Kenny I hadn’t seen in, what, three, four years. Kenny started with me way back when, the two of us standing there with our hands in our pants right outside the wormhole. Kenny wanders into the Windsock last night like the Keith Richards version of himself with this girl who looks like some movie star’s daughter. “Is that you?” he says when he spots me in a booth. “This is the guy you’re always talking about?” Carly asks once we’re a few minutes into the conversation. The girl’s name turns out to be Celestine. Talking to me, every so often he gets distracted and we have to wait until he takes his mouth away from hers.

“So my husband brings you up all the time and then, when I ask what you did together, he always goes, ‘I can’t help you there,’ ” Carly tells him. “Which of course he knows I know. But he likes to say it anyway.”

With her fingers Celestine brings his cheek over toward her, like nobody’s talking, and once they’re kissing she works on gently opening his mouth with hers. After a while he makes a sound that’s apparently the one she wanted to hear, and she disengages and returns her attention to us.

“How’s your wife?” Carly asks him.

Kenny says they’re separated and that she’s settled down with a project manager from Lockheed.

“Nice to meet you,” Carly tells Celestine.

“Mmm-hmm,” Celestine says.

The wormhole for Kenny and me was what people in the industry call the black world, which is all about projects so far off the books that you’re not even allowed to put CLASSIFIED in the gap in your résumé afterwards. You’re told during recruitment that people in the know will know, and that when it comes to everybody else you shouldn’t give a shit.

If you want to know how big the black world is, go click on COMPTROLLER and then RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT on the DOD’s Web site and make a list of the line items with names like Cerulean Blue and budgets listed as “No Number.” Then compare the number of budget items you can add up, and subtract that from the DOD’s printed budget. Now there’s an eye-opener for you home actuaries: you’re looking at a difference of forty billion dollars.

The black world’s everywhere: regular air bases have restricted compounds; defense industries have permanently segregated sites. And anywhere that no one in his right mind would ever go to in the Southwest, there’s a black base. Drive along a wash in the back of nowhere in Nevada and you’ll suddenly hit a newish fence that goes on forever. Follow the fence and you’ll encounter some bland-looking guys in an unmarked pickup. Refuse to do what they say and they’ll shoot the tires out from under you and give you a lift to the county lockup.

All of this was before 9/11. You can imagine what it’s like now.

For a while Kenny helped out at Groom Lake as an engineering troubleshooter for a C-5 airlift squadron that flew only late-night operations, ferrying classified aircraft from the aerospace plants to the test sites. They had a patch that featured a crescent moon over NOYFB. “None Of Your Fucking Business,” he explained when I first saw it. He said that during the down time he hung with the stealth-bomber guys with their Huge Deposit-No Return jackets, and he told his wife when she asked that he worked in the Nellis Range, which was a little like telling someone that you worked in the Alps.

I’d met him a few years earlier when Minotaur was hatched out at Lockheed’s Skunk Works. He’d been brought in for the sister program, Minion. We were developing an ATOP — an Advanced Technology Observation Platform — and even over the crapper it read: Furtim Vigilans: Vigilance Through Stealth.

It wasn’t the secrecy as much as the slogans and patches and badges that drove Carly nuts. “Only you guys would have patches for secret programs,” she said. “Like what’re we supposed to do, be intrigued? Guess what’s going on?”

In the old days Kenny’s unit had as its symbol the mushroom, and under it, in Latin: Always in the Dark. The black world’s big on patches and Latin. I had one for Minotaur that read Doing God’s Work with Other People’s Money. I’d heard there was a unit out at Point Mugu that had the ultimate patch: just a black-on-black circle.

“ ‘Gustatus Similis Pullus,’ ” Carly said. She was tilting her head to read an oval yellow patch on Kenny’s shoulder.

“You know Latin?” he asked.

“Do you know how long I’ve been tired of this?” she told him.

“I don’t know Latin,” Celestine volunteered.

“ ‘Tastes Like Chicken,’ ” he translated.

“Nice,” Carly told him.

“I don’t get it,” Celestine said.

“Neither does she,” he told her.

“Oooh. Snap,” Carly said.

“People’re supposed to taste like chicken,” I finally told them.

“Oh, right,” Carly said. “So what’re you guys doing, eating people?”

“That’s what we do: we eat people,” Kenny agreed. He made teeth with his forefingers and thumbs and had them bite up and down.

Carly gave him a head shake and turned to the bar. “Are we gonna order?” she asked.

It’s all infowar now. Delivering or screwing up content. We can convince a surface-to-air missile that it’s a Maytag dryer. Tell an over-the-horizon radar array that it’s through for the day, or that it wants to play music. And we’ve got lookdown capabilities that can tell you from space whether your aunt’s having a Diet Coke or a regular.

What Carly’s forgetting is that it’s not just about teasing. There’s something to be said for esprit de corps. There’s all that home-team stuff.

I heard from various sources that Kenny’s been all over: Kirtland, Hanscom, White Sands, Groom Lake, Tonopah. “What’s my motto?” he said, in front of his wife, the last time I saw him. “ ‘A Lifetime of Silence,’ ” she answered back, as though he’d told her in the nicest possible way to go fuck herself.

What’s it like? Carly asked me once. Not being able to tell the people you’re closest to anything about what you care about most? She was talking about how upset I was at Kenny’s having dropped right off the face of the earth. He’d gone off to his new assignment without a backwards glance some two weeks before, with not even a Have a good one, bucko left behind on a Post-it. She was talking about having just come home from a good vacation with her husband and watching him throw his drink onto the roof because of an e-mail in response to some inquiries that read No can do, in terms of a back tell. Your Hansel stipulated no bread crumbs.

The glass had rolled back off the shingles into the azaleas. By way of explaining the duration of my upset, I’d let her in on a little of what I’d risked by that little fishing expedition. I asked if she had any idea how long it took to get the kind of security clearance her breadwinner toted around or how many federales with pocket protectors had fine-tooth-combed my every last Visa bill.

“I almost said hello to you two Christmases ago,” Kenny told me now. “Out at SWC in Schriever.”

“You were at SWC in Schriever?” I asked.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Carly said. “Don’t talk like this if you’re not going to tell us what it means.”

“The Space Warfare Center in Colorado,” Kenny said, shrugging when he saw my face. “Let’s give the bad guys a fighting chance.”

“I didn’t know we had a Space Warfare Center,” Celestine said.

“A Space Warfare Center?” Kenny asked her.

At our rehearsal dinner, now three years back in the rearview mirror, during a lull at our table Carly’s college roommate said, “I never had a black eye, but I always kinda wished I did.” Carly looked surprised and said, “Well, I licked one all over once.” And everybody looked at her. “You licked a black eye?” I finally asked. And Carly went, “Oh, I thought she said ‘black guy.’ ”

“You licked a black guy all over?” I asked her later that night. She couldn’t see my face in the dark but she knew what I was getting at.

“I did. And it was so good,” she said. Then she put a hand on the inside of each of my knees and spread my legs as wide as she could.

“What’s the biggest secret you think I ever kept from you?” she asked during our most recent relocation, which was last Memorial Day. We had a parakeet in the backseat and were bouncing a U-Haul over a road that you would have said hadn’t seen vehicular traffic in twenty-five years. I’d been lent out to Northrup and couldn’t even tell her for how long.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I figured you had nothing but secrets.” Then she dropped the subject, so for two weeks I went through her e-mails.

“I don’t know anything about this Kenny guy,” she told me the day I threw the drink. “Except that you can’t get over that he disappeared.”

“You know, sometimes you just register a connection,” I told her later that night in bed. “And not talking about it doesn’t have to be some big deal.”

“So it was kind of a romantic thing,” she said.

“Yeah, it was totally physical,” I told her. “Like you and your mom.”

Carly had gotten this far by telling herself that compartmentalizing wasn’t all bad: that some doors may have been shut off but that the really important ones were wide open. And in terms of intimacy, she was far and away as good as things were going to get for me. We had this look we gave each other in public that said, I know. I already thought that. We’d each been engaged when we met and we’d stuck with each other through a lot of other people’s crap. Late at night we lay nose to nose in the dark and told each other stuff nobody else had ever heard us say. I told her about some of the times I’d been a dick and she told me about a kid she’d miscarried, and about another she’d put up for adoption when she was seventeen. She had no idea where he was now, but not a day went by that she didn’t think about it. We called them both Little Jimmy. And for a while there was all this magical thinking, and not asking each other all that much because we thought we already knew.

That not-being-on-the-same-page thing had become a bigger issue for me lately, though that’s something she didn’t know. Which is perfect, she would’ve said.

What I’d been working on at that point had gone south a little. Another way of putting it would be to say that what I was doing was wrong. The ATOP we’d developed for Minotaur had been an unarmed drone that could hover above one spot like a satellite couldn’t, providing instant lookdown for as long as a battlefield commander wanted it. But how long had it taken for us to retrofit them with air-to-surface missiles? And how many Fiats and Citroëns have those drones taken out because somebody back in Langley thought the right target was in the car?

There was an army of us out there up to the same sorts of hijinks and not able to talk about it. Where I worked, everything was black: not only the test flights, but also the resupply, the maintenance, the search-and-rescue. And the security scrutiny never went away. The guy who led my last project team, at home when he went to bed, after he hit the lights, waved to the surveillance guys. His wife never understood why even in August they had to do everything under the sheets.

On black-world patches you see a lot of sigmas because that’s the engineering symbol for the unknown value.

“The Minotaur’s the one in the labyrinth, right?” the materials guy in my project team asked the first day. When I told him it was, he wanted to know if the Minotaur was supposed to know where it was going, or if it was lost, too. That’d be funny, I told him. And we joked about the monster and the hero just wandering around through all these dark corridors, nobody finding anybody.

And now here I was and here Kenny was, with poor Carly trying to get a fix on either one of us.

“So what brings you to this neck of the woods?” I finally asked him once we were well into our second drinks.

“You know how sad he was,” Carly asked, “when he couldn’t get in touch with you anymore?”

“How sad?” Kenny asked. Celestine seemed curious, too.

“I thought we were gonna have to get him some counseling,” Carly said.

“It’s hard to adjust to not being with me anymore,” Kenny told her.

“So did he ever talk to you about me?” she asked.

“You came up,” Kenny answered, and even Celestine picked up on the unpleasantness.

“I’m listening,” Carly said.

“Oh, he was all hot to trot whenever he talked about you,” Kenny said.

“Sang my praises, did he?” Carly’s face had the expression she gets when somebody’s tracked something into the house.

“When he wasn’t shooting himself in the foot about you, he was pretty happy,” Kenny said. “I called it his good-woman face.”

“As in, I had one,” I explained.

“Whenever he tied himself in knots about something, I called it his Little Jimmy face,” he said. When Carly swung around toward him, he said, “Sorry, chief.”

“That was a comic thing for you?” Carly asked me. “The kind of thing you’d tell like a funny story?”

“I never thought it was a funny story,” I told her.

“There’s his Little Jimmy face now,” Kenny noted. When she looked at him again, he used his index fingers to pull down on his lower eyelids and made an Emmett Kelly frown.

“We started calling potential targets Little Jimmies,” he said, “whenever we were going to bring the hammer down and maximize collateral damage.”

Carly was looking at something in front of her the way you try not to move even your eyes to keep from throwing up. “What is that supposed to mean?” she finally said in a low voice.

“You know,” Kenny told her. “ ‘I don’t wike the wooks of this …’ ”

“Is that Elmer Fudd you’re doing?” Celestine wanted to know.

And how could you not laugh, watching him do his poor-sap-in-the-crosshairs shtick?

“This is just the fucking House of Mirth, isn’t it?” Carly said. Because she saw on my face just how many doors she’d been dealing with all along, both open and shut, and she also saw the We’re-in-the-boat-and-you’re-in-the-water expression that guys cut from our project teams always got when they asked if there was anything we could do to keep them onboard.

“Jesus Fucking Christ,” she said to herself, because her paradigm had suddenly shifted beyond what even she could have imagined. She thought she’d put up with however many years of stonewalling for a good reason, and she’d just figured out that as far as Castle Hubby went, she hadn’t even crossed the moat yet.

Because here’s the thing we hadn’t talked about, nose to nose on our pillows in the dark: how I’ve never been closer to anyone isn’t the same as We’re so close. That night I threw the drink, she asked why I was so perfect for the black world, and I wanted to tell her, How am I not perfect for it? It’s a sinkhole for resources. Everyone involved with it obsesses about it all the time. Even what the insiders know about it is incomplete. Whatever stories you do get arrive without context. What’s not inconclusive is enigmatic, what’s not enigmatic is unreliable, and what’s not unreliable is quixotic.

She hasn’t left yet, which surprises me, let me tell you. The waitress is showing some alarm at Carly’s distress and I’ve got a hand on her back. She accepts a little rubbing and then has to pull away. “I gotta get out of here,” she goes.

“That girl is not happy,” Celestine says after she’s gone.

“Does she even know about your kid?” Kenny asks.

The waitress asks if there’s going to be a third round.

“What’d you do that for?” I ask him.

“What’d I do that for?” Kenny asks.

Celestine leans into him. “Can we go?” she asks. “Will you take me back to the room?”

“So are you going after her?” Kenny asks.

“Yeah,” I tell him.

“Just not right now?” Kenny goes.

I’d told Carly about the first time I noticed him. I’d heard about this guy in design in a sister program who’d raised a stink about housing the designers next to the production floor so there’d be on-the-spot back-and-forth about problems as they developed. He was twenty-seven at that point. I’d heard that he was so good at aerodynamics that his co-workers claimed he could see air. As he moved up we had more dealings with him at Minotaur. He had zero patience for the corporate side, and when the programs rolled out their annual reports on performance and everyone did their song-and-dance with charts and graphs, when his turn came he’d walk to the blackboard and write two numbers. He’d point to the first and go “That’s how many we presold,” and point to the second and go “That’s how much we made,” and then toss the chalk on the ledge and announce he was going back to work. He wanted to pick my brain about how I hid budgetary items on Minotaur and invited me over to his house and served hard liquor and martini olives. His wife hadn’t come out of the bedroom. After an hour I asked if they had any crackers and he said no.

That last time I saw him, it was like he’d had me over just to watch him fight with his wife. When I got there, he handed me a Jose Cuervo and went after her. “What put a bug in your ass?” she finally shouted. And after he’d gone to pour us some more Cuervo, she said, “Would you please get outta here? Because you’re not helping at all.” So I followed him into the kitchen to tell him I was hitting the road, but it was like he’d disappeared in his own house.

On the drive home I’d pieced together, in my groping-in-the-dark way, that he was better at this whole lockdown-on-everybody-near-you deal than I was. And worse at it. He fell into it easier, and was more wrecked by it than I would ever be.

I told Carly as much when I got home, and she said, “Anyone’s more wrecked by everything than you’ll ever be.”

And she’d asked me right then if I thought I was worth the work that was going to be involved in my renovation. By which she meant, she explained, that she needed to know if I was going to put in the work. Because she didn’t intend to be in this alone. I was definitely willing to put in the work, I told her. And because of that she said that so was she.

She couldn’t have done anything more for me than that. Meaning she’s that amazing, and I’m that far gone. Because there’s one thing I could tell her that I haven’t told anybody else, including Kenny. At Penn my old classics professor had been a big-time pacifist — he always went on about having been in Chicago in ’68—and on the last day of Dike, Eros, and Arete he announced to the class that one of our number had signed up with the military. I thought to myself: Fuck you. I can do whatever I want. I was already the odd man out in that class, the one whose comments made everyone look away and then move on. A pretty girl who I’d asked out shot me a look and then gave herself a pursed-lips little smile and checked her daily planner.

“So wish him luck,” my old prof said, “as he commends himself over to the god of chaos.” I remember somebody called out, “Good luck!” And I remember being enraged that I might be turning colors. “About whom,” the prof went on, “Homer wrote, ‘Whose wrath is relentless. Who, tiny at first, grows until her head plows through heaven as she strides the Earth. Who hurls down bitterness. Who breeds suspicion and divides. And who, everywhere she goes, makes our pain proliferate.’ ”

My mother liked to remind me that at the age of four I left a garden party one rainy afternoon with my toothbrush in my fist, fully intending a life of exploration, only to be returned later that afternoon by the postman. Her version of the story emphasized the boundaries that her daughter refused to accept. Mine was about the emancipation I felt when I closed the gate latch behind me and left everyone in my wake, and the world came to meet me like a wave.

On April 1, 1930, the first night of my newest expedition, I had a walled garden, overarched by thick trees, all to myself, and still was unable to sleep. I considered rousing my muleteer early but summoned just enough self-discipline to let him rest.

Orion wheeled slowly over the village roofs, and the wind stirred the wraith of a dust storm. I lay listening to the soft and granulating sound of the fall of fine particles. In the starlight I could see the mica in the sand as it gathered on my palms.

My traveler’s notebook has on its oilskin cover in English, Arabic, and Persian my name, Freya Stark, and my mother’s name and address in Asolo, and the promise of a reward should the notebook be returned. Atop the first page, I inscribed an Arab proverb that I’ve adopted as one of my life philosophies: The wise man sits by the river, but the fool gets across barefoot.

The river in this particular case is perhaps the remotest area in the entire Middle East: the Persian mountains west of the Caspian Sea. This is country that has hardly been explored and never surveyed. The only map I had encompassed fourteen thousand square miles and featured three dotted lines and a centered X marking a seasonal encampment for one of the region’s nomadic tribes. The rest was blank.

I’m accompanied by a guide, Ismail, and our muleteer, Aziz. The former looks like a convict, ties his trousers with string, and reeks of stale cheese. The latter has none of the former’s dignity and seems perpetually gloomy, mostly because his colleague has informed him that he’s almost certain to be killed. Both have long since given way to despair at the prospect of protecting a British woman traveling alone.

My plan was to locate the ruins of the mountain citadel of the Assassins, that sinister and ancient sect that for two hundred years held the entire East in its reign of terror. Their impregnable fortress, somewhere in a lost valley of the Alamut, is described by Marco Polo at length in his Travels. And because Schliemann discovered Troy by continually rereading the Iliad while he searched, I brought along my copy of the Travels, marked with the annotations of twenty-two years. Besides my aluminum water-bottle, when filled, Polo’s account was the heaviest object in my saddlebag.

I no sooner had stepped onto a Lebanese dock before confronting the questions I’d be asked for the next three years: Why was I there? Why was I there alone? What did I intend to accomplish? Upon offering unsatisfactory answers to all three enquiries, I became a master of wrinkling customs officials’ brows with perplexity and concern.

I was thirty-four and so thin from my physical travails and my sister’s death that other passengers on the cargo ship began to save and wrap foodstuffs for the next time I might happen by. I was a bereaved Englishwoman who’d grown up in Italy and had only just torn free of the octopus of my mother’s demands, a child of privilege who’d lived mostly hand-to-mouth, a lover of erudition who’d been mostly self-taught, and a solitary and fierce believer in independence who was prone to fixations on others. I owed everything to an aunt who’d given me a copy of Arabian Nights for my ninth birthday, a kind-hearted Syrian missionary who’d lived down the hill, a sister who had never lost faith in me, and those long months of illness that had left me the time to negotiate the labyrinths of Arabic and then Persian. Once I was stronger I walked an hour to the station three times a week to take the train to San Remo, where for seven years I furthered my progress with Arabic verbs in the company of an old Capuchin monk who’d lived for half his life in Beirut.

I’d arranged for temporary lodging with the monk’s spinster sister in Brummana, a little village on a series of ledges above Beirut’s harbor. There I continued to study the Koran, since I knew of no better way to begin to know Arabs than through the stories they knew as children, the stories their parents and nurses told them. In the spring I took the slowest train imaginable through the orchards of the Beqaa Valley to Damascus, where the spinster sister had helped me find two rooms up a steep staircase that was opened to the roof. At night I left a column of empty cans on the steps to warn me of uninvited visitors. The ascent was through a canopy of garments and saucepans and old baskets but the rooms themselves were pleasant, if exposed: in all but one nook, the entire street could see me while I dressed. But there I learned that if I didn’t mind about privacy, or for that matter about cleanliness, and made myself independent of other physical needs, I could move about with astonishing freedom for next to no cost. I arranged to attend a girls’ school for Arabic grammar, but was forced to leave when a classmate reminded me too powerfully of Vera. I was dumbfounded by the parade of ethnicities and sects: Chaldeans, Mandaeans, Sabaeans, Yezidi, Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Jews. The Sunni were persecuting the Shia and both detested the Druze, while all three loathed the Alawites as beggarly apostates. I was jolted by the visceral immediacy of their hatreds — for ancient slights! — and reminded that everyone was irrevocably marked by whatever misdeeds their predecessors had committed.

And yet on celebration days everything, from merchants’ stalls to horses’ tails, was overhung with bouquets of peacock-blue flowers, and petals of apricot blossoms rode the ripples in the water basins outside the shops. On my first trip alone out into the desert, I sat in the shade of a parasol until I was finally surrounded by camels, hundreds of them, their huge legs rising around me like spindly and crooked columns before the herd, in its browsing, eventually moved on.

The following year an even slower train finally brought me to Baghdad, though Scheherazade had neglected to report the seasonal temperatures of 105 degrees or the corpses of donkeys and sheep and even men alongside the river traffic on the Tigris. My mother sent aggrieved letters to the consulate which were dutifully held for me as I roamed the streets and alleys, beside myself, for Nineveh was just to the north, and the ruins of the Sumerians and Ur, with the birthplace of Abraham to the south. I’d arrived a few weeks before the stock-market crash, having expended a total of forty-five pounds on the trip, and still had ten remaining, for emergencies, in my saddlebag.

Dip your foot in the water and here’s what you’re playing with: Xiphactinus, all angry underbite and knitting-needle teeth, with heads oddly humped and eyes enraged with accusation, and ribboned bodies so muscular they fracture coral heads when surging through to bust in on insufficiently alert pods of juvenile Clidastes, who spin around to face an oncoming maw that’s in a perpetual state of homicidal resentment. The smaller Xiphactinus are three times your length and swallow their prey whole. They’re gill-to-gill with Cretoxyrhina, great white sharks fifty feet long with heads the size of Mini Coopers and twelve-inch nightmare triangles of teeth. Mosasaurs big and small, the runts weighing in at two tons and the alphas like tylosaur a stupefying sixty feet. Under the surface, they’re U-boats with crocodiles’ heads. Pliosaurs in their hunting echelons, competing to see who’s the more viciously ill-tempered. Kronosaurs whose jaws provide the kind of leverage that can snap whales’ spines. Thalassomedons, the biggest of the elasmosaurs, with twenty-foot watersnake necks that allow the Venus-flytrap teeth to be everywhere at once. Dakosaurs gliding through the murk of fish parts spewed by their initial thrashing attacks.

And rising out of the blue gloom like the ridged bottom itself easing up to meet you, Lipleurodon, holdover from the Jurassic, the biggest predator that ever lived. Families could live in its skull. On the move it’s like the continental shelf taking a trip. It feeds everywhere, even in shallow water with the surf breaking over it like a sandbar. Its earth-moving front flippers keep it from stranding. If some of the bigger land predators stand around the shallows trolling for what floats in, that’s their mistake. It takes them off their feet like fruit off a tree.

This is the Tethys Ocean, huge, shallow, and warmed by its position locked between the world’s two giant supercontinents. This is the place where the prey could kill a sperm whale. This is all this one guy’s bed. This guy — we’ll call him Conroy, because that’s his fucking name — whose insomnia every night is beyond debilitating, teeming, epic with hostile energy, oceanic. What’s his problem? Well, where to begin? Kick your feet and watch something else surface from below. He’s been a crappy son, a shitty brother, a lousy father, a lazy helpmate, a wreck of a husband. As a pet owner he’s gotten two dogs and a parakeet killed. Some turtles and two other dogs died without his help.

His daughter won’t speak and wears a ski hat in the house and writes stories in which family members are eviscerated as the narrator laughs. She’s an isolate, watched but not approached. We don’t want to make the problem into more than it is. His brother’s alone in Florida, an older version of the same pain, just a phone call away. Whenever Conroy makes his hangup indications in their once-in-a-blue-moon conversations, his brother says it was great talking to him. His father’s ignoring the doctor’s advice — most of that advice having to do with meds, his Dilantin, his Prozac, his everything else — and going downhill because of it, and still they rehearse the same conversational rituals, as though time is standing still instead of vortexing down a drain. His career involves assuring people he’s got the answers and he’s got their back when he doesn’t have the answers and he’s all about craven self-interest: he’s part of the team rolling out a major new pharmaceutical, one of the accomplished tyros vouching for one of the eminences who did the science, and in that capacity he didn’t so much invent his data as cherry-pick it. Will it kill anyone? He hopes not. Because he means well.

He always means well. He tells himself this, treading water in bed.

The good news is who’s in this bed with him. His wife, the person he loves most in the world. Here’s the thing about his wife: she travels a lot, in her role as headhunter for the Center for American Progress, and she’s concerned about him, and the conversational form her concern has lately taken has been to suggest, half-jokingly and half-kindly, that he should have a fling. And to him this sounds like “You should get yourself some tenderness somewhere. Because you ain’t getting it here.”

He could ask if that’s what she means. But he’s the kind of guy given to building tall towers of self-pity and then watching them sway. So he speculates instead.

In bed he hints around. His wife is all psychological acuity and knows him like she knows her childhood bedroom, but she’s always been impatient with hinting and her requests for clarification sound like demands. Exasperation makes him close up shop like a night-blooming flower.

Think of the good you’ve done, he counsels. Think of the good you continue to do. A breeze blows over the water’s surface.

But here’s this letter in which a Sri Lankan says he’s all but sure he’s found some major links between the product and miscarriage. The Sri Lankan wants to know if Conroy didn’t review the same data. And here’s this journal entry from his daughter: My Throat = the Shit Pit. And here’s this dream he keeps having of himself as ringmaster with no acts performing, just a guy holding a hoop looking at him and waiting, and with everyone he’s ever let down scattered in the uncomfortable stands, eager to tell him that all of his forays into selflessness have only made clearer what they’re not, like a thimbleful of cola after a trek across the Kalahari.

His mode on such nights is the circuit between bed and bathroom and lamplit magazines. But tonight he’s heard his daughter downstairs ahead of him, and the delicate hiccups of the little breath-intakes that are her version of crying when it’s crucial she not be heard. Her favored position is to wedge herself into the wingbacked chair with her knees by sitting Indian-style. He holds himself still, listening, then throws open the sash on their upper-story bedroom window and climbs out on the roof. And his wife stirs and, sleeping, is sad for his unsettlement. The grit stings his knees. Gravity wants to welcome him forward in a rush. The breeze cools his butt. In the moonlight he’s just a naked guy, most of his weight on his hands, his hands bending the front edge of the aluminum gutter, the grass two stories below a blue meridian, zenith and nadir at once.

How do we help? Throw him a life preserver? How long should anyone survive in that ocean?

He’s Tethys Man, superhero and supervillain all in one. How much does he sweat at night? His sheets smell mildewy in the morning. If you saw him padding to the toilet, stepping naked in place, and waving off the bad images like the world’s least fetching drum majorette, would you imagine that “inauthenticity” was a term that haunted him? If you saw him bare-assed on his roof, gauging the distance from the sloping dormer to the strain insulators and primary cables of the telephone wires, would you imagine that once he jumped he’d ferry himself hand over hand from house to house? Would you imagine that if he did, he would have proved something to himself, in his own inchoate way, about his desire for change? Would you imagine that he then hated himself less?

Would you imagine that when he confronted his loved ones’ sadnesses, his vanity knew no bounds? Would you imagine that he thought his problems would solve themselves? Would you imagine that he fancied himself the prey when he was really the apologetic predator? Would you imagine that he’d last very long, much less get through this alive? Would you imagine that his kind should die out once and for all? Would you imagine that even now he was telling you the truth?

A long time ago a man had a dog that went down to the shoreline every day and howled. When she returned the man would look at her blankly. Eventually the dog got exasperated. “Hey,” the dog said. “There’s a shitstorm of biblical proportions headed your way.” “Please. I’m busy,” the man said. “Hey,” the dog said the next day, and told him the same thing. This went on for a week. Finally the man said, “If you say that once more I’m going to take you out to sea and dump you overboard.” The next morning the dog went down to the shoreline again, and the man followed. “Hey,” the dog said, after a minute. “Yeah?” the man said. “Oh, I think you know,” she told him.

“Or here’s another one,” Cato says to me. “Adam goes to God, ‘Why’d you make Eve so beautiful?’ And God says, ‘So you would love her.’ And Adam says, ‘Well, why’d you make her so stupid?’ And God says, ‘So she would love you.’ ”

Henk laughs.

“Well, he thinks it’s funny,” Cato says.

“He’s eleven years old,” I tell her.

“And very precocious,” she reminds me. Henk makes an overly jovial face and holds two thumbs up. His mother takes her napkin and wipes some egg from his chin.

We met in the same pre-university track. I was a year older but hadn’t passed Dutch, so I took it again with her.

“You failed Dutch?” she whispered from her seat behind me. She’d seen me gaping at her when I came in. The teacher had already announced that’s what those of us who were older were doing there.

“It’s your own language,” she told me later that week. She was holding my penis upright so she could run the edge of her lip along the shaft. I felt like I was about to touch the ceiling.

“You’re not very articulate,” she remarked later, on the subject of the sounds I’d produced.

She acted as though I were a spot of sun in an otherwise rainy month. We always met at her house, a short bicycle ride away, and her parents seemed to be perpetually asleep or dead. In three months I saw her father only once, from behind. She explained that she’d been raised by depressives who’d made her one of those girls who’d sit on the playground with the tools of happiness all around her and refuse to play. Her last boyfriend had walked out the week before we’d met. His diagnosis had been that she imposed on everyone else the gloom her family had taught her to expect.

“Do I sadden you?” she’d ask me late at night before taking me in her mouth.

“Will you have children with me?” I started asking her back.

And she was flattered and seemed pleased without being particularly fooled. “I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to pull information out of you,” she told me one night when we’d pitched our clothes out from under her comforter. I asked what she wanted to know, and she said that was the kind of thing she was talking about. While she was speaking I watched her front teeth, glazed from our kissing. When she had a cold and her nose was blocked up, she looked a little dazed in profile.

“I ask a question and you ask another one,” she complained. “If I ask what your old girlfriend was like, you ask what anyone’s old girlfriend is like.”

“So ask what you want to ask,” I told her.

“Do you think,” she said, “that someone like you and someone like me should be together?”

“Because we’re so different?” I asked.

“Do you think that someone like you and someone like me should be together?” she repeated.

“Yes,” I told her.

“That’s helpful. Thanks,” she responded. And then she wouldn’t see me for a week. When I felt I’d waited long enough, I intercepted her outside her home and asked, “Was the right answer no?” And she smiled and kissed me as though hunting up some compensation for diminished expectations. After that it was as if we’d agreed to give ourselves over to what we had. When I put my mouth on her, her hands would bend back at the wrists as if miming helplessness. I disappeared for minutes at a time from my classes, envisioning the trancelike way her lips would part after so much kissing.

The next time she asked me to tell her something about myself I had some candidates lined up. She held my hands away from her, which tented the comforter and provided some cooling air. I told her I still remembered how my older sister always replaced her indigo hair bow with an orange one on royal birthdays. And how I followed her everywhere, chanting that she was a pig, which I was always unjustly punished for. How I fed her staggeringly complicated lies that went on for weeks and ended in disaster with my parents or teachers. How I slept in her bed the last three nights before she died of the flu epidemic.

Her cousins had also died then, Cato told me. If somebody even just mentioned the year 2015, her aunt still went to pieces. She didn’t let go of my hands, so I went on, and told her that, being an outsider as a little boy, I’d noticed something was screwed up with me, but I couldn’t put my finger on what. I probably wasn’t as baffled by it as I sounded, but it was still more than I’d ever told anyone else.

She’d grown up right off the Boompjes; I’d been way out in Pernis, looking at the Caltex refinery through the haze. The little fishing village was still there then, huddled in the center of the petrochemical sprawl. My sister loved the lights of the complex at night and the fires that went hundreds of feet into the air like solar flares when the waste gases burned off. Kids from other neighborhoods never failed to notice the smell on our skin. The light was that golden sodium vapor light, and my father liked to say it was always Christmas in Pernis. At night I was able to read with my bedroom lamp off. While we got ready for school in the mornings, the dredging platforms with their twin pillars would disappear up into the fog like Gothic cathedrals.

A week after I told her all that, I introduced Cato to Kees. “I’ve never seen him like this,” he told her. We were both on track for one of the technology universities, maybe Eindhoven, and he hadn’t failed Dutch. “Well, I’m a pretty amazing woman,” she explained to him.

Kees and I both went on to study physical geography and got into the water sector. Cato became the media liaison for the program director for Rotterdam Climate Proof. We got married after our third International Knowledge for Climate Research conference. Kees asked us recently which anniversary we had coming up, and I said eleventh and Cato said it was the one hundredth.

Her envelope had hearts where the o’s in my name should have been and I tore it open and read her letter right there in the sun. The V-Mail was like onionskin and in the humidity you spent all your time peeling sheets apart and flapping them dry. Two guys who’d been waiting behind me for their mail passed out and fell over. Our CO had orders to keep everyone under some sort of shade until further notice. That was it in terms of his responsibilities for the day. But the mail hadn’t caught up to us since Port Moresby so even this one load pulled most of us out around the truck.

The guy next to me spat on the back fender just to watch it sizzle. As far as we could tell, we were the only four companies not getting any beach breezes, and we’d been sitting through this for two weeks and were pretty much wiped out to a man. Guys just lay in the bush with their feet sticking out onto the trail. The Bren gun carrier already looked like a planter, it was so overgrown. Almost nothing was running because the lubricating oils ran off or evaporated. We’d lost half our water when the heat dissolved the jerry cans’ enamel lining. Two unshaded shells farther down the trail had exploded. The tents accumulated heat like furnaces. The midday sun raised blisters on an arm in ten minutes. One of the medics timed it. Everybody lost so much fluid and salt that we had ice-pick headaches or down-on-all-fours dry heaves and cramping. Turning your head wasn’t worth the effort. Pickets got confused and shot at anything. A few facing the afternoon sun on the water went snowblind from the glare and didn’t bother to report it until relieved.

At least the Japs were lying low, too. I had a palm-frond bush hat but even through that the sun beat on my head like a mallet.

The first paragraph was all about how good it was to hear I was okay. It made her whole day easier, apparently. The second said “To answer your question, no, I didn’t see your brother when he was home on leave.” But he’d already written that she had. And then he’d left it at that.

“Get out of the sun, Foss,” the CO called.

One of the guys who’d passed out came to and staggered back to his tent. The other guy just lay there. The guy behind me got handed a Christmas package, but whatever was in it was smashed flat and melted besides. He picked over it standing in the truck cab’s shadow.

The PFC dishing out the mail was clearly hacked off that he had to do it right there on the trail. There was one good patch of shade from a clump of coconut palms and no one was budging out of it to let him park his truck. He called a name and if someone didn’t answer right away he pitched the letter or package over the side and went on to the next one. He was wearing a bush helmet and on the back of it someone had drawn a woman with her legs spread and written “Your Mother Says Hi” across the brim.

The third paragraph went on to something else as though that was the end of it. So-and-so said such-and-such about a friend of hers, could I believe that?

“What do you need, a road map?” my friend Leo said when I asked him about it.

“What?” I asked, like I already knew. “What do you think you think is going on?”

“What do I think I think is going on?” he asked, and the rest of Dog Company, a little ways farther off the trail, laughed. We’d heard that Baker and Fox Companies had been bombed with daisy cutters the night before, so we were working on two-man slit trenches, and in the close quarters entrenching tools kept whipping by people’s ears. “I think the two of them spend a lot of time agreeing on what a great guy you are. I think it makes them sad for you and they cry together in their beer. And then I think he’s sticking his dick in her.”

“What’s wrong with him?” our staff sergeant asked Leo while we redug our slit trenches the next morning. As if everybody else was the picture of contentment. If it rained at all during the night we lost like a foot and a half of depth to the mud.

“He’s jealous of his brother,” Leo told him.

“His brother better-lookin’ than him?” the staff sergeant asked, amused.

“I’ve seen knotholes better-lookin’ than him,” Leo told him.

“Why would he think it was about looks?” I asked him later.

“Why wouldn’t he think I was jealous of something else?”

“Where the heck is chow?” Leo wondered. Guys were milling around the bivouac, waiting. You could always tell when a hot meal was late, because everybody started acting like zoo animals.

We were the Second Battalion, 126th Infantry, 32nd Division, Michigan and Wisconsin National Guard, here in New Guinea all of fourteen days and — leave it to the Army — apparently the spearhead of General MacArthur’s upcoming drive to dislodge what everyone agreed were two divisions of the world’s most fearsome jungle fighters from one of the world’s most impenetrable jungles.

Two of us hadn’t hit puberty yet. Three of us couldn’t see without our glasses, and our hygiene officer couldn’t see with them. Before this, only one of the Wisconsin guys had been out of the state. We were fifteen miles from the nearest hut and a hundred and fifty from the nearest civilization, in the form of the mostly uninhabited northeastern Australian coast. We were ten thousand miles from home.

We’d trained in South Carolina, which didn’t prepare us much for jungle fighting but did its bit in getting us ready for the humidity. Any number of us couldn’t keep up during the double-time drills, which meant we had to run around the entire battalion area three times with knapsacks full of grenades. At one point our unit was first in the entire camp in hospitalizations.

We just weren’t crackerjack soldiers. Guys who panicked every morning about climbing into full field dress and getting their beds made in time for reveille and inspection started sleeping already dressed and under their beds. We were each scored on particular skills and then all classified as riflemen anyway and herded onto transports and shipped out. Once we got through the Panama Canal the ships were under orders to never stop moving, so anybody who fell overboard would have to take care of himself. We slept in the holds in canvas hammocks slung in tiers of four from the support beams. The top slot was so close to the metal ceiling that if you tried to see your feet you cracked your head. Everything smelled of socks or farts or armpit. Weapons were stowed in baggage racks and anything else got dumped on the floor. In the exact middle of the trip everyone was issued five dollars, a huge morale builder with the dice and card players. Some guys slept on deck because of the smell or because they figured they’d have a better shot of getting off if the boat was torpedoed. Like that would’ve mattered: all the cargo was high explosives. The whole stern hold was mostly gasoline in seventy-gallon drums.

We had one fifty-caliber mounted aft for protection. If we’d been attacked by three guys in a motor launch, we would’ve been A-OK.

We were only in Australia a week when we were told to pack up for New Guinea. We were playing baseball with some Kiwis when we heard. Leo was in the batter’s box when they called the game. He dropped his bat in the dirt and said, “Shit. I can hit this guy.”

When we got within range of the coast, the smell of everything rotting was so strong that we could pick it up before the shore was even in sight. “What is that?” Leo asked. We were all hanging on the cable railings. “That’s the jungle,” one of the LCT pilots told him. “What’s wrong with it?” Leo asked, and the guy laughed. It was like you could taste the germs in the air. Nobody on deck wanted to open his mouth.

It took our pathfinders an hour just to locate the trailhead that supposedly led inland. If you stepped five yards into the wall of leaves, you disappeared completely. All the barracks bags had to be left behind for the hump, so we carried only our weapons and ammo, knives, quinine tablets, mosquito lotion, canteens, and canvas water buckets. Everything else was left to the bearers. Our first night was spent in an old Aussie camp that was mostly a supply dump, camouflaged. Since Leo and I couldn’t sleep we watched the natives file in carrying everything on poles on their shoulders. They looked scrawny, but judging by the loads they were plenty strong. I tried out some sign language on one. “You need something?” the guy asked when I finished.

They made their own pile and then went off the trail to sleep by themselves. Fifteen of them took like three steps and disappeared. Leo fell asleep too, finally. Then it was just me, listening to the bugs.

We call ourselves die Harschblödeln: the Frozen Idiots. There are four of us who’ve volunteered to spend the coldest winter in recent memory in a little hut perched on a wind-blasted slope of the Weissfluhjoch 3,500 meters above Davos. We’re doing research. The hut, we like to say, is naturally refrigerated from the outside and a good starting point for all sorts of adventures, nearly all of them lethal.

It’s been seven years since the federal government in Berne appointed its commission to develop a study program for avalanche defense measures. Five sites were established in the high Alps, and as Bader likes to say, we drew the short straw. Bader, Bucher, Haefeli, and I wrap ourselves in blanket layers and spend hours at a time given over to our tasks. The cold has already caused Haefeli to report kidney complaints.

He’s our unofficial leader. They found him working on a dambuilding project in Spain, the commission having concluded correctly that his groundbreaking work on soil mechanics would translate usefully into this new field of endeavor. Bucher’s an engineer who inherited his interest in snow and ice from his father, a meteorologist who in 1909 led the second expedition across Greenland. Bader was Professor Niggli’s star pupil, so he’s our resident crystallographer. And I’m considered the touchingly passionate amateur and porter, having charmed my way into the group through the adroit use of my mother’s journals.

It might be 1939 but this high up we have no heat and only kerosene lanterns for light. Our facilities are not good. Our budget is laughable. We’re engaged in a kind of research for which there are few precedents. But as Bader also likes to say, a spirit of discovery and a saving capacity for brandy in the early afternoon drives us on.

We encounter more than our share of mockery down in Davos, since your average burgher is only somewhat impressed by the notion of the complexities of snow. But together we’re now approaching the completion of a monumental work of three years: our Snow and Its Metamorphism, with its sections on crystallography, snow mechanics, and variations in snow cover. My mother has written that the instant it appears, she must have a copy. I’ve told her I’ll deliver it myself.

Like all pioneers we’ve endured our share of embarrassment. Bader for a time insisted on measuring the hardness of any snow-pack by firing a revolver into it, and his method was discredited only after we’d wasted an afternoon hunting for his test rounds in the snow. And on All Hallows’ Eve we shoveled the accumulation from our roof and started an avalanche that all the way down in Davos destroyed the church on the outskirts of town.

I’m hardly alone in being excessively invested in our success. At the age of eighteen Haefeli lost his father in what he calls a scale 5 avalanche. As to be distinguished from, say, a scale 1 or 2 type, which obliterates the odd house each winter but otherwise goes unnoticed.

His scale 5 was an airborne avalanche in Glärnisch that dropped down the steeper slopes above his town with its blast clouds mushrooming out on both sides. His father had sent him to check their rabbit traps on a higher, forested slope and had stayed behind to start the cooking pot. The avalanche dropped two thousand vertical meters in under a mile and crossed the valley floor with such velocity that it exploded upward two hundred feet on the opposite hillside, uprooting spruces and alders there with such force that they pinwheeled through the air. The ensuing snow cloud obscured the sun. It took ten minutes to settle while Haefeli skied frantically down into the debris. Throughout the next days’ search for survivors, there were still atmospheric effects from the amount of snow concussed into the upper atmosphere.

The rescuers found that even concrete-reinforced buildings had been pile-driven flat. When he finally located a neighbor’s three-story stone house, he mistook it for a terrazzo floor.

Fifty-two homes were gone. Seventeen people were dug out of a meeting house the following spring, huddled together in a circle facing inward. Three hundred meters from the path of the snow, the air blast had blown the cupola off a convent tower.

When I was twelve my father bought me a sailboat, nothing America’s Cup — ish, just something he thought even I couldn’t get into trouble with — like a Sunfish, only tubbier and slower. The first day I owned it I dragged it to Long Island Sound in a thunderstorm. People were sprinting from the beach and here I was hauling this low trailer through the wet sand the other way. The rain was so heavy it knocked me to my knees. Lightning stripped the color away and left the afterimage of dune grasses and their individual shadows. It occurred to me that I should let go of the metal mast. When I did, it started this low keening and my hair lifted, as if in celebration, and even I knew something amazing was transpiring on a very fundamental level. My father, in his raincoat, dragged me off the beach by the collar. He wondered aloud then and later if his son had the brains of a walking doorknob. He was at that point interrupting his son’s first stirrings as a theorist. His son had been modeling something in his head, thinking that maybe there was already lightning inside the mast and inside his head, trying to connect with some kind of energy in the air.

It wasn’t the stupidest idea I’ve ever had. As my father and wife would be the first to point out.

I’m a particle physicist. Most of us here could be dumped into that hopper, in terms of category, though of course there’s the specializations-within-specializations: don’t tell the accelerator physicists that they’re particle physicists.

By “here” I mean in the general vicinity of the Large Hadron Collider; or, in my case, this room with that screen, that chair, and that locker for my coat. My coat doesn’t fit in it. It’s not like they didn’t warn me. When I’d wandered, stunned, out of grad school and into the job market, I’d been thinking mostly about Fermilab. And it’s not like the CERN people gave me the hard sell. They told me: you come here, your office’ll be a closet. Everyone’s here.

They weren’t kidding. Three thousand physicists, all roaming through how many little Swiss and French towns in their off-hours? Every one of them slopping food around and breaking things. Every one of them with a different idea of what constitutes collegiality. And as for all of the different project groups: well, let’s just say we’ve got some rivalries going. Even the engineers seem well adjusted next to us, and they spend their every waking hour petrified of system failures.

What are they worried about? Well, what could go wrong? They’ve only cobbled together the most massive and expensive and complicated piece of scientific equipment ever built. Never mind the collider itself; some of these detectors are so big that working on them requires climbing gear. Everybody’s triple- and quadruple-checked everybody else’s numbers, but so what? Tell that to the people on the Challenger. There’ve already been double-digit serious breakdowns.

But for us — the theory people — that’s neither here nor there. We’re all like, C’mon, let’s get this thing going. We only have so much data to work with. As far as we’re concerned, an ideal world is a place where experiments happen faster.

All of us have kids and spouses and pets and hobbies, but that’s not where we live. Where we live is that part of the cortex where we do our model building, what my advisor liked to call Adventure Travel Through Concepts. And that’s an ongoing whipsaw between exhilaration and despair. Welcome aboard, loved ones. Strap in. We call this one the Widowmaker.

First you hope you come up with something. Then you hope that it leads to something else. Then that that something else doesn’t bore you. Then that you’re not just entertaining yourself. Theorist friends when they get uppity tell me they do real theory, not phenomenology. Me, I think that whatever’s in my intellectual playground better connect to the outside world, because I’m not doing too well there, otherwise. I have the sort of life where even computational work makes me feel closer to the human race.

“You got that right,” my wife said when I made that joke in her presence.

She was talking about my capacity for certain kinds of curiosities and my apparent incapacity for others. Did I notice when she barely came out of her room all weekend? Did it strike me that dinners had been a little quieter those last few weeks before I left? Those questions, among others, hadn’t seemed to have crossed my desk.

She claims I have a dad thing going with my old advisor. She had some training in psychology and comes out with stuff like that every so often.

She complains that theorists say they have all the ambition, but really what they’ve got is vanity. But I say: when that curiosity’s gone, what do you have left?

Some stuff you come across and bam, you drop to your knees right there: that’s it, you think; that shifts the paradigm. Other stuff, you’re like, Why is this taking up everybody’s time? Some of the bigger-name theorists, they’re just out there hustling. They’re better salesmen.

The key is to go after the major stuff. Otherwise, you’re one of those guys who’s looking for what we call low-hanging fruit: the questions that are the easiest to answer.

I’m not the world’s worst husband but there’s a whole lot I’d walk away from to be a part of something even one-third as cool as this. The kind of collisions we’re going to generate should knock all sorts of stop-the-presses particles onto our screens, the way two torpedoes colliding head-on should knock some spray out of the Atlantic.

Imagine what it’s like for us most of the time. We spend our days in front of chalkboards. Progress is slow. The tea gets cold. Our only idea of the last three weeks fizzles out.

Anything that just confirms the standard model — as in “Oh, look, there’s a Higgs boson”—that’d be the most depressing result. We’ve been sleepwalking through the last thirty years waiting for what’s going to shake us up.

My wife was crying next to me in bed the night before I flew to Geneva, and I put my hand on her forehead in the dark. She said, “Remember when you told me that the one thing physics teaches you is that the reality you think you observe doesn’t have much to do with the reality that’s out there?”

We’re not entirely well matched emotionally. When I told my dad we were getting married, his way of putting it was, “Well, it could work for a short while, if everything breaks right.”

She had a miscarriage and felt like I wasn’t entirely on board for the stunned-by-grief thing. She’s also been blindsided by my refusal to try again.

The overarching lesson from science in the last century, I tell her, is that my experience isn’t going to help all that much, not in terms of providing a guide to yours.

It’s like when she heard me sparring with an old friend who’s a string theorist about how some of the follow-up discoveries about the likelihood of the Higgs field were redefining the meaning of empty. She’d snorted. “What was that?” the string theorist asked, long-distance from Berkeley.

They think this is even bigger for them than it is for us. This gives what they do the chance to make contact with observable physics and become an experimental science. If strings are as large as some of them think — a billionth of a billionth of a meter — that’s within reach of the LHC, and we’ll see new particles whose masses line up like harmonics in a choral piece. We’ll all be notes from a universal melody, patterns from the same object: a string. These people will go nuts with joy. As he puts it, they’ll hear the shrieks over in the humanities buildings.

Every time you turn a corner, something gets defamiliarized. This is the elevator that’s going to take us to the next floor. Some of those nuts that have been too hard to crack are about to get pried open. “What are you really looking for?” my wife said to me, last thing, before I left. What we’re all looking for. That saving thing, I think: something that right now is beyond our ability to even imagine.

Once again he weathered an afternoon of unease and little progress. He’d forgotten that today was the Star Festival, one of his wife’s favorites, and was beginning to wonder at which he was more adept: hurting Masano inadvertently or intentionally. He’d settled into the backseat that morning and spread onto his lap his section of the production board, glued on heavy stock and color-coded, when the driver had reminded him about the festival. The driver had noticed the paper cows and kimonos Masano had hung in their potted bamboo out front. They had to have been there when Tsuburaya had come home the night before.

The driver at that point had already turned onto the main street and Tsuburaya had considered asking to be returned to his home, but then had finally said, “Oh, keep going.” Immediately he’d understood how that compounded his offense. He imagined himself telling Masano, “I forgot. And when I remembered, I kept going anyway.”

She had signed the first love note she’d ever sent to him “Shokujo,” the name of the Weaver Princess Star, the central figure of the festival. It had been a reference to the extent to which their discipline for work had suffered in the face of their feelings. According to the legend, the princess had fallen in love with a cow-herder; and as a reward for their diligence and industry, the king had allowed them to marry, but their lovemaking had become for them such a delirium that she had neglected her weaving, and the herder had allowed his cows to stray, so in his exasperation the king had forced them to remain on opposite sides of the Milky Way, to approach each other only once a year. Every July Masano had celebrated the festival, in recent years more and more often with only Akira, their youngest child. The previous July, while Tsuburaya had looked on, she had shown Akira through his toy telescope how on this night and this night alone the Weaver Princess Star and the Herdboy Star were allowed to meet on the banks of the river of heaven. Tsuburaya had watched as if she were having this conversation with her son in order to have it with him. And if it rained? Akira had asked. If it rained, his mother told him, the two stars had to wait an additional year.

He was falling behind everywhere: in his wife’s affections and his work’s responsibilities. But in the case of the latter, whether he put in fourteen- or sixteen-hour days, each evening left his production team with still more to accomplish, with principal photography set to commence one way or the other on August first.

He told his staff whenever they protested that there was no sense in blaming Tanaka, since he hadn’t misled anyone. “Well, then he’s the first producer who hasn’t,” one of his assistants grumbled. But it was true, Tsuburaya reminded them: at the meeting at which Tsuburaya had agreed to come aboard, Tanaka had begun by saying, “The good news is: do you want to make this movie with me, or not? The bad news is, we won’t have enough time.”

Here’s the story of my life: whatever I did wasn’t good enough, anything I figured out I figured out too late, and whenever I tried to help I made things worse. That’s what it’s been like for me as far back as I can remember. Whenever I was about to get somewhere, something would step in and block me. Whenever I was about to finally have something, something would happen to take it away.

“The story of your life is that you’re not to blame for anything,” my mother always said when I told her that. “Out of everybody on earth, you’re the only one who never did anything wrong. Whatever happens, it’s always somebody else’s fault.”

“It is always somebody else’s fault,” I told her.

“Poor you,” she always said back. “Screwed by the world.”

“Hey, Dr. Jägermeister’s calling,” I used to tell her. “Bottoms up.” And she’d just go back to whatever she was watching.

“So what’s the deal with dinner?” sometimes I’d say. “You have a busy day?”

“Go to Pizza Hunt,” she’d tell me.

“That’s Hut, you fucking idiot,” I’d tell her back. And then she’d say something else wrong the next time, just to frost my ass.

I was thirty-nine years old and living with my mother. I hadn’t had a good year.

“What was your last good year?” my friend Owen asked me. “Nineteen ninety-two?”

He wasn’t doing too well himself, but he managed to come over once or twice a week to eat whatever we had lying around.

I made some comment about whatever it was we were watching and he said, “What do you like? Do you like anything?”

“He likes to complain,” my mother told him. “He likes to make trouble.”

I liked to complain. I almost choked.

What did I like? I liked my dog. I liked hunting in the woods. I liked target shooting. I liked my kid, when I was first getting to know him. I liked women who weren’t all about money or what I planned to do with my future.

“It’d be different if you ever got laid,” Owen said during a commercial. My mother snorted.

“Hey, you’re the one with the hand in your pants,” I said.

“Now he’s going to tell us about Stacey,” my mother told him. But I didn’t say a word.

My kid was down there in Stacey’s house a thousand miles away. I was supposed to send checks but otherwise not come around more than once or twice a year. I mean, try to cram a whole year’s worth of family time into one week. Maybe it’d work for you but it didn’t for me.

Stacey said the kid was asking where his dad was, and that if I wanted to see him I had to send money. It got so I let my mother answer when she called. They’d stay on the phone telling each other stories about me. “You think that’s bad,” my mother would say.

A guy in Basic told me that girls who weren’t good-looking were the smart move because they were more grateful and weren’t as likely to run off with somebody, and that made sense to me. I met Stacey at Fort Sill and liked her family better than her. I was a 71 Gulf, which is like a clerk, hospital stuff, administrative. She was, too. I’d be dropping off discharge batches and she kept her head down when I teased her, but I could see her smile.

We went out for a year and five months and then we got married and had a kid. She was always saying she was going to move out but she finally did the deed when I pushed her down the stairs. She was all like “You coulda killed me,” and I was like, “Hey: you shoved me first, and there was a railing, and there was carpet.” She said, “You don’t shove somebody at the top of the stairs,” and I said, “Well what did you do to me?” And the cop who showed up was a guy who had a crush on her in high school and he was all, “You can’t be with this person. You want to press charges?”

He’s standing over her while she’s crying at the kitchen table and I’m in the den thinking, Why don’t you rub her fucking back? And she was all Miss Generous: “No, just get him out of here. I don’t feel safe.”

Out here in the fucking sticks you don’t meet anybody. I went to this singles’ social in the basement rec room of the church. You had to fill out forms so they could match people up. These two women were running the thing. They asked if I could read and write. When they saw my face they said it was just a question on the form.

But then I always reminded myself I didn’t have it so bad. Our next-door neighbor’s nineteen-year-old had some kind of thing, muscular dystrophy maybe, and they told her kids like him only lived to be about twenty-one. When she came over for coffee with my mother, she told us to pray that his heart muscle stopped before his lungs, because that’d be a less horrible way to go.

I had all kinds of jobs. If it was some fucking thing no one else wanted to do, I did it. I worked in a hospital laundry. I washed pots and pans. I separated metals in a scrapyard. I drove a shuttle. That job had a little pin that came with it that said Martin, for Comfort Inn. Whenever I said stuff to my mother like I could see why my dad walked out, she’d go, “Where’s your pin? Don’t lose your pin.”

I started thinking I should just go off the grid. You know, if I wasn’t using anything or spending anything, I didn’t need to make anything. I’d grow my own garden and shit. In the winter there’d still be rabbits and deer. I’d work out. Read a book. Improve my mind, unlike the other fucking imbeciles around here.

“Who says you’re not using anything or spending anything?” my mother said when I told her. “Somebody’s cleaning out the refrigerator every two days.”

“That’d be your friend Owen,” I said. “Your TV pal.”

“My friend Owen?” she said. “He doesn’t come over to see me.”

“Well, I never asked him to come over and see me,” I told her.

“So why’s he come?” my mother said.

“Because he’s a fucking bum, like me,” I told her. “ ’Cause he’s got nothing else to do with himself.”

“All right, all right,” she said. “Don’t get excited.”

“Don’t get excited,” I said.

“Don’t get excited,” she said. “Put that down.”

The Comfort Inn was my last job. I took two days off to go to my grandmother’s funeral and they never let me forget it. The week I was back even when I did a good job on something all I heard was You never told anybody you weren’t coming in, you didn’t let us know we were supposed to cover for you, you left us holding the bag. I’m working and the supervisor’s just standing there running me down instead of doing his job. I finally told him that kind of horseshit was all well and good but, you know, it was pretty unprofessional.

As a child who could barely hold myself upright without tottering, I was steeped in my mother’s belief that our tumbledown farm was serried about and tumid with devils. In my mind’s eye they stood in a ring and clasped one another’s taloned hands and leered in at me while I slept. My fourth summer was the year that Sophie, the stonemason’s daughter, was seized with a helplessness in her limbs until her father conceded her diabolic possession and took her to the Church of Our Savior, where the priest found five devils residing inside her, whose names were Wolf, Lark, Dog, Jolly, and Griffin. The devils confessed they’d conjured hailstones through her by beating the surface of well water with her hands and that they’d additionally concocted the tinctures and ointments she’d used to blight her neighbors’ apple trees. They said they’d requested, and been denied, a special grease that would have turned her into a werewolf. When asked of whom they’d made their appeal, they said only “The Master.”

When I was twelve, the man from whom we rented our pastureland — a lifelong bachelor whose endless mutterings were his way of negotiating his solitude, and whose imagination extended only to business; the sort who milled his rye without sifting it, so it might last longer — was found in the middle of our lane one winter morning, naked, his feet and lips blue. He said a demon had appeared to him on a pile of wood under his mulberry tree, in the likeness of a corpulent black cat belonging to the house next door. With its front paws the cat had gripped him by the shoulders and pushed him down, and then had fastened its muzzle on the man’s mouth and would not be denied. The man claimed that for nearly an hour he’d remained that way, swooning, speechless, and open to the cat’s searching jaws, unable to make even the Sign of the Cross and powerless to diminish the urgings of its tongue. He had no memory of where his clothes had gone, or how he’d ended up in the lane.

My mother had long since taken to enfolding a crucifix in the bedcovers when she turned down my poor linens for the night. My chamber was in our barn’s loft, attached to the back of the house, and from this, the highest point on the hill, I could view the Delorts’ farm to the west. Their daughter, Katherine, was the continual object of my confused nightly agitations as well as the focus of my joy.

And then one sunstruck August afternoon when we were passing through the village, my mother and I investigated a disturbance on the church steps, a crowd squabbling over who had sufficient schooling to interpret the document posted on the doors before them. A sacristan emerged to provide assistance and to read aloud what he declared to be a juridical confession lately obtained through the harrowing of some of our neighbors. Said neighbors had been identified to the ecclesiastical investigators by other neighbors.

The confession stated that Marie Delort along with her daughter had for three years been giving herself over to a pair of demons, from Friday midnight through to Saturday dawn, and had assisted at a series of conjurings in the company of others. According to the deacon Katherine had testified that her association began when one evening, washing her family’s linen outside of town, she saw before her a man with a curved back and pointed ears whose eyes were like emeralds in an ash pit. He called for her to give herself to him and she answered that she would. He then gentled her cheeks with both hands, his palms softly furred, and flooded her mouth with his breath, and from then on each Friday night she was carried to a gathering from her own bed, simply by willing herself free. At the gathering place she shed her night-dress and was approached, every time having been made to wait for a period alone in the darkness, by the same man leading a gigantic he-goat, which knelt before her, and to both apparitions she abandoned herself.

The sacristan then read her mother’s corroboration of this account, which further detailed the strange trance during which she was also transported from her bed, and their mutual adoration of the goat and the man, and their not only bathing in but also taking in all sorts of offensive liquids, with satiation being the object of their every clutch and gesture.

We haven’t spoken in three days and haven’t stretched out in two, and that’s forty-four hours we’ve been braced back to back, holding our tent poles, one hand low and the other high, to keep them from snapping in the wind. They’re supposed to be titanium but at Camp 3 they went off like rifle shots in the night and these are jerry-rigged spares. The winds are topping 130 kilometers an hour. The temperature has dropped to 49 below. We’re wearing three layers of fleece, one of Gore-Tex, down bodysuits, insulated climbing shells, and even our overgaiters, with gloves inside gloves inside mittens, and headcaps inside balaclavas inside hoods. I’ve been unable to interrupt the clatter of my teeth. Jacek’s breathing sounds like someone blowing bubbles through a straw. Bieniek has long since given himself over to a kind of stupefaction. We store the radio batteries in our underwear and load them only when we need to call Base Camp. Once we’re finished, getting them back through all the layers takes ten minutes. Then we just grip one another and hold on until our testicles warm the battery casings. The casings conduct the cold with exceptional efficiency.

We’re at Camp 4 and only 1,000 meters below the summit, but the summit’s 8,126 meters high and in the winter at this altitude everything is sandblasted by the jet stream and the cold.

Because of that, the peak is called Nanga Parbat: Sanskrit for “Naked Mountain.” When the sky is not storming, it sounds like a giant’s flapping bed sheets as hard as he can. When it is, the turbine sound of the howl makes even shouting pointless. During those periods we’re reduced to hand signals with mittens.

We’ve been on the mountain for twenty-seven days. Our sponsors have shelled out big money not for attempts but for results. Our team members, strung out along the various camps below, are spent. Our wives back home are miserable. Our children are frightened. Poland is watching.

If we descend we won’t have the physical reserves to return. If we continue upward we’ll be ascending without being able to make out our hands at arm’s length. If we decide to wait out the storm, they’ll find us once it’s over, like everything else in the tent, from our sunscreen to our cameras: frozen solid and cascaded with frost.

This mountain is a widow maker in the summer, when the weather’s as good as it gets. It’s famous for the kind of ice and rock slides that in 1841 were big enough to dam the Indus, sitting at its feet. The first great mountaineer to set foot up here, the Englishman A. F. Mummery, along with his entire expedition, was never heard from again. Twenty-six climbers were killed before even the first summer summit was achieved. There have been twelve winter attempts since. None have succeeded.

Most of the stories in this collection could not have existed, or would have existed in a much diminished form, without critically important contributions from the following sources: the Municipality of Rotterdam’s Waterplan 2 Rotterdam; the Royal Netherlands Embassy’s Pioneering Water; Deltapark Neeltje Jans’s The Delta Project: Preserving the Environment and Securing Zeeland Against Flooding; Rotterdam Climate Proof’s The Rotterdam Challenge on Water and Climate Adaptation; Leo Adriaanse and Tjeerd Blauw’s Towards New Deltas; the Netherlands Water Partnership’s Climate Changes and Dutch Water Management; Hans van der Horst’s Rotterdam Discovered; William Z. Shetter’s The Netherlands in Perspective; the Ministerie van Verkeer en Waterstaat’s Storm Surge Barrier on the Nieuwe Waterweg; Stadshavens Rotterdam’s 1600 Hectares: Creating on the Edge; Dutch Delta Solutions’ Made in Holland; the Dutch Research Program’s Knowledge for Climate 2008–2013; the Port of Rotterdam’s Maasvlakte 2: Space for the Future; Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change; Jan de Hartog’s The Little Ark; Colin White and Laurie Boucke’s The Undutchables; Willem Elsschot’s Cheese; Jules Archer’s Jungle Fighters; Eric Bergerud’s Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific; John Ellis’s The Sharp End; George H. Johnston’s The Toughest Fighting in the World; James Jones’s The Thin Red Line; E. J. Kahn’s G.I. Jungle; Samuel Milner’s The War in the Pacific: Victory in Papua; Ian Morrison’s Our Japanese Foe; Peter Schrijvers’s The G.I. War Against Japan; Stephen R. Taafe’s MacArthur’s Jungle War; and the Historical Division of the War Department’s Papuan Campaign; Richard Ellis’s Sea Dragons; Eileen Powers’s Medieval People; Jules Michelet’s Satanism and Witchcraft; Reginald Hyatte’s Laughter for the Devil: The Trials of Gilles de Rais, Companion-in-arms to Joan of Arc (1440); Jean Benedetti’s Gilles de Rais; Marjorie Rowling’s Everyday Life in Medieval Times; Michel Foucault’s I, Pierre Rivière; Gareth J. Medway’s The Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism; Frances Winwar’s The Saint and the Devil; Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams; G. R. de Beer’s Early Travellers in the Alps; Edward Whymper’s Scrambles Amongst the Alps; Colin Fraser’s Avalanches and Snow Safety; Fergus Fleming’s Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps; Ronald Clark’s The Early Alpine Guides; Nicholas and Nina Shoumatoff’s The Alps: Europe’s Mountain Heart; McKay Jenkins’s The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone; Betsy Armstrong and Knox Williams’s The Avalanche Book; Brian Greene’s Fabric of the Cosmos; Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages; Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos’s Skunk Works; Trevor Paglen’s I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me; Philip Taubman’s Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America’s Space Espionage; Freya Stark’s The Valley of the Assassins, The Southern Gates of Arabia, and The Zodiac Arch; Lieutenant-Colonel P. M. Sykes’s A History of Persia; Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s The Order of the Assassins; Bernard Lewis’s The Assassins; Jane Fletcher Geniesse’s Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark; Calvin Trillin’s “At the Train Bridge”; the Marinette County Jail transcript of the interview with Scott J. Johnson; Kurt Diemberger’s Spirits of the Air and Summits and Secrets; Anatoli Boukreev’s Above the Clouds; Maria Coffey’s Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow and Fragile Edge; Greg Child’s Thin Air: Encounters in the Himalayas; Mark Jenkins’s “Ice Warriors”; Noel Busch’s Two Minutes to Noon; Charles Davison’s The Japanese Earthquake of 1923; Frank Stewart and Leza Lowitz’s Silence to Light: Japan and the Shadows of War; August Ragone’s Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters; Thomas R. H. Havens’s Valley of Darkness; Masuo Kato’s The Lost War; William Tsutsui’s Godzilla on My Mind; Soetsu Yanagi’s The Unknown Craftsman; and the Fujiya Hotel’s We Japanese.

I’m also grateful for the support provided by Williams College and the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, as well as for the inspiration and expertise provided by Elizabeth Kolbert, Rich Remsberg, Milton Harrigan Jr., David Tucker-Smith, Susan Coby, Kerry Sulkowicz, Margreet van de Griend, Karin van Rooijen, Monique Somers, Rebecca Ohm, Christine Ménard, Arnoud Molenaar, Jaap Kwadijk, Jos van Alphen, Pavel Kabat, and Djeevan Schiferli. I’m equally indebted to the saving editorial intelligence provided by Peter Matson, Jim Rutman, Frances Kiernan, Max Winter, Eli Horowitz, Michael Ray, Jordan Bass, Emily Milder, and especially Gary Fisketjon.

Other readers and friends like Lisa Wright, Steve Wright, Gary Zebrun, and Mike Tanaka have been even more constant in their support. But I need to single out for special praise the contributions of those readers who encounter my stuff at its earliest stages — Ron Hansen and Sandra Leong — as well as the person who’d be the first to say, with complete accuracy, that she improves me in just about every other way, as well: Karen Shepard.

Jim Shepard is the author of six novels and three previous collections of stories, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a National Book Award finalist. He teaches at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.