“It’s just a question of getting used to it,” he said, talking in his head, as though in reply to Olive, who would have challenged him—“See, you’re having trouble lifting it”—had she been there.

He smiled to think how we carry on conversations with people who are absent, who loom large in our lives, justifying our actions to them. He often found himself responding with force or irritation to the objections of his mother, though she’d been dead for years, opposing her through force of habit, feeling nagged.

How the dead rule our lives from the grave, he thought, remembering Olive and The dead don’t die, and laughing out loud at this gave him a jolt of vitality.

Pausing just before he got into the car, he glanced at its shine, its newness, the sleek bullet shape—and his surfboard strapped on the roof rack made it sleeker. Going closer, he saw his face in the side window, someone he scarcely recognized—a much older and frailer man, and though he told himself that his aged appearance was the result of his illness, he knew that face awaited him in the future, a preview of himself as an old man. Surfers aged badly; it was the sun burning their flesh and the erosion of strong waves—pitiless nature. Surfers remained physically strong but they looked like hell, like old homeless coots, their bodies dried and hollowed like driftwood, and for the same reason, bobbing in seawater, rubbed by salt, cooked by sun.

Behind the wheel, starting the car, moving up the driveway, he said (as though to a stranger who’d remarked on his worn and weathered face), “You know how long I’ve been doing this? Almost every day since I was a teenager at Magic Island, playing hooky from Roosevelt. Every day in the water, the sun and waves beating my face.”

He’d seen faces like this on old half-broken men on the coasts of Africa and Asia, but he was so disturbed by his own that he tried to verify it in the rearview mirror. The mirror was crueler, clearer than the side window with its dusty soft focus. He saw a brown pinched face and anxious eyes, and while still peering he oversteered, saddened by the sight, and saw his expression change as the right side of the car caught the edge of a terracotta planter and cracked it, raking the front fender, digging a furrow into the new paintwork.

“Shit!” He was further shamed by his eyes in the mirror, registering helplessness, as though rebuked. Then he leaned back and saw a cartouche of his foolish face.

To blunder was one thing; to observe yourself blundering in this way was worse. And when he backed up he raked the car again and swore louder. Then he averted his eyes from the face that grew older and uglier in those seconds.