Five hundred miles from the mainland, obscured by the curve of the earth, the islands of a nameless archipelago dot a patch of blue tarpaulin sea. Barren, old, crumbling, the islands are the only defined points on a watery plain that is as vacant and forlorn as sky. Cargo ships chugging across the sea leave wakes of foam, and the wakes crisscross like pick-up sticks, but purposeless currents dissolve these lines. Jet trails across the sky repeat this behavior, the perfect lines, the breaking apart. Clouds of fish drift below, clouds of rain above. Sheens of oil. A stray, melting iceberg from the south. A fishing net torn loose. Nothing holds fast. Not even the islands of the archipelago. They are old and chalky, and they are crumbling into the sea; most have eroded to fewer than a hundred yards wide; the lowest ones are submerged during storms. Someday, the islands of the archipelago will wash away.
The best navigational charts put the number of islands at about 200. The shorelines are sheer cliffs, jagged and white as bergs, crowded with puffins, cormorants, and gulls. Every island lies within sight of several others, and no island is separated from another by more than two hops. On a map, if you pinned down segments of string linking the islands, you would describe a network more entwined than the strands of a spider web. But understand this: if you tried to pull the string into a knot, gently, the tangled connections would amount to nothing more than a simple loop. It would be as if the archipelago were not even there.
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