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Ta’aroa
Ta’aroa creation
was Taaroa a bird if he had feathers?
people
atolls,
Makatea was where Rafi Young caught up with her again at last. And on that island, the two of them married and raised a family as well as they could, away from the growing sadness of the real world.
bird’s abdomen. Inside that chest, immune to decomposing, lay two fistfuls of plastic pieces.
Todd Keane,
I bent under the obligation to become the first person to reach the Future.
My father: the strength of mania. My mother: the cunning of the downtrodden.
locked in a contest to inflict as much harm on each other as possible without crossing over the line into fatality—
He worked in the pit at the Chicago Board of Trade,
father
My mother was a closet romantic. When she found out about my father’s secret life, she hired a private detective to hunt down a boy who had doted on her at New Trier High School and who went on to play utility infielder in the Cubs’ farm system for several years before buying into an AMC dealership in Elk Grove. She was constantly breaking up and furiously reuniting with this man in semi-public places, all but begging my father to put an end to it. My father rose lovingly to the bait, time and again.
The secret seemed to be to find some other place to live. I found that place under Lake Michigan.
All dramas sounded muffled, under the water.
my life makes any sense without this one piece. It’s a simple, small thing, but I’ve never told anyone but you. When I was young, I could breathe underwater.
Evie, young tall girl, 1947.
And now her father wanted her to be the first girl ever to test the Scaphandre. “You’ll be part of history!”
She had never felt at home up there, above the surface, with its noise and politics and relentless verticality. She had been made for water, gliding through a place edgeless and muffled, free of the blows that had always assaulted her in the world of air.
“Oh, Papa. It’s perfect. Don’t change a thing!” Pleasure on her father’s face turned into confusion. “What do you mean, don’t change anything? I’m an engineer!” YEARS LATER, EVELYNE BEAULIEU would learn what her father didn’t tell her that night at the Air Liquide test pool.
had sent a diver down in a test in the Mediterranean off the coast of Toulon.
Fargues lost consciousness and never recovered. He died in the “rapture of the deep.” The infant aqualung almost died with him. And yet, Emile Beaulieu had sent
his daughter on her own test dive. Half the age of the youngest person to have used the equipment, a girl afraid to step on the cracks in the sidewalk, and he’d tossed her into the water strapped to a prototype.
That night, on the other side of the Atlantic, a Norwegian was writing a memoir about crossing the Pacific on a handmade raft. Four hundred miles down the Atlantic coast, a pair of men working late stumbled upon the portal to the electronic age. And a li...
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EIGHTY YEARS LATER, on a crystalline afternoon in a calm patch of the South Pacific with the sun coming hard across the sky and nothing on any horizon but endless saline blue, a gangly ninety-two-year-old woman pitched backward over the gunwale of a five-meter dive boat and sank wakeless into the sea. Curled up like a fetus from the plunge, she relaxed, unfolded, and surrendered to sinking. She
Her father had lied. He had not brought her to the Air Liquide test pool that night because he and M. Gagnan needed someone her size and weight to test
He had tossed her into the water in the simple hope of building her confidence.
The experiment...
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Evie Beaulieu had nursed a secret wish to die diving. But not today. Today, she had one last task to finish. She was on this island for a single reason: To compile another book before she died.
To try one more time to make the land dwellers love the wild, unfathomable God of waters. To give the smallest hint of creatures so varied and inventive and otherworldly that they might compel humility and stop human progress in its tracks with awe.
the Spa.
Whatever senses were at play, more than one manta recognized her.
my octopus friend
the creature in front of her at this moment: this gigantic Loner,
people of these islands had long considered these creatures sacred—the spirit guardians and promoters of grace, wisdom, and flow.
So stunning was the Loner’s silhouette as he passed overhead that Evelyne gasped into her air hose. Her gasp turned into bubbles that rose through the water and tickled the manta’s underside. The bubbles trickled upward into his gill slits. The Loner proceeded to cough the air through his branchial filaments and out of his own mouth. The burst of bubbles dislodged all kinds of stuck particles, sending the cleaners into an orgy of feeding. The ton and a half of cartilaginous fish circled back and slowed just inches above Evelyne’s head. Startled, she blew another burst of bubbles. The ray drew
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she felt no qualms about giving the behavior in front of her a name. The way the Loner toyed with her air bubbles was clear enough. Call it what the evidence suggested. Call it what it looked like: the giant bird-like fish was playing. Play was evolution’s way of building brains, and any creature with a brain as developed as a giant oceanic manta sure used it. If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play.
PLAYGROUND!
even fish played: She needed to tell the world this, before she died.
Of first grade after the incident with the flaming orange cap and coat, Rafi Young later remembered little except his teacher Miss Ebberson’s astonishment at how well he could read.
rafi young, orange coat his mom made him wear so he wouldn’t get lost walking to school; exceptional reader in school
Donnie Young
rafi’s father, donnie young
after his mother smuggled Rafi and his little sister away into a new life in a new neighborhood
“The water belongs to nobody. It’s no-man’s-land. Anytime you need it, it’s here.”
Rafi headed into the room’s corner and went back through the wardrobe, stumbling into the brute particulars of another, more forgiving and beautiful world.
A world,
like the lake, that was endless, open, and free, bel...
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That Christmas, Evil Gramma gave him a doll.
They kicked Rafi Young up into the third grade,
“YOUR SON NEEDS GLASSES,” Miss Rapp
“You just wearing those to get attention. Trying to be somebody special!”
