“Maya?”
Dr. Island, through the leaves, said, “When I talk to you, Nicholas, your mind makes any sound you hear the vehicle for my thoughts’ content. You may hear me softly in the patter of rain, or joyfully in the singing of a bird— but if I wished I could amplify what I say until every idea and suggestion I wished to give would be driven like a nail into your consciousness. Then you would do whatever I wished you to.”
“I don’t believe it,” Nicholas said. “If you can do that, why don’t you tell Diane not to be catatonic?”
“First, because she might retreat more deeply into her disease in an effort to escape me; and second, because ending her catatonia in that way would not remove its cause.”
“And thirdly?”
“I did not say ‘thirdly,’ Nicholas.”
“I thought I heard it—when two leaves touched.”
“Thirdly, Nicholas, because both you and she have been chosen for your effect on someone else; if I were to change her—or you—so abruptly, that effect would be lost.” Dr. Island was a monkey again now, a new monkey that chattered from the protection of a tree twenty meters away. Nicholas threw a stick at him.
“The monkeys are only little animals, Nicholas; they like to follow people, and they chatter.”
“I bet Ignacio kills them.”
“No, he likes them; he only kills fish to eat.”
Nicholas was suddenly aware of his hunger. He began to walk.
H
e found Ignacio on the beach, praying. For an hour or more, Nicholas hid behind the trunk of a palm watching him, but for a long time he could not decide to whom Ignacio prayed. He was kneeling just where the lacy edges of the breakers died, looking out toward the water, and from time to time he bowed, touching his forehead to the damp sand; then Nicholas could hear his voice, faintly, over the crashing and hissing of the waves. In general, Nicholas approved of prayer, having observed that those who prayed were usually more interesting companions than those who did not; but he had also noticed that though it made no difference what name the devotee gave the object of his devotions, it was important to discover how the god was conceived. Ignacio did not seem to be praying to Dr. Island—he would, Nicholas thought, have been facing the other way for that—and for a time Nicholas wondered if he was not praying to the waves. From Nicholas’s position behind him he followed Ignacio’s line of vision out and out, wave upon wave into the bright, confused sky, up and up until at last it curved completely around and came to rest on Ignacio’s back again, and then it occurred to Nicholas that Ignacio might be praying to himself. Nicholas left the palm trunk then and walked about halfway to the place where Ignacio knelt, and sat down. Above the sounds of the sea and the murmuring of Ignacio’s voice hung a silence so immense and fragile that it seemed that at any moment the entire crystal satellite might ring like a gong.
After a time Nicholas felt his left side trembling. With his right hand he began to stroke it, running his fingers down his left arm, and from his left shoulder to the thigh. It worried him that his left side should be so frightened, and he wondered if perhaps that other half of his brain, from which he was forever severed, could hear what Ignacio was saying to the waves. Nicholas began to pray himself, so that the other (and perhaps Ignacio too) could hear, saying not quite beneath his breath, “Don’t worry, don’t be afraid, he’s not going to hurt us, he’s nice, and if he does we’ll get him; we’re only going to get something to eat; maybe he’ll show us how to catch fish, I think he’ll be nice this time.” But he knew, or at least felt he knew, that Ignacio would not be nice this time.
Eventually Ignacio stood up; he did not turn to face Nicholas, but waded out to sea; then, as though he had known Nicholas was behind him all the time (though Nicholas was not sure he had been heard—perhaps, so he thought, Dr. Island had told Ignacio), he gestured to indicate that Nicholas should follow him.
The water was colder than Nicholas remembered, the sand coarse and gritty between his toes. He thought of what Dr. Island had told him—about floating—and that a part of her must be this sand, under the water, reaching out (how far?) into the sea; when she ended there would be nothing but the clear temperglass of the satellite itself, far down.
“Come,” Ignacio said. “Can you swim?” Just as though he had forgotten the night before. Nicholas said yes, he could, wondering if Ignacio would look around at him when he spoke. He did not.
“And do you know why you are here?”
“You told me to come.”
“Ignacio means
Nicholas thought of the crystal gong and the Easter egg, then of the microthin globes of perfumed vapor that, at home, were sometimes sent floating down the corridors at Christmas to explode in clean dust and a cold smell of pine forests when the children stuck them with their hopping canes, but he said nothing.
Ignacio continued, “Let Ignacio tell you a story. Once there was a man, a boy, actually, on the Earth, who —”
Nicholas wondered why it was always men (most often doctors and clinical psychologists, in his experience) who wanted to tell you stories. Jesus, he recalled, was always telling everyone stories, and the Virgin Mary almost never, though a woman Nicholas had once known who thought she was the Virgin Mary had always been talking about her son. Nicholas thought Ignacio looked a little like Jesus. He tried to remember if his mother had ever told him stories when he was at home, and decided that she had not; she just turned on the comscreen to the cartoons.
“—wanted to—”
“—tell a story,” Nicholas finished for him.
“How did you know?” Angry and surprised.
“It was you, wasn’t it? And you want to tell one now.”
“What you said was not what Ignacio would have said. He was going to tell you about a fish.”
“Where is it?” Nicholas asked, thinking of the fish Ignacio had been eating the night before, and imagining another such fish, caught while he had been coming back, perhaps, from the Point, and now concealed somewhere awaiting the fire. “Is it a big one?”
