“Make all the wishes you want,” he says. “But they never come true, or if they do, too bad for you.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” she said. “How can you say that it would be bad if a wish came true? You don’t know what I wished. What if my wish was to make love to you? Are you a bad lover?”

He didn’t answer her as he got angrier, because if they made love, she would see his bare feet. The last time he made love was in Iraq, a twelve-year- old girl who screamed and cried and pounded him with small fists. Then she stopped and went to sleep, and he has never felt anything about it because she had no life, nothing to look forward to except the endless destruction of her country, and endless deaths. Her face fades from his mind as water drips. He holds the pistol in his hand as Roger screams because the pain is too much.

In the Cave of the Cupola, stones were round like skulls, and water dripped, dripped, dripped, as if it had rained, and then there were formations of stony frost and icicles and spurs that glowed like candlelight. He told her not to touch them.

“If you touch them, they turn black like soot,” he warned.

“The story of my life,” she said. “Whatever I touch turns to shit.”

“You will thank me,” he said.

“For what?” she said.

In the Corridor of the Return, it was warm and humid, and water ran down the walls like blood. He held the pistol and was one finger away from the end of all he knew about himself. If Roger could thank him, he would.

A simple thanks, and doing it again isn’t needed. People are ungrateful and take away whatever has meaning. Then one doesn’t care anymore. One can’t.

A red-and- white-striped lighthouse, built soon after the War, is isolated three hundred feet offshore and no longer has a beacon.

Will’s shoulders burn from rowing, and his buttocks ache on the fiberglass bench. It’s hard work because his payload weighs almost as much as the flat-bottom boat, and now that he’s close to his place, he won’t use the outboard motor. He never does. It makes noise, and he wants no noise, even if there is no one to hear it. No one lives here. No one comes here except during the day, and then only in nice weather. Even then, no one knows this place is his. The love of a lighthouse and a bucket of sand. How many little boys own an island? A glove and a ball, and a picnic and camping. All gone. Dead. The forlorn passage in a boat to the other side.