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many good things, but it was also static. Plato did not allow for growth or change or self-transformation, and in some sense this fl aw—of fixation—led very naturally to the dystopias we have all seen, and which many of us have experienced and have fl ed.”

“Is that another test for admission?” I asked, glancing around the room. “Surviving oppression?”

Gunnar, unamused, shook his head.

“It is not. But people with such histories tend to understand our purpose. You see, while Aristotle’s view, too, was fl awed, for him the community was alive. He believed it could grow and change, like every living organism. For Aristotle, politics was the science of the possible. That is what we believe. And this belief sustains us.”

I cupped the shell and remembered Gunnar’s eyes, his fi nger making that frantic slash across his throat, the bubbles fl owering from his lips.

“I risked my life,” I said, still angry.

“Yes,” Pragna said. “You risked your life for a man you hardly knew. Precisely.”

That night, as Jonathan slept, I lay awake and listened to the pounding of the surf. If I stayed, as they had asked me to, I would become the community health-care specialist. There was a doctor who came three times a month whom I would assist, and in her absence I would oversee the clinic. And once a week I’d go to the mainland, to a community there, and work training nurses and midwives, treating patients, giving vaccines.

I dressed and walked to the park, where I sat on a bench above the vast ocean. The stars were vivid, near, and the darkness was filled with sounds I didn’t recognize: birds and insects and the rustling of unseen animals. I’d never felt so unsettled, so unsure of what to do, the world unmoored, swimming. I wondered how my life would be if I stayed, what I’d gain and what I’d sacrifi ce forever.

Footsteps, then, on the crushed shells. Gunnar passed through a small pool of light from the community center. I remembered his voice, his passion, as he talked about this place. I remembered, too, the feeling I’d had on the dive, when we all swam, isolated from each
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other yet so intimately connected. I was flattered to have been chosen, it was true. And I wanted to explore the possibilities with Jonathan.

But as Gunnar disappeared again into the darkness, as I made up my mind to stay, it was yearning, finally, that compelled me. A yearning to know what Gunnar knew, to understand this place at its unmoving center. A yearning, too, for that brief moment of connection, as elusive and beautiful as the changing color of the sea.

The next day I went to work. The village was small—only 867

people—and relatively young, so I was surprised to fi nd the waiting room full, even at that early hour. On my first day I treated three kinds of skin rash and diagnosed two cases of giardia, several minor respiratory infections, a broken finger, one case of pink-eye, one urinary-tract infection, and a pregnancy. I did three well-baby checks and tested the eyesight and hearing of one of the retired scientists. The pharmacy was well stocked, and I was to prescribe within my own comfort levels. I’d never had such auton-omy, such a feeling of accomplishment. And I liked the doctor, a no-nonsense Vietnamese woman who had trained in Poland, who invited me over for sushi and asked diffi cult questions about English grammar, and who could find a vein in any arm with a single try and no break in conversation.

There were, right from the beginning, crises: a septic infection, an ectopic pregnancy, an alarming lump in one woman’s leg. A botanist in his mid-fifties came back from a jungle hike and dropped dead from a heart attack. There was nothing anyone could do.

The dives, too, involved risks. Much of the research happened underwater, and there was always the danger of a tank failure or an accident. One evening, just as I was about to close the clinic, Phil came in. He had been diving deep that afternoon, at a hundred fifty feet, working with a team to set up motion sensors, and as he worked he’d felt himself growing detached and dreamy. A slender white shark passed by; instead of fear he’d felt a surge of joy and reached to touch it. Phil was an experienced diver and knew what was happening: a kind of nitrogen poisoning that dis-torted reason. He knew he should rise to the surface—getting out
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of the deep would restore the balance in his blood—but he didn’t.

He swam on. After some time he floated over the shattered remains of a boat, where he thought he saw a human skeleton. He wasn’t sure if it was real or a hallucination.

I was listening, making notes on his chart. When I looked up he was handing me a human bone, a femur. It was both smooth and porous, bleached deeply white.

“Boat people,” he said, “that’s what I figured, people fl eeing Vietnam in the eighties who hit bad weather and drowned. It’s not uncommon to find them. But the light was odd, you know, and I was narked. I knew I was narked, I told myself I ought to go up, but instead I kept floating by the boat. Little by little it seemed to me that there were people in it again. Alive, I mean, but underwater. I talked to them,” he added, and then stared at me, defi ant.

I put the femur on the counter. I’d heard these stories a lot over the years.

“It’s lucky you had enough will to come back.” Phil nodded. “Gunnar saw me drifting off. He had to pull me by the arm, hard, because coming up was the last thing I wanted to do. I’m telling you,” he said, laughing at himself even as he spoke. “I felt New Age or something, as if I’d become one with the universe. Sentient and yet diffused. That sounds crazy, I know.”

“The rapture of the deep,” I said, thinking not of Gunnar but of Pragna reaching to pull him into the boat. “There’s a reason divers call it that.”

We talked some more—he wanted, mostly, it seemed, to tell his story. I gave him some Valium to see him through the next few hours. After Phil left I studied the femur, wondering about the life that had surrounded it, the dreams that had propelled it.

Wondering what should be done with it now. In the end I took it to the deck off the atrium, where I leaned far out over the water and returned it to the sea.

In this way the days passed with the fluidity and continuity of waves. I was very happy. Even as I rose in the middle of the night to a knock on the door, even as I helped the ill or injured, I felt a
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sense of peace, of purpose. Once a week I traveled to the mainland village’s makeshift clinic, where I taught the young nurses how to dress wounds, give shots, and disinfect equipment. Then I came back to swim at sunset in a sea as calm as glass. In Minnesota, Jonathan and I always had a hard time coming back together at the end of each day. Often, we’d sat together in the evenings, hardly speaking, each absorbed in our separate lives. Here, what we did connected us, and when we were together we talked as never before. In the distance windsurfers moved in slow lines, like the ever-shifting points of a triangle made from light.

I found myself thinking of Plato and his theory of ideal forms: a triangle drawn on paper, no matter how precisely, is only a crude representation of a triangle’s essence. Plato believed in a framework of perfection hidden behind the visible; I believed we had discovered that framework here. Jonathan and I were determined to see what would evolve between us. There were details we would need to attend to—our house, our things—but we rarely spoke of them.

At the end of the hot season, near the advent of the monsoons, many people left the islands, either to escape the tedious weeks of rain or because they feared that rough seas and skies would make travel impossible. Pragna, now at the end of her eighth month, would go to Singapore and wait in an apartment near the hospital. Gunnar would join her near the due date. At the boat Gunnar put his hand on the curve of her stomach and I saw it again: something invisible but real passing between them, the glimpse of another country, a place they inhabited alone. I felt pierced with loss. Jonathan was standing next to me, and I reached to take his hand.

A week later, the rains began. I woke to what I thought was thunder, rain so loud that Jonathan, lying next to me, had to shout to be heard. Laughing, we went outside and stood in the deluge, the water hitting the earth and bouncing high again, already filling the dry gutters and sliding in sheets from the roofs.

By noon the island was transformed, water standing in shallow
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places and dripping from leaves, the flagstones of the paths small islands in the mud.

Over the next days, mysteriously, the clinic filled up with crickets. When I came in the dusky light of early morning they were singing, and when I opened the door they jumped beneath the tables and onto counters, their narrow legs humming. I swept them out with a broom, great leaping piles of them. All day I leaned close to hear my patients, their breath against my ear.

When the rains eased, momentarily, or for a few hours, we all relaxed, as if silence were a kind of space that had opened up around us. Our sheets and clothes grew damp. Mildew erupted overnight on Jonathan’s huaraches. One morning, I found toads nestled in my shoes.

The rains were excessive, the worst they’d ever been. In meetings at the atrium, the sky and sea were indistinguishable. Just a few hundred miles away in Indonesia whole towns flooded, and a wedding party was washed away when a temple collapsed beneath a tidal wave. In the Philippines, an entire season of rice was destroyed. We left these meetings sobered, but sustained by Yukiko’s vision, imagining these powers transformed into energy, into light, by the ways we might change the world.

Three weeks into the monsoons, the resort, emptied of its tourists for the season, began to flood. This was not supposed to happen. The work Jonathan had done on current dynamics and surface-wave prediction was supposed to have averted any major disaster on those beaches. We listened, helpless and disbelieving, to the reports the manager sent up. Jonathan couldn’t sleep. At night I’d wake to the scent of kerosene and find him at the table, poring over his charts and graphs beneath a fl ickering lamp.

On the first calm day all of us boated over to view the damage. In places the beach had been totally resculpted. Two chalets had been swept away, the ceiling fans and Italian tile and comfortable deck chairs all carried out to sea. The main building had escaped damage, but its grounds had been flooded, and the receding water had left behind lakes of mud and debris.

We walked amid the beauty and the ruins, picking up trash,
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skirting new lakes. Generators ran everywhere, fueling the electric pumps and vacuums. Jonathan was silent, his face as shattered as the landscape.

When we reached the sunken garden behind the main building, Phil, his beard three days old and stubbled with red, stepped down off the stone fence and waded between the ornamental bushes. Fish were swimming in the grass, a strange and joyous sight that cheered us all. Laughing, Phil reached down and caught one in his bare hands, holding it up, a flash of white against the gray rain dripping from the sky, the leaves, our clothes. We were still laughing when we heard the soft crack, the rush of falling branches in the air. I stepped into the water, looking in the wrong direction, thinking the rushing sounds were coming from the beach. Then someone, shouting, pushed me so hard I staggered. My foot slipped in a low ditch and I felt my ankle turn. So slow, it all was, I struggled to keep my balance and yet, even as I fell, I saw the branch fl oating down, taking wires with it. I saw Phil see what was about to happen, the line writh-ing like a snake and then dropping into that lawn where water was not meant to be, where fish swam. Electricity traveled through the new lake like lightning, traveled through Phil, who dazzled us all for a terrible instant, sparks flying from his hair, his fingertips, like the flash of silver fish in the air. Phil, who was dead before he could even gasp or scream.

Khemma started toward him—he had fallen facedown by the bougainvillea—but Jonathan grabbed her arm. The line was still alive in all that water.

“Someone shut off the damned generator,” he shouted, his voice hoarse. And when no one moved, he went to do it himself, walking backward, his eyes caught on Phil. Already fish were beginning to rise up and float on the surface of the water. I stood up slowly, enveloped by the scent of burning flesh, singed hair. The generator ceased, and we all waded at once toward Phil, poor Phil. We pulled him out of the water, and I leaned close to do CPR, though his skin was blistered beneath his new beard, and I knew it was hopeless. Still, I held his face in my hands and pressed my lips against his, remembering his conversation with the dead
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at the bottom of the sea. They let me work for a while, and then there were hands on my shoulders, my arms, lifting me up.

“Anna, that’s enough, Anna. Anna, look, you have to stop, you’re bleeding.”

It was only then that I noticed my leg, the gash on my shin from where I had fallen, streaming blood.

Jonathan tore his shirt into strips, and we wrapped my leg.

His face was taut, a muscle jumping in his cheek. His eyes kept running over the ruined beach, Phil’s body. I tried to touch him, but he shrugged me off. When the rest of us left the island he refused to come, determined to see where he’d gone wrong. Besides, he said grimly, someone had to stay with the body. When the hydroplane reached the other island, Khemma helped me all the way back to the clinic. At the doorway I paused, remembering the day not long ago when Phil had come to me, excited and disoriented, full of visions.

“What will they do with him?” I wondered.

“I don’t know,” Khemma said. Her smooth olive skin was pale, and she was shivering, her arms folded tightly across her chest. “Find his family, probably, send him home.”

“I was about to step into that water. Someone pushed me.”

“Yes,” she said. “That was Gunnar.” She helped me onto the examining table and brought me a light blanket. “I need to step out for a minute. Will you be all right? I have to call Yukiko right away.”