Leviathan or The Whale

touch it through the thick glass, as if something might pass between us. I waited for it to raise a flipper. But it didn’t, so I turned away, unable to take its stare any longer.

    After years living in London, the city had begun to press down on me. I sometimes felt as if all the sky were sea, and we citizens mere bottom-feeders, held down by its great pressure as we moved around the caverns and boulders of the streets. I lived on the borders of the City, within sight of the Docklands; over the years I watched the replicating skyscrapers rise up from the London clay like crystal stalagmites in a schoolboy’s jam-jar experiment. At night I would dream that the tower block in which I lived was surrounded by water, inundated by the expected flood; that from my ninth-floor eyrie I could look down to see whales and sharks circling below. In other dreams, I saw a stone-walled harbour and a mass of marine animals caught within it, squirming and writhing to get out.
    A place that had represented all my youthful aspirations now felt like a viral infection; and although, like a dose of malaria, I would never quite shake it, I was gradually, incrementally, leaving my old life behind. With the death of my father, and my mother living alone, I found myself spending more time back south. It was a kind of consolation, for grief and loss, for the severing of other emotional ties. I felt set adrift, anchorless–yet also a kind of convergence, a symmetry. It was the comfort of the old, but I saw it anew.
    I replaced the treeless view from my ninth-floor flat with daily visits to the shore; the hard edges of the city with unconfined green and blue; stalking flea-bitten pigeons with black and white oystercatchers picking their way along the beach at low tide. My eyes stretched with the relief you feel when you look out over to the horizon from a train window, rather than onto the foreshortened visions of the street. Instead of superstitiously picking up pennies from the street, I combed the beach for stones with holes guaranteed to ward off witches, creating miniature avalanches as they piled up on my dressing table back home. And I stood looking out to sea, watching transatlantic ships sail by like Fitzgerald’s boats borne back ceaselessly into the past, waiting for a future that might never come, like the man who fell to earth. As consoling as the water was, it sometimes served only to make me restless in my suburban exile.
    Five years after my first visit to America, I took a train to Boston from New York’s Penn Station. Having bought a map of New England from the bookstall, I began to trace my route along the coast. The name itself–a
New
England–seemed romantic, optimistic; both familiar and strange at the same time. The names on the map evoked the country I had left behind–Manchester, Norwich, Warwick–as Manhattan gave way to sharp sun and wide beaches and picnicking families, apparently unaware of the train hurtling past behind them. At the end of the line, I walked down to the harbour and boarded the ferry, watching Boston recede in a sequence of small islands, to the toll of a bell fixed to a buoy:
    fuller of dirges for the past, than of monitions for the future; and no one can give ear to it, without thinking of the sailors who sleep far beneath it at the bottom of the deep.

    Ahead lay mile after nautical mile of sea. I did not know what to expect when I reached the other side, but as the boat docked, everyone else seemed to know where they were going. So I followed them, into Provincetown.
    Cape Cod curls out into the Atlantic like a scorpion’s tail. This is new land, carved out by mile-thick glaciers only fifteen thousand years ago. Its inner shores are still more recent, formed of sand carried from the far side of the Cape, an egg-timer adding even as it takes away. This is also the graveyard of the Atlantic. Its beaches bear witness to disaster: entire wrecks buried by the sand, their masts jutting from the dunes, along with human hands. Marconi, who established his radio station on this same shore, a forest of aerials among the marram grass, believed he could tune in to the voices of drowned men still hanging in the ether.
    Cape Cod is not so much the end of the land as the beginning of the sea. To Thoreau, who walked here a hundred and fifty years ago, it was a place where ‘everything seemed to be gently lapsing into futurity’. ‘A man may stand there and put all America behind him,’ he wrote;