The sun had risen on them and had stayed all this time on their faces. Their purpose was to fulfill the ultimate destiny of the human race. He was fifty-five years old and for the first time he understood that nothing bad had ever happened to him. He lived in a house worth a fortune with his wife of thirty years. His children’s lives had worked out, no one was on drugs or in prison, no one had died of AIDS. Everyone he knew led a nice life and on and on it was all supposed to go. Then this. Out of the clear blue. Only in the days after the catastrophe did he realize that all kinds of warning signs had been there all along. Not of the atrocity, but of his own misguided judgment about the permanence of the universal condition of his generation, to whom nothing bad was supposed to happen. “We’ve had such a long run of good luck,” he said to Andrea. “We thought it would go on all our lives. We were born in sunshine…” “You were. Not me.” “We all were.” How could it be that he, Stephen Newman of all people, should have turned into one of the gray men of the BBC, the stooped ghosts who lived on in a deluded fantasy of public service broadcasting, who stood with begging bowls outside the commissioning editors’ offices wanting handouts to make extravagantly expensive programs involving whole production crews being flown off to the Galápagos Islands to film a documentary about Charles Darwin?
