events at his upcoming swimming lesson in which a fatality occurs: his own. Teddy disengages from the interview and hurries to his lesson. Nicholson pursues him through the levels of the ship's decks, and as he begins to descend the stairs to the swimming pool, he hears the scream of "a small, female child" emanating from the enclosed walls of the indoor pool. The story ends on this ambiguous note. Analysis The porthole and the orange peel In the opening scene set in the Mr. and Mrs. McArdle's state room, Salinger presents two facets of Zen enlightenment: "God-consciousness", a profound awareness of "inner spirit", in contrast to material concerns, and secondly, "the notion of impermanence", based on "the Vedantic belief that separate existence is an illusion." Teddy, perched on a piece of luggage, pokes his head through the open porthole, penetrating figuratively into a zone of enlightenment and sublimity; his body remains in the cabin, where his parents – “materialistic and self-centered” – engage in mildly abusive repartee, issuing petulant and ineffectual commands to their son, who endures them with tolerant detachment. Teddy’s astonishing self-possession is a product of his adherence to Vedantic “philosophy of non-attachment”, enabling him to distinguish between “the world of illusion” – the material world – and “the world of reality”, where “only unity of God is real.” The boy focuses his attention on some discarded orange peel suspended momentarily on the ocean surface; as they sink out of sight, he engages in “solipsistic contemplation. Teddy conveys his revelation to his parents: “After I go out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances…I may be an orange peel.” His mother and father, victims of their spiritual “immaturity”, are incapable of grasping his warning that they may never see him again. Salinger issues this Vedantic premonition to the reader as a clue to Teddy’s fate. Booper The same studied disengagement that characterizes Teddy’s relationship with his parents also informs the “amazing” toleration he exhibits toward his younger sister – a child that biographer Kenneth Slawenski describes as “a cruel little girl” and “perhaps the most vicious child ever discharged by Salinger’s imagination.” When Booper announces that she “hates everybody in the ocean”, Salinger calls attention to the setting of his story: the sea, with its infinite horizons and indefinite boundaries where his characters drift – a seascape that reflects “the Zen