In a middle eastern restaurant

near the hotel where Jimi Hendrix wrote the lyrics to Little Wing, in the back room, a group of individuals with various international relationships and questionable employments, students, radicals, bureaucrats, organizers, educators, explicators, scullers, strawberry pickers, bicycle mechanics, sociologists, literary critics, environmentalists, medical technology specialists, policy analyists, French chevaliers, painters, poets, preachers, pundits, knitters, nyet-ers, food docents, bee keepers, and hyacinth farmers ate shwarmah and did not plot the overthrow of the government even though discussions of Deer Island made some ask impertinent questions about covert security agencies.