He felt Vivi staring, and he tried to hum some vague ideas. It was hard to keep up with radical thinking. He’d been trapped in the city while Vivi was traveling. She could sail off to Venice and come up with sweeping theories about economics and ethics, but he was stuck in the city, in his studio apartment, his basement job. This was not his beach, he hummed.

“Some of us don’t have the luxury of living our ideals,” he said, hating himself even as he expressed that idea. This was not how he wanted to be.

They weren’t reaching for luxury, only survival, someone responded.

The late grew later. They cleared and washed dishes. They laughed more. Fighting was okay. Bad jokes were okay. They argued about records, and someone turned up the volume. Alfonzo realized that whatever answers he wanted he would not get, and so it was better to just relax. Roberto poured strong mysterious drinks, and Tania rolled catnip joints that they smoked outside in the cold wind. The seagrasses bent and relaxed. They played and danced in the huge living room, sliding across the wood floor and falling into pillows. Someone put on the Flowers Group and then followed that with the hits of Princess Nicotine. They danced to Malagasy soul and scorpion pop. Alfonzo asked again about the sea music, but the others only headbutted in response.

“Just enjoy your time,” Tania told him. They all passed out on the floor in a heap.

Alfonzo had a vivid dream. There had been an earthquake. Old, once marvelous edifices lay crumbled. A herd of animals was constructing a fountain out of the wreckage.

The animals rushed to and fro in great excitement, gathering bits of green copper pipe and statuary. Here a spouting dolphin, there the leg of a bronze horse. The creatures explained to Alfonzo that the Panda-brand bottle conglomerate had donated the water for the fountain. Alfonzo was tasked with pouring the bottles’ contents into the fountain. The animals got more and more fevered as the dream went on. He struggled to keep up.

“We must finish,” one declared.

“No,” another said, “we’re just starting.”

Then he heard this sea song. It was a dream, but at the same time, it wasn’t.

30.

See.

The sea.

The sea exists as unknowably radical life expanse.

The sea exists as stretching groundswells, as brine life, capricious and dainty.

See the sea’s surfaces as a storm-flapping tent that glows from within green gold and blue black.

See, light exists. Exists in the form of sun waves falling as reflection and scattering.

Light falls into sea, and sea’s murk transubstantiates. Light food disappears into our heaving green-black folds. All who are in, who are all, eat the sea’s murk or eat one another with reverence. So, we in the sea see that we all eat the light’s waves, in a way.