The plane lurched slightly, and he grabbed the edge of the tray. Don’t crash, he told the plane. If you do, this all dies with me.

That wasn’t entirely true. He wasn’t the only one who knew. He’d told a few others. But he was the only one who knew the whole story, or at least as much of it as he’d pieced together. Now, as the plane jolted once more, he wondered if this was a grave error. Being the only one to know posed some problems, his death being the greatest of them.

He clutched the papers as the plane rumbled and a voice came over the speakers. “Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, we’ve encountered some turbulence. The captain asks that you please fasten your seat belts.”

Hudson felt for the belt at his waist, slipping the flat end of the buckle into the metal mouth and feeling it click. The absurdity of the notion that a single piece of fabric would save him in the event that the plane plummeted to the ground was not lost on him, but he brushed it away, preferring to accept that, safely strapped in, he would arrive in Monterey in one piece.

After a minute the plane settled, and a minute after that the seat belt sign flickered off. Still, he left his on. It might, he told himself, ward off further attacks by the elements.

Looking out the window, he saw nothing but bright blue sky and the softness of clouds. This did nothing to relax him. He realized that he’d been gripping the pages in his hand. They were wrinkled, creased by the anxious embrace of his fingers. He smoothed them out. Naturally, he had other copies with him. But he would no sooner harm a copy than he would imperil the original.

He tried to concentrate on Monterey. At twenty-four, he’d never been farther west than Chicago, and then for only a few days at a Faulkner conference, where he’d delivered his paper “The Myth and Mythology of Yoknapatawpha County: The Snopes Trilogy as Greek Tragedy” to a more or less positive reception. (Except, of course, for the woman from Duke who’d suggested that his reading of The Mansion was superficial, but she was a Lacanian, and her behavior typical of the breed. Anyway, he’d later been delighted to hear that she’d been denied tenure and been forced to take a position at a junior college somewhere in Minnesota.)

His four years at Yale had taken him far from his undistinguished rearing in Edelson, one of Maine’s less-enlightened towns, where his school’s guidance counselor, upon reviewing his performance on a recently administered aptitude test, had helpfully suggested a career in either the fisheries industry or perhaps the United States Navy, where she implied that Hudson might do well in the field of radio operations. Fortunately, the intervention of a teacher had steered him toward college, and a doorway had been opened for him. He’d stepped through gladly, mostly to escape the possibility of ending up like his parents, weary of life and resentful of anyone who wasn’t.