Free Freewill by Chris Lynch Page A

it.”
    â€œIt’s a mistake. It’s nothing. I’m supposed to be a pilot. I don’t, honestly, know what I’m doing.”
    â€œRight,” she says, backing away from it. “I forgot. It’s a beautiful accident then.”
    Could this be true, do you suppose? Could there be such a thing? Can accidents be beautiful? Wouldn’t you have to know what you were doing, in order to achieve something worthwhile? What do you think, Will? Do you think? What do you think? Is it all stupid blind accident? Is everybody fooling everybody else?
    â€œSummer Wind.” Summer wind could not possibly be an accident.
    No.
    You walk forward and as a habit barely remembered but obviously embedded, you make a little bow, a genuflection, before respectfully removing your contribution to a moment that has come and gone.
    â€œCan we keep walking?” you ask.
    â€œOf course we can,” she says.
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    The surf is crashing so hard you must defer to it. Angela speaks just as a wave has slapped down, and is hissing its retreat.
    â€œI don’t know why I don’t come here,” she says. “This is my kind of place.”
    You are about to respond but must wait for the next wave.
    â€œYa,” you say, looking out over it all, the silver sand, green water, sky. It is, in some elemental way, yours, isn’t it? Could you tell her that? Could you dare, knowing what she already thinks of you? Who could own this? Who could dare? But you do, don’t you. “It kind of stinks in the summer though, when people are here all the time and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
    It is the right moment, when the days are long enough to give you light into the early evening but the breezes are brisk enough to blow light souls off the beach. One old-timer is walking his arthritic retriever about two hundred yards away but it might as well be two hundred miles, with the sound and the whip of the wind.
    The sculpture lies in the sand between you. Like your baby, the two of you are watching over. Like it could make sand angels, if it had any arms.
    â€œPeople aren’t that bad,” Angela says, then hears herself, then starts laughing.
    â€œWhat?” you ask.
    â€œI can’t believe what I sound like. Here’s the real deal. There was a poet, who I can’t remember now but who I usedto like when I was in regular school studying, like poetry and stuff that regular school students study. She said something like . . . how was it . . . ?”
    Crash, and sizzle. The sea is the perfect soundtrack to this person before you.
    â€œ. . . oh right . . . I love humanity, it’s just people , make me want to puke.”
    Could this be it, your moment, your breakthrough? She is looking for it. She is looking into your uneducated face for recognition.
    And there you produce it. The smile. Could mean a lot of things though, couldn’t it? Doesn’t mean necessarily that you got the humor.
    Angela cannot sustain the patience to wait out this wave. “That,” she screams, “is the sorriest excuse for a grin I have ever seen.”
    There, the smile broadens. But my, the stuff that is so elemental for everybody else . . .
    The tide is at its highest. You know this. You know the tides, here, the times, the heights, without ever reading the little block buried on page twelve of the paper where they tell you such things. You just know.
    â€œSeriously though, why are you here?”
    She looks at you, at the sculpture, at the sky, at the water, at the sculpture, at you.
    â€œBecause you brought me here.”
    â€œSeriously though . . .”
    She stands up. She knows quite well what you mean. Folds her arms and gazes out at the water.
    Try to imagine standing there and not gazing at the water. Can you imagine, Will? Have you the power? To imagine it or to do it? Does anyone? The