IN 1853, Robert Foulis walked towards his house in Saint John, a seaport city in New Brunswick, having emigrated to Canada from Scotland three decades earlier. Saint John was familiar now as Glasgow no longer could be, but as he walked towards his house on a foggy night, all at once it was strange again. As he approached, he heard music, familiar notes of a melody he could almost piece together: it was his daughter playing the piano. Noticing he could only hear the very low notes, he realized that a device emitting low frequency sound could be used to warn ships approaching the harbor in dense fog.
In 1853, Robert Foulis invented the foghorn.
WHEN THE fog first rolled into their home in September, it had been ninety-six days since Ann had thought of theirs as a house of love. Ninety-six days? The number had come to her in last night's dream, urgent in its specificity. In the dream, it was another season: evening, but still light, the day's heat burning off—she and Dhyan had watched the adolescent geese paddling across a lake.
Lately, waking to the back of Dhyan's head in sleep, she imagined it was a head she'd never before seen. She pictured him, a stranger, rolling over and opening his eyes to look at her, and hers would be a stranger's face, too. Sometimes, they had the same face. That morning, though, she woke up to dense waves of mist, obscuring her view, and for a moment she knew she was alone.
Five years ago, Ann had seen Dhyan across the thirteenth floor of the library (810.8 to 899: Comp Lit, American Studies). He was tall, in an oversized coat, and so distracted that he nearly walked into a column on his way to the elevator. Ann packed up her bag and made it just in time to meet Dhyan as the doors dinged open. He had been finishing his thesis: a soundscape of their college town, its interlocking streets, the students and not-students, their summer crickets and dried gingko leaves, a thunderstorm. Something was missing, though, and he was looking for inspiration in the library's sound archives. When he ran his hand across his face, pushing up his glasses, she saw the purplish veins spidering across his eyelids, and it was there: the shadow of love.
