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Chapter Text

Monday April 2, 2057

The ship, which is not real, opens for tours at ten, though staff are expected to arrive by quarter after nine. Marcus, who is several minutes late, finds that the rest of the staff have already gotten into costume and are jogging in place on the cramped and rain-wet deck, doing a frantic team-building or acting exercise that he would like, more than anything else in the world, to avoid. He can hear the pounding of their feet before he gets to the ship, and he stops and tries to calculate an approach that will get him on board without being noticed. There’s not going to be any way, he thinks: the empty masts rise like barren trees in the cold, foggy spring air, and they provide absolutely no cover for someone trying to sneak onboard. The little whaling boats, hanging from their davits off the side of the ship, are similarly useless to him. Up top, the old American flag with thirty seven stars on it hangs limply, almost dripping with the humidity. Below, the lookout, a scarecrow tied to the mast like a prisoner, looks eerily human in the fog, and glares down at him, making him feel watched.

If he stands here much longer, someone real is going to glance down at the wooden dock  and see him standing there, observing the circle of joggers, so Marcus tries to board the tall ship via the dockside ramp, then sneak below without being seen. Much like the jogging, this is an exercise in futility: Joe, his boss, spots him before he’s managed to get to the aft cabin stairs.

“Marcus! Glad you could join us!” Joe yells out. His voice carries across the deck, and then across the water, making several seagulls perched on the rails take off, squawk unhappily, and go take up residence on someone else’s boat. The Wampanoag is docked in between a veritable forest of smaller pleasure sailboats, cheaper space away from the ferry and busy fishing trawlers. They’re not on the ocean proper, still inside the wide and sheltered harbor mouth of the Acushnet river, so the brackish water ripples sluggishly past in one direction, only rising by inches with the tide, and not slapped with ocean waves. “Not an auspicious start to our season, is it!”

“No, sir. Sorry, sir,” Marcus says as he changes course and heads towards the group.

“You’re not in costume yet— just Joe.”

“Yes, Joe. Sorry, Joe.”

“Echo,” Joe says, and points at one of the joggers, still dutifully moving. It’s Kelly, whose brown hair is bouncing up and down with every step he takes. 

“Yes, Joe. Sorry, Joe,” Kelly repeats in a yell.

Down the line: “Yes, Joe. Sorry, Joe,” from Waylon (panting), Jules (falsetto), Quan (bored), Langston (yelling again). Before Eli (singsong) is done repeating it, Marcus gets a word in edgewise and says, “Can I go get changed?”

Like the seagulls: “Can I go get changed?” “Can I go get changed?” “Can I go get changed?”

“Join our circle!” Joe says, and so Marcus wedges himself in with the joggers, barely enough room for all of them in the small clear space in front of the brick tryworks and their accompanying massive pots, one set out on the deck and not encased in brick for display. 

He doesn’t say anything else, since that would continue the echoing, and he begins to jog in step, already tired from his bike ride in. He feels very out of place amid his coworkers, his bike helmet still crushing his hair to his head, and his modern sweater and jeans sticking out next to the sundry assortment of oiled canvas jackets and patched-knee pants. He suspects the purpose of this exercise is to make them feel sweaty and disgusting— during their week long pre-season orientation, Joe remarked often, and loudly, that the accuracy of their costumes was compromised by the fact that they all smelled like lilacs and roses and pine shampoo. 

Already, Marcus isn’t sure he’s going to last the season, which stretches long and grim until the end of October. Earlier, when he complained about their orientation to Bryanne, she rolled over in bed and mumbled, “There’s no one worse to work for than a true believer.”

But Joe doesn’t have the monomania of Ahab, just the painful enthusiasm of a former drama teacher: the up-up-up-and-at-‘em that keeps him bouncing on his toes and crinkling his face into an exuberant smile, through which Marcus can feel his invisible judgment at his own lack of verve. 

They jog for another minute, Joe pointing to everyone in turn and asking questions that tourists or elementary schoolers needed canned answers to, and then he relents and lets them stop moving. A sudden silence falls, now that they aren’t drumming the wooden boards of the deck. The creaking of the ropes in the wind and the susurration of the dockside water against the sides of the ship feels like a momentary deafening. 

Joe lines them up in pairs facing each other, and when Marcus sees that Joe is matching tall with short and white with black, he knows what’s coming. It’s Joe’s favorite game, and Marcus’s least favorite. He ends up across from Waylon. 

They’re about as different as two people in their group can look, even aside from their mismatch in outfits. Marcus is twenty-five, black and stocky, with his father’s sharp nose on his mother’s round face. He wears his hair in a short afro, tapered down to meet his beard, which he’s constantly flirting with the idea of growing out, but never commits to. 

Waylon, on the other hand, has such Irish-red hair that Joe almost didn’t hire him, and although he graduated high school the previous summer, he looks two years younger than that, minimum. Marcus gives him a tepid smile. 

“I know I’ve said this plenty of times before,” Joe begins, “but since it’s the first real day of our long voyage together, it’s worth reiterating. While you are on this ship, you leave your own baggage at the dock, and you pick up somebody else’s.” The speech seems targeted at Marcus, not least because Joe is looking right at him, though he points down the line. “You’re not Kelly Carvhalo, late of Tiverton— you’re First Mate Charles Porter, of New Bedford’s Wampanoag . Get used to being someone else. When you look in the mirror, don’t expect to see yourself. Right? Right. Forty-five seconds, fore side first, then switch.”

Marcus is on the fore side, so he’s the leader of this exercise for those first forty-five seconds. His thin smile is still on his face, and Waylon takes it up on his own. When Marcus touches his ear, lifts his chin, rubs his knuckles from his eye across his cheek, Waylon mimics the motion so quickly that the delay is imperceptible. They feel like the same act, intrinsically tied together, and it makes Marcus shiver, which makes Waylon twitch in an echo of the movement. To his left and right, his coworkers are each enjoying putting their mirror counterpart through his paces, jumping and pulling faces. But Marcus finds the simulacrum so disturbing that he’s compelled to test it only in delicate ways. He leans forward; Waylon leans forward too. 

There’s a threshold: the closer they get, the smaller slice of his partner that Marcus can see, the realer that slice becomes. But get too close and Waylon, who is a good six inches shorter than he is, can’t get the height right to match where Marcus is leaning, and the illusion breaks. So he leaves them separated, raising his hand inches away from Waylon’s, that invisible pane of glass keeping them apart. 

It’s a relief when Joe blows his carved wooden whistle and they switch. It’s far easier to be the mirror than it is to be mirrored, and Waylon just wants to make him hop up and down on one foot anyway, and wave his arms and sway like a tree in the wind.

And then they’re done with Joe’s second whistle, and he lets them break off, get ready for their day. Waylon goes to stand over by the rail and peel open a granola bar that he’s had nearly falling out of his pocket, and Marcus heads down into the ship’s hold to get changed.

The upper section of the ship is fitted out with as much historical realism as they can muster, but the lowest area, where the tourists don’t go, is the staging area for their work. The forecastle and steerage have electric lamps disguised as oil lanterns hung from the ceiling, but down in the lower hold there’s bare LED bulbs strung up, casting a hard and miserable light onto the costume racks, and prop shelves, and the folding plastic card table and chairs which are so unpleasant to eat at that he’d rather stay on deck during his break. Without any cargo, the ship is sitting high in the water, but the electric pump still kicks on and off every once in a while, a hum that echoes and bounces around the mostly empty hold.  

Marcus dumps his backpack and bike helmet into one of the employee lockers, and doesn’t even bother going into the screened off changing area to get his costume on. He’s still pulling his shirt on over his head when Joe comes down. 

Joe gets himself a donut from the limp looking box on the card table, half-empty already. He is very careful to lean forward while he eats it, never letting a speck of jimmies or strawberry frosting fall on his costume, which is significantly nicer than Marcus’s— he plays the master. He speaks with his mouth full, though. “Any particular reason you were late today?”

“Sorry about that,” Marcus says, not answering the question. “It won’t happen again.”

Joe waves his hand. “It’s not the end of the world, but don’t make a habit of it.” He smiles, and the pink frosting fluff gathers at the corner of his lips. “See, you’re lucky— if you were Amos and late for your watch, I’d have grounds to flog you.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Marcus says in a near monotone as he carefully hangs up his sweater on the rack. “Flogging was banned in 1850. You might still do it, but you wouldn’t have the right to.”

Joe laughs. “You caught me! Good job.”

It wasn’t, really, and Joe’s patronizing tone didn’t make it moreso. There was a book of information that they had all been told to memorize in case of questions, and to help them personalize their own tour monologue. The section on punishments, Marcus paid close attention to, since he expected it to be of especially lurid interest to high schoolers. “Well, I try.”

“I know!” Joe crams the rest of his donut in his mouth, then says, “I got something for you.”

Marcus sits down on one of the chairs to pull on his shoes, which do not fit well at all. They’re at least allowed to keep their modern socks, rather than being provided with knitted ones. Joe goes into one of the lockers and pulls out a package, wrapped in the remains of a paper grocery bag. He holds it out to Marcus, who straightens up and takes it. 

“Thanks.”

“You said you were having difficulty reading the journal scans on a computer,” Joe said. “I know exactly how you feel. Anyway— there you go. It’s a bit of a self-serving gift, since the better you do, the better we all do.”

He peels the paper open, revealing a floppy, cheap paperback, the kind that you can get at a print-on-demand kiosk at most big box stores— meant to be read and recycled. Already, the cheap glue block is making the pages threaten to come out when Marcus flips it open. It’s not formatted very well at all. The original text was in a folio size volume, and the scans of its pages have been transplanted awkwardly onto a modern aspect ratio, textbook size. Even the cover has an ugly, digital-black border where the scans of the marbled red-and-blue original journal cover leaves off. Still, the writing on the first page— Journal of a Whaling Voyage on the Bark Wampanoag , Written by Amos Cudjoe, Harpooner — is perfectly crisp and legible.  

“This will definitely make it easier,” Marcus agrees. “Thanks.”

“You’re lucky to get a journal,” Joe says. “You’re the only one from this ship that has one preserved. The rest of us just have the log.”

“I know.” He wants to ask why Joe gave him the best part, or what Joe seems to think is the best part, but he’s pretty sure the answer is that he looks the role, and has a history degree, which nobody else has. Does that make him qualified to have the extra work?

It’s certainly not due to his acting ability, which is far below that of most of the other guys. He finds it hard to summon any emotion to his face other than what he’s really feeling, and his much-practiced tour script feels flat and dull when delivers it in front of Bryanne (who is tired of hearing it) and the mirror. He hopes that once it’s moved from the realm of intentional memorization to something that can be delivered off the cuff, knowledge that is simply part of him rather than imposed upon him, it will get easier. But he hasn’t spoken it to a real audience yet, and he guesses it will take a hundred times at least to get that comfortable. 

He hadn’t felt like that when he was a teacher— even when he gave the same lesson to seven different classes of kids, it was easy to speak extemporaneously, and the subject matter changed by the day. There was very little else he had enjoyed about that job, but he had liked that— it had felt natural, not like he was a character trapped on a stage. But he hopes he’ll get used to it anyway.

He pages through the book, wondering what pseudo improvisations it might prompt him to add to his lines. He should try to find some phrases to copy out verbatim— Marcus thinks he’s even less of a creative writer than he is an actor. Maybe Joe gave him the role because the extra material is a good crutch, making up for whatever it is that he lacks.

Joe interrupts his thoughts. “You haven’t finished the whole thing yet, right?”

“Not yet. I think I’ve made it through the first fifty days. It’s slow— the handwriting leaves something to be desired.”

“Is yours any better? I feel like my generation was the last one that did any writing by hand.”

“At least I write in print and not cursive,” Marcus says. “Even if I’m bad at it, it’s still clearer than this.” He flips the book open to a random page, where, as with every other page in the journal, the words at the beginning of each line are large and legible, and by the time the writing reaches the right side of the page, they are tiny and cramped to the point where they can barely be distinguished. The author’s miscalculation or desire to save space results in the entire book having a lopsided appearance, as if the writing is constantly trying to narrow down to a single point, to untangle the thread of ink that makes the words and fit them through the eye of a needle rather than a natural unspooling from the tip of a pen. Marcus doesn’t want to talk about his own block letters, and so he asks, “Have you read it?”

“Ages ago, but don’t ask me any details,” Joe says. “I’ve read so many of these that any that aren’t my particular focus all end up mushed together. A kind of congealed mass. The ur-whaling voyage.”

“Makes sense.” 

“Sense— yes. But it’s bad of me. I should keep a better handle on the individuals. This is a field with rich primary source documentation, I—”

The bell on deck strikes ten, interrupting them.

“Now I’m late,” Joe says. He shakes himself, brushes nonexistent donut crumbs off his shirt, and makes his way towards the ladder. “Get those shoes on and get on deck, Amos!”

“Yes, sir.” 

Nevertheless, he spends another minute in front of the cast mirror, trying in vain to fix the dents that his bike helmet made in his hair.

It’s about an hour long tour, showing the tourists around the Wampanoag , which is quite a long time for such a small ship. 

A tour leader heads up each group of eight. The leaders all play their own character, with a bit of a back-and-forth with every station on the ship. They come in, meet Joe, playing the master, who shows them around his cabin, and then the first mate (played by Kelly) leads them around the holds and helm. Their tour lead shows them the blubber room, and brings them back up. Marcus, on deck, gives a tour of the boats, demonstrates the harpoons and shows them the trypots, and then leads them down into the steerage. After that, they’re shown the forecastle, and then the main cabin is their last stop, to taste some whaling ship rations.

 It’s a long process, and while each stop varies in length, Marcus’s segment is almost ten minutes. Somehow, this manages to feel both extremely rushed and overwhelmingly long as a monologue. He has to stop himself from taking shortcuts through his script, and ending up with too much Q&A time at the end of his bit. Even though the guest pamphlets have a whole section of suggested questions to ask to prevent it, the worst thing at the end of a tour segment, and something that he encounters several times on the morning of the first day, is total radio silence during question time, especially if he’s trying to stall for time for the person ahead of him to get moving, the tour leader giving him the “give it another forty-five seconds” hand signal as he checks if the next group has moved on.

Because there are always multiple groups coming through at once, the tours weave their dizzying way around the ship, up on deck and below. If the stops were arranged to minimize ascents and descents, there would be a far more efficient way of doing it. But it’s a choreographed dance between all of their staff to keep everyone moving and to make sure two groups don’t bump into each other if one gets delayed. And in the tight quarters, it’s best to give them all a bit of separation, so that groups don’t break apart and switch tours, or have the staff yelling over each other to be heard.

About four tours come through every hour, which means that aside from the hour of open exploration time at noon — a disguised timeslot for staff to eat their lunches— Marcus sees twenty-four tours a day, almost two hundred people. Unless it’s schoolgroups, in which case they can have up to fifteen kids and a teacher on each tour. Those are very close quarters.

It could be a more chaotic job. After all, two hundred is not that many in terms of museum daily visitors, and all of theirs are scheduled and segmented, and there is enough slop in the schedule that he’s not talking nonstop all day long. The trust that pays for them to run the ship and use it as a museum resource is a generous one, and so they don’t have to worry as much about making the tour shorter to allow them to sell more tickets. Marcus tries to tell himself that it’s relaxing and low-lift compared to his last job, but the reality makes that hard to believe. Work is work.

Today, a school has booked out the whole afternoon’s worth of tours, after spending the morning in the museum proper. The buses that disgorged them and then bumped away to find parking can probably carry two-hundred kids. They were bussed down from Boston, and are all wearing the same garish, eye-searing green tee shirts bearing the name and tagline of their charter school. Soar Academy! Where Young Scholars Fly! Picture of an eagle! 

Many of them are swinging from the rope barriers that cordon off the lines. The teachers yell to get them to stop, and wedge their way through the mass of squirming bodies to scold particular repeat offenders. It’s a legitimate worry that some kid will fall off the side of the rope into the water, but Marcus doesn’t think that will happen. Overall, he just gets the impression that if the teachers could legally leash the children, they would. He suspects that it’s going to be a long afternoon.

At least it hasn’t started raining yet, though a thick cloud cover fills the sky, rendering the light eerie and grey. The tour will go on, rain or shine, which is miserable for everyone who gets caught out in it. They have their own jackets to wear if it’s pouring out, and they have a stash of recyclable rain slickers to give to guests, but there’s only so much that those things can do. 

At lunchtime, Marcus heads below, intent on eating his sandwich in peace before he needs to be on deck. Several of the other staff head down there, too.

“What are we thinking?” Kelly asks as he pulls the oilcloth jackets and hats from the costume rack, holding them up in front of him like he’s in front of a store mirror. “We gonna get rained on, or no?”

“Did anyone check the weather?” Waylon asks.

“I looked,” Marcus says. “Seventy percent chance of precipitation.”

“Seventy? That’s pretty bad,” Kelly says.

“I don’t think I believe in that,” Waylon says. He has his sailor’s knife out, though why Joe lets them carry such a thing is beyond Marcus’s ken, and he’s trying, and failing, to cut an apple. Maybe he’s struggling for the same reason that they’re allowed to have the knives in their actors kits: the top several inches of the knife have been snipped off, leaving a blunted point. “Things either happen or they don’t. Everything’s got a fifty percent chance.”

“Give me that, before you cut your own finger off,” Marcus says, holding out his hand. Waylon gives him the apple and knife, and Marcus deftly quarters it for him.

“So should I bring this up with me, or not?” Kelly asks. “I’m not gonna wanna leave my tour to go get my coat on, or stand there in the rain for ages before I can.”

“You could keep an eye on the barometer,” Joe says, coming down. Waylon, Kelly, and Marcus collectively wince at the sudden presence of their boss, though all try to stifle it. “That’s what it’s for, you know.”

“Yes, we know,” Marcus says. He passes the knife and the apple back to Waylon. “I should get on deck.”

He leaves, passing Joe, and doesn’t take the raincoat with him.

On deck, he watches the kids some more, seeing them jostle and yell and laugh, and feeling distantly fond of them, despite how chaotic the tours will surely be. Though, thinking about students, he winces, and hopes that none of his former students (from a similar New Bedford charter school) will ever show up here.

At one, Kelly strikes the ship’s bell, though it’s hardly necessary, since the tolling bell towers of the churches all ring out at the same time, and the tour leads grab the first tours after their lunch break. 

His next few groups go well. Compared to some of the other guides, who don’t get the middle schoolers’ immediate respect, Marcus is tall, and, more importantly, he holds up the harpoon that fascinates every boy between the ages of six and fourteen. That gives him more authority than he really deserves. He feels very silly, standing there in costume, holding out the harpoon with two hands so that the kids can touch the toggle tip.

By two, however, the rain begins, and Marcus cuts short his discussion of the trypots and hastily leads his group down into the steerage. It’s cramped down there. Fifteen seventh-graders and three adults— himself, the tour leader, and the harried looking teacher leading the kids— don’t fit very well in between the rows of bunks and sailors’ chests. He lets the tour leader leave to go grab jackets and raincovers for the guests, and once the jostling crowd is settled inside as much as he can, he starts his little story.

“So, my friends, this is where I sleep here in the steerage. As a harpooner, I’m a very lucky man on this voyage. No, sir, I’m not in the fo'c'sle anymore.”

He points out various features of the room, the little glass prism that would let in light from the deck above (if there was any light to let in) and he shows them several of the objects in his chest: his journal (a mostly blank book— Joe copied the first few pages out, but the rest of the handbound sheets are still sealed and would have to be cut apart with a knife), his blanket, his pipe. He lets them pass the objects around between them, and when the first kid tries to put the pipe in her mouth, the teacher snaps at her, “Scholar Jessica! Hygiene!”

Marcus winces, and tries to get the attention back on himself, rather than the red-faced Jessica.

“And this is my bunk, and I don’t have to share it with any other man with an opposite watch— someone who might leave a mess, or tear my blanket, or set fire to my bed when he’s smoking.” Marcus hauls himself onto the top bunk, and lays down, though he doesn’t fit well. He has to curl up his knees as he lays there, propping himself up with his elbow, resting his head up on his hand. “So long as you’re careful not to hit your head, it’s not a bad spot.”

He surveys the group of kids, who are all looking up at him, a sea of brown and black hair over wide eyes. 

“What’s your name, my friend?” Marcus asks the boy standing closest to him, chubby and shy looking, with his hands stuck deep into the pockets of his jeans. He had been accidentally squeezed to the front of the group by the way that Marcus shifted their attention from the back of the room to o the side. He always tries to pick the shy kids, at least one.

“Jason Yue,” he says, though Marcus can barely hear him. 

“Jason, you look like a good, healthy boy! How’d you like to join our crew? We don’t have a cabin boy right now, and we sure could use one.”

The rest of the group laughs.

“Uh,” Jason says.

“Cabin boy’s a fine position,” Marcus says. “You get paid— not well, but something, maybe only the 200th lay, but that’s better than nothing, it’s enough to spend when you’re in port anyway— and you get to see the world, and get some experience. On your next voyage, you can sign on as an ordinary seaman, and not a greenhand! That’s moving up in the world! What do you think about that?”

The boys are too busy laughing about the word ‘seaman,’ and Jason’s face is beet red.

“Well, think about it. A cabin boy gets a place in the steerage, too. Here— try out the bed down there. Comfortable enough?”

“I can get in?” It’s a funny, hopeful lilt in his voice— this is a rare historical exhibit where everything isn’t fenced off, and he seems to not have internalized it yet.

“Sure. That’s John— our carpenter— his bed. He won’t mind a bit.” They didn’t have anyone playing the carpenter— but the steerage beds were set up so that visitors could lay in them. “Go right ahead.”

“I’ll go if you won’t,” one of the other kids says, which makes Jason hurriedly clamber in.

“Cozy down there?” Marcus asks. “Now we’re in port right now, so not moving at all, but when there’s a storm, oh, you really feel the ship moving under you. Still, I have to think that in a storm, my bed is the best place to be. Maybe not the safest, but at least I’m not out on deck. And the more miserable the rest of the world is outside, the nicer it feels in here. What do you think?”

“It’s alright,” Jason says. “Kinda hard.”

“Maybe when we’re in our next port you can get some rags or straw to restuff that sleeping pad with,” Marcus says. “But you’re nice and short, so at least you’ve got plenty of room to stretch out.” He extends his leg out over the heads of the seventh graders, who dutifully laugh.

He sees the tour leader returning with a basket full of yellow rainslickers for the kids, and the heavy oilcloth jacket for Marcus, and so he asks, “Does anyone have any questions?” while the protective gear is getting passed out.

It’s a bit of a scramble for everyone to get the slickers on over everyone’s head— it’s small space there in the steerage, and so it’s a forest of limbs and crinkling yellow plastic bumping into each other.

“I have a question,” Jason asks, still sitting on the bunk below Marcus.

“Oh? Let me hear it,” Marcus says. He’s genuinely pleased that the kid has warmed up enough to ask something.

“Why’s the bed say Shanghai here?” he asks.

Marcus leans down over the side of the bed to see where Jason is pointing. There, where the white paint has begun to bubble and peel up from the humidity, it has revealed the branded marks on the bare wood beneath, the two offending characters marking the wood’s origin, and then a numbered brand for the construction crews to put the beam in the correct place.

“That means something?” Marcus asks, struggling to stay in character. “I never knew. John likes to copy down interesting pictures he sees. I think we passed a ship, or maybe he saw it in a book—”

The rest of the group has finished getting their slickers on, and the tour lead is saying, “Alright, lads, let’s get moving. Amos has plenty of work he’s got to be doing, we can’t all stay in bed all day long.”

The tour leader begins hustling the kids out, most of them following like sheep, and the teacher is at the end of the group. She leans down to look at the branded wood of the bed as Marcus clambers out from his bunk. She asks, in that dry voice that indicates she’s speaking to an adult, not a play-actor, and that she fully expects Marcus to break character, “So, this boat’s made in China?”

Marcus winces, weighs the cost of breaking character versus the cost of staying in it, and says, “The original Wampanoag was sunk in the Arctic in 1892— this is a reproduction, built from her construction plans as closely as possible in 2042. In every way, she’s a real whaling bark. The last page of your tour pamphlet has some photos of her construction— it’s pretty neat. But the last whaler that went fishing is down in Mystic, if you want to see it. That’s the Charles W. Morgan . The museum offers a reciprocal membership—”

She frowns. The last of the children are funneling out of the room. “A bit too far of a drive.”

The rain is short lived, and ends before the workday does, which Marcus is grateful for. He changes out of his sodden tour-clothes into his regular outfit, then bikes to a pizza place down the street, where he sets up shop for a while. He gnaws on two five-dollars-a-slice pieces of cheese pizza while thumbing through the journal that Joe gave him, and he spends so long doing so that the pizza grease congeals and the cheese hardens. He doesn’t really notice or care— he’s just killing time, and he’s not really hungry, anyway.

It’s Monday, which means that Bryanne’s whalewatching tour is returning to port from a four-day cruise around Cape Cod. They usually get back in around seven, but it takes her some time to finish her duties up as first mate, so he always meets her at eight. It’s a ritual that they’ve had for years during the tour season, even back when Marcus was working his last real job, doing Teach For America during the days and fumbling his way at night through a masters degree that he hated.

When he’s lingered over his dinner in the warm light of the pizzeria so long that the proprietor begins to give him meaningful looks, Marcus heads off. He stops at the convenience store for a bag of chips and a vape cartridge of the kind Bryanne likes, then walks his bike down the cobblestone streets to the dock where Bryanne’s tour boat is docked.

The Thylacine is longer and taller at the deck than the bark Wampanoag , and painted in crisp and modern blues and whites, all visible in the industrial glare of her running lights. Only its hull is easily visible from where Marcus stands— the deck area is in the shadow of the tall sail tower and deckhouse. Figures crisscross the deck— the ship’s staff on their usual errands. The gangway is down, but the tourists are all long gone. Marcus stands in the darkness of the parking lot, leaning against the chain link fence that separates the parking lot in front of the pier from the road.

When he sees Bryanne, her shoulders hunched tight with exhaustion, walk down the gangway with her day bag full of clothes thumping against her thighs, he gives a long and loud whistle— the shrill kind she taught him, with his fingers in his mouth. She looks up at the sound, and in the dim streetlights of the parking lot, he can see her face twitch in a smile.

“That scares the whales, you know,” she calls. “Aren’t you supposed to say that on your tours?”

“If any whales are in the river, they have bigger problems than me whistling,” Marcus says as she comes over.

She’s shorter than he is by a few inches, but she’s taught with sinewy muscle from years of physical labor on the Thylacine in the summer, and a machine shop in the winter, and a love of jogging when she’s not at sea. She’s tanned and olive-eyed, with long, dark, wavy hair that’s always pulled back into a rough ponytail, where today the ends gather into crunchy, salt-crusted chunks. Her lips, even in the summer, are perpetually chapped from her scraping them down with her teeth. Usually, she’d have a vape in her mouth— the least bad of all the nervous habits that she could have developed— but today she’s got her hands jammed into her pockets.

Marcus, from his own bag, pulls out the cartridge he bought at the corner store, and hands it to her. She visibly relaxes.

“Jesus, thank you. My modern Prometheus,” she says with relief, and rips the package open so that she can get the cartridge into her vape and her vape into her mouth. “I thought you got out of work at five? What are you doing around here?”

He grins at her— there’s no need for him to answer, after all. “Got some dinner and lost track of time doing some reading.”

“Grad school stuff?” she asks, referring to the Ph.D. programs that he should be applying to.

“No,” he says. “Just work.” He pulls out the journal that Joe gave him, and lets her look at it. She thumbs through the floppy pages with one hand, going over to Marcus’s bike and resting the journal on the seat so that she can see. In the dim lighting, it’s impossible for her to read the thin and old fashioned handwriting, so he supplies, “It’s the journal of the character I’m playing. Amos.”

“He a good writer?”

Marcus shrugs. “I don’t think literary virtue was really his goal.”

“What was it, then?”

“To get married,” he says.

Bryanne snorts at that. “How was your first day of tours?”

“Bad,” he says. “But it’ll get better. It was mostly the rain.”

“Only mostly.”

“You don’t need me to tell you how tourists are.”

“No, I certainly don’t.” She takes his backpack from his hands, and repacks the journal into it. “But I thought schoolkids were supposed to be different.”

“The kids aren’t the problem. The teachers are.”

“Takes one to know one!”

“I don’t know how I’m going to get through a summer of people asking me over and over if the boat is fake,” he says. “It’s written pretty much everywhere on our literature. And on the sign right out front. ‘ Reproduction of the Wampanoag provided by the estate of Arthur Zhang ,’” he quotes.

“Being a teacher doesn’t mean you can read,” Bryanne says.

Behind the both of them, the lights on board the Thylacine are going out, as its captain shuts the whole thing down for the night. The sudden encroachment of an even deeper darkness makes Marcus shiver.

“Did you see any whales?” he asked.

Bryanne scowls, and takes her vape out of her mouth. “Of course not. Why would we see whales on our whalewatching tour?” He knows he shouldn’t have asked— if she had seen any, she would have let him know first thing. In previous years, it was always something she enjoyed describing. Her eyes lit up when talking about them rolling across the surface of the water, or the presence of a calf, or the process of chasing them down. She rarely volunteered information, except for that. So he should have known that there were no whales.

“I’m sorry.”

“Heard them on the hydrophone,” she says. “They’re out there. But we couldn’t find ‘em.” She shrugs and stuffs her vape back in her pocket. “It is what it is.”

He nods.

In an attempt to clear the bitterness out of her voice, and to cheer him up, she asks, “Did you?”

“What?”

“See any whales?”

He laughs. “No, but I admit that I wasn’t really looking.”

“That wasn’t you up on the mast I saw when we sailed by?”

“It’s a scarecrow,” he says. “We’re not supposed to climb the mast— the museum’d have our heads.”

“Too bad,” she says. “I don’t mind climbing our sail.” The Thylacine doesn’t have any real sails or masts— she’s referring to the tall windmill tower that fuels their batteries. She’s described in gruesome detail the maintenance that she sometimes has to do when birds fly into it.

“I’ll have to ask Joe where we got our lookout,” Marcus says. “Maybe you can put one of your own up on top there, to spot whales for you.”

“Luckily, we’re a real ship,” she says, poking him in the chest. The mood has been lifted; she can tease. “I don’t think a fake crewman would do us any good.”

“Sure he would,” Marcus says. “He’d do the same job he does for us— yell out any whales he sees.”

She wrinkles her nose and says nothing.

“Well, we shouldn’t keep standing here until it starts raining again. Do you want a ride, or do you want to take the bus?” he asks, gesturing to his bike.

She considers her options, then says, “Let’s just go. I don’t want to wait around.”

So they both get on his bike, a funny, double-ended creature as he puts his backpack on backwards, and she drapes her duffle bag across her back. She sits on the padded cargo seat, and wraps her arms around his waist. The first time they ever did this, he thought she was holding on so tightly— so tightly that he strains to breathe— because she was scared to fall off. But when they moved in together, he found that she grips him just as tightly while asleep at night, holding him so close that she sometimes wakes up with her arms stiff and aching.

Chapter Text

Remarks Monday 10th of June 1867, 1st Day

O my dear I wish I could call you my wife.

Early part of the day engaged in stowing provisions. Good and fair wind from SSW. Took up anchor at 3 P.M. and left New Bedford. Half of us are drunk and most of the greenhands sick even with quiet seas. Leaving port is a sad day for all and for me most of all. There are many other boats in the water and God Bless those coming home I wish I was with them. Barometer 29.8 at 8 P.M. and steady.

Remarks Tuesday 11th of June 1867, 2nd Day

First part of the day engaged in stowing anchor and chains and all things. Good breeze from SW though the master is unhappy because he aims us for the Azores and this wind takes us in the wrong direction. At least we can move out to sea though if the wind was more foul we would have stayed in New Bedford a few more days and I would have seen you which would have pleased me. But half the crew would have been lost if we had stayed. There are already men who have regrets about going and at the latter part of last night I was one of them to be sure. But today the sun is warm and if the world is to be the small one of this boat for the next four years I think I can bear it with good cheer and a glad and thankful heart. Barometer 30.1.

Remarks Wednesday 12th of June 1867, 3rd Day

Though we are not yet far enough to have any true hope of seeing whales or so I should think I spent part of the morning aloft and looking for them. Saw nothing but sails which I tried not to watch as they made me homesick. Wind from the S continues but mild and pleasant weather that I cannot find it in my heart to complain about. Already I am used to the ship and all her crew. We are thirty plus the master which is neither a small crew nor a large one but she is a small ship and so it is tight quarters down below even though on this voyage as a harpooner I am in the steerage rather than the forecastle which is a blessing. I am glad to be aloft this morning though there is nothing to see. I spend my time thinking of what I should say to you my dear. I imagine the mast is you standing behind me and the sails are your pretty white dress and the hoop holding me here is your gentle arms around me and I tell you so many sweet little things and make you laugh though your laugh is the gulls yelling. But this makes me homesick too. I think this will pass if the Good Lord puts me in an easier mind. It is easy to be homesick at the beginning of the journey most of all. Barometer 29.7 and falling it seems we will have rain soon and maybe a turn of the wind.

Remarks Thursday 13th of June 1867, 4th Day

Early part of the day squall. Winds from the ESE trying to push us back to port and so many people wished they would but we must carry on despite the wind and weather. I know myself I cannot go home without some pay and what time it takes it will pass quickly if I let it. This is what I tell Tobey who is sick as a whole pack of dogs with the ship moving under him. I think he will get well soon enough but it makes me feel bad to see him in this state.

O I have not told you who Tobey is my dear. Tobey is my brother on this voyage. Not by blood of course. We met when we were signing on board. Tobey came up to the ship with me, and when the agent was asking for his name to sign him on and give him his lay Tobey wouldn’t give a surname for the crew list. I don’t know if he doesn’t have one or if he doesn’t want to give one. He’s a free man now so it wasn’t a problem with papers I can’t imagine that but he just said his name was Tobey and that was it. The agent wouldn’t sign him his lay unless he gave a full name so I said to Tobey Well you can have my name if you like. 

He looked at me so funny I knew he would be a good friend to have on this voyage even if he was only a greenhand having come up from Virgina on foot or so he said. Virginia is a long way for a man to walk but the Good Lord knows some people have the urge to go somewhere and they just go the only way they know how. So Tobey he asked me if my name was mine and I said whose else’s would it be and he said my father’s. I told him it was my father’s and my grandfather’s before that if that’s a problem. Was your grandfather a free man he asked and I said Yes my friend he was he bought his freedom and my family has been free men since that day though my grandmother was indian and we’ve lived near New Bedford for many years besides. And he said Alright what’s your name. So I told him and the agent wrote down that there’s two Cudjoes on the ship. So we’re brothers of a kind.

I think the agent shouldn’t have minded if he gave a fake name even if he just made it up instead of taking mine so that I’m responsible for him. He’s younger than I am he’s the age I was when I was a greenhand on my first voyage so I do feel responsible for him. O my dear you do not know how good it is to have a friend and brother with me on the ship it does get so lonely sometimes even when you can never get a moment’s peace to yourself you are lonely.

If I write so many pages every day I will fill up this book within a year and I will have to buy a new one when we are in our next port which is an expense I do not want if I want to bring my whole lay home to you. I am being tight with my money except for my ink and pages. I should write less but there is so little to do other than write when I am belowdecks with the rain. 

Tobey has brought me the board and chalk and he has drawn a figure on it which may mean he is in better spirits but o my dear the picture is not fit for me to copy here! And I do not have a good hand for drawings I hold my pen like I would rather be holding the harpoon or so somebody told me last voyage I was on. I think it was Jack who said that and he was a better harpooner than me.

Barometer 28.9 I think this bad weather will pass soon.

Remarks Friday 14th of June 1867, 5th Day

Fair breezes from the N early part of the day and all are in good cheer. Engaged in repairing sail ripped during squall. By the end of my last voyage the sails were so full of holes that they could be used for fishing nets if you plucked out the patches but this is a small tear and if God is gracious all our stitching will hold just fine. Since God is gracious and I’m as good with a needle as any woman if I need to be I think we won’t have trouble! O my dear maybe it is good that you did not marry me before I left because I will have four years to sew you up a sampler like a little girl but make it out of sailcloth rather than calico and twine rather than cotton thread. That will make a fine part of my dowry if you won’t marry me until I have such a thing, and my pay from this voyage will have to be the rest. There are worse ways to pass the time than with a needle and thread! You see I too am in a fair mood with good weather and making good way down to the equator. You needn’t worry about tropical maids we won’t be anywhere near pleasant ports like that we will be in the middle of the Atlantic ocean for a long time yet with nothing as far as the eye can see. Except for whales I hope! Barometer 29.7.

Remarks Saturday 15th of June 1867, 6th Day

Hot still air all day long with just a little breeze to move us. I do not think we made good headway today but what does it matter to me. One man saw finbacks but I did not and we aren’t fishing for finbacks in any event. I wonder when we shall see our first sperm whale or any other good kind to catch. Soon I hope. Barometer 30.2 at 4 P.M. but I didn’t have a moment to check it later though I would have liked to.

Remarks Sunday 16th of June 1867, 7th Day

On Sundays since the master is a Quaker and a good one he does read to any man who will listen from the Bible and if any man should have something to say well then he can get on up and say it. I don’t have much to say but I do like to listen as it does bring some of the comforts of being at home. The master had the idea that as we will be on this voyage a good long time together there will be enough Sundays to make it through the whole of the Book so we should start at the very beginning. It’s as good of a place to start as any. 

The first mate though he seems like a man who is pleased about very little he enjoyed hearing the list of God’s creation and didn’t even mind when Tobey asked why God bothered making so many different types of fish and half of them aren’t even good to eat. He said that probably there is some purpose to find for them all but we may not discover it for some time. He pointed out that there are things buried deep in the ground like oil that we did not find or know the purpose of from the time of Adam until now so maybe the same will be true of fish. There may be even types of whales that live so deep in the ocean that we have never seen them and certainly have not learned to catch them. Well maybe it is good that many generations of descendants of Adam all have their own work to do I do not know. It’s for cleverer men than I to figure it out and well the first mate may think himself one and may even be one.

As the master is a Quaker and a good one he says that work on Sunday should only be what’s essential but since this is a ship and a good one you will not be surprised to hear that all work is essential and there is always plenty of it. I was engaged in work on the ropes. No whales as of yet but I am hopeful and the Lord does provide if He sees fit even to us undeserving toilers of the sea! He has seen fit to provide us with a good wind from the NNE today which all of us are grateful for. Barometer 30 inches exactly.

Remarks Monday 17th of June 1867, 8th Day

Today I saw the master looking so forlorn at the photograph of his pretty wife he has hung up over the table in the main cabin. That photograph being the only woman on board aside from the hens and the goats all of us men have become quite familiar with her (though I of course have not!) So I asked the master why didn’t he bring his wife with him plenty of masters do. And you know what he said to me my dear? He said that the ship’s owner who is his uncle will charge him $1000 per head to berth his family on the ship. And seeing as he has a wife and three children so far that would be $4000 which is a sum that I can hardly fathom. But he is the master and so gets the greatest lay which might cover it. But being a Quaker he is tight with his money. And if being tight with money is a vice it is at least less of one than spending it on ill.

It is funny to think that even the master is hard up for money sometimes I don’t think the master on my last voyage ever would have let me know such a thing. But he was a hard man too hard to have a wife or if he did have a wife he never said. That was a long voyage. This one might pass more quickly since the master is a good man and doesn’t do wrong by us even the greenhands if we do our work well. The first mate I shall say nothing about.

I told all this to Tobey and he asked me if I was the master if I would take you along my dear if you cost $1000 to bring with me. If you were my wife of course. Tobey has heard me talk so much of you I think he is a little tired of hearing me and wanted to put a question to me that would cause me to think twice about you. But I said that even if I were afforded the position of first mate which is what I of course desire I do not think that I could ever be master. I’m not well suited for it and besides I intend to quit going to sea after this journey is over so that I can marry you. And first mates are not given a place for their wives on the ship. If every man was allowed to bring his wife well we would have no room to put our oil when we get some! Barometer 29.8.

Remarks Wednesday 19th of June 1867, 10th Day

O my dear I did not have time to write yesterday as it was so terrible. Yesterday early in the day fair weather but clouds and wind came the latter part of the day so fast that we were all quite engaged in tying everything down before the storm. It was a terrible sight much worse than the last one and anyone who went out on the deck tied himself down and even if he was tied down he was still saying a prayer to not be carried away though only the Good Lord could have heard him over the wind and the rain. But the Good Lord must have been straining His ears to listen to us because with His mercy we did make it through and we lost no one but one of the ties on the boats got loose and it did get slightly stove against the side of the ship. It seems like a bad omen to happen so early into such a long voyage or so people are saying. Today when we all passed it by going about our business we all took a look at it and there has been much discussion about fixing it. I’m sure it can be fixed our carpenter is a good man. I did not read the barometer yesterday but today it is 30.1.

Remarks Thursday 20th of June 1867, 11th Day

Fair winds from the WSW. All day I gave the carpenter his name is John my assistance in fixing our poor stove in boat. It was not very hard work and it was interesting for the novelty of it. I think we made her seaworthy once more and for that the master is glad and everything is well on board once again. It was good to sit in the boat and get a sense for it too seeing as I will be in it quite a lot when we lower for whales though we have seen none as of yet. I expect that some time in the next week we will hear a cry of There She Blows even if there are no whales in sight because we need to be set to practicing in the boats. None of the greenhands have rowed very much before unless it’s around a farm pond and as for my own sake it has been a long time since I was last rowing. I expect my arms will be sore on that day but I should not worry about that before it happens. You can’t rest your arms without tiring them first. Barometer 29.9.

Remarks Friday 21st of June 1867, 12th Day

Still air all day and nothing interesting on board. Some sails on the horizon but they are as still as us and not close enough to gam with. Close to port there were plenty of steamships and paddleboats but none out here as we are now a ways south. It is warmer but I do not mind. Barometer 29.8 but it barely moves.

Remarks Saturday 22nd of June 1867, 13th Day

Slow winds today and we are barely moving forward more than the water pushes us back. I am not worried about us being becalmed here it is early into our journey still and we have plenty of provisions and far more than plenty of time. Tobey is anxious to go somewhere but I said to him he boarded the wrong ship if he had places to go. The nice thing about a whaler I said is that we go out just to come home and we’re always returning to our home port even if very slowly. I’ll be very glad to be home in New Bedford though I try not to think about it too much now or I will be homesick which is not a pleasant thing.

I asked Tobey if he was homesick and he said he’s never been happier to be gone even if he wasn’t meant for the sea. I asked him what he meant by that and if he’s afraid of drowning and he said no. Sometimes I can’t understand much about him but I am glad to have a good friend here with me and even if he does not say so I think he is glad to have me to look out for him. I think he has had a hard life. To be sure many men have including other men on this very ship. I thank the Good Lord for giving me relatively few troubles in life although I am on board a whaler and have very little money and I am not yet married & happy so perhaps my troubles are not as few as another man’s! But I can bear it all with good cheer and I would not mind taking a share of Tobey’s troubles as I can be cheerful for the both of us. But I shouldn’t go asking the Good Lord for trouble because certainly Job teaches us that trouble is another thing that the Good Lord can provide!

When Tobey asked what I was writing I told him and he laughed at me. Barometer 30.5 very high.

Remarks Sunday 23rd of June 1867, 14th Day

First part of the day still air but later wind picked up from the NNE and we are moving again which has lifted spirits. Although until we see whales it does not change our daily labors much if we are moving or not but the boredom is much worse when sitting still.

The first mate was angry with me for checking the barometer so often and writing it down in my journal. I don’t know why he should be angry as I think it is good to have another man reading it to know if the weather will turn. He jealously guards his position which of course I cannot resent him for. He is a more experienced whaleman than I this is his third or maybe fourth voyage and only my second. I would like to be a mate and I am well qualified as I can read and write as well as any man and do sums also which is the duty and the pleasure of the first mate. But o my dear you know as well as I do that I am content with my lot in life and if the Lord has decided that on this voyage I am to be a harpooner I will not utter a word of complaint. And I did not complain to the first mate either. 

I will continue checking the pressure in the same way that I watch the stars. But it is harder to write what the stars are doing here as I said I do not have a good hand for drawing nor do I touch the instruments to shoot them. And besides if I write down our position the mate would accuse me of trying to collect the secrets of where the best whales are for myself. As if we have seen any whales so far! Barometer 30.2.

Chapter Text

Friday April 6, 2057

Bryanne’s alarm goes off at five, disorienting before she recognizes the sound, the tones of a song her brother Nickey loved as a kid, a classic jingle that she only moderately enjoys— familiarity, but not enough love there to sour by using it for an alarm. Cheer up, Sleepy Jean! O what can it mean? To a daydream believer and a homecoming queen…

Marcus is laying on his back like a dead man, and she has to disentangle herself from him. She has his arm crushed against her chest, and she’s been drooling onto his shoulder. He stirs when she lets him go enough to slap at her phone and silence the alarm.

“Morning?” he asks.

“Go back to sleep,” she says. “You don’t have work until nine.”

But it’s useless. As she gets up and goes to the closet, she sees his open eyes catching the light of her phone screen. She gives up on trying to let him sleep and turns on her bedside lamp, warm yellow light that makes them both wince.

“New naturalist arriving today?” Marcus asks, mumbling whatever he half remembers her mentioning.

“Hope so,” she says. “If he doesn’t, I’ve got my book of whale facts.” It’s too early to be cheerful. She corrects herself, “If he doesn’t, I’ll kill him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Dunno. Mike hired him. I wasn’t there for the interview.”

“Ah.” Marcus rubs his eyes. “I’ll miss you.”

“Nah.” She’s rifling through their closet, picking out four days worth of clothes that she should have packed yesterday, and shoving them into her bag. One of Marcus’s sweaters might have ended up in the pile, but it doesn’t really matter, and she doesn’t stop being hasty. Better to do this quickly, get everything she needs out of the room so that Marcus can go back to sleep. She tries to be considerate. “You’ll be having too much fun without me. Today’s Friday— school tours today?”

The noise Marcus makes means nothing.

“Yes?”

“Probably.”

“You sound like you’re dreading it. Thought you liked kids.”

“I like the kids fine.”

“Then?”

Marcus throws his arm over his face. “I never felt like I’d feel more of a fraud at this job than as a teacher.”

“You’re going to have to figure out how to answer those ‘is this ship real’ questions with a smile on your face,” she says.

“It’s not even just the ship. It’s me.”

“You’re an actor. That is your job.”

“I know. It’s just…” He waves his hand in the air, but he’s too tired to formulate much thought, and she knows what he means anyway— it’s been one of their rotating conversational topics since he was hired, and so there’s no need to rehash it now.

“Go back to sleep,” she says. She sits back down next to him on the edge of the bed in order to get her jeans and boots on, but before she bends down to tie her shoes, she gently brushes her hand across his cheek. “That’s one thing you definitely have in common with your guy— everybody sleeps.”

“That’s true.”

She looks over at the shiny, but now creased, cover of the printed journal on the bedside table on Marcus’s side of the bed. “Does he ever write down what he’s dreaming about?”

“Sometimes.”

“What about?”

“Whales.”

Bryanne smiles. “Then dream about whales.”

“Catch one for me,” he mumbles.

She shakes her head and sighs, then heads out.

She takes the bus down to the dock. This early in the morning, it only comes every half hour, and she runs to make sure she doesn’t miss it. If she does, it’s faster to walk than wait to catch the next one. Maybe she should savor walking while she still can— later in the season, it will be too hot to want to be out at all. But as she splashes through the roads to catch the bus, she’s glad she’s not going on foot: they’ve had so much rain recently that the earth can’t hold any more water, and it’s oozing out of every pore in the ground, sloshing mud across sidewalks and into the streets, pooling in every dip in the ground, a foot deep in the worst spots. She arrives at the bus stop thirty seconds before it pulls up, and she gets on board with a grim but grateful smile to the driver, who ignores her.

As the bus sets off, dark water roostertails out from beneath its wheels, encrusting the windows with black mud. Bryanne presses her forehead against the cold glass, leaving a greasy mark, and watches the world pass by. They lurch and skid through New Bedford’s old streets, past old mill buildings and crumbling houses from two hundred years ago. As they move towards the river, the ground slopes downwards. On hillsides, the orange netting that public-works puts up in a futile attempt to stop the wet ground from crumbling apart bulges at its centers, or falls apart completely. These crumbling embankments spill dirt into the road, which the bus squeezes around, honking at approaching cars to get out of the way.

With the sky full of low-hanging clouds, it’s still very dark by the time that Bryanne arrives at the Thylacine , the vessel on which she serves as the first mate. She swears she can hear the sail rattling when she’s still blocks away, though it’s probably her imagination. The rest of the crew is trickling in from all directions, the gangway down, every one of them yawning as they board. Passengers will arrive by eleven, but there’s plenty of work that needs to be done around the ship before then.

Bryanne drops her bag off in her room below, then finds Captain Mike in the deckhouse. He has his pre-boarding checklist open on his tablet, and is running down it to make sure that they have everything: their route where whales were last spotted, weather for the day, ship status, and checking off each crew member who reports to him, one by one. 

Captain Mike Haigh is a wiry older man, in his sixties, with the kind of sand-scoured face that a person only gets if they worked the deck of fishing trawlers for at least thirty years and never once bothered to put on sunscreen while doing it. His hair is still full and curly, though completely iron grey, and it falls down over his eyes whenever he looks down. He has a clumsy way of navigating the ship’s computer interfaces and his tablet: his hands are arthritically stiff, the joints all red, so he pokes at things while doing the least amount of curling and uncurling of his fingers that he can. 

The deckhouse is small, and, unlike most of the other areas of the ship, not decorated for passengers. The walls are covered with taped up navigational charts, a pinboard festooned with handwritten notes and reminders, a picture of Mike’s wife and him holding a huge fish, the long list of whales spotted and their photographs and dates. That last one is particularly mournful, considering that they haven’t seen any right whales yet this year. (A few weeks ago, they saw a few humpbacks that had wandered out of their usual locations, and that was cause for more excitement than humpbacks ever warranted.)

Mike only glances up at her when Bryanne comes in, though he prods his way down the tablet and checks her off the list. 

“Morning,” he says. 

“Has our naturalist arrived yet?” Bryanne asks.

“Not yet,” Mike says. “She swore until she was blue in the face that she’d meet us today. But she’s late.”

Bryanne is surprised by the pronoun. She had been assuming that the new naturalist was a man, like their last one had been— a retired professor who enjoyed getting paid to ramble about his passion. He had a health scare and ended up quitting before the beginning of the season; they’ve been operating short-staffed since then.

“Still got time, I guess,” she says. “Where’s she coming from?”

“Says she was up in Maine, last I talked to her. That was on Wednesday.”

“Not that far by train.” She sticks her hands in her pockets as she examines the log and the screens displaying the ship’s status. “What’s her name?”

“Atlas Vanderhook.”

“Christ.”

“Well, she’s your age, so my generation gets to bear the fault for that.”

“Can’t blame you for something you didn’t have a part in,” Bryanne says. Mike doesn’t have any kids. “Blame the parents.”

“Eh, maybe,” Mike says. “I think the cultural miasma we had going thirty years ago was a bad one to name kids in.”

“If you say so.” Her fingers curl around her vape in her pocket, and she mindlessly takes it out and sticks it in her mouth.

“Not in here,” Mike snaps when he sees her reflection in the window.

She purses her lips, annoyed, but puts it away. She’ll be outside in a minute, anyway. 

Bryanne checks the weather for their upcoming trip. Cloudy, windy, rainy. Even in Cape Cod Bay, where the great curl of land provides a natural barrier against the open ocean, the sea state is not going to be ideal. But the colorful blobs moving across the weather radar, hauling rain up the coast, don’t look like they’re going to arrive properly until tomorrow. That’s good— it will give the passengers a bit of time to get acclimated. The only thing worse than a pissy tourist is a seasick one, Bryanne thinks. Not that the Thylacine tends to rock too much— she’s a sturdy little ship, with a deeper keel than she has any right to have, considering her length.

She can’t stand around in the deckhouse forever; there’s far too many things she needs to do before they get underway: inspect their battery banks in the hold, check the sail, disconnect them from mains power, check their cargo and do an inspection of their lifeboats— the list goes on.

Their new naturalist does not arrive before the tour is supposed to depart. Bryanne knows this because, once the passengers start arriving and lining up along the dock with their bags in hand, Bryanne is the one to check off every person who steps on board the ship. Despite not liking passengers very much, she doesn’t mind this ritual. It’s a funny one. Hello, what’s your name?, can I see your ID?, (let me get a good look at you), (do you know that your life is in my hands on this boat?), here’s the room you’ve been assigned, if you have any questions— please ask, all the stewards are wearing windbreakers just like this, easy people to find, enjoy your trip.

But not any one of the guests are the naturalist, and so, when she and the second mate, Legend, pull the gangway back and cast off, it’s with a feeling of severe annoyance that she knows is going to sour the whole trip.

Without their naturalist— tourist babysitter— she and the other mates are going to have to fill in as entertainment— a duty they are not getting paid any extra for. If they had been rented out for a wedding, or for a corporate retreat, like they sometimes are, this would have been less of an issue. The weddings could not care less about whale facts, and the tech guys sitting in the dining room hunched over their laptops for what seems like thirty hours a day could not give a shit about whales at all. She wonders if a single one of these corporate retreats, where everyone is cloistered away from the rest of the world, have ever resulted in productive work. She doubts it.

But this voyage isn’t filled with marital bliss or code monkeys— it’s a random assortment of families and couples and singles, cramming themselves into the fifty passenger cabins available on board the Thylacine for a four-day getaway, and the hopes of seeing the last of the remaining North Atlantic right whales.

It’s a grim quest, and one that has not been fruitful at all this season. They’d have much better luck finding humpbacks if they went looking for them— there’s plenty of them up in Stellwagen, and further out. But if the passengers wanted to see humpbacks, they could get on board any number of cheaper day-tours, take a short little whalewatching cruise, and be done with it. That’s not what they’re here for, and she gets it. It’s appealing to see the last of something, like Halley’s comet: see it once before it vanishes in your lifetime. 

There’s a reason she took this job, instead of on the ferry, or on a fishing boat, or anything else. There’s a reason she’s kept it for three years. She likes the whales, and she wants to see them. It’s as simple as that, which is unfortunate. 

If it was more complicated, she could talk herself into leaving it all behind, and getting a job that pays better. Rent is not cheap. Not even in New Bedford— far from Boston, and with the inescapable architectural stain of long-gone industry hanging off every corner— and not even in her and Marcus’s near-to-condemnation third floor apartment.

But she wants to stay at the job regardless of the pay. She feels like, in some ways, she’s bearing witness. And when you’re bearing witness, you don’t look away, and you certainly don’t leave to go fishing.

There’s only so long this can last as a motivation— there’s only so long she can spend in a holding pattern. Whales live longer than people do, unless they’re getting killed by something, so she might die before the last of them does. But this simple motivation has been enough to keep her for now, and keep her lying to everyone asking her about her career who doesn’t know any better (which includes Marcus.) 

“It’s just about at-sea time,” she says whenever she’s asked. “I’ll have enough experience to go onto a larger vessel soon. I don’t want to look unqualified. And this industry’s about knowing somebody who knows somebody, anyway. I just need to make connections to get the job I want.”

Once they depart, Bryanne isn’t technically on duty (her usual watch is twice a day, from four to eight, both in the morning and evening) but Mike would expect her to be out on the deck and making herself available for help and to entertain passengers, at least until they’re well underway.

The Thylacine slides through the mouth of the Acushnet river, passing by all the sailboats and fishing boats, and the out-of-time bulk of the Wampanoag . It’s almost noon when they depart, so Marcus is sure to be at work. When they pass by, Bryanne squints at the tall ship, all its masts empty of sails, with tourists milling about on deck. Up in its rigging is a vaguely human figure— the scarecrow Marcus mentioned— looking out over the water. The two ships are far enough away from each other that she can’t see anything to distinguish one person from another, and so can’t find Marcus. Maybe for the best: his costume is ridiculous, and she’d laugh at him if she saw him in it.

Bryanne gives up on watching the coast as they slip through the hurricane barrier at the mouth of the Acushnet, the thin line of rocks piled up as a waterbreak that crosses nearly the entire river, leaving a slender passage for ships to get through. When she was young, the hurricane barrier had a walking trail along the top of it, an asphalt path for people to stroll along and enjoy the ocean air, or go fishing at its extremities. Now, the path is long gone, though ruined slabs of asphalt stick up from the water and amid the jumble of rocks like teeth. A succession of thousand-year storms caused the path to slide down into the water, and political and financial will has never been there to repair it, not when the odds were better than even that the next big storm to rip through would take any new path right down into the ocean, same as the old one. 

The lack of an easy walkway doesn’t stop anyone from scrambling out onto the hurricane barrier, though. It’s a popular spot for teenagers. Even though the weather is bad, and all of them should be at school, there’s five perched on the outermost piled boulders, chucking pebbles at seagulls. Bryanne watches them as the ship slides by, and hopes they leave before the tide and the waves come in properly— it’s a good place to drown. She can bring to mind several times watching the Coast Guard futilely dredge the river mouth for bodies— if they ever found them or not, she doesn’t know.

She turns away from them, back towards the Thylacine ’s main deck. It’s a pretty ship, in most of its aspects. The deck is planked with wood in the passenger-areas, and the whole thing is painted white, with light blue trim. Fastidious care is taken to keep the ship clean, power washing down the deck and sides of the vessel at the end of every tour. The whole experience tries to evoke the luxury of the White Star Line, with the grim threat of icebergs long since eliminated. 

Inside, the passenger cabins are small but luxe and well chosen. All the fixtures— switches, door handles, wall sconces— are made of elaborately whorled shiny brass. The carpets are plush and hard to keep clean when passengers and staff track in salty rainwater from the deck, but are nevertheless groomed back into perfection every Tuesday by the housekeeping company that they contract out. The hallways are decorated with surprisingly tasteful whale-motif wallpaper, and the pictures hung on the walls of are old tall ships and steamers. In the dining room, all the dishes have a painted border of ocean waves. 

Out on the deck, the covered lifeboats sit on either side of the ship, stored in the open beneath the tall frames of the passenger observation decks, which are only slightly more secure-looking than construction scaffold. The ship has an overall top-heavy appearance with all the things protruding from its deck; it’s strangely tall considering its relatively short length. The deckhouse sits well up high, providing a clear view of the ocean, and behind it rises the tall sail tower, painted sky-blue and making an incessant, clacking rattle that Byranne suspects must warn whales they’re coming from miles off.

The sail itself is a retrofit onto the ship, a donor lung that the Thylacine , due to the depth of her keel, was only barely able to support. Unlike the Wampanoag ’s wooden masts and fabric sails, this one is all metal and composites. It’s a compact windmill, or really a series of them in a stack, which power the batteries down in the ship’s hold. It’s the tallest part of the ship, and their navigational beacon blinks placidly at the top. When Bryanne gets close to it, it’s impossible to avoid seeing the ugly weld seams that crisscross this part of the deck where it was fastened in place years ago. It’s a necessary thing, and certainly better than fuel tanks, but nevertheless Bryanne rather resents it. The incessant clacka-clacka-clacka of the blades turning inside the metal frame is impossible for her to tune out, perhaps because she’s always listening to it, paranoid that something will go wrong that only she is tuned in to hear.

Most of the passengers, at least those who arrived early enough to have time to get themselves situated in their cabins, are out on the deck as Bryanne strolls around and looks things over. There’s not much to see, but there will be even less to see once they’re out away from the coast, which is why Captain Mike saves his welcoming speech until after they’re all miles out, and it’s time for passenger dinners. This means that Bryanne, the only interesting thing around, is a magnet for questions in her blue company windbreaker.

“When are we going to see whales?” one kid asks.

“We won’t be in Cape Cod Bay until some time tomorrow morning,” Bryanne says. “That’s where we have the best chance of finding them.”

She makes it a policy to never give actual numbers— it only leads to disappointment. But answering one question brings in a bevy of others, and so she’s trapped.

“Bit of a slow ship, isn’t she?” the father leading the child with the question asks.

“There’s lots of marine speed limits in place,” Bryanne says. “It’s for the benefit of the whales— ship strikes have been one of their leading causes of death ever since we’ve started tracking that kind of data. And—” She points behind herself at the sail tower. “The batteries are most efficient when we’re not using them at full load.”

This satisfies the adult, but the child strikes up with more. She lets the questions wash over her, and she answers each with a smile that feels stapled to her cheeks.

“Do you know a lot about whales?” “How big are they?” “How close is this ship allowed to get, exactly?” “Do you think I’ll be able to get good photos?”

“Be careful not to drop your phone overboard,” she says to that question. “And please don’t lean over the rail like that.”

The child is holding out his phone well over the water, standing on his tiptoes on the sliver of exposed I-beam that connects to the bulwarks and railings that ring the ship. He’s bent over at the waist, his stomach pressed into the cold and slippery metal bar, watching first the waves, then pointing his phone at the seagulls that are darting past.

One of the gulls, screaming as is their wont, passes over the deck of the Thylacine , intent on swooping for a passenger holding a sandwich. The passenger is sitting on one of the wooden benches near the deckhouse, and so the seagull swoops low over the deck, almost scraping the hats off the heads of several other people when it passes by. The passenger screams when the bird comes for her panini, and she waves the bird off, though scattering her bag of potato chips and half her sandwich as she does. 

Triumphantly, the seagull snatches up the huge hunk of bread, a forlorn tomato and some scraps of lettuce still clinging to it, and struggles to gain altitude off the deck. Its vision or bearing seems to be negatively impacted by its burden, and the rolling motion of the Thylacine makes the bird struggle to get distance. Its wings heaving, it crashes directly into the sail, fitting precisely through the thin metal bars that are supposed to keep birds out. The seagull explodes into a mess of feathers and gore, sliced instantly apart by the myriad windmill blades inside the sail tower. The clacka-clacka-clack of the sail’s blades whirring in the wind changes tenor to a clunka-clunka-clunk as the remainder of the bird, its forward momentum halted, falls down level after level, hitting every blade along the way, until whatever remains of it reaches the debris-trap in the bottom.

The child, who had been laughing at the sandwich theft and filming the whole thing, now turns pale. “Is he okay?” he asks. “Can you go get him out of there?”

Bryanne can’t even stop herself from rolling her eyes. “No,” she says shortly. “It’s dead.”

“No way,” he says, and starts jogging towards the sail, holding his arms out for balance as the ship sways with its normal motion. “No way!”

But there on the deck is a bloody chunk of wing, which Bryanne stops the kid from touching as he leans over it with a pale and horrified face. She picks it up herself and chucks it over the side, and when she comes back, he’s looking up at the sail tower.

“Just bad luck, buddy,” she says. “It’s just what happens sometimes.”

Bryanne’s nighttime watch is from four to eight, which means that her dinner time is either uncomfortably early or uncomfortably late. She usually steals an apple or a pastry from the kitchen to eat before she can get real food later, but by the time 7:30 creeps around, she’s starving and counting down the seconds until she can head to the kitchen to get something substantial.

The sun is long gone, and even though the Thylacine is not too far from shore by mileage, it still feels like they’re in the middle of the empty ocean— no sign of land in view. Cell service dropped off long ago, as soon as they got away from the towers, and though she could easily hop on the SATCOM link that they have, and send a message there, she doesn’t mind the feeling of isolation. Of course, the radio hissing static out of the speakers at her elbow occasionally blurts out a message from a passing boat, but it’s mostly quiet. Earlier, before it started raining, and when they were closer to the shore and traffic lanes, she could see the occasional blip of another vessel’s nav light, a replacement star-twinkle when the clouds and rain are obscuring the sky.

Except for when she trades places with one of their deckhands to rest her attention and take a different position that will keep her alert— usually walking around the deck and down to check the engine and batteries— she keeps one hand on the helm at all times, and her eye on the instruments. At the end of her watch, they generally stop the propeller, or at least reduce their speed to the bare minimum, to give the batteries a chance to recharge overnight. The wind whistling through the sail tower is so changeable that they’re not able to get much power from it while they’re moving. She makes a note in in the log about the status of their batteries, and then, again, for the hundredth time this watch, checks the AIS display and their radar.

The radar is nearly useless in weather this bad, even when she pulls the detection range in to about two miles. The rain and driving wind is scattering the radar’s signal, making ghosts appear and disappear on the display. The AIS fares a little better; she’s tracking a tanker ship about six nautical miles to their starboard, moving parallel to them.

She stares out into the darkness. With the rain splashing the windows, the deck is only illuminated by the light coming out of the passenger areas— the huge wide observation windows, with cozy seating to allow everyone to look outside from the comfort of the great indoors. 

She thinks she sees a flash of light on the horizon— distant lightning? But this isn’t a thunderstorm; it’s too early in the year. She fixes her eyes on the point where it might have been. It was probably just a raindrop catching the glimmer of a light below, or something like that. But then she sees it again, slightly to the left, a blip that comes and goes. She’s alert now, and checks the AIS and radar once again. Nothing on the AIS, but small pleasure craft aren’t obligated to have a transmitter. The radar is just a confused jumble.

She tries making a radio call, several times broadcasting her callsign, position, and asking, “Ship off my forward bow— identify.” But she gets no response.

Maybe it’s a buoy. She turns the Thylacine to starboard, but the blip remains directly ahead, as if it’s moving towards them. She turns more sharply, and again, after a minute, the blip obstinately swerves towards them. She tries the radio again and receives no response again.

The unexpected heading change summons Mike out of his cabin not five minutes later— he always has his eye on the compass, even when he’s below— sometimes even when he’s sleeping, Bryanne feels. But he troops up the stairs into the deckhouse, prepared to give Bryanne some kind of word about turning and disturbing the passengers.

But when he arrives, she points out the window at the blip before he can say anything. “What is that?” she asks.

“You tell me,” he replies.

“It’s coming right for us,” Bryanne says. “And it won’t answer the radio.”

Mike peers at the radar display, using both his hands to do a pinch-and-zoom that she would do with two fingers. “Sailboat, I bet.” 

She didn’t need him to tell her that, and so she says nothing.

“Well, if we can see them, they can see us,” he says. He looks at their position on the chart, then the battery display. “Just shut down the prop for now,” he says. “If we’re not moving, they’ll have an easier time avoiding us.”

Bryanne is frustrated by this instruction, and she frowns. It always annoys her to sit still.

Mike sees her expression and says, “Not like we’ve got anywhere to get faster. We’re not gonna see any whales.”

He probably just means the foul weather— Mike’s usually optimistic about their chances of spotting their quarry— but he’s right regardless. There seem to be no whales left, and whichever mournful trills they pick up on the hydrophone are those of ghosts, just like the shapes that flutter across their radar in this rain.

“Fine,” she says, and begins to pull the propeller back to idle. The blinking light still flashes in front of them. It’s impossible to tell how far away it is, the faintness being difficult to judge through the rain.

As the propeller spins down, a strange quiet overtakes the ship. Unless the propeller changes state, it’s hard to notice the omnipresent thrum that it makes, the hum that permeates the metal structure of the ship itself. The silence makes Bryanne’s ears ring, searching for the noise that was there a moment ago.

Mike leaves, headed back down to entertain guests or sleep or do whatever it is he does when she’s at the helm and he’s not, and she jots down a note in the log about the incident, and watches the flash on the horizon, waiting for it to do something. 

At eight, she’s relieved for the end of her watch, and, though she should go down and get dinner, she instead goes outside, stands at the observation deck at the bow, gets soaked to the skin, and watches the light flash.

She’s woken at 3:45 by her alarm for her four A.M. watch, and shuffles into the deckhouse after bolting down a caffeine pill and brushing her teeth. The storm cleared up sometime after midnight, while she was sleeping, and so now she can see, in the slowly pinking dawn light, the dot of white sails on the horizon. The sailboat is now visible on their radar, not a ghost but a tiny boat. And its doppler track left on the radar screen indicates that, one again, it’s coming directly towards them.

Bryanne starts up the propeller again, the batteries back up to 90% of their capacity, and turns them back on their proper course, trying to avoid the sailboat. But now in the daylight, she can watch as it tacks towards them, deliberately coming closer and closer.

She tries again to hail the ship, and gets no response.

Mike comes up when the sailboat is within half a mile of them, completely visible to everyone who goes out on deck, now that the sun has risen. “What the hell is that boat doing?” he asks.

“Should we try to flag them down?” Bryanne asks. “They just keep coming.”

“We’re faster than they are, aren’t we? Can we get out of their way?”

“I don’t think we are,” she says, checking the wind direction. “They’re moving with the wind.”

He opens one of the cabinets and pulls out his pair of binoculars, then trains them on the sailboat. “There’s people on the deck,” he says. “And they’re not acting like they’re in distress.”

“Maybe they’re just stupid,” Bryanne grumbles. “They see us. They have to see us. We’re huge.”

Mike shakes his head and goes out on deck.

The sailboat continues coming closer and closer, and Mike takes the bullhorn and goes to stand on the bow, trying to yell at the other boat.

By now, they’re close enough that Bryanne can see the two people manning the sailboat— a man and a woman, both blonde, though that’s the only information she can get from them. The boat itself seems to be in decent order, and nothing appears to be broken that would explain their strange behavior.

Mike yells through the bullhorn, though Bryanne can’t hear him outside, and the people on the other boat wave and cup their hands around their mouths to yell something back. The exchange would be comical if it wasn’t stupid and dangerous. Bryanne pulls back their engine to just above idle, trying to keep them in place as the sailboat comes closer and closer. Mike comes back inside the deckhouse.

“Let them come up alongside,” he says, sounding mystified. “That’s our new naturalist.”

The naturalist, Atlas Vanderhook, brings her sailboat right up to the side of the Thylacine , and Mike drops down their ladder so that she can climb on board. As soon as she does, the sailboat with its other pilot turns hard to starboard and peels away from them, practically skipping across the surface of the water. Bryanne watches from above as Atlas waves the sailboat off, then shakes hands with Mike, and has a bit of a conversation with him. He points up to Bryanne at the deckhouse, and Atlas turns to look, though with the glare from the rising sun, there’s no way she can see Bryanne inside at all. 

Bryanne studies the woman, peering down at her from above. She can’t see her face from here, but she can see that she’s tall and exuberant. She talks with her hands, and reaches over to clap Mike on his shoulder.

Mike leads Atlas down inside the ship, presumably to get her set up in the room reserved for her, or to talk away from the very confused few passengers who are out on deck early this morning, watching the whole saga take place.

Bryanne can’t help but feel supremely annoyed at the whole thing. The refusal to answer the radio, the casual disregard for safety, the fact that the naturalist was a day late anyway— it all makes her seethe and grit her teeth. She jots the relevant information down in the log, and lets out steam by pushing the engine harder than she should, making up for lost progress.

Forty-five minutes later, there’s a knock on the deckhouse door. Bryanne turns away from the helm, and sees the blonde hair of the naturalist in the window. “Come in!” she yells.

Bryanne doesn’t want to look at her when she steps inside, but she can easily see Atlas’s reflection in the window. Now that they’re on the same level, Bryanne can see that she’s broad shouldered, built like a rugby player. Her hair is properly blonde, not dyed, and shoulder-length wavy. But her face is charming: bright but narrowed eyes, and her eyebrows wiggle when she smiles— dimples— and inside her expressive mouth, her tongue sticks out past her perfect teeth, like she’s biting back laughter at every moment.

“I was told to come say thank you to the woman who was doing her best not to crash into me,” Atlas says.

“Would have been easier if you weren’t trying so hard to crash into us,” Bryanne says.

It makes Atlas laugh, which was not what she had intended. 

“I’m a better sailor than that!”

“And why didn’t you answer the radio?”

“Battery trouble,” Atlas says. “Clouds really do a number on what your solar panels take in, and I think I ended up with a fault in the one cell that actually managed to charge. I’d have called you in the morning, but by the time we got through our troubleshooting checklist, we were right on top of you.”

Bryanne purses her lips and says nothing. Even if this is true, which it probably is, it’s still irresponsible. She’s so annoyed by this that she doesn’t even bother asking the various other important questions: Why were you late? What the hell do you think you’re doing coming up to us in the middle of the ocean? What gives you the right? Are you expecting to keep your job after this little stunt?

Atlas takes her silence as an invitation to introduce herself. “I’m Atlas, by the way,” she says. “In case you didn’t know.” She holds out her hand.

The fact that Mike let this woman onboard, and didn’t send both her and her sailboat packing, does mean that, at least for now, this strange woman is part of the crew, and she has to at least perform the minimum level of politeness towards her.

“Bryanne Oliviera. First mate,” she says, and shakes Atlas’s hand. The other woman has an absolutely crushing grip, like it’s some kind of test, but she smiles jovially at Bryanne the whole time. 

“Pleasure to meet you.”

“I’m trying to make up for lost time,” Bryanne says. “You should get Captain Mike to introduce you to the passengers, if you want to jump in with your job.”

“I suppose that’s what I did come aboard for,” she says.

“I thought it was just because you wanted to impress people with a stunt,” Bryanne says, the remark coming out before she can bite it back. “But you’ve made the wrong impression on me.”

“I know,” she says. “It’s too bad! I’ll have to make up for it later.” She grins. “I’m sure we’ll be spending plenty of time together, won’t we?”

Since Atlas arrived on Saturday morning, that means that there are three long days together before the tour ends on Monday night. Bryanne tries her best not to stew on Atlas’s intrusion— she’s here now, so she should be grateful to not have to do two jobs on this ship. She tries to avoid Atlas, which is possible as long as she stays off the deck and out of the guest areas of the ship. It’s easy to stay out of the dining room (though Mike would want her to show her face and chat with the passengers), but it’s harder to avoid the deck, since she likes standing on the observation platforms, vape in one hand and binoculars in the other, looking for whales. Luckily, their schedules don’t line up enough for them to see each other much, and so Bryanne is successful at giving the other woman the cold shoulder for nearly their entire trip.

Even though she has no desire to speak to Atlas, this doesn’t stop her from studying her. On Monday morning, as they re-approach their safe harbor. Atlas is at the prow, and Bryanne trains the binoculars on her, standing up on the observation deck. She’s hoping to catch Atlas in a moment of discomfort, where her braggadocio of hopping on board fails her in front of the guests. There’s a laundry list of tour scripts that the naturalist is supposed to memorize, and Atlas, having just arrived, couldn’t possibly know what they contain. But, much to Bryanne’s consternation, she seems to have an endless ability to entertain guests, not fumbling in the least when someone asks her a question. Even though they’re headed back to harbor after not seeing a single whale, which usually causes the tourists to be frustrated and angry, Atlas is managing to make them laugh.

From her perch on the observation deck, Bryanne can’t hear what Atlas is saying, but she watches her face move, disarmingly charming and expressive. She’s a hand-talker, gesturing with her whole upper body when she needs to articulate the motion of a dolphin or seagull. And she never seems to run out of things to talk about, no matter how little there is to look at on the broad and open ocean, and no matter how little time she’s had to memorize the tour scripts. She’s especially entertaining to the few children passengers, even those who didn’t witness her interesting entrance onto the ship. It’s probably just because she’s loud and boisterous, like the kids are, and laughs at her own jokes, which tells them to laugh, too, even if they don’t know what’s so funny.

It must be the glint of the sun off of Bryanne’s binoculars that makes Atlas notice her; she looks directly up towards the observation deck. Through the lenses, she looks much closer than she really is, and so even though Bryanne should have pretended to be looking at something else, she can’t, and she immediately drops the binoculars, where they thump against her chest, dangling from their strap. Atlas raises her hand in a wave, and Bryanne can do nothing but nod back.

Even with this acknowledgement, it takes until they get into the mouth of the river that evening for Atlas to come and find her. The passengers are all below, packing up their rooms and getting ready to deboard, and Bryanne finished her duty checklist around the deck. So she’s leaning on the rail, watching the city come into view. It’s golden hour, and she’s unexpectedly happy to be going home, already anticipating Marcus waiting for her. The city, with its brick buildings, looks welcoming in the early evening light— distance makes everything look cleaner. The empty masts of the Wampanoag stand out in the harbor, and though it’s too late for Marcus to be there, Bryanne trains her binoculars on it, looking up at the figure at the top of the mast. Even through the magnification, it’s too far away to see clearly that it’s just a doll.

Atlas comes up behind her and puts her hand on Bryanne’s back. “I’ve been on that ship, you know,” she says.

Bryanne jumps. “Jesus Christ, don’t scare me like that.”

“I was walking loudly enough,” Atlas says. “My mother tells me I stomp everywhere I go.”

Bryanne shakes the touch off her back by standing straight, and doesn’t say anything in response to that. For lack of anything else to do, she takes the binoculars off hand hands them to Atlas, who presses them to her eyes.

“She used to be rigged as a ship rather than a bark, though,” she says, studying the rigging. “Or at least she was when I visited.”

“It just got here this year,” Bryanne says. “I don’t know how you had time to go see it.”

“No, when she was down in Macau. My dad was there on business, and he took me with him— this was like—” She tries to do the math in her head, and gives up. “I think I was twelve or thirteen.”

“And you could differentiate a bark from a ship, at age twelve?”

“Oh, you think I’m stupid. My stunning good looks have prejudiced you against me,” Atlas teases. 

“I didn’t know shit about ships as a kid.”

“I was a huge boat nerd,” Atlas says. “I think my parents put me in sailing lessons at age seven.”

Bryanne purses her lips. “Doesn’t surprise me.” It hadn’t been more than an intuition before, but it was now clear that her guess had been correct— Atlas was rich, or at least had a history with money.

Atlas laughs. “No, I figured that was information you could have guessed.”

“So you saw the Wampanoag ?” Bryanne prompts, trying to get Atlas to tell the story she wants to tell, so that Bryanne can politely leave. “You met the guy who built it?”

“Mr. Zhang? Yeah,” she says with a laugh. “Well, met might be a strong word. I was only thirteen. I went to his party and shook his hand, but so did a hundred other people that night.”

“Twelve.”

“And they let me have rum.”

“On the ship?”

“It was a great party.”

Bryanne was going to have to drag the details out of Atlas, which Atlas was clearly looking forward to making her do, so instead she fell silent, letting the silence stretch on long enough for it to become awkward, and for Atlas to be forced to provide the information herself. She didn’t seem bothered, and she launched into her monologue, as if it was a story she had memorized.

“Like I said, my dad was down in Macau for business, and it’s not like he was working directly with Mr. Zhang, but it was a contact-of-a-contact thing that got him invited to this party. I think pretty much anybody who had the right contacts could get an invitation to one of these events— he loved throwing them.”

“Mmm,” Bryanne says.

“What else was he going to do with his money?” Atlas asked— but it was a rhetorical question. “Anyway, it was a costume party thing— we all dressed up as Moby Dick characters. I got to be Pip.”

“Isn’t Pip Black?”

Atlas laughs again. “Call it race blind casting. And Mr. Zhang was the world’s first two-legged Shanghainese Ahab.”

Bryanne rolls her eyes and looks out at the looming, empty masts of the tall ship. They’re coming closer now.

“I was honestly a little disappointed at the whole thing at the time,” Atlas continues in the silence that Bryanne refuses to fill. “It felt really stupid to me to go all the way across the world to go to a party on an American style ship— I’ve been down to Mystic about a billion times. I would have much rather gone to a party on one of Mr. Zhang’s ancient junks— or he had a Roman trireme docked right next to it, too. I was seething that we didn’t get to go on that one— I was so mad that I almost cried as we got towed out of the harbor.” She laughs. “I didn’t really have a conception of how lucky I was.”

“And now you do?”

“Well, I ended up having a good time at the party despite myself!”

Bryanne frowns.

“I’ll get to see that trireme someday,” Atlas says. “I think it’s in… some maritime museum in Italy, anyway.”

Bryanne is finally too overcome with curiosity to not ask a question. “What was his deal, anyway, with the boats?”

Atlas tilts her head into the wind. “Mr. Zhang? Hm. You’re asking me to be a psychologist. He was the richest man in the world— gotta spend your money on something. Maybe he was just a sailing freak like me. I’d probably build boats too.”

Chapter Text

Remarks Monday 18th of November 1867, 162nd Day

Rainy weather first part of the day but cleared by the afternoon strong winds from the SSE.

O my dear I believe we have exhausted every whale in this ocean. But maybe they have all gotten too clever for us and learned where our boats are and have gone off elsewhere. It has been several weeks since we got our last catch and in that time we have seen not even a spout. Going whaling is about patience and I am lucky that I am a patient man.

The master seems ready to take us down and around the Cape to get to the Pacific whaling grounds. We will likely stop to refresh our stocks of wood and water before we go and I hope that this will mean we take some time on shore. But of course the master will not want to let us all go on shore because shore leave at any port worth visiting means that half the greenhands will leave for good and we’ll be down crew or have to hire more. We are still early into the journey not even a full year and no one has had a chance to spend down their entire lay out of the slop chest yet. I haven’t spent any even though I lost some buttons off my shirt I’ve been carving down teeth to replace them. I’ll make some extra for you my dear. It is something to do to pass the time though I am not very good at it. I should make sure Tobey gets some teeth to try carving I don’t think he had any interest in it before but o he could do with something to pass the time other than playing cards. And I have plenty of teeth (a whale has far more than he needs it seems) so if he ever has interest I will give him some of mine. He will get bored enough with cards eventually, when he has nothing left to gamble on them.

For anyone who does get into debt I can see why it becomes a better and better idea to take your leave of the ship and discharge any debts you might have by running. But I will be wearing a jacket that’s more darns than whole fabric before I owe a man money. I sometimes wonder if I would make a good husband to you my dear I think it is the wife’s duty to be thrifty. I might work us both to the bone to save a penny…

No when I come home with my pay I will spoil you my dear. You and I will go arm in arm through New Bedford and you will get the prettiest dress made that I’ve ever laid eyes on. And that is what you will wear when we get married in the seamen’s bethel. Do you think they would marry us there? I’ve never seen a wedding there but it is a church like any other and surely plenty of sailors get married like any other men. If they won’t then Well we can get married at your family’s house under that big old apple tree. Or at First Baptist church either way it does not matter to me whatever you like. But we will have to do it in the spring since that is the prettiest time for weddings isn’t it.

O why am I dreaming about this now.

Barometer 30.1.

Remarks Tuesday 19th of November 1867, 163rd Day

Early part of the day clear but rain in the afternoon. No sign of whales. Engaged in repairing sails. Plenty of other sails on the horizon and no indication that they’re having any luck either. The master has said he does not like gaming with other ships much because he has nothing to talk about but I always enjoy it as it is a good chance to meet other fellows and if they are on their way home or at least to a port where there is a mail packet we can hand them our letters. I wish I could get a letter back from you my dear but if all I can do is send you one of my own I will be content with knowing that when you read it you are thinking of me. Barometer 30.0.

Remarks Wednesday 20th of November 1867, 164th Day

Cloudy at day light and remained cloudy all day but no rain and still air. Barometer 29.7.

Remarks Thursday 21st of November 1867, 165th Day

We are still becalmed and the weather has been quite strange everything is so hot and the air itself is heavy. The sails don’t move at all and every sound seems like it carries across the water in a way that I have never heard before. Since we are becalmed and there is no hope of seeing any whales the master lets some of the men take the boats out to fish for dinner away from the ship. I took a boat out earlier but we caught nothing still it was nice to be out on the water. I would have liked to go for a swim but I am afraid of sharks which we have seen plenty of. Tobey cannot swim I ought to teach him if we ever have liberty on shore and shallow and calm water. He doesn’t care to learn but it’s a danger to be on a whaler and not able to swim for at least a minute. If a whale stoves in your boat there are always plenty of fellows around to pull you out of the water when you’re chasing a whale and I would rather not die of drowning if I can help it. I’d rather not die of anything else either but drowning is at least one thing I can work against on my own! The rest I suppose is up to the Good Lord. Still sails on the horizon. The boats might head in that direction and say hello. Antonio is out there fishing now and he is a friendly man he’ll call out a greeting to anyone even if that’s properly the master’s job. Barometer remains still and high.

Remarks Friday 22nd of November 1867, 166th Day

No wind for another day. Antonio took an old harpoon out when they were all going fishing and he harpooned himself a shark which we all ate for dinner. He is a better harpooner than me and braver as I would be too afraid to lean over the side of the boat and spear it. What if it leapt at me? They are not like whales which I feel I can understand or at least I am familiar with. A whale never tried to eat me except to stove my boat in but sharks look like they would take great pleasure in having a bite of me. (And I think a whale would do me the mercy of swallowing me whole. I think a shark would need to chew!) But since Antonio is brave and has a good arm we can all profit from him darting a shark. They are funny looking creatures and o my dear I will admit I was a little nervous to touch it even when it was lying dead there on the deck. Its teeth are not so big as a sperm whale’s but they are much sharper. The cook had a devil time trying to get the skin off him and cut him all up for us to eat. His knife just didn’t go easy through and trying to hold it steady would leave your hand all scraped up it has a hide like an iron file. On my last voyage men darted sharks so that they could get the skin to use for sandpaper not to eat. I think a tough skin like that is something that God gave the shark to stop him from being eaten up but o I hate to think about what animal eats sharks. Aside from us of course! I never ate shark before but a good soup it made it was a better meal than most we’ve been having for weeks. We ate the last of our hens a long while ago when they stopped laying and the pig was gone before that. Only our goats are left now and so I hope when we stop at port we get some new hens. Barometer 30.1.

Remarks Saturday 23rd of November 1867, 167th Day

Still not a breath of wind in any direction. It’s a long way to the nearest other boat but since the boredom has grown tiresome for even the master we are having a little gam with them. This is the bark Henrietta and she is like ours in every way though a good few voyages older as the Wampanoag is a new ship. I’m told that the Henrietta’ s master has a wife with him on the ship which has caused a small stir on board. But since our master’s wife is tucked away in New Bedford aside from her photograph there is no reason for a woman to come visiting us here. 

Today the master took the L Boat over to them and their first mate came here. We had a very fine time as a gam is a good chance to spend time with all on deck and have some games and drink and be merry. Although the air is still and dreadfully hot the weather was good for such a thing. There was a little competition between us as the Henrietta’s first mate asked if any of us harpooners could throw a dart as hard and as far as their best his name was Frank. And as Antonio and I both have good arms we both took a try. All three of us went out on a boat along with both first mates to act as judges. We stayed up right close to the ship so that all could watch and cheer us on. Tobey yelled so loud when it was my time to throw that you probably heard him yelling my name back home or at least they must have heard him all the way over on the other ship. Their harpooner went first and he darted four fathoms. O my dear this might not sound like much but the harpoon with its iron pole is quite heavy you would be surprised at how heavy it is and how hard it can be to throw. Antonio went next and I do not think he had a fair shot or he would have won. Just as he was in the middle of his throw a little wave hit our boat and made him stumble, and he only got two fathoms and was lucky that he didn’t go for a swim. I was nervous as anything when I stood at the front of the boat and they gave me the harpoon to try I didn’t want to let everyone down. But as I said Tobey was cheering for me and that put a smile on my face and made the dart feel a lot lighter than it usually does. And not having to worry about a whale stoving me in or even having to aim at anything at all helped too.

Now we were throwing our darts along the side of the ship so that everyone could get the best view. I aimed my dart higher than I usually would so that it could go a hair further. When I threw I knew I had made a good throw the iron just leaped right out of my hand into the air. The trouble was that the wind chose that moment to blow for the first time in days and it moved my dart right to the side and o my dear I felt as embarrassed as anything my dart stuck right into the side of the ship.

Everyone started yelling O Amos did you think we were a whale and telling the first mate to get out his lance to finish the kill. You would think that I had stove the whole ship in from the way everybody was yelling. Everyone had good fun and half were drunk as they’d ever been but o my dear I am so ashamed. Even Tobey laughed at me! And Antonio said he’ll be sure to keep his boat well out of my way when we go chasing whales.

I did dart four and a half fathoms though by measuring it on how we pulled ourselves on the line up to the ship. No matter how we pulled on the line we couldn’t get the iron out of the side until the first mate took the hatchet and pulled the dart out. The hole it left was as big as my hand and splintered though it did not go all the way through the wood. We’ll put some tar on it and if it gets too bad the carpenter can replace the wood.

I should have asked if the first mate would take the damage out of my lay because I’d like to know but o I thought that asking him would remind him that he should do so.

I’m sorry it was the first mate who saw and not the master I think the master might have laughed even though it is his family’s ship. I didn’t really stove us in.

Tomorrow the first mate will make a visit to the Henrietta and I’ll get to come along. Tobey too I don’t think the first mate will mind and Tobey should get to go gamming. Someone needs to row the boat after all and the two of us are in the first mate’s crew.

Barometer 30.2.

Remarks Wednesday 27th of November 1867, 171st Day

Tobey is still in chains on the deck and I do not know what to do.

Chapter Text

Friday May 25, 2057

Already in late May, the temperatures at noon on the deck of the Wampanoag crest in the seventies. It would be pleasant, if it wasn’t accompanied by the knowledge that June, July, and August will all be much hotter. The ship, not moving an inch from its dock, traps still air on the deck. Below, where Marcus is hiding and eating his lunch, it’s humid and oppressive. But he savors his half hour lunch break as much as he can. It’s too short to go anywhere, except run to the bathroom in the museum, and maybe grab a coffee. So, he’s down in the employee room in the hold, sitting at the uncomfortable card table, sweating, and eating a cheese sandwich on wheat bread. 

His phone is resting on the table in front of him, and he’s scrolling through Bryanne’s latest email, which reads like a combination of log entry and grocery list, which is exactly what it is. She doesn’t get cell service while out on her cruises, so she can’t text Marcus, but she can send and receive emails using the Thylacine ’s SATCOM. This lends her missaves a strange level of formality, since she has to go through the hassle of logging into the ship’s computer to send them. She ends up cutting out most of her personal feelings, if she ever considered writing them down in the first place, leaving just facts. She always uses voice-to-text, and so her messages are littered with transcription errors.

Heard whales on the hydro phone while I was on watch this morning turned in that direction but no sighting yet. Weather looking like it will turn bad later might have a storm so we won’t have a chance to see anything even if we’re close but maybe tomorrow. If the rain gets to you please bring the money tree in from off the balcony I don’t want it to be out in the wind. Can you make sure to get bleach when you go to the grocery and cilantro and basmati rice I forgot to get them when I went on Thursday. Thanks love you.

Her frustration bleeds through, even in the perfunctory message. The fact that she hasn’t spotted whales all season is not something she dwells on when she’s at home, at least not as much as Marcus would if he were in her position, but he knows that it’s wearing her down. Their afternoons have become filled with grim silences. Once, Marcus made the mistake of asking her why she has been so quiet, and she responded, “My mother ground into me that if you don’t have something pleasant to say, maybe you shouldn’t say anything.”

It’s not that she’s mad at him— but there’s nothing pleasant to report about the trips. In order to not make the silence quite so oppressive, she talks about how the naturalist on board does her best to field questions and distract passengers, and she says it with a bit of grudging admiration and gratefulness in her tone— glad that she’s not bearing the brunt of it. Grudging praise about a difficult situation is about the most positive she’s able to get.

Marcus understands her frustration, though there’s nothing he can do about it, and no comfort he can offer her without it feeling hollow, distant, like it’s coming from a different world.

Even without being in the direct path of anger from customers who paid to be shown something, it’s still a miserable sense of loss. She took the job on the Thylacine , rather than a larger ship, because she, too, wants to see the whales. She could have been a mate on a ferry, or a fishing trawler, and made at least a bit more money while staying equivalently close to home. But she enjoys chasing them, and especially seeing them. Last year when she came home from the cruises, she always described the sightings to Marcus with a level of detail and enthusiasm that her stories about anything else didn’t usually involve.

The message here could have fit quite neatly in to Amos’s journal, though Amos would have phrased all of his disappointment in a very cheerful way, Marcus thinks. But the spirit is the same. 

He’ll have to go to the grocery store once he gets out of here, though he wishes that there were some way other than following Bryanne’s instructions to cheer her up. He’ll install the air conditioner on the window before she gets home. That is a task that she hates, but that he can probably do on his own. Ruefully, he supposes that she won’t comment on it. She’s the kind of person for whom work is simply something to be done; if he doesn’t pry open the stuck window and install the AC, she’ll just do it without complaint, aside from her swearing as she tries to jostle it into the window frame. But maybe, maybe she’ll appreciate the task being done without her.

That resolved, Marcus checks the time again. He can stretch out his lunch break for another six minutes, which is five minutes longer than he should, but the tour that starts exactly at one won’t get to him for a while, and Joe will be too busy to notice that he’s not at his post. He crams the rest of his cheese sandwich in his mouth, drinks iron-tasting and warm water from his half-full lunchbox nalgene, and stares into space. 

The idea of going back on deck and giving another tour is making him feel ill, and there’s no amount of saying to himself: “Just four more hours today. That’s only eight half hours. That’s only sixteen quarter hours,” that can lift the weight of there being months and months until the end of the tour season. 

Ten minutes pass before Marcus realizes it, and he only jerks up from his seat when he hears someone else coming down into the hold. It’s Joe, and in his haste to get up, Marcus drops his water bottle to the floor, where it rolls away.

“What the hell are you doing down here, Amos?” Joe snaps. He’s in-character, and his goofy drama-teacher demeanor is gone, replaced by the stiff-necked master of the ship. He’d never yell if he was in a classroom, but here, he still thinks he’s on stage, even if they are backstage.

“Sorry, sir,” Marcus says. “Was finishing my lunch.”

“You need to report to your watch on time. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir, sorry, sir. I’m going.”

“A man can be put in irons for missing his watch,” Joe says.

It’s an empty threat, obviously, but it’s nevertheless demeaning to be threatened with. “I’m going, sir,” Marcus says again, and he heads back up on deck before Joe can say anything else.

As he goes, Joe calls after him, “We’ll talk about this later.”

He barely arrives at his position by the time the tour lead gets the group of old women who had reserved that timeslot to his station.

He’s distracted all through the next hour or so, his eyes always sliding around the deck, listening for Joe’s voice and following the movements of the rest of the staff, rather than paying close attention to the monologue he’s supposed to be giving. 

Joe doesn’t have the teeth to fire him, nor does he have a spare person to hire to fill Marcus’s place, but that doesn’t mean that getting a talk about being late won’t be unpleasant. It’s just shameful, and it’s the kind of shame that presses on his shoulders and sours every moment at the job until he quits— even long after whoever yells at him forgets his original transgression, Marcus can’t let go of the embarrassment. He’s very familiar with how this goes— it’s a routine cycle in his life at this point.

In every space between one tour group leaving and the next coming up, Marcus leans over the rail, looking out at the spiky masts of a hundred sailboats waiting for sailors, then the ocean, and the horizon above it. It’s not even that he dislikes the job— at least, no more than he would dislike most others. He wanted the job very badly. When he applied, he felt like it would be a step in the right direction for other museum work in the future, or at least gives him time to apply for doctoral programs. 

He lets his thoughts drift away from the current moment, shuffling them in that direction. In the moment he’s supposed to be doing anything other than working on emailing prospective advisors, he’s free to think happily about the idea of going back to school. Part of the reason he’s dragged his feet so long is that he’s not entirely sure what to study. His most focused undergraduate work had been about the history of the United Fruit Company in Honduras, specifically about political engagement of workers in the company towns, and the topic still fascinates him, though it’s been years since he was out of school and actively doing any work on the subject. His mother cautioned that he needed to find a way to make his life and applications feel less discontinuous— now that he has a useless master of education degree that he’s hauling around with him like a ball and chain, maybe he should try to leverage that to study the history of education, try to circle that back around to maybe eventually working at an education-focused NGO or something. He feels like he could do that, and he’d probably enjoy it, but it would be starting from nothing, and it’s a vague dream, and one that— even to him— feels paternalistic. He got out of teaching for more than one reason. 

He’s so distracted thinking about this that he doesn’t even notice that, creeping forward through the queue of people at the dock, is a group of students all wearing tee shirts from the school where he used to work. It’s a small group that boards the ship, one tour’s worth— half of a classroom. The other half is likely still inside the museum, or perhaps this is some kind of club. Regardless, Marcus doesn’t see them until they’re right on top of him, the tour lead snapping him out of his reverie as he approaches, calling out, “Amos, have you met these young fellows yet?”

Marcus jerks around from where he had been staring out at the water, and smiles at the group, “Well, no I haven’t, hello—”

“Mr. Ashton?” one of the kids says, first surprised and then with increasing glee. Not because any of the students— all of whom Marcus now recognizes— liked him particularly, but because the idea of meeting someone where they’re not supposed to be creates opportunities for trouble. He had never been good at classroom management. All of the kids in this group had been his students last year, seventh graders then, eighth graders now.

“I’m afraid you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” Marcus says, trying to launch immediately into his monologue. “I’m Amos Cudjoe, my friend, and I’m the harpooner on this ship. A harpooner is also sometimes called a boatsteerer, because we do both jobs. Now, you might think that the boat I’m referring to is this one” —He gestures around— “but I’m actually talking about these little boats right here.”

“You totally are Mr. Ashton,” one of the girls says. He searches his name for her memory— soccer player, always bleaches just the bangs of her hair— Genesis, that’s it.

“Who is this Mr. Ashton?” Marcus asks, deciding that it’s better to play along than let the situation get out of hand. He learned the hard way that trying to talk over students who are not listening is a road to losing control completely— better to engage and keep their attention on him.

“Brooooo,” one of the boys (whose name Marcus has completely forgotten) says. “Everyone thought you got fired.”

“I thought you got married,” one of the girls says. That’s Amy, with the thick glasses.

“No,” Marcus says, reaching back to his memory of Amos’s journal. “I’m afraid I haven’t been able to get married yet. I’d like to!”

“Ooooh,” Amy says. “Did you get dumped?” She’s the gossipy kind of sympathetic, but Marcus leaps on the question, and leans on the rail of the ship, really getting into character and pivoting.

“Well, no, not as such. It’s just I had no money to get married with. A woman, and she is the most beautiful woman, and respectable and would be a good wife, she needs a man who can provide for her. And so I’ve gone whaling to make my way in the world, and bring back some pay at the end of the voyage. But four years— that’s a long time.”

“Did she cheat on you?” It’s unclear if she’s gotten absorbed enough in Marcus’s play to ask about Amos’s life.

“I certainly hope not,” Marcus says. “I trust her. But, as I said, four years is an awful long time. This is my second voyage, and by the end of it, well, I’ll have spent eight years out whaling, that’s almost a whole third of my life. And it’s hard to get mail from people you miss back at home. They don’t always know where to send it off to.”

Even the surprise of encountering a former teacher is not enough to keep the kids’ interest. A handful of the boys have wandered away from the group, towards the trypots on the deck, and the teacher (who Marcus doesn’t know) is trying to corral them back. “Get down from there!”

“They’re not doing any harm,” Marcus says, and waves a hand at her to let the boys continue their investigations. He walks over himself and leading the rest of the more obedient kids behind him.

Two of the trypots are encased in the brick tryworks, but there’s a third out on the deck for demonstration purposes, the huge cast-iron vessel sitting there propped up on wooden chocks for the tourists to investigate. Marcus always finds it funny when parents ask if they can take photos with it, holding up their squirming toddler over the pot as though they’re going to put the baby in a soup. These kids are all too big for that, but exactly the right size to lean on it and bang their fists on it, yelling down into it.

“You like the trypots?” Marcus asks. “We’ve just had a poor soul in trouble who was late for his watch scrape and scrub them out— they’re as clean as they’re ever going to get. We could do our laundry in ‘em now. But usually they’re so full of caked on grease that you’d never want to touch them.”

Those of the kids who aren’t trying to climb inside the pot seem mostly bored. The teacher asks, “What are these for?”

“We use them for boiling down the whales once we’ve caught them,” he says. “It’s my least favorite part of the journey, I’m afraid. It’s hard and hot and messy work, chopping the whales up into pieces. But it’s the most essential for making money. It used to be— in the old days— ships wouldn’t have a tryworks like this on board. They’d catch a whale and haul him all the way back to shore, and process it down there to get the oil. But all the whales have gotten too clever for us, and they live far away from shore now, out in the Pacific, or up in the Arctic. We don’t have time after catching them to process them on shore— so we have to cut them up and boil them down right on board.”

He points to the chains and hooks further forward. “When we’re cutting up the whale, we use our windlass— the big winch and chain— to haul the big sheets of blubber up onto the deck, and then it’s our job to cut them down small enough to fit in the pot and boil off easy.”

The boys playing with the pot aren’t paying any attention, and one of the other kids leans over to his friend and says, “I’m gonna chop you up and boil you. Think you’ll melt?” And pinches the other boy’s arm, hard enough to make him jump.

“Stop it, fucker.”

“Language!” the teacher says, very ineffectually.

Before this can cause more of a problem, Marcus looks around to see who’s listening, and his eyes land on the girl Genesis again. He asks her, “Have you ever cooked bacon?”

“Seen my dad do it,” she says.

“It’s just like that, what we do,” he says. “We get the pieces of blubber so hot that the oil melts and renders right out of them. But when you cook bacon, what you want is the meat left over. We want the oil that comes out, so we can put it in barrels and sell it for lanterns and candles and a million other things.” He pauses. “Now, when you’re cooking bacon, you eat the meat. What do you think we do with the meat that’s left, once we’ve taken all the oil out?”

“You eat the whales?” one of the boys asks, finally interested. “What do they taste like?”

“Oh, no, I’ve never eaten a whale,” Marcus says. “I’m told it’s not pleasant.” He reaches for the big metal forks leaning against the tryworks, and grabs one— the blubber pike.

“Can I hold it?” one of the boys asks.

“Of course,” Marcus says. He hands over the pike, and, to forestall any possibility that the boy might brandish it, he says, “See how far down you can stick it in the trypot. Now oil isn’t as heavy as water, but it’s still hard to stir.”

The kid does stick the pike down into the pot, and is interested enough in this, at least until he bangs it against the side like a gong, that there’s no trouble.

 “We fish the pieces out with this, all the scraps, and then, well, the whale is a very generous animal. He gives us everything we need to process him down. Once we’ve gotten the oil out, we feed the fire with the scraps. They burn real hot, just also real smoky. You can always spot a whaler out on the ocean from the trail of smoke she leaves in the sky. And you can smell her from miles off, if the wind is right.”

All of this seems to be making the girls ill, and the boys are no longer interested in the pots, so Marcus gives up on this. “Well, I’ve been talking about this all backwards, anyway. Before you can boil a whale down and get his oil out, you need to catch him. And boiling a whale is everybody’s job, but catching him— well, I’m a harpooner. I like to think that I have the most important job.”

“Mr. Ashton, can I go to the bathroom?” one of the kids asks. Jackson, that’s his name.

“I really am afraid you’re confusing me for someone else.” 

“Wait until the end of the tour,” the teacher says.

“It’s an emergency!”

“Is there a bathroom on this boat?”

The tour lead spares Marcus from any further breaks in character and says, “Not a working one. You’ll have to go back to the museum.”

“Are you sure you can’t wait?” the teacher asks.

“I’m sure!” Jackson says, though he glances back with a smile as the teacher leads him away, surrendering the rest of the tour group to Marcus and the tour lead alone. Marcus, who is leading the rest of the group over to the boat resting on the deck, doesn’t process this fact. The kids cluster around him; the boat is at least of some interest, and since it’s fairly stable on its chocks on the deck, Marcus lets a handful of kids jostle for seats inside it.

“One thing about us whalemen is that no other kind of merchant sailor could ever do our job. And not navy sailors either. A sailor on a different kind of ship, once he’s used to it, he begins to think that the ship—” and he gestures around “— is the whole world, and the idea of stepping out of her safety is inconceivable to him. On any other kind of ship, a boat like this is a last resort— you’d never lower it and get in unless your ship was sinking. But for a whaleman, this is how we catch a whale. We’re happy as clams to be rowing around, or fitting up our sail here on the chase. Look at how long our oars are. Go ahead, you can pick them up.”

The boys immediately do pick up the oars, spending a moment trying to figure out the best grip on them. It’s unergonomic, since only half of the oars— the ones opposite from where people walk back and forth across the deck— are in place. They’re locked down too, to limit the range of motion and to stop passers-by from getting whacked.

“I’ve heard from plenty of men that there are some whalemen who love the boats so much more than they love whatever their ship is, they’ll be willing to steal one in the middle of the Pacific ocean, hundreds of miles from even the tiniest island and safety, and start rowing wherever they think they can get. I wish them all good luck with that! You can see how heavy those oars are, can’t you? Now imagine you’re rowing all day and chasing a whale. It sometimes does take all day! If we’ve spotted whales, we usually don’t come back to the ship until we’ve caught one, or it’s too dark to see anything.  Sometimes we can use the sail on the approach, but once we get close, we have to row. Put your back into it! You’re rowing air, not water! Let me see it move!”

Some of the boys are hauling on the oars, having now figured out how to swing them as far as the range of motion allows.

“Mr. Ashton, you shoulda taught gym instead,” one of the boys says.

“I’m afraid I am not that man!” Marcus says. “I’m a harpooner on the good ship Wampanoag .”

“Why do you work here, anyway?” Genesis asks. She’s leaning on the side of the boat now, looking up at the empty masts and the scarecrow, her long fingernails digging into the flaking paint on the side of the boat. The boy sitting at the position next to where she’s leaning pokes the small of her back, and she slaps at him without looking, then moves away towards the bow of the boat, going to fiddle with the ropes and investigate the knot around the loggerhead.

“I need the money,” Marcus says, which is true for both him and Amos, and it makes the kids laugh. “And I’m good at this job.”

“Proooove it,” one of the boys says.

“Prove it?” Marcus asks. The harpoon is not-quite-hidden beneath the boat, kept there to stop kids from grabbing it before Marcus can show it, and he reaches down and picks it up. “I’m the best harpooner on this ship.”

The sight of the weapon is the only thing that gets the kids’ attention, and their eyes snap towards the sharp iron on its long and heavy wooden pole. Marcus holds it out and lets the first boy in the boat hold it. He’s so surprised by its weight that he doesn’t think to resist when Marcus takes the harpoon away again. 

He climbs into the front of the boat, all the while explaining the pieces of the Temple toggle iron tip, who invented it, and how the rope is fastened and how the whale is darted. The details don’t enthrall them, but he keeps talking until the words peter out, and he’s left standing at the front of the boat, holding the harpoon in his hands.

It feels deeply stupid to talk about it— it’s the falseness coming back in full force, the play acting that isn’t even acting. No actor in a play would deliver such a factual monologue— he’s still only a history teacher, dressed in a costume. He can’t even blame the kids for poking at it; the feeling is too close to the surface, not even under the skin, just under the clothes.

“You look good up there Mr. Ashton,” one of the girls says, giggling. “I wish you didn’t quit. Or get fired.”

“I’m not that man!” Marcus says. “I’m a harpooner!”

“Yeah? And whaddya do with that thing?”

Marcus ignores the question, standing in the front of the boat. He can’t look at the kids. A heat is rising to his cheeks, and he tries to stifle the embarrassment by closing his eyes. The boat rocks on its chocks as the boys continue trying to haul the oars free and hit each other with them, but Marcus sinks down into his own world. Through the darkness of his eyelids, he can still see the sun, a bright spot rendering the world as nothing more than black ocean and white sky. He hoists the harpoon. Despite everything, it feels natural in his hands.

“There’s the whale,” he says, and points, imagining it somewhere off the bow. “It’s not too far. Now it’s my job to get it. I have to dart it, throw the harpoon hard enough that the tip goes right through its skin and digs in enough to get a good grip. It’s a hard job.”

“Do it, Mr. Ashton!” one of the boys yells. 

He’s happy to comply. He always mimes a throw during this part of the tour, raising the harpoon and pretending to spear the whale. He hoists the harpoon up like he’s going to throw it. Usually, he lets it slip a foot or so in his hand down the long wooden pole before he catches it again, but as the kids whoop and holler, rocking the tiny whaleboat back and forth on its chocks, he feels— for just a second— like he’s out on the open ocean with it, and he sees the whale rising up in front of him.

Before he’s aware of what he’s doing, he darts the harpoon, surprising strength in his arm, and it slips through his hand. He’s lost in the fantasy, eyes closed, for a fraction of a second too long, and by the time he returns to his senses, the pole of the harpoon is sailing through the air, and the rope that’s supposed to contain it is slipping out of his fingers. He snaps his eyes open, and the kids shriek in horror and delight as the harpoon flies away, off the side of the ship.

The boys en masse clamber out the boat, making it wobble on its chocks. Marcus sits down on the oarsman’s thwart heavily, clutching the side for stability. He’s as unsteady as the boat is, and the kids flashing back and forth before his eyes seem like strangers, their voices unnerving him. He knows who they are, but he can’t remember their names anymore— he’s not even sure he remembers his own. The boys lean over the side of the ship, hollering.

The yelling has attracted Joe, who leaves his own tour with the tour lead and comes over to investigate.

“Man, you got it!” one boy says. “Like a whale!”

“I guess those things are sharp.”

“They’re not sharp, just heavy. That’s physics.”

Joe arrives, and, without saying anything, leans over the side to see what’s happened. When he unbends and turns towards Marcus, his expression is unreadable, and he beckons Marcus over with one silent gesture. Marcus wobbles when he stands, and when he stumbles over towards the side of the ship and looks down, he thinks he’s going to be sick over the side.

The harpoon that left Marcus’s hand flew true almost four fathoms, given extra distance by the height of the deck, and then turned downwards, impaling itself directly upright in the deck of the closest sailboat. It pierced through the panels of the deck, and is now stuck in deep.

The general chaos that his accidental spearfishing caused means that both Joe and Marcus pass off their sections of the tour to the already-overburdened tour leads for the last few hours of the day. Nobody is happy about this, least of all Joe and Marcus. Additionally, nobody seems to know what to do with him, or about him. He’s sent into the museum proper, and he sits in the lobby, beneath the whale skeletons strung up above. He thinks he’s waiting for someone to tell him to fill out an incident report form, or maybe make a police statement for the insurance, but after Joe heads into the staff areas of the museum, no one tells him what to do, and he just sits.

This late in the day, the few guests passing through the lobby are on their way out, and so they don’t look at Marcus in his costume, scrunching his hat in his hands as he stares up at the huge bones overhead. The few kids who come by and try to climb into the open mouth of the floor display (a fiberglass model of a right whale feeding) ignore him. He should, since he’s staff, at least for the moment, tell the kids to knock it off, but he can’t bring himself to. He’s feeling too much like a scolded child himself, even though no one has said a thing to him yet. 

The room smells like whale oil— even after many years of being on display, the skeletons still drip with it, and so there’s plastic shields beneath the hanging displays, catching the thick brown liquid that oozes out of the pores in the bones. There’s a sign on the wall explaining this, saying that the newest skeleton might not stop letting out oil for another twenty years. Funny how long you can keep bleeding after you’re dead, Marcus thinks. 

He didn’t know what the smell in the room was was when he first visited the museum, thinking the dark scent was mold and rising damp from times the streets flooded, but after smelling a bottle of it, collected from the drippings and presented during their tours, he thinks he’d be able to recognize it anywhere. It fills his nose completely. The big glass windows in the lobby let him see out onto the cobblestone streets of the city, but the glare on the windows makes it so his own superimposed reflection is much more visible than the old buildings. Amos, with his hat in his hands, and the smell of whale oil. The city probably looks very different, but the smell, here, at least, would be very familiar to a man from a hundred years ago. 

He wonders how much Amos actually looked like him. There’s no photographs, of course, so he’s free to imagine that their reflections are identical. They both have Indian grandmothers, of a sort, though Marcus’s is from New Delhi via London, and Amos’s was probably Narragansett. It was a funny sticking point when he took the job, complaining to Bryanne about feeling insincere portraying the Black American experience, when both his parents were first-generation immigrants. Probably nobody looking at him notices or cares about the difference— the visual checks out.

He’s disturbed by the way his own reflection is looking at him (a squinting, studying contemplation), so he goes back to looking at the whales above. Funny how they’re displayed up high, when the experience of seeing a living whale is one of seeing it in parts, from the surface of the water and looking down. He could go up to the second floor balcony to see them closer, but even that would only be looking at them eye-to-eye. He’s not an expert on museum design, but this has to be intentional— the physical awe of craning your neck to look up, and the delicacy of the skeletons, no matter how large they are, obscuring the terror of flesh-and-blood at scale. The dead whales, silent and angelic overhead, communicate nothing of the visceral feeling of standing in the prow of a whaleboat, harpoon in hand. 

But Marcus can’t know what that feeling is, he’s imagining what that must feel like, and all he has to aid in his imagining is the skeletons. Even though it feels very real (when he tightens his hands and squishes his hat, he can still feel the wood of the harpoon), there’s no way he could understand it fully. He tries to shove away the odd sense of loss and think about something else. He wonders, if all Amos saw of whales was the leviathan, and then the leviathan as a mass of blood and flesh and oil, could he ever picture these clean skeletons above? Probably not. 

Still, the oil drips from them.

The museum is about to close for the night when Joe finally emerges from the staff offices. He seems surprised to find Marcus there, but he was the one who told Marcus to wait, so there’s no reason for him to be startled. Joe, too, is still in costume, his day-clothes still in the hold of the Wampanoag .

Even though he’s in costume, he has put his acting persona far behind him, and he’s now slumping with tiredness as he holds the heavy front door open so that Marcus can follow him onto the street. It’s a bit of a walk from the museum to the pier, and the hot early-summer air paradoxically makes them both shiver as they leave the air conditioned museum.

“I’m not firing you,” Joe says. “I’ll say that right out.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“The museum and the trust have good accident insurance, and nobody got hurt. It’ll all be fine.”

Marcus nods.

“But I don’t think I have to tell you that you could have really hurt someone,” Joe says. It’s the patronizing tone that makes Marcus grind his teeth, even though it was his mistake.

“I know,” he replies. “I am really sorry.”

“And I’m not going to ask you what you were thinking. Accidents happen. Mistakes happen.” He pauses. “I’m a big believer in second chances.”

“It won’t happen again, sir.”

“Let’s put together a plan to make sure of that, okay? What are the steps we need to take? Let’s brainstorm, right?”

Marcus is silent for a little too long.

“I fought for you, you know, in there,” Joe says. “I think you’re a good employee, and a good guy, and I wanted to keep you around. Don’t prove me wrong, Marcus.”

He tries to imagine himself in Joe’s position, and can’t. It was one of the things he was worst at as a teacher— sitting kids down and trying to cajole them through the guilt of not having done their homework, or acting up, or whatever the stupid infraction du jour had been. Joe, retired from decades of teaching drama, seems to be an expert at this. Marcus had hated the sliminess of it, looking down, and he hates being on the receiving end of it now. Shame is very effective at making something inside of him squirm, but the shape it wants to squirm into is hatred. They’re both adults— it’s demeaning to be treated like a child. He stuffs the feeling down. He should be grateful he’s not being fired. Like Amos, he needs the job, and he needs the money.

“I won’t stand in the boat to demonstrate the harpoon,” Marcus says mechanically. “It was rocking on the chocks when the kids were rowing, and I lost my balance.”

“It could have happened to anyone,” Joe says, false enthusiasm in his tone for Marcus offering a solution. “That’s good. That’s a step in the right direction. And?”

“And I’ll set my alarm earlier so that I’m not late.”

“Right! Good!”

As they come into sight of the ship, Marcus lifts his head and looks at the scarecrow at the top of the mast, and at the skeletal clouds that drift by.

Chapter Text

Remarks Thursday 28th of November 1867, 172nd Day

Since I am a boatsteerer I head a watch and when there are none of the mates on deck I make sure to give Tobey what little comforts I can. A drink of water or a piece of my dinner or my jacket to stop him from being so cold. But he won’t even speak to me or look at me though he does eat and drink what I give him. I do not know if he is more ashamed of me or himself. Tobey is a proud man so he is probably ashamed of me and o my dear so am I though I do not know what else to do or what I could have done. We have had so much rain it has rained without relenting for days.

Remarks Friday 29th of November 1867, 173rd Day

O my dear I haven’t even been able to write to you to tell you what Tobey did to be put in irons and kept on the deck. Every time I think about it I feel so awful I can barely hold my pen and think of words to write because I see him out there in my mind and can’t stomach it.

But I should tell you maybe telling you will make my head clearer. This is what happened last Sunday.

We were gamming with the Henrietta . The first mate and Tobey and I and as many other men as would fit in the B boat without knocking each other oversides all went to go see the other ship. She was a fine ship very well kept and she had just come out of port a few weeks ago before she got becalmed with us here. All of us were having such a pleasant time on the deck playing some little games cards and wrestling I no longer remember it doesn’t matter. The weather was fine early part of the day but I asked their first mate if I could look at their barometer. I just wanted to compare it to ours to see if they were measuring the same and I had looked at ours before we left. I like checking the barometer it gives me a great comfort I don’t know why and I like to know if ours is accurate.

The first mate of the Henrietta was in a fine mood he was a cheerful man and was happy to show me the barometer. I think he was just grateful that I wanted to look at something other than their master’s wife who remained on board though she didn’t come much out of the master’s rooms other than to say good morning. When we looked at the barometer I asked the first mate Sir was it this low this morning? I was wondering if their barometer measured differently from ours or if we had truly lost almost an inch of mercury in just a few hours. He checked their log and said that no one had recorded the pressure during the morning’s watch and went to scold whoever had been on that duty. 

I was nervous but our first mate would not want to hear about my forecasts for bad weather as there was still no clouds and no wind so I went back on deck and quietly watched the horizon for some time even though Tobey wanted me to tell everyone the story of harpooning our own ship which at that time I could still laugh about though I was already feeling like there was trouble coming even if I thought it was just the weather. I couldn’t see anything on the horizon and I wished I was aloft. Our ship wasn’t even in view from deck level that was how far we were away and just how becalmed we were otherwise we would have moved closer to have an easier time gamming. And it was a long row between one vessel and the other so if there was a sign of a storm we should have left right away. But I didn’t want to speak to the first mate and o my dear I wish I had I wish I had.

At 4 P.M. I saw that clouds were forming on the horizon and other people saw them also. The first mate said they were far off and we would leave soon at 6 ½ P.M. as we had intended. But o my dear by the time we saw the clouds we were far too late. By 5 the storm was all upon us and the Henrietta ’s first mate called all hands to help furl the sails (their master was on board the Wampanoag so the first mate had to make the call.) All of us from our ship helped too of course. And there was no way we could make it back to our own ship the rain was coming down so hard that no one could see his own hand in front of his face and the wind was driving the ship sideways. It was the most terrible storm I have ever seen and I have seen many. I was so afraid for us and for all back on our ship I was sure we would both be lost at sea.

When we had gotten the ship as tight as we could the Henrietta ’s first mate sent us below. There was no room for us in the forecastle or the steerage so they let us lay down in with the animals in the blubber room as it was too terrible of weather to leave them on deck. The Henrietta was full up on provisions having just come out of port and every space was filled up in the fore tween decks. Between us and the hens and the goats it was very tight but we could hardly ask for more care from the Henrietta ’s crew it was a very bad state the whole ship was in with the weather I am thankful we were given a place at all.

Although it was difficult to sleep with the ship rolling all underneath us and the rain dripping down through the deck and without even the comfort of a bunk I did my best to sleep. I pulled my jacket tight around me and put my arms under my head and just tried so hard to keep my eyes closed. I must have gotten to sleep because I remember waking up.

We had one little lamp hung in the room otherwise it would have been too black to see anything at all and even then I could see only a little. I don’t know what woke me and I wish I hadn’t woken. I think it was that Tobey had startled the hens. I sat up and saw him or I saw just his shadow but I knew it was him. He was reaching into the hen’s boxes and taking the eggs to eat. I watched him bite them open with his teeth on both ends and then suck them right down. 

O my dear I did not know what to do. I understood why he would do it the food is so terrible on board that a man would do anything to get a good meal and I cannot really blame him. It would have been nothing if he had done it on our own ship he would have gotten a beating and had to pay for it out of his lay but we were not on our ship we were on the Henrietta and not even with the master we were with the first mate.

I tried to get him to stop I said Tobey What are you doing and I said it as quiet as I could but he didn’t listen to me or he didn’t hear me and he didn’t stop just took another egg and ate it he had the yolk all dripping down his chin. But he scared one of the hens enough to make her cluck and jump up and that was the end of it the first mate woke up from where he was sleeping and he saw Tobey with the eggs in his hand and in his mouth. I don’t know if the first mate had even recognized who it was before he leapt on Tobey like a wild animal. O my dear it was so terrible I don’t know what to say to you. Tobey’s head nearly got stove in against a crate and he was crying out like I never heard before and the whole ship could hear and be alarmed.

I leaped in between them to try to get the mate to lay off but all I got was a fist in my eye for my trouble. I yelled for him to stop I told him I would pay for it from my lay but the first mate he didn’t care not at all. 

It was only the watch on deck hearing the noise and coming down to investigate that caused him to stop. O my dear if you had seen the first mate’s eyes in that light down there in the blubber room you would have been afraid for your life. His whole face was red like the devil’s and he was like a rabid dog with spit coming out of the sides of his mouth. 

The watch woke up the Henrietta ’s first mate and the situation got explained. Tobey’s face was so all swollen up I think he bit his tongue and his lips were bloody so he couldn’t say anything but what could he have said anyway. I kept saying O please let me pay for it out of my lay and the Henrietta ’s mate asked Why had I stole eggs or anything else and I said No but please he’s my brother let me take responsibility for him. I don’t think I succeeded in anything other than making our first mate hate me more. He will take the money out of my lay but that didn’t stop Tobey from getting whipped with the first piece of rope he got his hand on in front of everyone there on deck. 

O my dear I would rather have taken that too I could barely watch. And he looked at me all through it like I should have done something and perhaps I should have but o I don’t know what I could have done. And maybe he was ashamed to see me beg but how could I just say nothing. O my dear I wish none of this had happened.

For the first mate it was a matter of honor for our ship and of course he hates to have his honor ruined by someone like Tobey and so he had to dole it out right then and there as hard as he could. Stealing was just about the worst thing he could have done except laid a hand on the master’s wife and thank God Tobey isn’t that kind of man he’s just hungry and O Lord aren’t we all?

We came back to the Wampanoag after the rain let up enough to not overturn our boat and then Tobey was tied up on deck. O I know this has happened to other men before and they lived through it but o my dear having to see him and see the state he’s in what am I supposed to do. He is my brother.

I will beg the master tomorrow morning it has been long enough hasn’t it.

Remarks Saturday 30th of November 1867, 174th Day

I did beg the master I said O Sir it has been days and you will kill him if you leave him out in the rain for one more day. I think the master wouldn’t want to kill a man like that even if the first mate’s goal was to make Tobey so sick that that he would have to be left in our next port or die. 

They let him go and I tucked him back up in the fo'c'sle and told the man who shared his bunk that he could have mine in the steerage if Tobey couldn’t move or get up. Everyone understands that Tobey is never going to be right with the first mate again and nobody wants to give him any help since that will make the first mate hate them too. Only I would bother and I’m glad Tobey at least has me otherwise he’d be dead for sure I just know it.

He’s so sick he can barely move all he does is shiver and he won’t say a word. O my dear if he does not get better I do not know what I will do. I don’t think I can stay on this ship if he is killed. You will have to forgive me for losing my lay.

Remarks Sunday 1st of December 1867, 175th Day

Tobey still sick though the rains have stopped. I don’t want to anger the first mate by going to look at the barometer. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Winds from the N and we’re heading south towards the Cape.

Remarks Monday 2nd of December 1867, 176th Day

Winds from the NNW. Bright sun. Tobey still sick. I give him whatever I can.

Remarks Tuesday 3rd of December 1867, 177th Day

Winds from the WNW. Cloudy.

Remarks Wednesday 4th of December 1867, 178th Day

Winds from the NW. Bright sun early in the day, cloudy by the afternoon. Tobey well enough to sit up and draw. I do not think he will die but he does not want to speak to me or anyone. I gave him some scrimshaw to work on and at least that is something to keep his mind off things. I hope soon he can get up and rejoin the watch as his lay is in peril the more time he spends sick.

Remarks Thursday 5th of December 1867, 179th Day

Light wind from the NNW. Rain all day.

Remarks Friday 6th of December 1867, 180th Day

Hard wind from the W. Heavy rain. Tobey finished his scrimshaw picture. He asked me to do the lettering on it as he can’t read or write. It is the first thing he has said to me in days I hope he has forgiven me or himself whichever it is that caused him to not speak to me I won’t ask. He is well enough to rejoin the watch.

O my dear I’m sure you are wondering if the reason I haven’t told you what picture Tobey drew on the whale’s tooth is that it is a dirty picture. No it is not. I don’t know what to say about it.

He drew a picture of himself tied to the mast with all the stripes on him. He has a good hand for drawings but o it is a horrible picture it makes me shiver and I don’t know why he would want such a thing. But it’s already etched into the tooth there’s no way to change it into something it’s not. I asked him what he wanted written on it and he said God Almighty Free At Last.

I didn’t write that. I wrote God Protect My Brother Tobey Cudjoe.

Chapter Text

Sunday May 27, 2057

Dinner on Sunday night on board the Thylacine is grim. Not for any reason that Bryanne can point to, but the weary accumulation of yet another disappointing cruise crawling towards its conclusion is wearing everyone on the crew down. Mike generally encourages the crew to, when not technically on duty, take their dinners in the passenger dining room. Admittedly, it is a much nicer place to eat than in the crew quarters, and if she takes her dinner there, she can eat as much as she wants, go back into the kitchen with her staff access and poach fruits and extra dessert tarts. But today, she sneaks into the kitchen (only sneaking past the passengers— she gives a gruff nod to the kitchen staff) and loads up a tray with a plastic tub of penne a la vodka and sliced garlic bread, and as much of the good coffee as she thinks she can safely carry down the stairs. 

Below, she sets herself up in the staff lounge— empty, now, save for her. The room is very small. Probably the whole ship’s crew couldn’t all sit down inside it at once. The light is yellow, but nevertheless somehow cold— it’s the plastic walls and beat up furniture that does it. The ancient TV on the wall has a burned-in spot from displaying the company logo, back when it was used in the office lobby, but now it flickers silently, always showing some cop show they have ten seasons of programmed into it. The ghost of the logo is only visible in dark scenes, when the characters slip through old factory buildings with their guns drawn, or dash through the rainy night. Then the eye of SightLines’ logo peers through, the whale tail that makes up the pupil vanishing into the ocean of the iris.

The wooden table is the nicest feature of the room— reclaimed planks from some old sailboat that have been sanded down and fashioned into a long bar, with a matching bench. Both bench and bar are secured to the floor, and the table has slats nailed across it in a square pattern at each seat, to stop her plate from sliding too far away in rough seas. It might stop a plate from moving, but it won’t stop her cup, and though the weather is almost never too rough on these tours, Bryanne nevertheless has a habit of keeping her drink in her hand until the cup is too empty to pose a problem. In this way, she finishes her coffee long before she finishes her meal, and she’s thirsty before she’s done eating, but doesn’t want to get up to get water from the fridge. She replaces her coffee mug with her vape, and in between mouthfuls of pasta idly chews on the end of it.

She looks up when she hears the door open. She’s surprised to see Atlas come down, and even more surprised that she looks distracted. She sits next to her without saying anything, though when he reaches for the slice of garlic bread on her tray, she says, “Don’t you usually eat upstairs?”

“Can I not get some privacy, for once?”

Bryanne rolls her eyes. “If that’s what you wanted, you shouldn’t have sat down next to me.” But she lets her have the garlic bread, picking her tray up and putting it in the square in front of her. 

Atlas takes the bread in her hand, and then reconsiders eating it, waving the slice absentmindedly underneath her nose, like that old story of the poor man charged with theft for smelling the richness of the bakery. She’s leaning on her elbows on the table, not quite civilized. She wonders how much of that is a rejection of whatever manners her parents surely tried to grind into her, and how much of it is a deliberately constructed devil-may-care aura, and how much is her carelessly getting pasta sauce on her sleeve because she hasn’t noticed herself doing it.

They sit in silence for a long time. Bryanne is glad that Atlas doesn’t ask her why she’s hiding downstairs, because she might end up legitimately venting her frustrations to the first person who asks, and she’d rather save that for Marcus at home. She’s beginning to feel like her job is as fake as his is— whalewatching without any whales. Though, of course, she’s sure that by the time she gets home, she will have stuffed the frustration down deep enough that it won’t be worth venting about to him. She’s frowning down at her empty coffee cup, and when it looks like Atlas is about to say something to her, she speaks up.

“Is there a reason you’re hiding down here?” she asks. “It is part of your actual job description to eat dinner with the guests. Entertain them.”

“No reason,” she says. “Just tired of them.” She tilts her head. “Usually, after I’ve spent this long in one place, I’d fuck off on my boat somewhere. Spend the next month sailing back to Europe, or heading down to Bermuda, or something like that.”

“You live a charmed life,” Bryanne says dryly. She’s aware Atlas is wildly underselling the difficulty and danger of solo sailing, from the careless way she talks about it, but she has no interest in inflating her ego by mentioning it. “If only we all had that luxury.”

“It’s a very cheap lifestyle, actually,” she says. “It costs me way more to be here in port, paying for a place to park my boat, than it does for me to be out sailing. I certainly don’t pay for SATCOM bandwidth.” She grins as if he’s made a funny joke, but there’s nothing funny about it. 

“And food,” she says.

“Gotta eat on shore, too. Cheers.” She takes a bite of the garlic bread, finally. “No, I just hate sticking around for so long.”

“You’re begging me to play psychiatrist. Ask you what you’re running away from.”

She laughs. “Nothing. Running towards freedom, rather than away from captivity, maybe.”

“Perfectly poetic. Very meaningless.”

“It’s true.”

“Sure.”

“There’s a difference,” she stresses. “I’m doing it without any resentment in my heart.”

Bryanne gives Atlas a sidelong glance and says nothing.

“But if you’re picking at me— it’s only fair— I never did ask you how you ended up a sailor,” she says. “I’m curious.”

“If I was running away, I wouldn’t take a ship job that means I’m home to see my mother for lunch every Tuesday.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth, Bryanne!” Her tone is condescending, and she thinks about getting up and leaving, going back on deck, but she’s smiling at her and looking at her intently. Whatever was frustrating or distracting Atlas has fallen away, now that she has her to pick at and annoy. “You’re the only woman out of the mates— you’re outnumbered across the industry— there has to be some reason why you’d pick this as your career.”

“My brother, Nickey, did a few years in the Marines, but when I was seventeen, I had a vision of Jesus telling me not to join the Navy,” she says. She tips sarcasm into her tone, but she’s telling the truth. “So here I am.”

“Dios mio.”

“Shut the fuck up.” 

“Alright.”

“My family’s fucking Portuguese, anyway.”

She laughs at her. “So, Deus…”

She sticks her vape back in her mouth and ignores Atlas again, though it doesn’t take long for her to speak up.

“I didn’t even know you were religious,” Atlas says.

“I’m not.”

“But you’re listening to visions of Jesus.”

“I have what is known in the popular imagination as a conscience,” she says. “It just happened to reveal itself to me in that way.”

“Very nice. Usually, people think about things the other way around. It’s Jesus who’s granting a conscience. You’ve got the causality in the right direction.”

“I don’t need you to tell me that.”

“You’re so mean to me, Bryanne,” she jokes, trying to cheer her up. But she can’t be cheered, and her positivity is grating on her.

“I haven’t even tried to be mean to you yet,” she says. “I suggest you stop trying to make me.”

“Oh, I’d like to see you get really nasty.”

What she should say is that she has a boyfriend— a fact that Atlas is well aware of— and that she should stop flirting with her. But she scowls down into her empty coffee cup. “I have to be nice to you so that you don’t quit,” she says. “You might not need the money—”

“Who says I don’t?” she asks. “I’ve gotta pay for docking my boat somewhere. Keep myself fed and clothed.”

“Whatever trust fund you’ve been leeching off of, I’m sure that’s got you covered.”

“And if it does? Or if it doesn’t? Does that change anything?”

She scowls. “I have this philosophy,” she says, and she collects the trash from her dinner and pulls her tray back in front of herself. “I’m not really religious, but we all got kicked on our asses out of the Garden of Eden, right?”

“Sure.”

 “And God said man is only gonna eat by the sweat of his brow.”

“I’m not religious either.”

“Well, anyone who’s not earning his living— someone like that can’t even really be thought of as human. In my opinion.”

“Oh, that is harsh.” She puts her hand to her heart. “Wounding me, Bryanne.”

“I call it like I see it.”

“Anyway, I am working for my living,” she says. “I’m certainly not here as a volunteer .”

“But at the end of the season, you’ll sail away to Europe and live carefree on the Mediterranean, won’t you?”

“Wouldn’t you, if you had the chance?”

“Well, I don’t,” she says, and stands. “I’m not still living in unfallen paradise.”

The tour finishes without any sign of whales, and they creep back towards New Bedford on Monday night with an annoyed set of passengers and an exhausted crew. That morning, after Mike made the announcement that they were leaving the bay and turning back towards home, one of the passengers even went as far as to corner Bryanne in the hallway and ask about refunds, and it was only the swift intervention of Atlas that saved her from saying something to a customer that Mike would yell at her for.

Now, she’s in the deckhouse, one hand always on the helm. She mostly stares out at the water, occasionally looks down at the map and the positions of nearby vessels reported by the AIS. They’re nowhere near any other ships, and this course is free and clear of obstacles, and the weather is pleasant, so it’s easy sailing. The sail, which she could hear if she opened the window, is clacka-clacka-clacking away copacetically, and the batteries are all reading fine. 

From her vantage point, she can see down onto the forward deck. There are a few of the passengers milling about, taking the last scraps of enjoyment out of the sunlight and the ocean breeze that they can; they’ll be back to port in a few hours, and then everyone will be back to their mundane lives. Even Atlas is out there. Her blond hair catches the sunlight, and with her blue staff windbreaker, she’s very easy to spot. She keeps pacing back and forth along the starboard side of the ship, looking at the covered lifeboats, though Bryanne can’t tell why she’s doing that. She must, through whatever sixth sense that people have, feel Bryanne watching her, because she turns up towards the deckhouse and smiles at her, though she couldn’t possibly see her through the windows. She starts heading towards her, and she hears her come up the stairs and let herself in. Bryane doesn’t take her eyes off the water in front of the ship.

“How much longer ‘til we’re back home?” Atlas asks genially.

“We follow the same schedule every week,” she says. But Atlas wanders over to the console and takes a look at the maps, tracing her finger along their route, curving around the outside of Cape Cod, down into Buzzards Bay and then New Bedford. They already rounded the tip of the cape, past Provincetown, so it’s now a straight shot home.

“I’m in a bit of a hurry, unfortunately,” she says. “So I’d actually appreciate it if you could speed us up.”

“You’ve got somewhere to be?”

“When we passed P-town, I got enough cell service to hear all the voicemails that have been collecting on my phone,” she says. “The harbormaster left me a message. Someone hit my boat.”

Bryanne winces, genuinely and unexpectedly sympathetic. “Badly?”

“I don’t know— I don’t have any pictures. It doesn’t sound like they sank it at the very least.”

“That’s good,” she says. “You…” She hesitates, then says, “Do you have someplace else to go, if it’s in bad shape?”

“Oh, I can get a hotel. Don’t worry about me.” She grins. “It sounded like you were almost about to offer me some kind of help.”

“Mike would let you sleep on board the Thylacine .”

“No, thanks,” she says. “I spend far more than enough time here already.”

“That’s fair.”

“You doing anything when you get out of here?”

“Going home.”

“Come check out the damage with me,” she says. “I could use someone to scoff at me and tell me it’s not that bad.”

It’s a bad idea, and so she says nothing.

“Don’t want to do me a solid?”

“I don’t know what help you think I could possibly give.”

“You’re a more experienced sailor than I am.”

“I doubt it. Not on dinky little sailboats. Just commercial ships.”

She laughs. “A better handyman, then. I’ve never been good at repairs. Mike says you’re good at that kind of thing.”

“You just hire someone else to take care of it for you, I assume?”

“No, I hold everything together with duct tape. I’ve heard you can make a whole boat out of it— if you’re careful. By the time I’m too old to sail, it’ll be a real Ship of Theseus situation— duct tape replacing every board and rope.” Atlas leans back against the console, blocking her view of the map, and grinning at her. “Besides, don’t you want to see how the other half lives?” she asks.

“Why are you trying to invite me over so badly? I thought you wanted to get away from everyone else.”

Atlas looks at her, and maybe for the first time, it sounds like she’s being honest. “It’s funny. The first few days of a voyage by myself are always the loneliest. I’m always looking behind my shoulder, wondering if someone else will be there. When I get out of here— I mean, it’s only a few days off— but suddenly being on my own again. It’s strange.”

“Let me see the map. You’re sitting on it.”

Atlas obligingly moves, and Bryanne doesn't give her an answer either way, so Atlas slips out of the deckhouse and goes back down to the deck. She watches her get the attention of some of the passengers pointing at seagulls, and she starts talking animatedly about them, spreading out her arms like she’s some kind of swooping bird. The wind lifts up the back of her jacket like a sail, her hair like a pennant.

She’s expecting Marcus to meet her at the dock. Even when she tells him not to wait around for her, he usually does. But today, after they’ve finally shooed away all their passengers, and Bryanne has finished tucking up the Thylacine for her few days’ rest, the pools of streetlight beyond the parking lot are empty, and Marcus isn’t there to give her a bike ride home. So, it’s the bus. She stomps down the gangway, heading resolutely for the bus stop, but Atlas jogs after her.

“Bryanne,” she calls.

“What?”

“Come see my boat with me,” she asks again. “I could use the moral support.”

She stops, turns towards her, then glances behind herself again at the empty street. She hesitates long enough for Atlas to come over in front of her, grinning.

“I’ll look at it,” she says. “Nothing else.”

“That’s all I wanted,” she says, and she tosses her arm companionably over Bryanne’s shoulder. With both of their day bags on opposite sides, they look like some odd four-legged animal in silhouette, and it’s difficult to walk. She ducks out from underneath Atlas’s arm and skips a few steps ahead of her, though she doesn’t know where she’s headed, aside from the exit to the parking lot. “Where is it?” she asks.

“We passed it when we came in to port,” she says, but points down the road. “I couldn’t see anything wrong from so far away.”

“Don’t you have binoculars?”

“I do, but a guest was borrowing them to look at seagulls. Besides, I don’t think they would have helped.”

“Then the damage can’t be that bad.”

“Well, you never know. The worst place for trouble is where you can’t see it. ‘Specially when it’s under the waterline.”

It’s not a short walk to Atlas’s boat, and Bryanne is quiet the whole time, to the point where Atlas asks, “Is there something on your mind?”

“No,” she says. “Nothing at all.”

“You’re a good mate, but a bad liar.” But she doesn’t press, for which she’s grateful.

“What’s the furthest place you’ve sailed?” Bryanne asks suddenly.

“The world’s round,” she says. “That’s hard to measure.”

“Further than Europe?”

“Of course. I’ve been…” She consults her memory. “Hawai’i, Singapore, New Zealand…” She assumes there’s plenty more, but Atlas stops listing. “Why do you ask?”

She shakes her head.

“You like to travel?”

She sticks her vape in her mouth before she answers. “Never have.”

“A sailor who never goes anywhere…”

“I don’t know when you’d think I’d have the chance to travel,” she says. “A transatlantic flight costs— what— more than three months’ pay? And if I took a boat— that’d cost the same in lost time, since it’d take me two weeks to get across each way.”

“What do you do in this job in the offseason? You’re not running tours in the middle of winter. You have the time off?”

“Don’t invite me anywhere,” she says, preempting any invitation. “I won’t go.”

“I’m not— I’m just asking.”

“I do odd jobs. Repairs and shit. Mike’s brother owns a machine shop serving fishing boats. I help out there in the winter.” She shrugs. “Doesn’t pay that much, but it’s better than being a waitress or whatever the fuck.” They’re passing a chain link fence. She sticks her hand into it, running her fingers across its length as they walk, making it rattle. “I guess if I didn’t want to do that, I probably have enough saved to get on a train and go see my brother, do nothing out there for a while. He’s out on the west coast.”

“What does he do?”

“Industrial area remediation— he’s a foreman. They hire mostly local workers at each site, and so only the management is a permanent crew. He moves sites every nine months or so. They’ve got, like, company housing trailers that he lives in.”

“Does he like it?”

“I don’t know. He seems happy. Busy all the time. He gets paid better than me. And he says it’s pretty out there.”

“I’m an only child,” Atlas says, unprompted.

“Yeah, I could tell.” She pauses. “It’s a good job. Making the world a better place. I’m a bit jealous of him for it.”

“You could do something like it, if you wanted.”

“Sure, I guess. I don’t know.” She squints into the darkness, where the Wampanoag is looming into view. “I mostly just try to not make the world worse.” She looks up at the whaler. “Sailors have a pretty bad track record for that. But I guess so does everyone else.”

“I know I asked before— and you told me about Jesus— but really, Bee, how’d you get into this as a career? On a practical level. What levers did you pull that made you end up here?”

“I guess you wouldn’t keep your eye on what the trades are like.” Bryanne scuffs her feet against the ground as they walk. There’s nothing better to talk about it, so she explains it to Atlas like she’s five. “Trade school program,” she says. “People woke up one day and had realizations that having global trade run by crews the U.S. government can’t control, on ships Americans don’t own, wasn’t something they wanted. Well— they knew that for a while, but it took a long time for anybody to do anything about it. And there was a recruiter for it who came to my high school, got me into school with the intent to join the merchant marine.”

“Was this before or after Seattle?” 

“How old do you think I am?” Bryanne asks, annoyed. 

“I’m not asking about when you went to school,” Atlas clarifies. “I’m just asking if people needed a disaster to figure all this out.”

“I don’t know when the program started.”

“After, I bet.”

Bryanne shrugs. “Probably. But they kept it up long enough for me to take advantage, so I got a full ride at Mass Maritime. I’m sure the people footing the bill wanted me to work a cargo ship, but I do tourist shit instead.”

“It’s a good career. Guess you’re lucky.”

“Is it?” And she wants to ask Am I? but Atlas points down the dock.

“There’s my boat.”

Bryanne is surprised that they’ve arrived— they’re very close to the Wampanoag . But Atlas is pointing right next to it, to a much smaller boat, dwarfed by the tall ship: painted green, fiberglass hull, sails neatly furled.

“What’s her name?”

“The Whole Wide World ,” she says, pointing at the side, where the letters are hand painted in a neat cursive.

“Funny name for a boat.”

“It’s a joke,” she says. “You know— Atlas.” She lifts up her hands, like she’s holding up the sky above her head. “The world gets to hold me up for once.”

“Yeah, I get it.” She walks down the wooden dock towards where the boat is moored. They are very close to the Wampanoag , which rises up above them, holds them in her shadow, and creaks in the wind and the gentle waves lapping against her sides. “She looks fine to me?”

But Bryanne is around the back half of the boat, inspecting the sails and the hull, while Atlas hops onto the wooden-planked deck and walks forward. She swears. “What the fuck?”

“You found what’s wrong? How did someone hit you over there?”

“Come and look at this.”

She’s curious now, and follows her onto the boat, making a mental note of how well kept it is, and when she reaches the bow, she sees what has caused her to swear. Embedded in the deck, sticking up like a flagpole, is a whaling harpoon. Atlas tries to tug it out, but has no success— it’s jammed in so deeply that it’s gone all the way through the first layer of floorboards. The harpoon’s head, in the way that arrows do, has embedded itself deeply into the underside of the wood, holding it tight. To get it out, she’ll probably have to chop away the whole board that it’s stuck in.

“What the fuck,” she says again, giving up on pulling it out. She looks up at the Wampanoag , which, while close— it’s right next to them— is also not that close. “I assume it came from there?”

Bryanne already has her phone out, and, without even thinking much about it, is dialing Marcus’s number. She’s not exactly calling to gossip— she’s entered into her professional, problem solving mindset, where she wants to find out how to deal with issues quickly. And Marcus will surely know who to get in contact with to sort out the issue.

“Calling your boyfriend?” Atlas asks. “I guess he would know what happened here, if he works there.”

Bryanne nods silently as the phone rings, once, twice, three times. Marcus picks up before it rings four times, and his voice is muffled and groggy with sleep. “Bryanne?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Oh my God— what time is it? I fell asleep. I was going to meet you—”

“It’s fine,” she says. “I’ve told you, you don’t need to wait for me.”

“What time is it?” he asks again, and then probably checks it on his phone— she can hear him take it away from his ear, then make an annoyed sound. “Sorry— God— I’ll be home soon.”

“You’re not at home?” she asks. 

“Oh— you’re not home either? I’ll meet you at the docks.” He cheers up immediately. “Give me just a second, I’ll run!” 

“You really don’t need to—”

She wonders where on Earth he could be waking up, if he’s not in his own bed. If he’s at the library, the librarians probably wouldn’t appreciate him passing out on a reading chair. But she hears creaking and footsteps on wood, and her question is answered when she hears his voice, not through the phone speaker, but drifting through the air, as he clambers out of the Wampanoag ’s belly, and emerges onto the deck. “I’m just down at work,” he says. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

She hangs up the phone. Atlas is watching her with an amused expression on her face.

“Oh no—” Marcus says, somewhere above them, as he hears the call drop.

“Marcus!” she calls. “Over here!”

There is a moment of dead silence, presumably as Marcus looks around the deck in confusion. 

“Next boat over!” Bryanne calls. “The one with a harpoon in it!”

The silence continues, but then there’s trepidatious footsteps, and Marcus appears at the rails of the Wampanoag , leans over, and looks down at the two of them standing on the deck of Atlas’s boat. 

Even in the dim light of the docks, it’s clear that Marcus is in poor shape. Beyond the miserable expression with which he looks down upon the two of them, he looks unkempt, and like he’s barely slept in days. And he’s still wearing his work clothes, the coarse fabric hanging off him loosely. 

“You look awful. Are you sick or something?” Bryanne asks. The question starts out gruff, but by the end of it, she’s either foud gentleness or lost her gruffness, because her voice lifts up at the end with genuine concern, and she takes a few steps over to the bulwarks of Atlas’s boat, so that she can look up at him better. She holds out her hand, but there’s no way for her to reach him, so it’s more like an aborted wave.

“I’m so sorry,” Marcus says, looking past her to Atlas. “Is this your boat?”

“She is,” Atlas says. She smirks, realizing what Marcus is apologizing for. “ You’re the one who speared me?”

“I’ll pay for it,” Marcus says miserably.

Bryanne is very tired of this conversation already. “I’m sure the museum’s insurance will handle it. Or yours, for that matter.”

But Atlas ignores her, and so does Marcus. 

“Tell you what,” Atlas says. “Don’t worry about it.” She rests her elbow on the harpoon. “If you let me keep this— I won’t even file an insurance claim. Though I guess you’re lucky you didn’t hit a person.”

Bryanne makes a face. “You should make sure there’s no damage below before you say things like that,” she says. But, of course, Atlas has plenty of money.

“It’s not real,” Marcus says. “It’s a replica. It’s not worth anything.”

“It’s cool, though.” Atlas tugs on the harpoon again, but it’s so firmly wedged in that there’s no hope of getting it out. “And it certainly acts real enough.”

“Why don’t you come down here so we can have a real conversation, instead of having to yell?” Bryanne asks.

“Uh, yeah, sure,” Marcus says. He vanishes from sight, and they can hear him hopping over the gate that stops after-hours intrusions into the Wampanoag , though they never move the gangway to actually prevent it. Bryanne bets that it will only take one homeless person spending the night on board for that policy to be changed, and she’s amazed that it hasn’t happened yet.

Although she knew from seeing him up above that he is still wearing his work costume, it’s jarring for him to walk down the dock and come up towards Atlas’s little sailboat. She isn’t sure if she’s the one who’s stepped out of time, or if he is. He has his hands in his baggy pockets, and a cloth hat draped across his head, hiding in shadow some of the hollowness beneath his eyes.

“Why the hell are you still wearing that?” she asks. “You look ridiculous.”

He winces. “It’s my new strategy for not being late to work,” he says. “I just wear these.”

“You look ridiculous,” she says again— it’s the only thing she can say.

“So, you’re Marcus?” Atlas asks. “Marcus Ashton? Bryanne has told me a lot about you.”

Marcus’s face, always easy to read, jumps through several confused and uncomfortable expressions. “In costume, I’m supposed to be Amos Cudjoe. But yes, that’s me.” He shakes Atlas’s hand, though since he’s still standing on the dock, and Atlas is on the boat, it’s a lean over the water for both of them. “I’m afraid I have no idea who you are.”

“Oh, Bryanne, you’ve been hiding me from your lover,” Atlas says with a laugh, which makes Marcus even more uncomfortable.

“I just don’t like to talk about work that much. I’ve mentioned you. Marcus— Atlas Vanderhooke. Our naturalist.”

“Good to meet you,” Marcus says. “Sorry that we’re meeting because I attacked your boat.”

“Not a problem,” Atlas says with a laugh. “It doesn’t look like it’s unrepairable.”

“I’ve been looking down at it every day and hoping that was the case.”

“So… As Amos— you’re the harpooner, if you’re the one who speared me?”

“Yes, my friend, I am,” Marcus says. Bryanne has never watched his tours in costume, though she used to help him practice his monologues, back during his training. His demeanor is very different now than it was months ago— the moment Atlas calls him Amos, a change sweeps over him, and his posture shifts. “May I come aboard?”

“Of course.” Atlas steps aside so that Marcus can hop onboard. That’s funny, too— back three years ago when he and Bryanne were first dating, they cashed out the birthday money his parents had given him, and rented a sailboat not unlike this one, so that she could show him the ropes in the most literal sense. He had been wildly uncomfortable the entire time they were on board, constantly gripping anything he could hold on to, and nearly tripping over every line and getting his feet twisted together on the deck. Now, he looks around like he knows the boat already, and he casually hops on board and stands with his back straight. Maybe it’s just because they’re not moving, that they’re tied up and quiet at the dock.

“Here,” Atlas says, and leads Marcus over to where the harpoon is stuck in the wood. Marcus gives it an experimental tug. It stays put, and he makes a face that Bryanne can’t interpret.

“I think you’ll have to cut it out,” Marcus says. “It’s really stuck in there.”

“Well, it’ll be fine for now,” Atlas says. “I’m not planning on sailing anywhere until the end of the tour season, so I have plenty of time to get it fixed.” She leans down and pushes her palm flat against the deck, the side of his hand next to the harpoon. “If I just have to take an angle grinder to it, that’s fine, too. But I kinda would like to keep it. A trophy, you know?”

“Well, we should go home,” Bryanne says. “I’m glad it doesn’t look too bad.”

“Oh, you are in such a hurry to leave,” Atlas says. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay for a drink? Or go out and grab a pizza?”

“Not while he’s wearing that,” Bryanne says, gesturing to Marcus.

“He looks fine,” Atlas says. 

“Besides, I already ate. And so did you, for that matter.” 

“Hey, I’m allowed to have a little celebratory pizza. But just a drink, then?” It’s unclear what there is to celebrate.

Bryanne can’t even properly say no before Atlas is undoing the lock on the hatch that leads down into her boat. She vanishes, but Bryanne can still hear her walking around down there, below them, and the shaft of the harpoon at their feet twists and wiggles a bit, as she apparently examines it from below. Marcus is looking down at it, not at Bryanne.

“So, how did this actually happen?”

“We were—” He stops. “We were having a competition, to see who could dart the harpoon the farthest.”

“Stupid thing to do. I hope the tourists weren’t around when you were doing that.”

“No. They weren’t.”

There’s something very strange in his voice. She studies his face, even though he’s not really looking at her. She takes a step closer to him. Below, she can hear Atlas opening and closing cupboards, and the slosh of liquids moving from one container to another. Her hearing is too good, and without the Thylacine ’s sail and propeller rattling in her ears, she feels like she can hear everything in the whole wide world: Atlas, below; Marcus, the whisper of his clothing in the wind next to her; her breath in her own chest. Very gently, she touches his cheek. “And why do you look like you haven’t slept in days?”

“Because I haven’t really.”

“Is it because of this?”

“No— yes— I don’t know.”

“Did Joe chew you out?”

He looks away from her. “Yeah.”

“But you kept your job.”

“Barely, I think.”

“You gotta be careful,” she says. And if her tone is hard, at least her calloused fingers are gentle. “Seems like the kind of thing your captain’d beat you up for— firing you’d be the least of your problems.” She kicks at the harpoon, half expecting it to make a twang like a kicked doorstop.

“No, he— he wouldn’t do something like that.” Of course he wouldn’t— that would be insane. It’s like he didn’t realize she was making the most obvious deadpan joke in the world.

“Are you alright, Marcus?” she asks. He sounds strange, like he’s having trouble finding words. It’s very odd, because he’s usually talkative enough. Maybe it’s the specter of Atlas down below.

He shakes himself, though it’s more like a shiver than anything else. “I’m fine.” 

He smiles, but it doesn’t rise all the way to his cheeks. He runs his hand over the back of his neck, and then up over his head, where he seems surprised to find his own hat. He takes it off and puts it on Bryanne’s head, crooked. She smiles at him, though it’s a grimace— she thinks the hat is both ugly and filthy.

“We can go in a minute. I suppose we shouldn’t be rude.”

“As if you have a problem with being rude,” Atlas says, emerging from below. She very carefully is holding three glasses of some mixed drink, two in her right hand balanced on her wide palm. They’re fine, cut crystal glasses— certainly not the type of thing Bryanne would keep on a boat that’s getting jostled around by wind and water. But she hands them over. “One for you, and one for you, and one for me. Cheers.”

“What do you have to be cheered about?” Bryanne asks.

“Safe return?” Atlas says.

Bryanne snorts, and takes a sip of her drink (gin and soda) before Atlas can clink her glass against hers.

“You didn’t see any whales?” Marcus asks.

“Of course not,” Bryanne says. “Why would we ever see any whales on our whalewatching tour?”

“Someday!” Atlas says.

“To your greasy luck,” Marcus says, raising his glass.

Atlas laughs. “Is that what whalers say?”

Marcus nods. “If you’re ever sitting here when we’re running tours, Jules— he plays a greenhand— he has a little poem he recites about it.”

“I’ll have to keep my ear out, if I’m ever here during the day. You all seemed to have much better luck than we do these days. Maybe greasy luck is what we need. The whales seem to have enough of it— slipping away from us.”

They’re all still standing next to the harpoon, gathered around it like some kind of totem. Atlas tugs on it again, sees that it won’t budge, and then rests her glass on the end of the pole, where it’s flat. It balances there well enough, but any wave or nudge would send the glass shattering on the ground. She’s a careless woman, Bryanne thinks, and not for the first time. Carefree, Atlas would call it, but it’s the same idea.

“Maybe once I get this out, I should bring it along with us,” Atlas says to Bryanne. “You never know— maybe it will bring us some luck.”

“We’re not hunting them,” Bryanne says, suddenly very annoyed.

“What else are we doing?” Atlas asks. “I mean, we let them go. But we are hunting them down.” She laughs and picks up her glass again. “It’s a little game, I guess. They’re winning, though.”

“I don’t think a species that numbers fewer than a hundred members can really be considered winning anything,” Bryanne mutters. She doesn’t know why she’s so upset all of a sudden. It doesn’t make any sense to her, but her frustrations with everything else are coming out at once, here and now. “We killed them all.”

“We?” Atlas asks. She grins and looks at Marcus. “You killed any whales recently?”

“Yes, we’ve had a decent hunt so far,” Marcus says. “We’re only six months into our voyage, but I bet we’ll be coming home with plenty of oil.”

“Good one. Hey, Amos, do you hunt right whales?”

“No, my friend. We’re mainly hunting sperm whales— best oil comes from them— but once we get to the Pacific, if there’s a letter waiting for us at the Sandwich Islands saying that whalebone is more profitable, we might head to the Arctic to hunt bowheads next summer. They don’t have good spermaceti, of course, but with the prices of petroleum outcompeting us, it might be better to focus on the bone. So, I suppose if we see a right whale, we’ll certainly take it. But we’re not really anywhere near their feeding grounds, so I don’t expect to.”

“Man, I’d love to see your tour,” Atlas says. “This is great stuff.”

“Should be paying him to entertain you,” Bryanne says with a scowl. “Cut it out, Marcus.”

“No, no!”

Bryanne finishes her drink. “I’ve already heard this a hundred times, when he was practicing, and I don’t really need to hear it again.” She looks at Marcus and tries to find some sympathy in herself, hard now that she’s annoyed, even though it’s not his fault. “Aren’t you tired of giving the same lecture every day? There’s no reason to be doing it in your off-hours, too. Atlas should know.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t mind telling you every fact I know about whales,” Atlas says. “Unfortunately for me, I love my job.”

She’s lying, or she’s lying to herself. Bryanne finishes her drink. “Only because you don’t need the money,” she says. “We should go. One of us, at least, still does have work in the morning.”

“Oh— I meant to ask, when you came out of there,” Atlas says, nodding at the Wampanoag . “You were sleeping in there?”

“Yeah,” Marcus says. “In the steerage. I sat down after I was done for the day, and— I don’t know.”

“Well, it’s not that late, but clearly you need your sleep. Hey— I’ll see you around. Maybe tomorrow, since we’re practically next-door neighbors down here,” Atlas says. “Now that I know you, I’ll have to say hi.”

“Right,” Bryanne says, snippy. “Thanks for the drink.” She puts her empty glass down on top of Atlas’s solar panels behind her, and Marcus hastily finishes his and does the same.

Chapter Text

Remarks Monday 5th of January 1868, 210th Day

Bright good weather warm wind from the SW.

The master has decided that we will stop for supplies near Sierra Leone though only two boats will go to the town and port proper. The rest of us fellows including all of the greenhands will remain far enough up the coast that the master thinks there will be nothing to tempt us to desert. I think he knows that this is a feeble hope as men will desert on a spit of sand with no water or trees or even just dive into the ocean if they think things will be too unbearable for them to stay on board. I have seen it happen on my last voyage though the two who tried to swim away swam right back when they felt how cold the water was and we pulled them back up on deck. I have no plans to leave the ship so it matters very little to me. Though I would have liked to see Freetown which is the port town that the master will stop at for supplies. My father once mentioned when I was young that my grandfather was in support of the project to resettle freedmen there and would send money when he could. This was many years ago long before I was born and I don’t know what ever became of those men or if the project ever continued. They all had happy lives I hope. My father though he was a good man never had two pennies to rub together to give to charity and he never thought about it or talked much about it. This place is all British land now or so the maps say and we have seen their flags and sails on occasion but all are merchant ships and so in too much of a hurry to gam with.

Barometer 30 exactly. I didn’t get to check it until late as the first mate was too much on deck.

Remarks Tuesday 6th of January 1868, 211th Day

Good weather continues though it is a headwind we are fighting to get to port. Unusual feeling on board to have a destination suddenly everyone feels like we must hurry to get there even those of us who will not be allowed to go into town. We are all just eager for fresh supplies. This close to land there are many seabirds and if you tempt them with a bit of fish you can catch them if you are very quick about it. I do not think they make a good dinner but they are pleasant little things to see. Antonio is good at catching them and has tied one by the leg to the rail so that it can still fly a little. I don’t know if he plans to eat it or what he intends but it is an interesting thing to watch. It has a very pretty little sooty head and reddish beak. Still no sight of land though all are keeping watch for it and by the map we are quite near. I’m sure we will see it soon. Certainly since it doesn’t tend to move land is an easier thing to spot than a whale!

Barometer 29.8

Remarks Wednesday 7th of January 1868, 212th Day

Light rain early in the day and the headwind has lessened and we are making better progress. The master says we are only two more days out from port if the weather stays fine. 

Tobey has been very quiet these days and I am not surprised but it does make me keep a closer watch over him. I expect he might try to desert the ship and while I could not blame him as three more years with the first mate will be difficult I hope that I can stop him from leaving. In many ports any deserters are caught and I have heard stories of them being treated as badly as you could imagine. Tobey would hate to be caught I just know that. And besides I would be very sad if he left the ship as he is my good friend and I would have no one else.

It is not that I am not a friendly man my dear you know I am and I know everyone here well but it would not be the same. Tobey can always make me laugh and I would be lonely if he was not here. Having a friend and a brother on board goes a long way to making a man less homesick. I do not think Tobey feels the same way about home and so the pains and trials of being here sting for him in a different way. But o my dear I am as homesick as a man has ever been and if Tobey were to leave I would find it hard not to desert myself and find employment on a merchant ship heading home if I could. Though with my luck I’d end up stranded in Freetown for the rest of my days! That would be a fine trouble to be in. And I tell this to myself every time I think about leaving best to keep my head down and work for my pay… Tobey’s lay is much smaller than mine.

I do not even know if having Tobey gone would make the first mate feel inclined to treat me any better. I don’t write it down much because I do not want to worry you my dear but he is a fearsome man. He will find any excuse he can to knock you over the head for speaking out of turn or take some money from you for even the smallest thing. I saw a man and I won’t say who (though it wasn’t Tobey) taking apart a little bit of rope to wrap his pipe in and I told him that if the first mate caught him at that he’d be in for it, even if it was only a bit of rope and rope is something that we have plenty of. I was only making a joke because no one else would have minded not the master or the second mate or the third and certainly not me and the other boatsteerers. But even though it was a joke he jumped and hurried to put it away. I shouldn’t have said anything because it is not something that you can joke about. Everyone here is afraid of him and I think we are all lucky that he is merely the first mate and not the master. 

O my dear I never have been a pious enough man to pray for people who don’t need my prayers but I do make sure to slip one plea up to the Good Lord for the master’s health every once in a while. A whaling bark is a dangerous place even for the master and ours is always putting his hand in to help with the work which doesn’t do his safety any good that much I know.

Barometer 29.7.

Remarks Thursday 8th of January 1868, 213th Day

Fair winds we continue to make good progress down the coast land has been in sight all day which I will tell you my dear has been doing strange things to my heart. To think that we have been at sea for so long and yet are not even a quarter of the way through our voyage. Looking at land after such a long time and it being not the comforting sight of New Bedford’s rooftops and churches and all her ships darting in and out of the harbor o my dear it almost makes me wish that we were not going to land and that we could remain at sea until the day we returned home. But a ship cannot sail without water and wood and if the master can bargain for fresh food of any kind I will be happier than any man has ever been. 

Preparing to put down anchor and take on supplies means that the master has ordered all the ship cleaned and tidied and all the barrels readied for us to take on fresh water. When the master takes the boats into town it will be the duty of everyone left on the boat to collect water. He says that he has stopped here before on a previous voyage where he was the first mate and his uncle was the master and he has given us instructions on the map for the location of a fresh river that we can get water from. Even hauling barrels can be pleasant work if we get to stretch our legs on land.

Everyone is looking forward to a reprieve.

Barometer 29.8.

Remarks Friday 9th of January 1868, 214th Day

Dropped anchor up the coast from Freetown late in the day. Even out on the water still we can hear the birds calling in the trees and smell the smell of earth and o my dear I do not know how yesterday I ever said that I’d prefer to stay at sea! We won’t take the boats to land until morning no sense in stumbling around in the dark but all of us are out on deck just looking at it with the sun going down behind us. It’s nearly as good a sight as home and I can truthfully say my dear that I wish you were here with me rather than wishing I was home with you.

Tobey asked me Have I ever been to Africa before and I said No on my last voyage we went around Cape Horn rather than the eastern route to get to the Pacific. Why are we going this way then he asked. I told him I guessed it was because the master thought there would be better hunting in this direction as fewer ships come down this way and I think that Cape Horn is a more difficult passage for a ship so I would rather go thru the Indian Ocean especially on a new vessel like this one. She was just built and aside from all our lives of course it would be a shame to lose her. 

Tobey was very quiet but he was looking all out at the beach he seemed just about ready to leap over the rail to try to get to land and I told him We’ll be ashore in the morning and long days of hauling water ahead of us so no need to hurry. When we get to shore if the river is calm enough or I can be sure the beach has no sharks at it maybe I’ll teach you to swim I said. I’m sure we’ll have a little time.

But o my dear I just knew he is going to run. I am resolving to keep my eye on him. 

Barometer 29.8.

Remarks Saturday 10th of January 1868, 215th Day

Fine weather all day. It is very strange being at anchor. Early morning the master and third mate took the B and W boats to head towards the town for supplies. They were loaded down with cloth to trade and they took any letters the crew has written though I do not know if there is reliable post from this port. If there is o my dear you will get a letter or five from me. I would have liked to go with them to town but the boats were overloaded as it was and most of us have to remain at the ship. We are about 30mi up the coast from Freetown near Coreteemo Island and the river Scarcies on the map. It is a long way for the boats to go but with good wind they will make good time and I am sure that they will spend a few days in town anyway.

The rest of us had the L boat and the spares and a terrible number of barrels to fill with water. The first mate decided that in shifts to take the L boat up the river until the water runs clear enough to fill the barrels and then turn the boat around and come back to the ship. It is a fine plan though I don’t enjoy rowing some mile against the current! But we need water so row we did and I tried to keep a cheerful heart. During our first trip up river there were many jokes about wishing we had a mule for our own Erie Canal we were traveling but even if we had a mule on board with us he wouldn’t have been able to tow us anywhere. The riverbanks are choked with trees with the most tremendous roots that go down into the water and it was good that we were able to take the boats as there would have been no way to walk carrying barrels. 

If I have some time before we leave this place I would like to take a hatchet to one of those roots to see if the wood is good for whittling. We have plenty of cedar plank in the ship that we can take our knives to when boredom calls but a round piece of wood offers much more for the imagination than a plank does. O what should I carve for you my dear?

This whole place is very beautiful, with tall and strange trees that I have never seen much like. There are palms like there are in parts of the tropics but everything else is quite different. The dirt is a bright rusty red but it must be good enough for growing things. But o my dear as soon as you step away from the beach and the ocean’s air it is tremendously hot. By the time the first mate decided that we had rowed far enough that the water would not be too salty to drink we we were all drenched with sweat like we had been dunked in the ocean ourselves. At least after filling the barrels we could let the water carry us back downstream without rowing much at all. That was a much more pleasant ride!

When we returned and loaded the barrels back on board the second mate went out with his group to do the same. We’ll be doing this in shifts until the master is back as we have plenty of barrels to fill. 

The second mate had taken down the spare boats and let men go to shore so long as they stayed in sight of the ship on the beach. When we came back downriver we passed what seemed like half the crew out on the riverbank scrubbing their clothes, and the other half were collecting shells and things on the beach. 

I am writing this on the beach now and you will forgive me my dear if I get this book you gave me all full of sand. I think there will be time to take one more trip upriver for water and it will be my turn to go again. In the spare boats others went fishing and have had good luck. We have started a fire on the beach and are putting the little fish on spits. O my dear this will be a better dinner than any I have had for many many weeks. 

Tobey is collecting shells on the beach and it has been a good day. 

Now it is 10 P.M.

Although some men wanted to spend the night on the beach last night including the second mate who made a passionate argument for the idea of fresh air the first mate ordered everyone to return to the ship after sunset. When we took the boats back Charles started asking if the first mate was afraid of getting eaten up by a lion or a tiger or an elephant or whatever creatures might live around here. All the way back to the ship every time he pulled the oars he’d come up with some new animal that might rip the first mate’s head off. I think the first mate could probably hear this all the way over in the other boat with his crew. Later Willie drew a picture on the slate where a lion was at his throat and a bear each was grabbing his legs and wild dogs were getting his arms and a snake— well o my dear what the snake was doing I’m afraid is unmentionable.

Remarks Sunday 11th of January 1868, 216th Day

I had a late watch last night which I never mind. It was strangely quiet to be at anchor. The whole ship was quieter than the grave with so many gone down to Freetown with the master. It was a full moon or near enough to it that I could see pretty well. Most of the time on watch my mind wanders and it was not much different. I watched the trees just in case any lions or elephants decided to make an appearance though I doubted that they would. I sometimes thought that I could see things moving in the trees but it was just my mind and the light. I think we were too far from shore to see much really and certainly far enough away that nothing on shore could do us any harm.

I don’t know how I knew but I did know that Tobey would try to leave the ship. He wasn’t on watch with me but he snuck out of the fo'c'sle and crept around the deck.

I wonder if he had been calculating if he should sneak out when I was heading a watch or not. Did he think I’d let him run or did he think that he’d rather get caught by me rather than somebody else? I don’t know. I heard him though I have very good ears and I was waiting for him. He was halfway over the rail trying to slip down off the side of the ship when I caught him. I’m glad he wasn’t silly enough to try to steal one of the boats but o my dear I wish he wasn’t silly enough to try to swim either. We aren’t too far from shore for me to swim but Tobey has said he can’t swim at all and it’s well more than a quarter mile to land more than a half mile even and hard with the current.

I grabbed his arm when he was lowering himself down into the water and said What are you trying to do Tobey. He just tried to get away and when I wouldn’t let go of him he pulled his knife out and tried to slash me with it but you know my dear the sailor’s knife doesn’t have a tip they make you cut off the top two inches so that the most you can do is saw some rope if you’re lucky and anyway Tobey didn’t have the heart to really hurt me just threatened my arm. And we had to be very quiet as neither of us wanted to wake up the first mate. I said If you want to drown then alright I’ll let you go but I never did get to teach you how to swim. And when you start to drown I will have to call out a man overboard and rescue you I’d rather see you beaten than drowned but I wouldn’t want to see you beaten either.

I think he was still tempted to try it and I let go of him which maybe was a stupid thing for me to do. If he had jumped into the water right then I would have gone in right after him and we both would have been in a fine mess but he just hung on to the outside of the ship with his toes doing all the work to hold him on. 

I said Are you planning to walk all the way to Freetown it’s thirty miles. And he said that he’s walked further.

I said And what do you think you’ll do when you get there without any money and with everybody knowing you’re a deserter from a ship. And he said that he’d find work that pays him.

I said You’d give up your lay here. You’re going to get paid this is honest work.

He didn’t have anything to say to that though he could have told me that greenhands don’t get paid enough which is true. If he had said that o my dear you will have to forgive me I might have done something very stupid. If he had said it was about the money I would have offered to share my lay with him. Why I would have done that when I’m trying to save it all to bring home to you I don’t know but I would have done anything…

He said Don’t you want to go home? And I said Of course I’m as homesick as any man has ever been and I have someone waiting back home for me. And he said Well I haven’t and isn’t this place better than any other to try to find one.

But I just asked him what kind of life he thought he was going to find if he walked off into some jungle as a wanted man as deserters are not treated well in any port and really what is there for him here. You don’t have a friend on this whole continent you’d be a stranger and a poor one too. This made him angry o my dear he is too good at being angry. He asked me Well what is there for me anywhere else. And it made me so unhappy all I could do was walk away. 

I didn’t go very far I just walked off towards the larboard side and listened to hear him fall in the water. It took him so long to make up his mind to jump that I became relieved because I knew he wouldn’t really do it he wouldn’t try to swim far. I spent my time gathering up a nice long rope to throw to him when he did decide to jump. It took almost five minutes for him to drop off the side and as soon as he did I ran over as fast as anything and tossed him my rope. He couldn’t even make it three or four fathoms from the ship he didn’t know how to swim at all he was a sorry sight. I thought I might have to jump in after him but he managed to grab the rope and I pulled him right on up to the side and he climbed back on board.

All of this drama we did as quiet as cats. Everyone else on watch certainly heard and knew what was happening but none of them have a problem with me so they’d never wake up the mates to get me in trouble if I didn’t do it myself. I suppose that’s the good of being friendly with everyone but o my dear I’d never want to test that goodwill again. There’s only so far any man’s neck can stick out you know.

Poor Tobey was soaking wet and well all I could say to him was You know I will teach you to swim if you don’t keep trying to get yourself killed. I am your friend even if I’m the only one in the world.

Spent the rest of the day hauling water. Barometer 30.0.

Chapter Text

Friday June 8, 2057

In early June, the temperature tips upwards to the mid eighties, a miserable film of hot, salty air clinging to everything. School tours are more numerous now on the Wampanoag , with the end of the academic year approaching. They arrive on their yellow buses, the kids sticking their faces out the windows like panting dogs, shaggy heads trying to catch any breeze they can find as the busses slow to a crawl, trying to wind their way through New Bedford’s historic cobbled streets.

During the day, it’s raucous, but the kids tend to be gone by one or two in the afternoon, and so on weekdays, the latter part slides by in a quiet haze, where noises either echo or stick, and the asphalt shingle roofs of buildings begin to shimmer with collected heat.

Marcus, for his own part, has taken to climbing.

They’re not supposed to scale the masts, go up to the lookout where they left their scarecrow to watch for whales. But Marcus does, whenever he gets the chance. Joe, who saw him do it once, doesn’t yell at him, but if anyone from the museum proper saw, any of the administration, they’d have his head. It’s the kind of thing that all the staff signed an agreement not to do— do nothing dangerous, do nothing on the ship that is specific to it being a ship. They’re not sailors, after all. They’re theater kids with seasonal jobs, most of them. But Marcus has discovered that he likes the height.

It’s marginally cooler aloft. The sail-less spars of the mast don’t block the wind, and up high there’s more of a breeze than at deck level, coming in off the ocean. And standing up there, he can see the boats coming and going in one direction, and then New Bedford’s roofs in the other. He doesn’t look down at his feet; it’s dizzying to see the deck below him. 

Marcus doesn’t scale the mast until after everyone else has left for the day, and it’s best to do it when the evening’s shadows are swallowing the deck in darkness, so that none of the unobtrusive security cameras can catch a glimpse of him.

The first time he did it, it was on a whim, one Monday night. He wanted to see the Thylacine come into port, to watch her distinctive sail tower enter the mouth of the river. He figured that would be the way to time himself getting to meet Bryanne at the dock. 

The first time he climbed, he was very careful about it, hand over hand, feeling and fumbling his way slowly upwards, making sure his whole weight was held at three other points before he moved any limb. But when he reached the top, squeezed himself into the hoop next to the scarecrow tied upright to the mast like Odysseus, he felt elated, and like it had been easy, natural.

So, the next time, he climbed faster. 

After a few repetitions of this exercise, he can be at the top of the mast so quickly that he doesn’t have time to appreciate the sensations of the climb itself: the joy of motion and the scrape of the ropes and wood beneath his hands. He wishes, once he reaches the top, that he could climb forever, a Jacob’s ladder stretching up to heaven. The exertion of climbing feels very real, and the danger of being up high with nothing to hold him and stop him from falling is real, too.

Of course, on a real ship, no one would have been watching for whales after the sun went down, so Marcus is still playing a game, and the falseness sets in when he sees the last of the sun slip down behind the buildings of town, civil twilight filling the sky with a strange, pinky grey. Nevertheless, he likes it up there, and so he stays long after work is finished and he should have gone home. Bryanne is out at sea today, so there’s no one at home waiting for him, only tedious tasks and the endless quarreling of their downstairs neighbors and a phone call to his mother that he really should make, but won’t.

It’s just him and the scarecrow up there. 

“Evening, Tobey,” Marcus says to the scarecrow as he squeezes into the hoop. “Seen any whales yet?”

The scarecrow doesn’t have a name, at least not one that the museum has given him, but Marcus picks the name of one of Amos’s friends on the ship for him. It’s company up there, or at least the simulacrum of it. 

The scarecrow is made of brown oilcloth, stuffed overfull, probably with cotton-poly batting. The limbs are stubs, the pants and shirt thrift-store finds that don’t even match Marcus’s real costume. But no one would notice from down below that the denim pants are modern, and the loose white blouse is definitely a woman’s cut. The clothes are already ragged from months out in the weather; only the body of the scarecrow remains whole. A line of cord ties the scarecrow to the mast, fastening his arms to the hoop, pinching them down so that it looks like hands holding the metal, and cinching his waist tight to keep him standing upright.

“You alright up here?” Marcus slips his finger through the ropes around the scarecrow’s waist. “Not too tight, is it?” 

Tobey is a bad choice of name for the scarecrow, Marcus thinks, recalling the incident vividly described in Amos’s journal— Tobey being chained to the mast on deck and left outside for a week. But this is just ropes, not irons, and also just a scarecrow, not even one with a face. He doesn’t have any reason to speak to it, and certainly shouldn’t expect an answer. 

He shifts into his own safe position up there, facing away from the scarecrow, its slight stature a hint in his peripheral vision. The vague indication of another person’s presence feels much more real than looking at it directly.

“You’re going to be annoyed at me for talking about my girl,” Marcus says to Tobey. “Feel free to tell me to be quiet.”

The scarecrow, of course, is not capable of saying anything.

“I think she’s getting a little tired of me,” Marcus says. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m being paranoid.”

The wind rustles past them both, a fresh breeze. Out somewhere further down the Acushnet, a horn sounds across the open water.

“I know you don’t want to hear it. It’s just— okay, we’ve been dating for three years, going on four, living together for more than two. There’s a part of me that wants to ask her to marry me— and I know she won’t say yes, so I’m not going to ask.” He quickly clarifies. “It’s not that she doesn’t love me— at the very least she likes me, and we get along great, and I could see myself doing this with her for the rest of my life for sure— but I don’t think she believes in it as an institution or whatever. I get it.”

He pretends that Tobey is annoyed at him for talking, but the scarecrow has no choice but to listen.

“And we both keep saying to each other, well, I’m going to go to grad school, and she’s going to take a job on a bigger ship, and then, what? We won’t see each other. She’ll be gone for months at a time, and I’ll be— I don’t know.” He can’t imagine the future very well; he’s beginning to have his doubts that he will actually make it into a graduate program, among other things.

He leans on the hoop, feeling it press into his stomach and bend under his weight. It’s dizzying to imagine the ship swaying underneath him. Though they’re safe and sound at dock, he can conjure up the sensation when he closes his eyes: the way that a slight angular tilt of the ship at deck level means a wild sway of the mast this high up. When he was a kid, he used to be able to imagine the whole world of his bedroom swaying and rocking around himself at night: a dreamy, floating sensation unconnected to any real-world physics that only the insomniac mind of a ten year old could focus on and make real. The feeling is the same now.

“She was looking for new jobs last week,” Marcus says. “She was on the phone with her uncle, who said he knew somebody who could get her a job on a tanker ship. Oil, I guess, though that’s kinda a dying industry, so maybe she’d be better off with something else. And then I saw her looking on job boards, and I asked her if she saw any positions that she’d want. She just got annoyed with me. I don’t know if that’s because she’s annoyed with me or if it’s because she doesn’t really want to—”

Marcus glances behind himself at Tobey. “Like, what’s going to happen to us?”

He sighs and turns back out towards the water. He knows what’s going to happen, and he doesn’t need the scarecrow to tell him anything. The only way anybody stays sane is by pretending there’s something permanent in the world, but there isn’t. There really isn’t.

He thinks about the ways that Amos’s journal cleanly demarcates the passage of time. 1st day. 100th day. 200th. The numbers count up, but really it’s a countdown, a figuring of how long remains until the end of the voyage— four years. 

“Four years is a long time,” Marcus says. “I’m sure you know that better than I do. If that’s all I get, maybe I’d better just appreciate it while I’ve got it.”

It’s almost funny how little Amos’s journal says about the woman who is— was— perhaps waiting for him back home. She’s the empty you , the audience who doesn’t need Amos to hold a mirror of description up to her. It’s a strange sensation to read the journal, to be addressed directly. He knows nothing about you . But he knows a lot about Amos now, and can’t help but feel more closely tied to the writer than the reader.

“You’d better tell me, Tobey,” Marcus says. “You know how it ends. Is she waiting for me, when the voyage is over?”

A police siren wails in the distance, the yelps telling cars to get out of the way, and then falls silent. Marcus glances in that direction, and sees the blue and red lights dance through some distant street, down in front of one of the bars in this part of town.

“You must think it’s ridiculous that I haven’t finished reading the journal yet,” Marcus says. “I could know the answer if I wanted it. But I’ve got a whole summer to get through, and, I don’t know, I kinda like your company there in the book. I don’t want to run through it too fast. I’m rationing the pages.”

He’s rationing his time up on the mast, too. He should bike home soon, but he doesn’t want to go back. Even though the scarecrow is only a doll, it’s less lonely with his company than it is in his empty apartment. He looks out at the water and wonders what Bryanne is up to. She has the 4-8 watch, so she’s off duty now. She’ll get her dinner, and then go to sleep, most likely. 

He makes the mistake of glancing down below himself, at the sailboats docked next to the Wampanoag , and sees the Whole Wide World . Although the whole area is now cloaked in darkness, he can barely make out the harpoon that’s still sticking up out of the deck. His lip curls in an involuntary expression of annoyance, and then he looks away. The chagrin he once felt about accidentally spearing the sailboat has fallen away, and now the only feeling he can muster in himself towards the woman who owns it is a kind of anxious disdain.

He doesn’t mention that to Tobey, though, and stares into the darkness. Time is slippery, without any way to measure it. But whalemen get used to these long watches aloft— they find something to think about, or some way to avoid thinking.

Down below, there is shouting and laughter in the street. It sounds like a group of teenage boys, maybe college aged, who are running down the pier. Marcus, glancing down, sees their long shadows as they chase each other around. They look unburdened; he’s jealous.

They’re uncaring or adventurous enough to leap down onto the quiescent decks of the sailboats. When one of them hops onto the Whole Wide World , Marcus can’t help but be entertained to see them try the hatch. It’s locked, of course, so the little pirate leaps to the next sailboat over.

One of them comes up to the Wampanoag . He ducks beneath the ropes that form the lines for the tour, and tromps up the gangway, which the museum staff leave in position at night because it’s too annoying to move. At the top, before the easily leapt-over gate, he motions urgently to his friends, and looks around to be sure they’re the only ones in sight.

His friends, who have been chasing each other across the decks of the other nearby sailboats, see the summons and jackrabbit themselves back towards the tall ship. The boy at the top of the gangway easily hops the gate, and lands with a thump on the Wampanoag ’s wooden deck. The rest of them follow.

The doors to the interior of the Wampanoag are not locked, mainly because Marcus hasn’t gotten around to locking them yet; the keys are down in the staff room in the hold. Whoever’s the last one out for the night puts them in a combination lockbox in the deckhouse when they leave. 

The intruders are stealthier, now that they’re on the one ship and not leaping from deck to deck. They actually seem to be curious about the strange tall ship, so different from all the little sailboats. One of them sticks his head into the trypots, another tries to clamber up into the L boat hanging from the davits. All their props are put away for the day, inside the main cabin, so that stops any of them from grabbing a harpoon or a lance or a knife right away, but they discover that the doors are open, and one of them creeps down inside the ship, shining his phone flashlight on the way.

Marcus isn’t sure what to do— he feels the same momentary paralyzation he always felt when his students began to misbehave. Someone might know how to diffuse a situation before it got out of hand, but that person was not him.

During the last semester that he taught, no amount of pleading or threatening or ignoring could stop trouble. When a yelling argument arose, as it often did, he tried speaking calmly for a moment too long, or he thinks he did— he can’t quite remember. The scene in his memory always cuts directly to the two students leaping at each other, knocking desks out of the way, and the pool of blood at his feet when one breaks the other’s nose. The feeling of helplessness overwhelmed him then, and it still rattles around his mind whenever he thinks about it.

Now, he’s watching the scene from above, a silent observer, and the boys are completely ignorant of his presence. If they happen to glance up, they’ll probably assume they’re seeing two scarecrows on lookout.

The boy who went down below emerges with a harpoon, and says, loudly enough that Marcus can hear his voice drift up, “There’s tons of weird shit in there. Kinda creepy, though.”

Two of the other boys go down, while the one with the harpoon goes over to the one reclining in the L boat on the davits, and starts to mime stabbing at him. The boat sways and rocks.

Marcus, now that none of them are facing the mast, slips down from the lookout, and carefully clambers down to the deck. He moves as quietly as he can. In the shadows, neither of the two boys on deck see him as he creeps down the main hatch, where he saw the other two head inside. What the museum staff would tell him to do is call the cops, but he’s not going to call the cops on a bunch of kids. 

He’s very familiar with the bark; he could navigate it with his eyes closed, which is good because there’s no light below. He can hear the boys in the master’s quarters, fooling around with some of the props.

“What the fuck is this shit?” one of them asks. There’s sounds of thumping and laughter. “I think I broke it, chat.”

“Man, give it to me— hey!” More laughter. Marcus isn’t sure what’s being destroyed, but he hopes it’s nothing too important. The master’s rooms are the nicest on the ship, so there’s plenty in there to break, even if all the instruments and tools are replicas.

It’s very stupid for him to intervene, but it is his responsibility, since he was careless enough to not lock up, and then spend so long up on the mast. Marcus enters the master’s rooms, and then stands at the door. He’s still wearing his costume.

It takes a long second for either of the boys to notice him, even though his footsteps were clearly audible. One of them is sitting on the couch, the other is shining his phone’s flashlight around at the writing desk and peeking his head into the bedroom. On the floor is the remains of their demonstration whalebone, the three foot tall piece of baleen that they have to show during tours. Marcus usually thinks of it as quite sturdy, but he’s also never had two teenagers try their hardest to rip it apart before. It’s now in two pieces, with a few smaller of the baleen plates fallen to the floor. 

The one on the couch sees Marcus first, and scrambles to his feet. “Who the fuck—”

The boys are just high schoolers— he can see it now in the round-eyed youthfulness of their faces, and hear it the way the boy’s voice cracks on the question. Marcus, calm but taller than the both of them, and looming out of the shadows, asks, “What are you doing on my ship?”

He knows exactly the impression he’s creating, of a ghost swimming out of the gloom, and it has the intended effect. It has a strange effect on him, too. He mentally asks Amos what he would do— Amos would probably do the same thing. He never wants to get anyone in trouble, always aiding and abetting various minor infractions, mainly for the sake of keeping the peace. He can hear Amos in his own voice, and see him in the mirror hung on the wall, the boys flashlights training onto his own face and making him squint. As he raises his hand over his eyes to block the light, he takes a few steps forward towards the boys, moving in a heavy, deliberately slow, plodding way.

The boys scramble backwards, looking around themselves in a panic as Marcus the ghost approaches. The one who had been in the bedroom notices the open door of the master’s cabinet, full of both curiosities and tools. Among the books and reproduction scrimshaw, there’s the master’s gun: a Colt revolver. He grabs for the gun, knocking pens and maps to the floor as he does, and points it at Marcus.

On a practical level, he knows that the gun doesn’t work. It’s a reproduction for looks only. There isn’t even a firing mechanism. But it looks real enough, and in the mirror on the wall, Amos flinches.

But Amos doesn’t have to worry, Marcus thinks. He says, “You can’t hurt me with that— I’m already dead.” — And the gun doesn’t work. 

The boy holding it yelps in fear and tries the trigger and gets the expected result: nothing happens. He throws the gun at Marcus’s head, but he dodges to the side fast enough that it sails past his shoulder and thumps into the wall. 

But he’s out of the doorway now, and the boys make a break for it and run past him, stumbling and tripping over each other in the dark. The way they brush past him, the breeze from their movement the only thing that touches him, and he does feel as insubstantial as a ghost. He, too, lurches forward and leans himself on the writing desk, solid and real beneath his hands.

As they go, Marcus can hear them yelling: “This place is ultra haunted, chat! I told you!”

He thinks the moonlight and streetlights outside would ruin the illusion, so Marcus doesn’t follow them, instead listening to the pounding of their feet overhead as they hop the gate and run down the gangway again.

He’s now in darkness, aside from the tiny sliver of moonlight that makes its way through the deck prism in the ceiling. He can see enough to pick up the broken pieces of whalebone. He figures what’s the harm— he’s never going to get another chance— and so he slips one of the broken pieces into his pocket, and does his best to clean up the rest of the mess the boys left.

On the deck, he finds the harpoon tangled in the line holding up the boat on the davits, and he gently pulls it out. The boys are long gone, though one of them left an open bag of potato chips in the bottom of the boat. He can hear them calling to each other as they run.

“We both fucking saw it! A real-ass ghost!”

“An ass ghost? You looking at his ass? Chat, this man was looking at a ghost’s ass!”

“Couldn’t even see his ass, man!”

On Saturday, when Joe discovers the ruin of the baleen, Marcus confesses that he might have forgotten to lock up when he left for the night. He’d rather admit to that than describe to Joe the entire saga. Joe is deeply annoyed; it’s yet another straw on the camel’s back for Marcus’s continued employment, but his actual tours keep going well, and he’s no longer late in the mornings, so Joe lets it slide. 

The weekend, as it usually is, is lonely and boring for Marcus as soon as the day is done. He decides not to press his luck on the mast, at least for a few days, so he bikes home right after work and intends to spend the evening on the sagging apartment balcony instead.

At home, he rediscovers the piece of whalebone that he picked up from the floor of the ship and dropped on his peeling laminate kitchen counter before he went to bed the night before. The baleen piece is slender, about two inches wide and an eighth of an inch thick, dark brown, almost black. It’s vaguely triangular in shape, about nine inches long in its longer dimension. 

He’s held baleen plenty of times before— he regularly helps clean up the ship after tours are over for the day, and puts the props back in their proper homes— but he’s never gotten a chance to play with a piece like this. He takes it with him out to the balcony, and when he sits on their disintegrating lawn chairs, he tests its flexibility and strength. A piece like this would have been scrap, even back when whalebone was the most valuable product of whaling, used in everything from corset boning to sled runners. It’s too small to do anything real with, and so its only possible use is to entertain whalemen.

At the lower end, it frays off into fine hairs, and Marcus plucks those off with his fingernails; they litter the ground around him. At the end of this process, he holds the smooth piece, and wonders what he’s going to do with it. His mind drifts through Amos’s journal, thinking about the various pieces of scrimshaw and whittling that he describes. On his voyage, they were still hunting sperm whales, despite the floor of the market for whale oil falling out from under them with the availability and ease of petroleum, but that meant that Amos never talked much about baleen. But he liked most to carve little messages and trinkets for other people, and so spent a lot of time doing that on whatever wood or bit of tooth was at hand.

He lays the piece of baleen flat on his knee. When heated, the keratin in whalebone becomes flexible, and it will hold whatever shape it’s forced into when it cools. Marcus rolls his own wrist across the piece of scrap— it’s about the right size for a bracelet. Bryanne doesn’t often wear jewelry— it gets in the way— but she might appreciate something simple like that. He can feel the ghost of Amos smiling in approval of the idea.

He takes out a pencil from his pocket, and, in barely visible lines, sketches out the places where he’ll need to file the baleen down into shape, and then the design he’ll put on it. He’s not much of an artist, never has been, but the simple, blocky shapes of a cartoon whale are easy to draw, even for him: the rotund body, the friendly curve of the mouth, the striped lower part of the jaw— not really stripes, but folds of skin that expand to take in seawater— the comical tail, the tiny dot of an eye, the spout blowing out the top. 

He draws several of these, swimming along the outside of the bracelet. On the backside, it’s blank. Probably anything he writes there will get smudged and worn away, if Bryanne actually wears the gift, but it feels like he should write something there. He taps the pencil against his teeth as he thinks, then carefully letters: 

AND GOD SAID: LET THERE BE LIGHT
NEW BEDFORD 2057

Amos, in his day, would have found the message wholly true, Marcus thinks, but it’s grimly ironic with two hundred years distance. But New Bedford is the city that lit the world, so it’s the message that Amos chooses. It feels melancholy— like it’s only to commemorate this particular moment in time, when he and Bryanne both live here, a four year voyage together in the city of oil.

School tours on the Wampanoag resume on Monday, and it’s clear that through whatever local grapevine kids have, the story of a ghost has spread. It really only takes one particularly loud and gleeful student telling everyone who will listen that his cousin’s best friend’s brother saw a ghost, for real, stalking the deck at night. This particular boy, Marcus sees (or, more pertinently, hears) waiting in line before the boat opens for the day. He’s small for an eighth grader, with curly brown hair, and a mouth too wide for his face, but exactly the right size for his loud voice, which cuts right through the drizzling rain. 

Marcus, who is leaning on the rails of the ship before they open, watches the boy hold his phone up to take a picture. He uses his phone to project this image, dimly lit but clear even at a distance, onto one of the dock-side signs. Marcus blinks at the picture of himself suddenly appearing. The wavering quality of the light makes him unrecognizable; his face is unclear. It has the appearance of a much older photograph, not this weak projection out of a cheap phone— like he’s seeing Amos as he would have looked, rather than himself. He stares at the shaking photo, even though he should stand up and get ready for the tours to start.

Within half a minute, the boy has used an image generator to add a ghost to stand right behind Marcus in the frame, a thin boned man dressed in old-fashioned clothing, leering over him with hands like bloody claws. It’s a white man’s ghost, which is pretty funny— he supposes that he should be grateful that the salient identifying features of the “ghost” have been lost in the telling of the story. It must have been too dark last night for the boys’ cameras, if they were ever pointed at Marcus, to pick him up properly.

Even though everyone standing around the pier is aware that it’s a computer generated trick of the light, it still makes some of the girls nervous. “Ms. Jamison,” one whines. “Make him stop it.”

“Oliver, put that away,” the teacher says. “You know the rules about phones. If you use it, you lose it.”

But Ms. Jamison makes no move to enforce this rule, either on the laughing Oliver, who’s adding so many ghouls to his photographic creation that the scene is completely unrecognizable, or any of the other kids who are leaning on the ropes and texting.

Marcus tries to push the image out of his mind for a while as he gets ready to start his morning tours, but this proves very difficult. It’s not that the ship is haunted— or if it is, the last thing it’s haunted by is whalemen. The ship is younger than Marcus himself is; if it’s haunted by anything, it’s by the ghost of a persecuted Chinese billionaire, who built boats to get away from something that he knew he couldn’t escape. 

Marcus’s tours on deck are fine. At this point in the summer, the tour script has been polished to a mirror sheen; he knows exactly what to say and how long it will take, and he is even interesting enough with the harpoons to keep most kids’ attention, and those who don’t pay attention tend to lean over the side and look at everything else going on, rather than causing trouble. 

Marcus leads his first tour down into the steerage, shepherding middle schoolers like an unruly cohort of ducklings, and crams them into the room with its bunks on the walls and trunks on the floors. The only light that comes in is through the deck prism above, which is enough to see by; if it was any cloudier outside, he’d turn on one of their lamps and hold that up, the LEDs a fake spermaceti candle inside. But it’s ghostly dim, and some of the kids are nervous, not helped by the troublemaking Oliver projecting his flickering ghoul onto the walls whenever he can. The teacher corners him and confiscates the phone as soon as Oliver shines it at Marcus while he’s trying to explain the sleeping arrangements.

“Is this ship haunted?” one of the girls asks.

“Haunted?” Marcus says, scratching his chin. “Now, who’d you think it’d be haunted by?”

“I dunno,” the girl says. “Anybody die on board?”

“This ship was just built when we set out on our journey,” Marcus says. “And we’ve been very lucky so far— all of us’ve stayed safe— and thank God for that.”

“So, no one’s ever died here?” a different girl to his left confirms.

“Well. We’ve killed ourselves plenty of whales.” When Marcus turns to face that kid, he catches a glimpse of Amos in the little shaving mirror hung on the wall. 

“Do you think whales have ghosts?” Amos asks, meeting Marcus’s eyes. “It’s a pagan thing to believe, but maybe they do.”

Chapter Text

Remarks Sunday 2nd of August 1868, 420th Day

Rain and wind all day from the ENE and though we are in warm climates it is so very cold when you are wet with rain.

O my dear although this is my second voyage it is still very strange to be out on the warm water and not see the coming and going of the seasons. Every time the month changes I think about what it must be like at home and I miss it so terribly and worry that I am forgetting what it looks like. Out here on the water everything is the same except for squalls and wind. It must be the heart of the summer for you isn’t it? But soon the weather will turn. For now I pray that you are staying cool and in a month I will have to pray that you are staying warm and dry. 

Every day here is so long and we have been months without seeing any whales though I try to bear it with good cheer. It is Sunday and I am often homesick on Sunday as you know. When I start sighing about you Tobey won’t talk to me. I asked him if he had anyone he loved back home in Virginia and he told me he’d cut my tongue out if I ever asked him that again. I don’t think he meant it and he’s half a foot shorter than me and probably sixty pounds lighter so I won’t worry even if he did. It’s funny that some men want to do nothing except talk about home and some men would rather talk about anything else. Sadly there is very little to talk about around here but we make do! I worry about you my darling are you doing well? Is your mother well? And your brother Tom? O I wish you could tell me. Barometer 29.7.

Remarks Monday 3rd of August 1867, 421st Day

Early part of the day fair breeze from the N but later turned to ENE. All are trying to find some way to pass the time even though there is the usual work it does not stop the mind from going terrible places. I myself when I have to go down below to the hold to fetch one thing or another I see all the empty space down there for oil that we don’t have and feel how light the ship is and I think about what this means for my lay though I try to be grateful for our safety and what provisions that we still have. O my dear if we do not find any oil I will come home to you empty handed and worse than that I will have lived without you for four years when I could have been empty handed at home and married with you for that time. I know my mood will change when we find whales which if God smiles on us will happen soon.

When the men are bored there is often trouble and although I understand it I wish it would not happen. Willie and Charles came to blows though I do not know what they were fighting over and Charles almost threw Willie overboard and did break his nose there was blood all over the deck. I had to stop Tobey from getting drawn in because he is a friend of Willie’s and would have fought Charles too. I didn’t want to see Tobey whipped and Charles and Willie both got other hell from the first mate. After a big fight like that the whole ship is quiet and even men who were not fighting find some way to lick their own wounds whatever those may be. I think this is better than talking about it forever let us all let bygones be bygones. Maybe I should not even write it down. 

O when will we see another whale I feel useless on this ship I am a harpooner! But the Good Lord will send us whales when He wills it so I must be cheerful and at least be glad that we have plenty of water to drink and fair weather. If we see no whales here we will go back North at last. There was good fishing earlier in the season so it seems that the master was tricked into letting us stay in these grounds for too long. At least we are not the only ships in this terrible predicament here there are several others whose sails we have seen over and over going through these same waters.

Of course although one feels a kinship with his fellow man and most especially with his fellow whaleman on another boat if we should both happen to see the same whale at the same time I fear when we lower our boats out both crews will leap at each other rather than the whale and we’ll both lose him for that. I described this fine mess to Tobey and he asked me what happens if two boats are rowing for the same whale. I told him Well we’ll just have to row faster than them and faster than the whale too but in the end it’s God’s will.

Barometer 30 and rising. As I said at least fair weather is something to be glad about.

Remarks Tuesday 4th of August 1868, 423rd Day

Morning cloudy with not much wind but it lightened by the afternoon and we had a fair breeze from the NNW.

Spent most of my watch up high on lookout for whales which although it is sad to see nothing is still my favorite duty. Up so high you feel like you are almost a bird and the air is fresh and clean. Even when it rains I do not mind watching for whales.

O my dear did I ever tell you that my father was a whaleman when he was young? I must not have because you never asked me why I went to sea the first time. I think you just gathered it was about the money. Well it was as this is a good way to make a living if you are a careful man which I am so I will get to take home a better part of my lay to you. But I had the idea to go to sea because my father when I was a boy told us about his time on a whaler. Of course he only went on the one voyage and it was only two years but I think he had enough stories for a lifetime. I am now on my second voyage and have not found it so exciting but I am a quieter man than my father was. Sometimes I think he must have lied about how many whales there were or some of the other things he said in his stories but he loved to tell them so what does it matter to me. There must have been more whales when he was young since his journey was only two years and now us poor whalemen will be signed on for four or five. And we will come home with even less pay for the same amount of oil because the longer you are on the ship the more chances you have to let your money get away from you. 

Why am I thinking about this you ask me Well it is because last night I had a dream. It was a very strange dream and I still remember it even though I woke up at 4 A.M. and it is 10 ½ P.M. now and I cannot sleep because I do not want to dream about it again. In the dream I was a sperm whale with my sharp teeth which I was very proud of. I think every whaleman has dreamed about whales but when I was dreaming of it I became so lonely. I went through the ocean looking for my wife and I could not find her no matter how long I swam. There was no one there but me and above me always was the bottom of our bark so that I could hardly come up to spout. It made me feel so melancholy I did not know what to do and I do not even think I can tell Tobey. I am always trying to make him laugh so I would say something to him like Do you think that whales get married. And that would be the wrong thing to say. So I have to tell you my dear even though you are so far away and I miss you so terribly.

God willing we will find whales soon maybe there is one right under our boat!

At 7 ½ P.M. the barometer was 29.8.

Remarks Wednesday 5th of August 1868, 426th Day

Saw a spm. whale heading to the N.

Remarks Sunday 9th of August 1867, 430th Day

O my dear it has been a difficult few days even though we caught a whale. I should be thankful for that. 

As I said in my last entry we saw a whale and we lowered the boats to chase him but we lost him. Still we were able to turn the ship towards where he was going and thank the Good Lord that there were no other boats in that direction because even though there was a whale there are so few and I do not want to fight for them. It is difficult enough to fight the whale.

The next day we all anticipated a whale and it is difficult to sit still at a time like that you understand. It would have been terrible to wait so long and see a whale and not catch one so we all hoped to finally have a reward for our time at sea.

Caught sight of the whale at 6 ½ A.M. and lowered boats. Tobey, Jack, John, and KJ were rowing with me and the first mate steered though we first approached under sail. I was next to Tobey and I told him not to worry though o my dear I was as worried as anything. We approached slowly at first to not scare him off and going so slow in the boats makes everything feel so much more terrible it gives a man too much time to think. I have darted many whales before but it has been some time and o it would have been terrible if I missed because we are all looking forward to a catch. We were not the first boat to reach the whale the B boat got to him first. Antonio darted the whale from three fathoms but the dart must have been loose and he missed the second dart because the harpoon came out as soon as the whale started to pull and their ropes were just in the water and they could do no more. 

We almost lost the whale but the first mate yelled to row as hard as anything or he would kill everyone in the boat. O my dear Tobey is just a little thing but he rowed like you have never seen anybody row before. The whale was angry at having been darted and he was trying to escape us. But we kept pace with him and when he came up for air the next time we found him again.

We could not get close to him in our boat because the thrashing of his tail was so great and I felt I had almost no chance of darting him from so far away. O my dear when you dart a whale you want to be so close to him you can reach out your hand and touch him so that you can get the harpoon fixed in deep but we had no hope of that. But the Good Lord gave me a Good Arm which served me well. I threw with as much strength as I could and while I do not think I am a better harpooner than Antonio I did strike the whale with my first dart and as quick as I could I took the second and got it in there too.

The whale was as angry as I’ve ever seen and o my dear it is terrifying to be pulled through the water when he tries to escape. You may think it is a pleasure for those in the boat to go on a sleigh ride but there is no pleasure in it. I was nearly thrown overboard and I was sure our little boat would be stove in or bitten in half or flipped over and we would all be drowned. All I did was cling on for my life and try to steer as best I could and pray that we would not be stove in and killed.

When you are catching a whale the only thing you can feel is how small you are next to him. I imagine that when I die and stand before the throne of God I will feel the same way. Although I am a harpooner and a good one and I have seen it done and done it myself many times I still do not understand how any man catches a whale. He is just so large I really cannot tell you how big my dear. As big as a train car or bigger. But God has given us hands to hold tools and with that we can take them. All the whale has is his teeth and it seems that they are not enough. If the Good Lord cared for whales as much as he does for us men he would have made it a fairer fight. But I should not ask the Lord for trouble plenty of men have been killed by whales! I think we have all come very close to being swallowed up! And I do not think Jonah was swallowed by a spm. whale his teeth are too sharp to ever let a man go.

I wonder sometimes if the Good Lord had left us in the Garden of Eden if we wouldn’t have made ourselves an axe to chop down the Tree with. Though what we would have built with the wood I can’t say. Perhaps a whaling bark!

O my dear I am saying all of these silly things to you because if I fill the page with silly things I will feel guilty enough about wasting paper to not write down the rest. I should be asleep it is very late and all hands must be up early tomorrow for more work. But I do not think I can sleep. It is not so easy. I don’t know if I have ever written about all the whaling in detail before. I usually think it is too grim and I am usually too tired and want to spare my pages besides. But today I am in the mood to tell you about it so I will. O my dear if you don’t want to read it you should move forward a day or so and you will be spared the telling. It just gives me a little comfort to write today.

The first mate is the lancer on my boat you know, and though he is a hard man to know he is a good whaleman and a good mate and a good lancer. He has a steady hand and a keen eye for what to do. When the whale is tired from running and pulling us as far as he can take us we get our chance to kill him. I keep the boat as steady as I can while the mate takes his lance and he stabs into him right into his heart or his lungs. Although I would like to be the first mate for the better lay this is one task I could not envy him. It is a harder job than harpooning to be sure. A harpoon is just one throw or two throws if you can get the second dart in but lancing goes on and on until the whale spouts blood and we know he has a mortal wound or ten.

Well once he has tried his best to kill us and has spouted all his life out his head and he is still he is dead and we hook on the chains and tow him back to the ship. It is a tremendous labor.

And even if we have been on the chase all day as soon as the whale is fastened to the side we must at once start cutting there is no time to rest. Often where there is one whale there are more so we must clear this one away as quick as we can if we want to have an easy time to catch and process another and finish all we can on this one before the sharks eat half of it down. 

The officers cut the fat from the body in thick and long strips and roll the body over and over like unwrapping bandages. On the head of course there is the sperm which is most valuable and must be kept clean and separate from the rest of the fat. We can cut off the head and even can stand inside the head case to bail that out.

All the rest of us poor fellows on deck have a miserable time chopping up what they cut off the whale. Though it is a less dangerous job cutting up the fat than being off the side cutting the whale himself. The deck smells like blood and oil and everything is slippery with it. It is a dark smell with the whale oil especially once we’ve cut enough to get to boiling. It’s not like a tame little whale oil lamp or candle when you have so much of it. O my dear it is like nothing else it fills your mouth and everything you eat tastes of it. The sharks must be able to smell us from miles and miles downwind because they all come up running to get their pound of flesh from the body we have hanging over side. But it is what brings in the money so I have to think of it as a good smell.

The fat is so slippery that it is hard to even hold hold your knife as you chop it’s a wonder that more men don’t lose fingers while cutting or slip and fall overboard. The weather was poor too and all day long our boat was pushed from side to side. Although I do not like the first mate I was greatly afraid that he and the others when the boat leaned while they were cutting and turning the whale that they would be swept overboard and lost. There are many sharks in the water to eat the whale so if any man fell in that would be the end of him I’m sure.

The whale’s jaw is now on the deck and the teeth are as big as my hand. We got the spade in to the gums and used the windlass to haul that long strip of flesh and teeth up off the bone. It is easier to cut the teeth out that way than using your knife to cut them off one by one. And we may want to keep the jaw bones in any case. 

I always take some of the teeth for me and Tobey. He’s a greenhand so he gets the last pick so I save mine for him. As a boatsteerer I had a pick of any I liked after the master and mates came through and took their share. Although they have no value at home the master made sure to save some as he says they can be traded with natives for water and provisions as they like them for jewelry and other things. But there were plenty that we as the crew could have remaining. I believe the master is hopeful that we will catch more whales and we do not know if we will end up at those islands anyway. For us the teeth make good scrimshaw and Tobey will be very happy to have some more. When he is in a good mood he says he will make me a picture of a woman so I don’t have to be so lonely thinking of you and I tell him that I didn’t need any such thing. Tobey’s drawings are very funny but o my dear I would be a little ashamed to bring one home to you. You must forgive me for laughing at the things he does sometimes I hope the Lord will as well as they are a little sinful.

I have now taken so many hours to write this entry that it is near time for my watch again and all the boiling continues. I shall be glad when we are done boiling and all the oil is all stored up and we’ve scrubbed everything clean again. O it is so troublesome to walk around when the deck is so slippery. I guess this whale has given us around 60 bbls. of oil which is very good and we cannot complain.

Barometer 29.9.

Chapter Text

Thursday July 12, 2057

On Thursday night, Bryanne cooks dinner for her and Marcus, intending to eat with him around six, when he usually makes his way home after work. But, of course, every time she needs Marcus to be on time, he’s late, and isn’t answering his phone no matter how many messages she sends him. She has no idea where he could be, so, annoyed, she texts— of all people— Atlas. They’ve never texted before, but she has her coworkers numbers for emergency-contact reasons, in case something goes wrong with the Thylacine that Bryanne has to warn the rest of the crew about.

“Atlas, this is Bryanne. Are you at home? Can you do me a favor? Is Marcus on his stupid boat?” she asks, using text to speech as she usually does, holding the end of her phone directly up to her mouth.

The answer comes back immediately.

“He is!” And then a picture, of Marcus in the late evening sun, sitting on the deck of the Wamapanoag , doing something that Bryanne can’t identify.

“Can you yell at him to come home?”

“Do you need me to escort him?”

“Just tell him I’m going to eat dinner without him if he doesn’t move.”

She’s relieved that lingering at work is all that Marcus is doing, and that he didn’t vanish without a trace, but it’s still deeply annoying. The baked eggplant and pasta will keep until he arrives, but she’s hungry, and every second she sits at the kitchen table, scrolling through job postings that she doesn’t want, the more annoyed she gets. 

After some time, she puts her phone down on the kitchen table and paces back and forth through the house, going from the kitchen to the living room and back again. It doesn’t help that even with the air conditioner chugging along in the living room window, the third-story apartment is sweltering hot. In fact, the presence of the single rattling air conditioning unit in the living room probably makes the situation worse, making it necessary to keep all the windows shut in the hopes of keeping the cool air cycling around inside.

Sweat is clinging to her forehead, sticking her hair down in little curls to her face. She sticks her mint flavored vape in her mouth in an attempt to cool down, and moves from one room to another. She sits down at the wooden kitchen chairs, gets back up immediately, then goes into the living room and tries to sit on the battered leather couch. It’s a hand-me-down from her family, probably on its fourth or fifth owner, and the surface of it flakes and cracks against the bare skin in the crook of her knees. She gets up and kicks it for good measure, which makes her stub her bare toe on the wooden leg, and she swears in pain, which makes her vape fall out of her mouth. None of the floors in the house are remotely even, so it rolls away immediately, burying itself beneath the radiator behind the couch. She yells some incoherent swear, which causes their downstairs neighbor to pound on the wall angrily. She’d be more composed if anyone else was around, but by herself there’s nothing to diffuse her anger, and nothing to direct it t.

She couldn’t explain why she’s so annoyed if she tried; there’s nothing to explain. But looking around the house, she seethes. It’s the heat, she tells herself. It’s collecting up here, boiling her like a lobster, or a frog. It’s the latter, and that comparison makes her feel like if she does nothing she’ll die, so she stomps towards the window.

The air conditioner rattles; the fan belt inside it is loose. With hands that shake in frustration, she tries to pry the window open that it’s stuck in. But the windows and their frames are original to the house and well over a hundred years old, and the house’s shifting foundation means that everything is at an angle, and the window has gotten pinched into position. It would take a crowbar to unpry it to get the air conditioner free, or at least Marcus’s longer arms and better leverage. He’s the one who put the air conditioner in this window; she would have put it in the one across the room, even though it’s farther from the outlet. That window is loose in its frame, and slides around easily. She could have, and would have, done it herself. 

She slams her hand against the glass impotently, and then rips out the power plug. The fan in the air conditioner rattles itself to death, and then there’s a humming silence of her ears adjusting, and then the sound of her downstairs neighbor’s reality TV program rising up through the floorboards.

“And now! You’ve come through For Richer or For Poorer !All you have left to do is choose! Door number one? Or door number two? Remember what the stakes are!”

She’s like a trapped animal in the house, and she looks around wildly, but all she sees is the detritus of the past four years of living with Marcus, his stuff and hers so mixed together that it would be easier to throw it all out and start anew than figure out what belongs to either of them. Roadside-find furniture and the green checkerboard jute rug over the dingy grey carpet that probably was white fifty years ago. Thrift store novels on the table and empty drinking cups that neither of them have bothered to wash. Band posters hung with stickytack, slowly sliding down the landlord-white walls in the heat and humidity. Every individual thing feels so overwhelming; she picks up a cup and puts it back down with white knuckles, rather than bringing it to the sink.

“In door number one— ten million dollars.”

When she eventually hears Marcus stomping up the stairs, she thinks it’s a miracle of her own self control that she hasn’t— and doesn’t— and won’t— throw anything against the wall.

“And in door number two—!”

“Sorry I’m late,” Marcus says when he comes in. “I lost track of time.”

She takes deep breaths, tries to calm down, and puts the random cup that she’s picked up in the sink, like she’s been doing some tidying. Bryanne can’t stand the sound of the audience from downstairs, and she turns on her phone’s internet radio to the weather station, drowning out the tedious noise and replacing it with a robotic voice reading out the METAR.

Marcus is still in his stupid costume. He hangs up his floppy cloth hat on the coat hooks above the door, and sits down at one of their squeaking kitchen chairs to undo the laces of his beat-up leather shoes, which he lines up next to the door. She should be used to him wearing that getup; she’s seen him in it often enough at this point, now that he wears it to work and brings it home, but it never fails to make her cringe. There’s something painfully earnest about it, that, when combined with Marcus’s usual goofy smile, makes her feel embarrassed for him. He doesn’t seem to notice the embarrassment that he should feel, and whenever she’s tried to explain this to him he laughs and says, “Well, at least I’m not Joe!” 

It’s an emotion that doesn’t make sense, and is unfair, but she can’t shake it. And so after giving him a glance, she turns back towards the stove without saying anything, stirs the pasta sauce one last time, and gets out their plates and cutlery.

He washes his hands in the kitchen sink up to his elbows, and splashes water across his face for good measure, but then sits down at the table.

“Aren’t you going to go get changed?”

“Not fair of me to make you keep waiting.” But he catches her pursed-lips expression. “Is something the matter?”

“No.”

It’s unfortunate that there’s really nothing that he can do to soothe her annoyance, which he would do if he could. She plates up the pasta, and then sits down across from him.

“Thanks,” Marcus says. “You’re the best.” And, after a second, “I really am sorry for being late. Jesus, it’s hot up here.”

They eat in an unpleasant silence, one that is entirely her fault, but she finds it impossible to put down the bubbling frustration that she spent the last hour cultivating. She wants to smoke, but she can’t until she’s finished eating, and so she bolts down her plate of pasta so quickly that it gives her a stomach ache. Marcus keeps glancing up at her, opening his mouth to say something, and then deciding against it. When she drops her plate in the sink and heads out to the balcony (after fishing under the radiator for her vape), he doesn’t follow her. Once she’s gone, he opens the windows— as if it was her fault that they were closed. Now, through the open window, she can hear him humming some song and talking to himself as he washes the dishes.

The sun is setting by the time he comes out to find her. She’s just watching the sky, sitting on her usual lawn chair, not thinking about anything, and chewing on her vape pen. Marcus sits down across from her. The balcony sags and shifts under their weight, the boards of the floor and railing all half rotted away, the lead paint flaking off. Inside the apartment, everything is slathered in such a thick layer of paint, layer after layer, painting over every one of the original whorled wood ornamentations in the corners of the ceilings until they’re nothing but blobs of indistinct shapes. It’s like the paint in there is holding the building together, covering up the cracks like glue. The balcony doesn’t have that disguise, and it reveals the age of the place, sloping down over the street. Marcus’s mother, who visited the apartment exactly once, refused to set foot on the balcony that one time, claiming that she feared for her life.

Still, it’s much more pleasant outside than in, and the balcony is her favorite place in the apartment. If she was a real smoker, she’d keep an ashtray out here. But she’s not, so she fiddles with her vape. She watches the pigeons come out of hiding and flutter from one rooftop to the next, mourning someone long gone with their whoo whoo calls.

“Red sky at night,” he says, nodding out to the rooftops.

“Old wives tale,” Bryanne says, and closes her eyes. It’s cooler on the balcony, so she can think straighter.

“Is everything alright?”

“It’s fine.” 

He’s quiet for a long time.

“My uncle called me this morning,” she says eventually, her eyes still closed. Marcus shifts, startled. He was apparently lost in his own thoughts. “He keeps telling me that I need to quit my job.”

“Are you going to?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Eventually, I guess.”

“Do you have enough hours that—”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to quit?”

“We’re never going to see another whale, so I should give up on it,” she says. And that’s where the frustration really comes from— the feeling of once again preparing to get back on the ship and do nothing useful at all. “Really no point in having this job if all I’m going to get out of it is a headache.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. 

“It’s not your fault.”

“Amos’s journal sometimes feels like half of it is him complaining that he can’t find any whales,” Marcus says. “So I like to think that I understand the frustration.”

“Yeah,” she says, though it’s more to humor him than anything.

“But he always found them eventually, it seems like.”

“And then he killed them.”

“Well, yeah,” he says. He’s quiet, but then says, “But before that, the waiting— people have been looking out for whales for a long time. It’s kinda— I don’t know— nice, I guess, to have that continuity. Still doing things that people have always done— it seems very real.”

“A job is a job,” she mutters. “Getting paid is the only real thing about it.”

“There’s a difference,” he stresses. 

“Sure.”

“Like there’s nothing real about me.”

Bryanne is tired of this conversation. She says, “Is it a history student thing, to want to live in the past, or is this just you?”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“No,” Bryanne says. “I certainly don’t. And I really don’t know why you want to, either.”

He holds his hands up, not really able to explain it, and fumbles for words. She can tell even he isn’t quite buying into what he’s saying. “You’ll laugh at me if I say ‘men were real men.’”

“Yeah, you’re right about that.”

“It’s about— I don’t know. Feeling like you have a purpose.”

“You want your purpose to be killing whales?”

“No—”

She shakes her head and he falls silent.

“Lighting up the world,” he says. “They weren’t doing it because they wanted to kill.”

“They were doing it to make money.”

“That’s true.” He stops and looks away from her, out over the rooftops. “I guess I’m just a little jealous that you’re doing the same things Amos used to. It’s like you share something important with him that I don’t— can’t.”

 “I’m happy to be the same as hunters who can’t find their prey. Better than ones who do find it.” She frowns. “I was looking at that journal the other day. I’m always rooting for the whales.”

“I get it.” But she’s not sure that he does. “I hope you find one tomorrow.”

“We won’t, but I appreciate the support.”

“Where are they all?”

“Dead,” Bryanne says. 

“That can’t be true. You wouldn’t be selling tour tickets if it was.”

“Probably they’re just running around looking for food. The ocean is less predictable than it used to be, so everyone says all their instincts about where they should go to feed are confused. Either that or they’re hiding from us, which I sympathize with.” She laughs, if grimly. “I’d make a terrible whale— I’m not good at hiding. I’d start going after every boat I saw. Fight back.”

“Dead whale or a stove boat,” Marcus mumbles. But then he straightens up and asks, “Are you looking in the right places?”

“There’s public tracking data, but it’s on a two day delay so that people don’t bother the whales,” Bryanne says. “And we have the hydrophone.”

“You should post a lookout up high.”

“We have the drone.”

“Right, yeah. And still no luck?”

“I would tell you if there was!” Some of the tension between them has broken, the annoyance about Marcus being large for dinner forgotten now that she’s had a chance to relax and smoke out on the balcony.

Marcus is quiet for a minute. “I got you something,” he says.

“What?”

“Give me your hand.”

She cracks one eye open and gives him a grim little look. “Don’t embarrass yourself.”

He laughs. “You say I’m good at that. But I won’t.”

She holds out her right hand, and from his pocket he withdraws a bracelet: a black and solid curved section that fits around her arm, then a chain connecting both ends that he fastens around her wrist to keep it in place. She pulls her hand back towards herself and investigates the jewelry. It’s decorated with little pictures of whales, hand-drawn by the looks of it. 

“I know you don’t really wear jewelry that much,” he says, preempting her protests. “But I figured, you know, maybe it’ll give you some whale luck.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Made it,” he says. There is some embarrassment in his voice now, but the warm kind, and he’s looking at her for approval at the gift. She fingers the plate piece. “Trying my hand at scrimshaw, I guess. I’m not much of an artist, but I think it came out okay.”

“What is this? Plastic— resin?”

“No,” he says. “Our demonstration baleen plate got broken, and I got to take a bit of the scrap that fell off—”

But she’s already trying to claw the piece off her wrist. “Jesus Christ,” she says, trying in haste to undo the bracelet’s little silver clasp. “You think I want dead whale jewelry—”

His face falls, the round-cheeked happiness slacking into a sallow misery. “I thought you’d like it.”

Strangely, she’s not even sure if he’s telling the truth.

Two days later, as the Thylacine steams down into Cape Cod Bay, Bryanne is at the helm for her watch. She spent all day the day before cloistering herself away from everyone else as much as she can, still annoyed by the thought of Marcus, and she’s mostly succeeded at keeping everyone else— passengers and crew alike— out of her way. Unfortunately, when she’s on watch, that means that Atlas knows exactly how to find her, and she does, knocking on the door and then inviting herself in without even a by-your-leave.

She grins at Bryanne, who doesn’t acknowledge her, and then leans back against the wall. “Doesn’t Mike not want you doing that in here?” she asks, gesturing to the vape dangling out of Bryanne’s mouth.

“I’m not making a mess,” Bryanne grumbles. “A sailor has to have vices.”

“Oh, I won’t tell if you don’t,” Atlas says with a laugh. “So long as you let me hang out and chat.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be eating breakfast with the passengers?”

“I only give lectures at lunch and dinner,” she says. “Everyone’s too asleep in the morning to want to listen to me chatter about whales. So all I have to do in the mornings is stick around long enough to say hi, so that people will say they saw me, if asked.” She picks up one of the apples that Bryanne has waiting as a snack in the bag hung from the hook on the door and tosses it back and forth a few times. “You haven’t even eaten your little snack.”

“Not hungry.”

Atlas gives up on playing with the apple and eats it instead. “Sure you’re not.” She chews the apple like a cow, huge mouthfuls crunching audibly. “How was dinner with your boy the other day, by the way? I assume you had to be pretty pissed at him for missing date night if you were willing to text me about it.”

“It wasn’t a date,” Bryanne says. “I just cooked pasta, and it was getting cold.”

“Very romantic.”

“Not really.”

“Sounds like it went badly,” Atlas says.

“It was fine.”

“Oh, please, I want you to complain.” She grins, that funny little smile where her tongue sticks out past the edge of her teeth, blunting their perfect, tombstone whiteness. “I live for gossip.”

“There’s better things for a person to live for.”

“Sure, but I’ve got nothing better in my life. I live a very empty existence.”

“You and Marcus should join some kind of club. He was just complaining about the same thing.”

“I’m not complaining!” Atlas says. “God, nothing I love more than being free as a bird, doing nothing at all. Like the lilies of the field— neither toil nor spin.”

“I know,” Bryanne says. “It’s only slightly more tolerable than wishing you had a purpose to suffer for. I, personally, have to work for my living, and I’m not hung up on if I’m serving a higher purpose with it.”

Atlas laughs. “Oh, is that what you’re annoyed at him about? I guess that makes sense. I hear him talking lighting the world up when I’m sitting around— he gives a good little speech you know. Gets really into it.”

“If he wants to have a noble cause, he should have gone into a trade instead of majoring in history,” Bryanne says. “Or med school. His dad’s a doctor.”

“He’s too sensitive to be a doctor,” Atlas says dismissively. “You need at least a little bit of callousness.”

“You don’t know him.”

“Oh, that’s a thing you can tell at a glance, sometimes. It’s the way he moves his eyes to look at you— like he’s really trying to figure you out. If you’re callous enough to be objective about what’s going to kill somebody, you don’t care about stuff like that. You just hone in on the troubling symptoms, rather than putting together the whole gestalt.”

“Sure.” She isn’t at all sure this is correct, but Atlas sounds confident.

“I thought about med school for a bit. The idea of the prestige would have made my parents happy, but I think they would have found the reality a bit of a step down.”

“Your family’s old money, right?”

“How old’s old?” Atlas asks. “My grandmother made most of it. We’re really not as rich and famous as you might think.”

“Don’t give me a number.”

“Oh, I wasn’t planning to. You could look us up if you were curious.”

“What business did your grandmother do?”

“Petrochemicals,” she says. “She was a chemical engineer— did work with like polymers and stuff. She developed a bunch of new industrial processes for making super strong fibers. Anyway she was able to leverage the company she founded into much bigger things. Buying up oil companies, vertical integration. That kind of business.”

Bryanne turns away from Atlas, looking out the window at the water. There are some low cumulous clouds on the horizon, grey and threatening, though likely to dissipate soon with the harsh sun of midmorning, which catches them now and illuminates their curves. Abstract shapes form inside them like castles in the sky, imaginary oil rigs rising up out of the water.

Atlas leans forwards towards Bryanne, smirking at her scowl. “Oh, are you mad at me for killing the planet?”

“Yeah, you know, I kinda am, actually.”

Atlas shrugs, clearly used to this type of conversation. “If it’s any consolation— like I said— I’m too lazy to go into the business myself. I’m just leeching off my forebears’ bad deeds. And aren’t we all!”

“My mother works in a nursing home, so, no,” Bryanne says. 

“Hmm,” Atlas says. “Fair enough. Though even people who weren’t whalers were burning their sperm oil candles, weren’t they?”

“Are you on his side, or mine?”

“I’m not on anybody’s side,” Atlas says, holding up her hands. “I’m not into taking sides. And you’d be annoyed if I took yours.”

This is true— there’s no way for Atlas to win in Bryanne’s esteem— so she says nothing.

“Think we’re going to see any whales today?”

“No,” Bryanne says.

“Oh, you’re so grim. What’s the hydrophone got for us?”

“We can hear them all day long,” Bryanne says. “That doesn’t mean anything.” She reaches over and plays a a recording for Atlas, a right whale’s whooping call, starting low and spending about two seconds rising up. It’s like a request for other whales to come around, at least as far as Bryanne knows. It’s by far the most common call they hear— repeated over and over, and never answered. There seems to be one whale in this area, asking for company and not finding it. It’s a pretty miserable thing to listen to, at least when she projects her own meaning onto it.

Atlas listens to it critically. “Can we get to where that’s coming from?”

“We can try. I’m pointing us in the right direction. But we hear calls all the time, and it doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll have any success.”

“Yeah, I know the drill. Don’t get passenger hopes up.”

When she’s not on watch, Bryanne would like to get some extra sleep, but really she spends most of her time on deck. The fresh ocean breeze is pleasant, the humidity is less oppressive in the open air than below in the belly of the ship, and she doesn’t mind the summer heat and glinting sunlight on the water. 

She climbs up to the top of the observation deck and scans the horizon for a whale’s spout, turning around and around with her binoculars pressed to her eyes, until she’s dizzy. Even this reminder of Marcus’s assessment of her historical position as a descendent of whaling doesn’t frustrate her as much as it could. 

Later, when her binoculars have no success, she takes the drone out to the top of the observation deck with her, and tosses it into the sky, watching through its digital-clear vision from an even higher angle, tilting and zooming its cameras around and around, until it runs out of batteries and she has to swap out its battery pack. The passengers even enjoy watching her play with it, and she lets one guy who claims he has experience with a similar model fly it around for a little while.

Over the ship’s loudspeakers, Atlas has convinced Legend, the second mate, to play aloud the calls that the hydrophone is picking up. The occasional mournful whoop, even though it sounds depressingly lonely to Bryanne, seems encouraging to the passengers. Atlas keeps cranking up the volume on the calls— Bryanne can tell because of the increase in general hissing noise coming from the speakers— which seems to indicate that they’re getting further from the whale, rather than closer. She wants to go tell Legend to turn the ship in the correct direction, but decides she’d rather not bother. She likes Legend, and he generally knows what he’s doing— she has to assume there’s a reason they’re turning away from the whale. Maybe a newly-imposed speed restriction has come in over the radio or something.

Aside from the calls growing quieter, they also come less and less frequently. By the time that Bryanne goes to take her lunch (egg salad sandwich and chips) eaten up on the observation deck, there’s maybe one call every ten minutes, the low groan surprising her when it comes out of the ship’s speakers. She stares out at the sea.

Atlas comes out from the deckhouse and climbs up onto the observation deck with her, whistling a Mahler symphony. 

“Don’t whistle,” Bryanne says. “It scares the whales.”

“That is not true, and you know it.”

“Look, you’ve scared them all away,” Bryanne says, gesturing to encompass the whole horizon. “Either that, or Legend is steering us in the wrong direction.”

“No, we’re headed right for him,” Atlas says. “We should be close now, I think. Triangulating it right down.” She holds her hands up to her ears as a demonstration of the differential detection that the hydrophone is— in theory— capable of. Although the math works out, they have never once used their hydrophone alone to pin down a whale, even in their more successful years.

“Then where is he?” Bryanne asks.

Alas comes right up to Bryanne’s side, then takes the binoculars dangling against Bryanne’s chest and holds them up to her own face, without pulling the strap of over Bryanne’s head. She tugs the binoculars like a leash to get Bryanne to move, scanning the horizon and turning to look off the starboard bow. “Right there.”

Immediately, Bryanne snatches the binoculars away from Atlas. “Where?”

But as soon as she presses the lenses to her eyes, she can see it, the tiny puff of vapor, the whale breathing on the horizon. Bryanne has her crew walkie talkie clipped to her belt, and she immediately and urgently speaks into it. “Helm— whale spotted, three points to starboard, maybe two miles out.”

Immediately, before Legend in the deckhouse even responds, Bryanne feels the propeller drop back, slowing them down. There’s strict speed limits in place around whales, and there’s a limit to how close they can get, and they definitely don’t want to scare this one off by running towards it.

“Bryanne— get that drone up,” Mike says over the walkie-talkie. “We’ll put the image on the big screen.”

Even through the gurgling radio transmission, Mike sounds pleased, and it sounds even clearer when he makes his way up to the deck house to make the announcement to the passengers. “Well, folks, the moment we’ve all been waiting for has arrived— there’s been a whale spotted off the bow. If you want to look at it from the observation decks, please make your way there, or we will be showing live footage from above in the dining room. As a reminder, our vessel needs to stay at least half a kilometer away from the whale at all times, so the dining room view will have much more detail.”

The deck is immediately swarmed with passengers. Bryanne glares at Atlas to make her do her job entertaining them so that Bryanne can fly the drone in peace. She picks back up the heavy controller and the light for its size four-propeller drone (the battery is the bulkiest component), and tosses it into the air, sending it flitting away with a mosquito-like whine to go investigate the whale.

The grey bulk of the whale is floating right at the surface of the water, occasionally puffing its vapor into the air. Every time it does, the crowd on deck whoops, even though that’s the only thing they can see. Even from a distance, it’s clearly a right whale, not a humpback, which makes her smile. She wonders if it’s one she’s seen before, and she tries to compare its size to ones in her memory, figure out if it’s a male or a female, see if it’s a juvenile or fully grown adult. As the drone approaches, the image resolves on the controller’s screen. Bryanne shields it from the light with her hands, and drops the drone low to get a good look, making wide circles from above.

The whale is dying.

She’s seen plenty of whales in her life, some in good health and some in bad, but this is the worst she’s ever seen. Whales are not supposed to be skinny , and this one is emaciated. Its skin hangs loose around it, pushed to and fro by the water’s movement. It’s wrapped tightly in rope, fishing line tangled around its flippers and flukes, and there are deep gouges on its side where it looks like it tried rolling against rocks to free itself. It’s barely moving. Its tail twitches; it puffs out a weak breath.

Outside, the crowd cheers again at the spout on the horizon, but they can’t see the state the whale is in. Up in the deckhouse, they’re getting the same image from the drone that Bryanne is, and— unless Mike has cut the feed— so is everyone in the dining room. The news will spread in a minute, she’s sure. The propeller throbs beneath her feet, ringing through the entire metal structure of the ship, as they nose closer to the whale— slowly, excruciatingly slowly.

Mike makes no announcement, but the news clearly makes it to the people on deck: the mass of passengers standing at the bow on their tiptoes and leaning on the bulwarks, training their binoculars and cameras at the horizon. A strange silence falls across the ship, and the next time the whale spouts, there’s no cheering, just a collective intake of breath.

Bryanne controls the drone like it’s her own body, tipping it down close to the whale, moving the cameras like her eyes. She’s a ghost up there, a tiny bird of plastic and electricity containing her spirit and leaving her body behind. 

The curved mouth, the most distinctive feature of the right whale as a species, is open, the large tongue visible, and the strips of baleen. She brings the drone as close as she can, close enough to see the whale’s tiny eye through the water as it rolls a few degrees to its side, pushed by the water. She stares into it, across the distance between them. 

The whale must know it’s dying, she thinks. It was calling for someone else, but they’re the ones who came to bear witness.

They’re close enough to see it unaided now, and as they approach the five hundred meter restricted zone, the propeller noise drops to nothing, and there’s only the slapping of the waves against the ship, and the breath of two hundred passengers shuffling on their feet on the deck, breathing in a collective.

Atlas doesn’t even have anything to say about it, though it’s her job. She stands at the forefront of the crowd, leaning on the rail, leaning over the bow, saying nothing. 

“Can you do something about it?” A passenger, some young woman with tied back blonde hair and a flowery sundress, comes up to Bryanne. Her eyes are so glued to the drone’s screen in her hands that she feels ripped back to her own body, unsure of where she is. “There must be something we can do.”

Bryanne fumbles for the words, the language deserting her until she can find it again. “No,” she says. “We’re not allowed to get close— it’s against the law. The first thing Captain Mike does is report this to the authorities— probably Woods Hole will send out a ship— but no. We can’t do anything other than watch.”

Bear witness.

The woman is pale faced, and she moves to the edge of the observation platform, like she wants to dive into the water and swim for the whale herself, for whatever good it would do her. Bryanne is glad that she doesn’t— and she sees Atlas at the bow trying to corral people back who have gotten too close to the edge, and look like they’re going to make bad choices. Without really thinking about it, Bryanne calls up the stewards on the walkie-talkie and gets them to go assist Atlas in keeping the crowd safe.

The whale doesn’t move, and their ship doesn’t either. The only indication that it’s still alive is the occasional puff of air out of its spout, and twitches of its flukes as it tries to stay upright to breathe. Everyone moves quietly when they walk around the deck, like they’re at a funeral mass. They stay there for hours. 

When it’s Bryanne’s watch, she takes the helm, though they aren’t moving. There’s a clear view of the whale from the deckhouse as the sun slips down. There’s chatter on the radio, including a ship coming up from Woods Hole— constantly checking the Thylacine ’s position and asking about their observations of the whale. Bryanne answers the questions without emotion, like she’s filling out the log. They seem to already have been aware of the whale’s distressed state, and tell Bryanne there’s nothing that can be done, in their opinion, but they thank the Thylacine for reporting the information. 

Behind her, on the wall of the deckhouse, is their tall, years long chart of whale-sightings. She sees that when they first spotted the whale, whoever was at the helm took out their dusty stamp and ink pad and put a triumphant mark and the day’s date. She runs her fingers over the dry black ink— the closest she’ll get to touching the thing. She remembers stamping out the sightings herself, in previous years, and lays a finger on the first whale she spotted on board, three years ago. They usually find out later which whale it was, write down their number and name if they have one, age, length. None of this information can conjure up the real thing; data is a poor substitute for life.

When her watch ends at eight, she’d usually go down to sleep, but instead she sits outside on the observation deck. The heat breaks within an hour or so of the sun going down, and they turn off all the ship’s lights so that the whale can more clearly be seen in the moonlight. It’s a completely cloudless night.

The whale exhales its last puff of breath around two in the morning. People on deck keep watching for more— the breaths had been irregular before, so there was still hope— but when the waves roll the whale to its side completely, it’s obvious that it is dead.

Bryanne goes into the deckhouse, raises the Woods Hole people on the radio, and reports the news. She goes down below, lays in bed with her eyes open for an hour, and then reports for her four A.M. watch.

Chapter Text

Remarks Sunday 13th of September 1868, 462nd Day

Strong winds from the S all day cloudy. Saw two spm. whales and lowered boats but caught nothing. We have not caught something in quite some time but we do see the whales often which makes us all anxious. Tobey says they are playing a game with us and I said Well I would not want to play a game where someone might end up killing me at the end and Tobey said Isn’t that what we do. He is right but o if I were a whale I would stay as far away from ships as I could I wouldn’t ever let men see me I would go down to the deepest part of the ocean as soon as I saw their sails. It’s a pity for them and a mercy for us that whales have such poor eyes it seems. They haven’t even necks to turn to look behind them or above them out of the water. But still they manage to run away! 

It is a sad and funny little game that we play together the whales and us. I sometimes like to think that at the end of all this when I leave this world I’ll find all the whales I’ve darted waiting for me and well what will I have to say to them. Should I say I’m glad to see you my friends I’ve missed you and I’m sorry if it hurt. Well I shouldn’t say if as I know that it did. But o would you like to play it again? I’ll play fair this time. I’ll give a shout when I’m on my way. Olli-olli-olli-olli-oxen-free.

On bad days I do think that this ship is Hell for us and not just the whales. The only way I know that it’s not is that when I keep my journal I write the date at the top and it marches forward day by day. But in Heaven there’s no more time to measure just the long voyage that goes on forever…

There comes a point when you’re sailing where you stop being so homesick because you’ve forgotten what home is like and all your life is the ship. You pace from fore to aft and you look out at the water and you say Yes this is the whole world and I am content with it.

And when that day comes I’ll let you know!

But the whales are running not because they know that we’re here but because they have their own business to attend to somewhere far away though I do not know what it is. I imagine them all packing their bags and nudging their children to get moving as they have to go pay a visit their aunts and uncles and grandmothers off the coast of Japan. It’s a long way for a social call! But there must be a great feast waiting for them up there.

We may stop in port on our way following them as we are heading up north back towards the equator and even higher than that but we may not. We have plenty of supplies and the master does not have as much good news to report back home as he might like. I would like to stop in port but it isn’t up to me of course.

Barometer 29.9 and falling.

Remarks Monday 14th of September 1868, 463rd Day

Terrible wind from the SW and rain all day. Saw a whale even though we could barely see anything in this weather. Lowered the boats and chased but lost it and all were worse for trying. Barometer 29.7.

Remarks Tuesday 15th of September 1868, 464th Day

Heading N with the whales hopefully we will not be outrun by them and will keep pace to catch as many along the way as we can. There are many sails in this area we have seen but most are merchant vessels coming out of Australia’s ports on their own business. Even if they were whalers we would not have time to stop and gam all are in too great of a hurry to follow the whales. Weather has been very bad but not bad enough to make us pull down our sails and wait it out. One year into this voyage we have only 350 bbls of oil not much as many of the whales we have caught have been small ones and so even the master who is a calm man is anxious about arriving at the right whaling grounds at the right time of year. 

I have been working on a little whale figurine carving from some of the wood I collected some time ago. I would have done it out of ivory but I gave all my teeth to Tobey and besides wood is easier to whittle so I don’t mind. I don’t know if I should give my whale a spout or not though maybe I should put a hole in him where the spout goes and make it big enough to hold a pencil so that it can act as the spout. I would hate to make a mistake and have it be ugly but I have plenty of wood and more than enough time to carve another if I do it wrong. Though perhaps this one is too small to hold a pencil it would look too odd it is only about as big as my palm since I was as tight with the wood as I am with anything else. I should make a larger one next and then this one can be its baby.

Tobey has been carving down teeth into dominoes it is a tedious task but all are eager for him to finish it and several other people have furnished him with their teeth so that we can all benefit by having a new set to play with. The first mate in a fury threw several decks of cards overboard some time ago and we have been suffering that loss ever since. I tried making more out of my paper but even when you paste two pages together it does not play as well as a real deck of cards does so it was a poor substitute. I shall be glad when we make it to a real port and someone buys more as someone surely will. 

Gambling may be a sin but it does entertain us. And unless you gamble away your tobacco which will be smoked up faster than you can blink what was lost one day may be won back the next. I have gained and lost the same carved comb some five or six times. It is convenient to play a man at cards every time I want to fix my hair it’s one less thing taking up space in my own trunk! I just say O who has my comb shall we play for it and we do and I win it back and fix my hair and then I say Alright let’s play again and I lose it again. 

I have a terribly even-handed kind of luck that way.

Barometer 29.6.

Remarks Wednesday 16th of September 1868, 465th Day

Bad weather rough seas continue caught a whale mid afternoon commenced cutting but o it is hard. It is dirty and evil work but it must be done.

Remarks Friday 18th of September 1868, 467th Day

O we are in dire trouble. I should write down what happened yesterday as I can barely sleep. No one else here in the steerage can sleep either nor I’m sure in the officers quarters and probably not in the fo'c'sle either.

As I said we caught a whale at 6 P.M. on the 16th and as soon as it was fastened to the side of the ship we started cutting. The seas were terribly rough and when the mates were all on the stage planks cutting away the blankets from the whale they tied themselves down extra tight so they wouldn’t be carried away every time the ship got hit with a wave.

We cut until around midnight and then the master gave us some reprieve and told us to get some sleep aside from the watch. We did but by 4 A.M. we were back up even though with the clouds even when the sun came up we could hardly see. With all the grease on the deck and the way the waves were hitting us we were all almost flying off the sides of the ship.

Commenced boiling quickly and all was going well for a time we were making good progress still despite the weather being terrible.

The master was on deck as he usually is when there is work to be done. He is a hardworking man and for that he has had the respect of all of us. He was near the cooling tanks and KJ was bailing the oil into them I think the master was helping with the hose fittings or I don’t know what he was doing. But for just a moment a huge wave and gust hit us and the hot oil slopped out of the cooling tanks and KJ’s bailer and it got all across the master’s right side from his chest down to his foot his leg got the worst of it.

O I have seen and heard many awful things but this was one of the worst. His clothes were all covered in the boiling oil and they stuck to him so badly that the oil burned right down through his skin. I don’t know what he could have done aside from jump in the ocean to cool it but he’d have been drowned or eaten up by a shark right away if he did that and so he just tried to pull off his shirt and pants but he couldn’t or couldn’t fast enough and the damage was done. 

The first mate laid him out in his bed in his room but we all saw when he carried him in there how badly burned he was his leg was all red and bone white and the skin peeled off when they got his clothes off him. 

I do not know if he will survive I have never seen a man get burned like that before. He is awake now and says only his chest hurts his leg isn’t in much pain but o he must be lying because he can barely move when he bent his knee the flesh ripped right open you could see all the way down to the muscle the fat has peeled back like we were cutting into him like a whale.

All of us are keeping a kind of watch though what will happen we do not know.

Remarks Saturday 19th of September 1868, 468th Day

The master does not want to alarm anyone so he has not said aloud that he believes he is going to die but he is writing letters to the agent and to his wife and children and everyone else. Well his right hand is too badly burned for him to hold a pen he cannot curl his fingers around it even if he took his bandages off so he is dictating letters. He dictated the business letters to the first mate but then sent him out and asked if there were any among the crew who had a good enough hand to take dictation aside from the mates whose time he did not want to waste. I am well known for keeping a tidy journal as everyone has seen me writing in it every day so my name was put forth and I came in to the captain’s rooms to take his letters down for him.

Someone had moved the picture of his wife from over the table in the main cabin to right by his couch in his day cabin and he was looking at it when I came in. He should have been in his bed I think but there is no desk for someone to take dictation at in his bedroom. With the bandages on him no one could put any clothes on him they had tried but he just had a blanket over him covering his legs when he lay on the couch. 

I said Hello Sir I hope I can help with what you need. He said to me I never did ask you how you came to know how to read and write Amos. And I said Well my family was free for a long time even before the war and it was important that I was educated I got taught at the first Baptist church in New Bedford. He said That’s good.

I wrote down his letters for him and of course I will not rewrite them here. He told me to sign his name for him and I said Sir do it with your left hand so they know it was just dictation and I held out the papers for him and he did. 

He thanked me for my help and then he asked me if I thought the ship would be alright for the rest of the journey. I had to be very careful what I said I said Sir the first mate is a very capable sailor he knows everything about this ship and the crew will not give him any trouble. I think he knew that I was being cautious everyone knows what is thought of the first mate. I asked Do you really believe you are going to die and he said Well it is whatever God decides if it is just a burn it may heal but if it starts to rot there will be no saving me. He asked How many bbls of oil have we gotten from this whale and I said 40. Did you dart her he asked and I said Yes sir but I wish that I had not. He asked me why and I said 40 bbls of oil is not worth a good man’s life and he said Many more good men have gone for much less a price. He said I have been lucky I started as a cabin boy and I have survived many voyages so far but there is a time when every man’s luck runs out. 

He asked me if this was my second voyage or my third and I said second But I do not plan to go to sea again. He asked me why not as I could be third mate for the rest of this voyage and then second or even first on my next. It is a good way to advance for a negro. I said Yes but I wanted to stay home and marry and that I would find some other kind of work. This made him very sorrowful and he looked at his picture of his wife she really is a beautiful lady. I tried to make a joke to cheer him and so I said And besides in 4 or 5 more years I do not know if there will be any whales left in the ocean it seems like we are coming close to getting the very last ones. He just closed his eyes and said There will always be whales and there will always be a need to fish them. And besides you will miss the sea if you do not go back to it as I always did.

Yes sir.

Well since his eyes were closed I thought I should get up and go and let him sleep but I did not think I would have another chance to speak with him like this and I felt very odd and bold and I asked Sir may I ask a question that you will think is ridiculous. He said of course and I asked Do you think the whales will be there in heaven. And he said You’re a good man for making me laugh. Amos if the whales go to heaven then I’ll be heading to Hell. I’ll be sure to send a letter back on a mail packet to let you know how the weather is when I get there. I’ll check the barometer for you.

Our ship keeps heading N the first mate will have us keep moving regardless of anything else and I’m sure the master would never say to delay anything for his sake. Spent some of the day carving my figurine. Tobey’s dominoes are coming along well. O I am miserable.

Remarks Sunday 20th of September 1868, 469th Day

Continued sailing N. Weather improving.

Remarks Monday 21st of September 1868, 470th Day

Headwind has stopped us. No sails around if there were we would hail another ship and ask if they have a doctor. The master has a fever I suspect his leg is going septic though I have not seen it.

Remarks Tuesday 22nd of September 1868, 471st Day

We are still stopped with the headwind. The first mate gathered the crew and asked Has anyone performed an amputation. No was the answer. Then he asked Has anyone seen one be done. Several people raised their hands including Tobey which surprised me but all the rest had been soldiers during the war which I knew I had heard them talk about it. 

I have always been the odd one out on this ship because I was on a whaler all through the war which I sometimes feel terrible about but I signed on to a whaler and shipped out before the war started and I didn’t think much of it and then by the time we came back from the Pacific whaling grounds years later it was over. So I missed it all. Maybe I was lucky or maybe I was not I do not know.

The first mate said Is there any man who feels capable of doing one. No one said a word. I sometimes feel like I should have said something as the first mate then said Then I will do it and the boatsteerers will assist me. I do not know why he chose us and not David as the cook or John as the carpenter or even the second or third mates but Alfred had at least seen it done and Antonio has a good steady hand so maybe the three of us are fine choices of a bad lot.

Alfred asked Will it happen today and the first mate said No we will wait one more day and pray that we see another ship with a doctor. But this is a small hope.

I asked Tobey what it is like and he said You get him as drunk as he’s ever been and then some and then you give him some cloth to bite on so he doesn’t bite off his own tongue and then you hold him down so he doesn’t try to run away or kick and then you feel happier than you’ve ever felt in your life that it’s him and not you.

I think well 

O who cares what I think.

Chapter Text

Monday July 16, 2057

It is not yet the hottest day of the summer, which is what makes the heat so unbearable. Marcus at work is tempted to ask Joe if they can all take their shirts off, though he knows that Joe will refuse. It’d be plenty historically accurate, except for his coworker Jules’s tattoos, one on each freckled arm: red and blue waving balloon men, like you’d see in front of a furniture store, only instead of advertising a sale, one of them says KILL, and the other says YOURSELF. Flexing his skinny arm, where a sailor’s mermaid tattoo would dance, makes his balloon men wiggle. A condition of Jules being hired, which Joe enforces exactingly, is that the stupid tattoos be covered at all times. And the museum wouldn’t like their staff all wandering around shirtless, no matter if the temperature is climbing hand over hand into the triple digits. It’s the kind of thing that people get used to— no getting out of work for a whole summer when enduring this is your summer job.

At least there are no more school tours— only the very rare summer camp. School tours in this heat would be awful, since no one can leave. The regular summer tourists, looking at the time slots reserved on their tickets, and then looking at the temperature on their phones, and then looking at the fact that the tour claims to run an hour, usually decide that their money has gone to waste, and that they’ll suffer the hottest part of the day in the climate controlled museum. So from noon to about three, only one group’s worth of people comes by, and the tour leads shuffle them down into the marginally cooler (though disgustingly humid) underbelly of the ship before anyone dies of heatstroke.

In the morning, Joe helped everyone string out a sail between the lower spars of two of the masts, to make an impromptu tent cover. This, combined with the usual emptiness of the mast, is absurd looking, but it at least keeps some of the blistering sun off the deck, and provides tan, dappled shade for the staff when they stand beneath it. They took one of their empty prop barrels and filled it with water, and they dunk their torsos in as far as far as they can reach, soaking their costumes and emerging like wet dogs, shaking their strings of sodden hair and spraying water everywhere. It’s not enough.

At lunchtime, Marcus checks his phone and discovers that he has messages, though they’re not from Bryanne, who is coming home today. They’re all city emergency alerts about the heat, begging people to sparingly use electricity, to go to their basements rather than use their air conditioners, to turn off all the lights in their house, to not run their ovens or microwaves, to turn off their computers and unplug everything that can be unplugged. And to stay indoors and drink lots of water. There’s nothing Marcus can do except for that last one— he drinks it down by the gallon. When the Dels lemonade pushcart comes by, Joe buys some for all of the staff, and they sit in a circle beneath the strung up sail and eat the frozen treat, swirling it around in their cups and foregoing straws or spoons, joking about the vitamin C. It melts down into juice before any of them are even halfway through.

When the tours end for the day, it’s usually incumbent on the staff to do at least a cursory cleanup of the ship. But Joe sends everybody home right away, except for Marcus, who pleads that he has to bike home, and would rather wait until the sun goes down. He clambers up the mast, to take advantage of the cool(er) breeze and watch for Bryanne to come home.

When he gets up there, he doesn’t immediately turn towards the river, but instead gives his usual greeting to the scarecrow Tobey, and looks around, at the city behind him and across the river. The sun is hitting what looks like every windowpane in the city, too bright to look at directly, burning his eyes. He shields his brow with his hand and stares into the light. 

He stands up there for a long time. The glinting of light on glass and the glinting of light on water may as well be the same, and the brightness of the scene overwhelms his vision, so that it’s no longer clear what he’s looking at, just a chaotic field of light with specks of black color, the hard shadows of the sides of houses that don’t catch the western-sun, though it’s still high overhead. The heat feels cleaner up high and in this bright light. In the shade, he expects relief and is disappointed when there is none. Up here, the air itself is an autoclave, purifying.

He’s dizzy.

Below him, someone is yelling something incoherent. He’s not sure what it is. It’s his name.

“Amos! Amos Cudjoe!”

He looks down at his feet, down at the person standing below, yelling.

“I thought that would get your attention.”

It takes him a moment to place who the specter or intruder is. Broad shouldered and squinting up at him, with blonde hair that curls in a wild mane around her shoulders. She’s wearing a bright blue baseball cap and polo shirt embroidered with the logo of Bryanne’s tour company. That detail makes it all fall into place— this is Atlas. He recognizes her now, and something of the real world clicks back into place..

“What are you doing here?” he yells down. “You’re not supposed to be back until—”

“We’re back,” she says, and doesn’t answer the question.

Marcus bumps past Tobey and squeezes back down the mast, clambering ungainly. Of all the things he does on the ship, he’s least used to this having an audience, and he’s sure he’s making a fool out of himself. But he lands safely on two feet and looks at Atlas, who has gone over to lean on the rail. She’s looking down at her own boat, which still has the harpoon stuck in it.

“Why are you back so early?” Marcus asks.

“We left the bay early,” she says. “I figured I’d let you know, do Bee a solid, since she’ll just be mad at you if she finds you up here instead of at home.”

“Bee?” he asks.

“Just go,” Atlas says, waving her hand. “And maybe take off that costume before you do.”

“I don’t have anything else to wear.” 

Atlas looks down at herself, and tugs on the hem of her polo shirt, as if she’s going to offer to trade, but then decides against it.

“Just go,” she says again.

Marcus starts off, then he turns back towards her. “Hey— are you going to be alright? In the heat? I assume you don’t have AC in there.” He nods towards her boat.

“I’m fine,” Atlas says. “If it gets too bad, I’ll just head out for a couple days.”

“Right. Okay.”

It’s not like there’s anything he can do for her, even if the answer is no, so he’s not sure why he even bothered to ask. One dubiously good turn deserves another, he guesses. 

He bikes home, sweat soaking through his shirt even more than it already was. With the heat, there are very few other vehicles on the roads, and no pedestrians. It’s eerily quiet, like the whole city has been abandoned. Marcus sails down the middle of the road, figuring that going slowly won’t save him anything in the long run, and whizzes through intersections, glancing at the cross street to make sure he won’t get hit, and not bothering to wait for the lights. It wouldn’t have mattered if he did; the one time he happens to glance up at one, he discovers that it’s out, and part of the strange silence that has been filling his ears is the lack of electric hum: no rattling air conditioners, no buzzing wires, no TVs, no radios. No birds, no crickets either; it’s too hot for them to sing. Dead world.

He makes it back to his house, chains his bike up, and stares up at the sagging balcony. Bryanne isn’t out there, though in this heat she should be. Maybe Atlas was wrong, and she didn’t go home.

He heads upstairs and hears her. She’s in the shower. A trail of discarded clothing leads between the front door of their apartment and the bathroom: shirt, shoes, bra, shorts, underwear, one sock, two. The bathroom door is open, and Marcus figures that’s enough of an invitation to step inside. He heeds Atlas’s warning and strips his own clothes off first, before Bryanne can see his costume.

The water still works at least, and she’s running it as cold as it can go. She has her face tilted back into the stream of water, letting it fill her open mouth and drip out the sides, air coming up from her lungs and pushing it out in spurts as she breathes in through her nose and out through her mouth. 

She stiffens when he pulls back the shower curtain and slips in behind her, but she doesn’t say anything, and neither does he. She shuffles to push him into the stream of water so that she’s behind him, and she presses her forehead to his back, between his shoulder blades and his neck.

The cold water sings like electricity on his skin— he has a sunburn. He hadn’t noticed. But he’s been feeling like a ghost inside his own skin recently, so that’s not very surprising. 

They’re standing stock still in the shower, Bryanne with her arms wrapped around his waist so tightly that he can’t breathe very easily. He doesn’t mind, and he doesn’t say anything. He could ask her what happened, why the Thylacine came back to port early, why she’s so upset.

The tiny sliver of a window above the shower, the only light in the bathroom with the power out, faces east, and so as the sun moves further westward, the light in the room dims, rendering them both indistinct. The two of them could be anyone: Marcus and Bryanne, Amos and You , Adam and Eve. 

The water is condensing on the walls, forming rivulets and trails that snake down the shiny white paint and carve stripes on the mirror. They stand in the water until the clog in the plumbing somewhere deep down in the house’s basement backs up, and they keep standing there until the water rises and rises, around their feet, around their ankles, around their calves, until one stray movement of Marcus’s leg sends a wave cresting over the bathtub’s edge, spilling out onto the floor.

“Oh— fuck!” he says, coming to his senses. He steps out, dropping the water level enough to stop their whole bathroom from flooding. Bryanne doesn’t react as he turns off the faucet and pulls their towels from the rack over the door and drops them onto the floor to absorb some of the tidal wave’s remains.

Bryanne seems unable to move, standing there dripping. Even when Marcus holds out a fresh towel to her, she doesn’t turn towards him— she’s lost in her own world, looking down at the water sloshing around her calves. Marcus gives up on holding the towel out to her. He hangs it on the door and picks up all the wet laundry to go put it away.

The heat hasn’t broken at all in the time that they were in the shower, but the cold shower helped. He puts on shorts, and opens the balcony door, propping it open. With the sun well past its peak, it’s better to be outside than inside, where the heat gets trapped. The blackout probably won’t end until both electrical demand goes down (night, and fewer air conditioners running) and the wind picks up (for the windfarms offshore). He doesn’t expect sleeping in their bedroom to be feasible. He gets their battered, wheezing old air mattress out of the closet and pulls it out onto the balcony to inflate with his bike pump. It barely fits. The area between the splintered wooden railing with its chipped lead paint, and the wall of the house is not quite large enough, so the end of it squeezes through the open door, a quarter of its length ending up in the living room. 

He hears Bryanne finally get out of the shower as the bathroom drain gurgles, and he sees her through the open door, walking naked through the house and leaving a trail of wet footprints on the old tan carpet in the living room. She goes into the bedroom and leans on the windowsill, sticking her head outside and vaping for a while. Marcus finishes setting up the bed, goes in the kitchen and pulls out the half gallon of ice cream that’s going to melt in the unpowered freezer if they don’t eat it. Not much of a dinner, but better than letting it go to waste. He takes it out to the balcony with two spoons, and waits for Bryanne to join him, which she does several minutes later.

They sit on the air mattress, trying to preserve some space between them so that whatever snatches of breeze pass through the open air can get through and cool them. It shifts beneath them, rocking like a boat on a still sea. They pass the tub of strawberry ice cream back and forth until it’s too melted to be tolerable, and when Bryanne gets up to throw it away, the whole balcony shifts beneath her feet, the timbers creaking. When she comes back, she lays down flat on her back and stares up at the darkening blue sky.

Finally, Marcus has to ask, “Did something happen while you were out on your tour?”

“Yes,” she says, and throws her arm over her eyes.

“Is everyone alright?”

“Fine.”

He runs through the possibilities of what might have happened— Bryanne doesn’t like to complain about the bad behavior of passengers on the boat, but he can only imagine that it was something that one of them did— terrorizing the staff enough to force the ship to turn around and return to port early. Emotions tend to run high when people don’t see the whales they’re paying to see. But if she doesn’t want to tell him about it, he won’t press. “I’m sure you’ll see a whale eventually,” he says.

She says nothing, and they sit in silence for a long time. Marcus thinks about getting his computer and working on his Ph.D. program application, but decides against it. Instead, he reaches behind himself into the house and grabs the little bucket of tools that sits on the bookshelf, finds the pocket knife, and idly starts carving into the balcony’s balusters, flaking the lead paint onto the ground like so many snowflakes. He forms the rough shape of a whale, rounding the body and poking the tail out. He’s careful not to carve all the way through the railing, and makes the second shape of another one right below, one following another up the pole. The wood is very soft, eaten by the weather for probably more than a hundred years, but that doesn’t make it easy to carve. It chips apart, and so the forms of his whales are jagged and rough, the holes he tries to stab for eyes disappearing into the formless cracks that permeate the wood.

He thinks that Bryanne has fallen asleep behind him, for how quiet she is, but when he’s onto his third whale, he glances behind himself and finds her eyes open, and her vape in her mouth, staring up at the sky, which is by now growing dark enough that they can see the stars. With night rushing on, the breeze has picked up, and the temperature has dropped enough that it’s tolerable to exist in his own skin, though sweat is still clinging to him.

“Your uncle called me last night,” Marcus says.

“He called you? Why?”

“Your mom gave him my number. He said he wasn’t ever sure if you weren’t picking up the phone because you were ignoring him, or because you were out.”

“He knows my schedule.”

“He says he didn’t.”

She twists around so that she’s looking out the side of the railing, down the street, rather than at Marcus. 

“He said that he needed to talk to you, because he found someone who’s looking for a first mate, and would love to talk to you, since he’s vouching for you.”

“Who?”

“Someone he used to know from the Navy, I guess,” Marcus says. “Friend of a friend. He told me his name— Aaron or Jared Mitchell or something. He was in his car— I couldn’t hear him very well.”

Bryanne makes a noise that doesn’t mean anything.

“Anyway, I told him I’d let you know. I wrote down the guy’s phone number— you should call him. It seems like it’s a good job. It’d pay better than you’re getting right now.”

“I’m not going to quit my job,” Bryanne says.

“Why not?” Marcus asks. “It doesn’t sound like it’s going well.”

She responds with reluctance. “What kind of ship is it?”

“Tanker,” he says. “I think.”

“I’m not fucking working on an oil tanker,” she says, sitting upright at last. She’s actually angry, and she scowls at him. “Which is why I haven’t been answering the phone.”

“Oh,” Marcus says. He turns back to his whales, though it’s now too dark to see what he’s doing clearly.

“Oh? What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t mean anything,” he says. “It’s your life.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she says.

“What?”

“It’s my life— no it isn’t!”

He turns to look at her, and she stands up, making the balcony sway, and Marcus on his seat on the air mattress sink to the ground. The thing never holds its air, and without her weight on it increasing the pressure, it’s half empty. In the slim space left between the balcony and the air mattress and the wall, a rectangular sliver just a few steps wide, she paces back and forth, stopping at the furthest part of the balcony and leaning on the rail, clutching it with white knuckles.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he says, trying to mollify her. “I’m sorry— I’ll drop it.”

“Tell me why you think I should take it,” she says.

“It’d be— your career,” he says. “And it pays— he said like twice what you’re getting now. And you could do it. I asked him if you had enough experience and he said yeah, of course you did at this point, and you passed all your certification tests, so—”

“So, money,” she says.

“Yeah.” He scrapes his knife across the balcony baluster again, filing down the next whale in the line, trying to shape the roundness of its head.

“That it?”

He thinks about it for a second, and then says, “It seems like it would be good to have a job that’s doing something real, not just tourist stuff.”

She leans on the railing so far that he’s genuinely concerned that she might fall over, tumble down onto the street below, or, like Tobey, leap over the side. “Can you get your head out of your ass for one second?” she asks him. “I’m not kidding. Use your brain. I thought you were supposed to be the smart one here.”

“If you don’t want to talk about it—”

“I do want to talk about it, actually,” she says. “If you want to go work on an oil rig, be my fucking guest. Or do you only want to hunt whales?”

“I don’t,” he says.

“No? You don’t want to be just like your role model, Mister Amos?”

“He’s not my role model—” Except in that he is, in the strictest sense, a role that Marcus is playing. “And it’s not like he wanted to hunt whales either— he just needed the money.”

“Yeah,” she says. “And so do I.” She stares out into the darkness, stands on her toes. The balcony, like a rowboat, sways.

“It’s a good way to advance,” he says, and he realizes he’s quoting the journal, but not Amos. It’s a jarring moment of sudden disconnection, and he wishes Amos were here on the balcony instead of him— he’s too clumsy with his words, and doesn’t know how to diffuse Bryanne’s anger. 

She’s bouncing on her toes, a habit of hers that he’s familiar with, when she’s unhappy she turns to the repetitive and physical: running, ripping apart heavy old cardboard boxes that they tend to accumulate in the closet, hauling all their garbage out to the street or their laundry down to the basement, chopping onions, hammering the legs of their falling-apart kitchen chairs back into place for the millionth time. But there’s no room for any of that here on the balcony, so she’s squeezing the wood with her fists— if she had long fingernails, she’d be getting splinters underneath them.

“I get it,” he finally says.

“Do you?”

“I do, yeah.”

“Sure.”

“Amos didn’t want to hunt whales,” he says again. “He talks in his journal all the time about how it’s evil work, and how he is afraid of whalemen going to hell for it, and—”

“But he kept doing it,” she says. “They hunted every last one of them.”

“You’ll see whales soon. They’re out there.”

“We saw the last one today,” she said. 

“You saw one?” He’s startled, but pleased. “I thought—”

“It died,” she said. “Got caught in line and starved to death.”

Marcus abandons his little vandalistic carving project, looking up at her from his seat on the ground. “I’m so sorry,” he says, genuine pain in his voice. He wants to comfort her, but she’s turned away from him.

“I bet he did go to hell,” she says savagely. “I bet we all will.”

“Bryanne—” Marcus says, and stands up, reaching for her. But as he does, the house makes a horrible groaning sound, like the timbers creaking on a stove-in and sinking ship. His sudden shift in weight and Bryanne’s bouncing on the end of the balcony tears something critical apart at last, and the balcony sways, separating itself from the house one ripping wooden joint at a time. Marcus stumbles under the sudden movement of unsteady ground, which only makes the problem worse, and he doesn’t realize what’s happening soon enough to leap for the open door and get back inside the safety of the house.

Bryanne turns around, alarmed, and tries to run inside, but she steps on the air mattress, now at a steep angle with the collapsing floor, and the whole thing slides underneath her, dragging her down to the railing, which crashes apart as soon as she hits it.

And they’re both falling, tumbling down to the ground in a shower of lead paint and worm-eaten wood, and their second floor neighbor’s grill and folding chairs as they crash through that story too, until they land on the shingled roof of the entryway porch, slide or roll down that, and come to rest on the ground, covered in dust and bruised to hell.

“Bryanne—” Marcus calls, or thinks he calls, as soon as he processes what has happened, and that he’s still alive and laying on the ground. The shock doesn’t tell him if he’s broken any bones, but his ears and head are ringing like a struck bell, and his legs are tangled in the air mattress, which wheezes its last— his carving knife hanging out of it like it’s a stuck pig.

Bryanne doesn’t say anything, but she’s able to scramble to her feet through the rubble.

Someone, distantly, is yelling. It’s their second floor neighbor, standing at the newly made hole in the wall where her balcony formerly was. Marcus lays on the ground, looking up. It’s a strange reversal of earlier in the afternoon, he thinks. Before, he was up high, and Atlas was yelling at him down below. He laughs, and doesn’t stop laughing.

“I’m calling the police!” the neighbor yells. 

What are the police going to do? Marcus wonders. You might as well call a priest.

Bryanne pulls the air mattress off Marcus’s legs, and he manages to get to his feet, nothing broken. It was a high fall, but a strangely slow one, stopping at both the second floor balcony and the first floor roof before they tumbled the last ten feet to the ground, so they never made it to punishingly high impact speeds, which saved their lives, probably. 

The grill that was on the second floor is now embedded halfway into the patio roof, its silvery lid flopping open. Rubble is strewn all over the sidewalk and street: shattered timbers and shingles. When Marcus looks up at where they used to be, it’s like he’s looking at a cross section of the house: the balcony’s fall has peeled away huge sections of the outer wall, like opening an orange, or taking the blubber off a whale. He can see the house’s ribs, the thin balloon framing of the walls, and the way the floors all have a noticeable sag to them, slumping inwards like the balcony. The neighbor is still standing at the hole in the wall in her bathroom, still yelling, though this time into her phone.

With an electric hum, the power chooses that moment to come back on, the streetlights flickering up, and the lights that had been on but not shining in their house beginning their illumination, lighting the cutaway doll’s house. The roar of a distant crowd whoops and cheers as someone’s TV resumes playing a soccer match, the Brazilian announcer crowing, “GOALAÇOOOOOO! FERNANDO! GOALAÇOOOOOO!”

He’s barefoot, wearing nothing but his shorts, and Bryanne is only wearing a long tee shirt— the two of them don’t have a full outfit between them. She picks through the rubble to find her vape, and sticks it into her mouth.

The neighbor’s 911 call has summoned someone: a siren begins wailing somewhere, coming closer. Marcus, not thinking about much other than wanting to avoid an embarrassing and expensive ambulance trip to get checked out, stumbles towards his bike, still placidly chained up to the alley fence. 

“Where are you going?” Bryanne asks.

“Do you want to come?” He offers her the seat on the back of the bike, but she shakes her head, and goes back to looking up at the ruins of their house.

So Marcus heads off. The pedals of his bike dig into his bare feet, and he’s not sure where he’s going until he arrives. He’s down at the docks, and there’s the Wampanoag . It’s dark now, and the stars aren’t even visible, now that New Bedford’s lights are all back to their usual, gleaming brightness. He lets himself in to the ship, changes into the spare crew outfit they keep in the dressing room, and then climbs up into his bunk in the steerage, and falls sound asleep.

Chapter Text

Remarks Wednesday 25th of September 1868, 474th Day

Anchored off a small island I don’t know its name or even if it has one it’s not even two miles wide nothing but rocks and sand not even trees. There’s other islands like it around but they’re just as bare as this one. Only the second mate and a few others to watch the ship stayed on board the rest of us we rowed out in the boats and beached them up on the sand o it was the loneliest sight in the world. Dug a hole and laid him in it.

The whale’s jaw is his gravestone. We dug it a little into the sand and stood it up with a pile of rocks to hold it straight. In it we carved 

PAUL WILLIAMS
MASTER OF THE BARK WAMPANOAG
NEW BEDFORD
BORN 1826
DIED SEPTEMBER 23RD 1868
22 YEARS AT SEA

The first mate well he is now the master he said some words. I don’t know what he was thinking all during it he is such a hard man to understand. He is a Quaker too so anyone else who wanted to say something before we put the dirt over him they could. I didn’t have anything to say what would I have to say. 

Well when we carried his body to the island he was in our boat so I had a chance to slip my little whale figure in the cloth he was wrapped in so that got buried with him too. Maybe it’s a pagan thing to do and maybe he wouldn’t have wanted me to put it there with him but o I could not stop thinking about what he said to me. If there are no whales in heaven Well I think he would want one there with him so he doesn’t miss the sea. And if there are Well I hope when this one starts heading its way up there he grabs on as tight as he can holds the line as long as he can hold it and gets towed right along. He was a boatsteerer once. He knows how it’s done.

KJ and Charlie shovelled the dirt back in the hole and most other people gathered rocks to stack over the grave or just walked around. Me and Tobey walked together. What did he say to me o he said he was surprised I was so sad. I said It’s a shame for any man to die. Tobey asked if I would cry if the first mate— well as I said he is now the master it will be hard to think of him that way. He asked if I would cry if he died. And I said I probably would.

He told me You’re too soft on people. I wouldn’t cry for him I hate him.

Maybe I am too soft I don’t know.

He said I saw you put your little whittling in his pocket when we were rowing over. You’re always giving people little things like that. Did you write something on it.

No I said. And he said You are a liar Amos I know it. 

Well how could I prove it either way and what did it matter he was buried now. But I just said And you will have to forgive me if I am.

He said Willie laughed at what you wrote on my tooth that time. He said I asked him what it said and why he was laughing and he told me.

I didn’t want to fight about it with Tobey. I just said Then sand it down and have Willie carve something else there. Or put another picture on the back yourself.

He didn’t say anything after that. 

It was windy and the whole sky was grey with low clouds I thought it might start storming before we got back to the ship but it didn’t. When we heard the call to come back and board the boats to leave this place I saw the grave at the top of the hill of sand that makes up this little island. I thought that the next storm that comes through here this will all be gone. Or even if it lasts that out all I can imagine is the sea rising up over this place covering it up drowning it all. And the whales swim over top of it and we look up at them from below. 

Remarks Thursday 26th of September 1868, 475th Day

Well now Master Paul is buried and we are sailing again we all have to go about the business of the ship. The master picked Alfred of the three of us boatsteerers to be third mate and KJ is a boatsteerer now rather than just a foremast hand. Tobey is more burned by this than I am he said that I should have been third mate. Well I don’t know. It isn’t up to me. I shouldn’t have told Tobey what Master Paul said to me that day. He must not have said what he did meaning to leave instructions for who would be promoted to what position because I do not think he would have been disobeyed even after he died.

The third mate asked me to show him how to read the barometer and what it meant. He had never done it before. I’m happy to help.

Remarks Friday 27th of September 1868, 476th Day

Heading ENE. Sunny early part of the day rain at noon cloudy until nightfall.

I eat with the foremast hands even though I have a place in the main cabin at the table. I just don’t like to be much in there. Master Paul’s wife’s photograph is still hung up above the table we put it there so that he could look at it while we were cutting. I just don’t like to be in there anymore.

Tobey said I should be happy to not be the one dying and maybe I should be grateful to the Lord for my good luck but you know I’ve never been able to watch a man in pain and not wish there was something I could do for him some way I could take it on for myself.

Remarks Saturday 28th of September 1868, 477th Day

Heading NE fine breeze. Rain midday clear by evening.

Antonio called me into the steerage earlier while no one else was there which I think was something of a miracle it is tight quarters. He said Amos Well I don’t know what to say to you but you are a sorry son of a bitch. Which may be true I am and I had nothing I could say to him aside from that. So I just said Well I am homesick and I think I have a touch of the scurvy. He said Open your mouth and he looked at my teeth and he said You don’t have scurvy. Well how would he know.

But he opened up his trunk and in there was the bottle of fine whiskey that came from Master Paul’s room that we had given him to drink. There was about half of it left and he said Let’s not let it go to waste.

It made me feel sick more than it made me feel happy but we passed that bottle back and forth until we had toasted to all there was to toast to. To Master Paul and the whales and all us poor devils here out on the ocean and to everyone else back home too. 

Antonio said I talked less about You these days and he asked me if I’ve given up on marrying You. I said no or I hope I haven’t given up but I think I only recently realized how long three more years is going to be. And every time I mention You Tobey says If she wanted to marry you and be faithful to you she would have done it before you left.

So I try to think about You less because even if Tobey is angry and he doesn’t know You there have been plenty of other men like me and God knows they have been as hopeful and faithful as I am. But of faith and hope and charity the greatest of the three is the third and I do not know my dear…

Antonio asked what I would do if You get married to someone else while I’m away. I said I don’t know. He asked if I’d forgive You and I said yes of course but I don’t know if I’d forgive myself for leaving. And would I find someone else to marry or what would I do with myself afterwards? Well I said I’d probably go back whaling until my luck runs out or the whales do. He laughed at me and raised the bottle to me and to You and to us until the end of all our greasy luck.

We were still drinking when KJ came in and he looked at the both of us and if he had asked for a drink o no man could have said no to passing him the bottle but instead he said Where did you get that and of course there is no way for that question to end in anything but trouble. Antonio said From my dear mother who loves me. And I said It’s mine. And KJ left.

When I was on watch later at night I tossed the rest of the bottle over the side. It’s a sin to waste but it belonged to Master Paul anyway. Let him enjoy the rest of it.

Remarks Sunday 29th of September 1868, 478th Day

Heading ENE. Light rain early but clear skies afterwards. Fair winds which make the journey much more pleasant.

The master said that there had been accusations of theft on board and he wanted to get to the bottom of it so he made everyone turn out their trunks and show him all they had. It must just have been an excuse to demonstrate his command or something like that because if there had been trouble in the crew about stealing from each other o none of us would have heard the end of it. If Antonio and I with our bottle provided that excuse to go through then I’m sorry for bringing it on everyone else.

There was plenty that he disapproved of in all the trunks but I was glad I had got rid of our bottle. Last thing Antonio and I need is trouble. What did KJ think he was going to gain or maybe he just doesn’t like me much I don’t know.

Tobey’s dominoes would have been something the master didn’t approve of he thinks gambling should be forbidden but Tobey luckily hadn’t carved the faces on all them yet just had been carving down the blanks. The master came to Tobey’s trunk and paid extra attention to it because of the trouble with the eggs last year. When he saw the dominoes he said What are these and Tobey took up all his ivories and he stuck them up in between his lips and his gums like little tombstones and clacked them together and said Well sir I’m making myself a new set of teeth. Or he tried to say so anyway. It was very funny but the master didn’t laugh he hates Tobey and he seemed ready to knock the teeth out of his mouth. I will have to be very careful I do not want any trouble for Tobey or myself but o three more years is a long time!

Remarks Monday 30th of September 1868, 479th Day

Winds from the SSE. Dull and cloudy all day but at least no bad weather.

Tobey is still angry about being searched yesterday and furthermore he told me that he’s out of tobacco which means that every time he feels the itch to light up a pipe he gets angrier. It’s a dangerous state of affairs so I will have to give him some of mine and tell him to not smoke it too fast. I will tell him to keep his hands busy so he thinks about it less it’s the kind of thing my mother used to say to me when I had something on my mind. I don’t know what good it ever did me since all I do is think even when I have my hands busy whittling or fixing sails or anything like that. Even when we’re rowing after a whale I have too much in my head. 

But I don’t know what I’ll do when I run out of tobacco. I don’t smoke too often I save it for just this reason. But it is a real comfort and when it’s gone it’s like you’re being smoked up from the inside to miss it. Another man would buy some more from the slop chest but Tobey can lean on me and I don’t mind him doing so. I’d rather him keep as much of his lay as he can since he’ll be glad to earn some money and if I can stop him from gambling away his clothes to try to get some more I’ll do that. 

If we end up at the Sandwich Isles there’s bound to be a place I can buy more tobacco for less than what the master charges on board. But all ports are made to trap sailors so I don’t know. And the master doesn’t seem inclined to go to port any time soon since we have whales to catch.

It is now 9 ½ P.M. When I gave Tobey the tobacco he looked at me very funny and he said Amos I think you are beginning to scare me. I asked him why he said that and he said Last man I knew who started giving away all his valuables and worldly goods well he went off and hanged himself not even a week after. 

This surprised me more than anything else I’ve heard in my life and well that is quite a surprise because I came back from my last voyage and heard about two years of news in one day. O I have been miserable but every whaleman gets this way at some point in the voyage I think. Some of them desert but I keep my lay fixed right in my mind and you don’t get your pay if you desert either to some tropical port or Hell. 

So I said And you think I’m likely to hang myself? He said No I think you’d jump into the ocean. I said Well you know I can swim so that would be a very stupid way to try to do it. I would just be swimming there in the water like a seagull until a shark got me and I don’t like the idea of that. And he said Yes hanging would be easier but the master would charge for the rope. 

Tobey is funny he does make me laugh. 

I asked him why he said all that and he said that he saw me tossing away my bottle overside (it was Master Paul’s but I didn’t say that) and I give half my meals to whoever wants it and I am here giving him enough tobacco to last two or three months. Four if he’s careful.

I said Well faith hope and charity. What is any good to other people but the third. Probably it’s good for me too.

Tobey said You don’t even check the barometer any more.

That is a silly thing for him to say since he knows very well why I don’t. But I said Alright I’ll check it right now if it will make you happy. He said Well I don’t care. But it is nice that he does I have said many times it is good to have a brother on this ship.

Barometer 30.1.

Chapter Text

Wednesday July 18, 2057

“Yes, Mom, I’m fine,” Bryanne says into the phone for the hundredth time. She’s sitting on the deck of the Thylacine , sweating in the interminable heat. “No, I definitely don’t need to bother you with it. Please. Mike is letting me stay at work— it’s fine. I’m there most of the time anyway. Yeah, he’s honestly getting the better end of the deal, because if I’m sitting around here doing nothing, I’ll be bored out of my mind. So he’s going to get free maintenance work out of me. No, I’m not going to tell him to pay me overtime. He’d kick me out. I said— No, Mom, seriously, I don’t need to stay with you.”

The conversation is going in circles, and she’s more than tempted to throw her phone overboard. She supposes that she was lucky that she was able to find it in the rubble; Marcus’s never turned up. Maybe it’s still in the house, which they have been forbidden (by the fire department) to enter, even to get their stuff. It’s annoying, and she’s not sure how the situation is going to resolve. What she should do is start looking for a new lease for her and Marcus, but the idea of doing so makes her feel a deep-seated resentment that she can’t shake. 

It’s not like Marcus did anything wrong, at least that she can name, but the gulf between them shows no signs of repairing itself any time soon. She hasn’t spoken to him since he biked away, though she knows where he is: Atlas reported that she saw him at work. He’s living on the Wampanoag , just like she is on the Thylacine , though his living conditions must be much worse than hers. She’s not even sure if he got permission to move himself on board— he probably didn’t. But his boss, Joe, seems to turn a blind eye to him lurking around there after hours, so she figures as long as Marcus is careful, no one will find out for a while that he’s sleeping in the steerage. She should find a new apartment for both of them; he’s certainly not going to do it. 

Or she should call his mother, and get her to put him up somewhere, so that he’s not functionally homeless and sleeping at his job. His parents have plenty of money— they helped out with rent when Bryanne was short on cash several times. But snitching to Marcus’s parents that their son is going through some kind of mental break that makes him want to pretend to be a 19th century sailor all the time seems like a low blow, even for her. Even though they argued— or whatever it was that passed between them— she doesn’t have any desire to hurt him. She even wants to see him again, on the condition that he gets his life together. Probably she should sit down with him and tell him so in as many words, but she can’t stand the idea. He either understands what his problem is, or he’s beyond anything she can say.

“You should call your uncle,” her mother says over the phone. “He says there’s a good spot available for you. Especially if you don’t have a lease right now, a long term job like that—”

“I can’t really think about this right now, Mom,” she says. “I have to at least work the rest of the season with Mike.”

She can hear her mother pursing her lips— it’s an expression as familiar on her mother’s face as it is on her own.

“I really can’t believe I had to find out all of this from your brother, instead of you telling me,” her mom says. “What were you thinking he’d help you with?”

“I wasn’t asking for help,” she says. “I just wanted to talk.”

“So, you’ll talk to your brother, but not your mother. I see how it is.”

“I’m talking to you right now,” she says, but this just makes her mother huffy.

“Well, if you decide you want to stop being homeless, you know my door is always open to you. But I can’t make you! I’m only your mother, I suppose, and that’s never been enough—”

“Yeah, Mom, I’ve gotta run,” Bryanne says. “Mike is calling me.”

Mike is absolutely not calling her, but she can see Atlas walking up the dock towards her, bearing a reusable grocery bag.

“Please call me later,” her mom says, and Bryanne mumbles her assent and then hangs up with relief.

Bryanne stands up when Atlas calls, “Hey, Bee!” and holds up the grocery bag like a weightlifter. “Brought you something!”

“You really didn’t have to,” Bryanne says. “I was just planning on stealing kitchen leftovers. There’s plenty of them.”

Atlas grins and comes on board. “Oh, I know. Catch—”

She tosses the bag to Bryanne, who dodges out of the way, thinking it’d be heavy, but it’s actually quite light, and falls to the ground with a plop rather than a clunk. Bryanne opens it, and discovers that it’s full of her clothes— some of her favorite shirts and her two best pairs of shorts.

“What the fuck?” she asks.

“Emergency preparedness course I took says that if you have to leave your house in a hurry, grab your dirty laundry bin, since by definition, it has the clothes you wear in it. I took the liberty, since you seemed like you were going to keep obeying that caution tape all over your front door.”

“You broke into my apartment?” She doesn’t need to ask how Atlas knew where she lived— the address was in the news.

“It’s not really yours anymore. I think the city took it.”

“It’s not structurally sound,” Bryanne says. But despite her immediate gruffness, she can’t help but be grateful for the clothes. The emergency outfits she keeps on board the Thylacine in case her usual work clothes get damaged or too dirty to wear are not her favorites, and are uncomfortable and too warm for the season. 

“I wasn’t that worried,” Atlas says. “I think it did most of the collapsing it was going to.”

“You say that. But that’s what gets people killed. Things can always get worse.”

“Bee, I love how cynical you are.”

“Realistic.”

“Mmm.” Atlas cocks her head. “I gave Marcus his share of dirty laundry, too, but he seems happy as a clam wearing his costume. Something wrong with that man.”

“I hope he doesn’t have a concussion.”

“He sounded fine. But I’ll keep an eye on him, if you’re worried. Maybe you should ask Mike if he can stay with you here.”

Bryanne tosses the bag of laundry towards the stairs down to the Thylacine ’s cabins. “I’m not worried.”

“At all?”

“I think we might have broken up.”

“That is a lot of indeterminacy,” she says. “Did you break up or did you not?”

“I told him to go to hell.”

Atlas laughs. “Sure.”

“And he told me to quit my job here and move out, essentially. But we didn’t get to finish yelling at each other before the house fell down on us.”

“Will you?”

Bryanne goes to lean over the rail. “I don’t know. Maybe. I should stick out the season, at least.”

“Are you saying that because you actually want to stick out the season, or because Mike is letting you live here?”

“I could go stay at my mom’s if I had to.”

“There’s a reason I’m not staying with my parents,” Atlas says, faux scandalized. “You’re what, twenty-seven?”

“Eight.”

“Yeah, no, I wouldn’t go back to your mom’s house if I was you, either.”

“You think I should quit?”

Atlas leans on her elbows, facing the opposite direction from Bryanne, but speaking directly to her. “I’m not sticking out the season,” she says.

“Oh— fuck you!” Bryanne says, instantly angry. “Do you know how much of a pain it is for the mates to have to give your lectures and stuff? It’s not my fucking job!”

Atlas holds up her hands. “Hey, you could quit, too. You’re right that it shouldn’t be your problem. Don’t let it be.”

“Mike wouldn’t be able to run tours without three mates,” she says. “I’m not the kind of person who can just run off whenever I don’t feel like sticking around and doing work.”

“So mean to me,” Atlas says dryly.

They fall silent for a minute.

“You and Marcus would get along,” Bryanne says. “You know, what we fought about was him telling me to take a job on an oil tanker.”

“And you said no, I assume.”

“I don’t particularly want to say fuck it, get my paycheck, and watch the world burn,” Bryanne says. “Like you said to me once, I’ve got my conscience in the right order.”

“It’s not really your problem,” Atlas says. She waves her hand. “It was fucked before you got here, and it’ll still be fucked after.”

Bryanne scowls. “Don’t you have nightmares about that whale?”

“I don’t dream,” Atlas says. “Never have.”

She should have expected that answer, but is nevertheless frustrated by it. “But you can just watch it and say, oh, I don’t care, I’ll let it happen.”

“Bee, I’m living in my boat. I’m not causing any problems for anybody,” Atlas says. “I don’t know what you think I can do about it. Atone for my parents’ sins?” She shrugs.

“I don’t know.”

They’re both quiet. “Here’s something you’ll be happy to hear,” Atlas says.

“What?” Bryanne can’t get any excitement into her voice, and Atlas’s comment was wry, anyway.

“My grandmother’s going to kick it,” Atlas says. “End of the line.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not happy to hear that someone who really was responsible for the state of the world is about to die?”

“Is she going to hell?” Bryanne asks.

“You tell me,” Atlas says.

She shakes her head, and Atlas leans her arm on Bryanne’s shoulder. 

“Anyway, that’s why I’m going,” Atlas says. “My parents want me there until she does die, and then the funeral, and whatever. So I’m off, sooner rather than later.”

“You break the news to Mike— I’m not going to run interference for you.”

“Already have,” Atlas says. “That’s part of why I hiked all the way over here. I stopped in the office before I came to see you.”

“And what did he have to say to it?” Bryanne looks at her carefully. “You seem pretty cheerful for someone who just got yelled at.”

“He just waved me out of the office,” she says. “I think he was busy. He didn’t seem to care.”

Bryanne purses her lips. “He should care.”

“Well, you talk to him about it. Maybe he has an alternate lined up, or something.”

“He definitely doesn’t. Our previous naturalist can’t come back— doctor’s orders to actually stay retired.”

Atlas shrugs.

“Are you leaving right away?”

“No,” she says. “I can probably do one or two more weeks. But it won’t be the rest of the summer and fall. As soon as the end is near, I’ll have to drop everything, borrow a car, get down there.”

“You won’t sail down?”

“Too slow.” She tugs on Bryanne’s ponytail, which makes her slap her hand away. “Hey— you can feel free to borrow my boat while I’m gone. Go out and have a nice time on the water when you’re not working.”

“What for?”

“What do you mean, ‘what for?’” Atlas asks. “Has anyone ever needed a reason to go sailing?”

“Yes,” Bryanne says.

“I think you’re the first sailor I’ve ever met who doesn’t actually like the sea,” Atlas says.

“I like the sea,” Bryanne protests. “I just…”

Atlas looks at her tenderly. “Hey— it’s a sailboat,” she says. “It’s quieter than this beast.” She slaps the Thylacine ’s rail. “I see whales out there all the time. They don’t get scared away from me with the prop noise.”

“I don’t think there are any left.”

“There’s plenty of humpbacks.”

“You know what I mean,” Bryanne says.

“I haven’t seen any scientist say that one was the last one. There’s some out there still, if you want to go look for them.”

“They don’t say that the species is extinct until fifty years after the last one’s seen,” Bryanne says. “They probably won’t even declare it during my lifetime.”

“Come on. You know there’s more out there.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Take me up on the offer,” Atlas says. “I’m told that performing acts of charity is good for my soul.”

“I’m not a charity case,” Bryanne says.

“You’re homeless, aren’t you?”

Bryanne shakes her head and walks off.

Bryanne thinks about going to find Marcus before her next tour departs, and she even heads down to the Wampanoag on Thursday to catch a glimpse of him. But she goes during his tour hours, so that she has a convenient excuse at hand not to talk to him, if she decides that she doesn’t want to.

She doesn’t. She sees him on the deck, gesturing to the tryworks and leading around a big family group in shirts that say WARREN FAMILY REUNION on them, and decides it’s best not to try to interrupt, even though she could find him during his lunch break, or when the tour group moves on to the next step. He sees her standing on the dock, and their eyes meet, his widening in an expression of surprise, like he’s seen a ghost. He raises his arm in a silent wave, and she nods back, but neither of them call out to each other. She doesn’t stick around, pretending that she has some errand to run further away in town.

It’s strange to not talk to Marcus, to not even text him. She is used to him, in the way that people who have been living together entwine their lives, every thought circling back around to the other eventually. It’s hard, in that circumstance, to evaluate if she loves him, or if she is just accustomed to him. The pleasure of going out of her way to see him that she felt when they first started dating has faded over time into a simple knowledge that he would be there— a sure thing waiting for her every time she stepped back on shore. There is a relief and comfort in that, but she isn’t sure it is the same thing as love. Does she feel free without him, or does she feel lost? The difference is hard to calculate.

Regardless, it’s a relief when Friday morning comes, and the Thylacine gathers her passengers up to go. There’s fewer than there usually are, about half of the cabins empty. Bryanne checks the passenger list again and again as she stands at the gangway and checks in the small group of people who board— are there really this few? The gaggle of them gathered down at the dock looks forlorn, even though by the time boarding time rolls around it’s blindingly bright outside. The passengers’ shadows stand out stark on the ground, an extra set of immaterial forms boarding the ship with them. 

One of the passengers, a woman whose husband has walked on ahead without paying Bryanne any attention at all, says to Bryanne as she gets on board, “I thought about not coming, since I saw the news, but we had already booked everything, and it would have cost us more to cancel than just to go.”

“Well, I’m glad you came,” Bryanne says. “I’m not sure I know what news you’re referring to.”

“You saw that dead whale,” the woman says.

“Yes.”

“They’re saying that was the last one in the area.”

“I doubt it,” Bryanne says. “They have different migration patterns, and they have plenty of opportunity to come back into the bay. It’s a rich feeding ground for them, and ships have limited speeds there, so it’s safer for them…”

But the woman isn’t really listening. “And I saw the photos,” she says. “It looked really awful.”

At least that explains why the tour is so bereft of passengers, if there’s been some sort of shocking news article telling people that there won’t be any whales, especially one with the company’s name attached to it. It’s very bad PR. Presumably people who would book a tour with them in the first place are the type to pay attention to that kind of news.

“It was sad,” Bryanne says, and she keeps her voice as flat as she can, because thinking about the dead whale makes her want to scream. “But I’ll talk to the captain. Maybe we can take a little jaunt out to Stellwagen, to see some humpbacks.”

“That would be nice,” the woman says, and wanders off once Bryanne gives her the welcome envelope with instructions on how to get into her room.

As soon as she has a spare second, Bryanne tries to find the news article that the woman was referring to, and she does find several articles, but the moment she opens them, she’s inundated by pictures of the dead whale, and has to close them immediately. It’s not that she has a squeamishness about it, but the open, dead eye of the animal looks out at her and makes it hard for her to breathe.

When they cast off and pull out of New Bedford’s docks, it’s high tide, the water sloshing against the wooden supports of the piers, pushing against the stone walls that hold the sea back from the cobblestone streets of the historic district. 

During storms, this whole area tends to flood, the river overflowing its banks and spilling into the arteries of civilization: roads and basements and storm drains. She knows that in her lifetime, the sea level has risen almost two feet. Civil works project after civil works project has tried to shore up the coastline, to keep the beaches from sliding down beneath the waves, to keep the waves from sliding up over the cities on the coast. 

She pictures the future, the Thylacine like a doomed Noah’s ark, bobbing along the top of the ocean, the sail screaming and clacking in the wind like the voices of a thousand seagulls, riding a tidal wave that sweeps across the city. There goes her apartment, underwater. There goes the library. There goes the museum. The Wampanoag is tied down too tightly to the dock; when the water rises, it strains against its ties but can’t escape them, and the water crushes it, too. Atlas, on the deck of the Whole Wide World, casts off with a grin and a holler: “This place has gone to the dogs, hasn’t it?” And she bobs away over the top of the city, the water swallowing everything. 

Bryanne looks down into the water, picturing her daydream, and hoping at least in this waking nightmare, she’ll see a whale down below, taking its place in the ocean-sky above New Bedford. But the only thing she can imagine, swimming their cold and silent way through the streets, twisting and turning between the buildings, are sharks.

She shakes her head to clear it, and turns back towards the centerline of the boat, real and chugging along. The propeller throws up a churn of white foam behind them, and she watches that for a while— it’s hypnotic—  until she goes to find Mike at the helm.

Aside from checking in when she first got on board, this is the first time she’s spoken with him in days, since the night she called him and asked if she had permission to sleep on board. He’s looking ahead, and nods at her as she comes in. He has a grim look on his face, and she’s not sure what it means.

“Did we have a big group cancel, or something?” Bryanne asks, holding up their half-empty passenger list.

“Lots of small groups,” he says. “But I think even before that, we were having trouble booking full.”

“Ah.”

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” Mike says, which is never a good thing to hear.

“About what?”

“Financials,” he says.

She’s silent, and waits for him to continue.

“We’re probably going to end the tour season early,” he says. “If we can’t figure out a way to get revenue back up, we’re going to have to start cutting costs.”

Bryanne says nothing, just goes over to look at the whale sightings list on the wall, then at the logbook on the table. She’s not sure what she’s looking for, only that she has to put her eyes somewhere, and looking at the log and the instruments at least feels like something that she should be doing.

“It won’t be for a while,” Mike says. “And it isn’t my decision. I’m pushing to extend it for as long as possible, because giving refunds will dig us deeper into the hole, but I don’t know how much I can push for. We might get through August, but we’re not getting through October.”

“I understand,” Bryanne says.

“I know that this is a problem for you,” he says. “Especially because of your house—”

“It’s fine.” She cuts him off. “Don’t worry about me. I have it under control.”

He glances at her sidelong— he doesn’t believe her, but he respects her enough not to press the issue. “Alright.” 

“I figured this might be the case,” she says. “Since Atlas told you she’s quitting, and you didn’t worry about it.”

“It’s one less person whose livelihood I have to worry about being responsible for wrecking.”

Bryanne snorts. “I think our local trust fund baby will be just fine.”

“I was under the impression that she was going to get cut off if she didn’t get her life together and stop running around the globe,” Mike says.

“Sure,” Bryanne says. “I’m sure someone even believes that’s the case.”

“Well, now you know.”

“Always glad to be the last one to find out,” she says dryly.

“It gives you time to find some other work,” Mike says. “I can make some calls for you, if you need a recommendation—”

“I’ll let you know.” She snaps the logbook shut and puts it back on the shelf where it belongs. “My uncle says he knows someone who’s looking for a first mate.”

“That’s good. If you do need anything—”

“We should try to get more wedding groups,” she says, abruptly changing the subject. “That’s what we should focus on in our advertising, I think. They have a harder time canceling.”

“Or an easier one, if the wedding falls through,” Mike says. “But that’s a next season problem. It’s too late to book any big groups now.”

Assuming there will be a next season— that’s the height of optimism.

Chapter Text

Remarks Sunday 22nd of November 1868, 532nd Day 

Breeze from the SSE. We have finished storing the last oil and were engaged in cleaning the ship and fixing the W boat. 

Well it has finally happened one of my shirts has gotten too threadbare to even mend anymore. I was on my hands and knees scrubbing and when I stood it caught on a nail on the deckhouse wall and the whole back ripped clean open from shoulder on down. I tried to just sew it up as I have many times but when I stuck my needle through to try to darn it and I tightened the thread it ripped right through and made a new hole or at least made the old hole bigger. I am sad as this was my most comfortable shirt but o it is true that linen gets the softest right before it is ruined.

I could take my second most worn shirt and sew them together so that there is twice as much fabric there but then I would have one fewer shirt to wear and I wouldn’t know what to do with the sleeves. I think there is no point in me delaying I will have to buy some fabric from the slop chest although it pains me as much as getting bitten by a shark would. 

Well maybe not that much. But I hate to spend money.

I keep looking at our position on the map and thinking about how long it would take to get to the Sandwich Islands and if we will go there. We are still very far south of them now. I think we will sometime but o it may not be for months. Our food though it is in a sorry state will still last us and the master has no intention of leaving whaling grounds until the whole crew gets the scurvy. None of us have it yet though and thank the Lord for that.

 Barometer 29.9.

Remarks Monday 23rd of November 1868, 533rd Day 

O I hate feeling angry. I will put this book away until I can write without wanting to throw everything over the side of the ship. O I have never in my life been this angry. I can bear being taunted or even beat with a smile on my face but I cannot forgive being robbed.

Remarks Thursday 26th of November 1868, 536th Day 

How can I even look at everyone around without getting angry I understand why men desert the ship now.

Rmarks Friday 27th of November 1868, 537th Day 

You see there are pages missing. I have tried to write down what happened clearly and every time I have needed to tear it out. What a waste. I will try again.

I went to ask about getting cloth from the slop chest to repair my shirt. I knew I would have to put the price against my lay as that is just the way things go. I have no tobacco left to trade with another fellow to get him to get fabric for me, and I have no money with me in my trunk why would I. So with my hat in my hands I asked after a yard or two of fabric and how much it would cost me.

Now I have always known that getting anything from the slop you will be charged some five or six times what it costs even in a port where people will try to take everything out of a sailor’s pockets and then some. So I thought the cost was awful when the first mate told me what it would be but I would have to pay it as a man needs clothing. But the first mate opened up the account book and he said Well Amos you had better be careful there is not much left you can borrow against your lay it looks like.

I asked him what he meant as I have been very careful to buy very little even when I loaded on board and was outfitted I took most of my trunk with me from my last voyage I did not have to pay a seventy dollar advance for that. I should have had plenty remaining. But the first mate he showed me the account book and there under my name was debt after debt I had been gathering all in the master’s handwriting months of fees and fines for the eggs Tobey took and and a fine for taking care of Tobey when he was sick even though I used no medicine from the medicine chest and harpoons I had to cut loose from a whale and the damage on the W boat’s loggerhead from when we got slightly stove though what did that have to do with me and the list went on and on o I cannot even remember what it all said. I could not make myself read it all I just stood there and shook until the first mate handed me my fabric and let me go.

The master does not even get any more of his own pay when he takes from me o why does he have to steal from me what reason does he have to hate me. I have never raised a hand against him not even said anything.

I only have a 1/75 lay. Even if our ship came home with 10000 bbls. of oil (we cannot even carry anywhere near that much) and I came home with all of my share I would still not be a rich man I would just be a whaleman who needs to find work to live. Does he want to put me in my place what place does he think he’s putting me in that I am not in already? 

O I have never in my life felt more awful. I do not know what I will do. I have not told Tobey.

Remarks Saturday 28th of November 1868, 538th Day

Warm winds from the ENE. We are still on the line looking for whales. I am trying my best to keep my hands busy and to not think of it. The strange thing is that what I keep thinking about is Tobey’s scrimshaw picture the first one he did. He has done plenty since but that one is the one I am thinking of. I should have written what he asked for on it. Or maybe I should not have. I don’t know. Tobey is a cleverer man than I am or he understands the world better or at least he understood it faster than I did. I would have been a happier man if I didn’t! 

TIS A GIFT TO BE SIMPLE! TIS A GIFT TO BE FREE!

Or that is what I would write on my own picture if I had one at hand! O I have been a free man all my life and I have been lucky for it but o

Tobey came and told me what the barometer reads since I haven’t been to check it. He can see that I am in a black mood though I still have not told him why. Barometer 29.6.

Remarks Sunday 29th of November 1868, 539th Day 

Winds from the E. Rain all day. I think the master must expect me to beg for the debt to be erased and maybe I will have to let go of my pride and do so. He is a cruel man so he might not even let it go even if I do ask him but o I don’t have much of a choice. Pride is a difficult thing to have and how much of a price can I put on my own. It would be so much easier if he had done all of this to Tobey it would be easy for me to ask for his sake. Lord help me. I do not think there is any way to make that man like me if there were I would say that I would wait until the end of the voyage without asking I could go three years and perhaps he would come to his senses and strike out the debt on his own. But he is a stubborn man and I do not think there is any way to sway him unless what he wants is for me to beg. But he may only want to see me ruined and not to see me beg!

Four years of my life and no pay.

I cannot put that much of a price on my pride I will ask him tomorrow. I am calm enough now that I can resolve to do that without feeling like I will choke on my tongue.

Remarks Monday 30th of November 1868, 540th Day 

I found the master today while he was checking the barometer and he said Come to check the barometer Amos. I said no sir I have something that I would like to ask you if I may. I was very polite and very cautious and I tried to put my anger behind me. But he knew what I was asking for I could see it in his eyes o he is a cruel man. He said What is it then. And I said Sir I think there is something wrong with the account book where there are charges against my lay. He said Is that so. I said Yes sir I saw them when I went to buy some fabric from the slop. He said I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about I have prided this ship on keeping very careful records of all the money coming in and out it is how a business is run. And I said Yes sir I know sir but there are things charged to me that I do not believe are my fault. And he said Well Amos the charges are what they are. I said Sir please reconsider what you are doing. He just gave me a long look and he said O you don’t have to check the barometer today Amos. It’s 29.5.

O he is lucky that I am not a violent man. He is lucky.

Remarks Tuesday 1st of December 1868, 541th Day 

Winds from the ESE. Tobey found me today and he asked me Are there charges against my lay too. He must have heard me yesterday or heard from someone else who was listening it is a small ship I am not surprised. I said I don’t know I did not check. He asked me Do you want me to kill him for you. I told him not to joke about that he’d end up in prison or marooned on some island or killed. He said Better than being a slave. 

O this is why I did not want to tell him.

Remarks Tuesday 2nd of December 1868, 542nd Day 

Tobey fought with KJ today. Tobey started it by talking but KJ was the one who hit first or that’s what I was told. I was aloft at the time looking for whales and I did not hear it begin and I did not see it until it was too late for me to do anything. I was staring into the sun and thinking about nothing. When I heard the shouting on deck it took me some time to understand what was happening and when I looked down at everyone below it all seemed a thousand miles away and I saw Tobey laid out across the deck with KJ standing over him like Tobey’s little body on the ground was his shadow their feet together. 

John pulled KJ away and then the master came to see what the shouting on deck was and since Tobey was on the ground already he at least didn’t get whipped and the master didn’t even ask what the fight had been about he just confined KJ to the steerage for the next day and Tobey got sent to the masthead all night. It is better than being put in irons for either of them and it could have been far worse since fighting with a boatsteerer is trouble. 

I am surprised that Tobey didn’t get whipped again but the master might have had difficulty recording that in the log. It is against the law or so I believe and the master was not the one who signed on to head this voyage so he does have to be careful if he wants to be hired on again as master in the future there will be a long and close look at the logs. I wonder if the whipping Tobey got before was even recorded in the log. But it does not matter whipping is about shame and the master has other things he can do. He likes to shame people and there are plenty of other ways to make a man feel like dirt o there are plenty and I do know it. 

Whatever the reason I am glad that being sent to the masthead was all Tobey got I’m glad he wasn’t put in irons either.

I asked John what the fight had been about and he said that he did not want to repeat it. I will need to find out but of course I cannot ask KJ. He is looking at me like I am the devil. O what has happened to this ship I do not understand how it has all gone so wrong. What can I do…

Remarks Wednesday 3rd of December 1868, 543rd Day 

No wind not even a breath of it. Clear all day and hot.

There is a strange feeling in the air I want to check the barometer. But it is not the air of course it is something else the way people are looking around and the way they stop talking so quickly whenever they hear someone coming. It is all nothing but trouble. Tobey has not told me what the fight was about. If the master is smart he will turn us towards the Sandwich Islands. Time on shore will let everyone forget whatever has happened and it might be a chance for Tobey and I to trade ships. There must be some other ship with two men who would rather be on another. It is a small hope but it is the only one I have.

Remarks Thursday 4th of December 1868, 544th Day 

Still becalmed but clouds on the horizon I think we will have wind by tonight or tomorrow.

I could bear it no longer I asked Tobey what it was that he said to KJ. He almost did not tell me and that was how I knew it was bad but I made my demands I know how to demand things out of him now. I said if you are doing something for my sake because I knew it was whatever it had been that I deserved to know what trouble you are getting me into. He said that he told KJ directly that he thought he and the master had killed Master Paul on purpose for better lays. And so many people must have heard him! O that is not the kind of accusation that should ever be made. I saw it happen myself with KJ it was an accident and I saw the master when we went to cut the septic part of his leg off and O it was the only time I ever thought he was a human being and not the devil he did not kill him he wanted him to live else he wouldn’t have tried it at all. I told Tobey all of this I shook his shoulders and I’m sure he knows he didn’t say anything true but it doesn’t matter does it. Now it is in everyone’s head and we are all the worse for it.

Chapter Text

Sunday July 22, 2057

Living in the Wampanoag ’s steerage doesn’t bother Marcus at all. In fact, while it would be ridiculous for him to say aloud that he enjoys it, he does. He can admit that it’s difficult. 

For one thing, he’s not supposed to be there, and if anyone on the museum staff realized that he was, he’d be in trouble. He’s lucky that he already developed a habit for creeping around the ship after hours that Joe turns a blind eye to, and the museum staff in the regular building tend to leave the operations of the Wampanoag alone. Although they are very much part of the museum in name and mission and ticketing, the trust established for the ship that pays them to run tours and maintain the boat means that their financials are split out from the main museum’s funds, and they operate without as much oversight as they would if the museum needed to pay for their upkeep from its own foundation. But that gives Marcus the freedom to come and go as he wishes.

He keeps a few belongings in the staff lockers in the hold, but he doesn’t have much. He wears his costume all the time, except when he needs to wash it, which he does in the bathrooms of the nearby YMCA, where he also showers. He eats very little, since he has no way to cook food or keep it, so he stops at the grocery store daily and buys some readymade sandwiches and fruit. It probably will eventually grow tiring to do this, but it feels natural for now, this strange, self-induced privation.

He doesn’t have his phone or computer, since they are lost somewhere inside the house that he no longer is allowed to go to, and so he’s caught out of time, detached from his own life.

He sleeps soundly down below in the steerage, or sits out on the deck at night where it’s marginally cooler. He can spend hours doing very little: standing up on the mast and looking out at the sea, or sitting in the main cabin and flipping through Amos’s journal, which is the only thing that he has with him. He reads the sections he’s already gotten through over and over, not wanting to reach the end. Reaching the end of the journal shouldn’t matter to him— Amos has been dead for well over a century, even if he survived his journey unscathed. But there’s a sense of finality that comes from a journey ending, and Marcus wants to hold onto this piece of his own life for as long as he can, though he couldn’t explain why.

The whole experience is a kind of communion, he thinks, even though Amos never walked through this vessel.

Sometimes, after work but before he returns to the ship to sleep, he’ll walk around the town. These places, at least, are ones that Amos went. These streets, while changed over two hundred years, are the same streets. 

It’s so hot out that most people are inside, and so the roads are empty, the whole city a ghost town, and Marcus the ghost haunting it. He can easily picture the past superimposing itself on the present. At the docks, rather than pleasurecraft, there are endless barrels of whale oil lining up, row after row, millions of dollars of product ready to be purified and loaded on trains and canal boats and sent to light the world.

During the day, he goes about his tours as usual, and he doesn’t think that anyone notices anything amis with him. His house’s partial collapse was in the local news, and when his coworkers ask, he jokes about it, and says that he’s staying with a friend. They have no reason not to believe him; he doesn’t have anything personal to leave around the ship that would indicate he’s living on board.

It’s lonely at night, but he pretends that everyone else has gone out on deck during the dinnertime dog watches, and he’s sitting below to get some privacy to write in his journal.

He misses Bryanne, but that sensation, too, seems like a natural continuation of things, and so he makes no attempt to leave the ship to seek her out. He sees her once, walking down the quay, and he waves at her while he gives his tour, but she looks at him for a moment, then heads off. He doesn’t know what it means.

This situation cannot hold. He will be found out, and even if he’s not, he will someday reach the end of the journal, and the summer tour season will end, and he’ll be no closer to moving on with the rest of his life. He knows this, and yet he continues.

Maybe he did get a concussion when he tumbled three stories to the ground. He certainly got enough bruises and scrapes to empty out the ship’s entire first aid kit’s worth of disposable alcohol wipes, in the process of cleaning out splinters from his arms and legs. But maybe it’s the injury (to his head or not), and the strange reminder of realness and physicality that pain brings, that makes him want to sink further down.

The situation comes to a head from an unexpected direction. At the end of his tours on Sunday, he is leaning on the railing of the ship, watching the world go by, when he sees his mother march down the street.

He almost doesn’t recognize her, in the way that when you’re not expecting to see someone, they can vanish into the background. She lives in Providence, and so it’s strange to see her all the way down here. His mother is a short, slender woman, but she has a round face like Marcus’s. She wears her hair braided, and has for Marcus’s entire life, but it has long gone white around the temples, though she’s only in her late fifties— it’s from stress, he thinks. Never once has she left the house in anything less formal than a blouse and slacks, and that’s what she’s wearing now. Today’s shirt is loose and green with little cap sleeves, and it reveals the gold necklace at her throat, and the jingle of bracelets on her arms.

Joe is still on board, cleaning up the remains of their props, so, to forestall a messy family reunion in front of his boss, as soon as he becomes cognizant of whose heels are clicking up the gangway, Marcus leaps the barrier and goes to meet her, holding his floppy hat in his hand.

She looks him over with an expression that first belies obvious relief, then immediately shifts into disapproval. “Marcus,” she says.

“Hi,” he replies. “What are you doing here? You didn’t need to come out all this way.”

“I’ve been trying to call you for a week, since your father’s birthday was yesterday, and we both wanted you to come to dinner,” she says, “and when you didn’t answer your phone, or your texts, or your email, I grew very concerned, and then I went to your apartment, and found that the whole thing had collapsed and was covered in police tape—”

“I’m alright,” he says, trying to stop the rising of her voice. “Let’s go get a coffee—”

She purses her lips, but acknowledges with a nod at Joe, who’s now watching the scene, that family business might be best conducted elsewhere. She looks at him carefully, and the mess of scratches both shallow and deep that cover his bare forearms and cheeks make it clear that he was in the house when it collapsed. 

“You should have called me right away,” she says. A minute of walking has given her enough time to modulate her tone and choose her words carefully. “Even if you’re alright” — a fact that her tone indicates she disagrees with— “I would like to know when something happens to you.”

“I didn’t want you to worry,” he says. “I’m fine.”

They walk down the street, a funny pair with him in his costume and her in her business clothes. They head, not for the nearby coffee shop, but a park with benches. In the heat, it’s empty, but there’s enough of a breeze coming off the water that it’s not intolerable. 

“I’m sorry for missing Dad’s birthday,” he says as they sit down. “I’ll make it up to him.”

“You’ll have to apologize to him, not to me.”

“Can you relay the message?” he asks. “The reason I didn’t call— and haven’t been answering my phone is that I think it was left in the apartment, and the fire department won’t let us in to get our stuff.”

“Bryanne told me as much, when I called her. You need a phone— either get it back or get a new one.”

“How did you call her? She’s out at sea.”

“I called the tour office, and they put me through the satellite phone.”

“Ah.”

“You need to exercise a little more willpower,” she says. “The fire department would let you in with an escort, I’m sure, or get someone to gather your belongings. Even if the house is condemned, which I’m sure it should have been years ago—”

She keeps talking. It’s an old lecture, one that Marcus has heard many times in his life. He’s too dreamy— he can’t apply himself— he needs to get on the phone with somebody about something for some reason to just get it done. He nods along, agreeable if nothing else.

“I know. I’ll get my stuff when I have a place to put it.”

“And Bryanne tells me you’re living on that ship? Please tell me that isn’t true.”

“No,” he lies. “The message got confused. One of her coworkers owns a sailboat, and she’s letting me stay on board that for now. It’s nice— a thirty footer. I just spend a lot of my time on the Wampanoag because I don’t want to be too much of a burden. And Bryanne is staying at work, since she has her own cabin there.”

“I see.” He isn’t sure if his mother believes him. But he does know that if his mother asks Bryanne to confirm this story, Bryanne will lie for him. “I’m very worried about you, Marcus.”

“I’m fine,” he says. “You don’t have to worry. I have everything under control.”

“Do you need me to find you a new apartment?”

“No,” he says hastily. “I can do it.”

She furrows her brow. “Is there a reason you haven’t yet?”

“I think Bryanne and I might be splitting up,” he says. “So it would be kinda weird to get an apartment until we figure that out.”

His mother looks out away from him. “I can’t say I’m unhappy to hear that.”

Marcus’s shoulders slump, and he stuffs his hands into his pockets. “Please, can we not talk about this?”

“Are you thinking about graduate school still?” she asks, which is twisting the knife, and his mother knows it.

Time passes, in a way that Marus is barely aware of. And then, one day, he stumbles headfirst into the thing that he was trying to avoid: he reads the last pages of Amos’s journal.

He’s sitting in the main cabin, at the table with its crossbeams of wood to stop dishes from sliding around, with the now extremely battered print copy of the journal in front of him. He reads the entry for the 626th day, and then turns the page, and it’s blank. 

He flips another few pages, and then the journal picks up in someone else’s handwriting— a loopy, girlish style, not the careful but crawling penmanship that characterizes Amos’s hand. The girl doodles flowers and sketches butterflies and horses and ships, and copies out poems and recipes, or pastes them in from the newspaper. Marcus, growing increasingly alarmed, combs through these pages for any sign of who the writer is. One of the newspaper clippings has a fragment of a header attached to it— published on the Sandwich Islands— Hawai’i— eight years after the last dated entry in Amos’s journal.

He closes his eyes and leans back against the wall of the main cabin. Above him, the reproduction tintype of the master’s wife smiles out stiffly from her frame.

“Mrs. Williams,” Marcus says, tipping his head back. “Can you send a message for me—” he begins, but doesn’t know what to actually say. It feels strange to ask to speak to Amos. It feels like Amos should already be there with him.

“Mrs. Williams,” he tries again. “Can you ask—”

If there’s no possible answer, there’s no reason to ask the question. What he should do is look through the ship’s log, to find out what happened, but the idea of doing this makes him shiver. If it’s a mystery, he can pretend that Amos is still alive.

Sunday July 29, 2057

The hottest day of the summer arrives. It should be impossible to tell what the hottest of a group will be until that group is fully complete and tabulated, but everyone in New Bedford can feel the day settling down around them with a finality that does not allow any room for doubt. This will be the hottest day of the summer. By eight in the morning, it’s 97 degrees, and the humidity is climbing with the thermometer. Not a single breath of wind blows.

It’s Sunday, so Marcus should be running tours, but every employer in the city seems to cancel business under the pressure of the heat. Without his phone, he learns this in the early morning when he creeps out of hiding and goes to the YMCA to shower. They let him in, but they’re posting signs on the doors that they’ll be closing all facilities other than the basketball court— a cooling shelter for anyone who needs it.

The radio in the silent equipment room— no one on the ellipticals or treadmills— is turned to the weather, and every few minutes a warning tone chimes and reminds everyone that the temperature and humidity outside will be dangerous— too high to allow sweat to evaporate— and lists instructions and places to go if you live somewhere without air conditioning. Marcus doesn’t listen, or doesn’t care to listen. All that registers for him is that the museum will be closed, and tours will not be running, so he can spend the day as he pleases— an unexpected and welcome vacation.

Restaurants receive orders from the municipal government not to open; every business that is not designated as a public cooling shelter or housing is told to shut their building HVACs down, and their computer systems if they can. Schools, which have been closed, open their doors to the public, blast the air conditioners in their gymnasiums, and invite everyone inside.

Marcus has nowhere to go. He could stay at the YMCA, or go to the library, or the local elementary school turned cooling shelter, but he decides against it. He wets his towel and drapes it across his head and shoulders, and climbs the mast to try to snag some breeze.

The air is as still as the grave, even right off the water, so climbing provides no relief, and even exposes him more directly to the unrelenting glare of the sun. It is so hot that he cannot breathe, cannot even think. His wet towel refuses to dry.

The Thylacine is out on the water, he thinks. He wonders if Bryanne is as becalmed as he is, or if up in Cape Cod Bay her sail is rattling away. 

Usually, when he’s up on the mast, he watches the birds: seagulls whirling and swooping over the water, diving for the open garbage cans along the streets and whatever fish they spot in the murky water of the river mouth. Today, there are no birds, not a one. If there are any, they’re in the water, clustered in the shade of the sailboats’ hulls, keeping themselves out of the sun’s watchful eye. The sky is cornflower blue, without a single streak of cloud, though when Marcus stares into the far distance, looking for sails, a haze of still vapor in the air makes everything far away appear grey and dim.

By noon, the temperature is 110 degrees. Marcus grows faint up on the mast, but he clings to it resolutely. The metal of the hoop scorches his hands whenever he shifts their position, and he takes off his wet towel and uses it as a mitt to stop the burning. None of the water is evaporating at all; it’s too humid, and it’s too hot. Marcus can feel his heartbeat in his tongue, sticky and swollen in his mouth. 

The sky and the ground fade into and out of each other; he feels like he’s turning upside down, even though he’s standing still. There are no whales on the horizon, nor any sails. But he pictures them anyway, a heat-mirage, a phantom, shimmering in the air in front of him. A mirror ship. He sees the ghost ship in the sky, and raises his arm to greet the man standing on the other mast. The other man raises his arm as well.

Where are you going, Amos ? he calls to the mirror.

Amos points to something behind Marcus, very urgently. Marcus turns, clinging to the mast with hands that don’t work right, and he sees, in the gleaming, dark city, where all the lights have gone out, people leaving their houses in streams. They drape wet sheets over their bodies like they’re running through fire, but they stagger down the streets like pilgrims or refugees, heading down towards the water.

Those who can swim dive in the water off the docks; those who cannot swim walk further down, to the rocky river shoreline, and climb down into the water, fully clothed or casting off their clothes. They wade in the water to knee height, waist height, chest height, shoulder height, dip their heads in the brown water and come up gasping, tilting their faces to the sky.

Marcus turns back to the ghost ship. You know how to swim! Amos yells at him. 

The world tilts beneath Marcus’s feet, and he nearly slips from his lookout position on the mast. He’s too hot, boiled alive in his own skin, and it takes all his strength not to fall from the mast, to keep his hands tight on the ropes as he descends.

He’s surprised to find that the people walking the streets are real, that they grow realer the closer to them he gets. He leaves the ship and joins them, the pathetic cries of children and the gasping breaths of adults as they walk the last stretch, half a mile, to the rocky part of the shore. He clambers across the boulders with them, shoved hither and thither by the crowd. None of them speak much; it’s too hot to waste energy on things that don’t matter. 

The boulders themselves, when he brushes his hands against them, are burning hot.

He wades in the water, salty in the river mouth, cool against his legs, his costume clinging to him. He keeps walking until the water is too deep for him to continue, and then he stands there. The water pushes him towards the sea. He wants to let go, to lift up his feet and let it carry him out to the open ocean, to drift away. 

There are too many people in the water. When he starts to lean forwards, swaying on his feet and letting the water cover his face, someone grabs him and pulls him upright, putting her hand on his face to check something— a tender touch of the back of her hand on his cheek and forehead— looking into his eyes to see his temperature and his expression. 

He doesn’t understand what she’s saying when she asks if he’s alright, though surely that’s what she’s asking. He stares into her face; she looks like the picture hung above the table in the main cabin.

“Mrs Williams,” he says but she presses a plastic waterbottle into his hand, from a collection she’s carrying in a grocery bag, and then turns away from him, looking for someone else.

Chapter Text

Remarks Wednesday 10th of February 1869, 612th Day

Squall early. Strong winds from the NW and we are making no progress towards the Sandwich Islands. At least four in the focsle have signs of the scurvy now or at least that is what Antonio says as he thinks he is an expert on the scurvy. There may be more who are hiding it or have not realized they have it. It is a disease that will spread to all of us in time I am sure but the focsle has it worst because the air is so bad there. Even if there is rain people want to be out on the deck. Tobey does not yet have it and neither do I but none in the steerage do so it does not surprise me that I have been spared so far. I am very grateful for that and for Tobey being healthy still. It is a miserable disease but I do not think we are in too much danger from it as I have known men who had it before and they recovered after some time on shore and as long as we get to the Sandwich Islands in a good time then it will be an excuse for all of us even those who are not sick to have some liberty. And there will be other ships there in port it may be possible for Tobey and I to leave this one. I keep saying this to myself though it is not much of a hope and part of me has resigned to staying on for the rest of the voyage because if I carry around too much hope it begins to hurt like homesickness does. You learn to let those things go after some time at sea or you try to. If there is one thing the waves are good at it is scrubbing you clean of everything that is not necessary for you to survive. It has already been almost two years I will survive the rest of the journey. Well so long as I do not get the scurvy. But if this headwind ends we will make it to port within the next two weeks I have seen our position on the charts. Barometer 30.1.

Remarks Thursday 11th of February 1869, 613th Day

Headwind changed around 4 ½ A.M. we are moving again all are relieved. Barometer 29.8.

Remarks Friday 12th of February 1869, 614th Day

Squall early in the day but making good progress N with strong wind from the SSW. Tobey has asked if those most afflicted will be sure to get liberty on shore and I said yes. He had a very calculating look in his eye when he asked that question, which I am sure means that he is wondering if he could act as though he had the disease, but I do not think he will. Tobey is a very proud man and hates being ill or thought of as ill.

It is no wonder that so many are sick. Our food has gone from bad to worse. Had a look at the last of our potatoes and was almost overcome by the smell none could be saved. After we opened the crate and the air flew out at us in force rather than just leaking I held my breath for what felt like the whole time it took to pull it onto deck. I half suspect it was that foul smell making people ill. They had rotted into a black slime and we pitched them over side. I thank the Lord that no one suggested there might be value in eating them. They would have been fed to the pigs if we had any pigs left but we haven’t had animals for months. Maybe in port we will get some more.

I say that maybe in port we will do this or that but this is to stop myself from thinking that in port I will

I will not think about it!

Barometer 29.8 and falling.

Remarks Saturday 13th of February 1869, 615th Day

Continuing N though stopped by midmorning by heavy gale and it was all we could do not to get blown completely over. Barometer 29.6.

Remarks Sunday 14th of February 1869, 616th Day

Continuing N. Bad weather has passed over us and it is calmer now though we could use a little more wind. We are making good time. Some sails on the horizon a merchant ship I think. Barometer 29.7. 

Remarks Monday 15th of February 1869, 617th Day

Heading NNE. Good wind and fair weather. Antonio with his expert judgment says that another man has the scurvy. Well if Antonio says so! Mood on the ship is poor despite our good progress N and you can see it is getting even to me. The master does not want to go to port he has very little good to write back home and he will have even less good to say when half the crew deserts. But what else can he do the scurvy is no small thing. He will bring us into port and he will write letters home to the agents and the business and tell them what has happened and where we have been and most importantly how much oil they can expect us to bring home. Not as much as he would ever want.

And what will I say to You my dear? Do I have anything to say in a letter back home?

The photograph of Master Paul’s wife is still hung above the table in the main cabin. It is a funny ritual some in the steerage have when we come in to get our dinner they say Hello Mrs. Williams you’re looking fine as ever today. I hope you don’t mind me asking you to pass along a message to someone at home do you. Will you tell my wife Will you tell my friend Jack Will you tell my mother.

It’s a very pagan thing to do and disrespectful though none do it with any malice. She is not some spirit she’s a woman who soon will get a letter telling her that the man she’s waiting for is dead at sea and buried somewhere that might as well be the end of the earth.

O my dear I can understand why you never wanted to marry me I always did understand. It would be a shame to make you a widow.

Remarks Tuesday 16th of February 1869, 618th Day

Heading N. Good wind rain in afternoon clear by 7 ½ P.M. Tobey not feeling well and I told him to let Antonio take a look to see if he has the scurvy and Tobey said he wasn’t going to let somebody look at his teeth like a horse. So he may just be ill from something else I don’t know. Well we will be in port soon and I will make sure he gets some good air that’s not all cramped up in the focsle and fresh water and some rest. Barometer 30.2.

Remarks Wednesday 17th of February 1869, 619th Day

Heard words no one wants to hear when we are heading to port. Charles was aloft and spotted a whale. There she blows! I did not even know there were whales in this area it seems like with so many ships coming to the Sandwich Islands all the time the water here would have been picked completely clear of every living thing or all the whales would have gotten wise and gone somewhere else. But Charles saw some. Maybe they are lost and have wandered into this part of the world by accident. We lowered boats right away and were out on the water all day looking. Came back to the ship late having caught nothing though the ship kept raising its colors to tell us where the whales were. Saw them several times out on the boats but could not get close no matter how hard we rowed or how much the wind pushed us. It is like chasing ghosts I am half convinced that even though I saw them and so did everyone else it is us all coming down with a disease that makes us see whales where there aren’t any. O we should not be chasing whales we need to get to port. Barometer 30.2.

Remarks Thursday 18th of February 1869, 620th Day

Whole crew is angry because we have changed course and are chasing whales. The master cares more about reporting an extra 50 bbls of oil than he does about us. Everyone knew that of course but it is difficult to see it so plainly when we are just days from port and we all want liberty. If we had been anywhere else in the world it would be fine to chase whales but we are not. Lowered boats again mid afternoon when we spotted them but didn’t get close enough before the sun went down to make a kill.

Remarks Friday 19th of February 1869, 621st Day

Terrible day but at least I can thank the Lord that no one was drowned or killed.

Saw whales 7 ½ A.M. lowered boats immediately. All were anxious to catch a whale if we catch one we will perhaps turn back towards the Sandwich Islands. As we were lowering boats I could hear KJ say from the B boat over and over A dead whale or a stove boat A dead whale or a stove boat. Well I did not want to get stove in! I am a brave man and I have killed many whales it is not that I am a coward. But I did not want to get stove I wanted to live long enough to get to port and that was what I was telling myself as we lowered and set off. Maybe I am a poor whaleman to think my life and Tobey’s and all the rest of us is worth more than 50 bbls. Tobacco and cloth from the slop are dear on ships but men’s lives are cheaper than anything else!

We could see the whales even from the boat though they kept diving out of sight. Chased them for several hours. The third mate kept turning around to look with the glass at the ship and see what they were signalling and we turned so many times that even I was nearly seasick. The L and B boats were so far away from us that we could barely see them either. But the whales were in sight by afternoon and it seemed sure that today we would get them if we could sneak up on them before they heard us and dove. We pulled down the sail and went to oars and o we were as quiet as you have ever heard it was nothing but the sound of the water slapping the sides of the boat and you could hear the whales spout and splash their tails.

The B boat was with us next to the closest whale but we were closer and I got ready and waited for the third mate’s signal. I am a better harpooner than KJ and so I was going to try my hand first but KJ and the second mate they looked like they were going to try and I didn’t notice I had my eyes right on the whale as we got as close as we possibly could creeping up behind it. I darted and got my first iron in but then before I could get my second one thrown KJ had darted too and the whale was angry o he was as angry as I had ever seen. He sounded and started going down before I got my second iron in but both the B boat and us were fastened tight to him and as soon as he started going down I knew there would be trouble I was tempted to cut the line the second it started spinning out through the bow chock. The L boat which had been after another whale was nowhere to be seen or at least I was not looking for them I was too busy trying to keep our boat upright in the water now that I was back at the steering oar. The third mate had taken up his lance but the boat was being pulled every which way as the whale went down underneath us he was trying to come up behind us to stove us in and our line was getting tangled with the B boat’s.

Every second that we were in that boat I was thinking of picking up the hatchet and cutting the line and letting the whale go but the third mate yelled to hold on. I think he thought that if we didn’t get a whale we would have no hope of getting to port soon. 

Then the whale came up underneath us right underneath us and the third mate tried at him with the lance but we were lifted o it must have been twenty feet in the air I do not know and with such a lurch that the third mate went overside right away and Tobey dropped his oar and just clung on to the boat for dear life. I reached for the hatchet to cut the line but it was gone in the water and then the boat came down. I tried with my own knife but the line was going so fast out that I couldn’t touch it without my hand getting wrapped in it and I would have been ripped in pieces if I had gotten caught up in it.

The whale was tangled in our line and the line from the B boat. When the whale charged us again he knocked the boat over and all of us who were still in it ended up in the water. I could see nothing and hear nothing and I could not get my head above the waves and I was hit on the side of the boat and nearly caught in the rope. I have never in my life been closer to dying than in that moment.

KJ took up his hatchet and cut the B boat’s line I knew he did it because the second mate yelled at him later. But he got them rowed away from the whale and our W boat was tangled in the rope and the whale and the whale was running as fast as he could the force of his tail nearly drew me under the water again.

Tobey had swam for the B boat and when I got my head above the water I could see KJ pulling him in. I saw the third mate in the water and he was never such a good swimmer so I got him in my arms and everyone else thank the Lord also made it to the B boat and they got us all up. 

A dead whale or a stove boat Well the boat got stove or at least carried off by the whale it is gone. The first time in my life I have lost a boat like that. I hope I never go whaling again.

The master is always angry and even when he yelled at us I could barely hear him. I was just watching some cloud pass overhead.

Remarks Saturday 20th of February 1869, 622nd Day

The master ordered one of the spare boats outfitted to replace the lost W boat and we are still chasing whales. Another two men have come forward complaining about the scurvy though I do not know if they are telling the truth or not and Antonio has no interest in giving his professional opinion. Even KJ has begun to have a grim look in his eyes when the master walks by. Lowered boats early caught nothing. I saw Tobey in some conversation with their heads together and a terrible look on their faces and they all hushed right up when I came by. I told Tobey not to do anything that would get him killed but o he never listens to me.

Remarks Sunday 21st of February 1869, 623rd Day

Lowered boats again 10 A.M. returned 8 P.M. caught nothing. The whales are there we have seen them. But they are always just farther away than we can get. We need to get to port instead of staying here the mood is very bad on board. Barometer 30.1.

Remarks Monday 22nd of February 1869, 624th Day

Saw whales late afternoon lowered boats came back by sunset no luck. Went down to the focsle to give Tobey one of his pipes back I had wrapped the stem in rope for him and found him with the W boat’s hatchet that I thought had been lost when our boat got dragged away by the whale. He had it just tucked in his bunk not even in his trunk o there is going to be trouble if all the foremast hands are with him and do not mind him having such a thing. I asked for it but he would not give it to me. If he is talking everyone into a mutiny he will get us all killed or at least himself and probably me too. I wonder if Antonio knows what trouble is coming or anyone else up in the steerage or anyone in the officers’ quarters. I should speak with the third mate I know him well but o I could not do that to Tobey.

We are just a week of sailing out from the Sandwich Islands this is not very far it is close enough that a boat could get there if you were careful with your water and with the sail and the compass.

O this is not something I should ever think about. But I am imagining tonight on my watch greasing everything up to lower a boat silently into the water and taking Tobey and running.

Remarks Tuesday 23rd of February 1869, 625th Day

Saw whales and lowered and nothing once again. Antonio asked me and he was very casual when he did but o I could hear in his voice what he really meant and he asked me how much longer did I think this could go on. And I told him let’s be patient. We’re only a week out from port we could turn there at any time and all will be well if we do won’t it. And he said yes but when. I told him to ask the third mate who can ask the master. But Antonio wouldn’t go ask. But o no one can stand any more of this. It’s a matter of days. Do the officers know? That is the question. That will determine so much. But I do not know.

Remarks Wednesday 24th of February 1869, 626th Day

Saw whales lowered again nothing. One of the whales that we could not get to was dragging the W boat around still. Somehow it manages to be faster than we are even with its burden. I wonder how long it will go like that before it manages to loosen the rope or smash the boat to pieces. But perhaps the thing is so tied up in it that it cannot reach the boat with its tail or its head to smash it and it will never get free. I wonder if it can even dive with that stuck on it. But it goes so fast over the top of the water that it hardly matters if it can dive or not it seems to me we have no way of catching it.

Returned to the ship in terrible spirits this all seems like it will continue forever. The third mate asked me after we returned he asked how long will this go on. I know why he thinks that I know but I do not know. I asked him what he planned and he said Amos you cannot ask me that question even if we are friends.

Well are we friends? I looked at him but I didn’t ask him that. 

It is strange to be on this ship and think that I will leave it soon one way or another. It will have to be tonight or tomorrow night when I am on watch. I cannot let Tobey get himself killed and it must only be a few more days. It is a miracle that the master has not yet heard about the plot it seems that everyone else has. And if he hears about it or if it begins Tobey will be shot dead I know it. So I will say goodbye to this ship tonight. When I go in to the main cabin to eat my dinner I will look at the photograph hanging there and say Hello Mrs. Williams you are looking fine. Will you tell my dear back home…

O what will I tell you. What can I say.

Chapter Text

Thursday August 16, 2057

On the Thylacine , even in the middle of the night, even at dock, it’s never completely silent. The ship rocks and creaks almost imperceptibly, the batteries hum, the air conditioners belowdecks whirr, the sail shivers on deck, and the pump kicks on and off with a heavy thunk. Bryanne is used to this symphony, and finds it comforting, like the ship itself is reminding her that it’s alive, that she’s not the only one there, even when she’s the only person on board.

It’s bright, even below where there aren’t any windows. Lying in her tiny cabin on the lower level of the ship, the red emergency light glows unblinkingly, letting her see everything in her room with perfect clarity, as long as she lets her eyes adjust. The hallways, too, are lit with the same red-glow. Without passengers, the main lights are all off, but the emergency lights are always on.

At first, when she moved on board semi-permanently, she kept herself to her cabin and the staff rooms and the deck. It was what she was used to, and she didn’t feel the need to spend much time in the passenger areas. But now that she’s used to being alone on the ship, she doesn’t mind wandering through the hallways barefoot, or eating her breakfast at one of the nice tables in the main dining room. She sits there all alone, one plate on one white tablecloth, surrounded by an empty sea of dining chairs. 

She takes naps in the passenger cabins, picking the nicest room, much larger than her own, with a window. She lays on top of the neatly made bedspread in a puddle of sunlight like a cat. When she gets up, she doesn’t even leave a dent where her body was.

The cleaning staff come by on Tuesdays, and food and supplies for their next cruise are usually delivered on Thursdays, but this leaves Wednesdays completely empty. Bryanne has things that she can do— always some lingering piece of maintenance that she can stick her hands into— but it doesn’t take up all of her time. And she could easily leave the ship, go find Marcus, enjoy her days off and walk through town, but she doesn’t. 

Instead, she thinks about Atlas.

The Thylacine is a very different boat from Atlas’s tiny sailboat, but Bryanne can’t help but compare being alone to Atlas’s professed solo ocean crossings. She’s jealous of the experience, the idea of being totally alone and beholden to no one and nothing except the pressing problems of her own survival. It seems like— and she thinks ruefully of Marcus— a relic of a bygone age, when going to sea meant a total disconnection from normal life. Once upon a time, there was no SATCOM, no radar, no AIS, no GPS, no radio— just endless ocean, permanent, unchanging, and impersonal. 

The number of people filling out their tours continues to shrink, and so Bryanne has fantasies about taking the Thylacine out onto the ocean empty. Aside from food as a constraint to the length of a voyage, the sail and the batteries make it able move by itself for as long as it likes, if slowly. She doesn’t dream about stealing it, but she imagines being the only person on Earth left alive.

Bryanne is sitting in the empty dining room when the trouble comes to find her. It’s Thursday evening, and she knows that something is wrong, because the food delivery never came. She’s eating her dinner now, the last of the last of the leftovers from the previous tour, plastic wrapped salad gone limp and tiramisu gone both wet and stale. It still tastes alright, even if the texture is off. 

Being alone feels very natural to her now, and she lets that sense of solitude push every other thought out of her mind. Why did the normal food delivery not come? She doesn’t care. The only thing in the world that matters is the mechanical act of getting food onto her fork, lifting her fork to her mouth, chewing, swallowing. It’s an animalistic thought— as long as you have a meal in front of you now, it hardly matters where the next one is coming from.

This is what she tells herself, and when she hears heavy boots stomp across the deck above her head— very audible on such an empty and still ship— she does her best to ignore the sound. It’s just Mike, or one of the other crew. They’re the only ones who have the keys, and she can hear the doors above swinging open and thumping shut, and footsteps descending the stairs, muffled by the carpet in the passenger areas.

Her best attempt to ignore the sound is not very good; she tenses more and more with each creak and door-opening. There’s more than one person coming around, and now they’re below, down in the crew areas. She can hear muffled voices, even toned, professional.

She should get up and investigate. But she keeps eating until her dinner is gone, and when it is, she lays her fork delicately and calmly across her plate and waits in the dark dining room. It’s not completely lightless; the dining room has huge observation windows that usually look out to the ocean, but the sun is setting, and the ship is facing the wrong direction to catch the light.

Perhaps that’s why it takes so long for Mike and the rest of the people with him to find her; they’re not expecting her to be sitting in the dark. The wide double doors of the dining room swing open, and they stand in the hallway light. Mike isn’t in the front of the group, he’s standing off to the side, shoulders slumped, but he pushes forward through the huddle when he sees Bryanne. He’s holding up her day bag, lumpy and spilling open. He must have hastily jammed all of her belongings into it, not stopping to fold the few outfits she has.

“Bryanne,” he says, holding out her bag with his arthritic hand, “I’m sorry that this is short notice, but—”

She looks at the men next to him— they don’t look like port police, no uniforms. They’re wearing regular clothes, button downs and dress shoes, more like their usual passengers than sailors of any kind.

“It’s not illegal for me to sleep here,” Bryanne says, on the offchance that this is port police making a fuss about their licensing. It’s a futile hope, but she has to say something.

“This ship needs to vacated,” the man at the front of the group says. “Now.”

“It’s the bank,” Mike says, which is the explanation that Bryanne expects, and all that she needs.

“You never paid me for last week’s tour,” she says to Mike, who looks first genuinely sorry, and then annoyed.

“We can talk about that later,” he says.

There’s not going to be a later, and she’s not going to get paid, probably not even if she takes the issue to court. Can’t pay somebody money you don’t have. He’s still holding out her bag. The bank’s enforcers, or repo men, or whoever these other people are, don’t care about Bryanne’s paycheck, nor do they care if she has a place to go.

Slowly, Bryanne wipes her hands on her napkin, stands up, walks over to Mike, takes her bag, slings it over her shoulder, and then brushes past him without saying another word. If she had her way, she’d say goodbye to the ship, walk through it slowly, check it over one last time, and collect all the photographs and personal mementoes from the staff areas. But as she stomps past Mike, the bank men form up behind her, and escort her to the deck.

There’s a cool evening breeze, and when she stops to look up at the red sky, with the sail silhouetted against it, the man walking directly behind her bumps into her back.

“Do you have a place to go?” Mike tries to ask her, but she has nothing to say to him, and she raises her hand to shut him up and starts walking towards the ramp, and then onto the dock. Mike and the bank men remain on the ship, and don’t follow her.

She doesn’t know where she’s headed, and so she walks purposefully far enough that she can no longer see the ship behind her. She sticks her vape in her mouth and trudges along the pier until she gets to a park bench, looking out at the water, and she sits down onto it.

Her mother’s apartment isn’t that far away— over in Fall River. She could get on any bus and show up unannounced within the hour, and her mother would be thrilled to have her sleep on the couch and lord it over her. She closes her eyes and leans back on the metal bench, sliding down so that her legs stick all the way out over the sidewalk, and her neck rests against the top of the bench’s slats. She has a few friends in town— she could call them. Any of her coworkers would probably put her up for the night. Mike and his wife would let her crash in his guest bedroom, even. She could go ask Marcus to let her sleep on the Wampanoag .

But she doesn’t pick up her phone and call anyone. She sits on the bench, letting the darkness of night rise up around her like a swallowing tide. She probably would have sat there until morning, or until a cop came to yell at her, except that she hears a familiar whistling come down the street. She doesn’t even open her eyes as Atlas plops down on the bench beside her, and drapes her arm over Bryanne’s shoulder.

“Bee, I’m afraid I’ve come to be the bearer of bad news.”

Bryanne, without opening her eyes, fishes her foot underneath the bench, and kicks her day bag full of clothes out onto the sidewalk. “You’re too late.”

Atlas looks at the bag without processing it. “You’re quitting, too?”

Bryanne laughs, like a seagull. “Can’t quit if you’re fired!”

“You do something to piss Mike off?”

“We’re out of money.”

The situation clarifies for Atlas, and she laughs, too. “Incredible. Well— getting laid off is different from getting fired, you know.”

“Not that different.”

“Looks less bad for your next job.”

“Looks the same for collecting unemployment.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Atlas says. “But, hey! I guess I’ll learn, if I let Mike tell me I don’t have a job before I tell him he doesn’t have an employee. You should be proud— I’ll have the opportunity to learn to leech off the government, instead of just my parents.”

“Shut up,” Bryanne says.

“Sure.” Atlas kicks her feet out in front of her, resting them on Bryanne’s day bag, the clothes spilling out onto the sidewalk. Through her teeth, she whistles a few bars of an ancient Stan Rogers song. O I coulda stayed to take the dole, but I’m not one of those; I get nothing free and that makes me an idiot, I suppose.

 “What was the bad news you came to tell me?” Bryanne asks. Getting her talking again is the only way to stop the whistling, probably.

“Oh. My grandmother died. My dad just called me to say. So I’m headed to Connecticut for a few days for the funeral— maybe a week— and then I’m gone. Nothing keeping me here.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Bryanne says mechanically.

“No, you’re not.” She tilts her head back and says, “And neither am I.”

“Congratulations on your freedom.”

“I should congratulate you on yours,” Atlas says. “You’re not going to be stuck at this job either. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to find another job,” Bryanne says abruptly. “I can’t sit around doing nothing.”

“You’re so industrious— I’m jealous.”

“No, I just need money to live.”

Atlas cocks her head at Bryanne. “Are you jealous of me , Bee?”

She scowls down at her salad. “Don’t call me that. I don’t like nicknames.”

“Answer the question.”

“No.”

“Come on.”

“That was my answer.”

“You’re a liar, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Bryanne says. “Along with work, that’s another thing people learned how to do when we got kicked out of the Garden.”

Atlas laughs at her. “I’ll report back if my parents’ house in Connecticut is the Eden you seem to think it is.”

“Don’t bother.”

Atlas gives Bryanne another one of her funny little smiles. “I won’t even enjoy it down there,” she says. “I’m very used to being miserable in paradise.”

Bryanne purses her lips and says nothing.

“Oh, come on, Bee.”

“Are you here to say goodbye?”

“I came to offer you something,” Atlas says, and tugs on a lock of Bryanne’s hair.

“To let me go sailing? You already did mention that.”

“There won’t be any more tours,” she points out. “You have time. No reason for you to say no.” She pauses and looks at Bryanne seriously. “Do you even have a place to go? If Mike kicked you out— were you just going to stay on this bench?”

“I don’t know why you’re so eager for me to take your boat,” Bryanne says, ignoring the question. “I wouldn’t trust anyone with it, if I was you. I’d be too worried about someone sinking it.”

“I trust you.”

Bryanne looks away, across the dark water. All the sailboats are picturesque, and so are the seagulls darting around before they take their leave and settle in for the night. 

“You deserve a vacation,” Atlas says.

“Deserve is a funny concept.”

“You really do hate sailing, don’t you?”

“I don’t hate it,” Bryanne says. In fact, she loves the idea a little too much. It would be tempting to steal Atlas’s boat and never return. “I just have no reason to go anywhere. What would I do out there? I have things I should be…” She trails off into nothingness.

“Find your whale,” Atlas says.

“There are no whales,” Bryanne says. “They’re gone. We saw the last one.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“I don’t?”

“Of course you don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t be arguing with me about it,” Atlas points out. “You’d just go sailing and enjoy the weather and the wind, and not worry about chasing whales. You’re afraid of looking for something and not finding it.” She clucks her tongue and wags her finger in a cliche admonition. “Disappointment is a terrible thing to be scared of. You’re letting it hold you back.”

“I don’t need this lecture from you, of all people.”

“Who else is more qualified to give it?”

Bryanne shakes her head and looks away.

“I’m leaving tomorrow morning first thing. Train to Boston, then down to Hartford. I’ll be gone for a week, minimum. Do you want the boat or not?” She fishes in her pocket and jingles a set of keys in front of Bryanne. “It’s not like you have anywhere better to go.”

“Why?” Bryanne asks again.

Atlas smiles at her, the tip of her tongue sticking out past her teeth. “It’ll be nice, when I’m at home, to imagine that somebody else, somewhere, is having a good time. You’d be doing me a favor, providing me some fodder for my imagination.”

This is a patently absurd reason, but Bryanne looks at Atlas, who is still holding out the keys, and reaches out to take them from her. “Fine.”

Atlas grabs Bryanne’s wrist lightly, holding her hand in the air. “Well, those are my only keys, so you’d better come back with me tonight. I’ll show you the lay of the land— the Whole Wide World .”

Bryanne hates being trapped, but Atlas is grinning at her so congenially that she doesn’t pull her hand away immediately. Atlas’s hand is broad and sturdy, calloused like her own from hauling ropes and splicing lines, but this isn’t immediately obvious unless she’s touching you.

Atlas’s smile is triumphant, and without letting go of Bryanne’s wrist, stands and pulls Bryanne to her feet. By now, the feeling of being held in her grip is beginning to stale, and Bryanne pulls herself free so that she can pick up her day bag and spilled clothes from the ground, shaking the sidewalk dust off of them. 

Although the ocean breeze was cool enough when they were sitting still on the bench, they both begin sweating as they take the long walk down the port road towards where the Whole Wide World is docked, stepping over the train tracks that pass through the sidewalk at regular intervals. Their shadows stretch long and blue before them, and although Atlas is usually chatty, they don’t say much. 

“I really am sorry about your grandma,” Bryanne says, breaking the silence when the Wampanoag ’s tall masts come into view.

“It’s alright.”

“Were you close?”

“I’m the only grandchild,” Atlas says, which doesn’t answer the question. Even though the tall ship’s masts are visible, there’s still some ways to walk, and they slow down as they get closer. “She’s lucky, I guess.”

“Lucky?”

“She gets to die at home and rich and surrounded by family, right? Isn’t that as lucky as anybody gets?”

“I’d rather not die.”

“Don’t think anybody gets a choice about that,” Atlas says.

“Is your guilty conscience suddenly telling you that your whole family should be hanged for crimes against the biosphere?” Bryanne asked. “I didn’t think you had that kind of self awareness in you.”

Atlas looks up at the Wampanoag ’s masts. “You only get to choose the when and how if you decide you’re leaving the party early.” She pauses, then nods at the tall ship, or the memory of it. “When I went to that party, with my dad as a kid— they took the ship out to sea. I couldn’t leave if I wanted to, unless I wanted to start swimming. Three in the morning, I was so tired— I was just a little kid. And everyone was drunk and Mr. Zhang was yelling about sailing off the edge of the world.” She trails off.

“What ever happened to him?” Bryanne asks. “I know he died— that’s why this is here.”

“Left the party before the authorities could break it up,” Atlas says. “Museums around the world are lucky— he could leave all this in his will rather than having everything seized by the state first. Works out better for everyone that way. Saved his government a bit of bad PR, too. It was very pragmatic of him. Generous, even.”

Bryanne glances at Atlas, who shakes herself and puts her goofy grin back on her face, no longer wanting to discuss the subject.

They tromp down the dock, and then easily hop on board Atlas’s bobbing sailboat. Just as it was the last time Bryanne was on board, she’s surprised by how neat and clean it is. Atlas, for all she projects being carefree, is fastidious in the way she keeps her boat. She should ask Marcus how often he sees her scrubbing down the deck. 

The thought of Marcus is the one thing Bryanne managed to push out of her mind while they were walking, but now she glances up at the Wampanoag towering above them. Up on the mast, small enough with distance that she can’t make him out, is Marcus, standing like a statue next to the scarecrow, peering out into the darkness. He’s barely visible, only the outline of him caught by the dockside lights below.

Bryanne stares up at him, like a statue herself, hands on her hips.

“Oh, him,” Atlas says, when she comes back from unlocking the hatch down into her cabin. “Hey! Amos!”

“That’s not his name.” But it’s now too late to do anything other than get his attention. She’s surprised that Atlas wants to summon him down— she had thought, well, she hadn’t known what she had thought. But Atlas is waving like a maniac, and Marcus is turning to look at them. She raises her hand in a wave. “Marcus! It’s me!”

Why is she surprised when he shimmies down the ropes?

“Do you talk to him a lot?” Bryanne asks.

“Sometimes,” Atlas says. “It’s good manners to be neighborly.” She laughs. “Are you still…?”

“I don’t know.” Bryanne watches Marcus cross the deck and hop the barrier to head down the gangway.

“He’s been alright, if you’re wondering. I know you haven’t been here to talk to him.”

Bryanne scowls, but when Marcus stands at the edge of the dock, asking permission to come on board with his usual goofy smile, those apple-round cheeks and a simple sincerity in the way the expression swallows up his eyes, she tries to put her annoyance aside. He’s still wearing his costume, but she’s no longer surprised by this. It’s part and parcel of the stranger he’s become to her.

“Come on board,” Atlas says magnanimously. “How’ve you been?”

“Fine,” Marcus says. He hops on board. “Hey, Bryanne.”

The way he’s standing makes it obvious what he feels— that awkward shuffle of coming close but not too close, stifling hands that want to hold by shoving them deep in his pockets, smiling but chagrined, not asking for anything but wanting it anyway, and not sure if he should. It’s familiar to her, and he’s never been anything other than earnest to a fault, a counterpoint to her gruffness. If it had been any other day, two months ago, they would have embraced each other; he would have stroked his hand down her hair and she would have nestled herself against him. But instead they stand a few feet apart, looking at each other. Atlas watches them.

“I’m headed down to my family’s house for a week or so,” Atlas says, “and then I’m leaving town.”

“Where are you going?” Marcus asks.

“Connecticut.”

“No, after that.”

“I might head out to the Azores. Or go down to Cuba, if the hurricane season doesn’t look like it’s going to be too bad. I don’t really want to be in New England when winter gets here.”

Winter— the idea of it is as foreign to Bryanne as either of the ports Atlas named. It seems like a thousand years away, and unimaginable with summer still clinging to them. Even though the sun is now fully down, the hot air is still swallowing the three of them. Atlas is still sweating, a bead of it running from her temple to her jaw.

“Oh, I’ll be sorry to see you go,” Marcus says.

“Gotta keep moving.” She says it lightly, but she says everything lightly. “Anyway, since I’m going— I figured Bee could take a little vacation while I’m gone.” She taps the solar panels that are within reach, and then wanders away down the short deck of the boat, checking things over. As she does, she calls back over her shoulder, “Since the tours are canceled, might as well—” and re-explains to Marcus what little she’s managed to gather about the end of the Thylacine .

Bryanne and Marcus listen to her, but they’re looking at each other.

“I’m sorry about the Thylacine ,” Marcus says, and he looks back behind himself at the tall ship behind them. “That sucks.”

“It’s fine,” Bryanne says, and then adds, ruefully, “It just means that I’ll have to get another job. You were right when you told me to.”

Marcus’s smile dims. “I’m sorry that we fought about it,” he says. “I didn’t mean to—”

“No, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

“Do you have somewhere to go?”

“My mom’s, I guess, for now.”

“Yeah,” he says, and doesn’t follow it up. His shoulders are hunched, and she can see his hands clenching and unclenching in his pockets, some anxious habit of his.

“Come with me,” Bryanne says abruptly. “Out on the water for a few days.”

She doesn’t know why she offers, and at the bow of the boat, Atlas, who is now listening to them, once again rattles the harpoon that’s still stuck in the deck.

Marcus shifts back and forth on his feet. “I have work,” he says. “I can’t just leave them without someone to do my part of the tour.”

They both know exactly what Bryanne is demanding and offering— a last chance. “They can rearrange it so that one of the tour leads does your part, can’t they?”

Marcus nods, but looks away from Bryanne again, back at the ship.

“Marcus,” she says, and he looks at her with strange and wide eyes. “Come with me.”

He’s reluctant, and she wishes she didn’t understand why.

“Why are you asking me?”

She shakes her head. 

“I can’t,” he admits. Is it a relief to both of them, to finally break that last tie?

It’s not, she decides. Even though they’ve been living apart for weeks, when she looks at him, strange and ungainly as he is, she misses him. The idea of sailing alone is proper, and the subject of her dreams, but those dreams have been as close to nightmares as dreams get before she wakes up in a feverish sweat. She doesn’t want them to become real, no matter how vivid they are— maybe that’s the difference between the two of them. She wonders what it is about his dream that he’s clinging to so tightly— she’s never really asked him about Amos, despite how much that dead man seemed like an invisible third person hovering in between them.

“It’s real,” she offers. “Going sailing.”

“I know it is,” Marcus says. “It’s not that.”

Then what is it? she wants to ask, but Marcus would tell her about his responsibilities to his job, how he can’t leave them in the lurch, even if there is a replacement.

She reaches across the distance between them and puts her hand on his arm. “Well— if you change your mind. I won’t be leaving until the morning.”

He nods. 

“Bee,” Atlas calls from the other end of the boat, listening and choosing the best moment to interrupt. “Let me show you where the radio is, and how to hook up the motor.”

Chapter Text

Remarks 25th of February 1869, Thursday, 627th Day

At 2 ½ A.M. a boatsteerer and a foremast hand were seen stealing the L boat when the alarm was raised both leaped over side and could not be recovered. Early part clear barometer 30.1 wind from SSE. Saw whales headed to the N boats lowered no success. Later part cloudy wind from the SE barometer 30.0. So ends.

Chapter Text

Thursday August 16, 2057

Marcus slinks back to the Wampanoag , and then sits on the deck for a while, listening to Bryanne and Atlas’s voices drift through the air. They’re not exactly joking with each other— Bryanne is too serious— but they have a clear camaraderie that carries in their tones, if not their words. Bryanne is quick on the uptake whenever Atlas says anything, except when she isn’t.  When Bryanne is silent, Atlas will chime in again with a laugh and a wheedling tone. After a while working on deck, they head below. The sky is black now, and when they retreat out of hearing, it’s silent except for the water and the sounds of the city: police sirens, cars, some men yelling distantly outside one of the bars.

He goes inside the main cabin, where he has the printed copy of Amos’s journal open on the table, and the fake lanterns lit, with their LEDs flickering behind frosted glass. By now, the spine of the book is cracked and the glue is loosening the first few pages, where he’s pulled the cover back one too many times. There are no secrets left to uncover inside the book— he’s read it from front to back, and spent as much effort as he could divining who wrote in the end pages. He thinks it’s a stranger, someone who found the book in an old trunk sold at auction, and prized it for its blank pages rather than its written ones. He’s lucky that the girl never got around to using the written journal pages as a scrapbook, abandoning the effort or getting a new blank book before she ran completely out of space. 

Even though there’s nothing else to discover, he sits down to read it anyway, checking over the last few days of Amos’s writing. Was there a mutiny, even an attempted one, on board? If there was, Joe probably would have mentioned it during one of their tours. If there wasn’t, did Amos successfully steal a boat and row himself and Tobey to Hawai’i, leaving all his belongings behind when he did? It’s possible. Not likely— and he knows that Amos’s flight was one of desperation rather than rationality— but it’s possible. He clings to the same small hope as a man who’s a hundred years dead. Maybe Amos and Tobey were caught stealing the boat, and left in chains on the deck, and then abandoned in port. The idea makes Marcus shiver, but if that were the case, they would at least make it off the ship alive.

All of this would be recorded in the log, but he hasn’t checked the log. He can’t explain what his reluctance is, other than that the unknown has safety in its infinite possibilities.

He’s going to let his life slide by him, with the number of comforting fantasies that he clings to. That’s the core of his problems— or at least his mother would tell him so. He can imagine things so thoroughly that they act as a cozy substitute for the real. He wonders, ruefully, if he were Amos and truly on the ship, would the exertion and danger actually force him to act, or would he end up dreaming four years away as easily as he does now.

He jerks up and stands, taking the lantern in one hand and the printed journal in the other. He walks through to the masters’ quarters, to the room where the logbook is kept. The replica log, digitally printed but hand-bound to look just like the original, is sitting on the writing desk. Even though it’s one of the tour props that gets passed from hand to hand, it still looks too crisp and new. Maybe after running tours on the ship for half a decade, it will be as beat up as the real log is. The paper is thin, but it has modern strength and is not heavy and brittle like the logbooks in the museum collection. The cover, like Amos’s journal, is pretty marbled paper, though this one is done in blues and blacks, with flecks of yellow dye scattered throughout. Even the marbling is printed, though— a cleaned up scan of the original log’s cover printed out, rather than purchasing real marbled paper in a similar color scheme, with all the randomness that would introduce. The reproduction is faithful, but undeniably fake.

Marcus sits down at the writing desk and pages through the log. There’s a noticeable change in hand partway through, when the first officer received an unexpected promotion to master, and the former second officer had to take on the duty of maintaining the log. It’s too bad that Amos never got to fill out the log— he would have enjoyed it. 

Maybe he survived and was later able to become a mate on another ship— but, no, Amos didn’t want that, and there would be a painful irony if he did end up going to sea again. But that possibility is slim, regardless, and not something Marcus can divine from this book alone.

He pages through the log until he finds what he’s looking for, the days following Amos’s last entry, and reads them. It takes a minute for the reality to sink in, after he reads the words slowly, over and over. Tobey and Amos, overboard and drowned. 

With increasing agitation, he reads through the next few pages of the log. They’re never mentioned again, aside from a mention of auctioning off belongings when the ship gets to port. So they were dead, and a callous and impartial hand wrote it down, with no explanations or details. Not even their names were included.

Marcus throws the log against the wall in an uncharacteristic burst of anger. It bounces off the wall and hits the lamp sitting on top of the writing desk, which then crashes and knocks the compass and barometer off their perches. They clatter to the ground, and the barometer lands with a twinkle of breaking glass as its front dial shatters.

Marcus puts his head in his hands, and the room sways with a dizzy light as the lantern rolls around the floor until it comes to rest.

It shouldn’t matter to him what happened to Amos and Tobey— they’re like any men of history, anyone who lived and built some small and inconsequential piece of the world, and then who died. There’s thousands of other whalemen, even thousands who left journals behind, who Marcus would never find himself distraught over. Their joy and suffering, as soon as they step out of the direct light of the world, pass behind the curtain, disappear into the water, is lost from living memory and sinks into the entropic stream, the consequences of what they thought and felt only being made real in the marks they left on the world. The only mark that Amos left is in the slim journal— and anonymous barrels of whale oil sold for cents on the gallon, greasing the gears of a new age’s machines, or burning as candles until they went out. 

History is made entirely of men who are ground up and spat out— men and whales and the bones of the Earth. 

He doesn’t move for a long time, and when he does, he stumbles through the ship in the dark, leaving the lantern on and in the shattered remains of the barometer. He climbs into his bed in the steerage, and sleeps.

He dreams about drowning, an endless ocean without shore or ship in sight, and always trying to hold someone else up above the water, dragging a heavy body in his arms, kicking so that Tobey’s head doesn’t go under, no matter if the water fills his own mouth and covers his eyes. 

Marcus usually wakes up well before he needs to for work— he’s a light sleeper at the best of times, and he’s anxious living on the ship, fearing getting caught, so as soon as the church bells down the street begin tolling at six, he’s up. But today the nightmare has him in its clutches, and he doesn’t wake up until Joe begins stomping across the deck above. It’s still very dim, especially in the steerage, with the only the grey morning light filtering in through the deck prism, but it’s lighter than it should be, and this tells Marcus that he’s in danger.

For a moment, he doesn’t remember who or where he is— the sound of the master’s footsteps above strike a too-familiar terror into his heart, and the fear of being caught out for sleeping on board without permission tangles up with Amos’s terror at the master’s vindictiveness. They’re one and the same fears, or they might as well be.

He slips out of the steerage and presses himself into the shadows, waiting for Joe’s footsteps to recede. Joe goes into the master’s cabin, and Marcus can hear him swear as he catches sight of the shattered barometer and the mess left in the room, probably thinking that Marcus forgot to lock up when he left (again) and that vandals got in. While he’s distracted picking up the broken instruments, it’s Marcus’s chance, and he quickly climbs up to the deck, lightly runs across it while Joe is below, and escapes onto the dock, out of sight of the ship.

He doesn’t know where to go now. Reasonably, what he should do is head to the YMCA, take his usual morning shower there, and then get ready for work. He’ll have to face whatever consequences come from Joe believing he didn’t lock up, but he’s barely even thinking about that. His desire not to return to the ship is deeper than a fear of official reprimand. The idea of stepping back on board the Wampanoag makes him feel ill, like he’ll die if he goes back. The fear is totally irrational, but it constricts his throat and makes his vision shaky, his heartbeat throbbing underneath his tongue.

He should go to the library, email his mother, ask her for help, ask to move back into her house for a few weeks until he calms down and gets his life back together. But instead he sees Atlas’s little sailboat, and he leaps on board without thinking.

The noise of him stumbling around on deck causes the hatch to open, and out comes Byranne, blinking in the light and looking disheveled after a night of sleep in an unfamiliar location. She’s surprised to see him, and he’s surprised to see her, even though he knew she would be there. She gives him a long, searching look as they stand there looking at each other.

“I changed my mind,” Marcus says, holding out his hands in a shrug and reaching for the only thing he could possibly say.

Bryanne’s mouth is sticky with sleep, and she tries to speak, then clears her throat before she can get the words out. “Where’s Atlas?”

“I didn’t see her,” Marcus says.

Bryanne runs her hand over her face, rubbing her eyes, and then waves her arm to give Marcus permission to go where he likes on the little boat. If Atlas is gone, it’s hers for now. He isn’t really sure what to do with himself, though he does go below, if only to stop Joe on the Wampanoag from seeing and hearing him.

The interior of the boat is small, and extremely neatly kept. Even though the craft is very utilitarian, with a tiny galley area and even smaller head, and with floorboards that can all be lifted up to get to the spaces underneath where water goes to be pumped out, it’s nevertheless very pretty inside, clearly a toy for the rich and not a working vessel.

The furthest aft area has a bed raised up and tucked into the slim space between the deck above and the storage drawers below. Behind the fiberglass walls is probably the tiny motor with its batteries, but Marcus doesn’t investigate. A little way forward, there’s a small dining table and a bench built into the wall. Surprisingly, on the starboard wall, there’s a bookshelf, full of books all individually sealed in ziplock bags, and held tight against the wall with cord, to stop them from falling out as the boat moves. Below that are cabinets, and Marcus assumes they contain a mixture of useful things and life detritus, but it’s all tucked away so neatly that he can’t see any of it. Bryanne’s day bag is the only thing that looks out of place, sitting on the floor in front of the bed, with her clothes spilling out of it from when she fished through it for a new day’s outfit.

At the fore end of the boat, the harpoon sticks down through the deck into the ceiling above him. He reaches up and examines the harpoon toggle. He’s surprised that Atlas never seriously tried removing it, because he can see that it’s a simple matter, now that he’s gotten close. The iron of the harpoon goes all the way down through the deck’s planking, and it rests above the deck on the wider part of the wooden pole, which is stuck into the socket of the iron. When darting the harpoon, the wooden pole is what would be held by the harpooner— it’s heavy, and helps add force to the throw. The socket is wider than the thinnest part of the harpoon’s shank, but thinner than the harpoon’s head, and so the whole thing can be disassembled and freed easily, just by detaching the wood from the iron, and then drawing the iron below through the deck. It only requires two people to do so— one above and one below, pulling from either end to yank the wooden pole free. It would leave a hole in the deck, where the iron passed through, but not as large as drawing the whole wooden pole through, or trying to get the head back up. He can see that Atlas tried that several times, from the scratched wooden planking on the ceiling, the upward pointing barbs of the iron having gouged into the wood as she tried to pull it out.

Marcus waits for Bryanne to finish her work on the deck. She comes back down eventually, while he’s still contemplating the harpoon.

“Gonna cast off in a minute,” she says. “Your boss is looking for you.”

He nods, but doesn’t say anything.

“Deserting?” she asks. “You could at least call in sick.”

“I have a bad work ethic. I’m destined for a lifetime of no-call-no-show.”

This actually makes her laugh, though it’s not really funny. “Maybe it’s for the best.”

It certainly isn’t— they’re both about to be unemployed and homeless, a bad state for people to be in, even if they can lean on their parents for a while. Something strikes him as funny about them both suffering this strange quirk of circumstance together, even though it’s caused their mutual life to fall apart. “Maybe it will force me to figure things out.”

“Is that why you’re here?” she asks.

“No.”

She gives him a questioning look. 

There’s the truth, which he doesn’t understand and can’t communicate, and the lie that is easy to say. “I missed you.”

She smiles, and maybe she knows it’s not true. He’s not a good actor, and he still has his one hand on the shank of the harpoon. 

“Yeah,” she says, but turns away from him. “There’s food in the cupboards and fridge if you want breakfast. Don’t cook anything— I don’t trust you with that gimbal. But there’s bread and peanut butter and granola.”

“Do you need any help casting off?”

She laughs. “Not from you.”

Marcus doesn’t know where they’re headed on the boat. He can look at the compass and digital maps all he wants, but this doesn’t give him much insight into where Bryanne is taking them. She points her nose into the salty air, and the boat obeys her. They don’t talk much in the first few hours of the journey. It’s reminiscent of being at home, a companionable and familiar silence, and, as always, it helps for Bryanne to have something to do. It keeps her hands busy. She runs the motor for the first part of the journey, moving them at a speed of a few knots out of the river, and then out to sea, keeping a careful eye on the instruments and the horizon to make sure they’re not running into anyone else. 

When they’re far enough out at sea that the risk of encounters with other vessels is much lower, Bryanne turns off the motor. The sails snap in the brisk, hot wind, and they bounce along. They head northeast, the auto steering— an entirely mechanical mechanism of rope— keeping them pointed directly into the wind. It lets Bryanne take her hand off the tiller, and so she sits on the deck, alert but relaxed.

“It’s different with real sails,” she says unprompted. “I complain about the Thylacine ’s tower, but it does make traveling against the wind easier.”

“Are we making good time?”’ Marcus asks.

“We don’t have a destination.”

But she clearly has some idea of where she wants to be, since she points the boat towards it. North, and out to sea. The ocean around them is empty, but the sky is filled with towering white clouds. Marcus is worried about summer thunderstorms and squalls, but Bryanne ignores them, maybe having consulted the weather before they left. He could turn on the radio and check the weather report, but doesn’t. 

He likes the silence and emptiness of the ocean, the way it clears his mind. The tiny, modern sailboat is not the Wampanoag , and they’re in the Atlantic, not the South Pacific. This boat isn’t even that much larger than the tiny whaling boats that the hunt was conducted in. He wonders how long this little boat could go for, with the rations it has on board. Probably not very far— he doubted that Bryanne and Atlas stocked up for a transatlantic journey, or any trip longer than a few days.

Marcus often goes down below, but Bryanne remains resolutely on deck, often standing and leaning on the rail, looking out at the horizon, looking for whales.

At dinnertime, he makes them both sandwiches, turkey and mayo from the tiny solar-powered refrigerator below. Bryanne eats half of hers, picks the meat out with her fingers, then feeds the rest of the bread to a seagull that has decided to hitch a ride on the prow, ruffling its feathers in the wind.

Marcus goes over to the harpoon, causing the seagull to move, affronted, to the top of the mast.

“Help me get this out,” he says. “If we pull it apart, we can get it through.”

“And what will you do with it when we do?”

“It’s just getting in the way,” he says. “It’s right in the middle of the deck. Atlas will appreciate having it out.”

This is an undeniable fact, and so she acquiesces. Marcus goes below, and on the count of three tugs as hard on the iron shank of the harpoon as he can, and Bryanne hauls upward on the wood. The two pieces come apart violently with their combined force, the harpoon’s iron piece rocketing down through the planking of the deck with Marcus leaning his whole weight on it to drag it down. Both of them, above and below, tumble to the ground as it comes loose, Bryanne stumbling backwards and falling with a thump, and Marcus crashing down under his own body weight, unbalanced on his toes.

He brings the harpoon shank triumphantly back up on deck, and Bryanne hands him the wooden piece. He experimentally tests putting them back together, sticking the narrowed end of the pole into the socket. It’s loose, but he can probably hammer it back into shape enough to hold on. Below, he looks through Atlas’s cupboards to find her tools, and discovers that she has a hammer that will probably work. He sits down with it, the harpoon on his lap, while Bryanne keeps scanning the horizon. It’s growing too dark for her to see anything, even other ships. 

With a repetitive clank, of the hammer, careful not to strike the iron so hard that it cracks, he tries to narrow the socket. He realizes, after hitting it and inspecting it closely to make sure that brittle cast iron wasn’t breaking under his delicate blows, that it’s not actually cast iron— it’s machined steel— too ductile and smooth to be iron. Holding it up to catch the light, he can see the circles where the milling tool drew across it, and it has none of the lumpy irregularities that cast iron would have. The reproduction is made of a higher quality material than the original was, because the original was made with economies of scale in mind that don’t make sense for this fragment of an out-of-time object. It’s almost funny to him that he never took real notice of it before, even if he was subconsciously aware of it every time he held it. Even if it’s steel, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to refrain from calling it the iron .

 He jams the wooden pole into it as tightly as it can go, and then hammers it further into place. It’s still fairly loose and would come apart again with a solid tug, but it’s together. When he’s done, he stands in the prow of the sailboat and holds it out over the water, like he’s going to strike something below them.

“What are you doing?” Bryanne asks.

“Nothing,” Marcus says. “There’s nothing there.”

“Obviously.”

He swings the harpoon experimentally, letting the wooden pole slide through his grip before he tightens his hand around it, making sure he doesn’t lose it to the jostling waves.

“Stop it,” Bryanne says. “You’re freaking me out.”

“Why?”

“You’re going to fall overboard.”

“I’m wearing a lifejacket.”

“Marcus!”

He turns towards her and leans on the harpoon, the butt end of the wood resting on the deck, the iron over his head. She stares at him, then shakes her head.

“Aren’t we looking for whales?” he asks.

She pinches the bridge of her nose, turns away from him, and takes her vape from her pocket to stick it in her mouth. 

“I’m joking, Bee.”

“Don’t fucking call me that,” she says. “It’s bad enough with Atlas— I don’t need it from you.”

“Sorry.” He’s tempted to ask her exactly what Atlas is in her life, but decides against it, instead going to sit on the deck in front of her, while she occupies the long cushioned seat. He leans back against the bulwark and rests the harpoon on his crossed legs.

“It’s a replica,” he says. “And I think they glued it together before.”

Bryanne just nods, looking out to sea. 

“You can tell,” he says, and holds up the toggle end of the harpoon. “Ones that were used on ships, they would carve the name of the ship into the iron, and then which boat the harpoon belonged to. This one’s blank.”

He runs his hand over the iron, which is warm like flesh in the heat of the evening. 

“You don’t have to think about it having killed a whale,” he says, when Bryanne doesn’t say anything. “It’s just a toy.”

“I know.” She tips her head back and looks at the slowly darkening sky. They might be far enough from shore that ambient light pollution isn’t too bad— Marcus is looking forward to seeing the stars. 

“It’s funny,” he says. “It’s not even iron— it’s steel.”

She nods, though this information about its material properties makes no difference to her.

“Even on a molecular level, I bet you could tell that this is modern,” he says, hoisting the harpoon up. “It’s post-atomic steel. All the ambient radiation in the air from bombs and accidents gets forced in there during the steel making process and gets trapped…” He’s just talking, going into lecture mode and spinning one fact from another to fill dead air. “When people need clean steel that doesn’t have that kind of radioactive signature in it, they get it from old shipwrecks. Scavenging sunk battleships from an earlier age to use their bones.”

Bryanne doesn’t seem to know what to do with this information. “What did they do with all the old whaleships?” she asks.

“Burned them for firewood,” he says. “Everything gets broken up for scrap eventually. Except the ones that went to a museum.”

“Do you think in a hundred years, they’re going to have an oil tanker as a museum piece? Or is there not enough romance in it?”

“Nothing’s romantic until it’s gone,” Marcus says. He turns the shaft of the harpoon, spinning it against his legs. “Or at least until it’s dying.”

She laughs. “Maybe you’re right.”

“And there’s nothing romantic about modern life.” It’s a joke, for all the sociological implications he’s trying to put into it. But Bryanne thinks he’s serious.

“There it is.” She closes her eyes. 

They’re both quiet. Marcus should say something to her— about their future, about their relationship, about anything other than Amos— but he can’t find the right way to approach it. All he knows is that having her in front of him makes him feel more solid than he has in weeks, and he should do something to keep her there, so that he doesn’t blow away in the wind.

“I’m thinking of taking that job my uncle says he can get me,” Bryanne says abruptly.

“Really?”

She shrugs, hitting her shoulders against the wall behind her. Her hair is static-clinging to the plastic, despite how wet everything is. “I need a job,” she says. “I need a job and I need the money.” When Marcus says nothing, she asks, “Are you surprised?”

“I guess.”

“Didn’t think I’d abandon my principles?” she asks bitterly.

“You usually don’t change your mind.”

She picks up a piece of rope from the deck and twists it around her hands, her fingers turning red from how tightly she wraps them. “True.”

He can’t tell if she wants him to ask her why she’s changed her mind or not. She usually doesn’t volunteer information, but she was the one who brought up the subject. He pulls his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them and leaning his chin on his forearm. “Should I wish you good luck with it?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “You should hope I die.” She presses her head back against the plastic wall. 

“ Death to the living, long life to their killers, success to all the sailors’ wives, and greasy luck to all the whalers ,” he quotes, thinking of the poem that was once carved a piece of scrimshaw. It’s not a line that he delivers on his part of the tour, but he hears it echo up from the forecastle as Jules calls it out in his singsong voice. It rings around in his head, and comes out now.

“Yeah.” She’s quiet for a long time. “If we see a whale, I won’t take the job,” she eventually pronounces.

“Why?”

“Because if there’s any left out there, that’s something still left to ruin.” She looks out over the top of his head at the horizon. “If there isn’t— who cares?”

It’s a funny logic, and they both know it’s a wrong one, but it doesn’t matter.

“I hope we see one.”

“Sure.”

“I never have,” Marcus says. “I’ve never seen a whale. I want to.”

“I should have asked Mike to let you come on one of our tours. A few years ago, when there were some left.”

Marcus shakes his head.

“Yeah, too late.”

 There seems to be nothing left to say. Two years too late or ten or a hundred or two hundred— neither of them can change the past that they’re tied to.

The sun goes down red behind the puffy clouds on the horizon, and Bryanne stares at the open water until she can’t keep her eyes open. She takes in the sails so that their speed drops to almost nothing, and then goes down below. She doesn’t ask Marcus to join her, but she gives him a long look, which he doesn’t know how to respond to.

“I’ll keep an eye out for whales,” he says.

“It’s too dark to see anything.”

But he doesn’t turn away from the sky, stars stuck in it like rivets. She heads down into the belly of the boat, and closes the hatch behind her. He vaguely intends to go down, but as he stands with his hands on the rail, he loses track of time completely. 

The darkness of summer nights is never quite as thick and complete as those of winter, so he still thinks that he can see quite clearly as he watches the horizon. He’s looking for whales, or other sails, or anyone swimming through the water in need of rescue. But none of those things pass by— only the occasional piece of garbage that bobs past the prow: tattered plastic bags and soda cans and once a yellow buoy cut loose from its tether.

Hours pass. 

On the horizon, he sees a flick of white, the spray of foam from a whale’s spout. It rises up into the air, then vanishes against the sea in the direction of the prevailing wind. It’s so far off, and the night is so dark with just the light of the moon, that he can barely make it out, especially as the sailboat dips and rises in the sea swell. But he trains his eyes on that point on the horizon, and there it is again: a regular puff of breath from a whale, a few seconds after the first. 

This spouting becomes the single most important thing in the world to him, and they’re moving in the wrong direction to get to it. He goes back to the tiller and tries to turn the boat towards the whale, but has no success. He can’t wrench them in the right direction; he doesn't know how.

With Bryanne below, the little sailboat moves like a ghost ship, the automatic steering mechanism doing most of the work. Their transponder is set to alert them if they come too close to any other vessels, or if they end up blown off course, but that alarm doesn’t sound to wake Bryanne, and so they sail on, away from the flash of white air. 

Amos would laugh at him for being unable to steer them— a boatsteerer who can’t sail at all. 

This thought only keys the desire to see a whale higher.

The whale’s breath puffs on the horizon again as the boat crests a wave. It’s growing farther and farther away, every second that he wastes. Marcus clings to the rail, then, heedlessly, swings one leg over, then the other, until he’s sitting perched over the side. The water splashes his legs. He carefully but quickly pulls off his shoes and throws them back onto the deck.

It’s insane to think about swimming for it. He knows, rationally, that even with a life jacket, he’s likely to drown, and even if he doesn’t drown, as soon as he slips out of sight of the Whole Wide World , he’ll be lost at sea and unable to get back. What he should do is wake up Bryanne, but he doesn’t.

He’s not thinking about anything on this tiny sailboat. Instead, his mind is somewhere far away and long ago, and he’s standing on the deck of the Wampanoag with Tobey, frantically greasing up the ropes to lower one of the boats down into the water.

Tobey is looking around while Amos deals with the boat. He’s lucky that he’s convinced Tobey to leave, he thinks. The alternative is too terrible to contemplate, because it would end in certain death. Tobey isn’t completely convinced that running is the best option, even now, even as he tries, as quietly as possible, to load a few days worth of water and food onto the tiny sailboat. He’s lucky that Tobey can be swayed by talk of freedom, just as much as he can be by ideas of revenge.

But this is a perilous plan. One wrong step, one wrong person appearing on deck to look at what is going on, will end in disaster. Most of the crew, at least most people in the forecastle, are with Tobey in his ideas of mutiny, but even those who aren’t will be happy to see him go— it lessens the danger on the ship for everyone. So, the other hands on watch turn a blind eye to what they’re doing. And everyone is too exhausted after days of useless chase to do anything to stop them. Everyone wants to reach port, and maybe a desertion and theft of a whaleboat, especially after one has already been lost, will convince the master to turn them towards the Sandwich Islands at last.

The ropes slide silently, the boat lowering down.

It’s only the officers who pose a problem, and Tobey glances back again and again as they slowly work. 

The sea is choppy, and the Wampanoag sways and leans. It’s a clear night, but windy, and the waves bob them across the water. As they lower the boat and the ship leans, it thuds against the side, the sound ringing out like a gunshot.

Amos and Tobey hasten their lowering, trying to get it down into the water before anyone comes to investigate the noise, but it’s too late.

As the boat slides down the ropes, the master emerges from below. He’s a terrible figure, haggard with days of unshaven beard, and an anxious look writ clear across his face, even in the dim moonlight. He knows about the mutiny— Amos can see it in his eyes. And he holds his right hand in the shadows behind himself, the master’s gun— an inherited privilege— concealed there.

“Trying to steal from me?” the master asks. It’s not really theft he’s worried about, nor money at all. It might have been that once, but now it’s simple fear for his own life. A mutiny, no matter what else came of it, would end in his death. And he, like everyone else on the whaleship, wants to come home alive, despite the odds and no matter what the cost. Amos pities him, if only for a second. Somehow, in the two years they’ve been together, he’s never found out if the master has a wife.

“No, sir,” Amos says, and he tries to keep his voice conciliatory, though he doesn’t know why he bothers. He’s still holding the ropes, lowering the boat down, red-handed. He’s trying to push disaster off one more second. He feels a strange sense of calm as he realizes what that means— that he’ll say and do anything to avoid the threat of the gun. He and the master are the same that way; afraid of the same thing. 

But Tobey whirls, dropping his side of the rope and making the boat tilt crazily against the side. From where it rests at his feet, he picks up the hatchet. It glints in the moonlight. 

The two of them have performed a different math, Amos realizes. Tobey sees the presence of the gun just as well as he does, and they’re both familiar with the way a Colt revolver loads— six shots. Even in the dark, even on a moving ship, Amos thinks at least one of those shots will strike true before Tobey can make it with the hatchet. And if he does kill the master— what is waiting for them on shore? The gallows, at best.

“Trying to kill me?” the master asks. “You’ll regret it.”

The master’s hand moves, and he aims the pistol squarely at Tobey. Amos lets go of the boat’s ropes and it splashes heavily into the water, banging hard against the side of the ship.

By now, there’s commotion below as the noise gets everyone out of bed— the officers and the steerage first, and then the foremast hands all running to see the conclusion of the play. It surely doesn’t take more than a second or so for the boat to slip down the ropes, but it feels like a lifetime. Time moves strangely in visions and dreams.

Amos steps in front of Tobey, and the master fires the gun. The bullet whistles somewhere over his head, past his left side— wherever it goes, it doesn’t hit. But the master is cocking the gun to fire again, and he won’t miss with the second shot. Tobey tries to run forward, but Amos grabs him by the arm and hauls him backwards, towards the rail. 

The master shoots again. They dive off the side.

Marcus falls into the water. Even in the heat of the summer, the Atlantic is surprisingly cold, and his clothes billow around him, only his shirt trapped against his skin by the life jacket he’s wearing. It keeps his head above water during the momentary shock of submersion, but then he gains control of himself.

They want to climb into the boat, row it away from the ship, but when Amos tries to haul himself up, the master shoots again. He misses.

Even though he’s swimming in terror, grabbing Tobey who is a weaker swimmer than he is, he’s grateful that there’s no blood in the water. Not from a whale and not from either of them— he’s still scared of sharks.

There’s still three shots left in the gun, and the master has plenty of time to reload. There’s chaos on deck as someone yells to lower a boat to help them, but if a boat is lowered Amos doesn’t know. Tobey wrests himself free of his grip and swims away, as far as he can go. In the choppy waves, it’s all Amos can do to stay close to him, and keep his own head above water. The ship is lost from sight too quickly, vanishing into the darkness of the night, and the swell that lifts them up and drops them down in its hollows.

How long can a man swim? Amos wonders.

Marcus’s mouth is full of salt water, and he’s exhausted after a few scant minutes. He keeps crawling forward, the life jacket at least holding him at the surface of the water— he couldn’t dive if he wanted to. When the ocean lifts him high enough to see, the flash of white still lingers on the horizon, and he swims for it. 

Amos and Tobey swim, too. The exhaustion is worse for them, malnourished and already overtired. And they swim for no reason other than to keep their heads above water, in the hope that some other passing whaleship or merchant vessel will come by and see them.

Sunlight is pulling its way up the horizon, pink and orange. Marcus, lifting his chin as much as he can, sees the tall spokes of a ship’s mast rising up over the water, towering white. But then it moves and turns, twisting, and he thinks it’s his own vision failing him, or the way he’s being shoved around by the waves, until the form resolves into a familiar shape, the flash of white on the horizon, as regular as a metronome. 

The whale— though he knows it’s not a whale— he swims for it anyway, and keeps swimming until he arrives.

The water churns through a forest that towers above him, and it carries him through the endless array of windmills, all in perfect lines, their blades spinning. Their white blades catch the pink light of dawn, and they carve through the air with a low whumping sound.

He crashes into the base of one. It’s inhumanly large, so much so that he can’t see around it when he’s next to it— a wall of white. Up close, its pure white surface is grimy with barnacles and trash tangled up around it. He fumbles around it, the waves pushing him this way and that, threatening to snatch him away.

Amos and Tobey keep swimming. There, in the dawn light, they see something on the horizon. A spout of water, weak and feeble. It’s a whale— it really is. They swim for it, if only because a whale spouting on the horizon will bring boats from any ships that see it. It’s worth braving being close to it for that fraction of a chance, that signal flare.

But as they crest a wave and see it, it’s familiar to them. It’s the same whale they struck days ago, the one who has Amos’s iron still embedded in his side. He’s tangled in ropes, weakly drifting on the surface of the water, as barely alive as Amos and Tobey are. The whaleboat that he ran off with is still whole. It’s trapped against him in the web of rope, on its side, preventing him from diving.

When Amos and Tobey swim up to him and cling onto the ropes, grateful for the whale’s buoyancy— sperm whales float even after death, though this one is alive— it doesn’t make any attempt to shake them away. It’s perhaps too weak for even that.

Marcus scrapes his hands on the barnacles that festoon the windmill’s base, and the ocean slams him against its side again and again, making his head ring. He claws his way along it, a barnacle himself, looking for a way up.

Amos’s knife is still at his belt, the sailor’s knife with the first two inches cut off the blade. All it does is cut rope; it can’t be a weapon. He saws through the ropes, one after another, that trap the boat to the side of the whale. He doesn’t have enough breath to speak. Tobey clings to the underside of the boat, and as soon as it’s loose enough to turn, he tries to flip it over so that he can climb inside. It takes them both all their strength to get it free, and then they are so weak that they can barely haul themselves into it. They lay on the bottom of the whaleboat, gasping and alive, with the sun rising above them.

Marcus finds the ladder that he knew had to be on the windmill’s side. He pulls himself up, one hand over the other, until he reaches the tiny maintenance platform at the structure’s base. When he stands on it, he can see a great distance. Behind him, the forest of windmills stretches out impossibly far. They tower above him like cathedral spires, twirl like dancers. In the east, he sees a dot on the horizon— there’s the Whole Wide World .

Amos leans over the side of the whaleboat, knife in his hand. The whale is still there, still tangled in rope, turned partly on his side. His small, black eye is visible, following Amos’s knife. With the shortened blade, Amos does all that he can do: he cuts the whale free.