“He always talks like a terrorist,” Minna said, as if to reassure Lucy that her husband wasn’t improvising his own explosive device.
“No, I think like a terrorist. Somebody has to.”
“It’s the t-t-t-talk of terrorism that t-terrorizes me,” Lucy said, trying to muster her words. “Like these stupid TOPOFF dramas. I hate how the administration plays with us. You know, be scared, be very, very scared — but’s that’s okay, we’ll keep you safe, catch that plane, do that shopping. But watch out for the bogeyman! Sure, we’ll sometimes get acts of terrorism, like in Oklahoma City, but I don’t buy all the smoke and mirrors stuff. It’s so Wizard of Oz.”
“Ah, you’re a Christian Scientist!” Augie bared his false teeth in an alarming grin.
“No. Why?”
“Mrs. Eddy believed all disease was an illusion. A pity Mrs. Eddy died of pneumonia.”
Lucy bristled at his tone. “I don’t not believe in terrorism. It’s just that there are more threatening things — greenhouse gases, earthquakes, whatever. Like Seattle gets millions of federal dollars for mock terror attacks but can’t raise a federal cent for earthquake exercises, which is what it really needs.”
“Mrs. Who?” asked Minna.
“This is World War IV,” Augie said.
“World War what?” Lucy laughed. “You lived through World War II, and you seriously compare this to that?”
“I think the situation we’re in now’s as bad as 1939—worse, in a way. The world has changed. People have got to wake up to the complexity, the scale, the global nature of what’s happening. Unless we can win this war, I’m afraid we’re going to see the end of the modern nation-state, which — since I’m not of the anarchist persuasion — I happen to believe would be a catastrophe for mankind. So no, I’m not joking. I don’t think the destruction of our civilization is a laughing matter, funnily enough.”
He spoke in the dry, acidic voice of the classroom, and Lucy remembered Tad’s tight-assed prof who was gung-ho about Vietnam; strange that this victim of war should seem to be such an enthusiast of wars in general. Her glass was empty, and she cast a longing glance at the refrigerator door. “Really? The end of the nation-state?”
“You know how Max Weber defined the state, in terms of its monopoly on violence? We just lost the monopoly. You realize how big a deal that is? Used to be, only states had the armies and the hardware to go to war. This is the first moment in modern history when a bunch of private individuals have the power to take down a state. It’s like you, me, and Minna could get together and go mano a mano with the Pentagon — and what’s truly scary is we could win. Don’t laugh: the state’s set up to defend itself from other states, in the old-fashioned kind of warfare, but when it comes to fighting you, me, and Minna, the state’s clueless. Clueless!
“First off, it doesn’t know who we are. We’re everywhere and nowhere. We don’t wear uniforms. We don’t have a capital city they can bomb. They don’t know if we have a leader, even. They can’t negotiate with us. They can’t send the army, because we haven’t told them where the battlefield’s gonna be. Deterrence? Nope. Containment? Mutually assured destruction? Those things might work when you’re dealing with another state, but when it comes to dealing with the three of us at this table, they’re the wrong implements — like eating soup with a fork. Meantime, they know we have access to stuff that used to be part of their monopoly — chemical, nuclear, biological.”
Lucy joined the game. “And have we got it?”
“Doesn’t matter. We’ve got access. Look at all the nuclear material that’s been floating around on the black market since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Look at the anthrax lab at the U — suppose I have an angry molecular-biologist friend? The essential technology’s all around us, and the government can do very little — frighteningly little — to keep us from getting our hands on it, provided we have the contacts and the moolah. You want more wine in that glass?”
“Please.” This time the bottle stayed on the table.
Augie stabbed a chanterelle with his fork and waggled it at Lucy. “Now look at our enemy. He has the resources, the smarts, the manpower, and he’s hell-bent on attacking the United States and destroying our system of government, because he believes democracy is a blasphemy against his goddamn god.
“And we’ll help him do it. Americans take democracy for granted: they don’t stop to think how delicate and fragile it really is. He only needs to create the right set of circumstances, and we’ll finish the job for him. We’ll do the dismantling and rewrite the laws while he sits at home watching us on CNN, laughing his sorry ass off.”
Lucy was struck by the discrepancy between the size of Augie’s talk and the size of the man himself. His chair was too big for him, and his white mustache looked as if it had been gummed onto the face of an unhappy boy.
Minna said, “You should see our emergency supplies. We’ve got a roomful. We’ve got so much water, and rice, and beans. And…” Lucy saw sudden confusion in her eyes.
“More freeze-dried chicken à la king than you’d want to eat in an entire lifetime,” Augie said. “We just about filled the utility room.”
“My eleven-year-old would approve. She’s always lecturing me about earthquake preparedness. A flashlight and some bottles of Evian water is the best I’ve done so far. I was never any good as a Girl Scout, so I’d make a lousy survivalist.”
“You need duct tape,” Minna said, “and candles. Would anyone care for dessert?”
When lunch was over, Lucy offered to help load the dishwasher, but Augie led her upstairs to his study. Closing the door, he said, “You mustn’t mind Minna. She’s been having trouble remembering things lately — we’re a little afraid that Dr. Alzheimer may be paying us a call.”
Lucy had guessed as much. “I’m sorry.”
He looked out through a tall and narrow window. “Osprey,” his wan voice said.
From the modern California of downstairs, they’d walked into another century. Of all the weird architectural fantasies on Sunlight Beach Road, this room had to be the strangest — a long, warrenlike affair of molded, fussy-looking arches, nooks, alcoves, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and an old-fashioned fireplace, its grate piled with fir cones. And it smelled ages older than the house, a pleasing library scent of glue and must and paper fungus. Lucy had the unsettling, head-swimming sense that she’d been here before. Those arches. That oyster-white color. The small plaster bust on a shelf.
“It reminds me of somewhere,” she said.
“It should. It should.” The eagerness was back in Augie’s face.
Groping for the memory, she said, “It’s not…Monticello, is it?”
“Bull’s-eye! You know, you’re the first person to get it? But I guessed you might. Jefferson’s library. It’s kind of impressionistic. I gave a bunch of pictures to a retired architect here on the island, and he did what he could with the space. I was God’s gift to the contractors: we had them in for months, though they seemed to think I was a few sandwiches short of a picnic for wanting it. Tell me, is it insanely pretentious?”
“No, it’s charming.” It was the books that saved it, Lucy thought. They weren’t the kind that people bought for show; there wasn’t a leather binding to be seen. Wherever she looked, she saw more drab paperbacks, white spines gone yellow, titles in German and in Cyrillic lettering. Even when new they would’ve been cheap, shabby things; now they gave off a powerful whiff of the old, fallen Communist world in all its threadbare mediocrity. On Jefferson’s bookshelves, comically displaced, they gave the room an unexpected human warmth and messiness.