I walk through my childhood bedroom treading water. The carpets sodden. The wallpaper pockmarked and water-stained. I follow the sound of running water through my parents’ living room and then up, into my college dorm room.

Somewhere deep in the belly of the house I can hear Simone crying out, calling his name and then mine in an endless cycle. I call back and continue to search for her.

I walk through the bedrooms of ex-girlfriends. Through the offices and kiosks of long-forgotten summer jobs. Through department store stockrooms and doctors’ offices. Through classrooms and library stacks.

I find her standing in an overflowing bathtub, legs wet up to her knees, her face bloated as if from some horrific allergy. The whites of her eyes shot red and enflamed. Her tears falling in a solid sheet, filling the bathtub and spilling over perpetually.

She reaches out to me. Her hand hovering over the lip of the tub, over some imaginary precipice.

‘Phineas?’ I ask. ‘Where is Phineas?’

‘Is he not with you?’ she asks.

Then she retches, bringing up black water. I can smell the salt in the air. It’s invasive, almost overpowering. I walk backwards and shut the door behind me, but the scent lingers. It follows me. I feel heavy, as if I’ve been saturated by it somehow. A carrier for some imperceptible foreign body. I double over and vomit, each heave bringing up handfuls of the same water. It’s only then that I realise the smell is coming from within me. That we are both sick with it. The same guilt.

And though I can’t remember waking in the morning I feel more conscious than I have ever been. Simone rolls over to face me, and for a horrifying moment I expect to find her head bloated, her eyes shot red. But she is unchanged.

‘I dreamt we were at sea,’ she says.

XXIII

I hear running water all through breakfast. Each time I swallow, like a whisper. The sound disappears for long stretches, but inevitably it returns. There are minutes, hours, entire days when I hold my breath and wait. There is no measurable rhythm, no discernible pattern. I hear it so often it begins to sound like language. Sometimes the droplets fall rapidly, in enraptured speech, but often the breaths between are stuttered.

One grey afternoon I remember the book we bought Phineas on Morse code and find it on his bookshelf. I sit with a notepad in the kitchen and try to decipher the patterns, to translate them, but it is nonsense. When Simone arrives home I tear apart the pages out of embarrassment.

I walk the house with my fingers to walls as if I expect to feel a current beneath them. Sometimes I enter rooms and see puddles of water collecting on the hardwood floors but when I stop to inspect them I realise they are just pools of sunlight.

I put headphones on in the study and listen to records, but it brings me little peace. I realise I am listening more for the silence between tracks than the tracks themselves. I take long aimless drives, but when I return the sound greets me like an old friend.