My legs did give way then and I knelt suddenly, sobbing—not for her; not yet—just for air. There was such a rush about me: wind, and tangled spray, and colors upon colors and shades of colors that were not colors at all but shifts of white and silver. If light like that were sound, it would sound like the sea on sand, and if my ears were eyes, they would see such a light.
I crouched there, gasping in the swirl of it, and a flood struck me, shallow and swift, turning up and outward like flower petals where it touched my knees, then soaking me to the waist in its bubble and crash. I pressed my knuckles to my eyes so they would open again. The sea was on my lips with the taste of tears and the whole white night shouted and wept aloud.
And there she was.
Her white shoulders were a taller curve in the sloping foam. She must have sensed me—perhaps I yelled—for she turned and saw me kneeling there. She put her fists to her temples and her face twisted, and she uttered a piercing wail of despair and fury, and then plunged seaward and sank.
I kicked off my shoes and ran into the breakers, shouting, hunting, grasping at flashes of white that turned to sea-salt and coldness in my fingers. I plunged right past her, and her body struck my side as a wave whipped my face and tumbled both of us. I gasped in solid water, opened my eyes beneath the surface and saw a greenish-white distorted moon hurtle as I spun. Then there was sucking sand under my feet again and my left hand was tangled in her hair.
The receding wave towed her away and for a moment she streamed out from my hand like steam from a whistle. In that moment I was sure she was dead, but as she settled to the sand, she fought and scrambled to her feet.
She hit my ear, wet, hard, and a huge, pointed pain lanced into my head. She pulled, she lunged away from me, and all the while my hand was caught in her hair. I couldn’t have freed her if I had wanted to. She spun to me with the next wave, battered and clawed at me, and we went into deeper water.
“Don’t . . . don’t . . . I can’t swim!” I shouted, so she clawed me again.
“Leave me alone,” she shrieked. “Oh, dear God, why can’t you leave” (said her fingernails) “me . . .” (said her snapping teeth) “alone!” (said her small, hard fist).
So by her hair I pulled her head down tight to her white shoulder; and with the edge of my free hand I hit her neck twice. She floated again, and I brought her ashore.
I carried her to where a dune was between us and the sea’s broad, noisy tongue, and the wind was above us somewhere. But the light was as bright. I rubbed her wrists and stroked her face and said, “It’s all right,” and, “There!” and some names I used to have for a dream I had long, long before I ever heard of her.
She lay still on her back with the breath hissing between her teeth, with her lips in a smile which her twisted-tight, wrinkle-sealed eyes made not a smile but a torture. She was well and conscious for many moments and still her breath hissed and her closed eyes twisted.
“Why couldn’t you leave me alone?” she asked at last. She opened her eyes and looked at me. She had so much misery that there was no room for fear. She shut her eyes again and said, “You know who I am.”
“I know,” I said.
She began to cry.
I waited, and when she stopped crying, there were shadows among the dunes. A long time.
She said, “You don’t know who I am. Nobody knows who I am.”
I said, “It was in all the papers.”
“That!” She opened her eyes slowly and her gaze traveled over my face, my shoulders, stopped at my mouth, touched my eyes for the briefest second. She curled her lips and turned away her head. “Nobody knows who I am.”
I waited for her to move or speak, and finally I said, “Tell me.”
“Who are you?” she asked, with her head still turned away.
“Someone who . . .”
“Well?”
“Not now,” I said. “Later, maybe.”
She sat up suddenly and tried to hide herself. “Where are my clothes?”
“I didn’t see them.”
“Oh,” she said. “I remember. I put them down and kicked sand over them, just where a dune would come and smooth them over, hide them as if they never were . . . I hate sand. I wanted to drown in the sand, but it wouldn’t let me . . . You mustn’t look at me!” she shouted. “I hate to have you looking at me!” She threw her head from side to side, seeking. “I can’t stay here like this! What can I do? Where can I go?”
“Here,” I said.
She let me help her up and then snatched her hand away, half turned from me. “Don’t touch me. Get away from me.”
“Here,” I said again, and walked down the dune where it curved in the moonlight, tipped back into the wind and down and became not dune but beach. “Here,” I pointed behind the dune.
At last she followed me. She peered over the dune where it was chest-high, and again where it was knee-high. “Back there?”
She nodded.
“I didn’t see them.”
“So dark . . .” She stepped over the low dune and into the aching black of those moon-shadows. She moved away cautiously, feeling tenderly with her feet, back to where the dune was higher. She sank down into the blackness and disappeared there. I sat on the sand in the light. “Stay away from me,” she spat.
I rose and stepped back. Invisible in the shadows, she breathed, “Don’t go away.” I waited, then saw her hand press out of the clean-cut shadows. “There,” she said, “over there. In the dark. Just be a . . . Stay away from me now . . . Be a—voice.”
I did as she asked, and sat in the shadows perhaps six feet from her.
She told me about it. Not the way it was in the papers.
She was perhaps seventeen when it happened. She was in Central Park, in New York. It was too warm for such an early spring day, and the hammered brown slopes had a dusting of green of precisely the consistency of that morning’s hoarfrost on the rocks. But the frost was gone and the grass was brave and tempted some hundreds of pairs of feet from the asphalt and concrete to tread on it.
Hers were among them. The sprouting soil was a surprise to her feet, as the air was to her lungs. Her feet ceased to be shoes as she walked, her body was consciously more than clothes. It was the only kind of day which in itself can make a city-bred person raise his eyes. She did.
For a moment she felt separated from the life she lived, in which there was no fragrance, no silence, in which nothing ever quite fit nor was quite filled. In that moment the ordered disapproval of the buildings around the pallid park could not reach her; for two, three clean breaths it no longer mattered that the whole wide world really belonged to images projected on a screen; to gently groomed goddesses in these steel-and-glass towers; that it belonged, in short, always, always to someone else.
So she raised her eyes, and there above her was the saucer.
It was beautiful. It was golden, with a dusty finish like that of an unripe Concord grape. It made a faint sound, a chord composed of two tones and a blunted hiss like the wind in tall wheat. It was darting about like a swallow, soaring and dropping. It circled and dropped and hovered like a fish, shimmering. It was like all these living things, but with that beauty it had all the loveliness of things turned and burnished, measured, machined, and metrical.
At first she felt no astonishment, for this was so different from anything she had ever seen before that it had to be a trick of the eye, a false evaluation of size and speed and distance that in a moment would resolve itself into a sun-flash on an airplane or the lingering glare of a welding arc.
She looked away from it and abruptly realized that many other people saw it—saw something—too. People all around her had stopped moving and speaking and were craning upward. Around her was a globe of silent astonishment, and outside it, she was aware of the life-noise of the city, the hard-breathing giant who never inhales.