I reached for what should have been there, what I needed to do my business....

Chapter One

The afternoon I fell into the spring, I was wearing my good suit. Navy blue, medium-weight wool, the one I kept for client meetings. I'd driven out along the Tamiami Trail because the meetings were done and I had three hours to kill before dinner, and the Everglades were right there, flat and enormous and unlike anything in Rockford, Illinois, where I'd spent the last eleven years of my life.

I’d rented one of the new Buicks, next year’s model, a ’59, and drove out to find some nature,

I found the spring the way you find things when you're not looking -- following a path that went from gravel to dirt to something that might have been a path or might have been a suggestion, until I pushed through a stand of cypress and there it was. A pool maybe thirty feet across, the water the color of pale jade, perfectly still except for a slow upwelling at the center where whatever fed it came up from underground. No sign. No marker. Just water in the late afternoon light.

I should have gone back to the car.

I was trying to get a closer look at something on the far bank -- a bird, maybe, or the shadow of a bird -- when my left shoe found a patch of wet limestone and I went in. Not gracefully. Fully, suddenly, completely -- suit and tie and the good shoes I'd had resoled twice and the billfold in my breast pocket with the rental car agreement folded inside. Up to my neck in a Florida spring at four-thirty in the afternoon.

The water was warm. Warmer than I expected, and clear enough that I could see my hands in front of me, the bubbles rising from the upwelling at the center, the pale sandy bottom. I was not hurt. I was extremely wet, and the suit was ruined, and I pulled myself out along the bank and stood dripping in the late sun and looked at the spring, which looked back at me with complete indifference.

I drove back to the motel with the windows down, hoping to dry out before I had to walk through the lobby.

I didn't think about the spring again. I had dinner at the diner next door -- a patty melt and coffee and a piece of pie that was better than it had any right to be -- and I went back to my room and hung the suit in the bathroom to dry and went to bed.

* * *

The first thing I noticed, at something like three in the morning, was that I needed the bathroom. This was not unusual. I was thirty-eight years old and had been drinking coffee since six in the morning, and this was simply a fact about being thirty-eight years old and drinking that much coffee.

I got up. Crossed the dark room, found the bathroom, did not turn on the light, but stood there in the darkness in front of the bowl. I reached for what should have been there, what I needed to do my business.

It wasn't there.

I went back to bed.

I had clearly been dreaming. The mind did strange things in unfamiliar motel rooms. I would feel more like myself in the morning. I ignored the feeling of a full bladder and went back to sleep, feeling even more tired than I had when I came back to the motel, soaking wet in my medium-weight worsted Midwestern suit.

I lay in the dark and the air conditioner hummed and somewhere outside a Florida night bird delivered an opinion about something, and I drifted back toward sleep, and my hand moved in a half-asleep, completely automatic way across my own chest….

I was awake.

I lay very still.

I moved my hand again, deliberately this time. One side. The other side.

Then I did what I'd done in the bathroom -- the inventory, the check -- slow and careful, hoping very much to be wrong.

I was not wrong.

The sound that came out of me was not quite a scream. The walls in these motels are thin, and there were sleeping strangers on either side, and some professional instinct compressed it before it escaped fully, so what came out was closer to a very controlled, very emphatic exhalation. The sound of a person who has just received information that exceeds the available categories.

I lay there in the dark and thought: did I hit my head? I thought: have I been poisoned? I thought, because it was 1958 and I was a midwestern American and this was the kind of thing you thought: have the Russians done something?

Then the practical part of my brain, the part that closes equipment deals and reads balance sheets and gets things done, took the wheel.

I had a meeting at nine o'clock.

I sat up and turned on the bedside lamp. I put my arm across my chest. They were still there. Large, soft, smooth…things that had no business being on the chest of a heavy equipment salesman from Rockford, Ill.

The room looked the same. The suitcase on the luggage stand, the navy suit drying in the bathroom, my Braves cap on the nightstand. Everything exactly where I'd left it. I looked at my hands in the lamplight, turned them over, and they were hands I didn't recognize -- smaller, the fingers longer and more tapered, no calluses on the palms.

I got up and went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror for a long time.

The face looking back was mine and wasn't. The bones were there -- the structure, something around the eyes that I knew. But everything had shifted, softened. The jaw rounded, the brow lighter, the chin softened, the lines gone. A face with my face inside it, the way a photograph of a relative will sometimes contain a whole family history in one set of cheekbones. My hair was still the duck-butt I'd been wearing since 1951. It looked ridiculous above the woman’s face I was wearing.

I had been about five-foot-eleven. I measured myself against the door frame. I decided that I couldn’t be more than about five-foot-six, which was five inches shorter than I'd been yesterday. I was considerably lighter. I had, as previously established, a new configuration above the waist and a very different one below it. The suit in the bathroom was not going to fit. The pants were not going to fit. The shoes were not going to fit.

I sat down on the edge of the bathtub.

I had a meeting at nine o'clock to sell earthmovers to the Army Corps of Engineers, and I had nothing to wear, nothing to say. Thinking about those things did not produce any useful result.

First things first. I tried to make a long-distance call to Rockford -- my boss Walt, who would know what to do—but the instructions beside the phone on how to make a long-distance call defeated me. They made no sense at all. Besides, it was four in the morning Florida time, three in the morning Central, and the phone would ring twelve times in an empty office, so I hung up and sat in the vinyl chair by the window and looked at the parking lot.

The rental Buick parked under the Silver Springs Motel sign accused me of having abandoned it. Across the four-lane highway, a yellow-and-red neon Waffle Barn sign promised greasy meats and fluffy baked goods. The gravel lot had three semi-trucks in it.

My stomach rumbled. Another accuser.

I tried to get dressed. My briefs refused to brief me, and I discarded them into the trash receptacle beside the toilet. My pants were miles too long, tight across the seat and thighs and hugely unfit at the waist. I rolled the cuffs up so I wouldn’t be stepping on them. My shirt was too wide for my shoulders and hung oddly loose over my…breasts.

I tried stuffing my socks into the toes of my dress shoes to make them stay on my smaller feet. Even with the laces pulled as tight as my newly tiny hands could, the danger existed that I would simply walk out of my shoes. The strategy worked no better with the canvas deck shoes I’d packed in case someone offered me a boat ride.

I put my Milwaukee Braves cap on to hide the silly-looking duck-butt haircut.

Then I was out the door before I decided to go. The window of the motel office did not show a light, and I headed for the highway, stepping carefully to keep my shoes on my feet.

* * *

The air outside was warm and close, the sky doing something pink and extraordinary over the palm trees, and I was wearing the least wrong combination of my clothes -- the pants cinched to a belt hole I'd never used, the shirt enormous across the shoulders and problematic in one specific area, the canvas deck shoes which were too large but at least flexible. The Braves cap sat on my head loosely, where before it had been tight.

I stepped off the curb and started across the highway.

The truck came from my left, big and loaded, doing highway speed, and it didn't slow down -- it stopped, or nearly, and the air horn blast was long and appreciative, and the driver had his arm out the window and a grin I could see from the center line.

I stood in the headlights.

Thirty-eight years as a man, and I knew exactly what that air horn meant. I'd heard it directed at women from trucks like this one, understood the grammar of it, always filed it away as background noise belonging to a world I moved through without being part of.

I stood there and felt it land on me, and something moved through me that I was absolutely not going to examine before breakfast.

I gave the driver a small nod and a weak smile and scurried the rest of the way to the Waffle Barn. Weirdly certain that someone was looking at my ass.

* * *

The waitress’s name tag identified her as Vonzell. She had the kind of face that had seen everything come through a highway diner at four in the morning. She pointed me at the counter without a word, poured coffee without being asked, and put a laminated menu in front of me.

The coffee was terrible. I put three sugars and a container of cream in it, and it was still terrible. I drank half of it and let it argue with my stomach.

The hunger that had been patient was done with that. “Sirloin,” I said. “Two eggs, over easy. Biscuits. Grits. Bacon. Sliced tomatoes.” My voice sounded odd, as if it came from my face instead of my chest.

Vonzell's pencil paused.

“Hungry this morning,” she said. Not a question.

“Yes, ma'am,” said a voice that was mine and wasn't. Not so deep as before, almost whiskey rough, but more bourbon than rye.

*

From the kitchen, I heard the sound of the grill come alive.

I ate most of the steak, all of the eggs, the tomatoes and the biscuit. The grits I had always wanted to try. They were good with butter and salt, better than hashbrowns, I decided. I managed two pieces of bacon before the hunger finally relented.

Vonzell refilled the coffee. “You're up early,” she said. “You look like you're wearing your old man's shirt.”

“I had a funny night,” I said. “I went swimming. Something in the water disagreed with me.” I stopped talking. She'll think I'm crazy, I decided. My story was something out of an Alfred Hitchcock show.

“Water? Where?” Vonzell asked.

“Out in the Glades. There was a spring.” I didn’t want to talk about it, but Vonzell had questions.

She set the coffee pot down. “One of those old Spanish springs?”

“I dunno,” I said.

She called back toward the kitchen. “Johnny. You remember what Darlene said about her cousin Beaumont?”

“Which thing,” said a voice from the grill.

“The spring, the thing she said about Beaumont falling in the spring.”

A pause. “Ah, Darlene has told some bigger ones than that. Mind that time she claimed Jimmy Stewart left her a twenty-dollar tip?”

“He seems like he would be a good tipper,” Vonzell said. She leaned on the counter. “Beaumont went into one of those springs three years ago. Came out two inches taller and his trick knee cleared up entirely.”

“That's not quite what happened to me,” I said. Understatement.

“No,” she agreed, looking me over with calm, professional assessment. “I can see that.” What did she think she saw, I wondered.

From the kitchen, to the grill, “Which spring was it?”

“I don't know,” I said. “It wasn't marked.”

* * *

I needed the bathroom. I headed left by thirty-eight years of habit, and Johnny said, quietly, “other one, miss,” and I stopped and went right.

The bathroom had a single bare bulb and a mirror that had been honest with a lot of people. I stood in front of it in the fluorescent hum and looked at myself properly for the first time, in real light, with enough time.

The face was mine and wasn't. The bones were there, something in the eyes entirely and unmistakably still Guy Wendell of Rockford, Illinois. But the jaw was rounded, the brow softer, all of it redistributed into something that looked like the sister I'd never had. The shirt hung off my shoulders and didn’t work right elsewhere. My hands, when I raised them, were the wrong hands.

And the hair. The red-blonde duck-butt, faithful and unchanged, sitting on top of a face that could no longer keep any of its promises.

I don't know why it was the hair that did it. But something loosened and I cried for a few minutes in the Waffle Barn bathroom, quietly, because the walls were thin and Vonzell and Johnny were right outside, and Guy Wendell had never been a man who cried where people could hear him.

I ran the cold water. Washed my face twice. Put the Braves cap back on.

Went back out.

Vonzell had fresh coffee waiting and didn't say a word about my eyes.