The View From the Seventh Layer

The View From the Seventh Layer

What if a mysterious force could help us understand everything?

The island was so small that Olivia could hear the ocean no matter where she went. She lived in a little red garden cottage with thin wooden walls, and sometimes, when her pills didn't work, she would wake in the middle of the night to the hissing of the waves and the washboard-like croaking of the herons. Her house was nestled behind a two-story villa with a high collar of hibiscus bushes. At least once a week a spider or a bumblebee would find its way into the villa, and the widow Lorenzen would summon Olivia to get rid of it for her. "Here, smash it with this," she would say, handing her a magazine or a scuba flipper. "Kill it! Kill it!" Her fingers were stiff with arthritis. Her hair was the color of water in a swimming pool. Olivia always tried to escort the insects outside without harming them. The rhythm of the waves raking the beach reminded her of a song whose lyrics she could never quite remember. She spent whole hours some days narrowly failing to bring it to mind. She felt as though she were standing at the most remote border of her consciousness, far away from the light and warmth of the fire, peering out into the darkness like an aboriginal priestess.

During tourist season, she worked as a map vendor at the marina, operating a stand that also carried umbrellas, candy, and prophylactics. She sold more prophylactics than she did maps, and more candy than she did prophylactics, and more umbrellas than she did either. The rain came every day, starting at 3:15. It was as though someone hovering behind the clouds had opened up a spill valve. The water fell in coin-sized drops that knocked against the masts of the boats with a sound like a bamboo wind ornament, and then, at exactly 3:45, it stopped. The sun was so clean and welcoming as it shone on the docks that it was easy for the tourists to imagine it would never rain again. They took their shirts off and put their sunglasses on, rolling their shoulders as though they had just woken up from a long nap. Dozens of half-closed umbrellas lay discarded over the glistening brown boards, their handles glowing in the flawless white light. The local children collected them like flowers.

There was a bug that arrived for a few weeks in May each year and chewed the wild roses to tatters. The bug was a thick cream color at first, but its wings burned red as soon as the summer settled in. The islanders called it the "tourist bug." At the end of the season, when the tourists left, the island's teenagers took their place, walking along the docks with their hands in each other's pockets. They bought ice-cream cones, T-shirts, and cell phones, but never maps. Sometimes Olivia thought the rain that fell from 3:15 to 3:45 every summer afternoon was a message. She was convinced that she knew who had sent it.

Her father lived on the seaward tip of the island, in a colonial house with a wrought-iron balcony from which he could watch the gulls soaring out toward the open water. He owned the map-vending stand where Olivia worked in the summer, and the garden cottage where she lived when she was not working at all, and it was not unusual for her to find him sitting at her kitchen table when she got home. "You don't happen to have any gin here, I suppose?" he would ask, or, "What do you say I hire somebody to give this place a good scrubbing down?" When she was a girl, some thirty years ago, he used to call her his little baby marshmallow puff. She had always liked the soft cap of foam that marshmallows formed in mugs of hot chocolate. She owned only two keys, to only two doors, and she never knew when she would find her father waiting for her behind one or the other. Her mother, on the other hand, lived in São Paulo, Brazil, with her second husband, Graciliano. She and Olivia spoke once a month on the telephone, and when the conversation died away, as it invariably did, her mother always asked her what book she was reading, and Olivia always named the last book she had actually been able to finish, Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant, and her mother always said, "Ooh, I've been wanting to read that one. Are you enjoying it?" It had been five years since the Entity had taken Olivia into the sky, whispering to her with a tremendous musical breathing sound that was like the striking of every key on a harmonium. She still felt the singe where it had touched the hollow of her neck. 

There were days when Olivia could not ignore the tug of the sun as it crossed the sky. An overpowering dizziness took hold of her as the sun breached the horizon, subsided for a while as it climbed into the heights, and then seized her once again as it began to sink toward the mainland. It seemed to her as if every molecule in her body were tipping very slowly from the east to the west. The sensation reminded her of nothing so much as the feeling she used to get in her legs after she had finished a long day of roller-skating, when her sneakers were back on her feet but she could still feel her muscles swaying to the rhythm of the wheels. She used to love to roller-skate. Every year, beginning in the first grade, she had held her birthday party at the town skating rink—the Great Annual Birthday Bash, she called it. She invited all of her friends from both the school and the neighborhood, and her parents reserved the party room for pizza and ice cream, until one day, during her freshman year of high school, Kim Olsen informed her that no one threw Birthday Bashes anymore and she was making a complete and total idiot of herself. Olivia had changed so much since then. She had changed in ways she would never have been able to anticipate. She had become the kind of person who was barely able to get out of bed in the morning without buckling beneath the tidal pull of the planets. If only she had known when she was growing up how hard the rest of her life was going to be, how diminished, she would have been so much more joyful, so much more daring. She would have done all the things she had failed to do. She would have hiked across Europe. She would have gone skating every day.

She had moved away from the Midwest at nineteen to go to college, and, after the suspicions came out and her parents divorced, there had been little reason for her to return. Her dad bought his beach house on the island, her mom left for San Diego and Boston and finally Brazil, and Olivia drifted around like a bottle tossed carelessly into the water until she ended up here at the garden cottage, where even through the walls she could hear the ocean crashing. Nothing was secure from one minute to the next. She did not remember her dreams when she woke in the morning. A wild rooster had made its nest in the palmetto barrens across the street. The only one of her classmates she had so much as laid eyes on since high school was Chad Hayden, the captain of the varsity soccer team, who had come to the island a few years ago on his honeymoon and stopped at her map stand to buy a package of condoms and a Milky Way bar. Though she used to trade notes with him almost every day in Mr. Fuller's chemistry class, he had failed to recognize the girl she used to be in the face of the woman in the clean blue T-shirt offering him a dollar-fifty in change and a package of Trojan Ultra Thins. She had been too embarrassed to say to him, "I'm Olivia, don't you remember? From East High? The one with the bangs?" Later that night, as she watched her dinner revolving in the microwave, it occurred to her that somewhere on the island he and his bride were moving against each other in the dark, making love with a condom that had passed through her fingers. She had read somewhere that the best way to reset your circadian clock was to illuminate the backs of your knees, and so every night, after she took her sleeping pills, she was careful to shield the lower half of her body from the light.

Her father once told her that the clapboards of her house were salvaged from an allotment of hardwood barrels. One of the island's earliest successful businesses was the Holt and Liverett Cooperage, he said, which specialized in making barrels to carry whole grains and seed corn. When the cooperage went bankrupt, the wood was sold off to the highest bidder. Many of the staves had already been bound together with metal hoops, which explained why some of the boards in her wall slewed outward when it rained. "You don't even know where you're living, do you?" her father asked her. "You need to wake up and open your eyes, baby girl." Olivia had read a story once about a house that was assembled from the boards of an old race track. She remembered that the man who lived there could hear hundreds of cars speeding by, one after the other, whenever he put his ear to the wall.

There was a time in her life-and not so long ago-when she read nearly every day. Back then her favorite books had been Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, and everything by Jane Austen except Northanger Abbey. Then something went wrong, and she was no longer able to concentrate on the novels she brought home with her. Everything about them seemed imaginary, insubstantial, built on a tissue of fog and lies—and not just the settings and the characters, either, but the very words on the page. They might have been invented just that second by somebody who had never so much as set foot in the world. "This is a story about love and death in the golden land." "The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone." "One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other." What did it all mean? This was the truth: She could no longer hold a book in her hands without tasting the paper in the back of her throat and smelling the ink on her fingers. The whole experience made her feel unclean. And though she was better now than she had been in the beginning, she rarely picked up more than the occasional glossy magazine. She had lost the habit of reading for pleasure. She knew that this celebrity was dating that one, and that a third celebrity was divorcing a fourth one, and that a fifth celebrity was filming a movie in Nepal, and she did not like it.

The first few weeks of spring, when the butterflies arrived on the beach as if from another planet, had always been her favorite time of year on the island. The butterflies were the pale yellow color of primrose blossoms. They liked to rest on top of her map stand, exposing their wings to the sun. At certain times of the day she could see their shadows opening and closing on the underside of the awning—a phenomenon of nature. She had heard that you could balance a raw egg on its end during the spring equinox. She had heard, too, that tornadoes would not form along the equator because of the Coriolis effect. She could not remember which story was supposed to be true and which was supposed to be a myth. The widow Lorenzen had never asked her to kill one of the yellow butterflies, but she said that she considered them pests just the same. She liked to follow Olivia through her house as Olivia stalked the various beetles and wasps she had found. The widow ate prepackaged chocolate-and-cream rolls she called Debbie Cakes. Her face was always crimped with outrage over the insects. She never understood why Olivia would not kill them. "Why don't you just obliterate the damned things?" she asked. The portrait of her husband that hung in the parlor looked like Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. Olivia guided each and every one of the insects carefully toward the villa's front door, closing cabinets and window shades as she passed from room to room to seal off the various pathways of the labyrinth. Often the bees and wasps made a creaky warning noise with their wings and then plunged as if to sting her. But they were frightened and disoriented, and she did not see how she could blame them. She had the same responsibility as everybody else did: to live as softly as she could in the world. It was one of the many things she had learned when the Entity took her into the sky and burned her with the soft touch of its fingers. It gave her water in a smooth silver cup, and it spoke to her without moving its lips, and the gentleness in its eyes nearly blew her heart out.

She still thought about Chad Hayden sometimes, though of all the people she had known before she grew out of her ease with the world, he was one of the least important to her. She wondered where he lived now, if he had any children, whether he worked in an office. She sat in the rattan chair on her little square porch and watched the palm leaves shivering in the wind. One time, when she was eight or nine, she threw a rock at her father while he was watering the lawn, and he sprayed her with the garden hose. Another time, on the last day of her senior year of high school, following an impulse she only barely understood, she wrote in Brian Plimpton's yearbook, For what it's worth, I had a crush on you for most of the last three years, but I was too afraid to do anything about it. She found the gesture so liberating that she decided to tell some tiny part of the truth in every yearbook she signed that day. In Chad Hayden's she wrote: I will never forget the time the two of us hung the homecoming banner in the cafeteria and you lifted me straight up into the air by my ankles. In Deborah Straw's she wrote: I had a dream once that I was you, looking at me, and I said to myself, "I like Olivia, but I'm sure glad I'm not her." In Kim Olsen's she wrote: You were my best friend for so long that it slips my mind sometimes that you're not anymore. It was the bravest thing she had ever done in her small, shy, carefully studied life.

Some of the maps Olivia sold were simple municipal street maps. Some were tourist maps, highlighting various houses and landmarks of historic and cultural significance: the sculpture garden, the old town hall, the Eyebrow House where the notable painter used to live. There were topographical maps and hiking maps and commercial maps emblazoned with the emblems of all the shops and restaurants on the island. If Olivia were to dive off the edge of any of the maps and travel southeast—through the sea, over the mountains, and into the jungle—she would eventually pass very close to her mother's house in São Paulo, Brazil. Once, when she called the house, her mother's husband, Graciliano, answered the phone and told her, "Your mother and I will be—how do you say?—pleasing each other this afternoon. Perhaps she will call you tomorrow?" Olivia had met Graciliano exactly three times, first at his wedding to her mother, then on vacation in New York City, and then at a short overlapping layover the two of them shared at the St. Louis International Airport. He had worn the same pair of shoes each time, a rich black leather with a needle-prick design like a spreading sunset on the toes. His shoes were objects of beauty. Olivia did not have a car, and when she was feeling healthy, she took a different route home from the marina at night. She liked the slapping sound her sandals made on the pavement. She knew the island well, but not as well as her father. She would never know anything as well as her father. The Eyebrow House was called an Eyebrow House because of the way the roof mantled the windows on the second floor, he told her when she finally asked, and not, as Olivia had thought, because of the eyebrows of the painter who used to live there, however thick and bearlike they might have been.

She worked as a maid for a housecleaning service one year. This was when she first arrived on the island, before her father bought the map stand, when she was young and wandering and still remembered her dreams when she woke in the morning. The cleaning service called the houses on their roster "dwellings." Olivia was expected to clean three large dwellings or five small dwellings a day. After she had finished the floors and the carpets, she would always take a break, drifting through the rooms like a specter. The heart of every house was the kitchen, the soul of every house was the bedroom, and the mind of every house was displayed with hooks and thumbtacks on the walls. But the conscience of every house, she believed—the conscience of every house was the bookshelves. She was demoralized by the number of houses whose shelves held only clocks and geodes and a few back issues of TV Guide. She imagined the consciences of the people who lived there hardening into a thousand immovable facets as they sat in their armchairs and watched the minutes roll by. And many of the shelves that did contain books carried only a few tattered romance novels or an oversized hardcover tribute to some summer blockbuster or television series. It was the rarest of houses that was actually equipped with books she would have been excited to read. She knew that it was priggish, but she came to rash conclusions about the people whose collections she perused. She couldn't help herself. People who read Maeve Binchy gave their sympathy so indiscriminately that she wondered whether it might not be self-pity simply masquerading as sympathy. People who read Charles Bukowski believed that the only clear vision was a disfiguring one. Olivia used Windex on the windows and Scrubbing Bubbles on the bathtubs. She used Febreze on the carpets. People who read Thomas Pynchon were smart but disdainful. People who read D.H. Lawrence suspected that the forbidden was not necessarily without its virtue, and so were easily persuaded that the forbidden and the virtuous were one and the same. She stood on a stepladder to wipe the dust off the blades of the ceiling fans. She took extra care emptying the husks of insects from the light fixtures. The vacuum cleaner moaned and howled like something that was wounded, but she could hear the ocean again as soon as the motor died away.

Later, when she had stopped reading altogether, she filled her spare time listening to the radio and making pots of tea for herself. She captured insects for the widow Lorenzen. She allowed her mind to wander as she waited for the light to change. As soon as the sky went dark, she felt a tremendous loosening inside her body, as though some terrible knot had been teased apart and now all the threads that held her together were finally running straight again. She had no responsibilities once the sun set. Or rather, she had only one responsibility—the responsibility to fall asleep—and for that she could use her tablets. A few nights a year, the island's main generator went out. The street lamps and illuminated signs were all extinguished, and on impulse everybody looked into the sky. The frogs and crickets fell quiet to the count of five before they began to sing again. The smaller stars were spread across the darkness in a fine white powder, and the brighter ones pierced the air like nail-points. In Andrew Brady's yearbook she wrote: The thing I will always remember about you is the time we were watching the film strip in Miss Applebome's class, and the lights were out, and you sat behind me scratching my back with your fingers. Olivia had heard somewhere that the hour from midnight to one o'clock was called the witching hour because that was when the witches were supposed to be active, but she had heard somewhere else that the witching hour was simply that hour of the day when everything always went wrong. It was yet another instance when she could not remember which story was supposed to be true and which was supposed to be a myth. If the witching hour was the hour of hardship, the hour of lucklessness, then she had experienced witching hours that lasted for days on end, but if the witching hour began at midnight, then she usually slept right through it. Every night after she took her pill, she would watch TV for half an hour and then lie in bed staring at the wall of books that lined her cottage. She believed that her books were like the abandoned shell of a hermit crab—a historical record of the conscience of her house, rather than an actual living conscience.

There was a Greek restaurant at the western edge of the marina where she liked to eat lunch. The restaurant served falafel platters, gyros, and glasses of Dr Pepper with quarter-wedges of lemon suspended inside them like tiny moons. Its rooftop dining area had a row of pay-telescopes that were pointed toward the ocean. Patrons could purchase a minute of viewing time for a quarter, and each day at noon, when the crowd was at its thickest, a row of children stood there feeding quarters into the slots as though they were playing video games. The children, both boys and girls, wore baseball caps with pictures of Japanese cartoon characters on them. They had freckles and missing teeth. Olivia enjoyed looking through the telescopes herself, but only when the weather was right—bright and blue, with a few compact clouds riding the wind. The waiters at the restaurant knew her by sight, but not by name. "Miss?" they would say. "Oh, Miss? Why don't you step away from the machine for a while and give some of our smaller customers a turn?" Far out on the ocean, where the waves were slow and heavy, she could see the shadows of the clouds moving across the surface of the water. Once, a tourist who had just returned from an aquatic sightseeing trip told her that there were schools of fish that followed the shadows like newborn babies trying to keep their mother in reach. He said that the fish were the color of Dijon mustard. Olivia was more interested in the clouds than she was in the water, and she was more interested in the shadows than she was in the clouds. She did not know when she had become so unlike other people.

She took her pill every night at ten-thirty. The television was in her bedroom, and she knew it was time to switch it off and slide beneath the covers when her vision began to blur—or not blur exactly, since no matter what happened, her eyesight remained sharp, but separate, splitting into two distinct images, one that stayed in place and a second that seemed to drift up and to the left without ever actually moving. There were times when she slept so heavily that she barely heard her alarm when it sounded in the morning. It was two hundred years ago, and she was living in a cabin on the frontier, and though she could see the fires smoking off in the distance, she knew that it would be days before the Indians were able to cross the prairie. Her trouble with the sun began not long after she started taking the pills. She could not help but wonder if there was a connection. Warning: Side effects may include dry mouth, drowsiness, and an inability to tolerate the basic conditions of life on the planet. One morning she woke up to find her father sitting on the edge of her mattress. Her sheets were awry, and his hand was resting on her leg. People who read Anne Rice believed that tragedy was romantic. People who read Salman Rushdie used their scruples like a blade: The humane ones used them for opening, the cruel ones used them for wounding. Her father had her copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses open in his free hand. He said to her, "Did you know that Cupid was the Roman god of love and the Roman god of revulsion? Here, listen: 'From his quiver, full of arrows, he drew two darts, with different properties. The one puts love to flight, the other kindles it. That which kindles love is golden and shining, sharp-tipped; but that which puts it to flight is blunt, its shaft tipped with lead.'" Then he put the book down on her nightstand, and outside, in the garden, a hundred birds stopped singing and took to their wings as the widow Lorenzen's old Cadillac backfired.

Olivia worked at the map stand in exchange for her rent at the cottage, her monthly utilities, and the small salary her father paid her. He called the salary her "bonus." He gave it to her in a plain white envelope each and every Friday afternoon, even during the months when the map stand was closed. She opened the stand each day at eight o'clock, unlocking the cash register and raising the awning. Sometimes, in the morning, when the wind was blowing just right, the sun caught only the tops of the waves, and it looked as though a thousand bars of light were following each other over the water into shore. There were days when she thought she could not bear to stand behind the counter another moment, but this was the truth: Whenever she had some time off, she did not know what to do with herself. Toward the end of the tourist season, when the docks were busy only on the weekends, she liked to spread her maps open on the counter and trace the shoreline with her finger. The image of the island's loosely textured mesh of roads surrounded by the pale blue ring of the ocean always made her think of an old, torn fishing net. The net was ready to snap at any moment, and it caught only the slowest and least clever of fish these days. The fish were lifted from their avenues of water into the piercing blue air, where they thrashed their tails and struggled for breath. Every so often, after the 3:15 rainstorm, Olivia would close the stand early and walk home with her hands at her sides, weaving like a butterfly through the shining field of umbrellas.

She had been living on the island for eight and a half years. Every Tuesday afternoon the widow Lorenzen would rent the latest action movies from the new releases section of the video store, and every Tuesday evening Olivia would hear her yelling at her television through the window screens. "Fire! Fire!" she shouted, and, "Kill the son of a bitch!" and, "Right there! He's right behind you!" She liked Bruce Willis, Jet Li, and Harrison Ford, she said, but she hated Keanu Reeves and "all that supernatural stuff." The most formidable insect Olivia had ever had to coax outside for her was a dragonfly. When Olivia asked the Entity where it came from, it explained that there were twelve layers of space, of which the average member of the human race was aware of only four, though mystics, small children, and mathematicians occasionally caught a glimpse of the fifth or the sixth. The Entity told her that it came from the seventh layer. In the seventh layer of space, it said, the past was indistinguishable from the present, so nothing was ever truly lost, and nothing was ever truly irreparable. The Entity fell quiet as it caught sight of her face. It cocked its head and asked her, "Do you need me to help you?" And Olivia realized she was crying. People who read Tolstoy found it difficult to be alive because they were reasonable, while people who read Dostoevsky found it difficult to be alive because they were not. In Judy Cossey's yearbook she wrote: When we were in the eighth grade, I found a love note from David Diehl to you on the floor of Miss Mount's room, and I kept it in my purse for more than a week before I slipped it back into your locker.

Winter on the island was drowsy and temperate, a few short months of easy sleeping and cool wind gusts that carried the spindrift off the waves and sent it drizzling down over the beachfront shopping lanes. During the winter Olivia spent more time sitting outside on her patio, leaning back in her rattan chair and listening to the traffic on the street. The cars rolled by with a soft hiss of their tires. The bicycles gave off a barely detectable rattle of spokes. On the last page of the story Olivia recalled reading about the man who could hear the race cars in his walls, the protagonist discovered that the wood in his house was rotten with termites. She could never remember where she had originally read the story, or who it was that wrote it. Sometimes, when she was feeling well, she would set a winter evening aside to stroll through the island's Historic District and on out to the grassy rise of Norfolk pines. It was the kind of place where children chased each other through the trees and teenagers lay on picnic blankets with their hands inside each other's clothing. People smoked cigarettes, and picked flowers, and had conversations, and everything happened as though she wasn't even there. She was like the ghost of the moon in that half hour before the sun fell, hanging imperceptibly in the branches of the pine trees. She would not have been surprised to learn that she had become invisible.

She began walking home soon after the streetlamps were lit. It was important to her that she have an hour of silence in the house before she took her pills and prepared for bed, a time when nobody would place any demands on her and she would place no demands on herself. There were lamps on the streets of the island that were still filled with the breath of the glassblowers who had originally created them, and as she made her way home, she thought of them suspended in neat rows above the cobblestones, perfect little bubbles of captive history. She always hoped that she would not find the lights on inside her cottage. And, if she did, she hoped that it was only because she had forgotten to shut them off—that and nothing else. Her fingers twitched as she unlocked the door, like grass blades springing upright behind the treads of a tire. This was what the Entity had told her when her tears were finally extinguished—that there were seven layers of space between itself and the foundation of the universe, just as there were seven layers of skin between the open air and the inside of the human body. Then it touched the hollow of her neck, and she gasped as she felt the heat scorching through her skin. The sky outside the portal was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

She had been on three first dates since she moved to the island. Two of the first dates had taken place in the very same week, when she was still working as a maid for the housecleaning service and had not yet broken the momentum she was sure would sweep her away to another place. Eventually, after some time had passed, she would form the habit that all shore-dwellers had of hearing the ocean without noticing it, but in her first few months on the island she could never quite ignore the crashing of the surf. Night and day she felt as if she were lost at sea in a wooden raft, the waves lifting and releasing her again and again. The first of her first dates was named Richard Jackson. He spent their entire dinner telling her about the approaching age of digital consciousness, when the human mind would be subsumed inside a framework of super-powerful computers. He spoke in a thick chain of technological acronyms—CPU, MIS, LAN—and after a while, Olivia grew bored and bewildered and began interjecting various acronyms of her own into the conversation: "I'm worried about the MSG in this BLT," she said, and, "I had a PYT who worked for KFC, but he turned out to have an STD." A long time ago there were people who used to tell her she was funny. The second of her first dates was also named Richard—Richard Pheby—and though he slipped his fingers under the table to make a spidering gesture on her knee, and she liked the way he smiled at her, he did not kiss her when the night came to an end, and he did not call her again.

The hurricane sirens went off every Wednesday at noon. She had weathered one major hurricane and three minor ones on the island. There were some things she would never get used to. She still flinched every time the horns began to wail. In the Midwest the sirens were called tornado sirens, and on the West Coast they were called air-raid sirens. The one major hurricane that had swept through the island since she had been there—Carla, it was named—filled the streets with sand and tore a sheet of embossed tin off the roof of her house. For the next few weeks, until a good wind set it free, she watched it shining and swaying inside the coronet of the palm tree across the street. In Jared Serveert's yearbook she wrote: I can see your backyard from the roof of my house. Once, when we were kids, Kim Olsen was spending the night with me, and we climbed up there and watched you doing leaps on your trampoline. A few days after the sheet of tin came loose from on top of her house, a leak developed in her kitchen ceiling, passing a steady drip of coffee-colored water onto the linoleum. Her father sent his handyman over to repair the damage. The handyman wore a Harley-Davidson cap and a T-shirt that read no jesus, no peace. know jesus, know peace. He told her, "This primer works real good, boy, but let me tell you, you stand in those fumes too long and you're definitely killing off some brain cells. That's why so many painters are alcoholics. They walk around buzzed all day long." He made her open all the windows before he left. The widow Lorenzen cornered him in the driveway and asked him to help her kill a spider she had spotted crawling under her refrigerator—"a big, fat, juicy one," she said. The next day, when Olivia's father came over to examine her kitchen ceiling, he stood on his tiptoes and prodded the plaster with his fingers. "The man may be an imbecile, but he does excellent work," he announced, and he paused to scratch his jaw. "Not a damp spot to be found."

The leak had left a puddle of brown water on the linoleum that Olivia had to soak up with a few dozen paper towels. She was lucky, her father told her, that the water had fallen over the open floor and that nothing important had been drenched. In the kitchen she had her microwave and her food processor. In the living room there was her couch and her aloe plant and her stereo. The bedroom was where she kept her books, her TV, and the sandalwood jewelry box she had bought for herself when she graduated from high school. The jewelry box was painted a bright jade green, and it exhibited an image of a white-breasted nuthatch on its lid. Inside, it held her earrings and her bracelets and the gold necklace she had not worn since the Entity brushed its fingers across the hollow of her neck and wounded her with the heat of its touch, which was what people did when they wanted to love you. Once, she was standing on top of the Greek restaurant looking through a pay-telescope when the shadows of the clouds on the ocean began to flash with a range of colors that broke and swirled as she tracked them across the water. The effect lasted only a few seconds, and afterward she could not be sure it had happened at all. When her time ran out, a black gate snicked shut inside the telescope, and the lens immediately went dark. The sound reminded her of the silver blade of the novelty guillotine her father used whenever he wanted to clip the ends off his cigars. Olivia had read somewhere that the brain sometimes remained conscious for several minutes after a person was decapitated, and that the head of Charlotte Corday had blushed and given an angry sneer when it was slapped by her executioner. She could picture the expression with no trouble at all.

Her third first date had taken place just last year. This one was not named Richard, but Cason—Cason Copeland—and she never would have gone out with him at all had it not been for her mother, who had made her promise that she would make an effort with the next man who showed some interest in her. "You keep trying to change yourself from the inside out, but it doesn't work that way, honey. People change themselves from the outside in. You have to try, Via." So she had met Cason Copeland for sushi and drinks at the little Polynesian restaurant by the sculpture garden, and she had listened to his stories about the commodities brokerage he owned, smiling when he seemed to be making a joke, and she had tried—or at least she had tried to try. After they ate, he suggested that the two of them go dancing, and though Olivia didn't really feel up for it, she remembered her mother telling her, "What you do is pretend that you're up for it, and if you pretend well enough, you'll find that you are." The club Cason took her to had a live DJ and a tequila bar. It was one of her spinning days, when she could hardly turn her head to the side or roll her shoulders forward without feeling that she was about to topple over. She knew she was in trouble when she found herself looking for the mirrored ball above the dance floor and realized that there wasn't one. The dance floor was covered with scuff marks that looked like the impressions that car tires left in the sand: tiny tires with tiny treads. You could only see them when you were lying with your cheek pressed to the boards. People who read Anne Lamott, like people who read Anne Rice, believed that tragedy was romantic, but the people who read Anne Lamott believed it ironically. Olivia remembered the sound of Cason's voice apologizing to the other dancers as he lifted her up off the floor. "Sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry about this." He wrenched her out of the club and sent her home in a taxi. Later, when she looked in her bathroom mirror, she saw that the entire left side of her face was smeared with an oily black dust. She was too tired to wash herself clean. That night, as she slept, the dust came off in flakes against her pillow.

The map stand was built of cypress and heart pine, and was painted a salmon color that seemed to glow in the light of the marina. It looked flimsy, barely finished, and people imagined when they saw it that the first big storm would rip it away, scattering the pieces for hundreds of yards along the shore, but Olivia had watched it survive through all four hurricanes without so much as a cracked board. Once, she had come to work to find the lock hanging loose from the gate, and she was sure that thieves must have broken in and taken the cash register. But the only things missing were a box of thirty-six Mars bars and the Leave a Penny, Take a Penny cup. Four brass screws were standing in a row on the counter, their rounded ends pointing into the air like the noses of performing seals. When the locksmith arrived, he jiggled the lock and told her, "See, what you've got here is one of those crummy little Wal-Mart jobs. My guess is that whoever took your Mars bars there gave it a good tug and it just plain fell off. You folks need to get you a nice solid industrial lock, is what you need." Another time someone—Curtis Judkins, she presumed-spray—painted curtis judkins did this on the stand's back wall. The spray-paint was a sickly fluorescent orange. Her father had the boards recoated by the end of the business day. As far as Olivia could tell, the structure had an unending capacity to withstand assault without suffering harm. It was as though it presented itself so modestly to the world that the world had decided it was not worth destroying. In the summer she liked to listen to the rain drumming against the awning as the latest batch of tourists scrambled for shelter under their jackets and umbrellas, in the shops along the beachfront, and beneath the tarry brown wood of the docks.

The only people Olivia spoke to regularly were her father, her mother, and the widow Lorenzen. She had overheard the occasional conversation, though, and spotted the occasional glance, and she knew that she was considered unusual by many of the islanders. She was aware of the things they said about her. They examined all her most shameful impulses—every fantasy, every fleeting thought—then passed them along to each other as if they had really happened. There were rumors that she stole from the grocery store, that she stabbed herself with pencils, that she urinated outdoors, that she slept with older men, that she had long conversations with herself when she thought no one was listening. She had never told anyone about the Entity. It had assured her that she would always be able to tell when it was nearby because of the variation in the color of the shadows the clouds cast on the water. It said that she should look for a pattern of iridescence there, like the designs she had sometimes noticed on the inner bindings of expensive books, except that the marblings of color would appear in every possible shade of blue, from the softest of azures to the darkest of indigos. This was what she saw when she looked out over the ocean: gulls diving into the waves, boats with their sails belling out in the wind, and, every so often, a Coast Guard vessel thundering out toward the open water. People who read Tom Clancy would not have approved of Olivia—neither her weakness nor her sorrow.

One late-September Sunday, after the widow Lorenzen had returned home from church, she found an infestation of reddish-brown insects with clear triangular wings in her foyer. She called Olivia over to get rid of them. "There must be hundreds of them, crawling all over each other," she said. "Filthy things." Then she paused as she thought of a way to describe them: "It looks like a grasshopper and a mosquito got together and had babies." The insects were flowing over the small patch of tiled floor around the front door, spilling apart and then merging back together. They looked like the rain of static on a dead TV station. The widow wanted Olivia to kill them, but instead Olivia borrowed a broom and used it to sweep them out onto the porch, where they staggered around in a sun-struck daze. Half an hour later, they were back in the foyer. And half an hour after that, they were dead. Olivia was sure that it was her fault. The broom had broken their legs, or it had ruptured their hearts, and the injury had killed them. She was carrying the husks of the insects outside on a dustpan when a blast of wind sent them whirling off toward the palmetto barrens. People who read Tom Wolfe felt that they had never abandoned their ground, that it was the world around them that had snapped free of its foundations. The sheet of embossed tin that the hurricane had ripped from her house had sailed almost half a block after the wind lifted it out of the palm tree, landing finally in the pool behind the public kindergarten. Olivia paged through her copy of Insects of the Greater United States when she got home and discovered that the bugs were neither grasshoppers nor mosquitos, but mayflies. She felt sick to her stomach. Here was a group of insects that had been permitted only one day of adult life, and she had taken it away from them. If only she had known what she was seeing, she thought. If only she had been just a little bit smarter, just a little bit more careful. The kindergartners liked to pretend that the sheet of tin roofing that had landed behind their school was a door to another world. They heard the splash when it fell from the sky. They called it "the moon portal." They dared one another to swim to the bottom of the pool and open it.

Most of Olivia's favorite people on the island were strangers to her: the woman who drove the car with the missing windshield, the old man who sold bird whistles he had carved into the shape of finger bones, the little girl she had seen burying Oreos on the beach and then watering them with a plastic bucket. Why was it that the people she liked best always seemed to be the ones who inspired odd looks from everybody else? They were like those deep-sea creatures with watery, transparent skin: You could see the soft little jerking beans of their hearts, you understood that the very thing that was supposed to protect them was the thing that made them vulnerable, and you knew that you couldn't help them, so you decided to love them instead. Sometimes, when Olivia was working, she filled entire days watching out for her favorite people: They were everywhere, the people she loved but could not help, like a linked chain stretching from the early morning into the late afternoon. There was the man who scraped the moss off the hulls of the boats when he thought no one was looking. There was the woman who sat on the same bench every day, flossing her teeth and staring out at the ocean. There were the twins who always stopped at her stand after school had ended to buy two packages of Now and Laters—lemon for the girl with the pink backpack and cherry for the girl with the blue. Olivia could not remember whether she had read it in a book or seen it on a wildlife documentary or simply heard it in conversation somewhere, but one way or another she had picked up the idea that armadillos always gave birth to identical twins. The story was almost certainly a myth, though. She traced the shore of the island on one of the maps. She watched the clouds making shapes against the sky. Her mother called her on the first Sunday of every month. The time difference was only two hours, but she could never recall whether the clocks ran earlier or later on the island, and she always seemed to think that she was rousing Olivia out of a sound sleep. "I'm not ringing too early, am I?" she asked, or, "Am I calling you too late?" This was the truth: It was almost never too early. The pills Olivia took helped her to go under at night, but they did not necessarily allow her to sleep through till morning. Sometimes she would lie in bed for hours waiting until it was time to get up. She had become skilled at recognizing the first signs of morning. To begin with, the frogs and the night insects fell silent. The earliest of the cars went hushing down the street. The paperboy's bicycle rattled up the widow Lorenzen's driveway, and the paper landed on her porch with a flat little smack. The first few birds opened up their lungs as the farthest rim of the sky grew pale. But it was not until the great ball of the sun appeared that the curtains in her bedroom began to gather the light. Sometimes Olivia had already gotten out of bed to make her coffee before she remembered that she could hear the ocean. Her mother told her that there were times when the only sound she could detect from her window was the wind trickling through the orange trees like a cool lazy stream. "Why don't you come down to São Paulo? Move in with Graciliano and me?" she asked when she called. And then, later, "What did you say, Via? Paris Stories? I've always wanted to read that book." And then, later still, "I can't believe you're still speaking to that son of a bitch." On the few occasions when Olivia managed to sleep through the night, she would wake to the sound of her alarm going off, or her father opening the door, or the wild rooster who nested across the street screaming bloody murder.

The town library stood next to the repertory theater, which stood next to a bed-and-breakfast, which stood next to the Eyebrow House with the white picket fence and the ornate floral scrollwork around the porches. It had been a long time since she had read a book, but sometimes, in the evening, she still liked to sit in the New Acquisitions room behind the library's front counter and watch the people come and go. The leather chairs there were deep and comfortable, and the various readers were always poised and quiet. The wallpaper was decorated with seventy-eight hand-painted birds that the notable painter had brushed into place almost eighty years ago. If the bookshelves were the conscience of a house, Olivia thought, then surely the library was the conscience of the island. And the marina was the face, she supposed, and the shopping lanes were the appetite, and the grassy rise of Norfolk pines was that small peaceful place where it could forget what it was feeling for a while. Olivia approved wholeheartedly of people who read Carson Mc­Cullers—their open nerves and their beaten glances. She did not believe she would ever be capable of understanding people who read James Patterson. In Nathan Wilcox's yearbook she wrote: I'm sorry I never got to know you very well. In Indy Carmichael's she wrote: I'm sure that things will be better for you someday. The library had two sliding glass doors in front, one on either side of the lobby, and whenever both of them were opened at the same time, the air in the New Acquisitions room fell completely still for a few seconds. This happened once or twice an hour. There was something about that quickly passing, perfect stillness that reminded her of the way she had felt in the presence of the Entity, the amazement and dazzled well-being that were so unlike anything she had known before.

In addition to the mayflies, spiders, beetles, wasps, silverfish, dragonflies, and bumblebees Olivia had helped the widow Lorenzen evict from her house, she had also been summoned to remove any number of mosquitos and fireflies, as well as a pair of brown moths, a single green katydid, and a small mottled gecko that had suctioned itself to the glass front of her grandfather clock. Her husband had died almost ten years ago, the widow said, after a lingering emphysema that had confined him to the house for more than two years, and since that day the insects had never stopped coming. She told Olivia that she used to imagine she had gotten over him and had finally moved on with her life, but lately, when she was not thinking about anything in particular, she would suddenly hear him whistling the old Sinatra songs he loved or catch the aroma of his Benson & Hedges Gold 100's, and she would wander into the other room fully expecting to see him sitting in his favorite chair with a crossword puzzle open on his lap. She was starting to worry about herself. On her coffee table was the video case for a movie starring Roddy McDowall and Paula Prentiss called It Must Have Been a Nightmare. When Olivia read the title out loud, the widow nodded her head and answered, "It still is." She had pale freckled skin that allowed a tracery of veins to show through the backs of her hands. Once, Olivia was trying to coax a wasp through the house and the widow was following along behind her with a Debbie Cake when the wasp bobbed up toward the ceiling and the two of them had to wait for it to descend. They paused before the portrait in the parlor. Olivia told the widow, "Your husband was a striking man," and the widow gave her a look of squinting amusement and said, "That's not my husband." "Then who is it?" Olivia asked, and she answered, "It's Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon."

The island was shaped like a sneaker with a missing toe. The waves were strongest on the south side, where the sole would have been. There were so many undercurrents and slack areas in the water there, though, that the entire length of ocean had been restricted from recreational use. The waves on the north side were slower and heavier, and on any given day, Olivia could look past the boats in the marina and see them rolling deliberatively into shore. There were surfers who paddled their boards out to sea and tried to ride them back onto the beach, but they quickly discovered that it was no good. It was like trying to surf a supermarket conveyor belt, she had heard one of them say: You didn't feel invigorated, you just felt conspicuous. Sometimes, when she was in a particular sort of mood, she would purchase a few of the discarded umbrellas from the children who had collected them, paying half the original sale price. Some of the children spent the money on candy. Some of them used it to buy Black Cats and bottle rockets. Some of them saved it for the air-hockey tables in the lobby of the movie theater. Olivia allowed the umbrellas to dry overnight, then restickered and sold them again. The perspiration on the Entity's skin (if that's what it was—perspiration) had drawn together in hundreds of quivering beads that looked to Olivia like the rain on a freshly waxed car. There were days when the sky was so spotlessly clear that the clouds never came to cast their shadows on the water at all. "We must be like insects to you," Olivia had said to the Entity, and it had smiled, closed its warm black eyes, and answered, "Yes, you are all like insects to me. But I am like an insect to myself."

The walls of the cottage were wood, and the palm trees at the edge of the yard were wood, and the summer cabin where her father used to take her camping when she was a girl was wood. Once, when she was thirteen, he had allowed her to invite her friend Katie Gremillion with them for the weekend. The three of them went motorboating in the deep section of the lake, then hiking on the wilderness trail, then fishing in the lily pads beside the docks. The fish they caught worked their mouths open in astonished circles. Olivia knew what they must be wondering: How had the crickets they swallowed risen up like birds and wrenched them out of the water? She felt so sorry for them that she made her father release them back into the lily pads. On the evening of their second day in the cabin, he showed Olivia and Katie how to arrange a stack of cedar logs in the fireplace, building a teepee of kindling underneath so that the flame would catch and grow. The burning wood filled the cabin with its perfume. Eventually her father said, "It's getting late. You girls should go on back to your room and get some sleep now." The two of them brushed their teeth with the water from their canteens, and then they went to bed. It was just after midnight when the door to the room they were sharing came open, gliding around on its hinges as if by accident, making hardly a sound as it closed. It was surprising how empty a room could be with three people in it. The next morning Katie's eyes were shot through with red. She would not talk to Olivia. Later, in her yearbook, Olivia wrote: You didn't see what you thought you saw.

In the evening, just before the stars began to show in the sky, the western end of the island became like a painting. The sun grew larger and larger as it sank toward the horizon, laying an expanding cone of rippling red light across the water. The palm trees turned very slowly to silhouettes. Hundreds of tourists stood along the beach taking snapshots of themselves. Olivia had grown used to seeing them huddled together with their families, smiling and turning their faces to the lens. Their arms were always outstretched to hold their cameras at the proper distance, and it looked to Olivia as if they were trying to flatten something they did not really want to touch. She doubted that any of them would recognize her away from her station behind the counter of the map stand. Olivia had never operated a digital camera in her life. She had never carried a cell phone or owned a PDA. When she walked past a group of Girl Scouts selling cookies from a table in front of the Lutheran church, she closed her eyes for a moment and imagined she was roller-skating.

Her mother had told her many times about the days when she used to take her grocery shopping, how Olivia would sit in the cart scissoring her legs back and forth and strike up conversations with the people they passed in the aisles: Hi, I'm Olivia. What's your name? I don't like vanilla wafers. Are you buying any Sunkist? Are you buying any root beer? "You were quite the little charmer," her mother said. "Everybody used to love you," she insisted. It seemed clear to Olivia that the life she was looking at was one whose meaning lay entirely in the beginning. She had started out strong and beautiful, and she was not sure when she had changed. But surely anything that could change once, and change so dramatically, could swing back around and change again. This was what she told herself as she stalked another honeybee for the widow Lorenzen, or as she lay in bed waiting for the pills to take effect, or as she raised the awning of the map stand in the morning, or as she sat down to lunch in the restaurant at the end of the marina. Minute after minute, hour after hour, she turned her thoughts toward the day when the Entity would come back for her in its vessel. It would whisper to her with its tremendous musical breathing sound. It would burn her with the soft touch of its fingers. It would say her name, and it would carry her into the sky, and the two of them would set out from the island together, driven through the layers of space by a radiant dream of the way things could be.

Art: "Still a Tadpole, Already a Frog" (2003), by Irene Hardwicke Olivieri.