Night falls. The site manager has gone home. Ernesto, from the cabin at the top of the crane he works at the downtown port in Lower Manhattan, lowers an empty, uncovered freight container into the harbor water. He waits for a few minutes, looking at the horizon, today slightly hazy, before working the lever to raise the container, which, attached to the boom by straps, emerges full to the brim with water—like a dirty swimming pool. Water streams out through the joints and through holes in the sides of this metal cube, as through a colander, and in the end the bottom is left littered with a few punctured buoys, some pieces of wood, empty cans, broken lanyards, various other objects, and the fish. There’s always some leftover food substance, and the fish amass around it—wheat they avoid, salt beef they love. Ernesto grabs several that are still flipping about and puts them in an ATLANTA ’96 sports bag; the rest he puts back in the sea. An operation he repeats every 2 or 3 days. Ernesto comes from Kodiak Island in southern Alaska. In 1957 members of his family were the first Puerto Ricans to emigrate to the Alaska Territory, initially to work as fisherfolk there, though they later set up a Puerto Rican bar-restaurant that quickly became a modestly profitable chain with outlets throughout the polar territory. Already interested in technical drawings and buildings at the age of 7, Ernesto decided he would enroll at Columbia University in New York when the time came, with a view to majoring in architecture. So it went: Ernesto moved to Manhattan when he was 17, took some courses and did quite well, until he tired of that and took work operating this crane, in the same port where, on April 17, 1912, the survivors of the Titanic arrived aboard RMS Carpathia. A very well-paid job, a top job in dockworking circles. He still has a passion for architecture but he pursues it now for fun, not out of obligation. He lives in a modest apartment in Brooklyn, so that every day he has to cross the bridge of that name, the one that connects Manhattan to the continent, and each time he does so thinks of the Bering Strait. And about the fish inside the ATLANTA ’96 bag whose deaths are announced every now and then by 2 or 3 thrashes of the tail.