Rick Moody - Right Livelihoods

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Plum Island Animal Disease Center,

Plum Island, NY. It’s only six or seven miles away. There has been, according to the press, simmering resentment between the federal workers on location and the workers from the private sector, who have inferior benefits, longer shifts, et cetera. One way to infiltrate the PIADC and its companion laboratories would be to win over the disgruntled employees, inducing them to commit sabotage as part of

jihad

Ferryboats leave for Plum every day from Long Island and Connecticut. Ample opportunities for infiltration exist through these and other routes.

These constitute the more obvious targets in the region, though I’ve failed to mention Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant, Sikorsky Aircraft, the many bridges in the state of Connecticut that are important parts of our national highway infrastructure. And what of the port of New London itself? A nuclear warhead could easily be loaded onto a transport container, concealed as a shipment of sneakers. If major airports were no longer feasible for the dark-complected hostiles, what about a neglected seaport town or a tiny little airport on an island such as our island, a tiny little airstrip that is overseen, if at all, only by once proud fisherfolk surf casting each day for striped bass?

I tipped my hat to the Robertses, père et fils, though I don’t wear hats. I felt refreshed as a result of my time reposing in the golf cart, but now I required an early lunch to fortify myself. Perhaps some lobster salad. As I trod along, I heard a few golf balls whizzing by, like little asteroids in the great unknown of this apocalyptic present. I paid them no mind, nor did I attend to the cries of those who would have me take the long way around. Within ten minutes or so, I was making my way up the steps onto the veranda of the golf clubhouse.

The maître d’, Brittany, wife of the fellow who looks after the golf greens, came over to tell me how terrific I was going to look in one of the new cardigan sweaters the club was hawking this summer, robin’s-egg blue with a facsimile of the island on the left breast. The squiggle of our island, I have recently come to realize, almost exactly resembles the shape of a certain pathogen studied at the aforementioned PIADC, namely Borrelia burgdorferi, which turned up first in a local man just miles from the Old Saybrook PIADC ferry terminal. Where did he contract Borrelia burgdorferi, if not from the PIADC ecosystem.

It was incredibly generous of Brittany to offer me this cardigan sweater and even to volunteer to find me a pair of matching golf slacks. Yet I take a dim view of excessive matching of colors, so I was fine with my poplin shorts, even if they looked a little worse for wear. I would accept the sweater only because it was coming on sweater weather.

Soon the German exchange girl came by, the girl who would, she told me in a charming accent, be my server today. I must say that no German exchange girl in the annals of humankind ever looked as stunning as this fräulein. She had steel blue eyes that were almost lacerating they were so vulnerable, and it seemed to me that she had been crying recently. Perhaps the fräulein cried because she knew that there was nothing this life promised that it delivered, which is to say that every human interaction was mediated by the grim facts surrounding us — hemorrhagic fever, Arabs slaughtering Africans, Hindus slaughtering Muslims, Israelis slaughtering Palestinians, and vice versa; children perishing of diarrhea or malaria, dozens of them since I’d sat down for my lobster salad; massive earthquakes; tsunamis that swept hundreds of thousands out to sea; and worse. When you thought of it, if you happened to be a German exchange fräulein working the bar, the world was composed of heartless nonsense, and it was plain to see that all we wanted, this girl and I, was to speak of the necessity for warmth, to speak of how irrefutable human kindness could be if it were only practiced more regularly. Why didn’t I tell Brittany, the maître d’, that the rosy hue of her cheeks could make any child smile, and how lucky her husband was to press his face against hers? Why didn’t I congratulate Ned Roberts on the fact that he’d once routinely held Ned Jr. in his arms, that he had whispered to Ned Jr. that everything would be all right, even though this was erroneous. How was it that I detested anyone who supported the proposal for a bike path running to the far end of the island? Where was the warmth? When I asked Olga or Nina or Elsa, or Whatever her name was, for my Bloody Mary, there was a look on her face of benediction, as if she alone could deliver me from the desperation of my situation, and so I waited with great excitement for her return, and when she brought me the beverage, I told her my secret member number, after which I knew, without hesitation, that it was safe to tell her my story.

European citizens are more informed than we are in matters of international relations. Olga or Elsa listened with cocked head and one perfectly shaved leg bent slightly at the knee as I spun out a web of intrigue. Occasionally, she would brush back some of the delightful hair that fell into her eyes, almost as if these rogue locks knew that their indiscipline made her ever more vulnerable. She was all ears as I explained to her that federal agents were now present on the island, that they were conducting informational sweeps even as we spoke. And because she was so receptive, I then posed first to her some of the questions I now pose here. How did dark-complected hostiles discover that our island was an effective launching pad for their plot to overcome our nation through terror? How was it that they first realized the value of this place, this sleepy outcropping in the middle of the Sound of which no one knew a thing, except perhaps the three thousand people who have been coming here for generations, interbreeding, trying to keep out the uncivilized hordes beyond? How did this become the high-value target? This was not a place that anyone would bother to blow up with their impressive homemade fertilizer bombs or their dirty radiation-spewing devices! This was not a place that you would release a pathogen! We don’t even have deer! That nonsense about a deer washing up on one of the beaches! Have you ever run over a deer in your speedboat? I have been on any number of powerboats that ran over lobster traps! But neither myself nor anyone ferrying me anywhere, in thirty years, has ever accidentally run over a deer’s head, nor collided with the broad hindquarters of a buck whose ten points rose above the surface of the Sound like an antediluvian antenna! I have never seen such a thing, Olga, dearest!

Admittedly, I kept her going back and forth, in order to ensure that Olga or Elsa would forever orbit near, and she was thus engaged in fetching me one of several Bloody Marys when the worst of all eventualities came to pass, namely the sudden unavoidable appearance of my beloved wife, my plighted troth, whose search party had now returned to the golf club. There were some raised voices at this point. I clung desperately to the table. But soon I was obliged to cut short my luncheon.

6. Hospital Preparedness in the Event of an Emergency Featuring High Casualties

The foregoing took place over the course of one Saturday in late September. I mention the day in particular because weekends in the off-season can be notable for a certain romance of emptiness. You walk the muddy track of the bird sanctuary up island, and it’s just you and the migratory flocks. There is the occasional gun burst of the good old boys with their hunting dogs chasing after the pheasant with which they stock the local brush. Be sure you’re wearing high-visibility gear during these months.