It is always at the back of his mind, waiting there, informing his choices, casting shadows. He feels, somehow, that if the last of the earth were somehow swept away, if there were nothing left, if even the seas dried to salt, there would still be this, his memory of his first wife in Ocho Rios. They were both in their early thirties, on their honeymoon. Their hotel room balcony looked out on the blue Jamaican waters. What happened was a fluke, everyone said, one of those things, terrible fortune. His wife had a cerebral hemorrhage. Massive. Sudden. They were on the balcony when, without warning, she was violently sick to her stomach. She collapsed and in short order was no longer conscious. She died before the ambulance arrived. He remembers walking back later to the hotel, walking in the heavy Jamaican sun, and knowing that the world had altered that day, that nothing would ever return to what it had been. And even after he married again five years later, even after he had children of his own, even after-many years beyond that-he had grandchildren, he watched each and every one of them as though their brains might suddenly fill with blood and carry them away. All of us, it seemed to him, were already ghosts. One part was living, but the other part had already died. And the dead part, of course, was stronger. After all, the universe itself was mostly insensate-iron and stone planets, gas stars, empty molecules of space-and so it was arrogance to imagine we didn't belong that way ourselves. How could anyone truly love another person while possessing that knowledge? He'd been told often by his family he could be a cold fish. It was strange terminology, he thought. A cold fish was a dead fish, surely. They said this with love in their eyes, but whenever anyone spoke of such things, he thought at once of his first wife's eyes when they went suddenly cold and dead, when they were no more alive than a doorknob or a bowling ball. And now that he is dying, too-his doctors give him less than a year-he imagines he is about to join the great and eternal inanimate universe. He isn't sorry. He doesn't fear it. And in his final moments, he believes, he will dream again that he is standing on that balcony with his wife in Ocho Rios, and the blue of the water will be so intense that it will almost hurt his eyes. He will have no regrets-how can a stone or a wave regret anything, after all?-and when he is being swept off he will tell himself he is returning to a true and perfect state.