"Nathan!" Helen shouts, pushing the bathroom door open. "Didn't you hear me calling you?" She is a tiny woman, slender and heart-faced, with long, thick brown hair. She does not look thirty-eight, although Nathan, who is considered good-looking, if not handsome, because of his weathered, broad-featured face and shock of gray hair, looks every one of his forty years. "Michael's late for school again," she says. "He's missed the bus. And when I told him I'd take him to school, he told me to fuck off."
"That's not what I said." Michael appears behind his mother; he is sixteen and dressed in baggy slacks and a carefully torn T-shirt. His hair is swept back from his forehead and sprayed to a lacquered shine. He looks like his mother, and has her temperament. Flushed with anger and frustration, he says, "I told her I'd take the next bus, which I could have taken, if she would have let me out of the house to catch it. Now it's too late."
"Your mother said she'd take you to school."
"I don't want her taking me to school. I can't stand her."
"Well, I am taking you," Helen said, "and as a consequence for what you said to me, you're grounded this weekend."
"I didn't say anything to you!"
"Nathan," she said, turning to him, "he's lying again. He told me to fuck myself."
"I am not lying," Michael shouts. "And I didn't say 'fuck yourself,' I said 'fuck it' because nobody can talk sense to you. All you can do is scream and ground me every five minutes. I already bought tickets to The Flack concert," he says to Nathan, "and I'm going, whether she likes it or not. I've tried to be nice to her all week, but it's impossible."
Nathan wipes the soap from his face and, trying to remain calm, says, "We've talked about using that kind of language to your mother. It's got to stop…."
But there can be no quiet and rational resolve, for the family dynamics inevitably overpower him.
The argument gains momentum.
Michael is swearing and crying in frustration. Helen finally grabs him by his T-shirt and pushes him against the hallway wall. "I've got to get to work, and you are coming with me. Damn you!"
Michael tries to pull away from her, but she won't let him go. He pushes her, defensively, throwing her off balance.
Seeing that, Nathan shouts, "God damn you both," and rushes into the hallway. Everything is out of control now; it is all visceral response.
He pushes Helen aside and slaps Michael hard on the side of his face.
Helen screams, "I've told you never to strike him."
But before Nathan can recover and bring himself to apologize, they are out of the house.
By sunset the sky was the color of dull metal and filled with storm clouds. Only in the west did the sun bleed through the gray as it settled into the sea, which was pellucid and unnaturally clear. Sheet lightning shot through the massive cloud countries as the temperature dropped, and the humidity seemed to roll off the sea like mist, soon to be rain.
Nathan's fever thoughts burned like his red, broken skin. There was no food, no water to drink, just the slight smell of gasoline and the salty tang of the sea. It became dark, and still Nathan sat and stared into the transparent depths of the sea, as if he were looking for something he had lost. Sometime during the agony of afternoon, he had stopped thinking about rescue. That idea had become as distant as a childhood dream.
Now, his mind raw from the sun, he watched and waited, and as expected, something was swimming up from the depths. A vague shape rose through veils of green darkness, followed by others. Fins broke the surface of the water, and twenty-foot thresher sharks circled the boat. Then other fish appeared just below the surface: marlin and sea-bass, dolphin and barracuda, all circling, until the sea in all directions was filled with all manner of fish, from the smallest four-eye to sixty-foot star-speckled whale sharks.
It grew dark, and the water was lit now by moonlight and pocked by the rain that began to fall. The rain was cold on Nathan's raw skin, and it looked as if its own silvery light illuminated each droplet.
And as the rain struck the water, the fish became frenzied. They began to tear at each other, as if in a feeding madness. Huge white sharks snapped and gored the smaller tiger and mako sharks, while the barracuda cut sailfish and cobia and tarpon into bloody gobbets of meat.
Nathan could feel them smashing against the hull like hammers, and the ocean began to boil with the carnage.
Then, as if in concert, the storm exploded in claps and rolls of thunder and torrents of rain; and the ocean responded with high waves that almost turned over the speedboat. Reeking fish slammed into the cigarette's cockpit, as if thrown from the sky, splashing Nathan with blood and entrails. Lightning veined the moon, magnified by the atmosphere into a lifeless sun.
Nathan huddled inside the boat, pressing his legs and back against the fiberglass to prevent himself from being flung into the sea. The rain was cold, as was the seawater spraying over him, yet each raindrop and salty spindrift burned him. He raised his head one last time to look around, only to see that it was raining fire. The ocean was illuminated, as if by blue flame; and the sky glowed like cinders.
The sea was a bloodbath.
And as his heart stopped and his breath caught in his throat —
Nathan sits behind his desk in his three-windowed, mahogany-paneled office. He is looking at the rouged and concerned face of a wealthy dowager client as he learns of the death of his wife and son.
He listens to the voice on the phone describing the accident and feels himself freezing into shock. He can only stare at the dowager's huge emerald earrings, as if the green stones are tiny tablets: the emerald grimoires of Solomon, which contain all the answers to the mysteries of life and death and guilt and anger.
Dawn revealed the bloated bodies and remains of thousands of fish that floated like gray driftwood on the calm swells of the ocean. A few cumulus clouds drifted across the sky, as if to separate the chilly perfection of Heaven from the ruin below. Nathan awakened with a jolt, as if from a nightmare, only to find that all was as it had been. Repelled, he threw an eel and an ugly, spiny sargassum fish back into the sea.
He felt nauseated, but he had had the dry heaves during the night; there was nothing left in his stomach to expel. He had even tried to eat the fish that had landed in the cockpit of the speedboat, but the reek was so great that he couldn't manage to bite into the putrescent flesh. He was thirsty, but the sea was salt. Here was food and water all around him, yet he was starving and dehydrated. And naked. His clothes were not anywhere to be seen. Perhaps he had torn them off to relieve his burning skin. Nathan's flesh seemed to be pulling away from his bones. It was so scorched that his shoulders and face and arms were bleeding.
The empty bottle of scotch rolled on the fiberglass floor of the speedboat, catching the sun.
The hours passed. Nathan tried not to look at the sea, filled with the miles of decaying flesh and stink, but he could not stare into the sky forever. He surveyed the countries of flesh and sea around him, a sargasso mire that seemed endless, and he noticed something shiny bobbing in the water. It was the silver breastplate of a satin Torah covering. He scanned the ocean and found a Torah parchment floating, its Hebrew letters black mirrors reflecting the sun and sky above. Bits and pieces of the ark floated in the debris. Open prayer books seemed to move beneath the surface of the water like manta rays, their black covers dull and the golden letters washed away.
But the holy objects and bloody flesh seemed to form letters, signs, and portents that Nathan could not read. Yet when he reached for a prayer book floating beside the hull, it began to sink into the dark, shadowed water, to become a distant memory. As Nathan looked into the water that was as clear and still as the past, he remembered: His son, dressed in a new black suit, leading the Shacharis service at his bar mitzvah; his own wedding in a rundown, glot-kosher hotel in Miami Beach, Helen nervous around his eighty-year-old aunts, who insisted that she step on Nathan's foot for luck when he ceremoniously crushed the wineglass wrapped in a napkin; Helen taking him in her arms to tell him that his father had died; and the arguments and lovemaking and Sabbath candles; Michael stealing the family car, introducing him to his first «serious» girlfriend, who seemed afraid to look up from her plate at the dinner table….