Terralimbo

When I opened my eyes, he was three or four meters away—carefully not looking at me. Unmoving, he sat on the sand, with both arms encircling drawn up knees. One hand grasped the other wrist. Except for his darting, jungle-wary eyes tracing and retracing the distant horizon, he might have been painted there. He looked strange, foreign. If I spoke, would he understand?

            "The storm is over," I said, sitting up.

            "For us," he smiled gently, "the storm is always over."

            We stared out on the Caribbean together. I remembered walking far up the beach, only to have the rising thunderstorm overtake me. As I began running back toward the car, sand clutched at my athletic shoes. One was caught and pulled from my foot, as I felt the hair on my head lifting upward. Too late, I flung myself to the beach, as with a deafening crack I was slammed face first into the sand. Deafened I was, for I could hear none of the usual chirps of insects and cries of sea birds.

            Oddly, there were none of the common birds to be seen, so maybe I shouldn't expect to hear them. But, my sole companion visible on the beach, and I, had exchanged greetings. Why then were even the shore-battering waves silent?

            Breakers were not racing to shore! The sea lay still as an out-of-focus mirror. A layered mirror, transparent in degree, between what might be the normal span of crest and trough. Strange this dream. And yet, it didn't seem a dream.

            The four century old ruins of the fort beyond the mouth of the river, lay exactly as I knew them. Noticing the bare feet of the teenager sitting beside—hadn't he been farther away earlier?—I pulled off my remaining shoe. His torn and dirty shirt of strange style and no particular color and his pants of coarse weave, seemed not so very different from my own bleach-smeared tee shirt and patched cut-off jeans.

            "Have you been waiting long?" I asked, calmly accepting the permanence of our situation.

            "I've been watching for you since early in the Sixteenth Century. Or for someone."

            "Oh. And it is now near the end of the Twentieth."

            "I don't spend very long at any one time," he shrugged, "so I've looked for you probably through many centuries."

            "Who are you?"

            "My name is Fernando Perdida" he said. "I came to this shore by ship, and like you was caught by a lightning bolt I couldn't outrun."

            "From where did you sail?"

            "Spain. I was a poor farm boy who thought the sea held my fortune."

            Perdida. Was the name Christian, or Jewish? Or maybe he was a Moor? The Spanish Inquisition expulsion in the early 16^th Century had sent out so many Jews and Moors after kingdoms had joined together to make up the country. A farm boy, he said. Perhaps then from Andalusia in the agrarian south.

            "¿Por que estamos hablando ingles?"

            "We aren't speaking English," he laughed. For us, every language is now the same."

            "Fuerte San Lorenzo," I gestured toward the