The nights grew moderate. March arrived. Some days the earth breathed again, a sigh of oniongrass. The days turned almost languid. Crocuses erupted on the lawn. The house was Kevin’s alone, a kingdom, a cave. He retreated to the library and took out his old books, those he hadn’t opened since graduate school—so long ago! And at night, with the pages of his unfinished dissertation spread before him (untethered now from their rubber bands, their paper clips), he sat beside the fire with his old friends: Ovid, Pythagoras, Heraclitus. He reread Ovid’s Teachings of Pythagoras; it had been the basis of his dissertation. But what was Kevin on to back then, something he’d since forgotten and now—twenty years later, on these equinoctial nights—he tried to make sense of again? Pythagoras’s idea of metempsychosis? Heraclitus’s belief in universal flux, in the flame? Kevin had tried—and failed—to connect both Heraclitus and Pythagoras with Lao Tsu and Buddha Sakyamuni. The Western philosophers with the Eastern. They’d all been alive at roughly the same time—500 B.C.—and surely they had all drunk from the same source. Kevin’s Ph.D. adviser said that his dissertation draft was “bold” but “scattered” and “unfocused”; he needed to make it more cogent. And where did Ovid fit into all this anyhow? Where did reincarnation? Kevin was so young at the time, so insensible to half of it. And just about the same time, all his friends in New York began falling ill. So he’d put the dissertation aside and taken care of one and then another friend; and the plague years came and passed and the dissertation remained untouched—still in its cardboard box.

Now, those spring nights on Trachis, he pored over the pages once more. He may have been too young to comprehend it all back then—for death hadn’t surrounded him yet. But now the Heraclitean flame made stunning sense to him. For wasn’t each person he ever knew, living or dead, a candle that had flickered for a few years and then went out—his mother and father and all his friends who’d passed, his young nephews so recently kindled, who would extinguish just as well. “All things change to fire, and fire exhausted, falls back into things.” Hadn’t all of the dead in his life simply “fallen back into things”?

Kevin slept late in the mornings. At night, in the drawing room, the sound of the surf was a sentence that kept starting over and over but never finished. The ocean hurled entreaties at the land. What was it trying to say? What was the line that needed completion?

In April the spring tide was enormous. Monumental on the full-moon night. The tide erased the beach, disfigured the dunes, overran the sand with dulse and devil’s apron; and the half shells of scallops were castanets torn in two.