

REALITY

Linus Rollman

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Linus Rollman

WHO ARE YOU?

Those were the words on the sign that hung below the camera's lens. They were handwritten, all in capital letters.

It was very close and very hot. Fletcher could feel moisture beading between his shoulder blades, in the hollows of his temples, in the depression in the middle of his chest, and he couldn't tell whether that moisture was sweat or condensation. He was filthy, his hair was matted, and the remains of the lavender suit that clung to him were soiled and torn. But he was used to all of that; it didn't even seem strange any more. What was strange was that, at that particular moment, the dark corner of the world in which he crouched, staring at the camera, was perfectly, unnaturally still. Nothing stirred. There was no breeze, no scurrying of unseen animals, no clatter of insects. The air itself was hard and brittle, a solid thing.

He could see himself reflected in the lens. He had only seen his reflection twice in – how long? Months? The image he saw now was distorted: bloated in the middle and worn thin around the edges. It had a shaggy beard, and prominent bones, and strange eyes.

And then, somewhere behind that bulbous, bearded reflection, something stirred, breaking the stillness. With a tiny whirring sound that went right through Fletcher like the crack of a gun, the camera came to life. Its pupil tightened like an animal's. Something surged up inside him – a wave of brilliant, chemical fear that twisted his muscles and sent his blood spinning. He very nearly bolted. But running from a camera was the only thing sillier, the only thing more completely, horribly ridiculous than – well, than his being where he was in the first place. And so he stayed put.

He looked again at the question printed on the card. Who was he?

Just a few yards away, past a tangle of creeping vines, was Len, hovering over the bizarre thing that he had built out there in the middle of nowhere. Beyond that – miles through the jungle, perhaps – were the others: Little Rich, Prosperity, all of them, encamped and besieged. There was the blond woman as well, the one they'd kidnapped. Thinking about her made Fletcher feel a little sick.

And somewhere else – all around? – were the ones who must have left this camera here, somehow knowing that he would find it. They were the last people to have the right to ask him questions any longer. After all that had happened, after all they had done to him and to the others, how could they possibly ...? How could they think that he would answer another question? He ought to smash the camera, or try to find its power source, do something to sabotage it. But instead he just kept staring past his own reflection, deep into that round, glassy eye.

Who was he? He was having trouble telling the difference between things. The edges weren't crisp, they didn't feel properly defined. Everything was loose, permeable. He couldn't be sure, for instance, just exactly where the jungle ended and he began. Was it the jungle groping inwards or him leaking out? And, somewhere out of sight, the jungle itself bled untidily into the ocean, which became the sky and stretched on and on, all mingled together, until, somewhere in the impossible distance, all the things that constituted what used to be his life must also be entangled in it.

He could distinctly feel the sensation of his lips tugging gently apart as he wet them with the tip of his tongue. His voice sounded very strange in that silent place.

"Back ... back before all this ... whenever it was ... I had a job. I'm not sure that's important. It's difficult to tell. I had an apartment. A life. ... Something wasn't right. I'm not sure I know what it was. Not even now ..."

The First Part

1.

Outside the Murray C. Murry Building, the world was poised between afternoon and evening. The sun set fire to the spires of the city. The western windows of the office buildings had gone all copper and bronze. Down in the street, a thousand Lexuses – seafoam green, gunmetal gray – blinked their eyes as the sunlight stalked by. Saxophones mounted in pawnshop windows stretched and glittered as it passed. Department store manikins watched it go with their faces set. A pigeon glided between two buildings, met the sun, and together they briefly became a phoenix.

Fletcher Haywood stared at a computer screen. Every so often, he would type something or click the mouse. He worked in IT for Hungudunga and McCormick, a company that doesn't make the things you buy – it makes things that help the companies that make the things you buy interface well with the companies from which they buy things. How did he come to be in that place? What had brought him to that particular chair set in front of that particular computer screen on the sixth floor of that particular building? A long string of decisions, of course, some of them Fletcher's, some of them made by other people. Mostly they'd been disconnected decisions, merely overlapping, often poorly understood at the time they'd been made. There had been a certain amount of luck involved: good or bad, but mostly indifferent. You might picture the various forces that carried Fletcher onto that black swivel desk chair as a tide, moving through the world. The gray water rises slowly; it fills the streets and engulfs the buildings. It swells up, and then, just as slowly, it sinks down again and disappears. And Fletcher Haywood has been deposited on the sixth floor of the Murray C. Murry building, like a little sea creature left perched on a rock.

After staring at the screen for a while, Fletcher sat back and rubbed his eyes. He heard someone behind him and turned. It was Heidi Nuszbaum, one of the people with whom he shared his office. She was a pleasant woman, in a broad, beige sort of way.

"Hey, Fletcher," she said, "Any plans for the weekend?"

He smiled and even laughed a little, though he wasn't sure exactly why. "Not really. I'll probably take it pretty easy. Tonight's my poker night."

"Oh? That should be fun."

"Yeah. What about you?"

"Nothing, really. Probably try to get some things done around the house. I'm gonna take off. Have a good one. Hope you win big."

"What?"

"Poker?"

"Oh, right. Thanks. You take care. Have a good one." He smiled again and turned back to his computer as she left. He looked at the clock. Time for him to go as well.

Once outside, he found that he felt somewhat weak. Maybe it was the lukewarm coffee he'd been drinking all day. Or maybe there was something wrong with him. Nothing so dramatic as cancer, say, or flesh-eating bacteria, but maybe a vitamin deficiency, or something like that. He felt a bit out of focus, as if there were two of him slightly offset from one another, refusing to resolve into a single image. For reasons that he couldn't fathom, the feeling seemed to be particularly strong in his teeth. He felt very much as if he had two sets of them, and it bothered him. Was there some vitamin that controlled that sort of thing? He pulled a tube of lip balm from his pocket and applied some. It helped a little – not with the teeth problem so much, but in a general sort of way.

Along with working on the sixth floor of the Murray C. Murry Building, Fletcher lived on the sixth floor of his apartment building – a fact that he sometimes found pleasingly symmetrical and sometimes found irritatingly symmetrical.

As he entered his apartment, a cat regarded him from the back of the couch. He hadn't really wanted the cat, but his ex-wife, whose cat it had originally been, had given it to him in a fit of goodwill during the divorce proceedings. It had been a conciliatory gesture and he hadn't known how to refuse without appearing ungrateful. He and the cat didn't particularly like one another, but they'd developed a sort of diplomatic relationship in which each tolerated the other's presence and neither of them engaged in outright hostilities. The cat's name was Gomorrah.

While his dinner heated, he went out onto the balcony and leaned on the railing. The balcony was one of the most attractive features of the apartment – the one that had sold him on the place, really. It looked west. The sun had sunk out of sight by this time, leaving only a few glowing ribbons behind. The lights were coming on in the city: streetlights, the neon lights of businesses, the buttery lights of living room windows, the blue flicker of televisions.

He ate his dinner inside, sitting at the coffee table. As he ate, he leafed through the catalogues that had accumulated at his house during the week. He lingered for a long time over one particular photo: a woman in a silk robe sat at a glass table out-of-doors. On the table were dishes laid as if for breakfast and an artfully folded newspaper. The woman was beautiful, with carefully and dazzlingly tousled hair. She was looking at the camera, smiling, her lips parted a little. She held a cup with both hands. It looked as if the viewer had surprised her a little, coming from around a corner, and that she was pleased to see him. Fletcher looked at the photo for a long time, until he became aware of the kitchen light reflecting from the glossy surface of the page.

He shook himself and stood. On a shelf nearby was a set of penny whistles – five or six of them, of varying lengths, in varying keys. Fletcher had taken up the penny whistle a couple of years before, on a whim. He liked the fact that the penny whistle was convenient: it was small (one of his whistles could even be pulled into two pieces and carried easily in a pocket), and quiet enough not to disturb the neighbors. He'd bought a book entitled "How to Play the Tin Whistle" and had taken remote lessons from an extremely pleasant divinity student who posted them on youtube. In fact, Fletcher had learned to play it quite well, although he never played in front of anyone else. Standing by the shelf of whistles now, he ran a finger absently along the spines of the adjacent books, then picked one of the whistles up, put it into his mouth, and played a reel, tapping his foot in time.

Poker night took place at the house of a friend of his from college whose name was actually Eric but who, for a set of reasons too complex to be worth going into here, was universally known as "Eggs." Even his wife called him "Eggs."

"Eggs is in the kitchen," she said when she opened the door that night. "Come on in, Fletcher."

"How are you doing, Tina?"

"Fine. I'm doing pretty good. We're just finishing up dinner."

At one point, in college, Eggs had famously eaten an entire towel on a bet. True, it had been a dishtowel, but it had still been a very impressive. Eggs' towel-eating days were long behind him now. He'd softened in the middle and thinned at the top. He had watery, affectionate eyes and in the last year had cultivated a large mustache that he curled up at the ends and of which he was endearingly proud.

He and Tina had twin boys, four years old. When Fletcher was honest with himself, he admitted that he didn't like the twins, though he never would have said so aloud. No one says that they don't like children. Anyhow, it wasn't that the kids were so awful per se, it was only that Fletcher didn't know quite how he was supposed to act around them.

"Hey, Fletch," Eggs called from the kitchen, "You want something to eat?"

"I ate already, thanks."

"Okay. It's good, though"

"I'm okay, really."

"All right. Well, listen, I've just got to get the boys put to bed, then we can play. The other guys should be here soon. Come on boys. Say goodnight to your uncle Fletcher." The boys did no such thing.

Tina was doing the dishes.

"You want a hand?"

"No, no, Fletcher, that's all right. What's been going on with you lately?"

"Not much. The usual, you know. Work."

"How's work?"

"It's – okay. It's work. What about you?"

She dried a dish, put it away in the cabinet. Tina had a plain face and hair that was somehow no particular color at all, but her smile was sharp at the corners and her hands were long and slender and strong. Fletcher had tried fantasizing about her once or twice, in a guilty sort of way, but the truth was that he wasn't particularly good at that sort of thing. "I'm good, Fletch. Things are good."

The twins were successfully put to bed and the other two poker players arrived. Dave was another friend from college, also married, also with two kids. Eggs knew Spencer from work. Spencer laughed a lot and never seemed completely at ease. He had a nervous look to him that made Fletcher uncomfortable, but he was a good guy.

They played in the garage at a table covered in green felt, just like at a real casino, and used clay chips that were heavy and cool to the touch. Fletcher always tried to shuffle two piles of the chips neatly together with his left hand the way he'd seen poker players do on television. He could never get the hang of it, but he still liked the way the chips felt.

The talk at the table ranged over a number of topics: work, sports, investment opportunities. Dave was planning on going on a cruise with his family that summer and there was some diverting discussion of the whole concept of vacation cruises. Mostly they talked about the game itself, about the hand that had just been played, congratulating themselves or one another, or cursing a bit of bad luck or judgment. Eggs twirled the ends of his mustache between his thumb and his forefinger, especially when he won a hand.

After probably a couple of hours, Dave pushed his chair back from the table. "Well, I'm done, boys," he announced.

"Yeah. I should probably get going too," said Spencer. "Thanks for having us."

They didn't play for high stakes and really none of them were particularly skilled players, but Eggs was more or less the best of the bunch, usually coming out the overall winner and, indeed, he'd come out ahead tonight, so he was in a particularly good mood as he bid the other two goodbye and settled back in at the table with Fletcher, who was still finishing a glass of whiskey and was feeling a little drunk.

Eggs began to pack the poker chips away into their case. "Eggs," Fletcher said, "Are you happy?"

"Sure, Fletch. It's been a good night."

"You're happy? Really?"

Eggs finished tucking the chips into their little slots, closed the case, which was metal on the outside, ran his hands along the edges and pulled its two clasps shut. He looked up. Eggs had a large lower lip and he alternated his new habit of twirling his mustache with a much older one of tugging gently at that lip. Maybe it happened unconsciously when he was being genuinely reflective, but at any rate it had the effect of making him look as if he were being reflective. He tugged it now. "Okay. I didn't realize you really wanted an answer. Am I happy? Sure, most of the time I'm happy. Other times it's hard to tell. How's that for an answer?"

"Okay, I guess."

Eggs laughed. "What do you want to know, man?"

"I'm not sure. Are you – I don't know – fulfilled? Tina, the kids, all that?"

Eggs tugged his lip again. "There's a lot that's amazing. There's other stuff that's not so amazing. It's a lot like life, you know what I mean? What about you, Fletch? You doing okay?"

Fletcher took another sip of his whiskey, in which the ice had by now almost entirely melted. His shadow was black on the poker table, but with an amber spot in its hand where the light passed through the glass.

"Same as you, I guess. I don't know. Maybe being happy isn't the right question. Or even fulfilled." He paused and watched the shards of light that radiated from the hand of his shadow. "But then, if it's not, I don't know what the right question is. Sometimes I picture this room. Not even just a room, but a sort of a house, and it's full of doors. You constantly have to choose doors to go through and once you've gone through you can't go back into the last room, you just have to keep going forward, choosing new ones. And after a while, you've chosen so many doors that even if you could go backwards, you could never figure out which way you'd come from. Kind of like a maze. Anyway, so here I am, in this room. And it's not like this room is so awful or anything, in and of itself. It's only that I wonder what it would be like if I was in a different room. You know, if I'd picked another door along the way somewhere. You know what I mean?"

"I'm not sure," said Eggs, tugging. "Maybe. You feel trapped? Like, stuck where you are?"

"Sort of. I don't think I'm expressing myself very well." He drank a little more. "I think what's frustrating for me, maybe, is that it seems to me that the thing that's put me here or that's trapped me where I am, if I am trapped, is a lack of imagination."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I'm not totally sure. I guess – I guess I always thought of imagination as being like a thing that you're born with, like genetics. Some people have it and some people don't, you know? But I kind of wonder whether that's actually true. And I also think of it – of imagination – as being something that's used by like, I don't know, painters or artists or something. But lately I've been thinking that maybe imagination is something different, kind of like a muscle that you have to exercise or something. Only I've let mine atrophy. It's not that I'm so badly off or unhappy or whatever. I don't want you to think that. I'm all right. But I think of – I don't know how to say it exactly – the beautiful people, I guess. Not rich exactly, or anything like that, but that live the sorts of lives that are important and – and – beautiful. I don't know. I think that maybe what separates me from those people is a failure of imagination. Somehow they've imagined themselves into that situation. And all I seem to be able to do is sort of move pieces around that were all made by someone else. It's like one of those little games where there are moveable tiles and one of the tiles is missing, so you can push the other ones around. Or like a puzzle. Puzzles kind of seem like they take work, they kind of seem like thinking, cause you have to categorize the pieces and recognize patterns and stuff, but ultimately all you end up with is a picturesque photo of an English cottage or an impressionist painting or something that someone else actually made. Does that make any sense?"

Eggs tilted his head back, looking at the ceiling. "Kind of."

"Do you ever think about writing your obituary, Eggs? Or about someone else writing it, I guess?"

"No. I don't. That's fucking morbid."

"Well I've thought about it sometimes. I just don't know what would go in there. I want there to be – I want it to have a little pizzazz, you know? An attention-grabber. Something."

"You mean like you want to cure cancer? Be the poet laureate? Something like that?"

"Something like that. No. I know I'm not going to cure cancer. I don't write poetry. But something. That's all."

"You're not going to get religious on me? You sound like you're looking for god or something like that. And if you start asking me if I've accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior I may have to hit you in the face, understand?"

"I'm not going to get religious on you, Eggs."

Eggs sighed. "I knew there was something wrong with you tonight."

"No, really. Honestly. I'm all right. I mean, I've got my health and all that. No major tragedies. More than that. I make good money. I mean, you know – I even got a promotion. I like what I do. I like my friends. Things are good, overall. It's more like – you know how, after somebody gets a limb amputated they sometimes get a phantom limb? They feel like they've still got the limb, and it itches. That's what I've heard. Well, it's kind of like that. It's like something's itching, only it's not there. Do you see what I mean?"

"Fletcher, can I say something direct?"

"Sure, Eggs."

"I think you ought to get laid."

"What?"

"Look, I'm not trying to be shallow, and I can understand that maybe you're struggling with some kind of existential problem here and so on, but it may be the case that you're getting a little too wrapped up in things, and there's nothing like a good, visceral sort of experience to really clear your head. I'm not alone in thinking this. Important philosophers agree with me. I think maybe it was Buddha or somebody. It's good. Intimacy and so on. Human contact. And I strongly suspect – not that it's really any of my business, but still – I suspect that you haven't had sex since you and Beth split."

Fletcher only sat there.

"That's what I thought, man. What has it been, two years? Something like that. Listen, you ought to do it. For your own good. Honestly, like I say, I'm not trying to be shallow, but it really might make a difference."

Fletcher drank the last of his watery whiskey, pushed his chair back, stood, a little unsteadily. "Listen, Eggs. Thanks. You're a good friend. And thanks for having me over. It's late. I should go."

2.

He had written a poem once. He'd won a poetry-writing contest. Well, he'd been one of the winners. He was in fifth grade at the time. His poem had appeared in an anthology of young writers' work, and he'd received a free copy of the anthology. The poem was about his dog.

In tenth grade, he'd been the lead in the school play. He'd liked it. He liked the rehearsals, which made him feel involved in something. He'd liked the costumes, and the make up, and he'd liked the lights, and even the audience watching him. It had been years since he'd done anything like that.

He'd asked a girl to prom and she'd said yes.

He'd slept with six women over the course of his life. Or about six. It depended on how, precisely, you defined "slept with."

During college, he'd been the co-editor of the student newspaper, he'd achieved a 3.42 GPA, and he'd almost been in a fist fight.

"Fletcher Haywood, 35, winner of the Blue Mountain Annual Poetry Contest, Grades 4 through 6, for his work, 'Ringo,' dead of complications resulting from inertia. Mr. Haywood is survived by his ex-wife and his cat, both of whom thought he was as a pretty decent guy overall."

He'd been to Europe.

At his wedding, several of his friends had given toasts about him. They'd said funny things, told funny stories – what had they said? They'd been very complimentary, very flattering. Funny.

He sang karaoke once, on a cross-country road trip. In South Dakota, he sang "My Boyfriend's Back" in front of a bar full of truckers and bikers and good old boys. They'd laughed and bought him drinks.

He'd shaken hands with Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits once.

He'd broken his leg skiing when he was in high school and he'd ridden down the mountain in one of those sleds towed by a snowmobile. He'd watched the tips of the pine trees pass, blue against a blank sky.

He could picture the report he'd written in elementary school on tapirs – the blue binder that it had been in and the photocopied picture of a tapir that he'd glued to the front.

He could remember seeing aspens, with their perfectly straight trunks, so white they were almost silver, and gold leaves, though whether it was a memory of something real, or of a picture, or maybe even a jigsaw puzzle, he couldn't tell.

His ceiling stared down at him. He stared back at his ceiling. He was like a perfectly still pool of water, the kind you might find somewhere in the mountains, and each memory drifted down onto him like a flower petal, sending tiny quakes shivering across the surface of the pool. Down they fell, thicker and thicker, one after another, until the whole of him was clogged with those delicate petals, and atremble with the motion that they caused.

In his mouth was the flat taste of used whiskey. Over the course of the rest of that weekend, he accomplished nothing. It wasn't necessarily his fault; it was just that the world kept sort of getting in the way.

On Sunday night Fletcher dreamt that he was on the platform of a train station. It was crowded – packed, in fact, and for some reason everyone seemed to be wearing hats. He had a large set of luggage that he was dragging behind him and he was trying hard to make his way in a direction that seemed to be against the prevailing motion of the crowd. He was trying to get to his platform. Actually, he wasn't even sure of that. He was just trying to find a timetable or a directory, so that he could figure out where his platform was. He hadn't really any idea what direction to go, only that he needed to go somewhere. Horribly, he began to realize that his train was about to leave, or maybe even that it had left already. He had to get there fast. He pushed against the people around him but couldn't make any headway. It was getting harder and harder to breathe. The folks in the crowd were getting taller and they weren't actually wearing hats, they were carrying umbrellas and the umbrellas were rising up and blotting out the sky so that he couldn't see anything up above anymore. He had to get to his platform. He couldn't see. He couldn't breathe. He was suffocating. The people were swirling around and around him like black water, closing tightly, their long coats almost covering him. Suddenly someone lunged at him from behind, his whole body tightened and spasmed, and he jolted up several inches out of bed.

He knew immediately that he was utterly, irrevocably awake. There is a special little kind of horror that comes from waking in the middle of the night, hours before your alarm is due to go off, and being certain, deep down, that you will not get back to sleep. It wasn't even so much the current misery of being unable to sleep that bothered him, as the anticipation of watching the light of early morning creep into the room, of being underslept tomorrow, of being sick with too much coffee. His back was hot and uncomfortable, and he could feel the individual fibers of his hair pressed into the pillow, so he twisted onto his left side and turned his pillow over, folding it and jamming it under his head. He cursed under his breath. There didn't seem to be much point in that, however, so he cursed aloud. He sat up. Then, hardly realizing that he'd decided to do so, he admitted defeat and climbed out of bed, early morning and still dark though it was. The shower was hot, but it didn't help. There was a certain grim satisfaction in knowing that he was up now and would have to face the rest of the day as he was. He took pleasure in his martyrdom, though not enough actually to make it fun.

He ate a bowl of cereal and drank a cup of coffee, sitting at his kitchen table with the night still draped thickly against the windows. His skin felt raw, and it seemed to be stretched taut across his bones. His eyes throbbed vaguely. The noises that occupied this unclaimed hour – the hum of the refrigerator, the cat prowling around the living room, the faint groan of the walls – struck him as oddly loud and somehow menacing.

The halls and the elevator were untenanted. There was no one else in the garage beneath the building. The streets were virtually empty too; only a few other cars were out on mysterious late-night or early-morning missions. The attendant at the parking garage barely looked up from his magazine as Fletcher drove past. Fletcher couldn't even see his face. In a few minutes, Fletcher emerged from the garage, carrying his bag.

There was no one on the street. Not a soul. The emptiness heightened the peculiar feeling of being up and dressed and about at this time of night in the first place. The streetlamps filled the world with an eerie, yellowish light. The stone and steel of the buildings seemed to glow and even to pulse faintly. Their walls towered above him. They looked alien, as if they couldn't possibly have been planned and executed by human beings. It was like walking in some deserted canyon on another planet. A car passed in the distance, but even that seemed unreal, like a giant insect heaving its way across the canyon floor. He was surrounded by a heavy silence that was all the heavier for actually being filled with sounds: the buzz of electrical wires, the whisper of the vanished car's tires – and other sounds, fainter, more puzzling, more sinister. Everything seemed to be utterly different from what it should have been, and – for no reason that he could have named – thick with expectation. He felt as if something important was about to happen, even though it might be something awful. But at the same time he was aware that this feeling was produced by nothing more than the admittedly bizarre experience of being awake and alone in the city at night, and that nothing out of the ordinary was likely to occur at all. And this second level of awareness brought with it – a twinge of disappointment? What could he possibly be wanting to happen?

The spell ought to have broken at any moment, but it didn't. The sky, where he could see it above the canyon walls, was a sort of luminous yellow-green. Not the kind of color that the sky ought to be at all. His own footsteps sounded too loud as they reverberated off of the monoliths around him and disappeared up into that yellow sky.

At an intersection, blocks away to his left, he saw what might have been a human form moving. It was about the right size, but it seemed to lurch unnaturally and after a few moments it disappeared into the shadows. What a ridiculous thing to think! "Lurch unnaturally"?! Certainly Fletcher wasn't scared, but he did move a little faster and he did feel a tiny electric thrill at the base of his neck.

He rounded the corner and there it was: the Murray C. Murry Building itself. Under normal circumstances, he barely noticed it at all. In fact, just then he had the sensation that he was seeing it for the first time and that he only recognized it perhaps because he'd encountered it before in a dream. He was taken aback. In more ordinary light, he felt that it would be gray (he also felt that he ought to know for sure what color it ordinarily was, but he didn't); instead it was a livid, awful sort of yellow – a sicklier version of the color of the sky, mustard gone bad. Its shoulders were hunched and its eyes sagged and glared. It looked uncomfortable and bitter. He could hardly believe that he was about to enter it. Even as he felt the ridiculousness of his own thoughts, he took some perverse pleasure in them. The dream that he seemed to be moving in was uncomfortable, odd, and uncanny, but there was also something indefinably delicious about it. Maybe it was just that things felt different. For a few moments, everything was sort of holding still. Even as he felt the discomfort and disjointedness of those moments, some part of him longed for things to continue holding still in just that way.

And then, inevitably, everything was moving again. He was moving again. He was walking down the sidewalk in the direction of the Murray C. Murry Building. As his legs swung without his bothering to direct them, he thought that he might go some other way. He might choose to go any other direction. To continue down the street. To turn around and return to his car and start driving. He wouldn't even have to go back to his house. He could just drive and drive until he got somewhere else. Without knowing why, for a brief moment he pictured a crowded train station. But, of course, he didn't head in a different direction, and he didn't turn around, and he didn't start driving and driving. His steps took him along the path that he knew all along he would actually take. The only rebellion of which he was capable was that whereas in the normal course of things he would have crossed at the crosswalk already and would now be on the same side of the street as the Murray C. Murry Building, tonight he stayed on the other side of the street for as long as he possibly could.

When he had reached the point precisely opposite the entrance to the Murray C. Murry Building, he stopped again. He'd seen something gold. A flattish, gold something. A strangely misshapen, unidentifiable gold something, nearly a foot long, lying in the gutter only a few steps from where he stood. It seemed to have its own bizarre geometry. He couldn't identify its shape, or even whether it was two- or three-dimensional. He hesitated for a moment, looking at the something. Without thinking, in only a couple of almost-unwilled steps, he was there, bending down and picking the thing up.

It was an old newspaper folded in half. It was stiff to the touch, as if it had been rained on and had then dried again. It had only been some trick of the odd light that had made it glitter like gold, and the angle at which he'd been viewing it that had somehow made its shape mysterious. He held it in his hand for a few moments, looking at it. Then he lifted the flap of his bag and stuffed the newspaper inside before crossing the street.

3.

Fletcher couldn't say exactly when the strange spell he had been under that night began to fade and he descended into his normal life – or his normal life rose up around him. He sat down at his desk and picked up the projects that he'd left off on Friday. But he paused more often than usual and found himself lost in half-thoughts. Sometimes he even stared out the window for a little while. At some point, other people began to arrive for work and he talked to them when he saw them. The first few commented on his early arrival and he told them that he'd wanted to get a head start on the week. The sun came up gradually from somewhere and the peculiar radiance of the early morning disappeared. But even though the morning steadily advanced and the world became more real, he continued not to feel quite right and often gave his head a tiny shake as if to rid himself of some irritating idea.

Lunchtime came and he found himself outside. There was a sort of human current moving on the pavement, and he allowed himself to be swept up in it – or so it seemed to him at any rate. Little eddies developed outside the doors of shops and restaurants and once or twice he was almost swept inside and even looked over his shoulder with a kind of regret, unable to turn back.

Finally, more because his indecisiveness was beginning to make him feel ridiculous than for any more compelling reason, he mustered the willpower to make a hard left into the doorway of a sandwich shop that he had almost passed by.

He regretted his choice almost as soon as he was inside, but before he had had a chance really to reconsider it, there was someone in line behind him, and since it seemed silly to leave at that point, he stayed.

There was an array of sandwich selections written in several different colors of chalk on a board hanging from the ceiling above the cash register: roast beef, swiss, and horseradish mayonnaise on rye; prosciutto, tomatoes, mustard, and mozzarella on a baguette; garden vegetables and humus on wheat. And so on. The line crept along. He listened vaguely to the conversations going on around him. Someone was telling a joke.

And then something unexpected happened inside him. He'd just looked behind the counter for the first time and seen the girl making the sandwiches. She was incredible. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face. What a face! It was round – almost even a little plump – with a pointed chin and a mouth relaxed into a curve of sublime, otherworldly indifference. Her skin was like alabaster. Actually, he had no idea what alabaster was like, but it didn't matter. She was unbelievable. He was certain that he'd had a beautiful dream a long time ago and this very girl had been in it. As he watched, her perfect lips parted just a little and her shoulders moved in what appeared to be an inaudible sigh. It was too devastatingly much. She looked up briefly and scanned the room. When her eyes fell on Fletcher, he immediately looked the other direction, as if his own eyes were pushed aside like the opposite pole of a magnet.

Oh, god. Oh, jesus. He looked around, trying to behave casually, but there was no comfortable way for him to stand and nothing that seemed plausible to look at. He stole a hand up and rubbed it through his hair, then wiped at his upper lip and the tip of his nose. He shuffled his feet a couple of times. He risked a glance at her again. Her back was turned to him now. Her hair was tied in a braid that rested between her shoulder blades. He looked long now, watching the braid shift across her back as she chopped something on a cutting board. There was a pain inside him – a terrible pain, rich with longing. Oh, god.

She turned around and he shot his eyes away again, but she did not look up, so he let himself cast them back and forth across her a couple of times so as to appear disinterested, and then settle on her again, at least for a few moments. He had no right even to look at a girl like that. If only – in another universe – if only someone like that would grant him permission even just to look at her.

He was getting perilously close to the front of the line. What would he order? It seemed to him that perhaps, via his order, he could send her some sort of secret message. It was the only way that he could reach her. He would have to transmit something to her through the guy taking orders at the counter. What should he say? What was something significant that he could order? Or at least something unusual? Extra horseradish? No. Maybe no one ever ordered the chicken curry. That seemed unlikely. What if she was a vegetarian? Should he have the garden vegetables? She might be a vegetarian, but on the other hand it seemed just as likely that she was a great meat eater. Cream cheese? Provolone? No onions?

The pain swelling inside him was nearly unbearable. He wanted to save her from the school bullies. He wanted to ride to her rescue, to treat her gallantly but with humility. There had to be something to rescue her from, right? Everyone needed rescuing from something. If only he could show her that he was warm, funny, and tender.

The more he looked, the more painful it became. It was the pain of impossibility. To the casual observer it would have appeared that there was only a few feet of space between Fletcher and the girl with the braid, but actually there was an infinite, unbridgeable gap. There was nothing – no way – to cross that space. The thought tore a hole inside him. She might as well be a million miles away, a galaxy away. The hole grew wider and wider. The more acute the pain became, the more he pushed up against it, felt it, almost savored it. A thought came into his head, fully formed, as if it had leapt through a wormhole from the galaxy the girl inhabited: he was going to disappear from the world and never, ever have what he desired. And with that thought, it happened: he could actually feel his heart break inside his chest. Fissures ran through it as if it were glass shattered by a high-pitched sound, and the poor little organ shivered quietly, splintered into a thousand pieces, and disintegrated inside him.

"What can I get for you?" asked the guy at the cash register.

"Excuse me?"

4.

Fletcher liked to read while he ate and that night, once he had set out his bowl of take-out Vietnamese food on the table, he opened his work bag and inside found the folded newspaper that he had put there that morning. It confused him for a second or two, and then he remembered: the prehistoric lights of the city at night, the Murray C. Murry building glowering at him from across the street, and the gold newspaper lying in the gutter. Strange.

He took the newspaper with him to the table and pressed it flat. Its pages were stiff and made little popping sounds as he turned them. It was a local, free weekly that he read occasionally when the cover article looked interesting. Actually, the only things he ever really read were the personals and the surrounding advertisements for call girls, which he found titillating.

He finished his dinner before he was done reading. He should have put the newspaper away – it was a waste of time – but he felt compelled to finish the personals. He leafed through its crisp pages. He read a few reviews of movies that he had no intention of seeing. Finally, he flipped it over to the back cover, which consisted of classified-style, print-only ads.

Medical marijuana.

A service that made business cards and wedding invitations.

"Meet 100 Women without leaving your house!" What was that about? Some sort of dating service he guessed.

"Firewalk. Live the life you truly desire. The impossible is possible." Did that mean walking on hot coals? How was that supposed to work? And what, precisely, was it supposed to do for you?

Botox treatment.

A singles riverboat cruise.

"Bankruptcy. Get a fresh start!"

"Hot local bi guys."

Personal fitness trainer.

"Bellydance! Experience euphoria!" Really?

Treatment for erectile dysfunction.

More medical marijuana.

Penis enlargement.

And then, almost at the end of the page:

"Reality TV. Local casting call for reality television program. We are interested in a broad spectrum of applicants. Exotic, international location. Send a video of yourself to ..." and it had both an email address and a post office box.

He read it a second time. What was this about? Maybe it was some sort of front. "Send a video of yourself" sounded suspicious. Were they hoping to get a bunch of free amateur porn?

He read it a third time. What sort of video were you supposed to send? There was an address for a website at the end of the ad. Maybe the website would make it a little clearer. Were you supposed to do something adventurous or spectacular in the video? On what basis were they going to make their choices? Whatever. He folded the newspaper up, took it, along with his plate, to the kitchen, and stuffed it into the recycling bin.

That night, when he lay down, he knew that he wouldn't have trouble sleeping. It had been an odd day. He tried to run over pieces of it as he lay there, but it was jumbled, and he could hardly remember exactly why it had been so odd. An early morning walk to work. A beautiful girl at lunch. What was so peculiar about that? He couldn't recall now. As he was falling asleep, he felt as if he almost understood something, just for a moment, but that something was slippery and got away before he could properly catch hold of it. He could feel himself sinking behind his own closed eyelids. His last thought before he drifted off was that perhaps, now, everything would be different.

5.

It wasn't.

On the way home from work on Friday, he'd stopped for Thai food. The containers were still open on the table. He'd had a beer with dinner and now he was sipping at a glass of whiskey while he did some important research on the computer.

For whatever reason, he'd thought once or twice over the course of the week about the advertisement for the reality television show that he'd read on the back of that folded newspaper and now, as he sat looking at the screen, the thought of the ad came into his head again. It was irritating, like a bit of something wedged between his mind's teeth. Maybe he would just look at it again.

Fortunately, one of the things that he hadn't done that week was take out the recycling. The newspaper was still there, underneath a barely-read New Yorker and some cardboard food packages. He pulled it out of the bin.

"Reality TV. Local casting call for reality television program. We are interested in a broad spectrum of applicants. Exotic international location. Send a video of yourself to ..." a email address, a post office box, the address of a website. What could it hurt to just check it out?

The website was surprisingly restrained and professional, and he dismissed almost immediately his suspicion that it was a front for collecting amateur porn. There were very few constraints placed on the contents of the application video. It was intended as a chance to "introduce yourself to us," but it might consist of an anything from an explanation of why you were interested in being on the show to a video of you "engaged in some of your favorite activities," (this was the only part that sounded a little suspicious) or "an artistic presentation." They would not disclose the location at which the show was to be shot except to say again that it was "exotic." The shooting would take place over "several months." They would make arrangements with your employer. The company was a new one and so there were no previous productions to be viewed, although "our producers and employees all have extensive experience in television production." The show, apparently, had not yet been named, or they would not disclose the name. It was to be an "exciting new concept in reality television."

There was a digital video camera in his closet, on the shelf, next to some boxes of shoes. A rather nice one, actually. He'd bought it for himself the year before, more or less on a whim. He had no family, however, and nothing else in particular to record, so after some initial forays into learning its features, he'd allowed it to live a quiet life up in its case.

"Introduce yourself to us." "Some of your favorite activities." "An artistic presentation." Who knew what the hell they wanted. Probably something exciting. Something "extreme." Or, perhaps even "X-treme." There was nothing extreme about Fletcher, let alone X-treme.

He returned to debutantestack.com and finished his business there. He walked to the window. The sky was an indeterminate, faded gray. He took a sip of the whiskey in his hand. He must have refilled it at some point. In fact, the bottle was sitting out on the table. He squeezed his tongue against his upper palette and enjoyed the sting of the alcohol. He could see his own reflection, hanging in front of the city outside. Lights shown through the image like pinpricks.

Somewhat to his own surprise, he found that he was on his way to the bedroom, that he was opening the closet and removing the little black case from the shelf. He opened the case, placed the video camera on the dining room table, plugged it in, flipped open the little screen. He moved a chair to face the camera. The camera wasn't high enough, so he propped it up on a few books. All of this he did without thinking about why or what would happen next, almost consciously pushing those questions aside when they began to arise.

He sat down in the chair and looked at the little lens that was looking at him. On the screen, which he'd turned toward the chair, he could see himself looking at the lens looking at him. It turned out that there was more whiskey in his glass and he drank some of it. He sat forward on the edge of the chair, leaning a little bit toward the camera. He reached out and pressed the "record" button.

6.

It had been with a sort of savage pleasure in punishing himself that he had taken the final steps of transferring the video from the camera to his computer and then sending it to the address provided in the ad. He knew that its contents were utterly humiliating. Not that he'd watched it himself – he couldn't have stood to, and if he had watched it, he certainly wouldn't have sent it off. He'd talked about – God knows what. His job? His family? Maybe even his childhood? About whatever it was that he'd been trying to say to Eggs the week before? Drunk as he was (it was a wonder, in some ways, that he managed the technical steps of sending off the video), he knew that it was something no other human being should ever see, but he'd actually laughed as he lacerated himself by sending it, actually said aloud, "Ha!" and even "Naked! I want to be naked!" which for some reason was what he was thinking. And then he'd stumbled off to bed, knowing that he'd done something stupid, and still saying to himself one or two more times, "Ha!" in order to stifle the thought.

And so, when he woke the next morning, there was a bright nugget of shame in the midst of his hangover. It was radiant: a little pearl of humiliation. He couldn't help examining it, prodding it, almost as if he wanted to make it shine more brightly. He went over the details of the evening in his mind. He lay there trying to remember exactly what he'd said to the camera. Of course, he had a perfectly accurate record of what he'd said, but he couldn't imagine watching it. And he'd released that thing out into the world, let it go like some awful butterfly that now had a life of its own. There was a masochistic pleasure in imagining that other people could now watch it and that there was nothing he could do about it. He could picture them laughing at it, whoever they were. He saw several smartly dressed young executives, some of them female, laughing aloud as they watched him. His cheeks burned, but he just cursed to himself and rolled over on his side, thinking vehemently, "What does it matter, anyhow?"

The hangover burnt itself out slowly, leaving an internal wasteland: empty-headed, exhausted, a little nauseous. He couldn't think straight and the day was a total loss. But again, why should he care? He thought it almost with anger. Who was he responsible to that he shouldn't be able to waste a day? He drank coffee all morning and into the afternoon. He lay on the couch thinking nothing. In the evening, he rented a movie and watched it by himself. The video he'd made never really left his mind. It was the background static in his brain. Every so often the fact of it occurred to him with renewed force and he could feel the blood swelling his face, but each time he said to himself, "What the hell does it matter anyway?"

The rest of the weekend slunk by. And then it was the work week, with things to occupy him, at least during the day, for which was simultaneously grateful and resentful.

It was on Wednesday, when he had managed to put the matter of the video largely out of his mind (not that he'd forgotten about it exactly, just that it wasn't pressing against his brain like a tumor), that Fletcher received the email. Subject heading: "Your Submission." From "sklymer" @ the address of the company to which he'd sent the video. When he saw it, he went very hot and then very cold.

It was probably just a form letter, generated by a machine. Still, the mere presence of the email was proof that that awful video really had been sent, even if no one had actually watched it. He saw again a group of attractive young executives, appalled and giggling. Well, he would open the message at any rate. He couldn't help but do that.

It was brief and, as far as he could tell, not a form letter:

"Dear Mr. Haywood,

" Thank you on behalf of reality for your recent submission. The company is very interested in your application, and I would love a chance to meet with you personally at your convenience. Please call our offices in order to arrange an appointment."

There was a phone number, and then:

"Yours cordially,

"Sascha Klymer."

He read it a second time. It was the same. The phone number that accompanied it was a local one. He closed the message and reopened it. It remained unchanged. The sensation he was feeling now might have been either heat or cold, or maybe both – it was impossible to tell. His tongue had shriveled up. The ordinary sounds that always surrounded him were dull and muffled, as if they were traveling through water or cloth.

Was this for real? Was this something that happened to everyone who submitted something? And was he going to call?

Surely it would be better to ignore the message. To go on as if nothing had happened. He had a job, for Christ's sake. And an apartment. He had responsibilities. A cat. He couldn't just up and – he couldn't – anyhow – it was ridiculous.

He stood, said something that he couldn't remember to one of his co-workers and went out into the hall. He took his phone out of his pocket.

The woman who answered was cordial, accommodating, and efficient. In very little time, Fletcher found that he had an appointment for the next day at lunch time, and it was only after he hung up that it occurred to him that he probably ought to have asked a few questions. Was this going to be something like a job interview? What was the timeline for the – for the project? The ad, he thought, had said "months," but how many months? Where was the thing going to take place? What did it entail, exactly? What was he expected to wear tomorrow? And who was this Sascha Klymer person? He was fairly certain, for some reason, that it hadn't been Sascha Klymer to whom he'd spoken on the phone. Was Sascha Klymer a man or a woman? The person on the phone might have used a gendered term to refer to Sascha Klymer, but Fletcher couldn't for the life of him remember what it had been.

It was possibly because he had decided over the course of the evening that Sascha Klymer was almost certainly a woman, that Fletcher took extra care preparing himself for work the next morning. Or perhaps it was simply that he was expecting something like a job interview. At any rate, he shaved with more attention than usual and spent longer than usual regarding himself in the mirror afterwards, chose his shirt and tie and even socks with more care than usual, and splashed aftershave on his face, which was not his usual practice. It stung his cheeks and neck.

The building that housed the offices of the television company was not terribly far from the Murray C. Murry Building itself, perhaps a fifteen minute walk. Fletcher's insides became increasingly turbulent over the course of the morning, so that when the lunch hour arrived and he set off, he felt both unpleasantly hollow and as if he might need to use the restroom at any moment. Though the sky was covered in dirty clouds, the day was warm and by the time that Fletcher had reached his destination, slowing down more and more as he got closer, he could feel that his back was covered in a film of sweat.

It was a four-story, brick building on a corner. It was rather attractive, actually, with white embellishments of some kind around the windows, and a black iron railing along the few steps up to the entrance. It looked as if it had at one time been an apartment building, or even perhaps a single-family residence.

He didn't have to go in. He hated job interviews. Why subject himself to this?

The lobby bore out the impression of its once having had a non-commercial purpose; it was small, with wooden floors and whitewashed walls. A plaque displayed the names of the businesses that were now housed there: some sort of counselor's office, a company that apparently dealt in paper goods of some kind, another that was probably a small law firm, and, on the fourth floor, "reality."

The elevator had a grate inside that you pulled shut across the door – one of those old-fashioned ones that's composed of interlocking strips of black-painted metal that forms a series of tessellated diamond-shapes when it's closed.

On the way up, Fletcher considered a new thought, which was that this wasn't a front for amateur porn, but rather a sales operation of some kind in which he would be cornered for hours in some windowless room and bullied into buying a timeshare or agreeing to sell vitamins to his friends.

The fourth floor landing was much the same as the first floor's had been, only one wall was entirely composed of frosted glass, from floor to ceiling. A door let into it, the full height of the wall itself and made of the same material, with a large, circular handle that might have been brass, or something like it. In the middle of the expanse of glass, in neat white letters, all lower case, was again the single word: reality.

When he put his hand against the brass circle, he found that the door swung open with surprising ease. The offices of reality consisted principally of one large room. The floors were weathered, scoured wood. The wall opposite the one through which Fletcher had entered was all exposed brickwork and windows. The ceiling was high, and there were large wooden beams running across it. The space was broken up by a number of desks and drafting tables and work stations of various kinds. There were important-looking papers and plans, folders, and books tucked on various shelves. It was light and airy. It was, in other words, utterly unlike the offices in which Fletcher worked, and exactly like the offices of a young, creative, dynamic, informal, sort of establishment, such as, say, an architecture or design company, or a hip advertising firm, or, for that matter, a television production company.

Very near the door through which Fletcher had entered, seated at a desk, was exactly the sort of woman that you would expect to find working in a young, creative, dynamic, informal company of some kind. She was pretty without being aggressively so, wore blue plastic glasses, jeans, and a blouse.

She looked up and smiled. "Welcome to reality. How can I help you?"

"I'm here – I have an appointment – I'm here to see Sascha Klymer."

"Oh, Mr. Haywood?"

"That's right."

"Excellent. Sascha's expecting you, of course. Come right this way."

She stood and wended her way through a series of passages formed by the desks around her, past other people, all of whom were clearly creative, young up-and-comers, busy with various up-and-coming tasks. Fletcher wended right along behind her.

She led him to one of the side walls, made of the same frosted glass as the entrance, to a door leading into what must have been the corner office. She pushed the door open a little, leaned in and said, "Sascha? Mr. Haywood is here," and then opened the door all the way and moved aside in order to let Fletcher enter. Sascha Klymer was getting up from behind a desk and moving toward Fletcher.

Sascha Klymer was a man. He was of average height – no taller than Fletcher, probably – and slender. His hair was so pale that it was almost white, or even silver, and it curled finely, particularly at his temples. His skin was very nearly the same color as his hair, and his eyes, also, were pale – blue, or maybe gray. He was so striking that he might have been bizarre-looking, or even ugly, except that there was something indescribably pleasing about the geometry of his face. Its lines and planes were perfect. They were reminiscent of the facets of a gem, only without any hardness – maybe more like the facets of a pomegranate seed. He smiled in a gentle, even slightly sad sort of way that expressed a sense of sympathy and deep understanding. In fact, instead of being ugly, he was extraordinarily beautiful. This ought to have had the effect of making you feel awkward next to him, but instead, he somehow made you feel instantly, almost extraordinarily at ease, as if your presence was not only tolerable to him, but the one thing in the world that he was most inclined to take pleasure in.

Sascha Klymer's dress was as unusual as the rest of his appearance. He wore a light gray suit of an old-fashioned cut. He was even wearing an ascot rather than a tie. He was not wearing gloves, or a monocle, or a bowler, but any of those accessories would have been quite in keeping with the rest of his ensemble. Again, instead of looking odd in this outfit, Sascha Klymer looked thoroughly elegant. He was, in short, an apparition.

This apparition reached out its hand and said, "Mr. Haywood. Thank you very much for making the time to see me. It is, indeed, a pleasure to meet you." Perhaps he didn't actually say "indeed," but Fletcher felt as if he had.

Fletcher took the hand, finding that its grip was relaxed and warm, and allowed himself to be led to a pair of chairs and a kidney-shaped coffee table. "Would you like something to drink? Some coffee? Would an Americano be all right? Excellent. How do you take it?"

There was a small espresso machine on a shelf nearby and Sascha Klymer made the coffee himself. While he was doing so, Fletcher took in the office. The desk, chairs, and table were the principal pieces of furniture, all attractive in a functional sort of way. The two walls that faced the outside of the building were composed mainly of window, and where they weren't window, they were the same exposed brick as the main room that he had come through. The two glass walls (behind him and to his right, from where he was now seated) had shelves built up against them and the shelves, together with housing the espresso machine, held hundreds of books. It was hard to take them in at a glance, but they appeared to cover an astonishingly wide variety of subjects. From their bindings, some looked fairly old. He wondered what, exactly, this man's job was. Mounted on the walls were two pen-and-ink drawings and a shiny map of variegated color: a good deal of red, a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, a patch of purple.

"I hope you enjoy the coffee," Sascha Klymer said, handing Fletcher a cup and settling into the other chair, which faced Fletcher's obliquely. "It's my little vice."

The coffee was very, very good.

"Well. Welcome. Thank you again for coming. I'm so happy to have you here. I must tell you, I was – very impressed by your submission, and I have been looking forward to having a talk with you."

Fletcher found both of these ideas a little incredible and couldn't help thinking that, whatever may have been the case about the video he'd made, he was bound to be a disappointment in person, but nevertheless he nodded and said, "Thank you. Thanks."

"Tell me, Mr. Haywood, where are you from? Did you grow up here?"

Fletcher answered that question, and the next that was posed to him, and quickly found himself talking very freely and easily with this man, telling him all sorts of things. He told him about what it had been like growing up, about his relationship with his parents and his brother, about school, and friends, and interests, and aspirations, about his marriage, his divorce, his work, his ideas. He couldn't have said what it was that made him feel so natural discussing these matters with a perfect stranger. It was nothing like a job interview after all, even though they talked almost exclusively about Fletcher. It wasn't that Sascha Klymer didn't speak, because he did, not only asking questions but chiming in where he agreed, hmm-ing and ahh-ing appropriately. Most conversations are animated, to some extent, by competing agendas of one sort or another, even if it's a friendly competition. If Sascha Klymer had an agenda, however, he concealed it perfectly. The strange comfortableness of the whole experience was probably due to the fact that Fletcher had never been exposed to that kind of sustained focus before: it was sort of like the conversational equivalent of getting a good haircut or a really effective chiropractic session.

At some point, the clouds outside must have broken apart or burnt off, because Fletcher noticed that the room was full of light – one might almost have said glowing. He'd quite forgotten that he had intended to use this opportunity to ask questions himself. Or at any rate, the right moments to ask them didn't seem to come along. It didn't matter. He felt intimately connected to this man, cared for, and he was happy to go on talking as long as Sascha Klymer would listen. The atmosphere in that room was perfectly clear – almost unnaturally transparent – and warm. Fletcher felt as if he was surrounded by some medium other than air. Something slightly thicker and sweeter. Something pleasant. It would have been nice to drift off to sleep, except that there was an acute pleasure in being awake and conscious. He answered every question that was put to him with enthusiasm. And yet, some part of him must have drifted into a level of inattention, because all at once he was surprised and somewhat disconcerted to notice that Sascha Klymer had his head slightly set to one side, and that there was amiable question in his eyes, and to realize that he didn't know what that question had been.

"I'm sorry. What was that?"

"I only said, 'Well?'"

"Ah." He paused. "Well, what?" he asked.

"What do you think?"

"I'm sorry. What do I think of what?"

"Of the opportunity, Mr. Haywood." The hair at Sascha Klymer's temples was so delicate that it almost looked damp. "Would you like to be on the show?" He spread his hands in an invitation as he asked the question and then steepled his fingers in front of him. His nails were perfectly shaped and almost transparent. Their beds were violet.

Fletcher had actually, and perhaps not surprisingly, forgotten what it was that he'd come there about in the first place. It had ceased to seem important.

"Would I like? You mean – I mean – like a callback or something like that? Whatever the sort of next step is?"

"A callback? No, no. You misunderstand me. Would you like to be on the show?"

"Just – like that? Now? On the show?"

"That's right. Perhaps I haven't been clear with you, Mr. Haywood." If it's possible to frown and laugh agreeably at the same time, Sascha Klymer did so now. "We loved your submission. There are no callbacks. The opportunity has been yours for the taking since you walked in. If you're interested."

Dizziness rose up, choking him. Whatever thicker-than-air medium it was that filled the room began to shimmer. "If I would like it? When – that is – would this thing – this show – when would it start?"

"Almost immediately. You would be the last person we need. You would leave next week. Early next week, if at all possible. I realize that this is short notice, of course, but I hope that you'll understand. And that you'll be willing."

"Early next – ? But that – but today is Thursday – but that – that isn't possible. I mean, I have a job. I can't just leave."

"Please, Mr. Haywood, trust me. We will take care of all the practical considerations. We can come to an arrangement that I'm sure the people at your firm will find to be most satisfactory."

"Most ... ? But, I mean. I have a life. I can't just up and leave. I mean. I can't just disappear."

Sascha Klymer gave a small, friendly sort of sigh. "Mr. Haywood. I know that this is sudden from your perspective. But please understand, you're just the person we've been looking for. I'm quite sure of it. Before you came, I took the liberty of having a contract drawn up. I hope you don't mind." He stood and crossed to his desk, took a sheaf of papers from it.

"A contract?"

"That's right. And I would ask you, please, to take it home with you, to read it, and to consider it. I hope you'll understand that we'll need a decision rather soon, but we really would very much like to have you on the program. So I do hope you'll consider it very seriously."

He passed Fletcher the sheaf of papers and smiled. Fletcher looked blankly at the documents. He could feel his pulse going in his left armpit. There was an opening, a way leading out. (Out of what? He couldn't quite tell what he meant when he thought this.) Whatever was out there was dizzying and terrifying – incomprehensibly big. There was no way that he could do this. It was ludicrous. What the hell had he been thinking? After all, it was only a joke. A lark. A fancy. A fantasy. He had a life.

And then, suddenly, there was the girl from the sandwich shop. He could see her with perfect clarity: her braid, her perfect mouth. He could recall the sensation of his heart shattering in his chest – and not just recall that it had happened, but feel it again, or at least feel an echo of it and know that it had been real. And he could remember the thing that he had thought as he looked at her, just before his heart shattered. Or at least, if he couldn't remember the exact words that had run through his head, he could remember the feeling: he would vanish from existence, disappear into nothing, be obliterated, unremembered, utterly gone, and he would never have had what he had wanted.

"I don't need to read this," he said, holding up the papers.

Sascha Klymer's eyebrows came quickly together, registering surprise and concern. The medium that was not quite air had stopped its wavering. It was very still in the room, and warm.

"May I borrow a pen?" Fletcher asked.

7.

"Excuse me?"

Dick Eckhardt was Fletcher's immediate supervisor at Hungadunga and McCormick. Fletcher wasn't exactly afraid of Eckhardt. Eckhardt just made him sort of uneasy. There was something peculiar but hard to pin down about the way that Eckhardt's face worked, as if he had learned how to express human emotions by studying them in a book.

"I'm going to be on a reality television show."

Eckhardt looked narrowly down his nose at Fletcher – a trick which ought to have required tilting his head back but didn't seem to. "Just what, exactly, do you mean?"

"Nothing. I mean, nothing other than that. Really. I've been hired to be on a reality television show. You know, where people – do challenges and things like that?"

"Do challenges?"

"Right."

"And things like that?"

"Yes. I'll be gone for – for several months."

"For several – ? You've been hired by – ? Is it necessary to remind you that you already have a job?"

"No. Of course not."

"Is it necessary to ask whether you enjoy having that job?"

"No. It's not. No."

Eckhardt switched his posture, leaning forward now, and stared intently at Fletcher. Then, quite without warning and just a little too fast, his face opened up. He rocked backwards again.

"Fletcher, Fletcher, Fletcher," he said, each "Fletcher" falling on a descending note, "I see. I see now. It's the stress. Of the working environment. I understand that. Of course I do. I feel it as well, naturally. It's only natural. To be sure. And how long has it been since you had a vacation? You're a valuable employee, of course, Fletcher, and we understand that we need to take care of our employees. Listen, take a few days off. Take a whole week off if you need to. Relax. We can manage. Get out of town. Go somewhere sunny."

Fletcher sucked in a lungful of air between his teeth and swallowed. "No, really. I'm going on a reality television show. I already agreed to it."

Eckhardt paused.

"I just offered you a week off. You should take it."

"No, really. I – no, really."

Eckhardt's face snapped shut again. He turned his head sideways and looked at Fletcher out of the corner of his eyes. It made Fletcher feel as if Eckhardt were trying to see behind him. "You're going to be on a reality television show?"

"Yes."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Well." His head moved back and forth. "Well, well, well. This is, of course, highly unusual. Highly unusual and, I'm sure you can appreciate, entirely unacceptable. Entirely. No, no, no." He shook his head again along with each "no" – tiny, decisive flicks. "I'm sure you'll appreciate that I have no choice but to speak to corporate headquarters. Yes, I shall have no choice but to call right away and to speak to Mr. Hungadunga himself. No choice at all. And I must say, I'm very sorry. Very sorry, indeed. But I have no choice. I can only tell you to expect the worst. You'll have to excuse me."

Fletcher stood up and left Eckhardt's office with a few more apologetic words. He wasn't sure whether he was supposed to wait for Eckhardt to make the call or not, so he stood outside the door, rocking gently on the balls of his feet.

The semi-atrium outside of Eckhardt's office was the same indescribably neutral color as every other surface in building. There were two potted plants and a framed poster on the wall. It showed an eagle, which, having swooped down over a body of water, was now soaring upwards with a struggling fish gripped in its talons. Below the picture, in bold letters, was the word "COURAGE," and below that, in smaller print: "Success is founded on the ability to dream big." Fletcher wasn't sure whether he was supposed to identify with the eagle or the fish.

"Ahem. Fletcher."

Eckhardt had actually said, "Ahem," rather than clearing his throat. Fletcher spun around rather faster than he intended to. "Please. Come into my office. If you don't mind."

They sat back down. Eckhardt moved some papers back and forth indistinctly across the surface of his desk. "Hmm. Well. Well, well, well. This is all very unusual. Very unusual." He looked up at Fletcher. "I've had a talk with Mr. Hungadunga. And, well – well, it appears that Mr. Hungadunga has, in fact, already spoken with these – these people. These television people. He said that he had made an arrangement with them that was most satisfactory. Most satisfactory, he said. It seems you are to have the necessary time off. So. There it is. There it is. Very unusual, but there it is. So I suppose that all that is left is for me to wish you good luck in your – in your undertaking. So, there it is. Good luck." And with this he stood and offered Fletcher his hand, which Fletcher shook before he left the office.

8.

You would think that it would take a long time and a lot of energy to disengage from your life – to arrange your own vanishing – and in your own, personal, case, you may very well be right. For Fletcher, however, the process was surprisingly quick, even easy.

He called his ex-wife and got her to agree to take Gomorrah indefinitely. She'd been surprised about the whole thing and sighed several times – in fact, pronounced his name itself as a sigh in a way that he found unpleasantly patronizing. "Fleetchhheer. You're doing what?" Anyhow, she'd agreed to take the cat, and he'd stuffed the creature into its little carrier and taken it to her house.

He'd talked to a couple of family members and friends and acquaintances. He wasn't sure what he'd expected, but most of them found the idea to be ridiculous. The only one who really seemed excited about the prospect of Fletcher's adventure had been Eggs. "You're kidding me. That's fantastic, man. Really incredible. Have you seen those shows? There are some hot girls on those shows, I'm telling you what. This is gonna be great for you."

He notified the managers of his building. He notified the post office. He visited his neighbors briefly and told them he'd be gone for a while. The television people took care of some of the practical matters. They would see to his bills and other such things while he was away – it was no problem, no problem at all. They wanted to make things as smooth as possible. They set up a doctor's appointment for him, more or less a routine physical. He spoke to them on the phone, received confirmation of his flight status from them by email, but he didn't see any of them in person and certainly not Sascha Klymer himself. They would tell him nothing about his ultimate destination – all hush hush, but that seemed more or less in keeping with how he imagined that these things probably worked. There were doubtless issues of intellectual property and surprise for the audience and things of that nature.

All this mystery did make packing a rather interesting problem, however. The night before he was to leave, he stood over his empty suitcase, unable to decide. He'd actually filled it and emptied it once already. He knew that he was flying first to Denver, but since the ultimate location had been described as "exotic" and "international," he was fairly sure that that was only a stopping-off point. In the end, he simply packed several changes of clothes of the sort that he might have worn to the office as well as a couple of t-shirts, some shorts, and a pair of running shoes. He would just have to assume that he would be provided with whatever else might be necessary. The last item he put in was one of his penny whistles – the one that could be pulled apart into two pieces and carried in a pocket.

That night he had anxious dreams. He was back in school. Classes started the next day, but he wasn't sure precisely which ones he'd signed up for. He was supposed to have done preparatory reading, but he couldn't find his textbooks. He didn't know what time the classes met or in what classrooms. He felt disorganized and sick to his stomach.

The alarm was buzzing and there was something else, something he needed to concern himself with today. He wasn't a student, he didn't need to get to class – but there was something he had to do.

It took a few moments for him to remember what it was, but as soon as he did, he was completely awake. He ate breakfast mechanically. Afterwards he couldn't remember what it had consisted of. He'd arranged for a cab the night before. He'd arranged for it to arrive a little earlier than was necessary. Running late made him feel jumpy. The cab ride was dark and quiet, aside from the cabby making polite conversation. The streetlamps were still on.

Everything went smoothly at the airport. The line was short. He really was booked on the flight. No one looked at him strangely, challenged him, asked him what he was doing. Every moment he was aware that he could turn back, that this could be over right now, that all he had to do was leave the airport and forget about it, and every moment, he didn't. He thought that he ought to feel something: excited, nervous. But he didn't. He just felt – unreal. As if this were happening to someone else, someone in whom he was only distantly interested.

Through security, past the coffee shop, down the hall, past the moving walkways and the restaurants and the stores that sold t-shirts and mugs and magazines and stuffed bears with the state motto on them. Past people looking glassy-eyed in the waiting areas, staring out of the windows or at their laptops or watching their kids. Past the planes waiting silently, patiently outside.

And finally there was a tinny sort of voice:

"Flight 243 with non-stop service to Denver will now begin boarding through gate C7. Our business elite passengers, passengers traveling with small children, and any passengers requiring assistance during boarding are invited to board the aircraft first."

The Second Part

1.

"You don't like flying much, do you?"

His seatmate was a woman in her thirties of forties. She was attractive in a rather taut, soccer-mom sort of way, with her hair pulled back in ponytail and ropy veins on the backs of her hands.

"No, not very much."

She nodded, "I could tell."

"How?"

"You're kind of green. Around the eyes. Also, you were sort of whispering to yourself the whole time the plane was taking off. What was that about?"

"I was counting."

"Counting?"

"I read or heard somewhere – I don't remember where – that most plane crashes happen in the first three minutes of the flight. So I always count."

"Really?"

"Yes."

She smiled. Her teeth struck were very orderly and bright. She must have had an aggressive orthodontist. "You know they say it's the safest way to travel? Flying."

"I'd heard that, yes."

"Although I've also heard it's elevators that are the safest. But I suppose that doesn't count as a way of traveling. You should lighten up. Relax a little. What's in Denver?"

"I give up. What's in Denver?"

She displayed those teeth again, laughing. "You're funny. 'I give up.' Seriously, what are you going to Denver for?"

"Nothing. I mean, I'm not staying there. I'm – I'm going somewhere else."

"Uh-huh. Where is that?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know? Are you joking again?"

"No."

"What are you, some sort of spy or something? Or do you have amnesia?"

"No. I'm – I'm going to be on a reality television show."

"No kidding?"

"No kidding."

"I love reality television. It's great. What kind of show is it? Is it like one of those ones where you go on a bunch of dates and have to pick a woman to marry? Or where you're chained to four women and you have to go everywhere with them and eliminate them one at a time? Or one of those ones where you have to, you know, eat live bugs and walk on tight-ropes and that sort of thing?"

"I'm not sure."

"Really? Wow. Are they keeping it a surprise or something? I'll bet it's one of those challenge ones. There's this one I heard about where they put people in isolation – total isolation, and they don't have windows or clocks or anything and they won't let them sleep and the only voice they hear is this computer that makes them do weird challenges. They don't even know if the other contestants have dropped out because they can't leave and they can't see anyone. They're just locked up. They all go kind of crazy. I'll bet it's something like that."

"I don't think it's like that one. I don't know."

"In one of the challenges they had to drink root beer. Just drank it and drank it until they threw up. Really. I don't know why. Just entertainment, I guess. I don't know if I could do that. Or eat live bugs. I saw one once where they put people in a coffin with rats. Hundreds and hundreds of rats. There was some sort of special camera where you could see in the dark. I don't know if I could do that either. Or a boot camp. Screaming at you, waking you up in the middle of the night. Making you do push-ups. Anyway. Well, I'll have to keep my eyes open for whichever one you're on so that I can say that I met you. That's really great."

"Yeah. It's great. Why are you going to Denver?"

"To stay with my sister."

"Oh. That's nice."

"No. It's not. I'm going to stay with her and her kids for a while. She and her husband split and I'm going to try to help her out."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"Bastard."

"Excuse me?"

"Her husband's a real bastard, if you'll excuse my language."

"Oh. That's all right. Don't worry about it. I'm sorry."

"Sorry for what?"

"Um, I'm sorry your sister's husband is a real bastard."

"Uh-huh. Me too." She glanced away for a moment, then back. "Me too. I knew it when they got married. I knew it, but I didn't say anything, because it's no use telling anyone anything. You know what I mean?"

Fletcher wasn't sure that he knew, but he nodded anyway, "Yeah."

"I didn't say anything about it, but I could tell. I never trusted the bastard. He got drunk at his own wedding and I swear he was making eyes at every woman there. But she didn't see it. She didn't want to see it. You could smell it on him. He smelled like sex. In a dirty way. You know what I mean?"

He was even less sure about this one. "Uh huh."

"But she wouldn't smell him. Refused to. And now where is she? She moves to Denver with him and now he has a goddamn affair – excuse my language again – he has a goddamn affair and she catches him and kicks him out – only smart thing she's done this whole time – and now the kids are devastated and she's a wreck, because she refused to smell him back when it would have done her any good."

The woman shook her head. Fletcher couldn't tell whether she was upset about her sister's plight or satisfied about her own acute sense of smell.

"He wants to come back, of course. 'Oh, honey, I love you.' 'I can't live without you.' Even brought her a diamond pendant, if you can believe that. Probably something he got for his mistress – or one of his mistresses. God, who knows. I mean, can you believe that? I can just see him. Coming back to the house, all sniveling, all sweet, with his clothes rumpled like he's sleeping in some cheap hotel, brings her the necklace. The pendant. All he wants is his comfortable life back, so he can go back to comfortably doing – well, you know. What people like him do. She should ram that diamond pendant up his – anyway. I'm not going to let it happen. No way. He hates me, naturally. And he ought to. I swear he was making eyes at me at his own damn wedding. His wife's sister. Disgusting. I wouldn't have any of it – I knew what he was up to the whole time. So of course he hates me. I could see right through him. He thinks I'm interfering. I'll show him interfering. There is no way that I am going to let Dianne take that bastard back. Are you married?"

"Ah, no. No. Divorced, actually."

The soccer mom gave him a penetrating look.

"Did you cheat on her?"

"Me? No. No. It's, it's not really my style."

Her eyes narrowed a little, then she relaxed. "Sure. I can see that. You don't smell like it."

He wasn't sure whether to thank her or to be a little offended.

"Well, if you get married again, watch it. Watch out. Women can be just as bad, I know that. So watch out."

"Thanks."

They sat in silence for a little while. The airplane hummed around them. Every so often the pitch of the humming changed disconcertingly and Fletcher stomach would squirm.

"What are you scared of?" the soccer mom asked.

"What?"

"You said you were scared to fly. Counting when the plane takes off and all that. So what are you scared of? Dying?"

"Yeah, I suppose I'm scared of dying."

"You think we're just going to go plummeting out of the air all of a sudden? Like a wing's going to snap off or something?"

"Not exactly. I don't know. I just imagine the panic and the screaming, and then the – you know – that being it and everything."

"Sleeping."

"What?"

"Dying. It's just like sleeping, right? Sleeping is okay."

"I'm not sure about that. You know what part I like best about sleeping?"

"What?"

"Waking up."

"Hmm. Well, anyhow, you're not going to die in any plane crash. You worry too much. You know what's going to get you? High blood pressure. From so much worrying. You ought to relax."

2.

Later in the flight, he sank into a buffeted, disturbing sort of sleep from which he was awoken by his seatmate.

"We're here," she said. "We're coming in to Denver."

She pointed out of the window. The plane was banking slowly, and below he could see endless little rectangular roofs arranged around cul de sacs, tiny cars crawling along, swathes of brown earth, and the occasional flash of sunlight in a reservoir, or maybe a swimming pool. It all looked obviously human and planned and at the same time organic, like the roots of some huge plant, or a diagram of the circulatory system.

"Have you ever been here before?" she asked him.

"When I was a kid. I don't really remember it."

Slowly the cul de sacs spiraled closer. Trees and telephone poles leapt up from the ground. There were occasional malls with huge flat roofs and hundreds of hundreds of cars lined up in herringbone zigzags beside them. He could make out baseball fields, commercial buildings with tall signs, the cloverleaf loops of highways merging. Closer and closer it all came. Then there was open land, and the shadow of the plane whipping across it, leaping up and down over the vegetation, and then suddenly the runway underneath, alarmingly close, and in a few more seconds the plane hit the ground with a shudder and there was the horrible rush of sound as it slowed down that always made him think for a split second that the plane was going to explode on the ground just when he had made it so far through the air, and it was over. They were taxiing slowly toward the terminal and a voice was telling them that they should remain seated, that luggage was liable to shift in the overhead compartments, what the temperature was outside, acknowledging that they had many airlines to choose from thanking them for choosing to fly with us, and encouraging them to enjoy their stay in Denver.

He said goodbye to the soccer mom. "Have a good time," she said as he merged into the traffic in the center aisle. "Remember to make good alliances. And don't make anyone mad," she called after him. "They're always trying to get people to get mad at each other because it's good television. But that's how you get voted off."

He waved his thanks, left the plane, and walked up the little, moveable hallway toward the terminal. His sinuses felt very dry.

Have you ever wondered who those people in airports with hand-lettered signs that have names on them are waiting for? Well, some of them are waiting for reality TV contestants. There was one in the Denver airport with a hand-lettered sign that said, "Fletcher Haywood." They must be trained, too, these people, to recognize the way that a person looks at his own name on one of those signs, because, before Fletcher had a chance to worry about how he might open the conversation, this one said, "Mr. Haywood?"

"That's right."

"Come with me."

His guide led him through the airport crowd, then took a sharp turn down a narrow passageway that Fletcher would certainly have failed to notice had he been on his own, and through a door marked "Authorized Personnel Only." The hallway continued down a sharp grade and they passed through another door at its end, out into the open air. It was bright outside, and loud, and it made Fletcher's head spin a little. His ears still hadn't fully adjusted to the change in air pressure since landing.

They climbed onto a waiting shuttle bus, Fletcher lifting on his little, wheeled carry-on bag. He found himself facing his companion and looked at him closely for the first time. The man seemed to sag. The skin hung loosely on his face. You could see slivers of the insides of his lower eyelids, moist and pink. He had a mustache that drooped precipitously, the longest hairs curling down past his lower lip. His shoulders sloped downwards. Even the man's voice had seemed to sag, now that Fletcher thought about it. He wore a nondescript blue outfit that might have been a uniform. There was a cap that went with it, at any rate. No name tag or company logo, though.

"So," Fletcher said to the sagging man, "Do you have any idea where we're headed after this? Or where I'm headed, I mean? Where this – this show is taking place?"

The man's wet eyes flicked toward him but his face registered no emotion. "I'm afraid I wouldn't know anything about that, Mr. Haywood. I'm hired to get you to where you're supposed to go in the airport. That's all."

Fletcher sighed a little to himself and looked outside. They were rolling across the tarmac, past planes with all sorts of insignias on their sides and tail fins, few of which he recognized. The day was hazy, but Fletcher thought that he could make out a line of blue mountains studding the horizon. The shuttle bus passed an open airplane hanger like a giant garage and a series of smaller planes without any markings at all. They must have been headed to the outer edges of the airport, Fletcher thought to himself. The shuttle bus was small and they were the only passengers.

The bus stopped beside a long, low building, the doors opened, and they climbed out. It was windy, and he couldn't tell what the temperature was – only that he was uncomfortable.

The building they entered was something like what Fletcher thought of as an airport terminal, in the sense that it was the right general shape inside, but it clearly wasn't an ordinary terminal. It was too industrial, as if it was still under construction. It had a high ceiling criss-crossed by exposed pipes, and there were far too few people.

The sagging man escorted Fletcher a few hundred feet into the building, past several empty waiting areas with unmarked kiosks, and then announced, "Here we are, Mr. Haywood."

"Thanks," said Fletcher, "Thank you." He was just wondering whether the sagging man fell into the category of service personnel who expect to be tipped when he realized that he was alone. The sagging man was loping off the way they'd come.

Fletcher wasn't actually alone. This waiting area appeared to be the only one in the entire building that was occupied, and its occupants had stopped their various pursuits in order to look up at him. He nodded awkwardly and moved forward, finding himself a seat. The seats were made of orange plastic, molded into ass-shapes, and mounted on long metal bars. This area was not climate-controlled. The floor was concrete.

He counted sixteen people in the waiting area, himself included. When he had nodded, he'd had the impression of a diffuse sort of acknowledgment of his presence, and then they'd all gone back to what they'd been doing. Most of them were reading or looking at their phones or otherwise solitarily occupied, but there were one or two little clusters talking to each other. The group was of mixed ethnicities and ages, but mostly white and mostly somewhere between, say, twenty-five and fifty. Surely these people must be going where he was going. They must be his – what? – his fellow contestants?

Over the course of the next twenty minutes or so – during which Fletcher stretched, stood, walked around scuffing the soles of his shoes gently against the concrete, returned to his seat and occupied himself with his phone – several more people arrived. A big man in a leather jacket. A young woman wearing plastic-rimmed glasses, a long jacket, bangles around her wrists, big earrings. A woman with shoulder-length hair and bangs and severe eyes. Another man, Fletcher's age or a little older with dark skin, wearing a blue blazer. As each entered, those already in the waiting area, Fletcher included, mutely acknowledged the newcomers, who then found themselves seats.

Just as the man in the blue blazer was settling into his seat, a voice came from the other direction: "Hello everyone."

Fletcher turned. There was a new woman standing just by the door that presumably led out onto the runway. She must have been waiting outside and come in while they were all looking at the previous arrival. There was no doubt that the welcoming statement had come from her. She was wrapped tightly in a dark suit. Her hair was carefully lacquered. Her smile was embracing and hard, full of teeth like diamonds. She looked very much in-charge, an impression that was augmented by the clipboard that was tucked into the crook of her left arm like a riding crop.

"Welcome. On behalf of reality, I'm very happy and very excited to welcome you all. I hope you're all looking forward to your adventure. My name is Vanessa D'Oro. It's my job to see you through the next part of your journey and to provide you with anything that you need in order to make that journey comfortable. Everyone has arrived now, so all that remains is to get you on board the plane, which will be ready in just a very few minutes. In the meantime, please relax, make yourselves comfortable, and get acquainted with one another. I'll be back just as soon as we're ready to depart." She re-opened the door that she'd come through and slipped out again. It was much brighter outside than in, so that she seemed to disappear into a burst of light.

There was an immediate sensation of release in the room, like letting the air out of a tire. It hadn't really occurred to Fletcher that other people might be nervous as well, but they must have been, because the change in the atmosphere was palpable. People began to move around and there was suddenly a good deal more talking.

The nearest person to Fletcher was an Asian woman with dark freckles on her nose and cheeks. She looked up from the book she'd been reading and smiled broadly at him, showing a great deal of her gums. "I guess this is really it, huh?"

"I guess so."

"I guess we're really going."

"Apparently." He smiled and raised his shoulders.

"I can't believe it. I really can't. This is so weird. You know what I mean?"

"I know exactly what you mean. Just to check – you know – do you think we're about to leave to be on a reality TV show?"

She laughed. "Yeah. That's what I think."

"Wow."

She stood and held out her hand. "I'm Lucy."

"It's nice to meet you, Lucy. I'm Fletcher."

"Nice to meet you. I'm feeling a little antsy. I guess I'm gonna walk around for a minute. Jesus, I can't believe this."

"Yeah. Okay. Nice to meet you. Again."

The plane really must have been very close to being ready, because Vanessa D'Oro was back through the door and calling out to them within a matter of minutes. "All right, everyone. I've checked with the pilot and we are ready to go. So if you'll please gather your personal belongings. Make sure you've got everything. I'm afraid it will be impossible to have things sent on if you've left them behind." She flashed her diamonds. "And once again, welcome, and thanks for being here."

The sense of movement around the room increased. As people filed toward the door, Fletcher checked his bag several times – for what he wasn't sure, since he had no ticket or other documents to keep track of. Just to make sure that everything was in order.

The wind seemed to have picked up since he'd come inside only a little while before. His clothes whipped around him and there was a sort of a roar in the air. Lucy, who was a few feet away, turned around and said something to him but he couldn't make out what it was. He smiled and nodded.

They straggled out across the tarmac in a formation that was part line, part cluster, following Vanessa D'Oro toward a plane. There was a moveable staircase pulled up to its door, just like Fletcher had seen in the movies but didn't think he'd ever encountered in real life before. The plane was cream-colored and sleek, and had no identifying markings. A hatch near the rear was open and there were men in blue jumpsuits loading bags into it.

Up the staircase and into the plane he went. Its interior was very different from that of an ordinary commercial jet. The ceiling was higher, first of all, and, even though it was relatively small, there was an overall impression of a lot more space, mainly due to the fact that there was only one row of seats on either side. The area in between was so wide that it could hardly be called an aisle at all. If the seats weren't covered in leather, they were covered in an incredibly good facsimile of leather. Fletcher found himself one and tucked his bag next to it. It was profoundly comfortable. Far more comfortable than any piece of furniture in his house. It could swivel nearly 180 degrees and recline almost all the way back.

Once they were all settled in, Vanessa D'Oro gave them another little welcome speech: she hoped they would enjoy their flight, they were to make themselves entirely comfortable, there was a restroom in the rear, the flight would be an overnight one (exact length unspecified), if they needed anything they only had to ask. A flight attendant (if that was the right title – she didn't wear any insignia identifying her with an airline) brought around champagne flutes and Vanessa D'Oro filled their glasses herself. When all the glasses were full, she proposed a toast, the exact content of which Fletcher could not afterward remember.

It was quite interesting to discover that, under these circumstances, he was much less inclined to worry about the plane falling out of the sky or erupting into a giant fireball. There was a touch of the familiar tightening in his chest as the plane began to build up speed, and as the telephone wires and highways and ranch houses dropped away beneath him. But it didn't take long for the sensation of worry to fade, for him to relax, and even begin to take pleasure in being in the air. It wasn't exactly that champagne and really good faux-leather seats made the prospect of dying okay, but they did somehow seem to soften its edges.

As the plane banked, Fletcher could see Denver down below them through the opposite windows. Then the line of mountains reappeared on his side for a few minutes until the plane plunged upward into the clouds. Mist whipped past his window for a few minutes, and then they burst out into the open, above the clouds, and suddenly the world was all sun and long, strange shadows. The upper surface of the clouds stretched out around the plane, on and on and on. The champagne and the sudden change in altitude made Fletcher's head sing.

Slowly, slowly, as the plane moved along (no telling how fast – the scale was impossible to judge), the sun set across the fantastic wasteland of the clouds – like Antarctica, like the surface of the moon. Everything was shot through with orange and gold, and Fletcher felt himself drift back and forth, in and out of consciousness, and then settle into sleep.

3.

He awoke in darkness. It must have been the plane's descent that had disturbed him. He could feel that it was slowly moving downwards, though he wasn't sure just exactly how he felt it.

Down, down, they went, and through the window he could see nothing but blackness below. It was a little frightening. No one around him seemed to be awake. Were they crashing? He struggled toward full consciousness. Then there were lights – a scattering of them, a few clusters – rising up out of the darkness. The lights whipped past and then there was suddenly a runway, and the wheels hit the ground with a bump and a hiss.

The plane taxied to a stop. No flight attendants announced their arrival anywhere or told them the local time. There was just silence and the empty night, not even any signs of a terminal, or of other planes. Everything had a colorless look, and nothing beyond the nearby lights was properly visible at all.

A truck pulled up beside the plane and several men in jumpsuits hopped out. Most of them disappeared from Fletcher's view. One remained. He lit a cigarette and began to pace. Every time he pulled at the cigarette, the coal at its end flared. Another figure entered Fletcher's field of view from near the plane. It was Vanessa D'Oro. She approached the man with the cigarette and began to speak to him.

Fletcher leaned forward a little and pressed his forehead against the window. He was sticky with sleep, unable to think clearly. On the opposite side of the aisle from him he heard one of his fellow passengers grunt and stir.

It was hard to tell with the volume off, but it seemed to Fletcher as if Vanessa D'Oro and the cigarette smoker were having an argument of some kind. She was gesticulating broadly and the smoker was frowning and shaking his head. He pointed at the plane. There were more exchanges and then a third figure entered and joined the conversation. This man stood with his back to Fletcher, but Fletcher thought that there was something familiar about him. More words were exchanged. After a few minutes of this, the smoker appeared to be mollified. He nodded several times, shook both of the others' hands, threw his cigarette away, and departed.

The remaining two began to speak to one another. The third figure turned a little and Fletcher could now see his face. It was the sagging man, the one from the airport, the one who'd led Fletcher to the departure lounge and who had said that that was his only job and he didn't know anything about the television show. Fletcher blinked hard. Was he still partly asleep?

In another minute, the jumpsuited men began to reappear. They climbed into their truck. The smoker was among them. He got into the truck and gave a sort of salute to Vanessa D'Oro and the sagging man. At the new angle at which the smoker appeared, Fletcher saw something that he hadn't been able to before: slung over the man's shoulder, resting casually against his hip, was some sort of machine gun.

The truck pulled away. Vanessa D'Oro and the sagging man disappeared. Shortly, the plane's engines started up. Fletcher looked across the aisle. As far as he could tell, none of the other passengers had awoken. His head felt loose and his thoughts clung messily to the inside of his skull. He could peel them off only with difficulty. It wasn't long before he was fully asleep again.

For breakfast there was fresh fruit and real eggs and sausage and coffee. Looking out the window, Fletcher was disoriented. Yesterday's clouds had disappeared. There was an absolutely featureless blue sky. In the distance was a long, straight seam where the blue of the sky met the blue of the ocean. Below, there was nothing but water. If you watched it, little swirls of white would appear, and glimmering silver patches, like the scales of fish. Maybe those white swirls were the crests of gigantic waves. Maybe, if you were down among them, they would tower twenty, forty, sixty feet above you. But from up here, they were little nothings in that vast plain. They only served to emphasize the stillness of the view taken as a whole. Fletcher scanned carefully to see if he could spot a boat out there, or perhaps an island, or something else to give human scale to the scene, but, save for the moments of white and the silver flickers, there was nothing. He remembered hearing or reading somewhere that the sky wasn't really blue, that it was only a reflection of the ocean. Or maybe it was the other way around: water was really colorless, but appeared blue because it reflected the sky. Or maybe he had the whole thing wrong. Anyhow, right now it seemed as if either scenario might be true, or both: the incomprehensibly huge sky and the incomprehensibly huge sea facing each other like two mirrors, reflecting one another forever. Looking at it made him feel a little funny, and he refocused his attention inside the plane.

The man in the seat opposite him looked across. He smiled. "Excellent breakfast, don't you think?"

"Very good."

"This whole set-up's pretty good, huh?"

"What?"

"This." He waved his hand around him.

"Oh yeah. I've never been on one of these before. A private jet."

"Me neither. I'd say it's the only way to travel. My name's Len." He had a broad face and black hair, long enough to be held back in a little bun at the back of his head. His shirt was open at the collar.

"I'm Fletcher."

"Nice to meet you, Fletcher."

There was a silence, but a pretty amiable one. Fletcher felt that he ought to make conversation. "So, how'd you get into this mess? How'd you get involved?"

"Do you mean why did I decide to do this? To be on this show?"

"Yeah. Sure."

The man put his drink down and looked at Fletcher. His face made Fletcher think of dough, but his eyes were sharp. "You ought to ask why do I think I decided to do this. Because who's deciding? Is it this up here?" He tapped his skull. "This bunch of electrical connections? Did you know that they've discovered that you actually make decisions split seconds before you're aware of having decided them? True fact. They can measure this stuff. Don't ask me how, but they can. The deciding is just the story that we tell ourselves afterwards, after the deal's already done. I'll tell you something else I read about recently." He smiled. "There was this guy who suddenly, out of the blue, developed an interest in child pornography. Lived a totally normal life and one day, he's middle aged, no previous interest in that kind of thing, and bang, he suddenly wants to look at naked children. Starts trafficking in pictures. He gets caught. He's about to be sentenced and before they sentence him, they do a brain-scan on him. Don't know why. Maybe they do it to all criminals these days. Anyway, you know what they find? A tumor. A great big tumor, big as an egg, pressing on his brain. So they cut it out. Cut open his head, take out the tumor. And you know what? His desire – the child pornography thing – it just goes away. Just like that. True story." Len took a sip of his coffee and smiled at Fletcher again. "Six moths later, he's arrested again. Same stuff. And what do you think? Tumor's back. Like a switch had been flipped."

There was a pause.

"And then what?"

"Then what?"

"What happened to the guy?"

"No idea. Maybe he went to jail. Tumor probably killed him. Anyhow, it's a crazy thing, isn't it? Makes you think, doesn't it. I mean, I may be able to tell you why I think I'm on this plane, but in fact – the story may be something else. Who the hell knows? It's complicated."

Just at that moment, someone moved between the two of them. It was Vanessa D'Oro.

"Mr. Haywood? Sorry to interrupt. How are you doing this morning? Are you enjoying yourself? Is everything all right? Good, good. I just wanted to take this chance to say good morning and to welcome everyone personally and to thank you for being here."

She reached out her hand and he took it. "Thank you, Mr. Haywood," she said again. Her skin felt very smooth and almost hard, as if it had been varnished.

"Fletcher. Please."

"Fletcher, then."

He opened his mouth to say something, changed his mind mid-way through, but found that he was already speaking, so carried on the best he could. "Can I ask – where – where is it – where exactly are we going?"

"Now, Fletcher. We wouldn't want to spoil the fun, would we? Of course not. You must allow us our little bit of fun. Our little mystery." She laughed. It was a light sound, and pleasant, but it seemed varnished as well. "No, no, no. I know that you'll have a very, very interesting time when you get there. I can tell you that much. Now, can I offer you something? A drink? Something special? Let me make you a drink. We have a sort of house specialty."

He wanted to ask about what he'd seen the night before. Or thought he'd seen. But it seemed strange to say anything now, in the light. What, exactly, would he ask anyhow? "Sure," he said. "Sure, a drink would be nice."

As she left, he looked across the aisle again at Len, who winked at him.

An attendants brought Fletcher the drink. It was a pale shade of pastel blue, rather like the color of the sky outside, only more luminescent. It came in a round, glass tumbler with a thick bottom that had a very satisfying heft to it. He enjoyed lifting it up and just letting it rest solidly in his palm. And the taste turned out to be remarkable. Fletcher was sure that there must be rum involved, but there were other flavors too. There must have been some liqueur that gave it its strange color. It was slightly sweet, but more like the sweetness of flowers than the sweetness of fruit. He couldn't tell whether its effect was to warm him or to cool him, but whichever it was, the result was terribly relaxing. He swirled it around in the glass, sucked it slowly between his teeth, settled more and more deeply into his seat and stared out the window at a sea- and sky-scape that somehow was no longer vast and alienating, but soothingly distant and neutral and blank. He could feel his consciousness settling back further and further behind his eyes, so that everything he was seeing began to take on the pleasant unreality of a television screen. He would have to remember to ask what this drink was.

He wasn't used drinking alcohol at such odd hours. He quickly began to feel drowsy again. His head rocked toward his chest a couple of times. Some sound or thought caught him like a fishhook and jerked him awake several times, but each time it let go he slid further back. His eyes began to roll up into his head.

His sleep was troubled and intense. There were more-than-usually vivid and less-than-usually comprehensible dreams. Vanessa D'Oro was in them – he knew it was her, even though she looked different than she had in real life. Or maybe it was someone else that actually did look like her. Len was there as well and, so it seemed, were other people from the plane. There was some sort of elaborate play that they were all in, or maybe a game that they were playing, but he didn't understand the rules.

It was all unpleasant and disturbing and several times Fletcher thought he might be fighting his way toward consciousness, but each time he failed, and sank back into incomprehension. Once he even thought he woke and was on the plane again, but everything looked wrong and he couldn't move his body.

He saw the cigarette smoker and the sagging man. He saw flashes of things that might have been from his own childhood. He wanted to grasp them. He wanted to connect the pieces. He wanted to understand, but things only became harder to hold on to, more jumbled and confused. Further and further he sank. He was running through a strangely familiar city, up a cobblestone street, ascending a steep hill. Tall white buildings with tiled roofs teetered all around him. He didn't know why he needed to go so fast. There was something important at the top of the hill.

Then there were just noises and blackness and sometimes hardly even the awareness that he existed. The noises might have been voices, but they also might have been howls or the rumble of machines. Everything was thick and heavy and unresponsive. And then there was nothing. Just the colorless emptiness of non-dreams that must have lasted for quite a while.

4.

I'm sure you've had the experience of waking up in an unexpected place. Perhaps nothing as dramatic as a park bench after a night of binge drinking, but perhaps your grandparents house as a child, or in a tent, or just from a nap on the couch when you expected to find yourself in bed – somewhere that you don't usually sleep. You're disoriented for moment, you can't quite figure out what's going on, but generally your mind collects itself pretty quickly – you figure out where you are and what you're doing there. But even under those fairly ordinary circumstances, the experience can be disconcerting.

The tree that Fletcher was looking up at was very tall and slender. Up and up it stretched, disappearing, somewhere far above, into a warm, green haze. It's bark was smooth and slick-looking and nearly red. Despite its slenderness, the tree gave an impression of strength, almost of muscularity.

And, of course, it could not possibly have been there.

Fletcher lay staring up at the tree for longer than you might have expected. Despite his restless sleep and strange dreams, there was no question at all that he was awake now. His consciousness was so keen that it almost sparkled. There was no doubt about what he was looking at, or about its reality. It was just so utterly impossible that the tree should be there, so completely beyond his comprehension, that there didn't seem to be anything to do besides lie still.

There must be many trees, he thought, because the greenness above was too immense, too profuse and tangled, to come from just the one tree. And at any rate, he could sort of feel them around him. He thought he could make out other trunks in his peripheral vision, but he didn't let his eyes wander too far.

He just lay there and didn't think anything at all.

At last he thought he should probably sit up. But for some reason it seemed to him that sitting would be nearly impossible, that it would require a superhuman effort, all the strength he had. He was therefore a little shocked when, once he'd willed himself to do it, it happened very quickly and easily.

He was surrounded by trees, so thick and abundant in every direction that they quickly disappeared into an undifferentiated mass. They wound and twisted about one another. Vines grew in and among them, leaping from one trunk to another, clinging, climbing, choking. His immediate impression was that everything around him was more animate – somehow more alive – than he generally thought of vegetation as being. As if, were he to look away and then back again, it might have moved.

The air was thick and close and warm, and it curled up against him like an animal. It was so heavy with moisture that it seemed as if it might spontaneously become liquid at any moment. There were smells, too, that seemed almost tangible. They were sweet, thick smells: rot and growth, so intermingled that they had become one thing.

Fletcher sat and stared. Maybe somewhere within him there was a clamor of feeling, but he didn't have access to it yet. There wasn't any fear or anger or anxiety or resentment. Only utter, dazed, blank astonishment. Fletcher could hardly have been more bewildered if he had awoken to find that he was a different person, or that he had slept for a hundred years. Perhaps he was a different person, or had slept for a hundred years.

And then there was a flutter and a flash from somewhere above him, a squeal and a rattling of branches. It was as if his heart suddenly restarted. And restarted with a vengeance, too, pumping furiously. He leapt to his feet. Or at least he tried to leap to his feet – in actual fact, it was more like a spasm, or an upward stumble, that left him reeling.

He was in the middle of a fucking jungle.

He felt an insane desire to run, to run as fast as he could and maybe even to scream. It was a kind of sudden, choking madness and the only way he could resist it was to twist and collapse against the trunk of his tree, seizing it fiercely and holding on. There was something like a sob rising up inside him, filling his throat. He couldn't breathe. He could hear the blood hissing madly through his ears.

He still felt the terrible, frantic desire to run, and he clung to the tree even more tightly. Then, slowly, for no good or rational reason, he began to draw comfort, it seemed to him, from the tree itself. Gradually his knees gave, and, still slumped against the tree, he let himself relax and sink back to the ground.

His breathing slowed a little, which meant that he must actually have been breathing after all. His knee was pressed uncomfortably against something and, looking down, he saw that it was backpack lying on the ground. He released his hold on the tree (slowly) and twisted himself around so that his back rested against the trunk. He pulled the backpack into his lap. It looked like something from an army surplus store: green canvas with metal buckles, no larger than a child's book bag. There was something inside it.

He undid the metal buckles and opened the flap. There were three things inside: a canteen, a compass, and a scrap of parchment-style paper with a single word on it: "North."

There was something curiously settling about this little collection of things. They made his mission clear. He somehow had no doubt that he was alone out there, that shouting for help would do no good. No, it was obvious: he simply had to go North.

He held the compass in the palm of his hand. It was the old-fashioned variety, like one you might see in the movies but don't usually encounter in real life, made of metal and shaped like a pocket watch. The needle spun around and, after a few moments, settled into one position, its little engraved "N" perfectly visible. Fletcher understood vaguely that there was a difference between "magnetic" north and "true" north, but he didn't know exactly what that difference was. There was nothing for it, then, but to follow the needle.

When he looked back on it later, it seemed remarkable to him that he had been able to do anything at all, that he hadn't simply sat weeping at foot of the tree until someone found him or he died of dehydration. It was even possible, depending on how you looked at it, to regard as bravery the fact that he forged off into the jungle on his own. But at the time, it simply seemed as if he didn't have a great deal of choice. Eventually he stood, tested his legs, wiped away the sweat that had beaded on his forehead and began to walk.

The tree -- his tree -- disappeared quickly behind him. After he'd traveled about sixty feet, he thought he could still pick it out among the many trees in its general direction. Another forty feet or so, and it was hopelessly gone.

His shirt was quickly soaked through. He couldn't differentiate between his own sweat and the moisture in the air around him. He was wearing the same outfit that he had been wearing on the plane: pink button-down shirt, mustard yellow tie decorated with little ducks, khaki slacks, wing tips. He stopped to roll up the slacks and unbuttoned the shirt. He tied the tie around his head in order to help keep the sweat out of his eyes.

The difference between magnetic north and true north proved to be irrelevant because it was anyhow quite hard to stick very precisely to the direction the compass pointed. Obstacles of one kind or another were always cropping up: clusters of trees wound thickly around each other; gullies or depressions that had to be skirted; low banks that had to be climbed or scrambled over; heaps of lush undergrowth, that he didn't want to enter for fear that he might lose himself in them entirely.

Sometimes there were great, downed logs or the hollow standing stumps of fallen trees. These were so thick with water as to be moist to the touch, like sponges. Whole forests of moss and ferns had sprouted from them. New, young trees grew out of the logs, thrusting their roots into the rotting wood. For some reason this seemed sordid and decadent to Fletcher.

Aside from the over-alive vegetation, he saw hardly a living thing. Once, with a great, raucous shrieking, a flock of birds burst from the trees overhead, shaking the leaves as they plunged skyward in a great rush. Sometimes he thought perhaps that he caught other shakings and stirrings in the distance, on the edges of his perception. They made him nervous, although he didn't like to admit it to himself, and he found himself moving a little faster than was strictly necessary.

Light managed to trickle down through the many layers of leaves, but not once did he see a hint of sky above. And not a breath of air stirred in that place. It was claustrophobic and more than a little eerie.

It was during a moment when he had paused and was sitting on a nearly-bare bit of downed log, taking a drink from the canteen, that he first became aware of the sound. It must have been going on the whole time. He had only failed to notice it only because it was so unlike anything he had ever heard before. It was a sort of a roar, only somehow quiet. Actually, he couldn't tell how loud it was. It was all around him. A writhing, twisting, restless sort of a sound. A humming, vibrating sound that he almost felt more than heard. The sound of uncountable living things all purring and whistling and creeping and cackling and buzzing and growing, all at once. The sound that the cells of a living body would make if they were all – billions and billions of them – whispering to one another. It was the sound of the forest breathing.

Then the sound was gone. Or it wasn't really gone – he was sure that it was still there, only it had slipped below the level of his consciousness again. The sound itself was so very much like silence that it had become, again, indistinguishable from it. He sat there, listening intently, trying to hear it again.

For no reason that he could have pinned down, the hairs on the back of his neck began to prickle and he felt an urge to look over his shoulder. Silly, of course, but he suddenly wished that his back were against something. There was nothing behind him. Of course there wasn't. And he wouldn't look.

He looked. Nothing but trees. Great tangles of trees and vines.

Okay. It was time to move on. Yes. Okay, he would just take his time. Screw shut the canteen, put it in the backpack, check the compass, and let's go. No rush. His hands were shaking just a little. How silly.

He was up and on his feet, moving faster than he had been before he'd stopped. There was a new sound now, different from the huge non-sound of the jungle itself. It was a sort of clicking, faint and rhythmic.

Maybe he was imagining it. He forced himself to pause and strained his ears. The clicking sound had stopped. He started again and, after a few moments was sure that he heard it again. Pause. The sound was gone. Start again and there it was – he was sure of it. He could feel his heart speeding up.

Okay, okay, okay. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Ho hum. Here we are. Just walking in the jungle. La di da.

There was no mistaking it. Click click click clickity click. His scalp tingled. He was speeding up again – he couldn't help himself. And the sound sped up as well. He stopped abruptly. Instant silence. His heart was oversized, filling his chest. He looked over his shoulder. Nothing.

Whatever it was that was making the clicking sound was keeping pace with him. Stalking him.

And with that thought, there was no denying it any more: he was scared. He began to move again. Faster. Faster. He could hear the thing. Click, click, click. It was close behind.

He began to run. He stumbled. And again. And then, suddenly and painfully, he was on his knees, gasping, his eyes burning. He must have missed his footing. Oh god oh god oh god.

Silence. He knelt there expecting ... something. Oh god. He could feel every ragged breath. Total silence. He opened his eyes. He hadn't even been aware that he had shut them. He knelt, still, for a few moments longer. He twisted his torso to look behind.

Click.

There was the sound, directly behind him. He twitched around again. Click. He looked slowly over his shoulder now and down his back. Just as slowly he reached up, removed the shoulder straps of his backpack, and brought the backpack around in front of him. He shook it once, up and down. Click.

On the end of the straps that held the flap closed were little metal lips that helped thread the straps through the buckles. When he shook the bag, one of those little metal lips made contact with one of the studs that attached the strap itself to the bag. Click. Who knows how he could have thought that the sound was coming from somewhere other than his own back.

He wanted to laugh and to cry. His body was loose and watery. Removing the canteen from the bag, he took a long drink, his hands still shaking, but now with post-adrenalin relief.

As the chemical rush of fear washed itself away, he became aware of being very tired. He had no idea how long he'd been out there, but he was not used to this much walking, let alone clambering and scrambling and scraping and falling and running in fear. His muscles had begun to hurt. A spot stung where he must have skinned his shin.

He picked himself up and began to walk again, but it was somehow harder going now. After a while, the straps of his backpack began to chafe against his shoulders. The only good thing that could be said about this development was that it distracted him from the sensations in his feet. His ankles were almost certainly starting to swell and his shoes had begun to bite.

He was just really starting to wonder what it might be like to spend the night alone in a place like this when something changed. Through that huge, hot, arching cathedral of a world, a cool current of air moved.

Insensible, forgetting the pains in his shoulders and feet, he began to stumble rapidly forward, searching for the source of the breeze. There it was again. He hadn't imagined it. Somehow he could sense the jungle giving way, letting go of him. Yes! The trees were definitely thinning. And there was an unmistakable downward slope to the ground he was traveling. His stumble had almost become a run, quite beyond his control now, as he careened downhill. He could see something up ahead, through those thinning trees.

Suddenly the ground was different – no longer the mossy softness of the jungle floor, but something that gave beneath him in an entirely different way. Sand.

And then, with a last lurch and a stumble, he was free. The trees were gone and he found himself on his knees, then on all fours, still propelling himself forward, carried on by momentum, until he slid, scraped, and fell to a stop.

There was an incredible brightness all around him. He must not have realized just how dark it was in amongst those trees, because now he was dazzled, and it took a little while for him to be able to see properly. Still, he knew where he was. He had spent very little time near the ocean in his life, but he recognized the salt smell and the rhythmic sound of waves.

For a few moments he just knelt there, with his hands and knees in the warm sand, feeling the air move around him. At last he stood and blinked his eyes clear. The beach was long and flat and nearly white. Out in front of him, perhaps forty feet away, the sand began to shine with water. Beyond that were shallow networks of wavelets rolling over one another, their edges splitting into long arcs of foam. Past that was a row of larger waves, breaking open and roaring gently forward. Then the broad surface of the ocean, blue and gray, stretching off to the edge of the world.

He felt as if he could breathe again. He took off his shoes and socks and rolled up the cuffs of his pant legs. His ankles really were swollen, and his feet were blistered.

He removed the compass from the backpack and examined it. The compass needle pointed out across the water, but the left-hand path along the beach was the more northerly. For a while he sat and stared at the water, worming his feet gently into the sand.

But finally it seemed as if it was time to go, and he stuffed his shoes into the backpack and set off. He mostly skirted the waters edge, but sometimes he waded in the shallows. It felt deliciously cool around his ankles.

As he walked, he found that each new stretch of beach lay between two points that jutted out into the ocean, forming a sort of cove or bay. Within that basic framework, however, there was quite a bit of variation. Sometimes the spurs of land really were mere points, leaving the sand exposed to the waves; sometimes they were more like arms and nearly touched each other, so that the water they enclosed looked nearly motionless. The ocean itself varied, depending perhaps on its depth and motion, from an almost startling blue to a more turbulent bluish-gray, or even brown. Where it was very shallow and still, plants appeared to undulate beneath its surface.

Some of the beaches he crossed were utterly flat and smooth, but some were studded with solitary trees, or pieces of polished gray driftwood, or stones emerging from the sand like the bones of giants. Even the quality of the grains of sand seemed to change as he walked: in some places it was a fine sort of grit and in others it was composed of much larger pieces that looked as if they might have been the fragments of shells, worn almost round.

But always, beyond the changeable shallows, was the perfect, endless expanse of the open sea on his right. And always the parallel mass of the forest hung on his left, hot and thick and dense. Occasionally he thought he could catch the distant sound of its breathing, but he would shake off the thought with a little shudder.

At the line where the water met the sky was a scuff of clouds, like the vapor of something boiling in the distance, but up above that it was dangerously blue and empty. The sun was very high, much closer to being directly above him than he was used to. He was hot and tired, and at some point he found that he had finished the water in his canteen.

He couldn't have said how long he'd been walking, when he finally rounded a point and saw something astonishing out in the middle of the bay in front of him: a pair of large, white, glittering motorboats with blue stripes along their sides, bobbing out there like a child's toys in an immense bathtub.

5.

There were people out on the beach as well – a fair number of them, still quite some distance away. He stood, dumb, for a moment, and then began to run toward them. He actually waved his arms and yelled as if he were trying to attract the attention of a passing airplane.

It worked. A few of the people began to move in his direction. He could see one of them distinctly, out in front, followed by something he couldn't quite understand. Closer and closer the figures came. The one in front was a man, dressed in the sort of khaki outfit that you associate with a jungle explorer as pictured in an old textbook, or with a newscaster in a war zone, all the way up to the pith helmet. The thing behind him was a giant, lumbering, black insect.

The man was smiling. His smile split apart and out came a noise that Fletcher recognized as his own name. "Fletcher! Welcome! Congratulations!"

They had reached each other now and the man seized Fletcher by the hand and said again, "Congratulations, Fletcher! You've completed the first task." Fletcher noticed that the man had wiry, big-veined forearms and a gleaming tan. Behind the man, the giant insect made a whirring sound. It waved several long limbs, at the ends of which were furry appendages of some kind. It was covered in thick black cords, running back and forth across its body and it stared at Fletcher, and at the man in the pith helmet, with a single, glassy eye.

Suddenly Fletcher could no longer hear what the man was saying. There was only a kind of violent rushing sound coming out of his mouth. Then the man pitched alarmingly and lurched skyward, and the beach came vaulting up and hit Fletcher hard in the side. He started to retch.

He was more or less insensible for a little while, though he could make out voices around him, and could feel himself being half carried, then set down again. Water was poured down his throat. When at last he was more or less coherent, he found that he was sitting near the middle of the stretch of beach with his back resting against something hard. He was surrounded by people and activity, though no one seemed to be paying much attention to him now.

"You okay?"

He looked to his left. It was the woman from the airport, Lucy. He wasn't sure how to answer her. The question seemed awfully broad. "I think so," he said after a moment, and he tried to smile. He might have even succeeded.

"You look pretty rough." She smiled too, but the truth was that she looked rough herself. Her shirt was torn and her hair was stiff and tangled.

"I think I passed out. I was tired. It's hot. Where are we?"

She lifted her shoulders and gestured around in a helpless sort of way. "We're on the beach. Somewhere. I don't know where. I have a feeling that we're not going to find out, either. It think it's somewhere southern. Or at least tropical. The sun is pretty near straight above us."

"This is crazy."

"That's the truth."

One of the camera insects – there were several of them roving about – had taken an interest in their conversation. It moved in and pointed its glittering eye directly at them. Even though Fletcher had known that he was going to be on television – that's what he'd signed on for, wasn't it? – he hadn't thought at all about the cameras themselves. He didn't like the way that the thing looked at him somehow. It seemed sort of hungry.

"The guy in the pith helmet? Who is he?"

"His name's Mike. He's like the host or something, you know? Like the emcee."

"Are the other – have the others got here yet?"

She seemed to understand what "others" he meant. "Some of them. I'm not sure how many. Not all of them, though. In the meantime, all of these people are setting something up. I'm not sure what."

There was, indeed, a lot of business that was being carried on in the background of their conversation. There were quite a few people moving about – he had trouble estimating how many – who were clearly part of the "crew." Some of them had technical jobs that involved wearing leather tool belts and moving pieces of equipment. Others carried clipboards, talked into walkie-talkies, and pointed a good deal. They wore tennis shoes and shorts, and all of them had identical light blue t-shirts with an insignia of some kind on the left breast.

Surveying the scene, he could see that there were a number of the people from the plane scattered around. One fellow in particular caught his attention. Fletcher could remember seeing the back of his head in the airport. His back was to Fletcher again now. He had a perfectly round fringe of white hair surrounding a bald patch like a monk's tonsure. He was standing near the surf, staring out across the water with his hands behind him, fingers loosely intertwined. He turned, and Fletcher could see that he had a large white beard along with a round belly. He looked an awful lot like a black version of the Norman Rockwell image of Santa Claus. His arms and legs were disproportionately slender compared to his torso. He would have been a thoroughly comic-looking figure if he had not begun to walk along the edge of the waves. There was something powerful and decisive, as well as graceful, about the way he moved. Like a ballet dancer, Fletcher thought. Just at that moment, the man turned and looked directly at Fletcher, and there was something in his expression that indicated that the he'd known he was being watched. He showed no resentment or hostility over the fact, however. He simply looked at Fletcher for a moment, nodded deliberately, and then moved on.

Lucy sat quietly now, nearby. The sand was warm. The sky was deep. In the distance, sunlight flashed on the waves. It was all quite breathtaking. And incomprehensible. Fletcher simply couldn't take it in.

He didn't have very long to try. Soon there was a palpable change in the activity around the beach. It became more focused and energetic as Mike approached with another arrival – a woman in a tank top with tattoos on her arms and shoulders. The people in blue shirts seemed to swirl around the pair as they arrived near where Fletcher sat.

"Right!" Mike called out, "Everyone is here now. Welcome. Good job, so far and congratulations to you all. Now, let's get down to business. Please come and join me in the circle."

Fletcher rose with some difficulty – he still felt a little shaky – and moved along the beach with the others until they came to a spot where a circular depression had been dug into the sand, large enough for all of the contestants and Mike to perch on its edges, facing one another. The people in blue shirts had put together a series of platforms and they'd lain what looked like railroad track partway around the circle. On the track was a large cart, and mounted on the cart was an enormous bug with a head swaying and swinging at the end of a enormous neck, the queen of the other camera-insects.

Mike made a sweeping gesture that took them all in and began to speak. He had a rich sort of a voice, a radio voice, nice to listen to just for the sound. "Welcome! Welcome to all of you, and congratulations on completing the first task. Here you are." Mike's whole body was wiry and healthy, like his forearms. Even his smile was taut and muscular. When he spoke directly to you, there was an intensity that made the interaction feel intimate. He provoked a strong emotional reaction in Fletcher, but Fletcher couldn't tell whether the thing he felt was attraction or repulsion. "Take a good look around you. Take a good look at these people. You're going to be with them for a while. They'll be your best friends. You need them to survive. But be careful ... they're also your competitors. They may be your worst enemies. At any moment, one of them may stab you in the back."

They really did all look around at one another – there wasn't any helping it somehow – Mike's voice was too convincing. At that moment they all looked a bit frayed. It was hard for Fletcher to imagine them as friends or enemies.

Mike began to introduce each person, going around the circle. Or at least he addressed each of them by name and asked them variations on a series of questions. How had they felt about the first task? What had their experience in the forest been like? Fletcher had difficulty paying attention to what the others said. The woman with the tattoos who'd arrived last was named Bethany. The man with the goatee was Satchel. Mike called the man that looked like Santa Claus and moved like a dancer "Sarge," although Fletcher gathered that this was a nickname that some of the other contestants had already given him. There were two men both named Rich, one of whom Mike addressed as "Big Rich" and the other "Little Rich," which was strange since there was no discernable size difference between them. Another man was named something like "Nesploy," and there was a woman named Prosperity. There were other names – Nancy, Cliff, Ben, Bee, and quite a few more – but Fletcher lost track and didn't know to whom they belonged.

As Mike and the others spoke, the insects prowled through the sand around them. The queen swung her head around on its elongated neck and stared at each person as he or she spoke. After a while it was Fletcher's turn.

"How are you feeling, Fletcher, after the first task?" Mike asked.

"I'm okay."

"You looked pretty rough when you first arrived. You passed out. How was that?"

Fletcher's ears tingled. "I'm all right now. It was just, you know, the heat. And I was tired. That's all. I'm okay now."

Mike asked a few more questions before he moved on. Fletcher didn't tell him about how he'd run from the clicking of his own backpack, or about the sound of the forest whispering to itself. Finally, they made it all the way around the circle.

"Excellent," said Mike. "Again, welcome. Now you know each other. Or at least you've begun to know each other. Don't take what you think you know now for granted. Because all of you will change here. There's no telling how, exactly, but you'll change. Good luck to you all.

"Now, to the next order of business. Over on my right, near the trees, you'll see your luggage." There was, indeed, a line of suitcases laid out across the sand near the forest. "When I give you the word, you'll race to those bags. This is the last time you'll see them, and this is your one chance to get what you need from them. You'll need to make it fast, though. No time to look for luxuries, grab only what you need, because how fast you make it back to this circle will have a big impact on your existence while you're here. All right? On your marks, get set, go!"

There was no time to think. Fletcher was on his feet with the rest of them, pelting as fast as he could across the beach as fast as he could given that he was still rather light-headed. He found his bag, tore it open. Around him he could see a flurry of activity, clothes being tossed over shoulders into the air. What did he need? He threw things aside. Fortunately he'd brought a pair of tennis shoes, which was the main thing. He stuffed a couple of shirts under his arm, grabbed a pair of underwear. He could sense people leaving already, so he turned and ran. The last thing he took from the case, almost at random, was his little penny whistle. Halfway back to where Mike stood, Fletcher dropped one of the shoes and had to skid to a halt and turn around to pick it up.

He could hear Mike's voice: "Go! Go! There's Prosperity ... Lucy ... Fortunato ... Len ..."

He was running as fast as he could.

"Rex ... Little Rich ... Fletcher!"

He slid to a stop in the circle, looking around him. He hadn't been the first back, but thankfully he hadn't been the last either.

Mike waited for the sand to settle and then announced that the first two back had been Big Rich and Cliff. "From this moment forward, you will be divided into two clans: Itzli and Coatl. The people in your clan will be your teammates. Your partners. Your life line. Big Rich will be choosing the members of Clan Itzli, and Cliff will be choosing the members of Clan Coatl. Big Rich will choose first."

Big Rich looked around at all of them and said, "I'll take Little Rich." Little Rich walked over to him, took his hand, and folded him into a back-slapping, one-armed hug.

Cliff had scattered gray in his hair and his chin was dark with stubble. He looked like he was in excellent physical shape. "I choose Ben," he said, and he was joined by a younger man, shirtless, whose individual muscles Fletcher could clearly see. He was suddenly conscious of his own body, which seemed very doughy.

Big Rich said, "Sarge," Cliff said "Clementine," and so it went. One by one they stood and joined one of the developing teams, high-fiving the other members and bumping against them in a comradely fashion. The longer it went on, the hotter Fletcher's face felt. There was sweat running down his torso underneath his shirt. He tried to look any direction besides at the others who had already been chosen.

At last Big Rich pointed at Fletcher and said, "I'll take him." There were only three people left besides him, but at least he hadn't been chosen absolute last. The final choices were made. It was over.

"Excellent," Mike declared. "These are your clan members. These are the people you'll have to rely on. Now, you're going to be living out here for some time, so you'll be needing some supplies. There are two rafts with some things you might need right over there. The one with the blue cloth over it has a few choice items that the one with the orange cloth doesn't have. Big Rich, since you were the first back in the race, Clan Itztli will be taking the one with the blue cloth. Sorry, Clan Coatl, but that's the way it goes. You won't be living right here. The two clans will be separated from each other, so the first thing that you'll have to do is to take these rafts out to the two boats out there and they'll be taking you to your new homes. Okay. I'll see you soon. Good luck."

Fletcher pulled on his tennis shoes, leaving his wing tips lying in the sand. They didn't seem as if they'd be much use.

The raft covered in the blue cloth was heavy and awkward, but Fletcher was determined to contribute to the effort of getting it into the water. He pulled the tin whistle into two pieces and stuffed the pieces into his right-hand pocket. As he helped to heave and drag, he tried to take stock of his teammates. There were Big Rich, Little Rich, and Sarge. There was Lucy, and the man whose name sounded like "Nesploy," and a large, bald man named Rex. And there were three women whose names Fletcher hadn't been able to keep straight, two of them young and one considerably older.

Both of the Riches were shouting orders at the others. They tugged and pushed their way down to the water's edge, then the raft bucked up and back at them a few times, and it was afloat. Off they went into the water, still trying to control the thing. Quicker than he'd expected it, the ground disappeared from beneath Fletcher's feet.

He held onto the raft with his left hand, trying to use his right hand as a paddle, and kicked with his feet. The waves rocked the little raft and salt water filled his nose. It was hard to breathe and he wasn't quite sure which way they were supposed to be going. He hadn't been swimming in a long time.

There was a bump and a confused sort of motion and then someone grabbed the back of his shirt and hauled him out of the water. They'd reached the boat. Fletcher's clothes, which had been billowing out around him under the water, now clung, wet and heavy. With a great deal of heaving, one or two falls, and more than one or two minor injuries, they managed to pull the raft aboard. All the while, several of the people in blue shirts sat in the front of the boat and a camera stared at them.

At last everyone and everything was aboard. The engine woke up, roaring and coughing. They were off. Fletcher sat in the bottom of the boat, feeling wet and sick and wretched as the hull slapped through the waves. They were going quite fast. After a while the movement of the air began to revive him a little and he looked up and over the edge of the boat. They were moving the same direction he'd walked along the beach, more or less to the west. The water smacked rhythmically against the boat's flanks, sending spray into his face. He could make out that the land beyond the jungle's edge rose quite sharply in places. From this perspective he could see that there might even be a sort of mountain or set of mountains further inland. Yes, there almost certainly was a something like a mountain. The folds of the land were covered in dense vegetation, but he could still make out its general shape, and in one or two places there were what looked like the bare, rocky faces of cliffs.

It must have been getting rather late in the evening or afternoon. The sky had darkened and the clouds on the horizon had boiled further upwards. They'd been traveling for perhaps twenty minutes when the beat of the engine changed, they slowed, and the boat pulled shoreward into a broad bay.

"This is it, I guess," said one of the Riches as they came to a stop and one of the people in blue shirts pushed an anchor overboard. "Home."

The process of getting off the boat was the one they'd completed earlier, only in reverse. There was the same chaotic pushing and pulling as the waves toyed with Fletcher's sense of balance while they unloaded the raft, the same immersion in the water, and gagging, salty progress through it. This time, the land appeared under his feet instead of disappearing and, after a few bouncing steps and some last sideways thrashes on the part of the raft, he found himself on dry ground.

They hauled the raft as far as they could from the water. One by one, Fletcher's companions sat down or fell onto the sand. It was quickly becoming twilight in earnest. Fletcher lay down. He was unspeakably exhausted. His head was empty. He closed his eyes.

The Third Part

1.

You wouldn't think that sand crabs would have any particular reason for pinching a sleeping person. You also wouldn't think that a person could sleep through the experience. Pinch they did, however, through most of the night. And Fletcher did sleep, though not particularly soundly.

Dawn found him awake. The sky was fading and the clouds near its edges had begun to glow. A sliver of light sliced the world open. The ocean turned silver and the melting sun shimmered free of it. A breath of wind stirred across the water, full of warm, living smells.

"What's with the fucking crabs?" said someone.

"No kidding," another voice answered, "That is the last time we sleep on the sand, all right?"

"What's for breakfast?" asked a third.

The answer to that question was predictably unpleasant. It turned out that there was a certain amount of food on their little raft, but not an awful lot of it, and nothing terribly appealing: a large bag of rice, some tins of sardines, a few cans of vegetables. There were matches, and a jug of water, a cooking pot and some simple utensils.

"Well, lets gather some wood," said one of the Riches, "and we'll build a fire."

But, of course, building a fire without proper supplies is pretty difficult. With all of them scouring the beach and the edges of the forest, they were able to come up with a small pile of wood. Driftwood worked best because it was dryer than what they found in the forest, but still it took quite a while and more matches than it should have to get the fire started. There were a few sharp words exchanged during the process. Several people seemed to think that they knew the best approach, but in the end it was Nesploy who managed to get the thing lit. "Voyew saw!" he said with a grin. Or at least, it seemed to Fletcher that that's what he said.

Breakfast was plain rice eaten off of large, shiny leaves that they pulled from nearby trees. It was decided that the prudent course was to save the sardines and vegetables.

"It's pretty good," commented one of the younger women. Fletcher had managed to identify her as Prosperity. The other young one was Bee, and the older one Nancy.

"Well," said Sarge, looking around at all of them, "I suppose we need to decide what to do next."

It seemed sensible. Everyone agreed broadly about what ought to be done. They needed some kind of shelter and should look for sources of food and fresh water. There was a good deal of debate, however, about how these things should be accomplished, especially in the case of building a shelter. Some people felt that it should be located among the trees and others thought the beach would be better. There was a lively argument over how exactly it should be constructed. Fletcher didn't participate, or even pay a great deal of attention. Instead he looked out at the ocean. He watched a group of little birds scurry along the beach, chasing each wave as it rolled out. When they ran, their little legs would shimmy rapidly, comically, zipping along above their upended reflections in the wet sand. They would follow a wave out to its farthest point and poke the sand with their beaks, searching for little morsels that the water had left behind. Every so often, for reasons that were not apparent to Fletcher, a whole little flock would plunge spontaneously upward and skim like tiny darts for a few yards before settling in a new spot.

He was fairly badly sunburnt from the day before. His skin was painfully tight, especially on his face and neck. His hair was full of sand. His clothes were full of sand. There was sand in his mouth and inside his nose and ears. His eyes pulsed uncomfortably. There was something he couldn't pin down, some idea rattling around inside of him, like a fly thumping uselessly, over and over again, against the mesh of a screen door.

The little black birds and the sand crabs were not the only other inhabitants of the beach. While Fletcher and the others had been sleeping, the people that he had begun to refer to in his head as the Blueshirts had set up camp. Or not camp, exactly, because, as he observed later, they never slept there, and he never saw them eat. They must have been living somewhere nearby though, as over the next few days he got used to the occasional arrivals of replacement crews in a boat. Their main mission was clearly the manning of the cameras. It took two or three of them, at least, to operate one camera, if you included manipulating the microphones. They made Fletcher think of people in those horse costumes that you see in old movies, where one person is the front of the horse and the other is the back. There were usually more than one of these creatures lumbering around the beach at any given time.

The strange thing about the Blueshirts was their ability to turn invisible. It was something to do with the way that they never spoke to you or even looked directly at you, except through the eye of the camera. But maybe it was more than that – maybe they'd been selected for the job because they had the knack for invisibility, or perhaps there was some kind of special training. At any rate, after almost no time, they disappeared entirely. Not that they were actually gone – it was just that they removed themselves so completely from your consciousness that you had to focus to notice them at all. They were completely interchangeable. It was almost, Fletcher caught himself thinking, as if they didn't even have faces.

"All right, then," said Sarge's voice, "Let's split into teams and get started." Apparently matters had been settled to everyone's satisfaction – or, at least, the finer points had been set aside to be decided later. Perhaps because he had failed to express an opinion, Fletcher found that he'd been assigned to dig a latrine. At least Lucy had volunteered to be his partner.

Their raft contained a few tools, among them a small shovel. "How, exactly, do you build a latrine?" Fletcher asked Lucy as they walked across the sand together.

"Well, I think the idea is that it's just, you know, a hole in the ground. So we just dig it and then we cover it with these." Under her arm she was carrying a few boards that they'd pulled from the raft. "And when you need to go, I guess you just lift up one of the boards and kind of squat down and go for it."

"How deep is the hole supposed to be?"

"I'm not sure. But the deeper the better, right? I mean, you don't want to be too close to the contents, right?"

"No. No. I guess not."

The most promising spot they could find was over to the east. It was in amongst the trees for the sake of privacy, but not too far, because it seemed likely that the trees' roots might get in the way of the digging. In the end, they had to relocate twice, deeper into the forest, because the soil was too sandy and the walls of their pit kept collapsing. Every so often, Fletcher thought he could hear the strange breathing of the jungle, but it was less clear, and less disturbing, with another person nearby.

Once they found the right spot, the work itself was not too difficult, at least at first, and the company was pleasant. Lucy was easy to talk to. She laughed and smiled a good deal, even when she was freshly marooned and poorly slept.

"What do you do?" she asked at one point, when they had paused to rest. "When you're not digging latrines on reality television shows?"

"I work in information technology."

"Uh-huh. What does that mean?"

"Well, you know, I plan and implement IT infrastructure. I write various kinds of applications. I administer the servers for our organization. I troubleshoot. Data analysis. Things like that. Lots of different things."

"Okay. But what do you do? Like, on a daily basis. What does your job consist of? I mean, like, literally, what do you do all day?"

"Well, it's hard to say, in some ways. I mean, I go to meetings. I meet with people. I talk to people on the phone. You know, I work at my computer. Try to spot problems."

She laughed. "That's a little bit more like it. Still pretty general, though."

It took a good while for them to dig the hole, especially since they had only one small shovel between them. After a while the ground got harder and there were roots to negotiate. They stopped chatting as much. Fletcher's clothes, which had been uncomfortably stiff with salt from the ocean when he woke up, were now limp and plastered to his body. He still had his necktie tied around his head. At last, deciding that they were as deep down as they were going to get, they covered the hole up with the boards, and stood back to admire their work.

"It's beautiful. I've never seen a prettier toilet."

"Right. I can hardly wait to use it."

"Yuck."

Back on the beach, the tensions around shelter-building had percolated up into a full-blown argument, principally between Sarge, Big Rich, and Little Rich. Two of the cameras circled eagerly. Fletcher couldn't quite make out what the controversy was, but Big Rich kept pointing forcefully with the little axe that had been in their tool kit.

Lucy weighed in immediately, trying to settle the dispute, even though she couldn't have known just what it was about either. Nesploy sat nearby, building a fire pit out of stones, humming quietly to himself, seemingly oblivious to the furor. Not knowing just what to do, Fletcher decided to leave it be and explore the beach on which they were living in the hopes that things would settle themselves.

Like the other beaches he'd seen, this one stretched between two points of land; he wasn't very good at estimating distances, but he would have guessed that the two points were maybe three hundred yards apart from each other. The western point consisted of a series of rocks, sticking up from the sand like a spine and disappearing into the water. Fletcher clambered onto one of them. It looked as if the spine stretched away underwater for some good distance. The rocks were encrusted with all sorts of tiny marine life. There were things that looked like tiny volcanoes – he thought they might be barnacles. There were snails with extravagantly curled shells, gray and white and black, or sometimes blue or a tender pink. There were anemones that clung limply to the rocks when they were out of the water but that he could see, bright and unfurled, waving their tentacles when they were just beneath it. There were spiny urchins, little fish darting around in the pools left behind by the receding tide, and black and green crabs, hardly bigger than your fingernail. There were layers of slime in bright, almost iridescent colors, which Fletcher couldn't definitively classify as alive or not alive.

The sand on the beach was fine-grained. Just then it appeared to be white. When he watched it more carefully, especially over the coming days, he would find that it could be a number of different colors. Sometimes, when the sun was high, it was almost silver. At other times it was nearly gray. When you walked close to the waves and the weight of your foot caused the water that was trapped underneath to well up a little, the sand looked more like copper, or had the pearly sheen of spilled oil. The ocean often left things behind on the beach: sometimes just a thin line of foam at the furthest point the wave had reached, but there were also shells, half buried in the sand or resting in tiny cavities, or floating plants with air bladders that popped when you stepped on them, or little sacks of clear jelly.

That morning, there was a dead bird in the sand, near the edge of the surf, with its wing raised like a tattered signal flag. Where the feathers had been torn away, Fletcher could see gray and yellow bones. By the end of the day, the bird had disappeared.

2.

The argument over the shelter was eventually settled without Fletcher having to get involved. One of the Riches had apparently been committed to the idea of building an elaborate tree house of some kind, but in the end more practical minds prevailed. The shelter sat near the trees, but not among them. It wasn't really completed until a few days later, but even on that first day Fletcher had to admit he was impressed. He'd never been very handy at things like that himself. The highlight of his carpentry career had been his Junior year in high school, when he had been directly, though unintentionally, responsible for Julie Mertwellers' blouse getting caught in the lathe and being ripped entirely away from her body. Since then, every building project had been downhill. Several of his companions had managed, using only the little axe, to fell and strip a number of small trees and lash them together with ropes from the former raft and with vines to make a very stable platform. It was planted on several supports that raised it a foot or two off the ground. It had a sort of lean-to top that had been partially covered with the blue cloth from the raft. The cloth would eventually be supplemented with many of the large, flat leaves that also served them as dinner plates.

The real triumph of the day, however, was the coconuts that Prosperity and Nancy brought back to camp. There were only three or four of them, and they were small and green, but when they were chopped open their flesh was sweet, and if you drove a hole into one you could drink the milk. It had been Prosperity who had managed to climb up the trees and get them. Everyone else would try over the course of the next few days, but it was quite tricky and no one was ever able to do it as well as she. You wouldn't necessarily have guessed that she'd be good at something like that. She was a smallish woman in her twenties with black hair and pale skin. Prosperity always looked as if she was about to cry, even when she was perfectly happy, as she was now. It was something about her eyes. They must have drooped a little, or maybe they were unusually moist-looking. Her lower lip often looked like it was trembling as well. All of them developed minor skin afflictions living on the beach, but Prosperity's were the worst. After a few days, her face was dotted with tiny sores, especially along her jaw and on her cheeks. They were shiny at first, and then crusted over into dark scabs before erupting again. The cycle repeated itself over and over, without the sores ever seeming to heal.

Nancy was quite a bit older than most of the rest of them, other than possibly Sarge or Rex – certainly in her fifties, at least. Her face was not so much wrinkled as it was puckered. It was as if someone had seized her nose and twisted, and this had caused all of her features to tighten toward that center. Under her skin you could see the blue lines of her veins. She reminded you of a grade school teacher – or, more precisely, of the substitute teacher you had in third grade that you and your classmates forced out of the room in tears after twenty minutes.

The evening rice, seasoned with coconut milk, with a side of coconut, was more palatable than the morning's plain rice had been. Nesploy had assumed the role of fire-master. In order to save on matches, which struck everyone as precious, it had been decided that he would keep the fire burning all day long, only letting it go out at night. He was very careful about the work, collecting as many dry sticks as he could and feeding them into the flames. He seemed to like it, as well as being good at it. He struck Fletcher as easygoing and pleasant, though it was hard to say for sure because he found Nesploy completely impossible to understand. He mentioned the fact to Lucy and she appeared bemused. "Sure, he's got a pretty thick accent," she said, "I think he's Cajun or something like that. You can understand him, though. You just have to focus." Focus as he might, Fletcher couldn't make out any of it. In fact, Fletcher understood exactly four words that Nesploy ever said to him. But that didn't happen until much later.

The group had managed to find a source of fresh water as well. You had to pass three points of land heading east before you got to it. It was a stream. It ran across the beach in a broad fan, only a few inches deep, almost disappearing before it met the ocean. In amongst the trees, however, it was much narrower and deeper, with pools into which you could dip the water jug that had been part of their supply kit. At first, they debated moving their camp over to the beach with the stream, but in the end decided against that plan. It was probably for the best: fetching water every day gave people something to do.

It had been Rex and Bee that had found the stream. With the possible exception of Sarge, Rex struck Fletcher as perhaps the strangest of the little clan. He almost never spoke. Later on, Fletcher somehow learned that Rex was a middle school PE teacher and decided that it must be bitterness that made him quiet. He almost always looked a little angry, but maybe that was just a function of his prominent eyebrows. He was bald, and heavyset, and wore a moustache that gradually disappeared in the coming days as he began to sprout a heavy beard.

Fletcher conceived a nearly immediate dislike for Bee. She was tall, and thin, and sharp. She may not have actually bossed people around, but she gave the impression of believing that she knew better than everyone else about most things.

The last two members of the clan were the two Riches, Big and Little. In truth, Fletcher often had difficulty telling them apart. One was a tiny bit taller and leaner, but for some reason he thought that that one was actually Little Rich, though he was never completely sure. It was all right, of course, since all he had to do was address either of them as "Rich." Both of them were real men, or so Fletcher thought to himself. They were fit, with hairy chests, and liked to go shirtless. They got tan (Fletcher himself burned and peel repeatedly). They could do things like cut down trees and lash them together and build a level platform out of them.

Sitting next to the fire that first evening, finishing his ration of rice and coconut, Fletcher felt that he didn't like any of those people very much at all, even Lucy. He listened to them talk and they only annoyed him. Everything they said sounded empty and stupid. But he wasn't really fooling himself. It wasn't the people. He was tired and underfed and wanted to take a shower. He was simply miserable.

3.

It was on the next day – or perhaps it was the day after that – that one of the Rich's approached Fletcher as he was sitting on the beach, watching the waves. "Hey, Buddy," Rich called out. "Hey, Buddy, it's your turn."

Fletcher looked up. "My turn?"

"For the camera. To talk to the camera. Come on, I'll take you."

Lacking any particular reason to refuse, Fletcher stood, brushed the sand from himself as best he could, and followed Rich across the beach.

"What is this? What are we doing, exactly?"

"Talking to the camera, man. You know, then when they put the show together they have clips of us commenting on what's happening. It's a totally standard thing. Every show does it, I think. I think it's called a confessional."

"Like with a priest?"

"What? Oh, right. Sure. I don't know, man. I'm not really religious or anything like that."

Rich led Fletcher around the point of land that marked the eastern edge of their beach. Then he pointed toward the line of trees. "Right there. Have a blast, all right? See you later on."

In the shade of the trees a camera had been set up. In front of it was a roughly-carved wooden chair, placed so that the lens of the camera was just at eye level, or maybe a little higher. There was no one there: just the camera and the chair. Fletcher sat.

Beneath the lens were hung two little pieces of paper. One was a list of their names. Little Rich's name was just above Fletcher's own; beneath it was Nesploy's. On the other piece of paper were printed the words: "WHY ARE YOU HERE?"

The camera's eye was blank and glassy, but it still looked uncannily alive. It stared at him in an attentive, penetrating sort of way. A breeze stirred and little whirlwinds of sand lifted themselves up from the beach and went skittering across its surface. The water shone white beyond. Sweat beaded along his hairline.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. Why am I here?"

It was hard to know where to look.

"All right. I'm not quite sure how to answer that question. I assume you mean, why am I here on this beach or on this show or whatever. Well, you should know that better than me. I mean, you picked me, right?" He laughed. "I suppose I fit some kind of demographic you were after or something. White, male. Middle-aged. I don't know. I had the impression that you liked my application video, or whatever it was. So maybe it was something about me personally, although I don't have any idea what that would be. So you tell me: why am I here?"

The camera kept staring.

"Why am I here? Like, why did I choose to be here? I asked Len on the plane why he was doing this thing and he told me this story about this guy who got into child pornography because of a brain tumor. I think that the point was that we don't really understand our own motivations or we're wrong about those motivations, even the ones that seem like they're really essential, like sexual desire. So perhaps I don't even know the answer to the question anyhow. Maybe I'm just wrong about it."

In the distance there was something that might have been a bird's call, high-pitched and rather plaintive. Fletcher could see himself in the camera lens, distant and distorted.

"Listen. All right. My ears are full of sand. It's like this constant sensation of grit and I can't get rid of it because there's sand under my fingernails too, so when I try to get the sand out of my ears, I just end up depositing more. And even if I could get rid of it, it would be back in a few minutes and so there wouldn't be any point. Same thing with my nostrils. The insides of my nostrils are coated with sand. I can't seem to breathe right. I keep having this sensation like the sand is actually going to fill my nose and I'll suffocate. And the sand's in my hair – everywhere. I'm sunburnt. It's like my skin doesn't fit – it's too tight. I can't really sleep at night, surrounded by all these strangers, sleeping on wood, with the sounds of the jungle all around. I mean, I don't even really like camping very much, when you've got a tent and a stove and everything. I want to shower. I'm strung out and exhausted. I haven't eaten anything for days other than rice and coconut. Everything feels a little bit unreal. And this is probably more than you want to know, but I'm not sure I'm ever going to be able to use that latrine I helped build. I mean, I think my system is maybe permanently blocked up because psychologically I don't think I can stand pooping in that hole. And also – I'm not trying to make any accusations here – but what was up with waking up in the middle of the jungle? I mean, that doesn't just happen. You don't just fall asleep on an airplane and wake up in the jungle with no memory of how it happened. Not without – listen, I'm not trying to make any accusations here. It's just – it's just weird is all, and kind of disconcerting. And the truth of the matter – another thing – the truth of the matter is that I cannot stand the people that I'm here with. I can't stand them. My mouth just fills up with bile when I think about them, all right? I mean, I literally can't think of a group of people where – if you asked me who I'd like to be stuck on a desert island with, these would possibly be the last people in the world I would choose. Anyway, the point is this: I'm miserable. I hate this place. I mean, look. Look out there at the ocean and the white sands and there's palm trees and everything – I mean, all that shit. It's paradise. It's fucking paradise and all I want is to be back in my apartment, wash myself, eat something real. What am I doing here? I have no idea. What am I doing here?"

He paused for a moment.

"I went to Europe once. It was the summer after college. I went, you know, to celebrate or whatever, or to see the world. I'd saved up some money. I went and took the train, backpacked, all that. I went to Paris and Amsterdam, Switzerland, Italy. I remember – it's hard to remember now – I remember, before-hand, how excited I was. It wasn't even anything rational. I mean, I wasn't excited for the museums and the cities and the cathedrals, or whatever – all the things I'd seen in pictures. I mean, I was excited for those things, but that wasn't really it, that wasn't the crux of things. I had all sorts of vague, undefined ideas, fantasies, about what it was going to be like. I even – this is embarrassing to say, even now – but I felt like was going to maybe fall in love. Meet some beautiful Portuguese girl on the train or something, fall in love, spend the rest of my life out there. I don't even know what I thought was going to happen exactly, but I had this sense that there would be some kind of change. And then, once I was there, it just wasn't – I mean, the museums were great and the cities were beautiful, but it wasn't – there was this feeling that was building up in my stomach and I started to realize that I just wanted to be home. I didn't want to be riding the train anymore, or staying in dirty youth hostels, or going to discos, trying to get drunk and hook up with the other backpackers. I just wanted to be home. And it was terrible to realize that, it was a terrible feeling. A hundred times worse than Christmas-day afternoon after all the presents are already open and it's just another day in just another year.

"Look, the thing is that I'm just not a guy who things happen to. I don't think I'm a terrible guy, I'm nice enough and smart enough, but I'm just not – things happen in the world, I read about them in the paper or see them on TV and sometimes I think that they're even happening nearby. But they don't happen to me."

He paused. "Actually, I wonder sometimes if it really is just me. I wonder if things happen to anyone any more. I mean, I know that sounds ridiculous, because I just said that things happen, and they obviously do happen out there somewhere. But that's just it, in a way. We're so aware of the things going on in the world, maybe, we think that we're so connected to them with television and the internet, that our own private lives come to seem less and less real. It's as if things are only real if they are on TV. I'm not really sure what I'm talking about. It's just -- what I'm doing here -- I guess I had this crazy idea like something might happen. Something might finally happen. And it is, I guess. I mean, here I am on a desert island, right? And on TV and everything. But I'm still me. I'm still just Fletcher."

While he'd been speaking, Fletcher had moved forward toward the edge of the chair and had been looking straight into the camera. Now he looked away.

After a few moments, he stood and walked slowly back to the neighboring beach, listening to the waves. He found Nesploy by the fire. "Come on, Nesploy," he said, "It's your turn. To talk to the camera. Come on, I'll show you."

4.

As time passed, a sort of daily routine was established among them. It was Nesploy's job to tend to the fire. Rich and Rich busied themselves with finishing and improving the shelter. Prosperity gathered coconuts. The others fetched water, or foraged unsuccessfully for new sources of food. Other sorts of habits entrenched themselves as well. The two Riches became more or less inseparable, though they bickered. Lucy and Bee and Prosperity spent a good deal of time together. Sarge was deferred to in most decision-making matters. No one tried to get Rex to talk. It seemed that everyone liked Nesploy, and an unspoken collective dislike had been conceived for Nancy, who was shrill and rather abrasive.

Really, there was too little for them to do to fill the hours, and so it was a welcome relief when, on their third or fourth night on the beach – no one could agree afterwards just how long it had been or understand why it had taken as long as it had – a message arrived from Mike. One of the Blueshirts must have put it there, of course, though no one had seen it happen. The message was written on a piece of parchment, run through in two places by a sharpened stick that had been planted in the sand near their fire pit. It read simply, "Tomorrow morning be prepared for the next task."

Naturally there was a lot of speculation that night about just what would be demanded of them, and Fletcher slept even more poorly than he had the nights before. He awoke to find that there was a heavy fog or mist hanging over the water even though the morning was just as warm as ever. Only as far away as the tree-line where their shelter was, the day was fairly clear, but as you approached the ocean, everything disappeared, until finally, once you were quite close, all you could see were the edges of brown waves materializing from nowhere, one after the other. At certain points, you could make out the glow of the distant sun through the fog, surrounded by a sort of dull rainbow. Sea birds called out of the blankness.

It was for some reason nearly impossible to track time accurately in that place (and no one had a watch – Fletcher's had disappeared while he was unconscious), but under those misty conditions, this effect was amplified. As far as Fletcher could tell, they might have been sitting expectantly on the sand for twenty minutes or all morning long before Mike finally arrived. Since he was coming from the sea, he couldn't have helped but emerge mysteriously out of the fog. Fletcher had been expecting him to do so. But even expecting it, he felt an odd sort of chill as the vapor seemed to condense itself into a darkness that slowly took on the shape of a man. The outline of the man became clearer and clearer, and finally it was Mike, wading through the surf, smiling his tanned, muscular smile. The cameras, which of course had been hovering, gathered in closer.

"Good morning," said Mike. "Greetings, clan Itzli. I hope you're well. I hope you're rested. I hope you've enjoyed your first days here. I hope you're ready for the next task. Gather together, please, and follow me. Stay close. We don't want to lose anyone."

They did as he said. It was a peculiar experience, walking out into an ocean that you couldn't see. It turned out that there were two inflatable rafts, rowed by Blueshirts, closer than Fletcher would have thought possible given that they'd been invisible from the shore. Into the rafts they climbed. The beach behind them disappeared. No one seemed inclined to talk, and the only sound was the rhythmic splashing of paddles. How the rowers could possibly have seen where they were going Fletcher couldn't have said. But perhaps it was easier than it seemed, because it didn't take long before a large speedboat came looming out of the whiteness, rocking steadily. They transferred into this vessel, still in silence, and then, startlingly, its engine vibrated awake beneath them.

It seemed dangerous to Fletcher to travel blindly at such a speed. The pilots of the boat must have had some method of navigating that he didn't understand. Anyhow, as they went, the fog began to lift, so that by the time they arrived at their destination, it was more or less gone, though it left the sky blank and close-feeling. Their destination was another beach and on it was the other clan, along with numerous cameras, including the insect queen that Fletcher had seen when he first arrived. Whether this was the same beach he'd been on then, he couldn't tell. Out in the bay floated two wooden platforms.

Once Fletcher and his companions were ashore, their clothes once again soaked in seawater, they lined up facing the members of the other clan. Fletcher remembered that the raft that his own clan had won had supposedly had more supplies on it than Clan Coatl's raft. What could have been missing from theirs? Matches, maybe? Tools? What could have been worse than nothing but coconut and rice and living in the open for the last few days? At any rate, their skin looked burnt. Their clothes were tattered. There were one or two among them that Fletcher wasn't even sure he recognized.

Mike stood between the two clans. "Welcome, once again," he called out. "You've all had a chance to adjust to life out here. To life in the wild. Now it's time to test yourselves, one clan against the other. There are two things at stake here. The first is that the winning clan will receive some extra supplies, something to make your lives a little more comfortable. The second is that the loosing clan will be the first to exile one of its members. Tonight. Do you understand? Excellent. Listen carefully. Here are your instructions."

Somewhere in the hazy distance above, the sun buzzed away. Nearby, a tiny green crab scuttled toward the woods.

"Each clan will attempt the task, one member at a time. You will draw lots to determine the order in which your members attempt the task. The two clans will begin on the rafts out in the water. When the signal is given, the first clan member will dive off of the raft and swim to shore ..."

The little crab had made its way past them. Fletcher glanced over his shoulder at it. As he did, another movement caught his eye, in the edges of the jungle.

"... you will make your way through the woods ..."

It was just a shaking of the trees, but he kept watching it.

"... once you're past the pit ..."

The movement stopped, then began again. He strained his eyes in its direction.

" ... then you will climb up to the top ..."

Looking carefully, he thought he could catch a glimpse of the moving thing in among the foliage. He couldn't really make out anything but a shadow between the branches.

" ... the guardian of the gate ..."

What was it? Was it watching them? It was shifting a little bit. Moving from one tree to another?

" ... once you've hit the target, you can retrieve the apple ..."

If only he could get a little closer, maybe he could see it more clearly. He nudged the person standing next to him who happened to be one of the Riches.

"Hey, do you see that – "

Rich put his finger to his lips and nodded his head toward Mike. "Shhh"

" ... back through the woods ..."

Fletcher looked at the forest again. The movement was gone. No, there it was again, higher and further away. Then the thing emerged from the top of the trees.

" ... reach the platform ..."

It sort of loped or skimmed across the very tops of the trees. Something about the way it was moving made him uncomfortable. It looked big – nearly human-sized. And human-shaped as well. Except that it had – but that couldn't be. Then it was gone.

" ... complete the task and win."

"Hey," Fletcher said quietly, to those around him, "did anyone else see – " But no one paid any attention to him.

"Does everyone understand the instructions?"

There was a murmur of ascent.

"Each clan member step forward and draw a tile from the appropriate sack."

There was movement around him. The members of his clan were shuffling toward Mike. Fletcher managed to grab Lucy's elbow.

"Did you see that?"

"See what?"

"That thing. That thing that was in the trees."

"No Fletcher. What thing are you talking about? Take a tile."

"A what?"

"Take a tile! From the sack!"
"Oh, right. Okay."

The general shuffling had now moved Fletcher to the front of the group, a few feet from Mike. Lying on the ground was a large sack that looked as if it was made of blue silk. He was just in time to see Nesploy stepping away from it with something in his hand. Fletcher moved forward, knelt, put his hand in the sack. Inside were a number of smooth objects, cool to the touch, five or six inches long and perhaps three inches wide. They felt like overlarge dominoes.

Fletcher gripped one and pulled it out of the sack, then stepped aside to allow his remaining teammates to have a turn. The thing in his hand looked rather like large domino as well, except that its edges were irregular. On one of its smooth surfaces someone had carved a large number two.

They were loaded onto the rubber rafts again and shipped out to the two platforms that floated in the little bay. Big Rich went first for clan Itzli and waiting for him to return was grueling. First of all, there was the curious impression left on Fletcher by the thing that had disappeared over the trees. It probably oughtn't to have bothered him. Maybe it hadn't been there at all. He'd only thought he'd seen it because he was so over-tired and he'd eaten nothing for days other than rice and coconut. On the other hand, the thought that he'd been hallucinating wasn't especially comforting.

But there was also the more pressing issue that, once Big Rich got back, it would be Fletcher's own turn, and he had no idea what he was supposed to do. At first he hoped that he'd just be able to watch Big Rich and figure it out, but unfortunately, as soon as Big Rich tore himself free of the water, he went running across the sand and disappeared into the jungle at a point marked with a blue flag.

Fletcher ought, of course, to have asked the others, but it is not so easy to admit in front of a group of people that are relying on you, and that you collectively dislike even if it's for no reason that you can specify, that you have no idea what you're supposed to be doing.

The raft rocked gently. The sunlight splintered on the surface of the water. Fletcher felt a churning sense of nausea. The other members of his clan sat or lay scattered about the raft. They stared at the sky. A few of them chatted with one another. The horizon was an indefinite, seething line. There was a camera mounted on the raft, staring at them.

The nausea blossomed into actual pain. He felt as if he might lose control of his bowels. It was like one of those horrible dreams where you're back in college and you find yourself suddenly having to take a final for a class that you somehow failed to attend even once. His limbs began to tingle a little bit. How long would it take Rich to get back?

At last he found himself clearing his throat. "Ah ... Lucy?" he said.

Lucy was sitting not too far from him. "What's up?"

"Lucy, can I talk to you?"

"Sure."

"Uh ... ah ... can I talk to you over here? In private?" He tried not to speak too loud or let any alarm creep into his voice.

She cocked her head at him. "Sure. Whatever." And she scooted along to the edge of the raft that he'd indicated, facing off toward the ocean. It wasn't terribly private, of course, but there was no other option. They sat cross-legged next to one another. Hopefully the others were too busy watching for Rich's return to listen to their conversation.

"What's up?"

"Well," he said, trying to speak quietly, but trying to make it sound as if he wasn't trying to speak quietly, "The thing is. The thing is. Could you just go over for me what it is that I'm going to do out there?"

"What?"

"What am I supposed to do? You, know, out in the woods. When it's my turn."

"Jesus, Fletcher, weren't you listening?"

"Shhh. Yes, I was listening. I just want to clear up some – No, I wasn't listening. All right? Shhh. I got distracted. See, there was this – never mind. Could you please just tell me what I've got to do?"

"It's kind of complicated."

"Please."

"All right. All right. So you swim to shore, right? And then you go into the woods and take the path by the blue flag. The orange flag is for the other clan, okay?"

"Blue flag, right."

"You follow the path."

"Follow the path."

"Then you've got to go through the swamp, okay?"

"Through the swamp, right."

"Then you've got to scale the tower and go down the other side."

"Sure, tower."

"Then you'll come to a gate."

"Gate, good."

"But you've got to get past the guardian of the gate."

"Get past the guardian."

"Once you're through the gate, there'll be a target. You have to shoot an arrow at a target, okay? When you hit the target you'll get the golden apple. And then you've just got to come back – bring the golden apple back here. The first team with all the apples back wins. Got it?"

"Great. Okay. You're kidding, right?"

"No, damn it. Those are the instructions. Have you got it?"

"Sure. Of course. First the swamp, then the, uh, scale the tower, past the guardian to sleep, target, apple, get back."

"Great. Great. Say it again."

"Okay. Path, swamp, tower, guardian, target, apple, back."

"Excellent. You've got it. Which is good, because it looks like you're on."

It was true. The rest of the people on the raft, and the other clan as well, had all stood up and were pointing and yelling. Fletcher and Lucy stood as well. Rich had stumbled out of the jungle. He was pelting his way across the beach, clutching something to his chest. Once or twice he stumbled, then he hit the surf and began to splash wildly out toward the raft, one handed. A couple of the clan members started to cheer. In a few moments they were all yelling, shouting encouragement at him.

Fletcher's heart began to beat out of control. It was pressing hard against the inside of his chest, choking him. Path, swamp, tower, guardian, target, apple, back. Rich was splashing toward them. Path, swamp, tower, guardian, apple, back. And then, with wet fanfare, they were hauling Rich up and onto the logs. He spluttered and coughed, rolled over on his back, still clutching something to his chest.

"Fletcher!" someone called.

"Fletcher! Go, go! It's your turn."

He jerked toward the landward edge of the raft (path, swamp – path, swamp, tower – swamp, tower, gate) and dove. He swam as hard as he could and, after a few wet, swaying minutes, his feet made contact with something firm. It was difficult to separate himself from the waves – they wanted to hold on, to knock him over – but he managed. He churned his way up the beach, past Mike, past a camera, past the blue flag that had been stuck into the ground, and into the jungle.

There was a sort of a path cleared through the woods and Fletcher followed it as quickly as he could. Sometimes roots protruded into it or vines swung across it, but for the most part it was easy enough going. He took it at a jog.

Path, swamp, tower ...

The oppressive whiteness of the sky had disappeared, but the air still pushed down on him, heavy, hot, wet, forceful. He knew that he must be sweating profusely, though he couldn't feel it because his clothes were already so soaked.

Tower, gate ...

The trees leaned over him, their branches laced together. Rounding a little bend, he came to the swamp. There was no mistaking it. The path led straight into it. It must have been manmade. And it wasn't really a swamp, not exactly. It looked as if someone had dug a deep trench, poured in a good deal of water, dumped the dirt back in, and churned the whole mess until it was thick and black and thoroughly unpleasant looking. It was perhaps twenty feet from where Fletcher stood to the opposite side of the pit, or trench, or swamp, or whatever it was. He could see the path pick up again on the other bank. There were trees growing right up out of the mud, though fewer there than elsewhere. He couldn't see very far either to left or to right, and he didn't like the idea of trying to make his way through the jungle. Who knew how far this swamp extended.

There didn't really seem to be much choice. Hesitantly, he put one foot out over the muck. He let the toe of his tennis shoe touch its surface. An oily sheen spread out from the point where he'd disturbed the stuff, a pearlescent quiver. Slowly, he let his foot sink down into it. He found something more or less solid, not far down, and settled his weight onto the foot with a squelch. He began to wade.

In a few moments he was in past his knees, then his thighs. Five feet out from the bank and the blackness had risen above his waste. Another foot or two and it was almost chest deep. He had to raise his arms in order to avoid submerging them.

It had an odd smell. What was strangest about it was that, although Fletcher would have expected it to be foul, it really wasn't. Actually, it was almost sweet, and very heavy. Maybe there was a touch of rot in it, but there were all sorts of other smells mingled in as well.

His movements were thick and restrained. He was getting fairly near half way across and the black stuff had just reached his neck, when several things occurred to him simultaneously.

The first was an image of quicksand. It was something he had only seen in the movies – in fact, he wasn't at all sure that it existed in the real world – but the image of a raised hand disappearing from sight flashed into his head now. It would be like drowning only worse – more oppressive, like being smothered in heavy blankets.

The second thought – a sort of corollary to the first – was that he ought to have brought something with him to hold onto. There were a lot of vines around, and it wouldn't have been that hard or time-consuming to tear one down and anchor it to the shore so that he could hold onto it as he crossed. In case of emergencies. He'd seen that done in the movies.

Finally, it occurred to him that, whatever the stuff was that he was now nearly chin-deep in, there was no good reason to think that he was alone in it. After all, he was in the jungle, and the one thing that everyone knew about the jungle was that it was teeming with life. Which was all very well, and even rather charming, when you were watching it on a nature special, but a lot more disturbing when that life was teeming all around you, and perhaps even coiling its sinuous body around your legs down in the black ooze below.

It was the last thought that brought on the panic. Fletcher's chest tightened and sparks jetted across the corners of his vision. He had stopped moving. Oh great. Now he was going to have a fucking heart attack.

Perhaps it was a good thing that he hadn't brought a vine with him. If he'd had hold of anything, he would undoubtedly have started jerking on it and flailing wildly. As it was, he simply stood utterly still. After some time, he even breathed again. It helped a little. Maybe he wasn't having a heart attack. Now that he thought about it, a heart attack might have been something of a relief in its own way.

There was nothing for it. So, when he had reached the point where waiting became more intolerable than moving, he put another foot forward. Step. Step. His movements were slow and dreamlike.

He pushed one leg forward, then the other. His chin made contact with the murk. From this angle, the strange oiliness of its surface was especially apparent. It swirled and shimmered. It was as if there were slow currents underneath, or as if the whole thing were being brought to a boil. The smell was intense. Still not horrible – sweetness and decay, like an overgrown garden – but powerful, and strange. Now that he was so close, he thought he could see suggestions of vapor rising from the surface. He was walking on tiptoe.

He thought he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. Nothing. Nothing nothing nothing. If his ears were submerged would he be able to hear his own heartbeat the way you sometimes can in a hot bath? Would something else be able to hear it, if that something were submerged?

Another step. Again. Again. Yes! Two more steps and he didn't have to tilt his head back any more. Another few, and the mud was back down to his neck. It was receding.

He forced his legs forward, began to fight and push against the stuff with his arms. It was down to his chest and then, gloriously, to his waist, and he was trying to run, working his legs furiously, until, with a satisfyingly disgusting sound, he was free and lying again on the path, feeling his blood spin, pulling in churning breaths.

He didn't lie there for long. He was aware that he needed to keep going. He was also so glad to be out of the slime that he wanted to be moving again. In a minute or two, the trees had closed back thickly overhead and he'd left the swamp behind. It was only a little while before he came to the tower.

Again, it didn't seem quite to fit the description, though there was no question that this was it. It was more of a wall, really, than a tower. This time there was no doubt about it being man-made. It was built out of rough blocks of stone that seemed to be stacked tightly together rather than cemented or mortared. It was probably a little less than twenty feet high, well short of the height of the trees, but stretching up into the lower layers of the canopy. Like the swamp, it shouldered its way off into the jungle to the left and right, disappearing in the heavy growth. It actually looked rather decayed. There was a little heap of stones that appeared to have toppled from above, and there were vines and creepers crawling over the wall's surface. The Blueshirts had taken a lot of trouble, when building this thing, to make it look atmospheric.

He was relieved to note that the wall sloped slightly away from him and that there were one or two pretty sturdy looking vines in convenient places. And he was right: it wasn't such terribly hard going. The vine he'd chosen was sturdy and firmly attached to the wall, and the stones were stacked in such a way as to present plenty of ledges to grip or to balance on. He clambered and scrambled a bit more than halfway up with nothing worse than a couple of scrapes on his knees.

But he reached a point, as always happens when you're climbing, when not only did the obvious upward route give out, but there didn't seem to be any easy way to climb back down either.

"Probably less than twenty feet" looks pretty tame from the ground. After all, it's only a few times one's own height, and it ought not to be a very big deal. In the case of this wall, each couple of feet was more or less the same as the last couple of feet, and there was no reason that feet thirteen to fifteen, say, should be harder to scale than feet three to five just because they were further from the ground. Which is all very well when you're theorizing, but quite a different matter when you're actually on the wall.

It was a precarious few moments. The wall seemed to be tilting backwards, as if it wanted to dump him off. He clung tight. He was all right as long as he stayed where he was. Come to think of it, maybe this was a fine place to be. Maybe he would just stay here forever.

He took a deep breath. Several deep breaths. With each one, he told himself that after the next one he would go, and each time he turned out to be wrong. Then, quite to his surprise, he turned out to be right. He reached up and seized hold of something above him, put out his right foot and found a rock to brace it against. His fingers were sweaty, and he was still coated in the black stuff that he'd waded through, which seemed to make his whole body a little slick. But it didn't matter; he was on his way. Push, heave, pull, move, and then one last push as he braced his arms against what suddenly turned out to be the top. His stomach was scraping along the rocks, there was a moment where his feet flailed sickeningly against nothing at all, and then he was over.

The top of this side of the wall turned out to be a sort of battlement with a ledge beyond. Actually, now that he'd reached the top, it was a good deal more like a tower than he'd originally thought. His body was quivering.

On this side, the wall was a few feet shorter, or the ground a few feet higher. It must have been built on a slope. Not only that, but there was a set of narrow stairs descending its face. There was still a path to follow. How long was all of this absurdity taking him? How long had it taken Rich? He was still only part way done with the task. What was it that was supposed to be next?

The path twisted its way through the trees. It was convoluted enough that after a little while he was not at all certain whether he was going in the same direction that he had been originally. If pressed, he would have said that his progress was overall uphill, but he was not certain even of that.

Then, without warning, the path gave one last little twitch and was gone, opening up, spreading out, and vanishing. Fletcher was in the closest thing to a clearing that he had yet experienced in his travels through the jungle. It was a semi-circle, about thirty feet in radius, in which there were almost no trees at all. Ferns and grasses covered the ground. If Fletcher had looked up, he might have seen a break or two in the overhanging foliage through which the sky appeared, because there were certainly shafts of sunlight playing on the ground. But he didn't look up: there was too much to pay attention to on his own level.

The opposite side of the clearing consisted of a wall like the one he had just climbed, of the same very convincing faux-ancient stone, only slightly shorter. In the middle of the wall, more or less opposite where he stood, there was an archway. It was more than six feet high and wide enough for two people to walk through it abreast. Beyond it Fletcher could glimpse more grasses and ferns.

In between Fletcher and the arch, more or less in the middle of the clearing, there was a pile of stones, heaped and mounded quite high into the shape of a chair or throne. On the throne sat a skeleton. Really. The work on the wall was quite professional – very evocative – but the Blueshirts had outdone themselves here. The thing looked aged, yellow and gray and brown, rather than the stark white of a Halloween skeleton or of one that you might see hanging in a science classroom. It was wearing something, although the something had been made to appear weathered and crumbling and couldn't be readily identified. Wisps of hair clung convincingly to the dome of its skull, trailing out from beneath what might have been a crown.

Fletcher was tempted to laugh – it was all a little over the top – but something stopped him. The silence of the woods, maybe. A warm, full, thick silence. And there was something about the figure on the throne too. Whoever had made it had managed to give it a real air of dignity, a kind of decaying majesty that brought you up short even though you knew it was just special effects.

Well, it was obvious enough what he had to do. He waded out into the silence and the sunlight. The closer he got to the thing on the throne, the more impressed he was by it. If anything, the quality of the illusion increased with proximity. That was definitely a crown perched on its head – covered in grime, but clearly a crown, made of some sort of metal and hammered into a circlet. The king's arms rested beside him. Fletcher thought he could even make out a ring on one of the fingers. There was actually something sad about it all, as well as regal.

It was terribly quiet and warm and as he walked he thought again of the thing that he'd seen, or thought he'd seen, skimming over the treetops back on the beach. It had been completely ridiculous, but he could have sworn that, as it loped along, it had unfurled two large, bat-like wings. Silly. Just as silly as what was happening now. But nevertheless his skin prickled and he moved a little faster.

And then, just as he was passing the king, it moved its head. Gently, but unmistakably, it turned its empty sockets toward him. The voice of reason told Fletcher that it was all absurd. The voice of reason told him that the thing was obviously being operated by remote control, that someone unseen in the bushes was making it move. The voice of reason told him that it was a special effect, animatronic, a theme park dummy. But there are certain moments – and a moment like this, alone in the jungle, after days of eating primarily coconut and sleeping just out of reach of sand crabs, days of staring at the flat, endlessness of the ocean and the sky, when you've been shipped halfway around the world and ordered to trek through the forest past swamps and over walls to fetch golden apples, was just such a moment – when the voice of reason can go fuck itself.

It was a toss up whether Fletcher was going to bolt, faint dead away, or freeze in his tracks. He bolted.

It was undignified to be sure, as well as irrational, but such considerations didn't matter. In a couple of seconds he was through the door. A few yards past the door, he stopped and turned, panting, wide-eyed. Through the archway, he could see the heap of stones. He thought he could also see the back of the thing's skull. Couldn't he? It was still where it had been sitting, wasn't it?

He was in a real clearing now. In fact, it was a sort of a meadow, full of tall grasses, open to the hot, white sky. The pressure of the atmosphere lifted a little bit and the awful silence of the forest holding its breath was replaced by the same kind of buzzing, lively, lazy quiet that you find in any other meadow anywhere in the world on a sunny afternoon. Looking over his shoulder, he could seen that in the distance the trees sprang up again, and beyond them the land rose toward a peak.

There were a few other things as well: a small, wooden table with a bow leaning against it and arrows piled on it and, further on, a lone tree standing in the middle of the meadow.

He looked back toward the gate. Nothing moved. Nothing came shambling through it, moaning, with upraised arms. The movement of the head had been only a special effect. Slowly, Fletcher backed his way toward the little table. When he reached it, he found that there was a note tacked to it: "stand in the circle." Only a few feet beyond the table he could now see that there was a ring of trampled grass, marked off by a border of rope that had been lain on the ground. He took the bow and the pile of arrows and backed further until he was in the circle, all the while watching the gate.

Where was the target? It was behind him. Of course it was. He would have to turn away from the gate to shoot at it. And there it was, when he reluctantly turned: a hoop hanging from the lone tree.

He set the pile of arrows at his feet, keeping one in his hand. It was long and slender. He fitted the notched end of it to the string the way he'd seen it done in the movies. He wasn't quite sure how it was supposed to work and – there was no denying it – his hands were shaking a little. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. It had only been a special effect. He turned his back to the gate.

When Fletcher had been nine or so, there had been after-school activities at his school. Archery had been offered, and he had really, really wanted to do it. His mother had signed him up for a recorder class. As a result, he had never in his life shot a bow. Thanks a lot, mom.

He lifted the bow and pulled the arrow back until his hand was near his ear. Then he released. The arrow sailed forward in dying arc and disappeared in the grass a few feet in front of him. He glanced over his shoulder. The next arrow traveled further, but went veering off to the right. He tried to steady his breathing. Two more arrows went wide of the mark. A third sailed up and went flying past the tree into the distance. Each time he released the bowstring, the bow vibrated in his hand. The two finger that he used to pull the string back stung. The next arrow was much closer – in fact, it hit the tree itself with a satisfying thunk and stuck there, vibrating. For some reason this was heartening. Fletcher knew that he was listening carefully to the noises around him, even though he tried not to. Stop, stop. It was nothing. It was ridiculous. He could do this. He fitted another arrow to the string and this time – there it went, straight and true, right through the middle of the ring.

For a few moments, nothing happened. Then there was the slightest rustle behind him, a different sort of sound from the general whisper of the grass in a way that he could not have put his finger on. He turned. There was no one there, no one rustling, no movement at all, but sitting in plain view, on the little table, where it certainly hadn't been before, was the apple.

It really was kind of gold too. Not exactly the gold that you would get from a can of spray paint, not sparkly, but a sort of glowing, healthy yellow-green that was almost gold. It had little brown speckles all over its skin. It really was altogether a beautiful and delicious-looking apple. Taking a few steps forward, he lifted it from the table. His heart was beating fast. He was elated – he'd done it! But at the same time, he was conscious of the archway ahead of him, of the buzzing heat around him, of a loose weakness in his legs. He began to run.

He ran as fast he could: past the guardian without even a glance to check that it was still where it had been sitting, along the twists and turns of the path, clutching the apple to his breast. He ran up the tower stairs and found that, since he had passed before, a rope ladder had been mounted, hanging down the face of the tower. It was a simple matter to climb down, the stem of the apple gripped in his teeth. Two ropes had been stretched taut across the swamp, one to walk on and the other at chest height, to grip. He was over in no time.

He pounded his way through the last yards of jungle, burst on to the beach, pelted past the cameras and past Mike, who was saying something that Fletcher couldn't hear, and into the surf. Holding the apple to his chest, just as Rich had done, he beat and kicked his way one-handed through the waves, then he felt hands yanking at his shirt, his arms, his back, and was hauled up onto the raft.

After a moment or two, he could hear yelling around him, and then a splash, and then, sharper and closer, someone speaking to him.

"Are you all right, Fletcher? How did it go?"

He didn't know how long it had taken him to complete the task. He must not have compared poorly with respect to the other contestants, or at least no one told him that he had. Actually, no one said much of anything. Perhaps they were nervous. He supposed vaguely that Rich must have told them what to expect when it was their turn and that was why they didn't ask him very many questions.

It was just as well anyhow, because he didn't feel much like talking. All he could do, really, was lie there, watching the sky through half-closed eyes, feeling the movement of the water beneath the raft, until even that sensation was gone, and there was only the splintered rainbows of sunlight in his own eyelashes. Perhaps he slept.

Every so often, everyone around him would stand and begin yelling, and another clan member would be hauled out of the water. A little heap of apples grew in the center of the raft. Seven apples. Then eight. Nine. He was awake now. They were all awake, and attentive. The other clan must have been at the same spot in their rotation, because they were also all standing or sitting up and staring off toward the fringes of the jungle. Sarge had drawn the last lot and had disappeared into the jungle some time ago.

A sudden hiss went up from the members of Fletcher's clan, a stifled cry of triumph. There was Sarge! He sprang down the sand in long strides. But then, only moments later, someone erupted from the other, left-hand path. It was the man named Satchel.

Fletcher could see Mike gesticulating enthusiastically on the shore. The two figures were across the beach and in the water. But Sarge was surprisingly athletic, given his shape, and he cut more or less smoothly through waves, given that he was holding an apple, and in a few moments they were hauling him up onto the raft. There was general jubilation. There was back-slapping and hugging and cheering. A little bit to his surprise, Fletcher found himself pumping his fist in the air and whooping.

There were a few things that had to be done to wrap up. Both clans came back to the beach so that the mother insect could have another close look at them. The other clan looked dispirited, broken. Fletcher felt a little sorry for them.

"Clan Itzli has won," announced Mike, "Clan Itzli, here is your reward." He knelt and unrolled a bundle that was lying near his feet. Inside were two snorkeling masks, two sets of flippers, and two short, slender spears. "Fishing gear! Clan Coatl, I'm afraid you have lost. It's time to face the inevitable. Tonight you must exile one of your own."

Then they were rounded up again and taken back to the waiting speedboats. On the ride back to their camp, listening to the waves smacking against the side of the boat, it occurred to Fletcher that not once during the entire time that he'd been completing the task, from entering the forest to leaving it, could he remember having seen a single camera.

5.

There was enough of a celebratory atmosphere back at camp that they opened two cans of sardines to go with dinner. They were surprisingly good. Everyone settled in around the fire. Fletcher felt better than he had since he'd arrived. It would be exaggerating to say that he was actually happy, but he laughed at the jokes that people made, felt somewhat relaxed, and was not as conscious as he had been of the sand in his nose. The fire had finally burned itself down to the last few coals and they sat chatting quietly in the dark, resting, when there was a startling blaze of light nearby.

A torch had suddenly burst into flame only a few feet away. A face hovered above it, flickering. The face opened its mouth. "Come," it said. It was an alarming experience, though perhaps it oughtn't to have been. Just more theatrics on the part of whoever was producing the show, but the theatrics were effective. They all fell silent. One by one they stood up. There seemed to be no question about obeying the mysterious figure that turned and led them to the water's edge. The rubber rafts waited for them again, and again they were ferried out to the waiting speedboat.

It was different, though, traveling over the water by night. There was a bright light at the front of the boat that caught the tips of the waves, turning them silver, but otherwise it was very dark indeed. As a child, Fletcher had loved to look through a copy of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with illustrations by Gustave Doré. Long before he had any notion of what the story was about, he would sit and stare at those pictures, and particularly at the pictures of the ocean. In the etchings, the water twisted and curled as if it was alive, and it was full of strange creatures. There was one picture in particular that he'd loved: a view of the keel of a boat passing above the viewer who rests on the sea floor surrounded by ghosts and the wreckage of ships. He thought of that picture now, and of the sea over which they were speeding, of just how deep it might be and of what might be lurking down in the darkness, watching the progress of the boat above. There was, for the first time since they'd arrived, a chill in the air, and Fletcher's clothes and hair whipped around him. He could feel goosebumps rise on his arms.

They traveled for what seemed like a long time. Fletcher had trouble telling what direction they were going. Sometimes the dark hulk of the land seemed to be on their right and sometimes on their left. Something flashed suddenly in the boat's light, quite close by, and Fletcher had the impression of large, dark shapes against the sky, away on either side, just barely caught by the boat's light. The boat slowed, the water slapping less vigorously against its sides. It pulled in a long arc and came to a stop. They were beside a dock. Someone threw a rope on board from the darkness to the right of the boat and the driver cut off the light.

Torches flared up along the dock, several of them, and people began to help them ashore. Fletcher's companions looked strange and sickly in the torchlight. Fletcher felt sure that they were in some sort of protected cove, though he wasn't couldn't have said exactly why – something about the way that sound traveled, or the motion of the water.

Two of the torch-bearers began to walk up the dock, the clan members following, another two torch-bearers taking up the rear. They left the pilot of the boat in the darkness. The dock sloped upwards and, where it met the land, Fletcher found himself walking on flat stone. A little distance ahead, the two front torches began suddenly to mount much more swiftly. They were being led up a narrow, stone staircase built into what must have been very nearly a cliff. Once again Fletcher marveled at the industry of the Blueshirts. How long had they been planning this show?

Just when Fletcher thought he might run short of breath, they came abruptly to the top of the stairs. There was another level area of stone and, up ahead, he watched the torches disappear through an archway. There was a passage – broad and not too long – that opened up to the night air again on the other end.

As Fletcher stepped out of the passage, he felt the tension that had been building in his chest ever since their peculiar summons ease almost instantly: this time they had gone over the top. There had been something mysterious and – he could admit it – a little frightening about the silent, nighttime boat ride, the shapes in the darkness, the magical torches and so on, but now whoever was in charge of this show had crossed the line into camp.

The space that he was already descending into was also lit by fires: torches in sconces scattered about and a central blaze in a pit. The whole area – probably sixty feet across – was bowl shaped and built of stone, like the staircase. The stone was cut into long steps that could also serve as benches, all curved about a flat, circular space in the middle, at the center of which the fire burned in a sort of raised pit, also circular. The rows of steps were interrupted both by the doorway through which they had entered, at the top of the bowl, and by another arch directly opposite it, only set at the same level as the central circle. Above that second doorway was a level space on which sat a large chair, also carved from the rock. At the edge of the fire pit, near the door, was a raised platform on which there was a sort of urn. All around the edges of the space, up above, were broken columns of various heights.

The setting might have been dramatic enough, but it was the Blueshirts themselves that finished the ridiculous picture. It wasn't quite right to call them Blueshirts, though, because they were not in their usual uniforms. They were wearing robes with hoods that rose to peaks at the backs of their heads. And they had masks on. The masks were like ancient Greek theater masks, leering and exaggerated, and they all seemed to be different from one another. These bizarre figures were scattered throughout the little amphitheater. Even the Blushirts manning the cameras perched at intervals on the steps were robed and masked. There was a similar figure sitting in the chair above the lower archway. The only unmasked person, other than the clan members themselves, was Mike, but even he wore a set of robes. He looked, thought Fletcher, as if he were dressed for some sort Greco-Roman-Gothic luau.

The torch bearers led Fletcher's clan to a set of benches three rows from the bottom. Opposite them, only in the very first row around the fire, sat the members of the other clan. It was clear to Fletcher now what they must be doing there. He'd assumed, for whatever reason, that the members of his own clan wouldn't be present while the other clan chose someone to exile, but obviously he'd been wrong.

The members of Clan Coatl really did look haggard, especially in this setting. They were colorless and silent. Their pupils glowed in the firelight. They were each holding something that looked like a small bundle of sticks or leaves.

Fletcher had just seated himself when the music began. It seemed to come from beyond the broken pillars around the edges of the amphitheater. It was flutes – or something like flutes, pipes of some kind that were being blown into. It was a strange sound, like a sustained moan or wail. The rhythm was difficult to pin down – it seemed to swell and pulse rather than to follow any sort of regular beat.

Mike stood in front of the archway, next to the fire. He raised both of his hands, palms upwards. "Welcome!" he cried, "Welcome to the Clan Meeting. Members of Clan Coatl, tonight you must decide the fate of one of your own. Before that decision is made, each of you will have a chance to speak. To speak your piece before the others. We begin," he let his left hand fall to his side and made a sweeping gesture with his right, "with Chet!"

A few moments passed before anything happened. Perhaps no one had been properly prepped on what, exactly, was expected of them. At last, a little hesitantly, Chet stood up. Even haggard, he was very good looking. A gray beard had begun to sprout from his strong cheekbones. The dark circles under his eyes were actually rather flattering in an intense, masculine kind of way. He cleared his throat. "Well. You all know me. I hope – I think in some ways that I've come to be, in the last few days, a sort of a father figure for the clan. At least, I think that I've come to look on some of you almost as if you were my own children. I think that I'm useful. To the clan. You'll all make whatever choice you think is right, but – well, it's been – it's been an honor to be allowed to be here. And I'd like to stay. I'd like not to be exiled." He stood for a little longer, made one or two hesitant moves as if he might go on, but then sat back down.

Mike made the sweeping gesture again and called out, "Claire!"

One of the women stood, no hesitation this time. She had a look to her that made you think of a knife – not a kitchen knife, either, more like a hunting knife. "It's been a tough few days. I think Clan Coatl is tough. I really do. We almost won the task today, even coming at it from a disadvantage. We're going to come through this stronger and fiercer. And I'm a competitor. I think the clan needs me. I've got the hunger. I've got the fire. I'll give a hundred and ten percent to the team. That's all I've got to say." And she sat down.

Again, Mike made that gesture with his right hand. It didn't look quite natural, not the sort of movement that one would make under ordinary circumstances. More ceremonial. It must have had to do with being on television. "Ben!"

Ben was shirtless. He had incredible pectoral muscles – the kind you see in magazines that look like snakes or something writhing around under the model's skin. "It was a crazy day today. The task. And then there was – there was a lot of suspicion around camp all day long. A lot of tension. You know, deal-making and all that. People trying to form alliances. So it was pretty intense, you know. And anyway, I hope we can make it past all that. I know we can. We've just got to pull together and do what's best for the clan as a whole. I think I bring a lot to the clan. I think I'm physically one of the strongest members. I work hard. So I think I should stay."

And so it went. Each time Mike made his gesture and called out a new name, the music swelled a little. There was never a break in it, and you couldn't even hear when an individual note died out. It was probably the effect of the wailing music on Fletcher's already overwrought nerves that accounted for the fact that he began to find the proceedings less amusing as they progressed. At any rate, all of the things that had struck him as kitsch when he first entered began to seem, if not actually sinister, definitely a little creepy. The robes that the Blueshirts were wearing bore, on further reflection, an unfortunate resemblance to those worn by the Ku Klux Klan, which struck him as being in poor taste. And why, he asked himself, should it be the case that the cameramen and other technicians should be hooded, robed, and masked when they presumably weren't even being filmed?

Each of the members of Clan Coatl stood and spoke in turn. They all spoke with real earnestness, and most of them clutched the little bundles of leaves or sticks that they were holding almost desperately. One woman actually cried. Fletcher was conscious of a desire to stand up and shout, to do something ridiculous to disrupt the false solemnity of the proceedings, but he didn't act on it. Finally, they had all finished speaking.

"The time is upon you," said Mike. His voice was lower now, but still distinctly audible, even over the music. "It is time to choose who will be exiled. Look around at each other one last time. Who will leave tonight? Who is it that will leave forever? I will ask you to come forward one at a time and write the name of the person that you choose on a tablet, then drop the tablet in this urn. Chet, you are first."

One by one, the members of Clan Coatl walked past Mike to the raised platform or dais behind him on which the urn stood. There was a basin next to it filled with the tablets to which Mike referred and a long pen with which the clan members wrote.

When they had finished, Mike ascended the platform. He removed the tiles from the urn and, reading each one, he intoned a name. "Rosa ... Satchel ... Clementine ..." In the end, it was Satchel who received the most votes. He was the one who had lost the final race against Sarge earlier that day, but otherwise the choice seemed surprising to Fletcher. Satchel was tall and wiry and healthy-looking. Or at least, he had seemed healthy-looking before. Now he didn't look so well.

"Satchel, stand."

He stood. Actually, maybe he wasn't so much wiry as gaunt.

"Step up to the fire."

The firelight had the effect of highlighting Satchel's cheekbones and forehead and filling his eye sockets with shadows.

"You know what to do."

Satchel raised his hands. It seemed to Fletcher that he moved reluctantly. Slowly he released the little bundle he was carrying and let it fall into the flames. For the first time, Fletcher saw clearly what it was: straw or grass or twigs, tied together in such a way as to form a crude little human figure, like a doll. Whatever it was made of caught fire quickly and burned yellow. The little figure seemed to writhe for a moment, curling in on itself as it was consumed. Then, releasing a wisp of grayish smoke, it was gone.

Immediately, two of the robed figures swept down from above. They took Satchel firmly underneath each arm, turned him, and guided him away. He seemed to slump a little between them. Off he was swept, past Mike, and into the darkness of the archway beneath the seated figure.

There was silence for a few moments, then Mike spoke, raising both of his hands slowly. "Judgment has been passed. It is time now for those of you who remain to return to your camps. Farewell. For now."

They all stood, and, first Clan Coatl, then Clan Itzli, they were led up the steep steps and out the way they had originally come. As they walked, Fletcher looked back over his shoulder. Mike had turned away from them. It seemed as if he was looking up at the figure that sat over the archway through which Satchel had disappeared. Just as he stepped out of the amphitheater, Fletcher distinctly saw Mike incline himself forward, as if he were bowing.

6.

That Sarge should be the one in charge of the first fishing expedition did not come as a surprise, but Fletcher was surprised that Sarge chose him as a companion. Everyone was awake and moving about the camp, preparing their usual breakfast, so there were plenty of others to choose from. But he picked up the snorkeling masks, flippers, and spears that they'd won the day before, looked directly at Fletcher, and, as if the thing had been agreed upon in advance, said, "Come on, Fletcher. Let's go."

No one questioned Sarge's decision, least of all Fletcher. Off they set toward the ocean, just the two of them, trailed by one of the loping cameras.

Sarge chose a spot past the spit of land to the west. There was a long, flatish rock that extended from the beach quite a ways out into the water. They picked their way across it.

"How are we – I mean, how do you do this?" Fletcher asked.

"Have you ever been snorkeling before?"

"No. No I haven't."

"It's easy. Just get a nice tight seal around the mask. When you dive, your breathing tube will fill up with water. When you get back to the surface, just blow it out. Like a whale."

"Like a whale?"

"That's right."

"Okay."

"I think the best thing will be to stick close to the rocks. We'll have a better chance of spearing a fish up against them."

"All right."

"When you see one, just try to run your spear through it."

"I'm not really a very good swimmer."

"Are you ready to give it a go?"

"Right."

"Okay."

"Wait. Hold on. What about sharks?"

"I wouldn't worry too much about sharks."

"Oh? Why not?"

"They're not usually too interested in people. It would have to be a pretty big one to have a go at you."

"Well that's certainly a relief."

Sarge smiled. "If I were you, I'd worry more about jellyfish than sharks."

"Yeah?"

"Nasty stings. Depending on the type. If one of them gets you, just get out of the water and urinate on yourself. Urine's basic. It'll neutralize the venom."

Sarge smiled again, but not so that Fletcher could tell whether he was joking or not. He had a strange sort of face. There was first of all the contrast between his very dark skin and his very white hair and beard. But more curious than that was the fact that it was especially difficult to judge his age; his face didn't look nearly lined enough to match his hair, and his movements were so spry. He slipped a pair of flippers onto his feet, turned, and dove into the water.

Fletcher sat for a few moments. He wrapped the snorkeling mask around his face and put the breathing tube in his mouth. It didn't feel very comfortable. He pulled the flippers onto his feet. Sarge surfaced and beckoned to him. He stepped out onto a submerged ledge, adjusted the mask, and plunged in.

It took a few minutes to get used to using the mask and tube and to moving underwater. He'd swum in the ocean several times recently, of course, but he'd always been trying to get out as quickly as possible. This was different. He choked and spluttered quite a bit at first, and he felt a little nauseous. His movements were laborious. But, after a while he began to get the basic hang of it.

It turned out that there was a great deal to look at under the surface. The rocks were encrusted with life. There were pink and white fronded things swaying gently in the ocean currents. There were brilliantly colored anemones and urchins. There were pastel sea stars. And there were fish: clouds of silver fish that moved in unison and shimmered like ghosts; fish striped like tigers or spotted like leopards; fish with extravagant frills as if they were wearing lace collars; long, slender fish that darted here and there, looking startled; fish with bulging eyes and no foreheads; blue fish with beaks like parrots; bony-looking, leering fish with faces like old men.

Fletcher bobbed up and down for a little while, and then he tried diving. It was peculiar to be completely submerged in the warm saltwater with his eyes open, but not unpleasant, and though Fletcher had never been a great swimmer, after a few tries he began to feel more confident. Each time he would dive a little further, spend a little longer exploring, experiment with moving about in new ways. He began to develop a reliable sense for how long a breath could last him and was emboldened to venture deeper. And, after a while, he even began to enjoy himself.

Eventually he began to feel that he ought to get down to business. Business turned out to be fairly tricky. Even the fish that looked as if they ought to be slow moved with surprising speed when they were threatened. They had home field advantage as well: even though Fletcher was more comfortable than he'd anticipated in the water, he certainly couldn't move like them. When he'd thrust at one, it would sort of squirt out of the way, almost as if the current created by the movement of his arm helped it to escape. It was rather like trying to swat a fly in mid-air.

He kept at it for quite some time before he felt tired enough that he needed a break. He hauled himself up onto the rock to find Sarge sitting there as well.

He lay there for a few moments before asking, "You catch anything yet?"

Sarge shook his head. "Not yet."

"Me neither. I just think I may not be any good at this. Maybe I should give someone else a shot."

Sarge just looked at him for a moment, perfectly serious, unsmiling, saying nothing. He held Fletcher's eyes for longer than Fletcher was generally comfortable looking at someone. At last Fletcher couldn't take it any longer and looked away. Sarge slipped back into the water. Fletcher kept sitting, staring out at the ocean. Then, after a few minutes, he took the point of his fishing spear and used it to tear a small hole in his right pant leg, just at the level of his knee. Using both hands, he tore the pant leg all the way around until the lower portion was free. He removed his right flipper and then the lower half of the pant leg. He did the same thing to his left pant leg. Then he put the flippers on and followed Sarge back into the water.

It was Sarge who made the first catch. Fletcher was at the surface and saw Sarge emerge from the water with the fish flailing on the end of his spear. Fletcher waved at him and gave him the thumbs-up sign, which Sarge acknowledged.

Sarge's success inspired Fletcher: he redoubled his efforts, and it was not long before he, too, speared his first. It was one of the tiger-striped fish, the same sort Sarge had caught. They seemed to like to lurk close to the rock. Fletcher wasn't sure why he succeeded in skewering this one when he failed so often before. But there it was. He watched the fish as it crept along past a cluster of anemones, lunged and – he got it, all the way through its body, just in front of the tail. It began to flail thrash madly, but it was pinned. With a sort of scooping motion, he pushed the spear upwards and headed for the surface of the water, where he managed to carry the writhing fish onto the rock.

He waved at Sarge as soon as he next saw his head and Sarge came ashore as well. He was full of praise and slapped Fletcher on the back several times. Fletcher almost did a little dance. The few times he'd been fishing as a kid and had actually managed to catch a fish, he'd been unable to bear the process of beating it to death on a rock. He found that had no qualms this time, though.

After that the going didn't exactly get easy, but they were able to spear a total of five fish before Sarge finally said, "I think that's about all I can handle." Fletcher was glad. He'd felt as if he was on the verge of collapse for some time, but had been too embarrassed to admit it.

Back to camp they went, and for the first time in his life Fletcher had the feeling of being a successful hunter returning home. Gratifyingly, they were given more or less a hero's welcome when they arrived. Nesploy, when he saw the fish, actually sprang up and hugged both of them, expostulating incomprehensibly.

As each of the clanmates, who had been away on their various errands, returned, Nesploy would call their attention to the fish and point proudly at Fletcher and Sarge. They were all effusive in their praise. Lucy hugged him. The Riches patted him on the back and said, "Good job." Even Bee, whom he still found supercilious and unpleasant, smiled warmly. The thought occurred to him that maybe he didn't dislike these people as much as he'd thought he did.

All of the fish were of the same, tiger-striped variety, and none of them were huge. Five smallish fish split between ten people didn't make for an enormous meal, but it was a fantastic change from nothing but rice and coconut. Nesploy cleaned them and cooked them by folding them inside large leaves and putting them in the edges of the fire. They tasted fresh and wonderfully sustaining, and there was a good deal of amiable chatting that evening over dinner.

Fletcher awoke in the middle of the night. He didn't know what had awoken him at first, but, lying still for a few minutes he became aware of a sound at the fringes of his hearing – something other than the roll of the surf or the humming forest. It was something that he thought he recognized: rhythmic, unsettling. He strained his ears through the darkness. What was it? Could it be the sounds of someone having sex? Strange to say, he could feel himself blush at the thought, dark though it was. He focused his ears even more intently. Yes. There was no doubt. Was there? No. It was the panting, straining, breathless sounds of intercourse happening somewhere in the woods, maybe not too far away. Who could it be? He tried raising his head a little and looking around him on the platform to see who might be missing, but it was far too dark to tell. The sounds went on, swelling and then diminishing. From one moment to the next he was utterly convinced of what the sounds were and then doubtful of his own conviction. It was just possible that he was hearing something else. On it went, for how long he had no way of telling. The sounds were building, getting louder. And, as they did so, he was less convinced again. Surely they were too sharp, too wild for a person to make, even when gripped by passion. At last they reached a climax – almost a screaming or a kind of chattering, it seemed to Fletcher. He sat up now, his eyes wide against the blackness, and then the sounds were gone.

An electric current of goosebumps shot along his spine. There was nothing now but the sound of the ocean and the rustling of the leaves. No one else stirred. Surely he hadn't been dreaming? He had felt so keenly aware. He sat silent for a long time, listening to nothing. After an unbearable age, he stirred a little and then, slowly, picking his way between the other sleepers, he crawled out of the shelter.

He had to urinate, but it was also undeniable that he was experiencing an urge to investigate the strange sounds, perhaps to catch a glimpse of two of his companions slipping out of the woods. However, he was just on edge enough that, rather than head even along the fringes of the forest, he directed his silent steps out across the sand, toward the water.

Then he looked up. Somehow he had not yet managed to look properly at the stars. Perhaps there had been unnoticed clouds concealing them on the nighttime boat ride. Or perhaps he'd been too preoccupied to notice. But how could anyone be too preoccupied to notice this?

This was something entirely new, an undreamt of thing. The whole sky glowed. There were so many, so uncountably many, so monstrously, insanely many stars! They were dazzling, wonderful, awful. And as many stars as there were, somehow, there was space between them, and just as the stars were a thousand times more brilliant than any he had ever seen before, the space between them was a thousand times blacker, a thousand times emptier.

Almost immediately, without understanding why, Fletcher could feel tears well up in his eyes. It wasn't sadness or happiness or sentimentality or any ordinary emotion that he recognized at all – it was just that the sight was too much to bear.

Each of those points was an unimaginably huge, seething ball of fire, distant in a way that made nonsense of the whole idea of distance, suspended in nothingness. And Fletcher himself clung to the surface of a rock, along with all the great oceans and the forests and the mountains and everything he knew, spinning through that void, hanging improbably above it – or below it – up and down meant nothing anymore. He knew all of those things, of course, but now they were suddenly, forcefully real.

He must have continued walking, even as he looked, and he'd lost all sense of where he was going, because suddenly there was water around his ankles. He didn't look down. He was spinning, slowly. His legs gave out underneath him and, with a gentle, sagging stumble, he collapsed into a sitting position. But still he looked up. The waves washed in around him, soaking him to the waist. For a long time, Fletcher sat in the water and watched the stars.

7.

Bee came to fetch him the next day to tell him that it was time to talk to the camera. He still couldn't pin down exactly what it was that he didn't like about Bee. There was some element of condescension in her expression or her voice. And there was something sharp about her – whether it was her appearance or her manner, he couldn't decide. "Hey, Fletcher," she said, "It's time to confess. You're up." And she gestured over her shoulder.

"Thanks," he managed, and he walked past her across the beach. The set-up was the same as before: the unmanned camera facing the little wooden chair, the list of names. This time the question hanging beneath the lens was, "WHERE DO YOU COME FROM?"

Fletcher sat, sighed, looked away from the camera, then back toward it again. "Where do I come I from? I don't suppose I can get away with saying 'Lots of places' and get up and leave, can I? Okay, I was born in Bloomington, Indiana. You've seen Breaking Away, right? That place. I don't really remember it, though. We moved when I was a baby. We lived in a bunch of different places. Near Boston for a couple of years, in Montana for a little while. Mostly in California, though. But even there we moved around. It was my dad's work. He was an engineer who mostly worked for state governments. He'd keep taking different jobs. He couldn't really seem to settle anywhere, I guess. Where I ended up the longest was a town outside of Sacramento called Roseville. If you've never been there, don't. It turns out that there aren't actually very many roses. There are a lot of strip malls, though, if you like that kind of thing. My mom worked on and off as a secretary and a pre-school teacher. She and my dad got along okay – no fights or anything like that – but I don't remember ever being particularly struck by them being in love. Which I guess was right, because eventually he did leave her. This was after I'd gone away to college. I went to Redlands. It was a pretty weird thing, actually, their breakup. It turned out that he'd been having an affair, for years actually. He had basically this whole other life, which was very strange because, if you'd ever met my dad – well, he wouldn't strike you as the type, really. He's married to this other woman now – her name's Rachel. He's been married to her for more than a decade now and I've met her a few times, and the really weird part is that she's a hell of a lot like my mother. So he had this whole other life and everything, but it was essentially like the life that he had already. Weird. Anyway, you'd think that the whole thing would have really screwed me up, but maybe because I'd already left home or something, it didn't really have much of an effect on me. I don't even really think about it that much, to be honest. I've got an older brother. Michael. He's a lawyer now. We don't talk much these days. Actually, I guess we didn't talk that much growing up either. Not that we hated each other or anything – just – anyway. He was always pretty smart, but I don't think he was too happy. He's divorced now, too. Has a kid. He still lives in California."

He paused. "Is this the sort of thing you're looking for? I don't really know why I'm telling you all this. Pretty personal, I guess. Maybe it's about what I was saying before \-- last time -- about being on TV or something. About things being real or not. Like, if I tell you -- I don't know."

The sky was nearly cloudless, a dazzling blue. He thought of the stars the night before. And then he thought too of an assignment that he'd done in grade school. It had been given to him by one of his favorite teachers – he could still remember the way she smelled, though his memory of her face was vague. Everyone in the class had written a poem where each line started, "I'm from ..." The poems had been sort of miniature biographies.

"Okay," he said to the camera. "Okay. I'm not sure what you're looking for, really, but I'll try to give you some more. I'll give you some snapshots. How about that? Just some things that I remember, while I'm sitting here. So, let's see. When I think of Roseville, what I see is mile after mile of car dealerships, and I see the cars all polished and waxed and glittering like gems. I think of the Wendy's that I worked at during the summers. I think of Julia Gilroy. I was so desperate to be in love that I convinced myself during my junior year that Julia Gilroy was beautiful and interesting, but even then I think I knew it wasn't true. We used to drive in my blue Toyota Corolla that I bought with the money from working at Wendy's. We'd just drive around in it for hours it seems like. I don't know what the hell we were doing, me just lusting away after her. Before that, I remember – let's see, I remember middle school dances, and trying to conceal my erection by dancing with the girls sort of leaning forward in this awkward way so that my pelvis was pulled away from them. I was a pretty dorky kid. I loved Lord of the Rings and Dune and even Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books. I used to play Dungeons and Dragons. Then I got into The Smiths and The Cure, The Jesus and Mary Chain, that whole thing. I wear black on the outside and so on. I was pretty tortured in my own way. Pretty angsty. You would not believe what my hair looked like. That was in Junior High, beginning of high school. Later on, I remember thinking that college was going to mean freedom. And I think it did, actually, but I don't think before-hand I properly understood what freedom was about, really."

He paused for a moment. "I remember seeing fireflies for the first time. I don't even know how old I was. It was on a family trip to Missouri, I think. We had relatives there. My mom grew up there. I'd never seen fireflies before, and it was – it was amazing, really. I can still picture it perfectly. We'd had a picnic by this little river, and it was getting late, the sun was going down, and these things started flashing in the trees and the bushes. It was magical, to be honest. And before – before that, there were these – I don't know really why I remember this at all, but it's this very strong memory from way back. It's really present to me, like it's always there somehow, never very far from the surface, if that makes sense. I don't think I've ever even tried to describe it to anyone before. It's just such a little nothing. anyway, there were these two big, black dogs. Newfoundlands, maybe. I don't know whose dogs they were. Maybe they lived in my neighborhood, or maybe I just saw them in the park one time, I'm not sure. But there were two of them, and I can picture this sunny day and those trees – I don't know what kind they are – where the seedpods look sort of like little helicopters. That's what we used to call them. Anyhow, there were these two dogs and I can picture these great big ropes of saliva trailing from their mouths and the way that their mouths were red inside where their lips hung down. And I remember burying my face in their fur, by their necks. I can remember this sour smell, because I'm sure they weren't very clean, I'm sure those kinds of dogs are hard to wash. But it wasn't an unpleasant smell at all, and I buried my face in the fur and inhaled it. That's all. There were those two dogs, and the light coming through the leaves of the trees, I guess, and it was warm but with a breeze, and everything was slow. I don't know why, really, that particular thing is so vivid for me, why I remember that. It's just ... anyhow." He shook his head a little as if to rid himself of something that was bothering him and became aware of the camera again. Not that he'd forgotten it entirely – not really – but he was suddenly conscious of its staring eye, of its heavy physical presence. He shook his head again, stood, dusted off the seat of his pants, and departed.

8.

Strangely and gratifyingly, it turned out that no one else seemed to be quite as good at fishing as he and Sarge were. They all tried over the course of the next few days. Maybe no one else cared as much, and that was why they weren't as good, but the explanation didn't matter much to Fletcher anyway.

It was probably the fishing that accounted for the fact that Fletcher found himself less unhappy than he had been at first. On the other hand, most emotional states – bitterness included – require a certain amount of energy to maintain. Perhaps he just ran out of steam. Whatever was the cause, the sand in his ears bothered him less, he dreamed less about hot showers, and he began to think that the ocean, and sometimes even the jungle, was beautiful as well as immense and alienating.

Sometimes, when he was alone, he'd take the penny whistle that he'd rescued from his luggage out of his pocket and play a song or two. He liked the way it sounded among the trees, or on the beach – funny, out of place, comforting. The whistle was developing a rusty, salty patina, but it still played perfectly well.

He spent a lot of time fishing. For hours each day, he and Sarge would go out to the rocks and plunge, one after the other, into the water. Fletcher moved with more and more confidence. Once or twice, they even caught fish other than the little striped kind.

At one point, Fletcher asked Sarge about his nickname. "Were you really in the army – or in the armed forces?"

Sarge nodded. "The army, yes. I wasn't a sergeant, though."

"Really? I thought that you – that folks who were in the military were really sensitive about that sort of thing. About rank and stuff like that."

Sarge shrugged. "Some are. It doesn't really matter to me."

"Do you have a real name, then?" It was only after he said it that Fletcher realized what a silly question it had been.

"Let's just stick with Sarge, if it's all right with you. I think it works fine."

Once, when Sarge was staring out at the water, Fletcher asked him, "Do you like it here?"

He nodded, slowly. "Very much," he said, "I like it very much."

"Why?"

"I'm from Washington DC originally. There's a lot of people there. It's a crowded city. I've been in a lot of other crowded places. But it's not so much even the crowding – it's the ghosts. All those people who have lived there, they leave their ghosts behind. I'm not talking about their souls, but about the impressions they leave in the world. The vibrations they make, if you want to think of it that way. A city gets so thick with those vibrations that there's no where to go where other people aren't passing through you all the time. Here, very few people have lived. They haven't carved the landscape into the same kind of channels. In a city, you move in those channels made by those ghosts whether you like it or not – just like water running downhill. Here it's different. Here you can stretch yourself and move in your own ways."

It was during the days after he learned to fish and saw the stars for the first time that Fletcher lost track of time in earnest. It had already been very hard to track minutes or hours, but now he lost hold of how many days he'd been in that place. Apparently this malady was a collective one, because at some point one of them brought it up and a lively debate ensued over how long it had been since they'd arrived. The estimates were not radically different from one another, and several people agreed with each other individually, but there was no consensus on the issue. It was during these debates that they began by common consent to refer to the place that they were living as "the island." There was no evidence that it was, in fact, an island at all but the term stuck nonetheless.

The other thing that happened to Fletcher during that period was that he ran out of lip balm. He'd been addicted to it since he was a child, eight or nine years old, and used it so habitually that he was hardly even conscious of it. He had a way of pulling it out of his pocket, removing the lid, twisting the balm up, and applying it, all with one hand. He'd done this probably every hour or so of his waking life, if not more often, for more than twenty years. So you'd have thought that the one thing he'd have brought with him when he was going on an indefinitely long trip to an unknown place would have been a case of lip balm. But no, somehow he had brought only the one tube that had been in his pocket.

The twisting mechanism gave out first. It was always the first thing to go. Then he began to dig directly into the balm with the pad of a finger and apply it to his lips that way. When that no longer worked, he switched to using the nail of his pinky finger. At the very last, he ran that pinky nail around and around the plastic in the hopes of discovering some residue that was just not there.

Something terrible began to happen on his face. His lips were the driest, most horribly parched, loneliest patch in a vast desert. They had also swollen to several times their normal size. (Why did no one else seem to notice it? Why didn't they stare at his horrible disfigurement?) The corners of his mouth hurt. The area just below his lower lip hurt. It hurt to purse his lips or press them together (but he did it anyway, constantly, maybe hoping unconsciously that he could make them smaller or even make them go away altogether). At one point he tried furtively rubbing sand on them. For a few glorious minutes it actually seemed to help, but it was like scratching a mosquito bite or a chicken pock – in the end it only made matters worse. He had visions of lip balm farms, where they grew huge, luscious lip balm plants, or lip balm mines, where great, cool nuggets of the stuff were removed, glowing softly, from the living earth. When he could sleep, he dreamt of lip balm. It was very difficult to speak to anyone. He was tense and edgy.

Finally, one afternoon after he'd been out fishing, it was simply too much. He stood up, said something that he wasn't sure of to whoever was nearby, and stumbled off toward the woods. He didn't know exactly what he was doing, but he had the idea that perhaps out there somewhere he would find aloe. He wasn't sure what climatic conditions aloe plants grew in, or even exactly what they looked like, but he knew that aloe was an ingredient in various balms and he knew that he had to do something.

He entered the jungle at the point where the stream that they used for water came out. He didn't like to go very deep into the jungle at all, especially alone, and the stream seemed as if it might make things safer; in the depths of his lip-balm-less delirium, he thought of Hansel and Gretel and wanted to make sure he could find his way back home.

As he proceeded, the trees leaned in closer, gathering around him, and the stream found spots in which to form deeper pools. At first, there were rays of sunlight that stabbed down and shattered on the surface of the water. But after a while, no direct light penetrated any more. There was just a diffuse, green brightness through which the stream slid, silent and black.

His lips were huge. They were grotesque, like enormous inflatable rafts bulging out of his face. Inside, they were filled with something thick and ropey and heavy and the skin was stretched across this stuff like dry leather.

There were all sorts of plants growing along the banks, clinging to the trunks of trees, dangling from vines. Fletcher peered at them as he passed and even groped through them. Aloe? Aloe?

On and on he went, following the bends of the stream. Once or twice, he came to places where the streambed widened substantially and the water ran shallow between white stones. Here the water was no longer black and the trees above thinned a little so that you could almost breathe properly – or could if your lips weren't so swollen. Sometimes Fletcher clambered along the bank, sometimes he stepped from stone to stone, or waded through the water.

The leather on his face was drying and cracking. Perhaps the ropey stuff inside his lips was swelling even further. He was moving faster now, scanning the banks rapidly. What the fuck did aloe look like anyhow? How big did it grow in the wild? He wasn't sure. He'd only seen it as a houseplant, and he could barely remember that. Jesus. Was that it? That? That? What made him think that it even grew in the jungle at all? Wasn't it, in fact, maybe a desert plant?

His foot slipped, and he fell into the water, scraping his knee against a rock. He was on his hands and knees now, stumbling and shaking. His lips had stretched and swollen so much that he could feel their weight actually pulling him downwards and could hear the horrible cracking sounds they made as they split open. He began to grab and tear at the plants that were within his reach. He seized handfuls of fern and reeds and bits of tree bark. He was stumbling faster and faster. It was no use. No aloe. No relief. It was all over.

And then something broke inside him in earnest. There was no more thinking, or trying to understand, or even consciously yearning for relief. He flung himself headlong into the underbrush and began to roll and tear and grab. Whatever he could get his hands on – plant matter or no – he rubbed madly on his face. Grasses, bits of leaves, stems, dirt. He pushed his face into the foliage, against the ground, on the roots of trees, tore it back and forth. It was like being drunk: some part of his mind was conscious of the ridiculousness of his actions, knew how silly it was, knew that the fit would wear itself out and that he would not go mad or die of chapped lips. But that rational, objective observer within didn't matter, because the rest of him had been released. He would thrash and writhe. He would tear off all of his clothes and dash into the jungle. He would give in and become a beast. He began to yell. A gurgling, throaty call, like he imagined an animal in pain might make – a yelping, grinding, inarticulate protest against stupid, pointless suffering, against weakness, the wail of some dumb creature at war with its ridiculous fate.

Suddenly there was another noise nearby – the sound of something that wasn't him moving through the bushes. He stopped thrashing.

"Hey! Hey! Are you okay in there? Who is that?"

He sat up.

"Who's in there? Are you all right?"

He took a few swipes at his face, trying to clean it off, although his hands were probably dirty. He tried to smooth down his hair.

"Hey!" The foliage nearby parted and someone looked down at him. It was Bee. "Hey!" she said again, "Jesus! Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," he said.

"Christ! What's happening? What was that noise?"

"What noise?"

"You were yelling or crying or something. It scared the hell out of me."

"No. That wasn't me. I don't know what that was."

She looked at him for a moment in silence. He could see a small clot of dirt attached to one his own eyelashes.

"What are you – what are you doing?"

"Me?"

"Yes. What are you doing? Down there? In the ferns and everything?"

"Oh. I lost something."

"You lost something?"

"Yes. I lost something. In these ferns. I couldn't find it."

"Okay. You're sure you're all right?"

"Just fine. Thank you."

"Okay." For a moment she looked as if she was going to go, but then she hesitated. "Look. I'm actually kind of glad I ran into you, because I've been meaning to say 'thank you.' Thanks."

"For what?"

"For fishing. You know, for the fish. It's been great. Really."

"Oh. That. Well, you're welcome."

"Really. It's made a big difference. I was kind of going crazy and I feel a lot better now. So ... thanks." She smiled at him. Her eyes were very, very green. He had never noticed before.

"You're welcome. No problem."

She stood there for another few moments. "Well, I guess I should probably, you know, get going. Unless you want help finding it."

"What?"

"Whatever you lost in the ferns. Do you want help?"

"Oh, that. No, thanks. It – it really wasn't that important anyhow."

"Well, it was good to see you."

"Right. It was good to see you too."

She turned and left, the leaves closing after her. Fletcher just sat there. He wasn't thinking about his lips at all. He felt a weird sort of sustained electric shock, a kind of dazzle. He'd been wrong. He'd thought that he disliked Bee, but he'd been mistaken about that. Actually, it appeared that he was crazy about her.

The Fourth Part

1.

Some people are great lovers. Fletcher was a great unrequited lover.

It was a skill – or rather a mode of being – that he had cultivated since earliest childhood. His first great love had been Vanessa, a kindergarten beauty with explosive freckles and a red braid who despised him so completely that it was almost like she loved him. There had been Meghan, and Sarah, and Sunny and Shannon – the last two a pair of sisters over whom he'd pined over for a total of more than two years. Then, in middle school, there'd been Carla, who had hair like the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb, and Louise, who never seemed to look anyone in the eye, and a girl with the unfortunate name of Chastity. On it went – Lisa, Leslie, Una, Fiona – through high school, and college, and into adulthood.

He was democratic in his taste, as great lovers are. They had been short, tall, slender and curvy. They'd been of diverse ethnic backgrounds, religions, ideas, and tastes. He'd desired them for different reasons: the way that one tucked her hair behind her ear, the shape of another's shoulders, a crooked smile, a stutter. There had been one girl in college whom he'd loved almost exclusively because she was delightfully, gracefully knock-kneed and pigeon-toed.

How he had loved them! The heights of passion he had reached! In some ways you could say that Fletcher's unrequited love was more passionate than the requited variety; after all, it had to be self-sustaining -- he never had anyone else's ardor to feed off of. Indeed, many of those girls had hardly been aware of his existence.

His whole life story was the story of those loves. Up to a certain point, anyhow. Because, like all passions, his had seemed to cool. At some juncture – he couldn't remember exactly when – his ability to love in that way seemed to have left him. There began to be gaps in between the names, fewer women who inspired that ecstatic suffering. Fewer and fewer, and then, it seemed, none at all. It was sometime after that point that he had got married – and then, of course, divorced.

After that moment in the woods, with Bee, he knew that he could still love. How could he not have seen her properly before? How could he not have noticed those incredible, vibrantly green eyes? How could he have missed the charm of her skinny limbs and the way that she would sit on the sand, ankles crossed, arms wrapped around her knees, her right hand gently holding her left wrist? How had he spent those days not being enchanted by her laugh, which was warm and hearty and loud? How could he not have noticed all of her wonderful qualities?

But he noticed now. He positively drank them in. He watched her avidly, albeit generally from the corners of his eyes – it was a knack that great unrequited lovers cultivate. He developed a sense of where she was at all times, as if there were lines of force extending from his body and he could tell when she moved through them. He made excuses to be near her. He would join her and Nancy, say, when they went to get water from the stream. Then he would fall behind the pair of them, pausing to tie his shoe, as a test to see whether Bee would stop and wait for him, hoping that Nancy would continue walking and leave the two of them alone.

He talked to her as much as he could, without making himself too obvious, trying to collect as much knowledge as possible. He hoarded every scrap of information he could get, trying to assemble a complete portrait: she loved to read and to garden, she owned a dog, she played the flute, she rode a bike as much as possible. He listened most intently, of course, for the word "boyfriend" or "husband." She didn't wear a ring, but who knew about these things? He even tried as subtly as he could to coax such an admission from her, bringing the conversation in a general way to such topics. He was overjoyed that she said nothing to indicate that such a person existed in her life.

And he watched as closely as he could for any sign that she might share some of his feelings. Where did she sit at meal times? How did she talk to the others? Was it any different from the way that she talked to him? Were there any coded messages in her body language?

When he couldn't divine anything for sure, he switched quickly to old methods. Fletcher was not, most of the time, a superstitious person. He didn't believe in ghosts, or angels, or astrology, or ESP, or the Bermuda Triangle. But in matters of the heart, everything is different and, over and over again, he did things that were the equivalent of the ancient game of "She loves me, she loves me not." He'd count the steps that he took to reach a certain destination. If it was an odd number, she shared his feelings, an even number she didn't – or the other way around. But of course he couldn't keep from shortening or lengthening his stride in anticipation, hoping to make it come out right. He'd watch for bird signs, but he couldn't remember whether it was a bird flying right-to-left or left-to-right that was a good omen. When he fished, he would tell himself, if I spear this next one on this shot, it means she loves me. If he missed, or felt as if he might miss, he'd change his mind at the last minute: okay, not this one, the next one. It wasn't that he really thought that the outcome of some totally independent event, like spearing a fish, could actually affect Bee's emotional state. Not really.

He tried other means as well. He molded himself into what he thought she might like. Or at least, he tried to present himself in a favorable light. He spent time alone as conspicuously as possible. Once or twice, he even heaved a quiet sigh while she was near in the hopes that she might ask what the matter was, so that he could look into her eyes for a moment, then look away and say distantly, "Nothing ..."

And he fished a great deal, getting more and more successful at it. Fishing was the thing she'd thanked him for in the woods and, by bringing fish back to camp, he hoped to earn further praise.

And he fantasized the way only a great unrequited lover can. He would dwell, for example, on the scene of revelation, their mutual confession of attraction. Sometimes they would kiss for the first time unexpectedly. They would fall into each other's arms (Why? An earthquake, maybe? No, that was silly. Maybe he stumbled? Or rather, she stumbled – anyway) they would fall into each others arms, their eyes would lock for a second, they would feel each others skin and their lips would meet.

But just as often the first kiss would follow on some conversation. Something hesitant, vulnerable, shy. They would be on the beach together. Or better, by some waterfall in the jungle. There would be a great, deep pool of water at its foot, unbearably clear near the surface, fading to a heartbreaking blue beneath, wracked with silver ripples. In some versions, they would go swimming. She would dive off of the large rock that sometimes sat at the foot of the falls. Or he would dive off the rock. They would sit by the water, or walk near it.

"Bee," he would say, breaking the stillness, "there's something I want – I need to tell you."

"Yes?" she would almost whisper, suddenly vulnerable.

"These last few weeks here. I don't think I could have made it through them without you. I wanted to say thank you."

"Of course."

"And, I think, I think – I don't know how to say this ..."

"Yes?"

He would mix and match these pieces, building different scenarios. When he arrived on a combination that was particularly pleasing to him at that moment, he would play it over and over again with minor variations.

Some fantasies were even more outrageous. There were scenes that involved rescuing her from a various dangers. Drowning, often – it seemed convenient – but also snakes or other wild beasts, fires, boat wrecks, and even lightning. He liked the ones where he saved her from some other person or persons, although these were a little difficult to concoct without resorting to including pirates.

Maybe it was Big Rich. He'd insulted Bee for some reason. Fletcher would look him square in the eye. "You take that back," Fletcher would say, his voice icy.

"Fuck you, Fletcher."

Or better, "Fuck you, Haywood."

Fletcher's right fist would catch Big Rich in the jaw and he'd stagger. Or maybe Rich would swing first, Fletcher would step aside, catching him on the follow through and flinging him down face first.

Mike and the Blueshirts worked pretty well for Fletcher's purposes too. He'd imagine that he had to save Bee from them. Often, he would receive some mortal wound in the course of defending her. He would lie there in her arms, oozing blood, the light fading.

"Oh, Fletcher! What have you done?"

"It was ... nothing ..."

"Oh, god ..." her voice would break off. Tears would gleam in her eyes.

But then there was the problem of being dead, which would put an end to the fantasy. So better, by and large, if the injury was something grievous – life-threatening maybe, but not actually like-taking.

He would lie there, propped in her lap. The surf would run in around them. His face would be pale.

"Oh, Fletcher! What have you done?"

"It was ... nothing ..."

"Oh, god ..." her voice would break off. Tears would gleam in her eyes.

And on it went. Sometimes he would picture the two of them tangled together in a warm morning bed, lying there for hours as the sunlight slipped across the walls, laughing and embracing. It wasn't his own, actual bed (sunlight didn't slip across the walls of his own, actual bedroom in the necessary way). Maybe it was hers. The details were definitely hazy. At any rate, he made her laugh. In the evenings they drank wine and discussed books, and she loved him for his sharp mind as well as for his body. They were an admired and well-liked couple, dynamic and interesting, each with their own interests and lives, but sharing everything in their intimacy.

Sometimes Fletcher was left feeling a little exhausted and demoralized by all of these images. They began to seem frothy and anxious and made him a little sick to his stomach or lightheaded. Sometimes he thought he should stop, that he was driving himself crazy. And then, on the other hand, there was something wonderful about them as well, and something addictive.

2.

As part of his infatuation, Fletcher began to take longer trips into the jungle. This was partly in hopes of encountering Bee, as he had done that first day, and for that reason he often traveled along the little stream. But his wanderings also had to do with a genuine desire to be alone. He really was suffering in his longing for her, and his moodiness was enough to help him overcome some of his fear of the forest. It was still dark and strange, but in his current state darkness and strangeness held a certain degree of appeal.

His need for lip balm had faded after the furor of desire he'd experienced when it had first run out. It was remarkable, really. For a few hours after that crisis, maybe another day, he'd been intermittently tortured by his swollen lips, but having reached that extremity, his dependence faded quickly.

One day he ventured quite far up the little stream, further than he'd been the day he encountered Bee. The places where the stream spread itself out and became shallow made him think of high-ceilinged halls. In the narrow spots the water shot over rocks and dived into pools. Although it was still hot by the water, it did seem cooler than the rest of the jungle.

The plants were astonishing. Impossible-looking trees dipped their tangled roots in the dark water. Vines were knotted thickly overhead. There were bright explosions of fungus, and nearly every surface seemed to be covered in fine, wet moss. As he'd noticed before, it was all somehow a little more active than he usually expected vegetation to be.

He didn't encounter any animal life except for a huge insect resting on a log. He jumped when he first saw it, but it didn't move. He bent closer. It was nearly as long as his hand and had a green carapace covered in little red knobs. It only waved its feelers at him and rubbed its front legs slowly together.

After a while, he began to come across tributary streams, oozing or splashing their way into the main channel. And then he came to a place where two channels of very nearly equal size joined one another. He stood there, wondering which way to go. It occurred to him that the little stream almost undoubtedly didn't have a name, that it probably didn't exist on any maps and that perhaps he was the only human being ever to have set foot in that particular place. In fact, it seemed quite likely that he was the only human ever to have stood just exactly there, especially given that no cameras had followed him today. The idea was rather thrilling. It made him feel like an adventurer.

For no particular reason, he chose to follow the right-hand branch. The stream continued for a while in much the same way as before. But then came a place where it changed dramatically. He must, of course, have been headed uphill this whole time, but here was a spot where the ground shot steeply upward. The water fell down a face of exposed stone, perhaps fifteen feet high. It skipped off the planes of the rock, breaking into a fine spray. Fletcher had to deviate a little leftwards from the stream itself in order to scramble up, but scramble he did, after hardly any hesitation, and he reached the top of the little rise with only a few minor scrapes.

Only he found that was not really the top at all. There was another rock face down which the water ran, and another steep rise. This one looked scalable too, this time to the right of the stream.

There was another plateau and another rise, and another one past that. Sometimes Fletcher could hike up, sometimes he had to clamber, using rocks and vines and tree branches as handholds. He must have gained quite a bit of altitude in fairly short order. He found himself breathing hard from the exertion, but it felt good to be moving.

At the top of the fourth rise was a narrow cleft between two rocks. He had to squeeze and twist himself to get through it.

Past the rocks, there was something surprising. A series of surprising somethings, actually. For the most part the jungle was painted with a palette of astonishingly diverse greens, more different shades of green than Fletcher had ever thought could exist. But there were exceptions: the waxy yellows and reds of certain leaves (or possibly flowers -- it was sometimes hard to distinguish the two); the lurid oranges and strangely fluorescent grays of patches of fungus. However, Fletcher had not seen anything quite like what he saw on the other side of that cleft. He emerged from between the two rocks to find himself completely enclosed by the branches of a single tree. The trunk was nearby. It spread outwards as it went up, and the branches themselves hung down like those of a weeping willow, although that's certainly not exactly what this tree was. Every draping branch was studded with flowers. These were no daisies or roses either, nothing like a flower that you might find in a shop or find set primly along a garden path, nothing that had been bred and cultivated to suit human tastes. Each flower was about six inches long. Their bases were tube-like, which meant that at the center of each one there was a deep hole. Around these holes, the petals were velvety purple, the way that midnight is supposed to be but isn't. Away from the center, they became a lustrous orange, still flecked with dark spots, and beyond that, startlingly white. The edges of the petals were elaborately ruffled, but not like lace – more like the hood of some lizard. From the middle of each blossom hung two improbably long appendages, like horns, that curved up at the ends. The flowers looked like something out of a science fiction story: highly unlikely, and as if they might come alive and try to eat you. They were also very clearly sexual, almost pornographic. What they were most plainly was wild, and they brought home to him in an instant the foreignness of this place. But even "foreignness" was wrong; "alienness" might be better. He wandered, dazed, pushing aside the trees' branches with his hands.

After a few moments, the next surprising thing occurred. It started as a blaze of light. He had been in the jungle for long enough that his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, and when he brushed aside the last branch and emerged into the sunlight, he was nearly blinded. He blinked away tears and found that he was standing on a rocky outcropping, looking, for the first time, at the island from above. The tops of the trees spread out before him, so thick and continuous that it looked as if he ought to be able to walk across them. Above the trees, the air wavered a little with the heat. Beyond the forest was the water. From where he stood, the beach was obscured by trees. The spot where he was perched was part of a series of ridges that stretched away to the left and the right, building up toward the inland mountains that he had seen from the boat. He could see, way off to his left, a series of smaller islands thrusting up out of the water.

It was an astonishing view, and he stood looking at it for quite some time. It struck him that he was sitting on top of a huge mountain, only the very peak of which emerged from the ocean. The idea seemed more real in that spot than it did in a textbook. That made him think about what a tremendous volume of water he was looking at. On and on and on, it went. Somewhere, out at the other edge of that huge thing, there were piers and boardwalks and crowds and towels and sandcastles and the smell of sunscreen. The very same water that he was looking at touched those distant beaches. And beyond those beaches, somewhere, was his life: his apartment, his job, his friends, his ex-wife. It made him feel very small and sort of insubstantial, as if he might spontaneously drift apart.

He shook himself a little, but the feeling didn't go away. He leant back against one of the rocks, knocked off of his feet by the immensity. Almost unconsciously, he reached into his pocket, pulled out the two pieces of the penny whistle, and fitted them together. He put the end into his mouth, gripping it lightly with his teeth, and began to blow. The tune that came out was a sad one: "The Shoals of Herring." It sounded especially plaintive drifting out over the endless treetops.

Fletcher held the last note for a long time. Then, just as he was parting his lips to remove the whistle, another surprising thing happened: he heard the tune coming back to him. There was no mistaking the sound for an echo. Somewhere out there, someone or something was whistling the tune that he had just played. The hairs on Fletcher's arms stood up in a tiny wave.

Though it was very hard to place, he felt somehow that the sound was coming from behind him, and he half-stood and looked over his shoulder. From where he was, he could see quite a ways up, especially to his left, where there was a steep valley or ravine.

He couldn't be sure, but now that he was looking up the ravine, he thought that he could see something strange. It was hard to tell, because it was quite a distance away and covered in foliage, but actually he was almost certain that there was something up there that was just a little too regular. Yes. It had to be. Didn't it? It was a building of some kind, a structure. Something that was certainly made by human beings. It looked like a tower, maybe, clinging to the face of the cliff. A ruin of some kind, nearly swallowed by the jungle, but still visible.

Weren't there certain kinds of rocks that were naturally very angular, that looked built? Even though he couldn't be sure, the thought that the thing might be the ruins of something manmade sent a little thrill through him. It came from the depths of his digestive tract and it felt something like fear, but also like a kind of excitement.

The last notes of the song sounded out of the emptiness, just as he had played them a minute before, and then there was silence.

3.

If Fletcher had been planning to tell anyone what he'd seen and heard when he got back to camp, he forgot about it when he arrived, because there was a dramatic scene in progress. The two Riches had kept themselves busy since they had arrived on the island working on the camp shelter. It was already fully functional as a sleeping platform, and had a covering made of blue cloth and leaves, but Big Rich and Little Rich had occupied themselves for the last few days with building a sort of addition to it. The addition was raised a few feet higher, on posts, and climbed toward the trees. Fletcher had been absorbed in thinking about Bee, and so he had not paid a great deal of attention, but he had the impression that they had concocted a plan to build a multi-level tree house of some kind – a bit like what Fletcher imagined Robinson Crusoe living in. The two of them argued over the plans, but they also bragged to the others and seemed quite proud of the progress they were making. They spent nearly every waking moment together, working on it. When Fletcher walked onto the beach, it was clear that some kind of minor disaster had occurred. The addition had entirely collapsed. It was nothing but a lopsided jumble of broken wood.

The two Riches were facing one another in the phermonally charged posture of young bucks about to lock horns. Several of the others were gathered around making calming sorts of gestures, holding the two Riches back. Naturally, the cameras hovered close.

"I told him," one of them was nearly shouting, "I told him it wasn't going to fucking hold! But everything has got to be his fucking way!"

"Bullshit!" the other was yelling back at the same time, "He doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. It's pathetic! The jerkoff!"

On they went, in the same vein. It was more or less impossible to make out what either was actually accusing the other of. Meanwhile, the others were saying things meant to reassure or placate: "Calm down!" "It's cool, man." "It's okay." "Stop being idiots!"

Fletcher came in quite close – it was hard not to. Part of him wanted to stay away, though. The atmosphere in the little circle felt unstable, unpredictable. Fletcher had never been in a physical fight. He'd never even really seen one up close. But once or twice he'd been in a situation like this, where it felt as if a real fight might erupt. There was something chemical about it, a kind of smell that made him uneasy.

Wanting to do something helpful, he joined in the chorus: "Hey guys, just calm down," but his voice was drowned out.

"Get your hands off me, man!" said one of the Riches, pushing Nesploy, who was trying to get a hold on him.

Fletcher had been there less than a minute, and he was just thinking that the phermonal charge might be starting to dissipate, when things exploded.

"Jesus!" someone yelled.

They had gone for one another. Or one of them had gone, and the other had responded. Now they were flailing around, half wrestling, swinging their arms. It wasn't like fights in the movies – less loud and a lot less clear, but more frightening.

It was Nesploy and Rex and Sarge that managed to pull the two of them apart, though everyone tried to do something to help, even if it was just yelling encouragement to the pacifiers.

Bee was in between the two of them now as well, yelling, "Don't be so goddamn ridiculous! Jesus! Grow up! You're not impressing anybody!"

It seemed to be her intervention as much as the men physically holding the two apart that brought things to a close. The atmosphere had changed. Even Fletcher understood somehow that the thing was over: Rich and Rich kept grumbling, but the energy had left it.

"Hey everybody!" someone called.

It took a moment for the call to register.

Again, "Hey everybody!" It was Prosperity. "Look at this."

She was standing a few yards away from the rest of them. While the excitement was going on, one of the Blueshirts must have planted the thing there without anyone noticing: another stake in the sand with another piece of parchment impaled on it reading, "Be ready to leave in one hour."

There was no morning mist this time, so they could see the boat when it pulled into the cove. Out came the rubber rafts, which met Fletcher and the others in the water and ferried them out to the speedboat.

The water had different moods: its colors ranged from copper through emerald to murky gray; sometimes it was frothy and agitated and sometimes there was an underlying stillness to it that seemed to belie the actual movement of the waves. Today, as they moved over it, it was a blue that you only see in photographs and its surface shone like shards of glass. The two Riches weren't speaking to one another. Fletcher had replayed the scene from the beach a number of times in his head, each time trying to imagine a more prominent role for himself. Why hadn't he been the one to break up the fight? Now that it was no longer happening, it didn't sound like such a scary idea. He could have waded in there. Maybe he would have got hit, but that might have provoked some sympathy from Bee. He could feel her presence a few feet away, and let his eyes move across her several times.

They arrived at their destination at nearly the same time as the boat carrying the members of the other clan, and were unloaded onto the beach with them. This beach was broad and fine-grained, the yellow of a ripe fruit. A stream ran across it, considerably wider than the drinking stream near Clan Itzli's beach. It was up this stream, on opposite sides, that the two clans were led. As they moved inland, the streambed became deeper – or the land rose up around it – until the stream could almost be called a river. Some two or three hundred yards from the beach, there was a clearing on either side of this river, and in the middle of the clearing a log had been lain from bank to bank. The upper surface of the log had been carved flat, evidently with axes rather than with an electric saw, because you could see the marks of the blades. There were cameras on both sides of the river, and the queen insect sat near the log, her eye suspended on the end of its long boom.

Mike walked out onto the middle of the log, which was some fifteen or so feet long and perhaps two feet wide. He beckoned the members of the two clans close. On either end of the log, lying on the ground, were two poles about as long as Fletcher was tall, with great wads of padding on either end.

"Welcome to your new task! This time it's simple. One member from each clan will walk onto this log and attempt to get to the other side. You'll be armed with these." Here he indicated the padded poles. "The person who is knocked or forced off the log loses the match. There will be nine matches. The clan that wins the majority of the matches gets a reward. The clan that loses has to exile one of its own. Clan Itzli, you have ten members remaining. That means you need to choose one of your members to sit this task out. Opponents will be chosen and order will be determined by drawing lots. Does everyone understand the rules?"

Fletcher had paid attention this time and he understood. But he didn't like it very much. First of all, there was the look of the clan on the opposite bank. He hadn't seen them for days now, and they all looked sort of lean and vicious. It was something about the expressions on their faces, or maybe the way that they stood. He'd certainly never actually seen a pack of ravenous wolves, but he imagined that a pack of ravenous wolves would look something like that.

Then there was the idea of being hit with one of those sticks, as well as the whole physical aspect of the game. Fletcher had never been much good at that sort of thing. For a brief period during his youth he had played little league baseball. The theory had been that he would learn teamwork and fair play and other important values. What he had in fact learned was that if cream rises to the top there must be something much less desirable than cream that sinks to the bottom. He'd also honed a very reasonable fear of things being thrown at him. He remembered long stretches of boredom punctuated by spikes of anxiety in the outfield. He remembered lots of parents yelling agitated instructions at him from the stands. Most of all, though, he remembered going up to bat. Each time he'd been up had been a moment of perfectly distilled shame and fear and misery. His stomach would start to hurt long before he got anywhere near the plate. Everyone would stare at him. The whole game was focused on that one moment. And he would always screw up. No matter how many times his father or his coaches or other parents admonished him to keep his eye on the ball, he couldn't do it. He never got a single hit.

As soon as he realized what the upcoming test was to be, that same exact little league sensation began to disturb his digestive tract. He hadn't felt that precise thing in years, but he knew it immediately: an awful tightness in his stomach and esophagus and a just as awful warm looseness in his lower intestine.

"Well, who should sit this out?" asked Sarge.

It was a terrible little dilemma. How relieved Fletcher would be not to have to do this, and how utterly humiliated he would be to be chosen not to do this.

No one spoke for a moment. They didn't seem to want to look each other in the eyes either. Fletcher couldn't have said anything if he'd wanted to – he might actually have choked if he'd tried – but it was Nancy who broke the silence. "I don't mind being the one. If no one else wants to, I mean."

This option was quickly settled on, not by being put to a vote, but in the way that these things are generally decided: one or two people say yes loudly enough and no one dissents.

Having informed Mike of their decision, the members of Clan Itzli filed forward and each took a tile from a sack, as they had done the last time they met for a task. Fletcher drew the number six.

There was a while to wait before the action got underway. The Blueshirts had to make various preparations for shooting; one of them was powdering Mike's face. Time to wait meant time for Fletcher's guts to stew. They felt fermented. The others talked to one another, speculating about who they'd be facing.

Sarge had drawn the number one tile and after a while he was called up. Chet – the older, handsome fellow who thought of himself as the father of Clan Coatl – approached from the other side of the little river. Each of them was outfitted with a padded helmet and gloves, like a wrestler or a martial artist might wear; Sarge's were blue and Chet's yellow.

Mike, who now stood on the same side of the bank as Clan Itzli, called out, "Go!"

Sarge and Chet, each holding one of the padded poles, stepped onto the log. On the surface of things, Chet looked as if he should have the advantage: he was younger by a few years, and considerably less rotund. But Fletcher knew better than to take this match-up at face value: he'd seen Sarge move.

It was Chet that took the first swing. A little tentative, perhaps, and Sarge parried it easily and swung in turn. The poles made a wet, beefy sound when they connected. There were a few more exploratory blows and then the two began to swing in earnest. Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!

"Go, Sarge!" someone yelled at Fletcher's elbow, and there were corresponding cries of "Go, Chet!" from across the river.

They swung and shoved, using their bodies as much as the poles. Then Sarge got a blow past Chet's guard – a great, thick sort of wallop across his left shoulder and the side of his head. He stumbled a little, which there wasn't much room for. Sarge pressed toward him, swinging again and again. They came apart for a moment and Chet aimed a swipe at Sarge's ankles. But Sarge, shockingly nimble, danced out of the way, Chet's own momentum rocked him off balance, and Sarge used the padded end of the pole to finish the job, planting it on Chet's chest and shoving him off the log.

He hit the water with a loud fleshy slap. Fletcher found himself cheering along with the rest of the people nearby. Sarge walked over to the other side of the river and, after a few moments, Chet dragged himself up onto the near bank. He found a spot to sit by himself.

The pads and poles were retrieved and put back in their original places, and it was Bee's turn to fight Len. Len looked thinner than he had on the plane, certainly, but he seemed to be in good spirits. He bounced on the balls of his feet and grinned from inside his padded helmet. Fletcher was distracted from his own anxiety for a bit as he watched Bee. What did he want to happen out there? It was a little complicated. He wanted his own clan to win, to be sure. And if they won five straight matches, he probably wouldn't even have to fight. But there was some part of him that wanted Bee to lose. So that he could console her? So that he could feel superior to her? He didn't have the wherewithal to answer those questions.

They came out swinging hard right away this time. Their match lasted longer than the first one had. One of them would gain the advantage for a while, pushing the other back, but the second party was always able to reply. Finally Bee got under his guard and lunged low, wrapping her right arm around Len's thighs. With a shove and a lift, she sent him pitching sideways into the water, though she couldn't help following him in moments afterwards.

"Bee wins!" called Mike, and both of the combatants emerged a few moments later, spluttering, on either side of the river, joining their two clanmates.

Rex was next, versus a guy named Clancy that Fletcher felt as if he didn't even recognize. Rex really was a substantial block of a man, and Clancy was no more than average-sized. It was over quickly. Clancy got in a few blows, but Rex was able to overwhelm him, more or less pushing him off the log.

Fletcher cheered. Maybe he wouldn't have to fight at all.

The fourth match was Little Rich against Claire. She was compact and hard-looking, but Little Rich was confident. He actually laughed when he saw who he'd be facing. "I'm gonna take this poor girl down," he said as he was getting up. "She won't know what hit her. You should feel sorry for her."

It wasn't that simple, though. Claire fought hard. She was quicker than Little Rich, too, and got in a lot more blows than he did. She couldn't knock him off the log outright, but she came near to it. Little Rich swung harder and harder, trying to use his height advantage to come at her from above. Then, managing to push her back for a second, he lunged with his whole body and grabbed her around the shoulders in a sort of a wrestling move, still holding on to his own pole. They were locked together for a few moments, rocking back and forth. Then he jerked away forcefully, and his intention became clear: he'd managed to grab hold of her pole and with a powerful jerk he pulled it out of her hands and threw it aside into the water. Then he unleashed himself on her. He brought blow after blow down on her head and shoulders. Fletcher could actually see shock waves run up the pole with each hit. Claire stepped backwards, but she kept her fists tucked up on either side of her head and, though she rocked back and forth, she didn't fall.

"Hey," said Prosperity from somewhere near at hand. "Hey, isn't she like a kick-boxing instructor or something?" No one answered. "Seriously. I remember talking to her back in the airport. I think she is."

Little Rich began to batter the ribs that Claire had left exposed while protecting her head. This proved to be a mistake. Quicker than thinking, just as the padded end of the pole caught her in the side, she whipped her right arm down and caught the pole underneath it. They had twisted slightly on the log and from where Fletcher was sitting he could clearly see the look of shock on Little Rich's face. And when her left fist shot out into the center of Little Rich's chest, Fletcher could see Little Rich's eyes pop open almost comically. He staggered back as she released the pole from under her arm. One, two – right, left – she punched again, catching him on either side of his head, and off Little Rich went, toppling into the water.

The members of Clan Coatl, who up to that point had been looking like a very downhearted pack of ravenous wolves, cheered uproariously, jumping to their feet, as Claire walked the rest of the way across the log, shaking out her shoulders.

It took a couple of Blueshirts several minutes to fish the poles out of the river. They also fished out Rich, who was spitting water and yelling something incoherent, pointing back at Claire. Apparently there weren't any rules against punching, however, and at any rate he had been the one to steal her pole; after a few minutes he left off and went to sit sulkily by Sarge and Bee.

Up until that point, Fletcher had been holding on to the hope that perhaps the game would be over in five rounds, a hope which had raised his heart a little. It fell now, and it hurt when it collided with the material underneath.

It was Prosperity's turn. She was to fight a woman named Rosa, who was perhaps in her mid-forties. Fletcher vaguely remembered hearing at some point that Rosa was a doctor or a nurse or something.

"I don't really want to," said Prosperity. She looked, as always, as if she were on the verge of tears. The little sores all over her face glittered brightly. "I feel bad about this."

"It's all right," said Big Rich, "Go get her. It's fine."

Reluctantly, Prosperity was outfitted with her headgear and gloves.

"Go!"

They picked up the poles. Fletcher began to feel sort of watery and unreal. He was up after this. It went fast. Or rather, it seemed to proceed in strange, jerky fits and starts, speeding up and slowing down as if he were watching a badly degraded film. Prosperity looked genuinely reluctant to hit the woman at first. She defended herself, and she took a few swings, but without any real ferocity. Fletcher could feel people around him roaring at her, though he found he couldn't join in.

Fortunately for Prosperity, the other woman just didn't seem to be that good. A lot of her shots missed Prosperity altogether. With a few good, solid blows, Prosperity ought to be able to win it. But, as she advanced a couple of steps, she must have caught her foot on something because suddenly her arms shot straight out from her sides and began to execute perfect little flailing circles in the air just like the arms of a cartoon character; she hung for a moment or two on the edge of gravity and then she pitched off the edge of the log.

The world was peculiarly silent as Fletcher stood up. Actually, people around him were saying things, probably even encouraging things, but all he could hear was the whoosh of his own blood passing through his ears. Everything seemed strangely distant, as well, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Across the river, one of the members of Clan Cloatl had gotten up as well. It was the man named Fortunato. He was tall and lean and fierce-looking, with shaggy hair and whiskers; the wolfiest and most ravenous of them all.

Someone helped fit the padded helmet onto Fletcher's head and pulled the gloves onto his hands. The gloves were padded on the outside, but on the inside were attached only by straps, so that when he picked up the pole he could feel that it was covered in duct tape, which must have been how the wads of stuffing were attached to the ends.

"Go!" called Mike, from another world, and Fletcher stepped out onto the log.

His palms were slippery and his mouth was dry. In nerve-wracking situations, his body always seemed to produce moisture in the least useful places. Fortunato was creeping onto the other end of the log. He seemed to give Fletcher a shaggy nod and Fletcher thought maybe he nodded back.

Closer, closer – and then Fortunato struck. A sturdy shot, coming in from Fletcher's left. It was going to hurt. He swung blindly in the direction of the incoming blow, and very much to his surprise, found that his own pole was in the way, catching the other pole before it made contact with him. The strike was still jarring – he could feel the vibrations travel through the stick he was holding and up his arms – and he took a step backwards.

Another shot came spinning in from the other direction, but again, maybe because of some natural back and forth motion that his own staff made, he caught this one before it hit him as well, taking another step backwards.

The blows kept coming. Fletcher kept blocking them, kept being forced back. Fortunato seemed to be closing down on him from above, carrying him backwards like a force of nature, an unstoppable gust of wind, a hurricane. Fletcher was going to fall down, he would be pushed, he would be tossed away in a few seconds by that wind. The footing was tricky, he knew he might go toppling at any moment, the force of the blows was jarring and uncomfortable, but more than anything he felt simple humiliation. It stung in his cheeks and his eyes – that same old feeling of bottomless, angry self-pity, of being up to bat in Little League, of knowing that he would once again fail.

There were distorted waves of sound, yelling from the distance, muffled by his helmet and his blood and his shame. He couldn't see anything other than that huge wolf bearing down on him. The world was nothing but boom and crash and spin and jar and thunder. But in the midst of all that chaos, Fletcher became aware of a thought: he hadn't fallen yet. True, he was backing up, but he was blocking Fortunato's blows. And he hadn't taken a shot yet himself. He needed to swing.

Hum batter, hum batter, that's right batter. Swing batter!

It was probably only the fact that Fortunato wasn't expecting the attack, having been in total command thus far, that allowed Fletcher's blow to find its way through. But through it went, right down on Fortunato's forehead. Fortunato staggered backwards.

Fletcher was nearly as surprised as Fortunato, and it took him a moment to realize what had happened. There was yelling, and he could hear it now, clear and sharp: "Go, Fletcher!"

Hum batter! Swing batter!

Fortunato must still have been dazed from that first shot, because he barely fought back, and Fletcher's blows kept getting through. He struck wildly: head, ribs, legs, arms, whatever he could get at. That great big wolf seemed to have shrunk.

Swing batter!

The momentum was Fletcher's now. He was forcing Fortunato backwards. He was winning! It was exhilarating. It was almost fun. His swings began to feel natural. The pole sat comfortably in his hands. He was finding a rhythm.

Hum batter, swing batter!

Fletcher hammered away. Fortunato kept trying to right himself, trying to take charge again, but he couldn't. Fletcher was an artist. He was a dancer. The pole sang in his hands.

Hum batter!

It was time to finish it now. He could sense Fortunato's weakness. It was time for the killing blow.

Keep.

Your.

Eye.

On.

The.

BALL!

Fletcher swung, low and hard, from his right. The blow connected with Fortunato's staff. Fortunato teetered. A glorious feeling swelled to life in Fletcher's chest: the feeling of victory.

For another moment or two, Fortunato was off balance. He was going to fall. But he didn't. Somehow he caught himself, stayed on the log, and pushed back against Fletcher's pole where it still rested against his own. Fletcher must have over-extended himself on that last strike. His feet were no longer properly underneath him. He stumbled. Fortunato raised his staff. There were the combined sounds of a lump of wet clay being dropped to the ground and a high-pitched ring as the wad of padding connected with Fletcher's head. He was aware of those sounds rather than of any sensation of pain. Then another blow connected with his right ear and a corresponding one with his left. It wasn't so much painful as profoundly disconcerting and uncomfortable. He couldn't raise his arms. Again he heard the sounds and felt the world shake, and it was sort of a relief when his legs gave way and the sensation in his head stopped.

The water was cold and bright and underneath it everything was silent. His body was turning and tumbling in slow motion, past light and shadow, for what seemed like a good long time, and then he was above the surface again, choking and spluttering. Hands were gripping his and pulling him up. Once on shore, he collapsed onto all fours and let the water pour stringily from his nose. He'd lost.

People were helping him over to where the others sat. Sarge was patting him about the shoulders, telling him it was all right. Shame was pulsing through him: it was as if he had some shame gland, some part of his endocrine system whose sole job it was to produce chemicals that made him feel small and worthless, and those chemicals were being pumped all over his body. He could feel it in his armpits and groin and behind his knees, like a hot swelling. It only made it worse when he happened to make eye contact with Bee and she gave him a reassuring sort of smile.

The next contest was Nesploy versus Sinead. For the first time, as he sat there watching, Fletcher thought of what would happen after this was over – after this whole thing was over – about the fact that, in the end, there would be millions of people watching what had just happened. Maybe the shame wasn't so much a glandular product as it was a great solid lump in the pit of his stomach that kept giving off alternating waves of heat and cold.

Nesploy won, rather handily, and arrived smiling, looking a little embarrassed. Fletcher managed to smile back, but his face felt unnaturally brittle as he did it. At least they were ahead now. If they won, his own defeat would be less noticeable.

The next to fight were Lucy and Bethany. Bethany was the girl with the tattoos that Fletcher had noticed in the airport (it seemed like so long ago now); she came at Lucy hard. Now that Fletcher knew what it felt like, he particularly didn't care to see that buffeting happening to someone whom he liked. Lucy never seemed to find her footing and it wasn't long before the game was again tied, four to four.

Lucy was upset when she sat down. "I'm sorry – I don't know what happened. I just – I guess I panicked or something. I'm sorry."

They consoled her, patted her on the shoulders, told her it was okay. Even though he wanted the clan to win, secretly Fletcher was pleased: it was good to have Lucy in the same boat as him.

Only Big Rich and Ben were left to fight. In the abstract, it would have been hard for Fletcher to say which one he wanted to win. Big Rich had never done anything unpleasant to Fletcher personally, but as he sat there in a pool of his own bile, it seemed to Fletcher that Big Rich epitomized everything he hated and at the same time envied in other men. Big Rich was athletic, easy-going, handsome, and (Fletcher had to confess it) charismatic. Okay, perhaps Big Rich wasn't that smart – Fletcher wasn't even sure. And what did that matter anyway? He was sure that Big Rich didn't wish he was someone else. He was the kind of guy who moved through the world with blithe confidence, never questioning whether he was right. When things did go wrong for Big Rich, Fletcher was certain that Big Rich didn't waste time agonizing over whether it was his fault. He would really like to see Big Rich lose. On the other hand, it looked from a distance like Ben was just another version of the same guy. He was even better-looking than Big Rich, with very dark skin and strong features. His chest and back were almost super-human looking, with muscles that stood out in a way that you almost never see in real life. Fletcher had not once seen him with a shirt on since they'd come to the island. So, given that he, Fletcher, had a material stake in Big Rich's victory, he didn't really have much choice but to root for him. His heart wasn't in it, though.

The two of them were on the log and swinging. People around Fletcher were yelling.

"Get him!"

"Go Rich!"

"You can do it!"

Fletcher glanced at Bee. Her profile made him want to weep.

It was hard to tell who had the advantage in the fight. They looked as if they were swinging very hard, and Fletcher could hear grunting.

"Come on, Big Rich!"

"You got him!"

"Do it!"

The two men locked together, their poles pressed against one another. They seemed to be staring each other right in the eye. You could see them straining against one another. They were pushing as hard as they could.

Suddenly it was over. Fletcher couldn't tell exactly what had happened. It was almost as if Ben had just given up, as if he had stepped back and deliberately toppled off the log. Big Rich took a couple of lumbering steps forward, looking off balance. For a second it looked as if he was going to fall as well, but he caught himself. Then he was running the rest of the way across the log, holding the stick up over his head, whooping in triumph.

The members of Clan Itzli leapt to their feet ran and forward to meet him. Fletcher was toward the back, but moving with the others. They were all wrapping their arms around Big Rich, whooping along with him, slapping each other. Fletcher was on the outside edges of the huddle. He tried to catch an arm or two, high five someone, hug someone. He caught sight of Bee with her arms wrapped around someone else. Mike was closing in on them, along with several of the cameras.

"Clan Itzli wins! Congratulations! Well fought! Tonight ... you get your reward!"

They cheered. They raised their fists in the air. Before they departed, Fletcher took a look across the river at the other clan. They looked shattered. Ben was shaking his head slowly, as if in disbelief. They were holding on to each other. They still looked like animals, but perhaps not hungry wolves.

4.

Before they could have their reward, there was a clan meeting to attend. The ritual was the same as last time: after nightfall came the flaring torches, the boat ride over dark water, the hoods and masks, the strange music.

You might have expected it all to have had less of an effect on Fletcher the second time around. In fact, if anything, the reverse was true. It seemed less overdone, or at least somehow more strange and threatening. He kept running his hands over the stone he was sitting on and staring at it. It was not like the other stone structures that he'd encountered on the island, which had been roughly hewn and more or less gray. This stuff was polished until it almost glowed, especially in the firelight. And it appeared to be almost black, though its exact color was difficult to determine. It was carved in very large blocks, too – improbably large. The first time he'd been there, he'd thought that it was structure built by the Blueshirts themselves, but now he wasn't so certain. Surely they wouldn't have built anything quite this elaborate just for the show. He thought of the thing that he'd seen or imagined seeing up on the mountainside when he'd been playing his penny whistle. But if the Blueshirts hadn't built, then who had? And for what? And where were they?

He watched the figure above the doorway, thinking about how it had seemed as if Mike had bowed to it the last time he was there. The idea made his flesh crawl a little. The figure sat very still – so still that Fletcher wondered whether there was anyone inside those robes.

He stole glances at Bee too. She sat in the row in front of him. Her hair was tucked behind the ear that was visible. It seemed as if the folds of that ear couldn't possibly be more elegant.

He didn't pay close attention to what the members of the other clan were saying. They said the same sorts of things as before, though it seemed to him as if there was even more of an edge of desperation to their pleas. In the end, they voted for Rosa. She'd beaten Prosperity on the log, but it had only been because of Prosperity's mistake.

She was actually trembling a little as she held her little straw doll out over the fire. It twisted in the flames. Fletcher thought he could smell something sweet as it burned. And then, as before, two of the hooded figures descended upon Rosa, gathered her up, and almost carried her through the dark archway.

On the way out of the amphitheater, Fletcher tried to look back over his shoulder to see whether Mike repeated the bow of last time, but Rex's big form was in his line of vision.

When they arrived at their own beach, they found their reward waiting. It was a feast. There were troughs of potato and pasta salads with metal spoons shoved into them. There were heaps of bread and plates of cheese. There were grilled meats of all descriptions, shellfish, lobster tails. All of it was spread out across two folding tables covered in white tablecloths. But perhaps the most exciting thing was –

"Beer!" called out one of the Riches. And indeed there was a keg in a trash can filled with ice, with a hand-pump mounted on top, just like you'd see at a college party.

They slapped each other on the back and hugged. Someone began to pass around plastic cups full of beer. They toasted: "To Clan Itzli!"

And then they went for the food. My god, did they gorge themselves! It was like nothing Fletcher had ever seen before. After the sparse diet he'd been living on since they'd arrived, the food was almost too rich. It made him feel a little bilious, and yet he couldn't stop himself. The cameras hovered in the darkness, their eyes glinting in the light of the fire that the Blueshirts must have made while they'd been gone. Just as the eating was slowing, Prosperity made another discovery: a crate of liquor on the ground next to one of the tables.

"Woohoo!" someone cried. "Tequila!"

Fletcher found a cup in his hand.

"Drink up!" said Lucy, raising her own glass in a toast.

The liquor burned as it went down. After a while, they all settled in around the fire. Fletcher found himself suddenly in an excellent mood. The food felt great, the liquor felt great, and right at that moment he liked everyone around him heartily. His good will even extended to the anonymous people behind the cameras.

"Did you see the one with the pirates?" Lucy was asking one of the Riches.

"Pirates?"

"Yeah. Seriously. They had everybody dress up as like pirates. They lived on a ship and everything and when they kicked someone off the show, they had to walk the plank."

"Seriously?"

"Yes."

"That's fucking awesome."

"There was one that took place like it was Victorian England," said Prosperity. "Or maybe it was Elizabethan England. I can never tell the difference. Anyway, everyone had sort of like social roles, you know?"

"Social roles?"

"Yeah, like some of them were servants and some of them were masters or whatever. There was the poor cousin living on the estate and stuff like that. And they all kind of got into it, you know? Like, the servants got resentful and the masters just got drunk all day and started to think that the servants ought to be serving them. The only part I really remember is that they took baths in the same water. One after another. And they had their clothes on. But the bathing went in, like, order of social rank, where the most important people got to use the water first."

"Gross!"

"I like the ones where they do challenges and shit, or the boxing ones," said a Rich. "Or the ones where they're all chained together and they have to eliminate the people they don't like. Oh, plus there's the ones with midgets."

"The stuff about the English manor makes me think of that experiment in California." Said Bee. "You know the one I'm talking about? It's famous. It was in the sixties or maybe the seventies. The idea was to simulate a prison camp for some reason. It was some kind of psychology experiment, which I guess actually sounds pretty shady from the start. Anyway, it got completely out of hand. The guards started being bizarrely abusive and stuff. All sorts of weird head games and sexual humiliation. I think maybe they even hit some of the prisoners. Locked them in closets and stuff. The experiment was supposed to go on for months or something, but I guess they had to shut it down after something like two weeks because it was getting so crazy."

"That is fucked up."

"No kidding."

"What kinds of things would they do? Like, what do you mean 'sexual humiliation'?"

"I don't know."

"Was it like, fucked up bondage and kinky stuff? Tying each other up and shit?"

"I don't know, all right. That's not the point."

Fletcher listened to Bee debate one of the Riches – he couldn't tell which one it was, especially not in this light. That was one of the things about her. She was spirited. She was tough. That was probably what had made him think he didn't like her at first, that edge. But how he could have thought of it as a fault, he didn't understand now. God, it was great. Like she had some steel in her. He watched the firelight on her face. She had great features, prominent features – nothing weak or retiring. Strong nose, fierce eyes. She was smart.

He knew that he must be a little drunk. The liquor had stopped burning, for one thing. And he felt as if he were gently swaying. What was wrong with being drunk? It felt good. He refilled his cup from a bottle that was being passed around.

"Look at that moon," someone was saying.

"It's pretty amazing."

Indeed, the moon, which was perhaps three-quarters full, was spectacular. There were scattered clouds above, but they were the thin, shredded kind, and the moon shone through them so that there was a corona around it, silver but with hints of other colors.

"It's a nice night."

"The food is great."

"The liquor is great!"

"You know, this place really is beautiful."

"What, the island?"

"Sure, the island. I mean, it's a tropical paradise, right?"

"I guess."

"It's weird," said Fletcher, to no one in particular.

"Seriously. Look around you. You're living on a white sand beach. The ocean is incredible, perfect temperature."

"I'd like it better if I had a deck chair and there was some waiter in a white coat bringing me drinks in coconut shells."

"What did you say, Fletcher?" said Lucy, turning toward him.

"What? Oh. It's weird."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know. This place. This island. It's weird. It's not that I don't – you know, it's beautiful. But sometimes it kind of creeps me out is all. I just – like the hairs standing up on your neck or something." Now that he was talking about it aloud, he couldn't quite bring himself to say anything about the creature that he'd thought he'd seen in the treetops, or about the ruins on the mountain, or the whistling he'd heard coming from them. "You know what I mean?" he finished.

"I guess. I don't know. I mean, I've never lived in this kind of place before or – or under these sorts of conditions. I guess it's pretty weird, yeah. But I don't think I would call it creepy, exactly."

"But – what about all that stuff tonight? With everybody all in masks and cloaks and that weird music and the fire and everything? I mean, doesn't that all seem pretty – over the top?"

"I guess. I don't know. I don't make television shows for a living, you know? I'm not sure. Anyway, that's not exactly about the place, is it? That's not about the island."

"I don't know," said Fletcher, but he wasn't quite sure what he meant by it.

While Lucy and Fletcher had been having this aside, the general conversation had turned to a blow-by-blow analysis of the events of the day. Several people at once seemed to be recounting their own exploits to anyone who might be listening.

"That dude was cut, too. Did you see that one hit he got in? Man, that shit was intense. I was okay, though."

"It was bizarre, hitting someone like that. I just didn't like it. You know? It didn't feel right."

"You've got to surrender to it. You've got to feel your aggression and use it."

"Did you see that bitch punch me? I couldn't fucking believe it. How is that even legal? I totally had her and then she fucking punches me!"

It was frustrating that Lucy hadn't understood what he was talking about, but it was even more frustrating that he didn't understand himself exactly what he meant – or that he couldn't put it into words. And he wished that the rest of them would shut up about what had happened on the log. Rich especially – whichever Rich it was that was talking at that moment. It made Fletcher's head hurt.

"It was intense, man. I was like, 'boom,' 'boom,' you know?"

"Why don't you just shut up?" It was Fletcher's own voice, and he almost didn't recognize it.

"What?"

There was nothing for it now. The rest of the group had fallen silent – or at least it seemed to Fletcher that they had. "I said, why don't you shut up."

"What the fuck is that about?"

"You have to go on and on about how great you are. How cool you are. I'm sick of listening to people like you."

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

"I'm sick of it," Fletcher went on. Suddenly he didn't care what happened. He was drunker than he'd thought. The blood was rushing to his head. He wasn't even sure which Rich he was talking to. "You think you're so goddamn great. The whole fucking world revolves around you."

"Dude."

"You're so great and you can kick anyone's ass and you know how to do everything."

"Dude, chill out."

"I will not chill out! I'm sick of people like you. Stupid jocks and asshole class presidents and people who think they can never be wrong. Always – always lording it over everyone."

"Okaaay."

Fletcher actually stood up. He might even have pointed a finger at whichever Rich it was. "I just want you to know. This is the real world, okay? This is real life. Things are complicated. No one is right all the time. No one is that fucking special, all right? You're not that fucking special because you can kick ass or know how to build something, okay? The rest of us count for something too, and you might think about that while you're up on your mighty horse up there. Okay? And – and yeah."

There were a few moments of silence. Fletcher put his hand down. He felt that he hadn't quite finished his harangue in the way that he'd intended. "That's all," he said. And then, "And I'm going to the bathroom, now, okay? I'm going to go take a leak."

Actually, he was a lot drunker than he'd realized. But he grabbed a bottle anyhow as he passed the table, opened it, and threw the cap on the ground, marching off into the night.

Maybe he really did have to go to the bathroom. But he had to admit to himself that he also wanted to get as far away as possible as fast as possible from the scene that he had just created. As he walked away toward the tree line, he thought he could hear laughter coming from behind him. His cheeks burned. He took a big swallow from the bottle that he was carrying. He didn't even know what it was, and he couldn't taste it at all. Let them laugh! Of course they were laughing. He was laughable. What had he been thinking? Was he trying to start a fight? He'd never even been in a fight before. That thing today with the padded stick had been the closest he'd ever come. It was stupid – humiliating.

Time skipped forward a little bit – or maybe he just wasn't paying attention. He was up by trees, in fact he was in among the first trunks. He looked back. The moon shone on the sand. In the distance he could see the cluster of people around the fire, floating yellow like a firefly. The huddle of forms in the firelight looked warm and intimate from the outside. He wallowed in the feeling of being outside, actually imagined himself literally rolling in the feeling. None of them would miss him!

He spun around and kept walking. Fuck it, anyway. Fuck all of it. It was stupid. On he went, pulling sullenly at the bottle. When he next turned to look over his shoulder, the world seemed to keep turning for a few seconds after his body had stopped. He found that he couldn't see the fire anymore.

He stood quietly. Maybe it was time to go back.

He knew that he was about to hear the sound just before he actually did. All around him, the trees were moving. It was a rustling, writhing, twitching, restless sound. It was the same jungle sound he heard had before, but this was the first time he'd heard it at night, and it was even more disquieting now. There was moonlight where he was, but not a great deal. It was definitely time to go back. He was disoriented and drunk. He began to shuffle as quickly as he could in what he thought was the right direction, but of course his feet became tangled in the undergrowth.

Something was moving. Somethings. Maybe it wasn't the trees. The whole fucking place was alive. He moved as fast as he could, given his state. He knew he must be breathing hard, though he couldn't feel it. They were all around him. On he stumbled, faster and faster. He spun dizzily. Which was the right way? And then there was another noise – different and distinct and right behind him. He whipped about, grasping the neck of the bottle that he was still holding as he did so and turning it upside down so that he could use it as a club. He felt the remaining liquor, whatever it was, running down his arm.

"Jesus, Fletcher! What are you doing?"

It was Bee.

"Jesus. We came looking for you. We saw you head off into the woods."

Nesploy was with her.

"What are you doing with that bottle?" she asked.

He was so overjoyed to see them that he wanted to cry out, but he was embarrassed as well, so he said, "Bee! Nesploy! I was on the way to somewhere. It was very fast. I've got this bottle." He held the bottle out to show them, as if it proved something.

"I see that, Fletcher. Look, you're pretty drunk. Did you drink that whole thing? And will you stop waving it, please?"

"No I wasn't. I didn't. Some of it is here, see?" He tried to demonstrate by turning the bottle upside down again, but it was a tricky sort of maneuver and he wasn't quite able to pull it off.

"Okay. All right. Let's get you out of here."

Bee and Nesploy each took him gently by a shoulder and guided him between them. He was still holding the bottle and, drunk as he was, he was still overwhelmed with relief.

"We were worried," said Bee. "What was all that about back at the fire?"

Nesploy said something as well, but it was incomprehensible.

"I was in the woods. There was – what do you mean?"

"You really went off on Rich. I'm not sure what it was about."

They came out from among the trees and onto the sand. Fletcher shook his shoulders in order to free himself and looked up at the moon. It proved to be a mistake. The moon swam around his field of vision, turning awful, giddy little circles. He fell to his knees. A surge started as a sort of sweet sickness deep in his animal brain, then became hot and gritty in his throat, and wracked him forward. It was followed quickly by another and another. He'd breathe for a few moments in between, trying to suck the air in deep, trying to cool his insides, trying to make the world hold still and then – rush, splash, boom, slosh. It happened several times – he wasn't trying to count – and then there was a pause. He stared at the gray beach only a foot from his face. His breaths were stuttered, effortful, but his head was a little clearer. It actually felt good. He tried to say something – "So sorry – don't know" – but there were a few heaves left in him. When he was done, he found that there was a strand of saliva and vomit trailing from his mouth toward the ground. He must have teared up too, while he was puking, because his face was wet and his eyes felt big. The world was still moving a bit in rapid little jerks, like a poorly spliced film, but it was less disorienting than it had been only moments before.

He sat back on his heels and wiped at his face. "I'm so sorry," he managed to say. "I don't know what happened."

"It's all right," said Bee's voice from somewhere behind him. "Come on, Nesploy, let's get him back to camp."

They took him under his armpits and lifted him to his feet. He felt steadier now, cleansed, but weak, and he was grateful for the support. "Thank you, thank you," he mumbled. They half carried him back to the platform and laid him down.

"Just try to lie on your side, okay?" said Bee. "You won't choke that way, if you have to puke again."

"Okay. Sorry. Thank you."

"Don't worry about it."

He lay there on his side and drew heaving breaths, trying to make them come steadily. For a while he was unable to close his eyes because it made him feel ill again. He didn't think there was anything left in his stomach to get rid of, but he still felt unsteady. If only he could sleep. Slowly, gradually, he began to feel calmer. He was able to close his eyes. At least, he thought to himself as he faded off, I don't have to go to work in the morning.

5.

"Fletcher!"

The barking sound of his own name was extremely painful.

"Yo, wake up! Let's go!"

He tore his eyes open and the light crawled inside them, bright and hideous. There was no moisture in his mouth. His tongue was swollen and tasted foul. He was painfully conscious of the fact that he hadn't brushed his teeth in a very long time and of the horrible film that was coating them.

There was a good deal of activity around him. Someone was groaning. A hand came to rest gently on his shoulder. It was Sarge, who looked down at him seriously. "Fletcher," he said, "Mike's here. We've got to get in the boat right now."

Collecting the pieces of what was happening took several long, painful minutes. There was an ache somewhere behind his eye sockets, or maybe in his jaw. He felt weak and wretched and thirsty. Apparently, Mike had arrived only a few minutes before and announced that it was time to perform a task. Fletcher sat on the edge of the platform, staring at the circling cameras. He wasn't entirely sure that he could stand up at all, but he knew that he definitely couldn't do it quickly.

The night before – or what he could remember of it – assembled itself as well. What had he said to Rich? And why? And what was that nonsense in the woods? He had been crazy, hallucinating. And then puking in front of Bee. Plus, the only real meal he'd had in weeks had for all intents and purposes gone to waste, poured out on the sand.

He could hear Mike a little way off. Every word struck Fletcher just behind the left ear with a throb. "Let's move it! Good morning! Five minutes to be on the boat!" Maybe if he could stand up, he would be able to make his way over to Mike and hit him.

It was Sarge again who eased Fletcher to his feet and guided him down the beach. Fletcher winced with every step. He could not think of anything more horrible, just at that moment, than a boat ride. Bracing salt air is like an invigorating slap, and an invigorating slap was the last thing in the world he wanted. The light that had crept so uncomfortably into his face only minutes before was magnified and had its edges sharpened by the water; it was now rioting inside his eyeballs, thrusting about with hot pokers. He would have liked to shut that light out, but closing his eyes made him acutely aware of the motion of the boat, which was worse, even, than the hot pokers. All he could do was cling to the rail, stare out at the awful, glittering emptiness, hope that no one tried to speak to him, and think of all the things he'd rather be doing.

The boat beat into the waves, and every smack of the hull against the water carried all the way from the soles of Fletcher's feet, through whatever it was that his torso was full of, up to that same throbbing spot behind his eyes. He hung more tightly to the rail. The thought occurred to him that he had died in the night and that this was hell. The boat would never get to wherever it was supposed to be going. There would be nausea and water and violent rocking motions until the end of time.

"How you feeling there, buddy?" a Rich called at him, grinning.

He tried something that felt sort of like what he recalled a smile feeling like, but he was pretty sure he did a wretched job. There would be nausea and water and violent rocking motions and the taunts of assholes until the end of time.

But the boat ride did end. Any change was good, thought Fletcher, as the boat hummed its way to a halt, administering a few last sharp slaps behind his eyes for good measure. They were floating perhaps thirty or forty feet from the shore. At this spot, there was no beach at all: trees and vines coiled round and round one another in a great, confused tangle that crawled all the way to the water's edge and, in one or two places, even overhung it. It was doubtless a bit of tropical paradise, but at that moment it struck Fletcher as malformed and unnatural. It seemed to him that the vegetation was crawling toward him like a parasite or a scavenger, something awful and decayed and writhing with malicious intent.

Between the boat and the island floated two wooden platforms like the ones that had been at the beach the day he'd fetched the golden apple. There were things of some kind on the platforms, but he hadn't the wherewithal even to attempt to discern what they were; he was having to devote too much energy to keeping himself from dying right where he was. Another boat pulled up alongside them. It maneuvered quite close to their own boat; indeed once it came to stop the two were almost touching each other. On it were the members of Clan Coatl. Mike climbed up onto the stern of the Clan Itzli boat. Looking up at him, Fletcher, who had heretofore only been aware that Mike provoked some sort of emotional reaction in him but hadn't know what it was, now felt it with perfect clarity: he loathed that man. He abhorred everything about him, from his aggressive smile down to his impeccable hiking boots.

Mike stabbed Fletcher in the head with his voice. "Welcome once again! It's time for another task. Tonight, again, one of the clans will be sending a member into exile. The task today is simple. At my signal, the two clans will dive into the water and make their way to the two rafts – orange for Coatl, blue for Itzli. On each raft you will find three cannons, a stack of cannonballs, a cask of powder, and a brazier with wood, flint, and steel. You must use the flint and steel to light a fire in the brazier, then load and fire the cannon at the island. The clan that is able to fire the most cannonballs onto the island itself before I tell you to stop, wins! Only cannonballs that actually reach the island will be counted." He looked around at them, sweeping his eyes over them dramatically. "Do you understand?"

Before there had been periods of days between tasks. Why follow one task by another so quickly? Why on this particular morning? It could only be maliciousness. Fletcher didn't think he could do it. He couldn't even jump into the water. He would rather just give in and die.

"Are you ready?"

No.

Mike raised his arms above his head and then brought them down. "Go!"

There was splashing all around. Before he had come to the island, however long ago that was, Fletcher really couldn't have done it. He couldn't have woken up, bitterly hung over, and thrown himself into the ocean. He didn't even have time to notice it at that moment, but something in him must have changed. Sarge put a hand on his shoulder, helped him up, and he heaved himself over the side.

It was actually worse, perhaps, than he'd expected. In general, swimming in the ocean around the island was remarkably pleasant, the water being warm as a bath. But this time he was acutely conscious of the salt filling his nose. As he rose to the surface, kicking and coughing his way toward the platform, the waves pulled him up and down in an indescribably awful way. Even the warmth of the water was sickly and clinging. He made it, though, somehow, and dragged himself up onto the wood. He almost wished that he had drowned, just so that this foolishness would be over. He pulled himself upright.

The members of the other clan were climbing onto their platform. Just as they had the day before, they reminded Fletcher of animals – river rats or something, shaking the water off of themselves, swarming across the planks. He could hear noise behind him. The members of his own clan were already trying to get the fire lit. Flint and tinder are actually quite difficult to use, and the other members of Clan Itzli, if none of them were as badly off as Fletcher, did not appear to be in peak condition.

"Not like that."

"Jesus Christ, this is hard."

"Ouch."

"Here, give it to me."

Everyone seemed to be thrusting hands in at once, each convinced that he or she was best qualified to get the thing lit.

"Godammit."

"No, it's like this. Let me see."

Fletcher just sat watching. It all looked so useless and hopeless. Not just the fire-lighting, but all of it – everything. The wide ocean was bleak and washed out and wretched. Its undulations were forlorn and meaningless, like the final flailings of some dumb, dying animal. Awfulness. Emptiness. The plants spilling over the sides of the island were monstrous. The people arguing, caring, bothering, they were like – oh, he didn't even know, like ugly, frantic, pink insects doing some horrid, incomprehensible little dance.

"It looks like Clan Coatl have their fire lit!" Mike's voice called out over the water.

The dancing insects redoubled their efforts. It was Sarge who got the thing done by injecting a little reason into it: "Let Nesploy do it. Everyone else back off." They did as they were told and, after a minute or two of concentrated effort, Nesploy had it lit.

"Okay," said Sarge, "Nesploy, stay by the fire. Keep it lit. It'll be three to a cannon. Little Rich, Nancy, Rex – you take that one. Fletcher, Prosperity, Lucy – over there. Bee and Big Rich and I will take the third. You guys understand how to do this? You pour the powder down the barrel – I'm not sure how much, but I'd say use plenty to be sure and hit the island. Then you drop in a ball. You light your torch, touch it here," he indicated a spot at the base of one of the cannons, "And back off. All right. Let's go."

There was a scramble to get organized. Even with the bleak, hung-over knowledge of the pointlessness of the entire world, Fletcher couldn't help but try to do something. He was vaguely glad that he had Lucy in his crew anyhow – and at least he didn't have to deal directly with a Rich.

"Okay, it looks like you can kind of tilt the thing up and down like this," Prosperity was saying as Lucy returned from the barrel with a scoopful of gunpowder, when there was the horrible cracking sound of Fletcher's head splitting open. No, it wasn't that – it was the report of one of the cannons from the nearby raft. He turned around. Several of the members of the other clan were looking a little startled and singed. After a few moments, they began to hug one another and jump up and down.

"Clan Coatl has got off their first shot! It's a hit!"

All was chaos.

"Okay, so I dump the gunpowder down the hole and – damn! Okay, okay. Shit."

"Fletcher, will you get some more gunpowder?"

He scrambled to the center of the raft holding the scoop that Lucy had handed him. He was surprised that he could do anything that resembled scrambling. The barrel of gunpowder gave off a pungent smell. What was in it? Salt peter, he seemed to remember. But what was salt peter? And surely there must be other things as well. He'd just retrieved a scoopful when there was another report from the neighboring raft. He jerked, losing the gunpowder.

"Come on, Come on!"

"Let's go!"

"Be careful!"

Fletcher pulled out another scoop of the stuff and rushed back to his cannon as gingerly as he could manage to rush.

"Okay, okay – in the tube – right."

The barrel of the cannon, which was only a few feet long, was made of some metal that Fletcher couldn't identify. It felt slick, as if it had been greased. He dumped the powder down the hole at the end, which was maybe four inches in diameter. Prosperity arrived carrying a cannonball.

"Jesus Christ!"

The middle cannon on their own raft, the one manned by Sarge and Cord and Big Rich, had just gone off, a few feet away. It was monstrously loud. Fletcher could feel his eardrums collapse and his eyeballs shoot out at least six inches in front of his face, rebounding painfully into their sockets. The cannon rolled backwards at least a couple of feet. There was a burnt smell in the air.

"All right. I drop the cannonball in, right?"

"Right."

"Now back off from the front, okay? You think we're pointing in the right direction?"

"Yeah, sure."

"Okay. All right. Here goes." Lucy shoved the end of the torch into the opening that Sarge had indicated and held it there for a few moments. She pulled it out and the three of them staggered back. A second passed, two – and then the front of their cannon emitted a burst of flame followed by cloud of smoke and stench, there was an incredible roar, and the cannon came rolling toward them.

Away in the distance, on the island, the trunk of a tree exploded and split and the tree came crashing partway toward the water before it was stopped by the few ligaments still joining the two pieces of trunk.

Fletcher had thought the boat ride was hell, but the minutes – or hours, he couldn't tell – on that raft were beyond belief. Afterwards he wondered how he had survived them without collapsing. There was heat and unbearable noise and noxious smoke. Everyone was coughing and gagging. Every report of a cannon split Fletcher in half; every breath seared. He hadn't eaten, he still hadn't even had a drink of water, but he kept stumbling.

Through the haze of cannon fumes, he could see the sickly glassy surface of the water erupt into huge plumes when stray shots hit it. Beyond that, he could see the island. Some of the shots ripped apart the trunks of trees, but most of them simply disappeared into the leafy darkness, swallowed up. The cannons recoiled over and over again. His eyes stung. He was nearly blind. How could anyone possibly see what was going on? How could this absurd contest even be judged?

Fletcher could barely hear a thing, but somewhere out there, Mike must have called that time was up and someone must have heard him, or maybe everyone had simply run out of cannonballs, because suddenly the roar of the cannons ceased and Fletcher could see that the people around him had stopped their frantic activity. Smoke hung above the waves, eddying. From somewhere off in the forest came the cracking sound of a last limb falling, and then there was stillness. The only sounds were the lapping of water against the platforms and the slow, painful thunder of each wave of blood as it passed through Fletcher's empty brain.

Slowly the smoke began to clear. More of the island became visible. They had wreaked carnage along the shoreline. The limbs of trees hung at odd angles. Leaves drifted in the waves. But Fletcher could tell that the great, green silence beyond that torn edge was undisturbed. It was implacable.

From somewhere behind him there was a call: "Clan Coatl has won! Clan Caotl are the winners!"

There were celebratory hoots from the other clan. Fletcher sat down and rested his aching head in his hands. He felt nothing other than relief that the ordeal was over.

6.

Back at the beach, they ate in almost complete silence. They were nearing the end of their stock of rice. Fletcher managed to choke down a few mouthfuls and drink some water. Afterwards, he went down the beach by himself and found a rock to lean his back against. He felt a little better physically, but his head was utterly empty, a wasteland. He scratched absently in the sand with a stick. How long had he been on the island now? How much longer would he be staying? At some point, he became aware of someone approaching. It was Nancy, followed by one of the cameras. She walked up, quite near, and then sat on the sand, next to him.

"Hello, Fletcher," she said. "How are you doing?"

"Okay," he lied.

"Great. Good. I thought maybe – maybe we should talk."

He couldn't imagine why. "Okay. What do you want to talk about?"

She was silent for a few moments. "Have I ever shown you these?" she asked. She had. They were photos of her children. She must have taken them from her luggage the very first day on the island, and she'd shown them to Fletcher shortly afterward. She'd shown them to everyone. Fletcher took them from her. Three children appeared in several different photographs. They were all blonde and sort of chafed looking. They made Fletcher think of piglets. They were also awfully young to have a woman Nancy's age as their mother. He had the impression that the photos had been taken quite a while ago. They'd become very dog-eared during their stay on the island. One had a large rip in it. "Aren't they beautiful?" she asked.

"Yes, lovely," he responded, handing back the photos.

"I'm a mother, you see."

"Yes. I see."

"I miss my children very much."

"Of course. I'm sure you do." It was very hot. His head was still tender.

"But the thing of it is, I've come to view you all as my children here."

The idea made him squeamish. "Have you?"

"Yes. It's something you wouldn't understand. Not being a mother. But that's how I feel." She sighed. "I'm very sad – you know, about what's happening. About what's going to happen tonight. It was inevitable, I suppose. But still, I'm sad. As I say, you're like my children. And I want to make sure that my children are taken care of.'

"Of course. Naturally."

"But I also want to make sure that they make good decisions. Do you understand?"

"I guess so. I think so."

She smiled at him. "I knew you would. And so I think – I don't know how to say it – but I think it would be for the best if it were Rex."

"If what were Rex?"

The smile stayed put. "If it were Rex that we exiled tonight."

"Oh, right."

"I just think – how can I say this?" She paused. "I think that Rex hasn't made the effort to fit in – with the rest of our family. Do you see what I mean?"

"Oh, sure."

"Good. Good. I'm so glad we had this little talk." She reached out and patted him on the thigh, three little pats in rapid succession, and stood up. "So glad. So we can count on you, then?"

"Sure. Yes. Right."

The smile in her gray face broadened. "Oh, good. I knew it. I'm so glad." She turned and left.

He'd agreed for the mere sake of agreeing, of course, without thinking. He'd barely had time to begin wondering who, precisely, "we" were that were counting on him, when he received another visitor. It was one of the Riches. This Rich's wasn't wearing a shirt. His chest was broad and covered in thick hair.

"You mind if I sit down?" he asked.

"Please. No. Go ahead. Help yourself."

"Thanks," he said, and sat down facing Fletcher. The sun was behind him. Fletcher had to squint to look at him.

"Listen, Fletcher."

"Yes?"

"Listen, Fletcher, I just wanted to say, you know, no hard feelings about last night, okay? I mean, listen, we were all pretty drunk, you know what I mean?" So this must be the Rich that Fletcher had yelled at the night before. Whichever that one was.

"Sure."

"That's what I mean! That's what I'm talking about."

"I'm sorry about all that. I don't know what got into me."

"Hey, no worries. No worries, all right, man? Water under the bridge. Water under the mother fucking bridge. All right? Listen. Sometimes people make mistakes, right? But really, let's be frank, it's the will to win, right? That's what people are seeing. I want to win. Just like you want to win. Right?"

"Right."

"That's right!" Rich put out his right hand, balled in a fist, knuckles toward Fletcher, waiting. Fletcher put out his own hand, a little reluctantly, and bumped his knuckles against Rich's.

They sat in silence for a minute. "So what do you think of the other clan?"

"I don't know. I'm not sure."

"I tell you, a couple of them are pretty hot. That one chick with the tattoos – Bethany. Damn, man, don't you think she's hot?"

"Sure. I guess so."

"Damn right, right. She's hot all right. That other one too, I think it's Shinaid or something? She's pretty fine too. I think she's, you know, mixed race – like half black and half white – which is cool, you know? Anyway, she's fine. And Claire, that kickboxer. She's a little masculine for my taste maybe, but it's cool."

"Right."

"Right! But still. Not too bad. Not that we've got it all bad over here, either man. That Prosperity's pretty hot. Lucy, too. And Nancy, man, you know those older women ..."

"Sure." Fletcher shifted uncomfortably.

"No, I'm kidding about that. Seriously. I mean, there's no way. That's sick. But Bee. There you go. You think she's hot, don't you, man?"

Was Rich looking at him a little more keenly as he asked this?

"Sure. Yeah."

Rich laughed. "Okay. Whatever. Anyway, that's not really the point. The point is, I don't think the other clan has a chance against us. As long as we play our cards right. So listen, here's the thing, okay? Rich has got to go. That's just the way it is. Dude is psycho. He's got to go. I've talked to the others and that's what's happening."

"What others?" Fletcher asked.

"Sarge, Lucy, Nesploy. Bee. All of 'em. Properity, man. It's what's happening. It's the way that things are swinging, you see? You see? And you've got to be on board, all right? We need you on board. Not that we need you. It's already happening, no matter what. But you want to be on the winning side, right? You want to be part of the right group, the right alliance. You need to be on board. Cause if you're not with us – right?" Rich winked at him and swung his fist playfully. "Right?"

"Right."

"That's right. That's my man. You're the man. I knew you were the man." Rich stood and took a couple steps away, then turned back. "You're on board. Am I right?"

"Right."

"That's right. You're the man. That's right."

Fletcher shifted his back against the rock, settled himself into the sand, reclined his head and closed his eyes. His temples were throbbing. He still felt as if he might throw up. The sun burned pink and pale on the other side of his eyelids. It wasn't long, however, before a shadow fell across him. He opened his eyes. It was the other Rich. No telling whether it was Big or Little, but it was the one he hadn't just spoken to.

"Yo, Fletcher." This one didn't ask if he could sit, just went ahead and did it. "How you doin', man?"

"I'm great."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. Great."

Rich laughed. "So that was pretty f-ed up with those cannons this morning and everything."

"Yeah."

"Yeah. For sure. I mean, I feel like we did a really good job, you know, over all – as a team and everything. I mean, you know, we kicked their asses at the other tasks, so I figure that it was probably just that we were, you know, partying so hard last night."

"Right."

"Yeah. That was pretty sweet, huh? You really got pretty shitfaced, huh? You're like, a party animal, huh?"

"Um – right. I don't know."

"That's what I thought. Seriously, dude. You were ripping shit up. Bet you were feeling it this morning, huh?"

Fletcher just nodded and tried to smile.

"That's what I thought. You looked rough." He paused. "So listen, man. The thing is – the thing is – what I'm trying to say is that, well, listen – some people are saying that you're one of the weak links, man."

Fletcher could feel himself color in spite of his best efforts not to. The statement didn't come as a total surprise – not to some part of him, anyhow – but it still made his stomach sink a little.

"Not me, man! I'm not saying that. I think it's bullshit. That's what I said to the others too. I mean, you almost had that big dude on the log yesterday – what's his name? – anyway, you almost had him. I saw it. This morning you were just running slow, man. Anyone would be. Shit. No, maybe I would have said at one point that you were a weak link. Maybe. I'm not saying definitely. But maybe. But not after last night, man. Not after the way you stood up to Rich. I tell you, that was bad ass, man. Bad ass. I've been wanting to do that – shit, I've been wanting to do that this whole time. But I didn't have the balls for it. Not me. But you. No – you're no weak link."

"Thanks."

"Now's the time for action, you see? Now is the time. For action. No more talking. We've got to get that arrogant fucker exiled tonight. You called him that, too. Right to his face. Shit looked good on him. Anyway, we've got to get him exiled. And we've got the votes for it. After last night, we can count on you, I know that. And I've got Lucy, Nancy, Nesploy – at least. So that's five votes right there. Plus I think I can get some of the others too. The fucker is toast, all right? He won't even know what hit him. Tonight he goes down, okay? That's what I thought. Peace out, bra." He thumped his chest with his fist and pointed at Fletcher; then he got to his feet. "Tonight!" he said, and he was gone.

Fletcher lay his head back again. The sun baked the emptiness inside him. Not so long ago, he would have been glad of the news that someone was interested in removing him from that island. That was before, however – before Bee. Now he had to stay.

He had just begun to drift off when a shadow fell over his eyes again. "What do you want?" he asked without opening them.

"Veeyens."

"Oh, hi Nesploy." He opened his eyes. "Go ahead and sit down I guess." Nesploy was nothing but a black outline against the sun. The outline shook its head.

"Veeyens."

"Look, the truth is that I can't really understand you and I don't know that I have the energy to even try right now. But you can talk at me if you want. You have some idea who you want to kick off, right? And you want me to join up with you."

Nesploy's silhouette shook its head again. "Ahlons. Veeyens!" Nesploy held out a hand.

"Oh, jesus. Okay. I'm not sure I can do this." Fletcher took the hand and Nesploy helped him up. "Honestly, I'm not sure if I can handle much in the way of movement. Where are we going?"

Nesploy smiled encouragingly at him – Fletcher could see his face now – and patted him on the back. "Ah lakahm. Been!" And he led Fletcher off across the beach, toward the treeline. Every step jarred him a little and he couldn't quite remember how to breathe properly, but after a few minutes Fletcher saw where they were headed: an unmanned camera had once again been set opposite the little wooden chair.

"Jesus. Right now? I'm not really sure I can do it. Seriously." Nesploy gave him one more pat on the back, then gestured for him to go on alone. He sighed, which hurt. "Okay, okay. Fine. I'll go."

He had to squint at the sign beneath the camera's eye. "DO YOU CARE ABOUT THEM?"

"Do I care about them? What the hell is that supposed to mean? You mean my – whatever they are – my teammates or whatever. Now that one of us has to go. Now that I have to vote for someone or whatever, right? That's who you mean? Jesus. I'm talking to you like you're going to answer. All right. Do I care about them?"

He closed his eyes and for a few seconds he could still see the reflection of sunlight from the lens imprinted orange on his cornea. Did he care about them? How long had he been there? At first he hadn't even liked them. Maybe he'd even hated them. Maybe sometimes he still hated some of them. But, then – in fact, what did he know about them?

"I don't know. I guess I'm not sure. Who are they, even? I mean, what do I know about them? Let's see. Bee was born in Pennsylvania. In college she did a double major in art history and business. She likes running and hiking and camping and – anyhow, there's Bee, so – so, right. Lucy's a student. I think maybe she said she studies math. Or philosophy or something. I don't remember. Her family is Korean. I guess I probably spend the most time with Sarge, but we're usually pretty busy fishing and so on, so it's not like I've really found out that much about him. He actually was in the army, I know that. And I know that Nancy's got three kids, of course. Everybody knows that. Prosperity is from Texas. I don't know how she got that name, though. Which is a little funny, now that I think about it, because it's a pretty unusual name and you'd think it would have come up. And there's Rex. Well, nobody knows anything about him because as far as I can tell he never says anything at all. And I can't understand Nesploy, even though everybody else seems to be able to understand him at least a little bit. And then there are the Riches. Most of the time I can't even tell them apart. I'm pretty sure one of them is a personal trainer. I think I heard that."

His head still hurt, but it was in a distant way, more depressing than painful.

"So I don't know. I mean, I'm not even sure if any of them are married. I don't know who they are, except in the sense of being around them every day and seeing what they do. Anyhow, maybe that's irrelevant to whether I care about them. I mean, I like Sarge, even if I don't know much about him. I've really come to like him. I don't know what it is exactly, but he just has a presence that I like or something. And I like Lucy. And Nesploy seems like a genuinely nice guy, even though I don't have a clue what he's saying. And Bee. I – she's great. So I guess in some sense I care about some of them. Yes. I suppose I do. And the others – well, I don't know. Maybe it's not even important whether I like them, really. They're human beings, after all – real, living people. So I suppose they're important in some way and I ought to care about them. I'll try that old thought experiment. How does it go? Someone is living on the other side of the world, and if I want to, I can have them die and I'll get a million dollars. And there's no way to trace it to me – it's totally anonymous. I think it's something like that. So, would I take a million dollars in exchange for these people dying?" He paused.

"No way. No. Definitely not. I don't wish anything bad on them – not even the ones that I may not especially like. Which I guess may not be exactly the same as caring about them. If one of the Rich's were to die and I were to get a million dollars ... no, I wouldn't do it. But if I had to choose between Rich dying and Mother Teresa – who I realize is already dead, so let's say Nelson Mandela or somebody. He's alive, right? If I had to choose between Rich dying and Nelson Mandela dying, it would be a more complicated question. I mean, I know I said all that stuff to him last night, but that doesn't mean – that's just. Shit. I guess it's fortunate that I don't have to make that decision, isn't it? So do I care about him, then? I don't know. I'm just not sure. Maybe that makes me a bad person. I don't know. Maybe I care about some of them and I don't care about others.

"Okay? Are you satisfied?"

The camera, of course, said nothing, and the effort of talking had dried him up so he stood, staggering a little bit, and wandered away without even bothering to see whose name was next on the list. Instead, he drifted across the sand until he wasn't even capable of drifting anymore – which didn't take too terribly long – and lay down where he was, closing his eyes. He had to think. He ought to try to come up with a plan for the ceremony tonight.

There were occasional flashes on the insides of his eyelids. He watched them dance and spin, watched them turn into little kaleidoscopic patterns, twisting in and in on themselves. He thought could hear distant voices, though he wasn't sure what they were saying. They sounded familiar, like voices he remembered from his childhood. What had he been trying to focus on? There was something he ought to be doing.

When he opened his eyes again it was twilight. Sarge was nearby. "Better get up, Fletcher. They'll be here soon."

"Oh, Jesus! How long have I been asleep?"

"Better eat something before they get here."

He staggered to his feet. Nothing seemed to make sense; he was groggy and felt entangled in something. "Christ. How long did I sleep? Why didn't you wake me up?"

"Come on."

"Wait, wait," he stumbled along beside Sarge, "Wait. What's been happening? What happened while I was asleep? Is there an alliance? Who are we going to eliminate?"

Sarge looked at him, his eyes sharp but not devoid of sympathy. "Come on. You need to eat."

Someone had gone fishing and now everyone was gathered around the fire. As they ate, Fletcher looked around him from one to the other of his clan members. What was happening? What agreements had been made? He couldn't ask now, not with everyone there. Why had he slept so long? Why had he drunk so much last night? He couldn't collect his thoughts properly. Oh, god. The sky grew darker and darker. Even though Fletcher knew the Blueshirts would be coming, when they finally arrived it was hard to discern their shapes as they floated up the beach. A torch flared, magically as before. "Come," said the face above it.

The boat's light skipped across the waves as they sped along. It looked eerily as if the water were holding still, frozen in unlikely little peaks and valleys. They pulled up to the same dock as they had on the previous two occasions, and again torches sprang up suddenly in the hands of quiet guides. They were escorted up the steep stairs, through the archway, and into the amphitheater, though this time they were led all the way to the center, to sit by the fire. There were the attendants, or whatever they were, robed and masked, and the same hooded figure seated above the doorway. They seated themselves on the stone steps. The firelight cast little dancing shadows.

The other clan had not yet arrived. Mike entered from somewhere behind them, followed by a masked figure carrying a large bowl that looked like it might be made out of copper. The pair stood in front of them and Mike spoke. "Clan Itzli. I'm sorry to see you here tonight. This is not a happy occasion. It is time for you to make a choice. A difficult choice. I wish you luck. These totems," and here he reached into the basin carried by the other figure and retrieved one of the little straw dolls that Fletcher had seen before, "Represent each of you. They represent your lives in this place. Hold onto them tonight. Hold them close. As you have seen, the member of your clan that is chosen must burn their totem in that fire. One of you will burn your totem tonight. And that person will leave forever. I hope you have each considered carefully today. The choice is yours."

The attendant began to move about, passing out the little figures. It seemed as if he or she was being particular in selecting a figure for each clan member, and, when Fletcher received his and glanced at Lucy's, he saw that they were slightly different from one another. Each was perhaps six or eight inches long and made principally of some dried fiber (perhaps it wasn't really straw, now that he looked at it closely), tied off with cord at strategic places in order to give it a human shape. Woven in between the fibers were all manner of what seemed to be dried herbs of various kinds, as well as stone beads of different colors and shapes. It was the arrangement and coloring of the beads that made his own totem different from Lucy's. He was still examining the little straw man when the members of the other clan arrived, filing onto the benches opposite and a few rows higher, where Fletcher's own clan had sat on the two previous occasions.

"It is time!" called out Mike.

His words of welcome and instructions sounded to Fletcher like a chant. He raised his hands again, palms upward as if conducting a ritual and then he invited each of them to speak, signaling them to stand with a sweep of the hand nearest them.

"Big Rich!"

One of the Riches stood up.

"Well, we've been together for quite a while here, and, you know, I think we're a really strong team, and I think all of you know who I am and what I'm about. I'm about winning. I think we can win this thing, you know, and I think I can help us win this. Win this thing. I'm not gonna say that you guys need me necessarily, but, well – I think you need me. The fact is, I'm strong. I'm a strong player and I think I contribute a lot to what's going on here. So that's what I have to say. Thanks."

Fletcher had trouble listening to the rest of his fellow clan-mates. He was too busy worrying about when his turn would come, and what he would say when it did. He wasn't much of a public speaker under the best of circumstances. Nancy referred to the fact that she thought of them all as her children. Nesploy actually talked longer than the rest, and he seemed earnest and expressive, but as usual Fletcher couldn't make out a single word. Even Lucy's speech slid by him more or less unheard.

The little totem absorbed his attention to some degree as well. The longer he held it and looked at it, the more repulsive it struck him as being. It was clearly meant to recall "primitive" art, maybe voodoo, and so it was executed in what struck him as a deliberately crude fashion, but at the same time it was tightly and cleverly woven. The herbs, or whatever they were, seemed to be exuding an unpleasant odor, something that made him think of grease. The beads had things carved into their surfaces and looked as if they'd been arranged in a pattern that was supposed to appear meaningful. There were none woven into the face, which was blank.

"I don't like this."
It was Sarge's voice, clear and hard. Fletcher looked up. Sarge was standing. "I don't like this at all. None of us do. But we don't have any choice, do we?" The others who had spoken had all seemed to address themselves to their clanmates. Sarge, on he other hand, was looking directly, and only, at Mike. Or perhaps he was looking behind and above him, at the figure over the archway. From where he was sitting, Fletcher couldn't see Sarge's face. But he could see Mike staring back at Sarge, completely expressionless. "No, we don't have any choice. You have all the power. We're in your power. For now, at least. You tell us to jump, we jump. You tell us to hit each other, or shoot cannons, we do it. You tell us to vote against each other, choose one of us to 'exile.' We do that too. You've been careful to provide just one way out of this place." Fletcher saw Sarge's chin move toward the dark archway. "That's the only choice we have. And we're desperate enough, and hungry enough, and tired enough to take it. Or to force each other to take it, at any rate. As I say, we have no other choice. I don't know what any of my companions are going to do. But I want you to know – I want you to know that there are some of us who understand the consequences of their actions. We understand the consequences." And he sat.

Mike seemed to wait a beat longer than usual, but he didn't respond. Then he swept his hand and called out, "Fletcher!"

Fletcher stood up. There wasn't really anything else to do. He cleared his throat. Ladies and gentlemen. Dearly beloved. I bet you're wondering why I've asked you all to be here tonight. "Ah. Well. I'm not sure I do. Understand the consequences of my actions, I mean. I mean, I'm not sure it's even possible. There's that thing about the butterfly. And the hurricane. That's it, right? But the thing there is, the butterfly never knows about the hurricane, right? I mean, it's just flapping its wings, right? So if you're the butterfly, there's no way to know whether you've made the right decision or not. You're just doing your thing. Flapping around and all that. Anyway, that's probably not the point." He found that he was looking only at the doll that he clutched in his hands. "The point is, I think, I'd like to understand. To understand something. I think I'm close sometimes. But it's like – have you ever stood in front of a painting or something like that and everyone else says this is a great painting, but you just don't get it. You think there must be some sort of hidden code, a secret code or something, and if you just had the key, then you'd understand too. You can even sense that the secret is there sometimes. But you don't have the code, you know? It's something like that, I think. I don't know. So I'd like to stay here. Maybe it will help me understand. As far as thinking that the people here are like my family, like some people have said, I guess I don't know. I guess I can't really figure that out. And as far as being a key player in this – game, I guess the truth is I'm not sure about that either. I don't think I've been so bad at the game. Not really so bad as I might have thought. Anyway. So I'd like to stay. That's all. Thanks."

He sat down again, still staring at the doll. Whatever it was he'd been planning to say, that certainly hadn't been it.

"Little Rich!"

There were only a couple more speeches. Fletcher didn't hear a word. "It is time," said Mike. "I will call your names and each of you will approach in turn. You will write a name on a ballot and drop it into the vessel. Then I will read the votes and one of you will leave."

Incredibly, Fletcher had forgotten that this step was coming. Lord knows how he had, but he had. When he went up, he would have to write down a name. Whose? One by one they went. When Fletcher's name was called he walked onto the raised podium. On the table were the ballots. They were tablets, perhaps six inches long, of some hard material, one surface of which seemed to have been coated in wax. The writing instrument was a metal rod, perhaps ten inches long, with a sharp point. It was covered with markings of some sort. He put a tablet in front of himself and picked up the metal rod. It was heavier than he'd expected. With its tip he scratched a name into the wax: Big Rich. He dropped the tablet into the nearby urn and returned to his seat. The last few clan members took their turns. No one on the benches seemed willing to look anyone else in the eye.

Mike went up to the urn and reached in. He read the first tablet: "Big Rich!"

And the second: "Little Rich!"

"Big Rich!"

"Big Rich!"

"Sarge!"

Fletcher thought he felt a little ripple go through the bodies on the bench around him.

"Little Rich!"

"Big Rich! Big Rich, you know what this means."

One of the Riches stood. He took a few slow steps forward and held out his hand over the fire. The flames seemed almost to reach up and take the little straw man from his fingers. There was yellow smoke and the smell of burning herbs. Two cloaked figures swooped in like giant bats, one from either side, took him under the arms and led him away. Even from down at this level, Fletcher could not see more than a few feet into the darkness beyond the archway. Big Rich was gone in seconds. The other clan was being ushered out. One of the hooded people was collecting the totems from Fletcher's clan. Mike stood, looking down at the clan members. He was staring at Sarge. His face was blank.

7.

The next day, they returned to their normal routines. A few things, however, changed with Big Rich's departure.

The first was Little Rich. When Fletcher awoke, Little Rich was perched on the edge of the platform, staring at what was left of the addition that he and Big Rich had been building. He looked folded in on himself somehow, as if the air had been let out.

"What's going on?" Fletcher asked Lucy by the campfire, indicating the deflated man.

"He's been like that all morning. I think he was up before anyone else. He hasn't said anything."

Fletcher was partway through his usual meager breakfast when something exploded. Rich had emitted a horrible, inarticulate cry and thrown himself headlong into the wreckage. Still screaming, he was hurling pieces of wood into the air, had fallen to his knees and was then halfway up again, smashing anything that he could get his hands on. The others came running. Two of them – Nesploy and Rex – managed to pull him all the way to his feet. He was still wailing and moaning and thrashing in their arms. He screamed something unintelligible at them and tore himself loose. This time he went running down toward the ocean. They all followed – there was no telling what he was going to do. But when he reached the edge, he only fell onto his knees again and began beating the sand with his fists. Everyone stood and watched, embarrassed, not knowing what to do. Finally, after a few minutes, he seemed to exhaust himself, and curled into a sitting position with his arms wrapped tightly around his ankles and his face between his knees. Attempts to speak to him only caused him to bark or grunt, so after a while, since he didn't seem as if he was going to drown himself then and there, they backed away, though they agreed among themselves to keep an eye on him. Later in the day, one of them – it was Prosperity – saw that he was crying. "Really. I swear, great big tears just rolling down into his beard. I didn't know what to do." By the evening, he'd recovered himself enough to come back to camp and talk to the rest of them, but from that day on he was edgy and a little wild-seeming, as if he was about to start explaining some crazy vision that he'd had. He reminded Fletcher of a guy he'd once met on New Year's Eve who cornered him and talked a long time about the Bermuda Triangle.

Soon Little Rich threw himself back into his building projects with almost manic energy. He would work from dawn until dusk, barely pausing to eat, and then collapse exhausted. He built all sorts of extensions to their little platform, including a curious sort of turret that wasn't quite sturdy enough to go up into, as well as an outhouse structure that went around the latrine. If anyone so much as mentioned Big Rich's name, Little Rich would scowl and turn away, or sometimes fly into a rage that was actually frightening. People learned pretty quickly to leave the subject alone.

The next change was a much more welcome one, from Fletcher's perspective. That very next morning after Big Rich's expulsion, Fletcher was lying in the sand by himself, just thinking that it was probably about time that he went fishing, when Bee materialized out of the humid air with a shimmer.

"Hey," she said. "What's going on?"

"Fine. I mean, not much. I was just – you know, lying here."

"Uh-huh," she sat. "Listen it was cool what you said last night. At the thing, you know – where – well, the thing. About the butterfly and the hurricane and all that stuff. That was cool."

"Thanks."

"It was interesting. It made me think about how, you know, in high school science class, or wherever, you're supposed to have a test group. No, that's not it. A control group."

"Right. I mean, sure."

"You have a control group where you keep something under normal conditions. Whatever the normal conditions are, outside the experiment. So that you can see the effects of the experiment."

"You mean like, where you have one group of mice and you put them inside a vacuum tube or something and then you have a group of mice that you keep outside the vacuum tube? That sort of thing?"

"That's right. So, I think the problem – in general, you know – is that there's no control group. Say you get married, for instance."

"Let's say."

"Right. So being married is a messy and complicated sort of state – in an ordinary way, if you see what I mean – and it's maybe hard to know whether you made the right decision. But really it's more than hard – it's impossible. Because there's no control group, right? There's just no basis for making a judgment because what are you supposed to compare the outcome to? The you that didn't get married? Or the you that married someone else? Because it's no good comparing it to what happened to another person or in a book or something. That's just not you. So there's no way to tell. Especially with the things that really count, you just can't know – did I do the right thing, did I do he wrong thing. You see what I mean?"

"I think so."

The conversation went on for a while longer before Bee departed. Fletcher was electrified. His whole being tingled. What had happened? It was longer than she had ever spoken directly and privately to him for before. And she'd apparently come to find him. And the most astonishing thing of all was that it wasn't an isolated incident. Literally overnight, her attitude toward him appeared to have gone from one more or less of indifference to one of positive friendliness. No longer did he have to resort to ploys like pretending to go on the same errand with her: she sought out his company, invited him along on her daily rambles, sat next to him at meals. The glances that he had stolen at her were no longer necessary: he was allowed to look her full in the face.

What had hitherto been a trickle of information that he had collected in order to flesh out a portrait of her turned into a flood. She was a manager at a clothing store, but that wasn't what she really wanted to do, she wanted to be a designer. Clothes, maybe, but it didn't have to be, so long as it was making something. Architecture, maybe. Or industrial design. She loved the thrill of taking an idea and making it into an actual thing, a thing people could use. And she loved being around creative people, you know. She needed it. She had one sibling, an older brother. He was a drag. Pretty much a stuffed shirt. He'd been pretty cool when he was younger. He dropped out of school for a while and lived in a hearse and was in a band and stuff. But now all he cared about was making money and he was married to this woman who was completely awful. They didn't even like each other. And they were raising their kid like brats. She couldn't even stand to be around her own niece and nephew. She didn't get along with her parents real well either. They didn't understand her. She hated vain people, but she thought you had to make piece with your own vanity, too. She thought you had to get to know yourself as much as possible. It turned out that "Bee" was short for Beatrice – which meant that Fletcher had been spelling it wrong in his head this whole time – it ought to be "Bea." She hated "Beatrice" though. It sounded so pretentious.

Strangely, unbelievably, over the next few days, Fletcher became her confidante. Of course, if you are even a reasonably accomplished unrequited lover, you will know that, while moving from desiring-from-afar to desiring-up-close has its intense pleasures, it also has its attendant sufferings. Think of staring forlornly across your high school chemistry classroom at the object of your desires verses lying on her bedroom floor, tossing one of her stuffed animals in the air, listening to her complain about her boyfriend.

Fortunately, Bea didn't complain to Fletcher about her boyfriend, but nonetheless their new intimacy raised his emotions to a constant buzz, like having his hand resting on an electrode, and often left him feeling even more tortured than he'd been by her indifference. The highs might have been higher, but the lows were certainly lower. When he was with her, it was a sort of sweet agony. When he was away from her, it was just ordinary agony. He waited impatiently for their walks together, and if for some reason she decided to take a walk on her own, say, he took it as a terrible sign and was plunged into despondency. He became jealous – jealous of the other clan members when they spent time with her, jealous of the island itself, of the sky, of things he couldn't even specify, of whatever she might be thinking about or looking at, whatever absorbed her time and attention. The pain of it all notwithstanding, he dreaded most the idea that sooner or later, all of this would come to an end – that one, and then ultimately both of them would leave the island and return to their ordinary lives thousands of miles away from each other.

8.

The only times when Fletcher was voluntarily away from Bea were when he was fishing, which he still relished. It had also become increasingly important to the clan in general, since their stock of rice was now nearly gone.

A few days after Little Rich was expelled, Fletcher and Sarge sat together on the rocks in between dives. Sarge was watching something in the distance and Fletcher was poking absently at the pearly surface of an empty shell with the end of his fishing spear. "Sarge," Fletcher said, "Can I ask you a question?"

Sarge looked back over his shoulder and nodded silently. Seawater trickled from his beard and hair, and he looked to Fletcher as if he ought to be carrying a trident.

"Well, you know the other night? When we – when Big Rich left? What were you talking about? You know, when it was your turn to talk? I was just wondering. Because you said some things that I didn't understand."

Sarge's expression was very hard to read: his eyes were hard and bright, but the rest of his face was gentle, maybe even sad. He looked out at the sea again. "Didn't you?"

"No. Not really. I mean, it seemed like – no, I guess I didn't."

"You said, that same night, before I spoke, that you would like to understand. What did you mean by that?"

"The funny thing is I guess I don't know what I was talking about, really, any more than I know what you were talking about. That's what I thought when I sat down afterwards. I thought that that wasn't what I meant to say at all, and I didn't know what I was trying to get at."

"Come on," said Sarge, and he stood, holding out his hand to help Fletcher up.

"Where are we going?"

"If we're going to talk – about serious matters – it's best that we keep moving. There's less chance that we'll be overheard." He pulled Fletcher to his feet and began to walk along the water's edge. Fletcher walked beside him, trailing the point of his little spear in the sand.

"Did you know," Sarge said, "That there are over five thousand cameras in lower Manhattan alone, below fourteenth street? Put up by the police department, by private security firms, monitoring people as the walk around. That number is several years old, too, and it's only the ones that could actually be seen and counted. The real number now is far greater. And did you know that they've developed software that can scan a crowd and recognize suspicious patterns of behavior? Suspicious movements, whatever those are exactly. It's amazing, really. A computer can pick out a person behaving suspiciously in a group of a thousand other people. We live in an incredible time. People have always wanted to be known, to be seen, to be recognized, but our ability to achieve those things is absolutely flowering at this historical moment. We can post videos of ourselves to youtube and photographs and the minutiae of our daily lives to our facebook page, and the video cameras in lower Manhattan can recognize our suspicious behavior. Every smart phone is a GPS tracking device. This fact means that they've developed applications that enable you to hold up your smart phone and see tags that other people have left about the scene that you see in the phone. Amazing, isn't it? You can point your phone at a building and a description will appear: the building's history, the stores that are in it, whether it's for sale. But do you know what's more amazing than that? In principal you can do the same thing to human beings. Each one of us could be tagged with smart phone labels, walking around with invisible labels all over us: what our job is, how much money we earn, our family, where we live. There's software being developed that will allow a phone to recognize a person's face. How do you think those phones will access that information? How will they recognize you? From your youtube videos, of course. From the pictures of you that your friends have tagged on facebook. We love to be seen, and we are succeeding at it like no one ever has before; each one of us is becoming a celebrity. In authoritarian countries, full of spies, like the former Soviet Union, say, or East Germany, some people came to depend on the secret police, on the eyes of the secret police to define themselves. The secret police were like their lovers, the people who knew them. We love to be known. After all, look at the two of us. We were offered the chance to be watched and we took it, didn't we?"

Sarge fell silent. After a few moments, feeling a little embarrassed, Fletcher said, "Okay. That's true. But we're on a desert island and everything, not walking in lower Manhattan or being looked at through a smart phone. I mean, I guess from that perspective, here at least we have the advantage of knowing when we're being watched."

"There are cameras small enough to fit into shirt buttons and microphones that can pick up a conversation with perfect clarity from hundreds of yards away."

"Okay. Fair enough. But why bother? I mean, like you said, we signed up for this, right? We came here expecting to be on camera."

"People behave differently when they believe they think they're not being watched."

"You're saying that the people running this television show might be interested in what we do and say when we don't think we're on camera?"

"They might."

"Okay. Maybe. I guess I could see that. Actually, I suppose it would explain something. I've noticed sometimes that I don't seem to have been filmed when I expected to be. Like when we were going after the golden apple for example."

"Interesting, isn't it? You asked me once if I liked this place, this island. You remember that?"

"Yes. You said you did. You said something – I don't remember exactly – about how cities are full of ghosts."

"That's right. So, do you like it?"

"Like what?"

"Do you like it here? This island?"

Fletcher hesitated. "I'm not sure. If you'd asked me when we first arrived, I'd have said no. I hated it at first. But now I'm less sure of that. There's something about it that's – I don't know. Moving, I guess. If I can say that without sounding too sappy. Because I don't mean it in a sappy way. It's – I guess it's that it's just so immense. It seems as if it's beyond liking or disliking. It's too much itself. Completely itself, and my liking it or disliking it is so small a thing that it just disappears into irrelevance."

"Hmm. I like the way you put that. The place is powerful. I agree. It's all its own, complete in its mystery. But I wonder what these people" something about the way Sarge said it made it clear that he was speaking of Mike and the Blueshirts, "I wonder just what these people are up to. What they're doing in this vast, mysterious place."

"Well, they're just here to make money, right? They're doing a job. Making this show."

"How did you get here? How did you first arrive?"

Fletcher felt himself color a little bit. He'd considered the idea before, of course, but he'd pushed it aside, shelved it away for later consideration and never managed to get back around to thinking carefully about it. "I woke up here. In the woods." It sounded lame to say it aloud; of course the circumstances had been peculiar. "I went to sleep on the plane and I woke up next to a tree. Did the same thing happen to you?"

"It did. And in all the time we've been here, have you ever seen a plane pass overhead?"

Fletcher thought about it. "No. I guess, now that you mention it, I haven't."

"So we must be somewhere fairly remote."

"I guess we must be, yes."

"So you went to sleep on the plane, slept through the plane landing, slept through being transported what must have been a good long distance through the jungle, slept through being abandoned out there, and awoke alone?"

"All right. No. I'd thought of that before. I mean, I guess I must have been drugged or something. We all must have been. There was this blue drink on the plane. I've thought about that. And that's weird. Definitely weird."

"Definitely. More than that, I'd say. I'd say it was dangerous."

"I don't know about that. I mean, I don't think they'd do anything that was actually dangerous. They'd be afraid of a law suit and so on. I mean, we're an investment to them." But as he said it, he thought of climbing the wall in the jungle without a harness and of swimming in the ocean without any visible safety measures. He thought about the fact that he'd never noticed any medical personnel on the beach. If you'd pressed him, he'd have said that surely the appropriate doctors or nurses or whatever were waiting in the wings in case of an emergency, but still ...What had been in that contract that he'd signed so long ago without reading?

"People die under anesthetic. Fairly routinely. And that's in hospitals, with all sorts of precautions. Knocking someone unconscious is dangerous."

"Well, it's ... Maybe it is, then."

Sarge nodded several times. "Have you ever wondered what happens to the people – what has happened to the three people who have been 'exiled'? Who have gone through that archway?"

"Well, I suppose they go home, right? They go back."

"It seems like an awfully long and expensive trip to make every time one of them goes."

"I guess that's true. So maybe there's, like, some sort of staging area that they go to. Wherever it is that these people live – the camera-people and Mike and – and so forth."

"Maybe. Where do you think that is, by the way? Where is it that they live, that they store the gasoline to run their boats and the generators that charge their camera batteries?"

"Well, I don't know. Somewhere," he gestured vaguely, "else. Somewhere else that we haven't been. It's a big island, I expect."

"I'm sure it is." They walked in silence for a while. Whenever one of their feet pressed into the sand, the area around it turned silver. Sarge began again. "And why were you selected? Originally, to be on the show?"

"I sent them a video."

"What did you say in the video?"

"I'm not totally sure, to tell the truth. The fact is I was pretty drunk when I made it."

"When they contacted you, after you sent in the video, did they ask you about your family? About you friends?"

Fletcher pictured Sascha Klymer, immaculate, beautiful, sitting in his office. "Yes. They did. I think they did. If I'm remembering right."

"And are you close with your family?"

The truth was that Fletcher didn't spend much time thinking about his family. He suspected that they didn't think much about him either. They were geographically separated: mother, father, stepmother and brother each more than a two-hour plane flight away, and they rarely made those flights. There was no deep, dark secret at the heart of the distance between them – or at least none that Fletcher was aware of aside from the collapse of his parents' marriage, which had actually been rather pedestrian given the drama surrounding it. Fletcher's brother, a tax attorney in Palo Alto, wasn't a bad fellow, but they didn't seem to have much in common. Fletcher had more or less simply drifted away from them all – if they ever could have been said to have been close to begin with. Perhaps it had just been more work than seemed worthwhile to maintain those rather tenuous ties. "No," Fletcher said. "No, I wouldn't say we were close."

"But before you left I'm sure you informed them in detail of what you knew about where you'd be going. The name of the television company, how to contact them. Or if not your family, then your close friends?"

The question made the back of Fletcher's neck prickle a little. "I'm pretty sure I did. I think. There wasn't a lot of time."

"I see. In my case, my only living relative is my mother. She lives in an old-age home. She's not very well, mentally or physically."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"Don't be. I never liked her much. Even at the best of times, she wasn't a very pleasant woman. Do you happen to have talked to any of the others about their families or friends?"

"Some of them, I guess. Not in great detail, though. I'll admit that."

"I've done a little bit of inquiring. It's quite interesting, really. None of them have close relationships with their families. Not many close friends in most cases, either, I don't think."

"What about Nancy? She's always on about her three kids."

"That's true. Probe a little deeper, though, and I think you'll find that everything is not quite as rosy as she paints it. Those three children are grown now – middle-aged, in fact. I'm not sure, but I suspect that none of them have spoken to her in years."

Fletcher let this idea settle a little. "Look, Sarge, what is it exactly that you're getting at?"

"Just that it seems interesting to me that the one thing that all of us who are on this show seem to have in common is that in some ways we're not very closely bound up with the world that we've left behind. Not to offend you, but it seems to me that if we didn't happen to return none of us would really be missed. Ah, look: company."

Fletcher looked up and saw, moving across the beach toward them, Bea and Prosperity, accompanied by a lumbering camera.

"Perhaps," said Sarge, "We can continue this conversation some other time."

9.

Sarge's insinuations definitely disturbed Fletcher. Enough, in fact, that his reaction was to put them out of his head as much as possible. He didn't ask any of the others about their families, and he deliberately avoided restarting the conversation with Sarge. As it happened, no real opportunities arose anyhow; it seemed, at least for the next few days, that when they went fishing they were always followed by a camera crew.

Deny it to himself as he might, though, his talk with Sarge had put him on edge, and not entirely in a rational way. He found himself a little more attentive, suddenly, to the looming forest, watching it, sometimes thinking that he heard strange sounds coming from it or saw little movements among the trees. It would have been an exaggeration to say that he was actually frightened, but he was – unsettled. As for believing the things that Sarge seemed to be suggesting about what they were all doing on the island – well, that was clearly crazy. Sarge might be smart and perceptive, perhaps, but he had obviously succumbed a little to the unhinged mood that seemed to have taken hold of everyone.

At any rate, any concerns that Fletcher might have had were consumed by his obsession with Bea. It only got worse and, in truth, he had little mental energy for anything else. Most tortuous of all were the nights. The problem was that their sleeping positions had been firmly established on the first night that they slept on the platform. It was the same principle that operates in a classroom: on the first day of class, the students take their seats and then some form of common consent keeps them in those seats for the rest of the term. Fletcher did not sleep next to Bea. He slept in between Nancy and Rex. On the other side of Rex was Nesploy and after that, Bea. What this meant was that every night Fletcher slept only about four feet away from the object of his longing. He was so highly attuned to everything she did that he was sure that he could detect changes in the rhythm of her breathing even over the night noises of seven or eight other people.

What he wouldn't have given to hold her as she slept! To have felt her back pressing against his chest! To have smelled her hair and watched her cheek and let her hand rest in his! It would have been enough, it would have been all he would ever have asked of the world. It was unbearable to be so horribly close, and yet so incredibly far, from his heart's only desire. But there was no way to change the sleeping arrangement. It simply couldn't be done. He couldn't just lie down next to her without provoking a bona fide scandal. The whole situation spelled very little sleep for Fletcher.

Worst of all, some nights he thought he could hear those strange sounds that he'd heard the first night he'd seen the stars. He could never tell if they were the sounds of lovemaking in the forest or of something else. The possibility that it might be Bea who had slipped off with one of their clanmates positively obsessed him. Surely he would have been able to tell that she was missing from the platform, and yet, in the dead of night, listening to those noises, he wasn't so sure at all. He would focus every ounce of his attention on the sounds: were they the sounds of sex or weren't they? Sometimes he thought he could hear moanings and gaspings; but sometimes they seemed more like the distant wails of animals, the buzz of insects, or the movements of the sea air among the trees. The noises would build to a crescendo, then die away, leaving him uncertain whether they might not have been the products of his fevered imagination all along. No one else ever seemed to notice them. Or at least, no one else commented on them and he couldn't bring himself to mention them to the others in the light of day.

When he wasn't listening to those sounds, he lay and fantasized. If only Bea would be the one to move near him. If only, one night, she would crawl past the others, whisper his name, tell him to come away with her. He couldn't be the one to break through the barrier. It would have to be her. He didn't believe that it would happen. Not really, despite the many times he'd imagined it. Events like that existed on the other side of an invisible wall. Perhaps they happened to other people – he didn't know – but they didn't happen to Fletcher.

And then, one night, it did happen. It was as if he'd willed it into happening. His eyes were closed, but he was not asleep, when there was rustling close by, and someone shook him gently by the shoulder. It was Bea.

He wasn't dreaming. She put a finger to her lips and beckoned him to follow her. Quietly, exactly as he had in his fantasies, he sat up and they slipped past the sleeping figures and onto the beach. They slunk silently across the sand, crouching a little. At one point, Fletcher began to say something, but Bea motioned again for him to be quiet. Tonight there was a moon. He could see Bea fairly well, a few steps ahead of him, a blue figure against the white sand. The ocean and the woods were two swathes of darker blue off to either side. A band of moonlight glimmered in the water, keeping pace with them as they moved along.

Fletcher could feel his heart beating – actually feel it inside his chest. What was happening? Although he had spent a good deal of time with Bea during the day, this was entirely unprecedented. He told himself that he didn't dare to hope, but the truth was that he did hope, in spite of himself. That hope was a warm thing growing dangerously inside him, swelling in his throat.

Bea didn't speak a word until they had rounded the first point of land to the west and were out of sight of their camp. Even then she spoke quietly, although that may have been more the effect of creeping through the moonlight than the danger of being overheard. She looked back over her shoulder. "I think it's okay now. I didn't want to be noticed. They run those damn cameras all night long, I think, but I don't think they're always watching them. You've just got to be quiet and careful. I don't like being followed by them, you know?"

Fletcher was afraid to speak. The sound of his voice might shatter whatever was happening – he knew it wasn't a dream, but still couldn't believe. She had turned back to look at him. "Come on," she said, and he thought she smiled, though it was hard to tell. "I want you to come with me. It's kind of a long walk. Is that okay?"

"Yes." There. He'd done it. He'd said something aloud and none of it had disappeared. There she still was, and the night, and the moon, and the water. She turned and headed off.

They walked in silence for a while. He'd caught up with her, but didn't dare look at her directly. The sand was an astonishing silver. It no longer looked like sand at all; it might have been marble. The stars closest to the moon vanished in its halo, but the rest of the sky was so full of them that it hardly looked real. There was a breeze, full of the ocean.

And there she was, only feet away, walking next to him, taking him – where? He was suddenly struck by the reality of her. There, only feet away, her lungs must be drawing in that night air. Her feet were pacing the sand. Just her. Fletcher didn't spend a great deal of time thinking about the reality of other people, or of himself for that matter. He more or less took it for granted. But suddenly her reality, her particularity, struck him as unbelievable. Of all the uncountable people that lived and had lived, there she was – her! only her! – walking next to him, breathing the air, touching the sand with her feet. It was marvelous and astounding and fragile and a little terrifying. He had a strange urge to cry. Fletcher wasn't the sort of person who cried often, and certainly not like that, not from some excess of incomprehensible emotion that was wonder and joy and fear at the same time, but he wanted to then.

The moment was fragile. At some the sun would rise and all of this – overwhelming as it seemed just then – would be swallowed up and disappear. He would seize it! He would reach out and take her hand. It was only inches away from his. His limbs tingled and everything inside him buzzed at the thought. He would do it!

But he didn't. He couldn't. That gap of a few inches was too immense, too infinite of a smallness.

He did test things; he spoke again. "Where are we going?" he asked. The words vibrated in the air, trembled, rang a thousand tiny, invisible bells suspended around him, but the night did not fall apart – it was still real.

"I'm not going to tell you." He was looking at her again now – the speaking had given him permission to look directly at her – and she really was smiling, he could see her teeth, although she was not looking back at him. "I want you to see it yourself. So I'm not going to tell you."

A little while later, Bea became talkative. She no longer seemed to think that it was necessary to speak in hushed tones, but there was something about the night that made her voice different anyhow. She sounded almost giddy, although perhaps it was only his own giddiness that Fletcher was sensing.

"It's amazing at night. Much better than during the day. It makes it all worth it, I think – all the living on fish and coconut and the being spied on and always wondering if Mike is going to show up and force you to do something strange."

"You don't like Mike?" asked Fletcher, really only in order to keep her saying something, to keep hearing her voice.

"Ugh. How could anyone? He's so plastic. He belongs to the cameras, like some sort – I don 't know, some sort of genie or something. You rub the camera and he emerges. And he's creepy. I mean, I don't know why they have to have all that shit with the masks and the robes and everything. It's just – creepy. But anyway, I don't want to talk about him. That's exactly the point. At night here, that's all gone. It's all worth it. I mean, my god, look at this place. Have you looked at the stars? Have you ever seen anything like it? They're so different, too. Do you know the constellations very well? I don't really, but I know some of them, but since we're in the southern hemisphere I don't recognize any of them. I wonder what the names of these constellations are? Someone must have named them. The Aztecs, or people on fishing boats out in the islands of the South Pacific. I wonder what they saw up there. And I think that we should be able to see some of our Northern constellations – the ones that are above the equator. Those are the zodiac signs, you know. But I haven't been able to pick them out. Although they'd be upside-down anyway from this perspective, I guess."

Fletcher didn't speak much himself. He let her go on, half listening to her words, but mostly only hearing the sound of her voice itself. She would talk for a little while, then fall silent again, then take up the thread of her thoughts a few minutes later, and all the time the reality of her kept reoccurring to him, each time fresh and startling as the first.

After a while, the topography began to shift. The jungle crept closer and seemed to loom higher. The narrowed beach was more densely scattered with large rocks. In this light, they looked even stranger than usual, jutting up from the sand, even more like the spines of huge, prehistoric beasts that had crawled up out of the deep.

Bea quickened her pace a little bit. "It's not too far, now."

At last they came to a place where the jungle tumbled all the way down to meet the water, and where there was a huge outcropping of rock, larger by far than any Fletcher had yet seen, which sat in their way, stretching off and disappearing into the ocean.

Bea stopped and turned toward him. Her face was in shadows, but the excitement in her voice sent little thrills of electricity skittering across his skin. "We're almost there now. Come on. We have to climb up here." She reached out and actually took his hand to lead him up onto the rock. The contact with her skin was shocking, incredible. His heart beat so hard he thought he would choke with the pressure of his own blood. The contact with that hand only lasted for a few moments as she led him onto the foot of the rock. She let go and proceeded in front of him as they began to ascend. At first there were pockets of sand to walk in, but after a few minutes they were scrambling over bare rock. Big as the rock had appeared at first, its real bulk had been hidden from view. Who knows how it came to be there; perhaps it was some enormous, petrified lava flow. It was tall and became steep enough in one or two places that they were nearly climbing. But Bea knew the way, and she led him up and around, and back and forth, and none of it was too terribly difficult, even though he did manage to scrape a knee once or twice. Up they went, quite a ways above the level of the water. Then they came to a place where the rock flattened out, where they picked their way across its broad, pitted surface. He thought of the hidden bulk of that rock, under the black waves, stretching on and on and down and down.

Bea turned. He thought he could see her eyes glitter and it seemed as if there was a sort of energy field around her. He didn't believe in auras or anything like that, but still there was something – he could feel it making the hairs on his arms tingle.

"Almost there," she said, and she was whispering again. A few more yards and they came to the end of the flat area; ahead, the rock sloped back down toward a strip of silver sand.

Bea had stopped. She seemed expectant. Fletcher could hear her breathing. He looked out at what was in front of them. It seemed to him that he was looking at a bay that was much broader, deeper, and wider than any he had yet seen. If there was another headland somewhere in the distance, he could not see it. The beach curved off to the left and narrowed to a sliver before disappearing. The land rose high and dark from the water. He was sure that if he turned he would be able to see the highlands proper up against the sky. But instead he looked out at the dark water.

Only perhaps it wasn't so dark after all. At first he thought that what he was seeing was the reflection of the stars in the water. But he had looked at the water at night before and he had never noticed those reflections. And besides, they seemed to shift. It wasn't just that the waves were disturbing them; it was as if the waves themselves were causing the little flashes of light.

It was the water itself that was glittering. It was no wonder that he had thought of the stars, because with each undulation, countless sparks of light flared to life and disappeared. He stared, unable to take it in. The longer he looked, the more sure he was of what he was seeing, and at the same time the more convinced he was that it was an illusion. Out across that wide, wide, dark expanse, as far to the west as he could see, the water was alive with something that sparkled in the night.

"Well?"

He had actually, just for the briefest moment, forgotten that Bea was there. Her voice startled him. It was quiet, but somehow urgent.

"There's something living in there," she said. "Some things. Some things living in the water. Only here. You have to come to this side of the rock. I don't know why."

"Are they – are they fish?"

"No." There was laughter in her voice now. "Come on."

And she was off, down the slope in front of them, skipping over lips of rock and through gullies. He followed her as fast as he could. The descent was much easier, or seemed much easier, than the climb up the other side had been. She was ahead of him the whole time, almost seeming to glow herself in the moonlight. They were back on the sand, nearly running across it now, although Fletcher didn't know why they were running. Bea paused to pull off her shoes. She set them on the sand, close together, toes pointing toward the ocean. "Come on," she said again.

"Where?"

"Into the water."

"Is it safe?"

She really did laugh now, aloud, although not unkindly. "Is anything safe, really? Come on." And her feet were splashing among the waves. Fletcher pulled off his own shoes and tossed them on the sand.

The water was a wonderfully pleasant temperature, warmer than the breeze, and before he knew it he was deep enough that the waves lapped past his waist. All around, the ocean glittered, and the lights were still tiny when you were down among them, like stars. Bea was right – they must be creatures of some kind, millions upon millions of microscopic creatures, all flashing like fireflies.

He looked ahead at Bea and was even more astonished. Where her body cut through the water, the little things flashed even more vigorously, so that around her the glow was more intense. It was just like the aura that he'd sensed a few minutes before without believing in it. He looked down and saw that he had an aura too. His movements were disturbing the things, whatever they were, and they were flashing in response. They could feel him there. The water around each of them was agitated, alive. It was hard to say what color the little sparks of light were. Sometimes they appeared to be white or blue, but sometimes Fletcher thought they were very nearly gold and often all sorts of other colors too. They refused to hold still, but sparked and danced unceasingly.

"Look!" Bea called at him, and she scooped up a double handful of water that glowed in her hands like molten metal, then let it go running between her fingers, and where the drops hit the surface of the ocean they were like tiny embers.

Fletcher waded toward her and scooped up handfuls of water himself, watching them flash, scattering them about. Bea was laughing and scooping water and then there was more laughter, which Fletcher found was his own. It was as if he was drunk. More than drunk. His mind was reeling, but at the same time everything around him was sharp and clean and good.

Bea dove beneath the surface of the water and reemerged a few moments later, still laughing. Her hair and her clothes were full of the tiny things, whatever they were. Everything about her sparkled and flashed and glittered, and she was like a nymph or a mermaid, some strange sea creature, some impossible vision, more beautiful than Fletcher could bear. He could feel himself bursting with her beauty. Again, and more powerfully than ever, he was struck by her herness, her utter uniqueness, her particular, unbelievable, incomprehensible, mysterious presence.

Their laughter quieted and she stood, smiling, still sparkling. "Isn't it amazing?"

"I've never seen anything like it." And he meant her, as well as the water, and the strange creatures, and the night itself. "Never in my life."

"I know. I know." She turned away from him to look out at the sea. "I wanted someone else to see it with me. I wanted someone else – I don't know, so that I can believe that it's real somehow. Maybe that doesn't make sense. It doesn't matter, though. Nothing like that matters. I wanted to share it. I wanted you to see it."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

He took a step closer to her, sending little waves of phosphorescence in every direction. She turned toward him. Her movement disturbed the creatures that must still have been nestled in her hair and among the fibers of her clothes, making them flash again. He could see her face in the moonlight, and she was still smiling.

They were standing close now. Fletcher could feel something like the force of gravity between them. It was as if he had stepped close enough that he'd passed some invisible boundary, like the event horizon around a black hole, and now they were in each other's orbits and there was nowhere to go but closer still.

All around them the water glittered. The stars shone down. He could feel himself full of something – something warm. His heart was no longer beating – it was singing, twirling, flying in his chest. It was a wonder that he did not drop dead. But he couldn't die. Not on that night. Not that amazing night. A night like that really is magic. On a night like that, anything is possible.

He reached up, crossing the infinite distance that separated them, and gently, not daring to breathe, hardly able to believe that at that very moment he was doing the impossible, placed his hand on her breast.

The Fifth Part

1.

He couldn't see the black eye himself, of course, because there were no mirrors. He only knew that it was there because other people commented on it.

"What happened to you?" asked Lucy when she saw him the next morning.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that's quite a shiner you've got."

"What – oh – I – " His face went hot. "I went out last night. To use the bathroom. And I fell."

"You fell?"

"I fell. Into a tree."

"I'm sorry. It looks pretty bad."

"I'm okay. Thanks."

Not all of the others commented, though he was certain that they noticed. Nancy wanted to test whether raw fish might work like raw steak was supposed to, but Fletcher wouldn't let her.

How had it all gone so wrong? He'd tried to catch Bea's eye that morning, but she'd paid no attention to him, she'd left the beach quickly and of course he couldn't follow her. He didn't think that Lucy had believed his lame lie, but what did it matter? Bea would doubtless tell them all what had happened anyway. The rest of the clan would learn. Ultimately the millions of people who would be watching this on television would learn.

Fletcher dragged himself off to the trees a few hundred yards from the camp, followed by a camera that whirred hungrily. He sat with his back against a trunk and stewed himself in the awfulness of what had happened. He marinated himself in it, then ran a skewer through his own middle and slow roasted himself over the coals. Not too far away, Little Rich had already begun his daily labors, dragging branches and lashing them together. Fletcher thought about offering to help, but he couldn't bring himself to move. Half of him hoped that Bea would show back up at any moment and the other half hoped that she was somehow gone forever.

What had gone wrong? Hadn't he and Bea been growing closer? Hadn't they been spending time together? Sharing things? Still, he never would have done anything if it hadn't been for last night, for the stars and the creatures flashing in the water and the magic of it all and the fact that she'd taken him to see it.

God, why had he done it? Only the day before – hours before, really – there had been so much possibility. The world had been alive with it, the future glittering and unknown. If he had left well enough alone, it could still be that way. He could be rambling with Bea right now, thrilling in the occasional accidental contact with her body. But now the possibilities had disappeared. The present had snapped its jaws tight on him and all the glorious possible futures had disappeared.

And what was he to do now? How could he escape this shame? God, how he wanted to leave that island. That wide ocean, that heaving forest, the oppressive infinity of the flat, heavy sky. It all looked so awful. He was trapped by it, smothered. Yesterday he'd been able to breathe, but now he couldn't remember what that had been like. The air was crushed out of him.

He needed to leave. He'd thought about it before. He'd planned it in the beginning. Now he would do it, really. And when he went, then she would realize – then she would be sorry. She would know, only when it was too late, how much he had meant to her, and she would weep. Yes, he would go right then, without even seeing her, without saying goodbye. But of course he didn't move. He wouldn't have known how to go about leaving even if he'd had the strength to do it. And besides, a horrible notion immediately presented itself: what if Bea didn't care? What if he left and she was indifferent to his leaving? What if she actually wanted him to leave? And there would be no way for him to know.

What if she had left? Right now – what if she had gone to find Mike? His chest tightened, his heart began to beat faster. That would mean, at least, that she cared – but then she would be gone. Gone! The idea was too awful to contemplate, and he knew then that he couldn't leave the island, that he would have to stay as long as he could, just to be near her, even if she never spoke to him again.

What had happened? How could this have happened again? Why was he doomed to have this kind of thing happen?

You come to a desert island, full of people you've never met before: you can be anything you want to be, you can re-invent yourself. A circus acrobat, a professional gambler, an artist. Or more importantly, rather than simply lying about your past, you could become the person that you wanted to be.

Fletcher had always wanted to be the kind of person who could send back a meal in a restaurant. Or who could get in a fight with a stranger. Not, maybe, that there was anything so virtuous or wonderful about doing either of those things. Fletcher liked to think that what constrained him from doing them was kindness or forbearance, but he suspected that really it was a matter of timidity. It was that he was painfully aware of other peoples' opinions of him and dreadfully afraid of attracting negative attention, of being embarrassed. Even sitting at the same table as someone who complained about their meal was enough to cause Fletcher to blush and look down at his plate. He was the sort of man who, when some stranger was rude to him, would choke and apologize, back out of the situation, and then spend hours afterwards thinking of things that he might have said and promising that he would stand up for himself properly next time. He was the sort of man who never got the girl.

And here he was, on this island, where no one knew him, and now it occurred to him – now that it was too late – that he could have come here and been someone else. Why couldn't he have been the guy who looks the bully in the eye and challenges him? The guy who stands up for someone weaker than he is? He could have reinvented himself as someone outgoing, bold, and confident.

But, of course, it wasn't just the island. All along, at any point in his life, he could have done that reinventing: he could have been Fletcher the Brave, Fletcher the Deep, Fletcher the Talented. At any moment he could have looked the bully in the eye. He could have been candid, or romantic, or – or whatever it was that he was supposed to have been. But the horrible, horrible fact was that he hadn't and he wouldn't. That opportunity had always been there. He could have been – what? An Olympic athlete. An entrepreneur. Someone who created his own opportunities. Someone who seized the day. The guy who could walk up to a beautiful stranger and strike up a conversation. All he would have had to do was to start doing those things: practicing the high jump every day, or just walking up to those beautiful strangers. The years behind him had consisted of thousands – of a hundred thousand, a million – opportunities that had disappeared. He could see them, countless little glittering shards, scattered on the ground around him, utterly lost. Every moment he could have usefully spent was irrevocably and terribly gone.

He could have been anyone, but instead – unflaggingly, consistently – every morning he had awoken and remade himself as Fletcher. The same Fletcher. The one who was tongue-tied, who would laugh when someone made a joke at his expense and then feel embarrassed about it later, who never learned to dance or to speak another language. The one who never got the girl. He could have been anyone, and this – this! – was what he had chosen for himself.

And none of this was even the worst part. The worst part was that he knew – utterly, instinctively – that he would go on making the same choice. Tomorrow, and the day after, and on and on, he would open his eyes again and again, and the Fletcherness that he had created would assemble itself around him like some heavy, horrible, sodden blanket, and, once again, he would be.

He sat there, with the thoughts of all the things he could have been and done crawling slowly up through his body. In the distance, the ocean was as perfect a blue as could be imagined, and the air was clear, and the day warm. The world was mocking him. He was detached from it somehow, couldn't sync himself up with any of it. He felt like a record being played at the wrong speed.

Fletcher sat there, staring at the water, for a long time. But it's hard to do anything for too long, even feel sorry for yourself. It takes too much concentration. After a while, Fletcher realized that he was hungry. His left leg was entirely asleep, tingling all the way up through his buttock. The first few steps on it were painful, and he relished the pain with a sort of savage intensity until he realized that it was a silly, minor pain, woefully short of the sort of martyrdom that seemed to be demanded by the situation.

Prosperity was sitting by the fire, along with Nesploy. She was staring straight ahead, and when she registered that Fletcher was there, she said, without turning her head, "I always try to watch for when they're doing it. For when they're planting these things. But you can't watch all the time, I guess."

She was looking at a note that had once again been impaled on a stick in the sand: "Be ready this afternoon," it said.

"Allish es ploy des filshtells," said Nesploy with a shrug.

2.

Seeing Bea – who did, in fact, return to camp – was actually worse than Fletcher had expected. He first spotted her at a distance, walking along the tree line. His intestines twined around themselves like a bunch of nervous eels. She was accompanied by Lucy, which made matters even worse. What had they been talking about? He could imagine.

Closer and closer they came. He couldn't figure out which way to look. He tried saying something light and breezy to Nesploy, which was silly since he had no way of knowing whether Nesploy even understood.

She was getting closer. If he'd stopped to look, he could almost have made out her face. But of course he didn't look directly. He became busier than he had been all morning. He messed with the fire, which didn't need it. He made another light-hearted, casual comment to Nesploy.

Closer still. He would be just fine. He would be cool. It was hard to be cool when your tongue was stuck to the roof of your mouth, but, damn it, he would be anyhow. And yet closer. What would she say to him? What would he say to her? How could he give the impression of being un-phased? But should he give that impression? He wasn't, after all. Un-phased, that is. He was pretty fucking phased, as it happened. About as phased as one could be. Maybe it would be best if he just copped to it – admitted the way that he was feeling, apologized.

Oh god. She was quite close now. He could hear the familiar cadence of her voice and her footsteps. Would she still be angry? Would she be ready to forgive him? Would she smile a conciliatory smile?

There she was, a few feet away, and – nothing. He turned as they walked up to the fire, not yet entirely sure what expression he should paint onto his face. And they were already walking past. They were chatting animatedly. They didn't stop to say hello, or even look over, but proceeded directly on toward the platform without pausing. Fletcher couldn't breathe. The most awful part was the casual ordinariness of it. Bea didn't look at all as if she was trying to snub him, as if she was ignoring him. She was absorbed in her conversation and, in the most offhand way, seemed simply not to have noticed him – or not to have cared that he was there. He watched her back receding from him.

Fletcher was in agony until Mike arrived on the beach. For once, Fletcher was actually glad to see him. His presence was at least a distraction. The boat took them to a shallow bay full of plants that undulated inches below the water's surface. It was easy to wade to shore and the water was warm and pleasant around Fletcher's legs – or would have been if anything in the world could have been warm and pleasant at that moment. Bea still wasn't looking at him.

The other clan came crawling up out of the water, looking hunched and wounded and wild. There was activity on the beach, but Mike led them straight into the jungle. They walked for a good while, accompanied by cameras. Fletcher was soaked in sweat and the exhalations of the trees by the time they arrived at what seemed to be their destination. It was a clearing of sorts, though not much of one, not enough to be open to the sky. At its rear, a rock face rose up and disappeared into the foliage.

Mike turned to face them with a smile like a medieval torture instrument. "Welcome." His voice was quiet but resonant, perfect for the microphones. "It is time for another task." The gears that ran his smile wound a little tighter. "The task is simple. The clan with the first three members out will be the clan to win."

Mike stepped to the side and made a sweeping gesture. Behind him, in the rock face, there was the darkly gaping entrance to a cave. Fletcher had just had time to register what "out" must mean when something extremely unpleasant happened to him. Without warning, someone slipped something – a bag, a hood – over his head and someone else seized him by the arms, pulling him backwards and off balance.

Something similar must have been happening to the people around him because he could hear muffled cries and the sound of struggling. Fletcher tried to fight. He thrashed and kicked his legs. But it was no good. Several strong people were holding onto him and now they were half-dragging, half-carrying him forward. He shouted for help – he wasn't sure from whom to expect it – and loudly and instinctively threatened to sue.

If he had been paying attention, he surely would have been able to tell more or less exactly when he entered the cave from the change in the quality of the atmosphere or the sounds that he and his fellow captives were making, but he was too intently focused on protesting to pay these things much mind.

It wasn't until he finally fell silent and stopped struggling – a matter of some minutes at the very least – that he did become aware of the changes. The air, still very moist, had become cool against his skin, almost cold. And the scrapes and rustles of his captors' movements echoed in such a way as to make the walls sound quite close. As for the noises of his fellow captives – he couldn't hear them at all any more.

Fletcher was walking along with the people who held him now. Or at least he was stumbling along in their grasp. Whatever will to resist he had felt was quite suddenly gone, totally sucked out of him. The adrenaline that had been thundering through his veins only moments before now only thumped pitifully against their walls, exhausting him even further. He felt suffocated inside the hood.

"Where are you taking me?" he asked aloud, more to distract himself than in hopes of answer – and indeed there was none.

The people holding him moved confidently and quickly. His own feet only tapped against the stone floor in little stuttering stumbles, but he was swept along. In a very peculiar way, having surrendered himself into someone else's control, he was almost relaxed.

After a little while, he felt a brief surge of spirit. He threw back his head and thrashed his body – to no avail – and called out, "Lucy! Sarge! Bea!" He thought that he might have heard the echo of a shouted reply from somewhere in the indeterminate distance, but he wasn't sure, and he fell limp and silent again.

They walked for he-didn't-know-how-long. Fifteen minutes? Twenty? He actually tried to count the time – "one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand" – in his head, but since he didn't know when he'd begun and he was almost sure that his rhythm was off anyway, the attempt was futile. All he knew was that, at some point, he was placed or carried or settled into a sitting position on the cold stone. Something was thrust into each of his hands. He gripped the somethings, not knowing what else to do. There were shuffling and scraping sounds around him, and then – silence.

Fletcher sat, paralyzed. By the time that it occurred to him to do anything, he was sure that he was alone. The last scrapings and scratchings of his captors had disappeared. There was nothing.

He slowly became conscious of the objects in his hands. One was easily familiar. He should have realized what it was much more quickly – and doubtless would have if the circumstances had been more ordinary: a box of matches. The other object fell into place by association: a torch. It was smooth and slender.

He would need to remove the sack from his head. Slowly, carefully, he let the torch slide through his fingers and rested it against his thigh. He reached up and pulled off the sack.

We almost never actually encounter complete darkness; what we ordinarily call darkness is really more like twilight. In complete darkness, your first instinct is usually to wave your hand in front of your face, just to check. Fletcher did so now, and saw absolutely nothing at all.

The torch was still resting against his thigh. He held the box of matches with both hands. Around him there was total silence. Or ... or maybe ...

For some reason, the thought would not complete itself. The notion that maybe – just maybe – there was something to hear, down in whatever deep place he'd been brought to, caused a tightening of some unknown piece of his anatomy deep in his chest that sent little waves of constriction up through his throat and down into his intestines. At the same time, his limbs became loose and weak.

Fletcher didn't think of himself as a particularly fanciful or imaginative person. But no time passed at all between the inkling of a sound somewhere near at hand and the sudden onslaught of an irrepressible flood of images of the sort of things that might inhabit a lightless underground cave on a deserted island. It was as if he had accumulated somewhere, without being aware of it, a great horde of visions sown together from the fragments of childhood nightmares, and that those visions had suddenly been unleashed.

Some of the things that ran through his head were simply suggestive words or phrases: half-human, shambling, dripping. He tried desperately to quiet his thoughts, but they were impossibly unruly. Cunning, misshapen, groping. He didn't want to, but part of him was trying to listen in spite of himself. Needless to say, these were not the ideal circumstances under which to attempt to light matches. He pushed open the box with two fingers, reached inside, felt the little wooden sticks. The first one that he tried to grab slipped out and fell to the ground.

Another sudden image squeezed his throat even further and stung the corners of his useless eyes: a face, inches from his own, unseen in the dark.

Staring, malformed, grotesque. His hands were trembling now in earnest. He tried to calm himself. You're an adult, for god's sake. There's no such thing as monsters. Get a grip. He tried to push the picture of that face out of his head – he wasn't even sure what it looked like, exactly – but the moment he'd almost mastered it, could nearly think of something else, he would imagine it again. Greedy, curious, hungry. He wanted the match lit almost just to end the terrible suspense. It would be better to see than to imagine. Maybe. His fingers were as big as hams, but he had a match between them now. He turned the box. He flicked the matchhead across the little strip of sandpaper – with no result. A second time and there was a tiny flare and a quick tang of sulfur. Once more and, after a fraction of a second, the match burst into hissing flame.

There was no face inches from his. There was just the lit match and nothing else, besides his own hands, which looked strangely small and distant. The torch leaned against his thigh. Slowly, deliberately, he moved the match toward the head of the torch, which looked as if it were wrapped in some sort of gauze. He cupped his tiny hands around the little flame of the match. The torch must have been soaked in some kind of flammable liquid, because it immediately burst into such a healthy ball of flame that Fletcher sprang back a little in shock and very nearly knocked the torch to the ground.

It was amazing, really, how much the light alone comforted him. The unbearable tension of imagining the creeping, spidery hands of – of whatever he'd just been imagining – seeped out of his pores almost immediately. Not that he didn't shudder a little and quickly look over his shoulder, because he did. It was just that the sheer panic of a few moments before had subsided. Even torchlight – uncanny as it was – was enough to restore some semblance of rationality. Which was all very well, but it still left him in an underground cave with no idea how to get out.

The space which the torch illuminated was irregularly oblong. Its floor was uneven and rocky. It was certainly no vast cavern, but it was large enough that the torchlight faded to black in some of the further corners. Unfortunately, there were clearly at least two ways out of the place: the entrances to two tunnels crept off, one to the left and the other to the right. He struggled to remember which way he'd come from, but he couldn't grasp hold of anything. He wished that he'd been quicker to pull of his hood. If he had, he would probably have seen the receding light of his captors.

After some indeterminate period (during which he checked over his shoulder again several times, each time with a sense of dreadful expectation that he knew to be perfectly ridiculous), he decided that the left-hand passage was the more inviting of the two, being perhaps a little wider – and now that he thought about it, it seemed to him that maybe he had come from that direction. At any rate, he had to make some sort of decision, and sitting still was not likely to do any good at all.

As he stood and began to pick his way across the uneven ground, the light from his torch moved over the walls and ceiling, and shadows dived and spun. The sounds of his own movement and – now that he noticed – even his breathing, were ludicrously amplified, whether by some actual acoustical effect or by contrast with the tangible silence around him he couldn't tell.

He had to lower the torch a little as he entered the confines of the passageway. He was still edgy, but it was remarkable what a salve that light was, how it calmed him. Now one of his principal emotions was anger: how could they put him in this situation? How the hell could anyone do this kind of thing? It was irresponsible. Who were these people, with their blue shirts and their invisible faces?

The passageway twisted and turned, but, for a while at any rate, there were no branchings. He even seemed to be traveling in a slightly upward direction, although it was hard to judge.

He thought once or twice that he out to yell out, to try to call for the others, but he didn't think it would do much good, that it would probably echo terribly. Also, he was somehow embarrassed at the idea – he couldn't bring himself to call for help. Feeling silly over his own sense of embarrassment, he experimented with saying something aloud. "Probably wouldn't do any good," he said, quietly. He regretted it immediately, for reasons that he could not have named. There was something odd and disturbing about hearing his own voice under those circumstances. He cleared his throat a couple of times in a vain effort to convince himself that he hadn't been spooked by making a sound, but that felt strange as well, so he stopped.

At some point, Fletcher began to doubt his original decision to take the left-hand passage. Surely he'd been going too long. Doubt was squirming around actively inside him by the time a fork in the tunnel forced him to make his next choice.

He decided to go left. If he always went left – well, maybe it wasn't a good idea – but he thought that maybe if he always went left then he could find his way back to where he started if he needed to. How the hell was he supposed to do this? Who the fuck were these people? There was anger in the back of his throat. It was easy to confuse it with distress – they had the same coppery taste.

The passage was narrow for some distance and then began to open up, narrowed and opened again – more like a series of caves, really, than a proper tunnel. After a while he began to suspect that he was actually going down. He didn't know how or why he suspected it any more than he'd been able to explain the feeling of going up that he'd experienced earlier – perhaps it was some sort of primitive inner ear thing. Or maybe it was his imagination. It occurred to him suddenly to wonder how far down he was, exactly, and to think of the many tons of earth that must be suspended above him. His mind raced to mine shafts and the sorts of horrible disasters that one hears about, where miners are trapped in some tiny space underground and slowly suffocate. This was worse, perhaps, than the thought of blind, groping, subterranean creatures, and he tried to force the image out of his head by walking a little faster.

He had just decided that there was almost certainly, absolutely, probably for sure a downward trend to his progress, and that he ought to turn back, when he came upon something that – for a moment at least – really did drive everything else from his mind.

He rounded a sort of a bend in one of the narrower parts of the tunnel and came suddenly upon an aperture that looked out on the biggest space that he had yet seen. This place really probably did deserve the title of cavern. The light from his torch fled out into it and lost itself before it found the other end. The floor of the space into which he looked was definitely lower – probably fifteen feet lower than the spot at which he stood – and the ceiling, like the opposite walls, was lost in darkness.

What really brought Fletcher up short were the rock formations. He'd seen things like them in photographs and so on, but never with his own eyes. The rocks were twisted and coiled into fantastic, peculiar shapes. There were delicate spires; odd clusters of bulbs like great, cold heaps of bizarre fruit; broad, undulating planes; heaving, contorted columns, some of which disappeared into the darkness above.

It might not have been a fantastic idea to climb down into that place. But there were no really good options to be taken, and Fletcher's thinking was not at its clearest anyhow. At any rate, he began to pick his way down what was really quite a steep slope. He took the last few feet in a gravelly slide, arms flailing.

Walking forward, he wasn't exactly comforted by the grandeur of the place, but he was definitely awed and certainly distracted. The light from his torch crawled up the peculiar columns that surrounded him. They were pale; he thought that some of them might even have been white. Actually, perhaps he was comforted a little. A strange feeling began to come over him, at any rate. He suddenly found himself thinking of childhood games in which he had played the explorer. He thought of books that he had read when he was young – of The Hobbit and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books. Or maybe he didn't exactly think of them, at least not in any sequential, reasonable fashion – but he felt them in the way that you feel something that has always been present and that is unexpectedly awakened by circumstance. Here he was: in the bowels of the earth. Almost certainly, no other human being had ever seen what he was seeing. He forgot his anger at the men in blue shirts. He forgot the terror of darkness and of the uncountable tons of earth over his head. He forgot the fact that he was, quite possibly, in actual, physical danger. He was, or felt that he was for a few moments at least, the bold explorer that he had dreamed of being so many years before.

The setting was certainly right for the role: mysterious, impressive. You could easily picture hunting through such a place for buried, cursed treasure, and it was just as likely that you might, say, stumble on a forgotten race of monkey-men who would make you their king as that you would be taken by some nameless horror of the deep.

Fletcher remembered learning somewhere about the process by which stalactites and stalagmites are formed. If he remembered correctly, it had to do with water filtering through the soil, collecting minerals and falling, drop by drop, into underground caves where the minerals were left behind and slowly accumulated, growing steadily and imperceptibly. He looked at the towers between which he was passing and felt a shuddering thrill at the thought of the many eons that it must have taken for them to grow. He held out his free hand and ran his fingers along their strange, smooth surfaces. They were cold to the touch and, indeed, felt damp to him. In fact, there was something distinctly moist about the air all around him. It was impossible to tell just how big the place was.

He must have walked at least twenty or thirty yards into the cavern when he rounded the base of a particularly immense pillar and there was a sudden change in the light that his torch was producing. He couldn't name it at first – it only startled him. But after a few moments he realized that it was an echo of the light, thrown up from the floor. That he didn't recognize it immediately as a reflection was probably due to the fact that he had never seen light reflected off of water that was so perfectly still before. Sunlight reflected from the surface of a stream forms shifting patterns against the leaves above; torchlight on an underground pool is unwavering, or at least it wavers only with the movements of the flame and the torch-bearer.

This new discovery explained – or at least fit well – with the moisture that he had detected in the air. Once he realized what it was, he found himself powerfully and inexplicably drawn toward the water's edge. The closer he got, the bigger the pool became. In fact, like the cavern itself, it was very difficult to tell just how big it was.

Was it a pool? A reservoir? The edge of some vast underground lake? Or could this be some sort of access to the sea? Whatever it was, it was large enough that his torchlight did not illuminate the other side. Or at least he thought not – as he approached, things flickered in the distance that might have been rock walls.

A few feet from the edge, he paused. He still could not yet see the other side. The surface of the water really was perfectly motionless and, from where he stood, totally black. Quite suddenly, he was aware of at least one of the things that was drawing him forward. He had not seen his own reflection since he came to that island – not properly, at any rate.

A few more steps and he was at the water's edge. The lip of rock on which he stood was perhaps six inches above the surface of the pool – or the lake, whatever it was. He was aware, as he stood there, of a certain sense of vertigo. It was the irrational feeling of standing near a great height and of becoming alarmingly aware of your own center of gravity, of thinking that your leg muscles might, for no good reason at all, suddenly spasm and send you pitching forward, of secretly, with no suicidal intention at all, almost desiring to leap. And so it was with a certain amount of light-headedness that he leaned forward and looked down.

It was his own face that looked back at him; no doubt about that. It was reflected perfectly in the still surface of the water. He recognized its basic structure: the plane of the forehead, the shape of the eyes and nose. And yet, there was something strange. He was bearded, of course, and he'd never intentionally grown a beard before. And the torchlight made the shadows strange. But it seemed as if there was something else, too; something that he couldn't quite put his finger on. He leaned a little further and stared. With his free hand, he reached up and stroked his own cheeks and chin, feeling the beard, watched his reflection do the same. He felt drawn downward. Maybe he would just reach out and touch the surface of the water. After all, there was no reason not to. He put out his right hand. And, just then, his reflection began to waver. Regular undulations distorted the bearded face below him. It was the most ordinary thing in the world – ripples in water – and so it took him a moment or two to realize its implications.

Somewhere out in that dark lake, something must have stirred.

What was the worst thing that could have happened to him at that moment? Probably it would have been that some creature from his nightmares seized him, drew him into the lake, and ate him alive. However, barring that, the thing that actually happened had to be fairly close to the worst thing possible.

As soon as he did realize what that silent movement in the water must mean, a genuine explosion of terror bloomed inside him. He lurched upright and stepped backwards, automatically, in alarm. His left heel failed to find traction on the smooth stone, and he went tumbling. As he fell, he lost his grip on the shaft of the torch. The torch sailed up in a horrifying, slow arc and then plunged downward, directly into the dark water.

There was a loud hiss, a last flare of light that went on long enough for Fletcher to realize what was happening and to hope for an irrational second that he might be able to grab the torch while it was still alight, and then utter blackness swallowed him.

3.

The horror that Fletcher had experienced when he had first removed the hood from his head was nothing next to what he felt now. He was choked with panic and there was nothing to do other than to strain every particle of his being (almost unwillingly) into his ears. The tiniest thing – the creeping of some sightless, underground insect – would have set his eardrums trembling. He lay there and listened, and lay there and listened, and his heart crashed and thundered, and the panic filled all the places between his cells. It seemed entirely plausible that he might actually have a heart attack and die right there in the dark before whatever it was that was moving through the water even got to him.

Slowly, when after some immeasurable time no sound came, he became aware of the cold of the rock on which he was lying. He had landed on his back. He wondered if he was hurt. It didn't seem as if he was, although it was a little hard to tell. As he was wondering, and beginning to think that he ought to move, he realized that the fear had subsided a little. His heart rate had slowed – or at least the beating of his heart had grown less insistent. Actually, some part of him wanted to laugh. For the first time, it occurred to him that, after all, the ripple that had caused him to panic might have had a perfectly innocent origin – a drop of water falling from a stalactite above, say. He cursed his stupidity, but of course that did him no good at all.

Slowly, he stretched out his limbs. Nothing seemed to be broken, or even seriously bruised or sprained. Then he faced another blow: the box of matches, which he had put in his left-hand pocket, was no longer there. Perhaps he'd lost it in the fall. He felt around as best he could, but they were nowhere to be found. He rolled over onto his belly. And he began to crawl. The fear had definitely not left him entirely and he tried to move as quietly as he could, though of course every scrape and scrabble echoed disturbingly through that vast silence.

He was fairly sure that the water was in the direction that his feet had been pointing. But that was all that he was even remotely certain of. There was no way, in that darkness, to get one's bearings at all. But it didn't matter too much – away from the black water was really his only goal.

He didn't think much, as he moved – only felt, only slid his hands slowly across the rock to try to pick out a path that was free of hazard. It occurred to him fleetingly that he was like a worm, and he also thought once that maybe he was more like nothing – that he was disappearing there in the dark. He remembered things, at random really – once he even recalled that his heart had been broken only the night before – but mostly he just crawled.

The only moment of that journey on hands and knees and belly that was any different – the only punctuation at all – was when he found himself moving upwards, just a little, and his left hand collided with a sort of ridge of stone. He felt along it. Its lip was perhaps eight or so inches above the surface on which he was crawling. It rose very nearly vertically from that surface, and the raised area beyond it was flat and smooth. Carefully, he inched forward and up onto that ledge. It was broad enough that he could fit his entire body onto it, but he had barely begun to move forward when he encountered another ledge, similar to the first, rising up to about the same height. Up he crawled onto that. The process was repeated three times, and he had just run into a fourth such ledge, when the familiarity of what was happening occurred to him. These things over which he was moving were very much like broad stairs. It's true that rock formations can take all sorts of curious shapes and that sometimes they look rather to have been planned and executed by some intelligence than to have been the result of a natural process, but Fletcher was put in mind of the ruins that he had seen atop the mountain and of the crumbling wall he'd climbed in the jungle and the amphitheater with its jagged-tooth columns, and he paused in his progress long enough to ask himself, What is this place? But it did no good to ask the question of the emptiness, so he went on.

The stairs – if that was what they were – continued for a while. Fletcher lost count, but he was sure that he had passed at least ten before they gave way to a rougher surface. It seemed as if he had worked his way out of the cavern. He couldn't say exactly what it was that made him think this, but he somehow had the impression that the walls had moved in closer and that he was in a sort of tunnel.

He was exhausted. It had been hours, surely, since he had eaten, and a very long time since he had slept. He was drained, emotionally and physically. His knees and the palms of his hands were raw. Every time he put out a hand, he feared that he would find emptiness, or – and he had to fight back the image every time it came to him – something soft and yielding.

At last the moment came when he could move no further. It was impossible to say whether it was the spirit or the flesh that was no longer willing. They were both pretty well spent. Feeling with his right hand, he found what he thought (insofar as he could think at all) was the wall of the tunnel through which he was crawling and slowly he pulled himself up into a sitting position, leaning against that wall. The blackness was absolute. Worn away as he was, he could hardly remember what it was like to see. Perhaps he'd gone blind.

What now? He didn't even ask himself the question. There was nothing around him: blankness, cold, silence. He became aware that his right hand was resting against his thigh and that he could feel an object in his pocket. It was his penny whistle. He reached into the pocket, pulled out the two pieces of the whistle, automatically fitted them together, raised the whistle and put it into his mouth.

He breathed into it. There was a weak sort of tweet, like a sick bird. It was the most peculiar sound he could ever remember hearing. A few moments later, he tried again: the first notes of a song, but those too died strangely in the darkness.

He sat for a few more moments, then one more time he blew – and this time the song came. It gave a few weak twitches at first, caught up in its own echoes, but then it grew stronger. It was – perhaps oddly – a spirited tune that came to Fletcher's lips and fingers: "Courting in the Kitchen." He couldn't really have said why he was playing. Maybe it was an act of defiance toward the darkness. At any rate, it gave him a strange sense of comfort.

At last the song came to an end, and he finished it with a flourish. When the sound was gone, the silence was as absolute as it had been before, but some of its heaviness was gone.

And then there was a new thing. What was it? He could hardly tell. It was – it was – yes! – it was light! A flicker of light, he couldn't even tell from what direction.

He began to yell and his own voice surprised him. "Help! Help! I'm here! Help me! I've lost my torch! Help!"

For a moment, nothing happened, but then the light began to grow brighter. Fletcher yelled again and again, and then the trickle became a flicker, and a glow, and it was the light of fire on rocky surfaces, and then it was a torch, bright as the sun, rounding a bend in the tunnel.

Holding the torch was Fortunato, the shaggy fellow that Fletcher had battled on the log. He looked unreal in the firelight. His beard and his hair were tangled. His face was all shadows. For a short, horrible moment, Fletcher thought that maybe, because he was a member of the other clan, because they were supposed to be in competition, because the last time they had any close contact with one another they'd been trying to hit each other with poles, even because the man looked rather frightening, that maybe Fortunato would abandon him down there, or even attack him. But the moment didn't last.

"Are you all right?" Fortunato asked.

"I don't know – the dark – I lost my torch – in the water – don't know how it happened – I couldn't – Jesus, I've been crawling – oh my god – thank you!" His mouth had been uncorked and he was babbling, almost hysterical. He kept trying to talk, but wasn't able to form proper thoughts or phrases, and finally just fell into saying, "Thank you! Thank you so much!" over and over again.

When he had finally calmed down enough to quiet himself, when he had finished shaking Fortunato's hand – he wasn't even sure how he'd come to be grasping it, but it was really rather surprising that he hadn't embraced him – Fortunato looked him up and down with his dark, animal eyes and said, "What was that sound? That music?"

Fletcher held up the whistle. Fortunato looked at it for a moment. Then he nodded, the shadows in his face folding and creasing. "Well," he said, "Now that we've found you, let's see if we can find our way out of this place."

Now that there were two of them, everything was all right. It was hard to believe in monsters when there was someone else with you, even if you were underground. It took them a while to find their way out, but they did it. "Follow the air," said Fortunato, and now that he said it, Fletcher thought he could detect little currents moving around him when he concentrated. He hadn't noticed them before. At any rate, Fortunato managed to guide them out.

When they emerged, it was nighttime. The lights of the cameras shone brightly. Fletcher was so glad to breathe fresh air, so delighted by the closeness of the jungle, which was so much less oppressive that the closeness of the cave, so overjoyed to be free, that he forgot to be angry.

Though he and Fortunato had tied on their way out of the cave, Fletcher was the third member of Clan Itzli to emerge, and Fortunato only the second of Clan Coatl. They had won. Fletcher tried to protest at first, explaining that Fortunato had rescued him, but no one seemed to listen and, after a while, he lapsed, somewhat guiltily, into silence. The Blueshirts went into the cave to fetch the remaining members of the clan. Fletcher rested his back against a tree and sucked in mouthfuls of air as big as he could stand.

Once they'd arrived back at the shallow bay, they loaded into the boats and went directly to the amphitheater. He spent most of the boat ride staring at the back of Bea's head, trying to develop psychic powers. Look at me. Look at me. Look look look looklooklooklook. She turned her head once, but just a little, and otherwise looked resolutely out across the water. Fletcher was so busy thinking about the renewed pain of heartbreak and the relief of being outside that he almost failed to notice that the boat was pulling into its dock.

Up and in they went. There were the robes and the masks and the fire. The music seemed different to Fletcher this time: more insistent, more pounding. But perhaps it was only his mood.

Mike started the proceedings and the members of the other clan rose, one by one, to give their speeches. Where did people go once they leave through that dark archway? Sarge had been trying to suggest something – something awful and ridiculous. True, this wasn't like an ordinary television show. Fletcher had to admit that. The people in robes and masks, dressed like Klu Klux Klan members or something from the Spanish Inquisition. It was clearly designed to be ominous. But it couldn't be more than that – more than some tasteless television farce.

He was exhausted. Fortunato, his rescuer, rose to speak, and Fletcher found that he couldn't bring himself to look directly at him.

There was something frothy, overheated, and nightmarish about the whole thing. Something sordid. He pictured himself packed into a tight space with hundreds and hundreds of other people, unable to move. Then he saw himself standing suddenly and running down to the fire, knocking Mike over, grabbing him by the hair and beating his head against the stone over and over again until it was soft and pulpy. He wanted more than anything to bathe or to shower. Was he perhaps running a fever?

"The time has come!" Mike's voice sounded terribly loud, even over the strange pipes and drums. It was as if Fletcher had suddenly noticed that Mike was speaking at all. How had he not been hearing it this whole time? "The time has come to chose! Come forward and cast you votes!"

One by one, as they had done before, the members of the other clan filed up and wrote on the slates beside the fire.

Mike spoke again. It was as if the sound system in Fletcher's head had just been turned on, and now Mike's voice had an almost unnatural clarity. "All of the lots are cast! It is time to read the names!" He stepped forward and began intoning the names written on the tablets. It must have been intentional, what with the robes and all, but he sounded very much the way that Fletcher imagined a priest of druid or something might sound. The place looked right for it, too. Fletcher didn't keep track of the names, but evidently others must have been, because when Mike finished, Chet stood. He was the handsome, middle-aged man, the one who had spoken of himself as a father figure before. "Chet! Your time here is at an end! The clan has sent you away! Burn your fetish!" Chet stepped up to the fire, raised his arm, dropped the little straw figure into the flames. Then he turned and, escorted by two of the masked figures, stepped into the darkness of the arched doorway beyond the fire.

There was a stir among them, like the stir that happens in a crowd after the curtain has gone down and everyone prepares to leave.

"Wait!" It was Mike's voice again, like a hammer striking something large and hollow. "Tonight there is more. Tonight marks a new beginning for you. Clan Itzli and Clan Coatl are no more. From now, there will only be one clan. Tomorrow, Clan Coatl will join Clan Itzli. As of this moment, you are all in this thing together. Or perhaps I should say that as of this moment, each one of you is on your own."

The masked figures were suddenly moving among them. Fletcher felt something being pressed into his hand. It was a straw figure. Looking down at it, he thought that it might be the very one he'd held before, on the night they'd exiled Big Rich, but he couldn't be sure. There was murmuring around him. He held the little figure tightly.

The moon had risen while they had been in the amphitheater: a greasy, yellow smear hung upside down in the blackness. By its light, he got, for the first time, a fairly clear view of the area beyond the rings of light cast by the torches. The stone steps dropped steeply down to the wooden pier. It was clear now that the body of water on which the boats sat was a bay, almost totally sheltered from the sea by long spurs of black land stretching out in a great circle on either side. Once they'd descended and were all aboard, the boat's motor thrummed itself awake, and the boat arced out across the water. The mouth of the bay was narrow and flanked by two tall outcroppings of rock, almost like towers. That night, as he slept, Fletcher kept the little fetish clutched tightly to his chest.

4.

Prosperity came to fetch Fletcher sometime that next morning; it was his turn, once again, to talk to the camera. She walked with him toward the spot where the little confessional was set up. On the way, she asked, "Are you okay, Fletcher?"

"Am I okay?"

"Well. Your eye looks kind of bad."

"Oh, that. It's nothing. I fell down at night." There was probably no point in lying. She'd almost certainly heard the real story, but he couldn't bring himself to tell it.

"Oh. Other than that, you're okay though?"

He glanced over at her. She was walking with her head bowed a little bit, looking at the sand, but he could still see her watery eyes and the purple sores dotting her cheeks. She'd been perhaps a little plump when all this had started – he wasn't sure – but now she looked shrunken and wiry.

"I don't know. I guess maybe I'm going a little crazy. I expect we all are. I mean, I don't know how long we've been out here. There isn't much to eat. We keep having to do these bizarre things. That cave, yesterday. That was – it was hard."

"Yeah. You seem kind of tense. Kind of freaked out."

"Everybody seems a little freaked out to me."

"I guess that's true."

They walked a little further in silence, then she said, "Fletcher? Have you tried praying, Fletcher?"

It was not what he'd been expecting to hear. Fletcher was not a religious person, and under normal circumstances he didn't tend to associate with religious people. Or at least he didn't think he did; every so often over the course of the years some acquaintance of his had surprised him with a reference to church-going or to God. It always made him uncomfortable, as if the person had casually drawn attention to a thing that ought to have embarrassed them – a facial tic or a mild physical deformity, say, that Fletcher himself would have avoided mentioning.

"Um, no. No I haven't."

"Maybe you should try it. It always helps me. It gives me something to hold on to, you know? It keeps me sane, I guess. Anyway, I just thought I'd mention it. And I'm happy to talk. If you ever want to. Just let me know. Have fun."

"What?"

She lifted her hand to indicate just ahead of them. They'd arrived at the place where the camera was stationed. "Have fun."

"Oh, right. Thanks. Thanks, Prosperity. I'll see you later."

"Yeah. See you later." She turned and walked away.

Fletcher walked on. He gave his head a few little shakes, trying to clear it. He definitely didn't feel quite right. The camera was hunched in its little enclosure, staring, and he sat down in front of it. It was hot in there and the leaves folding over and around him made felt confining. The card hanging beneath the lens said: WHAT NOW?

"What now? What now?" he repeated, looking the machine in the eye and then looking away again. "What now? I don't know what now, really. Am I supposed to do something? Am I supposed to have a plan? What would you be expecting of me?" He sighed and blinked several times, still trying to rid himself of some thought that he couldn't name. "Okay. All right. I'm sure you know already at this point, so there's no point in keeping it from you. And I guess maybe I want to talk about it anyhow. I'm crazy about Bea. That's the truth. She's incredible, you know? I just – I can't stop thinking about her. It's the real thing. I know this sounds stupid, but I'm in love with her. There. I can say it aloud. Anyway. As you already know, she doesn't return my feelings. The other night, we – I – we went for a walk together. And anyhow, that's how I got this." He pointed at his eye. He sighed, blowing the air out of his nose. "It hurts. Not my eye, I mean. That hurts too a little, I guess, but not too bad. I mean my heart hurts, I guess. That's what I mean. There's this constant sort of pain like a – like a wail inside me. Like my heart is wailing. It's awful. It really is. It's more awful than any of the other things – the food, the sand, the exhaustion, all of that. I could deal with all of that, I really could, if only ...

"But I guess I can't figure out if it matters at all anyhow. I can't tell what matters. It's occurred to me a couple of times recently that maybe I don't exist. It sounds funny to say that out loud. Even funnier than saying I'm in love. I guess it's not really that I don't exist exactly, but that maybe I'm unimportant. I mean, I know in some sense I'm unimportant, of course, but maybe we're all a lot less important than we think we are. I've been thinking about genetics. About the genetic code. If I understand it correctly – which I may not – we each have this code contained in every one of our cells. It's mostly a code for making proteins apparently. A really elaborate and incredible thing. It's totally amazing that it works at all, if you think about it. But the real point is that the code just replicates itself. That's its real job. Not even a job, exactly, because that makes it sound conscious some how. The code just makes and remakes itself because that's what it does. It's the nature of the code. In some situations, the code is successful, and its success is measured only by its continued existence; and sometimes the code is unsuccessful and then it disappears. But the thing is that, from the code's point of view, it's irrelevant whether it expresses itself outwardly as a human being or as a spider or a tree or an ocelot or whatever. It's just code and the individual creature is just a vessel for the code, and when that individual creature goes away, it really doesn't matter. I mean, I really care that I'm not immortal. I don't want to die. But, physically at least, I'm just an expression of this code perpetuating itself and my death is irrelevant – just a tiny bit of that code going away. So, it's not that I don't exist, but maybe just that I'm epiphenomenal. All of this business, all of the things that I care about so much, that we all spend so much time worrying about, whatever it is that's happening on this show, say, or my wailing heart, are just extraneous, epiphenomenal. They're just byproducts of what's really going on. Effluvium.

"Just now, Prosperity mentioned God to me. I don't believe in God, I don't think. All the evidence seems to point against any kind of divine being, or at any rate, against a being that's particularly concerned about us. I think if God exists, he – or she, it, whatever – is probably the God of that code. That seems much more likely to be a thing that God would be concerned with. God maybe is a sort of mathematician, which I think someone famous once said. I don't know. I don't know what I'm talking about. Or who I'm talking to.

"It's like this: there are stories going on all the time, right? So how do you pick what story is important, what story is real? I'm obsessed with the story of how I'm in love with Bea and she's not in love with me. But what if the real story is about what's going on in our muscles or with the chemicals that our brains are constantly releasing, or in our digestive tracts? We're walking along the beach and I think what's important is that we're walking along the beach and I'm in love with her and she's not in love with me, but what if the thing that really counts is our blood carrying oxygen and hormones and waste products? That seems just as likely, really. Or what if the story is other than that? What if what really matters is the shifting of the sand underneath our feet, the changing positions of those grains? Or what if it's the waves coming in to shore, the hugeness of the ocean? What if it's the gradual wearing down of the island by the water, or the lifting of the island up from the sea floor, the movement of the tectonic plates and all that? I mean, that story's been going on for uncounted millions of years. Or the story of the hydrogen in the sun burning itself up, or the universe expanding? Next to that, all the human stories – probably even the story of the code – dwindle into total insignificance.

"What's next? What am I going to do next? Keep being in love with Bea, I guess. I don't see that I have any choice. Because as much as I suspect that there's something else behind or beyond what I think is going on, I keep coming back to the things that I think are going on. I'll try to get as close to her as I can, now that things have changed. And try to figure out whatever I can, even if it is all irrelevant. There's this thing too – Sarge has this idea about what's going on – I need to try to understand that, maybe – I need to think about that. Because if I understand right, Sarge thinks – "

Fletcher stopped. Sweat was forming at his temples, running down into his beard. Everything was very quiet. The camera was watching him, intently it seemed. He was still holding on to the little straw figure that he'd been given the night before.

"Nevermind. I have to go now."

5.

"What did you mean exactly that we wouldn't be missed? What were you trying to suggest?"

Fletcher had managed to find Sarge alone. He was walking along the edge of the water, his fingers laced behind him. He looked up at Fletcher. "What do you believe in?" he asked.

"I believe that it's very annoying to answer a question with another question."

Sarge laughed. "Sorry. Let me ask you something more specific. Do you believe that the earth is round?"

Fletcher surrendered. "Yes."

"Why?"

"I don't know. People have known it for ages. For millennia. The ancient Greeks knew about it. Everybody knows it." It didn't sound convincing somehow. "And I've seen photos. From space."

"You've seen photos that you were told were of the earth, that you were told were taken from space."

"Okay. Fine. I didn't take the photos myself, it's true."

"So the only reason that you know it is that people have told you it's true?"

"Yes. I guess so. I mean, I couldn't prove to you, standing here, that the earth is round, no. That's what you're trying to say, right?"

"Most of our knowledge is less secure than we think. I don't blame you for not being able to prove that the earth is round. Most people couldn't. You don't have the time to know everything from personal experience. It makes sense." He paused. "Why do you ask me now? About the thing I said to you before?"

"Well, it's just – I've been thinking. I'm not sure. I've been thinking and one thing is that there were no cameras yesterday. There couldn't have been cameras inside those caves, not even hidden cameras. Because there wasn't any light and I'm pretty sure that even a hidden camera needs some light in order to operate, even with night-vision or whatever. So, what was the point of the whole thing if it wasn't being filmed? It was dangerous down there. Really. I'm ready to concede that now. And they weren't even filming it."

"It was very strange, yes. Do you believe in evil?"

"In evil? I don't know. Not the same way that I believe the earth is round."

"People don't like to believe in certain things because it's uncomfortable. Evil exists, Fletcher. I don't know whether it's natural or not, but it definitely exists. Think about it. Think of all of the horrors of human history, all the things that we've visited upon one another. The mind boggles at it. I don't know whether evil is an active agent, or the loss of something vital, but evil exists, and it exists in just one place. Only inside of people, inside of human beings. You think it will never affect you? That it's something awful but distant? How many other people do you think have thought that same thing?"

Fletcher watched their reflections in the wet sand, hanging upside-down above the sky. "Are you going to answer my original question?" he asked.

"I'm not answering it because I'm waiting for you to do it yourself."

For some reason Fletcher thought of mole crabs. He'd seen them before, not at this beach, but when he was much younger. They burrowed into the sand and had little antennae covered with fine hairs like feathers that they used to filter their microscopic food from incoming waves. If you dug at the right moment in the wet sand you could find them and they would wriggle around in the palm of your hand, trying to dig their way into it. He wondered if there were mole crabs, or other creatures like that, underneath him right at that moment.

"You think," he said, almost sighing, "That we're not going back. That we aren't meant to go back. You think that when they say that we're leaving, that when we vote people off, that they're not really going home." He waited a second but Sarge didn't say anything. Why not go on, really, now that he'd started? "You think that they've brought us out here to kill us. When you're talking about evil, you're talking about Mike and the Blueshirts. Or maybe you mean us, because we can't face the facts and are willing to send people off to be sacrificed." Sarge only looked at him, his face devoid of expression. "But that isn't fair. Because we don't know. We don't know what's going on, and so if we vote people off – even if – even if something highly unlikely – something pretty much almost impossible – even if that thing is happening, then it's not our fault. Because we don't know." The sky beneath their reflections was very, very deep. "But if we do know. Then. If we do realize. Then." He wished that he'd had something substantial to eat at some point within recent memory, something other than bland, boney fish and coconut. His head felt swollen. The sunlight and the water had dazed him. "But this is crazy. This is ridiculous. Completely crazy. It's not possible."

Sarge kept walking. "There are lots of crazy things, Fletcher. Lots of crazy things out there."

Back at the fire, later on, Fletcher brought the subject of yesterday's task up with several of the others.

"Yeah," said Nancy. "That was awful. That was crazy. It was so dark down there. Kind of creepy."

"More than kind of creepy, I think," said Fletcher. "It was downright scary."

"Well, but they're supposed to test us, right? I mean, it's supposed to be hard. Otherwise there wouldn't be any point. Fear of the dark is pretty primal, so it kind of makes sense to test us that way."

"But that was dangerous. We were down there for hours."

"I think you're overreacting, Fletcher," put in Lucy. "It wasn't hours. Maybe an hour."

"It was night by the time we got out!"

"It was late when we went in."

"Well, but, anyway, they couldn't have even filmed us down there. I mean, there were no cameras. And it was pitch black."

"Okay," said Prosperity, "But they could get our reactions coming out, you know? I mean, this stuff all gets edited a ton anyhow. And what about, like infrared cameras or something?"

He couldn't actually bring himself to voice Sarge's suspicions, especially in front of the watching cameras, and he wondered now for the first time whether Sarge had spoken about this – whatever this thing, this idea, was – to anyone else.

"You don't think – you don't think there's anything strange about – about this place?"

"Well, of course it's strange," said Lucy. "None of us have ever been through anything like this before, have we?"

"Listen, buddy," put in Rich, who had joined the circle, "It's a test, all right? It's a test of strength and endurance. You've got to tough it out, see? You've got to stay strong." His eyes looked a little wider than they ought to have been.

"You have to think about what's important," Nancy added. "You have to focus on what keeps you going. As the mother of three children, I know that Rich is right – things can be really hard. But you have to focus on those kids. In my case. You've got to focus on what's in your heart."

This wasn't going right at all. They were talking to him as if he was the problem, as if they were counseling him. It wasn't what he'd intended.

"But you're a thousand miles away from your kids – just for the sake of naming a number. And you have no way of communicating with them. What good is it doing them to have them in your heart, or whatever?"

"I am here for the sake of my kids. They are the reason that I do everything." She sounded a little angry now.

"But it's dangerous. That's what I'm trying to say. The things they're having us do are dangerous."

Prosperity spoke again. "Not actually dangerous to us. There's always a safety net."

"What safety net? A lousy torch miles underground, lost in caves? I mean, Jesus – to me, that counts as actually dangerous. I don't know what you want for dangerous."

"What about the tracker?"

"What tracker?"

"The tracker thing that they attached to us while we were going down into the cave. Didn't you notice it?"

A heated debate ensued. Several of them insisted that they'd noticed tracking devices attached to their clothes. Others thought that the trackers hadn't been there, but that they had been in no real danger anyhow. After a while, Fletcher himself was no longer certain that he hadn't been wearing a tracking device of some kind. He hadn't noticed it at the time, but what if someone had removed it from him once he was out of the cave? He'd been pretty overwhelmed – it would have been easy enough for someone to do it without his noticing.

What was wrong with him? He was worn down, beaten, filed to a nub. That must be it. Hungry and bewildered in the dark, he'd been attacked by childhood fears. All this living on bland fish surrounded by people in blue shirts whose eyes were cameras. All these weeks or months or whatever under skies twice as wide as was even possible, with invisible cliffs that loomed somewhere beyond and above the buzzing jungle. All of these mysterious, nighttime voyages by boat. All of the tedium punctuated by brief interludes of inexplicable and contrived stress. It was all wearing him down, and that was why he felt this way about last night, that's why he had reacted that way in the dark.

What if Sarge was right, though? It was obviously impossible, but what if? It was too horrible even to consider. There wasn't just the fact that he would be in danger, but just the sheer perversity, the sickness of the whole operation. Dragging a bunch of people to an island in order to starve them, put them through these bizarre challenges and then – what? Murder them? Torture them? Sacrifice them? Force them to choose the sacrificial victims themselves? Unbidden, there came the thought of how people who would actually do such a thing might go about their sacrificing. It made him ill even as it fascinated him, and he tried to force the thought away.

Why? It wasn't possible. Why would anyone do such a thing? He thought of the cameras. What if this was that sort of film? What if the people staring through those camera lenses were waiting to watch – ?

He must be going crazy. What was it like to go crazy? He'd always assumed that he'd know if he were going crazy, but after all, was that right? Would you recognize the voices in your head as voices in your head? He'd thought he was too stable, too grounded, too ordinary, to go crazy. But mightn't that be wrong too? Sometimes, in some sorts of craziness, you were supposed to see and hear strange things. Well, he'd been seeing and hearing some pretty unlikely things lately: underground caverns with stairs carved in them, subterranean lakes full of mysterious ripples, unexplained music and ruins, woods full of strange presences, dark shapes skimming over tree-tops.

Wasn't it a sign of insanity that you didn't acknowledge it? Fletcher remembered reading somewhere that some shocking percentage of people believed that they'd actually spoken to god. You couldn't get much crazier than that, but those people probably had houses and jobs and cars and were, too all appearances, as normal as Fletcher himself. At any rate, they probably thought they were. In some ways he wished that he believed in god, like Prosperity. Maybe in that case there'd be something to fall back on, someplace that seemed solid on which to stand.

He was so absorbed in his musings that he managed to forget that the members of the other clan were going to be joining them that very day. They came by boat, sometime after noon, accompanied by Mike. A camera crawled down to the water to meet them, but the members of Fletcher's clan waited at their camp. Up the beach the others marched, carrying a few possessions. Soon Fletcher could see the whites of their eyes. He was just starting to feel uncomfortably as if someone ought to say something but sure that it wasn't going to be him, when Sarge stepped forward.

"Welcome," he said. "Welcome to you all. We've tried our best to make this place a home of sorts since we came here. We hope that you'll look on it as your home as well, and that you'll be comfortable. We need to stick together, after all, so please, come join us."

That was all that it took. A few of them took a step or two forward. Hands were shaken. Someone proposed that they should eat what there was to be eaten. Sarge had been fishing that morning, and though there wasn't a great deal to go around between that many people, they managed to stretch it out. Nesploy stoked the fire. Conversations began to break out here and there.

Fletcher ate a little, but didn't talk to any of the newcomers except Fortunato. He was still grateful to the man for having saved him in the cave, and so he did his best to find a few things to say. Mostly he tried to watch Bea out of the corner of his eye. It seemed to him that she was very animated, talking to the newcomers a good deal. She still hadn't said a single thing to him, or even looked directly at him. Her amazing eyes swept over him as if he were part of the landscape.

Later that day, after their frugal lunch with the newcomers, another change came to the beach. It started as a sort of a smell: something rich and acute and puzzling. There was a change in the texture of the air as well. It was hard to put your finger on – a sort of stirring, a restlessness. The trees hissed quietly. Fletcher doubted his own senses at first, but soon the others began to comment on it. They gathered around the fire. Someone pointed out across the ocean.

A darker blue had tarred the edges of the sky, and the distinction between sea and sky began to blur, as if the waters were rising up. Darker and darker the horizon grew, and the stain began to spread upwards. They all sat or stood, watching it. Whatever it was, it was dark, peculiar, and powerful.

Fletcher stole glances at the others' faces, trying to see whether there was any fear. He thought perhaps they should all be panicking, running for higher ground, but he couldn't bring himself to be the only one to panic.

"What is it?" he asked Lucy quietly, but she only shrugged.

The air felt hollow and huge, as if they were at the bottom of some enormous pit or crater. Distance was distorted. The sand in front of him seemed to stir. He glanced again at Lucy and was alarmed to see that some of her hairs had spontaneously begun to lift up from her scalp as if she were part of some high school physics experiment. His own skin began to tingle.

And then, without so much as a warning drop, it was upon them. Sheets and sheets of water. A wall of water roaring up out of the sea. Tremendous, unbelievable, fierce rain. Not individual drops it seemed, but one huge, undifferentiated mass. The sky was gone, and there was nothing but water.

6.

Down and down the rain came and continued to come, all through that first afternoon and into the next day, and the next. At first it had been like the roar of some incredible beast. Now, the water tapped on the leaves so incessantly that it was like a purring or a hissing. It didn't get cold; in fact, if anything it was hotter. It was as if the air, which had always been humid, had simply reached its saturation point.

There was very little to do. It might have been possible to fish, but it certainly wasn't possible to light a fire, and no one was quite ready to eat raw fish. If the Blueshirts were planning on killing them, they did not apparently intend to starve them to death, because the day after the rains began, they brought a small selection of canned goods. Meals now consisted mostly of cold beans.

They still did some things – collected coconuts for example – but mostly they lurked in the first fringe of trees. Fletcher watched. He watched occasional black or green crabs scuttle across the sand. He watched the sand itself. It had changed color; it was duller now, like lead. He would try to track a particular rivulet as it danced across the waxy surface of a leaf, or pretend that two of them were racing each other to the leaf's edge. Sometimes he would find himself becoming quite emotionally involved in these imaginary contests. He watched the rain soaking the sand and wondered where it all went when it had passed between the grains. Did it go back into the ocean? Did it fill that underground lake? He watched the little spikes where raindrops hit the waves and he watched the distance where the ocean and the sky blurred together.

When he could, he watched the other people. It was interesting to note how the new ones were integrating themselves. Rich and Ben, in particular, spent a good deal of time together. One thing that bothered him a little was that there didn't seem to be enough of them. Granted, it was hard to keep track under those conditions, since they were rarely all gathered together, and people seemed to materialize in and out of the water, but still he thought there ought to have been more. He tried to do a mental count of how many people there should be and how many there were, but found that he couldn't keep track of either number.

When he could, of course, he watched Bea. She still hadn't spoken a word to him since that night. It hurt just to see her, but the worst was when he saw her interacting with one of the new arrivals. Unless perhaps the worst was imagining her interacting with one of the new arrivals when he couldn't see her.

The others had hidden their straw fetishes. Fletcher knew because he had hidden his own. He'd spent a good deal of time examining it at first, especially the things that had been woven in amongst the straw fibers. There were several stone beads near the surface with lines crudely carved in them. There was something that he was fairly sure was a piece of bone. The figure was about six inches long, and only a few inches round at its thickest point, but Fletcher was pretty certain that there were other tiny objects inside it; he could feel them, and, if he teased the fibers apart a little, he thought he could catch glimpses of them. He wondered again whether this was the exact same doll that he'd held on the night when they'd sent away Big Rich. Had the doll been made for him? Did the beads and stones and things refer to him somehow?

He rubbed his fingers along and against the fibers of the little man, half hoping that they would come apart by chance and he could see what was inside, since he knew he'd be emotionally incapable of pulling it apart intentionally. But then he became worried that it really would fall apart. Once it struck him as a real possibility, the idea became horrible, and he took the thing into the woods to hide it. Why, precisely, it needed hiding, he couldn't have said. Surely it was ridiculous to think that any of the others would steal it – but then, well what did it matter anyhow if it was ridiculous? So he hid it, not far from the edge of the woods, in the hollow at the foot of a particular tree. He found himself going to check on it often, and each time his throat tightened with anxiety at the thought that it might not be there.

He was on one of these trips to visit the fetish when a voice surprised him. "Hey," it said from above.

He jumped with fright and looked up. It was Len, the guy he'd talked to on the plane. Len was perched among the roots of a moss-covered fallen log, a foot or two above Fletcher's eye level. "Hey," he said again, then shimmied lightly and soundlessly through the moss and slid down the surface of the log, landing near Fletcher. "I've been wanting to talk to you."

"Oh," said Fletcher.

"I'm not interrupting anything, am I?"

"Interrupting? No – I – no, not at all."

"Good. So, how's it going?"

Len seemed a lot thinner than he had on the plane. Fletcher seemed to remember that his face had been broad, even a little chubby. Now the cheekbones stood out. His hair was longer as well. He didn't have much of a beard, just a few hairs on his chin and in the hollows of his cheeks.

"It's going okay, I guess. Good."

"Having fun?"

"Fun? No. Well, I don't think that's the right word for it."

"Too bad. To be expected, I suppose, though. How about this rain?"

"Yeah. It's crazy."

"I feel like I'll never be dry again. Like I can't even remember what it's like to be dry. The whole world is wet, wet, wet, wet, wet. Do you mind if I ask you a question?" Len grinned.

"Sure. Go ahead."

"Your friend Sarge. What do you make of him?"

Fletcher wasn't quite sure that he would have called Sarge his friend. "I don't know. He's all right, you know. He's pretty in-charge, I guess you'd say. A pretty take-charge kind of guy. Why?"

"He's got some pretty funny ideas."

"Sure. I guess so."

"What do you make of his ideas?"

"Which ones?"

"Well, I'm thinking of the ones about how we're all going to be murdered."

"Oh. Those ones. Well, it seems – it's crazy, right?"

Len only cocked his head, so Fletcher went on. "It's crazy. Things like that just don't happen."

"People don't get murdered?"

"Well, it's not that. I mean, of course people get murdered. But, like wives and husbands shooting each other out of jealousy. Or money. Things like that. Of course it happens. It's just – "

"You ever know anyone who was murdered?"

"What, me, personally? No. Why, have you?"

"Uh-huh."

"Jesus. Wow, I'm sorry."

"It's all right. We weren't close. Girl I knew in school. Someone broke into her apartment, killed her with a knife. They never found out who it was." Len was still smiling, which made Fletcher uncomfortable.

"Wow."

"Yeah. Crazy, right? Weird experience."

"Right. Sure. I'm sure it was. But, you know. You know, it's still kind of different. Different from what's happening to us. I mean, from what maybe Sarge supposes is happening to us and all. Sure, random and really – really awful stuff does happen. But whole sets of twenty people aren't just spirited off to desert islands and murdered one by one in a way that they're sort of weirdly complicit in. That doesn't go on. It's like – it's like conspiracy theories, right? Some people believe in that kind of thing, but I'm just not one of them."

"Conspiracies don't happen?"

"No. I'm not saying that. There are conspiracies, sure. People conspire. It's just, there's no room full of men in suits deciding everyone's fate in secret. No eye in the pyramid stuff."

"No?"

"No. People just aren't organized enough for that sort of thing. Most of us can't even pay our taxes on our own, you know? A real conspiracy, with a lot of people, it just doesn't hold together. Something cracks, you know? It's like – it's like entropy. Things fall apart."

"It's like entropy."

"That's right. It's all just too chaotic. The universe."

"How does that prove that we're not here to be murdered?"

"I don't know. It's an analogy. Bad things happen, but not like that. Not in this day and age. It just doesn't happen. Why? Do you think we're all here to be murdered?"

Len didn't answer right away. The leaves above them rattled and hissed with raindrops. "I'm not sure," he said, "That it's the right question."

7.

The rain kept coming. Under the shelter of the trees, Fletcher kept staring at the beach and watching the others. The sound of the rain almost, but not quite, drowned out the curious pulse of the jungle behind him. Or maybe it actually highlighted and intensified that pulse. He thought sometimes that he could hear the boring of insects as they chewed their way to the hearts of the trees, or the delicate rasp of snakes' scales as they fled the deluge, or the tiny hooks in the wet feathers of unseen birds moving roughly against one another. Thinking about the tree he sat under, Fletcher began to wonder about the names of all of the teeming creatures in the forest at his back. He was sure that he'd heard or read that there were thousands and thousands of unnamed, uncatalogued, species inhabiting the jungles of the world. The idea that all of those hidden things were nameless thrilled him oddly. He thought he might try to name some of them – maybe just the plants and insects that he could see – but he ran out of names surprisingly quickly, or forgot which things he had named already and gave them new ones.

Fletcher had always – as long as he could remember – known that there were things happening that he didn't understand. Not things of a mysterious or spiritual nature – not ghosts or anything like that. Only lots of ordinary things going on all the time that he failed to notice or to get to the bottom of. He had that feeling now, especially when he watched the other clan members, but also when he heard the jungle, or watched the things that had once been sky and ocean. If he could only concentrate hard enough, or for a long enough period of time, or manage to drive his thinking into a new channel, maybe he could fit all the pieces together in a way that made sense. But he couldn't, and he was plagued by the feeling that he was failing to understand something that he really ought to have seen a long time ago. It was like trying to remember the detail of a dream that he was sure was important for reasons that he couldn't possibly have named. He tried to avoid dwelling on all of this, because it made his skin feel heavy and his gums swell with frustration.

The leaves did not keep him dry. Nothing could have kept him dry, when the rain simply materialized out of the air. His clothes were wet. His hair was wet. Everything was persistently, totally wet – so much so that, after a while, he almost stopped noticing the wetness, because it had obviously been that way forever.

They'd stopped sleeping on the platform when the rain started. Now they slept under the trees. In fact, Fletcher spent most of the hours of darkness unsure whether he was asleep or not, continuously moving, more acutely aware than ever of the sounds that crept on tiny feet or filmy wings amongst the trees. Sometimes it was only after the trailing edges of a dream had broken around him that he was aware that he had been asleep, but even then it was possible that he wasn't awake at all, but caught in another layer of dream. Once or twice, he was quite sure that he was awake but found himself unable to move, as if his whole body had "fallen asleep" the way your legs sometimes do if they lose circulation for a while, and he had the eerie sensation that he was somehow looking at himself from the outside. He dreamt of people that he was sure he recognized, but who seemed to have different faces from the ones that he felt they ought to. In one dream, someone was doing something awful and irritating and unreasonable, he couldn't get them to stop, and he was so impotently angry that he began to sob and sob, beating his fists against the ground, and he awoke full of an unbearable sense of despair.

When he lay down and tried to sleep, he began to notice that he could hear the hiss of his own blood passing through his ear. But only his right ear: hiss HISS, hiss HISS, hiss HISS. Had he always been able to hear it, and only just happened to notice it now? Sometimes he thought he could remember hearing it before. If it was new, was it insignificant, or did it mean that he had ruptured a blood vessel somewhere in the right side of his head? Once – again, perhaps he had just awoken or perhaps he was still asleep – he realized that he couldn't hear it any more, and that sent him into a panic. Though he knew rationally that if his heart had stopped there would probably be more dramatic symptoms than a lack of hissing in his right ear, he still could not manage to calm himself until he had found his pulse and held his finger against it for some time.

He tried again to count the people on the beach. Little Rich, Fortunato, Lucy, Bea, me, Ben ... Did you count yourself? Yes, me, Ben, Little Rich, Bethany, Lucy ... If he could figure out when people had been eliminated, maybe he could work out who should be there now. From this thought, he moved on to simply trying to calculate how long he'd been on the island period. He took a sharp rock and began to carve hash marks into the trunk of a tree, one per day. He tried to pin each day to an event: there was the day he'd arrived, the day the shelter had been built, the first task with the guardian of the gate, the day he'd realized he was in love with Bea, the fight on the log, the party. But he was sure that he had the order wrong, and that some of the events he was remembering had happened on the same day, and that, most of all, there had to be days that he simply wasn't remembering that had passed without notable event.

As he worked, a great orange slug appeared from around the trunk of the tree, at least six inches long and as thick around as his thumb, with brown spots all along its back. It worked its way slowly, slowly up the bark, leaving a sticky, silver trail behind. Its horns stretched out of its body and then retracted – delicate, sensitive. The slug had two rough patches on its glistening skin on either side of what Fletcher thought of as its head. Up and up it crawled, and once it had passed over his hash marks, he realized that he'd hopelessly lost track of where he'd been.

An idea came to him, accompanied by a thrill that might have been horror, but might also have been excitement: if he didn't know how long he'd been there, if it had been longer than he was able to calculate, then it was possible that his birthday had passed. It was possible that he was thirty six years old and did not know it. Like some Pacific Islander (which he probably was, now, after all) who knew only that he was born in the spring, it was possible that he did not know how old he was.

8.

"What do you mean, it's not the right question whether we're going to be murdered or not?"

"Just that."

"How can that not be the right question, whether we're going to be murdered? It seems pretty important."

"Maybe I'm not explaining myself well. It's not that it's the wrong question, exactly, or that it's not an interesting question. I just think it's not the only one, and not the most interesting."

Len and Fletcher were sitting on a rock, just inside the cover of the trees – such cover as it was. It didn't matter. Everything was wet. Their clothes, the trees, the rock, the air. Dry didn't mean anything any more.

"What could possibly be more pressing than whether we're going to be murdered or not?"

"I read about this thing that happened. A few years ago, I read about it. It was in India."

"In India?"

"Right. Big subcontinent, pressing up against Asia, forcing the Himalayas out of the ground."

"India."

"Right. They have Muslims there, and Hindus. Mostly Hindus, but a lot of Muslims too. They have a lot of problems with each other. Various things. Hatred. They hate each other, for various reasons. Political things, historical. A big mess. Anyway, a few years ago, there were these pogroms. It's a Russian word, you know. It means something like, "to wreak havoc" or "to demolish entirely." It sounds sort of funny in English, almost cute. Pogrom. Doesn't really do the thing justice. Anyway, the Hindus in this one city were conducting a pogrom against the Muslims. Just driving them out. Because there had been this fire on a train and a lot of Hindus had been killed. They blamed the Muslims, see? So there was this mob, this group of people, driving the Muslims out and harassing them, and they came across this one Muslim guy and they cornered him." Len's hair was plastered to his head. It was no wetter than anything else, but for some reason it really bothered Fletcher, particularly this one strand that stuck to his forehead and then made a sharp turn onto his temple. "They cornered this guy. He didn't have anything to do with the fire on the train – just some guy who happened to be Muslim. So these people, they took this guy and they hacked off his arms and his legs."

"Jesus!"

"No wait, I'm not done. They had knives or machetes or something. They hacked off his arms and his legs and his genitals as well. And then, once they'd done that, they set him on fire. Burned him alive."

"Oh my god."

"I'll never forget it. When I read about that. It was in a magazine article. It was afternoon. I was at my kitchen table, drinking a cup of tea. I could hear the traffic outside. And somewhere far off, somewhere that I couldn't see, people had actually done that thing. They'd taken this guy and cut off his arms and his legs and his dick, and then they'd set fire to what was left of him. It had really happened out there. Look out there right now." Len nodded toward where the ocean used to be. "Somewhere out there, past all that water, something like that might be happening right at this very moment. Something like that probably is happening. Somebody's being tortured, killed. We just see the ocean and the rain – but back beyond that, maybe somewhere that we've never heard of, never will hear of, somewhere where maybe the sun is shining, or maybe it's night, right this very second, they're lighting the match."

"Jesus. That's awful. I mean, that just makes you sick. It's – it's unthinkable."

"That's right. Unthinkable is right. Do you know what I did, that afternoon, after I finished reading about that guy?"

"No."

"I finished my cup of tea. I went shopping. That night I made myself dinner. We're sitting here, see, on top of the world. We are at the pinnacle of civilization. Just by blind luck, we were born into this place. Not this island, you see. Our home. America. No one, ever, in the history of the world, has ever had it as good as us. And the rest of the world envies us. Oh, they may rail against us and so on, but really it's envy. And what do we do with it? What do we do with it all? What is the highest – no, what is the only value that we have retained? What actually, really matters? Entertaining ourselves. That's all there is. Not even pleasure. Entertainment. We need a constant flood of – of ephemera, of nothings – to stay entertained. We each of us want to win the lottery, right ? Why? So we can do what? So that we can fill all of those hours with colorful business, with flashy lights, with things to watch while we're dying."

"Okay," said Fletcher. "Right. So what does that – how does that – "

"What would you do if you were trapped in an elevator? If you were trapped in an elevator and it was falling?"

"I – I don't know. I guess I'd pretty much get crushed to death. Maybe I'd look for a way out."

"There's no way out. You're trapped. Now what if the elevator is at the top of the Empire State Building or something like that, so it will take a long time for it to hit the ground?"

"I'm not sure."

"It's an important question, because the thing is, you are trapped in that elevator. We all are. It's falling and it's going to hit the ground. Maybe soon, maybe not so soon, but it will hit. The empire's dying. It's on its way out. Our civilization is collapsing, see? Like Rome. And we can't help but mirror what's happening to our civilization. We're on our way out, too. So it's important, what you're going to do."

"Okay."

"So what I'm saying, maybe we're going to be murdered here. Maybe we're not. Maybe we crash right now. Maybe we keep falling. Who knows. The question is not will it happen, or when will it happen, or is it happening now. The important thing – the question that counts – is what are you going to do. What are you going to do?"

9.

Fletcher had forgotten his ex-wife' face. He had forgotten what Beth's face looked like. He didn't know how he'd realized it, but it was true. He tried to reconstruct it. She had a mole, near her jaw line, which he used as a starting point. The mole had been black. He extended the jaw forward from the mole, then built the cheek on top of it. He placed an ear in the back, molded the temple. But by the time that he got to the nose and eyes, the jaw had collapsed. He'd start over, this time beginning from a different spot. Sometimes he could almost hold it all together, but even then, what he had was a sort of parody, something static and strange, not at all like the living face that he'd looked at for years.

The seams of his tennis shoes had begun to split. At some point he'd torn his shirt, he couldn't remember when. He still wore his tie wrapped around his head most of the time. It was fraying and turning gray.

The strange thing was that, just when he realized the thing about Beth, about not being able to remember her face, he did remember about the vultures. He could picture them almost perfectly. They were eating something. A rabbit, maybe? A fox? A dear? He'd rounded a corner, somewhere in the forest – not the forest behind him now, but another forest long ago – and there they'd been, only feet away from him, tearing off stringy, red strips of meat.

But the thing was, where could he possibly have seen them? It was a memory from a long time ago – or it felt like one – from his childhood, maybe, or his teenage years. But where could it have taken place? He'd never really been much of an outdoorsman. It's not like he'd spent a great deal of time wandering around in the wilderness – not anywhere that he'd have been likely to encounter vultures, at any rate. And it was a dramatic scene, at least in his head. The kind of thing that you'd expect to tell people about, that you'd expect to remember a context for and not to have suddenly reappear out of thin air years later. In fact, he really was sure that he could remember a time, walking in a park near his house, when he'd come upon a hawk eating a field mouse. He knew that that incident had happened. And the red strand of meat in its beak looked just like the meat that the vultures were eating. So what were the vultures? Where did they come from? The more he thought about it, the unlikelier it seemed that the incident could possibly have occurred. So, what was it? Was it the memory of the hawk, conflated with something else? Was it a story he'd heard someone tell and had adopted as his own? Was it a scene from a movie he'd seen long ago? And most important of all, how was it possible that this false thing – someone else's memory, a lie – could be more real and present to him than Beth's face, which he ought to have known almost perfectly?

Other faces were gone too, not just Beth's, now that he thought about it. Women he'd been in love with, his parents, friends, childhood playmates. He tried to catch them. Sometimes he could trap a feature – red hair, a particular nose, a beard – but everything that should have surrounded this feature was amorphous, or out of focus, or just blank. Sometimes he would get hold of an actual human face, nearly in its entirety, for a split second. But those faces would never hold still and, even when they did, he was sure that there was something wrong with them, something distorted, even inhuman. Or they would be crowded away by glimpses of other faces – people he'd seen for just a moment on the street, or that he remembered from the movies, or perhaps that he had simply made up, so that he had no way of knowing, after a while, which of the faces in his head had belonged to anyone he had known. The more he struggled, the less there seemed to be to hold on to, as if the struggling itself were tearing up the delicate fibers of memory.

With all the faces sliding away, he began to ask himself about other things. What was there left, as he sat under those wet leaves, of his life? He started trying to recall everything that he could from – well, from his whole life. What had been hanging on the walls in his second grade classroom? What had his own bedroom looked like when he was a child? What was the name of that one kid – the pudgy one – whose house he'd played at? He tried to remember every teacher he'd ever had, his complete schedule of classes for any year in high school, what he'd given Beth as birthday or anniversary presents, where he'd been on every vacation he'd taken, old phone numbers, the exact layout of the grocery store that he'd shopped at since his divorce – everything, anything.

At first, each new memory was a kind of triumph. Something new would occur to him: a time that he'd been sitting on a stone wall and could feel the cold of the stone through his pants and knew that it must have been morning because of the light that he could still picture in his head, and knew that he'd been sad about something; the particular smell that a friend's house had had, and the inexplicably, comically ugly statue of a shepherdess that had sat on one of the bookshelves in that house; the first time he'd tried to go golfing; a birthday party from his childhood. These moments would appear and it would be as if each one had been lying around in his head, on the very verge of becoming a conscious thought for years. Of course, the stone wall! Yes, the shepherdess! How could I have forgotten her? Or have I really almost been thinking of her this whole time without realizing it?

But gradually the comfort that the newly recalled things created began to fade. He realized just how few and how incomplete and how separated from one another those things were. Why had he been sad that day on the stone wall, and where had it been exactly? He couldn't even place the memory with any assurance in a specific period of his life. And what was there to connect that birthday party (which birthday?) with the stone wall with his high school physics teacher with the library at his college or with any of the other moments that he had managed to summon up? What had happened to all of the things in between? There must have been things in between. Days had gone by with – with breathing and meals and – and things to be angry or happy about and sunsets and books and – well, things – life. What had happened to all of that? It was all trivial, to be sure, all totally irredeemably trivial, like everything he'd ever done, but it had been his, and it was gone. What was left wasn't enough. It didn't seem to be enough to fill a human life of thirty five years. It was like – his life was like a series of beads, each of the moments that he could remember was like a bead strung out on a wire, only sometimes he didn't even know what order the beads went in, and it was mostly just empty wire. He could see that naked wire stretching off into the distance, stretching off in both directions before it was lost in fog. It was such a paltry set of things, those little beads, all so tenuously held onto and held together, that he began to wonder whether it had really happened at all. What if there had been nothing before this island? What if this was all that had ever really existed?

10.

Eventually, Mike came. There was no warning note this time. Or maybe it had been there, and had only bled away in the rain, unnoticed. Mike and the boat emerged from nowhere, as if the raindrops themselves had coalesced into solid form. First the boat was a dark smudge, barely perceptible against the larger smudge that was the rest of the world. Slowly it grew deeper, darker, and larger. And then Mike himself came working his way through the surf. He raised his arms to greet them as he came.

It didn't take long for them all to gather – though how the rest of them heard of Mike's coming, Fletcher never thought to ask. He still felt that someone – or maybe more than one person – was left unaccounted for overall, but they all must have been there, because Mike began to speak.

"It is time! It is time for another task."

He was wearing a yellow rain slicker, just like one from a children's book, along with a broad-brimmed, yellow hat.

"Follow me."

He led them into the jungle. They trooped along, mostly unspeaking, watching their feet until they came to a sort of a clearing, or at least a place where the water seemed to pour down with less interruption, as if there were fewer trees to impede it. Mike turned around to face them. The Blueshirts had been at work here, because there were cameras and tracks laid for them through the wet jungle.

Mike turned around. "Ahead of us is a hill." Fletcher was forced to take his word for it. He could barely see anything. The rags he was wearing clung to his body, as they had been clinging now for countless days, maybe forever. "At the foot of the hill are sledges. One for each of you. You must push your sledge to the top of the hill. The first person to reach the top will be safe. He or she cannot be exiled tonight. Begin!"

Hands gripped Fletcher's arms from behind – not rough, but firm – and propelled him forward. He had neither will nor reason to resist. He let himself be almost carried along for thirty feet or so and was set to rest next to what Mike had described as a sledge. It was a fair description. The thing was made of wood and lashed together with rope. It sat on two runners, also made of strips of wood. There was some kind of cargo, covered with a canvas.

What choice did he have, really? He bent and began to push. Whatever the load was, it was heavy, but the going was easier than he might have expected. Once he overcame its inertia, the sledge glided pretty easily across the wet ground, even if he had trouble finding traction with his feet. The Blueshirts must have cut some kind of track through the woods, because his way forward was free of obstacles. Rolling next to him was a camera on a dolly. Its operator was shrouded in rain gear.

After a few yards, the wet undergrowth on which he'd been moving gave way to pure mud. The runners still carried the sledge over it, but his feet sank in. At first, the thick red mud merely splashed across the tops of his battered tennis shoes, but soon enough he was ankle deep, and deeper, in the stuff. Its surface was slick, but underneath it must have been thicker, because it became more and more difficult to extract his feet from it, as if the mud were actively pulling on them. The ground began to slope noticeably upward. How much did the thing he was pushing weigh? A hundred pounds? Two hundred?

His body tipped at a steeper and steeper angle to the ground as he leaned against the sledge. Every so often he adjusted his position against it, shifting the brunt of its weight from one shoulder to the other, or against the palms of his hands. Whatever spot he chose tired quickly. The rough wood gnawed at his flesh. And of course everything was wet beyond wet. Every step, the sucking mud fought him harder and harder. Next to him, the camera hummed along on its track, staring.

Then one of his feet must have slipped. He groped with it, seeking something solid. The hold he had with his other foot gave under the pressure. Everything – Fletcher and sledge – slid downward. There were awful seconds in which it seemed that things were completely out of control. Then one of his feet found some kind of purchase beneath the mud. The sledge pushed at him for a few more inches, but somehow he'd won the contest against its momentum.

He was nearly lying in the mud now. He'd come down on one knee, and the lower half of that leg was completely submerged. His right shoulder was jammed fiercely and uncomfortably against the back of the sledge.

For a little while, he just stayed exactly where he was, afraid to upset the balance of the situation. Then he began to test it with minute shifts of his muscles. Somehow he'd wound up in a fairly stable spot. It seemed as if he could move around a little more than he thought, though he'd have to be careful. Slowly, he got his grip back on the thing and leveraged himself up so that he was looking over it. The canvas covering the load on the sledge had torn loose in one spot and he could see what he was pushing. It was a heap of stones. A little way beyond, up the hill, the glass eye of the camera stared out of the gloom. Its little mechanical pupil dilated.

A wave of hopeless, vicious anger rose up inside of him. It really did seem to burst upwards – as if it were something foreign that came through him rather than out of him, that traveled up out of the ground and into him, surprising and overwhelming. It was blazing, intense, awful hatred. He hated that staring eye. He could feel – despite all of the other physical sensations that were pressing on him – he could feel his jaw tense and his teeth grind together, almost as if he was imagining sinking them into something. He hated those round eyes that always followed him around, staring at him – hated them so much. And he hated the people in their blue shirts behind those cameras, the people who brought them cold beans to eat in the rain, and went off to – to wherever they went, and were probably dry and warm, and who were just following orders. He hated the rain and the mud and the sledge and the whole damn island. And he hated Mike – more than anything, he hated Mike. Mike surely hadn't been the one to plan all of this, but it didn't matter – he was the face of whoever had planned it, and Fletcher's fingers curled at the thought of him – he could imagine those fingers ripping, tearing.

It was a horrible anger, born in part of physical exhaustion, of mud and loneliness and desire. It was the kind of impotent rage that possesses you in dreams, when you pound and flail against your enemy, growing smaller and weaker and more and more enraged, while he remains unaffected. It was the desperate, self-righteous anger of a child facing a bully, knowing that the adult platitudes with which he's been armed – "just ignore him"; "stand up for yourself"; "bullies are cowards" – are utterly useless and foolish and that he is about to be humiliated once again.

With the anger there now came the ridiculous burning sensation of tears of self-pity building behind his eyes. He wanted to throw himself at the camera. Hurl his body at that eye and fight and thrash, and do some sort of damage – to them or to himself, it didn't matter – self-sacrifice was as good as victory at that moment. He wanted blood, he wanted to kill, which was – which was – which was the only thing stupider than pushing those stupid rocks up that stupid, stupid hill.

And with that thought, he set himself more firmly against the sledge, tightened the muscles in his legs, and began to push again. It wasn't that the anger or the self-pity had gone. It was only that he knew that he wouldn't lunge at the camera and put its eye out and therefore ... what else was he to do?

Stupid, stupid, stupid, he said to himself as he strained against the thing. Each step hurt and with each twinge of pain, he pressed his lips more tightly together and pushed even harder. Let them see. Let the eye of that camera see the strain on his face. Let them see the strain and the mud and the anger. Fine. Stupid, stupid – and useless.

Why did he push? Was he dreaming of fortune – some sort of prize? Was it fame? Was he willing to let the world see his grimaces and his tears – if the world ever would see – only for the very sake of having the world see something, of being watched? Was it that he had come to more than half believe Sarge's wild ideas and that he really did fear for his life? Maybe. Maybe it was all of those things. But, pushing away, he could sense another possibility. Quietly and insistently, that possibility tugged at him.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

It was simple, and it was awful. He pushed for the same reason that he did everything, for the same reason that he had always done everything. He pushed because someone told him to push. It was the same reason that he hadn't stood up to the schoolyard bullies, the same reason that he would never send back his food at a restaurant, the reason that he would never, no matter how much he fantasized about it, start a fight with a stranger who was being obnoxious, the same reason that he never, ever got the girl. He pushed because, at heart, he was a lackey. It was the same reason that he had ended up in his career, that he had gotten married, that he had gotten divorced, that he had failed not only to do any of the things that he might secretly have fantasized about, but that he had never even succeeded in properly fantasizing about them even in secret, the same reason that he had done everything in his stupid little life. He pushed because he lacked something – ingenuity, or creativity, or the courage to risk appearing ridiculous, to risk failing – he lacked whatever it was that he needed to keep himself from pushing. He pushed because it was the only thing he knew how to do.

His strength began to ebb. The anger that had animated him was so silly and useless – useless for him, anyhow. In the hands of someone else, maybe it would amount to something, be turned into action. Maybe he couldn't even push any more, even though it was all that he had – he lacked the strength even to do the only ridiculous, foolish thing that he knew how to do. He was no longer moving upward. And now he would give up. Just sit down and hang his head and give up.

No. It was stupid. It was foolish. He was nothing but a lackey. He hadn't the wherewithal to do anything but push against those rocks, but he was damned if he would give up on that. It wouldn't teach anyone anything, but it didn't matter – he would do it. He threw his right shoulder more firmly against the sledge. His feet found traction somewhere underneath the mud.

Stupid!

Stupid!

Stupid!

The word sounded in his head with each strenuous step.

Stupid!

Everything hurt, but still he pushed. It was useless, but still he pushed. He could actually hear himself grunting aloud.

Stupid!

He looked upwards, up over the back of the sledge, and he thought he could see it: it was hard to tell, but it looked as if the slope leveled off somewhere up ahead, as if he might be nearing the top.

Stupid!

Stupid!

It was almost like a cry of triumph now, inside his head.

Stupid!

It happened very quickly, and probably rather dangerously. Maybe it happened because he was pushing so hard now, because in this last frenzied effort he'd lost all sense of caution. Again, one of his feet failed to find purchase and again he slid. This time, however, rather than sliding directly backwards, the sledge began to twist to one side. He caught at it, desperately, even as his other foot went out from beneath him. He tried to grab at it with both hands, to throw himself at it, but without a foothold and with the sledge traveling sideways now, he didn't have a chance. It slid past him, carrying him a few feet before his arms gave out and it tossed him aside, then it slid ever more quickly back down the slope he'd pushed it up, bouncing off of one or two trees before disappearing from view.

He slid too, for a few more feet, through the mud. Coming at last to stop, he lay on his back, dazed. He'd failed – failed even in his pointless, lackey-like efforts. The sledge was gone. His hollow victory was gone.

But that wasn't what Fletcher was thinking about. The world around him was still wet. He was covered in mud. The moss on the trees was soaked through, and water dripped from it and ran down their trunks. The air was as heavy and as wet as it has always been. But somehow, from where he lay, Fletcher was staring up at a gap in the canopy high above him. He could see the sky. It was blue.

11.

As they made their way back to the beach, the jungle was full of steam. All of the water that had soaked into the world was boiling off. Clouds of vapor came hissing out of the crevices of fallen logs, billowed from the thick moss, rose in wave after wave from the ground itself. It was hardly easier to see now than it had been in the rain, but it felt different, and the vapor was lanced through with occasional rays of gold where sunbeams had crept down between the leaves.

The forest was full of sounds: buzzings and chitterings and hoots and splashes. There were flashes of color overhead and birdcalls – at least, they might have been birds. Fletcher thought, too, that he could hear the sounds of leaves unfurling, of the buds of flowers stretching, of hidden things coming to life beneath his feet.

They came out of the trees onto the beach, blinking, surprised by the light. The sand was exhaling, and as the steam rose, the rays of the sun split among the droplets of water so that a million tiny rainbows hovered a few feet from the ground and the air itself seemed to glow. They were all steaming as well: their clothes, their hair, so that they seemed like radiant ghosts stumbling out onto the sand.

It changed things. There was only a stunned kind of silence, but Fletcher felt clearer and sharper. It was a release of pressure, as if someone had pulled something smothering away from his face. That evening or afternoon, for the first time in a long time, they built a fire and sat together on the beach. No one had been fishing, and at any rate, one of the spears seemed to have gone missing during the rains, so there was nothing fresh to roast, but they heated the last of the beans from the cans and had a sort of a celebration.

Some of them talked about home a little, and then about what they would do with the prize money if they won. For whatever reason, the figure of a million dollars seemed to have been settled on, though no one could specifically remember that figure having been named by anyone in charge.

"A million dollars isn't really that much money."

"Hah. Maybe it's not to you, but where I'm from, a million dollars sounds like quite a bit."

"No kidding. I wouldn't mind a million dollars."

"It's not about the prize money, anyhow." This was Bethany, the tattooed woman. "Even if you don't win, you can win. As long as you're one of the last few and you've made a name for yourself in the game. It's about what you do when you're done, you know. Every one of us is poised to be famous out of this thing. That's where the real money is, not in the prize. You parlay this thing into a career."

"What kind of career is that?"

"As a celebrity. Don't you ever watch these shows? That's what it's about. You go home and you get famous."

"For what?"

"For what? For nothing. For being famous."

Fletcher watched and listened to them. He couldn't tell, from what they said, whether they believed in the prize money or not – whether they still believed that this was a game, or whether they were saying these things to comfort themselves.

"I'm gonna buy one hell of a car, I'll tell you that."

"Typical."

"Yeah, fuck you. So what if it is typical. A Ferrari. Or a big fucking Hummer with televisions in the back of all the seats."

"Why would you want that? If I win, I'm going to donate most of it to charity."

"What's most of it?"

"Yeah. Are we talking about half? Seventy five percent? How much goes to you and how much goes to the manatees or whatever?"

"If I win, I'm going to save it all for my children. They're the hope of the future."

"Screw the future. I want my Hummer."

"I'll buy a house."

"Well, of course. Everyone would buy a house."

"You're all crazy. I'd use the money to travel."

What if there actually was prize money? What if this thing really was the contest that it had originally been presented as? What would he, Fletcher, do with a million dollars? He really didn't have any idea. What he wanted to talk about was whatever had happened to him up on that hill. He wanted to explain to someone – anyone – what he'd gone through while he was pushing those rocks. He wanted to explain that he'd realized why he was pushing, and that it pointed toward some terrible truth about his life or himself or life in general, and that he wanted so badly to undo that truth, to work open whatever knot was holding him. But the things that he thought he had realized were already becoming hazy in his mind. So instead he sat and listened, and watched the others' faces. Studied the others' faces, really, when he thought they weren't looking. In fact, he might have been trying to memorize them. Especially Bea's, though of course he found it hardest to catch glimpses of her. It seemed so impossible that these faces would disappear, just like all of the others in his life had, once he wasn't looking at them any longer.

The beach had been changed by the rains. Once the steam had risen off of it, he walked around. There were pools and little ridges carved into the sand. All of the turbulence seemed to have churned things up from the sand: stones, fragments of shells, bits of polished wood.

Nesploy had been the one who had won that day's task. He accepted the others' sometimes grudging congratulations with modest, grinning good humor. "Suh ayeren pah," he said. In fact, quite a few of the others had also failed to get their sledges to the top of the hill. Everyone was muddy, although the mud began to flake off now that it was drying. More than one of them had torn what little clothing remained to them. Perhaps this should have made Fletcher feel better, but he wasn't comforted: his own defeat had been so personal, and at any rate it had involved something that seemed to be beyond the sledge and the hill.

Sarge found him while he was wandering on the beach. "Fletcher," he said, in greeting.

"Hello, Sarge."

"Well. Here we are."

"I suppose so. Yes. I suppose that's hard to argue with."

"Listen, Fletcher." He bounced a few times on the balls of his feet. He was still spry. "Listen. You know what's going on here."

"I know what you think is going on here."

"You're still not convinced?"

"I don't have any idea what I ought to think. Nothing seems clear. It's like – it's like – oh, I don't know. Never mind, anyhow. Yes, I know what it is that you think."

"All right, then. I want to ask you a favor."

"Okay."

"If I'm wrong, then it won't cost you anything. And if I'm right, well, it won't matter anyhow and it may even do you some good."

"Okay. Sure."

"Tonight, I want you to vote for me."

"You want me to vote for you? To vote to get rid of you?"

"That's right."

"You want me to – if you're right about things – you want me to vote to – so they'll do the thing to you that you think they're doing? So they'll murder you?"

"Yes."

"Right. Well. Why?"

The waves were coming in quite close to their feet. The sun warmed the back of Fletcher's neck.

"Honestly? I know what's happening. You may not be sure, but I am. I know that the people we've sent away have been sent to their deaths. I know that they're planning to kill all of us. I wish that I could convince you of that. Maybe we'd stand a chance together. But since I can't – well, the truth is that I can't stand to send anyone else off, knowing what I know. I can't send anyone to die. And anyhow, I think, knowing what I know, that I'm probably the best equipped to deal with – what there is to be dealt with."

Sarge crouched down and lowered his right hand into the surf that had come rushing in. His left hand moved across his thigh, and from somewhere inside his shorts he produced the tip of the missing fishing spear. It had been broken off so that it was only six or eight inches long. It glittered briefly in the sunlight before he tucked it away again and looked up at Fletcher, smiling.

"Okay," said Fletcher.

12.

Before boarding the boat that night, Fletcher fetched his little straw idol. All of them did. No one had told them it would be necessary, but it seemed obvious. The idol was still tucked where he had hidden it. Since he had last taken it out, things had begun to grow in it. It was covered in a fine, hairy green moss that looked like tiny ferns.

When the torches flared up out of the darkness, he wasn't alarmed. He felt less disjointed than he had since the rains had started. He was a little uneasy – that was all.

In the amphitheater were the fire and the music and the robed figures. He found himself looking closely at their masks. They were like the masks that he associated with ancient Greek theater, each one caricaturing a human emotion: anger, fear, joy. The effect of a group of people in robes and masks – particularly a group that you half suspect may be planning to ritually murder you on film – is bound to be rather ominous and threatening, and so it was striking to Fletcher, now that he looked closely, that some of the masks did not appear intended to frighten. One of them, for example, was clearly a sad face, and he actually found it a little touching to look at. Another – worn by someone quite close to where he sat – wore an expression that he couldn't readily identify, but for some reason he thought it implied some kind of sympathy. It seemed to him, too, that the person behind that mask was watching him in particular. He found himself looking over frequently, staring into its black sockets. He wasn't sure, but he thought he saw the figure incline its head slightly at him.

The little speeches that had been given that night were completely forgettable – variations on the theme of "what I've done for the team." Even Fletcher himself – his head still full of a jumble of things that had cropped up on that muddy slope – had said much the same thing as everyone else. Sarge's speech had been the only exception. "Well," he'd said, "I'm ready. All of us know what's going on. Even if some of us aren't ready top admit it to ourselves, we know. And if we don't know, we will after tonight. A sacrifice is demanded, and I'm ready."

When the time approached for writing names on tablets, Fletcher realized that he was facing a real dilemma. Before Sarge had spoken, Fletcher had been sure that he would vote for Sarge. Why not? Sarge had asked him to, and it was like Sarge said, there was no particular way that he, Fletcher, was going to lose as a result. But Sarge's reference to sacrifice stirred things up for him.

Suppose, he thought, as he walked toward the platform with its urn and its tablets, suppose for a moment that this is some sort of awful cult of voyeuristic murder. Suppose that they're doing this to us as some form of prolonged torture, and that, once someone is marched through that door they're – they're hunted on film or they're just taken to a cell somewhere and – and tortured to death or whatever awful thing. Then – then he and the others needed to do something about it. They needed to rise up or resist somehow, right? Even if all the power seemed to be in the hands of these masked people, they had to do something. And if that was true, then they certainly needed to have Sarge with them, didn't they? He was a military man and he might be their most valuable asset. If they were going to have some chance of fighting, they would need Sarge.

Fletcher was nearing the fire now, walking slowly, trying hard to focus. Okay, then. Suppose there wasn't a conspiracy. Suppose it was only a reality television show and the ways that they were being tortured and humiliated were only the routine ways that reality show contestants volunteered to be tortured and humiliated. In that case – in that case there seemed to be a very good chance that once Sarge walked through that door, he was going to – to do what? What the hell was he planning? Whatever it was, if there was no conspiracy, it seemed quite likely that he would grievously injure, or even kill, some poor cameraman or key grip or something using the broken end of a fishing spear.

So, given all of that, it seemed absolutely clear to Fletcher as he stepped up on to the little podium that the one thing he could definitely not do was write Sarge's name on the tablet. His stomach felt cavernously empty. Having been planning, unthinkingly, all afternoon to write Sarge's name down, now that he realized he couldn't, he had no idea whose name he should write.

Maybe it didn't matter, and he was only voting to consign someone to the fate of not getting a million dollars rather than to death. But maybe he was voting for someone to die. He wished that this had all occurred to him earlier in the day, that he had more time to think about it. It seemed to him that if he'd only paid more attention earlier in life, there had been things that would have prepared him for this sort of situation. Weren't there certain thought puzzles that were similar to this? What was the Prisoner's Dilemma – wasn't that what it was called? Something like that. Jesus. He had the stylus in his hand now and was looking at the tablet. If he could only call some sort of time out – talk to people now – figure out what to do.

Briefly he entertained the idea of writing his own name. There was some appeal to that – but god! – at the thought of actually going through that door, his throat began to close off in panic. He didn't have the strength to write his name.

Almost before deciding it, he knew what he was going to do. They hadn't explicitly said that anything like this was against the rules, and he couldn't think of anything else. He gripped the stylus firmly, pressed it into the tablet, and, as steadily as he could, wrote down the name, "Superman," and tossed the tablet into the urn with the others.

It wasn't until he was back in his seat that it occurred to him that his choice was undoubtedly being filmed by one of the cameras scattered around the amphitheater, that he might have put himself at risk by doing it, and that there had been a perfectly viable option all along. He should have written down Nesploy's name. Nesploy would have been safe because he'd won the day's contest.

Of course, what he had lost track of in all of his exhausting mental contortions was that the decision of whom to send through the door was not his alone. Mike never even got to the tablet with "Batman" written on it, or if he did, he didn't bother to read it aloud. Evidently Sarge had been at work with the others as well, though whether or not they'd seen the spear, Fletcher couldn't know. Every vote that was read out was for Sarge, so that it was unnecessary even to finish reading them.

Sarge stepped up to the fire and dropped in the little straw man. Fletcher saw him only from behind. Sarge never turned around as the robed figures escorted him through the door.

That night – the first dry night in who knows how many – Fletcher couldn't sleep. They'd built another fire out on the beach and sat around it for a while before people had begun drifting off one by one toward the platform. There was a gloomy atmosphere. Little was said. To Fletcher, it seemed like time that they should all talk – that they should talk about what Sarge had suspected, that they should have some kind of strategy. But now that this had occurred to him, he faced the problem of the ubiquitous cameras. Not that it was impossible to get away from them at all, but it was more or less impossible to discuss anything with a large number of people without one of the cameras looking on. If he was going to say anything, he'd either have to approach people individually, as Sarge must have been doing, or simply risk having things come completely out in the open. Neither course seemed very feasible. In the one case, he faced grueling hours of trying to convince individual others of something he was fairly sure he didn't believe himself. In the other – well, it seemed quite likely that, if the crew members were planning to kill them all, talking about it in the open might hasten the event. Whatever he was going to do, he certainly wasn't going to sleep. So, as the others drifted toward the platform, he slipped off in the opposite direction.

He'd forgotten, somehow, how incredible the stars were in that place. So brilliant they looked as if they were only a few feet away, as if you could climb to the top of a tree and pluck one down. In fact, it seemed to him that they looked delightfully edible. He was put in mind of pomegranate seeds.

He looked out across the water as he walked. Perhaps, somewhere out there, on some tiny island off the shore, Sarge was right now engaged in a glorious battle with their captors. Or, perhaps, a crazy, quixotic fight with people who only wanted to make a television show and give away a million dollars. Maybe. Just as likely, whatever was going to happen had already happened. Maybe Sarge was dead. He tried to register some emotion at the thought, but he was too exhausted and drained and confused.

He must have walked for a long time. It was late at night. His legs were tired. He found a comfortable place to sit, just along the edge of the trees. He watched the blackness, the night, and the water, and listened to the waves and the jungle.

The jungle was crashing.

It took him a moment to register it properly, but there was definitely an unexpected sort of a sound, a little way off behind him and to his left. It was very certainly the sound of something moving, fast and clumsy, through the trees.

He was on his feet very quickly, and had turned to face the trees, his heart pounding. Strange to say, he'd even seized a loose branch that had happened to be lying near him and was brandishing it, though lord knows what good it was going to be when an enraged boar, or tiger, or whatever it was, lunged at him.

And suddenly it was lunging at him – knocking him clean off his feet, in fact, before he even had time to raise the stick. He struggled and kicked, and the thing struggled and kicked as well, rolling on the ground, and it was up on top of him and it was – it was Nesploy.

Fletcher had a very clear look at his face in the starlight. He'd certainly never seen such an expression on Nesploy's face before. Normally he stood out for his easygoing nature, for his smile. He wasn't smiling now, though he was clearly in the grip of some strong emotion. Panic? Anger? His eyes were wide and his face was astonishingly pale, even for a face seen at nighttime. For a strange and horrible moment, as he sat poised above Fletcher, Fletcher felt certain that Nesploy was going to attack him. Nesploy opened his mouth and in a breathless voice, thick with fear, he spoke four words with perfect, alarming clarity:

"Fletcher! Please! Help me!"

Fletcher could only stare. Then something attracted Nesploy's attention, something over his shoulder, out of Fletcher's view. Fletcher could feel him go tense, could feel him stop breathing. He sprang to his feet and was gone, off into the jungle, running. Fletcher struggled to his own feet, winded. "Wait!" he called. "Nesploy, wait! Dammit!" And he went running after him.

It's not easy to run through a jungle at night. There are a lot of things to get in your way, and, of course, there are certain psychological impediments to that sort of behavior, especially for anyone who has ever watched a horror movie. But he tried to run anyway, in the direction that he had thought Nesploy had gone. He was fairly sure, for a little while at least, that he could hear Nesploy crashing along ahead of him.

"Nesploy! Hold on! Wait!"

But the noises seemed to be growing fainter – it was hard to tell. He thought he might be losing his way. He slowed a little. "Wait, godammit! How am I supposed to help?! How can I help if you run – damn."

There was a stitch in his side. His arms and legs were scratched by foliage. He slowed to a walk. It was with a cold, awful thrill of terror that Fletcher realized that, although he could no longer hear Nesploy, he could hear something else. From all around him came the sound of movement. It flowed in the same direction that he was moving, but it wasn't the thrashing, hysterical sounds that Nesploy had been making, or that he was sure he'd made as he fought his way through undergrowth. It was more like the rattle of insect wings, or the rasp of wind through leaves.

Maybe that's all it was – the wind moving among the trees. He would never know for certain. He was so tired and had been subjected to so many new and strange experiences that there could be no accounting for his mental state. That was also why he would never really be sure that he saw what he thought he saw in the pitch of the jungle: for a moment he could have sworn that there were darker shapes passing by him through that darkness, passing by with barely a rustle in the direction that Nesploy had gone. He fell to the ground and covered his head with his arms.

13.

Bizarrely enough, he slept. It was as if his mind had responded to whatever had was happening by simply shutting itself down. Perhaps it was only that he had been even more exhausted than he'd thought. At any rate, there had been confused images and sounds and dreamlike ideas that had blended into things that were definitely dreams – he'd been climbing into a boat, in the dark, and screaming something at the top of his lungs to someone who couldn't or wouldn't hear him – and then he'd had the definite sensation of waking up and found that he was curled on the jungle floor, stiff and sore, and that the quality of the light had changed since he'd closed his eyes.

It wasn't hard to find his way back, even though he was a little disoriented. It took a few minutes to figure out which way the beach was but, once he reached it, it was clear how to proceed. The pools that had formed on the beach during the rain – there were fewer of them already – were being stirred by a pre-dawn breeze. Their surfaces had curious patterns on them – they looked like the skins of steely, shimmering reptiles.

When he reached the camp, the only things stirring were one of the prowling cameras and a lone figure who had risen from the platform and was moving about near the fire pit.

Fletcher broke into a trot, then slowed as he neared the pit. The lone figure was Bea. She looked up as he got close. It was very difficult to read her expression in the half light.

He spoke the first words directly to her that he had since that night amongst the phosphorescent sea creatures. "Nesploy's gone," he said.

"Oh. That's too bad. I was just thinking about getting the fire started."

"No! No. You don't understand. He's gone. He's run away."

"Run away? What are you talking about?"

"He's gone."

"Fletcher, Nesploy is asleep over on the platform."

"No. I saw him in the forest."

She paused. "Are you all right? Come on. Come on over to the platform."

Nesploy was gone. It was almost a relief to Fletcher to find this out – perhaps not surprisingly, though he wouldn't have been proud to admit it. If Nesploy had been there, he would have felt like a fool, not to mention being even more confused than he already was. Bea began to shake the others awake. "Where's Nesploy?" she asked. "Has anyone seen Nesploy?"

"What?"

"What's going on?"

"Fletcher says he saw him in the woods."

"So?"

"He's probably off taking a leak." Ben rubbed his neck.

"Or he's gone for an early morning jog. Jesus. What are you worked up about?"

"No. You guys don't understand. I saw him. In the woods. Sometime during the night. He knocked me over."

"What?"

"He – he knocked me over. Not on purpose. He was running and I guess he ran into me."

"He was running at night?"

"See. I told you. Went for a jog."

"No. He was running – like – like running away from something. He was in a panic and he knocked me over and then he asked me for help. He wanted me to help him, but then – but then he got up and kept running."

"Where was he running?"

"Into the jungle. He ran off into the jungle and I ran after him, and I yelled but he wouldn't slow down and I – I lost him. In the jungle."

A few of them shifted around, looking at each other. Fletcher felt awkward. "He was running," he repeated.

"Okay, Fletcher," said Lucy, "Okay. That's weird. Definitely. I mean, you say he was running around through the jungle in the middle of the night. So what was it that he was running from?"

"Yeah, did you see what it was?"

Fletcher looked around at them. There seemed to be several reasons not to answer this question. Every time he'd stirred the thought of Nesploy's pursuers around in his brain on the way back, he'd regretted doing so. It only made him feel weak and unpleasant. Now that morning was really here – by this time the sun had broken open the sky quite completely – he was not nearly as inclined to believe – well, to believe whatever it was that he wasn't sure he had believed even in the darkness. Dark shapes and sounds like insect wings certainly seemed an absurd thing to say now, especially as he looked at the faces of his companions. On the other hand, the likelier explanation – or what struck him as the likelier explanation right then, though it too was ridiculous – made him painfully aware of the quiet whir of the camera that was watching the proceedings from nearby.

"I don't know," said Fletcher lamely. "I don't know."

"Listen. It sounds to me like maybe he just freaked out, you know?"

"Sounds like someone freaked out," said Ben, almost under his breath.

Lucy shot Ben a look. "He had heat stroke or something. Or he was having a nightmare. He was delirious. I'm sure he's fine. I'm sure he'll be back soon. Okay?"

"Yeah, Fletcher. It'll be all right."

"Listen, we'll let them know. I mean, they've already heard us talking, but – " Lucy turned toward the camera, "Hey! Hey, you! You heard all that, right? Nesploy is out in woods somewhere. It sounds like he may be – well, we aren't equipped to go looking for him, so maybe you could try, all right? We don't want him to get hurt. Okay?"

The camera whirred back at her.

"I'm sure they'll radio each other, and they'll look for him, okay? I'm sure he's fine, Fletcher."

"Come on. Let's see about some breakfast," someone said. The gathering began to break up. People headed off to try to find something to eat. Prosperity patted Fletcher on the shoulder as she passed.

Nesploy did not come back. Nor was there any sign that the Blueshirts were doing anything about his disappearance. Although perhaps they had radioed the news to someone. Perhaps something was being done. Fletcher suspected that they'd already known about it. At least sometimes he suspected that. He sat with his back resting against a tree and watched the others moving around. He watched the ocean too, and tried to think clearly. It was hard, though. He hadn't eaten or slept well in so long. His body ached. There was a horrible, tight, lethargic slowness that seemed to radiate from his jaw and temples.

Maybe Nesploy really had just gone crazy. Given the way he himself felt, it didn't seem impossible. Not that he knew him terribly well, but Nesploy had sort of struck him as less likely to have a breakdown than the other people there. Who knew, though? There was no way of knowing, from the outside, what was going on in someone else's head. So maybe Nesploy had simply flipped his lid. Or maybe he really was being chased. Maybe it had been a boar or a tiger that was after him. But if so, what had happened to this boar or tiger? And why had none of them encountered any other such beast before?

Then perhaps it really had been the Blueshirts that were after Nesploy. Maybe everything that Sarge had suspected was true and Nesploy had become convinced of it as well and had somehow tipped his hand and they'd come looking for him. It didn't fit with the way they'd been operating, allowing the contestants themselves to choose who would be sent through the archway. But maybe Nesploy had been about take some kind of action. And, at any rate, who was to say that they're methods were going to be consistent?

His thoughts grew more and more muddled, and as the heat of the day crept across the sand, he fell asleep. In his dreams again he was screaming, screaming as loud as he could without being able to make a sound – not screaming from fear, but wanting to be heard by someone. And then he was surrounded flocks of bats, thousands of them, flying close past him. The air that their wings had beaten was hot.

But really it was the sun that was hot. He was no longer sitting in the shade. Waking came slowly. He willed himself to sit up several times before he was actually able to do so, and when he did, it was with a convulsive, gasping sort of a shudder, like coming up from underwater. He was soaked in sweat.

In the midst of the thick haze in which that unexpected sleep had wrapped him, two ideas stood out very clearly. The first was that it was bound to be apparent soon, one way or the other, whether or not Sarge had been right about things. Assuming that Sarge had gone through with whatever plan he'd concocted that involved the broken end of that fishing spear, either some innocent crew member or members had been stabbed during the night, in which case, if these people were at all reasonable, the whole thing would be called off today and they'd all be sent home. Or, if no one said anything today, if they went on as they had been, then that meant that Sarge had been right, and that either he'd managed to escape somehow or he was now dead along with the others.

The second thing that was clear to Fletcher was that he wanted to go fishing. He hadn't lost the knack for it, during the rains. He dove cleanly into the water and pushed himself quickly beneath. It felt good to move in that way and the water itself was cool and pleasant and washed away the sickly sweat of his sleep. Down he went, past the bright fans of the creatures that clung to the rock, through the variegated water, away from the sunlight. And he speared a fish – a brightly striped one, flat bodied. It struggled for a few moments where he'd pinned it against the rock, a panicked flopping motion, and then went still. He shot upwards again, fast and easy, the fish stuck on the point of his spear, and emerged onto the rock again, feeling almost instantly ungainly once he was out of the water.

"Hello, Fletcher."

It was Bea. She was sitting on the rock, her legs stretched out in front of her, leaning back on the palms of her hands.

"Thanks. Thank you." Why had he said that?

"Listen, Fletcher. I wanted to ask you a couple of things."

"Okay. Right. What?"

She leaned forward now, and brought her knees up, resting her forearms on her legs. It was the first time in a long time that Fletcher had had the opportunity to look directly at her without, as it were, fearing reprisals. She was thin and coppery. He thought that you could see the structure that was underneath, as if she were one of those wooden models of the human form that artists use. The down on her arms shone whitish-gold in the sun. What color was it that he'd thought her eyes were? He couldn't remember.

"What do you think has happened to Nesploy?"

"I – honestly I don't know."

"You seemed pretty upset this morning, about all of it. You seemed like you thought you might have known something."

He looked around. There was no one about. Not a camera in sight. They must have been back at the camp with everyone else.

"I just – I don't feel like I can be sure of anything."

"What are you talking about?"

"It's only that I did think I saw something last night. Only it was dark. So I'm not sure."

She sat there, looking at him.

"I thought I saw something chasing Nesploy. Some things. Through the jungle. You know, chasing him through the jungle. It's like. Well, it's very hard to describe, but they were these, just these dark shapes. And they were making a sound, but very quiet, really. Not like the sound of running through the jungle. Like, like bugs or something. You know, like insects."

Those eyes – whatever color they were – remained fixed on him.

"I know it sounds crazy. I know. And I'm sure that I was only imagining things. But still. I'm not sure, you know. I mean, I think – I think something that's crazy really is going on around here. I mean, Sarge thought – did you ever talk to Sarge? Well, he thought, he was sure that all of these people who are running this thing are really murdering us off. I think, if I understood right, that the idea was that it was like one of those snuff films, you know, where people are really killed. Like that. I know that sounds crazy, too, when it's said aloud like that. But, I mean, weirder things have happened, right? Something about all of this is definitely not right. Right?"

The fish on the end of the spear gave a last dispirited flop.

"Okay," said Bea, "Well. Fletcher, I just can't say that I know what to make of all that."

"Do you think I'm crazy?"

"That's difficult to say. Listen, I think the bounds of what is permissible, what's acceptable as normal behavior or normal perceptions, you know, those bounds are pretty flexible. From one place to another and from one time to another. Crazy's pretty much relative. So's sane, right? In some places, and at some times, believing in ghosts was considered perfectly reasonable. The norm, really. You were crazy if you didn't believe in them. Lots of people still believe that the whole universe is operated and controlled by some old man with a long white beard somewhere. That seems crazy to me. It certainly seems like it wouldn't be an unreasonable thing for a society to lock up people like that, you know, for their own safety and well-being. So, what I'm saying is, it's really pretty hazy territory that we're talking about here. But given all that, yeah I suppose you might be crazy."

"Great."

"Well, I've got to say, it doesn't seem super-likely to me either that Mike and his buddies are murdering all of us, or that Nesploy was eaten by bugs. But listen, your crazy is really your own issue, right. I think we've all got to come to terms with our own crazy, really. I don't know what else we've got. So embrace it, I say. Go with it. There was something else that I wanted to ask you, though – although I guess maybe it's silly to sit here asking a crazy man questions. But anyway, what I wanted to ask was, where did you get off doing what you did that night?"

"I – uh – I –"

"Cause that really pissed me off, you know?"

"I'm sorry. I just –" He could feel himself going red.

"You just what, Fletcher? You just thought you could go ahead and feel me up? Do you just go around doing that kind of thing whenever you get the urge? Cause I'm here to tell you, it's not a very good idea. All right? You can't just go around groping people, okay? People are sensitive about that kind of thing."

"I don't – "

"Just listen for a minute, okay? The thing is – here's the thing that bothers me. I don't understand why every goddamn relationship has got to be sexualized in some way. It's a little disturbing. I mean, I know that sex is always there, right? I know it's in people's heads, but it's just – why can't it stay there? People have got to own things, they've got to possess them. They're never content just to let things be. It's never enough. Nothing is ever enough, right? Why can't you be satisfied with something that's already beautiful? Why, every goddamn time, does everyone have to have everything?

"When I was little, I grew up near the ocean and my brother collected rocks. Like a lot of kids do. He'd polish them. He had one of those little rock-polishing kits that you can buy – I don't know, he got it from a toy store or the back of a comic book or something. So he'd find rocks that he really liked and he'd polish them and make them all beautiful and he'd keep them in a row on his windowsill and just look at them. And then, whenever we went to the beach, which was probably like every week or every couple of weeks, he'd take all of those rocks. And you know what he'd do? He'd throw them into the water. Just throw them out there and never see them again. Maybe he thought that they'd wash up a thousand years from now and some other kid would find them. I don't know. He was kind of a fucked up kid in some ways. But the point is, he didn't have to own them. He didn't feel the need to own those rocks.

"He's not like that anymore. Most people are not like that. They've got to hold on to things, like they own them. Friendship's not enough, they've got to kiss. Kissing's not enough, they've got to fuck. And then fuck again and again, until they've managed to squeeze the life out of whatever it was that may or may not have been there in the first place. No one is satisfied. Why can't you just look at the butterfly? Why have you got to catch it? You see what I mean?"

Fletcher wasn't sure that he did, really. "I'm sorry, Bea. I really am. I just thought that, maybe – I don't know. It's not that I have to own everything. Really it isn't. I just thought maybe there could be this one thing. Anyway, I am sorry. I really am."

"Okay. I just wanted to tell you that I was pissed off. But I'm done being pissed off now, and I accept your apology."

"Okay, thanks."

"No problem. Like I say, I just wanted to talk to you about it. Anyhow, I'm going to go now." She stood up and dusted herself off. "I'll think about that other stuff that you were saying, okay? And Fletcher. Good luck. You know, with being crazy and all. I hope it works out." And she left.

Fletcher was having a lot of problems, these days, sorting out what he was thinking. The odd thing was that this conversation with Bea had left him feeling less than he would have expected. He'd been longing for her to speak to him, to forgive him, since that night. But, other than being embarrassed, he found himself not having much of a reaction at all. He explored the idea. Yes, it was true. He didn't seem to have had the reaction that he thought he would have. He'd blushed, that was true, when she first began scolding him, but the feeling didn't seem to run deep. He prodded at the idea as he brought the fish (he'd caught three more) back to the camp. He poked at the idea while the fish were being cooked (they didn't stretch very far between the people that were there, but they were happy nonetheless, to be eating something warm).

He poked and he prodded at the place inside himself that seemed as if it ought to have been painful but wasn't, just as he'd poked and prodded that same spot when it was painful. It was a sore tooth that wasn't sore any more. Just gone. Just like that. Maybe washed away by the rain. He couldn't tell. The last time he could remember checking, there it had been a canker on his heart – and now ... nothing. He didn't seem to be in love with her any more.

When the boat arrived, that evening, Fletcher was certain he'd been expecting it all along. He watched intently as it pulled into the bay, as it unloaded a raft and Mike paddled to shore. This was it. Now he would know. If the game was called off, then it had been a game all along. If not, then things were very bad indeed.

The others had gathered around and were watching Mike as well. "Greetings!" he called out. Fletcher could feel his heart sinking. Mike didn't act like someone who was about to announce that one of his crew members had been stabbed and that it was time for everyone to pack their bags.

"Hey!" It was Lucy speaking. "Hey! Nesploy is missing. We've been trying to tell your people about it all day, but no one will talk to us."

"There's nothing to be alarmed about," Mike replied, "We know about Nesploy. There's nothing wrong."

"Where is he, then?"

"Nesploy came looking for us last night. He asked us to be allowed to leave. He gave up."

"He told you that he wanted to leave? And he just left?"

"Of course. Why shouldn't he, if that's what he wants. He's left. He's left the game."

"Why didn't he tell any of us he was leaving?"

"I don't know. I couldn't tell you that."

There was a brief silence.

"Well, how come Fletcher saw him running through the jungle last night?" Lucy tried again.

"Running?"

"That's right. Like he was running from something. Right, Fletcher?"

Fletcher nodded, but he didn't make eye contact with Mike.

"I don't know about that. He was upset, certainly. No one likes to give up. To admit that he's been defeated. Perhaps that's what Fletcher saw? Perhaps that's also why he didn't tell any of you. Because he was upset."
No one said anything.

"Listen. Nesploy is gone! He's left the game. That means each one of you is that much closer to winning. Now, come. It's time for a task."

They waded out into the water. They loaded up into the boat. Its engine seethed and bubbled. The driver spun it about and headed directly out to sea. As they left the shelter of the bay, the sun sank below the horizon, sealing the world closed. Fletcher thought he could hear the sun go down, like a long sigh.

Mike sat in the prow of the boat and turned toward them. One of the cameras tracked him and a light shone on him. "In ancient times," he said, "People believed in being purified. Before warriors went into battle, they would be purified."

Fletcher ran through it in his head again. If Sarge had attacked these people, and they weren't out to kill everyone, then surely they'd have stopped the show. They wouldn't keep filming. And Sarge must have attacked them. Fletcher was sure of that.

"Women who gave birth were purified," Mike continued. "Young people were purified when they came of age."

Sarge must have attacked them. And here they all still were, still going on with the show, and that could mean only one thing.

"They had to be pure before their gods. And how were they purified?"

It could only mean one thing.

"By trial. Trials purified them. Trials of strength. Trials of cunning. Of ingenuity. Of dexterity. Trials of fire. And that is what these tasks are for you. They are trials, my friends. They are the means of your purification!"

The engine suddenly stopped its roaring. The boat slowed and then purred to a stop. Mike held out his hand.

"Nancy."

Nancy stood up from amongst them and stepped forward, a little unsteady in the rocking boat. Mike stood as well and took her hand, guiding her up onto the edge of the boat, and then off of the edge, into the darkness. "Good luck, Nancy!" he said. He sat and the boat began to move again. No one said anything. The light from one of the cameras panned across their faces and came to rest again on Mike. It was a few minutes before the boat slowed and came to a halt again.

"Bethany," he said.

Just as he had done with Nancy, he helped Bethany up and over the side of the boat. "Good luck, Bethany!" he said, and they were off again.

For some reason, Fletcher reached up and ran his hand through his beard. It was so strange that he'd grown one. He'd always rather wanted to, but it had been a hard thing to do, what with his job and everything. He wondered how he looked with the beard. He'd only really seen it that one time, reflected in the underground pool. He would have liked to have seen it again, at least once more.

"Fletcher."

Have you ever had that fantasy about being on a hijacked plane? The plane's been hijacked and the terrorists are walking along the aisles – they're going to take someone up to the front of the plane and shoot them to show the world that they're serious – and you volunteer. Because otherwise it would be someone else, right? You volunteer and you get up with them, and you walk down the aisle to the front of the plane. As you're walking along, because the aisle is so narrow, you're able to turn, and you hit the terrorist right in the solar plexus. The breath is knocked out of him. You grab the hand that's holding the gun, and you sink your teeth right into his wrist, your desperation has given you unexpected strength. He drops the gun. You both fall against the seats. The two of you are scrambling for the gun. The other passengers are kicking him, in an effort to help. Somehow you come up with the gun. You come up with the gun and you're the hero. You've saved the day.

Well that's not how it happens in real life.

Fletcher stood, a little unsteady. He let Mike take his hand and help him up, then down the outside of the boat, down a little ladder. He was almost surprised when his foot found something solid below. He stepped onto it. The solid thing swayed a little underneath him.

"Good luck, Fletcher!" came Mike's voice from above, and with a growl the boat was gone.

14.

He could hear the boat's engine for a little while after it left. Then the sound faded away and everything became extraordinarily quiet. He was sitting down – he couldn't remember having sat, but there it was – on some sort of wooden surface. A very little exploration led him to conclude that it was a floating platform perhaps about six feet square, just big enough to lie down on if he wanted to. All around was the unbelievable blackness of the water. It wasn't as dark as the cave had been. It was a cloudy night, but starlight still filtered through the clouds. If anything, though, open as this place was to the sky, it was lonelier than the cave had been.

Once he had explored the boundaries of his floating prison, he just sat for a long time, not thinking much of anything at all. Sometimes thoughts would begin to form, but they were too awful to articulate to himself. He would have to think them at some point, he supposed, but – not yet.

It was actually rather pleasant, in a strange way. He was out well past the breakers and the sea was calm, so that the action of the waves beneath him was just a gentle movement, up and down, up and down. A cool breeze moved across the water. It was undeniably beautiful. Too beautiful, in some ways – more starkly beautiful than one could really comprehend. There were no subdivisions. The world was unbroken.

He must have been ready to begin thinking, because after a while he was willing to ask himself consciously the question that had already been formulated quite some time before and had been drifting in his head.

Have I been put out here to die? He tried it again. Have they put me out here to die? He wasn't able to answer it. It seemed likely enough that they had, that Sarge had precipitated the final showdown, and that it would consist of all of them being set adrift on the ocean, just like pirates were supposed to have done to some of their victims, or like Vikings did with their dead. But he didn't know, really. Maybe this was just one more thing to be endured.

He tossed the question up two or three more times, like tossing a coin in the air. Have I been put here to die? Am I here to die? The question spun around and around – he could almost see it glittering – and landed in the water and sank. Then he thought of the water itself. He pictured it beneath him – deep, deep – straight down from where he sat, and his head began to spin with vertigo. Somewhere far below – how far he wasn't sure – he thought there was probably the edge of a continental shelf. He could imagine himself walking on the bottom of the ocean, out past the rocks where he had fished, passed the anemones and the corals, right up to the edge of that underwater cliff. Dark, unknown things moved nearby. In front of him, the ground dropped away precipitously, and beyond that drop – emptiness. Infinite blackness, alien and yet horribly intimate.

How was he likely to die? He'd heard that one died faster of dehydration than starvation, and he supposed he believed it. What would that be like? Wasn't that how the men in the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner had died? There was a line about it: "Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink." At least he thought that's what the line was.

Or would he die of exposure? What did it mean, exactly, to die of exposure? Did it mean heat stroke or something? Or maybe frostbite? It sounded like a sort of catchall category. Maybe it just meant dehydration as well – or whatever it was that killed you first, being out in the open.

What was dying of dehydration like? He thought of a sponge, left to dry, and of the way it shrank up a little bit and became hard and brittle. There were probably hallucinations that went along with that process, and it would probably be slow. Would he, he wondered, have the – whatever it was, the strength he supposed – to drown himself before that happened? Would he be able to crawl to the edge of the little raft, to slip off it, to let the water fold over him, to sink down, and then –

And then what? What, exactly, after that? It was this thought that brought it on. You don't have to be lying on a raft in the middle of the ocean for this thing to happen to you. Fletcher was scared of dying, in a routine sense, all the time. After all, he knew it was going to happen. It's one of the very few things that we all know for sure. We're going to die. You're going to die. One day, everything you've known, the whole world – after all, for you the whole world exists only in your perceptions – will simply be gone. Before you were born, the universe was nothing to you, just as you were nothing to it. After you're gone – the same. All the memories that you've stored up over the course of your life, however long it's been, will disappear. Mornings with the sunlight creeping across the bedspread. All the dinners you ever ate. Your first kiss. Things you feel guilty about. The smell of your second grade teacher's perfume. Hangovers. Stupid things that you laughed at. The hundreds of thousands – the uncountable number – of little moments that you have never, ever described to another person because they are too ridiculous, or too private, or too trivial, or too complicated. Utterly unimportant things that exist only because they are etched on the inside of you. Just suddenly gone, never to reappear. It is one thing to know intellectually that you will disappear, and another to feel it, to be sure of its truth, of the blankness that is coming to engulf you. At that moment Fletcher felt it. His own end was real for him.

Words couldn't be wrapped around the thought. It was going to happen. It didn't really matter, even, if it happened now, from exposure out here on the sea. Maybe it would be twenty years from now, or forty. But no matter what, no matter whether he managed to get out of this situation or not, it would happen. Fletcher would be nothing. The world would go on without him and he would see none of it.

He lay down and moaned quietly. His breathing was shallow. Against the sky, along the horizon, he thought he could see a deeper blackness. Maybe it was the island. And then he saw another black shape, much closer by. The back of a sea monster, he thought fleetingly, and almost laughed to himself. But it could be a rock protruding from the water, or another raft, or a piece of driftwood. His hands were squeezed between his thighs, palms together. The position seemed to provide a little comfort.

After a little while spent staring, he called out toward the other dark shape. "Hey! Hey!" But there was no reply. For a long time he stared at it, and stared at the other blackness that might be the island. He tried to discern whether either the island or the other object were receding or not. Sometimes he thought they were; sometimes he thought they weren't. It would probably have been hard to tell even in the daytime. Should he try to swim for it? But he didn't have the strength for that, either.

It was so terribly quiet. He thought sometimes that he could hear the distant crashing of waves from the direction of the island, but he wasn't certain. Other than that, there didn't seem to be a single sound. Maybe, he thought, this wasn't so terribly unlike death itself. There was nothing here, almost. In a sense this wasn't so bad. Quiet, peaceful.

Another wave of panic hit him. This wasn't death! He was still Fletcher, still fearing, still wondering, still remembering. He knew now why the fact of all the blank spaces between his memories, his inability to recall his own life, had bothered him so much recently: it was because death was forgetting. The memories that had looked so paltry when they were strung out like beads along a mostly empty wire now seemed unbelievable precious to him. The most inconsequential of them was like a world – not like beads strung on an almost empty wire, but planets whirling in the darkness.

And so it went. He would be calmed by the motion of the waves or be distracted by other thoughts. The most ridiculous things, really. And he would follow those trivial trains of thought for a while. But then the real, gripping awareness of his own death would come crashing back down on him, leaving him wracked.

Eventually, though part of him had ceased to believe it would ever happen, the morning did come.

15.

The day began as a lightening of the sky behind the clouds, imperceptible at first, then undeniable. The sun first appeared as a long, silver line. Then something flared to life at the center of that line – something that boiled white and orange. Fletcher watched every moment of its progress until it had broken the horizon, liquid and fiery. The dark object that he had seen in the night was, indeed, another raft. On it he could see the flashing eye of a camera pointed at him. And there was the island too – closer, really, than he had thought it had been. His little raft must have been moored or anchored somehow and attached to the raft with the camera on it.

The boat came the way the dawn had: it was impossible to say when the noise of its engine went from being something that only might have been there to something that was a complete surety. Mike helped him on board.

"Welcome, Fletcher," he said. "Welcome back."

Most of the others were on board already and they stopped to pick up Bethany and Nancy before they reached shore. No one spoke much, although a couple of them nodded in greeting or said Fletcher's name. Everyone looked tired and haggard. Did they know now? Did they understand? If not, how was he going to convince them?

Something had happened on the beach over the course of the night. Several temporary structures had been quickly erected. There were three or four huts or lean-tos. Near them was what looked like a dock or a gangway of some kind, only it ran out along the sand, parallel to the ocean, rather than into the water. Several cameras were clustered around the structures and there were a number of Blueshirts busy among them.

"Good morning to you all!" Mike announced, once they had waded ashore. "If you will follow me, please." He led them not toward the new structures, nor toward their own camp, but toward the large, flat stump of a tree. It hadn't been there before, either. "Your task – your test – your purification – is not over," he said. "You have all done well so far. Very well. The strongest, the toughest, the most mentally fit are left now. Please form a circle and have a seat."

They circled round the stump and sat. The surface of the stump was flat and on it there were a number of wooden cups. One of the Blueshirts handed something to Mike: a metal pitcher. There were beads of condensation on its sides. Mike set it on the stump with the cups. "In a little while, it will be time for another departure. How long it takes is up to you. In this pitcher is cold, clear, delicious water. Whenever you want some, all you have to do is step up and pour yourself a glass. But don't rush. The last person to take a drink cannot be exiled. He or she will be immune. Do you understand?"

They looked at one another.

"It begins!"

Fletcher had certainly been thirsty during the long night – he'd imagined dying of dehydration, after all – but now, in the heat of the climbing sun, staring at the pitcher of water, he could feel his throat constricting. He pulled his swollen tongue away from the roof of his mouth over and over again, feeling how it stuck there. Some of the others lay sprawling in the sand, staring up at the sky. One of them – Rex, it was – stood and began to pace.

There was no way to talk to the others about what needed to be talked about. The Blueshirts seemed to have anticipated this. They'd thrown them directly into another closely scrutinized activity with no time to talk amongst themselves. Maybe he should just do it anyhow, now, in front of the cameras.

The awareness of the reality of his own death was still there, but now, in the company of other people (even, strangely, some other people who were planning to kill him), it didn't press down upon him in the same way. Instead, what he really felt was the dryness in his throat. He was dizzy, too. Every so often, a bead of water would roll down the side of the metal pitcher.

The whole time, Mike kept narrating for the benefit of the circling cameras.

"Prosperity keeps eyeing that pitcher."

"It's a hot morning. It's been a long night. Everyone's thirsty."

"Fortunato's thinking about it."

Fletcher hated him so much, and so impotently. He was narrating their deaths! It made Fletcher's insides turn. How he would have loved to leap at that man, to tear him. If he did leap, how long would he have before the Blueshirts got to him? Long enough to do any real damage?

"Who'll be the first to break?" Mike asked the cameras.

As it turned out, Ben was the first. He stood up suddenly. "Fuck this," he said, and seized the pitcher. He poured and drank cup after cup – so many that the pitcher had to be refilled.

"Was it worth it?" asked Mike.

"Hell, yeah, it was worth it." Ben walked away.

It was worse after having watched Ben drink. Fletcher could feel his individual cells shriveling up for want of water. Several others caved in rapid succession: Bethany, Lucy, Fortunato. Each one swallowed several cups, almost choking. Fletcher looked at the others still sitting and waiting. Their eyes seemed glazed. Rex had stopped pacing, but still stood, with his arms crossed. Nancy was sitting, swaying a little. Rich seemed to be humming quietly.

Fletcher was one of the last to go. It wasn't really a thought process that took him to the stump, nothing reasoned. It was as if something inside him had snapped and he was carried forward without even consciously willing it. The water was incredible. Fletcher had never tasted anything so wonderful. As he drank, he could feel his mind re-focusing a bit. What was he going to do? What were they all going to do?

In the end, the contest was down to Rich and Bea. It had been going on for a long time – hours, Fletcher suspected. Mike was talking. "Little Rich is watching Bea. They're watching each other. They've got to be very thirsty by now. Who's going to be the first to give in?"

Fletcher couldn't believe they'd gone this long. It made him thirsty again just to see the two of them. They both sat in the sand, looking at each other, looking at the stump and the pitcher. Fletcher watched the copper of Bea's skin and marveled again at the absence of the thing that had been in his heart. How could it just be gone like that? What had happened? But it was true: he just didn't feel it any more. Suddenly Bea stood. She muttered something under her breath, grabbed the pitcher and poured.

"Little Rich wins!"

Little Rich didn't move. He just sat, staring forward. Fletcher wondered for a mad second whether the man had actually died where he sat. Mike walked over to him with a cup full of water and held it out. Little Rich only stared up at him without speaking. He didn't take the cup. "Congratulations, Little Rich!" Rich still didn't say a thing. "And now," said Mike, turning to the rest of them, the cup of water still in his hand, "Food!"

It was, in fact, only bread and potato salad, but it was heaven. Not much of a last meal, Fletcher thought to himself, but it didn't matter. He needed to eat so badly. The food seemed to revive some of his companions as well. A few of them talked to one another. Little Rich had stood and was among them eating, but he still remained silent. Fletcher tried to make sense of what was being built on the beach. The Blueshirts seemed largely to have finished their work. The principal structure really did look like a dock, only on dry land. At one end of it were two tall poles. A few Blueshirts were working to hang something from the poles. Was it a gallows, perhaps?

Well, with any luck his opportunity to try to do something was coming up. Hopefully he would have at least until night-time, when the sacrificial ceremony would happen. He might still not be able to talk to all of the others at once, but he should be able to convince at least some of them. He had to. They would have to believe after last night.

They had only just finished eating, however, when Fletcher's plan was undermined. Mike approached them. "It is time, now, for farewells. The clan meeting happens here and now. Come, gather round the fire."

Fletcher's stomach lurched. The game was up. There wouldn't be any time for convincing the others, or for planning. Someone had built up their cooking fire, much larger than usual. It was a real blaze. As the group approached, Fletcher was surprised to see their little straw idols gathered near it. He'd re-hidden his own the night Sarge had been sent away. Maybe he shouldn't have been surprised. After all, they were being filmed most of the time. If Sarge had been right, they were being filmed even more often than they realized, so of course the Blueshirts would have known his hiding place. The urn had been placed by the fire as well, along with the tablets into which they carved the names.

"It's time to make your choice," said Mike.

It was different, doing it this way, without the music or the masks. Maybe it ought to have been less frightening – it was less atmospheric at any rate, it had fewer trappings. But, with Fletcher's new certainty, this stripped down version was much worse than the elaborate one had been. There was no denying what was happening now, not for him.

The speeches were different as well. They seemed more intimate, done this way. Several of the others made direct, emotional sorts of pleas, talking about how close they'd become with one another.

It was Fletcher's turn. "Ah," he said. "Listen. Here's the thing. It's not about a game any more, all right? It's about pulling together. It's about surviving. Together. Don't you all see? We're doomed unless we look out for each other. Unless we work together. Do you see?" He looked around at them. One or two of them – Lucy, in particular, were nodding. He even caught Bea's eye and thought he saw a glimmer of understanding. But that was all. It hadn't been much of a rallying cry, really, but he'd already said more than he thought he ought to. He sat back down.

The time came for voting. This time, at least, he remembered to write down Little Rich's name, knowing that Little Rich would be safe. His mind was reeling as the votes were read. The water and bread and potato salad hadn't revived him enough after all. He heard Mike read his own name from one of the tablets. His bowels felt horribly warm and loose. Then everyone was standing. There were a couple of embraces. What had happened?

It took him a moment to register it. Bea was leaving. The others were saying goodbye to her. She was hugging several of them. Then Bea was hugging him too. "Goodbye, Fletcher. Take care." Fletcher's throat had seized up. He couldn't utter a word. Bea stepped up to the fire, holding her idol.

Fletcher's throat came unstuck. "No!" Everyone looked at him. "No!" he repeated. "Don't. I'll – I'll go. I'll go instead. Take me." It was all he could come up with, though once it was out of his mouth, he could hardly believe he had said it.

Mike's face was blank. "Let me see if I understand you," he said. "You want to leave the game? Instead of her?"

He'd said it now. It was done and he couldn't go back. "That's right." And again, just to be sure of himself, "Yes."

There was silence. Mike looked slowly away from him and at Bea. And Bea spoke, "Listen, Fletcher, that's sweet. It really is. Thanks. But, the thing is, everyone voted for me, you know, and I think you should stay. Thanks."

"No. Wait, you don't understand."

"No, Fletcher. I do understand. I know what you're thinking. But you're crazy, remember? This really is great of you. Really. I appreciate it. It – goes a long way toward making up for things. I won't forget this. You take care."

Mike spoke again. "You heard her, Fletcher. You did what you could. Now, it's time for her to go."

Bea let go of her little straw figure and the fire consumed it, and then there were Blueshirts among them, ushering Bea away, down the beach. They waded off into the surf, climbed into a raft, and rowed off toward a waiting boat. Fletcher looked around at the others, but he didn't have anything left to say. Someone patted him gently on the back. It was Len.

"Now," said Mike, loudly, "For those of you that remain, there is another task to perform. Come with me."

He led them toward the structures that the Blueshirts had been building. Fletcher looked over his shoulder. He could just make out Bea still, in the raft.

"Here," said Mike, "Are the dressing rooms." He was indicating two of the structures that had been erected. "This one for the men, and this one for the women."

From out on the water came the distant sound of a motor starting.

"The photo shoot will happen once you've been dressed and had your hair and makeup done. After that the show will take place. You'll be judged by a panel of experts both on how you perform during the show and on the quality of your photos."

Photos? Show? Dressing room? Fletcher looked at the things that Mike had been pointing out. The two towers that stood at one end of the dock had been hung with thick curtains that had the effect of screening off a backstage area. It wasn't a dock, or a gallows. It was a runway.

16.

The afternoon passed in a haze. Somewhere, Fletcher kept thinking to himself, somewhere Bea is being murdered. The Blueshirts had taken him and the other men into one of the huts. The hut was full of mirrors and electric lights and activity. Fletcher hardly noticed as someone helped him to undress. They dressed him again in something else and he hardly noticed that. While the Blueshirts were working away around him, he removed the penny whistle from the pocket of his discarded pants and stared at it for a few moments before slipping it into the pocket of his new clothes. The Blueshirts sat him down, covered his face with a hot clothe, then washed him and dusted powder on his cheeks. He didn't resist. He didn't come out of his stupor at all until someone spun the chair he was seated in around to face one of the mirrors.

It was the first time he'd seen his face since the night in the cave. The experience was actually more bizarre than looking into that underground pool had been. It was an ordinary mirror, surrounded by lights. The person looking out from it was recognizable as Fletcher. Or at least there were certain features of that person that reminded him of Fletcher – certain shapes and contours. But this man was thinner. His temples were darkly shadowed. A beard covered the lower half of his face. His hair was shaggy. He thought that now he could see what it was that had puzzled him in the cave. The eyes looked oddly unfamiliar; this man had serious eyes, grave eyes.

Also, this man was wearing a lavender suit and a polka-dotted ascot.

Outside again, it must have been late afternoon. The women emerged from their hut at about the same time. Everyone had been transformed. They looked extravagant. There were lots of different colors, swathes of fabric, tall hairstyles. It was all so utterly different from anything that had come before, that Fletcher could scarcely understand it. This was how they were going to be finished off? In elaborate suits, in argyles and flouncing dresses?

They were led across the beach to an area where there were several bright lights connected to generators along with large, reflective umbrellas, positioned to catch the light. One by one, and sometimes in small groups, they were put in front of a camera. There was a photographer in black jeans with red hair who kept saying things to them, most of which Fletcher only half-understood.

"Turn your head a little to the right."

"A little more."

"That's right."

"Bring a little more energy into your posture."

"Fiercer!"

"Eyes! Eyes!"

"Hold the coconut a little higher."

The camera snapped continuously.

"Okay, I'd like to get one with the snorkeling mask on."

"Don't be afraid of the parrot."

Somewhere out there, Bea was being murdered, and he was holding a parrot.

"What's wrong with you? How about a little more energy?"

And then, finally, "Okay, that's a wrap. Let's wind this up, people."

The sun was sinking. There were torches placed all along the edges of the runway. Fletcher and the others were led to the curtained end. Seated by the far end were several people: Mike, a handsome man with a shaved head, a squat man with glasses, a slight, middle-aged blonde woman. None of them were wearing blue t-shirts. Mike was saying something that Fletcher didn't catch to a camera. He lifted his arms and, on cue, music erupted from speakers that must have been hidden nearby: a bassy, dance-hall beat.

There were stairs that led up onto the runway, to the area behind the curtains. Fletcher and the others were herded up these stairs. No one said anything, at least not that Fletcher was able to hear. Claire was pushed out through the curtains by one of the Blueshirts. Then it was Ben's turn.

Fletcher felt sick. The music made his head throb. Somewhere out there, Bea was being murdered. Nancy was standing nearby. Her face had been heavily made-up, but it looked pale underneath. Of all the awful things that they had been put through on the island, this was the worst. It was grotesque, bizarre. At least last night's lone suffering out on the raft had had a certain dignity to it. This was horrendous, humiliating, insane. He'd rather be pushing that damn sledge up the hill again. Someone shoved him from behind and he stumbled through the curtains.

On the other side, the music was even louder and more insistent. He could hardly see at first, and he staggered onto the stage. Then, mechanically, he began to walk. At the other end of the runway, there were flashes of light. He felt hypnotized. On he went, closer and closer to Mike and the others. Claire passed him, going the other direction. She looked almost drugged.

He was only a few feet from the seated figures at the end of the runway, when a horrible noise came from behind him: a scream. He turned and saw that there were several others on the runway now and that hurtling past them, running and screaming at the top of his lungs, was Little Rich.

For a split second, Fletcher thought Little Rich was coming for him, but Little Rich bowled past him, nearly knocking him over, and leapt from the stage at the figures seated below. In moments, he had the man with the shaved head by the throat and was shaking him, still howling and gibbering. Fletcher was hit from behind again by someone running past and knocked off balance. He fell to his knees.

The music was still booming. Several more people seemed to be screaming now. His companions were all around him. Little Rich was grappling with the man that he'd grabbed. Everything seemed to be moving slowly around Fletcher and suddenly his perceptions were no longer hazy – they were clear and sharp. He saw one of the Blueshirts step out of the shadows nearby. He felt a pain in his knee, where he'd fallen. The Blueshirt raised his right hand. He heard his own voice. He was yelling. The Blueshirt was holding a gun, pointing it at the struggling figures. The music kept pounding. The hand holding the gun jerked slightly and there was a roaring, rushing sound. He was still yelling. Little Rich let go of the bald man, clutched convulsively at his own neck, staggered backward a step or two, and crumpled into the sand.

The Sixth Part

1.

After Little Rich was shot, a number of things happened very quickly, or even simultaneously, some of which Fletcher did not become aware of until later on. These events included: someone setting fire to the runway; Fletcher being shot at; the contestants escaping into the woods; the sun setting.

Oddly, the sunset was something that Fletcher did notice at the time. It was odd only because there were a lot of other things going on, and most of them were at the very least noisier, if not actually more important. Nevertheless, at some point during the action, Fletcher must have been facing west, because he caught the exact moment when the sun slipped past the horizon. Even at the time, regardless of everything else that was going on, he noticed that it was an extraordinarily beautiful sunset. The horizon was streaked with violet and there was molten bronze at its heart.

Fletcher never got clear on who set fire to the runway. Perhaps one of his companions did it intentionally; perhaps in all the furor, someone simply knocked over one of the torches. It was the curtains that went up first. They burned very quickly and very dramatically. The two posts that they were draped from were probably twenty feet tall and the flames shot up them like a flock of birds leaving the ground.

Actually, Fletcher might not have been shot at, but he definitely had a gun pointed at him. There were a lot of figures running nearby and it was hard to tell who was who. Someone had Fletcher by the hand. Some of the Blueshirts seemed to be trying to block their escape, but a lot of them also looked as if they were rushing to help put out the fire. Nearby, Fletcher saw Claire, the kick boxer, still with her hair elaborately done up, level one of the Blueshirts with a single blow to the side of the head. Then, suddenly, Fletcher was looking at a gun. Perhaps it was the same gun that had been used to shoot Little Rich. What struck Fletcher, looking at it, was not how much danger he might have been in, but how tiny the gun looked. All he could really see was the little black hole of the muzzle floating in front of him. He couldn't believe that anything that might kill him could come out of a hole that small. He simply kept running, with someone still pulling at his hand. It might not have been the wisest thing to do. Together, he and his companion ran past the Blueshirt with the gun. Fletcher wasn't really sure whether the gun went off.

There was a lot of noise all around: people yelling, feet pounding on the sand, the spit and crackle and roar of the flames, the insistent thumpa-thumpa of the blaring dance music. The fire had spread to the runway itself. Some of the Blueshirts were carrying buckets.

Just as Fletcher and his companions reached the edge of the forest, there was a loud sound like an explosion from behind. Looking over his shoulder, Fletcher saw that one of the pillars of fire had collapsed. Down it came, thundering, and when it hit the ground, a million sparks shot from it, like fireworks. There Fletcher could see the dark forms of the Blueshirts circling around the fire, silhouetted against it. For a moment, he had the impression that they were dancing.

Then he and his companions were in the woods, running, panting, jumping – somehow they were all together, at least as far as he could tell. Into the darkness of those woods they ran. They were swallowed up. He could feel the people around him more than see them. He could hear their breathing and the occasional calls they made to one another: "Keep going!" "Are you all right?" "Is everyone here?" "Keep going!" And he also thought he could hear, from somewhere behind, the howls of the pursuing Blueshirts.

He didn't know how long they ran for, or how they stayed together, or how none of them were badly hurt pelting through that darkness, or why they stopped when they finally did. He only knew that he was afraid and that his legs were moving frantically and that, later, he was exhausted and that, just when the exhaustion began to win out over the fear, something similar must have happened to the rest of them, because their pace was slowing and he could hear their breathing near him.

Once they did really stop, he more or less collapsed. He lay slumped against something – he didn't care what it was. He probably slept, because the Blueshirts that he thought were chasing them transformed into shrieking monkeys and then great, black, winged creatures of some kind and then other things even more mysterious and awful, clattering and whining like insects through the night. It wasn't until the morning that he realized that they'd kidnapped the blonde woman.

2.

Day seeped into the forest. Fletcher's purple suit was soaked with sweat – or with something – and it was torn in several places from the night before. Evidently it had not been made for running through a jungle.

There was no breakfast to be had, of course, not even coconut, rice, or cold fish. Fortunato had carried Little Rich's body over his shoulder all through the night. Fletcher didn't know how he could have done it. The body was curled up nearby. Fletcher couldn't help looking at it, even though he didn't really want to. The heavy air around them was more or less soaked through with light by the time that Little Rich's corpse woke up.

It woke up violently, heaving and gasping, and they all gathered around.

As it transpired, Little Rich had been shot, not with a bullet, but with a tranquilizer dart. Fortunato had pulled it out of him the night before. Now he showed it to all of them: a little plastic tube with a needle at its tip. Whatever had been in the tube, it must have been pretty powerful – it had knocked him out for a long time and it left his eyelids fluttering crazily and his mouth hanging partly open, even after he'd regained consciousness.

"Did you think he was dead?" Fletcher asked Claire, who happened to be standing near him, but she only shrugged. Once Little Rich had recovered a little, they all began explaining what had happened.

" ... that's when you got shot ..."

" ... I was standing behind the curtain. I couldn't even tell what was going on ..."

" ... heard yelling ..."

" ... there was some kind of explosion ..."

" ... they all had guns ..."

" ... the fire ..."

" ... so we made a run for it ..."

" ... fighting ..."

" ... into the jungle ..."

Slowly, Little Rich came around, but there was obviously something very wrong with him – though whether it was the tranquilizer dart that was responsible or the transformation that had begun in him so long ago when Big Rich had been exiled it was impossible to tell. Sometimes he spoke too loud and too quickly, then he would switch to a near-whisper. Fletcher didn't like to look into Little Rich's eyes. They made him nervous. If you looked at his eyes too closely you might see the fissure where he had broken and the stuff leaking out from inside. Whatever it was that was leaking out must have exerted a certain charm or fascination, though, because Little Rich quickly became the leader of the group. He had not been up and about for long before he began issuing orders. His first order had to do with the blonde woman.

Fletcher hadn't noticed her up to that point, but now she spoke.

"Well?" she said.

They all turned toward her.

"Well?" she said again. "Are we going back now?"

No one replied.

"Or can you even find your way back?"

She looked around at them.

"Hello? What is wrong with you people? I mean, what do you think you're doing? You can't just go running off into the jungle. You can't just drag people off with you into the jungle. I mean, my god! Do you realize what you people have done? You've committed arson, for one thing. I wouldn't be surprised if you've seriously injured or even killed someone. And you've kidnapped me. You'll be hearing from my lawyers, you'd better believe it."

The jungle seemed to close in a little bit. Still no one replied.

"Are you crazy? Hello? Are you people all crazy? What the hell do you think you're doing? I mean, what are you all doing in the middle of the jungle? What am I doing in the middle of the jungle? What is going on here?"

"Fletcher," said Little Rich, "Give me your jacket."

Fletcher took off the jacket and handed it to Little Rich. Little Rich grabbed it by either side and ripped it in two. He kept at it, tearing the cloth into long strips.

"What the hell is going on here?" The blonde woman was sounding shriller and shriller. "Who do you people think you are?"

"Claire," Little Rich said, handing her the strips of purple material, "Tie her up."

"Oh my god. You can't be serious. You can't – you aren't – get your hands off me!"

Little Rich's face convulsed.

"Shut up! Hold still!" It was Nancy speaking. She'd grabbed the blonde woman and was holding her so that Claire could tie her wrists behind her back.

"Jesus fucking Christ! Let go! Let go! Oh my god! Are you all insane? What are you doing? Are you all completely crazy? Do you know who I am?"

"Gag her," said Little Rich.

Fletcher was a little curious himself about what they were going to do out in the jungle. But he was also exhausted – and more than just physically. Little Rich had some sort of plan – or at least it was comforting to tell himself that Little Rich had some sort of plan – and it felt good to surrender to that. What precisely that plan consisted of – well, at any rate, it involved plunging further into the jungle. Little Rich talked a lot, but he didn't necessarily make a great deal of sense. The only thing that Fletcher thought he could understand was that they were aiming for "higher ground."

The blonde woman was under Claire's charge. Her hands were tied behind her back, which made her progress through the woods slow, but it didn't matter too much because they were all slow. There was nothing for them to eat, though they stopped by a stream to drink. The water was cold and clear where it ran over rocks, and dark – almost black – where it sank into deeper pools. It tasted delicious. Fletcher sank his face into it and splashed it around his neck and down his ruffled shirt front.

Sometimes he watched the others as they plodded along. Little Rich was always in the front, talking to whomever was near him. Fortunato looked like some great, shaggy animal. Nancy seemed curiously animated. And Len, too – Fletcher thought that sometimes he was smiling. Ben was skinnier than he had once been. Or leaner.

Claire's face and body were tightly wound. She kept her eyes on the blonde woman, though Fletcher thought it unlikely that there would be an escape attempt. Sinead's skin was scorched dark and her hair bleached of most of its red. Prosperity looked broken and gray; the sores on her face were crusted over. The back of Bethany's neck glistened with sweat. And of course they were all dressed in haut couture, albeit in varying states of disarray.

They trudged through the jungle for a long time. After a while, things began to appear at the edges of Fletcher's vision: sparkling things in the gloom, little flashes of light. He must have been very tired, because when they finally stopped he had to shake himself and was almost certain that he had been asleep while he walked.

Little Rich had chosen their spot. It was higher – near a fold in the land that formed a ridge and just past the top of an uphill scramble. They fell into a loose circle, leaning against tree trunks or resting in the thick moss that covered fallen logs.

Little Rich turned to face them. "There are things," he said, "called hookworms. They live in the ground, and when you walk barefoot, they can hook themselves into the soles of your feet and the crawl up inside you. They burrow their way up through your body until they reach your heart. That's what's happened to us. This island has burrowed up through our feet and now it's in our hearts. That's what they don't realize." Fletcher noticed that the blonde woman's eyes were very wide. "They don't understand. This place is ours now. And we are one being. Brothers and sisters. On our island. This place here," he indicated the area around them, "is where we will make our stand. It's where they will meet their defeat. And we'll have our revenge. For Rex and for Lucy!"

It was only at this moment that Fletcher realized that the two of them were missing.

"For Rex and for Lucy and for all the others! We'll get Rex and Lucy back. They have them. We'll get them back or we'll have our revenge. We'll eat them alive. That's what they don't understand. This is our island, our home. Our place. We are animals. We will do what we need to survive. We will eat them." Some of the people around Fletcher were nodding as Little Rich spoke. Maybe Fletcher was nodding too.

And maybe there was something to what Littler Rich was saying about it being their island and about their being able to survive there, because later he killed a monkey for food.

It actually wasn't all that hard to catch. Fletcher and the others were lying about their little camp. Fletcher was dazed. His head felt empty. The others looked hollow-eyed and twitchy. The monkey descended more or less into their midst in a series of little bounds. Probably there had been monkeys around all along, making some of the noises that were to be heard from up in the trees, though Fletcher had never actually seen one before. The little beast swung and loped its way onto a long fallen log. It was mostly gray – or maybe silver – with long, curling hair on its body and a bushy little white beard. Its tail was hairy as well, and longer than the rest of its body taken together. It had sharp little inquisitive eyes and it cocked its head, looking around at each of them in turn.

It seemed as if the monkey was merely curious and had no particular expectations of them. It paced back and forth on the log a few times, then settled and scratched behind its ears. It certainly was not expecting what happened next.

Little Rich moved with astonishing speed and he came from behind it. Fletcher hadn't even realized that Little Rich was there; his head was too empty, he was too occupied simply with watching the odd creature. But Little Rich had found a hefty stick, a couple of feet long and he swung it as he lunged, striking the monkey hard on the side of the head.

It toppled from the log, stunned, and Little Rich scrambled over, throwing himself on the beast just as it began to recover. Fletcher was momentarily bewildered, but Ben and Nancy and two or three others recognized what was going on and were there quick to help. They seized the little thing's limbs and held it down as it scrabbled and kicked. The stunning blow had been easy, but the killing took longer. Little Rich beat and beat at its head in a kind of silent frenzy. The monkey screamed, but none of them made a sound. There was the screeching of the monkey and the scrabbling and the "thud – thud – thud," of the stick as it beat against the ground and the monkey's face. And then those sounds stopped and for a moment everything was very, very quiet.

It was more difficult to build a fire and to clean the body than it had been to acquire the meat. Fortunato eventually lit the fire using the old boy scout method of rubbing two sticks together. It took a long time. Fletcher was surprised that it worked at all. They tried to skin the monkey – there was a good deal of debate over how best to do this – but in the end, not having a knife, they weren't able to do it properly at all. They found a stone with something of a flattened edge and had to settle for simply scraping some of the fur from the carcass. Even that job was impossible to do properly and the fire smelled of burning hair. Fletcher didn't help with cleaning the monkey. He gathered wood instead.

You couldn't have eaten something like that unless you were very, very hungry. There was no way to carve the animal up, so they cooked it bit by bit while the bits were still attached to each other and then tore the flesh away as it cooked. It wasn't very well cooked, either. Nearly-raw monkey meat with charred hairs still clinging to the skin is not particularly appetizing unless you have been walking all day through a jungle without eating.

But for Little Rich it was a triumph. He couldn't stop talking, throughout the entire process of preparing and eating the thing. Mostly he talked about the hunt and the joy of the kill – or at least that's what Fletcher thought he heard. And he carried the stick with him the whole time. Its end was black with dried blood. He also insisted on saying a sort of blessing – or a chant – over the meat as it cooked. After they'd eaten, Little Rich spent his time burning the ends of tree branches and then rubbing them to sharpness against the surface of a stone, smiling to himself.

Night had come and Fletcher lay down against a log, with monkey in his belly. He watched the blonde woman, who was still bound and gagged and had now closed her eyes. He thought about the people who had been exiled from the island and whose fate he now understood. Sarge had been right. They were dead. Big Rich, and Chet, and Satchel. And probably Nesploy, who had tried to run. And Bea. And Sarge himself. Had Sarge tried to fight? And how was all that killing done? It must be filmed. Some giant, awful snuff film. The monkey wouldn't settle in his stomach. They were gone. Just ... gone. He turned to look out into the woods, so that he could no longer see the gagged woman.

3.

Rich posted them on lookout duty in pairs. There was a spot at the top of the ridge where there was a break in the foliage and you could see out across the tops of the trees. But that was all you could see: just a great, green plain, wavering in the heat. Sometimes a flight of birds would burst upwards, hooting and chattering. But otherwise ... nothing. They must have been facing more or less north, since the ocean sliced thinly across the horizon, but it wasn't as if you could see the beach, or the boats, or anything of interest.

So Fletcher didn't know what, exactly, he was supposed to be watching when his turn came the next day. He glanced over at Len who was lying near him, scanning the blank vista.

"Len," he said after a few minutes, "Why are we lying down?"

Len looked at him and grinned. "No good reason," he said, "Makes this feel more like a covert operation, though, doesn't it? Kind of like commandos? Do you want to sit up?"

"Yeah."

"Okay."

They sat up. Fletcher leaned his back against a tree trunk. "Len," he said again, a few minutes later, "Do you really think they're going to come after us?"

"Sure. Stands to reason, doesn't it? Of course they'll come."

"And then?"

"Then?"

"Well, what do we do then?"

Len only looked at him and grinned again.

"I mean it. What are we going to do? I mean – I mean, what are we doing out here? What happens next? Do we – do we try to get one of their boats and, you know, do we try to get out of here?"

"Where to?"

"Away. You know. Escape. Home. To home."

"Why? What's there?"

"I don't know. Home. Family and everyone."

"Do you miss them?"

"Do I - ?" He hadn't thought about his family in longer than he could remember. The last time was when Sarge had asked about them, however long ago that had been. "Do I - ? No. No, I guess I don't. But, I mean. That's not necessarily the point. We've got to get back, right? I mean, we've got to. We can't – we can't just stay here."

He waited for a reply.

"We can't, you know, we can't eat monkeys forever. And – and – drink water from streams and live on the – Where do we – ? I mean, we can't."

"Can't we?"

"No, because. Because." He was quiet for a while, then he said, "So. So we're all going to die."

"What's that?"

"We're all going to die."

"You mean that those people are going to get us? Mike and his minions?"

"Yes. No. I don't know. I just mean, we're going to die."

"That's right. We're going to die. We're trapped in an elevator and it's falling."

"That doesn't terrify you?"

"I don't love it. But it doesn't keep me up at night, no."

"But it's all – everything just disappears. One minute, all this – the next, nothing."

"No. This all goes on. It's just you that's gone."

"Right. But functionally, from my perspective, it all disappears. The air and the trees and all of it just – I mean, what? Eternal darkness? And don't tell me that it's like being asleep either. I've heard that one. That's bullshit. When you go to sleep, you wake up, you know? That's the whole point. Maybe you have some dreams, you wake up: shower, coffee, newspaper. But this time, you don't wake up at all, so it's definitely not like sleeping."

"Okay. You're right. It's not like sleeping. Everything disappears."

"That doesn't upset you? I mean, it just seems so stupid. It's such a stupid way for things to work. You're born, you bumble around for a little while, sometimes you're happy, sometimes things are shitty, you buy a house, get married, get divorced, buy a toaster oven, maybe an espresso machine, you don't really know what to think, you can't figure anything out, then, you've barely gotten rolling, and – that's it? Lights out? What a stupid, stupid, inane way to run things."

"What are you talking about? God?"

"I don't know. Maybe. I just don't understand why things couldn't be different from this."

"Well, if you're talking about god, I think maybe you're being unfair. People always assume that he – or she, whatever – is all-knowing and all-powerful. I don't really understand why that's got to be the case. I mean, for example, the ancient Greeks didn't believe that shit. Why do we assume that god isn't constrained or limited in some way? Everything else is. It doesn't make sense. And also, people assume that god is benevolent, which just seems crazy. I mean, there is no evidence at all for that. Not that I'd say that god is necessarily cruel, or whatever. More likely, just indifferent. Impartial, maybe. If you figure that god just isn't so concerned about how well you're doing, it solves a lot of intellectual problems."

A breeze stirred for a moment. The leaves nearby them shook.

"So." said Fletcher.

"I'm sorry, what's that?"

"I said, 'so.' I mean, what then? What if you're right about god not caring about us, and what if all this trying to figure things out isn't doing me any good? You said before, when you were talking about being trapped in an elevator, you said that the important question was not whether you were going to crash, but what do you do. So. What do you do?"

Len's eyes flickered for a second, like static on a television screen. "Come on," he said, "I'll show you," and he hopped to his feet.

"What?"

"You asked me a question. I'll answer it. Come on." He stood.

"But we can't just leave. We're supposed to be keeping lookout. We're supposed to be watching."

Len looked out across the tops of the trees. "Watching for what? Come on."

Fletcher looked as well. Even if there had been something moving in the jungle below, there would have been no way to see it.

Down they went, into the woods. Len seemed to move easily, hopping from stone to log to stone, throwing out a hand to balance himself against a trunk or grab a vine. It was a little trickier for Fletcher.

"Where are we going?" he asked after a while. "I mean, can you show me whatever it is anywhere, or are we going to a specific place?"

"A specific place," said Len, looking over his shoulder.

"So, how do you know the way there?"

"It's not so hard if you know what to look for."

"But we're in the middle of the jungle."

"Not really. We're not that far from where we were camped originally. Clan Coatl, I mean. Anyhow, a lot of the moving around we've been doing has been circular, really."

"What?"

"Mmm-hmm."

"Why didn't you say anything?"

Len shrugged. "Some people just need to keep moving. Anyway, I figured you knew."

"No. It all looks the same to me. Like jungle."

"Ah."

What remained of Fletcher's suit was sweated all the way through; it evidently wasn't made to hold up in jungle conditions. At some point he'd snagged the shirt on a branch and torn it all the way from the hem to the armpit. It was really more like a short cape than a shirt now. And the pants were unraveling at the seams. Len had removed his own shirt – a sort of poncho, really, with a colorful collar and cuffs. His trousers – a more respectable black – were in a state similar to Fletcher's. It wouldn't be that long before they were running around in the jungle naked.

Len stopped. He perched on a log. He seemed to have swept himself up onto the log rather than climbed it, though maybe Fletcher was imagining things again. The flashes of light that had plagued him before had disappeared at least, but there were still rustles of movement from the foliage overhead, or off to the left and right, just beyond his vision. But he was almost used to the feeling of being stalked by now.

"Nearly there," said Len.

Another scramble – past a group of trees heavy with brightly-colored fruit, through a dense canopy of vines, over a little ravine, and under a fallen log bursting with fungus – brought them into a sort of sheltered clearing, or near-clearing, where bright water lanced down the dark face of a rock into a series of clear pools. Len turned, leapt across the little stream and settled himself on a flat rock. He looked back at Fletcher and cocked his head.

The little spot was lovely. The hot, heavy wetness of the jungle was broken a little by the cool mist from the stream. The sound of the falling water was soothing. A few rays of sunlight, gold-green, penetrated all the way through the leaves overhead. It was all very pretty, but then again there were many pretty spots to be found on this island.

The reason he didn't see the – the thing – at first was that it was made out of pieces of the jungle itself. Also, its scale was surprising. It took up an entire half of the spring bank or more – many, many square yards. It's hard to take in something so big – or better perhaps to say something so small. It was a vast collection of things, really: of tiny rocks and shells from the seashore, of pieces of wood, of leaves that had been carefully cut up or torn into geometric forms. They were all objects that had been collected on the island and brought here. They might have accumulated through some sort of natural process, except that now that he had noticed them it was perfectly clear that there was a human intelligence behind their arrangement.

He took a step closer. He could make out what he thought were tiny fragments of bone as well. The bones of birds maybe? He was next to all of it now, and he knelt to look closer. Only from that distance did it become clear what he as looking at: it was a city. There was no doubt at all. There were tiny streets radiating away from one another, climbing over the hills and winding through the valleys formed by rocks and bits of logs. There were neighborhoods of perfect little houses constructed from the thick fibers of tropical leaves, set in little lawns with pathways through them made of tiny flecks of stone and grit. There were denser spots where the buildings were taller, supported by twigs and other bits of wood – obviously commercial districts. Where the streets intersected, things that were unmistakably tiny lampposts and traffic lights had been erected. There were shops, and factories, and stockyards, and highways, and power lines, and rail-road tracks all built out of bits of detritus. There was even a suspension bridge meticulously spanning a tiny rivulet of water as if it were a river. There were shopping malls, and hospitals, and restaurants, and fire stations. There were vehicles on the roads too, made of all sorts of odd materials. One car, stopped at an intersection, must have been made of the skull of some little bird or rodent.

And people. The city was thronged with people. Their forms were sometimes crude – they were generally carved somehow from little bits of wood or bone – but there could be no doubt that they were people: shopping, working, playing, fighting, frozen in the act of living their tiny little lives.

The city ranged on and on: over rocks, around the stems of little plants, off, it seemed, into the woods. Fletcher moved slowly, almost crawling, looking at it. There was – yes, no doubt about it! – there was a little zoo. You could make out the enclosures with animals in them and the crowds of people gazing in. There was a park, complete with a tennis court and miniature tennis players. A sports stadium of some kind, a fair grounds. On and on he crawled. He came to a spot where there was a little rectangular building, like an apartment high-rise. Standing on one of its balconies, looking out across the cityscape, there was a tiny figure.

A strange feeling of vertigo welled up in him. It was as if the miniature city were suddenly huge, as if all sense of proportion had disappeared from the world, or been turned on its head, so that what was small was immense, what was trivial was important, what had seemed to matter terribly only moments before had turned insubstantial and hazy. The distance between him and the little figure below was impossible to judge: a few inches? a hundred miles?

There was a soft sound behind him. He looked over his shoulder. There was Len, moving slowly sideways, crablike, smiling.

"Did you – you – you made this?"

Len didn't answer, only crept a little closer.

"It's ..." Fletcher went on. "I don't – I don't know what ... How long have you been – how long have you been doing this?"

"The whole time."

"The whole time?"

"That's right."

"But how does it ... Surely, it's got to ... I mean, doesn't it get blown over and things like that? Or washed away?"

"Oh yes. Things happen. One night an animal got in here and rolled in it. That's what it looked like, anyhow. Things like that happen."

"And you just - ?"

"Rebuild. I rebuild it."

They were both crouched down, like spiders or insects. Or maybe like giants.

"But. But, why? What is it?"

"You tell me. That's not my job. I just make it. It's art."

"Art?"

"That's right."

"But no one will ever see it."

"You're seeing it right now. I'm seeing it."

"That's not what I mean. That's not the same."

Fletcher looked back over the city. How many hours had this taken? He remembered that he'd seen, somewhere in a book, a picture of a wooden cross. Some monk had carved little scenes into the cross, in which the human figures were each the size of a grain of rice. The monk had spent his whole life working on it; he'd gone blind. Just carved and carved all of those little figures until his sight dwindled away, and then he himself dwindled away. This was it? This was what Len did? This was his response to being in an elevator, falling to his death?

In a sudden rush, Fletcher felt again the certainty of his own death that he'd felt floating on the raft. He was holding his breath. He could picture himself sliding down a tunnel. The walls were slick, and the tunnel plummeted into darkness. There was nothing to hold on to. The tiny city, and the figures the size of grains of rice, were just efforts to grab hold, to slow yourself down. And other things too – all of the struggling and trying, the caring, the being in love with Bea and with all of the others – wasn't all of that just a desperate attempt to seize hold of something, to slow his descent? Or were the tiny city and the rice figures ways of letting go? He could feel himself sliding, picking up speed.

For a sliver of a second, another image flashed through his head: a long, quiet hallway, sunny and warm, but then it was lost in the tumult.

Len was looking off in another direction, smiling quietly to himself. Fletcher followed his eyes. He was looking off into what amounted to a darkened corner of the little grotto: an opening in the trees almost like the mouth of a cave. Fletcher thought he saw Len incline his head toward the opening in the slightest of nods. Slowly, Fletcher stood, not knowing quite what he was doing. His body seemed almost to move of its own accord toward that darkened corner, toward that open mouth. Almost there, he glanced back over his shoulder; Len remained squatting next to his tiny immense city.

The trees closed in heavy and dark around him. It really was almost like moving through a tunnel. The light from behind him had just disappeared when he saw more light ahead. It was muted – there were no breaks in the trees, but enough of a thinning up above to allow a green glow to fill the place. And there, crouched ahead of him, peering at him from amongst the leaves, was a creature – a great, one-eyed, staring insect.

Nothing moved, even inside of him. The whole world was perfectly still, like the little figures in Len's sculpture. Then the eye of the beast sprang to life, focusing on Fletcher with a tiny mechanical whir, loud as a gunshot.

WHO ARE YOU?

The words were written on the sign that hung below the lens, of course, but it also seemed as if the lurking camera had said them aloud. Its tone wasn't angry or judgmental, but it was insistent and penetrating. It seemed to pierce him. Sweat stung at his eyes.

WHO ARE YOU? it said again.

Everything was different from he'd once thought it was. Everything that he'd known or thought he'd known had disintegrated, had turned out to be made of nothing. It was all gone, as if it had never existed. Everything solid had crumbled and he didn't even have whatever it was that Len had out there, whatever it was that he was holding on to as his response to a world in which a man's limbs and genitals could be cut off before he was set on fire.

WHO ARE YOU? Its voice was lower this time, but still forceful.

Fletcher struggled to remember. "Back ... back before all this ... whenever it was ... I had a job. I'm not sure that's important. It's difficult to tell. I had an apartment. A life. ... Something wasn't right. I'm not sure I know what it was. Not even now ..."

Who was he speaking to, there among bushes? Who looked out at him through that glass eye? A million anonymous viewers? His enemies? His killers? Or someone more intimate? A lover?

"I wanted something that was missing. I would wake up sometimes – the morning, the middle of the night – didn't matter. And I would be surprised to discover myself, surprised at what I found. Not disappointed, exactly. But just asking myself, this was it? This was me? How silly. How ridiculous. How arbitrary. What a grab-bag this thing is. A loose assembly of notions, of decisions taken nearly at random, of other peoples' decisions. If I'd only walked around a different corner when I was ten years old, or twenty. Why had I wanted the things I had wanted, why had I done the things I had done? I could give reasons for some of them, but the reasons seemed flimsy in retrospect. I had this job, this apartment, this ex-wife, this whole life. But it could have been a different job, different apartment, different ex-wife. Maybe there was a story there, maybe there was something that made sense, that had, you know, a theme, and a third act, and a climax, and all of that. Or maybe there were a bunch of different stories, depending on how you looked at it. Or maybe no story at all. Once – when I was a kid, I think – I used to believe that people had centers, or cores. Like those nesting dolls, those Russian dolls, or like onions, maybe: peel away a layer and another layer, and eventually you're at the heart, you've found the core, the center. But then I started to think that there wasn't any center – just layers. Like curtains – you pull back one layer and behind it there's just another layer, and another layer after that, there's no person at all, no center. Just a collection of oddities, like the things inside that stupid little straw man, the bones and stones and things. They look like they should be meaningful, but really they're just random – no pattern, no meaning. I didn't know who I was."

Beads of sweat trickled down from his temples. Things were inside out. The little green grotto, the camera-insect, Fletcher, were a tiny corner of existence, a spot of nothing clinging precariously to the surface of the planet, hanging upside-down above vast, black depths, all – the camera, Fletcher, the planet, the depths – all of it immense and at the same time infinitesimal.

WHO ARE YOU? it whispered one more time, unsatisfied.

"Who am I? Not who was I. That's what you mean, isn't it? Who am I now? Who am I?"

4.

"It's a new world. That's what they don't understand. It's our world and here we have the power. They think they have it. They don't. They don't have The Jungle Mind. So they don't get it. We have The Jungle Mind. We can see."

Fletcher had rejoined Len by his little city and Len had led them back easily to the encampment. Fletcher had said nothing about the camera hidden in the woods. What had it been doing there? Had Len known about it? If so, what did that mean? That Len was in cahoots with the Blueshirts? That he was a traitor? Fletcher wasn't even sure that he cared about the answers. Back at the camp, no one seemed to have missed the two of them. In fact, it wasn't clear whether anyone actually considered the watch important – for instance, at this moment they were all gathered together and no one had been left as a lookout.

"We can see," Little Rich went on, "Look around you. This is ours. This place is ours. We are in the Citadel. We are the rulers of the Citadel. All about us are the open lands – the Wastelands. And our enemies may rise up. No, they will rise up – against us. The people of the Wastelands will come against us. But the Citadel is strong and shining. We, the people of the Citadel, the people of the Island, we are strong. We are shining. They will come and we will shake aloft our shields and they will be stricken with fear in their hearts and turn and flee."

Some part of Fletcher knew that this was crazy, of course. He knew that he didn't properly understand what was going on, certainly didn't "see" in the sense that Little Rich seemed to mean it, but there was a savage energy coming from somewhere inside Rich so that he seemed actually to shine, and strangely enough, Fletcher could feel something rising up inside himself, something that answered Rich's energy. It felt good. It felt good to release himself into the embrace of the craziness.

"We are chosen! We have chosen ourselves! We are born from the fire!" Here he knelt near the campfire, still burning, in which they had cooked the monkey. He held his right hand out over it, palm down. "We were born from the fire and we survived. We are the children of this island, now, newborn. The fire did not consume us and we have emerged strong and pure! And so now – now we need to be baptized. We are here. This is our place. Here we shall start anew."

A few of the others murmured in response.

"We are reborn. And we will need new names."

In the hand that was not over the flames, Little Rich held the stick with which he had beaten the monkey to death. He stood, walked a few paces and knelt again beside a patch of thick, muddy paste on the ground. Little Rich had made the paste by carrying water from a nearby stream in a folded leaf and mixing crushed flowers and bits of foliage into it. It had turned into red clay. He dipped his right hand into the mixture and stood, facing them all.

"From now on," he called out, and it had never really occurred to Fletcher before that Little Rich had a ringing voice, but it rang now, "From now on, I am ... Snake!" He ran his hand over his forehead and cheeks, streaking them with red mud. There was a leaf or a flower petal still embedded in it, close to his left eye.

Little Rich knelt, dipped his hand in again, and began to move among them. He came to Bethany, who was sort of kneeling, and stood above her. "From now on," he boomed again, "You are ... Maverick!" and he ran his hand over her face, leaving it streaked with mud.

Little Rich dipped his hand again and began to pace. "We are the children of Fire. We are the children of the Island. We have been chosen. And you are ... Mad Dog!" He caressed Nancy's face. Nancy seemed to shiver with ecstasy. Little Rich came now to Fortunato. "You will be known as ... Iceman!" he pronounced.

Then it was Len's turn. "The Nightrider!" called Little Rich. Did Len smile after Little Rich turned away? It was hard to tell.

Next Prosperity. "Avenger!"

Then Claire. "The Fist!"

Sinead. "Spider!"

And at last, dipping his hand again, he walked toward Fletcher. The others were looking at him. Their eyes were like little weights resting on him, or like barbs stuck in his skin, pulling. The light was thick now among the trees – it must have been getting late in the afternoon. The faces of the others were all coated with thick clay. It reminded him of the masks that the Blueshirts had worn in their strange ceremonies. He felt his own face flush and hoped it didn't show. Little Rich paced closer and closer. He was standing right above Fletcher. "From now on," said Little Rich, towering over him, "You will be known as ..." Little Rich's hand was on his forehead, the mud cool, almost soothing in that heat, "You will be known as ... Onion!" The hand ran down his face, across his nose, into his beard, over his mouth. "We are the Children of This Place! Born anew! And it is ours! We will begin here! We will live here! We will conquer!"

Fletcher's eyes were closed. A sort of moan went up from around him. They were all moaning, or sobbing, or calling out, and the sound rose up like the baying of animals, and Fletcher found himself joining in.

Daylight was already waning when Claire spotted the Blueshirts approaching. She came running. The Blueshirts weren't sneaking, she said. In fact, Mike was in their lead and it looked as if he was carrying a white flag. In a few minutes a plan of sorts had been hatched.

"We go out to meet them," said Rich. "Spider and The Nightrider stay here to guard the prisoner. Avenger and Iceman approach along their right flank. Stay hidden. Same goes for you, Maverick and Onion, only on the left. Keep your eyes peeled in every direction. Any sign of trouble and I want you to sweep in, right? Be ready for a fight. Iceman and Mad Dog and I will head straight for them. We'll parley. Got it?"

"Got it."

"Yeah, Snake."

"Wait, is the left flank – is that like their left or our left?"

"Damn it, Onion, just stick with Maverick, okay? Maverick, you keep him straightened out."

"Right."

They shuffled about quietly, gathering the stakes that Little Rich had sharpened in the monkey fire earlier that day. Fletcher approached Little Rich. "Hey, uh – hey, listen."

"What is it, Onion? We haven't got a lot of time here. They're on the way, you understand?"

"Sure. Yeah, of course. It's only – listen. What exactly are we supposed to do, you know, if there's – well, if there's trouble? Whatever trouble might – might look like?"

Little Rich fixed him with a passionate glare. "Oh. You'll know what to do."

"Okay. Right. Actually, though, I'm not totally sure I will know. Listen, Rich –"

Little Rich had him by what was left of his collar almost instantly and he found himself pressed up against the trunk of a tree, Little Rich's elbows against his ribs.

"Don't ever – ever – call me that again!" Little Rich hissed. "My name is Snake!"

"Sure – right – I was just – "

"You understand?"

"Yeah, right – I – "

"Do you understand?"

"Yes. Definitely. You're Snake."

Rich relaxed his grip a little, but he was still holding Fletcher to the tree.

"We're at war here. All right. This is fucking war. We didn't ask for it, but here it is. And we've got to fight. We've got to fight. No questions, no rules, no fucking mercy. Because you can be goddamn sure that they won't be showing any. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Okay." Rich let go, pressed one of the sharpened sticks into Fletcher's hand, and nodded at him. He smoothed down the shreds of Fletcher's collar, and patted him on the shoulder and arm. "Okay. I knew I could count on you. All right. Let's go."

Fletcher and Bethany crept through the woods, keeping as best they could to what seemed to be the left side of the approaching Blueshirts. He gripped his sharpened stick tightly. What was he supposed to do with it, really? He pictured himself running through the trees, waving the stick over his head, letting loose a great war whoop. What if the Blueshirts were spread out? What if there was an ambush being laid for them? And didn't they have guns, even if they were tranquilizer guns?

And then he spotted them. They were up ahead and off to his left. It was Mike in the company of two or three Blueshirts. Claire had been right: he was carrying a white cloth of some sort. And he must have spotted Little Rich and the others coming toward him because he began to wave the cloth back and forth. Now Fletcher could see Little Rich and Fortunato and Nancy.

"We want to talk to you!" called Mike.

"Come forward. Just you. Just you and me!"

Mike turned to say something in an undertone to one of his companions, then moved forward. Little Rich stepped closer to him as well, leaving Fortunato and Nancy standing a few yards behind.

"I don't know exactly what you think you're doing out here, but you're making a mistake. I think you should all just come back with us, all right?" said Mike. His voice carried clearly.

"We will never return," came the reply, "This is our home now. This is where we belong, and we are staying."

"Okay. Look. All right, then. If you're determined to stay out here, so be it. I won't stop you. But you need to give us the woman, okay? Then we'll leave you out here, all right? We'll leave you alone."

"We demand that you release our people!"

"Your people who?"

"We know that you have Rex and Lucy! We want them!"

"Listen, you're wrong. We don't. We definitely do not have anybody. We don't have Rex or Lucy. Aren't they with you?"

"You lie!"

"No, really. Look, we don't have them, okay? Listen. Listen all of you. This is crazy. Surely you've got to see that. I don't know what you think you're doing here, but you've got to see that this guy is unhinged. And anyway, there are a lot more of us than there are of you."

"Ha! The foul stench of your feeble cowardice! Try to take her, and the woman will perish!"

Mike was silent for a moment. "All right, all right," he said. "Let's not go nuts here. What can we do to make this work? What do you need? Supplies, maybe? We could give you supplies in exchange for her."

"We need no such things. We live off the land."

"Okay. All right. So what can we do about this?"

"We demand an exchange of hostages."

"Listen, I told you. We don't have any hostages, all right. You're the ones taking hostages."

"I don't mean Rex or Lucy."

"Okay, what are you talking about then?"

"We want you!"

5.

Fletcher and Bethany's job was to follow the Blueshirts back into the woods, to make sure that there was no "funny business" – that they didn't try to double back after the exchange had been made. It was quite a difficult job to perform in the forest twilight, especially as they were supposed to remain out of sight. More than once, Fletcher caught his clothing or flesh on a protruding branch, or stumbled and nearly turned his ankle. The lavender suit really was nearly gone. The Blueshirts would disappear occasionally in the foliage, then reappear after a few minutes. They were made somewhat easier to follow by the fact that they were carrying electric lights and had the blonde woman with them, who, you could tell just by watching her, was deeply agitated by her recent experiences and anxious to talk about them. But still, tracking anyone – even a group of well-light, distracted people – through the jungle was not Fletcher's specialty and after a while he lost sight of them. From that point on, he merely followed Bethany, hoping that she knew what she was doing.

After a while, Bethany held up a hand and balled it into a fist. Fletcher was sure that he'd seen that gesture in the movies before – soldiers made it on commando raids and reconnaissance missions. He wasn't really sure what it meant, though. Quiet? Stop? Surprise attack? Bethany was crouched down, her back to a tree so, for lack of anything better to do, he crouched as well.

"All right. This is far enough," she hissed, "We can turn back."

Far enough for what? But it wasn't as if he had a counterargument, so back they went. Or he assumed it was back that they were going – just as with Len earlier that day, he was surprised that Bethany seemed to know her way around. The gray of the air became thicker and thicker. Things called to one another in the branches above.

"Listen," said Fletcher, clearing his throat a little. His voice sounded abrupt, and too loud. "Listen," he said again, more quietly, "What do think – I mean, what's going to happen now? What are we going to do?"

"You heard Snake. This is our island. We'll do what we need to do."

"Okay. Right. Listen, forgive me, but I'm not entirely sure that I find that very informative. And – are you really going to call him Snake? I mean, even when he's not here?"

She glanced at him over her shoulder but it was too dark now to read her expression properly.

"Fine. Fine. Whatever. Listen, I don't mean any disrespect to Snake, or to anyone else. I'm just, you know, I'm just curious. Because, well, it does seem important. What exactly we're going to do. We have Mike now. That's great, I guess. I mean, maybe it keeps us safe from the Blueshirts, at least for now. But who knows how many of them there are, right? And they have – they have boats, and lights, and guns, and things like that. And food. Real food. I mean, don't get me wrong. I like grilled monkey as much as the next guy. It's just that it's not necessarily the most sustaining food in the world. And I think somehow that it might grow a little bit – well, a little boring after a while. I mean, some salt, maybe a curry, something like that. But just plain old grilled monkey? It's bound to wear on you. Which brings me to another point. I mean, there's sort of the problem of what we do immediately – how do we feed ourselves on a day-to-day basis, and not get murdered, and things of that nature. But then there's the longer term issue. Just what, exactly, is the long term plan? Because I get the feeling that the plan is not to steal one of their boats and make a run for it. Call me crazy, but all this talk about how this is our island – I mean, are we going to stay here? Are we – are we founding a new civilization or something? Not that I'm so terribly attached to the life that I was leading before all this started. Just between you and I, I think I was pretty miserable, in fact. But, by the same token, I don't know about disappearing forever into the jungle. The thought kind of creeps me out a little. Hello? Bethany? Are you listening? Is any of this making any sense to you?"

She lunged. Without any warning she seized him, pushed him back through a short stumble and pressed him against the trunk of a tree.

"Jesus Christ! Why is everyone doing that today?! Are you gonna yell at me for not calling you Nightcrawler, or whatever it is?"

"You talk too much," she said.

And then something much more surprising than her sudden attack happened. She pushed her lips hard against his. At first he didn't understand what was going on, but after a moment or two there was no doubt: she was kissing him. It had been a long time since anything like this had happened to Fletcher – just being kissed period, let alone being kissed suddenly and aggressively in the middle of a dark jungle by a woman he'd hardly ever spoken to. He wasn't sure he knew what to do. He began to try to say something, but she must have sensed it because she bit down on his lip. Hard.

Her tongue was in his mouth. It was warm, strange, alien. It felt ... good. It felt good. And then, at last, he found that he was kissing her back, and he'd lifted his arms and grabbed her around the waist. One of her hands was in his hair. He was acutely aware of the way her breasts were pressed against his chest. They were falling and sliding down the tree trunk and onto the ground, their bodies separating a little, but their mouths remaining in contact.

What was he supposed to do with his hands? He was acutely aware of his own breathing and of the tiny, wet sound of his lips each time they parted for another kiss.

Maybe this wasn't all so terrible – this being marooned on an island business. Maybe he could eat grilled monkey forever. Maybe this was what it was like now. He groped at her thighs. Yes, maybe this was what it was like now. Maybe they lived in the jungle. Maybe they made love like animals, wildly and passionately. He would never go home. What was there? He'd forgotten everyone's faces. Probably he'd always cared less about them than he thought. What did it matter? What was there for him? Dull middle age? Creeping his way, slow and lonely, toward a feeble little death? A life like a sigh – like a sigh of boredom! – exhaled and then gone, unnoticed?

She'd torn what was left of his shirt off – or perhaps the slide down the trunk had done it. He moved one of his hands to her breast. She kissed him more feverishly.

Because what did death mean here? He was already dead, as far as the world was concerned. It turned out this wasn't the sort of journey that you set out on and then the road ultimately found its way back to your door and you settled in and told stories about your adventures. This was the kind of journey that changed everything. The kind that you never came back from. It was a sort of death already. The idea was terrifying – never to return! – but exhilarating as well.

Oh god! With one deft move, she'd unbuttoned the front of his pants and pushed her hand inside! Did this constitute permission? It did! He slid his own hand up her skirt and she didn't shove it aside. He could feel a branch pushing uncomfortably into the small of his back. But what did it matter? What did anything matter?

They would live here in the jungle, where death had already happened and had lost its power over him. They would live passionately. It wasn't the dream that he'd always had of how his life would turn out. Or was it? He couldn't remember.

She sat up a little, pulling away from him. For a moment he was afraid – had he done something wrong? But she reached her hands up her own skirt and, shifting her body to accommodate the motion, slid her underwear down her legs and off onto the ground.

Should he say something? He thought maybe he should. What? Something passionate. Something like – oh, fuck it, why say anything?

She tugged at him and he pulled himself upwards so that he was half sitting, leaning against the tree trunk. She pulled his pants partway down. She was straddling him. He put his own hands around her back, straining upwards. He felt the roughness of her pubic hair against him. There were a few awkward moments of finding the right posture, she reached down to adjust the situation and then – he was inside her. A strange, warm, wet sensation ran over and through him – distantly familiar, but shocking. She began to move on top of him. The jungle night blazed hot around them. The things in the trees were shrieking.

They'd stay here forever.

She raised and lowered herself on him. It was so unexpected, such an odd feeling, so delightful.

They'd live here. And maybe – maybe he and Bethany could leave the others. They could leave and live on their own. He thrust upward each time she came down. Whatever had been pressed into the small of his back was now biting into his ass. They would go off from the others and build their own shelter. In a cave, or maybe among the trees. They'd live there together and finally he'd be happy. He'd be at peace. He'd be able to let go. He'd hunt for food and –

Dammit, even at a time like this he couldn't stop himself from having trite fantasies of bourgeois contentment! And what was he doing even thinking the word "bourgeois" at a moment like that? Just stop! Just fucking enjoy what's going on right now!

Up! Down! Up! Down! How delicious! Dammit, how delicious!

More likely, they'd all live together. Rich would take concubines. Maybe it would be like some sort of free-love commune kind of thing. They'd all just have sex all day and eat grilled monkey and swing through the trees with the greatest of –

Stop it! Stop thinking! Up! Down!

The thing, whatever it was, was pressing painfully into his left buttock. And then something horrible began to happen. He could feel himself wilting. Even inside her, even with the Up! Down! he was softening. No! He redoubled his efforts at passion. He thrust with all the more energy, pushing his pelvis hard against hers. He moaned aloud. No! Think of something dirty! Imagine her – imagine her – imagine what? What was he supposed to imagine that was more erotic than what was going on right now? Oh god! He braced himself with his hands, scooted to the side a little. Maybe if that thing wasn't hurting his ass. Okay – thrust – Up! Down! Up! Down! Up. Down. Up. But it was no use.

His stomach was weak and empty with dread. Somehow, even with the murders and the danger and everything else that had been going on, he couldn't imagine anything worse than what was happening right then. Inevitably, she noticed. Her grinding slowed. He could feel himself sliding lamely inside her, limp like a cold jellyfish. And at last, with what seemed to him to be a nearly audible little pop, he was out of her. She lifted herself up, levered herself off of him, and sat down nearby.

The thing that filled him with dread was not the event itself so much as the inevitable, awful, humiliating aftermath. If he could have somehow teleported himself a thousand miles away and never had to see her again, he would have done it in a heartbeat. If he could have erased the last twenty minutes – god, if he could only erase the last twenty minutes ... If he could go back and spurn her advances, or run away or something, that would be so much better. He sat there in the dark, still smelling her, with his dick curled in his lap like a dead insect. At last he felt that he had no choice but to say something.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled.

"It's okay."

Sympathy! Possibly the worst thing. (Though what would have been preferable? Anger?) "I'm really sorry," he said again. "That was incredible. That was so incredible. I don't know what happened. It was just that I was suddenly – I don't know. I got all – all self-conscious."

"Look, don't worry about it. I said it was okay. Shit happens, all right? It's no big deal. Just forget about it."

He longed to move through the dark and touch her, hold her. He didn't even know her, but he needed so badly to feel her next to him again. He couldn't move, though. There was no way. If only she would move to him. With a great gulp, he leapt off a precipice: "We could – we could try again."

And he plummeted from the precipice, down, down, down: "No," she said, "That's all right. We should go."

He was still falling. When would he hit the bottom?

"Where's my underwear?"

It was an awful few minutes, searching through the brush for her underwear. He had to re-button his own pants – it felt like an admission of failure. He found the underwear, handed it to her, trying to brush against her hand as he did so. She pulled it back on, all business, matter-of-fact. He put on the remains of his shirt. Still feeling empty, still falling somewhere inside, he dared once again. Stepping close to her, he reached out to place a hand on her hip. But permission had been rescinded. She turned away from him. "Come on," she said, "Let's get going."

Things, he thought to himself, could not possibly be any worse.

6.

He was wrong, of course. Not only could things certainly be worse, but it took only a few minutes of walking through the dark jungle for them to get that way.

All that had to happen, really – all that had to happen to prevent him spiraling downward was for Bethany to reach out and touch his hand as they walked – or even just say something that held out a little hope. But she didn't, and he could picture himself as a little World War I biplane, badly hit, pouring smoke and flames, spinning toward the ground.

He was probably wrong, but it seemed to him that there had been a moment of hope. His previous life – the life before the island – might never have existed in the first place, and even if it had existed, it was now irrecoverably gone. And this new life, free of the Blueshirts, living in the jungle, seemed to have offered something unexpected for just a moment: something uncharacteristic, bold, important. And he'd let it go. Betrayed by his stupid, feeble, flimsy, limp body, he'd missed the opportunity. A window had opened through which he might have escaped and he hadn't been man enough to take it. The window had shut – had withered and collapsed, had folded in on itself like a tent, and left an awful dryness in his mouth and a sorry hollowness behind his eyes. A line that he had read somewhere came back to him: "The defeat of feeling in the face of life, that was the failing for which there is no pardon, no pity, no honor." That was him, in a nutshell: the defeat of feeling in the face of life. He was simply unable to muster and sustain the necessary feeling, to suck the marrow, to crush the grape against his palette fine, or whatever it was. With each step, he sank deeper into the mire of himself. He didn't know where they were going, wasn't paying any attention at all. It didn't matter. Each one of those steps just led to further blackness. The best he could hope for was to disappear into it. Like all the others. Like Sarge. Like Bea.

He should – he should do something. Do something about the deaths of his companions. Do something about the suffering. That would redeem him. What could he do? If he wasn't on this island, if he could start again, he could – he could move to Katmandu, or Columbia, or Nigeria, or something and become a teacher, dedicate his life to charitable works, to mankind. That would show Bethany – that would make up for his weakness. But here he was – trapped on this island, with his miniscule, narrow future already set, and only himself to blame. He should feel something, at least. He should feel something about the suffering that was out there. He was the smallest, most awful human being that could possibly exist, trapped in an elevator plummeting toward oblivion without even the comfort of caring about the people trapped with him. There was nothing even to cling to as he fell – no love, no passion – not even sex, which his stupid plummeting body was incapable of.

It was with this thought – or one of a long, tail-chasing series more or less exactly like it – that he stumbled into the light of the campfire. The first thing that he saw was Mike, tied to a tree.

Fletcher was suddenly angrier than he could ever remember having been. Or perhaps it wasn't so much a question of degree as of kind. It was a new flavor of anger. It was anger over all that he – that they – had been put through: at sleeping on the sand, and nothing but rice to eat; at insects, and sores, and chapped lips, and no showers; at pointless, awful, sweaty tasks, and incomprehensible midnight ceremonies; at murder. He was angry, then, over things that might reasonably be construed as being at least partly Mike's fault. But it was more than that. It was the sudden release of a reservoir of unknown, un-comprehended emotion. He was swollen with anger and hatred and now – unexpectedly – he could feel it, penned behind his eyeballs, leaning on them the way a crowd leans against a fence that it's trying to get through, pushing on it. And more than that, even: the anger that had been building up in him towards himself also found an outlet. The sneering loathing for his own weakness – and it wasn't just that he was impotent just now – in the woods – it was that it was all impotence – all and forever – all he could remember from the earliest moment, from the very first memory, it was one long, pitiful history of impotence – a tale of one failure that couldn't even be stacked atop the last failure because the stack would only collapse – powerless – terrible and pathetic – hopeless – like a little child crying because it can't have what it wants – crying ineffectively, whining – his whole life, like one great big awful, muffled scream – unheard by anyone – unnoticed – worthless – gone – this man's fault, somehow – someone to be angry with – someone who stood for – for all the – for all the – for all of it – for all the blank, leering, casual success, the easiness, the handsomeness – one man – who –

The yell that he had been imagining was real. He was yelling – screaming, even – in a way that he could never remember having done before. Not only that, but as he yelled, he lunged at Mike. He didn't know himself what he intended to do, but as he moved quickly toward the bound figure he could see Mike's eyes come alive with fear, and it was wonderful.

Little Rich caught Fletcher as he flew toward Mike and wrapped his arms around him. He held him close against his chest. Fletcher struggled for a moment, but Little Rich held him tight and he felt his body crumple into Little Rich's embrace. He opened his eyes. He could feel the firelight on his cheeks and see it flowing in jagged little rivulets across the jungle floor. Little Rich pulled Fletcher a little distance away from his chest, still holding him. He put both hands on the back of Fletcher's neck, pressed his own forehead against Fletcher's for a moment, then pulled his head away and looked Fletcher in the face. "I know. I understand," he said. "The time will come." And with a last squeeze, he released him.

Fletcher reeled away and sank to the ground with his back against a tree trunk.

His head spun. He couldn't think straight, or concentrate, and he didn't want to. He was drunk with fear and hate and self-loathing and sorrow and misery and exhaustion. So tired, in body and in mind, that there didn't seem to be anything left to sustain him. What could possibly be holding him together? Whatever it was, he thought he could feel it fraying.

"The meek," said a voice, "get fucked. Let's face it. They've made a fine try of it. There's no knocking them, right? But in the end – in the very extremity – they absolutely get fucked right in their poor, meek assholes. Where has humility got anyone? Weakness? We've been weak. We've been weak in the face of someone else's strength. We've been bossed around. Pushed around. The schoolyard bully has taken our fucking lunch money. Over and over. Don't we deserve better?"

Fletcher's eyes were closed. Something pressed hard against the insides of his temples like an expanding balloon.

"Don't we deserve more? These people, these schoolyard bullies – they're our enemies. We know this. We should all be brothers, right? Of course we should. Of course. We all face the same stupid bullshit. But those people – they haven't been our brothers. We're all sinking in the mire. We're all trapped and suffocating. But there's always someone – always some group of people – who'll claw their way to the top of that mound – that sinking mass. And they aren't content just to breathe the air up there. They've got to grind the rest of us down. They've got to trample us. Those people – they're our enemies.

"We didn't ask for this. We didn't ask for enemies. But we surrendered to them. In our weakness we let them climb up – we offered our shoulders for them – without knowing it, we offered them our shoulders to climb on, we surrendered ourselves to suffocation so that they could breathe. Why? Because we were meek.

"Well not any more. The path has always been open to us. It's been right there – wide and open and easy – but we've refused to take it because our eyes have been beaten aside from it. Because we've been told not to – by endless nannies, by endless so-called prophets who, of course, have had our best interests at heart. And every one of those nannies and prophets have either been our enemies, or they've been just like us, willingly taking the bit in their mouths and crying to the rest of us to do the same.

"No more! We can take that road! We can take that wide road. It's open. There it is! Can't you see it? It's wide, and easy, and the air is clean. No one presses you down. No one chokes the life from you. It's easy. All you have to do is take the turning. Just take the turn. But you have to do it consciously. You have to choose it. You have to seize it. If you seize, you get! If you demand – really demand – you get! That's all you have to do. Say, 'No!' Shout it. 'No! I won't surrender any more. I won't take that bit in my mouth! I won't take that fucking yoke on my shoulders!'

"All that is demanded of us is action. All we need to do is take action. Seize. Demand. To surrender is the way of a sheep. The way of a lamb. Curl up and roll over and let the mother fuckers slice your belly open. But the difference between being that lamb and being the person who speaks up – that difference is nothing. Just an easy, wide path that nothing is preventing you from taking."

"This is crazy. You realize that everything he's saying is crazy. All of this is crazy and you're out of control."

It was a second voice. Slowly, painfully, Fletcher tugged at his heavy lids, dragging them like sheets of metal across the surface of his eyes. Firelight leapt at him. Amongst the flames he could see the faces of the others, all orange light and purple shadow, still encrusted in mud. Little Rich was on his feet, moving in between the others. His voice hung in the air. The new voice belonged to Mike. "It's mad. You've got to see that. You've got to see what's going on." Fletcher had never heard Mike's voice as quiet as it was now. There was something frail, insubstantial, even almost tender about it. It was the whisper of a ghost. "You can't go on with this craziness. What are you doing out here? What will people think?"

"Ah-hah!" Little Rich swallowed the ghost's whisper. "Listen to that. 'What will people think?' That's all he has. He's the little voice inside your head. The voice of everyone that wants to keep you small. They've put that voice inside your mind. Convinced you to put it there. 'No,' it says. 'Don't do it.' 'Don't cause a scene.' 'Don't make waves.' 'Don't get involved.' 'Lie down and be quiet.'"

Little Rich paced round and round to the cadence of his own words. He still wore dress pants, but his chest was bare, and smeared with mud. As he passed the fire, he loomed gigantic and jagged. "But he doesn't know you – they don't know you. They don't realize that they've snuffed out their own voice. They've extinguished it. They have given you your freedom. Without meaning to, they've freed you. Most people are scared of freedom. Of real freedom. They don't want it. They run from it. 'Chain me up,' they say. 'Chain me to a job, and to a mortgage, and to car payments, and to a ring full of keys.' But more than that. 'Chain me with a way of thinking. Chain me to my own smallness. Shut, and lock, and bar all of the doors but one or two, and then tell me which of those two to choose. Please take away the fear of choosing.' Because that's what all of those people fear. Freedom means choice and, oh, are they ever terrified of choice. 'Please, please, anything but choice.' Choice means the possibility of choosing wrong. Choice means the possibility of damnation. But is that really worse – is that really worse than the creeping horror of realizing, as you crumble into old age, that someone else has decided it all – that you have never, ever seized – that you haven't lived? But they don't know you."

His voice was quiet now too, but not the exhausted quiet of a ghost. The pulsing quiet of power. It tingled in the soles of Fletcher's feet. "Oh no. They don't know you. You can choose. You can choose without fear. They've taken the fear away. Stripped it away. And now – here in this jungle – in your jungle – you're finally free. No hopeless crumbling. A blaze. You are meteorites. You are shooting stars. You have become more powerful than they can imagine. The wide and easy path is right there. There for you to choose."

He knelt now, next to Mike, whose head had slumped downward, who hung limply from whatever bound him to the tree. "It's ironic." He spoke almost in Mike's ear, but his voice was sharp, and hard, and Fletcher could hear every word clearly. "This man made us what we have become. What we are becoming. He and all of his kind. They brought you here. They beat you, and melted you, and tore you down. To them you were all just playthings. They put you in the furnace and brought the hammer down on you for the pure pleasure of listening to you burn, of watching you writhe under the blows. They were planning on discarding you. But instead they've forged a weapon. They've made you keen and hard. They didn't mean to. They thought they were toying with you, weakening you, but they were only purifying you, and honing your edge. You are unstoppable now. Perfect. Shining. Deadly."

Again he stood and began to pace. "It's funny, really. This man created you. This man is your father. You should thank him – we should all thank him. He's our father. He is our maker. And he would be our ruler. But you know what has to happen when a child grows up. When the creation outgrows its creator. When the weapon that has been forged by accident will no longer obey its maker's orders. The father must be rejected. Only when he is rejected, repudiated – obliterated – only then can the child become what it was meant to be. What it must be. Only when we finally turn to that forbidding father and face him and say 'No. We won't listen any more. We won't obey any more.' 'Don't do this, don't do that,' he says. And we say, 'Fuck you, old man.' He wants to keep us from knowing. But we have to know. We have to set our demons free, we have to see them and know them, and realize, in knowing them, that we've mistaken them – they aren't demons at all, but only something that he told us we couldn't do. He has to be overthrown. Only then can your final freedom be realized. You know what has to happen. You know now."

Somehow it was only at that moment, only just then, that Fletcher saw what was in Little Rich's hand. It must have been there all along, but he only saw it now. It was the stick with which he had killed the monkey. One end of it he had burnt and rubbed against a stone, sharpening it to a point.

Fletcher was never able to say afterwards whether he could have stopped the thing that happened. Sometimes it seemed to him that he had actually thought, as he sat with his back against the tree, 'I could stop this.' It happened so slowly – or it seemed to happen so slowly. Surely he must have thought something after he saw the point of that stick in the firelight, as Little Rich was turning, as Little Rich was walking back toward the figure bound to the tree. Surely he must have known what was about to happen. There had been an awful intensity of feeling. It was as if the whole universe was stretched taught against the point of that stick, about to break. Surely he knew, and surely he could have done something, could have stood up, yelled, grabbed Little Rich. But maybe it wasn't so clear. Maybe he didn't know what was happening before it happened. Maybe his poor brain, wracked as it was with all the strangeness that he had been through and been a part of, still couldn't believe that this last, awful thing could really occur. Maybe he didn't think anything at all. And then, of course, there was the possibility that any action on his part wouldn't have mattered anyway. He was hungry and exhausted – exhausted by the limitless time on that island, by the exertion of his own self-loathing, of his loathing for everyone else, of not knowing whom he really ought to loathe, exhausted by the sheer task of being himself. Perhaps he wouldn't even have been capable of standing. And perhaps if he had, those painted people around him would have risen up and torn him to pieces. And maybe that would have been better. Maybe it would have been better to have been torn to pieces by them than to have allowed the thing to happen.

Killing someone should be loud. There should be screaming, thrashing, struggling – something more than a series of dull thumps, like someone vigorously kneading a lump of dough, or kicking a partially deflated soccer ball. But there was only that, and a long, low, hissing groan.

7.

Fletcher awoke suddenly to find a hand clamped over his mouth. He'd been submerged in a dream – something frenetic and ominous. But he was awake now, gasping underneath a large, strong hand. Its palm was very dry. He writhed for a moment or two and probably tried to cry out, but the smothering hand held fast and he surrendered to it. He was soaked with sweat.

A face was pressed close to his. He could feel a beard brushing against him and the weight of a body suspended near his. As awful as things were at that very moment, something more awful rose up suddenly from within him: the reality of what had happened to Mike. If it's possible to reel while you're lying on the ground with someone on top of you, he reeled. What had happened was so unspeakable, so impossible.

A voice vibrated against his cheek. "Shhhh," it said, "We need to go."

He knew that voice. It was Sarge.

The relief that Fletcher felt was like melting. He almost cried out again, this time out of joy. Carefully, beneath Sarge's hand, Fletcher nodded. Sarge loosened his grip and shifted his weight. Slowly, slowly, the two of them sat up, then stood. Fletcher felt Sarge's movements more than saw them. The others must have been nearby, sleeping. Fletcher thought that perhaps he could see a lump of blackness hanging from the trunk of a nearby tree. He nearly gagged.

Step. Step. Step. Moving as quietly as possible, they wound their way through the grove, past the sleepers, past the place where the fire had burned itself out. It didn't occur to him to question what they were doing. He had to go. Sarge was here to rescue him from this madness, and he had to escape.

It seemed to take a very long while. Every time he brushed against a leaf or vine, every time he swallowed, every time he took a breath, it sounded like thunder. It was probably only the restless noise of the jungle, twitching and writhing all around, that kept them from being heard. But at last he began to relax a little. They seemed to be getting farther away. And, of course, it was just at that moment that a figure stepped out from behind a tree trunk. It was Nancy.

It seemed to take a moment for her to realize who she was confronted with. Then, "Ah, Onion," she said, "Where do you think you're going?" Or it might merely have been, "Where are you going?" but the effect on Fletcher's nerves was more or less the same. She spoke quietly, thank goodness.

Fletcher was just trying to come up with some plausible explanation for his behavior, when Nancy's eyes ranged over his shoulder and she noticed Sarge, though she didn't seem to recognize him in the darkness. "Who's that?" she said sharply.

There were several possible courses of action. Perhaps the most sensible, had there been time for sober consideration, would have been to admit that it was Sarge – he was one of them, after all, even if he hadn't been involved in the horrible events of that night and even if his presence was near impossible to explain – and to improvise from there. That wasn't the course that Fletcher chose, however. Instead, more or less without thinking about it, he cocked back his right arm, balled his hand into a fist, and shot it forward, directly into the middle of her face.

Nancy stood for a moment or two, apparently stunned, then she emitted a noise halfway between a sigh and a chirp, and collapsed to the ground.

Fletcher and Sarge ran. They flew and bobbed as fast as they could through that black obstacle course of a forest. More than once, Fletcher stumbled or even fell, catching himself on the trunk of a tree or landing on the flat of his palms. It was dangerous and stupid and they couldn't proceed as fast as Fletcher would have liked, but it didn't matter. He ran as if he was possessed.

The more he ran, the less he thought about anything. There was a release in the movement, almost a wild sort of pleasure in the action of his own muscles, in his scraping against dark shapes in the night, in the pain in his lungs and the soles of his feet. He watched Sarge's large back and struggled to keep up, holding on to that sight as if Sarge were the only other human being in the world, as if he were Fletcher's only hope of salvation. If he just kept running, maybe he'd never have to think about any of the things that had happened. Maybe he could just run and run until it all disappeared, until he disappeared.

But he didn't disappear and, of course, there finally came a moment when Sarge slowed, when he began to pick his way more carefully. At first they'd been running downhill, away from the bluff where they had left the others, but now they seemed to be ascending again. And, just as Len and Bethany had, Sarge seemed to have some fairly clear idea of where they were headed. Was Fletcher the only one who had no idea where he was in that awful jungle? Finally Sarge came to a halt.

"Drink," he said, turning to Fletcher.

There was the sound of water. A little stream shot down along the rocks, glittering. Fletcher was monstrously thirsty. He fell to his knees and dropped his face into a pool at the foot of a mossy rock and he drank and drank. Finally, after a very long time, he dunked his entire head into the pool and came up with cold water trickling through his beard and hair. It had grown lighter, more gray now than blue. Somewhere far beyond the trees, the sun must have broken the horizon.

Sarge leaned against a rock, close at hand. His big chest and belly were bare. They were covered in dark hair that ran all the way over his shoulders and up his neck, becoming part of his beard. His expression was inscrutable. He was silent. Fletcher sat there staring at him. Suddenly Sarge began to laugh. You might think that laughter at a moment like that could come across as sinister or threatening, but there was nothing sinister or threatening about Sarge's laughter, no hint of craziness or mockery. It was a low, full laugh that made Fletcher warm to hear.

"I wasn't sure you had it in you," he said. "One punch and you knocked her out. She's a tough old lady, too. Tough" He laughed again. And now Fletcher found himself laughing as well.

"I've never hit anyone like that before."

"You'd never have thought it. You're a natural. One shot. Pow."

"I hope she's okay."

But Sarge only laughed again. "Oh, she's all right. You don't need to worry about her. She'll have a hell of a bruise, but she'll be fine. Bang. Just like that. Who would have thought?"

The laughter lasted a while longer, coming in waves, lapping around Fletcher, refreshing him. The world was sharper and clearer, though whether because it was getting lighter or because of the effects of the laughter Fletcher couldn't tell. In the new clarity, he was aware again of the thing that had happened.

"Sarge," he said, looking up and wiping at his eyes.

Sarge only looked at him.

"Sarge, we – " He couldn't go on. The thing stabbed at him like a jagged rock, like a blade, like the pointed end of a sharpened stick. He couldn't say it aloud. And then somehow he said it even though he couldn't. "Sarge, we killed him. The others and I. We – we – Mike's dead. He's dead, Sarge."

Sarge nodded, slowly. Acknowledgement? Judgment? Understanding? Sympathy?

"Oh, Jesus, Sarge. Oh god – oh god – oh god – "

And then strangely, he was caught up in Sarge's arms. He didn't know if he'd collapsed forward or if Sarge had moved toward him, or if both things had happened at once, but he found his face buried in the thick hair of Sarge's chest and he was sobbing with every ounce of energy that remained in his half-starved body. Tears poured out of his eyes and mucous out of his nose, meeting and mingling in his beard and on his cheeks, pouring freely onto Sarge. He convulsed. He was saying things – he didn't know what – trying to confess, trying to apologize, but the words were lost, mixed up in the tears and the snot and the hair. Sob after sob ran through him, and the whole time, Sarge held the back of his head and rocked him gently.

After a while, the sobs subsided, becoming wet little hiccups. He stayed where he was, rocking and hiccupping. When he sat up, he would have to look at Sarge's face. Finally, he felt that he couldn't hold on to Sarge any longer. He didn't have any tears left anyhow. He sat, looked over his shoulder, sniffed, wiped his hand across his nose, and at last looked up at Sarge.

His brows were furrowed, his face was serious, but there was no condemnation in his expression, no anger, no disgust. Fletcher was conscious of a rush of gratitude. Sarge had come to get him, come to save him, but the mildness of his eyes at that moment was the most important thing. He wished he could say something, he wished he could thank Sarge, or ask him how he'd survived, what he was doing there, what was going to happen next, but he felt that if he spoke, something would break.

When he at last did say something, it was not directly about the awful thing that had happened. "He's crazy," Fletcher said. "Little Rich is crazy. He's talking like he's – like he thinks he's some kind of prophet or something. About how we're destined to rule this island or at least live on it forever or something, and how we – how we shouldn't be weak anymore and how the Blue – how the people from the television show don't understand."

Sarge nodded.

"He had some kind of – he led this kind of ritual." Fletcher felt his face growing hot and looked away. "It was crazy – I should have – anyway, it was this crazy thing where he named all of us. Sort of baptized us, I guess. And – the thing is, Sarge – the thing is, I don't think they're going to let us get away. I think you've put yourself into – I think they'll come after us."

Sarge nodded again. "You're right. They'll come after us. But now we need to sleep. We can't go any further."

You mean I need to sleep, Fletcher thought to himself. Sarge looked as if he could go on forever. But Fletcher thought it without bitterness. Indeed, he was even more grateful to Sarge for pretending to be weak, although he saw through the pretension. "All right," he said.

"Down here. A little further." And Sarge led the way over the stream and down a gully to a spot where trees and vines leaned heavily against a rock face, creating a little alcove. "We'll be safe in here, at least for a few hours."

Fletcher wadded himself into a little ball against the rock face. If he could have been aware of it, he would have been surprised at how quickly he fell asleep. He'd been given some important job to do. Someone was counting on him. But he didn't understand quite what the job was. All he had was an awful sense of anxiety: the thing should have been done ages ago. Or maybe it was ages ago now, maybe it was the past – he didn't understand. He only knew that someone was going to be angry at him and it made his eyes burn. No, he did know. The job was to carry a sack full of something across the room, across the crevasse that occupied the middle of the room. It was a sack full of rice, or maybe of sand, and he had trouble holding onto it. The sack kept slithering through his arms and no matter how he scrambled to save them, the tiny grains poured out over its lip and were lost. The sack got smaller and smaller.

He awoke with difficulty, fighting his way to the surface. There was a pool of sweat in the hollow of his chest. His breath came in narrow, choking swallows. The first thing that he felt, when he could feel properly, was relief that his dream hadn't been true. The next thing was the awful, crushing weight of all that had happened in the last days, of all that the waking world held. It made him wish for the dream again.

He had slept a long time. He wasn't even sure precisely how he could tell, but he knew that the day was already far gone. It appeared as if Sarge had not slept at all. He sat with his broad, dark, hairy back to Fletcher, utterly still, looking out through the trees. Fletcher sat – slowly, painfully. The sweat that had pooled on his chest ran down over his belly. His body ached clear through to the bone. He crawled forward. Sarge must have heard him, because he turned his shaggy head and laid a furrowed gaze on him.

Fletcher had barely had time to realize how horribly hungry he was before Rex extended his hand. In it was a processed granola bar in a bright foil wrapper.

"Eat," he said.

It seemed to Fletcher that it was the strangest thing he had ever consumed. The packaging dazzled his eyes. The regular shape of the packed oats and raisins struck him as very odd. The grain felt foreign against his tongue.

"Where did you get this?" he asked when it was gone.

"I took it," said Sarge. "I have three more. We have to make them last." He spoke slowly and heavily. "We need to go now. They'll be coming."

"Sarge, how is it possible that you're here? I was sure you were dead."

"I should've been. But I escaped. It wasn't easy. There isn't time to tell the whole story. The important thing is, I'm here now and you're here, and we need to keep moving. We need to save our energy for climbing."

"For climbing?"

"Up, into the mountains. It's the only way to get to somewhere safe."

Fletcher didn't know when he'd lost his shoes exactly. Maybe it was during his woeful entanglement with Bethany. Maybe he'd left them back at the camp with the others. He wasn't wearing them now, at any rate. The lavender suit had been reduced to rags. He was nearly naked.

They were headed away from the sea. Although they had sometimes to work their way down through gullies, their overall trajectory was unmistakably upwards. They moved in silence, steadily. There was no way he could have climbed like he did now when he had first arrived on the island, not as relentlessly as that, not without having eaten a proper meal in god only knew how long. He had grown lean. Half starved, perhaps, but with nothing left besides muscle.

Every so often, Sarge paused. He would look behind them, scanning the trees, scowling. It seemed to Fletcher as if Sarge was using senses that Fletcher didn't possess himself. Fletcher didn't ask what he was searching for.

The further they went, the steeper the ground was that they covered. Fletcher never asked exactly where they were going. He only went on and on, without eating, without pausing, one bare foot in front of the other, picking his way over rocks and clumps of roots, through tangles of vines. There was a certain peculiar exhilaration in it. Every breath was sharp and hard and clean. His calves ached with the effort of climbing, but the ache was wholesome. The more he moved, the less he thought. He felt good.

It was only when he emerged into the daylight, only as he found himself in a flat, clear, regular space, largely free of trees, as he stepped up between two large rocks and found Sarge facing him, that he realized that for some time he had been climbing a set of stairs.

This spot was one of the places on the island – of which he had now seen several – that had indisputably been made by human hands. There was a low balustrade, broken in many places, running around the edge of the circular space. Vines had broken and lifted and covered the stones, but you could still make out that the area had once been paved. Scattered about were several larger stones. Some stood on their ends and others lay on their sides. Their original purpose – ritual objects, maybe, or the remains of some crumbled structure – was unclear.

Whatever this place had once been, it was perched on the spur of a mountain that rose dense and dark and green above them. In the other direction, Fletcher could see the whole broad line of the horizon and the great swathe of the forest through which they had come. The sun shot all around and about them. Out in the distance, beyond everything, so huge that it was practically invisible, lay the water, like a sheet of steel.

He felt his way across the paving stones with the soles of his feet and sank onto one of the toppled monoliths. Sarge stood nearby. Fletcher ran both palms over the stone surface on which he sat.

"Sarge. I think I've gone crazy. I don't know what happened. I don't understand." There was the call of a bird from somewhere. "I used to think – once upon a time, you know? – I used to think that things sort of held together. At least I think that I thought that. It's so hard to remember. I guess I should have written things down, you know? But I think I used to think, I guess not so much that everything made sense. It wasn't that I understood things, but I think I thought that it was at least possible that I would maybe understand things in the future. But the thing is, it's the future now, right? And it doesn't make sense. It's like I can't collect enough data. Or anyway, no matter how much data I collect, there's still something out there, behind things – between them – that I don't get. That I can't get. Because I'm starting to think now that all of the trying to make sense of it is just rearranging things that don't innately fit together at all. I'm looking so hard for a pattern, but there's nothing there at all. Like white noise."

Sarge didn't respond.

"Lucy and Rex are gone. I don't know what happened to them. They weren't in the woods with us and Mike claimed – before – he said that they didn't have them. They just disappeared the night we all escaped."

"They're safe. We're going to them now."

"They're safe? You mean, you – "

"I found them and I took them away with me. I tried to get you as well that night, but I couldn't manage it."

"You were there?"

"I was there. I'd been watching for some time, looking for an opportunity. And I can't say that I knew for sure, but I had a feeling that things would go badly with Little Rich and the others. I would have come for you earlier. I wish I had. But I needed to see that Rex and Lucy were safely away. Lucy is hurt."

"Lucy's hurt? Badly?"

"I hope not too badly. We'll see."

"Sarge." He looked at the man, sitting there, with his oddly ageless face. He'd saved Fletcher's life. Or if not his life, then at least – what? His soul? "Thank you, Sarge."

Sarge only looked at Fletcher, without smiling, but not unkindly. In that moment, it occurred to Fletcher that he loved this man. He would do anything for him.

His thoughts were cut short by a sound that came rising up out of the jungle. It was a long sort of wail, rising and falling. It was a hunting cry and it was followed by others, still far off but close enough to make Fletcher shudder.

"Come on," Sarge said. "It's time to go."

The going from there was so steep that at times they were literally climbing. On and up they went, through the trees that at some moments thrust out branches and creepers to block Fletcher's way and at others embraced him, held his hands roughly, tugged him onwards. He didn't pause to care, he only pushed and pushed and gasped and rattled on, beyond exhaustion, beyond emotion. There were things – important things – that he needed to think about. Only he couldn't – not then. He only had to keep moving.

At some point, twilight came, and then night. On they went. And always there was the awful, dream-knowledge of pursuit, of hunters closing in. Sometimes he could hear their howls, or thought he could, and other times it was simply that he could feel them, feel their malevolence boiling up from below, rushing up the mountain behind him. They were always there. And they were gaining. He knew it somehow, felt it in a way that was beyond anything reasoned. He didn't even know who or what they were. Little Rich and his followers? The Blueshirts? Something else?

On and up. There was a moon above, and the blackness of forest occasionally gave way to the naked silver of moonlight. On and on and on, and always there were the almost-heard sounds of pursuit wafting up from below.

Then there was a new something. At first it was only new, a something indistinguishable from all the other somethings clamoring and hooting and calling, and it was only gradually and with difficulty that he realized that what he was perceiving was a smell. He'd read about, or heard about (centuries ago, in another lifetime), people who perceived numbers as colors, whose sensory inputs were disordered. This smell was that way. At first he thought it was maybe something he saw, or a sound, and it was only slowly that he was able to perceive it clearly. It was a heavy, sweet smell, sweaty and enveloping.

After another minute it made sense that he had mistaken the smell for something seen, because in fact he was seeing it. All around, hanging on every branch, floating in the air around him were flowers. Thousands and thousands of them: numberless white flowers, with great bells like trumpets.

Then there was a warm slapping about his face and hands, a flurry of soft movement, and he burst through a last layer of trees into a new world. It was flatter than the ground that he had been traversing, though still sloped, and open in a new way, irregularly paved. He staggered a few steps onward and then slowly to a halt.

It was a space, perhaps, not unlike the one in which he and Sarge had paused earlier. But here, the monoliths stood upright and arced and vaulted over his head. They were like a huge ribcage, torn open and gaping up at the sky, though whether the ribs were of stone or wood or metal he couldn't tell. The place had been built a long time ago and now it was decayed, toothless, and wild. The pillars and arches were festooned everywhere with those drooping, iridescent flowers. They filled every cranny and hung in the air itself. The smell here was beyond intense: it was an atmosphere all its own, clinging and creeping with immense gravity.

There was movement too – a vast flitting and heaving. The things that he had felt slapping against him as he emerged into this place were bats. Huge flocks of bats, teeming and surging. As he watched, the bats dove again and again into the bells of those flowers. It was copulation: a mad, leathery, writhing orgy. The moon shone sideways on the pillars, on the bats as they flew and darted and dived and suckled. Somewhere far below, in the direction that he found he had turned, was the vast warmth of the sea.

"Come on!" he heard Sarge call from behind and above. "Hurry!"

But he didn't. The bats swarmed around him. The night was warm and thick. The invisible pursuers were close behind. He could feel them there, somehow, though he couldn't see them.

"Let's go!"

WHO ARE YOU?

He still didn't know what the things were that were following, that were almost upon him. But, as he stood there, he did know something. He was starved and fevered and crazed, but he knew this thing with a clarity that he had never experienced before. He knew that this was the moment that he needed, that he had been waiting for, or that had been waiting for him. In the house full of doors, this was the door that he at last could choose consciously and deliberately to open or not to open. This was the fulcrum on which it all swung. All of what swung? All of him. He'd tried to do the thing that needed doing before. On the beach with Bea, for instance – both the first time, on that phosphorescent night, in a sense, and then again when the Blueshirts had been about to take her away. Maybe he'd tried other times as well; it didn't matter. Now he could see clearly, for the first time ever. Maybe this is what it's like when people find God, he thought.

WHO ARE YOU?

"Come on!"

He stood where he was, knowing what he was going to do. He could feel Sarge leave. He didn't have to look to know that it was true, and he was glad – tremendously glad. It was exactly right. Their pursuers were almost upon them. But they wouldn't get Sarge, or Rex, or Lucy.

WHO ARE YOU?

The fatigue that seemed to have been with him now for longer than he could remember was gone. The fatigue, the hunger, the anxiety, the confusion, the fear were all gone. The frustration of losing his memories, the despair of realizing that he was a lackey as he pushed that sledge full of rocks, the horror of the darkness in the cave, the worse horror of realizing the emptiness that awaited him as he lay on the raft – had vanished. So too had his sense of self-condemnation, his worry, his guilt. He was empty, and it was a gloriously clean, fiery sort of emptiness, quite unlike anything he had ever felt before in his life. It was too bad, he thought, that he didn't have longer to experience this new thing.

The foliage from which he had emerged only a few moments earlier began to rustle. He heard the snuffling, eager progress of the things below. He saw the first of them emerge, white and dread and awful.

He yelled, loud and long, from his depths, and he leaped down the stone stairs, throwing himself into the midst of those emerging figures.

The Seventh Part

1.

He was neatly folded and creased. It was a novel sensation and yet also strangely familiar: crisp, clean, orderly, enclosed. A bed.

Flat, soft, rectangular. For a long time it absorbed his attention without his bothering to explore its ramifications. He looked out across a savannah-land of blankets, towards the horizon. Vast plains and, in the distance, two arms stretched out across them like great, dark ridges towering up out of that brilliant off-white-ness. He felt that he could watch that landscape for ... oh, for a long time. He could imagine armies marching across it or thundering herds of – of something thundering. Thundering.

After some time had passed, his eyes were drawn upwards from the horizon into the blazing, incomprehensible dazzle beyond. They fell back several times, leaden, and rested before they could make the climb again. If the bedspread was a vista, the space beyond it was a whole universe, a great, swimming beige and pale green nothing.

The bed must be floating. Floating on the ocean. Gentle and soft. He could even feel it, swelling up from underneath and then subsiding, slow and thick and warm.

He was falling away, crumbling back into unconsciousness. He could sense bits of him sloughing and sliding into a warm darkness somewhere down below. It was enticing, but also frightening, and he struggled against it. If only he could move. If only he could shake his head a little or raise his distant arm, the spell would be broken. Broken.

Broken. The word echoed and rolled about inside him, losing its meaning, just a lovely quiet little sound with things clinging to it, stroking it. Broken. Roken. Oken.

What had he been thinking? He struggled a little more, but he wasn't even sure what his was struggling against, or toward.

2.

When he awoke again, he had to fight his way to consciousness through a series of little shocks like brushes with electric eels, but this time the edges of the world were a bit sharper and clearer.

Perhaps he was surprised to find that he was alive. Actually, he wasn't entirely sure that he was alive, so those edges must not have been as sharp and clear as they'd felt. Looking out of his own eyes felt like staring through glass. He was standing inside his eyeballs, looking out of the great picture windows that they formed.

Through them he could see the bed, clearly now, though still curiously far away, and the nothing beyond it was a room. It was only that it had been so long now since he'd been inside a room. He must have had trouble recognizing it. Light fell heavily across the bedspread in rectangular patches. Through the windows of his eyes he could see his chest rising and falling.

He watched for a long time, curious, before a voice entered the room. The voice settled itself down, cozy, near him, and along with it came a man. The man and the voice were obviously parts of one another, but they didn't seem to line up quite right, like listening through distorted 3D glasses.

"Mr. Haywood," it said, and now there was a smile too. A voice, a man, and a smile. "How are you feeling? Any better yet?" The voice and the man waited. "Well, you've been through a lot. It may be some time before you're quite yourself again. I only wanted to check in on you." The voice turned politely to leave, taking the smile and the man along with it.

Fletcher watched them. Then, from deep inside, he pulled up a response. That's really how it was: he had to reach down and grab it and pull it up through his throat and onto his tongue, haul it forward, and heave it over dried lips. "Harrruogh," it went – or something like that.

The smile turned back. "Mr. Haywood?" went the voice, standing near him. A straight-backed voice, but crackling a little as if it came out of a poorly-tuned radio. "Excellent. Very good."

3.

Really, he woke up in layers. It was like peeling something off, like a snake's skin, and it took a long time. Successive layers brought new levels of awareness and activity, though slow and sticky.

He was in a medical facility of some kind. A hospital? He never did figure that out. He never even figured out where exactly the place was, what country or continent. When the people there spoke to one another, they spoke in a language he didn't recognize, and when they spoke to him, they had accents like jam spread on warm bread.

After a time an IV drip was replaced by liquids through straws, and then by solid food. He grew stronger, and sometimes, when he woke, his body was right there, very nearly where it ought to have been instead of off in the distance like hills at sunset. At some point, he sat up. He spoke, though it was rough in his throat at first.

There were quite a few questions that it would have been reasonable, perhaps even prudent, to ask: Where am I? How did I get here? What happened to Sarge and Lucy and Rex? To all the others? Do you understand what was going on in that place that I came from? And so on.

But every time he was on the point of asking them, it was as if his tongue swelled up. After all, if he started down that road, there were all sorts of other questions that might reasonably have been asked in return. He didn't seem to be in any sort of trouble – not for the moment – and perhaps it was best not to disturb that particular equilibrium. There were probably other, deeper reasons, as well, for not stirring those waters.

His doctor (or nurse, or whatever the man was) would have been easy enough to question. He was a smallish man with delicately baked skin, like a game bird, and a tongue that cupped each syllable as it left his mouth. His consonants were softened by whatever language he originally spoke (Spanish? Portuguese? Indonesian? Fletcher had no idea) and that, combined with his gently graying hair (though he seemed young enough) and Fletcher's own wavering consciousness, made him seem sort of blurry, though in a pleasant way.

He did ask questions, though never the dangerous ones.

"How are you feeling today, Mr. Haywood?"

"You are well?"

"How is it? You are comfortable?"

"Is there anything else we can be doing for you?"

He would put a cold stethoscope against Fletcher's chest, or look into his eyes, making Fletcher track the progress of his fingers.

"Please watch my fingers."

"Very good."

"You are doing very well."

"Yes."

"Yes, indeed."

Fletcher fought to stay awake during those days. It wasn't that there was anything so awful about sleep, not that he could have named. No nightmares. Just nonsensical, light, chattering sorts of dreams. Dreams folded over on top of other dreams, layer after warm, heavy layer. That was it, really. It was hard not knowing which layer you were in. And he would bleed outward, too, so that he wasn't totally sure about the boundaries between Fletcher and not-Fletcher. He fought to stay awake because it was something to fight over, because he could hold onto being awake for a few minutes. It was like being on top of a floating barrel and the other side of the barrel wasn't drowning, it wasn't death, but you still wanted to be on top.

He won the fight more and more as the days passed. Sometimes the fog cleared almost entirely, and then he was surprised to find himself where he was and surprised at all that had happened to him.

And then, once he had become more or less completely cognizant of his surroundings, they folded him up again and mailed him home. It was a long flight, mostly over water, but he remembered little of it. There was the hum of the plane's engine as it lifted into the air, a deep buzz that vibrated the plastic of the window against which he leaned his head. Endless, deep, distant, strange ocean, and the tops of clouds like turrets or like frozen tundra. The plane landed once and waited for a while on the tarmac. People got on and off. Fletcher stared out the window at carts driving little trains of luggage back and forth across the black surface. In the air again and then, so very oddly – odd precisely because it was so completely ordinary – the plane found its way: home.

He saw the city from above, in the night, and wondered if it was the place he lived. Afterwards he was sure that he had been sure it was, but really there was no way to know whether that was the truth or not. The change in pressure played tricks on his ears as they descended. In the end, after the plane's wheels had hit the ground, after the rush and roar as the plane slowed to a stop, when he was really sure that he was, in fact, home, he didn't know what to feel.

He stood for a long time in the airport. He had no bags to collect. No one was there to meet him. But he stood and watched. There was a soldier who greeted his family – a wife, three kids. He wore camouflage, his head was shaved close, and he held his wife for several long seconds while the kids clambered around his legs. There were grandparents there to visit their grandchildren and students on their way to college and business men and women, moving briskly, checking their phones. A group of flight attendants or pilots, or maybe a combination, walked by, chatting, dragging their little black and blue wheeled suitcases behind them. A man with big hoop earrings. Another one with a cowboy hat, a beard, and a jacket with fringe. Fletcher imagined a map on which the paths of all these people were traced. Each person would have a different color and the course of his or her life would be tracked on the map. There would be lots and lots of little loops and zigzags, probably the retracing of the same identical steps over a thousand and a thousand thousand times in the course of daily life. There would be a few one-way tracks over long distances, when people moved from one place to another, say. Some great, long loops, like the one he'd just finished. And, of course, a beginning and an ending to each line, a place where each one emerged out of nowhere and another place where the line was simply cut off. The different colored lines would cross one another, fail to notice each other, wander off in their own directions. He thought that if, perhaps, he could see them, see them from somewhere above, at a distance, with time to think, maybe he'd be able to understand them, perhaps they'd spell out some kind of message. "Help." "Save me." "Here I am." "Look."

Someone back at the medical facility wherever he'd come from had given him clothes. His own clothes, in fact, that he'd packed in his suitcase so long ago. In his pockets were his watch, his phone, and his wallet. There was even cash in the wallet. So eventually he did the only thing that could reasonably have been expected of him under the circumstances: he walked out of the airport, climbed into a waiting cab, and gave the cabby his own address.

The cabby asked him a few questions at first, but finding the answers to his questions unsatisfactory, he gave up and drove in silence. They hummed over the highway, passing other cars, people driving along at seventy miles an hour as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The orange-gray light of the streetlamps surrounded everything, cradling the world in its arms. Inside the cab, as they passed each light, there would be a moment of brightness, then the shadows would stretch and spin away toward the front of the cab at the same time as new ones crept up from behind, until there was another flash of illumination and those new ones were replaced, over and over again.

They arrived at his building. He paid the cabby, climbed out. He stood, looking upwards, while the cab pulled away. In one of the compartments in his wallet were the keys to the building and to his own apartment. On his way up, in the elevator, he thought about the entrails of the building, about the spaces he couldn't see. The heating ducts and the black pipes that carried shit from the floors above through the walls of his own apartment, down into the ground. The drywall and the girders and the cables and weights that lifted the little box he was inside and the empty spaces between things. There were bugs sometimes, that he found in his apartment. Spiders, for instance. Did they crawl up all that way, stories and stories, moving the opposite direction from all that descending shit? Or were they born up there, living their whole lives so far from the ground? The sound of the bell when the elevator reached his floor surprised him.

He turned left, walked down the hall, then right, another walk, and he was outside his own door, in which the key turned easily. He stood in the entryway, unable to digest what he saw. What he saw was: his apartment. Nothing but that. Just as he had left it, nothing altered. Undisturbed.

He went in. Short entrance hall with throw rug. Coat closet, complete with coats. Left turn leading down another hallway. Bathroom with clear plastic shower curtain and turquoise bathmat. (He picked up a half-used tube of toothpaste, held it for a little while.) Two other rooms off the hallway, one a bedroom, the other one used as an office. A desk, papers still stacked in little piles. The bed unmade, a pair of shoes sitting on the floor outside the closet, one of them resting on its side. Back down the hall, opening off to the right of the entrance, a combined living room and kitchen. An IKEA bookshelf, black. A coffee table, glass-topped. The refrigerator quietly humming.

It was all absolutely as he had left it, just as though he had gone to work in the morning or stepped out for some groceries. He half wondered whether someone else had actually been living here while he was gone. Just for a moment, he was discomfited, and looked over his shoulder, feeling like an intruder, wondering what he would do if the rightful owner suddenly came walking in. But no, it was his apartment. His things. Just as he remembered them. Just as they had always been, and totally alien.

After a little while, he sat down on the couch. He must have turned the light on at some point. It was uncomfortable to sit down – not physically, but still uncomfortable – and he stood up again. He didn't really know where to go, so he went over to one of the windows and looked out across the city. He didn't really see the city, though, because his own reflection hung in the way.

In the hospital they'd shaved his beard. He'd had a beard, hadn't he? Just recently. Or years ago. He ran one hand over his smooth cheeks. They'd cut his hair as well. It was a perfectly respectable length. He looked thin, he thought. Or maybe he just looked – unexpected. He'd read or heard somewhere that people constantly shed and replaced their skin cells. Or maybe it was all the cells in their bodies. He couldn't remember. How did the new cells know how to arrange themselves? How did they always know to re-make themselves in the shape of that little scar under his lower lip where he'd bit through it as a child when he fell off the monkey bars? And, if they were always replacing themselves, wasn't it possible that he had actually never before seen the thing that he was looking at?

A new thought occurred to him. He removed his phone from his pocket, pressed the little button that illuminated its screen and looked at the date displayed in the upper-right-hand corner.

He stood again and walked back to the window. A little more than four months. That was how long he'd been gone. That was all, including travel time and the time in the hospital. About one hundred and twenty days. One hundred twenty days was – one twenty times twenty four – was something like 2,800 hours. That was 168,000 minutes. His eyelids seemed to scratch the surfaces of his eyes every time he blinked. About 10,000,000 seconds. Or had he dropped a zero somewhere? His head hung, semi-transparent, in the dark window, the lights of the city showing through it from behind like pinholes in a piece of fabric.

4.

Many things were strange, and even a little difficult. The first time he went to the grocery store he stood in the condiments aisle for a long time, bewildered. There were probably two dozen different kinds of mustard. Electric lighting, driving, the casual presence of other people, were all hard to get used to. Being indoors at all was disconcerting. He had never really noticed rooms before, as such. Before they'd always simply been negative spaces, to be filled with things. Now they seemed very much like boxes; he was acutely aware of being inside them. He felt contained.

But perhaps the strangest thing was really how easy it was, relatively speaking, to slip back into life. It was as if he was an astronaut who had gone on a many light-years journey and returned to earth fully expecting everyone he knew to be long dead, only to find that they were all alive and well and had barely noticed that he'd been gone.

He arrived on a Saturday. On Monday morning, he got out of bed, showered, shaved, dressed, drank a cup of coffee, and went to work. What else, really, was he supposed to do?

It wasn't that people at work weren't surprised to see him. It wasn't that they didn't have quite a few questions at first. They were, and they did. It's only that, after not very long, they lost interest. The first day back, everyone greeted him, everyone wanted to know where he'd gone and what it had been like. They listened avidly for a few minutes, and then something would come up, they'd need to get back to work, they'd shake their heads a few times, tell him it was good to have him back, and be gone. By the third day, they had more or less lost interest. This may have been mostly due to the fact that Fletcher's answers to their questions were probably not what they hoped for. He didn't know what to say, so he was noncommittal. Sometimes his listeners wanted to know whether he'd been forbidden to talk, if he'd signed some deal not to reveal the outcome of the show, and he hadn't – not as far as he knew, anyhow – but it began to feel natural to pretend vaguely as if he had. What was he supposed to say? Especially when they asked about the television show as such – when it was going to air and so on?

The only person he really talked to about it all was Eggs. He called Eggs not long after he returned, and they got together for a beer after work. They sat in a booth at a little bar, one they'd been to often before. There was a television mounted in the corner that showed football or basketball games with the volume off. Fletcher found it difficult not to watch the flickering images over Eggs' shoulder.

"So?" said Eggs, once they'd settled in. "So? How was it?"

"How was it? Jesus, Eggs, I don't really know how to answer that."

"What do you mean? How was it? What was it like? Where did you go?"

"I was on an island."

"Really?"

"Yes. An island. A tropical island. Like a paradise, really."

"No kidding?"

"Yeah. Blue sky. White sand. Or gray sand sometimes. Sometimes silver. It's hard to say. I looked at it so much. I slept on a little wooden platform under the stars. The stars were incredible, Eggs. Like – I can't even say what they were like. There were so many of them. I'd never seen anything like it before."

"Wow. Did you – what did you have to do?"

"There were challenges. Just like on TV. Well, sort of just like on TV. I think. They were strange."

"What do you mean, strange?"

"It was – they were – I don't know what it was all about, I guess. It was bizarre. Really, really bizarre, man."

"I guess it must have been. You don't quite seem like yourself, Fletch."

"I'm not sure I am myself. I'm not sure what I mean by that. I mean, obviously I'm myself. Here I am. But on the other hand, it seems like everything is different. Everything is the same but everything is different. I don't know what to make of it."

"No shit? Weird, man." There was a pause. "Fletcher? Are you all right, Fletch?"

"I guess I don't know that either."

"What's wrong, man? What happened to you?"

Slowly, the story began to come out, in fits and starts, garbled. He got things out of order, either because he rushed ahead of himself in his effort to tell it or because he couldn't remember what order it went in. He talked for a long time, through one beer and a second and a third, looking Eggs straight in the eye sometimes, looking down at the table or off at the flickering television at others. And the whole time, Eggs listened, nodding, shaking his head, adding a word or two of commentary, asking a clarifying question. Did Fletcher leave things out of the telling? Of course he did. How could he help it? He didn't do so to protect himself – not really, not for the most part. It was just that there were certain things he couldn't say; he just didn't know how to say them.

" ... and so, here I am. You know? After all that, I'm back here."

Eggs hadn't said anything or asked any questions for a long time. Fletcher was staring down at the tabletop, pushing his nearly empty glass back and forth across its surface. He looked up now and saw Eggs looking straight back at him. Eggs didn't say anything.

"So there it is, Eggs. That's it. So. What do you think? Can it have happened? Can it have happened that way? Is it possible? It's not possible, is it Eggs? It can't have happened like that. Those things can't have happened. It's just – it's impossible, right?" He found that he was very nearly pleading. "It isn't possible is it, Eggs?"

Eggs reached up and tugged thoughtfully at his lower lip. Then he leaned back a little. He sighed. "I'd like to say that it wasn't, man. I mean, I'd like to be able to tell you for sure one way or the other. It sounds unlikely. Certainly it sounds unlikely. But the thing is, man – what is it, from Hamlet? Someone says it in Hamlet: 'There are stranger things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' I think that's it. It's true. There are stranger things than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Fletch. That's the truth. So I can't say, really, for sure that no such thing could ever happen or hasn't ever happened."

There was silence, again, and Fletcher looked back at his glass. "Eggs?"

"Yeah?"

"Do you hate me? I mean, do you blame me? Did I do wrong? In all of that – it was so hard and so strange, and I didn't understand. I still don't understand. I've got to ask you, Eggs, am I a horrible person?"

"How long have we known each other, Fletch?"

"Fifteen years or so, I guess."

"Longer than that, man. You forget how old we are. Eighteen years, at least. Maybe closer to twenty."

"I guess you're right."

"I don't hate you, Fletch. I don't think you're a horrible person. You did what you could, you know? We're all doing the best we can with what we've got, right? I've known you for a long time now and, don't get me wrong – you've got you're faults. So do I. We all do. You're doing the best you can with what you've got. You're not a horrible person, Fletch."

Fletcher looked up, and found that there were tears in his eyes. "Thanks, Eggs."

"It's okay, buddy. It's okay."

"Eggs, what do I do now? I mean, what should I do?"

Eggs tugged at his lip again. "You say they haven't tried to contact you? The television people?"

"That's right. I haven't heard anything from them."

"Then don't do anything. Don't do anything at all. Don't call anyone. And don't tell this story again. Keep it to yourself if you can. Can you do that?"

"Yes. I can do that."

"Then do it. Forget it. Forget that it happened. Don't talk about it and don't even think about it, okay?"

"Okay, Eggs."

"It'll be all right, Fletch. Really, it will."

"Thanks. Thank you, Eggs."

5.

And so Fletcher – Fletcher did what he had always done.

In the morning, the alarm would pull him out of thick, oppressive sleep. He would shower, drink coffee, drive to work. He'd go to meetings, make phone calls, respond to emails, generally attempt to manage his various contacts with the world. He'd come home again, watch television, maybe read a magazine or a book, surf the internet, buy something. When he lay down, he was exhausted or restless depending on the day, but regardless, eventually sleep would seep up inside him like oil bubbling up to the surface of the earth, and he would disappear. Sometimes trying to keep it all together, to manage all the pieces, felt difficult. But for the most part it felt more or less like nothing at all. For the most part it slid by like beads running smoothly down a wire.

He followed Eggs' advice about not calling anyone, but he dreaded a call or a contact from the people behind reality – or from the police. It had all ended so strangely. How had he left the island? Why hadn't he been killed? What had happened to Sarge and Rex and Lucy? To Little Rich and the others? He had escaped somehow and he should consider himself lucky. But the things that had happened on the island could hardly have been simply erased. And the people who had sent him off knew where he was – they must have been the ones to arrange the stay in the hospital and his flight home, to return his clothes and wallet. Why hadn't they killed him just as they'd killed all the others? In a way he had entered into a kind of conspiracy of silence with those people, whoever they were. It would have to end at some point, and end badly, wouldn't it? Surely it wasn't possible for him to return to his normal life without – without repercussions of some kind?

But apparently it was possible. The dreaded call did not come. Further and further, he settled into himself. His life rose up and folded him back in.

He'd returned alive. That was something to be glad about. There had been times when he'd doubted that it would happen. At least, he thought there'd been times like that. It was hard to remember. It was so hard to hold on to things. Even the things he'd sworn to remember – he was sure there must have been things that he'd sworn to remember and then forgotten. He could no more account fully for the days that he'd spent on the island than he could for any of the days that had come before that. Nothing seemed to stick. Not even, as it turned out, the intensity of that place. Just as he could no longer really recall (not properly, not, as it were, in his skin, not with the full force of his senses) what it had been like to be a child, or to be in high school, so the island began to seem distant and impossible, something he'd seen in a movie or read about rather than actually experienced.

He'd try to reach back and grab hold of something, to feel it, to smell it. The squeaking sand as his toes sank into it. The emptiness of the sky. The breath of the trees. Sometimes, for the most threadbare of moments, by dint of some mental trick that he couldn't even understand, he would catch a fleeting taste of the exhalations of the sea and sand and stars, and he would be there. But it would disappear before he had time to savor it. He would try the trick again (focusing on the squeaking of the sand, say) and if he was lucky, the ghost print of that taste would lay itself lightly on his tongue, growing fainter quickly until it was gone.

At those moments sometimes he would feel terrifyingly as if he were standing on the tiniest imaginable point, with the past tumbling off into oblivion on the one hand and the impenetrable future a looming abyss on the other. He was on the point of a needle, forcing its way with awful quickness through the fabric of time. He was skewered on that one moment of present, surrounded by an unremembered past and an unimaginable future. But that feeling didn't last long. Nothing does. And for the most part, his experience of return was one of simply and quietly re-entering routine that, if it had never been loved, was at the least well known and well understood by him, down, as it were, to the very cellular level of his being.

When he was not working, he entertained himself, which meant that he met his friends to play poker, that he watched movies, played games on his computer, occasionally went to restaurants or out for drinks and in general made whatever efforts he was capable of to keep his mind occupied.

Sometimes – often when he was unable to sleep, but increasingly at other times as well – he would simply wander about, drift around the streets. He looked at the sky a great deal. At night there were really only a few stars to be seen. He had never really noticed before how many things there were hovering overhead. The sky was laced and cut by wires – power lines and phone lines – and poles and spikes thrust up into it. He was always half hoping, when he wandered, that he might get lost (the hope was accompanied by the most curious, warm sensation in his stomach), but he knew the whole time, of course, that it wasn't possible. The direction home always hung somewhere inside him, like an anchor.

It wasn't that he missed the island. Certainly not. He was sensible enough to remember that when he was there he'd often wished for nothing more than to be gone. (Hadn't he? He was sure he had. Things did tend to grow blurry.) So, surely, he couldn't be so silly as to miss the place? He'd nearly been murdered. He'd seen people murdered. He hadn't eaten properly. He'd slept on the hard ground. No, he didn't miss it. It was only – it was probably only the way you feel after you've left any place and you can't go back. It doesn't really matter whether you had a good time. It's just that the place is gone and sometimes you think you can smell it, or you catch one of its sounds, and it feels like a dream that you're on the verge of remembering, and you think, beyond any kind of logic, that you may just step around the next corner and find yourself there. It's just that. Just the silly tug of emotion over something you can't have – a childhood fantasy, for instance, or the realization that you'll never have the opportunity to try living as someone else, or that you'll never get to go to a certain city, or see a particular place in anything besides a photograph. You look at the photograph, and you know that there are real people who have been there and that you, too, in some sort of alternate life, would be there. But that there are no alternate lives; this thing you've helped create is your only go-around, and darkness will enfold you without your ever having laid eyes upon the place in the photograph. Except, of course, in the case of nostalgia, it's rendered perhaps worse by the fact that you have been there. And no matter where the there is, or how much you enjoyed it or didn't enjoy it at the time, its gone-ness tugs at you, whispers to you, until you catch some part of yourself wishing desperately for a sky clustered with an impossible number stars, for the immensity of the ocean and the breath of the jungle.

He didn't miss it.

But if he didn't, why he kept the penny whistle in his pocket? It had been returned to him, along with his wallet and other possessions, at the distant hospital. It was tarnished almost beyond recognition, its metal ringed with bronze and white. There was no reason to carry it, but he did – every day. There was no reason, when he sat and looked out through the windows of his apartment, looked out over the city without seeing it, to remove the whistle from his pocket and put it between his lips. And it was impossible – completely impossible – that it could somehow still taste of the salt of the same distant ocean that he saw through those windows.

6.

In the world around him, spring came. Trees shook themselves, stretched, and opened their blossoms. Things grew warm and restless. It stirred something in him as well. It was as if the warmth had thawed something – his bile or his green humor perhaps – the same way it thawed the syrupy sweet blood of the trees. He felt that he must do something. But what? He'd already done it. He'd sent that video off and he'd gone to the island. He'd changed everything, and nothing that he could name had changed. His life was what it had always been: a slow, loose unraveling, the direction of which he could neither discern nor describe.

It was on a spring afternoon full of just such vague and restless emotions that Sascha Klymer finally called. The voice sent a spark of horror or excitement skittering through him before he even had a chance to identify it consciously. "Mr. Haywood? This is Sascha Klymer. I hope you remember me. How are you?"

"I'm – I'm well. Thank you. I'm all right." His heart had sped up. He felt sick and giddy, like the moment before the roller coaster drops the hill it's climbed.

"Excellent. I'm pleased to hear it. I'd begun to worry about you."

"Worry? About me?"

"Is there any possibility that you might be able to come by our offices?"

"When?"

"Well, whenever you can find a free moment. I'd love to see you."

"What about this afternoon?" He'd been dreading this call, hadn't he? He ought to have done something to avoid meeting this man, but he spoke almost without thinking.

"That would be wonderful. If you think you can get away from work at such short notice. Do you remember where we're located?"

He was out of the office in fifteen minutes. He shouldn't be going. He'd escaped. No one was after him. No one was trying to pursue him, or punish him, or involve him – they hadn't yet, at any rate. Mike was dead. There it was: an awful thing that he had refused, over and over again, to think about – or at least to say explicitly to himself – in the weeks since he'd returned. Mike was dead, along with so many others. Ceased. Over. It was so impossible, so awful. And he bore some responsibility for it. He should have done something by now. He should have told someone. It would all catch up with him. It was catching up with him right now. He'd been called by the very person that he'd thought of all along as the leader of these people, the man in charge (at least, now he thought he'd thought of him that way all along – he really couldn't remember). He should have been turning his feet directly toward the proper authorities, whoever they might be, turning Sascha Klymer in, turning himself in. But instead those feet were moving rapidly toward Sascha Klymer's office.

Outside of the brick building there was a row of young fruit trees – cherries, maybe. Each one protruded from a decorative black metal grate in the sidewalk. They were covered in white blossoms.

Inside, everything was as he remembered: small downstairs lobby; elevator; glass doors on the fourth floor. He paused for just a moment and ran his fingers over the letters printed on the glass doors: "reality." Pushing the doors open, he found himself in the same open loft of an office with interior brick and desks clustered in the middle; there was the same sense of dynamism and creativity, of important meetings with interesting colleagues, of espresso drinks and business casual and important, elegant lives that Fletcher couldn't imagine being part of. And in the middle of this, epitomizing it all as he walked forward with his hand outstretched, was Sascha Klymer.

He, too, was just as Fletcher remembered. More beautiful, if anything. He had on a gray suit, alternately loose and fitted in exactly the right places. Fletcher couldn't even imagine fitting into a suit in that way. He wore no tie and his collar was open. Everything about him was delicate and strong and made Fletcher acutely aware of his own body, of its thickness and unwieldiness, of the fact that it was made out of meat.

"Mr. Haywood," he said. "I am so glad that you could make it here on such short notice. Please come into my office. May I offer you something? A cup of coffee? Yes? What would you like? I hope an americano is all right. Do you take cream? Sugar?"

He ushered Fletcher through the tall, glazed glass door into his corner office. Sascha Klymer made the americano while Fletcher sat, waiting.

"I'm so glad you're here, Mr. Haywood. So very glad. As I say, I've been worried. First, you really must allow me to apologize. I'd been meaning to contact you sooner, but these past weeks have been very, very busy ones for us, as I'm sure you can imagine. Please accept my apologies for that. And also for the other inconveniences you experienced. Things did get a little – how should I say it? – a little out of control, I'm afraid, during the end of your time there. We had absolutely no intention that you should experience any medical inconveniences. No, no. So, I do hope you're feeling better. Are you well?"

Fletcher found himself responding. "I'm," he said, "I'm fine."

"You are? You're feeling well? That is a real relief, I can assure you. A real relief for me. And how are you otherwise? How are you settling in?"

"Settling in?"

"To being back? I ask only because I know that it can be difficult sometimes to make the transition back, and I want you to know that I care. That we care. We continue to care about what happens to our – people." He said the last word after a slight hesitation, as if to indicate that he was searching for just the right way to describe the special relationship between his company (if it was his) and Fletcher. Now that Fletcher thought about it, it wasn't clear what the right word was. Client? Employee? Customer? Co-conspirator? "So, are you finding that you're making the readjustment successfully?"

"Well – " Something got stuck. How could he be having this conversation with this man, sitting across from him, drinking coffee? Hadn't this man as good as tried to kill him? Wasn't he responsible in some way for the deaths of people that Fletcher had known? Weren't they enemies? Didn't they also share an awful secret? But, whatever else he felt, Fletcher didn't think that he hated this man. "Well. The thing is. Something. Something is not quite. Not quite right. Something is wrong."

Fletcher could feel himself growing redder as he spoke, feel the meat of his face swelling with blood. Sascha Klymer raised his eyebrows and folded his long hands in his lap.

"What I mean is. I don't know. When I came here – when I first came here, I mean – I guess it was because something was wrong then too. Nothing dramatic. I just. Do you ever picture time? I mean, what time itself would look like if you could see it? To me, when I picture it, it's this series of boxes. There's a Monday box and a Tuesday box and so on, just strung out in succession. A long line of them, not connected to anything at all. Inside those boxes are more boxes for hours and minutes. The upsetting part isn't really the boxes. It's knowing that someone else made it up. I mean, it's just a calendar, right? Basically? I didn't even create this picture of my own life. Somebody else made it up and I just accepted it. And I think, when I first came here, that's what I wanted to escape – the picture of what my life was like that I hadn't even created.

"And the thing is, I think it kind of worked. I think it worked. I'm not sure how. Even saying this now, it's only now that I'm actually saying it aloud that I'm realizing that it's true. Things were different there, while I was on that island. Not everything, but some things. Important things, I think. The world was different. Sharper, I guess, maybe. I don't know. Now that I'm saying it aloud, I realize that in this strange, inexplicable way, what happened on that island is the only real thing that ever happened to me. I was alive while I was there. Really alive. Do you know that I still find sand in my hair? It's crazy, after all the showers I've taken since I came back and the time in the hospital and everything, but it's true. Every so often I'll scratch my head and I'll find grains of sand under my fingernails. And I can't believe it – I can't believe that it really happened. But it did, and now I think I see that it was the only real thing that ever happened. Bea, and Sarge, and all of them – I think about them all the time. They're more real than the people I talk to now every day. Even though they're – anyway. I don't understand. I should be angry, of course. I know that. God, I know that. And grateful that I made it back. Grateful to be here, with all the stuff and the comfort that I have, grateful to be alive But now I am back. Everything's okay for me, right? Everything is just the same as it always was. It's just the same as it always was, and it's not real. I'm just drifting. Again. None of it is what counts. None of it ..." He trailed off and there was silence for a moment.

Sascha Klymer looked at him mildly. "Didn't you think you would be coming back?"

Fletcher looked back at him – looked straight into his clear eyes and didn't let his gaze waver. "Let's be frank with one another. Let's be frank, Mr. Klymer. Sascha. I feel like I ought to be able to call you Sascha after everything that happened. In a weird way I feel that there's a certain kind of intimacy between us. Informality, at least. A lot happened on that island, Sascha. A lot, you know? Things happened that shouldn't have happened. Maybe I'm guilty of some of those things. I'm not sure. I don't know what I'm guilty of, or whether what happened was important, or what any of it was all about. And now I'm back here. And I don't even know what happens next. Maybe I should do something about it, maybe not. Maybe I'm going to do something, maybe not. The truth is, I don't know. I don't know what I want.

"But that's not true. I do know. I do know, now that I'm saying it aloud, just like a minute ago. Now that I'm saying it – I know that I want to understand. Just that. I never understand – I've never understood. It's always been just beyond my grasp. I – there are things that happened – things that are happening. Maybe I'm happy, maybe I'm not happy. Maybe I'm okay, maybe not. There was one moment – just one moment – where I thought I saw it all very clearly. There were bats and flowers and I probably had a fever, I was half starved, but for a second I really did see something. At least I think that was the only time. Maybe there were others. You see? It's gone now. I've lost it – whatever it was – and now, I just want to understand."

The look on Sascha Klymer's face was not unkind. "You want to understand?"

"That's right." And now that Fletcher said it, he knew that it was right – that that was exactly what he wanted, all he wanted, that none of it really mattered except that he wanted to understand.

Sascha Klymer smiled. And then he began to laugh: gentle laughter, genuine laughter, a laughter full of warmth and sincerity. "My dear Fletcher, you're torturing yourself for nothing. All of this – all of this struggling. Don't you see? Don't you see how completely unnecessary it is? You don't have to understand. You don't have to understand. That's our job." He gestured, taking in himself, the office around him. "That's what we do. We take all the material – hundreds of hours – thousands of raw, unformed hours, lifetimes – and we carve it away, discarding what's unnecessary, stringing together the other bits. Making it into a story. Understanding it. It's what people like us have always done. Bards, troubadours, poets, whatever you like. The storytellers. And not just for you. For everyone. We tell stories so that people can look at things and say – 'Aha, I know this. I see what this is. A love story'; 'Ah ... the hero triumphant'; 'Ah, the hero brought low and defeated, destroyed by his pride.' Whatever the story may be. We do the work of understanding so that you can get on with your life. It's a simple division of labor."

Fletcher stared at him, at the gentle smile in his perfect face. The smile was like the sail of a boat in the distance. "You'll do the understanding for me?"

"That's right. You needn't worry. You needn't put yourself through this. All you have to do is watch."

Then it struck him: clear, awful, impossible.

"Wait. Wait. You don't mean – you can't mean – you don't mean that you're still planning on making the show?"

Sacha Klymer's brows contracted. "Of course. Of course we're going to make the show."

"You can't! That's – that's – you can't!" To his own surprise, Fletcher was actually standing now, looking down at Sascha Klymer.

"My dear Fletcher, of course we can. In fact, we have to. I've just told you: it's what we do."

It was beyond belief. "You can't! Not after – not when – not after the things I've seen! Not – not after the things I've done."

The room grew more brilliant suddenly, a shaft of sunlight piercing it, and again, impossibly, the man began to laugh. "After the things you thought you'd seen," he said, "After the things you thought you'd done."

Fletcher's righteous anger flooded away, drained by the laughter. He hung, suspended, a thousand feet in the air, looking down at the strange little figure of Sascha Klymer, far below him. "What do you mean?"

"Mr. Haywood, our job is to understand, but it is also our job to create. We create meaning. We're story-tellers. After all, no one wants reality."

7.

Outside, the spring air tasted funny. The sun still shone. There were still fresh blossoms. The pavement still radiated the warmth of the day. But the air tasted funny. Not stale – just not right. Not like itself.

Fletcher couldn't put order to his thoughts. It was all false. The only thing that was real – the thing that he had finally realized was the only real thing that had happened to him – was false. He couldn't seem to remember anything else besides the island – or, at least, the other memories seemed hollow, or as if they were someone else's. All the years that had preceded those few weeks on that island had faded. The world around him had faded as well. Only the island was bright and significant. Only the things that had happened on the island had any weight. He hadn't realized it until a few minutes ago, but everything else was unimportant, insubstantial.

And yet, it was precisely the things that had happened on the island that were false. They had been – the others must have been – hired actors. At least some of them. Sarge? Lucy? Little Rich? Bea?

They'd been making fun of him the whole time. He'd feared for his life – in the cave, on the raft, over and over again. Had they been laughing at him then? How often had the cameras been watching him without his knowing it? How often had the others been carrying those cameras, concealed on their persons?

It couldn't be true. Was it true? Was Sascha Klymer not lying now, lying to cover up what had happened?

He'd thought that they'd been murdered. He had grieved for them. He had tried to change places with Bea as she was being taken away. All of that was to be shown on television? As a farce? He had thought that Sarge was saving him, saving his life. He would have done anything for him. He did do something for him – something that he'd thought was important. He sacrificed himself. What did that sacrifice mean now? Bea. He'd been in love with her. Had she been acting the whole time? Had they all been laughing at him? They had. They'd been in on a great joke. And that joke was his life. He'd never felt anything before the island. He knew that now. Everything before had been pale and false, just a dull buzz, just the hiss of static. Then had come the island, and he had actually felt something, for the first time ever. And the island itself was a lie. The only time when he had ever been alive was a lie. He was tiny and meaningless and the only thing that had ever happened in his tiny, meaningless life was utterly false.

Without thinking, heedless of the people that passed him, Fletcher sat down on the pavement. He sat by one of the small trees with white blossoms surrounded by a decorative metal grating. He sat near the curb. The wheels of the cars passed him more or less at eye level, but he barely noticed them.

He was thinking of the miniature city that Len had built – or that he had thought Len had built – made of leaves and rocks and moss, and of the tiny figures that occupied it. He could picture it perfectly, as if it lay in front of him right now.

He was nothing. There was a strange sort of rushing sound building in his ears.

He was passing through a dark tunnel – a tube – hurtling downward, and there was nothing to stop him from falling, nothing to hold on to. The last thing that there had been to hold on to had been pulled away. He hadn't known how important it had been until now. Even his guilt over Mike had been something – something to feel. But now that guilt, along with his love and his sacrifice, was meaningless and insubstantial. The only real thing was a lie. The ground had disappeared from beneath him. There was just the abyss.

Some distant part of him was aware of the traffic passing. Falling, as he was, into emptiness, he could picture what should happen next. Stand and walk forward, into the street. Let a car run him down. Another part of his fractured being knew it was a stupid idea, a melodramatic idea, and one that was likely to result only in an expensive and embarrassing trip to the hospital. But it didn't matter. Really, nothing seemed to matter. It was like dreaming. He was plummeting.

And then, perhaps just as he was about to stand, to follow that laughable impulse, an image appeared. He saw a quiet hallway. It was a long hallway in an old house. He could tell that it was afternoon by the quality of the light that fell through open doorways on either hand. Dust rose in silence from the carpet beneath his feet. Through one of the doorways he could see a study with a wooden desk and shelves full of books. It was warm. It was totally silent. He knew this image. It was no place that he had actually been, but he recognized it. Maybe it was from a book he had read when he was quite young. Yes, he thought that was it. He wished he could remember what book it had been. The picture was tantalizingly familiar. He ran his mind over it, the way you would run your fingers over a smooth stone. The rushing had gone from his ears. He stood in the warmth of the hallway for a little while. He knew he'd been walking down it (his steps made no noise at all in that thick carpet) and that he would start walking again in a few moments, but for now he paused, and looked, and listened to the silence and felt the warmth. Then he was aware of the real warmth of the air around him, of the sound of the traffic and of people talking nearby, and of the mingled smells of tar and of spring. He breathed deeply.

He stood and dusted off the back of his pants. In the pocket of those pants was a funny thing: a penny whistle, burnt by the sun and the water. He took it out of his pocket. It was a lie. It was part of a lie. He ran his fingers over its surface. He loved it. That was the thing – the curious thing. Lie though it was, he did love it. He couldn't help himself. He put the two pieces of the whistle together, lifted it to his mouth, and began to play, right there on the street. The tune that emerged wasn't one that he recognized. It probably wasn't entirely new, but he didn't know where it came from. It was bright and lively, but a little sad too, in a way that pleased him.

As he played, he turned away from the street and watched the people on the pavement. Most of them shot him a quick glance and then looked away as they passed, but some of them let their eyes linger. He must have looked odd, but knowing that only made him play louder and with more feeling. One woman – an older woman in a business suit – smiled when their eyes happened to meet, and, through the music, he smiled back at her. He played the song all the way through, until he knew it was done.

What was he going to do now? He actually said it aloud: "What am I going to do now?" And, not having an answer, and finding the thought amusing, he said it again: "What am I going to do now?"

Only a very few things were clear. One of them was that he was not going back to work. In fact, he was not going back to that job ever again. He had a feeling that he was moving away as well. He had no idea where he would go or what he would do. Perhaps – who knew? – perhaps some place tropical, some place with a beach and a huge sky. It didn't seem to matter much. Nothing mattered – not in the way he'd thought it did, at any rate. He was suddenly, strangely free. It was a little frightening – like standing in some high, exposed place – but exhilarating at the same time.

