Hunger

said.
    “Why?”
    “Because Albert doesn’t just give stuff away. Not any more.”
    Quinn laughed nervously. “Look, brah, don’t tell me I can’t do this, okay? I’m not hurting anyone.”
    “I never said you were hurting anyone,” Sam said. “But look, Albert’s going to sell this fish to whoever will give him whatever he wants: batteries and toilet paper, whatever else he figures out he can control.”
    “Sam. I got, like, twenty pounds of good protein here.”
    “Yeah. And it ought to go to the people who aren’t getting enough, right? Mother Mary could serve some to the prees. They’re not eating much better than the rest of us, and they need it more.”
    Quinn dug his toe in the wet sand. “Look, if you don’t want me to sell or trade the fish to Albert, okay. But look, I have this fish, right? What am I supposed to do with it? Someone needs to put it on ice before long. I can’t just walk around town handing out pieces of fish, right?”
    Once again Sam felt the wave of unanswerable questions rising around him like a tide. Now he had to decide what Quinn did with a fish?
    Quinn continued. “Look, I’m just saying I can haul this fish and any others I get up to Albert and he has a refrigeratorbig enough to keep it in good shape. Plus, you know how he is: he’ll figure out how to clean it and cook it and—”
    “All right,” Sam interrupted. “Fine. Whatever. Give it to Albert this time. Till I figure out some kind of, I don’t know, some kind of rule.”
    “Thanks, man,” Quinn said.
    Sam turned and headed back toward town.
    “You should have come in and danced last night, brah,” Quinn yelled after him.
    “You know I don’t dance.”
    “Sam, if anyone ever needed to cut loose, it’s you.”
    Sam tried to ignore his words, but their pitying, concerned tone bothered him. It meant that he wasn’t keeping his mind secret. It meant he was broadcasting his foul, self-pitying mood, and that wasn’t good. Bad example.
    “Hey, brah?” Quinn called.
    “Yeah, man.”
    “You know that crazy story Duck Zhang’s talking about? Not the cave thing, but the part about, like, flying fish-bats or whatever?”
    “What about them?”
    “I think I saw some. Came shooting up out of the water. Of course, it was dark.”
    “Okay,” Sam said. “Later, dude.”
    As he walked across the beach he muttered, “My life is fish stories and Junior Mints.”
    Something was nagging at him. And not just Astrid. Something. Something about Junior Mints.
    But weariness swept over him and dissolved the half-formed thought. He was due at town hall before long. More stupidity to deal with.
    He heard Quinn singing Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” to himself. Or maybe to Sam.
    Then the sound of the putt-putt outboard motor starting again.
    Sam felt an intense stab of jealousy.
    “You don’t worry,” Quinn said, echoing the song.
    “I do.”

    “Caine?”
    No answer. Diana tapped at the door again.
    “Hungry in the dark,” Caine cried in an eerie, warbling voice. “Hungry in the dark, hungry in the dark, hungry, hungry.”
    “Oh, God, are we back to this?” Diana asked herself.
    During his three-month-long funk Caine had screamed or cried or raged in various different ways. But this phrase had been the one most often repeated. Hungry in the dark .
    She pushed open the door. Caine was thrashing in his bed, sheet twisted around his body, arms batting at something invisible.
    Caine had moved out of Mose’s cabin into the bungalow once occupied by the headmistress of Coates Academy and her husband. It was one of the few still-undamaged, untrashed spaces at Coates. The room had a big, comfortable bed with satin-soft sheets. There were prints of the kind babyboomers bought at Z Gallerie on the walls.
    Diana moved quickly to the window as Caine cut loose again, wailing like a lost soul about hunger in the darkness. She raised the room-darkening blinds, and pale early sunlight lit the room.
    Caine sat up suddenly. “What?” he said. He blinked hard several times and shivered. “Why are you here?”
    “You were doing it again,” Diana said.
    “Doing what?”
    “‘Hungry in the dark.’ It’s one of your greatest hits. Sometimes you change it to ‘hungry in the darkness.’ You muttered it, moaned it, shouted it for weeks on end, Caine. Darkness, hunger, and that word: ‘gaiaphage.’” She sat down on the edge of his bed. “What’s it all mean?”
    Caine shrugged. “I don’t