“The Hadal Zone,” by Annie Proulx

Arwen Rasmont waits hours at Keflavík International for his flight; they call it as he leaves the men's room. He walks past the mirrored wall and is assaulted, as usual, by his dead father's handsome image: high-arched nose, yellow hair. A difference in the contact glance—the father's a hard squinting challenge, the son's sidelong and measuring.

A week earlier the luxury-real-estate-rental mogul Rodrig Cushion had sent Arwen to Reykjavík to examine and make a judgment on a rare nineteenth-century whaling captain's house perched above a fjord with a view of dripping icebergs. Now, as he stands in the boarding line, he checks the snapshots on his phone. The most recent shows the interior entryway of that house; an umbrella jar holds several walking sticks and two ancient Inuit harpoons with whale-bone barbs; on the wall above them hangs a gleaming nineteenth-century harpoon gun. It is, Arwen thinks, whaling history in a nutshell. Such details, he knows, are priceless to Cushion. He looks at the steel gleam of the harpoons, cruel instruments. The owner is a taciturn old woman who didn't like the sound of Cushion's deal and pushed the door open, inviting Arwen out but not before he took that quick shot of the harpoons.

When Acme-Air's loudspeakers rattle out the information that boarding for his flight is under way, it is 3:20 a.m. and the Icelandic sun is coming up. He calls Carolla, who takes eight rings to answer.

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"So, where are you? Do you know what time it is? Are you in Boston? Will you be home soon?"

"No, I'm still in Reykjavík. We're just boarding. Sorry, babe, I forgot the time difference. I thought I was headed home, but I have to go to New York first. Via Chicago."

"What, Iceland to Chicago to New York?"

"Cushion's plan. He popped it on me out of the blue. He's in Chicago this week. Look, I'll call from there or New York. I don't know what he wants."

"Well—don't call at midnight. And as long as he pays for the travel he can do that, right? You get to go to marvellous places—golden sands of Araby and all that."

"Carolla, there's a serious heat wave, some new virus, an earthquake, and gunfire in Araby right now, so I'm hoping he don't get ideas about luxury tents and camels. I'll be back Friday night and there's a beaut cod on ice on its way to you from the fish market in Reykjavík."

"For Saturday?"

"Right. I ate at a restaurant in the fish market, tried to get their recipe for the baked cod, no go, but my God, it was—look, I'll call you from New York. When I know what he wants, O.K.? Take care of that cod. Love you, love you, I do love you."

Only Arwen, in that large shouting family of boys, inherits the father's face. All his brothers have enviable potato heads. As a child, he is the one chosen for the front row of school photographs or given a cookie and posed on the laps of relatives. Teachers treat him kindly and he imagines the world is a smooth place without difficulties until a summer family visit with his mother's people in Kansas. Two cousins, lump-jawed bigger guys with pimples, hit and push him back and forth until his nose bleeds. He cries and runs to tell his mother, but he is intercepted by his father, who pulls him into the bathroom and hands him a sopping washcloth, tells him that it could have been worse than a bloody nose and a few bruises. "Hey," he says, "the plug-uglies hate you at the same time they . . ." and he gives Arwen a fatherly smack on the shoulder. Arwen never knows what he means.

The father, Joe Rasmont, is a roofing contractor, whose pride is his Ulster Scots-Irish ancestry and his love of a scrimmage. The mother is a practitioner of invisibility and has secret habits. The father and Arwen's brothers are loud; they like sports contests and marching bands, and on weekends do not get up until high noon. Arwen dodges arguments, likes silence and subtleties, sleeps lightly. The father laughs with Schadenfreude when he hears that a boy from Iowa has been to the ocean and had his right leg severed by a shark. He says, "The kid was dumb. Punch a shark in the snoot it hauls ass," but Arwen has recurrent thoughts of the boy's terror. By his teens Arwen knows that his good looks are evidence not of his personal uniqueness but of his father's genetic domination. Even when Joe Rasmont dies after a fall from a roof where he was faking a clog dance for the plaudits of three preteen girls on their way home from school, Arwen's knowledge that he is not uniquely himself folds him inward.

At the state university Arwen signs up for the jumbled mix of architecture, history, and arts courses popular with the student misfits. In his last year he meets Carolla Windon—strong-willed and so sure of herself that with her he feels guided, a feeling he mistakes for love. She seems a different kind of person, a fizzing bit of electricity that has broken free from the main lightning bolt.

Carolla finds that Arwen's good looks enhance her own plain-Jane self, so she makes a decision not to correct his grammar. After graduation she hustles him into the jeweller's shop to buy her engagement ring. She organizes their wedding and arranges the honeymoon—a trip to Japan where they overdo garden tours and he develops an allergy to shoyu—and finds them a little saltbox house half an hour from Boston. He revels in the love-light that shimmers from her and envelops him as she excitedly describes her plan for owning a rescued-and-restored-furniture shop or a booth at the county fair where she will sell home-made pickles that somehow are never made. She is not a beauty: sandy hair, elliptical brown eyes, and a thin mouth perfectly sized to take in whole apricots. She is also bony and stiffly put together, wide hipped, her arms and legs apparently hammered into place. But her rapid reactions sweep him along. He is secretly thrilled by her liveliness and her sudden huge enthusiasms that disappear and reappear like sunlight on a day of moving clouds. She puts his wardrobe in order, manages their joint taxes, and works out soy-free menus that keep him in good health. She is exceptionally loving and a serious cook.

"Carolla, you treat me like the prize pig you're going to show at the farm fair—"

"I think you love every minute of being the prize piggy, don't you?"

He does love it.

Early in their marriage he expects babies but it doesn't happen. Carolla does not seem to miss being a mother and Arwen can find no way to introduce the subject without sounding like a domineering male.

In those same early days Arwen tries several jobs before finding Back Bay Garden Supply, in Boston. Since childhood he has waited for a defining moment, an event or a flash of comprehension that will shift him into self-recognition, the kind that happens in books when a character nails it—"from that moment Bertie Fuse knew what his life was going to be"—but Arwen's shock of understanding never arrives. The closest he has ever come to an epiphany was discovering, as a six-year-old, that flakes of mica in the driveway gravel could be split into glassy layers with his thumbnail. Life just goes on, but he never looks at a driveway again without checking for micaceous gleam.

Albert Bebby, a large man in his sixties who still has great physical strength and flexibility, owns Back Bay Garden Supply. He also owns some acreage with a two-room shack on it forty miles north, past Gristle Falls, past the years-long paving work on a twisted mountain road, past the renovation of the old woollen mill below the falls. Bebby is a climate-change denier who sometimes wears his MAGA hat and argues that every grim bit of warming, hundred-year storm, or sea-level rise is an anomaly. There have always been storms and hot days. Yet Arwen likes him, and he likes Arwen, and assigns him every interesting job, from greenhouse work to scouting antique shops for giant urns, encourages him to take night classes in garden design—training he might have given his son, Daniel, had turtles not interfered. Daniel is afflicted with a sense of moral outrage over the misdeeds of humans which are bringing about the climate shift, an outrage that merges with his impulse to save small animals, especially turtles, from highway traffic. Daniel used to spend weeks at the shack up north. Arwen does not know him except through hearsay, because a year before Arwen met his father, Daniel quit the shack and moved to the West Coast to become a road ecologist.

Bebby mutters to Arwen that he is glad to be free from Daniel's nightly dinner-table sermons about humans' destruction of the natural world. Daniel, gone but not forgotten, sends frequent e-mail bulletins to his father offering proofs of climate change, exposing the machinations of villainous corporations and of governments that are planning to dredge and rape the seafloor, describing the coming floods that will drown the cities around the Great Lakes and create Lake Gargantua. Daniel puts all his business out there—he cares, and he wants his father to care. Bebby dismisses the messages: "Daniel don't get it that there is always ups and downs. He thinks this 'climate' stuff is something special. We've had problems with weather and the seasons since the beginning. It's in the Bible, all the plagues and floods. Just like now with Covid and Vermont underwater last year. And this business about carbon credits—there's a crooks' game for you." But he continues to read Daniel's warnings and prophecies aloud, and Arwen listens. After one of Daniel's messages exhorting his father not to eat fish species that are struggling to survive—cod from the North Atlantic are on that list—Arwen feels a twinge of guilt, feels the earth beneath him stir uneasily like a sleeper seeking a more comfortable position, but the stirring is also possibly a global response to the devilish human fleas that plague its surface. He, Arwen, is just such a flea. He knows that.

Arwen and Carolla wink at couples who concoct a weekly date night to keep their marriage lively. Instead, they take a full day in the kitchen, usually Saturday, when they cook and eat together, trying difficult recipes such as duck roasted in a watermelon, chicharrones served in a greasy paper bag, a kavkaski shashlik. It is awkward in their poky little kitchen in East Ashbane, crowded with culinary accoutrements. They give each other presents of kitchen gadgets: smokers, hullers, scalders. Carolla lets him know that it is not every husband who can slice sea scallops into thin disks, steam them in a spoonful of white wine, and convert the juices into an unctuous sauce, and that she loves him for it. They drink back-page cocktails unknown to most bartenders and increasingly precious wines from European vineyards fainting with heat. They make a little world of toasting, roasting, boiling, grilling, and swilling which is inhabited only by the two of them. Once, a delivery man with a box of frozen crab legs looked around the kitchen and remarked, "You get a burglar in here, he sees all them knives, you got a killer instead of a thief." And he laughed at his own wit.

After some happy years, their life together changes. Carolla's mother dies, leaving her daughter money and a historic house called White Chimneys. And Rodrig Cushion appears out of nowhere.

White Chimneys is a large, extremely plain ten-room building, its defiant lack of exterior ornamentation a moneyed sneer at more ostentatious dwellings. White Chimneys dominates the landscape, exudes power. On the day of the funeral for Carolla's mother, the thought flashes into Arwen's mind that he is looking at an early example of brutalist architecture. The house is twenty-eight miles from the coast, set in acres of fourth-growth, boulder-strewn woodland that has seized the fields where sheep once ate grass down to the dirt. The woodland is neglected, a tangle of downed and broken trees, and in the clearings and along the old pathways grow invasive oriental bittersweet, buckthorn, Morrow's honeysuckle, poison ivy, nettles, and Canada thistle in such exuberance that the place can never be rid of them. Foreign phragmites encircle and choke off a small pond.

After the cursory funeral—there are no other mourners—they walk through the house. Carolla leads the way with a bottle of lavender-essence germicide, spraying as she advances. She had visited the house only twice while her mother was alive.

"Yes, and now it's mine so everything is new to me," she says as she talks into her phone, making a list of the furniture and fittings, the heavy damask drapes and two Chinese knotted silk rugs. Arwen lags behind, trying to quench his growing distaste for the house. It seems to him that every wall and staircase exudes an unpleasant past—incurable illnesses, schemes and plots, intentions, hot-breath lies and betrayals. When Carolla drags chairs back and shoves tables so that the legs chatter across the uneven boards he hears centuries-old bullying laughter. They go upstairs and the groaning treads evoke women weeping in closets—people cornered by circumstances beyond modern recognition. He knows that it is a terrible house but he keeps his mouth shut. Carolla does not care about the truths of history or geology; her ideas of how the world and time and people come together are set in her mind like Roman concrete. So he says nothing, for there is no point in arguing with Roman concrete.

"I just love it. I will have to get an antiques expert in here to help me catalogue everything," Carolla says. "I know Mother was really upset that a Searles family portrait was stolen by a house guest. Or a burglar. Or the guy who brings wood for the fireplaces. About twenty years ago. I don't know if they ever got it back. I think it's still on the IFAR list. An ancestor on a black horse."

On that first walk-through of White Chimneys Arwen turns away from a cherry tallboy and, as if he had stubbed a toe, he is suddenly filled with utter despair and dread. The feeling lasts only a millisecond and does not return; he believes it to have been the remnant of an old memory, so old he can not pull its long-ago reality into his present consciousness. He supposes that the brief but terrible spasm of misery is something he had experienced in wordless infancy. Children, especially crying babies, have been invisible to him for decades but now he knows unmistakably that they are not complaining of wet diapers or hunger, that even without words they roar to show they are in the grip of black existential despair. That he and Carolla do not have children was once a secret sorrow to him; he is relieved now that he need not comfort a squalling disconsolate infant and falsely say, "There, there, it's all right," while knowing that nothing is or ever can be all right. Yes, it is better that they have not brought a child onto the despoiled earth.

White Chimneys is not a property that has been handed down through generations of Carolla's family. Her family hands down nothing but the urge to move physically east and socially upward. The house was built in 1772 by Jonas Cutts, the wealthy owner of thousands of acres between two New England rivers who sold them off little by little, to maintain the Cutts family's bizarre illusion of living on an English country estate. Sometime in the mid-nineteenth century the property came into the possession of a distant cousin, Henry Mintroy Searles, a Portsmouth shipping magnate and goods importer. In Portsmouth in the late twentieth century, at an exhibition of early-American dough troughs, Carolla's mother found and rapidly married Nathan, the remnant Searles, who perished in the first wave of Covid. She metamorphosed overnight into a member of an "old Colonial family" with presumed American Revolution connections and became an impassioned spokeswoman for the house she described as a pivotal headquarters in the nation's early history.

Upstairs they come to the library, a room whose walls are tiers of glass-fronted cabinets, the shelves freighted with books all the colors of old age: burned caramel, leached gray, dirty blue, streakily faded red, the green of nettles. A small fireplace in a sequestered alcove with two crewel-worked-upholstery wing chairs facing each other lets him know without evidence that here the earlier occupants made their grasping decisions.

As they walk through White Chimneys Carolla ticks off the possibilities.

"It's better than I remember it. I can sell it. Or rent it out. It's stuffed with antiques and portraits. It's a historic house. Well, now that you're here you know. The house is famous as a meeting place for the patriots. When Mother got it, after Nathan Searles passed, she had an open house the first weekend of September every year and tourists paid to walk around. There is a letter in the historical society's collection showing that George Washington stayed in the north bedroom when he met John Adams. Or Sam Adams. Or Thomas Jefferson—one of them. Mother's copy hangs in the entry hallway—I don't know why it isn't there now. We'll look for it. Mother always intended to rent out the house for the 'historical experience.' But she never did it. Pretty sure I can rent it out."

"And where will we live?" Arwen asks, the pinched saltbox in East Ashbane a two-hour drive from White Chimneys.

"Easy-peasy. We'll fix up the carriage house with the money we get from selling the East Ashbane place. We will make a really great kitchen."

He has to admit that it is sensible. The carriage house is a handsome and sturdy building. He likes its inaccessibility out in the broken black trees. They make an upstairs bedroom and living room in the carriage house and turn the entire stone-floored downstairs into a huge kitchen with two refrigerators, a professional chopping block, ceiling-to-floor pantry, three prep tables, two dishwashers, and a big squashy sofa for relaxing while waiting for something to come out of the oven. There is an alcove with an antique chestnut plank table and only two chairs, for they never invite guests to their feasts.

Carolla quits her job to work on the interior of White Chimneys.

"She left enough money and there is a lot of work to do on this place. We have to redo all the bathrooms. Also, the gardens and grounds are in terrible shape," she says and looks at him.

"I can take care of that," he says. He is glad then for his job with Albert Bebby and the classes in garden design. He even tells Bebby, "Al, it looks like a big job." To Carolla he says that a restored and redesigned back garden at White Chimneys will be his contribution to the renovation if she gives him a budget.

"We'll do it together," she says. "Just let me know what your ideas are. And how much it will cost."

He makes a plan with Bebby to work three days a week in Boston.

"I can sleep in the warehouse," he says. But Bebby insists that Arwen use Daniel's room—Daniel is immured in Oregon and has declared himself free of the East Coast. He is engaged to a veterinarian who specializes in reptiles and he writes a letter to Bebby describing his happiness near the Pacific, which he says is a superior ocean, far more interesting than the Atlantic. Bebby replies with some malice that the Atlantic is growing larger while the Pacific is shrinking.

With Bebby's advice Arwen plans a wrought-iron archway. He discovers some antique bed edgings in a machinery warehouse, and although he wants to use native plants in the gardens Bebby begs him to choose the exotic and curious, as the original owners did. Yes, Arwen thinks, and that is why the place is choked with European weeds. Yet Albert Bebby knows the right stonemason to repair the tumbled rock wall; he gives Arwen the name of a poison-ivy-removal lady, and puts him on the trail of two old teak benches that once graced the gardens of the Maxfield Parrish house. They will be at their best placed along a gravelled path with good views of the water feature, a life-size spouting crocodile, a rescue from an estate sale. The crocodile looks uncomfortable as does all spouting statuary. The creature lies on its belly, snout raised like a howling wolf.

Arwen begins the physical work himself—it will get him back in shape. A patch of stinging nettles at the base of a mound surmounted by a huge red-oak stump takes a day's work in heavy gloves, stout boots, and a hazmat suit. He pulls up the nettles, the feathery towers of sorrel, ragweed, and ironweed. At night he fills sheets of paper with sketches of a fern grotto, a tiny wildflower meadow, a topiary shrub in the shape of a galloping centaur, perhaps a curved stone wall sheltering a beautifully shaped little tree he has yet to find. The red-oak stump is enormous. Bebby says that red oaks have the deepest roots of any tree in New England's forests and it will be costly to get the stump out—better to work it into the greater design. It can perhaps be a pedestal for an interesting sculpture—something like David Nash's charred shapes, or even something local.

During the first autumn that Carolla owns the house she continues her mother's hour-long leaf-peeper tours. The customers, all tourists, pay a hundred dollars each for the pleasure of seeing the cherry tallboy whose drawers gleam with decorative brass-inlay borders, the great fireplace so large a man can stand upright in it, the cast-iron cauldron big enough to boil a small walrus, and the rare beehive oven.

Rodrig Cushion is one of the visitors, and this is his first meeting with Carolla. He is a big man. Six-three with massive shoulders and bursting arms, which Arwen thinks are not muscle but good old American fat. In a jacket his shoulders look a yard wide but atop the swollen neck balances a narrow pointy face with slightly popped green-tomato eyes that seem to say, "What! Don't you believe me? It's all true!" Arwen thinks Cushion's head looks like one of Richard Avedon's road-trip portraits—one of the drifters. Cushion inhales deeply as his eyes sweep over the Queen Anne breakfast table with its sensuous, curved legs, the corner cupboard stacked with chinoiserie, the firedogs. He says, "Oh, my God. Oh, my God." He sizes up Arwen and nods, but openly declares his love of the house to Carolla, and at the end of the tour he takes her hand and says very softly that he wants to "partner up" with her. He gives her his card, explains his international rental business. "I take a very unique approach to the glamour of history," he says. "If you join me in my business—Heritage House Holidays—I will open the way to a select clientele that longs for deep historical experiences." He stares into her golden eyes with his drifter glare and says in a superior voice, as though conferring a prize, "We will both be part of the ecosystem of heritage homes." He promises to free Carolla from the burden of bookkeeping, insurance, upkeep, cleaning, advertising, and vetting guests. But she will have to install invisible air-conditioning because of the increasingly fierce summer heat. Once the air-conditioning is in, he says, he can get them twelve-thousand-dollar-a-week rentals in summer and autumn—Heritage House will take only a third of the rent. It is Carolla's property and she has the final word, and that word is "yes."

Rodrig Cushion seems to feel that Arwen comes with the deal as a subsidiary Heritage House Holidays employee. He calls on Arwen to examine other properties, discuss the annual listings brochure, and listen to his views on the international historic-house-rental business. There is more to it than Arwen imagines—special celebrations for local heroes and patriots of old like Pilsudski, Savanarola, Guy Fawkes, Betsy Ross, and especially Robert E. Lee, whose statues are being pulled down everywhere by left-wing philistines and scoffers. Small details are not neglected and Cushion and Carolla will tour White Chimneys together with the renters on the final day of their stay, "just to make sure," as Cushion says, "that nothing got broken or cracked." But Arwen understands it is to see that nothing has been stolen—not a fork, not a brick, not a portrait on the wall, not a linen pillow slip, not a pinch of ashes from the fireplace—for the framed letter proving Washington's stay is never found. Theft is the only possible explanation.

Arwen does all that Cushion asks without pay beyond travel expenses, which go to Carolla, who makes his reservations and doles out his travel allowance. Arwen believes that the arrangement is some undeclared part of Carolla's "partnering up" with Cushion, although he sees no salary, dividend, or share.

For the first months of the partnership Carolla spends hours in consultation with air-conditioning experts. Rodrig Cushion recommends Kool Haus Air Wizards. The outlook is not good. The old house is a sieve of air leaks—to make it tight means replacing every window and door. There is no insulation, no ductwork. And mini-splits cannot be used because they will ruin the authenticity of the old house. But the situation is not hopeless. Air-conditioning can be done though at an astronomical price. Carolla balks and after a conference with Rodrig Cushion they decide that temporarily the house will do without air-conditioning and will be rented only in times of moderate temperatures. Cushion sighs heavily, says, "You know what? This is really a modular situation, so let's just take a deep breath and see how it goes. But you will have to do it someday. If you want the real money."

Arwen works on White Chimney's gardens on weekends, when he's not travelling on Cushion's business. He hires Maddy Vane, a local landscape guy with a Kubota, to level some uneven ground where he envisions the fern grotto. The blade scrapes away the topsoil and then squeals as it rakes across a flat stone.

"Look at that!" Maddy says, pointing at soil-caked letters engraved on the stone. "Got yourself a gravestone. Could be somebody historic. Man, that's insane!"

"I guess I'll clean it up," Arwen says. "You don't have to hang around." But Maddy is interested in the stone and takes a stance near it that tells Arwen he is not going to leave. Arwen gets the hose and two stiff brushes, and handing one to Maddy he says, "We might as well see what it is. Looks like some inscription. Maybe an Emily Dickinson poem for garden thoughts."

"More likely a burial verse. Gotta be somebody's grave. Right here in your back yard. You'll have to call the police." Arwen says nothing but begins to scrub at the stone. Word pieces emerge: "Stra," "Froz," "esires."

"Not Emily Dickinson, I don't think," he says. By late afternoon the chiselled words lie revealed in six puzzling lines:

What strange Congealed Heart have I when I Under such Beauty shining like the Sun Able to make Frozen Affection fly, And Icikles of Frostbitt Love to run. Yea, and Desires lockt in an heart of Steel Or Adamant, breake prison, nothing feel.

He turns to Maddy and opens his mouth as if to ask the question. Maddy shakes his head. "Not like any grave verse I ever seen. Kind of a downer. Not sure what it means but I wouldn't want that on my stone. Better get in touch with Will Honor. He's the old president of the historical society and he knows everything worth knowing about this town from way back. Used to be a history professor at some university. They got a new president now—Mrs. Ella Miller Faller—but she still has to ask old Will about some things. She's not up on the fine points. Give me a call if you want to get back to levelling that area. Call me nosy but I'd like to hear what Will Honor has to say."

It is weeks before he remembers to call William Honor and ask him about the verse chiselled into the stone. The warm autumn days lean against one another like books on a shelf. Bright leaves cascade and still the days and nights are mild. Biting flies continue to hatch as though it were June and their insect lives stretch before them in an endless glory of sunlight. Arwen knows that the autumnal storms of crashing branches and splintered trees will come soon and cool the heated earth. There may even be early snow that will rapidly vaporize but make the point that the seemingly endless summer has been a lure, that the bitter stone-splintering cold of ancient days has returned to turn the leafy bowers into ice chambers, to freeze the marrow in deer bones and leave them poised to leap but immovable on their slender dead-cold legs.

If Rodrig Cushion looks like a nineteen-seventies interstate drifter, William Honor looks like an elderly African American artist, tall and spare, barefoot, clad in a pair of rolled-up duck trousers and a paint-blotched singlet as he opens his door. He holds a soft rounded-bristle paintbrush in his left hand.

"Mr. Honor?"

"Yes. And you are Arwen Rasmont."

"I am. Thanks for seeing me."

"Come in. Should I resemble a Sunday painter it is because I am a Sunday painter. Head out to the back porch while I clean this brush and then we can talk. I'll join you in a few minutes."

The screened back porch is stacked with junk, furnished with old wicker chairs, a table of planks laid on cinder blocks, a weathered green sideboard missing its shelves. The view is of a yellow garden where goldfinches stitch the air above, over and through a quarter acre of black-eyed Susans. The little birds are not still for an instant, diving and swirling, yellow on yellow in a patch of transparent yellow light.

William Honor returns with a pitcher of what he says is lemonade. There is no doubt about the lemon as the drink is unsugared and impossibly sour. Arwen takes one swallow, grimaces, and puts down the glass. He tells William Honor about Carolla, White Chimneys, the garden he hopes to make, the uncovered slab with the mysterious verse. "Here is the verse," he says, handing Honor the typed-out lines. "Could it be Emily Dickinson . . . ?"

William Honor joins the first and last lines aloud in a sombre, pinched voice: "What strange congealed heart have I when I . . . nothing feel." Then he says, "No, not Dickinson. I think by quite a different person. You say White Chimneys was built in 1772?"

"Yes. Or maybe earlier. By Jonas Cutts. And then it passed on to Henry Searles and eventually to my wife."

"Indeed. Searles from Portsmouth. Important fellow. But 1772 is too late for the poet I have in mind. Is your wife a Searles descendant?"

"No. Her mother married the last of the Searleses. They claimed it was an important meeting place for George Washington during the American Revolution."

"That would have been quite an event for General Washington—the horseback ride from Virginia to New England—not something he would do often. And, of course, there is the name—White Chimneys. Perhaps you and Mrs. Rasmont are not aware that during the time of the Revolution having white-painted chimneys was a secret way of declaring to others in the know that 'here live true loyalists to King George'?"

"No! We certainly had no idea—but that would mean Washington probably never—"

"Quite right. Probably never. Benedict Arnold, perhaps, or Major André, but not Washington. There is an old Federal in Kennebunkport called Tory Chimneys—and of course they, too, are painted white. It would be helpful if you can find out anything about the religious tastes of the Cutts and the Searleses. The verse on the stone is interesting. I need to do a little digging but I think I know who wrote it. A strange and rather tortured early preacher-poet working through his private beliefs long before Cutts built his manse. It might be one of his Meditations. What is not clear is why it would have been chiselled onto a stone in the garden of a 1772 Royalist's house. In fact, it is doubtful that the stone could have been chiselled before 1937 except by someone with a very private knowledge of Colonial church history. I'll look into it. May I suggest that we meet again in two weeks, on Friday?"

"Of course," Arwen says, his imagination steaming up.

The pallid Icelandic morning light makes him feel worn out—waiting for hours in airports kills him. He wants it to be Saturday, wants to be home in the carriage-house kitchen with Carolla, sharpening the knives, listening to Norteño music.

After a year of what Rodrig Cushion and Carolla call "partnership" it is still an unspoken, unwritten, and undiscussed arrangement that Cushion pays for travel and hotel rooms. Arwen takes care of food, car fares, phone calls. Rather than argue with Cushion he goes along. Slow and careful moves will work in his favor without hassle, without confrontation. Without shouting. But he notices certain things. Cushion, despite his many global offices, seems inept at anything except convincing women to let him handle their properties. He has a string of European "countesses" who let him rent out their mouldering heaps, which are more reminiscent of Piranesi ruins than of Downton Abbey. He can be persuasive and gently insinuating but Arwen knows he will drive toothpicks under your fingernails to get his way.

Acme-Air's plane is old and it stinks. He thinks the odor is like what you smell on opening a box of crackers languishing in a forgotten cupboard. Arwen has a window seat—he always has a window seat. Even flying over the ocean he finds pleasure in looking down, watching colors change from the pastel of coastal shallows, where he searches for the dark commas of whales, to the blue-black wrinkles of deep water. As the plane angles away he sees Reykjavík like a printed map and thinks he can just glimpse the sun-gilded geologic folds of the Hallgrímskirkja steeple. Then Reykjavík is gone. He is so intent on the dwindling view that he doesn't hear the woman in the seat in front of him asking something. She has twisted around in order to speak through the window-side gap between the seats and the wall of the plane.

"Your window blind! . . . Pull it down . . . light . . . ruin my movie!"

He squints back at her through the aperture and sees her black-eyebrowed glare and on a corner of her little screen shuddering images of Hollywood gangsters. He knows about "air rage," when disturbed passengers flip into violent tantrums; although he wants to watch the ocean he pulls down his shade. Air rage and road rage, waiting-in-line rage. He leans back and shuts his eyes, thinking about the countless rage attacks that are now part of daily life. His old college roommate Timo lost his job at the observatory in Puerto Rico when the big radio telescope, weak from age and neglect, fell apart. It took a year for Timo to find a job teaching at a small college in Nebraska. There his sixteen-year-old son Alondro was shot dead in what the papers called "a road-rage incident."

Arwen brought nothing to read on the plane and sits bored and clenched in his seat until he, too, turns on his screen, to watch the symbol of their tiny plane moving over the ocean, over the unrecognizable names of shipwrecks and seamounts—Reykjanes Ridge, Charlie-Gibbs Fracture Zone, Orphan Knoll. What are these places, he wonders—they are not islands—and he remembers a trip a year earlier on a North Atlantic flight when he saw constellations of clouds, the icy edge of Greenland, thousands of scattered bergy bits and open water giving way to a scribbled edge of ice that was no longer a continuous sheet but broken everywhere by glittering meltwater, and then, in a brilliant burst of sunlight like a death ray from space, he saw great thrusting mountains of purest snow. That day he pressed his face against the window until the landscape below went foggy and the mountains dissolved in smears. He sits now in the musty Acme-Air seat remembering that flight, burning to see what lies below, and edges his window shade up a few inches. Immediately the black-eyebrowed woman in the seat in front of him shouts, "Put down your window shade! "

Hours later in Chicago he waits at the baggage carrousel. As always, the wait is long. He glances at the other passengers standing beside the moving belt like herons poised for the opportune fish. The woman with the black eyebrows is ten feet away and looking at him. He moves to the far side of the carrousel and wills his bag to appear. But Black Eyebrows follows him to his new position and plants herself in front of him.

"I want to explain to you. About me watching the movie. You see—it was my son. He was a actor. His first movie—'Deadly Garbage.' I always watch it when I can. He died in a night-club shooting out in California last year and I guess I am not over it."

He feels himself reddening, feels the burn of dislike shift a little but most of it is still there. He turns away from her to look at the approaching bags. And with relief sees his old brown bag with the broken handle lumbering along. Carolla has been after him to replace it for years but about this he is stubborn. He seizes it now and as he turns he says to the woman, "I hope you get over it."

"You people!" she calls after him. "You are one of those woke people who think they know everything."

In Chicago he is told that Cushion is in New York at an emergency meeting—Arwen is to follow at once. In New York the car booked to meet him isn't there and when he calls the car service a voice tells him that the driver has gone to Grand Central instead of to J.F.K. "Of course," Arwen says, "hard to tell them apart." The harried voice seems to blame him for the mistake and tells him to take a cab.

There is another long line and a forty-minute wait. The cabdriver—a scrawny older man—drives rapidly and erratically, cutting off other vehicles, muttering imprecations in an unfamiliar language under his breath, swerving in and out of lanes, blowing his horn to force laggard drivers to let him by. Several times Arwen, who sways with each lurch, asks him to slow down but the man speeds on. When they pull up at the hotel Arwen speaks slowly to the driver and hands him the exact fare.

"No-tip-because-you-dangerous-driver."

The man looks at him; his inflamed dark eyes fill with tears. As the doorman opens the cab door and Arwen puts one foot on the sidewalk the driver suddenly accelerates and pulls out into traffic, pitching Arwen and his bag into the doorman's arms.

"Crazy driver," Arwen says. The doorman wears an elaborate uniform like a doorman in an old-fashioned Viennese film—part of the hotel's conceit. The cuffs are frayed.

He says "Yeah. Everybody's like that now—y'know?"

In the elevator Arwen's thoughts are not of the taxi-driver or Black Eyebrows but of the North Atlantic seamounts. In the room he opens his laptop, begins looking for the names of the mounts, and blunders into an undersea gazetteer. Such is the power of the names and descriptions that he feels himself sliding below the water, past mounts and spiky cockscombs of rock. Over the centuries drowning people must have seen the vertiginous undersea mountains with their fading sight as they glided into the dense blackness. He reads that some chains of seamounts are higher than the Rockies, higher than the Himalayas, one undersea mountain higher than Everest, heaved up by invisible plate tectonics, covered and surrounded by the seven seas, millennia after millennia in zones of darkness and pressure. He dimly remembers the Mariana Trench in the Pacific from a high-school science class. He doubts that kids today learn about the Mariana Trench, the deepest darkness on Earth. But he does not remember much about it himself, except that the ancient Greeks believed in a bottomless abyss. He reads more descriptions of the ocean layers and, inspired by the idea of layers, he calls room service and requests blinis with raspberry syrup but he has to settle for a B.L.T., extra mayo on the side.

As he eats he reads on until he imagines himself sinking down through the named under-ocean zones and layers: the epipelagic sunlight zone with its wind-mixing waves and seasons, then a slow descent through the mesopelagic twilight zone, where seasons, depths, and fainting measures of sunlight juggle up and down. He tumbles ever downward, through the bathypelagic zone of rich darkness and constant cold, luminescent animals stitching through unending density. Even deeper is the abyssopelagic zone, where the temperature hovers just above freezing, the darkness pitch-black under the crushing pressure of miles of water, which he can hardly grasp. But Arwen's imagination curls into a knot when he comes to the screamingly deepest and coldest waters of the hadal zone, with the vast brain-flattening pressure of eight tons per square inch. Even in that intense place there is life: snailfish and grenadiers with tapering tails. He wonders how the benthic grenadiers can swim blithely in such deadly pressures. He thinks of last year's headlines about a submersible implosion in a zone far less terrible than the hadopelagic. Then he reads that the lungless grenadiers can manage very well, that they have evolved in the deeps and are as comfortable there as humans are under the weight of their oxygenated atmosphere. Arwen's last thought before sleep is that he is in a twisting cyclonic fall down through the trench to become a compressed speck of matter. It feels good.

There is no point in trying to guess why he was summoned to a non-meeting with Rodrig Cushion in Chicago, the HQ of Heritage House Holidays, and then bounced to New York where Cushion makes a delighted fuss over Arwen's photograph of the umbrella stand and the harpoons. "It's very exceptional," he says. While Arwen stands waiting, Cushion gets the old-woman harpoon owner on the phone and after six or seven minutes of cajoling and promises—"It's perfect for discerning renters"—he closes the deal, says the papers will be delivered to her by courier within days. He winks at Arwen as if to say, "That's how I do it."

It is the same way that Cushion has got a hold on Carolla and wormed himself deep into their lives. Arwen finds it easier to go along with the man's endless brainstorms. Once in a while he submerges the unpleasant thought that Cushion is like Carolla in temperament and ambition. He believes Cushion has roped in Carolla in order to get access to White Chimneys, a house that Cushion says, using his favorite phrase, is "perfect for discerning renters." "Discerning" means ultra-rich. It isn't clear to him why Carolla has been so happy to go into business with Rodrig Cushion. The real-estate mogul boomerangs among his offices in New York, Chicago, Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Wellington, and London. Despite Cushion's efforts to pull off a smart-casual look with his Cuban-collar shirts and unstructured mohair blazers, Arwen still sees a dangerous and wily hitchhiker, and knows that whoever makes a bargain with him makes a bargain they will regret.

Before he gets home and goes to his Friday appointment with William Honor a viper twines around Arwen. He suspects something is wrong at the time of the aborted Chicago meeting with Cushion. He has a feeling that Carolla knows what Cushion is up to, a feeling that her sympathies and love have diverted to Cushion, who sends Arwen on useless errands in order to weasel his way into Carolla's affection. Arwen thinks that while he was in Iceland and then Chicago Cushion was at White Chimneys. He becomes wary and watches and listens. He is afraid, but when he calls Albert Bebby and tries to talk to him about his suspicions he gets Bebby's stock answer: that those are just the normal ups and downs of marriage, that it is just like the weather, just like the roasting-hot summers and snowless winters, just like the rising sea level and other climate-scare bugaboos that will infallibly straighten out "in time"—a time unspecified.

On Thursday, the day before Arwen is due to meet again with William Honor, as he prepares to wrap some potato peelings in newspaper for the compost heap he finds himself reading the page. It is the local paper, which specializes in long and florid obituaries about kindly oldsters who gave their lives and energies to the towns they lived in, and there it is, a quarter-page black-bordered essay, "William Hasty Honor, Well-Loved Local Historian Passes." There is a photograph of the African American Sunday painter. Arwen goes cold. He will never find out who wrote the chiselled verse or why it was at White Chimneys.

A few weeks later Cushion sends him on another trip, this time to Vancouver, where an old yacht has been hauled up on land, rejuvenated, and refitted as an eighteenth-century nautical-themed dwelling. The charming space is so small that only a thin couple or a single person can stay in it without cramping, but he guesses that Cushion will add it to his stable. Even by the shore it is furnace hot. There are no cooling sea breezes, and the air-conditioning in the plane on the flight back is no match for two hundred sweating bodies. The view out the window is of swaths of wildfire smoke and flickering red outbursts.

It is late when he reaches White Chimneys. There is a full moon and its light lies on the old house like boiled icing; the two white chimneys show like plastic-wrapped boxes. It is still hot and humid. In the carriage house Carolla is asleep. He leaves her undisturbed and settles down on the kitchen sofa. Too hot to sleep he watches the moonlight crawl across the wall until he somehow dozes, awakens, dozes. He is up before Carolla, before the heat of the day can sink its fangs in; he makes coffee and takes it outside to look over his half-finished garden and plan the next work area. He will sit on the teak bench and make a few notes, so he brings his notebook. As he rounds the corner of the house he sees that the half-finished garden is gone; utterly gone. A large bulldozer sits near the woods. Where once the new path wound, where once the fern garden was just beginning to feel at home, where once the water-feature crocodile howled, all is raw earth. And in the distance near the woods there is a heap of soil and rocks, wrought iron, and one of the Maxfield Parish benches upside down and splintered, a section of the crocodile's jaw like a giant comb thrusting up. He walks over to the pile and picks up a piece of broken stone that says "nothi." He rushes back into the carriage house and up the stairs and wakes Carolla.

"What have you done to my garden?" He—who is almost never angry—is afire, bursting with flame.

"Calm down," she says. "You'll have a stroke. And it is not your garden. Rodrig and I decided that a lawn would be better—more historical. That's what they had in the old days—a really big lawn. With sheep. As soon as the grass comes up I will get two sheep."

They quarrel loudly and dangerously for an hour, the worst argument they have ever had, Carolla aggressive with the rage of the guilty, Arwen trembling with the fury of betrayal. He wants to wound her and he has two arrows: "I always wanted kids," he shouts. And then, waspishly, "And the white chimneys were a secret sign that meant that loyalists to King George lived there. Not Colonial revolutionaries!"

"Well, aren't you the fountain of information," she sneers. She ignores the remark about wanting kids and hones in on the white chimneys. "I knew that. But that is not what people want. They want to believe in good-looking brave patriots fighting for democracy and freedom. Nobody wants to see a house because English loyalists lived in it." She tells him off. In the end she tells him to get out.

"I intend to be with Rodrig. We understand things the same way. And we never argue or fight. You can clear out right now. I have had enough. This is legally my property and I have the right to have a big lawn if I so choose. And I do so choose." Her face is scarlet; he is shaking. He looks around. Once again it is a hot day, every day will be another hot day. He is furious at Carolla and Cushion, especially Cushion—an incendiary deep red anger. If Cushion were to suddenly appear, he would tear his head off. But this doesn't happen.

He has not unpacked his suitcase and now he throws it in the too warm car. He knows he should react in the traditional way so often seen on television—pound on the steering wheel and shout, "Fuck! Fuck!" He hits the steering wheel hard three times. His hands hurt. He says "fuck" in a low voice and turns on the ignition, drives east to a cliff-top path overlooking the ocean. Even there the sun is brutal and hot. There is no sea breeze, just the stench of rotting seaweed. There is a sun-faded plastic bench. He sits on it until it's almost dark, watching the glitter of the sea, the curling foam that hides the immensely deep and lightless future. His skin feels hot and sore. It comes to him that the hadal zone is more extensive than any oceanographer imagines. Then he drives to Bebby's place and the old man lets him in. They don't say anything to each other. One look at Arwen and Bebby can see he is somehow wounded.

Arwen is still awake the next morning in Daniel's room after a sleepless night. He can hear Bebby downstairs, talking on the phone, coughing and choking. He dresses carefully, his maroon arms and face painfully tender and goes downstairs to talk to Bebby, to get help figuring out what to do. Bebby is sitting at the table, fiery-eyed and crying. His phone lies to one side. He looks at Arwen, tries to speak and cannot. Nor can Arwen speak. It takes a long time before either can say anything clearly, before either knows for sure what is wrong with the other. Bebby speaks first but with limping slowness for if the words are spoken rapidly they will blur, they will be facile. Bebby drags out the news that Daniel and the veterinarian have been killed by a driverless robotic taxi while crossing a street in California. Daniel is dead and the veterinarian is dead. Arwen is shocked but cannot help thinking it is an ironic death for a man who spent years helping turtles cross the road. He does not say this. He tries to tell Bebby about his sundering from Carolla, but it seems unimportant in comparison with the old man's loss. He can't go back upstairs to Daniel's room because now Bebby is in there, hauling out Daniel's school sports uniforms and notebooks, weeping, talking to Daniel's old shirts. Arwen drives back to the bench overlooking the ocean but the sun is too painful and he finds a shaded park and dozes in the car. At dusk he returns to Bebby's place.

"Can I sleep in the warehouse?" he asks and Bebby nods yes, says he is leaving the next day for Daniel's funeral in California. Days pass and Bebby returns saying nothing about Daniel and Arwen says almost nothing about Carolla. They follow the old daily work routine though Bebby often goes into the house to be alone with his feelings. He talks softly and often on the phone with someone, not letting Arwen hear.

The months go by, the season shifts with ravaging winds and Old Testament storms and downpours. Before dawn they can feel the oncoming heat. One day when they are setting out the frames and display tables for Bebby's big spring plant sale, five wild geese fly over in a pitiful semblance of a migratory formation. "Look at that," Bebby says. "Once we saw hundreds of them—thousands, miles of them—all over the sky." On Friday he says he is going up north to his property to see if the old shack is still standing, to see if he can use the land for extra nursery stock.

When Bebby comes back from the shack he is lively and purposeful, says, "That whole area up around Gristle Falls is changing. There's a lot going on—they are making the old woollen mill into apartments. They got a Whisperin' Smith Steakhouse, a fancy motel. The Turnpike Lodge. Daniel's old shack is still on the property but it is not what it used to be. Knock me down with a feather. You better come up with me next time and take a look. You won't believe it. At first I didn't believe it."

He disappears into his cluttered "office" complaining about the stacks of paper that rise like flooding water, muttering about hiring a part-time secretary. He says he wants to spend more time "up north." He somehow has a lot of money. Arwen thinks it might be from Daniel's life insurance and is surprised when Bebby buys a lime-green electric luxury car. Arwen thinks life is returning to the old boy. He wishes for a similar rejuvenation. He says yes, he will come to the shack with him. He looks forward to a change of scene even if it is only a shack in the woods. He is even looking forward to the steak house.

The next Saturday as Bebby steers his green car through street traffic and onto 93 North he stuns Arwen by saying that Daniel's shack is now a hospital and rest home for injured turtles, something Daniel started years ago. There is a fancy laboratory in a cinder-block structure put up by volunteer reptile fanciers.

"By God," he says, "they got more than a hundred turtle patients there right now. They got Daniel's picture on the wall. They got about six people work there. I never knew nothin' about it. Him and me never talked too much. They got some old-lady turtle-lover who's given them enough money to run the clinic for fifty years. It's called the Daniel Bebby Turtle Refuge. Anyway, I decided to get involved, whatever, legally turn over the property to them. Then it will be the Daniel and Albert Bebby Turtle Refuge. It's not that good a place for nursery stock anyhow, and I got some ideas for exercise rooms for the turtles that are gettin' healthy again but still don't got good muscle tone. You know, rocky climbs and sandpits—build them up."

Arwen thinks that during all the weeks of adjusting to Daniel's death Bebby has been talking with the turtle people. Making plans. But when Bebby makes the old familiar turn onto 95 South, Arwen understands that they are going not to the turtle hospice but to White Chimneys. He doesn't say a word.

They drive into the web of narrow roads that make it always possible to get anywhere by eleven different routes. There is no public transport in darkest New England—only cars and more cars. For travellers the illusion that they are entering the wooded past of ancient forest is spoiled by the sudden appearance around a twisted bend of a Whisperin' Smith Steakhouse backed up against the trees or a pizza joint beside a pathetic two-hundred-year-old house clad in age-stained chestnut siding. Arwen can almost feel the suction of charring beef fat and pineapple pizzas pulling drivers in. The railroads of an earlier century are now hiking or bicycle trails, their stations are antique shops, map stores, or coffee kiosks.

Up the long hill and around a bend that almost touches itself White Chimneys comes into view, as harsh and obdurate as ever. Bebby pulls up in front of the carriage house. He says, "I guess I'll wait here a while and catch up on my phone messages. Take your time. Then we will go to the turtles."

Arwen opens the door into the great kitchen. The sunlight streams in like languid honey, drenches Carolla, who stands in it, her wiry hair ablaze, not surprised to see him. He inhales the rich aroma of Maui Mokka. They look at each other. Carolla gestures at a box filled with pale torpedoes and says, "Fresh Belgian endives."

"They are beautiful," he says truthfully. "The best. What will you do with them?" He thinks, you—and the hitchhiker.

"There are a thousand ways. Help me decide. Please, will you stay?"

"What about—him?" He doesn't have to say the name.

"Forget him. He cannot boil an egg without burning it. He is a crap person with an air-conditioning obsession. He says White Chimneys is no good unless it gets the air-conditioning. And do you know who owns that big air-conditioning company he recommended—Kool Haus Air Wizards? He admitted it. That's the business he started out with before he thought of Heritage Homes."