The experience of sharing Charisse’s incredulous version of sea turtle bliss on the beach, under the stars, at Sanibel was even better than Ben had expected. And that was saying something given the Himalayan heights he thought he’d experienced previously. But, still, even in the exquisite tropical softness of the evening Ben remembered his new commitment to being somewhat more detached. He really was trying to be less vulnerable and more scientific, trying to grow little fins of willpower to try to steer himself in a more autonomous direction.
The first significant scientific finding of this very romantic and unusual encounter is that he was just as sleepy, afterwards, as he would have been anywhere else. The beach at Sanibel was just as great a place to nod off as it was to become intimately entangled. And it really was a gorgeous and balmy night. There was a half moon on the left side of the sky, shining like a stage light on quilted bits of clouds that were floating eastward toward the Everglades. A steady stream of blinking jets flew high overhead, as people from Seattle, and Oakland, and Houston, and Newark, and Cleveland buckled seat belts and turned in their cups for landings in West Palm, Fort Lauderdale and Miami.
Yet sleep was not what Charisse had in mind. She was wide awake, even fighting restless legs, and she filled the air with new observations and questions, and ideas about what they could do in the morning. But she was losing Ben, and this really was a first for her. And it would also be incomprehensible for a low flying god to observe, that a man in such a place and, um, circumstance, would be falling asleep.
The last thing Ben remembered is that she was fixated on the satellites passing between the jetliners and the moon. There seemed to be a new one every minute and a half, and she was just full of ideas about where it was from, what its purpose was, and how she could tell. For some reason, she thought she could discern the American satellites apart from the Brazilian satellites, apart from the European satellites, apart from the Chinese satellites.
“Was this a joke?” he wondered with the half of his brain that still had some current left in it. But no, she seemed serious. Then she was adamant that all the Chinese satellites beamed down continuous chords of The East is Red. And he wanted to inject that, no, that it was just the first one, from 1970.
But he’d been down this slope before. He would just have to accept it. He just couldn’t afford the energy to cope with what he would say next after Charisse would have answered that, no, she was sure of it because she’d heard it on National Public Radio, or read about it in a book that was very authoritative, about satellites, or about Chinese.
“Benny are you afraid of sharks?” she then asked, playfully.
But he was gone by then, well into a dream about sweet and sour pork in which he had to chase chunks of savory meat and bell pepper with an enormous and unwieldy pair of chopsticks.
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