 The picture is finished. The clouds came last, the sea came first. The horizon line was soothingly straight, just as the eye likes it. Then the islands, a little listless, alone, present from before they were ever seen. Before they were a resting point for the eye, a harbor for thoughts and loss. Before they were placed in the picture, they were present, in the sea and water, in the gleam of a sunset. In storm and drought, they were the anchor in a story made of pebbles and dirt and earth, before sight and speech, enviably old. She was 101 when she saw him coming out of the water, his shirt clinging to his chest like Mr. Darcy in the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. She forgot for a moment her advanced age and supposed wisdom, as her tongue crept into crevices in her mouth where her teeth used to be. She swallowed deeply as he waited towards the shore. His long tussled hair streaked across his shirt. She held him in her sight, grasping the fleeting moment, him waist high in waves, a soul without a past or future. The moment hung like a Christmas ornament, a bobble round and glistening. She reached for it. I am, he said, I am, and she stopped his mouth with her hand. We can, she said, talk once you have eaten. Would you like an apple? But his brow furrowed as he kissed her hand. He was wise enough to recognize a benefactor and frightened enough to do as he was asked. He said nothing and the bobble lowered itself as the sun lay down and turned itself into the ocean. I am, he said, clearing his throat. I am, she held her arm up again firmly, palm flat in the air, a universal sign for hell no. Her other arm cradled a blanket and a pillow for his head, which she threw down and stormed out as though she didn't care because vanity is undeterred by age and some small part of her had watched television and remembered what it was to play hard to get. And so it began, first kiss at sunrise, his hands strong against her fossil sides. Her body uplifted, her clothes undone. He would pick up, pick her up in his arms and hold her as though she was an ornament, a precious thing. Removing eye from his speech, he learned to refer to himself as himself. Exising past and future tense, they lived like this in the tremor of the present. He built things, of course, a canoe, a small cabin, a roof, a deck. It was not that she didn't worry when she bent over the nets to pick up a quivering fish. She would see her reflection and recoil. Time had not stopped. It would not stop. In moments of grief, she would shriek at her reflection. Stop, just stop it, stop it. Berating endlessness for the fact of its existence. Why, she thought, does one not become more beautiful with age? It was a cruelty that wisdom should be so unattractive. An evolutionary failure. Why, she thought, was all the gain of experience, all wisdom rendered invisible by her white hair and toothlessness. But as she saw him casting nets into the sea and felt her own longing, she doubted her own wisdom. He had not known a love as great as this. It broke his heart as it rebuilt it. He held her hand patiently. He does not say she saved him, but she knows. She also knows there is something else which they have not discussed. The current that brought him there, pulling him another way. The blue streaking across her heart, breaking it and mending it all at once. Tugs in all directions. It's permanence, a strange and endless lie. What is the matter, she said, summoning cheer, because that is the question we ask when something is both different and sad inside a loved one. Nothing, he said, except a kind of electric blue. So when he walked into her dorm room that day, first day of college, dragging a duffel bag full of books, his hair falling over his eyes, his smile crooked and worn, and much too old for his 21 years, she felt a tug in her gut, like a knot was coming undone. Hi, she said, tucking away a strand of hair. I am, he said, and then paused correcting himself. It doesn't matter. No one calls me by my real name anyway. You'll soon make up one for me. And there it was, the time, the late afternoon, him standing too long at her door, the sun streaking the floor, and the grim plasterboard on the wall. His cell phone rang a Christmas tune, even though it was early September. Its tinny ring brought to mind a shiny bobble hanging on the Christmas tree at home, the only gold shimmer in a sea of red and blue ornaments. I'd like, she said, but he had gone, wandering into the hallway that stretched evenly before and backwards, the doorway, a hinge to the past and future. An email in 2001. She opened it without the ceremony or emotion of opening a letter. Technology, she thought, had rendered letters soulless. It was told impersonally in the third person by someone hired to tell the story of love, he was getting married. They met, it reported cheerfully, when he was doing research and she too was doing research and they found one another terribly interesting. It is finished, she thought, and looked out of the window, out into the horizon where the sea was having a party she was not invited to. Hell no, she thought, and then wondered about her choice of words. The current had pulled her to a different shore where language was bigger and more important than life. She made important decisions about semantics daily. As a professor of linguistics, she specialized in the future tense in Slavic languages. Her department had made her chair. Right now she was immersed in Hungarian grammar, arguing the finer points of the origins of the future with her colleagues who all like her feared losing their jobs in a competitive marketplace. You know what the economy is like. So when someone else proposed on her 43rd birthday, a colleague who she had come to know at faculty parties over the years, she knew it was not love. She was much younger than him and did not enjoy Mahler or coffee or crosswords and in her own way considered contemporary culture to be inauthentic and dead. The classics were much more alive than the present. The epic stories, the Mahabharat, the Greeks, Odin, the others were much more interesting than her bland friends, their eyes glazed against the storm of social media. Terrorized by their cell phones, her colleagues walked the halls zombie like never pausing in any threshold, never halting in between to find themselves. Classical problems seemed a great deal more urgent than anything. Anyone living said or did. Yes, she said to him, looking at the doorway and the waves receded, the horizon sank as though frightened by her. The future tense, she had said famously, publicly, multiple times was a semantic manufacturing, absent entirely in some Indo-European languages. It was, she said, pushing her glasses up her nose, a way to order endlessness, a gesture of control. She did not add it was therefore a farce she did not wish to participate in. That would have been too strong, too personal, too unacademic. Children do not exist, she thought. There are only women and the women before them and the moment where they fell in love or didn't. There was only fate or choice if you had the luxury or didn't. And so when on her sabbatical in Budapest, she felt a kick in her stomach, she paid no attention at first because she and her husband had been apart for many months, connecting only on Skype, on weekends. But she felt the kick again and the doctor's hand firm on her belly. They told themselves it was a 24-hour layover they had in Prague, where he had given her a gift, a box set of Mahler's symphonies, to enjoy for many lifetimes. And they had chosen Prosecco over more expensive champagne and had fallen asleep almost certainly without making love. So when her waters broke, it provoked a serious inquiry in her mind, one that was to take up many years, as to the possibility of intellectual or mental conception, rather than a physical one. Because there had, you know, been no one else. And then he arrived wailing out of the ocean between her legs. She felt a twinge of familiarity at his cry and a tugging in her gut like a familiar current. Her husband was overjoyed. A son would be easier, he confided, less fraught. He thought, looking at his shipwrecked wife, grief will not settle in his bones in quite the same way as it does with women. And her grandson was a runner and her great-grandson lay in his cot, cooing at the star-shaped mobile. There was a quiet hush in her soul. And in the quiet she lay there running her mind over the years, the past became a cushion. It yielded beautifully and lay itself bare like an oyster trembling in its shell. Someone is here to see you, says the nurse. Oh, a visitor, I say that's kind. A young man with a tape recorder here to ask some questions I think about your life. Tell him to read my books, there's nothing to tell. I wrote what I could write. I was primarily concerned with the future tense and its absence. But then this young man sits down and he takes my hand and says the story is not finished. The waves have taken me out to see many times, I think, but don't say. I find this whole conception thing super fascinating, says the young man, his eyes shining. That's because I say to him, you'll never have to carry a child yourself. For me, it wasn't easy. I am, he said, and kissed my hand. Take me back to the islands where the picture was drawn. My feet are like hooves, my skin like leather. I'm wearing time these days on my feet, like women wear shoes. I didn't get that, he said, shit, can we start over? And it does somehow time itself rolling around in the ocean like a baby elephant. Could we begin again? Tell the story, he says, tell it was like it was never written. It isn't written. Time is fraying at the edges, burning grief like sun burns fog. The picture, I think, is finished. The clouds came last. The sea came first. The horizon lines stretched soothingly. Then these islands a little listless alone, present from before they were ever seen or held in vision, before they were a resting point for the eye, a harbor for thoughts and loss before they were placed in the picture they were present in the sea, in the water, in the gleam of a sunset, in storm and drought. They were the anchor in a story made of pebbles and dirt and earth before sight and speech. Enviably old, I begin again. I cross into the current, I walk into the sea. I am, I say, I am older than this. This story, myself, I am. Thank you.