Without crucial contributions from the following sources, many of the stories in this book would not have existed, or would have existed in a much paltrier form: Don J. Miller's “The Alaska Earthquake of July 10, 1958” and “Giant Waves in Lituya Bay Alaska;” Howard Ulrich's and Vi Haynes' “Night of Terror;” Elliott B. Roberts' “History of a Tsunami;” Lawrence Elliott's “There's a Tidal Wave Loose in Here!;” Antoine de Baecque's Glory and Terror; Regina Janes' Losing Our Heads; Olivier Blanc's Last Letters; Peter Vansittart's Voices of the Revolution; Stanley Loomis's Paris in the Terror; Rodney Allen's Threshold of Terror; Daniel Arasse's The Guillotine and the Terror; Daniel Gerould's Guillotine: Its Legacy and Lore; Barbara Levy's Legacy of Death; Simon Schama's Citizens; J. Mills Whitham's Men and Women of the French Revolution; Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles's Almost Heaven; Rex Hall and David Shayler's The Rocket Men; Nina Lugovskaya's The Diary of a Soviet Schoolgirl; Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony's Starman; Cathy Young's Growing Up in Moscow; Philip Clark's The Soviet Manned Space Program; John Herington's Aeschylus; W K. Pritchett's The Greek State at War; James Davidson's Courtesans and Fishcakes; Victor David Hanson's The Western Way of War; Bertha Carr Rider's Ancient Greek Houses; D. J. Conacher's Aeschylus: The Earlier Plays and Related Studies; Michael M. Sage's Warfare in Ancient Greece; R. E. Wycherley's The Stones of Athens; George Sfikas's Wild Flowers of Greece; Richard Lattimore's Greek Lyrics; Anthony Pod-lecki's The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy; Robert Flaceliere's Daily Life in Greece at the Time of Pericles; Nicholas Sekunda's Marathon 490 B.C.; Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire; George Derwent Thomson's Aeschylus and Athens; Robert Holmes Beck's Aeschylus: Playwright, Educator; Thomas G. Rosenmeyer's The Art of Aeschylus; and, of course, Aeschylus's surviving works, in translations by Richmond Lattimore, Seth G. Benardete, David Grene, Janet Lembke, C. J. Herington, Frederic Raphael, and Kenneth McLeish. Also: Richard C. Davis' The Central Australia Expedition 1844–1846: The Journals of Charles Sturt; Jan Kociumbas's The Oxford History of Australia 1770–1860; Bernard Smith and Alwyn Wheeler's The Art of the First Fleet and Other Early Australian Drawings; Tim Flannery's The Explorers; Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs' Uncanny Australia; Alan Moorehead's Cooper's Creek; V. M. Chernousenko's Chernobyl, Insight from the Inside; Iurii Shcherbak's Chernobyl, A Documentary Story; Grigori Medvedev's The Truth about Chernobyl; Alla Yaroshinskaya's Chernobyl: the Forbidden Truth; Alan Bowman's Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier; Nic Fields' Hadrian's Wall A.D. 122–410; G. R. Watson's The Roman Soldier; John David Breeze's Hadrian's Wall; Mingtao Zhang's The Roof of the World; Clare Harris and Tsering Shakya's Seeing Lhasa; Reinhold Messner's My Quest for the Yeti; Michel Peissel's Tibet: The Secret Continent; and Thubten Jigme Norbu and Colin Turnbull's Tibet.

I'm also grateful for the support provided by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the inspiration provided by F. Andrus Burr, Paul Park, and David Wright, the expertise provided by Colin Adams, Charles Fuqua, Michael MacDonald, Rebecca Ohm, Rich Remsberg, Matthew Swanson, Robbi Behr, David Dethier, and Mike Loverink of Air Excursions, the incisive editorial intelligence of Gary Fisketjon and Liz Van Hoose, the invaluable, tireless, and long-term contributions, as readers and friends, of Steve Wright, Lisa Wright, Gary Zebrun, and Mike Tanaka, and finally, in the category of those who have read pretty much everything, the unending aesthetic and emotional support provided by Sandra Leong and Ron Hansen, and — as always — Karen Shepard.

Guilt, Guilt, Guilt

Here's what it's like to bear up under the burden of so much guilt: everywhere you drag yourself you leave a trail. Late at night, you gaze back and view an upsetting record of where you've been. At the medical center where they brought my brothers, I stood banging my head against a corner of a crash cart. When one of the nurses saw me, I said, “There, that's better. That kills the thoughts before they grow.”

It's a crappy rainy morning in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and I'm home from seventh grade with a sore throat and my parents and brother are fighting and I'm trying every so often to stay out of it. Jonathan Winters is on Merv Griffin, doing his improv thing with a stick.

My father's beside himself because he thinks my mother threw out the Newsweek he's been saving to show my brother. It had war casualties on the cover. “You couldn't find your ass with both hands and a banjo,” he tells her, though she's not looking.

“Go take a shit for yourself,” she tells him on her way through to the living room. He slams drawers in the kitchen. When he gets like this he stops seeing what's in them. We have to double-check everywhere he's looked to find anything. All of this is probably going to make my brother go off and we all know it, but none of us can stop.

He was institutionalized at sixteen and released eight months later. It was at Yale-New Haven, a teaching hospital, and they either didn't have much of an idea of what to do with him, or they were totally at a loss, depending on who you talked to.

“God forbid we should go somewhere,” my mother says from the living room. She's smoking and keeping to herself. “What we need to do instead is show each other magazines.”

“Maybe you should go somewhere,” my father tells her.

My brother and I are playing 500 rummy. He's kicking my ass.

For a while I was kicking his. He's quiet like he's trying to concentrate. He hates when my father goes out of his way to do something for him. He pats his hair, which is falling out because of the medication, the way you check your pockets for something before you leave the house. His eyes are getting scarier, distracted and unfocused.

He takes a break to make a tuna sandwich. White bread, no mayonnaise: he forks it out of the can and tries to spread it around. The tuna doesn't cooperate. He clears his throat a lot. My mother's still talking to herself. I try a joke. He gets that look you get when bile backs up. He's at this point eighteen or nineteen and has, as he puts it, his whole fucking life ahead of him.

I ask my father why he's home from work today. “What're you, a cop?” he goes.

I'm flipping my cards and debating whether to look at my brother's while he makes the sandwich. I'm also poking through a book I took out from the library. It has a giant scorpion on the cover, and you have to take something out and do a report, every week. It always takes forever to find something that's even halfway interesting. I get good grades, which is what I do instead of talking to people. My parents think I'm going to college. My father says when people ask that it's the one thing this family hasn't fucked up.

Prearcturus gigas it says was over a meter long. I try pronouncing the name under my breath.

“You're all right,” my brother says, eyeing me.

That turns out to be a scorpion three feet long. There's a life-size picture of the fossil's pedipalps — movable things near the mouth that help shovel the prey in — next to a photo of ones from the largest scorpion today. It's like hunting knives next to fingernail parings.

My father starts rooting through the garbage under the sink, swearing. My mother calls it saying the rosary. “Don't go through the garbage,” she tells him. “It's not in the garbage.” Nobody's watching the TV in the den.

Scorpions apparently went nuts during the Carboniferous period, which was way before the dinosaurs. According to what the book calls the fossil record. But our science teacher says the fossil record's a joke. That it's like saying we can figure out who lived in the U.S. by going through twelve dumpsters. Sitting there at the table, waiting, I come across these things from before the Carboniferous that weren't even scorpions. Proto-scorpions. They have like no eyes, no claws. Who knows. They may just be lousy fossils.

My father starts shaking the plastic garbage can upside down into the sink. We can smell it from where we are. “I have no idea what you're doing,” my brother tells him. My mother says he better not be making a mess.

“There, you son of a bitch,” my father goes, pulling out the magazine.

“What do you want from me?” my brother says when he holds it up. “A dance?”

After a minute my father starts cleaning everything up, dropping stuff back into the can's liner. I start winning at rummy.

“Fucking Cincinnati Kid,” my brother goes, watching me tote up.

“I'm the kid with all the answers,” I tell him. You can see him wondering how I meant that and then figuring it's not worth finding out.

“So here's the article I was talking about,” my father tells him. There's a muffin wrapper stuck to it.

“Very nice,” my brother goes. He's rearranging the suits in his hand. He's starting to look worse. He doesn't do almost anything but work out, and his arms when he flexes them rip the T-shirt sleeves.

“I'm out,” I tell him again and fan the cards out between us. I catch him with another big hand.

He sits there with his eyes on me, setting one molar on another. While he does the math I page around some more in the book. There's a drawing of something that looks like a shingle with some antennae. It looks like I'm showing off, beating him while reading a book. But it's somewhere to put my eyes, so I can't bring myself to shut it.

“You playing cards or reading?” my father wants to know. He can see my brother's face.

“The library,” my mother says from the other room. “That's the only place anybody in this family goes.”

“Where're we gonna go? It's a fucking downpour,” my brother tells her.

She doesn't answer. My father wipes his sponge around the rim of the sink, finishing the cleanup.

I'm given a dream hand — a run and a half — right off his deal. And the card I need after that is the first one he discards. I think about not saying anything. Then I go ahead. “I'm out again,” I tell him, putting my cards down to show him.

He pulls his hands back to his lap and sits there. Then he turns the whole table over. At its highest point the whole thing's up over my head. A few minutes after it hits, the neighbor across the street calls to see if everything's all right.

Later when everything's quiet I'm still in the kitchen. There's a divot in the linoleum where the table edge came down. I'm in the corner with my back to the cabinets. My brother's in his room. My mother's in hers. My father hurt his back wrestling my brother up the stairs. He's got the heating pad on it. One end of the pad's tucked into his belt so it looks like he's plugged into the wall.

There's tuna in my sock. My throat's still sore. There's not enough self-pity to go around. “Is he your brother or not?” my father's asking me.

“Yeah,” I tell him.

“So you wanta help him?” he wants to know.

“Yeah,” I tell him, tearing up.

“Well then why don't you help him?” he wants to know.

Because there's what we want, and what we do, I'd figured out, even then.

“You want to help him?” he asks me again.

“Not really,” I tell him, sitting there. Not really, I tell myself, now.

Who hasn't heard by now of that long chain of events, from the invasion by the Emperor Claudius to the revolt of Boudicca and the Iceni in the reign of Nero to the seven campaigning seasons of Agricola, which moved our presence ever northward to where it stands today? From the beginning, information on our campaigns has never ceased being gathered from all parts of the province, so it's easy to see how historians and scribes of the generation before me have extended the subject's horizons.

In my father's day, before my morning lessons began, I would recite for my tutor the story of the way the son of all deified emperors, the Emperor Caesar Trajan Hadrian Augustus, on whom the necessity of keeping the empire within its limits had been bestowed by divine command, had scattered the Britons and recovered the province of Britannia and added a frontier between either shore of Ocean for eighty miles. The army of the province built the Wall under the direction of Aulus Platorius Nepos, pro-praetorian legate of Augustus. I would finish our lesson by reminding my tutor that my father had worked on that wall, and my tutor would remind me that I had already reminded him.

The line chosen for the Wall lay a little to the north of an existing line of forts along the Stanegate, the northernmost road. The Wall was composed of three separate defensive features: the first a ditch to the north, the second a wide, stone curtain wall with turrets, milecastles, and forts strung along its length, and the third a large earthwork to the south. Their construction took three legions five years.

I have memories of playing in the freshly dug material from the bottom of the ditch. I found worms.

The ditch is V-shaped with a square-cut ankle-breaker channel at the bottom. Material from the ditch was thrown to the north of it during construction to form a mound that would further expose the attacking enemy. The turrets, milecastles, and forts were built with the Wall serving as their north faces. Double-portal gates placed front and rear at the milecastles and forts provide the only ways through.

The countryside where we're stationed is naked and windswept. The grass on the long ridges is thin and sere. Sparse rushes accentuate the hollows and give shelter to small gray birds.

The milecastles are situated at intervals of a mile, and between them, the turrets, each in sight of its neighbor, ensure mutual protection and total surveillance. The forts are separated by the distance that can be marched in half a day.

Here then is the aggregate strength of the Twentieth Cohort of Tungrians whose commander is Julius Verecundus: 752 men, including 6 centurions, of which 46 have been detached for service as guards with the governor of the province, under the leadership of Ferox, legate of the Ninth Legion. Of which 337 with 2 centurions have been detached for temporary service at Coria. Of which 45 with 1 centurion are in garrison in a milecastle six miles to the west. Of which 31 are unfit for service, comprising 15 sick, 6 wounded, and 10 suffering from inflammation of the eyes. Leaving 293 with 3 centurions present and fit for active service.

I am Felicius Victor, son of the centurion Annius Equester, and I serve in the Twentieth Cohort as scribe for special services for the administration of the entire legion. All day, every day, I'm sad. Over the heather the wet wind blows continuously. The rain comes pattering out of the sky. My bowels fail me regularly and my barracksmates come and go on the bench of our latrine while I huddle there on the cold stone. In the days before his constant visits, my father signed each of his letters Now in whatever way you wish, fulfill what I expect of you.

My messmates torment me with pranks. Most recently they sent off four great boxes of papyrus and birch bark for which I'm responsible in two wagonloads of hides bound for Isurium. I would have gone to get them back by now except that I do not care to injure the animals while the roads are bad. My only friend is my own counsel, kept here in this account. I enter what I can at day's end while the others play at Twelve Points or Robber Soldiers. I sit on my clerk's stool scratching and scratching at numbers, while even over the wind the bone-click of dice in the hollow of the dice box clatters and plocks from the barracks. Winners shout their good fortune. Field mice peer in at me before continuing on their way.

Our unit was raised in Gallia Belgica according to the time-honored logic concerning auxiliaries that local loyalties are less dangerous when the unit's not allowed to serve in its native region. Since spring, sickness and nuisance raids have forced the brigading of different cohorts together in order to keep ourselves at fighting muster.

Scattered tribes from the north appear on the crests of the low hills opposite us and try to puzzle out our dispositions. The wind whips through what little clothing they wear, mainly what looks like muddy flags between their legs. We call them Brittunculi, or “filthy little Britons.”

Even with their spies they don't fully grasp how many of the turrets and milecastles go undermanned. Periodically our detachments stream swiftly through the sparsely guarded gates and we misleadingly exhibit strength in numbers.

The governor of our province has characterized us as shepherds guarding the flock of empire. During punitive raids all males capable of bearing arms are butchered. Women and children are caravanned to the rear as slaves. Those elderly who don't attempt to interfere are beaten and robbed. Occasionally their homes are torched.

Everyone in our cohort misses our homeland except me. I would have been a goat in a sheep pen there, and here I contribute so little to our martial spirit that my barracks nickname is Porridge. When with some peevishness I asked why, I was dangled over a well until I agreed that Porridge was a superior name.

Every man is given a daily ration of barley. When things are going badly and there's nothing else to eat and no time to bake flatbread, we grind it up to make a porridge.

I was a firebrand as a brat, a world-beater. I was rambunctious. I was always losing a tooth to someone's fist. My father was then an auxilia conscripted in his twenty-first year in Tungria. Later, after his twenty-five year discharge, he was granted citizenship and the tria nomina: forename, family name, and surname. I was born in the settlement beside the cavalry fort at Cilurnum. My mother worked in a gambling establishment with an inscription above the door that read drink, have sex, and wash. My father called Cilurnum a roaring, rioting, cock-fighting, wolf-baiting, horse-riding town, and admired the cavalry. My mother became his camp wife and gave him three children: a sickly girl who died at birth, Chrauttius, and me. Chrauttius was older and stronger and beat me regularly until he died of pinkeye before coming of age. Our father was on a punitive raid against the Caledonii when it happened. He returned with a great suppurating wound across his bicep and had a fever for three days. When my mother wasn't at work in the gambling establishment, she attended him with an affectionate irritation. She dressed and bound his wound with such vigor that neighbors were required to hold him down while she flushed the cut with alcohol. His bellows filled our ears. When he was recovered he brooded about his elder son. “Look at him,” he said to my mother, indicating me.

“Look at him yourself,” she told him back.

He had a particular way he favored of being pleasured which required someone to hold his legs down while the woman sat astride him. Usually my mother's sister assisted, but during his fever she feared for her own children, so I was conscripted to sit on his knees. I'd been on the earth for eight summers at that point, and I was frightened. At first I faced my mother but when she asked me to turn the other way, I held my father's ankles and pitched and bucked before he kicked me onto the floor.

At the start of my eighteenth summer I armed myself with a letter of introduction from him to one of his friends still serving with the Tungrian cohort. My father's command of the language was by no means perfect, and since my mother had had the foresight to secure me a tutor for Latin and figures, I helped him with it. Annius to Priscus, his old messmate, greetings. I recommend to you a worthy man … and so on. I've since read thousands.

I then presented myself for my interview held on the authority of the governor. Though I had no citizenship, an exception was made for the son of a serving soldier, and I was given the domicile castris and enrolled in the tribe of Pollia. Three different examiners were required to sign off on a provisional acceptance before I received my advance of pay and was posted to my unit. Attention was paid to my height, physical capacity, mental alertness, and most especially my skill in writing and arithmetic. A number of offices in the legion required men of good education, since the details of duties, parade states, and pay were entered daily in the ledgers, with as much care, I was told, as were revenue records by the civil authorities.

Thus I was posted to my century, and my name entered on the rolls. I trained for two summers in marching, physical stamina, swimming, weapons, and field service, so that when I finished I might sit at my stool and generate mounds of papyrus and birch-bark, like an insanely busy and ceaselessly twitching insect.

I have a cold in my nose.

We're so undermanned that during outbreaks of additional sickness, detachments from the Ninth Legion are dispatched for short periods to reinforce our windblown little tract. And there are other auxilaries manning the wall on either side of us. Asturians, Batavians, and Sabines to our east, and Frisiavones, Dalmatians, and Nervii to the west.

My father's agitating to be put back on active duty. He's discovered the considerable difference between the standard of living possible on an officer's pay as opposed to a veteran's retirement pension. He's tried to grow figs and sweet chestnuts on his little farm, with a spectacular lack of success. He claims he's as healthy as ever and beats his chest with his fist and forearm to prove it. He's not. The recruiting officers laugh in his face. Old friends beg to be left alone. He's asked me to intercede for him, as he interceded for me. He believes I have special influence with the garrison commander. “Oh, let him join up and march around until he falls over,” my mother tells me, exasperated.

Every day he rides his little wagon four miles each way to visit my clerk's stool and inquire about his marching orders. The last phrase is his little joke. It's not clear to me when he acquired his sense of humor. Even when the weather is inclement he presents himself, soaked and shivering, with his same crooked smile. His arms and chest have been diminished by age. “This is my son,” he tells the other clerk each day: another joke. “Who? This man?” the other clerk answers every time. There's never anyone else in our little chamber.

Sometimes I've gone to the latrine when he arrives, so he waits, silent, while the other clerk labors.

Upon hearing that I still haven't spoken to the garrison commander, he'll stand about, warming himself at our peat fire while we continue our work. Each time he speaks, he refashions his irritation into patience. “I've brought you sandals,” he might say after a while. Or, “Your mother sends regards.”

“Your bowels never worked well,” he'll commiserate if I've been gone an especially long time.

On a particularly filthy spring day dark with rain, he's in no hurry to head home. Streams of mud slurry past our door. The occasional messenger splashes by, but otherwise everyone but Wall sentries is under cover. The peat fire barely warms itself. The other clerk and I continually blow on our hands, and the papyrus cracks from the chill if one presses too hard. While I work surreptitiously on a letter to the supplymaster in Isurium, requesting that our boxes of papyrus be restored to us, my father recounts for us bits of his experiences working on the Wall. The other clerk gazes at me in silent supplication.

“We're quite a bit behind here,” I finally remind my father.

“You think this is work?” he says.

“Oh, god,” the other clerk mutters. The rain hisses down in wavering sheets.

“I'm just waiting for it to let up,” my father explains. He gazes shyly at some wet thatch. He smells faintly of potash. He reknots a rope cincture at his waist, his knuckles showing signs of the chilblains. His stance is that of someone who sees illness and hard use approaching.

“Were you really there from the very beginning?” I ask. The other clerk looks up at me from his work, his mouth open.

My father doesn't reply. He seems to be spying great sadness somewhere out in the rain.

When I point out that without that wall there'd be Britons on this very spot at this very moment, the other clerk gazes around. Water's braiding in at two corners and puddling. Someone's bucket of moldy lentils sits on a shelf. “And they'd be welcome to it,” he says.

The Wall was begun in the spring of his second year in the service, my father tells us, as the emperor's response to yet another revolt the season before. The emperor had been vexed that the Britons couldn't be kept under control. My father reminds us that it was Domitius Corbulo's adage that the pick and the shovel were the weapons with which to beat the enemy.

“What a wise, wise man was he,” the other clerk remarks wearily.

Nepos had come from a governorship of Germania Inferior. Three legions — the Second Augusta, the Sixth Victrix pia fidelis, and the Twentieth Valeria Victrix — had been summoned from their bases and organized into work parties. The complement of each had included surveyors, ditchdiggers, architects, roof tile makers, plumbers, stonecutters, lime burners, and woodcutters. My father had been assigned to the lime burners.

Three hundred men working ten hours a day in good weather extended the Wall a sixth of a mile. He worked five years, with the construction season running from April to October, since frosts interfered with the way the mortar set.

The other clerk sighs, and my father looks around for the source of the sound.

Everything was harvested locally except iron and lead for clamps and fittings. The lime came from limestone burnt on the spot in kilns at very high temperatures. The proportion of sand to lime in a good mortar mix was three to one for pit sand, two to one for river sand.

“Now I've written two to one,” the other clerk moans. He rises from his stool and crushes the square on which he's been working.

“Water for the lime and mortar was actually one of the biggest problems,” my father goes on. “It was brought in continuously in barrels piled onto gigantic oxcarts. Two entire cohorts were assigned just to the transport of water.”

The other clerk and I scratch and scratch at our tablets.

As for the timber, if oak was unavailable, then alder, birch, elm, or hazel was used.

While I work, a memory vision revisits me from after my brother's death: my father standing on my mother's wrist by way of encouraging her to explain something she'd said.

Locals had been conscripted for the heavy laboring and carting, he tells us, but everyone pitched in when a problem arose. He outlines the difficulties of ditchdigging through boulder clay. Centurions checked the work with ten-foot rods to insure that no one through laziness had dug less than his share or gone off line.

The rain finally lets up a bit. Our room brightens. A little freshness blows through the damp. My father rubs his forearms and thanks us for our hospitality. The other clerk and I nod at him, and he nods back. He wishes us good fortune for the day. “And you as well,” the other clerk answers. My father acknowledges the response, flaps out his cloak, cinches it near his neck with a fist and steps out into the rain. After he's gone a minute or two, it redoubles in force.

On my half day of rest I make the journey on foot to their little farmstead. When I arrive I discover that my father's gone to visit me. He never keeps track of my rest days. A cold sun is out and my mother entertains me in their little garden. She sets out garlic paste and radishes, damsons and dill. My father's trained vines to grow on anything that will hold them. There's also a new addition: a small shrine erected to Viradecthis, set on an altar. It's a crude marble of Minerva that he's altered with a miniature Tungrian headdress.

I ask if he's now participating in the cult. My mother shrugs and says it could be worse. One of her neighbors' sons has come back from his travels a Christian. Worships a fish.

She asks after my health, recommending goat cheese in porridge for my bowels. She asks after gossip, though it always saddens her that I have so little. How did her fierce little wonder boy grow into such a pale little herring?

She smiles and lays a hand on my knee. “You have a good position,” she reminds me proudly. And I do.

It would appear from my father's belongings that a campaign is about to begin. His scabbards are neatly arrayed next to his polishing tin. The rest of his kit is spread on a bench to dry in the sun. His marching sandals have been laid out to be reshod with iron studs. A horsefly negotiates one of the studs.

She tells me that periodically he claims he'll go back to Gallia Belgica, where the climate is more forgiving to both his figs and his aches. Having returned from service in Britannia as a retired centurion would make him a large fish in that pond. But he has no friends there, and his family's dead, and there's ill feeling bound to be stirred up by the relatives of a previous wife who died of overwork and exposure.

Besides, there's much that the unit could do with an old hand, she complains he's always telling her. Sentry duty alone: some of the knotheads taking turns on that wall would miss entire baggage trains headed their way.

She asks, as she always does, about my daily duties. She enjoys hearing about my exemptions. A soldier's daily duties include muster, training, parades, inspections, sentry duty, cleaning our centurions' kits, latrine and bathhouse duty, firewood and fodder collection. My skills exempt me from the latter four.

She wants to know if my messmates still play their tricks on me. I tell her they don't, and that they haven't in a long while. I regret having told her in the first place.

When I leave she presents me with a wool tunic woven with decorations. I wear it on the walk back.

During training, recruits who failed to reach an adequate standard with a particular weapon received their rations in barley instead of wheat, the wheat ration not restored until they demonstrated proficiency. While I was quickly adequate with the sword, I was not with the pilum and could hit nothing no matter how close I brought myself to the target. My father even tried to take a hand in the training. My instructor called me the most hopeless sparrow he'd ever seen when it came to missile weapons. For three weeks I ate only barley and have had the shits ever since. On the one and only raid in which I've taken part, I threw my pilum immediately, to get it over with. It stuck in a cattle pen.

Night falls on the long trek back to the barracks. I strike out across the countryside, following the river instead of the road, the sparse grasses thrashing lightly at my ankles. At a bend I stop to drink like a dog on all fours and hear the rattletrap of my father's little wagon heading toward the bridge above me. When he crosses it his head bobs against the night sky. He's singing one of his old unit's songs. He's guiding himself by the light of the moon. It takes him a long while to disappear down the road.

Guy's hurt? Fuck 'im. Guy can't get up, play's still going? Run his ass over. Whistle's blown? Stretcher bearer time. Grab a blow and let the Sisters of Mercy do their thing.

“Faggots,” Wainwright says whenever the trainers come out for someone. He means the trainers.

We're not talking games, here. We're talking summer practice, two-a-days, guys keeling over in the heat. When more than one guy has the dry heaves we call it Hee Haw because of the sound.

“That shit's not funny,” somebody'll say when they see us laughing. Some fat shit, holding his knees, blowing chow. “Dude for the Vikings died.”

We have it written in chalk and boxed on a corner of the blackboard that doesn't get erased: trample the dead, hurdle the weak. When the coaches first wrote it, they spelled it e-l, both times. “Dumb fucks,” Wainwright said when he saw it. He rubbed it out with his arm and wrote it right.

“Who's been screwing with my inspirational slogans?” our defensive coordinator wanted to know.

“I been,” Wainwright told him. It was after the afternoon half of a two-a-day and those of us not on fluids or hurling were on the rug, our legs spread out, because it felt cooler than the benches or we couldn't get up to the benches. “Just streamlining the spelling, Coach.”

“You better be careful you don't get on my list, Wainwright,” Coach told him.

“I'm on everybody's list, Coach,” Wainwright told him back.

Wainwright's a blue chipper's blue chipper. The top prospects in all of the regular and online rating services are always quarterbacks or running backs or wide receivers. He's been the cover of Street & Smith's High School Edition two years running at linebacker. “L.T. never made the cover,” I tell him.

“I don't think they had one for high school back then,” he tells me.

We argue on the way home from practice as to whether L.T. really wanted to kill people out there.

It's a hundred degrees with eighty percent humidity. Wainwright sweats right down the center of his chest, like he's wearing big stripes. Girls line the road we take home, just so they can say they saw him.

We want to cause panic on the field one hundred percent of the time. As far as we can tell, when it came to that, L.T. came the closest. We put him up there in the ninetieth percentile.

“You know how when you get licorice and you double it to get more in your mouth at once?” he said. “That's what he did to Theisman's thigh.”

L.T. was also the snot bubble guy. He said his favorite hits were the ones that popped a snot bubble out of the ball carrier's nose.

I met Wainwright my first day of varsity practice. I came out of the locker room and hadn't buckled my chin strap, and already there was an altercation. Wainwright and this fucking giant were locked up and pulling each other's face masks around. The giant I knew, everybody knew: Junior Cooley, our All-State offensive tackle. He benched 350 pounds. His helmet on his head looked like a bucket on a bush.

They avoided each other for a play or two, and then on a screen pass Junior swung upfield looking for someone to block and Wainwright was already in the air and en route. They hit each other so hard I could feel it. The little ear pads came out of Junior's helmet. The ball carrier and some of the pursuit all piled into the body. Everybody made those oooh sounds.

Wainwright pulled himself from the pile, his helmet a little askew. Junior's face mask bolts were snapped and the blood from his nose had fanned upward to cover his forehead. Wainwright put a hand on each side of Junior's helmet and got in close and waited for Junior to focus, and told him, “Remember: the next play could be your last, but your educationll never be taken away.”

He says he motivates through intimidation and positive reinforcement.

He runs full tilt, adjusts full tilt, arrives at full tilt. He hits like someone falling down an elevator shaft. “Friggin' seismic,” I heard the defensive line coach murmur once. What the coaches love about him is that no matter what, he gets to where he needs to go. And always arrives on time, in a hurry, and in a shitty mood.

Between games he likes to mingle with the regular students. Sprats, he calls them.

Most of us played for serious youth football or Pop Warner programs but even so this was eye-opening, this level of hitting. Whenever you'd hear a pop or a real collision on the field, a coach would murmur, “Welcome to the big time.” They didn't even need to be looking.

“Those of you who want to play, strap on your hats,” Big Coach said at our team meeting, day one. We call our defensive coordinator Coach and the head coach Big Coach. “Because we're gonna be flying around and cracking heads.”

An hour or so after Junior's reorientation Wainwright and I converged on a hit and his forearm shiver glanced off the ballcarrier's helmet and whacked mine. My helmet opened a divot in my forehead. I was bleeding like someone was pouring water over my head.

Wainwright liked my stitches afterwards. He called me The Lid for the way my scalp looked.

I had to miss two or three practices until I figured out how to keep one of my mom's maxipads over my stitches with a headband.

Here's the thing: Wainwright and me are pretty sure that my dad's kid is this All-State running back for Port Neches-Groves down around Beaumont. We saw the kid's picture in the Street & Smith's last year and he looked just like me. We checked him out on the Web site and Wainwright was like cackling when the kid's face popped up. “You, only smarter” was the way he put it. Plus my aunt made my mom cry once just by mentioning Beaumont. Plus she wouldn't answer when I asked about it. “Don't talk stupid,” she said. “I don't know any other way to talk,” I told her.

We wouldn't play a school from Beaumont unless both schools got pretty deep into the state tournament. But that could happen. They're district champs, and we're us.

Wainwright and me both got brother issues. When I point that out to him, he goes, “Yeah, except yours are uninteresting.” His brother's now with the Jaguars, getting paid serious money to hurt people every Sunday. He's third on their depth chart, but still. If you don't count Mystery Boy out at Port Neches-Groves, my family hasn't amounted to much. My regular brother's five years older than me and his main claim to fame is that he taught me how to play by kicking my ass up and down the field. I played a lot of games with him when I was crying so hard I could barely see the ball. “Be a Spartan,” he'd say in front of our friends after he'd leveled me, to keep me from running home to my mother. “Be a Spartan.” “I'll kill you,” I'd usually scream, when I finally could, and then I'd try.

“Get off me,” he'd tell me when I'd go after his Adam's apple or eyes.

Our dad left when I was two and my brother was seven. My mom says she never heard from him again but we think she's lying. I ask my brother what he was like and he says, “What do you think?. He was a dick.”

When I keep after him he'll say to Mom, “Mom. Wasn't Dad a dick?”

“Stop it,” Mom'll tell him.

I Googled his name and came up with a guy who wrote science fiction who I couldn't tell where he lived and a guy who sold boats in Michigan. I don't think either guy is him.

There's nobody with his name in the Beaumont area, according to the phone book. But get this: the kid's name is Corey. Our name's Royce.

“Look at that: it's a fucking antonym,” I said when I realized.

“That's anagram, you fucking clown,” Wainwright said back.

But it was. I called all three Coreys the operator gave me. Of course there were two unlisted, too. It was probably one of those.

This is the roof of the world. An immense, sequestered place, the highest of the high plateaus, many times the size of the Reich. I'm still sick. The porters still gesticulate and exchange private jokes when they assume my attention is elsewhere. Beger's bad ankle is still swollen. Somewhere I've misplaced my certainty.

The day was brutally hot and now no one can get warm. We sit around the fire like terns thunderstruck by the cold. Ahead of us the hardpan goes on for two thousand kilometers before it encounters a tree. It feels like the back of the beyond, the place where rumors lose their way. This is the second week of the trek, and every aspect of what's surrounded us has been featureless.

Beger lies on his side wrapped in a blanket. The boot on his good foot is too near the fire. We watch its sole sizzle as though we're dumbfounded by speech. Above us the starlessness comes and goes. When the wind dies, there's no sound. One of the pack animals coughs up something with a ragged, liquid snort.

We're feeding the fire with pats of yak dung. So even it is hushed. It's a feeble, smelly warmth.

We're without information or curiosity. Neither of us speculate. Confronted with what surrounds us, our powers of imagination have dissipated.

The world is empty. The world in every direction is empty. After sunup the sky comes down like an edict. The blue is so intense that birds fly low to the ground, intimidated.

In Lharigo I was chased away from a nomad encampment.

Children threw stones. Dogs gamboled unpleasantly about my heels. Women waved small ceramic pots of flour to exorcise my evil spirit.

Beger received the same greeting when he straggled in an hour or so later. “I don't think we should ask about the yeti,” he said, grimacing at his forearm. A dog had shredded his sleeve.

Two and a half weeks after I was born, on July 9th, 1958, the plates that make up the Fairweather Range in the Alaskan panhandle apparently slipped twenty-one feet on either side of the Fair-weather fault, the northern end of a major league instability that runs the length of North America. The thinking now is that the southwest side and bottom of the inlets at the head of Lituya Bay jolted upward and to the northwest, and the northeast shore and head of the bay jolted downward and to the southeast. One way or the other, the result registered 8.3 on the Richter scale.

The bay is T-shaped and seven miles long and two wide at the stem, and according to those who were there it went from a glassy smoothness to a full churn, a giant's Jacuzzi. Next to it, mountains twelve to fifteen thousand feet high twisted into themselves and lurched in contrary directions. In Juneau, 122 miles to the southeast, people who'd turned in early were pitched from their beds. The shock waves wiped out bottom-dwelling marine life throughout the panhandle. In Seattle, a thousand miles away, the University of Washington's seismograph needle was jarred completely off its graph. And meanwhile, back at the head of the bay, a spur of mountain and glacier the size of a half-mile-wide city park — forty million cubic yards in volume — broke off and dropped three thousand feet down the northeast cliff into the water.

This is all by way of saying that it was one of the greatest spasms, when it came to the release of destructive energy, in history. It happened around 10:16 p.m. At that latitude and time of year, still light out. There were three small boats anchored in the south end of the bay.

The rumbling from the earthquake generated vibrations that the occupants of the boats could feel on their skin like electric shock. The impact of the rockfall that followed made a sound like Canada exploding. There were two women, three men, and a seven-year-old boy in the three boats. They looked up to see a wave breaking over the seventeen-hundred-foot-high southwest bank of Gilbert Inlet and heading for the opposite slope. What they were looking at was the largest wave ever recorded by human beings. It scythed off three-hundred-year-old pines and cedars and spruce, some of them with trunks three or four feet thick, along a trimline of 1,720 feet. That's a wave crest 500 feet higher than the Empire State Building.

Fill your bathtub. Hold a football at shoulder height and drop it into the water. Imagine the height of the tub above the waterline to be two thousand feet. Scale the height of the initial splash up proportionately.

April 1st, 1840

The three of us traded Christmas tales during our long portage. Hill and Browne both professed shock at my contribution, which seemed less than shocking to me. I had related to them the method by which my father, with what I remember to be the sad-eyed support of our mother, celebrated our Lord's birth each Christmas Day.

Having three sons, myself the eldest, he had resolved, he said, to no longer be tyrannized by the understanding that during this particular season he was obligated as a Christian to provide even more for his family, by way of gifts, than he did in the course of the normal round. Henceforth, then, one and only one child each year would be favored with a lovely gift to commemorate the day. He hoped that the child's siblings would derive the pleasure they should from their compatriot's good fortune. In accordance with his understanding of the general workings of the natural world, the process would proceed by lot. So it was entirely possible that one child would be favored by chance two or even three years in a row. We would all find out only upon coming downstairs on Christmas morning, when we saw what was set about the hearth.

He made this announcement having gathered the family together on Christmas Eve the year I turned five. My brothers, being at the time only three and two, hardly knew what they were being told. His wife and our mother, by all accounts gay and outgoing before her marriage, stood by while he entertained questions about his decision, and then did her best to salvage some measure of wan cheer over the course of those Christmas Days that followed.

My story was greeted with an extended silence. We were having trouble with the horses in the current. Browne announced himself, finally, to have been cudgeled about the head by the damned thing. He meant my story. Hill found it odd that such a father would have shown a willingness to finance a part of the expedition. “I'm sure it's not entirely unusual,” I remarked to them, some time later, about my father's notion of gift giving. “I'm sure it is,” Browne responded.

I am Aeschylus son of Euphorion of Eleusis and I've come this day with my brother to take my place in the line with my tribe to meet the invader where he disembarks and drive him back into the sea. We've rested and waited six days in the Herakleion sanctuary on the plain of Marathon, with the Median fleet filling half the shoreline of the bay, even with their ships anchored eight deep. More men-at-arms are assembling before the Great Marsh than any of us have ever seen. We're told that their word for commander means “Leader of the Hosts.”

At the eastern end of the marsh is a lake, which enables them to water their horses. A stream flows out of it to the sea. It's fresh enough to be drunk by cattle where it issues from the lake, but at its mouth turns brackish and fills with saltwater fish.

Who knows me better than my brother Kynegeiros? Who's looked after me with more care? Whom have I disappointed as intensely? Who's been as terrible a household presence?

Who's trained me? Who's pruned my independence? Who's stopped my mouth? Who's set my feet on the path of understanding, and shown that knowledge comes in suffering? Whose hard hand gave me this scar across my scalp, just because it could?

We've spent six days checking and rechecking our kit and avoiding idlers and gossips. He's tried to interest me in his surgeon's packet: here's how you start the needle with the catgut twine; here's how you grip the narrow-nose to extract an arrowhead, as opposed to a sword shard. I don't need to be reminded that battlefield surgery can save a life. Yesterday to please him I sewed up some oxhide as practice.

We marched all night through Pallene, skirting Mount Pelikos to the southeast, and arrived here on the plain at first light. The plain, empty of trees and left fallow for grazing, smells of the wild fennel that gives it its name.

I'm all aches and pains. My brother has a month-old sprain that he aggravated on a gravely downhill track. I'm forty-four and he's forty-nine. We're no longer young men. We have families.

Here is our country's situation as we understand it: the Persian has come in response to our support of the Ionian revolt and the burning of his citadel at Sardis. He has come with the combined nations of Media, Sakai, Ethiopia, Egypt, Dacia, Scythia, Bactria, Illyria, Thessalia, and India. He has come through Rhodes, Kos, Samos, Naxos, Paros, Karystos, and Eretria, subjugating each as he went. Everywhere his fleet has put in, he has demanded and received hostages and men-at-arms. He has come in such numbers that the disembarking alone has taken, according to the local farmers, nine days.

We are of the deme Eleusis and the tribe Aiantis, and when our strategos draws us up in battle order, we will be in the place of honor on the right flank, the sea off our shoulders. We will with our other Attic demes and allies form a rank facing the invader that is sufficiently long but insufficiently deep. Our leaders call it Stretching the Soup. The rest of us call it, with quiet irony, Our Challenge.

14 June 1963 Morning

Though we've been in this cottage for only a day, I got up at first light and set about a housecleaning. Solovyova is still depressed and lay on her bed like a corpse while I worked. When I finished I left. In the chilly air the sun warmed my arms and long blue shadows crossed the roadside weeds and gravel. I walked through the pines to our little river and sat with my toes in the mud. Bream and sturgeon explored the stones on the bottom, flicking their fins.

We are in Kazakhstan, 370 kilometers northeast of a town called Baikonur. Solovyova and I are in one cottage and Korolyov himself is in the other. The cottages were requisitioned for Yuri Gagarin's flight and have been used ever since. Their original owners came by with flowers when we arrived, in honor of our undertaking. The cottage fronts are covered with creepers and face the pine forest. Behind and above them looms the launchpad in all its concrete immensity. It's a kilometer away but looks as if it could be touched with an outstretched hand. The sides of the blast pit resemble the face of a dam. The command bunker alongside is a squat hedgehog with jagged steel spars spiking from its super-hardened roof at all angles, so a malfunctioning first stage falling atop it would break up, thereby diffusing the focus of the blast.

Diary! You are a historic document: my name is Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, and I was born in the Yaroslavl Raion, and I am twenty-four years old, and by 12:30 Moscow time the day after tomorrow I will have put on my orange spacesuit and climbed into my own spacecraft, the Vostok 6, to rendezvous with a fellow cosmonaut, Senior Lieutenant Valery Fyodorovich Bykov-sky, 150 miles above the Earth. I will become, then, the tenth person, the sixth Russian, and the first woman in space.

But I have more reason to be unable to sit still, as if electrified by joy: the mind that has laid me open to awe and gratitude — the man for whom I'd give whatever I have to give — is already fulfilling his dream, orbiting above us in Vostok 5. And I am going to join him.

Technically, of course, that's incorrect. Our mission will be the first step in developing our country's capabilities for orbital rendezvous. Twice daily, during the parabolas of our orbits, we'll approach to within less than two kilometers of each other. But two kilometers is very close. At that range his capsule will be the size of a dried pea at arm's length. Two kilometers, given the slight imprecision of the trajectories, is as near as they dare bring us. As Korolyov put it, the achievement of two cosmonauts orbiting simultaneously would be compromised if they were to kill each other.

Even so, we'll be in space together. In other words, as Solov-yova pointed out before she fell asleep last night, the combined efforts of the most diligent minds in the Soviet Union — some one hundred thirty bureaus and thirty factories, employing over seven thousand scientists, designers, and engineers — have come together for however many years of labor in order to indulge my sordid and criminally irresponsible obsession with a Hero of the Soviet Union who bears a spotless reputation. “So that's the best they could do for you: two kilometers?” she asked, reaching to turn off the light.

Bykovsky is married, though he told me he hasn't touched his wife in years.

The plan was to make dual use of the second stage of this group mission to put the first woman in space. And after everything— the written examinations and the centrifuge, the parachute jumps and the pressure chamber, the psychological prodding and poking and the endless humiliations of the medical testing — Solovyova was judged top of the list. But Korolyov was concerned about her unsteady morals. It was felt she gave improper replies in the final interviews. When asked what she wanted from life, she said she wanted everything that it could offer. She maintained that a woman could smoke and still remain decent. She was unapolo-getic for having traveled unescorted into town.

When asked what I wanted, I said I wished to support the Komsomol and the Communist Party. I took no trips to town. I do not smoke.

In the end, there were advantages to favoring a farm girl over a teacher's daughter. I was a girl from the backwoods— the way Gagarin and Premier Khrushchev were boys from the backwoods — and our country was telling the world that even we could achieve at the highest level. “The meek shall inherit the earth,” Solovyova said when the other women sought to console her after the news had been released.

“When have you managed this grand passion?” she wanted to know last night, when I confided in her. “Where have you managed it?” She used “grand passion” with an unpleasant emphasis.

The truth is that he hasn't entirely committed to my feelings for him. A week ago we managed for ourselves an hour or so alone by plunging off the trails on a recreational hike, during which we kissed, in the darkness, as though all of our sharing would be accomplished by that alone. I had before those kisses kissed only two other boys: those memories a little keepsake-box of reticence and disappointment. But there in the forest we came together like an immersion, oceanic in its possibilities. The branches above showered us with cold drops shaken off at the breeze. Around his mouth he smelled of sun and beach, with an edge of herbs.

He was shorter but seemed older, and parted his hair on the side in the German manner. He expressed himself so well in our first meeting that I kept glancing at him as though I were doing something wrong. This was the first gathering of the finalists. We'd been asked to mark on mimeographs of a map where our relatives were located. I'd been holding mine upside down, causing the other women to laugh. “I guess you won't be navigating,” one of them scoffed. But he said with a smile that his was illegible too, and that these were poor mimeographs. And I thought he was kind. And that I wanted some of that kindness inside me.

He's not wildly good-looking. He hoards his green vegetables, whether from superstition or trauma, he won't say. Solovyova thinks his hands are too small. She has a man's hands, like mine.

Summer camp: here's how bad summer camp was. The day I arrived I opened my camp trunk and changed my shirt and just stood there alone and breathing through my mouth in the four-man platform tent, just me and the canvas smell and the daddy longlegs, and then I thought that I was the person who I least wanted to be with, and I stepped out into the cooler air. There was nowhere to unpack anything, and even I wasn't so scared that I could hang around in the tent. It was like 104. Sweat ran down the backs of my knees. The black metal stays on the tent ropes were too hot to touch.

We were in a pine forest. Everything had that baked pine needle smell. My father had just driven away. A squirrel sat up across from me, woozy with the sun. He worked over a nut and then spit it at me. Way off behind him, two kids were sitting on another kid's chest in a clearing. Down the hill to my right, someone was ringing a bell.

I headed down the path toward the noise. I think I was affecting a saunter. I sauntered down to the lean-to where a few kids and some counselors were hanging out. A sign on top said counselors lean-to. The counselors were two blond guys, maybe seventeen or eighteen, the kind of guys who seem like nice boys to moms. A fat kid who'd already taken off his shirt was bugging them about something. The fat kid had my glasses. Which was too bad for the fat kid. They were even fixed with electrical tape on the same side that mine were. There was a whine in his voice that I could hear from up where I was, and he kept at it. You fucking idiot, I thought the whole time I was walking down to them. I was talking about me. I was always wanting myself to die whenever I found myself in a stupid situation. When I got to the front of the lean-to, I nodded at whoever caught my eye. Nobody nodded back.

“I told you I don't know,” one of the blond guys said, watching me fold my arms and stand there. He seemed to be talking to the fat kid. He had both hands on the two-by-four that was the top edge of the lean-to and he was swinging his body a little, keeping his feet in place. He looked dangerously bored. The fat kid said something else. The blond guy ignored him. The fat kid said something after that. The blond guy swung with everything he had and brought his feet up together and caught the fat kid under the chin and up along his face.

The fat kid left the ground a foot and a half and landed on his back. The sound was like when I whacked the sheet on our line with my wiffle bat. We all just stared like now we knew what we were in for, for the next however many weeks. I felt this rush, like I was the blond guy and the fat kid all at once. One of the other kids bent over and found where the glasses had landed.

“How are you?” the guy who'd kicked the fat kid asked me.

“I'm okay,” I told him. I didn't know what else to say.

“C'mon. Talk to me. Tell me. What's wrong?” my mother said when she got me alone the day before I left. I told her I didn't want to go to camp and she said, besides the camp. I told her I guessed I felt bad about my brother and she said, besides your brother.

She was asking because she saw what I was like during the day and after school and she wanted to help. She was worried that it would get even worse now that school was over. She said that everyone was worried that everything was taking too much of a toll.

My grades had gone downhill. My friends had stopped coming around. Even the Venus flytrap in my room had died.

She'd also found my list of the World's Deadliest Poisons. I was always ranking them and changing the rankings. I had a notebook with that title written inside on the first page that I kept in my desk. I looked in the encyclopedia and in the library and also under our sink. If it had a skull and crossbones on it, I checked it out.

The blond guys turned out to be Chris and Caleb. Chris was the meaner one and he looked like a guy on TV. Once we all got assembled he started a speech and Caleb finished it. It was a welcome to the camp speech. The fat kid held a dirty hand towel up to his nose while he listened. The bleeding had stopped but his lip and nose were swollen and the kids who'd gotten there late were all clearly wondering about it. He sniffled and kept shooting them looks even though he kept his head down. Chris had found him the towel and told him to suck it up when he handed it over. When he went looking for it, Caleb had helped the fat kid to his feet and had straightened out his glasses and stood next to him with his hands on his thighs, telling him it was all right while the kid got ahold of himself.

There were more counselors than just them, they told us, but the campers were divided into Beaver, Moose, and Fox troops, and they were in charge of Beaver. We were in Beaver.

“You see that?” my new tentmate asked when we were headed up to our tents. It was a stupid question because we'd both been standing there when it happened. The fat kid had landed more or less between us.

I shook my head, a little dazed, as in: Man: the things I've seen.

“They can't get away with that shit,” my new tentmate said. He sounded like he was worried that they could. He was wearing what looked like his little brother's plain white T-shirt and it was soaked through. I thought I was scrawny but he was so bad you could pass a Dixie cup through his armpit when his hands were at his sides.

Our other new tentmate told us he was horny, first thing. The three of us had our butts on the beds and feet on the floor and were leaning back on our hands. It was still really hot but they'd told us to go to our tents so that's what we'd done. We had some quiet time until the dinner horn, which was apparently going to be a real guy blowing a horn. Somebody had eaten some Hostess somethings and had left the wrappers all over the other bed. Maybe the fourth kid wasn't coming.

The scrawny kid said he was Joyce from upstate. He said “upstate” like that filled in all the gaps, as far as information about him went.

“Joyce?” the other kid said. “Hey, there. I'm Wanda.”

“You are not,” Joyce said. “What's your name?”

“Lulu Belle,” the other kid said.

Joyce turned to me. “What's your name?” he asked.

I told him.

“Nice to meet you,” Joyce said.

“What happened to the fat kid?” the other kid said.

“Oh, man,” Joyce said. “You won't believe it.” He told the story. He said, “We were both standing right there.”

“That is so fucked up,” the other kid said, like he'd just come downstairs on Christmas morning.

“So what is your name?” Joyce asked once we were back from dinner. Dinner had sucked. A little piece of metal or something had been in my Salisbury steak, and a kid in line behind me when we were bussing our trays had made fun of my shorts.

“BJ,” the other kid said. Now we had more time to piss away before the big Opening Night Campfire.

“What's that short for?” Joyce asked.

“BJ,” BJ said.

All through the first part of the campfire my gum was still bleeding from the thing in my food. I could taste it. I kept doing this thing with my face to make it feel better. “What're you, retarded?” BJ asked. I guessed he could see it even though it was getting pretty dark.

I was pressing my hands together really hard. I couldn't keep my feet still. It was interesting, though: being here wasn't any worse than being home, or being anywhere.

There was a big pyramid of wood in front of us. It was like six feet tall. A wire ran from the middle of it to a stepladder set up behind us. Every kid sitting on the grass was thinking bonfire and hoping it would maybe get out of control and the state would burn down.

We all had our flashlights with us for the trip back to the tents, though at this point they were supposed to be turned off. Chris pulled three kids from the audience and sat them in front and told them to turn their flashlights on him when he got up onstage. The stage was a plywood sheet on four metal milk crates. One of the kids was still shaking when Chris climbed up there. You could see the light beam jittering. He'd probably been thinking they were going to start things off by kicking three kids in the face.

Instead Chris said hi to us all and then said “I can't hear you” four times at what we said back. Finally even I screamed hi. He introduced the Camp Director, who had a beer in his hand. The Camp Director handed him the beer when he climbed up onto the stage. The plywood almost tipped and the Camp Director held his hands out on both sides of him and said, “Whoa, Old Paint.” He seemed to think that that should get a laugh.

He told us that Pautapaug was an old Nipmuc Indian name that meant “swampy land.” He told us that the camp got started by the Bridgeport Rotary Club in 1919. He said that we were 175 acres from the nearest town. He gave us the schedule: Reveille; Bunk Attack, for kids who slept through Reveille; the Call for Waiters; Breakfast; Sign-Up Events; the Call for Waiters; Lunch; Siesta; Sign-Up Events; Call for Waiters; Dinner; Water Polo or Capture the Flag; Campfire and Taps. He gave it to us again. Then he taught us the camp song.

“Pautapaug, carefree land, Pautapaug, helping hand,” the kid next to me sang.

The Camp Director got down and Chris got back up there. The Camp Director took his beer back. The other counselors were all doing something behind us.

“Fire god of Pautapaug, send down your fire!” Chris screamed.

A coffee can filled with some kind of fire slid down the wire to the pyramid. It bounced when it hit the wood and then sat against it for a minute before the whole thing went up. It must have been totally soaked with gas or something. That was a big hit with the campers.

The kids in the front row had to move back. The toe of one kid's sneaker started to melt.

There was more singing. Then the counselors all went somewhere. We sat there in the dark, looking at the fire.

Was I really going to make it to eighth grade? Did I even want to make it to eighth grade? Nothing about the year coming up seemed like anything I wanted to go through.

“So is that it?” BJ said, before the fire was even out.

The counselors came back. They shoved each other around and got each other in headlocks. Campers were dismissed by troops, Beaver first. One kid tripped when we got up to leave and burned his hand. On the way back to the tents everybody had sword fights with the flashlight beams until the counselors told us to cut it out.

Nobody said anything in the tent. I climbed under the covers, already too hot. Mosquitoes buzzed in one ear and then went over to the other one.

They called lights out. We switched off our flashlights. “So, do you beat off?” BJ asked, as soon as they went out.

For some reason I got all teary and rolled my face into the pillow. It already smelled like the bottom of a laundry bag.

“How old are you?” he asked. A light went by outside and I could see his silhouette.

“Who you talkin' to?” Joyce finally asked back.

“You,” BJ said. “Anyone.”

“I'm eleven,” Joyce said.

“Yeah, well I'm twelve,” BJ said.

“Huh,” Joyce said. In the dark, one of them rolled over and then kicked hard at his sheets.

“What about you?” BJ asked.

“I'm twelve too,” I said.

“You are not,” BJ scoffed.

“I don't have time for this,” I said.

“He is not,” he said to Joyce.

“He says he is,” Joyce said back.

“Fuckin' liar,” BJ said, and rattled something in a box. I could hear him eating.

I was crying, which was the very last thing I wanted to be doing, and trying not to make any noise at all. I was pushing on my eyeballs with my fingertips and I was worried I was going to drive them through my skull. They hurt enough that I stopped. My father had said, “You don't want to go to camp? You don't want to do any thing. Times're tough all over. Go up there and force yourself to have a good time. We'll stay down here and deal with your brother.” When I tried to bring it up again later on, he told me, “Believe me, you got the better deal.”

“I got a boner like an iron bar,” BJ said. He made a noise on his bed like he was hauling it around.

This is only the first night, I kept thinking. And that only made me cry harder, until I stopped.

“What was that?” Joyce asked, and he and BJ stopped moving to listen. But then there was nothing else to hear.

My father, Jean-Baptiste Sanson, had christened in the church of Saint-Laurent two children: a daughter, who married Pierre Héris-son, executioner of Melun, and a son, myself. After my mother's death he remarried, his second wife from a family of executioners in the province of Touraine. Together they produced twelve children, eight of whom survived, six of whom were boys. All six eventually registered in the public rolls as executioners, my half brothers beginning their careers by assisting their father and then myself in the city of Paris.

My name is Charles-Henri Sanson, known to many throughout this city as the Keystone of the Revolution, and known to the rabble as Sans Farine, in reference to my use of emptied bran sacks to hold the severed heads. I was named for Charles Sanson, former adventurer and soldier of the King and until 1668 executioner of Cherbourg and Caudebec-en-Caux. My father claimed he was descended from Sanson de Longval and that our family coat of arms derived from either the First or Second Crusade. Its escutcheon represents another play on our name: a cracked bell and the motto San son: without sound.

You want to know — all France wants to know — what takes place in the executioner's mind: the figure who before the Revolution wielded the double-bladed axe and double-handed sword and who branded, burned, and broke on the wheel all who came before him. The figure who now slides heads through what they call the Republican Window on the guillotine. Does he eat? Does he sleep? Do his smiles freeze the blood? Is he kind to those he kills? Does he touch his wife on days he works? Does he reach for you with blood-rimmed fingernails? Did he spring full-blown from a black pit to send batch after batch through the guillotine?

Becoming shrill, my wife calls it, whenever I get too agitated in my own defense.

“What struck people's minds above all else,” Livy, the great Roman, wrote in his History on Brutus's sacrifice of his own sons for the good of the Republic, “is that his function as consul imposed on the father the task of punishing his sons, and that his unbendingness compelled him personally to order the execution, the very sight of which was not spared him.” In Guérin's rendering of the scene, the hero turns away but does not blanch. Standing before it in the old Royal Academy with Anne-Marie, I told her that perhaps this is the way we attain the sublime: by our fierce devotion to the required. She was not able to agree.

I am a good Catholic. The people's judges hand out their sentences, and mine is the task of insuring that their words become incarnate. I am the instrument, and it is justice that strikes. I feel the same remorse as anyone required to be present at an execution.

Before the Revolution, justice was apportioned and discharged in the name of the King, who ruled by divine right as one of God's implements. Punishment of malefactors was God's will and therefore earned for his sovereign minister God's grace and esteem. But in the eyes of most, that grace and esteem did not extend as far as the sovereign's handservant. Before the Revolution, daughters of executioners were forbidden to marry outside the profession. When their girls came of age, such families had to display on their doors a yellow affidavit clarifying the family's trade, and acknowledging the taint in their bloodline. Letters of commission and payments were not passed into their hands but dropped before them. They were required to live at the southern ends of towns, and their houses had to be painted red.

Before the Revolution, a woman with whom I dined at an inn demanded I be made to appear in court to apologize for having shared with her a dinner table. She petitioned that executioners be directed to wear a particular badge or color upon their coats or singlets so that all would know their profession. Before the Revolution, our children were allowed no playmates but one another.

This book was set in Minion, a typeface produced by the Adobe Corporation specifically for the Macintosh personal computer, and released in 1990. Designed by Robert Slim-bach, Minion combines the classic characteristics of old-style faces with the full compliment of weights required for modern typesetting.

Composed by Creative Graphics,