to feel that their lives were small. Freighters passed on the far horizon and he liked to imagine their routes. He liked the endlessness of the Pacific from this vantage point, nothing but ships and water between Leon and Japan. Could they somehow get there? Of course not, but he liked the thought. He’d been there a few times on business, in his previous life.
“What are you thinking of?” Marie asked once, on a clear evening on the beach. They’d been in Oceano for two months by then.
“Japan.”
“I should’ve gone there with you,” she said. “Just once.”
“They were boring trips, objectively. Just meetings. I never saw much of the place.” He’d seen a little. He’d loved it there. He’d once taken two extra days to visit Kyoto while the cherry trees were blooming.
“Still, just to go there and see it.” An unspoken understanding: neither of them would leave this continent again.
A containership was passing in the far distance, a dark rectangle in the dusk.
“It’s not quite what I imagined for our retirement,” Leon said, “but it could be worse, couldn’t it?”
“Much worse. It was much worse, before we left the house.”
He hoped someone had done him the favor of burning that house to the ground. The scale of the catastrophe was objectively enormous—We owned a home, and then we lost it—but there was such relief in no longer having to think about the house, the vertiginous mortgage payments and constant upkeep. There were moments of true joy, actually, in this transient life. He loved sitting here on the beach with Marie. For all they’d lost, he often felt lucky to be here with her, in this life.
But they were citizens of a shadow country that in his previous life he’d only dimly perceived, a country located at the edge of an abyss. He’d been aware of the shadowland forever, of course. He’d seen its more obvious outposts: shelters fashioned from cardboard under overpasses, tents glimpsed in the bushes alongside expressways, houses with boarded-up doors but a light shining in an upstairs window. He’d always been vaguely aware of its citizens, people who’d slipped beneath the surface of society, into a territory without comfort or room for error; they hitchhiked on roads with their worldly belongings in backpacks, they collected cans on the streets of cities, they stood on the Strip in Las Vegas wearing T-shirts that said GIRLS TO YOUR ROOM IN 20 MINUTES, they were the girls in the room. He’d seen the shadow country, its outskirts and signs, he’d just never thought he’d have anything to do with it.
In the shadow country it was necessary to lie down every night with a fear so powerful that it felt to Leon like a physical presence, some malevolent beast that absorbs the light. He lay beside Marie and remembered that in this life there was no space for any kind of error or misfortune. What would happen to her if something happened to him? Marie hadn’t been well in some time. His fear was a weight on his chest in the dark.
3
“How’s retirement treating you?” Miranda asked. They were sitting in her office, which had previously been Leon’s boss’s office. It was larger than he remembered. Several days had gone by since she’d called him in Colorado, during which he’d left his job at the Marriott—an urgent family matter, he’d told his boss, in hopes of being rehired later—and driven the RV to Connecticut, where they were parked in the driveway of one of Marie’s college friends.
“Can’t complain,” Leon said. Miranda seemed not to know that he’d been an Alkaitis investor, although the information wasn’t hidden. There was a victim impact statement online somewhere, which he didn’t specifically regret but probably wouldn’t have written if he’d realized it was going to be available to anyone who typed his name into Google.
“No complaints at all?”
He smiled. “Did I seem ever-so-slightly overeager on the phone?”
“I didn’t sense any reluctance to give up your life of leisure and take on a consulting gig, let’s put it that way.”
“Well,” Leon said. “There’s such a thing as too much retirement, if we’re being honest here.”
“There’s a reason why I’m not planning to retire.” Miranda was flipping through a file folder. I didn’t plan to retire either, Leon didn’t say, because he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t be desperate or bitter, that if anyone asked he’d spent this last decade living in an RV because he and Marie had had enough of the hassles of