As recently as three years ago, the last time Desmond had visited Anderton’s daughter, Lorna, and her collection of memorabilia, this stretch of the Florida panhandle had been a piney wonderland of shabby motels and tourist cottages scattered along the beaches and roadsides as if they’d been dumped there from a fast-moving truck. There were dark bars and unwholesome, oddball restaurants with gaudy signs. “Home of the Topless Oyster,” “All You Can Eat Shrimp,” “Ho-Made Po-Boys.” He’d been fascinated with the run-down glamour of the place, imagining that if he were a completely different person—a married truck driver from southern Georgia, let’s say—he’d come here to spend vacations with the family. Now even that shaky fantasy couldn’t support its own unlikely weight. The area around the airport was being brutally developed with big concrete hotels thrown up by multinational chains and strip malls with the usual cast of retail characters and restaurants. It was as if some fungus had arrived in the hold of a plane, transforming the landscape close to the airport first, and starting to spread.

Jane was comatose in the passenger seat of the van, and Chloe and Tim were in back, playing an electronic game that made strange bleeps and elicited groans.

He supposed people found the growing uniformity of the world comforting. You didn’t have to react to this landscape or these shops or restaurants because they were all identical to ones you’d seen thousands of times before in hundreds of other places. The food you bought at the big chain restaurants was so familiar, you didn’t have to worry yourself with actually tasting it. The world was bursting at the seams with information and “content,” information’s brand-new sibling, and in order to assimilate all of that, you had to neutralize as much sensory input as you could.

Fortunately, as they got closer to Gulf City, the development thinned, leaving more of the seedy disrepair he remembered fondly from his last visit—roadside bars and motels, a few weed-choked vacant lots. A naval base that had been in Gulf City for decades had closed at the end of the 1980s, and the town was still reeling from the abandonment, refusing to pick up the pieces and start anew, like a bitter husband who couldn’t accept that his wife had left him. Russell had accompanied him on that other visit and had declared Gulf City, “a real place, even if it is a really awful one.” And yet all of it, the drinking dives and dying malls, the hotsheets motels and the little restaurants named after the owner, were circumscribed by the incongruous beauty of the wide, green expanse of the Gulf waters and the white sand that seemed to stretch for miles.