I looked up “roadrunner” in The Lives of Birds. As part of a mating ritual, male roadrunners present food to a desired mate but won’t relinquish the gift until after mating has taken place. I felt honored by the offer, but chose not to dine on lizard that night.
Friends met me at the beach, among them, Blaine. He talked about the heart’s atrium—how, compared to other cardiac muscle, its muscle was “uncomplicated,” by which he meant perfectly smooth, so that it could conduct electrical impulses more efficiently. That’s how I wanted to be, a smooth conductor—not of electricity-I’d done that—but of whatever else blew in on the hurricane’s breeze, so that, kneeling on the altar of sand and swimming in the ritual of tides, I could listen and watch and see and hear.
We sifted through rocks and shells, taking a sand dollar to commemorate the day. The sun had long since risen out of the sand dollar’s hole and was getting ready to return. A night heron landed on a post, cocked one leg up until it disappeared into breast-feathers, then flew away. A month before, after a round of tests, Blaine had given me a clean bill of health, but some weeks later chest pains nagged me again. It seemed fitting enough. How could there be a certain end to anything?
Who could say of the Phoenix after it made its nest of sweet-smelling wood which the sun set on fire, and burned itself to ashes in those flames, that it then rose from them, it would not face more trials?
As we walked we came upon a shark’s egg case, called a “mermaid’s purse.” The amber pouch looked like kelp, a flattened version of the gas-filled floats that raise the long stems of seaweed to sunlight. On each end, the tendrils that hook the egg case to a kelp bed for safety had lost their hold in the hurricane’s strong surge and waved like tiny arms in the sea air. At the point where we were standing, a kingfisher flew in, perched on a rock, and peered down into incoming and outgoing water. Battalions of pelicans flew over in formation and a young seal, ready to molt, hauled out on the sand.
Blaine held the egg case against the sun. There’s something lonely and appealing and unnerving about sharks. In the midst of gross biological and cultural mutations, nothing about the shark has changed in the last sixty million years: the corkscrew-shaped valve in their intestine, their rigid fins, the abrading denticulated structure of their skin. Because they lack an air bladder, which gives most fish their buoyancy, sharks have to swim about all the time, never sleeping, as if motion would untie the knot of evolutionary stillness.
Stillness and motion. How does the knot get loosened? In our tepid, human sea of constant change, the shark, in perpetual movement, represents immobility.
“Look,” Blaine said, “I think there’s a live shark in there.” Then I saw it too: a miniature inside the rectangular pouch, bobbing in his teaspoon of fluid, so like the amniotic sea into which he would soon swim. “Let’s give him a break,” Blaine said, always fair-minded, and, walking out into a turquoise wave holding the tiny shark in his big hand, he let the mermaid’s purse go.
Sam and I went to bed early so we could leave before dawn to avoid the desert heat. Between highway sounds I heard waves and thought how the curve of the coastline here had sheltered and nurtured live-born sharks, humans, and migrating whales. Here, at the edge of the continent, time and distance stopped; in the lull between sets of waves I could get a fresh start.
“Now you are sentenced to live,” a neurologist at the lightning conference had told those of us who had been dead and revived. A sense of panic ensued, but panic is like fresh air. The world falls out from under us and we fly, we float, we skim mountains, and every draught we breathe is new. Exposed and raw, we are free to be lost, to ask questions. Otherwise we seize up and are paralyzed in self-righteousness, obsessed with our own perfection. If there is no death and regeneration, our virtues become empty shells. At best my virtues were small, but at least I could rely on panic. A carapace had been smashed by lightning and all the events that followed-divorce, loneliness, exile, and unmasking—had exposed new skin.
During the night I was awakened by the window, cranked open, rattling. Leaning over Sam’s sleeping body, I looked out: an owl stared in at us. Owls have always been associated with death and night, with the “dead sun,” the sun that has set and passes beneath us in darkness. That’s why the appearance of an owl is thought to herald disaster, the other side of the coin from the phoenix who rises from the dead like daylight. But, in China, bronze vessels were made in the shape of owls and used as rooffinials, which were supposed to shelter the inhabitants from thunder and fire.
I peered up as the bird twisted his blunt head to look at me. He was, after all, just an owl who had found a convenient perch. I thought of the lighthouse at Point Conception and took the owl’s presence for a middle-of-the-night, messenger-from-the-grave greeting. This was a dead man’s wink, a lighthouse’s watchful eye turning slowly, allowing me to see inside the ocean, the dark canyons where bat rays mated, the shaking seamounts where tsunamis are born, the perilous ledge where the continental shelf would someday break off, sending us who knows where.
In the morning a thick marine layer of fog that had smothered the coast for weeks broke open. When I put my spurs, snaffle bit, and saddle in the back of the pickup, Sam jumped in and would not leave again. Far up the coast, even in daylight, the Point Conception light still revolved its great head, and just before I turned inland, north toward towering ranges and oceanless basins of grass, I thought I saw that light wink as if to say, “Hell, yes, you’re still alive.”
To fall
is to return,
to fall is to rise.
To live is to have eyes in one’s fingertips,
to touch the knot tied
by stillness and motion.
The art of love
—is it the art of dying?
To love
is to die and live again and die again;
it is liveliness.
—Octavio Paz
A Match to the Heart Page 16