“It’s a sign of life,” Olive said, thinking of Sharkey’s delusion of health in his weird confinement of repetition.

But Luana’s question had startled her—she had not thought she’d looked so obvious in her discomfort. Olive’s nausea was unusual. She had arrived early so that she could meditate awhile before she signed in. But life goes on, she thought, emptying her mind, and was heartened: if she was sick, she’d get well.

She sat in a lotus posture under an awning on the roof, with a view of the sea, and she inhaled the day, using her breathing exercises to clear her head and settle her stomach. It seemed to work; a sensation of weightlessness lifted her. But when she lay flat on her back in a corpse pose a new thought intruded: there was nothing like this variation in Sharkey’s day-to-day—no friend, no yoga, no questions. He sat smiling. Was he holding his breath? His past crowded his present, and the rest was a void. She knew that much of what he’d claimed he’d done was boasting or invention, but that was how heroes lived, inhabiting their own myth with such conviction that other people were persuaded. Yet most people’s lives, no matter how humble, were marked by incident, the rise and fall of hope, the swelling of self-belief, the looking for more, and always the waking to a new day.

Olive saw that Sharkey’s repetitive life, more serious than a delusion, was like a terminal illness.

Yet the man was functional. He ate, he slept, he limped in his garden, feeding his geese and chickens, plucking blossoms, squinting at the sun. Perhaps this was how prisoners or monks lived their lives, shuffling in narrow spaces, pausing often, adjusting themselves to their confinement, like animals in zoo enclosures, learning how to repeat their small steps: pacing, drowsing, blinking, head-bobbing, vegetating—functionless behavior, with the shallow breathing and slowed heartbeat of someone buried alive.

And if you interrupted them in their pacing, asked a question, you got the same answer, and perhaps a monologue—something circular, the thought that had been stewing in their mind.

Or was she imagining his condition, exaggerating his passivity and drowsy routines? He was an energetic surfer, but he was a panting animal too. A lion pounds after its prey across the savannah and seizes it by the haunches to devour, roaring and tearing with its teeth, and gorges itself, and then lolls and naps, yawning under a tree, days of this, long periods of grunting repose. The monk seal on a wave, the water dog of the Hawaiian coasts, tossed in surf, diving for food, rolling in the swells nipping at fish, until at last exhausted, noses to shore and bumps up the hot sand above the tidemark and sleeps. He was that lion, he was that seal.