A voice behind me spoke—“Do you know why you dream of the sea, Abram?”I turned and instantly fell to my knees. It was father Noah. His eyes glinted with amusement as he spoke “surely, no one would know that better than I?” He motioned me to stand. What I saw in his eyes horrified me.

“Father Noah,” I said. “What is this place?” He smiled the saddest smile I have ever seen.

"It rained, Abram, rained for days and days. I stayed below deck and listened to the rain, God filling the trough from a bucket that never seemed to empty. We rigged a tarp over the stairs, rather than a hatch so, we thought, we could see the sky but we couldn't see it. It was as if it wasn't there. And after the first week, I knew why. The sky itself was dissolving on top of us. The universe was coming apart. God had lied—he was going to destroy everything."

"I could not hear the voice of God. Nothing but darkness and the pounding of the rain, the howling wind…and I thought perhaps God had destroyed the world, the whole world, and me with it. Do you understand Abram? There was nothing out there."

"At night we listened to the sighs of a dying universe, like a fire slowly going out. I heard screams at night, and I could not tell whether it was the dying. I fancied it was spirits. We could hear the wind scraping on an empty universe."

"And then nothing. I was alone in an empty world. A dead world."

"Our fathers have asked, who was with God in the moment of creation? For he says, we will create the world, we will make men in our image. The answer is that I was. For He destroyed a world, and He created it again, and I watched. It wasn't the seas I sailed upon, it wasn't even a world. It was nothing. What is a body that has no life in it? A whole world full of nothingness."

"And that’s when I heard it for the first time. No, not the rain, something else. Whispering. Not a voice. Voices, whispering. And as the sounds of the living universe died away into silence, they got louder. I remember the day when I could finally make it out so clearly, for it was the day I thought I had at last gone mad. It was a love poem."

"I cannot tell you the eeriness of the moment Abram and hope you never experience its kind. Blind in emptiness, naked and alone, sailing—that is not the word, but there cannot be another—through the gigantic void, through the complete lack of creation. My ship, I knew, was no longer on Earth. And hearing on the edge of sound the whispers of the voices of the gods themselves."

"They were huge voices, and slow. It took me days to understand them. Whispering across the nothing to each other, through the ashes of a dead world."

"Dark am I, yet lovely, o daughters of Jerusalem," he intoned, "Dark like the tents of Kedar, like the tent curtains of Solomon. Tell me, you whom I love, where you graze your flock, and where you rest your sheep at midday."

"And then the other voice, deeper."

"If you do not know, most beautiful of women, follow the tracks of the sheep and graze your goats by the tents of the shepherds."

"I couldn’t take it any more, stuck in that boat. I was sure I was dead, that we were nothing. When I could take those voices, talking over and through the sounds from the dying universe, I opened the hatch. I walked out on deck. And do you know what I saw, Abram? In the rain above my head?"

"God’s face. I saw God’s face in the rain."

"And far, far below, I could see her face upturned to his. The face of the woman of the universe, of the Earth, speaking those words into the emptiness. And I saw…I saw amid the thousands of falling drops, glinting and shining with fierce silver light, how the words they spoke to one another gathered fabric like bones putting on flesh and rebuilt the Universe, piece by piece."