* * *
It must have been pressure that drove me out—pressure and training, because I remembered nothing of it at all. After a while I was conscious of being on my knees in the cockpit of the boat with my forehead on my arms on one of the seats, praying. I hadn’t had an identifiable religion for years and had never believed in immortality, but I was asking Somebody to be good to her.
“—be gentle with her. Take care of her. Please, please, please, be gentle with her—”
The sun beat down on my back and water dripped off me. After a while I stopped, and for the first time I realized I had been praying aloud because when my voice ceased I began hearing the silence. The whole boat was drenched with silence. There was an emptiness about it you could actually feel. It pressed in on me. I went down in the cabin and it drove me back on deck. I sat on one of the cockpit seats with my face in my hands, still numb with shock and only half aware of what I was doing. Less than an hour ago she had been right here, here in the cockpit, alive, warm, lovely, brilliant, thrilling to touch and look at.
That was it, I thought. She was here all about it; not a million miles away, but right here, offset only by a thin, transparent sheet of time one hour thick. Why couldn’t you reach through an hour’s time the way you could through a foot’s space? What was time but a ball of mud spinning on its axis? Time? Her watch down there in the cabin was set on 90th meridian, Central Standard Time. The chronometer within three feet of it in space was six hours away on Greenwich, zero meridian time. The local apparent time where we were ourselves was 88th meridian. Time? I wanted to cry out. Offset slices of time lay side by side here like laminations of plywood and she was forever unreachable because she was on the other side of one thin, unshatterable pane of it.
I realized I wasn’t completely rational, and tried to get a grip on myself.
What had happened? How had it happened? I’d told her, warned her over and over about depth and the awful things pressure could do. She’d been above me, right there under the boat. Maybe that was it. She must have been too near the surface, under the stern maybe, and had been hit on the head by the rudder or propeller as it slid off a passing swell. I stopped. No. She hadn’t been falling, except at the very end. She’d been swimming down. I could swear it. I saw the long legs kicking, the way I had taught her.
But maybe she had been dazed by the blow and didn’t know which way she was swimming. Or she could have been knocked out momentarily and settled beyond any distance she’d ever been before and had been seized by drunkenness, the rapture of the depths, brought on by breathing air at too great pressure. When I saw her she’d been at least 200 feet down, and she’d never been below sixty before.
Then I stopped and raised my head and stared unseeingly out across the water. No. She wouldn’t have. It was unthinkable. Why would she? She was happy, wasn’t she? Wildly, deliriously happy, as I had been. Of course she was. It was apparent in every smile, every laugh, every word she said, every gesture of love.
But I was remembering now. I was thinking of those times I awoke to find her rigid and tense, staring into the darkness beside me. Those times I’d had that feeling she was being tormented in some recess of her mind she’d never let me near. What about the way she had kissed me, suddenly and fiercely, just before we’d gone over the side?
Was it “Macaulay? Of course it wasn’t. She wasn’t in love with him. And he’d betrayed her. He’d lied to her, and double-crossed her. The very fact of her trying to find excuses for him only showed him up for what he was. She didn’t owe him anything. She’d paid it all. She’d even stayed and tried to save him after she knew what he had done, stayed at her own danger.
I didn’t bring you much of a dowry, did I?
I sat up straight, feeling sick. There it was. That was it. I had failed her. I could see all the clues, now that it was forever too late.
“I’ve been doing this a little longer than you have,” she’d said. “There is no escape.”
She’d already had too much of being hunted, with Macaulay, and I’d failed in trying to show her we could get away. I remembered the way she had looked at me when I was showing her on the chart, the places we’d go, the things we’d do. She’d been like someone listening to the babbling of a child. She didn’t believe it. She wanted to, and she tried, and she pretended to, but in the bottom of her heart she couldn’t. There were too many of them after us now. She and Macaulay had never been able to get clear away from Barclay’s crowd, and now we had not only them but the police.
We were doomed, she thought, and she blamed herself for it. She’d tried to keep it from me, to give us what time there was, but in the end it was too much for her. And I’d been too blind and stupid to realize she was being tortured by it. Oh, God, if I’d only been able to show her, to make her understand we could escape! Just one more chance, now that I knew what it was. Please. Please. The whole world was before her, and I let her kill herself. It was agony. I couldn’t sit still. I stared down into the water where she had gone. The sloop rolled. I forced myself away from the rail.
“No,” I cried aloud. She hadn’t done it deliberately. It was an accident. Nobody could have been outwardly as happy as she had been and be tortured by something like that at the same time. She had been happy. It was an accident.
“It was an accident,” I cried out wildly. “An accident.”
But she’d been swimming down.
The sloop rolled. The silence screamed.
I went below. She came at me from everywhere at once. I was drowned in her. Everything was saturated with her. She’d touched this, she’d stood there. She came from behind the curtain in a white dress dabbing at the lobe of an ear with the glass stopper of a perfume bottle. “I know it’s ridiculous—” she said. The ghost of the perfume was still there. It was all over the cabin. The mattress and pillow were back on the bunk where they were stowed during the day, and the perfume was on the pillow where her head had lain and there was one long, shimmering, ash-blond hair. I knelt beside the bunk and pressed my face into the pillow, holding it with my arms.
“Swede,” I said. “Swede—Swede—Swede—”
I knew the danger of it. It was morbid. I stopped.
The sloop rolled. The silence rose and screamed.
The sun went down. It was night. I couldn’t sleep. When I closed my eyes the picture was there on the backs of my eyelids, the infinite blue and that last flash of silver, beckoning as it faded.
I’ve got to quit seeing it, I thought. I’ve got to. I’ve got to.
The boat rocked. There was no wind.
At dawn I took star sights and worked them out because I had to have something to do. The current had set me 18 miles to the northwest. I started the engine and ran back. I wasn’t sure why, except that 23.50 North, 88.45 West was a place. It had existence. It was fixed. Nothing else had reality. I shot the sun at noon and plotted my position. I was at 23.46 North, 88.44 West. I had missed it four miles. I was too far south.
“Well,” I said reasonably, “it’s all right. I knew that wasn’t the place, anyway.”