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was entirely beyond him. Except what wasn’t beyond him? Was there anything?
    “What’s going on with the glove?” he said, like a person to whom this was really happening. “It’s warm out.”
    “Well, I’m glad you asked.”
    Britt gave him a weird smile. There was food in her teeth. He didn’t know her well enough to mention it. Thank God.
    “This, sir, is a brand-new glove. I just took it from its package.” Britt flopped the glove against her face—a gesture of, what, self-harm?—then added, blushing, almost too quiet to hear: “No one has been pleasured with it yet.”
    Fleming studied the glove, leaned in, and pretended to sniff it. “That you know of,” he said, in his scientific voice.
    Britt laughed. “You
are
funny. We’ve been debating this. I’ve had to
defend
you. They think you’re
so
serious. But you’re not! You, my friend, are catching on.”
    She swished the glove at his face and he leaned away from it.
    “I
am
catching on, Britt. You might try that glove on someone else. Go throughout the longship, trying it on every young oarsman.”
    “But I don’t want to go throughout the longship. I have traveled far, good sir. I am home now. I have
found
the owner of the glove.”
    She baby-pouted up at him.
    “No thank you, Britt.”
    “You don’t know what you’re missing!”
    “True,” he said, walking off.
    And neither did she. What Fleming was missing was a home and family and self that had never quite come to be, which was maybe why he was on a boat now with strangers, pitying himself. How could you miss something that hadn’t happened? There was a certain feeling at home with Erin and Sylvie that sometimes, rarely, despite the prickly ways they fought, swept through them, for reasons he could not understand, little gusts of unexamined happiness when he and Erin smiled at each other for no reason and when they stretched out on the rug and played blocks with Sylvie and when Sylvie would roll over and suddenly yell “Pants!” kicking her naked legs in the air. A serious call for pants from his young daughter that made them laugh so hard. That’s what he missed, but it stood alone. Had it really even happened that way? And if something like it happened again, who knows, Fleming or Erin or both of them would react differently, would look away from each other, embarrassed that they’d suddenly been caught living while poor Sylvie shrieked with joy under the cold gaze of her functionally dead parents.
    From the house phone outside the restaurant Fleming dialed the ship’s operator and asked to be connected to the room of C. L. Levy.
    “I have no such passenger,” said the operator.
    “As of when?” asked Fleming.
    “I’m sorry?”
    “Did you ever have a passenger by that name?”
    “You mean ever on the ship? That’s not really something I can look up.”
    Oh, but you fucking can, you master of the database. “I mean up until yesterday. Was there a C. L. Levy yesterday and now there is not one today?”
    “But we haven’t put into port yet. No one has left the ship.”
    Fleming paused. “It does stretch the imagination,” he admitted. He pictured C. L. Levy, just a shadow, standing on the ship’s railing, tilting out of sight. They say you can’t hear the splash. He bet to hell you could hear the splash. Something that awful could never be silent.
    “Sir, I apologize, I’m not sure I can help you.”
    “Thank you,” said Fleming. “I understand.”
    But he didn’t, and he wouldn’t, and he couldn’t. The encounter joined too many others in the bottomless gunnysack he lugged around for situations that didn’t, maybe never would, make sense. He’d become a bit of a collector, but was the material worth anything? Everything unbelievable in his whole life that had nevertheless still happened. It would need to be probed for secrets.
    Out on deck it wasn’t dark enough to hide. His students would be roaming the ship, drinking, waiting behind fake bushes so they