Daniel had been wearing the same clothes for forty hours now. A shower and a good sleep and a new day in his new threads could wait a little longer. “I’m up for it, but I’m not much of a churchgoer right now, Ferdi.”

“Oh no, no, no. It’s just another beautiful thing we do. If we don’t, who will? It’s part of the fabric of this city and country, you know. And Father Odo’s a good thing. Rather, he’s something you must see. With any luck he’ll have us in for dinner afterward.”

Five minutes later, they passed back through the main entrance to the college, walking briskly as the bell struck its first of five loud tones. One of the porters, a skinny tattooed veteran of the Falklands War named Ken, called out to Daniel from behind. “Mr. Perrin! I have a message for you, sir. A lady rang for you a couple of hours ago. I’ve taken a message, sir.” He handed Daniel a note: “Going to search for your luggage tomorrow at Victoria Coach Station. Have you got your mobile? See you soon, Susan.”

He stood still in the middle of the Quad, noticing the air was suddenly much cooler than it had been when he and Ferdi were hustling back from Marks & Spencer. Ferdi scolded Daniel, “Well come on! Odo will not be best pleased to see us bound in there late.” Daniel stuffed the note into his jacket pocket and scurried through the portico and into the chapel doorway.

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The boys from the choir school were singing the service alone that night, without the men from the college, and the crowd was sparse. An American study-abroad kid from a small Christian college had found C.S. Lewis’ famous stall on the far lefthand side, the cantoris or north side of the chancel. No one was sitting anywhere near him, but Sid climbed up the creaky steps to tell him to remove his baseball cap. Unused to such a request and a little confused, the young man finally obliged.

In the middle of the back row of the choir stalls on the south side of the room stood the Dean of Divinity, the Very Reverend Odo Wigborough, who was clad in a black cassock, flowing white surplice, black preaching scarf, and the familiar red Oxford M.A. hood. He was not especially tall, but he was wiry and unusually muscular for a man of almost sixty, with close cropped, thinning white hair and a toothy smile, the top canines jutting noticeably up and out. When he opened his mouth, there was a glint of silver from the left molar behind the sharp chopper in front of it. He spoke in an artificially deep voice and regaled listeners with wild tales from his years as Dean of Jerusalem, an exile from which he had finally been brought back to England and into university life. He was originally an Essex man, and proud of it.

Odo insisted upon being called Father, and his theory of Anglicanism was that it was the English expression of Eastern Orthodoxy. He was a fearsome tutor who only taught undergraduates, and he was known for having favorites whom he invited to stay and chat after the weekly chapel fellowship meeting. He was an expert in esotericism, and he lectured in the theology faculty on the Book of Enoch and demonology, and he championed writers like Éliphas Lévi and René Guénon. He contended that Julius Evola was a genius, unfairly maligned.

“We simply weren’t there to judge,” he would proclaim loudly. More quietly he would add, “And so what if he did call himself superfascista?” Odo lived during term in college accommodations, but he also maintained a private residence up the Iffley Road, where he kept a collection of rare editions of works by Aleister Crowley.

Ferdi pointed Daniel to the stalls closest to the back, and Daniel went one place too far and plopped down in the college president’s unoccupied seat. Ferdi waved his hand for Daniel to move further in. The choristers had begun the psalm, which Ferdi showed Daniel how to follow in the Prayer Book, a religious artifact similar to what Daniel was used to in the pews of Grace Episcopal Church back home. It was Psalm 36, Dixit injustus: “My heart showeth me the wickedness of the ungodly, * that there is no fear of God before his eyes.” The pauses were too long for Daniel. The time passed slowly.

After fifty minutes, the service was finished, and Ferdi introduced Daniel to a beaming Father Odo. “Well, Ferdinand, what have we here? A new man!” Daniel immediately felt himself in the vested cleric’s thrall.

Ferdi replied, “May I present to you Mr. Daniel Perrin of the United States of America, Father. He’s here to do French of all things. We’ve had to save him from a spot of bother this afternoon. No clothes, you see. Pitiful.”

“Well,” Odo began as he waved perfunctorily to a pair of old townswomen who had cycled down from the parish of St. Mary and St. John, where Odo filled in from time to time out of term. “No clothes, you say! Well, I am having my old friend Michael Taylor in for supper tonight, and Edwin too of course.”

Michael Taylor was once a prominent barrister and evangelical lay leader in the Church of England, but he had expatriated to Zimbabwe and later South Africa some years earlier under suspicious circumstances. Edwin Assmann was the son of a great German Egyptologist who was born in Oxford and had never left. He worked at the Bodleian Library, and he was a frequent companion of Odo’s. None of them were married men. The invitation Ferdi assumed was coming finally arrived. “You two must join us. There’s no one else dining in the Senior Common Room tonight. We shan’t even be up at high table. Do come along.”

Delighted at the young men’s acceptance, Odo walked over to the wooden closet in the corner of the antechapel and replaced his vestments for the night. He then led them to the heavy wooden door of the fellows’ dining room, held open by the college steward, Terry Tyerman, the portly son of a Sheffield steel worker. Terry had avoided the vanishing family occupation after saving up enough money driving a removal van to pay for a course that brought him a diploma in food and drink. He had been working at the college for ten years, spending his days rummaging for vintages in the cellars, and his evenings serving food to the fellows and their guests. In full term, that meant high table. At this time of year and on special occasions, it meant instead the small fellows’ dining room on the cloister right next to the staircase leading up to Jerry and his chips. Terry contrasted sharply with his near namesake upstairs. He was what Daniel’s grandmother would call sharp as a tack, possessing encyclopedic knowledge of growing regions and grape varietals. In his strong Yorkshire accent, he had a poetic way of describing the dishes he served to mostly men and a few women who spent their days reading, writing, and teaching.

It was not nearly cold enough in the dining room for the fireplace, but the logs were lit nonetheless, making the room too cozy, even a little oppressive. There were candles on the table and only minimal artificial light from lamps on the buffet and end tables next to the arm chairs on the other side of the room from the dining table. Terry quickly added two additional place settings and assured Odo with a smile “we’re not likely to run out of food any time soon, sir.” Odo grimaced slightly. “Er, Father,” Terry corrected himself. “Please help yourself to sherry on the buffet there, gentlemen.”

Odo played the host. “Ah, try the dry, Daniel. When I was a young man of your age, I came here to Oxford to interview for a place as a graduate in theology. There were no application forms or test scores or any nonsense like that. Austin Farrer was warden of Keble by then. He was very near the end of his life, and although he took very few students, I was determined that he should be my supervisor. It was all done very easily. He offered me a glass of sherry and said, ‘I should imagine you prefer sweet,’ to which I replied, ‘Dry for me, I’m afraid.’ He poured the glass, handed it to me and said, ‘You’ll do.’ Farrer was a genius and a holy man by popular standards, but I quickly realized that he would prove, well, too dry for me.”

Odo roared with laughter, the points of his teeth glistening again. He continued, “Farrer thought himself a metaphysician, you see, but his beloved St. Thomas Aquinas was far more interested in the occult than he ever was.”

Odo excused himself to talk to Terry, and Daniel turned to the rest of the group, who were topping up their glasses, the smallest drinking vessels Daniel had ever seen. Michael interrogated Daniel on his academic background, and he seemed a little surprised to learn that Daniel had never heard of any of the prestigious American prep schools where Michael had a network of close friends. He explained that he had been a governor at one of England’s most famous schools for years, and he had run an Evangelical boys’ camp geared towards equipping the future elite with Christian values. Edwin appeared a little uncomfortable with the topic. Ferdi changed the subject to the spiritual state of the African continent, a topic that animated Michael. Odo returned with a command, “Drink up, gentlemen. Our dinner is served.” Odo reached around Daniel’s waist with his right hand and Ferdi’s with his left to shepherd both young men to the table.

The starter was a simple leek and potato soup served with a flowery white wine from the Côtes du Rhône, which Daniel enjoyed much more than the dry sherry. He zoned out for the first course and came back to life as Terry took away his empty bowl and set down a sirloin steak, which he described as “preternatural pub style. Mr. Pepys would have written about it in his diary, gentlemen.” Daniel thought it looked delicious, but rather ordinary, and it was certainly not what his father would have called “big fancy beef.” As the men began tearing the meat with their knives, Ferdi drew Odo into a topic which he hoped would provoke the evening’s entertainment.

“Now Father, tell us. How do you think about all this terrorism palaver in light of your theories about evil?” Daniel wasn’t entirely sure what palaver meant, but he suspected it meant Ferdi did not take the matter of terrorism as seriously as everyone did where Daniel came from.

“Ah. Ah-ha. Haha,” Odo sputtered. “You are a devil, aren’t you, Ferdinand? I admit, I have been mulling this matter over for the past month without a soul to discuss it with. Edwin prefers to keep his head in the sand, you know. He helps people find books all day and wants nothing more than to come home and watch University Challenge on the television in the evening. There, there, Edwin. We love you that way. We’re all much too curious. Too curious. A curse. But a cursed age! Well, that’s precisely your question now, is it not, Ferdinand?”

Terry filled the second, larger wine glasses with something red, from a decanter, so that Daniel could not notice its origin. Terry looked poised to describe his selection to the party, but Odo had the room in his grip. The air suddenly felt even heavier as the fire made a sudden loud crackle. Blood dripped from the piece of steak suspended on the prongs of Odo’s fork. He put it down, took an aggressive gulp from his wine glass, and began to speak again. Terry recharged the glass immediately.

“It is a terrible privilege to be alive during this great age of the egregores,” Odo said. “The shape of the apocalypse is more visible by day, and every moment is a spiritual battle of our own making, the expression of our collective imagination gone wild. Psyches connected, tribalized, and weaponized. We have made demons, and they are our masters now. Thus, we must ask ourselves: Will we assert the persistence of the old man, the human, or will we embrace the shadow that engulfs the world as its lights dim and go right out?” He pronounced each of the last three words slowly, and with even more intensity in his voice and eyes than usual.

Michael interjected, timidly, “I say, Odo, what is this you’re talking about? An egregore, is it?” As Odo slurped down a second glassful of wine, Ferdi chimed in. “An egregore is a spiritual being alluded to in the Book of Enoch. Watchers, they’re called in the Book of Daniel. Good ones and bad ones.” Michael rose his eyebrows and replied, “Ah, like guardian angels then. Ye watchers and ye holy ones, and all that.”

“Not exactly,” Ferdi replied, “they may not correspond directly to Jewish and Christian angelology. Perhaps a Babylonian spirit being, or perhaps something older and only hinted at in the Old Testament. They may be the Nephilim, the half-angelic giants that still walked the earth at the time of Noah. Or they are perhaps something much more. Lords of light or darkness. Demigods.”

Odo’s mood lightened temporarily. He turned to Ferdi, laughing, “Almost, Ferdinand! Ha-ha! You simply must attend my lectures next term on Enoch. Not that your supervisor would approve. Of course, I could give him an earful on the relevance of all this cosmology to the science and statesmanship in your beloved twentieth-century history. No one who saw an approaching cloud of mustard gas at the Somme or tested the atom bomb in New Mexico would deny the unleashing of a spiritual power made by man that is also fully capable of ending mankind. And that’s what I mean by egregore. It’s a matter quite beyond the questions of biblical interpretation and dogmatic concerns about angelology. Boring business, all that, anyway. Irrelevant hobbyist preciousness.”

“But what about the St. Michael’s prayer Catholics say?” asked Ferdi. Is there not in traditional Christian religion some understanding of all this strife on the astral plane?

“Oh yes,” Odo replied. “Our Christian ancestors may be accused of superstition, but they put on the armor of God, as St. Paul says. We are not contending against the flesh,” a word Odo elongated with extra emphasis on the shhh sound. “Or blood,” he concluded with a blunt clip at the end, making a t instead of a d sound. “The ancients got all that perfectly right,” he concluded.

Odo motioned to Terry to take away his plate, barely touched, and to refill his wine glass. Daniel had cleaned his plate and was satiated, realizing his first English lunch was still sitting under his supper. He found the wine more delicious than anything he had tasted before, and Terry was topping up his glass as efficiently as he was Odo’s.

Odo resumed.

“The problem, you see, is once the dominant egregore has decidedly supplanted its competitors, one cannot resist it. It is quite futile. Otherwise, one simply lives amid the ruins until it occurs to someone to come round and clean them up. In fact, it will occur to the world soon that this very city in which we live and work is the empty shell of the old dead God’s great fortress. Poor old T.S. Eliot looked around a place like this and relished a fight for a lost cause. That was the American in him talking. Forgive me, Daniel.”

Odo downed another half glass of his wine and kept talking.

“Christianity succeeded because the spirit of Christ, the Anointed One, overcame the gods who protected Rome. But before that, Rome’s gods had defeated the Greek ones, who had defeated the Persian ones, who had defeated the Babylonian ones, who had defeated the Assyrian ones. Ironically, the Jewish spirit or watcher managed to survive all these other conquests. More to the point, it was permitted to persist as a spiritual bargain. The Israelites were allowed to be a people because their egregore vowed no spiritual ambitions. No conversions, for example. But then, der Führer ruined the world forever, because he cancelled the arrangement in a far more violent fashion than any of the earlier essays in antisemitism could have ever hoped to achieve. The final solution!”

He paused to slurp down yet more wine.

“Therefore,” Odo continued, “we see today, Christ’s prophecy of the demise of the evil one, the light-bearer, was short-lived. The prince of the world was cast out, but he has come back, with Baphomet, Baal, Isis, Rah, Leviathan. All of them. Crossing yourself four times facing each cardinal direction and reciting Psalm 63 will not affect them anymore. The exorcist perishes even when he succeeds in driving one of them out of an innocent girl. The power of the Christian spell has been broken, and Christ has left the tabernacles. The glory of the Lord has departed, because no one believes it was ever really there. And the quaint virtue of Christian hope is now only fulfilled in Psalm 88. Darkness, my boys, is our only companion.”

Terry instinctively stepped back towards the buffet, nearly dropping the decanter. A tiny whelp issued from Edwin, who looked to be fighting back tears. Daniel had found Odo’s discourse fascinating, but he suddenly felt uneasy too. Maybe Odo was right earlier on when he said curiosity was more a curse than a blessing.

The door suddenly opened. It was Jerry stumbling in with a tray bearing five desserts that resembled Italian Capezzoli di Venere, or Nipples of Venus, a Brandy and chestnut cake which Daniel recognized from the movie Amadeus. Only these were covered in dark chocolate instead of white. Michael attempted a joke. “What do we have here? Black man’s nipple? Ha!” Odo alone smirked back, replying, “You know something about that, don’t you?” Michael pursed his lips, and both Ferdi and Edwin seemed to understand the context. Daniel was visibly confused. He decided to engage Odo.

“Father, I admit I’ve never heard anything like what you’re telling us, but it doesn’t sit very well with me. Take your critique of Eliot a moment ago. I’ve only been in this country for one day, but I already feel as if there is a realness to it that I never experienced back home in the States. Eliot articulated that depth of experience in his poetry. What you are saying sounds very theoretical and unreal.”

Daniel paused, realizing he had everyone’s complete attention.

“At first, I was surprised to hear a Christian minister talk the way you do, but as you kept on, it occurred to me that your spirituality is a step beyond the concerns I have about prayer and sin, let alone things like angels. Ordinary religion already feels too out there,” Daniel waved his arms in circles. “But at least that stuff has…I don’t know…a positive message or something. There’s meaning, even if we don’t understand what it is yet. Truth that goes beyond this world. Again, I don’t really buy all that right now, but it seems like what you’re saying is we should just, like, kill ourselves or do whatever we want and not care about anything else or anybody else. Like, there’s no point to anything.”

The room stood silent for several seconds as Odo bit into a spoonful of the dessert, then put down his utensil, and wiped the corners of his mouth. He looked directly at Daniel and flashed his full smile. “Not kill ourselves, Daniel, no. But do whatever we want, maybe. Your own popular music icon, Bob Dylan – not my cup of tea, but some of my friends tell me, you know – he once sang something that I have come to understand differently than I once did.”

Odo contorted his mouth to attempt an American accent, then said in a nasal high pitch, “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.” He smiled again, then returned to his normal voice. “I thought for years I was making a sacrifice at the altar to the former, the Lord, but I realize now there is only the possibility of serving the latter. So why resist? I must say, the old moral dilemmata over which I once agonized now seem so trivial.”

Michael squirmed a little in his chair, and Edwin clinked his spoon on his plate in a gesture designed to break the oppressive silence that usually reigned in between sections of Odo’s speeches. Suddenly standing up with the firelight behind him, Odo’s muscular frame projected strength to his dinner guests. He then declared in an almost saccharine tone, “Let’s move over for port, shall we? And Daniel, I apologise for the quality of the food here in college tonight. I thought the steak rather flavourless and chewy, despite Terry’s propaganda. You must come visit me up the Iffley Road,” he added with a mischievous look, “if you can penetrate that far!”

Odo roared with laughter and appeared a little wobbly with drink as he took Daniel’s arm and sat him in a chair by the fireplace directly next to the trolly, a famous little device in the common room that ensured the after-dinner drinks got to everyone, without anyone having to get up. By custom, Terry withdrew at this stage of the evening and the guests served themselves. Odo sat in the chair on the receiving end of the trolly, directly facing Daniel.

Michael picked up the snuff box from the table that sat in between him and Odo, and he held it up, shifting his eyes and mouth in an inquisitive gesture. “Oh yes, do Michael. We pass the snuff round with the Madeira.”

“Snuff?” Daniel asked.

“Indeed,” Ferdi said. “This will be just your thing, Daniel. I should think you’re dying to light up again, which you are welcome to do here, of course, much as I would prefer you didn’t. We have not yet got to ‘smoking’ and ‘non-smoking’ like in your country. But give this a try. Take a pinch and put it at the base of your thumb and snort it. It clears up a boozy head instantly.”

Odo sat in an alcoholic trance, and Michael turned to Daniel in an attempt to smooth out the rough edges of his old friend’s cosmology. “I absolutely hate theology, you know. Evangelists have no need of it. It is simply useless except to cause more confusion among people who are already confused. Discipline is what we need. I haven’t got a Catholic bone in my body, but I do wish Protestants would do a bit better in support of something like what that Maciel chap has done with his Legion in Mexico. Of course, we’re not forming priests.” He turned to Odo. “Sorry, old man, but on that matter, I wholly agree with you on one point you made earlier. No one is sacrificing anything at altars anymore.”

“One wonders,” Ferdi said, “whether Voltaire’s old dream of using the entrails of priests to strangle a king was supposing more human agency than would be required to turn us all off religion and tradition. For my part, Father Odo, you may be like the pagan shaman offering the final cock to Asclepius, but it is important that you carry on. I’m with Daniel on this matter. Eliot is very inspiring when he encourages us to fight lost causes.”

Edwin appeared despondent, downing his first glass of ruby red Port and nervously filling up another.

At this moment, something snapped in Odo. His eyes popped open again and he inched forward in his chair, staring straight at Daniel. He opened his mouth, and in an even deeper voice than anyone had heard him use that night, he declared, “You are a super super lovely lovely boy.” Then, in an almost superhuman motion, he lunged at Daniel and forced himself on top of him, planting a wet kiss on his mouth. Horrified, Daniel managed to throw Odo off, casting him all the way back into his seat. He then pushed the trolley toward his assailant with all his might. The heavy crystal decanter jumped out of basket and sailed as a missile directly onto Odo’s crotch. He wailed as Daniel jumped out of his chair, walked to the door and turned the enormous iron handle.

A gust of cold air flooded into the dining room, and Daniel disappeared down the corridor, spitting repeatedly and wiping his mouth on his sleeve. He made his way through the porter’s lodge, back onto the High Street and finally to the entryway to his staircase. He stumbled up, and with some difficulty, he successfully wielded two different keys to release both the Yale lock and the Chubb lock beneath it, and then he passed out on the bed straightaway.

The Palomar was a world away now.

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The dining hall was just down the corridor from the chapel in what was universally appreciated as the most beautiful quad in Oxford. It was called the Cloister. Daniel arrived at the bottom of a steep stone staircase that went straight up, and he could smell a familiar blend of institutional meat and potato. At the top of the stairs stood a tall man with golden blonde hair, short on the sides and back and swept up in front with pomade. He was wearing a traditional Austrian Tracht jacket in olive green, with welted brogues in walnut brown on his feet.

“I say! Hello there,” the stranger bellowed down.

“Hello,” Daniel replied hesitantly. He began his ascent up the stones that were smoothed down on the edges from centuries of wear.

“You must be Daniel Perrin. The porter told me one of our new Americans was wandering about on the grounds someplace. Have you been round Addison’s Walk? Out to the Ford? Oh, I know. The chapel! You’ve been in there striving for an experience like Augustine and Monica at Ostia, haven’t you?”

“What, n-no. How did you…” Daniel stammered.

“Oh, I saw you come out of there,” the young man laughed. “I’m teasing. Let me introduce myself properly. I’m Ferdi Fremantle, second year graduate in Modern History. Excepting a few of us elder statesmen, no one is up yet.”

“Up?” Daniel asked.

“Yes, up. That’s what we say here. Haven’t you read any Waugh? In an earlier age, everyone studying here came from somewhere further south. And if they disgraced themselves they got ‘sent down.’ Oxford being Oxford, the old expressions endure, thank God. Shall we go in?”

As he entered the buttery, Daniel noticed a large chalkboard with the day’s lunch menu, featuring a main course of Lancashire sausages, which Ferdi told him would be presented again as Toulouse sausages on another day. In addition to the main course, there were always chips, baked beans, and salad, with curious individual packets of salad crème. There was also cheese pizza and an assortment of pasties and pies, and at the end of the line there was the pudding, which few students ignored. Today it was blackberry and apple crumble portioned in individual bowls, with a vat of hot yellow liquid and a ladle next to it. Daniel had certainly had custard before, but he had never seen it presented in such a large quantity.

As Daniel moved into the hall, he followed Ferdi to a table in the middle of the enormous medieval room. Daniel regretted he was too far from the perimeter to see who was depicted in the many portraits hanging high above the tables. These pictures would have been in a museum where Daniel came from, not in a cafeteria. For now, Daniel and Ferdi were alone, with the faces of the past staring down at them from three of the four long walls of the hall as they began to eat. Ferdi crossed himself, muttered something in Latin, crossed himself a second time, smiled at Daniel, and picked up his knife and fork.

“Oh, are you Catholic,” Daniel asked?

“Yes, although I spend more time now with Anglicans and hedonists, and Anglican hedonists for that matter, than with my own spiritual tribe. My mother was born in Austria. Distantly related to the Hapsburgs. I hear she was a fun-loving Baroque religionist.” Ferdi paused to compose a meticulous forkful of sausage, chip, and beans.

“So, your name,” Daniel interjected, “is it short for Ferdinand, like the Archduke?”

“The name, yes, Ferdinand. As for its origin, I like to think I’m named after Ferdinand I, who fought off Muslims and Protestants in the sixteenth century. But it’s likely my mother just liked the name. She died when I was a child, and my father simply doesn’t know or care. Anyway, mother had me Christened in her family church before leaving me with my hapless and religionless English father, who took me with him to Texas, then Russia, and finally Saudi Arabia working in the oil industry.”

“I had never even lived in England until I started here at Oxford when I was eighteen. I like to think I appreciate everything about this place more than most. And although I am somewhat at odds with Rome for personal reasons, I am proud of my Catholic and continental heritage, and my English heritage too, of course. Being from here but not having grown up here makes me very suspicious of what I see all about, even in a fortress like Oxford. You see, it’s as if the people here don’t want a country. They seem quite content to be replaced over the long term, and before then to abandon what was once great about a place like this. Have you been by the monstrous new business school building by the railway station?”

Daniel made no reply.

“Well, even if you had,” Ferdi continued, “you wouldn’t have known. It’s an inconsequential box of glass and steel. An unremarkable credential factory for nobody from nowhere.”

To Daniel’s ears, which were used to hearing idealistic rhetoric about melting pots and color-blindness and, as the Ambassador had put it, “tolerance,” Ferdi’s discourse was beyond the pale. And yet, Daniel was now in a new world, which happened to be the Old World, and he found his companion’s contrarianism entertaining, even intriguing. Perhaps it was the accent. Ferdi could tell Daniel was unaccustomed to hearing such tosh. He picked up his spoon to eat his pudding before changing the subject slightly.

“Daniel, your country has been through quite a fright recently, and we shall see what it all means; but it is really nothing compared to what happened in the Great War. Now that was the worst disaster in history. The beginning of the end, perhaps. It’s my area of interest. I am working on sort of a counter-factual thing my supervisor hates, but he tolerates it because we get on so well. I contend the modern Christian imperium, over which the Hapsburgs were just beginning to preside, was the last great hope of the West. Ever since Sarajevo, it’s been mustard gas and death camps, yes, but also plastics and pop music and adverts for stomach complaint remedies. Americanism is quite unfortunate, I’m sorry to say, Daniel. But enough about that. How are you getting on so far? You look dreadfully pale and tired, I must say.”

Daniel filled his water glass from the jug on the table and took a long gulp. He was devouring the food which, the Ambassador was right, Daniel’s family and friends had ridiculed in advance of his departure. He began to explain his current predicament. “Well, I’ve lost my things. My bags. I left them on the Oxford Tube. But Susan…,” he blushed, “um, the lady who runs my scholarship program. She’s looking for them. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I think maybe Susan and I like each other. Fancy each other, as you would say. Anyway, she’s helping me.”

“Well now. Good heavens, Daniel. Have you gone and fallen in love with the first British woman you’ve met? Susan, you say? Not a Susan but a rose, no doubt. A lady?!” He laughed, wiped his mouth and set his cutlery down on the plate. He folded his hands, and his facial expression went serious. “Let me give you some unsolicited advice, Daniel. I’ve seen this before among young men who are at once too interesting and too immature for the girls their own age. There is a reason your Susan has not yet met Mister Wonderful.”

Daniel felt embarrassed. What possessed him to say something about Susan? But also, how dare this fop presume to know anything? Visibly perplexed, Daniel was at a loss for words, his mouth agape.

“Now Daniel, don’t be cross with me. I don’t know what experience you’ve had, but if you’re here to meet a woman, you ought to look down, not up. Go younger! You mustn’t think of yourself as anybody’s. You are a man of the world. A catch.” He concluded with what seemed to Daniel like a non-sequitur, “I shall never marry, you know.”

Daniel began shoveling spoonfuls of gooey crumble into his mouth to stifle his frustration. But with each bite, he thought it more likely Ferdi was right. What were the chances the first attractive female he encountered in his new life abroad would be his soulmate? Susan had a career in government, and Daniel had his studies ahead of him. Maybe they were not walking the same path.

Daniel and Ferdi finished lunch and carried their empty trays back to the buttery, where they were met by a white-coated man named Jerry, nicknamed Jerry Chips, who had worked at the college for over thirty years, since he was fourteen. He served plates of food twice a day during the peak times before moving over to wash them as the meal services finished. Jerry stood barely taller than five feet, and he was “slow” as people used to say when Daniel was a kid. He was generally pleasant, except when students became distracted and broke his rhythm of his piling on food, or when they were not quick enough to hand him their dirty dishes. So much for “slow.” He tolerated a break in his routine only if you asked him which football teams were worth betting on that weekend. Daniel was silent and straightforward, receiving from Jerry a smile of brown, crooked teeth and a “thank you, sir,” emitted on nicotine flavored breath.

As they headed down the stairs, Daniel explained his present material needs in a little more detail to Ferdi. “Well, it’s settled then,” Ferdi declared. “Marks and Spencer. You can get everything there, apart from the mobile, of course.”

As the two men walked down the High Street, it occurred to Daniel to ask where Ferdi got his haircut. “Oh, Walter’s! It’s just here. Why, yes, of course, you need one.” At that, Ferdi led Daniel into Turl Street and through the door to a men’s clothing shop, full of tweeds and flat caps and tattersall dress shirts, only without the button-down collars Daniel had seen on the few decent shirts he had received from his father as gifts, usually a size too large. He suddenly wondered, was his dad subtly ridiculing his son’s slight build by ignoring the fact that he wore a Medium, 15/32? Daniel tried to calculate what that was in centimeters, as Ferdi bounded up the staircase next to a large display of umbrellas. Daniel followed, suddenly finding himself in a barber shop. It was warm outside now, but it was downright hot up here where Daniel immediately saw serious work being done. This was no discount “clips” chain salon in the mall.

Ferdi called across the room, “Helen!”

A pretty, middle-aged brunette sweeping up hair between the chairs of two large, mustachioed barbers turned and smiled. She walked towards Ferdi with a limp. A birth defect perhaps, Daniel thought. Polio? She spoke with a slight west country accent, but she came across as educated in the traditional academic disciplines beyond the standard of most people in her profession. “Mr. Fremantle, what are you doing back so soon? You were in the chair just two days ago, I reckon.” “Oh, it’s Ferdi, Ferdi. Please, Helen. No, no, it’s not for me. It’s for my new American friend here. I would like for you to meet Mr. Daniel Perrin. We’re awfully sorry to burst in here, but is there any way you can do him now? His new life demands a new style. We’ll eliminate the use of a comb now, Daniel, won’t we? Something quite short you can fix with your hands. I hate to tell you, Daniel, but you are thinning a bit. Never mind. But this parting and wave thing doesn’t suit you. What do you say, Helen?”

Helen was free. She liked Americans and was happy to have a new one as a client, so she went to work on him. In a quarter of an hour, Daniel had a new look, kind of a spiky forward thing, but rather dignified. This would do nicely. But what did Ferdi mean by “thinning”?

On their way out of Walter’s, Ferdi turned back to the umbrella display and grabbed a medium-sized black one with a curved wooden handle. He tossed it to Daniel and nodded his head towards the sales clerk standing behind the till. £20. He could never have imagined paying the value of more than five used cd’s on something to keep the rain off. Back home in Florida young people simply made a run from the car to the front door as fast as they could. In Pittsburgh people made do with cheap giveaways, little extendable things ladies kept in their purses. Golfers, Daniel remembered, walked around with umbrellas as long as their clubs, and those seemed to achieve something. But in this old English university town, a proper brolly was part of the uniform, at least among the Oxford true-believers like Ferdi, the kind of guy, minus some of the affect, that Daniel came to Oxford to become.

With his supply of cash down to £140, Daniel followed Ferdi back onto the High Street and up to Carfax Tower at Cornmarket Street through the covered market, with stalls of meats, cheeses, baked goods, an engraver, a picture framer, poster salesmen, and various other venders. Three American football fields further along and they were in a modern supermarket that gave way to a fully stocked department store. Marks & Spencer was a popular chain store; but this location had a unique distinction. It displayed a large bronze cross in the floor of the entryway, a mark that showed the meeting point of the old parish boundaries of the city.

It was in this very establishment that Susan had acquired the little black dress in which she had suffered at the Ambassador’s luncheon. She had purchased it on a return trip to her alma mater for a gaudy, an event which Americans would simply call an alumni dinner.

Ferdi walked quickly through the food aisles towards the escalator to the men’s clothing department. “Daniel, knowing as I do the unlikelihood that your luggage will be recovered in tact, we must proceed as if it is lost. Now, what of your present wardrobe do you expect to arrive eventually from America?”

“Oh, you really think my things are gone,” Daniel said, alarmed. He re-composed himself. “Right. Well. Mostly what’s coming from the States are books and cd’s. My blue suit, a decent dress shirt or two. More underwear, socks. I don’t know. Not a whole lot. I almost feel now, what’s coming isn’t right for me anymore anyway.”

Ferdi nodded solemnly. He looked Danie up and down one final time, then he espied the racks carefully, and went on the attack. Meanwhile, Daniel wandered around the men’s department scanning the room, finding another parish boundary marker carved into a piece of stone sitting behind a piece of plexiglass in the wall. He then started “people-watching,” as Roger would say. Suddenly, he saw a familiar face.

About ten feet in front of Daniel, there was a small man with a droopy eye and three or four-days’ growth of beard. He was wearing a t-shirt with the cover art from R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction on it, and he was standing behind a collapsible baby stroller containing a fidgety toddler. There was no mistaking. It was Thom Yorke, the frontman of the band Radiohead. Daniel’s jaw dropped and he began to breath quickly and shallowly from his chest. He looked all around him qickly, as if at any moment a crowd might overwhelm the scene and crush him and everyone else in the store. He called out to Ferdi, intensely focused, who was rifling through a pile of shirts.

“Ferdi, come here!”

“What? Oh Daniel, what is it? I’m working on your new look here!”

“Just come here for a minute,” Daniel insisted.

Ferdi complied, but he showed pre-emptive disinterest in whatever Daniel had discovered.

“It’s Thom Yorke! From Radiohead! Right there!”

Ferdi replied, “Who?” He then looked around and landed his gaze on the same man Daniel had spotted with astonishment. “Oh, yes, that rock and roller chap. ‘Creep’ and all that. I’ve seen him here before. And in the Whittard tea shop too. And in the covered market. Daniel, you must drop this middle-class fascination with celebrity. That man is from Oxford, and he likes it here because he can depend on people to let him live like a normal person. Because, you know, he is a normal person. You will see him again, Daniel. Come now and look at these.”

In Daniel’s old life, it would have been unthinkable for him to see one of his musical heroes and not ask for an autograph. But now, Ferdi was right. It seemed wrong to put anyone on a pedestal. Here was a man - an eccentric, talented man - out doing some shopping with his family in a town full of many oddities.

Ferdi had picked out a pair of medium grey gabardine trousers and another pair of tan corduroys, two versatile dress shirts, one light blue and one white with a subtle herringbone weave, both with French cuffs. Finally, there was one Navy blue jumper – a word that would take time for Daniel to use himself – and a package of white underwear, briefs.

“I don’t even have cuff links, Ferdi,” Daniel noted.

“Oh, no bother,” he replied. “You will. For now, you’ll wear them rolled up when the weather is warm and it won’t matter in your jumper sleeve the rest of the time. No decent shoes coming, am I right?”

Daniel was wearing his favorite brown bluchers, and Ferdi approved of them.

“As you don’t have a decent suit right now anyway,” Ferdi explained, “we shall have to wait on black cap toes. I assume the dress shoes you’ve lost were not up to standard. Composite leather, rubber souls.”

“Not rubber souls, no,” Daniel corrected him.

“Ah good,” Ferdi replied. “That said, when you come into any more money, you must get some real calfskin Oxfords, a second suit, and most of all a proper overcoat. I’m sorry, Daniel, but that suede jacket is a disaster. You cannot walk around here as if at any moment you might withdraw your hacky sack and lie around on the lawn with scruffy intellectual pretenders. Oh, and I am afraid we are out of money for your new telephone gadget, but surely that’s not urgent. Unless, there is the matter of that Susan you mentioned. Well, she knows where to find you.”

By now Daniel was so caught up in Ferdi’s spree that Susan was receding further back in his mind. He did, for a moment, wonder what Roger would think of all this. After all, he worked in a store not unlike this one. He had many of the same fashion ideals as Ferdi, but he now settled mostly for cut-rate alternatives, even with his employee discount. He no longer even bothered to shine his favorite tassel loafers, which he wore most days on the sales floor.

Roger had concluded his fashion sense would die out with him. He assumed his son did not think clothes made a man. But perhaps he had judged too soon.

As the driver called out the stop, Daniel hurried to get off the bus, and he was relieved by the fresh air outside as the doors closed shut behind him with a pneumatic seal. The enormous modern vehicle rumbled off alongside the walls of St. Edmund’s Hall on the left and Merton College on the right. By the time it was up to full speed at Longwall Street, Daniel realized he had left his bags in the cargo hold. In his first act as an Oxford man, he chased after the bus, waving his arms and shouting into the air, to no avail.

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Daniel had slipped away from the rest of the American scholars at the airport, getting on a train from Heathrow to Victoria Station, where the Oxford Tube bus line originated. By the time the others had retrieved their bags and began looking at the personalized travel instructions Hiba had provided to each of them, he was gone. The truth was, he was a little embarrassed after the fiasco with the rock and the Marine savior. More importantly, while winding up the M40 to Oxford, he wanted to sit alone and begin to imagine the new identity that he could choose in this new setting.

On the airplane, everyone was still buzzing from their experience at the Embassy the day before, with Jonah walking the aisles as a politician checking on his constituents. “We’re all on the same team here, everybody. If there is anything, anything I can do to help, I want you to let me know, all right?” He made a particular point of expressing nuanced solidarity with Daniel. “Buddy, you really took one for the rest of us. But that guy who hit you has no other voice. What the world saw on television was a man with privilege taking heed, hearing the cries of the downtrodden. That’s you, buddy. Taking it hard too, yes, but moving forward, transformed. Hey, anything I can do to help, Perino. Anything, ok?” Daniel attempted a soft reply, “How can I listen to someone who hits me on the hea….”

“Anything,” Jonah interrupted, moving on to his next concern.

Standing on the High Street alone, without his satchel or suitcase, Daniel looked up, sighing in a gesture of near despair. He did not handle deviations from plans very well. What was for others a commonplace inconvenience was for him a matter of life and death, and he was on the verge of hyperventilating. He felt for a fresh pack of Kamel Reds in the pocket of the tan suede jacket his mother had bought for him at Stein Mart before he left. The coat was well made, but it had an elastic bottom more suited to a man twenty years older. He stood by the phone box on Longwall Street as he took out the cigarettes, turned over the pack and rapped it several times on his left palm, then removed the cellophane, pulled out the tinfoil covering, and removed a cigarette. He lit it, his first since Washington, and remained still for a moment, considering what to do. His anxiety subsided with each drag.

He decided to call Susan. He grimaced at the idea of having to speak to her in an official context. He was dying to talk to her again, but this was not how he was hoping their next encounter would go. She had given everyone her direct line at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as well as her mobile number for emergencies. This constituted an emergency, but the numbers were in his satchel, which was somewhere near the village of Minster Lovell in West Oxfordshire by now. Could he dial information? Was there a phone book?

He took a look inside the red box, which was just like the ones in films he enjoyed that were set in England, like A Fish Called Wanda and The Great Muppet Caper. EIIR on the side and everything. The phone took coins, but he didn’t have any. There was a slot for inserting a card, which he didn’t have either, so he went back out to the High Street and looked back towards the bus shelter where he had got off the Oxford Tube. There was a shop. They would call it a convenience store in Florida and Pittsburgh. A bodega in New York. Here it was just a shop.

He went in and asked the man behind the counter, a tall, handsome Gujarati named Rahul, if he had phone cards. “Oh yes sir, many phone cards. Here, look.” He pointed to a small display to the left of the till. “Which one would you like?”

“I don’t know,” Daniel replied. “What’s the difference?”

“No difference, sir.”

“Oh, well in that case,” Daniel looked them over closely, “I’ll take this one. Dog and Bone.” “Dog and Bone card, very good choice, sir. Thank you. Would you like £5, £10, or £20, sir?” Daniel opened his wallet and saw the £200 he had put there before the plane departed. Hiba had been instructed to give each student a cash stipend to tide them over until they received their first scholarship check in about a week. Daniel withdrew one of his £20 notes and handed it to Rahul, who gave him the card.

Daniel wondered why Dog and Bone. He chose it only because there was a little cartoon animal on it that made it stand out a bit from the rest. He returned to the phone box at the corner of Longwall Street, and placed the card into the slot. A pre-recorded voice immediately came on the line. It sounded a bit like Michael Caine, but female.

“Welcome to the Dog and Bone Card. No porkies, you’ve spent your bees and honey now, ain’t you? Twenty merry go round remain. Please dial the number you wish to reach.” Next to the keypad there was a small set of instructions for placing calls. Dialing 100 would give Daniel the operator. He pressed 1-0-0, and when a voice came on the line, he requested the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and got through immediately. He asked for Susan.

“Susan Anguish,” she answered.

“Susan, it’s Daniel. What is dog and bone?”

“Daniel! What are you talking about? Dog and bone? Oh, phone. It’s Cockney rhyming slang,” she explained.

“It’s on this phone card I bought,” Daniel explained. “And porkies, what’s that?” “Oh…golly. Lies, I think. Porky pies. Lies. Is this why you’ve rung me at the office, Daniel, or is there something else? Have you arrived all right? Hiba said you weren’t with the others.”

Daniel paused. “Did you ask Hiba where I was?”

Now she paused. “Yes,” she replied. “But what is it, Daniel?”

He sighed, then told her, “I left my bags on the bus, Susan. I’m an idiot. I wasn’t thinking. Can you help?”

Daniel realized long after the fact that he could have taken care of finding, or not finding, his bags on his own. After all, he had left his personal belongings on private property, and his mistake had nothing to do with his scholarship or the British government or Susan. This had all crossed Susan’s mind; but she was touched that Daniel thought of her anyway. She could help him, surely. And it occurred to her that it was a good excuse to spend time with Daniel again. Just as Daniel kept picturing her in front of the crowd at the Embassy, she could not shake the image of his rosy cheeks across the table from her at Le Petit Prince. She would track down the bags and bring them to him in Oxford and see what came of it. Maybe nothing. Or maybe Daniel’s negligence might achieve a happy result for both of them.

“Don’t worry, Daniel. I’ll find them,” she reassured him. “And don’t bother with the phone box. I’ll ring the porter’s lodge at your college when I hear something. Go and get yourself a mobile phone with the money we’ve given you. You’re going to need it. Good-bye, Daniel.”

Before she could hang up, Daniel remembered an important detail. “Susan, a red ribbon!” Beginning to put the phone down, she caught herself and returned the receiver to her ear. “I beg your pardon, Daniel. What red ribbon?”

“On my suitcase,” Daniel told her. “My dad told me to put a red ribbon on the handle so I could spot it quickly at the airport. Maybe that will help you find it.” Susan replied, “Oh, I expect so. Thank you, Daniel. And Daniel, please don’t worry. And try to enjoy yourself.”

Daniel put the receiver down, confused about Susan’s instruction to buy a phone. He had made fun of the three or four friends back home who had cell phones, as if they were so important to need to be reached at any moment.

But the purpose of her instruction would soon become clear. Daniel walked back to the porter’s lodge and was given the keys to his room, which was not inside the college walls, but was instead in a staircase of flats on the High Street nearby. As it happened, Daniel’s room was just above Rahul’s little shop, where he had just bought the phone card. When he got to his room, he discovered it was not equipped with a telephone. There was, however, a sink, built-in bookshelves, and a window he could climb through onto a small terrace where he could sit and smoke.

On the landing of the staircase outside his room, Daniel met a short, round woman of about sixty who introduced herself as Diana. “I’m your scout,” she said matter-of-factly. In an earlier time, the scout was a man who would light fires and serve meals and function as something of a valet to a university student. Now there were women at the university too, and scouts were all women. They were essentially cleaning ladies who also served as spies for the deans. The potential appearance of one’s scout mitigated the possibility of live-in student romances, or even of sleepovers among the more scrupulous. A hot plate was forbidden. A microwave unheard of. But an electric kettle was allowed, and the gesture of offering one’s scout a cup of tea was a mark of character.

By the time Daniel came to Oxford, students and scouts addressed each other on a first-name basis. The foreign students, as a rule, were generally more polite – indeed, some of them, like Daniel, were rather embarrassed by the whole arrangement of having someone come in and change their bedsheets once a week in what amounted to a glorified dorm room. Learning of Daniel’s nationality, she launched right into her love of all things American, although she was also devoted to the royal family, and she boasted of a large collection of commemorative magazines, plates, tea towels, and other Britannia kitsch. Lord Frederick “Freddie” Windsor was a student of the college, and Diana was bitter that scout duties for his room had been allotted to a “dour Scots republican cow” named Aileen – “no ray of sunshine, ‘er!” Diana took solace from the fact that Freddie was almost never in Oxford and rarely used his college room and board when he was in town anyway.

Diana loved Princess Di and was particularly proud to have the same name as the beautiful, lately departed queen-not-to-be. But she disapproved strongly of Fergie. Diana explained in her slight south Midland accent, “Andrew’s a scoundrel to ‘er but ‘e ought not to have married a commoner, I say. Don’t understand that life, does she?” She then told Daniel of her one trip to the United States, to South Bend, Indiana of all places, where her husband, a car enthusiast, had made a pilgrimage to the Studebaker Museum. It was her turn to pick the next destination when they had saved up enough money. It would be Disney World, and the full “princess package,” as she described it. For the moment, Daniel didn’t feel like telling her he came from somewhere very near the happiest place on earth.

Diana could tell straight away which students she would like best, and she was known to offer them extra help. She identified Daniel as a friendly presence and got a bit chatty. “I’m ‘appy to make runs down the shop too, Daniel, if you need anything. Cigarettes, milk, sweets. Just leave me a note and some money. I’ll bring the change. You’ll know how much everything costs soon enough. I don’t much approve of our country bein’ overrun with Asians and the like, but that Rahul downstairs is a good lad. Runs a nice shop.”

Diana explained that she had made the bed, hoovered, cleaned the sink and the window, adjusted the radiator, and dusted all the shelves. She would be around most days for a while, as this staircase had been completely vacant the previous term. Diana had been tasked with giving all the rooms and common areas a deep clean, although she explained that Daniel and one undergraduate girl were the only two students assigned to the staircase so far. The toilet was just up the landing, the shower was all the way at the top, and there was a bath next to the kitchen all the way downstairs if he preferred. She did not ask where any of Daniel’s things were, but it occurred to him to ask her how to go about getting a telephone. “Oh, mobiles! Everyone’s got ‘em now. Not me, no. But try down the Carphone Warehouse in the Cornmarket, center of town. All right, Daniel. Bye, love.”

Standing alone in his new dwelling place, Daniel suddenly felt anxiety well up within him again over his missing suitcase and satchel. As a natural achiever, he was furious with himself for creating such an inconvenience. He had heard adults half-jokingly lament losing bags on airplanes before; but the idea of being somewhere without the basic items one carefully chooses as companions on a trip made Daniel feel nauseated. How do people speak so blithely about difficulties? His cd’s! The Discman!

Daniel decided he had no choice but to use more of the cash stipend Hiba had given him to buy some necessities. How long would it take for Susan to find his stuff? But why, again, was he relying on her to solve his problem?

Cornmarket Street.

Carphone Warehouse was there. He would be able to find underwear and a toothbrush somewhere nearby, surely. He descended the staircase and was back on the High Street. Disoriented from his travels, Daniel now noticed it was midmorning, clearer and warmer by several degrees than it had been when he was listening to Diana upstairs. He had just begun walking slightly north and west towards the center of town, when another Oxford Tube coach pulled up at Queen’s Lane. Tom Mawhinney led a squad of eight American scholars off the bus, helping each retrieve his or her bags from the hold underneath. Daniel looked up and turned on his heels, observing the medieval buildings before stopping and breathing in deeply, smiling. Embarrassed by his fortune and tired of extraversion while at the same time lonely (a common predicament for Daniel), he turned and walked briskly in the other direction, towards the college. His shopping trip would have to wait a while.

Passing back through the porter’s lodge, Daniel entered St. John’s Quad, where he noticed what appeared to be an outdoor pulpit jutting out from the wall. Most of the students had not yet returned from the long vacation, and the grounds were deserted. Noticing the reverse side of a large stained-glass window, he passed through an archway on the right and found himself in a small, dark passageway with an enormous wooden door immediately to his right. He went in, looking up, westward, at the window, which, to Daniel’s surprise, was monochrome and did not contain the bright colors he had seen in the windows of big churches in France. The scene it depicted was beautiful, but deadly serious: the Last Judgement. The sun shone through the top of the window above Christ’s head, as cherubs blew their horns beneath him, and groups of people with miserable expressions were gathered to the right and to the left. A warrior angel was doing battle at the very bottom.

He turned to the east, walking through the open space of the antechapel to the chapel proper. Ahead of him was more beauty, and more seriousness: a large painting of Jesus carrying his cross behind the stone altar, which had been pulled a few feet off the wall some decades earlier. The two sides of the aisle faced inward, not forward, and Daniel found it odd. C.S. Lewis had prayed in here every day, looking across at dopey students or, more likely, empty stalls like the ones around him now. Daniel walked up the wooden steps to a seat on the top row and sat down. He wondered if he could pray. But what is prayer? Whoever or whatever God is, he is not a vending machine in the sky who dispenses what people ask for if they insert the right change. Daniel thought it an insult to ask for his bags back, and quickly. “Contemplation,” Daniel told himself instead. “Consider the meaning. The meaning.”

As much as Daniel wished he could will the elevation of his mind and his soul, he could not fix his attention on anything abstract. Had students in generations past been successful at this? What did it mean to them? Daniel could not escape the concrete images of faces and places. He saw Tom drawing his ridiculous blade again and felt proud and grateful. He saw his old girlfriend Mara reclined on the ratty love seat in his student apartment, and became overwhelmed with guilt. He saw Roger mixing a drink in his little kitchen and felt sadness for his father’s circumstances. But he was also somehow comforted to know Dad was just out there, being himself and doing his thing. He saw Susan again, this time red-faced and tying up her bathrobe on the sidewalk in Washington. He felt desire for her, but in an unfamiliar way. It was not lust now, but admiration. It was physical, but more than physical. It was a mystery he did not want to solve. What’s more, he knew it could not be solved.

He softened his face and smiled gently, then closed his eyes and fell asleep.

Her mind then changed to practical matters. Her main purpose for being in Washington was to play the hostess the first night, before Daniel had arrived, and to speak briefly that afternoon, before the Ambassador addressed the scholars. Then she was to go straight back to London on her own, taking copies of all of the young Americans’ passports and university acceptance letters to her counterpart from the Home Office at Heathrow Airport before the scholars themselves came through the next day. It all made sense in the planning, but Susan could have just as easily stayed over and taken care of the visas when she landed with the rest of the group. She was suddenly worried that her conversation with Daniel may never resume.

What if Susan’s whole life could be turned upside down by one more night at the Palomar?

Tom approached Daniel. “Right on, Perrin. Sightseeing this morning?” Jonah, standing nearby, turned and interjected, “Perrino! Well played, man. Everyone was wondering where you were. Nice, dude. You’re going to do well in England, man. You’re the type. I can tell.”

Daniel was flustered. “No, I took a walk to the Cathedral. That’s all.”

Sully registered his opinion next. “I think it’s encouraging to see more romantic partnerships between younger men and older women. We’re a long way from Jane Austen, but we still have it in our minds that the right age for a man is his early thirties, after he’s lived a bit, whereas the right age for a woman is barely past puberty. Nowadays, even challenging that paradigm is implying there should be a paradigm, which eventually there will not be, mark my words. But for now, it’s enjoyable to see people break the rules a bit. Test those soft taboos.”

Suddenly feeling on the defensive, Daniel fired back, “there are plenty of examples in history where the woman is older than the man. Respectable people too, or sort of – not Cleopatra, or George Eliot, or someone like that. Disraeli’s wife was twelve years older him, I think. Queen Mary was way older than Philip. Shakespeare’s wife was seven or eight years older, if I remember correctly. Anyway, that’s not the case here. We were just talking. Susan’s…lovely.”

“Ohhhhh!” All three men around Daniel erupted in the kind of taunting, schoolboy laughter men hang onto until middle age, even among liberal elites. Hiba overheard the conversation and smirked at the young men’s reaction. She had never thought about Susan’s love life. But she was a bit perturbed at her boss at that moment. She thought it inappropriate for Susan to disappear all morning dressed up in a black dress and heels and return in an overheated rush with a young man – one of the scholars, no less.

Although she was always respectful to Susan, Hiba sometimes complained about her off the clock. “Susan’s family business caters to hunters, for Christ’s sake,” Hiba complained to one of her girlhood friends, in the East London accent she mostly concealed at work. “It’s going to be illegal soon, yeah. And all dat Home Counties, public school stuff is just nauseatin’, innit?”

Secretly, Hiba imagined how much better she would be at Susan’s job. Susan was a bigger splash in front of people, that was true. She was so British, which was exactly what the Minister wanted for this assignment with the scholars and the Ambassador. She was a public face of and for Western leaders. But Hiba was more methodical, and in the department’s everyday work, which consisted of meetings with education ministers and junior officials from the Middle East, India, Pakistan, and even Africa and the Far East, she thought that her smaller, subdued physical appearance, and most of all her hijab, made a better impression. The still-quiet undercurrent of Hiba’s generation, around the same age as the American students, was that it was people like her who represented the Britain of the future. Such a thought had not yet occurred to people like Susan’s parents.

Susan and Hiba descended the steps of the coach first, leading the Americans to the doorstep of the British Ambassador’s residence, a grand red brick estate with lush gardens, including roses still in full bloom on this early autumn occasion. In fact, the weather was nearly summery as the sun reached its peak in the sky. The party was welcomed by the Ambassador himself. His name was Sir David Manners KCMG, a long-time diplomat, and the sort of person Susan had thought she might like to become when she entered the civil service. He was tall and blonde, spoke in a posh, military-style clip, having been recruited for Army intelligence out of Cambridge. As a reward for presiding over the sad transfer of Hong Kong, he was given a knighthood and the brass ring for his final assignment: the U.S.A. Sir David was a protégé of the infamous Enoch Powell, but he had long since denounced the “rivers of blood” language of British nationalism. He was a man of the world now. “Ambassador to the future,” he joked. He was close friends with last Tory Prime Minister, but he liked the current Labour man an awful lot too.

The Ambassador’s wife led the Americans through the back of the residence to the large garden, where there awaited an even larger group of Americans, mostly recipients of two other major scholarship programs. Various dignitaries and guests roamed among them.

Susan realized right away that her black dress was a bad idea. This was an outdoor affair, for God’s sake. The humidity was stifling, and waiters were bearing trays full of Pimms, G&T’s, and champagne. The bottomless glasses of reds and whites would come when they all sat down. Across the garden, Susan spotted Daniel in a group with Tom, Jonah, and Sully. A slim brunette of about forty, of average height, pretty with slightly masculine shoulders, was making her way to the young men. She walked with a confidence characteristic of the well-bred, or at least the well-connected. She stood out in a fuchsia-colored cocktail dress.

“Hello, boys. I’m Ghislaine.”

“Gee-lane?” Tom repeated. “I’ve never heard that name before ma’am, but it is a pleasure to meet you.” He extended his hand. “Tom Mawhinney of the state of Oregon and the United States Marine Corps. You look lovely, by the way, ma’am.”

“It’s gruesome that someone so handsome should care!” the woman fired back. “As for my name, my mother is French. My father is English and he works in the newspaper business. That’s why I’m in America. New York, not Washington. I’m a friend of the Ambassador’s, you see. He wanted to populate the place today with some of the great and the good to give you lot a proper send-off. Not that I’m either, really. But now you know the truth about me, you won’t see me anymore,” she laughed.

They all found her turns of phrase odd, but Daniel also thought them familiar. She turned her attention to Jonah and said, “Anyway, it’s time the tale were told. What do you do and where are you headed?”

“Women’s Studies at University College London,” he told her.

“Good heavens! A man making an academic study of women? Now I know how Joan of Arc felt,” she replied, laughing to herself again.

Daniel had figured out her strange way of talking, but he kept his discovery to himself for now.

She then looked at Sully. “And you?”

“Literature at Edinburgh.”

“It would be such a romantic place if not for the Scots,” she joked. “But stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Haha!” Obviously bored with the company, Ghislaine skipped Daniel and backed up a step to address all four men. “Well it’s all changed now, chappies. You’re on the cusp of a big adventure, but I wonder to myself, could life ever be sane again? I want to tell Sir David about a dear friend of mine. Bon voyage, gentlemen. And congratulations.”

When she was still within earshot, Sully commented, “What the hell was all that about?”

“Smiths lyrics,” Daniel replied. “She was quoting Smiths’ songs. Messing with us for some reason.”

At that moment, Daniel saw Susan, who was standing in a small group of young women gathered around a short man in a medium brown suit with a light blue shirt and dark blue knit tie. He had brown-grey hair and a matching a handlebar mustache. He was holding court in a way that made Daniel think he must be a professor or an author or an inventor of something famous that everyone had heard of but him.

Jonah identified the man as John Freeman. “What a genius. Don’t you know him, Perino? Pulitzer Prize winning columnist at the Washington Post. His work is so timely. So timely!” Daniel shook his head.

“No? Well, he wrote about how we all completely misunderstand Islamic countries and the developing world, and we’re blinded by Hollywood stereotypes and one-off atrocities like the Ayatollah or, you know, the recent stuff…. Anyway, he’s really sounding the alarm against retaliation. Our thoughts are clouded by racialist and mercantilist views of nations and peoples. He says we should all experience life as a Chinese person for a day or two and reset our expectations for the future.”

“Sounds like a bunch of Commie propaganda to me, fellas!” Tom said with a booming laugh. “But hey, whatever. Fight through it. I see one of my academy buddies. Later guys.” Sully was not amused by the burly military man’s remarks. He asked, “Aren’t there any poets here?” Daniel suddenly noticed Sully was wearing some kind of shiny lip gloss. And was that eyeshadow? He had never seen such a thing.

For the next hour, the service staff, dressed in formal livery, brought more drinks and hors d’œuvres. Only they used a different French word, “canapés.” Sully pointed out to Daniel a little band of thirty-something men with crew cuts wearing tan, light grey, and medium blue suits. “CIA,” Sully said. “Or NSA, government guys in sensitive departments. They know we hate them, but they think they’ll stumble on some real elite young patriot in a crowd like this. They’ll probably fall all over themselves to get to our friend Dean the Marine or whatever that Mawhinney’s name is.”

For just an instant, Daniel thought fondly of Tom Cruise sitting in a safe house, writing messages in all the known languages to try and find an arms dealer named Max.

The Ambassador finally ascended the back steps of the residence to welcome the crowd onto the large covered patio. It was here that they hosted luncheons when the weather was fine, a condition interpreted more liberally by the Embassy than most Americans would. On this day, the men’s suit jackets were soaked through the back with perspiration. The women’s hair was frizzing and their deodorant was failing under their sleeveless dresses.

The Ambassador had created the menu himself. It was a tribute to British cuisine, an unsolicited response to the friends and family members of these young Americans, who had endured their jokes all summer about the wretched food that awaited them abroad. The starter was a mulled poached pear and goat cheese salad, with watercress and toasted pecans, followed by an array of three small Hebridean lamb chops plated in a minimalist, modern style with traditional candied carrots, mint peas, and oven roasted rosemary potatoes. Dessert was a summery berry trifle. Daniel found it delicious, but as he ate, he worried about the story of President Zachary Taylor dying from cherries and milk on a hot day. The Ambassador’s meal was much too heavy for an Indian summer midday al fresco experience.

To Daniel’s right was a pale female engineering graduate with acne scars and not-quite brown or blonde hair, best described as plain-colored. They said almost nothing to each other apart from exchanging their undergraduate school credentials, which were both second-tier public universities. To his left and across the other side of the table, Sully had found a new activist-minded cohort of four souls issuing an uninterrupted rumble of jargon, without the aid of any wine or spirits. For his part, with the earlier cocktails and more red wine every time the waitress approached the table, Daniel was stuffed to the gills and completely sloshed by the time Susan came to the microphone.

Susan’s American bra was just about suffocating her as she began to talk, and she had an absurd passing image of herself ripping it off and baring all. Even Bridget Jones would never entertain such an idea. Maybe Eddie from Absolutely Fabulous would. Susan had been told she looked a little like a young Jennifer Saunders.

Once at the microphone, Susan’s task was to recognize various members of committees involved in selection, and giving the scholars an overview of what to expect during the brief immigration interview upon landing in London. The Minister had told her to offer a few tips about the difference between ordinary life in Britain versus the U.S.A., so she mentioned inanities like there are no mixer taps on sinks and you still have to buy a plug separate from electrical appliances sometimes. For the Oxford-bound students she recommended they get to know Blackwell’s bookshop immediately.

She was perfect for the part, exuding official charm.

Daniel did not listen closely to Susan’s words, but he enjoyed seeing her up front. He didn’t know about her uncomfortable underwear, of course, but his inebriated state made him more aware of her figure, which was womanly compared to the still girly look of most of the females his age. Ravishing. Did Susan know someone found her ravishing? Daniel hated pro forma speeches as a rule, but he had a voyeuristic appreciation for them from people he knew and liked. It was if he was in on their joke. He felt privileged to have seen beneath Susan’s public persona already during their impromptu breakfast earlier in the day. Now, drunkenly, he imagined seeing under her dress.

Next, it was the Ambassador’s turn to speak, and he intended to use the occasion to say something significant about the challenges and opportunities facing the Anglo-American alliance. Members of the press were there after all. And it was an open secret that many members of the British media in Washington did double-duty for the intelligence service back home. The Prime Minister was eager to let Sir David be a surrogate for articulating his forward-thinking solutions to global challenges, and the right people were present to disseminate it.

“Thank you very much indeed, Susan,” he began. “You’ve all been asked to wear pins of the American and British flags, and I am pleased to see you doing so. We all know this is a time for particular pride in your flag, as we see moving images of its rising up from smoke and rubble in lower Manhattan and nearby at the Pentagon. The tattered banners of stars and stripes call to mind for students of history the images that inspired the writing of your national anthem. Of course, as an Englishman, I am loathe to remember it was my country firing upon yours that inspired Francis Scott Key’s stirring poem. It is, however, some consolation that the tune was written by an Englishman. If only it was a bit easier to sing!”

At this remark there erupted a small, dutiful outburst of laughter among the Embassy staff. The Ambassador cleared his throat, adjusted his reading glasses, and looked down closely at his notes before continuing. His demeanor had intensified.

“On behalf of her Majesty’s government, I welcome you all here today, and especially the groups of young American scholars, tomorrow’s leaders of this great nation, about to continue or, in some cases, finish, their academic formation in Great Britain. We find ourselves today in a position of unbreakable strength in our partnership. We are better allies than ever before in the cause not only of defending our respective nations, but of promoting values that transcend nationhood itself. Whereas our common ancestors believed in the supranational principles of Christendom, we, the sons and daughters of the Enlightenment…we believe not only in supranational principles, but in suprareligious ones, if I may be permitted the invention of a neologism.”

Sir David reckoned that a little linguistic innovation was the order of the day for an important speech like this. He continued,

“Some of you here wear the uniforms and insignia of your nation’s military branches, as I once did for mine. And we shall soon embark upon new conflicts to which you may be called to serve and to sacrifice. For this reason, to you in particular, but to everyone here present and to the wider world beyond, I want to say a word about our enemy. Most importantly, despite what he says, our enemy fights not for his god, but against his own freedom. As such, he is to be pitied, not hated. He maintains the absurd view that the progress we all enjoy represents the rotten fruit of our wicked toil. We enthusiastically offer him his own abundance from our superabundance, and he attacks us in return as brokers of decadence. The tokens of our vengeance on behalf of our countrymen who have so tragically died, therefore, are hot showers and television sets and myriad choices of things to eat for dinner. We shall civilise our aggressors if we must at the last use our missiles and tanks to do it. They shall one day be so comfortable, as we are, that it would not occur to them to do violence to anyone.”

On this point, the man from the Washington Post was particularly pleased, and when a round of applause began, he led the assembly in a standing ovation. It was going well for the Ambassador. As the applause died down, however, a rumble of chatter and shouts began to creep over the luncheon. It seemed to be coming from outside the embassy walls. Ignoring the noise, the Ambassador picked up where he left off.

“We must now think beyond the thousands of lives already lost. They could have been anyone. Indeed, they were anyone, and no one in particular. They belonged within the democratic world. Or more accurately, they belonged to the democratic world. They wore lounge suits and they wore track suits. They wore dresses, like Susan here. And they wore traditional head scarves, like Hiba there.”

He was proud of himself for double-checking the young civil servant’s name before he began speaking. But as he paused, the roar from outside the compound was now too loud to mistake. There was a protest going on at the gates. Nonetheless, he resumed his speech, increasing the volume of his voice and articulating each word more deliberately.

“The world is our community, and all of us will find our lives changed, mostly for the better…much better… as technology shortens the distance between our communications and our commerce. It will be much easier for the closed-minded to use our own tools of progress against us as weapons of regress. In order to remain free, we must change our laws to ensure that freedom is not abused for the sake of destroying what the heroes of our modern era have built upon the ruins of a decaying and superstitious past.”

The outside noise had become a roar, and the crowd was visibly agitated. Sir David’s aide-de-camp was flicking his wrist in a circle, as a signal to wrap up. Perturbed, the Ambassador skipped the paragraphs about surveillance as a necessary sacrifice, and a passage about how important it would be for elite professionals to be exemplars of trust in international governing bodies. It would not be an oration for the history books after all. He jumped to the end, almost shouting the conclusion.

“This is a moment of the greatest import. The chess board has been overturned. The pieces hang now in the air awaiting their fall to earth. The choice before us is whether to let them settle in a chaotic heap, or seize the opportunity to re-order them for a common victory. We have in our power the means to destroy ourselves or to give everyone else the prosperity we enjoy. Only the moral authority of people like us, thinking beyond old hatreds and prejudices, can ensure not only survival, but flourishing. For this reason, even as the bombs begin to drop, we must lead the way in embracing tolerance as the virtue that undergirds our complex society. Tolerance for America. Tolerance for Britain. Tolerance for our wonderful world. Thank you all very much, and Godspeed.”

Instead of the final ovation the Ambassador had hoped for, and frankly expected, the seated guests stood up as the final syllable boomed through the PA system, and they began to rush through the house towards the front gates on Massachusetts Avenue. Daniel figured he could see at least a hundred people through the iron bars. The two civilian security guards were shouting into walkie-talkies, clearly spooked. Daniel turned around and saw Susan approaching him on his right. On instinct, he held out his hand to her, and she grabbed it, in shock about what to do. Was she in charge? “Perhaps everyone should take off their pins,” she whispered, staring blankly forward.

At this moment, Tom Mawhinney made his way through the crowd, still protected by the bars of the security check point, but little else. He approached the frantic security guards and ordered them to open the gates. “We’ll fight through this, boys!” Standing before them at almost two meters in height, with a strong American jut jaw, and wearing his Marine Dress Blue uniform, complete with a traditional Mameluke sword, Tom conveyed natural leadership clad in raiment that made disobedience to his word nearly impossible. Wishfully thinking the man before them may have been part of some un-summoned American military backup, the guards nodded to each other, and the one closest to the security booth pressed the bright red button. The gates began to swing inward. Tom drew his antique saber, turned back to the group, and bellowed, “To the buses!” As he walked out ahead of the others, the protesters cowered before him, parting ways and opening up a safe passageway like the waters of the Red Sea.

The Americans ran to the open doors of the rock-dimpled coaches and scurried onboard. Hiba pulled Susan back, breaking her grasp of Daniel’s hand. Caught up in the movement of the other students, Daniel was pushed through the gates, looking back in resignation at Susan, whose facial expression bore witness to her surname, Miss Anguish.

In an act of puerile protest, one of the agitators let fly a final rock, which pelted Daniel in the back of the head, knocking him temporarily to the ground. With Tom’s shepherding task nearly complete, but requiring one last heroic effort, he helped Daniel to his feet and threw him up the stairs onto the bus, whose door closed behind them both. “That’s it Daniel. Fight through it,” he said, puffing up his chest and exhaling loudly as the bus lurched backward.

Susan shrieked from the edge of the Embassy grounds, where the gates suddenly slammed shut in her face.

927 miles away at Tyrone Square Mall in St. Petersburg, Florida, Roger was on his “lunch” break, which he normally took from 3:00-4:00 p.m. on days when he closed the store. Some days he would buy a coffee from a local chain called Barney’s, always avoiding the flavored options. Unlike his cop buddies, he insisted on good coffee, and he had strong preferences for the beer he drank, cigarettes he smoked, and food he ate; although, as a now-single man, his preferences were in the domain of which microwave meal he liked best. Or more likely, why Wendy’s hamburgers were vastly preferable to McDonald’s, although he frequented the latter almost daily for breakfast. With a steaming cup of Kona Blend or Kenyan Supreme or Sumatran Special, he would usually sit in his early 90’s police-discard Chevy Impala, listening either to sports talk radio or to the local public classical station.

Once or twice a week, however, Roger would spend his lunch break in the bar area of Mr. Dunderback’s, a local German restaurant and a Tampa Bay institution, which had opened a second location at Tyrone Square a few years earlier. With his bad knee, Roger labored to walk to the restaurant clear across the mall next to Burdines department store. The coffee behind the bar was not as good as Barney’s, but it was good enough, and although he tended to live by his own code of conduct, he was respectful of his store’s strict policy of not drinking alcohol on the job.

At least he could smoke there. The new state laws allowed Dunderback’s customers to light up in its separate bar area, where they could even order food, so long as the bar’s overall drinks-to-food ratio favored booze by a 60-40 margin. The barkeeper had one tv permanently tuned to cable sports, which was usually a chat show at this time of day, and therefore useless without the sound. The other tv was set to one of the news channels, again normally muted. When Roger was more-or-less alone at the bar, he often asked to have one set or the other turned up. Today he saw something that immediately interested him on the news tv. “Hey Frank, turn up CNN. Turn it up please,” he said as he sidled onto a stool and took out a cigarette.

There was a raucous demonstration going on outside the British Embassy compound in Washington, D.C. It was “a volatile situation,” the reporter said. A group of radicals, comprised of a known anarchist group, Muslim activists who resisted the moniker “Islamists,” and an assortment of various malcontents, were protesting a fancy luncheon of American students, who were about to leave for graduate studies in the United Kingdom. There were reports of people nearby hearing wildly varying slogans including “No gods, no masters,” the similar “no goods, no masters,” and the hippie throwback “Make love, not war.” Above them all echoed the startling credo “No God but Allah!” The protestors were rattling the gates of the Embassy, vandalizing the brick wall perimeter with spray paint, and throwing rocks at the luxury coaches waiting to transport the students back to their hotel.

Seeing an arial shot of the young Lieutenant drawing his sword on live television, Roger exclaimed, “Good God, what is that Marine son-of-a-b***h doing?!” The image changed to a close-up shot of the crowd moving toward the bus. And then, to his amazement, he saw his firstborn, clear as day, bringing up the rear of a convoy of natty-dressed college kids with fear in their eyes. As Daniel crumpled in a heap next to the bus, Roger was horrified, blowing out a long drag of smoke and putting his hands on his head, ash dropping on his bald spot. Seeing his son hop up and then be manhandled to safety on live television, he stepped back from the bar in relief, took another long drag from his cigarette, and quietly said to the barkeeper, “Hey Frank, give me a Yuengling, will you?”

Daniel then got right up, shaved, and pulled out clothes for the day, thinking he would have a walking adventure for a few hours and return just in time to keep the schedule. He relished the opportunity to wear his slightly baggy, thrift-store grey suit as a subtle statement - too subtle perhaps - of his Bohemian pretenses. But his fairly new, white dress shirt had gotten crumpled up in his suitcase, and a wrinkly shirt was a step too far. He called down to the desk and asked to have a full ironing board delivered. The miniature ones, Daniel thought, are not for people who really iron.

As he waited, he dug the portable cd player out of his satchel and picked up the small stack of discs he had chosen to tide him over until the box containing his complete collection arrived at his college. The man at the shipping company in Fort Lauderdale had told him he would have his things about a week after he arrived. Needing to conserve space, Daniel chose a few recent albums from artists he already knew well so that he could forever associate their work with the sea change he was experiencing in his life.

He decided on Reveal by R.E.M., Amnesiac by Radiohead, Love and Theft by Bob Dylan, Time (The Revelator) by Gillian Welch, and Vespertine by Björk. Seeing he had enough room for two more jewel cases, he impetuously grabbed Red House Painters’ Old Ramon, and then he spotted No More Shall We Part by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. He was relieved not to have to remove something else to include that one. He now opened the case, took out the disc, and inserted it into the player. It would be his accompaniment for the morning’s wanderings. Nick Cave would forever mean Washington D.C. on a warm early October morning. A cathedral visit.

Daniel finished ironing, got dressed, and put his room key in his wallet. He pressed play on the Discman and dropped it into the front compartment of his satchel, then placed the headphones on his ears and carefully avoided pulling out the wire as he lifted the bag to his shoulder and walked out the door. He would skip the hotel’s continental breakfast in order to avoid the company of the other American scholars. He was sure he could find a place to sit down for decent cup of coffee and his first cigarette of the day on his own. He hoped northwest Washington would live up to the popular “kind of feels European” reputation he had heard his father explain to someone once while sitting in a plastic chair outside a strip mall coffee place next to a six-lane highway in Florida. As Daniel hit the stairwell, he noted Cave’s poetry, “We watched the world as it fell past.”

As Daniel entered the lobby, he immediately spotted Sully, who was in full verbal stride with a group of young women eating stale bagels and a buffet fruit salad with a lot of melon and a few berries. Daniel pulled off his headphones to eavesdrop. “Now, Judith Butler argues there is nothing fixed or natural about men and women at all. It’s all a social construct that the patriarchy uses to flatten out the real differences of how a so-called man and a so-called woman experience and live their sexuality. But I’m no expert. You should ask Jonah here who’s really studying it.”

Daniel put Nick Cave back on, kept moving, and avoided making eye contact. He suddenly remembered an embarrassing scene at his undergraduate German conversation group, der Stammtisch, where he had tried to make a pass at a known feminist Linguistics major. He praised a London art installation he had just read about that consisted only of a woman’s messy bed. Of course he didn’t really like the messy bed. He had never even seen it. Why did he think he could impress a girl by talking about it, especially in a language he did not know very well?

Daniel’s mind then jumped to another awkward encounter with a girl. “I don’t know. I like the mirror-for-princes poetry. The royal stuff,” he said to a female graduate student from his Renaissance France seminar. She was twenty-four-years-old and had a pretty mouth, short syrup-colored hair, and far-apart brown eyes. She explained she intended to write about how Marguerite de Navarre was a transgressive figure whose devotional poems were proto-feminist jabs at male authority. “Wow, that’s great,” Daniel replied automatically; but he was really thinking, “I have no chance here. She’s dating the TA for French Civilization. He’s an actual Frenchman.”

Daniel approached the concierge to ask whether there was a quaint café nearby. A short, smiling man whose name tag said “Muhammed” directed him to a place called Le Petit Prince, which was a few blocks south on 19th Street. Realizing this location was in the opposite direction from the Cathedral, Daniel decided just to walk north instead, noting the time was 7:32 a.m. on the clock over the door – the same door he had crashed through several hours earlier. As he walked out, he withdrew his Kamel Reds, took one of the last three in the box with his mouth, and lit it without the coffee he had intended to pair it with.

He passed several breakfast and beverage chain restaurants on the way, but he continued at a brisk pace until he reached the hill leading up to the front doors of the cathedral. “The National Cathedral,” Daniel reminded himself. “National.” He stopped and read a tourist information sign that betrayed the building’s age. It had been finished just eleven years earlier, after almost a century of construction.

Daniel walked around to the north side of building, casually looking up at the grotesques, when he spotted the unmistakable mask of Darth Vader, carved in Indiana limestone. He was no longer sure about proceeding with the visit. Nonetheless, he walked back around to the west side, where he was met by another surprise, a ticket booth. “Surely one just walks into a place like this,” he thought. The man behind the plexiglass was organizing stacks of tickets, and he was not prepared for visitors. He had patchy grey hair and a droopy face, and he wore a badge that read “Volunteer,” and underneath it, “Earl.”

Daniel stood in front of the glass, eyeing the board, which displayed different options and prices. Earl stopped shuffling the piles of tickets and looked up, telling Daniel, “Entry is $6.50 for adults, $4.00 for students for self-tours, but not until 9. Guided tours at ten, one, and three. Free entry at five o’clock for the choral service.”

Daniel was annoyed, as he often was in situations that were only mildly disappointing to most people. “Can’t I come in now? I’m here now! I’m an Episcopalian, by the way. And an American! Why should I have to pay to enter my cathedral?” He began quoting a line he remembered from the Book of Common Prayer: “We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness…” Earl interrupted him. “I’m sorry, sir. You can go in in a half an hour for $4.00. I assume you’re a student.”

“Forget it, Earl!” Daniel shouted at the man, who shrugged his shoulders and returned to his work.

Immediately ashamed of himself for his protest, Daniel turned around and withdrew his penultimate cigarette. He lit it and began walking briskly to the south, figuring he would save the last one in the pack for Le Petit Prince.

As the sun rose, Susan began her own preparations for the day. Instead of her usual routine of listening to Radio 4 while she performed her morning ablutions, she tuned the electric alarm clock to National Public Radio, which she quickly found to be both too serious and too hard to take seriously. Lots of thoughts, but no Thought for the Day. She switched it off. From her suitcase, she extracted a large parcel full of materials necessary for the next two days’ events, and she used the second queen-sized bed in her room to lay out the name badges and welcome packets, which she would ask Hiba to distribute to the scholars.

The phone rang. It was Susan’s boss, the Minister of State for North America, calling from London to make sure the students would all wear their pins. He explained they were a “small but significant symbol of the partnership of the United Kingdom and the United States.” He elaborated, “This isn’t a normal year, as you well know. Even as we speak, plans are in place that will put our soldiers and theirs together on the battlefield. The War on Terror!”

“Of course. The pins. Yes, sir,” Susan assured him. She called Hiba to come collect the packets and to confirm the travel arrangements to the reception. And she reminded her to double-check everyone’s pins before they set off.

Like Daniel, Susan decided to dress early for the event later in the day. Especially after last night’s sleepwear affair, she needed to reestablish an air of professionalism from the moment she left her room. After all, she was going to meet the ambassador and speak in front of the entire crowd. These American students probably already viewed her as one of the many quaint British characters who would populate future anecdotes about their time in England. She feared she was already something of a Bridget Jones in their eyes. Her colleagues at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, however, would find this comparison laughable - not because she was not prone to occasional gaffs, but rather, most of them suspected she had never even slept with a man before. She was far from the sort of person, like Bridget Jones, who had to impose a personal austerity program of counting cigarettes, limiting alcohol units, and cutting down on sweets. She hated cigarettes, for one thing. No one back home took her for a slapper. In fact, she was obviously capable of real grace and beauty.

Susan washed her hair and blew it dry with the little hotel hairdryer, a feat which took almost thirty minutes and made her break a sweat, even though she was standing under the air conditioning vent in nothing but her panties. The floral air freshener affixed to the wall was making her feel ill. She put on her new bra, which dug painfully into her side, then she applied her makeup and got into her black dress and black leather shoes with a small heel. She looked at herself in the full-length mirror inside the wardrobe door and nodded approvingly. She packed all her things and set them aside to retrieve later before going to the Embassy. The students were staying in Washington one more day, but she was returning to London that night.

Knowing there would not be any decent tea at the complimentary breakfast, and more importantly, not ready to make small talk with America’s best and brightest, she took the elevator downstairs and inquired about cafés nearby. She wanted a strong cup of ordinary builders’ tea, but she had been warned that most American breakfast places would give her an old bag of Lipton’s from the back of a pantry, not-quite-boiling water, and half-and-half instead of milk. Horrid. She had better splurge for something more luxurious. And why not?

“Ah, yes. Try Le Petit Prince,” Muhammad told her.

As Daniel made his way south again back towards Dupont Circle, he pressed play on No More Shall We Part for a second time. As Daniel finally turned the corner on 19th Street and could see the sign for Le Petit Prince, a song called “Sorrowful Wife” began, which gave him pause. He had seen in his mother something of a sorrowful wife, but the idea of love causing real, lasting pain in his own life had not occurred to him. Whether it was arrogance, naïveté, or both, Daniel figured he could not possibly end up with someone who was “counting the days on her fingers,” as Nick Cave’s woman was doing for some reason. For an instant, he wondered whether Susan was prone to sorrow. “Anguish,” he thought to himself. “No way.”

As Daniel at last reached the front door of the café, there were two wooden planters full of lavender, flanking the double doors. The smell was a pleasant contrast to his own light sweat, lingering cigarette odor, and the exhaust of the rush-hour traffic. He walked inside, finding it unusually warm – obviously not air-conditioned, an annoyance to Americans in a city where the summer humidity had not quite subsided.

Surveying the room, Daniel looked straight past the shock of red hair in front of his face, and then he did a double-take. It was Susan, in the light of day, pushing her hair out of her face with her right hand and fanning herself with her left. She turned and instantly blushed. “Blast!” she thought, grimacing, before composing herself with a smile. “Hello again, Mr. Perrin.” Before Daniel could reply, the hostess asked, “Table for two?” Susan looked to Daniel, who instinctively nodded in the affirmative.

Daniel and Susan were seated at a little round table in traditional rattan chairs with green and cream-colored nylon weaving, next to an open window on the far side of the dining room, away from the street. The air was fresh, accompanied by the scent of more herbs planted in boxes on the shady side of the building. Mint, thyme, and oregano. Susan ordered a pot of Assam, and Daniel a café au lait. The hostess left them each with a handsome menu printed in an art deco font, featuring omelettes au lard, parmentier, and chasseur; classic quiche Lorraine, brioches, croissants, pains au chocolat, chuassons aux pommes, and clafoutis with late-season peaches. There were also lunch items, including an unconventional salad of mixed greens and fruit with a creamy chili flake dressing, and a croque monsieur, which Daniel had eaten in abundance on his first trip to France with his father as a fourteen-year-old.

Daniel let the menu distract him from starting the conversation.

“Lovely,” Susan began. “Daniel, you’re on your way to graduate studies in French literature. You must feel right at home here.”

“Well, I like it so far, yes.” Daniel replied, “But I’ve actually only been to France twice. I had intended to move there, but England worked out instead. Have you been there?”

“Oh yes, we have a home there as a matter of fact. My parents, I mean. A little bungalow in Normandy. Nothing impressive really, and too far from the sea to be a proper holiday home. Our Catholic friends come to visit Mont Saint Michel. It’s quite close by.”

Daniel’s eyes opened wide. “You own a house in France? That’s incredible.”

“Oh, not really,” Susan replied, suddenly realizing that talking about second properties was precisely the kind of bourgeois discourse she was hoping to avoid with the Americans, and especially Daniel, now that she guessed he pretended to an anti-establishment attitude. “We’re quite middle class,” she explained, “and some of our British neighbors there are quite working class, really. One man is a retired tattoo artist! Anyway, my French is probably much worse than yours. I did it for A-Levels but actually haven’t spoken it too much. A lot of educated British people know French, of course, but they wouldn’t dare try to use it.”

Daniel looked down nervously at the menu again. Susan moved the conversation away from herself. “Well Daniel, I should think it is quite an honor for you to represent your country like this, isn’t it?”

“My country? Well, I suppose so. My parents are very patriotic. Especially my father. I’ve lived in several different places in the United States, so in some ways I don’t feel like I’m from anywhere specific to be proud of. But that’s normal in America. I’ve begun to wonder whether my language studies and my dreams of living abroad have ruined my appreciation for my own country. You know, during the attacks, I was as horrified as anyone. And quite frankly, I was bloodthirsty after the fact. But I’m not sure I was gaining a lot of affection for my country. I just kept thinking of those people who had to jump off the towers. And I had nightmares about being on one of the planes that was highjacked and flown into a building. The firemen coming out of the rubble. All that stuff.”

“It was horrifying, Daniel. If affected all of us awfully.”

“Of course,” Daniel replied. “The headline in Le Monde was Nous sommes tous Américains. But what’s the nous, the we? I mean, a month before the attacks, I was at a Radiohead concert at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, with the Twin Towers looming behind the stage on the other side of the Hudson. At one point Thom Yorke pointed up at the buildings and sang, ‘Come on if you think you can take us on.’ I cheered along with everyone else. Those buildings obviously represented things he thought were evil. And I guess I agreed with him.”

“Evil?” Susan was surprised at his use of such a serious word, a theological word. “Daniel, I understand your passion, but your country has done so much good for the world. Don’t you know that’s what your scholarship is about? It’s a gesture of gratitude from Britain to America for World War II and the rebuilding of Europe. It’s all about Churchill’s prophecy.” Susan puffed her cheeks out and attempted an old-fashioned posh accent. “In God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

“Yeah, I know. My father certainly taught me to think like that. Both my grandfathers were in the war. But I wonder where it’s all going. You know, a few months ago, in one of my classes we watched a movie called Germany Year 90 Nine Zero. It’s by Jean-Luc Godard. I love his old movies. Breathless is his masterpiece, and it’s very pro-American to me really. Not so much his films after that one. I mean, they’re good too. But anyway, this one is really confusing and not that great, but I was bowled over by one line near the beginning, where a guy in a Mercedes is talking on a car phone and he says, ‘Now the Cold War is over, being American is pointless.’ Then he runs over a sign that says Karl Marx Straße, or it says something about Karl Marx anyway. I forget.”

“Daniel, don’t you think you’re overthinking this a bit? Of course there’s a point to being American. Europeans don’t like to admit it, but they are generally rather envious of Americans, really. You’ve said it yourself. The man in that film criticizing America is enjoying technology and luxury that makes him seem very American to my ears.”

“Yes, you’re probably right,” Daniel said quietly. He realized, once again, he was in the presence of a beautiful woman and was in danger of turning her off with a rant like Alvy Singer to Allison Portchnik in Annie Hall. “Hang on,” he thought. “She works for the British government. This is ok.”

“One of the poets I’ve studied,” Daniel continued, “Joachim Du Bellay. He was the founder of a group called the Pléïade. You know, like the stars, the Pleiades. They lived in the sixteenth century.”

“I think we read something by Ronsard at school,” Susan said. “He was one of them, wasn’t he?”

“Right. He was the biggest name. Ronsard was the greatest French poet before Victor Hugo. But it was Du Bellay who was sort of the leader and wrote the manifesto for the movement. It’s about language and poetry and antiquity. It’s about being Christian, and having a Christian society. Being men, being French, being European. But it’s really about what it means to be human. The Reformation had really thrown everything into chaos, and suddenly people in northern Europe were aware of the fact that their heritage was more a dead relic than a living organism. Du Bellay went to Rome and was shocked to walk among the ruins. It seems weird to us now, you know, but it took centuries for people to realize that the Roman Empire was really gone. And that’s why I think it’s important that these poets wrote about mythology and nature and food and religion, but they were most famous for their love poetry. They were trying to figure out what to love and how to love. We’re so much more confused now than they ever were. And we don’t have much love poetry.”

Daniel realized he was wound up now. Screw it. Keep going.

“We were talking about patriotism before. Love of country. I used to have a poster on my dorm room wall of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and I thought maybe I was supposed to love my country in a different way from my father and my family. Like, the idea of America was lovable, but not the reality. Never the reality. The reality was all evil, from the Indian wars to slavery to the oppression of women. But then I got to thinking, how can I love an idea? The politicians say the terrorists hated our freedom, but they didn’t attack our freedom, did they? They attacked people, buildings, real things. Now I’m just so confused, because I think my biggest problem is there’s only reality or nothing, and I feel like I’m unconsciously choosing nothing. Really, I just don’t know what to love.”

Silence hung in the air between them, and Daniel wished he had his drink already or a cigarette to puff on to ease the awkwardness. Instead, he asked Susan, “What do you love?”

At this moment the waitress returned with the Assam and café au lait, and she asked the pair what they would like for breakfast. Susan never ate much early in the morning, but she figured it was expected of her now to order something. This had clearly become an impromptu breakfast date. She chose the pain au chocolat. Daniel was famished from his walking, but he always had trouble eating and talking seriously at the same time. He had to focus on one or the other. He played it safe with just a croissant.

Susan contemplated her reply to Daniel’s question.

Susan’s college was women-only, but she certainly knew young men at the university who were prone to romantic ramblings like Daniel’s. She liked it. And in fact, she was regularly disappointed with the sensitive chaps who did this sort of thing, because they normally turned out to be gay, or else they fancied extremely uninteresting and unattractive girls who were content to sit and listen a lot and drink red wine and eat a box of After Eights on the sofa and have sex. For no particular religious or moral reason that she could articulate, Susan strongly disapproved of promiscuity, so much so that the suspicions of her coworkers were correct. She was a virgin, by no real fault of her own.

Susan’s father came from a family of recusant Catholics who boasted various martyrs in their bloodline, and they had preserved and handed down tales of secret hiding places for Jesuits and illegal Masses in country estates. He half-joked that what his ancestors had kept alive for twenty generations, he had all but killed off in one. Her mother was unbaptized but loosely identified as Church of England, and as a concession to the slim possibility of the truth of the Christian claims, the Anguish’s had their only offspring Christened in the Catholic Church. They neither prepared her nor presented her for any other sacraments, but they sent her to a prestigious Catholic school, for academic reasons. If their daughter happened to absorb some old-fashioned religion along the way towards a place at Oxford, so be it. As far as Susan knew, nothing holy had stuck to her.

“What do I love?” she asked back. “I’ve never worried about answering questions like that one, Daniel. I am alive. I believe I have a purpose in this world. I love my family. I suppose I must say it. I do love my country, although love of country in Britain is not like the flag-waving you have here. My country is who I am. British in every direction as far back as anyone can say. But it’s not something we’re proud of exactly. Or it wouldn’t be welcome if we were, except on certain rare occasions. Actually, I sometimes think my parents wish the queen had died when I was a child so they could have made a patriotic memory. You know, standing on Pall Mall with a packed lunch and a good excuse to enjoy our heritage for a brief while. That’s morbid, I know. Her Majesty seems nowhere near death, thank God.”

“Ah, there! God,” Daniel interjected. “What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t know,” Susan answered. “I believe in God, I think. Maybe that’s your answer. God is love, right?”

“That’s where I’m mixed up,” Daniel confessed. “I can’t avoid thinking about what you’ve said, only backwards. Like, these days, love is God, not God is love.”

He paused for about five beats, debating whether to ask what he really wanted to know. Then he went for it. “Have you ever been in love, Susan?”

Susan reddened. “Another big question,” she replied, “and a rather personal one this time, Daniel.” She hoped he would take back the conversation, but he cocked his head to the side and waited patiently for her reply. She continued, “Well, I had….”

This time she paused, considering for a moment whether to proceed with her Harrier pilot story. It was not quite a total fabrication. She had known a handsome man in the Royal Air Force. Maybe she loved him. Did he ever think of her? In any case, it came to nothing.

Her mind wandered further. There had been no boys at the Thornton School, which she attended from her first year through Sixth Form. At Oxford, she had had dates here and there with young men, who ranged from well-meaning and hopeless to total predators. At work there had been Michael, ten years her senior, a handsome, kind, and slightly aloof man she had worked with briefly in the same department. She thought there was something was building there. But then, he suddenly moved back to his native Hampshire, got married to the daughter of a family friend, and was standing for parliament in a safe Tory seat.

Susan had a group of girlfriends in London, mostly leftovers from St. Hilda’s. She would see different combinations of them once or twice a month for lunch. They often encouraged her to come out with them in the evenings and meet men. Not just to “pull,” mind you, but to put herself in more situations that could lead to something lasting. Commuting to and from Buckinghamshire, however, did not lend itself well to night life in the capital. She supposed if she was in London, she could at least be in group settings from time to time with decent people. But why settle for a sad flat in Acton or Peckham or even Bayswater, when she could live in a proper home in a lush setting?

Suddenly a flash of anger overwhelmed her. Why did she have to justify herself? Why should it be odd that she was content with her life as long as she wasn’t made to feel something was missing? Of course she wanted more, eventually. Having grown up an only child, the result of a careful plan, she daydreamed occasionally of being the matriarch of a large, messy collection of little humans. She had told no one, but her work for the government was now of no long-term interest to her. The problem was, most real men she encountered seemed…well…just not good enough.

“You had…?” Daniel prodded her.

“No, what I was going to say is, I love a lot of things, Daniel. I love music, for example. I’ve played the flute since I was a little girl. I was in the Wind Orchestra at Oxford. Actually, we have a little orchestra at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office too.

“You have a band at work?” Daniel asked, surprised. “Like Brassed Off but for bureaucrats?”

“Well, I don’t know about that, but it’s not uncommon in Britain to have musical ensembles or choirs or clubs or hobby groups and things like that with colleagues.”

“See, I love that! That is love to me. Your society is set up to encourage your passions and interests. It’s humane.”

“Perhaps,” Susan replied. “But I have dodged your question, haven’t I? Have I ever been in love?”

Now she sat pensively as her heart beat hard out of her chest.

“No, Daniel. No. I have not been in love.” She blushed brighter than ever, feeling exposed but also relieved. No young Englishman – not even one of those wispy-faced Romantics from her philosophy tutorials – would dare ask a woman seven years older than him whether she had ever been in love.

The waitress returned with the croissant and pain au chocolat, and Susan realized she had let the Assam steep the entire time they had been talking. She poured a little milk into her teacup, followed by the piping hot tea. Daniel gulped down his coffee quickly and asked the passing waitress for a second cup.

For his part, Daniel had mistaken being in love several times, and he had broken at least three hearts that he knew of between his two high school girlfriends, and one more at college named Mara. She was a particularly hard situation. Daniel knew he was not in love with her, and he would have to end it. Finding out about England was as good an excuse as any. But he remained in the same friend group after the fact, and with his flesh being weak, he pushed his way back into a relationship with her, even using the L-word disingenuously: Love. When it was about to be over for a second time, Daniel wished he had some real way to unburden his conscience of shame; but instead, he wallowed in his poor judgment before breaking it off with Mara in a more selfish display than the first time. He cried. How dare he?

But like Susan, Daniel had not yet been completely intimate with anyone, although he had certainly “done stuff,” as Americans of his generation said. In the case of Daniel’s first two girlfriends, he toed the line of his Christian upbringing, in a tradition that was passing through a brief moment where theological liberalism and personal restraint intersected. It was just before the moral economy of Daniel’s little society came off the gold standard of “no sex until marriage.” Likewise, drug use was universally frowned upon. “Just say no,” was accompanied by the wink of the president saying, “I didn’t inhale.” People had sex and did drugs in many of the movies and tv shows Daniel loved, but throughout his teen years, he maintained a strict sensus fidelium that no one particularly expected of him, nor he of others.

With Mara, however, Daniel was ready to cross the line on physical intimacy. “This is absurd,” he thought. “Doing stuff is no different than going all the way.” But Mara held her own line. She was a secular Jew, and she felt no compunction about sexual morality apart from a personal conviction of “only when it’s someone I really love.” She and Daniel had a common interest in cinema, and they often lay cuddled up on the couch in the lounge of her dorm suite watching movies, in which famous actors and actresses were going “all the way.” In fact, Mara did really love Daniel, but she knew he didn’t reciprocate. Her real conviction on sex, therefore, was “only someone who loves me as much as I love him.”

“Good for her,” Daniel thought now, partly absolving himself for messing her about.

Susan resumed talking. “Have you ever seen the interview just before Charles and Diana were married, where the presenter asked if they were in love?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Daniel replied.

“Well, Charles famously answered something like, ‘whatever in love means,’ and Diana was visibly embarrassed and everyone thought it was odd of him. But everyone thought him a bit odd anyway, and what should a future king say to such an impertinent question, people said. But of course, we now realize he knew exactly what ‘in love’ meant, because he was in love with Camilla and not Diana. He married the poor thing anyway, and he resented her and ignored her, and now she’s dead.”

“Yes, I remember when she died,” Daniel interjected. “They interrupted Saturday Night Live to announce it. My mother was devastated. She loved Diana. Loves all the royal stuff.”

“Really? That’s interesting,” Susan replied. “What do you make of the ‘royal stuff’?”

“Oh, I think it’s great too.” He prepared to let loose a quote he had memorized – something he frequently did that some people found charming and others show-off-y and strange. Sitting with a British woman, he hoped it would be the former. “Where men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

“That’s clever,” Daniel. “What is that?”

“It’s C.S. Lewis. I read him a lot my freshman year. Actually, it’s why I chose Magdalen College. He was there for years and years.”

“Yes, of course. Well, Lewis was right, I reckon. But Charles may be hard to honor. It may be love that does him in, like Edward VIII. You know, surely there must be some via media with all this sort of thing. Take my parents, for example. I think they would find a question like “are you in love?” rather embarrassing to answer, but they would finally say yes. I have never seen much public display of affection between them, but they are the whole of each other’s lives. They hardly even do the shopping alone. They have worked together for years at their small business, a saddlery and horseback supplies company. They take day excursions and birdwatch and drink milky cups of tea in the evening whilst watching gardening or cooking programmes or Morse or Miss Marple. It’s beautiful.”

Daniel asked, “Is that what you want too, Susan?”

Caught flat-footed again by Daniel’s directness, Susan stuttered. “W…Well, yes. I think so.”

“Don’t you want a bit more passion?”

Daniel surprised himself by his forwardness. Perhaps it was the coffee or the adrenaline or the novelty of the circumstances, but he felt the tingle.

Susan felt it too. She confessed, “I don’t want to be Princess Diana or my parents. Certainly I want passion. Yes.”

At that moment the waitress set down Daniel’s second café au lait, and Susan, who realized she had worked up a noticeable sweat, looked up at the clock on the wall on the far side of the room, above the entryway. “Blimey! I have to get back,” she exclaimed as she slid the chair back from the table, opening her handbag to find a twenty-dollar bill, which she threw down on the table.”

“No, let me,” said Daniel.

“Of course not. I’m here to support you. I must dash.”

Daniel took a quick sip of his second cup of coffee, jumped up, grabbed his satchel, and followed Susan out the door. The two walked in step back to the Palomar, where they entered the lobby side by side, right into the staring eyes of thirty-nine American students pinned with the Union Jack and Stars and Stripes, ready to depart.

The alarm suddenly cut off, and Daniel and Susan remained sprawled out in an embarrassed daze.

As the crowd began to file back into the building, Susan rolled back onto her bottom, and Daniel sat up, hopped into a squat, and looked at Susan, who was still as red as the flashing light of the alarm system. As she began to get to her feet, Daniel stared at a pair of speakers overhead that were issuing soft music onto the porch, where guests normally waited for taxis. “Careless Whisper,” he muttered.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Careless Whisper is playing. A top-ten pop song of all-time. Underrated.”

“Oh, yes. I hear it. George Michael. Or is it Wham?”

“Both,” Daniel declared. Coming to his senses, he extended his hand in an awkward combination of a shake and a help-up. “I’m Daniel Perrin. Are you all right?”

“Yes, thank you. And I know who you are. I’m Susan Anguish. I represent Her Majesty’s government. I’m helping you lot get to your universities. I’m new at this. Well, not new to the civil service. Or new to working with foreign students. But new to this.”

“New to crashing into people in your bathrobe?” Daniel joked, instantly regretting it. Sarcasm always made him sound mean, never funny. Susan reddened more, and Daniel’s rosy cheeks returned too. He changed gears. “Anguish, huh?”

“It is probably an Anglicisation of Angus,” she replied breathlessly. “Unusual, but found in parts of Norfolk, where my father’s people come from. Walsingham, you know.” She finished her sentence with a posher flourish than came naturally to her, as she closed her robe and inhaled deeply through her nose.

Neither Daniel nor Susan could think of what came next. Susan defaulted to efficiency. “So much commotion, and I am terribly jet-lagged. I shall see you in the lobby to go to the Embassy tomorrow morning, Daniel.” She spoke as if she was not in her nightclothes on a busy city sidewalk, and was instead saying farewell to a client at the end of one of her usual meetings with university officials on matters like technology grants for Ghanaians or Saudis. “Very nice indeed to have met you, Mr. Perrin. Good night.” She turned, walked straight into a nearly full elevator and kept her head down as she turned back toward the hotel exit, where Daniel stood with his mouth agape. She looked up and caught his eye once more as the doors closed.

“Good night,” Daniel whispered.

As he passed from the swampy early autumn D.C. sidewalk back into the cold air conditioning of the hotel lobby, Daniel noticed the party had not reconvened at the high-top tables in the bar. The place was nearly empty, apart from guests still making their way back upstairs. He retrieved his bags and walked to the desk to get his room key. “Welcome Mr. Perrin. Lieutenant Mawhinney has already settled in the room, but I believe he has gone out.”

“Who?” asked Daniel.

“Your roommate. It says here ‘Second Lieutenant Thomas Mawhinney, United States Marine Corps.’ You will be sharing a suite together during your stay at the Palomar.”

Daniel went up to his room on the fifth floor, a relatively high perch for D.C., and he noticed the twin towers of the façade of the National Cathedral, with the even taller Gloria in Excelsis Tower fixed centrally behind them, staring back at the hotel from a couple of miles northwest. “I wonder why those 9/11 terrorists wouldn’t rather aim the planes at buildings like those?” he thought. “Wouldn’t a big church make their point better than a big bank?”

As Daniel was told to expect, there was evidence of another inhabitant of the room. He saw a standard suitcase open on a luggage rack, with uniform regalia and civilian dress clothes folded neatly inside. In the corner of the room nearest the door, standing level with the shoulder-height thermostat on the wall, was an enormous military duffel marked USNA.

“The Naval Academy. Right,” thought Daniel.

Feeling suddenly anxious, Daniel sat down on the bed and decided to make a phone call home. Why not? It was on the British government’s bill. For some reason, however, Daniel always felt guilty splurging beyond the basic offerings of another’s generosity. But Her Majesty was already paying for his graduate degree, he thought. And she was making him share a room.

But which home would he call? His mother would be out teaching her college class.

Dad then.

His father picked up before the first ring had finished.

“Hello?” he said in his deep but pleasant voice. Daniel knew smoke was pouring into the little holes in the receiver. What would Dad be drinking? G&T season was over. Was it back to Bourbon?

“Daniel! Have you lost it yet, son?”

“What? Lost it? What could I have lost, Dad?”

“Your mind! Washington is full of pod people.” He laughed deeply, giving way to a thirty-second coughing fit. “Oh, sorry about that. Drink went down the wrong pipe. Anyway, mindless zombies. A few days up there – hell, a few hours there – you’ll forget how to think. All ambition, no substance.”

Daniel changed the subject. “Hey, my roommate is from the Naval Academy.”

“A sailor, huh? They give those fancy scholarships to the academy guys all the time. Excuse me, guys and gals, not that anyone cares about the fact that drastically lower muscle mass and lung capacity make women a liability on the battlefield in many cases. They get raped onboard ship all the time – not that I’m excusing rape, but come on. The guys get so horny when they’re out there they go after each other. That’s bad enough. ‘In the Na-vy,’” Roger sang. “You know that Village People song?”

“Yeah,” Daniel replied in frustration. “Anyway Dad, he’s a Marine. Why am I telling you this?”

“A Marine! Damn. Don’t challenge him to a push-up contest, son,” he laughhed. “Hey, but seriously, this military guy can get you good deals on stuff at the American bases over there. Our big installation at Lakenheath is twenty-eight miles from Cambridge, son. I looked it up. You can get American steaks, beer, whatever you want. Cigarettes. You won’t need those, will you? What about electronics? No sales tax if this guy gets you in with his I.D.”

“Dad, I’m going to Oxford, not Cambridge. Why do you have trouble remembering this? You never forget anything. Besides, they have steaks and beer and everything in normal stores over there. And how am I going to cook steaks anyway? I don’t know why I told you about the Naval Academy guy. I haven’t even met him yet. He’s not here right now.”

“Well, I’m no Marine but tell him Semper Fi and thank you for serving our country in its hour of need. Not that going to graduate school in England is doing us any good back home.” Roger erupted in laughter again, followed by another, shorter short coughing spell.

“Well, I gotta go, Dad. I’ll call you somehow when I get to England.”

“Alright. The Rays and Red Sox are back from commercial now anyway. I love you, son.” The dial tone sounded immediately.

Daniel lay down on the bed in his clothes and replayed in his mind the collision with Susan from a few minutes earlier. Unable to sit with his thoughts for long, he grabbed the tv remote and flipped through the cable channels until he found Bravo. James Lipton was doing the Proust questionnaire with Ben Stiller on one of Daniel’s favorite programs, Inside the Actor’s Studio. “What is your favorite word?” Lipton asked, followed by “What is your least favorite word?” Daniel was sound asleep before he could get to the famous finale question: “If heaven exists, what you would like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?”

Two hours later, Daniel awoke with a start. The shower was running in the bathroom. Inside the Actors Studio was long over and something else was blaring on the television. It was a movie called The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. The shower turned off, and fifteen seconds later a large man with a crew cut and a hairy barrel chest burst out of the bathroom door, wrapped at the waist in a white towel. He said in a loud voice, “Whoa. Is that General Zod dressed like a woman? Dang.”

“Oh,” Daniel replied groggily. “Yeah, Terence Stamp. He played General Zod in Superman II. This is a weird movie. I…I fell asleep.”

“No worries, buddy. Tom Mawhinney. Baker City, Oregon.” Tom casually dropped his towel and took a pair of white jockey underpants from his suitcase. He put them on in no particular hurry, and with no concern for being seen. “I’ve just been out with some of my academy buddies. I don’t drink, but they took me to a smoky bar. I hate that stink. Hey, a couple of the girls downstairs said you made a scene in the lobby or something.”

“A scene? What girls? No, we all had to leave the building and a woman crashed into me. Actually, it was the English lady in charge of our scholarship. Who told you I made a scene?”

“Ah, doesn’t matter. Just fight through it. Fight through it, buddy. You crashed into Susan, huh? She’s a rose. Great lady. She means business, but she’s a sweetheart.”

“You know her?”

“Talked to her when I first arrived. Seems super nervous. She’ll fight through it. Hey buddy, I need to do my nightly devotions real quick. Bible time. Mind if I turn off the tv or should I just fight through it?”

“No, no. Go ahead.”

“You wanna join me?” Tom asked.

“Well, I don’t know,” Daniel replied pensively. “I don’t believe in an interventionist God. I don’t believe in the existence of angels. That sort of thing. But I consider myself a Christian.”

Tom looked at him skeptically, as if ignoring the significance of any words besides “yes” or “no.” Daniel paused and silence hung in the air between them for a few seconds until he finally got to the point. “No thanks, I won’t join you. I need to go downstairs for a minute.”

“Roger that. You’re a smoker, I can smell it. Suit yourself, buddy.”

Daniel avoided the elevator, thinking it was less likely he would run into anyone who had seen his earlier mishap with Susan if he took the long way down. The stairwell came out on the far side of the lobby, almost completely out of sight of the bar, which now appeared to be closed anyway. He walked around the corner to 21st Street, where he could see bright lights and hear the noise of traffic on Massachusetts Avenue up ahead. He smoked two Kamel Reds and retreated back up to his hotel room, where he found the lights out and Tom sound asleep already. Daniel showered and returned to his bed, wishing he could turn the television back on to lull himself to sleep, but he feared the judgment of his disciplined roommate. “Fight through it,” Daniel decided. As his head lay on the pillow, he thought about taking a walk in the morning to explore. He thought about what Oxford would be like. And he thought about Susan Anguish.

At the same time, Susan was tossing and turning in her room down the hall. She had not grown up on television as Daniel had, and it did not occur to her to channel-surf as a way to numb the combination of jet lag and nerves she was experiencing on her first trip to the United States. In fact, she did not even consider the fact there was a television in the room until she completely gave up on sleep at around midnight. She pressed the power button on the remote control on the bedside table. “Ah, that’s queer,” she thought, “it’s the chap from Far from the Maddening Crowd. Dressed like a woman.” She drifted off less than an hour later, and she woke up to the sound of a man on her screen selling an “O-Matic” device. She remembered the incident with Daniel and smiled to herself, then cringed. She got up, drew the curtains, and spotted the sun peeking above the horizon.

“America,” she sighed.

Chapter 1

As the tower of Magdalen College, Oxford came into Daniel Perrin’s sight for the first time, he was daydreaming of Susan, whose name would have been a little old-fashioned for a woman of her generation, except she had a slight schoolmarm quality that had not yet found its purpose in childrearing. Susan’s parents had had respectable professional hopes for their only offspring, whom they raised in a small, prosperous Buckinghamshire village ten miles north of High Wycombe.

Susan did A-Level English, French, Mathematics, and music – the last against her headmistress’ expressed wishes. After three years and a First-Class Honours degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, one stop past Magdalen over the bridge, Susan went home again, passed the civil service exam and began driving the M1 to the A4 to Constitution Hill every morning, passing through the security checkpoint at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office well before sunrise in the grey and golden months alike. As age twenty-two quickly became twenty-nine, her colleagues pitied her on the rare occasions when her simmering insecurity bubbled up and she fibbed about an ex-boyfriend in the RAF. “A Harrier pilot, you know.” She pretended to be officious, but no one feared her. In fact, everyone liked her. She was indispensable.

Daniel was a romantic American who had imagined since adolescence standing on cobblestones in the Old World. He had wrongly assumed he would have to settle for the old-enough bricks of a city like Pittsburgh, which contrasted with the hermetically-sealed, air-conditioned silos of the southwest Florida suburbs where he had grown up.

Daniel’s father Roger was a formidable failure whose fondness for cigarettes had transformed into a full-blown love affair after his second divorce and early retirement from the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. His smoking needs had caused him to self-select out of any professional opportunities requiring more than a few minutes’ time indoors, in the iron grip of newfangled anti-tobacco laws. “They actually think they can purify the whole world,” he told Daniel often, as the words rolled out of his mouth on billows of smoke, which he didn’t bother to exhale with any force.

Working retail was Roger’s best option, and he got a job selling suits at J.C. Penney, where he took longer and more frequent breaks than his co-workers, who did not complain. He carried a pistol in an ankle holster in violation of the store’s employee handbook, which he was prepared to argue was in conflict with state law. The world being as it was, the store manager knew about Roger’s firearm and never addressed the matter, feeling a little safer with an old lawman roaming his sales floor. Roger regaled the stock boys with violent stories from the beat, and he had various explanations for the slight limp that took him off the police force and made him into a mall salesman. “I do what I want, boys. And it’s never the wrong thing. Never.”

Roger spoke fluent French from adolescent years in Paris as a military brat, or, technically, a NATO brat. He implicitly projected to Daniel, his firstborn, a cosmopolitanism he assumed his progeny could never hope to attain. Despite Roger’s blue collar first career as a cop and subsistence-level second life in retail, he was proud to explain how he had turned his back on an elite intellectual life, crashing out of a Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland in 1977. “The political science department was full of Soviet sympathizers, son. Academia is no place for a man like me.”

As a firstborn, Daniel took his father’s manly genius as challenge. Roger never dissuaded his son from the intellectual life. On the contrary. “The commies have temporarily receded into the woodwork, Daniel” – it was always Daniel, never Danny or Dan – “get in there and shake things up.” Daniel majored in French and spent lonely evenings in his dorm room dropping into AOL chatrooms full of aspiring European backpackers, whom he half-heartedly asked to let him tag along to Prague or Warsaw. He would often ask if people had read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, and he began to imagine meeting his soul mate on a train somewhere like Ethan Hawke did in Before Sunrise. But unlike Ethan Hawke, Daniel wouldn’t let his dream girl loose with some cockamamie plan to meet up again in a year. Then again, maybe meeting a girl could wait, and he would find out if there was a place for him with a super-secret intelligence service within the CIA like in Mission: Impossible.

More seriously, Daniel treated life as a college student like a job, and his discipline was almost monkish. There was no shaking things up. He carried eighteen credits per term, and he rewarded himself for each day’s reading with VHS tapes of Woody Allen movies and solitary walks with cigarettes, which he felt the need to conceal from his father. Daniel knew Roger would not disapprove of the smoking. Rather, he was likely to judge his proficiency at it. Unlike his old man, Daniel loved to exhale with a great thrust, pushing the smoke out as a jet stream. Daniel stood just shy of six feet tall, which was a good three inches shorter than Roger, who was privately happy that his son had not exceeded him in stature. For his part, Daniel took it as a consolation that his nose was smaller than his father’s, and his eyes blue instead of green.

Just before his college graduation, Daniel had shaved off his hopeless, sandy-colored goatee which matched his hair, parted neatly to the side since he was a little boy. He thought he might finally make a change to his style when he saw how the men looked in England. For all that Daniel disdained attention-seeking in others, he was, like Roger, prone to vanity.

Daniel’s grades in college were nearly perfect, although he impressed no one in particular. He was surprised, therefore, to be called into the dean’s office and told to apply for two prestigious scholarships. Both awards paid for a graduate degree in the U.K. – one at Oxford, and the other one at Oxford or at any other British university. As it seemed like a pipe dream anyway, and France was where he was surely headed – destined, even – he thought he would make an experiment of refusing to apply for the Oxford-only one and agreeing to apply for the anywhere-one, but he would use it to choose Oxford. He pretended he liked the man whose name bore the second scholarship, Marshall, whereas the first one, Rhodes, was evil.

When he was called for an interview at the British Embassy in Washington, he told one of the inquisitors, a thirty-something Indian-American scientist who was an alumna of the scholarship program, how he had just driven historic Route 40 through the Pennsylvania town where the scholarship’s namesake was born, and he admired the man deeply for what he did for Europe after World War II. The interviewer’s polite smile was betrayed by eyes that said, “this guy is a little odd. Not a lot odd.”

Daniel thought, “That was dumb of me,” but the British ambassador was delighted. He examined Daniel’s transcript and when he noticed it contained various courses related to the Middle Ages, he asked him about Vlad the Impaler. Daniel panicked out of ignorance and changed the subject, volunteering the opening lines of Beowulf, then Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, both of which happened to be fresh in his mind but would soon leave his brain and never return.

The fortieth of the forty scholarship awards, along with its accompanying automatic university entry, was offered to a young woman from California who decided to forgo Blighty and head straight to a prestigious American medical school. As the first alternate, Daniel was chosen instead. Susan, whose office was tasked with formally extending Her Majesty’s congratulations, left a scripted message on the answering machine Daniel shared with his roommate Erik, who was on his way off campus for good after spending his entire junior year trading music files with strangers on Napster. “Dude, some lady called. You got the England thing.”

Just like that it would be England for Daniel. Roger would retain control of France.

Before England came Washington, which Daniel reached belatedly because the airports had all been shut down three weeks prior. Consequently, Daniel had to fly from Tampa to Baltimore and then take a long taxi ride to meet the rest of his scholarship class for orientation. Each scholar was sent a pin with half Stars-and-Stripes and half Union Jack, and each was asked to wear it in his lapel or on her blouse or in some other prominent place on the business casual attire required as a “representative of your country, and a welcome guest in ours,” as the letter explained. Daniel reluctantly complied. His cab driver, Yusuf, said it was ok to smoke, so Daniel worked his way through half a pack of Kamel Reds all the way to Dupont Circle, where about a dozen students were having drinks in the bar of the Palomar Hotel and practicing to become masters of the shrinking universe which their grades and extracurriculars had almost qualified them to rule. Daniel decided he hated them all.

Susan didn’t hate them all, but she resented the young women, elites seven years her junior, whom she perceived as marginally smarter and demonstrably prettier, or at least more put together than she was. Like them, she had never learned to cook. Unlike them, she had a small gap in her front teeth that was not unusual even among attractive people in Britain, but which would never have gone uncorrected in middle-class America. Susan was ginger, with a slim but not toned body. She applied makeup carefully but unadventurously, and she was imprecise and infrequent at shaving her legs.

In an attempt to spruce herself up for her American debut, she had bought a new bra from a chain lingerie shop in the international terminal at Dulles Airport. She would soon experience its suffocating fit underneath the little black dress from Marks and Spencer that she always wore to semi-fancy dos.

When Daniel entered the lobby of the Palomar, he was immediately met by a tall, smiling young man with thick, short dark hair, wearing penny loafers, khakis, and a blue and white Bengal stripe button-down. “Perino!” he exclaimed! “Daniel Perino, I’m Jonah Green. Join us for a drink! We heard you guys coming from the south would have more trouble getting here. I wonder if they’ll ever reopen Reagan. Or at least rename it,” he laughed.

“It’s Perrin,” Daniel corrected him, noticing a subtle scar on his neck from a tracheotomy at some point in the past. Jonah was a Princeton man from a New York Jewish family that had settled in West Palm Beach before he was born. He did not raise the issue with Daniel of their common shallow roots in the Florida sand. Jonah had been interning on Capitol Hill that summer, and he made no secret of his intentions to find a way back there as quickly as he could with more credentials. To wit, he had strategically decided to do a master’s degree in the new Women’s Studies department at University College, London.

Daniel propped up his suitcase and satchel against the wall next to the men’s room door before making his way to one of the two high, round tables, which had been pushed together to accommodate a group of five, now six. As Daniel maneuvered himself into the tall seat, a young man with thinning red hair and a babyface was holding court about cinema in between cigarillo puffs. His name was Sullivan Gallier of the great Louisiana Gallier family; but Sully had barely known his father, who disappeared into alcoholism and died under mysterious circumstances in Las Vegas. His mother heard little from her son’s wealthy relations, and she taught middle-school English for twenty years at the Academy of the Holy Name in uptown New Orleans. Sully was a lonely prodigy, graduating from high school at fifteen and Loyola University at eighteen. He was now on his way to Edinburgh, which he repeatedly promoted to his countrymen as one of the world’s most poetic cities.

“I don’t buy it! The late 90’s were no golden age of cinema,” Sully declared. “Or if they were, a golden age is something we ought to be running away from, not praising. American Psycho, Fight Club, The Big Lebowski, they’re all so goddamn right wing. The Matrix is too of course, although I suspect we may realize it has a very different meaning someday. I can’t put my figure on it. But Beau Travail – now that’s a movie. It’s time we turn the gaze on men, I say. It’s a scandal that twenty-two out of forty of us here on this scholarship scheme are men. A scandal!”

“The movies are all so irrelevant, really,” replied Jonah. “Except for these clever documentaries,” he added. “What a genius that Michael Moore is. Genius! He makes us laugh for two hours and sends us back to the parking lot ready to repeal the Second Amendment. Now there’s an example of art accomplishing something useful. Like Upton Sinclair!”

As a lull formed between the pronouncements of Sully and Jonah, Daniel began to wind up a half-hearted defense of the movies Sully had criticized. All he could muster was a mumbling, “Well, I don’t know…I think,” when the din of a fire alarm suddenly drowned him out. America was on edge, and cities like Washington particularly so. None of the well-formed young people like Daniel would yet concede the possibility of a widespread terrorist threat from any particular group of people. But even being on the right side of the matters of the day, awful things could happen to anybody.

As the siren continued to blare, the hotel restaurant emptied and guests began pouring down the stairs from their suites to the lobby and out through the front doors. A stampede had begun.

Jonah, Sully, and the rest of the party at the high-top tables jumped up and darted fifteen feet to the exit. Daniel stood up more slowly in defiance of his panicky peers, and he began to walk leisurely to the door. Suddenly remembering his bags by the men’s room, he turned around quickly, walking straight into an oncoming redhead in a bathrobe, who knocked him through the door and off his feet.

Daniel lay prostrate on the sidewalk. Susan was on top of him.