Rick Moody: Right Livelihoods

“What was that?” A steady stream of mucus cascaded from my nose, a stream I was powerless to bring to a halt, except with the occasional swipe from the back of my exposed wrist.

“Well, I was just a couple hundred yards from here, down the beach, and the fish were not exactly biting.”

By this, of course, he meant that he was near to the airstrip. Because alongside the former military outpost on our island is a tiny airstrip, just a pair of crisscrossed runways, really. They form a kind of an X on the western end of the island, and when the barons and viscounts of our community are in the mood to charter flights, you might see a Piper, Cessna, or even a small jet land here. A faded wind sock, in orange, flops lazily on a flagpole at one end of the tarmac, and there are two or three prop planes parked, awaiting their inconstant custodians. There’s no air traffic controller here. In fact, the upper floor of the one remaining structure beside the airstrip has lately been given over to one of the local contractors. That is, even if there were air traffic controllers, they would not have a place in which to set up their equipment. Ours is just a modest airstrip, and people drive their cars across it every day on the way to the light-house at the end of the island, and let me tell you how they do it: they look up. If they see aircraft, they wait. If not, they drive on.

“I’m minding my own business, the way I do,” Ed continued, “down there by the end of the runway”—the runway that, because of prevailing winds, is the less often used of the two—“and I watched a plane park at the end of the tarmac.”

“Why, Ed,” I said, “that’s not very unusual. Don’t planes land there every day?”

“Right, except that they don’t park so far away from the main parking lot. And then there’s what happened after these guys parked. That was the part that got me thinking a little bit. These persons, they got out of the plane, and they took their time getting out, and then they were standing around outside. Kind of looking around.”

It is true, for those of you who are unaware of the status quo here, that there is virtually no way to visit our island if you are not already here. Nor is there anywhere to stay were you to surmount the first hurdle. Were you kidnapped by evildoers and chloroformed and brought here to the island, to be released into the wild, you would find that there was neither inn nor motel to take you in, to give you succor, to offer you starchy towels. So, as Ed suggested, the very appearance here of strangers was worthy of note.

“And these persons, I don’t know how else to talk about them, except to say that they were dark-complected persons. They were dark-complected, and they were standing around outside of the plane, and here’s the really unusual part, they had some kind of camera, and the camera had a big lens, and they were photographing the area around the landing strip. There was a lot of photographing going on, all the way around where they had landed. I was sort of minding my own business, but I couldn’t help thinking that there was something downright disturbing about it, Dr. Van Deusen. I watched them taking pictures, it must have been ten minutes or so, and then just as quickly as they touched down, they got into their plane and took off.”

As if the tension were too much for him, Ed once again took up his fishing pole and waded out beyond the edge of the shore, one of the once proud fisherfolk of our area attempting to forge a living from a dwindling fish stock. I was given to understand, astoundingly, that the conversation was now at a close, taciturnity ever being a characteristic of the traditional angler. However, the devastating implications of Ed’s remarks stayed with me long after.

For example: though it was true that there was nowhere for the visitor to our island to stay, there existed simultaneously a powerful allure to our enclave. Who would not care to see the affluent and well-connected families of the oligarchy at play, who would not care to observe us up close? Who would not wish to banter or shoot the breeze with oligarchs in the context of luxuriant cocktail party soirées? I know that for many people social events of this kind are not to their tastes. And yet when you have flair and style, you know that any party is not memorable until you throw your car keys to the valet and stroll onto the patio. Yes, when my wife and I arrive, when we administer our air kisses and firm handshakes, then it is widely known that an island party has begun to lift off.

Now, because of the powerful allure of our island, as I have described it, you will find that curious persons occasionally take the ferryboat over just to see the place for a few hours. Often they bring bicycles, until they are told that the island is largely off-limits to bicyclists, the majority of the roads being under the control of the several exclusive country clubs. Just when the cyclists, with their unbecoming fanny packs, have given up hope, then the pleasure boaters begin to assault our shores with their shameful powerboats or, even worse, those things, what are they called? Those things that look like large-scale electric shavers of some kind, inevitably piloted by young men with revealing bathing trunks. These so-called pleasure crafts assault our beaches and shores, and their helmsmen bring tape players and play horrible music, and they roast salmonella-infected meats over open fires.

It was possible, of course, that the plane Ed described carried the sort of dark-complexioned, or dark-complected, persons who were simply curious about the island, a rumored enclave that houses many storied individuals. And yet you know as well as I that there are certain moments in a life when you begin to see the way things really are. You have just been fished from the sea. You see information systems spread out before you. You understand that divergent and equally important systems of thinking and communicating are happening at one and the same time. You understand that there may be a manifest echelon to human events, and this manifest echelon may conceal much more important subliminal echelons, and this subliminal content is the region of government operations, where secret budgeting processes take place, where backroom negotiations transpire, where deals are cut, and where prisoners are occasionally forced to listen to popular music that is distasteful to them, or are made to touch the breasts of female interrogation experts. This is the way it must be.

When Ed Thorne said what he said to me about the aircraft, I immediately recognized that dark-complected, in this context, had a particular meaning, and the meaning of it was that Ed himself was now in the employ of important national intelligence agencies, though I couldn’t be certain which shadowy acronym applied. If those of you in the intelligence community are reading these pages, as I certainly hope you will, you’ll no doubt remember from your own surveillance operations that the far end of South Beach is noteworthy for two local sites much celebrated hereabouts. One of the sites is the naval radar facility that is still, to this day, engaged in the business of searching the waters compassed around us for enemy submarines and other unidentified craft. The conjunction of that radar parabola (sweeping around in the distance like a heliotropic lily sped up on some nature program) with the facts described by Ed Thorne was totally overpowering. That’s what I’m trying to say. Suddenly, I recognized what I had dim-wittedly forgotten. That we were in a time of national emergency! In a time of war! And the first casualty of this war was superficial meanings. Things no longer meant what they seemed to mean. Words had begun to mean more than they appeared to mean. So it was that the employment of the awkward and hyphenated term dark-complected here on our vulnerable and pivotal island suggested to me grave international events, events that had mostly been distant from me personally. And as soon as I understood, I began to run in the direction of the other important local site at the distant end of South Beach, the golf course.