Bond is tired and ailing. Bond is a jigsaw puzzle of sexually transmitted disease and organ failure. Bond is exhausted.

Her Majesty’s Secret Service disbanded years ago, but Bond unconsciously mimics second lieutenant Onoda who fought for an army that had surrendered 29 years earlier. Bond, too, was trapped on an island with no means of communication and had been for what he mistook for 29 years. It had only been six months, but time was beginning to tell. Bond wrestles with pythons and fights sharks occasionally. There is no one else on this island, though there is a house and a landing strip that he watches carefully. He forages for food and his clothes are rags, slacks shredded into hip-hugging shorts, sleeveless shirt ridiculously confetti-like. He must be here for the house.

On this particular day, Bond props himself up against a coconut tree to watch the dark, silent house. This is not his style and he knows it, but he is tired. On this particular day, Bond scoops out the white flesh from a coconut with a spoon he has fashioned from a chipped stone and wood. On this particular day a light comes on in the house.

Action, Bond sighs and hefts himself up off the moist ground, his feet wrapped in banana leaves. The long climb up the slippery, foliage-choked hill to the house gives him time to think. He’s not sure why he hasn’t retired, or been retired and all of its implications. His knees hurt going up such a steep slope. He’s been out of this business for quite a long time or he’s been waiting for this to happen, he’s not sure which anymore. Hard to say how long, but long enough that he doesn’t know why he is going to check on the house now, after all this time. It’s as if he’s been on vacation. And what does he think he’ll do if he finds someone up there, thirty years younger and all that goes with that? At this point he doesn’t know and doesn’t really care anymore.

He stops a short ways up to catch his breath. He thinks about a drink, vaporous, but vague and for the first time really looks around. This island is magnificent: so green and fecund, so quiet, so unearthly. Why haven’t I seen it before? The decrepit stucco, stone house with its extensive wooden deck so anomalous in the surrounding forest* looming up above him, the single light still shining in the living room window off the deck. Who’s house is this anyway? Was I dropped here? Shipwrecked? Am I in purgatory? He begins his ascent again.

A very long time later (days? He cannot keep track of the time anymore, even the days are dark for him) he is under the deck, which is five or six feet above the slope of the island hill, crouching on his painful ankles. He kneels in the muck (knees popping in the dark, wet underside of the deck) and then lies on the ground and crawls around the house to a window he had, some time ago (when he first arrived?), noticed was open. As he creeps through the window he realizes that he has no weapon. He does not stop. He stands when he gets into the bare room. He opens the door adjoining the living room.

Silence.

The light is not on.

*What kind of trees were these anyway? At one time he would have known what each tree was, the toxicity level, the hardness of the wood, the types of berries, nativity. Now he only knows that he knew this information. Now he only has a wooden spoon.