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I had to get up early for the airport the next morning. All I could see in my mind when I shut my eyes was his small mouth, the wet-dryness of it, the pressure of his cheek brushing mine when he pulled away. How he asked if he could do it again, and how I tried to keep his arms and hands in sight at all times as he moved closer, afraid that he would reach or brush or take something more. In the bar, after the guy left, I tried to relax, but I kept thinking, What if he did come back, what would I do then?

What would I do when I felt a strange hand on me, years and miles away from that place? There are easy guesses: I was raped often as a young person; I was abused physically; no one ever hugged me until I was a teenager. But these have the hollow ring of simple solutions to complicated questions.

When the guy at the writing retreat kissed me on the mouth, I felt, first, emptiness, and then the queasy, earth-tilting sway of fear. Worse still, I saw the flare of their words working, contextualizing the moment, knowing that it would be even harder to explain my feelings about it later; that it would be impossible to dismiss it. Oh, when. Why are you alone? And then, I guess, I feel like a hypocrite, because while I do bristle when people ask me questions like that, I do long for something. Recently, another friend came to stay with me for a couple days.

We had coffee and tea. We ate meals together. We looked at books. We had long conversations deep into the night. We challenged each other. We engaged each other. He is thoughtful and good. But I did not fall in love with him, not really. To be open to another person; to be aware of them, their faults, their glories, their ugliness, their beauty. Sometimes, I say that I want to be with someone who I only have to see three or four times a week, and only to cook meals and go book shopping.

I say that I want some flannel-wearing bearded man to descend from a rainy mountain in Washington State or Vermont, who smells like crushed ice and the sharp scent of pine sap, who will read Proust to me in French and drink from enamel mugs beside a firepit with me. But the look in their eyes is rueful pity, that this is not enough. What I want is mostly to be alone. And to not have to contextualize my loneliness in a way that makes other people comfortable with it. So what if I sit in my apartment and read one book after another or watch period pieces.

Or Do gay men find black men attractive? Or Do gay men find fat black men attractive? Maybe I do. I probably do. The idea of sex — thirst — is at some level physiological for me. A reflex from some vestigial organ. But the actual, pulsating need for sex is long gone. And maybe I never had it. The length of record is not a sign of legitimacy, but rather inertia, chronology, sequence.

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And as for romantic love, that too feels like an unnecessarily complicated game. Trujillo Ruiz was momentarily nonplussed, but as the police closed in, he pulled out a diplomatic passport and claimed immunity. The police had no right to be there, he said, as they were actually on territory belonging to another country — his office was the Sealandic consulate in Spain. The passport was superficially quite legit, with a rubber coating and foil-stamped seals, and it gave the officers some pause when considering how to handle the arrest.

Far from being a diplomat, Trujillo Ruiz was one of the prime movers and shakers in a gang of scam artists operating throughout the world. At least 20 fake diplomatic passports, hundreds more blank passports, and 2, official documents were seized in the raids, as were two vehicles with Sealand diplomatic license plates that had been escorted through Madrid by Spanish police on more than one occasion.

While the Versace incident in had alarmed them, the Bates family had been oblivious to the extent of the problem with Sealand passports. Michael scratched his chin. Sealand did have a website, but it was in its infancy. The site was how he had left it. He then searched around and turned up a Sealand site with a much more manageable domain name: Lo and behold, it was a website purporting to be the official mouthpiece of Sealand, and one could indeed buy a number of Sealandic documents.

Spanish investigators unraveled the web and found that the scams associated with the fake Sealand paperwork involved more than 80 people from all over world.

The scams were impressively wide-ranging: We knew nothing at all about it or the people involved. They intended to sell the arms to Sudan, which was under embargo by many governments of the world for being a terrorist state. How disgusting can you get?

Trujillo Ruiz reportedly first learned about Sealand while working in Germany for a man named Friedbert Ley, who had launched his own Sealand fan website in and asked Trujillo Ruiz to set up a Spanish branch office of the Sealandic government. When confronted by investigators about the fake passports, Trujillo Ruiz conceded that they were made in Germany but said he had been appointed acting head of state by the royal family of Sealand and been given authorization to issue Sealandic passports.

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Roy Bates was of course fine. The Germans had once visited the younger Trujillo Ruiz in Spain, and they appeared to be a bad influence on him, the father said. I n the early s, Roy Bates had prepared to turn the fort into a much larger ministate with a group of Belgians and Germans who had offered to go into business with him.

The Germans were led by Alexander Gottfried Achenbach, said to be a former diamond dealer who was planning on a quiet retirement raising rabbits in Belgium until the Sealand opportunity sucked him back in. The Germans were remarkable busybodies, drawing up a constitution and legal decrees and bombarding embassies all over the world with requests for diplomatic recognition. Nevertheless, the petitioning continued in earnest and their zeal was infectious. Roy Bates had long intended to make the fort into a profitable business, and the plans he and the Germans cooked up were grandiose.

Back in Sealand, however, Michael was working on the fort alone when a helicopter landed. Out came some of their German associates, who claimed Roy had given them possession of the fort. Michael was extremely uneasy about the situation — and completely outnumbered. Roy and Joan were similarly uneasy when a friend back in England alerted them that he had seen a helicopter hovering near Sealand.

Their sinking feeling was justified. Michael tried to wrench himself free, his hair falling in his eyes as he was dragged into the room and shut behind a steel door. The only possible way out was a porthole window, but it was far too small for an adult to fit through.

Michael was left in the room for three days, keeping himself warm by wrapping himself in a Sealandic flag. Eventually, the captors threw Michael onto a boat, which deposited him in the Netherlands, with no money and no passport. A sympathetic skipper helped him get back to England, where he linked back up with his parents.

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But Michael explained his ordeal. Holding the Fort. The family quickly decided that the only possible response was to recapture the fort. They gathered some rough-and-tumble friends and a few guns, and enlisted the talents of a pilot friend who had flown helicopters in a James Bond film.

The plan was to fly to the fort, rappel down ropes, and retake the Principality by force. Attacking at dawn, they descended from the sky, fired a single shot from a sawed-off shotgun, and tossed the captors into the brig. A tribunal was established to try the invaders.

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Britain shrugged its shoulders when asked to intervene, saying the fort was not on its property. The Germans retreated back home after the failed coup and established the Sealandic government-in-exile, a dark mirror version of the Principality that persists to the present day. T he government-in-exile disavowed any role in the late s Spanish passport scam.

They were arrested when they tried to cross into Italy.

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The money had in fact come from a gambling enterprise in Poland, but it was an aboveboard operation. Did we recognize these passports or not? For a time in , after Slovenia was briefly caught up in the Bosnian war, many countries refused to recognize our nation. Achenbach was 79 when he filed the lawsuit in , and he succumbed to old age in the middle of the litigation at age The strange legal and financial quagmire was a fitting final chapter in the life of someone who had spent his whole life involved in dubious ways to get money.

Today, however, the Principality does offer a legitimate way to become a citizen of Sealand. The Bates family sells royal titles, an official business whose proceeds go only to funding the honest initiatives of the true Sealandic government. Costs vary: Prince Roy and Princess Joan passed into the next realm in and , respectively, but the country is going strong more than five decades after it was founded.

Michael takes only intermittent trips out to the fort these days, but Sealand is always occupied by at least one armed caretaker, lest any of the events of its bellicose history repeat themselves. The government-in-exile is still going strong as well, led by Prime Minister Johannes W.