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how close he’d come to committing a crime. He quickly drew backward. The power of his ningwas good for a shoal of one only. The singular, secret body language was his alone. And only thus was it possible for him to say “I” without the tinny resonance of “we” Bruno removed himself from the circle of fish and stopped, breathing heavily, beyond the shoal. The salmon turned and looked at him vacantly. They remained in place this way for a long time. Meanwhile, Laprik had partially recovered. Echoes of his ning revived and began to reach Bruno, but they no longer penetrated him. The shoal moved slowly on. It left without him, and for one last moment, Bruno was seized with the old fear. But it was merely force of habit.

The shoal drifted away. In the course of a few hours, hundreds of thousands of fish passed him at a steady float, and he waited motionless. The only one he could distinguish among them was Yorick, but in a little while he ceased to see them as fish and saw them instead as a large complex body, dissociated from himself: his former being. All his possessions passed before his eyes, all his memories and shreds of what used to be. He waited thus for an hour after the last of them had gone, deep in the contemplation and sadness of parting from his former self. From now on, everything he would ever do, think, or create would be his by right. On the distant horizon, the last of the stiff fins could be seen. Very soon they will arrive at the great falls on the river Spey. They will leap up three, four meters against the foaming current, fall back into the water, and leap again and again. Whoever survives the waterfalls arrives exhausted at the little stream where they were born years before. For a few days they will rest, huddled together, dead tired, reduced, tortured to the limit of endurance. Above them, birds of prey will circle. The fish will cast dark shadows on the water. A few days hence they will grow a tough hump and auxiliary teeth, and then there will be bloody battles over females and territory. The survivors will fertilize the roc, and die. Bruno knew: little Yorick would not survive the falls. Laprik would make it, but he would be too exhausted to fight the younger males. In a few hours, the Spey would be filled with the mutilated corpses of salmon. All the cruelty of the journey would suddenly hit them and leave its deadly mark. Birds of prey would peck them clean.

Bruno was all alone. The old shark that tailed the shoal stopped midway. He turned from the multitudes of fish receding in the distance to look at the strange creature who gave off the smell of blood andappeared to be particularly easy prey. He decided to have it both ways. He plunged below the water and disappeared. A fast, narrow course in a beeline to Bruno, who noticed nothing.

Only, at this point, something strange occurred: something difficult to explain, the cause of a great deal of embarrassment among biographers of the sea and the conservative archivists of liquid history: suddenly, without any explanation, the shark was hurled upward like some gigantic bird-fish, and he floundered helplessly in the air, snorting two-part harmony through his grotesque, hammerhead-like snout, and landed far far away, in his usual position, at the tail end of the big shoal.

The sea churned a moment more. Bruno thought he heard a strange sound, like clapping: the small waves around the place where the shark had been hurled in the air heard, to their surprise, a fizzling sound, like an angry and particularly juicy curse, but they preferred not to believe it came from the mouth of their Lady. They rammed into each other in harmless, gay abandon, told their different accounts of the shark-spitting campaign, spoke excitedly about old steamships, about navigation by the flight of birds, about different treatments for seasickness … in short, they changed the subject.

Nicely told, Neuman.

I’m trying.

Except for the curse at the end. You know I never talk that way.

It was the shark who cursed!

The shark? He can barely swim, let alone—Right. Now I remember. Hammerhead sharks are known for their foul language.

And after a moment’s silence: You’re cute, you know. You’ve changed since then.

Are you ready for the rest of the story?

I guess you haven’t changed, after all.

Please?

Go on, feel free. I’m not listening in any case … Wait a minute! You forgot! You forgot the main thing!

Huh? What did I forget?

Bruno! The wounds! Remember? Please, please, you have to remem—

Of course. How could I forget. You’re right. Listen.

Bruno swam slowly through the waters of the North. She was hisfrom horizon to horizon, and he didn’t know it. She pressed down on his sores. Stem-faced fish were at work in her laboratories extracting their own special substances. Waves summoned from the Caspian Sea and Dead Sea, breathless and foaming after seeping out of the abysses of landlocked waters, and passing briskly through the telegraphic currents of subterranean rivers, arrived weary and worn to maim themselves by their Lady’s decree in order to produce the rare salts required for instant recovery. Seaweed, drifting in Bruno’s path as if by chance, wrapped itself around him briefly, dabbed him with mysterious astringents, and floated on, rejoicing in her joy. There were only two sores left, two narrow sores on the sides of his neck, though in fact they were not sores at all but, rather, openings, or little mouths. Or simply: gills.

Bruno swims on, his head immersed in the water. He no longer needs to breathe the air outside. He gazes down at the abyss: the waves have ground the lenses of his eyes till they are marvelously suited to underwater vision, and objects now appear wavy, their colors breaking and winding to reveal the threads of a thousand subtle hues embroidered there and