In water is the snow of creatures, plankton that glows in the dark. It is blue-dark, green-dark in the swells of waves. Underneath the cold, dark, enchanted world the sea is full with life barely seen. It bears a different weight, a different gravity. Sometimes the beam of his waterproof light is refracted from beneath the water. She knows he is seeing the white suns of fish, the anemones.

There are creatures that thrive on darkness. He has become one of these. Some create their own light, like the ray and the shrimp and the plants at certain seasons. The light-makers. Thomas has not become one of these. For the most part his light intrudes, he invades. She wants to tell him that the creatures of the night do not want his light, but this is all the life he has right now, his going beneath. She doesn’t want him to know she follows his descents and passages. For now, as he is awakening, he is a creature of night water.

Ruth knows he is practicing, like Witka and the other old whalers. As if he is trying against time to have the world back the way it used to be. He doesn’t know some changes can never be reversed.

There are also the nights both of them remember facing the ocean, walking, looking at the tide pools. And with his memory he still sees black snails, kelp and its golden bulbs awaiting its return to the sea. Even on cold days he used to walk the beach out to Old Spirit Rock with Ruth. It was in the days before girls wore pants, so her legs were always cold and wet.

Old Spirit Rock was formed by a war between wind and land. It was a place the old people wouldn’t go. At the very top, wind has shaped a hole into the rock and sometimes, when wind blows from the right direction, it is heard singing like a flute, sometimes a howl like the cannibal who wanted to swallow their people.

Some nights he holds himself to the wood, shining his light, looking, as if he would see Marco. Instead, on a ledge, is an orange starfish, the kind he loved as a child when he and Ruth were explorers together in the magic of the world, wandering the lines between land and water at the west end of a continent.

At first he stays down briefly, then longer every night, holding his breath until his veins might burst. He, Thomas, sees and touches the barnacles in the disintegrating wood pilings and posts, creatures closing and opening, like him. Many lives hanging, holding. He is where small fish take refuge in between the pillars, where the gobies live. Then, again he rises to the surface, gasping for air, cold after these moments gone from this world.

Ruth knows his alphabet, his syntax, his silent language. She feels him. His very skin cries out. When in the day it seems he does nothing, she knows something is taking place, even if it is invisible. Nothing is ever static. If he were a spiritual man he would one day emerge from his dark house like a prophet or saint, enlightened and shining. But for now, the closest he comes to this emergence is from the water and though his heart carries such a great weight you’d think it would pull him down. For him it is the only time he feels unburdened.