“You hungry? There’s good grinds at a little place near here.” Still he worked the zippers open, poking beneath them with his fingers. “I’m meeting Nicole there pretty soon.”

“That your board?”

“Yeah,” Garrett said, and lifted the upper flap of the bag, revealing a gleaming silver thing, a Mercedes medallion, stamped near its top end, and a pointed tip that made it seem more like a dagger than a surfboard.

Sharkey said, “I’m not hungry, man.”

He slept badly, but when at last he subsided into sleep, his phone rang in the darkness—João, excited, fully awake, barking in his ear.

“It coming big, Joe!”

“Where’s the team?”

“They leave a message. They say tomorrow for sure.”

“Who’s riding today?” Sharkey asked, but he knew the answer.

Joao said, “Your friend.”

“Right.”

“You can maybe watch.”

Sharkey was not used to being a spectator, idly watching and whistling among people turned away from him, anonymous in a crowd. He backed off, sliding around the photographers, the cameras, the paraphernalia of umbrellas and tripods and billowing windbreaks, all Garrett’s team and well-wishers. His own team—the Prime Fuel people, his photographers—had still not arrived. He had asked João about the tow-in, and João had smiled and pointed to Garrett on the beach below, setting off on a jet ski, and said, “Only got one.”

And now the crowd on the cliff was calling out to Garrett as he was being towed from the harbor to the left, into the dark slope of the swell. Their faces were tight with fear. They were not cheering, they were appealing to him, offering piteous encouragement, as though to a man in grave danger, and could not help sounding sorrowful.

Sharkey did not think of himself as a jealous man, yet he felt an unexpected tug of resentment, as of being betrayed, cuckolded by a friend, seeing Garrett clinging to the back of the jet ski, dragging his board, climbing at a sharp angle up the wave, carving a streak of white into its belly, like a tear in dark billowing silk. And he was glad when Garrett was towed beyond the break and was hidden by the high foam-trimmed tops. Sharkey raised his binoculars and peered. He saw black water brimming against the sky. The man was lost to view, in the distant sea, behind the huge swell.

Hearing several anguished cries from the crowd, Sharkey looked up and was strangely consoled, and a moment later hated himself for it.

The sound of the sea helped: it smothered him. Falling water had never sounded more destructive, the early sets sliding toward the cliff and breaking like boulders cleaving—not the slop and splash of liquid but the shattering of rocks splintering to smallness, the whole great mountain of water smashing and draining away to a swirling reef of bubbles; and then another, louder.