Farrell was a good swimmer, for Ben had taught him, in the old days, all that a dolphin can actually tell anyone about moving in the water. He kept decently even with Ben for five laps, began to wallow a bit on the sixth, and hauled out to sit with his legs dangling and watch his friend working up and down the pool, arms reaping the water in short, flat slashes, head turning only slightly to breathe. Yet it struck Farrell strangely that once or twice Ben lost the water altogether, flailing and gasping in a moment of distorting terror. Farrell decided that it was one of the mysterious games Ben liked to play alone, for each time he caught his stroke immediately and swam on as powerfully as ever. After the second time, he climbed out at the far end of the pool and came around to Farrell, shaking himself dry.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was meant to be a compliment, actually. You were always so aware of loss—you were missing things before it was fashionable, before whales and old people were in. I remember, you used to know whenever anything anywhere got paved over, or torn down, or became extinct. It wasn’t nostalgia, it was mourning. You still doing that?”

Farrell shrugged. “Sort of. Sort of not. I’m getting a little old to go around keeping track of my defeats.”

“It’s an honorable calling.” They sat by the pool, talking quietly, while jets of water from the inlets thumped against their hanging legs and lights fluttered in the Avicenna hills beyond the small wired windows. Ben asked if Farrell had been meeting old acquaintances, and Farrell said, “It’s a little scary. Half the people I know are still striding around Parnell, taking anthropology classes and making the parties. They hang in different coffeehouses now, but it’s the same faces. I can’t go into that new place, the South Forty, without running into somebody who wants me to come over to the house and play Fishing Blues.”