He was not shaking anymore.
The sweat on his face began to dry in the cold air gushing from the dashboard vents.
He was no longer plagued by a sensation of falling. He had reached bottom.
Through the August heat and a thin haze of smog, passing cars and trucks shimmered like mirages, trembling westward toward cleaner air and the cooling sea. Joe waited for a break in traffic and then headed once more for the edge of the continent.
3
The sand was bone white in the glare of the August sun. Cool and green and rolling came the sea, scattering the tiny shells of dead and dying creatures on the shore.
The beach at Santa Monica was crowded with people tanning, playing games, and eating picnic lunches on blankets and big towels. Although the day was a scorcher farther inland, here it was merely pleasantly warm, with a breeze coming off the Pacific.
A few sunbathers glanced curiously at Joe as he walked north through the coconut-oiled throng, because he was not dressed for the beach. He wore a white T-shirt, tan chinos, and running shoes without socks. He had not come to swim or sunbathe.
As lifeguards watched the swimmers, strolling young women in bikinis watched the lifeguards. Their rhythmic rituals distracted them entirely from the architects of shells cast on the foaming shore near their feet.
Children played in the surf, but Joe could not bear to watch them. Their laughter, shouts, and squeals of delight abraded his nerves and sparked in him an irrational anger.
Carrying a Styrofoam cooler and a towel, he continued north, gazing at the seared hills of Malibu beyond the curve of Santa Monica Bay. At last he found a less populated stretch of sand. He unrolled the towel, sat facing the sea, and took a bottle of beer from its bed of ice in the cooler.
If ocean-view property had been within his means, he would have finished out his life at the water’s edge. The ceaseless susurration of surf, the sun-gilded and moon-silvered relentlessness of incoming breakers, and the smooth liquid curve to the far horizon brought him not any sense of peace, not serenity, but a welcome numbness.
The rhythms of the sea were all he ever expected to know of eternity and of God.
If he drank a few beers and let the therapeutic vistas of the Pacific wash through him, he might then be calm enough to go to the cemetery. To stand upon the earth that blanketed his wife and his daughters. To touch the stone that bore their names.
This day, of all days, he had an obligation to the dead.
Two teenage boys, improbably thin, wearing baggy swim trunks slung low on their narrow hips, ambled along the beach from the north and stopped near Joe’s towel. One wore his long hair in a ponytail, the other in a buzz cut. Both were deeply browned by the sun. They turned to gaze at the ocean, their backs to him, blocking his view.
As Joe was about to ask them to move out of his way, the kid with the ponytail said, “You holding anything, man?”
Joe didn’t answer because he thought, at first, that the boy was talking to his buzz-cut friend.
“You holding anything?” the kid asked again, still staring at the ocean. “Looking to make a score or move some merchandise?”
“I’ve got nothing but beer,” Joe said impatiently, tipping up his sunglasses to get a better look at them, “and it’s not for sale.”
“Well,” said the kid with the buzz cut, “if you ain’t a candy store, there’s a couple guys watching sure think you are.”
“Where?”
“Don’t look now,” said the boy with the ponytail. “Wait till we get some distance. We been watching them watch you. They stink of cop so bad, I’m surprised you can’t smell ’em.”
The other said, “Fifty feet south, near the lifeguard tower. Two dinks in Hawaiian shirts, look like preachers on vacation.”
“One’s got binoculars. One’s got a walkie-talkie.”
Bewildered, Joe lowered his sunglasses and said, “Thanks.”
“Hey,” said the boy with the ponytail, “just doing the friendly thing, man. We hate those self-righteous assholes.”
With nihilistic bitterness that sounded absurd coming from anyone so young, the kid with the buzz cut said, “Screw the system.”
As arrogant as young male tigers, the boys continued south along the beach, checking out the girls. Joe had never gotten a good look at their faces.
A few minutes later, when he finished his first beer, he turned, opened the lid of the cooler, put away the empty can, and looked nonchalantly back along the strand. Two men in Hawaiian shirts were standing in the shadow of the lifeguard tower.
The taller of the two, in a predominantly green shirt and white cotton slacks, was studying Joe through a pair of binoculars. Alert to the possibility that he’d been spotted, he calmly turned with the binoculars to the south, as if interested not in Joe but in a group of bikini-clad teenagers.
The shorter man wore a shirt that was mostly red and orange. His tan slacks were rolled at the cuffs. He was barefoot in the sand, holding his shoes and socks in his left hand.
In his right hand, held down at his side, was another object, which might have been a small radio or a CD player. It might also have been a walkie-talkie.
The tall guy was cancerously tanned, with sun-bleached blond hair, but the smaller man was pale, a stranger to beaches.
Popping the tab on another beer and inhaling the fragrant foamy mist that sprayed from the can, Joe turned to the sea once more.
Although neither of the men looked as if he’d left home this morning with the intention of going to the shore, they appeared no more out of place than Joe did. The kids had said that the watchers stank of cop, but even though he’d been a crime reporter for fourteen years, Joe couldn’t catch the scent.
Anyway, there was no reason for the police to be interested in him. With the murder rate soaring, rape almost as common as romance, and robbery so prevalent that half the populace seemed to be stealing from the other half, the cops would not waste time harassing him for drinking an alcoholic beverage on a public beach.
High on silent pinions, shining white, three sea gulls flew northward from the distant pier, at first paralleling the shoreline. Then they soared over the shimmering bay and wheeled across the sky.
Eventually Joe glanced back toward the lifeguard tower. The two men were no longer there.
He faced the sea again.
Incoming breakers broke, spilling shatters of foam on the sand. He watched the waves as a willing subject might watch a hypnotist’s pendant swinging on a silver chain.
This time, however, the tides did not mesmerize, and he was unable to guide his troubled mind into calmer currents. Like the effect of a planet on its moon, the calendar pulled Joe into its orbit, and he couldn’t stop his thoughts from revolving around the date: August 15, August 15, August 15. This first anniversary of the crash had an overwhelming gravity that crushed him down into memories of his loss.
When the remains of his wife and children had been conveyed to him, after the investigation of the crash and the meticulous cataloguing of both the organic and the inorganic debris, Joe was given only fragments of their bodies. The sealed caskets were the size usually reserved for the burial of infants. He received them as if he were taking possession of the sacred bones of saints nestled in reliquaries.
Although he understood the devastating effects of the airliner’s impact, and though he knew that an unsparing fire had flashed through the debris, how strange it had seemed to Joe that Michelle’s and the girls’ physical remains should be so small. They had been such enormous presences in his life.
Without them, the world seemed to be an alien place. He didn’t feel as if he belonged here until he was at least two hours out of bed. Some days the planet turned twenty-four hours without rotating Joe into an accommodation with life. Clearly this was one of them.