“The gate’s open,” Sharkey said. “I’ll get it.”

Walking in the darkness on the loose stones of his driveway, he felt the ache in his toe sharpen with such suddenness he stumbled slightly from the pain and wondered if he’d stubbed it.

He closed the gate and, limping back to the house, saw Olive watching from the lanai.

“I think I stepped on something.”

Olive shone a small flashlight on it. “You’re really unlucky. Two punctures, near your cut. I told you to let me bandage it. That’s a ghastly centipede sting. Poor toe.”

“Poor me.” But it was only his toe, and he was someone who had known broken bones and slashes from crown-of-thorns starfish, and stinging stonefish and razor coral. And he smiled, thinking it was the toe the goose had stepped on and clawed, the one he’d cut on the lava rock, and now the centipede.

“Poor you.” Olive hugged him.

“I’m happy,” he said. “Nothing hurts if you’re happy.”

They went to bed. Olive was asleep almost immediately. Sharkey lay awake, slowly subsiding as he reflected on the day. It had been a good day, waking from a dream of flying and making love. The contented geese, surfing at Rubber Duckies, swimming at Three Tables. He’d seen whales and had an inkling of their long eerie calls from underwater. He’d spotted a green sea turtle. He’d surfed a monster wave at Waimea. He’d bought and seared an ahi steak. He’d drunk a beer by the light of a dazzling sunset. His toe ached slightly still—perhaps more than slightly—but that pain was a reminder that he was fully alive.

A perfect day. He’d spent many days like this. He hoped for more.

3

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Early evening in the dusty exhausted light on the North Shore, the purply-pink sunset puddling at the far end of the ocean, and then the green flash, the gulp of the sun as it winked beneath the water. Sharkey turned from this splendor to watch the twitch of the waitress’s shorts. He stood to see more, then self-consciously looked away, and just beyond the window a white-faced owl was spooked from a monkey pod tree to flap into blackness. As a mass of flies found his sweaty head, he batted at them with his free hand. And Olive was on the line.

“Liv,” he said, the phone clapped to his ear.

The waitress’s tight-fitting shorts were white frilly knickers, her T-shirt was artfully torn, a disk tattooed on the nape of her neck beneath her swinging ponytail, a spidery tattoo wrapped around her ankle.

“That was the second transfusion we did today,” Olive was saying. “I was in triage . . .”

He looked away from the waitress and said, “Sounds like you had a big day,” hoping to take up the slack.