The Last of the Repercussions
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.