It was a big beautiful room in a big beautiful hotel. One glass wall looked out to white beach and furious surf. Yesterday, I'd seen dolphins leaping.
The three walls were koa panels so densely figured they seemed to tell a story. Crystal chandeliers hung above black granite floors. Up in front was a banquet table laden with papayas and mangoes, bananas and grapes, and thick, wet wedges of the kind of orange-yellow, honey-sweet pineapple you get only when you harvest it ripe.
Sterling silver coffeepots were set every six feet, their shine blue-white.
Other tables, too, round, seating ten, interspersed around the hall. Hundreds of men and a few women, eating and drinking coffee, and listening.
Robin and I watched it on TV, from a suite upstairs. Room service and suntan lotion and every newspaper and magazine we could get our hands on.
"Here he goes," she said
Hoffman stood up at the center of the big table, dressed in a mocha suit, white shirt and yellow tie.
A banner at his back.
He talked, paused for applause, smiled.
The banner said: PACIFIC RIM PROGRESS: A NEW DAWN.
Another one-liner. Laughter.
He continued talking and smiling and pausing for applause.
Then he stopped and only smiled.
Something changed in his eyes. A shutter-snap flicker of confusion.
If I hadn't been looking for it, I probably wouldn't have noticed.
If I hadn't been looking for it, I wouldn't have been tuned to C-Span.
The camera left him and swung to the back of the room.
A tall, gaunt old man in a brand-new charcoal-gray suit walked toward the front.
Next to him walked a woman I'd known first as Jo Picker, then as Jane Bendig, official-looking in a navy-blue suit and high-necked white blouse. For the last three days she'd worked nearly twenty-four hours a day. The easy part: using Tom Creedman's computer to send bogus messages by e-mail. The hard part: convincing Moreland he could redeem himself.
The doctors and psychologists at the medical center had helped some. Examining the kids with care and compassion, assuring the old man they were clinicians, not technocrats.
Jane shared her grief with him, talked numbers, morality, absolution.
Eventually, she just wore him down.
Now he walked ahead of her.
Behind the two of them, six men in blue suits flanked a massive black thing, like pallbearers.
Black thing with legs, a shuffling variant of the circus horse.
Stirring and confusion at the other tables, too.
Moreland and Jo kept marching. The black cloth seemed to float in midair.
Some men next to Hoffman began to move, but other men stopped them.
Zoom on Hoffman's face, still smiling.
He mouthed something- an order- to a man standing behind him, but the man had been restrained.
Moreland reached Hoffman.
Hoffman started to speak, smiled instead.
Someone shouted, "What's going on?" and that seemed to shake Hoffman out of it.
"I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, this man's quite disturbed and he's been harassing me for quite a-"
The men in blue suits flicked their wrists, and the black cloth seemed to fly away.
Six soft, misshapen people stood there, hands at their sides, placid as milk-sated babies. Ruined skin highlighted mercilessly by the chandelier. The doctors at the medical center had established that only UV was a threat. The black sheet protecting them from the stares of gawkers.
Gasps from the room.
The blind one began bouncing and waving his hands, staring up at the light with empty sockets.
"My God!" said someone.
A glass dropped on the granite and shattered.
Two blue-suited men took hold of Hoffman's arms.
Moreland said, "My name is Woodrow Wilson Moreland. I'm a doctor. I have a story to tell."
Hoffman stopped smiling.