When he woke it was not yet light, but the night was fading to a gentle gray. Headless, the palms stood like tall ghosts up and down the beach, their tops lost in fog and the lingering dark. He was cold. His hands rubbed his sides; he danced on the sand and sprinted down the edge of the lapping water in an effort to get warm; ahead of him a pinpoint of red light became a fire, and he slowed.
A man who looked about twenty-five crouched over the fire. Tangled black hair hung over this man’s shoulders, and he had a sparse beard; otherwise he was as naked as Nicholas himself. His eyes were dark, and large and empty, like the ends of broken pipes; he poked at his fire, and the smell of roasting fish came with the smoke. For a time Nicholas stood at a distance, watching.
Saliva ran from a corner of the man’s mouth, and he wiped it away with one hand, leaving a smear of ash on his face. Nicholas edged closer until he stood on the opposite side of the fire. The fish had been wrapped in broad leaves and mud, and lay in the center of the coals. “I’m Nicholas,” Nicholas said. “Who are you?” The young man did not look at him, had never looked at him.
“Hey, I’d like a piece of your fish. Not much. All right?”
The young man raised his head, looking not at Nicholas but at some point far beyond him; he dropped his eyes again. Nicholas smiled. The smile emphasized the disjointed quality of his expression, his mouth’s uneven curve.
“Just a little piece? Is it about done?” Nicholas crouched, imitating the young man, and as though this were a signal, the young man sprang for him across the fire. Nicholas jumped backward, but the jump was too late—the young man’s body struck his and sent him sprawling on the sand; fingers clawed for his throat. Screaming, Nicholas rolled free, into the water; the young man splashed after him; Nicholas dived.
He swam underwater, his belly almost grazing the wave-rippled sand until he found deeper water; then he surfaced, gasping for breath, and saw the young man, who saw him as well. He dived again, this time surfacing far off, in deep water. Treading water, he could see the fire on the beach, and the young man when he returned to it, stamping out of the sea in the early light. Nicholas then swam until he was five hundred meters or more down the beach, then waded in to shore and began walking back toward the fire.
The young man saw him when he was still some distance off, but he continued to sit, eating pink-tinted tidbits from his fish, watching Nicholas. “What’s the matter?” Nicholas said while he was still a safe distance away. “Are you mad at me?”
From the forest, birds warned, “Be careful, Nicholas.”
“I won’t hurt you,” the young man said. He stood up, wiping his oily hands on his chest, and gestured toward the fish at his feet. “You want some?”
Nicholas nodded, smiling his crippled smile.
“Come then.”
Nicholas waited, hoping the young man would move away from the fish, but he did not; neither did he smile in return.
“Nicholas,” the little waves at his feet whispered, “this is Ignacio.”
“Listen,” Nicholas said. “Is it really all right for me to have some?”
Ignacio nodded, unsmiling.
Cautiously Nicholas came forward; as he was bending to pick up the fish, Ignacio’s strong hands took him; he tried to wrench free but was thrown down, Ignacio on top of him. “Please!” Nicholas yelled. “Please!” Tears started into his eyes. He tried to yell again, but he had no breath; the tongue was being forced, thicker than his wrist, from his throat.
Then Ignacio let go and struck him in the face with his clenched fist. Nicholas had been slapped and pummeled before, had been beaten, had fought, sometimes savagely, with other boys, but he had never been struck by a man as men fight. Ignacio hit him again and his lips gushed blood.
He lay a long time on the sand beside the dying fire. Consciousness returned slowly; he blinked, drifted back into the dark, blinked again. His mouth was full of blood, and when at last he spit it out onto the sand, it seemed a soft flesh, dark and polymerized in strange shapes; his left cheek was hugely swollen, and he could scarcely see out of his left eye. After a time he crawled to the water; a long time after that, he left it and walked shakily back to the ashes of the fire. Ignacio was gone, and there was nothing left of the fish but bones.
“Ignacio is gone,” Dr. Island said with lips of waves.
Nicholas sat on the sand, cross-legged.
“You handled him very well.”
“You saw us fight?”
“I saw you; I see everything, Nicholas.”
“This is the worst place,” Nicholas said; he was talking to his lap.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’ve been in bad places before—places where they hit you or squirted big hoses of ice water that knocked you down. But not where they would let someone else—”
“Another patient?” asked a wheeling gull.
“—do it.”
“You were lucky, Nicholas. Ignacio is homicidal.”
“You could have stopped him.”
“No, I could not. All this world is my eye, Nicholas, my ear, and my tongue, but I have no hands.”
“I thought you did all this.”
“Men did all this.”
“I mean, I thought you kept it going.”
“It keeps itself going, and you—all the people here—direct it.”
Nicholas looked at the water. “What makes the waves?”
“The wind and the tide.”
“Are we on Earth?”
“Would you feel more comfortable on Earth?”
“I’ve never been there; I’d like to know.”
“I am more like Earth than Earth now is, Nicholas. If you were to take the best of all the best beaches of Earth, and clear them of all the poisons and all the dirt of the last three centuries, you would have me.”
“But this isn’t Earth?”
There was no answer. Nicholas walked around the ashes of the fire until he found Ignacio’s footprints. Nicholas was no tracker, but the depressions in the soft beach sand required none; he followed them, his head swaying from side to side as he walked, like the sensor of a mine detector.
For several kilometers Ignacio’s trail kept to the beach; then, abruptly, the footprints swerved, wandered among the coconut palms, and at last were lost on the firmer soil inland. Nicholas lifted his head and shouted, “Ignacio? Ignacio!” After a moment he heard a stick snap, and the sound of someone pushing aside leafy branches. He waited.