CHAPTER TWO

His name was Remo and he bathed his body in the blue deeps off Florida's west coast. He moved with the slow, crisp snap of a muscled fin through the green plants and rocks where crabbers plucked delicacies for the rest of the nation. There had been a shark warning that morning, and most of the pleasure divers had decided to spend that day with gin and lime and stories about heroism which rose with the ascent of the sun and the decline of the gin in the clear glass bottles set on checkered tablecloths, as the drinkers washed down fresh crab and baked mullet in sweet butter sauce. Remo followed four divers with spear guns, fading in and out of their group, going ahead, falling behind, until the group stopped and pointed to him and made the signal for going up to the surface. The surface always looked so shiny from below. He accelerated up into it, like a porpoise, so that as he cut up into the thin air, the water dropped beneath him to his ankles, and at the apex of his thrust, it appeared as if he momentarily stood ankle deep in water. He came back down with a slapping splash of his arms that stopped his head from going under.

The divers broke the surface too.

Puffing and spitting water, they removed the mouthpieces that led to tanks of compressed air on their backs.

"Okay. We give up," said one. "Where's your air supply?"

"What?" said Remo.

"Your air supply."

"Same place as yours. In my lungs."

"But you've been under with us for twenty minutes."

"Yeah?" said Remo.

"So how do you breathe?"

"Oh, you don't. Not underwater," said Remo, and went back down, curving into the green-blue cool of the salt water. He watched the other divers come down in splashing, jerky, waving, energy-wasting motions, muscles that worked against themselves, breathing that had never been trained, minds so locked in what they perceived as the limits of the human body that even a thousand years of training would never get them to use a tenth of their strength.