Shadow Man: A Novel by Jeffrey Fleishman

Author:Jeffrey Fleishman [Fleishman, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Health & Fitness, Psychology, Alzheimer's & Dementia, Cognitive Psychology, Literary, Diseases
ISBN: 9781586421991
Publisher: Steerforth
Published: 2012-08-21T04:00:00+00:00

thirteen

Kurt and I went back into my room. Vera was still sleeping, her macramé purse, the one with the gun in it, lay beside her on the bed. Kurt went to the mirror and studied himself. He rubbed his hands under his eyes and through his hair.

“I found a gray one the other day, Jim. On my temple like a silver thread. The sunlight caught it when I was shaving. At first I thought it was paint from the shipyard.”

I stepped to the mirror.

“Where?”

“I yanked it out.”

“It’ll come back.”

“Nah, I got the root and all.”

“It’s pigment. We learned it in biology class. Your body’s losing its color. Sister Hanrahan says the body’s more complicated than the universe.”

“When’d you get so smart?”

I shrugged. “Simple biology.”

Even though we were whispering, Vera stirred. She rolled over, curling around her purse, drooling like a child, at peace.

“Should we wake her?”

“Let her sleep a little more. I don’t think she’s slept much in days. Let’s go for a swim. I’ll write her a note.”

“What about the gun?”

“I told you I took the bullets out.”

“What if she wakes and sees the man from Marrakesh.”

“She doesn’t usually see him in the mornings. C’mon let’s swim.”

The beach was quiet. It was too early for day-trippers. Kurt sprinted toward the water and dove, a spear cutting through a wave and rising beyond. He stood and shook the water out of his hair and dove again. I followed. The ocean was cold, sharp, stinging my sunburn. Kurt jumped on me; he wrestled and lifted me and threw me into a wave, and when I surfaced he did it again, and he kept laughing.

“When you were small I could throw you a mile.”

Another wave came and knocked us both down. The undertow pulled at my calves.

“Let’s get past these waves to deeper water.”

Kurt didn’t swim like he played tennis. On the tennis court, he was compact, quick, precise; every movement a burst. But in the water, he seemed big and languid, moving with a long crawl through the currents like a steamship. We were about seventy yards offshore, at the place where the water gathers just before it rises and rolls toward land. It was peaceful out there. My body lifted and dipped and I felt as if I were on a slow-motion roller coaster, a bobbing speck in what the Indians in this area once called “the Great Water.” The Indians were gone but there was a brochure in the hotel lobby advertising Indian tours and an Indian museum. The Indians pictured in the brochure didn’t look like Indians, though. Their skin was the orangey color of an indoor tan and their wigs and suede clothes looked as if pulled from a Halloween box; they seemed like dressed-up car salesman and undertakers standing around a tepee and a fake fire.

The water rose; I ascended. I was glad to be out here alone with Kurt. All sounds gone except our breaths, our words, our hands treading water, the currents below us running like icy slivers around my ankles.

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