Published Fall/Winter 2007
 
Jonathan Kieselhorst Is an Island
by David Yost | ns 69
Such responsibility is a heavy burden, but the stout of heart do not shrink from the weight of the crown.
—Erwin S. Strauss, How to Start Your Own Country
Jonathan Kieselhorst is jogging his thirty-third lap around the deck of New Iowa when he sees the gray blur slipping over the waves toward him and grabs for the binoculars. For a moment he wonders if Tolu'atu's bringing the supplies a day early, but before his index finger's even on the focus knob he realizes it must be a TDS cruiser. It's their new one, the pride of the Tongan Navy, a US Coast Guard hand-me-down with a 25-mm machine gun leering from its bow, and Jonathan Kieselhorst isn't at all surprised to focus in and see Captain Viliami Vikona at the helm, his face streaked with jellyfish scars and ill-will. Jonathan Kieselhorst clings to our reefs like a barnacle, the Captain once told the Los Angeles Times, but one day we will scrape him away.
JK leaps onto the northernmost Bofors gun and wheels it about, its barrel flashing in the Pacific sun. He checks the TDS boat again with his binoculars, only to see Captain Vikona watching him through an identical pair. The boat's easily within the mile JK claims as his own and its course leads smack between the double pillars of New Iowa's platform. He considers letting the boat just plunge right through, imagining the satisfying screams of metal and sailors as the cruiser's antennas shear off against the platform's bottom, but he knows that the captain is testing his sovereignty and must be answered. He wipes the jogsweat from his eyes and fires across Vikona's bow. He checks with the binocs. Vikona only smiles, his hands steady on the wheel. Am I being set up, JK wonders, but he also thinks, well, what the shit, and rips another line of 40mm holes into the water just short of the cruiser's hull. He switches to the binocs again but the cruiser's still coming in fast and he focuses in to see a Tongan seaman bringing the 25-mm to bear on him and without even thinking, JK wheels up the Bofors and sprays down the cruiser's bow. The gunner drops and slithers behind the gunwales. The cruiser turns.
JK stands post with the binoculars for another hour, then rushes inside. He mixes a Mudslide, calls Carl on the satellite phone and dictates a press release protesting Tongan incursions into New Iowa's territorial waters.
"If it wasn't just you out there," Carl says, "the sovereignty fight would be going a lot smoother."
It's an old lecture, and JK just hangs up. He curls up on the couch and reflects. His first armed action against another nation. He acquitted himself well, he feels. He pours another Mudslide and toasts to no one.
- - - - -
They've only e-mailed before this point, so JK is nervous as to what she might look like and terrified as to what he might look like. At least he's got his muscles but he's still not proud of his broad face and uncorrected overbite, and though he gets his Esquire and his GQ, it's not the same as being able to step into a club and see what shoes everybody's wearing this year—though admittedly, even before he renounced his citizenship, he tended to pass his weekend nights working late, anyway. He finally chooses a dark suit of tropical wool and a dark tie with the first full Windsor knot he's ever tied and if he looks like an undertaker she'll just have to live with it. He puts on aftershave, cologne, and a thick layer of talcum powder for the sweating.
When Heike arrives, she's young and sleek and serious and in a silver minidress that seems ill-chosen for the open ocean but which even through the binoculars drives JK wild. There's a bit of confusion as to how to get her up the ladder in spike heels but Tolu'atu finally agrees to carry them ahead of her; he scales, fat but nimble, from the rocking boat and up the ladder and through the hatch, tossing the gleaming shoes onto JK's couch, and gives JK a wink and a double thumbs-up. As the rungs clang below them, Tolu'atu tosses in a bow and a deadpan "Your Majesty," and then Heike's there between them. Her face is beautiful and hard and when she takes JK's hand without affect or royal protocol, he feels the sweat ripple from his pores like a slowly cracking dam.
JK gives her the tour, the 550 square yards of habitable rooms that make up his life: the 102" Samsung plasma TV, the glossy Ikea furniture, the exercise room with its Landice 8 Executive Trainer treadmill and BodyCraft Galena Home Gym System that he and Tolu'atu raised into the platform with a pulley. Jonathan Kieselhorst is in remarkable shape for a monarch and he hopes she'll notice. He shows her the flag and crest of New Iowa (azure, a coral reef gules ensigned with a corn field or) and the Bofors guns, installed by the British Navy but refurbished by JK, hunched like jaguars behind steel sheets of armor. Could they have fired at her grandfather's Stuka before being dragged out here? He wonders, but does not ask.
Heike takes it all in with metallic indifference. JK grows desperate. He shows her the racks of champagne in the galley kitchen, the Iridium satellite phone, the signed first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls. "I'm really not that into material things," she tells him. But then he hits the jackpot when he shows her the emeralds he keeps stashed in case of a fast escape.
Heike crouches beside him, exposed thigh pressing thoughtlessly to his. Her eyes burn with a green greed.
"You shouldn't keep these hidden away," she says. "Not with all the energy they store." She shows him her rhodonite necklace, its rose-red globules bunching around her throat. Rhodonite vitalizes the organs near your sacrum, she explains, creating an energy matrix between your mind and your reproductive organs. She says "reproductive organs" without a trace of self-consciousness, and JK feels a stirring in his own. This matrix makes a solid emotional foundation, she says, to which unproductive emotions like grief can't attach, forcing them to dissolve harmlessly into the atmosphere.
Heike's father died of a heart attack the year before, JK knows, and he suspects this is the experience that drove her overseas, and possibly insane. Most grieving people still didn't drop their families and friends to go teach algebra in Fiji, he supposes, but then most people don't end up running international banking scams from abandoned anti-aircraft platforms either, which led him to hope they'd be a pretty good match. Now, as he watches her rub an emerald across her abdomen and speak of its potential for liver repair, he knows it's time to throw in the towel on this one. For a long and lustful minute he considers going for it anyway, but he feels it's important that a man in his position not be less picky, but rather more picky. If JK was planning to settle for anything easy in this life, he'd still be back in Des Moines.
"Please, take it," he says.
"Well, of course, I couldn't," she says, unconsciously clenching her hand over it.
"Please," JK says, "as a favor to me," but then he keeps dinner very, very short. Later that night, drunk, horny, and embittered, he shoots off some press releases declaring war on Austria, getting the Dominion of New Iowa written up in "News of the Weird" for the third time that year.
- - - - -
Tolu'atu swings by in the late afternoon to find JK still in bed.
"Lazy man," he says, grinning fatly behind his mustache. "Awake up! It is beautiful day in the world."
When JK stumbles into the living room, Tolu'atu's got photographs all over the table. The girls are young, plump, and fresh, and make JK think of the end of Mutiny on the Bounty. But he's read his Pacific history and he knows how the mutineers and the Tahitians really got on: alcoholism, rape, suicide, and murder after murder, half of Pitcairn's population massacred in a single day, Fletcher Christian shot in the back and you can't help but picture Clark Gable bleeding there on the ground. Sometimes JK tries to imagine himself in bed with one of these girls, no language between them, new as Adam and Eve, naming each bit of their bodies and each of his possessions in a language known only to them. More often he imagines the girl glaring at him from the slick Ikea couch as he pantomimes obscenities. He keeps walking, pours himself cold coffee left from last night's dinner.
"These girls are very young," he calls to Tolu'atu from the kitchen.
"Oh, maybe you want old woman. Old and skinny like the Western girl. Like the mulberry tree."
JK's seen pictures of Tolu'atu's round, smiling wife and of the four daughters swelling to match her. JK wishes that he, too, could pack contentedness around him like a buttery dough, but he also knows that without exercise he'd be mad within a week.
So they put away the pictures and play Monopoly, but later that night JK's back on the sat-phone Internet looking at Belarusian mail-order brides. Ilenas and Natalyas and Tatyanas with broken grammar and short, plaid skirts. He imagines Lyudmila leaning down from those high heels to kiss him, Valentina letting down his zipper with those long fingers, Ksenia astride him, orgasming Slavicly.
- - - - -
Jonathan Kieselhorst does his pullups and crunches and twenty-eight one-handed pushups. He accepts five Burundian deposits into the National Bank of New Iowa and then redeposits each, fresh and untraceable, to the Swiss, netting a transfer fee of $14,000. He drafts a letter for Carl to send to the Los Angeles Times demanding that they retract a description of New Iowa as "a non-existent floating fraud"; New Iowa is in fact solidly anchored on a sunken barge atop a coral reef, the letter observes. He writes a personal ad detailing his situation at pathetic length. He plays three hours of online backgammon. He wipes the salty crust from the Bofors guns and clips his toenails with military precision. He touches his nose to the mirror and stares.
- - - - -
Half an hour into dinner with Molly it's clear to both of them that she's not going to sleep with him, so they both relax and have a good time. She wears a pink dress and a green kiekie of pandanus leaves and coconut fiber and tells him about life as a Tongan Peace Corps Volunteer, the rewards of her English teaching and the library she's organizing, but also the diarrhea, the lice, the pounds she's put on from all the taro and cassava, the hikes she takes along the beaches to burn them back off, brandishing a stick for the stray dogs that chase her. JK thinks she looks good plump and tells her so and she smiles. She has some questions about bank fraud which he disposes of quickly and she raves over the fondue, happy to get anything that's not cooked in an umu. They have an extra lobster tail that he lets her toss to the skuas and then they talk on into the sunset, legs dangling over the platform's edge, waves lapping the pillars below. They talk about her childhood on military bases in Japan and Germany and his in a town of dying farms and before he knows it he's circled up to when he left the brokerage and opened the Bank of New Iowa and fled the country to beat the warrants and subpoenas.
"And now?" she asks.
He shrugs.
"You're looking at it," he says. She lifts a hand and touches his talcumed cheek.
"You poor man," she says, then puts her hand over his and gives his fingers a squeeze.
When Tolu'atu comes for her a few minutes later JK can't believe the night's passed so quickly. And maybe there's more here than he thought; maybe she's just not a first date kind of girl.
"You had a good time, right?" he asks. "Tell me you'll come again soon."
"Listen," she says, "Thank you. I'd love to. I had such a nice time. But I'm not supposed to cross international borders without telling the Peace Corps. I could get thrown out. I think it'd be pushing my luck."
"Sure," JK says. "Okay."
She squeezes his hand again and starts down the ladder, but then stops and looks at him, considering. His heart flips over, but what she says is, "Why were you so determined to make all this money, anyway?"
"So I wouldn't have to be alone all the time," he says. He's got nothing to lose from the truth.
- - - - -
The next day JK wakes at noon to an e-mail from Molly. He clicks it open, his heart doing triple axels, but when he reads past the thank yous and regrets he sees she's after funding for science textbooks.
Sure, he writes back. I'll have Carl cut you a check.
For lunch JK simmers veal medallions with white wine and capers but even when the platform is redolent with garlic and rosemary it still feels empty. He eats the veal and has a Budweiser and does chin-ups until his arms ache to the bone.
- - - - -
Jonathan Kieselhorst is moving backwards and knows it. He does his chest press and lat pulls and wonders if it's possible to devolve until his body's just a muscly shell with an infant's mind to guide it. He remembers a dark February where he paced the decks mullah-bearded and eating nothing but Fruit Loops, and he swears, never again.
But then, good news: after two years of Carl's lobbying, the Central African Republic formally recognizes the sovereignty of the Dominion of New Iowa. JK prints out the story from the Washington Post and makes a note to ask Tolu'atu for a frame; they can put it up next to the one from Burkina Faso. First, though, he picks up a marker and blacks out the reporter's comment that the CAR would happily "recognize the State of Denial, if it had a letterhead" as well as the much more worrying rumors that the US State Department thinks he's a terrorist financier. JK's moved plenty of money around for embezzlers and dictators but that doesn't make him al-Qaeda, does it? He passes an anxious afternoon on the phone with Carl checking and doublechecking their records but they find nothing.
"I thought this is why we renounced my citizenship in the first place," JK says, "so I wouldn't have to worry about this stuff."
"Welcome to the age of extraordinary rendition," says Carl, sucking a lemon drop.
JK hangs up and puts out a press release deploring terrorism in all forms, but when he closes his eyes he can already feel the burlap hood scratching his face, the cool clamp of electrodes on his scrotum. It scares the crap out of him but he's never been happier to have renounced his citizenship. He knew lots of people in Iowa who could love their country unconditionally, the way you might an adulterous father or a deadbeat brother, but he's not one of them. He'll take the island.
- - - - -
Captain Viliami Vikona circles all that afternoon, and then the next, and then the next. Jonathan Kieselhorst understands that this is a test of will; as long as JK can convince the Tongans they'd lose a few men by attacking, the king will never allow the assault. So JK lounges hour after hour in the Bofors, slathered with sunscreen and snacking on Funyuns, his dog-eared copy of Robinson Crusoe resting on the sights, and when night falls, he double-bars the hatches.
The Tongan chiefs received Captain Cook so graciously, JK knows, that Cook named the archipelago "the Friendly Islands"; a later expedition discovered that the chiefs had been planning to murder him all along, but failed when they couldn't agree on the means. JK thinks of this story often, and it gives him comfort.
- - - - -
"And why not pay for it?" JK abruptly demands of his ham-and-tomato sandwich. He's seen men buy their way into relationships with triceps, with wit, by playing water polo or the bass guitar. So what's so wrong with actual money? You're settling, the sandwich warns, but he ignores it and takes a bite. "Did I give up my country just to keep acting like I'm from fucking Iowa?" he asks, spattering flecks of bread and mayonnaise across the table.
But when JK asks Tolu'atu over a Budweiser, he turns out to be a harder sell than the sandwich.
"So," Tolu'atu says, putting his beer down with an unflickering grin, "I show pictures to you of fifty good and lovely girls, but the only girl you want from my country is a whore?" It took JK more than a year of knowing Tolu'atu to understand that this was how he showed anger: a rhetorical question atop a stolid smile. "I am sorry, JK," he says. "I am a man with daughters. I will bring your Western women, but never my country." Then he laughs and reaches for the cashews.
"There's more than one boat for hire in the South Pacific," JK says. Tolu'atu looks at him in honest surprise.
"Sure," he says, "but we are friends."
So they play a few hours of X-Box, and later that night JK's there in front of the computer with his pants open again and he's just narrowed it down to a tall Svetlana and a petite Tatyana when his inbox pings with new mail and he opens it.
Your Highness, it reads, I saw your ad and couldn't help but respond—a gourmet cook and a king, too? As it happens, my work often brings me to the South Pacific. Maybe some day we could meet?
- - - - -
"Welcome to the Dominion of New Iowa," Jonathan Kieselhorst says with all the grandness he can muster for his living room, but Hannah mimes a curtsy in her short yellow dress and murmurs, "Thank you, your majesty," in a way that thrills him to his marrow, and at this point JK starts sweating and doesn't stop.
"Please," he says, "call me Jonathan."
She's willowy for an international tax attorney, he thinks, though he has to admit he didn't know what he had expected. He gives her the tour, he feeds her filet mignon and baked potatoes and she-crab soup. She talks insightfully of his tax status under maritime law and follows his hands with gleaming blue eyes, and when she laughs, she touches his arm. When he hoists himself onto a Bofors to demonstrate the wheeling mechanism, she clambers up into the sight operator's seat beside him and he shows her which pedals to depress for firing. She grins and bears down with a black pump and the gun jerks hotly between them, spitting rounds into the setting sun.
"Now I've definitely never done that on a first date," she says.
"What have you done?" he asks, proud to have even the slightest repartee on tap, and prouder still when she laughs and says, "Don't get fresh."
But a bottle of champagne later she's leaning over the armor plates, elbow brushing his, and staring out over the sea as she says, "You know what I admire about you, is that even in Iowa you knew you were a king. And so you went out and you became one."
"I'm a lucky man," JK says, already forgetting the desperate legal dodges, the move to the platform to escape prosecution, the renunciation of his citizenship to slow extradition, the days and nights of online billiards and hunched masturbation.
"No," Hannah corrects, "you're a brave one," and just like that, JK feels that, too. "When I was a little girl—I know every little girl wants to be a princess—but I really wanted to be a princess. I had poofy pink dresses and this big canopy bed that I would play in all day long, and I even covered my walls with construction paper bricks so I could imagine I was living in a castle. But then around middle school, my friend Joanna slept over and made fun of it, so I took it all down the next day and had my dad throw it away. But I couldn't stop thinking about it." She watches the petrels circling in the dusk. "I don't think I ever got over that."
JK turns her face to look at him.
"You could be a queen," he says, and for the first time in five years, Jonathan Kieselhorst is kissed by a woman.
- - - - -
The mornings they spend on the deck playing badminton or sniping at petrels with his Ruger carbine; in the evenings, they go below deck to cook escargot and macaroni and cheese and make love on thousand thread-count sheets. He can't get over the feel of womanflesh after so long, the taste of it, the warm softness of her thighs, the kindness of her lips upon his neck as he holds her in the dark. When Vikona circles him on the third morning, Hannah sits across his lap in the Bofors seat and JK can barely remember to turn the gun.
But at the same time, he can already feel her restlessness with the space, can see it in the way she paces the rooms like a bored housecat, or the way she picks up a canister of tarragon when he cooks, stares at it, then puts it down again.
"So is there a future for us?" Hannah asks him in the pitch black of the bedroom, her back tight and slick against his hands..
"Stay with me," JK says in post-orgasmic abandon. "Be my queen. We'll have whatever we want."
She's silent a long time, and he keeps his strokes steady over her body, careful not to betray his alarm.
"I think I could live with you and be happy," she says, "but I can't live here." He feels the bed shift as she rolls to face him. "There must be somewhere we can go without extradition," she says. "Laos, Brazil. Someplace we can buy passports and settle down on the beach."
As if he hasn't thought of this a thousand times. "Even if I get past the Tongans"—seeing a maze of jellyfish scars floating in the dark—"the Americans will still be after me."
He counts her breaths before she answers. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen.
"Don't get mad," she says, "but have you ever thought that maybe you just like it out here?"
His lips go taut. A therapist diagnosed him with Social Anxiety Disorder once over the sat phone, which JK thought a cheap shot at a man in forced solitary confinement and fired her. Still, reflecting later, he couldn't deny there was some truth in it.
"This isn't life out here," Hannah whispers. "This is just stuff." Her fingers slither through his chest hair and circle his right nipple. How good it is to be touched.
"But the kingdom," he says. She shifts again and now her mouth is over his, kissing him, long and deep.
"Come be my king," she says.
- - - - -
Once Jonathan Kieselhorst makes up his mind to leave, he's surprised by how little there is he wants to keep. Tolu'atu gratefully accepts the plasma TV but declines the X-Box—"JK, I think this would be mind-poison for my children"—and JK giddily tosses it through a porthole.
"Nothing for Vikona," he says, "that's the rule," and they take turns winging champagne bottles off the deck while the other blasts away at them with the Ruger.
Hannah visits again with pictures of a riverside villa in Luang Prabang and outlines a plan: a fast boat to Vanuatu, a plane to Indonesia and then Laos, and never a single inch of extraditable soil. He makes love to her and thinks of a train rushing through mountains, a skua plummeting through the sky.
But with only five days to go he can't deny that doubts are thickening in his mind. He imagines Vikona overtaking them on the open water and then JK throwing himself over Hannah as 25-mm holes open up across the hull and across their bodies. He imagines learning to talk to waiters and shopkeepers all over again and in Laotian, no less. Most of all he imagines Hannah trying to put up with his nerves and his overbite in five years, in ten, and the next time they speak codedly of their plans over the sat phone, it's on the tip of his tongue to say, Look, maybe we're rushing into this. But he also knows that if he flinches now, he may never work up this momentum again, and what he says instead is: "I can't wait. I love you, too."
That afternoon, JK peers at Captain Viliami Vikona until the Captain raises his own binoculars, and then JK gives him a little goodbye wave. Vikona glares opaquely back, but JK is pretty sure he'll understand later.
- - - - -
And though Vikona circles for four days this time, sure enough, come moving day, Hannah calls to say that he's back in port.
"Be safe, sweetheart," she says. "I love you."
So JK calls Tolu'atu and the Tongan sets out in one boat and his son-in-law Bobu'atu in another and they arrive at New Iowa just as JK's finished soaking the place in gasoline. But when Tolu'atu and Bobu'atu come up the ladder, neither is smiling.
"What?" JK asks.
"There is bad news, JK," Tolu'atu says. He takes a deep breath but starts coughing from the fumes, and then Bobu'atu starts to cough sympathetically, and instead of whatever Tolu'atu was planning to say, he motions to Bobu'atu. Bobu'atu covers his coughs with his left hand and hands JK an envelope with his right.
"What the hell, Tolu'atu," JK says, but he opens it and takes out the stack of photographs.
Hannah, with broad sunglasses in a cheap beachside restaurant.
Hannah, peeling the meat from a crab's leg.
A man, his back to the camera, sitting down at her table.
A bright yellow folder passed across.
The man, walking away, folder tucked under his arm
A close-up of the man's face, livid with slender scars.
Hannah, walking away.
"I don't understand," JK says. The Tongans are still giving little coughs, eyes watery, but then they stop with suspicious ease.
"I have a friend at the embassy," Bobu'atu says, "who thinks she is American government."
"I am sorry, JK," Tolu'atu says.
He restacks the photographs one by one and hands them back to Bobu'atu, nostrils burning with the angry stink of gas.
"Let's go up to the deck," JK says.
- - - - -
The air is clearer, but Tolu'atu and Bobu'atu still say nothing and avoid his running eyes.
"You followed her," JK says.
"We asked about her," Tolu'atu says. "Then we followed her."
"Because you didn't think she could be real." He wants to be angry, but hadn't he thought the same thing? Tolu'atu says nothing, a grave boulder of blubber. The wind shifts and the stench of gasoline crashes over them like a wave.
"And you came out here to warn me not to go," JK says.
"I did not want to lie to you. I want you to know that this is an American trap. But I think you should go to it. Go to it and surrender and go home."
JK can't believe what he's hearing.
"That's decades of jail," he says.
And for the first time in the conversation, Tolu'atu laughs a big belly jiggler.
"JK," he asks, "where do you think you are now?" Bobu'atu starts to laugh, too, looking around at the ancient Bofors guns, the ragged badminton net, the oak dinner table standing chairless on the tern-spattered deck.
"That's Your Majesty to you, you fat fuck," Jonathan Kieselhorst tells him. "Now get out of my country."
Tolu'atu stops laughing. "JK," he says.
"I mean it," says the King. "Or I'll kill you."
- - - - -
Jonathan Kieselhorst walks the petroleum-saturated rooms of New Iowa, fingering his Zippo. There's little that can be saved, he thinks, if he wants to start again. He'll have to dump all of the furniture, ventilate and wash out all of the rooms before he can even turn the generators back on. Already he regrets his words to Tolu'atu, but he likes the bitter clarity that it's brought to his situation: he can stay, alone, or he can die. He walks his ruined rooms and picks at the thought like a scab.
So he's almost disappointed when he opens the bottom hatch for fresh air and sees Tolu'atu's boat still bobbing in the water below. A final offer; a free ticket to jail. He feels another spike of anger but then when he looks ahead to the empty days and nights of the empty platform, he finds himself actually considering it. A minimum security prison in exchange for a surrender and cooperation, surely; Carl could see to that. 20 to 30 with a few years off for good behavior and JK walks out a strapping mid-fiftier to rejoin the human race. And in between, trading stories on bunk beds and across cafeteria green beans. Movie nights and recreation yards, arts and crafts. A pretty social worker smiling down at his ceramic giraffe. Now that's fine work, Mr. Kieselhorst, she might say. I made it for you, he'd tell her.
Out of curiosity JK drops his suitcase through the hatch. It lands in the boat's stern with a smack, bounces, and lies flat, and it's then that he realizes the full extent of Tolu'atu's gift. The boat is stocked with food, fuel, and navigational gear; Vikona is out of position on the route to Vanuatu. JK traces mental courses to Samoa, to Nauru, routes he's stared at a thousand times on the map but which have never been real to him the way they are at this moment. He thinks again of the pamphlets Hannah littered his table with—Luang Prabang, Bali, Dakar, Kathmandu—and bursts into a sweat.
The key is to not make a decision now, he thinks, feeling for the rung below him with a loafered foot. The key now is only to move. He hasn't climbed down the ladder since the day they moved in the treadmill, and he's surprised to find the steel warm and salty under his palms. Vikona could still overtake him, JK knows, or a storm, or he could overshoot and die gasping like an albacore in the Pacific sun, but at least it's a step up from the self-immolation he had planned a minute ago. I'm a survivor, he thinks with pride, and then he thinks, Jesus, I'm really doing this.
Below him Tolu'atu's boat clinks against the ladder once, then twice. JK thinks of prison movies he's seen where the inmates tap messages to each other through the bars. Escape, they'd tap out, or just, You are not alone. He stops on the sixth rung down and flicks the Zippo open. His eyes rehearse the toss through the open hatch and the leap to the ocean below, wide and dark in the shadow of the platform. He thinks of Vikona's cruiser slicing through that same water, the shadow of Hannah's plane back to Washington passing over it, but he thinks, too, of Tolu'atu and Bobu'atu scudding home in their small launch to the elephantine wives and daughters who will embrace them in the surf.
All Jonathan Kieselhorst has to do now is jump.
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