"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
The grass was cool under his shoes. The good shoes, the Italian leather. The sound of voices behind him had taken on the quality of voices processing catastrophe: high, broken, uncertain, the social machinery stripped of its gears and spinning free.
He descended the slope. The couch grass was thick, maintained by the council, and it gave slightly under his weight, the blades springing back behind him as if he had not passed. The fairy lights were above and behind him, their warm glow reaching only partway down before giving way to the blue dark. He could feel the scroll in his right hand -- the carved head, the volute warm and smooth, the four tuning pegs jutting at angles from the shattered neck. His body had done these things without consulting him -- standing, walking, stepping down onto the grass -- the way it had done things without consulting him for most of his life, and now it was moving on no instructions at all, which felt like freedom, or like its opposite, the two being closer than he had understood.
The air smelled of pine resin and salt and, faintly, jasmine -- the night-blooming jasmine that grew along the fences of the houses and that released its scent at dusk as if the darkness were a signal. He breathed it in. His chest expanded and the breath caught on something -- not a sob, a physical obstruction, as if the sound he had made on the terrace had left a residue in his airways. He breathed out. He kept walking.
He thought of nothing.
No: he thought of the sound. The crack of the spruce plate splitting. The specific, structural sound of three hundred years of resonance ending in a single second on limestone. He could not stop hearing it. The sound played on a loop, layered over the ghost of the Chaconne, the two sounds existing simultaneously -- the music and its destruction -- and between them was a silence that was not silence but the space where the instrument's voice had lived, a room with the furniture removed.
The esplanade. The low stone wall. He stepped over it, and the concrete was hard and flat after the give of the grass. A streetlight cast a circle of orange on the path. He walked through it and out the other side, into the dark.
The sand began.
He stopped at the edge and took off his shoes. Carefully, methodically -- loosening the left with the toe of the right, then the right with the toes of the left, placing them side by side on the concrete, aligned, the heels touching the low wall. The socks tucked inside. The gesture was automatic. Bob was a man who had always put things in order -- the desk, the lines on the quarterly reports, the numbers that did not add up and that he arranged in rows anyway, giving them the appearance of order because the appearance was all he had. This was the last thing he would put in order, and he did it with the same care, because care was what he had, and care was what the world had never asked for, and he gave it anyway.
He took off the jacket. Folded it the way Jeannie had taught him: shoulders together, sleeves aligned, a single fold at the waist. He placed it on the sand beside the shoes. He put the scroll in the jacket's inside pocket, the silk-lined pocket where he kept his wallet, and the scroll fit as though the pocket had been made for it.
The sand was cool and fine under his bare feet. Cottesloe sand -- white, almost powder, ground by the Southern Ocean over millennia into a softness that felt like something between silk and ash. The beach was empty. It stretched north and south in a long pale crescent, the sand luminous in the faint light, the darkness beginning at the waterline and extending west to the horizon and beyond.
He was not considering what happened next. Or he was. The distinction had ceased to matter. He was walking toward the water because the water was ahead of him and the terrace was behind him and between the two there was nothing -- no plan, no intention, no architecture of thought, nothing but a man in a white shirt walking barefoot across a beach at dusk with the sound of a broken violin in his ears and the knowledge, which was not knowledge but sensation, that the life he had lived was over and the only direction that remained was west.
He reached the waterline. The first thin sheet of water ran up the beach and over his feet and retreated, and it was cold -- colder than the air, the ocean in April carrying the memory of the deep water beyond the continental shelf, water that came from the south, from places where the sea was not a surface but a body, vast and dark and indifferent.
He walked into it.
The water rose around his ankles, his shins, his knees. The trousers darkened and clung. He kept walking. The water reached his waist. The cold pressed against his stomach and he drew a breath, sharp, tasting of salt, and he could feel his heart adjusting, the body's ancient response to immersion -- the crossing of the boundary between the element that sustained it and the element that could take it away.
The water reached his chest. His shirt floated around him, the white cotton spreading on the surface like something spilled, and his hands were in the water now, the hands that had held the violin, that had drawn the bow across the strings, that had felt the vibration of three-hundred-year-old spruce transmitting the sound of a piece written in 1720 by a man whose wife had died while he was away, and the sensation of the water on those hands was cold and clean and absolute, and something in him -- some last tension, some held breath he had been holding for years -- released.
He began to swim.
The shore behind him. The lights of the coast, small and warm. They grew smaller. The houses grew smaller. The pines became silhouettes, became shapes, became suggestions.
He swam west. Freestyle, steady, unhurried -- the stroke of a man who had grown up on this coast and had swum in this ocean all his life. Three strokes, a breath. Three strokes, a breath. The water was dark around him and the sky was dark above him, and the stars were appearing -- not the faint suburban stars but the real stars, the ones you saw when you got beyond the light, the ones that had been there all along behind the glare of the life you had built.
The shore was distant now. The lights were a thin line of warmth along the dark coast, and the ocean around him was black, and the sky above him was black, and between the two blacks was the horizon, which had ceased to exist, so that he was swimming in a space with no edges, no boundaries, only the water beneath him and the air above him and the stars, and the sound of his own breathing, and the ocean, which made no sound, which needed no sound, which had been here for four billion years and would be here for four billion more and did not care about funds or marriages or violins or any of the things that human beings built on its shore and called permanent.
Something moved beneath him.
A shadow. A displacement in the dark water, something large and slow, passing below and to the left. There and then not there.
Bob may have seen it. He may not have.
The novel does not say, because the novel is no longer with him.
The point of view has risen. It has lifted like a bird from the shoulder of a man swimming alone in the ocean at night, and what it sees from this height is only a shape in the water. A shape that is growing smaller. A white shirt in the dark, the arms still reaching, still pulling, still steady.
And then the shape is very small.
And then the shape is not there.
The morning came the way mornings come to coastlines: slowly, then all at once. The ocean was pale blue, glassy, a sheet of hammered silver under a sky that had not yet decided whether to be clear or overcast. The sand was cool. A jogger ran along the waterline, earbuds in, not looking at the water. A woman walked a Labrador that strained toward the shallows and was pulled back.
A couple found the shoes at seven. Side by side against the low wall, heels aligned. Italian leather. Beside them, on the sand just above the high-tide line, a folded jacket. The woman pointed them out. Her husband looked at the shoes and then at the water and took out his phone.
By eight the beach was closed. Yellow tape along the esplanade. A lifeguard on a jet ski, scanning the water in slow passes. Two police officers at the waterline, one on a radio, the other looking at the shoes. A helicopter from the south, low, the downdraft flattening the surface. It circled twice and moved north.
A shark report. Something sighted offshore the previous evening -- a recreational fisherman, heading back at dusk, had seen a large shape in the water, moving south.
The police opened the jacket. In the inside pocket, a carved wooden scroll -- the head of a stringed instrument, old, very fine, the spiral of the volute worn smooth. They placed it in an evidence bag with the jacket and the shoes.
The body was not recovered.