There was a river in a gorge far below the village which he suspected might be the Sepik, though the People called it Goubal, which meant simply, “dark river.” He was trapped in a prison of infinite green mountain ranges, and in time he reflected that the body itself was a prison, and by extension the earth, though one large enough to amuse him for a lifetime if he could ever get to it. Once he asked Kopa ki if he had ever seen a water so large he couldn’t see the other shore, and Kopa ki laughed and said...

She kissed him on their first date. It wasn’t that she allowed him to kiss her; he hadn’t thought about it, hadn’t let himself think about it because he knew thinking would make him nervous, lead him to say stupid things that would make him wish he were anywhere but in the front seat of his father’s Ford, alone with her at that moment, his face burning self-consciously. But as it was, she leaned over the instant he’d pulled to a stop in the driveway and gave him a wet kiss on the lips. He’d turned to say goodnight, and...

After the war, russell came back to a four-year-old daughter named Marlis and to a wife who was effectively a stranger. After years in the jungles of New Guinea, everything seemed strange. Five Oaks was like a town he’d read about in a novel, its people characters he distantly recalled. He’d had no communication with the world in which he’d grown up, no knowledge of who’d died, been born or married, who’d fallen on hard times, who’d prospered. Where he’d been and what he’d done seemed unrelated to either the war or to life anywhere else on earth.

All he...

Russell lives alone now with Lily, his Labrador retriever. Josephine, who has been with him for thirty-five years, comes daily to cook and clean. He recently retired as Chairman of the Board of Wheeler Industries. According to the by-laws, as its founder he could have stayed in office till the age of seventy, and he isn’t absolutely certain why he chose to step down on his sixty-fifth birthday. The reason he gave his board of directors was that he wanted to make room for a younger man with new ideas, but the truth isn’t that simple. He can’t ignore a...

Russell enjoys watching a sixteen millimeter film of Nick when he was three, taken on the dock in front of their newly-built house. Nick bounces and claps his hands to some unheard music. He approaches the camera and tries to look around it, to the left and then to the right. Finally he mouths, “Hi Dad!” and claps his hands for the joy of having discovered who is behind the whirring black machine.

Nick, however, remembers a bright winter afternoon on the frozen lake with his father, the wind tracing just an edge of sharpness on their faces, and the...

Occasionally russell gets a letter from Miriam, and once in a while she calls. Their divorce was not bitter. Russell had been in love with his work and Miriam had grown bored. For a while she drank and then she began to create a life of her own. And when the children were grown she and Russell simply discovered they had nothing in common but some memories of the people they had been a long time ago.

Miriam found a younger man; her “puppy,” Russell calls him. She helped him with his business, a chain of beauty salons. The puppy...

The green dye of their uniforms was still wet when they stumbled off the planes in Port Moresby, New Guinea. The general staff had decided that khaki would be unsuitable camouflage in the jungle, and the day before they left Australia their fatigues had been dyed by a dry cleaner in Brisbane. The airplane ride from Australia had been the first for most of the National Guardsmen in Russell’s regiment, and many of them, including Russell’s boyhood friend, Roger Hatten, were sick from the turbulence, the close quarters, and the smell of the fresh dye in the overbreathed air. Despite...

During the forty-seven day march over the Owen Stanleys, Russell had the abiding feeling that they’d been cheated, lied to about combat and glory and esprit de corps. They were being barraged by their bowels rather than by the artillery that lit up the night sky. There was no night sky, and nothing to fulfill his expectations: no adventure, no enemy, no victories, no pliant Polynesian women to adore him, only excrement and bad food and fevers and sores, unbreathable heat and the clammy chill of Ghost Mountain.

As a child Russell had often admired the plugged cannons in the...

When they were in college and Nick first phoned her, Lesley felt flattered although she hadn’t seen or even heard of him before. She never thought of herself as being particularly attractive, and the idea that some boy who had seen her walking through the lobby of her dormitory cared enough to find out her name and call her up was thrilling. She had been tall since adolescence and her appearance in high school was gangly and stork-like. Lesley wasn’t homely by any means, but thought of herself as big-toothed and awkward and had little confidence in her ability to...

Lesley is pleased with the way Russell has taken to the majestic melancholy of Sibelius. He tells her he imagines deep mountain landscapes in the near dawn or near dark. She has introduced him to Mahler, and together they listen for the particular influences of nature in theThird Symphony. Russell has been spending more time at home, reading Thoreau’sJournals, Whitman’s poems and the novels of Garcia Marquez, and wondering more and more about what will happen when he dies. Each year now the telephone brings him news of the death of men he has known in the industry,...

Russell was troubled by something he had read in Thoreau. He was troubled because he had found a kind of peace in Thoreau that made sense to him.How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding. All his life had been given to figuring things out, and in business it had worked well for him. But he couldn’t figure out getting old; he couldn’t figure out dying.How many greater things might he see in the meanwhile. Russell wondered how Lesley, having just turned thirty-seven, could understand what had only recently begun to trouble him....

Russell had some questions about Tom Carey, the man he had chosen to take his place as CEO of Wheeler Industries. He had confidence in Tom’s abilities and was pleased with the hard decisions he had made in streamlining the corporate staff, but worried that Tom might be a little too demanding on his co-workers (Russell didn’t like the term subordinates). He was worried about morale.

Russell wondered if it might not be his own attitude, if he might resent anyone who took his place, especially someone as brilliant as Carey, a Harvard MBA who had come from Pacific Packaging...

Years after he had returned from New Guinea Russell would read of the Buna campaign and find it hard to believe there had been a great battle there. It was like reading a history of another time. He had been airlifted from Wanigela with malaria and dengue fever before his regiment ever reached Buna, and his plane crashed in the mountains somewhere southwest of Natunga. Russell determined this much from the maps Kopa ki had rescued with him from the wreckage of the C-4. He had come to think of the tribe as the Goubal, from the name of the...

Sometimes weeks would go by without Russell’s giving a thought to the spot near the corner of Ottawa and Main, a spot he passed almost every day on his way to the office, where his great-grandfather had been hanged.

According to J.M. Leet’sEarly Days of Wing County(set down in green buckram on typed onionskin), Ambrose Wheeler had been strung up by an angry mob on a raw October evening in 1880 for a murder he didn’t commit. It had been a shameful episode for the settlers and their immediate issue, but the passing of a century made it...

The world in which nick grew up was vastly different from that Russell had known, not only in the particulars of history but because of the extra scrutiny he received as his father’s son. Once thing he didn’t want to be was a businessman. His father had to wear a suit every day and sit in an office for longer than Nick had to stay in school. From a child’s-eye view, the world was full of possibilities, and his idea of what he would become changed as frequently as the Friday night movie at the Odeon Theater. The week after...

Because she admired him, Marlis often tried to be like her father. As a child she imitated his mannerisms, his posture, his way of walking, and Russell found this charming. But as she passed adolescence, it began to annoy him, and he regarded his irritation as a failing in himself, a defect of love. “Well, look at it this way,” she might say in the course of a discussion, as she leaned back in her chair and stared portentiously at the ceiling.

Russell would take a deep breath to contain his impatience. Oh my God get to the point, he...

One night when marlis was fourteen and had been unable to fall asleep, she sat up in bed to look at the luminous dial of the electric clock on her desk and was surprised to discover that there was no light whatsoever in her room. She switched on the lamp on the night stand by her bed and saw that the hands of the clock rested at 8:15. But it couldn’t be 8:15, she reasoned. It had been almost 11:00 when she had gone to bed, and if it were 8:15 in the morning, there would be daylight coming through...

One evening in 1958, russell came home to discover that Miriam had gone to bed with a headache. It seemed curious that she had contracted a headache on a Friday evening on which they had nothing planned. It wouldn’t have been unusual if they had been invited to a party or were having company for dinner. Miriam was frequently stricken with a convenient malaise, leaving Russell to entertain their guests alone.

“Miriam isn’t feeling well,” had become a cliché Russell blushed to repeat. He swallowed the words as he spoke. His eyes would momentarily beg for understanding and then glaze...

After russell took the bluegill off Katy’s hook, he threaded the aluminum point of the stringer through its gill and dropped it over the gunwale with the half-dozen or so they had already caught.

“Do they like each other down there?” Katy asked.

“Down where?” Russell was poking around in the plastic cottage cheese container for another worm.

“Down there.” She pointed to where the stringer of fish had just sunk below the surface.

“Well, I don’t know.” Russell concentrated on working the hook through the length of the worm. “It’s something that hadn’t occurred to me. I suppose they...

Russell enjoyed feeling the late afternoon sun as he sat at his desk reading a book calledNature’s Diary. He found himself hunting in the taiga of central Russia, observing that fine edge where the life of a man comes up against all that is untamed in him, where the first bare ground of spring is greeted with the astonishment of a weary explorer discovering a new continent. It was a wilder reflection of the delight he had known as a boy, hunting first with his father and then alone, not so much hunting as becoming absorbed in the life...

The longer russell stayed with the People the less he thought about the war, and his memories of the world that had spawned it grew more remote. The trek over Ghost Mountain had convinced him that it would be impossible to make it to the coast on his own, however far away it might be. He didn’t know what he would find there anyway. Americans? Japanese? From time to time he heard distant explosions which the People regarded as thunder or the drums of unknown tribes. And once in a while he heard an airplane high above the forest canopy...

For the plain satisfaction of living, of being about their business in some sort or other, do the brave, serviceable men of every nation tread down the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all the stumbling blocks of prudence. Lesley dosed the volume of Stevenson’s essays on her thumb and mulled over the sentence, diagramming it in her mind. She looked up “nettle” in herAmerican Heritageand discovered its tertiary definition to be “to sting with or as if with a nettle;” its secondary “to irritate; vex.” Plain satisfaction, she thought. Plain satisfaction seemed to characterize Russell and to...

Now for the first time not on business, having no agenda or corporate identity, Russell saw concourse G at La Guardia as a gallery of lives, anyone of which might have been his. In the men’s room he watched a man about his own age pathetically trying to shave a five-day beard with a rusty Gillette razor he had probably found in a trash bin. Without any conscious intention, Russell found himself moving one sink further away from the man. He felt slightly ashamed that he had done this. It wasn’t just the sour smell of the man, though there...

It was odd, the idea of a day in New York with no agenda. When he woke he thought about stopping by the New York office or calling David Gould at the agency for lunch. But no, he would spend the day alone. Why should that seem like a challenge? He smiled, remembering a passage from a book of legends Lesley had recommended, in which Arthur’s knights, setting forth in search of the Grail, declared that “they thought it would be a disgrace to enter the forest in a group.” He would be a solitary knight. Though, like Parzival dreaming...

Even in the mirror of his hotel bathroom, tinted to flatter, the face that looked back at him as he brushed his teeth looked old. Old as he had thought of old as a child, a childhood that didn’t seem very long ago. He reflected how all the events of one’s life between a particular memory and the present fall into oblivion so that any experience brought vividly to mind seems only yesterday. He rinsed his mouth and examined the darkness around his eyes. It was his eyes that looked old. Maybe it was all the wine. He still had...

Down below a metal roof or a solar panel caught a ray of sunlight and reflected it back up to him at thirty-five thousand feet. How often he had seen that vast miniature world from the window of a plane and mused about how lonely it would be to live down there in western Pennsylvania or eastern Ohio simply because it wasn’t home to him, how invisible he would be in that expanse, his troubles and triumphs reduced to scale in a new landscape. He thought also of how often he had made this trip thinking of Miriam, his heart...

One summer on a two-week drive with Miriam in their 1952 Buick convertible, Russell turned off on a ridge of Big Lue Mountain overlooking the valley of the Gila River in southeastern Arizona, and it seemed to him that the entire earth lay below them, range after range of blue mountains graying into the horizon. Russell was wearing a sports jacket he had bought in a western store in Silver City, New Mexico, a light beige coat with suede yokes which Miriam thought gave him the look of a singing cowboy. They laughed about the outfit, which was oddly striking...

Two weeks later, after it was generally known that Nick was gone and Lesley had filed for divorce, Russell began to receive phone calls from old friends of Miriam’s, fishing for details. One of the callers was Mildred Wallace, who had tried to get something going with Russell after he and Miriam divorced. She had suggested they might console each other over their mutual loss of Miriam, but Russell hadn’t felt a great need of consolation and had tried, with difficulty, to convey that to Mildred without seeming heartless. She brought him casseroles and invited him for quiet little dinners...

It thrilled russell to think that every now and then someone was killed and eaten by a bear, that there was still that kind of wildness in the country. It wasn’t the kind of thought he expected anyone to understand, and of course he would feel sorry for the friends and family of whoever was eaten. But it reinforced the idea of the food chain as cyclic rather than linear, with man standing inviolate at the head of it. Every natural thing in the world had a purpose, if only to give itself up to foster something else. The rain...

“Coffee?” tom carey pushed the thermos across the table toward Russell. They had been joined by Paul Blakely, another member of the executive committee, as well as Gordon Smith, the company treasurer, and Taylor Stanley, the chief corporate counsel.

“No thanks,” Russell passed the thermos along to Gordon. “I think I’ve had too much coffee already.”

“We might as well get started,” Tom said. “Art is out of town. Would you mind closing the door, Gordon?”

Tom leaned forward in his chair and clasped his manicured hands together on the table. The energy of his still youthful face was balanced...

“What does all this mean?” Lesley asked. They were sitting in the living room of her house overlooking Big Bear Lake. Floodlights from the house illuminated the new snow, and they could see glass-like panes of ice suspended in the reeds along the edge of the water. They had taken Katy to one of the company pine plantings to select a Christmas tree, and after dinner they had decorated it with ten strings of lights, tinsel, and almost two hundred ornaments and played five games of Old Maid with her before she could be convinced that it was time for...

For several years Russell had tracked the approaching solstice. He noted each day where the sun rose, on those days it was visible, and thought to himself that that spot, just to the right of the tallest white pines across the road, was as far south as it would go. No matter how dark the winter might seem, once the sun reached that point the days would be getting longer and the sun would be, however imperceptibly, climbing back toward the crown of the sky. Several times he commented to Lesley that as he grew older he felt a greater...

In the forty-odd years since the war, Lesley was the only person Russell had told how he felt when he first heard the engine of the plane that eventually came to rescue him, a harsher, more articulated sound than any he had heard since the day of his crash on the ridge above Tapua, and how often he’d wondered what might’ve become of him if it hadn’t appeared that day over the clearing.

He hadn’t been happy living with the People, not as he had always thought of happiness—getting what he wanted or thought he wanted, however ephemeral. In...

In their upper west side apartment, Philippa brought Nick a cup of black coffee and put it on the desk where he was sorting through boxes of papers and photographs Lesley had packed up and sent to him.

“I want you to have all these,” she had written. “I don’t want them around like a ghost in the closet.”

He untied the strings of an accordion file-folder and pulled out a photo of his father with a pump-action shotgun tucked under his arm, and Bing, their black Labrador, sitting eagerly beside him with his tongue hanging out. The picture had...

Russell’s annual early december cocktail party was a highlight of the Five Oaks holiday season. Apart from a few small dinners, it had been the only entertaining he had done at home since his divorce, and invitations were coveted. The guest list was limited to close friends, company executives known personally to Russell and occasional newcomers whose acquaintance Russell had recently made. This year Lesley had suggested a few new people to be invited and had volunteered to act as hostess.

The din of conversation and laughter made a music more audible than the tapes Lesley had selected to promote...

Only once during his years in Tapua had Russell felt threatened by the deification that had been his aegis. On the third night of an unrelentingly violent thunderstorm, following a near-total eclipse of the sun, Kapoua, Neggi’s half-brother, began to chatter about how the God of the Sky was angry with the People for keeping his son prisoner. He proposed that Russell should be made to fly from the lip of the gorge above the river; that only by returning him to the sky would the God be appeased and the life of the village spared. “These arrows of fire...

For months russell hadn’t paid any attention to the painting on the wall by his closet, but this morning his eye had been drawn to it upon first waking, and he carried its image in and out of sleep. Several times he resisted the impulse, forged through years of discipline, to swing his feet immediately to the floor, and instead indulged what he knew to be a perilous practice so early in the morning: thinking about his life.

“When you wake up, get up, and when you get up, stay awake,” had been his father’s adage for success. Russell knew...

A week later, under a nearly full moon, the Lear climbed towards 40,000 feet and the lights of Chicago splayed out in an almost perfect grid. Russell thought of photographs of microscopically illuminated snowflakes he had seen In a recentSmithsonian. He couldn’t remember the air ever being so clear. He fixed himself a bourbon and water and looked down on the city, as if it had been electrified purely for his delight. He was relieved to have his deposition behind him. The lawyers for United Tobacco had tried to make an issue of the Wheeler Stock he had sold...

Twelve days after the work on the airstrip had begun, Kopa ki used his machete to chop off the little finger of his left hand at the first joint. It was a sacrifice to the spirit of his first wife, Neggi, the mother of Matu, who was dying of the laughing death, which the People called kuru. The day after the plane had dropped its supplies and instructions for the strip, a creeping paralysis had set in, beginning in the muscles of Neggi’s legs and moving up to her throat, until she could no longer swallow. In her last hours,...

The summer everyone was singing “Volare,” Russell and Miriam arrived in Brussels for the World’s Fair. A policeman sang it in front of their hotel, and they heard it again outside the Russian Pavillion where they viewed a replica of Sputnik, watched over by matrons in sensible oxfords. They heard it in London, in Paris and, of course, in Rome. He remembered an afternoon spent in their room at the Excelsior following a leisurely lunch, feeling the warmth of the sunlight which came through the curtains with the muffled cacophony of the Via Veneto. He angled a mirrored door of...

January 4th. Why did this date seem significant? It occurred to him that as he got older almost every day had become an anniversary of some kind, the birth date or death date of someone he had loved. It would be nice, he thought, to selectively cull his memories the way he might discard old letters from his files or books he knew he wouldn’t read again from his shelves.

After lunch, Russell laced up his Sorels and headed out for the mailbox with Lily trotting along behind him. Powdery new snow splayed out before him with each step, bow...

Russell shivered in the chill of the examination room. He got up, lifted his shirt from the hook on the wall where it covered his sportcoat, draped it over his shoulders and returned to his perch on the examining table. Warren Riorden had been probing Russell’s chest with his frigid stethoscope when he had been called away by the nurse, who had drawn blood from Russell upon his arrival. Russell smiled to himself. Sitting there half-naked, he felt like so much prime beef hung in a cooler to age. He concocted a few remarks for Warren’s return about economizing on...

Because the thought seemed venal, Lesley tried not to acknowledge it. At first she was hurt and then angry. Russell’s short good-bye note struck her as patronizing as she reflected on it. Goddamn him, she thought, how could he think I could be so naive? It pleased her to feel the injured party. But after the anger and the initial wave of sorrow, she was left with a solution, a burden dissolved.

She wondered if he had suspected her feelings for Tom. A presence had come between them, a stifling politeness. Finally, she hadn’t wanted Russell as a lover, yet...

He kicked open the cargo door and felt the blast of the wind and the propwash. He checked the cinch of his parachute and the static-lines to the crates on the conveyor track. Then he braced himself in the bay and looked down at the once familiar green land, the dark river winding through the gorge, the transparent summer morning. He inhaled deeply and was sure he could smell it; the damp, slightly metallic odor of the forest, like leaves underfoot after a rain in October. It was mid-morning, and there were no signs yet of the clouds the afternoon...