By touching its snout to the board, the fish was monitoring my physiology: pounding heart, electrical circuitry on panicked overload, mammalian blood pressure lowered by alcohol then spiked by fear.
I was flesh. I was eatable.
For a micro-instant, I felt a tremendous weight on the back of the board-perhaps the fish had mistakenly bitten the skeg. Then the fish passed beneath the board at twice my speed, its tail-slap creating an unexpected wake.
In the same instant, my big sail was hit by a gust of wind.
I was drunk. My balance isn’t great to begin with. It was enough to catapult me over boom and board. I landed atop the slowly sinking sail, still hooked to the boom.
My hands were shaking as I fixed my glasses back on my face and tried to free myself. Frantically, I looked ahead: The shark, turning, had created a swirling green vortex with an exit streak like an arrow.
The bull shark was returning. Its sensory receptors were attuned. The sound of my pounding heart had to be unmistakable, nearly deafening. It knew exactly where I was, what I was.
Windsurfing sails are made of see-through plastic, a kind of monofilm. I watched the shark cruise toward me, and then beneath me-me atop the thin skein of plastic, it below. I could feel the pony-sized girth of the animal lift both the sail and me briefly; could hear the rasp of its rough skin abrade the boom. I sensed a rolling movement-had it turned to bite?
Then the shark exited from beneath the sail. Confused, it cruised a few meters beyond, and turned toward me again.
I was free of the sail now, standing in waist deep water, trying desperately, pathetically, to right my board and get back atop it. But I was drunk and disoriented. I was too fat, too winded, too slow. I kept slipping, falling off.
That’s when something in my brain ruptured once again. It was the same sensation: a flashbulb exploding behind my eyes.
And, once again, the result was a cold and loathing fury.
“Fuck it!”
I shoved the board away from me, and turned to face the shark. I could see the column of water rising as the animal gained speed, coming at me. I could see the silhouette of its dorsal fin trailing star-bright streamers. In my crazed state, there was a single, stabilizing truth that fueled my rage: Why run? We are both predators.
I began to walk toward the shark. Then I charged it, creating my own wake as the stranger in me screamed aloud, “Come on, you big bastard. Hit me. You’re doing me a favor!”
When the bull shark was three or four body lengths away, I dived hard toward it, both fists extended. I expected to collide with the fish; to feel its jaws crush my arms.
Instead, my fists touched only soft bottom.
I came up, searching the surface through blurry glasses.
I could see that shark’s wake plainly.
It was swimming away at top speed. Spooked.
I took my time sailing back. I’d not only sobered; I felt as if I’d experienced some elemental transformation. What had occurred was powerful beyond any encounter I’d anticipated or imagined.
I thought about it on the long reach home, trying to figure out what had happened, why I felt changed. The lights of the marina glittered in the near distance. The windows of my house and lab were yellow rectangles, uniform and solid. My tin roof appeared waxen.
To live fearlessly, one must first invite death. It’s one of Tomlinson’s favorite maxims. That may have been a tiny part of what I was feeling, for I had certainly accepted the inevitable when I charged the shark. If the shark had rolled and locked, I would have been killed. I would have died quickly or gradually, but I certainly would have died. I would have bled to death.
It was a strange disconnected feeling, as if I were suddenly free of all emotion, fear included.
It was unexplored territory. I felt energized.
What I felt was more than just the absence of fear. I’d spent the last year or so reacting to past mistakes, punishing myself-or so my inner voice claimed. After my shark encounter, though, self-flagellation seemed an absurd justification for allowing the circumstances of my life to control me. We’ve got to be suspicious of that little voice. Our innermost voice sometimes lies to us. It is a necessary revelation if a man or woman is to take the occasional leap of faith and invite the courage necessary to live an aggressive, creative and satisfying life.
I’d known that before. How had I lost the thread?
Maybe it happens to us all, sooner or later. Maybe we all stray off the path, driven by incremental events, great or small. Or maybe it’s just a secret laziness that seeks an excuse to escape the daily discipline, bravery, endurance and plain hard work that it takes to live up to our own idealized image of self.
I’d certainly strayed from the path.
I despised what I’d become. I didn’t like the way I looked, didn’t like the way I felt. There had been growing in me a bedrock unhappiness and discontent that I could never quite define.
Now, though, I was struck by what seemed to be a rational explanation: For the last many years, I have been at odds with my own past. In my previous work, in what I think of as my former life, I’d been required to demonstrate what I prefer to define as extreme behavior.
I was ashamed. Ashamed of what I’d done. I’d hidden it from others, which was not just understandable, but a legally binding mandate. However, I’d also attempted to hide the truth from myself.
Why? What did I have to be ashamed of?
Alone, beneath stars, buoyant, water light and moving with the wind, the answer to that question seemed to ring like crystal in my innermost being.
Nothing. You have absolutely no reason to be ashamed.
It was a transcendent moment. A few minutes before, I’d confronted what is truest in me- We are both predators.
It was true. I am predatory by nature. I also like to think that I am ethical, kind, selective and generous. But, at the atavistic core, I am a hunter, a killer.
I am a collector.
It has always been so with me. It will always be so.
In accepting that truth, I felt a delicious sense of freedom.
I steered my surfboard home. I hung the sail, washed the board-a kind of workmanlike penance. The bottom half of the skeg was missing: Ragged fiberglass in a half-moon shape. No surprise.
Then, after a quick glance at my fish tanks, a quicker hello to Crunch amp; Des, I went to my galley and placed upon the cupboard every bottle of booze I owned. It was an impressive stash. Five unopened bottles of Flor de Cana, two unopened bottles of Patron, which is a superb tequila, plus a complete stock of other whiskeys, gins and vodkas.
I also stacked up two and a half cases of beer… thought about it for a moment before deciding to keep the beer for Tomlinson’s visits.
I put the bottles in boxes. It took me two trips to carry it all to the marina. It was a little after 2 A.M. Aside from the hiss of the bait tank aerator, and the flapping of sail halyards against masts, all was still. I opened the ice machine and buried fourteen bottles therein.
Finders, keepers. If someone wanted the bottles, there they were for the taking.
I’d brought a flashlight. The marina’s commercial fish scale is out back behind the marina office, next to the cleaning table. It had been more than six months since I’d last weighed myself. I stepped onto the scale, touched my fingers to the poise counterweights, moving them.
It took awhile. Was the damn thing broken?
When the suspension bar was finally balanced, I whispered, “Jesus Christ, this can’t be right.”
I was still wearing my wet T-shirt and shorts. I stepped off the scale, stripped naked, then stepped back onto the scale plate.
After a few more seconds, I whispered, “You fat son-of-a-bitch.”
I walked back to my stilt house.
Every human being should have at least a half-dozen people that he or she can call day or night when they are sleepless, goofy drunk, feeling lonely or in emotional need.