At dusk he rode with them into Lamu. The taxi let them off on a pier and they climbed a hill to town. He heard birds call from the scrub by the road, and from the mango trees that leaned over the path. The air smelled sweet, like cabbage and pineapple. The Jims labored as they walked.
In Lamu the streets were crowded and the street vendors were out, grilling plantains or curried goat over driftwood coals. Pineapples were being sold on sticks, and children moved about yoked with boxes from which they hawked maadazi or chapatis spread with ginger. The Jims and the shell collector bought kebabs and sat in an alley, their backs against a carved wooden door. Before long a passing teenager offered hashish from a water pipe, and the Jims accepted. The shell collector smelled its smoke, sweet and sticky, and heard the water bubble in the pipe.
“Good?” the teenager asked.
“You bet,” the Jims coughed. Their speech was slurred.
The shell collector could hear men praying in the mosques, their chants vibrating down the narrow streets. He felt a bit strange, listening to them, as if his head were no longer connected to his body.
“It is Taraweeh,” the teenager said. “Tonight Allah determines the course of the world for next year.”
“Have some,” one of the Jims said, and shoved the pipe in front of the shell collector’s face. “More,” the other Jim said, and giggled.
The shell collector took the pipe, inhaled.
It was well after midnight. A crab fisherman in a motorized mtepe was taking them up the archipelago, past banks of mangroves, toward home. The shell collector sat in the bow on a crab trap made from chicken wire and felt the breeze in his face. The boat slowed. “Tokeni,” the fisherman said, and the shell collector did, the Jims with him, splashing down from the boat into chest-deep water.
The crab boat motored away and the Jims began murmuring about the phosphorescence, admiring the glowing trails blooming behind each other’s bodies as they moved through the water. The shell collector took off his sandals and waded barefoot, down off the sharp spines of coral rock, into the deeper lagoon, feeling the hard furrows of intertidal sand and the occasional mats of algal turf, fibrous and ropy. The feeling of disconnectedness had continued, been amplified by the hashish, and it was easy for him to pretend that his legs were unconnected to his body. He was, it seemed suddenly, floating, rising above the sea, feeling down through the water into the turquoise shallows and coral-lined alleys. This small reef: the crabs in their expeditions, the anemones tossing their heads, the tiny blizzards of fish wheeling past, pausing, bursting off…he felt it all unfold simply below him. A cowfish, a triggerfish, the harlequin Picasso fish, a drifting sponge—all these lives were being lived out, every day, as they always had been. His senses became supernatural: beyond the breaking combers, the dappled lagoon, he heard terns, and the thrum of insects in the acacias, and the heavy shifting of leaves in avocado trees, the sounding of bats, the dry rasping of bark at the collars of coconut palms, spiky burrs dropping from bushes into hot sand, the smooth seashore roar inside an empty trumpet shell, the rotting smell of conch eggs beached in their black pouches and far down the island, near the horizon—he could walk it down—he knew he would find the finless trunk of a dolphin, rolling in the swash, its flesh already being carted off, piece by piece, by stone crabs.
“What,” the Jims asked, their voices far-off and blended, “does it feel like to be bitten by a cone shell?”
What strange visions the shell collector had been having, just now. A dead dolphin? Supernatural hearing? Were they even wading toward his kibanda? Were they anywhere near it?
“I could show you,” he said, surprising himself. “I could find some small cones, tiny ones. You would hardly know you’d been bitten. You could write about it.”
He began to search for cone shells. He waded, turned in a circle, became slowly disoriented. He moved out to the reef, stepping carefully between the rocks; he was a shorebird, a hunting crane, his beak poised to stab down at any moment, to impale a snail, a wayward fish.
The reef wasn’t where he thought it was; it was behind him, and soon he felt the foam of the waves, long breakers clapping across his back, churning the shell fragments beneath his feet, and he sensed the algal ridge just ahead of him, the steep shelf, the rearing, twisting swells. A whelk, a murex, an olive; shells washed past his feet. Here, this felt like a cone. So easy to find. He spun it, balanced its apex on his palm. An arrhythmic wave sucker-punched him, broke over his chin. He spit saltwater. Another wave drove his shin into the rocks.
He thought: God writes next year’s plan for the world on this night. He tried to picture God bent over parchment, dreaming, puzzling through the possibilities. “Jim,” he shouted, and imagined he heard the big men splashing toward him. But they were not. “Jim!” he called. No answer. They must be in the kibanda, hunkered at the table, folding up their sleeves. They must be waiting for him to bring this cone he has found. He will press it into the crooks of their arms, let the venom spring into their blood. Then they’d know. Then they’d have their story.
He half-swam, half-clambered back toward the reef and climbed onto a coral rock, and fell, and went under. His sunglasses came loose from his face, pendulummed down. He felt for them with his heels, finally gave up. He’d find them later.
Surely the kibanda was around here somewhere. He moved into the lagoon, half-swimming, his shirt and hair soaked through. Where were his sandals? They had been in his hand. No matter.
The water became more shallow. Nancy had said there was a pulse, slow and loud. She said she could still hear it, even after she woke. The shell collector imagined it as a titanic pulse, the three-thousand-pound heart of an ice whale. Gallons of blood at a beat. Perhaps that was what he heard now, the drumming that had begun in his ears.
He was moving toward the kibanda now, he knew. He felt the packed ridges of lagoon sand under his soles. He heard the waves collapsing onto the beach, the coconut palms above rustling husk on husk. He was bringing an animal from the reef to paralyze some writers from New York, perhaps kill them. They had done nothing to him, but here he was, planning their deaths. Was this what he wanted? Was this what God’s plan for his sixty-some years of life led up to?
His chest was throbbing. Where was Tumaini? He imagined the Jims clearly, their damp bodies prone in their sleeping bags, exhaling booze and hashish, tiny siafu biting their faces. These were men who were only doing their jobs.
He took the cone shell and flung it, as far as he could, back into the lagoon. He would not poison them. It felt wonderful to make a decision like this. He wished he had more shells to hurl back into the sea, more poisons to rid himself of. His shoulder seemed terribly stiff.
Then, with a clarity that stunned him, a clarity that washed over him like a wave, he knew he’d been bitten. He was lost in every way: in this lagoon, in the shell of his private darkness, in the depths and convolutions of the venom already crippling his nervous system. Gulls were landing nearby, calling to each other, and he had been poisoned by a cone shell.
The stars rolled up over him in their myriad shiverings. His life had made its final spiral, delving down into its darkest whorl, where shell tapered into shadow. What did he remember, as he faded, poisoned finally, into the tide? His wife, his father, Josh? Did his childhood scroll by first, like a film reel, a boy under the northern lights, clambering into his father’s Bell 47 helicopter? What was there, what was the hot, hard kernel of human experience at his center—a dreamy death in water, poison, disappearing, dissolution, the cold sight of his arctic origins or fifty years of blindness, the thunder of a caribou hunt, lashing bullets into the herd from the landing strut of a helicopter? Did he find faith, regret, a great sad balloon of emptiness in his gut, his unseen, unknown son, just one of Josh’s beautiful unanswered letters?
No. There was no time. The venom had spread to his chest. He remembered this: blue. He remembered how that morning one of