Underwater, he can calculate almost anything. Brilliant. Gifted. Prodigy is the word they used after the IQ evaluation in London when he was seven. "Intended for greatness." "Greatness." The word hissed sharply through the square white lab coat's square white teeth. He could still hear it 4,128 miles, 21.795840 million feet, 261.550080 million inches away, through thirty-three feet, 10.05842 meters, of undulating Aqua-Velva blue. Skimming across the pastel palette—the emerald reef, the violet sea fans, the infinite pale sand—he suffers, a lifetime from greatness. Counting conch: one, two, three.

​

When he counts ten and the yellow mesh bag is full, he slides the ring down the cord and heads for the surface. Reginald J. Johnson, "Whizmon" to his friends, is brilliant. His IQ measures 169, fourteen points above genius. He released his first word when he was just three months and read his first at just eighteen months. By the time he was four he had swallowed every book in his parents' house and then gulped them down house by house through the town. 

​

By the time he was seven, he had devoured every paperback and hardcover; every volume, every manuscript, every abstract and index card in the town library, possibly every book on the island. Probably more books than anyone else he knew, which isn't saying much. He lives on Anegada, an inconsequential coral island in the British Virgins that rises just twenty-eight feet, 861.53846 centimeters, at its highest point, above the Caribbean Sea. It has under 200 permanent residents descended from a few families who live in a dusty area called the Settlement. Reginald counts sixty-two as his direct relations.

​

He works, as most every man on the island does, as a fisherman—he free dives for conch. At night, he's a bartender at the Anegada Reef Hotel, which caters to the wealthy yacht captains that moor the scrubbed-white chartered sailboats in the bay each afternoon. Mostly Americans, but some French and Swedes, they come to experience the wonder of remote island life. Reginald has become proficient in those languages, yet he never speaks them, hiding instead behind the sing-songy pigeon tongue he was born with.

​

He knows a lot about the world. Which is remarkable since other than short boat rides to Cooper or Virgin Gorda (73,920 feet, 887,040 inches away) he never leaves the island. He has learned some from books and some from crossword puzzles in the New York Times, the airline magazines, and other newspapers which are left behind at the bar. All of the other bartender cousins know to save them for Whizmon, stacking them up next to the sticky chrome blender and corrugated cans of Cocoa Lopez. He does them religiously, completing them in ink often in less than twenty minutes, just 1.38% of his day, each box filled, each answer correct. 1 Across: Jazz town. "N-E-W-O-R-L-E-A-N-S," he writes. 53 Down: Chez Everest. "N-E-P-A-L" is quickly penned in.

​

Reginald is cemented in place by a deep swirling inertia of self-doubt. He was made to hide his talent. From the very beginning his father disheartened him, told him books "are far dem sissies and girls, deep divin', conch divin', and bone fish is far the mens." It was his mother that convinced a researcher to bring him to London for tests. When the results arrived, his father burned the papers in a coffee can and spread the black pieces and ash in the sand next to a pungent pile of conch shells behind their tin roof house. But she hid a letter from the agency behind an old black and white framed photograph of Queen Elizabeth that hung on the wall. "Reginald has extraordinary intelligence," it said. "His IQ, at 169, is among the highest in the Empire."

 

Both are dead now, and he is forty-two—15,342 days, 367,920 hours, 22,075,200 minutes, 1,324,512,000 seconds, and counting.

​

He hasn't read the letter in years. In fact, in almost everything but the crosswords, Reginald conceals his ability. He views his intelligence as a burden, as if his brain were an overloaded bag of conch, too heavy to surface. But it is the real him, floating inside a big-lipped, brown paper island doll like they sell at the hotel shop—trapped energy, never diminished, never transferred.

​

Like the conch he counts, he retreats deep into the loneliness of a hard spiny shell, burying the ache of lost promise in the silky gray sand, in the soundless reef, in the swaying green sea grass. To keep the swell of brain inactivity, like the tide, from pushing through his ears and drowning him, he calculates the angles of geometric shapes between the pink shell waypoints. Or he recites passages from books to the fish: Great Expectations, Middlemarch, Living Language's Conversational French, TimeLife's Small Engine Repair. He's absorbed them all.

​

There is solace below the surface.

​

And so he has given up that he will ever see the crossword places for himself, that he will ever be anything but a conch diver—a conch diver on Anegada.

​

Until this Saturday. This Saturday, he breaks the surface and there is something else. The water sheets off his mask to reveal a sparkling blue sailboat, rising high above the thin coral atoll behind it. Serena. A yawl. He recalls the sail configuration from Chapman Piloting, Seamanship and Small Boat Handling. A rig for two-masted sailboats, in which there is a main mast and a smaller mizzen mast, stepped aft of the rudder post flashes through his mind's eye. On deck he sees a man, a flat straw hat balanced above a wrinkled face.

​

"You there," the voice, British, is crowded with age, "I've fouled the prop, can you get it loose?"

​

"Ya-mon." Reginald responds, sets his mask, and slips below. 

​

As he works the line slack from the shaft, he can see the man hanging over the transom. Distorted in the carnival mirror surface, his skin is like the leather purse made from stingray hide Reginald once saw in a tourist shop on Cooper, dark and textured. Deep lines stream down from the corners of his eyes and mouth. Too severe to be only from sun and age, they are lifeless rivers in scorched earth, a millennium in the making. A bony silver barracuda hovers nearby; its black doll's eye fixed on the situation, wondering, no doubt, why such a small fish would endeavor to harass such a large one. Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea. Why as men do a-land, the great ones eat up the little ones. Shakespeare.

​

"Ya free, mon." He spits out water and breath and arches his back to dive.

​

"Wait a minute there, permission granted to come aboard." The man flips a rope-and-wood ladder over the gunwale, before disappearing below deck.

​

Reginald pulls himself onto the gray teak. Hot wood on cool feet. He has never been aboard a boat this magnificent and immaculate. He was hired as a guide a few times on charter boats—white, molded-plastic giants—but the private yachts navigated the reef themselves. And Serena is among the best he's seen. He admires the knots in the rigging—bowlines, clove hitches, reef knots, and monkey fists are sketches in the Sailor's Handbook, Updated Edition. The varnished bulwark caps catch sun in beaded-water diamonds, and the halyards tinkle against the aluminum masts. But the man is gone.

​

A few silent minutes. Then he squeezes in front the chrome wheel in the cockpit, wondering what it would be like to command her, to glide past the reef one final time, past Cooper, and Virgin Gorda, and Tortola, and Beef Island, to make the sprint to Puerto Rico, and the passage to Bermuda, the Carolinas, Norfolk, New York, Boston. To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars, until I die. Tennyson.

​

He steps down the companionway, leaning his head under the sliding hatch. Nothing. Two more steps and he is standing in Serena's saloon. Like the inside of a jewelry box, it is almost entirely varnished mahogany highlighted by polished brass and chrome fixtures reflecting blue, green, and red-tinted spots of light as they swing in their gimbals. He senses the distinct quality of loneliness here, like in the bottomless blue pockets around the reef. Completely devoid of the idiosyncratic touches of identity and life, it's as if humans didn't inhabit the place at all. And he is an expert.

​

Then, there they are. Along the port side is a long expanse of bookshelves, stacked, piled, and heaving with hundreds of books, enough books to occupy him for years. Reginald recognizes most of the authors: Coover, Wolfe, Casey, Michener, Irving. So mesmerized by the vibrant spines and covers, he involuntarily tips sideways as he walks, and he's completely forgotten his brown paper self. It's as if he's underwater again soaring over the reef and plunging into a limitless valley.

​

At the end of the shelves is a fold-down table suspended by a brass chain. On it is a pile of six books all by the same author, James R. Henry. He picks up the first on the pile and forces his mind to stop thinking in pigeon: "With his sixth book, Desperate Valley, James R. Henry takes his readers on another roller coaster journey deep into the human psyche, beyond the barrier of sanity and into the endless blue-black expanse of a complicated mind," On the back of the dust jacket is a black and white photograph of the author, which he recognizes as a younger version of the wrinkled man, the lines less pronounced. The smile is forced and not radiating past the lips and mouth. "James R. Henry, an avid yachtsman and world traveler, has written six books and is a regular guest at Buckingham Palace. He lives alone aboard the sixty-six foot yawl Serena berthed in London, Naples, Lisbon, and New York."

​

Next to the pile is the New York Times Crossword Omnibus. The spine is broken and the book lays open to "The Bard's Follies." He can see only one answer hasn't been filled in. In that moment, Serena is like heaven to him, and he contemplates the possibility that the water finally pushed its way into his ears, that he drowned. Then there are steps behind him.

​

"Who said you could come below?" It is James R. Henry standing in the companionway, straw hat removed, the face lines opening and closing with anger.

​

"One sixteen," Reginald releases in his best English, annunciating every syllable.

​

"What. ..what are you—"

​

"Blank minds,' twenty-three across, four letters...it's from Sonnet 116, 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.' The answer is true." It is the first time he's quoted anything out loud in years. The entirety of the sonnet remains in his mind's eye.

​

"Yes. ..well. . yes. . true, of course." The man angles a disbelieving glance at the open crossword book. "Well that may be, but you take this and go. Nobody comes below." The buzz of a small engine—an outburst of mechanical sound—grows and the wake spanks the boat abeam and rolls under. There is a dance of light spots across the books, mahogany, and wrinkles. When the man steadies himself, an American five-dollar bill is shoved forward, and Reginald is the paper doll again. The burden and blood move into his cheeks and ears.

​

"Ya, mon." And then Whizmon is back below the surface,fully silenced, as if he had never left. But his mind is full of the books and full of the man James R. Henry, "world traveler."

​

~

 

For a week, Serena is anchored in front of the hotel, the beach bar where he bartends, inside the reef. During the days he dives below her, slipping effortlessly through her shadow on the rippled sand, and looks up at the fat red keel suspended mystically in the surface tension, where the dogfish have taken up residence. The volume of a floating body displaces an equal amount of fluid. Intro to Elementary Physics I.

​

In the last few days he's visited the library in the Settlement, which he hasn't been to in years, not since his mother died. He still knows most of the books there, as they have not been replaced, but he manages to gather an armful new material. He's ravenous. He transports the precious haul back to the baked cinder block cottage on the edge of the Settlement where he lives alone. His heart gallops as he jams them under the mattress like a child. A Man in Full, Spartina, Five Frogs on a Log, Merriam Webster's Guide to Business Correspondence, and the fourth edition of Desperate Valley. Desperate Valley by James R. Henry. He takes it first, the thin blue-striped polyester sheet pulled up over his head. He peels back the foreword, his lips move with the words: "Desperate Valley is James R. Henry's last book. Soon after its release and the deaths of his wife and son, he never published another word and withdrew completely from public life, a great loss to the genre."

​

As the days pass, he does not see him on deck, but he is aware of life on Serena. He hears the report of her various expulsions which pour into the water and create foam. At night from his perch he sees the dull orange glow of the port lights. He finishes the day’s crosswords with 54 Across: Dante’s Burden. "C-I-R-C-L-E-O-F-H-E-L-L." Under the sun, he swims close, hoping to be noticed by James R. Henry, eager and terrified to engage him about Desperate Valley, about the Queen, about the condition of the larger world. "Why would he want to talk to me about anything?" he thinks. "I'm sho day no conch divin' in dem books o his, mon." He dives.

​

It is six days before he encounters him again. Reginald finishes his catch from the library and his mind is bursting with fresh quotes and the world. He is under Serena, the empty mesh bag attached to his waist flutters behind him. A small school of goatfish follows, their yellow stripes and silver bellies discharging sunlight like flashbulb pops. His audience.

 

He surfaces. As Serena swings into the wind on her anchor chain, the transom with its shining gold-leaf letters is only a few feet away. His eyes adjust in the sunlight to see James R. Henry at the life rail, his hands cupped around his mouth: "You there…I need you to come aboard."

​

He nods, mask on his forehead, delighted at the invitation. He glides to the rope ladder and pulls himself up, rushing with excitement into his greeting. "I'm Reginald Johnson," he says, one foot on the deck, extending his hand. "My friends call me Whiz—" He stops himself as suddenly with the sound of his own voice; he's embarrassed. He wants to blurt out: "I have a 169 IQ, among the highest in the empire. I know Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Keats, and physics, and every element in the periodic table, and calculus. I've read Desperate Valley. I am a genius." He wants to blurt this out before he is asked the price for some conch, or lobster, or to scrape the growth off the bottom, or to point out the best snorkeling or bone fishing spot. Before he slips below the surface again. But he doesn't, and he feels the blood and disappointment move into his face.

​

"Whiz?" the pebbly British voice claims all of its octave. "I'm J.R. Henry." His hand moves into Reginald's, liberates a burst, one short shake, and retreats. "You're a diver."

​

"Yes, the solitude…it's what keeps me sane," he says. He can't believe he said it. It's the first truly honest thing he's said to anyone in a long time. His brain, like his pupils dilating below the surface, swells with the possibility of true engagement, of a dialogue, and suddenly with a quiver, the din of quotes drains from his mind. "Serena must be your solitude." No recognition. His eyes follow the teak seams forward to occupy the silence, and he rolls his neck back and explores the rigging before settling back on J. R.'s over-ripened face. He is a tall man, but faintly stooped with age. His hair is perfectly white, absent any color, and is pushed back from his forehead. A few strands like bundled wire slip over one side and bounce in the wind. He is severe, Reginald thinks, like Serena, somehow antiseptic, somehow lifeless. Magnificent and immaculate. He too is a paper doll.

​

"I need the bottom scraped." The words hiss and hang cold in the breeze. "How much?" Green American bills in his hand.

 

Reginald drains. He can't even slip below to drown the sound, to drown. In the deepest recess of the human mind there is something more than regular darkness. It is blue black. J. R. Henry. He shuffles weight from one foot to the other, and some trapped salt water slips out from under the mask and stings his eyes. He is flat like Anegada, perilously suspended above the surface, barely existing until the next hurricane or tectonic shift. "Ya, mon, fifty."

​

There is silence while J. R. produces a plastic bucket and a bottle of liquid soap from under a hatch in the deck.

 

Reginald retreats to the opening in the life rail and then something bursts inside him: "Why no seventh?" It came out in perfectly annunciated English. For the first time in years, his mind is operating without its governor. "No seventh book...no more books at all?" His heart flutters with the release.

​

J.R. stiffens, his white eyebrows clenched, his face parched from the absence of human charity. "I don't need a review from some island boy who thinks he's qualified because hes good at the crosswords." He moves the bucket forward across the deck with his foot. "I don't know what you want from me, but I'm not interested." J.R. is done with the human race, his patience with it exhausted long ago. "So take the bucket and get to work, or go."

​

Reginald knows J.R.'s face. It is a creation of the deep loneliness that results from an existence of isolation, from years—even more years than he has dedicated—of struggling to keep the water out. "I'm sorry," he blurts a reflex. Like the blinding white surface light, he is suddenly in possession of the truth: he is an expert in only one subject. He has devoted his life to it. To J.R., people are like barracuda, staring with black doll's eyes, lifeless eyes. Reginald feels himself in his skin for the first time since he was a child. "I'm sorry. I thought you might want a friend on the island." He is sincere, and honest, and sad. "Someone to bounce the crosswords off of." He picks up the bucket by its crusty rope handle and drops a foot over the side to the first rung of the ladder. His other foot hangs out over the vast blue liquid canyon. He knows what it looks like from below—to the angels, and the goatfish, and the conch—but all he thinks of is the pressure of the water pushing him further down until the sunlight is flimsy and Serena is gone. But before he steps, he senses acknowledgment. There is an almost inaudible human sound. A confession of gratitude reveals itself in J.R.'s expression. There is something in Reginald that disarms J.R. It's as if he were not part of the human race at all, but living coral of the Anegada reef—alive, but benign. "Well," he says, "I suppose there's no harm in working on a few puzzles together, you might learn something. When you're done with the boat."

​

A broad smile swells on Reginald's mouth and remains even as he disappears below the gunwale and into the canyon with a slap and a splash. Along the curved white boot stripe, Serena is endless, the vertical edge of a newborn universe. He scrapes, and brushes, and dives along the keel until the water is coated with delicate pink diamonds—a gift of the Caribbean twilight. On the beach, flames from the oil-drum barbeques are furious, soaking the air black with kerosene and wood ash. Tonight Anegada is at rest, motionless. It is a night for the sand fleas. A night when the breeze comes sluggishly in chunks like the first drops of island rain.

​

He wonders, for the first time, about the library in Road Town on Tortola, lying behind him in the distance, and he can't think of why he hasn't visited. He imagines the university on St. Thomas. He allows the pale images of London to invade his mind's eye. 

​

~

​

Reginald works on Serena everyday for a week, scrubbing the bottom, the bright work, the brass and chrome. J.R. recounts the life of a celebrated novelist as Reginald sands and polishes. The places he's seen: Sydney, Johannesburg, New York, Miami, and others; and the people he's known: the Hollywood starlets, intellectuals, Nobel scientists, and politicians. Reginald quotes from memory and sketches reef fish on a pad. He writes the genus and phylum below in block letters and shows him. And they finish the crosswords in the Omnibus and the magazines that he brings from the bar. J.R. gives him his collection of signed books. "I wrote them, and I never read them."

​

The days pass and Serena's perfection is maintained, a Ceylon sapphire on a platinum band. And for the first time in an eternity, Reginald's curiosity and talent is unbridled. And for the first time in an eternity, J.R.'s bitterness is relieved. Their loneliness is a common bond, and like aging prizefighters, or men who have been to war, the experience is a communal meal portioned and swallowed like a sacred right. It is a sacrament for a lifetime of isolation. It is atonement, and fulfillment, and nourishment.

​

He dives. The purple sea fans salute in unison as he soars above them. He wonders how long it's been since he's appreciated their loveliness, the fragility of their life. And there is sound. Shifting sand and rocks tinkle with each invisible surge, and the ocean, rhythmic and pounding, thunders in its ceaseless struggle to claim the island. He slips sideways between towering formations past a wary female leatherback. Then beauty is its own excuse for being. Emerson.

​

One late pink afternoon as Serena strains in creeks and pops on her galvanized chain, Reginald and J.R. are in the cockpit. Reginald produces a Tupperware container. "It's conch stew," he says, "my mother's recipe." And by the time he emerges from the galley, the thick brown gravy and conch chunks spooned onto paper plates, the sun has retired into a glass harbor.

 

J.R. lays out across the white vinyl cushion, one knee up, his wire hair spilling out from under the straw hat, the horizon burning behind him. "If I were you, l'd never leave this island…I'd stay exactly as you are." He deposits a hot conch piece between his lips, rolling it around in his mouth to keep it from burning. "You've never asked me why," he says with a nod and a hard swallow. Reginald sees his face distorted and misshaped in the chrome compass binnacle, but he knows what he means: why no life off Serena; why suppress an incredible talent; why no seventh book. He realizes these are his questions, and he already knows. "The world is too cruel." J.R.'s hands shake with age and the weight of it. As the final slivers of light retreat into the horizon, J.R. tells him of the death of his wife and son. How he was in New York promoting Desperate Valley, and they were in London. How his wife was mentally ill. How she drowned their son in a warm bath and slit her wrists, the blood dripping through the ceiling to the servants' quarters below. How he dined at the Waldorf on shrimp cocktail, porterhouse, and Stoli that night. How he left on Serena and never returned to the world.

​

“When I stopped writing…stopped producing, my so-called friendships dried up. In this world, people who want something from you, they are your friends. All the intellect in the universe can't change that." Reginald passes another steaming scoop of stew onto J.R.'s plate. J.R. is pale to him.

​

"But there are so many opportunities when you have a talent like yours," Reginald says. But it is hollow, not for lack of sincerity but because, like the lines in J.R.'s face, the sourness is deep; the damage too severe. J.R. dips his head and releases a long forced breath through his nose. With it, Reginald's calloused envy of the outside world begins to dissipate. In J.R.'s world, too, Reginald is a man; Whizmon is a paper doll.

​

At night, Reginald is back at the beach bar, among the cousins, friends, and pigeon English. They talk about tourist girls and fishing. One of his cousins has gotten a job with an airline on Beef Island and will be traveling daily to Puerto Rico and Florida. They share a drink in celebration. He decides to walk home, his head singing with Pusser's and the hum and crackle of the blender and ice. The moon is bright and casts long tree shadows across the sandy road in front of him. Through the breaks in the trees, he sees the harbor, the white mastheads are strung in a line like Christmas tree lights and the whine of the rubber Avons—their drunk crews returning from shore—fades in and out.

​

His living room is stale with trapped air. Kneeling on the worn sofa, he lifts the black and white photograph of Queen Elizabeth and turns it over revealing a folded piece of typing paper, yellowed with age. He reads:

 

Dear Mrs. Johnson,

After completing the standard battery of intelligence quotient examinations on your son, Reginald Johnson, we've determined that he is a very special young man. Reginald has extraordinary intelligence, and his IQ, at 169, is among the highest in the Empire. We recommend that he be placed in a special school in London, where his talent and intelligence can be properly addressed and nurtured. We have no doubt that with the proper education, Reginald will have a significant contribution to make in his chosen field of endeavor.

 

Reginald pinches the paper back along the original folds and drops it into a plastic kitchen garbage can next to the sink, before shutting off the light.

​

The next day, the sun comes in the open window, across the blue pinstripes and his face. He rolls over, chin on the concrete sill, and looks out across the dusty yard through a small grove of scraggly palm trees to the infinite expanse of blue and white. There is a flamingo poking through some standing rainwater by the road's edge, the spindle legs and snake neck an unkind gag of evolution, he thinks. It's Sunday. By ten o'clock he is in the flat-roofed, cinder block chapel next to the library under the hand-carved crucifix, fluorescent lights, and ceiling fans. Whizmon is enveloped by his family, the aunts and cousins, the infants and the teenagers, round and slim brown faces and bright floral shirts. There is singing, and swaying, and crying. After, there are handshakes and lunch of curried fish roti and cold Carib served from the bed of a thick-wheeled Toyota pick-up.

​

The next day he calls the university on St. Thomas and requests some materials about their programs: Business Management, Computer Science, Language Arts, Literature, and Creative Writing. He can't decide which one; maybe he'll study them all. He slides a paperback out from under the mattress and reads until the daylight is gone.

​

The next day, he dives again. In the afternoon, he swims out toward the radiant Serena. He's proud. Behind her, a fresh flotilla of chartered sailboats and crosswords motors around the reef. Their eager crews lean on forestays and assemble on gunwales for their first glimpse.

​

As he comes up for air, he sees J.R, on the bow. He's under again. With the next breath, he recognizes Serena is prepared to leave. There is a small octopus below him changing color with the sand as he passes over. Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness sink. Keats.

​

Serena's anchor breaks the surface and drips, and he realizes that he won't make it to her before she slips forward, beyond the reef. He thinks of the acidity of J.R.'s deep bitterness, of his loneliness, of his choice to let it consume him wholly. Maybe it's not a choice, he thinks, but like the swollen Caribbean grinding away at Anegada, it's a relentless, throbbing, involuntary motion. When Serena grows thin and transparent, he feels alone. It's the loneliness he felt when his mother died, the loneliness he felt in London, the unique loneliness of being Whizmon.

​

He dives, and there is silence. The chartered boats have found their moorings in the harbor in front of the hotel. Below, he skims across the edge of the green reef out over a deep gorge, plotting a course through a squadron of emperor angels toward a glowing nebula of pink conch.​​