PART ONE

       THE FUNERAL FOR A MISSING MAN BECOMES REDUCED to objects. Small proxies, a collection of artifacts. In lieu of a body, just left-behind things. Things judged dear to the departed, or emblematic of his quicksilver existence, as all our existences are ultimately mercurial. The table, where the eye looks for a casket, is set up with his childhood photos and the chosen props: the mildewed leather baseball glove, the football cleats, all the equipment of lost youth. The brass sextant, ceremonial and that day left behind, ironic perhaps for a man disappeared into the sea. Some rust-tinged tools, as if the place setting of a simple life. As present in the moment are the objects not offered: the needles and pipes and plastic bags, all those defeated soldiers of a decades-long war. How ironic, then, that his beloved sea has claimed him after he’d thought he’d looked behind at all his demons.

       The funeral parlor, filled with his own kind, of two kinds: the remnants of his family and old friends, and to the other side, the thick-handed lobstermen rubbing their weathered faces, itching to cast off even as they account for another loss among them. Small murmurs in the back rows about another, a man swept off a deck down by Cape May. They sit in leather jackets and mended trousers and look warily at those here who are not among their ranks.

       Their boats fill the harbor today. The lobsters are granted stay. A man is gone, but a table of effects remain as scant touchstones of a full existence. And over it hangs that fog of indistinct death, and possibly of murder, but by whom, and to whom, unknown.