PROLOGUE

DEEP WATER

When women ask David what he does, he tells them he’s in league with a god, the one who lives at the bottom of the ocean.  The deepest waves are his domain; they roll fifteen thousand feet below the surface, racing along undisturbed over the bottom of the sea floor.  Higher up, at seven thousand feet, slow, ponderous water slides over rocks, across great oceanic deserts, then cascades down vast canyons, carrying turbid currents of sludge, hurricanes of debris that swirl in silence.  The moment one of these long, slow waves meets another of different salinity and warmth, internal breaking surf is the result, exploding up hundreds of feet into a dark underworld that contains enough food for the whole planet, enough minerals for all civilization.  This deep water glides beneath us, lives on without us, waiting perhaps for the ultimate abandonment of the planet by man.

The next time you are at the beach, consider that water you behold; it knew the abyss, knew the great drum rolls of the ocean floor, and it rose up to you from a world as distant as the stars.  That wave might have traveled twenty thousand miles and ten years just to touch you.  It is the intersection of yourself and fate. 

David’s own life had reached such a point.  The murky water that appeared on the surface so inexplicably, and he thought, so undeservedly, had actually been coming to him from a long distance and from the depths.