Excerpt from Part I, Chapter 1

I have blue eyes. My father has blue eyes. I remember, as a child, visiting him at his laboratory where he studied the distribution of phytoplankton across various bodies of ocean water. I'd peer into his microscope. There, between two slices of glass in a slender density of seawater, single-celled diatoms, dinoflagelates and coccolithaphores careened lazily, their translucent, lacey structures resembling fantastical legs and carapaces, spines and antennae crossing, fusing then separating in an elaborate but accidental choreography. How could a single cell be so intricate? How could a drop of water hold so many creatures? In evenings at home I glimpsed him in wavering candlelight at the dining room table surrounded by fanned out papers. Four brass candlesticks, dim with drools of hardened wax, stood sentry over his bent head as he wrote up his research, scribbling intently with a pencil which made a dry sound like the scurry of mice. Every so often, the flame spit and jumped.

Recently, I asked him what caused the shifting color of the sea, thinking that a seasonal growth fluctuation of plankton would account for the cool grays of winter tides against the turquoise spring waters and ochre toned summer swells. But no, the plankton count is quite stable, he said. The variable shades of Cape Cod's Vineyard Sound, the body of water that watched over my childhood, came from a complex equation of reflected atmospheric light and coastal turbulence stirring up bottom sediment.

Blue water. Blue skies. Blue eyes. When you are a small child you don't yet know that other people look at your eyes and see their blueness. You know only that you see the world through eyes; there is no blue cast to the view, no sensation of blue. Blue eyes are genetically recessive, like a scarce chip of sea glass made from bottles smashed and rolled in the waves then cast on the beach, the edges rounded to harmlessness. I looked in the mirror. As complex as their fitful Atlantic counterpart, my eyes were the color of a December sea flecked with splinters of gray into which spilled light refracted by an outer world of landscape, buildings, people. My irises glistened with tears when bottom sediment churned to the surface.