At four on a Saturday in a neighborhood theater, you find, at our age, people like yourselves—slow, with time on their hands, deferential, not asking much from life, and collectively aspiring toward the faint traces of courtships that had played out, years before, in run-down, stuffy, and unhygienic movie houses featuring esoteric European movies and surrealism. Alison and I sat loose-limbed, an island to ourselves, canoodlers sharing a huge tub of popcorn, ensconced in the general celluloid blue darkness with plenty of seats between us and other moviegoers. The film was a Canadian festival favorite starring James Cromwell and Geneviève Bujold as rural holdouts who, though weathered and worn, love each other with indelible chemistry. He’s become craggy; she’s become fragile. They must face facts, many of which are bureaucratic—in a way reminiscent of a politicized youth—others morbid. They suffer well. Sex is implied, wrinkles and all.

  Ahead of our viewing, the theater manager had opined before all that this film, Still Mine, initially called Still, had been poorly retitled by the distributors who’d swooped in on it at the Toronto Film Festival, because Still Mine sounded maudlin, and one thing this film wasn’t was maudlin. That wasn’t true. It was maudlin. Alison said as much afterward, as we were walking away—that it was maudlin, and also that, when the time came—or if it came—it was okay with her if our lives felt maudlin, but not too much, and as for maudlin, what did it mean anyway?

  We went home. I sat down to read a book. From across the hall, Alison yelled, “Listen to this! A Genèvieve bio! ‘In 1977 Bujold met her current partner, carpenter Dennis Hastings, while he was building her house in Malibu’! ‘They are still living in California together today’!”

  “No wonder she did Still Mine!”

  “Still!”

  Soon, from across the hall, I heard Bobby Darin singing “If I Were a Carpenter.” A little while later, Alison shouted, “Can’t find a picture of Dennis Hastings…. Here’s Genèvieve with Jean-Paul Belmondo…Genèvieve with Michael Douglas…Genèvieve 1966…Not sure anyone was ever better looking than Genèvieve…. Here she’s kissing Yves Montand…. Here she’s in Obsession with Cliff Robertson! So what happened to Cliff Robertson? Let me see…. Oh, he died!”

  In bed, I told Alison what my father had said while I was driving him home from Mount Vernon the day before: that love and work aren’t mutually exclusive. “Couched as formal logic,” she replied, “which doesn’t make it any less true.”

  “He’s going to need a lot of rides.”

  “Do it,” said Alison.

  The next morning, she got up before I did and started pruning the Camperdown. On her side of our bed—proximate to which I regularly wonder how she cooks up so much heat—or, rather, on the floor next to it, sat eleven books, a box of Kleenex, her reading glasses, a bobby pin, a hair clip, a small bottle of aloe vera skin cleanser, a receipt for a library overdue payment, a wooden back-scratcher, and three pencils. I opened our curtains onto a breadth of morning sun. The silk tree outside our window had no pink flowers on it at that moment, but its pods were pierced by light such that its shrouded beans wore nimbi; meanwhile, the lost blossoms were a brown morass gathering toward a fall. I got up, looked for my nail clippers, and found them, at last, in the room where I used to scribble fictions. It hadn’t taken very long for the smell of dust and emptiness to seep into everything there. My desk and shelves, my sideboard and file cabinets, had quickly metamorphosed into a figureless diorama, had become inert, had taken on the pallor of a stage set; all that was needed was a velvet rope hung across the door frame to complete the portrait of a historical phenomenon, in this case one with no interest to anyone but myself, although, at bottom, I wasn’t interested in anything there other than fetching the nail clippers and looking out the window, and then in noting that the ivy growing vigorously up the house imperiled the gutters, which weren’t sagging but threatened to. It’s a shame to view things this way. Everywhere I turned on our plat, I now saw maintenance. It had come to seem that the life of a homeowner—or at least of this homeowner—was a series of staying actions against ruin. I’d noticed, and it was streamable, a show about ruin, a series devoted to imagining places once humans stopped doting on them, and I’d binge-watched it against the odds. In one episode, while a narrator sounded a basso profundo of ominous notes, feral hogs rooted in a desolate and weedy Buckingham Palace. In another, Seattle appeared as a salt marsh over which the Space Needle made a last, contorted stand while a torrent of Biblical proportions fell out of a toxic sky.

  * * *

  —

  The afternoon after Still Mine, or Still, my father called. “If this was the old days,” he said, “I’d drive out to the Boeing plant in Everett and talk to people there about Delvin Harvey, since it might be him and not Betsy Harvey who’s at fault here, but the old days are gone now, so I can’t do it.”

  I didn’t answer. “Actually, I could do it,” my father said. “I could go by cab and try to work my way in. But I think your status as a writer helps, because you can just call them up and say you’re writing a novel and have to get your details right and have to do some research and you’d like to get permission to go inside the plant and see what millwrights do and talk to millwrights, and of course, in the course of that, you can ask these millwrights about Delvin Harvey and see what kind of guy he was, was he a jerk to everybody or something else entirely, did he say anything pertinent, did he do anything telling. You get the idea. Be me.”

  * * *

  —

  I called the Boeing plant in Everett. Whoever picked up thought I should talk to someone in Chicago. The person in Chicago said that the Everett plant was open to the public and that if I looked on the Boeing website I could sign up for a tour. No, I explained. It’s not a tour I have in mind. It’s more that, for purposes of a book I’m writing, I’d like to hang around some Boeing millwrights. “A book,” she said, which made me realize that my request must trouble her because Boeing had been blamed for plane crashes, accused of war profiteering, and widely characterized as an unscrupulous lobbier incestuously coupled to the Department of Defense, so that my disclosure—that I was writing a book—must raise for her a red flag. “It’s just fiction,” I said. “A novel.”

  I was to call Jim Little. I could also call Leslie Schmad. She would call them both first and give them my name and tell them what I wanted to do, and they would put me through the vetting process and get me the forms to fill out and—music to my ears—it shouldn’t be a problem. All because—I think—fiction isn’t true, so you don’t have to worry about it.

  * * *

  —

  I got through the hoops and over the hurdles. In Boeing’s lobby, where large, shiny models of airplanes were displayed in glass cases, Leslie Schmad gave me a preprinted name badge. Then she and I got into an open-air but canopied electric vehicle driven by Jim Little. We moved as if weightless, and our vehicle was nearly silent. It was 2:00 p.m., and the Boeing Everett premises seemed languid. A placid sterility prevailed. Everything seemed bland, muffled, clean. We turned a corner and came to a lurching halt. Jim hopped off and pushed buttons on a keypad. A large door rolled open, and we entered what I suppose you would call the Boeing Everett main production facility, or maybe the assembly building, and as we rolled onto the factory floor, following more striping and maintaining a careful speed limit, Leslie Schmad leaned toward me and said, “I’m going to give you a factoid that you might want to jot down. This is the largest building in the world. It covers almost a hundred acres. Its volume is four hundred seventy-five million cubic feet. It’s a mindblower, a mindblower. Every time I come in here, and I don’t come very much, but every time I come in here, it’s: Wow.”

  There were airplanes, of course, in progressive stages of production—some skeletal, with skins off, others bright with rivets. I saw a fuselage in cutaway view, as if a side had been peeled away. I also heard the pop of pneumatic riveters. People were scrambling over wings and ducking in and out of tailpieces. I couldn’t understand anything. It was too complicated. And it made sitting in a room by yourself making up stories seem ridiculous. While I was thinking this way, Jim Little got us to the warren, or corner, or sector, or whatever you want to call it, where the millwrights were quartered, and I was delivered into the hands of Brian Kleist, who had agreed to shepherd me, or babysit me, and who murmured with Jim and Leslie before they disappeared in their personnel carrier. Then, with Brian, who had shaved his head until it gleamed as if burnished, and who looked like the actor Woody Harrelson—heavy brow, Roman nose—I went into what he called “the pod room,” where about a dozen millwrights, all male, were sitting around, mostly in slouches of varying degree, at a long, scarred, dinged, and dented table. It was the beginning of “second shift,” meaning 2:00 to 10:00 p.m. The millwrights were drinking coffee, eating potato chips, reading newspapers, and mousing away at desktop computers. On their table were some fat, old-school Thermoses, scattered plastic safety glasses, toothpicks, and salt and pepper shakers. There was a strong smell of burned coffee. My presence was explained but not commented on. I felt that everyone in the room was attempting to appear unflappable, and also pondering whether or not to say something about me. All opted not to. I sat there with my notepad. At two-thirty, Brian Kleist passed out work orders, and the millwrights exited. I followed Brian. Outside the pod room, he said, “Hey, come here,” and two guys did, and then three others turned around and appeared to think about it for a moment, whether this directive meant them, too, and from among those three, two decided it did, so that in the end we were a group of six—Brian, me, Ralph Gibson, Wade Lantz, Jeremy Barrett, Ron Richardson—and Brian said, “Okay, this guy is a writer, like I said, and he needs to follow people around today, so, Ralph, Wade, Jer, Ron, he follows you around, and just whatever it is or whatever happens, and you just answer his questions or whatever.” Brian turned toward me. “So hang around with these guys,” he said.

  Ralph, Wade, Jeremy, and Ron had a work order that called for building a crib. (A crib is an enclosure, in this case one that would contain wiring harnesses.) It was supposed to include a four-foot sliding window with a shelf and a four-foot sliding gate. There was another work order calling for the construction of pallet racks. The shelves were supposed to be ten to sixteen feet high to accommodate storage of fuselage rails. I tagged along while Ralph, Wade, Jeremy, and Ron got the right tools and the right materials for these projects, and as this was going on, I singled out Jeremy as my most likely conduit to information about Delvin Harvey, and focused on him in what you would have to call an ingratiating way, thinking simultaneously of something the journalist Janet Malcolm had written in a book about a murder trial: that every journalist (my circumstances were essentially journalistic) who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what journalists do is morally indefensible. That didn’t stop me, though. After about forty-five minutes of working Jeremy (not without shame), I said to him—in hearing of the others—“I heard about a millwright here who was arrested for murder.”

  Jeremy sported long gray hair in a kind of mane. He also had a mustache. And very heavy eyebrows that were not gray yet and that included little up-sweeping points that made him look devilish. He wore a chambray shirt with a couple of its buttons unbuttoned, and in the long V formed by that grew a dense coiling forest of salt-and-pepper hair. He also featured what I called patrol boots in grade school. His gut pooched. He was creaky. His shoulders were narrow. His mane was well coiffed. He wore plastic safety glasses held to his head by a tight elastic band that bit into his hair. “Murder?” he said, but not incredulously.

  They talked about it for a while, Jeremy, Wade, Ralph, and Ron, going back in time—many years, in fact—figuratively scratching their heads in unison as they built the crib meant for wiring harnesses, doing so amid an astounding density of pneumatic tool noise and moving machinery, until, finally, someone hit on Delvin Harvey, and then they were telling me about him with profuse insistence and texting millwrights in far corners of the facility who could “fill me in on the guy.” And here I will ratify the maxim I mentioned earlier (the one about journalists knowing perfectly well that what they do is morally indefensible) by acknowledging my exploitation of the will to participate. Most people, properly primed, will speak to a writer, even if in principle they’re prepared to refuse. You can study that in a journalism school. Or more broadly in a course on sales. By lunch—6:00 p.m. on second shift—I was recording guiltlessly.

  * * *

  —

  First millwright: “Harvey was an interesting guy who kept to himself but would say unexpected things out of left field. I remember, a few times, he talked about the Civil War. He was a history buff when it came to the Civil War. Like, at the Battle of Chattanooga, if only General Confederate had gone left instead of right and put the artillery on his flank and—What is this guy talking about? Mainly, though, you didn’t toy with Harvey. There was no back and forth. He wasn’t, you know, loose about stuff. He had twelve kids or sixteen kids or fifty kids or something. ’Cuz he was Christian, I guess. Personally, I don’t have a problem with Christians, and I don’t have a problem with anybody, really. My thing is, live and let be. Not Harvey, because when he got on Christian it was: I’m right and there’s no two ways about it. But I never had a problem with him. It’s okay with me. No biggie. Either way. Here’s the thing, though. You can’t say Harvey was like this or like that, because I knew him twenty years, and that’s, like, I don’t know, age twenty-eight to age forty-eight, and people change. Like I can remember Harvey, he actually talked quite a bit about his kids, like you would be out there on the floor with him and he would tell you how over the weekend his kids, whatever, and he would go on to where it was like he was a chatterbox. So that was different. Some of these guys won’t remember this, but for a long time Harvey was flat-out hillbilly. What does that mean? It means big-ass beard. You guys remember that. Some guys called him Smith Brother, ’cuz he looked like the guys on the Smith Brothers Cough Drops. ‘So where’s Smith Brother?’—stuff like that. Big fuzzy beard. Lunch break, for a while there, Harvey played a flute. Feature that. Or guys called it a flute. Personally, I don’t know what it was. It sounded like a flute. Anyway, he played that. So, going back a while, guy with a Smith Bro beard playing a flute in the corner, what’s that all about? I would say he looked sorta like an Amish dude at that point. Pretty weird.

  “What did he play? Hell if I know. Little songs, I guess. ‘Johnny Comes Marching Home’?”

  * * *

  —

  Second millwright: “That thing was called an ocarina. Reason he had it, it was smaller than a flute. Type of thing you can put in your pocket. Smith Bro played that through his hillbilly beard. His monster muff. Whatever you call it. One time, Smith Bro told me he was making little wooden stuff to give his kids for Christmas instead of going to Kmart. I told him I make wooden stuff. Because I do. Quick stuff. Blocks, toys. Del was making these wooden guns look like BB guns, and these little cowboy corrals. And he whittled. Do I remember he had trouble with anyone? Yeah, he had trouble with people, but the people he had trouble with were troublemakers anyway. He didn’t look for it. He left for a while to do something other in the plant—like he was inspecting crane cables, servicing elevators—but then he came back, and I remember, when the eight-seven plane was coming out, we had this job, Del and me, we had to pull all the rubber out of the tracks for the hangar doors, and he was in a shoot-the-shit mood, and he was on religion a lot, like ‘God has a plan for you,’ and I thought that was flaky. When I was a kid, my parents, they made me go to Bible camp, and when they picked me up after three weeks, I told them I wasn’t gonna go again next year, because they try to scare the shit out of you there, but I didn’t say this to Del, because he was such a hard-core church guy you couldn’t say that to him. Massive hard-core church guy. He was in Planned Jobs, remember? So he had something to say. He had control for a while there, and there were guys didn’t like how he handled that. They thought he turned down jobs. Underestimated them. Didn’t trust. Made you feel small. Not everyone. But there were guys felt like that. Didn’t understand him. Always took overtime, though. One time, Del and me, we worked twenty-four straight, because the seven-seven line was down, they had these hoists for the wing frames out of whack, and so we did that. There’s also this thing called the ‘body section turn fixture,’ which you oughta see while you’re here, because this thing, it rolls the body sections around for inspection, and it always needs maintenance, so we did that, which was a drag. What else? You wanna know what else we did? What Harvey and me did? We worked on the crawlers. We put in jib booms. One summer, me and Del, we were down in an elevator pit all summer, where they put in the landing gear, and we were working on the portals and messing around with the jackscrews, and Del, he hardly said two words for three straight months, which was fine with me, ’cuz I’m the kind of person wants to concentrate on his job, get outa there, and go water skiing.”