82 Desire

whether he’d be rescued and how long it would take. He tried to imagine how the search would be organized and who would come for him—a helicopter or a ship?
    He thought these thoughts again and again, obsessively going over the details—what the rescuers should do, how they should do it, what equipment they’d need. Finally, he realized, What’s the point? I can’t control this. But he couldn’t stop obsessing. He could feel every muscle tight and ready for action, though there was nothing in the world he could do except cling to his shelf. He tried tensing and relaxing, but each fiber jumped back to tense the second he relaxed. He fought sleep as if it were a dragon.
    But in the end, it won. He slept for ten minutes or ten hours, he had no idea, awakening when the roiling of the sea finally stopped. The storm was over. Now rescue was possible.
    He almost didn’t care. That is, he no longer felt it necessary to act out the rescue in his head—he had bored himself silly with it.
    For a while, it seemed, he had no thoughts at all. So he consciously cultivated them. He thought of Bebe, of making love to her, something he rarely did these days. Oddly, he couldn’t get into it. What had happened to their sex life seemed a much more interesting subject. I’ve been too busy , he thought, and so has she. How could we have let this happen?
    He vowed to change that if he were rescued. And he realized that he had thought “if”—and that, without realizing it, he’d gotten into that thing he’d heard about, that people in extremis do. He was bargaining with God.
    He began consciously to do it, wondering first what he had to negotiate with.
    Maybe he could wiggle out of the Skinners; maybe he could even stop the others. But the weight of what he had done engulfed him like a wave.
    So much damage had been done. So many lives ruined.
    Maybe he deserved to die.
    He didn’t get far with that one, but it was an easy progression from there to I’m going to die. Might as well make peace .
    And that was what changed him. He couldn’t say how or why, but the minute he thought the word “peace,” it came over him. He slept again.
    When he awoke, he was a different man. Maybe dead, maybe alive, he was ready for either thing. It was then that he began to float through space, and oddly, he enjoyed the sensation. His previous life at United Oil seemed to tiny, so unimportant. The things he had done were preposterous. He couldn’t conceive of why he had done them.
    He had passed the bargaining stage now. If he died, he died. If he didn’t, things were going to be different, and not because he’d been a former atheist in a foxhole—because it was the way of the world as he understood it now; the only way he could live. If he lived.
    When they finally came, he had no idea it had been five days, though that didn’t seem unreasonable. It could have been two or ten just as easily—in the dark, in his floating womb, time as he knew it didn’t exist.
    At first he thought he was hallucinating. But when voices joined the engine noise of the rescue boat, his desire to live came back as strongly as if he were in the peak of condition rather than starving and cramped. He untied himself, eased into the freezing water, took a breath knowing it could be his last, dived, and swam toward the voices. He popped up two feet from the rescuers, startling them so severely that one of them screamed.
    He wondered if his metamorphosis would last, and if it would show, and if he could talk about it.
    As it happened, it did last in a sort of a way and only showed a little. He tried talking about it only once—to Bebe.
    “You don’t seem yourself,” she had said, after time had passed.
    “Something happened out there. I had a kind of revelation.”
    “Omigod. Don’t tell me you found Jesus.”
    No , he thought. I found myself . It was an unbidden and indeed surprising thought that he wouldn’t have dreamed of expressing—wasn’t even sure he believed.
    “I don’t know if that’s what you’d call it,” he said. “I just had a sense of … I don’t know, exactly. Simplicity, let’s say, for lack of a better word.”
    “Simplicity? That was your revelation?”
    “A kind of peacefulness.” He had read about it—the oneness, it was usually called, something like that. But nobody talked about it, and anyhow it was hard to remember it. It was a feeling that didn’t stick with you; and yet, he didn’t think he had to have the