Well, let’s be honest. In fact, there were plenty of people who cared what was going on, and moreover figured they knew, all right. Millions! As Irene sat in the sand with Sam, holding hands, thinking about how to reply, housewives and bus drivers and secretaries and farmers around the world were right then imagining that scene between the two of them, people just like you imagining what would happen if you too were marooned on a desert island with some man or woman with whom you were secretly enamored. The more cynical among you might call this an old story, a chestnut, but chestnuts have their purpose, don’t they? They allow us to imagine some all-too-human aspect of our condition on this earth, some thought or fantasy or conundrum we share in common, we flawed and yearning animals, we complicated and contradictory beings. That was why the world was transfixed with the story of the lost pilots. Sam and Irene, c’est nous.

If you were Irene, what would you say?

If you were Sam, what would you do?

At 0431 local time the next morning, the Farragut dropped anchor about two hundred yards off the rim of Howland Island. Once dawn broke, the captain dispatched a boat containing himself, an oarsman, and the reporter and photographer from the UPI, to survey the atoll for any sign of the lost pilots.

The news crossed the wire at 0603.

Hanalei, Hawai’i

October 1947

Lindquist tells me to look out the window at that glorious sight below, and I tell her to stick her glorious sights in the world’s darkest cave. I ask her what was the real reason she made me come up here with her today. Is this some kind of murder plot? Are we going to crash on this island of hers and end our miseries?

“Of course not,” she yells, over the noise of the engines. “What a waste of a good airplane.”

“Maroon us on the island, then? Deliver me the full Foster and Mallory experience? The crabs, the peanut butter, the saltwater distillery? Listen up, dame. The desert island survival story, that’s a dime a dozen. All variations on a theme of building campfires and eating shellfish and getting sunburnt. Who cares anymore? You know there’s only one thing people really want to know.”

“Oh? And what’s that?”

I lean forward. “Did you or didn’t you?”