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channel anti-Muslim crap? Since when?”
    “I’m you, El, I don’t show on Sunday afternoon. Our asshole mayor, on the other hand—”
    “I know Mark Martello. The four of us have dinner occasionally. He’s normal, reasonable, with an understated sense of humor. Not paranoid.”
    “All well and good. His homosexuality is not a factor here.”
    “Who said it was?”
    “El, live and fuckin’ let live is my philosophy. But keep in mind, however so-called normal this three-dollar bill Martello is, the sophisticated monitoring goes on way above Markyboy’s pretty head. They pick up the chatter of the jihadists. Via Montana, D. C., Langley, via outer fuckin’ space, wherever they have surveillance devices of enormous power they look right up our—my guess? They think you might be closely guarding information as to the whereabouts of Mirko Ivanovic, if they’re not thinking you’re harboring the little raghead. They likely don’t rule out criminal complicity on your part, El. In my opinion.”
    “Don’t make me laugh.”
    “Are you?”
    “Am I what?”
    “Complicitous?”
    “You’re working hard, Antonio, to divert from the real subject we’re here to discuss.”
    “All these years you call me Robby—now it’s Antonio?”
    “So what?”
    “What do I know, El? This is my speculation. Martello is cagy. Homosexuals, in my extremely limited experience, can be very indirect about what’s really on their secret minds.”
    “How much of this are you making up? Because you’re beginning to piss me off.”
    “You teach fiction, I deal in harsh facts on a daily basis”—as he takes another piece. Eats. Requests a napkin. Conte goes to the kitchen. Robinson glances quick and hard at the closed door to the spare room. Touches his upper-left chest.
    Conte returns with an elegant cloth napkin: “When I feel what you’re feeling now, I do what you’re doing.”
    “What’s that, Professor?”
    “Don’t play dumb. We binge eat when we have fear and anxiety. We eat and we divert and we avoid. Today we’rebinge-eating brothers. I don’t believe you missed your supper tonight. Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda in Iraq, Al Qaeda in East Africa, Al Qaeda in Yemen. And now you come here with a story. Al Qaeda in Utica, New York. Al Qaeda in a small, sad, economically destroyed town fading fast into the sub-cellar of American history. Utica, New York, the looming site of a major terrorist attack. Utica, New York, displaces Manhattan, D.C., Boston, Chicago, and L.A. as the focus of Al Qaeda’s desire to do mass murder to America’s innocent civilians. All GPS devices manufactured from here on out position and measure distances from the new global center: Utica, New York. Where the fuck is Islamabad? Nine thousand miles east southeast of Utica, New York. And my gentle student, whose goal is to teach literature in high school, is a key operative of terror.”
    “Hey! El! Don’t think I didn’t voice skepticism along your lines, which is why I sat out there so long shivering in the car, talking to Mark Martello. Know what he said? He says, Chief, all due respect. The handful of big cities can be defended, maybe, but small town America has no chance. The people in small towns, he says, they think they’re beyond the reach and they’re secretly wishing the worst for the big cities of the immoral liberal elites. Martello says they believe—the small town types, the rural types—that on 9/11 New York got what it fuckin’ deserved and too bad all of Wall Street wasn’t destroyed, where they steal our money on a daily basis. Fuck the elites. Fuck Manhattan. This is what the real America thinks, Martello says. Now real America is about to take it hard up the ass, though because of his erotic persuasion Mark doesn’t quite put it that way. You forget, El, thatMuhammad Atta was a gentle-appearing little guy, a possible faggot, just like your Mirko? An intellectual, just like your little Mirko?”
    “You’ve taken