BEYOND THE SEA

Zack realized with a start that his mother had lapsed into silence. As she rested her fingers on the keys, he thought he saw on her face, in the lines around the eyes and at the corners of the mouth, a hitherto secret and inexpressible sorrow, even pain. It was there and then not there, but in that instant he understood, wrenchingly, that she was not and had never been merely the accessible, humorous, even-tempered parent who played counterpoint to the impatient, humorless, implacable one, that she was a more mysterious being than he had imagined. It was there, and then, when it was not, he sensed that they were passing from an accustomed state of being to another where she would have to accept that her child was no longer a child, and he, for his part, would never be able to forget his unsettling glimpse of the private self, the stranger who lived inside his mother.

When she spoke again, she did not look at him. "I'll see if I can't convince your father you have to go. For your own sake and for Granddad's, too."

He did not know whether to give her a hug and a kiss or thank her formally, adult to adult. Finally, he managed to gasp out, "Thanks."

"No promises."

"Thanks."

She slightly dipped her head in acknowledgement of both his gratitude and his uncertainty. She played a note and let it fade, leaned back from the piano, smoothed her dress across her lap. Then suddenly she smiled at him. "Her foot!" The smile broke in soft laughter. "That's our Mozart, all right!"

#

Granddad, Zack says, this is a dream, isn't it?

There are dreams, and there are dreams. You either dream your own dream or dream someone else's. The old man spreads his arms in an ocean-encompassing gesture. Find out whose it is for yourself. Go in.

Yes. I will. Yes.

And, "O," Granddad sings in his cracked tuneless voice,
"I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas!"

Zack wades in. Flat mats of alga glisten on the surface near the shore, but he moves easily through them, the water is warm and clear. He slips beneath the calm surface and discovers not only that visibility is excellent but also that what he took to be a clarinet is actually a snorkel that will enable him to breathe while underwater. Ahead, he sees flower-like crinoids, a meadow of them, waving in greeting and invitation. I accept, he thinks, and swims languidly toward them. There are moving glints everywhere he looks, and after a moment he identifies them as echelons of darting silver cephalopods, with shells as long and straight as pencils. The echelons keep forming and reforming around him, crossing and recrossing before him. They dart everywhere among the crinoid stems and rippling dark algal ribbons. Thus escorted, propelling himself with an occasional lazy kick, he passes above the lagoon's shallow bottom with all the eerie silent majesty of an airship. Below him are what seem like ten thousand kinds of shellfish, worm, and arthropod, clusters of rugose corals, strange seaweeds. The least flurry of activity on the bottom suffices to raise a small obscuring cloud, as when a swarm of trilobites the size of beans scatter before a tentacled predator. He does not see the outcome of the attack, but he does not care. He is too happy. He thinks, What sweet mystery. Humming far back in his throat, he swims away.