By the time the boy climbs out of bed and goes outside, they are already searching for the Frenchman, a guest of the hotel, whose clothing has been spotted adrift in the kelp-logged surf by one of the local fishermen. The morning is hot and bright, and Jack stands at the entrance to his mother’s bungalow with his toes in the shade-cooled sand, watching the crowd of hotel workers grow bigger and bigger at the bottom of the beach. He can see Fawad, the Ethiopian fisherman, and Mr. Hafez, who helps run the hotel while Jack’s mother is away; he can see the pool boys in their yellow uniforms, and the lifeguards with their sunglasses on. For the moment, there is no panic. It is still early. The sun breaks a white line down the water and dances on the orange buoys, strung like ornaments along the curve of the cove, and on the hull of the glass-bottomed boat, just now returning from its dawn tour at Ras Um Sid. As the boat comes closer, past the atoll where the shipwreck lies, the boy can smell it, the thick, bitter odor of petrol. He rubs his eyes, heavy with lack of sleep, and goes down the slope to join the men crowding around the Frenchman’s clothes. They are all talking about the Frenchman. They are saying, Perhaps he’s gone swimming, perhaps we’ll find him sunbathing on the other side of the pier, he must have gone out on the glass-bottomed boat again, but their voices are hushed. At first, no one notices Jack, and his stomach feels tight, as though something had pushed its way under his ribs. Then Fawad puts a calloused hand on top of Jack’s head, and he stands there, yellow hair in his eyes, feeling the weight of the fisherman’s arm and his own weight in the sand.
The Arab lifeguards have taken some long poles from the recreation room and are ladling the Frenchman’s large shirt and trousers carefully out of the seaweed that has tangled in the shallows. The clothes are limp, draped like skin over the poles. The shirt is bright red, the trousers blue. Jack watches the lifeguards spread the shirt out and hold it up to the light. They are thin, long-legged men, and it takes two of them to stretch it out while the others laugh. Mr. Hafez, dressed in white, tells them to get on with it. Water, slick and iridescent, drips from the points of the collar and gathers in the creases of the Frenchman’s shirt. Everyone knows whose shirt it is, but one of the lifeguards checks the tag anyway. There is no name written anywhere. The Frenchman’s empty trousers are unbuttoned.
As the glass-bottomed boat comes closer, some of the fishermen wade into the water and wait for the mooring lines. Fawad goes to help them. Jack wants to help, too, but, with his mother away at a conference in London, he is not permitted to swim. Instead, he watches gulls gathering on the shore, picking through the sand for crabs. He can see already that the Frenchman is not on the boat.
Up and down the beach, the morning’s first tourists are arriving with their towels and beach balls, their sand pails and striped umbrellas. They are coming down from the hotel bungalows with their beach mats rolled up under their arms, their skin already reddening with heat. The venders are arriving, too, setting up their stands of pots and jewelry, polished turquoise, hawk charms, papyrus scrolls on which they will paint your name in hieroglyphs. Jack watches them line up their trinkets. He has known these venders since he was very young, and sometimes they give him honeycombs, or rocks that he cracks open to reveal purple crystals nestled inside like candy, but he does not plan to visit them today. He is thinking about the Frenchman’s limp clothes as the men tie the boat to the little wooden jetty and help the tourists down—sleepy children and women in loose white shirts, an American girl with a large orange hat, and a man from Bulgaria whose skin is peeling off in strips.
“Do you have the Frenchman?” Mr. Hafez calls out.
The captain says, “You mean—?” and spreads his arms out around his middle, and then he says, “No. He did not come today.” The captain is wearing a big white hat with a red anchor on it and a shirt with the hotel logo stitched in gold over the left breast pocket. He bends down and picks up his satchel and the blue bucket where he keeps the boiled eggs he uses to tempt the humphead wrasse up from the reef, now empty. “I thought he had gone home,” he says, and climbs out of the boat. If he sees the shape of the Frenchman in the clothes now lying on the sand, he pretends not to notice it. Instead, he smiles down at Jack from the pier and says, “You must come out someday, habibi. There were mantas twice your size on the Ras.”
“Well,” Mr. Hafez says to himself. The men gather around him in silence, and the boy puts his hands behind his back and looks down to where his ankles taper off and disappear under the sand, the dusty gray circles that have caked around his legs. To Jack, Mr. Hafez looks very old, much older than his mother—older even than Fawad now, the bottom of his face heavy and lifeless. Jack remembers seeing him like this once before, last summer, when a young man tried to pose for a picture with his head halfway inside the mouth of what he thought was a dead tiger shark, and the shark closed its mouth on him, so that, even with six fishermen’s hands prying at the animal’s blood-stained nose, it took a saw to the jaw-hinge to release the young man, and still he lost an eye. Mr. Hafez checks his watch and looks up and down the beach. “Perhaps,” he says to Fawad, “he came out here last night for a swim and left his clothes on the beach and the tide washed them out.”
“I have never seen him swim,” Fawad says. The fisherman is picking at a scar on his bony elbow, a white strip of raised skin that looks as if it had been smoothed down with sandpaper.
Mr. Hafez takes off his sunglasses and wipes the sweat from his eyes with the back of his hand. Then he touches Jack’s shoulder and says, “Go in for breakfast,” and, for a moment, the thought of eggs and bread and dates with syrup is comforting to the boy, but then there is shouting farther down the beach. One of the lifeguards has made another discovery. A little way along the beach, where yellow bluffs project over the shallow, flat part of the reef, the receding water has left the tide-pool shelf, and, in one of the spongy starfish ponds, the lifeguard has found the Frenchman’s flipper. Just one. The boy watches the lifeguard climb down from the tide-pool ledge and cross the reef with the flipper in his hand. The flipper is bright green. To Jack, it looks like treasure, like something Fawad might find in his net on the skiff, as he drags it up heavy with grouper and parrot fish or butterfly fish, vibrant, unintended casualties of the reef.
The lifeguard puts the flipper down in the sand at the foot of the Frenchman’s outstretched shirt and trousers. Jack is dizzy with sleeplessness. The day’s first bathers are making their way into the water, with masks and buckets and pieces of bread smuggled from the breakfast buffet for the benefit of the reef dwellers. Thirty feet out, the bright tubes of their snorkels circle the rocks of the reef. For the first time in two weeks, Jack does not see the Frenchman among them, standing like a boulder in the shallows, bending to either side of his enormous belly to peer into the water, his blue goggles tight against his face.
“We must be absolutely certain before we call in,” Mr. Hafez says. “Absolutely certain.”
One of the lifeguards says, “Maybe he took the tour to St. Catherine’s. They left very early this morning.” Jack tries to picture the Frenchman—sitting, as he does, with his hands folded on his lap, his back straight, his small bald head like a melon on top of his sloping shoulders—on a bus in the desert. He has seen the Frenchman sitting like this every morning in the shade of a beach umbrella, waiting for the glass-bottomed boat. He has seen the upright bulk of the Frenchman drifting away on the sunlit deck of the yacht that takes divers out to the Ras, the useless, tag-along, bowling-pin shape of the Frenchman, who, like the boy, is not permitted to swim. Jack finds it difficult to imagine him going to St. Catherine’s, struggling up the cracked desert trail to the monastery. He almost says something, but then Mr. Hafez replies, “Part of that trip is on camelback,” and everyone knows that it would be impossible, that this is not where the Frenchman has gone.
Mr. Hafez says that they must search the hotel grounds thoroughly—without overlooking a thing. He splits the men up to search the reading room, the massage parlor, the sauna, anywhere that the Frenchman might have gone—even though no one can recall seeing him anywhere, in the fourteen days he has been at the hotel, except the beach or the buffet room. Mr. Hafez tells his assistant to radio the driver of the St. Catherine’s tour.
He goes to the Frenchman’s room himself. Jack follows him. At first, Mr. Hafez does not appear to notice the boy, walking there beside him. Then he turns to him and says, “You should go and see about breakfast now,” but he seems to forget that the boy doesn’t belong there as Jack stays with him on the wooden path that leads up from the beach, past the pool, where young women smelling of coconut oil are lying bare-backed under the thatched canopy of the courtyard.
Jack has never been to the Frenchman’s room, the last bungalow in the east garden of the hotel. One of the men who clean the rooms is standing at the Frenchman’s door, smoking a cigarette. On the floor beside his white sandals, there is a large tray with an empty wineglass and a dirty knife and fork, a small stack of plates, a few slices of lemon. Some flies are sitting on the lemon slices. Without a word, the cleaning man holds the key out to Mr. Hafez, who unlocks the door. “Good morning?” Mr. Hafez says from the doorway. “Good morning, monsieur?” But there is no reply.
The Frenchman’s curtains are drawn, and it is dark inside except for the glow of the television. On the screen, a woman is giving the weather forecast in Arabic. Jack stands by the door while Mr. Hafez opens the curtains and then the veranda door to let the breeze come in. There is still something hopeful in Mr. Hafez’s face as he peers outside at the unclaimed chairs and then opens the door to the wardrobe, which has a neat row of white shirts hanging inside. The shirts look like robes to Jack.
The Frenchman’s large black shoes stand together by his suitcase, which lies open on the floor. In it, Jack can see the Frenchman’s straw hat, and hidden beneath the hat an enormous curved shell, which the Frenchman has obviously been planning to take away. On the table by the bed, a pile of books. Some of the spines are turned his way, and the boy can see that the books are about fish, food, the history of the Suez. Jack moves forward a little, away from the door. Mr. Hafez is in the bathroom now. He pulls aside the shower curtain, and then looks thoughtfully into the trash can under the sink. He comes back into the bedroom and stops by the bedside table to pick up a little plastic box from behind the books. The bottom of the box is transparent, and colored pills rattle inside.
The bed is unmade, and covered with papers. Mr. Hafez leans over them, and when Jack comes closer he realizes that they are from the Frenchman’s sketchbook. He has seen them before: under the Frenchman’s arm or umbrella or pinned down by a rock on the Frenchman’s towel at lunchtime. In thick lines of color, the Frenchman has drawn the shapes of the fish that filled Fawad’s nets the last few mornings. Anything that emerged from the night’s catch—squirrelfish or parrot fish, milky-eyed goatfish dead in the ropes, sling-jawed lionfish with their wings twisted—now lies spread in smudged colors across the Frenchman’s bed. Jack recognizes the wide outline of last week’s manta, the picture the Frenchman drew on the first day that the devil rays winged into the harbor from the warm Gulf, and Fawad caught one and split it open on the sandbar like an envelope. The Frenchman drew it from the top first, its horned mouth wide and dead, then added a smaller sketch to the side—the rows and rows of shining gills he drew after following Jack’s example and putting his hand in the ray’s mouth to feel the cave of its insides. Jack remembers the sensation he had that day, of wanting to punch the Frenchman, but also of feeling sorry for him, surprised at how hard he had to breathe as he stooped to reach for the ray. Among the pictures, Jack notices the one of the emperor angelfish, whose colors the Frenchman got all wrong until Jack asked Fawad to bring it back in a bucket so that the Frenchman could draw it properly.
“But where are the pencils?” Mr. Hafez is saying as he lifts up the pages one by one and looks under them. Jack does not tell him.
Among the papers scattered on the bed is the picture of the turtle from the day before, green, sturdy, fat-necked.
The previous morning, the Frenchman had stood on the beach with everyone else, watching the fishermen with the turtle. It had become tangled in Fawad’s net during the night, and was so heavy that he had not been able to raise the net and had instead dragged it through the water, slowly, carefully, until he reached the beach and called for help.
Jack heard Fawad shouting and came out to watch as the men pulled the skiff into the shallows, then lugged the turtle out of the water, the net gathered around its neck and mouth, its eyes quiet and serious in its billed green head. They turned it onto its back, and the shell drew a thick rut in the sand as they dragged it up the slope, its yellow-green underbelly wet, so soft it was almost obscene, its flippers drooping like towels over the edges of the shell. The turtle had been all night in the net, gulping air when it could, and was too tired now to fight when they stopped; it lay still with its eyes shut while Fawad got his knife and began cutting around its legs where the net was squeezing the flesh.
Jack touched the turtle’s belly and the rough skin of its flippers, pitted with scars. Once its legs were free, the men had to flip it back over to loosen the tangles around its neck. Right side up, the turtle seemed to realize where it was, and, suddenly revived, made a dash for the water, plowing through the sand, so that the men had to throw themselves on top of it to hold it down, and even with four of them pushing on it it still kept moving.
By now the early risers—the Frenchman, the honeymooners from Spain who were preparing for a day of golfing, an old Portuguese woman and her dog, the dervishes from the previous evening’s show, coming back from a night of drinking at the neighboring hotel—had appeared, and stood in a small crowd by the water’s edge, watching the turtle drag the men, inch by inch, toward the sea. One of the fishermen, a young man who had never caught a turtle before, was laughing. The Portuguese woman took a picture with a small yellow camera. Jack did not like the way the Frenchman watched the turtle. There was something cowed and lonely in the Frenchman’s face when he looked at the things that came out of the water. He clearly wanted to touch the turtle, but the struggle on the beach made that impossible.
About five feet from the water, the turtle fell forward into the sand, and for a second the men stopped shouting. At this moment, Jack ran forward, all the while looking at the Frenchman, and put his hand on the turtle’s head. Fawad pushed the boy, hard. “What are you doing?” he said. “What’s the matter with you?” By the time the boy picked himself up, Fawad had cut through the last of the netting and stepped away from the turtle. Jack could see its shell now. It was enormous and brown, like a map, and there was a little yellow sticker on it, which he had seen on turtles before. The turtle wasn’t moving. It lay in the sand, watching the people around it with its old, old eyes.
“Is it going to die?” the Portuguese woman asked.
“No, no, madam,” Fawad told her in English. “Very tired. Resting.” Then he made a motion with his hands, showing her how the turtle would escape. The Portuguese woman asked the Frenchman to take a picture of her with the dog and the turtle. Fawad stepped out of the frame.
“What’s that on its back?” the Frenchman asked, after he had given the woman her camera back.
Fawad searched for the right word for a few moments, and when he did not find it he said, “It is to find the turtle.” He made a globe with his hands. “Travel many miles, then come back each year to make eggs. See?” he said.
“I didn’t mean the tag,” the Frenchman said. He had got out his sketchbook and taken off his hat, which had left a red ring around the wisps of hair on his head. “I meant that thing on the shell, that split.”
That was when the boy saw it, and he wondered how he had missed it. The top of the shell, just below the neck, was jagged and cracked, open like a ravine. The edges were sharp and uneven, white-rimmed. Fawad leaned in to take a closer look, and when he stood back again he said, “Shark.” He said this without conviction.
“I told you there were sharks,” the young Spanish woman said, slapping her husband with her hat. “I told you they were lying when they said, ‘Oh, no sharks, madam, no sharks here.’ ”
But Jack knew, from the way Fawad smiled at him, that sharks had nothing to do with it, nothing at all. He knew from the way Fawad dusted off his hands and looked out to sea and then back at him, as the Frenchman began to sketch the turtle, and the Portuguese woman asked about turtle eggs, and the turtle started moving again and dropped down into the water, activating itself like a giant engine, and swam away.
Past the breakwater, out where the sea is as clear and bright as ice, is the ship that the atoll broke years ago, the waves dashing it against the rocks in a ragged bend on the eastern side of the lighthouse. It is an old ship, rusted gray and green, a Navy gunboat, and it lies on its flank like the eviscerated body of an enormous fish, its smooth glass-window eyes smashed in and crowded with darkness.
For Jack, the ship is the edge of the world, and it has sat there, on the lip of his knowledge, for as long as he can remember. He knows that other boats go beyond it, that far away there is the open sea. But, to Jack, there is the ship, and then nothing, and he knows that people do not swim to the ship or dive near it. They are not permitted; there are signs that tell them this, and the lifeguards will shout to swimmers who get too close. The swimmers come back without knowing why. But Jack knows. Fawad has told him all about the ship, which is the home of the water djinn.
Fawad has told him about late nights on the water, the eerie music of the ship when the moon is high. The strangeness of the dead fish smashed on the rocks, the split turtle shells, the strings of teeth and skin that arrive in the tide. “It is easy to say ‘shark,’ habibi,” Fawad has said. “It is easy to say many things that are not true when we are afraid.”
Fawad has told Jack about long spindly fingers, and voices that sound like rain when they strike the water, thunderclap voices in the dark, pulling ships in from the deep water. Jack knows about moist eyes and singing mouths, about webbed hands and coral combs pulling through hair as tangled and coarse as kelp. He knows about sailors who have fallen in love and swum out never to return again, about capsized boats, about the skull cups the djinn keep in their underwater caverns as reminders of the men who have loved them.
It holds the boy, the corpse of that ship, because of its murky secrets, its rusted grottoes and metal lagoons. He thinks about it when the moon comes out of the water behind the atoll, thinks about seawater filling the cold cavity of the hull, the swelling walls of silver batfish up against the ceiling where the crusted barnacles live. He thinks about the water djinn: their teeth, their hands, what they see down there in the darkness. He has seen their lights around the ship at night, the green glow of their underwater torches, and he imagines them hovering in the water-worn doorways, their mouths red with the flesh of men, their wrists braceleted in seaweed, singing, weaving moonbeams into their hair.
It is lunchtime when Jack follows Mr. Hafez back to the beach. Mr. Hafez is carrying the Frenchman’s drawings. The afternoon is hotter than the woman on the television in the Frenchman’s room predicted, and there is an unexpected calm on the water. The wind from last night is not coming back, and a dead glaze of light stuns the cove.
Still no one has seen the Frenchman, so Mr. Hafez calls the police. The men of the search party wait on the beach for the police, and the chef from the restaurant, who knows what is happening, sends them lunch in boxes, carried by the young women who work at the hotel. The men sit on deck chairs out of the sun and talk about the tides, and about the police captain, whom they do not like, because he is always fining them, and then they talk about next week’s soccer match against the neighboring hotel, and how this time they are going to win, because they have the new lifeguard, who is a wizard. Jack stands with his lunch box and listens to them talking until he sees Fawad turning over the skiff on the sandbar near the breakwater, and then he walks over and sits down with Fawad in the shade of the boat. Fawad eats fresh fish for his lunch, and today he does not volunteer to tell a story. Jack sits with his lunch box on his knees, until Fawad opens it for him and takes a French fry, and asks him why he is not eating. Jack says that he does not know, and Fawad puts a hand on his shoulder and leaves it there for a little while.
Jack sits in the heat, hungry and tired, his stomach tight against his ribs. The smell of the fries makes him ill, and he gives the box to Fawad and lies down in the sand. He can see all the way down the beach to where the Frenchman’s clothes have been laid out. He must fall asleep, because suddenly there is new shouting down the beach, and by the time he gets to his feet and remembers where he is the lifeguards are all going into the water, and they have found something else. Fawad is with them. Jack does not want to go and look, but he runs across the hot part of the sand and onto the wet slope and stands there.
“What is it?” someone is saying. The lifeguards are gathered around something small that is floating in the water. Jack comes closer. He steps in up to his ankles, and then wades forward a little farther, just a few feet, until he is standing on the hard rock of the reef, and the water is resting against his thighs. He sees Fawad reach for what is floating in the water, and the shine of it strikes the boy’s eyes. When he can see again, he sees that Fawad is holding the Frenchman’s metal pencil case. He is holding it upside down and shaking it, and water is dripping out of it. The pencils rattle inside.
“Hey,” one of the lifeguards says to Fawad, pointing at Jack. “He’s coming in.”
Fawad turns around and sees the boy standing in the water, and he says, “Get out immediately. Get back up there, do you understand? Wait for us.”
Then Jack gets out and sits on the wet sand until the police captain, Abdul al-Basri, arrives; he is by himself, wearing a green uniform. The boy picks barnacles off the bottom of the beached skiff with the point of a jackknife, while the men show the police captain the Frenchman’s clothes and flipper, the wet pencil box, the drawings from his room. Mr. Hafez talks for a long time, and then he becomes upset and sits down on a deck chair with his head in his hands until one of the lifeguards brings him a glass of lemonade.
The police captain looks up and down the beach, and then he comes to the skiff to talk to Fawad. He is shaking his head, and Fawad, who has begun readying the net for the evening, does not say anything.
“We will look,” Abdul al-Basri says.
“Where?” Fawad says.
“At Pharaoh’s Island, and also at Dahab,” he says. “But with the currents—”
“You do not need to explain the currents to me,” Fawad says.
The police captain flips through the Frenchman’s drawings. He has a large mustache and thick hair that he sweeps out of his eyes with the back of his hand, and round, gold-rimmed sunglasses that are too big for his face. He is wearing a gold watch to go with the glasses.
“These are quite good,” he says to Fawad.
“They are not so good that I would agree if I didn’t think he was dead,” the fisherman says, threading his line.
“They are good enough,” Abdul al-Basri says, as he rolls the drawings up. “But there isn’t much to hope for.” He stares at the water, swaying a little on his toes, tilting his head upward so that he can look through the bottoms of his sunglasses, which are lighter than the tops. “By now there has been a shark,” he says. “Or a propeller.”
Fawad makes a little motion with his hands, and the police captain looks at the boy.
“My apologies,” he says to Fawad, and Fawad shakes his head and continues untangling his net.
“He’ll turn up,” Abdul al-Basri says finally.
“It might be better if he didn’t,” Fawad says. The two shake hands and the police captain leaves.
Jack sits with his legs out in front of him, piling fistfuls of sand around his shins. Fawad smiles at him, his mouth full of clotted net. Then he looks down at the boy’s legs and says, “What happened to your knee?”
The night before, Jack had been unable to sleep. In his cot by the window, he gazed up at the wedged plaster of the ceiling, listening to the soft breath of the wind outside, and the absence of his mother, which had a sound all its own—no quiet shuffling of papers or clink of coffee cups, no sliding of the liquor-cabinet door. A dotted pink lizard with large eyes was inching up the wall opposite his bed, its skin runny and transparent. Jack watched its slow ascent, then he coughed and the sound sent the lizard scuttling up to the rafters and the roof beyond. The beams of the house creaked like a ship. The blanket was stifling, and Jack struggled to kick it off. The dead ship on the atoll sat in the corner of his consciousness, as it always did when he was alone, ever since his mother had caught him sitting in the shallows of the mangrove swamp and had said to him, “Is that what you want—to die like this? To drown, to not be found? Eaten or mangled into shreds—is that what you want?” all without shouting, without once raising her voice, and then the next day Fawad had told him about the ship and the water djinn.
The boy lay with the blanket around his legs, and still he could not sleep.
Outside, the night was cold. Sharp, clear stars lay flat against the sky. When he stepped out of the bungalow, the sand under his feet was moist, still steaming with the heat of the day. He ran down the dunes, his toes stabbed by splinters of driftwood, and when he reached the wet edge of the sand he stopped to catch his breath.
It was high water, and the swells had cut the beach short. They opened out as they rose, white-capped rolls unwinding, smashing against rock and sand, tossing clots of seaweed up the beach. Jack felt the booming resonance of the surf all the way down to his bones, and he stood very still and watched the sand release its dwellers, tiny armies of crabs rising out of the ground. Out past the breakwater, he could see the atoll lighthouse dragging its yellow light in a circle over the curve of the reef, the shape of the ship chiselled out of the darkness.
The beach was empty and unfamiliar, the dunes white and shifting and snaked with shadows. The wind was leaning into the date palms. Jack looked out at the spinning light on the atoll, the blackness like a mouth around it.
The sea was making a sad, sad sound. It was a low sound, a sound he had never heard it make before, steady and unwavering. He went down to where the sea had run up among the rocks and the picked-over shells, and he sat down and put his feet in the foam. He was sitting like this when he saw it, a big green flipper that had washed up and got stuck under one of the boulders with the sand sucking down on it as the water rushed backward and forward. He got up and pulled the flipper out, and he looked at it, bright and wet in his hands. He had seen this flipper somewhere before, he thought. At that moment, the sound grew louder, a hollow, howling sound, and Jack held the flipper in his hands and looked into the darkness for the water djinn.
Out in the waves, in the black, pitching hillocks of water, something large and pale was bobbing in and out of view. At first he thought it was a buoy or a boat that had come unmoored, but then the pale thing crested on a large wave, and suddenly he saw them. He could see them now. It was them—they were making the sound, riding the waves, clustered heads in the water that called to him, laughed at him from the carcass of the ship—and he was so afraid that his limbs felt heavy and weak, and the rising waves in the distance seemed to put out hands to touch him, and still he couldn’t move. He wanted to close his eyes so that he would not see them, so that he would not go blind, as Fawad had said he would, but the reality of the moment overwhelmed him.
A wave hissed over the beach and wreaths of foam sucked at his heels, pulling him down into the sand. He almost fell, waved his arms to regain his balance. When he looked up, the thing in the water seemed farther away, more abstract, round, bloated. Different. The voice on the wind formed a word.
And then Jack was running, sprinting for the sandbar and the breakwater. His chest felt swollen, his heart was too big for it, and the air was catching somewhere between his mouth and his lungs. He scrambled up the narrow ledge, which was slippery, wet with the tide, alive with tiny creatures scattered by his strides. He was still holding the flipper, and the rocks cut into his feet. He tripped, fell, split his knee, but he pushed himself up and ran again, the sea pulsing around his ankles. At the end, where the rocks plunged into darkness, he stopped.
It was the Frenchman—he could see that now. The Frenchman was naked, large and white and naked, and sitting on the waves as if he were being carried. Sitting perfectly still, his hands in his lap, bobbing up and down like a cork. The Frenchman’s head was turning slowly from side to side as he sat there, looking down into the water, and Jack stood with the flipper against his chest. He could see that the Frenchman was holding some paper, his pencil box, holding them on his lap as if he were sitting in a class. Then he looked up and saw Jack, and he waved his great meaty arms.
Jack stared and stared, and then he found himself waving back. He raised the flipper high and waved with it, and the Frenchman waved again. He waved harder this time, and shouted something. Jack couldn’t hear it, couldn’t hear the word.
The water djinn were carrying the Frenchman away, Jack realized. But this was not how Fawad had told him it would happen. This was not a struggle; there were no webbed fingers pulling him down, holding him under. The Frenchman was sitting like a great fat pharaoh on the waves, letting them bear him away in their naked blue arms. He did not seem to care, as Jack did, where they were taking him. Jack wanted to know where. Jack wanted to know why.
The Frenchman shouted again. This time Jack heard it, a desolate word. Help.
Help, the Frenchman was shouting for help, and, suddenly, Jack realized that the Frenchman was thrashing and rolling over in the water. Jack stood stiff and still on the rock, but he could not move. He was not permitted to swim, and he could not run back to the hotel in time to get help.
He stood there for long moments, hearing the Frenchman howl and watching him fight the torrents of water that wrapped around him and rushed down his nose and throat. The current was strong, a glass line of suction that streamed past the atoll, past the ghost ship, past the horizon, and the fat man fought it, arm over arm, call by call, but he could not overcome it.
Then he went under, and Jack’s throat caught. When he came up, he was far away, turning like an enormous white bottle, bobbing weightlessly down the channel.
Three days after the Frenchman goes missing, they find him. He floated, as Abdul al-Basri guessed, out to sea and into the Gulf of Aqaba—past Tiran Island and the blue hole of Dahab and the kelp beds where the whale sharks feed, past four cruise liners and an oil rig, until at last his swollen form came to rest against an orange buoy just off the coast of Nuweiba. There, the Frenchman’s arm snagged on a rope, and as he lay face down in the water the gulls stood on him and ate his back.
Jack goes down to the beach to watch them bring him in. It is a hot morning, heavy with mist, the prow of the police boat caked with wads of rust as it cuts through the waves. Fawad swims out, shoulder-deep, to help the policemen lower the Frenchman onto a stretcher, very gently, and carry him ashore. Jack stands in the shallows, his shirt sticky with heat. As they pass him, he sees the Frenchman, wrapped from head to foot in yellowed linens, tied off at either end like a great parcel of sausage, and the stench of saltwater rot washes over him. He pictures the bloated blue corpse, punctured like a balloon by the teeth of dogfish, the claws of crabs, the mouths of lampreys, thousands of skittering things that have burrowed frantically into the flesh and deflated him inch by inch until he is as ragged as a web of tide pools.
Jack stands in the shallows, urinating, until Fawad pulls him out.
Mr. Hafez calls the boy’s mother to tell her the news, and, from London, she suggests that they hold a wake while they wait for the Frenchman’s family to collect him. The Frenchman has a brother, Jack hears at the hotel, a man who works in a garage, who is coming for the body. Mr. Hafez has offered him a free stay.
For the wake, they light candles and find a priest from St. Catherine’s, a man who comes down to read verses from the Bible over a cross that they have buried in the sand near where the Frenchman’s belongings were found. Night falls and the priest says things that Jack does not understand, and the soft honey smell of smoke and flowers fills the air above the courtyard until it is so thick that Jack cannot find room in his lungs to breathe. Some of the hotel guests come dressed in black. The old Portuguese woman is there, wearing a faded green sweater. There is a piece of fish in her hand, and during the service she feeds little bits of it to her dog, whom she is holding against her moist underarm. The Frenchman is not in attendance; he has been cleaned, perfumed, wrapped in new linens, and stored in the hotel’s meat locker, between blocks of ice.
When the fire burns low, Fawad goes out to pull up his nets. Jack follows him and watches him put his bucket and rod into the bottom of the skiff, along with some bottles of water and a small pot of goat stew. Jack wishes that Fawad would ask him something, but the old man doesn’t say a word. The boy tries to help push the skiff into the water, but Fawad waves him away, and then he sits on the beach, watching the fisherman alone in the boat, the even swing of his arms as he rows himself along the line of the breakwater, through the low waves and away into the darkness. When he is gone, Jack goes back to his room and gets the Frenchman’s missing flipper out from under his bed. He will wait for Fawad on the beach, he tells himself, and in the morning he will tell the old man everything.
Jack makes a burrow for himself in the sand and lies on his back with the sky pressing in around him like an overturned bowl.
When he wakes up, there is silence. He thinks he has heard his mother calling his name, looking for him, but then he stands up and remembers that she is far away, that she is in London, and that the Frenchman is dead. The dead man’s flipper is in his hand.
When he looks around, the water is gone. At first, he thinks that sleep is playing a trick on him, and he rubs his eyes but still the sea has vanished. He can hear it, somewhere in the distance, very far. The tide has pulled the water out like a net, and has left behind the pale, crooked body of the reef, white and empty and stark in the moonlight. Jack has lived his whole life on this beach, but he has never seen the tide so low. He can see the water now, when he looks very hard. It is buffeting the side of the atoll that faces the open sea, the roar of it singing in the metal belly of the ship.
His first step out, Jack realizes that the reef is slippery. Grass, silk-soft, has grown up out of the living rock. All around him stand small towers of coral, gray breathing things. The retreating water has dragged the starfish from their moorings, left them red-backed and raw in the sand, reaching for their hiding places. Sea urchins cluster together, spines shining. Twenty feet out on the crenellated alleys of the reef, the underwater forest begins. The grasses are longer here, thicker, and as he steps through them Jack’s bare feet touch the still bodies of butterfly fish, emperor angels. A lionfish lifts its feathered barbs at him from a cradle of water in a rock. Under the boy is the porous face of the reef, its millions of crawl spaces, nets of tunnels swollen with tiny hidden monsters.
The atoll is different. Its rocks are sharp, and he cuts his feet on them as he climbs up and over, toward the ship, toward the water. Toward the water djinn. Salt stings the cuts in his heels. The ship clings to the edge of the atoll like a rusted clamp, its metal flank striped with light. Beyond it, the sea is breathing, coming slowly back over the rock.
When he reaches the hull of the ship, he puts the Frenchman’s flipper between his teeth and hoists himself up until his head is wedged through a rusty porthole. At first, he sees nothing. The inside of the ship is black, swollen with dark water. But then his eyes adjust and the moon comes out from behind a bank of cloud. Shafts of light fall through the gnarled holes in the metal and slice the green water inside.
When he sees it, it is more than he expected. It wheels, weightless and slow, skimming the cracked husk of the ship, more graceful than any he has ever seen, even though he has sat on the beach for years watching them come and go. It swims, compressed, into the bottom of the ship, its beaked head darting at cracks that are too small to let it out, trapped in a metal tide pool on the edge of the abyss. The water sighs, sloshes around the iron trough, and Jack catches a brief glimpse of its black eye, the globe of its shell, as it turns and dives once again, trying to press its body out into the sea. ♦
