One of the crew sees him glance out to sea as the boat streaks forward over an unusually smooth, glassy surface. It is a brighter, lovelier face at sea in the morning, like the girl who read his future in her cards the night before, her eyes, mouth, figure lovelier than the future she foretold. Maybe his lungs weren't completely healed after almost a year diving for conch, those brightly-colored, spiral-shaped mollusks, diving too deep, surfacing and coughing blood for an hour. A metal basket weighted with pellets of iron drifts down to him in an atmosphere of green vegetation and fragmented sunlight. He tears clusters of shells apart, though his only cognizance is of her. The color of her skin, he thinks as he holds a bright, pink shell to his eyes, filling basket after basket only for her, the conch plentiful, she too in memory. He fears his recollection will vanish . . . more conch, big and small . . . and dizziness. He remembers her hand as she pushed the fateful card into his. His lungs ache for relief, but he sees her again and again in his mind's eye, imagining her hand inches from his. Luis with pock-marked face and pure heart pulled from the sea floor coughing blood for the last time, the sky swaying and spinning above in a blind, white radiance he no longer sees.