NACH.COM

On the beach. Our fingers just touched in the sand between our towels. The lemonades were hot. Our skin was hot, sticky. We should have brought the cooler and the umbrella.

“Griz,” I said. “Toss it over here.”

Our fingers parted as he reached for the tube of sun screen and tossed it. It landed near my head. I rubbed the cream into my face, arms, chest, legs, stomach, neck - whatever spots I could reach.

“It’s hot,” I said.

“Go in the water,” Griz answered.

The tips of our fingers touched again as we resumed our tanning positions, both of us on our backs, staring up through sunglasses and closed eyes into the clear blue sky that might have been a million miles from anywhere but was actually only 250 miles from the nearest islands, 500 miles from any continental land mass. A hot tropical spring day, near the end, and I remember thinking, “What’s wrong with this picture?”

I had campaigned to stop the construction on this island of captivity, this penal colony that should never have been built. I had slept with my brother’s enemy. And I once tried to care for two hungry, abandoned, terrified boys. For one offense or the other I was sent here to die. And there I was, killing myself with the sun’s ultraviolet rays.

At first our fingers intertwined. Now they only barely touched.

I met Griz when he was 31 and I was 33 and what I know about his past before me is only what he told me in the short time we had together. So I don’t really know where the story begins, or it where it ends.

It is still hot here, even under the coconut palms that tower over these white sands. The nearby forest drips with life all the way from the treetops to the aquifer beneath the rocks. The forest is filled with cypress, mahogany, strange epiphytes, ferns, strangler figs, and orchids unknown to science when I first came here. The streams are fished by ibis, herons and kingfishers, the banks prowled by ginkos, bats, rabbits, pigs and fire ants. There are children here now, and we can come and go as we please.  But now more than ever I am held here, waiting to die.

The Precaria colony had been established on this small tropical island in the southeastern Caribbean a year before I arrived and two years before Griz arrived. At the time of its opening it had been hailed by the leaders and legislators of its three proprietor governments as a marvel of international cooperation in the war against terror. Of course long before the first prisoner set foot on the island the colony had been decried by the liberal press and by human rights groups as an ingenious and masterfully malevolent conspiracy against the common rights of all men and all women, and though the island’s location was one of the most heavily guarded international military secrets, protected like the launch codes for the neutron bombs, the environmentalists in London, Moscow and San Francisco - and me, in Tel Aviv - complained about the wildlife killed and the habitat destroyed during Precaria’s construction, and at the same time, still years before prisoner number triple-oh-one was interned on the island - a Palestinian I once met in the security zone - conservative politicians and right wing political organizers in Europe, North America and the Commonwealth of Independent States disputed the wisdom of such an expense and such a level of cooperation among inherently antagonistic governments. The fascist, xenophobic isolationists, and the Arabs and the Japanese, were dutifully ignored by the intelligentsia that had already perceived sufficient political support for Precaria to justify its construction. Privately the governors recognized Precaria to be a political tool of unprecedented power: an inescapable prison island whose very location was known to only a handful of people in the world. A humane, popular means to justify their ends.

It was beyond public dispute that the island was absolutely one-hundred percent inescapable. The prison was designed only for convicted criminals sentenced to life incarceration. Government planners even included a cemetery on a cliff at the north end of the island. Prisoners sent to Precaria were said to have died, and if they had families, this is what their families were told. Precarians were not expected to leave the island, not even after they died for real.

Another closely guarded secret about Precaria was the unanimous findings of an international team of penal psychologists and psychiatrists, who concluded with absolute one-hundred percent certainty that one day a man like Griz Manderson would arrive at Precaria, shackled at the legs and waist and bleeding from a gash on his forehead.

Griz was the one-hundred and third prisoner to arrive at Precaria, number one-oh-three. He was sentenced to life incarceration without parole for acts of terror intended to disrupt domestic tranquility in seven nations. In addition to seven life terms he was sentenced to seven concurrent 75-year terms for conspiracy to overthrow the governments of the United States, Mexico, Canada, Great Britain, Venezuela, Brazil and Japan. And he was sentenced to three years in prison for illegal satellite telephone transmissions.

Griz spent two months in the Dade County Jail in Miami; one year in a holding cell in Brooklyn, New York; two months in a Caracas dungeon; two months in a Communité du Europe Maison du Détention in Brussels; one year of house arrest in Tokyo; and three weeks in the Brasilia home of United States Ambassador Philip McCracken, with whom Manderson played tennis in the evenings during his quick, perfunctory trial. After tennis each night Manderson slept with Bambi McCracken, the ambassador’s 20-year-old daughter, a lusty athletic brunette who was on spring break from Bennington College in Vermont.

The trial in Brazil was the last for Griz and after it he was sent to the Leavenworth Federal Corrections Facility in Kansas, U.S.A., where he resided for nine months.  As at all the prisons he had ever been held in - with the exception of Ambassador McCracken’s 10,000-square-foot home - he was kept in solitary confinement at Leavenworth. He had one hour of mandatory and solitary exercise once a week. In the summer he jogged and stretched in an outdoor yard ringed with barbed wire. In the winter he lifted weights in a small, empty, unheated and poorly lit gymnasium. He kept in shape in the cell with push-ups and sit-ups.

Griz grew used to the routines and the frustrations of his prison life. He wrote letters to his ex-wife and his daughter, but they ever answered. Like anyone else who read a newspaper, a habit Griz said he was allowed to continue in prison, he was well aware of the new super prison that had been constructed on some mysterious island in the Caribbean. But he had no idea that he was to be transferred to Precaria until several hours after he was dragged out of bed by two guards before dawn one December morning when dark, quiet sleep in solitary confinement suited Griz better than any unexpected early morning activity.

He was pulled to an interrogation room, beaten on the legs and arms and stomach with black billy clubs, and then he was cuffed and shackled and placed in a bullet-proof van that took him to an airstrip at the edge of the prison grounds, where a small jet and three International Police agents in heavy winter coats were waiting for him. They dragged him a dozen frozen yards to the airplane and pushed him up the  stairs and to a seat, which in its softness alone was a relief from the pain in his ribs and winter air outside. The plane’s door shut without a word from anyone. The pilot or pilots remained unseen and unheard behind a bullet-proof door that never opened. The flight began in darkness and ended as the sun began to set, by which time Griz had figured out where he was going.

The plane banked right and Griz saw the ocean and a white beach, and as the plane straightened one of the Interpol agents stood and approached Griz’s seat. The agent looked unhappy as he approached, a billy club dragging from his left hand behind his thigh. The agent lifted the club and crashed it into Griz’s forehead and then returned to his seat.

“Sorry mate,” the agent said with an Australian accent as he sat down and buckled up for the landing. Griz, already shackled and buckled in his seat, slumped against the window. Blood trickled down the left side of his face into the corner of his mouth. He said the blood was warm and that it tasted sweet.

The plane landed and the three Interpol agents dragged Griz’s sore, limp body across the tarmac and through a series of doors and passages, and when they reached the debriefing pens of the airport holding unit they removed his leg irons and the belly bands and dropped him unceremoniously into a solitary white cell.

“Good luck,” the agent who had clubbed him in the plane said as the thick fire-proof steel door swung shut. The slam of the door and the grind and clash of the locks echoed briefly but then vanished with the agents’ footsteps into silence.

Griz rolled onto his back on the smooth vinyl floor and he looked up at the camera lens in the ceiling, and his eyes followed the ceiling to a far wall and down it to the floor and to a low, polished steel bunk pushed into one corner. Above the bunk on one wall was a recess and in the other wall a small window near the cell’s ceiling that allowed some of the pink and purple light of sunset to stream across the sands beside the runway and into Griz’s small, disinfected three-meter by three-meter cell.

The sun disappeared beneath the long, liquid horizon that Griz had seen stretched from one invisible end of the Atlantic Ocean to the other just beyond the beach that ran parallel to the runway on the west side of the tiny, rugged, tree-covered island. For three hours Griz’s cell was lit by a soft white fluorescent bulb inserted into a secure, unbreakable ceiling panel. His head ached, but the bleeding was minimal.

It had been a splendid beach, serene in its emptiness except for the gulls, sandpipers, and the two watchtowers at opposite ends of the runway. Griz had not seen any other buildings as the plane descended over the beach that stretched on beyond the watchtowers in either direction, and on which, far to the north, as the plane banked for its final approach and the landing gear engaged, Griz thought he had seen naked bathers running in the sand and splashing in the warm ocean waters. By then he understood where he was going, and he wondered when he was going to die, and how. Then he was clubbed across the forehead.

In his cell he lay still on the floor and did not even bother to pull himself onto the steel bunk, which had no mattress, no pillow, and which he guessed could not have been any more comfortable than the polished white floor. He listened for prison sounds but heard nothing at all, just the stone silence of his breathing and his occasional movements on the floor. Later he turned his head and noticed a stainless steel toilet beside the bunk. He pushed himself up to a crawling position, then stood, urinated, and then he sat on the hard bunk.

Three hours after darkness a female voice from an invisible speaker in the ceiling startled Griz out of his solitary contemplation. The voice instructed Griz to disrobe. He stood and took off his orange, one-piece Leavenworth uniform and then he waited, naked, in the center of the cell. He stood on top of a small drain at the center of the floor, which sloped inward ever so slightly toward the drain. He clenched his toes against the floor and he looked down at his hunched, black-and-blue body. Beneath the bruises and his blanket of dark curly hair it was still a body that had improved and strengthened since the divorce, a body that had grown lean and taut since his capture.

“Place your uniform on your bunk,” the voice instructed, and Griz obeyed. His head pounded from the beating and his stomach ached from hunger.

“Are you ready?” the female voice asked in a dispassionate but not unfriendly way.

He wanted to shout with that resonant baritone voice, “Ready for what you bitch?”
But when he tried to move his mouth nothing came out. Parched after a day without water, his lips cracked and began to bleed when he attempted to move them, and after a few moments of more painful silence a mist of lemony warm water mixed with lice remover sprayed out of a nozzle in the ceiling above the drain. Griz approached and stood beneath the water, which slowly heated and increased in pressure, scouring his body and massaging his arms, legs, back and neck. The water cleared of the additives and then became sudsy. Griz scrubbed himself and he soaped his dark brown hair and rubbed his scalp.

Words had often failed Griz, who sometimes found it inconceivable that he was who he was and where he was, a convicted terrorist     sentenced to spend the rest of his life behind bars and prison walls ringed with barbed wire. He said he sometimes sat in his solitary cells and stared at his hands, wondering when they would be touched by other hands. At Leavenworth, where he saw another human being once a week, he would sometimes hear footsteps outside his cell and noises that sounded like they came from microphones or walkie-talkies, and in the mornings and evenings when his water was poured through the slots in the door into a pan, he thought he discerned reflections of skin tone. He saw pictures of other people in the Kansas City Star delivered each day to his cell, but the real purpose of the newspaper was to help him keep track of the days. That was the only way he knew that his exercise was on Fridays.

Griz had never been a vocal antagonist, always fearing the likely repercussions of a futile protest and preferring before he was arrested the more solitary aspects of his work and his crime. Although he stole, altered and deleted secrets, he did so with a reverence for the hushed nature of his work, of the things he stole, altered and deleted, and he felt that in some way he was not breaking a vow or a law or a corporate or state secret, but fulfilling with his silent, unspoken acts a great, secret, silent, unspoken responsibility: to hide the truth, rearrange the facts and confound the perpetrators of madness. He rejoiced in holding the secret to the secrets. At each of his trials he pleaded innocent, refused to testify, and though convicted he never revealed the remarkable extent of his mischief. He believed it would take them a decade or more to discover and repair the damage he caused, and for the real victims, the victims of the truth that Griz had mangled, it would be a decade or more of reprieve, a brief moment in time to live, to breath, to reproduce, and to plan.

The soapy water poured out forcefully from the nozzle. Griz carefully avoided letting the water hit the coagulated blood on his forehead. He washed all around it and removed flakes of blood that had dripped and dried in his left eyebrow, and then the water became clear again and Griz rinsed the sweet, fruity smelling soap from his body and hair. The water was hot, but he swallowed as much as he could. His lips stung and he could feel the rawness of their cracks, but he let the hot water pass over them and into his throat. The water washed away months of silent routine and dry thirsty filth. His last shower was a week before, following his weekly hour of exercise, and it was cold, soapless and quick, with a machine gun aimed at his head.

The water continued to pour into the room and drain out the floor. The room filled with steam that began to condense on the walls and then finally, at the same moment that a narrow jet of pressurized steam gushed into the cell from a nozzle beside the toilet,  the water shut off. The steam filled the room and kept it hot and moist like a sauna so that Griz didn’t feel chilled when the hot water shut off. He dried himself with the thick white cotton towel tucked with a set of white overalls and slippers into the wall recess above the bunk and he placed his orange Leavenworth uniform beneath the bunk and then he put on the new overalls and slippers. The overalls bore the number 0103 in large black numerals on the front and back.

“Thank you one-oh-three,” the female voice said through the invisible speaker in the ceiling. Griz lay down on the steel bunk. An hour later the fluorescent light shut off.

---

Soon after he awoke, the cell already dimly lit by the rising sun, Griz heard birds outside the window above and behind his head and he remembered the months of hiding in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He had fled New York because his activities had been discovered. He was wanted on three continents. His escape had pointed to Rwanda and then to Nigeria, as if he had been making his way to the jungles of central Africa. But it was all a computer ruse he had planted before leaving for the mountains, where he lived peacefully for one summer before attempting to make his way to Australia. There he would have lived in anonymous peace, maybe even with with his ex-wife and daughter, if the cargo ship captain with whom he had made arrangements months before had not turned out to be as reliable as the men he once worked for. Griz was arrested when the ship docked in Miami.

The chirping above his head faded and at first Griz thought the birds had flown away or that he was dreaming, but then he realized that the songs had been transmitted through the speaker in the ceiling.

“Good morning one-oh-three,” a male voice with an educated British accent said through the speaker in the ceiling. “I trust you slept well.”

The door to the cell unlatched and swung out.

“Please,” the voice said, “Join me for some breakfast.”

Griz sat up and he watched the door open automatically into a hallway.

“Come on then,” the voice said.

Griz said he sat still on the bunk for a moment because he wanted to know what would happen if he disobeyed. He wanted to know how terrible this new place was and he decided there was no better time to test the will of his captors than on this first morning at Precaria, when he was so hungry that they could not imagine he would spit in their faces and refuse to move.

But he was by nature a quiet man. He said his insanity passed on through the door  ahead of him as he came to fully recognize the desperation of his situation: that he was clean, well-rested, only slightly sore, on an island miles from anywhere, and - he already suspected - that he was dead.

He stood and walked through the door, and when he saw that his cell was near the end of a long dead-end hall he turned to the left and walked past several doors identical to his own, thinking that all the doors hid cells just like his. And why was he the only one invited to breakfast? How did he know this? How did he know that he was the only prisoner invited to breakfast by a friendly British voice that might have belonged to a sadist? He did not know. He had been in a soundproof room all night and he realized that he knew nothing at all about his surroundings other than what he had seen. He knew of a beach and an air strip. He knew of ocean, and sun. And he knew of his hunger. That was all.

Griz walked to the end of the hallway, which intersected another hall that continued to the left and right. Just as he reached this `T’ intersection, the man with the British voice stepped out of nowhere from someplace to the left.

“Hello one-oh-three. Mr. Manderson. I’m Walter Bartholomew. I’m so glad to meet you. Welcome to Precaria.”

Walter politely and automatically extended his hand to Griz, because Walter is automatically polite. Griz looked at Walter’s hand and then at Walter, who was several centimeters shorter than Griz’s full two meters. Griz took note of Walter’s short dark hair, broad shoulders on a stout frame, and his perfectly tailored gray chalkstripe suit, polished black leather wingtips, his white button-down shirt with a burgundy and blue regimental striped tie, and on his left wrist a gold watch with a black leather band. Griz distinctly remembered all of this and the mole on Walter’s left cheek and the gray hairs in one of Walter’s eyebrows. He thought Walter looked like he had had just stepped out of Parliament for a chat, or out of a bank or a corporate board room. He was clean shaven and wore cologne.

Walter’s cheeks stretched into a mild, amiable, rosy smile, but Griz was unmoved. Griz clasped Walter’s outstretched hand tightly and shook it.

“Sorry about the clothing and the number, Mr. Manderson,” Walter said. “We don’t really use numbers here. Just for the first day. It’s part of the transition. Don’t want to turn your world upside down all at once. We’ve all got names and faces here. Please,” he said, motioning with his hand, “This way.”

He guided Griz with the wave of his hand. They walked beside each other through empty, brightly lit hallways lined with blank, windowless doors, turning left, then right, then left again until they reached a glass door. Griz could see deep green vegetation and sunlight on the other side of the door. The door was unguarded and unlocked and Walter guided Griz through it.

They stepped outdoors onto a slate path that twisted through a well-manicured lawn and garden. The garden was lined at its borders with tall coconut trees at the back of what appeared to be a British aristocrat’s version of the two-story beach bungalow - with a  satellite dish on the roof. Griz could not see the ocean, but he could feel it in the light morning breeze. The isolation of the past three years, with the delightful exception of Brazil, had taught Griz the true art of silence, of which he knew only the simplest principles when he committed his crimes. In prison, especially at Leavenworth, he learned that silence was not merely secretive and non-communicative but an act of defiance and self-preservation. He kept his head as stiff as possible so as not to show too much surprise or wonder as he and Walter climbed broad granite stairs that led to the granite patio at the back of the house.

Walter offered Griz a white painted iron lattice chair at a glass table shaded by a yellow and blue striped umbrella. The table had been set for two with white china, polished sterling silverware and crystal, a glass pitcher of orange juice, a tea pot, a steel vacuum canister, a basket of tropical fruit, a butter dish, and a basket of bread sticks, poppy seed rolls and croissants. Walter sat down across from Griz and poured himself tea and a glass of juice. He took a banana from the fruit basket.

“You must try the fruit,” Walter said. “Try the bananas and the mangoes.”

Griz took a small banana from the basket and he poured himself a glass of orange juice.

“There’s coffee in there if you like,” Walter said, pointing to the vacuum canister. “It’s local. We grow it, pick it, dry it and roast it ourselves. Very good.”

Griz poured himself a cup of dark, fragrant coffee. He said the smell of that coffee nearly gave him an orgasm. He added a dash of cream and dropped a lump of sugar it the coffee, which splashed slightly onto his saucer.

“I must say, one-oh-three, you’ve been very decent about all this. Oh, good lord, listen to me. I’m truly sorry about the clothing and the number. It’s so big and bold and it’s running through my head. The numbers are part of this grand plan the psychologists dreamed up to ease the transition, you know, from prisoner to Precarian. I still have trouble with it and I don’t know why we keep up with it. We take their advice, but we shouldn’t. We know we shouldn’t, but we do. Just for a day. What if they’re right? Anyway, you’ ve been quite decent and I for one appreciate it. Some of us started out rather more violent than you and to be honest we expected you to be less cooperative. Your size alone makes you a bit, shall I say, imposing?”

Griz broke a croissant in half and spread some butter and apricot preserves in the center of one half of the croissant, and he took a small, measured bite, careful to chew slowly. He followed his first bite of food in 36 hours with a small sip of coffee.

“Really Mr. Manderson, I know all about the third degree. I’m a master of it myself, you know. Or I used to be. I’m not going to poison you or eat you and we’re not being video taped, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m just trying to make a little breakfast conversation. We’ve got a meeting at half past. You can keep quiet until then if you wish. I do hope food will make you a bit more cheerful. Your dossier says you were well liked by your friends and at Richmond Hillier. It describes you as a gentle, good natured father, a nouveau radical. How do you like that,  nouveau radical? God, what will they think of next? Old-world fascist? Born Again Nazi? I don’t see how you were even radical, let alone nouveau. In my day you were called a hacker. Just a clever mischievous hacker. But look how things have changed since my day.”

Walter let out one of his gruff, short-burst laughs, and he ate some unbuttered roll and drank from his glass of orange juice, and then, as he dabbed the corner of his mouth with his linen napkin, he continued: “Mind you, there’s an awful lot that doesn’t make sense. I’ll tell you now, we have our doubts about you.”

“Why?” Manderson asked, his heart racing as he gave in to the desire to speak, to ask a question.

“Mr. Manderson, really,” Walter said without pausing to acknowledge Griz’s voice . “We know all about you.”

“What do you know about me?” Griz asked.

“All in good time, rest assured,” Walter said with that warm, friendly voice of his. “I’ll introduce you to some of the others after breakfast. Please, eat. You must be ravenous. You haven’t had food in thirty-four hours, and I’d hardly call what they fed you in Leavenworth food. The croissants are wonderful. And try the bread sticks. It’s all fresh. Go on.”

Walter waved at the food with his left hand, urging Griz on.

Griz took a second croissant and spread orange marmalade into it and then he chewed, followed by a deep gulp of coffee.  He pulled a bread stick from the basket and he broke off a piece and buttered it and he bit into it, and then he drained his glass of orange juice and poured himself a second.

“That’s more like it,” Walter said, smiling.

Griz buttered another piece of the bread stick and ate it, and another, and soon it was devoured. The poppy seed roll, also warm and freshly baked, reminded Griz of poppy seed bagels in New York, where he worked for four years as a computer programmer for the accounting firm. As the food and drink settled into his reduced stomach Griz became acutely aware of his clothes, which had been irrelevant when he put them on the night before after his shower in solitary confinement, but which seemed absurd as the attire of a breakfast guest at some Oxford-educated aristocrat’s colonial retreat. In the white jump suit he felt juvenile, and medical, like a child registered at a hospital. He felt like the unwilling subject of a medical experiment, perhaps being fed his last meal. It was strange to be in the presence of another person and not be bound at the legs and waist, and yet his legs and waist felt as if they were bound, tight with anxiety.

Griz looked up at the house and behind Walter at the coconut palm trees that towered over the yard. The yard was full of unseen birds singing their wake-up calls to the island prison that Griz had heard and read so much about. Were they real birds?

It was the strangest feeling, he told me, to feel clean, relaxed, and well fed, and yet to know for certain that he was as much a prisoner as he had ever been, on what had been described as the most inhuman place on the planet. Perhaps that’s why he was beaten on the plane - to remind him of the unexpected, the unseen, to remind him that he would always be a prisoner, no matter how gentle the beaches looked, no matter how joyous he felt. His experience was typical. Many of us had been beaten before we were transferred, and it took all of us time to adjust.

“I’ve heard this is a terrible place,” Griz said as he looked beyond Walter. “An evil place.”

“Now don’t jump to conclusions. You can’t believe everything you read. Coffee?”

“No thank you.”

Griz sipped at his orange juice.

---

Walter sat at the end of a long wooden table that fit his corporate image, in an oak-panelled conference room reached by walking through the sitting room and through the library. Griz sat at the opposite end of the table, and one by one the eight empty seats at the table were filled by men and women who carried attaché cases, briefcases or binders filled with notes. Some, like Walter, were dressed in suits, some, like me, in shorts, t-shirts or one-piece bathing suits.

“So,” Walter said when the chairs around the table had all been filled with bodies. “Let’s get started. Everyone, this is one-oh-three, Mr. Griswold Aimes Manderson.”

We all nodded at Griz.

Walter picked up a folder from the table in front of him and he lifted a packet with a green cover out of the folder.  He dropped the folder back on the table and opened to the first page of the packet and he began to read out loud:

“Born 12 October 1991 at University Hospital in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. Parents, Benjamin Aimes Manderson and Laura Ingolls Weisenberg, separated 26 July 1993. Moved with mother to San Francisco. Parents divorced 17 October 1993. Father killed in automobile accident 27 February 1994 while driving to San Francisco to attempt reconciliation with former wife and for possible arms negotiations. Father had ties to intelligence communities, arms and diamond merchants. Death apparent assassination by Japanese nationalists affiliated with the Kamikaze Guard terrorists. No investigation. Body cremated.”

“What the hell,” Griz said as he pushed his wooden chair out from beneath himself and stood up, leaning his fists against the table for support and looking first at Walter and then around the table at the others, who returned looks of equally mystified surprise and suspicion.

“Please, Mr. Manderson,” Walter said. “Just a  little backgrounder for the others.”

“Assassination?” Griz asked. He had never been told anything about an assassination.

“There’s plenty of time to discuss that later. Please, have a seat. Now, where was I?” Walter turned his attention back to his file. Griz looked around the table once more. I could see the sweat on his brow and that the muscles in his arms were tensed, ready for a fight, and that Walter might have to call in the unseen security detachment that had been on alert since Griz’s arrival the night before. Our eyes met briefly and then he sat down.

“Public education, yes, yes, we know all that, graduated University of California at Los Angeles, majors in computer science and accounting, minor in business administration and personnel management, grade point average 3.26, blah, blah, blah, okay, here we go. 17 June through 23 August 2010. European tour with biology student Lilian Winchester Beedle. Great Britain, Northern Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, Slovakia. Initial underground contact 12 July 2010 in Frankfurt. Wolfgang Schroeder. Conversation at beer garden about toxic waste, biodiversity, literature and computer programming  Petra, you knew Schroeder, didn’t you?”

Petra, the blond-haired woman sitting just to Griz’s left, answered, “We knew of each other but he was killed before we met.”

“That’s right,” Walter said, and then he continued from the report: “17 September 2010: begins employment as management trainee at Richmond Hilliard International in New York. Married Beedle 17 May 2011. Transfers to Tokyo, London, Zurich and back to New York. One child, Grace, born in London 24 September 2012. Arrested in Miami 18 May 2017 on various charges we’re all familiar with. Dismissal in absentia from Richmond Hilliard 21 May 2017. Convictions, etc., etc., yes, we know all that. And now here he is. With us. Well then, Mr. Manderson. Welcome to Precaria.”

Walter smiled and looked at Griz and then at all the others.

“So,” Walter said, addressing the others. “You’ve got the details. Any questions?”

“The psychological profile,” Petra said.

“Yes, I know,” Walter answered, and then looking at Griz he said, “Mr. Manderson: Several of us are troubled by your psychological profile. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble, but would you mind answering a few quick questions?”

“Like what?” Griz asked.

“Like why did you delete Consolidated Uranium data from computer files that you knew had been duplicated and stored on optical disc?”

“A delay,” Griz answered. “It gave me time.”

“On the contrary, it cost you time. Two hours and 23 minutes. And it set off all sorts of alarms. You never had a chance once you did that. You’re lucky to be alive.”

“I had an excellent chance,” Griz said. “And the alarms had been set off long before that. I’d been under surveillance for weeks.”

“But why the delay?” Walter asked. “It may have cost you your freedom.”

“It did not,” Griz answered.

“Would you care to explain why not?” Walter asked.

“No, I would not. It was necessary.”

“Something you did to the records?”

Griz didn’t answer.

“Very well,” Walter said. “That simply brings us to another point. On several occasions you have taken unnecessary, foolish, one might almost say suicidal risks, with no apparent gain. You stole sensitive, closely guarded documents from Kensingworth Pharmaceutical. And after your capture, all those escape attempts. They were futile. They were terribly dangerous. Surely you knew this?”

“What are you talking about?” Griz asked. “I never tried to escape.”

“Come now, Mr. Manderson. We’re not judges here. 24 March of last year. You attempted and failed to grab the prison cell keys from a guard in Brussels.”

“That’s crap,” Griz said. “I never tired to escape.”

“And two nights ago,” Walter continued, “You attempted to break free of your guards at Leavenworth. Got you a nasty bump on the head.”

“They beat me!” Griz said sternly. “At Leavenworth and on the plane. I never attempted to escape. I never gave them any trouble at all.”

“Come now Mr. Manderson. I hardly think you were beaten on the plane. Interpol does not beat their prisoners.”

“Fuck you.” Griz said.

Walter looked around the table at the raised eyebrows, glanced at me for a moment, and then, mildly embarrassed and flushed, he said with slight laugh, “Well, no matter. You’re here now. You’re safe. We’re very pleased to have you here. Allow me to introduce the others.”

Beginning at his left and working clockwise around the table, Walter introduced: Garrick McKennan, 39, an Irish diesel engineer and explosives expert; Phillippa Brenshaw, 53, a British Far East expert and double agent and a cat burglar who specialized in Van Gogh; William Brenshaw, 57, her husband, who torched part of the British Museum’s Chinese and impressionist collections following an argument with Phillippa; Jose “M.C. Ice Nine” Escher, 26, a San Jose, California, elementary school teacher, musician and union activist sent to prison for killing an undercover police officer who ran into Escher’s school in pursuit of a 12-year-old heroin dealer; Petra Romanov, 34, the blond Russian army psychoanalyst and counter-terrorist expert who moved to the U.S. in 2011 and who a year later was sentenced to life in prison without parole for running down the Croatian Secretary General of the United Nations with her New York City taxi cab; Gerhard Manheim, 59, the German physicist who masterminded the near-meltdown of a flawed Japanese nuclear power plant; Ikara Mitsui, 24, the Harvard-educated daughter of former Japanese foreign minister Akira Mitsui, who was convicted a day after her 28th birthday of shooting to death two police guards posted outside a Tokyo brothel, where her father was in the company of two geishas, one of them a North Korean spy - an incident that led to a constitutional crisis in Japan and two years of violent nationalist uprisings; Dr. Carlos Juan de la Rios, 44, a Mexican pediatrician who led strikes and riots in Mexico City; and me, Lucy Lerner, 33, an American-born Israeli paratrooper convicted of espionage and dereliction of duty for aiding and abetting wanted Palestinian terrorists - two teenage boys who slept in my apartment for a week after their parents were killed by my brother’s military police unit.

Walter said to me, “I trust you will help Mr. Manderson adjust,” and to Griz he said, “Mr. Manderson, I’ve asked Lucy to help you get settled. It’s something she does for us. I think I can speak for all of us in saying that we’re very pleased to have you here. Very pleased. We’re thrilled to have someone with your skills here, truly. When you’re ready, I’ve got a number of computer questions. My system is so sluggish these days. Well then, I guess that’s it. Any questions? No? Good. Let’s see, assembly meeting tomorrow morning. Lucy, Mr. Manderson is of course welcome, but you two might want to just go about your business. Everyone, do remember to send me agenda items by two p.m. And remember, there’s a barbecue at my place tonight at six.”

Walter pushed his chair out from the table, stood while lifting the folder off the desk, and he walked out without saying a word to anyone, exiting through the door that he and Griz had walked through from Walter’s office a half an hour earlier.

The others meandered slowly toward another door, smiled at Griz, nodded, and M.C. Ice Nine and the Mexican doctor patted him on the back. Griz and I remained seated until the others had left the room.

I had seen fifty others go through the same procedure, including Gerhardt Manheim, Garrick McKennan, M.C. Ice Nine, both Crenshaws and Ikara Mitsui, so from past experience I expected a look of perplexity, embarrassment, terror and confusion. Griz was calm, cool, unfazed by each new development in what for some time would be a string of strange, new experiences. After a brief glance at me he stared at his hands and said, “A paratrooper?”

I said, “Yes,” and he shook his head.

“And you’re all prisoners?”

“Yes.”

“Walter?”

“Him too. Bank fraud. Arms merchant. Big time scandal.”

I waited for him to move, to ask another question, but he didn’t. His hands were locked together on the table in front of him, and he continued to stare into them.

He was still, stony, and I admired this. I was sure his mind and his heart were racing, nearly out of control with anxiety, but all I saw was a strong, white, motionless figure.

He was thinking about his daughter, he told me later, about her wide hazel eyes and her broad, plump, smiling cheeks.

It was my job to introduce the new Precarians to Precaria, so I had been in similar positions before, seen the newcomers squirm as they struggled to understand why they were dressed in white jump suits, why they saw beaches and smiles and sunshine when hours before they had been imprisoned, sometimes in hell holes far worse than the one Griz came from. I had sat in the same chair and watched men and women pound their fists, throw chairs, weep, shout at me, threaten me, curse me. I was once the newcomer, once the unknowing, uncertain victim of Precaria’s cruel hoax.

Griz finally broke. Without moving his eyes he asked in a softened, unchallenging voice,
“Am I dead?”

“Yes,” I answered, and he wept.

---

We were all dead. Our families were told we were dead, usually weeks or months after the transfer when someone would try to make contact with us. Murders, suicides, heart-attacks. Autopsies, death certificates. Cremations. No remains. To our families, whom we rarely if ever saw to begin with, we were dead. A security measure to protect the dark secret of Precaria. Beyond the island’s sandy shores, none of us existed.

Griz looked up from his hands and into my eyes and I was incapable of turning away. This tall, broad-shouldered man was wet, confused, afraid, and he knew that without my help or someone’s help his great physical strength and powerful intellect would not be enough on their own to forge an explanation of what was happening to him. I was his best hope.

“What is this place?” he asked, pleading with his eyes for an honesty that until that point had not been denied, only avoided.

I knew he knew the answer and I paused, encouraged him with my pause to say it himself. But his face changed, the muscles tensed and the weakness disappeared from his eyes.

“What is this place?” he asked, pounding a fist into the wooden table. And then, slowly, pounding on the table with each word, he shouted, “What - Is - This - Place?”

“This is Precaria,” I said numbly. We had arrived at the emotional breakdown I had expected.

His shoulders sank slightly beneath his sleeves.

“It’s not what you think,” I said, almost pleading with him to give Precaria a chance, to give me a chance. “Everything will seem strange at first. Don’t be afraid. You know nothing about this place.”

“What do you mean?”

I meant that he knew nothing about me, but of course despite the dossier I really knew nothing about him. I meant that what I was going to tell him would confuse him far more than the carefully concocted, terrifying and utterly false myth of Precaria. I meant that he knew only of a lie, that he did not know the truth. I meant that he was about to start life over in a new place, among new people, and that he would never again have to drink water poured through slats in a prison cell door. I meant that he could walk to the mangrove forests at the northern end of Precaria and stay there and be eaten by mosquitoes if he wanted, or rest  in an air conditioned cottage, or bath naked in our warm tropical waters. I meant that he could eat mango, papaya, coconut or fried chicken, tell anyone he wanted how dissatisfied he was with the conditions, spit and chew gum, laugh loudly at any hour. I meant that through some incredibly secret procedure he had been sent to Precaria not as a form of punishment but as a reprieve, a reprieve not just from a sentence of imprisonment, but a reprieve from the world itself. I meant that Griz had been transferred, against his will, without his knowledge, to paradise. I meant that he was free.

“What do you mean?” he asked again, this time softly, inquisitive, like a child in a man’s body. His head tilted, his eyes pleaded, and I meant to begin the explanation of the magical transformation his life had undergone since he was dragged away from his cell in Leavenworth, Kansas. But that morning, when Griz and I sat alone for the first time and when I was supposed to be there simply to explain to him why he was where he was, a strange hesitancy came over me that I had never felt before, an uncertainty, as if I were the one not sure where I was or if I would ever leave and whether this man before me was my friend or my enemy. I was supposed to be the one with the answers, the one assigned to help ease the new Precarians into their new lives, but that morning I hesitated, I questioned the answers, and to this day I wonder if Griz registered and absorbed my hesitation, caused it, adopted it, or if he did not notice the pain I felt in looking into his handsome face.

“Are you tired?” I asked.

“No,” he said dismissively. “What do you mean I know nothing?”

“Let’s get you some clothes,” I said.

I stood and he grabbed me by the wrist.

“What do you mean I know nothing?” he said fiercely, squeezing my wrist. “I am dead. My life is over. My wife is gone. My daughter is a fragmentary, unhappy image from 18 months ago. I’m trapped I don’t know where - for all I know I may really be dead. This may be heaven. This may be hell. My battles are over, my dreams are over. And you, you sit there calmly and tell me I know nothing? You’d better think again, young lady. Think about what you know. I know death. I know it. I live it. What do you know?”

He released my arm and turned to the door.

“You’re not dead,” I said to his back.

“Don’t patronize me,” he said. “Show me. Show me this death.”

Rather than argue I decided to show him. I walked past him through the door to an empty  marble hallway and he followed and we walked out the front entrance of Precaria headquarters and along the gravel path to the commissary that stocked everything from office supplies to prescription drugs to clothing. The food was distributed at the market a short distance away.

Griz walked forcefully behind me, refusing to again demonstrate the weakness I know he felt, and at the commissary he picked blue shorts, leather sandals, a white t-shirt and a Minnesota Twins baseball cap. I suggested long pants and a long sleeve shirt for the evening and told him I owned a similar daytime outfit. He growled when I used the word `outfit.’

“It’s just clothes,” he snapped. “The clothes of the dead. It’s not an outfit.”

“It’s an outfit,” I said. “We’ll stop by later for a wardrobe.”

He didn’t crack a smile.

“Just clothes,” he mumbled, and then he said, “How about some extra underwear?”

“We’ll come back later to complete your wardrobe,” I said.

At my urging he requested a tube of sunscreen, and then I led him along the forested footpath beside Thames Creek to West Beach. We sat there past lunch and into the afternoon as I explained Precaria to him. To the unknowing propagandized world, it was a penal colony. To us, it was home.

Later we took our shoes off and walked in the water and then I took him to his cottage. Later we ate dinner with Marty Eisenberg and Jocelyn Pullman. Griz said he slept well that first night in the bed in his cottage. In my own cottage, warm and humid without the air conditioning, I could not sleep. The breeze kicked up the curtains around the window in my bedroom and like the curtains I was restless. I could not stop thinking about Griz.

---

Griz had no trouble understanding what Precaria was, and he quickly adapted to the carefree lifestyle. But he had a hard time accepting that Precaria was permanent.

“Israel?” he asked one morning as we walked along a wooden boardwalk toward East Beach. “What part?”

“I was born in Chicago, ” I said. “We moved to Israel when I was two. I was raised in Jerusalem. The Old City.”

“Oh,” he said admiringly. “The golden sunset reflected off the Dome of the Rock. Evening prayers. The Wall. Soldiers. Little children. I would like to see it again.”

“Yes,” I said. “So would I. I wish that were possible.”

“Anything is possible,” he said.

“No,” I answered. “Some things are not possible. I’m thankful for what we’ve got.”

“You’re just tired,” Griz said. “You need some sleep.”

It was morning.

“I’m not tired,” I said. “I’m realistic. And you should be too.”

“I am,” he said.

We spent most of his first few weeks in each other’s company, discussing the nominal routines of life on Precaria, including the few simple rules: no smoking in common buildings, no violence, and no loud noises within the residence boundary after 11 p.m. weeknights, 1 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays. We had no specific punishments spelled out anywhere, and I explained that all group decisions were up to the assembly - the weekly island meetings where we discussed and voted on whatever issues needed discussion and deliberation. The important rules were always obeyed. We never had trouble. If someone broke a rule it was usually enough to point it out in assembly. The embarrassing shouts of “Shame on you,” were enough to deter further transgressions.

Theft, of course, was unlikely, because we could all have anything we wanted — anything within reason. There was no valuable jewelry or clothing on the island, no guns, and no cars or boats or valuable art.
Griz was pleasantly startled when we first walked along West Beach and came to the nude section.

“I saw that from the plane,” he said, excited. “Or I thought I did. And I didn’t. I thought it must have been a hallucination.”

He smiled and tried not to stare too obviously at Cassandra Sings A Lot, a dark-haired Oglala Lakota from South Dakota who was sent to Precaria after two years in an American prison for the Mount Rushmore paint bombing. She was a six-foot-tall 23-year-old beauty. I couldn’t blame Griz for staring a little - I stared myself.

One Sunday night, after a hot day hike to the northern end of Precaria that ended back near the cottages with a sunset walk on West Beach, Griz and I became lovers.

Late that night in my bed, when the wind was still and the forest quiet, we rested naked beside each other and held hands.

“I am the happiest man alive,” Griz said.

“I am the happiest woman,” I said.

“I’m in a daze,” he said. “I’m not sure if any of this is real.”

“It’s not,” I said. “It’s all a dream and we’re going to wake up one day somewhere else.”

“But we’re not,” Griz said. “We’re never going to wake up anywhere else. We’re in this dream forever.”

“I hope so,” I said.

Griz ran his hand through my hair and then we fell asleep.

---

Griz moved into my cottage. It took him weeks to tell me the details of his journey to Precaria, whereas my own story was so much simpler: I was arrested in Tel Aviv, convicted in Tel Aviv, and sent to Precaria a week later. My brother was apparently told I committed suicide. He was all I left behind, and we were never close.

Griz held onto the dream of seeing his daughter again. His ex-wife and daughter visited him once when he was in jail in Miami. Lilian was living in Minneapolis with someone else by then, Jack, a divorced cardiologist, who had two children. Lilian came to Miami just weeks before she was to defend her doctoral thesis in prairie ecology at the University of Minnesota. She had resisted the trip, but Griz prevailed upon her in a series of letters over a period of months to bring Grace to Miami for a quick visit. He pulled whatever heart strings he could, at  one time telling Lilian it would be good for Grace, it would be immoral to deny Grace the visit, that down the road Grace would resent her mother if they didn’t visit, that their five-year-old would be scarred for life without more of her father. Finally, in December, just three weeks before his first trial was set to start, Lilian came to Miami.

Griz was brought to the visiting room first, his legs shackled but his hands free. He sat in a chair at a glassed booth, one of a dozen in the room. A dozen guards watched the meetings, as did a dozen cameras. Griz took his seat in front of the glass divider, and he waited. He could hear fragments of other reunions, “Baby I miss you…Grover gettin’ on my nerves…Jenna’s pregnant…Iss jess business baby…” and fast , angry Spanish that he could not follow. The walls were industrial yellow, and above where Lilian and Grace would sit a large clock ticked away the precious moments.

Griz blinked, and when his eyes opened Lilian and Grace were standing in front of him on the other side of the bullet-proof glass.

“Say hi to daddy,” Lilian said, and the frightened little girl in the pink dress said, “Hello daddy.”

“Hello sugar plumb,” Griz said, and then looking up, “Hello Lilian.”

She smiled perfunctorily, for the sake of appearances, and then sat down in the hard-backed chair, Grace leaning at her side.

“How’s my little girl?” Griz said.

“Fine,” she answered. “I have a puppy. A black labrabor retrieder.”

“Labro-Dor-Re-Triever,” Lilian said.

“Labrador retriever,” Grace said. “Charlie.”

“A puppy, that’s wonderful. How old is he?”

“He’s two months old daddy. Jack got him for me at the animal shelter. For my birthday.”

“Well that was nice of Jack, wasn’t it,” Griz said, beginning to recognize the absurdity of the meeting.

“Tell daddy about your star,” Lilian said.

“I got a star,” Grace said. She was squirming beside her mother but becoming more relaxed.

“A star? What kind of star?”

“In the sky, silly,” Grace said, smiling for the first time. “Where else would you find a star?”

Her smile was as brilliant and awesome as any star in the universe.

“Jack bought it for her,” Lilian explained, interrupting Griz’s split-second of joy. “He got a star named after her. Grace 01-G-01-01. It’s ten thousand light years away.”

“A star?” Griz asked, shocked. “What the hell does that cost?”

“Three thousand,” Lilian said coldly.

“Daddy, when are you coming home?” Grace asked, quietly.

“Shush,” Lilian said to her. “I told you not to ask that.”

“She can ask,” Griz said angrily, and then sweetly to his daughter. “Sugar plumb, I’m not sure. Not for a long time. They’re going to want to keep me in jail, and they probably will.”

“What did you do daddy? Were you bad?”

“No darling, I wasn’t bad. But the people in charge don’t like what I did. I tried to stop them from doing bad things.”

“Then they should be in jail.”

“Yes, but they run the jail, so they’ve put me here.”

“And they’re bad men?” she asked.

“Very bad.”

“Okay, you two,” Lilian said, interrupting and scowling at Griz. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“Daddy,” Grace said, tears swelling in her little eyes.  “Mommy says I shouldn’t miss you, but I do. I’m sorry daddy,” and she began to sob. Griz reached out to the glass barrier, wishing he could touch her and console her. Lilian did the job for him, holding her, rocking her, and saying softly to Griz, “I’m sorry Griswold. I hope you’re okay. We better go now.”

“No,” Grace said, pulling away from her mother. “I don’t want to go. I want to stay with daddy.”

“But we’ve got to get to our plane, darling. We’re going back to Minneapolis today. To Jack and Greg and Leslie.”

“I don’t want to go to Minneapolis! I want to stay with daddy.”

“Say goodbye, Grace. Say goodbye to daddy.”

“Goodbye daddy,” she said, sobbing. ” I love you daddy. Please come to Minneapolis.”

Lilian turned Grace around and said softly to Griz, “Goodbye Griswold,” and she turned and walked out of the visiting room. A guard put his hand on Griz’s shoulder.

“Come on man,” he said.

---

Griz and I woke up most mornings just after sunrise, ate a small breakfast with fresh juice and coffee, and then we typically went for a walk or a run, either along West Beach or sometimes through the forest near East Beach, which was further away but always a rewarding, soothing journey.

We devoted several hours each week to our voluntary services: Griz managed the computers and became involved in the island’s inventory management, and I organized the physical education facilities: the weight room, pool, sauna, rowing machines, three aerobic muscle toning classes a day, plus bicycle, running, diving and rowing clubs.

We didn’t have television or movies or newspapers. At night we would read books from the island library, or visit some of the other cottages, or go to one of the islands two “restaurants” for drinks, dinner or desert. All for free, prepared by volunteer cooking staffs.

Our supplies were always fresh and always plentiful, but they were not consistent like the supermarkets we had been used to before prison. This made dining, even at home, an adventure and a treat every night, because if we ate salad, it meant a recent delivery of greens and vegetables. The seasons didn’t matter so much as the whims of the military shipping clerks who handled our top-secret grocery orders. I remember the whole island was abuzz with news of one shipment: cantaloupes and zucchini, and for a week we ate nothing but cantaloupes and zucchini.

One of the restaurants was called Mervyn’s On The Beach. It featured fish whenever the supply planes brought fish, chicken when they brought chicken, and beef when they brought beef. And almost always wonderful soups and salads.  We also had frequent meals of pork thanks to the growing population of formerly domesticated pigs that roamed the island. Fortunately there were a few hunters among us.

Mervyn, formerly a white a mercenary from Zimbabwe, was famous for his grilled satay pork ribs.

---

It was a Tuesday in March, Griz’s third month at Precaria, my fifteenth. We lay in sizzling stillness on the beach, fully exposed and unshaded by the nearby palms, protected only by the lotion we repeatedly rubbed into our skin. Our books lay unopened at our sides.

It was a day like most, steeped in tropical simplicity. I listened to the waves rolling in on top of each other, waters from beyond that had touched places we could see only in our imaginations. I felt the weight of the sun’s heat push down on me and the weight of the sand beneath my towel push up. I was suspended in perfect balance between the sky and the earth and Griz, motionless, our fingers limp and stretched across the sand, falling just near enough to touch like wisps of hair touching end to end.

Finally I could take the day’s burn no longer. I took Griz’s suggestion and and ran into the water, which itself was tepid but which still cooled my seared skin and dissipated my heat. Griz stayed on his towel. He only moved when I returned to him and I shook my hair dry. His shoulders twitched when the first drops of spray hit him, but then his muscles relaxed again.

I lay down to let the sun dry my brown front, then I rolled onto my stomach to bake off the last remaining molecules of sea water on my back.

We dressed and returned to the coolness of the cottage for showers and lunch, and after lunch Griz spent most of the afternoon at the computer operations office at headquarters. I taught an aerobics class and made final arrangements for a scuba dive the following morning. I got back to the cottage around four and cleaned up a bit. Griz got back around five.

“How was work?” I asked.

“Dull,” he answered. “Like everything. Sunny and pleasant and dull.”

“You don’t have to do it,” I said.  “You don’t have to do anything.”

“I have to do something,” he said nastily, pulling off his shirt and throwing it on our couch.

“Well you don’t have to yell!” I shouted, and I left the cottage and walked toward the beach. Griz followed and caught up with me. He gently grabbed my arm.

“Luce, I’m sorry.”

I kept on walking without answering.

“Luce, I’m really sorry,” he said, his hand still softly clutching my right arm as we stepped onto the sand while the sun sank quickly toward the horizon. We walked on in silence and then I said,”This is it, Griz You don’t have a choice.”

I was so angry that he had vented his frustration on me. “You’ve got to take this. Is that so terrible? Am I so terrible? Griz, it doesn’t get any better than this. We’ve got it made. Not a care in the world. We’re healthy, we’re happy, we do what we want, when we want.”

“I’m sorry I blew up,” he said. “But you’re wrong.  We don’t do what we want. We do what we can. There’s a difference.”

“We can have children,” I said.

He took my hand and looked into my eyes and then we sat down in the sand. The tide was rising. The sun had already set, and we had missed it. Griz didn’t say a word.

Soon after that Griz began taking long walks by himself in the morning. Sometimes he would leave at dawn and not get back until noon. He said he needed time to think, that he might like to write a book, maybe a novel. I knew, despite his denials, that he wanted to get away from me. We no longer made love every day. I decided to wait for him to leave because I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of getting himself thrown out.

One night he finally told me the truth. We walked in the moist darkness along the raised wooden footpath to North Beach, where a few Precarians had set up sleeping bags and were having a beach campfire. Griz made me hunch down to avoid being seen, and we made our way through the woods at the edge of the beach to Gray’s Lagoon, a secluded tiny bay that I had taken Griz to when he first arrived at Precaria. We walked along a dirt path in the woods to a small clearing, and Griz shined his flashlight on the wooden truth.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a boat,” he said.

“You built it?”

“Yes. I set sail tomorrow. Will you come?”

“To where?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Possibly Africa, possibly South America. Depends on the winds.”

“Right,” I said sarcastically, thinking he was joking. “Have you tried it out yet?”

“No.”

“Is it sea worthy?”

“I think so. Will you come?”

“Sure,”     I said. I thought he was kidding. I thought we would go for a sail around Precaria. He had said before that he wished the island had some boats.

We got up early the next morning and walked back to the raft. Griz insisted I wear long pants and long sleeves to prevent sunburn and dehydration.

“I know about the sun, for heaven’s sake,” I said. “I’ve got sunscreen.”

But he insisted, so I wore long sleeves and long pants and a hat.

Griz carried a large duffel bag filled with food that I thought was for a picnic later in the day.

The raft looked bigger in the early morning light, not the Huckleberry Finn contraption I had imagined, but an actual vessel, with a mast, two sails, a rudder, oar locks, four sets of oars, and a white fabric canopy. We dragged it, stripped of the mast and oars, to the water. It floated, and after securing it to shore we attached the mast, threw in the oars and food, and behind some bushes he revealed two large, heavy coolers filled with water and two large bags filled with supplies that he had previously packed and stored at the launch site.

“Are you coming?” he asked gravely, and that’s when I realized he was about to attempt an escape, not a ride around Precaria.

For weeks I had been ready for him to walk out on me, but I was unprepared for this.

“You mean leave?” He nodded, and I lost control of myself completely.

“Are you crazy?” I asked tearfully. “You’ll die. If the oceans don’t kill you, somebody in an airplane with a gun will. We’re not allowed to leave. It’s the one thing we’re not allowed to do. It’s just one thing.”

He held me in his arms.

“I can’t stay,” he said. “I’ve got to try. Will you come with me? Will you come with me to find my little Grace?”

“But you’ll die…”

“Shh…” He put a finger to my lips.

“I don’t want to leave,” I said through his finger. “You’re going to die.”

“Shh…Wish me luck, Luce. I love you.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yes I do. I’ll try to come back for you.”

I helped him lift the heavy coolers into the boat, and from the bay’s sandy shore I watched him sail north until he disappeared.

“Good luck,” I said quietly to the empty ocean.

It has been years now, with no word of his fate, but I like to think he made it. I like to think that he was the one who told the world months after his escape that we were all alive, that Precaria was not the evil place the world had been led to believe. Now we are free to come and go, an independent nation under United Nations protection, a tourist destination. I never waited for Griz, but I remained a resident of Precaria. I live in comfort, in a new, larger cottage, with my husband. Our two daughters are married and work on the mainland.

I thought I was free before, satisfied with walking unclothed on the beach and with lounging in Griz’s warm arms and kisses at night. But really I wasn’t free until after the top of his mast sank beneath the curved blue horizon. The problem may have been that I thought of us as a picture, because the entire island was a picture - a two-dimensional image of ease. It was a picture-come-to-life in the minds of the desperate political leaders who couldn’t bare the thought that they were the generation overseeing the dissolution of Western History. Imagine if this tiny island had been the answer to all their problems! Imagine if we who were sent here were the sole cause of our polluted society’s problems - all cleansed, corrected and made right by this beautiful picture of an island, this paradise far, far away from anything.

They could simply have killed us. There was no need for any of the expense, any of the comfort, any of the pleasure. I can not believe they took pity on us. What then? Why did they want us alive? To prove some rhetoric? Our existence made no sense. Were we, perhaps, sent off to save the species? To survive and to breed and to repopulate the planet?

My lasting image of Griz is of his naked body roasting quietly on the beach, one of his fingers just barely touching one of mine. We both knew the end would come. We knew our paradise could not last. Our fingers inched further and further apart. Had I been more successful in my efforts before I was sent here, Precaria would never have been built. But then we would never have met. And Griz would never have escaped.

I have never heard what became of him. I like to think he made it. I like to think he found his Grace. I like to think we both did.