Duma Key

I walked that way, partly because as a southpaw, turning left had come naturally to me my whole life. Mostly because that was the direction I could see in. And I didn't go far, no Great Beach Walk that day, I wanted to make sure I could get back to my crutch, but that was still the first. I remember turning around and marveling at my own footprints in the sand. In the morning light each left one was as firm and bold as something produced by a stamping-press. Most of the right ones were blurry, because I had a tendency to drag that foot, but setting out, even those had been clear. I counted my steps back. The total was thirty-eight. By then my hip was throbbing. I was more than ready to go in, grab a yogurt cup from the fridge, and see if the cable TV worked as well as Jack Cantori claimed.

Turned out it did.

iii

And that became my morning routine: orange juice, walk, yogurt, current events. I became quite chummy with Robin Meade, the young woman who anchors Headline News from six to ten AM. Boring routine, right? But the surface events of a country laboring under a dictatorship can appear boring, too - dictators like boring, dictators love boring - even as great changes are approaching beneath the surface.

A hurt body and mind aren't just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion. That my mind had been as badly hurt as my body was a thing I only came to realize once I was alone and all other voices dropped away. The fact that I had tried to choke my wife of twenty-five years for doing no more than trying to wipe the sweat off my forehead after I told her to leave the room was the very least of it. The fact that we hadn't made love a single time in the months between the accident and the separation, didn't even try, wasn't at the heart of it, either, although I thought it was suggestive of the larger problem. Even the sudden and distressing bursts of anger weren't at the heart of the matter.

That heart was a kind of pulling-away. I don't know how else to describe it. My wife had come to seem like someone... other. Most of the people in my life also felt other, and the dismaying thing was that I didn't much care. In the beginning I had tried to tell myself that the otherness I felt when I thought about my wife and my life was probably natural enough in a man who sometimes couldn't even remember the name of that thing you pulled up to close your pants - the zoomer, the zimmer, the zippity-doo-dah. I told myself it would pass, and when it didn't and Pam told me she wanted a divorce, what followed my anger was relief. Because now that other feeling was okay to have, at least toward her. Now she really was other. She'd taken off the Freemantle uniform and quit the team.

During my first weeks on Duma, that sense of otherness allowed me to prevaricate easily and fluently. I answered letters and e-mails from people like Tom Riley, Kathi Green, and William Bozeman III - the immortal Bozie - with short jottings ( I'm fine, the weather's fine, the bones are mending ) that bore little resemblance to my actual life. And when their communications first slowed and then stopped, I wasn't sorry.

Only Ilse still seemed to be on my team. Only Ilse refused to turn in her uniform. I never got that other feeling about her. Ilse was still on my side of the glass window, always reaching out. If I didn't e-mail her every day, she called. If I didn't call her once every third day, she called me. And to her I didn't lie about my plans to fish in the Gulf or check out the Everglades. To Ilse I told the truth, or as much of it as I could without sounding crazy.

I told her, for instance, about my morning walks along the beach, and that I was walking a little farther each day, but not about the Numbers Game, because it sounded too silly... or maybe obsessive-compulsive is the term I actually want.

Just thirty-eight steps from Big Pink on that first morning. On my second one I helped myself to another huge glass of orange juice and then walked south along the beach again. This time I walked forty-five steps, which was a long distance for me to totter crutchless in those days. I managed by telling myself it was really only nine. That sleight-of-mind is the basis of the Numbers Game. You walk one step, then two steps, then three, then four, rolling your mental odometer back to zero each time until you reach nine. And when you add the numbers one through nine together, you come out with forty-five. If that strikes you as nuts, I won't argue.