Now I can lift the ice directly out—the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, soon I lose count. I fling the containers onto the floor. They’re not going into the water, although they will perhaps end up there anyway, to join the mountains and islands of plastic in the ocean and slowly decompose into microplastic, disappear into the digestive system of a fish, be served up on a plate to be eaten by a human being, who eats his or her own garbage, the way we all eat our own garbage every day.

The plastic feels hard beneath my fingers when I remove the lid of yet another container. I lift it, carry it toward the hatch, flip it over, and dump the huge white blocks out into the water, where they hit the surface with a gentle splash. The ice bobs on the surface—white, shiny cubes against the pitch-black water, amid the uneven yellow reflections of light from the lampposts on the wharf. Sweat trickles down my back, but my hands are cold inside my gloves, so frozen that I have lost all feeling in them. The sensation is painful, but satisfying.

The ice blocks lie in the water like small icebergs, just the upper portion of them visible—that’s how it is with floating glaciers, more below the water than above. But these won’t harm anyone, won’t destroy. I am the destroyer here, because the water is warm and the ice will quickly melt. When the skipper comes to start the engine in a few hours, the blocks will already be smaller, but nonetheless the salt water will have ruined them. This ice can never be used as ice cubes—it can never, ever be served on a sheik’s table, in a crystal tumbler, in a drink, in Saudi Arabia or Qatar.

Ice that melts, ice that melts in salt water, I am a part of it now, a part of what is taking place at all times. I am compounding the changes. I laugh, startled by the sound of my own laughter, an unfamiliar croaking like a frog. They are dying, the frogs, being wiped out in silence, without the world caring. One-third of the world’s species are in danger of extinction, but nobody thinks about it. Nobody thinks about the frog, as it moves through the world’s marsh landscapes, always in contact with water—slimy, modest, not disgusting enough to be hideous, not strange enough to be amusing. Just odd, how it croaks, how it hops, how it flees from humans.

Finally I am almost finished. My back is aching, twenty kilos of ice in every container, so heavy, too heavy. I count rapidly, only twelve more, only 240 kilos. I am about to open yet another container, but my hands are trembling, my fingers are stiff. And then I stop—I’m tired, I am just so tired, too old for this kind of lifting, my flesh and bones protest, far too old.

I sit down on the containers. Oh, Magnus, I am incapable of hurling the last of the blocks of ice overboard, our ice, it has been left in peace until now, until you came. But it hasn’t been silent, because ice is never silent, it has its own sound, it creaks. Ice creaking is one of the world’s oldest sounds and it frightens me, has always frightened me. It’s the sound of something going to pieces. And the sound of a stone that fails to penetrate the ice, but gives off an echo all the same, a brief reverberation, of the water below—is a reminder of everything imprisoned underneath, of how solidly in place everything is.