I have not told Sophie about Madame Blanchard and do not want to admit that she died before I had a chance to say goodbye. Much less can I confess I’ve lost her remains through negligence, through inattention or preoccupation….Sophie is always accusing me of these things.

“This rain reminds me of the night I saw Eliza Lawson’s wraith come to me in a vision on the seas!”

“Stop it. You need to come back into the present.”

“But I plainly saw Eliza! I’ve told you, she sailed through the constellations and her hem snagged on Orion’s dagger over my ship the night she died—I got no sleep on that board under my smudged porthole…”

“Please.”

“No! I watched Orion straddle the North Atlantic and wished I had his nonchalant tilt….English manners had unfastened from me like pea-tendrils from a trellis! I’d forgotten how to relate to men in any civilized way. Whenever I set sail my belly spewed sustenance and instead of food I absorbed rain, wind and weed-stink. You know this! You know I remembered how to command men, but not how to command myself—how sick I was of retching into my old friend, the too-small tin pail….”

“I bet that made a nice splash and a pretty tinkling sound, like a bell, and I suppose right after the bell you saw your dear Eliza, dagger-snagged…”

“Hanging against the star-hunter as if she were his little sister—how small she looked! Her dress was like the rosy inside of a shell sequined with herring-scales. She stared through my porthole. I knew Miss Lawson was dead and I needed no telegram. I already wore a black armband after my father’s death—it was easy to pry my porthole open and drag the mourning-silk through the starlight as Eliza scattered her Valentine sequins down on me.”

“Valentine?”

“We had departed Portsmouth for Quebec on the Neptune on February the fourteenth.”

Sophie chaws her stick of beef jerky from the Dumpster.

“Eliza was my mind’s guide. She was my inspiration and my self-knowledge. She was and is my every true vision, my every signal. There was nothing sublunary about her.”

“Sub-what? What the hell?”

“Have you not read Donne?”

“Er, no?”

“Dull, sublunary lovers’ love, whose soul is sense…‘Sublunary’ means under the moon, accompanying other things that also exist under the moon…”

“Seal-flipper pie?”

“Things that can be felt, tasted, touched and smelled…”

“Narwhal? Army boots? Hard-boiled eggs?”

“Things whose soul is sense…”

“You mean you and Elizabeth Lawson didn’t feel each other. You didn’t touch each other. You didn’t smell each other. Did you even talk? Or were you locked together in some sort of extraterrestrial sacred silence?”