The Shell Collector. Anthony Doerr

in the morning and plead forgiveness, but first he had to sting her with one of those incredible shells one more time. She was on her knees. She pawed up his shorts. “Please,” she begged. She smelled so different.

      He refused. Exhausted, dazed, he sent her away on a water taxi to Lamu.

      

      The surprises weren’t over. The course of his life was diving into its reverse spiral by now, into that dark, whorling aperture. A week after Nancy’s recovery, Dr. Kabiru’s motor launch again came sputtering over the reef. And behind him were others; the shell collector heard the hulls of four or five dhows come over the coral, heard the splashes as people hopped out to drag the boats ashore. Soon his kibanda was crowded. They stepped on the whelks drying on the front step, trod over a pile of chitons by the bathroom. Tumaini retreated under the shell collector’s cot, put her muzzle on her paws.

      Dr. Kabiru announced that a mwadhini, the mwadhini of Lamu’s oldest and largest mosque, was here to visit the shell collector, and with him were the mwadhini’s brothers, and his brothers-in-law. The shell collector shook the men’s hands as they greeted him, dhow-builders’ hands, fishermen’s hands.

      The doctor explained that the mwadhini’s daughter was terribly ill; she was only eight years old and her already malignant malaria had become something altogether more malignant, something the doctor did not recognize. Her skin had gone mustard-seed yellow, she threw up several times a day, her hair fell out. For the past three days she had been delirious, wasted. She tore at her own skin. Her wrists had to be bound to the headboard. These men, the doctor said, wanted the shell collector to give her the same treatment he had given the American woman. He would be paid.

      The shell collector felt them crowded into the room, these ocean Muslims in their rustling kanzus and squeaking flip-flops, each stinking of his work—gutted perch, fertilizer, hull-tar—each leaning in to hear his reply.

      “This is ridiculous,” he said. “She will die. What happened to Nancy was some kind of fluke. It was not a treatment.”

      “We have tried everything,” the doctor said.

      “What you ask is impossible,” the shell collector repeated. “Worse than impossible. Insane.”

      There was silence. Finally a voice directly before him spoke, a strident, resonant voice, a voice he heard five times a day as it swung out from loudspeakers over the rooftops of Lamu and summoned people to prayer. “The child’s mother,” the mwadhini began, “and I, and my brothers, and my brothers’ wives, and the whole island, we have prayed for this child. We have prayed for many months. It seems sometimes that we have always prayed for her. And then today the doctor tells us of this American who was cured of the same disease by a snail. Such a simple cure. Elegant, would you not say? A snail that accomplishes what laboratory capsules cannot. Allah, we reason, must be involved in something so elegant. So you see. These are signs all around us. We must not ignore them.”

      The shell collector refused again. “She must be small, if she is only eight. Her body will not withstand the venom of a cone. Nancy could have died—she should have died. Your daughter will be killed.”

      The mwadhini stepped closer, took the shell collector’s face in his hands. “Are these,” he intoned, “not strange and amazing coincidences? That this American was cured of her afflictions and that my child has similar afflictions? That you are here and I am here, that animals right now crawling in the sand outside your door harbor the cure?”

      The shell collector paused. Finally he said, “Imagine a snake, a terribly venomous sea snake. The kind of venom that swells a body to bruising. It stops the heart. It causes screaming pain. You’re asking this snake to bite your daughter.”

      “We’re sorry to hear this,” said a voice behind the mwadhini. “We’re very sorry to hear this.” The shell collector’s face was still in the mwadhini’s hands. After long moments of silence, he was pushed aside. He heard men, uncles probably, out at the washing sink, splashing around.

      “You won’t find a cone out there,” he yelled. Tears rose to the corners of his dead sockets. How strange it felt to have his home overrun by unseen men.

      The mwadhini’s voice continued: “My daughter is my only child. Without her my family will go empty. It will no longer be a family.”

      His voice bore an astonishing faith, in the slow and beautiful way it trilled sentences, in the way it braided each syllable. The mwadhini was convinced, the shell collector realized, that a snail bite would heal his daughter.

      The voice raveled on: “You hear my brothers in your backyard, clattering among your shells. They are desperate men. Their niece is dying. If they must, they will wade out onto the coral, as they have seen you do, and they will heave boulders and tear up corals and stab the sand with shovels until they find what they are looking for. Of course they too, when they find it, may be bitten. They may swell up and die. They will—how did you say it?—have screaming pain. They do not know how to capture such animals, how to hold them.”

      His voice, the way he held the shell collector’s face. All this was a kind of hypnosis.

      “You want this to happen?” the mwadhini continued. His voice hummed, sang, became a murmurous soprano. “You want my brothers to be bitten also?”

      “I want only to be left alone.”

      “Yes,” the mwadhini said, “left alone. A stay-at-home, a hermit, a mtawa. Whatever you want. But first, you will find one of these cone shells for my daughter, and you will sting her with it. Then you will be left alone.”

      

      At low tide, accompanied by an entourage of the mwadhini’s brothers, the shell collector waded with Tumaini out onto the reef and began to upturn rocks and probe into the sand beneath to try to extract a cone. Each time his fingers flurried into loose sand, or into a crab-guarded socket in the coral, a volt of fear would speed down his arm and jangle his fingers. Conus tessulatus, Conus obscurus, Conus geographus, who knew what he would find. The waiting proboscis, the poisoned barbs of an expectant switchblade. You spend your life avoiding these things; you end up seeking them out.

      He whispered to Tumaini, “We need a small one, the smallest we can,” and she seemed to understand, wading with her ribs against his knee, or paddling when it became too deep, but these men leaned in all around him, splashing in their wet kanzus, watching with their dark, redolent attention.

      By noon he had one, a tiny tessellated cone he hoped couldn’t paralyze a housecat, and he dropped it in a mug with some seawater.

      They ferried him to Lamu, to the mwadhini’s home, a surfside jumba with marble floors. They led him to the back, up a vermicular staircase, past a tinkling fountain, to the girl’s room. He found her hand, her wrist still lashed to the bedpost, and held it. It was small and damp and he could feel the thin fan of her bones through her skin. He poured the mug out into her palm and folded her fingers, one by one, around the snail. It seemed to pulse there, in the delicate vaulting of her hand, like the small dark heart at the center of a songbird. He was able to imagine, in acute detail, the snail’s translucent proboscis as it slipped free of the siphonal canal, the quills of its teeth probing her skin, the venom spilling into her.

      “What,” he asked into the silence, “is her name?”

      

      Further amazement: the girl, whose name was Seema, recovered. Completely. For ten hours she was cold, catatonic. The shell collector spent the night standing in a window, listening to Lamu: donkeys clopping up the street, nightbirds squelching from somewhere in the acacia to his right, hammer strokes on metal, far off and the surf, washing into the pylons of the docks. He heard the morning prayer sung in the mosques. He began to wonder if he’d been forgotten, if hours ago the girl had passed gently into death and no one had thought to tell him. Perhaps a mob was silently gathering to drag him off and stone him and wouldn’t he have deserved every stone?

      But then the cooks began whistling and clucking, and the mwadhini, who had squatted by his daughter nightlong, palms