From the outside Alfonzo saw that the exterior of Cappuccino’s house was not so much a structure as a dune with windows. Despite its interior volume, the place almost disappeared into the island. You’d never know it was there, save for the windows’ reflections flashing from behind a screen of seagrasses. Even when he studied the building straight on, Alfonzo couldn’t tell if it was buried on purpose or by nature. Was it a result of slow disaster or design that winked at disaster? Alfonzo saw that Cappuccino’s mound lay between more traditionally designed mansions owned by other millionaires, billionaires, or whatever sort of -aire you had to be to own a piece of beach.

The air moved the sand and turned everything into waves, sand particles and light, bird calls and echoing horns. Nothing was solid. Sand caught in their wool. The land was less land and more loose matter in continual flux. The wind was catching bits of him and carrying them away.

In college, Alfonzo and Vivi had taken a class with a famous bird. The bird was a linguist who focused on time and speech. In one lecture he had explained that Aymara—a language spoken in the Andes—appeared to be the only one in the world in which the past was conceptualized as physically in front and the future behind. What most of us are used to imagining is the past at our back and the future ahead of us. It’s so ingrained it feels natural, invisible in the way seasons used to be. The future comes at us, the past recedes at our backs.

In the Aymara framework, by contrast, one moved backward into the future. In that period of college, Alfonzo had been experimenting with mind-altering substances—locoweed, chocolate, catnip. Perhaps it was that, or that this information related to the Andes, but the lecture had struck Alfonzo. One backed into one’s life while looking “forward” at history. When Alfonzo considered it, the Aymara conception made more sense than the one we’re used to. We’ve already seen our past, so one might imagine that we’re facing it. Our future, however, sneaks up behind us. It leaps out and shocks even the most careful creature. The future is unknown until it grabs us by the tail.