Most of Lowry’s attention has accreted around the linguist, a volunteer with radicalized ideas about the value of free will. You wonder if Lowry prefers it when there’s more or less resistance. So you absorb the brunt of his briefing, his report on progress, his teasing taunt about whether you’ve reconsidered his offer of hypnosis, of conditioning, with the hint behind it that you couldn’t stop him if you tried.

Honestly, you don’t give a shit about his briefing.

At some point, you steer Lowry toward the idea of a walk—down by the fake lighthouse. It’s early summer, the weather still balmy, and there’s no reason to sit there in Lowry’s command-and-control lounge. You cajole him into it by appealing to his pride, asking for the full tour, taking just one thin file folder you’ve brought with you.

So he gives you the not-so-grand tour, through this miniaturized world of ever-decreasing wonder. There’s the strange kitschy quality of piped-in music through speakers hidden around the grounds. A distant but cheery tune—not pop, not jazz, not classical, but something all the more menacing for being jaunty.

At the top of the quaint little lighthouse—what would Saul think of it?—he points out that the daymark is accurate, as well as “the fucking glass shards somebody added later.” When he pulls the trapdoor open at the top, what’s revealed in the room below are piles and piles of empty journals and loose, blank pages, as if he’s bought a stationery store as a side business. The lens isn’t functional, either, but as if by way of apology, you get a history lesson: “Back in the day—way back in the day—they used to just shove a big fucking fatty bird onto a stake and light it on fire for a beacon.”

That “goddamn hole in the ground,” as Lowry puts it, is the least accurate part—an old gunnery position with the gun unit ripped out, leaving the granite-lined dark circle that leads down a ladder to a tunnel that then doubles back to the hill behind you that houses most of Lowry’s installations. You climb down only a little ways, enough to see, framed on the dank walls, Lowry’s art gallery: the blurry, out-of-focus photographs, blown up, brought back by various expeditions. A kind of meta version of the tunnel brought to the faux tunnel, displaying with confidence something unknowable. Thinking of Saul on the steps of the real tunnel, turning toward you, and feeling such an acute contempt for Lowry that you have to remain there, looking down, for long moments, afraid it will show on your face.

After you’ve made the right noises about how impressive it all is, you suggest continuing along the shore, “fresh air and nature,” and Lowry acquiesces, defeated by your tactic of asking a question about each new thing ahead because he just cannot shut up about his own cleverness. You take a side path that leads north along the water. There are geese nesting on a nearby rocky point that give you both the stink eye, an otter in the sea in the middle distance, shadowing you.