East is East

It was a sixty-eight-foot drop from the bridge to the water, and from that height it seemed a hundred and sixty-eight. Hiro never hesitated. He fell into the empyrean like a skydiver running before the chute, like an eagle plunging from its aerie, but there was nothing to sustain him in that indifferent element, and the sea rushed up at him like a bed of concrete. He hit feet first, letting the life ring fly, and still the force of the concussion nearly ripped Jōchō from his body. By the time he bobbed to the surface, his lungs heaving for the sweet, sweet air, the Tokachi-maru had passed him by, sliding across the horizon like a liquid mountain.

Under full steam, it would take the ship nearly two miles and three and a half minutes to come to a full stop. She would come back for him, Hiro knew that, as he knew that even now all hands were scrambling across the decks shouting “Man overboard!,” but he also knew that the tightest turn she could make was almost a mile across. He stroked hard, his feet churning in the brine, arms hammering at the chop. He had no thought of heading west toward the distant shore—they’d expect that of him—but instead he watched the sun and pushed himself due south, the way they’d come.

The water was warm, tropical, gleaming with a thousand jewels. He watched the birds overhead, watched the clouds. He clung to the life ring and kicked his legs. And the sea sustained him, embraced him, wrapped him up like the arms of a long-lost father.

Thanatopsis House

Ruth had watched the storm gather all morning. It was so dark at 6:30 she nearly slept through her wake-up call, and she pulled on her shorts and top in the gloom. She came down for breakfast at 7:00, taking her place as usual at the silent table, and even then it seemed as if the night had never ended. Owen Birks-head, the colony’s director, had lit the lamps in the corners, but everything beyond the windows was flat and without definition. Inside, it was muggy and close, the air so thick you could almost pat it into place like a down comforter. There was no rumble of thunder, no flash of lightning or streak of rain, but she could feel the storm coming with a deep physical intuition that connected her with the newt beneath the rock and the spider drawn up in the funnel of its web. Of course, she couldn’t mention it to anyone, couldn’t say, “It feels like rain” or “We’re really in for it now.” No. She was, by choice, sitting at the silent table.

When Saxby’s mother, Septima, now in her early seventies and snoring raucously from the master suite behind the breakfast parlor, had set up the trust for Thanatopsis House on the death of her husband some twenty years earlier, she’d followed the lead of other, more established artists’ colonies like Yaddo, MacDowell and Cum-mington. One of the traditions she’d adopted—and particularly adhered to—was that of the silent table. At breakfast, it was thought, artists of a certain temperament required an absolute and meditative silence, broken only perhaps by the discreet tap of a demitasse spoon on the rim of a saucer—in order to make a fruitful transition from the realm of dreams to that exalted state in which the deep stuff of aesthetic response rises to the surface. Others, of course, needed just the opposite—conviviality, uproar, crippling gossip, lame jokes and a whiff of the sour morning breath of their fellow artists—to settle brains fevered by dreams of grandeur, conquest and the utter annihilation of their enemies. For them, Septima had provided the convivial table, located in a second parlor separated from the first by a paneled corridor and two swinging doors of dark and heavy oak.