The FBI was probably tapping Edward Said's phone right up to the day he died in September 2003. A year earlier, when he was already a very sick man, Said was scheduled to speak at an event at the Kopkind Colony's summer session near Guilford, Vermont. The morning of Friday, August 2, the day Said was due to arrive, the colony's John Scagliotti picked up the phone at the colony's old farmhouse and found it was dead. He went to a neighbor to report the fault.

"Within half an hour," Scagliotti remembers, "there was a knock at the front door, and there was a man who said, 'I hear you have phone problems.' Now, I am a gay man. I know what a phone service repairman is meant to look like. The phone man is a gay icon. Tool belt, jeans, work shirt, work boots. This man has a madras shirt, Dockers, brown loafers. He goes to an outside junction box, and a few minutes later the phone is working. Off he goes."

A month later, in the course of a complaint to the phone company about an unusually high bill, Scagliotti suggests that the trouble may have stemmed from something the repairman did. After further checking, the phone company tells him they never sent a repairman that day.

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