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Koch_9780804138819_01_5p_r1.indd 1 3/26/14 1:52 PM
 Summer House
with
Swimming Pool

Koch_9780804138819_01_5p_r1.indd 3 3/26/14 1:52 PM

 A lso by H er ma n Koch
Th e D i n n er

Koch_9780804138819_01_5p_r1.indd 4 3/26/14 1:52 PM

 Summer House
with
Swimming Pool
a novel

Herman Koch
T r a n s l at e d f r o m th e D u t c h
b y Sa m G a r r e tt

H o ga r th
London New York

Koch_9780804138819_01_5p_r1.indd 5 3/26/14 1:52 PM

 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Translation copyright © 2014 by Sam Garrett

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Hogarth,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House LLC,
a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited,

and the H colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

Originally published in the Netherlands as Zomerhuis

met zwembad by Ambo Anthos, Amsterdam, in 2011.
Copyright © 2011 by Herman Koch.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Koch, Herman, 1953–
[Zomerhuis met zwembad. English]
Summer house with swimming pool : a novel / by Herman Koch ;
translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett.—First edition.
pages cm
1. Physicians—Fiction.  2. Medical ethics—
Fiction.  I. Garrett, Sam, translator.  II. Title.
PT5881.21.O25Z6613 2014
839.313'64—dc23 2013042805

ISBN 978-­0-­8041-­3881-­9
eBook ISBN 978-­0-­8041-­3882-­6

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Barbara Sturman

Jacket design by Christopher Brand
Jacket photograph by George Baier VI / Hand lettering by John Stevens

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

Koch_9780804138819_01_5p_r1.indd 6 3/26/14 1:52 PM

 1

I am a doctor. My office hours are from eight-­thirty in the morn-

ing to one in the afternoon. I take my time. Twenty minutes
for each patient. Those twenty minutes are my unique selling
point. Where else these days, people say, can you find a family
doctor who gives you twenty minutes?—­and they pass it along.
He doesn’t take on too many patients, they say. He makes time
for each individual case. I have a waiting list. When a patient
dies or moves away, all I have to do is pick up the phone and I
have five new ones to take their place.
Patients can’t tell the difference between time and atten-
tion. They think I give them more attention than other doctors.
But all I give them is more time. By the end of the first sixty
seconds I’ve seen all I need to know. The remaining nineteen
minutes I fill with attention. Or, I should say, with the illusion
of attention. I ask all the usual questions. How is your son/
daughter getting along? Are you sleeping better these days?

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 2  p  H e r m a n Koch

Are you sure you’re not getting too much/too little to eat? I
hold the stethoscope to their chests, then to their backs. Take
a deep breath, I say. Now breathe out nice and slow. I don’t
really listen. Or at least I try not to. On the inside, all human
bodies sound the same. First of all, of course, there’s the heart-
beat. The heart is blind. The heart pumps. The heart is the
engine room. The engine room only keeps the ship going, it
doesn’t keep it on course. And then there are the sounds of the
intestines. Of the vital organs. An overburdened liver sounds
different from a healthy one. An overburdened liver groans. It
groans and begs. It begs for a day off. A day to deal with the
worst of the garbage. The way things are now, it’s always in a
hurry, trying to catch up with itself. The overburdened liver is
like the kitchen in a restaurant that’s open around the clock.
The dishes pile up. The dishwashers are working full tilt. But
the dirty dishes and caked-­on pans only pile up higher and
higher. The overburdened liver hopes for that one day off that
never comes. Every afternoon at four-­thirty, five o’clock (some-
times earlier), the hope of that one day off is dashed again. If
the liver’s lucky, at first it’s only beer. Beer passes most of the
work along to the kidneys. But you always have those for whom
beer alone isn’t enough. They order something on the side: a
shot of gin, vodka, or whisky. Something they can knock back.
The overburdened liver braces itself, then finally ruptures.
First it grows rigid, like an overinflated tire. All it takes then is
one little bump in the road for it to blow wide open.
I listen with my stethoscope. I press against the hard spot,
just beneath the skin. Does this hurt? If I press any harder,
it will burst open right there in my office. Can’t have that. It
makes an incredible mess. Blood gushes out in a huge wave.
No general practitioner is keen to have someone die in his

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 S u m m e r H o u s e w i th S w i m m i n g P o o l   p 3
office. At home, that’s a different story. In the privacy of their
own homes, in the middle of the night, in their own beds. With
a ruptured liver, they usually don’t even make it to the phone.
The ambulance would get there too late, anyway.
My patients file into my practice at twenty-­minute inter-
vals. The office is on the ground floor of my home. They come
in on crutches and in wheelchairs. Some of them are too fat,
others are short of breath. They are, in any case, no longer
able to climb stairs. One flight of stairs would kill them for
sure. Others only imagine it would: that their final hour would
sound on the first step. Most of the patients are like that. Most
of them have nothing wrong with them. They moan and groan,
make noises that would make you think they found death star-
ing them in the face every moment of the day, they sink into
the chair across from my desk with a sigh—­but there’s nothing
wrong with them. I let them reel off their complaints. It hurts
here, and here; sometimes it spasms down to here . . . I do my
best to act interested. Meanwhile, I doodle on a scrap of paper.
I ask them to get up, to follow me to the examination room.
Occasionally I’ll ask someone to undress behind the screen,
but most of the time I don’t. Human bodies are horrible enough
as it is, even with their clothes on. I don’t want to see them,
those parts where the sun never shines. Not the folds of fat in
which it is always too warm and the bacteria have free rein, not
the fungal growths and infections between the toes, beneath
the nails, not the fingers that scratch here, the fingers that rub
there until it starts to bleed . . . Here, Doctor, here’s where it
itches really badly . . . No, I don’t want to see. I pretend to
look, but I’m thinking about something else. About a roller
coaster in an amusement park. The car at the front has a green
dragon’s head mounted on it. The people throw their hands in

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 4  p  H e r m a n Koch

the air and scream their lungs out. From the corner of my eye I
see moist tufts of pubic hair, or red, infected bald spots where
no hair will ever grow again, and I think about a plane explod-
ing in the air. The passengers still belted to their seats as they
begin a mile-­long tumble into eternity: It’s cold, the air is thin,
far below the ocean awaits. It burns when I pee, Doctor. Like
there are needles coming out . . . A train explodes just before
it enters the station. The space shuttle Columbia shatters into
millions of little pieces. The second jet slams into the South
Tower. It burns, here, Doctor. Here . . .
You can get dressed now, I say. I’ve seen enough. I’ll write
you a prescription. Some of the patients can barely conceal
their disappointment: a prescription? They stand there for a
few seconds, staring blankly, their underwear down around
their knees. They took a morning off from work, and now they
want value for their money, even if that money has actually
been coughed up by the community of the healthy. They want
the doctor to poke at them at least; they want him to pull on his
rubber gloves and take something—some body part—­between
his knowing fingers. For him to stick at least one finger into
something. They want to be examined. They aren’t content
only with his years of experience, his clinical gaze that reg-
isters at a single glance what’s wrong with a person. Because
he’s seen it all 100,000 times before. Because experience tells
him that there’s no need on occasion 100,001 to suddenly pull
the rubber gloves on.
Sometimes, though, there’s no getting around it. Some-
times you have to get in there. Usually with one or two fingers,
sometimes with your whole hand. I pull on my rubber gloves.
If you would just roll onto your side . . . For the patient, this
is the point of no return. Finally, he is being taken seriously,

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 S u m m e r H o u s e w i th S w i m m i n g P o o l   p 5
he is about to receive an internal examination, but his gaze
is no longer fixed on my face. All he can look at now are my
hands. My hands as they pull on the rubber gloves. He won-
ders why he ever let things get this far. Whether this is really
what he wants. Before putting on the gloves, I wash my hands.
The sink is across from the exam table, so I stand with my
back to him as I soap up. I take my time. I roll up my sleeves.
I can feel the patient’s eyes at my back. I let the tap water
flow over my wrists. First I wash my hands thoroughly, then my
lower arms, all the way up to the elbows. The sound of running
water blocks out all other sounds, but I know that once I’ve
reached the elbows, the patient’s breathing has quickened. It
quickens for a few seconds, or stops altogether. An internal
examination is about to take place. The patient—­consciously
or unconsciously—­has insisted on this. He had no intention
of letting himself be fobbed off with a prescription, not this
time. Meanwhile, though, the doubts arise. Why is the doctor
washing and disinfecting his hands and arms all the way up
to the elbows? Something in the patient’s body contracts. Even
though what he should be doing is relaxing as much as pos-
sible. Relaxation is the key to a smooth internal examination.
Meanwhile, I have turned around and am drying my hands,
my forearms, my elbows. Still without looking at the patient, I
take a pair of plastic-­packed gloves from a drawer. I tear open
the bag, press the pedal of the trash can with my foot, and
throw the bag away. Only now, as I pull on the gloves, do I look
at the patient. The look in his eyes is—­how shall I put it—­
different from what it was before I started washing my hands.
Lie down on your side, I say, before he has a chance to express
his misgivings. Facing the wall. A naked body is less dis-
graceful than a body with pants and underwear down around

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 6  p  H e r m a n Koch

its ankles. Less helpless. Two legs with the shoes and socks
still on, and bound together at the ankles by pants and under-
wear. Like a prisoner in a chain gang. A person with his pants
around his ankles can’t run away. You can submit someone
like that to an internal examination, but you could also punch
him right in the side of the head. Or take a pistol and empty
the clip into the ceiling. I’ve listened to these fucking lies long
enough! I’m going to count to three . . . One . . . two . . . Try to
relax, I say again. Turn on your side. I pull the rubber gloves
tighter over my fingers and farther over my wrists. The sound
of snapping rubber always reminds me of party balloons. Bal-
loons for a birthday party. You blew them up last night in order
to surprise the birthday boy. This may be a little unpleasant, I
say. The important thing is to just keep breathing calmly. The
patient is all too aware of my presence, right behind his half-­
naked body, but he can’t see me anymore. This is the moment
when I take time to submit that body, or at least the naked part
of it, to a further look.
I have, until now, been assuming that the patient is a man.
In the example we are dealing with, a man is lying on the table
with his pants and underwear pulled down. Women are a dif-
ferent story; I’ll get to women later. The man in question turns
his head slightly in my direction but, as I’ve mentioned, he
can no longer get a good look at me. Just relax your head now,
I say. All you have to do is relax. Unbeknownst to the patient,
I now turn my gaze to the naked lower back. I’ve already told
him that what follows may be a bit unpleasant. Between that
remark and the unpleasant feeling itself, there is nothing.
This is the empty moment. The emptiest moment in the entire
examination. The seconds tick by silently, like a metronome

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 S u m m e r H o u s e w i th S w i m m i n g P o o l   p 7
with the sound turned off. A metronome on a piano in a silent
movie. No physical contact has yet taken place. The bare back
bears the mark of the underwear. Red bands left on the skin
by the elastic. Sometimes there are pimples or moles. The skin
itself is often abnormally pale—­it’s one of those places where
sunlight rarely reaches. There is, however, almost always
hair. Lower down, along the back, the hair only increases. I’m
left-­handed. I place my right hand on the patient’s shoulder.
Through the rubber glove I feel the body stiffen. The entire
body tenses and contracts. It would like to relax, but instinct
is more powerful. It braces itself. It readies itself to resist inva-
sion from the outside.
By then my left hand is already where it has to be. The
patient’s mouth falls open, his lips part, a sigh escapes as my
middle finger goes in. Something between a sigh and a groan.
Take it easy, I say. It will be over in a moment. I try to think
about nothing, but that’s always difficult. So I think about the
night when I dropped my bicycle key in the mud in the middle
of a football field. It was a patch of mud no bigger than one
square yard, and I knew for sure my key was there. Does this
hurt at all? I ask. Now my index finger joins my middle fin-
ger. Using both of them will make it easier to find the key. A
little . . . Where? Here . . . ? Or here? It was raining out, a few
lights were on around the field, but it was still a bit too dark to
see well. Usually it’s the prostate. Cancer, or just an enlarge-
ment. Usually there’s not much you can say about it after the
first examination. I could have walked home and come back
the next day, once it got light. But my fingers were already in
there, the mud was already up under my nails, there wasn’t
much sense in stopping now. Ow! There, Doctor! Fucking hell!

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 8  p  H e r m a n Koch

Excuse me . . . Oh, fucking hell! And then there was that one
fraction of a second, my fingers feeling something hard amid
the goo. Careful, it could also be a piece of glass . . . I hold it
up to the light, the dim light from a lamppost beside the field,
but in fact I already know what it is. It glistens, it gleams,
I won’t have to walk home after all. Without looking at my
hands, I pull off the gloves and toss them in the step-­on trash
can. You can sit up now. You can get dressed. It’s too early to
draw conclusions, I say.
It was eighteen months ago when Ralph Meier suddenly
appeared in my waiting room. I recognized him right away, of
course. He asked whether he could talk to me for just a mo-
ment? . . . It . . . was nothing urgent, he said. Once we were
in my office, he came straight to the point. He wanted to know
whether it was true, what so-­and-­so had told him, that I was
fairly accommodating with prescriptions for—­Here he looked
around somewhat skittishly, as though the place might be
bugged. “So-­and-­so” was a regular patient of mine. In the long
run they all tell one another everything, which is how Ralph
Meier ended up in my practice. It sort of depends, I said. I’ll
have to ask you a few questions about your general health, so
we don’t run into any unpleasant surprises later on. But if we
do that? he insisted. If everything is okay, would you be will-
ing . . . I nodded. Yes, I said. That can be arranged.
Now we’re eighteen months down the road and Ralph
Meier is dead. And tomorrow morning I have to appear before
the Board of Medical Examiners. Not for what I helped him
out with that time, but for something else, about six months
later. Something you might describe as a “medical error.” I’m
not so worried about the Board of Examiners; in the medical

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 S u m m e r H o u s e w i th S w i m m i n g P o o l   p 9
profession we all know one another. Often enough, we even
went to school together. It’s not like in the States, where a law-
yer can ruin a doctor after a misdiagnosis. In this country you
really have to have gone too far. And even then: a warning, a
few months’ suspension, no more than that.
All I have to do is make sure the members of the board ac-
tually see it as a medical error. I’ll have to keep my wits about
me. I have to keep believing in it, one hundred ­percent—­in
the medical error.
The funeral was a couple of days ago. At that lovely, rus-
tic cemetery by the bend in the river. Big old trees, the wind
blowing through the branches, rustling the leaves. Birds were
twittering. I stayed as far to the back as I could, which seemed
prudent enough, but nothing could have prepared me for what
happened next.
“How dare you show your face here!”
A brief moment of absolute silence, as though even the
wind had suddenly died down. The birds went quiet, too, from
one moment to the next.
“You piece of shit! How dare you! How dare you!”
Judith Meier had a voice like a trained opera singer, a
voice that could reach the audience in the very last row of a
concert hall. All eyes turned in my direction. She was standing
beside the open back of the hearse, into which the pallbearers
had just shouldered the coffin containing her husband’s body.
Then she was trotting toward me, elbowing her way through
hundreds of mourners, who stepped aside to let her through.
For the next thirty seconds, her high heels on the gravel drive
were the only sound in an otherwise breathless silence.
Right in front of me, she stopped. I was actually expecting

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 10  p  H e r m a n Koch

her to slap me. Or to start pounding her fists against my lapels.

To make, in other words, a scene; something she had always
been good at.
But she didn’t.
She looked at me. The whites of her eyes were laced with
red.
“Piece of shit,” she said again, much more quietly now.
Then she spat in my face.

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 2

A general practitioner’s task is simple. He doesn’t have to heal

people, he only has to make sure they don’t sidestep him and
make it to the specialists and the hospitals. His office is an out-
post. The more people who can be stopped at the outpost, the
better the practitioner is at what he does. It’s simple arithmetic.
If we family doctors were to let through everyone with an itch,
a spot, or a cough to a specialist or a hospital, the system would
collapse entirely. Entirely. Someone did the arithmetic on that
once. The conclusion was that the collapse would come more
quickly than anyone expected. If every general practi­tioner
referred more than one-­third of his patients for further care
from a specialist, the system would begin to creak and buckle
within two days. Within a week it would collapse. The general
practitioner mans the outpost. Just a common cold, he says.
Take it easy for a week, and if it’s not over by then, well, don’t
hesitate to come back. Three days later, in the middle of the

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 12  p  H e r m a n Koch

night, the patient suffocates on his own mucus. That can hap-
pen, you say, but it’s a fluke. A rare combination of factors. We
see it in no more than one out of every ten thousand patients.
Patients don’t realize that there’s strength in numbers. They
let themselves be ushered into my office one by one. There I
spend twenty minutes with them, convincing them that there’s
nothing wrong. My office hours are from eight-­thirty to one.
That adds up to three patients an hour, twelve to thirteen a
day. For the system, I’m the ideal family doctor. General prac-
titioners who think they can make do with half the time per
visit see twenty-­four patients in a working day. When there are
twenty-­four of them, there’s more of a chance of a few slipping
through the cracks than there is when there are only twelve.
It has to do with how they feel. A patient who gets only ten
minutes’ attention feels shortchanged sooner than a patient
who gets the same song and dance for twenty minutes. The
patient gets the impression that his complaints are being taken
seriously. A patient like that is less likely to insist on further
examination.
Mistakes happen, of course. Our system couldn’t exist
without mistakes. In fact, a system like ours thrives on its mis-
takes. Even a misdiagnosis, after all, can lead to the desired
result. But usually a misdiagnosis isn’t even necessary. The
most important weapon we general practitioners have at our
disposal is the waiting list. The mere mention of the waiting
list tends to do the job. For this examination there’s a wait-
ing list of six to eight months, I say. With that treatment your
symptoms might be a little less acute, but there’s a waiting
list . . . Half the patients give up as soon as the waiting list
is mentioned. I can see it in their faces: relief. One of these
days is none of these days, they figure. No one wants to have

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 S u m m e r H o u s e w i th S w i m m i n g P o o l   p 13
a tube the size of a garden hose pushed down their throat. It’s
not a particularly comfortable procedure, I say. You could also
decide to wait and see whether it goes away with a combina-
tion of rest and medication. Then we’ll take another look in six
months’ time.
How can there be waiting lists, you might ask yourself, in a
wealthy country like the Netherlands? For me, the association
is always with the gas bubble. With our reserves of natural gas.
I brought it up once during an informal gathering with col-
leagues. The waiting list for hip operations: How many cubic
yards of gas would you have to sell in order to do away with
that list within a week? I asked. How, for Christ’s sake, is it
possible that in a civilized country like ours people die before
they reach the top of the waiting list? You can’t look at it that
way, my colleagues said. You can’t tally gas reserves against
the number of postponed hip operations.
The gas bubble is huge. Even worst-­case scenarios predict
that there will be enough natural gas for the next sixty years.
Sixty years! That’s bigger than the oil reserves in the Persian
Gulf. This is a wealthy country. We’re as rich as Saudi Arabia,
as Kuwait, as Qatar—­but still, people die here because they
have to wait too long for a new kidney, infants die because
the ambulance that’s rushing them to the hospital gets stuck
in traffic, mothers’ lives are endangered because we, we gen-
eral practitioners, convince them that home-­birthing is safe.
While what we should actually say is that it’s only cheaper—­
here, too, it’s clear that if every mother claimed the right to
give birth in a hospital, the system would collapse within a
week. The risks of babies dying, of babies suffering brain dam-
age because no oxygen can be administered during a home
birth are simply factored into the equation. Every once in a

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 14  p  H e r m a n Koch

great while an article appears in a medical journal, and some-

times a summary of that article will actually make the Dutch
papers, but even those summaries show that infant mortality
in the Netherlands is the highest in all of Europe and indeed
the Western world. But no one has ever acted on those figures.
In fact, the family doctor is powerless in the face of all this.
He can put a patient’s mind at ease. He can see to it, for the
time being at least, that a patient doesn’t seek the assistance
of a specialist. He can convince a woman that home-­birthing
poses no risks whatsoever. That it’s all much more “natural.”
Whereas it’s only more natural in the sense that dying is natu-
ral, too. We can give them salves or sleeping pills, we can burn
away moles with acid, we can remove ingrown toenails. Nasty
chores, usually. Like cleaning the kitchen, using a scouring
pad to remove the goo from between the burners.
I lie awake at night sometimes. I think about the gas
bubble. Sometimes it resembles a bubble like the ones you
blow with soapsuds, only it’s right under the earth’s crust; all
you have to do is poke a hole in it and it deflates—­or blows
up in your face. At other times the gas is spread out over a
much greater area. It has permeated into the loose earth. The
natural-­gas molecules have mixed invisibly with the soil. You
can’t smell it. You hold a match up to it and it explodes. The
little fire becomes an inferno that spreads within seconds
across hundreds of square miles. Underground. The earth’s
surface becomes hollowed out, there is no more support for
bridges and buildings, not enough solid ground beneath the
feet of humans and animals, entire cities sink into the burning
depths. I lie there with my eyes open in the dark. Sometimes
our country’s undoing takes the form of a documentary. A docu­
mentary on the National Geographic Channel, with charts and

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 S u m m e r H o u s e w i th S w i m m i n g P o o l   p 15
computer animations, the kind of documentary they’re so good
at: documentaries about dam bursts and tsunamis, about ava-
lanches and mudslides that wipe whole towns and villages off
the map, about the entire side of a volcano that breaks off from
an island and slides into the sea, causing a tidal wave, which,
eight hours later and thousands of miles away, reaches a height
of almost four thousand feet. The Disappearance of a Country,
tomorrow night at nine-­thirty, on this channel. Our country.
Our country consumed by its own reserves of natural gas.

On rare occasions, lying awake at night like this, I think about

Ralph Meier. About his role as the Emperor Augustus in the
television series of the same name. The role suits him to a
tee; both his fans and his detractors are in total agreement
about that. First of all, of course, because of his build, the cor-
pulence he nurtured through the years. An obesity achieved
exclusively by means of systematic pig-­outs in restaurants
with one or more Michelin stars. By lavish barbecues in his
yard: sausages from Germany, hams from Bulgaria, entire
suckling lambs roasted on a spit. I remember those barbecues
as though they were yesterday: his hulking frame beside the
smoking fire, single-­handedly flipping the hamburgers, steaks,
and drumsticks. His unshaven, flushed face, the barbecue fork
in one hand, a sixteen-­ounce can of Jupiler in the other. His
voice, which always carried right across the lawn. A voice like
a foghorn. A voice that tankers and container vessels might
use to find their bearings in distant estuaries and foreign ports.
The last barbecue wasn’t even that long ago, it occurs to me
now, only about five months. He was already ill by then. It
was still he who flipped the meat, but now he had pulled up

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 16  p  H e r m a n Koch

a plastic lawn chair—­he had to sit while he did it. It’s always
fascinating, how an illness—­an illness like his—­attacks the
human body. It’s a war. The bad cells turn against the good. At
first they attack the body from the sides, a flanking maneuver.
An orderly little attack is all it is, a glancing blow, designed
only to divert attention from the main force. You think you’ve
won: You have, after all, repelled this first minor assault. But
the main force is still in hiding, deeper inside the body, in a
dark place where the X-­rays, the ultrasounds, and the MRI
scans can’t find it. The main force is patient. It waits until it
has reached full strength. Until victory is assured.
The third episode was on TV last night. The emperor con-
solidates his power. He changes his name from Gaius Octa-
vius to Augustus, and sidelines the Senate. There are ten
more episodes to come. There has never been any suggestion
of canceling or postponing Augustus just because its star is
dead. Ralph Meier is formidable in his role, the only Dutch
actor in a cast of Italians, Americans, and Englishmen, but he
outplays them all.
Last night, I believe I must have been the only one who
watched the series in a different way. Through other eyes, per-
haps that’s the way to put it. The eyes of a doctor.
“Can I go, anyway?” he’d asked me at the time. “It’s a two-­
month shoot. If I have to pull out halfway through, it would be
a disaster for everyone involved.”
“Of course,” I told him. “Don’t worry. It usually doesn’t
amount to anything. We’ll just wait for the tests to come back.
There will be plenty of time afterwards.”
I watched the Emperor Augustus as he spoke to the Sen-
ate. It was an American-­Italian co­produc­tion, and they hadn’t
cut any corners. Thousands of Roman soldiers, entire legions

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 S u m m e r H o u s e w i th S w i m m i n g P o o l   p 17
cheering from the hillsides around Rome, tens of thousands of
swords, shields, and spears raised high, fleets of hundreds of
ships before the port of Alexandria, chariot races, gladiatorial
contests, roaring lions, and mangled Christians. Ralph Meier
had the illness in its most aggressive form. It was something
you had to act on immediately; otherwise it was too late. Radi-
cal intervention: a first strike, a carpet bombing to knock out
the malignant cells at a single blow. I looked at his face, his
body. Inside that body, in all likelihood, the main force had
already begun its offensive.
“Senators!” he said. “From this day forth I am your emperor.
Emperor . . . Augustus!”
His voice carried, as always—­at least it still did then. If
there was anything wrong with him, he didn’t let it show. Ralph
Meier was a real trouper. If need be, he could upstage anyone
and anything. Even a fatal illness.

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