Life in the Empire

By Stuart Balch

Charlie Smith, trapped in his house during a hurricane, recounts his perilous journey through the shark-infested waters of the greatest empire in the history of the world and issues a warning that all is not what it seems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781365686702

Book preview

Life in the Empire

Life in the Empire

Stuart Balch

Copyright © 2017 by Stuart Balch

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First printing: 2017

ISBN 978-1-365-68670-2

Green Hill Publishing

PO Box 7271

Somerset, NJ  08875

Noon

Chaos, now and forever.

I think, Lydia says, I’m going to sleep through this.

Lydia, my wife, heads downstairs to escape the oncoming hurricane, no doubt midwifed into slumber by her favorite sedative -- a cocktail of prescription medications that will render her comatose until morning.

The hurricane serves as a perfect metaphor for the whole crazy parade I’m about to describe. My plan is this -- I will sit in my library and type until dawn, pulling an all-nighter, which by my calculation should give me enough time to finish this account, memoir, history, explanation, and warning all in one.

So where to begin? History is less an assemblage of facts than a story based upon them. A historian takes facts and spins them into meaningful patterns. Paranoids see patterns, too, but the historian’s trick is to connect the pattern to a larger reality recognized by others, else it becomes a work of madness, maybe divine madness, of angels and spirits, but madness nonetheless.

To build up stamina for the long march I nap by the fire, and it’s during this nap that I conjure up a dream, though it’s not really a dream, more of a daydream, a recurring memory that marks the beginning of this story.

The dream -- the memory -- is about a woman I once knew. I say woman, but she was little more than a girl at the time, the setting a cabin in the Colorado high country (specifically, Telluride).

It is 1971, and from the cabin Milla (the woman-girl) and I look across a field toward a stand of aspens and the mountains beyond. Rod Stewart plays on the radio: Someone like you …

We are in the kitchen, she washing white chipped dishes, naked from the waist up, her shirt lying across the back of a chair, wood-burning stove pumping enough heat into the room so she can walk around like that.

I have a difficult announcement to make. I’m leaving.

Really? Where are you going?

Back east.

"Oh, you mean you’re leaving leaving."

This was only temporary, you knew that.

I did?

What I’m trying to say is, it can’t continue.

It can’t?

I wish she would stop turning my statements into questions. Coming from her tender mouth it sounds like the voice of reproach, leaving me nothing but blunt masculine responses that sound clumsy like bluntness always does in delicate situations.

In the dream-memory she dries her hands and puts her shirt back on and we go for a walk, she slightly above me on a hillside surrounded by an orange halo that might be the sun.

Charlie Smith. That’s not your real name, is it?

I hesitate, the truth being complicated. I have a real name, I just can’t use it right now.

That must be a sad way to live. Her words serve as lyrics to the music in my head, Beethoven’s Pastoral to be precise, bountiful notes dispersing into the open air. But it might work out for you back there in the East.

Now sex can’t run everything, Milla, you know that.

It was a rationale I had rehearsed many times -- that sex is a bad reason to do anything permanent, a spasm, a temporary charge to the system.

"That is such an insult," she says, and it ends like that, with her walking down the hill, the orange halo pulled along behind like an effervescent balloon, a vision with chestnut hair and a liquid, willowy body. A spiritual vortex, last night’s whispers, framed against a high ridge of green, never to be seen again.

*    *    *

The memory-dream turns into wispy vapor as I wake and look around the library, a large space, 34’ by 30’, decorated in English-gentleman style, mahogany paneling, glassed-in bookcases, antique billiard table, a Star globe to the right of the desk, a day bed behind me, and arching above it all a ceiling painted to resemble a blue sky with puffy clouds, an extravagance, the entire house an extravagance, even here in New Jersey where excess is expected from those who have made it.

We are renters. Our landlord, Dr. Ezekiel Wetherspoon, is a defense contractor who invents and manufactures technology for the U.S. military. He owns ten acres of land here in the Watchung Mountains. The carriage house we rent is down at the lower end of the property, while his Tudor mansion occupies the high ground.

The Pastoral disappears with the memory-dream, the only noise now the crackling fire and a rising wind outside. Dr. Wetherspoon prefers Mozart to Beethoven. He and I have debated this before (though it’s not really a debate, his intellect easily running circles around mine), he claiming that Mozart channels the music of the spheres while Beethoven toils in an earthly world of storms and passions. He sometimes invites me up to the mansion for chats. A very large head on the man, and it just looms at you. He’s rich, of course, earning megabucks supplying technology to the military wing of the greatest empire in the history of the world.

But he isn’t home tonight, having flown away ahead of the storm.

*    *    *

I arrived in Telluride in 1970 in a converted mail truck driven by two hippies who had traveled from San Francisco to Denver to purchase a load of second-hand books and were bringing them back to a bookstore in Telluride. One of the hippies was Milla.

They had picked me up at a remote crossroads on the other side of the Rockies with night falling ahead of a thunderstorm. Lydia (we weren’t married yet) had dropped me there, and I was thumbing it with head down, hiding my face even though the odds of being recognized were small.

This happy pair didn’t care. They would have picked up anyone -- Che Guevera, Charles Manson, a runaway slave, it was all the same to them.

Their vehicle was in terrible shape, with a shaky, vibrating axle shaft and bald tires. The flat part in back, built to carry mail sacks, was stacked with books, and I made a shelter for myself back there as protection against the wet May air that poured in through the missing passenger door.

It wasn’t easy talking through the wind, but during eight hours of night driving we managed to get acquainted, Milla explaining about the cargo of books and how she and her friend -- a San Francisco longhair -- were delivering them to her uncle’s bookstore in Telluride, after which the longhair planned to drive back to California while Milla would stay in Telluride to help out her uncle with the store.

I decided to stay in Telluride, too. My only other options were to disappear into the wilderness where I could live off the land until winter, or go to San Francisco, and I didn’t see how the mail truck was going to make it that far, not to mention possible interventions by the highway patrol, which was the last thing I needed.

We pulled into Telluride at dawn on wobbly axles, trundling down a side street to Being and Nothingness, a bookstore that specialized in folios of philosophy with a sub-specialty in French existentialism. You could run a bookstore like that back then if you didn’t mind living on bean sprouts.

I helped them unload the books, stayed for breakfast (eggs and bean sprouts), and, after presenting myself as a nice young man named Charlie Smith, got hired to work in the store, a job that included a small studio apartment above the shop. I was paid in room and board and enough cash to give me some walking-around money. There was no employment paperwork, which was the way I needed it.

Milla took a shine to me on the ride, influencing -- okay, deciding -- my decision to stay in Telluride. Her uncle and I got along, too. I had minored in philosophy at the University of Colorado and was able to talk to him with some knowledge about his favorite subject.

Milla was the prize, though. A song to God. We became lovers right away (hippie chicks acted fast back then when the vibe was right), and by the end of summer we had moved into a cabin outside of town.

Telluride, paradise. Its box canyon served as a refuge, the twilit sky like blue glass, wind whispering through the pines, the smell of dry earth, sleeping at night as if the rest of the world didn’t exist, her slender body next to mine.

Why don’t you ever tell me about yourself? she asked one night.

Oh, that would just ruin the mystery.

But I don’t want you to be a mystery.

It was that kind of summer.

Being and Nothingness housed 10,000 books, a miniature Strand, a quixotic effort to corner the market in used volumes of philosophy. I was her uncle’s Sancho Panza, stacking and re-sorting books as he continually conceived of new ways to organize his collection.

The place was doomed. I recently did an Internet search on Being and Nothingness and found no evidence of its existence. The uncle probably sold everything off and closed it down when the yuppies invaded and the rent got too high. He was nice to me, though, and often afterward I have wandered into used bookshops just to take in the smell.

In November a man named Universitas flew into Telluride’s scary airstrip on his private plane. How he tracked me down I’ll never know for sure, except to say that there are networks out there exchanging information that most people don’t know about.

He claimed that he used simple deduction to find me. My story had been in the newspapers, and he calculated I would run west toward familiar places and then migrate to the nearest leftist-friendly town, which was Telluride. I’m not sure I believe that. What I mostly believe is that law enforcement was closing in on me, and Universitas, through his connections, cut a deal to get me free.

He looked much the same then as he does today, loose limbed and casually alert, walking into the bookstore and introducing himself, a frightening presence until I realized he wasn’t there to arrest me. We had coffee at the Fountain Blue Diner, and I offered to let him stay at our cabin.

No amount of physical discomfort could deter Universitas, then or now. He slept on our epically uncomfortable couch. Milla was friendly and he charming in return.

I’m leaving, I said to her.

That was after Universitas explained my options.

Really? Where are you going?

That was after Universitas told me that hiding was futile. Only he could help. Only he could make everything okay.

East.

His logic was irrefutable. I could not go back to college. The trajectory of my life had changed. The interlude in Telluride was just that, an interlude, a bubble of a daydream next to the reality that waited for me out there. He offered escape from all that.

"Oh, you mean you’re leaving leaving," she said, and then walked away, framed by a high ridge of green, never to be seen again.

Universitas and I flew to New York that afternoon. When I asked him what he had to gain from his efforts he told me that his mission in life was to scour the world for interesting situations and then resolve them to everyone’s satisfaction.

Finding seeds to plant and letting them grow.

Lydia and I reunited in New York, where we stayed in Universitas’s apartment for several weeks. His building seemed like a dense, looming presence, a fortress, the same impression every New York building gave me at first. I had never experienced that many people packed into one place before, or even known that such a thing was possible, New York attaining levels of density as to be almost an experiment in density.

We became a couple again, Lydia and I, and eventually Universitas drove us to the suburban wilds of New Jersey to meet a man he described as Edison and Oppenheimer rolled into one -- Dr. Wetherspoon.

The Wetherspoon property was nestled in the first uplift of the Watchung Mountains. The doctor conducted a short interview and then agreed to let us move into his carriage house, an arrangement that was supposed to be temporary but continues to this day.

*    *    *

Let me move this story forward to 1996 and the founding of my company, Einstein Promotions, an act inspired by the man who flew to Telluride to retrieve me 25 years earlier. Over time Universitas became my mentor, helping me find jobs, start a career and sharing many morsels about his experiences around the world. It was 1996 when he summoned me to his apartment in Manhattan and asked a startling question -- would I be interested in starting my own business?

I laughed. What do I know about starting a business?

Are you telling me you can’t do it, or are you telling me you don’t want to do it?

"I’m saying it’s risky -- for somebody like me."

You forget that I met you at a time of risk.

Which is a very true, Universitas, but what do you mean?  What kind of business are you talking about?

Well, the best policy, in my experience, is to begin with something you know, like the company you work for. Refresh my memory -- what does it do again?

You mean the Matrix Group?

Yes, the Matrix Group. What does it do again?

So I described a company I worked for at the time that provided marketing services to major corporations in the New York area.

Does this Matrix Group make money?

I think so. They pay me on time.

Then there you go. There’s your business.

You want me go into competition with the Matrix Group? That’s impossible.

Why?

They’re too big. It would take a fortune to compete.

Universitas spread his hands with his smartest-kid-in-the-classroom, ageless look. I had just ignored an obvious factor, that he had money.

Lydia will be against it. We’ve gotten some stability in our lives, and she likes that.

Universitas sipped water from a glass. He kept a supply of pure spring water in his apartment at all times, bottled from his mountain retreat in the Catskills.

He ignored the mention of Lydia. We were sitting in his sixth-floor apartment, a spacious pre-war near the East River. There was a schoolyard across the street, and the noise of playing children came through the open windows.

Just put a business plan together for me, and then we’ll talk about it some more.

I always tried to accommodate Universitas, who had helped me in so many ways, and two weeks later I presented a preliminary plan based on a start-up version of the Matrix Group. He asked a boatload of excellent questions that led to many revisions, and less than a year later, assisted by an investment from him (in exchange for 51% of the company), I founded Einstein Promotions, bringing with me a few minor accounts along with three key employees.

*    *    *

The company struggled at first, but within a year Universitas introduced me to Calvin Belmont, Vice President of Marketing for RPG Motors, a German luxury automobile manufacturer (the names of some of the people and companies have been changed to protect the so-called innocent), and Calvin hired us to conduct a radical project that sought to identify future customers before they were affluent enough to buy an RPG vehicle. He wanted to market to them in utero as he described it, but needed to know who they were first.

I formed a team to tackle the challenge. Diligently, we delved into the data-driven characteristics of human purchasing behavior. There had to be patterns in the data, Calvin told us, and he wanted to know what they were.

So I open with this question: Is it possible to predict the future?

Calvin Belmont certainly thought so. People, he said, are data points translated into algorithms that illuminate patterns, patterns that can be read, leading to predictions. There were plenty of fucks and bullshits ladled into that statement (Calvin being a profane buccaneer at heart), but I’ve left them out so as not to muddy the core of his philosophy.

*    *    *

The introduction to Calvin Belmont had been enabled by a software program of ours called DeepCast, a thought-experiment that a Matrix Group programmer had conjured up years earlier, but which had remained unknown, unused and dormant until one day a client -- a purchasing manager for a book publisher -- asked me during lunch if I knew of any innovative marketing ideas he could take to senior management, believing that the right idea could catapult him into the executive ranks. The main barrier to a promotion so far, he said bitterly, was that he worked in purchasing.

They despise me for it. Purchasing isn’t sexy. You know what’s sexy? Sales, marketing, all the playboy shit. The more you guys abuse your expense accounts, the more everybody loves you. Everybody says they want to save money, but they don’t really want to save money. They want to spend as much of it as possible and hope somebody like me keeps them from driving off a cliff. So give me something sexy that costs a lot of money and I’ll make it worth your while. Meaning the bench vise he applied to our prices might be loosened a bit.

The book publisher was a good client, the purchasing manager my main contact, and so I tried to help him even though the Matrix Group didn’t really traffic in the sexy stuff. We were implementers, low on the sex-appeal totem pole, but I nosed around anyway and stumbled on a solution in the form of the aforesaid programmer, Billy Shakespeare.

He had worked with me on several projects before and, knowing him to be smart and creative, I took him out drinking to find out what he was working on and there learned about his thought-experiment that used past purchasing history to forecast future buying trends. It wasn’t a program yet, just a concept, but he agreed to slap together a demo for me to show my client.

I gave it the name DeepCast. The purchasing manager liked it, but the idea didn’t go anywhere because he was in purchasing and nobody wanted to hear anything from him that didn’t involve squeezing vendors.

So it sat idle until the founding of Einstein Promotions. The programmer brought it with him when I hired him away from the Matrix Group, and it got included in our list of assets, duly noted by the sharp-eyed Universitas, who one day called to say that Calvin Belmont, Vice President of RPG Motors, was interested in hearing more about it.

*    *    *

Owen Watts joined me on the sales call because he was nominally in charge of sales but also, unlike me, something of an automobile enthusiast. Universitas had not given much intel about Calvin Belmont (spontaneity being another Universitas tenet, serving, in his view, as a useful counterpoint to the world’s grinding determinism), and so, feeling poorly prepared, I hoped Owen’s car knowledge might come in handy in case the meeting started going in that direction.

I’d woken in the dark beneath heavy blankets with heat percolating through the house. Lydia slept on the other side of the bed. She likes the windows open in all seasons, even winter.

There had been a forecast for light snow, and a sense of padded silence indicated that the weatherman had got it right.

Sex always warms things up, but Lydia and I don’t have sex with each other.

Are you awake? A small, feminine voice.

Yes.

It’s so early.

I have a meeting in the city.

Can I make you some breakfast?

"Please. As in: Are you crazy?"

I don’t mind. I’m awake.

Don’t bother. Go on back to sleep. Victoria fixed something for me last night.

Victoria von Bismarck was -- and still is -- our live-in housekeeper, a Latina in spite of her Germanic-sounding name (more on that later). Lydia and I are the only other inhabitants of the house, and we don’t need a housekeeper, live-in or otherwise, but Victoria had recently moved here at Dr. Wetherspoon’s request, taking over a small suite of rooms off the kitchen on the top floor, which is actually the ground floor.

Let me explain. Our two-story carriage house is built into a slope, with the lower floor wedged against a hillside so that one enters the house on the top floor, which is also the ground floor. The library where I’m now writing is on this top floor/ground floor, along with the kitchen, a living room, and Victoria’s suite. The lower floor where Lydia and I sleep consists of a bedroom, a furnace/utility room, a large space that separates the two, and a sun room that juts out of the southwest corner of the house.

Victoria’s main job is to clean the house, but she also prepares occasional meals, so the previous evening she’d chopped some fruit and put it in the refrigerator for me.

I got out of bed, went upstairs, had the fruit and three cups of coffee, came back down, showered, dressed, and waited for Owen Watts, my Director of Sales, to arrive, which he did a half hour later after running through the Wetherspoon security gauntlet and driving down a winding, crushed-gravel lane in his bought-at-auction, baby-blue Mercedes, past the doctor’s mansion and around a grove of trees to our carriage house that sits at the lower end of the property.

It was a misty December morning with light snow falling, a granite tang in the air. I got into the Mercedes, and we drove back out.

This is some place, Owen said, looking over at the Wetherspoon mansion that loomed to our left, shrouded in mist.Thought they were going to shoot me on the way in.

I can only tell you this, Owen.They already know everything about you.

Once on the highway Owen gunned it east, hammering the Mercedes down I-78 past tractor trailers spewing sheets of icy spray. He drove fast until reaching the backed-up traffic of the Lincoln Tunnel but once through maneuvered the city streets like a pro. Owen was a good driver.

It was as if the city had been photographed in black and white. The mountainous craziness of Manhattan rose above us in dark clouds. On Ninth Avenue pigs were loaded into the basement of a Cuban restaurant. Lines of headlights on side streets ran red away from us, white toward us, the snow not sticking, the whores and junkies all gone. Wall Street funny money had hosed all that riff-raff away.

I remembered those same streets from the ‘70s. For all its lurid mood and music, Taxi Driver had mostly got it right. Now Wall Street was in control. If fascism ever comes to America, Universitas has said, it will be sponsored by MasterCard and hosted by Disney, though fascism, in his opinion, is an outmoded concept that will be succeeded by new forms of totalitarianism not yet conceived.

Fifty Second Street. We caught a break heading eastbound and quickly arrived at a favorite midtown garage where Owen wheeled in and down the ramp, and just like that we were walking through gray, snowflake-sparkled streets toward Park Avenue, our destination a hulking green-glass building that occupied the entire frontage between 54th and 55th Streets.

You think we got a shot at this? Owen asked. He was a good-looking kid built in a series of squares -- square head, square shoulders, square torso, square voice even.

It’s a referral, I said, which was a good sign, referrals being the mother’s milk of new business, but you never know.

The sales call took place eight months before the party at Keen’s, and Owen had yet to meet Universitas, let alone know he had arranged the meeting. He was young. This was only his second job out of college, and for all he knew I had personally financed the founding of Einstein Promotions. In reality, I was solvent but hardly wealthy, benefiting from a sweetheart rent deal from Dr. Wetherspoon and Universitas’s investment in the company.

Security was almost nonexistent in those pre-9/11 days, and we walked into the building like a couple of samurai and took an elevator to the RPG lobby on the 32nd floor. And why do I call us samurai? Because we belonged to a class of people who did battle in ritualistic fashion.

Calvin Belmont kept us waiting in the lobby long enough to establish his dominance, and we waited stoically (more samurai behavior) until his assistant came to fetch us. We then followed her down a long line of cubicles and perpendicularly down an even longer one.

"That girl’s got a sweet ass, you know it?" Owen whispered to me.

Shh, idiot.

The further we went the more important Calvin became until the assistant stopped one office from the corner and waited at the doorway, uncomfortable, it seemed, to interrupt whatever was going on in there. It was like being led to see the Wizard of Oz.

A little more waiting, and then we were ushered in.

Calvin Belmont rose to greet us. Firm handshake, black eyes, killer eyes, an expensive Italian suit covering a muscled physique, topped by a sleek, self-approving face.

I held his eye contact while trying to absorb the surroundings. This is an important moment in a sales call. One must peripherally gather as much information as possible without actively staring at anything. There are markers all over the place, family photographs, artwork, books, diplomas, certificates of achievement, each of them telling a story.

This reconnaissance was made especially difficult because behind Calvin’s right shoulder swung a novelty contraption consisting of four plastic balls -- green, red, gold and purple -- affixed to black rods and powered by a battery in its base, the device twirling the balls in mesmerizing patterns. A deliberate distraction, a controlling tactic.

Over his left shoulder sat a row of books on a window shelf. Beyond them, through the window, condensed water hovered, the color of gray cotton. We were in a cloud. The book titles could not be read, but they were grouped by color, a black section next to a white section, as if purchased and arranged by a books-by-the-foot consultant.

Everything else was made of dark wood, expensively plush, the lair of an executive.

Only one personal item jumped out, a framed photo of an attractive blonde woman.

The placement of family photographs is an important signifier. People who labor in service to their families usually prefer to have the pictures facing toward them as a reminder of why they work so hard. Pictures turned outward are often a prop, a signal to visitors that the resident wants to be seen as a family man (or a dog lover, or whatever).

In Calvin’s case (I found out later) the blonde (picture facing out) was his wife, an heiress to a minor Brazilian sugar fortune who lived with him in a penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side while her two children from a previous marriage remained in Brazil. Calvin and his wife did not have any children of their own.

Crunch time for me, he said as we sat down. Would have postponed you boys, but you came recommended so maybe if you get right to the point we can get on with our wonderful fucking day. A predator’s smile, the profanity a torpedo aimed right at us, delivering a message -- I’m a street animal, don’t fuck with me.

So I did what he asked. I’m not sure what Universitas told you about us -- Calvin not reacting to the name -- but our company has developed a software program that makes sales predictions.

He looked down at some papers and began crossing things off, sending another message -- I’m a busy man, and I’ll work on something else while you talk.

"What software program? What predictions?" he asked, pen slashing across the paper.

I kept it simple. Long-winded spiels were not going to fly here.

"Our program is called DeepCast. It takes data from past purchases and predicts what people will want to buy next."

This was a stretch. DeepCast was still in demo stage and couldn’t predict anything, but its design was based on the idea that such a thing was possible. A mere technicality, however. Billy would finish DeepCast if we ever got a client willing to pay for it, and then the program would be able to make predictions of one sort or another.

That is, after all, what we did at Einstein Promotions, conceived and then delivered.

Calvin tossed down his pen and leaned back in his chair with hands folded behind his head. Tell me who your clients are. I mean, the ones who use this program.

I named the publishing company for whom Billy had originally created the DeepCast demo. This was another stretch because the program had never been developed for the publishing company, and it wasn’t even one of our clients.

Practiced eye flick, Calvin talking to the ceiling:

"I’ve been contemplating a related concept. The concept I’ve been contemplating is an idea that will stand conventional marketing on its head. Rather than ask who my customers are, I’ve been asking myself who they aren’t, which leads me to the next logical question, which is: who will they never be? So what I’m asking you is, can your program make predictions about who my future customers will not be? Can it tell me who walking the earth right now -- and here he came down hard from his backward tilt -- will never be in the marketplace for my product, who are in effect the embryonic enemies of my product?"

Mr. Belmont –

You can call me Calvin.

Calvin, we haven’t thought about it quite like that, to be honest. It’s an interesting idea, though, sort of a reverse marketing angle.

I call it Dark Marketing.

Even better.

Then Owen barged in. Billy Shakespeare can do anything, Cal. You just name it.

Calvin had seemed to forget that Owen was there and now turned and studied him for a moment before saying, First off, dickwad, the name’s Calvin. And second, who the fuck is Billy Shakespeare?

Then he came back to me, as if his finely tuned corporate nose had sniffed out Owen’s subordinate status, and he would waste no more time with him.

I said, "He’s the programmer who designed DeepCast."

And his name’s Billy Shakespeare?

He had ambitious parents. He doesn’t talk about it much.

An intimidating stare. I waited (another samurai moment), waited some more, a test, the predator stare holding firm. Okay, I’ll tell you what, boys, he said. Leave your info with my assistant, whatever you brought with you, and I’ll review it when I get a chance. I’ll call if I’m interested. Pardon the bum’s rush, but the rest of my day is booked, and you’re going to have to clear out.

As if Calvin had pushed a secret button, or maybe the power of his thought was that strong, his assistant was already standing at the door waiting for us.

We shook hands and left. I gave the assistant a packet of information (we still hauled around stacks of promotional material back then), and she escorted us to the lobby.

It had been a short, intense meeting, and as we walked away from the building Owen and I turned and gazed up at its cloud-hidden heights. Part of sales discipline is to not discuss client meetings until well clear of the site, in case somebody might overhear you. Owen broke the silence first.

You know what that guy reminds me of, Charlie? A dragonfly.

The name stuck, and Dragonfly became our code name for Calvin.

*    *    *

The day had warmed somewhat, the sky turning a queasy gray. All the way home Owen adjusted the heat but never quite got it right.

He dropped me at the front gate, sweating, and I walked the hundred yards back to our house, grabbing a beer in the kitchen and then wandering downstairs where I found Lydia sitting in the sun room. She held a book in her lap but stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows that formed the two outside walls of the room.

She wore a sweatshirt and jeans, and her dark-dyed hair, brushed to a luster, seemed a tad too long for a woman her age.

I kissed the safe zone of her forehead. The room was quiet except for the rustling of her pet parakeet, Humbert, in his golden cage in the corner.

She took a breath and looked up at me. A child in many ways. No, not a child, she was mature, but at that moment a child.

You’re home, she said softly. In her youth she sometimes reminded people of the singer Karen Carpenter, but that impression, I believe, derived from a distinctive lost quality in her voice. Lydia often got depressed and traveled down psychological rabbit holes that were frustrating until I came to understand that psychological states are subjective, that one simply can’t assume that others see the world the same way as you do.

Which is not to say that intervention isn’t required.

The walk from the front gate to the house had pulled me out of my stupor, the beer putting me in a better mood, and I wanted some exercise.

Come on outside with me. Let’s get some air.

The wife -- I seized her hand. Maybe it was rough. It startled her, for sure, but whatever was driving her depression cleared enough to reveal a brittle mood like a weak, metallic sun drifting behind thin clouds.

Not right now, Charlie, but thank you for asking.

I tugged the book loose from her fingers. Come on, you need the exercise just as much as I do. You’ll sleep better tonight. This said in my businessman’s voice. By bringing it down low I could sometimes get her to move in my direction.

Charlie, have you heard of Aldebaran?

Aldebaran?

It’s a star, and it’s running out of fuel.

They all do that, don’t they, sooner or later?

"That’s my point. Everybody says they know, but do they really know? Do they understand what it means to run out of fuel and then just burn out? Because if they did, what’s all the running around for if everything just burns out and dies?"

How often had I told her that thinking about things like Aldebaran causes the mind to wander to unnecessary places? Why dwell on the magnitude, the distance, the sheer accidental nature of it all?

What are you reading, anyway? Checking the book, a paperback with the title The End of Eternity. Its cover was illustrated with an astronomical photograph of stars and space.

A story.

Some story if it’s making you think about the end of the universe. That settles it, Lydia. You and I are going for a walk. Just to the lily-pad pool and back. Fifteen minutes, max. There are ailments that defy diagnosis. Her eyes measured me, flat. Come on, I insisted, for the air. We can even talk about Aldebaran on the way, if you want. Astronomy ran underneath our conversation. The Earth’s axis, gyrating over time, the stars above, spending their fuel. And I don’t want to go by myself. It’s lonely out there. Tongue in cheek, but treating the situation as a conspiracy between us against whatever was bothering her.

The air inside the room was like ether, an invisible, enduring substance.

Is it cold? she asked, looking out at the milky light.

Not much, just the way you like it. Right now. Persuasion worked; she rose from the pressure that extended from my hand to her body.

Why had we lived here for so long? In retrospect, so many decisions are unexplainable. Things work gradually in life, and one is usually too busy dealing with minutiae to recognize the forks in the road, only looking back later and wondering why one went this way instead of that.

But can disaster be foretold? Can life be seen in a large enough context to know which way the water flows? Because it always flows downhill.

We left the sun room and walked down a short hallway to the large space that separates our bedroom from the utility room. Coats hung there.

A sliding glass door led outside where an inch-deep layer of snow still lay on the ground. A brick walkway meandered fifty feet to a tree line; the warming air had melted the snow away from the bricks, forming an inviting path. Winter sparrows cut through the air.

We stepped around icy patches. Potted plants sat like enormous ice cream cones, the air drawing mist from the ground.

There was a fork in the pathway where it reached the trees. Turning left, one could make one’s way down the hillside on a broken-brick pathway, a journey rarely taken because it was steep and ended anticlimactically at the back of a strip mall. The more-traveled right turn followed the tree line and snaked to the other side of the property where Dr. Wetherspoon kept his lily-pad pool.

We turned right. The wind picked up and snow tumbled off a bare branch onto the ground, a clot of it hitting my shoulder.

What’s up with you today? I asked lightly.

Just a mood I’m in, I guess.

We rounded a bulge of trees, and the lily-pad pool came into sight. Originally designed for swimming, the pool had been converted by the doctor into a testing site for lily pads. He claimed to be on the verge of developing a hybrid tropical lily that could survive cold temperatures, and experimental specimens grew here.

A large expanse of snow-covered lawn rose uphill to the Wetherspoon mansion, visible through leafless trees, an imposing structure built during the late 19th-century financial boom. From its turret one could see out over the New Jersey coastal plains that stretched all the way to the sea. The doctor kept his study up there, with 360 degree views.

Lydia, buried in her coat, quickened her pace to keep up with me, and we made our way along the walkway to the pool, an antique limestone hole in the ground, lined with local flagstone dug, lifted, and set in place by cheap immigrant labor a century ago. The weather had been warmer than usual, the pool not yet frozen.

I must have felt reckless, possibly influenced by meeting Calvin Belmont (it was my first taste of the reality-distortion field that surrounded the man), because I looped an arm around Lydia’s waist as we neared the pool. Physical touching wasn’t a big thing between us, and she stiffened slightly but didn’t