By sunset she was only a baby, thinking nothing, absolutely adrift, waking to cough and begin crying, drifting and weeping, sleeping and sinking, waking up to choke the water from her mouth and whimper, indistinguishable from what she saw, which was the grey sky that held no interest, identity, or thought. This was the point when she reached the bottom of everything, when she had no idea either what she’d reached or who had reached it, or even that it had been reached.
The heavens looked huge today, as if their blueness rocketed out beyond the edge of everything and even beyond time itself, because their infinite spaces easily entertained great clouds like monsters that moved through them living their oblivious, prehistoric dreams. But Mr. Cheung wondered who it was who watched and who it was who slept. Behind the clouds, in the south, a clear patch was growing larger, and pretty soon emptiness would have the sky. That was the way, a dream of days followed by emptiness, the huge water turning over the grains of sand, neither one knowing which was big and which was small. Mr. Cheung was uneasy and sad. He would have to die, and the quiet knife of this fact wasn’t dissuaded by the interplay of milkiness and inkiness in the textures of the Atlantic under these clouds of October, or by his prayers, best wishes, or sorrow. His mood swelled and the action of the wind over the beach seemed full of power.
Since the death of his mother, Belinda, Fiskadoro was confused. If everyone in this world around him had died once, as he himself had died, then where had Belinda gone when she died the second time? How many worlds were there?
As a way of approaching these questions, he confided to Mr. Cheung, “I saw those skeleton in the cars that won’t go.”
“You’ll be a great leader,” Mr. Cheung said.
Fiskadoro didn’t know what his teacher was talking about, as he hardly ever knew what anybody was talking about. “I’m not like other men,” he reminded Mr. Cheung.
“No, I know that. You’ve been to their world and now you’re in this world, but you don’t have the memories to make you crazy. It isn’t sleeping under the moon that makes a crazy person. It’s waking up and remembering the past and thinking it’s real.”
“I saw the ashes driving the cars forever,” Fiskadoro said.
“Something big is happening today. I wish it was yesterday,” Mr. Cheung said. “I wish it was five minutes before this minute, when I went around wishing it was a hundred years ago. You know,” he said, “in this past I long for, I don’t remember how even then I longed for the past.”
This talk was only taking them away from what Fiskadoro wanted to ask. With some anxiety about being so direct, he got right to the question. He pointed off toward the northern horizon as far as their vision would carry, and brought his finger around in an arc through the chambers of the sky over the Ocean and held it out to the south. “I don’t know what es,” he said.
His teacher seemed to understand. “I don’t either,” he told Fiskadoro, “but we’re here.”
“You don’t remember?”
“I never knew.”
“Anybody know?” Fiskadoro asked him.
“Possibly my grandmother,” Mr. Cheung said.
The Lieutenant was lost. Small children were lost. The husband and wife who’d persevered and stayed afloat a long time were lost and still falling, probably, through the water toward the bottom, and everybody was lost who had flailed in panic, while their lives clung to them unreasonably, through the fields and barricades and over the faces of other people equally rabid to live. Marie was the last of three to be taken out of the water — Captain Minh and one other woman had been saved, and now the young girl Marie. Saved not because she lasted, not because of anything she did, or determined in herself to do, because there was nothing left of her to determine anything; saved not because she hadn’t given up, because she had, and in fact she possessed no memory of the second night, and couldn’t believe, to this day, that she’d spent twenty hours staying alive, breath by breath, without knowing enough to desire it; saved not because she’d held out long enough, because there was nothing to say what was long enough; saved because she was saved, saved because they threw down a rope, but she couldn’t reach her hand up now to take hold of it; saved because a sailor jumped off the boat, his bare white feet dangling from the legs of khaki pants, and pulled her to the ladder; saved not because her hands reached out; saved because other hands than hers reached down and saved her.
Mr. Cheung stood on the beach holding his clarinet in one hand. He and Fiskadoro were standing, as a matter of fact, between two civilizations, standing together at the southern edge of the crowd of people and at the northern edge of the crowd of seagulls, who’d come around to see what was happening through eyes too tiny to hold any questions. The seagulls walked back and forth at the border of water, all bellies and beaks, throwing out their chests with an air of flat assumption like small professors. Fiskadoro looked back and forth between these seagulls and Mr. Cheung, and Mr. Cheung guessed what he was seeing.
The Cubans will come, the Manager recited to himself, the Quarantine won’t last forever. Everything we have, all we are, will meet its end, will be overcome, taken up, washed away. But everything came to an end before. Now it will happen again. Many times. Again and again. Something is coming and something is going — but that isn’t the issue. The issue is that I failed to recognize myself in these seagulls.
On the boat she hung onto the bunk’s right edge with both hands and never once let go of it. Each motion of rising and suddenly unsupported sinking shocked her awake.
In the hospital, each time she passed into sleep, she woke up immediately.
The last of it, the bottom she’d sunk to by staying afloat, would have meant nothing if she hadn’t stayed alive. It only made sense when a person had a name, like Marie, and a body, like this wasted old one, and a place like this rocking chair, and a breath, like this one she was taking now.
By now all the clouds had passed them by, and the blue atmosphere looked thin enough that Mr. Cheung expected to see faint stars behind it. Though it was sunny, a haze came down over the water and made it seem the beach led down to the end of all thought. A few feet past the licking edge of water there was nothing. Sounds came out of it that made no sense — a talking of horns, a shifting song of voices, and something too low and too deep to hear which was still much more definite than the other sounds. Everyone on the beach was silent. Mr. Cheung was frightened.
One day the Quarantine would be lifted, and the Cubans would come. If today was that day, then the shape of something, a white shadow framed by dull swords of light in the place out there beyond the end of all thought, was a Cuban fleet.
Ship or shape, it came in slowly as the tide.
One day they would all be dead. If today was that day, then everything was clear. Now the sounds and visions and ideas coming at them from beyond the end of all thought were real. Now the white boat, or was it a cloud, came for the Israelites out of the fog of their belief. In all likelihood it was a ghost-ship, and the Israelites were ghosts, and the man standing at the bow was a ghost who had come for them, it was clear in the draw of this white, white vessel — unless the light happened to be playing tricks, it wasn’t touching the water at all — clear from the majesty of it, the sense that it floats in the air and not in the waters of the world, floats in the heart of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.