Outside the ocean air was clean and vibrant. But our togetherness was inside a little shack on the smallest of islands, where we had transcended a lifetime of unconsummated violence and arrived at the combined awareness of isolation and sadness. Outside, the world throbbed with energy, with the open sky promise of potential and the clear depths of a green sea’s promise of knowledge and wonder. But for all that, emptiness returned when we decided to leave the moist shadows of our cabin; and we were in a new darkness, or, rather, in the consequences of the old darkness.

In less than the span of a moment, when I turned my eyes away from her, I heard a certain suction. When I looked back, I saw her sucked down from our island into the ocean, through an impossible swirling pit in its perfect surface. Then I dived, trying to gain entrance to the sea, but I could not--I was confined to the air, I was calling out, searching for a trace of her through the liquid glass, but I could not find a way into the water. I could make out the silent fathoms but she had disappeared, and I could only see those languid, indifferent ocean beasts, the marlin, the silvery Jack fish glinting in waves of refracted light, the ethereal, translucent lenses of Portuguese man-of-wars; and all the dead black eyes of underwater half-life were witnesses to my escalating panic.

The story nears its end. We are in the presence of death—whether I lose her now or later, her death is unavoidable—but the story will not end this way, not yet. They say (they have always said) that a story has but one possible conclusion—but this story is not about the conclusion. Nor is this story about the catharsis of falling into sleep; nor the catharsis of waking that must follow the roaring, rising, boundless dream of fear.

A story is only a story; but the plot of this story is structured to explain the inevitability of a dorsal fin. The classification of the specific fish no longer matters because our human instinct of names will always be replaced by the mystical, durable moment: a moment’s horrific encounter with chance—or with fate, as some choose to believe—when an uncaring fish shifts his focus toward a new, invisible goal, changing his direction in the water, and his dorsal fin slices through the boundary between sea and sky.

Like Stephen Dedalus before me and Icarus before Stephen, I am a fettered spirit of the air: all the spiritual rules of the cosmos prevent ilk, such that we are, from entering the water without the whirlpool. But this dorsal fin enacts a moment of transgression. The high becomes low, low becomes high, and my duration of panic is pierced by hope’s bright dare.

Through the breach in the surface of the ocean, I see her swirling in the mind of watery oblivion. She has forgotten everything. When I pluck her from the depths and return her to the island, and her life finally comes back to her memory, all her experiences, all her beliefs, even the game of names—even when her memory returns, she has forgotten.

Here is where the story’s structure reaches its limits. Poets have always noted, with startling blindness, that a story ends in death; however, we who have lived one death after another know otherwise. Stories always unfold in a steady progression toward the beginning. There must be some invisible moment when we lost something--something precious, we believe--and we search for its knowledge in our yesterdays, in the remnants of our youth, in the lives of our parents and our ancestors. And when we have searched beyond the realm of Eden's innocence, and beyond the moment of creation itself, and no names remain, the dorsal fin will have vanished forever.

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