See the stranger drink. See the stranger swallow. See how ugly the stranger is with his thick glasses, crooked nose and scars. See what an absurd and meaningless little creature the stranger is.
Still holding the bottle, I walked outside and stood on the deck.
It was after midnight. The lights of the marina created conduits of shimmering brass on the water, linking my stilt house with the darkened trawlers, sailboats and houseboats, and to the solitary lives within.
To the east, a bulbous moon, a week past full, was illuminating far mangroves, creating silhouettes and shadows. With the rising of the moon came a freshening northwest wind. It was blowing an uneven fifteen, gusting out of a high-pressure-system blackness domed with stars-the frail, ancient light of distant suns, incalculable solar systems.
Standing there, I felt as if I were staring into a funneling abyss that began within my own dark soul and expanded into the infinite. I took another gulp of rum, unzipped my pants, and pissed into the darkness below, watching the bioluminescent sparks my stream created; sparks that, in shape and brilliance, were not dissimilar to the starscape above.
For some reason, I found the parallel heartbreaking.
The wind gusted, messing my hair, blowing harder now.
That gave me an idea.
I started windsurfing a little less than a year ago. I keep my sails rigged, hung beneath my house so they are always ready when I want them. On other moon-bright nights, I’d considered windsurfing-but always dismissed it as idiotic. Too many oyster bars, crab pots and old pilings out there to hit.
Now, though, windsurfing in moonlight seemed a superb idea.
I tripped going up the steps; nearly tripped again when I banged my shoulder against the wall, entering my lab. I touched the wall switch, and stared at the rows of aquaria; could smell the sweet ozone odor created by the systems of aerators. I was aware that, from within some of the glass tanks, certain animals-octopi and squid-were staring at me just as intently as I stared at them.
A couple of months back, at a party, Tomlinson and I got into one of our complicated debates. It was about the mandates of scientific method. The debate was unusually heated and, at one point, I told him, “It’s the way I’ve been trained. I’d rather be precisely wrong than approximately right about almost anything.”
He found that hilarious. A week later, he’d presented me with a wooden sign with the silly phrase engraved on it. I’d tacked the thing on the north wall of my lab.
Now I looked at the sign, reading it-I’D RATHER BE PRECISELY WRONG THAN APPROXIMATELY RIGHT-and the welling heartbreak I felt earlier was transformed inexplicably into fury. An absolute cold and loathing fury.
That’s when it happened. That’s when I snapped. It was like a flashbulb going off behind my eyes. I took the rum bottle, hurled it hard at the sign, and turned away, hearing an explosion of glass.
In that isolated space between what I was, and what I had become, the stranger within spoke for the first time: You are insane.
I wobbled back down the stairs, strapped a harness around my waist, then rigged my surfboard. I chose my favorite board-an ultrawide Starboard Formula 175. It’s built for big, clumsy people like me. I locked on my largest, fastest sail, a 10.4-meter Neilpryde Streetracer.
It took me lots of fumbling and falling to get the sail up. When I had the boom under control, I tilted the mast forward to gain speed. Then, as I sheeted in, I walked the board beneath the sail, feeling the wind on my face, feeling the board lift itself off the chop as I accelerated onto plane, the elastic up-haul line thumping rhythmically against the mast. Thumping, it seemed, as if my heart were echoing off the far stars, beating fast enough to explode.
With a little kick, I arched my hips and belted myself to the boom. With my bare feet, I searched the board until I found the foot straps. I wiggled my feet in tight.
Board, sail, boom, mast and I were now a single, connected unit. Tomlinson once told me that the wind does not push a sailboat, it pulls it. I could feel the wind’s inexorable pull now as I flew across the water, sailing toward the moon at close to twenty miles per hour.
Then the moon disappeared behind clouds, and I was speeding through mangrove shadow, hearing wind and water in the caverns of my ears. The bioluminescent wake I created was an expanding silver-green crescent. The sensory combination was that of riding a comet across a liquid universe. Off to my right, I saw a mobile galaxy of green streaks: a school of fish. I watched the school explode in a firestream of color; then explode again.
Something big was beneath the fish, feeding.
I turned my board downwind, jibbed, popped the cams to fill the sheet, accelerated quickly and sailed toward the school.
They were mullet-a silver, blunt-headed fish with protuberant eyes. Thousands of them in a tight, panicked herd in waist-deep water. Three or four pounders. As I approached the edge of the school, they began to jump-gray, arching trajectories in the darkness-banging off my board, hitting my legs, landing on the board, then flopping wildly until they were free.
As I sailed through the school, I saw something else. I saw the predator that was feeding on the mullet. It appeared beneath the water as a submarine-shape, outlined in green. It cruised with a slow, reptilian movement as if crawling, tail and head shifting, always at apogee.
It was a shark. In this brackish mangrove lake, it was almost certainly a bull shark judging from its girth. It was the fish that I’d traveled the world studying. It was the fish I often used as an excuse for clandestine work.
The shark was big. Probably nine feet long, three or four hundred pounds. As I passed near it, I watched the shark turn in a whirlpool of light. I saw the shark pause, as if reviewing its options. Then it began to trail me, pushing water in a vectoring, sparkling blaze as it increased speed.
Drunk as I was, I could feel my heart pounding, my knees shaking. A cliche often repeated is that sharks are unpredictable. Seldom true. Like most predators, sharks have a strong pursuit instinct. If something runs from them, they chase it. What this animal was now doing was perfectly predictable: It was tracking me. If I was fleeing, there was a reason. I must be prey.
Watching the fish, my head was turned toward the rear of the board-not a smart thing to do when windsurfing day or night. I could see the shark’s bulk creating a column of water as it swam faster, closing the gap between us. I applied pressure to the board and sheeted in even tighter to get maximum speed-an absurd thing to do, because there was no way that I, a land mammal, a novice surfer, could outrun the muscled culmination of a million years of perfected genetic adaptation.
Then the shark was on me, behind the board, its fin cleaving the water, tacking back and forth with every thrust of its tail. I pulled my back foot out of its strap in an attempt to kick at the thing, and nearly lost control of the boom; almost went flying over the sail.
For several seconds, the shark matched my speed, both of us streaking through darkness, stars above, bioluminescent stars below. Then I felt the board jolt beneath me once… twice… then a third time.
The bull shark was bumping the board with its nose. It was testing, feeling, sensing what I was, interpreting the why of me.
Few know that a shark’s most powerful sensory organ is not its sense of smell, even though the sensory apparatus is located on the animal’s nose. If you ever get a chance, take a close look at shark’s head. You will see that the snout area is covered with tiny black dots. These are, in fact, pores that are filled with a complicated jelly. The jelly accurately detects bioelectric impulses. Quite literally, a shark can sense the precise location of a human heart beating from many hundreds of yards away. It is a remarkable sensory ability, and I know of no other animals that are equipped with it.