Sharkey sensed the bewilderment in the room, felt it on his skin, the murmuring, the confusion. They hadn’t known Hunter either. And he smiled, thinking how he and Hunter were either unknown or forgotten. But he couldn’t blame the new generation of watermen for their ignorance, because he himself had never read Hunter’s books and could hardly believe that such a restless man could sit still long enough to write anything.

Dusk was falling, lending a fragile luminescence to Franco’s garden, the white petals of the plumeria, the crimson torches of ginger, and he was studying them in the mild stupor of pakalolo when he was nudged—Garrett.

“Why didn’t you come inside, man? I wanted to introduce you.”

“That’s good. I like that. Introduce me.” Sharkey was thinking how, as a stranger now, he needed to be identified and his history explained.

“You did it! You surfed Nazaré!”

Sharkey said, “No one saw me.”

“Wrong! They told me—they saw you from the cliff, they saw you from the beach. Diogo, the jet ski guy, saw you.”

“Was that his name? Garrett, what I did isn’t news.”

“That’s better, that’s humble.”

“Everyone saw you, man—the whole world.”

Garrett said, “The only one who mattered to me was Nicole. She saw me. That was all I wanted.”

Hearing this, Sharkey became tearful, and blamed the blunt in his fingers. He hid his sorrow with sudden anger, saying, “My team didn’t show up!”

“You didn’t need them! If I’d done that with no one watching, I’d be stoked.”

“I could have wiped out bad. I only realized it when it was over.”

Garrett said eagerly, “Yes. Did you sense it? That you might die?”

“My mind was empty. I felt”—Sharkey took a hit of the blunt and held the smoke down, then exhaled—“I felt that because no one was watching, I didn’t exist. That I only came alive when I was in the shore break, pounded in the soup. And no one was waiting for me.”

“Your wave might have been bigger than mine,” Garrett said, teasing Sharkey with a poke in his arm.

“They’re gone—your wave, my wave. Gone forever,” Sharkey said. He put the blunt to his lips and drew on it.

Garrett nodded slowly. “You going back to Nazaré?”

Sharkey did not reply, he was holding his breath. Finally he said, “That was the one I was waiting for,” through clenched teeth. “I’m done.”

“Me too. But I want more. What’re you going to do now?”