The fact he saw no waves was ominous, although he did not know it. Behind his house, closer to the beach, the sea had erected an escarpment of wreckage three stories tall and several miles long. It contained homes and parts of homes and rooftops that floated like the hulls of dismasted ships; it carried landaus, buggies, pianos, privies, red-plush portieres, prisms, photographs, wicker seat-bottoms, and of course corpses, hundreds of them. Perhaps thousands. It was so tall, so massive that it acted as a kind of seawall and absorbed the direct impact of the breakers lumbering off the Gulf. The
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