Right Livelihoods Read online

  After all, I am a man who has made health issues an important part of his professional life. Did I not report directly to Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare Caspar W. Weinberger during the presidential administrations of Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford? Did I not admire the hairstylings of Secretary Weinberger, the way his erotic forelock curl was swept back and tamed with some old-world fixative? I most certainly did! Moreover, I authored a report on the termination of smallpox vaccination among American Indians in 1974, reasoning that the risk of smallpox infection was so small that it was no longer cost-effective for the department to spend its budgetary monies in this way! I spent three years preparing that report! I know enough about health issues and about my own health and the functioning of my physique to make informed decisions about how to enjoy my retirement years! My God!

  The first fairway is the long par four, and it’s uneventful, serving as a warm-up for what comes later. Our golf course is a wonder of the world, and many famous golfers have been known to helicopter in to play eighteen holes. The first fairway wants for cover, but if I ran into the one thicket of rough just beyond the sand trap, where the phragmites threatened to overwhelm the fairway, I could easily dash from here to the second hole, which, you’ll recall, ambles along the ocean before curling dangerously toward the bluff on which, several hundred yards distant, sits the US Navy radar station, eyes of the world. It would be easy to attach myself to some foursome, the first of the morning, and in this way I could foil my wife, who would not wait long in the clubhouse. My wife hates golf.

  When I saw Ned Roberts improving his lie in the middle of the second fairway, I strolled up as though I had just run into him at the village market, where it often takes me so long to produce my change that Ned ribs me about it.

  “Jamie,” he said, using the diminutive that I have never quite managed to avoid, though I am well nigh upon my elderly years and most of my family is deceased. “What the hell is wrong with your lip?”

  “Insect venom, Ned. I’m just out for a little bit of a stroll.”

  “But you—”

  “I really couldn’t. I played the other day, and for once in my life I was unbeatable. Let me go on believing I’m a success for a few more days—”

  “What I meant was—”

  “Well, if you insist, I could take a whack at one or two.”

  At the same moment, Ned Jr. was attempting a chip shot from the lip of the green, and it seemed to me that the second green was some distant paradise where only the most fortunate of island residents would be permitted to tarry. I watched Neddie’s backswing. Ned Jr. had gone into his father’s money-management enterprise and was in the process of making a bundle. I’m sure the budding groves of the island, if you get my meaning, were open to him, and indeed his test swing was a marvel, likewise his backswing, and the ball arced away from us, and we could not see its trajectory, though we could see him subsequently pound the air and hop with joy, and in the consideration of this moment, my own heart seemed to thunder with some tachyarrythmia, and my knees buckled, and I was about to go down. Ned the elder caught me by the arm, swearing briefly, dropping his club, ruining his improved lie.

  “Jesus, Jamie,” he said.

  “It’s nothing, Ned. Nothing at all. I ate something that didn’t quite agree with me.”

  Ned helped me to the cart, and that was the best he could do in the midst of his intergenerational competition. Of course, a pause in the action suited my purposes because it offered me time to collect myself. I became the watcher of sunlight on the water. What can be more beautiful than this melancholy dream of the late summer? When you have lost your spectacles, and the sunlight resembles the pointillist dabs of an Impressionist canvas. In such a moment, the sun is the animator of all that is, of all that could be. It presides over even global politics and religious conflicts.

  Waiting in the cart, I had ample opportunity to return my attention to Omega Force: Code White by Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell. Let me note in passing that the current fad for the dangling participle in contemporary literature is more than I can take. Hawkes-Mitchell is not on my side. Also, it’s “different from,” not “different than,” Stuart. And “between you and me,” not “between you and I,” you cretin. Hawkes-Mitchell, I felt, really needed to open his style manual. Of course, it was obvious whenever the editor swooped in to attempt to make Stuart sound like he had a brain in his head. These were the lucid portions of the text. The passages Stuart wrote himself are the ones in which the detective narrator, Ernest Piccolo, unburdens himself at great length about beer. There are also “humorous” references to his manhood, which he calls by names like “Willie the Conqueror” and “President Johnson.” These asides are meant to be earthy, but I don’t find them amusing in the least. For comic entertainment, I prefer sketches, dancing girls, ribald verse, that sort of thing. Well, enough said on the subject of stylistic poverty, and on the subject of Detective Ernest Piccolo’s skirt chasing. (When Piccolo meets the infectious-diseases researcher and refers to the engorgement of his “stalk,” the work certainly strains for credulity, likewise thirty lines later, when her “firm breasts belled out into his callused hands.” He’s known her only fifteen minutes!)

  I was able to muster these analytical perceptions on the front nine despite having been deprived of my corrective lenses earlier in my ordeal. This difficulty was not insurmountable if I held the book at arm’s length. I could get the gist, and what more than the gist did I require? What was beyond all dispute was the fact that Omega Force: Code White had eerie national security ramifications, especially with respect to matters discussed between myself and federal agent Ed Thorne. I would now like to enumerate for the reader the material contained in Omega Force: Code White that impacted on these ongoing researches.

  1)On page 78, Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell, who cleverly creates a so-called front story, a serial-killing spree, to propel his “thriller,” first mentions the proximity of his setting (a resort town on the North Fork of Long Island) to Plum Island, better known to federal government employees as the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, or PIADC, an animal facility also containing the FADDL, or the Foreign Animal Disease Diagnostic Lab, these two together being designated as a level-four bioresearch facility, right here in our Long Island Sound neighborhood.

  2)On page 113, Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell alludes to the possibility that the serial killing is no more than a by-product or cover-up tangential to some kind of amphibious assault on Plum Island (and with it the PIADC and FADDL) by foreign hostiles, which conspiracy according to the infectious-diseases researcher with the bell-shaped breasts was generally referred to as an Omega Force among counterterrorist experts, which is the very sort of expert the infectious-diseases researcher turns out to be, an undercover counterterrorism expert.

  3)On page 249, the Omega Force prompts a so-called Code White, in which military specialists from around the country descend on the coasts of Long Island and Connecticut in an effort to defeat wide release of an airborne zoonotic disease, such as West Nile, hantavirus, Ebola, or Rift Valley fever.

  I don’t want to give away the ending of Omega Force: Code White, because it’s possible that some of you in the national military-industrial complex will have the time or inclination to read Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell’s fiction. (You may want to skim.) But I don’t think it ruins anything to let you know that Detective Ernest Piccolo, who later in the book actually pulls out a man’s intestines through a gunshot wound and makes his victim look at them, proved so popular among readers that he was brought back (raised from the dead, as it were) in a number of Omega Force prequels and sequels.

  What is important is the presence in this potboiler of Plum Island itself, which is very nearly adjacent to our own island. It’s likely that the military has already thought through these issues, that Plum Island is a legitimate military target, one that is well-known to hostiles around the globe, but I would feel remiss if I did not expatiate at length on the is
sue of targeting, in these remarks.

  Before I do so, however, I should add that Ned Roberts Jr. was very kind about driving me around for the next few holes. His father had to ride in the back with the clubs, and this was not ideal, but young Neddie was only too polite, claiming, on the fourth green, to remember taking swimming lessons at the club with Skip, back when they were both young. I watched Ned very nearly sink a hole in one on the fifth, and I experienced only a momentary regret that after Skip’s birth, my wife and I were never again able to conceive.

  5. High-Value Targets in the Region

  We were on the seventh, a long par four. Not much of a water hazard, although lefties such as myself are in danger when shanking. They are going to lose a ball or two. I said as much to Ned the elder, although he’s a traditional righty. He was appropriately grateful for my advice, because of his son’s three-stroke advantage. I was, however, getting a headache from trying to read the Hawkes-Mitchell, and I was within walking distance of the clubhouse. I could easily have disembarked at any point in order to have a bit of lunch (or late breakfast) while talking over the issues I’m describing here with any persons I might encounter inside. Of course, I was highly regarded at the clubhouse, so that when I turned up there was often merriment among the staff and other members. Furthermore, I could “charge” my lunch without having to produce identification or a credit card of any kind, as I had mislaid my personal identification.

  Now, there were any number of ideal targets within ten or twenty miles of myself, the author of these remarks, for those dark-complected persons who wished to strike out against our great nation, and some of them are as follows:

  A)Osprey Nuclear Power Facility of Niantic, CT. The plant has had safety issues in the past, including using sea-water as coolant for its fuel rods, though seawater is known to be highly corrosive. The plant has received several citations from the Atomic Energy Commission, which I happen to know—from my own government days—is unusual, since the AEC’s initial purpose was, historically, the promotion—not the regulation—of atomic energy. Osprey is good about sending those of us here in the area yearly pamphlets on living downwind of the plant: “What is radiation? Radiation is energy given off in the form of waves and particles. The term ‘radiation’ is broad and includes ordinary sunlight and radio waves.” As it happens, I look directly at Osprey from my breakfast nook, which we added to the house a couple of years ago. My wife was bent on using the very fashionable “modern” architect I mentioned at the outset of these pages, but I insisted that we use someone who was more traditional and able to work in the shingle style for which our island is justifiably famous. The steam rises from the Osprey containment vessels each morning. It’s especially lovely in winter.

  B)General Dynamics Corporation, Electric Boat Division, New London, CT. Few of us here could fail to have noted that snipers have recently been positioned among sandbags at the Electric Boat dry dock, where Polaris nuclear submarines were once manufactured and may be again in the future—if a political officeholder deems it politically useful. Nuclear submarines are the crown jewels of our naval fleet. Many such submarines are moored upstream in the Thames River. I once traveled to see the christening of one, and I was greatly moved to observe the former military men whose recollections of service brought tears to their eyes at the beholding of that warrior vessel (arrayed with festive bunting).

  C)Plum Island Animal Disease Center, Plum Island, NY. It’s only six or seven miles away. There has been, according to the press, simmering resentment between the federal workers on location and the workers from the private sector, who have inferior benefits, longer shifts, et cetera. One way to infiltrate the PIADC and its companion laboratories would be to win over the disgruntled employees, inducing them to commit sabotage as part of jihad. Ferryboats leave for Plum every day from Long Island and Connecticut. Ample opportunities for infiltration exist through these and other routes.

  These constitute the more obvious targets in the region, though I’ve failed to mention Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant, Sikorsky Aircraft, the many bridges in the state of Connecticut that are important parts of our national highway infrastructure. And what of the port of New London itself? A nuclear warhead could easily be loaded onto a transport container, concealed as a shipment of sneakers. If major airports were no longer feasible for the dark-complected hostiles, what about a neglected seaport town or a tiny little airport on an island such as our island, a tiny little airstrip that is overseen, if at all, only by once proud fisherfolk surf casting each day for striped bass?

  I tipped my hat to the Robertses, père et fils, though I don’t wear hats. I felt refreshed as a result of my time reposing in the golf cart, but now I required an early lunch to fortify myself. Perhaps some lobster salad. As I trod along, I heard a few golf balls whizzing by, like little asteroids in the great unknown of this apocalyptic present. I paid them no mind, nor did I attend to the cries of those who would have me take the long way around. Within ten minutes or so, I was making my way up the steps onto the veranda of the golf clubhouse.

  The maître d’, Brittany, wife of the fellow who looks after the golf greens, came over to tell me how terrific I was going to look in one of the new cardigan sweaters the club was hawking this summer, robin’s-egg blue with a facsimile of the island on the left breast. The squiggle of our island, I have recently come to realize, almost exactly resembles the shape of a certain pathogen studied at the aforementioned PIADC, namely Borrelia burgdorferi, which turned up first in a local man just miles from the Old Saybrook PIADC ferry terminal. Where did he contract Borrelia burgdorferi, if not from the PIADC ecosystem.

  It was incredibly generous of Brittany to offer me this cardigan sweater and even to volunteer to find me a pair of matching golf slacks. Yet I take a dim view of excessive matching of colors, so I was fine with my poplin shorts, even if they looked a little worse for wear. I would accept the sweater only because it was coming on sweater weather.

  Soon the German exchange girl came by, the girl who would, she told me in a charming accent, be my server today. I must say that no German exchange girl in the annals of humankind ever looked as stunning as this fräulein. She had steel blue eyes that were almost lacerating they were so vulnerable, and it seemed to me that she had been crying recently. Perhaps the fräulein cried because she knew that there was nothing this life promised that it delivered, which is to say that every human interaction was mediated by the grim facts surrounding us—hemorrhagic fever, Arabs slaughtering Africans, Hindus slaughtering Muslims, Israelis slaughtering Palestinians, and vice versa; children perishing of diarrhea or malaria, dozens of them since I’d sat down for my lobster salad; massive earthquakes; tsunamis that swept hundreds of thousands out to sea; and worse. When you thought of it, if you happened to be a German exchange fräulein working the bar, the world was composed of heartless nonsense, and it was plain to see that all we wanted, this girl and I, was to speak of the necessity for warmth, to speak of how irrefutable human kindness could be if it were only practiced more regularly. Why didn’t I tell Brittany, the maître d’, that the rosy hue of her cheeks could make any child smile, and how lucky her husband was to press his face against hers? Why didn’t I congratulate Ned Roberts on the fact that he’d once routinely held Ned Jr. in his arms, that he had whispered to Ned Jr. that everything would be all right, even though this was erroneous. How was it that I detested anyone who supported the proposal for a bike path running to the far end of the island? Where was the warmth? When I asked Olga or Nina or Elsa, or Whatever her name was, for my Bloody Mary, there was a look on her face of benediction, as if she alone could deliver me from the desperation of my situation, and so I waited with great excitement for her return, and when she brought me the beverage, I told her my secret member number, after which I knew, without hesitation, that it was safe to tell her my story.

  European citizens are more informed than we are in matters of international relations. Olga or Elsa listened with cocked head
and one perfectly shaved leg bent slightly at the knee as I spun out a web of intrigue. Occasionally, she would brush back some of the delightful hair that fell into her eyes, almost as if these rogue locks knew that their indiscipline made her ever more vulnerable. She was all ears as I explained to her that federal agents were now present on the island, that they were conducting informational sweeps even as we spoke. And because she was so receptive, I then posed first to her some of the questions I now pose here. How did dark-complected hostiles discover that our island was an effective launching pad for their plot to overcome our nation through terror? How was it that they first realized the value of this place, this sleepy outcropping in the middle of the Sound of which no one knew a thing, except perhaps the three thousand people who have been coming here for generations, interbreeding, trying to keep out the uncivilized hordes beyond? How did this become the high-value target? This was not a place that anyone would bother to blow up with their impressive homemade fertilizer bombs or their dirty radiation-spewing devices! This was not a place that you would release a pathogen! We don’t even have deer! That nonsense about a deer washing up on one of the beaches! Have you ever run over a deer in your speedboat? I have been on any number of powerboats that ran over lobster traps! But neither myself nor anyone ferrying me anywhere, in thirty years, has ever accidentally run over a deer’s head, nor collided with the broad hindquarters of a buck whose ten points rose above the surface of the Sound like an antediluvian antenna! I have never seen such a thing, Olga, dearest!

  Admittedly, I kept her going back and forth, in order to ensure that Olga or Elsa would forever orbit near, and she was thus engaged in fetching me one of several Bloody Marys when the worst of all eventualities came to pass, namely the sudden unavoidable appearance of my beloved wife, my plighted troth, whose search party had now returned to the golf club. There were some raised voices at this point. I clung desperately to the table. But soon I was obliged to cut short my luncheon.