Intent upon his own rites of purification, George staggers out once more,

wide-open-armed, to receive the stunning baptism of the surf. Giving

himself to it utterly, he washes away thought, speech, mood, desire, whole

selves, entire lifetimes; again and again he returns, becoming always cleaner,

freer, less. He is perfectly happy by himself; it's enough to know that Kenny

and he are the sole sharers of the element. The waves and the night and the

noise exist only for their play. Meanwhile, no more than two hundred yards

distant, the lights shine from the shore and the cars flick past up and down

the highway, flashing their long beams. On the dark hillsides you can see

lamps in the windows of dry homes, where the dry are going dryly to their

dry beds. But George and Kenny are refugees from dryness; they have

escaped across the border into the water-world, leaving their clothes behind

them for a customs fee.

And now, suddenly, here is a great, an apocalyptically great wave, and

George is way out, almost out of his depth, standing naked and tiny before

its presence, under the lip of its roaring upheaval and the towering menace

of its fall. He tries to dive through it — even now he feels no real fear — but

instead he is caught and picked up, turned over and over and over, flapping and kicking toward a surface which may be either up or down or sideways,

he no longer knows.

And now Kenny is dragging him out, groggy-legged. Kenny's hands

are under George's armpits and he is laughing and saying like a nanny,

"That's enough for now!" And George, still water-drunk, gasps, "I'm all

right," and wants to go straight back into the water. But Kenny says, "Well,

I'm not — I'm cold," and nanny-like he towels George, with his own shirt, not

George's, until George stops him because his back is sore. The nannyrelationship

is so convincing at this moment that George feels he could curl

up and fall immediately asleep right here, shrunk to child-size within the

safety of Kenny's bigness. Kenny's body seems to have grown gigantic since

they left the water. Everything about him is larger than life: the white teeth

86

of his grin, the wide dripping shoulders, the tall slim torso with its heavyhung

sex, and the long legs, now beginning to shiver.

"Can we go back to your place, sir?" he asks.

"Sure. Where else?"

"Where else?" Kenny repeats, seeming to find this very amusing. He

picks up his clothes and turns, still naked, toward the highway and the lights.

"Are you crazy?" George shouts after him.

"What's the matter?" Kenny looks back, grinning.

"You're going to walk home like that? Are you crazy? They'd call the

cops!"

Kenny shrugs his shoulders good-humoredly. "Nobody would have

seen us. We're invisible — didn't you know?"

But he gets into his clothes now, and George does likewise. As they

start up the beach again, Kenny puts his arm around George's shoulder.

"You know something, sir? They ought not to let you out on your own, ever.

You're liable to get into real trouble."

THEIR walk home sobers George quite a lot. By the time they reach the

house, be no longer sees the two of them as wild water-creatures but as an

elderly professor with wet hair bringing home an exceedingly wet student in

the middle of the night. George becomes self-conscious and almost curt.

"The bathroom's upstairs. I'll get you some towels."

Kenny reacts to the formality at once. "Aren't you taking a shower,

too, sir?" he asks, in a deferential, slightly disappointed tone.

"I can do that later. I wish I had some clothes your size to lend you.

You'll have to wrap up in a blanket, while we dry your things on the heater.