Brooks stared at the maps and repeated the reports but now he was not aware he was doing it. He was thinking of Lila again, of their conflict and of conflict in general. He tried not to think about her. He attempted to supplant it with thoughts of the here and now but it didn’t work. There was Lila and there was that thing bothering him and there was racial tension and there was war. They were all conflicts and he wanted to think about conflict causation but under it all there was that thing. The thing in Hawaii. Perhaps it had really begun with their first fight and with what happened afterward. Maybe, he thought, that was the origin of the Hawaii thing. It goes back a lot farther than those divorce papers, he said to himself. Farther back even than Hawaii or even than getting married. Ma
