Stranded social novelists up and down the river dutifully photographed hard-to-identify flowers and took notes on the appearance of gathering storm fronts and menacing thunderheads. More than one could be found looking up at a slumbering owl or a sunburned meadow beseeching their higher power to help me make something out of all this stillness.
Meanwhile, the landowner’s estate buzzed with animal and human-animal activity. Steve the Groundhog had decorated his poolside-adjacent hole with lilacs, or so it looked to Nat （actually Uncle Vinod had decorated the lair himself and convinced the child that it was the marmot’s doing）。 Traveling birds—warblers?—would invade a tree, ravish it with their chirping, and then abandon it just as quickly and for no discernible reason, like bored American tourists at an ancient historical site. Karen and Vinod would sneak into Ed’s outdoor shower and have monumental sex, their four hands pressed against the seashell-studded walls as they worked each other to completion, even as Vinod occasionally put a hand to his mouth to make sure that he wasn’t intubated, that all this was really happening. He had transferred his luggage to Karen’s bungalow and unpacked all but some emergency underwear and the notarized papers at the bottom of one suitcase. He wouldn’t need them now. He was healthy and strong and in love. Karen was helping him prepare query letters to agents. He could at last abandon the character he had written for his father, “the lonely man, his aloneness bordering on the holy.”
With the Actor gone, it was as if a factory owner had left and the workers strolled dazed past the silenced conveyor belts. How should they behave among one another? Was all this theirs now? What would they do without the boldface name above the front gates? Strangely enough, the seven remaining colonists became closer. They all had their faults and their past tussles （recall Dee’s last outburst at the dinner table）， but they all liked one another at heart, were by now as familiarized with each other’s company as siblings or polar explorers. Now they had lunches as well as dinners together, gathering in the kitchen en masse at 12:30 p.m. promptly to throw Masha’s egg salad onto peasant bread. And at 3:00 p.m. during weekdays, when Nat was on a call with her speech therapists, those forty or older ran to the pool for a quick skinny-dip, mixing their happy nudity with the pungency of Karen’s marijuana.
And then there was Dee.
When a lover stalks off, we miss the heat of his touch first, the skin-to-skin contact babies crave and that Nat had never known. （A surviving photo from her orphanage shows her at the beginning of life, dark lashed, squirmy, with many tender folds to her wrists, but no one to clean them regularly or hold her through a night’s cry.） And so Dee felt her abandonment on a dermal level. She tried to readjust, but every single square inch of Senderovian territory that she passed throughout the day called for a handsome man’s touch, called for that skin to skin. And I never even wanted to love him! she would say to herself. But the skin told another story, and when the sun began to set she would touch the nape of her own neck, just to know that touch was still possible. In the future, she thought, the Karen Chos of the world will develop golems instantly conjured from roving atoms who will embrace us and hold us through the night only to dissolve by daybreak, and then there will be no need for any of this cruelty. （Or for humanity, really.） But until then? Until then, she was in pain.
Given that the colony now reminded her of the one failed relationship she had had in the last decade, given the traumatic footage of them having sex down the road, which had destroyed her privacy （her most private parts had been covered by his body in the video, but that didn’t really help）， her original impulse was to flee. But where would she go? She swore she would never look at his social media, but she did anyway, and it was clear that his handlers were positioning him as having rediscovered the ills of racism （without mentioning her, of course）， and now he was throwing out one obvious initiative after the next, acting camps for Black children on a fifty-acre retreat in Central California （the anti-Senderovsky-bungalow-colony）， which also introduced the participants to the complete farming experience （they were now selling produce at the original farmers’ market in Los Angeles） and even a socially distanced re-creation of Gone with the Wind, but with the races of the characters reversed. （This would soon enough lead to a new series of problems for the Actor and his team.） She saw his doe-eyed appeals to donors and sponsors and couldn’t help but think that the extra-winsome sadness he brought to these performances was not just his newfound understanding of structural racism but the fact that he still loved her and missed her.