Anyhow, I went out to see Clendon one summer expecting the weather to be cool, praying that it would be cool that summer, and it was atypically hot and there was some kind of mosquito convocation going on there—every mosquito in the world flew into Vermont that summer.

Historically mosquitoes are among the deadliest enemies of man. Mosquitoes caused the downfall of ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean Sea—sleeping sickness, elephantiasis, dengue, malaria. Plus you know about all of that yellow-fever jive when we dug the Panama Canal, right?

Well, great big monster mosquitoes from Siberia, the size of sparrows, made the trip to Vermont that summer, and there were little ones that were, in a way, worse because they had no fear of the blazing sun, thrived under it, and would attack at high noon like Mirage fighter jets. Aedis aegypti if you want to get technical. Aedis aegypti is completely dependent on human blood and will attack in the full light of day, like Dracula with sunglasses. I mean, they wouldn’t light on you and make preliminary moves to give you warning before they injected their hypodermic proboscis into your skin. They were like flying piranhas; they would practically bite you on the wing.

You couldn’t buy, beg, or steal insect repellent. There was a run on it. It was more precious than a rhinoceros horn in an Asian bazaar. Clendon was so preoccupied with his marital problems that he scarcely noticed the mosquitoes, but they were all I could think of. There are nearly two thousand species of them and I think most blew in for the big convocation. Mosquito Woodstock.

I hated to watch my brother grovel, the children irritated me, and so I holed up in the guest bedroom with the air conditioner on full blast and a satchel full of medical journals. Victoria had the gall to insist I confine my cigarette smoking to the bedroom. “What kind of doctor has a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit?” she says.

“Smoking is good for you; it makes your heart merry,” I say.

“Oh bullshit,” she says. “It’s such a juvenile habit.”

If you were my wife, I thought, you would be a splat on the wall.

Clendon had given me a number of literary magazines to read including stories of his own. I’m a reader, I read them but it was always some boring crap about a forty-five-year-old upper-level executive in boat shoes driving around Cape Cod in a Volvo. I mean you actually do finish some of them and admit that “technically” they were pretty good but I’d rather go to back-to-back operas than read another story like that. It was with relief that I returned to the medical journals.