What Water Dissolves by Marta Regn

Three days after wondering if one drink could really hurt, I wake up to a pounding coming from the street below my apartment and a police officer shouting, “Get out of the car!” Each “out” deeper, more guttural than the last, like a slow approach underwater toward the song or sonar of a hurt whale on its great descent. Outside, there’s a man in an SUV, shrugging his slack shoulders to the hammering on his window. It’s as if he can’t see through the dark, can only sense there’s a knocking. The air is all mist. The night is slurred with red and blue and the yellow flicks of a flashlight. Everything in the scene beckons me. I get out of bed and crouch at the window, watching, stunned, heart whacking my lungs. “Where have you been tonight?” the officer demands. “Where are you going?” The sounds reach me on a wavelength my body registers as dangerous, near-death: a phone ringing through the car’s speakers, unanswered, then the clobbered door unlocked, forced open by the cop. “Nowhere,” is on the man’s low voice, all vowels.

While touring this apartment, the landlord said that through this bedroom window was a view of the water. I imagined winter—the trees revealing themselves, leaves gone—and watching a gentle tide slosh the docks. But the bay never appeared. It doesn’t crest the horizon beyond the townhomes, never fills the empty space that widens with each frost. As I’ve strained to see for months, I strain now, tracing the black water riffling over the asphalt and down the storm drains, soaking the man’s pants as he leans against the car, still refusing to speak, darkness growing like mold from his hem.

The man clenched something like pride at first—upturning his chin at the officer’s questions, jeering when the flashlight was held to his eyes—but the passenger behind him was a wave of limbs, searching the glove compartment and center console. When the second cop arrives, arms outstretched and clasped around something like a gun or a taser or a weaponized shape, the passenger opens her door freely, crumbling any line of defense. “Who is she to you?” the first officer shouts at the driver who has given up, his head in his hands, rubbing his eyes like he’s just woken up. The woman whispers with the second officer as she steps onto the sidewalk and sits on the damp concrete. Doing this, it strikes me how young she looks, like a little boy. Her slender shoulders hunch and slip through the stretched-out collar of her sweater.

In the foreground, the driver shuffles alongside the car into the first steps of a field sobriety test. The first cop shows the man how. One foot in front of the other, heel to toe. But the man lifts his feet like they’re encased in cement. There’s an awkward amount of space between his bent legs as if astride a bike or straddling a fence post. As he is handcuffed, the officer must hold him upright, against the weight of his own body as the man swirls, recoils, then launches forward like a jellyfish. The driver’s eyes look long up the wet street, past his passenger who is beginning a cold walk elsewhere, leaving him here to drown.

It’s been four years since I last drank, but I always thought drunkenness felt like being underwater. When I dream of it, I am swollen and floating. The edges are limned like oil-slick rainbows on the blacktop. It is always night. It is always raining.

A few times, I think the cops can see me leering from above, watching from the vantage we do most every catastrophe: throngs of cars wrecked on a highway or streams of humans waiting at a border. Two days before I toured this apartment, a fleet of drones captured footage of the scarred bodies of two whales beached not far from here, their tails still wet with surf. Long before this kind of aerial photography became reality, painters had been coveting the viewpoint of birds. Battles were fought and won by those who had access to the most expansive view. The first recorded experiments of flying photography came during the American Civil War, when the Union army launched balloons over enemy lines. By World War I, the technology was widespread. When we learned to photograph from the air, we manifested a longstanding desire for perspective and power. To see a threat from a distance is like a mystic prediction of the future. It’s that important, that predominant. To see the contours of disaster—zooming out, far removed—minimizes reality until it fits within a screen, becoming scene, becoming consumable, controllable.

It is only when the drunk driver flings back his head—laughing at his bad luck, taking in the night like it is an ornate ceiling in Vatican City—that I duck below the sill, ashamed to have almost met his eyes.

***

In winter, humpback whales on their migration south are sometimes spotted in Chesapeake Bay. Increasingly, these sightings are of strandings. Bus-sized bodies halted in sand, shining like polished obsidian. Barnacled backs showing their age. The alarming symmetry of ventral grooves on their jawlines like the teeth of a comb. Great cathedrals of rib cages revealed by gulls and vultures picking at the layered blubber and meat-red flesh. This, all along the East Coast. Since 2016, so many whales have washed ashore along the Atlantic coast that scientists have declared an ongoing “unusual mortality event.” Remarkable deaths. Deaths to write home about. The cause is unclear. Possibly military sonar, possibly seismic exploration by offshore wind companies—all the underwater blasting, an oceanic din. It might be hunger, warming waters, or a natural collapse beneath their own weight: a whale’s fate. A single cause has yet to be determined, and may never be, for the ocean is far too complex, too unknown. We have no name for this whale-sickness or the ocean’s sickness, no diagnosis. The whale deaths become a question to be answered. They pose possible futures, horrible threats, so we take to the air. Learning about the whale deaths, I mostly look at aerial pictures. Hundreds of inch-high boxes fill my screen, each containing a dead whale.

Not long after moving here, I began to dream of beached whales. The whales in each dream are different, but my position in space remains the same. I am elevated, looking down. Sometimes on high ground. Once on the world’s biggest ocean liner that bobbed slowly with the sea. I can see the water. I can sense the salt air. But the peaceful scene begins to swirl, spins out into something terrible. A wall of a wave rises, towering over the beach below. Swimmers and surfers duck into it, determined to avoid the crash, but the wave is so tall and the dream so defiant of reality, they simply fall from the water as if it is a ledge. The beach is swallowed. The high hill I am on fizzes with the wave’s edge, wetting my shoes. I think I’ve dodged some disaster as the wave recedes, but in its recoil, the whales appear. So many whales, stranded. They look like gargantuan platypi, lined up like leather loafers, but the dream’s noetic quality tells me they are whales, and they keep materializing in the waves that swell to impossible heights. And the whales, one by one, die in great heaps on the beach until I must wake up.

The only recurring dreams I’ve experienced conjure scenes in which I am out of control. Sky-sized tsunamis. Drunken careening. Driving a car with no brakes. The dim image of a man sneering down at my blacked-out body. In the dreams, I can’t tell real from unreal, memory from imagination. Reading up on my nightmares—trauma dreams, phobia dreams, drunk dreams—I learn that it is normal to be overcome with fear and guilt upon waking. Sometimes numb, having just surfaced from a frigid helplessness. The therapeutic advice is to take care of one’s self, heed the research that these dreams don’t correlate meaningfully with impending doom—don’t signal relapse, don’t indicate any personal regression. But I can’t help but take them as signs. During the brutal reign of the Roman Empire, the diseased and dying traveled to the temple of Asclepius, god of medicine, to sleep on the stone floor, desperate for dreams sent by the god himself. Their dreams were interpreted into prescriptions: fasts, purges, phlebotomy. They carried instructions and delivered diagnoses, ways to make sense of pain, faith that pain will someday end. The whale dreams don’t make sense, so I only try harder to understand. I wait for the dreams to pattern themselves into a future I can tell. I open myself like a medium ready to receive a vital piece of information—not from an ancient god above, but from the scene playing out below.

***

The drunk driver is cuffed and folded into the backseat of the patrol car like a secret piece of notepaper into a fist. A pink tube of ChapStick falls from his pocket and into the street, rolling under the car and out of sight. They don’t notice, and a pang of recognition comes to me that I might be the only person on Earth to have seen this.

I stand up, bleary and aware of the early hour of the morning, full of ache in my thighs after squatting for so long. I am loose in the world, and it blinds me, like I’ve just stepped out of a movie theater or surfaced with a snorkel. It is no different, I realize, than waking up. I walk a rigid line to the bathroom, feeling for corners I can see only in the flare of the tow truck’s rotating yellow lights. For hours afterward, I can’t sleep. My heart is alive in my chest. My blood streams in irregular directions.

Three days before, I’d been moving about my apartment, casually considering if I’d ever smoke weed again. Were psychedelic drugs still off the table? Would a pressed pill of MDMA and whatever other clandestine powder send me down a tunnel out of which I’d have to claw?

I have a thousand reasons to stay sober, but it’s the memory of pain that is most convincing. Past pain that still lives in my body. It is one electric reason that reliably finds me, returns in a dream to shake me from the amnesia of time gone by, or plays out in a scene below my bedroom window. Pain is a man outside in handcuffs. Pain is a girl slipping out of her sweater in the dark. Pain is a body washed ashore on the beach.

***

Our deepening addiction to things and the subsequent explosion of ship traffic has left almost every humpback whale found stranded on eastern beaches in recent years with the sure signs of a vessel strike. Bad weather can pummel a whale, disorienting it until all water disappears. A lack of food can force a desperate whale to swim too close to land. This desperation mounts as warming water shifts the availability of whale food: fish, squid, amphipods. Plankton, krill, copepods, all trying to adapt, fewer and fewer to be swallowed in huge, sieving gulps. And, like anything capable of being alive and then not, a whale can arrive at the end of a natural cycle. Its life becomes concentric with the tide that carries out the rest. All of these deaths seem slow and probably painful, and so many of them knotted with injustice, like the fishing rope and lines that humans continually engineer to be stronger, that continue to entrap whales and lacerate their bodies until they die of infection, starvation, or drowning. The two whales that washed ashore not far from here both had entanglement scars, cloudy crosshatches like lengthy cataracts covering their gray-black bodies.

When I scroll through the abundant aerial photography of whale strandings, I look for signs of pain, as if it is always visible. As if skin-shredded and on a beach is the only way a whale’s life ends. As if there is no death that can escape observation. When a whale is sick, injured, disoriented, hungry, or old in the middle of the ocean, far from land, its death is underwater. Sometimes quickened with the help of sharks or other predators. I cannot say this kind of dying is quiet. I cannot know if it is unceremonious. I only understand that it is a sinking. A sinking through the midnight and abyssal zones of the sea, through half-light and into complete darkness. As a whale falls, its body erodes into particles like ashes scattering in a marine snow. There are rare photographs of these whalefalls taken by submarines. A few spotlights have caught all the bottom-dwelling life that flourishes on the carrion. Death turns to life. Two ends of a circle joining.

That is how the British man narrating the nature documentaries I watch in clips on YouTube describes a whalefall. He characterizes it as natural, mathematical in its transfer of energy. It is distanced from the whale’s cause of death because a whalefall can decompose for decades. Temporally distant, but emotionally distanced, too, because the form becomes unrecognizable as a whale—save for the spoked vertebrae amid a pile of bone-colored debris. Water working it away, a whalefall eventually becomes undetectable as having been alive at all. The deaths are useful, anti-aesthetic as scientists theorize that there are entire species subsisting off whalefalls. Anti-aesthetic unless specialized equipment 10,000 feet deep chances a whalefall and photographs it. In 2024, only an estimated twenty natural whalefalls had been confirmed by scientists. In the documentary, the feat of discovery begins to foreground the whale’s death. In his even tone and subtle awe, the British narrator implies a question: how could you be so sad when it’s merely evolution you’re witnessing?

Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, wrote in Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life, “Compassion is the pain we experience at the sight of misery.” Not at speculated miserable deaths. Not at the invisible, ash-fallen body. Not at the imagined, nor the dreamt.

But I do not dream of whalefall no matter how many YouTube videos I watch. The magnitude of tragedy that is a whalefall I do not know. I have so little footage. I have no ominous dream. I realize I have relied on the visible as a way of knowing, formed by a culture addicted to watching. The British man, with water glittering the edges of his eyes as bacteria mats form a fur on a whale’s body, might tell me that I am like a bottom feeder giving new meaning to something dead. Through the high window of my apartment, I watched a drunk driver flounder in the soaked road and feared for my own life.

At first, I was afraid because of the officer’s outstretched arms and the shadow of a weapon. I considered filming it, knowing what I do about weapons in the hands of people with power—a tragedy captured. But the officer lowered his arms, and the scene was documented in my mind’s eye, a mental aerial image. And then my fear shifted. The man taken somewhere. The passenger gone. The car towed. And, still, I can’t sleep. I can’t look away. I sense that I know this man, or I am this man, or that time will unwind itself and I will fall silently through this black ocean of a night and land there, years and years ago in a car I’ve since sold, that one time on the worst night, missing every turn on the drive home, waking up on the bathroom floor by a miracle and realizing all that had been done to my body. Driving like that, waking up like that, I don’t know if fate missed me or not. If I’ve been invisible or violently viewed. Did fate miss me? Is it coming back? The same painful questions echo when I’m stranded on a beach and yearning at an empty sky as when I’m ashamed and watching from above.

***

The morning after is bright and blue. The world has been scrubbed overnight, and light seems to radiate from the inside of all things. I am tired on the sidewalk walking the same path I always take in the mornings, but aflame like I keep with me a secret. The dogwalkers and their hot-breathed animals move through the intersection like nothing has occupied this space but them, like this street corner is outside of history. The cars stop and lurch and honk at each other. One of them has run over the tube of cherry ChapStick with no idea that it is the only thing left of a scene that lives inside of me. The plastic has fractured into innumerable pieces. The roseate wax is a static splash. It stays smashed there in the street all day, and I keep returning to the window to watch people walk by it like I know something they don’t, like this piece of trash is a sign they are all missing, like I am looking for proof that the scene was not a meaningless dream.

In the evening, I walk a different path, up the slight hill and away from the docks. I walk with the traffic going out toward the suburbs. I walk the same path taken by the passenger, and my fear shifts again. Every question and hope and ache I felt in the night returns: the ride someone should have offered her; the place she was or wasn’t going; the relationship she did or didn’t have with the drunk driver, a man who looked so much older and taking her somewhere he wouldn’t disclose no matter how many times the officer asked.

After the arrest, what stays with me longer than anything is the image of a woman going out into a dark night until she is submersed. For a week or more, I Google the name of my city, the name of the street running beneath my apartment, and every iteration of “drunk driver arrested” I can think of, searching not for information about the driver, but about the girl. What I will do with my findings, I do not know, but this doesn’t matter because nothing is revealed. The story stays unseen, though I sense it is out there. It is not a dream. It is as real and absolute as the bottom of the ocean, in a world all its own. Perhaps because my own painful stories stayed invisible for so long, and because I doubted their truth and reality, I pay attention to all things that happen in the dark; behind the eyes, behind doors, underwater. I admit to myself that I worry for her. I will the universe hard and with the full force of my heart to spare her, to let her get home safe. Of course, the sight of her going into the night has caused my own past to flare, and I am once again watching.

Where is the line between desire for salacious tales and simple empathy for the world which brims with hidden pain? For every tragic image, there is a voice asking, “Now what will you do about it?” I know from the mornings, when I am rattled awake by a nightmare, that it is so easy to feel nothing, numb and dismissive. The acknowledgement of pain is what led me to stop drinking—pain I inflicted on others, pain I inflicted on myself, pain inflicted on me. All of it twined like wired circuitry, all of it downstream of somewhere and flowing into a vaster ocean. Flooded with this truth, I was sensitized. The aperture of all that I could feel and care for increased. Maybe where empathy begins is at the rejection of a myopic, narrow vision. A dismissal of focalized pain. A stirring disgust at the notion of pain being isolated, intransient, and ahistorical. I do not know this girl’s story. I have never witnessed the bottom of the deep sea. What I trust to be true is that acknowledging pain and paying it attention has been my life’s most consequential confrontation.

***

It is now months and months after researchers made clean, straight cuts around the circumference of each of the stranded whales. Slabs of skin and tissue were peeled back, and every shade of red, purple, and pink was shown to the sea. Some of the researchers stood behind, taking pictures. Others climbed the whales like jungle gyms, walking along their broad bodies wielding hand saws, measuring sticks, and shining metal instruments. Hacked-off fins and bloodied tools were strewn about the beach. And then they buried the whales deep in the sand, out of the way until the ocean would eventually come to retrieve them. All this, and a definitive cause of death remains unknown.

For all my internet research, I cannot determine if these whales had names, were noted by someone or tagged by scientists with a jumble of identifying numbers before they died. Instead, I discover the website for a nonprofit dedicated to saving the North Atlantic right whale, another species suffering from the unusual mortality event. I scroll through a photo grid of whales breaching, a catalog of every mother and calf pair left in the wild. These whales have names like plush children’s toys: Cashew, Caterpillar. Only seventy reproductively active female right whales remain in the world. They're projected to become functionally extinct within ten years. The two whales stranded near here were humpbacks, a species whose population is listed as scientists’ least concern. And it is this finding that feels like a cracking in my chest. I think, Which whales are we watching? And, Why? A futile thought. Despite the humpback’s numbers holding stable at 135,000 or so, most of us will only see these whales in our dreams or as pictures on a screen. Regardless of whether we see them, name them, uncover their stories, they are known to one another. Something goes missing when a whale drifts off to shore or passes on through the deep, night-dark ocean. The activists and poets have dreamed up words for this particular kind of ecological grief. I imagine the whales feel it too. I’ve memorized these grief-terms like fatal diagnoses, but the names bring me no comfort. It is a pain with no locus or center of control. It is an everywhere pain. All I know to do is feel it.

When I moved here, I hoped to experience the ocean, to feel its truth behind the pastel painted houses, beneath the paved salt marsh. That first evening, the sun shifted behind a zinc-colored cloud and soon came the most intense thunderstorm I’d ever witnessed. Foolish and inspired, I thought, This is what it means to live on the coast. I imagined an entire sea had risen and plummeted, beating the street into a swift river. Surely it was an omen, the sky disgorging all that water dissolves.

Marta Regn (she/her) is a writer and yoga instructor living along the edge of the Chesapeake Bay. She holds an MFA from Hollins University, and her work has appeared in Necessary Fiction, Hunger Mountain, Wildness, and X-R-A-Y, among other venues. She has contributed writing on animals to the World Wildlife Fund, and co-hosts the podcast, Weathering — an exploration of weather, technology, & more.

Published October 15 2025