I stopped the car.
“A dog, I think,” she said.
I backed up. In my side-view mirror, a black mound marred the road, resting precisely on the divider. The brake lights were not enough to illuminate it. I turned the car around to shine the headlights on it. It was not a dog. It was a sheep.
Its wool was black and its eyes were almost white but also gray and blue. They reflected the car’s lights flatly. There was blood coming from its mouth. Its head was twisted. Oh God, said Erin.
There were two white sheep by the side of the road. They were speaking to the dead black sheep. They made tentative steps toward the middle, where the black one’s body lay. They wanted the dead sheep to get up and get going.
Erin and I both said Oh my God, oh my God, look at that. I thought, for the first time in my life, that the known science of the world was going to be changed by something I had witnessed. This communication between sheep, this cognizance of mortality, was surely unaccounted for.
“Should we pick it up?” Erin asked.
I considered this.
“No. It’s in the middle,” I said. “It won’t get hit anymore — it’s not in anyone’s way. We should leave it.”
The two sheep looked toward the car and spoke to Erin and me. How could you? They brayed at the car. Don’t you have enough? You fucking monsters!
“Oh God,” Erin said, “now they’re talking to us.”
Both sheep stepped toward the car. Quickly they picked up speed and started jogging at us.
“They’re really scaring me,” Erin said.
I backed up. I backed up fifty yards. I stopped the car again and watched. One sheep was still talking to us and the other had turned again, had resumed talking to the broken black one.
We drove then, both of us now very awake. As we slowed through Portree, a small town of tall clapboard taverns and inns, shops of woolen goods, I was half-broken but only when I concentrated on it. Fuck those people. I moved my mouth when I thought this, and then I smiled. Erin saw me smile and she didn’t smile in return because she knew why I was smiling.
The hotel in Portree had been awarded too many stars — it was well-made and charmless. Twelve different newspapers fanned out on a heavily lacquered table in the drawing room, a robust fire chewing its cereal in the corner, the ceilings were vaulted and the beds canopied, but there was a sickly tint to the lighting, the smell of rain and frustration coming from the walls. The only softening touch was a cat, sleeping atop the bar. It yawned at me, showing its plasticine teeth.
We got a suite with two rooms.
“Tom,” she said as we stepped up the quiet stairs.
I didn’t answer her.
In the suite I closed my half from hers with a white sliding door. I changed and jogged down the steps alone, determined to claim the dining room as my own. Around my table, unspeaking couples were watching me and breathing into their plates. I looked out the picture window. The moon’s reflection was sketched loosely with chalk on the black flat bay. The silverware was too heavy.
I woke up to coughing. Erin stumbled into the bathroom to do it but that only made it louder, slapping against the tiled walls. The sun was just coming up. She blew her nose. I opened the sliding doors in time to catch her emerging from the bathroom, naked below her small T-shirt. With the bathroom door open, she was backlit in gold. She turned the light off and was black again.
“Sorry,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”
I squinted at her. Her legs were thinner than I’d expected, softer. I thought of white glue.
“I feel like hell.”
I was thrilled. God had acted quickly. Erin was transformed: yesterday strong and quick-moving, now frail and sour. She threw back a shot of Nyquil and passed out.
I slid the doors and slept until nine. I wanted to be gone, but I worried about what the hotel staff would think of me leaving my one-armed friend alone, sick, while I flitted about the island. I left and told the man at the desk that Erin was resting, not to disturb her.
It was mid-afternoon and wet but my head was clear. It was more difficult to be angry at Erin while she was asleep and I was driving, away and alone. I was at Kyleakin, the tiny town of intersection with mainland Scotland, and stopped before the bridge ready to take me back over. I could leave her. I had a change of clean clothes in the car. A small group of buildings to the right, a small castle’s ruins just beyond.
I stopped at a hostel. Everyone in the common room was young and pretending to be poor except, to the left, in the cafeteria, a family of five, Russian, eating spaghetti while assembling a jigsaw puzzle.
At the counter, I asked about a boat.
“We have one rowboat.”
The boat, laying on the gray shore of rocks and sticks, everywhere black seaweed like the hair of a hundred dead mermaids, was overturned and silver. I untied the knot, righted it and dragged it to the water. I pushed it in and jumped from a rock, trying to keep my feet dry. The water here would be brutal. The tip of my right foot came into the boat wet, but otherwise I had done it. I was in the boat and it was moving from the shore. I was shooting out into the bay in this borrowed boat and I was alone and could be going anywhere.
But the boat was facing the wrong way. All I could see was the shrinking of that beach and those buildings. For a rowboat passenger all was adventure, facing forward, but for the rower it was work, the shoveling of coal in the furnace-room. I rowed until the hostel was vague and the castle ruins were a smudge. The water was smooth and the rowing easy. I was heading into the ocean.
I’d never owned a boat but now felt I’d wasted so many years. I laughed and laughed at the simplicity of it all, this boat, this water. I couldn’t believe how stupid it was. I could pinch all this between my thumb and forefinger.
I rowed for twenty minutes and then heard barking. I looked to the shore, for a dog running along the beach. But I saw no dogs. I turned around and found myself fifty feet from a pair of rock islands breaking the water’s surface, parallel, black, each the size of a bus. One was barren, but the one beyond it, about a hundred feet farther, was being busily evacuated by at least forty seals, platoons of seals, all barking and flopping and diving to get away from something. But what?
Oh.
I turned the boat and rowed away from the rocks; I felt terrible for upsetting them. I rowed quickly so they would return. I was halfway back to the shore when they began jumping back aboard their rock.
I turned the boat around again, heading back toward the seals. I wanted to see them, had to. This time I stayed low, rowing slowly, almost imperceptibly turning my head periodically to check my direction and the state of the seals. The seals were not acting in a uniform way. They wrestled. They barked, they leapt on each other. Some would dive into the water and others would appear, shooting from the ocean as if falling from holes in the sky. It annoyed me, exasperated me, all their movements, without sense, all their bumping into each other, their flesh rubbing and undulating, all their noise. I expected these animals to be orderly. Their bodies were sensical, their cells and veins were mathematical. Was not everything, on a cellular level, well-maintained, logical and unimproveable, like a honeycomb? At some point, though, up the developmental ladder the order is lost and there is this, the bouncing and barking, everything foul.
And my feet were wet. My ankles were wet. I looked down. The boat was sinking. It was only a few inches above the water, which was plowing cheerfully through a hole under my seat. I tried to row but the boat was done for, immovable. The hole was enormous.
To shore it was five hundred yards at least. I’d freeze before I made it. I realized with clarity that I might die here, and could think only of what the three of them would do the weekend of my funeral, reunited again. I left my pants and shoes and belt in the boat and jumped before I could guess at the shock to my chest. My arms flailed but soon found a rhythm and I swam for shore, the car keys in my mouth, the sun now gone and the wind coming in. I swam with a necessary fury. I swallowed the coldest water.