Look Hard at My Stripes (There’ll Be No More After Me)
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.”