May You Live In Interesting Times

Nadia Bulkin

Alice Grant’s eyes flashed like a pair of headlights careening around a dark bend in the road. It was nice of her to give him that warning, Theo reasoned. It meant she liked him. Otherwise he would have no idea until after her engine had run him down. “Ready?” she asked.

“Yes. Ready.” He gave her a smile that he hoped exuded more confidence than he was feeling, though he suspected she saw right through it. She knocked on the door of apartment 5F, and without waiting for a reply, let the both of them in. Like the rest of the building, the apartment was steeped in marijuana and tobacco. Alice’s friends were sprawled around what looked like a large lacquered placemat, painted with an ornately-designed alphabet and numbers and some other markings he couldn’t discern.

“Hey everyone,” Alice said, breezily. “This is my friend…” she gave him a meaningful glance, a little trickster smile that set his heart just a little bit on fire, “Theo.”

By way of greeting, they jostled their drinks. “Come sit down,” said the one girl he’d met before, the hostess Heidi. “We’re just about to start conversing with the other side.”

A little lump formed in Theo’s throat, but Alice, as usual, was full-steam-ahead. Too much drive, his father would have said. Not enough control. She noticed that he wasn’t taking off his coat and shot him a look, somewhere between a plea and a demand.

“How do you play?” Theo muttered, unraveling the scarf he still wasn’t used to wearing.

“You just put your finger on the planchette,” said Alice, pointing at the wood-rimmed pointer that Heidi was pretending to peer through. “The board does the rest.” She winked, slipping her shoes off her maroon wool tights. That didn’t help the lump any.

Heidi made them a pair of very strong drinks—for a flash Theo thought of his mother, imploring him in the name of Allah not to drink too much, I know Americans drink a lot! while his father muttered his own Masyallah —and then they joined the circle on the floor, their fingers squeezed right next to each other on the planchette. Theirs and everyone else’s.

“Say, you’re the bloke from Nusantara, aren’t you?” said one of the guys, a lanky, long-haired princeling sitting sideways on a leather throne of a chair with his legs dangling over one arm and one limp hand reaching down to the planchette. All he was missing was the elephant rifle. But Theo smiled and said, “Yes,” because that meant Alice had been talking about him.

“That mean you got sent by the General, then? You in the army?”

Alice’s pointed little chin, made sharper by her voice, shot up. “Niels.”

“I’m not in the military,” said Theo, trying to keep his tone level and bright, diplomatic . “I’m in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

“Oh. So you just make excuses for the awful things the General does.”

That time the cries of “Niels!” came from more parties. For a second Theo felt his face burn with indignation and the seconds on his watch drag to hours, and from somewhere very far away Alice was saying, “Niels is just upset that no one cares about anthropology,” and Niels was cheerfully explaining, “What? That’s what every foreign service does!” until slowly, the heat subsided. “Niels,” Theo decided to say. “Is that a Dutch name?”

Niels had nothing to say to that. Guilt is impossible to wear well. Theo felt Alice nudge him appreciatively in the ribs, and he took a drink of confidence.

Through the mahogany bourbon Theo could see now that the markings on the board he hadn’t been able to read spelled GOODBYE. Alice’s friends started moving the planchette in wide, lazy circles over the board, like an amateur figure skater, as Heidi threw back her head and crooned, “Is there a spirit out there that wishes to speak to somebody in our circle?”

They jerked the planchette toward the upper left of the board. YES. Theo barely stifled a nervous laugh. They had just seen Halloween two weekends before—what Theo had been hoping was their first date, though it still remained a little unclear—and Theo remembered thinking while watching the babysitter huddle in a closet in a spellbound theater on Mercer Street, how starved for entertainment these people must be.

“Lovely. Can you tell us your name, spirit?”

“A-F-R-I-E-N-D,” came the answer.

“Well, hi there, Friend. Who did you wish to speak to this evening?”

“T-H-E-O,” the planchette spelled. The group released a collective ooh, all eyes riveting toward him a little too quickly for his taste. It reminded him of that time when he was moved up a grade and several pranksters in his new class decided to trick him into believing that there was a ghost in the only boys’ bathroom on their side of the school. You have to go inside, they insisted, pointing to the paint-stained door holding back the foul, rotting darkness.

Alice, too, was ooh -ing. She was testing him. Wanted to see what he would do. She was always trying to make him jump, trying to see if he could take it.

He had gone into that bathroom in Pondok Kelapa. They shut the door on him, like he knew they would, and he stood there staring into the mirror focusing on how strange and sunken his face looked in the dark, and nothing happened aside from the boys rattling the door in an attempt to scare him and then running away, sandals slapping the dirt, hooting like howler monkeys. There was no ghost. The bathroom surrendered him back into the fragrant night.

So he smiled, thinking, relax . “Hello, Friend,” he said, fixing his gaze on the lightbulb because it was the only space that seemed safe. He was urged by the group to ask this “friend” something fun, but luckily, one of the girls squealed that she had a question, a good one.

“Hey, Friend,” she said. “Who’s Theo gonna get lucky with tonight?”

“M-A-R-Y-A-N-N,” the planchette spelled. One of the guys belted, “Who’s Mary Ann?” But Theo knew. That was what Alice called herself when she couldn’t find her keys or drank one too many kamikazes or left an assignment until the night before, “Goddamnit, Mary Ann,” which made no sense to him but apparently had something to do with Alice in Wonderland.

He looked at Alice, and she was laughing, blushing, giving herself away. They left not long after that, and he spent the night in her leaky, book-ridden apartment for the first time.

“It wasn’t me,” she would insist for the rest of their relationship, but with that glint in her eyes that said don’t trust me, the glint that made him notice her in the first place, defending the October Revolution as if it was a game in their Tuesday evening discussion group: I’m trouble.

***

The board was a gift, said Jack Stoker. A gag gift from a college friend who’d heard there were a lot of restless spirits in Nusantara. “But the maid’s always saying something’s watching her do the laundry, so I thought maybe we should try it out.”

As soon as the board was trotted out, Theo should have begged his leave. He hadn’t been near one since that night in Heidi Souza’s apartment when Alice and her friends tried to rattle him with this supposed “Friend,” and he wasn’t in any shape to be thinking about Alice’s eyes and Alice’s laugh and Alice throwing uncooperative books over her shoulder while she was writing her dissertation, once hitting him in the head. But the world seemed to have turned inside out since he got the letter, and in a massive error of judgment, he stayed.

He had been writhing around in the lobby of the Hotel Des Tropiques, refusing to force himself to go home to Nelly, when Jack approached him to ask about the future of a formerly Portuguese island colony that had been left stranded in the middle of Nusantara. Jack was the Political Affairs Officer at the freshly-painted U.S. Embassy, though a rather odd one, very different from his over-rehearsed colleagues. Jack reminded Theo a bit of Alice. He supposed that was why he talked to him, fed him a little information now and then, because he trusted Jack to tell him the truth about how the Americans might respond.

He didn’t have any answers about the Portuguese colony. Under normal circumstances—and even to Jack—he would regurgitate the Foreign Minister’s assurances that Nusantara was not in the business of colonization and the colony would be free to choose its future. That night he could only shrug and say that even the beautiful and innocent had to pay God’s price.

“You should get out more, my man,” Jack said, reaching into the peanut bowl. “Tell you what. I’m having some people over tonight. Just a little get-together. Why don’t you come?”

Anything was better than going home and looking at Nelly, the Air Marshal’s daughter, carrying the weight of expectation in her belly and a great stoic silence in her statuesque features. By the time they climbed up the steps to Jack’s luxury apartment, past the sleeping pink bougainvilleas, it turned out that these “people” were a man working for an American oil company, his wife, and the latest raccoon-eyed lounge singer in Jack’s life. Once again, everything stank of cigarettes, and this time of patchouli. Several times that night Theo would imagine a bestiary of nocturnal animals perched on the balcony, peeking in with lunar eyes.

He should have written to Alice more. He had written a couple times, once a week after he landed and once again when he couldn’t help himself. When Nelly found out she was pregnant, he’d had the inexplicable itch to write another letter. Not to let her know, but to walk further down the aimless path he’d started charting in his first two: here are all the things I imagine we would be doing, if things were different. He hoped she threw them away. He wrote them just to get those garbage thoughts away from his own head, after all.

“What on earth is happening up in Samudera?”

Theo lifted his head off his fist. “I’m sorry?”

“The rebels! They’re giving guys a hell of a time up at the LNG facility. I’ve got workers scared to come in because they think some savage is going to throw a Molotov cocktail at them.”

It was amusing to hear those austere devotees—who thought they were closer to God than anyone else in the archipelago—described as savages. “It’s a delicate situation.”

“Delicate! It’s an armed insurrection, isn’t it! What else is the military there for?”

Fuming oil-men were liable to turn into volcano-sized problems, so he leaned forward and promised, “I’ll look into the situation in Samudera, Mr. Gary.” Gary muttered his flushed gosh-gee-thanks-appreciate-its, and Jack tipped his glass at Theo in gratitude.

With business taken care of, Jack brought out the Ouija board and they put their hands on the planchette, the lounge dancer looking as taken aback by this uniquely American version of superstition—superstition as Hasbro-toy—as Theo must have looked in Heidi’s apartment. Once again, it was the host’s responsibility to invite the guests from the other side. “Hello-o-o,” Jack crooned, as if into a suspiciously empty house. “Anybody listening?”

Theo’s finger brushed against the lounge dancer’s and he thought again of Alice, of the terrifying freedom she had made him feel. Being honest, neither of them had seen an intertwined future. Theo’s life was already set up for him, like a place setting at the most important banquet of his life, surrounded by Senior Advisors with the Foreign Minister just a few seats away and the General somewhere up at the head of the table, not quite visible, but all-seeing. The woman sitting next to him at that dinner was not Alice and could never be Alice, even if Alice wanted that life ( all the frou-frou dinner parties, she’d say, rolling her eyes), which she didn’t.

Heidi had been furious at him for “abandoning Alice,” as if Alice would ever let herself be abandoned—she’d just start walking in the opposite direction, he was sure—but of all people it was Niels Spijker who understood that there were certain chasms that couldn’t be crossed—not yet, anyway. Niels and Theo stood across just such a haunted chasm from each other, tortured by the possibility that their forefathers might have crossed paths, which was why they always had to shout, even when they were in agreement. And it was Niels who let him know, in a terse letter on filmy blue paper that he’d probably stolen from the funeral home, that Alice died.

He asked his secretary to look up the details, and to say nothing to Nelly. The doctor had said not to stress her; she didn’t know about Alice. His secretary gave him clippings with needles for eyes, but he could only think of Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Multiple stab wounds to the neck, the Delphi Gazette said, a rare and random act of violence. Off with her head. He searched desperately for the date. March 3. The third letter probably wouldn’t have arrived yet.

Then all at once the planchette moved, with a vigor that seemed almost angry, scraping against the board in rough, jagged angles. “M-A-R-Y-A-N-N,” the planchette spelled. Theo flinched as if he’d been struck across the bridge of his nose. “H-E-L-L-O-T-H-E-O.”

“This is bullshit,” grumbled Gary, while his wife nudged him in the ribs, staring wide-eyed at Theo like this was the closest she had yet come to a wildlife safari. But all that mattered was the knowledge that Alice was hovering in the room with him—had always been with him—would never be abandoned. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

He begged Jack to let him buy the board. Jack stared at him for a moment, bewildered, and then winked and said, “How about if I let you have it for free, and we call it even?”

***

The instructions on the Hasbro box told him not to, but Theo only ever used the board alone. He told Nelly it helped him concentrate, and when she protested that it was unnatural, unhealthy, he shot back, “How much money have you spent on your damn fortune tellers, again?” Even the General took spiritual pilgrimages, had his own army of dukuns. At any rate, Nelly knew she had no right to complain too much. Not when they kept moving into bigger houses, not when their vacations were international, not when Dino wanted for nothing. She still had no idea about Alice, and Alice, fortunately, never spelled N-E-L-L-Y either.

He and Alice—or M-A-R-Y-A-N-N—talked about other things, the same old things they had debated in her leaky apartment or his spartan government-sponsored one: the machinations of power, the definition of national interest, the execution of game theory, whatever the hell the Russians and the Chinese were doing out there in the cold, barren deep.

Alice had unlocked more doors in death, and there were things she knew now that she never would have known in life—specific, secret things, like who the Khmer Prime Minister had met with and how furious the General’s Private Assistant for Special Affairs was with the Foreign Minister for maintaining a public commitment to not annexing that Portuguese colony. Alice was under the impression the island belonged to Nusantara, and was quite confused by his reluctance to undermine his Foreign Minister. It made Theo laugh; she had always been such a realist, such an American, such a believer that because the mighty inherited the Earth, it was in anyone and everyone’s best interest to become as closely aligned to the mighty as possible.

“It’s a delicate situation,” he told her. “You can’t just hold a nation together with chains. Besides, what kind of example would that set? We’re trying to stop a slaughter in Indochina…”

It was a slaughter that Alice had paid no small part in helping stop, counseling him so he could counsel the Foreign Minister on how best to talk to Annam, what terms to put on the table. She might have been a realist, but she had always been good-hearted.

“B-E-S-T-R-O-N-G,” Alice urged him.

Only when he saw his teacup shaking did he realize that someone was banging on the door to the study. Nelly was the only one who ever used that much force on anything. He gave her credit; when Dino was at his most monstrous as a toddler, the mask she’d worn since they were first introduced had broken, and she had taken to committing the occasional extreme acts of violence. He preferred plate-breaking to a martyr’s silence, even though he understood neither.

He said GOODBYE to Alice and then opened the door. Nelly still had her fist raised and almost put it through his face. “There’s people here to see you,” she growled. “From the General’s office. You’re lucky I didn’t tell them you were talking to a board game in there.”

Theo vaguely recognized one of the two men sitting in his living room as a nameless Army Lieutenant who was never more than twenty feet away from the General and always seemed to be one assassination attempt away from strangling the nearest bystander with his bare hands. There were a great many terrible things that the General demanded be done in the name of the nation, Theo knew. He knew with equal certainty that he did not want to know any more than what was absolutely necessary. “We’re all doing the best we can,” the Foreign Minister told him while they were sitting dazed at the Saigon airport, hugging their briefcases like a pair of junior staffers. “There’s no manual for running a nation that’s younger than you. No matter how much education, how much advice…we are the ones that live with the consequences.”

Theo just sat there and tried not to look them in the eye.

At last the one Theo recognized sighed and put the cup and saucer down. “The Foreign Minister is dead,” he said. “He was killed this evening. The General would like you to serve as Acting Foreign Minister until he selects a replacement.”

He felt as though his heart had stopped. All he could see was the Foreign Minister’s joy as he clapped him on the shoulder, saying, We did it, Theo. “What? How? Did someone…”

“Some psychopath jumped him while he was sitting in a restaurant. Two cuts to the carotids, right over his bowl of noodles.” The Lieutenant shrugged, shaking his head. His hand was twitching for a cigarette. “There’s a lot of crazy people running around these days, Mr. Hartono. Seems like the whole world has gone insane.” And then they were gone, and somewhere outside with the mosquitoes and the medicinal smell of citronella, a cigarette was being lit. And standing in the hallway under a clicking gecko was Nelly, asking if it was true.

Two cuts to the carotids. Two cuts to the carotids. Multiple stab wounds to the neck.

He pushed past Nelly and charged toward the study, ignoring the echoes of her yells, and shoved the door open when he saw that it wasn’t fully closed. Dino was leaning on the desk on his tiptoes, staring at the Ouija board, picking up the planchette.

“Dino!” he shouted. His little son swiveled his head to look at him, so much less startled than he should have been to hear that tone from his father, but the board had strange effects on people. Dino was staring through the planchette, his eye suddenly inflamed and unblinking and unnervingly wise, like doors that he shouldn’t have even known about had been opened to him, as they had been to Alice in death, and to Theo, through Alice.

He ripped the planchette out of Dino’s hand and the boy shook his head as if he’d just walked through a cobweb. “Don’t ever touch this!” Theo shouted, flailing the planchette and then throwing it down when he felt his hand tingling. “Never, do you understand?”

“There’s someone inside there, Daddy. Look!”

All he wanted to do was cry, hold his son, take him somewhere far away, but all he actually did was push Dino out of the room, latch the door, and hyperventilate with his head between his knees, because he was, somehow, Foreign Minister now, and even without looking through the planchette he knew that whatever was in the board was not Alice, after all.

***

Of course the board didn’t burn. Of course the board wouldn’t be sliced. He couldn’t even return the board to Jack Stoker, who had long since been reassigned and left no forwarding address. And of course after he locked the board up in the china cabinet and buried the key in the garden, the whispers started: you are nothing without me.

These whispers tickled at him while he sat in traffic, while he sat in the parking lot staring at the decisions he would be asked not to make but to rubber-stamp, at the intense moral slippage that was spilling forth like a mudslide—the melting of the good and honest that the real Foreign Minister had tried to hold together with his own hands—at the horrible subterranean things he hadn’t wanted to know anything about. You are shit without me. And then the whispers began to take bodily form and to stalk him, to walk alongside his sedan as it crept through traffic.

The whispers looked like Alice. In meetings she walked behind the heads of the other squawking, frightened men in the General’s cabinet with her neck split open in two broad slices— two cuts to the carotids —and blood pouring down her body. You are all so weak.

“Are you all right, Theo?” What felt like a cold anchor dropped down into his stomach as he realized the General himself was speaking to him. All eyes—including Alice’s, blue headlights flashing not in friendly warning but double dare you aggression—turned toward Theo. He forced himself to look through the beads of sweat at the man who was their beginning and their end. He looked almost like a kindly grandfather, cheeks beginning to sag to jowls, eyes twinkling with an inquisitive sharpness that could disguise itself very well as concern.

“You’re looking a little pale. Not eating enough vegetables? Needing a little holiday?”

The other men chuckled, as they had to when the General made jokes. Wildly, Theo imagined himself kneeling in the General’s place at the foot of some mystical mountain as an old woman sprinkled holy water in his face. He never used to believe in any of that.

“I’m fine. I apologize.”

“Mm. Are you anticipating any issues moving forward on Operation White Dove, Theo?”

What a name they had come up with for the annexation of the little Portuguese colony. Correction: their little Portuguese colony, whether the inhabitants liked it or not. A little delegation had paid Theo’s office a visit when they heard plans were finally moving toward what surely even they saw as inevitable, even though they wept and called him “hypocrite” and “murderer” and worse. If he could be honest he would have told them: you were abandoned by your ruthless parent and we were abandoned by ours. We are the mighty, now, and you are the weak. Save yourselves, come quietly! But he could not be honest, only very, very silent. Silent like Nelly had gone silent again, because although Ministers’ wives had to host, they didn’t have to truly speak .

Behind the General, Alice was grinning—a twisted, empty shadow of her hot-blooded trickster grin—and behind Alice, or Mary Ann, or whatever that thing was going by these days, what stood there? No problems at all, are there, Theo?

“No problems,” he mumbled, looking at his paper-cut thumbs.

He did his evening prayers at the office as usual—trying to make tiny, useless decisions that he hoped would do some good in time—and then headed home in a river of headlights, with the monster that looked like Alice at his side, using her blood to paint words on his window. She must have really missed that board. I-M-I-S-S-Y-O-U.

Nelly was watching television in the dark when he got home—some terrible variety show populated by puppets wearing elaborate, perpetually-laughing masks. It had been a year in this house and he still felt like he was dragging the bloody shit of the world onto its perfect white tiles every time he trudged home. “Nelly,” he said. She didn’t hear him at first. “Nelly.” She turned her head, her pretty doll-like face looking almost submerged, like a drowned actress at the bottom of a pool. Like a girl drowned in her own pool of tears. “I need help,” he said.

They drove out to the far outskirts of town in silence, with the dug-up board between them. There was no traffic now, only the occasional veering motorcycle and wild-eyed dog and sleepwalking urchin. Only when he glanced in the rearview mirror did he see Alice, floating behind them. Nelly would pay him a long, pressing glare, but of course she didn’t say a thing.

Her dukun lived in a small shanty tucked next to the railroad tracks that, in a few hours, would start shuttling trains overcrowded with workers in from Priangan. He was awake—he had “felt” Nelly’s need—and he was leaning against his fragile doorway, smoking a cigarette, when they arrived in a car that seemed more like an overfed water buffalo than a Jaguar.

“You are such an idiot,” the dukun said, immediately after the board was placed on the plastic stool and stained doily that served as his ceremonial table. “What were you thinking, using this thing? Bringing this into your home? Where your family sleeps?”

“No different than hiring a dukun to make sure it doesn’t rain on your wedding day…”

The severe-faced, thin-mustached dukun stared at him so forcefully, eyes nearly bursting from his head, that in his half-delirious fatigue Theo almost acknowledged that yes, there was an Alice involved, and yes, he missed her, and yes, he sometimes wished that he had just run from his obligations and stayed in America and married her instead, when he was feeling cowardly, and yes, he sometimes hated Alice, even dead Alice, for not even suggesting that she follow him to Nusantara—but then the dukun blinked and mercifully looked away.

“This isn’t like asking for blessings with the help of someone who is trained to speak to the spirit world,” the dukun said, with an extra spoonful of patience. “This is a gateway to the damned with no padlock on it! Of course a Westerner would think this was a good idea, just like they think nuclear bombs are a good idea. Masyallah. They probably didn’t think it was real!”

“Do you know who it is? I mean, what it is. What’s been speaking to me?”

The dukun wagged his finger. “No, no, Minister. And we aren’t going to find out, either.”

There was no destroying the board—not even the dukun could remedy that. But toward dawn—after hours of purified water, of chanting, of candles burned to the wick and strings cut and blood spilt and many tears of exhaustion on the part of every human present, the dukun did detach the spirit from Theo. He felt it dig its sharp Alice-nails into his arms, hissing, now look what you’ve done, before the dukun pried it off and hurled it away, past the train tracks and the banana tree graves, into the cracks of the visible world and back from whence it came.

In the feverish aftermath, the shanty thick with the smell of burning organic matter, the dukun wrapped the board up in a bedsheet like a baby, like a body, and promised to find a way to destroy it. He also asked for more money than they had brought, far more than a younger, dumber Theo would have found remotely reasonable, but it didn’t matter anymore—the lightness and freedom and distance he felt from that terrible bloody presence was so great that the dukun could have asked for the deed to their house and he would have given it freely.

“You should be careful the next few days,” the dukun said, lighting another cigarette as a neighborhood rooster prematurely announced sunrise. “Just to make sure.”

“I know,” he said, but it was hard to keep the happiness from his voice when he couldn’t remember ever being able to breathe so deeply, to inhale so much of the sweetness of the day.

***

Nelly Hartono sat in the Hotel des Tropiques with her sunglasses on, waiting to repay her family’s debt, watching a lounge singer prepare the evening’s songs—“Can’t Help Falling in Love”?—and trying to hold steady to the collar of the wounded monster that sat where her heart used to be, stretching out her diaphragm, breaking her ribs.

A few Americans in cheap suits—Embassy staff—wandered by. The one woman, Deputy Chief of Mission Christine McGrath, stopped when she saw Nelly and awkwardly outstretched her hand, between a touch and a handshake. “Mrs. Hartono. I’m so sorry about your husband.”

Theo had left their house the morning after his exorcism promising that he was going to make things right. She assumed he was talking about Operation White Dove, and she warned him— don’t do anything foolish —but when was the last time Theo listened to her? He didn’t come home that night, and still wasn’t home the morning after, and she was biting her knuckles, debating whether or not to call the police, when one of his colleagues from the Ministry arrived and said with a sad smile that there had been an accident. No blame, no fault. An accidental chain of events that Theo had instigated when he started voicing his most severe objections to the annexation of that poor, bleeding little Portuguese colony. So yes, what naturally followed was an accident. When you anger the bull, getting gored certainly isn’t the bull’s fault.

“Thank you,” said Nelly. “I’m sure Theo is in a better place now.”

She had fought to see him, in the hospital or the police station or wherever they had him, but they told her no, better if she didn’t, Theo didn’t look like himself, a knife had been used, his throat had been cut, both sides, he had practically been decapitated . “And you need to calm down,” they said, “for your son.” She got the message, though she didn’t know what was left for her and Dino now that she was worse than a widow, and Dino worse than fatherless.

Christine McGrath nodded curtly and rejoined her posse. As soon as they were gone, the dukun slunk out of the shadows and sat down next to her, wearing a frown so deep it seemed to have been carved into the bone. She slipped him the money they owed him in an envelope, but he pushed it back to her. “Keep it,” he said, “for your boy’s schooling.”

“It’s a debt,” Nelly said.

“I don’t want it, Mrs. Hartono.”

Shivering a little, she took the money back, nestled it in with what little she had left to her name. “What happened to the board? Did you figure out how to destroy it?”

“I threw it into the sea,” the dukun sighed. “Hopefully it finds its way back to America.”

Instead she imagined it being carried away on gentle waves to the little Portuguese colony, their newest little Portuguese province, finding a home amongst the battered separatists, again birthing something at once beautiful and powerful—another blonde nuclear missile, aimed straight at Nusantara. Of course she had known about Alice. Even if his secretary hadn’t told her the gory details, she had known by the way his gaze searched the empty horizon, by the way he was never present even lying in bed beside her, that there had been someone else. At the piano, the lounge singer had chosen the night’s poison: “You Are Always On My Mind.”

“What interesting times we live in,” Nelly said, with a small, indecipherable smile.