The water, a transparent green, took on a deeper, bluer hue as he swam. He swam out until his sandals were two specks on the sand, his book a blur of blue. He enjoyed the feeling of his body exerting itself, helped on by the current. Words floated out to him and he clung to them. Silence. Ocean. Enough.
He should have told someone. He could have told that woman who had e-mailed him, for instance. The one with the son. The thought of his last case was like a strand of hair tethering him to land—all that was left between himself and the open sea. He could go back and try again to e-mail her. He had meant to write “Good-bye” and the word had come out wrong, a different word. He hoped she understood what he meant.
If he stopped thinking of it, if he let the current carry him, the strand would break easily of its own accord.
Think about something else, he thought. He closed his eyes. The sun created dark spots on the pulsing orange inside his eyelids.
Sheila.
The day he met Sheila.
A Saturday. He’d left the lab early and had taken the first train he saw until the end and walked the rest of the way to the beach. Sitting on the damp sand, brooding. A whole universe out there, so many things unknown. Why was he stuck in cages with the rats?
Two girls were sitting next to him on a beach blanket. A blonde, a redhead. Two silly girls eating ice-cream cones and laughing at him.
The blonde was the bold one. She walked up to him.
“Are you religious?”
“Not at all. Why?”
He glanced at her. Her cheeks were pink from the sun, or maybe she was blushing. Her hair was tied back in a band but coming loose around her face in bright fluttery pieces.
“We were thinking you must be religious to be wearing that. Don’t you have a bathing suit?”
He looked down at himself. He was in his usual graduate student attire, long-sleeved white oxford shirt, black pants.
“No.”
“Oh, I see. You’re far too serious for the beach.” She said it lightly, teasingly. She had a strong white body. It hurt his eyes to look at it. Silly polka-dot bathing suit.
He scowled at her. “You’re making fun of me.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re far too serious for the beach.” Her blue eyes were both affectionate and mocking. He couldn’t make sense of that. She was making him dizzy.
The ice cream was dripping down the cone in the hot sun over her fingers. He had the strangest urge to lick them.
Why not, polka dots?
“Your ice cream is melting,” he said.
She licked the cone, then her fingers, one after the other, laughing at herself. He had taken her for a giggler, but her laugh came from someplace deeper, it rolled out into the air, taking up space. Ice cream, he thought, giddiness rising up his body from the white soles of his feet. The secret to life is ice cream. Her laugh rang in his ears and kept on ringing.
He had hoped it would never stop.
He was getting tired now. This treading water business was more exhausting than he had anticipated. There was more resistance in him than he’d thought there would be. Just stop moving, he thought. Let go.
He opened his eyes. The current had worked fast. The sandals and book were gone now, blended into the shore.
He felt his heart pounding. He calculated how far he was from the beach. He could probably make it back if he wanted to. And then what? Back to that small, increasingly circumscribed existence of seafood and short walks. Not a terrible life. But winding down …
He didn’t miss language anymore. He liked the concreteness of this new way of living: the briny taste of the crab he was eating, the shy, curious face of the girl serving it, the sand slipping through the toes of his sandals as he walked back to his bungalow, the feel of his breath tickling his nostrils as he meditated. It was as if the earth was holding him in its gaze, cupping his face in its hands. He felt it whispering to him in a wordless language he had forgotten his whole life and only now remembered, speaking to him of a reality so vast he couldn’t impart it to another human even if he had the ability to do so. He barely recognized himself in the mirror: the brown, careless, leathery face, the wild, much-too-bright eyes—who was this man? He had accepted the simplicity of this life gratefully but knew that soon he would not be able to understand even the most basic transactions. He would be forced to succumb to the only thing he feared: helplessness.
The shore was a pale smudge in the distance. His book was out there, on the sand. He felt bereft without it; he had carried it with him through these last days. At first it was to forestall conversation—dipping his face into those pages he had written and could no longer read—but lately it had become like a friend to him. When he awoke in the night disoriented and afraid, he turned on the light and through the thick bodies of the circling moths sought out its blue cover on his bedside table. It spoke to him without words, assuring him that he had lived.