At first it was just oil that leaked from the ruptured pipe at the bottom of the ocean, so we didn’t work that hard to stop it. We had all lived through oil leaks before, after all. We tried to plug it with waste, with boatloads of debris scooped out of one of the great floating garbage patches in the ocean. We thought maybe we could recycle the problem away. But the pressure just forced the garbage back out, an underwater geyser of everything we’d discarded and forgotten. So we settled for skimming the oil off the ocean surface. We shipped it to the same refineries we would have anyway, and pumped it into our cars, only now with a few more dead turtles and pelicans in the mix.
But then other things came out of the pipe. The ghosts of all those who had died at sea. They got caught in the
