The Circle

have wanted her to go this far, and might have sent a speedboat to find her and bring
     her back. And the Coast Guard, didn’t they routinely dissuade people from coming here?
     Was it a private island? All of these questions and concerns were irrelevantnow, because it was dark, no one could see her, and no one would ever know she was
     here. But she would know.
    She walked the perimeter. The beach collared most of the southern side of the island,
     then gave way to a sheer cliff. She looked up, seeing no footholds, and below was
     the frothy shore, so she returned the way she came, finding the hillside rough and
     rocky, and the shore largely unremarkable. There was a thick stripe of seaweed, with
     crab shells and flotsam embedded, and she threaded her fingers through it. The moonlight
     gave the seaweed some of the phosphorescence she’d seen before, adding a rainbow sheen,
     as if lit from within. For a brief moment, she felt like she was on some body of water
     on the moon itself, everything cast in a strange inverted palette. What should have
     been green looked grey, what should have been blue was silver. Everything she was
     seeing she’d never seen before. And just as she had this thought, out of the corner
     of her eye, dropping over the Pacific, she saw what she was sure was a shooting star.
     She’d only seen one before, and couldn’t be sure what she saw was the same thing,
     an arc of light, disappearing behind the black hills. But what else could it be? She
     sat for a moment on the beach, staring into the same spot where she’d seen it, as
     if there might be another, or that it might give way to a shower.
    But she was, she knew, putting off what she wanted most to do, to climb the short
     peak of the rock, which now she set herself upon. There was no path, a fact that gave
     her great pleasure—no one, or almost no one, had ever been where she was—and so she
     climbed using tufts of grass and roots for handholds, and placed her feet upon the
     occasional rock outcroppings. She stopped once, having found a large hole, almost
     round, almost tidy, in the hillside. It had to be ananimal’s home, but what sort she couldn’t be sure. She imagined the burrows of rabbits
     and foxes, snakes and moles and mice, any of them equally possible and impossible
     here, and then she continued, up and up. It was not difficult. She was at the peak
     in minutes, joining a lone pine, not much bigger than herself. She stood next to it,
     using its rough trunk for balance, and turned around. She saw the tiny white windows
     of the city far beyond. She watched the progress of a tanker, low-slung and carrying
     a constellation of red lights into the Pacific.
    The beach suddenly seemed so far beneath her, and her stomach somersaulted. She looked
     east, now getting a better view of the seals’ group of rocks, and saw a dozen or so
     of them lying about, sleeping. She looked up to the bridge above, not the Golden Gate
     but a lesser one, its liquid white stream of cars, still constant at midnight, and
     wondered if anyone could see her human silhouette against the silver bay. She remembered
     what Francis had once said, that he’d never known there was an island beneath the
     bridge at all. Most of the drivers and their passengers would not be looking down
     at her, would not have the faintest idea of her existence.
    Then, still holding the pine’s bony trunk, she noticed, for the first time, a nest,
     resting in the tree’s upper boughs. She didn’t dare touch it, knowing she would upset
     its equilibrium of scents and construction, but she badly wanted to see what was inside.
     She stood on a stone, trying to get above it, to look down into it, but she couldn’t
     position herself high enough to get any perspective. Could she lift it, bring it down
     to her to peek in? Just for a second? She could, couldn’t she, and then put it right
     back? No. She knew enough to know she couldn’t. If she did, she’d ruin whatever was
     inside.
    She sat down, facing south, where she could see the lights, thebridges, the black empty hills dividing the bay from the Pacific. All this had been
     underwater some millions of years ago, she’d been told. All these headlands and islands
     had been so far under they would have barely registered as ridges on the ocean floor.
     Across the silver bay she saw a pair of birds, egrets or herons, gliding low, heading
     north, and she sat for a time, her mind drifting toward blank.