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smoothed down a feathery white-blond cowlick on Carson’s head. “I still love you, Paul.”
    “But you’re giving up on me.” It seemed impossible that his wife would abandon him just as the lawsuits from the neighbors were coming to a head, as they were falling behind on their mortgage payments, as the credit card debts were mushrooming and the cost of health insurance doubled. All that debt was in Paul’s name alone. Amanda was free to start over.
    “I’ve given you
so
many chances to turn things around, Paul. You could have sold off the rest of the land. You could have changed your mind and done something different when it was obvious that this dream of yours wasn’t going to work.”
    “It wasn’t just
my
dream.”
    “No, honey,” she said, jaw rigid as she tried not to cry or scream, he wasn’t sure which, “you’re not rational anymore. I don’t know if it’s the house or the land or your own mind, but you’ve become someone else in the last couple of years. Do you see the way the neighbors avoid you?”
    “They’re suing me, Amanda, what do you expect?”
    “They’re suing because you’re being so unreasonable. These houses are a
mess
and you refuse to see it. You built houses that look great in the beginning but start falling apart after six months. Look at this one! Everything creaks, the roof leaks, the whole thing sounds like it’s going to be blown into the air when there’s a strong breeze. The neighbors are right.”
    His sons gazed up at him, Carson pale and staring through reflective sunglasses, Ajax lying on the carpet swimming his arms and legs in the air, rolling over on his stomach and laughing so hard that Amanda shouted at him to stop. She never shouted at the boys. Paul looked from his sons to the antiques he and Amanda had picked out together. He loved every line of that furniture, the way it all seemed made for the house. The boys—Ajax at least—seemed anxious to go. Carson was a puzzle, the kind of child who might throw himself off the roof of a garage in the belief he could fly, a great billowing piece of dark material fluttering behind him as cape and shroud. Paul never understood Carson. His face was unreadable, a shifting maze of intention and desire. He was not the kind of son Paul ever bargained on having, quiet and studious and attached to his mother, nothing like the boys who had been Paul’s childhood friends. Ajax made more sense, was less mysterious, more like Paul himself. But it was Carson he was going to miss most, and whom, by law, according to the order his wife had taken out against him, he could no longer contact. If he had money and lawyers, if he were free to pursue them across the country, everything would be different. He would fly to them now, fly and rescue them before the coming cataclysm.
    After half an hour of silence Paul moves his hands, shifts the rifle, slides the safety catch into place, sits up, places the gun under his bed. The helicopter might have been monitoring traffic or a fugitive, but not him. He has done nothing wrong. He shakes his hands and arms to call back sensation, wincing as the blood returns to his fingers. Sitting still for several more minutes, he feels his feet begin to throb. The ration regime is too strict. He will need to augment his diet with food he can gather or kill. If necessary he will retreat to the woods, standing still and silent like his father taught him, building a platform in the trees or a blind on the woodland floor, mounting the suppressor on his rifle, hunting regardless of the season. He will do whatever he must to survive.
    Let us enter into the state of war
.

T he foreclosure auction took place on the steps of the county courthouse, a palatial domed building in the French Renaissance Revival style completed in 1913, built of brick faced in pale sandstone and occupying a whole city block. A fifteen-foot statue of Justice stands atop the dome, which is constructed from iron and sheet metal