This whale can’t be alone either, it is bound to have a partner or a child nearby. And anyway, it has the entire ocean beneath it, with all the life it contains, the unimaginable number of species. Only I’m alone up here on the surface, only me and the huge surface of the ocean and an infinite emptiness above me. I am a cross on a map, a dot on a surface, insignificant, almost invisible, as we all are, because from a distance, from above, each and every one of us disappears. From outer space it is water one sees, the ocean, the clouds, the drops that give the earth life. The blue globe, different from all the other planets we know about, just as alone in the universe as each and every one of us down here.

You have to stay, dear whale, you have to stay here with me, just stay.

But at that moment it disappears. Without warning it’s gone, no ripples on the waves, no bubbles in the water, just the sheer, flat surface left behind—the enormous, unwieldy floor of water, with its incomprehensible system of waves and streams, not hard, yet closed.

And the whale doesn’t return.

I’m unable to move, just stand here, the deck solid beneath my feet. How cold my hands are, the light wind, the humidity in the air.

It’s just me, me and the surface.

There have been periods in my life when I thought I had a pod—Eidesdalen, Alta, Narmada. But actually, there’s only been me, alone, now and always.

I think I’ve been alone ever since the night Daddy blew up the bridge. I think it happened on that night.

They met up there, he and Sønstebø, in the middle of the night, in the dark. I wonder what Daddy was thinking as they attached the sticks of dynamite to the freshly cut timber of the bridge, if he thought about Mommy and about me, or if he just thought about what he had between his hands, the blasting caps, the explosives. Perhaps he thought about Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite sometime in the nineteenth century. It would be typical of him to think of Nobel. . . . And when they had driven the van away, when they got into position to detonate the charges, did he think of us then, of me? Did Sønstebø think of his child, of Magnus?

Or did the two men think that they were at war, that all’s fair in war. Was it a war they were fighting, the two of them, up there on the mountainside that night?