A little over an hour after Wilder mistook the invasion of her home for the freedom of flying, Nick Loukakis, who in consequence of rowing with his wife was sleeping on an air mattress on their living room floor, gave up on the idea of sleep. His thoughts turned to his marriage and it suddenly struck him that they could no longer go on living together and that he must leave her. It seemed not simply important, but overwhelmingly necessary, that they talk. He got up and went upstairs to their bedroom in order to speak to his wife. But she was asleep, on her side, with a slight snoring burr to her breath.
Still there was the hopeless momentum of his need to change, to no longer live the way they lived, and though all this remained important and necessary in his mind, looking at her now he had no idea what he might say.
“Are you awake?” he began softly, hoping to wake her gently; hoping even more strongly the opposite, that she would not hear him and sleep on. She slept on.
He sat back up on the side of the bed, and, having nothing better to do, continued sitting there. He thought of a documentary he had seen about a great inland sea in Russia, the life-giving forces of which had always been taken for granted, until in a few short years it shrivelled up and disappeared. And somehow their love seemed to him like that inland sea that had simply vanished, that sea that seemed inexhaustible and immortal, and after a time he again leant over and once more whispered to her, because he wanted to tell her about that sea, and once more she didn’t answer.
And so he sat on the bed until the dark night changed into a grey dawn, and he was no longer sure what it was that was so important and necessary, only that whatever it was, it was urgent. Through the course of the night the story about the vanishing sea had also transformed in his mind, until now it was only a tale that really meant very little. But still he hoped that together they might find some words for all the torment he now carried within him and, he suspected, she now also bore inside her.
But the dawn passed and the day came and when they saw each other in the kitchen an hour later, coffee cups in hand, it was as strangers who have no words other than the dullest and most obvious for each other. For, Nick Loukakis dimly realised, there were no words for any of it, neither the finding of love, nor its disappearance.