Randy White - Shark River

Violence is a vital component in natural selection and the hierarchy of species, and I view it unemotionally in all conditions but my own, which is the human condition. Violence debases us. It sparks the dark arc that refutes all illusion. In the instant it occurs, humanity seems reduced to the most meaningless of fictions, nothing but a hopeful fantasy created by primates who aspire to elevate themselves.

I don’t know why it affects me so, but it does.

Perhaps it’s because inflicting injury on a person also inflicts an equal and opposite proof, the proof of one’s own mortality.

As I moved from kitchen to porch, I kept reviewing the series of events over and over in my mind, wincing at my own stupidity, my own clumsiness, cringing at the whap of a bullet that passed much too close and at the sound of a man’s spine snapping.

We are frail creatures, indeed. Contribute to the debility or death of another human and, if you have any conscience at all, you will find yourself standing on the lip of the abyss, peering downward, into your own black reflection.

No, I wasn’t celebrating. But it was good to finally be alone. I took the Bud Light I’d opened, and poured it in a glass over ice with a wedge of lime. I had a book to read and a floor lamp for light. Had my portable shortwave radio at my side, dialed into Radio Quito, Voice of the Andes, on the 49 meters band, the English-speaking newsperson reading articulate government disinformation and sharing static with Papua New Guinea Radio and the BBC.

Waldman was exactly right. It was time for me to start paying attention to the world outside. Time for me to poke my head up and take a look around. I’d become way too comfortable in the tiny, safer world of boat and fish and my lab back at Dinkin’s Bay Marina.

The book I was reading was an instructional pamphlet. I’d just taken delivery of a new telescope, a really superb Celestron NexStar five-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain, and now I was tutoring myself on some of the finer points of operation. Program it with latitude and longitude, then point it at Polaris, and by punching in the proper code, the telescope would swing automatically to the Great Nebulae of Orion or show you the polar caps of Mars or locate any of 1,800 deep-space objects already programmed into the little handheld computer.

Amazing.

I sat there reading in the soft light as a sulfur moth fluttered around, casting a pterodactyl shadow on ceiling and screen. Moonlight and the smell of night-blooming jasmine filtered in on dense air, as if fanned by the moth’s wings.

I had the little telescope on the table in front of me, following the instructions, experimenting with the computer and clock drive.

I don’t consider myself an amateur astronomer. I’m not knowledgeable enough or active enough to be worthy of the title. I do, however, enjoy applying what little I know about the science. Spend an evening viewing objects in deep space, and your own small problems and tiny life are given healthy proportion. Plus, as Tomlinson is continually pointing out, there is an unmistakable if unprovable symmetry and repetition of design shared by the marine creatures that I collect and the visible structure of the universe.

The rays of an anemone and the plasmaic traps of certain hydroids appear as micro mimics of starbursts and celestial protoplasm. In narrow passages between two islands, eddies created by a running tide swirl in patterns similar to nebulae and whirlpooling comets.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, one I don’t pretend to understand. So I’ve always had telescopes, and recently decided to trade in my old and simple refractor for this high-tech replacement. The Celestron has the added advantage of being very light-about twenty pounds, plenty small enough and light enough to carry around on my boat or in my truck.

I’d figured that Guava Key would be two lazy, uneventful weeks, with plenty of peace and quiet in which I could learn the scope’s entire system and do some stargazing.

As Tomlinson says, “Want to give God a good laugh? Tell him your plans.”

Even so, my previous days on the island had been sufficiently quiet, with good, dark nights and clear skies. I’d used the scope nearly every night, and was particularly pleased because a celestial oddity was occurring that week: The sun and six of the planets were lined up like cosmic billiard balls, an event that happens about every twenty years and unfailingly inspires an assortment of weirdos and prophets to predict global chaos and destruction.

Like the stars, the Earth’s prophets don’t seem to change much over the years.

So I was sitting, reading the manual, futzing with the little handheld computer. Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn were easy enough to find on my own. But had the little scope been programmed to locate Mercury and Mars? I was following the guide through a slow step-by-step, looking from the page to the digitized screen… and that’s when I stiffened in my chair, listening. I heard a twig break, then a rustle of leaves as the silhouette of a person moved across the porch screen.

I was so overly sensitized and paranoid from Waldman’s warnings about drug runners, terrorists, and revenge, that I was about to throw myself backward, out of the chair in an attempt to roll away from any potential line of fire, when I heard a woman’s voice call, “Doctor Ford? Is that you?”

An unusually girlish voice; it sounded like a teenager who’d yelled herself slightly hoarse at some school function.

I stood and opened the porch door to see Lindsey Harrington standing on the sidewalk in a white T-shirt that hung to mid-thigh, no shorts showing on tanned legs, blond hair fanned over her shoulders.

I heard her say, “I hope I didn’t startle you.”

I answered, “Not at all,” even though my heart was pounding.

I stood in the doorway looking at her. It seemed like she’d just gotten out of bed. Her smile and her wry tone implied apology as she said, “First thing I wanted to do was thank you. But the two women from the Sheriff’s Department wouldn’t let me leave our cottage. So now they think I’m sound asleep in bed, which is the way I always worked it when I wanted to sneak out, back when I was living with my dad.” She used both hands to rope her hair back and stretched slightly. “Truth is, I can’t sleep at all after such a crazy day. Mind if I come in?”

I pushed the door wider and said, “You want a beer?”

W e sat, sipping our drinks, and took care of the uneasy formalities of strangers newly met. I listened to her thank me over and over again, and deflected her apologies for stopping by when it was so late.

Then we both began to relax a little as our exchanges became more personal and personable, her recounting what had happened that afternoon, the way she felt when she first saw the men in ski masks, me not saying much. When I could, I asked questions. I was interested in who she was, why the kidnappers had targeted her.

I sat and listened, then, as the diplomat’s daughter told me, “My father was in D.C. for, what? Like sixteen years and spent eight working in the basement of the White House, part of the staff, so I got to know three presidents pretty well. Two of the three, you couldn’t ask to meet nicer men. I mean, really cool guys. The kind you’d trust for a father or a grandfather. The third one, though, he was a pompous asshole.”

“Your father worked for all of them?” I’d switched off the lamp and sat, alternately, looking at the water, then at her. Lindsey Harrington’s blond hair looked satin white in the peripheral light, her face, delicate, pale, very young. The moon, low on the horizon, created a corridor of color on the water, silver and brass.

“No, just two of the three. He did, like, political analysis stuff, administrative stuff. I’ve never really been sure. The way he puts it is, picture the White House as a major corporation-which it is-so my dad would be like the equivalent of a department head in one of the smaller departments. He does it ’cause he loves it. It’s not because he needs the money, that’s for sure.”