The City

I lived in the city for eight months after the island, and the city was the hardest fence I ever kept.

I did not know it at first. The first weeks I was grateful for the crowds, because the crowds were a kind of noise that drowned the other noise, the sound of the shed and the sound of the village at dusk and the sound of Corbett's hands going empty on the dock. I walked the streets with the Whistle, and I let the city pour over me, and I understood that the city was the largest village on earth, and that it kept its Code, and that the Code was the thing that made it hold.

Then I began to see them.

It started with a man on the bus, a commuter in a gray suit with his face in his phone. I was watching him the way you watch a stranger, and his jaw was wrong. It was too long, and it moved the wrong way, and I looked at him and I saw, for one cold second, not a man in a gray suit but a thing that had been made to look like one, and the making was holding, the way the Code held, and the holding was the only thing standing between him and the old sentence. I blinked, and he was a commuter again, and the bus went on, and I understood that I had carried the island across a thousand miles of water, and that the island had settled into my seeing, and that the seeing was not going to leave.

After that they were everywhere. The woman at the checkout whose hands worked against each other, the way the cougar's hands had worked against the fence. The man at the crosswalk who went down on a knuckle for half a step and came up corrected. The child in the park who screamed, and the mother who held the scream the way the Code held, and the child who was not a child, the child who was the small one, the small one on all fours in the scrub with the keeping ended, and I stood in the park with the Whistle pressing his head against my hand, and the city was not the opposite of the island. It was the island with better fences.

I stopped going out. I told myself it was the doctor's advice, and the prescription, and the noise, and I let the apartment close around me, and the Whistle lay at the door, and the days went by in the gray light, and Lena came and went, and her kindness was the most terrible thing I had ever been given, because it was the one fence I could not see, and I could not keep it, and I could not let it down, and I sat in the middle of the apartment with the island in my seeing, and outside the window the city kept its ten million lights, and I could not name a single one of them, and I understood that I had come back to the wrong world.

The end of the city came in a grocery store. I had gone out for the Whistle's food, the way I did once a week, and I was at the register, and the man ahead of me was arguing with the cashier, and the argument was small and the man was red and his hands were working against each other, and I watched his hands the way you watch a verdict, and he turned, and he looked at me, and his eyes were the cougar's eyes, and his eyes were the woman's eyes, and his eyes were the last eyes I could keep, and I walked out of the store with the Whistle's food still on the counter and did not go back.

Lena found me at the apartment that night, and she sat across from me, and she did not bring takeout, and she did not bring questions. She brought a map, and she spread it on the table, and she put her finger on a point on the coast, forty miles from the nearest town, and she said, "There is a cabin here. It belongs to my father's estate, and it has a cliff, and a beach, and a well, and no neighbors, and it has been empty for three years, and it is yours for as long as you need it."

"Why are you doing this?"

"Because the city is killing you," she said, "and because the only thing I have ever been able to do for you is the thing you need the most, which is a door that opens the other way." She looked at me, and her eyes were kind, and her eyes were not the cougar's eyes, and I understood that Lena was the one thing the island had not made, and that the world had made her the way the world makes the few things that hold, and that she was holding me, and that the holding was the only keeping left on my side of the water.

I took the cabin. I took the Whistle. I took the map, and the key, and the prescription, and the box of files I had kept, the ones with no form signed, and I drove north along the coast with the sea on my right hand, and I did not look back at the city, because the city had already decided, kindly, firmly, that there were no islands in it, and I had decided, slowly, painfully, that I could no longer keep the city's Code.

The cabin was gray wood and salt air, and the cliff dropped forty feet to the water, and the beach was gravel and driftwood, and the nearest light was a mile down the coast, and I stood on the cliff with the Whistle at my feet and the sea coming in, and I understood that I had found the only fence on the mainland that I could keep: the one with nothing on the other side of it.