The seaman’s coat was like cardboard, and I eased it open at the collar to look beneath. My heart fell. She wasn’t wearing the jacket, and after checking her pockets I found that she wasn’t carrying the recipe either. I took a deep breath, and my emotions, enhanced by the poem, suddenly fell to rock bottom. Wirthlass-Schitt must have given the jacket to her crewmates—and if it was back at Goliath, I’d have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting to it. Friday had entrusted me with the protection of the Long Now, and I had failed him. I waded back to shore and started sniffing as large, salty tears ran down my face.

“Oh, please dry up,” I said to Colin, who was sobbing into his hankie next to me. “You’ve got me started now.”

“But the sadness drapes heavily on my countenance!” he whimpered.

We sat on the foreshore next to the fisherman, who was still looking aghast, and sobbed quietly as though our hearts would break. The young girl came and sat down next to me. She patted my hand reassuringly.

“I didn’t want to be rescued anyway,” she announced. “If I survive, the whole point of the poem is lost—Henry will be furious.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll all be repaired.”

“And everyone keeps on giving me their jackets,” she continued in a huffy tone. “Honestly, it gets harder and harder to freeze to death these days. There’s this one that Anne gave me,” she added, thumbing the thick pile on the blue Goliath jacket, “and the one the old man gave me seventeen years ago.”

“Really, I’m not interested in—”

I stopped sobbing as a bright shaft of sunlight cut through the storm clouds of my melancholia.

“Do…you still have it?”

“Of course!”

And she unzipped the Goliath jacket to reveal—a man’s blue jacket in large checks. Never had I been happier to see a more tasteless garment. I quickly rummaged through the pockets and found a yo-yo string, a very old bag of jelly beans, a domino, a screwdriver, an invention for cooking the perfect hard-boiled egg and…wrapped in a plastic freezer bag, a paper napkin with a simple equation written upon it. I gave the young girl a hug, my feeling of elation quadrupled by the magnifying effect of Poetry. I breathed a sigh of relief. Found! Without wasting a moment, I tore the recipe into small pieces and ate them.

“Riublf,” I said to Colin with my mouth full, “leb’s get goinf.”

“I don’t think we’re going anywhere, Ms. Next.”