“Traveling costs money. You’ve never been out of Hale‘iwa. What do you know?”

Enraged by the question, by Sharkey’s kicking her yoga mat as he said it, Kailani lost her tears in her anger and said, “That stuff is so junk. Is like poison. And you promised you never do it, and now you doing it. So you fake, and you make ass, and it have a bad ending—that’s what I know, panty!”

And when she left, taking her tray of sprouts, her sticks of incense, her aromatic candles and her yoga mat, Sharkey was relieved. He had wanted to go alone. All the sponsors needed was his name and a photograph of him holding the bulbous bottle of Prime Fuel and smiling.

He flew via New York to Lisbon and rented a car. Passing the villages, the markets, the tile-roofed bungalows, the field hands pruning in the vineyards, he thought, I am a stranger in their country. No one knows that I am on a reconnaissance mission. They too are unaware of the monster wave.

João was waiting for him as he’d promised, at the church in Sitio, Nossa Senhora de Nazaré. He greeted Sharkey with a hug and said, “I obey what you said. I tell no one that you come here.”

“I drove via Santarém—deliberately avoided the coast road,” Sharkey said. “I wanted to be surprised.”

“I show you,” João said.

In the car, driving into the town of Sitio, he’d heard nothing, keeping the windows closed. And the church was in the town. But getting out of the car he’d become aware of a rumble—the sound not of water but of something more solid, like the movement of earth, the shifting of big boulders, the seismic tumble of their stone surfaces chafing, with the suggestion of a motor behind them; then silence; then the rumble again, a sequence of landslides, a mountain moving. He felt it under his feet, the vibration traveled up his legs and into his belly, he sensed it at the back of his eyes.

“We walk—we go to the farol,” João said, leading him upward along a road, a fortresslike building in the distance, on the cliff at the end of the road, the cupola of a lighthouse surmounting it.

Approaching the cliff edge, Sharkey saw another cliff on a mountain headland beyond it, but this one was in motion—gray, still swelling, topped with froth, and the cliffside was not smooth. On its face were the toppling boulders in the landslide he’d heard. The mountain moved toward him in silence and then, slowly, it broke in a succession of loud collapses, some explosive, the shattering of rock, others aqueous sighs of sea spray, all these sounds at last subsiding in a rattle and smash, a swallowing of the sea.

João had been talking—the falling water had drowned out his words.