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bottom and the toadstool was no longer visible from here. With a second’s tingling excitement in his groin he knew now more than ever that, eventually, he would come back here and descend into that invisibility and sitting on that same toadstool looking up, masturbate himself. Play with himself, he added, in the jargon of his parents. Then he swam on.
    Ahead of him Bonham had turned the corner into an alcove-cum-tunnel almost at the ceiling of the cavern and was waiting for him. Ahead at the end of it was sunlight, and together in this more than comfortably wide space they swam toward it, then through it and back into the world.
    But the dive was still not over. Emotionally, it was, perhaps; but they still had to get back to the boat. Bonham did not even bother to surface and look around but (he really did know this area like his backyard) struck off up and over the coral hillock they had just left the insides of, and which came to within less than ten feet of the surface. Grant could not see boat or anchorline ahead, but Bonham was obviously heading straight for them. Below them as they swam were the tangled, trashy staghorn-coral beds—the brown ones, their hunks of old fishing line caught here and there, rusting beer-cans in the low spots—which marked the hillock’s crest. But now after the cave all that was boring. It was hard to believe they had been inside this hill, and that it was damned near entirely hollow. Grant’s sadness at leaving it—out here in the sunlit, brightly coral-studded, open water—was slowly turning into a wild kind of elation. Above him the surface was only a few feet away, and every now and then—as in some silvered but unsolid mirror—he could see himself or Bonham, grossly distorted, reflected back from the underside of it as it moved. His air, without his pulling of the reserve lever but getting harder and harder to draw, lasted just exactly to the side of the boat. At the boat he had a bad moment when, trying to shuck out of his tank straps and pass the lung up to Ali, he went under gulping seawater and almost choked; but then he was over the side and in the boat safe from sharks, barracuda, Portuguese men-o’-war, the bends, air embolism, busted eardrums, and mechanical lung failure. Why the hell had Bonham tried to make it seem so hard? His elation continued to grow.
    Behind him Bonham handed up his own lung easily and smoothly, moved his bulk smoothly up the little ladder and over the side and, dripping wet, started the motor. Ali ran forward to haul in the anchor. Before Grant could get himself out of Ali’s clinging wet shirt Bonham had sold him, the diver and his helper were headed back to shore full throttle like two men going home from the office, Bonham at the wheel and Ali dismantling the lungs. In the west the sun was still quite a few yards above the big mountain that jutted out into the sea.
    Grant’s new elation lasted all the way back to shore, and longer. It lasted through the Yacht Club and then to Bonham’s shop in the dirty old station-wagon, where they left Ali. It lasted through all the drinking and eating they two did at Bonham’s favorite bar after that. It lasted, in fact, until around two-thirty in the morning, when he walked half-drunkenly up the path to the villa where his ‘mistress’ and her husband were staying, to go to bed. Then it completely disappeared, when he discovered his ‘mistress’ was still up.
    In the boat he had been shaking and chattering uncontrollably as he rubbed himself down with the towel Bonham thoughtfully handed him from the wheel. He had not felt unduly cold ‘downstairs’, as Bonham called it, but up here in the air and speed-induced breeze he was freezing. When he stepped to the gunwale of the rolling cockpit after discovering he had to piss, his penis—so counter to the half-erection he had had down below—was shrunk up so from his cold chill that he had to search for it in his pubic hair and stretch it out by