Augie Silver slept fitfully for most of the day. It was brutally hot, the palm fronds hung limp and silent outside the bedroom window, yet the painter never lowered the cotton quilt from under his chin. He was too thin, too dry, too tired to sweat, he lay there papery and brittle, his breathing shallow, the dream movements of his eyeballs clear and disconcerting through the veiny translucent skin of their lids.
Around six o'clock he struggled out of bed, slipped out of his clothes, and went slowly to the closet for his favorite robe. It never occurred to him that the robe perhaps had been moved from its accustomed peg during his four-month absence-and it hadn't been. It hung there patient and welcoming, the loops of yellow terrycloth worn flat and shiny at the elbows, the big soft collar suggesting a certain pomp, like the entrance of a champion boxer. Directly under the robe, as if held in place by an invisible mannequin, were the backless slippers that so perfectly suited his shuffling, meandering walk. He stepped into them with the reverent confidence of the prodigal who knows in his bones that his wanderings have made him more profoundly, more legitimately the possessor of his home, his comforts, his life.
Silently he strolled into the living room. His former widow was lying on a sofa reading, and she did not hear him approach. He took a moment to gaze around the house. His paintings hung on almost every wall, they rang in his brain with a glad but overwhelming clamor that had less to do with sight than sound, as though he were a composer and ten orchestras were simultaneously playing every tune he'd ever written.
"Looks like a goddamn museum in here," he said.
Nina looked up. Her reading glasses stretched her eyes, made them huge and liquid, and the lifting of her head made the sinews rise and quiver from her collarbone to her jaw. She had at that moment an unposed loveliness that made Augie's knees go even weaker in appreciation of what he had come home to.
"I hung the paintings for the memorial service," said his wife.
"Memorial service," mused the painter. "I keep forgetting I was dead." He mused further. "Guess I'm still dead, far as anybody knows. It's kind of relaxing… Was I lavishly and excessively praised?"
"Your ears must have been on fire."
"Who gave the eulogy?"
"Clay."
"Ah. Elegant and flowery, I bet. I owe him one."
Nina said nothing and Augie shuffled to the sofa. He leaned over to kiss his wife and tried not to let her see what an effort it was to straighten up again. She tried not to let him know that she had noticed.
"Hungry?"
The word sounded somehow foreign to him and he took a moment to respond. "I should be. But my body seems to have forgotten what to do with food." He sat.
Nina hesitated. It seemed too soon to speak of doctors, of worries, of the fresh fear of recurring death. She draped herself across her husband's shoulders.
"I blew to Cuba," he suddenly said, being pulled back into his story as into a fever dream. "Funny, huh? A place I'd always wanted to go."
"Cuba?" said his wife.
Outside, soft evening light filtered through the oleanders and the crotons. A faint smell of jasmine and mango slipped past the louvered shutters and through the unscreened windows. Augie half leaned, half fell against the back of the sofa. His robe splayed open to reveal a white thigh that had grown thinner than his knee.
"Eventually," he said. "I guess I passed out after hauling myself into the broken dinghy. When I came awake, I was still having trouble breathing, my arms and chest ached horribly. But the storm was over and a fresh cool norther had blown up behind it. From the color of the sea I figured I was in the Gulf Stream. It was just before sunset. I watched awhile and conked out again.
"Night came. It got cold. In the morning I was shivering and parched but alert enough to remind myself not to go crazy. I needed something to concentrate on; but when I tried to pick something, I noticed I couldn't remember my name. Or what I did. Or where I lived. Or you. For a while I was panicked, then a weird acceptance kicked in: I was in the ocean and as blank as the ocean. I drifted. I curled up this way and that way, trying to hide from the sun. Now and then I peered around, imagining I would see a boat, an island.
I tried to sleep but my head was pounding, surging like waves were trapped inside it.
"By the next day I think I was getting delirious. I shook. I tasted blood in my throat. I was no longer sure whether I was asleep or awake, wet or dry, cold or hot. The glare on the water was blinding me, I kept seeing green streamers like when you press on your eyeballs. Then I saw the fins, circling, approaching, retreating, approaching."
Nina whimpered. It was an involuntary sound, a tiny shriek from an ancient nightmare. Augie reached out and put a hand on her head. The sleeve of his robe hung down from his bony arm. "Sharks?" she whispered.
"Dolphins," said her husband. "They were swimming with me. Or at least I think they were. I was pretty out of it by then. My sense of time was all screwed up, I expect I was yammering to myself. But I had the definite impression that a pod of dolphins, four or five, was surrounding me, protecting me, guiding me to wherever it was I was floundering. I watched those beautiful arched backs, the spume flying up from their blowholes and exploding into rainbows in the sun.
"More time passed. Another day, maybe two. I could feel myself shriveling up like a leaf. My skin was cracking open. Then, when I was asleep or raving, I felt and heard the dinghy being rammed, nudged, pushed. It was the first time I was afraid of capsizing. I grabbed the gunwale and looked over the side. Coconut palms. The dolphins were shepherding me to land.
"I have a very dim recollection of crawling to shore. Pebbles and shells cutting my hands. Saltwater searing deep into my flesh. I remember cool sand against my cheek. And the next thing I knew, I was waking up in an old fisherman's hut.
"I heard voices before I could open my eyes. Spanish voices. I couldn't understand much, but I guess I wasn't in very good shape, because one of them kept saying muerto, muerto. That made me nervous. I felt I had to do something impressive to show them I was alive, or they might do the decent thing and bury me. So I tried to move. I couldn't. I tried to speak, to groan. Nothing. I used to think failure was relative, but this was failure in the absolute. I couldn't even blink.
"But they must've found a pulse or something," the painter continued. "Maybe they just didn't feel like digging right then. Anyway, they told me afterward I was unconscious for around ten days."
"Who told you, Augie?" asked his wife.
He slowly shifted on the sofa and managed a skeletal smile. "This old man who spoke pretty decent English. Used to work at a casino in the Batista days. Told me I almost cashed in all my cheeps."
Nina tried to smile in return but found that she could not. The person to whom something terrible has happened is usually the first to be able to laugh about it; those who love him are always the last. "But Augie," she said, "why did it take you so long to get home?"
"Amnesia, paranoia, and politics," he said. "I didn't know who I was. It wasn't till much later that I remembered the waterspouts, the wreck. I had no I.D. As soon as I could speak, the fishermen realized I was American, and they didn't know what to do with me. Where I landed was very remote-an isolated little peninsula called Boca de Cangrejo. What these people knew of the outside world was what the government radio told them. They were savvy enough to see I was no Yanqui imperialist devil, but they were afraid of what might happen if they turned me in."
"Afraid for themselves?"
"For themselves. For me. Afraid. Who knows of what exactly? So they kept me under wraps. Tried to feed me fish broth. As I got a little stronger, they helped me to the beach to watch the boats. They were very kind."
He paused, and Nina rubbed his shoulders. It was almost dark outside, the windows were soft gray pauses in the painting-covered walls. A block away a dog was barking, palm fronds scratched softly against the tin shingles of the roof.
"Only problem was, these little strands of memory started tugging at me, more and more each day. It didn't bother me especially that I didn't have a name. So what? But I was getting to ache about other things. Yearn. Yearning. I'd used those words, everybody does, but now I knew what they meant. I knew I had a home somewhere and I yearned to get back to it. I believed I had a mate, someone it was my proper destiny to be with. And I had this nagging and, if this doesn't sound too crazy, religious sense that I had work, some kind of work, to do."
"It doesn't sound crazy," said Nina Silver, but her husband continued as though he hadn't heard. Even through his weakness, it seemed a kind of frenzy was upon him now, and he hurtled through the rest of his story as if the meaning of it existed not in the details but in the sheer momentum.
"Day to day," he said, "I felt that I was getting stronger, but the strength wasn't going to my body, it was being siphoned off into this groping quest for memory, this blank struggle to recall or invent who I was and what I was put on earth to do. Everything had to be relearned; it was exhausting as childhood. Little bits of things triggered recollections that, maddeningly, went nowhere. A color. A smell. I knew them. But how? From where? I asked for a paper and pencil and I started to draw. I didn't know I knew how, I just drew. I looked for hints in the pictures. And that's what I saw: hints, nothing more. A couple of months went by. I doodled and racked my brain. Meanwhile, my body was languishing, this need to remember was like a tumor, was like a sucker on a plant, it just took all the nourishment for itself.
"Then one day it clicked. By chance. That's always how it happens, isn't it? Some screwball fact that becomes the anchor of a new universe. There was a big sport-fishing tournament-marlin, sailfish-international. Big beautiful boats flocked by, the whole village stood on the beach and cheered and waved. Boats from Venezuela, Mexico, boats from Argentina, Panama. Americans weren't supposed to participate-part of the economic embargo, you understand. So if the U.S. government says don't do something, who's the most likely person to do it? A Key Wester, right? So sure enough a Key West boat goes by. Lip Smacker, Key West. I'm standing on the beach, taking turns looking through this ancient spyglass someone had, and I see it on the transom.
"Suddenly it was as if I had a fever. I had to be carried to my cot. I spent a couple days in bed, totally immobile. I was conscious and I had the weirdest sensation I've ever had in my life: a kind of itching, clicking, sparking inside my brain, like the whole computer was being reprogrammed and it was draining every last volt from the battery. I came out of the stupor, and I remembered.
"The tournament headquarters was about thirty miles up the coast, at a small resort called Puerto Dorado. The old croupier went there and made discreet contact with the Key West captain, a real crazy man named Wahoo Mateer. For the two of them, I imagine, the whole thing was pretty titillating, both sides feeling pleasantly subversive. A couple of evenings later, Mateer came and fetched me, and here I am. In and out of Cuba without a passport."
The painter paused and settled in farther against the back of the settee. He ran the sleeve of his bathrobe across his forehead as though mopping perspiration, but there was no moisture there, only a brick-red sheeny flush through the burned and crinkly skin. He pulled a slow deep breath into his ravaged lungs, and when he spoke again his voice was even and serene.
"I'm home with my mate. And I've remembered the work I have to do. I'm going to paint again, Nina. As soon as I'm a little stronger. I'm going to paint every day. I don't have to be great. That was arrogant nonsense: genius or nothing. I'll do what I can. I'm going to fill the world with paintings."
It was full dark beyond the windows now, and the only brightness was a yellow oval thrown by the lamp where Nina Silver had been reading. Her husband looked closely at her face and saw a catch at the corners of her mouth as she stretched her lips to smile.
"You don't think that's a good idea?" he asked.