Fear Nothing

turned south to swim back the way we had come, still too far from shore.
        My limbs grew heavy. Faint but frightening cramps twisted through my stomach. The pounding of my riptide heart seemed hard enough to push me deep under the surface.
        Although the incoming swells were as gentle as they had been when we first entered the water, they felt meaner. They bit with teeth of cold white foam.
        We swam side by side, careful not to lose sight of each other. The winter sky offered no comfort, the lights of town were as distant as stars, and the sea was hostile. All we had was our friendship, but we knew that in a crisis, either of us would die trying to save the other.
        When we returned to our starting point, we barely had the strength to walk out of the surf. Exhausted, nauseated, paler than the sand, shivering violently, we spat out the astringent taste of the sea.
        We were so bitterly cold that we could no longer imagine the heat of the crematorium furnace. Even after we had dressed, we were still freezing, and that was good.
        We walked our bicycles off the sand, across the grassy park that bordered the beach, to the nearest street.
        As he climbed on his bike, Bobby said, “Shit.
        “Yeah,” I said.
        We cycled to our separate homes.
        We went straight to bed as though ill. We slept. We dreamed. Life went on.
        We never returned to the crematorium window.
        We never spoke again of Mrs. Acquilain.
        All these years later, either Bobby or I would still give his life to save the other-and without hesitation.
        How strange this world is: Those things that we can so readily touch, those things so real to the senses-the sweet architecture of a woman's body, one's own flesh and bone, the cold sea and the gleam of stars-are far less real than things we cannot touch or taste or smell or see. Bicycles and the boys who ride them are less real than what we feel in our minds and hearts, less substantial than friendship and love and loneliness, all of which long outlast the world.
        

    * * *
        
        On this March night far down the time stream from boyhood, the crematorium window and the scene beyond it were more real than I would have wished. Someone had brutally beaten the hitchhiker to death - and then had cut out his eyes.
        Even if the murder and the substitution of this corpse for the body of my father made sense when all the facts were known, why take the eyes? Could there possibly be a logical reason for sending this pitiable man eyeless into the all-consuming fire of the cremator?
        Or had someone disfigured the hitchhiker sheerly for the deep, dirty thrill of it?
        I thought of the hulking man with the shaved head and the I thought of the hulking man single pearl earring. His broad blunt face. His huntsman's eyes, black and steady. His cold-iron voice with its rusty rasp.
        It was possible to imagine such a man taking pleasure from the pain of another, carving flesh the carefree manner of any country gentleman lazily whittling a twig.
        Indeed, in the strange new world that had come into existence during my experience in the hospital basement, it was easy to imagine that Sandy Kirk himself had disfigured the body: Sandy, as good-looking and slick as any GQ model; Sandy, whose dear father had wept at the burning of Rebecca Acquilain. Perhaps the eyes had been offered up at the base of the shrine in the far and thorny corner of the rose garden that Bobby and I had never been able to find.
        In the crematorium, as Sandy and his assistant rolled the gurney toward the furnace, the telephone rang.
        Guiltily, I flinched from the window as though I had triggered an alarm.
        When I leaned close to the glass again, I saw Sandy pull down the wall phone. The his surgical mask and lift the handset from tone of his voice indicated confusion, then alarm, then anger, but through the dual-pane window, I was not able to hear what he was saying.
        Sandy slammed down the telephone handset almost hard enough to knock the box off the wall. Whoever had been on the other end of the line had gotten a good ear cleaning.
        As he stripped out of his latex gloves, Sandy spoke urgently to his assistant. I thought I heard him speak my name-and not with either admiration or affection.
        The assistant, Jesse Pinn, was a lean-faced whippet of a in with red hair