Excerpts

Excerpt #1

The Caribbean island Mabuhay is not large enough to appear on maps, but it is large enough for the purpose of our story. To Mabuhay, pristine and treasure-laden as the twentieth century drew to its close, fled an American of European descent, mourning the death of his nephew. When Matthew was a child, Travers had taken him to the playground, to the movies, the zoo; then, like the coming of night, he let his nephew slip away, he let himself slip away. Travers Landeman was thirty-eight years old with nothing in Ohio for him to go back to and much for him to flee. On Mabuhay, he was a fugitive from others—from the prison of a loveless marriage, from the lunacy of bureaucrats who tyrannized his failing business, from unknown and unnamed others who promised him harm, but no longer was he a fugitive from himself.

Who among us has not dreamed of going to the corner store for a carton of milk and simply disappearing? It was imperative that he seize the moment and seize it when he did for it was still dawn and not yet full sun of permanent revolution. Yes, the good news was that communism was dead, but the bad news was that capitalism was very much alive. The new millennium would come and with it would come GPS, DNA, voice and face recognition, and, on viaducts and lampposts, the cyclops blue light of surveillance cameras lurking to track and tally men, women, and children in the far from unwithered State. In 1989, airplanes had not been crashed into buildings; Travers Landeman could and he did slip away. The question was—would he get away with it?

Excerpt #2

That was about it. We ate and we drank; we smoked and we danced. Finally, we fell asleep. In the frolic of the morning that followed, birds jabbered high and low in the branches. The rising sun stoked greens—emerald and jade, myrtle and moss—into glistening gold. Albert Sidney McNab, the most unlikely of heroes, who would eat mushrooms and do without the shoes, was off. He and Ragweed Jones entered the glimmering jungle. Al stopped, turned, and, with a wave of lavender lace, was gone. I hobbled to a rocking chair and sat there in wonder, high on a balcony on the side of a volcano on the island of Mabuhay at a place called Schuraga. In the valley below, people walked with a happy walk or tended to the earth, plough down sillion shine. From beyond the sea’s silver song and forever of sky, the ceaseless new day reached out with a lover’s arms.