by Paul Theroux
Sharkey said, “I’m not hungry, man.”
He slept badly, but when at last he subsided into sleep, his phone rang in the darkness—João, excited, fully awake, barking in his ear.
“It coming big, Joe!”
“Where’s the team?”
“They leave a message. They say tomorrow for sure.”
“Who’s riding today?” Sharkey asked, but he knew the answer.
Joao said, “Your friend.”
“Right.”
“You can maybe watch.”
* * *
Sharkey was not used to being a spectator, idly watching and whistling among people turned away from him, anonymous in a crowd. He backed off, sliding around the photographers, the cameras, the paraphernalia of umbrellas and tripods and billowing windbreaks, all Garrett’s team and well-wishers. His own team—the Prime Fuel people, his photographers—had still not arrived. He had asked João about the tow-in, and João had smiled and pointed to Garrett on the beach below, setting off on a jet ski, and said, “Only got one.”
And now the crowd on the cliff was calling out to Garrett as he was being towed from the harbor to the left, into the dark slope of the swell. Their faces were tight with fear. They were not cheering, they were appealing to him, offering piteous encouragement, as though to a man in grave danger, and could not help sounding sorrowful.
Sharkey did not think of himself as a jealous man, yet he felt an unexpected tug of resentment, as of being betrayed, cuckolded by a friend, seeing Garrett clinging to the back of the jet ski, dragging his board, climbing at a sharp angle up the wave, carving a streak of white into its belly, like a tear in dark billowing silk. And he was glad when Garrett was towed beyond the break and was hidden by the high foam-trimmed tops. Sharkey raised his binoculars and peered. He saw black water brimming against the sky. The man was lost to view, in the distant sea, behind the huge swell.
Hearing several anguished cries from the crowd, Sharkey looked up and was strangely consoled, and a moment later hated himself for it.
The sound of the sea helped: it smothered him. Falling water had never sounded more destructive, the early sets sliding toward the cliff and breaking like boulders cleaving—not the slop and splash of liquid but the shattering of rocks splintering to smallness, the whole great mountain of water smashing and draining away to a swirling reef of bubbles; and then another, louder.
Three more swelling waves, with wide irregular faces, almost vertical, and then hollowing and scooped and toppling; but no sign of the surfer. Sharkey turned his back on the wave; he kicked at the stones on the cliff, hating the ugliness of the land, feeling stifled and disgusted, stumbling slightly as he gasped for breath. Then a sudden shriek from the crowd, and more yelps, some agonized cheers, and he spun around.
A tiny figure had slipped across the top of the wave and dropped in, and was speeding across its face, carving a narrow furrow of froth.
The wave was still rising as the man grew smaller, cutting sideways—and when Sharkey looked through his binoculars again he saw something even more unusual than this dwarf tumbling down the wall of water. On the face of the wave were more waves, some like moguls on the black run of a ski slope, others like ridges, still more of them formal waves—surfable waves on the wave itself—taller than the surfer who was carving his way around them, speeding toward the bottom of the trough.
Sharkey willed him to stay upright, and when at last the man was struggling in the massive collapse of the wave, then lost to the fury of the foam, Sharkey cheered with the rest of the watchers on the cliff, the photographers, the exuberant locals, the sponsors in their distinctive jackets and caps, the team hurrying down to the beach.
João rushed to Sharkey and hugged him.
“Tomorrow your turn!”
* * *
He had no fear now. Seeing Garrett master the wave convinced him he could ride it, and if the wave was bigger tomorrow, so much the better. Yet he slept badly, remembering how the face of the wave had not been glassy, how there had been ridges and head-high waves protruding from it, the phenomenal scowl of the water monster, its vast bumpy face seen up close.
He was up and in his wetsuit before João’s wake-up call. The weather that early morning was bleak, a low sky of woolly gray clouds, a wind thick with the sourness of kelp and the tang of the deep sea.
He had his surfboard, he was dressed to surf. But his team, the sponsors, the film crew and photographers he’d expected, were nowhere to be seen. João stood with a warmly dressed woman and man, their faces scarcely visible inside their hoods.
Futile, surprised into his own language, João said, “Muitos carros.”
Sharkey was disconcerted to be among strangers and was aware of their indifference.
“Conferência de imprensa,”the woman remarked, pointing to a platform near the hotel that had not been there the day before, people gathered around it.
“Incrivel!” an old woman in black shrieked. “Grande onda!”
A group of eager hurrying boys pushed past him. Sharkey hated being able to understand what was said, and that he did so imperfectly made it worse for its truth being blunter—traffic jam, press conference, a mass of excited chattering people turned away from him.
The news was of Garrett’s ride, the man himself being interviewed, the lights singling him out in the early-morning gloom. He stood straight, a small glowing man on the improvised stage, holding his magical board, the board glinting in the photographers’ flashes.
Looking fascinated, João and the others drifted toward the press conference, and Sharkey slipped away. Seeing a pickup truck passing, he stuck out his hand, and when the driver smiled in a wondering way, Sharkey pointed to his board and said, “To the beach—okay?”
His words were barely audible over the booming of the waves, but the board said enough.
As they drove down the hill to Nazaré and the beach, Sharkey glanced at the cliff at Sitio and saw a pack of children, not looking at the wave but kicking a football, and felt a pang for his insignificance.
A jet ski was parked on the slope of the beach, a man astride it, eating a small circular pastry.
“Take me out,” Sharkey said, slapping his board.
The man smiled—he understood but looked doubtful, narrowing his eyes.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Sharkey said. “Grande onda.”
Shaking his head, the man finished his pastry and licked his fingers, then began to drag his jet ski the short distance down the slope into the flop of the shore break.
No one saw Sharkey yank the zips, sealing himself into his wetsuit; there were no witnesses to his splashing toward the jet ski and fastening his board to the rear bracket. The man revving the engine did not speak English but used gestures—his voice could not be heard in any case in the loud surf.
That no one was watching made it easier; without witnesses Sharkey was so negligible as barely to exist, half submerged and insignificant being towed across the harbor and into the steepness of the swell, up and over two rising waves, and disappearing behind them.
And then he was at sea, in the middle of the channel, his back to shore, facing the incoming waves. When he let go of the tow rope and was released from the jet ski and was alone, he was a mere wisp on the water, ghostlike, no more than flotsam, perhaps not even visible to anyone on the cliff. And the jet ski was tipping past the crest of a wave and growing tiny, then gone.
For fifteen or twenty minutes Sharkey straddled his board, wondering if the sets were diminishing but keeping to the back of the wave, slipping away when it built and rolled beneath him. He was content in the lift and push of the swell, and unobserved he felt a great stillness, buoyant in the black water, too small to be seen, calm in his smallness.
But he felt himself lifted higher and higher now with each successive wave, the sets rising and giving him a better view of the cliff at Sitio—the crowd had dispersed—and of the ocean. He saw a bulge at sea, like a whale surfacing, its enormous gray head em
erging, losing its roundness, its mouth opening, its jaws widening , becoming cavernous, resolving into a formal wave, still rising as it neared him. He recognized it as his longed-for wish; he smiled in greeting, thinking, Yes.
This was the wave he’d been yearning for, finally reaching him from the far ocean, long awaited, the wave at last coming to meet him. He was glad to be alone for this, the intimacy of this rendezvous, relieved that no one was watching, liberated by being no more than a speck in the sea.
No one saw him being hoisted and flattening himself on his board, no one saw him paddling like mad into the spume on its crest at the edge of its lip, no one saw him make the final push and drop in. No spectator stood on the cliff as he drove left down the face of the wave, using all the strength in his legs to steer himself across the sudden ridges and creases of steep water toward the thickness of yellowy froth and sea scum on the shore—only small boys on the high cliff, kicking a football, but they were looking at their bouncing ball. And then he was tumbled, blinded, fighting for air.
19
The Kiss of Life
Sharkey’s whole back smarted like a blistered sunburn with his fresh tattoo, UNDER THE WAVE, his skin still hot, stinging with the welts of a mass of unhealed needle punctures and bright ink. He stifled a gasp as he was nudged by someone pushing behind him. He stepped aside on the lanai to let the young chattering surfers pass by, and he growled in annoyance at their clumsiness, bumping him, oafishly and unlikely, unsteady in their gait, pigeon-toed and toppling, like amphibians—so sleek in the water, so awkward, stumbling on solid and unforgiving wood planks.
None glanced at him, none spoke, none saw him or commented on the blood that had leaked into the back of his T-shirt. He was old and inanimate. They were big reckless boys, with a scattering of pretty girls, wide shoulders, crazy hair, and bruised feet, pushing past him in a scrum of energy and health and, what was most remarkable, their youth, their gusto, a heedlessness that made them risk the biggest barrels at Pipeline or the winter swell at Waimea.
I was a punk like you once, he thought. But I surfed Nazaré, and no one here knows it.
The bungalow belonging to Hunter’s friend Franco faced Rocky Point—not large, but the lanai was wide and roofed, surrounding the whole house, and when it became obvious to the surfers that there was not enough room for them to circulate inside they spilled back onto the lanai, laughing, teasing, swigging beer and smoking joints in the sharp burned-vegetable smell of pakalolo and sour beer suds.
“That’s a man-sized blunt,” one of the boys said to Sharkey.
Sharkey showed his teeth as he held the smoke down, saying nothing, wondering whether he would be recognized. But the boy merely nodded in the torpid, seemingly slow-witted way of an uncertain sea animal, sleepy-eyed and tottering on a clod of earth. He seemed to look past Sharkey’s head at the breaking waves at Gas Chambers, animated by the sound of water sloshing on the shore, like pebbles swilling in a barrel.
“Custom-made,” Sharkey said, and tried to think of something more, but he was too buzzed to come up with anything clever. And talking to surfers involved the challenge of thinking in another language.
“I seen you with Moe Kahiko,” the boy said. “He got da kine. Killer buds.”
Sharkey was about to reply when he realized the boy was not listening, had begun to lurch away in the direction of four young surfers at the rail of the lanai, whooping at the arrival of someone from the street.
“Hi,” he said to a young woman, who looked surprised to be greeted.
“Hi,” she said guardedly, and hurried past him, her surprise becoming a kind of anxiety.
I look like an old man, he said in his mind, speaking to himself in a tipsy way, his nose full of smoke, his back burning with the unhealed tattoo. But I have surfed the monster wave at Nazaré.
Then he was alone, and looked inside the house through the big window on the empty lanai. But he saw nothing but a thin man, gaunt-faced with falcon features, in a stained T-shirt, one blue tattooed hand raised to his mouth for a hit on a sparkling doobie. The man’s face was creased, his neck leathery, his hair spiked and going gray, his mouth half smiling in puzzlement, the lips cracked and stung by salt, the long upraised fingers also sea-soaked and pink and pickled, holding the burned-tipped joint—a weatherbeaten man peering back at him from the inner room, a stranger, his own reflection.
Then he knew why no one recognized him: he was sinewy, too watchful to be trusted, lurking like an outlaw, an idle predator, not hungry but hopeful and alone, a nonentity but old. His skin was blackish and blotchy in places, and the tattoos on his hands and arms were no longer blue but grayish and porous, his skin tissuey from decades of waves slapping it, of sun scorching it. He was a scarecrow haunting the party, a wraith among the pretty girls and golden boys.
The man in the mirror of the window was crowded by gesturing boys, hooting, whistling.
“He’s here!”
“Yo!”
“Aloha!”
And he saw, still reflected in the window, the slight, smiling, crop-haired figure of Garrett, garlanded with leis, and his pale lovely wife, wearing a crown of blossoms, advancing behind him across the lanai, greeted by Franco.
“Here’s our hero,” Franco said.
But entering the house, Garrett looked aside and saw Sharkey standing by the rail of the lanai—he had backed away from the window and the cheering boys.
“Shark,” Garrett said, and reached to bump fists, but before Sharkey could meet him with his own fist, Garrett staggered, surrounded, and was pushed into the house, the young surfers following.
In an unexpected hush, the music shut off, Franco began to speak, praising Garrett, provoking bursts of laughter and some boyish hoots; and then Garrett, to applause, haltingly thanked Franco and the partygoers, who cheered as he introduced his wife. The awkward enthusiasm, the inarticulate hollering, were like a tribal rite, but a happy one, of simple celebration.
“Really happy to be part of the paddle-out,” Garrett was saying. “Though I never knew him.”
Franco interrupted, saying, “Hunter was one of us. He’d understand why it’s taken us so long to pull this thing together. How many years, eh? Try wait, doc! But we’ll give him a real sendoff, with lots of aloha.”
Sharkey sensed the bewilderment in the room, felt it on his skin, the murmuring, the confusion. They hadn’t known Hunter either. And he smiled, thinking how he and Hunter were either unknown or forgotten. But he couldn’t blame the new generation of watermen for their ignorance, because he himself had never read Hunter’s books and could hardly believe that such a restless man could sit still long enough to write anything.
Dusk was falling, lending a fragile luminescence to Franco’s garden, the white petals of the plumeria, the crimson torches of ginger, and he was studying them in the mild stupor of pakalolo when he was nudged—Garrett.
“Why didn’t you come inside, man? I wanted to introduce you.”
“That’s good. I like that. Introduce me.” Sharkey was thinking how, as a stranger now, he needed to be identified and his history explained.
“You did it! You surfed Nazaré!”
Sharkey said, “No one saw me.”
“Wrong! They told me—they saw you from the cliff, they saw you from the beach. Diogo, the jet ski guy, saw you.”
“Was that his name? Garrett, what I did isn’t news.”
“That’s better, that’s humble.”
“Everyone saw you, man—the whole world.”
Garrett said, “The only one who mattered to me was Nicole. She saw me. That was all I wanted.”
Hearing this, Sharkey became tearful, and blamed the blunt in his fingers. He hid his sorrow with sudden anger, saying, “My team didn’t show up!”
“You didn’t need them! If I’d done that with no one watching, I’d be stoked.”
“I could have wiped out bad. I only realized it when it was over.”
Garrett said eagerly, “Yes. Did y
ou sense it? That you might die?”
“My mind was empty. I felt”—Sharkey took a hit of the blunt and held the smoke down, then exhaled—“I felt that because no one was watching, I didn’t exist. That I only came alive when I was in the shore break, pounded in the soup. And no one was waiting for me.”
“Your wave might have been bigger than mine,” Garrett said, teasing Sharkey with a poke in his arm.
“They’re gone—your wave, my wave. Gone forever,” Sharkey said. He put the blunt to his lips and drew on it.
Garrett nodded slowly. “You going back to Nazaré?”
Sharkey did not reply, he was holding his breath. Finally he said, “That was the one I was waiting for,” through clenched teeth. “I’m done.”
“Me too. But I want more. What’re you going to do now?”
The question was vague and ungraspable. It was like being asked, “Who are you?” He had not thought of What next? And in his confusion he became aware of a commotion inside the house, a swelling of shouts and bumping floorboards, as of sudden knocking feet. With that too, being crowded by hearty boys and laughing girls, the golden youths, jostling to get near Garrett as Garrett laughed, fending them off, calling out, “He did it too! The Shark was at Nazaré!”
But no one heard, or if they did, no one recognized his name, and Sharkey stepped aside as the surfers pushed past him.
But beyond this were the other cries—yelps, urgent shouts from inside the house, as Franco appeared at a side door and called out, “Olive—we need you here!”
Sharkey watched like a sleepy child as Franco called the woman’s name again to the next house, another bungalow behind the hedge of torch ginger and heliconia stalks and crooked plumeria branches.
A small but certain voice in the twilight responded, “I’m here.”