Water is omnipresent in Before the Fall, swallowing up the wreckage of the aircraft and the bodies of the victims. It has long been a central motif in Scott’s life, ever since he saw Jack LaLanne’s swim in San Francisco Bay. A champion swimmer in his teen years, Scott grounds himself in later life by returning to the activity. At the same time, he remains haunted by the drowning of his sister in Lake Michigan, to the extent that all the women he paints continue to have her face. The third painting the novel describes is itself set underwater.

Water—especially the idea of being underwater—also has numerous metaphorical resonances in the novel. The bar where Cunningham meets his informant, Namor, is called Swim!—not only is the décor nautical, but the quality of the lighting suggests being underwater, making it an ideal setting for facilitating nefarious and illegal deeds. More seriously, of course, the government investigators must go underwater to seek the remnants of the plane and the bodies of the passengers and crew. Truth, that is, cannot be limited to surfaces—it is what is underneath the water that matters. Still, even the attempts to recover the plane from the water remain partially incomplete, reinforcing the notion, implicit through the entire novel, that water, whether the Atlantic Ocean or Lake Michigan, remains radically outside of human control.