2D

One could not imagine until we lived it, how it felt to enter a town whose entire occupants lay prostrate before an invisible power. When Annabell Trainer and Miguel Vega arrived at the port of Manaus exactly three weeks after Fernando Lollo was expedited to the United States for crimes against humanity, that same city was a ghost town. Except the ghosts were not invisible. The docks were littered with the bodies of men and women, rats, rotting fish and produce, crocodiles, mangy cats, dogs and a zillion flies and other winged marauders taking advantage of the suspension of human defenses...

I’ll tell you exactly what happened. It was a lovely fall day, no fog, clear as glass. The Farallon Islands are twenty-seven miles out. You’d have thought you could swim to them. The Marin headlands, the lighthouse, the defunct windmills, they were all in view that morning because a storm had passed through the night before and blown everything away but the clear blue sky. All it left was sand in big drifts across the traffic lanes. That’s when the road crews pull the gate closed across the Great Highway from Sloat Street to the Golden Gate Park entrance and bring in their front end loaders...

On the morning of the feast of St. Nicholas, the edges of Manhattan architecture first glimmered for me in the hard frost of early December. I was about to go ashore after seven miserable days at sea. These last seven days falling at the end of a hundred traveled from the time of our departure at Denver when we were merely just flipping the bird at our past through the eye of an airplane. We had no idea what was coming. Enough said about that for now.  New York, as many have said, introduces America splendidly from its harbor. The Empire State Building stands shoulders above the crowd like a...