The shock to my body as we tumbled in

[sovay]

I dream of drowned men often; I dreamed of one last night. We were in the wreck of the Terror, which looked in my dreams like the cabin of a much older sailing ship, more than half a reef with flat-bladed kelp and sponges and soft corals, a thick lunar swirl of silt underfoot. The light was glacier-blue. I can't remember feeling cold except inside my lungs, where I was breathing water. If we'd been above sea level, I would have said that he was floating, but eighty feet down he looked like he was sitting cross-legged on the water, watching me. He shouldn't have drowned, if he was one of Franklin's men; he should have died of starvation, scurvy, lead poisoning, exposure. One of his crewmates might have butchered and eaten him. He didn't look like a malnourished corpse; no one had jointed him for his meat or cracked his jaw for his brain. He had a thin-faced winter pallor under a dark scurf of beard and his feet were bare despite the heavy wool of his sailor's jacket, which in the dream told me he was dead more clearly than anything else, because a living man would have had his boots on and all the insulation he could find. He said nothing to me. I didn't expect him to. We were under water. (It made sense at the time.) So many of the dead I dream about are younger than I am and I don't know what that reflects, unless something about historical mortality. The ship around us made sounds like pack ice, creaking, burring, singing. The rest of the dream was something muddy with shouting and stress and I woke with my jaw aching even worse than usual. Nobody in these dreams ever comes with names; they are symbols, composites. I still felt, looking at his face in the silt-falling ice-light, that I should have known it.

I have a smothering headache. Just in time for moving, I may be coming down sick. I spent most of my afternoon at the Somerville Department of Traffic and Parking and then on hold with Eversource and National Grid. I got home, made some more phone calls, ate dinner, felt awful. I am sitting on the carpet square in the summer kitchen, with only the side lights on so as not to attract the vortex of bugs that so badly marred last night; Autolycus has curled himself onto my lap in the computer-displacing way that he seems to find deeply satisfying—of course you love me better than the laptop, which almost certainly is true; I love the information on my laptop and the access, but in a fire I'd go for the cats first of all—and is purring like a drain, occasionally and sleepily licking the inside of my arm. Starboard cat. Hestia settled underneath the bed, just behind me. Port cat. Soon we will have a secure home.