed that the emergency lights in the hallway were a little brighter than he had first thought, and as he focused his eyes on the distant light coming through the third door there was a slight modulation in the light and Clay thought to himself that the lights overhead had blinked, but then he stood and watched the modulation and suddenly became aware of a slight electrical hum coming from a light overhead.

Some faces appeared in the window in the distance. They had been there before, but he hadn’t seen them in the light. Now, as his senses returned, they came into focus and he could see, but not hear, that they were shouting and beckoning to him. His heart jumped. He felt the cold of the floor on his feet. He could not read their lips or hear their shouts, but he could see that a few of the faces seemed to be red from crying. Their hands were clawing at the window in exactly the same way that he had cried out and clawed at the window outside the facility only moments ago. This connection, though unidentified in his conscious mind, tore at his heart and soul. He blinked in incomprehension.

The people behind the glass motioned to him, and in his short-term memory he heard, conformed to the movements of their lips, his own voice screaming out for someone to hear him and save him. But, in reality, he could not hear the voices at all. He thought of the face staring out at him through the glass, and wondered if that is the way he had looked, pawing and beating on the glass to be let in. The juxtaposition of the wild gesticulations of the faces and the utter silence of the hallway was jarring, and his thoughts remained jumbled and confused.

Whoever was locked up in that distant room was motioning to him, and as he focused his eyes again a sign was held up, written crudely on paper. Clay narrowed his eyes to try to read it, and his squint blocked some of the light, but the light from behind the faces shone through the paper and he could make out some letters. It was only, maybe, forty feet to the end of the corridor, but it was through windows crisscrossed with chicken wire and his brain was still fuzzy as he struggled to solve the puzzle.

Focusing his eyes intently the chicken wire disappeared and he noticed that the sign was written in Russian. Russian again? He felt his knees buckle slightly and his head grew light and, shaking his head at the faces he motioned helplessly and wondered if this was another of his recent delusions. Sorry. I don’t read Russian, he pantomimed. He tried to communicate with his eyes, but that didn’t work any better. I’m just a man on a walk… a beautiful walk out of the prison of my old life.

Different faces appeared in the window and also made wild pleadings for help. He blinked and Cheryl appeared in his memory and was transported to the other side of the glass. He was jolted for a second, then shrugged. “Sorry, Cheryl,” he gasped, surprising even himself at the words. I can’t help you.

Try to warm up, Clay said to himself, and began to pace back and forth down the short hallway, stepping back into his cell after a moment to sit on the bed again. Todd had told him not to snoop around. He suddenly wondered whether there might be cameras watching him, and he did his best to appear unconcerned about the faces he’d just seen down the hallway. This wasn’t, in the end, all that difficult. He did not want to encourage anyone who might be looking to him as a way of escaping their own prison. He thought of Mrs. Grantham and the doll-eyed walkers that he and Clive had passed on the roadside. I have a prison of my own that I’m busy escaping, thank you very much.

He thought of the door that led back out into the cold blizzard, telling himself that he could leave anytime at all, and that he was perfectly free, and saying it firmly, out loud, he mostly believed it. Isn’t that what we all tell ourselves? But he had just come within a hair’s breadth of freezing to death in a blizzard the likes of which New York had never seen and the muting and silencing of his compassion was a momentary need brought on by his reason. He decided that it would be best for the moment to do precisely as Officer Todd had asked.

He did not know how long he waited. Time seemed to have disappeared since he’d begun his walk through the mountains. Was it now Friday night? Or was it Saturday night? He got up and paced the floor. He sat down on the edge of the bed. He looked down the hallway again, noticing signs here and there, all written in Russian. What is this place? Shaking his head, he turned and walked back into the cell.

He thought to squeeze out his socks so they would dry faster, so he did that to all of his clothes, ringing them into the toilet and then stretching them out on the concrete bunk. He remembered Clive’s business card so he pulled it out of his pants pocket and blew on it for a second before sticking it into the zippered pocket of his pack. The memory is a funny thing. He was unsure of exactly what day it was, but he remembered Clive’s business card.

His body and his mind slowly reconnected. If he’d been asked, he would have said that the period from his entry into the facility until now had taken hours. In actuality, it had only been minutes. As he sat on the bed and his core temperature came up, Clay suddenly became aware of a noise in the hall. Keys turning. Clay heard whistling and a moment later Todd returned with steaming hot coffee, some garish prison clothes, blue slip on shoes, and a few more blankets.

“Alrighty Clay my-boy, here’re some temporary clothes and warmth for you. Be glad you aren’t being in-processed into this facility permanent-like. You wouldn’t like it in here.” Todd set everything down on the end of the bed and handed the coffee to Clay, who took it gratefully and with copious thanks.

“Bring those over into the office when you’re done getting dressed. I’ll throw them in the dryer for you. Oh, and bring your fish too.”

Todd turned to leave again and, as he did, Clay thanked him again profusely, but Todd just waved his hand at him dismissively. As he stepped out of the cell, Clay asked, “What is this place, Todd?”

“I told you. It is a juvenile detention facility. In layman’s terms it’s a juvie prison run jointly by the state of New York and the Federal Government for hard-core juvenile offenders.”

“Then why are all the signs in Russian? I… I didn’t stumble into Siberia did I?” Clay asked, smiling at his joke and trying his best to be polite.

Todd smiled but the smile seemed forced. “Well, Clay, generally when someone saves your life and offers to cook your fish for you it is best not to ask too many questions. That was part of our deal. This is a secure facility, after all, so let’s be clear about that.” He looked at Clay as if the matter was settled, slightly jutting out his chin and narrowing his eyes. Then he relaxed and added, “Listen, I figure your brain is still a little frozen from your hike and the details may be a little cloudy. Drink your coffee and put on these dry clothes and I’ll talk with you in the office when you’re done.”

Five minutes later, Clay walked into the office, feeling sheepish and embarrassed in the jail clothing, but refreshed nonetheless. He had the blanket around him and carried the wet clothes wrapped up in his shirt. Todd took the clothes from him and dropped them into a plastic mail basket next to his desk. Clay smiled to him and handed Todd the fish.

“Here in a minute I’ll go get you some supper,” Todd said, looking down at the fish, “and this will be most of it.” He slid out from behind the desk. “We’re shorthanded due to the storms, and our supplies are way down. Do you want another cup of coffee? We’ve got plenty of coffee.” Clay nodded, and Todd took his cup over to the coffee maker and filled it to the top.

“You still have power, I see. Sandy didn’t knock it out around here, I guess?” Clay asked, taking the coffee from Todd and nodding his thanks.

“Sandy was only the first blow, man. Power has been sketchy since she went through four or five days ago, but it’s looking like this nor’easter is going to do most of this area in BIG-TIME.” He really laid emphasis on those final words and Clay noticed to himself how quickly the memory of Sandy had faded. Already it was “four or five days ago” and he could relate, having lost his own sense of time in the aftermath. Todd continued, “Power’s out all over the eastern seaboard and some people are saying that it might be out for a long time. Radio called it a cascading blackout, and it’s more serious than it sounds. Last I heard they’re shutting down the nuke plants. We’re on a generator right now. As you probably saw out there, fuel was a problem even before the Nor’easter hit. Now it’s near impossible to get. That’s why some of the areas and hallways in this place only have emergency lighting levels right now. As is, though, we’ve got enough fuel for a week, maybe more if we really cut back our usage. In a serious emergency, we can get some more backup fuel from nearby, and if the stuff really hits the fan, I’m sure the National Guard would have us pretty high up on the list to get gasoline. One way or another, it looks like it’s going to be a long month or so before things get back to normal.”

There was that word again, Clay thought. What is “normal”? Seriously? Was it ‘normal’ in the millennia before his great-grandparent’s generation, or in the state that almost a quarter of the world’s population still live in today, where people have no concept of readily available electrical power? No running addiction to fuel? Who gets to define that? He didn’t say this to Todd. He simply shrugged his shoulders and sipped his coffee. It felt good to be back in his body.

“How long are they saying this storm might last?” Clay asked, hoping beyond hope that the nor’easter might blow through quickly and that he could really get back on the road in the morning.

“I don’t know. It looked bad last time I checked. Could be a couple of days,” Todd replied, “why? Where’re you headed?”

“Up near Ithaca. I got out of the city on Wednesday.” He stopped himself. “Or was it Tuesday? Man, are the days just running together for you now?” Todd nodded in agreement. “Anyway, caught a ride up yesterday, and then…”

“… then you got lost in the worst blizzard up here in modern memory? Yep,” Todd grinned, “that sounds about right. You were lucky to make it anywhere out there, man. Counting Sandy and now this storm, they’ll be stacking up bodies like cordwood after this is over.”

“I hope not,” Clay said, narrowing his eyes, uncomfortable with the word picture.

“You can bet on it,” Todd said, nodding his head and indicating ‘outside’ with his coffee cup, “one thing I know is that in this world today, people die when things aren’t running absolutely perfectly. One glitch, people die. Ninety-five degrees in Chicago for five days? They’re hauling bodies to the morgue, man. The worse the disruption, the more bodies pile up.”

And this we call normal? Clay thought, then took a drink of coffee and tried to change the subject. He wasn’t as subtle as he might have hoped.

“What in the world are you doing with a Russian prison here, Todd?” he asked, raising his eyebrows and trying to look innocent.

“I thought we agreed you were going to practice your manners, Clay,” Todd said, with a condescending smirk on his face.

“Ok, Todd. It’s your dacha. I’m just here drinking coffee, trying to warm up.”

Seeing that Clay was not at all satisfied with his evasion, Todd grimaced, took a deep breath and then offered an explanation. “There are a lot of immigrants from the former Soviet Union—you know, Mother Russia, the Ukraine, all of those old republics over there. My little wing of the prison houses juvenile prisoners from the former Soviet bloc who don’t speak much English. It’s as simple as that.”

Clay thought the explanation sounded rehearsed. And something in the back of his mind kicked at the thought that this man still used the term “former Soviet Union.” It had been so long since he had heard that term, even the maps and school textbooks rarely mentioned it at all. And now, out of nowhere, in the midst of the weirdness of his journey, he was hearing it used everywhere. He’d heard it on the television at Veronica’s, then from Clive Darling in his big, expensive truck, and now from Todd. It didn’t sit right, but he didn’t want to irritate his host so he smiled and said, “You don’t have to explain anything to me, Todd, I’m just here for the coffee… and some food?”

Todd smiled back. “Now you’re talking! I’ll take your clothes to the dryers and then get us some grub. Why don’t you go lay down in your cell and I’ll holler at you when it’s all ready?”

“Can we call it my ‘room’ instead of my ‘cell’?” Clay asked, grinning.

“Oh yeah, Clay, whatever makes you happy, bud… now you run on back to your guest room, and hotel manager Todd will get you some supper.”

As soon as Todd was gone from sight, and when he heard the double doors slam shut in that awful way that jail and prison doors always seem to shut, Clay walked back into his cell, lying out onto his bunk, feeling incarcerated again and thinking about closing his eyes and getting some sleep. But the coffee was doing its warm work in him and his mind was busy, though not yet working altogether right. He could still feel the disembodied faces of those young men down the hallway who cried and clawed at the door for freedom. What was their crime? Clay wondered.

He reached into his backpack, shuffled some things around in it, then pulled out his copy of The Poems of C.L Richter and looked at its clean blue cover, already familiar. The caffeine was finally starting to clear his mind somewhat and, stretching his neck to each side to relieve some of the stress, he turned to one of his poems randomly and read…

He closed the book and shook his head. Wow. He’d been in a dark place when he wrote that. He wondered what Cheryl had thought of his glaring indictment of all of their ancestors. This distrust and dislike of modernity had been with him longer than he’d thought. Maybe he was just a Luddite anarchist, like Clive said.

He put the book back into the pack and zipped it closed.

Standing up again he considered for just a moment what it would be like to actually be locked in this cell, and then he laughed, figuring that it would feel kind of like the last six years of his life felt. Wasn’t his Brooklyn apartment his most recent jail? Wasn’t this what he was escaping? Back to comparing physical and metaphorical prisons again. If only I were tired enough to fall asleep.

He walked back out into the hallway, figuring it would be some time before Todd would return. He struggled within himself for a moment, hoping to keep from looking through the door that led down the hall to the others. But the window, crisscrossed with chicken wire, drew him in like a moth to flame.

The faces were still there, and when they saw him appear a struggle broke out, some pushing and shoving, and then he could see that they held up a new sign. He had to strain his eyes again, lean really close to the window and allow his eyes to get used to the extremes of dark and light.

Another paper was thrust against the window…

What? He shook his head, showing the faces that he didn’t understand. How can that be? Todd seemed to be fed well enough. The place had emergency power. Why wouldn’t they be feeding the inmates? Was it a labor problem? Had people stopped coming to work? That could certainly be true. Clay couldn’t imagine anyone making it to work in the past several days.

His mind worked feverishly now as the faces once again begged him. Tear streaked faces, pleading for help. What if they are trapped. What if they are telling the truth? Could it be? He suddenly put his finger on something that had bothered him about the conversation with Todd. He’d never in his life heard of a prison facility for a particular people speaking a specific language. Not in America. Not in 2012. As he watched the faces he noticed that several among them seemed to be pushing the others out of the way. Those faces mouthed the word “No” and “Go” and waved him away, but in a way that was subtle, not aggressive or obvious. He couldn’t decide whether they were afraid for the others, or for him, but he decided he ought to do something.

Clay walked back into his cell and looked around. He had a flash of inspiration and reached deep inside his backpack and pulled out the small pocket camera he’d carried with him since he left. He had intended to use it to document his trip and had made some small efforts to do so early on. One can only shoot so many pictures of downed trees, however, and he’d simply pushed the camera deep inside the pack and forgotten about it. He saw now that he had several exposures left on the digital dial and he stepped out into the hall and quickly snapped some picture of the faces in the window.

Mindful that Todd could walk through the office at any moment, Clay didn’t give much thought to what he was shooting. He simply raised the camera and listened behind him as he rattled off the last of the camera’s memory. He was vaguely aware that there was a scuffle in the light of the window as the youths—were they youths?—began pushing their way into the window. He then walked quickly back into the cell and hid the camera in the deep recesses of his backpack and turned around and sat on the bed. He was vaguely proud of himself. If nothing else, he thought, I can show it to somebody when I get out of here. Maybe some news organization would be interested in the story. He tried to fight it, but he couldn’t help it—his mind drifted back to the moment when Cheryl was trapped in that car, the girls dead, their lifeless bodies ruined on the cruel pavement. No one had been there to help them. What if these young people are trapped?

He heard Todd return into the office, so he joined him, breathing deeply and trying to look pleased and excited at the thought of a meal.

“I cooked up your brown trout, Clay, and I didn’t have any tartar sauce, but I do have the bottom scrapings from a jar of mayonnaise and an ounce or so of dill pickle relish if you want to make something of that. I also found a half a packet of Saltines and a tomato.”

Clay nodded to him and said “Thanks.” He wasn’t sure if he could eat now that he thought there might be children starving only fifty feet away from him. He nibbled some on his fish, and he could feel Todd’s eyes on him as if the guard expected him to offer some kind of critical review of the meal.

“Do you all eat pretty well here, Todd? I mean… is prison food as bad as they make it out to be?” He snapped off a piece of cracker and choked it down before taking another sip of coffee.

Todd looked at him, amused, and then shrugged, “Well, usually we do alright, but things have been a bit tight this week. What with the storm and the lack of power and the disruptions and all. We’re a little low on manpower and most of our deliveries haven’t made it.” He rocked back in his chair, trying, and failing, to look nonchalant. “I suppose with this nor’easter, it might stretch on a little longer, but it’s not like we’re freezing and starving out in the blizzard like you were an hour ago.”

Clay took a larger bit of the fish, and he felt his stomach growl and he felt guilty for it, but he chewed with some intensity now. Todd took a long drink of his coffee then got up to pour himself another cup. “So what’s it like out there, Clay? How bad is it from what you’ve seen?”

Clay was happy for the diversion, and between bites of fish, filled Todd in on what he knew, at least all of the basics. He related his trip across the bridge, but left out the part about Veronica, offering only the parts that he had seen on her television. He told Todd about his ride with Clive, leaving out any details about Clive the man but sharing what he knew about the stores stripped of products, and about the gas lines, and about how the people walking on the highway seemed to be like zombies, their eyes dead like shark’s eyes… doll eyes.

“They weren’t zombies or undead or vampires or anything like that, they just looked like it, you know?” he said. This, he supposed, was the veil of civilization peeling back, the line of civility stretching ever thinner.

Just as Clay was finishing his story, and his fish, he heard a muffled sound coming from down the hall. THUMP. The sound seemed heavy, as if a body had been thrown against a wall or a bird had flown into a window. It was jarring. It reminded him of a tree falling in the woods in winter, after the crack, in that long, slow moment before the top slams into the snow.

THUMP.

Clay looked up at Todd, and he saw the guard’s countenance fall. Fear, mixed with anger and confusion marched across the tall security officer’s face, and he seemed to be frozen in place, unable to move.

“Todd? Um… What was that?” Clay asked, sitting up straighter in his chair.

THUMP. Louder. Somehow closer.

There seemed to be a loud clatter, off in the distance, like a car wreck a dozen blocks away on a foggy day in his Brooklyn neighborhood, and Clay could barely make out voices and screaming. The sounds were as if they were in a freezer or a coffin buried deep someplace and the vibrations were deeper than the clatter.

THUMP… Closer.

The last one was loud, and Todd jumped to his feet, finally motivated to action. He spun around to the cabinet behind him and pulled out a large bat, a stun gun, and a handful of handcuffs.

THUMP. Louder. The sounds of breaking glass and screams.

“Todd?”

“Get in the cell and close the door! I’ll lock it behind you!”

THUMP. The sound of wood splintering.

“What is this, Todd?”

“GO! NOW! Into your cell! They’re trying it! It’s a jailbreak! RUN!”

Clay hopped up from his chair, his tray spilling onto the ground and the coffee, thankfully cooled, landed down the front of his bright orange prison jumper, drenching him. He sprinted down the hall, his mind reeling, and as he turned towards his cell he could hear that the inmates had breached the second door with a loud crash of what sounded like wood and steel and glass, and now voices could be heard, yelling Russian words, and there seemed to be fighting and shouts and yelps.

Todd pushed him from behind and Clay landed hard on the concrete bunk, his shoulder smashing painfully into the cinder block wall. “Gonna turn out the light and lock you in, Clay! Don’t make a sound! They’ll kill you, man!”

The light snapped off.

He heard the lock click into place and the keys rattle in Todd’s hands and Todd’s panicked footsteps as he raced back towards the office. Clay stared up at the extinguished light, and the bulb, clad in heavy metal mesh, was visible now as the element faded to black. His mind connected it with the light in the entry vestibule that had clicked on to herald his safety and salvation and he heard the door across the way splinter and complain as the weight and pain of hunger and despair and freedom crashed against it.

CHAPTER 7

For some men, the world is an autoclave. A steam engine bearing down upon them. A tumbling aerial swan dive into a lake of uncertain depth. There is no society that stands behind them, no motion to follow their leadership, no positive reviews in the daily papers. Life is merely, as Hobbes said, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. Life for such men—for (perhaps) most men throughout history—varies little in substance from that of the animals. Cattle in their stampede, sharks in their chum-fueled frenzy, armies of driver ants with their smothering razor-sharp jaws lined in charging columns… each of these bears a striking resemblance to the worst expressions of human nature in its unbridled chaos. And in the long catalogue of such expressions, from war to neglect to terrorism, little compares to a prison riot.

Sitting in the darkness, back pressed hard against the cold concrete bunk, Clay felt a terror well up in him that he had only felt once before in his life. His mind, still addled from the sense of displacement brought on by the effects of hypothermia and shock, flashed back to that moment when he was on the phone with Cheryl after the crash. It was the only thing he could hold on to, and it was also the worst. That infinitesimal micro-second when he just absolutely knew that everything he loved had just been taken from him. That was it. That was the moment. Sheer terror. Helplessness. Fear.

The sounds of violence punctuated the air and he closed his eyes wanting to wish himself invisible amid the pandemonium of Hurricane Sandy crashing outside his cell. What? No. This is not Hurricane Sandy. Sandy’s gone. Cheryl’s gone. Back in prison now. No, this was not the hurricane. Sandy was merciful.

Now there was loud shouting—sounded like Russian—and he could clearly hear Todd, though the words were in a language he did not understand, pleading as if for his life. Clay understood the language of pleading fluently. He had practiced it and was attuned to its inflections and lexicon, the nuances of its verbiage. He had pleaded with Todd to be let in; the inmates had pleaded with him for help; and now Todd was pleading for his life. He heard a shriek amidst shouts and what could only be described as a gurgling noise as he searched through his mind for some escape route. He hadn’t left himself one. He waited and held his breath.

More commotion now and the sound of upturned furniture and a turbulent ruckus as another door somewhere relented, pummeled into submission. Maybe they’ll just go. If they would just go out the same doors Clay had come in, they could get away. The entrance vestibule was right there. The fence was down. Is the blizzard still raging? Are they smashing in the doors to my left, or to my right? Can’t tell. His heart was pounding in his chest, and he could feel his elevated pulse in his eyelids.

And then there was silence. Blessed relief. Are they gone? He tried to calm his breathing and slow his heart rate and he took several deep diaphragmatic breaths trying to force himself to calm down. Panic never served anyone. He swallowed and listened and waited. Then he heard the jingle of keys. Panic. His heart racing again. Please let it be Todd. Please let it be Todd.

The key was in the lock now and before this fact had time to register, the reinforced wooden door to the Tank flew open and Clay was seized in the grip of a mass of humanity. There was shouting and anger, violence and the smell of unwashed bodies in the air, and he was enveloped in dark color and dragged out of the cell by his hair and his arms and feet. The lights in the hall had been extinguished and glass lay on the floor and as he was dragged down the hall his skin slid across it in dark, jagged slices. He kicked and tried to rise but he was thrown to the ground and fists and elbows began to fall on him like rainwater. Clay moved to cover his face and tasted blood in his mouth as a boot stomped his head against the cold concrete. His ribs were crushed by shadows and his feet were held down and someone stood on his arm and ground a heel in.

The beating lasted for an eternity. In reality it was only a moment but the brain fills in the spaces of such moments and the fluidity of sensory overload becomes a kind of infinite regress. The electrical impulses in his brain fired their neurons like scattershot in slow motion replay and then, as quickly as it had begun, it was over. He heard spit fly out of the shadows, felt the saliva in his beard, and there was a final kick… that was the one that hurt… landed next to his right eye and he saw stars—not stars but fireworks, firing upwards like rockets—and he felt like he was about to lose consciousness.

Criminals.

For a moment there was silence. The storm passed along the shores and the calm was felt, and there was more Russian spewed at him, angry and vicious, but it was only the lapping of waves on the banks. He collapsed against the cold of the floor for a moment then was dragged back into his cell.

The shuffle of shadows left the room and the door closed behind them and he was left alone in darkness and pain.

Clay laid in the dark with his eyes closed. He listened for the sound of movement but heard none. After a moment or two, convinced he was temporarily safe, he raised himself from the ground and stumbled onto the bunk. Feeling for his pack on the end of the bed, he was overwhelmed by a need to protect it. He quickly stuffed it under the bunk and draped one of the blankets over the lower end of the bed so that the pack could not easily be seen from the doorway. Then he reached inside his jumper and ran his hand along his ribs feeling the tenderness under his touch. He reached up to touch his eye and felt blood dried on his face, but couldn’t seem to find any cut. The marks on his body from the glass were superficial scratches, but his jaw ached and his eye was on fire.

Having taken inventory of his body, he now leaned back onto the bunk and tried to lift his legs to lie down but was unable to manage it for long because of pain and soreness coming from his back and kidneys. Not knowing exactly why, he pushed the thin mattress off the bed onto the floor and lay down flat on the cold concrete bunk and the icy smoothness on his back and his bruises immediately started to numb the pain. He laid there for a moment, embracing the numbness.

Turning over to his side, he tried again to imagine all of this away, and, thinking clearly now for the first time in a very long time, he began to count the stupid mistakes he had made since leaving Veronica’s place there in Harlem. That, he thought now, was the first and biggest of them.

After what may have been five minutes, or an hour, or three, Clay heard the lock turn again and the light flicked on and a head looked in, then a few more.

“You alright, man?” one of the heads asked. Hard to see faces, even with the light on. Clay looked at them through the only eye he could open. The flood of light in his dilated pupil caused his eye to water.

“Um… no,” He responded, trying to push himself up with his hands. He felt his body ache at this new demand, but he grimaced through the pain and sat up to look into the faces of his captors. The three young men all had sheepish looks on their faces, almost as if they were embarrassed. It was something in their manner. He couldn’t decide exactly what it was.

They were dressed in standard prison garb, and their faces looked wan and thin. They looked hungry and they smelled of sweat, fear, and elation. The lack of depth perception caused him to see them only partially. He wasn’t sure how to size them up. They looked almost familiar.

“So… ok, good,” one of the faces said in a friendly and almost apologetic way, nodding toward him. He was the short, stocky one with close-cropped hair, black. He had the look of a bulldog. He was small, but muscular, with a barrel chest, despite the evident loss in weight he had suffered. His voice was surprisingly high for a man, soft-spoken, gentle, and airy. After a pause, he continued, “good that you can communicate and that you’re not dead.”

Clay looked up into the young men’s faces and then, unconsciously, his hand rose up to his lips and examined them to make sure they were not badly split or swollen. He didn’t think that he’d lost any teeth. For the most part, his mouth was fine, but as his hand withdrew it migrated to the lump above and to the right of his right eye, and he noticed the eye was closed and that the lump stuck out far enough that the skin over it seemed foreign and unconnected to his face.

“You broke my face,” Clay said, trying to open his right eye unsuccessfully.

The bulldog shook his head, sadly. “Well… technically it wasn’t us who broke your face,” he indicated with his hand to the three young men in the room. “In fact, we tried to warn you off, or at least I did, when I saw you looking down the hallway.” That was why the face looked familiar, Clay thought.

“You could have tried holding up a sign that said ‘get out of here now’ or ‘run for your life’,” Clay said, with not a little bit of hostility in his voice. He looked down at his feet and noticed that the bridge of his foot had a large, blue welt.

“We’d have gotten it far worse than you did if we tried to alert you in any way,” Bulldog said. “But I did try to warn you as best as I could under the situation.”

“And what was the situation?” Clay asked.

“Well, no one in that cell block has eaten anything in a week, and we were on half-rations before that,” Bulldog replied, matter-of-factly. “The leaders in there decided, when they saw you walk in, that maybe you’d be of some help, but instead you took pictures. After they couldn’t get you to help them, they decided to do just what they did. To be truthful, I didn’t think they’d do it. But, as you can imagine, they aren’t particularly… pleased… with your participation or help. Frankly,” he said almost sorrowfully, “I’m surprised you aren’t dead.”

Clay hung his head down and felt the tightness in his neck. “I was going to show those pictures to somebody in order to get you help, you know? I came in out of the blizzard half dead myself, and was trying to figure out how best to handle it.”

“Ahh, yes. Well, they couldn’t have known that, I guess.”

It occurred to Clay that these men—at least Bulldog here—spoke absolutely perfect English. Not a trace of any accent. Not from Russia, not even from New England. Not from anywhere. He spoke perfect accentless English.

“Anybody want to tell me what’s going on here?” Clay asked, painfully arching his back and testing to see if he felt any serious organ or bone injuries. He was pretty sure he had a couple of broken ribs. Couldn’t know if there was bleeding somewhere on the inside.

“Well,” Bulldog said, hanging his head and shuffling his right foot against the concrete floor and pushing on the mattress, “I just told you. It seems you got caught up in a riot.”

“That part I had figured… ummm…. what is your name?” Clay asked.

“I am Mikhail. This tall one here is Vladimir Nikitich and the other one by the door is Sergei Dimitrivich. You can just call us Mikail, Vladimir, and Sergei.”

“Your English is impeccable,” Clay responded, icily.

“Why wouldn’t it be? We’re Americans,” Mikail shot back.

“None of this makes any sense,” Clay said, continuing to feel with his hands down the length of his legs, engaging in an extended medical self-examination as they talked.

“You don’t know the half of it, Comrade,” Sergei sneered, looking toward Vladimir and laughing.

“Listen,” Mikail interjected, “what’s your name, anyway?”

Clay looked up to Mikail, straining to see anything—any light at all—through his swollen right eye.

“Clay.”

“Well, listen, Clay. For the three of us, I am really sorry that this has happened to you. I know that you may not believe that, or you may not care, but it is true. I really didn’t want any innocents to get caught up in what’s going down here right now.” As he talked, his right hand found his own rib cage, and he seemed to unconsciously press against his ribs one at a time as though he was counting them. “You’re in a bad spot. So are we. None of us asked for this.”

“Ok, so you’re sorry,” Clay said, looking Mikail in the face with his one good eye. “So, why don’t you guys let me out of here and I’ll just be on my way.”

Mikail shook his head. “That’s impossible, for two reasons. One,” he held up one finger to illustrate his point, “is that there is one hellacious blizzard going on out there. No one could go anywhere even if they wanted to. Two,” another finger popped up, “is because we’re not in charge. In fact, we’re probably the worst allies you could have right now… except, of course, for all of the other maniacs in this place.”

Mikail turned and began to tap the wall with his hand, then looked back at Clay with a worried look on his face.

“It’s not possible for you to understand the politics of this place, Clay. You don’t even know where you are. But,” he indicated ‘out’ by making a circular motion with his hand, “the rest of these guys are real criminals. Some of them are the worst kind of criminals. Whereas we,” he indicated the three there in the room with Clay, “are political criminals. They think we’re spies. Listen.” He stopped and walked toward the cell door, looking out for a moment before poking his head back in. “Forget all of that. None of that is going to make sense to you. I just say all of that to tell you that we are not your enemies, and those guys out there are not your friends. They’re rifling through the place as we speak, looking for food. That’s all they can deal with right now. Todd is dead, and if they find any other guards around here, those guys will be dead, too. I’m thinking that the back to back storms basically doomed the place. I’m not sure that any of the other guards even made it out here after the Hurricane. I’m thinking Todd’s been manning this place by himself. So, when no food showed up and things ran low in the cafeteria, he just decided that no one would care if we starved to death.”

Clay stared for a moment, trying to take it all in. Mikail looked at Sergei and Vladimir, “Well, I think that’s about it, Clay. An unnecessary chain of unfortunate events and now, shall we say, things have gone a little haywire.”

Clay just looked at Mikail, not sure what to think about anything he was hearing. He slipped off the bunk onto the mattress on the ground and sat there, pulling his legs up to his chest. Mikail crouched down, looking at Clay face to face. He whispered conspiratorially, “The new bosses, those thugs out there, they sent us in here because we speak good English, which is exactly why they hate us. That is why they suspect us of being spies. They don’t trust us. But they use us, you see, because our English is good. We’re here to find out if you can help them. To find out what you know.”

Clay shrugged, wordlessly. What could he tell them? He knew nothing. He showed as much in his face, as a way to answer.

“These young men and boys will kill you, Clay. That’s a fact. They almost did it before, but we were able to stop them. So, we’re supposed to find out just who you are and if you have any value to them.”

Clay shook his head, slowly. Strangely, the effects of the hypothermia had worn off, but the world he’d stepped into seemed to have shifted. It was as if the beating—perhaps it was the adrenaline—had served to heighten his awareness and his thought processes were back to normal, but the world had gone sideways in the bargain. He felt like he’d walked off the edge of the earth. He believed that Mikail wanted him to tell him something but he had absolutely nothing to tell him. He was a guy who had hiked out of the city and into the mountains and seemed to have wandered into a world not of his making. The only thing he knew for sure was that his only way out of this was going to be to convince someone, somewhere, to let him leave.

“Well,” he said, after some thought, “I’m Clay… I told you that. I am a hiker and a traveler that got lost in the storm. The second storm, not the first one. I was fine after the first one. I’m from upstate but I’ve been living in Brooklyn for the last six years. I got out of New York because of the storm, and because I just want to get home. I’m trying to get home to Ithaca. Then the nor’easter hit. I got completely turned around. I was unprepared. I made stupid decisions. Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I stumbled into this place. One whole section of the external fence is down, by the way. That’s how I got in. Anyway, I stumbled into this place about half dead and frozen and I was able to plead with that security guard named Todd to let me in to warm up and dry out. That’s all that I know, but it’s the truth.”

“Yes,” Mikail said, “well, the truth shall set you free, I suppose.” He stood up and looked at the others.

Vladimir, the tall one, speaking for the first time, said, “Stumbling into this place was probably a bad deal for you. Might have been better if you died out there in the cold.”

“Maybe,” Clay said.

“No maybe,” Vladimir said. “This place eats people. It doesn’t spit them back out.”

Sergei interrupted. “What Vladimir Nikitich is saying, Clay, is that you need to work with us. Think of something to give them. If they don’t need you, you’re dead. Right now they’re probably at the cafeteria ripping it apart for packets of ketchup or rotten fruit. But they won’t be down there forever.”

Mikail picked up where Sergei left off, almost without missing a beat. “Just so you know, those guys aren’t geniuses. They’re not all idiots, but most of them are. They’re in here for being sociopaths, psychopaths, and rejects, your social castaways. Warwick has those things just like any other place in the world. Maybe even more so. You ever been in jail, Clay?”

“Yeah. Nothing too serious, though. You call this place Warwick?” Clay asked.

“That’s where you are. Not the prison here. The prison is part of Warwick. Warwick is the whole damned town.”

“What do you mean the whole town?”

“Clay,” Mikail continued, “Focus. What you’ve stumbled into is too big to get in your head, so you’re just going to have to get your head into what’s going on right here and right now. Everything else… you don’t need to know. What you need to know is that here in a bit—maybe in an hour, maybe in five minutes—those guys that wrecked this place and killed Todd are going to come back here, and you will need to give them something. We don’t have time to mess around.”

“Give them something? What can I give them? I don’t even know what’s going on,” Clay said in something approaching despair.

“If you’re working for someone, Clay—CIA, some faceless government agency, a joint task force, anything like that—you’ll need to tell them. That’ll keep you alive. You’ll have value to them then.”

“But none of those things are true!”

“Do you want to live, Clay?” Mikail asked, with an intense look on his face that seemed to mask a motive that Clay was not able to discern.

“Of course.”

“Then what are you really doing here?”

“I told you.”

“You told me nothing!” Mikail shouted angrily, before thinking better of his outburst and lowering his voice, “I’m trying to help you, Clay. That’s all. No one else needs to die. Who are you?”

That was it. Right there. That was the moment when Clay knew. Looking Mikail right in the face, he knew… and Mikail knew too.

“I’m just a guy who’s had a very bad day. I obviously ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m just trying to get home.”

Mikail nodded at the other two and they slowly moved toward the door, but before Mikail turned to leave, he knelt down and touched Clay on the shoulder, “I don’t think you’re going to make it home, Clay, not if I can’t tell those guys something other than that you’re just a tourist who stumbled into prison. That story doesn’t fly, so just think about it.”

With that, the three young men shuffled out of the Tank and the door closed softy behind them and Clay heard the lock turn and engage and the light clicked off bathing him once again in inky blackness.

Outside, somewhere, the blizzard still raged, if Mikail was to be believed.

Inside, the questions swirled through Clay like a tempest in their fury. How would a prisoner have even known all of this, Clay wondered, especially one who was an outcast among outcasts? If Mikail was under suspicion as a spy, how would he have known their motives, and his own role in carrying them out?

Clay sat on the floor in the dark and went over the conversation in his mind, trying to grasp at any straw that would help him solve the puzzle in a way that would allow him to give the three visitors the benefit of the doubt. He could find none.

He didn’t know what kind of place this was, this place called Warwick, but he knew that whatever storm was raging outside was nothing compared to the storm raging in here. Further, he knew that if he was so foolish as to allow himself to think for a moment that the three young men were being straight with him, he would certainly end up dead. Perhaps it was the weirdness of the encounter with others who, like him, were aliens in their own homeland, or maybe not that, exactly, since he’d experienced several such encounters over the course of the last few days. But it was something along those lines. He’d grown sensitive to the nuances of such meetings. Out of all of his uncertainties and confusions, Clay was absolutely sure of one thing…

Mikail had the keys.

These three young men were not innocent victims of circumstance, like he was. They were not “political prisoners” either. In fact, he was certain that these three were the ones really running this place.

Saturday

He didn’t know when he fell asleep, but he figured it must have been way after midnight. He was so exhausted, though, that he eventually slipped into a very deep and fitless sleep. It was the kind of sleep that only attends to a man whose waking life is falling apart. When he awoke he could not remember tossing and turning at all.

Clay’s eyes (or was it “eye”, singular?) opened slowly when he heard a commotion in the hallway outside his cell. He sat up in his bunk and it took him some time to get his bearings on where he was. The dull aches in his body reminded him that things had not gone well the night before and his right hand found the lump near his eye and probed it, noting that he still didn’t have any feeling there at all. It was dark in the room, so he didn’t know if he’d regained any sight in that eye. A thought crept into his mind and slowly formed until it joined with memory and he realized that somewhere out there, according to Mikail, the prisoners were supposed to be deciding his fate. Apparently they were in no hurry.

Along with his pains and a dull ache coming from his lower back, he felt a gnawing hunger that reminded him that he had not eaten much at all since the turkey sandwiches at the restaurant just off the highway back in another life. The little bit of fish he’d swallowed right before the riot hadn’t amounted to much, and he felt the growl in his gut and the faintly pleasant tightness that reminded him of day three of a fast. Does the condemned man get a last meal around here? He suddenly remembered that food may not be the best topic of conversation with prisoners who have been starved for a week.

After an hour or so sitting quietly in the dark the light flipped on and he saw a face look in at him through the tiny window. With his one good eye and the crisscross of chicken wire he didn’t recognize the face at all. Clay sat up on the bunk and pushed his way along it to the far wall, not knowing if this was to be another interrogation or if they were actually coming to kill him.

The lock turned and the door swung open and a face looked in at him and smiled. It was the face of a boy who looked to be about sixteen or seventeen, and then the rest of the boy came through the portal carrying a faded green plastic meal tray. The young man approached slowly, with some hint of fear on his face, and he tried to smile bravely as he handed the tray to Clay.

Clay looked down and he was startled at what he saw. For a starving people they surely ate well around here. His tray was loaded with four or five thick slices of some kind of rye bread slathered with butter. There were two hard-boiled eggs, peeled; a bowl of some kind of hot cereal grains (also slathered with butter); some sliced apples; a hunk of whitish cheese; and a mug of hot, black coffee.

“Wow,” Clay said, looking over the veritable feast. “Good thing I still have my teeth.”

The young boy nodded, smiled politely again, and then turned to leave.

“Wait… you,” Clay sputtered, not knowing what to call the youth, “what’s your name?”

“I don’t speak the English,” the boy said, shyly and with a very heavy Russian accent.

“Someone forgot to tell your mouth,” Clay responded.

“Vasily,” the boy replied, again with a very thick accent, looking over his shoulder as if he were doing something very wrong. He stepped back out into the hall, and then quickly returned back to the cell with a case of water in plastic bottles, still in the plastic wrap. The writing on the water bottles was, he assumed, in Russian.

Clay grabbed one of the bottles of water and twisted off the cap and took a long swig of water. “Where’d you get the food, Vasily? I thought you guys were all starving to death.” Indeed, Vasily did look slightly thin, though not in any way approximating starvation or even some kind of malnutrition. His eyes were clear and bright, and his hair had been cut recently and he looked strong in a sinewy kind of way.

Vasily did not reply, but something in his eyes tried to communicate with Clay and he wrapped his hands nervously in his faded orange prison shirt not knowing if he wanted to flee or stay and talk.

“Are they going to kill me today, Vasily?” Clay asked, taking a bite from the toast, his good eye rolling back in pleasure at the taste of the salty, melted butter and beautifully toasted rye bread. When he looked back to Vasily, he smiled at the boy again, just waiting for a reply.

Vasily did not reply, he just nodded his head and walked back out of the cell. The lock ticked closed but this time the light was left on.

The next two meals that day were the only other interruptions to Clay’s somewhat welcomed solitude. Lunch was as bountiful as breakfast had been, though Clay could not be sure exactly what each of the dishes were or what they contained. There was a cold, sour soup that Vasily called “Okroshka” which had some green leafy vegetable, large pieces of potato, and chunks of fish. It was delicious. There was actually a small dab of some white caviar with small crackers which he did not enjoy, but then there was a heavy pancake topped liberally with butter and sour cream which was perfect. There was more coffee to drink, along with a shot of vodka. The only things he left on his tray after lunch was the caviar and the vodka. He laughed to himself as he looked at the un-tasted vodka. Last time I had vodka, I got thrown in jail!

Supper was a bowl of what looked like beet soup with ample pieces of meat (he could not tell if it was beef or venison or some other meat) and heavy dollops of sour cream on top. This was served with thick chunks of black barley bread with butter and a couple of sliced cucumbers.

“Maybe they’re getting me ready for my execution,” he told Vasily, “fattening me up so they can eat me.” The boy, who either did not understand or did not appreciate gallows humor, simply paused at the door as if to say something, but decided better of it and then disappeared again.

He was left alone without visitors for a few hours after his supper, and then, about the time that he figured it might be starting to get dark outside, he heard a knock at the door and recognized the tall figure of Vladimir peering in. Why knock?

Mikail led the procession into the cell and Vladimir and Sergei came in behind him. Both leaned up against the walls with arms crossed affecting a youthful position of arrogance and unearned power, like thugs who had just taken over the playground. It had become evident to Clay that Mikail was the man in charge and it didn’t seem that he minded letting Clay know that either.

“Good evening, Clay,” Mikail said with a cold smile of mock friendliness.

“Hello,” Clay responded unemotionally. It was apparent to him that the façade of good cop had been dropped. Mikail had apparently decided to now deal with him as who he really was, whatever that could be. With the better lighting and some minimal use of his right eye, Clay now noticed that Mikail was probably in his early 20’s, older than Clay had originally thought, though youthful enough to pass for an older teenager. Sergei and Vladimir did not look to have reached their 20th year yet and were maybe in their late teens.

“I hope you have enjoyed the food. Things improved for us radically once we’d taken the town,” Mikail said, with just a hint of pride.

“So there is a Russian town around here?” Clay asked.

The three young men started to laugh, Mikail laughing the hardest, and it took a moment for him to return to his more serious demeanor.

“Yes, Clay, there is a Russian town around here. Right here in America. Warwick, as we informed you earlier. And like a wick draws up oil, so Warwick has drawn you into itself. It is our town, and now we run it.”

“Congratulations. Ok, so what does that have to do with me? Why am I still here? Why are you still acting like I should know something I don’t? Why was I beaten? What comes next?”

“Easy, Clay” Mikail said, “You are still here because we have not yet decided what to do with you. You are a hostage. The rest can wait for now.”

“Do I get a phone call?” Clay asked sarcastically.

“Maybe you could if the phones were working, or if anyone else in the tri-state area had electricity. But…” Mikail paused, taking a deep breath. As he did so, Clay could sense the bravado drain out of him, replaced by a level of stress and weight that the young man was not entirely used to. The crown weighs heavy on the head of a king.

“But,” Mikail continued, “it seems that the fortuitous duet of storms that has plunged this part of America into utter darkness, has had—is having—some serious effects. We were able to take this prison—and all of Warwick—because the guards and many of the employees either couldn’t make it here to work, or chose not to come in for some selfish reason of their own. As we mentioned last night, the prison didn’t even have a ghost staff on duty when we took over. The town fell just as easily.”

“I don’t know Warwick, and I don’t know Russian, and I don’t know you, and I don’t have any idea what any of this is all about, Mikail,” Clay stated, frustrated and starting to get angry.

“We’re pretty sure that you are telling the truth, Clay. Unhappily, whether you knew it or not, whether you were a spy or not, whether we took over the prison or not, you probably were not going to make it out of here alive,” Mikail said in a matter-of-fact tone. He showed that he was not particularly concerned one way or another with what Clay thought about what he was saying. “You see, you’ve stumbled into a very secret compound, Clay. Once you got into this building, you were not getting out alive. This place doesn’t exist. Warwick doesn’t exist. As of last night, man, you don’t exist.”

“What is all of this, then, Mikail? Why are you telling me any of this? Do you think that you are some movie villain, some brilliant psychopath who has a soundtrack playing everywhere he goes and likes to talk his victims to death? Why not just do whatever it is you’re going to do?” Clay asked.

“We’ve come to take you to a meeting, Clay,” Mikail said, smiling. “We’re waiting on word that a ‘high value target’—is that what you people like to say?—has been captured, then we’re going to have a little town meeting in the gymnasium. Nothing so sinister as you imagine. We’re just filling time, being neighborly. I am glad you liked the food.”

As Mikail finished talking, Clay saw another young man enter and some words were shared between him and Mikail, and then the young man exited again without having looked at Clay at all.

“Time to go to the meeting, Clay, are you ready?” Mikail asked, smiling.

“What do you want me to say, Mikail?”

“You don’t need to say anything. Just put your hands behind your back. We’re going to take a walk.” Mikail pulled out a set of handcuffs and before Clay could even think of some plan to fight or escape or shout, the handcuffs were clamped on to his wrists behind his back, and he was gently pushed toward the door. Mikail and Sergei walked before him, Vladimir walked next to and somewhat behind him, holding him lightly by the handcuffs.

The first thing Clay noticed was that the door to the hallway down to the cell clusters, the hallway down which he had first seen the prisoners, was completely intact. There was no damage to it at all. In fact, as he walked toward the office and followed Sergei into it, he saw no damage anywhere. No wood particles, no pieces of glass, no blood. There wasn’t a single clue that there had ever been a riot. Of course, he thought, he’d only heard it. He hadn’t seen any of it.

Rounding the corner into the security office, as soon as Sergei and Mikail had moved to the right and cleared from his vision he saw, sitting at his desk, completely unmarred, unbeaten, and fully alive… Officer Todd Karagin. The man smiled like the cat that ate the canary, the smile of the magician who was savoring his lifelong best reveal.

“Good morning, Clay,” Todd said with a wink in his voice, if not exactly in his eye. “Good to see you. Welcome to the Charm School.”

CHAPTER 8

Never, in the long history of humankind, at least since Plato wrote of The Cave, had a man appeared so surprised and confused as Clayton Richter did in that moment. He stood in the prison office, handcuffed, before the man that had, he had thought until this very moment, died in an effort to save him. And now it turns out to be a con? But… why the charade? Clay wondered.

For his part, Officer Todd was, for the moment, enjoying the surprise. He was acting like he’d just won a prize fight. He stood up and cracked his knuckles, and sucked his wind in and did one of those shadow-boxing dances, before raising his arms in mock triumph. “What’s the matter, Clay? Cat got your tongue?”

If Clay had been a bit more clever and if this new shock hadn’t stolen his breath, he might have replied, “Yes, Schrodinger’s cat,” and while these Russians tried to figure out what he meant by that, he might have rushed headlong into the officer or straight through the office, down the hall, trying to find a door, anything, any way that might lead to out. But none of that happened, because he was surrounded by captors, deep inside a locked prison and sometimes cowardice and fear are the things that keep endangered men from engaging in heroic stupidity.

As it was, he stood there like someone about to be administered a test he knew he’d flunk. No. It was worse… It was that he felt so overcome by a sense of helplessness and disgust that his knees buckled slightly and he turned pale. Too many weird things. Too much to handle. Best to just observe my right to remain silent. He caught his balance with a shuffle of his feet and then straightened, but he didn’t answer.

Todd reveled in the obvious reaction. Clay wasn’t sure whether the man couldn’t, or wouldn’t, wipe the smile from his face, but he knew instinctively that there was a difference. The officer reached down and snapped the black holster on a service pistol, patting the gun with his right hand and winking at Clay as he saw Clay trying to remember whether he’d been armed when he first met him.

“My real name is Fedya Leonivitch Karaganov,” the officer said. “My friends call me Teodor, or just Todd. You are in Warwick, but I guess you know that already. It is the place of our birth. It will be the place of your death. We call it Novgorod among ourselves. Perhaps you’ll get to see some more of our little town before your short visit with us comes to a close.” He smiled at this, pleased with himself, and Clay wondered why. Then he leaned over Clay and made a sweeping gesture with his arm. It was the kind of gesture that you make when you make an obvious bow, like that one the servant makes before the throne. Todd made that kind of gesture, then he stood up and said in his best mock British, “And might you have any bags, Guv’nuh.”

Clay looked at him and all of the throbbing pain and discomfort from the recent beating intensified and he could feel his broken ribs expand and strain with his breath, and as a man he just wanted to punch Todd in the face. But, he didn’t. He was still processing the fact that Todd was not dead and here the man was before him, and in the seriousness of the moment and with all that had happened, Todd was playing the clown as if life and love and hate and tragedy and comedy were all the same thing and that there was no proper place for each.

“And might you have any bags in yuh guest quarters, sir, or will you just be traveling with what’s on your person? Have we advised you of our check out policy?” Somewhere in that last sentence he had lost the accent, probably about the word “sir.”

Clay just stared. He didn’t know what to think. Was this just Todd’s weirdly aggressive finale in acting out a too-scripted end to the little production they’d just so obviously put on for his benefit? Or was it an actual, honest-to-goodness threat.

Clay looked at the other men in the room and noticed that none of them carried weapons or made stupid jokes. He wondered now if he had been wrong in his assessment that Mikail was in charge, and Mikail seemed to notice his doubt. He’d been standing to the side, watching, like the others, for Clay’s reaction, but now he stepped forward into the center of the men. “Enough, Todd,” Mikail said sharply. He barked out what sounded more like an order than a question. “Has Volkhov been captured?”

“He’s being brought to the gymnasium as we speak. They found him hiding like a coward in his basement. Everyone else is being assembled according to your instructions. We can go whenever you’re ready.” Mikail looked around the room, then looked at Todd, then at Clay, and motioned with his hand toward the hallway.

Todd took Vladimir’s place escorting the hostage, and the whole entourage walked through the office, past an unlocked door, then moved into a long hallway that was dark and only faintly lit by the emergency lighting recessed in the ceiling. As they passed under evenly spaced orbs of light they went into and out of the light and the darkness in regular succession, occasionally stopping or slowing to open doors or turn down hallways as they wound through the maze of the prison. Clay found himself, for no apparent reason, beginning to shuffle his feet, as though he had leg irons. Dead man walking, he thought. It was an eerie and frightening feeling and he could not help thinking that he was a condemned man, walking to his execution.

The others, the youths, were practically stoic in their quiet, as though they were going over something in their minds, mulling some decision. Only Todd seemed unable to stand the silence. He nervously fidgeted with his hand on Clay’s arm before he began speaking a little too boisterously. “You’re probably a little freaked out right now, aren’t you? That’s OK. I would be, too. Imagine how I felt, for example, when you showed up at our door in that storm. We’d already been planning our little takeover for a long time when you showed up, you see. And here you came, just in the nick of time.”

Clay heard the implication but hadn’t yet figured out whether they had come to believe him. He turned his head to look at Todd for some clue, but he couldn’t make out the guard’s features in the dark with only one good eye.

Todd gave him a clue. “I was pretty sure that you were a spy sent by American intelligence. It was just a matter of deciding which outfit you were with.”

Clay decided to press his case, but cautiously. “I was with me,” he retorted blandly. “Only me.”

“Yes, maybe. But how could we have known that? A man who takes pictures… he could be anyone, couldn’t he? And besides, it didn’t matter. It’s not like you’re innocent, Clay. The sign did say you’d be shot if you didn’t stay five hundred feet away. I even told you that myself, and you agreed. You even asked for it! Remember? Either way, of course— ”

“The pictures were innocent, a stupid mistake, and I was dying,” Clay intoned.

“Well, you still are, Clay,” Todd shot back, laughing at his own wit. “I guess, in the end, we all are, but some sooner than others.” Clay buckled again, causing Todd to have to stop and shake him violently, as a warning to keep moving.

Todd went on, “Anyway, the whole world is about to go bottom-side-up and you’re getting a ringside seat, at least for the opening bell… aren’t you excited?” Clay looked at him. Layers of incomprehension were turning into utter confusion. The pieces of fact and truth that he thought he held were being scattered one by one. He wondered to himself if this might be, perhaps the moment when he stepped off into the abyss.

“Is there any way we can do this,” Clay asked, “without the chit-chat?”

“I doubt it,” Todd replied dismissively. “You see, we weren’t expecting the main event until Tuesday. Didn’t you say you were a Democrat, Clay? I forget… Oh yes, I remember… you said you were whatever I wanted you to be. It probably would have been better if you were CIA. I mean, you probably would have lived longer. You would have had some value then,”

Still no real comprehension.

“Anyway, Tuesday and your ringside seat… We were planning for it all to happen later, but the storms happening together as they did, well, that pushed up our plans considerably.”

No comprehension.

“But then we had to take over the town, and that took a moment, so—”

“Enough, Fedya Leonivitch,” Mikail snapped, and then leaned into two double doors which he’d just unlocked, revealing what in the utter darkness appeared to be a very bright line of light at the place where the two doors met and which grew larger as the doors swung outward into a courtyard where Clay saw, once the bright moonlight had washed over him, laid out in the valley, tucked in the hollow of a range of mountains that rose up and shielded it on all sides, a hamlet that for all the world seemed as if it belonged in the Caucasus Mountains.

Warwick, Russia, America.

Comprehension.

The cold hit them like an icy frozen wave and the snow was still falling, only not as violently as before, and their boots (his shoes) crunched on the frozen snow and ice that had been trampled down by the weight of many feet.

They passed through a gate set in a heavy chain link fence like the one he’d seen when he first stumbled upon the prison, and heavy razor wire reflected the moonlight and the beams from the flashlights. Then they headed down a slight hill on a well-traveled path through the snow and eventually they were on a sidewalk that was packed hard in trampled down snow and ice and Clay had to slow a bit because his prison shoes had no traction.

Arriving at what appeared to be an old school gymnasium, Clay looked around and decided that this was exactly what this structure was. It was the only building in the hamlet that was lighted, but the snow and the moonlight gave the whole town a beautiful, blue shade and the buildings and the town folk could be seen clearly as they moved toward the gym. People were going in, chatting nervously in Russian, and Clay could see armed men—boys actually—all around the place and directing the people into the building.

Once inside, Clay saw that the gym was set up for an assembly with chairs arranged in neat rows covering the floor and there was a small stage to the left but it was dark and the deep red curtain was drawn closed. Clay glanced around and saw that the gym looked like any old American gymnasium built anytime between, say, the 1940’s and 1960’s, with a hardwood floor deeply worn by thousands of feet, and the smell of All-American high school sweat hanging in the air. The main difference between this gym and any other that he’d been in throughout his life was that the signs in this gym were all in Russian lettering, and the scoreboard also seemed to be sprinkled with Russian figures as well. There was an old banner hanging limply on the far wall and Clay wondered what it said. Probably something like “Go Bears! Beat the—“ who? Who would these Russians play in a basketball game? The Chinese? Latvia?

Mikail’s entourage lined up in front of the stage on a low podium as more chairs were brought in. Todd, a little too roughly, forced Clay into a seat and then sat down in the empty seat beside him. Todd seemed to be absolutely loving every minute of this bizarre pageant, as if he had waited for it all of his life.

Clay watched as hundreds of people filed in—the citizens of Warwick, he presumed—and he noticed that they were an interesting mix of young and old, mostly middle class, it seemed, and neither expensively nor shabbily dressed. There were some Asians and what looked like Arabic people among them as well. The crowd resembled what Clay would assume any small town in rural Russia might look like, though their faces showed signs of strain and worry and it was obvious that they were not used to having men with machine guns everywhere.

Clay heard a noise start from somewhere within the crowd and the noise grew outward exponentially like a wave. At first it was just a whisper and then it became a general gasp, slowly growing into loud murmuring as the back door to the gym was thrown open and a cold air rushed in along with four heavily-armed boys dressed all in black who pushed before them in chains an old man with a thick gray beard. The man had evidently been severely beaten during his ‘capture.’

The man looked old and wise and his condition readily discomfited the crowd as he passed along a makeshift lane that formed in the standing room only crowd that had formed at the back of the gymnasium. The old man proceeded to walk into the crowd and the lane continued forming before him, giving off an impression of Moses parting the Red Sea by walking into it one belabored step at a time. Women put hands over their mouths to stifle gasps and men had looks of outrage on their faces, but none were brave enough or outraged enough to do anything other than gape and murmur and then slink slowly back into their seats.

The old man had trouble walking and stumbled to the ground several times as he was pushed rudely and disrespectfully from behind by the armed boys. As he fell to his knees, his head drooping low, one of the boys snatched him up roughly, pushing him forward once again until the group had joined the “leaders” at the front of the assembly. Volkhov (Clay assumed this must be the one they had called Volkhov, and it turned out that he was right) was thrust down into the empty chair next to Clay, and his head hung down so that Clay could not see his face.

A deathly silence finally overtook the crowd. The tall young man named Vladimir stood and walked forward and indicated with his hand upraised in the ancient style of the Romans that he had something to say, as if he were Cicero about to address the Assembly.

The general din in the room died down, as all eyes were turned to him.

Clay suddenly felt someone behind him, slightly at his side. He felt the person put a hand on his shoulder and lean over and whisper into his ear. “I am to be your interpreter. I am called Alyona,” He tried to turn his head to see who it was and then realized to his surprise that it was a young woman who was maybe eighteen years of age. She, too, turned her face, so that she could look him in the eye, and he saw that she had the slightest smile and sadness in her eyes.

Vladimir began speaking. Alyona translated into Clay’s ear as quickly as Vladimir spoke. She spoke English well, but not perfectly, and this accent for the first time gave Clay the impression of Vladimir’s, and even Mikail’s, Russian-ness, which was something they had lacked in his mind until now.

“As most of you know, or have heard, the town of Warwick is now in our hands. You may not believe it is so, but we are sorry for any trouble that this necessary action has caused you and your families. It was something that had to be done. Comrade Mikail Mikailivitch Brekhunov has assumed command of this town—if it may be called a town—and has graciously organized this meeting to inform you of the situation and the details of what must soon come to pass. I will endeavor to be brief.

“This place—which the Americans call Warwick—is not a ‘town’ at all, though you may think that it is because you have lived in it all of your lives. It is a prison, and a place of slavery, owned and operated by billionaire capitalists on American soil. It is the Dachau of the American Experience and when we write its history, as we shall, the thousands upon thousands of human deaths will be catalogued for the rest of the world to know. The people who live here did not choose to be born here, did not invite or approve of their own slavery, and have committed no crimes against either America or Russia.

“Most here may not even know that this town—this spy factory we ourselves call Novgorod—has not been a part of the federal government of the United States since 1992. To the contrary, after the so-called ‘collapse’ of the Soviet Union, the American government, ashamed of what it had done to thousands of free U.S. citizens born on its soil, desired to shut this place down and sweep their crimes under a rug. Those who lived here twenty years ago may remember that time. Even today we call it “the Great Confusion.” If the American government plan had been completed in 1992, most of you would have either been killed or deported to Russia, a foreign country to you, where you were not born. Those sent to Russia would have been given false passports and would have been expected to spy for the Americans in your new country. Most of you, though, would have met with some unfortunate accident, because it would not do to release you all into freedom in America, a place you do not know, cannot understand, a place where—by their accounting—you do not even exist.

“Every one of us, who is over the age of ten years old, knows what this place is because that is when they tell us. And we know, even if we do not admit it or consciously understand it, that we were born into slavery in a spy school, and that we have been incarcerated here against our will for all of our lives. Every one of us knows by heart the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States, yet, for some reason, we do not acknowledge that our very existence here, and our continued enslavement here, is a patent violation of those rights supposedly guaranteed to all citizens of America.

“At ten years of age, we were tested by our captors, and those who tested the highest for intelligence and the necessary characteristics requisite for dishonesty and lying, were set aside for extensive training so that, eventually, we would be sent to Russia to live among the peaceful people there to be traitors to our own culture and identity.

“Over the last fifty years, thousands of our friends and neighbors have been shipped to Russia to live there as Russians and to spy for America, and that is the truth of this place. But we are not Americans! We are not citizens of the United States of America, for if we were citizens we would have the basic rights afforded to all American citizens. We have been born Russian, and our lives have been lived as Russians, despite whatever soil happens to have been under our feet for all of our lives. We are Russians!”

Both Vladimir and Alyona stopped speaking for a moment, as the crowd began to become very animated at this last point. Many of the older villagers began shaking their heads and booing and hissing, while some of the younger residents were nodding their heads and clapping. Vladimir seemed to want this reaction and he allowed the turmoil to continue until it rolled across the entire crowd of people assembled inside the gymnasium. It gave Clay a moment to catch his breath and wonder at what he’d just heard. He felt light-headed. Too much information… He didn’t understand any of it.

Vladimir raised his hand, and then raised his voice so he could continue.

“In 1992, this town and facility, slated to be closed by the American government, was purchased….” (murmurs and heated shouts from the crowd) “Yes…. It’s true! You were bought as chattel property by American capitalists! This town and facility was purchased by American billionaires and has since operated as a private security firm with special contracts with the American government to provide human agents, information, intelligence, and scientific research to the intelligence infrastructure of America! Comrades! You are property! You are cattle! You are owned by companies, and you belong to them!”

The crowd was now in turmoil and a general buzz began to grow into an angry din until Vladimir quieted them again with the raising of his hand.

“Comrade Mikail Mikailivitch is in the process of freeing you from your slaveholders, and that process may take some time. You have been used as weapons against the free and peaceful people of Russia who have done nothing to deserve your hatred or your enmity. Comrade Mikail has come to save us all, and to free us from the bondage under which we have lived our whole lives!” Again the crowd became very animated and loud, and Vladimir had to raise his voice even louder to quiet the crowd once again.

“I said I would be brief, and I will be brief. With us today, we have some prisoners who deserve your attention. On my right, you will see two men who are with us in chains. Some other guards and employees of Warwick, Incorporated were, unfortunately, killed during the liberation of this Dachau, this prison camp, this death camp of lies, or they would be here in chains before you as well. But these two men have been captured according to the revolutionary laws we have implemented in order to insure safety and peace while the next events unfold.”

Vladimir stopped. Clay noticed the theatrical quality of his pivot as he turned to regard the two men, and now the entire crowd did as well, and Clay found everyone in the gymnasium looking straight at him. He blushed, he did not know why, to be there under the gaze of the crowd. Vladimir walked over to Clay and, reaching down, pulled him to his feet.

“This man calls himself Clay, and he is one of two things, Comrades: He is either a spy employed by American intelligence to thwart our work toward your liberation and freedom… or, he is what he claims to be; an innocent wanderer, who, during the most sensitive part of our revolution, just happened into the Warwick Prison. He is one or the other, and to us it matters not. He is a prisoner all the same, and has violated our laws and thus is a criminal and a representative of arbitrary abuse and of the wickedness of the capitalist powers. He is held now so that we can ascertain whether he has any future value to the Revolution.”

Vladimir pushed Clay back down into his seat, and then tried, struggled, and eventually succeeded, to haul the injured and weak old man to his feet.

Clay’s face paled and his head seemed to drain of blood as he sat and watched Vladimir lift the old man, and as he did so Clay’s equilibrium failed a bit and he almost lost his balance, almost slid off his seat into the floor…

Uugghhh…! He had to come up for air… What was this freaking place?! He was sitting here, going under water in a freaking Russian prison camp in the Cascades… Or was it the Caucasus… Whatever! He was sitting here before a crowd of people who seemed unfriendly and who spoke Russian and who were in the path of his freaking homestead farm in Ithaca! He thought of the Superstorm and the aftermath. And the Walk. And the Almost Was. And the “What is that!” He was feeling overwhelmed and shell-shocked. He was thinking of the talk with Clive, and the firewall. And His Cheryl’s Face. And the sweet, precious faces of his daughters… His Daughters! His beautiful, artful daughters…

…and then he blacked out.

After a brief moment in which the crowd sat and watched the group of men at the podium bend to the aid of the collapsed man near the podium, life in the crowd began to stir. A man stepped out of the crowd, a woman cleared her throat, two stomps of a foot, a shift of a grocery bag across the floor, conversations about hairdressers and ‘when do we find out what is going on?’ and ‘God when is this going to be over?’, and whispers while children run on the floor and start playing… and all of it is in Russian.

Vladimir spoke again. “Every one of you here knows who this man is.”

The crowd reassembled themselves and fell into silence again. They were taut. At attention. The man at the podium began to speak as Clay slowly, groggily opened his eyes…

“Lev Volkhov is known to everyone in Warwick…”

Spinning. He was going under again. He steadied himself and began to breathe deeply and the spinning slowed and then stopped. The man at the podium was standing, and talking, and his words began to wash over him and Clay calmed himself and listened.

“… unhappily, as some sort of wise sage—an ancient seer and prophet of forgotten times. At one time or another he has taught everyone here, and he is called The Professor by most of you who still cling to him as your honorable teacher and grandfather. But who is Lev Volkhov really? He is a traitor, many times over! In fact, not one person in this gymnasium could tell me positively which side Lev Volkhov is on today. Do you know? Of course you don’t. It has been a long day, and perhaps he has switched sides again since he woke up this morning?

“Volkhov was born in Soviet Russia in 1937 but came to America in December of 1956 after the failed Hungarian Uprising. He came to America in the guise of a Hungarian college student seeking asylum, supposedly having fled the so-called ‘Soviet crackdown.’ But that is not who Lev Volkhov was or is.

“Let’s see if we can unravel it. By his own admission—and we all know this from his own stories in our classes—he was a Soviet spy, and the Hungarian college student cover was designed to infiltrate him into the American society. But wait, it gets better!—”

Clay sat.

And waited.

For any of this… any of it… to get better.

“In 1962 Volkhov was exposed to the Americans as a Russian spy by Golitsyn and other traitors to the Soviet Union. That is the risk, isn’t it Professor?” Vladimir spit on the floor as if to say that the title of Professor was offensive to him. “Isn’t that the risk, that no matter how well you do your job, that some weasel or coward or double is going to get caught and then give you up to your enemy? Isn’t that what has happened to most of our friends and parents and loved ones in Russia? Aren’t many of them dead now for this same reason?”

Vladimir turned back to the crowd.

“Rather than take a free ticket of expulsion back to his homeland, we are informed that Volkhov switched sides! We all know the story because he has told it to us enough times that we know it by heart. He became a traitor to Soviet Union, and began working for the Americans. Eventually, afraid for his life—because he is by nature a dishonorable coward—Volkhov agreed to come here to Warwick and be an instructor, to train other spies to infiltrate and harm his own people. That is how most of you know him. But is that all we know about Lev Volkhov? No! Still No! Some of you know, as do many of us standing here before you, that—according to Lev Volkhov—he never did switch sides! Over the years he recruited many of us to secretly work for the Russians, and to do harm to the American intelligence plans. How can we keep it all straight? Well, to those of us who knew that Volkhov was actually, and had always been, a Soviet spy, we loved him for that and he became to us like a father—even while he was betraying you. He taught us English and how to put away our Russian accents so that we might better serve our Mother Russia. Some of you today, your hearts go out to broken Volkhov because you know him as grandfather and teacher. To you, he was a traitor to Russia and a lover of America, and you loved him for it. To us, he was faithful to Russia, and we loved him for it.

“Let me pause now and clear the air. So many faces! So much switching of sides! What can we believe? Right? But, in reality, it is all very simple. Volkhov was sent to the U.S. as a spy. He was unwittingly exposed by Golitsyn and served his country by allowing himself to be recruited by U.S. intelligence so that he could infiltrate this place for his home country. He has switched sides only once, and that most recently. For all intents and purposes, Volkhov has been a faithful employee and servant of his former Soviet masters… until just over a year ago.”

The gasps started up again in the audience. And Vladimir let it go on for a minute and then he began, again, his speech.

“Just over a year ago, Lev Volkhov informed his superiors here in Warwick, and their handlers in American intelligence, what he has been doing all of these years. That was when he became a traitor. He exposed the names of hundreds of your neighbors, your parents, your friends as double-agents. He gave them everything. The damage wrought by what he has done spirals outward, even now.

“I have spoken long enough. Now it is time for our new leader, our liberator Mikail Mikailivitch to speak to us.”

There was some applause and a lot of general noise, and a smattering of boos, and hisses, and even a few sounds of spitting as Vladimir bowed to Mikail and went to take a seat.

Mikail stood up and looked over the crowd. His eyes were piercing. While the crowd looked on and at one another and wondered whether anyone would tilt at windmills, or hoist themselves, you know, on their own petard, Mikail’s eyes gripped the whole town and everyone began to wait, in absolute silence, for whatever he had to say.

When he spoke, there were no interruptions. There was no applause, and no booing. The gymnasium, as a single entity, embraced the voice of Mikail with utter and soundless attention.

“Comrade Vladimir Nikitich has spoken well. I do not plan to wear out your patience, so I will speak only briefly.

“I am a young man. But I believe that actions speak louder than words.

“I know what you may think, but you are wrong. I do. I believe that actions… speak louder… than words.”

Full Stop.

“I think you all have some idea now as to what is happening. In here, and out there.

“As we gather here tonight, forces beyond your reckoning and your imaginations are gathering together to right many of the wrongs of the world. As you in Warwick now know, all of this part of the country is without power, and the Americans have announced that voting in Tuesday’s elections for the Presidency of America has been delayed in all of the areas affected by both Hurricane Sandy and the blizzard that we have all just suffered.

“Oh, how we all have suffered, and we have also persevered. But, because of the blizzard, all over America tonight, riots and disturbances have greeted this announcement about the election. Societal upheaval is underway. It is nothing that was not expected. But still, perhaps, not entirely to be welcomed, because it can be worked into the plan.

“Of course, we,” he indicated to the men standing at the front and the others with guns, “did not plan the Hurricane or the Nor’easter, but they could not have happened at a more opportune time for all of us. For well over two decades, for my whole life and for the entire lives of many of you young people here, our cultural and national brethren in Russia have been planning an event. Some say that the spark of the idea of that event was birthed as far back as 1960, and that very event, so long in the planning, is soon to come to pass.

“I will have more to say on that in the future, but I wanted to mention it because some of you might believe that this action of ours in taking the prison and then Warwick has been rash and unplanned. You might be saying to yourselves, ‘Hey, as soon as the Americans learn of it, they will raid this place and destroy all of us.’ But you would be wrong if you were to believe that. There is no help—or intervention—coming from the Americans, and if it does come, it will be destroyed.

“So tonight—and I hope you don’t mind if I just do away with all pretense—is all about the necessarily brutal assumption of power.”

He looked at the crowd. They looked at him.

“In several days, you will thank me. In the meantime I will expect you all to behave yourselves and to obey all commands and laws given to you, and to wait patiently for your liberation from this American Gulag. In the end, I am sure, you will thank me.

“But I am not a Pollyanna. I am not a sanguine dreamer just hoping that things will go right. Some of you, unhappily, feel affinity for your captors and you want to see America win. So old is the Stockholm syndrome… older than Stockholm. So to display to you my determined intention to maintain power and peace and security among us, we are going to have an execution. Right here. Right now.”

The crowd stirred, inhaling deeply for the first time, and there was conversation as each man or woman or child seemed to need to gain balance or understanding or perspective by whispering to a neighbor or parent or friend.

The word “execution”, in a general sense, hit Clay in much the manner that such a thing should hit a man, but the mental churnings and the snap-snap of puzzle pieces coming together in his brain prevented him from clearly analyzing just what the word meant to him.

“I apologize to those of you who are of a temperament that is too sensitive for what you are about to see. It is a necessary evil. The murders and deaths of thousands of your brethren and hometown friends have escaped your notice, but this death will not. Believe me, it is a necessitous act to insure order. We have brought before you tonight a few criminals, and one of them will now face execution as a sign of our determination.

“I am not a terrorist or a tyrant. I am a patriot, of sorts, for a nation I have never seen, and likely never will see. I, like you, am Russian. And so that we will not seem to be unfair, I have determined to let these two prisoners speak to you on their own behalf if they so wish.”

Vladimir walked over to Clay and lifted him up by his upper arm and pushed him forward toward the crowd. The people murmured and whispered, and he wondered what they were thinking. His heart pounded in his chest and his mouth was so dry that he could only swallow with difficulty.

Clay looked over and near the wall closest to the entrance he saw Vasily. The young man’s eyes were closed as if he were praying or wishing himself to be anywhere else in the world than here.

Clay’s legs moved only with reluctance, and he did not know if he could trust them for long.

“I have nothing to say,” Clay began, “other than that I am not a criminal. I have broken the laws of neither the United States nor Russia. I am an innocent man, just trying to get home to my old farm in upstate New York. In this, I am like you. I have been in a prison, and only hope to be free. I know nothing of Warwick, nothing of spies or intrigue or wars or traitors. I only want to go home.” He turned slowly and walked stiffly back to his seat.

Vladimir bent down to lift up Volkhov, but as he did, the old man began to rise to his feet under his own power. His head was still drooped over onto his chest as he began to rise, and Clay wondered whether he had been that way since he had first arrived—as if he were unconscious the whole time. As he stood to his feet, though, his head rose as well and, eyes ablaze, he stepped confidently forward before the people of his town.

“I don’t need to introduce myself. You all know me. Every one of you. I taught you, and I probably taught your parents. What young Vladimir has said about me is mostly true, and the things that are not true are things about which I will not quibble. All of my adult life I have been a Russian spy, and for most of that time I have lived in America. Now, for a short time, I have also been an American spy, living in a little piece of the world that, for all intents and purposes, is Russia.

“This place. Our place. Warwick.

“In reality, though, I have no country, for I am a citizen of nowhere.” He paused for a moment, and his legs seemed to grow unsteady. He attempted to wipe his face with his arm but was unsuccessful, the chains preventing any such movement.

“I am an old man,” Volkhov continued, “and old men learn things, and these things I will tell you.” He looked over the crowd and captured the audience with his steely gaze.

“It is true. I did tell the Americans about the plans to destroy her; plans I have known about for twenty years or more; plans that existed even before I knew about them. I did so because I believe that a surprise attack on America, which is what we are talking about here after all, is a foolish plan, and a murderous idea.

“It is the governments of America and of the Soviet Union that have been at war throughout this last century, and not the peoples of those two countries. Ideologies are at war, and not individuals. But ideologies do not suffer and die in wars. People do. And I have learned, because I have been on both sides, I have lived in both worlds. I have lived in both worlds and have been accepted in both worlds and have been rejected by both worlds, but mostly I have found a home. Like here, among you.”

Lev Volkhov paused to let the crowd bathe in that thought. Clay knew that Alyona was still speaking into his ear and translating the old man’s words, but that reality faded and another, higher, reality emerged and he heard the man speak and as his mouth moved, Clay understood him and heard his voice and it was as if Alyona disappeared as Volkhov spoke directly to him.

“…But there are no differences between the sides. We are talking here about a Cold War grown hot that most of the rest of the world has already forgotten. They’ve just forgotten it existed. America has never been at war with the Soviet Union, except by proxy… in Vietnam, and Afghanistan, and Nicaragua, and Korea, and a hundred other places around the world. Everyone is trained to think of these opposing forces as two sides, good and evil, light and darkness, right and wrong. However, as an old man I have learned that there are actually three sides. One side is always pitted against another, so that the third side wins.

“Did you hear that? The third side always wins.

“How do you know which is the third side? The third side is always made known by what actually happens. We are dealing with the age-old dialectic that everyone knows about and no one heeds and all of you were my students, and you should all know who you are…”

He waved his cane at the crowd. They watched him.

“… and what that means.”

Silence.

“In America, as we speak, Republicans and Democrats are at war, and neither side will ever win because they want the same things, only at different speeds and with different details. The third side will win, because there is not a dime’s worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats. Both sides will accept annihilation and totalitarianism because neither side truly wants freedom.

“They are all statists. Do you know the meaning of this word? Yes, those of you who were my students…

“I have learned this, so listen to me. The Russian and American people do not want war, but they will have it. Why? Because the third side wants it! The third side always wins!

“I will give you a most poignant example. Black separatist Malcolm X and white separatists heading the KKK were both controlled by the CIA in the 1960’s.”

Stomp.

“Malcolm X admitted this in his autobiography! Why? Because democratic socialists in the government and around the world did not want fascism or communism, they wanted Martin Luther King.”

Cough.

“And if you want Martin Luther King—who would never have even been received by Americans willfully—you use The Nation of Islam and the KKK to frighten people into embracing MLK.”

Wheeze.

Aaahhrrggh. Clay felt as if he was going over. He felt himself dipping. He was sitting watching this old man seem to draw strength from the crowd and he began to feel as though the man drew even his own vital energy. He was growing woozy.

“If you want democratic socialism in America, you do not just propose democratic socialism! You produce a far left Democrat party and a far right Republican party who both want statism regardless of what they say!

“Do you know the word? Do you know that word? Statism?” He stuck out his chest and rose to the crowd. An angel floating over head at just that moment might have seen a giant magnet in the center of a box with a million tiny metal marbles spread around the walls of the box, just vibrating, ready to make their break. To run to the man. To freedom.

Clay wondered how, if they did, if the crowd did surge forward toward Volkhov, he might swim through the crowd, through the chaos, to the door to the valley and make a break of his own.

The man continued, but in a quiet, more reasoning tone, “They are all statists, only with different winners.

“And the people will embrace democratic socialism! All of them will. Both sides. They already have. But you can never tell the people that, can you, because you see their lusts and their drive for comforts… you see… all of them are statists.”

He let the word sink in.

“They are all against real freedom.”

He let that sink in.

“Your political pundits, your crazy activists, your radio show hosts are all successful precisely because they do not uncover the real and simple truth. Do you hear me? The truth. As long as they stay away from the truth, and play their audience into the hands of the dialectic, then the money flows and they get to keep their seats in the game.

“But the truth, perhaps that is too big to swallow entire. Let’s begin with a bite.

“Every false conflict is precipitated. Think about it… Every false dialectic is put forth by someone… someone…”

He let the statement hang in the air.

“… because the third side wants something that the people will not freely give. If people wanted freedom, they’d turn off their televisions and move from the cities and grow their own food and just say ‘NO.’”

“Did you hear that? No.”

The crowd sat in silence.

“No, to everything that is contrary to their freedom. No. Simply… Not marching, or petitions, or voting, or organizing, or gathering signatures… Just No.

“It is hard to believe, but sometimes just saying ‘No’ is a revolutionary act.”

Absolute silence.

“But they do not want freedom. The crowd. They want peace and safety and comforts without cost.

“In America tonight people are fighting one another in the streets, and people are burning down businesses, and people are shooting one another at the gas pumps, and the economy has plummeted into the abyss. Why? I will tell you why. Because in the last century or more, so-called ‘patriots’ and so-called ‘communists’ have whipped the people into a frenzy and given them the false idea that ‘voting’ is the only arbiter and guarantee of their peace.

“And now… now… now some of them believe that ‘voting’ has been taken from them. Their only hope. Their great ‘god’.”

Clay wondered at the oddness of the talk for a moment. He was beginning to come back to his senses after the fainting spell and he was listening to the man enough to have picked up that many of the things he said sounded familiar, but in a far off kind of way.

“We all only have one inalienable right. Only one! It is not the vote. It is not. It is, instead, the right to say ‘NO’ to all of this manipulation.

“And then we must be prepared to accept the consequences of that singular, valorous, and revolutionary act.

“But that is the one thing that modern people just will not do.”

He let that word sink in. Will.

“We are enslaved by our possessions, and imprisoned by our wants.

“I am just an old man. I’ve lived my life without a country. I have made a lot of mistakes, and I’ve caused a lot of pain and even death no doubt. But I have learned something. I believe that all of this, every bit of it, is about power. Power is the ability to coerce others to do what they would not otherwise do.

“All of history is a lesson in the third side using lies and wars and manipulations to get what they want. The Russian people do not want war.”

The crowd shuffled their feet on the floor. They looked at him.

“But the third side does. So we will have warfare.

“The American people do not want war, but the third side does, so we will have warfare.

“The powers-that-be finance both sides of every conflict, and the third side profits, and the people don’t care as long as they are comfortable and well fed and have some neighbor to hate.”

He paused again and let that sink in.

“Let me ask you a question, those of you who condemn me for switching sides—which I did not do, by the way—but if you say I did, well… there is always the public’s opinion. But let me ask you a question. Why, if I switched sides as you say I did, isn’t America moving to stop what I told them is going to happen? Or why didn’t they listen to Golitsyn, or Stanislav Lunev, or Vladimir Bukovsky, or any of hundreds of other men just like them. You know these names. I have taught you all of them.

“Defectors. Dissidents. Refuseniks. Risking life and limb, leaving family and home, to go off into the wilderness of public opinion… and to freedom. Why, if I have switched sides, do the Americans treat us defectors as defective?

“I told them that my country planned to destroy America within a quarter century of 1992. And to what end? Did they listen?

“If the-powers-that-be in America had wanted it stopped, then they could easily have stopped it. Could they not? But why, then, did they not?”

He swallowed, and let the crowd wonder.

“Just Golitsyn’s testimony alone ought to have been enough to convince them. It has been estimated very conservatively, and yet, even in that tentative suggestion, it has been argued persuasively that almost all of his predictions, almost all, have been fulfilled. And most of them by 1993!

“Trotsky, in The Revolution Betrayed, predicted that just such a thing may have to come to pass in order for the worldwide revolution to take place. Are you telling me that the American leadership never read Trotsky!?”

Not since Marc Antony stood before the Romans, had a crowd been more receptive, more quiet and attentive, more thriving with pent up energy.

“But I am not here to say that Russia is our enemy! No! WE are our enemy. We who will not unplug from the dialectic and refuse to participate are the enemy. No! Refuse. Never again. Not anymore! No. Simply, No.

“I did not betray my country. I betrayed a handful of wicked men—some Russian, some American—who want to annihilate the world…

“…so that they can have their worldwide revolution.

“America has always been the only bulwark against that worldwide revolution. And whatever side we are on we must admit that. So, no, I did not betray America. I told them the truth about what was about to happen, not because I love America—”

He paused.

“—but because I love truth.”

Volkhov looked around, worn out from speaking, and his eyes seemed to close as he glanced at faces he knew around the room. “I’m tired,” he said, “and I don’t care if these young boys shoot me now. I’ve said what I had to say.”

The old man slowly moved back to his seat and sat down, ignoring the thunderous applause and some boos and hisses from the gathered villagers. Mikail stood and once again froze the commotion with his icy stare.

“Nice speech old man,” he said with no hint of affection or emotion. Then he raised his voice to silence the crowd. “I wanted everyone to hear his confession from his own mouth, and he did not disappoint me. Now, I told you that one of the men up here will die, and I am a man of my word.”

He turned on his heel and walked over to where Clay was sitting, right beside Officer Todd Karagin. He stood over Clay and indicated to the officer with a wave of his hand that he wanted him to hand over the pistol from its holster, snapping his fingers at Todd as though he were a dog. Even Pavlov couldn’t have asked for a faster reaction, and Todd complied, handing the pistol, butt first, to Mikail who made a display of examining it to make sure it was loaded. He checked to see if there was a bullet in the chamber and that the safety was released and then he walked around Clay ominously, peering into his eyes and looking into his soul.

Clay’s pulse had been racing dangerously ever since Mikail had repeated his statement that one of them would die. But now, as he looked into the eyes of the man who was menacing him, he suddenly felt a calm come over him. He felt at one with his surroundings. He looked into the tough exterior Mikail was putting out and he saw a pitiful vulnerability. He thought of the look in the eyes of the red haired man on the bicycle as they’d parted, and the eyes of the young man named Vasily from his cell when they first met. He then watched as the sad vision of Mikail turned around and confronted the room full of peasants, by waving his loaded gun. The impotent threat of the thing. Clay had decided that such a threat could have no long-term hold over his soul anymore. He watched and he felt a surreal sense of calm flood through his body. Is this it?

He tried to think of everyone he loved, but now, with death staring him in the face, he could not. He really could only think of what Volkhov had said, and that he had also been a pawn and a prisoner in a system of lies that his own lusts had enabled. All of this, this microcosm of world conflict and agitations playing itself out in a gymnasium in a little town in New York, was all engendered by his own lust for comforts and stuff, and air-conditioning, and cheap gas, and gadgets, and the soul-killing desire for more. That was the root and the base of it. That was the prison he’d tried to escape when he left Brooklyn. Everything else was just theater. Perhaps dying is the only real freedom. His interpreter had moved away from him and, after pausing for a moment, had returned to her seat. Poor girl. She doesn’t want to get shot by accident. I don’t blame her. He saw her looking at him and he nodded his ‘thank you’ to her.

Mikail spoke again to the assembled villagers, but Clay could not understand him. Suddenly Mikail was walking very rapidly towards him. Clay closed his eyes and bowed his head and he heard the deafening shot from the pistol.

But he didn’t feel anything,

His heart raced again and his eyes opened and his breath caught in his chest.

Looking up, he saw Mikail walking by him and out the door with the pistol still in his hand.

What happened? He looked up and saw the crowd and they were all frozen in shocked disbelief and there were screams and a few people fainted. Clay looked out over the crowd, his ears still ringing from the blast, smoky confusion rising in the air.

He scanned the crowd with his eyes and suddenly felt the thick, wet, fluid seeping into his prison jumper. He thought it might have been urine at first, but then he reached down with his hand and wiped the viscous stuff from his arms, and realized he was soaked in blood. He instantly came into awareness of the people rushing to the figure beside him and he looked to see if Volkhov had been shot, then saw the blood seeping underneath the old man’s chair. Without any particular notion of volition in doing so, Clay stood up to see where Volkhov had been shot.

But Volkhov’s eyes met his and they both looked down into each other’s souls and they confirmed in that look that they each were still alive.

The body of Officer Todd Karagin was writhing on the ground. He had been shot in the head.

It looked like the old man was going to collapse, and Clay motioned to him and Volkhov stood up and they both backed away from the body as it kicked and twitched there on the ground. A young boy came up—he could not have been more than fifteen—and he pulled the trigger on his machine pistol hitting Todd’s body three or four more times and eventually, after an agonizing few seconds, the writhing stopped and Todd’s blood ran into the hardwood of the gymnasium in Warwick.

The crowd watched the frenzy at the podium in silence and no one even noticed the weary, haggard traveler helping the old bearded saint off the podium and into a chair at the edge of the crowd.

CHAPTER 9

An hour later Clay and Volkhov were locked in a cell together. Not the cell Clay had been in earlier, not the Tank, but one of the cluster cells where the young boys had been held prior to Clay’s arrival at Warwick Prison.

Clay and Volkhov talked, but only after a moment or two of silence. Upon entering the cell, they’d sat quietly, collecting their thoughts and breathing. Then they had talked. Clay heard more of the old man’s story and he told a bit of his own. They clung to one another in the exhaustion and euphoria that grips two people who have temporarily escaped death together.

Clay did not know Lev Volkhov, but in a strange way, he felt a kinship with the old man. Somehow he even had affection for him, this man he did not know. Like everyone else in America, Clay had been trained to call every idea that flew in the face of the collective talking points a conspiracy theory. But he’d identified with Volkhov’s speech to such an extent that, except for the details about spying and such, the old man could have been reading the text directly from Clay’s heart. This is not merely to point out that Clay felt at peace with the man; it is to notice the more important fact that Clay felt at peace within himself in the man’s presence.

He knew that both he and Volkhov had been on a long journey that had led them here. His own journey had not started on the steps of that Brooklyn brownstone the day after Sandy. He’d been traveling all of his life. Clay thought of friends and loved ones—the ones still alive, and the ones he’d lost—and he imagined telling them the story of this journey. Would they believe it? Who knows. Everyone carries their own baggage into a story.

Some people would hate the things that they’d heard and would reject this old man and his ramblings, and would curse the things that Clay now thought about the world and his countrymen and this life and the way of it. Some might want to lock Volkhov up and others would want to embrace him or stone him or ignore him with the hope that he would just go away. After all, the dialecticians had done their work. Journeys, in the end, are individual things no matter how many people come along on them. His journey had led him to this place and time, and he accepted where he was despite the danger, and he saw in Volkhov a fellow pilgrim on the pilgrimage of truth. Perhaps they had just started too late. Procrastination tends to be the genesis of almost every journey.

This old man with him in his cell had carried burdens and had walked a path that, prior to meeting him, Clay had only read about in books. He’d lived a life of adventure and danger. More importantly, perhaps, the man had lived a life of the mind. He had lived within himself and within his worlds, whichever one he found himself in, in a search for knowledge and truth. His face was lined with intrigue and despair and excitement and frightful loss. He wore a beard that most, even those who lived in a Russian village today, would consider “unkempt” or wild. Despite his higher learning and his brilliant mind he could easily be mistaken for a homeless drunk or an insane philosopher-poet.

Clay could imagine Volkhov as Diogenes lying in the sun when Alexander the Great rode up and said something akin to “I am the great King Alexander!” to which Diogenes had replied, “I am the great dog Diogenes.” Alexander had promised Diogenes anything he wished in the whole world, to which Diogenes had only replied, “I wish you’d get out of my sun.”

He had the look of that. The face of Lev Volkhov aged in wisdom and worry and want, had had enough of king’s shadows.

In the fullness of time, Volkhov wanted to talk, so Clay let him.

“Clay, what I said in that gymnasium was the truth, but it didn’t matter. In the grand scheme of things it was just an old man railing against the darkness of a life lived by lies. Solzhenitsyn, my honored countryman, said ‘Live Not By Lies’ and it took me way too long to heed him. I should have read more Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy and less Marx and Lenin.

Had Clay been in the other world he would have thought about the books in his backpack, of his own influences, of the writers who gave him hope, but he was not, and he didn’t.

“America is more divided than it was before the Civil War… why? Because the third side has presided over a century’s long plan to dumb down the people and to colonize them into thinking that the only answer to every problem must come from government. In my last ditch effort to save a system that really doesn’t want… no more… it doesn’t need saving, I tried to tell the Americans the truth of what is coming. But, like Golitsyn before me—”

“Stop.” Clay interrupted. “There’s that name. I don’t know who he is…”

The old man waved him off and kept talking.

“The Americans believed everything—bought the whole story—except the most important part! They claimed not to believe what is called The Long-Term Deception Strategy. I told my new masters that the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960’s had been faked. I told them that the Perestroika and Glasnost were faked. I told them that the plan was—” he stopped, as if searching for a word, “—that the plan had always been, to break up the Soviet Union and feign a collapse in order to rake in Western aid, weaken the capitalist west, and to eventually destroy America.

“Golitsyn told them this in his book New Lies for Old, written before the collapse in ‘92, and they believed everything but that. So many other defectors told them this, but they would not believe it.”

The old man looked at him, sadly and spread his hands, holding them palms upward as if in prayer.

“Volkhov told them this too, and they could not accept it.”

Clay looked at him and continued to listen.

“But I’ve learned that there are some in the halls of power who are one with those who are in the halls of power everywhere. They are the ones who forced America’s leaders to disbelieve the truth. Because the third side wants the war.

“They want the planet to lose six and a half billion of its inhabitants. They want to save the environment by destroying it, or they want all of the gold, or they want to continue to be the masters of history… I don’t pretend to understand the why completely. I don’t understand why, but in just a couple of decades from now what once was America will be a collection of independent fiefdoms, a balkanized mess of warring kingdoms like medieval Europe. That is what comes next.”

As Volkhov paused, the door opened and Vasily came in slowly with another case of bottled water. Though this cell had a sink, the water system was not currently operating due to the power outages. Clay smiled at him, and Vasily smiled back weakly.

Just before Volkhov and Clay were ushered into the cell they’d been standing in the cluster day room when Mikail came in to give instructions on their care. Mikail, speaking in English, probably out of habit more than anything, had ordered Vladimir to have Vasily oversee the two prisoners as their caretaker. He had given Vladimir specific instructions that no one else should be admitted to the room to see them.

“Vasily is young and stupid and doesn’t speak English,” Mikail had told Vladimir.

They smiled and nodded but Clay had seen a change in Vasily’s face. It was subtle, so subtle that no one else noticed it. His jaw had tightened and his eyes had narrowed only slightly and his gaze had met Clay’s. There had been an invisible communication between them. Vasily understood English. He was a book that had been judged by his cover, but they had misread him. He was not stupid, although he was indeed young. Clay had decided that perhaps he had an ally.

Now, in the cell, as Vasily dropped off the water, Clay looked at him and pointed to the ceiling and then to his ear asking Vasily silently if the room was being monitored. Vasily shook his head ‘no’ then spoke in perfect English, “The whole electronic security apparatus is down right now. The entire facility is on minimum power, and since you two are the only prisoners, they have shut down everything but the emergency lighting.”

His words hit Clay like a rocket. What is this place, where even those who seem the meekest are so competent? To the two adults in the cell, the boy had just summed up a mountain of information in the most efficient way possible. He was like a co-conspirator or… a spy.

He went on. “They’ve ‘appropriated’ several homes in town for themselves, and there are only four guards placed at the entrances of this building for security.”

Volkhov looked at Vasily with concern and care on his face and asked, “What will you do, Vasily Romanovich?”

“What would you have me do, grandfather?” Vasily asked affectionately.

Clay wondered whether this term was a sign of respect or an indication of lineage. He was finding it hard to see, in the big picture, who was on which side in this vast game of chess, but he knew in his heart, as well as he had ever known anything, that the three of them in this cell were of one mind in that moment.

“You must escape here, Vasily. The attack, if it comes as planned, will start in three days and if you are still here, things will get very bad very fast.”

Volkov turned to the cinder-block wall and drew a map of the east coast with his finger. “It will start in the areas currently blacked out, and the attack will focus first on Washington D.C. and the rest of the eastern seaboard. News will be sketchy, and any government information will be lies. The rest of the country will just hear about the continually plummeting stock market, and the major power outages. They will say that information is unreliable because of the lack of power and fuel.”

He paused and looked at them. “Turmoil and confusion.”

“It’s already gotten pretty bad out there, grandfather. It has been bad since the first storm hit, but in the last two days everything has just gone haywire. You haven’t heard the news. We’ve been listening in on the radio pretty much whenever we have free time. The world is spiraling into chaos even now.”

The boy paused. Clay heard in the pause, as the old man did, the boy asking, “How will I escape? And where will I go?”

Volkhov offered a way out.

“Clay here says that the fence is destroyed on the south side of the facility. If you can get out that way, you could escape. I don’t know where you can go in the long-run. Go to the Amish, if you can. We’ve talked about that.”

Clay looked at him, surprised.

“Or just find someplace away from the cities to hide out. There may not be a good solution out there, but being in here would be the worst solution of all,”

Volkhov shook his head. He tried to be secretive about it, but Clay saw him wipe away a single tear that had welled up in his eyes.

“They have guards posted on all of the exits,” Vasily said. “If I leave through the north door, towards Warwick, I will not be noticed, but if I attempt to leave out of any of the other doors, they won’t open them to me and they’ll ask questions. Besides, what about you grandfather? And Clay? What should we all do?”

Clay looked at Vasily intensely. He really did hope that the boy would escape, but Vasily didn’t seem to have much hope for himself. Clay grabbed a bottle of water and took a long drink, and then he handed one to Volkhov.

The old man received it with a nod, as a way of thanks. Clay offered one to Vasily, who refused, saying that he had plenty and that he didn’t want to drink theirs.

“Where are you staying, Vasily?” Clay asked.

“Most of us who are considered ‘worthless’—we who do not have homes and families to go to—are sleeping on cots in the gymnasium.”

Clay looked at Vasily and decided that he had to trust him. “Vasily, I need to tell you that I have a backpack hidden in the Tank. They never thought to look for it, at least as far as I know. I think mostly because they killed the only man who ever saw it. Why they never searched the Tank for the camera is beyond me, but with so much going on, I think—once they realized that I was just a lost hiker—they just forgot about it.

“Anyway, the backpack is stowed under the bunk in the Tank, hidden under a blanket.”

“What should I do with it?” Vasily asked.

“Do you think you can get it out of here?”

“I can. I can walk it out the north entrance and tell the guard there, if he asks, that I am taking it to Mikail. They all think I’m stupid, so they don’t suspect me of anything. They don’t think I’m capable of trickery, lying, or subterfuge.”

“That makes you the best spy ever in a whole town of spies, Vasily,” Clay said, smiling.

“They could eventually figure it out if the guard thinks to ask Mikail about it later, but that won’t happen for some time, if it happens at all. Most of the people think of me as an ignorant automaton and I do my best not to rid them of the notion.”

He smiled at Clay. “It made my life easier in here for them to think that I was stupid and that I didn’t speak English.”

“What in the world were you locked up in here for, Vasily?” Clay asked.

“I got drunk,” Vasily replied. “I was tired of all of the abuse and I stole some vodka from the store and sat out behind the church in the cemetery drinking. Some students from school came by and started in on me, so I set into them like a windmill in a hurricane. It’s the first time I ever did such a thing, but I think it had built up in me for a long time.”

Clay smiled at Vasily and replied, “Well, I’ve been there, brother. Got locked up for it too! Ok? So listen, the backpack isn’t immediately critical, but if any one of us can escape, it has things in it that might keep us alive,” Clay said. “There is at least one clean change of clothes in there too. I think Todd stole my other clothes, thinking they were the only ones I had. But there are some other things in there that might be useful as well.”

Volkhov stood up and took a long swig from his bottle of water. He looked at the bottle intently.

“This reminds me, both of you, starting tomorrow, if we are still alive, do not drink any municipal or public water supply,” he said.

“Why?” Vasily asked.

“Just don’t.”

“Ok.”

Volkhov continued, “Vasily, when you leave here you need to find Pyotr Alexandrovitch, my nephew. He knows the whole story. There is another way out that he will show you.”

“Yes, grandfather, I’ll do it, but what about you two?”

“Well—”

Clay interjected. “All I can think of is that we can try to make a break for it. This place has never been weaker than it is right now. It has almost no security and only four guards. Mikail carries the keys. We can just jump him or something and try to make a break through the south fence.”

“It won’t work, Clay,” Vasily responded. “I have the room key, which also fits the cluster doors, but it only fits the rooms in this cluster. Vladimir is head of security now, and I think only he carries the external door master keys. I have to knock on the door to get out, so that means the guards carry a door key as well.”

Clay paused and thought. He trailed his hand along the cold concrete before slapping it in delight. “That’s it! So you have a key to this cluster, and the guards at the exits have a key to the external doors?”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“And if you were to try to exit the south door, which is only a brisk run from the collapsed fence, they wouldn’t let you out because you’re not authorized to go out that exit, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Beautiful! And they’d never let you through, because you only speak Russian. Right? At least that is what they think! Right?”

The boy looked at him, waiting.

“Right now there is only one man with a key and a gun between us and freedom! So you could speak in perfect English and they would assume that it was either Vladimir or Mikail! They’d open the door to either of them, would they not?”

“They would!”

Clay and Vasily smiled broadly and started to give one another a high-five, but then they looked over at Volkhov who was frowning. “We shouldn’t try to all get out the same way,” he said, “What if something goes wrong? They’d kill us all.” He looked at Clay. “You and I, we are as good as dead already to Mikail and his people. Not Vasily. He can get out cleanly.”

“What do you recommend, grandfather?” Vasily asked.

“We mustn’t underestimate Mikail. He is a brilliant young man, and I don’t mean that he is just ‘smart’. He tested off the charts in every category. He is a phenomenon.”

Volkhov looked at Clay as if to ask if he knew what they were up against. Clay nodded his head and took another drink from his bottle.

“Why wasn’t he sent to Russia to spy? He’s old enough isn’t he?” Clay asked.

“Some people are not sent because they fail the tests, or because they are not adept at being dishonest, or because they have a skill or ability that is valuable for the village here. Some people are not sent because they lack some critical mode of thinking that is required for the job they are being sent to do. Mikail was not sent because he has a gloriously beautiful mind and is a completely unpredictable sociopath.”

“You’d think that would be a plus in the spy game,” Clay said, smiling.

“They don’t mind ‘sociopath’ so much, but ‘unpredictable’ is what gets you disqualified. His whole attitude—his anger, bravado, and even his danger—comes from being rejected for service by the Americans. The Russians accepted him, because they had nothing to lose. He is expendable if he fails, and if he doesn’t…” Volkhov said, sighing.

“Ok, so back to this plan. So you and I bust out the back, Volkhov, while Vasily goes out the front. Then he can meet up with—what is your nephew’s name, Pyotr?”

“That’s it,” Volkhov said, nodding his head.

The old man took Vasily by the shoulders and smiled at him affectionately for a moment. “Vasily, you will take the bag because you can surely get it out without being stopped. You must get to Pyotr. Whatever the cost. Tell him what we are doing. If we get out, tell him we will meet you at the pumping station. He’ll know what that means.”

Vasily nodded, and gave the old man a hug. When the embrace was broken, Volkhov added, “Let me tell both of you something. If anything goes wrong during this ill-advised and quixotic jailbreak, anything at all, you are to leave me behind. I will not go with you unless you promise me that. I am an old man, and I really don’t want to live through what is coming anyway. If the attack comes, it will be on Tuesday. That was the plan from the beginning. It will begin on the evening of the election.”

Both Clay and Vasily nodded. Something in the back of Clay’s mind should have noted that he was making a plan for escape with a young boy and an old man who had just stated that there was to be some sort of apocalyptic attack due on the day of an election, but he did not make that connection in that moment. The tension between his old world and this new world had snapped. He was simply a man fighting for his life in a cell with two other men who were doing the same, and who were offering to watch his back.

The excitement of making a decision had trailed off and an aura of sadness now permeated the cell. They stood silently for several moments before Volkhov again broke the quiet. “Come Tuesday, you guys have to really step it up a notch. Everything will change dramatically, even as it has already begun to change.

“Don’t drink municipal water anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard. Stay away from any areas where masses of people are gathered. Don’t trust anyone in uniform…”

He paused to let that sink in.

“Don’t try to fight it out, because that is a loser’s game. The Soviet plan, or should I say, the plan of those on the third side, will be to foster instability and chaos and panic. The primary purpose of government in an advanced civilization is to prevent or minimize panic. That is it. Everything else is window dressing. You don’t have to invade a country to destroy it. The people will do that for you when their comforts evaporate.”

“Sounds ominous,” Clay said.

“You have no idea,” Volkhov replied. After a moment he said, “People who know such things will expect the bombs to start dropping immediately, but that won’t happen. They will want to maximize the damage from confusion and riots before they use bombs. You’ll have some time to get somewhere safe.”

“You mean we will have some time,” Vasily said.

“If I am alive, then yes. Anyway, as I mentioned during my boring speech, the higher-ups on both side know what is coming. It’s been planned all along. But the law of unintended consequences will come into play. No plan survives contact with the enemy.

“They’ll intend to launch missiles soon enough, but subordinates, and some free agents, and others throughout the system will have war-gamed that. The initial launches will be thwarted by massive EMP attacks in all of the critical places.

He paused and looked at the farmer-poet and the errand boy standing before him, his generals. He felt not a single bit, not even the scintilla of the slightest bit, of irony.

“We don’t have time for me to explain it all. Anyway… two weeks. That’s how long you’ll have. Then, the law of human ingenuity will kick in. Despite key cards and codes and fail-safes and guarantees it will only take two weeks before some brilliant minds on every side figure out a workaround. And they will figure out a workaround, you can bet.”

He stopped and let the word will sink in.

“Two weeks,” Clay said, nodding his head. “That’s if we get out of here.”

Vasily looked at Clay and said, “So, now you will have to be the one to imitate Vladimir’s voice. Can you do it?”

“I can,” he said, and Clay was pretty sure he could.

They went back over the plan quickly, noting that the guards would be expecting Vasily to exit at any time now. There was no benefit in making them suspicious. So after they had all agreed to the plan, Vasily shook their hands and departed. He was to grab the backpack, and head out the north door. His job was to not get caught, and to meet up with Pyotr.

“Do not turn back, no matter what happens,” they told him. They’d give him five minutes, then head out the south vestibule—the one through which Clay had entered this nightmare.

Five minutes passed like an hour. The air was so thick with expectation and fear and excitement and terror that Clay wanted to scream in order to cut through it — if only so that he could breathe.

Moving through the unlocked cluster doors, Clay and Volkhov tiptoed as silently as they could manage. All went well and they passed through the final door and turned to the right and Clay could see that the Tank’s door was open but the light was off and he assumed that Vasily had successfully removed the backpack.

Listening for a moment, they heard no sounds and that was a good sign because it meant that Vasily had made it outside without the guards being alerted or suspicious.

Clay and Volkhov had agreed that when they heard the lock in the inner door snap and when the door started to open outward, they would rush through the door and do their best to overwhelm the guard. There was supposed to be only one man standing guard, but he would be armed. Clay and Volkhov looked at each other with a shared agreement that they would see each other on the other side.

It was very dark and the overhead emergency lights provided little assistance, but the darkness should give them cover. Clay wondered for a moment about the mechanics of his body, how he should hold his voice out, just so, in order that his much smaller body could emit the same force of sound as the huge beast of a man.

He stepped to the door and felt the urgency in his belly. He cleared his throat silently and swallowed.

When they were ready and in place, Clay knocked on the door and with an authoritative voice commanded the guard to open up. He thought he did a pretty good job of it. He looked at Volkhov in the dim light and could see that the old man’s head was nodding approval.

The outer door opened and they heard the guard grunt and then they heard the key slip into the lock on the inner door, but then the sound stopped.

“Who is it?” the voice asked in heavily accented English, “say again who it is!”

“It’s Vladimir Nikitich, stupid! Open the damn door!”

They heard the grunt again and then the lock turned and the door began to pull outward and that is when they rushed through the door.

Clay slammed through the portal violently and felt the guard collapse into the vestibule wall as the door unexpectedly hit him across the face. He felt Volkhov rushing behind him, clasping on to the thin fabric of his prison jumper, and he saw the faint outline of the stunned guard with the machine pistol and he rushed him and put his hand on the gun, pushing it downward as he brought the full force of his body crushing downward against the darkened figure.

He was surprised when the guard recovered so quickly, and he felt the gun being ripped from his hand and a booted foot came upward and caught him in the chest and he was brutally kicked across the vestibule. He expected bullets to rip into his body at any moment, but Volkhov had responded like a man half his age and he crashed into the guard before he could raise the gun. With both hands the old man grappled with the gun and his head turned toward Clay, who had regained his feet…

The old man shouted “GO!” at the top of his lungs.

Time, in such moments, telescopes outward. Every moment, every motion becomes an infinity, an eternity. The reasons before you and behind you come into sharp focus in your being and you know what it is you are made of. Such moments are, perhaps above any other moments in one’s life, clarifying.

Clay was able to see in the darkness and he rushed forward to help Volkhov but it was too late and the gun fired and both Volkhov and the guard crashed to the ground.

Clay froze and heard Volkhov yell “GO!” again. This time it was weaker, less in bravery than in finality. He immediately knew that he did not want to waste the man’s sacrifice, and he pushed his way out the outer door and began to sprint along the south wall of the prison.

His right hand brushed lightly along the wall and the cold gripped him and he realized he was just in his prison garb. He could feel the cold assaulting his fingers through the cracks in the bricks where the mortar lines had crumbled and were now filled with flaking snow.

The gun fired again and when Clay looked back he saw the guard was backing out of the outer door and Clay felt himself sprinting as fast as he could run through the snow and down the gentle incline that led to the fence line. He lost one of his slip-on shoes in the snow, and then the other came off, and he fell down in a small snowdrift, but he clawed his way back up and kept running. He could see his breath rush out of his body like a spirit.

He ran for his life.

He broke towards where he knew the gap would be in the fence and was now running across the open field, struggling in his bare feet through the snow and from this point on things could only be called ‘surreal.’ He saw what looked like huge gray balloons floating all around him toward the ground and though he was confused he picked up his speed and looked over his shoulder to see if the guard was gaining on him.

He didn’t see the guard coming and thought perhaps that he had made it, and he ran toward the grey balloons floating beautifully out of the sky and he listened intently in the distance for a gunshot. But he didn’t hear any.

He didn’t hear any gunshots.

When he came up over the last rise where he expected to see the fallen trees, he noticed that there were no trees at all. He ran toward the nothingness. In fact, any clue that would tell him that the storm had destroyed any section of the fence at all was now gone completely. The fence that stood now was shiny and new, and the ground was disturbed around it evidencing the new construction, then his vision of the new fence was obscured by one of the gray balloons and then another and another.

Clay Richter stopped and stared in the middle of the pristine field of glowing snow and watched the forms fall downward in the crisp moonlight. His eyes focused intently on the billowing orbs as they hung in the sky and just gently swayed in the reflective glow of the nighttime. They contrasted sharply with the clear, black sky, filling up with air and glow from the snow’s bright light. They were beautiful and wondrous… and then Clay realized what they were.

Parachutes.

As he watched one of them down while it fell silently through the cold, he realized that hanging from the bottom of the round parachute was a paratrooper with a rifle.

His heart raced, and then he knew he was saved.

Clay ran in the direction of one of the men, waving his arms like a drowning man in the sea of snow. Collapsing into a snow bank, he struggled to move on all fours, shouting that he was an American and that he had been captured by escapees from the prison. Rising to his feet he stumbled forward thinking that the man was too far away for him to see Clay clearly, but the soldier looked around and noticed him, anyway. He heard the sound of Clay’s yelling and he started toward him, raising his weapon as he did.

What’s going on? Clay struggled in his mind to ask that question. Then he suddenly realized they could not know who he really was because he was wearing prison garb. They could not know him.

He put his hands above his head and dropped to his knees. He showed them he meant no harm. He repeated his story loudly as a soldier walked across the snow toward him. Another was making his way through the distance and Clay could almost see them, could almost read their faces.

Then his heart sank. He looked back up into the paratrooper’s eyes, and followed the intent gaze. Off to the left. The paratrooper was not looking at him at all.

Clay looked across the field of snow and saw his tracks leading backward, toward the prison, toward the figure of a man standing in the doorway. The man stepped into the light underneath the overhang and then was followed by another, and another, and Clay followed the paratrooper’s eyes to see Mikail and Vladimir and Sergei walking towards them.

He saw the paratrooper raise the gun and he wondered if the soldier was going to shoot the three unarmed young men right there in the snow.

The man shouted to the trio approaching on foot, but—and this fact took time to penetrate Clay’s mind—the soldier spoke in Russian.

He spoke in Russian?

Clay saw his life flash before his eyes. He saw the tree swing and the cabin, and the inside of his brownstone, and Veronica. And Cheryl. Lovely Cheryl. He swallowed and looked up into the nighttime sky.

Clay heard the shouts in Russian and saw the waving angry menace of the bulldog Mikail. The gun moved slowly, lazily towards Clay and then Clay…

…heard its bark and felt its bite.

He saw the flash at the muzzle and thought how beautiful it was, how much it looked like fireworks. He felt bullets ripping into him and sensed a jerking in his body. The breath ran through him and then out of him and he noticed the beautiful fog it made against the clear night air, rising up like a spirit.

He collapsed on the snow.

The last thing Clay Richter saw was his own blood in sharp contrast with the whiteness of the pristine snow. It ran in little rivulets along the fresh packed snow where his body had fallen and then sank into the white and beyond that into the ground he loved so dearly and from whence he’d come. The last thought he ever formed, which slowly gripped his fading mind, circling in and around his consciousness like a vise until it held in him for an instant like a thin point of light or like a star in relief against the midnight sky, was a sentence that never had its own chance to find its period.

Always leave yourself a way o

Vasily Romanovich Kashporov heard the gunfire, and then he heard it again, and then once again. Looking over his shoulder and up the hill he saw the outline in the dark sky of the silent paratroopers gliding down in and around the prison walls and its fence and its fields.

A half-dozen came down in the street, drifting past the grocery between the Church and the shops and the houses. Some others looked as though they might have landed on top of the gymnasium.

He shivered just a bit in the cold wind and ducked his head as he pulled the shoulder straps up on the backpack and tightened them slightly across his chest.

He set his square face towards Pushkin Street and the light brown house on the end which even at that very moment had a candle showing through the window.

He knew the house well. He’d often passed it on his errands in and around the village and many times he had stopped to admire its many raised gardens and unique landscaping.

That was where he knew he’d find Pyotr Alexandrovitch Bolkonsky.