Duma Key(23)

Dried off and with my teeth brushed, I crutched into the master bedroom and surveyed the king, now divested of decorative pillows. "Houston," I said, "we have bed."

"Roger, Freemantle," I replied. "You are go for bed."

Sure, why not? I'd never sleep, not after that whopper of a nap, but I could lie down for awhile. My leg still felt pretty good, even after my expedition to the water, but there was a knot in my lower back and another at the base of my neck. I lay down. No, sleep was out of the question, but I turned off the lamp anyway. Just to rest my eyes. I'd lie there until my back and neck felt better, then dig a paperback out of my suitcase and read.

Just lie here for awhile, that was...

I got that far, and then I was gone again. There were no dreams.

viii

I slipped back to some sort of consciousness in the middle of the night with my right arm itching and my right hand tingling and no idea of where I was, only that from below me something vast was grinding and grinding and grinding. At first I thought it was machinery, but it was too uneven to be machinery. And too organic, somehow. Then I thought of teeth, but nothing had teeth that vast. Nothing in the known world, at least.

Breathing, I thought, and that seemed right, but what kind of animal made such a vast grinding sound when it drew in breath? And God, that itch was driving me crazy, all the way up my forearm to the crease of the elbow. I went to scratch it, reaching across my chest with my left hand, and of course there was no elbow, no forearm, and I scratched nothing but the bedsheet.

That brought me fully awake and I sat up. Although the room was still very dark, enough starlight came in through the westward-facing window for me to see the foot of the bed, where one of my suitcases rested on a bench. That locked me in place. I was on Duma Key, just off the west coast of Florida - home of the newly wed and the nearly dead. I was in the house I was already thinking of as Big Pink, and that grinding sound -

"It's shells," I murmured, lying back down. "Shells under the house. The tide's in."

I loved that sound from the first, when I woke up and heard it in the dark of night, when I didn't know where I was, who I was, or what parts were still attached. It was mine.

It had me from hello.

Chapter 3 Drawing on New Resources

i

What came next was a period of recovery and transition from my other life to the one I lived on Duma Key. Dr. Kamen probably knew that during times like that, most of the big changes are going on inside: civil unrest, revolt, revolution, and finally, mass executions as the heads of the old regime tumble into the basket at the foot of the guillotine. I'm sure the big man had seen such revolutions succeed and seen them fail. Because not everyone makes it into the next life, you know. And those who do don't always discover heaven's golden shore.

My new hobby helped in my transition, and Ilse helped, too. I'll always be grateful for that. But I'm ashamed of going through her purse while she was asleep. All I can say is that at the time I seemed to have no choice.

ii

I woke up the morning after my arrival feeling better than I had since my accident - but not so well I skipped my morning pain cocktail. I took the pills with orange juice, then went outside. It was seven o'clock. In St. Paul the air would have been cold enough to gnaw on the end of my nose, but on Duma it felt like a kiss.

I leaned my crutch where I'd leaned it the night before and walked down to those docile waves again. To my right, any view of the drawbridge and Casey Key beyond was blocked out by my own house. To the left, however -

In that direction the beach seemed to stretch on forever, a dazzling white margin between the blue-gray Gulf and the sea oats. I could see one speck far down, or maybe it was two. Otherwise, that fabulous picture-postcard shore was entirely deserted. None of the other houses were near the beach, and when I faced south, I could only see a single roof: what looked like an acre of orange tile mostly buried in palms. It was the hacienda I had noticed the day before. I could block that out with the palm of my hand and feel like Robinson Crusoe.

I walked that way, partly because as a southpaw, turning left had come naturally to me my whole life. Mostly because that was the direction I could see in. And I didn't go far, no Great Beach Walk that day, I wanted to make sure I could get back to my crutch, but that was still the first. I remember turning around and marveling at my own footprints in the sand. In the morning light each left one was as firm and bold as something produced by a stamping-press. Most of the right ones were blurry, because I had a tendency to drag that foot, but setting out, even those had been clear. I counted my steps back. The total was thirty-eight. By then my hip was throbbing. I was more than ready to go in, grab a yogurt cup from the fridge, and see if the cable TV worked as well as Jack Cantori claimed.

Turned out it did.

iii

And that became my morning routine: orange juice, walk, yogurt, current events. I became quite chummy with Robin Meade, the young woman who anchors Headline News from six to ten AM. Boring routine, right? But the surface events of a country laboring under a dictatorship can appear boring, too - dictators like boring, dictators love boring - even as great changes are approaching beneath the surface.

A hurt body and mind aren't just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion. That my mind had been as badly hurt as my body was a thing I only came to realize once I was alone and all other voices dropped away. The fact that I had tried to choke my wife of twenty-five years for doing no more than trying to wipe the sweat off my forehead after I told her to leave the room was the very least of it. The fact that we hadn't made love a single time in the months between the accident and the separation, didn't even try, wasn't at the heart of it, either, although I thought it was suggestive of the larger problem. Even the sudden and distressing bursts of anger weren't at the heart of the matter.