Sharkey had spent his big-wave-riding years as one of these golden men, and though he’d become over time friendlier and more detached, he was sought out by other celebrities, surfers, or visiting musicians or writers—rockers and names.

One of these was Hunter Thompson, himself a talker—a shouter when he was drunk—and seldom a listener, gravelly voiced and unpredictable, attracted to the recklessness and tribalism of surf culture, the available drugs and the drinking, the stew of hangers-on, the promise of sex—sex was like a handshake here, a way of getting acquainted. When there was no surf there was nothing to do except raise hell.

Hunter had become Sharkey’s friend. Everyone in Hawaii knew Sharkey; everyone elsewhere knew Hunter, it seemed. In the fractured days after the accident, in what he thought of as his convalescence, Hunter Thompson was often in Sharkey’s thoughts—he mentioned him to Olive, he talked about the derangement of celebrity, the famous person, known to all, looking for listeners.

“In actual fact,” Olive said again, with as much tact as she could, “you’ve told me that before.”

The softened words still stung Sharkey, especially as Olive had listened to an hour or more of his talk, and he realized that he’d bored her, as Hunter had often bored him, telling the same drunken stories in a hotel room or over the phone from Woody Creek at three in the morning. But his embarrassment was brief; he quickly forgot what he had told her and how she had responded.

“He liked me. We had plans.”

She nodded and decided not to say, “So you’ve told me.”

She was surprised by his solemn, reflective tone, as though he’d just remembered these incidents and was imparting them with reverence for the first time. She knew they were old settled memories that he’d told her before. Why he was repeating them she had no idea, but if she commented too often he’d be self-conscious; so she listened, as though hearing them for the first time, because he spoke in tones of discovery and wonderment.

Sometimes her patients, stunned by a drug or waking from surgery, behaved in this muddled way, and so she listened to Sharkey, trying not to seem clinical or detached, to his earnest recollections as he walked her backward through his memories, as though on a path they’d traveled together. He seemed to believe that everything he said was a stark revelation, while she squirmed, pitying him for his obvious repetition. None of it was new to her.

At what point would he realize he’d told her all this before?