Carmel

Carmel registers as a windswept golfing locality where sand bites the air and manicured fairways slope toward hidden coastal edges. Characters imagine a mundane leisure scene — an advance man loosening his stance on a green, a helicopter idling nearby — that collides with institutional urgency. The place feels simultaneously small‑town and performative: sunlit tees, scattered sand traps, the metallic thrum of rotor wash, and the uneasy aftertaste of privilege turned headline. Carmel functions narratively as the offstage site of embarrassment and accountability, its physical textures (sand, grass, wind, distant engines) grounding a scandal that threatens to travel back into the corridors of power.