How I met Tyler was I went to a nude beach.
This was the very end of summer, and I was asleep.
Tyler was naked and sweating, gritty with sand, his hair wet and stringy, hanging in his face.
Tyler had been around before we met.
Tyler was pulling driftwood logs out of the surf and dragging them up the beach.
In the wet sand, he’d already planted a half circle of logs so they stood a few inches apart and as tall as his eyes. There were four logs, and when I woke up, I watched Tyler pull a fifth log up the beach. Tyler dug a hole under one end of the log, then lifted the other end until the log slid into the hole and stood there at a slight angle.
You wake up at the beach.
We were the only people on the beach.
With a stick, Tyler drew a straight line in the sand several feet away. Tyler went back to straighten the log by stamping sand around its base.
I was the only person watching this.
Tyler called over, “Do you know what time it is?”
I always wear a watch,
“Do you know what time it is?”
I asked, where?
“Right here,” Tyler said. “Right now.”
It was 4:06 P.M.
After a while, Tyler sat cross-legged in the shadow of the standing logs. Tyler sat for a few minutes, got up and took a swim, pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, and started to leave.
I had to ask.
I had to know what Tyler was doing while I was asleep.
If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?
I asked if Tyler was an artist.
Tyler shrugged and showed me how the five standing logs were wider at the base. Tyler showed me the line he’d drawn in the sand, and how he’d used the line to gauge the shadow cast by each log.
Sometimes, you wake up and have to ask where you are.
What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand. Only now the fingers were Nosferatu-long and the thumb was too short, but he said how at exactly four-thirty the hand was perfect.
The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute Tyler had sat in the palm of a perfection he’d created himself.
You wake up, and you’re nowhere.
One minute was enough Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
You wake up, and that’s enough
