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feel a deep unease. For a moment she stared at the bright fl owers without really seeing them. Then a movement caught her eye.

From each stake in the ground to each new mango tree, bridging the air over the circles of poison Jamal had put down just that morning, there was a dark, quivering line. Joyce blinked, and when the illusion didn’t go away, she opened the screen to look more closely. Lines of ants were walking through the air. But it was not air, she realized, it was the fishing line Jamal had used to stake the trees, so transparent that she would not have seen it except for the ants. They were the large red ants, so dense and steady they seemed more substantial than the fishing wire itself. Joyce held herself still, as if a single motion would shatter something fragile. She hardly breathed, watching the steady progress of the ants. They were working very hard, each one excavating, then carrying away, the very heart of her trees.

Aristotle’s Lantern

Phil gave the signal, his arm a swift blur in the heat-shimmering air. Pragna, her head tilted to catch the sun, dark glasses hiding her expression, lowered her book to her belly; at seven months pregnant, she couldn’t dive.

“Go!” Phil called as his arm fell, and in the next instant Jonathan was over the edge, disappearing into that sea, so blue, so green, the water a liquid gem closing over him. Then Gunnar, lean and tan, plunged into the sea and disappeared. I sat on the edge of the boat, adjusting my mask. “Go, go!” Phil called, and I pushed off, sliding after Gunnar into that other world.

It was so quiet. Falling, I noticed this first. Light fell in shafts and then diffused, the water turning dimmer and more opaque and suddenly cooler. A school of tiny silver fish scattered before us like sparks. Below, Jonathan’s limbs were luminous against the ocean floor. I felt the water shift as Phil dove in, and turned to see him silhouetted against the clear, wavering ceiling of the ocean, a wide stream of bubbles in his wake.

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It was the fifth dive of the week. For me, the last. Tomorrow I would leave these islands, this resort built so unobtrusively amid the white beaches and jungled mountains. Jonathan’s research on current-wave dynamics often took him to remote places. He always went, eagerly—it was the bane of his existence that he taught oceanography in Minnesota, a thousand miles from any ocean. He had discovered this resort while wandering around the archipelagos of the South China Sea on a grant. One morning I’d answered the phone in Minneapolis, heard static sweeping through the line like snow. Then Jonathan’s voice came, fading, clear, echoing itself.

“Anna? Can you hear me?”

“Kind of,” I said, sitting up.

It was eleven o’clock in the morning and I’d been sleeping, a Minnesota winter sleep, the kind of sleep you sink into for a few weeks after a patient throws up on you and ten minutes later a doctor tells you off for a mistake that was his own, after you go downstairs and hear the receptionist arguing with a woman who’s maybe forty-five, maybe fifty, a woman who is clearly in great pain, and the receptionist is telling her that she can’t see a doctor if she can’t pay, but there’s an emergency room in a hospital across town that still takes the uninsured.
I’m too sick to drive,
the woman says, and she looks it. Pale, she’s leaning on the counter for support, like she might fall. She is well dressed, in a dark-red skirt and matching sweater, though her hair isn’t combed. Her hands are shaking, and she’s having a hard time catching her breath.
Please,
she says, and the receptionist looks grim and troubled; it’s not her fault that there’s nothing she can do, and you stand there in the doorway and hear yourself saying,
Look, don’t
worry, I’ll drive you there.
Anna? the receptionist says, and the doctor, who moments ago was screaming that you were a bloody fucking idiot, totally inept because you didn’t notice the medica-tion error he’d written on the chart, comes in and says, Anna? I need you upstairs right now. And everything slows down as you cross the room instead and take the woman’s elbow. She is puzzled but in too much pain to protest. There is a moment when your eyes connect, you see the fear in hers and you know it could be you
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standing there, your throat closing up, fear and pain making you light-headed, and that’s when you decide. You take her across the narrow swell of the Mississippi River to St. Paul and get her admitted to that hospital and then you don’t return to your job as a physician’s assistant. You go back home and fall asleep, waking at strange hours to eat cold cereal or watch TV, wondering what the next thing in your life will be.

Jonathan, a world away, didn’t know any of that, of course.

“How are you, Anna?” he asked. “You sound tired.”

“It’s a long story,” I said, walking to the window. My breath clouded the frozen glass. Beyond, the suburban world was fl at and white. Cars crawled along I-35W like bright-shelled bugs. Even here, in this clean midwestern city, traffic had multiplied; in the summertime, ozone alerts forced the very old and very young to stay inside. I’d treated them, the elderly gasping for breath, their heads arcing back to meet the plastic mask; the infants, limp and wheezing in my arms. That morning the cars were stalled, heat shimmering from their hoods into the snowy sky. I imagined the hospital, its regulated air and gleaming white walls and swarms of business managers in their cubicles, calculating and adjusting and maximizing the potential of every human resource. “What’s new with you?” I asked.

“Look, cash in your vacation time, all right? Anna, I can’t explain any of it long distance, but please. Say you’ll come.” I didn’t answer right away. We’d been together for fi ve years and had reached some sort of intersection: whether an ending or a turning we could not yet tell. But I heard something different, im-perative and inexplicable, in Jonathan’s voice.

“Anna?” My name traveled through dark space, echoed from satellites.
Anna, na, na,
like a song. “Are you still there? I’m having trouble hearing you.”

“I’m here,” I said, and there was a pause as my words traveled back over the curve of the globe, over oceans.

“Just come,” he said. “I’ve sent you a ticket.”

“I’ll think about it,” I promised. But I already had—long beaches, deep seas, sun all over my skin. The minute I hung up, I started packing.

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Jonathan met me in Singapore and then we traveled for two days more, by incrementally smaller planes and boats, until we reached this remote chain of islands. They emerged slowly from the horizon as we approached: the white lines of beach, the tree-dense hills. The low buildings were teak and thatch in the style of old sultans’ palaces, their tile roofs the same dark red as the earth.

Chalets, barely visible, were situated only yards from the sea. The resort was elegant, yet also an ecologist’s dream: the toilets were self-composting in bathrooms of Italian glass tile, and the electricity came from windmills on the hillside and solar panels on the roofs. The airy rooms had high ceilings; windows and doors opened onto shady verandas. We slept to the sound of waves and waded each morning into water as clear as air.

That sea: limpid around our ankles in the shallows, dense blue now as we dove. Gunnar, my diving partner, kicked his way down to a giant clam nestled in between two boulders. Gunnar was elusive, I’d noticed, prone to floating off in his own direction.
Freedom fi rst,
he’d said one night over beers, after a dive, and Pragna had looked up, her eyes narrowing. Her dark hair was swept back in a clasp and long silver earrings brushed against her neck. She spoke intensely, her eyes fl ashing.
Yes, but what frees a community
must necessarily restrict the individual,
she said. Gunnar waved his hand, dismissive.
We will raise this child to be absolutely free,
he insisted, and Pragna flushed, clearly angered by this old argument between them.

Now, in the ocean winds, Jonathan and Phil drifted lower, examining anchor damage at the base of the reef, setting up the instruments that would measure tidal shifts and currents. I had done dozens of dives with Jonathan, in the weedy bottoms of the Minnesota lakes, to wrecks off the Florida coast, and in sinkholes in the Virgin Islands. I was struck, each time, by how happy he seemed in this world, isolated and self-contained, while I was always longing to erase the distance—to hear his voice, feel his touch. I ran my hand across the bottlebrush coral. The fronds, waving red and yellow and purple like exotic flowers, pulled inside and disappeared, leaving only a stony, pitted brain. A manta ray flashed, scattering a school of butterfl y fish, silver and striped
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with dark gold, each moving like the pulse of a wing. Chains of clear eggs drifted near my face. The rush of air, and some faint, distant clicking, as if the coral were speaking, or the stones. I hung suspended for a moment in that blue silence, watching the others, isolated and yet bound to them, the water around us a living thing, embracing and sustaining.

I touched Gunnar’s shoulder and gestured beyond the coral to the field of sea urchins, their black spines waving like dark wheat in the currents. He smiled and waved me off.

I swam low over the field, spines just inches from my skin. All week I had been fascinated by these sea urchins. Each was the size of a baseball and had a dozen spots, blue and orange set in white, like bulbous eyes. Clustered on the ocean floor, they seemed to watch me with an infinite and wary gaze. I was searching for a skeleton. The inner shell of a sea urchin is a hollow globe, scored in five curved sections that taper at the ends into a small hole at the top and bottom. Echinodermata: Echinoidea, whose shell is known as Aristotle’s lantern. In the hushed lobby of the resort there was a sculpture, delicate, made of bronze: an Asian goddess with fifteen graceful hands, the shell of a sea urchin, white and cream and rust, balanced on each open palm. The dark spines of living sea urchins were quite poisonous—I’d seen a fellow tourist with an ankle like a grapefruit, downing Valium and gin to kill the pain. But this was my last day, and it seemed worth the risk: I wanted a souvenir.

A glimpse of white. Mud bloomed from the ocean floor as I cupped the shell, a fragile sphere, in my hand.

When I turned back, Jonathan and Phil had moved off into the gloamy distance, but Gunnar was still drifting by the bank of brain coral. A rush of guilt—I’d let him slip completely from my mind. And something was not right: Gunnar’s regulator trailed free. Air rushed in my ears; even from this distance I saw Gunnar’s pink lips, a wildness in his eyes. He waved, and then drew his finger swiftly, definitively, across his throat, the diver’s universal signal of distress.

I swam to him, and he grabbed my arm with such force that the shell slipped from my hand, tumbling slowly back to the spiny
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field. The arrow on his oxygen gauge was in the red. His grip hurt. He was all desire, all desperate need, and yet I hesitated for an instant, taking one last, deep breath before I passed my regulator to him.

Water moved against my naked lips; the taste of salt, the taste of panic. It seeped into me, became a slow welling, as Gunnar breathed and breathed, as my own lungs grew taut. Jonathan and Phil were still dozens of yards away and did not notice what was happening. My lungs began to burn. I touched Gunnar’s arm. He did not respond. I grabbed him harder. He opened his eyes, calmer now, and put one hand on my shoulder. He passed me the regulator, warm in my mouth from his lips.

Together, then, with many pauses, we kicked our way toward the surface. A deep breath, a passing of the regulator, acts as intimate and essential and full of question as a kiss. I breathed, and then Gunnar did. It was a kind of dance, urgent and calm, full of fluid grace. One creature, with one purpose: the surface of the water far above, that invisible border where the water opened to the sky. It seemed to take forever, but at last we broke through, fl inging our heads back, releasing each other. I drank in the air.

“Anna!” Gunnar shouted, gasping. He ripped off his mask, sunlight in his dark blond hair. “Anna, you saved my life, you did.” That night, in the darkness of our chalet, my bags already packed, I lay next to Jonathan. We had eaten grilled fish with the rest of the group and had drunk a lot of beer in celebration and farewell, watching the sunset flare the world pink and gold. The manager had walked down the beach setting coconuts on fire, leaving them to blaze like skulls against the sand. Now it was late, the fi res had died, and we were alone with the moonlight and the waves, but even though I was leaving in the morning with nothing settled, what Jonathan was talking about was the dive.

“I was right behind you,” he said. “I know it must have been terrifying, but it was also beautiful to watch, Anna. You were splendid.”

I shifted, turning to lie on my side. What went unspoken between us had always seemed like its own sea, full of mysterious
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shifts and currents. Jonathan’s dark hair brushed my arm. He placed one hand lightly on my hip. I wondered when he was coming home to Minneapolis. When or if.

“I didn’t want to be splendid,” I told him. “It was awful to be without air. I was afraid every time that he wouldn’t give it back.” Jonathan looked at me, his expression so intent, so focused, a sort of intimacy he didn’t often allow. “Still, you did it,” he said.

“You didn’t miss a beat.”

I remembered the shell then, its slow, tumbling fall through the dark blue water. And I thought of Pragna, how she had stood up in the boat when we broke through the surface, leaning to help Gunnar in, her arms slender and muscled, his hands running down the swell of her belly, his cheek sliding down to rest there.

An intimate moment, so passionate, so spontaneous; I’d paused in the water, watching, glad to be alive, yet struck with yearning.