All the Water in the World

Content Warning: This section discusses death, sexual violence, and racism.

“I can feel water and I can feel heavy weather on the way. Mother said, ‘You’re like a dowser, Nonie, like those people who can feel water under the ground and help farmers find it, only you do it with water everywhere.’ What she said is so. I can understand water—floods and rivers over their banks, storms and clouds and placid days when the droplets sit in the air like they are thinking quietly of joining the earth.

But the storm that took Amen, that storm I didn’t feel. It was too big. It […] broke the floodwalls. That was the last night of the Old City and the museum and Amen and everything that trapped us, when the wide Hudson opened its mouth wider and became the sea […] and we took off north, no matter how scared Bix was, no matter how hard it was to leave Mother behind. It was the storm that started something new.”

Nonie’s unique relationship with water sets her apart from other characters in the book. She was born into a world where water is a dominant force. Everyone needs to survive, yet it constantly threatens their survival. Nonie can sense ambient humidity and water pressure, and the novel implies that this ability is a result of extreme sensory sensitivity stemming from neurodivergence. The Amen community came to realize that this sensitivity was a reliable way to predict storms in what was overall an unpredictable climate. However, despite how reliable her senses are, the wild climate of the “World As It Is” is beyond anything that anyone can predict. Nonetheless, her attunement to water demonstrates how well-suited she is to the new world: Traits that society previously might have ignored or marginalized are valuable in the storm-ravaged world.

“The Museum Logbook was to keep understanding alive, the most important work there was for Amen, a race against rot and mold and time to save things, even the memory of things. My Water Logbook was only for the future. I was young then and didn’t know why I was making it. Now I know it was to make the new way of knowing that might put it all right again, the new thing I’m standing at the edge of, here where there is drinkable water and where people are in the rooms of the house writing and cooking, and I’m about to leave again, but only for good reasons, remembering what was left behind in that storm.”

This passage presents a central internal conflict both for Nonie and for some of the settlements: the prioritization of preserving the past over preparing for the future. Nonie’s mother inspires the Amen community members, including Nonie, to all record their findings and preserve cultural artifacts in hopes of carrying knowledge of their past into the future.