You and Me and a High Balcony

Monday July 16, 2057

It is not yet the hottest day of the summer, which is what makes the heat so unbearable. Marcus at work is tempted to ask Joe if they can all take their shirts off, though he knows that Joe will refuse. It’d be plenty historically accurate, except for his coworker Jules’s tattoos, one on each freckled arm: red and blue waving balloon men, like you’d see in front of a furniture store, only instead of advertising a sale, one of them says KILL, and the other says YOURSELF. Flexing his skinny arm, where a sailor’s mermaid tattoo would dance, makes his balloon men wiggle. A condition of Jules being hired, which Joe enforces exactingly, is that the stupid tattoos be covered at all times. And the museum wouldn’t like their staff all wandering around shirtless, no matter if the temperature is climbing hand over hand into the triple digits. It’s the kind of thing that people get used to— no getting out of work for a whole summer when enduring this is your summer job.

At least there are no more school tours— only the very rare summer camp. School tours in this heat would be awful, since no one can leave. The regular summer tourists, looking at the time slots reserved on their tickets, and then looking at the temperature on their phones, and then looking at the fact that the tour claims to run an hour, usually decide that their money has gone to waste, and that they’ll suffer the hottest part of the day in the climate controlled museum. So from noon to about three, only one group’s worth of people comes by, and the tour leads shuffle them down into the marginally cooler (though disgustingly humid) underbelly of the ship before anyone dies of heatstroke.

In the morning, Joe helped everyone string out a sail between the lower spars of two of the masts, to make an impromptu tent cover. This, combined with the usual emptiness of the mast, is absurd looking, but it at least keeps some of the blistering sun off the deck, and provides tan, dappled shade for the staff when they stand beneath it. They took one of their empty prop barrels and filled it with water, and they dunk their torsos in as far as far as they can reach, soaking their costumes and emerging like wet dogs, shaking their strings of sodden hair and spraying water everywhere. It’s not enough.

At lunchtime, Marcus checks his phone and discovers that he has messages, though they’re not from Bryanne, who is coming home today. They’re all city emergency alerts about the heat, begging people to sparingly use electricity, to go to their basements rather than use their air conditioners, to turn off all the lights in their house, to not run their ovens or microwaves, to turn off their computers and unplug everything that can be unplugged. And to stay indoors and drink lots of water. There’s nothing Marcus can do except for that last one— he drinks it down by the gallon. When the Dels lemonade pushcart comes by, Joe buys some for all of the staff, and they sit in a circle beneath the strung up sail and eat the frozen treat, swirling it around in their cups and foregoing straws or spoons, joking about the vitamin C. It melts down into juice before any of them are even halfway through.

When the tours end for the day, it’s usually incumbent on the staff to do at least a cursory cleanup of the ship. But Joe sends everybody home right away, except for Marcus, who pleads that he has to bike home, and would rather wait until the sun goes down. He clambers up the mast, to take advantage of the cool(er) breeze and watch for Bryanne to come home.

When he gets up there, he doesn’t immediately turn towards the river, but instead gives his usual greeting to the scarecrow Tobey, and looks around, at the city behind him and across the river. The sun is hitting what looks like every windowpane in the city, too bright to look at directly, burning his eyes. He shields his brow with his hand and stares into the light. 

He stands up there for a long time. The glinting of light on glass and the glinting of light on water may as well be the same, and the brightness of the scene overwhelms his vision, so that it’s no longer clear what he’s looking at, just a chaotic field of light with specks of black color, the hard shadows of the sides of houses that don’t catch the western-sun, though it’s still high overhead. The heat feels cleaner up high and in this bright light. In the shade, he expects relief and is disappointed when there is none. Up here, the air itself is an autoclave, purifying.

He’s dizzy.

Below him, someone is yelling something incoherent. He’s not sure what it is. It’s his name.

“Amos! Amos Cudjoe!”

He looks down at his feet, down at the person standing below, yelling.

“I thought that would get your attention.”

It takes him a moment to place who the specter or intruder is. Broad shouldered and squinting up at him, with blonde hair that curls in a wild mane around her shoulders. She’s wearing a bright blue baseball cap and polo shirt embroidered with the logo of Bryanne’s tour company. That detail makes it all fall into place— this is Atlas. He recognizes her now, and something of the real world clicks back into place..

“What are you doing here?” he yells down. “You’re not supposed to be back until—”

“We’re back,” she says, and doesn’t answer the question.

Marcus bumps past Tobey and squeezes back down the mast, clambering ungainly. Of all the things he does on the ship, he’s least used to this having an audience, and he’s sure he’s making a fool out of himself. But he lands safely on two feet and looks at Atlas, who has gone over to lean on the rail. She’s looking down at her own boat, which still has the harpoon stuck in it.

“Why are you back so early?” Marcus asks.

“We left the bay early,” she says. “I figured I’d let you know, do Bee a solid, since she’ll just be mad at you if she finds you up here instead of at home.”

“Bee?” he asks.

“Just go,” Atlas says, waving her hand. “And maybe take off that costume before you do.”

“I don’t have anything else to wear.” 

Atlas looks down at herself, and tugs on the hem of her polo shirt, as if she’s going to offer to trade, but then decides against it.

“Just go,” she says again.

Marcus starts off, then he turns back towards her. “Hey— are you going to be alright? In the heat? I assume you don’t have AC in there.” He nods towards her boat.

“I’m fine,” Atlas says. “If it gets too bad, I’ll just head out for a couple days.”

“Right. Okay.”

It’s not like there’s anything he can do for her, even if the answer is no, so he’s not sure why he even bothered to ask. One dubiously good turn deserves another, he guesses. 

He bikes home, sweat soaking through his shirt even more than it already was. With the heat, there are very few other vehicles on the roads, and no pedestrians. It’s eerily quiet, like the whole city has been abandoned. Marcus sails down the middle of the road, figuring that going slowly won’t save him anything in the long run, and whizzes through intersections, glancing at the cross street to make sure he won’t get hit, and not bothering to wait for the lights. It wouldn’t have mattered if he did; the one time he happens to glance up at one, he discovers that it’s out, and part of the strange silence that has been filling his ears is the lack of electric hum: no rattling air conditioners, no buzzing wires, no TVs, no radios. No birds, no crickets either; it’s too hot for them to sing. Dead world.

He makes it back to his house, chains his bike up, and stares up at the sagging balcony. Bryanne isn’t out there, though in this heat she should be. Maybe Atlas was wrong, and she didn’t go home.

He heads upstairs and hears her. She’s in the shower. A trail of discarded clothing leads between the front door of their apartment and the bathroom: shirt, shoes, bra, shorts, underwear, one sock, two. The bathroom door is open, and Marcus figures that’s enough of an invitation to step inside. He heeds Atlas’s warning and strips his own clothes off first, before Bryanne can see his costume.

The water still works at least, and she’s running it as cold as it can go. She has her face tilted back into the stream of water, letting it fill her open mouth and drip out the sides, air coming up from her lungs and pushing it out in spurts as she breathes in through her nose and out through her mouth. 

She stiffens when he pulls back the shower curtain and slips in behind her, but she doesn’t say anything, and neither does he. She shuffles to push him into the stream of water so that she’s behind him, and she presses her forehead to his back, between his shoulder blades and his neck.

The cold water sings like electricity on his skin— he has a sunburn. He hadn’t noticed. But he’s been feeling like a ghost inside his own skin recently, so that’s not very surprising. 

They’re standing stock still in the shower, Bryanne with her arms wrapped around his waist so tightly that he can’t breathe very easily. He doesn’t mind, and he doesn’t say anything. He could ask her what happened, why the Thylacine came back to port early, why she’s so upset.

The tiny sliver of a window above the shower, the only light in the bathroom with the power out, faces east, and so as the sun moves further westward, the light in the room dims, rendering them both indistinct. The two of them could be anyone: Marcus and Bryanne, Amos and You , Adam and Eve. 

The water is condensing on the walls, forming rivulets and trails that snake down the shiny white paint and carve stripes on the mirror. They stand in the water until the clog in the plumbing somewhere deep down in the house’s basement backs up, and they keep standing there until the water rises and rises, around their feet, around their ankles, around their calves, until one stray movement of Marcus’s leg sends a wave cresting over the bathtub’s edge, spilling out onto the floor.

“Oh— fuck!” he says, coming to his senses. He steps out, dropping the water level enough to stop their whole bathroom from flooding. Bryanne doesn’t react as he turns off the faucet and pulls their towels from the rack over the door and drops them onto the floor to absorb some of the tidal wave’s remains.

Bryanne seems unable to move, standing there dripping. Even when Marcus holds out a fresh towel to her, she doesn’t turn towards him— she’s lost in her own world, looking down at the water sloshing around her calves. Marcus gives up on holding the towel out to her. He hangs it on the door and picks up all the wet laundry to go put it away.

The heat hasn’t broken at all in the time that they were in the shower, but the cold shower helped. He puts on shorts, and opens the balcony door, propping it open. With the sun well past its peak, it’s better to be outside than inside, where the heat gets trapped. The blackout probably won’t end until both electrical demand goes down (night, and fewer air conditioners running) and the wind picks up (for the windfarms offshore). He doesn’t expect sleeping in their bedroom to be feasible. He gets their battered, wheezing old air mattress out of the closet and pulls it out onto the balcony to inflate with his bike pump. It barely fits. The area between the splintered wooden railing with its chipped lead paint, and the wall of the house is not quite large enough, so the end of it squeezes through the open door, a quarter of its length ending up in the living room. 

He hears Bryanne finally get out of the shower as the bathroom drain gurgles, and he sees her through the open door, walking naked through the house and leaving a trail of wet footprints on the old tan carpet in the living room. She goes into the bedroom and leans on the windowsill, sticking her head outside and vaping for a while. Marcus finishes setting up the bed, goes in the kitchen and pulls out the half gallon of ice cream that’s going to melt in the unpowered freezer if they don’t eat it. Not much of a dinner, but better than letting it go to waste. He takes it out to the balcony with two spoons, and waits for Bryanne to join him, which she does several minutes later.

They sit on the air mattress, trying to preserve some space between them so that whatever snatches of breeze pass through the open air can get through and cool them. It shifts beneath them, rocking like a boat on a still sea. They pass the tub of strawberry ice cream back and forth until it’s too melted to be tolerable, and when Bryanne gets up to throw it away, the whole balcony shifts beneath her feet, the timbers creaking. When she comes back, she lays down flat on her back and stares up at the darkening blue sky.

Finally, Marcus has to ask, “Did something happen while you were out on your tour?”

“Yes,” she says, and throws her arm over her eyes.

“Is everyone alright?”

“Fine.”

He runs through the possibilities of what might have happened— Bryanne doesn’t like to complain about the bad behavior of passengers on the boat, but he can only imagine that it was something that one of them did— terrorizing the staff enough to force the ship to turn around and return to port early. Emotions tend to run high when people don’t see the whales they’re paying to see. But if she doesn’t want to tell him about it, he won’t press. “I’m sure you’ll see a whale eventually,” he says.

She says nothing, and they sit in silence for a long time. Marcus thinks about getting his computer and working on his Ph.D. program application, but decides against it. Instead, he reaches behind himself into the house and grabs the little bucket of tools that sits on the bookshelf, finds the pocket knife, and idly starts carving into the balcony’s balusters, flaking the lead paint onto the ground like so many snowflakes. He forms the rough shape of a whale, rounding the body and poking the tail out. He’s careful not to carve all the way through the railing, and makes the second shape of another one right below, one following another up the pole. The wood is very soft, eaten by the weather for probably more than a hundred years, but that doesn’t make it easy to carve. It chips apart, and so the forms of his whales are jagged and rough, the holes he tries to stab for eyes disappearing into the formless cracks that permeate the wood.

He thinks that Bryanne has fallen asleep behind him, for how quiet she is, but when he’s onto his third whale, he glances behind himself and finds her eyes open, and her vape in her mouth, staring up at the sky, which is by now growing dark enough that they can see the stars. With night rushing on, the breeze has picked up, and the temperature has dropped enough that it’s tolerable to exist in his own skin, though sweat is still clinging to him.

“Your uncle called me last night,” Marcus says.

“He called you? Why?”

“Your mom gave him my number. He said he wasn’t ever sure if you weren’t picking up the phone because you were ignoring him, or because you were out.”

“He knows my schedule.”

“He says he didn’t.”

She twists around so that she’s looking out the side of the railing, down the street, rather than at Marcus. 

“He said that he needed to talk to you, because he found someone who’s looking for a first mate, and would love to talk to you, since he’s vouching for you.”

“Who?”

“Someone he used to know from the Navy, I guess,” Marcus says. “Friend of a friend. He told me his name— Aaron or Jared Mitchell or something. He was in his car— I couldn’t hear him very well.”

Bryanne makes a noise that doesn’t mean anything.

“Anyway, I told him I’d let you know. I wrote down the guy’s phone number— you should call him. It seems like it’s a good job. It’d pay better than you’re getting right now.”

“I’m not going to quit my job,” Bryanne says.

“Why not?” Marcus asks. “It doesn’t sound like it’s going well.”

She responds with reluctance. “What kind of ship is it?”

“Tanker,” he says. “I think.”

“I’m not fucking working on an oil tanker,” she says, sitting upright at last. She’s actually angry, and she scowls at him. “Which is why I haven’t been answering the phone.”

“Oh,” Marcus says. He turns back to his whales, though it’s now too dark to see what he’s doing clearly.

“Oh? What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t mean anything,” he says. “It’s your life.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she says.

“What?”

“It’s my life— no it isn’t!”

He turns to look at her, and she stands up, making the balcony sway, and Marcus on his seat on the air mattress sink to the ground. The thing never holds its air, and without her weight on it increasing the pressure, it’s half empty. In the slim space left between the balcony and the air mattress and the wall, a rectangular sliver just a few steps wide, she paces back and forth, stopping at the furthest part of the balcony and leaning on the rail, clutching it with white knuckles.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he says, trying to mollify her. “I’m sorry— I’ll drop it.”

“Tell me why you think I should take it,” she says.

“It’d be— your career,” he says. “And it pays— he said like twice what you’re getting now. And you could do it. I asked him if you had enough experience and he said yeah, of course you did at this point, and you passed all your certification tests, so—”

“So, money,” she says.

“Yeah.” He scrapes his knife across the balcony baluster again, filing down the next whale in the line, trying to shape the roundness of its head.

“That it?”

He thinks about it for a second, and then says, “It seems like it would be good to have a job that’s doing something real, not just tourist stuff.”

She leans on the railing so far that he’s genuinely concerned that she might fall over, tumble down onto the street below, or, like Tobey, leap over the side. “Can you get your head out of your ass for one second?” she asks him. “I’m not kidding. Use your brain. I thought you were supposed to be the smart one here.”

“If you don’t want to talk about it—”

“I do want to talk about it, actually,” she says. “If you want to go work on an oil rig, be my fucking guest. Or do you only want to hunt whales?”

“I don’t,” he says.

“No? You don’t want to be just like your role model, Mister Amos?”

“He’s not my role model—” Except in that he is, in the strictest sense, a role that Marcus is playing. “And it’s not like he wanted to hunt whales either— he just needed the money.”

“Yeah,” she says. “And so do I.” She stares out into the darkness, stands on her toes. The balcony, like a rowboat, sways.

“It’s a good way to advance,” he says, and he realizes he’s quoting the journal, but not Amos. It’s a jarring moment of sudden disconnection, and he wishes Amos were here on the balcony instead of him— he’s too clumsy with his words, and doesn’t know how to diffuse Bryanne’s anger. 

She’s bouncing on her toes, a habit of hers that he’s familiar with, when she’s unhappy she turns to the repetitive and physical: running, ripping apart heavy old cardboard boxes that they tend to accumulate in the closet, hauling all their garbage out to the street or their laundry down to the basement, chopping onions, hammering the legs of their falling-apart kitchen chairs back into place for the millionth time. But there’s no room for any of that here on the balcony, so she’s squeezing the wood with her fists— if she had long fingernails, she’d be getting splinters underneath them.

“I get it,” he finally says.

“Do you?”

“I do, yeah.”

“Sure.”

“Amos didn’t want to hunt whales,” he says again. “He talks in his journal all the time about how it’s evil work, and how he is afraid of whalemen going to hell for it, and—”

“But he kept doing it,” she says. “They hunted every last one of them.”

“You’ll see whales soon. They’re out there.”

“We saw the last one today,” she said. 

“You saw one?” He’s startled, but pleased. “I thought—”

“It died,” she said. “Got caught in line and starved to death.”

Marcus abandons his little vandalistic carving project, looking up at her from his seat on the ground. “I’m so sorry,” he says, genuine pain in his voice. He wants to comfort her, but she’s turned away from him.

“I bet he did go to hell,” she says savagely. “I bet we all will.”

“Bryanne—” Marcus says, and stands up, reaching for her. But as he does, the house makes a horrible groaning sound, like the timbers creaking on a stove-in and sinking ship. His sudden shift in weight and Bryanne’s bouncing on the end of the balcony tears something critical apart at last, and the balcony sways, separating itself from the house one ripping wooden joint at a time. Marcus stumbles under the sudden movement of unsteady ground, which only makes the problem worse, and he doesn’t realize what’s happening soon enough to leap for the open door and get back inside the safety of the house.

Bryanne turns around, alarmed, and tries to run inside, but she steps on the air mattress, now at a steep angle with the collapsing floor, and the whole thing slides underneath her, dragging her down to the railing, which crashes apart as soon as she hits it.

And they’re both falling, tumbling down to the ground in a shower of lead paint and worm-eaten wood, and their second floor neighbor’s grill and folding chairs as they crash through that story too, until they land on the shingled roof of the entryway porch, slide or roll down that, and come to rest on the ground, covered in dust and bruised to hell.

“Bryanne—” Marcus calls, or thinks he calls, as soon as he processes what has happened, and that he’s still alive and laying on the ground. The shock doesn’t tell him if he’s broken any bones, but his ears and head are ringing like a struck bell, and his legs are tangled in the air mattress, which wheezes its last— his carving knife hanging out of it like it’s a stuck pig.

Bryanne doesn’t say anything, but she’s able to scramble to her feet through the rubble.

Someone, distantly, is yelling. It’s their second floor neighbor, standing at the newly made hole in the wall where her balcony formerly was. Marcus lays on the ground, looking up. It’s a strange reversal of earlier in the afternoon, he thinks. Before, he was up high, and Atlas was yelling at him down below. He laughs, and doesn’t stop laughing.

“I’m calling the police!” the neighbor yells. 

What are the police going to do? Marcus wonders. You might as well call a priest.

Bryanne pulls the air mattress off Marcus’s legs, and he manages to get to his feet, nothing broken. It was a high fall, but a strangely slow one, stopping at both the second floor balcony and the first floor roof before they tumbled the last ten feet to the ground, so they never made it to punishingly high impact speeds, which saved their lives, probably. 

The grill that was on the second floor is now embedded halfway into the patio roof, its silvery lid flopping open. Rubble is strewn all over the sidewalk and street: shattered timbers and shingles. When Marcus looks up at where they used to be, it’s like he’s looking at a cross section of the house: the balcony’s fall has peeled away huge sections of the outer wall, like opening an orange, or taking the blubber off a whale. He can see the house’s ribs, the thin balloon framing of the walls, and the way the floors all have a noticeable sag to them, slumping inwards like the balcony. The neighbor is still standing at the hole in the wall in her bathroom, still yelling, though this time into her phone.

With an electric hum, the power chooses that moment to come back on, the streetlights flickering up, and the lights that had been on but not shining in their house beginning their illumination, lighting the cutaway doll’s house. The roar of a distant crowd whoops and cheers as someone’s TV resumes playing a soccer match, the Brazilian announcer crowing, “GOALAÇOOOOOO! FERNANDO! GOALAÇOOOOOO!”

He’s barefoot, wearing nothing but his shorts, and Bryanne is only wearing a long tee shirt— the two of them don’t have a full outfit between them. She picks through the rubble to find her vape, and sticks it into her mouth.

The neighbor’s 911 call has summoned someone: a siren begins wailing somewhere, coming closer. Marcus, not thinking about much other than wanting to avoid an embarrassing and expensive ambulance trip to get checked out, stumbles towards his bike, still placidly chained up to the alley fence. 

“Where are you going?” Bryanne asks.

“Do you want to come?” He offers her the seat on the back of the bike, but she shakes her head, and goes back to looking up at the ruins of their house.

So Marcus heads off. The pedals of his bike dig into his bare feet, and he’s not sure where he’s going until he arrives. He’s down at the docks, and there’s the Wampanoag . It’s dark now, and the stars aren’t even visible, now that New Bedford’s lights are all back to their usual, gleaming brightness. He lets himself in to the ship, changes into the spare crew outfit they keep in the dressing room, and then climbs up into his bunk in the steerage, and falls sound asleep.