Fun With Problems by Robert Stone Page A

was not altogether true. Eric could be quite discreet, however. "Did the Sec really throw Taylor off the boat?"
    Officer Ussolini looked troubled.
    "Wait a second, Del," he said.
    "Word's gettin' out, Charlie," Captain Negus told the policeman. "Annie's gonna write about it. You're gonna write it up for the record. They know they can't kill it."
    "Yeah," Ussolini said. "But Eric's—pardon me, Eric—he's a little strange."
    "No, no," Eric said. "I only appear strange. You can check my clips. My background."
    The two of them watched him. "I could call you," Eric suggested, "'officials familiar with the circumstances.' I wouldn't have to say 'local officials' if you didn't want me to. If the Coast Guard investigated, I could say 'Homeland Security officials.'"
    "They couldn't kill it after that, could they, Charlie?"
    "Trust me," Eric said. He gave the captain his card. "I'll be in touch."
    Being led tenderly up the gangway, the Secretary was sure he spotted wise guys in the crowd. Some were taking photographs with their cell phones. Agents advanced on them threateningly. A reporter on the dock was wrestling an agent for his laptop.

    "How do you like it now, gentlemen?" the Secretary called merrily to the people on the dock. That, he happened to know, was what Hemingway used to say to wise guys.

    In a day or so, Eric sneaked back onto the island to interview his eyewitnesses. Taylor refused to speak to him. Annie also refused. But in the end it was Annie, working day and night at the island paper, who got her version of the events in print before anyone else. Annie's version was extremely partisan but convincing enough for the paper's owner to triple the print run and sell copies on the mainland. Blogs picked it up before the mainstream press did, together with YouTube videos of the Secretary's tantrum. The package was a great success.
    A magistrate dismissed the charges against Taylor on the grounds that he had only passed a remark. The Sorenson-Shumways were not litigious and sought no settlement, although they were irritated to discover that in common law the king could do no wrong.
    The public relations people at Defense were unable to keep the story under control. The plenitude of YouTube scenes provided evidence more vivid than any description of Annie's or Eric's ever could. In them, the Secretary railed against the CIA and its collaborators, who were mainly Filipino Mormons from Panay, paid handsomely to spy on him.
    His mission completed, Eric left the island forever and never saw Annie or Taylor again. Six months later in India he was reunited with Lou, who explained ectomorphism and its relationship to alcoholism and mayhem. Eric and Lou went to Bali together, and then Eric went back to Possibilities.

    The Secretary resigned his cabinet post and returned to private life, working on his poetry and translations. Presently he was reported ill, resting at a naval facility near Baltimore. The facility was a twenty-story wedge of brick, almost winged in shape, red brick wings folded each over the other. It seemed capable of some kind of ungainly sudden flight that would appall and unsettle witnesses. Its wings hovered over a courtyard a hundred feet below. The Secretary's accommodations had an exhilarating view of the sky too.
    The Secretary's special labor in the months following his embarrassing exposure to the press had been translation. He had been working on little reading costumes calculated to charm an audience, making crowns, transliterating the Greek alphabet. He had fashioned a pillowcase with an eye torn in it for his poem about Cyclops, Poseidon's son:
Blinkered child of sea and sky

Made weak by the sly man'S trickery,

Conniving Odysseus laughs and chooses,

Leaves to you the cursed, the defense of island realm, resounding cavern.

Defending your island, your realms your caverns resounding.
    Then one day he took it to their faces, a banner short and sweet, and on it read: APOTETELEMENON ! A strange