SHARK REEF

I crawl out of bed, yawning with my whole torso as I pull on my faded red bathrobe. I am twenty-eight years old and living alone in an apartment in Beaverton, Oregon. The complex is nicer than I could have afforded in the Bay Area, with a pool and gymnasium. I still need to find a job if I want to keep it.

On the first day of this year, I purchased a pair of midnight shoes. These are no island shoes, no hippies-take-‘em-off-at-the-door-protect-the-carpet shoes, chores-to-do shoes, no hitch-to-town-slipper, no drying-off-after-the-beach clog. No, these are the kind of shoes meant to make noise on urban concrete.

Is it worth it, leaving the island? No. Emphatically no. If you can’t find what you need on the island, which means if you can’t find it at the grocery store, the drugstore, the hardware store, the consignment furniture store, the consignment clothing boutique, a yard sale or, better yet, at the Exchange, where even rich people poke around in garbage, you don’t need it. Because I promise

nside the white mini bus. Twelve seats, all facing Dakar’s cacophony of human wanderings, roadside. Lemons, oranges, bananas. Cloth dolls and fabric passport-purses balanced in flat baskets on heads of moving women swathed in vibrant prints. Upholstered sofas wrapped in plastic for outside sales. Pens of goats awaiting slaughter—Mrs. Camara’s dinner. Fathers, mothers,

A washed-out sign leaning into a ditch informed me I was “Entering Whiting.” I was driving north on Vermont Route 30. The year was 1992. Clapboard farmhouses and towering feed silos dotted the sprawling fields. The horizon burned in brilliant blotches of red and