Right Livelihoods Read online

  More pressing, in a way, was the rule that in certain circumstances the players were required by the drinking game to embrace or even kiss one another. I pointed out to a young blond fellow with a backward baseball cap (and one of those preposterous necklaces) that this was a requirement from which I needed to be exempted, by virtue of advanced years. The towheaded son of the president of one of the country clubs, I believe, whose name was D’Arcy, said that this should elicit no worries, because I could always just drink some more.

  I reluctantly assented. D’Arcy again asked if I didn’t want Skip to play.

  “He’s very sensitive about things like this. And at any rate, he’s more interested in rhyming games. He’s a demon for rhymes.”

  A young woman who had been sitting on the far side of one of the enormous logs on the beach appeared from the shadows and demanded, with a sloppy grin on her face, a demonstration of Skip’s rhyming skills. Skip sat quietly at my feet, looking out at the ocean, since the sound of waves often pacified him.

  “Skip, my boy,” I asked, shaking him, “can you give an example for the good people of a rhyme for the word orange?” This was a trick question, of course, because there are no perfect English rhymes for orange, as Skip had properly observed on many occasions.

  “No rhymes,” Skip said darkly. “Change, mange, short-range, strange, arrange, derange, estrange, exchange, shortchange.” And then he got stuck on mange for a while and kept whispering it to himself.

  A contestant, Meghan was her name, was asked by the moderator for a penetrating truth about herself, and she admitted that she’d cheated on every test in geology, a required course in her core curriculum. This was not considered a penetrating truth, and Meghan laughed gaily as she swigged another dram of From Here to Eternity.

  Let me pause briefly to observe that Omega Force: Code White by Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell has the requisite stunning reversal in its last chapters, and this I learned by borrowing one of the multiple copies of the book from the shelves of our tiny island library after I had mislaid the earlier, purloined copy. Why would there be multiples of such a book on our island? Let us leave this question aside for the moment. The stunning reversal in the Hawkes-Mitchell tome is as follows: Ernest Piccolo, the astringent detective at the heart of the saga, it is revealed, has all along been in cahoots with the Omega Force. That the book shifts abruptly from Piccolo’s point of view to the point of view of a small-town lawyer named Bonnie Peebles is one of the few unusual features in what is basically hackwork, and it enables Piccolo’s betrayal of Peebles, notwithstanding his claim to have fallen in love with her after a grand total of two romantic evenings; Piccolo waits until they are on the verge of landing on Plum Island in their stolen Coast Guard launch, and then he puts his .38-caliber wheel gun to her head and tells her that since she’s the only one who is in possession of the real story, she’s the one who’s going to have to die.

  Frankly, I couldn’t have lived with Piccolo for another fifty pages, and his novelistic urge to spill the entire story in his last speech is difficult to take. Still and all, whichever jihadists brainwashed him had already prepared for this moment, the moment when he enacts the murder of his doomed romantic obsession. Meanwhile, the Omega Force has plan B in place. Either Piccolo murders the small-town lawyer, and the Omega Force reaches the PIADC unimpeded, or he does not. But by distracting Bonnie Peebles, by encouraging local law enforcement to follow the stolen Coast Guard launch, the Omega Force ensures a clean getaway, in scuba gear, so that they can live to fight another day—in the next Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell sequel.

  It was the realization that such a stunning reversal—the imminent betrayal by Ernest Piccolo, a.k.a. Ed Thorne—might already have been in the offing that led me to undertake some quiet interrogation of the persons gathered at the party. Sotto voce, naturally. I was performing the role of the intoxicated retiree, and performing, I must say, with a certain spirited aplomb. As soon as I had what information I needed, Skip and I could repair to the brush beyond, to see if men in wet suits were indeed scrabbling up the eroding face of Carson’s Bluff, just out of view.

  To the contestant named Meghan I mumbled the following question: “Was a rather gruff man called Ernest Piccolo here earlier in the evening? Before we arrived?”

  “Who?”

  “Ernest Piccolo. Rough-hewn, salty guy, curses like a sailor. Might have attempted to take advantage of you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Excuse me, then. Thank you for your time.”

  11. Policy Recommendations

  To maintain deep cover, it was crucial that I should be seen serving myself more of the punch, so I poured a liberal amount of it into one of the plastic cups available. Just beyond the punch, a strapping young man I recognized as one of the soda jerks from the ice cream establishment in town was singing quietly to himself. He too had liberally sampled the punch, and he was well on his way from here to eternity. I asked him if there had been an infiltration of this beach party by person or persons unknown to him, dark-complected persons, persons who might seem to have allegiances to foreign powers, particularly powers of a globalist perspective, powers that were aligned with uncontained growth of a united Europe, or perhaps powers that had a pan-Arabist or pan-African worldview. Did he perhaps see Sudanese Arabs coming down the beach? Riding Arabian stallions, bent on some kind of ethnic cleansing? Did he see any of these things? Anything out of the ordinary? Anything at all?

  The soda jerk stopped singing abruptly and fixed me with a rheumy eye. “Damn straight,” he said. “Damn straight, I did. I saw them. I saw them all around. There were guns going off. They were running up and down the beach and they were raping and pillaging and they were stealing everything that was left to steal, everything that wasn’t screwed down. They were stealing people’s television sets, especially the flat-screen ones, and they were stealing the satellite dishes because they knew with the satellite dishes they could make us all watch Arabic-language cable stations, and they were taking the family silver, and they were melting it down and they were making statues out of the silver, fat Buddha, Mohammed, Ganesh. And they were stealing the expensive twenty-speed racing bikes with the little mounting thing where you put the bottled water. Oh yeah, and the cars. They took every Hummer on the island, every one of those Hummers on the island, they took them, and they made some kind of military convoy with all the Hummers. And the tank, the guy who owns that tank and drives it down to get the newspaper, they took that guy’s tank, and they actually ran over him with it, because nobody should own a tank, not even as a joke.”

  The young man did not stop here. He went on to describe a host of signs of the invasion. The hostiles took a lot of clothes because, the young man said, there was nowhere else on earth you could get clothes in these colors, and the clothes would serve as camouflage. They went rampaging into our town, seizing hostages along the way. They stole all the trunks of garments from the Lilly Pulitzer trunk show. And then these dark-complected guys broke up some barbecues that were under way, because, the young man told me, the food was too bland, and when the strict Islamic sharia was adopted on the island, whoever hadn’t died a nasty, violent death was going to have to learn to mash their own chickpeas, and they weren’t going to be able to drink alcoholic beverages, because that was part of the sharia, no more drinking. “And because we knew they were coming,” the soda jerk continued, “we came down here, because hell if we’re going to watch them pour out all the rest of the booze when we could have the chance to drink some of it ourselves, so we came down here to wait for it all to happen.”

  These were his words! Raping and pillaging! Arabic-language cable stations! Lilly Pulitzer! Strict Islamic codes! I stared at him for a moment, absolutely uncertain about what I should do. Knowledge itself had been vitiated, vaporized, obliterated, in the international conflict flourishing here on the island. Old-fashioned know-how was the thing that once brought the constellations into focus, the Big Dippe
r and its neighbors. Knowledge was the thing that enabled you to read the morning paper, to digest the day’s events; knowledge was what you used when you were telling your son what to believe and what to ignore. But knowledge and certainty had been wiped out in the conflict at hand. It was now impossible to verify anything at all. I’d had weeks to research and to cross-reference all the various strains of the story. I’d found that an architect on the island was illegally building modern architecture against the wishes of the local citizenry, and through these structures, through the heretical cult of modernism, he was indoctrinating people into decadent lifestyles and signaling about this to Islamist compatriots. I had learned that people with dark complexions had been landing on our island in small aircraft, as witnessed by our once proud fisherfolk, and these people were taking photographs of our island, without permission, in an effort to mount attacks on high-value targets in our neighborhood, where certain rogue elements were also beginning to experiment with increasingly unstable germs.

  Which side was which? The sides had become indistinguishable. The government position either included my own wife, who was acting in a way that was frankly conspiratorial by my standards, and Ernest Piccolo, who may or may not have been a once proud fisherman of our island, or who may or may not have been a character in a novel called Omega Force: Code White, a novel that may or may not have been written by someone called Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell, whose own Cessna aircraft may or may not have been the one flown to this very island by certain dark-complected people, or else this Cessna aircraft may have gone down in a fiery crash in western Massachusetts, which suggested that he was either a casualty of the dark-complected or he was a confederate of same. Was Hawkes-Mitchell on the side of the government? Was he attempting to suppress a revolution? Or was he attempting to hasten it? Was the government attempting to control the revolution or not? Was the government for the people or against the people? And on what basis was it possible to ascertain these things?

  I shook the young soda jerk roughly in an attempt to get him to answer further questions, but he was now apparently disinclined to respond. In any event, my attention was called away because, sitting on the great white log by the bonfire, the young man called D’Arcy was now offering Skip, my beloved son, heir to all that I had done and would attempt to do, some of the punch. Now my son Skip was drinking the punch and I was rushing to my son’s side, where unfortunately I had no choice but to slap the cup of punch out of his hand.

  “Listen up, all of you young people. Listen up! I have something to say. Listen to me!” I looked at the assembled faces, in various stages of dishevelment. “It’s important that you understand what’s taking place around you—” And, realizing that this was a rather provocative assertion, I—

  “Shut up, Dr. Van Deusen,” one of the kids called. “Answer a question or have a drink.”

  “I will not shut up,” I said, my pride rising. “Please. Listen for a moment while I make some observations about current events.”

  Another voice cried out, “Ever spent a sober day in your life? That’s your question!” Much snickering.

  And then suddenly Skip was running off. My son was fleeing the scene. Owing, no doubt, to some tiny slight. I saw his handsome body, his stunningly handsome but empty-headed vessel, disappear into the darkness beyond the bonfire, a darkness that quickly enveloped whatever came its way. I picked up the nearest piece of driftwood that was at hand, and I closed in on the master of ceremonies, young D’Arcy, with intent to batter his person. But then it was there in my hands, the precious stick, and I could feel the stick calling to me. Above were the stars, wheeling in the dispassionate sky, and there was the hypnotic flickering of the fire, and before I had a chance even to think about what was happening, I was led by the stick into the night, following my son. I was hearing the ringing of the symphonies of strategic information, the contemporary symphonies, the symphonies of the civilian dead, and I said to myself that this was just absolutely wrong, and yet I felt my legs, my toes, my ligaments, my sinews, beginning the dance, the dance of death, on the shore of the beach, just out of the ken of the youngsters, who no doubt had begun to climb into one another’s arms. I began to cackle bizarrely. I knew arcane things that were lost to the historical record, and I was dancing and spinning like some Sufi master. I was a beacon on the shore. I was the sign, because there was always a sign, there was an indication, a first shot, a lantern in a window. It was clear! It was clear that I was meant to wake on the loggia, it may even have been my own loggia. I was meant to see Ed Thorne, double agent, meant to hear his story; these things lined up. The Omega Force knew that I would walk from the house at dawn. They knew, when they saw the Dance of the Stick, that it signaled the end of the West, the end of the American Century, and Ed Thorne told me what he needed to tell me, that they would come, the Omega Force, to set American against American. Ed Thorne was where he was meant to be, and when I heard what he had to say, I embarked on my researches, researches that brought me here, where, of course, I would repeat the Dance of the Stick, I would begin my foul dance, my ghoulish jig, and I would cast off my clothes. There was no other interpretation possible. It was I who was to invite in the Omega Force and its foreign agents. I was powerless to stop them, and in this dream I danced to the death, with the stick whose only wish was to be again in the sea, scrubbed by salts and storm tossed, and I would not bend to its will, and so we fought, the stick and I, a pitched battle, and the stick wrested me to its purpose, to be adrift, yes, as the great poets have always known, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, it is sweet and fitting to die for your country.

  II

  K&K

  Ellie Knight-Cameron oversaw the suggestion box at Kolodny & Kolodny, a small insurance brokerage company, and in all the many years of discharging this humble task, she’d never come across a suggestion like the one she discovered Monday nestled in that cardboard container: If they’re going to close lanes on the parkway, they ought to actually repair the goddamned road.

  K&K, as they abbreviated themselves, were located in the sprawling suburban municipality of Stamford, CT, a mile or so off the High Ridge Road exit of the Merritt Parkway, and for some years now this verdant stretch of pavement had been a maze of lane closures, especially west of town. The majority of K&K’s ten employees commuted into town against the prevailing traffic, and it was here that they often encountered the dreaded file of orange cones.

  Without a doubt, this suggestion she found was reasonable. Excepting the split infinitive and the profane language. People complained about traffic. It was one of the things they talked about. Still, it was hard for Ellie Knight-Cameron to imagine what she, as office manager, was supposed to do about it.

  Ellie had nothing much in the way of organizational power. In fact, the suggestion box existed mainly to enforce camaraderie at the K&K coffee station. Usually, therefore, the suggestions were kind of routine. Can we possibly get a blend with a little hazelnut in it? Just once in a while? Even if Dolly Halloran hated the vanilla hazelnut variety that Ellie later selected, the suggestion in this instance had met with general favor in the office, bringing good cheer to the lounge area.

  Ellie Knight-Cameron was thirty-four, and she was a bit heavy for her age, or maybe it was just that despite years of workout regimens and exotic diets she had never once resembled a svelte, cosmopolitan type of woman, and she was a little self-conscious about this, despite her brown ringlets, which took an awful lot of work to maintain, and the mole above her upper lip that she thought was one of her best features. Her eyes were as gray as flagstones. She had an easy smile. People liked her, just not in that flinging-off-clothes kind of way.

  Ellie’s hyphenated surname, to broach a sore subject, was the creation of her parents, who were as yet unmarried. These free spirits had met in the early seventies, out in the Sun Belt. The conception of Ellie Knight-Cameron, according to the story, had taken place during a festival gig by the venerable Allman Brothers Band. There’d been a particu
larly adventurous solo by Dickey Betts. In the far distance, beneath a tattered blanket, love conjoined the not terribly illustrious families Knight and Cameron.

  Every Saturday, Ellie cleaned her apartment in Rye, and she started in the bedroom and worked her way north in order to avoid disturbing her cat, Nails, for the longest possible time. Ellie had ridiculously strong feelings about her vacuum cleaner, which was British, purple, and designed by an aeronautical engineer. Her excitement about vacuuming depressed her, though if you are going to be depressed about your enthusiasms, you should at least have a reliable vacuum cleaner as consolation prize.

  On Saturdays she cleaned, and then she went to the organic market, and then she tried to arrange pastimes that involved her friends from the office or from college. She’d gone to school in the early nineties, those go-go years, as far away from the Southwest as she could get, which turned out to be Westchester County. What she liked to do with her friends from college—most of whom had crazy, arty ambitions—was play miniature golf. She also loved minor league baseball. At some hazy point in the future she intended to learn the tango.

  Because Ellie Knight-Cameron was orderly in her habits and in her thinking, she’d been a natural hire for Kolodny and Kolodny. The name of the firm was a little misleading, actually, because there was only one Kolodny, and that was Duane, who had long ago hoped to lure his boy, Mark, into the business. Mark had gone into real estate instead, though he nonetheless presumed to inherit the business, perhaps so he could sell it off. Duane Kolodny had begun life as a contractor in Fairfield County, but he’d become fed up with the lawlessness and Darwinism of contracting. The gravel business was controlled by the mob, the cement business was controlled by the mob, the building permits were controlled by the politicians, the politicians were on the take, and so forth. Duane was a low-key person. He’d settled on insurance because it was pragmatic. He didn’t have to sell too hard; he just had to believe in his product. Which was another way of saying that Duane believed that you should take care of yourself and your family and move gingerly through life, on the lookout for trouble.