The man looked down at her hand on his arm and smiled softly, a smile of the lips only, as if all this was faintly amusing. The other man, who’d stood stiffly at attention to this point, now seemed tensed for action, and she realized, with a start of alarm, that if the one she knew were but to give the word, this one would show no restraint. “I am sorry,” he said, still with that soft smile, then turned his gaze back to Tim, whose own smile had come back now, huge, toothy, titanic, as if to say everything was all right and always would be, nothing to worry about, just the smallest misunderstanding, that was all.

“On what grounds?” Tim said, smiling still.

“Read the order,” the other man said, the one she didn’t know. He was short, there were red flecks in his eyes and he regarded Tim steadily, as if he knew his kind—a perpetrator like any other, the lowest of the low—and wouldn’t think twice about reaching for his handcuffs if that was what it would take.

“Running a business without a license,” the first one said. “As an alien. That is the official offense, and the most convenient way to be rid of you. But if you’d really like to know it’s because of this.” And here he handed Tim a pair of rolled-up newspapers, which, as she was later to learn, accused them all of being a cult purveying “marijuana orgies, hairy women, black magic, venereal disease and profiteering.” They were even tied to the death of a woman none of them had ever seen or heard of, whose body was found in a village more than a hundred miles away, which made for a front-page story under the headline HARVARD DRUG ORGY BLAMED FOR DECOMPOSING BODY.

Alice, who was right behind her, said, “But this is ridiculous. We have a lease on this property. We’re scientists!”

Somehow, though, the claim itself seemed ridiculous, coming as it was from a barefooted woman in a bikini, and in that moment, Joanie saw the truth of it—they were ridiculous and all their beliefs and aspirations were laughable in the eyes of the authorities, of the stooges who ran things in a world of closed-off minds and seekers after nothing but more of the same. She took in the scenario—Tim in white, the federales in black, the women in a display of flesh—turned her back on them, dove into the pool and went all the way down till she touched bottom.

Chapter 3

3.