I GUESS THE​ REASON I can’t relate to Clendon:…he almost cracked up getting his Ph.D., got weird, and took off to Vermont, bought a Volvo, and married this cool slim blonde with long legs, nine thousand dollars’ worth of capped teeth and a heart colder than the dark side of the moon. Victoria. Spoiled single child, rich and indulged. Sarah Lawrence degree in art history. Clothes are DKNY. She drives a BMW and Clendon worships her and all the time I was there I saw her make him squirm and humiliate him. I’m thinking he’s getting some kind of masochistic thrill out of this. There was something in that that has estranged us as brothers and has made us like Cain and Abel. I mean, I can’t identify with somebody who won’t fight back. I can’t work up any sympathy for him.

“The kids,” he says. “You have to think of the kids.”

Or: “A divorce would leave a psychic scar.”

Clendon teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont. Middlebury is really a beautiful place but it’s that old bullshit: Greenpeace. You know, I don’t want to overgeneralize but it’s a style I find hard to take. They really let you have it up there. Throw it right in your face. Self-righteous do-gooders. I mean, I think we ought to save the dolphins, too. Torpedo those Japanese fishing boats if they don’t lay off! But spare me the folksingers!

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.