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Cool October wind like a living thing squirms across your skin. On this dark beach, dead stars hang in their billions above the horizon while your flashlight skitters across damp, hard-packed shoresand. Chummily, Jim Healy slaps a folded nesting chart against your shoulder; then he’s pushing ahead, moving closer to the water. He and Edie Russel march south. Night surf sucks greedily at your boots as you follow.
“There...!”
The oblong of Healy’s light surges forward: almost thirty yards down the beach, wave-spittle drags back off a hard, curving shell. The big female struggles out of the surf’s grip, hauling two hundred pounds of reptile up the intertidal slope. You and the others pad forward in an elephant line; you’re conscious of the sand crunching under your soles.
But the female ignores you, slithering forward with a marathoner’s grim patience. Clear of the water now, her bulk leaves the sand smoothed down in a broad, snaking line. Healy arrives first, lurking in her blind spot. His flashlight beam narrowed to a white pearl of light, flashes curiously across her curving backside.
“Check for a tag,” Edie hisses, appearing at his elbow. But Healy’s already bent forward, holding his glasses so they don’t slip down his nose. His light finds the blue ocean-safe plastic tab fixed to the female’s front flipper next to a pebblish cluster of barnacles.
“Tee-double-oh, three-two-two.” He grins approvingly like the numbers mean anything to him.
Edie compares this against her database. The tablet screen’s seeping glow colors her severe triangular face like a photo negative. “She’s a loggerhead,” she reports tonelessly. “Twelve years old, eight recorded nests on this beach. Name, ‘Wanda’...”
Healy quips: “Well—we can’t name them all Shelley.”
Edie doesn’t glance up from the tablet. There’s no patience or hatred in her silence. She taps a few touch-keys, then locks the screen. “Mile Four-Thirteen,” she instructs Healy. “Mark the chart, and let’s keep going south before it gets much colder than this.”
Healy’s bearded face emerges from behind the nesting chart, now half-unfolded. “We’re not going to watch her lay?” He looks and sounds like a puppy who’s had its tail stepped on.
Edie’s chin wrestles in a yawn. “Digging the nest eats an hour all on its own. You want to bear witness to the miracle of life, watch a YouTube video. Or lay your own eggs.”
She hugs her black wool cardigan around her skinny shoulders and tracks back towards the pounding surf, the tablet stowed under one wiry arm. “
Team Seven’s coming through the other way to rope the nests off as the mothers leave,” she calls back to you and Healy. “We’ve got two more miles of beach to walk tonight.” She doesn’t even turn her head; this last item is directed at neither of you in particular or nobody at all.
Healy catches your eye. You shrug and follow Edie. She’s the only real pro there: the remaining two members of Turtle Team Six are greenhorn volunteers. Healy, you’re pretty sure, signed on to meet coeds. Listening to him grouch under his breath now, stomping along behind you after Edie, you can almost taste his disappointment, like salt on the wind.
To your left, lights from condos and beach hotels bleed up into the night. Opposite this looms a vast dark emptiness, out of which comes the roar of surf licking up the shoreline. You recall, briefly, snatching a flier off a lamppost on campus at Armistice College. Or maybe it was somewhere downtown. This image is only half-formed, half-congealed, less a memory than a shallow impression, like a footprint in hard, cold sand.
You don’t really remember why you’re there at all.
The next thirty minutes yield nothing but chapped lips and numb toes. Your flashlights crisscross the surf line, sometimes swinging up towards the dunes, hunting after a stealthy female who might’ve slipped past you or a night stroller trespassing near the nests previous surveyors already cordoned off with police tape. But you don’t spot so much as a ghost crab sprinting along the flats. The only noise is the sand under your boots and the wind and the surf’s hoarse, constant cough. The ocean is colored like night, reflecting leaden moonlight in trembling slivers.
The night sky is an ocean, the surf seems to whisper against the sand. Just as cold and as airless.
Without thinking, you numbly rejoin: “...the voyage was long and lonely...”
“What’s that?”
Edie doesn’t seem to have heard, but Healy twists to look at you, half-backward and slowing so as not to trip on the uneven sand slope. His eyes are half-masked by the glare of his glasses.
“Hand warmers,” you tell him, too quickly by a shade. “I was saying—hand warmers. The little pouches full of chemicals. Or some decent gloves that would make this tolerable.”
Your voice sticks like a rusted motor. But Healy only grins and slaps his arms in an X over his chest, trying to drive feeling into his fingers. “Yeah—it’s a real bitch. Isn’t it?” He half-turns back around to search for Edie in the dark. But she’s too far up the beach, and the wind’s going in the wrong direction, pushing right into your numb faces.
“She could stand a cup of soup, huh? Warm her up some?” Healy jerks a thumb at Edie. But you can’t think of a reply, so Healy turns again,
disappointed, and the silence returns. You listen to the surf murmuring against the sand, against the high shafts of your wading boots.
The night is an ocean. And the earth is the shore...
“Hey, wait a minute.” Healy twists again at the hips, one last attempt to engage. “Didn’t Miss Russel say Team Seven’s supposed to be coming up this way about now?”
He doesn’t see that Edie’s stopped. She’s got her flashlight hooded by her hand; Healy stumbles blind into her back, and you shunt him, moving all three of you like dominoes. Edie turns, and her wild white eyes silence Healy’s complaint on his lips. For a moment, she only stares at the two of you, those widened eyes darting from face to face.
Then strange excited energies collide in her voice: “Look down the beach. Just there...”
And she lifts her palm, uncovering her light.
For a second, you think it could be another female. But then the dark surf lifts away. It’s too flat, too sprawled. Edie’s flashlight skitters and jumps in her shaking hands. By that juddering illumination, you see the body lying half-in, half-out of the breaking waves. You see me.
The air seems to thrum. You reach me first, sprinting ahead before anyone else can speak, your beam caressing my nakedness. My ocean-tumbled skin, my mannequin face. The featureless valley that lies between my spread-eagled legs.
Then, the others are around you, gathering unsteadily on the slope. Healy crosses himself. Edie presses thin fingers over thin lips. I’m lying face-up. My blank eyes are full of night sky, full of dead stars. Somebody—not you, never you, one of the others—is saying “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit...” over and over without stopping for breath. You keep your cool, even though when you look at me, you feel your skin wriggle all over like it’s too loose, flapping in the wind.
“He’s not Turtle Watch,” Edie’s saying, to which Healy protests:
“He’s fucking naked.” He shifts from one foot to the other. “Where the fuck are his clothes?”
“Anybody know him?” Edie continues as if Healy hadn’t spoken.
All Healy can say is, “Where the fuck’s his junk?”
“We should call somebody,” you say. But your voice is hot leather on bare flesh.
Finally, somebody thinks to check for a pulse. It’s Edie collapsing on her knees and pushing two fingers against the artery under my chin. I feel her touch—cold, but not as cold as the water pawing at my bare feet. “Nothing,” she says. “He feels... I don’t know. Like...”
“Holy shit,” Healy murmurs again. He finishes cleaning his glasses and turns his gaze on you, his eyes lost behind the lenses’ glare. “You know, he almost... He almost looks like...”
You and I share a flash of gratitude when Edie interrupts: “What the hell is this?” Her probing fingers find the wound at last, the slightest split in the skin that travels from the hollow of my throat to the fork of my groin. It almost splits me in two.
“Are you seeing this?” Edie says. You are. And you see that her fingers, curious and prodding, have opened the wound slightly, splitting the seam into a yawn.
You can imagine, viscerally, the writhing, rubbery feeling when my first skin peels away.
It comes off, not in flecks or scales or pulled-pork shreds, but in one solid piece. With a tacky sucking sound, a suction cup pulling off a wet shower wall. It’s like sorcery—as though Edie had pulled some hidden zipper or string and somehow magicked away the tear-away clothes that were—are—my flesh. What lies beneath makes you all gape. The second skin under the first is smooth and unblemished instead of mottled and bruised, but it still possesses all the same features as what came before. The face, open-staring eyes and all, is identical. Is mine, is ours.
Edie gags, turning in time to retch a hot, thin stream of gruel into the sand behind her; Healy mouths something profane and blasphemous but makes no sound. You stare and stare and stare.
I lie beside myself, empty and full. The first skin has a stiff structure: it doesn’t collapse under its own weight. It’s like a hollow carving, a plastic Easter egg body. I feel your eyes. I know you see it, even before the others. The second seam, nearly invisible under your flashlight. It splits me again, throat to groin. You don’t want to do it, not consciously. But something makes you kneel next to Edie, like Thomas at the wounds of Christ...
Edie wipes her mouth and shouts your name, thinking it might shock you to reason. But you hear her voice as though she’s talking through cotton, hardly feeling her shaking your shoulder. You pry me apart: a second
skin slips free, flopping empty beside the first. Already, your fingers find the seam again, opening me again, finding new layers and flesh and pulsing warmth beneath.
Four more layers, four more skins are freed by the time they haul you away. Healy’s stronger; his hands under your right arm nearly wrench the limb from its joint. Your skin squirms in protest; when they dump you on the cold sand, you stare up at them dumbly, surrounded by pieces of me.
“What the shit was that?” Healy’s panting: you imagine his face flushed, his lips buzzing.
Eide unclips her walkie-talkie from her belt and holds it in front of shivering lips. “Base, this is Turtle Team Six. We’ve got...” Her fingers release the button before she finishes—a cough of static swallows the last lucid thought she’ll ever have. “Oh, God.”
My skins, hollow husks all, have risen to their feet. I’m a ring of pale smooth pelts, with eyes full of night sky, full of long-dead stars, all staring intently at her. She can’t make herself scream. To scream would acknowledge the horror, the data her own eyes are feeding her brain. So she only breathes quick and shallow, turning from one slack, empty face to the next. She turns to you just as the hard, heavy butt of your flashlight crashes against her skull.
You cut Healy’s shout of outrage off at the source. He, too, falls limp on the sand.
Sea turtles have some of the largest brains in the reptile kingdom. But they are still creatures of habit. Instincts developed over millions of years of evolution make them slaves. Year after year, they travel the same routes in the ocean; they return to the same beaches to spawn. Edie told this to you long ago, on a shuttle between campus and the beach access. ...
