When I went out to sea the first time I was terrified. The terror was a constant ringing or groaning within. I was losing my mind. I got so sick I couldn’t leave the cabin. It wasn’t even that the water was choppy or that there was some real danger. I just had this feeling the trip was the end. I panted and rocked and cried and hummed over what was lost—you, Silvio, my childhood, the idea of my life. Time stretched painfully. I felt I couldn’t handle living, and yet I continued breathing. Sleep didn’t relieve the pain. Dreams didn’t. I couldn’t eat or drink. And all the while we were moving farther out to sea.

We sailed, and the inner angst got a little quieter, or rather it got more manageable. Calmed, I began to listen in a new way. I rejoined the crew. They had been busy all during my crisis, keeping us afloat and moving. The other crew had been carrying me, and themselves, on.

Above board I began to notice things about the landscape of the sea. Huge ships passed us by, rocking us like we were a toy. We moved through oil slicks that fouled the hull. Dead birds and fish swirled in the waves. We heard strange booms and felt shocks.

We arrived at a zone of blue water crosshatched with orange-brown seaweed. I didn’t think there could be seas within the sea, but that’s what it was. The Sargasso. We’d been sailing south, not west. We stopped and stayed there, still, floating on this edge. I asked what we were doing, but my friends wouldn’t tell me. Maybe they didn’t really know.

What I began to notice in our stillness was the trash, large and small and smaller still, all mixed into the water. I had heard there were trash islands. That’s how they’re described in the news, right? I’d always pictured them as solid heaps made of car parts, Styrofoam, and basketballs covered in mussels all wrapped together by rotting ropes. Like a trash mountain that drifted and spun with the tides. I imagined something you could climb. But what I saw was more like a cloud, billows of milky dust in the water. The others told me all the tiny particles were plastics and what kept them together was the Atlantic vortex. I kept watching the sea. The weather was warm. The days and nights were of equal length.

I listened to the VHF radio, and Tania explained what I was hearing. Codes, strings of three letters, squeaks and static and silences. Send three letters and wait for a response. That was how it worked, she told me. It has a poetry to it, a call-and-response musicality.

We sent out a question, to whom, I did not know. We asked, “QOA?” Can you communicate by radiotelegraphy? And after a pause we would hear back, “I can communicate by radiotelegraphy.”

We asked, “QOF?” What is the quality of my signals? They would reply, “The quality is good.”

“QUK?” Can you tell us the condition of the sea observed? “The sea is calm with blue mixed sargassum waves,” they replied.

We knew they were close. But still we had to wait. We just sat, rocking. Two more days passed like this in undulating stasis. On the third evening, we were sharing stories to pass the time. And just as the orange sun slipped below the horizon, we heard the radio whistle.

“QRV?” Are you ready? they called to us. We responded, “We are ready.”

Then we asked, “QUP?” Should we indicate our position by searchlight, black smoke trail, or pyrotechnic light? We heard back, “No searchlight, black smoke trail, or pyrotechnic light. Just wait.”

We asked, “QBH?” Are you flying below cloud? But we heard nothing.

Then someone hooted up on deck. We went to see, and there was Bobby Seal. He was profoundly calm. He was glossy black-brown and big, powerful and graceful in his movements. We offered him water, food, whatever we had, but he didn’t want anything. He just stared, and we stared back.

After some secret cue, he began to sing. His mouth was closed, but there were words. It was like humming or piping, or maybe there wasn’t even sound. But we could all feel the vibrations. The strange thing was, we could understand him perfectly. We compared what we had retained and our memories matched. Parts of this foreign song lodged in our brains. After he’d gone, we tried to write down what we knew. We tried to keep it all fresh.