The Forgetting Time(100)

The shore was a pale smudge in the distance. His book was out there, on the sand. He felt bereft without it; he had carried it with him through these last days. At first it was to forestall conversation—dipping his face into those pages he had written and could no longer read—but lately it had become like a friend to him. When he awoke in the night disoriented and afraid, he turned on the light and through the thick bodies of the circling moths sought out its blue cover on his bedside table. It spoke to him without words, assuring him that he had lived.

Perhaps a tourist would find it while out collecting shells. Perhaps it would change everything for her.

His legs ached. He stared in the sunlight at the retreating wisp of shore until it seemed merely a trick of the eyes, an imagined oasis. Here, then gone. Of course the body would resist its demise. Of course; this was how life was. How could he have thought otherwise? It was a lesson he’d learned again and again: no matter how carefully you planned or did your research, the unknowable things would rise up out of the deep and overturn everything. But that was what had drawn him in, wasn’t it? The depths of what we don’t know?

Maybe he’d see Sheila again. Her face. Or some glimmer of her in another.

Maybe he wouldn’t.

He looked around him at the wide sky, at the ocean that continued now as far as he could see. The water sparkled in the sunlight, dazzling his eyes. Every molecule glistening in the radiant, polka-dotted world. He felt his limbs relax, his body melting beneath the beauty of it.

Blue sky, blue water, and nothing else.

The undiscovered country.

Look at it this way, Jer, he heard Sheila saying. Now you’re going to get some answers. He felt the curiosity beating through him at the thought of it, stronger than his heart.