When appearing lost one day, the town constable asked Smart where he lived and how to get there. Smart said he didn’t know. The constable took him into protective custody. Unable to hold Smart against his will for more than a day, the constable hauled him before the judge on charges of vagrancy so he could hold him until the authorities could locate his home and return him safely to it. The judge ordered it so and the constable escorted the ‘prisoner’ back to jail.

Smart was quiet and content in his new surroundings: he was dry, had a bed, and three meals a day. As time passed, the jailers forgot about him and the constable retired without ever finding the Smart residence.

One day a lawyer was visiting his client in the slammer when he noticed Smart, by then an old man, sitting quietly in the corner of the common area looking at a book. The lawyer went over to him and asked what he was reading.

Smart looked up and said, “Oh, I don’t know.”

“Can I see the book?” the lawyer asked. Smart handed it over.

The attorney read the title: What You Never Knew You Didn’t Know.

“What have you learned?” asked the lawyer.

“Oh, well,” Smart said, clearing his throat. “I don’t know—”

“Really?” the lawyer interrupted, “nothing, ever?”

And in Britain, not telling on someone is ingrained from childhood – all those repetitions of ‘tell-tale tit, your tongue will split’ made sure of that.

I didn’t tell tales when for weeks Hazel persecuted me, made my life a misery with constantly poking me, hard-fingered, into my back from the desk behind, (not until I put her into a novel that is, describing her ‘boot-button black with anger’ eyes, her skin ‘so densely freckled as to suggest that she’d been liberally sprinkled with grated nutshells’ and making sure she was rejected by the hero.)

Instead I ran away from school, put the headmaster into a state of apoplexy, so that he came after me, and shouted and banged on the windows of my house until I emerged, scared and crying. I still didn’t tell on her so he put the entire school into ten minutes silence, hands on heads – including me – and was bad-tempered for the rest of the day.

She had a little jar on top of her bureau; it was half full with loose change. She never used it as far as I could see. It was spare change I reasoned, dreading each step as I ascended up the stairway.

She sat on the side of the bed and motioned me in. There was a cross with an impaled Jesus hanging over her thin bed. She didn’t yell, only said she knew I’d taken the money. I asked how she knew. “My house has sensitive eyes,” she said. Her house was creepy, old and spacious with a basement I never went near. “We see many things and you need to also.”

I found out later it was my sister Kath who’d squealed, dropped the dime while I was out spending the money on a new Superman comic I’d wanted, the one featuring Super Girl. Kath was mad because I kept insinuating she was adopted from the asylum on the edge of town. Geez, I was just kidding!

Some people have walked on the surface of the moon while others have merely been shot into space to gaze weightlessly on the face of infinity. Still others, of course, have never escaped the limitations that bind us to earth.

Some people have driven submarines, some have circumnavigated the globe while remaining submerged the whole way round; others, sadly, have never left their home ocean, the one called Atlantic, the Pond between North America and Europe. Some have never been to sea, poor sots.

Some people have seen war, some have died of mortal wounds, or disease, or starvation, and some have suffered the horrible damage of body and mind; others, thankfully, have known only relative peace. Maybe they are the one percent.

Some people have gone to college to learn which questions to ask; others have intuited them their whole lives with little help from school.

Some people have been incarcerated as convicted criminals while others simply haven’t been caught, and still others stand falsely accused.

Some people are some of us and some people are Others. Some are fellow citizens and some foreign aliens. Some look like us, but most don’t.

Some people fly and some people swim, I take the train on a traveling whim. Some people rhyme and some people just can’t.

Lots of people are in the one percent, and some are the ninety-nine. Some people go back and forth.

“The dark ages are over,” I shot back. “Time to catch up with today Pop. That’s called progress, in case you didn’t know.”

“Yeah, I read that somewhere,” he says, pushing back into the recliner, disappearing back into a tattered book.

The old man’s stuck behind the curve. The cell phone he carries around is an embarrassment, pure old school technology. “I call people on it and they call me back,” he says. “Works perfectly… the way it’s supposed to. Don’t need no fancy contraption to simply communicate.”

Okay, he may have a point but I sure as hell won’t give him the satisfaction of it. This here is supposed to make things easier but I’m having doubts. It doesn’t feature any bells and whistles and the keyboard is a little bitch. Maybe my fingers are too big. Maybe I’m too impatient. Or maybe it’s just a piece of crap. I don’t know how many times I’ve toggled the ‘previous page’ button. Even then I’m unable to find the page I want to reference.

He waited to be seated for a minute then realized he might stand there all day for all anybody cared, looking like an idiot in his Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts and Yankees cap. Finally, he got the idea, perched his sunglasses on his hat and took his own seat.

He was in luck, the bartender came over.

“May I have a menu, please?” Daniel said.

“Hamburger, beer and whiskey,” said the man who looked like a refugee from an Alaskan caribou grazing range. “That’s the menu.”

“Excellent,” Daniel said. “I’ll have a burger—well-done, of course—and a Heineken.”

“We ain’t got no Heinies.”

“Coors Light then.”

“Coors.”

“Coors it is.”

“That’s it?”

“And a shot of Drambuie.”

“Wild Turkey.”

“Fine. I’ll have a burger, a Coors—in a frosted mug, please—and a shot of Wild Turkey.”

“Hmph.”

When the Alaskan served his lunch, Daniel noticed the following discrepancies: the burger was charred black, the beer was warm and the whiskey was hot. He called the bartender over.

“My burger is burnt black, the beer is warm and the whiskey is hot.”

The music stopped. Patrons at the bar turned to look. The bartender’s black eyes glared.

This is my third lap on my journey home. I’m writing this from Mrs. Bennett’s little desk in Warrington. I arrived here about teatime and were they surprised! Mr. and Mrs. Bennett are both looking very well. They have a lovely home with roses everywhere. There is a small pond and rockery just beside me out the window. They told me Ron was in Rangoon. He will be home in sixteen days. They miss him very much.

It has been a hectic week over here; everybody’s so excited, they’ve gone mad for a few days. We are all very relieved and thankful it is all finished in this area. I think I realized – for the first time in five days – the war is over. It’s so wonderful when you think about it. That George could see this day! But that is not for us to decide. God rest his soul. We will never forget him.

Mrs. Bennett and I went to town to look around this morning. I tried to contact Emmie Flavell at Pont Street but nobody home. We had coffee at a nice place then back home for lunch. After supper we took a walk in the country.

I slept in Ron’s room last night and had tea in bed this morning. It’s wonderful to be a human being again. I do hope you are both well. The way things are going I should be there well within two weeks time. Keep smiling.

In other words, things had gotten pretty screwed up over the course of the day, and though I should have see it coming—the end result, I mean—I couldn’t, because I was involved, to say the least. Had I been a fly on the wall, an observer rather than a participant, a spectator instead of a player, maybe then I could have predicted the results with some accuracy. But as it was, I couldn’t, and we would all end up paying the consequences.

Chalk it up to the fog of war, dammit.

Looking back, it had always been like that, out of control laughter, set off by the most innocent event. Even after eighty years, Jaddock still got a kick out of it. It didn’t take much to set his daughter off and she erupted again when Jaddock blurted out a comic “O…H… D…EER!!!” Through wet eyes, Julia saw it too late. A deer stood in the curve of the road. She swerved helplessly and launched the car quietly over the edge into the ravine.

That was three days ago; there was no laughter now. Julia leaned silent in the driver’s seat, a crumpled paper doll propped against the window. A deep ugly crevice marked her once beautiful mouth. It smiled blankly back at a clicking maw… a wolf’s black mouth relentlessly snapping against the thin glass. Jaddock lay wedged between the backseats, flat palms pressed over his ears. “Wolf’s at the door,” he whispered to no one.

The Christmas punch, of dodgy home-made wine enlivened by dregs of various unwise holiday-purchased liquors (although not, I’m fairly sure, the Angolan whisky which we’d used to clean the drains) is most enthusiastically received by respective mothers-in-law; its kitchen conversation tongue-loosening effect on them ought to have been more educational:

“I don’t know why but he never seems interested these days.”

You could press your ear against the pressure hull of a nuclear-powered submarine making steam and you would hear nothing of the operations and conversations going on inside. A nuclear reactor making pressurized water more than two and a half times hotter than you can make in an open pot on your stove, flashing pure water into superheated steam, spinning giant turbines to make electricity enough to power Des Moines, running air compressors to blow through the whistle, illuminating hundreds of lights for humans to see in a hermetic tube, making food for the anxious men of the crew, all wondering if Santa Claus will get laid before they do.

Home for the holidays? We were home, all right. And we weren’t. We had been at sea for months, and now were so close to the pier I could hit a golf ball from the missile deck to the bollard standing erect to receive our mooring line, but we couldn’t narrow the gap safely.

Gordy Cannon is wiggling something awful. He told me before mass he’d had apple pie at dinner and now I can tell he’s fighting the crabapple quicksteps… Jesus, he just oinked an F Major through his cassock… throats are clearing and there are quivering shoulders in front of me… God if they laugh out loud… oh shit, it’s my demented sister sticking her big head out into the aisle looking back with her big moon face… man if she says anything, I’ll pound her… please Jesus, start the goddamn music… wait… the lines moving forward again.

This year, my darling, you are gone, and I have not even found the energy to open Christmas cards. They are still lying on the floor inside the front door where they slid from the postman’s hand.

The phone has been ringing. I hear the messages on the machine inviting me to parties. But I refuse to budge.

I look for peace in all my turmoil of life, but in looking harder and harder for it, I know I’m missing it. Looking, but never seeing, reading, but not between the lines, searching, but never finding – and it all has my mind in a chaotic state.

I’m coming more to terms with myself only to find that I no longer like who I am, and I’m confused. Who am I, and who do I want to become? Will I change but unknowingly hold on to my narcissism and other bad habits? What parts of me am I willing to change and which parts am I not? I haven’t yet decided.

I passed by the new releases. Big books with hard covers that are hard on the hands and wrists to hold for hours. But they look nice, they look substantial and inviting, like something I’d like to own, just not at that price.

I strolled deeper into the store. I could see an overhead sign that said, “Literature/Fiction.” That seemed right, stuck as it was between “Science-fiction” and “Poetry.”

Four young men in their mid-teens, I’d guess, were holding a quiet conversation at the sci-fi end-cap. The one who was talking was bigger than the others, by a large margin. The others were paying strict attention, enthralled.

All I heard was an emphatic, “Dude, it destroyed four star-systems!”

So many thoughts ran through my head. What kind of weapon could do that, ‘destroy four star-systems?’ Was it a weapon, or a black hole? Why hadn’t I heard of this powerful force before? How much catching up did I have to do to know as much as this teenager did about such an incredible force?

We had planned to go together but you left too soon. I guess that bus barreling down Sansome had its own plan. It was an accident the police report said – the bus behind schedule, wet pavement and the driver in a hurry. It had been raining. You were wearing that lovely black London Fog raincoat and that canary yellow scarf around your hair; how could he not have seen you? The impact knocked you right out of your shoes.

I come here often and sit on the warm bench, right where the accident happened. Everything was taken away that day, in that instant, our forty-seven years together… gone. You were my life. We had planned to grow old together… planned to die together. Now here I am left behind.