Anna. Anna. Jesus. What kind of a man am I, what kind of a partner, what am I doing?

Finally I sat down at the map table. There was no room for anyone else beside me there.

Lou showed Marguerite the toilet.

“Daddy says that it works for sure,” Lou said. “He checked the pump.”

“How nice,” Marguerite said.

“But we can’t use it here,” Lou continued. “Because it will fall into the garden.”

“Gross,” Marguerite said.

“Yes, gross!” Lou laughed.

They continued chatting. Laughing more. Enjoying themselves. Having far too nice a time.

I turned toward the map table. Something that was covered with old plastic bags was screwed onto the wall. I took them off, one by one. They concealed instruments. It reminded me of the control room at work. I quickly read through the names, echo sounder, VHF, GPS.

Then I discovered that the tabletop could be opened. I raised it. Nautical charts. Large, transparent plastic folders containing maps.

I picked them up, spread them out before me. White ocean, light blue along the shoreline, gray where it was the shallowest. The land was light brown, almost golden. That was fitting. Dry. The ocean was covered with numbers, there were numbers everywhere. It took me a while before I understood what they represented: shallows and depths.

Along the shore the numbers were close together, many places just one to two meters, but at sea, on the white patches, the open sea, the numbers were farther apart. And it was deeper—250 meters, three hundred, four hundred.

How much water made up an ocean? How many liters? An ocean three hundred meters in depth, an area of one thousand square kilometers. How much water was that?

The calculation made me dizzy. An infinite amount of water. And all of it completely undrinkable.

Dead water, Thomas, my boss used to call it. Not good for anything. You can’t water your plants with it. You can’t water yourself. Salt is dead.

Thomas had been proud of the job he did. And his pride was infectious. “Salt water is the future, David. Water into wine is all well and good, but what we’re doing is even better. We are the magicians of tomorrow.”

We just didn’t wave our wands quickly enough. There weren’t enough of us. The plant was too old, too run-down, too small.

And then . . . I remembered the flames when the building caught fire. It burned so well, almost brightly. That something that contained so much water could burn so well . . .

“Where has it been?”

Marguerite was standing over me, pointing to the maps.

“I . . . um . . . what do you mean?”

“The maps show where the boat has been, don’t they?”

“Oh. Yes. Maybe they do.”

I glanced down at the map I had lying in front of me.

“This is France.”

“The Atlantic coastline,” she said, pointing. “Bordeaux is there.”