The fishermen who found him among the mangroves in Dove Key could hardly believe that his blanched naked body, nipped by fish and crabs, could still produce a heartbeat. They motored him to the Tavernier landing, where the local deputy loaded the breathing cadaver onto a pickup truck and drove northbound on the sun-beaten pavement of US 1.

Minutes later, the red pickup pulled in front of a low, flat-roofed building with the words “FLA KEYS CLINIC INC.” stenciled on its bleached façade. Nurse Parker, wearing a white-winged cap and a lab coat over T-shirt and jeans, stepped out into the noon glare. Luther, a corpulent dark-skinned man, the clinic’s orderly and janitor, followed her out.

“Got here fast as I could,” the deputy said, his broad red face shadowed by his visored cap, his thumbs hooked under his service belt. “He looks dead, but he’s still breathing.”

Nurse Parker took a sun-squinted look at the truck’s flatbed. In between two sooty tires, she saw mud-smeared soles and a dirty blond head, speckled with seaweed—all that showed of a body rolled up in a straw mat. “Why did you bring him here?” she said. “You should’ve taken him straight to a hospital.”

“Didn’t know what else to do. Dr. Levin’s hospital is still under construction.” The deputy removed his cap to wipe the sweat off his brow. He knew Dr. Cohn’s private clinic was set up only for the care of outpatients, unequipped to handle critical emergencies—but it was a short ride from his home. “I figured it’d be okay.”

Luther spoke up: “There ain’t nobody here today but Miss Parker—”

“It’s all right,” she said. “Bring him around back. Let’s clean him up.”

The deputy huffed his end of the stretcher. “Where’s Dr. Cohn today? Playing golf?”

Nurse Parker gave him a sideways look. “In Miami with Dorothy. Don’t worry, I’ll tell him who brought in the patient.”

At the rear of the building, they laid the body on a canvas cot and unrolled the mat in which the fishermen had wrapped the body. Luther hosed it down as Nurse Parker indicated. A rainbow formed in the sunlit water splashing off his skin. Nurse Parker felt the multi-hued mist on her face. “Not so hard, Luther. This isn’t a cah wash.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, smiling at that accent of hers.

As the swamp sludge spilled off limbs and torso onto the cement floor, the chiseled physiognomy of a most handsome young man began to appear from under it. The deputy, Nurse Parker, and Luther stood in silent contemplation over the body. Its wet, glistening skin shone whiter than the nurse’s lab coat—a body that by all appearances should be dead but was not.

Nurse Parker leaned over until she was almost nose to nose with her patient. “He is breathing.”

“Told you,” the deputy said.

“Okay, bring him in,” she said. “Be careful.”

In the hothouse heat of the consultation room, the deputy and the orderly laid the body on the examination table. Luther flipped a switch, and the window air-conditioner clanked on. Nurse Parker turned on the bright overhead lamps.

“Is he going to make it?” the deputy asked.

“At this point, Ray, your guess is as good as anybody’s. Tell me what happened to him.”

The deputy told her what he knew.

Nurse Parker lifted the patient’s eyelids with her thumb. His blue irises and the red-smudged white of the sclera made her grimace with pity. “Did anybody try to pump him for saltwater and give him mouth-to-mouth?”

The deputy shrugged. “Maybe the fishermen did.”

Nurse Parker unpinned her nurse’s cap from her gray-streaked blonde bun. She washed her hands in the sink, checked the patient’s vitals, and sterilized his lesions.

The deputy pulled out a notepad and a ballpoint pen from the pocket behind his badge. “How old you think he is? Hard to tell, laying there like a statue.”

“He looks no more than eighteen to me,” Luther said. “What do you reckon, Miss Parker?”

Nurse Parker had the stethoscope plugs in her ears. The boy’s skin was colder than the metal end of the scope. “My god,” she said, “his heart rate is 26-over-zero—unreadable. It’s got to be wrong.”

She pointed at the jar of tongue depressors, and Luther handed her one. Holding the patient’s chin down, she inserted the wooden stick in his mouth and peered inside, beyond his perfect teeth, then threw the stick in a pan.

“Well?” the deputy said.

“Hard tellin’ not knowin’.”

“She ain’t done yet,” Luther translated.

Nurse Parker walked to the white cabinet and came back with an ear dropper.

Puzzled, the men watched her fill the dropper with distilled water. Back at the examination table, she turned the boy’s head to one side and emptied the liquid in his ear—a trick she’d read about in a medical journal for bringing a patient back to consciousness.

“Hey there, mister!” she yelled at the boy’s face. “Do you hear me? What’s your name?” She waited for the patient to react, then straightened up, shaking her head. “This boy, he’s not just unconscious. He’s in a coma. Can’t feel a thing.”

“He ain’t gonna die on us, is he?” the deputy said, as if the possibility would be a nuisance.

Nurse Parker stood staring at the boy, fists on her hips. In the past, she’d handled all kinds of walk-ins who came in thinking the clinic was a hospital. She’d learned how to suture most wounds, control hemorrhages, set broken bones, stitch up cuts on children, and treat victims of household accidents and minor car crashes on US 1. Not to mention mending gashes and broken heads from Saturday-night brawls at the Tiki bars. But never a coma emergency. “I’m sorry—I can’t do a thing for him here. You’ve got to get him to a hospital.”

“Then you better call Dr. Levin to come and get him,” the deputy said.

“Me? Come on, Ray. Just put him in your truck and run him to Venetian Shores.”

The deputy winced. “With all the hoopla over at Munson and Ramrod Keys with the Hollywood movie people? Hell, I’ve been off duty for over two hours already. I shouldn’t even be here now.”

“Look, all I can give you is my opinion,” she said. “And I’m telling you this boy could stop breathing at any time. He’ll die on that table if he’s not taken to a proper hospital. Now.”

The deputy put on his cap. “I’m calling Sheriff Spotswood. Where do you keep the phone?”

“There,” Nurse Parker said, pointing at it. “Where it’s always been.”

The deputy pushed the cat off the chair, sat down, picked up the receiver, and dialed zero with his thick index finger. Then he glanced up at the ceiling, waiting for an answer.

“Betty, it’s me, Ray. I’m in Tavernier at Dr. Cohn’s … Okay. You? Good. Listen, can you put me through to the sheriff right away?” He paused, listening. “I know he’s with those movie folks, but I got an emergency situation here … Yes, the life-and-death kind … Has anything come in from headquarters, the Coast Guard, anything? Any boating accident report in our area? No? Can you check?” He waited, rubbing his cropped head. “Nothing? All right … Me? Drive him to Florida City? Can’t do it today … Okay, thanks, see what you can do.”

He hung up, and the phone rang soon after—Sheriff Spotswood calling. The deputy stood up to take this call. Nurse Parker and Luther huddled around the desk, listening.

“Deputy Ray Tandy here … Yes, sir, at Dr. Cohn’s … Betty’s right, a life-and-death situation. Looks like a near-drowning … Well, Nurse Parker says the subject’s in a coma … Yes, I brought him myself. No, no idea who he is … Fishermen working the outer Keys found him at Dove … Oh, I got their IDs all right. The boy? Nothing on him, not even a tattoo.” The deputy looked at his notepad. “Male Caucasian between eighteen and twenty-five. Maybe five-eleven, 160-170 pounds. No, no evidence of that. A few cuts and scratches from being out in the mangroves, I reckon. Yeah, it looks like he was there a while. Maybe since last night … No, no reports of boating accidents. Betty checked. He doesn’t look like a refugee to me, sir, but … You’re right, we can’t exclude foul play … That’s what Nurse Parker said, he’s more dead than alive. But he is breathing—”

“Give me that.” Nurse Parker took the telephone from the deputy’s hand. “Hi, sheriff. Yes, it’s me. Sir, it’s like this: you either have someone rush him to a hospital now, or in a couple of hours you’ll be calling the coroner to take him away …”

Sheriff Spotswood, who was about to settle with a team of Hollywood producers on a rental price for his island to be used as a film set, said he would take care of it. Then he instructed Betty, the telephone-exchange operator, to find someone, anyone, to take the boy to a hospital, anywhere. After a series of calls, the local Volunteer Corps agreed to transfer the patient to Miami in the only vehicle available, a funeral hearse.

Before the volunteers arrived, Nurse Parker went into the examination room to make sure the boy was still alive. She gazed at his marble-like figure floating in the hot light over the metal table. His faint respiration was the only visible sign of life. She brought a pail with lukewarm water to the table, sponged his body carefully around his lesions, and toweled him dry. Next she fitted the blood-pressure cuff around his arm, slipped the stethoscope under it, and pumped the air valve. She let it go while listening to the whooshing as his blood flow resumed. Astonished, she watched the meter spiking up higher and higher until it stopped at 58/20. After his should-be-dead reading earlier, she couldn’t believe it. To make sure she’d done the procedure correctly, she tried it again. She repeated her motions one by one; again, both systolic and diastolic readings rose nearer to the standard range. It made her own heart race, thinking that her touch had somehow made it happen. From the cabinet drawer, she pulled out a secondhand hospital gown and called Luther. Together they fitted the gown over the patient’s nude body.

Luther kept smiling at his boss, aware of how her satisfaction hinged on the well-being of her patients. “He’s sure nice and clean now.”

“Just want him to look decent,” she said. “Don’t want people to talk.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

When the volunteers arrived, Nurse Parker watched them carry the boy out of the clinic. Luther stood behind her on the steps, his arms crossed, until the black hearse pulled away in a puff of gravel dust.

Back inside the clinic, Nurse Parker put away her cap and lab coat in her locker and untied her hair. It fell straight over her shoulders. Something about the boy was staying with her, something she couldn’t put into words but felt as real as her own beating heart.

“It sure is a pity, a good-looking boy like that,” Luther said as she locked the front door of the clinic. “Who knows, maybe them Miami doctors will make him well.”

“Maybe.”

The gleaming black hearse pulled into the bright lights of the Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. Two nurses rushed out with a gurney and wheeled him inside. A mixture of pity and mystery rolled along with the unnamed patient into the white-tiled Emergency ward.

An hour later, after the ICU team had him stabilized, he was left in the care of Nurse Angelo. A trio of staff nurses coming back from their break gathered around her and watched her deterge the anonymous patient. The nurses, all women, made a few whispered comments on the extraordinary glow of his skin and his well-proportioned body. “It’s like he’s made of plaster of Paris … Has anyone checked his back for wings, ’cause this boy looks just like an angel! … A scratched-up one, but mmm, an angel indeed, the poor thing …” One compared him to a defaced Renaissance sculpture, except for a prominent aspect that made the others giggle.

When the attending physician arrived to examine the patient, the nurses dispersed back to their stations.

After a quick evaluation, Dr. Michaels—a wiry, short man in his mid-thirties who could have passed for a man even younger had he not carried himself as smugly as any veteran physician—sat at a desk in the vestibule and filled out his report on the unidentified youth.

Since “John Doe” had already been taken by another unidentified patient, he asked the nurses for a name to call the new patient.

They answered almost in unison: “David.”

“Okay,” he said, amused. “David what?”

“Fine?” one nurse answered. “Yes, yes, Fine is fitting,” the choir agreed.

So David Fine it was.

During the next twenty-four hours, a parade of officials came to see the unidentified white male who had washed ashore in the Keys. The first ones to show were two Miami Police detectives, who took his fingerprints and upset the staff with their smoking and the ink stains they left on the bedsheets and towels. A local councilman, accompanied by a Dade County lawyer, came before lunch, followed by two FBI agents who stayed only long enough to take his photograph. Several TV and newspaper reporters asked for and were denied access to his ICU room. Everyone wanted to know to whom the angelic young man belonged.

The following morning, every plausible theory of David Fine’s origin and the probable causes of how he had ended up in a deserted key were debated on talk-radio programs and newspaper editorials. Every imaginable scenario was discussed—an accident in the high seas, a suicide gone awry, a sailor fallen overboard from some passing vessel, a botched kidnapping victim left to die, a marooned refugee escaping from communist Cuba. There were less logical ideas as well—a drowning swimmer rescued by dolphins, or the mysterious doings of mermaids, or the Bermuda Triangle.

The following evening, Nurse Parker came home from work and gazed across her back yard at the orange and blue sunset over her little piece of oceanfront. It was too late for the swim she’d hoped for, so she sat down on a metallic chair by the screen door and switched on her transistor. In the Keys, time moved slower than painkillers, she was given to say. Days overlapped each other until she couldn’t tell them apart. Today could have been yesterday or the day before, if not for the castaway boy.

She sipped her virgin iced-tea-lemonade and smoked a Kent while listening to the news. She couldn’t get the image of the boy out of her head. Even the crackling voice on the radio was going on about him. No one seemed to know who he was or where he came from. The issue of his identity hadn’t even crossed her mind until then, and that seemed entirely reasonable to her, given what had happened between them. The steamy rainbow that had formed before her eyes, which apparently only she had seen; the way his blood pressure had risen as if by magic after she bathed him; the out-of-the-blue feeling that had washed over her of experiencing a revelation, which after a whole day still tremored within her… No, she didn’t need to know who he was. Do marvels need a background check? The thought made her smile.

Nurse Parker listened to the radio until the mosquitoes chased her back indoors. In the kitchen she heated up a conch chowder that Fannie, her neighbor down the road, had brought her. She stirred it slowly on the fire, thinking she should call the Jackson Memorial Hospital and find out how the boy was doing. Then she decided against it, wary of how it might reflect on her at the clinic. She wasn’t sure what Dr. Cohn and Dorothy might think if they found out she was following up on a non-paying patient. She could imagine the many ways it could set their suspicious minds working.

She opened a can for Mister and emptied it into his bowl, then sat down before her own bowl, full of chowder, with a side dish of diced avocado from her tree, and ate her meal. Her rabbit-ears TV was showing the only channel it picked up. The local newscaster was reporting on the “unidentified youth found in Dove Key.” She turned up the volume. Sheriff Spotswood appeared briefly on camera, taking credit for the rescue. She laughed in silence, imagining how Ray the deputy—who’d thought himself the hero of the day—must be feeling about it.

The boy was famous now. She put her dishes in the sink, wondering if she would ever see him again. Out on the front porch, she eased herself into the rocking chair under the ceiling fan. Her Johnny Mathis record was playing. A patch of stars flickered through the nebula of the window screens. Thinking of the boy made her feel less alone. He stirred up feelings in her that had been gone for a long time, together with others she’d never felt before. Chances are, she crooned to herself, she’d call the hospital tomorrow and inquire about him. Why shouldn’t she?

The identity of the young, comatose stranger was the topic of the day for the staff at the Jackson Hospital, but for Dr. Michaels and Nurse Angelo, his identity was a secondary concern.

The doctor was awestruck by the patient’s extraordinary response to his alleged near-drowning. After twenty-four hours, he exhibited none of the clinical signs associated with fluid aspiration or hypothermia or hypoxia. And while his condition could not be diagnosed in any other way but as a state of coma, he showed no evidence of decorticate rigidity—the mummy baby posture—or extensor posturing, the symptoms associated with most comatose patients. He could even do without the ventilator to help him breathe.

Dr. Michaels began to think that he might have stumbled on a patient with a unique constitution, much more resilient than the average patient, an organism worthy of deeper study. It fired up his interest in a way that reminded him of why he’d chosen medicine as his life’s work. “I’m telling you,” he said to Nurse Angelo as he checked the EEG’s metal discs attached to the patient, “the numbers don’t lie. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Nurse Angelo, a long-boned woman, taller than the doctor, answered with a silent grin.

“I can’t think of anything else we can do with him.” The doctor shook his head, smiling. “All this boy needs to stay alive is a conservative dose of glucose to control his hypotension, some antibiotics given intravenously twice a day, a comfortable bed—and he’s as good as asleep. But what worries me,” he added, his smile fading, “time is not on his side. No matter how strong his heart is. If he doesn’t wake up in three days or so, he’ll remain in a coma indefinitely—a vegetable.” The doctor waved his clipboard at the nurse and walked toward the door. “See you in the morning.”

“Have a good night, doctor,” Nurse Angelo said.

By seven a.m., Nurse Parker was on her porch having breakfast, dressed to go to work. She could see her rusting 1956 Chevrolet convertible, parked on the weed and gravel in front of the door, and behind it dusty Ogygia Street. She grabbed her purse and the bag with her nursing clogs and walked to the clinic. Mister followed her like a dog to the clinic except on rainy days, and sometimes only as far as US 1, whenever he sensed that Dorothy would be there.

Like Mister, Nurse Parker didn’t walk when it rained; she drove instead, but only because she might lose her shoes in the sandy mud roadside. There were no sidewalks or curbs in her part of Tavernier. Urban development wasn’t something the Conchs believed in much; anything that would derail their laid-back life was a thumbs-down for them, delayed forever.

Nurse Parker was okay with that. After six years, she’d been able to find something akin to contentment in her rented zinc-roofed bungalow by the Gulf, something that more than made up for the wild surges of weather, the frequent power blackouts, and the quirky locals who had unnerved her so when she first arrived. The Florida Keys had been as far as she could get from Portland, Maine, without moving away from the sea and still being able to make a living. She had her neighbors to thank for that: the Conchs may not have believed in many things, but they believed in what they saw. In their end-of-the-line world, this meant that if you told them you could do something and did it to their satisfaction, then in their eyes you were the real thing—even a professional nurse—with or without a license. No more questions asked.

On the turnoff to U.S. 1, Fannie’s husband, Marvin, honked his car horn as he drove past her. She saw him wink at her from behind the wheel—the bug-head.

As the sole full-time nurse at Dr. Cohn’s clinic, Nurse Parker had become a local of note, not only because of her professional qualities but because of her punctuality, a rare characteristic among the natives. She was also slim and physically fit, thanks to her athletic past, and that meant keeping the women-starved Conchs in line. She’d been able to handle it so far, at least outwardly so. Being raised in a house filled with males of every age had prepared her well for the nuisance of it, and the severity of her demeanor helped too, so much so that after her first year the local housewives had gone from resenting her for her figure to accepting her as one of them, even pitying her solitude.

When she arrived at the clinic, Dorothy, Dr. Cohn’s wife, was already there, sitting at his desk, “minding the store.” The doctor usually came in later, after the patients began arriving.

After a polite good-morning exchange, Nurse Parker busied herself setting up the medical instruments for the doctor in the consultation room. She glanced at the empty white table, and the image of the boy, the man—she hadn’t decided—suddenly appeared before her eyes. It froze her in place.

One night in the Gulf Stream near the Florida Keys, a man alone in the water is about to drown. The next day, local fishermen rescue the almost lifeless body of a young man from the mangrove shores of Dove Key. Their discovery causes a series of strange reactions among those who come in contact with him, and the legend of the White Wingless Angel begins.

Set mostly in the Caribbean basin, the Florida Keys, and New York, this novel takes place during a two-decade period beginning in the early 1960s. It is composed of several parallel stories that come together at its climax, driven by the powerful ambitions of its main protagonists—a presumed shipwreck survivor, the Angel, whose exceptional physical appearance affects most of those he encounters; and a group of women whose feminist militancy pushes them to unforeseen excesses: Nurse Parker, Sylvia, Mrs. Brothers, Nancy, and a host of others women who are both witches and healers, who bear the burdens of sexual trauma but still seek pleasure. The mundane and the impossible in their lives coexist, creating a defamiliarization that mirrors the strangeness of their experiences and hopes.

The novel combines intense realism with elements of the surreal, edging on magical realism, in the same way that fantasies crash in the face of each of its protagonists. It is a story made to surprise, to dare, and to thrill.