THE TIP OF THE CONSORTIUM stayed for my reading, and they insisted that Lana stay with them, so I had an audience of twenty for my reading of “Enough Is Enough,” the twenty-seventh episode of Dead Air.

ANOTHER OF THE REALTORS, Lana, brought a group of potential buyers to the island. They came in their own boat, one of those long, powerful speedboats modeled on offshore racers, the kind that my friend Mark Dorset, the unaffiliated psychosociologist, calls a penis boat.

BALDY THE DUMMY ended his program that night with a story that began with a question, his favorite kind of question. “Have you ever wondered what evil looks like, boys and girls?” He waited a moment, gave his listening audience a moment of dead air, so that we could answer, “Yeah.” . . .

I READ “Filling Time,” the twenty-sixth episode of Dead Air, to a good crowd, but as I looked out over their faces I couldn’t help seeing them as agents of destruction, people who were going to make messes and break things and cost us money. . .

I’VE SAID IT BEFORE: imagination can be a curse.

AFTER THE READING, and after some discussion of the reading, I made my way to the bar, where I ordered a drink from Lou. When he handed it to me, I leaned across the bar and said, “We have to talk.” . . .

THAT EVENING, I read “Testing, Testing,” episode twenty-five of Dead Air, to an audience of thirty-four — Albertine, Suki, Lou, Elaine, Clark and Alice, Artie and Nancy, Otto and Esther, Louise and Miranda, Tony T and Cutie, and twenty daytrippers.

WHEN I WENT DOWN to the dock to pump the launch dry, I found that someone was already there. From a distance, he looked like a hood from my school days. (If you were not around during my school days, reader, you may not know that hoods were bad boys, or boys who wanted to be mistaken for bad boys. . . .

“THERE ACTUALLY IS a drink called a hurricane,” said Lou, filling a line of glasses along the bar, “but I tried it and I didn’t like it, so this is my version of it, the Hurricane Lou.”

THE WIND was still roaring in the evening, the tide was still high, the basement was completely flooded, the cabins were partly submerged, and our island was only a fraction of its usual size, . . .