We Belong Dead
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.