Yes, anything is possible, I texted back. I can dive for you.

I left my promises and my proposals vague. I believed in what I did to an extent, and I had to sound confident, a silly word. The winter beaches were the best, mostly empty, and I went to them looking first.

Every object on the beach seemed like it might have been Matthew’s, but most was just trash. I’d been given a list of his belongings, and I didn’t think of it as a scavenger hunt, because I would have lost every time. I got the jobs by scouring the flyers along the boardwalks, this one a new construction meant to look old. Most of the flyers were torn or faded, difficult to decipher: weird cartoons, cryptic political messages, tear-offs with phone numbers. One, my favorite, requested a secret delivered to 1-863-555-0156. I ripped it off and tried to think of one, nothing and everything a secret inside my roiling diver brain.

I called and said into the recording: Atlantic, Pacific, Rock Mills, Tomales Bay, Russian River. I listed each body of water I could until I got disconnected.

On the beach, there was a pile of plastic shovels and buckets at the end of the boardwalk, where construction had stalled. A complicated shelter of propped up sticks. Small birds who slept while standing on one leg, facing the darkening sky. And me. I kept walking. It was a strange beach here, the tide always coming in. I swear I checked the charts, and they were always wrong. A cluster of rocks on the far north end always inspired me to push my luck. I waited, ran. There were places to get caught, to drown. There were helicopter rescues.

I’d been given three days by Matthew’s family, and this was the third. So far, I was empty handed. The thing they were looking for, in particular, was a bracelet that they were sure he’d been wearing, a thing of value. It was all they wanted. I couldn’t tell if their request was sentimental or financial, and it wasn’t up to me to decide. The photos they gave me showed a handsome, dour boy. I wouldn’t be finding him of course; I don’t know why they wanted me to know what he looked like. I’d been in love with a boy like him once; we’d argued about feminism and voting, and who deserved to die.

The currents were not in my favor; I always made that clear. Matthew had jumped from the bridge to the south or crashed while hang gliding or some other cliffside accident of which there were more and more these days. I didn’t need to know that part. My anxiety, though I didn’t call it that, kept me away from those edges myself. It was only diving where I took my risks. They were controlled ones, and only because I had to. It’s funny how you get good at a thing by accident, and then, after a while, it’s all you can do.

To comfort the families and to set expectations, I told them about the ocean currents. One, called affectionately “the conveyer belt” by divers, was driven by temperature and salinity—a deep, slow river far below where any of us went. The conveyer belt took 1,000 years to complete a cycle. Imagine waiting that long for the thing you were waiting for to circle back around again. I felt I had been.

During the day, I stood at the highest part of the dunes and looked at the splotches of green in the water. I stood back the distance of my own height, as if I would fall directly, face first, forward and remain safe.

On the third day, the rain had stopped, and so I walked down to the beach and watched the sun set, which I liked to do before I dove. I got my bearings that way. If someone disappeared, as Matthew had done, it is more likely to be foul play if they were not from the place where they disappeared. I am not sure if that is right. You must check your sources these days. People kept disappearing from places I had stayed safely in myself. This boardwalk itself, the moon a little shard of bone, a way it had been described before. “So beautiful!” little girls shrieked as their mothers held them in their arms. Others went into the water to swim and did not reappear again. Many of us were not being looked for. I wasn’t, and it made me feel like a layer upon a layer, a shadow of something against a bare wall, beholden to the light behind me.

I dove at night, kept the competition at bay. From the shore, I could see the headlights of people who’d stopped their cars on their drive up the hill to take a photo. It was that kind of place. Still, even after all that had happened, all that had burned down inland, none of us could believe the view.  

Later, the rain started again, but more torrential, and I went back to my room to wait it out. I was renting a room at the Sandpiper. I had to crawl through the chain-link to get to the beach. There was never a lifeguard anymore. Surfers still went out at sunset, even in the cold. Everything looked like a body out in the water and sometimes was. On the second night, a dog had emerged from the waves, just walked right out, easy as you please. I wouldn’t say this aloud, but I wondered if the girl who’d disappeared had turned into this creature, and I stopped worrying about her. I often wanted an entirely new form myself.

As the sun set, I took photos where the sky reflected on the wet sand. This was proof; I tried! I texted Matthew’s family the sky reflecting on the wet sand to let them know I was here, but no one responded.

Sometimes the beauty of the world was a rebuke, other times a solace. When it got really windy, like tonight, the beach emptied out earlier, and then I felt as if I knew something no one else did. Some people want to live so much, and then others don’t. I think often of the time before I was born. It makes something deep inside me turn over and sizzle a bit, but it’s too far away to grasp, and so I let it go. But I understand, I do, the curiosity about not existing.

When I was young, I bought a camera and learned how far to open the aperture and how to tilt it toward the snarl of upturned eucalyptus so that it would be a little bit darker when it got developed. It’s incredible the things a person can forget. I lost the lens cap, the strap. I forget which lover went with me to the camera shop. There haven’t been that many; I loved almost all of them terribly.

Alone on the beach, I put on my wetsuit and left my sweater, dress, and sneakers in an inconspicuous pile on the sand. I walked into the surf. The water was cold, but I moved fast. There was an art to going fast enough to not get scared, but slow enough to not startle your system.

I thought about balance a lot on these thankless jobs. There were all these odd, beautiful things: driftwood, egrets, empty lifeguard stands, expensive restaurants where they have so much caviar to spare they just put a big bowl of it in front of you when you order oysters. Many nights I do that with all the money I get from this thankless and tiring work. But what else would I do? No one even knew I was here except my clients. I love the restaurant here. I ask for extra croutons, doused in oil and hard, sharp cheese. I stay until I am the only one on the deck, and the servers have tilted all the empty chairs toward the tables.

I dove under the first wave and then the second. I’ve gotten leaner, faster. You have to go deep enough or you get a bit pummeled. I’m tough in certain ways and not in others, but everyone is like that. There are parts of the brain shaped like seahorses. We can’t remember and we don’t listen.

When I dove, I thought about my grandmother. Her lipstick, her TV Guides, her pencil markings on the books of poetry. She taught me to swim. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to swim. My memories are riddled with swimming pools, lakes, oceans, ponds, waterfalls, rivers, hands pressed to cement pool floors, feet out in the cool spring air. I’m always inordinately shocked when people tell me they can’t swim. Last summer, after they sliced me open, it was the only way I could move, suspended in the public pool during open lap swim, all my valuables in the unlocked locker. After that was when I got good, when I was willing to go out further, aim for the spot where the river beneath the ocean was. I mean, not really, but I felt sure after those slow, slow laps that a thousand years meant nothing.

We think we are important because of art or cities, but everything human we have built has eventually been lost at sea. More so now than ever. That one writer, how she drowned so close to shore. Her brother too, how it doesn’t take that much depth at all. When we were kids, we’d throw something to the bottom of the deep end and see who could dive to retrieve it. We’d tap the drain, we’d push our luck, our lungs billowing out toward the back of our ribcage, the confident half circle of our frog kicks. I know now that all it takes is a second of miscalculation.

In theory, I’m hired to find the artifacts of loved ones, which I rarely do. It’s why I have a no refunds policy. I tell them at the outset that the likelihood is a single digit percentage. It’s incredible what people don’t hear when they are holding out hope, when they imagine that wanting something enough will make it so. But I do try to give them something. I come back with a cowrie, a junonia. I tell them this natural discovery is oracular; it means prosperity, protection, reward. Occasionally, I will come back with just a fragment of something, and I will be so frustrated by their disappointment that I will have to stop myself from yelling.

“Look at this shade of violet!” I will say in my calmest voice, the broken oyster shell in my open palm. I can understand that this is the least of their concerns, but still. Once, despondent at my failure, I sat on the beach and just picked up handfuls of the sand. I found the tiniest piece of blue sea glass there. I exclaimed aloud, overcome. The beach had been stripped of the glass years prior, even though it was still called Glass Beach. It was far too small a thing to return with for a paying customer. Besides, it was illegal to take it from the beach. I flicked it to my tongue and swallowed it before I could think twice.

Matthew's family gave me a lot of money. An amount that keeps me up at night if I am honest. They must want the bracelet for other reasons, but I go out of my way not to fill in the story with my own imagination. They told me he was a musician, and I make a point not to look him up to hear the music. But one night, I am tired. I can’t resist. He is there in his red suit, his nervous hands around the mic, his soft, dark curls. On the beach, before sunset, the teenage boys throw themselves every which way with such careless abandon. Imagine thinking you could run like that, slide your beautiful tan legs forward, plant your sturdy feet on a board along the slick of sand, flip off when you fell, your laugh breaking the world, unafraid to die.

People are getting rich doing far less ethical things than me. I can only be concerned with myself. I look up other divers on the internet to see what they charge, but few post their prices. We are a niche market. As things get worse, as the days ahead look bleaker, I can only imagine people will care less about this thing I do, or maybe some will care more. I don’t know how to explain it. I worry sometimes.

I feel as dark as I imagine anyone could feel. I don’t believe in peoples’ goodness. I am preoccupied, disassociated. And yet, on those moments when I slide my foot out of my sneaker, when I step upon the sand, when I walk toward the water, when the birds scatter at my approach, there is something I know to be true that I find as obliterating as it is comforting.

We are murk, cells, the disappearing storm, abalone, and salt. It does make me feel like I want to try to bring something back, to be an honest person. I am that snap of green that burns the eyes right before dark. We’ve all been told not to look directly, but of course I do.

One night, another disappearance. A man swims out and doesn’t come back. I may have missed him. He may have floated east, gotten out down the beach somewhere closer to town. A pickup truck of young people are in the parking lot laughing or screaming. Another night, a small shark, the size of a harmless fish, glides right by.

When I emerge after an hour, I peel my wetsuit off, I put my sweater over my wet skin, I make my way back through the chain-link toward my room. This was my last night.

The underwater feeling fades away. There is wine in the fridge, a bed that is not mine; a crow, just a crow, is drying its feathers on the fence near my door. I stop, though, because look at him! And then there is the palm tree bent beneath the weight of the rain, which has torn back from sea, and the moon a quarter full, and the hard wall of the mountain to the east, all the humans fleeing. At sunset, if you look at it instead of the sky, the rocks are glowing gold and rust. How beautiful, I would scream if anyone wanted to listen.

No one else is staying here tonight but me. The whole street is dark. I unlock the door to my room and flick on the light. I draw a bath, move into the warm water. I slide the gold bracelet around my wrist. It’s too big; I turn it around and around on my wrist.

Later, the room too hot, the fake fireplace glowing, I try to sleep. I stick a bare leg out from under the heaviness of the hotel comforter. Something crashes, and I only half listen. It’s the cheap closet bar. I see it when I turn the light on. I call the secret hotline. Tyrrhenian, I whisper. Arafura. I turn the light back off, swing onto my back. I think of my childhood home. The red door, the apple tree. As I fall back to sleep, it is only a quick shadow, could be anything, could be the darting figure of a young man. I sit up in the dark, but he is gone. In the morning, the bracelet is still there, right on the end table where I left it. The details of the jewelry are exactly as they were described to me by my client. If it was him, he wouldn’t have left it. I tell myself that, I believe it. I text them back that there was nothing to find. Maybe later, maybe centuries from now. At the ever-incoming tide, I kneel down, and I leave his bracelet there. The birds are asleep. Some are rare, some nearing extinction. No one sees me.