Shaking coins in his pocket now and then, he walked toward the city in the morning, feeling also the bundle of bills from the overdue pay he’d collected in Hawaii. Some of it should have gone to Ruth, he thought. He bore the realization that she had worked all those years. He had given little. The army didn’t know about her.

The distance from the airport was deceptive and by the time he saw buildings, he was tired.

He was cold even as the fog lifted and his feet had new boots on them, the ones they gave him in Hawaii when they questioned him on how he’d been treated. Now he had blisters.

When the officers questioned him, with their gray unyielding authority, he’d said, “Fine, I’m fine,” but his eyes were swollen with uncried tears, his face red. He thought they would want him to go to the brig for years.

The strange men said, “‘Fine’! That word is the typical reaction. Did you know that?”

He didn’t. So, everyone said fine. What else would they have said? The truth?

The war was like an ocean, an ocean where everyone burned or drowned, and only a few could swim it.

He missed the real ocean. He’d never thought of the future in that ocean. Only of swimming and holding his breath.

As he walked, his feet hurt, but he was glad to hurt, glad his tooth hurt, also. He changed his bag to the other shoulder. He felt a pang of missing home. He saw Ruth’s teeth, how small they were when they bit into a piece of fruit, and he missed her. He wanted to touch her, but this was the decent thing, he told himself, the right thing, not to go back. He had two lives. Now they both seemed as if they belonged to another man. He’d been taken away from both of those lives. He was a stolen person. What remained was not him. It was just his body walking, the body of dishonesty. He was a taken-away human being. Right now the only earthly connection he felt to anything was this walking away from everything in his new boots, hurting and stiff. Miles he walked, miles a long way for a man who was a rice-grower, accustomed to standing in water, bending over, a man with a back that showed his labor, too. And a fisherman he had been until he was found. He saw the brown sea grasses as he walked, then the green of the plants on the side of the road. He was in a different world. He was from a different world. It was a long distance between the two. He thought it would never be crossed.

When at last he reached the city it was in warmth. People passed by, foreign to him, pale, everything about them strange. The sun watched him from the sky. He set his bag down on a bench.

Before he began his third life, he lay down on the bench that said THE HARTFORD with an elk on it, loosened his boots, and fell asleep beneath the antlers, dreaming his head was in a woman’s lap, not on his bag of earthly possessions.