today than I anticipated. I feel that we will get along together very well.”
After fifteen minutes or more, the boy asked, “Where does the light come from?” There was no answer. The boy waited for a time, then climbed back down the trunk, dropping the last five meters and rolling as he hit in the soft sand.
He walked to the beach again and stood staring out at the water. Far off he could see it curving up and up, the distant combers breaking in white foam until the sea became white-flecked sky. To his left and his right the beach curved away, bending almost infinitesimally until it disappeared. He began to walk, then saw, almost at the point where perception was lost, a human figure. He broke into a run; a moment later, he halted and turned around. Far ahead another walker, almost invisible, strode the beach; Nicholas ignored him; he found a coconut and tried to open it, then threw it aside and walked on. From time to time fish jumped, and occasionally he saw a wheeling seabird dive. The light grew dimmer. He was aware that he had not eaten for some time, but he was not in the strict sense hungry—or rather, he enjoyed his hunger now in the same way that he might, at another time, have gashed his arm to watch himself bleed. Once he said, “Dr. Island!” loudly as he passed a coconut palm, and then later he began to chant, “Dr. Island, Dr. Island, Dr. Island,” as he walked, until the words had lost all meaning. He swam in the sea as he had been taught to swim in the great quartanary treatment tanks on Callisto to improve his coordination, and spluttered and snorted until he learned to deal with the waves. When it was so dark he could see only the white sand and the white foam of the breakers, he drank from the sea and fell asleep on the beach, the right side of his taut, ugly face relaxing first, so that it seemed asleep even while the left eye was open and staring, his head rolling from side to side, the left corner of his mouth preserving, like a death mask, his characteristic expression—angry, remote, tinged with that inhuman quality which is found nowhere but in certain human faces.
W
hen he woke it was not yet light, but the night was fading to a gentle gray. Headless, the palms stood like tall ghosts up and down the beach, their tops lost in fog and the lingering dark. He was cold. His hands rubbed his sides; he danced on the sand and sprinted down the edge of the lapping water in an effort to get warm; ahead of him a pinpoint of red light became a fire, and he slowed.
A man who looked about twenty-five crouched over the fire. Tangled black hair hung over this man’s shoulders, and he had a sparse beard; otherwise he was as naked as Nicholas himself. His eyes were dark, and large and empty, like the ends of broken pipes; he poked at his fire, and the smell of roasting fish came with the smoke. For a time Nicholas stood at a distance, watching.
Saliva ran from a corner of the man’s mouth, and he wiped it away with one hand, leaving a smear of ash on his face. Nicholas edged closer until he stood on the opposite side of the fire. The fish had been wrapped in broad leaves and mud, and lay in the center of the coals. “I’m Nicholas,” Nicholas said. “Who are you?” The young man did not look at him, had never looked at him.
“Hey, I’d like a piece of your fish. Not much. All right?”
The young man raised his head, looking not at Nicholas but at some point far beyond him; he dropped his eyes again. Nicholas smiled. The smile emphasized the disjointed quality of his expression, his mouth’s uneven curve.
“Just a little piece? Is it about done?” Nicholas crouched, imitating the young man, and as though this were a signal, the young man sprang for him across the fire. Nicholas jumped backward, but the jump was too late—the young man’s body struck his and sent him sprawling on the sand; fingers clawed for his throat. Screaming, Nicholas rolled free, into the water; the young man splashed after him; Nicholas dived.
He swam underwater, his belly almost grazing the wave-rippled sand until he found deeper water; then he surfaced, gasping for breath, and saw the young man, who saw him as well. He dived again, this time surfacing far off, in deep water. Treading water, he could see the fire on the beach, and the young man when he returned to it, stamping out of the sea in the early light. Nicholas then swam until he was five hundred meters or more down the beach, then waded in to shore and began walking back toward the fire.
The young man saw him when he was still some distance off, but he continued to sit, eating pink-tinted tidbits from his fish, watching Nicholas. “What’s the matter?” Nicholas said while he was still a safe distance away. “Are you mad at me?”
From the forest, birds warned, “Be careful, Nicholas.”
“I won’t hurt you,” the young man said. He stood up, wiping his oily hands on his chest, and gestured toward the fish at his feet. “You want some?”
Nicholas nodded, smiling his crippled smile.
“Come then.”
Nicholas waited, hoping the young man would move away from the fish, but he did not; neither did he smile in return.
“Nicholas,” the little waves at his feet whispered, “this is Ignacio.”
“Listen,” Nicholas said. “Is it really all right for me to have some?”
Ignacio nodded, unsmiling.
Cautiously Nicholas came forward; as he was bending to pick up the fish, Ignacio’s strong hands took him; he tried to wrench free but was thrown down, Ignacio on top of him. “Please!” Nicholas yelled. “Please!” Tears started into his eyes. He tried to yell again, but he had no breath; the tongue was being forced, thicker than his wrist, from his throat.
Then Ignacio let go and struck him in the face with his clenched fist. Nicholas had been slapped and pummeled before, had been beaten, had fought, sometimes savagely, with other boys, but he had never been struck by a man as men fight. Ignacio hit him again and his lips gushed blood.
H
e lay a long time on the sand beside the dying fire. Consciousness returned slowly; he blinked, drifted back into the dark, blinked again. His mouth was full of blood, and when at last he spit it out onto the sand, it seemed a soft flesh, dark and polymerized in strange shapes; his left cheek was hugely swollen, and he could scarcely see out of his left eye. After a time he crawled to the water; a long time after that, he left it and walked shakily back to the ashes of the fire. Ignacio was gone, and there was nothing left of the fish but bones.
“Ignacio is gone,” Dr. Island said with lips of waves.
Nicholas sat on the sand, cross-legged.
“You handled him very well.”
