He did not have words to describe to her how he felt—that after the accident his life seemed to stall, to falter and then to skip backward. And that he seemed to separate from himself and become a bystander to his own life, watching without comprehension but amazed that he was offered this perspective, as his own shadow. The experience was pleasantly bewildering, because there was no threat. It is not dangerous to be your own double, he thought. But it was illogical, like a dream, full of absurdities, vaguely shameful. He watched like a passive onlooker as this deepening stillness took hold, sinking to a tedium he found restful, especially after the hallucinatory suddenness of the accident. That crash had been a seismic sucker punch, like a reef rising up to knock him from his board and hammer the board apart.

Now inert, dull-minded, becalmed, and enlarged by the tedium, the way indolent people grow fat—but the fatness was in his head—he recalled a slow succession of awkward incidents. Though strange, they had seemed fairly normal by Hawaii standards. The North Shore, he liked to think, was the edge of the known world, the absolute limit: beyond it was unreadable ocean, strange lands.

But after the accident these little episodes seemed to have the weight and meaning of portents. None had occurred on the water—water was his element; all had happened on land, many of them after he’d just come ashore.

It was as though—he imagined—he’d been singled out, and someone, or some sentient force, had been speaking to him; and he hadn’t paid attention. Had he listened, heeding the warnings, there might have been no accident. There would have been no revelation for him, and no story, nothing to tell. If he’d been alert and known the implications, his life would have been undisturbed and remained the fiction he contrived to make it.

An accident is a surprise, unanticipated, a happenstance. But this, he now saw, had been foretold, because there was a meaning in all events and it is their accumulation that gives them form and meaning and makes them readable. It was not a single thing, it was many, and they made a pattern that sprawled and became logical and had a meaning.