The deflating Zodiac is a symbol of human vulnerability and of the inadequacy of the systems designed to protect the most vulnerable people. Part 2’s account establishes that the boat is doomed before any wave or call: “obvious there were too many of them” (61), the outboard “low in the water, as though bogged down” (61), the deck already “sticky, damp with briny pools of water” (61-62). The disaster is built into the launch, not produced by a single later failure. When the tubes deflate and the floor begins to sink, the passengers’ efforts to redistribute weight only speed the collapse (66-67); the boat will not hold whatever is placed on it. By Part 3, the boat is the figure the narrator cannot keep contained inside her console. The narrator sees “little inflatable boats in her soup, tiny arms emerging from her soup” (81) at her own kitchen table, and refuses to hang a mobile in her daughter’s room because “I would have seen the French navy helicopter circling over my daughter’s bed” (82). The dinghy refuses to stay in the jurisdiction she assigned it. Léa’s bed becomes “a fragile nut shell” (79) by the same logic. The boat ends up standing for every instance of human vulnerability for which the narrator declines to recognize her share of responsibility.