conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about U.S, Americans, Marshall with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Missile Paradise'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Missile Paradise
  Cooper anchors a good hundred yards from the pilings—because he doesn't have the strength to tie up, much less negotiate the breakers. The island looks like an accident of nature, a thicket of palm trees on a hump of sand, hazy in the distance. Cooper can't be sure how much of the haze is due to heat and salt spray and how much is a product of his alarming fever: 104 by the thermometer's last warning. His right leg looks like a broiled side of beef, yellow-brown and bloated, a crusty custard of puss attracting all manner of flies on this windless afternoon.
  His pain is a hot and humming thing, as if it had a life of its own. Like a teeming colony of red ants: always busy, always chewing.
  Ahead he sees only a single, aged pier, which suggests that the island has few inhabitants and receives fewer visitors. He's not completely ignorant about the mid-Pacific. He's done some reading. He knows that these atolls are crowns of coral left by sunken volcanoes a million years ago. Some come and go with the surge of storms. Many have never been visited or have been visited only long enough to be deemed uninhabitable because there's little fresh water out here. It's tropical, yes, just north of the equator, but not rain-forest tropical. The rainy season crashes through every summer, sometimes a typhoon in the spring, but most storms are squalls, abrupt and short-lived, the sun breaking through to bake things dry within the hour. Always the relentless sun.
  This afternoon's squall won't even reach him: he sees skyscraping thunderheads thresh the water a mile away. The clouds are trundling north, black as a nasty bruise. Behind him lies a silver gleaming, endless horizon. No wind today, so he couldn't sail even if he had the strength. Which is why he put into this lagoon two days ago to find a landing. Since then he has been congratulating himself for this show of prudence.
  The atoll's name, he thinks, is Lili. Or, rather, he wishes it were Lili because the name reminds him of his ex-finacée, Lillian. Orange-haired Lillian, three inches taller than he (which accounts for her slight stoop); green-eyed Lillian, a collector of vintage pottery, which she displays on shelves and tables throughout her A-frame in Montara, just south of San Francisco; swan-necked Lillian, who leotards her yoga in front of the CD-player, with its music of Zen garden gongs, the A-frame resounding with eerily sonorous notes at eerie intervals: bong... bong... bong; cinnamon-scented Lillian, who bakes oatmeal-cinnamon-coconut-raisin granola for breakfast; speech-impeded Lillian, whose stutter makes even her anger sound charming.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Missile Paradise
  Cooper anchors a good hundred yards from the pilings—because he doesn't have the strength to tie up, much less negotiate the breakers. The island looks like an accident of nature, a thicket of palm trees on a hump of sand, hazy in the distance. Cooper can't be sure how much of the haze is due to heat and salt spray and how much is a product of his alarming fever: 104 by the thermometer's last warning. His right leg looks like a broiled side of beef, yellow-brown and bloated, a crusty custard of puss attracting all manner of flies on this windless afternoon.
  His pain is a hot and humming thing, as if it had a life of its own. Like a teeming colony of red ants: always busy, always chewing.
  Ahead he sees only a single, aged pier, which suggests that the island has few inhabitants and receives fewer visitors. He's not completely ignorant about the mid-Pacific. He's done some reading. He knows that these atolls are crowns of coral left by sunken volcanoes a million years ago. Some come and go with the surge of storms. Many have never been visited or have been visited only long enough to be deemed uninhabitable because there's little fresh water out here. It's tropical, yes, just north of the equator, but not rain-forest tropical. The rainy season crashes through every summer, sometimes a typhoon in the spring, but most storms are squalls, abrupt and short-lived, the sun breaking through to bake things dry within the hour. Always the relentless sun.
  This afternoon's squall won't even reach him: he sees skyscraping thunderheads thresh the water a mile away. The clouds are trundling north, black as a nasty bruise. Behind him lies a silver gleaming, endless horizon. No wind today, so he couldn't sail even if he had the strength. Which is why he put into this lagoon two days ago to find a landing. Since then he has been congratulating himself for this show of prudence.
  The atoll's name, he thinks, is Lili. Or, rather, he wishes it were Lili because the name reminds him of his ex-finacée, Lillian. Orange-haired Lillian, three inches taller than he (which accounts for her slight stoop); green-eyed Lillian, a collector of vintage pottery, which she displays on shelves and tables throughout her A-frame in Montara, just south of San Francisco; swan-necked Lillian, who leotards her yoga in front of the CD-player, with its music of Zen garden gongs, the A-frame resounding with eerily sonorous notes at eerie intervals: bong... bong...
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is four more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Every morning he brings Cooper here, to the "Recreation Center," a large pre-fab facility with an ocean view. It looks like any other health club, right down to the TVs hanging over the treadmills and stationary bikes. From the inside of a place like the Rec Center, you'd never know you weren't in America. It makes Cooper think of the episode from the campy "Prisoner" series, where the bad guys build a duplicate of London in order to fool their captive, John Drake, into thinking he is home again.
  Gus has Cooper working in the matted area, where children practice tumbling and jujitsu. He works out three times a day, with an hour's rest between each session and a two-hour lunch. This is the last of his sessions today and he is exhausted, though he has promised himself that he won't complain.
  He looks up at Gus who is beckoning him like an eager father. Gus has unruly black hair that would better suit an Asian pop star. His droopy face almost gives him the look of a friendly dog—a basset hound, perhaps. Like Bo, his father's pet.
  DataCell offered to send Cooper to Hono for six weeks of the intensive PT but Cooper sensed that it would be a mistake to absent himself from his new community for so long. By toughing it out here, he can save DataCell a lot of money, win himself some points with his supervisors, and make some connections on the island. Cooper never considered himself so calculating but, since the Benefit Specialist's visit a week ago, he has become very cautious. His every other thought now, it seems, is about survival: keeping his job, securing his future. Whatever it takes to keep from returning as damaged goods to his parents' modest rancher in Baltimore.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last three paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It is time, she knows, to bury Erik. Despite protests from her parents and his, she has stubbornly refused to hold a memorial service for him, as if she still expected him to show up one day with a tale of how he was picked up by a Malaysian freighter and carted twice around the world before he could return home. Now she is willing to accept what she has never accepted truly, that he may never be found. A fact of life. To accept Erik's absence finally is to accept also something she has kept secret from herself: no matter where she goes, she will see water, either in its abundance or in its absence, stream beds, lake beds, the beds of ancient oceans; and every body of water will remind her of Erik's body, the phantom warmth of his hand against her cheek, his chest against hers, his breath like her breath. This is all she's left with and this will have to be enough.
  Until a couple weeks ago, Lino was visiting Jeton nightly. He would stand at Jeton's bedside and stare at him with wild drowned eyes and say, "Hey, Jeton, 'sup?" This was better than saying, "We're sinking, man!" Jeton would be polite and make small talk but it was frightening every time. He is not sure why Lino stopped coming. Maybe the flood settled the ghosts in the Baptist graveyard. In an effort to keep the peace and show respect, Jeton visits Lino's grave once a week.
  Here is something Jeton tells no one: he has quit smoking and is running every day because he wants to try out for the national soccer team. He runs barefoot from one end of Ebeye to the other. He runs very hard and very fast. The old people think he is crazy. "Where are you going in such a hurry?" they ask. "Do you know where you are going?"