Thel and the swimmer found this a bit much, and one day they decided to take advantage of the mobility of residence, and they got Psara and some others to help them drag their shell out to the edge of the village, just inside the broad eastern point of the bay, beside a stream, behind a dune, and all by themselves. Their old neighbors shouted abuse at them as they left, but in a friendly tone, and they dropped by later to help return all the furniture to its proper place, and to trade for the previous day’s catch of blue puka shells.
24. Pure Duration
And so they fell into the rhythm of the bay, into their own rhythm. They had their home, isolated from the battles and out under the eastern point’s bluff. That whole stretch of beach they had to themselves, especially in the mornings; and the point was washed by the tides, and was an especially rich source of the blue shells.
Each strangely long day became a sort of eternity in itself. In the mornings the air was cool and clear and salty, the sea calm and the sun blazing over it. They stood calf-deep in the tumbling waves, facing the beach and the granite bluff behind, watching the water and sand mix wildly, tiny shell fragments of pink and brown and yellow and purple and red tumbling over each other among the clear and white and tan grains of sand, all a tumble and a rush of wet brilliant color with the clear foam-flecked water pouring over it, and once in a while a flash of blue like a dark sky would reveal itself among the rest and they would dive, scoop up handfuls of sand, let it sift through fingers until the blue fragment was there to be plucked out and put in a bag. If they proved to have missed it, they groaned and started again. And it seemed it would be morning forever.
At midday they sat on the beach and ate something, and slept on the sand or talked, and it seemed the midday would last forever, a warm lazy eternal nap; and then in the afternoons they would walk the beach in search of food or the rare overlooked blue button poking out of the dry sand, or get in the surf and hunt again, and it seemed the afternoon would never end, the sun white and stationaryin the broad western sky. Only at sunset did it seem time passed; slow, stately, the sun dropped and slowed as it dropped, it seemed, until it stood on the horizon chopped into orange slices by the layering of the atmosphere, and they had time to climb the bluffs and watch the mallow sea go indigo and the air become visible and the pared sun turn to a yellow sliver, then an emerald green dot, the green flash that ended the sunset. And then they were in the endless dusk, all its dark grainy colors filling with blackness as the eternal night came on. And this was just one day in an eternal round of unchanging days, until Thel felt that they lived forever every couple of weeks; and beyond that, in the unimaginable fullness of whole years, lay the touch of pure duration.
25. Castaway
Most of these endless days they spent alone, but sometimes one or more of the shellfolk would drop by, especially the children, who were delighted to see them do something as childish as recover pukas. Their most frequent adult companion was Psara, who occasionally joined them in the surf, laughing at the sport but incredibly fluid and quick eyed and quick handed at it; he could collect more blue shells in a morning than Thel could in a couple of days. As he dove and spluttered in the shorebreak he regaled them with the village gossip, which was consistently lurid and melodramatic, a never-ending extravaganza of petty feuds and sordid sexual affairs. He also invited them in to the rare festival nights, when everyone came out to a driftwood fire by the biggest stream and drank the clear liquor until they were all maudlin with drunken affection for one another, their feuds forgotten in the brilliant yellow light of festival reality. They would dance in rings around the fire, holding hands and crashing left and right, embracing their partners and declaring them wonderful browns or purples.
During one of these parties, late, when the fire was a pile of pulsing embers and the shellfolk were comatose with liquor and neighborly feeling, Psara regarded the two beachcombers with his quick ironic smile, and slipped over to them and put a sensuous hand on the swimmer’s broad shoulder, and on Thel’s. “Would you like to hear a story?”
The two nodded easily.
“Paros,” Psara said loudly, and the oldest person there jerked upright, peered around sleepily. “Tell us the story of the castaways, Paros!” and several children said “Yes please, please!”
Old Paros nodded and stood precariously. “This is a story from the world’s beginning, when ocean-never-equaled gleamed in the dark, perfect and white and empty. Across her white body sailed a raft, not our ship of fools but an orderly and good society, the brown and the purple having little to do with each other but coexisting in peace.” Some of the villagers laughed at that.
“But one day a brown man and a purple woman met at the mast, and talked, and later they did it again, and again, and when the browns and the purples bathed over the side, they dove under the raft and swam together for a time; and they fell in love.
“Now both of them were married, and their partners were prominent in the societies of brown and purple. So when the two were finally discovered, all the browns and purples were outraged, and there were calls to drown the two lovers.
“But the raft sailed by an island in the white sea, the smallest speck of land—a rock, a tree, a shell and a stream. And the browns and purples decided to maroon the two lovers, and threw them overboard, and the two swam to the island. And as they swam, ocean-never-equaled seeped into their minds and took all memory of the raft away from them, so that they would not despair.
“And they landed on the island, and the raft sailed away and would never come back. The woman gave birth to many children, and the children quarreled and would have killed each other. So ocean-never-equaled made the island longer, so that there would be room for the children and grandchildren of the two lovers to live without mortal strife between them. But they fought and multiplied at such a rate that ocean-never-equaled had to stretch the island all the way around her, to give them room to chase each other endlessly; and the white sea turned blue with the blood and tears shed.”
Silence. Paros sat down. Gray film fluttered on the dull coals of the fire. Thel felt as though he were falling, he had to clasp the swimmer’s arm to steady himself, even though they were sitting.
Later as they walked back home he stumbled once or twice, though he had not drunk that much. And several times he started to speak, and stopped; and he noticed the swimmer did the same. And that night in their narrow bed they hugged each other like two frightened children, lost at night in the woods.
26. We Are Clouds
Days passed. In the summer the shallows got so hot that they had to swim offshore to get any refreshment from the sea, and they searched for shells naked, as brown as the brown shellfolk. In the winter the water was so cold that it hurt their ankles as it rushed over their feet, and each day their skin turned as purple as the purple shellfolk, teeth chattering so that the fire in their bedroom was a lovely warmth. They spent storm days sitting in the bed watching the fire and talking and making love, while wind and rain lashed at their streaming window. Days like that were wonderful to Thel, but better yet were the long summer days, knee-deep in surf under the sun, the intense rays pulsing on his neck in what felt like discrete little pushes of light and heat. He would look up from the sand tumbling in the Whitewater and see the swimmer make some graceful move, her naked brown body twisting as she dove for a blue fragment, or streaming with water as she stood up after a dive; or the muscles of her arms rippling like backwash hitting an oncoming wave; or the sight of her legs and bottom and back as she walked away down the beach; or the tilt of her head as she walked toward him, looking down at the Whitewater; and his heart would swell like an erection inside him and he would run through the broken surf and tackle her, kissing her neck and face until she laughed at him and they would make love there, with water and sand running over them. And sometimes she would run up and tackle him and they would do the same. And afterwards they would play grunion in the surf, lying in the shorebreak and rolling up and down with the broken waves, taking the sea in and spurting it out like fountains, not thinking a thing. Every part of the day eternal, on summer days like that.