Tanner Sack is swimming doggedly back to the split in the cliffs. He anticipates the terrifying climb up that staggered path, practicing the movement of kicking out from the rock should the mosquito-women come, hurtling back into the sea.

He is unhappy. It does not help to think that he had to do it.

He wishes suddenly that the sea would do what poets and painters promise of it: that it would wash everything away so that he could start again, that it would make everything new. The water sluices through him as if he were hollow, and he closes his eyes as he moves, and imagines it cleansing him from the inside.

Tanner’s fist is clenched around the ugly seal ring. He wishes his memories would wash out of him, but they are tenacious as his innards.

He stops suddenly in the middle of the sea, suspended fifty feet below the surface, hanging like a condemned man in the black water. This is my home, he tells himself, but takes no comfort from it. Tanner feels a rage in him, a rage that he controls, sadness as much as anger, and loneliness. He thinks of Shekel and Angevine (as he has done scores of times).

He reaches out deliberately and opens his hand, and the heavy Crobuzoner ring pitches instantly away.

It is so black, the sense of his own pale skin is more memory than sight. He can only imagine the ring falling from his palm. Plunging. Falling for a long time. Coming to rest at last in a snarl of rock or lost engine parts. Threading perhaps by chance onto some frond of weed, some finger of coral-a mindless, contingent affectation.

And then, and then. Ground down by the endless motion of the water. Not swallowed as he tries to imagine, not lost forever. Reconstituted. Until one day, years or centuries from now, it will resurface, thrown up by submarine upheavals. Diminished perhaps by the implacable currents. And even if the gnawing of brine has been absolute, if the ring is dissipated, its atoms will rise to the light and add to Machinery Beach.

The sea forgets nothing, forgives nothing, whatever we’re told,thinks Tanner.

He should swim on, and he will soon; he’ll return and clamber up dripping into the mosquito township. Tentacles flailing like fly whisks, he will scuttle back to the door where Bellis will admit him (he knows she’ll be waiting). And the job will be done and the city (the old city, his first city) safe, perhaps. But for now he can’t move.