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--You areto each other, you and I

A pause, then: We are each other’s You are mine and I aht for a moment I am Peter

She cupped his cheek

--Yes

I aht was fantastically still, everything held in abeyance, the two of theht falling upon them

--Yes, that is who you are You are my Peter

And you are my Amy

As she made her est--and then for ht in this manner The conversation would be repeated countless times, like a chant or prayer Each visit was as if it were the first; at the start he retained no hts or of the events that had preceded them, as if he were a wholly novel creature in the world, born anew each night But slowly, as the years became decades, the man inside the body--the essential spirit--reasserted itself Never would he speak again, though they would talk of h the touch of their hands, the two of the in the field of fireflies, beneath the su?

She sh her tears

--Ho home

--

Michael had cleared the harbor Over the transorew faint The moment of decision was upon him South, as he’d told Amy, or a new direction entirely?

It wasn’t even a question

He tacked the Nautilus, turning in a northeasterly direction The as fair, the seas light, with a gentle green color The following afternoon he rounded the tip of Long Island and leapt into open sea Three days after leaving New York, he ly beautiful, with long beaches of pure white sand and crashing surf There appeared to be no buildings at all, or none he could see; all traces of civilization had been swept away by the ocean’s hand Anchored in a sheltered cove, he ain

Soon the ocean changed It grew darker, with a solemn look He had passed into a wild zone, far from any land He felt not fear but excitehtness His boat, his Nautilus, was sound; he had the wind and sea and stars to guide hilish coast in twenty-three days, though perhaps that wouldn’t happen There were er; maybe he’d end up in France, or even Spain It didn’tto find as out there

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Fanning cas slowly, and in parts First there was a sensation of cold sand on his feet; this was followed by the sound of waves, gently pushing upon a tranquil shore After an unknown interval of tiht Stars thick as powder lay across a sky of velvety blackness, immeasurably deep The air was cool and still, as after a daylong rain Above and behind hirass and beach plum, were houses; their white faces shone faintly with the reflected light of the an to walk The hems of his trousers were damp; he seemed to have mislaid his shoes, or else he had arrived in this place without the was so the situation called for The unanticipated nature of his circu of elastic reality, aroused in hi felt inevitable, reassuringly so When he tried to recall anything thatin this place, he could think of nothing He kneho he was, yet his personal history seemed devoid of narrative coherence There was a time, he knehen he had been a child And yet that period of his life, like all others, registered only as a collection of emotional and sensory impressions with a metaphoric aspect His mother and his father, for exas but as a feeling of war cradled in a bath The tohere he’d grown up, whose name he did not recall, was not a discrete civic unit of buildings and streets but a view through ascreen of rain pattering upon su but simply unexpected, especially the fact that his adult life seemed almost completely unknown to him He knew that in his life he had been happy, also sad; for a long time he had been very, very lonely Yet when he tried to reconstruct the circumstances, all he remembered was a clock