A black Labrador ambled through the waves, licking our hands and ready to shake its coat over us. I patted its head, admiring the easy expertise of the American crew. A man in swimming trunks and straw hat filmed the launch with a handheld video camera. At least this vessel would not sink, and a trial cruise among the weekend yachts of Marina Del Rey might uncover more truths about the performance of crew and vessel than its original’s abortive mock-voyage across the Atlantic.

I thought of Olga sailing serenely through the lobby of the Beverly Hilton after we said goodbye. As she pressed her cheeks against my own I kissed for the last time the face of my childhood governess. That youthful and ageless mask was her true self, which time had stolen from her, the innocent and unlined face she had never been allowed to know as an adolescent.

The war had postponed my own childhood, to be rediscovered years later with Henry, Alice, and Lucy. The time of desperate stratagems was over, the car crashes and hallucinogens, the deviant sex ransacked like a library of extreme metaphors. Miriam and all the murdered dead of a world war had made their peace. The happiness I had found had been waiting for me within the modest reach of my own arms, in my children and the women I had loved, and in the friends who had made their own way through the craze years.

The waves struck sharply at our ankles. A strong wind was gusting across the beach, and the papyrus craft had broken free from its crew. With only the cameraman aboard, fumbling at the mast as he ducked the swinging boom, the craft confidently rode the waves. The launch crew leapt through the deeper water, pulling on the mooring lines but unable to restrain the boisterous vessel. The replica of a replica it may have been, but it was buoyant and well-founded, more than capable of taking on the sea and setting its own course across the Pacific, with only its shanghaied cameraman as crew, perhaps ending with a last triumphant heave on the beaches of Woosung.

“New York tomorrow. Then home to the children.” Cleo held my arm tightly as we walked back to our car, past the hippies and the fragrant beach fires, embers glaring in the freshening air. “Tell me—when they show the film in London, will they put back your little cameo?”

“I hope not.” I watched the papyrus craft cresting the breakers that rolled in from the Pacific, its bow set towards the China shore. “Cleo, think where that might lead…”

Also by J. G. Ballard

Also by J. G. Ballard

The Drowned World

The Voices of Time

The Terminal Beach

The Drought

The Crystal World

The Day of Forever

The Venus Hunters

The Disaster Area

The Atrocity Exhibition

Vermilion Sands

Crash

Concrete Island

High-Rise

Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories

The Unlimited Dream Company

Hello America