PROLOGUE
HE ROUNDS THE westernmost tip of the island. Nearing the reefs he jumps up, and falls back in. Sunlight bends against the waves, then spreads into blue glow. The entire hemisphere of the sky compresses into a circle over him. Coral heads stretch up to the surface like underwater skyscrapers. Multicolored scales rush by.
This is life, Elio thinks, and why it simply goes on. This kept him from succumbing to the small failures he’d endured one after another—the meaning of which he now understood. Had he stayed any longer, long enough to outlive his obsessions, he would have lost something precious. Something that had been in him, perhaps always. Something not belonging to him, but to life itself.
Ordinary as his days had been, they formed a pattern—how life works, how life really works. Spread them out on a table like puzzle pieces, fit them all together by color, timbre, and shape, and an image eventually appears. Because it isn’t enough to identify the pattern. One has to get close enough or far back enough to see the image.