another hiker or tourist appeared to be within miles of the place. Nick’s rental was the only car in the parking lot. From his perch, not a road or car or building or urban light violated the primitive panorama. Not a single sign that this was the twenty-first century and not a sunrise during the Mesozoic age. In fact, this could very well be another planetscape—a vista on Mars, given the reddish stones. Yet the stunning lack of sound was a gratifying relief from the noisy, crowded conference rooms and dining halls.
Nick mounted the Nikon with the three-hundred-millimeter gun-barrel lens onto the tripod, attached a shutter release cable, and began taking shots of the predawn light glazing the towering fins rising from the canyon floor.
He would take maybe four or five shots, then move along the rim as the light changed. When the sunlight began slanting into the canyon, he switched to the two-and-a-quarter Mamiya 7 with the wide angle and headed for the very edge to shoot vistas. One must sustain a near-religious trust in the integrity of limestone, for he was at the very edge of a sheer drop-off, the sight of which sent electrical eddies up his legs.
He aimed at the sunrays gilding a row of rock blades.
Then back to the eighteen-millimeter wide angle.
The light was changing by the second. He shot off the rest of the roll and put in another, then moved up the rim. There he crouched down at the edge and shot down at the sunlight glancing off a clutch of sun-enameled fans of limestone. It was amazing how they resembled a colony of fire coral, but in monstrous proportions. Of course, despite the calcium carbonate structures and the fragile flamelike shapes, so-called fire corals are not true corals but rather a hydrozoa whose stinging cells are equipped with needlelike projections containing burning neurotoxins closely related to those of jellyfish.
Jellyfish.
Amazing how lines converge. Of all the people on the planet to meet up with Solakandji jellyfish, Jack Koryan. And what had brought them together was a confluence of seemingly random geophysical events—cool Pacific seas, warm Atlantic highs, errant Gulf Stream waters, a man on a swim in the right place at the right time.
Statisticians would put the odds at one in a million-except that this was not a statistically random convergence of the twain. Far from it. Nick didn’t know to what extent things connected, but when he got back to Boston he’d check. But it was amazing how the closer you looked at life, the fewer accidents there were. In fact, maybe there were no real accidents.
Nick looked at the sun rising between a fissure in a hoodoo blade rising out of the chasm. A shaft of gold sent spikes in all directions like a crown of glory.
Nick moved to another outcropping of rock where he hung over the edge with the Nikon. He clicked off three shots. The light was rapidly shifting, shafts of gold shooting from the horizon through the cloud holes. He traced one to his right when he thought he spotted some movement on the higher ledge. He swung his camera around to zoom in on what appeared to be a clotted shadow among some pines just below where the rays lit the treetops.
In the split instant he depressed the shutter release halfway for autofocus, uncertain whether the shadow was an animal or a person, sudden movement from behind him sent a reflexive shudder through his body.
Before he knew it, a figure rushed out at him. In the instant before impact, it all became clear to Nick. But in a hideously telescoped moment he felt the wind punch out of his lungs, and his body was propelled off the rockface lip and into the abyss.
FROM A PERCH FIFTY YARDS TO the upper right, the only sound was a solitary note of recognition—a short “ahhh” escaping from Nick Mavros’s lungs as if he had found a misplaced key—then maybe ten seconds in real time the soft smack of his body against the rock rubble below … then some muffled afterechoes as he and his camera tumbled to their final resting place in the cretaceous layers of ancient seas.
It was done, and Dr. Jordan Carr signaled below to his accomplice to return to their car before day hikers began to show.
Jordan’s guess was that Nick would eventually be found by backpackers or park rangers—a battered thing in a red North Face parka and jeans. And, depending on how long it took to recover the body, the newspapers back home would run the sad obituary of Dr. Nicholas Mavros of Wellesley, Massachusetts, senior neurologist of MGH and chief principal investigator of clinical trials of the new experimental wonder cure for Alzheimer’s, who had apparently lost his footing during high winds on a slick and crumbly rim in Bryce Canyon National Park while alone on a photo hike. He had been in Utah attending a meeting of clinical physicians for blah blah blah, as Gavin Moy would so eloquently put it.
Jordan took a final glance into the abyss.
The only barrier between him and the Promised Land now lay below.
77
SOLAKANDJI.
Jack had written the word on the back of Rene Ballard’s business card.
It was a warm afternoon, a fine day to be outside. And Jack’s rehab people were of the Kamikaze School of physical therapy, encouraging him to get out and walk twice a day.
The Robbins Memorial Library was no more than two miles from his house—maybe an hour’s walk at his rate with the cane. Located in the center of town on Massachusetts Avenue, the library was a beautiful Italian Renaissance building whose interior might have been one of the most stunning in the Northeast—high vaulted arches, Doric columns, carved marble niches, paintings, and multicolored marble floors. Beyond the rotunda was the reference room, where a bank of online computers stood against a wall. At this hour most students were in class, so there was no wait for a machine.
On Google, he came up with hundreds of hits for “Solakandji jellyfish.” He scrolled down the list, uncertain what he was looking for, but positive that this was preferable to laundry and housecleaning. Besides, he was curious about the little critters that had taken a half-year bite out of his life.
Some of the sites contained general info about jellyfish with sidebars about Solakandji; other sites were for naturalists, students of marine biology, and underwater photographers. Several explained treatments of jellyfish stings. Aunt Nancy had been right—vinegar, and don’t rub.
He clicked on a few sites that included color photographs of the animal. And there it was:
This highly venomous jellyfish is extremely hard to detect in the water …
… its tentacles can grow up to 2m long and are near invisible under water.
