Trick Mirror
Monday April 2, 2057
The ship, which is not real, opens for tours at ten, though staff are expected to arrive by quarter after nine. Marcus, who is several minutes late, finds that the rest of the staff have already gotten into costume and are jogging in place on the cramped and rain-wet deck, doing a frantic team-building or acting exercise that he would like, more than anything else in the world, to avoid. He can hear the pounding of their feet before he gets to the ship, and he stops and tries to calculate an approach that will get him on board without being noticed. There’s not going to be any way, he thinks: the empty masts rise like barren trees in the cold, foggy spring air, and they provide absolutely no cover for someone trying to sneak onboard. The little whaling boats, hanging from their davits off the side of the ship, are similarly useless to him. Up top, the old American flag with thirty seven stars on it hangs limply, almost dripping with the humidity. Below, the lookout, a scarecrow tied to the mast like a prisoner, looks eerily human in the fog, and glares down at him, making him feel watched.
If he stands here much longer, someone real is going to glance down at the wooden dock and see him standing there, observing the circle of joggers, so Marcus tries to board the tall ship via the dockside ramp, then sneak below without being seen. Much like the jogging, this is an exercise in futility: Joe, his boss, spots him before he’s managed to get to the aft cabin stairs.
“Marcus! Glad you could join us!” Joe yells out. His voice carries across the deck, and then across the water, making several seagulls perched on the rails take off, squawk unhappily, and go take up residence on someone else’s boat. The Wampanoag is docked in between a veritable forest of smaller pleasure sailboats, cheaper space away from the ferry and busy fishing trawlers. They’re not on the ocean proper, still inside the wide and sheltered harbor mouth of the Acushnet river, so the brackish water ripples sluggishly past in one direction, only rising by inches with the tide, and not slapped with ocean waves. “Not an auspicious start to our season, is it!”
“No, sir. Sorry, sir,” Marcus says as he changes course and heads towards the group.
“You’re not in costume yet— just Joe.”
“Yes, Joe. Sorry, Joe.”
“Echo,” Joe says, and points at one of the joggers, still dutifully moving. It’s Kelly, whose brown hair is bouncing up and down with every step he takes.
“Yes, Joe. Sorry, Joe,” Kelly repeats in a yell.
Down the line: “Yes, Joe. Sorry, Joe,” from Waylon (panting), Jules (falsetto), Quan (bored), Langston (yelling again). Before Eli (singsong) is done repeating it, Marcus gets a word in edgewise and says, “Can I go get changed?”
Like the seagulls: “Can I go get changed?” “Can I go get changed?” “Can I go get changed?”
“Join our circle!” Joe says, and so Marcus wedges himself in with the joggers, barely enough room for all of them in the small clear space in front of the brick tryworks and their accompanying massive pots, one set out on the deck and not encased in brick for display.
He doesn’t say anything else, since that would continue the echoing, and he begins to jog in step, already tired from his bike ride in. He feels very out of place amid his coworkers, his bike helmet still crushing his hair to his head, and his modern sweater and jeans sticking out next to the sundry assortment of oiled canvas jackets and patched-knee pants. He suspects the purpose of this exercise is to make them feel sweaty and disgusting— during their week long pre-season orientation, Joe remarked often, and loudly, that the accuracy of their costumes was compromised by the fact that they all smelled like lilacs and roses and pine shampoo.
Already, Marcus isn’t sure he’s going to last the season, which stretches long and grim until the end of October. Earlier, when he complained about their orientation to Bryanne, she rolled over in bed and mumbled, “There’s no one worse to work for than a true believer.”
But Joe doesn’t have the monomania of Ahab, just the painful enthusiasm of a former drama teacher: the up-up-up-and-at-‘em that keeps him bouncing on his toes and crinkling his face into an exuberant smile, through which Marcus can feel his invisible judgment at his own lack of verve.
They jog for another minute, Joe pointing to everyone in turn and asking questions that tourists or elementary schoolers needed canned answers to, and then he relents and lets them stop moving. A sudden silence falls, now that they aren’t drumming the wooden boards of the deck. The creaking of the ropes in the wind and the susurration of the dockside water against the sides of the ship feels like a momentary deafening.
Joe lines them up in pairs facing each other, and when Marcus sees that Joe is matching tall with short and white with black, he knows what’s coming. It’s Joe’s favorite game, and Marcus’s least favorite. He ends up across from Waylon.
They’re about as different as two people in their group can look, even aside from their mismatch in outfits. Marcus is twenty-five, black and stocky, with his father’s sharp nose on his mother’s round face. He wears his hair in a short afro, tapered down to meet his beard, which he’s constantly flirting with the idea of growing out, but never commits to.
Waylon, on the other hand, has such Irish-red hair that Joe almost didn’t hire him, and although he graduated high school the previous summer, he looks two years younger than that, minimum. Marcus gives him a tepid smile.
“I know I’ve said this plenty of times before,” Joe begins, “but since it’s the first real day of our long voyage together, it’s worth reiterating. While you are on this ship, you leave your own baggage at the dock, and you pick up somebody else’s.” The speech seems targeted at Marcus, not least because Joe is looking right at him, though he points down the line. “You’re not Kelly Carvhalo, late of Tiverton— you’re First Mate Charles Porter, of New Bedford’s Wampanoag . Get used to being someone else. When you look in the mirror, don’t expect to see yourself. Right? Right. Forty-five seconds, fore side first, then switch.”
Marcus is on the fore side, so he’s the leader of this exercise for those first forty-five seconds. His thin smile is still on his face, and Waylon takes it up on his own. When Marcus touches his ear, lifts his chin, rubs his knuckles from his eye across his cheek, Waylon mimics the motion so quickly that the delay is imperceptible. They feel like the same act, intrinsically tied together, and it makes Marcus shiver, which makes Waylon twitch in an echo of the movement. To his left and right, his coworkers are each enjoying putting their mirror counterpart through his paces, jumping and pulling faces. But Marcus finds the simulacrum so disturbing that he’s compelled to test it only in delicate ways. He leans forward; Waylon leans forward too.
There’s a threshold: the closer they get, the smaller slice of his partner that Marcus can see, the realer that slice becomes. But get too close and Waylon, who is a good six inches shorter than he is, can’t get the height right to match where Marcus is leaning, and the illusion breaks. So he leaves them separated, raising his hand inches away from Waylon’s, that invisible pane of glass keeping them apart.
It’s a relief when Joe blows his carved wooden whistle and they switch. It’s far easier to be the mirror than it is to be mirrored, and Waylon just wants to make him hop up and down on one foot anyway, and wave his arms and sway like a tree in the wind.
And then they’re done with Joe’s second whistle, and he lets them break off, get ready for their day. Waylon goes to stand over by the rail and peel open a granola bar that he’s had nearly falling out of his pocket, and Marcus heads down into the ship’s hold to get changed.
The upper section of the ship is fitted out with as much historical realism as they can muster, but the lowest area, where the tourists don’t go, is the staging area for their work. The forecastle and steerage have electric lamps disguised as oil lanterns hung from the ceiling, but down in the lower hold there’s bare LED bulbs strung up, casting a hard and miserable light onto the costume racks, and prop shelves, and the folding plastic card table and chairs which are so unpleasant to eat at that he’d rather stay on deck during his break. Without any cargo, the ship is sitting high in the water, but the electric pump still kicks on and off every once in a while, a hum that echoes and bounces around the mostly empty hold.
Marcus dumps his backpack and bike helmet into one of the employee lockers, and doesn’t even bother going into the screened off changing area to get his costume on. He’s still pulling his shirt on over his head when Joe comes down.
Joe gets himself a donut from the limp looking box on the card table, half-empty already. He is very careful to lean forward while he eats it, never letting a speck of jimmies or strawberry frosting fall on his costume, which is significantly nicer than Marcus’s— he plays the master. He speaks with his mouth full, though. “Any particular reason you were late today?”
“Sorry about that,” Marcus says, not answering the question. “It won’t happen again.”
Joe waves his hand. “It’s not the end of the world, but don’t make a habit of it.” He smiles, and the pink frosting fluff gathers at the corner of his lips. “See, you’re lucky— if you were Amos and late for your watch, I’d have grounds to flog you.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Marcus says in a near monotone as he carefully hangs up his sweater on the rack. “Flogging was banned in 1850. You might still do it, but you wouldn’t have the right to.”
Joe laughs. “You caught me! Good job.”
It wasn’t, really, and Joe’s patronizing tone didn’t make it moreso. There was a book of information that they had all been told to memorize in case of questions, and to help them personalize their own tour monologue. The section on punishments, Marcus paid close attention to, since he expected it to be of especially lurid interest to high schoolers. “Well, I try.”
“I know!” Joe crams the rest of his donut in his mouth, then says, “I got something for you.”
Marcus sits down on one of the chairs to pull on his shoes, which do not fit well at all. They’re at least allowed to keep their modern socks, rather than being provided with knitted ones. Joe goes into one of the lockers and pulls out a package, wrapped in the remains of a paper grocery bag. He holds it out to Marcus, who straightens up and takes it.
“Thanks.”
“You said you were having difficulty reading the journal scans on a computer,” Joe said. “I know exactly how you feel. Anyway— there you go. It’s a bit of a self-serving gift, since the better you do, the better we all do.”
He peels the paper open, revealing a floppy, cheap paperback, the kind that you can get at a print-on-demand kiosk at most big box stores— meant to be read and recycled. Already, the cheap glue block is making the pages threaten to come out when Marcus flips it open. It’s not formatted very well at all. The original text was in a folio size volume, and the scans of its pages have been transplanted awkwardly onto a modern aspect ratio, textbook size. Even the cover has an ugly, digital-black border where the scans of the marbled red-and-blue original journal cover leaves off. Still, the writing on the first page— Journal of a Whaling Voyage on the Bark Wampanoag , Written by Amos Cudjoe, Harpooner — is perfectly crisp and legible.
“This will definitely make it easier,” Marcus agrees. “Thanks.”
“You’re lucky to get a journal,” Joe says. “You’re the only one from this ship that has one preserved. The rest of us just have the log.”
“I know.” He wants to ask why Joe gave him the best part, or what Joe seems to think is the best part, but he’s pretty sure the answer is that he looks the role, and has a history degree, which nobody else has. Does that make him qualified to have the extra work?
It’s certainly not due to his acting ability, which is far below that of most of the other guys. He finds it hard to summon any emotion to his face other than what he’s really feeling, and his much-practiced tour script feels flat and dull when delivers it in front of Bryanne (who is tired of hearing it) and the mirror. He hopes that once it’s moved from the realm of intentional memorization to something that can be delivered off the cuff, knowledge that is simply part of him rather than imposed upon him, it will get easier. But he hasn’t spoken it to a real audience yet, and he guesses it will take a hundred times at least to get that comfortable.
He hadn’t felt like that when he was a teacher— even when he gave the same lesson to seven different classes of kids, it was easy to speak extemporaneously, and the subject matter changed by the day. There was very little else he had enjoyed about that job, but he had liked that— it had felt natural, not like he was a character trapped on a stage. But he hopes he’ll get used to it anyway.
He pages through the book, wondering what pseudo improvisations it might prompt him to add to his lines. He should try to find some phrases to copy out verbatim— Marcus thinks he’s even less of a creative writer than he is an actor. Maybe Joe gave him the role because the extra material is a good crutch, making up for whatever it is that he lacks.
Joe interrupts his thoughts. “You haven’t finished the whole thing yet, right?”
“Not yet. I think I’ve made it through the first fifty days. It’s slow— the handwriting leaves something to be desired.”
“Is yours any better? I feel like my generation was the last one that did any writing by hand.”
“At least I write in print and not cursive,” Marcus says. “Even if I’m bad at it, it’s still clearer than this.” He flips the book open to a random page, where, as with every other page in the journal, the words at the beginning of each line are large and legible, and by the time the writing reaches the right side of the page, they are tiny and cramped to the point where they can barely be distinguished. The author’s miscalculation or desire to save space results in the entire book having a lopsided appearance, as if the writing is constantly trying to narrow down to a single point, to untangle the thread of ink that makes the words and fit them through the eye of a needle rather than a natural unspooling from the tip of a pen. Marcus doesn’t want to talk about his own block letters, and so he asks, “Have you read it?”
“Ages ago, but don’t ask me any details,” Joe says. “I’ve read so many of these that any that aren’t my particular focus all end up mushed together. A kind of congealed mass. The ur-whaling voyage.”
“Makes sense.”
“Sense— yes. But it’s bad of me. I should keep a better handle on the individuals. This is a field with rich primary source documentation, I—”
The bell on deck strikes ten, interrupting them.
“Now I’m late,” Joe says. He shakes himself, brushes nonexistent donut crumbs off his shirt, and makes his way towards the ladder. “Get those shoes on and get on deck, Amos!”
“Yes, sir.”
Nevertheless, he spends another minute in front of the cast mirror, trying in vain to fix the dents that his bike helmet made in his hair.
It’s about an hour long tour, showing the tourists around the Wampanoag , which is quite a long time for such a small ship.
A tour leader heads up each group of eight. The leaders all play their own character, with a bit of a back-and-forth with every station on the ship. They come in, meet Joe, playing the master, who shows them around his cabin, and then the first mate (played by Kelly) leads them around the holds and helm. Their tour lead shows them the blubber room, and brings them back up. Marcus, on deck, gives a tour of the boats, demonstrates the harpoons and shows them the trypots, and then leads them down into the steerage. After that, they’re shown the forecastle, and then the main cabin is their last stop, to taste some whaling ship rations.
It’s a long process, and while each stop varies in length, Marcus’s segment is almost ten minutes. Somehow, this manages to feel both extremely rushed and overwhelmingly long as a monologue. He has to stop himself from taking shortcuts through his script, and ending up with too much Q&A time at the end of his bit. Even though the guest pamphlets have a whole section of suggested questions to ask to prevent it, the worst thing at the end of a tour segment, and something that he encounters several times on the morning of the first day, is total radio silence during question time, especially if he’s trying to stall for time for the person ahead of him to get moving, the tour leader giving him the “give it another forty-five seconds” hand signal as he checks if the next group has moved on.
Because there are always multiple groups coming through at once, the tours weave their dizzying way around the ship, up on deck and below. If the stops were arranged to minimize ascents and descents, there would be a far more efficient way of doing it. But it’s a choreographed dance between all of their staff to keep everyone moving and to make sure two groups don’t bump into each other if one gets delayed. And in the tight quarters, it’s best to give them all a bit of separation, so that groups don’t break apart and switch tours, or have the staff yelling over each other to be heard.
About four tours come through every hour, which means that aside from the hour of open exploration time at noon — a disguised timeslot for staff to eat their lunches— Marcus sees twenty-four tours a day, almost two hundred people. Unless it’s schoolgroups, in which case they can have up to fifteen kids and a teacher on each tour. Those are very close quarters.
It could be a more chaotic job. After all, two hundred is not that many in terms of museum daily visitors, and all of theirs are scheduled and segmented, and there is enough slop in the schedule that he’s not talking nonstop all day long. The trust that pays for them to run the ship and use it as a museum resource is a generous one, and so they don’t have to worry as much about making the tour shorter to allow them to sell more tickets. Marcus tries to tell himself that it’s relaxing and low-lift compared to his last job, but the reality makes that hard to believe. Work is work.
Today, a school has booked out the whole afternoon’s worth of tours, after spending the morning in the museum proper. The buses that disgorged them and then bumped away to find parking can probably carry two-hundred kids. They were bussed down from Boston, and are all wearing the same garish, eye-searing green tee shirts bearing the name and tagline of their charter school. Soar Academy! Where Young Scholars Fly! Picture of an eagle!
Many of them are swinging from the rope barriers that cordon off the lines. The teachers yell to get them to stop, and wedge their way through the mass of squirming bodies to scold particular repeat offenders. It’s a legitimate worry that some kid will fall off the side of the rope into the water, but Marcus doesn’t think that will happen. Overall, he just gets the impression that if the teachers could legally leash the children, they would. He suspects that it’s going to be a long afternoon.
At least it hasn’t started raining yet, though a thick cloud cover fills the sky, rendering the light eerie and grey. The tour will go on, rain or shine, which is miserable for everyone who gets caught out in it. They have their own jackets to wear if it’s pouring out, and they have a stash of recyclable rain slickers to give to guests, but there’s only so much that those things can do.
At lunchtime, Marcus heads below, intent on eating his sandwich in peace before he needs to be on deck. Several of the other staff head down there, too.
“What are we thinking?” Kelly asks as he pulls the oilcloth jackets and hats from the costume rack, holding them up in front of him like he’s in front of a store mirror. “We gonna get rained on, or no?”
“Did anyone check the weather?” Waylon asks.
“I looked,” Marcus says. “Seventy percent chance of precipitation.”
“Seventy? That’s pretty bad,” Kelly says.
“I don’t think I believe in that,” Waylon says. He has his sailor’s knife out, though why Joe lets them carry such a thing is beyond Marcus’s ken, and he’s trying, and failing, to cut an apple. Maybe he’s struggling for the same reason that they’re allowed to have the knives in their actors kits: the top several inches of the knife have been snipped off, leaving a blunted point. “Things either happen or they don’t. Everything’s got a fifty percent chance.”
“Give me that, before you cut your own finger off,” Marcus says, holding out his hand. Waylon gives him the apple and knife, and Marcus deftly quarters it for him.
“So should I bring this up with me, or not?” Kelly asks. “I’m not gonna wanna leave my tour to go get my coat on, or stand there in the rain for ages before I can.”
“You could keep an eye on the barometer,” Joe says, coming down. Waylon, Kelly, and Marcus collectively wince at the sudden presence of their boss, though all try to stifle it. “That’s what it’s for, you know.”
“Yes, we know,” Marcus says. He passes the knife and the apple back to Waylon. “I should get on deck.”
He leaves, passing Joe, and doesn’t take the raincoat with him.
On deck, he watches the kids some more, seeing them jostle and yell and laugh, and feeling distantly fond of them, despite how chaotic the tours will surely be. Though, thinking about students, he winces, and hopes that none of his former students (from a similar New Bedford charter school) will ever show up here.
At one, Kelly strikes the ship’s bell, though it’s hardly necessary, since the tolling bell towers of the churches all ring out at the same time, and the tour leads grab the first tours after their lunch break.
His next few groups go well. Compared to some of the other guides, who don’t get the middle schoolers’ immediate respect, Marcus is tall, and, more importantly, he holds up the harpoon that fascinates every boy between the ages of six and fourteen. That gives him more authority than he really deserves. He feels very silly, standing there in costume, holding out the harpoon with two hands so that the kids can touch the toggle tip.
By two, however, the rain begins, and Marcus cuts short his discussion of the trypots and hastily leads his group down into the steerage. It’s cramped down there. Fifteen seventh-graders and three adults— himself, the tour leader, and the harried looking teacher leading the kids— don’t fit very well in between the rows of bunks and sailors’ chests. He lets the tour leader leave to go grab jackets and raincovers for the guests, and once the jostling crowd is settled inside as much as he can, he starts his little story.
“So, my friends, this is where I sleep here in the steerage. As a harpooner, I’m a very lucky man on this voyage. No, sir, I’m not in the fo’c’sle anymore.”
He points out various features of the room, the little glass prism that would let in light from the deck above (if there was any light to let in) and he shows them several of the objects in his chest: his journal (a mostly blank book— Joe copied the first few pages out, but the rest of the handbound sheets are still sealed and would have to be cut apart with a knife), his blanket, his pipe. He lets them pass the objects around between them, and when the first kid tries to put the pipe in her mouth, the teacher snaps at her, “Scholar Jessica! Hygiene!”
Marcus winces, and tries to get the attention back on himself, rather than the red-faced Jessica.
“And this is my bunk, and I don’t have to share it with any other man with an opposite watch— someone who might leave a mess, or tear my blanket, or set fire to my bed when he’s smoking.” Marcus hauls himself onto the top bunk, and lays down, though he doesn’t fit well. He has to curl up his knees as he lays there, propping himself up with his elbow, resting his head up on his hand. “So long as you’re careful not to hit your head, it’s not a bad spot.”
He surveys the group of kids, who are all looking up at him, a sea of brown and black hair over wide eyes.
“What’s your name, my friend?” Marcus asks the boy standing closest to him, chubby and shy looking, with his hands stuck deep into the pockets of his jeans. He had been accidentally squeezed to the front of the group by the way that Marcus shifted their attention from the back of the room to o the side. He always tries to pick the shy kids, at least one.
“Jason Yue,” he says, though Marcus can barely hear him.
“Jason, you look like a good, healthy boy! How’d you like to join our crew? We don’t have a cabin boy right now, and we sure could use one.”
The rest of the group laughs.
“Uh,” Jason says.
“Cabin boy’s a fine position,” Marcus says. “You get paid— not well, but something, maybe only the 200th lay, but that’s better than nothing, it’s enough to spend when you’re in port anyway— and you get to see the world, and get some experience. On your next voyage, you can sign on as an ordinary seaman, and not a greenhand! That’s moving up in the world! What do you think about that?”
The boys are too busy laughing about the word ‘seaman,’ and Jason’s face is beet red.
“Well, think about it. A cabin boy gets a place in the steerage, too. Here— try out the bed down there. Comfortable enough?”
“I can get in?” It’s a funny, hopeful lilt in his voice— this is a rare historical exhibit where everything isn’t fenced off, and he seems to not have internalized it yet.
“Sure. That’s John— our carpenter— his bed. He won’t mind a bit.” They didn’t have anyone playing the carpenter— but the steerage beds were set up so that visitors could lay in them. “Go right ahead.”
“I’ll go if you won’t,” one of the other kids says, which makes Jason hurriedly clamber in.
“Cozy down there?” Marcus asks. “Now we’re in port right now, so not moving at all, but when there’s a storm, oh, you really feel the ship moving under you. Still, I have to think that in a storm, my bed is the best place to be. Maybe not the safest, but at least I’m not out on deck. And the more miserable the rest of the world is outside, the nicer it feels in here. What do you think?”
“It’s alright,” Jason says. “Kinda hard.”
“Maybe when we’re in our next port you can get some rags or straw to restuff that sleeping pad with,” Marcus says. “But you’re nice and short, so at least you’ve got plenty of room to stretch out.” He extends his leg out over the heads of the seventh graders, who dutifully laugh.
He sees the tour leader returning with a basket full of yellow rainslickers for the kids, and the heavy oilcloth jacket for Marcus, and so he asks, “Does anyone have any questions?” while the protective gear is getting passed out.
It’s a bit of a scramble for everyone to get the slickers on over everyone’s head— it’s small space there in the steerage, and so it’s a forest of limbs and crinkling yellow plastic bumping into each other.
“I have a question,” Jason asks, still sitting on the bunk below Marcus.
“Oh? Let me hear it,” Marcus says. He’s genuinely pleased that the kid has warmed up enough to ask something.
“Why’s the bed say Shanghai here?” he asks.
Marcus leans down over the side of the bed to see where Jason is pointing. There, where the white paint has begun to bubble and peel up from the humidity, it has revealed the branded marks on the bare wood beneath, the two offending characters marking the wood’s origin, and then a numbered brand for the construction crews to put the beam in the correct place.
“That means something?” Marcus asks, struggling to stay in character. “I never knew. John likes to copy down interesting pictures he sees. I think we passed a ship, or maybe he saw it in a book—”
The rest of the group has finished getting their slickers on, and the tour lead is saying, “Alright, lads, let’s get moving. Amos has plenty of work he’s got to be doing, we can’t all stay in bed all day long.”
The tour leader begins hustling the kids out, most of them following like sheep, and the teacher is at the end of the group. She leans down to look at the branded wood of the bed as Marcus clambers out from his bunk. She asks, in that dry voice that indicates she’s speaking to an adult, not a play-actor, and that she fully expects Marcus to break character, “So, this boat’s made in China?”
Marcus winces, weighs the cost of breaking character versus the cost of staying in it, and says, “The original Wampanoag was sunk in the Arctic in 1892— this is a reproduction, built from her construction plans as closely as possible in 2042. In every way, she’s a real whaling bark. The last page of your tour pamphlet has some photos of her construction— it’s pretty neat. But the last whaler that went fishing is down in Mystic, if you want to see it. That’s the Charles W. Morgan . The museum offers a reciprocal membership—”
She frowns. The last of the children are funneling out of the room. “A bit too far of a drive.”
The rain is short lived, and ends before the workday does, which Marcus is grateful for. He changes out of his sodden tour-clothes into his regular outfit, then bikes to a pizza place down the street, where he sets up shop for a while. He gnaws on two five-dollars-a-slice pieces of cheese pizza while thumbing through the journal that Joe gave him, and he spends so long doing so that the pizza grease congeals and the cheese hardens. He doesn’t really notice or care— he’s just killing time, and he’s not really hungry, anyway.
It’s Monday, which means that Bryanne’s whalewatching tour is returning to port from a four-day cruise around Cape Cod. They usually get back in around seven, but it takes her some time to finish her duties up as first mate, so he always meets her at eight. It’s a ritual that they’ve had for years during the tour season, even back when Marcus was working his last real job, doing Teach For America during the days and fumbling his way at night through a masters degree that he hated.
When he’s lingered over his dinner in the warm light of the pizzeria so long that the proprietor begins to give him meaningful looks, Marcus heads off. He stops at the convenience store for a bag of chips and a vape cartridge of the kind Bryanne likes, then walks his bike down the cobblestone streets to the dock where Bryanne’s tour boat is docked.
The Thylacine is longer and taller at the deck than the bark Wampanoag , and painted in crisp and modern blues and whites, all visible in the industrial glare of her running lights. Only its hull is easily visible from where Marcus stands— the deck area is in the shadow of the tall sail tower and deckhouse. Figures crisscross the deck— the ship’s staff on their usual errands. The gangway is down, but the tourists are all long gone. Marcus stands in the darkness of the parking lot, leaning against the chain link fence that separates the parking lot in front of the pier from the road.
When he sees Bryanne, her shoulders hunched tight with exhaustion, walk down the gangway with her day bag full of clothes thumping against her thighs, he gives a long and loud whistle— the shrill kind she taught him, with his fingers in his mouth. She looks up at the sound, and in the dim streetlights of the parking lot, he can see her face twitch in a smile.
“That scares the whales, you know,” she calls. “Aren’t you supposed to say that on your tours?”
“If any whales are in the river, they have bigger problems than me whistling,” Marcus says as she comes over.
She’s shorter than he is by a few inches, but she’s taught with sinewy muscle from years of physical labor on the Thylacine in the summer, and a machine shop in the winter, and a love of jogging when she’s not at sea. She’s tanned and olive-eyed, with long, dark, wavy hair that’s always pulled back into a rough ponytail, where today the ends gather into crunchy, salt-crusted chunks. Her lips, even in the summer, are perpetually chapped from her scraping them down with her teeth. Usually, she’d have a vape in her mouth— the least bad of all the nervous habits that she could have developed— but today she’s got her hands jammed into her pockets.
Marcus, from his own bag, pulls out the cartridge he bought at the corner store, and hands it to her. She visibly relaxes.
“Jesus, thank you. My modern Prometheus,” she says with relief, and rips the package open so that she can get the cartridge into her vape and her vape into her mouth. “I thought you got out of work at five? What are you doing around here?”
He grins at her— there’s no need for him to answer, after all. “Got some dinner and lost track of time doing some reading.”
“Grad school stuff?” she asks, referring to the Ph.D. programs that he should be applying to.
“No,” he says. “Just work.” He pulls out the journal that Joe gave him, and lets her look at it. She thumbs through the floppy pages with one hand, going over to Marcus’s bike and resting the journal on the seat so that she can see. In the dim lighting, it’s impossible for her to read the thin and old fashioned handwriting, so he supplies, “It’s the journal of the character I’m playing. Amos.”
“He a good writer?”
Marcus shrugs. “I don’t think literary virtue was really his goal.”
“What was it, then?”
“To get married,” he says.
Bryanne snorts at that. “How was your first day of tours?”
“Bad,” he says. “But it’ll get better. It was mostly the rain.”
“Only mostly.”
“You don’t need me to tell you how tourists are.”
“No, I certainly don’t.” She takes his backpack from his hands, and repacks the journal into it. “But I thought schoolkids were supposed to be different.”
“The kids aren’t the problem. The teachers are.”
“Takes one to know one!”
“I don’t know how I’m going to get through a summer of people asking me over and over if the boat is fake,” he says. “It’s written pretty much everywhere on our literature. And on the sign right out front. ‘ Reproduction of the Wampanoag provided by the estate of Arthur Zhang ,’” he quotes.
“Being a teacher doesn’t mean you can read,” Bryanne says.
Behind the both of them, the lights on board the Thylacine are going out, as its captain shuts the whole thing down for the night. The sudden encroachment of an even deeper darkness makes Marcus shiver.
“Did you see any whales?” he asked.
Bryanne scowls, and takes her vape out of her mouth. “Of course not. Why would we see whales on our whalewatching tour?” He knows he shouldn’t have asked— if she had seen any, she would have let him know first thing. In previous years, it was always something she enjoyed describing. Her eyes lit up when talking about them rolling across the surface of the water, or the presence of a calf, or the process of chasing them down. She rarely volunteered information, except for that. So he should have known that there were no whales.
“I’m sorry.”
“Heard them on the hydrophone,” she says. “They’re out there. But we couldn’t find ‘em.” She shrugs and stuffs her vape back in her pocket. “It is what it is.”
He nods.
In an attempt to clear the bitterness out of her voice, and to cheer him up, she asks, “Did you?”
“What?”
“See any whales?”
He laughs. “No, but I admit that I wasn’t really looking.”
“That wasn’t you up on the mast I saw when we sailed by?”
“It’s a scarecrow,” he says. “We’re not supposed to climb the mast— the museum’d have our heads.”
“Too bad,” she says. “I don’t mind climbing our sail.” The Thylacine doesn’t have any real sails or masts— she’s referring to the tall windmill tower that fuels their batteries. She’s described in gruesome detail the maintenance that she sometimes has to do when birds fly into it.
“I’ll have to ask Joe where we got our lookout,” Marcus says. “Maybe you can put one of your own up on top there, to spot whales for you.”
“Luckily, we’re a real ship,” she says, poking him in the chest. The mood has been lifted; she can tease. “I don’t think a fake crewman would do us any good.”
“Sure he would,” Marcus says. “He’d do the same job he does for us— yell out any whales he sees.”
She wrinkles her nose and says nothing.
“Well, we shouldn’t keep standing here until it starts raining again. Do you want a ride, or do you want to take the bus?” he asks, gesturing to his bike.
She considers her options, then says, “Let’s just go. I don’t want to wait around.”
So they both get on his bike, a funny, double-ended creature as he puts his backpack on backwards, and she drapes her duffle bag across her back. She sits on the padded cargo seat, and wraps her arms around his waist. The first time they ever did this, he thought she was holding on so tightly— so tightly that he strains to breathe— because she was scared to fall off. But when they moved in together, he found that she grips him just as tightly while asleep at night, holding him so close that she sometimes wakes up with her arms stiff and aching.