—You are mine, and I am yours. We belong to each other, you and I.

A pause, then: We are each other’s. You are mine and I am yours.

—Yes, Peter.

Peter. He held the thought for a moment. I am Peter.

She cupped his cheek.

—Yes.

I am Peter Jaxon.

Her vision swam with tears. The moonlit night was fantastically still, everything held in abeyance, the two of them like actors on a stage of dark wings with a single spotlight falling upon them.

—Yes, that is who you are. You are my Peter.

And you are my Amy.

As she made her way west—and then for many years after—he was to come to her each night in this manner. The conversation would be repeated countless times, like a chant or prayer. Each visit was as if it were the first; at the start he retained no memory, either of the previous nights or of the events that had preceded them, as if he were a wholly novel creature in the world, born anew each night. But slowly, as the years became decades, the man inside the body—the essential spirit—reasserted itself. Never would he speak again, though they would talk of many things, words flowing through the touch of their hands, the two of them alone among the stars.

But that came later. Now, standing in the field of fireflies, beneath the summer moon, he asked her:

Where are we going?

She smiled through her tears.

—Home, said Amy. My Peter, my love. We are going home.

—

Michael had cleared the harbor. Over the transom, the image of the city grew faint. The moment of decision was upon him. South, as he’d told Amy, or a new direction entirely?

It wasn’t even a question.

He tacked the Nautilus, turning in a northeasterly direction. The wind was fair, the seas light, with a gentle green color. The following afternoon he rounded the tip of Long Island and leapt into open sea. Three days after leaving New York, he made landfall at Nantucket. The island was arrestingly beautiful, with long beaches of pure white sand and crashing surf. There appeared to be no buildings at all, or none he could see; all traces of civilization had been swept away by the ocean’s hand. Anchored in a sheltered cove, he made his final calculations, and at dawn, he set sail again.

Soon the ocean changed. It grew darker, with a solemn look. He had passed into a wild zone, far from any land. He felt not fear but excitement and, beneath this, a thrilling rightness. His boat, his Nautilus, was sound; he had the wind and sea and stars to guide him. He hoped to reach the English coast in twenty-three days, though perhaps that wouldn’t happen. There were many variables. Maybe it would take a month, or longer; maybe he’d end up in France, or even Spain. It didn’t matter.

Michael Fisher was going to find what was out there.

* * *

84

Fanning came to awareness of his surroundings slowly, and in parts. First there was a sensation of cold sand on his feet; this was followed by the sound of waves, gently pushing upon a tranquil shore. After an unknown interval of time had passed, other facts emerged. It was night. Stars thick as powder lay across a sky of velvety blackness, immeasurably deep. The air was cool and still, as after a daylong rain. Above and behind him, atop a steep bluff of eelgrass and beach plum, were houses; their white faces shone faintly with the reflected light of the moon, which was ascending from the sea.

He began to walk. The hems of his trousers were damp; he seemed to have mislaid his shoes, or else he had arrived in this place without them. He had no destination in mind, merely a sense that walking was something the situation called for. The unanticipated nature of his circumstances, its feeling of elastic reality, aroused in him no anxiety. Quite the contrary: everything felt inevitable, reassuringly so. When he tried to recall anything that might have happened prior to his being in this place, he could think of nothing. He knew who he was, yet his personal history seemed devoid of narrative coherence. There was a time, he knew, when he had been a child. And yet that period of his life, like all others, registered only as a collection of emotional and sensory impressions with a metaphoric aspect. His mother and his father, for example, resided in his memory not as individuated beings but as a feeling of warmth and safety, like being cradled in a bath. The town where he’d grown up, whose name he did not recall, was not a discrete civic unit of buildings and streets but a view through a window screen of rain pattering upon summer leaves. It was all very peculiar, not unsettling but simply unexpected, especially the fact that his adult life seemed almost completely unknown to him. He knew that in his life he had been happy, also sad; for a long time he had been very, very lonely. Yet when he tried to reconstruct the circumstances, all he remembered was a clock.