Captiva

I looked once more at the docks . . . saw nothing.

'They're waiting.'

I removed my glasses, stepped to the telescope, and leaned to see a pulsing dot move across the optic disc and gradually disappear. I adjusted the focus, disengaged the clock drive, moved the scope's tube on its axis, and found the dot again. As I followed the light, I listened to Tomlinson's running commentary. One night, in the cockpit of his boat, he had been in deep meditation, just him and the stars. A meteorite—a comet, he called it—had swept down out of the sky and the shock of its appearance, its brilliance, had vaulted him through into another dimension of awareness.

'An awakening is often catalyzed by a shock or a surprise,' he explained. 'In the fifth century, a simple monk gained enlightenment and became Buddha after he stepped on the tail of a very vicious dog.'

The comet, Tomlinson said, had drawn his consciousness outward, beyond the confines of earth. All that night he sat in meditation, allowing his brain waves to probe the stars. It was cold out there, he said. He sensed the infinite chill of nothingness, the black abyss of space.

'It was a serious downer, man; a very heavy mojo. I mean, scary. That emptiness, it was like pulling me apart, molecule by molecule. Diluting me. You know how the beam of a flashlight diffuses over distance? Like that. But I kept going, fighting the panic.'

Finally, he said, his mind had sensed a flicker of warmth. 'It was sentient consciousness, man. You hear what I'm saying? Life, energy— whatever you want to call it. It was out there, very frail at first. Still a long way away, but I was homing in on the signal. It got stronger. Then—truly amazing—I began to sense other signals, but from different directions. Spread out all over the place. Thought . . . power. In far corners of the universe, these little islands of . . . divinity. I was making contact! This was. . . two weeks ago. Every night, I do deep meditation, man. Bypass all that deep-space bullshit so it's gotten to be like dialing from a cellular. If I had a cellular.'

He chattered on and on while I used the telescope to chase the flashing dot. Universal energy fields. Chakras, auras. Life registered a specific measure of electrical current—that, at least, was true. All matter in the universe was structural repetition. An atom with electrons, a planet with moons. . . adapted fins which were a bird's wing, the fingers of a child's hand. And had I looked down to notice that a stream of urine spirals like a DNA helix? Communication was nothing more than conduction; the dipoles could be at opposite points in the universe and it would make no difference. Tomlinson had simply accessed that current . . . and made a few new friends.

'God's out there!' Tomlinson said. 'God is out there, and He's not us. What a relief!'

I stood from the telescope, cleaned my glasses and put them on. 'Tomlinson?'

He had been curling his fingers in his hair—a nervous habit. He moved toward the telescope. 'The Big Guy wants to talk to me now?'

I didn't want to have to tell him. 'Not exactly.'

'Then what?'

'It's ... an airplane. That's what you were seeing. An airplane.'

' What? Naw. . . .'

'It took me a while to figure because the running lights weren't quite right. And it was moving so fast.'

'An airplane? They were going to give me some kind of signal. It popped right into my mind: ocular confirmation. Just the other night, making very heavy contact. Those very words. Right there on my boat, they were telling me to look.'

I shrugged. 'Yeah, well. . . but this is some kind of fighter jet, probably out of MacDill or could be Homestead. Maybe a Tomcat with its war lights on, an F-14. Pretty strange. They do strafing and bombing runs in a restricted area off Marco. Remember that time we were anchored off the Ten Thousand Islands and heard explosions?'

Tomlinson said, 'Shit. Wouldn't you know.'

'They like to scramble early, avoid the civilian traffic. They've got Air Combat Maneuvering Instrumentation towers out there, built way off shore.'

He said glumly, 'The military industrial complex is going to fuck with me one too many times. Seriously. Mark my words.'

Disappointing Tomlinson is like disappointing a child. I nodded toward the Celestron, checking my watch as I did: 4:00 a.m. We had a good hour of darkness left, and I was about to suggest that he scan another part of the sky. I was facing the marina . . . had, once again, confirmed that there was no movement on the docks; realized I had probably imagined the human form . . . and I had begun to say, 'Check the northern sky—' when the dock exploded. An orange corona bubbled up over the water, I heard a suctioning ka-WOOF, and then the entire marina was illuminated . . . illuminated just for an instant, as if a flashbulb had gone off. All this in a space of microseconds.

I yelled without thinking: 'Incoming!'—a response programmed long ago. Yelled it even before I realized what had happened; yelled it as I collapsed, dragging Tomlinson to the deck.

A fireball ballooned above the dock, back where they kept the sport-fishing boats. Not a big explosion, but it generated enough energy to arch debris, rubble, burning slats high into the air, toward my stilt house. And I thought stupidly: Grenade? Light mortar?

Tomlinson poked his head up. 'Holy shit! The sonsabitches opened fire on us!' Which didn't make any sense either . . . nothing was making sense . . . then, out of the confusion, his meaning took form: He was referring to the jet. He thought the jetfighter was attacking us.

Ludicrous; it should have been funny . . . but the dock was blazing, looked like a couple of the boats had caught fire too. By then I was thinking: Gas fumes in the bilge, ignited by a spark. It was a reasonable explanation, even probable, but I didn't pursue it because out of the flames stumbled a human figure . . . no, a human torch, clothes ablaze, arms clawing, sputtering, whooshing, making a guttural caw-w-w-w-ing sound. I was already on my feet and running toward the marina when the torch seemed to kneel, a gesture of submission, then tumbled, hissing, into the bay.

It was a man. Not that I could tell at first. I went sprinting down the dock past the bait tank and gas pumps. . . then tried to stop so quickly that my feet went out from under me and I bounced along on my butt. I had realized something: If the fire got to the gas pump, the fuel tank beneath the marina's deck would blow. Instead of one burn victim, there would be dozens—myself included.

I found the storage tank's emergency shutoff switch in a gray box beside the pumps. Hit the switch, took two strides and leaped off the dock into the water. The tide was up, but that area of the harbor is so shallow that I had to half swim, half slog to what, in the copper light of the fire, resembled an inflated garment bag. Grabbed it without knowing what or where I was grabbing . . . pulled it to me, felt weight, felt life . . . and the thing rolled over in my arms to reveal a mask of black from which two bright, dazed eyes blinked.

A hole formed in the mask and a croaking sound came from it: 'I can see . . .Jesus. I can see Jesus.'

The image of a human who has been maimed goes straight to the motor reflex region of the brain. It touches all the genetic coding for flight and survival, leaching a primitive, chemical excitement from the adrenal gland— which is probably why the trash newsmagazines and some of the trashier media have come to rely on human suffering as stock-in-trade. If they can't create excitement one way, they'll serve it up in another. Their favorite shield—'We're journalists, trained professionals'—is as clouded as a pornographer's videotape, which at least makes their cry 'It's what the viewers want!' analogically accurate.

What I knew was that I wanted to pull this guy onto the dock and get him covered up before the gawkers arrived. Tragedy is a personal thing; a human property to be shared—if by choice—but not stolen away in film bites.

I moved to touch the man's head; realized I shouldn't. Instead, I said, 'I'll get you out of here. You'll be okay.' Wondered if he had even heard the lie.

There were people shouting now . . . the heavy thump of bare feet on wood . . . the whine of a boat engine. Tomlinson came racing around the corner in his Zodiac as someone called in a panic: 'Is he hurt? Who is it?'

I looked toward the flames, saw silhouettes, and I answered, 'Don't know. I can't tell who it is'—pleased, on some perverse level, that my voice remained calm, controlled. 'He needs help. Call nine-one-one, tell them we want a medevac. A chopper.'