A Short, Sharp Shock

27. An Old Coin

Another day, in late autumn, Thel was standing in the surf, hunting pukas in the colorful, tumbling retreat of a wave, when he saw a bright flash—something metallic—and his pounce, trained now to a fine accuracy, brought it up in his sand-streaming hands: an old coin, worn almost smooth but still bright, a color between the gold of the mirror’s surface and the bronze of a bronze sunset. One side held the profile of a head, and holding it up to see it better, Thel caught sight of his swimmer with her close-cropped head in profile some yards away; and it was exactly her profile on the coin. The same strong nose, full mouth, distinct jaw, high forehead: as exact an image as a black paper silhouette cut by a sidewalk artist, in some life he could not otherwise remember. It had to be her. And yet the coin was obviously ancient, the remnant of a long-dead civilization.

Thel pocketed the coin, and that night in their shell cottage he put it on the brick mantel of their chimney, next to the spot where light occasionally pulsed through the wall, from the mirror hung in the next chamber. He said to the swimmer, “Were you ever the queen of an ancient kingdom?”

“Yes,” she muttered sleepily. “And I still am.” But this, he supposed, was another of their misunderstandings. Thel had first noticed this phenomenon when he had seen a windhover, hunting over the meadows inland. “Look,” he had said, “a kestrel.” But the swimmer had thought him crazy for pointing into the sky, for that to her was the name of a kind of fish. And later he found that when he said loyalty she understood it to mean stubbornness, and when she said arbitrary she meant beautiful, and that when she said melancholy she did not mean that sadness we enjoy feeling, but rather mendacity; and when she said actually she meant currently; and when he said I love you, she thought he Was saying I will leave you. They had slowly worked up quite a list of these false cognates, Thel could recite scores and scores of them, and he had come to understand that they did not share a language so much as the illusion of a language; they spoke strong idiolects, and lived in worlds of meaning distinct and isolated from the other. So that she no doubt understood queen of an ancient kingdom to mean something like a swimmer in the deep sea; and the mystery of the ancient alloy coin was never explained, and, he realized, never would be. It gave him a shiver of fear, thinking about it—it seemed to him that nothing would ever be explained, and that all of a sudden each day was slipping away, that time was flying by and they were getting old and nothing would ever come clear. He sat on the beach watching the clouds tumble overhead and letting handfuls of sand run through his fingers, the little clear grains of quartz, flecks of black mica, pieces of coral, shell fragments like small bits of hard ceramic, and he saw that a substantial portion of the sand was made of shells, that living things had labored all their lives to create ceramic shelters, homes, the most permanent parts of themselves; which had then been pummeled into shards just big enough to see, millions upon millions of lives ground up and strewn under him, the beach made out of the wreckage of generations. And before long he and the swimmer too would become no more than sand on a beach, and they would never really have understood anything.