* * *
As the sky outside lightens, the pages of the magazine are gradually illuminated, revealing their full spectrum of cobalt blues so pure they dazzle the eyes and greens so deep they look as if they have been painted in acrylics; here and there you can see the wake of a surfboard, a tiny white stripe traced across the vast wall of water, and the boys blink and mutter Jesus look at that, wow it’s insane. Chris leans back to check his cell phone, and the screen light, shining from below, turns his face bluish, reveals the bone structure — the prominent arch of the eyebrows, lantern jaw, mauve lips — while he reads the news out loud: today in Les Petites Dalles, there’s an ideal southwest/northeast swell, waves between five and six feet, the best session of the year, each snippet of information punctuated with solemn cries of yes, man, we’re gonna rule out there, we’re gonna be kings! — their slangy French sprinkled with fragments of English, as if they’re living inside a pop song or an American TV show, as if they were heroes, foreigners, the English words lightening deep, dark thoughts like vie and amour to the airy, meaningless “life” and “love,” the English making them sound humbler — and John and Sky nodding in infinite agreement, yeah, man, big wave riders, we’ll be kings.
* * *
It’s time. The break of day, when the formless takes shape: the different elements coming into focus, sky separating from sea, the horizon growing visible. Methodically, the three boys get ready, following a precise order that is also a sort of rituaclass="underline" they wax their boards, check the leashes are attached, put on their special polypropylene underwear before struggling into their wetsuits, their bodies contorted in the parking lot — the neoprene sticking to their skin, sometimes giving them friction burns — a choreography of rubberclad puppets asking each other for help, yanking and twisting. Rubber boots and hoods and gloves follow, then they lock up the van and walk down to the sea, boards light under their arms, striding across the shingle where the pebbles collapse noisily underfoot. When they reach the shore, everything growing clearer in front of them — the chaos, the celebration — they attach the leashes to their ankles, reach back to zip their hoods so there’s not an inch of bare skin on their necks — they have to make sure the suit is as watertight as possible to protect their young skin, often studded with acne on their shoulders and shoulder blades (where Simon Limbres has a Maori tattoo) — and then that movement of the arms, straight up in the air, meaning that the session is about to begin, let’s go!, and now perhaps their hearts start to pump a little harder, shaking themselves slowly like waking animals inside their rib cages, now perhaps their mass and volume increase, their beating intensifies, two distinct sequences in every pulse. Two beats, always the same: terror and desire.
They enter the water. They do not scream as they throw their bodies into it, protected by that tight-fitting flexible membrane that conserves the warmth of their flesh, the explosiveness of their momentum. They don’t loose a single cry, but pull faces as they cross the wall of rolling rocks, the seabed steepening rapidly until, five or six yards from the shore, they can no longer touch it with their feet and they plunge forward, lying facedown on their boards, their arms cutting forcefully into the waves, driving through the backwash, heading out into the open sea.
Two hundred yards from the shore, the sea is just a wavelike tension, hollowing and bulging, billowing like a bedsheet. Simon Limbres becomes his movement, paddling toward the lineup, that zone in the sea where the surfer waits for a wave to rise. He checks that Chris and John are there, to his left, bobbing like little black corks, hardly visible as yet. The water is dark, marbled, veiny, the color of tin. There is still no sparkle or shimmer, only those white particles that powder the surface like sugar, and the water is icy, less than fifty degrees. Simon can never take more than three or four waves when it’s like this, and he knows it: the cold wrings out the body. He has to choose carefully, seeking out the best-shaped wave, high-crested without being too sharp, with a curl that will open wide enough for him to take his place there, a wave that will last all the way to the shore, breaking and frothing only when it hits the shingle.
He turns back to the coast, as he always likes to before moving farther out: there is the land, stretched out like a black crust on the bluish glimmers where he floats, another world, a world to which he no longer belongs. The cliffs with their layers of different-colored rock mark the passing of time, but where he is, time no longer exists — there is no history here, only the randomness of the waves that buoy and whirl him. His gaze lingers on the vehicle made up to look like a California surfer van, parked on the lot by the beach — he recognizes the bodywork covered with stickers, all those names he knows by heart, Rip Curl, Oxbow, Quiksilver, O’Neill, Billabong, the psychedelic fresco mixing a hallucinatory vision of surf champions and rock stars, sprinkled with a nice heavy dose of siren-like, long-haired girls arching their backs in teenie-weenie bikinis, that van which they have created together, the antechamber to the wave — and then his gaze shifts to the taillights of a car climbing up to the plateau and disappearing inland, and he thinks of Juliette asleep, curled up in the fetal position beneath her kid’s comforter. She looks so stubborn, even in sleep, and suddenly he turns the other way, leaving the continent behind, tears himself away from it with a burst of energy, another sixty-five feet or so, and then he stops paddling.
Simon floats, arms resting but legs kicking, hands gripping the edge of the board, chest lifted slightly above the water, chin high. He waits. Everything around him is in flux: whole sections of sea and sky appear and disappear with each eddy of the slow, heavy, wood-like surface, like cool lava. The harsh dawn burns his face and his skin tightens, his eyelashes hardening into vinyl, the lenses behind his pupils icing over as if they’d been forgotten at the back of a freezer. His heart is beginning to slow down, in response to the cold, when suddenly he sees it, coming toward him, solid and homogenous, the wave, the promise, and instinctively he positions himself to find a way in, to slip inside like a thief entering a safe to steal its treasure — same balaclava, same precision of movement, down to the last millimeter — to slip in through the back, into that twist of matter where the inside turns out to be even huger and deeper than the outside. There it is, thirty yards away, coming toward him at a steady speed. Abruptly, concentrating his strength in his forearms, Simon sets off, paddling at full speed, and he is traveling quickly when he takes the wave, so he can be caught in its slope, and now it’s time for takeoff, that ultrafast phase when the whole world concentrates, speeds up, a temporal flash when you take a deep breath, hold it, and gather your body in a single action, giving it the vertical impetus to stand up straight on the board, feet nicely spread, the left in front, settled, knees bent and back flat, almost parallel to the board, arms open wide for balance. This is Simon’s favorite second, the moment when he is able to seize the explosion of his existence, to win over the elements, to become part of the life around him, and, once he is standing on the board — guessing, in that moment, that the height of the wave from base to crest is about five feet — to stretch out the space, prolong the time, use up the energy of every atom of the sea until it breaks on the shore. To become the wave.